Black Friday 2024: Select OSR Publications
Another year, another chance to buy great OSR publications at discounted prices. Just like last year, I decide to do a single megapost by category (adventures, supplements, and bestiaries). I also limited myself to only ten bullets per category (but I cheated a bit).
Either way, below are books I'm happy to recommend, because I found them useful for my game. Some of them aren't often suggested, so I hope you find some inspiring gems as well!
Adventures
- Gatehouse on Cormac’s Crag. A village, seven-level dungeon with good verticality, and player handouts, all in 39 pages. Appropriate for levels 1-3.
- The Sanctuary Ruin & Ironwood Gorge by Ludibrium Games. Great mini campaign, good pacing and escalation of threat, interesting dungeon to explore, multiple factions, and easy to plug into existing setting and/or build on. Ruin is levels 1-3, Gorge 3-5.
- The Pod-Caverns of the Sinister Shroom. Very fun dungeon with 52 keyed areas over three levels. Includes novel enemies, environmental hazards, and plenty of interactivity.
- The Palace of Unquiet Repose. An interesting underground necropolis for exploration. One of those places where you just want to get the treasure and get out ASAP.
- The Black Monastery. A mansion full of monsters. Slightly nonsencial at times, criminally lacks treasure, but I still find charming in that “this has seen a lot of play” way.
- Mike's Dungeons, Mike's Dungeons: The Deep Levels and Mike's World: The Forsaken Wilderness Beyond. Less than $10 for material that will last you a lifetime whenever your players decide to go somewhere you haven't prepared for. As a bonus, aforementioned supercharge B1 and B2.
- Griffin Mountain. Amazing old-school sandbox module by Kraft, Jaquays, and Stafford. Although it is for Classic RuneQuest it is easy to adapt to D&D and OSR systems.
- Palace of the Vampire Queen, The Dwarven Glory and The Misty Isles. Witness for yourself how the earliest adventures looked like. Will you be able to make them work?
- The Lost City of Barakus (local and regional maps). Includes a starting city (with seven adventures), a wilderness area (with 26 keyed encounters and mini adventures), and a large five-level dungeon with interesting factions and cool big-bad.
- Cyclopean Deeps (volume one and two). Underground hex-crawl for high-level parties. Includes underground settlements as well. Perfect for plugging into lowest levels of large dungeons or under a sprawling city.
Supplements
- Tome of Adventure Design. Over 400 random tables for randomly generating adventures, monsters, dungeons, and “non-dungeon” adventures. Includes small essays as well.
- Book of Lost Tables. Includes 348 random tables for generating random wilderness terrain, random wilderness encounters, random dungeon terrain, random dungeon encounters, random urban terrain, random urban encounters, character parties, and more. Very much in the styled of AD&D 1e tables.
- The Dungeon Alphabet. Lovely supplement for zany dungeon elements.
- How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox. Practical step-by step guide on how to create your own sandbox. Written by Robert Conley, a Wilderlands legend. (Watch out for his Majestic Fantasy Realms as well, forthcoming.)
- Cults of Prax and Cults of Terror. One of the best takes on religion in fantasy.
- Seven Years Of Fantasy Weather Volume 1: Medieval England, Volume 2: The Iceland of the Sagas, and Volume 3: Indea. Awesome series of weather supplements covering, as it says on the tin, seven years.
- Cities by Midkemia Press, City Encounters by Mythemere Games, and The Nocturnal Table by First Hungarian d20 Society. Everything you need to run an infinite number of urban encounters with zero prep.
- On Downtime and Demesnes, Artifices, Deceptions, & Dilemmas, and Bestial Ecosystems Created by Monstrous Inhabitation. Hack & Slash Publishing / Courtney Campbell trilogy covering downtime, environs, and monstruous ecosystems.
- Realms of Crawling Chaos and Swords of Cthulhu. Two great sourcebooks to add Cthulhu mythos to your D&D game.
- The Metamorphica Revised. Wonderful tables for body and mind mutations. I love using them to create unique characters and monsters.
Bestiaries
- All the Worlds' Monsters Vol. 1, Vol. 2 and Vol. 3. One of the earliest published bestiaries. Has that true vintage typewriter look and nonsensical monsters.
- Fiends & Foes. New monster book by Mythmere Games, updates many monsters previous published in the Monster Compendium: 0e. See Swords & Wizardry bestiary analysis here.
- Monstrosities. Nearly 500 monsters. Each monster comes with an example encounter/nano-adventure. Includes tables with monsters by challenge level, guidance on creating new monsters, tables of monsters by terrain, and tables of random encounters (3d6, so normal distribution curve).
- Tome of Horrors Complete. More than 700 monsters (no duplicates from Monstrosities). Again, each comes with a small encounter. Includes mundane animals as well.
- Dwellers in Dark Places. Awesome collection of more than 300 original OSRIC monsters.
- Book of Lost Beasts. A collection of AD&D 1e monsters to supplement the Monster Manual, Fiend Folio, and Monster Manual II.
- Malevolent & Benign and Malevolent & Benign II. Collects all monsters published in the Expeditions Retreat Press OSRIC modules. Each book contains 150 monsters, so 300 new monsters in total.
- The Slaver Fungus and The Undead Leviathan. Ecology as a monster, suitable for challenging the players with living environment.
- The Monster Alphabet. Random tables to generate and modify monsters.
- The Random Esoteric Creature Generator for Classic Fantasy Role-Playing Games and Their Modern Simulacra. Bunch of random tables to create horrific monsters. Or horrifically comical; depending on your rolls and interpretations of therein.
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