NO ONE CAN TAKE YOUR GAME FROM YOU
There is a sickness in the modern tabletop hobby, a kind of creeping, insidious consumerism that tries to convince you that you need things to play. We get caught in an endless, cyclical loop of acquiring. We wait for the next massive Kickstarter campaign to fulfill, tracking shipping containers across the ocean so we can finally get our hands on a three-pound hardcover rulebook. We pay monthly subscriptions for proprietary virtual tabletops that calculate line of sight and automate our math. We buy resin dice cast with tiny, suspended galaxies, thinking that if we just accumulate enough aesthetic artifacts, the game will finally feel real. We wait for permission to have fun, gatekeeping ourselves behind a wall of manufactured products.
But the truth of the OSR, and the absolute bedrock truth of tabletop RPGs writ large, is that the game exists entirely in the ether. It lives in the charged, invisible space between you and your players. It is an act of shared, defiant imagination. It is yours, entirely and completely, and no one can take it from you.
I know this is true because I played the most important game of my life in a place where I owned absolutely nothing. Not even my own time.
When I was in prison, the world was reduced to concrete, steel, and a crushing, inescapable routine. The walls of a cell are designed to do more than just hold you; they are designed to shrink your horizon. They compress your existence down to an eight-by-ten box filled with the incessant, echoing noise of the block—the slamming of mechanical doors, the shouting, the heavy, vibrating hum of institutional ventilation. In a place like that, you are systematically stripped of agency. You are told when to eat, when to sleep, and when to walk. You become a number, a physical object moving through a rigid system. But a tabletop roleplaying game is the exact opposite of that system.
We played a folk version of Dungeons & Dragons one-on-one, just me and another inmate, sitting on thin mattresses in the stifling heat of the afternoon, based on my own memories from playing as a teen in the 2000s. We didn't have character sheets printed on heavy cardstock. We used scraps of paper smuggled out of the commissary, writing with the tiny, flexible, ink-filled tubes they gave us instead of hard pens, which were considered potential weapons.
We certainly didn't have dice. In prison, dice are contraband. They are tools for gambling, and being caught with them would get you a write-up, a loss of privileges, or a stint in solitary confinement. So, we had to invent the mechanics of chance from the literal garbage around us. At first, we tried drawing numbered chits out of a torn paper bag, but that felt too easy to manipulate. Eventually, we settled on a makeshift spinner. We flattened a piece of cardboard from a cereal box, drew a crude circle, divided it into twenty slices, and used a straightened paperclip pushed through the center as the needle. It wasn't perfectly balanced. It wasn't mathematically pristine. But when that paperclip spun, clicking softly against our fingers, it held the exact same electric tension as a crystal twenty-sided die rolling across a velvet mat.
When you play a tabletop RPG in a cage, it ceases to be a mere hobby. It becomes the only thing that makes you still feel like a human being. When I closed my eyes and described the damp, creeping fog of a haunted moor, or the smell of ozone before a wizard unleashed a spell, the concrete walls dissolved. For three hours at a time, I wasn't an inmate. I was a traveler. I had choices. If I wanted to walk north, I walked north. If I wanted to kick in a tavern door, I kicked it in. It allowed me to imagine being free, because in the theater of the mind, you are free. You aren't rolling a piece of plastic to see if a corporation's intellectual property allows you to perform an action; you are relying entirely on your own ingenuity, your own voice, and your own mind to navigate a world without walls. You own the landscape. This experience fundamentally changed how I view the principles of the OSR. When we talk about these philosophies online, they can sometimes feel like academic debates about game design. But in that cell, they were matters of absolute necessity.
Take the concept of "rulings not rules." When you are playing a game entirely from memory, without a 400-page manual to reference, you simply cannot care about the minutiae of grappling mechanics or the exact area of effect of a fireball. You just need a brain and a sense of fairness. If my player wanted to blind a goblin by throwing a handful of crushed rock dust into its eyes, I couldn't look up a rule for improvised blinding attacks. I had to look at the situation, look at the fiction we had established, assign a risk, and make a call. We ran the game on pure, unadulterated logic and consequence. It forced a purity of play that I have rarely seen since. The character sheet was just a loose collection of ideas; real freedom came from engaging with the fiction directly, asking questions, and poking the ceiling with a ten-foot pole.
This absolute reliance on the immediate, improvised fiction is intimately tied to the DIY ethic that permeates the best of the old-school scene. We shouldn't be running things we derive no joy from, and that we must build the tools that serve our specific tables. In prison, DIY wasn't an aesthetic choice; it was survival. We hacked, slashed, rewrote, and completely dismantled the game to fit the materials we had. If a rule required a specific spell deck, the rule died. If a mechanic required tracking intricate math that we didn't have the paper for, it was excised. You have the power to do this at your table right now. You do not owe the text anything. You only owe the game to yourselves.
Running games in that environment also taught me about the absolute necessity of embracing the void. We obsess over getting it right , over the perfect way to key a dungeon, over the optimal balance of a random encounter table or how to Jaquays a dungeon. The magic actually happens when you step into the unknown without a safety net. In that cell, I had no prep. I couldn't hide behind a beautifully illustrated module. I had to run the game scared, pulling descriptions out of thin air, reacting in real-time to the chaotic decisions of my single player. The struggle, the messiness, the sheer improvisational panic—that is what makes the hobby real. It is the vulnerability of sitting across from another human being and saying, "Let's find out together what is behind this dungeon door."
Furthermore, playing in total isolation strips away the need to conform to standard fantasy tropes. We weren't trying to emulate the sanitized, mass-market fantasy currently lining the shelves of bookstores. Our world was weird, sprawling, and deeply idiosyncratic. It reflected our fears, our anger, and our desperate need for agency. When you have no books to tell you what an elf or a dwarf is supposed to be, you make them into whatever resonates with your own soul. You build spaces that reflect the inside of your own mind, rather than the boardrooms of a publisher.
There is a quiet, melancholic beauty of the game as an art form, a way of processing the world around us. In the darkest moments of my incarceration, the game was the only light. It was a protest against the reality of my situation. Every time that paperclip spun on that torn piece of cardboard, it was a tiny rebellion.
We have to stop waiting for permission to play. We have to stop letting our joy be held hostage by production schedules and shipping delays. The hobby is not the books on your shelf, the miniatures in your foam case, or the subscription tier on your digital account. Those are just artifacts, detritus left behind by the actual magic.
If you stripped away every PDF, every virtual tabletop, every resin die, and every leather-bound book from my life tomorrow, the game would still survive. It survived in the deafening roar of a prison cellblock. It survived on scraps of stolen paper. It will survive in freezing living rooms, in crowded cafeterias, and in the quiet, unassailable spaces of your own imagination.
It is just you, your friends, and the infinite horizon. No one can ever take that from you.