Some interesting conversation recently around the “nature” of the OSR. This topic waxes and wanes, and will probably never really be settled, but for what it’s worth (almost nothing) I’d like to share a thought that occured to me as I was reading Brendan’s post on the topic.

Like Richard, I have my attachments to the term OSR. I’m not convinced by Marcia’s positioning of that attachment along the axis of an originary myth, accurate or otherwise. As Brendan notes in the post linked above, such originary claims can be made after the fact. In other words, they might more accurately be interpreted as speech or textual acts that mediate an ongoing social formation, rather than telling its history.

But that’s beside the point. If we want to talk about what the OSR is, without questionable historicizing1 or appeals to beliefs that others may not share, we could do worse than to look at its material culture. In other words, we can think of the OSR as a scene organized around a collection of quasi-canonical texts. We don’t have to look very hard to identify these texts: the LBBs, the Basic D&D line, and to a lesser extent AD&D, as well as their retroclones – in other words, the textual heritage of early D&D – have been extensively analyzed, debated, and mined by people putatively affiliated with the OSR.2 We might frame the OSR as a kind of tradition, or network of traditions, of working with those foundational texts.

We engage with these texts in different ways. Some folks are interested in learning more about the culture that produced those texts, others in reenacting that culture, others in searching the texts for principles which may or may not be intended or reflective of that culture. Others don’t care much either way and use them out of preference for certain aspects of the text itself (rules lite, fiction-forward, etc.).3 Some of us still engage with these texts directly, whereas others are happy to build on the interpretive work of intermediaries who have begun to spin these texts into their own trajectories. (Into the Odd and FKR strike me as good examples of OSR “offshoots” that have gone on to generate their own tradition.)

When I shared a draft of this post with Brendan, he raised a very good question:

What do you think of the risk that emphasizing material culture leads to the blind spots of the Forge? That is, people doing hardcore textual analysis and actual play analysis without acknowledging that a lot of the actual game resides in the culture and non-textual norms?

I don’t know enough about the Forge to stand behind the part about “blind spots”4 but the question is valid regardless. I think for me the difference lies in those texts’ function as a source of common ground – a common font of products, play objects, rules, adventures, histories, etc., that we can look at together and talk about. That is, the OSR doesn’t all have to have the same relationships to those texts nor the same ideas about them, for them to act the basis for a kind of shared experience. I emphasize the texts here in their status as objects in common, not as containers of authorized meanings.

As a closing conceptual note, I’m flirting with a couple ideas from the philosopher Jacques Rancière and I’d like to give credit to his work. Rancière is interested in questions of how things like art and knowledge give rise to forms of “being in common”. I’m not working closely with him here, but half-digested recollections of his writing, particularly on art in Dissensus (2010) and on education in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991), have fed into my thinking in this post.

  1. You could argue that some subsequent intepretive works, eg. influential blog posts or publications, have themselves become canon. I suspect arguing either way would require a more detailed sociological analysis than I have time for here. ↩

  2. Although, I want to note, Marcia’s historical analysis is excellent. ↩

  3. For what it’s worth, I started off in the final category. ↩

  4. Don’t @ me. Also, don’t @ Brendan, probably. ↩