The Future - 2026

A Dyson Logos Classic

This post was written as a "Secret Santicore" response to the Dododecahedron's request : "What are your hopes for the future of the OSR/NSR?" 

What is the OSR? What is the NSR … or the POSR even? Where, assuming they exist, are they headed, and what will the future of “old school gaming” look like?  Damned if I know…I just like to write up location based adventures and play games about dungeon crawling …

My OSR

Of course that’s not entirely true. I’ve been involved in the old school role playing game scene for 15 plus years, and have seen changes, personalities, trends, and innovations come and go. I could write a whole book on this nonsense, but here a brief and personal reminiscence should suffice.

For me it all started around 2010. Back then the scene didn’t really have a name - at least not on the blogs and forums I read. Five years later the identity of the “OSR” had come together a bit, but in those early days of blogging and playing online a collective sense of identity was still growing. For the purpose of looking backwards I will still use the term OSR, though it’s worth noting that there’s never really been an entirely clear and broadly adopted definition of the term … even its basic meaning … is it a “revival”, “renaissance”, or even “rules”... In 2009 through 2013 or so the term OSR was thrown around from time to time, but it wasn’t a label a lot of people used.

In roughly 2009 I found myself thinking about getting back into role playing games.  I started playing in the early 1980's, as a kid and hadn’t played since the late 1990’s ... but due to the economic downturn and related changes in my career, I suddenly had a lot of free time and not a lot of money. I also had a group of friends that were in similar circumstances. I started looking around online, and found the then new 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons and the legacies of 3.5E… Mostly I read play reports that felt like chemical formulas or technical documentation … and that wasn’t something that interested me much. To me spreadsheets are for making money, not evoking fantasy and wonder. Overly complex combat had been what drove me away from 2E AD&D and other RPGS back in the 1990’s, first toward systems like Mekton and Ars Magicka and then to Warhammer 40K and fantasy wargames.

In 2009 and 2010 the OSR consisted largely of blogs, the early days of the “Forum OSR” was still interacting with them, but to me it was blogs that drove engagement and acted as the primary platform for sharing ideas and enthusiasm. I found “Henchman Abuse” by Patrick Wetmore, along with “Sorcerer’s Skull”, and other key blogs of that time. They had an approach to games that I wanted to get involved with, and started me on my first OSR campaign … running Anomalous Subsurface Environment (“ASE”) for a bunch of other 30 something junior technocrats. We had fun, and I started my first blog “Dungeon of Signs” during this time. In 2011 and 2012 the scene was extremely welcoming and very hobbyist focused. While people were publishing adventures and a few retro clones, the attitude was generally a sort of shock that one could produce a decent looking book and maybe get beer money from sharing it with friends. Patrick Wetmore hired me to draw some art for ASE 2 and insisted on sending me a check (I promptly spent it all on good Scotch and a nice bottle of wine for my dad).  

Somewhere in 2012 Google Plus (G+) started to take over the burgeoning OSR scene - bloggers found a place to talk to each other directly and began to do so.  Online play followed shortly. This is one key aspect of the OSR that I don’t think gets enough attention. The OSR adapted older style rules to online play from an early date, and did so almost entirely distinct from the streaming/performance style Youtube RPG style. There’s nothing wrong with “actual play” shows and such, but back in 2012 the OSR was using social media and online meeting software for an entirely different, organic, and rather democratic style of play. Through G+ dozens of long term campaigns were active with a “drop in” approach to player involvement.  My own HMS Apollyon campaign was typical of these - a setting widely at variance with traditional Dungeons & Dragons (or Gygaxian vernacular fantasy) that I ran using Moldvay Basic (“B/X”) and then the 1974 edition of the rules(“OD&D”). House rules were frequent, published and updated regularly on my blog. Many others created long term campaigns using the same technologies of online play. Some of these did cling close to TSR and Gygax’s vision of Dungeons & Dragons, but most were distinctive and creative - drawing on a wide range of fantasy influences, or at least the referee’s own idiosyncratic take on fantasy.

I often wish that the OSR was better known for these innovations - designing for online play, and utilizing simpler ruleset as a basis for customization without losing cross-compatibility … rather than for its maxims, grimdark aesthetics, or a focus on nostalgia.

Jump to the Present

I no longer consider my current work (or anyone else’s) to be “OSR”. Not because there’s anything wrong with the term, but because the OSR was essentially an arts movement of a particular time and place… one that has passed. The innovations and various concepts of OSR design persist, but it no longer has a center, instead consisting of a variety of smaller scenes and styles that I broadly lump under the term “Post OSR”, or as Prismatic Wasteland and Papers & Pencils called it “POSR”.  I consider my own focus within this wide space to be “procedural dungeon crawling” - games focused on the room by room exploration of fictional spaces with an emphasis on procedures backed with simple mechanics. There are lots of other subscenes and design movements within the Post-OSR, they're all the inheritors of the same set of principles, but they're different and distinct. I think it benefits everyone to think of them that way.

So, my design goals are only one of many varieties of Post OSR design … and not a big one. There are entire Post OSR scenes focused around various design principals, such as the “NSR”, as well as those focusing on specific games and publishers, such as Shadowdark, Mork Borg, OSE’s or Mothership’s communities. This tendency towards community built around an Idiosyncratic creator or game like Chris McDowall’s “Into the Odd/Bastionland” has its roots in the late-OSR of the 2015 or so, but each community is its own within the larger Post-OSR framework.

Because of this variety, and to respect the clear shared lineages these games and communities have going back to the OSR, I reject recent efforts to both define the OSR as an ongoing concern that covers everything, and efforts to exclude games like Mythic Bastionland from the space of obviously OSR derived systems. The OSR in its heyday was never only about cross compatibility with older Dungeons & Dragons (this is a 4chan definition - and when you use it you ride with Pepe), though Moldvay Basic/Expert did become its go-to set of rules.

Instead I propose viewing the present crop of games and scenes derived from OSR designs and OSR spaces as new approaches to indie RPG design and play, loosely linked by the Post-OSR umbrella. No one gets to wear the rotting crown of “THE” OSR - but we’re all its horrible little children and can certainly say things have "OSR design elements". The OSR is like punk rock - it's been dead since 1978 when Crass sang "Yes that's right, punk is dead, It's just another cheap product for the consumers head." We can still enjoy it though. Sit with your discomfort for a moment, enjoy the duality and the chaos of the real.

The Post-OSR … Where to Now?

At the end of 2025, the Post-OSR is a large space, and one whose size means I don’t actually pay a great deal of attention to it outside my narrow interests and friends … but it still makes sense to ask what trends are likely going forward? Below are tendencies I see from looking at the broad trends, social media, and a few forums. If I sound pessimistic, it's because these are generally not great tendencies for my preferred style of play ... but that doesn’t mean they are a problem - they are driven by the broad Post-OSR community’s desires and limitations, and they're also full of positive opportunities even for people who prefer dungeon crawl style games.

• Fracture and Heartbreakers … Personally I expect the fracturing into additional scenes and slightly varied design principles will continue… and with it the endless parade of new games marketed as “OSR” and utilizing a few basic types of mechanics, largely borrowed from older Dungeons & Dragons. This is a fundamentally boring future, but it seems that the lure of having one’s own “system” and selling it is irresistible to a large number of people. This isn’t new and while I don’t enjoy it, there is nothing wrong with it … except to the degree that it limits the number of good adventures being written. To counter this blast of pessimism I’d note that while most systems being written are near pointless clones, there are still innovative systems and games to be written in the Post-OSR - for example “His Majesty the Worm”.

• Stumbling Towards OC … Similarly I suspect that the influx of 5E players (now mostly via Shadowdark) will continue and with it a tendency to produce scene based adventures that omit exploration mechanics (which paradoxically are plentiful in Shadowdark). In other words, significant parts of the Post OSR will walk the same journey that D&D did in the 1990’s to focus on tactical combat, mechanically modeled character variety, and free form role play around the personalities of the characters. It's not my thing, but it's not a bad thing ... one might even suspect that this kind of narrative and character driven "Trad" play is something a lot of RPG players enjoy! The difficulty for the Shadowdark, or whatever other Post-OSR community (05R maybe?) decides to focus on this play style will be how to build systems and adventures that support it well ... fundamentally this is the same issue that TSR faced in the Dragonlance era and after.

• Playing Outside ... These two broad trends, along with the critical success of Mythic Bastionland, Cairn, and Dolemwood, will continue to promote the interest in regional adventures. For those who want this kind of play, great … but I suspect that in response dungeon design and adventures focused on larger dungeons will continue to recede.  Instead we'll keep seeing hex crawls, wilderness adventures, and small 5-10 room site adventures dominate published work. This tendency is further encouraged by the contemporary design culture of “jams” and fast publishing. Large dungeon adventures are exponentially harder to write well, let alone quickly … Couple that with the greater need to provide functional layout and the reasonable desire to make a well illustrated project, and it’s easy to see why larger dungeons (even those over 15 rooms even) are rare these days.

• Lost Dungeons ... This doesn’t mean people will stop trying to write dungeon adventures entirely … especially megadungeons … but I suspect fewer will be published and most that are will suffer from a lack of active community input, a lack of popular systems (or at least popular understanding of those systems) that support dungeon crawling well, and the decreasing percentage of Post/OSR designers familiar with exploration/location based adventure design.

• In The Ossified Depths ... Relatedly, and unfortunately, the segments of the Post OSR that appear most enamored with location based design are also the ones most focused on the “revival” aspect of old school play… mired in older Gygaxian Vernacular aesthetics and systems. If one enjoys this kind of game, that’s fine. It can work well enough, but it seems unlikely to me that one will be able to “out Gygax Gygax” . Mazes of grey stone and orc filled holes fill up the hobby already.
  
  It says something to me that the most recommended “mega dungeon” in Post-OSR space appears to be Stonehell … and I get it… Stonehell, despite some issues, is extremely well designed for functional play and it hits the old aesthetic quite well. It’s a great dungeon. Similarly, B2 Keep on the Borderlands is constantly promoted in nostalgia driven Post-OSR space as the essence of great adventure design. Once again I don’t have a problem with B2 … but I do think it’s hard to argue a hobby community or art scene is vibrant and productive when it’s focusing mostly on works that are seventeen and forty-seven years old. This is ossification and decline. I fear it will continue.

I warned you I was a bit pessimistic… and while I worry that the focus on wilderness exploration and regional adventures represents a loss of hard won OSR knowledge … What I don’t worry about is that these trends and any “loss” are connected. They aren’t, and I also see ways that these trends represent positives for both the POSR and within it dungeon crawling style play.

We still need more Warduke

None of the trends here are new … they’ve all been around a while. However, 2025 has seen them reach a certain threshold of success and with it shown paths towards positive results from almost all of them. We’ve watched the continued success of Shadowdark on one hand and the publication of the definitive “regional adventure” game … Mythic Bastionland. Not only are these events obviously positive for people who enjoy these games, but they represent vibrant communities being built, and clarify the spaces of the Post-OSR.

Shadowdark provides a natural and growing Post-OSR community for players seeking a more contemporary playstyle that still has old school aesthetics and simpler rules. It’s a gateway for newer players to begin experiencing the fun and creativity associated with old school play. They're writing a lot of stuff and if it has its own spin, that's good - Shadowdark is its own community within the larger Posr-OSR. Likewise, the success and undeniable fun of Mythic Bastionland likewise creates a new Post-OSR space focused on regional and wilderness adventure (also on knights which is cool), as to an extent do Cairn 2’s more detailed and evocative wilderness exploration rules. Interestingly, Cairn 2 also has plenty of dungeon crawling procedures, and authorial support for dungeon adventures, but it's community still appears to largely focus on regional and wilderness adventures. Defining spaces and focusing on specific styles of play is not a bad thing, it means that players who want that kind of experience know where to go to discuss it, but it also means that players looking for other kinds of games know that certain games or spaces aren’t going to offer what they want. 

Finally, Dolemwood and its popularity show a more interesting way forward for retro-clones - ditching the endless repetition of slightly changed mechanics in the same vernacular fantasy setting in exchange for a bespoke setting that modifies a set of well known rules just enough to support its peculiarities. Personally I hope that future products moving in this direction will do so without wasting the space necessary to include an entire retro-clone, and instead focus on the changes that make the setting interesting. This is also a tendency that the Mork Borg community has embraced, producing various “systems” that are all built of the Mork Borg chassis, but have distinct focuses and niche settings.  It’s a positive trend, and one that I hope move into more Post-OSR spaces.  I’ve wanted to see more settings with attached house rules for a while, and think it’s a promising possibility that deserves more exploration.

When it comes to dungeon design, I don’t think the stale mysteries of the revivialist crowd will go away, but it’s my hope that wilderness adventure becoming a well settled space, and 5E/Post-OSR combinations having largely locked into a singular system more players will start thinking about dungeons again.  I mean interesting dungeons, that are both concerned with pushing the aesthetics of the dungeon beyond the stale, and with examining what rules actually make location based exploration compelling. The future is here now I suppose - and whatever happens, the Post-OSR seems to be here to stay, growing and mostly healthy, despite some dead wood. We'll see how long I find myself staying a part of it, or more likely what parts I drift towards.