Black Blade Publishing and the OSR Community

...or, Why Does Black Blade Publishing Still Exist?

Earlier this year, Jon Hershberger and I met to conduct some Black Blade Publishing 2025 planning, and discussed preparations for GaryCon XVII and North Texas RPG Con, among various and sundry other topics, as is our wont.  

Black Blade Publishing logo---
yeah, that's us!

A Short History of Black Blade Publishing

In case you are unfamiliar with Black Blade Publishing---which is not only possible but quite likely since our web site has been kaput since before COVID, we don't do much in the way of outbound marketing, never launched a Kickstarter, and publish brand-new products less frequently than we would prefer---here's a snapshot summary:

Founded in 2009 by Jon Hershberger and Allan Grohe, Black Blade Publishing publishes and sells old school role-playing game products. We publish the OSRIC rules and Monsters of Myth supplement, adventure modules by Robert J. Kuntz (co-DM of the original Lake Geneva Greyhawk campaign), Tales of Peril (the D&D fictions of John Eric Holmes), and gaming supplies including graph and hex pads in a variety of formats ranging in size from 4.25 x 5.5" up to 17 x 22".

2025 marks 16 years that we've been been pursuing OSR publishing, which in our case invites some occasional introspective reflection.

Black Blade's Raisons d'Être

As part of our discussion, we revisited some of the core principles around which we founded Black Blade back at the dawn of the OSR---a phrase that recalls Babylon 5's season one opening line, "It was the dawn of the third age of mankind" (or at least it sounds that way in my head! ;) ).  Some of the principles that guide us include:

1. Publishing high-quality print products that support AD&D 1e and it's retro-clone, OSRIC
2. Supporting that communities that keep AD&D 1e and OSRIC alive 
3. Providing the homebrewing tools that drive DIY gaming
4. Supporting the publishers and gamers who participate in the old-school community

For the record, other reasons drive our business goals and planning too, but the above four were top-of-mind in our discussions at the start of the year.

Let's tackle them each in turn!  

1.  Publishing High-Quality Print Products that Support AD&D 1e and it's Retro-Clone, OSRIC

Publishing high-quality print products that support gaming using the rules and design ethos of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons first edition (AD&D 1e) and its retroclone, OSRIC. 

This includes our work publishing OSRIC and Monsters of Myth, our adventure modules The Original Bottle City, Cairn of the Skeleton King, and Tower of Blood by Rob Kuntz, Tales of Peril: The Complete Boinger and Zereth Stories of John Eric Holmes and our graph and hex paper pads that support homebrew gaming:

Monsters of Myth
(BBP edition 2024)

Tales of Peril (released 2017,
returns to print in 2025)

Cairn of the Skeleton King
(BBP edition, 2015)

Tower of Blood (BBP edition 2015)
by Robert J. Kuntz

The Original Bottle City
(BBP edition, 2014)

The Original Bottle City map from Castle Greyhawk,
by Rob Kuntz (included in BBP edition, 2014)

2.  Supporting the Communities that Keep AD&D 1e and OSRIC Alive
 

We support the AD&D 1e and old-school gaming communities that keep the heart of AD&D 1e alive and kicking nearly fifty years after its launch with TSR's Monster Manual in 1977.

2a.  OSRIC Pricing

This includes our pricing strategy for our OSRIC hardcover edition, which binds our price to the Lulu.com edition---Black Blade's price is $26, the Lulu version is $25.20.  

Our fixed price keeps AD&D 1e and OSRIC available in a comprehensive edition (including the equivalent content of TSR's PHB, DMG and MM books in a single volume) at an affordable price that's accessible to any gamer who wants it.  (We have been told by many other friends and publishers that we should be selling OSRIC for $50 or more!). 

OSRIC continues to remain freely available in PDF and wiki editions:

OSRIC front cover

2b.  Gaming Conventions

Black Blade's community support also includes our participation, engagement, support, and promotion of 1e gaming both offline at GaryCon, the North Texas RPG Con, and at conventions local to us: 

Locally today, that's primarily through Jon's continuing leadership at ScoutCon, which he has supported since its 2017 beginnings; we also supported KantCon in Kansas City for its first eight or nine years, and TsunamiCon in Wichita for many years as well:

Online, Allan continues to support the annual Virtual Greyhawk Con each fall, and both Jon and Allan support the hobby through engagement in online old-school and OSR groups on Facebook, reddit, and discord, as well as through community forums at Dragonsfoot, Knights & Knaves Alehouse, ODD74, and various other social media channels.  

3.  Providing the Homebrewing Tools that Drive DIY Gaming

Some of our philosophical approach is to provide the tools that support old-school DIY game play and homebrewing, which is where our graph and hex pads come to the table---literally and figuratively:

Black Blade graph and hex pads
(all but the new big one)

Black Blade's largest hex pad at17x22"
with an OSRIC rulebook for scale

In addition to the below examples, you may find my post #Dungeon23 Resources - Mega-Dungeon Tools of the Trade helpful to homebrewing and DIY gaming.  

3a.  Graph Pads!

I offer two examples of dungeon levels built using our Black Blade graph pads, but you can crawl through the blog and find many others if large levels don't excite you:

Allan and Henry's summer 2022
COVID mega-dungeon

Allan's revised Level 1 map
for grodog's Castle Greyhawk (2020)

You can read more about those levels and designs in my posts about Mega-Dungeon Design Sprints with Henry (or, How to Cope with COVID together after NTX 2022), and my Revised Maps for the First and Second Levels of grodog's Castle Greyhawk.  At the other extreme, some smaller examples on our mini-pads appear at Cairn Hills Lairs - The 1st and 2nd Fluted Cairns. 

3b.  Hex Pads!

Here are a few images that offer a better look at the hex pads in action:

Our 11x17" hex pad, showing the Gnarley Forest
and Kron Hills west and south of Dyvers (drawn by Allan Grohe) 

An earlier draft of the above map, with my 
DMG ruined monastery environs on the right

I've previously shared my DMG monastery environs map, but not this map of the environs around Nosnra's Steading from G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, drawn under guidance from Bill Silvey for his Monday nights Greyhawk campaign: 

Nosnra's Steading Environs, 
map by Allan Grohe 

Mike "mortellan" Bridges has featured our hex pads in many of his maps shared on his Greyhawkery blog, with this beautiful Perrenland regional map being the most-recent  (click through to the blog post for a higher-resolution version):

Mike Bridges' gorgeous Perrenland cartography,
on our 17x22" hex pad!

Mike has similar examples of his fabulous maps at https://greyhawkery.blogspot.com/2017/06/new-greyhawk-map-ulakand-mesa.html and https://greyhawkery.blogspot.com/2020/11/new-map-ice-barbarian-campaign.html, among others.  You should definitely check all of his Greyhawk work out!

4.  Supporting the Gamers and Publishers Who Thrive in the Old-School Community

Lastly, through our work at conventions and in our booth, Black Blade supports the OSR and old-school gamers, designers, artists, and publishers who also support AD&D 1e, OSRIC, and similar old-school systems. 

Knockspell Magazine #3
(Summer 2009)

Jon and Allan have both written for Knockspell Magazine, and while Allan has occasionally contributed to Fight On! Magazine, Jon spearheaded and led production on the massive Gong Farmers Almanac for the DCC community from its inception through 2020 (as well as maintaining our Black Blade DCC zine annual indexes during that same time). 

Saving Throw #1 fundraiser zine, 
honoring the memory of Jim Kramer

This also includes maintaining our Black Blade booth at GaryCon and the North Texas RPG Con each year.  We have attended GaryCon and NTX since their inceptions, and in our booth we try to promote the best that the OSR has to offer alongside our own products, since many of those products are created and published by our friends and fellow-gamers!:

Black Blade's GaryCon booth in 2024

Black Blade also represents a large and varied assortment of other old-school game publishers, carrying their products for Gary Con and North Texas RPG Con attendees' enjoyment. These publishing partners include Goodman Games, The Tekumel Foundation, Anthony Huso, Bat in the Attic Games, Mythmere Games, North Wind Adventures, casl Entertainment, The Arcane Library, Swordfish Islands, Three Line Studio, E.M.D.T. - The First Hungarian D20 Society, and numerous others. 

You can view pictures of our booths in our Facebook albums, and see gaming in action in my 2025 and 2024 GaryCon convention reports (and further back if you're inclined toward a stroll down memory lane!).

John O'Neill, editor in chief of Black Gate magazine, has also showcased the breadth and depth of our booth's cornucopia-like offerings in recent feature articles from 2023 and 2018.

Still Crazy After All These Years

In revisiting our origins and talking through the whys and whats that we do, Jon and I reaffirmed our interest in continuing Black Blade. 

Jon (tacojohndm) Hershberger and Allan (grodog) Grohe
in the Black Blade booth at GaryCon 2025
(photo courtesy of John O'Neill)

"Staying in business" is not a foregone conclusion since Black Blade consumes a lot of our time (including vacation time from our day jobs---Black Blade is far from a full-time career for Jon or me, and it would never support our families), energy, and creativity.  We intentionally reexamine this question every few years, as the business climate and our personal circumstances warrant.  

We have come close to shutting down Black Blade more than a few times in the past, but for now we plan to hold the line, and to continue to proudly carry the torch for old-school gaming.

A Heartfelt "Thank You" 

As always, we thank you for your patronage and your continuing support for old-school gaming in all of its forms, and we look forward to seeing you in Lake Geneva and Dallas again in 2025, and beyond!

Allan and Jon.

grodog's Founders & Legends and GaryCon XVI Convention Reports - 14-25 March 2024 - Part 2

GaryCon XVI – 20-25 March 2024

Continued from Part 1 – Arrival through Founders & Legends and Interregnum Tuesday.

With the shift to Wednesday, this required the changing of the badges over from Founders & Legends to GaryCon:

The changing of the guard....

Wednesday - 20 March 

Booth Setup

I came into Wednesday having spent the day before hanging out and gaming, rather than driving cross-country, and I could definitely get used to that!  Robert Brandon graciously agreed to help me unload the minivan, and we arrived at the Forum for the 8am start of exhibitor check-in.  With Robert’s help, I was able to cede my spot at the loading dock by 8:45am or so, and to begin building the booth.  

I had planned for a similarly-open booth design like how we’d set up last year, but this process is, unfortunately, more art than science, and it’s not something anyone who doesn’t know the planned layout and the products as a whole can really help much with.  So, after Robert and I rejockeyed the tables a few times, and with some reconfiguration and fine-tuning by swapping out tables with the able assistance of the hotel staff, the booth settled into its final form, and I thanked Robert and released him to rest of his day by 9:30 or 10am. 

The Forum was reorganized this year, which was a bit of a surprise---I’d seen changes in the layout design, but they hadn’t quite clicked, given the relocation of the GaryCon merchandise to the back-right corner of the hall.  The big surprise (and a hugely positive change overall!) was the shifting of the throughways in the Forum to run the full length of the hall---this really opened the chamber up, and allowed gamers to see down the full length of the halls from the main entry doors.  That in turn gave better line-of-sight to vendors along the throughways, and helped to showcase the breadth and depth of products available at the show. 

Black Blade Publishing and Our OSR Cornucopia

For those folks who are unfamiliar with Black Blade Publishing, we publish our own books (OSRIC, Monsters of Myth, Tales of Peril) modules (Rob Kuntz’s Bottle City, Cairn of the Skeleton King, Tower of Blood), and gaming tools (graph and hex paper pads from quarter-page size up to 17x22”).  However, our content only represents about 15% of the booth’s content footprint.  

The remaining 85% is provided by third-party, old-school publishers, many of whom are friends and fellow old-school designers, including works from The Tekumel Foundation, North Wind Adventures, Gabor Lux’s E.M.D.T., Carlos Lising’s casl Entertainment, Paul Stormberg’s TLB Games and Legends of Roleplaying, OSRIC sourcebooks like Trent Smith’s Heroic Legendarium and Matt Finch’s Tome of Adventure Design, Swordfish Islands and Third Kingdom Games’ hexcrawls, and adventures from Anthony Huso, Jennell Jaquays, G. Hawkins, Paolo Greco, Robert Conley, Expeditious Retreat Press, and Goodman Games’ Original Adventures Reincarnated, among many others!

This year we brought many new-to-our-booth publishers and products to GaryCon, including the D&D documentary films Secrets of Blackmoor and The Dreams in Gary’s Basement, Merle Rasmussen’s new ally-friendly card game I Choose to Rise, Aron Clark’s Holmes & Clark clone (and his conversion of the classic level 1 adventure, “The Lichway”), Knave 2nd Edition, and last but certainly not least, Kelsey Dione’s ShadowDark. 

I can't post a pictorial review of the booth because blogger's editor hates me, so here's one image from just before the opening on Thursday morning, about 9:15am or so:

Pre-opening Thursday morning!---
and who are those VIGs entering from the left!?!

To see the rest of the booth pictures, please use my publicly-visible Facebook album entitled "Founders & Legends and GaryCon 16 (March 2024)" at https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10163493148909832&type=3, which includes many fun images from the conventions as well as booth pics.  

Allan (grodog) Grohe in the Black Blade booth
at GaryCon 2024

The back of the booth,
with our graph/hex pads and more OSR books

New Empire of the Petal Throne maps
from the Tekumel Foundation

Empire of the Petal Throne books
from the Tekumel Foundation

Front-left corner of the Black Blade booth

Holmes & Clark clone, Heroic Legendarium, and more!

Left-side corner of the Black Blade booth,
with OARs and OSRIC modules

Front of the Black Blade booth with OSR books
from EMDT, Anthony Huso, Jennell Jaquays, Hyperborea, and more!

G. Hawkins, Larry Wickman,
Plagmada/Tim Hutchings, and more!

OSR Indies united!---Jacob Hurst,
Ben Milton, Paolo Greco, and more!

To get an idea about the evolution of the OSR through the products in our booth over time, see John O’Neil’s wonderful photo-essays from Black Gate Magazine at https://www.blackgate.com/2023/03/26/gary-con-report-black-blade-publishing-and-limitless-adventure/ and https://www.blackgate.com/2018/03/13/the-1001-treasures-of-black-blade-publishing-and-goodman-games-gary-con-2018-report-part-ii/.

I wrapped up the booth setup by 4pm or so, leaving a few placeholders in the shelves for product that had not quite made its way to the booth yet.   

That left me free to finish moving out from 328 Center Street before the rest of Robert’s crew arrived, time to coordinate keys with Victor Raymond (my roommate again this year for GaryCon) and to bump into Carlos Lising and Erik Mona in passing at Jay Scott’s pre-con streaming show, and a peaceful interlude to find and eat some good food at the Chophouse while chatting with my wife and sons.  

"The Wolves of St. Cuthbert"

After eating, Carlos and the redoubtable Jeremy Breazeale hussled us offsite to the second (?) annual gathering of “The Wolves of St. Cuthbert”—a reunion of the GaryCon 2022 campaign crew, which Carlos eloquently recounted as part of his GaryCon 16 Patreon summary.  As usual, I had a great time playing with Gregory, Danny, Nick, Dan, Triet, Jeremy, and Carlos, and I managed not to lose any dice this year, too ;)

Thursday - 21 March 

The Exhibit hall opened early daily at 9am for special guests, VIPs, and Platinum+ badge holders, while exhibitors were able to enter to finish set-up starting at 8am.  I was able to visit for a bit with friends from the Acaeum (and Jim Kitchen graciously tracked down the last? set of GaryCon lockpicks at the main merch booth for me), and then the Forum doors opened wide.
The Thursday opening crowd proved to be the closest I’ve come to GenCon-level-chaos in nearly two decades.  On the plus side, Thursday morning was very busy from opening through about 12pm or so, which was great for business, but clearly showed the limits of what a one-human booth can manage.  Everyone was gracious and polite, but the long was long for quite some time….

We did sell out of some books even before opening on Thursday (two sets of Anthony Huso’s limited edition of Castle of the Silver Prince), which does happen when we have lower stock on more-expensive books, but I had to reshuffle the booth a few more times than usual during the rush.  ShadowDark flew off the shelves, quite literally, throughout the day, and the Knave 2e books arrived in time for opening too.  The rest of the day was thankfully less insane, and Rich Franks (our chief in the Legio V) lent a hand in the afternoon (and again on Friday and Sunday too), which was very appreciated!

Abyssal Rift 1

Thursday night I ran the first playtest for my high-level, aquatic “Abyssal Rift” adventure:  

Playtest grodog's newest high-level adventure, exploring an aquatic wilderness in the World of Greyhawk. Your mission is to pursue a set of aquatic foes into their lair beneath the waves of the Azure Sea. The ixitxachitl have captured a sea-elven princess and plan to sacrifice her to Demogorgon at the next new moons, in three day's time!  

Bring your hex and graph paper, dice, and a healthy dose of paranoid courage! 12th-17th level PCs will be provided, most with some form of aquatic survival (along with some house-ruled spell changes).

The GaryCon portion of the adventure used Mike Bridges' South Seas of Greyhawk map as the base adventuring environ, and I slapped together a quick hex grid on it using the overlay sheet from the Forgotten Realms grey box set:

Mike Bridges' South Seas of Greyhawk map + 
Forgotten Realms template = instant hex grid!

We played in Evergreen 2 in the dedicated Legio V and Legends of Roleplaying room, which ended up being where I ran all of my GaryCon games.  The PCs accomplished their mission in spite of a somewhat slow start on my part, and the noise level in the room making it difficult to hear at times (one of the players left early due to a noise-induced headache).  

Friday - 22 March 

More Booth

The craziness of Thursday morning opening did not reassert itself, and Friday remained steadily busy, which was wonderful on both counts---plenty of time to socialize with friends and to help customers find the X-level adventure or the new setting or the new zines or the documentaries, et al, that they sought.  

As with Thursday, Rich Franks came by and helped me out a bit, which allowed me to eat some food and take a bathroom break (not necessarily in that order; thanks Rich!).  

francisca and grodog in the booth
(with Dirk Collins' son foregrounded)

Sales were brisk, and some product definitely began to ran low or out completely---many of Melan’s newest zines and adventures, including Castle Xyntillan, and the leatherbound sets of Hyperborea 3rd edition.  And by the end of the day, we had both documentary films in the booth---Secrets of Blackmoor and The Dreams in Gary’s Basement---as well as The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg, too.

Paul’s Legends of Roleplaying Tourney

Every year for the past several Paul Stormberg has run a large (the largest?) tournament at GaryCon.  The past few years have been themed around exploring the Temple of Elemental Evil, and this year’s tourney capstoned that series, as the PCs attempted to bring battle to the Elder Elemental God itself!  

Similar to previous years, this year’s scenario included some challenging puzzles, but the overall adventure was more streamlined, which allowed more time to work through its challenges, as well as more time to complete the adventure.  My crew of players were all veterans of both the tournament format and of the ToEE background and environs (several played last year).  They fared well during the initial encounters, but were stymied in a puzzle room that permitted three of the PCs to pass relatively unscathed, but which damaged the rest of the party when they attempted to follow.  In the end, they wisely decided to split the party while working through the logic of the puzzle, which permitted the first group to advance to the semi-final encounter.  They were joined by one of the other PCs toward the end of the round’s time, and those PCs were literally saved by the bell---my phone timer went off as I was picking up handfuls of d8s to hit the four PCs with three flamestrikes, which would have insured their doom (dead PCs aren’t worth points in the tourney scoring).  

In the end, they ranked in the middle of the teams, with 100 points.  Paul’s tournament summary and the final scoring results are posted to the GaryCon blog at https://garycon.com/the-legends-of-role-playing-tournament-results/.  

Saturday - 23 March

Yet-More Booth

Saturday saw more of books sell-through, including all of the copies of the ShadowDark rules and zines that we had available—we tried to finagle another shipment to the convention, but it wasn’t feasible, unfortunately.  They were gone by noon.  

On the plus side, Saturday brought a restock from Carlos Lising with new casl Entertainment adventures, and Merle Rasmussen brought copies of his new game, I Choose to Rise, just released in February 2024 for Black History Month. 

  

Abyssal Rift 2, Hollywood Style

My last game of the convention was my second run-through of Abyssal Rift.  I was able to tweak the introductory portion of the scenario a bit to provide more concrete guidance to the players, which got them started in earnest a bit more quickly than Thursday night’s crew.  

And what players!—I knew two of them already (Aron Clark, who plays in my regular group, and John Roberts, who I played Titan with during F&L), but five of the remaining six were Hollywood friends of Luke’s:  Vince Vaughn, Tom Morello, Paul Wight, Dan Weiss, and Joe Manganiello; with Greg Joseph rounding us out at eight.  

I was somewhat nervous about DMing celebrities, but it worked out fine in the end:  they all acquitted themselves well in the south seas of Greyhawk, and accomplished their mission to locate the ixitxachitl lair in time to prevent the sacrifice of the sea olven princess.  (They did employ some non-standard cooperative tactics inspired by 5e mechanics, which we improved within fine).  Afterward we hung around a bit chatting about Greyhawk and its history (including some basic questions about what is Greyhawk, that they had to reign me back a bit in my responses), and the history of Dave and Gary’s work together before they took a group picture with Luke and headed off.  

Sunday - 24 March

Closing Out the Booth

On Sunday the Forum was only open until 2pm (although I think I was still closing out the our last transactions around 2:30pm), and as with Friday and Saturday, sales were steady but not crazy.  The time went by quickly, all-in-all, and before I knew it the hall was starting to shut down.

Thanks to our voluminous sales, I was able to pack the booth up and—through the assistance of some very determined GaryCon volunteers who wouldn’t take “no really, I can manage” for an answer:  Dirk Collins and his son, Mark from Wales, and Jeff MacKay; they loaded my minivan completely!!-- get out of the hall by 6pm!  Perhaps a GaryCon first for me! :D

Empty booth!

The spoils of victory---empty boxes!

Afterward, I gratefully grabbed a burger at the Chophouse bar, and had a fun dinner discussion with another GaryCon attendee, who opened our chat with the gambit, “Your favorite and least-favorite mega-dungeons?”  Only at GaryCon :D :D

Legio V Board Meeting

While packing up the booth closed out the Black Blade books for the show, there was still business to attend to.  Each year after GaryCon the DMs of the Legio V gather to commune with the winds of GaryCons present, past, and future by invoking the Genevan mysteries through rituals of haruspicy and the sacrifice of slain character sheets, conducted by Dionysian celebrants.

This year’s meeting ran a bit longer than usual—from 7:30pm until 10pm or so—and I retired soon thereafter, as I was exhausted from the very busy long weekend, unfortunately missing out on both the celebration and the Hyperborea adventure that Del had prepared :-/

And that's a wrap!

I crashed early on Sunday night, and slept well into Monday, which closed out another fabulous GaryCon.  

I'll conclude in part three with my Thank You acknowledgements and convention loot and swag!

Allan.

What types of product designs does the OSR lack?

In the discussion over @ https://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?41224-What-Would-You-Like-In-A-Fantasy-OSR-Product, Simon mentioned (my emphasis):

I don't find weird 'edgy' stuff much use, and I'm not currently in the market for Venger-style sleaze or Pundit's historicism; fairly meat & potatoes stuff with a typical OD&D/Greyhawk vibe rather than B/X - so more demons & snake cults, fewer BX standard monsters like giants, probably preferable. The heavy OSR emphasis on BX type material leaves a bit of a gap for the former.

I haven't given a ton of thought to the B/X and/or SW focus in the OSR creating a content gap, but that makes sense. We've discussed these concepts a little bit before at the Knights & Knaves Alehouse:

• Bill Silvey's Book of Lairs 1 & 2 review: https://knights-n-knaves.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=10791
• Guy Fullerton's Q about what to call "lair raid"/traditional dungeon crawling: https://knights-n-knaves.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=9336

but not necessarily with an emphasis on what's not out there, content-wise. 

 

OSR-content-gaps analysis probably requires a broader understanding of Kickstarter and other crowd-funding platforms, as well as DriveThruRPG pdf offerings, than I've got these days. The continual need for "good vanilla fantasy" content that Melan has mentioned in his blogs, zines, and adventures (see https://beyondfomalhaut.blogspot.com/search?q=%22vanilla+fantasy%22 for some good examples), and Bryce's focus on highly-usable adventures that don't suck are good touchstones for tone and quality, but don't really touch on the content gaps for the types of books that aren't being written and published.

 

In my head, these are the main types of content for RPGs that exist, regardless of game system, setting, edition, etc.:

• Core rulebooks: the holy trinity: PHB, DMG, MM; OSRIC rule book; etc.; these could be books or boxed sets, but define the DM's minimum investment required to play the game
• Supplemental rule books---these build out the rules further in terms of expanding upon the original footprint of the rules with new types of rules/content like in D&DG, MotP, DSG/WSG, et al, as well as expanding the amount of material within the original footprint of the rules as the setting books like UA, OA, GA, FRA, etc. do, and as new monster books do in FF and MM2, Monsters of Myth, Malevolent & Benign 1 & 2, Dwellers in Dark Places, etc., which also obviously fall into this category, as do magazines since they generally focus on supplemental rules (or adventures); books like WotC's Primal Order series, Bard Games' Compleat Alchemist/etc. all fall into this category, as does Trent Foster's AD&D Companion
• Adventure modules: modular modules, either stand-alone or in a series (which tend to be bigger and get complied or published as super modules: GDQ1-7, A1-4, Guy Fullerton's F1-4, Jeff Talansian's ASSH modules, etc.); many modules often introduce new supplemental rules material as well with new monsters, magic items, spells, classes (although less frequently), etc.; WG6's new to hit tables and attrition rules fall into this category too (since they're not really extensive enough to warrant calling their inclusion in the module as a supplement too, in my mind)
• Adventure supplements: modules that are also supplements; S4 Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth is the best example of this content type since its Book 2 was a mini-MM2/UA rolled in with the main 32 page module, but others definitely exist too, including ones where the new rules are required to play the adventure (which is not the case with S4): Q1 (with its myriad of rules for planar travel in the Abyss), B1-2 (with their guidance on how to run and play adventures, although one could argue that this content belongs in the core rule books), and S3 (with it's Gamma World-like technology usage charts); more-recently, Anthony Huso's Zjelwyin Fall fits this category with its Astral rules and codifications
• Setting Books: these book obviously detail setting-specific content a la the World of Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Tekumel, et al, which can include sourcebook material about gods, spells, races, classes, etc., in addition to the usual geography, history, languages, runes, clothing, culture, and such
  
• Content Tools: these tools aid a DM (or perhaps a player but I mostly think of these are DM/referee aids), so this is a much more narrow label in my head than most folks probably think of accessories, and includes books like Monster & Treasure Assortments, Dungeon Geomorphs, and Rogues Gallery, as well as books of tables like Dungeon Dozen, Tome of Adventure Design, the d20 era Ultimate Toolbox, much of Kellri's CDD netbooks, with Gabor's recent Nocturnal Table being a recent example. Midkemia Press' Cities also lands into this category, although most of their other city books would be adventures or supplements. On the player tools front, the only example that really jumps out to me is for CoC, with the S. Peterson's Guides to Creatures and Creatures of the Dreamlands books; but while written as field guides for players to use for their characters to ID Mythos horrors, in practice I always used the books as referee to show players a picture of the creature that their characters were confronting....
• Accessories: character sheets/adventure logs, DM Log/campaign mgmt tools, JG's Ready Reference Sheets, DM Screen (low content unless there's an adventure or set of reference sheets with it), as well as graph/hex paper, miniatures, and dice---although Inkwell's dungeonmorphs dice and Flying Buffalo's Adventure Dice certainly provide some content; I suppose books of maps without keys/adventure content for them would fall more into this category vs. content tools too
• Guidance Books: this one's a bit fishy to me, but I think that there's a category for books about how to play in general, how to play in a certain style/setting/tone/edition, best practices in adventure design, etc.; my still-unpublished dungeon design essays book will fall into this category, as does EGG's Role-Playing Mastery and Master of the Game books, and perhaps his Gygaxian Worlds series; this category would not include gaming history books like Playing at the World or Designers & Dungeons or general summary/catalog books like Heroic World or JEH's Fantasy Role Playing Games, since those don't usually impact how you play the game at the table; magazines sometimes focus on this kind of content in their articles, too

So, given all of that, are there any additional content types that OSR-minded folks would want to see that's not already in the list?

My sense is that the OSR largely focuses on core rules these days, with supplemental rules and adventures being the next categories that see the most content focus (although if you look at the number of dice, cards, and miniatures Kickstarters it's entirely possible that Accessories are the tail that wags the OSR dog, perhaps?). At the Knights & Knaves Alehouse I think we lament the lack of focus on good adventures (which is a tone/quality issue rather than a volume issue), and also see a lack of content tools as a critical gap that drives down the supportability of AD&D/OSRIC as a platform. 

 

I'm definitely curious to hear others perceptions on this!

Some additional discussion on Knights & Knaves Alehouse at https://knights-n-knaves.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=16157, and on reddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/dcdlu1/what_types_of_products_does_the_osr_lack/, and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/AllanGrohe/status/1183766019090845696

 

Allan.