It's My NSR Now

So we had our biweekly shrugging session at the NSR Cauldron talking in circles about how we don’t know what the NSR is. Our resident NSR expert Tim B. (I think so, Tim might disagree) said he doesn’t use the term anymore. I joked multiple times in the preceding conversation how the NSR isn’t real.

Tim tried to call people to action earlier this year but not much happened. The NSR remained a memory. So I’m doing something about it. The best way to make people talk about something is to proudly declare your opinions and misplaced authority online. So here I am.

I made a game called Runecycle. I wanted to call it NSR but I couldn’t really fit it into the definition. So I’m doing the next logical thing and changing the definition of NSR to fit Runecycle.

This is where I would explain the history of the OSR and NSR. But I won’t, because the point here is to make something new. The NSR was a thing. It might still be a thing, I don’t know. But I’m going to foster-parent it for one blogpost until someone else writes a response. If you still want the history you can read my version of the OSR history in my thesis or stuff about the NSR on Tim’s blog.

My NSR is here

My NSR is indie. It’s small, scrappy, and diy. Chris McDowall is still indie.

My NSR is new and experimental. It’s the New School Revolution. Nothing old about that.

My NSR likes RPGs. All of them.

My NSR likes to play. The games are less important than the play. What happens at the table is what matters.

From one-page games to small softcovers, my NSR is affordable, accessible, and easy to digest. My NSR is cool, weird, poignant, punk, political, topical, contradictory, co-operative, inconsistent, impressionist, insistent, incandescent, indecent, and everything else that comes with being New, School, and Revolution.

What’s your NSR?