Johnny Rook Games publishes role playing game material compatible with OSRIC or other 1e rpg systems. This is just the beginning of a nice, solid game publishing company that is dedicated less to the profit margin and more to the hobby.

About our Westgate Adventures! line of modules:
Westgate is really only a province but it serves well as a starting point both for us and for you, the players. I really felt that we should produce books from that perspective – pure hobby, pure love of real role-playing (as opposed to what we generally see today with gamers), and giving you all something to use as frameworks to develop your own wonderful stories. The Westgate modules and accessories are and will be written for mostly dropping into any campaign. They will have plots and NPCs, nice maps, nice settings, but overall these should be general enough that any campaign can use them. Some of you might, perchance, play entire Westgate campaigns. Right on, I hope some of you do assuming we can pump out books for you fast enough. Very soon, we’ll have the first maps of the Westgate area for sale, with or without the campaign setting set. The world Westgate exists in has a general plot, it’s human-centric, it’s got magic but it’s not ridiculous – again, it’s a general campaign setting, easily modified to fit your stories.

JRG’s rules adaptations:

1) We make games suitable/compatible to the 1st and 2nd edition of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, although we are officially and legally only making games which are compatible with the OSRIC rules index. Although we are aware of the general rift of players between 1st and 2nd edition of AD&D, we feel those editions of the AD&D game are fine examples of revisions and any game made for a general AD&D audience can be adapted to either edition, no problem. On a small aside, we were going to join the FEADAD community but because we’re supporting a general AD&D and not exclusively 1e, we decided against stamping ourselves – although we support the efforts and FEADAD community greatly.

2) We do not make games suitable for any d20 version of D&D. This game is not role-playing, it is a video-game on paper. The d20 game is, in our minds, not a 3rd or 4th edition of D&D, but a whole different game wearing the face of the hobby king. We wish they would have marketed it like that. Of course you can probably convert our games to d20, but we certainly will not ever do this nor support the idea unless our OGL changes in which case we’ll just stop making games altogether.

3) Our games are suitable for basic D&D and contemporary versions of this game as well.

4) We do not support the 2nd edition revised rules of AD&D – those black-bound books. These rules are just bad and personally, I believe these rules led the way down the dark path to d20. Nix.

5) As we publish more of our Westgate Campaign, attentive readers will see many rules additions to the OSRIC game, with very few variations or alternate/optional rules. These guys made a nice index and we’re just going to try to grow it. The rules and systems we are going to be adding are what we call our “3rd edition AD&D,” although unofficially because we’d rather not get sued (at this point I’d like to direct any employees of WotC to our legal email address [legal@johnnyrookgames.com] if any lines get crossed…). We feel strongly that what we have here is not simply a collection of silly house-rules, but a nicely tested and edited version of AD&D which adapts the rules from Unearthed Arcana, Oriental Adventures, he Wilderness Survival Guide, the Dungeoneer Survival Guide, and some of the 2nd edition nuances into a very nice, solid experience of AD&D role-playing, and here’s the kicker: for the contemporary role-player. This is not a retro-clone, it is a continuation of a hobby which we’d like to see continue. The d20 world, other than allowing us to write OGL games, has done some damage to the hobby, in terms of how players play the game, which we’d like to fix up a bit. We’re not sure if older gamers are really that aware of the damage to younger players, but it’s bad out there. And of course, new players have no idea whatsoever. d20 players who sit at my AD&D/OSRIC table have life-changing experiences. But if I hear one more story about some guys d20 group of Dwarven Jedi-Paladins using detect evil abilities to hunt down kobolds and kill them with lightsabers and light-side powers to level-grind before beginning the DM’s adventure…

So there it is. I hope that explains our game product to some folks out there and hope that it doesn’t drive anyone away. We believe we’re making some very high quality work here for the widest audience possible, and hope that you see it in the months and years to come. We have some big plans…