The Functional Addendum
2026-02-15
I recently had been in a debate with some design colleagues of mine. The debate was on the basis of a critique leveled at The Functional Definition of The OSR. The primary contention was that the Definition was too narrow and did not include non-D&D-derived games. E.g., Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, and FASERIP.
It’s a common enough opinion within design/game circles that such games should be included under the umbrella that I felt the need to address this in an addendum article.
I generally find this opinion mostly comes out of bad nomenclature. When people hear Old-School Revival or Old-School Renaissance, they think that should include any game that they consider old school-why, it’s in the name! But names can be misleading. The Holy Roman Empire was named in spite of being really none of those things. (Or so Voltaire asserts.)
For those that have read The Functional Definition of The OSR, they will understand that compatibility and continuity are at the core of what defines it; you can read that article for more specific deliberations. Anything that breaks with compatibility can’t be OSR, because the point of the OSR was to revive specifically an era of D&D that was out of print and hard to get into. Making games which were compatible with the older games was essential in being able to preserve and play old modules.
As time carried on, people found that much like the TSR games (OD&D, B/X, BECMI, AD&D 1e–2e) being all generally compatible with one another, so were the retroclones. Further derivations on the formula eventually became what some call the 2nd wave OSR games-games which did not slavishly adhere to being clones while still retaining compatibility. Then even further alteration into different genres and concepts which birthed what some call The Third Wave.
Back in the debate I had, I used an analogy that I think also demonstrates the point as to why not everything old school is covered by the OSR.
So imagine for a moment that a hypothetical nuclear war wiped out most humans and most information we had. Then imagine a couple generations go by, so that nobody currently alive had any idea what the old world was like.
Eventually this new society would rediscover some of our old pastimes via archaeology. Say they started doing archaeology in North America first before Europe; they would quickly discover the sport of American football. They might not understand all the rules or concepts or how it was originally played, but they could piece together a reasonable facsimile of the sport.
Later this starts a movement called The Football-Revival Movement, where people attempt to play and modernize the sport. It’s not quite the same, but it has evident continuity with the original, same premise and all that.
Later in Europe archaeologists then discover another sport, also called football… a similar process occurs as it did for American football. However, this new movement or group argues that they should also be called The Football-Revival Movement, and that the American version should also include the European version in its movement.
You could see how that doesn’t really make sense, given they don’t share a common rule-set or continuity with American football. The only thing they share in common is that they are pre-atomic war sports that are having a revival, but that’s about it.
The European version should just honestly pick a different name so as not to spur confusion, but the European football group insists on the shared name despite not being the first on the scene, and only having, at best, a tenuous connection with American football.
This is pretty much how I feel when people insist Traveller or FASERIP is OSR. It’s mainly just confusion from nomenclature and misses the point. The D&D crowd basically had first pick of the name, and OSR is what they settled on.
Footnote: I want to make it clear that when I say something is not OSR, that is not a qualitative judgement, but rather a categorical distinction. When I say something is not OSR, that does not mean it’s bad.