Top 10 Best Commercial OSR Products

[I am putting up a series of 'Top 10' posts in the lead up to my 2,000th post here at Monsters & Manuals. You can read the first post in the series here, and the second here.]

Since 2008 I have been a heady devourer of blogs, but - I will here confess to heresy and also out myself as a dilettante and ingenue - I tend not to buy a great deal of RPG books, back a lot of kickstarters, or download a lot of PDFs. This is for one simple reason: I am grumpy, stuck-up, and extremely hard to please. I am unimpressed by the things that most other people like. And as a result I only tend to buy things that I am very sure have a high likelihood of winning me over. 

With that said, there are certain products that I think of as, if not the 'essentials' (the only really essential thing is the core OD&D rules), then at least the highly recommended. These are the top 10, in no particular order - and here I should also make clear that I am limiting myself to actual commercial, for-sale things, rather than free material like, say, Philotomy's Musings. 

10. Misty Isle of the Eld. This is simply a great marriage of tone, art and content - a module that manages to be very playable while also creating a coherent, integrated mood and feel (in this case, roughly Flash Gordon meets David Bowie meets Michael Moorcock). It remains a high watermark in the peak of the OSR years (2016), when enthusiasm and competence had combined to maximal effect. 

9. Qelong. There are short modules whose brevity derives from laziness. There are others whose brevity derives from the author's incapacity to properly explain and elucidate. This is one which is brief because its author thought carefully about how to condense everything necessary into 48 pages. It is a finely distilled shot of RPG material, and also a beautiful example of how to make a 'high concept' module playable.

8. The original Lamentations of the Flame Princess core rules, in A5 format. I do not myself use LotFP (I exclusively use BECMI and have for years), but I recognise its original iteration to be the best that the OSR really had to offer in purely mechanical terms - and also respect the thematic coherence of its implied setting. I also loved the sheer at-the-table effectiveness of the old A5 basic rule books, which were eminently flippable and browsable - qualities that are severely underrated.

7. Pariah. As I wrote in a review long ago, 'This describes itself as "old school roleplaying when the world was young" - that's right, it is a stone age RPG, though one that is very carefully thought-out and (it seems to me at least) well-informed. Not so much 1 Million Years BC, or Stig of the Dump - more Lavondyss, the middle story of Fifth Head of Cerberus, Helliconia Spring, those novels about neanderthals whose name I forget. The PCs are exiles from their tribe(s); it has spirit realms and rituals; extensive rules for psychobotanicals; a random wilderness generation method; images of waif-like girls covered in face-paint and tattoos. I very much like it and would run it: this is high praise, because as a general rule I don't run anything written by anybody else.'

6. Punth: A Primer. Another book which I reviewed here at the blog, and of which I said, 'Punth approaches Tekumel, not in substance (although there is something of Tekumel's alien coldness in it), but in ambition. This is not a typical fantasy setting. It is an exploration of themes: the control of thought through language, the formation of state power, and the philosophy of law. If that sounds like a bit much, it is a cool ancient Near Eastern sandbox setting ruled by dictatorial multi-limbed aliens written by somebody who has really though things through. And it's a marvel of succinct, concentrated. distilled communication to boot.' It is the closest that I think the OSR-adjacent sphere has come to producing something that is actually philosophically interesting.

5. Veins of the Earth. You have almost certainly read it already. Suffice to say, it would probably be in everybody's top 10 list provided they weren't deliberately leaving it out for effect.

4. The Gardens of Ynn. This would have a strong claim on the number 1 spot if this list was an actual ranking order. Having looked at the reviews on DriveThruRPG it seems that recently a new version was created - I cannot speak to its quality, but certainly the original was a revelation: a brilliantly realised procedural-generation method with a beautiful skin wrapped around it.

3. Into the Odd. Is this an OSR product? It is certainly OSR-adjacent. I have ambivalent feelings about quite how rules-lite it is, but it is certainly the best rules-lite system that I know of, and is also probably the best not-D&D-but-still-recognisably-D&D-ish system that came out of the OSR. 

2. An Echo, Resounding. There have been more successful Crawford vehicles since, and no doubt material of higher quality, but An Echo, Resounding was truly pioneering work - Crawford went out into the Sandbox Hills with a pickaxe, shovel, and a few sticks of dynamite, and came back with jewels. Now the landscape has been picked clean and erosion has transformed it into a barren wasteland, but the valleys and chasms still echo with the sound of his footsteps, and the soil remembers him.

1. Carcosa. At the time Carcosa first came out I thought it was hubristic, and courting of controversy for the sake of it, but the fact remains that if Crawford was a pathfinder for sandbox settings, McKinney was a trailblazer for self-publication in general. Where most of us saw blogs and forums, he saw books; where most of us spewed ephemeral rants in to the ether, he created physical products for people to have and hold. Others saw the crescent, but he saw the whole of the moon - and set the pattern for everything that followed.