‘Old School Essentials’ Roleplaying Passes 500% Kickstarter Funding

Apr 23, 2019

Gavin Norman and Necrotic Gnome Games have a reinvigorated Basic/Expert fantasy OGL series of rulebooks up for Kickstarter crowdfunding and the project has already passed the 500% funding goal. Old School Essentials aims to present the venerable B/X rules in a much more modern and easily comprehended manner. The rules will be available as an all in one tome or as five separate books; there’s absolutely no difference in the contents, just the choice of one large book or five smaller books. You can reserve a copy of Old School Essentials in PDF for an $11.00 pledge, the one volume physical tome for a $28.00 pledge, or the five volume slipcased Black Box for a $56.00 pledge through May 12th. Expected delivery on the digital and physical products is October of this year.

On a side note: It looks as if much of Old School Essentials is actually the very well produced B/X Essentials, which were released over the last couple of years and was available in PDF. I had an opportunity to page through a couple of volumes of B/X E and was impressed by the layout and ease of use.

From Necrotic Gnome:

A modular adventure game in the tradition of the beloved 1980s role-playing rules. 100% old-school rules, 100% modern design.

Old-School Essentials is an adventure role-playing game of exploration, danger, monsters, and magic. The game is intentionally rules-light, putting the focus of play on imagination, improvisation, and fun. The rules are optimised for ease of use at the table, with meticulous attention to wording and layout clarity. What’s more, Old-School Essentials is 100% compatible with the classic Basic/Expert game from 1981, meaning that decades of adventure are at your fingertips!

This game is the culmination of over 2 years of painstaking, passion-fueled work, and represents creator Gavin Norman’s vision of his personal dream RPG.

Old-School Essentials comes in two forms: a chunky tome and a modular boxed set. The content is identical. Choose one or both, depending on your preferred format!

The Old-School Essentials Black Box: A game box containing five deluxe, sewn-binding, A5 (Digest sized), hardcover rule books presenting the complete rules of the game and everything you need to run games in the classic fantasy genre.

The Old-School Essentials Rules Tome: A deluxe all-in-one, sewn-binding, A5 (Digest sized), hardcover tome containing the complete rules of the game and everything you need to run games in the classic fantasy genre.

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Jeff McAleer

Founder/Editor-in-chief of The Gaming Gang website and host of The Gaming Gang Dispatch and other TGG media, Jeff tackles any and all sorts of games but has a special fondness for strategy, conflict sims, and roleplaying games. Plus, he's certainly never at a loss for an opinion...