Black Blade Publishing and the OSR Community

...or, Why Does Black Blade Publishing Still Exist?

Earlier this year, Jon Hershberger and I met to conduct some Black Blade Publishing 2025 planning, and discussed preparations for GaryCon XVII and North Texas RPG Con, among various and sundry other topics, as is our wont.  

Black Blade Publishing logo---
yeah, that's us!

A Short History of Black Blade Publishing

In case you are unfamiliar with Black Blade Publishing---which is not only possible but quite likely since our web site has been kaput since before COVID, we don't do much in the way of outbound marketing, never launched a Kickstarter, and publish brand-new products less frequently than we would prefer---here's a snapshot summary:

Founded in 2009 by Jon Hershberger and Allan Grohe, Black Blade Publishing publishes and sells old school role-playing game products. We publish the OSRIC rules and Monsters of Myth supplement, adventure modules by Robert J. Kuntz (co-DM of the original Lake Geneva Greyhawk campaign), Tales of Peril (the D&D fictions of John Eric Holmes), and gaming supplies including graph and hex pads in a variety of formats ranging in size from 4.25 x 5.5" up to 17 x 22".

2025 marks 16 years that we've been been pursuing OSR publishing, which in our case invites some occasional introspective reflection.

Black Blade's Raisons d'Être

As part of our discussion, we revisited some of the core principles around which we founded Black Blade back at the dawn of the OSR---a phrase that recalls Babylon 5's season one opening line, "It was the dawn of the third age of mankind" (or at least it sounds that way in my head! ;) ).  Some of the principles that guide us include:

1. Publishing high-quality print products that support AD&D 1e and it's retro-clone, OSRIC
2. Supporting that communities that keep AD&D 1e and OSRIC alive 
3. Providing the homebrewing tools that drive DIY gaming
4. Supporting the publishers and gamers who participate in the old-school community

For the record, other reasons drive our business goals and planning too, but the above four were top-of-mind in our discussions at the start of the year.

Let's tackle them each in turn!  

1.  Publishing High-Quality Print Products that Support AD&D 1e and it's Retro-Clone, OSRIC

Publishing high-quality print products that support gaming using the rules and design ethos of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons first edition (AD&D 1e) and its retroclone, OSRIC. 

This includes our work publishing OSRIC and Monsters of Myth, our adventure modules The Original Bottle City, Cairn of the Skeleton King, and Tower of Blood by Rob Kuntz, Tales of Peril: The Complete Boinger and Zereth Stories of John Eric Holmes and our graph and hex paper pads that support homebrew gaming:

Monsters of Myth
(BBP edition 2024)

Tales of Peril (released 2017,
returns to print in 2025)

Cairn of the Skeleton King
(BBP edition, 2015)

Tower of Blood (BBP edition 2015)
by Robert J. Kuntz

The Original Bottle City
(BBP edition, 2014)

The Original Bottle City map from Castle Greyhawk,
by Rob Kuntz (included in BBP edition, 2014)

2.  Supporting the Communities that Keep AD&D 1e and OSRIC Alive
 

We support the AD&D 1e and old-school gaming communities that keep the heart of AD&D 1e alive and kicking nearly fifty years after its launch with TSR's Monster Manual in 1977.

2a.  OSRIC Pricing

This includes our pricing strategy for our OSRIC hardcover edition, which binds our price to the Lulu.com edition---Black Blade's price is $26, the Lulu version is $25.20.  

Our fixed price keeps AD&D 1e and OSRIC available in a comprehensive edition (including the equivalent content of TSR's PHB, DMG and MM books in a single volume) at an affordable price that's accessible to any gamer who wants it.  (We have been told by many other friends and publishers that we should be selling OSRIC for $50 or more!). 

OSRIC continues to remain freely available in PDF and wiki editions:

OSRIC front cover

2b.  Gaming Conventions

Black Blade's community support also includes our participation, engagement, support, and promotion of 1e gaming both offline at GaryCon, the North Texas RPG Con, and at conventions local to us: 

Locally today, that's primarily through Jon's continuing leadership at ScoutCon, which he has supported since its 2017 beginnings; we also supported KantCon in Kansas City for its first eight or nine years, and TsunamiCon in Wichita for many years as well:

Online, Allan continues to support the annual Virtual Greyhawk Con each fall, and both Jon and Allan support the hobby through engagement in online old-school and OSR groups on Facebook, reddit, and discord, as well as through community forums at Dragonsfoot, Knights & Knaves Alehouse, ODD74, and various other social media channels.  

3.  Providing the Homebrewing Tools that Drive DIY Gaming

Some of our philosophical approach is to provide the tools that support old-school DIY game play and homebrewing, which is where our graph and hex pads come to the table---literally and figuratively:

Black Blade graph and hex pads
(all but the new big one)

Black Blade's largest hex pad at17x22"
with an OSRIC rulebook for scale

In addition to the below examples, you may find my post #Dungeon23 Resources - Mega-Dungeon Tools of the Trade helpful to homebrewing and DIY gaming.  

3a.  Graph Pads!

I offer two examples of dungeon levels built using our Black Blade graph pads, but you can crawl through the blog and find many others if large levels don't excite you:

Allan and Henry's summer 2022
COVID mega-dungeon

Allan's revised Level 1 map
for grodog's Castle Greyhawk (2020)

You can read more about those levels and designs in my posts about Mega-Dungeon Design Sprints with Henry (or, How to Cope with COVID together after NTX 2022), and my Revised Maps for the First and Second Levels of grodog's Castle Greyhawk.  At the other extreme, some smaller examples on our mini-pads appear at Cairn Hills Lairs - The 1st and 2nd Fluted Cairns. 

3b.  Hex Pads!

Here are a few images that offer a better look at the hex pads in action:

Our 11x17" hex pad, showing the Gnarley Forest
and Kron Hills west and south of Dyvers (drawn by Allan Grohe) 

An earlier draft of the above map, with my 
DMG ruined monastery environs on the right

I've previously shared my DMG monastery environs map, but not this map of the environs around Nosnra's Steading from G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, drawn under guidance from Bill Silvey for his Monday nights Greyhawk campaign: 

Nosnra's Steading Environs, 
map by Allan Grohe 

Mike "mortellan" Bridges has featured our hex pads in many of his maps shared on his Greyhawkery blog, with this beautiful Perrenland regional map being the most-recent  (click through to the blog post for a higher-resolution version):

Mike Bridges' gorgeous Perrenland cartography,
on our 17x22" hex pad!

Mike has similar examples of his fabulous maps at https://greyhawkery.blogspot.com/2017/06/new-greyhawk-map-ulakand-mesa.html and https://greyhawkery.blogspot.com/2020/11/new-map-ice-barbarian-campaign.html, among others.  You should definitely check all of his Greyhawk work out!

4.  Supporting the Gamers and Publishers Who Thrive in the Old-School Community

Lastly, through our work at conventions and in our booth, Black Blade supports the OSR and old-school gamers, designers, artists, and publishers who also support AD&D 1e, OSRIC, and similar old-school systems. 

Knockspell Magazine #3
(Summer 2009)

Jon and Allan have both written for Knockspell Magazine, and while Allan has occasionally contributed to Fight On! Magazine, Jon spearheaded and led production on the massive Gong Farmers Almanac for the DCC community from its inception through 2020 (as well as maintaining our Black Blade DCC zine annual indexes during that same time). 

Saving Throw #1 fundraiser zine, 
honoring the memory of Jim Kramer

This also includes maintaining our Black Blade booth at GaryCon and the North Texas RPG Con each year.  We have attended GaryCon and NTX since their inceptions, and in our booth we try to promote the best that the OSR has to offer alongside our own products, since many of those products are created and published by our friends and fellow-gamers!:

Black Blade's GaryCon booth in 2024

Black Blade also represents a large and varied assortment of other old-school game publishers, carrying their products for Gary Con and North Texas RPG Con attendees' enjoyment. These publishing partners include Goodman Games, The Tekumel Foundation, Anthony Huso, Bat in the Attic Games, Mythmere Games, North Wind Adventures, casl Entertainment, The Arcane Library, Swordfish Islands, Three Line Studio, E.M.D.T. - The First Hungarian D20 Society, and numerous others. 

You can view pictures of our booths in our Facebook albums, and see gaming in action in my 2025 and 2024 GaryCon convention reports (and further back if you're inclined toward a stroll down memory lane!).

John O'Neill, editor in chief of Black Gate magazine, has also showcased the breadth and depth of our booth's cornucopia-like offerings in recent feature articles from 2023 and 2018.

Still Crazy After All These Years

In revisiting our origins and talking through the whys and whats that we do, Jon and I reaffirmed our interest in continuing Black Blade. 

Jon (tacojohndm) Hershberger and Allan (grodog) Grohe
in the Black Blade booth at GaryCon 2025
(photo courtesy of John O'Neill)

"Staying in business" is not a foregone conclusion since Black Blade consumes a lot of our time (including vacation time from our day jobs---Black Blade is far from a full-time career for Jon or me, and it would never support our families), energy, and creativity.  We intentionally reexamine this question every few years, as the business climate and our personal circumstances warrant.  

We have come close to shutting down Black Blade more than a few times in the past, but for now we plan to hold the line, and to continue to proudly carry the torch for old-school gaming.

A Heartfelt "Thank You" 

As always, we thank you for your patronage and your continuing support for old-school gaming in all of its forms, and we look forward to seeing you in Lake Geneva and Dallas again in 2025, and beyond!

Allan and Jon.

grodog's Top 10 Favorite Greyhawk Adventures

On tonight's Gabbin #353 "The Top Published Greyhawk Adventures!" show, Jay Scott, Anna Meyer, and Mike Bridges feature Erik Mona, Carlos Lising, and Joe Bloch as guests (with others to be announced during the show) to discuss their favorite Greyhawk modules of all time.*  

My favorites rankings have slowly evolved over time (two different links there), as I've revisited various classics and my assessments of them:  D3 and L1 rose through such reconsiderations, while G3, WG4, and S4 lost some ground when considered as adventures first and sine qua non, rather than for their introductions of seminal new monsters or magic items, etc.

For my top favorite Greyhawk modules lists below, I've limited myself to adventures set in Greyhawk (whether explicitly or with the serial numbers filed off), rather than those that can (or perhaps should) be adapted to Greyhawk:

grodog's 10 Favorite Gryehawk adventures, ranked, with some quick notes about what appeals to me about each:

1. D3 Vault of the Drow by Gary Gygax:  D3 has dethroned G3 as my favorite adventure of all time; it is the quintessential AD&D scenario---a high-level sandbox of doom that will snuff out your PCs if they're not as capable diplomatically as they are in combat; combining the best of dungeon play alongside factions and city play, D3 is the ultimate test of a DM and a play group!
   
   
2. WG5 Mordenkainen's Fantastic Adventure by Rob Kuntz:  WG5 continually remains a favorite, but it is difficult for me to choose between these three levels vs. others in Rob's Maure Castle (in my head, I group the three levels here with the three from Dungeon alongside "Warlock's Walk"), but for the moment it remains at the top among his designs, in my eye:  it's hard to beat the Kuntzian expansiveness of The Lost City of the Elders, the octych stars before the Unopenable Doors, the imaginative Eli Tomorast and his unique familiar Rel, Kerzit and his stewardship of The Tome of the Black Heart, and the fabulous set-pieces throughout the first level
   
   
3. MoZ4 The Eight Kings by Rob Kuntz:  like WG5 it's hard for me to rank MoZ4 vs. others in the series, but this one edges the others out since it presents a 32nd-level archmage's magical lab demi-plane, invaded and taken over by Xaene after Zydilec (its original proprietor) fell victim to one of his own experiments; it also offers a wonderful conclusion to the series, and the opportunity for the PCs to restore the good-and-just Ivid V to the throne of the Great Kingdom (as opposed to his evil clone, controlled by Xaene)
   
   
4. T1 The Village of Hommlet by Gary Gygax:  the quintessential challenge for expert players---new 1st level PCs thrown into a powderkeg of local politics and regional-spanning machinations that involve gods and demon princes!; the fact that Lareth is beloved by Lolth (or Zuggtmoy, or whoever you decide to replace his patron with) also demonstrates the importance of actively-engaged deities in the setting (St. Cuthbert and the Old Faith druids and bards, among others), something I have certainly taken to heart in our current campaign
   
   
5. L1 The Secret of Bone Hill by Lenard Lakofka:  another wonderful introductory sandbox, this one uniquely providing local wilderness exploration accessible to lower-level PCs (2nd to 4th), alongside fun dungeon exploration, and the introduction of local politics later exploited and developed further in L2 The Assassin's Knot
   
   
6. G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King by Gary Gygax:  While I've slipped my ranking of this adventure as I've reconsidered it over time (for many many years it was my #1 module), that's only because I've grown to appreciate the other scenarios above even more-deeply; I still love the drow, the interplay of the factions throughout the adventure (in particular when you consider any previously-surviving giant thanes from G1 and G2 making their last-stands here after fleeing the PCs earlier in the series!), the temple to the Elder Elemental Gods, the wall of tentacles and tentacle rods, and the subtly-suggestive interplays among the evil forces (Queen Frupy's occasional magical control of her husband, the suggestion of an affair between Eclavdra and the king, the illithid spying upon everyone, etc.)
   
   
7. A1 Slave Pits of the Undercity by David Cook:  perhaps my only pick still on the list influenced in part by nostalgia (A1 was the first module I ever bought for myself, using monies saved up from paper routes and/or lining Little League baseball fields), I still find this scenario quite compelling---the introduction of the Slave Lords and their foul depredations throughout the communities of the Sea of Gernant, our first introduction to the ruined-but-still-living city of Highport, my first exposure to tribal shamans and witchdoctors in play, and the vision offered for how to flesh out a four-hour convention tournament (with scoring details, and now-iconic pregen PCs) into a campaign scenario; A1 inspired me to design other buildings in Highport, and to build out its sewer system that the dungeon level would naturally connect to, as well
   
   
8. "Chambers of Antiquities" by Rob Kuntz and Paizo in Dungeon Magazine #124 (July 2005):  my favorite of the three levels published in Dungeon, and only eclipsing #112's "The Statuary" because I still dislike the ideas of the Id Core and its minions (I haven't reimagined these concepts in my head yet for deployment at the table) enough that they outweigh my love of The Statuary's map (one of my favorite designs by Kuntz); that said, the set-piece encounters of "Chambers of Antiquities" are brilliant, and I love the concept of the Maure family maintaining vault of "stuff to dangerous for us to mess with yet," and the hints at the wider world of the setting (the Dragonmasters of Lynn, Arodnap/Pandora, and the many artifacts and relics Kuntz introduces).  
   
   
9. "COR1-03 River of Blood" by Erik Mona, an introductory and core Living Greyhawk scenario from the campaign's launch in 2000:  Mona's brilliant introductory scenario stands right up there with T1, L1, and T1 as an excellent introductory campaign starter; it leverages xvarts (an under-used goblinoid monster unique to Greyhawk), and as the first in his "Absolute Power" series of planned LG scenarios ties into the Maures, the octyches from Maure Castle, S2 White Plume Mountain, and the ancient powers of the Suloise archmages; Mona followed-up on this adventure in "COR2-01: As He Lay Dying" and I hope that he returns to the series in the future, as it's an excellent premise
   
   
10. Return of the Eight by Roger Moore:  Despite it's railroady introduction---which, in truth, is not much worse than others in classic modules; the advantage of such starting premises is that they can a) be easily jettisoned, and b) take up little space in the module's text---I love this module for its creation of Greyhawk lore (oerthblood and the Fortress of Unknown Depths itself), its exploration of a high-level wizard's demesne (only Kuntz's MoZ4 surpasses it as such!), and a continuation and homage to Iggwilv's ongoing machinations in the setting, building from S4, WG6, and later scenarios (like "The Ravage of Ghorkai" from the d20 freebie download for Slayers Guide to Dragons, and perhaps most-notably in Carlos Lising's use of the character in his C11 and G2 modules)

10 Honorable Mentions (in alphabetical order by title, rather than ranked):

• "Fiend's Embrace" by Stephen S. Greer in Dungeon Magazine #121 (April 2005)
• G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief by Gary Gygax
• G2 The Witch Queen's Lament by Carlos A. S. Lising 
• LGCC-1 The Original Bottle City by Rob Kuntz
• "Kingdom of the Ghouls" by Wolfgang Baur in Dungeon Magazine #70 (September/October 1998)
• "Quest for the Golden Orb" tournament from Origins in 1984 by Elaine Walquist
• S4 Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth by Gary Gygax
• "The Whispering Cairn" by Erik Mona in Dungeon Magazine #124 (July 2005)
• WG4 The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun by Gary Gygax 
• WGR6 City of Skulls by Carl Sargent

I'm sure the discussion tonight will be well-worthwhile, so check it out live on Twitch or as a rerun on YouTube!  (I'll update these links once it's posted).  

* The discussion piggybacks on "The 30 Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time" listing published in Dungeon Magazine #116 (compiled by Mona, James Jacobs, and the Dungeon Design Panel and published in November 2004).

For reference, here is that list, but note that a) it's not Greyhawk-specific, and b) it cheats by grouping multiple modules in a series as a single line item, which doesn't force hard choices like G1 vs. G3, for example ;)

1. GDQ1-7 Queen of Spiders 
2. I6 Ravenloft 
3. S1 Tomb of Horrors 
4. T1-4 The Temple of Elemental Evil 
5. S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks 
6. I3-5 The Desert of Desolation 
7. B2 The Keep on the Borderlands 
8. Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil 
9. S2 White Plume Mountain 
10. Return to the Tomb of Horrors 
11. The Gates of Firestorm Peak 
12. The Forge of Fury 
13. I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City 
14. Dead Gods 
15. X2 Castle Amber 
16. X1 The Isle of Dread 
17. The Ruins of Undermountain 
18. C1 The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan 
19. N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God 
20. A1-4 Scourge of the Slave Lords 
21. Dark Tower 
22. S4 The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth 
23. WG4 The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun 
24. City of the Spider Queen 
25. DL1 Dragons of Despair 
26. WGR6 City of Skulls 
27. U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh 
28. B4 The Lost City 
29. L2 The Assassin's Knot 
30. C2 The Ghost Tower of Inverness

...with some analysis by Glyfair in 2004 ENWorld discussion:

• OD&D: 0 
• 1st Edition: 18 
• Basic D&D: 4 
• 2nd Edition: 5 
• 3rd Edition: 3
• Non-TSR/Wotc products: 1 

Allan.