Dungeons & Dragons retro-clones

• 1. Introduction

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  Dungeons & Dragons retro-clones occupy a strange corner of gaming history: legally distinct games that are, by design, as close as possible to games that no longer exist in print. The question they pose is deceptively simple. If the rules of a beloved game are out of print, who gets to keep playing it? And who gets to decide what those rules actually were?

  The answer turns out to involve a legal document called the Open Game License, a small group of dedicated designers, and a community that would eventually call itself the Old School Renaissance. What began with a single reference document released to the public in 2006 spawned an entire ecosystem of tabletop games, each one reaching backward in time to recover a specific version of a game that kept changing. Some chased the 1974 original. Others wanted 1977. Others wanted 1981. Still others went all the way to 1989 or 1991. The disagreements about which edition was the real D&D were, it turns out, productive ones.

• 2. The Legal Foundation

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  Wizards of the Coast made retro-clones possible, even if that was not the company's intent. By releasing later editions' rules in a System Reference Document under the Open Game License, the company allowed publishers to use much of the proprietary terminology that might otherwise constitute copyright infringement. The license created a legal pathway that designers quickly walked through.

  There was a catch. The license explicitly prohibited the use of the brand names Dungeons & Dragons, D&D, and all other trademarks associated with those brands. So retro-clones could replicate the mechanical heart of old editions while being barred from wearing their name. That constraint shaped everything: the games had to find their own identities while being transparent about what they were imitating. The result was a publishing category defined by its relationship to something it could not be called.

• 3. OSRIC and the First Wave

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  Matthew Finch had already worked in the retro-clone space before writing what would become the movement's founding document. He served as editor of the Castles & Crusades Player's Handbook, a game that borrowed the unified d20 mechanic from third edition while stripping out feats, skills, and prestige classes that its developers regarded as complications. That experience positioned Finch to author OSRIC.

  OSRIC, which stands for Old School Reference and Index Compilation, was designed as a recreation of the first edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Stuart Marshall took up the project after Finch's initial authorship, and the two brought the document to public release in 2006. It targeted the version of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons that ran from 1977 through 1989. The latest version, OSRIC v. 2.2, arrived in 2013.

  The release of OSRIC set off a chain reaction. Daniel Proctor read it and responded by writing Labyrinth Lord, which arrived in 2007 through his company Goblinoid Games. Where OSRIC targeted first-edition Advanced D&D, Labyrinth Lord went after the 1981 Basic Set edited by Tom Moldvay and the accompanying Expert Set by David "Zeb" Cook. Proctor made one notable mechanical change: he extended character advancement to 20th level, since the 1981 Expert Set had only included levels up to 14. He also gave clerics spells at first level, a nod toward Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

• 4. Swords, Wizardry, and the 1974 Original

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  Finch announced Swords & Wizardry the year after Labyrinth Lord appeared, and the game he was chasing was older than either OSRIC or Labyrinth Lord targeted. Developed under the Mythmere Games banner, Swords & Wizardry aimed at the original 1974 edition of Dungeons & Dragons, the boxed set that launched the hobby.

  The game offered three distinct versions for players with different appetites. White Box stripped things down to only the rules and options from the original 1974 boxed set, deliberately leaving out expansions and the many elements added to D&D over the following years. Core brought in additional rules to include most classic game elements. Complete went furthest, pulling in nearly all the rules and options added through supplements and articles. In 2009, Swords & Wizardry won the Silver for the ENnie Award for Best Free Product, one of the hobby's recognized awards for tabletop games.

• 5. A Diverse Ecosystem

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  Basic Fantasy, written by Chris Gonnerman, also targeted the 1981 Basic and Expert sets but made deliberate departures. It introduced d20-style ascending armor class and separated character race from character class, two mechanical choices that differed from the source material it emulated. First released in 2007, it was updated in 2008, 2014, and 2023.

  Dark Dungeons took a different path entirely. Its primary source was the 1991 Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia, with secondary inspiration drawn from the 1989 Spelljammer campaign setting. Because the Rules Cyclopedia itself collected and edited rules from the Basic, Expert, Companion, and Master sets published from 1983 through 1985, Dark Dungeons carried broad compatibility with adventures designed for all of those sets. The game's name came from a specific place: a Chick Tract of the same name, which Dark Dungeons used in parody. The game did include rules for immortal-level play, though those rules drew from the 1993 Wrath of the Immortals supplement rather than the 1985 Immortals Set, making them incompatible with the original immortal-level material.

  Mazes & Perils, developed by Wild Games Productions, pursued the 1977 version of the Basic Set edited by John Eric Holmes. It expanded the level cap from the original 3 all the way to 12, and won the 2013 ENnie Award for Best Free Game. An expanded Deluxe Edition with new classes followed in 2015. For Gold & Glory targeted AD&D second edition from 1989, first published in 2012 by Justen Brown and edited by Moses Wildermuth, available free or as a print-on-demand book.

• 6. Holmes, Blueholme, and Old-School Essentials

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  The 1977 Basic Set edited by John Eric Holmes attracted more than one retro-clone. Alongside Mazes & Perils, Michael Thomas of Dreamscape Design published the Blueholme Prentice Rules in January 2013. The Prentice Rules covered only first through third level play, matching the scope of the Holmes original, and were available as a pay-what-you-want download or in print-on-demand form. They earned joint runner-up in the 2014 Indie RPG Awards. Two expanded versions followed in production: the Journeymanne Rules covering first through twentieth level, and the Compleat Rules adding sub-classes and additional creatures.

  Old-School Essentials arrived as perhaps the most deliberately engineered entry in the category. Originally called B/X Essentials, it targeted the 1981 Dungeons & Dragons Basic and Expert sets edited by Tom Moldvay and David "Zeb" Cook. Its stated priorities were 100% faithfulness and compatibility with the original rules, brevity, clarity, and careful organization and indexing. By 2020 it came in two versions: Classic Fantasy and Advanced Fantasy, with the latter adding B/X-compatible material drawn from first-edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. It was also the only retro-clone to offer both its versions in two formats: consolidated rules tomes or modular multi-book sets that let players assemble only the pieces they needed.

• 7. The Old School Renaissance

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  The forums and blogs that grew up around retro-clones came to be called, collectively, the Old School Renaissance, or OSR. That term became a banner for a broader cultural movement within tabletop gaming: one that valued the playstyle, aesthetics, and mechanical sensibilities of pre-third-edition D&D. The retro-clones gave the community legally distributable reference points.

  The games were not confined to digital distribution. By the time the movement had accumulated years of releases, retro-clones were increasingly finding their way into physical game stores, moving from a purely online phenomenon into the same brick and mortar spaces where mainstream tabletop products competed for shelf space. Castles & Crusades, the game that drew on third-edition mechanics while rejecting third-edition complexity, stands as an early example of how the impulse to recover older editions could produce something genuinely new. For Gold & Glory, available free online or as a printed book, shows a later version of the same dynamic: a game that is simultaneously a historical document and a live, playable product for anyone who wants it.