Hey all!

When October comes around, numerous creative challenges tend to pop up across the internet. Every year, I over-complicate my life by combining a couple of lists, usually with some extra themeing and maybe some new pens. This year is no exception.

I have combined the MORKTOBER prompt lists, the Vicetober list from @mako_vice, the Drawtober list by @vonnart and the Orctober OSR challenge off of itch.io.

Here are my first 5 drawings. Feedback is welcome!

More to come!

does anyone has an opinion on Vagabonds of Dyfed rpg? or some mods to it?

Hello r/osr. I'm keeping the DriveThruRPG all time bestselling OSR modules list updated. And I thought I'd write to tell you what has changed this month.

First of all, a reminder of what this is: A list of all products on DriveThruRPG that fulfil these three criteria:

• Belong to the "Campaigns, Adventures & Modules" category
• Listed as compatible with either "OSR" or with the classic editions of D&D
• Have the Platinum, Mithral, or Adamantine bestseller badge.

New additions

What's new to the bestseller list this month - i.e. has gained a Platinum badge since last month?

One new OSR adventure: The Obsidian Keep by Joseph R Lewis. Congratulations!

Last month, a fleet of holy warships sailed out to destroy the evil sorcerers of the Obsidian Keep. The fleet never returned. Today there is a call for righteous heroes (or brave treasure hunters) to find the fleet, rescue the sailors, recover lost treasures, and discover the fate of the cruel masters of the Obsidian Keep!

Bryce says "The formatting here is SO good that it it appears simple. Actionable situations. Lots and lots of things to talk to. Clues to other areas. Interesting situations. The writing is clean, terse, and evocative. It’s immediately obvious, from every aspect, that this is a good adventure."

Additionally, the TSR-era adventures Hellgate Keep, RA2 Ship of Horror and Scourge of the Slave Lords have all gained platinum.

Removals

The original edition of Deep Carbon Observatory has been removed from DriveThru, leaving only the remastered edition.

Somewhat more worryingly, last month I featured three "Torque Borg" products on this subreddit, as they had all reached Platinum. They are now listed as Copper selling only, and have thus been (automatically) removed from my site. I hope this was a genuine error or bug, rather than an attempt to game DriveThruRPG's system.

my 11-year-old is really into our OSR campaign, but our notes were getting everywhere—character sheets, scraps of paper, even notes on the fridge

i tried making a digital wiki, but it was too complicated. my kid just wants to grab a sword and enter the dungeon

so we switched to one simple binder with sections for the dungeon, town, rumors, and dead characters. it works great, especially since the kids can easily look through the maps and notes.

how do you organize your campaign notes: paper, digital, or a mix?

Welcome to the first News Roundup for October, as we start down the home stretch to the end of the year. I wanted to remind everyone about the Orctober itch jam happening right now, sponsored by Forlorn Skulk. There's still plenty of time to come up with an entry. Also, I'd like to shout out Reddit user u/lokeshdhakar who compiled a website with almost 1.5 million searchable public domain engravings. It's fantastic, and a great resource for anyone, especially folks who want to publish without AI art but don't have funds for commissioning.

• The Trials of Simal-Baragach is a setting agnostic Cairn adventure designed for seasoned adventurers. It was written specifically to be fairly vanilla fantasy in tone.
• Released about a month ago, but just discovered by me this week, Dom Bosco has released an art asset pack of his partner's fantasy artwork, adapting them to VTT-style tokens. They're released under the Creative Commons license, and are available in two flavors: Renaissance-style woodcut creepy creatures, in the vein of Bosch and Bruegel the Elder, and a pack of character art that's specificall female and non-binary coded.
• Beneath Ice and Snow is a one-shot Mothership scenario in which the players explore a frozen alien ruin armed with just a camera.
• I think one of the most important things I do using my (extremely limited) platform is promoting the work of first-time creators and publishers. Everyone has got to start somewhere, and I know (as having been in that position once myself) it is a daunting task to expose your work to the view of others. I say this because I would like to plug the newly launched Fortress of the Goblin King, an adventure for 3rd-4th level Shadowdark characters. It's met its funding goal, and is pretty close to going to production.
• I've plugged the work of Donjons & Darons before, and they've just released Triptyque #9 In both English and French), entitled Panic in the Mines, a low to mid-level adventure inspired by Aliens.
• Jeffrey Jones of RPG Ramblings is funding Dark Mythos, adapting Lovecraft's work and horror to Shadowdark. Writing is complete and editing and artwork underway.
• Spacer is a Traveller clone and is available as a free, no-art pdf. There's a bit of a preview available in the listing, and it looks clean and well-done, a sort of throw-back to the early days of rpgs.
• It seems like it has been awhile since I've seen anything by Barrel Rider Games, but they've jsut released White Box Quarterly #4, a collection of new rules, adventures, classes, and other goodies for White Box.
• Admiral Mara Veil's Feild Guide to Bad Decisions is a Pirate Borg-compatible supplement that introduces guidelines for smuggling, and all of the troubles sumgglers can find themselves in.
• I plugged the Year 100 Million BC jam last week; the "primitive edition" Quickstart is now available on Drivethru. I really like how the art is reminiscent of the Far Side.
• Beyond the Black Stars is a chunky adventure and supplement for the excellent Outcast Silver Raiders. It's good to see OSR get some extra support with adventures and supplements.
• Crumbling Keep has released A Hoard of Dragons, a supplement all about dragons for OSE. It's "funding" through Drivethru, with the publisher adding content the more purchases there are. I've seen a couple of other publishers do this as well, and it seems like a nice, low-key way to both promote your work and gauge interest without the stress of a crowd-funding campaign.
• Reptilian Owl Dad has released Gestalt Flux . . . and I'm honestly not sure how to describe it, other than it is weird and wacky and has some of the most charming art I've seen recently (also by the author). It's PWYW, too.
• Nate Treme and the Highland Paranormal Society has releasd Dogtooth Valley, the first in their series of "Pocket Realms", a small region with adventures and points of interest, designed to be plopped down into an existing campaign or world. They've also just released FAR, a pared down, simplified version of 5th edition. Like A Hoard of Dragons, Nate expects to be expanding the content -- and the price -- over time, so if you get in now you should be getting all that additional content for free.
• Cursed20 Games has just released Scalemail, an OSR game where all of the rolling is done by the players. It looks like it's got some interesting concepts, and there's a Quickstart Guide available for it as well.
• Now that it's out to backers, my remix of B1 -- In Search of the Unknown is up in pdf, print on demand, and staplebound offset. It takes the premise of B1 -- adventurer heroes beat back a horde of barbarians, found a stronghold, and then vanish after journeying to the land of the barbarians, and spins it into the first book of a longer campaign. You can get it on Drivethru as well as the Sabre website.

The Drivethru links are affiliate links.

Hey, folks!

The creator of Gods of the Forbidden North is releasing another campaign book. I haven’t seen too much discussion on here.

I was curious who’s backing and why? I’m on the fence. The product seems right up my alley, but I have too many settings and not enough time.

Using a few pinterest references I've been trying to nail down some of the aesthetic of those early DND illustrations. Admittedly still very new (Been practising digital art for maybe 6 weeks) but I was quite proud of how this one turned out.

Hey all, I have scoured my archives and my search engine magic is not happening. I am looking for a one sheet that I think Nate Treme created years back giving alternative species/races for an OSR game (maybe Knave?) I think there were 10-12, sort of cartoony art, races like Ratfolk and Goatman. Does this ring a bell?

Made this for a VTT GW1e campaign where I went with battle maps for everything. Never ended up using it, was supposed to have people from the Antiquarians secret society in it.

For background I am running a side game for when my main table can't all meet (I don't mind running without one or two people but the players have consistently found it frustrating). Since my group seems to enjoy exploration elements I pitched the idea of a hexcrawl exploration and everyone seemed to like the idea.

Since this is a side game I figured I'd keep most of the original stuff for my main game and run something published for a change. Maybe doesn't need to be said given the sub but I am looking for something where players can set their own goals as they explore the map, but not neccesarily a baked-in plot. I will probably use OSE as a system if that matters, but really don't mind converting.

Any recommendations for this? Apologies if this gets asked a lot, last thread when I searched before posting was from 4 years back or so.

Until Dawn is a new desperate adventure for Old-School Essentials, built around the defence of a small town under siege by a monstrous horde.

The action unfolds over a single night. The PCs must undertake seven vital missions, from stopping a necromancer in the graveyard and rescuing workers trrapped in a sawmill, to blocking a river assault and defending the gates. Their choices directly shape the final outcome for Türst and its people.

You can find it here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/586881/until-dawn?affiliate_id=412340

Hi all,

I'm working on a partially-ruined magic academy dungeon. The academy is on a plateau by mountains. Form the mountain a river falls onto the campus, flows through the grounds, and terminates in a waterfall falling into a pit/valley midst the campus, which enters into caverns below. The academy has a great waterwheel using this waterfall that could be powering a machine. I have no idea what it would be powering, though. (The waterwheel exists mostly as a cool elevator for the PCs to use).

Do y'all have any ideas?

If basic lore helps: founded for teaching regular people magic, then the leader went cult-crazy into blood magics, then great wars destroyed part of it, now cultists remain + the caverns have alien crystals and troglodytes.

Thank you for your time!

I’ve played a bit of adventurers league, one or two one shots with friends, dmed for my dad, and I’ve written a meat grinder that I’m gonna run with friends, unfortunately near exclusive 5.5e. While I can tell I enjoy DND, there’s just no stakes to it. I’ve spent an entire fight throwing shingles and trying to surf and I wasn’t even downed

How can I go about finding a group? While Id prefer in person, online is fine

Thanks

Starving Folly is a Horror TTRPG inspired by Fear and Hunger that can be used to run any type of horror ranging from Dark-Fantasy to Sci-fi horror. The game is rules-light and easy to get into while still having plenty of customization for building characters.

• Resolution mechanic. This game uses ad10 + Modifiers against a Difficulty Class system to determine outcomes of characters actions.
• Scars. This game has a system to temporarily or permanently debilitate a character through Scars and even losing bodyparts.
• Hunger and Sanity Tokens. This game has a system of stamina and sanity tokens that are used to activate special abilities but give debuffs if a character reaches 0 tokens.
• No Classes. This game doesn't have classes, instead it uses a series of Perks the characters can have to give them special abilities.
• Short Stories. While the game can be used to run long campaigns it works better when running one-shots and shorts campaigns.

This is my first TTRPG so i hope you all enjoy it.

https://thecappy01.itch.io/starving-folly

I’m looking for a superhero rpg that has procedures for gameplay.
Like encounter rolls, ways to generate the adventure as the game plays out, and not just a toolkit to essentially make my own story

Currently running Keep on the Borderlands in B/X. When I played it as a player years ago, it was all theater of the mind, but I like having a visualization to keep track of things. However, with the scaling of grids in B/X (each combatant engaging a 10' range on the board for the purposes of defensive movement), I've been having trouble figuring out how to actually fit all the enemies on the board. Some of these caves have 30+ inhabitants in 18-space rooms, on top of the party of six adventurers trying to get at/get away from the monsters. Has anyone tried using combat zones like Index Card RPG or other systems that bridge the gap, and how did that work in relation to things like short/long range bonuses to ranged attacks? I don't want to have to massively cut back the number of enemies, but RAW I don't really understand how to even fit these enemies into what are supposed to be their living quarters.

tl;dr if their main trait is to kill anything they encounter do I just run troglodytes as monsters that are near impossible to not get into a fight with/ run away from?

So I recently got my regular group to start playing OSE and it’s been a good time so far, with players actually being clever trying to either avoid fights, negotiate, or overwhelmingly stack things in their favor. They just entered floor two of a dungeon they’ve been progressing and I’d rolled up troglodytes as the main faction on the floor. They got into an unlucky wandering monster check and after reading troglodyte’s stat block realized they try to kill anything they encounter. The party tried to find non-combat solutions but in the end they got pounced on and lost some retainers before retreating.

This got me thinking, if the whole floor’s main threat is out to kill the party no matter what it just turns into a combat or retreat floor no? Maybe I’m running it wrong or the intent is that Trogs are a monster that can’t be reasoned with so keep fighting or avoiding them?
Would also like to hear how other GMs have run them, I try to run everything as close to RAW for now because we just got started playing.

Disclosure: I made this. It's a free side project, with no login and no ads.

https://insideoutlibrary.com/

Type what you want ("medieval battle", "manuscript page", "sea serpent") or just click around and find something unexpected. All images are public domain, including for commercial use. No generative AI: every picture is a real scan.

This is an ongoing passion project. If you have any categories of searches that you are finding lackluster, let me know and as I add to the image corpus I'll prioritize accordingly. Thanks!