OSR News Roundup for December 29nd, 2025

Welcome to the last News Roundup for 2025. I know this year was fraught and stressful, at best, for a lot of people, and we're looking at a 2026 with plenty of unknowns and economic uncertainty. A big bright spot for me in the upcoming year is going to be ZineMonth2026, starting in February. I've already seen a number of people start promoting their projects, and I'd love to help with that. If you're going to be participating in the event, and have time to answer a few short, softball questions about your project, please let me know and I'll send them over.

Also, I've had some people ask about how to subscribe to the Roundup. This link should take you to the sign-up page. I send the Roundup out every Monday around 1:00 pm (eastern US time) via Mailchimp. It's a relatively light week, as might be expected for the week between two holidays, and a month before ZineMonth.

• As someone who publishes my own work I like to have a collection of dungeons to draw on that I can use to populate; NPC has just released the Guildhall Basement Dungeon, a small, ready to populate dungeon laid out with space to record encounters/areas of interest (this was supposed to go in last week's Roundup); also now out is Crook Sect, a release for Shadowdark with NPCs and a ritual fighting pit.

• Drops of St. Jerome is a small, nine-room dungeon written for Cairn, with themes of sorrow and loneliness.

• Hilander has released Felwoods, an OSR-lite game of travel through a mysterious and dangerous land, using the public domain art of Warwick Goble.

• Block, Dodge, Parry is a sweet little OSR system I've mentioned before, and I see that there's no an "official" zine: Steel & Survival, Issue 1. It focuses on gear and equipment, and should be useful for a variety of OSR systems in addition to BDP.

• In the Light of the Setting Sun, by Sivad's Sanctum, is a wild west game that I've been following the development of over the past year or two, and the publisher is currently hosting a game jam on itch for it, entitled On the Rails Jam, with the goal for all participants to contribute a car to the Rose & Thorn train, traveling along the frontier.

• Menagerie Press has released Gnome for the Holidays 2 -- A Shadowdark Christmas Adventure and Gnome of the Holidays 1, as well, on Drivethrurpg. Both are for Shadowdark.

• A Christmas Cookie Caper is another holiday themed adventure, written for Mausritter, where you play mice trying to steal Santa's cookies from under the watchful eyes of Pepper, the housecat.

• David Garrett has released Forgotten Shrine 1, a puzzle dungeon for Shadowdark.

• Many readers may have been gaming in the 80s and 90s and will well remember the Satanic Panic; Eric Bloat has just released a zine about and influenced by those dark days in gaming history.

• The Goblins of Volm is a one-page dungeon that is modular to allow mixing and matching to create up to ten different dungeons. It features charming, lo-fi art that is right up my alley. Everyone who insists on using AI art for their projects should check this out.

• The OSRIC 3rd Player's Guide pdf is now available on Drivethru. It's free, and should be a marked improvement -- from a layout perspective -- from the previous versions. I'm looking forward to diving in and seeing how it's been put together.