Review: OSRIC 3E

Well, a few years ago I posted a "review" of the product I expected OSRIC 3e to be.  Last year, I appended to that review because of certain developments.  This year, the game has been produced and for a hefty sum of $0 it can be yours too!

If you buy it then, like me, you'll have overpaid.

OSRIC 3 fails on a base level.  The initial development of this "game" was actually a smokescreen to continue producing AD&D1E content.  It wasn't even intended to really be playable initially.  2E "fixed" that and made the game into a sort of near-perfect realization of an end goal.  I say near-perfect because it was missing some stuff they should have included, but it was also missing some stuff that really shouldn't be included.  And it was officially better off out of Matt Finch's hands, who dropped the project because he wasn't in the UK.  Long and dumb story, not going to bother telling it.

So what does OSRIC 3E do?  It brings back some of the shit that should have stayed gone, and turns the game into 2 books to do so.  So it's not even convenient anymore.  It also does something else that's awful.  It pisses on Gary Gygax's grave.  That's the part I'm focusing on here.  Not Finch's bizarre need to change the word "race" to "ancestry".  Quick aside, there's an actual explanation, kinda:

The question is begged, why the fuck can't you just use "race" Matt?  HMMMMMM?  Seemed good enough for OSRIC 2E.  Is it because your girlfriend's other boyfriend told you not to?  Where are your balls man?  It's not like anybody gives a shit what they say on blusky and none of those woke retards are going to buy this book anyway.  Plus it's FREE now.  This is just to be a shithead and potentially kill OSRIC by cucking it into irrelevance.  Admit it, bitch.  You did this same shit to Swords & Wizardry.  All the balls were in Bill Webb's court when you worked with FGG.

Since the last time I shit on Matt Finch's name, I learned he has a much younger girlfriend and she may be the reason why he's swan dived off the woke retard tree and hit every fucking branch on the way down.  Well I hope the BJs are worth it, because she sucked your fucking brain out, dude.  

I thank god I had the wherewithal to know with utmost certainty that Matt Finch's inclusion would fuck this edition of OSRIC up, in every sense of this sentence.  The Player's Guide has only one mention of Gary Gygax, that being: 

Which is absolutely fine.  This is the normal sort of thing to see in an OSR product.  His name is not repeated elsewhere in the Player's Guide, which is also fine.  He didn't need to be peppered throughout both books to maintain the old school spirit, it's an overly good statement to stand in solidarity with the forefathers that basically designed the game you are regurgitating and, to be frank, the very reason I or anyone in the entire world knows who the fuck you are.

As you can tell by my tone, this is not maintained in the GM Guide.  Of course this acknowledgement blurb is copy/pasted, but there are 2 more instances of Gygax name in this book.  The first is on page 30:

So, the first time his name is brought up it's to make a joke of the harlot subtable on the DMG page 192.  A subtable you didn't include in this, what is supposed to be a reproduction of the AD&D1E rules.  Not only did you not include the subtable (which could be forgiven if you weren't such a dick about it as it was itself a joke by Gygax), you omitted your own expanded variant of it from OSRIC 2E (page 174):

This is proving that there was a time Matt Finch and/or Stuart Marshall realized the original table was funny.  I miss those guys.  Instead, we have men standing on the shoulders of giants to merely have a better vantage point to piss on the giant's face.  Both versions of OSRIC broke up the City/Town Encounters Matix and into two and actually created a less useful design in the process.  This would be something I would fix in my own index of AD&D, should I have made one.  Making part of the product less useful than the original should probably not be a design goal.

So where does the other instance of the big man's name occur?  I'm sure if Finch is somehow reading this he rushed to his PDF copy to CTRL+F it. I'll save you the trouble, it's deep within this half of a wasted page on the GM Guide (p 86, an apt placement as it should be "eighty-sixed")

So this drek could easily be cut.  Like the terms "men" and "women", old schoolers have no problem understanding the difference in the terms "evil" and "good".  Actually mentioning changing terms from something understandable to something incomprehensible isn't justified by a lame paragraph, even if the subtext is that your girlfriend told you to from the next room while fucking another dude.  The entire next page is wasted text as well.  I'm not going to bother reposting it here, it's an entire page to say "monsters don't have to be the alignment given but usually are." 

This is all so effortlessly bad.  How did we go from S&W complete 2nd print to this?  144 pages with nearly all the options from AD&D as well as good layout and masterful writing to this bloated 600 page pile of horseshit that can't even manage to keep hardly any tables on one fucking page.   

So I will now explain exactly what OSRIC should have in it.
1: A plain English translation of the vast majority of AD&D1E.  Even the stupid hooker table, preferably without commentary.  This is a historical reference text, not an opinion piece and especially not your libtard girlfriend's opinion piece.
2: Instead of the bullshit initiative system, the one everyone actually used instead (d6 individual, monsters use "side" initiative or "type" initiative, low roll goes first).
3: An integrated option of ascending AC, the only objective mechanical improvement on the game post-TSR.  When I say integrated, I mean you don't have to hunt for it.  Finch managed to do this in S&W as well, though the explanation of BAB was hidden at the very bass-end of the combat section.
4: Other than the core three, monsters also sourced from the MM2 & Fiend Folio, for a more complete view and usability.  
5: Editing to where all this fits inside a 300-page book.  I think you can easily fit the entire game system in a 300-page book (maybe 400), sparing every word you can throughout.  It absolutely doesn't need to be 600 pages across two books, and frankly doesn't need any art outside the cover.  This is a reference and index compilation, it's not supposed to be a sexy game book or books.  
6: An index.  That meaning, this book directly has references to the source material.  So the harlot table would reference the DMG page 192.  It would be drastically easy to do: PHB is "P", DMG is "D", MM is "M1", MM2 is "M2", and FF is "F".  In order to avoid copyright issues you'd have to omit the actual explanation of these references, but accepting the intelligence of your audience goes a long way.         

I will now explain exactly what OSRIC should not have in it:
1: Psionics
2: The Bard
3: The Monk
4: Weapon v Armor AC adjustment tables.
5: Non-weapon proficiencies, skills, or anything else created outside the core of AD&D1E other than the aforementioned ascending AC rule.

This endeavor would not be difficult for even a second-rate technical writer with any experience at all.  Fuck I could have done this as a high school kid.  It's stupid this hasn't already been done.  This is what everyone wants out of OSRIC.  It's basically "OSE but for AD&D".  Minus a bunch of shitty color plates, multiple formats, and stupid rules-expansion books.