Yes, I feel the need to kick the OSR logo off the back covers of both. (It has no right to be there now regardless, since Stuart Robertson rescinded it for everybody.) But there are also a few minor corrections to make—tweaks to the character sheets, the usual spate of minor typo corrections, and two bigger deals.
First, I'd like to tack the boxer and scholar classes that I wrote up (and presently have in their own little file on my sidebar over yonder to the left of the ol' blog) onto the end of the book in another appendix; and second, I feel a desperate need to update the melee weapon list, which (as it turns out) has some glaring inaccuracies that I just can't stomach anymore.
Corrections to things like the relative sizes of daggers, long-knives, short swords, arming swords, bastard swords, long swords (long swords are BIGGER than bastard swords; and even bastard swords are practically always used two-handed, never with a shield), and zweihänders. Or the fact that "great axes" and giant fantasy two-handed war-hammers are basically not a thing and never were, and that the largest historical axe and hammer weapons were pole-arms (namely pollaxes, bardiches, Lucerne hammers, and halberds) with long hafts, but relatively small heads.
Yeah, it's weird and pedantic that I feel the need to fix that of all things, but I prided myself on making the armor in E&E historically reasonable without bothering to do the same for weapons. Oops.
Back in my "aloha to the OSR" post, I said that I was reluctant to give up the acronym. Not because of the branding per se (at this point, I could care less whether anyone in the future discovers E&E while looking for "OSR games," and in fact I think I rather prefer to cleanly and completely divest any association with the OSR as such). But more because of the value of the OSR / TSR "visual pun" that gave rise to such artifacts as Mr Robertson's OSR logo. That, at least, was to my mind a clear and exceedingly useful statement of compatibility with the "core engine" at the heart of 0th/1st/2nd edition O/AD&D.
But I think it's fair to say, my reluctance is now utterly quashed. Too many bad apples have spoiled the OSR barrel, and I'm not even going to use the bloody abbreviation in my books anymore. (Jeez, I've just realized that I'm going to have to re-write the introduction to the new edition of Retro Phaze yet again to account for this.) But I do need to have something somewhere on the cover of Engines & Empires books that does the job of declaring, "hey, this thing is kinda based on a TSR edition of D&D and might be compatible with it!"
So I need a different acronym, a different something that looks like "TSR" but doesn't stand for "Tactical Studies Rules." And a bit of pondering and playing around has led me to a different idea altogether: this is a logo that I'm only going to use on E&E (since that's my definitive "old-school RPG"), not on Retro Phaze or anything else. Retro Phaze is not old-school, Three Bones is definitely not old-school, and I doubt I'll ever publish any other game that will fall under the "old-school" umbrella. So it can be totally unique to E&E, a way of saying that "this is old-school, steampunk, and fantasy, like a marriage of Arcanum and B/X!"
And, boom, that was perfect: just cross the T on the old TSR logo, and you get "FSR":
<Image removed because reasons;
see update below.>
Now that's a visual–verbal pun! So that's what's gonna go where I had an "OSR" logo on the old book covers.
Incidentally, while on the subject of visual puns, that brings me back to the subject of Retro Phaze. I had intended to name the new edition of that game Retro Phaze VI because it would be both the sixth revision of the game, and the cover art could be a shout-out to 16- and 32-bit era Final Fantasy box art. But I've decided to back off that decision both to avoid the inherent confusion of a numbered title, and because the new edition of Retro Phaze is still very much going to be only about 8-bit console RPGs in tabletop form.
So instead, I've decided to be a little more honest in the advertising (after a fashion) and acknowledge that the new edition is going to be both more complex and more complete than the original. As of now, I'm titling the new edition Retro Phaze Advanced, which gets to be its own special sort of pun, calling back as it does to both AD&D and to the titles of oh-so-many RPGs that got re-released on the GameBoy Advance and therefore had "Advance" appended onto their titles. Something like:
EDIT/UPDATE:
After giving it some more thought, I've decided that the steampunk logo doesn't actually do the job that I need it to do. My objection to the OSR logo, after all, is mainly one of false advertising—if "OSR" doesn't mean TSR D&D anymore, it doesn't indicate compatibility with any particular game engine. So why not just spell it out? Compatible with so and so. So I'm going back to the dice design, making the die symbol itself subtle and abstract (just three visible faces with 0, 1, and 2 pips), but then spelling out the meaning very clearly underneath that. A-like so:
Ain't no mistaking what that means. And while, yes, "OSR" is still technically present in the logo, it clearly does not say Old-School Renaissance, so I think I'm in the clear there.
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