Only one of the foul creatures remains—abominations forged by the meddling hands of wizards. After generations of slaughtering us, we've finally driven them back to the brink. Let the final hunt commence: the hunt for the last Owl Bear.

Hunt for the Last Owl Bear is a 16-page A5 fantasy hex crawl adventure for B/X and other old school games. I wrote it as part of a game jam last year. It came in third place according to the votes of everyone else who participated, and got an honorable mention in a YouTube video by the host of the jam.¹ Some people said some nice things about it, and some other people said some not so nice things about it—more on all that later.

(All of this happened over a year ago, but I'm just now getting around to writing about it. Forgive me this late indulgence.)

I've been running dnd² for about a decade and a half now, and almost always adventures of my own creation³ (and sometimes game systems I made myself, too). I like to fiddle with things. I like to tinker. I like to create. So I signed up for a game jam to give me the motivation to finally polish something up enough to publish it.⁴

It went... well. I had a few scraps of notes collected in the first few weeks. I had the seed of an idea and a rough hex map. Then I had procrastination. The majority of the work was done on the last day of the jam with my wife standing behind me with a timer, giving me just fifteen minutes to complete each page. Turns out, that method works really well for me! (Thank you, Sai! Thanks for that and for the art!)

In the end, I have an adventure module I'm proud of. It's got some rough edges that I might still sand down eventually. And I'd like to throw a dungeon in there someday. But I'm happy with it. Actually, it's really good!

But don't take my word for it!

Just listen to Bryce Lynch of tenfootpole.org who had this to say:

"This is not roleplaying. There is no subtly [sic] here...I am not amused."

Or, better yet, Meguey Baker, the Mother of the Apocalypse, who said:

"This is the most interesting hex crawl I've seen in a Very long Time."

Anyway, it's on sale now for 50% off as part of a big Halloween sale (because this adventure has ghosts in it). Check it out!

1: There was some negativity surrounding the host of this jam, so I have chosen to distance myself from them professionally. Email me if you're curious about the details.

2: Lowercase "dnd" being my preferred generic term for tabletop roleplaying adventure games. Everything else is just too much of a mouthful.

: Proposal to add Medievalist punctuation characters to the UCS

3: Don't call it "homebrew". Dnd is all homemade. Don't let the corporations that control the brand make your creations feel second class.

4: Well, my two games—Fell and Peasant—were already available to download. But those are free, so I don't count them.