Welcome to the Glyph and Grok - A weekly blog-letter exploring design, execution, and culture relating to anything played on a tabletop. See the other Game Mastering entries from the Glyph and Grok here.
Introduction
A large part of my game mastering and design journey for the last couple years has been heavily steeping in the Old School Revival (Renaissance?) - whatever OSR truly stands for. One of the most interesting aspects researching in the space is the open-source community-grown do-it-yourself best practices approach that makes it kind of amorphous but also an endless well of knowledge.
Anyone who follows this rabbit hole will find themselves traversing an infinite blog-o-sphere, going from oasis-to-oasis mining for gold. Whispers of a once great centralized “Google Plus” community that was shut down, scattering holy scriptures to the winds…
Enter The Merry Mushman, native to the country of France, led by Olivier Revenu. The oases and their many contributors were brought together to forge a single fold in space-time that could house all this arcane information and bring it to the OSR Faithful. Thus KNOCK! was born.
The Thing
This review will focus on KNOCK! #1 because it’s the one I have physically manifested before me, After hearing it talked about by one of my favorite creators Kelsey Dionne of The Arcane Library, I decided I had to see what was in here.
The first thing I notice, is that every part of the buffalo is being used here, and they’re adding parts and writing roll tables on them. The dust-jacket of each of the KNOCK! books has awesome stuff on the inside, #1 having an entire level 1-2 adventure with map and fleshed out key.
In issue #2 it is mentioned this first book took two years of work to make, and it does show. The entire book is densely populated and laid out in a collage style that makes it feel like someone’s game binder they’re passing off to you.
A contributors short list:
Sean McCoy - Mothership
Ben Milton - Questing Beast
Chris McDowall - Into The Odd, Mythic Bastionland
Arnold K - Goblin Punch
Gavin Norman - Old School Essentials
Many others!
For the game master who has everything, even if you’ve read some of these articles elsewhere, this relic is a great addition to your library. Here is but a taste…
The art, use of color, and journal-like aesthetic playfully offers to entertain you before injecting a payload of rich OSR culture right to your brain. The shift is consistent within a single entry, but can swing wildly between each entry. You cannot be sure what is behind the corner of the dungeon, or the next page of the book.
Starting with the definition of OSR with thought-out examples, walking through alternate approach vectors to many aspects of TTRPG adventure gaming, thought experiments that have been battle-tested, and ending with a pile of player options and artfully designed monsters. This is a treasure trove for any game master who has their mind open to new ideas and realizes we are in the driver’s seat to design and implement “the game” in any way that makes it fun and exciting for the players at our tables.
Minuses
A couple minor nitpicks.
There’s the occasional typo, but I forgave that as soon as I realized it was made in France by someone who may not be an English speaker as their first language. They are also few and far between and there’s A LOT of words per page in this book.
I was expecting the finish be more matte and feel like older school books, but the finish on the pages is more glossy and can feel plastic to me. But I believe the durability of this finish is high, so I will take the tradeoff.
I wish there was a hard-cover version, but is ok.
Getting Your Own Copy
I am writing this from the United States, so my perspective reflects that. The shipping on getting a single book to me was half the cost of the book. It is half of what I paid of you live in the EU, but alas I do not. Because of this, I would highly recommend the PDF version of the book - BUT - if you are patient the crowd funding campaigns for these books when a new issue comes out have options to get all of the books shipped to you and if you’re in the US it’s a really good deal to get the whole collection shipped to you rather than one book at a time (though I’m sure you could get a deal if you bought the whole collection at once from the webstore - I haven’t tried)
I backed and have received all of the PDFs of all five books. It is going to take me some time to read through all of it, but I am quiet excited to do so.
Finally
This is the best collection I’ve found that has everything I’ve wanted to know more about in one location regarding OSR ideas. It’s worth it if this is something that interests you. I will be taking my time reading all five of these monsters.
The other place I’d certainly look into that even has some overlap with the articles explored within is the Blogs On Tape podcast which reads aloud OSR articles.
Thank you, dear reader!
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Till next time!
