Posters, Posers and POSR(s)
Never tweet a joke because it might come true. In spring of 2021, I was still just spreading my wings as a blogger but already sensed that the movement aspect of the OSR (or Old School Renaissance/Revival) may have run its course already.
The meta-OSR discourse is back again, again, again. (Or at least it was when I started writing this and maybe will be once I get around to posting it.) Is the OSR dead? (See below!) Is the OSR a neoconservative, fascist movement? (See next question.) Is it not a monolith? (Well said, Zedeck.) I try not to engage in this perennial conversation because it honestly has nothing to do with actually playing games, making your games better or even understanding why we play games. We all know to never wrestle a pig because you both get dirty, but the pig likes it. However, here I am getting in the mud, but I’m going to try to do so while at least acting as if I’m above it all. “I don’t care who started it; I’m ending it!” But this essay probably will neither end the OSR nor un-end it but at least it will be something to point to when someone says “so what exactly is the Post-OSR?” Because to the extent I want to categorize my gaming stuff, it is Post-OSR. And you might be a POSR too.
An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a specific period of time, (usually a few months, years or decades) or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defined within a number of years. “Hey, wait a minute,” exclaims the imaginary reader, “you gotta tell me what the Post-OSR is; you can’t just copy and paste the first line in a Wikipedia article at me!” Oh, but I can. But this is necessary. I need to first talk about what the OSR was and is before I can get to the POSR. But this blog post is more of a sandbox than a railroad, so scroll down to “But what the hell is the POSR?” if you don’t need a primer on the rise and fall of the OSR first. Or read this whole post backwards if you want. Listen to Pink Floyd while you do it.
The OSR is Always Over
The OSR was, among other things, an artistic movement dating from approximately 2004-2019. What I call a movement could also be thought of as a “scene” (which, for more on that, see this post from my colleague Anne of the DIY & Dragons blog) I was not involved with the OSR during during its inception, as I was too busy being a 4th grader. But I remained unaware until 2020, after the fall, when Ultraviolet Grasslands, a late-OSR or proto-POSR adventure caught my eye and drew me in. Because I can only play the part of armchair historian, I want to quote two of my colleagues, Gus L of the All Dead Generations blog and John B of the Retired Adventurer blog, who were both there, at least somewhat, and at least had their historians’ armchairs closer to the actions. This conversation occurred in 2021 and is heavily edited to fit the medium of a blog post rather than a quick Discord conversation.
GUS: I personally have been breaking the OSR into early, mid and late phases based on my own vague understanding. (1) Pre-2010/Google+ is early (Forums, OSRIC), (2) The Rise of Lamentations of the Flame Princess (LotFP) and the Z. Smith influence on utility ending with the release of Maze of the Blue Medusa in 2016, and (3) The fracturing and decline ending with the death of G+ in 2019.
JOHN: I'd say that my overall impression of trends is that from 2006-2011, the focus is on retroclones and minor adaptations of retroclones, then the market stabilises around Labyrinth Lord (LL), Swords & Wizardry (S&W), LotFP, and Stars Without Number as the big market leaders, so people move into writing their own games or master supplements (Yoon-Suin, etc.). Into the Odd joins them in what, 2016? And S&W gradually dies off as the one with the weakest institutional ecology. And then in 2017-2018, Old School Essentials (OSE) takes over from LL, LotFP gets into financial trouble, S&W is relatively ghostly, and SWN launches a second edition aimed outside the OSR. With the end result that OSE becomes the market leader far ahead of the others, but the disruption in the field more generally allows smaller stuff to flourish.
So I'd separate out OSR as a brand from OSR as a scene from OSR as a play culture. I think the brand is very healthy, and the play culture is widespread, but the scene is mostly gone. Or at least, splintered and weakly integrated across those splinters.
JOHN: With the OSR, I think there's a brand component, a play culture component, and a scene. The scene is the original of the three. Nowadays I think the brand still does quite well. OSE is the perfect expression of that. The play culture component is also relatively healthy - Reddit and co., as incompetent as they usually are, can articulately recommend when someone might have their gaming needs met by OSR styles, which is a sign to me that the general RPG public has it as a living concept.
GUS: Generally I see EARLY OSR (“Forum OSR”) as revivalism and refinement of old systems - a lot of focus on recreation of old play as it was meant to be. MID OSR (“Blog OSR”) is the G+ flowering, Renaissance stuff and a creative community using the old rulesets to create an ethos of play. It's also the evolution of the market and brands - especially LotFP and the shift into the idea that OSR means high lethality, grimdark stuff. I end it with the sort of ascendance of LotFP and the Z. Smith school of caring about design/book usability but not rules functionality or playability and Maze.
JOHN: Strong agree. It's that 2011-2016 pulse and the interplay between G+ and blogs that is crucial, vs. the earlier phase that felt more mediated through forums.
GUS: LATE OSR (“Commercial OSR”) is basically LotFP eating itself, the Revivalists freaking out, larger cultural forces breaking the personal relationships and community (this includes brand loyalty/dreams of professionalism and of course creeps). A scattering of creatives, the rise of marketing guys instead of hobbyists and culminates in the end of G+.
JOHN: The other thing to bear in mind with the OSR is that D&D 5e comes out in mid-2014, and Critical Role premieres in 2015. Both take a bit to build up steam, but by 2016 you've also got them putting pressure on the OSR but also bringing in new people who want to design games having had their palates wetted by 5e, but who don't want to write giant clunky 5e-type games.
The OSR not only varies over time, it has various potential meanings itself. As John says above, there are at least three meanings: OSR-as-brand, OSR-as-play-culture, and OSR-as-scene. This post is most interested in the OSR-as-scene, since I posit that the original artistic movement has long since fractured, fell apart, and now multiple colonies (in the fungal sense of the word) of artistic movements grow from the soil it fertilized with its corpse.
This list is not comprehensive.
Is the OSR Dead?, The Other Side (August 21, 2012)
Is the OSR Dead?, ENWorld poster pretending to be a blog (September 14, 2015)
The End of the OSR, Beyond Fomalhaut (August 7, 2019)
OSR is dead and I did not know, THAC0 Blog (August 7, 2019)
Kill the OSR - OSR is Dead!, Secrets of Blackmoor (August 9, 2019)
The Crypt of the OSR, False Machine (March 11, 2021)
The OSR Should Die, Traverse Fantasy (June 2, 2022)
The OSR is Dead (Long Live the OSR!), Hexed Press (September 23, 2022)
My Own Personal OSR, Seed of Worlds (April 22, 2023)
I’m not the first to claim the OSR (as artistic movement) is dead, but it is necessary to show you the autopsy report so you’ll believe me. Time of death? An easy benchmark, a shorthand that isn’t completely accurate, for when the OSR proper ended is around April 2, 2019 when Google+ ended and February, 2019 when Z. Smith, a prominent (central even, if also repulsive) OSR figure was exposed allegedly as an alleged rapist and cast out of even impolite society and allegedly reduced to suing everyone (allegedly) who didn’t pepper their sentences with enough “allegedly”s (and losing, allegedly). These events, especially happening, as they did, so close together, severed many of the ties that bound the OSR movement. G+’s importance to the OSR-as-scene cannot be overstated, as it was the town square, the central organizing virtual location where conversations were mediated. The shutting down of G+ was the fall of Babel for the OSR of 2019. The aforementioned figure was also essential to the OSR by 2019, both by legitimizing the OSR (winning industry awards, consulting on the world’s largest RPG brand to bring it more in alignment with OSR principles) and by policing its borders, constantly instigating feuds with outsiders and, in doing so, creating and maintaining those outside bounds of the OSR. When my colleague Patrick of the False Machine blog “mapped” the OSR in 2017, the individual is not only described as a “fulcrum” of the OSR, the individual’s presence is all over that post, as it was in the scene at that time.
Today, the OSR survives mostly as a marketing term. It is the OSR-as-brand aspect that has not only survived the G+ apocalypse, but rather has thrived. And there is nothing wrong with that! Marketing terms can be useful–mostly for marketers, but occasionally it’s actually helpful for consumers too. But a marketing term alone does not an artistic movement make; A QLED TV is just a TV, it isn’t itself art. “Keto” isn’t an artistic movement, but it at least tells a potential customer to expect a varying degree of low amounts of carbs, a modicum of information about what they are buying. Over the history of the OSR, there has always been consensus over what the OS meant (old school) and debate over the R (is it revival, renaissance, revolution even?). In light of the OSR being a shambling corpse of its former self, I offer a new R: rot.
“What even *is* POSR?”
It’s easiest to start with what POSR (or Post-OSR) is not. Unlike the OSR in its heyday, the POSR is not a movement. There are movements, or the inklings of movements, within the POSR, but these proto-movements lack any common philosophy and are composed of different, often bickering groups. This was true to an extent even during the origins-to-heyday of the OSR, but the extent is unquestionably different. The POSR does have something in common though. While the OSR were TTRPG thoughts and games inspired by old-school games, the POSR are TTRPG thoughts and games that are inspired (at least partially) by the output of the OSR itself. I, for instance, have never played B/X D&D or Traveller or whatever old-school game du joir. What inspires me are the games made in the past decade (or even those themselves inspired by games from the past decade)–games like Into the Odd or Knave, each of which has spawned their own family of game-descendants. But the POSR only shares a lineage; it has little to no ancestral memory and, largely due to the more siloed post-G+ mediums (what my colleague Patrick of False Machine called “the great migration to the Halls of Discord, Zuckerbergs Labyrinth of Pain and the Screeching Azure Cage”) promoting factionalism (for a good example, just see the conversation with Gus and John above, which came from a private discord server; during the OSR-as-scene, this may have taken place in G+, where more lurkers would have read it and the information would have been disseminated more broadly within the community. Now, information has to wait for me to copypaste it into a random blog two years later). The POSR is not a community. The most contact that factions within the POSR get with each other is on Twitter (thus the aforementioned perennial discourse I am pretending to be above). Twitter is not a place for communities.
Of course, naming a movement is more fun than actually creating one, so names abound for the successor to the OSR. There is Sworddream, the New School Revolution, the After School Revival, all of mixed success (the only one of these with any legs at the moment is the NSR, largely due to the efforts of my colleague, Yochai Gal, to both create vibrant communities and not just rebrand for the sake of rebranding and to embrace theories and methods from story games, the once-rival to the OSR, and incorporate that into perhaps a new playstyle). To distinguish what scenes are emerging from the post-OSR, however, I think it better to examine the underlying common principles and styles rather than just labels, cliques, and marketing attempts.
The OSR was never a monolith, but it was broadly attempting to move in the same direction and working with similar sets of influences; not so for every part of the POSR. There are those trending toward minimalism with their rules lite games getting liter and liter, while others trend toward more baroque rules sets (not maximalist, but comprehensive. See, for instance, the differences between Knave 1e and Knave 2e). There is a post on rules lite games from my colleague Anne of DIY & Dragons, which I’m expecting any day now. One sub-trend within these more baroque games is proceduralism, already a bit of a submovement with its own subscene. My colleague Marcia of the Traverse Fantasy blog has a truly excellent and interesting post showing the various “rules families” of OSR and Post-OSR games where she coins the term “Old School Baroque” where “overall focus is on abstracting the minutiae of the game in order to focus on procedurally simulating specific activities, from dungeon exploration to hex crawls to long-term domain play.” (Note: the post also included an early version of Prismatic Wasteland (v0.3), but given the changes I have made in v0.4, I suspect this will shift a bit but still remain definitely baroque.) She also comes across a difference between influential late-OSR games, Into the Odd and Knave, and the early Post-OSR games that are heavily inspired by these games:
MARCIA: Like Into the Odd, Knave does not include procedures for exploration, but its derivatives often do. This seems to be because both Into the Odd and Knave date to a period when there was an expansive culture of play centered on referee-side procedures, such that these rulebooks aimed only to provide a different player-character interface than the standard D&D Basic/Expert rules. The derivatives of both of these rulesets, however, tend to be more cohesive in providing rules for both playing and running the game. This is what ultimately distinguishes, in my opinion, the ultra-light games of the 2010s from their successors in the 2020s. One category aims to simplify the player side of a commonly understood 'game'; the other category wants to resystematize the 'game' altogether.
Note, however, that the old-school baroque style games do not come close to representing the diversity of new POSR rulesets. As Marcia identifies, there are other clusters that hew more fully to being Knave- or Into the Odd-hacks, while other games, like The Vanilla Game or Dungeon Game are examples of the more rules-lite games, and games like Trespasser are “modern” in the sense that it mixes OSR and D&D 4e DNA.
The differences within the POSR are not just in the games we play but how we play them and how we design them. There are those who swear by the prep-centric blorb principles while others are more interested in decentralizing the traditional authority of the referee to the other players, à la the anti-canon approach. My colleague, Joshy of the Rise Up Comus recently wrote about Blorb vs Quantum approaches, which the Indie RPG Newsletter responded to, adding more clear and less incendiary dichotomies of Prepped vs Improvised and GM-driven and Player-driven. This split (and many of the new fractures in the POSR) can be partially traced to growing story game influence on the OSR play style (this is particularly apparent in those games and designers associated with the NSR community), especially now that several prominent gatekeepers in both of those communities have fallen, spurning more dialogue between these former separate camps of RPG design and theory (and this union makes sense–the OSR and story games were both born in reaction against the Trad and Neo-Trad play styles). Even information design and writing styles are starting to diverge into clusters, ranging from those who see useability as a primary concern in gaming products to those who are indifferent or even openly antagonistic to useability and view Ben Milton and his focus on these concerns as the great Satan. And these are just a few of the growing fissures. I don’t think any of the current tensions will resolve themselves into any sort of synthesis. Rather, I suspect that multiple movements will emerge from this postdiluvian-yet-primordial ooze, movements that will only be clear as distinct when we look back on them, with the broader context provided by time.
In 2033, we will have a better idea of what exactly was going on in the various POSR scenes of the early 2020s. What trends will take off and consolidate or coagulate into full-fledged movements of their own? Which will splinter into philosophically antagonistic factions? Which will collapse in on themselves and be forgotten by all but the most arcane 2030s gamers? It is hard to see it all when you’re in the thick of it. And we are.
Call me OSR, call me POSR, just don’t call me late for dinner. For myself, I like the label POSR not just because it sounds like “poser” (a joke also shared by my colleague Nick of the Papers Pencils blog). It simultaneously refers to both the larger non-group group(s) I am part of–the post-OSR scene(s)–and the more narrow handful of designers who are specifically interested in elevating game procedures and other forms of gaming scaffolding, those designing “Old School Baroque” games. For me, POSR is simultaneously the Proceduralist-OSR. Who knows whether these ideas will take off? Time travelers, I suppose.
Shit, I’m late. The POSR is dead. Ignore everything I just said. Long live the PPPOSR.
Note: Cover art for this post is from my colleague, Norn Noszka.
