the OSR was inside you all along....

18 Jul, 2026

Responding to this Youtube video about the work-in-progress dungeon crawler Crows (caw) from MCDM. As I've followed Crows, I've thought it was really interesting how MCDM has Matrix-dodged their way around the acronym by referencing more recently released dungeon crawler TTRPGs. Obviously those games were influenced by other games, surely. For a while I thought this was a deliberate choice, because the OSR is generally a poisonous term in the greater TTRPG space due to various bigots trying to become Thought Leaders. I also thought it could be because the community has a strong DIY mentality and often dislikes the idea of buying books instead of googling "dnd basic expert pdf free", which is not a great community to market to as a TTRPG publisher. But it is actually more benign than that - the leader designer doesn't think it counts as an OSR system! But what if I told you... that the OSR wasn't a system at all... it was in your heart all along 💖 ¹

One of the sources referenced in the video is another, longer video from Ben Milton about the six cultures of play. Six Cultures of Play is first a blogpost from Retired Adventurer, and Ben Milton's video is more or less an audiobook of it. The original author is cool (and I'm a Blogpost Enjoyer, call me biased) so I’m going to refer to it as the primary source. RA specifies that the play cultures are almost never pure, they're just sections of people that learned to play TTRPGs. Crows is a game that demonstrates this - it is influenced by the lead designer’s love for this old school play, the understanding that it’s going to hit a neo-trad audience and using those assumptions to make the game more comprehensible to them, it’s taking bits like “fail forward” and degrees of success from storygames. But none of these things categorize or disqualify Crows from the OSR, it just means that different cultures of play have influenced its design. Lots of people will be able to come to Crows with their own understanding of TTRPGs, see familiar mechanics that make them go “oh yeah I know how to run games”, and do that successfully.

The blogpost also discusses this! Games themselves are not OSR, they're just tools for play cultures to inhabit. This is really important to the second half of the video, in my opinion - all of those examples about how Crows fails the OSR tests just mean the game resists some OSR-playstyle-preferences, but none of them are disqualifying. Crows has rules for searching a room with a die roll? So does B/X. with a 1-in-6! Long combat rules? Let's go visit AD&D, it's just not on a grid yet. (I also think "Can't run Keep on the Borderlands in Crows" is a fun challenge rather than a fact, but I'll wait til the game is released-released to see if there are kobolds or a reskinnable little guy in it. :P) The mechanics in a system cannot create a Classic or Trad or OSR culture from scratch, so I think it’s wrong to say that these elements of the system disqualify the game from consideration. A gamer that's only played B/X with their old school friend group could absolutely pick up Crows and run a game with the experience and culture they're familiar with, much like how the lead designer describes how Crows tries to make dungeon crawling familiar to the 5e-based-audience that MCDM grew from. I see old school gamers running challenge based, player driven, diegetic decision making gameplay in Pendragon and FATE-inspired systems, taking their past with other OSR tables and making new, unique experiences.

Despite the fact that I think Crows is fairly friendly to the play culture, I think MCDM is right to not market Crows as an "OSR" game. ² Not because the system has inherent opposition to the play culture as described by RA or commonly understood by those survey takers, or Dragonsfoot, or G+ groups, but because in the wider RPG community, OSR has become a marketing term for rules light, ruling-focused games. Or, it's a term that means "your character dies", or it’s when your book has black and white art. Crows has both of these things, but it's not a good idea to attach the acronym when you're marketing it. People who like OSR games will naturally click on a dungeon crawling survival horror game, and you don't need to scare off people who disliked that time they played Old School Essentials, and you don't want to confuse people who are just learning that Draw Steel isn't just house rules for 5e.

Anyways! I appreciate the videos explaining the game design process over at MCDM, it’s really cool to see behind the screen and having the designers talk about their work both on Draw Steel and now on Crows. None of this play culture or system taxonomy will help MCDM with its two goals, “making the best dungeon crawling RPG that [James] can” or successfully launching a TTRPG with a thriving community. I’m excited to see where Crows goes on its way to a full release and, even if it ends up not being my preference, I am excited to loot its corpse for art and weird dungeons, like some sort of intelligent bird with an appreciation for trinkets.