The Odd Path

Chris McDowall spent seven years designing games before he sold anything. That patience matters. When Into the Odd arrived in 2014, it didn’t feel like a debut — it felt like a thesis, fully formed. Three ability scores. No to-hit rolls. Damage happens automatically. Character creation takes minutes, not hours. The rules fit in your pocket; the world they describe does not.

What McDowall understood — and what made Into the Odd land differently from the dozens of other rules-light fantasy games circulating through the OSR — was that brevity is not the same as shallowness. His prose was spare and evocative, painting industrial horror and cosmic strangeness in the gaps between mechanical instructions. The game asked players to engage with a world rather than a system. The system was just the door.

The Bastionland Engine

Electric Bastionland followed in 2020, shifting the lens from dungeon-delving to strange urbanism. The mechanical core remained recognizable — the same three-stat chassis, the same emphasis on failed careers and found equipment as character identity — but the tonal register changed completely. Where Into the Odd was industrial and weird, Electric Bastionland was absurdist and metropolitan, a city that felt like it had been designed by Kafka and illustrated by Moebius.

Mythic Bastionland arrived in 2024, pivoting again — this time toward Arthurian myth and wilderness exploration. Three major systems across a decade, each built on the same engine, each proving that the engine could hold different kinds of stories without breaking. The Doomed, a horror-themed skirmish wargame, demonstrated that the minimalist philosophy could cross genre boundaries entirely.

This is a designer who treats every release as a refinement rather than a reinvention. One book per year, give or take. No bloat. No filler. Every page earns its place.

The Movement

The real legacy isn’t the games themselves — it’s the Mark of the Odd. In 2020, McDowall released an open SRD licensing framework that invited other designers to build on his chassis. They did. Yochai Gal’s Cairn became a major indie RPG in its own right, spawning its own SRD and ecosystem. Ben Milton’s Knave drew direct inspiration. Dozens of “Odd-like” games emerged, forming a recognizable sub-genre within the broader indie RPG landscape — games that were, as the community described them, “a distillation of OSR principles freed from compatibility with B/X or 1e D&D.”

McDowall didn’t just make a game. He made a platform. The Odd-like movement represents a genuine fork in rules-light RPG design, one that continues to grow and diversify years after the original release.

What the Scoring Sees

The invention score is high because Into the Odd wasn’t a simplification of existing games — it was a reconception. The auto-hit damage system, the three-stat architecture, the emphasis on evocative setting over mechanical scaffolding: these choices created a new design language that other designers adopted, adapted, and extended. Not a new category, but a genuine paradigm nudge within one.

Architecture reflects the durability and elegance of the core engine. Three distinct tonal applications across a decade, plus an open SRD, demonstrate a system that can hold weight. But the scope remains deliberately narrow — these are variations on one engine, not a portfolio of distinct architectures.

Mastery is constrained by volume. Four published titles across an eighteen-year trajectory is quality-focused but thin. Each release shows refinement, but the body of work doesn’t yet demonstrate the breadth or depth of a mid-career designer working across multiple systems.

Total: 22 points. Year: 2014.

Final Score: 22 / 40

Mastery is constrained by volume. Four published titles across an eighteen-year trajectory is quality-focused but thin. Each release shows refinement, but the body of work doesn’t yet demonstrate the breadth or depth of a mid-career designer working across multiple systems.