Flashing in arcs, his long knife severed hands, cut trenches of flesh and blood before he managed to dig his heels to his mount. They fled west, his last view of the square was his mad pursuers fruitlessly sprinting after him and the leader sitting before a lit sickly yellow candle.
A Quick Drink On the Road
Our initial publication run has been heavily focused on the TTRPG side of our mission. Long form fiction just simply has a much longer creative process, so in the meantime we’d like to announce a little experiment.
A blend of traditional TTRPG material and flash fiction – to really set the intended flavour of the TTRPG material. Ye Olde Tunscipe is 2 pages of fantasy town, 4 pages of sword and sorcery, and 1 page of brewery recipe. What we find really exciting about this work, is that while there’s sinister undertones in the mechanics of the town, its within the story that the real darkness is exposed.
Addiction, a honey cartel, and an evil wizard are easy to improvise and add while at the table, but the fiction really gives you notes to riff off and hang your own creations.
We feel that the New Edge Sword and Sorcery genre is tailor made for OSR TTRPG games, and this is our first fusion.
A dead country, sealed in a giant circle of death for generations, finally opened for intrepid adventurers to delve into its secrets.
One of the projects for 2022/23, The Broken Circle is a new OSR setting describing the ruins of an technologically and magically advanced country, dead and sealed for 800 years. Recently open to exploration again, the players will plumb through near pristine ruins for riches beyond their wildest dreams.
Rather than just a set dungeons, this fully imagined setting is a world where Magic-Users, Clerics, and other magical classes don’t exist, where magic is channelled by Transmuters who are just gleaning the art from scraps found within the circle, where medics heal with stolen and half understood learning, and mechanics try to revive the forgotten mastery of metal machines.
If that sounds interesting, we have a preview of some initial pages and some concepts we’d like to share here. We also post regularly on our social media: Twitter & Instagram.
Here’s the excerpts:
Background
It’s been 800 years since the country Amon Des died. In its place, over the years, a great circular desert appeared. Anyone who crossed the surprisingly hard line at its edge, died. Animals died. The fish that migrated through the circle died. Birds would rain their corpses on the soft sand every year at migration. Rather than decaying, everything within the circle just disintegrated into ashy sand.
Though the cataclysm has left living memory, paintings, stories, and songs live on. They all spin the events in their own way, but all agree on dark violet lightning, a great door in the sky, and a giant wrestling a great eye from within the doorway.
200 years ago, a great quake shook the land, and the birds stopped raining on to the desert. Grasses, and trees, began to sprout. Nature managed to put footholds into the sands, and the desert shrinks with every passing year.
Amon Des was a bastion of technology and magic – hoarding skills and knowledge from the rest of the world. Even with the promise of great riches and war assets within the ruins of their great cities – no one dared enter the circle for generations.
That has changed, and great expeditions into the ever shrinking deserts have returned with untold riches: precision tools, black powder weapons, and a method in which with great study and application, one may transmute the firmaments of the world itself.
You have answered the call and are ready to delve past the line of demarcation and into the heart of the desert itself. You are ready to find adventure within The Broken Circle.
System
This setting was designed with Old School Essentials in mind, but will work with any OSR system with minor modification. It would even work with the 5th edition of a popular role playing game, although it would not follow the expected balancing rules.
However, there are a number of changes to the base class lists that are restricted to fit with the feel of the Broken Circle – Referees, of course, can ignore these if they wish.
This settings is designed for humans only, and the base setting will not mention any demi-humans. Additionally, Magic Users, Clerics, and other spell casters are not supported, however the Transmuter class will fill the settings arcane niche.
Healing will be handled by the Medic class, and in certain situations, the Mechanic class.
Black powder weapons will be available as treasure, although ammunition will be hard to find unless certain artefacts are recovered and returned to a safe haven.
Players will be from cultures much less advanced than that of Amon Des, there will be certain things, like MechLimbs, adrenaline, aspirin, and antibiotics that will seem like magic to them. They are picking over the bones of a dead, but advanced, civilisation- who knows what horrors they may uncover.
While the lands within the broken circle were dead, there have been hundreds of years for beasts, creatures, and others to recolonise, the land will not be empty out of the desert.
So the last batch of OSE content written this summer has been released!
Poached Parchment is a bit of a different stand alone dungeon, in that it’s full of good, rich, people that are ripe for plucking by a party of morally grey characters.
At it’s most basic, the dungeon is a stronghold of a name level Magic User, but rather than a traditional wizards tower, this is a fully working Scriveners Guild. It of course has hidden arcane secrets, but players will need to get outside help, ply the guild members with alcohol, or resort to grand divinations in order to find them.
There are traps in the places where the Magic User doesn’t want people to go. They are unfair, they are effective against intruders, and progress in lethality the deeper you go.
A creative Referee could use this module to create guard rotations, schedules, weaknesses, and other tools to make this fit a Conan style raid or an Oceans Eleven elaborate heist.
The Guild Master is no fire wielding evoker, but instead a more sage like diviner, and the set dressings try to reflect someone who’s main weapon is their guild and wits.
So enjoy, and take advantage of our opening sale with 10% off using the coupon code OSR10OFF.
Welcome to Broken Arch Publishing – focusing on small indie publications for the Old School Renaissance (OSR) and New Edge Sword and Sorcery (NES&S) genres. While I’m starting with a small roster of OSR works, we are hoping to expand into NES&S soon.
What is:
Old School Renaissance
The Old School Renaissance, Old School Revival, or OSR, is a play style movement in tabletop role-playing games which draws inspiration from the earliest days of tabletop RPGs in the 1970s. It consists of a loose network or community of gamers and game designers who share an interest in a certain style of play and set of game design principles.
The general ethos of OSR-style play emphasizes spontaneous rulings from the referee, or Game Master, over set rules found in a book. The idea is for the players to engage with the fantasy as much as possible, and have the referee arbitrate the outcomes of their specific actions in real time. The idea of game balance is also de-emphasized in favour of a system which tests players skill and ingenuity in often strange or unfair situations. The players should expect to lose if they merely pit their numbers against the monsters, and should instead attempt to outwit or outmanoeuvre challenges placed in their way. Keeping maps comes highly recommended.
In Howard Andrew Jones’ own words: “We can find inspiration from the old tales without slavishly duplicating every aspect of them. Specifically I mean setting aside the sexism and racism and the suspect politics but embracing the virtues of great pulp storytelling: The colour. The pace. The headlong thrill and sense of wonder. The celebration not of the everyday and the petty, but of those who dare to fight on when the odds are against them. We can create new characters. Not homages, or ironic send-ups. We can craft fascinating, living settings rather than faux REH or generic game fiction backdrop number 9. We need to make our own worlds and look past the seemingly unbreakable moulds set in place by the big names and gaming manuals. We must restore the sense of fantastic. Once magic is banal or easy, once magic rings can be found at the corner market and wizards are everywhere, sense of wonder goes straight out the window.”
Howard goes on to write: “Great sword-and-sorcery is usually moving at a fast clip. It takes you somewhere interesting in the company of fascinating characters, exposing you along the way to scenes of dread and wonder. There are great action set pieces that actually count for something, entertaining side characters and villains, surprises and sometimes twists, and a conclusion that satisfies.
“If a sword-and-sorcery tale has a message, it doesn’t smack you over the head with it. Most times it may seem to lack a message entirely, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing redeeming in a story where characters are shown overcoming terrible challenges with wit and brawn. Sword-and-sorcery is part and parcel of the mythic cycles we’ve been sharing around the campfire since the earliest days of our species. We’d hear how our ancestors chased down the elusive stag, or fended off the clawed thing in the dark, or guided the tribe to safety through a land of enemies. In listening, we were inspired to emulate courageous action and to not stand idle when times were dark and our people were in danger.”
