OSR News Roundup

[thirdkingdom]

We're in the middle of October, and some stuff to go over. The only thing I wanted to point out is that I had mentioned Gurbintroll's (i.e. Blacky the Blackball) Light Fantasy Kickstarter. Last week I published a print interview with Gurbintroll where he talks about the design goals of Light Fantasy, upcoming projects, and more. You can check it out here! This week's Roundup is a bit shorter than normal, largely due to family obligations this weekend that I had briefly mentioned in last week's post.

• The crew at the Melsonian Arts Council is raising funds for a reprint of Luke Gearing's excellent hexcrawl Fever Swamp, and it looks like they've added some new material!
• I haven't heard of the game Notorious, but there's an expansion called Outsiders for it that is now on Kickstarter. It's a solo game of space outlaws and bounty hunters, inspired by the Star Wars universe (especially shows like Andor and the Mandalorian), Mad Max, and more.
• The ever-reliable Levi Combs is raising money for Reverend Werewolf's Old Timey Monster Mania Family Hour, a mouthful of a Halloween horror-zine that looks to be pretty system and genre agnostic.
• Out of Darkness is a sci-fi horror adventure written for Mothership. It's got a neat 1970's vibe in layout and design.
• taichara, one of my favorite authors out there, has just released As the Spirits Move, a system-agnostic collection of 31 spooky instances and events. It's PWYW over on itch, and their work is always top-notch and very creative.
• Chloris has released an alpha test of their oracle system, which uses icons, rather than words, to provide inspiration. The project is called The Vibrant Muse.
• I always like new spells to draw on to add to my games, and vdonnut has created a free download of Disturbing First Level spells.
• Kyle Tam has released Spirited Encounters: Creatures for Mausritter, a collection of four spooky creatures to add to your Mausritter game.
• Downsized Press has released Volume 1, Issue 4 of their OSE zine The Pauper's Page. It's a short, 4-page zine that is priced as PWYW.
• OFR -- Old Freestyle Revival is another entry into the retroclone field. The big thing that drew my attention, however, was the inclusion of rules for solo play. I think that's a really smart thing to do, since there seems to be a growing market for solo gaming.
• We've added a number of OSR-related topics to the webstore, including:

*Dark Places and Demogorgons, the Stranger Things-inspired OSE game by Bloat Games.
*Singing Flame has just released Issue #3 of Aquilus, their OSR zine.
*The softcover new edition of Troika. This is a beautiful little book.
*We've added a number of used OSR titles, including the Zweihander Starter set, Dungeon Alphabet, and An Echo, Resounding.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I cannot say enough nice things about the Dungeon Alphabet. A gem of a book.

 

[thirdkingdom]

Welcome to this week's OSR and indie News Roundup. As many readers might already be aware, Jennell Jaquays, one of the seminal figures in the development and evolution of D&D, is having pretty serious health issues and can use some support from the community. If you've got money to spare, her wife has set up a GoFundMe to help with hospitalization costs. If you're unfamiliar with Jennell's history and contributtions, you can check out this interview I conducted with Jennell. We are wishing her a speedy recovery.

It's been another kind of slow week in releases, for some reason, but I've compiled a decent sized collection of ones that have caught my eye. Also, I don't usually plug individual websites or blogs, but Shane Thayer (formerly of Wizards and Wobblies podcast) has done a ton to promote and support independent and minority creators in the rpg space, and they've just done a soft launch of the website of their new project, the Hobo's Collective, which in addition to the eponymous podcast is also meant to be a community publishing project.

• Friend of the Roundup Howard Andrew Jones has just published City of Marble and Blood, book 2 in his Chronicles of Hanuvar series. I've just started reading the first book in the series, and it is an excellent entry into the Conan-inspired sword and sorcery genre.
• I've mentioned Moonlight on Roseville Beach before (and you can find my interview with the author here), and they're Kickstarting a second printing of the book along with some bonus content. The art in this book, especially the cover, is an absolutely amazing example of using public domain works and captures the feel of the game effortlessly.
• An Infinity of Ships is another project I've had my eye on. It's raising money on Kickstarter, and the goal is to produce a book chock full of system agnostic sci-fi ships and vessels. Again, the art for the ships is pretty great.
• I don't know if I mentioned this or not, but Appendix N Entertainment is Kickstarting another in their bestiary series, this one appropriately (for October) focusing on the Cthulhu Mythos. The Mythos Manual has just over a week to go and is halfway to funding.
• Doomsong: Lord Have Mercy Upon Us is also Kickstarting. It's a macabre horror game, set in the time of a biblical apocalypse.
• Populated Hexes Monthly, Year Two, is winding down its campaign and entering the last week of funding. We're funded, but I'd love to see more pledges and perhaps even hit one of the new stretch goals that will enable grants to independent game designers. The book is a compilation of issues 13-24 of Populated Hexes Monthly, and contains nearly 200 pages of setting locations, new classes, monsters, and spells for OSE or other OSR games.
• I'd mentioned Savvy Donkey Press a few weeks back; they've just published the Travel Challenge Generator, a 72-page, system-agnostic book of challenges you may encounter while traveling.
• Gield is a nordic setting for the low magic game Heroic Tales. It's billed as a system-neutral setting, so you should be able to adapt it easily to other games. The use of art in it reminds me of that found in the RC clone Dark Dungeons.
• I've recently become somewhat enamored by tri-fold adventure supplements, and just found a new one the other day. Something Wicked on Picnic Point is written for OSR games, and inspired by a real-world location in Madison, Wisconsin.
• Dungeons Regularly Issue #1 popped up in my feed the other day. For 3.33 Canadian you get a workbook with a unfilled but numbered dungeons that are licensed for commercial use with attribution; if you double that, you get the same product, but with filled in dungeons statted for Cairn. I thought that was a pretty neat idea and presentation, appealing to both creators who might need an empty dungeon to customize and DMs looking for short dungeons to plop into a sandbox setting.
• I love supplements with new spells, and Archives of Nabu: School of Water, is one such supplement, with 36 new water-themed spells written for OSR-style games.
• Living Hive is a new class for Mork Borg, individuals whose bodies are host to swarms of insects they can control and command.
• I'd mentioned Volume 1 of Medieval Margin-arie when it came out awhile back and was super excited to see Volume 2 is now available. It's an old school bestiary based upon medieval marginalia, the weird, funky doodlings in the margins of medieval books.
• 10 Downing: A Mausritter Campaign, is 50-pages of setting and adventure for use with the Mausritter system. As may be guessed from the title, it takes place at Number 10 Downing St, the home of the British Prime Minister.
• Jacob Fleming of Gelatinous Cubism has been producing some quality products, and they've just released Scourge of the Northland on Drivethru. It's a sandbox setting designed for low-level characters.
• Sabre Games has recently added some new titles to their webstore, including the whimsical Taming of the Slugirrafe solo game and Hull Breach, Vol. 1, written for Mothership. We've also got a week to go on our Halloween Horror Sale, where you can save 20% on a selection of horror-themed titles.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

An Infinity of Ships looks so good. One of these days, I'll find a sci-fi RPG system that will click with my players.

And the Medieval Margin-arie is the kind of demented fun that OSR is so good at.

 

[thirdkingdom]

Welcome to the News Roundup for the last Monday in October. It's the day before Halloween, and we've seen no shortage of horror-themed releases this month. Let's jump straight in, shall we?

• Woeful Barrows and Other Places is a collection of short adventures written for Shadowdark that is currently raising funds on Kickstarter. It's written for parties of levels 1-5, so looks like it should be a good collection to pull starter adventures or sidequests from.
• I'm seeing an increase in GM-less cooperative games, and one of these that is currently raising funds is Negocios Infernales. It's set in an alternate universe 15th century "Spain", during the inquisition, but with aliens. The art that's previewed on the Kickstarter is absolutely fantastic.
• The publishing collective Soul Muppet puts out some consistently awesome products, and they're raising funds for Orbital Blues: Afterburn, an expansion to Orbital Blues, their game of sad space cowboys.
• I came across The Molt on Kickstarter the other day and thought it looked really cool. It's a setting/system based on and compatible with Mork Borg, written by the author of the acclaimed Vast Grimm. In this setting, rifts in the earth's surface are beginning to appear, releasing the beings that have been trapped in the underworld.
• I don't usually plug blogs or personal posts, but I stumbled across this and wanted to share it. I plugged the indie game FEUD awhile back, and the artist made a blog post explaining how they produced the distinctive lino-type art for it. Anyone interested in doing their own art for projects would benefit from reading it.
• Eva K has released Hundreds, a simple, semi-agnostic D100 game with rules for combat lightly based on Luke Gearing's Violence. It's short and elegant, but also quite bleak, which isn't necessarily a bad thing!
• Electric Bastionland is a neat, quirky system, and Wuggy has just released The Undermall, an EB adventure set in an abandoned shopping mall.
• Goblins are pretty popular -- we can't keep Goblin Errands on the shelf -- and The Lawful Neutral is itchfuning Gobs Galore: a d100 Goblin Generator. This looks to be a neat addition to a Referee's toolkit for adding depth to NPCs/monsters.
• Rugose Kohn has released Thirty Days of Mork Borg, Adventure Chapbook Vol 5, a collection of three adventures for Mork Borg. Like most MB supplements, this comes with a generous number of trigger warnings, but also promises to be an interesting addition to the adventures for the system.
• The Valley of Flowers is written for OSE and Cairn, and is 150 pages of sandbox setting in the eponymous Valley of Flowers. There's all kinds of goodies here: 15 dungeons, new monsters, spells, and more, and VTT-ready maps, as well.
• I'm not familiar the publisher Wizards with Laser Rifles, but they've just released Silam #1: The Spike of Doscu, a unique setting for DCC that introduces some new classes, and adventure, and more.
• Red Ruin Publishing puts out a steady stream of adventures and supplements for the Dragon Warriors game, and it's all free. Their newest release, just in time for Halloween, is written by Paul Partington. Called Lair of the Vampire, it's a solo adventure for Rank 7 characters.
• Downsized Press has released Issue 5 of Pauper's Pages, their short zine for OSE. It's designed to be printed and folded, newspaper-style, and the author's goal is to put out one themed issue every two weeks.
• The Reptile House is a 72-page adventure for the Shadowdark RPG. It's priced at under four dollars, is written for 3rd level adventurers, and is billed as the first in a series of adventures in this setting.
• The RPG World Creation Map Kit is available on Drivethru, and includes a commercial license. It's a collection of nearly three hundred tokens and icons that can be used to create fantasy overland maps.
• In the category of products I've been waiting eagerly for, Issue Three of the Planar Compass zine is live on Drivethru. Sabre should be getting print copies in this week (fingers crossed), as well as restocks of issues 1 and 2. You can catch an interview I did with the authors awhile back here.
• Sabre's Spooky October sale only has two more days left, so if you want to pick up some horror-themed products at 20% off retail there's only a limited time left to do so.

 

[thirdkingdom]

I It's the first week in November and the end of the year is rapidly approaching. Let's take a look and see what last week brought us.

• Longtime readers of this feature may know that one of my favorite OSR rulesets to have come out in the past couple years is Errant, by Ava Islam (you can find my interview with her here as well as a followup interview here.). She's currently running the Kickstarter Sanctimonious Slimes vs Expired Epicures, the first official adventure for Errant. At the highest backer tier it includes a copy of the limited print run of an adventure by Gus L, never to be printed again.
• Exalted Funeral is crowdfunding a collected volume of Max Moon's Abyss of Hallucinations. The original volumes are already some mighty nice looking zines, but this project looks to add some real pizzazz to the product.
• Rob Conley, of Bat in the Attic fame, is crowdfunding How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox, a compilation and revision of his most popular series of blog posts.
• Cezar Capacle has been releasing some of the most creative products in the indie sphere over on itch, and they're currently slowfunding Midnight Melodies, a solo rpg where you play a jazz pianist who cannot die, and who Death recruits into a secret organization devoted to tracking down and solving the mysteries of unauthorized deaths. The art is absolutely stunning and perfectly fits with the themes of the book.
• Fear and Loathing and Second Guessing on the Campaign Trail is another solo adventure, this putting the player in the role of an aspirant seeking the role of student body president.
• Bastardized Classics: Squash Hunt is a stand-alone adventures for the Bastards game, a reworking of the tournament module Bugbear Hunt that appeared in Issue 28 of Polyhedron way back in 1982.
• Dithmer has just released Daemognosis. It's a free scenario for Heirs of the Leviathan, an interesting little game that puts the players in the roles of tragic inheritors of a fragmented realm.
• Fire from the Heavens is a DCC scenario that is designed to be set in a wide range of time periods. When a mysterious object from the sky crashes to the ground the adventurers are faced with ethical choices to make about how to resolve the situation.
• Vitoria Faria has released OSE Monster Girls, a PWYW pack of four playable monsters for OSE and old school games: succubus, medusa, minotaur, and dryad.
• Games Omnivorous has released some pretty cool products, and their newest one is a multi-media extraveganza: Death Robot Jungle is a soundtrack and printable LP cover that doubles as adventure and DM's screen. Electric Mangrove is a follow-up.
• Mark Hunt wrote the Gangbuster's BX rpg, and they've just released Peterson's Billiards and Social Club, a location that can be slotted into that game when the Referee is in need of an adventure seed.
• Cocoxoca, by Marco Serrano, is a setting compatible with the Primal Quest game, and looks to explore the Mexican wetlands. Marco's been publishing some really cool stuff, and this is defintely worth a look.
• Red Ruin Publishing has just released two more free adventures for the Dragon Warriors system: Tarnished Silver and The White Raven.
• I'm thrilled to announce that Sabre has just stocked Reach of the Roach God. For those who have been following the along, the two creators behind this (and the super cool Thousand Thousand Islands series) have moved on from their partnership, and it is unlikely this book will ever see a reprint.
• We've also stocked up on some indie titles, including Bridgetown, Bones Deep, a number of Best Left Buried, and Orbital Blues.
• The latest session of Basilisk Hill Breakdown is now live. In this session, the adventurers learn that basilisks really aren't that much of a threat when you get the drop on them with a few squads of archers.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

• I'm thrilled to announce that Sabre has just stocked Reach of the Roach God. For those who have been following the along, the two creators behind this (and the super cool Thousand Thousand Islands series) have moved on from their partnership, and it is unlikely this book will ever see a reprint.

Strong recommendation to get this. It's systemless but incredibly evocative and could easily work for a single creepy one-off adventure or be the basis of a long campaign going ever-deeper into a distinctly uncomfortable underworld.

 

[thirdkingdom]

We're cruising towards the end of the year, and almost to the Thanksgiving holiday in the States. One event lurking on the horizon is February's ZineMonth. I will be conducting my regular interviews with ZiMo creators, so if you've got something you're working on that you'll be crowdfunding for let me know and I can get you questions. I know it is still early, but it never hurts to get stuff together in advance!



Also, I'm sure many of the readers are fans of the 3d6 Down the Line podcast/Youtube channel, currently playing an amazing campaign of the Arden Vul megadungeon. They've just started a Patreon to support their work, and could definitely benefit from listener support.

• Jim Wampler of Mudpuppy Games is Kickstarting Issue 6 of Scientific Barbarian, his zine of gonzo mutant future goodness. Included in this issue are guidelines for playing a Thundarr the Barbarian style game.
• Blog favorite Evlyn Moreau is raising funds for a project she's both written and illustrated. Goblin Mail is written for Troika! and is an adventure set in a chaotic, multi-dimensional post office run by goblins.
• Chris McDowall is raising funds for Mythic Bastionland, billed as a prequel to Into the Odd. Their work has set a benchmark for NSR games, and MB already has a 70+ page quickstart ruleset available for free.
• Bolt Neck Opposum is raising funds for Spectacle, another project for Troika!. Spectacle is a game of science-fantasy gladitorial mayhem.
• Tony Vasinda and the +1 Exp team is raising funds for The Wassailing of Claus Manor, a holiday horror adventure using the Trophy Dark ruleset.
• Relics of Woe is a treasure book written for OSE and Cairn that presents twenty magic weapons with distinct backgrounds and abilities to make them more than just the bog standard sword +1. Plus, one of the things I really like, is that it comes with printable stat block cards to hand out to players.
• Penny Spent, by Ian McDougall, is an entry in the second minimalist TTRPG jam. This game plays around with shared world-building and focuses on long time periods and distances, which I think is a pretty neat and relatively unexplored part of gameplay.
• Traverse Fantasy, author of the recently released OD&D retroclone Fantastic Medieval Campaigns, has just released a cool little project. Titled Bite Sized Dungeons, it's a workbook for writing and developing small, six-room dungeons, with one side of the page containing a sample nodal map and the other side blank space to record room contents, encounters, and other notes.
• There's a DURF jam currently running on itch, and one of the releases is the delightfully titled The Fabulous Luxurious Totally Normal Hot Springs Resort on Reverie Island. It's a pamphlet adventure set in a totally not cursed resort.
• Hairic Lilred has released a CC asset map pack of 23 colored characters that can be used for commercial or personal use. The assets are also available in greyscale.
• The Pauper's Page, a short OSE zine, is out with Issue #6. This is a PWYW product on Drivethru, and this issue looks at owlbears, mysterious tracks, and more.
• The Scorched Church is an adventure for Dark Places and Demogorgons OSE version by Bloat Games. This is the Stranger Things inspired kids on bikes game that just came out. I'm still in the process of working my way through the core book, but have been really impressed by what I've seen so far.
• This is the first time Monolith has come across my radar. It's billed as a quarterly zine that focuses on a single system per issue; the current issue's focus is Mork Borg. It looks like an interesting concept, and seems well put-together and thoughtful.
• Gary's Appendix Issue 3 is out on Drivethru, and this issue focuses on an undead theme.
• Written for DCC, but broadly applicable to any OSR system, Outlying Farms is a trifold pamphlet to presents a dozen outlying farms around a town, those that inhabit the farms, as well as adventure hooks. This looks to be a really cool product when a Referee needs to either populate a community or pull a quick homestead out of their butt on the fly.
• Atop the Wailing Dunes, by Atelier Hwei, is a sandbox adventure for PARIAH, and features a psychedelic, proto-neolithic world to explore.
• I'm not familiar with Sorchi Games, but they just released The City Beyond the Portal, a science fiction OSR setting inspired by Franco-Belgian sci-fi comics. The rules are inspired by Mork Borg, Knave, Black Hack, and more, and the art is pretty dang cool.
• Populated Hexes Monthly Issue #27 is out, and features a set of interconnected caves located on a sheer cliff face along a remote stretch of ocean. It's available on Drivethru as well as the Sabre Games webstore, and if you buy through us can be purchased as a pdf or saddle-stitched version.

 

[thirdkingdom]

This is going to be somewhat of a shorter roundup; I got my Covid booster on Saturday and it has really knocked me for a loop. We're moving into Thanksgiving week in the States, and the resulting commercial frenzy that accompanies it. To do our part in furthering capitalism, Sabre Games is going to be having an online sale Saturday through Monday; 25% off all in-stock physical items. Starting Saturday morning you can use the code Cyber2023 at checkout to get the discount.

• Zeth has two entries in the DURF jam on itch: Eel Folk Aristocrat, that includes dueling rules, and Dale and Pocket Sand. Both are archetype books for DURF (by Emiel Boven).
• In a Bubble Brightly is another entry into the DURF jam, this one by A Swamp in Space. It's an adventure set in an interdimensional bubble piloted by wizards and their slug-monster creations.
• Bolt-Neck Opposum and Christian Kessler are sponsoring a jam on itch for TROIKA! and Longshot City. Longshot City and Beyond is seeking campy, comic-book entries to the jam.
• Month of Misery is currently raising funds on Kickstarter. Written by Greyson Yandt, it is a Mork Borg zine that compiles their 31 entries from this year's Morktober into a single zine.
• Wuggy has released Praise be, God of Filth on itch. It's a pamphlet adventure written for Cairn and promises to delve into unseen levels of filth and slime (in a good way!).
• Black March Issue #1 is a new OSR zine that is available on itch. The layout and art looks really interesting, and it is written to be system agnostic so it can be applied to any number of OSR-style games.
• James Chip has released The Adventurer: Space Between the Stars, a solo journaling game using the Adventurer journaling system.
• The Tabletop Engineer has a bundle up on Drivethru of the first six issues of their popular Delver zine. Filled with all sorts of random tables, this series is a boon to any Referee.
• I mentioned Kavlov's Santuary awhile ago when it was crowdfunding, and it is now available on Drivethru in pdf and POD versions. Written for OSE, it's a dungeon and sandbox adventure module with a bunch of new stuff included.
• The big title that I wanted to be sure to plug is the first publication by the folks behind 3d6 Down The Line. They've published Feats of Exploration, a guide to the house rule they've started using in their Arden Vul actual play.
• Champions of the Goblin Market is written for DCC and is a 0-level funnel that challenges standard fantasy assumptions and is a good entry point for the author's level 1-4 adventure path, A Tale of Two Sisters.

Thanks for reading; I'll be back next week with a longer, less-fever induced Roundup.

 

[thirdkingdom]

It's the last Monday in November, and the Thanksgiving holiday has ended for folks in the States and we're staring down the barrel of the gun that is Christmas in less than a month. A reader recently reminded me that I'm coming up of the two-year anniversary of this Roundup -- the first one was published on December 20th, 2021, and I'm pleased that I've managed to keep up a regular weekly schedule for the past two years. Some weeks are better than others, I think, but that is true of anything. I am nothing if not a creature of habit, and having these weekly releases has been good for me to stay active in the community as well as keep up with new releases and goings on. It's been a somewhat light week on the rpg release front, especially those on Drivethrurpg, but hopefully there are some worthwhile releases I've included.

• Idle Cartulary has released Dungeons Regularly, Vol. 2. I plugged Vol. 1 a month or so ago; it's a map workbook with a blank map on one page, and room to populate it on the facing page. You can also pay more to have it filled out in advance, and statted for Cairn. The author has made it under the CC BY 4 license, so the empty maps can be used commercially as long as you attribute them.
• Tlombev's Tokens are a collection of bare bones, black and white NPC tokens that were designed to be as role-agnostic as possible. There's a wide range of art in this pay-what you want bundle.
• The Final Days of Schnarb is a solo mini-rpg where you play as a tree planter in the last days of planting season.
• Castle Grief has released Kal-Arath, a fantasy rpg designed for play with 1+ players. What drew my attention was how it is written for a number of styles of play: solo, co-op, or standard party with a Referee, which means that it has plenty of tools to generate random results.
• The Candy Emporium, by Ashvi Gupta, is a Halloween-themed adventure written for Mausritter. It looks to be a fun romp through a mouse wizarding school run in the candy counter of a human store.
• I don't think I've plugged this before, but Jess, of Jumpgate Games (author of I Have the High Ground) is itchfunding Planet Fist, a satirical sci-fi skirmish game. I'm a big fan of their dueling-themed IHtHG, and Planet Fist looks to be intriguing.
• Patrick Stuart consistently puts out some of the most interesting and creative products in the OSR/NSR sphere, and they're in the process of Kickstarting a new project: Gackling Moon. It's part art book, part gazetteer, and looks phenomenal.
• Forgotten Ballads is the new Zelda-themed rpg published by Bloat Games, and they're currently in the process of raising funds for Cries of the Overlord, a bestiary and monster book for FB. It's got about a day left as of this posting, so if you're interested in backing time is limited.
• The author of Gremlins, a new class for OSE that is a sneak preview for the upcoming Land of Mists release reached out to me about doing a Meet the Publisher interview, and I was reminded I need to put together some questions when I saw this PWYW character class pop up on Drivethru. Gremlins is done in the standard OSE two-page format. They've recently released a number of PWYW products from this upcoming release: I'm not going to link to all of them, for space reasons, but if you're interested in checking out some new OSE classes it might be worth a look.
• Brian Colin has released Vast Grimm Space Cruisers and Vast Grimm Space Raiders, a pair of releases for the Vast Grimm (a Mork Borg-derived game) system that includes a hexcrawl adventures, spaceships, and more.
• Sabre Games is having a 25% sale on all online purchases, ending today (Monday the 27th) at midnight. Use the code "Cyber2023" at checkout to get 25% off everything in your cart.
• We're restocked a number of titles, including Monster Overhaul, Hole in the Oak, all versions of the Old School Essentials rules, and we've also added a bunch of new titles, including Kosmosaurs, Hexcrawl Toolkit, Herbalist's Primer, and more.