OSR News Roundup for October 19th, 2026

Welcome to the third News Roundup for October. We're getting into the home stretch for the end of the year, and there's nothing specific I want to plug this week, so let's dive right in!

• One of my favorite memes is Ea-nāṣir, the copper merchant from Mesopotamia, and I was tickled to see that David Blandy has published Ea-nāṣir Must Die!, a Bronze age house crawl where the PCs play as bounty hunters tasked with assassinating their target. It's written to be played with Mark of the Odd games, but of course should be easily adaptable to other OSR systems.

• Bog, a game of frogs, is set in a Marsh where the frogs have Awakened and discovered chivalry. It's absolutely charming, and I've enjoyed the art sneak previews the author has been posting on Reddit.

• Library Rats is a short adventure set in a library, written for Cairn, containing another one of my favorite things: random book generators! I've really become enamored with the idea of using books for treasure, and love that this really leans into that.

• Hilander is a publisher who has been putting out consistently good products for a number of years, and they and other folks in the OSR are Kickstarting Fletchwind: Out of the Cities, a system-agnostic toolbox for creating cities and urban-based adventures and encounters. It hasn't funded yet at the time of this writing, which I'm really surprised at. Go back it!

• Not quite Whalefall, but Inside the Whale is an adventure for Liminal Horror all about a missing person trapped in an abandoned aquarium in the Pacific Northwest.

• Gourd_dwarf has released the ashcan version of Heroix, a setting/ruleset based on Wayfarer. I'm a sucker for lo-fi art like what is featured here, so am looking forward to checking it out!

• I've plugged Bartosso-N's collage hexmaps before, and so I was excited to see they've just released a second collection of their work. They're super evocative, and designed for games like Mythic Bastionland, but really they can be used for pretty much any hexcrawl-style fantasy game.

• Mellow Golem Games has released Tables & Lore Vol 7, a collection of, well, tables and lore that does pretty much what it says on the tin.

• Far Relay is a system agnostic sci-fi game that looks like it would be ideal to run in something like Mothership or Stars Without Numbers, designed as a low to no combat scenario centered around problem-solving.

• Written for Pirate Borg, Lair of the Frog God is a one-page adventure with a giant emerald protected by frog-people.

• Barrel Rider Games has released White Box: Pirate Adventures, a supplement for pirates and sail for your White Box or similar games.

• Ziggurat is a pamphlet adventure for Mork Borg in which the PCs must resist the attempts of a dying sorcerer to use their (still-living) bodies as part of his mausoleum.

• I'm not sure how I missed this, because it's one of (or used to be, when it was in print) best sellers at Sabre, but Racoon Sky Pirates is currently funding a new edition, with tons of new content, on Kickstarter.

• A Game Master's Guide to Poisons is funding on Backerkit. It's a short, 16-page zine all about poisons -- from harvesting monster venom to synthesizing poisons to buying and selling -- and includes rules for GMs to randomly generate poisons that are more interesting than "save or die".