/osrg/

Good program or website for creating hex maps?

>Good program or website for creating hex maps?
pic related is pretty good, don't you think?

although no joke, that's the one i use. just active the snap feature and star dropping pics

Print out hex sheet, use pencil and paper. It's the best method I've found.

well yeah, there's also this route this user posted(), but if you're going to do this, i recommend printing out a large piece on a plotter from your local print shop.

choose vinyl and you'll get a reusable mapgrid

PERSONAL OPINION TIME

I don't know BFRPG well but I love LL and:

1) I don't think descending AC is such a bad thing to have. You just need to fill in the attack matrix.

2) You CAN swap LL for Basic and no one will know. I've run a lot of Basic modules with LL and everything worked perfectly

Books ARE kinda expensive but the pdfs are free (i printed them out and had them bound).

I'd say, If your players are NEW TO RPGS AND D&D start with race-as-class for their first character, and when/if they die inform them that they "unlocked" races and classes as per LL Advanced Companion.

>also try to give the players physical things (like an actual scroll), they love that shit. also they become treasures to remember past adventures.

Feelies are AMAZING. Letters, treasure maps, even just handing players cards with pictures of their magic items make the entire experience SO MUCH MORE immersive.

the whole "the contact stuffed a piece of paper in your pocket and just blended into the crowd" becomes so much better when you take a piece of colored paper (yellow, because fantasy) and write the info.

also there are TONS of props at a costume shop near my house.
because of this, one of the guys has a minotaur's horn with him, and he also has a petrified medusa's snake (snake toy painted grey).

even though we think larping is really cheesy, we enjoy doing these. i dunno, it feels alright.

I used to do LARPing (still do sometimes), and some of my players did/do too.

It's INCREDIBLY cheesy, but it also means that we have a lot of little props hanging around and the skills to make them. Writing in stylish calligraphy, making little contraptions, or even just handing your players a small glass vial half-wrapped in leather cord and filled with strawberry syrup telling them it's dragon's blood (a thing that happened in my game).

That shit sticks in the mind, man. Way cool.

i suppose. no wonder lots of cosplayers/larpers get stylist jobs for movies and such, it builds technique.

question though:
did he drink it? the dragon blood?

Both are fine. I would probably use LL with a few house rules just because it's more well known.

In-game it was terrifyingly acid (black dragon!), so no, he didn't. It was basically a magical component he decided to hang on to for the future. He plans on using it someday to make a magic item of some sort.

I can tell that he wants to drink it sometimes, just because he KNOWS it's strawberry syrup and when he unstoppers the flask the smell is delicious and tempting.

I've secretly decided that if he really drinks it eventually, he'll have to save vs. poison.
On a failure he dies. On a success he starts to mutate. Small horns, some scales, low-damage acid breath.

Then, we'll see if he decides to hunt for another black dragon in the hope of drinking more of his delicious strawberry syrup.

The only thing that really stops me from diving head first into LL is descending AC (Its a dealbreaker. LL is only on the block because it has almost everything else right) and the fact the free pdf has no art, which would be fine if it wasn't for these awkward huge blank spots that always manage to catch me off guard.

And yet on the otherhand, BFRPG gives me pause cause I see things in it that I know are straight up 3.5, like hardness rules, and wrestling, and it creates a natural aversion in me that I should probably just grow-up and get over.

It's a Rules Cyclopedia retroclone that cleans up some stuff and also includes a more liberal rewrite of the Wrath of the Immortals rules and general cosmology, on account of one of those being kind of shit and the other one being proprietary and thus not something you can get away with sticking in your retroclone.

It's still got all the issues the Rules Cyclopedia has, though, except amplified a bit because it's not just the BECM monsters lumped indiscriminately into a huge chapter - it's the WotI ones as well.

If you can get your hands on BECMI it's the better product, but that's easier said than done and Dark Dungeons is literally free (although you can pay for POD).

Can't say much about Darker Dungeons since I'm not that familiar with it, though.

IIRC the author posted a big list of changes between the RC and DD somewhere, so maybe look around for that?

It's not that hard to convert the descending LL AC to a ascending AC with base armor of 10 (or 9 or w/e), and a BAB according to class/lvl/ or hd

Well thanks!

I bought the Rules Cyclopedia book a while ago (thanks to ProJared, i must admit). It's beat up, but i suppose i'll read it instead of DD.

Yeah, I know, I just get hung up on the slightest things.

Okay, then I have one last question that will be the deciding factor overall.

Has anyone run a regular D&D module using BFRPG, and if you did, how well did it convert? Any small fiddly things? Any weird number hang ups that you had to fix pre-play?

If you don't might asking, why have you disregarded LotFP? It seems like the best fit.

Oh, I love LotFP. I game with a bunch of wimps, I legit don't think they're 'metal' enough to enjoy the weird horrors involved with the game or its modules.

Why not use LotFP as your game, but other modules that your players would enjoy though? I play LotFP, but I am not a big weird fantasy dude; you can disregard tone, the rules are still a fantastic modern B/X.

The rules aren't weird at all if you exclude the summon spell and use the no-art document. Even the 17th century stuff is in the appendix.

I printed the no-art PDF and play the game with 11 year old kids.

My attitude has usually been "Why fix up something to look like something else already on the market?" Basic Fantasy and LL look like they'll fit what I need without risking the weirdness and the one or two things I don't like from LotFP (like only fighters get better at fighting)

Besides, that plan would work insofar that the players are casuals without the internet. I have had this conversation before
>"Hey, user, did you know that one of the authors on this rulebook triggered someone online?"
>Oh boy, politics!

Alternatively, please save me from this hell on earth.

I get where you are coming from, I also sometimes have difficulties with the whole "DIY D&D" aspect of the OSR (I just like finished product ok!). But remember that B/X style D&D really isn't that hard to manage from the player side: you got yer class, level, stats, saves, (spells), HP, AC, XP, and inventory; you don't need to explicitly know what rule-book (or combination of books) you are using to make a character, as long as the DMs game logic is consistent. What I'm trying to say is; don't be scared to "make it your own". It will still be D&D, as long as you still operate within the B/X adventuring framework.

>risking the weirdness
You better not risk the weirdness!

I could stomach to play with SJWs, but that's me.

>I could "not" stomach to play with SJWs, but that's me.

(oh boy)

Reposting two posts from last thread, since the thread died when I was in the middle of stuff.

>Thief skills start off higher (though still terrible) in BF, but they cross over around 7th level, after which LL skills are higher (LL's peak at 14th level, where they're all pretty much 99%, while BF's don't peak until 20th level, when they run the gamut from 73%, 83%, 88%, 93%, 95% and 99%). I'd say LL wins if you take all the levels into account, but since you're more likely to play at low levels, it's a bit closer to a toss-up. Still, thief skills are screwy all around, as even in BF, if you attempt something at 1st level, you may have a 1 in 4 chance to succeed.

>Of course, it's been said that thief skills should be treated as saving throws in case you otherwise fail at your task, but this begs the question of what the primary determiner is. Ability checks are an okay fallback but not a very good primary method of resolution because a person who rolls high scores has such a huge advantage. Resolving things purely through description can be good (saying exactly where you poke and prod for the trap with your wooden pole, for instance), but I'm not sure that the thief percentages work very well with that (it seems like they should be more static and not going from terrible to virtually automatic, where it's almost a waste of time to describe what you're doing, since a roll will carry you through 99% of the time), and resolution purely through description only really works for things like traps and not, for instance, stealth or climbing.

>But maybe you want to institute a primary 2-in-6 chance roll for everybody, with the thief skills being a saving throw on top of that. The pic shows the percentages you get if you combine these into a single roll (using Moldvay Basic's thief skill percentages as the basis).

>But I've strayed a bit from the topic at hand...

>You just need to fill in the attack matrix.
Or just have a DM that knows the first to-hit row by heart. Then the players just tell the DM what their roll + attack bonus was. No looking at matrices needed.

Pic is alternate thief skill system tying into what we were talking about last post.

>Anyway, continuing on with LL vs. BF...

>LL gives clerics spells at 1st level (BF, like Basic, itself, does not) and is more generous when giving clerics spells per day. I'd say the point goes to BF here. Clerics gain levels quickly, can wear any armor, and are decent in combat, so they probably don't need a boost in the department of magic.

>In terms of spells per day, the magic-user progressions in the two systems are much closer to the same. The only really significant difference is that, like Moldvay Basic, BF caps things at 6th level spells, while LL has 7th, 8th, and 9th level spells (it also has 7th level spells for clerics, while BF stops at 6th, and Moldvay Basic at 5th). I don't think high level magic-users need more levels of crazy-powerful shit, so this is a definite point in favor of BF, but you're pretty unlikely to have characters that are higher than 12th level, so it really doesn't matter much in the end.

And on to new stuff in the next post...

BF keeps armor simple, with just leather, chain and plate (improving AC by 2 points with each step). Meanwhile LL throws in most of the AD&D armors (scale male, splint male, banded mail, and studded leather) and has a less regular progression (leather only improves your AC by 1 point, for instance). Clear winner: BF.

BF uses ascending AC while LL uses descending AC. The former is a bit more intuitive, but there's no big difference, and it's easy enough to convert from one system to the other, so I won't award any points on this.

BF lays out its weapons better, and generally reduces the clutter of LL's list a bit (which is closer to AD&D's). However, I would welcome BF's inclusion of flails and picks (though not necessarily breaking them into the light and heavy varieties, like LL does). So I give BF a slight edge here, but not a full point.

BF divides race and class, but while I personally like the simplicity of racial classes, this mostly comes down to preference. I will say that the human's +10% bonus to XP isn't really sufficient to make up for the bonuses other races get, but at least it's a step in the right direction from AD&D, which gives humans squat. And the demihumans racial classes are overpowered in Basic D&D too, especially elves.

Previous thread was for those who are going through archives.

Speaking of BFRPG can anyone tell me what's the main rules changes between 2nd and 3rd edition?

I dug around for that info. Apparently he fixed some typos and added a monster or two. If you bought the 2e book, there's no point in buying the 3e book, but if you're using PDF, there's no reason to not upgrade.

I think I might email the guy later today about keeping a changelog since so many people have edition ptsd

This, and a quick google search telling me that BFRPG is "highly compatible" (though I wish they would go into specifics), I think I'm going to go with BFRPG for now, and if it irks me enough, try LL later on.

Thanks guys.

Pic is descending/ascending AC conversion, since we were talking about that last post.

As far as spell lists go, the systems mostly have the same number of spells at each level (8 for clerics, and 12 for magic-users starting off and 10-12 at high levels), so no big difference there. Both systems lay out all the spells in alphabetically order, instead of sorting by class and level. I hate this, but they both do it, so there's no net gain here. Overall, the spells seem to be at about the same level of simplicity/complexity, so no advantage there either.

BF has saving throws increase more often, but in single-digit increments instead of using gaining 2 points at a time. They start out roughly the same, but BF falls a bit behind both LL and Basic D&D at higher levels. Magic-users and clerics ultimately end up with better saves at the high levels in LL than in Basic D&D, while the other classes are about the same. Overall, I give the nod to LL for having better saves at high levels, when casters are most powerful and need a limiting factors. The smoother, more regular progression that BF has is probably a bit superior for PCs, but might be a bit more obnoxious for GMs running monsters.

Speaking of monsters, the layout and level of detail of the monster sections are relatively similar, with BF sometimes going into a bit greater detail on the humanoids, I think (though both systems are fairly short and to the point). BF's monster section is probably 50% longer than LL's, but LL fits a bit more into the same amount of space, and according to a quick-and-dirty count I just did, the two contain very roughly the same number of monsters (I think BF has about 10% more entries). I don't see much of an advantage in either system here.

Since we were discussing saving throws last post, I will say that I'm rather fond of Swords & Wizardry's single category saves, which cut out some clutter, and ditch the clumsy, ad hoc saving throw categories of old school D&D. The progression is a bit fast though, and you end up with significantly better saves as you advance in level if you directly port it.

And finally, neither game has any significant boundary to using misc. old D&D modules and material. I will give LL a point for having the Advanced Edition Companion, which gives you AD&D-level options but with a more streamlined core system, since it's directly compatible with the core LL rules, making porting stuff over even easier, and giving you a fluid way of expanding/shifting your game if ever you want to (you can even have race-as-class characters in the same party with race and class characters).

Yeah, the single saving throw mechanic rocks.

Single category saving throws with numbers that are more in line with with B/X's numbers (change the bonus categories around as desired).

Single category saving throws with numbers that are more in line with with B/X's numbers (change the bonus categories around as desired).

Are there some good winter wilderness modules or Referee aids I could use to throw some life into the frozen wilderness?

Would there be interest in a traveller clone redesigned to be aimed at fantasy?

Have you SEEN the reactions to the Wanderer mockup?

You'd need to do it right, though, and that's a hard job. Also IIRC there's some roman-era traveller clone out there you might be able to crib stuff from?

There's one called Adventurer, can be found on Doc Grognard's blog.

Are there any good versions of Gnomes for race as class? Also a decent witch class?

There's Weird New World for LotFP. I'm not a huge fan of that one, but it might be worth a look for ideas.

Otherwise maybe take a look at Inuit mythology or Siberian people like the Chukchi or Koryaks.
Highlights include:
Meteoric iron weapons and armour
Snow goggles, harpoons, scrimshaw
Dog sleds, kayaks, reindeer, muskox, walrus
Fumaroles, Aurora Borealis, glaciers
Lots of giants, child-stealing hags, shadow people, dog monsters and the occasional mischievous dwarf.

In terms of environmental hazards, consider snowstorms, avalanches, frostbite, thin ice, mirages, ice bridges
If you're talking about your normal campaign setting during the winter then ignore most of this, I guess.

Are there any retroclones that have an ascending AC lower than 10 (or a descending AC higher than 10)? I'm starting to feel like it should be easier to get hit in these games.

Adobe Illustrator

user made this, link to it was in the Webtools Pastebin. rhysmakesthings.com/gm_friend

You could always just improve everybody's to-hit/attack bonus by 2 points or something.

For Basic-based games with ascending AC (like Basic Fantasy), "unarmored" is normally 11 (to mirror 9 AC), and 10 is a more natural number. Sure, that's only an extra point in the attacker's favor, but each bit helps. Like...

Unarmored 10
Leather 12
Chain 14
Plate 16

I personally like the idea of fate / talent / hero / etc. points of limited power that can be spent to give you a little boost in combat, like letting you hit if you miss your target number by 1. This gives you a deplete-able resource that can pull you through when you need it. But it's not exactly the typical way of going about things in OSR.

Castles & Crusades uses a base AC of 10, but then that's hardly surprising given that it uses the unified d20 mechanic of new school D&D as its engine. And, of course, while it's an OSR game, it's not exactly a retroclone.

Honestly? Play 5e and just ban feats. The feeling is pretty close.

That seems pretty extreme when you could just nudge armor class up/down by a couple of points and be done with it.

Yeah, but if you lower the AC to make it easier, things die way faster, you have to balance that back out.

bump

>Adobe Illustrator

Correct answer is Inkscape.

Search check.
Yay or Nay?

I vote nay. If the group takes a turn to search something (or hear something) they should succeed. Something like the snake door handle in Tower of the Stargazer is just there of course, no search reveals it as trap.

What about situations where it's not clear whether something might be there. Combing a desolate beach for debris, like a stick or rock with a specific shape for instance? (I'm writing up a scenario right now where this might actually matter).

I say nay.

Listen Noise, as a thief skill, is still acceptable because highly situational (if there are loud noises, they hear them. that skill is only for very muffled, distant or weak noises).

The x-in-6 secret door search is tested when the players are in a room but did not describe themselves searching for secret doors. If they search in the correct way (knock on walls, try pushing loose bricks, try pulling torch sconces, etc) the door is automatically found.

Hidden treasures (concealed under rubble, etc) are automatically found if the party spends a turn searching.
Secret treasures (secret compartment in chest, sewn inside couch, etc) are NOT automatically found if the party spends a turn searching. They have to do something connected to the secret ("I check the chest for a false bottom", "I inspect the couch", etc.) If they do, they automatically find the secret.

A special case is invisible items. In that case it's appropriate to have a random chance of stumbling into them, depending on their size and time spent wandering around the general area. This is less of a search check and more of a pure luck roll.

If there is only a single appropriately-shaped rock on a miles-long beach, it'll take a HELL of a long time.
If there's several appropriately-shaped rocks, just eyeball the chances and say something like "every turn spent searching for an appropriately-shaped rock, each character has a 1-in-6 chance to find one if the party spreads out. If they stay together, they obviously don't cover as much area: roll only once per turn for the entire party"

This gives them a choice: if they split up they'll find it faster, but they'll be more vulnerable to wandering monsters and the like.

Time searching already takes resources. Wandering monsters, food, light resources and NPCs that do something in the meantime.

bump

I suppose its rather late for a thread question, but here goes -

Would you/have you run a game for an all thief party? What kind of challenges, foes and heists might such a party encounter aside from dungeoneering?

Alternately

Do you run games featuring intrigue, plotting and other 'social adventures'? Do they ever feature as much as (or more than) dungeon-running?

You communists and your bad UI´s

Mutant Future any good? Or is it just "lets add guns to LL and call it a day"?

sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/d_thang.htm

sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/d_nuth.htm

sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/d_hoard.htm

Dunsany is a good place to look if you want stories about thieves getting in over their heads.

>Would you/have you run a game for an all thief party? What kind of challenges, foes and heists might such a party encounter aside from dungeoneering?
It would be an interesting thing to run, but I'm not sure that dungeoneering would be where it would shine the best - perhaps something more fitting to an all-Thief game would be more, I dunno, having the players run around in the City-State of the Invincible Overlord and see what heists they could pull off?

It does sound interesting, at least.

Fuck, now I really want to see someone run through the city-state with the intent of getting as much money from the populace as is possible.

Also fun: consider how you could run any module with a detailed city or town with such a group. Imagine a group of players trying to pull off a caper in the Keep on the Borderlands - that would be some real Oceans Eleven shit.

Basically, ignore most of the fantasy literature and movies out there and just go marathon a bunch of heist movies. Oceans Eleven, The Italian Job, whatever you can get your hands on.

I haven't run it yet, and never ran Gamma World back in the day but it seems like it would be a blast. To a certain extent it is LL + guns but the mutation tables are pretty great and it handles most of what I remember being in the GW rulebook (I had the one that was most like ad&d 2 ed) although heavily streamlined. Definitely worht taking a look at. It's in the trove.

You fucking homeless degenerate scumbag bum NEET piece of garbage. WAHHHH someone else is using quality software but I can't because I'm a broke poor basement dwelling troglodyte! WAHHHH you can't use superior things to me it's not fair, I don't have any money or the ability to earn such! WAHHHHH I can't pirate, I can't do anything other than let neckbeards provide free gibs!

>All this mad from a techno-serf

If only I could use inferior programs like you in order to act superior to those using superior programs

You can, you just have to start caring more about your freedom than shiny feature lists.

Have you ever made your own monster? What was it like?

You talk like a butthurt stupid child trying to be funny.

Back to OSR.
Can someone educate me on the "SA-crowd"? Do they have an OSR-fancircle behind their paywall? And why do they hate Zak, Raggi and Pundit with such a passion? I read some YDIS and I'm kinda freaked how they get 1000s of comments there. Must be some form of troll bots, right?

All communities have their own circlejerks and bandwagons that can't be explained.

yeah Something Awful has a dedicated OSR thread, don't recall seeing much hate for any of those guys though, or at least the kind of hate you're talking about

Just made a fish man troglodyte. 1 HD, breathes underwater, lives in small tribes close to underground lakes.

I use OD&D so I can come up with new monsters in 5 seconds if I need to.

>Can someone educate me on the "SA-crowd"? Do they have an OSR-fancircle behind their paywall? And why do they hate Zak, Raggi and Pundit with such a passion? I read some YDIS and I'm kinda freaked how they get 1000s of comments there. Must be some form of troll bots, right?
Remember, each /osrg/ probably gets a couple hundred posts - 350 for autosage.

If you have six /osrg/ threads, that's 2100 posts.

Now imagine that you're in a forum where the topics can stay open indefinitely rather than having an imageboard's more impermanent nature.

Racking up thousands of posts ain't that hard, man. Especially when people don't read the fucking thread (on account of it being a mile long), and so you get a lot of repeat discussion and questions and whatnot.

I don't have any experience with SA's OSR community in particular, though. If you're wondering because of the Fatal & Friends posts that were linked last thread, that's just because it's one big fuckhuge thread where people post readthroughs/reviews of awful and/or obscure games. That poster in particular just happened to dislike Raggi's style.

Fatal & Friends is one hell of a thread, though, and I'm pretty glad that that archive exists so I can read some of that shit when the paywall's up. I probably would never have heard of Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist otherwise, to be honest, and that's one of the most interesting games I've read so I owe them for that.

If they declare a search check and where, then yay.

If a thief walks near something noticeable, I make a secret roll based off of their skill. I rule that anyone can search without a thief, but a thief has a chance of just casually noticing something is wrong/up.

>If you have six /osrg/ threads, that's 2100 posts.
Yeah, I made that calculation after posting. I was just comparing to most other blogs which get perhaps a dozen comments in good times.

The big difference there is that most blogs have one content creator and then people commenting on the content, while threads have multiple content creators and thus higher output speed.

I mean, imagine a post with a dozen responses in /osrg/. That's kind of a lot, and not something you'd see all the time.

Also, of course, by having just one megathread (/quarantine, whatever) you concentrate all those dozens of comments into one big pool. If a blog gets a dozen comments in good times, how many comments has it gotten over the hundreds of posts during its entire lifetime?

Also, of course, shitposting and short posts drive up the numbers as well. (Although SA actually has mods that do stuff, I'm not really clear on the rules and on how much they actually do since, you know, fuck paying them :10bux: when I can get just as good discussion in other communities that I'm already familiar with rather than being a newbie and outsider.)

Hey, I was referring to
yourdungeonissuck.wordpress.com
which is a blog of sort. I'm not paying for SA to look at their threads.

One guy involved in the mentioned site has a blog which has pretty funny reviews:
princeofnothingblogs.wordpress.com

>Do they have an OSR-fancircle behind their paywall?

Yes.

>And why do they hate Zak, Raggi and Pundit with such a passion?

The three have been involved in harassing a bunch of people when arguments broke out about games. Zak gets whiny about SA's opinion of table top games like their FATAL & Friends thread, Raggi has a history of being a creep and SA doesn't like him for it (the "Flame Princess" is based on a girl he had a crush on and stalked a little, and then there's all those pictures of her dying in various ways, sooo...) and Pundit's a libertarian jack-ass with dumb opinions.

I haven't looked too much into it. Zak doesn't seem as bad as they make him out to be, he supports LGBT-etc. I checked Pundit's blog and, yeah, he has dumb opinions.

>The three have been involved in harassing a bunch of people when arguments broke out about games.
It was the other way around though. SA convinced themselves that they were harassers after Zak and Pundit got to do "consulting" on 5ed, and then they started a mass harassment campaign against them. Perhaps Zak said some nasty things like calling them the drama club, but he never called for harassment.

Gonna start working on a Thief-only OSR.

- Skill system is skin to LotFPs Specialist.
- Saves are modern D&D categories. All start at 16 and each level, including 1, players have 3 points to freely distribute to lower them.
- Wis replaced with a luck ability. Will prolly use the idea of Luck Burning ala DCC.
- Avoid Death is rolling your modifier or under on a d6. And that's if you're lucky enough to HAVE a modifier.

Gonna start working on a Thief-only OSR.

- Skill system is skin to LotFPs Specialist.
- Saves are modern D&D categories. All start at 16 and each level, including 1, players have 3 points to freely distribute to lower them.
- Wis replaced with a luck ability. Will prolly use the idea of Luck Burning ala DCC.
- Avoid Death is rolling your modifier or under on a d6. And that's if you're lucky enough to HAVE a Luck modifier.

Neat idea! Don't know why the "avoid surprise" thing is needed though, won't it always be 2-in-6 anyway? Also how will the "read scroll" skill work?

Sorry I deleted the last one.

The reason it's shown is that there might be things that modify surprise, whether it be Arcane or maybe racial. I'm not sure yet.

The magic will only be scroll based. The idea is that even a Nightblade isn't a dedicated practitioner of the arcane. They're a thief first and foremost, so the reading of scrolls will be skill based. ie) You only have a CHANCE to read off that Magic Missile spell.

Instead of actual classes, I was thinking about doing optional Vocations, like so.

>sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/d_nuth.htm
>sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/d_hoard.htm
These are seriously two of the best things I have ever read in my entire life.

(I mean, I didn't just encounter them now, it was a long time ago. I'm just mentioning it so user won't overlook them.)

Sorry I deleted the last one.

The reason it's shown is that there might be things that modify surprise, whether it be Arcane or maybe racial. I'm not sure yet.

The magic will only be scroll based. The idea is that even a Nightblade isn't a dedicated practitioner of the arcane. They're a thief first and foremost, so the reading of scrolls will be skill based. ie) You only have a CHANCE to read off that Magic Missile spell.

Instead of actual classes, I was thinking about doing optional Vocations, like so.

Yeah, this. Zak didn't fucking harass anybody, that's all bullshit and lies. They just got pissy because he got the plum they wanted.

(It turns out that being highly creative AND a portal figure in a desirable demographic is better than being humorless and easily offended; who knew?)

What advice do you have for someone who wants to break into the OSR scene as a content producer?

Not a producer myself, but I notice that people want free ideas and tools. Once you've done that for a while, you can write a book with some more ideas and tools (that are worth paying for) and some nice art. Layout is important too. Bonus points if you come up with something nobody else has tried before that is really neat.

Decent art.
Good layout.
Find a niche.
Clear and concise writing.
Network with other people.
Don't be a moody grognard cunt.

>Raggi has a history of being a creep and SA doesn't like him for it (the "Flame Princess" is based on a girl he had a crush on and stalked a little, and then there's all those pictures of her dying in various ways, sooo...)

...Well ok that kind of IS creepy. Puts a lot of the violent/sexual content of LotFP in a whole new perspective.

How well would a megadungeon work if I tried to eliminate a lot of the hallways and try to make it more focused and split into smaller thematically different segments while still trying to retain a lot of choices, shortcuts, secrets, and whatnot?
Or better put, keep the levels on multiple levels, if that makes sense? Much more verticality on separate layers. I'm trying to accomplish this by drawing the map isometrically.
Downside is it'll lose a lot of the typical stuffed feeling megadungeons tend to have. Where you map out a level and basically every spot is taken up. I'll miss that.