A Glaring Omission

[Giblet Blizzard]

I'd love to know why in Shannon Appelcline's Platinum Appendix for Designers and Dragons, covering the years 2008 to present, there is no mention of Zak S, James Raggi, Zzarchov Kowolski, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, the award winning Vornheim, Qelong, Secret Santicore, a bunch of other brilliant releases, and why the single mention of the OSR (in the year 2011, p77) is an entirely negative POV sourced from some random guy's post from RPG.net's forums.

It's as if the tens of thousands of hours of creative outpouring from the hundreds of people I know online completely don't exist.

A historian who allows their personal grudges to deny the existence of an entire movement's worth of creative wonder, community, and collaboration is no historian at all.

A glaring omission, Mr Appelcline. I implore you to fix it.

 

[Crothian]

What evidence do you that shows he has "personal grudges" against OSR? I haven't gotten around to reading these books but I'm sure there are plenty of games and genres that don't get as much space in them as the fans would want. Have you written him directly or perhaps looked for an answer on the message board that he reads?

 

[Gradine]

There is no such thing as a conclusive, objective historical account of anything. Every historian has a perspective, and has to make choices about what to devote more time and space to and what to devote less to, and also which voices to utilize when doing so. Any historian who tries to convince you they are perfectly objective is lying, either to you or to themselves.

In this case it seems (I have not read the book itself) a historian made a choice that the OSR movement did not warrant extensive coverage, possibly for a variety of reasons. That you or others would disagree with that choice is understandable. If what you say is true about the contents of the work I would say your critique is warranted. But that does not make the author any less of a historian as any other who has to make choices on what to omit or cover in brief all the time.

 

[Giblet Blizzard]

Turns out raising grievances opens communications:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JezGordon/posts/3SGQMw5MCB1