RPGs and Creative Constraints: What’s behind the OSR and FKR?
I. Before RPG design became my main hobby, I used to write poetry. My favorite book on my shelf from that time is The New Book of Forms by Lewis Turco. It explains the fundamental building blocks of poetry (such as what “iambic pentameter” means) and lists, in encyclopedic fashion, all the notable forms within English poetry. Most modern poetry is free verse, including all the poetry I ever wrote. You put the words together however you think they sound good. There are certain principles to absorb that’ll help you with that, but it’s ultimately up to your intuition of what feels right. It wasn’t always that way. For various historical reasons — because poetry used to be primarily for performance, because it used to be set to music, etc. — poems almost were almost always composed within a particular form, such as the sonnet or the villanelle. To gloss over a lot of history: at a certain point, there was a shift. Poets like Walt Whitman popularized a transition to free verse as the domi