What even is the OSR? part 1: how did we get here?

The OSR (or old school rules? old school revival or old school renaissance) is a loosely collected group (or Groups more accurately) of people dedicated to making systems and adventure inspired by "Old School play", so a lot to define and explain in some way.

I think any explanation of the OSR needs to start with a brief history lesson, so this pulled from what I have read and heard is how the OSR formed and evolved. So first off is AD&D, people loved AD&D, some people loved AD&D so much that they kept playing it when AD&D 2e came out, they loved it so much that even when the company that made AD&D went out of business they kept playing. This was fine and all but time is a harsh mistress (doubly so to well used gaming books) and these dedicated AD&D players had a need for new AD&D books, But getting new prints of a discontinued ttrpg is hard, especially when a new company has the IP (Note this was before the OGL).

the solution was OSRIC (or the Old School System Reference Index Compilation) due to copy right not applying to rules, it was perfectly legal to copy over the rules from AD&D as long as you wrote it in your own words or had slight modifications. And it was a success, people tried similar things with B/X and OD&D, making systems such as Labyrinth lord and Swords and Wizardry. With an influx of systems and players some started to make adventures and supplements for these retro clones as well as increased discussion about old school D&D design and play.

Thus concludes the first generation of the OSR (we have 3 more to go), next came the innovators who made their own systems based on these older editions of D&D but with their own creators flare, this is where we would place systems like Adventure conqueror king, Swords and Wizardry Complete and Basic fantasy role plating game, these systems try to keep more to the spirit of old school D&D while simplifying or abstracting some rules and adding additional systems for others. 

Now there is one system that should probably be mentioned before discussing the 3rd generation OSR as it could be seen as the progenitor to much of the 3rd generation, and that system is Lamentations of the flame princess, this is a B/X derived game that had some very interesting and innovative design concepts, stuff like  only fighters getting to hit bonus increases, Item slots (foreshadowing) and not having a monster manual, needless to say it was very bold, very edgy and very controversial (and still is) all in all I quite like Lotfp but the supplemental and third party stuff is a mixed bag some great adventures too(and some horrible ones), it had quite grand ideals and was once a titan in the OSR.

3rd generation OSR, where as before the OSR was dominated by systems that contain all the standard sub systems and rules you would expect for D&D, 3rd generation D&D is dominated by minimalist systems, these systems are something you could pick up and run in the same afternoon. Stuff like Into the Odd very high concept and innovative. Systems start to have more abstractions than concrete rules or number crunching, instead of tracking resources you started having resource die, instead of calculating weight in pounds or coins you have item slots, some systems start to drop GM advice sections or substantial magic item or monster sections or books.

So what is 4th generation OSR? well you in it, a continuation of the trends shown above, the OSR is dominated currently by the titans of Morkborg, OSE and DCC(which just always does its own thing), just look at the amount of third party material out there for these systems. Layout and design is king in this generation (as some would claim at the cost of substance) many systems practice abstractions without knowledge of the original system these abstractions replaced. In fact from talking to many OSR veterans there seems to be a shared sentiment that much of the 4th generation (or NuOsr) lacks much of the knowledge of older editions that the first and second generation had. This is most blatant in dungeon design with concepts being talked about a lot but the understanding of what they mean is lost, something like Hall of the Bloodking for OSE has corridor loops (that encompass a single room and takes like 2-3 exploration turns to complete a circuit of) faction play (where each faction owns one or two rooms) and generally reads like a bite sized version of Castle Ravenloft. 

Once again most of this is based off second hand accounts and blogposts, some inaccuracy's are to be expected, if your looking for a more in-depth history of the OSR I would recommend the Simulacrum blog's a historical look at the OSR series

https://osrsimulacrum.blogspot.com/.

since this ended up being a lot longer than I expected I'm going to do a second part of this series trying to nail down some definitions for some terms that are loosely defined or without definition entirely.

M.C.