If you go by game release dates, 2026 is the year where Wizards of the Coast becomes the longest-running shepherd of Dungeons and Dragons. The release of 3e serves as an inflection point in how the game was designed, and as a historical note set the stage for the enormous surge in popularity enjoyed by both D&D and the TTRPG hobby as a whole in the following 26 years. This transition of power in the hobby also served as the impetus for the largest movement of D&D revanchism, the OSR. For better or worse, every edition of D&D Wizards put out eventually got its own revanchist movement: for 4e the backlash was harvested by Paizo and turned Pathfinder into the second-largest TTRPG. For 5e, the backlash was a slow burn, coming much later in the product lifecycle and mostly as a result of Wizards of the Coast’s attempt to rug-pull the OGL. It’s here now, though, and has brought us games like Draw Steel and Daggerheart.

The OSR, though, is special, because the grievances that started the movement are about playstyle more than one specific edition. D&D started as a wargame, and was molded over time (and editions) into the character-driven heroic fantasy game we know it as today. Somewhere in the ten year window between the release of original D&D and the release of the Dragonlance setting was something special, as the OSR tells it, a recipe for more grounded gaming. I think there is some merit to that idea; it’s one of the reasons I’ve written about the OSR before and also why I play games like Mothership and Mythic Bastionland. Even so. The era between OD&D and Dragonlance (the setting that “ruined everything” according to some) was ten years; the time that has passed between the release of OSRIC and now is about twenty. What does it mean to be part of a “revival” or “renaissance” that has been around for twice as much time as the thing that’s being revived or reborn?

Theory and Fragmentation

The OSR as a movement developed in response to Wizards of the Coast releasing the Third Edition of Dungeons and Dragons. While there was backlash among certain segments of the hobby immediately, a good signpost for the start of the OSR as a cohesive design movement would be the release of OSRIC in 2006. OSRIC was one of the first D&D retroclones, and it came out the same year that RPGNow and DriveThruRPG merged to become OneBookshelf. In this way, both the OSR and PDF distribution started coming of age at the same time. The acceleration of OSR theory writing happened around the same time, and the late aughts saw seminal blog posts both general (Matt Finch’s Quick Primer for Old-School Gaming) and specific (Ben Robbins’ West Marches).

If I try to recount more of the history of the OSR in any depth I’m quite likely to screw it up (if I haven’t already), so let’s jump forward to the present. While the broad principles of the OSR are enshrined in a set of generally agreed-upon publications (the abovementioned Quick Primer, the Principia Apocrypha, key blog posts by Yochai Gal and Chris McDowall), the OSR is still considered by some to be somewhere between ‘nonexistent’ and ‘fragmented to hell’. From an outsider perspective, old-school gaming does have notably more diversity of form than it did in 2006. Hell, it’s arguable that there’s more diversity of form since 2020, when I last looked into OSR games. Back when the discussion was focused around B/X and retroclones, there was more alignment between the two main columns of the OSR. The gameplay principles is one column: OSR play favors player skill over character ability, a fully prepped and consistent world (and therefore one that isn’t ‘player balanced’), and a precedence of common sense over game mechanics (‘rulings, not rules’). The other column of the OSR is compatibility, specifically with the original rules of Dungeons and Dragons that’s typified by B/X but can roughly include every edition published between 1974 and 1999. This second column is where several schisms occurred, and now some disclaim that compatibility is needed at all (In The OSR Onion it’s argued that the columns of compatibility and principles are in opposition with each other, even). In contrast, there are those who maintain that the movement is in an orbit around older editions of D&D, and those are the people you generally get the gatekeeping and the sub-movement taxonomies from. It’s rather unfortunate, because in my view at least the future of the OSR depends on games which are not directly compatible with old D&D.

Games and Grognards

There are roughly three phases of OSR game development, and when I wrote my last article the second phase was beginning to wane in favor of the third. The first phase is the retroclones. With the release of the OGL in 2000 it was now possible to recontextualize D&D mechanics, even with minimal editing or adjustment. OSRIC and Basic Fantasy were followed by others like Darkest Dungeon and Labyrinth Lord, and finally the retroclone reached its apex with Old-School Essentials, a definitive cleaned up version of Basic D&D that was both slick and loyal to the source material. While the existence of OSE doesn’t mean there will never be a new D&D retroclone, it sets the bar quite high for any game intending to supersede it.

The second phase consists of what I like to call D&D distillations. These are games which concern themselves with being able to use modules and other material, but don’t see a need to recreate D&D mechanics in whole. Two of the most impactful distillations were the ‘Hacks’, Whitehack and The Black Hack. These two games took different approaches to reimagine a D&D-like system, and at the same time made strong statements about what was needed to build a game that would feel like D&D while still dispensing with many of the mechanics. One distillation in particular opened the door for more expansive game design: Into the Odd. While Into the Odd itself was mostly boiled down D&D, both its design and the community around it helped push open the door to more and more interesting games, not the least of which were its direct descendants, Electric Bastionland and Mythic Bastionland. Electric Bastionland’s release in 2020 coincided with another game which began an OSR explosion: Mork Borg. Of course, in talking about Mork Borg you’ll get different opinions as to whether that was an explosion of popularity or the sound of the OSR splintering as the compatibility and principles camps were blown apart.

Thanks to Sean McCoy, the Stockholm Kartell, and others, the third phase of development is currently holding the vanguard for old-school gaming. The third phase, the old-school expansion, is represented by games that align to the principles and aesthetics put forth by the OSR, but only concern themselves with compatibility on a superficial level. Mork Borg uses a d20 but otherwise isn’t aligned with any edition of D&D, however it’s so simple that adaptation of old D&D modules is still fairly easy. Mothership is a d100 system, though if there was any interest in compatibility with BRP or Call of Cthulhu it doesn’t show through in the game or its modules. What both Mork Borg and Mothership do well is illustrate how their rules support their chosen genres (grimdark fantasy and space horror), which in turn helps sell an OSR experience to gamers who have likely never played a TSR edition of D&D. The other arguably more successful attempt to sell the OSR does return to compatibility, but in the opposite direction that most theorists intend. Although it’s never going to be the most popular playstyle, many gamers like the trappings of the OSR and there is real demand for an experience that isn’t based on heroic protagonism like 5e. That said, 5e is how you get people to pay attention. Enter Shadowdark.

Dungeons and Dragons?

There is almost an allergy to calling Shadowdark related to 5e, but all of the core mechanics in Shadowdark align to 5e, and this is both intentional and the reason it’s successful (well, that and very nice binding). It’s hardly the first game to use a more modern version of D&D as a baseline for an old-school game; Dungeon Crawl Classics is successful with its modified 3e ruleset, and Kevin Crawford’s games like Worlds Without Number and Stars Without Number are similarly d20-based, dispensing with archaisms like descending armor class and THAC0. Even with the 5e undercarriage Shadowdark is certainly an OSR game, using simple rules to enable easy prep and adaptation of scenarios and discourage any overtures towards balance. It then keeps running further away from 5e. Advancement is randomly rolled (not just HP, what talents you get are random), which pushes harder on the reward equation than most old-school games. The real-time torch timer adds pressure but is an affectation, not a popular rule; the same goes for equipment slots, although I personally tend to like slot mechanics more than encumbrance. It is the same sort of distillation and best-of mechanics collection that have been seen in games like The Black Hack, Whitehack, Cairn, Knave, and Errant, except marketed at 5e players and therefore ten times more financially successful (at least) than all the games I just mentioned. That said, there are limits to the success of ‘the most commercial OSR game’. When you also consider Shadowdark raised about the same amount of money as Tales of the Valiant, the Kobold Press counter-OGL effort that is now trailing Draw Steel and Daggerheart (as well as Pathfinder and D&D), it serves as a reminder that 5e connections may get you invited to the lunch table, but they won’t make you head cheerleader. Taken together, Shadowdark and Daggerheart both show that no matter where you’re getting your design philosophy from, the most repeatable recipe for commercial success in the hobby is courting the Fifth Edition fanbase.

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The success of Shadowdark illustrates the contradiction inherent in looking at the OSR in terms of systems. Of course, that is exactly what I did last time and there is some value in that continuity, but when you get into the heavy game design that’s going on in and around the OSR, you start to leave what people consider the OSR. Mythic Bastionland is a great game with evocative writing, procedures, and ideas. It also treats its characters and its worldbuilding quite a bit differently than most games in the OSR sphere, and it eschews compatibility as a priority, instead aiming to be self-contained. At the same time, modules, traditionally the mainstay of OSR publication, are themselves fragmenting into their own little fiefdoms. This makes sense with Mothership, a game that while inspired by the OSR is obviously in a different genre and made with different sensibilities than the traditional arch-genres of OSR modules: hexcrawls and dungeons. When I see modules marketing themselves as ‘For Shadowdark’ though, it gives me pause. These stat blocks are supposed to be easy, and the way most I’m familiar with are written, you don’t really need to do much to accommodate pretty much every D&D-based game out there. Why list out one specific system? As usual, the answer is another set of consonant nouns: Marketing & Money.

If I had to characterize what’s happened in the OSR scene broadly since 2020, I’d probably say one key word is moderation. The OSR is arguably the current standard bearer of what could be called simulationist play, based on standards set forth on Usenet back in the day. Simulationism is of course broader than the OSR, but the arguable schism within the playstyle comes down to ‘defer to statistics’ (Hero, GURPS, BRP) versus ‘defer to common sense’ (OSR games). Many of the prep directives, in terms of providing a world that is internally consistent and not subject to the whims of either ‘story’ or ‘balance’, are the same on both sides. Sam Sorensen has a taxonomy that addresses this split well, calling the two sides world-favoring and rules-favoring. Of course, one of the key points of Sam’s taxonomy here is that these are continua, not points or binaries. The OSR gains new players not from the preponderance of blog posts but from games which promise something that they aren’t getting from what they’ve already been playing (read: D&D or Pathfinder). That means coming up with solutions using in-game information is likely to be appealing, but it doesn’t mean that everyone wants to go ‘pawn stance’ and ditch the skill list. Similarly, more tense, dangerous games are exactly what some people are looking for, but the balance between frustration and reward is more important than sticking blindly to how a module is written. Every time someone figures out that there is a compromise that will make their game more fun, somewhere on the internet another person will write that the OSR is dead.

The OSR continues to be important in the hobby because it serves as an effective foil to current mainstream gaming. Unlike most indie games, the OSR claims to provide the same genre and activity as D&D Fifth Edition, just in a very different way. I do wish that the simulationist mindset espoused by the OSR showed up more broadly. We have Mothership, yes, but the OSR mostly concerns itself with being a particular way to play D&D. In the end, that’s going to be its downfall, and some have argued that marketing-wise that’s already caused the downfall of ‘OSR’ as a useful term. For better or worse, outsiders like me don’t know the movement by any other name, and we also don’t really care about purity testing it. I still want to see a bit more variety, though. It may be hard to imagine D&D truly waning from where we see it now, but it is likely to happen at some point in the future. When it does, another game, be that another Call of Cthulhu or Vampire:the Masquerade or any number of other trad games will take its place. By the time that happens, I hope the OSR puts the D&D orbit to bed more seriously. As it is, so much of the OSR is refinement and reinterrogation of the same ideas; I really do think taking them outside the dungeon and getting some fresh air may be a productive next step.

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