So what is this game? Is it any good?

a B/X offshoot retroclone that manages to be more than some guy selling his house rules. it has an idea of what it wants to be and succeeds at being it. heavy metal horror lovecraft vibes.

I like it buts its not for run of the mill sword and sorcery shenanigans. no slaying goblins with +1 sword. can be graphic with content.

rules and a big adventure are free so check it out

What is this B/X thing you speak of?

One of the editions of Basic D&D. After OD&D, the game split into the Basic and Advanced line. Advanced went from 1e to 5e, Basic has a different line of editions, usually called by the editor like Moldvay, but sometimes referred to by what each edition includes, like Basix/Xpert.

It's the system where I ripped the flesh off a demonically mutated man-servant and went head-to-head with a newborn lizard-god with a pitchfork and lived.

It's also the system where I and a fellow PC stabbed each other for literally no goddamn reason right before an insane boss fight.

It's very fun if you have really fucking good dice rolls goddamn how did I even live.

It's basically this in RPG form.

I personally prefer calling them B/X, BECMI, and RC. Committing the editors names to memory feels more nerdy than necessary. It would be like referring to Three Musketeers remakes by the name of the cinematographer or something.

But there's more than B/X, BECMI, and RC. Holmes, Moldvay, Cook, Mentzer, and the RC is the complete list of Basic editions.

Except that the basic editions were billed as revisions of OD&D, so the complete list is Gygax/Arneson, Holmes, Moldvay/Cook, Mentzer, and Denning/Allston.

>Is it any good?
ask /guro/

A fair point, good sir. I believe you have out-nerded me. Well done.

A competent retroclone with a few genuinely inspired design choices, but which ultimately isn't nearly as revolutionary as its designer wants you to think

The published modules for it are a mixed bag. 'Scenic Dunnwich' is masterful, although it can feel a little bland and unfocused if the map generation process goes sour. Better Than Any Man has some great thematic hooks but falls flat by crowbaring some dull and generic dungeon crawling elements into an otherwise rich historical setting. The Magnificent Joop van Ooms is a great set of building blocks but demands that the DM do all the heavy lifting and actually construct a cohesive adventure from the pieces. The God That Crawls is compact and very fun. Death Frost Doom is emblematic of a big problem I have with a lot of the adventures the guy puts out: basically anything the players touch will harm them in some way, meaning you're essentially training them to never interact with anything if they want to survive. There's rewarding caution and then there's making your group impossible to DM for. If they get bit ever time they do anything, they'll learn not to do anything.

Tower of the Stargazer is the only one that I think is genuinely just plain shit. It plays like a bad caricature of old school gaming: the doorknob to get into the location is a save versus death, the first room has a bottle of wine that will automatically kill you if consumed, there are magic mirrors which will kill you if you look at them, the puzzle in the wizard's tower will kill you if you solve it, and the treasure is guarded by an elaborate switch puzzle that requires a fuckton of bookkeeping on the part of the DM, unless you want to just let the players brute force it and subtract however much time that takes.

Here's one of the campaigns. I'd post a link to the mega and let you look for yourself, but the OSR trove got gassed again so you'll have to scavenge the rest on your own.

>the doorknob to get into the location is a save versus death,

Which is telegraphed so well that any non-stupid party will not be caught by it. It's designed by the wizard to kill stupid would-be thieves, because they're not worth toying with. Anybody who skips the big brass knocker and tries to open the venomous-serpent-shaped handle is up to no good, and none too bright.

No, 'a wizard did it' isn't an excuse for bad game design. The church has gargoyles on the roof, should I expect them to come to life and attack me? What about the lion head on my walking stick?

>No, 'a wizard did it' isn't an excuse for bad game design.

That's not what people mean when they say "a wizard did it."
In this case it's literally a guy putting a handle on his door, with a poison needle on it, to kill people who try to break into his house. It only kills people who don't knock and wait for entry, and aren't smart enough to find the fact that he put a handle shaped like a snake on his door suspicious.
People have run complete RPG newbies through this module as their first foray into RPGs and still they didn't fall for it, it was so utterly obvious. Why would you ever expect an evil wizard, or any evil recluse, to let you just casually stroll in his front door unannounced?

>muh realism

Alright, if that's the game we're playing

Page 10

>Against the east wall is a glass cabinet stocked with serving china (worth 10gp total if kept intact – it’s delicate!) and four bottles of wine. One of the bottles has gone bad (drinking requires a poison save or the drinker dies after a twelve hour painful illness)

and on the next page

>in no circumstances should the poisoned bottle be described any differently from the others unless someone actually drinks from it.

This is bullshit. Wine that goes bad doesn't become an undetectable poison that you only notice when it kills you, it basically becomes vinegar. You could instantly tell by smelling it that something was off, and drinking it would A: alert you if you somehow hadn't noticed, and B: not kill you, just taste like shit and upset your stomach.

Sure, that's pretty hinky, but the doorknob makes sense. "A wizard did it" is what people say when they're joking about trying to explain stuff that makes no sense, which doesn't apply to a guy trying to keep intruders out. A trap to kill thieves is sensible, it doesn't need any explanation.

To play devil's advocate, though: you know you can make wines out of all sorts of plants, right? Not just grapes? (I hear blueberry wine is great)
I wouldn't be surprised if there are unusual plants whose wines that can become poisonous if brewed or stored incorrectly.

currently playing it. In my opinion it's a great system for rolling up like 3 characters each, going into a module and seeing who can die the best.

I personally don't like the fact that you only get exp for the amount of gold you get back to town but I understand it nails the whole point of the game.

Also summon is the best spell there is. I'll see if I can green text what happened on saturday to prove it.

I'm not going to disagree with you, and at some point I'd like to run a modified star gazers tpwer that cuts out the save or die shit, bit if I recall correctly, Raggi built it as an intor adgenture to Lfp to kind of get players in (what he thinks of) the correct mindset.

The one that reqlly pisses me off is in tue monolith module where there is an instant death encounter thwt doesnt resolve for weeks, thwt you dont get a save for, thwt you get for LOOKING AT SOMETHING, and an adventure that is otherwose more weord than deadly.

>>sjw being buttmad.
Don't listen to this subhuman.
knows what's up.

It's a primary example of shit-and-sugar. It's a system that has both Quelong, which is an awesome supplement, and the Isle of the Unknown, which is so bad I'd hesitate to use it to line a parrot's cage for fear of insulting the parrot.

Plus, the adventures tend to push the whole "punish adventurers for being adventurers" angle way too much. It's like Raggi thinks the only good classic module was Tomb of Horrors.