Interview with Yochai Gal
Yochai Gal has a clear position on OSR: it is not bringing back an age that actually existed.
"I was not playing D&D in the 1970s and 80s," he told me. "At the time there was no Ben Milton on YouTube explaining how to play. Everyone had a copy of the D&D manual and that was their only connection to the rules. They had to make up their own rules as they went and developed their own play style. People today look back nostalgically because they can insert whatever experience they want, since there was no consistent experience across the board. I see the OSR as a new phenomenon, not a faithful reconstruction."
He also had something interesting to say about what actually drew him into the movement — not nostalgia, but a specific frustration with options:
"I remember running a game of Dungeon World and one of my players said: there are just too many options here and I do not want to look at this. Playing old school games later I thought: I do not need to push a button to do a special move. The special move is my brain."
Cairn itself started as a personal solution — he wanted to play Dolmenwood with Into the Odd mechanics, no compatible version existed, so he mixed Knave and Into the Odd, added two original mechanics, and put the result on GitHub under Creative Commons. There are now hundreds of forks worldwide.
I spoke with Yochai for Narrative at the Crossroads.
Happy to answer questions about the interviews in the comments.