The real legacy of D&D will live on forever in all the amazing games inspired by B/X, BECMI, zero edition, White Box, and first and second editions of the game. I need to shout out the wonderful Basic Fantasy, too. No matter what happens to D&D, these games will live on. One by one the OGL is going away, and we have games that are under open licenses, free from fear and control.
While OSE is still under the OGL, we have plenty of games that are being rewritten under Creative Commons and other free licenses. Basic Fantasy got rid of all the OGL contents, Swords & Wizardry is free, C&C went OGL free, OSRIC 3 is coming under the CC, and many more are showing up every few months.
I hope the OGL stays around forever, but I understand the community living in fear and being put in that position. Too many good games can't easily escape the OGL, but we can hope for a better future and companies that support open and free gaming as a gift to the world. If we believe in our hobby as a force of good and bringing people together, things should be more open, and those who have that power should lead by example.
How you treat those smaller and less powerful than you defines who you are as a person.
And as a company.
Old School Essentials is still and forever a gold standard game. This took the crown from Labyrinth Lord and has never really passed it along, it is still that good of a game. Shadowdark may have come along and picked up the torch, but that is still nothing like the original, which many use interchangeably with Shadowdark, or play both games in their groups.
While OSE is the heart, what people do with this game is the true legacy. We get amazing rules expansions like Into the Wild, re-imagining the classes as more robust and customizable frameworks.
We have the amazing ...Without Number games. Most of which have core rules in the Public Domain. All of these are side-to-side compatible, if you need a monster for any of the Without Number games, just pull it in from OSE, no conversion needed. These cover fantasy, cyberpunk, science fiction, and the post-apocalyptic genres wonderfully, without needing to relearn a system or do much of anything differently.
We also have a few science fiction games to choose from, some hard-science, other more science-fantasy and pulp-adventure. All of them are excellent. Monsters just work here, too.
I have a World War II game based on these rules. I can drop a dragon into these rules, too. It still works.
I have silly one-shot games that are still cool, like all the "Beyond Belief X!" titles. These are all B/X games. These all work with what I have.
And what I love is the characters absorb new things like an index card covered with sticky notes. We have books that add new systems, like skills, wounding systems, or feats, to any B/X or White Box based game. People make rules mods all the time, and completely new ways of handling things. When the basic system is kept so simple anyone can understand it, the expansion potential comes naturally. For 5E players, they may look at OSE and B/X based games and say, "Is that all a character does?"
For those of us in the OSR and looking at 5E players, we smile and say the same thing back at them, since our characters do not need to follow "programmed builds" or "character validation" procedures. We don't need to "pay money for digital books" we don't own, or subscribe to a service to create characters. And lose it all when the service shuts down. We own our books and our PDFs.
We remember the days before gaming was used to bring us together.
Not take advantage of our wallets.
There is no such thing as a "legal character" in the OSR, and abilities and changes get added to character sheets all the time. Even ability scores can suddenly change due to magic. If a magic fountain gives you "water breathing" we don't need to give up a feat for that, or design it in a point-buy system to "pay for it." If training gives us a feat to "safely shoot into a melee" we just write that down, assuming we had a trainer, rules, and the gold and time to pay for it.
It is a much more free world over here, and the characters can do anything.
The true magic is not having rules limit what our characters could possibly do.
Only our imaginations.
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