Nostalgia

There are times I think nostalgia is cool, and other times I feel nostalgia is killing the hobby.

I go back to my old games and old campaigns, and I love those moments. I want to relive them. I restarted my old Mystara campaign with Castles & Crusades, and it feels great. I love all the classic monsters and settings. I go to a superhero movie and I feel the same feelings, how cool is it to see comic book heroes on the big screen?

And then it hits me.

What I am seeing is playing upon my original feelings, and those feelings are not new. Why I remember the original so fondly because it was something new for me.

This nostalgia?

Not new and never will be new again.

It will never create the same feeling in me, only attempt to bring it back in a weaker, diluted form.

One of the worst things big companies do to creative forces them to work on nostalgia IP. They often mess it up. And worse, those creatives are being robbed of the opportunity to create something new, that would give fans these original feelings again of "not seeing this before" and letting those creatives make history. The fans are robbed too because the copy will never live up to the original.

Criticize Strixhaven and Radiant Citadel from Wizards all you want, but these are new settings. Well, Strixhaven feels like a note-for-note Harry Porter bucket list adventure, but at least it isn't another classic adventure reboot. They are something new within the D&D pantheon - a new experience through the lens of D&D. They are not for me, but I applaud the company for taking a risk. This is far better than another Tomb of Horrors reboot, another Temple of the Elemental Evil, with more beholders, mind flayers, more drow, more displacer beasts, the D&D pantheon, Vecna again, and the same old product identity regurgitated to infinity and beyond.

But were mind flayers cool? Yes, when we first saw them. Now, 40 years down the road, they have been rehashed and rebooted so many times they are nothing special. No matter how many new artists you throw at them or tweak their combat stats, they will be nothing special. When you see them again, you are not surprised, you know what they do, they are nothing to fear but a mathematical challenge, and that moment where the players do not know what they are facing is taken away from them for a cheap nostalgia hit.

Tomb of Horrors was cool the first time through. Keep rebooting it and all you are doing is rob the creative people who work for you of the chance to create this generation's "Tomb of Horrors" and show people something entirely new and terrifying for the first time. What scares this generation of creative adventure designers? What monsters in their imaginations are terrifying to them? Let them show us.

Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, and Mystara are cool, but those feelings come from being the first to travel there. Could they be made cool again? I would have to tear things up and change them dramatically. At that point, the effort is probably better spent creating a new campaign world, rather than fighting an old one and changing what I loved about it.

If I take the classic Threshold city out of the Mystara world, one of the classic starting towns, and change it to make it interesting - let us say it is now ruled by an evil cult! Okay. Part of me hates the change because it feels petty like this is a "heel move" in wrestling purposefully done to make me angry. So right off, minus points for trying to manipulate my emotions. Second, I know what to expect here. I know the general layout, who the important NPCs were, and the history if I knew it.

Contrast that with creating a new evil town called Darkhaven, and putting it up north in the valley. Oh! We have never been there! What is it about? Why did it get built? What is it like? Who runs this place? The new town itself is far more interesting and intriguing than the old one changed.

The same logic can be applied to the region, the kingdom, and eventually the entire world. It is far more compelling to just make something from scratch than it is to try and reboot something familiar.

And I find myself gravitating back towards the never seen and unknown again.

I picked up the Sullenlands Adventure Omnibus, and DCC is a great game if you tire of nostalgia and want to always experience something new. From what I see, DCC modules do not reuse the tired old tropes, and they constantly invent new monsters, magic items, traps, locations, and crazy situations you feel you have never been in before. You don't know how to fight a monster because this is the first time you ever encountered it. There are no "we know what to expect" orcs, goblins, trolls, and other creatures here. Most everything is new and you are experiencing it for the first time.

And there is this in the Sullenlands forward:

But while the game was still fun (4th edition), something about it had changed from what I had remembered. The art had become slick and commercial. The game was more tactical now. Yes, the powers were cool, but the reliance on minis and maps pushed the theatre of the mind to the back burner. The game I remembered from long ago was just a little subversive and dangerous. We had felt like we were on the frontier of some strange country. I was still enjoying playing the game again, but it just wasn’t what it was before.

The game I had remembered from before had been looked upon with skepticism from adults, as if we kids were trifling with powers best left alone. There was something about it that had felt very underground, like an undiscovered secret. It captivated my thoughts and imagination. The game we had played back in the day made us feel like we were on the edge of a new, untamed frontier. Now, I just wondered if that same feeling was still out there… somewhere.

It took a few more years of playing before I discovered the Dungeon Crawl Classics rulebook. Before I’d finished the first chapter, that long-lost feeling had somehow found me again. It was everything that I had remembered about our first game in 1979. The art sometimes seemed crude and unrefined, but I kept coming back to the images and their elemental power: they inspired me in ways more polished or safe art never could. The ruleset was old-school, and packed with cool features, but the experience was easily accessible to my new players who by this point were familiar with the d20 system. We played it as written, and we never looked back.

Others feel this feeling.

That reboots and nostalgia aren't everything they are sold to be. These are not the experiences we are looking for. Our minds will never create new feelings or memories if we keep bringing back the past.

We crave the new and unseen.

And it was true back then. I get the feeling the best modules from the AD&D era were the ones that did not leverage the well-worn tropes. The Tomb of Horrors was not a combat slog, it forced you to think. The Expedition to the Barrier Peaks was a deadly romp through a destroyed sci-fi ship, and nobody knew what was around the next corner or what the next insane robot was going to do.

It seems at times even the original players and designers of D&D were sick of the tired old tropes.

And what do we do today?

Endlessly celebrate and reboot the tired old tropes they were trying to create to break free from that trap. We have to have our beholders, even though, yes, everyone knows what they do, their weaknesses, and how to fight them, and they are not scary or special anymore. At this point, I would leave them out of the next monster manual but please yes, oh yes, sell them as plushies.

I would retire them to a Hall of Fame.

Let a new generation make the next scary epic monsters. It is time. Keep the game young and on that edge. Let it be cool again.

Because product identity has become a prison mentality.