Welcome to the Old School Renaissance General thread

what special ability should an OSR monk have?

>though mostly I just get impressed or ego-stroking comments because I'm pretty creative.

Nah, welcome to people. I've never once been told something negative about one of my settings, especially true while they're still wip. I have ran some horrendous shit without a single complaint, critique, or even vaguely negative remark.

Brewery and illumination.

how so?

Creative people are usually their own worst critic. It's one of the reasons I like soliciting anonymous comments on my stuff from places like Veeky Forums or /ic/ in addition to mentors or peers who are too jaded to give a fuck about being polite. Everyone else gives bullshit critique.

>For me, character-building is a player skill.
This is honestly just a misunderstanding of what's meant by "player skill" in the present context. (That and "system mastery" is one of the most widely hated thigns about 3E in the wider OSR)

Oh no, no no, you don't understand. Truely horrendous shit has come out of me doing things. One of the things that has got me hook on the /wbg/ bug, made the gm/dm I am today is the ability to look back, and learn from my mistakes.

And you'd be surprised, we aren't ic/, still Veeky Forums yeah, I'll give you that.

Worlds? That's a difficult one. First, you have to be reasonably sure that your players are going to stick with it, or accept the fact that you may be wasting time and effort. On the other hand, if you just enjoy worldbuilding, it's a fun activity.

I put together my favorite setting this way. Here's my step-by-step as best I can remember it.

>1. Pick themes
I wanted elements from the following: Reconquista of Spain, New World, Earthdawn, Fritz Leiber. I took inspiration from those topics and works to inspire the denizens of my world.

>2. Pick locale
Try to select a part of the real world to use as the focus for your adventures. You can introduce more areas eventually, but you need an area that's going to get the most attention at the start. I picked Finland. So, you've got the biodiversity of Finland (Sarmatic forests, Taiga) and then I threw in some more stuff I wanted to include. There's areas that are more like Steppes, and an entire region that's basically the Alberta Badlands.

>3. Fantasy influence
Decide the level of fantasy and sprinkle that in. Your mileage may vary.

>4. People
I made a bunch of interesting NPC's, a few factions and the people who ruled them. This is probably the most important part.

That's what I had nailed down when I started a campaign, and it led to my favorite setting.

I'm about to out myself to my own group hey guys! who lurk/post in /osrg/, but I'll do it anyway.

One of my campaign settings is enormous. Stupid huge. Think Dyson Sphere sized, but has stars orbiting around it so that the continent sized shells that float because of "photonic pressure" (a joke with my brother in law - he asked me once why lasers in scifi knock people down or throw them into the air and that was my flippant answer) and some silly element that is essentially macguffinite.

Around this immense planet are moons, which are themselves planets. They have civilizations of moon men on them, and potentially rocket ships.

Originally, this was my "I'm going to include everything from 3.5!" setting that I was foolish enough to think was a good idea. However, as the years dragged on, I got less and less enamored of 3.5 and started looking back. I found the Rules Cyclopedia, which is one of my favorite books now.

I abandoned 3.5 for OSR and I've been here every since. But I kept the setting because ultimately, it's huge enough that I can make any setting I want within its realm, and it's possible to travel to another setting. They just have some races, some tech, some magic, and a heaping pile of macguffinite to tie them all together.

Each floating continent is its own self-contained setting, and without some advanced magic or tech, the civs on the continents are effectively stuck there. I even have my own cosmology, which in no way features the cosmology of D&D, but with a few flavor tweaks, everything form D&D can be made to fit my setting.

OSR, ironically, made it easier to include everything and the kitchan sink, despite 3.5 having more rules for that stuff.

>OSR, ironically, made it easier to include everything and the kitchan sink, despite 3.5 having more rules for that stuff.
Are you me? I started working on a setting for 3.PF, then dropped it after my group got a little sick of it. I eventually turned it into a LotFP setting, then adapted it for 5e.

It was super helpful making it OSR-friendly, and I really dig 5e as a framework because I run my 5e games as if they were OSR.

>photonic pressure

Sorry, got ahead of myself. The continents are floating on top of what is effectively a neutron star made of the afore-mentioned mcguffinite. The stars and moons orbit that.

>Are you me?

Not unless you just had bowl of chicken noodle soup, a Star Trek mug full of cranberry juice for dinner, and are fighting a cold.

If yes to all three... Something bizarre has happened.

I had potato soup for dinner, got over a cold a week ago and am drinking coffee w/ honey liqueur out of a nondescript mug.

We got real close to a continuity problem there, but I think we're safe.

Stupid question, as it's probably in there, but is Misty Isles of the Eld in the trove, or am I blind?

Also, has anyone run a game using the Lankhmar setting books?

Originally I had a sort of idea for my old OSR homebrew I was making where the standard Fighter sort of morphed into a 'slayer' character, who was essentially really good at fighting single opponents and big monsters, and the monk as a sort of sweeping character who took care of crowds easily.

Basically the 'Slayer' Fighter could take a trophy from the biggest monster (HD) he had slain and use it to recruit either lvl 1 hireling fighters or use it to reroll combat rolls with a number of uses equal to the trophy's HD- can only be replaced by a bigger trophy.

The monk instead got a number of attacks equal to the difference between his level and the highest HD opponent in a fight. So if the Monk was level 5 fighting HD 1 goblins, he would get 5 attacks per round. If one of the goblins was a powerful sorcerer with 3 HD though, now the Monk only got 2 attacks per round. This meant defeating the leader of a pack of enemies was the best way to scatter them and let the monks do their thing.

I ran into problems with mass combat and the number of rolls involved, plus the thematic elements of the game eventually changed from the more high fantasy stuff to my more low fantasy stuff, so things like monks got phased out. This is just my personal journey however so take it with a grain of salt.

>Also, has anyone run a game using the Lankhmar setting books?
I wish. As the GM I could force it on my players, but none of them read Leiber and thus the magic would be lost on them.

>haven't read Leiber

The cretins!

>Nah

Well you'd be wrong about that. I see the average quality of content on this board and I know I'm much better then it at least. Not everyone lacks self confidence like you do.

Seriously, I have no doubts that I sound like a shill right now, but the OSR got me into Leiber. Through Leiber, I found that childish feeling of wonder again, and that feeling is pushing me to DM.

I'm a 23 year old recent college graduate. I run a game for my closest friends from college, and I've previously run campaigns for randoms from the FLGS and a different group of friends.

Out of the 12-15 people that I've run games for (all of which were within 1-5 years of my age) I can firmly say that only 2 of them were even remotely well-read, and both of those people are among my close friends. I think two of my old players were actually illiterate, and the rest never read books unless forced to.

Cretins indeed.

from a world building standpoint, is 9 gods enough for a starter pantheon - they will be central figures in some manner throughout the campaign.. reputation with one god directly influences another, etc.
one per alignment combo... feels trite but easy to emulate the core pantheons .

have them all allocated, named, general ideas, principles.. the basics. any ideas how to spice them up without writing out extensive lore?

>childish feeling of wonder from leiber
I like you.

On the topic of OSR-flavored reading lists that capture childish wonder, If these aren't on your list, try and squeeze them in. I'd also like suggestions, but let's keep to our top 3 to filter out all but the best.

William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land
Robert E. Howard, Solomon Kane
Rosemary Sutcliff, Eagle of the Ninth (fond memories of this from childhood)

I get you. Leiber is weird and familiar at the same time. It's this wonderful blend featuring two friends against the bizarre and fantastic. I don't think I've laughed quite so hard at an event in a story (that wasn't presented as a comedy) as the one with Issek of the Jug.

It took me almost ten years to get my best friend to read scifi. I had to soften him up with fantasy and then some 40k first. It's bizarre to me that people don't read. I can't stop. I'd go mad if I did.

I would add the Book of Skaith by Leigh Brackett.

Same! Seriously, that scene is the reason I'm tempted to play some kind of cleric of Issek or just have his faith show up later.

This is why you don't pick prior to having rolled for your ability scores. The XP modifier is the trigger for selecting a class, the additional bonuses/penalties are just minor conveniences/inconveniences.

So I'm making a classless,level-less game and have to work on the skill system for specialist types.

This looking good? I think this is a great way to advance in skill growth and coincidentally makes it harder to grow the better you get.

>I'd go mad
Same, I don't understand it at all. My main dig is poetry and history, but good fiction is a joy to read. When people say they don't enjoy reading at all, it's just.. Bluh.

I'll be honest, it's a full on/off thing for me,either:
> I'm chewing through series of books.
> I'm staring at the same 3 websites over and over again, doing nothing productive.

Granted, so far, today's been one of the latter, as I tend to procrastinate with the studies.

Any interesting contemporary stuff? Admittedly, part of the reason I've stopped looking outside of Leiber is paranoia over "oh, this book's only on the shelf because a critic was bought and paid for"

9 is certainly enough and works well if you're going with the 9 alignment system - this is sort of the approach in say, Dragonlance. I'd actually say 9 is at the upper end especially if you expect heavy interplay between the religions - this already is a lot of interconnections and relationships to think about.

I will say one thing is that having one god per alignment creates the idea of a very neat, orderly, and designed world, so that's something to keep in mind if you do want to go down this route. "Real-world" religions are a lot messier than this - even groups that believe in a supposedly miraculous event still will splinter over it's interpretation.

Contemporary is hard. Most of my favorite 'recent' stuff is from the 80's. Wolfe's Book of the New Sun and Cook's Black Company are some of my favorite in recent memory, but those certainly don't capture -any- childish whimsy.

Similarly, The Buried Giant by Ishiguro was very solid, but it's also grim. Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor was fairly fun as well. Both of those are safe buys, in my opinion.

>what special ability should an OSR monk have?
Nonexistence. It's not a unique ability though, because it shares it with the bard.

No need to be mean user,if a player wanted to be a monk in your OSR game what would you do?

Not him but I would tell the player "ok dude, roll a fighter and call yourself a monk".

>if a player wanted to be a monk in your OSR game what would you do?
Tell them I will always value the time we had together when we used to be friends. Seriously though, I have no suggestions. Monks don't really fit in very well, in my opinion, so I don't have anything to navigate by. You've looked at the AD&D monk? And maybe new school edition versions for inspiration?

Well, if i winged it, and using LotFP as a basis:

Ability to have two melee attacks Fist (d4) + Kick (d6) per round (one to-attack roll).
Add level to the to-hit roll like a Fighter.
Gift them with STR modifier as Melee Damage bonus.
Access to lvl-1 cleric spells after level-3.
Limit abilities to require Lightly Encumbered.

Like real monks that trained for combat, they gain the ability to use weapons, fight proficiently in armor and... Oh wait they're fighters.

I'm trying to come up with a starting Ravenloft scenario for some 1st level players but I can't think of a thing. Any ideas?

Sup /osr/, I actually went and made a gun creation guide/list. Any thoughts on it?

What's the point of a wire stock?

Other than that question, it looks like a (cumbersome) but passable system for gun creation. I do like that it all fits on one page. I'm not sure how it would work in practice, and I have a nagging itch that some combinations would be broken in comparison to the rest, but it looks like it would be fun to play around with.

Derp, nevermind, I misread 'load' capacity and got really confused. Now I'm curious why a heavy-duty stock increases the capacity of a gun. Does it hold ammo?

It's weird that a "heavy-duty" stock which confers +1/2 (1/2?) capacity to a gun could earn you a reduced capacity flaw. Or that a heavy-duty stock could make your gun more fragile if you rolled that flaw.

Put /osrg/ in the subject field next time, it makes it easy to just ctrl-f the catalog.

Yeah, the Heavy Duty is supposed to be like heavy weapon version of a basic gun. Like everything is really fat and metallic, compared to a more slim wire or wooden rifle sort of thing.

You're right about that, I need to change that flaw to something else or make you immune to it if you have Heavy Duty perhaps. The fragile thing is fine though, just an error in wording.

This just promotes skill grinding.

What's some good reference material for filling out hexes for a desert hexcrawl?

What, in the same way that receiving XP for recovering treasure promotes going into dungeons?

Fucking dungeon grinding. I don't allow that shit in my games.

So I have a setting that is entirely urban and set in one city.

Is it better to do a hexcrawl here or a point crawl? Maybe street-crawl or something similar?

I want to run something that isn't D&D or Traveller, but that has well-thought, easy to DM and play rules that aren't too hippie-storygamey and not too crunchy-as-in-90s-trend-to-make-rules-for-everything.

What games do you suggest? Old-School or Traditionnal, I don't mind as long as it's well-made.

Runequest or WHFP maybe?

I never tried 1e Warhammer Fantasy, but I do have a 2e book that is frankly too rule-y for me. Is 1e more "less-is-more" in terms of mechanics?

Runequest...I love Runequest's setting, and have played in it with a lot of games in the past, but I can't work with Chaosium's system as a DM. For some reason I'm just utterly put off by rolling d100 percentile dices for resolution.

When you wrote that you don't want anything that is D&D, did you also mean that you're not interested in any of the D&D retroclones?

I love D&D and its clones, I have spent three years working with LotFP, OD&D, B/X, Holmes, Delving Deeper, etc. I mean that I want to do something else for a change, but I find myself unappealed by most modern "big" games because I miss the freedom of the OSR. So I'm looking for people here who have other favorites aside from the old and new classics that could satisfy me. I'm tempted to go back to Cyberpunk 2013 but it looks a tad bit too crunchy for me now that I'm accustomated to easier stuff.

So yeah, I include retroclones from Castles & Crusades to Labyrinth Lord and neo-clones like Lamentations of the Flame Princess or Into the Odd when I say D&D.

The Fantasy Trip, maybe? It's the predecessor to GURPS, but only does warriors and wizards.

So, no D20 resolution, fairly light ruleset. Have you considered Savage Worlds?

Mutant Future
Other Dust
Silent Legions
Tales From the Floating Vagabond

Rules Cyclopedia if I had to. Thought about allowing them in Carcosa but they seem super out of place in a vanilla western fantasy setting. I don't even like the idea of them in Yoon-Suin.

Cleric spells AND fighter attack bonus? Too much. Also, wears the canonical bonus to AC?

>Cleric spells AND fighter attack bonus? Too much. Also, where is the canonical bonus to AC?

My setting is final fantasy 1

>My setting is final fantasy 1

Well, that's a cross you're just going to have to bear, isn't it.

So my campaign right now is tailored to introduce some friends to D&D through LotFP. I made a small mega-dungeon (around 50 distinct locations), with 3 factions. We played 2 sessions so far and they loved it. I've introduced them to all the relevant dungeon crawling rules and procedures (such as light, encumbrance, and the base game mechanics).

Starting from tonight's session I want to introduce wilderness travelling (so overland travelling rules, resting in towns, stocking up in towns, monsters in the wild and some mild exploration). For this I've prepared a small barony surrounding the dungeon. So here is my question; I want to give em some memorable locations, right now I've got:

- The dungeon,
- A bridge between town and dungeon (introduce some taxes on em)
- A small village that will from now on serve as resting point
- A monster lair with the apex predator of the random wilderness monsters (thinking griffin, might go weirder, should be suited for lvl 1-3 at party size of around 6 though).
- a forest region
- a farm region
- a mountain region

Tell me osrg, what are some cool things to add?!

Witch cult amid the farmers.
Fallen dwarf mine.
Freaky elf settlement.
Thieves Guild in town.
Troll under bridge.

1. Dancing elves/fairies/fae, pic related
2. Secretive halfling village, like a piece of unchanged forest in the middle of a bunch of farmlands
3. Ghost pirates who took the wrong turn and are sailing across the hills

I lost my saved copy of the random, but fair ability score pdf. Anyone got it on hand?

...

Thanks a bunch, user

>A mass grave where something horrible (a one-sided battle, sectarian masacre, religious martyrs, human sacrifice, plague etc) happened. Risk of undead nightmare if messed with.
>Ancient temple to nasty forgotten gods. A small cult maintains the old rites, which are suitably nasty. If the rites go neglected, the gods wake up and bad times ensue.
>Woods where the trees are wrong. Too intelligent, and seething with rage at the flesh-and-blood creatures that cut them down and burn them.
>Somewhere properly holy. Consecrated ground that nasty stuff won't set foot on. Maybe a monastery or reliquary.

Best retroclone for teaching beginners? I was going to got with LL, but Basic Fantasy seems a bit sleeker and more accessible. LL has a big collection of nice looking character sheets, and I'm a bit ashamed to say that it's making me want to play LL more.

>A creepy mansion in the woods, rumored to be haunted and avoided by the populace - which suits the vampiric magician living there just fine, as it lets them focus on their alchemical experiments.
>A forest bridge is guarded by an Ogre, who lives underneath it and demands a small toll from those who wish to pass. Locals tolerate him, as he greatly dislikes bandits of any kind and refuses them crossing.
>A bottomless pit, as wide as the river that disappears into it in a thundering waterfall. Many fell humanoids have carved their homes into the edges, and a great net lets them salvage all that falls.
>An ancient, moss-covered statue of a long-dead king, visible from miles away as it towers above the treetops. If asked by someone wearing the royal insignia, the statue will split the earth with its sword to open the passageway to a hidden treasure trove - those without the sigils will be warned away or removed with force, although the statue is incapable of killing.
>A farmer has chained down the door to their basement, to trap the giant rats found within; they will pay for their removal. Unbeknownst to the farmer the rats are actually wererat burglars.
>A monastery following a vow of silence, secretly a front for a guild of assassins (likewise sworn to silence).
>A blind dwarf and a medusa are having a fistfight while eleven other dwarves cheer from behind a rock.
>The fortress of an Evil High Priest.The Priest is willing to cast high-level spells for adventures - if one pays the tithe, of course. The dozens of guards manning the walls are resurrected dead who were sworn to a year of service, and the spectres patrolling the grounds once refused to pay their debts. For the poor, servitude is a small price to pay for life.
>A viking ship being carried across the plains by two dozen burly norsemen, two of which are arguing loudly about the directions to the closest river.
>A small but deep lake, long rumored to house a fish that actually IS that big.

LL and Basic Fantasy aren't too different from eachother: they're both quite close renditions of D&D B/X.

B-but the character sheets...

Haha, go for it ;)

Nothing wrong with LL. It's more compatible with original material.

>Nothing wrong with LL. It's more compatible with original material.
I don't think there's any significant difference other than having to switch between ascending and descending AC, and that's really not very challenging.

So a cancelled appointment has unexpectedly freed up tomorrow (Friday, Nov. 18) and I was wondering if anyone would be up for another /osrg/ open table game (playing slightly modified B/X) from 2pm PST/5pm EST/10pm UTC - contact Stagehand on the Discord for questions/details.

having the local apex predator be something they can't kill now could be cool - eventually they'll hunt it down after getting higher level and feel like goddamn kings

d20 resolution and D&D aren't the same thing.
Savage Worlds is too obtrusive for me.

Crawford's work, while amazing, is still D&D with some Traveller trappings. I will check out Mutant Future and Tales, which I have never heard about before, surprisingly. Thanks a lot for your insights.

I used LotFP extensively, but I would recommend Delving Deeper for the *original* flavor.

Numenera? It's simple enough.

I gotta check this one out too, especially since I love ItO. It's got a different system than D&D though, right?

Oh and symbaroum (or however its spelt )

Its d20 roll under. But its a very different system to d&d

I read the CharGen section, and Numenera has too much funky mechanics (expected that much from Monte Cook). I really mean *light* as in, a player can make a character in less than ten minutes the first time he hears about the game.

It's interesting, but yeah, I wouldn't use the system. Too much book keeping.

Symbaroum I heard about cause I'm a dirty frog eater. I LOVE the art. I usually hate french RPGs though, we suck at game design most of the time. So I'm half happy, half worried it might be terrible.

I just remembered there's this weird S.T.A.L.K.E.R-Dark Fantasy norwegian game that's around, I should look around for an english translation, I could run this with ItO.

>Symbaroum
>French
Vad i helvete snackar du om?

Oh nevermind, my navigator led me to believe the game was originally in french. I am stupid to let myself get tricked by a machine.

So Symbaroum IS the Weird Dark Fantasy northern european stalker thing?

I guess you can call it that. The translation should be finished now, so it shouldn't be too hard to find a pdf in english.

Found one on seven chan. I am currently devouring the illustrations. I really really really love those. I'll plunder a lot from this book, that can be sure.

Hope you enjoy it! I actually haven't checked it out much myself, I find the writing and design of swedish RPGs become a bit samey after a certain point, but that's just me.

Well, I'm the guy who's terrified of any RPG that goes further than Traveller Classic in the way of rules nowadays, so I'm not afraid of its system cause I'm pretty sure I won't use it. I find the setting very appealing though. Reminds me of Wormskin, Dark Souls, Edge Chronicles, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, among other things.