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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9666558" data-attributes="member: 7026594">Well, there were a couple of parts to that.First was the desire to publish new stuff for sale (as opposed to just for free, like all the 1E AD&D stuff Dragonsfoot has been putting up for download since 1999), and wanting a legal framework to do that without putting "AD&D" on the cover and running afoul of trademark issues.  OSRIC was designed to meet that need.  You could put "For OSRIC" or "Compatible with OSRIC" on the cover and customers would know it was 1E compatible without using WotC's trademark.There were indeed concerns about the shrinking availability of original old rulebooks on the secondary market (though good gods, back then at nowhere near the prices the collectors market has gotten to now).  Some folks hit on retroclones as a good way to make fresh rulebooks affordably available. OSRIC also met that need for AD&D. OSRIC (2006) and Basic Fantasy RPG (2007) were the first two retro-clones, and BFRPG was and is a big standard bearer for "make the rules available cheap", still making the PDFs free and selling the physical books at cost, which is a super bargain.  WotC had  also licensed RPGNow to sell PDFs of a lot of the old books online, but then in 2009 they pulled those, and this reinforced the desire for retro-clones and motivated even more people to make them.Yeah, Hackmaster got a special exception because TSR/WotC screwed up and reprinted Kenzer's Knights of the Dinner Table comic strips in a Dragon Magazine CD ROM compilation without having electronic republication rights.  As part of the settlement negotiations Kenzer got the rights to do Hackmaster and to use the D&D brand on Kingdoms of Kalamar products for seven years.Necromancer and Goodman Games were the two biggest brands I remember marketing "old school feel" with their 3rd ed/D20 products.  If you remember, Dungeon Crawl Classics was originally the brand name for a whole line of dozens of dungeon bash-focused modules for 3rd edition, going back to 2003, before they made their own game in 2012.Castles & Crusades predates OSRIC and BFRPG, coming out in 2004, and it's an interesting specimen.  It's deliberately built on the 3rd ed OGL, using the unified d20 mechanics, but simplifying and trying to aim for the feel of AD&D.I think the retroclones gave it much more visibility and kicked off a new wave of popularity.Before them, it was just discussions of old school stuff on forums. Just about concurrent with the retro-clones we also saw the blog explosion. Delta's D&D Hotspot popped up in early 2007 and Grognardia (one of the best known) almost exactly a year later.Once retroclones starting being published, there were now physical books with new art for people to discuss and ogle over and spend money on.  And this caught wider attention and grew the movement.</blockquote>

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