May D&D Sale 2022: My OSE Recommendations

 DriveThruRPG is having a HUGE sale on thousands of titles with the May D&D Sale, with everything Dungeons & Dragons, from Original to Fifth Edition!

And when I say thousands, I mean almost seventeen thousand. Good luck browsing those! Only considering the titles tagged as OSR, you get the incredible amount of 1980 titles on sale to check!

And to those, we must also add 107 official OD&D/BECMI titles, and 134 AD&D1stEd titles! 

The sheer amount of titles available makes it hard to create a list of OSR recommendations, so this time I'll focus on Old-School Essentials as it is my current go-to ruleset.

OSE Rulebooks

Of course the list begins with the core OSE books, both the Classic Rules Tome and the Advanced rules. If you're reading this, you're probably already a fan (like me), but don't forget sales are a great occasion to spread the word. Tell your friends!

Adventures

Well, the whole Old-School Essentials line is part of the sale, which means you can get some great adventures too, like Incandescent Grottoes or the Ennie award winning Halls of the Blood King, and also the Dolmenwood setting line!

Ominous Crypt of the Blood Moss - A very good 10 room dungeon. I've reviewed it here.

The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford - An exquisite, sandboxy point-crawl adventure for characters level 1-3, very easy to run, with lots of interaction between locations, that I can't wait to run. Just reviewed it!

Puzzle Dungeon: The Seers Sanctum - Another very good 10 room dungeon with, well, a lot of well conceived puzzles. I've reviewed it here, and if this dungeon is a great opportunity to connect your existing campaign to the setting outlined in the best seller Planar Compass zine series which is on sale too!

Hideous Daylight and Temple of 1000 Swords - Two third-party Old-School Essentials adventures by Swordlords Publishing with awesome reviews.

Xanadu - Another acclaimed third-party Old-School Essentials dungeon adventure, by Singing Flame.

Bottomless Pit of Zorth - Another acclaimed adventure, with a slime theme and insane art, for  characters level 3-5, which is a less frequent level bracket in comparison to level 1-4, and makes it definitely worth checking.

Tannic - A just released level 1-3 adventure set in a haunted forest, by Amanda Pratt, that looks pretty cool (seriously, check the preview).

Sourcebooks, Supplements & Zines

The whole Third Kingdom line of hexcrawl supplements is out there, including the great Filling in the Blanks guide.

The unusual A Groats-worth of Grotesques bestiary, which I've reviewed here.

The Delver Magazine zine series, full of awesome random tables, along with its Tavern spin-off.

My very own Lands of Legends zine series, learn more about it here.

The Old School & Cool zine series by Knight Owl Publishing.

Bonus Offerings

For those who feel like reading thousands of pages, the Castle Oldskull Megabundle is definitely worth a look (includes guides, classes, bestiaries and even novels), and price-wise it is the sale with the largest discount.

And if all those sales don't whet your appetite, you can check some free or PWYW titles, such as my own Old-School Essentials e-zines, or the stunning Black Pudding zines by James West!

Axian Library Preview: A new d20 Table of Magical Mishaps

  Here's a d20 table with twenty new Magical Mishaps for your OSR game of choice, wether is Old-School Essentials, Labyrinth Lord, Sword & Wizardry, or any other clone of OE, B/X, or BECMI Dungeons and Dragons.

This is the second preview from the new, alternate Magical Mishaps table that will be included Axian Library. The first preview can be found here.

The full table will include 100 results, to complement the original table from Wondrous Weavings Warped and Weird, totaling 200 different effects!

They are, in turn, a functional part of the whole alternate arcane magic system detailed in Wondrous Weavings Warped and Weird, which empowers the the players of magic users to break the rules of magic, if they are willing to take some risk....

These mishaps have effects that are not "Spell range is reduced by 10%". Who needs these? I don't. I want  actual consequences and the possibility to create fun, interesting, challenging situations that push the game and the story on.

Hope you'll like them!

d20 Magical Mishaps

Roll a d20. If the listed effect affects the target, and the intended spell didn't target a creature, the effect is applied to the caster.

1. A decorated stone fountain appears next to the target, with brilliant water spouting. A character drinking from the fountain rerolls their ability scores. The fountain has a 2-in-6 chance of disappearing after use.
2. The spell creates a magic mouth on the nearest wall. It can identify magic item properties by tasting them, but wants to be fed fresh fruit for its services.
3. An earthquake shakes the ground in a 1d6 mile radius. Unstable buildings and structures (including dungeon sections) have a 3-in-6 chance of collapsing; mechanical room traps hidden in walls, floors etc. have a 3-in-6 chance of getting damaged and stop working.
4. A black disk covers the sun for 2d6 days. For the duration, chaotic monsters gain +1 attack rolls and saves.
5. A tombstone appears next to the caster and to each of their allies, with their names on it. They suffer -2 to all their saves while in sight of their tombstone.
6. The caster vomits a stream of 1d4 x 5,000 copper pieces, equivalent to a breath attack (a cone, 30’ long, 1’ wide at the mouth, 30’ wide at the far end). All caught in the area suffer 1d8 damage (save versus breath for half). The caster may target the breath in the direction they prefer.
7. All creatures capable of speech within 10’ of the target reveal their best kept secret.
8. The spell summons a tyrannosaurus rex 2d6’ from the target. Roll for random reaction.
9. A 1’ long, spiraling horn grows on the target’s forehead. It has a continual light spell on it, which the target can switch on and off.
10. The spell creates 1d4+1 killer bees telepathically linked to the caster and obeying their mental commands.
11. The caster’s eyes become mirrors. They are now immune to all gaze effects and abilities.
12. Stone statues appear next to every creature within 50’ of the target, duplicating their aspect.
13. The spell summons 2d6+20 goats 1d6’ from the target (herd animal, small; 1 HD). Roll 1d4 every round. 1: flee immediately. 2-4: stampede in a random direction (roll 1d12 and read it like a clock).
14. All metal weapons and shields within 50’ of the caster are pulled into a magic vortex, forming an anthropomorphic iron living statue which obeys the caster’s orders. After 2d4 rounds, or if killed, the statue crumbles in a pile of all the weapons that made it (intact).
15. The caster’s INT and STR scores are swapped for 1d6 days.
16. The caster and all creatures within 100’ float 3’ up into the air for 1d6 turns as per the levitate spell, except they can’t mentally direct vertical movement.
17. All creatures of comparable size within 100’ of the target become illusory copies of the target.
18. All footwear within 10’ of the target are magically glued to the ground for 24 hours.
19. All the caster’s prepared spells leave their mind and transfer their energy into the nearest non-magic sword, turning it into a sentient sword. The sword’s INT is equal to 6 + the number of spells drained from the caster’s mind (up to 12).
20. All non-magic melee weapons within 100’ of the target become succulent roasted gigots, with the same size of the original item.

Into OSR? Check my other OSR posts and reviews!

About Artifices, Deceptions and Dilemmas

 Artifices, Deceptions and Dilemmas is a book by Courtney C. Campbell, of Hack & Slash blog fame.

In short: this book collects guidelines and ideas for old-school games DMs to both create and adjudicate fairly a variety of "unusual circumstances, hazards, benefits, and puzzles, and creating interesting encounters". It is designed to create better dungeons, and to become better at running them at the table.

Is this for you? You may check some portions of the content at Campbell's blog.

The print-on-demand version, which I've grabbed a couple months ago, is a 162 page, A5 b&w book. It is available both as soft- and hardcover, and I've picked the latter as I strongly prefer a solid book. It is one of the few OSR titles that are currently part of the global Best of Print sale on drivethru (and for some strange reason the hardcover costs less than the softcover version).

Esthetically, AD&D (see what he did there?) is a spartan book with a super-simple, one-column layout.

It sports an amazing wrap-around cover art by Karl Stjemberg (aka skullfungus), and a LOT of functional art by Campbell in the Rooms section of the book (more on that later), plus a bunch of illustrations by James Shields.

Skullfungus' incredible wrap-around cover

What game is this for? Despite the acronym, AD&D is a book for DMs/GMs/Referees running any old-school or OSR-adjacent game. Game rules and statistics are barely present, if at all, as the focus of the book is on dungeon design and adjudication. I think it can be of interest to GMs of any edition of Dungeons & Dragons or other fantasy games, if they feel traps-as-hp-tax and perception checks are boring.

So...

Let's break down the content. We have four main sections: Rooms, Agency, Traps, Tricks.

The first section has a set of tables to randomly determine the specific nature of a room. Each of the results of such tables is described in the following pages, where you find more than 100 room types in alphabetical order, from Amphitheater to Zoo. Each room is described in objective terms, with its necessary, functional features, plus a list of possible additional elements, objects that can reasonably be found in that type of room, plus an illustration for each. This section is definitely useful if you like your dungeon rooms to make sense! See the images below for some nice examples.

The second section, Agency, describes the mechanical or magical functioning of a variety of triggers such as pressure plates, switches, latches, levers, and so on. More important, and the reason why the title of the section is Agency, this section describes how to run them in game: what to describe, how to give clues, how to give a reason to players to investigate and interact with them.

The third section, Traps, describes what's at the other end of the trigger, detailing more than 30 literal traps and environmental hazards, from arrow trap to vents & sprays. For each, examples are given to make them unique, and turn them from a boring hp-tax into an interesting encounter.

Where the Rooms and Traps sections deal with physical elements of a dungeon, the last section of the book, Tricks, tackles situations. It describes 17 categories of them, form bait to weirdness, each with examples, plus a two-page guide on how to design them for your games.

AD&D together with its companion book OD&D, and the Italian version of Old-School Essentials 

All in all

Like the immensely popular The Dungeon Alphabet, this is a great book if you want more creative fuel when designing your dungeon. What's more: it gives a lot solid advice on how to design environments and situations that create challenging gameplay in the OSR sense: challenging player skill to investigate and interact with the environment in a meaningful way.

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Into OSR? Check my other OSR posts, reviews and games!