BROZERS & Braunsteins

I initially started this with some long monologue about how I got into gaming but honestly those stories are not as interesting as people make them out to be.

I lived in the country. We played in the wilderness. And when we weren’t making bombs or shooting guns we played D&D.

That’s it.

It’s sort of a reflection of the post-OSR RPG community in a way. The most exciting things to happen in this hobby were 5e and OSR, and as I have said perhaps unfairly many times, the OSR is not as interesting as everyone makes it out to be. (ACKS not withstanding) When the best materials produced aren’t even a real improvement from B/X, and the more outlandish games like all that one page shit on Itch and DriveThru are embarrassing even by the standards of most anxiety ridden androgynous geeks who are still talking about Firefly like its the best thing that has ever existed are not being played - by anyone - so who gives a shit about them?

What I am interested in are ideas. Not products, but ideas that can actually push the hobby forward out if its samey stagnancy and all the adopted tropes it has embraced from drama school dropout “actual plays”, which aren’t actual plays at all but scripted, schmaltzy produced content.

And let me say this - that is the real problem with this whole internet experiment that we are into, and which has failed us in so many ways. Everything today is just product. It’s content. It's hashed out shit made by nobodies to suck a buck out the FOMO ridden consumer, and everyone wants a piece. Most of the games in the OSR are sold based on the personalities behind them, and most of those are just slight variants on other products with extra house rules. They certainly resemble games, and you can play them, but once you’ve seen one you have seen them all.

And then out of the blue, BROZER shows up; a straightforward document, the first published that anyone is aware of that brings a way for people to enjoy a new-old piece of the RPG hobby called the Braunstein.

I know. I’m just being an asshole.

I am not going to spend a lot of time talking about what a Braunstein is. I am going to break it down as simply as I possibly can, and I’m going to do this in the words of Jeffro Johnson, the head honcho of a group called the brOSR who has put this thing together in the first place. And it’s important, so pay attention:

A Braunstein is a mode of play that involves multiple actors operating in conflict under a fog of war.

My first reaction to reading this, not in BROZER but in How to Win at D&D, a cursory introduction to these concepts also penned by Jeffro, was “Oh yeah, that’s cool. So what the fuck does that mean?”

And actually the more I came to learn about Braunstein, the bros, and BROZER, the more it made sense because it quite literally explains itself. Let’s break it down.

A mode of play is just that - it’s a way of playing an RPG that differentiates itself from the typical way most of us look at RPG’s, and how it does this is explained in the same sentence - through a fog of war.

Multiple actors we don’t need to stretch far to figure out. Well, your players are the actors. They are taking on roles, no different than they do in D&D.

There are two key things here that are extremely important however - conflict and fog of war. Understanding these isn’t difficult, but also essential in understanding what a Braunstein is and how it functions.

I try really hard not to mock storygames, I really do. I want people to be able to do what they like as long as they aren’t hurting anyone doing it. I don’t give a shit. But one thing I see a lot of these one page Valium equivalents is a lack of conflict. It’s always “You are on the last train home. There is a woman on the other side. She looks sad and forlorn. There are no rules here. Do what comes naturally.”

If I was playing this game my immediate response would be “I jump outta the train head first and fucking kill myself so I can go play a real game.” There is no conflict here. Is it roleplaying? I mean, I suppose. You are just talking out some bizarre melancholic fantasy. And I have actually seen people play shit like this. And look, I get it. Games like Stardew Valley are the biggest thing going right now. People want escapism into a world that feels less cynical and more down to Earth and not as fraught with problems.

But this is not at the heart of D&D by any kind of stretch - conflict is key to a good D&D game, and conflict can mean a great many things. But where D&D is typically concerned with Player vs. NPC conflict, Braunstein is directly and explicitly concerned with Player Vs. Player conflict.

So, a Braunstein then, is a game where you play a character, but rather than engaging in group shenanigans and being buddy buddy, you inhabit a faction of some kind, and are in conflict with other factions. So rather than being referee run, a Braunstein is referee moderated - players are going to spend most of their time talking amongst themselves about actions they will take in the world, and in the process they are even going to contribute to the world building. And rather than acting as the force building all of this for the players, the DM has a very particular role; accepting and implementing instructions from other players.

As an aside - this is more for the completely uninitiated. I wills say this right now; if you want to run a Braunstein, go download BROZER. It’s free. And there is a nice book available on Amazon if you want something physical.

Without conflict, most games in general do not work, and a Braunstein definitely won’t work. But the other critical element here is the fog of war.

Rather than the DM sitting at the table buddy buddy with the rest of the group, the DM sort of fucks off in the background and is approached individually by players who will be giving orders on what they want to do. If domain play is considered the “end game” of D&D (which, it isn’t…but that’s outside the scope of this article) BROZER is the final boss. When playing BROZER or your own variant, Jeffro states clearly that time will become a little…slippery. The key here are the orders the players are giving, and making sure that these orders result in conflict between players - that’s it.

Now, to be frank I haven’t run a Braunstein in its entirety yet, but I do use a lot of those ideas in my own AD&D campaign. My first introduction to the bros was relegated to their advocation for RAW 1:1 timed AD&D. In between sessions, I still communicate with players, and they still take on tasks etc. even when we are not actively playing. And a Braunstein can function long-term this way, but it can also be a one-off where a winner is decided by DM fiat and awarding points for winning conflicts, usually ending the game before it totally sputters over the finish line without any juice in the tank. It’s even a far more social experience than regular D&D in a way, because while the DM is resolving conflicts such as battles and taking orders, the rest of the players are in constant communication with one another - brokering alliances, betrayals, deals, etc. all in the name of achieving their individual goals.

In a way it reminds me more of Civilization than it does typical D&D. I haven’t mentioned it until now because I figure my core audience is going to be familiar with most of this stuff, but the Braunstein goes back to David Wesley and the Blackmoor group, and though David has been running these RPG precursor games since the 1970’s, the method has never been codified, and it really came to the attention of Jeffro and others when the Secrets of Blackmoor documentary was released. I will give a list of recommended materials at the end of this article.

While D&D went on to be something different, a trend of moving away from its wargame origins that we see continuing today, a lot of the ideas that help to make a Braunstein work are hinted at in the pages of OD&D, AD&D, and to some very small degree even B/X. (which really just amounts to a referral to Swords and Spells) But it was not until Jeffro and his Dirty Dozen of hardcore grognards (and well, it’s a lot more than a dozen) started piecing a lot of this together and experimenting with running Braunstein’s that any of this was public knowledge.

And Jeffro will tell you there was always blowback to this. To quote him:

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that these ideas are clearly in the gaming literature of the seventies, that basically no one discussed this in any kind of depth for 40 years, and that when we finally succeeded in drawing attention to these things our reward was to challenged, ridiculed, slandered, unpersoned, harassed, and threatened with lawsuits.

My recent entry into the online D&D community allowed me to see some of these things occur firsthand. There is a great amount of contention over the Braunstein name that I won’t deep dive into, but the creator of the Secrets of Blackmoor doc, a man named Griff, who is close to David Wesley, expressed a lot of issues with other people using the word Braunstein to describe their games, feeling that they should have unqiue titles. Thus Starstein, and Dogstein and Catstein and whatever other Stein people are running out there. (I am soon going to be running Streetstein, which is my fantasy medieval take on the movie The Warriors.) This boiled over into a drama that went on for a bit and seems to have mostly cooled down - if nothing else, we are a pasisonate breed.

But regardless, Jeffro and the gang went on to create BROZER anyways, and I asked Jeffro some questions about BROZER for clarification which I will share in it’s entirety for you here. Thank you to Jeffro for taking the time to entertain my inquiry.

How long was BROZER mulling around the think tank before you fellas decided to publish it, and was it a reaction to the vague legal threats of calling your games "a Braunstein", or was it coincidence that it came out around the same time that dirt was being kicked up?

Brozer happened very quickly because the time was right. We had been experimenting with these ideas for five years. We had a dozen people run session braunsteins in their own campaigns this spring which replicated our results in a wide range of play groups. Interest in this new direction compounded dramatically during the "summer of Stein" with more Braunstein events going than anyone could keep up with anymore. Most importantly, I explored Bdubs's controversial idea of the ineffable Total Nonstop Braunstein in a series of Traveller sessions over the summer. Basically, I ran a different type of Braunstein game every week or two an then placed them all in the same continuity. A lot of people had said that that couldn't be done. Well, after I'd done it I was sure I finally understood how Braunsteins really worked. Now, I am not sure of the exact chain of events. Griff had been calling us names and saying we were all doing this wrong for many months. This was really annoying. But I didn't really get the idea to do something like Brozer until Rob Kuntz had challenged me to a module writing contest.

When he chickened out from actually following through on that, I was really disappointed. It might never happened at all had not Griff suggested that he would like to make a play to somehow control the concept of Braunstein as if it were a trademark or some kind of intellectual property. Of course, he was so rude and so insulting to so many people, this galvanized everyone within the scene to come together for a prank. We figured he was making a big deal over the Braunstein thing because we had already demonstrated conclusively that it was fundamental to roleplaying games in addition to being a great deal of fun. We didn't think he understood this stuff at all and that we could easily beat him in a race to get the definitive Braunstein product out the door. So everyone in the BrOSR came together like some sort of fantasy Amish-style barnraising and just got it done.

It was amazing! We were ready to go in something like five or six weeks. In retrospect, making it a group project was the objectively correct move. Not only could we put together a sort of greatest hits collection of the BrOSR's best factions, but we could also give referees a truly authentic gaming experience. When you run intense, longrunning campaigns with heavy Braunstein elements, you end up having to make games out of whatever it is that the players have come up with and gotten excited about. It's not going to be a perfectly consistent fantasy milieu! It's just always going to be a weird mishmash that grows on you the more you play with it. With Brozer, though, you not only get to turn players loose with just that sort of weird mishmash-- but you also get to hand them the best Braunstein factions created by the the very best players in the BrOSR have come up with. It's a gold mine of gaming greatness!

Do you consider BROZER a complete and encompassing manual explaining the Braunstein and how to run one, or is it a companion piece to the Blackmoor film/your own writing where it is expected people will have some familiarity with Braunstein before picking BROZER up?

If you want to want to know the real story on the history of the game, then yes, you will want to view the David Wesely segment of the Blackmoor film. I didn't really understand the significance of Braunstein until I myself viewed that back in 2020. If you want a very persuasive argument outlining what Real D&D is and why Braunstein is fundamental to it and why it is intrinsically different from what we call "roleplaying games" today, then yes... you don't want to miss my own hard hitting pamphlet "How to Win at D&D". But I have to tell you... nobody cares about any of that stuff. Most people that dig into it come away wanting to run Braunsteins or exciting campaigns like the ones Dave Arneson did... but they have no idea where to begin. And it is not just us. There is even a form thread from a few years ago where some guy was back from playing Braunstein at a con with David Wesely. He wanted to run games like that himself! But neither he nor anyone else on the forum had any idea of where to begin or how such games worked.

It turns out that this is a very challenging problem if you haven't spent five years tinkering with this stuff. But Brozer not only gives all of the best advice and direction from countless hours of great gaming, it also explains how to skip right to the good parts without making any of the errors that we made along the way. There really isn't anything else like it in gaming history!

Was there a consideration for having an "example of play" in BROZER to more clearly outline what game masters should generally expect when they first run one? Do you have any specific recommendations for such an example on video or otherwise for people to reference if they want to see a Braunstein in action?

Okay, no, we never talked about writing up an example of play. One reason is that it would be boring. Another reason is that it would be hard to follow. What are you going to do? Write up five conversations that happen concurrently? Bruh. I don't even want to think about how to lay this out.

My personal opinion of this is that people that think they want this don't actually exist. Or else including something like this won't solve the problem that these people actually have, which is that they need to put their rpg books away, sign up for some dance lessons and then spend a great deal of time outdoors and at the gym.

Listen. The idea of Braunstein is very simple. All of the players are able to do whatever they want independently of everyone else. The referee talks to the players one at a time to find out what they are doing. While the referee is busy, everyone else is talking to each other hatching plots and setting up schemes. When conflict occurs, the referee resolves it just as it is done in any roleplaying game that you would care to mention. In subsequent player conferences, the referee informs players of any gameplay results which they would have knowledge of. Play continues to evolve from there-- and more than likely will become volatile, chaotic, and dramatic. So now I have told you everything. All you need to do is just go do it.

But you might object then, "Oh! I have never done this before! I don't know where to begin and I haven't the faintest notion of what the best practices are for this new type of game!" Well, okay. The factions we put in Brozer are the ones that were the most fun in our group after five years of gaming across a half dozen tables. Even better, we tuned them up in order to help you sidestep things which were problems in our games. And even better than that we included a great deal of advice and direction from the most thoughtful and cogent guys in our scene to help get you pumped up enough that you can find the courage to dive into this utterly compelling form of gaming. You really can't miss with this! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!

See, I really like these guys. My first intro to them proper was some podcast where Jeffro was interviewed and I was enamored of his passion and intensity for the ideas he was expressing. I was also reticent - so many people claim to have actually “changed the face of the game” or are “bringing out something no one has seen before” and then it ends up being some dreck shelf-rider that you’d rather fuck a fistful of your own shit than play. So for the past few weeks, and why I have been quiet for that time, I was doing my own experiments - analysing the AD&D rules, trying out concepts like 1:1, and working out the best way to run mass battles. And in that time I never found a single thing that contradicted all of the bold claims the bros have been making about AD&D and its connections to Braunstein.

And those connections are clear. Gary Gygax specifically talks about a game where strict-time keeping is kept, and where the game continues even if characters are otherwise proccupied. He described a campaign in the more traditional sense of what that means, over the commonly understood current definition of “a string of adventure modules you buy from WOTC.” A campaign could theoretically go on forever, spanning multiple generations of characters, dozens of players, and so on. When I call Braunstein the final boss of D&D, what I mean by that is it is the logical tipping point for domain play that is actually interesting. Because you are doing everything you might do in a domain play game anyways, just with more expedience and the all encompassing and important fog of war.

This is not the Bastion system the new 5e DMG describes where you and your buddies build a cute little Animal Crossing town together and jerk eachother off. This brings D&D fully into the space of wargaming once more, but in a way that is more dynamic and interesting.

It also begs the question of why the fuck modern wargames are doing giving you predictable pre-baked scenarios with time elements, but not having a referee in the mix to quantify the over-all conflict into an interesting narrative as well.

I don’t want to single out Jeffro here either. There were a bunch of contributors to this book, some of whom I interact with frequently, others who I don’t. When trying to ask the question “what is the brosr?” or “how do I join the brosr?” I can say this; if you embody a lot of the qualities these guys share such as putting an emphasis on physical health and social interaction, engaging in these experimental Braunstein events, and yes, an active practice of faith in Christianity (of one kind or another) you are at least pseudo-brosr by proxy. Of course, like all loose organizations there is still something of a hierarchy involved, but I think it mostly boils down to who is playing these games together.

However I have heard stories of people being kicked out of a game until they have done a proper run through of key Appendix N material - and that’s really important, because Appendix N is at the heart of D&D, and the bros take this seriously.

Although they may have developed a reputation for “meanness”, it says something to me about male spaces. It’s not even a question that many male spaces have been co-opted by women or effeminate men and have been encouraged to be more inclusive. The “boy” Scouts were not even impervious to this. But the reality is, men need spaces for men. And to me, the attitudes expressed are not out of spite or posturing - they are if anything a filter to maintain the stability of the brOSR as being an exclusively male space.

I do not have a problem with this, and infact I encourage it. It is one of the best parts of being in a band. Men need to bond and develop fraternal relationships with other men. Men rip on eachother. They beat eachother down sometimes, or give eachother shit, but in groups like this it is almost always in the spirit of making more timid men into something formed of tougher stuff. It’s initiatory, and I think it’s self-evident enough that I don’t need to speak more on it.

But whatever you think of Jeffro or the bros, they are absolutely doing something unique in this hobby, and they are providing it for free consumption.

So, fuck off and go get BROZER now. Because as Jeffro said in his most recent blog post, “we made Brozer free because we love you.”

Special mentions are the other contributors to Brozer, as listed in the book:

Gabe Mamola
”Contorted Trash” (I don’t know if that’s a guy, or a nickname for Gabe.)
Bdubs1776
P. Alexander
Ryan Howard
RDubs
Macho Mandalf
Kes
Night Danger (The SECOND best D&D guy in Canada right after me.)
drakoninviktus
James Streissand
HjeuphosAcre
Fluid the Druid
Jon Mollison
Max Scruby
NotJohnDaker
JD Sauvage

Here are some relevant links as well:

Brozer: Island of War and Winter
Jeffro’s Blog
How to Win at D&D
Brozer Paperback
Secrets of Blacmoor documentary
Appendix N: The Literary History of Dungeons and Dragons