Expeditious Retreat Press's Advanced Adventures the focus of a scholarly paper about the OSR

There are so few scholarly treatments of table-top gaming, that I thought I should let everyone know that I'm majorly stoked that our Advanced Adventures line is the focus of a Master's degree paper about art, nostalgia, and the Old-School Renaissance. Awesome!

The essay was written by Darren Allan Crouse, and supervised by Dr. Greg Gillespie, in the Department of Popular Culture at Brock University in Ontario. In the study, Crouse discusses the construction of nostalgia in the art of our Advanced Adventures line. He challenges traditional academic understandings of nostalgia as simple escapism. Crouse argues that, while the Advanced Adventures pay homage to the history of RPGs, the series is an expression of an emerging old school gaming subculture who use nostalgia in new and creative ways - while charting new directions for their hobby.

This is obviously a dreadfully terse simplification of the paper. Read the entire paper for yourself at Your Games Now. Regardless if you end up agreeing or disagreeing with Mr. Crouse, I think we can all sit back and enjoy the fact that the OSR has spurred one of the few professional analysis of the hobby that we all love. I hope there will be more and more.

I want to express my heartiest thanks to our artists Stefan Poag, Bradley McDevitt, Peter Mullen, John Bingham, Jeffrey Womack, Matt Finch, and William McAusland. It is their collective visions that bring the Advanced Adventure series to visual life. Personally, I'm finding it hard to express just how happy and proud I am. I never thought that anything I had a hand in would end up as a subject of scholasticism. So I think I'm going to keep grinning like a fool for quite some time... :)

If you would like to contact Dr. Greg Gillespie at Brock University, his e-mail is ggillespie@brocku.ca