Adelaide Inaugural OSR/NSR Meetup
On the 28th of June, on a local RPG Facebook group I admin, a post was made gauging interest in OSR style games, spruiking an Into the Odd game at AVCon - our local anime and video games convention.
(I remember back in around 2010 or 2011, we asked the AVCon organisers about the possibility of having an RPG track at the con, but this was during D&D’s hibernation - the world was not ready. So we launched Conformat in 2011, but that is a tale for another time.)
I pointed folks to the Old School RPGs - Australia & New Zealand group rather than start a new one. There, one of our members decided to then launch a Discord server: OSR AuNz. It seems that since the last time I tried (and failed) to mobilise old school/OSR/NSR fans, popularity has grown! From there, I floated the idea of a regular lunch meetup to network/recruit players/swap notes/etc and a booking was made at Two-Bit Villains in Adelaide for the inaugural Adelaide OSR/NSR Meetup on Sat 26 July 2025.
Two-Bit Villains is a vegetarian/vegan burgers and sodas restaurant, nice and central in the Adelaide CBD, spacious and well-lit. A perfect venue for a meetup like this. Cue usual conversation about how I’m not vegan, but I thought the place would be cool. I’ve used it for work lunches before and just generally love going there with my family.
We had nine attendees in all, and the mood was super enthusiastic and positive. We agreed to do this again on a several-week basis.
During our chats, Peter and I mentioned Conformat and Concentric and how we always dreamed of running a minicon focusing on the sorts of games we like. The group ran with this, and the Adelaide OSR/NSR Minicon was born with a rapidly assembled event schedule. I’m running Planet Crasis/Silver Swords: The Harvest of Sommerton but sincerely wish I could play in every single one of them. I’ve been playing in Chris’ games for many years now and I’ve never played in one of his Planet Psychon games so I’m sad to miss this one.
A photo was taken of the group, but out of respect for people’s privacy, I won’t post it but super stoked it exists.
What else happened? Chris brought along his trade pile, and everyone descended on it, buying the whole stack, I think. A couple of us (not me) are game authors - cool! Some folks had been running games at AVCon that week (tempting, but I’m not particularly anime/video-gamey unless you count some incredibly ancient texts; would I be an impostor?). People are running Cairn, Mothership, DCC, Into the Odd, CoC, Elfmaids & Octopi, Old School Essentials, Shadowdark and others I forget.
Since the minicon is coming up Sep 13th, we’ll be doing the next meet several weeks after that.
(Edit 12 Oct 2025: I was set to run a game at the minicon but it never happened. I was quite sick at the time. I hear it was a success though and we’re running another in the new year.)
– Dallas