OSR OSR News Roundup

[thirdkingdom]

It's the last Monday in July, and the week is rolling right into the biggest week in gaming: GenCon. I hope everyone lucky enough to be going has a great time. The big news from last week, as I'm sure many of you have heard, is that due to pressure from payment processors, themselves under pressure from a small, Australian anti-smut group, itchio has de-indexed, as far as I can tell, all of their games -- both crpg and ttrpg -- labelled NSFW. As is often the case, this has affected a number of LGBTQ-positive products that are deemed NSFW simply because of queer themes and not because of explicit content.

If you feel that a small group of people in one country should be able to influence what the rest of the world might want to enjoy, Lin Codega posted a link to a website outlining concrete actions we can take to put pressure from the other direction.

• A Vampire in Neraka is a short adventure for low-level characters, written for OSE. It's almost something of a funnel, or 0-level adventure, and can be used as a stand-alone one-shot, a sidequest, or as part of the author's Neraka series of adventures.
• I'm not going to link to all of them, but the incredibly talented Dyson Logos has added a number of their map collections to Drivethrurpg, these from 2024. Dyson is very generous with the licensing of these products, and they're a true resource to indie gamers.
• TLHP Games has released a Random Adventure Generator for Medieval Games, a collection of tables and worksheets to help guide the adventure creation process.
• Most of what I've seen released for the Appendix N game jam has been on itch, but I noticed one released on Drivethru: The Astral Ship is about a fairy astral ship trapped in the mortal world, and warping reality around it.
• I don't see that much stuff for Dragonbane, which is a shame, 'cause it's a really cool system, and I was excited to see Wonderful One-Shots: Kobolds Stole My Babies up on Drivethru. It's a short adventure designed as a one-shot or a session cleanser.
• Vasili Kaliman, the author of DNGN and the Xanadu series of zines, has just released an official OSE adventure published under the Necrotic Gnome new line of Quick Delves: Milk is a short adventure designed as a one-shot or sidequest (boy, lot's of those this week!) for characters of levels 2-4.
• I really love Teresa Guido's art (I've used her on a number of projects), and I see she's released a packet of ten black and white character illustrations.
• Floodplains of Illamoor is a hexcrawl written for Cairn. It's PWYW over on itch, and the layout and art is really charming.
• Another submission to the Appendix N jam is Invaders of Atlantis. Written for Cairn, it imagines a reverse invasion, where after centuries of Atlanteans attacking surface dwellers, the tables have turned and it's time to invade the underwater kingdom of Atlantis.
• Another Appendix N submission is Raiders of the Crystal Keep. When a mysterious giant crystal appears in the nearby mountains, does it portend woe or weal?
• The Crypt of Atan-Thu is currently raising funds on Kickstarter. It's written for a variety of OSR systems, and is a mid-range adventure featuring an ancient undead necromancer.
• With the new release of Dolmenwood we're likely to see a bunch of 3pp written for the setting/system; the second one I've seen thus far is The Swallowed Saint. It brings the characters to a swamp and a forgotten holy shrine that has been subsumed by the muck and mire.
• We're working on clearing out some backstock, and have started to put together some zine bundles. If you're looking for a great deal on some great zines we've got you covered!

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Just got my entry in under the wire for the Appendix N Jam. I appreciate you highlighting it, @thirdkingdom.

 

[Mannahnin]

Just got my entry in under the wire for the Appendix N Jam. I appreciate you highlighting it, @thirdkingdom.

Which is yours?

 

[thirdkingdom]

Yeah, throw us a link, please!

 

[thirdkingdom]

It's the first week in August, and GenCon is officially over. Congratulations to all of the Ennie winners (and nominees!). It's an achievement to have been nominated for the award, and the number of OSR and indie titles on this year's slate speaks to the quality of product the community has been releasing.

The Appendix N jam is over, and some of the more recent releases that have caught my eye are:

• Stronghold on the Edge of Forever, an exploration through a constantly morphing tower as it travels back in time.
• Labyrinthine Press released He Who Walks with Shadows, a system-neutral adventure inspired by Lovecraft, Ashton Smith, and Howard.
• The Leshy's Grove, a forest-crawl written for Cairn, by void_stitch.
• Matt Kelly has compiled a list of all the Cairn adventures submitted to the Appendix N jam: there are a whopping 30 titles in there!
• I'm a big fan of Weird Wonder (Amanda P), so I was excited to see they submitted an entry to the jam: The Eternal Empress (it's part of the Cairn link above, but I really love her work and wanted to give it a special shoutout).

With one jam ending another jam is starting up: Mythic Bastionland did extremely well at the Ennies, and the new jam is all about writing adventures for that system/setting. You've got about a week and a half as of the time of this post.

• Vaults of Vaarn 2e is currently funding on Backerkit, and there's a concurrent Vaarn game jam going on over at itch, as well. VoV is a great system and setting, and I'm really looking forward to the 2nd edition.
• Another great game raising funds on Backerkit is Dragon Reactor: Embers, Ashes, Moments, and Stars. Its a fascinating mech tragedy game, and is edited by Sam Leigh, so you know it will be top-notch!
• We don't see many products distributed via ko-fi, but One Foot In has released Mystery Mastering, a guide to planning and running mysteries in rpgs.
• I had mentioned A Perfect Wife awhile back when it was crowdfunding, and the pdf is now available on itch through David Blandy. It's got an all-star cast involved: one of my favorite authors, Zedeck Siew, and artists Amanda Lee Franck and Scrap World.
• Izegrim Creations is raising funds for the second edition of Bugbears and Borderlands, a mash-up of BX and 5th edition. Including in the campaign, and relevant to my professional IRL interests, is a limited edition run of walnut box-sets.
• Glory&Ruin is an interesting-looking supplement out on Drivethru. It's designed as a toolbox to generate history and backstory for a setting, based on the Toynbee-en concept of the rise and fall of empires.
• The Tabletop Engineer has released Delver 18, their quarterly (?) zine of excellent OSR content.
• The Spawning Deeps is a short adventure for Shadowdark featuring a monster giant crab and her babies.
• Using the Mork Borg engine, Berserkr is a game of Norse fantasy set just before Ragnarok. The art is stupendous, and while I have a hard time with Mork Borg, I relate better to some of its offshoots, like Pirate Borg, so I'm hoping this is a system that I can get into.
• Originally written as part of the Return to Perinthos game jam honoring Jennell Jaquays, Xuesis' Labyrinth is a dungeon that is written for 3rd level characters and features traps, treasure, and deceptively fast gelatinous cubes.
• The Big Book of Little Dungeons is a community project, a collection of short and sweet system-neutral dungeons, with an emphasis on playability. I'm hoping this is the first volume of many.
• Chris Gonnerman and Basic Fantasy are names that fly under the radar when compared to the more popular publishers and systems in the OSR sphere, yet BF was hugely influential in the movement, and the amount of free content available for this system is truly staggering. Gonnerman just released Iron Falcon, his Creative Commons system based on OD&D, but without the licensing.
  

 

[Mannahnin]

It's the first week in August, and GenCon is officially over. Congratulations to all of the Ennie winners (and nominees!). It's an achievement to have been nominated for the award, and the number of OSR and indie titles on this year's slate speaks to the quality of product the community has been releasing.

The Appendix N jam is over, and some of the more recent releases that have caught my eye are:

• Stronghold on the Edge of Tomorrow, an exploration through a constantly morphing tower as it travels back in time.

Typo here- it's "Forever", not "Tomorrow".

 

[thirdkingdom]

Typo here- it's "Forever", not "Tomorrow".

Fixed, thanks for the head's-up.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The large percentage of Cairn entries in the Appendix N Jam is a good illustration of how much more indie itchi.io is versus DriveThurRPG. There are a few 5E adventures in the jam, but getting massively outnumbered by entries for Cairn and Borg-based games (not to mention OSE and Shadowdark) really shows the different audience. There may even be more adventures for Into the Odd than there are 5E.

That said, I've reviewed more than 40 of them now and 99% of them would be easy to convert to other systems, even on the fly. There are a lot of very cool ones.

I would also recommend checking out Death, Imprisoned!, Jungle of the Jade Jaguar, Idol Thieves of Old Uruk (the quest-giver's head tells you to watch out for his roaming body inside the dungeon!), Scrolls from Azov's Shelf, Servants of Shaitan, The Null Conclave and The Indigo Illusionist. Even if all of the entries aren't perfect, they almost all have great ideas and hooks in them and the entries tend to be bursting with energy you don't always see in other short one-shots.

 

[thirdkingdom]

The large percentage of Cairn entries in the Appendix N Jam is a good illustration of how much more indie itchi.io is versus DriveThurRPG. There are a few 5E adventures in the jam, but getting massively outnumbered by entries for Cairn and Borg-based games (not to mention OSE and Shadowdark) really shows the different audience. There may even be more adventures for Into the Odd than there are 5E.

That said, I've reviewed more than 40 of them now and 99% of them would be easy to convert to other systems, even on the fly. There are a lot of very cool ones.

I would also recommend checking out Death, Imprisoned!, Jungle of the Jade Jaguar, Idol Thieves of Old Uruk (the quest-giver's head tells you to watch out for his roaming body inside the dungeon!), Scrolls from Azov's Shelf, Servants of Shaitan, The Null Conclave and The Indigo Illusionist. Even if all of the entries aren't perfect, they almost all have great ideas and hooks in them and the entries tend to be bursting with energy you don't always see in other short one-shots.

I don't know if it is apparent, but one of my goals with the Roundup is to promote indie games whenever possible, so I always include links to itch products first, to try and drive more people there, and if a product is listed on both itch and Drivethru I'll try and promote the itch version. For whatever other faults itch might have, especially in light of the recent NSWF controversy, they do really support indie creators and provide a much more fertile environment for creativity.

 

[overgeeked]

For whatever other faults itch might have, especially in light of the recent NSWF controversy, they do really support indie creators and provide a much more fertile environment for creativity.

That is a major concern conidering they’re using that as cover to specifically target LGBTQ+ content by mislabeling it as NSFW. I won’t be buying from itch until that policy is fully reversed and apologies go out.