/osr/ - The Old School Renaissance

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Previous Thread: What's your favorite blog that gets shilled on /osr/?

Other urls found in this thread:

jrients.blogspot.co.nz/2011/04/twenty-quick-questions-for-your.html
lastgaspgrimoire.com/in-corpathium/
coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/05/osr-building-city-first-section.html
watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funerary_Monument_to_Sir_John_Hawkwood
falsemachine.blogspot.ca/2017/07/held-kinetic-energy-in-old-school.html
youtube.com/watch?v=cN0IuqgC3N8
archive.fo/UAtda
archive.fo/gzEJm
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Anyone else hyped for this?

>What's your favorite blog that gets shilled on /osr/?
I follow none of those on principle.

I'm planning to have the villain of my current campaign melt the polar cap to reveal Hyperborea within, awakening from suspended animation. He's got plans there and the party must follow.

All I need is a good map of the whole place.

I've been trying to figure out how to do healing with limited supplies (first aid kits) for a few days now. The idea being if you take a turn off from exploring and patch yourselves up, you'll be able to heal a bit of health.

Originally, I thought to just make it something like 1d4 or 1d6 + Wisdom modifier. But the problem with that comes with time and scaling; you could patch up a level 1 character to full with this but a high level character would barely be healed by it.

Then I thought, hey maybe make it heal 1 health point PER hit dice you have, so it will always restore aprox 1/6th of your health, which might be too good, but at the same time I wasn't sure how to add Wisdom modifier bonuses to this that wasn't too good.

My game is also aspiring to be pretty high fantasy most of the time, I don't really do death and dismemberment and such, people in my setting heal their injuries pretty well and often with magic so stuff like losing limbs and getting gangrene doesn't happen too much, so perhaps this wouldn't be a bad way to do it.

Any thoughts?

Use flat rates. No dice, just x turns to get y% of your health back, up to a maximum of z. It should be useful but worse than magical healing. Make it a limited resource that varies by class, like 4e's healing surges, so maybe the fighter gets to stop and patch up his wounds 3 times per day but the wizard just can't put up with the strain and only gets to do it once. To prevent cheese and make it a bit more gritty, give it slightly diminishing returns, maybe?

Hard to have a favorite, but there's a few I get a lot out of. Dungeon of Signs, Against the Wicked City and Monsters and Manuals off the top of my head.

I'm pretty excite.

lol people take that shit too serious. Bloggers too. They just like some of the things about a thing you like some of, you don't have to like them as people. Even if you don't the might have an interesting idea you can use.

>What's your favorite blog
Probably one of the more analysis-heavy blogs right now. Delta's D&D Hotspot and whatnot.

> that gets shilled on /osr/?
I think ANT-LERRR got shilled here once? That's a pretty good blog. Lots of weird stuff.

Are there any OSR play videos/podcasts? Especially any with a ton of play derived from improvisation and random chart results, whole cloth?

How do you determine carry weights? Do you go by weight or by general units?

I just wing it.

What is a good way to create a starter generic city?

I really like the GLOG method

You have a limited number of slots. Going over that limit gets you encumbrance.

Makes it more a matter of 'what tools are useful enough to take up slots' rather than tedious beancounting by weight

(STR * STR)/5 in pounds for unencumbered, then double, triple, and sextuple that for light, medium, and heavy encumbrance. Lower characteristics accordingly.

It really depends on what you intend to use it for.

Is it a city that the campaign can focus on, like the City-State of the Invincible Overlord? Is it a city that the characters just spend their downtime in before returning to the dungeon next session?
Is the city the entirety of the setting, or just a safe space to rest between adventures?

If it's the former, you can't really get away with making it "generic" - you need to give it some flavor to make it interesting. If it's the latter, you can probably get away with the roughest of descriptions and then wing it when the player's ask you about the details.
Maybe make a list of major characters, I guess, and major locations - churches, banks, inns and stores.

Answer these questions:
jrients.blogspot.co.nz/2011/04/twenty-quick-questions-for-your.html

Keep
Mercantile district
mage college
arts district
slums
Resource extraction
City guardhouse
general store
pub

yeah, I think that pretty much covers the fundamentals.

>What's your favorite blog that gets shilled on /osr/?
Melancholies and Mirth has posted some pretty useful stuff for me recently, so I'll say that.

What about religion? i was thinking in using the ones from greyhawk but dont know if there is a ntoehr method for generic religions

yeah I flubbed on that, add two different churches and a cult

Yeah, it's pretty new but I'm really liking that one so far

Almost didn't make it.
Nah, it's all good. Fixed the descriptions a bit to match the map.

I wouldn't say this way is best or generic, but it's hella fun:
lastgaspgrimoire.com/in-corpathium/
And the core idea is worth riffing on. For example: coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/05/osr-building-city-first-section.html
The 20 questions here are vital.

This tool is also good: watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator

One important thing to note about the original five-save system is that to some extent they emphasize the mechanical effect on your character as much as the actual source.

For example, the category of Instant Death *and* Poison is linked together because both effects result in instant death for your character (note this is the most forgiving save too).

Generally speaking the game mechanic categories are:
1. Effects that cause instant death: this is the most forgiving save, usually starting at around 14+, since there's generally no way to mitigate these easily.

2. Effects from a wand. These are harder to save against, even if the effect would be identical to the spell, because they represent a expenditure of a rarer and more expensive resource (this makes wands considerably stronger than spell scrolls, for example).

3. Paralysis or Petrification. This represents another medium difficulty save, because while it's very debilitating it's not permanent death for your character assuming your team-mates survive to help after.

4. Area damage. These are in the hard-to-save category because this effect damages your HP and consequently isn't as immediately fatal.

5. "Spell effects" a catch-all for anything not covered by others. While a difficult saving category by default, you'll note that individual spells may have their own positive or negative modifier depending on the strength of their effects.

tl;dr the 5-save system is grouped by their *mechanical effect on the character* as much as distinguishing the source - the exact same effect produced by a different source may be more valuable.

How come costs of armor in AD&D don't make any sense?

'cause they're the best defense other than a good offense

how does an adventurer guild works?
how are adventurers seen by normal peasents?

>how does an adventurer guild works?
There are no adventurer guilds. They're stupid and nonsensical.
>how are adventurers seen by normal peasents?
The same way regular real-world humans would see vagrants and thrill-seekers: a bunch of loonies, but harmless so long as they keep their trouble away from us.

What's wrong with the first one?

Nothing, just nice to get a new edition.

>Adventurer Guild
Joining the adventurer guild can be done by basically anyone. It's a highly meritocratic organization though, so Wizards who are already established when they join the guild will be able to move up the ranks quickly, if there even are 'ranks'.

Stories of fame and fortune make tons of young and stupid people join, even if just to be a porter or lantern boy. Presumably after the first mission when they see their guild master getting fucking eaten by the floor that grew ragged teeth, they'll either quit or harden the fuck up.

>How are adventurers seen by normal peasants?

Rockstars. You don't really want them in your community most of the time, and you lock up your daughter/son/sheep when they come around, but everyone is a little jealous. When they haul a bunch of bloody treasure into town though they are everyone's friend though.

>There are no adventurer guilds. They're stupid and nonsensical.

Please explain why a highly dangerous, highly skill based, high reward job with a high turnover rate and need for constant apprentices/unpaid lantern boys wouldn't have a guild to go along with it? You seem a bit triggered. Does the thought of adventurer guilds make your muh grit and grime setting feel less legit and "realistic"? Get over yourself dude.

>2. Effects from a wand. These are harder to save against,
Other way around. Wand/Staff/Rod is always an easier Save than Spell.
There is not one exception to that anywhere on the Save tables.
>because they represent a expenditure of a rarer and more expensive resource
Because lv.14 MUs throw 14 spells/day, and lv.1 MUs w/ wands can zap dozens for one day.

>Please explain why a highly dangerous, highly skill based, high reward job with a high turnover rate and need for constant apprentices/unpaid lantern boys wouldn't have a guild to go along with it?
In a feudal setting? Because adventures break the class/wealth/status, and challenge the state's monopoly on organized violence.

In setting where feudalism isn't important? They make sense, provided that "looting stuff" is a sufficiently common and widespread activity.

This all varies by setting, game tone, and game goals.

>lv.14 MUs throw 14 spells/day
*lv.10

Because the costs of everything in AD&D don't make sense. Accept it as a game thing and move on, or find a better price list.

>Please explain why a highly dangerous, highly skill based, high reward job with a high turnover rate and need for constant apprentices/unpaid lantern boys wouldn't have a guild to go along with it?
Because "adventurer" is not a profession.

The vast majority of people counting among such are either too inherently dysfunctional and selfish to belong to any guild, or already owe their allegiances to another faction - thieves in thieves' guild, clerics and paladins at some god's temple, fighters under some lord, wizards have a mage's guild, and so forth. Even the lantern boys and other camp followers can be hired from a bunch of other guilds.

The adventuring business, going out to explore ruins and old dungeons and wizard towers and shit, is also far too uncommon to warrant an entire guild: there's simply not enough ruins around, nor people mad enough to dare delve into one. There's some wicked shit down there: anything can happen, anything can be encountered, and laws of physics just go wonky.

Also, as said, the local lords and kings and whatnot will object. At least the mages keep to their towers and can occasionally serve in the court, while thieves mostly just steal things, but if you gather all these rowdy madmen under one roof, you'll soon have a psychopathic mercenary band in your hands - they might even try to organize a revolution! You just can't have that.

You'd need a very specific setting for it to work: some kind of a Points of Light where all forests are filled with goblins and there's like three ruins at a mile's radius of your home village, enough that a few swords and spells wielded by these adventuring lunatics wouldn't go amiss. And in such a setting, they wouldn't be called adventurers, but rather Judges: highly trained and organized specialists, licensed and tolerated only as long as they'll point their swords at the right direction.

>but if you gather all these rowdy madmen under one roof, you'll soon have a psychopathic mercenary band in your hands - they might even try to organize a revolution!
And do you know what we call unscrupulous, mercenary, extortionist madmen with an independent army?
"Savior of the City" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funerary_Monument_to_Sir_John_Hawkwood

It's run by Adam Koebel, who gets a lot of hate around here, but the Old School Roleplaying series on roll20's youtube channel is a straight run of Keep on the Borderlands using Moldvay D&D.

>What's your favorite blog that gets shilled on /osr/?
Out of the ones commonly shilled here I think Dungeon of Signs is the greatest. Planet Algol and Jeff Rients 4 life though.

What game would you recommend for a party who wants to play in the world of Al-Qadim with as few books as possible?

Honestly I found the intro and retrospective of the Roll20 KoTB series more interesting than the actual series itself.

Many of the players ended up absent for a lot of the sessions; for what it's worth I think it demonstrates the weakness of KoTB as an introductory dungeoncrawl; there's very little in the way of alternate paths or reward for careful exploration.

>how does an adventurer guild work
An adventurer guild is just a thieves guild that's more respectable. The closest analog to one I have in my setting is basically just operated by a gang in a city that gives a certain degree of legal protection/responsibility for all adventurers while promising business to all the merchants of the city. If the treasure flow into the city is running low, they might put out notices or do a drive, and if there's a need for a certain type of adventurer, say a very skilled fighter, they might host a tournament or something to try and get people to come.

For the most part, many cities with strong enough governing bodies/states would probably ban a adventurer's guild since if you have one around and have the treasure become too important the adventurers will run everything, and then that means it's not too long before demihumans will get a little uppity and before you know it there's an elf quarter or a dwarf manufactory ruining an entire district.

>how are adventurers seen by normal peasants?
It's a two step process, step one is that they're probably laughed at as pathetic or suicidal, and the second step (optional) is suspicion and envy at their success.

What are some good OSR dungeons that work with most games?

Just scan the last 2 or 3 threads, user. People were posting tons of them.

For Gold & Glory + MC Al-Qadim Appendix.
That's two books.

>This tool is also good: watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator
Did anyone ever mention how to save the results from that? It's a pretty shit tool if you can't put your generated town into your notes permanently tbqh.

piano

did it 4 u skerp

That was meant for B 4
4

I don't mind others shilling for him, I just don't like when he does it. Which is 80% of the time.

what?

>Did anyone ever mention how to save the results from that?
I don't recall, sorry. I screenshot the maps and chuck them in as a base layer in Photoshop. The guy spams it on reddit though so maybe there's a comment there?

Soon to be obsolete, motherfuckers! As in, 20 minutes.

what is your experience with for gold & glory?
do you use other classes?

Awesome. Why For Gold & Glory though?

Like gangs, cults, bandits, mercs and other cutthroats who can sometimes flash colours, bribe and muscle their way into each other's turf to take over their established spaces or get absorbed. Communication and travel between somewhat civilized centers is difficult so they aren't capable of being unified or cohesive over distance. If they get too big either or they become an overt threat to local lords they either collapse from internal conflict, get broken up by threatened churches, nobles, etc. or take over. Sometimes the take over is sanctioned, sometimes not, depends on the political climate, who's back yard they're in, who they offer to support, etc.

Peasants see them as well armed unknown variables. Sometimes with lots of cash to blow, cool stories and a willingness to kill local threats. Sometimes broke, staving, psychopathic monsters and otherwise becoming the local threats. If the peasants think there's a benefit to having this particular pack of adventurers around they'll be hospitable, if not they'll make themselves scarce and look for ways to drive them off.

You're not describing anything like a guild, man. The whole point of a guild is *protectionism*; "anyone can join! Fast advancement!" is literally the opposite of a guild's principles.

The point of Thieves' Guilds in the stories where they appear is a cynical illustration of how corrupt the city is; you can't even become a burglar without joining an established organization, doing your seven-year apprenticeship, bowing to the guild masters who get all the plum jobs and blah blah, so there's literally no get-rich-quick scheme, no corner unoccupied by the beggars, nothing. If you want to make a quick buck you have to operate unlicensed and get *everyone* up your ass.

>Please explain why a highly dangerous, highly skill based, high reward job with a high turnover rate and need for constant apprentices/unpaid lantern boys wouldn't have a guild to go along with it?
Those are literally the reasons *why* there would be no guild. Most likely the adventurers would just recruit like landsknechts or other mercenaries instead.

So, after many edits, v 2.0 of Tomb of the Serpent Kings is finally done!

It's got art! It's got style! It's got the will and desire to be spammed in these threads for months!

Seriously though, people do like it, and it seems to work fairly well as a learning/tutorial dungeon. Thanks to Veeky Forums for encouraging me to write it and continue to improve it.

>Soon
>20 minutes.
>Soon
...nah.

...nah.

I said what I meant and I meant what I said.

>1500948646533
>1500948653192

>files were uploaded 6.659 seconds apart
May you eat your favorite pet.

> and you have to credit me somewhere. Same goes for the art.
Are you telling me to say you did the art?

>May you eat your favorite pet.
No thanks. they'd taste terrible.

Also, that was pretty fucking serendipitous.

>Are you telling me to say you did the art?
Nah man, Scrap Princess did the art. Pretty clear. That particular sentence is only ambiguous if you didn't read the preceding bit.

HOW DO I KEEP MISQUOTING FUCK

Anyway, FG&G is a one-book 2e clone that will be compatible with all the Al-Qadim material. However, I have 0 experience with the system. And I'm only reccing FG&G because of the weird "as few books as possible" stipulation.

How long should a torch last?

As long as it must, but no more.

3,600 seconds and not a moment longer.

Thank you for making my day. The next three posts are as follows. 1. Dungeon#01 a series of towers with an elevator which leads into the sky. 2. Sky/Clouds terrain encounters,bestiary, and rules. 3. A breaking down of one of the encounters (essentially a flying mini-dungeon). If those all sound like garbage let me know what to write instead.

Write me a check for a million dollars

Yeah man, you're doing good stuff. I'm still looking over your worldbuilding posts, but I think the
>If a player is an X, then Y. If 3 or more players are X, then Z
idea is fucking /solid/ and probably should be in every setting guide in one form or another.

I'd like to see elevator dungeon. Have you read this post: falsemachine.blogspot.ca/2017/07/held-kinetic-energy-in-old-school.html ?
Could be worth integrating.

Also, I've added you to my blog sidebar. Sorry about the delay. Hope that drives a few more eyeballs your way.

Google and iqdb give no useful results, source?

Ah shit, its not an elevator dungeon at all. Its a dungeon that just happens to have two elevators. one of which extends to about a mile upwards. It's basically the album Warlord by Yung Lean as a dungeon. youtube.com/watch?v=cN0IuqgC3N8

Thanks man! I have no idea how to use google+ and at this point am afraid to ask so I appreciate it

Got it from Veeky Forums.

While looking for a source, I found these threads:
archive.fo/UAtda
archive.fo/gzEJm

They aren't what you're lookign for, but they should be relevant to your interests.

Also, I assume you used Veeky Forums's built in buttons for those searches.
Word of warning: you probably searched the thumbnails.
The thumbnails do occasionally get results that the full image doesn't, but the reverse is far more common.

I'm going to be honest, the layout isn't really doing it for me. It's OK. I just can't put my finger on why it doesn't make me go "ooh, I want to run that".

It might be that the design feels very game-like, and not like a real construction? Hrm.

Meant for

I've just now realized that my game has no max level.

What happens? How do you treat a level 60 Fighter or Rogue? Do they even need to roll to hit mortal beings? What about magic users? Do they get some lvl 11th spell slots or some shit?

Would there be any interest in a "retro-clone" of DCC's spell/magic mechanics done in such a way that they were entirely OGC? I know I'd like them for my projects but most of /osr/ is just homebrewers who would swipe it wholesale from DCC and I'm wondering if should go through the effort or not.

This a concept map/sketch of the structure. I'm play testing the dungeon at a bar Sunday and the layout above is to give them measurable distances. Is this more "ooh, I wanna run that"?

It looks too linear in terms of how it would play, but too unconnected in terms of how it would have to be constructed in world?

Aside from the 2-4-10-20 loop the entire dungeon is just linear branches.

There are basically 3 long paths with a few 1/2 room dead ends that don't interconnect at all.

If you want ot get from one room to any other there is basically only 1 way to do it.

lol not him, but yeah. Scribbly shit does it for me more than blocks. Still looks too straight lines through the dungeon if I think about it, but I am a sucker for hand drawn.

>It looks too linear in terms of how it would play, but too unconnected in terms of how it would have to be constructed in world?
Yeah, that's it.
With TotSK, there are a few paths you can trace - paths for priests, paths for sacrifices, paths for petitioners meeting the current king. The dungeon was built for a reason, and that reason wasn't "to be a dungeon."

Also, it's kind of spread out. You can compress it more without making it a maze. Don't be afraid to use some symmetrical sections.

Also, pick a real-world building or archetype and work around that: monastery, temple, catacombs, forge, power plant, cathedral, rotary supercollider...

Either they get only modestly better (+1 HP per level, saves improve very slowly). The idea being that, no matter how great they are, they're still mortals. Perhaps age eventually produces level drain, or permanent ability score loss.

Or you crack open the CMI in BECMI and start handing out the really crazy shit. Complicated quests to attain godhood and so forth.

I can't fathom why someone would still want to go dungeon delving at that level when they could be toppling kingdoms and slaying deities.

And yeah, in situations where there's absolutely no chance of failure (high level fighter hitting a goblin), I'd probably start just handwaving shit instead of rolling dice to determine the inevitable.

>And yeah, in situations where there's absolutely no chance of failure (high level fighter hitting a goblin), I'd probably start just handwaving shit instead of rolling dice to determine the inevitable.

That's actually the advice the Master set gave, Something along the line of not even describing the encounter, just giving a snapshot narration of the party moving past the carnage dipping with blood and gore of fallen enemies.

Last chance to tell me if this is shit before I start printing it out for my game group.

Occultesque guy, what're you working on atm? Haven't heard from you recently.

The death touch would barely do more damage than using 2 elemental bolts, on average, and costs one mana point more. And if someone got extremely lucky and got a +2 int modifier, spamming the 1-point elemental bolt becomes the best damage spell. The illusion spell seems overpriced

Oh, I would also switch the levitate spell and the bubble one in price. The spell for disappearing sounds like it'd be more of a nuisance than anything else. "lolno I want out, good luck guys" almost never makes for engaging gameplay, and that's from experience with certain types of character in M&M

Random thought: By making the "get the fuck out" spell so expensive, you're encouraging the MU player to squirrel away valuable resources to save his own hide (consciously or not). You also don't want it to be so cheap he spends most the session as a ghost. It could be reworked into something like a 3-point spell that can be ended at will and gives you some turns of guaranteed safety, but starts having some sort of drawback if you spend TOO MUCH time in there.

>but starts having some sort of drawback if you spend TOO MUCH time in there.
Obviously you get attacked by the ghosts of all the OTHER MUs who spent too much time in there. If you die you become one of them.

The spells are meant to have diminishing returns to keep the first level ones competitive.

Doing the whole disappear thing is something I think is super cool that Wizards don't do that often. I see now that being able to disappear might make Wizards only care about themselves, but they're not really meant to be meat shields anyway right? I would think a craft one might use it to disappear and then reappear a round later behind an enemy for example, but that might seem like bending the rules too much.

Ok /osr/ are there any really good
-heist dungeons (get in, get thing, get out)
-time pressure dungeons (whole thing explodes in 30 minutes)
-political dungeons (less "the orcs hate the kobolds but are friends with the necromancer" and more "infiltrate this ball/peace treaty")

What's a good alternative for a 5 cost spell then? Sorry to pester, but I'm seriously getting my printer set up right now. I want to make sure nothing is too stupid for the first time I whip out this homebrew.

i think it's fine

Three turns if you want to be realistic, six if you want to be traditional.

>the entire dungeon explodes in three exploration turns
So... you want a corridor with a room at the end?

Shilled you say? Why Dungeon of Signs, of course.

If you don't mind me asking, where do you step from? I always assumed british, but am getting some mixed signals here and there.

>how does an adventurer guild works?
It's run by an interdimensional wizard looking to twist all adventurers to his own ends. All kings and lords and other leaders hate him, but can't do shit about him.

It's the only way I've seen adventuring guilds make any sense.

>how are adventurers seen by normal peasents?
Weird, unpredictable, occasionally beneficial, always feared. If the peasants don't have enough of a police force to try and contain these assholes in case of shit going down, they'll usually just drive them off.

August can't come fast enough. Might be the first game I actually drop real money on.

Are there rules on eating and drinking in B/X? I can't find them.

I was thinking just -1 to hit and damage for each day without food or water, dead after three days (for water) or three weeks (for food).