The first post to my blog was on Sept. 22, 2013. That was four years after I had gotten back into the same old-school gaming I had enjoyed as a kid, thanks to one of a handful of the first retro-clones Swords & Wizardry White Box (link is to a PDF of the first printing, no longer available in print).
That first post had an image of my gaming collection – just one bookshelf! Now that has increased to four shelves. Of course this is just what I wanted to collect in print over the years – like many in this hobby, I have a large digital collection of games as well. But I still prefer print copies of the classic games.
Much has changed with the OSR in the past 10 years, and much is the same. Mainly I think there is more fragmentation as people joined groups on various social media platforms when some of the original forums, along with G+ went away. But I’m happy that there seems to be a resurgence in OSR blogs, and forums are definitely not dead, with some of the largest from 10 years ago (or longer) still online. In my opinion the blogs and forums are where the old-school gaming community should congregate, discuss and share ideas, as they are indexed by search engines and the Internet Archive. Facebook, MeWe, Discord and the like are not public in that sense, and anything posted to those platforms is lost when they go away. I created my own public forum in 2016 in reaction to the Swords & Wizardry forums being taken offline, and in 2017 I created a static snapshot of the Goblinoid Games forums, just before they too were taken offline.
2013 was also the year our current gaming group was formed, and it’s still going strong today. It’s not a overstatement to say that these games, gaming friends and the OSR in general have been a major part of my life for the past decade. So thanks again to the OSR and the many people that make it fun, and here’s hoping to another 10 years!
