OSR News Roundup for July 8th, 2024

Welcome to the second news Roundup in July. SabreCon2024 is officially over, and it was both tiring and a lot of fun. It is perhaps good that the last week was light on new releases. No doubt the long holiday weekend in the US had a lot to do with it. Anyway, it'll be a short Roundup this week.

• I've been listening to Dimension 20s new game, Never Stop Blowing Up, based on action movies, and so it seems to be perfect timing that I see Bravado, Bombast, Brains + Bullets is live on itch. It's a rules-lite homage to cheesy 90s action flicks.

• Nuked! is a clever little post-apoc rpg, and the author has released the first two supplementary zines for it that are available on itch: the Totally Radical Tales Volumes One and Two. Volume 1 is an adventure, while Volume 2 is a rules supplemen and expansion.

• We're currently out of stock of Barkeep on the Borderlands, but a little itch adventure caught my fancy when I saw that it was inspired by the music of John Fahey. The Outer Reaches was a submission to the recent Barkeep jam on itch, and details a setting to use for that system.

• The Occluded Keep of the Doomed Elementalist is a new adventure by YouCanBreatheNow Games, and it has gotten praise from the excellent Between Two Cairns podcast. It's written for broad OSR-play, and is designed for adventurers of 3-4 level.

• Prolific author Philip Reed has released The Many Eyes of the Tyrant, a system-neutral supplement for customizing the already terrible eye tyrant. It's primarily written with 5e in mind, but Reed is no strange to old-school gaming, and wrote this specifically to be used in older games, as well.

• The Harvest of Horror is written for DCC and starts off with a mysterious meteorite landing in a farmer's field, one of my favorite plot hooks to throw at characters.

• I'm not familiar with Bee Excellent Games, but they've just released a 0-level adventure for Shadowdark entitled Tower of the Missing Mage. The premise is that a local wizard was defeated in a magical rivalry, and their tower is now open for plunder. Even if you don't run it as such, I think it sounds like a good resource for adding a mage's tower to your setting.

We've added a bunch of new titles to the Sabre website, including:

• I played my first game of Battletech about a month ago after a thirty-year hiatus and was surprised and thrilled to learn that the rules really haven't changed that much. Anyway, we've started to carry individual Battletech minis in addition to the larger force packs, so if you're looking for a specific mech or two to round out your lance you don't need to buy an entire box.

• We've restocked the OSR Classic Rules Tome, Advanced Player's Tome, and Mausritter,

• Populated Hexes Monthly Issue 35 is now in stock in both print and pdf. This 44-page issue takes a look at the first level of the dungeon underneath Dry Gulch and expands on the city encounter tables found in Issue 34.

• The Kickstarter for Issue 36 -- the end of the third year of this zine! -- is now live on Kickstarter. This issue finishes up the three part series on the town of Dry Gulch and the dungeon that lies beneath its streets.