Outcast Silver Raiders, an Old School Renaissance
The Old School Renaissance (or revival, if you prefer) has been going strong for two decades at this point, emulating and capturing the essence of that original feel of Dungeons & Dragons way back in the 70’s.
It’s a genre that I feel has exploded especially over the decade or so, crossing over from niche forums dedicated to it and over to the mainstream. You’ll see a lot of games now billed as OSR, or even OSR-lite or like, all trying to capture different parts of the vibe or aesthetic Basic/Advanced D&D did. It’s a philosophy that generally encourages three things: player skill, open-ended scenarios, and punishing consequences.
But also it can simply mean one of those things, or just a few of them, or maybe it can just be inspired by those design elements.
What OSR means, or can mean, or doesn’t mean, can be an entire article on its own. It’s a space with its own thick textbook of vernacular and expectations that would swallow up the focus on Outcast Silver Raiders if I vomited it all out now. Instead, I’m going to let the review for Outcast Silver Raiders speak for itself as I feel it presents a strong enough case for its own identity.
Before this review starts, I want to give a content warning. Outcast Silver Raiders is a dark game, and it covers a range of topics some people might find distressing such as: dead siblings, self-harm, and religious oppression to name a few.Â
I’d like to give a big thanks to Esoteric Ludology and Issac for providing all the material needed for this review!
Pillage & Plunder Across the Dark Ages
Outcast Silver Raiders is a game trying to bridge that gap between the old school and new players. It’s taken the old bones of gaming systems past and whittled them down into something new and compact.
It’s a simple system to understand, with a lot of what you expect from something billing itself with the same initials as the philosophy it was born from. This game is dark, even a little bit grim, and characters will meet their end brutally and without mercy if they aren’t careful. The odds are stacked against you, but it isn’t unfair, and nor should it ever be.
Outcast Silver Raiders is a game split between three books, and I’ll list them here for reference.
- The Player’s Handbook – All the rules players will be needing, cut to a trim 64 pages. You’ll spend most, if not all, your time with this book as a player.
- The Referee’s Handbook – For the aspiring dungeon master. This book contains additional rules for players and a huge amount of advice for budding referees and veterans alike.
- The Mythic North – The setting of Outcast Silver Raiders, modelled after medieval Europe.
This review is going to look at each of the books in order.
Outcast Silver Raider’s Player’s Handbook will be the start and end for a lot of people. It’s filled with earnest forewords that follow on from the introductory fiction that help not only introduce you to the game itself, but also what type of game it is. It’s written out as an invitation for you to try another way of play, and encourages you to buy-in to the old-school way of thinking.
It wants you to dive into this perilous world, and test your creativity and problem-solving with the safety off. Outcast Silver Raiders’ world is fraught with evil, occult or otherwise, and beneath the surface lurks powerful evils that will need to be bested in some way to get at the treasures they jealously guard. Outcast Silver Raiders makes a point to say that, yes this game can be harsh and judgement is final, but it isn’t spiteful about it. Victory is possible, but it’s only possible with ingenuity and clever thinking, and never with simply the raw might of a few dice rolls.
It seems like a lot, and I thought so too at first. I’m a veteran of games now, I’ve been playing since I was a teenager, and I’ve built up a lot of preconceived notions of what old school means, and not all of those notions are positive. In fact a lot of them are downright negative. Outcast Silver Raiders managed to hook me originally with its artstyle, but these forewords made me stay and really commit to ignoring all my previous ideas and dive in fresh, yanking my friends down under with me.
My regular gaming group now of around ten years would not class themselves as old school enthusiasts, and half of them would say they still don’t quite know what it is. We’ve bounced between a few games but we usually keep to modern systems, like Pathfinder 2e, D&D 5e, Imperium Maledictum, and Lancer to name a few.
It took a little convincing to go against the grain of our preferred games and try something out of our comfort zone, but once everyone got comfortable reading through the Player’s Handbook and taking in the paragraphs of advice to help ease people into the old school game design philosophy we all got very enthusiastic about trying it very quickly.
There’s a reason the entire fundamentals of the game system fit in a 64 page book. It’ll be familiar to anyone who has played an edition of D&D in the past 20 years – same attributes, same style of rolling, and familiar tables of skills and equipment. This is a D20 system through and through with very little bells and whistles attached, and modifiers are kept deliberately low so you feel a lot more at the mercy of the dice when making rolls for things your character would be trained in.
If you haven’t touched D&D (or any D20 game for that matter), for one reason or another, then I think you could get the gist of the game in an hour or two. It’s laid out well and it’s easy to follow along with.
Character creation in particular is a total breeze and is entirely random. You have some ability to nudge but you will be up to the mercy of the dice with no exception.
There’s a built in limiter that stops you being left with someone unfit for anything at the very least. At the end of rolling attributes, you add up your total bonus in each stat and if it ends up below 0, the character you rolled dies during childhood and becomes a dead sibling that haunts your inevitable successor. This can happen more than once. I genuinely love it as an inclusion not just mechanically, but for the extra sauce it adds to your eventual outcast. There’s a lot of great tips included in the passage to add this weight onto your character.
Ultimately, you’ll end up with someone who’s slightly above average most of the time. In our sessions, we had a diverse spread and a character saddled with the weight of their brother’s soul on their shoulder.
After rolling up a character that doesn’t perish young, you’ll get to pick a class to best fit your stat spread. Your classes will be a big part of defining your character, but they won’t be critical to your success in the way you think. Each class comes with a unique mechanic that allows them, in some way, to bypass the odds
Rogues are Lucky, and are able to reroll a random amount of skill checks per day to help them get the result they want, and can deal massive damage with Sneak Attacks that can stop fights before they start with the right set up. They’re backed up with the most access to skills too, leading them to be versatile party members that can always find something to do. Rogues should take the time to create and exploit opportunities for their party.
Warriors have Combat Reflexes that make sure they act as quickly as possible when a fight inevitably breaks out by re-rolling initiative. They also have Battle Intuition, which allows them to declare a single blow they make a hit, or a blow against them a miss. Warriors are the most capable of stand-up violence but they’ll find themselves dropping as quickly as any other character if they charge in with no plan to even the odds beyond their raw strength.
Sorcerers rend their own flesh apart to cast abhorrent blood magic that can help their team in strange, esoteric ways. For each point of health they rip from themselves, they may commit that to Aiding their comrades dice rolls, Mending their wounds, or Rending their opponents. Each is a powerful tool that can swing a situation in favour of the party, but ripping yourself apart can leave you vulnerable.
Every class has a unique niche that makes them feel enjoyable. You’ll notice the theme here of abilities that simply work. This is what separates an Outcast from a regular peasant. You have something in ya’ to achieve things your average knight could only dream of.
It’s no coincidence that these classes are all familiar to classes in other popular fantasy games either, adapted to fit within Outcast Silver Raider’s style. Sorcerers especially are the most major departure from their D&D counterpart, and are significant within the base setting how powerful and horrific their magic really is. I love them the most.
In our play sessions, we ended up with an even spread of a single party member of each class. This was quite a low turnout for our group, we typically end up with four-to-five players, but I wouldn’t have felt like any double-ups on classes would have taken away from anything. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see tables with multiple Rogues, and only a single Warrior & Sorcerer just for how versatile they are.
Overall, Outcast Silver Raider’s play system is purposefully simple, and it does its job well. It’s meant to transition players of things like D&D 5e over to this new style of play, and provide a streamlined experience for people who are already familiar with the old school style. With the Player’s Handbook being as thin as it is, you could absolutely pass one out at your usual game-night and have people understand it before the night is over.
You’ll go into this game feeling like the odds are stacked against you, and they definitely are, but that’s fine. Your victories will be hard earned, but they will be yours.
Shaping the Chaos of the Mythic North
The Referee’s Handbook contains everything you’ll ever need to run a game of Outcast Silver Raiders, and is filled page-to-page with helpful advice that starts with tasking the prospective Referee to have those hard conversations around expectations and limits, and ends with advice on going with the flow and nurturing your player’s creativity.
As the Referee for my games of Outcast Silver Raiders, this book was an essential piece of kit for getting me through it. I had a lot of hangups about the old school philosophy that were going to taint my and my friends’ experience with the game if they weren’t checked by the advice within.
You could in theory play Outcast Silver Raiders with the Player’s Handbook alone but I think you’d be hamstringing yourself as a Referee and risking the enjoyment of the group without it. It’s hard to get across a lot of the advice within it for using the various game mechanics to their narrative fullest without just regurgitating it.
In addition to the columns of advice is a lot of additional content for your players. A lot of this content is intended to help you transition from a traditional high-fantasy game, and opens up classical fantasy races like Elves, Orcs, and Dwarves as well as providing a whopping additional 7 classes that are all inspired from the same place.
These classes majorly change the power-level of the game, and the book warns this, but each is tweaked with a particular Outcast Silver Raiders flavour that I really like, especially the Warlock, who takes this bargain with daemons to its logical extreme with you essentially being on a timer until you’re ripped down to Hell to make good on your end of the deal. It rules beyond belief.
Preceding that are 20+ entire pages dedicated to strange, occult rituals that have gnarly, and macabre requirements to fulfil them that I can foresee some players getting really interested in.
These rituals can be the focus of an entire adventure and have some fantastical and horrific consequences once they’re cast. They also emphasise how important it is to have those talks before you play, as more than a few of them involve animal and human sacrifice and don’t shy away from the brutality of these things. You are casting dark magics for your own ends, after all, and people will suffer for it. I appreciate the authenticity of it all even if these aren’t my particular cup of tea.
Surviving the Cold: The Mythic North Guide
Following the Referee’s Handbook is The Mythic North, which to me, is the thing that makes Outcast Silver Raiders worth diving into with total, reckless abandon. This is the intended campaign book for the game, a beautifully rendered hex-map for you to crawl through with the travel rules included within the Player’s Handbook.
It’s filled to the brim with places, locations, factions and NPCs along with a quick-notes to give you inspiration on how to play them. You’ll find hooks for adventures here, and nothing more. Outcast Silver Raiders makes a point to present locations as they are and let creativity and player choice generate the adventures.
And there will be plenty of hooks. The Mythic North is a twisted imagining of medieval Europe. It’s a lawless, unenlightened place, filled with wannabe warlords and has-been monarchs that are glued in places of power by the ascendant church. It’s a world that is caught in the clutches of turmoil.
I got a real sense of loss from it, every bit of lore has this vibe of post-apocalyptica on the verge of another catastrophe that’s reinforced by the unrelenting and bold illustrations that accompany it. The Mythic North feels like a world that has lost something that it will never know again. It’s unforgivingly dark and cruel, with civilization as nothing but a dim candle that keeps the horrors away, and that light it shines only makes its own cruelties the more obvious.
I’ve mentioned a couple times in the review that the book calls for having discussions on limits and game content, and that pops up again here too. Outcast Silver Raiders doesn’t shy away from particularly nasty and complex themes (religious oppression, self-harm and societal inequality to name just a few), and it deliberately tasks players with engaging with these aspects even if they are alien and uncomfortable.
With the right group, with trust, these themes can be amazing for roleplay. Outcast Silver Raiders places the player characters as outcasts to the social order, and allows them to interact with the social hierarchy in a way that NPCs can’t or won’t. The societal restrictions of the Mythic North give the Player Characters a lot of freedom in how to engage with the topics in a lot of diverse, interesting ways.
It won’t be for everyone. Inequality is already something a lot of us cope with in our daily lives for a multitude of reasons, and if you’re not someone who wants to engage with themes you might be experiencing in your daily life then you are perfectly valid for it. Outcast Silver Raiders doesn’t come across as judgemental in any regard. It urges people to try to tackle these themes as a matter of broadening horizons, but it always states everything will be just fine if you choose to ignore it or take it out of the game entirely.
I have a lot of respect for that. I’ve always been someone who enjoys roleplaying into darker, more macabre themes like that. I like a bit of bite and edge to my games, even if I always personally play a little neurotic freak who ultimately tries to do good. I think a lot of that is where and how I started roleplaying in the first place.
A Tough Adventure, but a Worthy One
Outcast Silver Raiders is a worthwhile recommendation for me as a total and complete package, especially if you’re looking for something different. This is an amazing gateway game into the greater, old-school renaissance space, and it hits its design intent perfectly there. From start to finish, you’re invited with a red carpet to come, give it a try and then tailor it to suit you and your group’s needs.
Even if you eventually feel you’ll outgrow the system, and I definitely foresee that happening with me and my friends, you might find yourself sticking to The Mythic North as a setting for another game system instead. It’s built with that in mind too, as after all a hex map is a hex map, no matter the mechanics around traversing it.
It won’t be for every group, which seems like a cop-out thing to say, but that’s a deliberate conceit here. Even if you stripped back on all the major themes, the setting at its core is deliberately grim. It’s a selling point to a lot of you reading this, I’m sure, but for those whose group aren’t interested in at least tackling some of the themes presented in the book I don’t think any amount of tweaking would make it for you.
I say that as a fact, rather than a positive or a negative. I don’t think everything has to appeal to everyone, in fact I think that’s a good thing. What Outcast Silver Raiders gets right though is that it doesn’t make a point to exclude people. Despite its grim themes being what they are, there is an effort woven through the books to encourage people to come and give the OSR style of game a go.
At the very least, if your group bounces off the game and the setting you’ll be left with some incredible artwork by Kim Diaz Holm that blows me away even after trawling through these books for this review.
I’ve followed Kim’s YouTube channel for a long time, and the topics he discusses about art, politics, and his methods always struck me. It’s really awesome to see their artwork across every page, and it ties in so strongly to the themes and aesthetic of the book that I couldn’t imagine anyone else doing as good a job with it.
I genuinely cannot express how much I love Kim’s style, in general and in Outcast Silver Raiders specifically. I want a tattoo inspired from it, and will probably make it a Christmas gift to myself to get one.
If you’ve got the cash to spare, absolutely pick these books up and support this game. If you’re looking for an alternative game to introduce to a group of any skill-level, Outcast Silver Raiders is a perfect fit so long as you’re looking for something darker and harsher.
You can pick up Outcast Silver Raiders at https://www.exaltedfuneral.com/products/outcast-silver-raiders and if you want to support Kim, the artist, you can at https://denungeherrholm.com/
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