The Old-School Essentials Black Box Set is Now Available

Necrotic Gnome has released a deluxe black box set for their well received Old-School Essentials fantasy roleplaying retroclone. The boxed set contains five A5 digest sized hardcovers containing all you need to dive into classic B/X fantasy adventure. The black boxed set is available, including PDFs, for 60 euros (approximately $66.85) or in a 296 page PDF alone from DriveThruRPG for $19.99.

From Necrotic Games:

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!

Old-School Essentials is a modular game where the core rules of the game are extended by additional “rules modules” which add content for different genres of fantastic adventure. The Old-School Essentials Black Box is a compilation of the core rules plus four rules modules, forming a complete game for Classic Fantasy adventures:

• Core Rules: Rules for character creation and advancement, adventuring in dungeons, the wilderness, and at sea, magic and combat.
• Classic Fantasy: Genre Rules: Seven classic classes (cleric, dwarf, elf, fighter, halfling, magic-user, thief), complete lists of weapons and adventuring gear, extensive lists of vehicles, mounts, and vessels, mercenaries and specialists for hire, rules for stronghold construction.
• Classic Fantasy: Cleric and Magic-User Spells: The complete set of 34 cleric spells (from 1st to 5th level) and 72 magic-user spells (from 1st to 6th level), for use by players of cleric, elf, and magic-user characters.
• Classic Fantasy: Monsters: A selection of over 200 classic monsters to challenge adventurers of all levels.
• Classic Fantasy: Treasures: A hoard of over 150 wondrous magic items.

The material in this boxed set forms a complete clone of the classic Basic/Expert game, including all rules, classes, spells, monsters, and magic items.

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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...

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