OSR News Roundup for December 8th, 2025

Welcome to the second News Roundup for December, 2025. Last week was a bit slow on releases, so let's see what this week looks like as we steam towards the end of the year. One development that I'm really pleased about is that Drivethrurpg has now made it mandatory for publishers to indicate if their releases contain any AI assets, as opposed to just an optional disclosure. It should hopefully make my job easier; I'd like to see them ban all content with AI assets, but that's a long uphill climb, I'm afraid.

If you're participating in the upcoming ZineMonth 2026 next year, I've started a thread on rpgnet that you're welcome to post in to promote your project.

• Temple of the Forked Tongue is a short dungeon crawl for Cairn 2e usable as a sidequest or one-shot, featuring a temple built by serpent-folk.

• Another Cairn release, this one by Pointless Monument, is Ruin of Reputation. This one is a sweet and short puzzle dungeon.

• Exeunt Press has released Blood Chapter, a bookmark game that uses any random book to generate keywords, and is about hunting vampires in 16th century Germany. This is a submission to the currently running (with a little more than a week left at the time of this posting) TTRPG Bookmark jam.

• Spooky Aurora's Final Cut is a horror-themed holiday adventure based on The Final Girl RPG

• Castle Grief is one of my favorite publishers I've discovered over roughly the past year, and they're currently Kickstarting Arathi Sector, a sci-fi hack of their popular Kal Arath system, designed specifically with solo gaming in mind, although it can certainly be played in a group.

• It's for 5th edition, but Eric Bloat is raising funds for Dark Places and Demogorgons, a kid's-on-bikes-style game. I'm a big fan of the BX version of the game that he published a few years back.

• I forgot to plug this last week, but I'm excited to see Hinterlight almost hitting its funding goal. Based on the Together We Go system, it's a really neat looking game of gothic horror role-playing.

• I mentioned Berserkr, a Mork Borg hack set in an impending Ragnarok, awhile back (we've got some physical copies preordered for Sabre), and I just saw Zoological Zine #1, three creatures statted up for use with Berserkr.

• Elln the Witch has been releasing some neat little OSR supplements in the past year, and they just released My Little d6 Tables -- Caves, a short supplement of random tables for, you guessed it, caves.

• Fight On was a seminal publication in the early days of the OSR, and publisher Ignatius Umlaut has brought it back, having just released Issue 17.

• Blade of the Explorer is an interesting looking rewriting of the BX rules. It's a barebones, no art release, available as PWYW.

• Using the Shadowdark engine, Shadows of the Star Knights is a sci-fi space opera setting.

• Paul Partington is known for his gamebook releases, and has just released Village of the Damned, a solo gameplay book using Old School Essentials.

• The Sun's Betrayal is Volume 3 in the Fortnightly adventure series, a planned collection of one-shot adventures that releases every two weeks or so. This one is written for OSE and set in a steaming jungle.

• I'm currently running a Kickstarter for Issue 52 of Populated Hexes Monthly, moving north to the a region of the world known as The Ruins of Isenden.