Welcome back to the Illusory Sensorium. It's my inestimable pleasure to be hosting this months' RPG Blog Carnival, a lovely little travelling tradition kept inflated and tied into balloon animals by Of Dice and Dragons' Scot Newbury. So far in 2025 we've had a pair of lovely thematic topics: Worlds Beyond and Dragon Neighbours. Now for something incompletely different: Over the Garden Wall - Beyond the OSR.

The tacit framing of this illustrious carnival is we're all prepping and playing fantastic medieval adventure games; or more effusively the most multifarious (Post-)Old/New School Revival/Renaissance/Revolution/Rapprochement. It's got the bones of a broad, blue church, but there has still sadly been a long history of gatekeeping the walled garden.

If you've somehow wormed your way to this very post, on this here blog, about this little hobby, without already having a working knowledge of what the "OSR" even is - I will skip the usual apocryphal primers, and instead recommend this recent tidy summary by Yochai Gal (New School Revolution).

This month, I'm calling everyone in - what is something usually held as outside the domain of adventure gaming, which you think actually blends away nicely? It doesn't have to please everyone - someone's yum is another stooge's yuck - but what's an aberrant idea you're keen to try? Even better: what's something you've already brought to the gaming table last summer, and can now report back to the class?

There are a lot of external sources I'd like to consider, so I'll present an amuse-bouche of inspirations you might like to draw from, as well as some of my own idle musings that I'll (hopefully) expound upon before the end-of-season round up on March 31st:

'Outside' cultures of play

I would consider all forms of make-believe, pretend and imagination play more similar than they are different; if you're not already amongst the weeds on the taxonomy of roleplaying games, I would suggest reading the Retired Adventurer for a primer. Add to that lyric games, board and card games, live-action roleplaying games, family and parlour games, improv, serious/war-games, mega games...

For example, I reckon a lot of story/narrative game 'tech' is well worth pinching: Playbooks, Custom Moves, Clocks, and Fronts from Apocalypse World; negotiating Position and Effect, Flashbacks, Loadouts, and Downtime procedures from Blades in the Dark (and the nuance of the Threat Roll in the Deep Cuts expansion); CATS (Concept, Aim, Tone, Subject matter), Paint the Scene, and Unscenes from The Gauntlet games like The Between; and even (Thoughts), Stars & Wishes by Lu Quade and Craig Shipman.

None of that's novel: what I haven't seen discussed much though, is how play norms like the line of narrative authority might not only vary between games, but even within the one game between its phases of play. Specifically: what about marrying classic/OSR dungeon-delving adventure gaming to alternate phases of more story game downtime or seasonal play in a city or stronghold? The line of narrative authority could deliberately shift, so players may setup scenes and play supporting characters in civilisation, without compromising the verisimilitude of exploring the dungeon (or untamed wilds). Put another way, the players could intentionally shift stances between pawn/actor and author/director, adding another rhythm and dimension to play.

What other ideas from an 'outside' culture of play might be fun to mix with the OSR?

'Outside' roleplaying games

Let's go further afield: what of computer and video games, or other entertainment media? Of course several digital game genres owe their roots to Dungeons & Dragons, but the field has gone on to make further strides that we might now wish to reincorporate:

• Dice-less combat. High-information and low-chance tactical skirmish games like Into the Breach, Mario & Rabies, Marvel's Midnight Suns, and Tactical Breach Wizards demonstrate a style of combat that could prioritise interesting decisions and player skill. In the tabletop space, one of the main such examples I know of is Spencer Campbell's recent LOOT game (Illuminated by Lumen 2.0).
• Mobile combat. The above skirmish games also promote movement and positioning through varied elevation, hazardous terrain, destructible cover, and forced movement. What they don't have is Opportunity Attacks for moving out of a threatened space: a mainstay of D&D that promotes stasis in combat. What if instead, like Midnight Suns, you were liberal with forced movement powers and let people make out of turn attacks whenever an opponent is pushed into them? C-c-combo beatdown!
• Environmental attacks. These same games also reveal the untapped space of pushing people off ledges, through windows, or into explosive or electrified obstacles; and pulling down or activating other hazards. D&D has always presented these opportunities as uncompetitive against your character's intrinsic combat abilities - flip it round so these circumstantial and limited use attacks are the most potent, and even let characters specialise in this (such as a Berserker being better with improvised weapons and smashing into terrain).
• Concrete magic. Advanced by Paulo Greco of Lost Pages, this principle takes on another hue through the lens of the immersive sim genre (such as Thief, Deus Ex, and Dishonoured). Defining character abilities or magical effects in more grounded and less abstract ways facilitates rulings over rules, and play as an open system. Re-purposing a dungeon trap as a limited-use special weapon, using sticky mines as a makeshift staircase, taking control of camera and computer systems... This is why the 5E approach of the Grease spell being uninflammable is so stifling.
• Open-air dungeons. Games like Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Metal Gear Solid 5 give a blueprint for embedding dungeon-like enemy fortresses in a broader open world. This goes further than just Jaquaysing the dungeon with multiple routes of ingress and egress: by bringing the adventure site up to the surface, it facilitates broader faction play with neighbours, and opens up more operational approaches for infiltrating or sieging. There is still work to be done in how to design and present these spaces for ease of play: well-annotated maps, orders of battle, reinforcement plans, alarm level responses, and more are required.
• 4X. eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate. A somewhat calcified genre of strategy wargames, now typified by the Civilization series. Rather than the usual framing of domain- and name-level play with singular stronghold building, what about broadening the scope to conquering and ruling an empire? The typical campaign hex map is begging to be repurposed for this: just assign contested strategic resources to settlements and dungeon sites, and change the timebase for downtime play to seasons so you can feel the roll of years.
• War magic. Extending on the 4X idea, Age of Wonders 4 shows a way of linking tactical skirmish combat with the larger scale strategy layer through a shared resource. You could draw upon Mana from claimed land to fuel epic siege-spells and wizardry of mass destruction.

What other ideas from 'outside' tabletop gaming might be fun to mix with the OSR?

'Outside' gaming

Last but certainly not least: what about your second favourite hobby, or your profession or day job? I'm a statistical amateur learning some Bayesian data modelling at the moment - there are interesting questions about empiricism and ontology in science that are raised by the priors and likelihood, deduction versus induction and falsifiable claims. It has got me reflecting on the old D&D: Planescape setting, and what it even means to say that belief shapes reality. Is a post-truth world really such a fantasy anymore?

What other ideas from 'outside' gaming entirely might be fun to mix with the OSR?

Get on the Blogs!

So consider this the slap across the cheek with a white kid glove: you have been challenged to write a post on your own blog (or even micro-blog platform like Bluesky) informed by one of these angles. When you have, please comment below or email me at illusory.sensorium@gmail.com with a link. Come the end of the month I'll post here again with a round-up of all the contributions.

Excelsior!