OSR OSR News Roundup

[thirdkingdom]

It's the first roundup for October, and the big event for this month is Mothership Month. It starts on October 14th, and will be chock full of projects Mothership. Exeunt Press is running an event for October as well, called Morktober, which is for all the various Mork Borg games. Backerkit has really been pushing these collaborative projects; in November they're doing Mausritter Month.

It's been a strangely slow week for new releases. The big news is that the winners for the Appendix N itch jam were announced on YouTube. Congratulations to the winners and everyone who participated. This was definitely one of the coolest projects I've seen this year.

Let's jump right in and see what came out last week, shall we?

• Beneath the Muckfort is an adventure written for Cairn 2e. It's an undead and mud themed sandbox adventure that is billed as being especially deadly.
• Recursive Faults has released OSR Ready, a guide to running OSR games. It's meant to be an alternative to the OSR primers that were released in the early days of the movement, with emphasis on practical advice for running games.
• Pirate Borg is probably my favorite of the various Borg clones, and I just stumbled across the released Pirate Haven, a short supplement designed to help generate a pirate settlement.
• Lost Contact is a Mothership one-shot, a quick and short adventure that features a research station gone silent based on Aliens.
• I've seen a fair amount of online conversation recently about different combat resolutions for BX-style games, using armor or to-hit rolls differently. Interestingly, I also saw Camelot Combat, which is a 32-page supplement that provides an alternative combat system compatible with BX-games.
• I'm a big fan of Joel Hines and Silverarm press, and he's just released Bastion of the Barren Five, a two-page pamphlet adventure written for OSE and designed for characters of level 3-5.
• Nepo Baby is a one-page class for the CY_BORG game, where you're a spoiled child of a wealthy family.
• Eat God is funding on Kickstarter. You play strange, muppet-like creatures, the amalgamation of all the strange little critters in fantasy: goblins and kobolds and homunculi. Your mission: to cause trouble.
• We just added Inevitable to our inventory, the game of doomed Arthurian gunslingers by Soul Muppet Games, and I just saw they're raising funds for Doomspiral, billed as their lovesong to Dark Souls and Elden Ring.
• Emiel Boven is crowdfunding Durf Expanded on Kickstarter, fully illustrated and updated. Emiel is the force behind the excellent Electrum Archive zine, and Ava Islam, the author of Errant, is going to be editing it.
• We just got in Beetle Knight, by Jim Hall. Part of a crowdfunding project for ZineMonth in 2024, this took awhile to get out but it is totally worth it. Very cool project, very well done, well worth the wait. We're selling it as a bundle with the core rules, world guide, adventures, solo rules, and more.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I am really torn about this year's Mothership Month being so focused on Prospero's Dream, the setting introduced in Pound of Flesh. It's fantastic news for those who use that setting, which I gather is often the case, but it looks like slim pickings for those who don't. I'm sure this isn't the last Mothership Month, though, so folks in my boat can just wait until next time.

 

[thirdkingdom]

I am really torn about this year's Mothership Month being so focused on Prospero's Dream, the setting introduced in Pound of Flesh. It's fantastic news for those who use that setting, which I gather is often the case, but it looks like slim pickings for those who don't. I'm sure this isn't the last Mothership Month, though, so folks in my boat can just wait until next time.

It's a curious choice, to be sure. It seems like it might require a fair amount of coordination between the different participants, rather than doing something more open ended/larger in scope.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

It's a curious choice, to be sure. It seems like it might require a fair amount of coordination between the different participants, rather than doing something more open ended/larger in scope.

Last year's Mothership Month featured Tuesday Knight Games crowdfunding a hardcover about bounty hunting. I suspect TKG is hoping to expand what people expect from Mothership, beyond monsters on derelict ships. (That said, monsters on derelict ships is awesome.)

 

[thirdkingdom]

Oh, yeah, totally. I would have just assumed it would have been easier to take something a little more abstract, like a sector, or a theme, like corporate malfeasance, and go with that, rather than something much more laser-focused.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Given my personal interests vis-a-vis Mothership, I'd love to see more on management-vs-labor, like we see in a fair number of early Mothership adventures.