The best of the OSR is back with KNOCK! #5
Rumours of death, so often exaggerated
Although the OSR scene presents the illusion of reaching back in time, in reality it is an incredibly novel space. As Rascal staff writer Thomas Manuel recently put it:
one of the core ambitions of both the original OSR and the various post-OSR (POSR) scenes as a design movement: to have your cake and eat it too. The cake here stands for sandbox play in settings that are original, exciting, and weird. The challenge is opening your mouth wide enough to eat the cake without your brain falling out.
KNOCK! magazine is an attempt to chomp that big old cake.
KNOCK! is one of the most well-known publications in the OSR space. Since 2021, it has collected and curated important ideas from the scene's game designers, theorists, and fans. It bills itself as: An Adventure Gaming Bric-a-Brac. A Compendium of Miscellanea for Old-School RPGs. For OSR weirdos and curious D&D heads alike.
It's latest issue, KNOCK! #5, is currently fundraising on Kickstarter.
Blogs are the bedrock of the OSR community. They are the place where its ideas are invented, traded, and iterated on. KNOCK! is inspired by (and inspires!) this creative energy. Recognizing the importance of blogs to this game-design space, the magazine has brought the "canon" of OSR theory into print, allowing for a wider audience.
But more than just trapping a blog post in amber, KNOCK! is a community of contributors who revel in the spirit of weird ideas, quick iteration, and messy creativity. Like the OSR, it's filled with a mix of new and old, established voices and newcomers, neophytes and adherents. The most recent issue includes writings by: Alex "Dwiz" Dzuricky, Andre Novoa, Arnold K, Ben Laurence, Ben Robbins, Chris McDowall, Dan Phipps, David "noisms" McGrogan, Eric Nieudan, Evlyn Moreau, John Ben Heinl, Joseph Manola, Josh McCrowell, Luke Gearing, Marcia B., Nick LS Whelan, Nicolas Dessaux, Olivier "Nobboc" Revenu, Paolo Greco, Phlox, Sean McCoy, Sersa Victory, Ty Pitre, Vagabundork, W.F. Smith, Warren D., Zedeck Siew, and many others!
The content is a mix of gameable stuff in the tradition of Dragon and Dungeon magazines. This issue includes:
- Monsters! (The hydra knight sprouts riotous limbs each time they’re hit! Scary!)
- Essays! (Ever wonder why kobolds are sometimes depicted as lizards and sometimes as dog people?)
- New rules! (Put some strange weather in your dungeon.)
- Random tables! (100s of names and quirks for your next familiar.)
- Magic items! (What will you get from the dungeon vending machine?)
- New classes! (Ever wanted to absorb a monster’s powers by eating them? Now you can!)
- Adventures! (What happens when a goblin gets a hold of a ray gun?)
And if you're new and have a lot of time on your hands, there's a never-seen-before reward for the whole collection: over a thousand pages of rules ideas, game design essays, random tables both serious and silly, adventures, character classes, monsters, and goblins.
Interested? Head over to the campaign page before May 21st and get the new issue at a discounted rate! For those newly curious about the OSR scene and those who have vociferous opinions about what that mysterious acronym actually means, KNOCK! represents a fun addition to your gaming bookshelf.
