/osrg/ OSR General - Something Something Edition

What'd be the best way to understand chainmail? Use a retroclone? Are there any even?

>What'd be the best way to understand chainmail?
I'm not sure what's so tough about it, but asking in the thread's probably your best bet.

I'm not the same user as the one asking just now, but I do have a question about Chainmail that's connected to the stuff discussed last thread.

So a hero is defined as a man with the power of four men, and requires four simultaneous hits in one round to be killed. How does this work in man-to-man combat? It seems like in all cases of man-to-man combat, the person to land a blow will kill the defendant. So what happens when, say, a light footman goes head-to-head with a hero? Or is this not possible? Are only men of the same power allowed to engage in man-to-man combat?

>So a hero is defined as a man with the power of four men, and requires four simultaneous hits in one round to be killed. How does this work in man-to-man combat?
It's actually very simple. Consider that the actual phrasing of the Hero's durability is that "four simultaneous kills must be scored to eliminate them". One man can score one kill against the Hero in Man-to-Man, just as you observe.

>So what happens when, say, a light footman goes head-to-head with a hero?
He attacks, and, if successful, scores one of the requisite four kills for that round.

>Or is this not possible?
No, it's possible alright. It's just that in practice, any lone regular figure going up against a Hero is stone fucked. His attacks alone can't eliminate the Hero, no matter how successful, and the Hero gets four chops against him. On the other hand, if you were to assault the Hero with six or seven enemies at once, their concerted efforts in MTM may well overwhelm him.

>Are only men of the same power allowed to engage in man-to-man combat?
On the contrary, actually: Heroes don't fight one another in MTM at all, they use the Fantasy Combat Table, where each may instantly slay the other.

Mutant Future. I just love it's take on mashing B/X and Gamma World, but I dunno a soul who plays or talks about it here.

So a footman all by himself really has a 0% chance to win against a hero, considering that he can only make one attack per round?

And if heroes and supernatural beings use the fantasy combat table, then I'm assuming that man-to-man is more about normal soldiers battling one-on-one? In those cases I guess the "simultaneous hits" rules don't come up since footmen are weak.

Man, I just wish some of this stuff was presented in a different way, but I guess that's not how wargames do things. Some form of quick statblock like "Hero - four attacks per round, four simultaneous hits to defeat" would have been nice.

>So a footman all by himself really has a 0% chance to win against a hero, considering that he can only make one attack per round?
Correct. Also the Hero is going to mash his face into the ground with the fury of a lightning bolt.

>And if heroes and supernatural beings use the fantasy combat table, then I'm assuming that man-to-man is more about normal soldiers battling one-on-one?
They use the Fantasy Combat Table *against one another*. They don't use it against anything that's not *on* the table, which is why the rules specify that a Hero "fights like four men" -- so that you know how to regulate him fighting in mass combat, or in MTM.

But yes, at its root MTM is about normal soldiers battling one-on-one; it wasn't developed specifically for any of the fantasy parts, but mainly for scenarios such as skirmishes, a castle siege and so on where having each figure count as 20 men doesn't make any damn sense.

In general, it's best if you read the Fantasy Supplement to Chainmail as just that -- a supplement. It's bolted on, it's not integral to the working of the rules. (From our perspective coming at it from D&D, it's easy to think of it that way, like the fantasy rules are the main purpose. That might get in the way of understanding stuff properly.)

Man I just got the book for MF, and man it's awesome, but I don't talk talk much about it A) because I have yet to run a game with it, and am still reading up on it, and B) /osrg/ has not been at it's friendliest lately.

Alright, I think I get it a bit more now. Thanks for the help!

Interior awareness (self-evaluation) and exterior awareness (instincts and senses).

I use Charisma for willpower since I think personal magnetism is a reflection of self-confidence which is a reflection of willpower.

save.vs.totalpartykill.ca/grab-bag/madlibs/

Here's an interesting new tool. I'm probably going to use this with modules I kind of like but want to remove things from or change things in.

Am I crazy or do I just not see the potential use of the tool?
The way I see it, it's more work than just redesign things and stealing cool ideas.

Post-Chainmail, getting into early D&D, Gygax used all kinds of stuff. There's some comments on it in one of the early books - IIRC 10mm figures for hobbits or pixies, 40mm persians? as orcs? I thought he went with 30mm for basic humans though. I can't find the grogthreads I read on it right now.

Also a note to people looking into this stuff - "25mm" can mean a lot of stuff to early grogs, from 1/72 (what we'd now call 20mm) figures to what we'd now call 25mm, all the way up to 30mm. Basically it took a hell of a long time for people to settle down and at least agree to disagree on a convenient fiction for figure scale

This is what Zak Smith used it for. He liked many of the hex descriptions in Carcosa but needed to season it to his own campaign.

for example, those are 1/72s and these days people would call them 20mm.

The airfix robin hood stuff makes good (thin) hobbits alongside modern 28mm figures though!

>There's some comments on it in one of the early books
Of course I posted that before remembering there's literally a chart in chainmail. That's the starting point, but I have read more details of the miniatures they used for early fantasy chainmail games elsewhere...

It's pretty useless though. I could just jot the changes down in a .txt or a notebook instead of working on this weird generator thing.

Not that user, but it has Gygaxian organization and diction.

Mate, it's a wargame. Gygaxian prose is nothing compared to Barkerese.

(Phil Barker, not MAR Barker)

>and requires four simultaneous hits in one round to be killed
They require four simultaneous hits in non-Fantasy combat.
In Fantasy combat, the Hero goes down like butter.

But it's hundreds of places, and he just wants to change all the Carcosa stuff into randomized other stuff. I find that to be pretty handy.

>B)

Is the couple of dumb arguments really all it takes to shut down the possibly interesting discussion?

>There's some comments on it in one of the early books - IIRC 10mm figures for hobbits or pixies, 40mm persians? as orcs? I thought he went with 30mm for basic humans though. I can't find the grogthreads I read on it right now.
PatW mentions all of this stuff at length in its section on minis.

As bad as the handful of trolls are, what makes it unreadable is the mob of angry fa/tg/uys who spam the thread to argue.

Just once, I'd like to see some faggot make an "I don't like thing" post and not see five replies next to the post number.

Does anybody play Chain Mail? Does it measure up at all to good modern war games, or is it just a historical oddity?

15mm fantasy seems like it'd be cool. I could use 28mm dudes as ogres and trolls.

The alternative mass combat system that got posted at dndwithpornstars is sort of interesting, but it seems like it could only work within a narrow scale (50-500 soldiers in battlefield formation).

>As bad as the handful of trolls are, what makes it unreadable is the mob of angry fa/tg/uys who spam the thread to argue.

Yeah, this is exactly what I'm talking about. The last few times I tried to get involved in a discussion, it was immediately drowned out by arguments. You tend to miss anything good, because it always seems to be sandwiched between novel length posts of the same old pissing matches.

The nature of Veeky Forums anonymous posting and generals should tell you that yes, that's all it takes.

We should start using old-school art images as an indicator that we're starting a new topic, or something.

Actually, not a terrible idea. Makes me a bit annoyed I have to be out the door to work in 2-3 minutes.

>The nature of Veeky Forums anonymous posting and generals should tell you that yes, that's all it takes.
Case in fucking point.

Anywaaay.

>Am I crazy or do I just not see the potential use of the tool?
>The way I see it, it's more work than just redesign things and stealing cool ideas.
Mostly the use is when you have a LOT of shit you want to process and not a lot of time. You can plug in the cool shit you want to steal (or placeholders) and get it back in semi-random places in the larger document, then tweak it to your taste.
That's as opposed to writing down everything, painstakingly going through and finding the best place for each one-by-one.

Sure, it's lazier, but it's also faster. When I have a couple hours to prepare and a "no Humanoids" policy in my game, it's a Hell of a lot easier to swipe a published text through that to pull the Goblins and Orcs and Bugbears and Elves and fucking Dwerrows or whatever out for some carnivorous Apes and bandit factions.

Here's a timeline of miniature wargaming. Scale creep started in 1964!

www-personal.umich.edu/~beattie/timeline2.html

All I was trying to say is that we need to do better at not feeding the trolls and rageposting.

Pic is something some other user posted, by early 20th century artist Ephraim Moses Lilien (I think). The guy has some pretty sweet pen and ink drawings. I'd totally buy a book with this style of art.

>Pic is something some other user posted, by early 20th century artist Ephraim Moses Lilien
That'd be me, last couple of threads I was talking about lizardmen. Lilien was heavy into Judaica, and did a lot of really cool and inspiring stuff for gaming. I try to post an inspiring or semi-relevant image whenever I post (especially when I'm otherwise shitposting*) as a way to contribute to the thread. Plus, it occasionally turns anons like you onto some really cool art. If you're not familiar with Aleksandr Brodsky, John Bateman, and William Pogany, I strongly suggest you check them out.
Come to think of it, I should probably go back to posting weekly art reviews on my blog again.

*See: the post you replied to, And kinda this one.

Not strictly a retroclone, but I'm fond of The Gene Hack's Form/Flux mechanics for character creation, where your stats determine just what kind of genetic mishap you'll be playing as.

>he just wants to change all the Carcosa stuff into randomized other stuff. I find that to be pretty handy.

I find it pretty dumb and pointless.
"Inside the cave are 1d6 GATOR-MEN armed with CHAINSWORDS and wearing POLICE UNIFORMS. Each carries 3d4 STONE PHALLUSES"
It literally adds nothing.

Heroes & Other Worlds, because it's basically a streamlined GURPS

>It literally adds nothing.
It adds the fact that you can take that revised text and use it in your own game.

>Inside the cave are 1d6 GATOR-MEN armed with CHAINSWORDS and wearing POLICE UNIFORMS. Each carries 3d4 STONE PHALLUSES

Oh man, is that the new LotFP module?

Needs more apocalypse triggers. The chainswords summon half of a randomly determined cthulhu on a critical; when two appropriate halves are summoned together by two criticals from different chainswords on the same round, the cthulhu awakens.

The stone phalluses are just inert stone dildos.

Pretty good, but needs some work. The dildos are currency among the local tribe, perhaps?
Fund it!

>Is the couple of dumb arguments really all it takes to shut down the possibly interesting discussion?
honestly yes

Is there a table somewhere that I can roll on to see what's in a hobgoblin/orcs war chest?

1d10
1 Erotic poetry of Elf cuckoldry genre
2 A letter from his dad telling the owner how proud he is
3 A very intricate ensemble of bone and feather ornaments
4 A sealed letter with a noble's seal upon it
5 A dead, but strangely clean, rat
6 The shrunken heads of 7 goblins/halfling/kobolds
7 Aromatic salts
8 An invisible dagger; character reaching into the chest must make a Dex check or accidentally stab himself
9 A treatise in goblin/orc debating the morality of mating with non-goblins/non-orcs
10 A second smaller chest; roll again to see what's inside it

>2 A letter from his dad telling the owner how proud he is

Let it be known that whomsoever possesses this letter is entitled to the respect of Thrul the Terrible, Orc lord of the Northern Wastes. I'm proud of you son/letter holder.

>what follows is a D&D version of The Addams Family movie with the orciest/ugliest PC pretending to be Thrul's long-lost son so the party can steal Thrul's loot

What was that OSR that let you roll for different things in your character and was all about creating the village you live in as much as creating the character you are playing?

I find that interesting and I'd love to read it, but can't remember which game it was

That's Beyond the Wall, I think.

Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures

Exactly! Thanks a lot anons

Does anyone have a link?

Sure, the OP does.

Check trove, in pastebin, in OP.

Well I guess I'm an idiot cause I hadn't seen the trove the first time I checked

Thanks!

Nah, easy mistake
It was *in* the OP for the longest time, but it kept getting DMCA'd (or whatever)
Still happens, but waaaaaay~ less often than it used to

Who uses the original monster tables from odnd? How do they work in a dungeon?

What are some cool things I can do with an encounter in a goblin kitchen?

I know there is a bugbear chef and two sous-chef goblins.

I know that there is a shitload of haphazard cooking that makes a lot of noise.

Maybe the goblins throw hot food at them, like splashing stew?

The bugbear will have a huge cleaver.

Assorted "ingredients" that are still alive (like a box full of chittering stingbugs for the chittering stingbug fried pie)

A human-sized meat grinder.

A door to a cold-storage room with a bound ice elemental powering it.

There is a trove of expensive spices and herbs that the goblins looted from some caravan.

The goblins' recipe book (actually an old grimoire) zaps anyone not wearing the bugbear chef's hat when approached.

The treasure should include poison gas.
One of the sous-chefs has pocket sand.
There are stray daggers all over the counters.
There is a third goblin, dead in the stew.
The floor has rotten intestines everywhere (slippery).
They can loot the recipe book. It's actually pretty nice.

>shitload of haphazard cooking that makes a lot of noise.
The goblins shout for reinforcements, but they never arrive.

honestly the odds are pretty good that I'd include an expy of the extended Addams clan in my setting somewhere(with a large percentage of the setting's human adventurers either being part of it or ending up marrying into it)

1d4 Shwarma Golems, shwarma being a favored way of cooking large amounts of meat among the Goblin hordes, the golem magic is used as a form of preservative, properly cast a Shwarma Golem will remain hot, juicy, and fresh for potentially weeks(not to mention it discourages goblins from sneaking pieces outside of scheduled meal times as Shwarma Golems are hostile to anyone who gets within 5 feet of them that aren't dressed as a cook or accompanied by one)

>a local orc tribe tasks the PCs to bring them an unspoiled shwarma golem for research, as their own sausage monsters do not last as long during marching conditions

How do you handle encounters where players are being attacked by enemies they cannot reach?

This d12 Skillset for LotFP:

1. Offers condensed 5e style skills to the game, for people who are into that.
2. Offers characters other than the Specialist a chance to be decent at some skills.
3. Characters also have a chance to be terrible at some.
3. Still protects the Specialist's niche.

After I made it, I integrated it into my Ruinations homebrew. Hopefully it'll make some OSR blasphemers happy.

Barrels of flammable grease/butter.
Crates of live frogs/rats that might cause combatant to fall.
Toxic leftovers; saves vs Poison or spend one turn vomiting, unable to act

>the mad wizard Oskar Majoris has used forbidden alchemy to create a ham-and-cheese loaf golem

For those of you who don't use miniatures, how do you keep combat interesting?

Shit like this. Vivid description.
Making sure they understand their environment.
Unaccounted for things going down. Etc.

Spice up the narration.

I always found it difficult to do *with* miniatures, because I felt like the battle grid instantly makes people start thinking in terms of chess-like movement and attack, rather than imagining the scene.

Though verbal description along can get confusing sometimes with mobs of enemies...

Anybody ever try a sort of middle ground, where minis are just a rough representation instead of a tactical overlay?

Miniatures don't require a grid.

That must have have been from an older version I made, cause this has been corrected and in my trove since at least August.

bitdo/TSRTrove

Hand drawn caves on a whiteboard are you best friend

I'm becoming increasingly interested in creating a huge dungeon and then let a bunch of different people and groups traverse through it during different sessions, changing it in the process. I kind of feel like this style used to be pretty common, but I can't find any good documentation about it.
Has anyone here done a whole campaign set in a megadungeon, which constantly changes with new people entering and moving further down? If so, how did it go? Was it a sustainable model or did it fall apart?

I used to use a whiteboard and made sketches on them, but realized I wanted to keep the maps. So now I get a decently large art/sketch book and draw maps, pictures of monsters, items, etc in it. On the opposite page I make notes as they come up. We add stuff to maps when discovered or changed, and use coloured glass beads and mahjong tiles to keep track of rough positions. It looks cool and I can flip through the book to go over what's happened.

I'm not even that good at it drawing shit, but it goes well with the grit/punk vibe a lot of osr seems to shoot for. Its also cool to see how I've gotten better over time.

Hey /osrg/ If I write an OSR blog how can I add it to the OSR blog list?

Why do you even need to ask? it's intuitive.

It was very successful. I used the random dungeon generator from the 1st Ed. DM's Guide hardback. There were sessions where I would take players aside individually and ask, "Ay, you getting tired of this? Wanna play something else?" And they were all, "NO."

Another thing, they were all running PCs that lots of people would consider generic and boring. But they became unique in and of themselves, even while lacking otherwise flashy gimmicks.

The game ended due to offf-topic infighting. If it weren't for that, we'd have gone on for another 3 years.

Copy-paste into a new pastebin.
Add your blog to the new pastebin.
Wait for the thread's dying breath.
Poach the OP. Switch the blog link.

I get to make the new /osrg/ edition title, cool

>Does anybody play Chain Mail? Does it measure up at all to good modern war games, or is it just a historical oddity?
As far as I'm concerned, it's not old-school enough to be fun, and not remotely modern. I'd rather play Bath, even though he doesn't have fantasy rules IIRC (just a fantasy setting).

Wargames started way before Chainmail - Chainmail, in RPG terms, would be one of the many 80s RPGs, and it suffers for it.

>1d4 Shwarma Golems, shwarma being a favored way of cooking large amounts of meat among the Goblin hordes, the golem magic is used as a form of preservative, properly cast a Shwarma Golem will remain hot, juicy, and fresh for potentially weeks(not to mention it discourages goblins from sneaking pieces outside of scheduled meal times as Shwarma Golems are hostile to anyone who gets within 5 feet of them that aren't dressed as a cook or accompanied by one)
This is a Good Post.

So what are "early" wargames? Kriegsspiel and little Wars?

If you link it, even if it's blank bare bones, I can add it. Same goes for the webtools. There are actually a couple user items in the pastebins, including a hex mapper and and a two or three blogs.

Eh, Kriegsspiel is earliest but also kind of a precursor to recreational wargames, and little wars more of a genre-starter. I'm talking Featherstone and contemporaries, 60s and early 70s stuff - chainmail is on the outer edge of the range, but it's on the clunkier side and would probably be mostly forgotten if it hadn't spawned D&D.

www-personal.umich.edu/~beattie/timeline2.html

Featherstone's first book was 1962, and while there was stuff beforehand, that's where it really kicked off. Morschauser’s worth a read too, from the same year. Charge! was 1967. Advanced War Games was 1969. Fantasy gaming had been going on a while.

Chainmail was building on a wide base of design, and it's only really the fantasy bits that make it special - the core game isn't anything revolutionary, nor particularly interesting, unfortunately.

also if anyone's interested, the 1910 rules on that list are here: monstrousmatters.com/2016/10/war-games-for-boy-scouts-ca-1910.html

They're again more of a precursor to early recreational wargames than that actually being there, a weird pre-pre offshoot.

thanks, also forgot to mention that rules wise it uses the Flesh Golem's stats*, but loses the Flesh Golem's immunity to non-magical weapons, healing from Lightning, and immunity to spells, in exchange though they only take half damage from blunt weapons and most projectiles due to being non-living meat and fat animated by magic(magical versions of these weapons deal full damage though), that same property however makes them more vulnerable to fire damage

these changes from the Flesh Golem formula(and the overall cheaper and easier to obtain ingredients) makes making a Shwarma Golem a much easier task(if you have access to a spell or ritual for crafting a Flesh Golem, the level requirements are reduced by 2 levels if you use it to craft a Shwarma Golem, and material costs are halved as well)

I'll admit this is all just off the top of my head, so feel free to modify it as needed(since I'm sure I screwed something up here)

*Swords & Wizardry Complete(newest version) version

>rules wise it uses the Flesh Golem's stats
obviously the flesh golem was designed by a chef gone mad, and this is the original version.

What happens when a PC licks the special drug toad of a goblin junkie?

Save v. Death, or die. Then,
Save v. Wand, or be Feebleminded. Then,
Save v. Petrification, or develop 2d20 warts. Then,
Save v. Breath Weapon, or develop halitosis. Then,
Save v. Spell, or be charmed by the 2d6th next humanoid you meet.

Shawarma Golems should take double damage from cutting and slicing weapons, both because d4 Flesh Golems is a pretty crazy thing to add to a goblin encounter and because shawarmas are made to be cut into little bits.

You ever try cutting away a Shawarma? It takes foreeeeeever~

Switch minds with a hippie from Earth in 1977.

Roll 1d4

1 Another special toad just like it erupts from the lickers mouth in 1d4 days (or hours or whatever). For the duration the licker can speak with toads and many other things but most of them don't reply because they're very shy.
The new toad gains this same bizarre reproduction method in one week, when it begins to smells strongly of sweets.

2 The toad's mouth enlarges and swallows the licker. Inside is a 5'x5' pitch black wet fleshy room. The goblin hid a big stash in here and forgot. Flame-based light will cause the toad to cough and eject the licker.

3 A near by witch is now tracking the licker, as this is her stolen toad. She sends some of her animated house items (lamp, cauldron, fireplace poker, etc) to retrieve the toad.

4 The toad grows to about 4' tall and stands upright as a Toadman. Relieved of it's curse, it desires to join the party and aid them. Stats are as Normal man, however once a day the Toadman can lick their hand and make and attack to smack someone with it. On a successful hit the target makes a Save vs Poison, on a fail the target eyes bulge out of their socket and dangle from their head.

So is #1 a one-off thing, or do you just keep doing that forever?

All thouls, all the time.

Just a heads up for people who like LotFP and physical copies.

Only a few copies of Scenic Dunnsmouth and World of the Lost remain in the LotFP store, so you might want to get them now if you want them.