/osrg/ - Old School Renaissance

I don't like it that, to the extent players have control over where their abilities go, magic-users are likely to highly prioritize constitution, meaning that magic-users tend to be good at constitution checks, which belies the frailty a low hit dice size is supposed to impose on them.

Well that is excellent then.

Any Exploding Death Men yet?

I like the wild magic surge mechanic in 5e, something like that would probably work for causing random effects and sometimes explosions. Something like, every time you cast a spell you roll a d20. If the number rolled is equal to or under the level of spell you're trying to cast, a wild surge happens.

I'm trying to make an OSR setting and it's fucking tough cookies.

Not yet, those are planned for later. But I am glad you saved my shitty class inspired by another user.

Well the other user was me, so I'd feel terrible if I didn't save it. And it did trigger a bunch of other anons, so clearly, it's a great idea.

I think that's neat, but it still makes the spells predictable.

Wizards have nice orderly spell lists. They're like the guy in tacticool armour with bandoliers and carefully labelled pouches and hand signals.

Sorcerers are like these guys.

This will probably be an annoying reply, but it's only as hard as you make it, user. You can just go with a small hexmap's worth of regular medieval fantasy to start with, you don't NEED anything more to play. And if you WANT more gonzo and peculiar stuff, just add it as you go along, in the margins of or outside the first hexmap.

Yeah, my thinking was to make them like M-Us but with an ever-changing loadout of spells plus the minute chance of exploding into a fireball if they trigger a wild surge. Not sure how I'd randomize spells without putting in a whole lot of work changing them up, possibly a random roll determining the level of the sorcerer to use when casting the spell, so you can cast Fireball as a 1st level Sorcerer? Hell, combine it with the wild surge chance roll, indicating how much of a handle you have on the spell.
>Get 20 on Sorcerer die, cast Fireball as a level 20 caster, basically act like a magic shotgun
>Get 2 on Sorcerer die, cast Fireball as a level 2 caster, your handle on the spell goes awry and smoke starts spewing out from all your orifices due to the wild magic surge
Something to that effect.

>Due to their small size and skills at dodging, halflings have a bonus of -2 on their Armor Class when being attacked by creatures larger than man-sized.
Pretty sure this should read "+2 on their Armor Class" or "-2 on to-hit rolls" since you're using ascending AC everywhere else.

Well, I did just post 100 spells

coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/03/osr-100-orthodox-spells.html

So you could go:
1. Roll 1d100
2. Consult table. Get spell
3. Roll 1d4 for [dice] and multiply it by 1d6 for [sum] and hey, presto, that's your spell for the day.
4. Hooray!

What's a good way to do equipment and encumbrance?

I like simplified versions. Something like light items and daggers are one point, medium items and weapons are two points, armor is like 3 points and so on. Add your strength modifier to how many items you can carry. Everyone gets a base of like 10.

youtube.com/watch?v=nx3KD9Xo1fg

Spears or really cumbersome pikes seem like a Truer Form of weapons than broadswords.

What about the goblin punch version?

Inventory Slots and Encumbrance
You have a number of Inventory Slots equal to your Strength + 2 (from you backpack). Most items take up one Inventory Slot. Two-handed weapons take up two inventory slots. Armor takes up a number of slots equal to its Defense bonus (or AC-10 in some systems). Negligible items (small enough to put inside your closed mouth) take up none. Coins and gems never take up any Inventory Slots.

You gain 1 point of Encumbrance for every Inventory Slot in excess of your capacity. In addition to getting Encumbered from carrying too much, you can also gain Encumbrance from wearing armor. Each point of an armor's Defense bonus in excess of +3 (or AC above 13) incurs a point of Encumbrance. Encumbrance is applied as a penalty to your Movement, Stealth, and Dex checks. (It doesn't actually decrease your Dex, it just makes any Dex checks more difficult.)

>to the extent players have control over where their abilities go,
>tend to be good at constitution checks,
I bet you like NWPs, too

,

I don't like how it makes strength so important, but the rest of the rules are pretty much exactly what I wanted.

Bit more Goblin Punch shills on here then I expected.

>since you're using ascending AC everywhere else.
*Hssssss* didn't he sort-of promise to fix the AC?

>didn't he sort-of promise to fix the AC
Oh, I'm not sure. I wasn't paying too much attention last thread.

Well, Strength has to do something (other than adding or subtracting damage). It doesn't add to attack rolls in the system.

We've established that there are at least four of us.

Not last thread, the time before that.
Pretty sure he offered to have both ACs listed.

Is it in the trove somewhere?

It would be near the right amount of gonzo.

I think he was talking about switching back to descending AC at one point. Not sure where he ended up though.

Reposting in the new thread. I wrote a post about Elementals, how to interact with them, and what they can do for you. It's... probably not what you think.

coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/03/osr-what-does-elemental-want.html

It's probably one of my favorite posts yet, even if it does include pretentious bullshit like:

>[Ice elementals] loathe fire elementals with all the bitterness of an atheist invited to a maudlin heaven.

Still, it does explain storms, acid, and glaciers in what I hope is a unique and interesting way.

Heck, I'm just gonna roll everything up into one post and shill my shitty, rarely updated blog while I do it.
dmnoises.blogspot.co.nz/2017/03/my-take-on-sorcerers.html

That art is fucking great, is the setting good?

Yes! It's in the Settings folder in the Supplements folder.

I like it. It's very not-Europe-y, if that's what you're into.

Is there supposed to be any mechanical advantage to sorcerors? Faster leveling, or something?

Generally casting spells at higher levels with the chance of a wild surge doing something more beneficial. A lot of their theme is "live fast die explosively".
Upping their hit die to d6 or allowing them to wield weapons other than daggers, darts, and staves could be good ways to make them a little more desirable than a wizard.

What do you guys think of randomly generated creatures?

Low opinion. It leads to messy, stuffy settings.
...not quite kitchen sink, but bad for the same reasons.

And honestly, monster design seems important enough to want to do well.

Old thread is extant.

I was thinking more like, the world is filled with your typical mundane creatures and fantasy monsters, but then there's also some randomly generated creatures in there. I was thinking like the titans and forgotten beasts and some of the demons from dwarf fortress.

Yeah if you tried to randomly generate every creature that would feel like shit, I agree. But like say a dungeon has 1 big and tough randomly generated creature to fight

I was thinking about just generating a world in dwarf fortress, going into legends mode, picking a titan/forgotten beast at random, and coming up with stats for it

>Old thread is extant.
Old thread is archived.

>I was thinking about just generating a world in dwarf fortress, going into legends mode, picking a titan/forgotten beast at random, and coming up with stats for it
This is perfectly fine, but only because it's (mostly) deliberate creature design.

I think if you try to generate the ENTIRE creature randomly, then yeah it will end up kind of shitty.

But if you have a specific archetype or chassis for a creature in mind and give it a few random possibilities I think it can be quite good. Check out the Small God monster entry here.

I like it. I don't do it often, I'm content with the staples, but occasionally I really want to throw a curveball in, so I randomly roll a monster and then come up with a way the world sees it (is it a myth, is it a common problem, is it a thing like based Owlbears where some wizard got smashed) and knows of it.

Also, I enjoy it as a toolkit because sometimes I want to random-gen an entire setting with Donjon and it's cool to random-gen monsters with it, and then just put it all together. It's like a puzzle. It's fun.

>What's your favorite OSR setting?

Wilderlands of High Fantasy.

>What's your favorite OSR setting?
Post-Tolkien New Weird stuff. Yes I'm a fucking hipster.

If that's the case, then literally everyone on OSR is a fucking hipster.

What happened with zak s (in terms of content quality)? I've been reading these in this order:
>motbm is uninspired as fuck, just a exercise in information delivery with some cool factor shoved in in strategic chokepoints. Forces a story. Layout is serviceable but boring and aseptic.
>rapl is interesting and has a few great bits, but feels lazy, incohesive/incomplete. No low level adventures. Excelent layout/illos without looking busy
>vorheim is *top notch*, cover to cover - except the layout

The rules and random tables stay excelent, but the content feels lazier and tamer with each new book...

That's funny, I've had almost the opposite reaction to all of those. Although I wouldn't call any of his books bad content.
It seems as if he gets his friends to come up with ideas or write parts of his books, so maybe that's the stuff you don't like?

Back in old-school games, there were many enemies that nonmagical weapons couldn't harm.

How can you have the party face these enemies without such weapons, build up tension and challenge, without still utterly annihilating them?

Not 'bad', but uninspired or plain standard content. And I'm a big fan of false machine, so that's not a problem.
What's so good about motbm? Granted, it's big and has flavor, but that's it.
Vornheim is a (vaguely defined) setting, plus a city, plus 3 awesome adventures with ramping difficulty with interesting monsters; plus you get tons of DM tools, tables and the like - in a limited page count.

Vorheim feels like a dude grabbing you by the neck and yelling "i played this and it was awesome, here's how you can do it too, LOOK". It's no perfect and some wording can be grating (specially stats), but that's it.
Motbm feels like a wedding invitation under the door saying "welp so here is this game content, good luck with it".
For ex. the Cannibal Critics feel like something a guy in art school would force upon his non-artsy players. More like a vague... thing, than the mindblowing creativity + excellent gameplay you'd expect from that combo of authors.

Wolvesbane, garlic, holy water, sunlight... standard equipment list stuff.

What is the most contrarian sort of deity (or force or philosophy) that you could see backing paladins, short of purely opposite day stuff like good fiends and good undead?

Dunno, I've seen nothing but near-unanimous dicksucking of the guy and his work. Personally I think they're "just okay". A little too vague and artsy for me to do anything but cannibalize the bits I like and then ditch the rest.

I have three v. important questions:
- what do you think of baremaidens.com?
- what do you think of dungeon synth?
- what do you think of this?

I don't understand the first two questions, but that's pretty damn neat.

>what do you think of baremaidens.com?
It's porn.

>what do you think of dungeon synth?
Pretty boring but alright if you haven't found any better background music for a session.

>what do you think of this?
Looks like some I'd draw while desperately brainstorming for a session I forgot to prepare earlier.

i like a bit of summoning but any attempt to go any further into dungeon synth i seem to find a whole lot of music that just fucking sucks
I should like it, dark, lo-fi music about fantasy, but I just can't do it.

>What's your favorite OSR setting?
TSR: I can't choose just one.
OSR: I dunno, maybe the one Faster Monkey used for Lesserton & Mor/In the Shadow of Mount Rotten
Other (Veeky Forums): Dominiarian Ice Age
Other (vidya): Skyrim
Other (literature): Demon in The Mirror

I think the Monster Extractors for DCC would work for that system but not much else.

Has anyone got the Blood and Treasure 2e monster book?

>not into it, blond women with big tits dressed up for nerds is even more tacky than regular porn
>don't like low tempo music
>Neat. Seems a bit small but the style doesn't get in the way of content, iconography is clear. Has some funny shit in it like merchants in pots. Would be interested in more.

I want to run a game with wilderness travel between towns and dungeons, so I'm thinking of running a point crawl with each point being an interesting place / landmark, and the edges (lines) being landscape travelled between those landmarks.

I need help with ways to make regular european terrain feel nuanced. How do I vary woods and hills? Are there some resources for making this interesting and fun?

Stuff like darker denser woods, older woods with bigger trees, parts of the wood with certain flora, etc.

>Coins and gems never take up any Inventory Slots.
Not the guy who originally asked, but this is literally the exact opposite of what I would consider a good encumbrance system. I'd even prefer something like
>armor sets base movement rate
>nothing else you carry matters for encumbrance purposes until the referee calls you a mong
>coins and gems are meticulously calculated like a sperg based on the weight of real-world coins and carats of gemstones

And that's not something I'd call an ideal system. It's just that how much loot you can carry is the *crucial* factor in an encumbrance system.

What's your opinion on letting players having more than one character? Because a lot of the old tales have parties with like a dozen dudes, but nowadays it's good if I can scrounge together four assholes that don't flake.

Frankly, experience and evidence have led me to believe they never had those huge player groups to begin with.

...

>What's your opinion on letting players having more than one character?
Fine as long as you bring 2/adventure at most.
>they never had those huge player groups to begin with.
Those huge groups were "everybody who hung out at their FLGS, and their uncles."

All right, fine, but those huge groups would either have had to come back for several more sessions, or play like twelve hours at one time, in order to get through all those big dungeons with big bands of enemies with their hugeass parties.

Nowadays it takes my three-man group fucking four sessions exploring a single two-story manor.

>How do I vary woods and hills?
Generally speaking, you don't.

You could drop mid-dungeon (mid-session, even) in or out and have you character conveniently appear or disappear.
Same deal if you died mid-session, but had other characters outside the dungeon.

>or play like twelve hours at one time, in order to get through all those big dungeons
>it takes my three-man group fucking four sessions exploring a single two-story manor
Chesterton's Fence. You (or someone before you) took out rules that ought to have stayed in.

But specifically, I want to in order to make choice of place to go meaningful.

How does different parts of sherwood forest differ from eachother?

I don't see how the presence of a caller makes things any faster: it just moves the problem one level lower, you needing to all tell the caller what you do rather than the DM, without truly solving a thing.

The caller makes most decisions on his own.
Any consultation that happens is minimal.

You're welcome to give the caller suggestions, and the caller is welcome to ignore them.
If the caller has your character (rather than the group) do something, you can say "no."
If the caller has the group do something you don't like, you can elect a new caller.

>what do you think of dungeon synth?

As a child of the 80s, I know deep down in my heart that synthesizers are actually for lamers, like bisexual dudes from Europe with ridiculous hairdos that we all make fun of.

>Learn to play a real instrument, wuss!
- Teenage Me

What are the best books on D&D's history?

I hear mixed things about this one, but god damn I can't help but judge it by that wonderful cover.

Google 'weird forests' or something similar and loot ideas from their pictures. Check out tmblers about the woods. Go for a walk in a big park or the woods if you've got one near by. There's a huge amount of variety in most woods. Enough to give you a few different descriptions for encounters anyway.

>This part of the forest is densely packed with tall, thin white barked trees that bend in the wind.
>Here a massive weeping willow grows over a chunk of jagged rock, obscuring what lay beneath it.
>Ancient tree roots are exposed along the slope of this hill, thick and gnarled.
>New growth packs this part of the forest, smaller scrub and young trees over rotting stumps.
>The fallen fir needles in this part of the forest cover the ground, preventing much undergrowth.
>The remains of a rusted out metal chariot rest overturned in a ditch. Mosses and corrosion spread through its frame.

Shit like that. That's just behind the house where I grew up.

It was a car not a chariot, but you get the idea.

I've heard good stuff about this one.

Playing at the World is the best one, bar none. If you don't like autistically meticulous lineages of where shit like AC and initiative came from you'll want to skip a lot of the system section while reading, but it's there if you do want it.

Any chance of getting it in the trove?

>I'm not sure what this could be used for, but it seems like something an Orthodox Wizard would do.
Seems like a good way to transfer memorized spells.

Don't know if it's in the trove but it's def. available in PDF (have seen the physical book and it's brutishly huge and unwieldy) so shouldn't be impossible to get it

Does anyone else gravitate to OSR not for the style of play, but the rule simplicity? I'm currently homebrewing a version of LotFP that takes a lot of cues from 5e to give my players more of an ongoing campaign with their characters instead of high death terror. Rave/Class separation with bonuses, higher HDs (but lower AC from LotFP).

I tried and tried to get them into the OSR mindset, but it just isn't working and I'm not about to introduce a whole new system. Also I don't think 5e is simple enough, as most of them just casually play.

Any advice on things to keep and things to tweak?

Something like that, only my system of choice (AD&D 2e) really isn't that simple. But I like its rules a lot more than those of later editions, and prefer it even when otherwise not doing an OSR game.

Yes, a lot of people are here for that reason. Some of the crotchety grognards hate it, but it's a valid approach as long as you focus on the dungeon crawling.

>Does anyone else gravitate to OSR not for the style of play, but the rule simplicity?
At least half the thread population these days does this. (Your own question comes up roughly every other thread.) It used to mostly be people who came for the play style, but you see more and more people going "ree muh grog high-lethality playstyle, bluh blur shitters, the Primer is for fags" now.

I don't mind the preference per se, but a lot of you guys sure have a salty-ass attitude in here

Death at -10 instead of 0. Keep your traps similar to each other.
Tack on simple and generous! rules to abstract parlay, surrender, and retreat.
And remember that the "OSR mentality" asks more of the referee than of the players.

>Rave/Class separation
Noice.

Lol. Fuckin autocorrect.

Everyone's the same at a rave, maaaaaan
Unite across class borders!
PLUR

>first L is capital
Whenever I see this I fill with doubt. I know you to be phoneposter,
but wish to believe you emoted throwing arms up in exhaustion.

>the Primer is for fags

What's wrong with the Primer? It seems like pretty sensible advice what it has.

There is "Of Dice and Men" as well as the "Designers & Dragons" line of books.

...

I'm not sure I understand.

It attracts some criticism, mostly from the anti-grognards it seems to me, that it's too political and and pushes "the one right way to do it" too hard, and has kind of a strawman of "new school play."

Not the same guy but if we're talking about the Matthew Finch one, I have some issues with it.

Mainly the way he presents modern-style versus old-style games. He makes it sound like rolling dice to detect traps (for example) is a new thing. I don't want to tap every wall, floor and ceiling with a 10' pole. I want to take a turn to say my character does that and then roll a d6, just like it says in my copy of Basic.

It's a mnemonic for the False Dilemma fallacy.

What false dilemma do you think it gives?