Welcome to the Old School Renaissance General thread

I think it's for in the world where you aren't playing with friends. When you're running a game for people.

>Deities & Demigods
>nice art
>just a monster manual of gods

>Legends & Lore
>virtually no art
>actual discussion of the gods and rules for their priesthoods

Why do people like Deities & Demigods again?

Didn't Gygax DM for like 10 players at a time? I understand why he wouldn't want to waste time having one-on-one chats with annoying players in that case.

~10 players in a session, from a total pool of like 50+ people, from what I've heard. "Sit down and have a chat with them" is probably asking a bit much in that environment.

Welp, I do that. And I have only a few players.
If the game is going strong, I just give them the eye. If they insist, I make monsters focus in that PC (telling the player this happens because he's being a cunt).
After the game is over / quick break, I talk about it. This only happened twice, then kicked that player.

Same reason they like LBB: vicarious nostalgia

Neat: redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/

t. shit DM

I absolutely hate Gygax's writing.
He's such a fucking autist.

The charisma drain is actually pretty appropriate.

I know. But I'd rather keep the game going and deal with meta crap later on.

How would you guys implement and balance D&D 5e fighting-styles into OSR like BFRPG and LoFP ?

Check out ACKS, it has proficiencies that work kinda like that

Which OSR system would people recommend for:
-castle building
-fief holding
-investment and growth
-village raising

And all that sort of thing?

Labyrinth Lord with An Echo, Resounding

The BFRPG supplement Sword & Board has a slew of Fighter options in a similar vein of 5e's fighting styles.

Thanks. Can't seem to find a PDF anywhere though.

Can't find it in their download section. Do you mean Combat Options ?

I think it's in the Trove under Sin Nomine press? Or maybe look for Red Tide.

I have no idea what races to use in OSR.

What races do your players want you to use?

It's in the showcase section of the downloads page.

Aha! Got it.

Table!

Think i found it thx!

>(telling the player this happens because he's being a cunt)
We're reaching levels of That Guy that shouldn't even be possible.

ACKS is the go-to system for this stuff.

>Elf
>Save vs. Ugliness
Whuh? Is that supposed to mean that you have to roll a saving throw or be ugly, or that everytime you see something ugly you have to make a saving throw? If so, what throw? What happens when you blow it?

Elves believe they own beauty in the same way that Merfolk believe they own the sea.

As an Elf, you have to Save vs. Ugliness or take a minor Fear effect (in the case of ugly people) or a debuff (in the case of ugly locations) or just be revolted and peevish for the rest of the day. If you pass, you can tolerate the ugliness without any issues.

I left it deliberately vague because of space constraints, and to see how the players would interpret it.

I didn't know Arnold browsed /osrg/.

Also, I didn't know you adding slug and possum men to Centerra. Pretty cool. How does this effect Noth's politics?

Hah, nope, sorry, just shamelessly stealing ideas from Arnold. This doesn't effect his setting at all.

>As an Elf, you have to Save vs. Ugliness or take a minor Fear effect
Okay, but what save is it?! Petrification? Spell? Its own category?

The system I'm using just has one Save, so... that one.

I'd use Save vs Fear or Save vs Mind Control if those are things in your system of choice.

>"Read the 1E DMG," they said. "It's full of great advice," they said.
I wouldn't put it like that. I'd say that the 1e DMG is a treasure trove of ideas and a great source of inspiration.

ACKS

This

What ancient secrets (i.e. loot) could an ancient snakeman sorcerer-king, who has fused his lich-like body with a primordial snake, have lying around?

Not +1 swords. Plot-defining, city-influencing, items.

The first paragraph, where he says to ask them to leave, and not to invite them back is the appropriate, grown up response to dealing with "troublesome players".

The rest of it I have issue with, since I think the expulsion from the game is sufficient. No need to get petty, or turn the group against a problem player.

While it might be nice to have a DM who is willing to sit you down and hash out with you what the issues are and why you're being disruptive as a player and how to resolve said issues to everyone's satisfaction, he's under no obligation to do so.

This goes double if you're playing at his home.

After reading a trying out The Cursed Chateau, I realized that very intricate and narrow mazes like hedge mazes are incredibly boring for players, at least if played straight with having the players make a choice of which direction to go at every intersection.

Do you guys know any better way to do it?

I usually make it a few rolls to stay on track or get hopelessly lost.

The missing, but legally (and magically) binding city charter.
IOUs from powerful undead.
Colorless, odorless, tasteless poison. Kills in 2 weeks. No symptoms.
Snake charming pipe, a la. Pied Piper of Hamelin.
Copy of an extant (but closely guarded) technique for refining snakeskin into silk.
Wooden stick in a bowl of sand. Shaking, twisting, etc. the stick moves a major river in the same way.
Bell that chimes if someone lies within 3-miles of it. Liar vomits a poisonous snake when they go to sleep.
Foreign curio: Net that can snare the sun.
Potion of Mind-Switch.
Accurate Model of the World, bring a magnifying glass to look for armies etc. Slightly damaged.
Too-Scale Maps of the whole World, stacked across a whole wing of the tomb. Slightly out of date.
Voice of a God trapped in a bottle. Declared enemy of the church after going silent. Centuries painted it as a bogeyman.
Letters from puppet rulers.
Accurate Book of Prophecy, penned centuries ago. Final entry was last week.

Excellent, thanks.

To follow up on this, what sort of castles, strongholds, hideout, or temples have your groups built over the years?

Stealing, thanks.

Why can't anyone agree on the value of a gold piece?

You see this shit? 4 systems, 4 completely wacky values.

Every system agrees that torches are cheap. But is a lantern worth 10 gold pieces, 7, or 3? Are rations worth

It makes it damn near impossible to convert between "classic" systems, especially if you're looking at treasure values or the cost of castles.

Prices are notoriously retarded in D&D, old as well as new. It's the one trait of OD&D I won't even try to defend (well, that and the weight of one gold coin). If you want to get a proper sensible handle on it there are various medieval price lists floating around online that you can make use of to cobble together a more reasonable D&D one.

...

Just use the pricing you like. Also, remember that pricing is bound to vary region to region, even village to village.

The issue isn't that the prices don't match medieval prices. I don't give a fuck if a torch in Florence cost half a guilder or three groats or whatever.

It's that the ratios aren't consistent.

In ACK, you can buy 625 torches for the cost of 1 lantern. In LoFT, you can buy 30.

In AD&D, you can get 1.7 days of rations for the price of one lantern, but in CDD, you can get 200!

It doesn't make sense. There's no internal logic.

It also makes it impossible to estimate the cost of items on the fly. Want to know how much the Dwarf's pony ride costs? Is it 1gp? 1cp? Who knows, unless you look at the table and guess.

>There's no internal logic.
Those are separate systems.
There's actually no external logic.

luminarium.org/medlit/medprice.htm
Just make your players use pence, shillings, and pounds.

Eugh, non-decimal currency.

Also, still doesn't solve the problem of estimation. Probably makes it worse.

It's got Elric and Cthulhu.

>But is a lantern worth 10 gold pieces, 7, or 3?
I think the prices in D&D are rather arbitrary, but it's worth mentioning that LotFP is based on a time period that's a bit later than at least some of the others. DCC isn't really even a retroclone, but rather an OSR game. I don't honestly know much about ACKS, so I can't comment on it.

All fair points. I considered going through every single OSR book I could download, but then realize I'm already cruising perilously close to the "a-word" with this.

Also, strangely, Adventurer Conqueror King lists "Sheep" under "Lodging."

Despite exhaustive entries on every other topic, this is never explained.

I guess some people take animal husbandry very seriously.

If you're trying to build a list to facilitate conversion between systems it's fine. If you're doing it because you feel compelled to compile a list of differences in item costs between system for no reason other than doing so, then you have a problem.

The former, thank goodness. I was converting and comparing ACK costs and decided to see if other systems were comparable.

The answer is no.

Missed a couple weeks because both life and because I've been working on my actual D&D campaign, but I threw up a 1d100 - Odd Treasure chart tonight. I'll post a picture upload here in a little bit.

occultesque.com/2017/03/1d100-odd-treasures.html

Nice. I like your city encounters table.

Thanks! It's a shitty little side project to keep me writing in my spare time, and I'm glad some folks enjoy my stuff.

As promised, here's the png.

If you want an idea for another list, "1d100 [type] Spells" could be good.

For example, "1d100 Orthodox Spells"

1. Bartholemew's Pit
2. The Razor Spiral
3. Oxhold's Lament
4. Negasonic Ray
5. Summon Candles

1d100 Annoyingly Over-Specific Spells

Heh, that'd be good too. Spells a very powerful but very peevish archmage would write for one particular situation, rather than being sensible.

1. Destroy Elementals Named "Dave"
2. Extinguish Sodium
3. Summon Cotton Balls
4. Circle of Protection from In-Laws
5. Move Warts

Create Light of That Shade of Green I Like

You should give it a shot yourself; you might be surprised at how easy it is to dig up 100 small snippets of ideas. Here's 5 spells, though.

1. Farrar's Invert Socks
2. Molblin's Animated Pebbles
3. Greenstave's Faithful Sunflower Guardian
4. Destroy Waterfall
5. Conjure Butterscotch Sweets

But for real, I am going to be doing a few extra 1d100's here shortly to make up for missed weeks, and I think the ones I have picked out are '1d100 - Shitty Peasant Arms & Armor' and '1d100 - Strange Goblin Variants.'

7. Silence Urchins
8. Vaporize Unicorn
9. Tenser's Floating Lounge Chair
10. Carbonate Liquid
11. Remove Undergarments
12. Count and Stack Currency

Ok, fine. Dibs the spell lists then. These are fun.

13. Glitterize
14. Deglitterize
15. Tune Instrument
16. Bigby's Backhand Slap
17. Ray of Condiments

18. Summon Doorstop
19. Destroy Rust
20. Bigby's Masturbatory Aid
21. Conjure Breakfast Elemental
22. Siphon Stain

23. Circle of Protection from Mold

Maybe drop the 'Circle of' bit.

24. Toast bread
25. De-toast bread
26. Continuous Lightning Bolt That Targets Arnulf the Blacksmith from Cobbletown because Fuck That Guy and his Attitude
27. Permanently Delayed Blast Fireball
28. Ray of Tape
29. Tint Goblins
30. Mandatory Applause (Mass)

31. Disintegrate Beer Foam
32. Animate Bodice
33. Bigby's Masseuse
34. Conjure Rocking Chair
35. Korbyn the Grey's Hair Growth

36. Turn Page

37. Least Necromancy, Bump Dead
38. Conjure Humidity
39. Animate Light Wound
40. Invisible Flip Off
41. Contact Winds and Rain
42. Recieving
43. Abjure Light Wounds
44. Protection from Beggars
45. Protection of Beggars
46. Disguise Enemy
47. Power Word Surrender

>Continuous Lightning Bolt That Targets Arnulf the Blacksmith from Cobbletown because Fuck That Guy and his Attitude
Pretty useful spell, once you disinter his corpse.

48. Make Hair Stand On End
49. Cause Beer Foam
50. Remember That One Time You Got Really Embarrassed

...

51. Cure Emotional Wounds

Is there a way to have a Harry Potter-ish magic system in a classic B/X game?

>need foci (wand) to cast, need to learn spell to cast it.
>caster and spell levels are independant -- you know it, you cast it.
>unlimited casting times, but casting should require a test (even if it's a simple missile attack to aim).
>failure comes with great risk, as implied by the books (magic-fumble table?)
>assume there's no magic college -- spells are found in spellbooks as usual.

In practice: you work as a MU by the book. Spells prepared daily from a book (following the MU table) are safe to cast. Other spells can be cast passing a roll - fail and you get railed.

It doesn't sound THAT bad, right? Now MUs can decide if they want to try another Sleep, but they risk losing a leg or polymorphing into a black pudding.

Punishing the wizard for using his magic is pretty bad. I dislike this mechanic.

I do like HP style magic when properly nerfed to fit in more with other games and stories. The issue then becomes the innate challenges of fixing the HP style magic system to other concepts of magic; how and why do potions work if most magic is wands? How do magic items work? How do long lasting spells work and why don't wizards just spam them, etc.

Also giving a small selection of unlimited use weak cantrips is interesting but goes against the resource-based nature of OSR casters, and OSR in general. Somewhat harder to balance as well.

I am absolutely all for casters requiring wands to cast spells though. Especially if you make the players create or generate a wand of different materials and describe how decorated they are, love that shit. I made a whole game book about that sort of thing.

I never said anything about cantrips. With unlimited casts I mean that you can try casting again outside your daily quota.
Spells work the same. All magic items work the same, except wands don't contain spells -- they are akin to a holy symbol.

I don't think it's punishing casters. The other way around. You actually have more options than a MU by the book -- it's a risk-reward decision, nothing else.

The casting fail tables should contain a variety of effects, some very bad, some character-changing, some plain funny.

By using the term 'Harry Potter style magic' and 'unlimited casting times' it heavily implied limitles use spells.

Irrelevant to this though; I think those random spellcasting fail tables are fucking trash. But it's your game and group, so obviously I can't stop you.

>Irrelevant to this though; I think those random spellcasting fail tables are fucking trash

Not him, but what if it's more like the wizard can still prepare spells, but if he uses up all his spell slots he has to do the rolls?

I think the backlash against spell fail tables and that sort of thing is that it's kind of against magic's traditional role as 'reliable, but rare'. As compared to thief skills, which are unreliable, but you can always do them (depending on edition, you may only be able to do them once per item/set of conditions). Double-compare AD&D's Bend Bars/Lift Gates roll, which is the worst of both worlds.

I don't like the random spell effects table. I think it's bad.

You may justify it as 'risk vs reward' type system but I think it's fucking dumb. I don't like it, no matter the situation as to why I don't like it.

It's not about tradition, you have ONE spell per day that might not even have effect because the enemy can save against it. Now your chance is even lower because the spell might not work and fuck you up.

That's the idea.
You can also cast 'unsafe' spells first, and leave your prepared ones for crucial moments.

The magic in the books (and vancian magic in general) it's supposed to be dangerous and unpredictable - none of that happens in D&D.

But why? I could understand if you didn't like a specific table, but I don't get why you dislike the idea of it. Too many rolls?

---

Just for the record -- I've already playtested this and worked just fine (except using a fixed damage instead of a random effect). It worked, but felt like D&D+1, nothing else -- fine by me.

Oh, of course, it absolutely fucks over low-level wizards.

Though some would say playing a single-classed wizard if you have the option not to is a fool's game in the first place.

You don't get it. Please re-read.
You get your normal spells per day, but you can try and cast more: roll for it.

>I am absolutely all for casters requiring wands to cast spells though.
In this vein, I require Magic-Users furnish their spellbook when casting.

52. Corey Cadence's Conjure Caffeine
53. Power Word DMCA
54. Phantasmal Torque
55. Hang Upon Stars
56. Grebber's Ward Against Grabbing
57. Circle of Protection: Geometry

>The magic in the books (and vancian magic in general) it's supposed to be dangerous and unpredictable - none of that happens in D&D.

Do you mean HP or DnD magic here? Kind of vague.

To be honest, I don't really like that style of magic. That's my point. I much prefer a more high fantasy/final fantasy aesthetic myself.

>But why? I could understand if you didn't like a specific table, but I don't get why you dislike the idea of it. Too many rolls?
The reason is threefold.

For starters, it doesn't 'really' add in any good gameplay options. Sure it may seem that giving a chance to fuck up but chance to do something cool when you run out of 'safe' spells seems like an interesting mechanic, but I don't think it will be that interesting in practice. For starters, you are going to get a lot of conservative players who will never use the mechanic at all, because they want to be safe. Secondly the few fun players who do use it will either be fucked over way to hard or not at all due to the random nature of the tables.

The other reason why I don't like it is because, at least in my opinion, it doesn't feel good in a setting sense. Why can the mystical Wizard cast a few spells, but then if they cast more they start getting fucked over? It's one of those things that makes magic in a setting less believable that its a valid profession. Though you could argue that 'only freakshows use it then!' alright, but once again matter of personal preference.

My other issue is I do like magic that can 'backfire' in some way, but it should be an innate part of the magic, not some arbitrary win/loss roll. Summoning a demon is inherently risky, it shouldn't be that summoning any animal past the first X number has a chance to fuck up.

I don't know, it's just a pet peeve of mine like I said. Wizards already "pay" for their powers by being weak, badly equipped, and specialized for magic. I'd say just let the Wizard be a Wizard.