My interest in RPG publishing and blogging about such things has been practically absent for some years now, leading to no new output from my DIY publishing imprint Lazy Sod Press. I have of course continued to write and play RPGs during this time, but only with my tabletop group and mostly non-OSR/D&D games.

However, this is about to end pretty soon, as my interest in these things have returned, mainly as a result of being a player in my buddy’s old school Rules Cyclopedia/BECMI D&D game “Night’s Dark Terror“, which was super cool and hilariously fun. Somewhere, I had forgotten how smooth these old rules run.

I currently have three partly written up adventures in various states of finished-ness:

• Tomb of the War-Pig (short super lethal dungeon adventure)
• Fiery the Angel Fell (longer adventure including a base village, an overland area and a large creepy dungeon complex abandoned by the forces of good)
• Klaatu Verata Nictu (part 3 of my adventure trilogy Per Aspera ad Inferi, set in the Silent Valley and centered around a weird sorceress and her bio-horror experiments)

All the adventures are set in different parts of my own loosely defined setting Terra Inomminata, but easily placed in the GM:s world of choice.

Going forward, I have also decided to change my preferred publishing game format to Old School Essentials (OSE). I have previously supported Blood & Treasure (1st ed) and Swords & Wizardry Complete, as well as Castles & Crusades and Labyrinth Lord. However, I see no point in publishing several versions of the same materials and it is pretty simple to convert adventures between different OSR and old D&D versions. Maybe, I will write down a free short PDF about conversion between various OSR and Old School D&D systems, making it even more convenient.

The reasons for changing the game system to OSE is that (i) OSE is easily available where I live, (ii) the production values are very high (i.e. the books are gorgeous), and (iii) that it is actively supported and published by a professional publisher. These days it is pretty much also the most popular and talked about OSR game, thus ensuring interest from the old school gaming community. Labyrinth Lord and Blood & Treasure were among the first but are one-man print-on-demand projects that seem mostly abandoned these days. To be fair, I really like Swords & Wizardry Complete that is also produced professionally, but it is nigh impossible to get hold of in Europe where I live, so there’s that.

This also means that I will create OSE versions of my currently published stuff at DTRPG and Lulu, cleaning them up and improving things I’m not 100 % happy with these days. It also means that i probably will retract the older Blood & Treasure, Castles & Crusades, and Swords & Wizardry versions as well.

Personally, I prefer Castles & Crusades for my own games and will probably use that rule set at my table most of the time, as it feels like the logical successor to AD&D 1e/2e, but with modernized mechanics that actually makes sense. For shorter games or one-shots I will however go with Old School Essentials.

More information about these things will be published on this blog, so keep your eyes peeled if you are interested!