Hey! I've been working on and collecting ideas for something that's been living in my head for quite a while now.

It's a project about a city called Ragbone — a place that finds a use for everything other cities throw away. And I mean everything: discarded materials, unwanted ideas, strange inventions, and even some rather questionable creatures.

This is a little glimpse of everyday life there. In Ragbone, venom milking is just one of many perfectly normal trades.

Wild caterpillars in this world had small, retractable venom glands on the undersides of their bodies. When attacked, the glands released an irritating substance that could even paralyze some predators. Over generations, goblins (because Ragbone is mostly a goblin city} selectively bred caterpillars that produced the most venom, until their glands turned into large, soft sacs resembling udders. The caterpillars can still partially retract these sacs while moving, and breeders are able to collect this valuable substance without killing the fuzzy-headed caterpillars.

I'm still developing the world and illustrating its many oddities, and I thought I'd start sharing some of them here.

The texts are in Polish: Milking venom, do not startle, be careful and A Class - very itchy.

Hope you like it!

Fantasy RPG modules for 1st/2nd Edition Advanced D&D (AD&D), B/X-BECMI D&D, Pathfinder, OSRIC, DCC, Swords & Wizardry, & OSR systems.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dgg-03/cloud-and-stone-a-dungeon-delve-adventure-duo

Magicians and Magic of the Darkened Earth

After over a year of drafting, feedback, and edits, I'm finally ready to release my Dying Earth inspired class for review and playtesting!

With 45 new spells, 9 new magic items, and a class built to evoke the Vancian style of magic while staying true to Shadowdark's "Roll-to-Cast" magic system, this was quite the endeavor for me. I look forward to any comments, critiques, and other feedback on my work.

Hi!

This is my first drawing in OSR style. Trying to play with light and and shadow.

What do you think about it? Do you have any tips or advices to improve my skills?

Thanks for your answers!

In the spirit of spooky season, I made a recent dungeon module pay what you want: A Century of Grief on an Eclipsed Night. If you want the printed version, you will need to at least cover printing and shipping. Otherwise, you can get the PDF for whatever.

If you get around to reading it and/or running it, I would be very happy to hear your thoughts (preferably as a review, but you can also message me here), so that I can see what worked or clicked for you.

Cheers

We’re wrapping up a year-long Old-School Essentials campaign soon, and am looking for a palette cleanser. I mostly run vanilla fantasy, and since 2/3 of these players have only ever had me as their GM, I thought a brief hop over to sci-fi might be fun, and perhaps eye opening to most of my table.

System is less important, as I can convert as-needed, but I’m leaning toward a Mark of the Odd game like Monolith, Meteor, or Opera.

I’m interested in an adventure module that can be played in 1 or 2 three-hour sessions.

Themes/Settings I’m not interested in:

- a lot of insectoid horror (no triggers, just not into it)
- a lot of body horror (no triggers, just not into it)
- IP settings (I love Starwars, Dune, Star Trek,… but I don’t want to distract my players with any setting errors I make)
- military/space marines (just doesn’t sound interesting to me)

Themes/Settings I’m into:

- space opera
- space western
- retrofuturism
- steampunk
- Tech-noir
- light horror/thriller
- Exploration and/or investigation

(Please no “just write your own adventure” recommendations).

There is a French teenager who was very active here under the name Zonreiryd. He loved AD&D and posted pictures of fantastic maps he drew and play reports of old modules like Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. I always enjoyed his stuff but don't think I have seen anything from him for some time. Does anyone have any news about him?

Late edit: so politics. okay

Based on the cult classic Chill RPG we’ve poured all our passion, heart, and knowledge of Chill into this project to pay homage to the original 1985 work, while creating a gripping horror thriller. Mark Acres, co-founder of Pacesetter and co-creator of Chill, has done us the honor of writing the foreword.

Stay tuned for all the details on the upcoming release.

Subscribe on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

Gorth is a sci-fantasy comic, traditionally drawn, inked, and lettered by me. Issue 1 features a one page old-school dungeon adventure on the back cover. Pay what you want PDF available here.

Three years after taking the plunge in the OSR, I have released my first OSR adventure, The Hive Under Eisenstead! This was funded via Kickstarter as a part of Zine Quest 2026, and is now live on DriveThruRPG.

In addition to some amazing art and maps, some key features are:

• Designed for characters of 2nd to 4th level.
• Statted for both old school systems (OSRIC, OSE, Swords & Wizardry) and modern systems (5E, Shadowdark, Pathfinder).
• 84 keyed locations across four areas. 
• Four new monsters and several riffs on classic foes.
• Two rival adventuring parties.
• Several unique magic items and two new Magma Sorcery spells in D&D and DCC compatible formats.
• Five adventure hooks to tie player characters to NPCs immediately.
• 48-pages in a 5.5" x 8.5" zine format, easily printed at home. 
• 14 handouts, both digital and printer-friendly. 
• Player-ready maps and digital tokens for a virtual tabletop. 

It was a blast to make, and it has been incredible to see it come to life. I hope you will check it out.

I currently own The Staffortonshire Trading Company Works of John Williams, Fungi of the Far Realms and The Perilous Wilds. I am looking for similar system neutral books that can enhance games with world building tools and tangible descriptions of interesting stuff. Not necessarily in-game artefacts/books as they tend to be only useful through one campaign but any idea of the sorts are welcome.

They will be bought with our "table tip jar" so I want a book that will see use during play and not only during GM prep work.

Thanks for your ideas!

Happy Friday,

Mushrooms and fungus. An integral part of many adventures:

Welcome to the weekly r/osr blogroll - come share your great ideas!

The mission: to be a showcase and clearinghouse of blogposts where we share in the DIY principles of old-school gaming. So drop in links to your writings, gaming theory, advice, play reports, and whatever other creativity you have posted on your blogs to share with our community.

Also, if you have favorite blogs you follow, or find interesting blogposts that you want to share, feel free to post them here, as well!

Happy blogging!

I'm talking about books like Veins of the Earth, Wyrd and Wyld, Vast in the Dark, Skycrawl, books about building a specific personal version of a kind of setting.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hilanderrpgs/fletchwind-out-of-the-cities

Hey folks!

9 authors and artists got together to make an Urban Adventuring-focused zine, including 3 fresh adventures and a bunch of tools! Stats are for Cairn, but the tools are universal.

Adventures by Arnold K, Willem-Jan, and Wuggy

Tools by Hilander, Phlox, and GeekChef

New Backgrounds by Cats Have No Lord

Art by Karly Andersen

Comic by Labjer

Hi fellow judges, I'm back to share the city I have been developing. That setting, Akawatten, is still under development, but previous posts here have encouraged me to share my progress, so I wanted to share my latest achievement: I recently finished the map and made it available for free download. Regardless of what system you use, it may be useful for your game. The file is a 24"x18" PDF at high resolution, so you can even print it at poster scale.

I plan to do a little bit of a dev log series on my blog about Akawatten, since designing the city has been the largest-scale project I have undertaken as an OSR game designer so far. It's been a really rewarding challenge, and researching all the old city modules and learning from them has been a ton of fun as well. I think it's a space that is still a little underdeveloped compared to all the mega dungeons and adventures out there, so hopefully something like this gives you more tools to work with in your games.

As a bonus, the post also links to two free adventures I wrote this past summer for adventure jams, so there is something free for basically everyone!

Happy gaming!

Hi all, and thanks to for letting me share this.

This is Whisper Creek, a little Indiana town that’s been quiet since 1958. It was the town map for the first version of The Drowned Bell, a module I’ve been writing. Six kids in the 80s find a homemade dungeon booklet in a shoebox, written by a boy who vanished years ago, and start playing it in a basement. The more they play, the more the game bleeds into their town, and the more the town bleeds back into the game. In the final version the town became a different place, but Whisper Creek is where it started.

I drew it with the 80’s Suburbia kit. That’s one of three rubber stamp kits my wife and I are launching on Kickstarter this Tuesday, October 20, alongside high fantasy and a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Every stamp is drawn by hand, then traced and laser cut. The idea is one plenty of you already use: draw the map at the table as the players poke around, not before. This version was assembled digitally from the stamp illustrations so it prints cleanly (I also included the map base we include as part of the suburbia kit so you can make your own isometric town).

The map is free to use at your table. If you’d like to see the stamps, the project is here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kingdomsofink/kingdoms-of-ink

Happy to answer questions about the stamps, the process or the town.

[SELF PROMO]

Something is crawling out of the grave. Different but with that same cigarette, blood, and pizza craving fever soul. The new breed clashes with the old bloods and no one ever learns any lessons till its too late and then some Morningstar burns the sky up and the swarms of slayers start showing up. Might as well enjoy the moonlight while it lasts and get ready for the next show.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/deathandthewerewolf/into-the-night-a-goth-punk-city-monster-rpg

After 40+ years of enjoyable game play - in the same scenario that started 1982 - I am still inspired by the basic OSR art. This is my latest drawing from the story "The Witch of Myrkholt", one of the first scenarios I created in the 80s and the very first that started a campaign that has been going on for 45 years :)

So I’ve been cooking this one for a while and wanted to see if it lands with you lot. Your players run two people each: a kid in Corwin Mills, Pennsylvania, the last week of October 1984, and that kid’s character in a homemade dungeon their 13-year-old DM bought at a yard sale for a quarter. The booklet was typed in 1977 by a kid the whole town has somehow forgotten. Thing is, stuff bleeds between the two. Light a torch down there and a bulb pops upstairs, get your character soaked and your sneakers are full of river silt next morning, sneak into the fenced-off flood ruins by the river and next session your sneaker prints are in the matching dungeon room. A single hidden number called Static tracks how bad the leak’s getting, and on Halloween night the bell at the bottom rings whether you’re ready or not. What it rings depends on whether the kids figured out who that forgotten boy was.

Under the hood it’s plain B/X for the dungeon (3 levels: a drowned abbey, flooded cellars, and a bell tower buried upside down in the earth) plus a dead simple 2d6 roll-under system for the kids, where the real dangers are getting grounded, getting disbelieved and having your mom call the PTA about “that game.” Kids never get hurt, characters die like normal. Nothing ever walks down Main Street; every weird thing has an explanation an adult would buy. It’s built for 5–6 sittings, comes with 6 pregen kids, maps, handouts, and it’s free, not for sale. Would this hit your table? Mostly curious whether the two-layer thing sounds fun to actually run or just fun to read, and if folks want it I’ll drop the PDF.

Hey everyone,

I'm looking for advice on how to run a rival adventuring party/faction that is in the dungeon at the same time as the players.

CONTEXT: The dungeon is a ruined war-torn magic academy, there's evil magic cultists in the academy, and there's a band of fed-up villagers / warriors turned witch hunters that have entered the dungeon seeking to destroy everything and everyone magic. Burn the library, capture all the items, kill any cultist they find, etc.

The witch hunters are a threat to the PCs of course because the PCs want the magic books and items.

I'm trying to figure out the best way to simulate the witch hunters' progress through the academy as a time pressure and threat to the PCs. Some ideas:

• The witch hunters have already destroyed the rooms they can easily access and are kept at bay by an obstacle. Roll % to see if they get further in X day(s) (or if the PCs clear a path)
• For the reachable rooms, roll % to see if the witch hunters have sacked it or not (etc).
• Have a basic timeline, like day 1 of the PCs' arrival, the witch hunters will have made X progress, on day 2, this much progress etc, (of course the timeline will change if the PCs do something major).

Do y'all have any ideas?

Thank you for your time!

EDIT: To be clear, while I am considering a bit of a 'race' theme with this, this dungeon is meant to be at least 3 levels big and there are 2 dangerous factions to worry about, so the witch hunters will not be clearing the place out no matter what.