As announced in our first newsletter a couple of weeks back, a massive batch of Old-School Essentials books went live at the Exalted Funeral US store on September 1st! (Mostly remaining stock following our Kickstarter last year.)

• The new Advanced Fantasy Player's + Referee's Tomes.
• The new Advanced Fantasy Monsters and Treasures books (supplements for OSE Classic Fantasy).
• Three new adventures: The Incandescent Grottoes by Gavin Norman, Halls of the Blood King by Diogo Nogueira, and The Isle of Plangent Mage by Donn Stroud.
• The Advanced Fantasy Reference Booklet.
• More stock of the Classic Fantasy Rules Tome, the Advanced Fantasy Genre Rules and Druid and Illusionist Spells books (supplements for OSE Classic Fantasy), and the deluxe referee's screen.
• Revised reprints of the adventures The Hole in the Oak (now in hardcover) and Winter's Daughter (now with colour interior art).

Some Books Already Sold Out!

That's a lot of books that went live! And, wow, the response was amazing — Old-School Essentials books have never flown off the shelves so quickly! It's both exciting and humbling to see how many people are passionate about this game.

At the time of writing, a few books are already sold out:

• The Advanced Fantasy Player's Tome.
• The Advanced Fantasy Druid and Illusionist Spells, Monsters, and Treasures supplements.

This kind of blows our minds. We already have a second printing of the Advanced Fantasy Player's + Referee's Tomes in the works, but we'd estimated the current stock would last at least a few months while the next print run is happening. It actually only lasted a few days!

So thank you so much to everyone who's picked up copies of the new books and our apologies to anyone who missed out on copies this time around — we weren't expecting this to happen!

Note that there's additional stock in the EU and UK, awaiting the opening the upcoming Exalted Funeral EU and UK stores.

Advanced Fantasy Tomes Reprint Beginning Soon

We'll be kicking off a second printing of the Advanced Fantasy Player's + Referee's Tomes soon. (And yes, based on how quickly they've been selling, we'll be printing a lot more this time.) It will be a few months before they're live in the store again (printing, shipping, and general pandemic-induced delays take a while), but keep an eye on our newsletter / social media for updates.

Advanced Fantasy Expansion Box Set in Planning

As for the Advanced Fantasy supplements (Genre Rules, Druid and Illusionist Spells, Monsters, Treasures), those will be available again in the Advanced Fantasy expansion box that we're planning to Kickstart along with a new print of the legendary Classic Fantasy box set.

We won't be making the individual books from the box sets available again separately. The reason for this is that we've decided we need to simplify the Old-School Essentials product line...

Simplifying Things

Anyone who's been following Old-School Essentials for a while has probably noticed that there are a lot of different books that contain overlapping content. This is because the game has been available in three formats:

1. Tomes: Thick hardcover books containing the complete game rules.
2. Box sets: Sets of slim hardcover books each covering a certain aspect of the game (classes, spells, monsters, etc.).
3. Modular books: The same slim hardcover books that you find in the box, just sold separately, not as part of a box set.

The reason for making these three different formats of the game available was to cater to different people's tastes. Some people just want everything in one book. Some people love box sets. Some people want to be able to mix and match different elements of the game with the separate modular books.

There's a major downside to the game being available in three formats, however: it can make things very confusing for newcomers. Figuring out which of the wide range of rule books / boxes (13 products and counting...) are required to play the game and which contain overlapping content is not trivial. And this can be off-putting to newcomers.

As more Old-School Essentials books are published (and more are planned), it's no longer feasible to make the game available in all the three formats — we've had to make the tough decision to drop one of the formats. So going forward, we'll be producing box sets and tomes, but will no longer sell the modular books separately.

This image nicely demonstrates how this will vastly simplify Old-School Essentials, making the game a lot easier to understand and jump into.

And this image shows how the Classic Fantasy and Advanced Fantasy flavours of the game will look, with the two formats (tomes / box sets).

All For Now

We hope this post has helped to explain our plans for Old-School Essentials and what's coming up. We're super excited to keep the game growing with lots more products to come!