Exalted Funeral, the Idaho-based distributor that has become the de facto storefront for the “boutique” side of the tabletop roleplaying hobby, has released a retrospective on 2025. Titled “The Top 10 games you loved the most this year”, the list serves as a significant barometer for the health and direction of the indie and OSR (Old School Renaissance) scene.
While mainstream outlets focus on the latest edition wars of the world’s oldest roleplaying game, Exalted Funeral’s sales data paints a different picture. The results indicate that for the independent enthusiast, the hobby is currently defined by two massive pillars: Necrotic Gnome’s Old-School Essentials and Isaac Williams’ Mausritter.
- Land of Eem Deluxe Box Set
- Mausritter Boxed Set
- UVG 2E (Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City 2nd Edition)
- His Majesty the Worm
- Carcass Crawler: The Official Old-School Essentials Zine Issue 5
- Old-School Essentials: Classic Game Set (The “Black Box”)
- Old-School Essentials: Advanced Expansion Set 1
- Old-School Essentials: Advanced Fantasy Referee’s Tome
- Old-School Essentials: Advanced Fantasy Player’s Tome
- Mausritter: The Estate Adventure Collection
The Necrotic Gnome Hegemony
If there was any doubt that Old-School Essentials has become the standard-bearer for B/X D&D retro-clones, this list extinguishes it. Of the ten items highlighted by Exalted Funeral as bestsellers/most loved in 2025, five are directly tied to the OSE ecosystem.
The Classic Game Set (often called the Black Box), the Advanced Fantasy Player’s and Referee’s Tomes, and the Advanced Expansion Set 1 all made the cut. Furthermore, the ecosystem is vibrant enough to support strong zine sales, with Carcass Crawler Issue 5 also ranking in the top ten. This suggests that the OSR audience is not just buying core rules to shelve, but actively purchasing supplementary material to keep their campaigns running.
The Year of the Mouse
The other clear winner in the 2025 recap is Mausritter. The sword-and-whiskers roleplaying game, which combines OSR principles with physical inventory slot management, took two spots. Both the Mausritter Boxed Set and The Estate Adventure Collection appear on the list.
The success of Mausritter highlights a trend towards tangible, high-quality production values. Both OSE and Mausritter are famous for their tactile nature, whether it is the modular books of the former or the item cards of the latter, suggesting that in a digital age, gamers are increasingly paying a premium for physical artifacts.
Psychedelia and Megadungeons
While the heavy hitters took the lion’s share, three other titles broke through the noise to capture the community’s attention.
- Land of Eem: A lighthearted fantasy sandbox RPG from the creators of the Rickety Stitch graphic novels. Its presence here validates the market for “cosy” but adventurous fantasy outside of the grimdark norm.
- UVG 2E (Ultraviolet Grasslands): Luka Rejec’s “psychedelic metal” point-crawl remains a cultural touchstone for the art-punk movement. The Second Edition’s performance proves that style is as important as substance for the Exalted Funeral demographic.
- His Majesty the Worm: A tarot-driven megadungeon crawler that focuses on resource management and procedural generation, catering to the hardcore dungeoneering crowd.
Digital Availability
While Exalted Funeral specialises in physical imports and boxed sets, many of these titles are available digitally for those who prefer PDFs or want to inspect the mechanics before committing to shipping costs.
You can find digital editions of Old-School Essentials, Mausritter, and Ultraviolet Grasslands directly on DriveThruRPG.
The dominance of boxed sets in this list, however, sends a message to publishers: the indie RPG consumer in 2025 wants a game they can hold, unbox, and display.
