“Is that all genre is? Like, a bunch of people who like a thing deciding to make a bunch of shit like that?”
““The first wave started in 2005 with things like Labyrinth Lord and OSRIC, the latter of which was co-designed by Matt Finch, author of the foundational text, A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming which is still spoken of as a core part of the OSR culture of play”
“I’d say the second wave starts in 2010/2011, with the release of Stars Without Number and when certain blogs, like Jeff’s Gameblog and co. sprouted up and grew in popularity”
“This is where you’d find Lamentations of the Flame Princess”
““Then it gets fiddly. The third wave starts around 2015, because 5e happens, and also Questing Beast starts looking at published OSR books on YouTube to a still-growing audience”
“These flip-throughs are important because they establish and popularize a lot of modern OSR principles. Art-punk aesthetics, the idea of the two-page spread, small press publishing, rules-lite and minimalist systems, and the further branching of inspirations away from TSR”
“Troika!, MOSH, OSE, Into the Odd. This is also where you get Deep Carbon Observatory, A Thousand Thousand Islands, and the Hydra Coperative.This is where a lot of people’s minds go when they think of the OSR”
“you could argue that the second and third wave here are one big wave from 2010 to 2020, but I really, really disagree. The shift in 2015 came about because of what happened in the early 2010’s. So many legendary OSR bloggers are huge in 2015, like False Machine and Goblin Punch”
“2019 is when Google shut down G+, which is how a lot of OSR blog folks chatted and ran games. It was their cultural focus”
““Mörk Borg.” She takes it from my hands. “This book ripples through all tabletop gaming. It’s the end-result of art-punk. Everyone’s conception of standard layout practices changes. The OSR changes too. Where do you go if you’ve reached the end of a thought?””
“now we’re in the fourth wave, which begins with that black and yellow devil. The people creating now are folks reacting to that G+ era and taking influence from other places, like storygames: His Majesty the Worm, Errant, Mausritter”
“The whole reason I’m here, the point is that talking about the OSR, not as a movement, but as a collection of 20 years of shifting communities and a variety of movements and off-shoots, y’know, a genre, opens the door to a more healthy dialog”
“It allows for the bad to exist alongside the good and still have merit. It allows for a deeper understanding of tabletop games”