Dark Fantasy X and the OSR

For fun, I'm going to link to a series of articles posted online a couple of years ago about the OSR and its development. If you aren't interesting in reading this much about the movement, I'd totally understand, but if you are, it's well written and interesting. I also find that it coincides with my memory of events as they happened, although I also profess to be more of a bemused observer of the development of the OSR rather than someone who was in the thick of things.

https://osrsimulacrum.blogspot.com/2021/02/a-historical-look-at-osr-part-i.html

https://osrsimulacrum.blogspot.com/2021/02/a-historical-look-at-osr-part-ii.html

https://osrsimulacrum.blogspot.com/2021/02/a-historical-look-at-osr-part-iii.html

https://osrsimulacrum.blogspot.com/2021/03/a-historical-look-at-osr-part-iv.html

https://osrsimulacrum.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-historical-look-at-osr-part-v.html

This weekend, I also went through my own Dark Fantasy X document, and found that I'd left a number of outdated sections of text in there that needed fixing, as well as a few other things that I didn't think were well-written and needed to be revised. I've officially bumped the revision from 2.0.1 to 2.1. But more interesting to me was going through my own document after having just read these posts in the last couple of days, and thought that maybe I was more sympathetic to the OSR and its goals than I'd thought. Reading my document again, I think I probably need to swear off having more than a very vague connection to anything happening in the OSR. 

For those not interesting in reading all of those articles, let me offer a very quick summary:

1) The OSR was foreshadowed by a number of mid to late 3e era products and product lines that capitalized on being "old school", in particular the success of Necromancer Games (Third Edition rules, First Edition feel) and Castles & Crusades, a hybrid of sorts between the d20 rules and some call-backs to 80s style mechanics.

2) Although Basic Fantasy RPG was technically the first retroclone, it was the high profile of OSRIC and the attendant bated breath drama around "will they get away with it" wondering that really launched the OSR. When it became obvious that they could, and that "cloning" the rules of AD&D 1e under the rubric of the OGL, then the OSR officially became a thing.

3) There were four big early retroclones: Basic Fantasy RPG which cloned B/X, with a few modications, Labyrinth Lord which cloned it more faithfully (although still with a couple of modifications), OSRIC which cloned 1e AD&D, and Sword & Wizardry which cloned OD&D, in various editions, with various additions of the OD&D supplemental material folded in. For a number of years, this was the primary focus of the OSR; because these retroclones existed, new material (mostly modules) compatible with these older systems were able to be released. In a subsequent development, the big four (all of which still exist, by the way) the OSR seems to have "settled" more or less on a B/X standard, and B/X-like clones are the most popular. Probably the most popular of all of these is Old School Essentials, which is a quite clever attempt to mimic B/X with an extremely minimalist approach to text, and highly efficient organization and layout. But ultimately, that's all a question of presentation. You could use that, or you could go buy PDFs of the actual B/X books, and get more or less the same experience out of the rules themselves. In any case, the OSR compatible products now aren't necessarily tied to any specific retroclone, but would be broadly compatible with any of them, much as the rules through the 80s were broadly compatible with each other and more resembled house-ruled variations on the same theme rather than different games. Until the release of 3e.

4) After a time, people in the OSR started thinking about creating products that were still based in large part on the retroclone movement, but which deviated in some fashion from them. Consider them possibly fantasy heartbreakers, or house-ruled sets of their own. Some of these were rules-related changes, but many of them were attempting to change the tone, themes or even genre of the game. This lead to the so-called "OSR Adjacent" titles, which had some compatibility with the Classic OSR stuff, but may have required some more conversion to use material as is, because by definition, either the themes of the game or the rules of the game deviated from the Gygaxian core of the retroclones themselves. Many of these borrowed interesting rules that debuted after the "old school" period was over, or attempt to "hack" newer games, like 4e or 5e, into a more old school feel.

5) The nu-OSR, or NSR are games that were birthed in the OSR in many ways, but which deviate from it sufficiently that there is little compatibility without serious conversion work. Many of these games deliberately borrow from Forge-like indie game design principles. In spite of these, an old school feel of some kind is deliberately maintained. Much of these launched from the efforts of James Raggi and Zac S, who were prominent OSR figures who published material that deviated from the classical standard in many ways, especially in terms of aesthetic and tone; Lamentations of the Flame Princess isn't really all that different mechanically from any other B/X clone, for instance. But as the movement continued, you get games like Into the Odd, or Mörk Borg, or a number of others that are only old school in a vague sense, really.

6) Finally, we arrive at a point where OSR is merely a marketing tag and has little meaning; people calling stuff OSR that isn't even built on Dungeons & Dragons at all. Some of this is at least thematically consistent, like retrocloning other older, out of print games like Classic Traveller or James Bond, but some of it is merely a tag for "rules light indie game". At this point, the movement has become incoherent; merely being vaguely "old-like" in some way doesn't make it part of the OSR. The conclusion of the articles, which I agree with, is that in order for the OSR as a label to mean something, it has to be more than just a marketing gimmick. The classic OSR, the retroclones themselves and products made specifically to be compatible with them, and an attempt to play games that are still consistent with the way D&D specifically was played is the OSR. Any other game that is somewhat compatible and/or which utilizes some of the principles of playing in an old school manner would be OSR adjacent. The NSR and any other rules-lite or indie game that doesn't do one of those two things to an admittedly arbitrary degree, can't really call itself OSR or OSR related. Which isn't meant as a value judgement on those games, merely a statement that they don't fit the criteria of belonging to a specific gaming movement. Even if they were birthed in that movement, they've deliberately gone too far astray from it to call themselves part of it anymore. 

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So, having re-read and re-edited Dark Fantasy X after that, do I think I have any reason to call myself OSR? I'm more convinced than ever that I'm old-fashioned, but not old school. The core tenets of the OSR, that is, playing specifically an old version of D&D (or a clone thereof) in the broadly compatible environment that existed in the 70s and early 80s between all of the D&D variants, in a manner that specifically imitates the Gygaxian playstyle, as close as reasonably possible, is not what I'm doing. So, I'm certainly not "classic OSR." I'm also not nu-OSR, or fake OSR, but I might be able to consider myself OSR Adjacent, depending on how strict you are about that definition. My game certainly has a lot of rules that differ from classic OSR, like a universal task resolution system (thanks to d20/m20), sanity and sanity-cost related to magic and possibly daemons too (Call of Cthulhu-like, although much more rules-lite), a la carte class abilities making the game effectively classless (borrowed from numerous games who've done that before; Knave is probably the closest to a classless OSR D&D analog) and a number of other swashbuckling and derring-do related rules (heroism points, advantage/disadvantage, minions, etc.) borrowed from many sources, as diverse as some third party 3e stuff, and even 4e and 5e. 

That said, even though my game is not meant to be nor designed to be played according to Gygaxian principles of play, with resource management, dungeoneering or site-based exploration, or even (necessarily) high lethality as key components of play, it is broadly compatible with a lot of D&D stuff. It wouldn't take a lot of conversion to run a D&D module using my game, and a lot of OSR materials; spells and monsters, for instance, could be used in my game as is without really any conversion needed at all. But that was always the case; as much as OSR people like to pair the rules with a playstyle, and sometimes some of them suggest that anything else is "wrong", in reality there were always multiple playstyles within old school D&D, and at least in a few instances, Gygax himself said as much.

However, in some ways this convergence is an accident. Dark Fantasy X wasn't birthed as a development from within the OSR, it came instead out of the rules-lite m20 scene, and only "by accident" came to so closely resemble some OSR rulesets, and have compatibility with the OSR. Maybe that doesn't matter all that much which "direction" the commonalities came from; whether inherited, or through convergent evolution, to use a biological metaphor, but I think it does, because my approach and attitude is and never really has been in line with what the OSR is doing. I think the articles linked above, as good as they are, don't address my situation, because they describe a situation that's a kind of binary in the OSR; either you're more or less trying to make games that feel old school, or you're trying to use old school mechanics to make some other kind of game. What if you're not really in either of those endpoints? What if you're not even on the spectrum between them? What if you're modifying a D&D or even specifically OSR-like mechanical chassis, but you're on a spectrum between that and a Call of Cthulhu-like playstyle, for instance, or a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay equivalent?

This is much of what I mean about being old fashioned but not old school. I've never loved the principles and paradigm of D&D specifically, i.e., what's the story of D&D and what kind of game are you playing? This was true even when old school was just "current school" for me; I dabbled in OD&D when it was still in print, and got more into the game when Holmes and B/X were in print... not to mention the first run of the AD&D ruleset. I was there. I was there when the OSR started too, and although I wasn't interested in recreating old D&D for the reasons just mentioned, I also wasn't thrilled with where 3e was, and where 4e was going to go, so I was sympathetic to the OSR even while not really looking for what it was offering. There's a kind of binary narrative at play; OSR or old school games vs "modern" games, but of course, D&D is what is meant in all cases. It's really old school vs 3e, and then later 4e and 5e. It doesn't take into account anything else going on in the world of RPGs other than developments specifically within D&D, and even then, it reduces everything to a binary narrative. 

I don't know. Was any of that rambliness useful to anyone at all, even me? Probably not. So, here's some images. They're old school, but they're from the Fighting Fantasy Gamebook City of Thieves, which was one of my gateways into getting more invested in the concept of RPGs back in the 80s.