I was going to title this post How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the OSR but before posting I checked to see if the title was taken. Jesse Goldshear beat me to it with a thoughtful post that expresses points in line with mine. I’m certainly not the only person to observe that the best Dungeons & Dragons products – be they rule books, adventures, supplemental materials, etc. – are not official products. Wizards of the Coast, the company that owns and publishes D&D, is putting out books that can’t hold a candle to the awesome stuff coming from small publishers and individuals.
It’s counter intuitive. How can unpaid hobbyists working from their kitchen tables put out better books than a company with a large budget, paid staff, years of experience and a recognized brand? It’s about intentions. Wizards of the Coast (WotC) is about politics first and profit second. Little bits of love of the game get squeezed in here and there but there isn’t much room for it. Press releases and YouTube videos show WotC’s core developers, the people responsible for creating and guiding the direction of the game, talking more about their brand and their political goals then the game itself. Mike Mearls has taken to social media in repeated attempts to drive away D&D fans that don’t meet his moral standards.
The small publishers and hobbyists who have gone semi-pro are guided by their love of fantasy roleplaying. They have formed a movement called the OSR (Old School Renaissance) and are kicking butt and taking names in the fantasy roleplaying space. I believe nostalgia is a terrible guiding principal for most anything but it’s working well for the OSR community. The love of the game is taking them back to half-forgotten days of their youth while at the same time taking them forward into new territory. They offer revitalized versions of older editions of D&D with better layout, organization, graphics and rules updates. Their adventures and other add-ons have the most interesting, imaginative and daring material out there.
Many gamers talk about megadungeons. The OSR community offers Barrowmaze, Dwimmermount, Rappan Athuk, Stonehell, Castle of the Mad Archmage, Castle Triskelion – and those are only the most noteworthy. WotC isn’t offering any megadungeons. When TSR held the reins for D&D they only offered Greyhawk Ruins and Ruins of Undermountain. Numerous voices online are not at all impressed with TSR’s 2 megadungeons but the OSR’s are popular.
WotC’s adventures have slick maps and gorgeous illustrations but not much else to offer. They repeat simple, well-worn storylines and linear progressions. OSR adventures often have an amateur appearance but when you read them you find a wealth of options for the players, new ideas, more daring excursions into sub genres of fantasy (weird fantasy, historical fiction, mythology, etc.) cool puzzles and traps and so many other things you wouldn’t expect.
OSR products really shine in how well they work at the gaming table. While WotC books assume you want to imitate the one-way story games that the “cool kids” are doing, OSR games explain the possibilities of a game session to new players and offer meaningful options to old hands.
Some people believe that the OSR community is only working with older editions of D&D but if you take a look you’ll see they offer a lot for every edition. There are many products out for the current 5th edition of D&D as well as the third and fourth editions. The OSR is even making new core games that drift away from specific editions. Dungeon Crawl Classics and Basic Fantasy are two examples of games that take recent editions of D&D as a loose starting point and then innovate rules and setting to such an extant that something truly new results.
How is WotC responding? WotC appears to have taken a policy of denial. They are dedicated to never mentioning the OSR in any form. After reading, seeing videos and hearing podcasts from WotC employees it is amusing to see the skill they employ in avoiding any line of discussion that might lead to mentioning what is happening outside their walls. They are banking on making themselves appear “cool” and then hooking young people who are new to the hobby. The problem is young people have no fear of the internet. What’s waiting for them online? The awesomeness of the OSR.
0 Comments