A new edition of Old School Essentials has been announced for next year.
Necrotic Gnome will (finally) get rid of the classic/advanced split and consolidate everything in a Player's Book and a Referee Book. Following a common trend for many clone games, this new edition will no longer use the OGL.
Here's a list of updates taken from the linked page:
- New art. Around 200 new illustrations, including an illustration for every class and race, lots more monsters, and a set of beautiful colour paintings by Jacob Fleming.
- Introductory material and examples. A completely rewritten introduction plus dozens of new examples of rules and gameplay, including fully detailed examples of creating a wilderness region, base town, and dungeon.
- Glossary and index. The Player’s Book now contains a glossary of common game terms and a full index of rules topics.
- Basic play appendices. An appendix in each book notes which content is derived from the Basic/Expert D&D rules and provides additional tables for those seeking a core B/X experience.
- New optional rules. We're adding a handful of extra optional rules, including training, XP for magic items, hovering at death’s door, and higher Hit Die types (à la AD&D).
- Class tweaks. Minor tweaks to the assassin, barbarian, knight, and ranger classes, based on feedback from players over the past 6 years. (As mentioned in our end-of-2024 update.)
- Minor rules fixes. A small number of tiny fixes to core rules for the sake of B/X fidelity, for example attacking from behind, sea-based encounter chances, and travel effects of roads and trails.
