What is the NSR?

Strictly speaking, the New School Revolution is school of game design. In spirit, the NSR is a community to be found on Discord at the NSR Cauldron. You can call your game “NSR” whether it follows the strict definition, it was inspired by the NSR community, or both.

I. The NSR Strict

1. Rules-light, content-heavy. The bulk of the rulebook consists of GM tools and/or random tables for character creation. The core rules might fit on just a couple pages.
2. Lore-light, flavor-heavy. The setting is not explained, but implied through rules and tables. There is no canonical or correct interpretation of the setting outside of any given table playing the game.
3. Story-light, problem-heavy. The GM decides what happens based on what makes for a consistent world and/or an interesting challenge, not what makes for a good story. Players must be creative and clever to solve weird problems with the weird tools their characters have at their disposal.

II. The NSR Spirit

1. The best game is the game you like to play, the way you like to play it. There is no One True Way to play an RPG, and there’s something to learn from every style of play.
2. Don’t make myths about history. Look backward, think forward. There was no One True Way back in the ’70s or ’80s either, and there’s still a lot to learn from studying the past.
3. Hack a game together. Steal from everything. Never be satisfied with someone else’s rules. Embrace the attitude of Romantic poet William Blake: “I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. / I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.”

III. History of the NSR Game

1. Into the Odd was originally released in 2014 and very much came out of the Google+ era of the OSR. The GLOG (Goblin Laws of Gaming) also came out of this around 2016 and is probably best represented in its original incarnation by Skerples's "Many Rats on Sticks."
2. Maze Rats started as a hack of Into the Odd but tried to be more streamlined for the purpose of running games with children. (Knave was designed for the same purpose, but it's compatible with classic D&D stat blocks, where Maze Rats is not.) There's a subgenre of little adventure games broadly inspired by Maze Rats, including Tunnel Goons and other Nate Treme games but also including things like Adventure Hour by Sam / Dreaming Dragonslayer.
3. Electric Bastionland was something of a sequel/expansion to Into the Odd. It came out around the same time as Troika: Numinous Edition, which was a revival / "retroclone" of Advanced Fighting Fantasy. Both games had a big focus on a large variety of weird backgrounds that starting PCs could have (and I’m told this element of EB was partially inspired by an earlier edition of Troika).
4. Mausritter combined Into the Odd's core rules with Knave's inventory slot system and the GLOG's weird "magic dice" system. (It also took a lot from the "control panel layout" standards generally pioneered by Ben Milton.) Cairn took what Mausritter did (Into the Odd chassis + Knave inventory slots) and gave it a "forest fantasy" flavor (inspired by Necrotic Gnome's Dolmenwood setting) that appealed to many folks coming from D&D.
5. Liminal Horror belongs to a new generation of Into the Odd descendants alongside games like Lilliputian and Runecairn. All this is to say nothing of 2400, an ultralight collection of games that started as an Into the Odd hack but cuts out the combat system, and heavier games like the Black Hack and Errant (a “rules-light, procedure heavy” game).
6. NEXT-DAY EDIT: And how could I forget the big eye-catching Kickstarter successes like Mothership, Mork Borg, and Shadowdark? (That last one is probably more OSR than NSR, but still!)

IV. History of the NSR Cauldron

This post by Yochai Gal still gives a good sense of the conversations we were having around the time the community was forming. I would only add that I think we benefitted a lot from the coming together of story gamers, OSR players, and 5E fans around the same time that the work of RPG historians like Jon Peterson (and, more directly impacting our community, Tom / Lich Van Winkle) was breaking down a lot of myths about how RPGs were “supposed” to be played. We really wanted to get away from the 5E-bashing and story-game-bashing of other OSR communities online.

V. Current Trends and Projections

A few years ago everyone was excited about Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland because they eschewed fantasy in favor of common-sense problem-solving in weirder, more modern settings. Now, the zeitgeist has swung back toward fantasy, with Mythic Bastionland and Cairn 2E leading the pack alongside Dolmenwood in the more traditional OSR.

A few voices bemoan the death of weird settings, while most seem perfectly happy with the more traditional genre fare on offer from recent games. Some of the innovations of ItO and EB, such as removing inventory tracking and exploration procedures, have largely been rejected.

Rulesets seem unlikely to get any lighter under current paradigms, and there’s already an NSR hack out there for every popular genre. Could there be a swing back toward more original, weirder settings in the future? More in the vein of Ultraviolet Grasslands, Vaults of Vaarn, and the Electrum Archive, or more modern weirdness like EB? Or might the NSR begin to break from some of the core assumptions of OSR play in favor of something more freeform like matrix games?

Whatever the case, the future of innovation in this space looks bright as far as I can see. There’s still plenty of playing, learning, and hacking left to do.