OSR General /osrg/

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Hireling: drawfag who drew your character
Henchman: shows up to your sessions
Follower: follows you on blogger and namedrops you on Veeky Forums

> What's different about your setting?
Greco-Roman gods and a central sea that dried out: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messinian_salinity_crisis

>What's different about your setting?
This is a relevant question since I'm working on almost 30 pages of encounter charts for my implied setting.

>The most common form of elves are the avariel/winged elves. Nice folk but they've got really bad clautrophobia and more mild pyrophobia
>The most only (?) form of dwarves are the urdunnir who can shape stone and metal into clothes and eat gems
>No gnomes
>Halflings are very rare and only exist in amazon tribes
>There's psionics around in the form of brain-spiders, tigones, and the perfidious gith
>Dragons are an oddball assortment of my personal favorites including: gold, cloud, rain, cobra, deep, spider, red, crystal, amethyst, white, amber, and forest linnorm
>My underworld (Underdark) is shaping up to be an insanely lethal hell-hole
>Liches may or may not exist (if they do exist then I'm using suel liches); however, web-spectres (from Dragon #252 or so) do exist and are currently the hip thing among wizards
>vaguely non-European flavor due to all the genies plus OA and DS monsters
>haven't decided on player races/classes yet

Sounds like OA with Dark Sun's currency rules.

>the Law=neutral Unaligned=neutral Chaos=neutral you're aiming for
I'm actually not really aiming for that, rather an inversion of your Law/Chaos = both cunts thing. I'd like it to be obvious why a sensible person could like either philosophy, but also obvious why they don't get along at all to the point of warfare. Instead of both being cunts, I want both to have clear, distinct but incompatible good points.

Of course you can ALSO just be a douchebag, but it should be obvious why someone might e.g. swear fealty to Arneson and just enjoy the high life of commanding some lizardmen and riding a dragon while brandishing a magic sword.

>rather an inversion of your Law/Chaos = both cunts thing

Would this mean that in your version it's the Neutral ones that're cunts? The indecisive wishy-washy faggots who just want to fuck off and do their own thing?

No; ideally, nobody would be a cunt just by virtue of their alignment.

I admit I'm much less sure of what to do with them, though. I'm sure we all know the guy who wanted to play a black knight and thought orcs were cooler than the PC races, and that's my ideal Arnesonian. Likewise the Gygaxists should be pretty recognizable.

I'd want to use this in a pretty Blackmoorish game involving larger battles -- confrontations between armies and such. Maybe the solution is just to have Neutral refer strictly to NPC mercenaries both sides can hire? Or to let players play those, whether mercenary captains or solitary heroes?

I like the way the Paladins! Light Novel did it.

"Chaos" is the god of order through power, focuses on doing anything to obtain order, even murdering someone if he conflicts against order. He is an amoral agent.
For even in Hell, there is order and a hierarchy.

"Law" is the god of order, but focuses on forgiveness, comprehension, and follows his own set of rules much like regular paladins. He is a moral agent. They do what they feel is right but without murdering unless necessary. They protect the weak, the faithless, and the people of the opposite church alike ("Chaos" promotes ignoring or exterminating heretics)

Neutral is neutral. No benefits no drawbacks.

The more faith you have in one god the more you are rewarded. Chaos rewards with enchanting weapons. Law rewards with enchanting armors and shields. Both gods and churches are eternally at war, but this doesn't mean they will instantly kill each other upon sighting, it means paladins of both churches would often duel against one another to prove their faith. Sometimes to death. Both set of paladins preach on cities, as the more people believe in the gods, the more powerful they are.

Both gods have the same goal but a different way to approach it. If say, an orc army sieges the town. Both churches will work together to stop the orcs. As the orcs are agents of disorder(and true chaos) which go against the will of both gods.

Failing to please "chaos" you will get burned by your own weapon, marking you forever within your kin as a doubter. If you are "Law" and do something immoral, the enchanted armor may fail to shine when you need it, making it just a regular armor with no extra protection.

One church can heal, the other one can burn, etc etc.

I thought it was a cool couple of gods.

>Light Novel
Y'know, I might have a little too much appreciation for Japanese media but that's whole other level of hella fuckin weeb you're bringing to the table.

>"Chaos" is the god of order through power
So he has nothing to do with chaos? Might as well be named "Stacy"

>He is an amoral agent.
"amoral" is just a buzzword people use when they want to make evil seem 2deep4u

>"Law" is the god of order, but focuses on forgiveness, comprehension, and follows his own set of rules much like regular paladins. He is a moral agent.
So he's literally Neutral Good.

>I thought it was a cool couple of gods.
But you literally just described a setting "Chaos" = Evil and "Law" = Good. Shaking my damn head to be honest kouhai.

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>"Chaos" is the god of the opposite of chaos
I have some sort of obscure philosophical objection to this concept.

What is the recommended 'balanced' party size, with or without hirelings, in B/X and clones thereof?

Group of 4-8 players, usually with two to three hirelings each, is how me and my group plays.

Posted before, but here's a map for running a string of LotFP adventures together.

And here's a non 'real-world' variation.

The bottom part is new, right? Totally fair repost in my book.

On the other hand,
>adding BitC
Just skyfortress my broodmother up, f a m

BitC seems like a fun romp tho. Cut out some of the dumb bits and it would go over well at my table I think.

In case you missed it last thread, Paradox Angels!

coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/05/osr-creature-paradox-angels.html

They turn up when something goes terribly wrong in the world and set everything on fire. They're easy to trick but hard to kill and they are really, really violent.

Do you happen to have a starting items generator where you drop dice over a chart?

>terribly
Bit of an overstatement?

>Bit of an overstatement?

Paradoxes have the potential to unravel everything. They're like catching missingno in pokemon. Sure, at first, all that happens is some items get duplicated and plants change colour. But the effects spread and soon you'll be dodging falling clouds and trying to eat soup with your sense of balance, while outside, monsters made of raw language try to play checkers.

...

Can you sell me on LotFP? I don't love the C'thulu/wyrd-dark aesthetic but I like the encumbrance and skills system enough to consider it.

If that's all you're in for, there might be other systems that do a better job.

I'd say read through a /bunch/ of stuff in the Trove and either mash games together or pick one. Maybe it's LotFP. Maybe it's another system with LotFP's systems in it - I used their inventory tables for my game and nothing else.

The aesthetic isn't baked into the mechanics. You could play a normal campaign with it if you liked.
There's an art-free PDF if you want to avoid the depictions of weirdness.

That stuff really isn't present in the core rules, just the module writing.

Also this one.

Aside from a few spells in the book, 99% the Lovecraftian, esoteric horror bits are via modules. You can just as easily use LotFP to run any old TSR D&Dmodule or something more sword & sorcery oriented.

As far as stuff it has I like better than it's basis (B/X):

- Better thieves. Like, much better.
- It's skill system is lightweight and simple.
- Best encumbrance system.
- Each class has good role protection.
- Optional firearm rules are pretty well done.
- Easy peasy to hack.
- Ascending AC.

It's my favorite OSR to run and easily the quickest to pick up for newbies. If it doesn't really do it for you after all that, then Basic Fantasy RPG is just about perfect and even has a few things I like LotFP doesn't include (Race/Class separation for instance.)

>I like the encumbrance and skills system enough to consider it.
Just steal those for your own game then.
Benefit of wide compatibility.

> Doublewinters are a bad time, man.
white walkers?

>- Better thieves.
And yet still terrible.

>Just steal those for your own game then.
>Benefit of wide compatibility.
This. I mean, I'm not against you running LotFP, but it is very easy to insert bits of it into another OSR game.

post the original of this image please. i still have this box at home wasnt it just called D&D back then I got it from my brother.

I disagree about the thieves. LotFP at the least lets you build entirely different types of PCs with the Specialist class. Assassins, Spies, Thieves, Archaeologists, Trapsmiths, Rangers...

>Assassins, Spies,
Their skillset is salvageable, but these are not jobs that matter in the dungeon.
>Thieves,
Not something the Specialist adds.
>Archaeologists,
A character trait anyone should be able to get away with.
>Trapsmiths,
Yet another case of rollplay infringing on roleplay.
Anyone should be able to lay traps, but thye should explain how.
>Rangers
Name one ranger trait that (a) isn't snowflaking and (b) shouldn't be in everyone's toolbox.
>...
...

I'm about to publish a review that's fairly critical of Van Richten's Guide to the Ancient Dead.

Does anyone out there have particularly nostalgic memories for this thing? I just want to know who I'm about to offend.

I haven't read it but I like the Guide to Ghosts and Werewolves. How bad is it?

It's not bad, it's just... padded. This bit

>My studies have revealed an account of a mummy with a unique and baffling power. The creature had command over its own body weight and could render itself light as a feather. This supernatural weightlessness allowed it to tread on water, run straight up vertical walls, or perform other astonishing feats of mobility.

But for the entire book.

Anyone should be able to fix a car too, but I cant.

Role-types are ok outside the basic 7 homie.

Ok, maybe I lied. It is bad, but compared to some of the stuff I've seen on this site, it's at least inoffensive. It's beef broth served lukewarm, but at least it's not shards of glass in milk.

Yeah, every VRG is like 66% fluff and 33% crunch. Remember, it's supposed to be a selling point that they're facsimiles of in-setting books.
At least the writing is better than Planescape, eh berk?

If you don't want to play a guy who fixes cars, just don't have your character fix cars.
Saying, "fixing cars ought to be a mechanical character trait" is pick related.
To make a slightly more relevant comparison, it's like the 2e riding NWP.

It's not the fluff/crunch thing, it's how boring and repetitive it is. Sure, it's supposed to be an in-setting book, but I've read in-setting documents for the real world and they're not even a 10th as /boring/.

Fuck, the Malleus Maleficarum might be convoluted and weird and full of bad quotations but at least it's got some evocative flavour to it. The VRG books suck all the mystery and discovery out the things they describe.

But yes, correct. The writing is competent even if the author keeps fucking up his tenses.

Anyway, here's the review.

coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/05/osr-review-veins-of-earth-vs-van.html

Then what is the issue with the LotFP being able to specialize in certain skills others don't have? The specialist literally exists as the skilled member. I don't understand the argument.

>Anyone should be able to lay traps, but thye should explain how.
>A character trait anyone should be able to get away with.
>Name one ranger trait that (a) isn't snowflaking and (b) shouldn't be in everyone's toolbox.

Anyone, anyone, everyone?

>The VRG books suck all the mystery and discovery out the things they describe.

I was particularly amused when in VRGtG we get the prose saying
>Ghosts cannot be understood by mortal science
And a few pages later he's all
>My wizard friend told me that . . .

Ravenloft was a real mess when it came to sticking to themes and flavor.

Can I get a statblock for that jewish orange?

>jewish orange

>Read chapter 1, sentence 1, and tell me if it adds anything to a book called "Guide to the Ancient Dead".
> Most of the ancient dead were once living, breathing people who have defied death to walk again among the living- as mummies. Their tortured spirits remain bound to their now-
It does actually tell me something.Namely, that some undead were never alive. I don't think that's what it was going for, but it's an interesting thought.
Reminds me of a dungeon some user posted (a month ago?) with a "minotaur" trapped in a maze... who was actually the hypothetical son an angry goddess(?) never had.

>I disagree about the thieves. LotFP at the least lets you build entirely different types of PCs with the Specialist class.
I'm not saying they aren't an improvement, but low level thieves still really suck at the majority of their skills, to the point where most of them aren't worth trying, unless there are no repercussions to failure, anyway. A 1st level specialist's average chance of success on one of his skills is something like 25%. That's pathetic.

>It does actually tell me something. Namely, that some undead were never alive. I don't think that's what it was going for, but it's an interesting thought.

I don't think it's ever covered. Ironically, it's one neat idea that's also completely untrue (by the book as written).

Ah well.

>Ravenloft was a real mess when it came to sticking to themes and flavor.

You said it.

I don't know about you but the concept of Nito in Dark Souls 1 is still one of my favorite ideas in all of fiction.

>the God of Death
>also the First Undead
>Probably was never alive
>Probably just a mass of dead things comprising a humanoid skeleton
>The literal concept of Death itself incarnate in something that was not ever a living being before it became undead

This shit gets me.

There's also the Dark Souls idea that humanity is a disease you can catch, like leprosy, and that the natural state of man is undeath.

It doesn't make a lick of sense but it's neat anyway.

>A 1st level specialist's average chance of success on one of his skills is something like 25%. That's pathetic.

It's 33% and only if you try to be a generalist specialist and put one point into four different skills. Which is not smart.
If you put all your 1st level points in a skill, you'll have a whopping 83% success rate at that thing. Or you can put three points in one thing for 66%, and put the remainder into a secondary thing for 25% at that, or just do two and two for 50% success at two things.
But the point of the specialist is to specialize and be good at something, whereas the original Thief had to gain a lot of levels before he became good at anything.

Apple-ohm (AC by armor; HD 1+; MV 25'; #AT 1; D 1d4 or by weapon; SD as gnome; Save F1; Ml 12; AL N)
Ostensibly a genus of gnome. Befriend burrowing mammals as gnome, plus bees and birds (including dinosaurs).
Can cast 2D-lusion 1/day/HD while wearing a gnome hat. Duration is until concentration breaks or hat is removed.
Sleep dangling from tree branches (they hold on with their teeth).

כָּתוֹם (AC 8; HD 2-1; MV 25'; #AT 3/2; D 1d4-1 or by weapon; SD possession (see below); Save F2; Ml 3; Al C)
Possesses a person by eating or being eaten by them. Victim regains control while under the open sky without a hat.
If planted, grows an orange tree and a single, vengeful כָּתוֹם. If victim is planted with an orange tree, bears 3d6 כָּתוֹם/year.

So I informed my artist friend of Veeky Forums's immediate and unhesitating response to her image.

She says you're all bastards.

Carry on.

found the reissues of judge's guild material at my flgs, are they worth picking up? or are they like remastered albums in that theyve changed shit for no discernible reason and ended up kacking the whole thing up

>It's 33%
They only have enough points to advance half their skills at 1st level. Thus, their average skill is 1.5 / 6 = 25%. (That's if you include sneak attack but leave out languages.)

>only if you try to be a generalist specialist and put one point into four different skills. Which is not smart.
Granted. And thieves have a somewhat expanded list of skills, so if you shave off a couple, the numbers look slightly better, with the emphasis on "slightly".

My complaint is not that a specialist can't relatively quickly get good in a couple of skills, but rather that his baseline is pathetic. To be a well-rounded thief is impossible until you hit high level. Having an ability that's essentially a coin flip isn't ideal, and having one that's worse than that is hardly worth having (again, unless there are no repercussions to failure). Really, I think the skills (most of them anyway) should have a higher baseline (2 in 6 at the very least), and maybe the specialist should gain points more slowly to compensate.

Said it before, I'll say it again.

Thief skills should be automatic successes, dicing for time cost.

>To be a well-rounded thief is impossible until you hit high level.

Well, yeah, that's why he's a specialist. It also means you can have two (or three!) in the party and they're not redundant. Mastering a whole spate of skills is a thing for high level specialists, not 1st level ones.

This is interesting. Tell me about that. How would you order it? They roll, you tell them how long it will take, they decide if they're willing to take that long? Could do it with they roll, it takes half that long before you tell them the full duration and they can back out if they want to save time? Does it mean non-thieves have % to fail?

Hidden roll, cover the die but leave it on the table. Reveal it when the reach the time or give up.

Non-thieves do milder (less supernatural) activities, have a chance of failure, and still roll for time.
That said, higher level non-thieves *do* improved their speed at some of the (neutered) thief abilities.
No improved chance of success, but there are retires with consequences.

Not that guy, but I'd make it "You know how likely you are to succeed. You need X successes to finish the task. Start rolling."
You're sure to do it, but the question is how much time it'll take.

I've always done that, but less explicit and meta. Failing a stealth check doesn't mean the ogre instantly sees you and stealth time is over. That's no fun.
The first failure might be a noise that wakes him up, while the second makes him suspicious so he picks up his club and goes to look around and see what that sound was, and maybe on the third one he spots you. The initial failure puts you in a tighter spot, but doesn't shut you down just yet.

Sorry, I wasn't clear.
I actually do say "X successes". As in the letter, not fill-in-the-number.
It's some finite quantity. They know there's some goalpost. But they don't know where it is or how close it is.

See, with no threats there shouldn't be any issue bruteforcing it. But if they're in a situation where there's no threats, I'm not doing my job. Time is always and forever the enemy.

I guess the only thing I'm different-wise from my friends is that I'm the crunchiest dm & I love giving my players as many options as they need to make characters. I love to make new magic crap & spells. I throw traps I've made at them constantly and puzzles and riddles too. Most of the other forever dms are all about the combat but I love personal intrigue and people actually forgetting who they are for a little while. It's great decompression I'm. I'm a bit older than some of y'all here, though. I think I've dmed for twenty-nine years now?? I've had one thirteen year campaign (Greyhawk), a seven year campaign (Dragonlance) and my current one, it's not very old though.

You could maybe do a base of 2 for skills, with the same 4 points to add at 1st level, and 2 thereafter, until you hit mid-level, at which point you'd only gain 1 (maybe after 5th level). At any given level, however (including 1st), you'd only be able to increase a skill by 1 point. So the highest you could have at 1st level would be 4/6.

Honestly though, I'd be tempted to change things to a d10 roll to give a bit more granularity. This would also make it easier for folks to grasp their chance of success (6 out of 10 = 60%). The only downside I see are that d10s are less ubiquitous dice, and there could be significantly more points to allocate at 1st level, but I don't think either of those are major problems. Unskilled could start out at 3 out of 10, and specialists could start out with 4 out of 10. On any level gain, they'd get 2 or 3 points to add, and could put no more than 1 point into any given skill. 1st level would essentially be a double level: you'd get double the points to add, and could increase a skill by up to 2 points.

There's a little old lady who lives on her own half a mile outside of town.

What's she doing out there, and why? And don't be obvious about it.

We /just/ did this one. Her cottage is a change-of-scale gimmick dungeon, she buys groceries for the monsters in the walls.

As I recall, you guys got about 3 rooms in before people lost interest. /osr/ has too many different styles and desires to collaborate. It's a society of wizards, and the plural of wizards is war.

>The entire book feels like it was rushed or written in one go and never substantially edited or examined from first principles.

I'm reasonably ignorant of the personalities and history of mid-D&D. Since this is Veeky Forums, I suspect you're not in favour of this lady?

Why....I never knew what she looked like and that was purposeful. Spoiler your shit, man!!

War. I like war. Just like Mordenkainen. Maybe you remember him huh....

So OD&D doesn't give more abilitie score for level up right?

That's the CEO who drove TSR into the ground then sold it to Wizards of the Coast.
She kicked Gygax out of TSR in a hostile takeover, and instituted a "no playtesting on company time" policy.
She also hated the hobby and it's hobbyists, she was only interested in TSR for it's money.

Legend has it she put a stop to playtesting at TSR. To play devil's advocate, from what a lot of folks said about their time at TSR, the "playtesting" at TSR when she came in sounded a lot like round the clock fun and games on the company's tab rather than serious quality control work.
IMO The Blumes were the real bad guys of the story. Lorraine Williams was just the one who was given the unpleasant task of trying to fix a company that had lost its direction and was hemorrhaging cash at an alarming rate. (Which I gather is always a thankless task, because it hurts.)

Nope. And if you aren't using the Greyhawk splat book; Strength, Intelligence, and Wisdom are only used to calculate bonus xp.
Aspects of you character that falls under those attributes are folded into your class and level.

The 'prime requisites" were initially just aptitudes for classes.
>Hitting harder than the more "experienced" guy, because you're bulkier.
>Learning more from your "experiences" than the less smart guy.
>etc.
It was all very abstract, but so were all the other mechanics.

Nope. There are ways to get stat increases however.

Nope.

You've confused her with the Blumes. They were the ones who took the company from Gygax, and the company took a nosedive under their direction. (Though it was probably headed that way under Gygax, too.)

>Legend has it she put a stop to playtesting at TSR.

To be fair, I've seen some of the stuff TSR and Wizards produced with playtesting, and it's not a thrilling endorsement of the method. I'd rather have 2 extra hours per day spent thinking about high-level problems and usability issues than 2 extra hours futzing around looking for traps.

But since option 1 is not common in RPG design it's a moot point. You can lead a grognard to water but you can't make him think.

>There's also the Dark Souls idea that humanity is a disease you can catch, like leprosy, and that the natural state of man is undeath.
>It doesn't make a lick of sense but it's neat anyway.
definitely one of the reasons I prefer Bloodborne as a setting, it's overall more coherent, which is kinda funny considering it's a sorta-Lovecraft setting(although honestly there's just as much of Robert E. Howard, and William Hope Hodgson in Bloodborne's setting as there is Lovecraft)

overall though comparing the two I'd argue that Bloodborne would be the easier setting to emulate under an OSR ruleset, might not seem that way at first glance but definitely feels that way to me(only major systems in Bloodborne that really need much work to emulate are the Trick Weapon system and the Gun Parrying system)

Do you have a favorite osr dev? Is that not grognardy? You do realize you're on an osr thread in tg, correct?

Why do we need stupid labels anyway...

Jeff Grubb. He was responsible for ⌈Manual of the Planes⌋, ⌈Spelljammer⌋, and ⌈Al-Qadim⌋.

Well now I'm reading his short stories again, damn it. I hope you're happy, user!

Honestly, great choice in dev, no fault there.

>but at least it's not shards of glass in milk.
What sorts of magic potion could that be for you to willingly drink it?

Bastard! My setting is 1630 but with magic!

...

The universe is very unstable, and entities from other universes are lapsing into the world. Portals appearing out of nowhere is becoming more and more common.

youtu.be/7M2Qt0RjktU

Why does /osrg/ never talk about Paladins?
Is it an extension of only discussing B/X?

>Lemon Demon
>I've Got Some Falling to Do
Now that's a blast from the past, I remember watching the TmsT/Andrew Kepple animation on AlbinoBlackSheep.

> What's different about your setting?
It depends on the setting.

Has anyone done a system where PCs with lower ability scores actually get more experience? I feel like that would make sense, and it would make lower-stat characters more viable options.

I brought up paladins before, but many here are very adamant about keeping their prime requisites, so I don't think they've ever actually used the class.

Eeh, it was pretty conclusively demonstrated that even a +100% xp rate, although a decent reward for humans, barely matters.

As far as HitDudes go (which is most chars when you get down to it), a simple +1 to hit and damage is going to make them crazily better than their INCURABLY shittier peers.