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.

 

[thirdkingdom]

This is going to be a bit of a short Roundup; I had covid and flu boosters on Saturday and they really knocked me for a loop. Just a caveat before we dive into the week's releases: I hope that I'm not coming across too critical of some of these projects, specifically when discussing lead and production times. When I first opened the webstore, and then a physical FLGS, I was backing a lot of Kickstarters, primarily as a retailer, but over the years I've been burnt by a number of projects, as I'm sure many of you have. Even if a project releases successfully, if it is more than a couple months for me to get product I won't back it; as a retailer it is too difficult for me to have cash tied up for that long. I've grown leery of games that have such a long lead time from crowdfunding to fulfillment, especially those that have a lot of add-ons or stretch goals.

• I'm a big fan of Colin Le Sueur's work (We Deal in Lead, Runecairn), and they made the interesting choice to slowfund their most recent release, Midnight of the Century, on itch, and it's within striking distance of hitting the funding goals. It's a lovesong to 90's serial killer and murder investigation shows, where the streets are dirty, the rain is omnipresent, and the Pacific Northwest is where the action is. I'd like to sit down and chat with Colin about the process, because I think it's an intriguing way to fund projects.
• Duginthroat Divided is funding on Kickstarter. It's a large-ish dungeon for OSE, designed to take PCs from levels 1-4. The art is astonishing, and the adventure looks really solid, but the only thing that gives me pause is the lead time; it's planning on releasing in August, 2026, and that just seems like an awfully long time with everything going on in the world.
• Another Kickstarter with a long lead time and a host of add-ons is RagnaBorg, a Mork-Borgian take on the end of the world and raging against the dying of the light. It looks super cool, and has already shot past its funding goal, but the number of add-ons and year to fulfillment is giving me pause.
• I've been seeing KOKOTÖNA promoted on socials recently; it's a grimdark take on precolonial MesoAmerica, using the MorkBorg system. It's written by a LatinX author, and brings in a host of others from the community, so it looks like this will be a great project to back if you're looking for a perspective written by indigenous voices.
• The Wandering Cities is a zine funding right now on Kickstarter, and is about a vast grasslands and the cities, built upon the backs of giant isopods, that wander the plains. It's system agnostic.
• Written for Forbidden Psalm, 1540 Salt War looks like a pretty fascinating scenario set in war-torn Italy of the 1500s. I've been seeing more of these historically grounded adventures or settings recently, and it seems like a rich vein for exploration.
• I've mentioned Ever & Anon before; it aims to fill the spiritual shoes of the sadly discontinued Alarums & Excursions, and E&A is now out with Vol 4, almost two hundred pages of free content for your gaming pleasure.
• I feel like at least half of these offerings are some version of Mork Borg, and Super Borg is no exception, with art that evokes the golden age of comic books.
• Just in time for Halloween, Black Flies is funding on Backerkit. It's a rules-lite, GMless game where you play the villains all vying to turn the residents of your town into flies.
• The SoloRPGList popped up on my socials this weekend, and it looks like a fantastic resource; a collection of links to solo and duet rpgs.

 

[GothmogIV]

I hope you feel better.

 

[Autumnal]

Okay, KOKOTÖNA is something I’ve wished for for years: more games building fantasy out of pre-Columbian materials, by people with more clues than I have. I fell on it with glad little cries. Thank you for pointing it out!

 

[thirdkingdom]

Okay, KOKOTÖNA is something I’ve wished for for years: more games building fantasy out of pre-Columbian materials, by people with more clues than I have. I fell on it with glad little cries. Thank you for pointing it out!

Yeah, it looks great. It's filling a niche that, quite honestly, I'm surprised hasn't been filled sooner, what with the number of indie LatinX and BrOSR (Brazilian OSR) creators out there these days.