Pembrooktonshire Gardening Society Member 017 reporting for duty

I’m pretty pleased at the direction and sheer creativeness that the OSR seems to be taking. It would have been a simple matter to just rehash stuff from the old days or doing pastiche work. Indeed, in the early days of the OSR, it seemed that was where things were headed. However, several clever souls have been spending their free time crafting up some pretty inventive stuff. James Raggi of Lamentations of the Flame Princess (LotFP) fame has been one of those who are taking the OSR in wildly divergent directions (I'll do a review as soon as I'm done reading through and reviewing Carcosa by Geoffrey McKinney - that should be up this weekend). Of course this is not without controversy, but hey, most people don’t take change and new ideas without grumbling. At any rate, I just received my official Pembrooktonshire Gardening Society membership kit in the mail (member 017 since October 2010). There is a certificate of achievement; a membership card and a very nice print of the LotFP game cover (the unedited version). I’m pretty happy to support these kinds of creative endeavors. I have pretty much all of Raggi’s offerings so far. I haven’t read through all of them yet (my read pile is getting bigger and bigger) and I don’t know how much of it I’ll actually use when I do get a gaming group together; but I can say that it is inspiring to be able to see how people are utilizing the groundwork laid back in 1974 by Gygax and Arneson and really are taking those rules and the hobbyist style play and adventurous spirit in new directions. It just seems like the OSR is getting better and better every year. I can’t wait to see what the future holds. Oh yeah, it is also nice that I’ll be able to share the fun with my son and know there is an active, thriving creative community behind it.

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