Meet the Publisher: Matt Finch

Matt Finch is coming back for a rare two-fer interview. He answered my questions almost three years ago when he officially founded his own publishing company, Mythmere Games, and has graciously agreed to let me pester him with some more questions, this time about OSRIC.

Question. For those who don't know OSRIC, or Old School Reference and Index Compilation, was one of the real retro-clone on the market, and the one that really enabled the boom of what became the OSR. It was originally written to compile the rules from AD&D 1e, and used the (relatively) new OGL and SRD to create a framework that could be used to continue to publish new material for that system. Can you speak to the origins of OSRIC? How did it come about?

Answer. It started out as just me turning over in my head the legal puzzle of what would be required to publish resource material for AD&D, like adventure modules. To do that with relative safety, you need a license of some kind, and the OGL was there, but the OGL prohibited any mention of a trademark -- so you couldn't say what version of D&D it would be used for. Eventually I realized that by rewriting AD&D the whole project could work, but my assumption was that this would be too much work to ever manage. Fortunately, I started playing a game with some of the mods at Knights & Knaves of, "Is this me writing, or is it Gary Gygax," just trying out the process of rewriting to see if it was feasible. And I realized at that point -- from actually trying it out -- that the rewriting wouldn't take as long as I had thought. So at that point it turned into an actual project. Stuart Marshall and others joined in, and OSRIC was begun.

Q. You're planning a new edition of OSRIC. Can you tell us a bit about the big picture changes, if any, you'll be making?

A. The objective isn't really to change the scope of OSRIC, it's to make it into a better learning tool for the AD&D rules, and one that's more attractive to the post-2000 generations of gamers who never played the game originally. So there's an option for using Ascending Armor Class, and the rules are going to be broken out more clearly into granules instead of long paragraphs. We're also taking the opportunity to bring OSRIC a bit closer to the AD&D rules than it was in OSRIC 2.0. The license will be different, too. 

Q. Since OSRIC was published, it feels like BX-derived games have really stolen the spotlight in the OSR field. What do you think the new version of OSRIC will offer that its BX cousins do not? One of the appeals of the BX systems, especially OSE, is the sparse, bulleted presentation of the text. Even though I primarily use OSE, I personally find it a bit cold, and occasionally yearn for the jumbled Gygaxian prose. Are you hewing closer to the original, trying to streamline it like OSE, or something else? 

A. It's focused on teaching the game, so the rules will look more streamlined, but there will be much more walk-through explanation and examples than I have seen in most other retro-clones.

Q. What are some ot the aspects of the new edition of OSRIC that you're most pleased with?

A. I'm not finished with editing the draft yet, but I was pleased that we were able to work in the monk class. This isn't going to be something where one particular part stands out as "good," it's more going to be judged on how well it all hangs together as a whole, I think.