In March 2025, the Arcane Library Kickstarted an expansion to the OSR-style Shadowdark RPG which reached $1 million in 12 hours. As of this writing, the project has reached $1.7 million with 15 days remaining. This astounding success follows another $1 million Kickstarter campaign and a sweep of the 2024 Ennie Awards, when Shadowdark RPG won four awards including: Best Game, Best Design, Best Rules, and Best Layout.
This is not the first time that an OSR game has stunned the RPG community. In 2023, Dolmenwood by Exalted Funeral created for Old School Essentials reached $1.3 million with their Kickstarter campaign. The accelerating success of these titles and others has proven that OSR gaming is a powerful movement within the RPG hobby.
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Defying Definition
The democratic and DIY nature of the OSR makes it difficult to define. Even the “R” in “OSR” is debatable, with some proponents insisting it stands for “Renaissance” and others for “Revival.”
In the simplest terms, the OSR is a movement of creators, Game Masters, and players to promote the style of gaming which flourished in D&D’s earliest years. The OSR emphasizes dungeon crawling, deadly peril, resource management, and open-ended storytelling. It eschews gameplay featuring invincible adventurers and scripted narrative.
To expand upon that definition, the OSR is a combination of design philosophy, gameplay ethos, writing style, and aesthetics. When these four ideas are expertly married to one another, as with the OSR sci-fi horror game Mothership, the result is an elegant, exciting experience that promotes creativity and collaboration.
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Back to Basics
The OSR scene began with the re-organization and republishing of classic rulesets to create games like Old School Essentials, but those rules have diverged widely since. What remains consistent is the importance of speed and simplicity to all aspects of the game, from character creation to combat to exploration. Many OSR games do not include skills. Cairn doesn’t even have classes. A character may be reducible to a name, ancestry, a pool of hit points, a few ability scores, and an inventory.
To a D&D 5E or Pathfinder 2E player, such a character might seem ludicrously generic. To an OSR player, this is a feature not a bug. The choice of class, subclass, species, background, spells, and feats does not define the character. The character is a blank slate on which a player can write the stories their group will tell as they play together.
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Player Skill vs. Character Skill
Recently, I attempted to run the D&D 5E campaign Rime of the Frostmaiden using Shadowdark RPG. Despite my best intentions, the project was a failure because of two conflicting design philosophies: D&D 5E designers aim for broad appeal by creating adventures that allow for “brute force” solutions. Players don’t need to rely on cleverness, experience, or teamwork unless they choose to; OSR games emphasize party skill rather than optimized character design.
A character is an avatar through which the player interacts with the fictional world and the character’s competence reflects the player’s resourcefulness. The solution to a given challenge, whether it is a deep ravine or a powerful cadre of foes, requires the players to think through the problem, develop a plan, and act as a team.
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Emergent Storytelling
In a typical OSR game experience, a new player-character is a nobody who decided to trade in their cabbage hoe for a longsword or wand. The story of an OSR campaign is not a character’s backstory, nor is it a story written in any book because no one, not even the Game Master, knows what tale the dice will tell. This is “emergent storytelling.” The story emerges from the imaginations of the players as those players make choices and the dice thwart those choices.
If the party finds a strange relic in a goblin gang’s hoard and decides to investigate the relic’s magical history, that is the direction the story goes. If the party instead decides to determine who is arming the goblin gangs, the story goes in a different direction. If the party misses the strange relic entirely, they might return to town for a new quest, leaving the goblins and their relics forever.
Published OSR-style adventures tend to be excursions to dangerous locations stocked with traps, treasures, monsters, and NPCs which the party can explore however they choose. There is only enough story to keep the experience fresh. There is rarely a goal beyond “Find the treasure,” “Kill the boss,” or “Rescue the maiden.”
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Random Tables
In OSR gaming, random tables are essential to creating a lively and unpredictable gameplay experience.
A random table can generate a brand-new monster, a fully realized NPC, a wondrous artifact, or even an entire dungeon. Random tables can determine what bizarre effect occurs if the wizard’s spell misfires. Random tables can also determine the potential threat of an enemy group. For example, a d6 might determine if the orcs the party encounters are a war band or a family having a picnic.
The chaos of the dice is the primordial clay from which Game Masters and players might form unique and memorable experiences.
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Rulings Not Rules
“Rulings not Rules” is an article of faith among the OSR community. The Game Master is supposed to make rulings to adjudicate a situation in the absence of a specific rule. This is true of any role-playing game, but OSR game creators design systems with intentionally minimalist rules.
For example, Shadowdark RPG has a death timer like the death saving throw mechanic in D&D 5E, but the rules do not prescribe what happens if a dying PC takes damage. The Game Master must rely upon their instincts or default to the tone of their game. One Game Master might rule that a rat bite has no effect on a dying PC but a fireball to the face means instant death. Another Game Master might rule differently and neither would be wrong.
You might call this “emergent game design.” The book presents a simple rules system, and the Game Master elaborates upon it to create a collection of house rules perfectly tuned to their style, their group, and the tone of the game.
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Nostalgia Meets Modernity
OSR gaming is founded upon nostalgia. As the story goes, in the early days of D&D, the game was in an Edenic state of purity before commercialism and popular appeal corrupted it. So why not just play B/X D&D? Lots of people do! But if we look with clear eyes, we see that early D&D was an often confusing mess of rule systems with some problematic content.
Different games use different approaches to compensate for the shortcomings of classic D&D. Necrotic Gnome rewrote and reorganized B/X D&D while maintaining as much of the original game as possible to create Old School Essentials. Kelsey Dionne worked backwards applying the best features of modern gaming to the old school ethos and aesthetic to create Shadowdark RPG. Goodman Games created its own rules system for Dungeon Crawl Classics that leans heavily into the wildly imaginative gonzo style of adventuring.
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The Limitations of the OSR
By now, you might wonder why OSR is a niche rather than mainstream. Here are three limitations to the genre to consider:
- OSR games tend to be low-powered and deadly. This style will not satisfy a player trying to scratch that power fantasy itch and it may be stressful for players who identify closely with their characters.
- The focus on exploring dungeons and collecting treasure limits the kind of stories players can tell with an OSR game. Players eager for heroic or character-driven fantasy find the tight spaces of the dungeon claustrophobic.
- Certain OSR communities may encourage gatekeepers who insist that players who deviate from OSR dogma are “having fun wrong” and traditionalists who reject any modern sensibilities in their games (such as safety tools and inclusivity).
The greatest strength of the OSR style of gaming, however, is its hackability. With trial and error, your OSR experience can be whatever you want it to be. Every fan of tabletop roleplaying games should try at least one OSR system and decide if this style is right for them.
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OSR-style Fantasy Games on StartPlaying
Old School Essentials including Dolmenwood
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OSR-style Non-Fantasy Games on StartPlaying
Lamentations of the Flame Princess
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Meaghan J (she/her) is a professional Game Master, podcaster, and game designer based in Los Angeles specializing in Dragonlance, Ravenloft, and other dark fantasy settings. You can play with Meaghan on StartPlaying!
