OSR News Roundup for May 13th, 2024

This is likely to be a somewhat short edition of the Roundup. I caught whatever current variant of the flu is making the rounds of the east coast, and it knocked me out Friday and Saturday. I'll do what I can to post some of last week's releases, however.

Well, I lied. There's a fair amount of stuff I was able to add. Oh! Also, Sabre Games will be holding a mini-convention July 4th-7th at the store in downtown Charlottesville to celebrate our one year anniversary. We're still working on a schedule, but if you're in the area and think you might be interested in running a game hit me up and we'll try and make it happen.

• Every once in a while I come across a project being funded on Crowdfundr, an interesting crowdfunding platform that got a lot of love two or so years ago but seems to have dropped somewhat off the radar since then. But Cezar Capacle is using it to fund Wraithbound, a game of ghost hunters endowed with supernatural abilities.

• Mobile Hut has released The Choir, a short, 8-page adventure for Mork Bork. It features some art and design by Roundup favorite Evlyn Moreau.

• I often see people asking about a suitable mass combat system, and while I've written one included in Into the Wild I'm always interested in other peoples' takes on it. Killchain, by Castle Grief, is inspired by Chainmail but meant to be simple enough to be run via theatre of the mind.

• I do not speak Spanish, unfortunately, since so much of what is innovative in the OSR-sphere is coming out of Latin and South American, and the collective OSR Latam has just released Mestiza #1, a zine that collects essays, discussion on game theory, a small dungeon, and more. It's all in Spanish, though.

• We're both named Todd and are into hexcrawls, but Todd from Hexed Press has just released a one-page guide to dungeon-crawl procedures to help new Referees understand how it works.

• I've been plugging Chaoclypse's work for awhile now, and they've just released the first issue of Chaos Crawl, a weird old-school zine broadly compatible with BX-style games. It's got a bunch of weird and gonzo content.

• What Lurks Beneath Tidewater Tower is a short adventure written for OSE with an aquatic theme that features a cursed idol, undead sea creatures, and more.

• The prolific author James Floyd Kelly has released Issue 14 of his Delver zine, written as a gaming aid for OSR/OSE games.

• As Above, So Below is a short, system-neutral adventure that explores two dungeons, each a mirror of each other, one celestial and one infernal.

• Eric Bloat and Pete Spahn are both mainstays in the field of OSR publishing, and they're collaborating to produce WWII: Operation BX for Old School Essentials, a WWII rpg based upon Old School Essentials. It's currently raising funds on Kickstarter, and both authors have a proven track record of publishing high quality products.

• I'm unfamiliar with the work of Ed Stanek, but their raising funds for Cosmologia, a guide to planar geography in DCC. This looks like an interesting take on the standard fantasy planar cosmology, especially how it works with the implied setting of DCC>

• Hammer City Games is currently Kickstarting Earth: After Death, a post-apocalyptic survival game inspired by Gamma World, Fallout, and other similar systems.

• I'm running a Quickstarter for Populated Hexes Monthly Issue 34. By popular demand, this issue begins a look at Dry Gulch, a city mentioned in the Basilisk Hills Hexcrawl but never expounded on.

• Sabre Games is still having our spring cleaning zine sale. By using the code Spring24 you can take 35% off all in stock zines. We've also added a bunch of new titles to our selection of used books, including original TORG, Rolemaster, and more.