OSR News Roundup for May 25th, 2026

Welcome to the last News Roundup for May. One of my goals for this Roundup is to promote small press and indie creators, people who may not otherwise get much publicity, or are dipping their toes into the world of publishing and have just released their first title. If I have the choice between highlighting someone's first release versus a big, well-known project like the OSE demon month, I'll pick the former every time. The OSE project has plenty of eyeballs on it, and a small blog like mine isn't really going to help them out. But smaller creators I can potentially give a much larger publicity push for.

I bring this up because of a comment someone made on a platform about their work; I wasn't aware of their work, and apologized for not mentioning it, and they responded "they're the smallest of the small". Well, two things: first, if you're a publisher, no matter how small, and have released something you'd like promoted, please let me know! As long as there's no AI or bigotry involved, I will happily do so. Second, Fenris-77 has just released the Alchemist Class for Shadowdark. It's available on both itch and Drivethru (I try to promote itch links over Drivethru, because creators get a larger cut), and is a pretty chonky, detailed supplement. Everyone should check it out!

• Weird Heroes of Public Access is a consistent best seller for us (reminds me that I need to restock!), and there's currently a project on Backerkit that's raising funds for Visitors to Fairhaven, a trilogy of zines written for WHPA. Everything's written, edited, and laid out, and just needs to go to press.

• I saw on socials a release called Sghorbi with just the most adorable illustrations I've seen in awhile. It's built off of DURF, and looks like it is going to be great fun to play.

• The Ossuary has just been released on itch. It mixes Gritty Fantasy and Undead Apocalypse, and is by Jim Pinto.

• Gourd_dwarf has just released Star Marauders: Peril and Plunder on the Stellar Seas, a game of spaceway robbery and skullduggery.

• It's not new, but it's new to me, and germane to my interests in general, so I wanted to plug Dungeon Architecture's Hexcrawl Tiles on itch. They're really cool looking.

• Donjons & Darons has released Triptyque #5, an infiltration/dungeon crawl of a notorious prison. It's available in both French and English.

• A friend of mine from high school, Aaron Dill of Jolly Lark, has been helping out with the Noir 1933 Pulp RPG currently raising funds on Kickstarter. It focuses on the unheard, marginalized voices from that time period, and reminds me a bit of Chris Spivey's excellent Haunted West.

• mucilage has just released the first issue of Gadzooks, a zine for Shadowdark, with the aim of releasing a regular series of short adventures that can be completed in a short amount of time.

• Speaking of Shadowdark, David Okum has just released The Goblinoid Incursion. Exploring an abandoned orcish temple leads to mayhem?

• I'm not aware of their work, but Kobold King has just released a supplement called "Mini Settings", a guide to creating small sandbox regions larger than an adventure but smaller than a campaign. It's also their first release on Drivethru, so I'm curious to see what folks think of it.

• Will of Forbidden Psalms fame has just released Invasion of the Daemons of Disorder, a short supplement for their line of products that adds demons to the setting. As a reminder, Sabre is now fulfilling Forbidden Psalm products in the US, so if you order from Will's webstore we'll be the ones shipping it to you. They've also released Legitimate Salvage, a game of corporate space horror, and its supplement Dead Silence.

• Simple Coastal Boat Mechanics is a supplement for fantasy games that pretty much does what it says on the tin.

• Wytchin Hour has just released a bundle compiling all of their terrain generators, which is a useful resource for folks creating a hexcrawl or setting.

• Tower of the Mothman is an adventure for Shadowdark set in an abandoned lighthouse.

• I interviewed Grim Games a couple of months ago about their zinequest project, and it has just been released. The Colour Out of Space is a 68-page, Lovecraft-inspired adventure for Shadowdark. If anyone's wondering what happened to the Sabre Rattlings podcast, the city has been doing roadwork outside the store for the past month and a half (where I record the episodes) and it has just been too loud to properly record. Once the roadwork is done (hopefully by the end of June) I'll be resuming my interviews.

• Populated Hexes Monthly Issue 57 is currently funding on Kickstarter, and includes rules for adding madness and insanity to OSE and other similar games. I'm pretty pleased with how the madness rules worked out, inlcuding an escalating scale of intensities triggered by stress.