OSR: Review: Lorn Song of the Bachelor

To avoid entombment in RPG cruft, I only buy books I want to use. My RPG shelf is spartan. (We won't speak of my PDF directory). I don't collect or curate. It's a toolbox.

There are a few exceptions and Zedeck Siew is one of them. I have no immediate plans to use Zedeck's 'zines or adventures. I stuck them on the map of my piratical wavecrawl, but with few illusions about their inclusion.

I buy them to marvel at their craft.

Lorn Song of the Bachelor (print) is one of the most exquisitely and delicately crafted RPG books I've ever seen. There are RPGs that are clever, and RPGs that are beautiful, but Lorn Song is, for lack of a better word, meticulous.

The title grabs you. What is a "lorn song"? Is it a forlorn song? Who, or what, is "The Bachelor", and why do they sing?

I don't like GM-facing mysteries in RPG adventures. Some authors love putting the twist in the last paragraph of room 99, or referencing an NPC throughout the adventure without explaining them until the end. It's a fine technique to keep the GM-as-a-reader interested, but if an RPG book is a tool, hiding aspects of the tool doesn't seem wise. Writing exclusively for GMs who won't, or indeed can't, run the adventure creates novels with some numbers attached.

Lorn Song doesn't directly conceal the plot.

The Tortoise and Achilles

While testing or evaluating RPG books for clarity, I like to imagine a dialogue between the reader and the book.

Book: "Here people are called the Gleaming Fins. Their territory is known for three things: One: dreaming agaru."

Reader: "What the heck is a dreaming agar?"

Book: "[In the next sentence]. Some trees have the souls of birds. Their heartwood makes a powerful incense— notes of balsam, rain; flashes..."

Etc, etc. The reader reaches out for the answer to their question, and the time it takes the book to respond - the distance between the statement that raises a question and the answer - is a useful metric of clarity of purpose. If "dreaming agar" was defined in an appendix or a sidebar or buried somewhere in a location description, the reader would have to put in metal work to link the two sections and concepts, and while running a game spare brainpower is hard to come by. But, in Lorn Song, it's not. Terms are defined right when they need to be defined, in phrases that are both brief and immediately evocative.

RPG books need to introduce a lot of new concepts to a reader in quick succession. Choosing how and where these new concepts are defined is part of the author's craft. Conceptual density is important, but conceptual striation is important too.

Lorn Song rarely misses a beat. Every time a concept is raised, an answer is provided. Everything falls neatly into place. The reader is drawn in by perfect mystery-resolution pairs. In case the concepts don't stick, cross-reference page numbers are provided.

The sublimely elegant dance of call-and-response starts to collapse by the last third of the book, but by that point you're already hooked.

Appendix Z

So... why isn't Lorn Song all over the place?
People are talking about it. Pirated copies are available; a mark of quality if ever there was one. Reviews are generally positive to effusive. People like it and admire it.

So why do I feel like I can't run it? It isn't a lack of content or clarity in the module. If it was, I'd fill in any (purely self-perceived) gaps myself. It's my usual strategy. Everything I need is present. I'm  just not sure how to use it.

Zedeck explicitly addresses one possible stumbling block in the afterword. "If you worry about doing justice to Southeast Asia, at your table - don’t."

For me, the issue is less about justice and more about having a sufficiently stocked mental toolkit. I feel like running Lorn Song is like running a medieval game without the foggiest idea of feudal obligation, and trying to make everything fit, say, an employer-employee paradigm.

It needs to hit the point of saturation, where concepts are reinforced in a dozen different ways, sometimes obviously, sometimes subliminally. Even a strict diet of Disney films and TV commercials will give a person a vague and moderately useful sense of medieval tropes.

But SEA tropes? Not quite as ubiquitous.

Tossing Zedeck's zines at a group and going "here, read these to see what this game is about" is a decent strategy, but how many players actually read handouts? And if they do, how many will absorb and implement lessons, cultural values, and concepts that aren't explicitly stated or mechanically reinforced? And, more worryingly, has their GM (me) really understood the material?

There's also the worrying sense that plenty of Appendix N material exists, but that I'm either too lazy or too out of touch to find it. Maybe one day I'll hit the comfort point, either by learning enough or by caring less. Maybe not.

In Conclusion

It's a good module. It sets a new standard for terse functional design. It's got great art and maps and all the usual high-quality touches. It's very affordable.

Full Disclosure: I've worked with a surprising number of the people in the book's credits, but I didn't know they'd worked or consulted on Lorn Song until I checked the credits while finishing up this review.