And for the first time I am writting one of these immedietly after reading the book. Knock! is a magazine series from The Merry Mushroom collecting contributions from fantastically creative people across the OSR scene and all packaged up with some great art.

The first thing to say is just how much stuff is packed in here. Pretty much every availiable surface has something on it. The dust jacket has a little sandbox adventure on it. The bookmark has a chaotic papercraft dice pattern. The spine even has a little table on it!

And then for the main bulk of the content the key word (other than 'good') is variety. There are articles on theory; drop in rules systems; so many random tables; modules; monsters; classes; and stuff im not even sure how to quickly categorise. All this stuff just highlights one of the things love about osr stuff, which is the do-it-yourself community vibes. I think if someone was just getting started in osr play and you only gave them this magazine and one of the many freely availiable simple osr rule sets they would be set for a fair while before they needed to look elsewhere.

On the negatives: It is in large part a collation and pretty-ing up of content that is already availiable on the contributors blogs. So if you are someone who is deep in the blogosphere you may not be seeing that much you havn't seen before. However, I much prefer having stuff in a physical book. You will also notice in my first picture that the cover is peeling a little, and this is only after one read through. Perhaps this is my fault as I took the dust jacket off to read it but I find them rather iritating on paper backs and I also didn't want to damage the dust jacket because it has the module on it!