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.

Classic Vs. Five Rooms

FIVE ROOMS DON'T MAKE A DUNGEON

This blog is largely devoted to repeating a single message about game design, hammering away at the same subjects for what I hope is a growing audience. At times it feels repetitive and foolish, but then when one looks out into the larger Roleplaying Game community there’s still a lot of confusion about these same subjects -- the “Dungeon Crawl” style of play.

So once again what is a Dungeon Crawl? Why might some adventures or play styles that call themselves Dungeon Crawls fail to deliver on the promise of the genre? To explore this topic I’ll discuss a design exercise/theory and adventure format popular in the Contemporary Traditional community, the “Five Room Dungeon”. To some extent this distinction is one of definition, but I think it’s a useful distinction as it will hopefully introduce some players to the Classic style of play or at least provide tools to think about the differences between play styles and examine what sort of experience one’s table provides.

The Contemporary Traditional community has its own ethos of play, values, design principles, preferred mechanics and of course play style, and my goal isn’t to pass judgment on them, denigrate, or otherwise offend. Rather I want to present some reasons why designing and playing following the Five Room Dungeon format may not feel much like dungeon exploration and why it doesn’t fit within the (or my) definition of a Dungeon Crawl derived from or following the Classic play style found in such adventures as Caverns of Thracia.

This is all certainly not to say that Five Room Dungeons are bad or don’t work for the play style that they are designed for, only that they aren’t a panacea for adventure design or a great place to start when learning about Classic play or the Dungeon Crawl. To help understand why, it’s necessary to describe what goes into a Dungeon Crawl, or perhaps a “Crawl” more generally, as the Dungeon Crawl shares key elements with wilderness adventure designed as Point, Hex, or Wave Crawls. The basic structure of the Crawl style adventure contains three elements: Space, Exploration and Procedure.

Crawling Into the Past 

What does the Dungeon Crawl promise? To some it’s a label for any adventure set in an underground maze or even any fantasy adventure regardless of design and mechanics. To me and as used here, the Dungeon Crawl label implies something more: an adventure in a complex environment filled with danger: traps, monsters, secrets and mysteries -- something beyond just combat or NPC interactions where the location and environment is an important character in the game. Focusing more narrowly, the simplest definition I have for a Crawl as a set of design principles is to say that it’s a play style or adventure where the locus of play is:

A fantastical SPACE that is EXPLORED PROCEDURALLY.

I’ll be looking at each of these elements a bit individually, and they may already be familiar to regular readers of All Dead Generations, but I’ll only be discussing the definitions and how the elements work holistically rather than the details of their history or supporting mechanics.

Dragon of Icespire Peak - A Review

A REGRETTABLE WASTE OF OPPORTUNITIES

Icespire GM's Screen - that almost makes up for sparse art.

This blog isn't often kind to the products of Wizards of the Coast - largely because the ‘Crawl’ (as in Dungeon Crawl) playstyle that All Dead Generations champions is very different then the one 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons seems directed towards. Yet, taking a deep look at offerings from Wizards of the Coast is one of the best ways to highlight those differences and understand them. Lost Mines of Phandelver has been the WotC sanctioned introductory adventure since the 5th edition came out, but in 2019 Wizards of the Coast published the Essentials Kit, updating the boxed set concept for 5th edition and including an introductory adventure/campaign “Dragon of Icespire Peak”.

Introductory Adventures
Introductory adventures are interesting things, doing a lot of work to define setting, and if they're part of a particularly successful system they can offer a model for adventure design to an entire generation of players. When the first edition of Basic Dungeons and Dragons was introduced in 1977 it didn’t contain an adventure, though this was remedied by 1978, when B1 (for “Basic”) “In Search of the Unknown” by Mike Carr was included. In Search of the Unknown, despite an alluring cover illustration* and amazing title has to be regarded as a somewhat experimental product, which perhaps took its role of educating the new GM too far at the cost of being fairly uninteresting and a bit unplayable. Alternatively B1 represents an insight into what early D&D looked like -- its lack of naturalism or any kind of monster ecology (it depends on random stocking) and equally unnatural map emblematic of a wargame derived early play that Gygax (for all his flaws) showed an alternative to. B1 was quickly supplemented by B2 “Keep on the Borderlands” by Gary Gygax, which is likely his best work, and still remains a read for anyone interested in adventure design or game mastering.

“Keep on the Borderlands”, the nature of the challenges in its caves of chaos and the playstyle it fairly effectively taught defined Dungeons & Dragons for TSR’s early 80’s golden age: dungeon crawls based on a stilted internal logic and ecology where scheming humanoid factions were the primary foes within a ‘points of light’ setting. That’s the power of the introductory adventure, to not only showcase an official setting (promoted or implied), but to set the tone and playstyle. “Keep on the Borderlands” was removed from D&D basic sets in 1983, which instead included a short solo adventure heavy on scripted events (as it would have to be given it’s solo nature), around the same time as the first Dragonlance module (“Dragons of Despair”) was published championing adventures of the linear, scene-based style where player characters receive immunity from harm to assure the adventure's narrative remains predictable.

Yet “Keep on the Borderland” set the basic model for the introductory adventure, one that “Dragon of Icespire Peak” even follows to some degree, it to is a regional set of adventures set in a lawless region of a world where “[e]ven farms and freeholds within a day's walk of a city can fall prey to monsters” prefaced by more general play instructions and including play aides. The adventures within “Dragon of Icespire Peak” however, and especially how they are structured, vary from the open world presentation of B2. The question for this review is thus “How well does Dragon of Icespire Peak work to introduce players and GMs to the game, and what sort of game does it introduce?” Even more specifically, and derived from looking at other 5th Edition products, “What, if any, are the contradictions between Dragon of Icespire Peak’s fiction (setting and adventure details) and the mechanical playstyle it presents?”

Dragon of Icespire Peak

A 64 (Including 15 pages of 5th editions’ indulgent monster stat blocks) page series of 13 adventure locations ranging in size from 5 (Umbrage Hill - a Manticore attack) to 30 (Axeholm - A ruined Dwarven Fortress) keyed locations and designed to be played episodically, connected by an underlying structure of regional events. I believe the adventure is written by Chris Perkins, he’s credited as the designer in the rulebook, but not the adventure itself. Likewise art in the standard 5th edition style drawn by a passel of artists specifically for the adventure, unlike early 5th edition offerings. The art and cartography has the bright colors and generic fantasy look one expects from a Wizard’s of the Coast product, though it’s pretty sparse - we have illustrations of several monsters, cover art of some adventurers confronting the titular dragon, NPC illustrations, a vista of Phalanden, a random gnome fiddling with a contraption and a skeletal horse. Given the blandness of the wotC house imagination/style and the quotidian content of Dragon of Icespire Peak this is good as far as it goes. No illustrations that are especially useful at the table (magic items, complex rooms), but the NPC cards are a nice touch and drawn in a more whimsical style than most WotC illustrations. Maps are likewise typical of a WotC product, serviceable, not especially complex but not entirely linear either -- though the small number of keyed areas in many of the locations limit the orienteering aspect, which is perhaps a hallmark of 5th edition play.

Reading through the overall introduction of “Dragon of Icespire Peak”, I’m pleasantly surprised by its openness and stated commitment to player choice. The central “job board” gimmick is something borrowed from CRPGs from before they had the budget or graphics to animate NPCs - but I guess it’s an expected trope. I sometimes wish there was a board in my town that said things like “The mayor will pay $5,000.00 to any brave souls that investigate the ruined missile silos and defeat the scabrous vermin that dwells within” but like much of WotC’s brand of D&D fantasy the job board has a logic of its own at this point. Starting quests lead to complications and new quests that all tie into an overarching region's situation of the same sort that this blog champions - factions fighting over land and power, with the adventurers theoretically holding the balance. While Dragon of Icespire Peak still assumes the party and players will be drawn to heroic motives, unlike many WotC offerings it doesn’t lay out how to act on them in a linear and entirely predetermined manner. The seemingly open basic structure is reinforced by a set of advice that might seem familiar to All Dead Generations readers, though it's fairly general in nature.

Descent into Avernus - Dungeon Keying

In the last post All Dead Generations looked at the general design principles in Wizard’s of the Coast’s new campaign tome Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus, and compared them to the classic style of open world, location based dungeon crawls. Descent into Avernus is not a classic adventure, it is not meant to be played as an open world and even its locations which have some of the trappings of dungeons, or are named dungeons, aren’t in any mechanical sense. Rather the majority of Descent’s dungeons appear to either be small lairs, arenas to facilitate a specific encounter, or a series of linear scenes sometimes laid atop a map but largely unconnected during play.

The Dungeon of the Dead Three is the last of these: a selection of encounters partitioned off from the location largely as a means of introducing or ending them each with filmic or novelistic flair - to create a predesigned “moment” of gameplay. This is obviously a very different play style then the classic dungeon crawl, and it seeks to produce predictable narrative moments at every opportunity - willingly sacrificing many aspects that define the classic dungeon crawl to do so. Still, The Dungeon of the Dead Three and Descent into Avernus in general show care and creativity, and the contents of the individual keyed areas within it can be evocative enough that even a reader who doesn’t like the encounter based playstyle must recognize that Descent’s design choices are intentional.

The Dungeon of the Dead Three in particular deserves a closer look, because of anything within Descent it is most like a classic dungeon crawl, and seems to want to evoke the feeling of one - even if it pays no attention to the exploration elements of timekeeping, supply or risk management. Yet, despite disfavoring an exploration playstyle (which is hard not to with the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons mechanics) Dungeon of the Dead Three includes many aspects that superficially make it appear to be a classic dungeon: a looping map that includes empty or nonessential rooms, traps and secret doors as well as a traditional feeling of the dungeon crawl - the infiltration or exploration of close corridors in an alien underworld. Here of course that’s focused on a sewer, which unfortunately is also a popular video game cliche, but at least it avoids including wererats. Because of these inclusions, it’s easier to conceive of the The Dungeon of the Dead Three as a classic dungeon, and despite its designers clear intent for it to play very differently, one can interrogate it in the context of running a resources, risk v. reward dungeon crawl.

Beyond modifying or including rules that better encourage exploration play (e.g. random encounters, timekeeping, meaningful encumbrance, and lighting) the question of “how does one design a dungeon that facilitates exploration play” remains. With the larger elements of the adventure: map, concept and basic structure in place, or at least not actively working against the dungeon crawl play-style, the core of the design process is in the individual location keys.

Keys are the basic building block of adventure design, information that the designer believes most important to understanding the location, provided in a way to allow the reader to run the adventure.

TEXTUAL PITFALLS
There's a variety of techniques to keying locations, from the ultra minimalism found in some of the first published adventures, to boxed text designed originally for tournament adventures, and bullet points or other, mixed types of formalism. The style used in Descent is mixed one: short boxed text, sometimes preceded by and always followed by GM directed text about room contents. Areas without encounters (combat in Descent) lack boxed text and have only short paragraphs. The writing itself is serviceable, but it doesn’t appear to have been intended as writing for a location based adventure, and it’s not well focused on usability. The organization that exists is a haphazard use of bolding to set off paragraphs about treasure or traps in some of the locations. This sort of effort is good, but without consistency it doesn’t help a GM run the location by highlighting the most important information in the key so that it stands out. Descent does make laudable effort to limit the length of its locations, but because of uninspired writing may do so at the cost of dulling down the play experience of the dungeon as a whole.

Boxed text is always a concern, it exists to regularize play experience, an understandable goal in the tournament modules that pioneered it, but unnecessary for players and GMs that aren’t in a tournament. Like all design choices, it has a cost as well as an advantage and that cost is generally a risk of confusion for both players and GM. There’s a lot of potential sins for a designer writing boxed text (or simple keys without read aloud text), and below is a list of some of the most obvious with notes on how well Descent’s Dungeon of Dead Three manages them.

Descent into Avernus - From a Dungeon Crawl Perspective

Cover of Descent Into Avernus

With the basic ideas behind dungeon crawl style play covered, I'll be taking a look at the current state of contemporary Dungeons & Dragons adventure design and how it succeeds or fails to deliver a Dungeon Crawl or Classic Play experience.  Specifically I'll be looking at the recently published Wizards of the Coast ("WotC") campaign book "Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus" ("Descent"). My goal isn't to attack or denigrate Descent or the play style it supports, but to discuss where and how it follows design principles that support classic play, where it departs from them and to what effect.  I may also be able to offer some ideas that will help others run the adventure in a more classic way emphasizing: dungeon crawling, player choice, and open worldbuilding.

Fairly typical of WotC's contemporary adventures Descent is a 200 plus page series of adventures that make up a campaign that will take characters from 1st to approximately 14th level.  It's designed for many sessions of play and an epic scope. The campaign is the product of a large team of authors, designers and artists including D&D's current creative leads Mike Mearls and Chris Perkins. It's also nice to see that much of the cartography within is the work of Dyson Logos, a blogger and map maker who I consider to be broadly part of the same community as All Dead Generations and whose distinctive cross hatching style is inspired by classic map design.

FIRST THE STORY

Descent is an epic story, and this is it's first goal, and the first way it departs from classic sensibilities.  Organized (as are the vast majority of contemporary WotC adventures) into Chapters Descent is a linear narrative where the players follow and unfolding danger, overcoming challenges and gaining power as they go. It's writers don't countenance players deviating significantly from the chapters, their order and the consequences or events of each.