Ostensible Cat

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 th

The Old School Renaissance (hereafter OSR) has spawned quite a bit of hobbyist gamers into becoming RPG designers, pundits, publishers, etc. This is nothing new. The hobby has pretty much had folks that have created their own additions, house rules, divergent systems, etc since the inception of the hobby. And even with the seemingly cyclical “sky is falling” doomspeakers that always seem to predict the end of the hobby, it is precisely because of the very inherent grass roots nature of the hobby that no one will ever to be able to effectively kill it. As the hobby has grown over the years, the flagship title or the game that stated it all created by Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, has gone through several iterations; morphed beyond the original concept; become an industry success and a darling in the public eye as well as almost disappearing totally due to financial mismanagement and being reviled by many as a gateway to all kinds of alleged aberrant behavior. But quietly, the origin