By Eric Nieudan

This month, I’m helping run my first Kickstarter campaign ever.
We are crowdfunding the first issue of KNOCK! magazine, a publication we have exhaustively dubbed an Adventure Gaming Bric-a-Brac and a Compendium of Miscellanea for Old School RPGs. It’s a bazaar of the OSR if you like. Not a news periodical (who needs printed news for a niche hobby these days?) but a thick, colourful brick stock full of ideas you will want to keep close by for perusing, daydreaming, and prepping your next session.
Where did the idea come from? Well, it came from Urt, a village in the Basque mountains. That’s where the email I got came from, about two years ago.
I had met Olivier circa 2001 in Paris, in the offices of Hexagonal, when he was laying out their gaming magazine, d20. Soon after that, he came to write for the third party D&D line I was in charge of, Archipels. I really enjoyed his writing, which was very much in keeping with the heroic-meets-Vancian tone we’d established for the past couple years. It was obvious we’d had the same influences in our gaming youth.

So we go to work. Olivier drowned me in links of blog posts he wanted to publish, and I started getting in touch with their authors, sending them mockups and contract terms. Also, I got an advance on my royalties immediately. Which this freelance designer immensely appreciated — it paid for Christmas that year.
And then, life happened. We got back in touch after a few months of silence, made some progress, and dropped the ball again when something more urgent came along. Our growing stable of authors and artists didn’t seem to mind the time the whole thing took.
Every time we had a frenetic couple of weeks, I got a longer, crazier looking PDF to feed my motivation. And we got there, taking our time, bit by bit.
Now, with the help of our siblings in arms of the adventure gaming scene, KNOCK! Magazine issue one is becoming a reality!