January & February 2025

DURF Expanded Kickstarter, Faces of Orn, and TEA Jam!

A belated happy New Year!

The end of December and the start of 2025 took more out of me than I had expected, and in early January I decided to take a much-needed break. I had been busying myself with RPG work almost non-stop since I finished The Electrum Archive issue 02 in the summer of last year and my brain just couldn’t keep up. So for three weeks in January I didn’t work on anything, but spent my time reading (I finally finished reading Orlando, a book I had been reading on and off over the past months, and made a good-sized dent in Vinland Saga) and played a slew of video games (The Bazaar, Inscryption, Lunacid, Caves of Qud, and Balatro), but I mainly just took time to recharge.

Since the start of February I’ve picked up RPG work again and the break has really helped me get back my creative juices. So let’s dive into the things I got up to!

DURF Expanded

The Kickstarter prelaunch page for DURF Expanded is up! Go follow it if you want to get notified when the campaign launches!

I’ve been playtesting this latest iteration of the game with a megadungeon of my own design (see my previous newsletter for more on that) and it has been a lot of fun! The things I run into during these sessions actively shape the rules and or make me add new appendices with optional tables or procedures, so the final book will truly be something that actually reflects what I like to have on hand while running the game instead of just what I think a rulebook “needs”.

I’ll still be working on the game for a few more months before it launches, so if you want to check out the drafts as they come out each month, check out my Patreon!

The Faces of Orn

One of the stretchgoals for The Electrum Archive - Issue 02 was a collection of NPC illustrations to flesh out the world of Orn outside of the zines and give people playing the game some more visual representations to use at the table. After a long time of working with various artists it was finally published last month! You can find the Faces of Orn on itch.io for free! I was such a joy to work with all these artists and figure out the look of some of the peoples that only exist in my haphazard notes for later zines!

Speaking of The Electrum Archive, this month was also the month of the TEA Jam, a game jam dedicated to creating zines and supplements inspired by the world of Orn. This jam was organized by the amazing moderators of the CULT OF THE LIZARD KING Discord in response to folks asking for it during the DURF Jam last October.

The jam finishes in few hours and the submissions so far have been really awesome!

I highly recommend you check them all out, but here are some picks to pique your interest:

Gav van Saxen wrote this sweet depthcrawl zine inspired by The Stygian Library and Vast in the Dark. It lets players delve into The Chrome Leviathan, a massive eldership that is mentioned briefly in the first issue of The Electrum Archive zine. It is incredible to see folks run with ideas I set out in the TEA zines, expand on them and make them their own in this way.

Speaking of expanding on ideas found in the main zines: Kerobuki made a new player archetype called the Spirit Potter, which can create vessels out of clay and elder ink and imbue them with spirits to give them life, creating specialized clay companions!

Erwin_the_German teamed up with John Tan (aka Fluctuating) to make a pretty gruesome dungeon called The Tesseract Fragment. It leans more into the horror aspects of Orn, which might not be for everyone, but a deserted underground irr colony overrun by a fragment of a fungal hive mind is sure to deliver an interesting game session!

But really, go check out the other entries, there is so much good stuff there!

Odds and Ends

• Go check out the new newsletter OSR Rocks! by Golem Productions. They wrote a short review of TEA’s way of handling “lore” which was a good read and they recently interviewed Skurzyński, the creator of Beyond Corny Groń, one of my favorite OSR books!

• The two-player romance game Dracotrophication is currently funding on Backerkit! It’s created by my friends of You Are Beheld and looks like a great time. If you enjoy kinky, queer games, go check it out ;)

• While I was working on the cover illustration for DURF Expanded I listened to all episodes of Chaoclypse’s Kal-Arath solo RPG campaign. I highly recommend it if you have some time. I’ve long been a fan of Brandon’s zines, and after getting my hands on a physical copy of Chaos Crawl #1 by successfully rolling to find secrets (The Lost Bay stand was stacked with too many different zines, so the Chaos Crawl zines were stored in a secret stash behind the table, only available for truly decrepit OSR freaks) I cannot recommend their work enough. It’s just oozing with sincere OSR DIY vibes and fun. Good stuff.

That’s all for now! Thank you for reading and take care!

Cheers,

- Emiel

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