A couple years ago I entered Prince of Nothing's "No Artpunk Contest" by converting a 5e adventure I'd designed for my home table to OSRIC. I was already committed to shifting back to Basic/Advanced D&D, as my disenchantment with 5e had reached a critical point. The 5e version was written with classic-style adventuring principles, however, so I found it converted pretty easily to the older ruleset. I also needed to abide by the contest limitations, so a few other other changes applied to the OSRIC version of the adventure. I was actually still play-testing the 5e version (for the second time) when I entered the contest.
Prince's review came back pretty positive, but I didn't quite make the cut for the finalists. At the time, I intended to publish the 5e version on DM's Guild/DriveThruRPG, but after being reprimanded for defending Oriental Adventures in the product comments, and then having an email fight with the site's CSRs for calling out a blatant double-standard on a different product, I pulled my adventures off the site and stopped doing business with them.
Unfortunately, if you want to publish game materials, they're pretty much the only game in town. I'm looking into Lulu, but itch.io seems like a nightmare and I have no large following to draw attention to a product for direct sales. I'm not really looking to make money (based on past efforts, I won't), but I have a good deal of experience (40+ years) designing adventures, I have a ton of existing material in my campaign folders, I know a lot about writing and layout, and it's a creative exercise that gives me a lot of personal satisfaction and joy. I wouldn't mind earning a few bucks for the trouble, either, so what the hell...
I took my OSRIC version of Bergummo's Tower, rewrote the copy (reducing word count by about 15%) and redrew the maps to clean up a few things I didn't like. The final result is now up for sale at DriveThruRPG.
Here's the cover...
...and the annotated dungeon map as a preview.
It's a challenging gauntlet of puzzles, tricks, and monsters that will test even the most experienced players, but stays simple enough to avoid getting bogged down over impossible riddles and inscrutable clues. Check it out and let me know how it plays at your table.
I'm currently working on two other adventures for publication, with a list of six more I plan to release over the next year or so. Hopefully, I can contribute to the effort of bringing this ruleset and style of gaming to new players.
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