Acknowledgements
OSwR exists because of the people and games that came before it. This page is overdue.
Scott Myers
Scott designed the original Olde Swords Reign.
I met him through an old ICRPG product called Ancient Crypts and Creatures. That was before COVID. Since then, he’s become one of my closest friends - we’ve played every Monday for years.
Scott wasn’t going to release OSwR. He knew at least I would play it, so he put it out there. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have gone down this torturous journey.
He’s one of the most talented game designers I’ve ever met, a complete lunatic, and a fantastic friend.
Basic Fantasy RPG
Basic Fantasy blazed the way.
Chris Gonnerman and the BFRPG community showed what’s possible when you give things away, build a community, and do things the right way. The bestiary in this new version was heavily augmented from their open game content - but more than that, Basic Fantasy changed how I view games.
Amazing community. Amazing products. Amazing people. They’ve been incredibly supportive.
Cairn
Cairn shaped how this website works.
Yochai Gal’s approach to presentation - the simplicity, the layout, building through GitHub, giving everything away CC BY-SA - showed me what a modern RPG website could be. The generosity of that model still strikes me.
If you want to fork OSwR, translate it, or build something new from it you can because Cairn showed the way.
Maze Rats
Maze Rats was one of the first things I read that wasn’t 5e.
I fell in love. It’s still my favourite RPG artefact - far more than a game. I use it constantly.
I don’t think Ben Milton realised what he’d made. For someone with aphantasia, Maze Rats is a revelation. It doesn’t give you vague ideas to imagine - it gives you building blocks. Physical, concrete things you can put together. It opened up a whole new area of creativity for me.
Seeing it shared CC BY-SA just seemed so generous.
Knave
Knave proved that simple rules and player choice aren’t opposites.
Ben Milton’s design philosophy runs through the OSR: strip away what doesn’t earn its place, trust the table to fill the gaps, make every choice matter. OSwR tries to honour that.
5th Edition
I started with 5e. It shaped me.
It’s not my preferred way to play anymore, but the mechanics make sense to me. OSwR uses 5e’s chassis - bounded accuracy, proficiency bonus, the d20 resolution - because those bones are solid. The goal was never to reject 5e, but to ask: what if the familiar mechanics served a different style of play?
The Journey
OSwR started because Scott made something and I wouldn’t shut up about it.
The original came out in 2021. Since then I’ve written three different games while supposedly “editing” this one. The current version is an amalgamation of the best ideas from all of them - finally coherent, finally finished enough to share.
If you’ve read this far: thank you. Now go play something.
Damien