/osrg/ OSR General - Simply Making the Thread Edition

>1. He's a fucking dragon in a human form, duh.
Alternatively, he's a dragon otherkin.

>He's a fucking dragon
Actually he is fucking a dragon and his new woman requires outrageous amounts of gold to be happy

Encounters in an unfinished dungeon!
1. 3d6 construction workers on a break, plus 1d3 engineers. Will raise alarm if disturbed.
2. Suddenly, [1d6, 1 = magma, 2-5 = water, 6 = slime] starts gushing in through a poorly placed wall!
3. Muffled screams can be heard from behind the freshly constructed walls.
4. A shipment of specially bred dungeon vermin! Including, but not limited to, man-eating roaches, giant rats, and normal bats.
5. A mortar and plaster golem appears. Then a wall collapses.
6. The Evil Duke himself, escorted by 4 bodyguards and 1 engineer.

Misread this as he's an actual dragon and that that bitch of princess he kidnapped is nagging him for more expensive shit.

It is not inherently evil but some sects want to merge every worker in the world together.

Because the even eviler archduke is going to seize his lands and conscript his population if he doesn't pay up a sizeable carucage. Next year, the archduke will raise the taxes even further, and the duke won't be able to pay even if he 100% taxes his people.

To force one of them to defeat him and rise up as a hero, who may be powerful enough to defeat a greater evil.

Evil duke is actually heroically sacrificing himself.

reading guns of war from ACKS, and other versions of firearms rules for OSR, I don't feel like they add anything mechanically. Penetrating armor is fiddly and annoying to adjudicate on the fly, and the damage being comparable to bows despite having such a slow rate of fire just makes them boring additions to the game.

I want fantasy firearms. The kind where you shoot once per battle since it's so fiddly to load, but hits blows a fist-sized hole trough an ogre and makes so much noise everyone in the field is deaf for a round.

I want a BOOMSTICK.

I mean it's a fantasy game. Why are the guns so boring and realistic?
I don't want to go full katana pasta here but I want guns to be something players will want to use, even the ones that are mostly melee, just for the first volley before charging ahead.

So lets have it:
>Fantasy Firearms: They use powdered magical runes instead of blackpowder, and bullets inscribed with runes.
>Reloading: Fantasy firearms takes 10 full rounds to reload (1 entire minute). Cannot be reloaded in battle.
>Damage: Musket: 3d6, pistol 2d8, handcannon: 6d6 (think a one-use per battle wand of fireballs).
>prices: Cannot be bought, should be added to the treasure table to be randomly rolled. (so I don't have to balance prices cause fuck that)
>Ammo: 20 rune-inscribed bullet+ enough powdered runes to shoot 20 times costs 1000gp

before you tell me it's unbalanced, I'm not good at balancing so I'm 100% welcome to ideas on how to balance it. The basic idea is: A huge damage spike at round 1, then you have to go melee. The guns themselves should be rare enough that the usual "bandoleer of pistols" tactic to avoid reloading is impractical, and Ammo should be so expensive players will really want to save their shots until they absolutely have to use it.

Of course, there would also be regular guns in the setting, using the standard rules. These would just be the gun equivalent of a +2 or +3 magical sword

That's the worst plan I have ever heard.

A political rival has captured the Duke's son and heir in battle. If he doesn't pay the ransom, his heir will waste away in the rival's dungeons.

Despite having a reputation for being evil (and possibly even the actual alignment), he isn't doing this out of maliciousness, and knows full well its eroding his feudal relationship with his people.

AD&D 2e had firearms rules. There was a rule (and I'm not now sure what book it was from) where firearms dice exploded, making them something of a gamble.

You might get a roll that explodes several times, and kills your target in one hit. Or you might roll a 1.

>firearms dice exploded

Now I have a stupid idea: if exploded dice result in a more damage than maximum possible damage from a natural roll, it hurts the shooter. Derp, literally explosion.

that seems cool

It's that or start burning down farmsteads to create orphans, and this way you get something out of it at least.

Please considering contributing to Troll Gods, /OSRG/'s very own fanzine.

...

This. Why would he need an excuse? He wants velvet pants and a gold bathtub, who the fuck ever needed more reason than that to take what they can?

These are the retroclones I have downloaded and read:

>ACKS
>AS&SoH (Thats what I call long name)
>Basic Fantasy
>Beyond the Wall
>Blood & Treasure
>Crypts and Things (remastered)
>Dark Dungeons
>DCC
>Exemplars & Eidolons
>Grey Matter
>Holmes Other Game
>Into the Odd
>LL
>LotFP
>Myth & Magic
>Star without Number
>S&W
>Old School Hack
>OSRIC
>Rabbits & Rangers
>Renegade
>Spears of the Dawn

What other systems would recommend me to check out? I love races-as-multiple-classes, unusual and weird settings and I prefer games that don't go beyond level 15, I also prefer basic D&D than AD&D. But you can suggest whatever you want, I just want to read more for inspiration and get new ideas of how to do things

>What other systems would recommend me to check out?
Hm, I think mostly just OD&D to see how compact you can actually make the whole game.

Then after that I'd start looking at setting books instead if I were you -- notably Carcosa and Yoon-Suin.

Dungeon World and Torchbearer

>I'd start looking at setting books instead if I were you -- notably Carcosa and Yoon-Suin.
I already checked both, I was going to make this question (good setting books) later

>Dungeon World and Torchbearer
I didn't mention these because they aren't retroclones, but I read both already. MouseGuard is better than torchbearer IMO and DW is not as good as AW, it's core system

But DW is just PbtA with autism mods.

Incidentally, Torchbearer is BW with less autism.

Why do no adventurers ever seem to take a compass along?

I guess players tend to forget about it while making characters. I always pack one when it's available.

never seen it listed in the equipment section of any of the retroclones I've played so no one thinks of buying one.

Usually not on the equipment table. Seen as too advanced.

What's the main differences between Torchbearer and BW? Granted I like BW's basic rules.

Maybe the world you play in doesn't have the poles.

Maybe it's just easier to use minor magic.

Maybe your world simply isn't that advanced. I mean, fucking spyglass costs more that your life, Sir Murderhobo Jr.

I heard Torchbearer is simpler than BW, it also has race as class if I remember correctly

Gonna ask again just to be a lazy slob: does anyone have a link to an unlisted Lulu edition of Chainmail, or any suggestions about where one could find such a link?

Has any of this happened yet? I remember some noise about it like a year ago, but then someone got sick I think.

Because Sunstones are more period for most games. Also, because a compass is included in the Specialist's Tools for Seamanship.

1) If you would have peace, prepare for war.
2) Restoring Roman public works projects. The jackoffs out in the sticks don't see anything but slightly better roads, but the city he lives in is loyal to the death now that they have clean running water and a wall that can stop cannon shot.
3) His father made it so that traditional days of service could be bought off. The Duke increased the number of days because nobody wanted to actually do any work for him. The peasants are still getting more leisure time just paying his jerk ass off and the Duchy is falling to ruin.
4) He's an alchemist and made the mistake of shooting his mouth off to the King. Now he's trapped in a Ponzi scheme trying to find the real formula before his chickens come home to roost.

First issue is in the trove.

Awesome, thanks

I would change the Pabst in that image to Schlitz. Pabst is NOT good, just a solid RECENT advertising campaign south of the Mason Dixon line. Or maybe put something on the bottom left near the bong where a Pabst is being inserted into the bleached rectum of a millennial?

Is that like a sheet-rock golem?

You are a mean fucker to recommend Carcosa. I mean, I love it, but it's a place I stick players when they get inadvertently transported somewhere to very quickly die. Party fucks up and maybe should get TPK... but feeling soft? send them to Carcosa instead.

Is Castle of the Mad Archmage any good?

Not the user you're replying to, but I think Carcosa works best if you adapt it to your own purposes rather than running it as is. The setting really doesn't give you any reason to adventure, since there's no large settlements or cities where you can offload wealth.

I mean, after you've spent all that snek man gold on every color of prostitute (and maybe even a space alien or two) and you've managed to cobble together an arsenal of rayguns and take over some warlord's "stronghold" of 300 persons, what else is there to do except die horribly?

"As is" is fun for one-shots or short campaign though.

I like Carcosa's psionics. Very straight forward.

Ambitions & Avarice
Perdition

>The setting really doesn't give you any reason to adventure, since there's no large settlements or cities where you can offload wealth.
In fact, it's so gritty and horrible there's even a real problem with the concept of "wealth". Where does the gold come from and what does anybody do with it? Word of God the inhabitants are all stone-age primitives or professional archsadist Cthulhu cultists, so who mints coin or knows any other use for gold?

Carcosa is one of my best RPG purchases ever, but damn if the world as printed holds up internally to even five sessions' worth of play.

To me, Carcosa is one of those OSR darlings that is seriously overrated. The concept is metal as hell but most of the material is just so useless without tinkering I wonder why buy it at all instead of just sticking to the metal concept. And yeah, part of it is the helplessness of the setting - there is in fact fuck all you can do to even begin to improve things, and even something as simple as getting filthy rich is completely pointless.

Also the Sorcerer class is pretty much completely and utterly useless to PCs. Like, "why even present it as an option, just have sorcerer NPCs" useless. The requirements to do any magic whatsoever are just so insane it's inconceivable any sorcerer PC would live long enough to USE it in their career.

Is B/X available from lulu?

Any tips on running Play by post games?

I am sure this could be it's on entire thread. But I only trust people in this thread to give me valuable advice.

>Dungeon World
>OSR
You need to see somebody about that Int drain

Haven't ever done PbP it but I would definitely use simultaneous combat.

>simultaneous combat.
Interesting, never heard of that. Any links to specific articles I can read? I'll be doing some research.

Are there any systems that are optimized for PbP, OSR or otherwise? I've had some really good games using Wushu but Wushu is just a couple of lines above completely freeform RP.

I do too.

I think the bast thing one can do with OSR stuff is adapt it to your sensibilities, since nothing is ever going to be perfect as presented. In my own in-progress rework of the material, I'm setting up an adventure area around an inner sea with a bunch of city states with crazy forms of government and some stuff liberally stolen from Gor.

I wouldn't even use it. Everyone is a Fighter, and everyone can learn Sorcery. Done.

>I think the bast thing one can do with OSR stuff is adapt it to your sensibilities, since nothing is ever going to be perfect as presented. In my own in-progress rework of the material, I'm setting up an adventure area around an inner sea with a bunch of city states with crazy forms of government and some stuff liberally stolen from Gor.
I understand that, it's just that there's so much adapting I'd have to do for a Carcosa game I question the utility of the book itself. More power for you if it worked out, but I have trouble seeing how.

>after you've spent all that snek man gold on every color of prostitute (and maybe even a space alien or two) and you've managed to cobble together an arsenal of rayguns and take over some warlord's "stronghold" of 300 persons, what else is there to do except die horribly?
I remember reading a post by McKinney where he suggested nuking Shub-Niggurath as a possible endgame -- it's theoretically possible to do so with the stuff contained on the map. Shub-Niggurath is also stated or heavily implied to be at the bottom of a megadungeon full of spawned horrors, so in a D&D-gameplay context it makes sense. Still...

Personally I think the easiest solution is to make Carcosa itself an evil and decadent but functional and inhabitable city which functions as a home base for PCs. You could probably even get a lot of mileage out of PCs prying at the mysterious disconnect between the state of the city and the rest of the world.

>most of the material is just so useless without tinkering I wonder why buy it at all instead of just sticking to the metal concept
This I don't get at all, though. The psionics rules are the best ever, even if one finds the sorcery gross in its basic details the basic concept for it is amazing and he's done the huge work of implementing it, the hexcrawl's solid and the various other stuff (robots, rayguns, grey alien tech) is great too. There's a ton of out-of-the-box usable material.

The only thing I think is really flawed in its design is the dice conventions, because randomizing the damage die rolled for each attack is both super cumbersome AND precisely counteracts the randomness of rolling your hit die size. You can just as well skip the entire size-randomization part and just keep the "roll your HD in the beginning of each encounter part", and that's exactly what I do.

>Also the Sorcerer class is pretty much completely and utterly useless to PCs. Like, "why even present it as an option, just have sorcerer NPCs" useless. The requirements to do any magic whatsoever are just so insane it's inconceivable any sorcerer PC would live long enough to USE it in their career.
Plain wrong. Actually, not only that, but it's one of the most consistently functional motivators in the entire setting. Players can, will and have performed rituals.

Look through the Barf Froth Apocalyptica forums for a surprisingly brilliant little game called The Last Hours of Yhtill. It's a heavily ceremonialized, creepy game about playing decadent nobles in the crumbling city of Yhtill in the literal final hours before the King in Yellow arrives, reality breaks down and it turns into Carcosa. It starts with strange, ethereal masquerades in Halls of Gold and Lapis Lazuli, and all goes down from there as the debauched city dominos into insanity, depravity, mass murder and eventually cosmic destruction.

Like this user I think there's a lot of usable material out of the box. The robots, spawn of Shub Niggurath, and space alien tech are all great stuff that can be plundered as a toolbox for just about anything you want to do, so it has that going for it at least.

In my own reworking of the material, I'm using Vornheim to create the city states.

I don't think the dice conventions help either. They slow down play in my experience.

The power of sorcery being a motivation unto itself is one of the reasons I think sorcery is good.

>Look through the Barf Froth Apocalyptica forums
But I hate Vincent Baker, everything he stands for, and everything he's associated with!
It's because Seclusium of Orphone was so disappointing

Hey, it works for Stormbringer. The Sorcerer class itself is so naff, though. I agree with >I wouldn't even use it. Everyone is a Fighter, and everyone can learn Sorcery. Done.

I use Caracosa as an outpost of the Dreamlands, where decadent survivors of the last magic apocalypse hid out and waited for things to get better. And then got fucked over by their own bastardy and overuse of magic. Some of them escaped to Voivodja, which is an attempt by the Caracosans to create a realm comfortable for themselves.

The King in Yellow is one of a number of powerful rulers who used symbolism to avoid true-name magic. The Colorless Queen, the Cards, and the Queens in Red and Black are all native Caracosans. The Realm of the Twelve Medusas is on the other side from Earth. Not in an "east to west" sense, but more of an "other side of the mirror" sense.

The wealth of Caracosa is dreamstuff, but not completely symbolic, and the magic there is constrained by custom and the dangers of playing with Chaos in a realm where thinking too hard can distort reality. Which is why dumping Terran PCs into it is so much fun. especially if they piss off the cats..

apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=7514.0

One of the cleverer uses of the gamist nature of the Powered by the Apocalypse engine. The game takes place in two Acts, each 13 Hours long, counting down to the arrival of the King in Yellow. Over those 26 hours, disaster engulfs the city as feuds spiral into duels, hatred into murder attempts, death into familywide tragedy, orgies into riots and riots into civil war. The moves all change in Act 2, with each one having a direr form in which it's no longer possible to succeed without consequence and the consequences become worse and less controllable.

And in the end, everyone loses. It's only a matter of whether you went down in a fire.

Stormbringer allowed you to at least summon elementals fairly easily, so you can build up a sorcerous power base and gain some experience before advancing to more dangerous stuff. I don't remember if there's so much as a single ritual in Carcosa that doesn't require you to be in some highly specific, likely TPKingly dangerous location on an extremely unlikely time and make a mass sacrifice.

Here are the phases of a single round of combat in Moldvay's Basic D&D:

- Morale checks, if needed.
- Movement per round, meleed opponents may only move defensively (spell-casters may not move and cast spells).
- Missile fire combat.
- Magic spells.
- Melee or hand-to-hand combat.

To resolve combat phases simultaneously for all participants, you require a declaration of intent from each player at the beginning of each combat round. Once all players have posted their plans for the round you can resolve the action without additional input from the players. It's pretty simple really.

The guy asked for other systems for inspiration, he said nothing resembling "OSR only, guys!" And I notice you didn't say anything about him mentioning Torchbearer, which is about as close to OSR as Dungeon World.
Quit huffing memes, user, it's causing brain damage.

>I don't remember if there's so much as a single ritual in Carcosa that doesn't require you to be in some highly specific, likely TPKingly dangerous location on an extremely unlikely time and make a mass sacrifice.
Most of the locations are fully harmless. Also, not a single banishing ritual requires sacrifice and all of them are the exact opposite of dangerous.

In user's defense, the summoning rituals are probably the most memorable.

have you read Fantastic Heroes & Witchery's Firearms rules, I feel it makes early Firearms sufficiently deadly, and if you include the optional "Science-Fiction" weapons, then things get really deadly

Whitehack, Fantastic Heroes & Witchery, Pars Fortuna, The Nightmares Underneath, Hideouts & Hoodlums, Microlite 74(including it's expansions)

Oh, yeah, definitely; I mean, they're the key all the other types of ritual hinge on. But, still, they mostly don't take place in dangerous places, just at very specific times or similar. Most of the danger comes from fucking up due to having bad information, or doing something wrong for some other reason e.g. getting interrupted.

Well, that and if you don't have a binding prepared you may have just made a free Lovecraftian horror appear right next to you.

I used the setting of this module for flesh out Carcossa:
atlas-games.com/product_tables/AG3401.php

The idea was that the Emperor send the PCs to retrieve Orlando's sanity, which was basically the legendary hero's brain stolen by the mi-go.

>have you read Fantastic Heroes & Witchery's Firearms rules
nope.
is that in the trove?

here
found it, gonna take a look

Is that the one where Rabbi Lowe of Prague is the local Jewish Elminster?

More or less. He is one of the rival factions and the golem is certainly a meat grinder if you aren't careful.

>Whitehack
interesting

>Fantastic Heroes & Witchery and Hideouts & Hoodlums
Will check them

>Pars Fortuna and The Nightmares Underneath
Both have free rulebooks, great (no images though). Pars Fortuna is from the same people who made Blood & Treasure? I didn't like the later, hope this one is better.

>Microlite 74
I forgot about this one! Already read it, it isn't on my OSR folder tho, don't know why, maybe I deleted it

Why the dislike for Blood & Treasure? So far as retroclones go it's a fairly nice balance of minimalism and depth.

It's a cross between 2E (not oldschool) and 3E (utterly antithetical to oldschool), that's why.

Thought oldschool was a philosophy, not a system?

In a way it is, but
• that philosophy isn't equally well served by every system, and
• to the exact extent it's a philosophy, system's got nothing to do with it, so why would that side of it make people more likely to talk about Blood & Treasure than about 7th Sea, 4E or GURPS?

When someone says "this system is not oldschool", what he means is "this system does not, or I feel it does not, aid an oldschool playstyle, and may even get in the way a bunch".

I imagine it's cause while it has a lot of content, it's also kinda bland compared to most other OSR games

quiet you, we do not need more of those pointless "What is OSR" arguments ruining yet another OSR General

honestly at this point the only definition for what makes something OSR that even remotely works is that it has to be vaguely compatible with most other systems labled OSR and/or was published by TSR

>Race-AND-classes, not races-as-classes
>classes looks to much like 3e classes, but in the same time they don't bring interesting mechanics do diferentiate them
>Goes up to level 20, not my taste, I prefer lower levels
>Feats
>bland, not even one defining feature, why would I run this over other retroclones?

meant to

So how do you do combat maneuvers? Things other then attacks like grapples, disarming the enemy, pushing them away, slamming them to stun, knocking them to the ground, throwing sand in their face and so on.

I'm really not sure what system to use, but I have a few ideas. For one thing I want it to be a good option that anyone can use and that's useful, that something the Fighter is 'best' at but not the only one that can do it. (No mighty deeds dice, please.)

Currently I have two concepts;
>Sacrifice your attack, do a combat move
>Roll 19 or 20 on attack roll, get to do a free combat move against the enemy after you attack (this range increases for Fighters as they level)
>You get a combat move EVERY round along with your attack, for free

The last one I think is the most interesting though chaotic option. What do you think?

*three concepts

>What do you think?
I think both of your options #2 and #3 sound a lot like less good/manageable (a combat move every round, guaranteed?!) versions of just giving everyone a Mighty Deed die, but letting the Fighter's die be the biggest/the only one to increase. Honestly despite your embargo this is what I'd suggest, just handle it the same way hit dice work.

Player declares a maneuver and rolls their attack with Disadvantage (i.e. they roll the attack twice). If both hit, they perform the maneuver AND deal their damage. If one hits, they perform the maneuver OR deal their damage. If both miss, something bad happens (use your game's rules for fumbles, or just make something up Dungeon World style).

If the move is especially powerful, the player has to succeed with two to-hit rolls (but if a natural 20 is hit then that's enough)
Is the move is just something different, then only a normal to-hit roll is required.

I do a modified version of DCCs Mighty Deeds.

Well, I finally got to work writing down and codifying my Fighter feats. Sadly I only kept the most grounded and 'conservative' ones. Still, it's looking alright so far.

>If one hits, they perform the maneuver OR deal their damage.
Uhhhhhhhh
That effectively means being able to always attack for damage with Advantage, p. bad rule if you ask me.