/osrg/ OSR General - Cosmic Beings Edition

>Sounds interesting, elaborate pls.

The goblins worship a slug god who they believe 'creates' all souls and simply 'loans' mortal beings their bodies for a short time before being devoured. They sacrifice their most attractive maidens AND young men to it in an attempt to appease it, because they are so scared of it. The goblins clerics have blackened lips from sucking the acidic juices of the slug gods incarnations.

Humans from Talmora worship Old Gloria, an old spindle woman who waves the tapestry of the world on her wheel. No other Gods exist, it is merely Old Gloria, a simple grandmother to all creation.

The men from the isle of Nald worship not Gods but the movement of plasm in the universe, who they track with star charts and consult every single day. These astrologer-priests view the heavens as divine, a 'step above' the mundane and dirty earth, and they aspire to one day ascend to it. With great effort and sacrifice, some of their number manage to transform themselves into pure energy and ascend, leaving behind the wheel of cosmic reincarnation and becoming nothing more then light blossoming through the eternal universe.

All of these clerics have clerical powers. How can all of these Gods exist as written if they contradict each other? That's part of the fun.

Not into lotfp but this is nice. More like this?
I need stuff with wolves and towers in ruins and borderlands stuff and flawless info delivery, for what I've read so far.

>reading MC10
>"this is a typical D&D encounter"
>9 lines of read-aloud
>"this is a Ravenloft encounter"
>34 lines of read-aloud

Man, I like 2E and Ravenloft but a lot of these writers have no sense of brevity.

DCC sorta does that.
Instead of getting xp-per monster you get 1-4xp for the encounter based on how hard it was for your party. eg. you learn more through hardship.

I don't think it makes players avoid fights though. Probably pushes them to fight tougher stuff. You could conceivably award the full 4xp for avoiding a fight, since that can often be a difficult thing to do. Certainly takes more creativity than drawing your sword, as it were.

writers get paid by the word, yo.

>Frost Warrior
>LVL 2d4+4, DC -2, Speed 6
>Abilities: Armor, Attack (Cut), Bind (vs Con), Flurry
>8 foot tall, appalling armed & armored frozen warriors radiating chill. Their Bind and Flurry abilities go together: when they attack, everyone within melee range has to roll to resist the joint-freezing cold about them.
>Weakness: Saltmelt

Damn Vincent Baker, you do good dee n dee

Does anyone think Darkest Dungeon's stress mechanic would work in D&D?

I've never liked how sanity mechanics have worked in ttrpg's. Taking away control of a character or forcing the player to role-play insanity tends to be awkward/forced at best. But I do like how most of Darkest Dungeon's afflictions and quirks translates to certain courses of action that a character might or will take.

For example, the 'Selfish' affliction. A selfish character has a chance of doing one of the following each round:
Deal stress damage to the rest of the party.
Move to the front of the formation to hog glory.
Move to the back, for self preservation.
Use a random ability (without player input).
Add stress to the party when they succeed (bragging).
Add stress to the party when exploring by making selfish remarks.
Pass their turn in combat, commenting that they've done their fair share of the work or need to rest.
Add stress to the party by insulting another member when they miss/fail.
Steal loot.
Refuse to use their healing skills on other party members.

Think something like this could work, or does it tread too close to removing player agency?
Most of these afflictions can be removed by lowering stress or extended rest at a tavern/church.

If you wrote this up mechanically I would splooge over it. I tried to implement this once in my lovecraftian homebrew game but I gave up. I'd gladly graft a system-neutral or D&D-specific system like that onto something I'm playing.

Is the implication that Clerics are Magic-Users with *even less* understanding of what they're dealing with?

The 'flavour' and 'soul' is all in the Dungeon Master's Guide.
The Player's Handbook is tolerable, but not a good book.

>It's pretty cool to see the roots of it, now I just need to check out OD&D
>even though I'm sure it's even more simple and rudimentary.
LBB is about as complex as B/X, though the "core" rules are a bit simpler.
OD&D proper is almost exactly as complex as AD&D. Worse organization, too.

If you want really unique clerics, Hackmaster 5th edition has about 40 or so faiths, and each priest is essentially it's own unique class, with it's own spell lists, powers, abilities, hitdice, skills, and rituals and sacrifices that they follow.

They also include information about each religion and how they feel about everyone else or how well accepted they are in certain places.

So what OSR uses armor as damage reduction?

>Now that we are at it, what's the best way to give it a try? OSRIC is too big for me (400+ pages...) and my players aren't even used to B/X btb.
Showed up too late to answer this in the last thread but I just wanted to tell you and anybody else who's curious that OSRIC is literally the worst way to try AD&D. Hell, it wasn't even meant to be *read*.

anyone know what happened to EncounterAnon?

The Black Hack

>the lower monster xp totals in Classic [compared to Advanced]
They're pretty much the same up to 9+ to 10+ HD. It's only after that that the AD&D ones ramp up significantly (because the XP curves start to diverge about there).

Can someone recommend me some good supplements to enhance my combat? Believe it or not but I found the Player's Option: Combat and Tactics book to be quiet useful and would like to beef up my combat some more.

Also on that exact note, are there any OSR systems that tackle initiative differently? How does it work in ACKS?

Accurate and underrated.

I haven't taken a close look at OSRIC, but I thought one of the points of it was that it was reorganized from 1st ed AD&D precisely so it could be better read.

Thanks guys. The reason I didn't do "generic" tables is that it rapidly became boring.

>black meat, green meat, jelly meat, ghost meat

Are cool idea, but their generic nature tends to make them... flat. Or completely gonzo.

If you eat a Beholder, you should have some intuitive ideas of the kinds of possible results. Madness and eye lasers immediately spring to mind.

But on the generic red meat table... the results wouldn't be specific. They' just be "bad effect" "death" " good effect". There'd be no specificity. Meat from a purple worm and an aboleth should do different things, ideally.

Plus, it's super easy to write these tables on the fly for most monsters, once you've done a few.

>Reading Deep Carbon Observatory
>"this is a typical encounter"
>Unsure when encounter ended, or began
>Unsure about everything
>Stare at hands for twenty minutes
>Reread page

Write it, user.

How the hell is combat even a thing under most OSR rules? Yeah yeah, combat shouldn't be your first choice, be creative and all that, but seriously. Even shitty koboldsgoblins are AC 7 (13), so that even a fighter needs a 12 to hit one of them, and there's always so many more than one. I get that you need to work up to later threats, but how do you even survive to get past the first one? Was every starting party expected to ninja and Home Alone their way through 40d10 goblins?

>Was every starting party expected to ninja and Home Alone their way through 40d10 goblins?
pretty much, in the early days Combat was meant to be a failure state no matter what(which kinda makes having Fighter be a class rather counter-intuitive), I'll admit that's one of the major OSR conceits I absolutely despise

It's not so much that fights are a failure state. If fighting is sure to result in victory, then you must fight. But if there's any other way to win, do that.

Morale rolls are also a thing. If you casually explode six goblins out of forty, the remaining thirty-four goblins are going to take a moment and consider their options. There aren't many sentient creatures that fight to the death.

Why /should/ one guy with a sword be able to fight 40 goblins at once and win? Where is it written that it's mandatory for that to occur? If a giant rock falls from the ceiling, nobody complains when you get squished flat. People are squishy. That makes sense. Well, people are stabable too.

I dont expect people to be able to fight 40 goblins at all; that's my entire point (also, 40? someone rolled 40 1s and should be playing the slots instead of D&D). There's no way you're exploding 6 goblins at first level. Hell, even the supposed fighter is going to have their hands full with *one* goblin. But the books say 40D10, and you get XP for defeating monsters, so there was obviously some intention that you were going to see combat. I don't expect all 40-400 in a single room, but still, you're going to be outnumbered unless you waging a ten-session guerilla war campaign against one encounter.

Basically what I'm saying is that I literally don't understand how you have any combats at all unless you start ignoring the numbers encountered and things like that. There's a big difference between "failure state" and "utterly impossible except under the most cherry-picked examples".

I'm new to this, so I'm perfectly willing to accept that I'm missing something here; that's why I'm asking about it. I keep hearing about how much OSR is free-wheeling and whatnot, so maybe there's a non-rules element I'm missing, but overall I just don't get it. Roleplaying/making up a story so that you don't have to ever fight until you actually can handle it seems to be the antithesis of what people are always talking about in terms of OSR gameplay.

Can someone give a description of a typical 1st-level battle, or point to a link that has one?

First-level battles tend to be more along the lines of 1d6 goblins than 40d10. 40d10's more of a wilderness encounter, the same with 30d10 barbarians and shit like that.

Actually, to pull directly from the 2e Monstrous Compendium:
Goblin: Number Appearing: 4d6
Number Appearing indicates an average encounter size for a wilderness encounter. The DM should alter this to fit the circumstances as the need arises. This should not be used for dungeon encounters.

The wilderness is a dangerous place, Level 1 bunnies should stay in the dungeon.

So you're saying the 4,000 kobolds thing is a wilderness encounter issue? That makes a lot more sense than dungeon horde out of nowhere. Thanks!

Yeah, the 30d10 barbarians thing is a horde appearing on the horizon, not 300 burly dudes hiding around the corner in a 10' wide corridor.

Applying the encounter distance rules is really helpful, especially in wilderness encounters.

Yeah.

"What's over yonder hill?"
[GM rolls. Looks concerned. Rolls some more]
"Uh... 4,000 kobolds. And a dragon."
"Oh fuck that, we're going the other way."

Also, don't... don't worry about the rules so much. They're just guidelines. Nobody's ever run a game with all the rules. Do what makes sense, not what the book says.

>Do what makes sense, not what the book says.
This should be taken with a grain of salt. While GM fiat is acceptable, players are expecting a set of rules that are logical and follow reason. If you wing it too much or too hard, you risk breaking your PCs' immersion as they begin to question the rules by which their characters live and die.

>If fighting is sure to result in victory then you must fight
Sun-Tzu said that! And I think he knows a little more about fighting than you do pal because he invented it! And then he perfected it so that no living man could best him in the ring of honour!

People also tend to forget about the reaction rules. Somebody with huge Charisma and lucky dice can just walk through a dungeon level going 'Hey Iqbiq, hey Grog, hey Sslanathrax'.

>you risk breaking your PCs' immersion as they begin to question the rules by which their characters live and die.

This is very true, but in my experience, the opposite applies. The rules as written break player expectations more often than GM trickery. "Oh, no, sorry, you can't charge that guy, he's 2' out of range." "Oh, sorry, the rules say that Platinum Orcs can't be bargained with, even though your argument was compelling", "sorry, mirrors do not in fact reflect Beholder eye-beams. They do reflect Basilisk eye-beams though."

This is especially important for world and dungeon plans. If the rules say "this 10' by 10' room contains 215 kobolds, 16 kobold sorcerors, and a random potion" you've got to ask yourself... why?

>I thought one of the points of it was that it was reorganized from 1st ed AD&D precisely so it could be better read.
Naw, it was literally only created as a fig-leaf so people could write new AD&D modules using the OGL, and then sell them to grogs who had never stopped playing AD&D. It came as a shock to the creators when people asked for print copies.

>"Sorry user, there aren't any rules for moving an opponent through inertia, so tackling that guy off the balcony isn't going to happen. You can try to move him with a bull rush, but since there's a handrail, he isn't going to fall off."

This is exactly why there is a difference between fiat and arbitration. I grant you it is occasionally a very fine distinction, but I'd rather allow a player to flying tackle an enemy off of a balcony than slavishly follow the rules as written.

>there aren't any rules for moving an opponent through inertia, so tackling that guy off the balcony isn't going to happen.
You may have chosen a poor example, because you can just use the rules for knocking people off bridges and ledges from the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide.

My example was actually a dig against 3.x, actually. But just because there's a rule for any given example buried in some non-essential book doesn't mean that it's a good rule. Or that it's a good idea to have a rule to cover every occasion.

That way lies madness.

I could have easily said "flying tackle an enemy out of a window" instead, if you would prefer that.

Just to make sure this is super clear here: yes, the "No. appearing" line in a monster description is meant for wilderness encounters only, and wilderness encounters are meant in turn for higher-level characters.

In dungeons, you should use your own artistic temperament to place the monsters, and if you want a rule of thumb or guideline for monster numbers, look at the random encounter table for a given level. In your case, level 1, this will typically be like "1d6 goblins" (and the group may well be a dozen strong, counting henchmen and bearers and shit).

My example was a dig against 3.x, actually. But just because there's a rule for any given example buried in some non-essential book doesn't mean that it's a good rule. Or that it's a good idea to have a rule to cover every occasion.

That way lies madness.

I could have easily said "flying tackle an enemy through a window" instead, if you would prefer that.

Is there any place for a luck stat or fate point mechanic in OSR? Obviously it would invalidate the low level life-or-death struggle unless properly balanced, but if you or your players are those fags that enjoy long campaigns but also like simplicity and have too much pride to play White Wolf games it could work.

I personally think having an OSR-style Dark Heresy/WFRP would be amazing but I have no faith in my skills as a designer.

>Is there any place for a luck stat or fate point mechanic in OSR?
Yes, DCC has a Luck stat and it seems to interact well with Thieves.

>I personally think having an OSR-style Dark Heresy/WFRP would be amazing but I have no faith in my skills as a designer.
WHFRP 1E works great as an OSR-style dungeoncrawler out of the box. You never get above the equivalent of say level 5, though, which might be good or bad depending on your perspective.

Not as such that I know, but the attached might suit your fancy.

You can also steal luck stats or fate/hero points from other systems, if you like.

>Is there any place for a luck stat or fate point mechanic in OSR?

Check out Red Sonja Unconquered.

I think the best way to enhance combat isn't through adding additional options and rules from the mechanics side. I think it's to create more interesting and fleshed out environments for combat to take place in.

That means, add things to the place. I have a fight for a first level party inside a tomb, and one of the room has goblins in it. So the goblins knew they were coming, so they heated up some pig fat in pot and spilled it out covering an area like a grease spell. They set up some wooden furniture to give themselves cover, they took advantage of a large deep bronze brazier to cast dim light into the room so they could see well, but all the humans would have an attack penalty, and so forth.

In the next room, that room has stone columns, and the goblins will have knocked down a column to create rubble and cover to give them more time to pelt away at the players with slings and crossbows. It's all about taking advantage of what could reasonably be expected to be in such a place, and maxing it out.

I'm relatively new to this group, but enjoying it. What's the general feeling around posting bits of your own OSR here for review?

I'm actually considering it and awarding XP only for spending GP on anything that's not supplies, hireling pay, or living expenses. Stuff like carousing, bankrolling a town festival, commissioning art pieces, or even starting a business would all be valid for gaining experience.
In my mind, I feel it would open up the door for more playstyles, at least in my solo games. At the very least, the player who wants to own and run a tavern will be able to do it and get money to supplement their experience gain while recovering between adventures.

>this 10' by 10' room contains 215 kobolds, 16 kobold sorcerors, and a random potion" you've got to ask yourself... why?

Because kobold orgies with a potion of levitation and lsd is how kobolds like to get down.

A lot of people their ideas and clones here, the worst thing that can happen is the clone be ignored. But I'm sure someone will reply.

All right, here we go. It's just the character creation stuff, since that's the heart of it.

I wrote up an equal amount of designer's notes to go with this, since we all seem to be tinkerers and I know I appreciate that sort of thing, but I think I'll leave it off for not. But here's the essence:

B/X Heretic Summation: Ascending ACs, 3rd ed saves, higher bonuses.

PRIMARY AIM: To better capture the feel of the
classics of heroic fantasy within the framework of ruleslight adventuring.
BROADER GOALS: Streamlining of nnecessarily complex rules; creating a more flexible character creation process; adding useful combat complexity without meaningfully increasing combat time or creating analysis paralysis; keeping the ruleset relatively setting neutral; actual attention to layout / readability / usability.

Heroic is the key: bonuses are purposely higher (although even with all this, a 1st level warrior totally maxed out only hits a goblin 70% of the time). I just didn't want a million special abilities and counters and at wills and such to go with it.

All armour is just light, heavy, and medium (+2 AC for a shield).

All weapons are broken into small (1d4, only backstabable weapons), regular (1d6), and large (2d6, two-handed) weapons.

Cleric and mage spells all together and split between seven levels.

Thanks for any feedback.

See, now /that/'s interesting.

Varies by edition, but
LBB/OD&D recommends 1 wandering monster per player (rounded to the nearest 3) for successful wandering monster checks.

>on anything that's not supplies, hireling pay, or living expenses
I give ½xp for expenses. Reminds people to recruit monster hirelings when they're overburdened at the bottom off the dungeon.

Raging Swan makes the best OSR stuff that isn't actually OSR.

Anyone have any more recent DCC modules, like the Lankhmar stuff, or anything not in the Trove?

Does this seem like an accurate assessment to you? Source is the Hollow World DM's Guide

It's not wrong. Magic missile in the RC uses d6s, and isn't capped at 5 dice of damage. It just keeps going until level cap.

There's some important differences though, namely ability scores, since the AD&D ones are needlessly complicated and are one of the worst changes to the game.

I mean, it's not wrong, but it's also not... that important, overall.

>Do all clerics follow a benevolent power?
>benevolent
>power
Pick one.

How many of you use some one-page adventures like pic related for your games? I am thinking of using some of these to supplement my LotFP game between modules.

I usually write up my adventures for my current game in a similar format, though nowhere near as pretty and using a lot of shorthand and stuff. It's nice to be able to glance at one a4 piece of paper that has a whole floor of the dungeon on it,

Has anyone run/played Council of Wyrms?
Looks far-out, in a good way.

Attached is about the amount of info I like from one sheet adventures.

You'd obviously gain abilities related to the creature, but you'd roll on it's meat table. The meat table is also generic and says something like:
-gain monster's primary trait (stone gaze for a medus)
-gain its primary defense (either AC or a secondary ability)
-gain its speed
etc

Different kinds of meat are simply balanced tables; Blue meat is usually magical critters, so results are more gonzo and hit/miss. Green meat is usually goblinoids so you tendo to gain strength/languages/infravision. Etc.

Your method: you have to 'stat' every monster, come up with creative stuff for each table, and making sure it's not game-breaking. DM has to lookup a index of monsters and then its table.

My method: you have to come up with a way to classify every monster, then write a few tables that are easy to adjudicate on the spot. DM has to roll a few dice and make sense of it based on the context (easier to do on the fly imo).

Dude I fucking love this. The art is fantastic and I'm liking what I'm reading

Not sure if this is the place to ask, but:

Did anyone ever try to use the initiative/movement/range rules of Crossfire with a D&Dish game?

Crossfire is a wargame where you can hold initiative as long as you don't fail a roll; you can keep doing shit more or less forever if you plan carefully. Enemies can react (once), an dif they succeed attacking you they take the initiative.
You can move as much as you want, as long as it's a straight line, and inside one 'terrain type' (game board is heavy populated with tons of different terraint types, think a camo pattern).

For some reason I think this would play very nicely inside a dungeon, once you adapt timed resources like torches and such.

>You dash across the corridor. There's a trap but you succeed a roll and keep moving down the corridor. There's an open door here! Goblins are inside! They have spotted you!
>Goblins react and try to stop you. They hit! You lose initiative; some goblins form a defensive line while others spread around with bows.
>The archer hits!
>The other archer hits!
>The goblin shaman begins to cast a spell.
>The archer missed! The shaman is still casting, and you have the initiative. What do?

How does this sound?

I think I tried this long ago, but never tested it, I think I have a draft in pdf somewhere...

>You can move as much as you want, as long as it's a straight line, and inside one 'terrain type'
So how do you leave a terrain type?

The rules I posted are suuuper simplified and maybe poorly explained, but-
In your next movement. You usually end your move by entering a different terrain, like dashing across a grass field and entering a forest. Crossing an obstacle like a fence takes a move by itself.

This is just to break up movement so enemies can react to you. If you are pinned right after you jump that fence and want to retreat, you're done for.

In my example, the first move would end up by entering/triggering the trap, the second by a successful enemy reaction.

K.
Pic is my attempt at adapting Darkest Dungeon's stress and afflictions to something b/x compatible.

Feel free to punch it up.

aand I just noticed I forgot to number the virtues/afflictions. Whatever.

I tried to strike a balance between afflictions doing something but not taking too much control away from the player. Hence the saving throw.

I love these one pagers and I use the One Page Dungeon Contest all the time. Sometimes they're better than published modules.

Really? Which ones?

I´d love to see a curated list of one-pagers, because there´s just soo many of them they look all the same... And I mean selected both because of the content and the layout, because I feel like half of them weren´t tested or even designed for actual play.

Personally I think that the DD stress system only works because you aren't playing a character in that game, you're playing the town and the full party. With D&D, there should already be a lot of stress coming from the players reacting to the gameplay, so a stress system to simulate that isn't needed.
I'm a bit concerned that this stress system leads to player agency being removed and a frustrating death spiral being created. I think you should keep that in mind as you keep developing your system.

>player agency being removed and a frustrating death spiral
Sounds like the Cavalier.

that was exactly my concern when I first thought of it.
I honestly was only driven to write it from the replies requesting it be done.

But I'm curious if anyone here could workshop it to be less of an agency thief but not require good roleplay. Not everyone can do it, and even fewer can do it without being annoying to everyone else at the table.

I do alignment like that. I don't ask my player for good RP, but I punish them if they act "out of character". Yes, also when the chaotic muderhobo pets kittens.
In B/X you have mechanics for stress already: -1 to all (d20) rolls, cummulative. It's usually applied to all the party at once.

What else do you need? (I'm not familiar with DD or its mechanics)

How do you explain untriggered traps in a dungeon that's seen previous adventuring parties?

>previous adventuring parties managed to avoid the trap or went a different route

>monsters or people in the dungeon reset the trap

>traps reset on a magical timer

>operable thing in the dungeon magically resets traps

>dungeon-time is convoluted, previous adventuring parties are actually from the future

Thanks user. What would be the best AD&D retroclone, then?

Somebody in the last thread suggested Labyrinth Lord Advanced - I've read a bit and I like it so far, but I read somewhere
>it adds stuff and makes things more complex, but it doesn't give enough to give the AD&D feel; it sits in a spot where it's not Basic, but it's not really Advanced, which is probably the point of the whole operation, but to us felt somewhat "meh".

A different, but very related question: can you play AD&D (or a clone) strictly by the book?
I know D&D folk tends to favor cherrypicking and mix-matching, but I like solid rulesets.

The Dungeon is actual an enormous ancient Mimic, unable to perceive time at a useful rate it sets traps to kill quick moving prey for digestion. The Dungeon Mimic allows various monsters to live inside it in the hopes that they will attract and kill prey for it, only digesting them in times of famine.

>can you play AD&D (or a clone) strictly by the book?
Yes. 1e's made slightly more difficult by Gygax's fancy language, but if that's not a problem for you then it's fine. 2e is easier to read, but it's missing some of the better bits of the 1e DMG, and also doesn't default to gold=xp (though that's an optional rule, along with individual awards and some other stuff).

In which book would these faiths be found?

PHB and Zealot's Guide I-III.

>Zealot's Guide I-III.
Or 1-7, as it is now.

Sorry to ask for spoonfeeding, but I'm not familiar with Hackmaster at all.
Do they have a trove or something?

I don't think so. Hackmaster is basically a parody of the worst parts of AD&D that somehow became a game that people play seriously. I don't think the fanbase is that big though.

Pretty sure there is a trove about, but I don't know where it is. I don't think ZG4-7 have been posted anywhere.

Sounds like you want OSRIC: systemreferencedocuments.org/resources/systems/pennpaper/osric/osric.pdf

The mixed list of feats that each class can only use half of is sort of messy/awkward. There might be a better way to do that like adding them as class advancement specific options. It seems like you're trying to give mages more to do by letting them wear armour, backstab etc, which is neat, but it will probably work better as other options on their own list just from an organization standpoint.

Why flat 1d8 hd for both classes? What size hd are monsters using? The d6-2d6 weapon damage is interesting, why did you do that?

Being a duellist and a whilrwind gives a warrior an AC of over 18 if they have any dex bonus at level 1. Concentration is obviously a trap shit feat. These might be on purpose, but it does get into obvious ways to min/max builds. Don't like it, wouldn't advise it. ymmv.

Depends on what you're going for but I'd cut/refine the feats/weapon specializations/magic-school abilities and playtest a lot of combat because it seems like you're building the game towards more hack&slash.