OSR News Roundup for June 30th, 2025

Welcome to the last Roundup for June. We're also halfway through the year, and less than a month out from GenCon, which is usually a slow time for releases as publishers work on getting their ducks in a row for the biggest convention of the year. I will likely not be publishing a Roundup next week; with SabreCon going on at the store I'm not sure I'm going to have time.

• Odinson Games has released Knight of the Corpse Trials on itch. Written of Cairn, it's a forest hex-crawl with gothic horror vibes, as the adventurers are sent to capture a celebrated knight who seems to have gone crazy and is exhuming corpses to put them on trial.

• Grinning Rat has released The Outcast, the Witch, and the Shepherd as part of the Cairn Backgrounds jam. These are three science fantasy backgrounds for use with Cairn 2e.

• Another entry to the jam is the Biomechanist, by Francisco Lemos. This background is available in both English and Spanish. One of the things that has been really neat to watch happening in the Cairn community are all the translations that have taken place; at last count Cairn is available in at least ten languages, an impressive feat for an indie game.

• There's a third entry to the jam: the Colonial Rebel background, inspired by Andor and published by Riles.

• Corvid Court, by Gila RPGs, is a game about bad people doing bad things in a city filled with even worse people. Also, you might be birds?

• Eco Mofos is one of my favorite games released last year, and there's been a ton of great community content written for it, as well. Dream Church Seed Vault takes place in an abandoned movie theater from ages past.

• Necrotic Gnome has released the Dolmenwood Creator's Guide, everything you need to know to publish your own material for DW. The pdfs for Dolmenwood are also available. I'm not going to link to all of them, but here's the Campaign Guide.

• I think everybody's waiting with bated breath for the physical release of Dolmenwood. 2Die10 Games has just released three titles for the setting: a short starter delve called Into the Dolmens, Books of Dolmenwood, and The Wrowl, a Kindred Class.

• Mork Stad is another Borg adjacent release, this one set in a twisted, alternate reality version of London. It looks well done, and has some neat ideas in there.

• I'd mentioned Barrows and Borderlands awhile back, and I see the author has just released Barrows and Borderlands, Electric Boogaloo, a collection of house rules and esoterica that will be updated as warranted.

• Mister Smith Designs has released Sour Grapes, an adventure written for OSE that features an undead vinter and their estate.

• I'd mentioned the Mortdraken RPG (and have an interview with the author coming up, as soon as I take care of some other things) and it's now available on Drivethrurpg. I really like the art in this game.

• Max Moon is Kickstarting Twelve Years at Sea, a solo+ game of nautical exploration inspired by weird fiction, mythology, and Ray Harryhausen films.

• We've added two new products to our inventory that I have been really excited about and waiting for their release:

  • The Cairn 2e boxset. It's gorgeous, and longtime readers of this roundup will know that there's an active and vibrant community of folks publishing content for Cairn.

  • Lucid: Sea of Dreams. I posted a few months back about this project from 2022, and how the author pushed forward through a bad case of writer's block and other issues, and has finally released the finished zine. It looks amazing, and I'm really glad we've got some in stock, and that the author was able to bring this project to completion. Kudos!