Old School Revival 5

In November 2017 we presented our fifth annual Old School Revival Bundle that celebrates the spirit of the roleplaying hobby’s earliest days. This OSR Bundle +5 assembled a well-balanced party of games and supplements — including Index Card RPG, Dragon Kings, The Nightmares Underneath, books by Kevin Crawford, and dungeons by Dyson Logos — that showcase the diverse approaches of the neoclassical Old School Revival.

There were four titles in our Starter Collection (retail value $41):

• The Nightmares Underneath (Red Box Vancouver, retail price $15): Johnstone Metzger (Adventures on Dungeon Planet) presents a complete game of Dream Kingdom incursions in the waking world — invasions that manifest as dungeons to be crawled and destroyed. (Try before you buy with the Nightmares Underneath Free Edition.)
• Mortzengersturm, The Mad Manticore of the Prismatic Peak (Hydra Cooperative, retail $8): Trey Causey’s deceptively whimsical foray into a wild wizard’s mad magic mansion.
• Gathox Vertical Slum (DIY RPG Productions, retail $10): A gonzo transdimensional campaign by David Lewis Johnson, set in a city growing on the back of a world-hopping godling.
• Red Tide (Sine Nomine Publishing, retail $8): Kevin Crawford’s sandbox campaign in the savage jungles of the Sunset Isles. [Originally presented in our November 2013 Worldbuilder’s Toolkit.]

Those who paid more than the threshold (average) price also got our entire Bonus Collection with seven more titles worth an additional $70:

• Index Card RPG (Runehammer Games, retail $16.50): The bestselling fast-play light-rules system from the creators of Drunkens & Dragons on YouTube.
• Dragon Kings (Soldier-Spy, retail $20): Dark Sun co-designer Timothy Brown created this spiritual successor, a sand-blasted desert of desperate city-states, monstrous rulers, and dark sorcery.
• An Echo, Resounding (Sine Nomine, retail $10): Kevin Crawford brings Game of Thrones-style domain-level struggles to the untamed wilderlands of Red Tide or any campaign.
• 2016 Dodecahedron Cartographic Review (ZERObarrier, retail $8.50): Dyson Logos, king-hell master of dungeon cartography, gathers new works from his Dyson’s Dodecahedron blog. This offer included Dyson’s Business Cardography, ten business card-sized geomorphic dungeon maps available only in this offer and nowhere else.
• The Crimson Pandect (Sine Nomine, retail $10): Kevin Crawford’s expansive sorcery system for Red Tide or any Old School game. With this addition, this OSR collection presented all three Red Tide books.
• City of Poison (Red Box Vancouver, retail $5): A sample Dream Kingdom incursion by Johnstone Metzger for The Nightmares Underneath.

That’s a total retail value of US$111, worthy of at least Treasure Hoard Class III and a +5% modifier on the Miscellaneous Magic Items table. Ten percent of each payment (after gateway fees) went to this offer’s designated charity, Human Rights Watch.