OSR News Roundup for January 20th, 2025

I had mentioned over the summer that author (of both fiction and game material) Howard Andrew Jones was sick with terminal cancer. In addition to being a great writer, Howard was incredibly encouraging to me when I started writing, and his infrequent emails in support of my projects really gave me the confidence to keep going. It is with great sadness that I learned last week that Howard has since passed away. The GoFundMe to support his family is still active, though, and if you can't donate to that I suggest you check out some of his writing.

• Davide Quatrini has released 6 for .66, a collection of six new monsters for Mork Borg. This was actually released last month, but I missed it, and thanks to Davide for reaching out to let me know about it (if you've released something please let me know, as my gaze is not ominiscient!).

• DedZepplin has released Wilderlands, a game of heroic characters inspired by the works of JRR Tolkien and using a system similar to Cairn or Into the Odd.

• The charmingly named Valley of the Cannibal Cow is a short (two page) adventure written as part of the Zungeon 2025 Jam, and features a murderous bovine terrorizing a small, helpless village.

• el has released Nothing will come of Nothing, a short introductory adventure written for Cairn. It's meant to be deadly, and requires clever thinking and teamwork in order to survive.

• Escape to Blackboot Bog is another introductory adventure for Cairn. It's designed as a "pathcrawl", taking adventurers from point to point to illustrate gameplay.

• James Spahn is crowdfunding a campaign for the White Box Cyclopedia, a compilation of the core rules plus various supplements and additional materials that have been published over the years.

• Hobgoblin is the first issue of a new OSR zine, written to be system agnostic. There's not much more information on it, but it looks interesting.

• Underground Oracle Publishing has released the intriguing Bad Moon over Burnt Rock, a weird west adventure written for Mausritter. It looks pretty amazing.

• Tales of Argosa, by Pickpocket Press, is a fun low-fantasy game, and I stumbled across the Jester, a new playable class for ToA.

• The Elixer of Kosmodes is a 1st-level, city-based adventure for DCC, inspired by The Invasions of the Body Snatchers.

• When I saw the product entitled Cowborg, I must admit that my mind leapt to a different conclusion than what it actually is. Regardless, I'm hopeful that this, a hack of Morg Borg set in apocalyptic wild west, does for the weird west genre what Pirate Borg did for nautical-themed campaigns.

• Chainsaw Space Wizards is powered by Troika!, and takes place roughly 40,000 years in the future, with all of the, um, grimdark fun that suggests.

• There's only a couple days left in the Kickstarter campaign for Issue 42 of Populated Hexes Monthly. This issue, featuring cover art by Waclaw Traier, nine demons from other sources adapted to BX-style games, and extensive rules and guidelines for creating new demon types.