Black Pudding
The OSR B/X Labyrinth Lord OSE zine most often consumed with roasted potatoes.
Way back in the olden days of 2016 or so, I wanted to make an RPG zine. I wanted it to kick some ass and be fun. I drew some hand-made character sheets and they were very well-received on G+. I decided to call my zine Claw Claw Bite until I discovered another RPG zine with the same name… so I went with Black Pudding because it sounded delicious and gross and was based on one of my favorite old monsters. I started collecting material for it, decided it would be 24 pages long, and made it happen. Not long after publishing it in PDF format, Peter Regan offered to put it into print. I said yes and BAM, those wonderful, crisp, A5 zines were brought into the world, screaming like a newly glorped ooze.
Check out Squarehex, where the zines are given physical life.
BP 1: Chainmail chicks, iron devils, and gravity guards.
BP 2: Whisperers, werewolf hunters, and yomgarfs.
BP 3: Luchadores, medusae, and hags.
BP 4: OSR playbook, goblins, and birdies.
BPHH V1: Collecting BP 1-4, organized into handy categories, with a few extras. Hardback print on demand.
BP 5: Boolas, rat queens, and star trolls.
BP 6: Underground, fat ladies, and snowmen.
BP 7: Rat bastards, worm witches, and dinosaurs.
BP 8: Rotters, royals, and wolf-rats.
Eyeball character class from issue 7 is a personal favorite of mine. I want to do an entire eyeball campaign.
Crypt golem from issue 3.
Character sheet from issue 1.
What is it?
Black Pudding is a zine. No one can accurately define what a zine is. It’s just a thing you make when you want to be creative and you’re not concerned with high polish. Zines are kind of raw. This one is raw. It’s filled with drawings. Every page has art, usually lots of it. Many of the pages are lettered by hand, so they look like some young dude’s D&D notebook he scrawls in at school when he should be doing his math. That was me. I was that young dude. But lest I fall into the trap of diminishing my own work, rest assured the scrawlings in this zine are not purely wild and unrefined. I work hard on these pages. I want them to look good, and I think they do.
I also sometimes invite others to join in the fun. Some contributors include Karl Stjernberg, Matt Hildebrand, Hodag, and Evlyn Moreau.
The contents of Black Pudding is almost exclusively compatible with games like Labyrinth Lord or Old School Essentials or Basic Fantasy RPG (anything “B/X”, based on the 1981 Basic and Expert sets of the world’s most popular RPG). But of course it can be used with any adventure game if you want to tweak it a bit.
I don’t know how long I will continue the zine. So far I haven’t had the urge to stop, but I definitely go in spurts and pauses. I go months or a year between issues. I like to think that when I’m an old fart in a nursing home I’ll be putting together issue 20 or something. We’ll see.