OSRToday Says Goodbye to Tomorrow - Site is Winding Down

Earlier today I spoke with +Jason Paul McCartan and he informed me he will be winding down the OSRToday website. It is very upsetting news for me. Jason is a dear friend and OSRToday is the homepage on my browser and the site I most often go to in search of OSR news.

The sad reality is that running an updated and informative website with creative content, news and all the things between is time consuming. When you need to decide how best to allocate that time to put food on the dinner table for your family, decisions like this, no matter how painful and disappointing, are inevitable. Few have the luxury of a government pension to allow for creativity (or whatever you call The Tavern's postings) at less than minimum wage in return for the effort.

Jason hinted that The Tavern may need to pick up the slack that the loss of OSRToday will have on the community. I know there are regular features at OSRToday that may need a new home and I'll be in close contact with Jason over the next few weeks to see what can be done.

Just like OSRToday, The Tavern is mostly a one man show. I have some amazing partners in crime that contribute when they can, but the reality is they need to put money on the table too. I'm not like some other site that can pay folks to fish the internet for press releases.

I was already working on plans for the future of The Tavern. The loss of OSRToday is huge but perhaps we can minimize the loss by integrating some of it's goals here.

OSRToday is winding down operations. 

Starting something is always exciting and filled with challenges, but the challenges don’t stop when something has been running for a while. Sometimes they lessen and sometimes they intensify, ebbing and flowing. Usually the challenges don’t come from the something itself but from other things that press upon it. 

OSRToday finds itself in that position right now due to a number of factors. It’s mostly been a one-badger operation from its launch (with the awesome support of contributors such as Glynn Seal), and it was always intended to grow and develop and be not only a community resource pointing to other content, but to provide original content too. The time and resources to develop it haven’t been truly available, and due to circumstances out of my control, those aren’t going to be available going forward. The amount of time, effort, energy, and other factors it takes to maintain and operate OSRToday outweighs its performance in a number of areas, and it make more sense to apply that to other areas of InfiniBadger Press’ product portfolio that have better returns and performance. 

You can read more at of today's announcement at the OSRToday site.

Polyhedral Dungeon Released and is Sitting at #1 on the RPGNow Sales Charts - See What Happens When Your Bartender is Bedridden?

You know what sucks about being bedridden for 2 1/2 days (besides the obvious "bedridden" part)? Not being able to keep up with the pulse of the OSR, Kickstarter and beyond. I was getting updates about game releases and even Far West non-sightings and there was nothing I could do. Posting from your tablet, in bed while lying on your side? It ain't easy, let me tell you.

So, what do I find in my reviewer inbox? A comp copy of Polyhedral Dungeon. Of course, I don't know my RPGNow password, which is saved on my desktop but not my tablet. What a painful pain in the ass it was to download on my desktop, drop into Dropbox and pull it up on my tablet.

Oh what a joy it was to start reading it. Then the codeine kicked in and I dreamt polyhedral dreams.

Seriously, D4's wearing swords and a D20 warmachine running people down like the Arneson D&D module cover. What does any of this have to do with Polyhedral Dungeon by The Badger / Infinibadger Press / +Jason Paul McCartan ? No idea. It was my trip, not his.

What follows is Jason's trip...

POLYHEDRAL DUNGEON is an ultralight modern take on old school roleplaying. Using the new and simple to use and extend POLYHEDRAL SYSTEM, you can have countless hours of fun delving into dungeons and stealing dragon's hoards.

Features of the game include:

-Create new characters for play in about 5-10 minutes.
-Choose from the classic old school character tropes, but with slight twists. Play classic dungeon crawls with a flexible unified system that’s easy to learn and extend - make up your own content, or use any of the official Expansions, including The Advanced Rules which provides many new options for play, The Book of Monsters which expands and explores the Monsters in the game, The Book of -Loot for more complete treasure and loot options, including many unique items, and The Book of Magic, which expands Talents and rules for magical and divine characters.
-Designed for quick pick-up play as well as to handle large groups of players who have little experience in tabletop roleplaying - a perfect beginner’s game and still fun for experts.
-Pocket-sized, so that you can take it wherever you’re going.
-Includes dice printed in the page margins in case you forget your own, or if you need to make a secret roll as the Judge!
-Includes a Giant Badger!
-The book comes in a fully layered and bookmarked digital version, in both color and grayscale formats. Full sized character sheets are available in both formats too.

A sample adventure, The Crypts of Bes-Amat will be made available for free shortly, showcasing how simple it is to create and run adventures for the game and system.

Both Polyhedral Dungeon and the Polyhedral System are also going to be released under an open license soon, allowing third parties to create and release content for it. Details on that are still being finalized, but as soon as they are, the product will be updated to reflect it and details will be listed on our website.

Back to your bartender - I'm always looking for simplified yet deep old school feel rules, as my wife Rach pretty much stops reading gamebooks after about 5 pages and just wants to know "what do I need to roll, when do I need to roll and lets kill shit!" Before I dozed of and started tripping, I showed Rach that the ability score were actually dice and it was all about rolling high. She liked that. She liked it a lot.

PWYW - Charity Module for St Jude Children's Research Hospital

I can't think of a better cause than St Jude Children's Hospital.

PWYW, but please, pay something for the Charity Module. The list of those involved is pretty much a who's who of the OSR :)