As a hexcrawl fan I'm always in need of more lairs and smaller sites for exploration, and Coldlight Press has done a good job fostering such (in a addition to becoming a welcome new voice in the module review game). A few months back they held an Adventure Site Contest, which ultimately produced some very nice small-scale adventure areas.
Now they have a second round up and open for submissions. If you have an idea, get over there and submit it. I need more lairs! You have until January 1.
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Along these lines, magic has a rather noticeable if underappreciated effect on your implied setting. Beyond the obvious, which is that magic exists and so any number and type of amazing things can be dropped into a setting, many specific spells greatly shake up the world if taken at their word: Continual Light being perhaps the most obvious, but Animate Dead, Raise Dead, and Permanency being of especial note.
What I think is less considered here is the nature of magic itself. The default magic system for D&D is Vancian casting. I'm quite fond of it, and have no interest in the thousands of failed alternatives that have been proposed over the decades because it's "not realistic" or what have you. However, Vancian casting as seen in D&D is a system with a decidedly academic basis. That is, it all works off of spellbooks, which in turn requires literacy and the production of books and scrolls, and additional implied research and training. As a system it's all very, well, systemic.
There's nothing wrong with that either, but strictly speaking in terms of implied settings, it does close off a lot of worldbuilding avenues unless one wants to lean heavily on clerical magic. What if you want to have innate magic-users? How do you handle arcane magic in non-literate societies? What did arcane magic look like before the institutional framework was created that made the literate style possible? And, most importantly, how do I sell my soul to the forces of evil in pursuit of quick and easy power?
The base concept is not new, of course. Sword & sorcery fiction is full of this sort of thing (and DCC has built its magic system around things going terribly wrong as you wield its power). D&D nods in this direction with the DMG's witch doctors, but on the whole it's lacking, and one of my goals is an attempt to expand on elements like this that traditional D&D tends to be weaker at. Dissatisfied with the idea of sacrificing a virgin and summoning Baphomet in pursuit of terrible sorcery, only to told in a cavernous voice echoing with a thousand thousand screams, "there will be a test on Monday", and then handed a pile of books and ink quills, I decided to construct some alternate systems, not to replace Vancian casting, but to complement it.
Of course, you could always just take a conventional magic-user, add an evil alignment, a two-line backstory, and a roll
or five on a random corruption/mutation table (I'm fond of the ones in The Metamorphica: Revised). This is intended for those who want a more systemic approach to the subject, with results that can be gained through actual play. I've looked to the influences given above, as well as the general sense of
the Dark Side system in the old West End Games Star Wars RPG.
My GM's Manual has the write-up on this for my own system (it's there because I don't really expect it to be a typical player option, though it's possible), but here's a full D&D equivalent. Non-evil versions I'll tackle another time.
Let's look at the OD&D equipment list:
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| OD&D Vol 1, p. 14 |
It's light: weapons, armour and gear in just under one booklet-sized page. Nothing really exotic except in terms of scale (the ships). There's no rules for any of this stuff, outside of where it appears in relevant other sections of the rulebook; for anything that doesn't, what the item does is rather obvious. More importantly, everything here fits into one of five core categories: weapons & armour, transport, food & drink, adventuring supplies, and what you might call "buttons"—items designed specifically to counter one type of monster. It's extremely utilitarian—some may even say sparse.
Now I wouldn't call this an example of brilliant design, because it's mostly not design, per se. Rather, it's the logical offshoot of OD&D being a game first and foremost. That is, OD&D was a played game before it was a published ruleset, and was intended to do a very specific thing compared to the "world's most popular fantasy roleplaying game" kitchen-sink, all-things-to-all-people school D&D embraced later. The people who played in the early games leading up to publication used it to do that specific, intended thing. Along the way, stuff came up, and the most relevant bits were added to the developing ruleset. The equipment list was just one of those things. The key thing here is that the list wasn't designed in a vacuum. In other words, it's mostly not the result of someone sitting down and saying, "okay, I'm making a game, and as part of that there should be gear for people to spend their money on". Instead, it's the largely result of "I already have a game, and here's the gear that people have been spending their money on as a result of playing it".
This might seem to be nitpicking, but reflects a key difference in approach. The first approach (building from design) is post-hoc and can be detached from the needs of actual play. What's more, it's often slaved to abstract notions of design, further detaching it from at-the-table needs. For example, the person making the rules-light game pares the list down because the game is about having less rules, while the person taking the more AD&Dish crunchy approach blows it up in size because the game is about giving you more; neither is really looking at what their particular game actually needs or what will typically see use in it. The second approach (building from gameplay) is founded primarily in at-the-table usage, and so only gives you what's relevant. It's not a medieval economic simulator. Instead, it's all about actually playing the game as it was intended to be played—adventuring.
Let's look at (some of) the 2nd edition AD&D list by comparison:
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| 2nd edition PHB (revised), p. 90 |
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| 2nd edition PHB (revised), p. 91 |
Weapons and armour are listed separately, as they're multiple pages themselves; we'll skip these, except to note that there's many more of those than in OD&D. Overall the full 2nd edition weapons and equipment list is 5-6 times the size of the OD&D list, reflecting the "more is more" school of design. Some of it is a useful bit of gap-filling over the OD&D version: the spyglass and magnifying glass, Greek fire, thieves' picks, grappling hooks, some of the animals, the costs for meals and lodging, and the rates for torchbearers (but note how there's no longer a ten-foot pole). A bunch of this material however falls into two broad categories: the micromanaged, and pure fluff. Micromanaged items are things like the fishing hook, flint and steel, or scroll cases, which you previously would have just assumed you had as a competent adventurer but now have to buy—and track. Another example would be yokes, bridles, saddles, saddle blankets, shoes and halters, which used to presumably come with the horse but now all have to be bought separately. Similar is baffling precision: a carriage costs 150 gp, but an ornamented one costs precisely 7,000 gp—no more, no less. What if I only want to invest 3,000 gp into pimping my ride? Too bad, apparently.
Fluff are items that you're likely to never see bought: the stuff that exists in the game universe, but has no direct relevance at the table. These things, like the capon (a castrated rooster), perfume, pounds of soap or figs, ox yokes, swans, barrels of pickled fish, funeral mourners, or the all important differences between a tabard, tunic, toga or vest are all unlikely to ever come up in actual play. The inclusion of such items is a result of D&D's steady drift from tightly bounded design and a clear focus on being a game to an attempt to be a medievalesque fantasy simulator for adventures of all kinds, including the non-adventure: MMO-style "crafting", economic speculation, and the tedium of day to day life.
Unlikely does not mean impossible, of course: the endless possibilities inherent in RPGs are the major part of their charm. However, every single sentence you add to a ruleset imposes a comprehension tax on the reader. It has to be parsed, sifted and analyzed, and takes up space in the book that has to be glanced over when you're looking for whatever it is you're actually looking for. As such, the more is not the merrier: you should be considering the actual gameplay use of every last thing you add. This goes double for options, since many have to be weighed against one another in addition to being weighed at all. Anyone who's played RPGs for any length of time knows that the longest portion of character creation is often the shopping part, where players take their starting coin, read over the equipment list, and try to decide what might be the most useful things to purchase—doubly so for people entirely new to a game, who have little to nothing in the way of experience to work with. In that light, the majority of the items on the 2nd edition list are just junk. This is where the "rulings, not rules" philosophy shines. If you need a cost for things like those it's unlikely to be more than once: wing it. If it so happens that your games keep revolving around the vital difference in cost between a pound of figs vs. a pound of nuts, you can always add that to your house rules document.
So what's the key takeaway here? I'd sum it up as:
A game's equipment list should be a list of functional items likely to be used in the playing of that game, not an attempt to list every possible item or to create a coherent glimpse of the world economy. An attempt to cover items outside of core gameplay is not only usually wasted, but actually harmful to play.
Someone here might point out ACKS as an exception, an OSR game literally built around an exploration of economic factors. However, I'd argue that in being designed to treat economics as gameplay, that game's thorough equipment list is fulfilling the first part of my takeaway above, rather than the second—it all has a reasonable chance to be used in the playing of that particular game (even if use is merely as an economic unit bought and sold as a commodity).
One of the things I wanted to do with my game was re-examine the core of D&D. For the most part this wasn't with the intent of reinventing the wheel—quite the opposite. It was more of trying to think "what is X rules component trying to do, and how can I improve on that while not sacrificing its key functionality?" Considering that goal and the above overview (and ignoring weapons, armour, hirelings, and general lifestyle costs for the time being and just focusing on gear), here's my California emissions:
And here's the principles that went into what's on my list, which I think apply to most any game but usually aren't articulated:
1) A list designed to point to and facilitate intended gameplay. You can use your equipment list to help reinforce the themes of your game and to show what's expected at the table in typical scenarios. The items here are specifically focused on classic D&D adventuring, particularly dungeoneering, just like the game as a whole. Equipment lists should not obfuscate or fight against your core design; by keeping it tight, you make clear to the reader what to expect and perhaps what not to.
2) An attempt to cover only common scenarios specifically rooted in gameplay. Following from the above, what doesn't fit the intended gameplay—or could conceivably fit but is so unlikely that the vast majority of sessions would never see it used—has been left out. The most obvious thing is the lack of fluff items: no swans or capons here. This is not the same as "streamlined" or "rules-light" design (the latter of which in particular I've come to see as a destructive meme, a means that has become an end and a mention of such in its advertising now perhaps my number-one reason to skip an OSR ruleset). That is, I haven't cut items for the sake of cutting items: what's been left out has been left out for a reason. There are no sailing ships, for example, because the number of times players need to buy a war galley are few and far between: I'll do some quick research or wing that if I have to, and the other 99 times out of 100 I'm coming out ahead in terms of rules text not spent and page count kept down. In a nautical game things would be different, with nautical rules then moving into the "common scenarios" category. Even then, there's a big difference between needing to be able to resolve sailing as a casual gaming factor and regularly having the need and the coin lying around to buy your own medieval battleship.
3) An attempt to reduce analysis paralysis. As above, there are no items not relevant to intended play, which helps here. But there are also no redundant options: everything has trade-offs in terms of cost, bulk, or other gameplay effects. And in a departure from the typical D&Desque equipment list, there is no price for items so cheap as to effectively not matter—they're free. This just comes out of an understanding of the larger rules engine: with wealth = XP systems, PCs are almost immediately awash in so much coin that counting coppers is almost never meaningful, and with encumbrance being a key limiter, there's still a clear cost to taking items even when they're free. With this approach, I avoid the tedious and time-consuming bean-counting phase of character creation. For unusual scenarios where the price of, say, a hundred shovels might matter, I can make that up the one time; an understanding that you only need to cover typical play and that ruling on oddities is fine is remarkably freeing.
4) A list integrated with the ruleset. I see a lot of equipment listings that tend to just tell you what the item is, a practice which ranges from "gee, thanks" when I'm told what a blanket is, to "okay, and so what?" when I'm given an item whose relevance is not immediately obvious, leaving me to wonder if it's pure fluff, or there's a use that may or may not come up later in the rules or during play. For that reason, every item has its encumbrance value, all relevant core gameplay effects (including page refs), and typical usage cases. For the latter, that's not all-inclusive: if you're a new player, being told that a torch helps with green slime doesn't really mean much. But it's helpful all the same: you can see that torches don't last anywhere near as long as lanterns, but have some combat and utility uses to compensate in addition to a larger radius, and make a consideration based on that.
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| Sigh. |
Over the course of four parts (I, II, III, IV) of a series nominally about the Old-School Renaissance, we've spent three of them on TSR-era Dungeons & Dragons and one on clones of TSR-era Dungeons & Dragons. I hope by now the reason is clear: rather than a nebulous interest in "old games" (with even what "old" meant being undefined), the OSR was a movement entirely rooted in a specific style of early D&D and cannot be understood without reference to the game that birthed it. This isn't an approach rooted in elitism or exclusion, as is so often charged, but simply an acknowledgement of what actually happened.
This final part is dedicated to explaining how this very concrete base fragmented into the increasingly incoherent movement we see
today, a movement frequently having nothing to do with or even in direct contradiction of what it began as. I want to emphasize that this isn't necessarily about the OSR getting better or worse (although I firmly believe that strong design principles trump vagueness every time), but about how it changed.
I've worked on this part the longest because, having moved away from the concrete realms of official product (corporate and otherwise) and into the realm of ideas, it became harder to document everything thoroughly. As one of the major topics of this part is the decentralization of the OSR, that naturally meant ranging farther and wider in search of material, much of which has vanished due to link rot. It also became more difficult to capture every point of view, as more and more of them developed. Ultimately I can only hope to annoy everyone with my portrayals, thus demonstrating my clear bias in favour of / against all concerned.
I think it's fair to say that there is no singular OSR today: hence all the confusion. However, though people then and now have tortured the issue to arrive at a definition that just so happened to include all their favourite D&D editions and clones while excluding anything they didn't like, what the OSR was is easy to define: it was simply a rebirth of interest in old-school Dungeons & Dragons, specifically as its original designers intended it to be played.[1] Its adherents had never entirely disappeared, but it was certainly a playerbase on life support for the longest time. Around 2007 began a renaissance, one that manifested in a variety of ways but at its heart was firmly rooted in mechanical compatibility with TSR-era D&D and a sharing of certain key design principles that went with those editions and the way their designers intended them to be played (which I hope the earlier entries in this series have clearly laid out).
Before I start the history, I need to lay out where we are now for it to make sense. Today, we have four core groups that different people place under the OSR umbrella:
Classic OSR is straightforward: it's what we've been talking about up until now. These are the greybeards that never stopped playing old-school D&D--as well as those that came along later and adopted it as their game of choice while most everyone else had moved on to other editions or games--who decided to work to bring about fresh support for their beloved editions. These players were inspired by the rules of old-school D&D, the principles that run alongside those rules, and the unique gameplay experience that results when you have both working side by side. Classic OSR includes the original old-school TSR editions: the original goal of the OSR was to provide additional content for old-school D&D, after all, rather than to design new games. However, it also includes 21st century games built with the intent of capturing both the compatibility and principles elements, though this can still lead to a great deal of variance. Beyond the classic four I covered in the previous part of this series, this would include games such as LotFP, AS&SH, ACKS, Seven Voyages of Zylarthen, Beyond the Wall, Blueholme, Blood & Treasure, Blood & Bronze, Crypts & Things, Fantastic Heroes & Witchery, Iron Falcon, Greyharp, Delving Deeper, Dark Dungeons, Old-School Essentials, and so on.
These games are often labelled as "retroclones", following on from the original four such games detailed in Part IV, even though (confusingly) many of them are not trying to emulate any specific system. But they unquestionably use D&D rules for the vast majority of their mechanics, and can run a TSR-era module with minimal effort. Their overall experience may emphasize or de-emphasize certain aspects of the old-school D&D experience (e.g. Crypts & Things and its focus on the sword & sorcery element of D&D DNA, LotFP with its emphasis on horror and late Renaissance/early Enlightenment elements), but the broad feel and gameplay will still be D&D, albeit stretched sometimes as far as it can go (and perhaps beyond that, depending on who you talk to).
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| Daniel Proctor (creator of Labyrinth Lord), June 2011 |
From a strictly mechanical perspective, all OSR-Adjacent games can be used to run old-school/OSR modules. However, much more conversion work than usual is typically required, and going the other way--attempting to use old-school/OSR rules to run modules made expressly for these systems (such as DCC or 5th ed modules)--takes yet more work again. For example, Knave has no bestiary or magic item list and uses a custom spell list, meaning that any time you encounter a typical D&D monster, spell, or magic item you need to haul out a separate D&D book to learn what it does. From a principles standpoint, these games also (especially the hacks) tend to jettison large amounts of the text that teach you the core gameplay loop of old-school D&D and the principles surrounding it, leading to a poor understanding of what they're derived from and are attempting to do.[4]
The right wing of the OSR tends to congregate with the above two groups, with the exception of the newer "hacks" like Knave.
Commercial OSR is the realm of the grifters and the lazy; when I say that this branch has no principles I mean more than just gameplay. This is not a community or a coherent set of games, but simply a grouping I use to lump in everyone who adds an OSR search tag on their shitty shovelware on DriveThruRPG. They are products, often originally 5th edition in nature, that are or can be converted to old-school D&D with some minimum effort and so are advertised as OSR, but have absolutely nothing old-school about them besides the D&D mechanical base and some kind of (usually generic) fantasy setting. You can usually see a few of these a month being reviewed on tenfootpole, and the unifying theme is how much writers of these products simply Do. Not. Get. It. Rather than rulesets, the Commercial OSR is almost entirely rooted in modules. These have minimal treasure for proper gold-for-XP games, lots of setpiece and often carefully balanced combat encounters a la 5th edition, oceans of read-aloud text dictating player actions, and minimal player agency in general, but might be set in a dungeon or have orcs or something and so the designer slaps an OSR tag on it in the hopes of higher sales.
Not included anywhere above is a vague "old games" category. Some with no grounding in the history of the OSR have become fixated on the "old-school" part of the OSR label and, taking "old-school" to mean only "older than I am" have begun applying to any suitably (arbitrarily) old RPG. As such, you get games like Traveller and Gamma World and RuneQuest and Champions and WEG Star Wars slotted here. Some people now ask if 3rd edition D&D is included, seeing as it's over two decades old at this point. I think any serious reflection would make a person realize that a so-called movement that can encompass D&D, Bunnies & Burrows, Traveller, and Teenagers From Outer Space is conceptually useless except in the broadest categorizational sense (i.e. "RPGs"), but as this confusion occurs all the same I felt it worth covering.
While I think the above is useful in differentiating the various rather different strains of thought that comprise the OSR movement today, the question is, well, how did we get here?
By mid-2008 the big four initial retroclones had been released: BFRPG, OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, and Swords & Wizardry. By this point you were already hearing grumbles that there were too many clones, which seems hilarious considering the avalanche of such that rapidly followed. In this early period of the OSR, designers set down two initial paths.
Once it was realized that anyone with MS Word could and would take the OGL and release their own preferred D&D-plus-houserules, games came (and went) with regularity and people simply expanded the definition of the OSR to include this phenomenon. Some were happy at the increased choice, others annoyed at the idea that people would try to improve on what already worked fine. The earliest grumbles as to how the OSR related to old-school D&D were over the proliferation of and increased focus on retroclones and what such games meant in terms of the future of the old-school D&D movement.
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| Click to enlarge. Note "Old-School Renaissance" in quotation marks: the term was in regular use from 2008 onwards, but was still new enough that many still felt it needed to be singled out somehow ("so-called" was another popular adder). Various other proposed labels cropped up, but none took hold. Original thread found here. See also this thread and this thread. |
Few systems beyond the initial four developed much of a userbase: getting there first was the key determinant of success, at least initially. But the focus on rulesets as a whole is quite notable in that this switched the primary creative emphasis from support product (adventures and the like) for D&D--the original intent of the OSR--to creating and supporting related but still separate rules systems.
While this was significant, the truly major fragmentations came in three forms: the evolution of social media, changing product styles, and general commercialization.
As seen in part IV, the OSR began as a forum-based movement, Dragonsfoot, K&K and ODD74 being key, with a few other smaller forums playing subsidiary roles. But by 2007 Blogger had picked up steam and was increasingly being used to host important original content. In terms of pivotal early blogs connected to the OSR, we have:
The above list of 32 early blogs is by no means exhaustive, and not every one of them started out as OSR blogs (formally or informally) or concerned themselves with just that topic, but I think it covers all the major movers and shakers in this formative period (even if some of them took a little while to get going). You can see by the dates that 2008, the close of the initial burst of the OSR (which I'm placing as the release of Swords & Wizardry in June 2008) coincides with the birth of a lot of these blogs. The effect was that a lot of the key posts--analysis, theory, content--once the OSR took off increasingly began to be made in areas outside the OSR's forum birthplaces. And of course, further notable blogs came along as the movement grew: Hack and Slash (August 2010), Dreams in the Lich House (December 2010), Mythmere's/Uncle Matt's Blog (March 2011), Hall of the Mountain King (April 2011), Hidden in Shadows (July 2011), False Machine (August 2011), Dungeon of Signs (May 2012), etc. But I'm not going to try and list every OSR-related blog that has ever mattered; I think the point is made.[5] While many of the more interesting blog posts were regularly discussed on the forums and many of their creators were also forum members, all the same the movement began to decentralize, as the discussion spaces began to multiply.
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| ENWorld, March 2010. Discussion has moved to new venues, and with this questions move from quibbling over the finer aspects of the OSR and its scope to outright trying to figure out what it is. Click to enlarge. |
Lest I give an impression of too much consensus amongst Classic OSR fans, this outward expansion also had an effect on the core in terms of definitions and muddle. Posters at Dragonsfoot and K&K, under the influence of the wider movement and its rapidly expanding scope, tried to keep up with and hash out what the OSR really was themselves, with some looking to keep the old boundaries, others responding to what was actually happening on the ground and trying to reflect that, and still others trying to do both by introducing a new separation between old-school (actual D&D, nothing else) and whatever the OSR had become. This thread from mid-2010 makes for a good example of the debate.
Following the blog explosion was the launch of Google+ in mid-2011. That ugly social media duckling turned out to be a swan in the eyes of the OSR, as the movement flocked to there early on. To quote the Papers & Pencils blog:
In 2011 the service was launched concurrently with Hangouts, which folks quickly realized was the most powerful game facilitating tool since polyhedral dice. It was only natural that Google+ (which Hangouts was then inextricably connected with) become a tool for finding new people to play and discuss games with. The fact that g+ lacked the social baggage of sites like Facebook, as well as the tools it had for organizing a person’s interactions by topic, gave people a freedom they lacked elsewhere. Nobody’s grandma is on Google+. Nobody had to worry about bothering people by posting too frequently about weird nerd shit. Google’s failure to convince everyone in the world to use the service made it an ideal space for hobbyists who wanted to spend a lot of time talking about something esoteric.
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| Stuart Robertson's logo, 2011 |
The majority of the OSR's creative energies initially were funnelled into an exploration of D&D proper: new rules like the old days, new dungeons like the old days, new monster manuals like the old days, and so on. Variances were there, but a broad classic D&D European medievalism predominated.
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| From S3 (Expedition to the Barrier Peaks), 1980 |
But very quickly you had people who weren't content with this. These people were enthused by the rebirth of old-school D&D, but of course that was never just one thing, even (especially) from the earliest days: fantasy/SF mashups, Arnesonian surrealism, high and low fantasy, quests and story versus sandbox site exploration, funhouse dungeoneering, and so on. It's easy to forget today, but Appendix N was a rather diverse list of influences and it took some time for what D&D was "supposed" to encompass and how it was "supposed" to be played to be largely settled on--for it to become that self-referential collection of tropes and genericisms that we now think of whenever we say "D&D".
The overlooked element that enthused the OSR the most was the sword and sorcery aspect of D&D, which as a fantasy fiction phenomenon was rapidly dying out in the late 1970s, just as D&D was getting rolling, and so from a RPG perspective was ripe for a fresh look.[6] It was only natural that people would take the opportunity presented by the birth of the OSR to run with it in more idiosyncratic fashions, either to explore roads usually not taken or, in the case of some creators, to start trails of their own, sometimes with bulldozers. And hand in hand with these creators came players upset that people were going off the reservation. There were always those whose definition of D&D was narrower than others: that didn't include the techno mashup of S3 (Expedition to the Barrier Peaks) or the Looking Glass-whimsy of EX1 and EX2 or what have you, or who might have been happy with all of the above but preferred their murderhobos to be abstract ones rather than knee-deep in vividly-pictured blood and viscera; the morality play implicit in the presence of young monsters throughout B2 was not to everyone's liking. With the OSR explosion, these more conservative players were to come face to face with all sorts of products that claimed to be old-school, representing either minority strands of TSR D&D or things that Gygax would never have cottoned, and the reactions were often strongly negative.
I'm not sure what's going to be more entertaining... the book itself... or the shitstorm that it's going to cause.
—James Raggi, October 2008
In 2008, a longstanding old-school poster by the name of Geoffrey McKinney released Supplement V: Carcosa. Carcosa tossed aside all the typical Tolkienesque elements, replacing this with the sword & sorcery and weird horror of Lovecraft, Howard, Moorcock, Lin Carter, and MAR Barker's The Book of Ebon Bindings. The name itself caused a stir, a seemingly presumptuous insertion of the work into canon alongside the original four OD&D supplements (though, like the selection of booklet sizing over 8.5 x 11, this was merely McKinney attempting a mock historical fidelity). But that was nothing compared to the outrage the contents summoned up, in particular its series of sorcerous rituals.
This one-hour ritual requires the Sorcerer to stand in cold, waist-deep water and to there drown a Jale male baby. He must rend the corpse with his own hands and spill the blood upon a stone
The sacrifice is a virgin White girl eleven years old with long hair. The Sorcerer ... must engage in sexual congress with the sacrifice eleven times, afterwards strangling her with her own hair.
The initial public reception was largely negative (though McKinney reported strong sales). While McKinney's pre-release campaign postings using Carcosa were very well received, creating an eager audience for the book, once it was released its Dragonsfoot review thread became so acrimonious that it was locked, as free speech advocates and people horrified at the thought of child rape in D&D, fictional or not, hammered away at one another.
One reader, however, was quite impressed. James Raggi, an American relocated to Finland, had fixated on horror and the Weird Tales aspect: HP Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, and the like. This was a traditionally overlooked aspect of D&D, since it wasn't what Gygax was particularly interested in beyond a bit of garnish to his more traditional fantasy tales, and because soon enough Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu came along to explore that niche better than D&D ever could. Raggi ran a successful OSR blog, which made waves early on with his influential 2008 article, I Hate Fun. In May 2008 he decided to make a go at RPG publishing.
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| An early screenshot of Raggi's publishing venture, Lamentations of the Flame Princess (LotFP). Click to enlarge. |
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| From the LotFP rulebook |
Raggi also began putting out a large number of his own works. Of the first 14 releases in his LotFP line, 11 are by Raggi. All depart from the traditional dungeoncrawl theme in some major way. For example, Death Frost Doom (LotFP's first adventure) is largely a dungeoncrawl but can easily end in the players unleashing an undead apocalypse upon the world. Tower of the Stargazer, designed to be an introductory adventure, emphasizes the lethality aspect and can be quite punishing to those seeking to fiddle with the environment as is typical for old-school games. Eventually LotFP's modules gained a reputation for unremitting hostility: just as the smartest thing to do in a Call of Cthulhu game is to burn without reading any book you find, the wisest thing to do in a typical early LotFP module is to dynamite the entrance and fuck off to somewhere with only liches and archdemons to worry about. This concept of the dungeon that punishes you for having the temerity to play it became popularly known as the negadungeon, and was strongly associated with LotFP.
The LotFP line was a huge success (at least by indie RPG standards). Taken on their own terms, not every adventure worked, but they were neither generic nor dull. That having been said, not everyone was willing to take them on their own terms: many objected quite strongly to those terms. LotFP adventures soon gained a reputation in the old-school as pretty, bold and different, but also overly stylized examples of excess: shock and horror and trope subversion in a pleasant-looking package, but either unplayable or so unpleasant in tone that they might as well have been. And the fact that these adventures were being gobbled up almost as fast as they could printed and receiving rave reviews by many bloggers led to the beginnings of the first major rift in the old-school community, between those who thought that Carcosa and the LotFP line in general were breaths of fresh air and perfectly acceptable riffs on the old-school D&D formula and those who thought them a bridge too far--in terms of style, content, or both.
Adding to this was the rise to prominence of Zak Smith, aka Zak S or Zak Sabbath, the blogger behind Playing D&D With Porn Stars and the D&D-based web series I Hit It With My Axe (played with said porn stars). While the title and initial content of his blog (launched October 2009) may have drawn people in, many soon found Zak to be a compelling, insightful writer who threw himself into the OSR, blogging almost daily with his take on it. Smith and Raggi rapidly teamed up, Raggi releasing Smith's work beginning in 2011 with Vornheim, a city-based supplement.
Smith's anarchist leanings, appearance in Maxim, and his own former career in porn combined with a general brash attitude to irritate many old-schoolers, some of whom politically were slightly to the right of Attila the Hun. At the same time, this was not a universal,[8] and while a decent amount of pearl-clutching and think-of-the-children posts occurred on the topic of Zak, many simply claimed that he didn't seem to be playing old-school editions in his broadcasted games and argued that he was a textbook case of style over substance (or just plain found him aggravating, sans politics). When Smith began releasing OSR supplements, such as Vornheim or Alice in Wonderland-themed A Red and Pleasant Land, there was a similar divide between those who saluted him for his vision and those who argued that these products were perhaps pretty,[9] and certainly different, but not especially usable at the table.A 2018 look back by long-time poster T. Foster does a good job in summing up the twinned influence of Raggi and Smith. In reference to a survey asking people what they thought of the OSR, which left out much of anything about the OSR the people who there at the beginning recognized, Foster explained:
 |
| Dragonsfoot, Dec 2018. Click to enlarge. |
Smith, an artist, in particular would popularize visual divergences from classic TSR appearances. As Kevin Crawford would point out in 2015 in his "A Brief Study of TSR Book Design", there was a tendency in the OSR to slavishly ape the simple TSR design dress of circa 1981--monocolour covers, Futura or Souvenir fonts, two-column layouts--either to conjure up that old-school feel or just because writers (which OSR people primarily were) are rarely also skilled in art, layout, and graphic design and so graphically took the path of least resistance.[10] Just as Raggi broke with TSR thematically, so too did Smith, but in addition he began to break with the old ways from an aesthetic perspective. His first release, Vornheim, was comparatively conservative in that regard, but he would get bolder as further releases appeared.
 | |||
| Veins of the Earth, LotFP, 2017 |
Like Raggi's adventure ideas, Smith's art and layout stylings, part of what he termed "DIY D&D",[11] were controversial with the old guard. Some enjoyed it, or could at least ignore it, but others saw it as ugly, or more substantially an example of style over substance. That the newer generation of OSR enthusiasts was more likely to enjoy this style, and then began to release material of their own aping it in various ways, only encouraged division.[12] Today this style is considered part and parcel of what Patrick Stuart would later term artpunk (a term taken up by Prince of Nothing over at the Age of Dusk blog and now generally associated with him via his No-Artpunk essay and contests). It has created a divide between a group that sees the OSR as stodgy, staid, dogmatic and repetitive, versus those that see artpunks as so focused on visual presentation and challenging conventions that they forget that it's all for a game intended to be played, often creating material that is empty from an at-the-table perspective and even, through its emphasis on aesthetics, a hindrance to people actually trying to game with it.
At its start of the OSR, the only real difference between the old-school and the OSR was chronological, an arbitrary gap in between like-minded, linked content. When misconceptions and divergences occurred, the OSR base worked to counter them, perhaps the best example being T. Foster's Five Things That Need Saying, on K&K in 2009. But the size of the influx of new fans and the inability to reach everyone involved with just one or two sets of forum posts as one could just a few years prior meant that this was not very successful. By 2012, the idea that the old-school and the OSR were perhaps fundamentally different entities began to take root.
 |
| Dragonsfoot, Nov 2012. Click to enlarge. |
 |
| Dragonsfoot, Nov 2012 |
 |
| An important caveat. Dragonsfoot, Nov 2012. |
Divergent or not, the OSR remained rooted in a solid TSR-era base mechanically. LotFP changing its spell list or the base AC, or Swords & Wizardry moving to a single saving throw type--these weren't meaningful changes in a larger categorical sense. However, the success of the retroclone movement, with its ability to resurrect
long-neglected rules engines, very early on encouraged an expansion of efforts
along those lines, with retroclones being released that were entirely separate from D&D. GORE (a clone of BRP, 2007); DoubleZero (James Bond, 2007), Four Color System (Marvel Superheroes, 2007); ZeFRS (TSR Conan, 2007); OpenQuest (RuneQuest, 2010); and The Fantasy Quest, Warriors & Wizards, and Legends of the Ancient World
(The Fantasy Trip, all 2010ish) built off of the success of games like
BFRPG and OSRIC, with a focus on their own preferred engines. However, none
of these captured the imagination in the same way, being based on far
less popular game systems. They also had a significant philosophical divergence, in that they were focused on making a dead game available once more, rather than in resurrecting a style of play that had been lost through iteration in an otherwise living game. However, they introduced the idea that maybe the OSR did not need to be all about D&D, and resulted in even OSR fans arguing over this. It was a small argument initially, since the games in question didn't have much of a following, but that too was about to change.
With these games came a sense that you didn't need old-school rules engines to truly capture the old-school experience. As long as you gave some sort of attention to tracking consumables and encumbrance, didn't have superheroic characters that were never intended to face meaningful threats, and concentrated on the dungeon, you too could be old-school. The often-touted advantage to such games was in their modern rules approach, the ability to apply everything game designers had developed since 1981 to the problem of how to create a smooth-running, intuitive, streamlined dungeoncrawl experience. While neither Dungeon World nor Torchbearer are normally seen as OSR of any stripe, their debt to it is clear, and I think it fair to say that they marked the birth of the NSR.
The problem, as the original OSR players saw it, was that they weren't looking for new games that were "D&D but better", beyond perhaps a certain amount of houseruling that every DM worth their salt did anyways (an arbitrary boundary, but one generally understood within the community, occasional flamewars around perceived heresy aside). They had embraced old-school gaming because it did pretty much exactly what they wanted; they liked D&D. In that light, "D&D but better but also not D&D" was a contradiction in terms. No matter how cleanly written and smooth-running your game, or what novel new things it did, if it wasn't D&D or very close to it, it wasn't what they were interested in: games that claimed to run on the principles of old-school D&D without using its rules were missing the point. Some OSR players did wind up running both types of games, because these new games definitely had something to offer (again, let's try and avoid the idea that there are only good games all on one side and bad games all on the other here), but there was apparently little in the way of crossing over from the initial OSR to new games like Torchbearer; again, new generations of players were the ones picking this material up.
With this divorce from Dungeons & Dragons as a rules engine came the idea of universalizing the concept of OSR play. A focus on distilling a set of core principles had been with the OSR since almost the beginning, with Matt Finch's A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming (2008) starting the trend. In his primer, Finch identified four key principles he saw as essential to the old-school D&D experience: "rulings, not rules", "player skill, not character abilities", "heroic, not superheroic", and "forget game balance".
The first two in particular caught the imagination of the OSR community and became endlessly reiterated on blogs, newer primers and the like. This could lead to distortions, as people began using them in a cargo-cult fashion. For example, "rulings, not rules" was meant to explain that old-school D&D used neither universal skills nor a universal task resolution system, thus necessitating the players and DM to collectively negotiate the way the campaign handled many given tasks on a situational basis (see Part II for more on this). That having been said, D&D could be quite rigorous in its rules, becoming very specific when its designers felt that such an approach was necessary, as with dungeon exploration or elements of combat. As blogger Trollsmyth's A Theoretical Framework for the OSR explained, such rules as existed in D&D almost always had a good reason behind them (though they could also be awkward implementations, and frequently what the reason was wasn't obvious to a modern audience).[14] Finch's principle was not a call to avoid detailing key procedures, toss aside the rules that did exist, or just wing things in general, and doing so would wind up cutting away much of what made old-school D&D so distinct. Ultimately (and through no fault of his own), Finch's primer proved to be somewhat of a game-design Pandora's Box, releasing a host of readily memeable and mantra'd principles onto the world that were very easy to strip of vital context. It also inadvertently set loose the idea that principles might be all that you needed to be old-school, or perhaps could be divorced from their original context entirely--D&D--and applied to game design in general (the latter being true at least in part, but also inevitably an approach that would created different kinds of games and thus different OSRs).
Related, one supposed core OSR principle that Finch never outlined and the original OSR in general never considered key was "rules-light game design". Originally a comparative label used by the OSR in specific reference to the extreme crunchiness of the then-current third and fourth editions of D&D, rather than a principle that stood on its own, the idea that "rules-light" was an essential or perhaps even the defining quality of old-school play appeared quite early on.
 |
| RPGNet, July 2009. The rules-light phenomena has already begun showing up as a concept intrinsic to defining "old-school". |
 |
| RPGNet, May 2013. The belief in inaccurate principles also leads to confusion over things like just how internally coherent the OSR is. |
The rise of these D&D-ish games left a sour taste in the mouth of many old-schoolers, who soon came to use terms like "streamlining" and "rules-light" with a heavy dose of sarcasm, feeling that such principles created games that smoothed so much of the classic D&D experience away that they were no more old-school than 4th edition D&D, regardless of how much the games referenced dungeoncrawling or their designers reminisced about playing BECMI back in the day. The label "OSR" grew increasingly amorphous, as the movement became more and more reduced to a series of fortune-cookie-style aphorisms like "rulings, not rules" often devoid of any context.[16] Ideas such as resource management were evermore abstracted or went by the wayside as "needless cruft", mirroring the decline of old-school principles in D&D itself.
 |
| A 2015 blogpost illustrating how the focus moved from a solidly understood ruleset and gameplay effects entirely derived from it, to supposedly universal principles with a specific de-emphasis on systemic matters. The entry concludes with the idea that 5th edition is better at running an old-school game than actual old-school games. |
The OSR early on took minor side treks down science fiction roads, the sword and planet roots of D&D making such exploration reasonably natural, building new games by slapping TSR-era rules engines onto SF settings (2008's Mutant Future, a riff on Gamma World / Metamorphosis Alpha, being an early example, but 2010's Stars Without Number easily being the dominant one, "a retro science fiction role playing game" often referred to as OSR, but described by its creator as simply "influenced by the Old School Renaissance").[17] However, between the appearance of non-TSR-based clones, the move into non-fantasy settings, and the social and rules mechanics fragmentations described above, "OSR" eventually became a label applied to almost any sort of RPG.
 |
| Credit to Melan.[18] |
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| Reddit, r/osr, 2021 |
With its once-firm criteria stripped away, all that was left to guide people was the rather vague name of the movement itself, which only led to further confusion. Having lost the knowledge that "old-school" was merely shorthand for "old D&D", people began wrangling over the definition of "old-school" in a chronological sense, completely isolated from either compatibility or principles.
 |
| Reddit, r/osr, 2018 |
"Old-School" was very clear when used in its original context, in the places where it was born: there was no need to specify "Old-School D&D" because that was obvious, any more than you would feel the need to add "Ford" to the name of a Ford-based movement about old Fords on a Ford forum: it could be taken for granted. However, after some 15 years of playing Telephone across multiple social media outlets, each time seeing various core components of the OSR stripped away, it's created a lot of vagueness and even hostility, as gamers sensitive to being ostracized and ignorant of the movement's history treat being presented with the original definition of OSR as an exclusionary effort attempting to take ownership of the concept of "old-school" in general. The result is that when someone tells another that no, Traveller or RuneQuest or Rolemaster or whatever is not OSR, the person being told doesn't hear "that's not an accurate label for those; this is no judgement of the quality of these games; arbitrary dates alone are no rung on which to hang a design movement". Instead they hear "I am declaring this game you like to be insufficiently old-school", with the implication that old-school equals authentic, and not-old-school equals shallow/bad. It's an emotional response, one born out of a focus on the "old-school" part of "OSR" without any understanding of what the label was actually meant to refer to. The person pointing out that perhaps discussions of old Nissans, no matter how capable or how aged a vehicle they are, don't belong on a forum for old Fords becomes that most dreaded of elitist figures: the gatekeeper.
 |
| Pictured: a grog gatekeeper |
Lastly, commodification of the term "OSR" also contributed to the confusion. Noble Knight added an OSR category in 2009, and Lulu opened an OSR storefront that same year. Similarly, RPGNow/DriveThruRPG added their own old-school category, rapidly featuring hundreds of items.
 |
| Daniel Proctor, May 2009 |
Unfortunately, these places were self-policing. It wasn't reasonable to expect retailers to inspect the contents of each product tagged as "OSR" by its creator to ensure that it used gold for XP or avoided skill challenges or what have you. However, this rapidly led to a glut of product produced by the clueless and the shameless, only further reinforcing the growing perception that "OSR" was whatever people felt like. There was nothing preventing anyone from taking the most railroaded, plot-heavy quest to save the princess or a RPG about roller-skating or what have you and slapping a "OSR" tag on it. This in turn led to the creation of the Commercial OSR, referenced at the start of this post.[19]
G+ was killed off by Google in April 2019, and the current OSR social media environment is ... not so good. It would be naive to pretend that politics and the OSR had never intermeshed before, but the increasing politicization of 2016 and beyond has firmly extended to hobby spaces. Today, new OSR spaces are regularly filtered around political and social stances, through a combination of deliberate exclusion of elements perceived as bad and departures based on an inability to coexist with people of different ideologies. For example, the major Discord and Facebook OSR groups are run by what are often labelled "zoomers" and "pink-hairs" (and with a focus almost entirely on NSR). The old-school forums in return are the domain of "boomers" and "fascists". Ideas are filtered based on the beliefs and practices of their creators.
 |
| Reddit, r/osr, 2021 |
No one platform has arisen with the popularity G+ once had to replace it. Combined with formats that hinder
searching and archiving (Facebook, Discord, 4chan, Reddit, MeWe), you
get active communities but representing fractions of the user base and
with very little in the way of ancestral memory. Questions are answered, and then
disappear into the aether. Ideas appear, and then vanish, even if
good, and interactions that once occurred between disparate
designers are often walled off. The movement as a whole continues to
thrive in terms of
numbers and day-to-day interactions, but the facilitation and
cross-pollination of ideas has certainly been stunted. At the same
time, to claim that the OSR has ground to a halt is just simple doomsaying, and new and exciting releases still occur.
A rite of passage for old-school bloggers seems to be generating the proof for Betteridge's Law of Headlines that is a "Is the OSR Dead" post (or its rebuttal), but over at Beyond Fomalhaut a 2019 post along these lines contained a very solid summation of the state of things:
So it actually happened. The old-school community split this year, and its surviving pieces have gone their separate ways. It is gone. There has been surprisingly little talk about it, and most still speak in terms of a general scene, but in my eyes, the divorce has clearly taken place. The fault lines had been present for a few years, and the conflicts were visible for all to see. Google+’s shuttering by its corporate overlords provided a good opportunity for things to come apart, but it has also obscured the OSR’s disintegration.
[...]
What exist now are separated communities which have increasingly little in common, and do less and less communication as time progresses. There will always be individual connections, and some people will doubtless remain involved in both spheres. Things are never tidy and clear-cut. But there is no big tent “old school community” in the way there was one on Dragonsfoot ca. 2004-2008, the blogs ca. 2007-2012, or G+ for a few years afterwards. These will be smaller groups with more focused interests.
—Melan / Gabor Lux, August 2019[20]
One of my questions at the start of this post was "well, how did we get here?" Old-school D&D players
didn't set out to exclude anyone when they birthed what became known as
the OSR. However, neither did they think about including everyone, any more than a travel guide to Bulgaria includes all countries.
They were D&D players, interested in reviving a very specific,
relatively narrow part of the D&D experience. Essentially, the same growth
phenomenon that occurred with TSR-era D&D occurred in the OSR.
Growth brings new blood, but it usually arrives with a very
surface-level understanding. Given enough
new blood at once, assimilation cannot keep up and the environment
begins to change based on the pressures, active and passive, exerted by
the flood of new arrivals. This in turn generates resentment on both
sides: the original group is put off by the newcomers' assumptions,
which the OG crowd sees as shallow or outright wrong, while the newcomers are annoyed by the
original group resisting experimentation and largely insisting that things are fine the way they are. This
dynamic is all the stronger in a movement dedicated to preserving or
reviving an older thing against clear, very real examples of unwelcome
change. Like TSR, the OSR became a victim of its own success.
At
the same time, this only applies from an internal cohesiveness
standpoint. A great deal of new and interesting work came out of this
newer school, and dismissing non-Classic OSR games simply because "they're not D&D" is, unless D&D is the only RPG you care about, missing the point and ignoring their actual qualities: part of moving away from the OSR means that a game deserves to be taken on its own terms. The trouble, if it can be called that, was in still
applying the label of OSR to such games, which by implication implied that they
still meshed with old-school D&D and the work of the early revivalists.
Essentially, many members of the OSR tried to have their cake and eat it
too: the cachet (such as it was) of old-school bonafides, with the
ability to innovate and break free of perceived old-school cruft and
silliness and do something different. As many old-school players would frustratingly point out,
however, many of these innovations hadn't been ignored, but were specifically rejected or never even considered because they were so obviously contrary to old-school
principles.
So, do I think there's any value in
applying the OSR label to anything other than Classic OSR? No. At the
risk of being prescriptivist, words mean things; after a certain
point, the movement devolved into a vague conceptual slurry of "anything
I feel is OSR is OSR", and I seriously wonder at why people are determined to embrace a movement and label that they might in the same breath argue cannot be defined. That's not to knock some of the games and
supporting material that came out of this (some of which achieves what
it sets out to do quite admirably), only the increasing organizing
uselessness of the term compared with its original, clear definition. But at the risk of being
descriptivist, "OSR" is now a label being used to fit all sorts of
disparate things and there's no sense in trying to pretend otherwise:
you're not getting that djinn back in the lamp. My hope is that
eventually the various groups break away enough and clear labels
develop that each of the four (okay, the three--the Commercial leeches
will always be there muddying up things) will be easily identifiable
without histories such as this and able to do their own thing without irrelevant ideas from one group being knowingly or unknowingly glommed onto another.
[1] This is broad, since RPGs were freeform in nature, and so even such a limited definition still leaves a great deal of room for variety: tone, setting, technology level, emphasis on the dungeon vs other adventure settings, core vs. peripheral fictional inspirations, etc. And yet here we already come to a fork in the road. There is a significant core of old-school players that felt that the only true old-school D&D was what they regularly refer to as Gygaxian D&D, which is to say OD&D, Holmes, and 1st edition AD&D; left out would be B/X and the rest of the post-Holmes Basic line, anything for 1st edition released after Unearthed Arcana (with even that book given the side-eye), and 2nd edition anything whatsoever. These would be, for the most part, the players that were least happy with the OSR in general and the ascendancy of B/X as the preferred edition of OSR gamers in particular, and absolutely contemptuous of anything remotely NSR. As an aside, the caveat given here "as its original designers intended it to be played" is a key one: a lot of people who take issue with the OSR argue that the idea of a single universal "back in the day" playstyle shared amongst its scattered playerbase is a myth. Of course they're right, which is why no one who knows anything about the original old-school environment actually makes that claim, but as it's a common charge given weight by a few overzealous OSR converts I feel it's important to be specific.
[2] "Two years down the road" edit: I originally used "Nu-OSR" as the term for this style of play, a label I saw in use by
fans of these sorts of games (presumably as a sort of ironic pre-emptive attack
on charges concerning the group's false/ersatz nature compared to
stricter adherents to the OSR) and which I snagged under the principle that
it's always better to use what people are calling themselves than
inventing some new term. But along those lines, the term hasn't really developed legs and
insofar as there can be said to be a unified community of this kind,
the New School Revolution
is probably the best example and "NSR" a better label (and one now far more regularly used by adherents): an attempt to carve out a unique design
space that acknowledges the debt to the OSR but that at the same time
clearly marks itself as something of its own (and without any perceived
disparagement in the title). If you're interested in actual dialogue with these folks, you probably don't want to be calling it Nu-OSR. As such, I've altered the original wording and just added this note in the interests of preserving the snapshot of time in
which this was originally written.
[3] The hacks in particular can cut and change so much that they straddle NSR territory. For example, in addition to all of the cuts Knave implements, it's also a classless game. Similarly, while S&W Light is incredibly chopped down (4 pages), it's intended as an introduction for the full S&W system, which is unquestionably Classic OSR. Ultimately no single set of categories I create is going to work 100%, but I think it captures the most important qualities well enough.
[4] At
the same time it's easy to overstate this: one of the major impetuses
for 1st edition AD&D and one of the reasons the old-school movement
died out is how vague, incomplete, scattered, and at times outright
absent the information on what the game as a whole was meant to do and
how it intended for you to do it: plenty of rules, but nowhere near as
much guidance in terms of implementation. As I've mentioned previously,
the old-school died under the watch of gamers with 1st edition DMGs
clasped to their chests.
[5] A snapshot of the most popular OSR blogs of December 2010 can be found in this Cyclopeatron post. The blog ran monthly assessments of the state of the OSR blog scene by way of follower rankings from late 2010 to mid-2011. Philotomy's OD&D Musings, a webpage rather than a blog, was also highly influential.
[6] Sword & sorcery fiction was already a good forty years old by the time it was replaced as the leading form of fantasy fiction by the enormous success of The Sword of Shanarra in 1977 and was creatively exhausted. Additionally, the mid-70s shift from taut novels in the 160-180 page range to doorstoppers as a result of changing publisher trends was not kind to S&S, which really worked best at shorter lengths. Part of the shift in D&D from S&S to the heroic quest style of play was a mirroring of what was going on in the wider world of fantasy literature as a whole.
[7] Raggi did of course eventually come out with his own game, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, in 2010 (revised into the Grindhouse edition in 2011), a B/X derivative heralded for its solid encumbrance system and innovative approach to the thief, amongst other things. What I find most interesting about the system is how little it goes out of its way to support the sort of weird / horror gaming that it aims to facilitate. Unlike Call of Cthulhu, it is content to leave that to the DM and the adventure being played rather than attempting systemic mechanical support.
[8] Politics were banned at both Dragonsfoot and K&K not because everyone agreed but because forumgoers argued so much whenever the topic came up. While old-school D&D players are indeed mostly old white guys and often have old white-guy politics (what I've seen described as "Boomer conservatism"), the perceived "fascist" bias of the old-school by some is largely an invention of a recent crop of young left-wing Twitter types who, equipped only with a Marxist hammer, see everything as kulak nails.
[9] If you liked that kind of thing. The aesthetic preferences of this newer, younger group of players, which often tended towards the abstract, helped brand this school as "artpunk", usually not in a favourable way. Old-schoolers praised the less trained and more unconventional stylings of artists like Trampier and Otus over the photorealism of Elmore and Caldwell, but this appreciation for the unusual often did not extend to the experimentalism favoured by people like Zak S (who tended to do his own art) and Scrap Princess.
[10] Certainly one of the great gifts of the OSR, especially in its later period, has been an increased emphasis on layout, readability and usability, fully taking advantage of how the design of rulebooks has advanced and what desktop publishing software allows you to do compared to old-style (literal) cut-and-paste layout. There has also been an emphasis on writing in a way that cuts the fat, emphasizes key points, and properly organizes the flow of information. Old-School Essentials is probably the biggest recent example of a clean layout style here, with a heavy emphasis on bullet points and gradients in particular that has proven quite influential in a short period of time. My only quibble is that, if anything, there has been in some cases too much of an emphasis on reducing information, to the point that the negative effects of the "rules-light" phenomena have been somewhat mirrored in terms of text. In its worst examples we're seeing a sort of textual disintegration, where much of the potential flavour and atmosphere of a text that enthuses the reader and helps a DM understand the tone and environment is being sacrificed in the name of ruthless efficiency. While more focused on adventures than rulesets, Melan's excellent article "OSR Module O1: Against the Ultra-Minimalism" is definitely worth a read.
[11] For Zak's own definition of DIY D&D and some insight into his thoughts on design, see this 2014 interview.
[12] Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess are probably the apotheosis of this style, with Scrap's art style as seen in Veins of the Earth and Deep Carbon Observatory often parodied by the more traditional OSR. The image given from Veins of the Earth is a Scrap Princess piece.
[13] Dungeon World co-designer Adam Koebel has spoken often of his fondness for B/X and ran a group through Keep on the Borderlands using it as part of a video series for Roll20.
[14] Also sometimes summed up online as Gygax's Fence, a riff on Chesterton's attack on ill-informed reform that was termed Chesterton's Fence.
[15]
The rise to dominance of B/X over the crunchier AD&D as the favoured ruleset of
the OSR no doubt contributed to the idea that rules-light was an
essential principle.
[16] The best attempt at producing a systemless collection of OSR aphorisms is 2018's Principia Apocrypha, which while it won't teach you to play old-school D&D will almost certainly help your DMing if you're new to it.
[17] See also 2009's Hideouts & Hoodlums, a Swords & Wizardry game reworked for Gangbusters-style play, or 2012's Blood & Bullets, for Old West games in the spirit of TSR's Boot Hill.
[18] I see that MoRB has evolved into something that no longer mentions the OSR and now features a fabulous trashy 50s-60s-style sleaze cover. https://rosevillebeach.carrd.co/
[19] As of this writing DriveThru lists almost 8,500 products bearing the "OSR" tag. Daniel Proctor's view of the OSR's then-future was rather prescient, as the interview he mentions in the screenshot (Knockspell magazine #2, May 2009, p. 32) shows. "Currently, many people (not all) have at least some fuzzy idea about what “old-school” means, which has some overlap between people. I think as time goes on the term “old-school” will be co-opted ever more for other games, since this term is seen as a desirable characteristic of games in the broader market. The “commodity” of old-school really began in the heyday of 3e, when “old-school” was advertised as desirable in 3e products. So I see this desirability transferring to just about anything and it will become more of a marketing term than anything else."
[20] I was also fond of EOTB's summational effort over at Chronicled Scribblings of the Internant Overlord, but I'm at 10,000 words as it is.
[21]
Retrocloners--whether strict clones or LotFP-style small-scale
modifications--appear to be generally fewer in number today, with the important exception of the enormously successful Old-School Essentials. WotC making legal PDFs of some of the old-school rulesets available,
and then Print on Demand versions of AD&D starting in 2017 and the Rules Cyclopedia in 2018, no doubt contributed to this. In any case, retrocloners have no single social media space.
