Personal Reflections on the OSR at 1,990 Posts

This post is the 1,989th published at Monsters & Manuals. That's a lot. I have been writing this nonsense for sixteen years, which might actually be before some readers were even born. (Are teenagers even still able to read? Or do they simply drink Prime while buckling themselves into self-driving buggies which infinitely project TikTok videos directly into their brainstems via Bluetooth? I'm out of touch.)

Over the next ten posts leading up to post 2000 I thought it would be fun to do some 'top 10s' relating to events since 2008. But before doing so I would like, in the manner of an aged veteran reflecting on his many campaigns (the edition wars, the storygames wars, the GNS wars, the yourdungeonissuck wars, the Zak wars, the other Zak wars, the other other Zak wars, the post-Zak wars, the post-G+ wars, etc.), to try to put it all into some sort of context and perhaps even frame it with a meaning of some kind. 

In many ways the past sixteen years can be understood as the creation, flourishing, co-option and gradual dissolution or maturation of a scene, which in the way of all scenes - the Merseybeat scene, the grunge scene, the acid house scene, the arts and crafts movement, hard bebop, and so on - began with a huge cultural flowering, generated vast enthusiasm, become dominated by commercial interests, and then entered into a 'grown-up' phase in which it is essentially acting as a foundation or groundwork for newer things. 

But what strikes me now, looking back, is something a little more dramatic and, dare I say it, important: the OSR mattered not because it was any old scene, like any other; it mattered because it kept alive what I long ago referred to as the subversive qualities of nerd-dom. These days, geek culture has well-and-truly entered the mainstream and has as a result been thoroughly commercialised, and D&D has as a consequence become much more universal and standardised; there is not only a very widespread mode of play, but a very unified aesthetic and design philosophy and even illustrative style that is unmistakably now its own subgenre of fantasy. And at the same time the space for other RPGs has undoubtedly shrunk; it's not as though D&D is the only RPG in existence, but its dominance in the mainstream has become effectively total. 

What the OSR did, in essence, was to subvert the monolithic and centralising tendencies that were so much in evidence in the d20 era and which have only really accelerated since, by liberating D&D from ownership by any one company, or association with one brand, and thereby in essence giving its ownership to the people who loved it in order that they could do what they wanted with it. The major writers and thinkers of the movement were not alone in taking this kind of approach (Ron Edwards and the story game crowd certainly played their role with respect to the liberation of the wider hobby as such) but they were instrumental because they took on their task in respect of the most significant RPG by far, and the one which was most in danger of becoming the only game in town. 

If I could summarise, then, what the OSR did was genuinely rebellious and even, dare I say it, punkish, in that it took something that was becoming flagrantly commercialised in a monopolistic way and rescued it from the bland, drab fate that awaited it if it was allowed to go down that road too far. In the process, the OSR itself become a (very minor) commercial phenomenon, but in way that allowed it to stay true to its basically subversive origins. This was no mean feat. It was worth doing, and we should be glad that it was done.

The other thing that strikes me is that as the scene has collapsed, or mellowed, or aged, or whichever term you prefer to use, it has moved blessedly beyond its early associations with particular authors or notable charismatic figures and bigmouths. Here, I will venture into controversy, but I think it is important to make the point that we owe a debt of gratitude to those people - including, yes, Zak himself, probably most of all - for being the ones to pour rocket fuel on the emergence of the scene in the period 2008-2012 or so. Without those figures, I'm not sure that the OSR would have been a 'thing' in the first place. I certainly owe what small successes I have had to the fact that many of these minor celebrities of our obscure niche of the hobby championed what I have written. But it is also a relief to not have to spend even a second of any given day paying attention to the psychodramas associated with the big G+ personalities of yesteryear. We've moved beyond that phase, and it's largely a good thing that we have.

Where do we go next? Who knows? I certainly have no intention of stopping blogging or writing, and this year I think a logjam will be cleared that will allow me to publish a few completed-but-not-published books. Life has gotten in the way in so many respects; when I started writing here I was 27 years old and working for a start-up in Yokohama; now I'm nearly 43, married with two kids, with a proper career and actual proper books with proper publishers to write. Somewhere along the way there have been deaths, natural disasters, emergencies and crises of all kinds. But I've somehow kept going. And I'll keep going a while yet.