Fountainhead

While it's still possible to argue in good conscience about the precise origins or start date of the Old School Renaissance, I don't think there can be any serious debate that the major intellectual impetus behind the early OSR was the reexamination of original (1974) Dungeons & Dragons. That's certainly how I first became aware of the growing network of forums and blogs that formed the nucleus of one the most imaginatively dynamic movements within the hobby in some time. 

Of particular importance in this regard is Finarvyn's OD&D Discussion forum, better known simply as ODD74. At the suggestion of Philotomy Jurament (of "Philotomy's OD&D Musings" fame), whom I met through the Troll Lord Games forums, I registered at ODD74 in early December 2007 and began my own personal journey into reexamining OD&D.

Or perhaps I should say examining OD&D, because, while I had owned copies of the Little Brown Books and supplements since the mid-1980s, I'd never really read them carefully, let alone used them at the table. They were, at best, historical curiosities that had value as collector's items and little else. To my way of thinking at the time, OD&D had long ago been superseded by several later editions of the game, most notably Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which I held in especially high esteem. Through my interactions with the many knowledgeable and thoughtful gamers who posted at ODD74, I began to see just who wrong I was in thinking this way.

Among the many lessons I learned over the course of the next several months, during which I read and posted to the forum with obsessive regularity, the first was this: old ≠ bad. That might seem like a small thing or even an obvious thing, but, sad to say, it wasn't, at least to me. I'd fallen prey to the consumerist myth that newer is better, buttressed, no doubt, by the desire of RPG companies to sell me new editions of games I already owned and enjoyed. That's why I'd dutifully bought both the second edition of AD&D in 1989 and Third Edition (of what?) in 2000 (not to mention v.3.5 just three short years later). I wanted to stay up-to-date in my gaming and the only way to do that was to buy more stuff.

OD&D, even in its purest form – the three LBBs and nothing more – is a perfectly playable game. Certainly, it requires a goodly amount of interpretation by any would-be referee, but that's not the same thing as saying, as some do, that OD&D is incomplete, never mind unplayable. It's definitely not a "modern" RPG, lacking as it does definitions, explanations, and even occasionally consistency between its various sections. Instead, it's a glorious, extravagant mess, a veritable Pandora's box whose chaotic contents literally changed entertainment forever. There's an almost palpable power in those three slim, staple-bound booklets if you're willing to cast aside, if only briefly, the subsequent history of roleplaying. After all, this is where it all began.

I had initially come to study OD&D because I'd become dissatisfied with the direction of Dungeons & Dragons under the stewardship of Wizards of the Coast. I was driven by the paradoxical notion that the only way forward was backward, which is to say, that I felt D&D had become so changed that the only way I could conceive of fixing it was to try and turn the clock back, all the way to the very beginning. Anything less than that would be a half-measure, doomed to repeat the very same mistakes that had led Dungeons & Dragons to where it was in 2007 – overcomplicated and deracinated.

The second lesson I learned from examining OD&D was this: it contains multitudes. The same qualities that had led Gary Gygax famously to declare his first creation to be "a non-game" – its open-endedness, flexibility, and variability – were precisely those that I now found so appealing. Indeed, I saw in them an antidote to my dissatisfaction with the direction of contemporary D&D. What's more is that, as I interacted with others on the ODD74 forums (and, in time, OSR blogs), I discovered that, by design, OD&D could be played in a variety of different ways. The history of the early hobby attested to this and, in fact, proved to be the fertile seedbed out of which so many later roleplaying games would flower. 

I can't stress enough how emancipatory this was to me at the time. I'd grown up a TSR fanboy, hanging on the Word of God that descended from the heights of Lake Geneva. This meant that I tried to the best of my ability to play D&D in the "official" manner whenever possible. While this took a lot of the burden of rules interpretation off my shoulders, it also probably curtailed my creativity to some degree, prodding me to play the game in a particular fashion. I have no real complaints about this – I had a lot of fun playing RPGs in my youth, as evidenced by the fact that I still play them in middle age – but I have no doubt that I also closed myself off to other possibilities. Coming to OD&D with an open mind helped me to understand this.

This is why I think, even half a century later, that there is value in reading original Dungeons & Dragons. Indeed, I think there's value in playing OD&D. This the game that started it all, the one that first taught the world what a fantasy roleplaying game was. Much like the details of the early history of the OSR, it's possible for men of good conscience to argue about the merits and flaws of OD&D's design, but I hope we can all recognize just how literally vital the three Little Brown Books are. They presented the world not merely with rules but with a new form of entertainment – one limited only by the collective imaginations of those who participate in it.

How many other books – RPG or otherwise – can honestly make that claim?