OSR News Roundup for April 14th, 2025

Welcome to the third Roundup in April. Last week I published an interview I conducted with Daniel Kwan, the author of the upcoming Wandering Blades, a wuxia-inspired OSR game being published by Plus One Exp. I'd like to revise my Meet the Publisher series, so if you're in anyway adjacent to the ttrpg field, whether as an author, illustrator, publisher, editor, etc., I'd be happy to send you over some questions about your work.

Releases are still a little slow; it could just be spring or people recovering from their ZineQuest projects, but let's see what we've got!

• Mortdrakon RPG is a new, rules-lite fantasy rpg inspired by Cairn and Basic Fantasy, with a sweet pixel-dungeon vibe.

• Jeffrey Jones has been producing some great old-school content over the past three or so years, and they've just launched a Kickstarter for a combined volume of Issues 1-6 of Gary's Appendix, combining the first six issues of that zine.

• Uneasy Lies the Head 2e is an interesting project that just launched on Kickstarter. It's a GM-less competitive game of courtly intrigue. I really like their use of public domain art in bringing the project to life.

• I can't remember if I plugged this already or not, but Solo Borg is doing gangbusters on Kickstarter, raising funds for a ruleset designed to aid in playing Morg Borg.

• Justin Sirois of Severed Books is crowdfunding for Sickest Witch, a d20-based, rules-lite folk horror game. This is a core ruleset for the setting of many of Severed Books products.

• Tom Phillips reached out to let me know about Monster 24, a collection of 250 monsters for Shadowdark created during 2024.

• Written for OSE, The Herbomancer is an adventure set in an abandoned botanical garden. It's written for a party of 3rd-5th level characters.

• Kal-Arath, by Castle Grief, is popping up more and more in my social feeds, and I ran across Al Rathak, Tales of the Crescent Kingdom, a pseudo-Arabian setting designed for use with Kal-Arath and similar settings/games.

• Mouths in Your Skin is a short and sweet (or maybe gross) supplement to help Referees generate the NPCs that live in the characters' skin. It's got a bit of body horror, as may be expected.

• Spellburn and Battlescars is an OSR game designed to work with the various Mark of the Odd games. It's got some really nice art.

• Will Flora has released Tome of the Ancient Hero, an adventure for Old School Essentials. I'd like a little more information here about the adventure itself, but there's an available preview that should give you a good idea of what is contained within.

• I've uploaded a free preview of Mind over Matter, my upcoming psionics book for OSR games. It's an unedited, un-laid out, incomplete version of the work, but it captures some of the highlights, including the introduction to the Path of Seven Blades (an adaption of the Book of Nine Swords to OSR), a few classes, and more.