No, the OSR is not done - the lesson still needs to be learned
This was the content of the first tweet I saw this morning...
"Now that the OSR renaissance or revival is done we discuss how to better label these games. "
Over on the twitter, I had two responses...
"Now that the OSR renaissance or revival is done... "
"... we discuss how to better label these games."
Now I don't expect that my shitty little blog has survived "dead blog" cullings and with good reason. It's not like I'm a content fountain or focused on my brand that I have to keep churning out posts - in reality, I said pretty much everything that I needed to say by about 2011 and moved on with life and gaming.
Yet it feels like the simple lesson that felt like it was so blindingly obvious back then seems to have been forgotten, or lost, or perhaps cloned by a clone of a clone to the point where it was lost? I don't know...
It's getting close to twenty years since the first roughly OSR-ish flag was raised, with the publishing of Castles & Crusades in 2004. I said "getting close"... when you start counting in decades, precision doesn't have to be there, 'k? Nearly twenty years of going back and forth on the same things, and now with the yet-another-edition coming out of the D&D factory, I guess this was inevitable?
The lesson... though... and the reason why the OSR isn't done, nor will it ever be done, is because of the very last paragraph in the last book of the 1974 edition of Dungeons & Dragons - the first one, yannow.
That paragraph explains why DIY, OSR, retroclones, forums, blogs, podcasts, streams, old editions, new editions... nothing is "done" and doesn't need "labeling".
As I said in my twitter thread, and repeating here, I now understand why some of my punk friends get a certain twitch in their eyes and an almost spasmodic clutching of hands, as if around necks, about every fifteen years or so, when the Internets start talking about "punk is dead" or "punk is back" ...
... here we are. *sigh*
but I just wish that last paragraph from OD&D would STICK a bit more, yannow... just a little more?