/osrg/

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

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gameswithothers.blogspot.co.nz/2013/12/troll-world.html
gameswithothers.blogspot.co.nz/2014/02/trollomancer.html
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Question!

Who even uses Dominion rules?

I usually just wing it. Probably should though.

Was reading Into the Odd (discussed last thread). The 3 stats reminded me of Advanced Fighting Fantasy. Then I started looking and my houserules for LotFP in which I have removed a lot of modifiers. Today I came up with this 3-stat system:

The new ability scores replace the classic 6. Might and Wits have 3 sub-abilities each. Saving throw categories in parentheses.

Might: Encumbrance (Paralyzation), Initiative (Dodging), HP (Poisons)
Wits: Languages (Magic), Morale (Mind Control), Negotiations
Luck: Luck Points (Luck)

Roll 3d6 for each.
Swap one score with another if desired.
If the highest score is 9 then discard and re-roll the character if desired.
Look up the rolls below and assign each modifier to a sub-ability/save combo.
For Luck, apply the best/worst +/- mod to LP.

(18:1/2/3) (17:1/2/2) (16:1/1/2)
(15:1/1/1) (14:1/2) (13:1/1)
(12:1) (10-11: 0) (9: -1)
(8: -1/-1) (7: -1/-2) (6: -1/-1/-1)
(5: -1/-1/-2) (4: -1/-2/-2) (3: -1/-2/-3)

eg. I roll Might: 16, Wits: 8, Luck 5.
For Might, I assign my +2 to HP and +1 ea to ENC and Init. I also get a +2 bonus to saves vs poisons and +1 ea to saves vs paralyzation and dodging.
For Wits, I assign a -1 to Languages and a -1 to Negotiations. This also gives me a -1 penalty to saves versus Magic.
For Luck, I must have a -2 penalty to Luck Points, also giving me -2 to luck saves. The remaining -1's are ignored.

Would this stat array create appreciably better/worse characters? Any glaring mechanical issues I didn't account for?
Don't mind the other non-lotfp rules mentioned.

New thread, new hexmap seed.

What's the danger lurking in the city sewers (or alternately a sublevel that the sewer connects to)?

Another fan of ACKS here; I feel it provides a lot of value especially for people who are picking up OSR type games from scratch. Aside from introducing a number of flavourful racial classes (a nice compromise between race-as-class and separate race selection), there's also lot of concrete rules and procedures for wilderness exploration, dungeon stocking, and campaign set up - things that are probably second nature to an experienced old-school GM but vastly helpful to a new group.

The Player's Companion also provides methods for creating custom spells and classes - again, something that can be eyeballed by an experienced GM but it's useful to math it out and confirm those instincts.

- The residual gases of effluvia have always posed a risk to the lower quarters due to their flammable nature, the occasional explosion or gas fire is considered par for the course by those in power. Rashes of homicidal behaviour and self-mutilation are a little more unusual and a much more recent development, driven by exposure to reddish pockets of gas as it erupts from weakspots and faults in the city surface.

The gas in question is made up of clouds of fungal spores unwittingly introduced into the local eco-system in a shipment of exotic furs shipped from a far off land. In the absence of conventional checks on it's growth this fungus has spread like wildfire beneath the city streets and in time will threaten far more than just the most downtrodden citizens.

- The city is built on top of ruins far older than anyone would care to admit. Many of the passages and tunnels show signs of being repurposed from much older structures and the layout is byzantine. These things are known by it's residents but hardly ever considered beyond the occasional inconvenience of a sinkhole or structural collapse. In the past two months these collapses have accelerated and people have begun to go missing from their beds in the dead of night.

The Labyrinth - a hungry proto-dimensional organism of forgotten catacombs and impossible architecture - roams the hollow space below the city. Loosed from it's subteranean prison by a seismic shift it is drawn to the consciousnesses above it like a moth to flame. It lures sleeping locals into it's depths, seeking to fulfill a yawning and non-sentient loneliness, by baiting them with the missing pieces of their lives that it psychically teases from their sleeping minds.

- 1d4 Trash Hydras, who will happily eat your friends and family.

It occurs to me that you could convert OSR stuff into an entirely d6 system.

>3d6 + diddly for attacks.
>xd6 + diddly for weapon damage.
>d6 + diddly for HD
>3d6 roll over for saves.
>d6 "skill" system

You could, but attacks and saving throws really benefit from swinginess of d20.

Indeed. I've even though about using a d20-based homebrew of GURPS.

Toxic Zombies animated by Rat Witches.

Alternatively, a portal has opened to the Sortaelemental plane of Shit and/or Piss and the players must defeat the encroaching hordes of filth.

Gross.

Take a look at OD&D some time - the only things it uses a d20 for, from the player's side, is attack rolls and saves.

And even then you can just use some variant on the Chainmail tables to roll 2d6 for attacks, and if you feel like making statisticians cry you can do what the playtest did and roll 3d6 for saves.

2d6 attacks, 1d6 damage, xd6 hit points, 3d6 saves, d6 open doors/listen/traps/wandering monsters/surprise.

Of course, that's only on the surface of the player's side. You'll need to work a bit to change all the DM's tables and spells to use six-sided dice. Y'know, treasure tables, numbers appearing, percentile chances,
I suggest d66 tables, either in the full 36 results variant or the lowest-result-is-the-tens-digit version that gets twenty-something results. (I don't know if that's been used anywhere else, but I saw it in Make You Kingdom and kinda like it.)

Good luck converting those percentile tables, though! That'll be a drag.

Is a 1DM 1PC game possible with OSR stuff?
I know I could just have a bunch of NPCs trailing behind, but I really like the idea of a solo crawl.

Scarlet Heroes was made for you. I believe it's under Labyrinth Lord.

Heh, try it. I don't see mechanical issues but I don't really see in what way it makes the game better.

Check out The Big Brown book, which is an OD&D + Chainmail retroclone. It uses only d6, it's nice.

Yes.

Option 1 - The Real Man(Woman)'s Way
>Use no nonsense game like Into the Odd or LotFP, keep running until satisfied. If the sole PC dies, assume control of the closest NPC and keep going. You can see entire worlds this way, and it's pretty fun.

Option 2 - The Super-Star
>Use your favorite brand of OSR and add Scarlet Heroes to the mix, which makes solo PCs about as dangerous as a Barbarians of Lemuria PC.

Option 3 - It Gets Worse
As Option 1, but when the sole PC is supposed to die, things get worse instead. He/She can never really die unless you both want to.

Option 4 - Party like it's 1974
>Use system of choice, roll a lot of characters, let the player control the whole party. It's satisfying for people who know the game well and can multitask, but can be cumbersome for others. I did that for a Wolf-Packs and Winter Snow solo campaign, worked like a charm.

I do. Google "Carcosa Domain Play Into the Odd".

All of this sounds great, I'll definitely be trying some of it. Thanks!

You're welcome. Lots of people have blogs with great actual play exemples of their solo play, you might find insightful stuff in them. I particularly like alea iactanda est . blogspot

Well I've been having a hard time getting a group of likable, competent players together.

But I do have one that is very into RPGs, so I'm hoping to use stuff like this to at least get SOME play going.

>likable, competent players
How about introducing your friends to the hobby? I find that newbies showing a genuine interest make for great players if pushed in the right direction.

plus, the beauty of TTRPGs is that anyone from any social class or age can get into it and have fun.

I recently moved country and have none. :(

Oh that's too bad user. Well, it's time to make some then, I think friends make the best kind of people to play with. If you're lucky, some places have clubs and the kind, too.

There's a few FLGS near me that I've visited.
Seems like a good place to start, if I can decide on a system.

Into the Odd. Prep-less, get total noobs playing in 5 minutes, full of cool shit, short, easy to run, easy to hack, has a blog with shitton of free content that you can use and advices for your DMing.

Sorry, what is Dominion (rules)?

Light a tinderstick and watch the elemental plane burn?

Rules for running a kingdom or other state. Like name level play in Basic/Advanced, or the rules in ACKS or An Echo, Resounding.

It should probably be noted that running a kingdom (or, indeed, becoming nobility) is more of a BECMI thing - OD&D, B/X and AD&D more have you be a dude who just built a castle out in the wilderness and claimed the surroundings as their land. More a colonial thing than a feudal thing, really.

I think AD&D even has some paragraphs on the subject of not necessarily becoming part of any feudal structure in the process?

Or OD&D, or DM rulings.

I tend to handwave as wanted/needed but I have taken concepts from numerous OSR games and other systems to add events and mishaps so even if they do focus for a while on some things regarding Domains and such they still have shit to do.

>Underground railroad for slaves escaping from the megacity. The railroad is run by mindlfayers who tax the escaping slaves a portion of of their members and find the emotional gamut a delicacy.
>A miniature scale recreation of the city above that fills an entire sunken room. The citizens, soldiers and nobility are represented by rodents who dress and act as the people of the city do.
>A hermetically sealed section filled with tribes of people descendent from an ancient time who escaped an apocalyptic calamity.
>Limb-Dealer. A deranged flash crafter collects parts from monsters and anything else that drifts down the drains. They will attach them to the players for a price.
>Enchanted graffiti by two rival gangs of thieves fighting over turf. The walls argue with each other, shift and move to entrap, aid and interfere.
>A caravan of Dark Dwellers travelling with a captive renegade of their own kind. They are taking him to the cursed surface for exile.

What is the most bullshit TSR module you ever read/played?

Castle Greyhawk

I don't know if its bullshit or not, but the entire Masters series of adventures confuses me a lot. Did people have groups like this? Was play like this common? Did people just make higher level characters to play through these modules?

I remember there were people who had characters they'd been playing for years, so yeah, I'd be surprised if they weren't up there.

I've never DMed anything before and now a group of friends want me to run a campaign because I'm somehow the most experienced one despite having only a dozen or so hours of playtime myself.
My top two choices for system right now are DCC and ACKS, but I'm open to suggestions. Thoughts? Advice?

How can something like this miss out the Clergy?

ACKS is a better version of D&D 3 with old-school input.

DCC is also based off d20 System but it's its own thing. It's nice if you like lots of fiddly stuff to play with, mechanically.

LotFP is the tightiest shit you can use and is super modular so you can add stuff as needed, it also has a tutorial and referee guide with great instructions on how to start playing and DMing D&D. And it's all free (well, do use the Rules & Magic book in the trove, it's better than the Grindhouse free edition, but the tuto and ref book are from grindhouse, read them)

I'll look into that, thanks

They're high-level adventures for groups with very high-level characters. They didn't assume that you'd make new characters or anything, as far as I know - they expected you to use the Master-level characters that you presumably already had on account of buying a Master-level product.

Think of it like 3E's Epic Levels or 4E Epic Tier, or even earlier 2E's High Level Campaigns and whatnot.

Much like the rest of those, I'm pretty sure that the Master-level products didn't sell that well?

Those adventures were important, though, because by that point in time TSR was somewhat assuming that modules were the standard way to play the game and if that's the case you really need to have modules for the players who actually get to those levels.

Hell, there's plenty of people who probably never got to Companion levels or even high Expert - not to mention those who like sticking to Basic-level play for whatever reason.
At one point in time name level was considered to be roundabout the point where you'd retire your character and make a new one, since level advancement was so slow and meager - by the time BECMI rolled around, though, that kind of stopped being a thing?


Also, if you think THAT'S nuts you should check out the Immortal set. It lets you "beat" D&D by reaching the highest mortal levels, reaching the highest immortal tiers, returning to mortality, and going all the way up again.
You can kind of tell that it's basically a rewrite of Gods, Demigods & Heroes, and wasn't entirely meant to be played by players. It was, though, from what I've heard, even though there were only a bare few introductory adventures for it.

Well, there's always this one!

Hehehe.

The Shitlords.

Could someone point me towards some good urban resources? Adventures and other modules, just generally stuff to help me with cities/towns. My players have been crawling some dungeons and their local small village just doesn't have the kind of stuff they want to get with their new riches, so they're hopping into a boat and sailing downriver into an actual city.

It'd be nice to have some developed material for them (I'm busy as hell nowadays and can't do a lot of prep beforehand, which is why dungeons and the like are really nice right now) instead of just a completely faceless, tasteless city that's basically an inventory list. Some urban adventures and/or dungeons would be nice as well, so that they can get a change of pace.

On a sidenote, this is making me think of how there's not that many adventures that aren't dungeon romps in OSR. I get why, it's part of the thing and those are easy to make in comparison, but I really appreciate it when I find a good scenario-based adventure. Variety is good, and I kind of have this idea that there should be a clear difference between how monster-infested wild borderlands and civilized cities and towns feel. They're different kinds of environments and challenges, and throwing in a standard dungeon in the form of a sewer or somesuch just seems like a waste.

So, any good urban resources one might use?

Vornheim : The Complete City Kit is great. It's a city and it's a guide for running cities in an interesting way. It has a few dungeons and fun fluff, plus cool rules to do urbancrawl easily.

Scenic Dunnsmouth is a creepy village generator that can be re-used a lot but needs quite some prep.

Those two products are LotFP and are in the trove. If you want old-old-school, there's :

Judge's Guild has also great shit : villages, cities, City-State of the Invincible Overlord is amazing too.

Into the Odd can be centered about Bastion, a weird industrial city of oddities and dangerous adventure, business and other niceties. It's in the trove, and pretty cheap for its professional layout (the physical book is excellent).
It has Hopesend, a small fishing town, with some interesting setups for city and social-based adventures.

There's also the City of Lankhmar but I don't know where it hails from, it's old tho.

The Last Gasp Grimoire blog has some cool random tables for generating towns and cities.

GM's Miscellany is for 3pf but has a bunch of useful random tables for urban and village settings.

There's Vornheim, Scenic Dunsmouth, Forgive Us, No Dignity In Death and The People Of Pembrooktonshire for basically set but easy to adapt urban stuff from LotFP.

City State Of The Invincible Overlord is a classic urban setting, and Fever Dreaming Marlakino has a lot of cool stuff in it too.

A few of the one page dungeons are urban, and there's a couple well fleshed out cities in Fight On, bu I forget what issues.

B6 The Veiled Society for dnd is urban, but it didn't seem that good. Haven't run it though.

Hey, is Marlakino in the trove somewhere?

I think Fever Dreaming Marlinko is a Labyrinth Lord book.

Vorneheim

get it right now from the trove

Thanks user.

It say's "give this cutie a piece of Ukrainia"

1.) In a particular alley in the poorest quarter of the city is a manhole that leads to a cistern. The cistern has doors at each of the cardinal directions. Each leads to a different place in time and space. Roll randomly for each door:

>1.) A nightmarish hellscape where great boiling clouds pull flying creatures into their misty bodies, wax runs in rivers, and the land is scaled and oozing. Things haunt this place, ululating madly, though sometimes gibbering in profane speech.
>2.) Strange tunnels formed of dirt, held together with some sticky compound wind for miles. If further explored, there are oval shaped caverns filled with larvae the size of sheep. If disturbed, they release a distinctive reek, and 1d6 giant worker ants arrive to investigate the hubbub. In 1d4 rounds, 2d6 giant warrior ants arrive.
>3.) A tranquil forest. It is quiet, but not unnaturally so. The occasional buzzing of insects and the chirping of birds can be heard. At the center is a great clearing with a meadow. Dominating this space is a megalithic structure, where an altar crouches in the middle. Its top is concave, and filled with bright, warm blood.
>4.) A muffled snowscape, with grey uniform skies. It is eerily silent, and even footfalls breaking the crust of the snow sounds wrong. At the bottom of some hills, a small town's lights can be seen along with smoke from their chimneys.
>5.) A rainbow leads to a fantastic castle in the clouds. The rainbow can be traversed as though it were solid, and it leads to the front gate of the mighty fortress. A princess waves cheerfully from the top of the tallest turret, a knight guarding the entrance. The knight will not move or allow anyone to meet the princess unless he is defeated.
>6.) A stone passage way leads deep into the earth. Anyone following it eventually reaches a large rectangular room with a reflecting pool. A bronze and teak door opens to bright sunlight, oppressive heat, and sand dunes.

Well, that's a random encounter. Literally the last thread I expected to stumble upon a joke about my country.

Continued.

>Observing from outside, it is revealed that they have exited a pyramid.

In all cases, anyone stepping beyond the threshold of the doors and fully entering the rooms finds themselves trapped with no way back.

2.) A stinking thing squishes and oozes its way through the darkest alleys in the evening. No one leaves their homes at night for fear of it, as people and pets who are caught outdoors are found as skeletons come morn.

3.) A seasonal storm has flooded the city, and its streets are now three feet underwater save for the tallest hills. Foul fish attack anyone foolish enough to wade in the fetid waters, and strange croaking speech can be heard at midnight.

4.) A circus has arrived, filled with all manner of strange freaks, as is their menagerie. Their performances last all night, and some wayward souls never find their way back. The mayor never attends the circus, but has ordered the constabulary to leave them alone. Pleas from those who have lost family members in recent days fall on deaf ears.

5.) The mayor (or lord) has gained a new vizier. A strange man who works no magic, carries no weapons, but is strangely persuasive, and seems to know what others will say before they say it. Various factions have already tried to assassinate him, but his luck is unbelievable - he spills a poisoned goblet, changes direction and is missed by a poignard, or sneezes of avoids the quarrel of a crossbow. It is rumored that no one is beyond his charms, and he has bedded and discarded several well-bred ladies (and men) in the weeks since he has come to court.

6.) Millions of moths come to the city each year on the night of the summer solstice. It is considered good luck, and people buy, rent, or build extra lanterns to attract the moths. The city is bathed in light broken by the fluttering of the furry creatures.

This summer solstice however, the moths do not come.

5 days ago a group of thieves led a successful heist of a noble of not insignificant wealth. To escape the authorities, they fled into the sewer. The guardsmen lost them deep within the sewer, and the treasure was thought lost. However, a few days ago, the sewers under one section of town have backed up, and the man sent down there to investigate has not returned.

aesthetically, really.
Reduce the amount of numbers to keep track of/reference. Make those that are left do more work.

There is a certain charm to having the original 6 attributes. But they tend to become superfluous after determining the modifier. Except for ability checks.

Would you lose anything by halving the options for ability checks? I don't think so. Seemed to work well enough for saving throws in 3e (or DCC to keep it osr).

Maybe there is something useful lost with less granularity to the ability scores, but the sets of modifiers hopefully make up for it.

>B6 The Veiled Society for dnd is urban, but it didn't seem that good. Haven't run it though.

Yeah, it's not. It's basically an adventure from back when an adventure that wasn't set in a dungeon was an AMAZING idea. It has a couple of scenes set in the city, a bit of setdressing, and then... your party goes into a dungeon and fights against kobolds and shit.

It was a small step in a big direction.

Is there a bard class out there that's compatible with LotFP's design ethos?

>LotFP's design ethos
Yes, I'm sure someone has made a Bard that is shitty edgy garbage.

Bard:
Daily wage - tips.
Wage - 80sp
Live-in Wage - 50sp
Space requirements - 10'
Share - n/a

You're welcome.

also.

Mechanical design ethos, not module design ethos (which is, imo, pretty overrated).

I'm asking because I'm kludging together a modified Ravenloft setting and bards are a Pretty Big Deal in one of the domains. I might just grab the AS&SoH bard and tweak it a bit.

Did Zak Smith make that? And is there even such a thing as a jester class in any D&D iteration?

I really want to play a Jester in OSR now.

What sort of skills would a jester have? High reaction rolls, tumbling, sick burns.

Feels to me like jester would just be a subclass of bard.

>is there even such a thing as a jester class in any D&D iteration?

I know both 2e and 3.x had them.

bobsenk.com/rpg/rules/chclass/jester.html
alcyius.com/dndtools/classes/jester/index.html

Kill Jester.

Jester was a kit in 2e.
Anyway, that picture is the truth. I'm about to run 5e and first thing | did is got rid of the bard. And the dragonborn.

Here's the one for BFRPG.

>Yes, I'm sure someone has made a Bard that is shitty edgy garbage.

I don't really get it though. Bard, jester and pirate doesn't seem too different both mechanically and thematically. Is it just because the word bard sounds silly?

I think it's just cultural illiteracy. Folks whose only knowledge of the bard archetype is videogames and pop culture, rather than the old sagas and legends where bards were badasses.

Celtic bards were a suborder of druids. They were the oral history keepers (generally in song), and also the lawgivers.

About the only thing the D&D bard has in common with it is the singing part. They were not wandering vagabonds begging for money in return for entertainment.

It was taboo to harm a bard, and while bards often marched to war, they were not generally targets (and were unlikely to fight).

Skalds were effectively the Norse equivalent, but skalds did fight. Especially against non-Norsemen (most other Norsemen were unlikely to want to fight a skald, since they held them in high regard, culturally).

Yeah, I associate them with classic myths too. I dunno if illiteracy is the reason Zak Sabbath dislikes them though, for all his flaws he seems to to be at least a somewhat well read guy.

Basically, in many editions and systems Bards just suck ass. They take the "Jack of all trades, master of none" -shtick really far, and it ends up with them not being able to do everything, but them SUCKING at everything.

Some have done bards better, but in general they're terrible in almost everything. Usually they also have thematic problems, because making "Some guy who plays a lute and can kinda do a lot of stuff. Usually also casts some spells" is the kind of non-concept that ends up causing headaches when you try to actually fit it into anything.

I mean, yeah. The idea of a charming, witty adventurer who plays music, throws spells and fences while wooing the ladies is pretty kickass, but it becomes a lot less kickass when it's turned into a fucking profession that's apparently practiced systematically. The fact that it usually also sucks doesn't help.

>Implying the D&D bard has anything to do with that

Yeah no. You're deluding yourself.

That's mostly later D&D, though. Let's not forget the AD&D bard. Five levels of Fighter, five levels of Thief, then you had to seek out a Druid for druidic training.

See

Alright, so I stand by this and you should do it too but.
In LotFP you should try to give a class one thing it does really well and bard is usually a jack of all trades and that role is covered by specialist.

So, I'd base bard on specialist. Give him a Lore skill or Secrets skill, that allows him to learn one useful random fact about anything. It's at 3 in 6 at first level, so new bard only has 2 points instead of 4 to allocate as he wishes.

If he wants spellcasting, he can waste 2 points on a random spell. Assume generic Magic-User spell level progression and spell list probably should be a bit limited as you seem fit.

It's not really about cultural illiteracy, it's about the D&D image of the bard. And as it stands, it sucks.

I know about the AD&D bard. Doesn't change the fact that it's the only time (barring some obscure-as-fuck stuff that might possibly exist) bards had anything to do with that. I mean yeah, 2e still had a few kits that included stuff like Norse skalds and the like, but then let me point you at literally decades of bards being tights-clad swashbucklers running into dungeons armed with lutes. Including in 2e. Including in most every spinoff system that feature bards.

The spiel about them having all this cool historical background is nice and all, but in practice... yeah, no. They have about as much historical basis as a psionic.

You guys have any good Planetary Romance/Sword & Planet module/game recommendations? I'm bashing together something using ACKS and I'd rather see what I can port in rather than work off the bare bones entirely.

So, what you're saying, is that unlike a psionicist, bards suck both as a concept and mechanically?

Who know.

Now you're moving the goalposts, user.

Bards have a cool historical background, and it was in early D&D. Later D&D lost that background, and they started to suck. But that doesn't change the fact that the historical concept is legit.

What would be a good program for making a character sheet? I've got a homebrew system, and it's somewhat different from the norm, so existing sheets don't really fit. And just scribbling them out by hand is nice for a while, but an actual printable sheet would be much handier.

I was thinking about dropping Vancian style spellcasting for Bards altogether and instead have a small, focused list of magical effects a bard can do if he succeeds on a d6 Perform check. Then a Lore skill like you suggested, and then a limited number of specialist skills to spend points on.

The idea would be the bard as less of a Jack of All Trades and more as loremaster with some magical effects based around performance.

Sure, you could make a class like that. But I can't for the life of me recall any modern systems that would actually allow you to play a character like that, out of the gate. I mean, if you play AD&D1 or import it somehow, great. Otherwise, I really doubt you're going to get that kind of experience by taking a current bard class and trying to jam your historical druidic/skaldic bard into it, considering how much of it wouldn't fit.

Historical concept is legit, but you can't find it in D&D now, is what I mean. And implying that the bard is totally cool now because it once kinda had a historical vibe in an edition that was published 40 years ago (and after which it degenerated into all hell) seems kind of dishonest, to me.

Still, the concept is legit. You just have to make it happen yourself. Not sure it actually requires a class. I mean, depending on what kind of historical vibe you're going for, a fighter with some background and oratory skills is pretty close already. Or a thief.

>And implying that the bard is totally cool now because it once kinda had a historical vibe in an edition that was published 40 years ago (and after which it degenerated into all hell) seems kind of dishonest, to me.

Nobody said that. This started with a guy wanting to either find or make a new OSR bard class for LotFP, I implied that if you're going to make a bard class, you should base it on the solid historical concept, not the crappy pop culture one.

while Yoon-Suin covers a lot beyond the titular city, said City is given a lot of focus

also Weird Adventures is 90% focused on a single city if you don't mind a setting more Modern than is the norm for OSR

>a limited number of specialist skills to spend points on

Actually after thinking about it I might just have them gain ranks in said skill automatically. What's the point in having them pick and choose if they just get so few skills to choose from anyways.

Something like:
-Perform (tied to magic effects)
-Lore
-Languages
-Search

That way they're focused around a more narrow idea and not just shitty hybrids.

Actually, this started with someone asking why bards are disliked, and then someone claimed that it was probably cultural illiteracy because bards are actually cool in history. Which really doesn't work here, considering this is about D&D and how bards suck in D&D. Which they do, in many ways and with great vigour.

I mean, if you're just discussing about why people don't even want to include a bard class, of any kind, into a system, then sure. But there's also been discussion here of people removing them from existing systems and not liking the class, which would logically pertain to bards as they are in D&D, not to bards as they might be.

I guess my argument as to why you possibly shouldn't put a bard/skald class into your D&D system is that it doesn't really require a class. If you just want an oratory storyteller/diplomat who's also possibly a warrior, you can do that by making a fighter. Or a thief, depending on how you visualize them.

Then again, some people like having many classes for more niche roles, so I guess it's not in any way out of line in that regard. Still, what we can all probably agree on is that bard as it is in D&D is shit.

I dunno about modules and such, but try this guy: planetalgol.blogspot.com/2010/04/master-index-of-freely-available-planet.html

>planetalgol.blogspot.com/2010/04/master-index-of-freely-available-planet.html
Thanks, chum.

I found this on my nets travels and thought i'd let you all see it and give your thoughts on it.

>link:crossplanes.com/2016/08/hackable-alternative-skill-system-for.html

>The other day I had a brainstorm to replace Non-Weapon Proficiencies and Thief Skills in ADnD 2E.

>Basically you adapt the THAC0 combat system to skill checks.

>Thieves, Rangers, and Bards would have there Skill advance at the same level as Warrior's THAC0.

>Having a Non-Weapon Proficiency from your class's group would advance at the same level as Priest's THAC0.

>Having a Non-Weapon Proficiency from a group outside of your class would advance at the same level as a Rogue's THAC0 (this also replaces NWP's cost extra).

>Having no Non-Weapon Proficiency would advance at the sam level as a Wizard's THAC0.

>Most Difficulty Classes would be 10, 5, 0, -5, remember that DC goes down the more difficult it is.

It sounds really elegant. If only I knew how NWP worked in the first place though. Is it roll-under on d20 or something?

another good Urban OSR setting;
Trollworld
gameswithothers.blogspot.co.nz/2013/12/troll-world.html

Trollomancer Class
gameswithothers.blogspot.co.nz/2014/02/trollomancer.html

Trollworld Items & NPC Reaction Charts
gameswithothers.blogspot.co.nz/2014/02/things-you-find-in-trollworld-magic.html

Troll Master Class
gameswithothers.blogspot.co.nz/2014/02/it-is-hard-to-find-cool-pictures-of.html

Trollworld City Encounter Chart
gameswithothers.blogspot.co.nz/2014/02/trollworld-city-encounters-d-wandering.html

i like the 5e bard...

Castles & Crusades does away with vancian magic for Bards, Rangers and Paladins. I forget what the Bard looks like (because I hate Bards and so don't give a shit how they're put together), but you might want to see if what they did is any good.

Can someone explain to me why there are so many OSR clones -- any maybe which ones do the rules best (in your opinion)? I've played in a few Swords & Wizardry games and a DCC game at a convention. Aside for the funky dice (I actually won a set during that DCC tournament)... what's the difference between DCC, Lamentations, S&W, etc? I mean, I know they all claim to be based on different versions of early D&D... but isn't the only real difference between all these clones is if AC is ascending/descending and if you have a skills system or not?