/osrg/

So /osrg/, I want your opinions.
I just got slumbering ursine dunes. I was wondering if you guys think it'd be appropriate to run a campaign based around it. Does it have enough content or reason to go there for that to work?

I was thinking of having a village near it as a home base for exploration into it. Also prison of the hated pretender could work well as something to stick in it. As far as putting the dunes into a larger setting, my idea is that the government of the region for some reason tries to restrict access to the dunes but there are professional smugglers of artifacts and weirdness who enter it. Sort of a stalker vibe, have the rest of the world be much more mundane. A sort of "The year is 1523. You're in the crimean khanate but more importantly, you're right outside the slumbering ursine dunes."

Hey famalams. Good news I guess. Sometime last week I copied the trove to a mega account to be able to make pdf related.
A few of the very newly added stuff is missing, but here you go: mega.nz/#F!oN9XQRaR!3IOuPLcjR9zBh_xvIvrwEw

Not sure how long I'll keep that open, since I tend to be a bit paranoid when it comes to copyright infringement, so let's all hope TroveGuy shows up soon, and imports it back to his account. That should be much faster than reuploading it all too.

TL;DR: Here is a temporary backup of the trove: mega.nz/#F!oN9XQRaR!3IOuPLcjR9zBh_xvIvrwEw

One thing I'd recommend, for the "true" experience, is to take a look at some of the actual old-school hexcrawls out there.

The Wilderlands of High Fantasy are neato and all, but I'd recommend starting with something more restricted and, well, defined. The Wilderlands require some serious improv skills at times, not to mention all the mid-70s third-party OD&D funkiness the rules aspects of it have.

So grab your copy of Moldvay's Expert, give it a thorough read-through, and then read X1 The Isle of Dread.

That looks awesome. My only gripe is that fish lade on the right? The face looks really fucking goofy. Maybe it'd look better/more eerie just without the face?

However long it remains available, you are a gentleman and a scholar user.

In my next game, I want to make it clear that law and chaos do not explicitly correspond to good and evil respectively.

I still see Law and Chaos as primordial forces which must be in balance for the physical world itself to continue functioning. The ultimate victory of order would mean perfect stillness, and thus the end of all things. The ultimate victory of chaos would mean the abandonment of causality, ultimately leading to the same consequence.

Meanwhile good and evil are just "how much of a dick are you," which can create conflict, of course, but isn't the same thing at all.

For some examples of how this would look in effect:

>Halflings - Lawful (good) - Halfling societies all have their own quirks and cultural differences, but they tend to be based around a system of rules which are in place for the benefit of all, and which may never be broken but which may be twisted for the sake of showing compassion to those in need or mercy to the truly remorseful. Eight great feasts are thrown each year, in accordance with the beginning and middle of each season. Attendance is compulsory, and having fun is strongly encouraged.

>Goblins - Lawful (evil) - Goblin societies are led by mayors, who are elected in open ballots where anyone who votes for the wrong goblin can expect to be assassinated neatly and cleanly, according to the specific criteria laid down in local ordinance for such an assassination. Laws are seldom broken, and seen as absolutely essential to avoid falling to violent mayhem where few would survive. The most admired (and feared) goblins tend to be the attorneys, who can whip up a crowd into a righteous frenzy with their rhetoric about lawbreakers, albeit usually not without some help from their crew, who disperse themselves into the crowd to react positively to the attorney's speech.

(cont'd next post)

(continued from )

>Elves - Chaotic (good) - Resembling the wild/wood elves you may have seen in other settings more than high elves, they tend to have no leaders at all, decisions being made on a case-by-case basis by those who are likely to be affected by those decisions. Traditions do exist among them, but are not slavishly followed so much as brought up when some elves are bored and want something to do. Conflicts may occasionally be solved by violence, but this is a last resort and seldom comes up, as the elves are taught from a young age to consider the needs of others. Perhaps their greatest weakness is difficulty mobilizing for the solving of distant but serious problems, such as the slow encroachment of a human kingdom on their forest, until it has come to a point of conflict with the strangers.

>Bugbears - Chaotic (evil) - It has been said that the only rule a bugbear knows is "stay out of the way of the bigger bugbear," and that may be the case. Bugbear "society" is the kind of thing Hobbes was afraid of. When living in proximity of one another, each bugbear spends every waking moment trying to appear proud and unafraid, while never knowing when a lethal blow could come from behind. For this reason, they tend to spread out, only spending extended time together when extenuating circumstances or, more rarely, genuine personal affection makes the prospect more appealing. Instead, bugbears are prone to fall in with more neutral (albeit still evil) races like orcs, or even to find a group of goblins away from home and force them into servitude. However, goblins are not prone to take kindly to a despot, and more than one bugbear has been poisoned by the raiding party he captured and then been meticulously added to the list of acquired goods.

Anyway, what do you think?

Alignment was originally concieved as law v chaos, with characters displaying various degrees of dichishness (typically increasing as they got more magoc and henchmen)

Elric books and Poul Anderson's 3 hearts and 3 lions both use this scheme and gygax recommends both in appendix n.

Yeah, I know. I'm just saying I want to make a setting where it is clear to the players that "lawful" doesn't mean good and "chaotic" doesn't mean evil. I was mostly curious if you thought the descriptions of common practices among the four fantasy races described were a good way of showing that.

Not that guy, but I like it. Seems like bugbears would have a hard time making more bugbears though.

Might help to have humans and orcs as the neutral example with slight good/evil inclinations depending on how you want to flavour it.

How do you guys do halflings in your game? Just like LotR? Cannibal farmers? Something else?

Can anyone provide advice on what the good sourcebooks are versus the bad?

For example, I bought the following sourcebooks over the past few months:

Tome of Magic
Player's Option: Spells & Magic
Complete Handbooks
> Fighter's
> Thief's
> Priest's
> Psionics
> Wizards

Any winners there? Anything to beware of? What else is recommended?

Thanks in advance.

What to do about the board game challenge in Tower of the Stargazer? The idea is that the referee plays versus on of the players, but the suggested game to play is chess and that feels a bit "eh".

I really like the meta-thing of having the player actually play against the referee, and I really really don't want players to solve a puzzle or riddle by rolling dice against it.

The Player's Option books are mostly a big pile of untested junk, but have some good bits in there. Combat and Tactics is the best of the three, and actually fairly solid. Spells and Magic has some neat stuff, some broken stuff, use your best judgment. Skills and Powers is just broken, and is the nascent form of what would turn into 3E.
The Complete books are handy as sourcebooks for the GM, but be careful about letting players just dive in and go nuts, some of it can be cheesed. (The Complete Book of Elves is supposedly the worst offender, but that may be more about people being angry about elves than anything else.)
I don't know Tome of Magic very well.
I do hear that the Castle Guide is pretty useful if you need to know anything about castles and keeps and stuff.

Wolfpacks and Winter Snow question:
Which of the save categories (weather, poison, hazards and magic) would make most sense for avoiding the effects of radiation? I'm thinking most likely Weather, since it's an ongoing environmental effect, but that seems a little odd when I say it out loud. Your thoughts?

I just call 'em goblins and leave it at that. Or, if I'm playing in a human-centric world, then they're the class for plucky child urchins.

Isle of Dread needs even more serious improv and work than Wilderlands, IMO. Some of the hex listings are just "this hex has X".

At the very least Wilderlands helps you out by assembling some of the stuff into an adventure or encounter; Isle of Dread just gives you the ingredients and no recipe.

So what do you guys think of this? Steven Lumpkin came up with this as a result of running West Marches, which was an attempt to run an OSR styled hexcrawl in 5e. He's abandoned that, as the system became increasingly untenable for the purpose at higher levels, but the guy's spent a lot of time thinking about OSR, and wrote these two pieces as a way of explaining how OSR gameplay works to newcomers.

roll1d100.blogspot.ca/2016/08/osr-gaming-player-agendas.html
roll1d100.blogspot.ca/2016/08/osr-gaming-referee-agendas.html

I was wondering what people could tell me about Lamentations of the flame princess. Any opinions? What is it exactly?

It's a tight, streamlined retroclone based on B/X D&D. Its core rules are simple and elegant, and the game's intended playstyle, transmitted largely via modules rather than the rulebook, is a weird horror adventure in the 17th century, taking inspiration from heavy metal album covers, Hammer horror films, and a bit of Lovecraft.
It has strong role protection for classes, clean and easy to use encumbrance, and some pretty good early firearms rules.

osrg, I need your help.

I've filled out one of Welsh Piper's atlas maps, because I want to try and do more than my usual points of Light setting. However, I'm an idiot when it comes to scale, economics, etc. Are there any guidelines to how big a country should be, on average? I know one answer is "Whatever suits your needs", but when I don't know my needs...

For reference, I'm going with a scale of 1 atlas hex = 25 miles across, so the entire chunk of continent is about 406,000 miles. Or roughly two and a half Californias. A single block of the Atlas would then be approximately 16,200 square miles, or 2 New Jerseys.

Assuming just bog standard B/X D&D, how many hexes should each country be? Would d6 hexes for poor realms, d12 for and d20 for good be unrealistic? I'm trying to hit a sort of early 17th century France/Germany feel.

d12 for average.

We played Cee-Lo.

What do you mean with the playstyle being transmitted through modules?
Does it not work well for custom made games then?
Is it more of a lower fantasy then?

I like to think about what sort of dynamics are possible.

A realm between a mountain range and the sea filled with dozens of petty kingdoms and duchies lends itself to military adventure, political intrigue, and so forth.

A few big, stable realms separated by oceans, mountains, and impassable jungle means opportunity for wildly different cultures and perhaps more wilderness exploration, or even kingdom building on the frontier.

It means the unique weird horror stuff is all in the modules, the rules themselves are fairly general. So it works great for custom made games.

You play it up well but what about the downsides? Every system has its own good and bad points.

It doesn't have a comperhensive monster manual, so you have to use another B/X compatible one. But there's plenty of those.
Some folks may be turned off by the artwork, describing it as "edgy."

There's not a lot to say against it. It is one of the most well-received OSR clones. It knows what it wants to do and it does it well. Plus it has some amazing modules.

>Some of the hex listings are just "this hex has X".
The wilderlands has a bunch of those too, y'know. It's mostly just the Idyllic Isles that are interesting - the rest need a fuckton of improv skills, especially with the random tables you can use.

Here's some typical examples from Map 1's tables:
Villages
>0115: Grita Heath, Pop: 110, Civ: 4, Align: CG; Ruler: Iskarban, CL 7, LG; Resources: Spices
Citadels & Castles
>0107: Citadel; MU 7, CE; 40 men
Idyllic Isles
>1901: Isle of Ampedocles - A castaway pirate who knows fears the return of a giant crocadile which hates him.
>4102: Isle of the Elect - A completely deserted city with a dungeon beneath the temple.
>4915: Isles of Wight - 56 extremely poor vikings and one longship.
>5116: Isle of Tombs - 1420 tombs full of undead and demons.
Lurid Lairs
>0102: 6 Minotaurs

Of course, even those isles require a fuckton of improv. The Isle of the Elect has an entire fuckin' dungeon underneath it, for fuck's sake.

>17th century France/Germany feel.
So what, the HRE? Well, I can't find any numbers on the size of the individual states of that but the size of modern Austria is roundabout eighty of those hexes.

Two Californias is a bit more than you'd need to cover modern France, for reference, but it's a bit small if you're talking Europe as a whole.

A country with twenty of your hexes would be something like 8118 mi^2, or the size of El Salvador - which Wikipedia helpfully lists as "the smallest country in continental north america". That's #148.

For some countries that are larger, how about Denmark and Switzerland (roughly twice as large), Ireland (three times and a bit), Greece (six times), or France (seventeen times as large, or 609 hexes in total)?

17th Century France was smaller, but still kind of huge.

Yeah, you don't really have any idea of how large the countries should be. Fuck, even the countries in X1 are all at least sixty-something 24-mile hexes!

Some players may not like that only one class can even really fight at all, and only one class gets tougher as they level up.

Not him, but LotFP is one of my favorite systems.

The only downside (for me; others wont mind) is that it keeps the level 1, 'one-spell-a-day' snoozefest that isn't so bad in a hexcrawl but is BOOOORING in a dungeoncrawl. I've added simple cantrips to my LotFP "World of the Lost" game to help alleviate this. I'm also integrating the Wonder & Wickedness spells to add some more flavor and magic items. I understand that magic is treated as bizarre, unworldly, incomprehensible and dangerous, but in a game, a MU that can only do one spell a day is like a thief that can only pick one lock a day.

It managed to fix small annoyances, like class weapon restrictions and giving clerics a spell choice at lv. 1. It's adventure output is high quality and most are fantastic. It did take away the ability for demihumans to see in darkness, which I'm mostly OK with, but Dwarves by nature should have it, RAW. Also, a lot of the modules don't have real 'support' for the 3 demihuman classes and if your players want to play as one, you'll need to alter the settings a bit to allow for elves and halflings etc or just flat out say no. Not a real issue.

There really aren't a whole lot of downsides to it.

The artwork is, perhaps, not always in the best taste. Some of it's horrific and creepy and evocative, like the one I've attatched.
And then you've got that picture where a zombie's sticking its hand up a girl's vagoo, which is... less good.

Enemies don't get tougher as you level up, though. LotFP makes the Fighter the Fightiest, which I think is a good thing. Other can contribute, regardless of level, but they aren't going to equal a dedicated Fighter PC.

All this LotFP talk is making me want to watch some movies to get aesthetic some inspiration. What should I check out?

I actually taped that spread together because the other page isn't much better.

i also feel the LotFP magic-user class is a bit uninteresting in the dungeon crawl situation. in both the NSFW and Cursed Chateau modules, for example, the magic user is next to useless.

i've tried the Beyond the Wall cantrips and found them uninspiring. the BFRP cantrips look better. what i used last time was that any spell from the magic-users book could be cast if they took 10-60 minutes casting it. it meant the spells actually get used but in combat the magic user still spends most of its time cowering in the corner.

that's my favorite part! the demi-human classes are the only other classes i'd consider improving their combat stats, but at a much slower rate than the fighter.

So I have this idea of running my players through a grand game of "Keep on the Borderlands" to "Against the Slavelords" and then through "GDQ". System is a mashup homebrew but draws heavily on AD&D, BECMI and a few things from 5e.

How hard do you think it will be? Each player will have 2 characters (5 players so 10 characters in total) but once they die they are done (once both characters die they can roll 1 new one).

Personally I'd say the Complete Thief's Handbook is top notch. It's the peak of that whole series, nothing too unbalanced and tons of material for playing different kinds of thief.

The Player's Option books are controversial to put it nicely, so don't adopt much from that without due reflection.

Out of those I'd say poison or hazards. After all, it's called radiation poisoning for a reason.

Hey, can you all help me come up with some weird PC races? They won't be race-as-class, but I might borrow from ACKS by making race-specific classes.

So far, I'm removing all the small humanoid races (halflings, gnomes, and dwarves), and replacing them with a single race of three-foot-tall anthropomorphic moles (think less "furry" and more "Redwall but bigger"). They live in hilly, temperate areas where they cultivate forest gardens of nuts and berries and raise earthworms as a food source. I think I may give them very good dark vision and limited sight in bright light. Classes would include a guardian class, for those who protect their society from enemies both above and below ground.a psion class, for those who are born with a natural psychic talent and choose to develop it, and a thief class, for those who somehow ended up in a more urban environment among humans or other larger species and used their ability to see in the dark to become thieves. My only concern is that being able to burrow seems possibly too strong for a racial ability. Thoughts?

Any other ideas for races?

How about something akin to the Galka from FFXI/Rogadyn from FFXIV? Big, burly, hairy with minor animalistic traces who are fine craftsmen but overall are not too violent (but make great fighters when they put their mind to it)

Turn them into bipedal badger people.

It's fine if you like adding more dice systems to B/X, and don't mind that only the fighter, wizard, expert and elf are worth playing. The rules are also terribly presented, and classes are too stuck in their niches.

Thoughts on a Marksman variation of the Fighter class?

Le Pacte de Loups

Saw this on G+! Looks cool, man.

I can't really say that I like this. I kind of prefer the minimalism of LotFP's class selection, and I don't want it to become bloated with hundreds of more specialized classes.

What I would like though is for fighters to get their own pool of skill points to allocate among special fighter skills, including a Reload skill that you subtract from the amount of time required to reload a firearm.

I proposed some rules for drinking contests on the odd74 forums, but I wanted to see what you guys think:

"If we want to emphasize experience over ability, here's an idea:

When you drink alcohol, you take subdual damage. You can make a saving throw vs. poison to half the damage (dwarves get their bonus on this save.)
Last man standing wins, and is awarded XP determined by the HD of his opponent.

If you want to represent a game of beer-pong or something, have the players make attack rolls as though attacking with a ranged weapon against their opponent's unarmored AC. If the attack hits, the target takes no damage but instead must drink.

I'm sure you could even incorporate hireling morale into this somehow.

You can keep things nice and minimalistic this way; instead of adding a new layer of rules to the game, you can represent drinking contests using an adaptation of the combat rules.

Your constitution ability is still involved with this, of course, as it determines how many hit points you have and thus how much subdual damage you can take from drinking.
Incidentally, fighters drink hard. Dwarf fighters drink harder than everybody with their save bonus, but elf fighter/magic-users drink hard too if you use the rule that elves roll hit dice twice and keep the better result. Clerics can't drink as much unless they sober themselves up a little with Cure Light Wounds. Non-elf magic-users are the worst class for holding their liquor."

>doesn't want class bloat
>wants skill bloat

Blood on Satan's Claw
Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter

New skills are less intrusive than new classes.

Is Mutant Crawl Classics out yet? If so, anybody played it? If not, when does it come out?

Comes out next June. I backed the Kiskstarter. No word on if we'll be getting an early-release PDF.

I ran the Free RPG Day funnel and I found it a little lacking. I mean, I know funnels are supposed to be lethal and all but I think that as-written it becomes less of a "story of how these guys became adventurers" and more of a "post-apoc tribesman murder simulator".

Okay, serious question.
Letting magic-users cast straight from their(physical) spellbook, bypassing spell slots restrictions - good idea or bad idea?

Integrate the DCC method. Have them roll to cast.

d20+Level+INT Mod over a Spell Check [SC]: 10+(Spell Level x 2)

1 is a failure with something disastrous.
2-[Below SC] fail and they lose the spell for the day.
[SC]+ is a successful spell casting.

This allows them to cast as much as they want, but with a chance of failure to try to balance things out.

>New skills are less intrusive than new classes.
Iunno. A class has, maybe, one new mechanic that the player playing that class (and nobody else but the GM) has to learn. A new skill or bolt-on system requires everybody to know it.

Plus classes are way easier to slip into a campaign that other houserules. You can fit everything you need on one piece of paper and it's neat and self-contained.

honestly depends on both the system and setting

How long would a spell take to prepare? that's how long it takes to cast from the spellbook.

i run a lot of OSR one shots, mostly LotFP modules. i'm considering replacing LotFP with Into the Odd as my go to system for one-shots. the rules are simpler, magic is "solved" by making it arcana, and it has decent death/dying rules so that the LotFP modules can be better experienced.

any one have any experience with Into the Odd?

for those interested

There should be at least one more level of success for the spells, that's a big part of what makes the spell system fun and exciting for players. It's especially cool if there's some level of the spell that is absolutely nuts but incredibly hard to get to.

I would say the downsides are is that it doesn't offer much more than a cleaned up and tightly presented B/X ruleset. As others have noted what makes it feel more unique are the modules and content put out for it, rather than the rules themselves.

I don't find it a very big value-add compared to some other retroclones but there are people who appreciate the direction it's gone.

maybe some of the non modern period hammer horror films?

Fuck, why is it impossible to decide on what setting to use, /osr/?

I currently have 3 open settings I could use for OSR gameplay but I can't for the life of me decide which one to use.

>High fantasy setting with bronze age aesthetics; central asia and india inspired in some aspects. Divine Bureaucracy runs whole world, less a religious thing and more just how everything functions.
Spontaneously generating goblins, boggarts born from human suffering, and rapey beastmen keep things dangerous. Humans are the playable race joined by gnomes (which are really a combination of elves, dwarves, hobbits, and gnomes put together. Hobgoblins, lizardmen, and twisted Fomorii cursed fish-men giants.

>Second setting is a lost city outside of time, featuring early 1920s aesthetics and junk or scrap yard technology to keep everything working. A mysterious and seemingly endless power grid keeps things working, keeping monsters in the darkness at bay. The city is always covered by night, as the sun never shines here. Different races include ayylmaos from many worlds and naturally humans. Guns are called Chimneys because they spit so much ash. Mysterious service tunnels house weird magic-ish things and psychics occasionally develop within the city's population.

I'm also considered making or finding something new to run but these two are my 'most developed'. Any thoughts on which I should try to run first?

I'd buy LOTFP if it had an up to date art free version available for print, as is though I probably wouldn't buy it as I really don't like the art(have a low tolerance for "edginess")

not bad, unlike I think more classes is always a good thing as long as there's a strong core set(which LOTFP has), but then I'm the sort of madman who would love an OSR system with a class system like this pic

agreed(although I'm not necessarily against skill systems either)

Smash them all together.

The artless Rules and Magic book is the current one.

I'd argue this is a big incentive for magic users to start up a laboratory and start cranking out scrolls and wands ASAP. It also roots the party somewhat if they want to reap the benefits of ample spellcasting.

Dub trip dubs speaks the truth

>Fuck, why is it impossible to decide on what setting to use, /osr/?
Because in choosing one setting, you are discarding all the possibilities and potentials of all the others. It's the kind of thing that leads people to run kitchen sink campaigns, though by trying to include everything, you invariably end up compromising things and not giving proper focus to their logical ramifications.

As far as what you should run: I can't answer that. If you can't figure out what speaks to you more, maybe you should consider your players or potential players.

With that many characters I think you'll be fine. Just don't place the caves so close to one another, spread them out some so that the players need to explore the area. Have them have run-ins with the monsters outside of the caves (and maybe swap some of the monsters out for other things. One tribe of orcs in it could simply be replaced with a faction of human mercenaries and the players would never know).

I'd be curious to see how you string those adventures together as well. Are you using Greyhawk or a homebrew setting?

What I do is I run a pretty straight medieval setting (well, straight D&D medieval so the society and pop density's basically at a 5th century level while weapons and armor are effectively high- or even late-medieval) and then the dungeons have portals to bizarre other planes, and faraway countries are as weird and shit up as people thought they were in early middle ages Europe. Sort of the closest thing to having my cake and eating it.

I feel like if I were to start a game now though I'd just draw a huge set of dungeon-style maps of a renaissance-era city built directly on top of an older Rome-era city which in turn concealed an even older substratum of a say 1980s New York-ish city and then below that maybe a hi-tech futuristic city, have the dungeon be the city and have the "town" just be the more or less safe areas on top and in the middle. I figure it'd be an assload of work to get right, though -- even the CSIO takes so many shortcuts with stuff like plausible city development, building height etcetera.

>that pic
Man, that gives me nostalgia for early-'90s computing.

>Winter Wonderland
>Epic
>Cave in the Hills
>Grue Cave
>Grindur
>Mage Tower
>Alchemist's House
>Gnome House
>Haunted Manor
>Necromancer's Lair
>The Old Hermit
>A Forest Trail
>Bandit Hut
>Garrison
>A High Tor
>Overlands
>Ravenloft
>Owlbears
>Troll Alliance
>Lost Woods
>Rampart
>Sand Pit
>Hell
Truly the greatest setting ever!

One last class-hack. The Berserker. A modified Dwarf with an AB blatantly stolen from DCC.

>Adventurer: "I thought Hell was bigger . . . and on another plane."
>Asmodeus: "We had to downsize, our utilities were too expensive.

>That heating bill was out of this world.

>Every time some incredibly rare event happened, the whole damn place would drop below zero

Early firearms in OSR, yes or no?

I hate to say it, but depends on the setting.

It also depends on the ruleset.

1. How the hell did THIS DUDE make Within the Ring of Fire, which is actually a pretty good RPG if you want a certain kind of game:

youtube.com/watch?v=5e0eGaRnAGI

2. Any other videos of people talking about OSR who have no goddamn clue what they're talking about?

Sure.

is there an anime osr?

Do you mean:

>A. An OSR system meant to simulate anime?
or
>B. Anime series that resemble OSR play?

Record of Lodoss War was based on an old D&D game though which edition I'm not sure of (has feels for B/X and AD&D 1E)

A, an OSR system meant to simulate anime, but is good to know stuff about B

I'm unsure of the first question posed, but Record of Lodoss War is OSR as fuck, down to the dog-like kobolds.

Once you make an archer class you start to take ranged combat away from fighters, much like how the introduction of the thief took sneaking and climbing away from the other classes.