OSR

I'm not above swiping some good content. Here's a couple of comments on a reddit post that I thought were both pretty interesting. I'll add my own commentary below, or maybe embedded within:

[The OSR] started out with retro clones. That is less of a focus now. Part of that is with the release of all the original TSR material on One Bookshelf, with PDFs of everything, and even print-on-demand of many of the early TSR books. As a result, there is less need now for something like OSRIC, since much of the purpose in 2007 was to provide the ability to play AD&D at a time when AD&D was not being published. But retro clones still come out, often with an intent to streamline, or to publish a heartbreaker that distills the rules according to certain guidelines. Black Hack and White Hack are popular rulesets. Old School Essentials has replaced Labyrinth Lord as a leading retro clone. Lamentations of the Flame Princess is still a popular ruleset, though controversial (see below). Shadowdark is a new popular ruleset that mixes Basic with 5e (see below). Stars Without Number/Worlds Without Number is a fully developed rules set and toolkit for building a setting. You have Dungeon Crawl Classics which is a few steps away from classic D&D, and then Cairn, Knave, and Mork Borg as well (see below), which aren't retro clones at all, but rather new systems influenced by the OSR.

I love a good fantasy heartbreaker. I wrote my own! And I have a fondness for collecting them, for whatever reason. Although I'm not necessarily interested in too many of the ones listed above, in part because their whole thing is that they're trying to emulate the OSR game principles. Most of which, I'm not necessarily super interested in. My interest in the OSR is not based on recreating the gaming environment of 1970-something or even 1980-something, but rather taking what was good about that era, but abandoning what was not. (Recognizing, of course, that what I mean by "good" is "aligned with my tastes.")

It branched out pretty early into a number of adventures and settings that provided an aesthetic or theme that was unsupported by mainstream rpgs. Labyrinth Lord started with B/X gaming, but then branched quickly into the post-apocalyptic Metamorphosis Alpha/Gamma World space. Barbarians of Lemuria focused on Sword & Sorcery. Lamentations of the Flame Princess created weird horror, historical, and/or heavy metal style adventures, with an emphasis on production values and high quality art. Goodman Games' Dungeon Crawl Classics was a new system with an emphasis on gonzo weird adventures. Kevin Crawford created a very popular scifi space setting toolkit, Stars Without Number and then later fantasy and other adaptations. Beyond the Wall was a quaint English village storybook style game. Hydra Cooperative's central-European Hill Cantons have a whimsical slavic flavor pulled together by the artwork of Luka Rejec. Necrotic Gnome created the fairy tale world of Dolmenwood. Yoon Suin, the Purple Land, is a weird setting in fantasy east Asia. Mork Borg is a heavy metal themed system with a very tight aesthetic look. Kickstarter has allowed many different publishers to put out very specific books that matched a specific theme. Far too many to list them all.

I don't know for sure that that's true. A lot of these diverse themes and aesthetics were supported by the "modern" OGL back in the early 2000s, and there's no reason why they couldn't be still, except that they're cottage industry niche aesthetics and themes. The ruleset that they use is immaterial; there's no reason why d20 or 5e couldn't have supported them just as well as B/X. But maybe the OSR and cottage industry niche kind of just go together, somehow. Of course, see below; some of those aren't really OSR products at all. But let's not get ahead of ourselves just yet...

The influence of D&D 5e has been huge, first in the attempt to embrace the OSR community at the beginning, and then later primarily in pushing gamers more familiar with modern D&D into the OSR. As a result, there is a lot of conversation about 5e rules, and Hasbro and WotC as companies, and framing of games in reference or opposition to the current edition, as well as Pathfinder and 4e. Into the Unknown, Five Torches Deep, and ShadowDark are all systems that bridge the OSR to 5e, to varying degrees and popularity. Also major publishers and kickstarters created content for both 5e and OSR rules.

This is certainly true; while the OSR's stated early goals were to recreate the older, then out of print versions of the games that the OSRians wanted to play but couldn't easily get their hands on, given that the products were out of print (or that they wanted to expand on, but still definitely within that aesthetic and mold of ~19-early-80s-something gaming), but it really was a reaction to what was going on in gaming rather than a "true" recreation of something old. Finch's Primer and other documents, Grognardia's blog, discussions on Dragonsfoot, etc. calcified an interpretation of the OSR that such and such was how it was played back in the day and how it was "supposed" to be played, but more astute gamers, and those who actually still remembered the 70s and 80s often pointed out that such a monolithic and simplistic interpretation of the past doesn't actually match the experience "on the ground" at the time. All of the various "styles" of gaming existed almost from the very beginning... even if we didn't yet have the vocabulary to define and describe them, or games that catered more specifically to them yet.

Theories of game design and other RPG systems have heavily influenced the OSR. Powered by the Apocalypse, Burning Wheel, and other narrative games have had an effect, DCC of course has their own take that creates a new system, but games like Into the Odd, Cairn, Knave, and Maze Rats introduce other concepts. GLOG has a system that encourages hacking. Mork Borg is a heavy metal aesthetic and free-flowing open rules anti-canon game. The idea of NSR has been introduced as a label for games that bring principles they identify with OSR, but apply new mechanics and systems that depart from retro games.

While the NSR, of course, spun off out of the OSR, it really is in opposition to what the OSR was. The idea that you can flip something's principles on its head and yet still call it the same thing is fallacious. Regardless of the history of the NSR as nested within the OSR, I think that it's not helpful to consider them the same anymore. (Just like it's not helpful to call birds dinosaurs. Another pet peeve.) If I have a complicated relationship with the OSR, I have an even more complicated relationship with the NSR. I kind of like where it is in principle, yet I don't actually like much, if anything, of what it actually produces. (Depending on what you consider an NSR product. I like Knave 2e, for instance. If I bothered to check out Black Hack, White Hack or some of those other similar games, I probably wouldn't mind them. Although I probably wouldn't care either about them.) It's like it has the right idea; to take the OSR and go somewhere new with it, but it's the wrong people with the wrong notions of what gaming should be coming up with stuff that I don't actually want. But I keep thinking that the right person is going to stumble across the right thing one of these days within that movement.

There has always been a strong emphasis on DIY adventures. Some of the bigger names have gotten more polished and slick, but there are still many blogs, zines, and free one-page dungeons. Some blogs that started in the DIY zine space have had successful kickstarters and become more polished systems of their own. Old School Essentials is an example of this. Gavin Norman started with a blog and his weird DIY Dolmenwood setting, but his development of an organized and streamlined version of the D&D B/X rules eventually became a polished rulebook.

DIY and blogs, zines and free one-page dungeons are not the same thing, except by example. DIY shouldn't be confused with a kind of pseudo-crowd-sourced approach. That would contradict the Y in DIY, right?

I do think, and I can kind of see this in many of his comments, that Gary Gygax himself was often kind of frustrated and mystified that people didn't just do stuff themselves, because that's clearly what he envisioned, and he clearly thought everyone would enjoy it more. On the other hand, calls for more material that was "official" created and opportunity for him to write and sell more product, so he was obviously conflicted here.

There has been a fragmenting of the community over political opinions and claims about the personal lives of some creators. Some works have been censored and creators blacklisted, while others have said controversial things, or had rumors spread about them and their reputations affected. See Rule 6. Publishers have had to decide on how they react to these controversies. There have been conversations around the Me Too movement, BLM and White vs BIPOC diversity, LGBTQ inclusion, cultural appropriation, and themes around indigenous culture influencing art and writing from the early 20th century and before, and the various viewpoints and opinions held by Lovecraft, Howard, Tolkien, Gygax, etc. The increased presence and popularity of right-wing politics across the globe has influenced tabletop and wargaming, and some of that influence, and the reaction to it, has affected the OSR community. Some have attempted to curate based on these topics, others react to those decisions, some just want content they view as problematic to be labeled as such, while some people chafe at the idea of censorship, or narrowing content creation to match a moving target of non-controversial community-approved guidelines.

As in every other sphere. I actually think that the OSR has been less influenced by this than many other areas, in part because the OSR is more on the same page than much of the rest of our culture. Or rather, there may be a political/social split between the "true" OSR and the NSR to some degree, which is why I'm conflicted in many ways. I think the NSR is on the right track with regards to gaming, or at least they could be if the right people got involved, but the wrong people with the wrong ideas are instead leading the NSR off a cliff. Yes, some of this is social/political. How could it not be? While the OSR proper is much closer to where I am socially and politically (sorta) in some ways that stifles the opportunity to do something different in gaming. There's too much of an attempt to stay where they're comfortable and familiar. And the NSR is willing to get out of that zone, but they want to go somewhere I have no interest in. I have to kind of wend my own way, because neither on its own is trending my direction.

Anyway, that's an annotated version of one big comment. Here's another one:

Well, from where I stand, the acronym works in a few different ways these days.

Those who think of it as Old School Revival view only the original TSR editions and clones thereof to be OSR.

Those who think of it as Old School Renaissance accept the Revival and expand it to include systems that branch off in some distinct fashions from the originals.

And then there are those who take it as Old School Revolution and view systems built from the ground up as fitting, as long as they adhere to principles found in the original systems and the OSR (while others see these as OSR-adjacent).

So, there are strict traditionalists and reformers who both use the term. The divisions I described aren't used by the people involved, of course, as it's entirely my taxonomy. 

I'm a taxonomist by nature, so I like things to fit into neat little categories. In reality, they don't, of course. Rather than branching flowcharts, it's more like fuzzy, soft-edge Venn diagrams. But here I think he's got it right. The "actual" or "original" or "true" OSR  is what he calls the Old School Revival. I would call the Old School Renaissance, depending on degree, either a fringe of the OSR, or OSR-adjacent, whereas I don't think what he calls the Old School Revolution is actually Old School at all. By definition, even, and really shouldn't be considered part of the same movement.

I've linked before to other taxonimist-type posts written by others, and they'd use the labels OSR, OSR Adjacent and maybe NSR or simply non-OSR for the last group, depending on the details. There's a point where simply being an indie garage band game with a rules-light approach isn't sufficient to call itself OSR. It's hard for me to call The Black Hack or Mork Borg an OSR game when they differ in such fundamental ways from D&D, for instance. In most respects, they're more different from "OSR" D&D than d20 or even 4e or 5e is. Just being rules-light and having a few aesthetic cues from the OSR, as well as being fantasy games that tread much of the same conceptual territory as D&D albeit with very different rules disagree make you OSR. Although it might make you appeal to the same crowd. 

Of course, this isn't a value judgement. If it were, it would be a higher value judgement, probably, given that I've always looked for something other than D&D in most respects. Fidelity to the original D&D experience of the 70s or early 80s isn't something I personally value except in the sense of not fixing the elements that ain't broken. 

Anyway... Here's an image. I'll probably do a setting video tonight and stop talking specifying about D&D. 

Imagine Annie Lennox singing Into the West... 

Another post:

The NSR is a strange and unpleasant collection of individuals that arose from the Lamentations of the Flame Princess fandom, beginning with Troika and Into the Odd, but has now been expanded to encompass all manner of derivative remixes. The defining characteristic of the NSR is that they don't really have an interest in DnD and thus are disqualified from being OSR, yet claim to abide by OSR principles. Although there are certainly exceptions, and plenty of well-intentioned newcomers in their ranks, they are most famous for their aggressive gatekeeping and deplatforming strategies, paranoia, infighting and the toxicity of their communities.

NSR games tend to be extremely rules light, involve inexplicable remixes of already extant rules-light games, have limited long term potential, and are characterized by a short lifespan.

Sadly, that's probably quite true, because the OSR is mostly Ben Shapiro style "conservatives" and the NSR is mostly bohemian culturally radical socialists and freaks. Sigh. At least the Ben Shapiro style conservatives are OK to hang with as long as you don't talk too much about politics or the JQ or something like that.