Antarctica Jam 2025 - Overview

Taking a break from writing blogposts over the Easter weekend, I found and got stuck into a new RPG project. An immense collaborative effort to write settings, hexcrawls and adventures for Antarctica, rendered as a warmer continent and overlaid with the standard B/X six-mile hex.

There is no understating the enormity of the task. Antarctica may not be the biggest continent, but it is thousands of miles of interior landscape and coastline in every direction. Apart from the need to comply with the limited number of rules, I am free to do what I want with it.

Here's the overview map and the submap I selected my region from.

Most people have taken the idea of an ice-free Antarctica as an excuse to do sword & sorcery and other antediluvian/lost world stuff. I joined in on this because a continually updating bestiary of monsters leaned that way. But I hope to mix in some standard B/X or OSE monsters as well.

This was organized over on Itch.io and can be found here (https://itch.io/jam/antarctica-jam).

Just click join, look at the map, FAQ and head over to the Discord for more idea sharing between members.

Submissions open until February 28th 2026 at 7:00 PM

 

This is obviously a big project, one of which I will be keeping the blog updated throughout the rest of the year on. Interrupting my carefully planned schedule of posts but maybe allowing me to finally start posting about OSR content with any frequency.

My Work In Progress Guide

What I’ve done so far is reserved an island down in what is real-life Wilkes Land to develop. The island itself is a little under 10,000 square miles or about the size of North Macedonia. It’s self-contained and quite warm by the setting’s logic, covered in farmland. But influenced by Wolves Upon the Coast, I wanted to do something a little more mundane. A place of rival tribes and city-states vying for tribute.

I used this chart, lifted from here (https://occultronics.blogspot.com/2024/10/stocking-hexes-with-bx-dungeon-stocking.html), which is already linked on the Antarctica Jam to help fill out the island. Rolling each hex’s feature. Farmland was automatically a town and if farmland and a Special result met, I eventually decided it was a city of thousands.

The low population density of Wolves Upon the Coast’s hex fill procedure worked in my favour. Creating small patchworks of communities with the sort of wilderness that can hide monsters. Luke Gearing fortunately uploaded it here (https://lukegearing.blot.im/wolves-upon-the-coast-hexfill-procedure).

I then used the standard OSE encounter tables to fill out the monster lairs. Adapting any new ideas to try and fit my humancentric and S&S feel.

Eventually I ran into two problems, the idea of reusing the B/X dungeon stocking table for the wilderness meant I had a huge number of locations to write up. As you can see, I had to trim them down to reach 200 or so, especially as each farmland hex was dense enough to justify a writeup on this island.

The other major issue was a self-inflicted one, I had been using the Dungeon Lair numbers and not multiplying them by 5 for the wilderness. Meaning my landscape was carefully calibrated for roving bands of low-population raiders and traders. Not hundreds of monsters.

I tried to justify this by saying the monster-slaying had reduced the population to merely Number in Lair x2 and not x5.

For the dungeons, and it’s hardly an OSR game without dungeons. I used this nifty chart (https://grinningrat.substack.com/p/tetromino-dungeons) to find some random square assemblages of what I learned are called tetrominoes. Then I stuck them together to make dungeon layouts and stocked them with OSE monsters.

In the future, I would just stick to the WUTC hex filling procedure, digitized here (https://dungeon.loottheroom.uk/wolvesfills). Using the OSE SRD to fill wilderness lairs, compensating for the reduced number WUTC would generate.
Or any of the other tools and proeedures on the Hexcrawling page for the Jam.

The areas curently claimed.

I’m super interested to see if the project goes anywhere and how many people finish. If I finish my first region early, I might choose another region. Otherwise, I await you readers to join us in creating a setting that could provide years, if not decades of play.