In my opinion, Fight On! remains the best OSR zine. Each issue is filled to the brim with gameable material, and everything is bursting with creative energy. Rules, monsters, treasures, adventures, essays, interviews, megadungeon... So much!
Once I finish with the Dragon Magazine reading I'll do the same with Fight On!
Return to Perinthos: A Memorial Book Fundraiser in the Memory of Jennell Jaquays has just launched. It contains over 80 “one-spread” dungeons that can be used together or standalone, unpublished Q&A with Jaquays, and a mini-setting by Luke Gearing.
Pre-publication contributions can be seen here. Some of the OSR systems included are OSE, S&W, Cairn, and Shadowdark. There are also OD&D and AD&D contributions as well.
I've donated the Halls of Viridian Mist, a dungeon level for 4 to 6 Swords & Wizardry Complete characters levels 3 to 5. This challenging adventure features many tricks Jaquays used in her dungeons like non-linear loops, multiple elevations, interactive factions, and secret doors hidden behind other secret doors.
You can learn more, support the fundraiser, and get the book here.
Running a freewheeling city adventure can be hard work, but this book gives you a powerful resource for handling interactions with non-player characters — their names, objectives, abilities, and quirky activities! City Encounters provides 200 daytime encounters and 200 night-time encounters for your characters to run into while exploring the city. Plus, each of the encounters has several alternative possibilities involved, so you can adapt the encounter to your players or use the same encounter more than once with a different alternative. Encounters that can lead to adventures are cross-referenced to let you find the other NPCs who might be involved in an ongoing situation, and there are several possible “recurring” villains, heroes, and weirdos to battle, assist, and befriend.
Enter a city filled with anarchists, arsonists, sorcery, skullduggery, factional conflict, and necromancy!
This is the OSR version of City Encounters, written for Swords & Wizardry but easily usable with systems including OD&D, AD&D (1E), B/X, OSE and others!
It's great to see City Encounters once again available. It's a great utility for running urban adventures on the fly. You can get it in PDF and print at DTRPG.
This is intended to be a table copy for players. Use it, write in it, spill soda on it and get cheeto fingers on the pages. Then when it falls apart, get another one.
Old School Reference and Index Compilation (OSRIC) is an OGL retroclone of the AD&D 1E. It restates PHB, DMG and MM in a single book, with minor modifications for legal reasons.
Version 2.2 was released in 2013, and is freely available on Lulu and DTRPG. Knights & Knaves Alehouse hosts a thread for tracking and cataloguing latest known errata.
This book is a collection of 24 updated and revised articles published by Rob since 2009. It follows a 34-step process for creating a fantasy sandbox that should take around 24 hours to complete.
Rob has four decades of experience playing, running, and designing fantasy sandboxes. His credentials include:
Adventurer Conqueror King System Imperial Imprint (ACKS II) is coming to Kickstarter on October 24th. It will consist of three books: Revised Rulebook, Judges Journal, and Monstrous Manual.
ACKS II Revised Rulebook will be everything BECMI and Rules Cyclopedia wanted to be.
ACKS II Judges Journal will be the contemporary OSR Dungeon Master's Guide.
ACKS II Monstrous Manual will set the standard for OSR bestiaries.
Here are five reasons why I will back ACKS II on day one:
If you ever read early issues of Dragon Magazine, you have surely spotted various letter and articles proposing various tactics to cheese the game and one-up the Dungeon Master. A lot of Gary's rule modifications were his responses to players attempting to break the game. That's how we went from original Dungeons & Dragons booklets to the legendary Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. We wouldn't have had the game we had, hadn't it been for all the players that tried to break the game. ACKS II went through more than a decade of brutal play-testing. It survived players trying to break dungeons, economies, kingdoms, and planets.
Basic D&D was about dungeon delving, Expert D&D was about wilderness exploration, Companion and Master D&D were about domains, warfare, and rulership. BX/BE procedures held up extremely well, as attested by a deluge of retroclones built on them. I attribute that to all the play-testing these rules were subject to. Domain and war machine rules, on the other hand, were mostly penned by a single man (probably a small team to be honest), and briefly tested. D&D was never known for tight economy. Some try to fix it by introducing the silver standard, i.e. switching all costs from gold piece to silver piece. ACKS II is built ground up to have tightly integrated economy which works. It is based on thorough research of historical data, followed by careful modelling and simulation, followed by playtesting above. “Oh no, is this a spreadsheet simulator?” Only if you want it to! ACKS II summarises everything in gameable tables. You know the numbers work—you can roll and play, being confident in the results given.
Common complaint (lament?) in OSR circles is that player characters rarely go over 10th level, hence a lot of cool higher-level BECMI stuff doesn't get played. ACKS II fixed the problem by building everything from level 1 to 14. There is domain stuff you can play with from level 1; there are warfare rules covering small gangs as well as whole armies; there is something to challenge character of every level and every class.
It evolves and builds on decades of gaming experience. Innovations it brings are firmly in the spirit of TSR's D&D, while fixing many, many small issues. Linear fighters, quadratic wizards? Fixed. Monsters of myth and legend that have very little to do with actual monsters of myth and legend? Fixed. Thieves that suck? Fixed. The list goes on (really, campaign description has 40+ bullet points). And the best part? Everything is presented and explained in such a way a Judge can simply lift part of ACKS II they like and use it.
After years of turmoil, the Estate of Gary Gygax was taken over by a court assigned estate manager. As part of the agreement to raise money to secure the debts of the estate, Troll Lord Games was granted the right and privilege to reprint several of Gary Gygax’s works. To wit, The Gygaxian Fantasy World Series, Castle Zagyg: Yggsburgh, and The Hermit are each coming back into print.
We hope to bring each of these to you table as soon as possible. Our current plan is to release a Castle Zagyg: Yggsburgh retro print immediately. This is a reprint of the book as it was released in 2005. Following this, we will release The Hermit as a Kickstarter campaign. The Hermit will be updated for Castles and Crusades; the Fantasy Roleplaying Game, laid out in full color with new maps and illustrations, contain notes on its development and all original material as well. The Gygaxian Fantasy World Series will be launched on Kickstarter in the first quarter of 2024. The eight plus volume series of works is one of Gary’s prides and joys as well as a treasure trove of information for anyone wanting to create a comprehensive fantasy world setting.
Read the full statement from Troll Lord Games here.
US Copyright Office issued US Copyright Registration TX 9-307-067, which was the only thing left for Open RPG Creative (ORC) License to be considered final.
Here are the license, guide, and certificate of registration:
As a brief reminder, last December Hasbro & Wizards of the Coast tried to sabotage the thriving RPG scene which was using OGL to create open gaming content. Their effort backfired and led to creation of above ORC License as well as AELF (“OGL but fixed” license by Matt Finch).
As always, make sure to carefully read any license before using it.
