Returning to Rappan Athuk or, How I got into the OSR
I recently started running a new Pathfinder first edition game of Rappan Athuk, a throwback to my first "real" campaign which was the same thing roughly 8 years ago. I've ran a lot of other systems since then, and I've even ran Rappan Athuk in other systems since then. There's something about this Rappan Athuk and Pathfinder 1e combination that's special to me though.
The incongruity between the heavy char-op of Pathfinder and the old-school dungeon crawl of Rappan Athuk was the reason I got into the OSR. I got Rappan Athuk because I wanted to run a dungeon like Nethack or other traditional roguelikes -- I wanted something difficult and deadly and seemingly never-ending until all of a sudden you were done. I was running Pathfinder because I'd played in exactly 2 systems and a handful of game sessions before that: 4th edition of D&D and Pathfinder. Of the two, I found Pathfinder to be much easier to get into.
Running RA in PF was a pretty clunky experience initially. I was engrossed in the play culture for Pathfinder at the time, I was thinking about problems like "How will my players get The Big 6 in the middle of a megadungeon?" and "how do I do milestone XP for a game that doesn't have a story?" and didn't have the necessary mindset to even understand how a long-form dungeon crawl was supposed to work. Players didn't track arrows, rations or light sources, I didn't roll random encounters (the Paizo forums people said they just take up time!), I spent hours agonizing over how to "balance" encounters that were never meant to be so and I handwaved travel of hundreds of miles to buy new items because "travel is boring." I ended up running a pretty hacky RA run through into a custom campaign for about a year before I dropped RA entirely and switched to custom Pathfinder campaigns and APs. I always regretted not being able to get the dungeon crawl I really wanted back then.
Entry into the OSR
As time went on and I got more dissatisfied with Pathfinder 1e char-op (a tale as old as time), my mind turned back towards megadungeon play. I started reading pre-G+ OSR blogs like Goblin Punch, Coins and Scrolls and Against the Wicked City (especially their condensation of Pathfinder APs) and got into more and more OSR blogs via their list of other blogs in the sidebar. I still ran Pathfinder 1e, but I started incorporating more and more OSR style into my game. I especially loved playing P6, a Pathfinder version of Elite 6 where you limit level ups to 6th level to prevent the rocket tag that happens with higher-level PF characters.
In 2019, I started a project of playing as many new systems as possible. I ran a bunch of 5e, SotDL, BitD, a whole slew of PbtA games, DCC, Forbidden Lands, Symbaroum, and crucially: as much GLOG as my players could stomach with a wide variety of rules variations. At this point, I was also neck-deep in OSR blogs and the OSR discord spawned by Chris McDowall and was well and truly invested in the OSR. I started writing my own GLOGhack to run for my players as the COVID-19 pandemic hit, disrupting gaming for a while.
Over the next few years after that, I ran a lot of OSR games basically exclusively. My old Pathfinder players, loyal as they were, stuck with me (mostly) though the different games, finding their own playstyles beginning to get warped by the game design theory I spewed at all opportunities. At the point we're at now, my players are old hands at OSR-style dungeon crawling, they know how to check for traps, track their resources, be on the lookout for random encounters, think about faction dynamics, etc. They describe themselves as OSR players!
Current Day and my White Whale
Which brings me back to Rappan Athuk and Pathfinder 1e. Ever since my first campaign ended in what I consider a failure (we weren't playing RA by the end at all), I've wanted to go back and fully conquer Rappan Athuk with a party. I've ran the dungeon in other systems to try and get there (5e, Pathfinder 2e, a brief foray with a GLOGhack) but never felt satisfied, its never felt like a true retry of my first campaign without PF1e.
Cue my new game. I'm running for OSR vets, for Pathfinder vets. My players are used to the constants of megadungeon play at this point like logistics and travel. They know about staying as safe as they can from random encounters and they know that nothing is balanced in RA. Several of them have described the jarring dissonance they get from their now OSR-wired brains trying to read classic Pathfinder rules text, but they're managing OK so far. I'm hoping that this is the time my table finally clears the dungeon so I can finally put this book to rest.