OSR News Roundup for October 16th, 2023

We're in the middle of October, and some stuff to go over. The only thing I wanted to point out is that I had mentioned Gurbintroll's (i.e. Blacky the Blackball) Light Fantasy Kickstarter. Last week I published a print interview with Gurbintroll where he talks about the design goals of Light Fantasy, upcoming projects, and more. You can check it out here! This week's Roundup is a bit shorter than normal, largely due to family obligations this weekend that I had briefly mentioned in last week's post.

• The crew at the Melsonian Arts Council is raising funds for a reprint of Luke Gearing's excellent hexcrawl Fever Swamp, and it looks like they've added some new material!

• I haven't heard of the game Notorious, but there's an expansion called Outsiders for it that is now on Kickstarter. It's a solo game of space outlaws and bounty hunters, inspired by the Star Wars universe (especially shows like Andor and the Mandalorian), Mad Max, and more.

• The ever-reliable Levi Combs is raising money for Reverend Werewolf's Old Timey Monster Mania Family Hour, a mouthful of a Halloween horror-zine that looks to be pretty system and genre agnostic.

• Out of Darkness is a sci-fi horror adventure written for Mothership. It's got a neat 1970's vibe in layout and design.

• taichara, one of my favorite authors out there, has just released As the Spirits Move, a system-agnostic collection of 31 spooky instances and events. It's PWYW over on itch, and their work is always top-notch and very creative.

• Chloris has released an alpha test of their oracle system, which uses icons, rather than words, to provide inspiration. The project is called The Vibrant Muse.

• I always like new spells to draw on to add to my games, and vdonnut has created a free download of Disturbing First Level spells.

• Kyle Tam has released Spirited Encounters: Creatures for Mausritter, a collection of four spooky creatures to add to your Mausritter game.

• Downsized Press has released Volume 1, Issue 4 of their OSE zine The Pauper's Page. It's a short, 4-page zine that is priced as PWYW.

• OFR -- Old Freestyle Revival is another entry into the retroclone field. The big thing that drew my attention, however, was the inclusion of rules for solo play. I think that's a really smart thing to do, since there seems to be a growing market for solo gaming.

• We've added a number of OSR-related topics to the webstore, including:

*Dark Places and Demogorgons, the Stranger Things-inspired OSE game by Bloat Games.

*Singing Flame has just released Issue #3 of Aquilus, their OSR zine.

*The softcover new edition of Troika. This is a beautiful little book.

*We've added a number of used OSR titles, including the Zweihander Starter set, Dungeon Alphabet, and An Echo, Resounding.