About PDX OSR

Portland Old School Renaissance | Revival

Welcome to PDX OSR, a community in Portland, Oregon, that enjoys playing a variety of role-playing games, often centered around Old School Renaissance (OSR) gaming. This typically focuses on Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) in its various early forms, or similar roleplaying games inspired by the early play styles of the era. While the OSR is often associated with "dungeon games," it embraces a wide variety of RPGs that capture the essence of early roleplaying and the hobby's development.

The nature of what "old school" means and what the "R" in OSR represents remains a topic of endless and entertaining debate, largely due to the OSR’s disconnected, forum-based origins. The OSR arose from a general response to the "modern" (3rd Edition D&D at the time!) game, which was perceived as being forcefully inserted into the state of play in an overly codified manner. Character building and adherence to numerical balance took precedence over the gameplay of earlier editions, which emphasized exploration, decision-making, and roleplay.

New readers are encouraged to explore Matthew Finch’s ‘A Quick Primer for Old-School Playing’ and the four Zen Moments within, which help unlock the door to the OSR ethos. To paraphrase, they are:

There is a deep and fascinating history of roleplaying game development that is slowly fading. Fans of old-school styled gaming may have grown up with it or recently discovered it through various good moves and missteps, improvements in design versus heretical overwriting of previously “perfected” expressions of rules. The OSR encompasses much of this history but is not strictly defined by it. Many still play the exact same game they have been playing since its original inception (with the start date varying by system of choice), finding endless ways to share stories at a table with friends using comfortable rules (or a lack thereof).

Many others explore older systems to interrogate and understand the wisdom of early design attempts, re-formalizing these learnings into a manner of play that suits their taste, taking from here and there what they will to craft their own style of play.

Players introduced to RPGs using modern systems often find great joy when encountering the OSR, breaking free from the constraints of the monolithic entity that today’s “D&D” has become. It’s not only expected but rigidly enforced that there is “one way” to play the game, with a meta-culture that exists outside the simple idea of gathering with friends to engage in entertaining roleplay adventure.

Some feel that OSR entails only previously released games from a certain era, while others feel that OSR gaming embodies the spirit of the early years. Let it be said that there are many definitions and interested parties. They all share, at their core, an act of gathering to share a communal fictional hallucination, often using dice to provide random elements to the story.

Fast forward to 2025, where multiple new editions of Dungeons and Dragons have come and gone. What is “modern” is a shifting landscape, and the OSR has also spawned the even more nebulous New School Renaissance (NSR), which often focuses on extremely rules-light gameplay and re-digests and presents new visions of what some in the OSR may consider sacred cows.

New landscapes beckon to those who dare. Today, we live in a golden age of game pluralism with a healthy respect for the roots of the hobby, without an innate need to universally adhere to specific incarnations of codified systems for roleplaying. PDX OSR, as a community, aims to foster this spirit, and I hope I may be so bold as to say so without assuming all folks involved agree in totality.

One important aspect of this mode of being is sharing our thoughts, ideas, adventures, scenarios, etc., with others without expressing them as ground truth or accusing others of having bad fun or harboring wrong think. This does not mean everyone agrees or that vociferous opinions are not held, but that we accept and encourage exploration of various expressions of “how to play roleplaying games.”