The Corona Hack
An OSE Advanced Fantasy hack for bringing old-school play into a realistic, grim and sacramental world of saints, wounds, relics and damnation.
The Corona Hack is the rules engine being built for Of Iron & Thorns. It keeps the bones of old-school play — exploration procedures, encounter structure, referee authority, resource management — and binds them to the specific demands of a sacramental, historically grounded world.
Built upon OSE Advanced Fantasy
The Corona Hack is built upon Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy by Necrotic Gnome. It does not replace OSE. It hacks it — extending and reshaping the system to fit a world where sanctity is a resource, damnation is a condition, wounds are permanent and social station shapes what characters can do and be.
The Three Books
The Corona Hack — Player’s Tome
Character creation, careers, humors, sanctity, damnation, charismata and the rules for play as a character of the Regnum.
PlannedThe Corona Hack — Referee’s Tome
Encounter tables, dungeon procedures, relics, ancient peoples, the Infraworld, the Night of Screams and the tools for running the world.
PlannedAtlas of the Imperium
The world gazetteer: cities, noble houses, ancient peoples, roads, sanctuaries, forbidden places and the cartography of a fractured empire.
PlannedWhat Changes in Of Iron & Thorns?
The Corona Hack introduces rules and procedures specific to this world:
- Humors and apostemas — disease, constitution and bodily condition as mechanical states
- Careers and social station — characters have history and class in society, not only combat roles
- Sanctity and damnation — spiritual state as a resource, a condition and a fate
- Charismata and dark gifts — divine and infernal powers specific to this world
- Treuga Dei — the laws of sacred truce and their consequences when broken
- Relics and saintly artifacts — objects of genuine miraculous power, with conditions and costs
- Ancient peoples — not demihumans, but older broken lineages with their own laws
- Local history as scenario engine — the world’s chronicles generate adventures, not random tables alone
From 5E to The Corona Hack
The first Of Iron & Thorns adventures were written for 5E. They remain canonical. Future releases will be built for The Corona Hack. Legacy Conversion Notes are planned to help referees bring previous publications into the new old-school rules framework — without discarding the material already in play.