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Friday, August 31, 2012

The rumors of the OSR's death...

Thanks to my lousy, dead-end job, I don't read as many gaming blogs as I used to. However, I hear third-hand reports that with the recent GenCon announcement that WotC is going to put out the original D&D catalog on PDF early next year, some have declared the OSR either dead or obsolete.

Really.

Tell me, is WotC going to publish any new material for OD&D or 1st Edition?

I don't think so.

Are they going to publish variants of the original rules that take the Original D&D out of the traditional "high fantasy" genre? (i.e. Sword & Sorcery, Sword & Planet, Science Fiction, Horror, Post-Apocalypse, etc..)

Nope.

How about new settings? Is WotC going to give Original D&D those, or is it all going to be digitized Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance...?


I see.


What about all the non-D&D, non-TSR titles? What about Empire of the Petal Throne, Star Frontiers, Gamma World, Classic Traveller, Top Secret, Tunnels and Trolls, and numerous out-of-print RPGs from the Golden Age? Can we declare all of those "dead" now too?

Hmmmmm?

So what you're telling me is that WotC, while kindly allowing us to legitimately draw from previous editions by making them available again, is NOT actually going to support those games. They've moved on to D&D Next, and they're merely throwing the Old School Grognards a bone as they pass by. Therefore all of those OSR hobbyists and campaigners should just toss away their retro-clones and their "vanity press" modules come in out from the cold back into WotC's loving embrace? After all, we only play these games for the nostalgia, right?

Sorry. Not interested. I'm having way too much fun here. Thanks.

1 comment:

  1. Well said. Besides, we all know that WoTc will only open up the electronic format to a pay per view subscription, where as you will have to pay a monthly fee, and you can access anything they own and view it online only, and you won't be able to keep a local copy. I see it already.

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