/osrg/

>Guys who have access to good pussy don't obsess about it like this
... he's married, bruh. It's statistically proven that married guys get laid better and more often than bachelors.

I'm not saying that his reported GM'ing style might not be a little *too* broad-minded for conventional American mores, but you need to find the right root cause to understand it properly. Apparently one of the key memories of his childhood (in the 1960s, the time of Free Love) was watching naked hippies wander around in the commune across from his school(?).

>... he's married, bruh.
Fuckin' Jesus.

That puts /r9k/ in a whole new disturbing light.

>It's statistically proven that married guys get laid better and more often than bachelors.
Is it statistically proven that Ed's wife can bear to touch him without salad tongs? Actually, don't answer that.

- He is a former military officer from an enemy nation in a recent war. Having fled after being made a scapegoat for atrocities committed by others he seeks only to hide from the government bureau created to hunt those like him. If he believes his ruse has been discovered by someone he will try to lure that person to a secluded place and then kill them before either making the death look like an accident or random crime, or fleeing the city.

- The dockmaster is a flesh golem granted the spark of intelligence and independent thought by some unique quirk in his creation. Although unnaturally stout and battered he has kept his nature a secret so far and is terrified of discovery due to the persistent superstitions held against his kind. He does not remember much of his past life, his only link to it is an intricate brooch that he keeps on his person at all times.

- He beat the duke's nephew to death when he came upon the man in the midst of committing a terrible crime, not knowing who the man was. Now he - and the nephew's would-be victim - are being blackmailed by a local criminal whose underlings witnessed the crime and are forced to do her bidding to evade the crown's justice.

he's of Deep One descent, and is beginning to undergo the changes into being a fullblown one

...or he's a Deep One that slowly turns into a human.
Don't literally fuck with land-dwellers, fishkiddos.

A warehouse.

The captain is Rakshasa who has become disillusioned with the whole "conquer-and-eat-people" lifestyle in favor of his new MARITIME HIGH ADVENTURE life.

However, he's in trouble because (1d4):
1 - A trio of Paladins suspect that he's a fiend
2 - Another Rakshasa is blackmailing him
3 - A cult led by a fiend is spreading rumors about his true nature
4 - He's racked up a lot of debts and may lose his ship

How do you make an adventure feel.. old-school and high adventure?

Every time I start trying to write stuff, it either winds up as gimmicky gonzo nonsense, diving into weird horror territory, or .. just generic high fantasy.

read conan

read Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser

at this point I feel like I should say "read Elric" just for solidarity's sake

Read all of the books in Appendix N

Abandoned sites are always a good bet - mines, subways, bunkers, missile silos. Basically, think about what you'd adventure in for places in, say, Shadowrun or Fallout.

Slums are also good - the dungeon isn't a specific building, it's the entire area with buildings as rooms and alleys as corridors. Of course, this also works as a fantasy dungeon.

The dockmaster has a deal with a group of doppelgangers, letting them covertly take over select ships and eat the sailors while out at sea. The specific ships are chosen either because they would not attract attention or because the dockmaster's contacts within the local trading guilds have a grudge against them and pay for them to disappear.

The dockmaster is a former pirate. He has hidden his treasure on an uninhabited island, and regularly takes a couple gold from the dock fees to add to it - the characters may hear rumors of a boat sailing the sea in the middle of the night.

The dockmaster has a pact with a group of mermen, who will sink and plunder any ships whose hulls are marked with a specific symbol - the dockmaster gets a share of the profit, of course, and makes sure that nobody would miss the ship in question.

The dockmaster is a high-ranking demon who was cursed into the form of a feeble-minded human - he regularly pays adventurers for any information about ways to dispel his curse or, failing that, some method for prolonging his now-mortal life.

In addition to the others, give Vance a try.

-The dockmaster is working for a foreign power, slowly sending coded messages to his contacts on where the king's navy is moving out to.
-The dockmaster is actually a highly ornate flesh golem who took the place of the real dockmaster nearly a year earlier by a wizard who is using it to find rare materials for their experiments.
-The dockmaster really loves tea and is constantly imbibing it at work despite his wife's protests.

Would an OSR game be good for a kinda Zelda-ish game? I have an idea for a campaign where the characters have to take down the evil tyrant and reinstall the princess as ruler of the land but to access the castle they need to acquire several rare magical items. The dungeons would be filled with traps, puzzles and a big bad boss protecting the magical macguffin. The world is fairly easy to port, I guess, and the lore is easy to pick up since it tends to not be the main focus of the game really.

Conan the Barbarian is a B/x thief.
> bxblackrazor.blogspot.com/2009/09/conan-barbarian-bx-thief.html
Is he right?

I could see OD&D working well enough for a Zelda 1-ish game, with the whole "overworld is a megadungeon" aspect and mapping the unknown and whatnot, but you'd need to mess around with the magic-using classes a lot. Probably just nix them entirely so you only have a single fighter-ish class. Also, instituting some kind of Bloodborne-esque "do damage to enemies to regain health" system, if you really want to keep to the theme of never going back to town.

Of course, at some point you're probably better off making your own system that encourages the right playstyle. OSR generally encourages being sneaky, avoiding fights, gathering monetary treasure and keeping strict records of time and general logistics through various methods - the slow grind of losing spells and health and torches and rations, mostly.
Zelda, well, generally isn't about that. At all. There's some mapping in Zelda 1, but that's almost the only OSR-y thing - Link is very much self-sufficient, finding most of the stuff needed out in the dungeons in one way or another, and for the most part only spending rupees for consumable items.

I mean, what do you actually get out of an OSR system for a game like this? Classes? You don't really want the magical ones for a Zelda game, I don't think. Magic items? They're very different types. The health system? Sure, I guess, but you want more plentiful health restoration and more individually dangerous encounters. Wandering monster encounters, traps, listen checks and opening doors? Fuck, man, I don't know what to tell you.

I mean, you could totally make an OSR campaign that just uses the general themes that Zelda uses - it's just that, well, that requires some pretty good map design. Also, there's a lot of stuff that works in video games that doesn't work on the tabletop.

Conan actually isn't any class or alignment because he isn't a D&D character.

> Character classes can only be used to talk about D&D Brand D&D Characters
Okay.

It's more that classes and alignments and whatnot are inherently limited game constructs that aren't directly applicable to non-D&D fictional and nonfictional characters since those character don't have any reason to cooperate with the limits put upon them by those constructs.

Take Harry Potter, for instance. What class would he be? A magic-user, clearly. Except his magic doesn't work like that at all.

Or, say, Legolas. The Elf doesn't really work for him, since his magics have fuck-all to do with that class.

Also, it's a dumb example because Conan used armor heavier than leather, fought with two-handed weaponry, and generally did stuff that a B/X Thief can't. On the other hand, he doesn't completely correspond to a B/X Fighter either. There's a reason that when Gygax statted up a probably-overleveled version of him in Dragon he made him a Fighter/Thief duel class with some unique abilities since those two classes still didn't represent him in his entirety.

Anyone have spell lists or spell compendiums? Looking to throw in some spells that aren't in the rulebook as treasure for PCs to find - hopefully this helps create the impression that magic is very unique and personalized.

Go check Wonder & Wickedness in the trove.

2E's Wizard's Spell Compendiums (a four-volume set) will give you literally 2173 spells to work with.

The goal of it, at least, was for it to contain literally all the published AD&D spells. I don't know how complete it is, but, well. It's a thing.

Attention Trove folks, the Dungeon World "Freebooters on the Frontier" book way cool btw is missing the playbooks, and more importantly, it's watermarked.

..Weirdly, my copy of the trove doesn't even seem to have that book.

I'm not sure, and I can't find the link to the blog it was from. Sorry.

I added it, just check out Dungeon World folder.

About playbooks, you can find those here: mysticworks.com/freebooters/downloads/Maezar-Freebooters-Sheets.pdf

Didn't occur to me to add them since it's literally the first result you get googling "freeboters on the frontier playbooks"

Anyone holding an old school D&D game here, or considering one?

>About playbooks, you can find those here: mysticworks.com/freebooters/downloads/Maezar-Freebooters-Sheets.pdf
>Didn't occur to me to add them since it's literally the first result you get googling "freeboters on the frontier playbooks"

Yeah, but those are unofficial ones that don't appear to include everything. The rules refer to things like the Heritage table you roll a d12 on, which isn't on those 3rd party sheets and isn't in the main rules.

Like I said it would Zelda like, not Zelda directly (if I wanted that, I'd play the unofficial Zelda RPG which really should be made official imho). I was more wanting to know if it'd be possible to do a game like Zelda within the framework of an OSR game.

As for classes, I don't see why I couldn't include a magic-user class so long as I nix the divination spells.

Well, in that case you just need to have really solid dungeon design. Figure out which paths you want available, how to make those paths obvious, what you're doing with the dungeon item opening up new paths, etc.

Maybe read up on Zelda dungeon design? This video series is pretty good:
youtube.com/watch?v=ouO1R6vFDBo&list=PLc38fcMFcV_ul4D6OChdWhsNsYY3NA5B2&index=3

Also, of course, you'll want to do something about the lethality level. While overly lethal games work fine for the more sandboxy play that OSR started in, they work less well for plot-focused games - the party that gets the mission in the beginning might all be dead and replaced twice over by the time their heirs "win"!

Also, if you just boil it down to the broad themes Zelda's story is pretty basic and somewhat cliche. Evil wizard-king captures princess, heroes must go through three/seven/whatever trials to reach him and put an end to the evil he has wrought upon the land.
Fuck, you could rewrite the "plot" of Super Mario Bros. 3 to be pretty much that as well: evil wizard-king has bewitched a number of kingdoms that the hero must travel through and set right by defeating the guardians set there by the wizard-king, at which point the wizard-king kidnaps the princess and the hero must travel to the wizard-kings lair to defeat him and save her.

Also, the divination spells aren't really an issue as much as the spells that just outright negate encounters by save-or-losing the boss or teleporting everyone to the princess' castle or even just making a hole through a wall into the next room.

Fuck, what about this: imagine a vertical wall that is unscalable for whatever reason - maybe it's covered in that acid-wall thing that people like to put in the "everything is a mimic" room. The designer-intended way to scale the wall is through some kind of dungeon item - anti-acid gloves, hookshot, whatever.

Instead, the magic-user just casts Levitate on themselves and drops down a rope.

Oh, I see. Well, I didn't really read it closely since I'm not into *W right now so sorry about that.
Couldn't found official playbooks anywhere anyway. But I guess if the only thing missing is heritage people can live with that.

Couldn't find*
derp. Not a native speaker, yada-yada.

Only if you can cope with a player dying when they walk into the crossfire of a couple goons with crossbows.

On second look, it's missing heritage (plus the heritage rules and moves) and alignment, with the alignment moves and rules, which are all supposed to be in the official playbook PDF.
So it's pretty much unusuable by itself. I'm gonna keep an eye out for an unwatermarked, complete version of it, though.

Or when they fight Iron Knuckles

>Maze of the Blue Medusa has tons of shit that reminds you of old homebrew
>you posted it on Veeky Forums
>you search for it
>archive gaps have lost it
This is a bad feel.

Are you implying Maze took elements of your homebrew?

So I've decided what game and system I'm going to be using for my campaign. I'm using guns, some modified stat and save rules, and a unique setting.

Now tell me this- how can I make it work? Any advice for starter campaigns?

No, just my stuff will seem a lot less novel now and I have no way to evidence I thought of it independently.

Just checked out a video review. The book has 24 pages, just as the pdf does. So my guess is heritage and alignment rules are in official playbooks.

For starters, actually describe what you're aiming at. What's the setting, what kind of adventures do you envision happening there? Otherwise we can only offer some general advice.

Depends on a lot of factors. A little info on the setting could help us give more advice.

>For starters, actually describe what you're aiming at. What's the setting, what kind of adventures do you envision happening there? Otherwise we can only offer some general advice.

Alright so basically the setting is in a setting stuck outside of time. Different dimension where 'lost' people end up, including aliens. The city is a sprawling metropolis but it is always night time there.

The idea is that there is a lot of abandoned buildings, old factories and mine shafts around. The first part of the game I imagined was the party being able to clear an abandoned apartment complex, which they could later use as a base or sell off as rental properties. However the party would run in to another gang who would say that since it's their territory and they own the building's plunder.

In the meantime though, I won't keep things too heavily planned. I wonder if I should plan a city-wide hexcrawl map just in case.

If you'd prefer to keep it light on prep until the direction of the game is established come up with a couple of points of interest that you want to stress and then put together handful of hexes that you can randomly assign to fill the space between them during play as the PCs explore. That'll give you plenty of time to expand between sessions depending on what direction/tact the party takes.

Okay, I hope there's someone more competent than me to give advice on city adventures since I know fuckall about them. But!

Not sure how suitable hex map would be. It's an abstraction that works when there's a lot of space. Weather and terrain are obstacles, you can only cover so much distance in a day, so you're making decisions on which path to take and how to manage your resources. You can make it more detailed, but that's okay to have just that and some interesting stuff every 3 or 4 hexes, maybe more frequently. Depends on the needs of your campaign.

The city, even if it's half-empty, is packed with stuff. Buildings at every corner, «sprawling metropolis», right? At any point players can go "so what kind of neighborhood is this" and maybe try to investigate. There's law enforcement (supposedly), there are definitely different factions who want different things. Especially where all kinds of folk end up.

So
1. Read Vornheim. It's a fantasy supplement, and I don't know how much fantasy you want to be there, but it's got absolutely setting-neutral urbancrawl rules, quick floorplans, tables for when pcs get sued, encounter tables that are easily reskinnable if something doesn't work for you etc. It’ll give you good and quick structure for improvisation, and city adventure requires a lot of improvising.
2. Run your first adventure.
3. So they had a run-in with some gang and there’s a lot of empty buildings, so probably that’s not the best neighborhood you might end up in. Define how powerful that gang is, what’s their main schtick, who they’re might be in conflict with. After you got the main factions down, give a few thoughts to what impact on neighborhood their confict has, what people are occupied with, what do they want. Come up with some simple encounter table for this neighborhood. Run another game.

4. Players will try to gather info on other city districts and probably get there once they got safehouse and cash. Or faster. Make some notes, «alien district», «district of rich and powerful assholes», «consumed by gang wars district», «lunapark-like district». Once they get there, repeat step 3: main factions, what do people want, encounter table to reflect what happens here.

That’s as prep-light as I can imagine.

Bumping for this

New to OSR stuff, can you fa/tg/uys help me out- what's up with turn tracking? How do you measure turns out of combat? How do you determine what level-appropriate encounters are for a party so that it's not just all horribly strong traps and monsters? Also, is the AEC for labyrinth lrod compatible with b/x? Like if I wanted to just rip the Druid from there, would that work? Also! How do you guys stock your dungeons?!

>New to OSR stuff, can you fa/tg/uys help me out-
Sure. Whoa, that's a barrage of questions.
>what's up with turn tracking? How do you measure turns out of combat?

Turn tracking is the engine that an old-school dungeon crawl runs on. Rules are in the books, but generally all actions are put into a 10 minute turn. If it would reasonably take up the better part of 10 minutes, count it as a turn. It's a little chunky, but that keeps you from having to do too much as a GM.

>How do you determine what level-appropriate encounters are for a party so that it's not just all horribly strong traps and monsters?

Generally you put nastier stuff on the lower levels of the dungeon, but don't worry too much about it. Sneaking by, running away, and talking your way past monsters are all an important part of old-school play. Players get piddly XP from killing stuff, so the incentives are all to get the loot without a fight wherever possible.

> Also, is the AEC for labyrinth lrod compatible with b/x? Like if I wanted to just rip the Druid from there, would that work?

Yep, that's exactly what it's for. It translates AD&D stuff into a B/X compatible form.

> Also! How do you guys stock your dungeons?!

See above, go by dungeon level. Throw in stuff that seems interesting or fun, let the players worry about what to deal with and how.
In an overmap you'd put easier stuff near the starting point and harder stuff further away, and let players worry about how far out they want to go.
It's also fun to throw in a few surprises that are out of their normal level in an overmap.

Thanks for the ideas and help.

>What's up with turn tracking? How do you measure turns out of combat?

Just eyeball it based on what the players are doing since every turn is ten minutes it's not hugely important to split hairs over. It's intended to be used to introduce a cost/benefit dynamic on lingering in dangerous areas like dungeons. Every moment they spend mooning over the cyst-encrusted Throne of the Swine Prince is resources spent (food, water, light, spell duration) and an increased possibility of something coming down the hallway to see what all the noise/light is about.

>How do you determine what level-appropriate encounters are for a party so that it's not just all horribly strong traps and monsters?

What said, reaction rolls are also useful to moderate how encounters behave towards the party. Another thing to consider is possible explanations for what the encountered parties are up to when encountered rather than treating them as static mobs just waiting for the PCs to drift by and proc them into hostility: two individuals dueling over a slight, a broody monster building a nest in the area, the ragged and lost remains of a previous adventuring group trying to get their bearings, etc. Not every encounter has to have a story behind it but doing it occasionally is one of the things my players seem to enjoy seeing.

gonna make a mega-dungeon, what system should i use? wanna avoid lotfp though.

I really don't think it matters.

Any.

Personally I would use ACKS or BFRPG. Barring that, Swords and Wizardry or DCC would be good imo.

The system means fuck all so really, knock yourself out. Building and running a megadungeon is a challenge in itself, the specifics of the system are not a part of that challenge.

Best 0-level DCC adventures? Might not have a huge group for a while, but I want to start reading through modules to get a grasp of how they're run.
Just got my copy of the rules and my set of Impact! dice, so I'm gonna try to buckle down and get really familiar with the system for when I finally do get to run a game.

I guess go with Sailors on the Starless Sea, it's sort of their iconic adventure.

Oh right, also Frozen in Time. It's a level 1 adventure, but I see no problem doing it with funnel and come on, it's Michael Curtis.

The Madhouse Meet from RPG day worked really well when I ran it as a funnel.
I bumped the Wizard and Jailor down a level, and reduced the amount of guards (a patrol only had two members).

I wonder...

About what? A shitty thread about a shitty card game?

Looking for a good post-apoc module to run that isn't ASE. Halp?

You could run Keep on the Borderland as a post apoc module, just make the monsters mutants, the keep an abandoned "fort" (basically a mall) and such.

How would you expand and build on Expedition to the Barrier Peaks?

I was thinking that the beings the ship belonged to arrive (far too late) to recover the ship and come to blame the nearby peoples on it resulting in the players once more having to take on the alien menace but this time dealing with the living inhabitants of a ship.

I have a question regarding Maze of the Blue Medusa:

In Starlit Stones (Room 3.) what happens to a PC who falls into a shadow pit which is then sealed up by the presence of light. I know it says they have to wait for another shadow before they can climb out but what do they experience in the meantime. Are they sealed in stone? Does it seem like no time passed at all from their perspective while sealed down there? Is it just the top of the pit that gets sealed giving them their own little chamber? If so wouldn't the walls of this chamber move with the shadow or risk slicing them in half if the next shadow doesn't line up properly?

Think han solo stuck in the carbonite

I don't know, answering these questions by yourself is like half the fun to me.

I think there was a sequal to Expedition called Temple of the Frog... or maybe it was just in the same genre. But there's a good place to start

Temple of the Frog? Which version? The '86 version or the one that was the first "module" ever, released in the Blackmoor Supplement?

and that bloody massive mimic of a tower is a wandering AI Having "Fun" with the ex-controllers (i.e. Humans and their decedents)

there's also a "Return to the Temple of the Frog" for 3.e. It must be of the same genre, as the villains are a mutinied space ship.

Space ship CREW. Friggin phone.

Long timw lurker. Been running a DCC game for some newbies on roll20 set in ~Japan and one of the players started recording and editing our sessions as a project. We liked how it turned out so I recorded an intro/recap and the first game recording starts a few sessions into the actual campaign.

soundcloud.com/99-flasks-of-oil/sets/bakufu-no-blood-campaign

Check it out if you're bored and let me know what you think. We've been recording the ones after this too, just trying to figure out where to upload since soundcloud is fuck.

That's a pretty good idea, it's consistent with the encased interpretation. Give it a second or two transition period and you've got something that isn't tacitly lethal.

That's fair, I'm just curious how other people have done it. The possible explanations as to how it works seem to range from mildly dangerous (and potentially useful) curiosity to something that ends with one of the PCs screaming "Holy shit, what the fuck!?!" while cradling the pureed remains of their comrades in the bloodied stumps that used to end in their hands. Either of which can work just fine.

About to run a friend who's never really gotten a chance to play TRPGs through a game of Basic, 1e, and 5th in the next coming days so they can compare and contrast systems.

What's everyone's favorite OSR introduction module?

I don't think it's a good idea, that'll only confuse him because he won't get a feel for the system from only one session (which is what it sounds like).

That said, Tower of the Stargazer or Tomb of the Iron God are my default intro dungeons.

As for 5e, Lost Mine of Phandelver is one of the best moduals to come out for D&D in a dog's age.

>Basic
"The Lost City"
>1e
"The Village of Hommlet"
>5e
"The Lost Mines of Phandelver"

Seriously though, just stick to one system until the adventure (or better, campaign) is over.

Honestly, I'm using her as an accomplice to finally try out all the RPG systems I've always wanted to play, but could never find someone who was interested in breaking away from 3e D&D.

We both get a quick, real-world test of how each system plays, and we both, hopefully, walk away with some systems we genuinely like. I just ran her through a quick game of Mouse Guard RPG today. We both quickly decided that we didn't like that.

Man, Mouse Guard is awesome.

That said, of those systems 5e is probably the best if you all are relatively beholden to 3e style games but are interested in OSR games. Play it first then go to 1e and then finally Basic if you are intent on playing those games.

3e is what we both started with, but we both hate it for its sluggish combat and consistent "I dunno, let's check the rules." It's the main reason I pitched this idea to her.

>Mouse Guard is awesome
Quick question: Is there no formal way that players obtain their Ability and Skill scores? I read, and reread, and reread some more, and could not find a section that explained if players rolled a d6 for these numbers or what. In the end, since it seems to have a real focus on drilling in the whole roleplay aspect, I told her to pick scores that best fit her character scheme. In the end, she picked 5 across the board.

So I'm running an AD&D campaign over roll20 and I had a party composition question: Should I look for a player to play a cleric? And should I look for more? I've been reading through some classic modules for inspiration and most of the adventures I've seen call for 6 to 8 players. So far we have three players, a thief a paladin, and a magic user. I have two other friends coming in to participate (one coming in this week, and another the next week). This will add another magic user, and a fighter. Although this is a bit on the tentative side as their job schedules are constantly subject to change, so they might not be able to commit understandably.

With this in mind, with some intervention on my part, would the party be able to to survive fairly within the confines as is with three people? Or should I consider trying to find more people on roll20 or Veeky Forums?

Forgive me for my cluelessness I have never ran a proper game with such a venerable system before

Allow them to hire additional adventurer NPCs for 1/2 of a share of treasure (treasure is XP, remember - and yes, it is important!). They'll get less XP, but increase their chances of survival. The NPCs should roll morale checks like any other NPC/creature, and you should decide how "steady" each individual NPC is.

Let them hire-on and manage retainers and maybe throw in a couple of minor healing items as part of their initial kit (like a signing bonus if their characters are doing a job for someone). That way you aren't taking any of the choice or responsibility out of their hands.

Expedition to the Barrier Peaks was literally just a big crossover module with Metamorphosis Alpha created to hype up and advertise the latter game.

Temple of the Frog, meanwhile, is just Arneson making a smallish example dungeon with the idea of a crashed spaceship and the technologically advanced crew pretending to be powerful magicians. This is similar but different to Barrier Peak's crashed spaceship with crazed robots and escaped experiments, and honestly there's little-to-no connection between the two other than the loose themes.

It's worth remembering that sci-fi and fantasy weren't that different back in the day! The hard divide is more of a later thing, and even then there's still Jedi being space wizard-knights saving princesses and fighting evil emperors.

>long post
I read The Seclusium of Orphone and its attempt to marry the choose- and roll- styles of *world games and more traditional dungeon crawlers, which ultimately seems to lead to a lot of 'choose one or two options' from a set of conveniently dice-shaped tables.

In the absence of detailed mechanical puzzles (which it does have some of, and by which I mean stuff like rather than strict rules for everything stuff) I think a lot of the good parts of it are the personality traits, which are a quick way to give you characterful magic-influenced NPCs.

It did give me an idea for running a wizard's tower crawl myself though, which starts with you asking the question "WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE FOOD?" as the PCs walk through the gate. The idea here is to move the choices and random gen around a bit, so that every significant progression the party makes in the tower is accompanied by a question - and after answering it a corresponding loss of memory. Once you've told the wizard's tower what your favourite food is you can no longer remember that food.

The nature of the phenomena within the tower changes based on the answer to each question. I'd have a list of categories for answers and I'd let players answer and match their answer to the nearest category, or let them roll randomly on the list. The first question (because this is a bad joke about taste) changes how you perceive the tower - the actual architecture, decoration, materials of construction, etc. Other questions play into encounter design, the character of NPCs, hazards or rewards or other options. The first question is easy because it's a buy-in to the whole dungeon idea too.

The wizard is in the tower in more than one body, and whenever you encounter it (it's no longer really human) you get to ask it one question for free because you have already paid it with your lost memories. There are creatures and adventurers who have lost all sense of purpose wandering the tower. There are rogue memories, areas where the wizard is experimenting with memories, hungry spells looking for empty brains to colonise. There's a library which is really just the wizard's own stored and protected memories that you perceive as a library.

The reasons I like this as a dungeon are:
>it highlights the wizard's tower is a thing of splintered realities - right from the off there's a sense that the physical tower you perceive is only your best way of understanding something that can't really be imagined
>it adds an extra area of resource drain on the PCs - as well as the usual hit point loss, spell slots, horrible consequences and so on you are actually eroding your personality by continuing to venture into the tower
>there's just a lot of fun stuff you can do with the idea of memory in a dungeon

Of course there would have to be some way to restore lost memories at the summit of the tower, with some chance for restoring the wrong memories or a mix up.

What do you anons think?

The rocket tag nature of OSR combat and the fact that combat is de-emphasized means you don't really need a "healer", and there's plenty of alternatives in that regard - give parties the ability to hire healers or give them potions. party.

In OSR play Clerics are more useful for their abilties vs. Undead.

I've never played MG or any Burning Wheel game for that matter. What about it you disliked?

Mouse guard really requires a party of at least 3 to work as intended. I dont think you can judge it from a 1 on 1 experience.

>The rocket tag nature of OSR combat

Only at low levels. Once players have 30 HP, 1d8 + diddly ain't rocket tag.