From controversial publishers and exiled pundits to belligerent posts in facebook groups somtimes it seems to be impossible to swing a cat in the Old School scene without running into agressive and exclusionary rhetoric. As fan of all the wonderful aspects of OSR style games I am concerned with what I see as a worm in our otherwise delicious apple. I am interested in anyone elses thoughts on this situation, I apologize now If this post leaves anyone feeling called out or atttacked. I just want to start a little conversation about our culture.
Most gaming stuff definitely has that image — that is, that the participants are a bunch of relatively young cis white guys who are unable to talk to women and are terminally un-woke when it comes to the issues of social justice.
That said there are a ton of good gamer groups (and games!) if you know where to look. Anecdotally there are a lot of gay nerds out there, and queer people of all stripes seem to love RPGs.
So I don’t think it’s inherent to the medium… and even most of the OSR stuff I’ve read has been pretty good. The stuff to stay away from is those that equate “historical realism” to “violence against women and minorities.” Obviously FATAL exists but in the OSR space I think there’s no equivalent and even Lamentations of the Flame Princess (the darkest and edgiest out there) is dark and edgy equally.
How much you consider this an issue is a function of how terminally online you are. I mean this a bit more charitably than it sounds. If you consider the OSR a loose design and play philosophy you are picking from, then whilst you may be non-plussed that e.g. Prince of Nothing deadnamed Jannell Jacquays in his review of Caverns of Thracia, it does not substantially affect the ways you prep for your game. If, however, you consider the OSR to be a specific cultural space in dialogue about design, which I am lead to believe was actually the case back in the G+ days, then who is in your spaces becomes a much more salient issue to your day-to-day interactions. This is true regardless of your political positions or which “gated” (by which I mean containing a higher coherence around particular norms) community space you occupy, be it the OSR discord, NSR discord, Tenkar’s Tavern, therpgsite, etc. To some degree, these spaces are often culturally downstream of a much looser network of design discussion happening over on blogs, but this is not always the case, and I recommend this post https://traversefantasy.blogspot.com/2022/01/steps-to-demonetize-ttrpg-hobby.html as a consideration of the additional dimension of the base (as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure) of licensing and commercializing that shapes interactions in ways that don’t always align to what you might expect a grouping based on politics was. For example, I associate Yochai Gal politically with roughly the same group of people who participate in Zinequest and hang out on the OSR discord server, but the Cairn is published for free online under CC-BY-SA 4.0, which changes the design culture around it as a result.
I recommend this post (http://osrsimulacrum.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-historical-look-at-osr-part-v.html) for some history that’s useful context.
As a heuristic, I think it’s generally true that the people who spend the most amount of time talking about meta-level issues like this are not likely to be fruitful sources to follow for gameable content. Unless you’re a moderator of a community space, you’re unlikely to have to power to exclude people, but you do have the power to shape ideas through publishing content freely into a gift culture akin to open source. Spending time discussing values instead of publishing materials that embody them is a miscalibration wrt the ways the average person can have an impact.
Who cares! No matter what you say it is wrong to them. Just go be you!
