This year’s Cauldron Con was hit by the winds of change. Not only did the event move from the beautiful but cold Schloss Hohenroda to the cozy and rustic Hofraithe Park in Rosenthal, but it was also only three days long instead of four. What’s most important is the con’s spirit, though, which remained the same: it was all about celebrating the various iterations of old-school Dungeons & Dragons. And of course Chainmail! You can’t have Cauldron Con without a huge table with green cloth and dozens of miniatures on it, waiting in neatly ordered lines for their demise.

HackMaster 5e is the greatest game ever developed by humankind. It says so in the introduction of the Player’s Handbook, and they are goddamn right. Ironically, the game started out as a joke: it was a parody of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons from the pages of the Knights of the Dinner Table comic strip. KoDT started its run in Shadis and is nowadays published by Kenzer & Company, but it also appeared in Dragon. When Wizards of the Coast released their Dragon Magazine Archive, they reprinted the strips without anyone’s permission.

June starts strong with Kickstarter campaigns. Right on the coattails of OSRIC comes another big and important OSR project. Robert Conley has proven with his past works that he knows a thing or two about sandboxing, and now he is gathering funds to release his magnum opus, The Northern Marches. If you need a setting with huge-ass hex maps or want to fill the Wilderlands-sized hole in your heart after giving up on Judges Guild, look no further.

It’s refreshing to finally play a game I’m invested in instead of running it. Yesterday, one of my friends ran a session of Dragonbane in Drakborgen. Dragonbane is the latest edition of Sweden’s national fantasy RPG, Drakar och Demoner¹. Drakborgen is a third-party module for Dragonbane based on a classic Swedish dungeon-crawler board game of the same name². We dusted off last year’s pregens we used for another Dragonbane one-shot, and I pulled another pregen for myself, so our party ended up with Aodhan, the human elementalist; Sir Dagobert, the mallard knight; Jürgen, the human fighter (that’s me!); Krisanna, the halfling thief; and Orla, the elf huntress.

Mark your calendars for the 6th of May; that is the day when the Backerkit campaign for the new edition of OSRIC starts. In case you’ve been living under a rock, OSRIC is a damn fine retroclone of AD&D1e and also one of the founding fathers of the whole OSR movement. Given that it will turn 20 next year, I can’t imagine a better way to celebrate than releasing a newer, prettier, revised, more accessible edition.

Welcome to the new and improved Vorpal Mace blog! Following a long break, I finally sat down to write a post on my old blog. I stared at Blogger’s interface for a while, then said: “fuck this shit, it’s time to move on”. After exploring other options, I embraced my inner software developer and decided to cobble together my own trash heap using GitHub Pages. I spent more time experimenting with styles, comment plugins, and web analytics platforms than I’m willing to admit before ending up with the current site. It’s ugly, but it’s mine. I’ll keep tinkering with it whenever the mood strikes, so expect more changes in the future. To top it off, I bullied my dear friend Vesper into drawing me a logo, so I can truly feel special.