This past January, I had the privilege of attending the Philadelphia Area Gaming Expo and participating in a discussion panel on the State of the OSR. The panel was hosted by Luke Stratton, author of Pirate Borg and host of the Ship of the Dead podcast. My fellow panelists were Kelsey Dion (Shadowdark), Tiger Wizard of Exalted Funeral, and Levi Combs of Planet X Games.
We had a lively and positive discussion about the OSR and its various aspects, which you can view here.
One of the first questions asked was “What is the OSR?” I’d like to share the answer I gave. Once again, thanks to Luke for hosting, and to Kelsey, Tiger, and Levi for a great discussion.
I’m going to offer a slightly different take on the question. What is the OSR? It’s about the logistics.
In 2009, I wrote that the OSR wasn’t about a specific rulebook or about running a dungeon crawl. It was about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what avenues were left unexplored because of the personal or commercial interests of the time. In fact, the OSR is an alternate history of what game design could be.
It started with the hack that Matt Finch, Stuart Marshall, and Chris Gonnerman discovered. They found that they could take the d20 SRD and, if they omitted the newer stuff, what they had left was only a hop and a skip away from the classic edition of your choice. From that, we are now living in that alternate history.
The reason we’re living in that alternate history is that we built the infrastructure to pursue those unexplored avenues: open licenses, digital distribution, and crowdfunding.
So my answer to the question “What is the OSR?” is simple: it’s all of the above. The classic editions form a gravitational point source around which systems, play styles, and projects orbit. Some of them achieve escape velocity, but most remain either further out or closer in.
Those classic, out-of-print books form the center of the OSR, but what you do matters more. It is the logistics that drove the explosion of creativity and enabled it to move from the gaming table to global audiences.
It’s why we have Shadowdark, Pirate Borg, OSRIC, my stuff, and all the other offerings, both commercial and non-commercial, available today.
So that’s what I think the OSR is.
