Necrotic Gnome development news! Dolmenwood character creator! OSE zines on Kickstarter!

Development Diary: Funnels & Fiends  

The Necrotic Gnome team is hard at work behind the scenes, bringing more Old-School Essentials goodness your way. Here’s what we’ve got cooking in the cauldron:

Carcass Crawler Issue 5

With the writing and layout complete, playtesting is underway for the included adventure and the new level 0 character rules, ensuring they bring the right mix of challenge and fun. Illustration work has just begun, and we estimate a retail launch around June 2025. We look forward to sharing more details as we get closer to release, but in the meantime, you can catch up on what's in store for CC5 here.

Dungeons of the Undermoon

This upcoming OSE starter set (dungeon and base town) is deep in playtesting—experienced groups at first, and then with players new to old-school gaming to ensure it provides an engaging introduction to the system.

Devils & Demons

Writing has kicked off in earnest on a yet-untitled publication that will feature an extensive roster of devil and demon lords along with their infernal minions. Expect a mix of familiar classics from fantasy gaming and plenty of brand-new horrors designed to bring sinister depth to your campaigns.

All in all, 2025 is shaping up to be a huge year for Necrotic Gnome. As we approach these exciting releases, keep an eye on the newsletter for more updates, sneak peeks, and previews!

Dolmenwood Character Creator

Streamline character creation and NPC generation with our new online character creator! 

Generate a random table-ready character in just one click, or take it step-by-step from ability generation and kindred and class selection to equipment and character details.

This handy tool can::

• Auto-populate equipment or buy gear manually.
• Re-roll specific results.
• Toggle between kindred-classes or kindred + class selection.
• Easily export to PDF or copy to clipboard.

Find a bug in the character creator? Report it here.

Gods of the Forbidden North 3

The final instalment of the ENNIE award-winning Gods of the Forbidden North, a massive three-volume mega-adventure for OSE, is now live on Kickstarter!

Set in an arctic region of a world supported by an intriguing backstory, GOTFN is designed to offer a complete campaign setting that supports both open-ended sandbox play and a more streamlined ‘adventure path’ style with enough adventure content to support characters going all the way from 1st to 14th level.

The Kickstarter for volume 3 promises 400+ pages of high-level adventure focused on the sprawling megadungeon of Castle Thar-Gannon and an endgame climax in the mystical Tesseract of Time. Backers can pledge for the third volume or snap up the entire trilogy at a discount.

Check out these Kickstarters from third-party OSE creators:

• Arden’s Adventure/Arden’s Notebook, a set of full-colour OSE zines by Necromancer Games with full adventure, feature articles, and premium art. Check out the free preview here.
• Witch Lords of Skull Mountain a sword-and-sorcery hexcrawl zine detailing a village base and four adventure sites.
• Mill of the Twelve Dead, an adventure module for levels 1-3 inspired by European folklore.
• Populated Hexes Monthly 43, the latest in this zine series, unveiling the sinister secrets of the Shadowlands.

Want to submit a third-party product for a shout-out in the newsletter? Send them to 3pp@necroticgnome.com

Sometimes, what seems like treasure is only trouble, and the unfortunate character has to contend with a curse. Here’s a table of torments for game masters to reach for when you need a hasty hex on the go:

Cursed scroll, potion, spell, etc., effect

So you’ve been cursed to:

1. Every time you try to speak, you vomit a toad instead. The toad can emit your intended speech, but only if caught and coerced.
2. Emit a distinctive odour that a nearby monster type finds 1-2 disgusting, 3-4 delicious, 5-6 threatening.
3. Obsessively read scrolls, graffiti, runes, and other text you encounter aloud.
4. Believe yourself invincible; become immune to fear effects, but take +1 per die of damage from all sources.
5. Become permanently invisible, even to yourself. 
6. Take a drink of every new fluid you come across, from potions to pools to monstrous secretions.

Yikes! Naturally, a remove curse or other powerful magic can remedy the afflicted. Good luck out there, adventurers!