OSR News Roundup for December 22nd, 2025

Welcome to the penultimate News Roundup of 2025, and, as it happens, the anniversary of this newsletter. The first Roundup was published on December 20th, 2021. I hope that readers have gotten some benefit from it; I know for me it has opened up a wide range of indie and OSR publishers and some fantastic products that I otherwise might not have heard from, and the simple act of maintaining this as a routine as helped motivate my writing in general (I am, if anything, a routine-driven person).

Since this is two days before Christmas, and right in the heart of the holiday season, releases are a little light this week.

• Ran has released a Quickstart guide to Those Under the Mountain, a dwarven fortress inspired settlement building game. It looks amazing.

• Frozen Fane of the Far Traveler is a mini-dungeon for Cairn, written as part of the Zungeon jam. It's a cold-themed adventure, perfect for this time of year (in the northern hemisphere, at least!), and features alien yeti, ice scorpions, and more.

• The prolific ManaDawn has released Riverbend Valley, a mini-setting hexcrawl for Mausritter.

• Rat in a Suit is a publisher I discovered this year, and they've just released A Glorious Winter Gift Giving, an adventure for the Trains of the Glorious Republic of the People game.

• I'd mentioned the Land of Mist last year when it came out as a setting for OSE; the author is currently raising funds for Adventures in the Mist, a Gazetteer and Campaign book.

• Arion Games is raising funds for Maelstrom Expanded, not on Kickstarter or another platform, but on Drivethrurpg. They're near their goal, and will use the money raised to commission art for the project. Maelstrom was originally published in the mid-80s, written by a British teenager, and has recently been revised and expanded.

• The folks over at Red Ruin publishing have just release Casket of Fays #18, the Dragon Warriors fanzine. Because it's not official it is listed as a PWYW product, but it is certainly a labor of love and worth supporting.

• Liminal Grimoire for Liminal Horror is a collection of six adventures, designed to be played either as one-shots or linked together as a campaign, written for Liminal Horror.

• It seems to me (in a good, fun way) that Mork Borg has become the 5e of indie games, used for a bewildering array of themes and settings. In the case of Mork Borg, it seems that a lot of these games are written for the ability to pun off the MB name. In this case, Smork Borg (a Smurfs knock-off) Episode Book 1 is out, over one hundred pages of Smurfy . . . I mean, Smorky, zany fun.

• Dried Marrow Fort is a fun-looking adventure for Shadowdark, heavy on undead themes.

• Lazy Litch has been consistently publishing some of the best weird fantasy content out there, and they've just released Demidirge -- Fanged Funnel, a 0-level funnel for Shadowdark. It looks exceptional, like all of their works.

• I'm raising funds for the third volume of the BX Advanced Bestiary, a collection of the monsters L-R from the BX and OSE Classic books, expanded with variants and monsters inspired by them.