Sometimes something is "one and done," and all you can think is - "more would have been awesome!" That's how I view The Wizard's Scroll, a zine for Swords & Wizardry, but really usable as is with any OSR game. Look at the contents squeezed into 50-some odd pages - new races, new monsters, new magic items, two whole adventures, critical hits, and so much more!
The Wizard's Scroll is priced at PWYW, so feel free to leave a tip if you find value in it.
The Wizard's Scroll is a new Swords & Wizardry fanzine. Within you will find all manner of excellent gaming material by some truly creative fans of the game.
2 Races: The Testudo (tortoise men) and Ratfolk
A Spell: Binding Familiars
An NPC for Carcosa
4 Monsters: The Skin Bag, Lightning Monk, Shield Guardian and the Abominable Beastman
7 Magic Items: Including Zum Kali’s Ancient Sword of Bone and the Claws of Carcajou
2 Adventures: The Demon-Shattered Tower (levels 2-3) and The Bandit Caves of Cyrus Blacknail (low level)
A Fantastic Location: The Wizard’s Tower
Optional Rules: Critical Hits and Basic Skills
A Recipe: How to Cook a Halfling
So put on your reading glasses (if you need them) and settle down in a comfortable chair. For the Wizards of the Scroll have cast an arcane ritual of "Read Magic" enabling the secrets of the Scroll to be read by all, for the very first time.
Kevin Crawford and his Sine Nomine publishing house are best known for Stars Without Number, Kevin's behemoth of an OSR ruleset that showed you didn't need the OGL and the 3.x SRD to create OSR-compatible material. Kevin plowed his own path, and it has worked very well for him.
In 2021, Kevin published Worlds Without Number, coming perhaps full circle, and giving us OGL free OSR rules for fantasy gaming that feel familiar to old school gamers, and continued using his popular Tag System (to enhance sandbox play).
As an alternative to WotC D&D, Worlds Without Number is an excellent choice. The Tag System should be in every GM's toolkit.
Worlds Without Number is a fantasy role-playing game, one fully compatible with the hit sci-fi game Stars Without Number. It's built from the ground up to provide gritty, hard-edged adventure in the fathomless future of the Latter Earth, a fantastic realm of time-lost sorcery, savage foes, and barbaric splendor. The cold steel in the fists of your heroes and the half-understood sorcery in their tomes must suffice to overcome the monstrous remnants of ancient alien rulers and the present depredations of ruthless lords and hideous beasts alike. The riches of lost ages await in the subterranean Deeps that once held their kingdoms, and even the heavens above are not beyond the reach of the recklessly daring.
(Note: this is the free version of WWN. If you'd like to grab the full deluxe edition with almost fifty extra pages of bonus content, head right over.)
Worlds Without Number isn't just a savage game of steel and sorcery. It's packed solid with system-neutral GM tools and worldbuilding support, with hundreds of pages of useful tools, tags, tables, and practical advice usable by any GM, regardless of their favorite setting or system. The well-loved sci-fi tools of Stars Without Number are reworked here to support fantasy gaming, whether in the provided setting of the Latter Earth or in your own carefully-crafted homebrew world. Even GMs who don't prefer the OSR-compatible game system of WWN will find more than half the book dedicated to tools they can use in the systems they like best.
So what do you get in this book?
Sword and sorcery heroes of blade, cunning, and spell. The proven OSR-compatible character creation system of Stars Without Number is redone here for a fantasy world of blade and black magic.
OSR-compatible rules, allowing you to plunder decades of existing adventure material for your play. You can even pull in Stars Without Number content, as it's fully compatible.
The Gyre region of the far-future Latter Earth, a premade sandbox for quick play. Venture forth to clash with the sinister powers that gather in the shadow of the waning rule of the Reaping King.
Worldbuilding tools crafted to the renowned Sine Nomine standard. Did you like the hundred different world tags in SWN? Then have two hundred inspirational tags to help you build ruins, courts, communities, and wilderness points of interest. Grab a wealth of tools for building histories, societies, governments, religions, and geography, all written with a keen eye toward producing good, playable content for your adventuring group.
Adventure creation tools to soothe the pangs of a working GM, with guides for building adventures out of combat, exploration, social, and investigative challenges. Use the tags you picked in the worldbuilding section to speed up your creation of a good night's gaming.
Faction rules for fantasy worlds, with dark cults, fierce lords, grasping abbots, and greedy merchants all serving to keep your world in motion even when the PCs aren't on the scene.
Nominally written for Swords & Wizardry, Hack! Firearmsshould be suitable for ANY OSR game (and possibly, with some tweaking, 5e. Written by the same team (Straycouches Press) behind the CRAWL! Zine for the DCC RPG. Do you want to bring firearms into your OSR game or run a S&W Western campaign? You've got what you need right here.
Hack! Firearms! is a supplement compatible with the Swords & Wizardry rules. It features simple firearms rules, an adventure tool-kit for introducing firearms to your campaign and whole bunch more!
Basic and optional rules for Firearms.
Different eras of firearms and their stats.
An adventure tool-kit for adding guns to your campaign.
Friday Post Roundup
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A few posts of interest for the week or so.
- Grognardia has a brief look at the Victory Games James Bond RPG Q-Manual.
A great supplement back in the day,...
[Fanzine Focus XXXVII] Black Pudding #8
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On the tail of Old School Renaissance has come another movement—the rise of
the fanzine. Although the fanzine—a nonprofessional and nonofficial
publicatio...
dErO - VotE: Re Development
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the mysterious Stephan Poag did a comic about them!
The dErO Do Not Exist
You do not believe in dErO. The Player Characters *cannot* believe in dErO.
...
Fog Diver’s Personal Log — SCV12
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Operator: J. Taran | Date: Cycle 2447.98 | Vessel: SCV 12 “Bleeding Mercy”I
woke to the sound of the filtration alarms coughing again—three dry pulses,
the...
The grodog Thither and Hither and Points Between
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While the blog and I have languished together in torpid stupor for quite
some time now, the blog's silence did not originate in or from
*wordslessness*, ...
Where did I come from? Where do I go?
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Part of the reason I went all in about videogame design and dropped RPGs
entire was as always ADHD. But another big part was that I had been having
some am...
Tariffs, CanCon, and You
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In 1972 the CBC asked listeners to complete the saying "As Canadian as...",
to match "As American as apple pie." The winner was "As Canadian as
possible ...
Temple of the Beggar-King
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By Jesse GerroirLuminescent Lich PublishingOSELevel 9 One-thousand years
ago the royal guard of Leon III, the King of Kings, set out into the desert
to fin...
Landmark Sites - Hazard
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The next two landmarks will be the overtly bad ones. No positive spin on
this, a Hazard is just a place you want to avoid.
Unless...
Well, let’s make th...
Hexcrawling for Ethyria pt 1
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As my game is small currently I'm going for sandbox style with lots of
mission tables and adventure threads in my villages but now I ...
Afrika Korps Tiger 1 - WiP
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Next project: a 15mm Tiger 1 for my Afrika Korps.
I'm 3d printing an Afrika model, with the Feifel air cleaners, from
TigerAce1945. It's the one in the...
Music Monday - Pink Pony Club
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I will admit I'm a little late to the game, but I've been listening to
Chappell Roan a lot recently and after watching a skit was inspired to
create a magi...
Should you PAY your GM?
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Let's start with the conclusion: GM-for-pay is okay.
In other words: there is nothing wrong with paying someone to run a game
for you, or charging people f...
Noodle Bar & Industrial Scatter Terrain
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This past weekend I got a couple of solid hours to paint when I wasn’t dead
tired, and decided to spend it on the 3D printed Flatline City Noodle Bar
tha...
A Surprising Look at Murderhobos...
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So I asked a question on Facebook this week. What did people do with the
humanoid women and children in the Caves of Chaos, among similar
adventures, persu...
36 units sold on day one
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Not big Kickstarter-type numbers or anything but still pretty personally
gratifying to me, because 1) it'a more copies than the first book sold on
its fi...
Praise for Songs of the Dying Earth
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Among my favourite works of fantasy fiction are the *Dying Earth* stories
and the *Lyonesse *trilogy by Jack Vance. I’ve read the *Lyonesse *trilogy
three ...
Best OSR Cartographers
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A video about some my favorite cartographers in the game. This is not an
exhaustive list, but the ones I go to the most and ones that have
influenced my st...
Gary Con XVII
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I attended Gary Con this year. Last year, I was supposed to go, but
something came up and I had to cancel. This year, I ran a scenario I
created called The...
[BLOG] News on the March! Episode VI.
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This post continues the series of brief play reports I have been posting on
Discord. This does not cover every single session (sometimes, recon and
setup...
On the Success of the VOTE
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You voted for it, and it's here!
All the prices on the books I sell on DTRPG will be rising in price, 40-50%
so I can maintain the same margin as now!
...
Fight On! number 16 is out.
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The new issue of *Fight On!* has been out for a bit. You can get copies via
drivethru or lulu.
I haven't finished reading my copy, but I'd like to reco...
Wandering through the Majestic Fantasy Realms
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It's time for another Bat in the Attic update!
I am halfway through the first draft of my upcoming project, Into the
Majestic Fantasy Realms, the Northe...
The Hungering Dark
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Go into the earth, and reality will walk alongside you.
Walk further, and you will eventually be walking alone.
The world is plastic down there. Tar Lat...
Hobby Bingo 2025: January Progress
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Welcome back to the Vault! I've painted a few bits and pieces in January
and made a dent into my Hobby Bingo card! First up is a Chaplain in
Terminator ...
NTRPG Gaming Weekend
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[image: NTRPG Gaming Weekend]
This weekend was a "game day" for North Texas RPG Con, held at the same
hotel the con is held at. I haven't slung dice since...
The Stats of a Dave Arneson Player Character.
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If you want to find the details for one of the characters that Gary Gygax
made and played as a PC, perhaps to use as an NPC in your own game, it
isn't t...
Articulations
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Creating house rules, custom rules specific to a local group or campaign,
has been common throughout the history of D&D. What makes an effective
house rule...
A Fiftieth Anniversary Year
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The 50th anniversary year of *Dungeons & Dragons *is drawing to a close. A
number of projects I'd been planning for this year finally came out, and I
...
A Quick Look at The Wizard’s Scroll II
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October of this year saw the release of The Wizard’s Scroll II, the second
issue of a White Box Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game (FMAG) zine whose first ...
Writing playlists for all occasions
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Hello again! Going off the idea of inspiration elaborated on by the prior
post, I also have music playing while I write my various games and fiction
pieces...
The Tarot of Pips
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Somewhere in your dice collection is a die like this one, the humblest of
dice. Although you don't know it, this small white die carries with it a
secr...
Pirates and Necromancers, a Play Report
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Over the Thanksgiving weekend we did a lot of gaming ranging from
“off-table” domain level stuff to some solo adventures to spell and magic
item rese...
Welcome new Greyhawk Fans!
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With the publication of the new Dungeon Master’s Guide, there are doubtless
going to be a lot of new D&D players interested in my favorite setting, the
Wor...
It's been a bit
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Hey everyone, I hope you are doing well! I've had a lot going on and
haven't had much time to blog lately. Heres a recap of gaming events and
other st...
*'s in SpaaaaaAaaaace
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A lot of SF (including a certain 2D6 RPG grandaddy) deal with ancient
aliens taking humans from Earth and dropping them, fleas and all, on one or
more w...
Last move - to self-hosting!
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As my vote regarding Substack in the “marketplace of ideas”, I’m moving to
self-hosting.
I’m now at (and hopefully staying for a long time at)
Blog: ht...
This is an Important Game Mechanic
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*"That's the GM's Regional Map from my AOWG. And it's a damned good
regional map. It's not a good map for a Simple Homebrew Campaign. It does
some s$&...
Clean Your Room
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Looking back at my little blog here. That last post… wow, I was having fun
playing WOW Classic! That was August of 1999 and I was having a blast… it
was ...
Steve Jackson Interview
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James Maliszewski recently did an interview with Steve Jackson over on his
Grognardia blog. Steve chats about the beginnings of The Fantasy Trip and
upcomi...
ToAD Monster of the Week: Crocoman
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Now that I'm back doing the blog thing I thought I would use Tome of
Adventure Design to create monsters for The Black Hack.
Using the monster tables in th...
Strange, Dangerous, and Inhuman: The Fey and Fairie
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When I was a boy I loved fairy tales. Jack and the Beanstalk, Puss in
Boots, Rumpelstiltskin - I devoured all of it. My fascination that there
was a strang...
New Map of the Elf Empire and Southern Isles
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I’ve been having fun developing a new map-drawing style that I think is
finally reaching a certain level of maturity. And yeah, it owes a lot to Matthew
Ad...
Dungeons & Dragonmead Fall Schedule
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*As you know, I run public classic Dungeons & Dragons games at **The Loaded
Die**/Metro Detroit Game Night's Board Game Nigh at **Dragonmead**, in
Warren...
Fiction in Airhde
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On a whim this weekend, I picked up some fiction off the TLG store. *A
Houseless God & Other Tales* and *The Mirrored Soul & Other Tales*, both by
the T...
Ravensburg Reboot: Streamlined City Map
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I mentioned in my last post how I was tweaking and reworking parts of my
Ravensburg setting. Today I streamlined the city map. The old map had lots
of redu...
And Now the News Draft Download on Patreon
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It's self-styled Throwback Thursday and *having just released the 34-page
draft booklet of Hill Cantons news to my Patreon backers* I am going to
indulge m...
The Withered Crag available now
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I just enabled the sale of the PDF version of The Withered Crag at
DriveThruRPG a few minutes ago, and the custom print version will be
available startin...
Annihilation Rising Goes live
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The latest in Fail Squad Games’ Quick Kick projects has gone live and needs
your support!! This project is only running 11 days and ends on 5/28/2019!
...
James's Celebration of Life
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We could not have asked for a prettier day for James's service. It was a
bit chilly and windy but gorgeous. A heartfelt thank you to all that joined
us tod...
Trap Tuesday: A step back
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I will get back to Tomb of Horrors soon. I found a topic that was
interesting enough to take a break. While interacting in a 5E group on
Facebook I talked ...
Let's Talk About Pacing!
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The idea, I think, is that the RPG is ultimately about the long game. Even
rolling back to the early days of Basic & Expert, the goal of the player
was...
Profane and Profound Prep Part 2
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This is part 2 of my work to edit my magic items for a DMsGuild release,
along with adding cursed items along the way. Here is part 1. Bone of a
Saint 8000...
Please, I don't do paid advertisements - don't ask.
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A little note since people have asked me about this. My video channel's
*not* an advertising platform, so I'm not available for hire if you want to
promote...
New website!
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Slowly but surely, all the content here will make its way — in updated
form! — to my new website: timbannock.com. For fairly obvious reasons, that
site wil...
Please Update Your Link!
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If you're seeing this, it means your link to the Greyhawk Grognard blog is
out of date.
Please update your link to www.greyhawkgrognard.com (RSS feed is
h...
Total Sales for WB:FMAG
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Hi Folks,
It's been a long time since I provided an update for the sales of White
Box: Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game.
*LULU*
Print: 396
PDF: 433
*OBS*...
How can We Destroy this Campaign World?
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d12
1. You must trick a bard into strumming the *Chords of Fate* on the *Lute
of Annihilation*
2. Legends tell of thermonuclear weapons beneath megadunge...
Mord Mar - Session 5
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We had another successful delve into the dungeon yesterday. The delvers:
Moira, the Magic-User
Radovan - Human Cleric (of Odin?)
Khazgar Stonehand - Dwarf ...
Bundle of Fantasy Age
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Bundle of Holding: Dragon Age/Fantasy Age: Available until March 12. PA
Presents: Fantasy AGE Freeport live play Green Ronin in 2018 The Fantasy
Age RPG ma...
New Free PDF Module: The Hyqueous Vaults
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A new dungeon module—written in celebration of OSRIC's 10th Birthday—by
Rebecca Dettmann, Allan T. Grohe, Jr., Jimm Johnson, Matthew Riedel, Alex
Zisch, a...
Swords & Wizardry Light: Session # 6
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Two months after our last session (thanks to things like 8th grade finals,
a 4 year-old's birthday and party, Father's Day, etc.), we finally had our
next ...