OSR News Roundup for November 18th, 2024

Welcome to the third Roundup for November. Releases are a little light this week, no doubt due in part to the impending holiday rush/busyness.

• There are plenty of one-page systems out there, and now there's Forest Burial, a solo rpg designed to be printed out and stored in a chewing gum case. It's a submission to the Solovember Game Jam, and takes inspiration from Vermis, Princess Mononoke, Shadow of the Colossus, and more.

• Transgender Deathmatch Legend is a title that we constantly sell out of at Sabre, and the folks behind that game are currently crowdfunding TDLII, a sequel to the first. This new book is available in an A4 landscape coilbound book.

• James T Hook has released Sword & Backpack: Reforged, an rpg where you play a young and untested adventurer setting out to seek gold and glory for the first time.

• Cyclopean has released a pretty cool-looking free product on Drivethru: entitled The Faction Machine, it's a system-neutral faction generator for sandbox campaigns. It's five pages, and provides simple rules creating self-motivating factions for your games.

• The Dreamgod's Idol is a 1st level adventure written for DCC. It's a short adventure, suited for a one-shot or side-quest, or as a hook to throw out for low-level players.

• Written for Shadowdark, Smoke and Shadows is a short supplement and expansion for the system (and for OSR systems in general) that add rules for gunpowder weapons, as well as the musketeer class.

• I always enjoy seeing a new release and remember covering it in the past as part of a crowdfunding project. FÄNGELSEHÅLA is now out, and I remember covering it for 2024's ZineMonth. It's an rpg in the style of an IKEA instruction catalog, and is really well done and very clever.

• Hangry Dwarf Games has released The Wizard Remains, a mid-level (6th or so) adventure that is written for 5e, Knave 2e, and generic OSR games. I'm usually really hesitant to recommend games written for both 5e and OSR games, since I think the two playstyles are usually too divergent, but the author has included conversion and scaling notes, which will no doubt help with that.

• Kevin Crawford is crowdfunding a new in the "Without Numbers" series: Ashes Without Number is his take on the post-apocalypse genre, with tools to create your own version of the apocalypse, as only Crawford is able to deliver.

• I'm crowdfunding yet another issue of Populated Hexes Monthly, this one Issue 40, which continues the look at Tyeld, the City of Shadows, and begins an exploration of the Shadowlands, where spirits go after death and demons feed upon the unwary.