/osrg/

Welcome to /osrg/ - the OSR General, devoted to pre-WotC D&D, retroclones, and all other related systems.

Trove: Down as far as I know.
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I like Lamentations of the Flame Princess and you don't like it you can go play some other game

Tell me about your Fighter /orsg/

It's my player's. He's a Maasai warrior in 'World of the Lost' for LotFP. He carries a bastard sword.

He drew his sword on a barkeep to act tough. That got him beaten, 86'd and arrested. It is illegal to draw a weapon in Kihrima. Upon being released, he drew his sword in the Blade District, whereupon a soldier immediately threw an axe into his chest and threw him out the gates. After licking his wounds, subtly threatening a man of the cloth and healing a bit, he tried to drive a spike through the head of a relatively peaceful crocodile ominously staring into a lake... and was nearly bludgeoned to death by religious fanatics.

He's not smart nor tactful.

Currently recruiting for a new game that I have been talking about a few times in the thread.

Basically imagine a world that is dominated by a great electric city. It is always night, nature is everywhere, and people get by. The guns and cars are all made of scrap metal, but crime and adventure are just a few ways to get rich. Chimney-Sweeps are the gun smiths, selling their smelly dirty 'chimneys' to anyone who is willing to pay up, which probably includes you. Psychic powers awaken at this place, as humans and many alien races who are 'lost' end up here. You can always tell the difference between a local and somebody who ended up here later in life; the locals never look up and wonder where the sun went.

Does city adventure, dungeon crawling, mob politics and urban hex crawling appeal to you? Then come on by, and don't forget your guns.

Full details on the game finder post Game rules are homebrew but heavily inspired by into the odd, which I expect this game to be most like.

Does anyone have Golden Huzuz for Al-Qadim? I can't find it in the trove.

It's in the City of Delights PDF. It condenses the books into one pdf.

your player honestly sounds like an idiot

Okay?

Thanks

Why haven't you killed him yet?
Running a modified moldvay dnd
>explain to friends that game is lethal. (Using warhammer fantasy 0 hp tables.)
>friend known for being a bit of a wild card
>lolrandumb shit sometimes
>playing an elf with 3 hp
>in dungeon, ship buried in sand.
>party goes into the hold, it's dark.
>Because he's an Elf, sees door in the darkness, no one else sees it (all humans.)
>doesn't say anything to the party, just goes into the dark and listens at it,
>hears voices speaking a language he doesn't understand.
>says aloud "this door seems fine."
>8 goblin and 2 2nd level cleric equivalents.
>hit by cause light wounds
>reduced to zero
>one round later spear through the thigh
>bleeds out, he 2nd level cleric can't reach him.
>he's 100% mad.
>mfw

No prob.

New thread, new hexmap seed question.

What's troubling the village at the edge of the woods?

The Edgelords.

...

1.) A number of cows have been mutilated. Strange lights have been seen in the night sky, and there are rumors of strangers lurking about forest edge. One man claims to have been taken inside a silver beast that exhales fire. There he was tortured by demons.

2.) A sinkhole has swallowed an entire farm, and a rushing undergound river can be seen in the darkness below. Thundering up from the depths, a great bellowing can be heard for miles around.

3.) War has come. The orc chieftains have driven their hordes down from the mountains and laid waste to the village. The sole survivor is an apprentice magic-user who has made a pact with Death. He will aid you with his necromantic powers if you take up his cause of vengeance for his slain family.

4.) The village priest confides that he has seen a change come over his flock in recent days. They act strangely, as though they do not remember events of their lives, though they always have an excuse when called on their faulty knowledge. The priest is convinced these are untruths, and that there are witches at work.

5.) The village's well is befouled, though no one knows why. Several new wells have been dug, but they too are poisonous. A few have died. Unless someone can discover the cause, they may have to abandon their homes and seek settlement elsewhere.

6.) A star has fallen at the very edge of the wood, and it glows with an unearthly light. Those who have basked in its glow gain strange powers and a driving impulse to construct... something. Even now some of them try to convince their fellow villagers to bask in the star's glow, and assist them in their mission

They are attacked by The Things Not In The Woods.

People are obsessed with making prosthetic limbs out of the trees from the heart of the woods, even going as far as chopping of their meaty ones.

A rivalry with another village at the opposite edge of the woods. Which is exactly the same.

Elves. Always elves. Jesus fucking christ, why are there always so many elves?

My player's fighter in LotFP started out as a no-nonsense bandit. He quickly gained fame by beating the shit out of any noble asshole in a shining armor he could find. At level 5, he had killed a demon, the black knight, a goat-demon, a succubus and a whole lot of people called the best at fighting by their peers. He had also acquired a badass magical sword, a shiny armor and a fucking lot of cash.

It is probably important to also note that during his adventures, he was almost always in the company of a mud cleric who was the unluckiest man alive, but still managed to stay alive, probably due to his God being nice. The session before our last, said Cleric decided to retire to raise an orphan as another cleric, because he was, well, one-eyed, one-handed, didn't have feet anymore and had a punctured lung and stomach, and still survived.

So yeah, badass fighter goes to another town 15 days from here with his buddies. They meet a bunch of bandits, no-nonsense bandits that merely take hostage one of their (trusted and old) follower and ask for all their stuff. The fighter, his dwarf companion just go "fuck you you stupid bandit, we rule", and eventually let the new follower realise they don't give two shits about NPCs, so he rolls for morale and fails, and quits their side. So they both charge. That's ten bandits, most of them with bows. They actually managed to kill every single one, short of two. In the end, there was two bandits left, with daggers, and the dwarf and the fighter, bare-handed and with 2 hp out of 25/27 left. The bloody melee draws longer until the bandits get hurt but don't go down to 0. One last morale rolls tell me they're gone berserk.

And then they both crit their respective PC opponent, put them at -4 each, that's instant death in LotFP.

They loved this final campaign-stopping TPK.

I don't know why, but Al-Qadim books are so fucking gorgeous.
After my drive wipe, this is the first setting books, that I downloaded.

a Witch Coven known as the Builders of The Flesh King have returned several decades after they were driven away from the village, and are gathering corpses, both Human and Beast to build an army to destroy those who have persecuted them, to aid their efforts they have summoned an Avatar of The Flesh King to the mortal plane, an abomination known only as He Who Is Man

if the PC's don't stop the Builders and He Who Is Man here, they'll eventually obtain enough corpses to raise enough undead/flesh golem abominations to overrun the village, which will in turn snowball to more and more of the region getting overrun till the Builders achieve their ultimate goal; summoning The Flesh King himself to the Mortal Plane in his full power, which would probably lead to a small scale apocalypse

Thats a pretty good way to go!

7.) On every full moon, an animal or a person is found ripped apart in great gory gobbets. There is talk of lyncathropes, and wolfsbane is placed around thresholds, and talismans of silver are kept close at hand. But they don't seem to be working. It isn't a werewolf or other werecreature

8.) A stairway has been found in a clearing in the forest, despite there being no foundation or other signs of a structure nearby. Anyone climbing the stair disappears. Occasionally, a curious or intrepid person who did make the attempt is found days or even months later, often many miles from the location of the stair. All dead. Some appear to have died from exposure. Some are missing fingers, toes, even whole limbs. The cuts seem impossibly straight.

Sometimes, only a part of a person is found.

I honestly have no idea what's going through his head at times. When he played a Cleric last time, he was basically a huge pussy and avoided everything. I think in his mind, he's this Dirty Harry "walk in a room and fuck shit up" kinda character now.

He scraped out of the last session with 1HP and had his left hand cut off as sacrificial atonement while he was unconscious. I'm sure he'll be dead soon enough.

>What's troubling the village at the edge of the woods?
The fact that up till yesterday there wasnt one?

>A cult of Werebears are infecting villagers in the hopes of building the ultimate Lawful Good army

>A pack of outcast Elves have recently moved into the woods. Heated words have been exchanged and the villagers fear an escalation.

>Certain houses and fields have burned by a strange fire that doesn't spread beyond the houses or fields themselves.

>The village is 99% Human. The villagers and their local cleric haven't reported it to anyone but for the past 5 years all the children born have been Tieflings.

Really pushy door-to-door evangelists.

Hey, /osrg/, how would one run a proper campaign in ACKS? Just do dungeon delves then wilderness shit then build a kingdom? Is there anything more to the whole thing?

>Just do dungeon delves then wilderness shit then build a kingdom?
Isn't this the same for most OSR games? You can use ACKS for any type of OSR game - you don't have to get into the kingdom building stuff.

Personally I like ACKS because makes running "sandbox" campaigns easier. It provides some concrete guidance and ballpark numbers for a lot of background details that are often very hard to eyeball - population, availability of stuff in the market, rudimentary supply/demand simulation, etc. and just provides a behind the scenes methodology for organizing/classifying not just player domains but NPC ones.

WE'D LIKE TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT OUR LORD AND SAVIOR, JESUS CHRIST

Trovesenpai, when are you going to bring the trove back with whatever's missing? Just checking up on progress.

It could be that you're just a fan of the Arabian Nights genre. I know I enjoy Sinbad, Aladdin and the over all theme.Shame that it'll probably never get remade due to the shit happening with the extremists.

upd.: Brought in non-watermarked version of The Perilous Wilds.

geekspeaker.com/skills-and-sensibility/

plz give me feedback

It's a good codification of the general principles that make for a good task resolution with nods to *W. The issue is that it doesn't have room for advancement (not a neccesity) and doesn't account for class (also not a neccesity but I like it). I suppose you could drop from hard to moderate and from moderate to easy in some situations if class is applicable.

Characters are pretty strong in Dungeon Crawl Classics. How do I make things more dangerous? Are there any guides for balancing for that game? (And I know unbalance is fun, but I need to know what balanced is before I unbalance)

You probably won't find a lot of detailed math breakdowns on any OSR game, since eyeballing difficulty and to hell with the so called balance is the whole point of it.

In general though, making stuff dangerous is the same in any game: make it tougher, make its attacks deadlier, make it cunning, make it hard to kill without magic or researching a way to weaken it, etc.

I didn't run DCC, but do you run it right now? Does characters' power level feel like a problem to you? Cause I don't know if I ever felt this in any OSR game. Usually it's because DM was somewhat forgiving, not the system.

In the campaign I am playing, the opposite happens, What is happening in your campaign?

In mine we removed the bleeding out, But if we reach 0 you are just knocked out with no other bad thing.
Also, If you are knocked under 0, you check the body.
Also instead of losing only fisical stats you might lose others stats like Luck and Intelligence.

>DCC
>not dangerous enough

Monty Haul, is that you?

I thought it was Freebooters that had the watermark.

Bunch of OSR people seem to be way more familiar with Empire of the Petal Throne than I. What all is available in PDF, since the old stuff at this point seems to be pretty damned rare?

I guess I'm too nice to my players overall. I recently moved to DCC from LotFP and I found that LotFP was much more unforgiving. Having players be allowed to be healed after going under 0 hp and giving the wizard and cleric much more of a chance to shine and use spells has definitely made things easier for them. There was a point in the end of the latest session where I thought a players fighter would die but it turned out there was still enough time for the cleric to heal him. And this was after the cleric had gotten disapproval which made it so he couldn't cast lay on hands more than once on a person each day, so with his final heal he managed to get him back to full health. I don't see how that's anything but forgiving, and that was all the system, no specials rulings by me.

Eh, they came very close to death, so that can be chalked up to being lucky. What I'd be worried about is just giving your players too many things that help them get through encounters, because if you have to compensate for your own kindness by jacking up encounter difficulties you're nearing game inflation territory.

Did you take away a point of Stamina?

EPT is actually available off DTRPG.

I can upload it, are you looking for the box set, the one-volume World of Tekumel book, or the Swords and Glory revised edition thing?

The box set and World Of Tekumel, but if Swords and Glory has stuff that wouldn't be in the prior source I'd also totally grab that.

For treasure I mostly give them unconventional items that I hope they use in a clever way. Hasn't happened that much so far.

Oh shit, is that a rule? In that case I made a mistake and I'll fix it for next time. I think the player might be happy about that too, he also felt that him surviving was a bit too easy.

Yeah page 93

I was a little wrong about WoT, because the original box set only had one book in it as well.

The maps are in the Tekumel Map Sets file, along with a whole bunch of others.

I just zipped my whole EPT folder, so you can check S&G for yourself.

www73.zippyshare.com/v/zP122Mtt/file.html

Nice, thanks.

...

OSR is only a meat grinder if your players are stupid and/or unlucky. If your players are being smart, stacking the odds, escaping or dodging encounters that they appraise as dangerous, it's quite possible to have a low casual rate. Meat-grinder insta-death modules like Tomb of Horrors are the exception, not the rule.

As far as I can tell deaths in OSR tend to happen as a result of a cascading series of bad decisions rather than as an ordinary course of affairs.

>when you got work in the morning but your roommate's got friends over

>when her fat-fuck friend is cockblocking you and your boys

If you like tinkering with systems, there's a pdf put together by Kevin Crawford which is a pretty nice adaptation for the system he uses in his games (pretty much basic D&D with a 2d6 skill system attached). It has a nice pulpy Sword & Sorcery feel (e.g. there are only 2 classes, Adventurer and Sorcerer), and you can plug in the monsters and magical items of the original EPT system without much change.

It's incomplete though (especially in the DM side), and I felt the need to translate S&G spells into the system. I'm running a (until now) pretty successful campaign using it.

You can probably find it in the RPGnet thread he posted it in.

>only two classes

I need a little more crunch than that.

Hey, I am unsure if I should ask here, but does anyone have AES 2-3?

And in DCC even the shitiest character that survives becomes a threat.
I was having a joke character, a Warrior, almost did nothing, was a coward escaped combat, complained all the times, and suddenly he is level 4 and the second strongest character on the party (Mostly because the top brass died in inter party drama, which was mostly between the Cleric and the Elf,Long story short the elf won by sending a Minotaur swat team almost making a total party kill.)

S&G is REALLY crunchy, even abstruse, so much that even the author didn't use it. The original EPT has three classes (warrior, priest, and sorcerer) and a skill system that is really just fluff. Maybe you should take a look at Tekumel: Empire of the Petal Throne by Guardians of Order, or Jeff Dee's Bethorm (looks like GURPS-lite, but I didn't read it in detail).

OSR related, and we're a creative lot of bastards anyway

LotFP. He carried a battered saber, dagger, and a pair of pistols. He had high charisma and a swagger to match, mostly ran around like a clint eastwood character. Never did get to finish that campaign.

A D&D 1E, Adrian Half-Elven, bore a fiery sword and shield. Served as Lord and General for his King, who was also his adventuring companion. Suffered mortal wounds defeating a foe long thought dead and his massive bone beast. Perished after sending the healers to save his grandson rather than himself.

Anyone got an old school D&D game going on that's accepting players?

bump

What about DCC?

Hey, can someone explain Lay On Hands in DCC to me? I get the gist of it, but I'm confused as to how many hit dice are actually restored? Also, what dice do you use? Is it just the HD of the player being healed?
Also, by my reading, if you choose to use hit dice to restore broken limbs or cure diseases, you CANNOT also use Lay on Hands to restore hit points.

Am I dead wrong here? Is it actually super clearly written and I'm just stupid?
It's the only part of the DCC rules that I can't decipher, and it's driving me crazy

It's HD of the creature being healed limited by creature level. So if cleric got a good spell check (say 20-21 which allows him to heal 4 HD), he can only heal level 1 fighter for 1d12 hitpoints. If that was level 4 fighter, cleric could heal him for all 4d12.

>if you choose to use hit dice to restore broken limbs or cure diseases, you CANNOT also use Lay on Hands to restore hit points.
Correct. And this part is actually less clear, but what you need to do is to generate the number of dice that corresponds to the condition you want to heal.

So you'll need to get at least 12 on your spell check to heal broken limbs and at least 14 to heal paralysis. Not accounting for opposite alignment and such.

I had to reread the LoH rules like 5 times before they clicked.

>Alignment effects the number of HD rolled to restore health.
>If you roll to heal a lv. 3 Warrior who shares your alignment, you'd need to roll 12-13 to restore 2HD (2d12 for Warrior) worth of HP.
>If they are the OPPOSITE alignment, you'd need a roll of 12-13 to heal just one HD worth.
>You can't heal more HD than their level (1 for lv.1, 2 for lv.2 etc.)
>You can opt to either heal HP or a specific malady (blindness, broken arm etc.) when using LoH, not both at once

Okay, that makes sort-of sense, so thanks!
DCC is probably one of the coolest games I've ever read, but it's got some weirdly indecipherable crunch that makes the game feel like it would be really hard to teach, especially to people who are generally unfamiliar with RPGs.
Any advice for making the game easier to learn for players?

I guess introduce more complex rules over the course of play. Say, when combat comes up, explain Mighty Deed mechanic to the fighter. When healing comes up, explain to the cleric basics of Lay on Hands, just the basics - roll spell check, the higher the better. Don't fiddle with exceptions like adjacent / opposite alignment if you really don't want to.

That said, weird crunch is a huge part of the DCC feel. So it's expected to deal with it sooner or later.

Why are the B/X D&D systems the most popular ones for OSR fans to emulate?

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say it's because B/X is dead simple to build upon. While not necessarily entirely accurate, a lot of people like to described AD&D as a bunch of house rules for Basic. B/X is about as comprehensive as you get while still being "barebones."

Very simple and to the point rules that give you just enough structure but also encourage tinkering and making the game your own.

Basic is simple and easy to build off of. AD&D adds more options, but it also adds more clutter, and a lot of what it adds is derivative, inferior in quality, or just downright unnecessary. Also, it adds more moving bits into things like the spells the systems share (so you have more numbers that scale with level and more complicated descriptions with more conditions explicitly detailed). Aside from the fact that I feel like this doesn't add nearly as much as it takes away from the game, it's also extra shit to deal with when designing a game. So it's easier to base your game off the more bare-bones Basic.

Simplicity, with fewer "fiddly" rules, like how ability scores go up to 18 in AD&D 1e, but Str goes up to 18./00.

In B/X, they all stop at 18, with no exceptions.

Not to #blogpost but that fucker has friends over every single night until at least midnight and it's driving me nuts.

Anyone ever got a hold of any of the DCC Lankhmar PDFs?

Bump.

Just started yesterday, hope that shit doesn't end up happening
He seems cool though

Can anyone familiar with Stars Without Number tell me if there's a specialty ammo section somewhere?

Shit happens

Using a BX system that the GM is modifying on the fly but basically she is the equivalent to a samurai ronin, a warrior who had a master but who passed away (everyone started off with three character and now everyone is down to one each due to high mortality in the low levels. Her master was one of the ones I had that died). Seeking to better her skill so she may return one day to help defend Elfland from the greenskin menace (basically dominion level play).

Nice dub trips

Sounds fun. Anything else about the system you can comment on?

>dub trips
And apparently I can't even read today, fuck...

Getting sleep now...

Inspired by Chainmail, OD&D and AD&D weapon vs weapon and weapon vs armor rules, and BECMI's weapon mastery rules, I was thinking of a combat system that used the following values: Handling, Parrying, Sharpness, Penetration.

Loosely, handling is to-hit vs surprised, flanked, unarmed, and monstrous foes, and factors in skill and such. Parrying is to-hit vs armed foes, against their parry value. Wooden weapons, hafted weapons, and unarmed combat has better handling values, while all metal weaponry like swords tend to have higher parry values.

Sharpness is effectiveness vs unarmored and monstrous foes. Penetration is effectiveness vs armored foes. It would probably be a modifier to the weapon's base die for each. Its similar to AD&D's variable damage vs larger foes.

I'm thinking some of it may be unidirectional: that is, if your weapon is too weak to safely parry the enemy's attack, he can combine handling and parrying (if you can chop up their hands, you can't really make an effective unarmed defense, etc), and likewise, if you can chop through their armor like butter, you may be able to combine penetration and sharpness.

Basically it's similar to ACKS but with some different things tacked on. He uses a wounds system as well where if you take your con score or more damage you gain a wound (roll on a table, see what the wound is. Might be just a scar, might be the loss of a limb that comes with it's own issues).

I dig it, you're onto something good here.

You're reinventing the wheel a bit.

Flanked, surprised, etc. is just flat-footed AC.

Parrying should just modify AC.

Sharpness/penetration could just be attack modifiers to increase damage.

>You're reinventing the wheel a bit.

Nah, trying to reuse concepts from old forms of D&D that were abandoned.

What's the earliest level a party should encounter a dragon and reasonably be expected to win?

In 1e AD&D, there is the example (in the MM? not sure) of a meh tier level 5 party taking on the strongest possible dragon in the core game and winning at heavy cost.

Feels both too abstract in some places and too granular in others.

The way you've described it I'm better off hitting a guard with my bare fists or a halberd when I sneak up behind him, rather than shanking him with a dagger.

Likewise, a flat armour penetration value doesn't take into account the fact that armour has uneven coverage. Also, some foes are both monstrous and armoured (ex. dragons) - how do the stats interact then?

>The way you've described it I'm better off hitting a guard with my bare fists or a halberd when I sneak up behind him, rather than shanking him with a dagger.

Eh, daggers do seem to be something better used for surprise attacks and versus prone foes than against someone with a drawn weapon. Logically speaking, daggers should be at least as good for backstabbing as halberds in both this and vanilla D&D, but that's not the case at all. Length really should fit in there somewhere, as in 1e (and a lesser extent, Chainmail).

As far as uneven coverage, a metric for attacking by means of simply trying to avoid armored locales should definitely be in place, and thinking about how that sort of thing would work was what led me to this line of thought (particularly, mesoamerican obsidian chainswords).

>how do the stats interact then?

Opinions on how much dragon scales are like armor vary. That being said, armor piercing weapons don't help with dargons in 1e, Chainmail or OD&D, so I probably wouldn't count them here.

yes
[email protected]

>visited several threads regarding modern editions
>stumbled onto a few optimization and minmaxing discussions
>remembered spending a few days on creating individual pathfinder characters for players and myself and how corebook is not enough options

Damn it I'm really happy to end up here guys.

This is not to start any edition wars, btw, just really happy that my priorities changed. And we need something to bump the thread with.

>I remember starting roleplaying in the crunchiest editions of Shadowrun and staying there for like a year and change
agreed tbqh

I started with 3rd edition. Didn't really know any better for many years. I eventually wanted to see what earlier editions were like (I had become disillusioned with 3rd edition), and if it would explain weird things like Druids not being allowed to wear metal armor.

My quest took me to the RC, and there, it told me that Druids could not wear or use anything not previously alive. On the way I got an appreciation for the older editions and their way doing things. Then, some years later, I found out about OSR games.

I'm not looking back. This is where I belong. 3.pf can burn in Hell.

Agreed, I'm pretty tired of the character build talk in the 5e general. It's kind of funny how the games with the least mechanical options ends up garnering the most creative and interesting discussions.

I started with Basic Roleplaying stuff like Runequest. Customization through the roof but god damn me and my players just didn't have fun. OSR has definitely breathed new life into tabletop roleplaying for me.

Oh, I'm kinda nterested in Shadowrun. It's crunchy and probably unnecessarily complicated but I feel like it has to be. Crunch actually reflects the world as it is, chaotic and complex.

I like my D&D as simple as possible but in a cyberpunk setting shitton of gear and complex initiative and stuff like different recoil penalties sort of fall into place. At least that's what I can think until I actually run the damn thing and that's not happening any time soon.

Pic related. Obviously modern D&D is used for comparison but the passion of runners is kinda inspiring.