History — Advanced Old School Revival

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OSR+ (Advanced Old School Revival) is a rules-light, web-first tabletop roleplaying game for new and veteran players alike, mixing old school play with modern storygaming.

From the Creator

Daniel Quinn here—this game’s creator—writing to you now. I could provide a clever-sounding pitch that tries to sell you OSR+ in a paragraph, but that’s not going to get at the “why” behind this game. I created this game to solve a very particular modern problem that cuts to the heart of why we play. What follows is an exploration of the history of this game and how it came to be.

WHAT THE PLUS IN OSR+ MEANS

While I had the hubris to name OSR+ after an entire movement—the “Old School Revival” or “Renaissance”—it’s a bit of a misnomer, because OSR+ is neither a retroclone of Dungeons & Dragons nor an entirely OSR-adjacent game. Metaphorically, the “plus” part is borrowed from the “Advanced” tagline in Dungeons & Dragons, particularly those optional books in Second Edition called Skills & Powers and Combat & Tactics. What I liked about those books, despite their crunchiness, is that they made Second Edition modular, in a way that Dungeons & Dragons hadn’t been outside of the stuff you could mine from Dragon Magazine in the pre-2000s. But the “plus” part also refers to something else: the burgeoning storygaming scene, arguably spearheaded by Powered by the Apocalypse-inspired games, where there’s an interest in shaping the game’s narrative through “dissociative mechanics,” to borrow a term from my personal hero, Justin Alexander.

I found that in order to facilitate the kind of collaborative storytelling I was always interested in, I had to incorporate techniques from both of these schools of thought. Hence my quest to create OSR+ began.

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How It All Started →