Kickstarter - Shaker - Editorial @ Edge

Jason Killingsworth from EDGE has penned an editorial about Shaker, the old school rpg created by Tom Hall and Brenda Braithwaite. In it, he asks the question "old school rpg, what does that mean anyway?"

A quote about what he thinks about the rpgs of the past:

The primary distinguishing traits of many old-school RPGs were nothing more than creative workarounds for the nascent technology available at the time – text input, turn-based simulations, etc. The Kickstarter page assures us that the game will have the graphical fidelity players expect from contemporary games, but that doesn’t get us much closer to a working definition.

A quote about what he thinks about naming Shaker an old school rpg:

To label one’s project Old School RPG seems to just draw attention to this appeal to nostalgia in such an obvious way that it comes off feeling a little crass, perhaps too forward. Especially in a context where you’re trying to convince people to contribute money to your project. It’s easy to romanticise the past, but Brathwaite and Hall still need to offer a compelling case for what makes old-school RPGs not only meaningfully different, but preferable to the genre’s more evolved descendants living today.