Millions of us played Dungeons and Dragons (aka D&D) in the 1970s and 1980s. We got busy with life, and are just barely finding time near or in retirement to get back to our favorite teenage hobby.

Still more millions of us grew up looking at our parent(s) old D&D books or even playing games as family time with the old rules and want to find out where they all went. It’s nostalgia, or maybe we’re looking for something a bit simpler than the newer versions of D&D or Pathfinder role-playing games.

Looking Back

The old TSR company that produced D&D from the 1970s and 1980s is gone. It got sold out to Wizards of the Coast (WotC) in the 1990s. Then WotC got absorbed by the game-play black hole known as Hasbro.

For decades, the only way you could get a hold of the old rules was through Ebay or other online flee markets. Eventually, Hasbro kindly made the old rules and adventures available as PDFs for sale online.

In the mean time, the older versions of the game developed a new online presence and tag-line. The old versions of the game became known as OSR. OSR stands for Old School R*@#$. (No one really agrees on what the ‘R’ stands for. Renaissance, Revival, or pick your favorite ‘R’ word.

Those that lived through the 1970s and 1980s probably experienced the fluidity of the adventures and rules. Many people playing the game back then felt AD&D was different from D&D, but players of D&D rarely cared about the differences in editions of D&D. You would often see different editions of D&D rules at the same tables even though a close examination would have shown stats didn’t match up between different editions of D&D. This lack of concern about the differences in those early editions of D&D likely led to them all being clumped together under the single title of OSR.

OSR Clone Wars

The three sets of old D&D rules that primarily were included in the OSR definition were:

1. Original D&D that included any of the editions that came before the first Expert Rules were written.
2. B/X D&D which included the era of the first Basic and Expert box sets.
3. BECMI D&D that came out in the 1980s and included box sets for Basic, Expert, Companion, Masters, and Immortals rules.

For some reason, there wasn’t as much strong nostalgia for AD&D. Possibly, the types of players that wanted the most complex version of D&D love the modern crunchy complexity found in 5th edition D&D and beyond.

All the renewed excitement about the old versions of D&D in the new millennium (post 1999) resulted in a bunch of OSR-compatible games and adventures being produced. Several clones of the OSR rules came about in the 2010s.

Some of the most popular OSR-compatible rules sets that came out include Old-School Essentials, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Shadowdark, and Cairn. There are tons more.

Old-School Essentials

Probably the most popular of the OSR rules sets is Old-School Essentials (OSE).

The first version of version of OSE was pretty much a clone of B/X D&D with a much better presentation and organization. Then an add-on to that classic OSE came out that incorporated some of the favorite classes and rules into OSE. Imagine if AD&D had been converted to be compatible with B/X D&D and you’d have a pretty good idea what the additions were like.

After all the extra books those additions created, the creators of OSE came out with an “Advanced Fantasy” OSE. This kept the simplicity of B/X rules, but gave options from AD&D converted to be compatible with OSR D&D. That two-tome rule set has proved to be the most popular of the ORE and possibly OSR-style role-playing games.

Dude. Where’s my D&D?

You have lots of really good options. The two best options are, find the original rules and adventures as PDFs on sites like DriveThruRPG. The other really good option is to pick up the two Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy rules tomes: Players Tome and Referees Tome.

However, you’ll probably find that any OSR compatible rules set will easily work with your old adventures or new OSR-compatible adventures with minimal conversion.