Into the Unknown is now available in print & pdf

Into the Unknown is an Old School game that seeks to blend the Basic & Expert rules and style of play of the '80s with the current 5th edition ruleset of the world's most popular roleplaying game.

Get it here in print and pdf!

(Also, Pick up your free character sheet here)

What does the Game have?
The game is divided into five digest-sized booklets, optimized for use at the gametable:

• Book 1: Characters holds all you need to quickly create a new character (52 pages)
• Book 2: Playing the Game has all the essential rules for players to get going (28 pages)
• Book 3: Magic is strictly for those players whose characters are spellcasters (54 pages)
• Book 4: Running the Game has everything a Game Master needs for running old-school games (85 pages)
• Book 5: Monsters holds a selection of ready-to-use critters, complete with morale scores and treasure types (65 pages)

These are all laid out and edited to be as quick to scan and find what you are looking for at the table as possible- no more getting bogged down by looking things up in play!

Read a quick Introduction from Book 1 summarising the rules and its differences to 5e. (pdf)

How is this different from 5e or B/X?

Into the Unknown is based on 5th edition of the world's most popular roleplaying game and is fully compatible with it to the extent that you can easily create a 5th edition character and use him in a game of Into the Unknown and vice versa.

What sets it apart from 5th edition is that this is a "non-advanced" version that hearkens back to the "B/X" version of the game. It has been simplified in many places to speed up things such as character creation; "race-as-class" is back; so are old-school mechanisms such as morale, reaction rolls, 'random encounters', 'gold for XP' and henchmen.

For players used to 5e, Into the Unknown is easier and runs faster, and is an excellent game for exploring the old school style of play or introducing new players to the game.

For players used to running B/X, Into the Unknown is an opportunity to explore the latest edition of The Game without losing that Old School style of play you have been used to.

Additionally, the game offers a clear and structured approach for Game Masters to quickly and easily build a sandbox and run open-ended hexcrawl wilderness adventures, with simple and seamless mechanisms for time tracking and resource management to add a sense of pacing, tension and urgency to your old school dungeon-crawling games.

It also comes with plenty of advice on how to play the game in the Old School style, and a toolbox for how to houserule your game into something that fits your game table.

If you like the modern rules but would like to run more Old School games, this is the game for you!

A note on pricing:
There are bundle deals for those who want the whole game and the savings are notable.
Likewise, I encourage people to buy this in print - The revenue from print sales is less for me than with pdf (and even moreso on print bundles) but the hope is that they will be used at the game table.

Into the Unknown is complete! (pending proofs for release)

Today, I finished the last bit of writing, editing and proofreading on the last book, uploaded the files to onebookshelf and am now awaiting approval (which will go through no problem I expect) before I can order proofs. When they come in, and assuming they look as I expect them to look, I press the button for release and they are released! I expect this will be no more than two weeks away.
In between there is a few hours work with fitting the pdf products with cover and back cover, writing product descriptions and setting up bundle deals. But the files I have on my computer are basically the ones I expect to go on sale in two weeks or so.

I can't quite believe I am finished. This started out as a small scale project I thought I wrap up in a few months, grew into a complete game with ambitions for proper layout, plenty of artwork and all that jazz that people would enjoy having at their game table. The last year of sickness I've battled with didn't exactly speed things up.

The biggest challenge has without a doubt been book four, the gamemaster's guide. Where the other books were in large part about creative adaptation, much of the gm guide was written from scratch - Add to that, it took a very long time for my vision of it to condense into its current form and structure. The finished guide is my attempt at a definitive old school GM guide, most of which appplies to any ruleset - It straddles between brevity and focus vs completeness, fluff/advice vs. usable toolsets. Unlike the DMGs of D&D, it does not attempt to be a catchall versatile guide to all things D&D.

It's pretty focused on how to build a dungeon, build a wilderness sandbox, and build a settlement; and how to run adventures in these. Sprinkled with some advice on how to do all this in the Old School way. It's been thoughtprovoking to me that since Basic and Expert D&D, it's only really non-d&D products that have offered a tight focus on this aspect of gaming, in a way that doesn't either gloss over lots of stuff that old schoolers would consider integral to old school play (Pathfinder, 5e) or leaves a lot unsaid for newbies to figure out themselves or online (retroclones).

In that sense, Into the Unknown exists in a similar space to Torchbearer, The Perilous Wilds and Freeboters of the Frontier - As a modern and comprehensive light ruleset to emulate old school style of play. The difference to these is that ItU is basically teaching 5e how to play like B/X. "Un-advanced" 5e so to speak, with a focus on OSR style gaming.

I am glad that I did the heavy lifting early on while my enthusiasm was high. There is a lot of number-crunching on damage-per-round, design analysis etc., under the hood to make it fully 5e compatible that most players will probably never notice that I wouldn't want to ever do again. But it's done, and I am quite happy to be able to say that you can take your 5e dragonborn paladin or tiefling warlock and use at an Into the Unknown gametable without any conversion necessary.

There is a character sheet in the making, that I am excited to see myself. But I won't wait for it to finish. I am too excited to share all this with you guys!