Free OSR - The Wizard's Scroll - Issue 1 (S&W)

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.

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Free OSR - Worlds Without Number: Free Edition

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).

Worlds Without Number actually comes in three flavors. There is Worlds Without Number: Free Edition, which is totally free to download and use. Then there is the pay-for Worlds Without Number Deluxe Edition (this is also the edition that is POD), and finally, there is the free Worlds Without Number SRD released under CC0.

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.

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Free OSR - Hack! Firearms

Nominally written for Swords & Wizardry, Hack! Firearms should 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.
• A bunch of bonus items.

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