OSR General – Arnesonian Campaign Edition

>But the players got so distracted by dungeon delving
Wasn't it the other way around, with them ignoring the dungeon and thus not having enough cash?

A few generalist classes augmented by whatever crazy shit the players can think of to play.

No, I'm pretty sure they got preoccupied with dungeoneering and forgot to raise forces, otherwise the campaign wouldn't have transitioned to the dungeon and we would probably never have had a D&D.

is there something like a character background generation for OSR games? something along the lines of dirt farmer and that shit

any sword and wizardy online tools?

Depends on the setting.

In DCC you roll on a chart when making a 0-level character to see what they were before the game started.

It's not that screwy at all. It's very simple and quick really.

It works great when it's men vs men, but when you bring in the fantastic creatures rules, I found it kind of weird.

Just have bigger HD monsters fight as a number of men equal to their HD.

For reference, this is literally how OD&D did it:
>Attack/Defence capabilities versus normal men are simply a matter of allowing one roll as a man-type for every hit die, with any bonuses being given to only one of the attacks, i.e. a Troll would attack six times, once with a +3 added to the die roll. (Combat is detailed in Vol. III.)
(Combat was not, in fact, detailed in Vol. III. It was in the playtest, though?)

For handling fantastic combat, though, where one fantastic creature fights another, I recommend that you just move over to the ACS for that specific fight. Or the tables, at least. Because fuck trying to expand the FCT with every single new creature out there.

It's been a while since I've tried to pimp out the Discord server, and some of the Pastebin stuff, so here we go.

Found in the Discord chat is a link to a Google Doc where we're trying to organize some music for those DMs who like to DJ. I won't link Doc here to avoid spam, but you'll see it right away in the Discord. It's severely lacking would benefit from someone with a large repertoire of RPG-appropriate music.

The OSR Blog list is still missing some descriptions for some blogs, either because I struggled to come up with something or don't read it. Blogs that needs short blurbs are:
abominablefancy
aeonsnaugauries
antlerrr
dndwithpornstars
dragonsgonnadrag
dungeonsofsigns
gorgonmilk
monstersandmanuals
quasarknight

wizardawn.and-mag.com/rpg_sandw.php

There's smatterings around. You can also use stuff like hireling tables/generators and steal from those. There is also a an interesting Major Life Event generation found in "The Sandbox" issue #2, which is interesting, but I don't think that's what you're looking for. Page in question attached. Here are a couple things online that you might be able to use
random-generator.com/index.php?title=Fantasy_Character_History
angband.oook.cz/steamband/CharacterTraits.pdf
springhole.net/writing_roleplaying_randomators/backstory-idea.htm

I want both, so I've started thinking about just having base classes but the player can also decide an extra ability to make it more specialized.
This might be a slippery slope to builds, and that spooks me a bit.

I think FCT is unneeded. You can represent any monster imaginable in mass combat by just assigning fitting troop type classifications to the monster. There's no reason why e.g. a troll or a whole unit of them couldn't participate in mass combat.

So I kind of want a system where Wizards don't feel as limited in daily spell slots as in regular DnD but aren't able to just spam blindly either.

What kind of magic system can I use besides 'lol if you fail a spellcast roll then your arm gets blown off lmao" like in DCC? I want something different then that.

Yeah, and in fact they already do in Chainmail!

It's just that the FCT table exists so that you can have, for example, a eight-man Superhero fight a twelve-man Giant and actually have an edge. You have multiple units that are powerful in mass combat but should perhaps use a different system when facing other 1:1 units.

Also, well, it's basically just an adjusted Man-To-Man table. So that's a thing.

Maybe consider going actual Vancian? You have a very limited number of spell slots, and higher-level spells take up multiple slots, but refreshing the slots is as simple as just studying your book for a while.

Another option, of course, is rituals - at-will spells that take multiple turns if not hours (or weeks!) to cast but have powerful effects. For the truly powerful stuff that you don't necessarily want to fit into the once-per-day dungeoncrawling-optimized system.

I'm the ABSOLUTE MADMAN from the last thread and I've got a question for y'all. I'm converting some standard monsters into unique individuals. Should these unique individuals be intermixed with standard monsters or should they get their own separate section?

Reading this thread I got curious

How many of you never played old school D&D before getting into OSR? And how you define OSR?

>I'm the ABSOLUTE MADMAN from the last thread
What madman exactly? It seems like we're all maniacs. (Notably that guy who makes the encounter tables, his quality/speed ratio is inhuman)

>I'm converting some standard monsters into unique individuals. Should these unique individuals be intermixed with standard monsters or should they get their own separate section?
I like when shit like Orcus or Medusa is just in its alphabetical place without comment. It makes the bestiary more... authentic-seeming somehow? Despite the very idea of "a real fantasy bestiary" with stats instead of vague panic being kinda preposterous.

The closest I got to playing old-school D&D before getting into this stuff was playing good ol' third-edition Drakar och Demoner.

Which is a BRP game. Oldschool as fuck and probably what you'd make an OSR-esque clone of here in Sweden, I suppose, but not really D&D in the slightest.

As for how I define OSR, that's a tricky one - there's the actual OSR games, which doesn't include OD&D or BECMI on account of them being actual old-school games rather than a retroclone or so. But more generally I just use it to refer to older TSR-era D&D, and include some stuff like Torchbearer and Dungeon World as "OSR-adjacent".

>What madman exactly?
Probably the guy slamming together... what was it, again? Torchbearer, GURPS, 5E and RIFTS? Less extreme than that, but you get the gist of it.

It depends on how obvious you want them to be! Personally I'd stick 'em in next to the other ones, but also try to sort stuff so that they're next to relevant creatures - more of an OD&D order than a later alphabetical one, in other words. Put Gorgoth the Ur-Troll adjacent to his lesser brethren, Balor the Balrog adjacent to the other demons, Bahamut by the dragons, etc.

If you're going for an alphabetical order, though, either have them as a subsection of their ordinary cousins (e.g. "Red Dragon, Smaug") or put them in an easily-found separate section before or after all the other monsters. After if you want new readers to know the monsters before reading their bosses, before if you want readers to know that they exist rather than just skipping past the entire bestiary section. (Or just call them out at some point near the start of that section, I guess.)

I play a game of Kings of War.
Obviously that's not really a helpful suggestion for most, though.

>How many of you never played old school D&D before getting into OSR?
I didn't.
>And how you define OSR?
I like the ability to tweak and add to a system without it imploding.
I also like that characters feel more like normal people in a strange hostile world instead of a team of mid-evil superheros.

>GURPing up D&D
>GURPing up anything, ever

honestly I like both, although which I'd use depends on the OSR system I use(and to a lesser extent what setting)

honestly I see no problem with builds in and of itself, it only becomes a problem if it becomes a broken mess like 3.5/PF

To be fair, that's not actually what the guy's doing. I looked up the post in the last thread:
>I'm frankensteining 5e, PF, BFRPG and LL at this very moment

So yeah, it's a purely incestuous D&D slurry.

That Dungeon Fantasy boxset looks pretty sexy, though.

>Which is a BRP game. Oldschool as fuck and probably what you'd make an OSR-esque clone of here in Sweden, I suppose, but not really D&D in the slightest.
Is BRP and RuneQuest very popular in Europe?

>third-edition Drakar och Demoner
Vilken var det? '91?
Hursomhelst så tycker jag personligen inte att DoD är likt Basic D&D överhuvudtaget. För mycket av reglerna var flummigt BRP utan fungerande system. Det var mer som något sorts Runequest-kopia som inte visste vad det ville vara, men som visste att det behövde konkurrera med D&D.
Av vad jag har förstått så finns det dock ett modernt svenskt rollspel som heter Fantasy! som jag tror försöker vara OSR, men jag vet inte hur bra det lyckas med det.

>Reading this thread →
Bad move

>How many of you never played old school D&D before getting into OSR?
I started out with Rules Cyclopedia when I was a kid, but played it that "AD&D use-everything" kinda way where you just gorge on rules and splats and don't give a fuck, the style 3E was built to cater to basically. So obviously I moved to 2E and then 3E and 4E but then flipped through my old RC one day, out of nostalgia originally, but ultimately I thought hol' up, this stuff seems... then I found out about the OSR and headexplode.gif

>And how you define OSR?
Stuff: New products for old-school D&D (and the various clone games made to support that new stuff). I don't think something like B/X is an OSR product.
Gaming subculture: People who play old-school D&D and retroclones. B/X is definitely an "OSR game" in this sense.

For Sweden, it was probably more that the creators of Drakar och Demoner needed a game license, and they couldn't get D&D so they settled with BRP and Runequest. BRP-systems did become very big in Sweden because of that though.
Rest of Europe I don't know.

Pretty much any Continental country with an RPG culture worth a damn (Spain, France, Germany, Sweden, etc.) has had a BRP clone as their signature game at one point.

>Bad move
I'm very curious

>BRP-systems did become very big in Sweden because of that though.
Are RPGs popular in Sweden? Which ones most people play? D&D seems obvious, but what about others?

>Pretty much any Continental country with an RPG culture worth a damn (Spain, France, Germany, Sweden, etc.) has had a BRP clone as their signature game at one point.
Interestng, I'm not from Europe and very few RPGs from there get translated here

>En drös av lönnsvenskar i tråden
Did any of you guys hang out on WRNU? I remember someone on there years ago had a river setting he was making with all kinds of Yoon-Suin-ish type gonzo stuff that maybe user who wanted help with his river game could use?

If one of you could find and translate it I remember there was some cool stuff in there.

>Vilken var det? '91?
I think it was the 1987 edition Expert and Gigant was written for. '91 was the fourth AFAIK

>Av vad jag har förstått så finns det dock ett modernt svenskt rollspel som heter Fantasy! som jag tror försöker vara OSR, men jag vet inte hur bra det lyckas med det.
Det går åt helvete, Arfert är sjukt talanglös och försöker bara kopiera sånt som han ser som är populärt.

>Are RPGs popular in Sweden? Which ones most people play? D&D seems obvious, but what about others?
They used to be due to the RPG fad, it happened at about the same time in Sweden as in the US. Then it got BTFO by video games the same way.

Andra utgåvan, verkar det, så '84 - förlåt, men jag glömde bort vilken det var. Jag spelade bara det för några år sedan, och har ingen större historia med det.

Jag vet at det inte är alls likt D&D men, tja, när det enda andra rollspelet man hade spelat var All Flesh Must Be Eaten...

Ochså, såklart, närhelst DoD nämns bör man nog länka allting:
>riotminds.se/vara-spel/drakar-och-demoner-retro/tiden-innan-trudvang/
Tycker fortfarande att det är otroligt att Riotminds bara släppte ut allt helt gratis sådär.

From what I know Sweden has one of the bigger RPG communities in Europe. Just this month a new version of Drakar och Demoner comes out in fact, and it's mostly a reprint of the 80s rules with new art. I'd say that that is proof that the OSR mindset is sweeping through many countries.
Other than that we have Mutant Year Zero, Symbaroum and Trudvang Chronicles (which is based on a setting from one edition of DoD) which have been translated to english. We also have a rules-heavy dicepool game called Eon and a horror game called Kult (unsure if it's the same as the american one) among a bunch of other stuff.

>Did any of you guys hang out on WRNU?
Nope, I couldn't really get into all the stuff that those guys were doing a couple years ago so I didn't bother.

>I remember someone on there years ago had a river setting he was making with all kinds of Yoon-Suin-ish type gonzo stuff that maybe user who wanted help with his river game could use?
Funnily enough, I'm also the guy who needs river material. Do you remember what it was called?

>I think it was the 1987 edition Expert and Gigant was written for. '91 was the fourth AFAIK
Neat. I have the one with the Elric covers and three booklets as main rules. Not sure which one that was. Never had expert though.

>Det går åt helvete, Arfert är sjukt talanglös och försöker bara kopiera sånt som han ser som är populärt.
Preach.

>Did any of you guys hang out on WRNU?
Nope, sorry. I actually have roughly zero interaction with Swedish internet culture for some reason. The closest I've gotten is hanging out in some of the Melodifestivalen threads.

On a completely unrelated note, I've really got an itch to translate Men & Magic into Swedish so I can easily start up an OD&D group here. But that also seems like it would take a fuckload of effort for very little gain, so.

Det var ganska schysst av dem, men lite tråkigt att de inte la ut Svavelvinter på grund av det där nya spelet. Det är ändå ganska lätt att hitta det antar jag.
Jag fattar inte varför de inte har släppt sina trudvang-böcker varken som vanliga ebooks eller fysiska böcker. Hela den där grejen med Riot Online känns helt onödig och krånglig.

Do you know anything about Ur Varselklotet/Tales from the Loop? Because I heard some buzz about it recently and it looks pretty dope.

>Symbaroum
I really like this one, I hope I can it someday

> a horror game called Kult (unsure if it's the same as the american one) among a bunch of other stuff
It's the same, or at least used to be. The Swedish version is the original that got licensed out and translated.

>Funnily enough, I'm also the guy who needs river material. Do you remember what it was called?
No, but I guess I can go to that horrible shithole and look for it. Give me half an hour or so and pay a priest to say a mass for me if I don't return.

Not really, but I do like Simon Stålenhags art. The game doesn't really appeal to me and I'm not that interested in getting new games right now.

That would be really nice of you, and I'll be sure to pay the priest double.

I just want to say that I'm not dead yet but I had to go into some archived old version of the WRNU forums where searches is restricted for some reason. So it might be a while just because I'm only allowed one search every five minutes or whatever.

The Fantasy Trip, which was literally proto-GURPS, was actually released before OD&D.

Just don't get lost in the warp, user!

Before AD&D, but not OD&D - Melee came out in '77, the LBBs in '74. Also, incidentally, after Metamorphosis Alpha got released in '76, or Boot Hill ('75)

Okay, I found it. The board's being a fag about the URL and calling it spam, sorry about the chopping.

oldsite rollspel nu/forum/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/884632/

Less good content than I thought but there's a bizarre table in there someone could probably translate pretty easily.

Oops

This is definitely helpful, thanks for finding it! rollspel.nu sure is a weird place.

It's mostly pretentious faggotry and gender nazism for some reason. I tried to lurk it for like years but it was such total shit I eventually realized there were less toxic places online.

So I came here.

It genuinely is much less toxic.

alternative to fighters having extra attack for 1hd monsters?

Roll a die roughly equal to your level. You kill that many 1HD enemies.

This is apparently how Gygax eventually handled it. It's got some nice simplicity, I suppose.

In ACKS a fighter can make an extra attack if they killed their original target and the new target was within 5 feet of it. They can also move 5 feet in between attacks. It can be done a number of times equal to their level.
This can lead to a high level fighter wading through a swarm of goblins with bodies flying everywhere.

How long is an ACKS round?

Why do you acks?

For OD&D I think the best alternative (and also the superior reading to "1 HD monsters") is to give extra attacks against normal man-type monsters (see the Chainmail discussion at the start of the thread for what that might mean; basically it's "any ranked troop").

In B/X or BECMI, since the Basic round is 1/6 as long as the OD&D round you kind of can't adapt directly without producing absurd results. My suggestion would be using a progressively increasing attack bonus against low-HD or man-type monsters instead, or just using BECMI Weapon Mastery, which is crazy powerful and honestly, would most likely need quite a bit of reining in.

Because of the above. It's weird if ACKS has a six- or ten-second round and lets you take eight 5' steps and nine attacks in that time if you're eighth level.

in sword and wizardy, the classes say something like prime attribute, are those the requisites for creating a character of that class? or just for th 5% bonus?

>That Dungeon Fantasy boxset looks pretty sexy, though.
agreed, I wish I had been able to back the kickstarter, but I'll still be getting it when it comes out

Rounds are 10 seconds in ACKs. A buff 10th level fighter killing a goblin a second as he charges through a horde of them sounds awesome to me though.

I haven't actually read S&W, but based on the original game it clones it's almost certainly just the requisite for getting the XP bonus.

>A buff 10th level fighter killing a goblin a second as he charges through a horde of them sounds awesome to me though.
Fair. It sounds less gritty-realistic than I like my game to be, but it's certainly not a worse kind of superhuman than Disintegrate in any general sense.

There's a pretty fun one that gives extra dice for stat generation in the Hill Cantons Compendium II. My players have dug it.

About fighters:

>What games have good fighter classes?
>What games have cool maneuvers available for martial classes?

more questions about s&w, how much time does it requires to prepare an spell? after casting it you have to wait a day to prepare it again?

Dungeon Crawl Classic has the Warrior class with the great Mighty Deed mechanic.

>all of the best mechanics got branded as Product Identity

Really, Goodman?

Dude, it doesn't mean anything anyway, rules can't be copyrighted, you don't need the OGL to clone the piss out of games, and Goodman don't have enough money to HASBRO CRUSH you with lawyers. Just steal that shit.

Literally this. A giant fights as 12 heavy foot, though hits for an additional die in melee. 12 cumulative 'kill' rolls take him out. It's right in the book, guys.

Are there any fun beastfolk OSR classes around? By beastfolk, I mostly mean wolfmen, catmen, lizardmen, etc

It's a stretch, but I could use some for LotFP if there are any, but they'd be nice for LL as well.

So i'm wracking my brain on how to do a more science fantasy post-apocalyptic game. I want weird magic, and mutants, and playable androids, and the like. I had a look at Mutant Future, and I like it except it doesn't have any magic users, just mutations that are like super powers. I'm considering doing a race as class kind of thing for Androids, but i'm not sure

This is an entire book dedicated to OSR animal races.

...

Look at the end of the Mutant Future book in the "Mutants & Mazes". It's an amalgamation of Mutant Future and Labyrinth Lord. Puts the MF races, powers and HP levels on par with the LL ones. I used it to run a short campaign set in Ralph Bakshi's "Wizards" setting.

And of course you can use DCC with the Crawling Under a Broken Moon zines (or wait til' MCC comes out).

I did, but it states that Androids beyond Replicants aren't good for PCs. I want to ignore that and make it possible, but I don't know how.

Maybe use this version of an OSR Android?
drivethrurpg.com/product/182508/PC6--The-OSR-Android

How did I miss this. Thanks buddy, I'll look for the pdf now.

Today I learned that a swedish edition of D&D included a duck demihuman class.

Those scandinavians sure love their donald duck.

Glorantha strikes again.

It was just a race actually. DoD didn't really have race-as-class.

Got it, a friend just sent me that picture but I don't know its details.

If you want some random lore, I can tell you that white ducks are generally merchants, black ducks are usually warriors and brown ducks are often pirates.

Runequest clone actually

There's also The Black Hack which has a bunch of mechanics I really enjoy, and for the Rad Hack which isn't in the trove strangely. It's like 6 dollars on Drive Thru RPG, but for 38 pages of content i'm not sure that's worth it.

Has anyone where played Silent Legion? I don't know much about it and was curious about how it plays/how complicated or simple it is. I could read Stars Without Numbers since it says they're compatible, but another thread said that Stars Without Numbers has a lot of poorly written rules, but that appears to be an anti-OSR thread.

help please

What's a good number of monsters for a bestiary? I've currently got 57 that I'm going to write up and I'm wondering how many more I should add.

Is there a table/equipment list out there that's specific to post-apocalyptic games? Im looking for weirder sorts of weapons like the crafted weapons in Fallout, Dead Rising, and Let it Die.

Not sure about Swords & Wizardry in particular, but it's typically something like: a full night's sleep and an hour of meditation replenishes your spells.

>after casting it you have to wait a day to prepare it again?
You have to sleep and meditate in order to put a new spell in that now-empty spell slot, but if you want, you can memorize the same spell multiple times (filling multiple slots).

The MCC book will probably have some good tables in it.

Yeah but is there anything that's available today?