/osrg/ OSR General - New Monsters Edition

I think it's because they are the main character archetypes you see in most fantasy literature. How many series have a cleric as a protagonist?

Not but its a really common thing (mostly in vidya) but I think it has a lot of merit.

Considering the adventuring lifestyle there are basically 3 things you're doing all the time. Fighting, Bypassing obstacles, and Magic. Each of the classes falls in line pretty well with each objective. Additionally, each one is useful in combat to some extent; we can extrapolate the fighter as being the tank, the Rogue as being a kind of sneaky damage guy and the Wizard as magical damage artillery/crowd control. Each one also covers the primordial stats; Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence. If you reduced all that stats down to what is most inseparably different about them, you would get something like those three. Pretty much all ancient legends and lore involves either really strong dudes, really sneaky dudes, or really magical smart dudes. Obviously there is overlap here but it's a very nice clear-cut triangle of three classes.

Naturally the Cleric fucks up this natural order by doing things that the other classes are meant to do, as opposed to the ordered perfection of the class-triangle.

Three is just a magic number man, I don't know how to explain it any better.

...

Horror, I guess? Like Dracula and The Exorcist.

I dunno, you're making some kind of odd stances here. It might be a perfect trifecta for something else, but for old school D&D I'm not so sure. What's this idea about "primordial stats"? Primordial how? You basing each classes merit on their combat ability is also very weird.

That thing about legends and lore seems kind of cherrypicked too.

Stars Without Numbers has some solid architecture tables, as well as some other tables for creature creation, NPCs, and races. Godbound has stuff for random monster tactics (read actions taken in combat), though I'm not sure if that's something you would find useful. There's the Encounter user who's a mastermind, and showers these threads with reliably high quality encounters. Finally I want to highlight the blogs Elfmaids & Octopi and Goblin Punch who both have a million interesting and thought provoking tables to rip from.

Do you mean to tell me that this is a good way to look at D&D classes?

>I dunno, you're making some kind of odd stances here

Well to be fair I'm basically just trying to justify my own beliefs. So you'll have to excuse me.

By 'primordial' I mostly mean if you reduced every attribute and rolled them together I would imagine you would end up somewhere with Strength, Dex and Intelligence as your stats.

You could argue that Strength and Constitution go together, a general whole body wellness. You could also argue that Charisma and/or Wisdom could be folded into Intelligence for a total Mind stat, but what about Dexterity? You can't really mix that in with mind because its more of a body/coordination thing but you can't really mix it in with Body either because that's how we differentiate people. As far as people go we know Smart people, Strong people, and Dexterous/Graceful people. It's just a good grouping to use, even if it is somewhat a cherrypicking sort of thing.

I just really like the idea of being forced along using a class that does fighting ok and magic ok, like the cleric. I don't like that. I want classes that are broad and reductionalist as possible.

I understand if it's your personal preference, but I personally can't really see the appeal of what you're talking about. I think classes are a bit more than their proficiency in fighting and magic, since this game about dungeoncrawling has to do with a lot of other stuff and has been balanced on account of that. I also think that putting stats in categories that don't really have anything to do with the game is kind of poorly thought out too. I mean, I get that the idea of the game rules resembling some sort of deep fundamental tripartite theory of the body, soul and mind is very appealing, but is this actually making the game better or does it just block discussion of actual balance and rule issues?

>How much of your games happens outside "crawls"?
Most of it. The PCs own a ship, although they have taken part in a couple Vornheim-style neighborhood crawls and "Forgive Us".

>Do you have an ongoing intrigue that the PCs are caught up in or do you focus purely on the dungeon delving?
Most of the intrigue is payer-generated. They've pissed off a few powerful/influential NPCs and are getting involved in national politics, although they've also abandoned a couple of really juicy plot hooks as too much effort.
I do use a Coincidence Dice system; I forget who I stole it from (it sounds like one of Rients' ideas). Basically any time there could be a reasonable literary coincidence where none currently exists, roll a d6. On a 6, it happens. For example, a generic plotting Frenchie-on-the-run in one port popped a six when the French player (a former Royalist agent) ran into him; post Reaction roll, I determined that the NPC was a French agent of the Queen and former ally of the PC, before a disastrous falling-out in the court set them both to flight. Now they're conniving to get back in the Royal good graces, while another pair of PCs is tits-deep in a brewing slave revolt and the rest are mostly trying to score drugs and pussy.

>Do you roleplay shopkeepers or do you give your players an item list?
At creation, players get a list just to keep things fast and fair.

Once you're in-play, I roleplay. Have a system for dealing with them:

>Shopkeeper reaction system
Hostile: Refuses to deal with any PC(s) present. Charges at least double if forced to deal, and will gleefully slander them to other shopkeepers/town watch if possible.
Unfreindly: 1d10x10% surcharge on all goods. Will be surly and uncooperative, and require extensive bribes or other convincing to find rare items.
Indifferent: (1d6-1d6)x10% surcharge/discount. Will not go out of his way for PCs unless tipped.

>What's the most interesting monster you've ever seen?
The Sussurus if we're just talking gimmicks.

>Or clever take on a classic monster?
Ravenloft's Halfling Vampires, who are repelled by tobacco smoke and fire-places.

>Indifferent
should be "neutral". Also, in all cases a "0" on the D10 indicates a zero, NOT a ten. Positive is a surcharge, negative a discount.

Indifferent: (1d6-1d10)x10% surcharge/discount on all items. If prompted, will look for/order rare stock or otherwise help PCs. May buy stock from them, depending on quality and heat.

Friendly: 1d6x10% discount on purchases. Will suggest useful items, even if he doesn't carry them, and provide recommendations to other shopkeepers in town (+1 bonus to Reaction rolls and general quality of items).

>How many series have a cleric as a protagonist?
Le Morte d'Artur, especially the sections dealing with Percival and Galahad. Gawaine is some kind of Warlock/patronized by an Earth deity. Roland is a Cleric, as are most of the "holy knights" in European romance. Note that they're heavily-contrasted with the more Earthly warriors, like Kay and Bors. Arabian stories have a crap-load of them, in particular the Thousand and One Nights, usually portrayed as mendicant warriors.

>>Somewhat setting A-Neutral (implied priesthood and not!catholic church)
It implies >only< a religion that has Holy warriors.
Sikhs, Moslems, Hindus, Zoroastirans, Mithrains, and many African or American native cultures have similar traditions of wandering warrior-mystics who heal, oppose evil magic with their own more Lawful charms, and shank a motherfucker, while still not being especially Thiefly or Magey, and more magical than a straight fighter.

Clerics are NOT priests.
They were never meant to be; they're holy warriors and monster hunters with a god over their shoulders.
It's only in the Satanic Panic and after the creation of the Paladin in 1e pushes them out of their niche that they start going there, and then 2e wasting half of a book to create a bunch of more "priestly" kits.

I really don't mind an Evil High Priest/White Wizard/White Mage/Priest class based on the Magic-user, but the Holy Warrior is a different thing than the good old Murderer we all know and love as the Fighter.

>Class suggestion
It's an okay idea, if a bit simplistic at this stage,
Just have Rites be efficacious only once per day, and they must be performed with believers in attendance. If you really want to be mean, use something like the Force Points system from WEG d6 Star Wars, where you lose points/have them corrupted when you do things opposed to your deity and only uncorrupt them with great services.

>Complaining that clerics messed up the natural order
>Not the thief
>Probably doesn't realize the original three classes were fighting-man, magic-user and cleric

>What are some good classic TSR modules?

I'm fond of:
B1 - In Search of the Unknown
B4 - The Lost City
I1 - Dwellers in the Forbidden City
I2 - Tomb of the Lizard King
WoG04 - Forgotten Temple of Tharizduin (it's just FUN, damnit).

So, my OD&D digest came, and I have two questions, /osrg/.

One, does anybody have a similar link to a Chainmail? I have a serious need for the proper combat rules now.

And two, what the hell happened? Why did so many of the *really good* rules in OD&D just fall by the wayside? LBBs get a lot of (mostly deserved) flak for being unclear, but I can't remember ever seeing clearer or simpler overland travel rules. Even Basic manages to make them clunkier somehow. Where did the rules for evading monsters and for inhabitants of castles go? Why do the djinn and efreet suck compared to the straight LBB ones in every other edition? (That is, they suck in implementation, not in terms of power level. On the contrary, their power level rising made them worse.) And so on, and so on.

Dulac is *the* GOAT but your scans are terrible.

Are you TroveGuy? If so, did I ever send you my Martyr class for Basic?

>Dulac is *the* GOAT but your scans are terrible.
I agree, I should probably hunt some more up. I've just been on a Harry Clarke kick recently when I'm not writing (how the fuck did ~10,000 words come out of my hands in the last two weeks, and why did I have to delete half of them?).

>how the fuck did ~10,000 words come out of my hands in the last two weeks, and why did I have to delete half of them?
Fuckin' nice, what are you writing?

Right now, as far as I know it's a lack of *any* content, not a specific kind. There's a small amount but not enough to fill pages.

Nope, I'm just the OP. If you're not sure if you've sent something already, just try again. If there are edits to the previous version submitted, note them it in some capacity or a revision number. I'm sure it will help TroveGuy spot the changes.

Can anyone suggest any good OSR podcasts? Not actual plays, just discussions.

I've listened to some Save or Die and Roll for Initiative so far.

Does anyone have; Blood & Treasure 2nd Edition Monsters?

It's not in the OSR Trove

IT BEGINS

Bunch of different shit. I'm still transcribing some of my old notes and rules from back in the '90s, and revising them for modern play, plus I'm writing up a toolkit book full of random shit that I use during play so I can finally get it all out of my head.

Highlights (subject to change):
• "Wunderkammer" system for nerds who want to Carouse but also want to spend money on things like spells.
• A series of essays on treasure and alternate stuff to make hoards more interesting, along with a bunch of treasure tables (this got lost when my tablet got stolen last week, I hadn't backed it up to my desktop yet)
• Those Familiar rules I posted the back-of-the-envelope notes for last week.
• An ongoing project to make an NPC-generation supplement that doesn't suck, either by being too goddamned clunky to actually use, or too sparse to be useful. Goal is to combine it with some stuff I've already done on generating wizards and make a publishable book (see: wp.me/p2mOz7-pR )
• Writing up administrative shit for my next campaign session, which my players have made vastly more-complicated than it needs to be. As long as I can get all the fuckers in one place for long enough to start a game, anyway..

Stop asking, if you haven't found it only 4/7/ 4+4 or here it probally doesn't exsist, so stopnasking about shitty retroclones, when there is REAL D&D to be discussed.

Retroclones were a mistake anyway, a bunch of fucking pathetic nerds who are trying to scam other 40-50 basement-dwellers by selling them their homebrew.

It's like Pathfinder

>Combat Maneuvers allows you to reduce enemy's AC by one OR make the next attack they take gain an additional attack die.

Wouldn't making an opponent gain an attack die be a losing move?

I like the armor simplification but the extra AC modifiers seem weird.

Fresh and spicy.

In my TSR Trove...

I completely redid Chainmail 3rd print from scratch, and it now matches the format of the OD&D Premium Editions (which are also on there). And I even did a whitebox version that is made from the Premium Editions, but changed back to all the 6th print version including what WOTC removed.

bitdo/TSRTrove

Then I have white background covers of all these so they can be printed on colored paper.

bitdo/HomebrewDesign

Isn't it here

mega.nz/#F!7xdGUDaR!DAHjel-07Eq__KdJAHPgXw!ngFxWJRJ

No only the first edition of it

>Wouldn't making an opponent gain an attack die be a losing move?

I'll need to reword that.

>I like the armor simplification but the extra AC modifiers seem weird.

This is somewhat intentional; I want the stats of all characters to play in to what equipment they use, not just fighters.

This is exactly my point, we live a shitty world where fat grongards repackage D&D dozens or hundreds of times to resell like your mothers rotten cunt to every sailor on shoreleave.

We should just bann all retroclones and tell those shitty fucks that if they don't like how we play D&D they should just fuck on back to pathfinder and leave us to proper discussion of the original and best edition of D&D.

Better WotC should actually do their fucking jobs and rescind the OGL, then we wouldn't have to deal with Pathfinder or the endless stale retreads of chetoos-stain personal wank material called OSR.

>"Wunderkammer" system
Sounds cool. Does it basically entail buying weird shit like mummified crocodiles, human-skin belts and huge bits of coral for your weird-crap cabinet and then the cabinet counts toward the value of your lab, or something?

>my tablet got stolen last week
God dammit, hate that. Sorry to hear it, OSRbro.

>Familiar rules
I missed these, kinda skipped a bunch of threads when they got all spergy there for a bit. Standard familiars, or is it more like a historical-style familiar-spirit thing where their main function is to help you with spells?

>dat map
I like the Kirby Krackle coastline and the Western ship a lot, but the dating is almost certainly off; it shows the flag of the Hospitallers over Mdina and apparently Valletta on Sciberras in the Grand Harbour, which makes it post-1570. Even if those are just supposed to be the forts that still dates it to post-1530 when the Order took over the island.

>proper discussion of the original and best edition of D&D.
So, not AD&D.

Thanks! I don't have a Lulu account and don't know diddly about how to put up private books, though. (Plus, I already have a PDF edition of Chainmail, I guess I was unclear but I was asking for a digest print like the one user posted for OD&D and the supplements a few threads back)

>Better WotC should actually do their fucking jobs and rescind the OGL
they legally can't rescind either the OGL or the SRD

>it's an 'anything I don't like is pathfinder' episode

...

I'm sure the new american administration would be happy to give an american company sole market dominace.

So since I started the topic, does anyone have a scan of the Second edition Blood & Treasure Monster book?

can an open world sandbox game be properly run in OSR?

>reading The Horde
>a paragraph or two of clever material sandwich between dozens of pages of boring encyclopedia entries

Is this just a hallmark of 2e FR? I don't remember Maztica or Ravenloft being this bloated.

I like the traditional d20 vs target AC combat system, but is there a way to avoid the endless AC inflation that happens at later levels?

>can an open world sandbox game be properly run in OSR?
...Yes? That's the default assumption.

man have you even played games that aren't modern d&d
so many don't have that

I am a 3.5 babby and reading a few OSR books including AD&D I was under the assumption it was tailored for dungeon crawls and modules mostly.

>traditional d20 vs target AC combat system
Ascending AC ain't traditional.

>is there a way to avoid the endless AC inflation that happens at later levels
Make modifiers smaller, set up a hard limit (like AC 30 or something)

Traditionally dungeon crawls are aimed at low and high levels. Mid levels get tasty wilderness adventures and hexcrawls. And of course AD&D 2e kinda abandoned the dungeon crawl as time went on. There's a reason WOTC tried to hype the "BACK TO THE DUNGEON" meme.

Oh, I get it. Well, the explanation is that old-school D&D kind of expects you to center your game on one central megadungeon with a hexcrawl around it, with no "plot" or anything like that in evidence (story is created by the crazy shit players get up to -- obviously NPCs will have motivations and do things as the game goes on, but not in a way where you're obliged to give a fuck). So, the two things gameplay focuses on is dungeon exploration and wilderness exploration. In original D&D ("OD&D", "LBB") there's a clear expectation that characters will level up into rulers of provinces and commanders of armies in a wargame, basically, and of course that involves hexmaps and shit extensively. But yeah, absolutely the dungeon play is also crucial. In the base style, that is -- you don't have to use it.

Modules, though, are actually something that never really sat totally well with the creators of the game themselves, and were produced mainly because they sold like hotcakes, since it ended up that lots of players were babbies or literal children who couldn't make good campaigns on their own. Old-school rules are not really optimized for module play at all.

>Sounds cool. Does it basically entail buying weird shit like mummified crocodiles, human-skin belts and huge bits of coral for your weird-crap cabinet and then the cabinet counts toward the value of your lab, or something?
Basically, yeah. I'm also writing up a Carousing-style "complications" table for it, and granting XP. Penalties are a little harsher, since you're getting more out of it, but I was having real problems with the Magic-users (and other nerds) falling behind the rest of the party in XP simply because the player didn't feel that riotous partying was in-character. And now I have players in bidding wars over two-headed calf skeletons and shit, so it's all good.

>Familiar rules
Semi-historical, semi-spirit stuff. Basically natural animals are easier to bind, but ultimately more limited and fragile; supernatural familiars are harder to find and harder to keep but more useful. I'm also referencing hte Homunculus rules from England Upturn'd, with an eye to Khoura from Golden Voyage of Sinbad instead of Kabbalah.

>Map dating
Yeah, I wasn't certain of the exact date, since it came up in an academic discussion of ship designs, and the Knights of Malta aren't exactly one of my specialties.

>can an open world sandbox game be properly run in OSR?
Absolutely. So can a pointcrawl. It's all about how you present shit.

See LotFP's combat rules for one way to avoid it (Fighter is the only one to get additional bonuses to-hit, various weapons ignore some or all armor, no +AC magic items). HP bloat is still an issue, but you're not dealing with the geometric effect of unhittable characters with more HP than a stone tower.

Since we're talking about it, what game has your favorite Cleric + Cleric spell list?

It's cool that you're doing this. I just don't know OSR well enough to write anything.

>As arcanists advanced in level, they gained access to a greater number of arcs. These arcs equated to the number of spell levels that the caster could cast in a single day. In addition, an arcanist’s level dictated how deep into the weave he could go for spells (the maximum level of spell he could learn or cast).

From Netheril: Empire of Magic. An interesting variant of the traditional M-U. Clerics use the same system but with winds/wind depth instead of arcs/weave depth.

I really like DaS's magic systems. Pyromancy in particular can be dropped in almost any campaign.

Cletus, look at all them kids on your lawn!

He's a cuck

>Murder
>Killing any creature in Karsus imposed a steep penalty, normally the loss of the guilty party’s own life. Unlike most cities, however, even the death of a cat could prove a fatal offense (archwizards got very upset when their familiars were slain).
>Archwizard Ruler: This entailed a painful, torturous death and the resurrection of the offender. This cycle was continued (varying the death each time) until the creature’s body could no longer be brought back to life (a failure of a Resurrection Survival or System Shock roll). Then the criminal was reincarnated and then forced through a planar conduit into the Elemental Plane of Fire.

Check the DMG, natural weapon speed factor depends on size category.

>What are some good classic TSR modules?
I'm partial to the S series--Tomb of Horrors, White Plume Mountain, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth--though they're pretty special snowflakey, for good or for ill.

Question for Encounter Tables user, whenever you might appear: what's up with the low HD in your Great Wall table? I didn't see anything going above 4, even for the giants, immortal warriors and such.

Also, what do you use to make your PDFs? I'd like to be able to make some simple ones, too.

I was referring to OSR systems, but I'd love to put a Sunlight Spear style cleric spell in my homebrew.

You said it, it's just a meme really. Many people don't want to add the skill system magician (thief) into their games and stick to the original three of Fighting Man, Cleric and Magic User.

How should ancient magic scrolls and towers be handled in a setting where most magic these days either comes from a quartet of prestigious arcane schools or passed down from tribal chants, hymns, and introspective spirit quests with nature.

Well, to tell you the truth I think most monsters and encounters should be geared to low level characters, so that anyone can pull out the encounters list and go to town.

Secondly? My not so solidified rules don't involve people doing much more damage or getting much more health at higher levels, so I don't like inflating health pools too much.

Maybe I'll make a high powered monster or encounter list, just for you.

My program is open office. Just a shitty littlw thing with the ability to have columns and export to pdf

It's really about pulp S&S stereotypes. The Cleric was invented as a Van Helsing figure to deal with a specific gameplay problem (viz., Sir Fang) in Blackmoor, which was pretty wobbly and even silly (Super Berries, Blue Bill, Marfeldt the Barbarian, I could go on) thematically, so clerics don't have much of a basis in the fiction, albeit they have much better *mechanical* underpinnings in OD&D. Thieves and rogues are everywhere, however, much like warriors and magic-users are. So in that way the trifecta makes a lot of intuitive sense.

>My program is open office.
Oh, OO can do PDF conversions/save as PDF? I guess I'm downloading that now, then.

Oh, also, I don't really need high power encounters. I was just curious about your thinking.

So can LibreOffice, which is better.

>better.
Explain.

It's a fork of OpenOffice. OO has stagnated, the community all jumped ship to LibreOffice.

howtogeek.com/187663/openoffice-vs.-libreoffice-whats-the-difference-and-which-should-you-use/
Basically, LibreOffice can steal all the good features from OpenOffice, but not the other way around. LO development is also faster than OO.

They're sudden and chaotic. Their effects are greater when wielded by those outside of modern magical traditions because their minds have not been tainted by fail-safe programming.

As an example of what the above are talking about - LibreOffice can save as a decent version of .docx, while OO.org fails miserably without extensive plugin fuckery.

OO.org is dead, man, it's Apache OO now.

Only True AD&D can be superior for only True AD&D encompasses all rules from the 1970s into the next millennium.

>the original True AD&D claimed that the WotC takeover was the cutoff point
>in other words this one's demonstrably not the same guy
This is some Subcomandante Marcos type shit.

Wow, Ronin's Challenge is really fucking weird.

How many other adventures have the boss fight be all your PCs controlling a single dragon while fighting a giant head that spits streams of bones? It's pity the set-up is so boring though.

I've been the Prophet of True AD&D since 2007 at least. Summer of 2000 has always been the cutoff. WotC did nothing to harm 2E until they destroyed it in order to sell an inferior ruleset (3rd edition). Lorraine Williams was the villain. This is our doctrine.

Oh you done it now boy.

>there has only ever been one Subcomandante Marcos, the mask is Marcos
Yeah yeah, I know.

Yay, for Gygax did return in Dragon Magazine Annual after the defeat of Lorraine Williams by the superior monies of Wizards of the Coast. And lo, did Gygax finally speak to the fans once more as a game designer, and reveal secrets of Castle Greyhawk. For the Lump was dead, and True AD&D could finally continue unfettered—until WotC became turncoats and destroyed True AD&D. But True AD&D can never die, and is now immutable. Only House Rules can threaten it.

True AD&D is a Platonic Form and the AD&D we play is but a shadow of its ideal concept. One may only approach True AD&D asymptotically.

>One may only approach True AD&D asymptotically.
Which I do through the Heartbreaker. And thus the Heartbreaker is at once the Truest of the Deeundees and the falsest.

Give me your ideas for OSR fighter "feats"

Weapon specific feats
I.e. due to their martial expertise, fighters get extra benefits from a weapon other classes don't. Such as when a fighter wields a shortsword, he gets one extra attack per round or when a fighter uses a polearm and attacks a foe with (acending) AC above 15, is calculated as if it were 15.
tl;dr Fighter exclusive bonuses for each type of weapon.
Don't know how multiclassing would work with this idea tho.

Encounter Table user here again- any requests?

various town/village festivals and observances?

So then, people of the OSR thread, should I make classes for this shitty homebrew I'm planning or do a pick'n'mix talent system like Godbound mortals?

Vicious hares and bunny rabbits.

why did you post a picture of a vagina?

Witches, and things associated with Witches

Just make a whole bunch of shitty specific classes. Whacko and weird but fun and engaging.

Don't even give an option for Fighters or Clerics. Naw man, you're a Shield Bearer or a Medium.

Specific classes all the way. I like them even though it's not the default way to go.