OSR News Roundup for March 25th, 2024

Welcome to the fourth and final OSR News Roundup of March. As I write this, on Sunday, I'm seeing reports trickle in from GaryCon of the wonderful time that everyone had there, and I'm super jealous. Maybe one of these years I'll be able to make the trip. In the meanwhile, I've been occupying myself by searching out some of last week's most interesting (to me, at least) releases. It seems like this week's releases are a little light, which I'm not surprised by given GaryCon and PAXEast happening this weekend.

• Many of you may be aware that the duo behind the amazing Thousand Thousand Islands and Reach of the Roach God are no longer working together, but I just learned that Munkao, one of the two, has released their first adventure. Stirring the Hornet's Nest at Het Thamsya is available on itch and Drivethru. It's written for Cairn and Into the Odd, and of course brings Munkao's take on mythical Southeast Asia. You can find an interview I conducted with Munkao here.

• tlomdev has added and expanded to their selection of gritty tokens on itch. There are over 200 character, item, and monster tokens that have a delightful 1960s gritty vibe to them. If you're playing virtually and need some vtt art this is what you should get.

• Otherworldly Flesh, by Fran, is a system-neutral sci-fic scenario in which the players investigate the mysteries of a strange, organic spaceship.

• Idle Catulary's been putting out some really neat, innovative rules-lite stuff on itch, and their newest project is SLMDNGN, a tri-fold dungeon crawl game that is designed to be compatible with adventures from meatier systems.

• The Lost Bay, by IKO, is live on Kickstarter. I've been looking forward to this project for, oh, as long as I've known about it, and am really excited to see it do well. While many games in the suburban kids genre of games focus on the 80s, the Lost Bay is influenced by a fair amount of 90s media.

• It seems like I haven't plugged any of Philip Reed's products recently, but that's likely just because he maintains a pretty fervent pace of releases. His newest release is Vol. 3 in the Old School Encounters series of cards, a set of 72 system agnostic random encounter cards for fantasy games.

• Kevin Crawford of . . . Without Numbers fame has just released The Diocesi of Montfroid, a gazetteer for use with The Atlas of Latter Earth, although, like all of his products, it can be mined for ideas and used virtually anywhere.

• The Petals of Splendour is a mid-level adventure written for OSE. It's designed to be tough, combat-heavy, and run in a single session.

• The House Under the Moondial is an adventure written for Old School Essentials and features art by Roundup favorites Evlyn Moreau and Dyson Logos. I like that the pdf is linked and has form-fillable settings for the Referee to use; it seems very intelligently laid out and set up for ease of play.

• Moira Games has released Hidden Gods of the Woods, a one-page adventure about a hermit who discovers a strange jewel deep in the woods.

• I'm not aware of the first two issues of Dark Star Violet, but Issue 3 is out. It's a zine with a sci-fi, punk asthetic, but is statted for OSE, which I think is pretty interesting. I know there's a recently released adaption of OSE for modern games, but wasn't aware of a sci-fi version.

• It's not OSR, but Jenna Moran is one of those writers that I aspire to be 1/10th as good as one of these days. Her games are some of the best out there, all around, and she's currently Kickstarting The Far Roofs, a game of talking rats, god-monsters, and you, as she describes it.

• I'm currently Kickstarting Vol. 2 of the BX Advanced Bestiary, covering and expanding monsters from BX/OSE from E to K. Art has started to come in, and here are a couple of the newest pieces:

The Loxen, or elephant-folk, warriors with a fearsome psionic stomp ability. By Marco Ortiz Walters.

Gug, by Adrian Barber

Blood Hawk, by Francesco Accordi