/osrg/ OSR General - Because no one else would do it edition

You haven't seen a review that talks about the mechanics? Weird, because the mechanics are a hot mess of Fantasy Heartbreaker shite.

DESU, I think the racist parts are ppl grasping at straws. I mean, yes, it talks about race issues within the game but so does D&D and LotR (Dwarves HATING Goblins? Wanting to commit genocide on them? Elves being prejudiced towards Dwarves? People fearing Tieflings?)

Mechanically, it looks too crunchy for my taste.

Encountering a psionic/intelligent yellow mold colony with a wizard in the party who had already begun growing a tree cutting in the back of his skull (it was a tree of knowledge, he did it for the spell bonuses). He negotiated with the mold, which let us pass in exchange for taking samples of it in glass containers and spreading it to other areas of the dungeon. Shit was cool.

anyone have a copy of that baitfish.jpg where someone just threw a sword into the water? I figure osrg needs that.

>anyone have a copy of that baitfish.jpg where someone just threw a sword into the water?
random women in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government?

trap components. Literally place them at the bottom of a pit and anyone inside is fucked.

Maybe hit mazesandminotaurs.free.fr/VIK.html, or the Trove's "Mazes & Minotaurs" folder, and give "Vikings & Valkyries" a go? It's a re-skin of M&M itself, but it looks nice and straight-forward, and has enough Nordic flourishes to make a good starting point. There are even rules for drinking contests!

Only got this, which I figure is old-school enough.

>Post dungeon ideas:

FULMATORIUM OF THE WEATHER WYRD:

A vengeful wizard uses his control over the weather to rain destruction down upon surrounding lands. Nowhere is safe. Freak storms flood the countryside and ruin the crops, villages are pulverized by hail, and the local city bears the brunt of the Wizards tempestuous rage, threatened by tornadoes and lightning storms.

It's up to the PC's to scale the highest peak of the nearby mountain and storm the climatological citadel where the wizard has secreted away the source of his meteorological magicks: a massive arcane device, powered by the still-beating heart of a Storm Giant.

It's a giant mess. The racist parts could be ignored if the game itself were good, but it isn't. Just one example

Would like to see more of these, need setpieces to flesh out a hexmap, especially ones to convert into a megadungon.

One of the ideas I'm tossing around would be the sewers of a former magocracy - the modern city with it's sewers is built atop the buried ruins of the old capital after an ancient rebellion secured their freedom from sorcerer-kings. Brass constructs, a legacy from those days, patrol the sewers and keep them clean, as well as preventing ancient experiments from escaping (or nosy adventurers from getting in).

Trudvang would be perfect, in fact I have a copy of the recent Art Book in PDF format(which serves as a pretty good primer of the setting), might share it if I can find somewhere to upload it in a more anonymous fashion

Uploadmb will let you upload anonymously and will handle files up to a 100 megs. Zippyshare will let you go slightly bigger. Anonfiles has an even larger limit and it doesn't log anything, but it's had some nasty third-party ad banners a while back and so some folks get warnings from chrome/firefox.

I donated to that KS, I didn't know they had sent out the artbook PDFs.

I have reams of old adventure ideas stashed away, scribbled out from when I should have been paying attention in math class. Maybe I'll look through them and see if anything is salvageable.

I need spells, fuck!

> DESU, I think the racist parts are ppl grasping at straws
It is you grasping at straws. Varg is literally force-feeding people his bigotry every chances he gets. There is no way around this.

> Mechanically, it looks too crunchy for my taste.
Mechanically it is another FATAL.

Thanks for the suggestions, though I'm less looking for games themselves and more for a sandbox I can just read through and run.

Trudvang seems interesting, I'd totally be interested in that artbook.

Wizard's Spell Compendium Vol. I-IV
Priest's Spell Compendium Vol. I-III

For bonus fun:
Encyclopedia Magica Vol. I-IV or The Magic Encyclopedia Vol. I-II (Magic Items)

Is the d30 sandbox companion anywhere in the Trove? I can't find it.

>(pre-)historical European nobles
>further implying any man with wealth and/or power has ever been anything other than a piece of shit
What assbrain wrote this

... wow. I don't know what's more off-putting: the condescending attitude towards modern readers or his utopian portrayal of the aristocracy. Either way, he's a fucking looney tune.

Best gelatinous cube I used was a really obvious one blocking a treasure chest.
Players thought they were real clever when they poked it with a stick, said "nope. Nice try, you tricky asshole DM!" and went the other way.
It slowly stalked them the entire dungeon.
They forgot about it. When it was time to retreat from a group of angry troglodytes the PC in front (see: the most cowardly) ran full-tilt in to it.

NOW WHO IS THE TRICKY ASSHOLE DM?

(still me)

lastgaspgrimoire.com/religion-is-a-nest-of-serpents/
rememberdismove.blogspot.com.au/2015/07/cleric-rules-i-stole-from-last-gasp.html

>The actual cards are below (I print them on A4 card, punch out the holes and bind them to make a little book), but this is the general idea:
>Mystics no longer have set spell lists.
>Instead, they can attempt to make anything happen that they think their god would be in to (though there are general guidelines called Liturgies that make some things harder to make happen than others).
>After announcing what they want, they make a 4d6 roll on the Invocation table, which can be altered by using Favour points that they’ve earned by doing appropriately religious things.
>I got over LotFP’s dreary nihilistic “there are no gods just delusion”, it’s much more fun if the things Mystics are worshipping are actually real.
>There are still going to be mishaps, but instead of being the Mystic’s delusion wavering or their god suddenly getting pissed off for no good reason, it’ll be because their god doesn’t really understand what is appropriate. So if Roy’s snake worshipper Tipanius fudges a roll in the middle of combat and gets Inopportune Favour and falls to his knees vomiting an unending torrent of slick adult snakes, the Seven Serpents will be like, “Oh haha what, you didn’t want to give birth to a thousand snakes from your mouth right now? Haha whoops sorry love you xoxo.”
>There will be specific spells that Mystics can find, where they just have to use a number of Favour points rather than rolling, but those will be things to go out and find from different cults and libraries and stuff.

>Trudvang
As a person who owns and has played the swedish version way too much, I would too recommend Trudvang. Also, it would be amazing if you could upload the artbook somewhere. I have trouble support the creators nowadays since they've decided to make an online platform to put their books on instead of physical copies.

Recently, a Lightning [prefix-]elemental attacked a village. The party tracks down the creature's origin point as the copper-lined citadel of wizard Edigran the Electromagnificent.

Robots! Elementals! Reanimated bodies! Electric oozes! Adventure galore!

Turns out that Edigran was just so engrossed in an ongoing experiment that he didn't even notice that one of his pets escaped.

>make excessive amount of excessively fiddly modifiers
>make further modifier that invalidates half of them in most cases

idon'teven

> character durability determined by rolling dice

> using literal tables to see if you hit
THAC0 is a thing. Also, there are retroclones where you add an attack bonus to your die roll and try to overcome your target's AC.

> zero character building options
OSR tends to focus on rules rather than rules, and much of your character's capabilities are built into their story.

> XP only for killing shit & looting treasure
Honestly, most DMs seem to just decide when people level. I've always found the D&D approach to XP to be overly mechanistic and mathy.

> retarded nonsensical dungeons with unsustainable ecologies
It really depends on the campaign, but I will admit that D&D doesn't strive as hard for realism as some other games. What it does is to present you with some interesting challenges that you must beat, prioritizing that sort of thing over verisimilitude. If that's not your kind of thing, that's fine. Play something else.

> crappy line drawing art
I actually think that some of the old school art is nicely stylistic, but overall, I would agree that it's not as professional as the newer stuff. But then RPGs were in their infancy and they were largely flying by the seat of their pants. Regardless, if you judge the quality of an RPG by its art, you're an idiot.

> obtusely phrased rules
Again with the infancy thing.

> ten different kinds of saving throws
Five. And I never much cared for the categories, myself. But Swords & Wizardry gives you single-stat saves (with most classes getting a bonus to some category of saves, like "spells", for instance), which seems to work pretty well.

I don't think many OSR fans think that old school D&D is perfect. Most recognize that it has strengths and weaknesses. This makes them easier to deal with than a lot of people playing more modern games, who seem to think that their system can do no wrong. I will also add that OSR games tend to be much more easily tweakable than modern stuff, which is to their advantage.

Don't take the day-old bait, man. It's already starting to smell bad.

Eh. Bait can still serve as a conversation starter. You just shouldn't take it too seriously and get riled up over it.

>character durability determined by point-buy minmaxing.
>having to do math homework to play a game.
>too many options, half of them broken, and no way to tell the failures from the overpowered munchkin builds going in.
>"real word" experience system where you can level up from making 100x iron daggers.
> retarded nonsensical splatbook factions with unsustainable society & culture.
>cheesy tumblr-tier art.
>annoyingly conversational unclear crunch.
>"attribute-driven" saves you'll never get any better at.

Person, please.

>Post dungeon ideas:
Been toying with starting off a campaign with a new spin on 'You wake up in a dungeon'.

The idea is that the player characters wake up in a rusted and ancient metallic chambers, having been dragged from glass preservation tanks. Who broke them out is not evident, but to escape they need to master navigating the malfunctioning, labyrinthian facility, arm themselves and somehow hunt down the biomechanical arbiter who keeps the exits to whatever surface awaits them sealed.

On one hand I think it strays a bit near the tropey and slightly cheesy, but on the other it allows me to start the players in the action, with a reason to stick together and objectives (Who sealed us down here? Who/what were we?) without dumping exposition.

How bad is this idea? Is there a better solution?

I posted this one before.

The House of Tigers. A "living" dungeon because there are workers and shit around, but there is also hidden stuff and the machinations of a certain God tiger. The evil emperor hires the players to find which tiger, in this great zoo of different tigers, is actually a god. That way he can kill it, skin it, and have sex with his wife on its pelt. Doing so will grant him a demigod child that he can use to ensure his strong legacy.

Naturally the players can either do the job for the emperor or they can try to free the tiger, either way.

The best thing with them, I think, is how they interact with the pursuit & evasion rules.

After all, they encourage ignoring doors for open passages and blindly running around corners.

THE WALLED CITY is a Kowloon-inspired surface level for a megadungeon, crawling with various squatters and nasty beasts who emerged from a great sinkhole in the center of the settlement - its appearance resulted in mass evacuation of the old citizenry and the erection of an inward-facing wall around the city. The sinkhole leads all the way down into Underdark-esque caverns, and can serve as a shortcut to the lower dungeon levels if need be - otherwise, however, scaffolding around its edges allows access to shallower caverns including various cults, an abandoned dwarven outpost, and lairs. Rumors say that the hole has no bottom - others say that it leads directly into hell itself.

Entering the dungeon is done by dropping down from the encircling wall onto the roofs of the city.

That's about how far I've come - I really need to get down to properly sketching out level relationships and whatnot some day.

..i just can't get past the fact that he published an entire book with papyrus as the main font. As someone with a design background, this makes me cringe so hard it physically hurts.

Papyrus as the main font: better or worse than Comic Sans?

Any OSR systems that can do modern fantasy? Something with guns? Into the Odd is my only current option, not that it is bad.

honestly almost any OSR system will work with a little tweaking, and almost all OSR systems either include guns somewhere officially, or have a supplement that adds them

I have to run a game coming up. What's a good module for B/x that isn't from the B series?

I just ran DCC for the first time.

Every negative thing I've ever heard about it here was so fucking wrong I couldn't believe it. That was one if the single funnest games I've ever ran and my players LOVED the volatility of spellcasting, crits and fumbles etc.

I was more referring to automatics and rifles and such, not black powder.

Mutant Future is a post-apocalypse game based on Labyrinth Lords.
Stars Without Number and White Star are both games based on sci-fi settings.
Ruinations of the Dust Princess is a LotFP post-apocalypse hack written by someone on /osrg/.
There is a whole folder called OSR Westerns.
Hideouts & Hoodlums is a Swords & Wizardry hack meant for Golden Age comic book heroics.

All of the above involve OSR format with automatics, rifles, and various tech levels. I'd find one you like and then just adjust the tech level to where you want it.

As someone who wants to run it, did you print out the tables or did you use bookmarks or something like that? I'd imagine it gets annoying to flip through the book every time.

I printed out the DCC reference booklet here:
>peoplethemwithmonsters.blogspot.com/p/dcc-rpg-resources.html?m=1

And had the Crawlers Companion app on my Kindle for quick referencing spellcast effects. Its not even necessary, but does speed things up for sure.

Thanks for the link!

>app on my Kindle
Oh shit, kindles has app support? All the more reason to get one.

>had to use several 3rd-party references to get through a single session
>"DCC so ez guise"

Who said anything about it being easy? I said it was FUN. Its crunchier than I prefer, but that meant nothing in the end.

Level 1's finally get more than a single spell. The spell effects and mercurial magic are incredibly fun. The Warriors deed die makes being a fighter more fun. The thieves skill bonuses aren't pathetic.

Shit's tight.

Fantastic Heroes & Witchery also has them under a section for Science Fantasy weapons and equipment

also several supplements for DCC have gun rules(one of which also has a S&W version)

Speaking of firearms rules-

I've been debating using this potential system for combat.

When you attack with a melee weapon, you just roll the damage and subtract the opponents armor value (1-3) from the damage.

If you shoot someone though, you have to hit them with a d20 attack roll over AC in which armor only adds to AC. If you hit, deal dice roll in damage.

This way, melee is more reliable but deals less damage them a powerful gun blast. Any takers?

There's nothing wrong with tropey and cheesy in an RPG, in my opinion. Part of the reason many RPGs turn to comedy is precisely because the cognitive dissonance between the tension of the situation and the people creating it.

Unlike a movie or film an RPG has everyone constantly creating stuff as you go along, which means cliches actually tend to help - you don't have the opportunity to proofread or do retakes, so cliches help get everyone on the same page immediately.

Most stuff from the X series is pretty good, if you have enough time to prep a sandbox adventure then Isle of Dread is right up there with keep on the borderlands IMO.

Indeed user, I found that once you have a dice roller for the weird dice and write down a few important page numbers DCC is one of my favorite OSR games.

Did you run a module or just make your own adventure/funnel?

I'm glad you had a good time user.

I ran the Wizardarium of Calabraxis as a one shot, since my LotFP crew was missing 2 players. They really like LotFP's skill system and small learning curve, but the spellcasting in DCC made them excited. Even when shit went wrong SOMETHING interesting went down.

And honestly, the whole '1 spell a day at level 1' shit is tired.

Hey guys. About three years ago, my friends and I played Call of Cthulhu in high school, but we stopped when we graduated a year last year.

Enough of the old guys are back in town permanently and they want to start a new group. But we're looking for a new system. All of our previous gaming was done with CoC 6e and we want to try going in the fantasy route. Specifically, we want the brutal, yet fun and classic, gameplay of an OSR.

Keep in mind that none of us have played an RPG in about a year, and for some of us it's been two years. We want something that's got flavorful gameplay and still offers very much as much of a classic fantasy RPG feel as it can. However, even though I myself am okay with reading through rulebooks, the majority of them don't want to be bogged down by a plethora of rules.

What would you recommend to us?

Thanks, /osrg/!

FATAL

Lamentations of the Flame Princess or Dungeon Crawl Classics are both excellent.
Lamentations is easier to learn and run, Dungeon Crawl Classics has more bells, whistles, and randomness. Both have incredible adventures published for them.
I'd recommend The God that Crawls or Death Frost Doom for LotFP, both of which have a dark and weird fantasy vibe to them that should work well for fans of CoC.
For DCC, I'd recommend Doom of the Savage Kings or People of the Pit.

All of this stuff is available in the mega link at the top of the thread. If you enjoy it, I'd recommend supporting it. The physical products are awesome and definitely worth the $.

Is lamentations the one written by an edgelord?

He is occasionally an edgelord, but a lot of the stuff he puts out is great and not everything is written by him. The rulesystem is pretty much separated from the edgy aesthetic so if you like how it plays then you can just take that and leave the edge behind.

Seconding Lamentations of the Flame Princess. The edginess is optional, but for the most part over-hyped. It plays more like a B-horror movie in a lot of cases, which might actually be a good fit for a CoC group. It's also one of the tightest OSR games out there. I've run a ton of it.

I made a little table that lets people determine if a dead character rises as a Ghoul. It should be compatible with all edition of D&D, retroclones, and DCC.

buzzclaw.blogspot.com/2016/07/roll-d-to-see-if-you-rise-as-ghoul.html

Sidenote: Binging on RPG blogs and reading some 90s TSR material is good for getting those creative juices flowing.

way worse. Comic sans is, at least, readable.

my only issue with DCC is the weird-ass dice I don't own.
The tables are largely bolt-on, and you can just Not Use Them and make shit up and you'll be fine.

Run Lamentations with Last Gasp Grimoire's houserules. It really pushes home the weirdness, whilst making things nice and simple.
Using LotFP modules is a smart plan, they're very CoC-esque.

>buzzclaw.blogspot.com/2016/07/roll-d-to-see-if-you-rise-as-ghoul.html
I'm gonna have to start following you.

t-thanks

Just don't expect quality or frequent updates.

Yo this is really neat, imma use this for the game I'm running. Ghoul party members coming back to attack the party is a really fun concept

Do you let players have methods other than resting and magic to regain hitpoints? If yes, what are the methods?

Asking because I've never felt fully comfortable with just the classic style of healing, but I've never come across another system that didn't give players way too much of a chance at healing either.

This is a really neat idea, something I've been looking for for a while now, just never realized what exactly I wanted.

Clerics never felt any different from magic-users/wizards to me.
Holy magic should be more "open to interpretation" by the caster, due to them channelling godly powers. Why would the god of the sea grant healing powers the same as the god of the light?

Now I've got some gods to write up

I like this. Great way for the PCs to meet a friendly quest giving NPC.

What kind of methods are the players proposing? Or what do you have in mind?

I could see a medicine skill of sorts existing in something like LotFP, to cure sickness and set bones and whatnot, but not restore hitpoints

For LotFP and my hack 'Ruinations of the Dust Princess':

Medkits.

All players have a 1-in-6 Medicine Skill and it requires a medkit to work. INT modifier adds to the skill. Specialists can invest in it. Works like this:

You have a 3-in-6 medicine skill? Roll 3 or under on a d6 and heal that amount in HP. Takes 1 full turn out of combat, and 5 uninterrupted rounds during. You can basically cap at healing 6 HP. Whether you succeed or not, the medkit is expended.

So kinda like cheaper healing potions that may not work?

Thanks, man. I hope those rules will serve you well.

And I already have an excuse for cannibalism to be in the game, so it's only a matter of time. Thank you!

has anyone bought the Rad-Hack yet? It looks really interesting.

drivethrurpg.com/product/187874/The-RadHack

>What kind of methods are the players proposing?
They propose just about anything to heal them if they really need it.

>Or what do you have in mind?
That's the thing, I'm not sure.

This I like. I'm gonna talk to the players about it. How much does a medkit cost in your game?

Hey Ruination guy- how do you do firearms in your game?

My game has them at 20sp each give or take, and each takes an individual item slot.

I basically stole and modified the rules from Hack! #1, made for S&W.
Guns have negative initiative modifiers and I made ammunition scarce and relatively expensive.
A roll of natural 1 means the ammo was a dud. Rifles can be used as a d6 melee weapon with a 10% chance of breaking on impact.
To add some further balance of melee and ranged weapons, I have melee weapons get bonus damage from the STR modifier, ala DCC.
>docdroid.net/kHgwIZv/rotdp.pdf.html

How do you feel about this potential homebrew?

Doesn't seem like a bad idea. I'd have to see it in action. I'm somewhat averse to having 2 different methods of attack, but that's just my taste.

I figured I'd ask here: What are the big differences between ad&d 1st and 2nd editions (aside from the removal of "evil" options like half orcs and assassins)? I played a bit back in the day but it was a weird mishmash of books from the two editions. It worked, so I assume the systems are compatible to some extent.

dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=7116

Non-Weapon Proficiencies and Kits are probably the biggest immediate differences.

> Hack!
We need all of this.

Your healing factor equals 1 + 1/10 your maximum hit points (rounded down). After each battle, you can treat your wounds and bandage yourself to regain a number of hit points equal to your healing factor (theoretically, they can only be hit points you lost in that battle, but you don't really need to keep close track--just as long as it doesn't seem silly). If there's somebody with some skill in healing (I like to give it to rangers by default), they can heal one person twice that amount.

A good night's sleep (along with the opportunity to tend to wounds) allows everybody to heal 1d4 x their healing factor (a healer can allow one person to take the better of two rolls). In less than ideal conditions, that roll may suffer a penalty (1d4-1 or even 1d4-2, allowing somebody to actually take damage as they suffer from infection, etc.).

Tweak the numbers as desired to allow people to heal up as fast as you want them to.

>You have a 3-in-6 medicine skill? Roll 3 or under on a d6 and heal that amount in HP.
I don't like the ramping numbers on this one. Normally, a 5-in-6 skill is five times better than a 1-in-6 skill. That's a lot better. But in your system, a 5-in-6 skill not only succeeds five times as often, but on a successful roll, it heals you three times as much on average, making it 15 times better.

>they can heal one person twice that amount.
That is to say, the person they treat heals twice as much as they normally would. They don't get double healing added to their regular healing: it's just twice overall.

Why shouldn't a character who is trained in medicine or naturally more intelligent NOT be able to heal someone better?

I think the reasoning is this:
for most LotFP skills, putting a skill point into it makes you linearly better. Going from 2-in-6 tinkering to 3-in-6 tinkering makes you half as likely again to succeed. Going from sneak attack x2 to sneak attack x3 doubles the damage you do with a sneak attack.
Healing, however, is quadratic. You' get more chance to succeed, and when you DO, you'll probably heal more. Going from 2-in-6 healing to 3-in-6 healing means you're half as likely again to succeed. But it also means you heal an average of 2 damage rather than 1.5 damage, so putting an extra dot into healing is probably more efficient than putting it into (say) tinkering - particularly at high levels.

That said, it's not very significant, and I'm not sure it makes enough difference gameplay wise to be worth caring about.

Healing people more often is healing them better. And healing people more hit points is healing them better. But when you combine the two, your healing skills get exponential results, which is mechanically problematic. If a 6-in-6 skill heals 20 times better than a 1-in-6 skill, then either the former is too weak or the latter is too strong (or quite possibly both). Just having something succeed 5.83 times more often than something else an enormous difference. But then having it be more than three times as effective when it does succeed makes things downright preposterous.

The gap between a man of modest ability and an expert is much wider than for any other skill. It'd be sort of like if you divided traps into 6 different categories (pits, snares, etc.) and 1 skill gave you a 1-in-6 chance to detect only 1 chosen type of trap (only pits), while a 5 skill gave you a 5-in-6 chance to detect 5 different categories of traps.