OSR General /osrg/

So first of all, I don't know what edition you're using, or if you're talking about the saving throw in all old school editions of D&D. I think you mentioned 2e earlier, and I admit that I'm not used to that system. I can imagine that most of these things are very similar in all editions though. Still, there might be some discrepancy.

>Save vs death is said to be against losing a fight, petrification against being gimped. The former can be cured with a fifth level spell, the latter with sixth. I was told the latter is a longer term issue... but being killed or turned to stone is going to get you out of the present situation just as surely, and if the battle is lost, no one is going to be there to ever turn you back to flesh anyway.
I believe the spells you're talking about are Raise Dead and... Actually, which sixth level spell cures petrification? Animate object? You'll have to tell me which one that is. Anyway, it is worth noting that Raise Dead actually doesn't resurrects the character, but instead keeps him alive for as many days as the cleric has levels. The character also loses ability score for each time he's raised and can only be raised a certain number of times. It's not really a permanent solution to the problem of death.

Too long, I'll have to split this post up.
1/?

The spell is Stone to Flesh
Raise Dead costs you a point of constitution (permanently); there is a hard limit to the number of times you can be Raised; there is always a chance, sometimes high, that Raise will fail.
Stone to Flesh just fixes you with a relatively low chance of side effects or death as an option.

>Raise Dead actually doesn't resurrects the character, but instead keeps him alive for as many days as the cleric has levels
This isn't true in OD&D/AD&D 1e/AD&D 2e: in those, you just lose a point of constitution if you make your System Shock

>Save vs breath weapon is made against unavoidable large area damage (such as dragon's breath), while save vs spell is as you say it to resist magic, and as I understand it to deal with whatever doesn't fit in the other categories. Yet Fireball, despite being a blast you can at most resist halfway, is a save against spell. The best explanation I've gotten are that it's just written that way, or that it's a leftover from when breath weapon was just against dragon's breath.
It's an interesting detail, and it might just be a leftover like you said. Then again, save vs. spell is generally a more difficult roll than save vs. breath weapon, and this is a spell that is intended to be used by the player. A dragon's breath generally does an astounding amount of damage, equal to its hit points. Saving against that attack was very important to have a chance to defeat the dragon. Fireball can also do a bunch of damage, but it's not as fixed and as massive as a dragon's breath. The developers might have thought that saving against a fireball should be more difficult because the attack, while similar, doesn't have the same function as the dragon attack.

>Then, apparently because you have no other answers to give, you implore me to change it myself. I could, but I wonder what made them come up with such a weird and self-contradictory way of dealing with this stuff to begin with, and why they couldn't manage something better even then - it even carried on to the 2nd edition and most of the retroclones!
Further muddling the issue is the claim that I shouldn't change it, lest I break something I don't understand. As you see I'm trying my best to, yet fail.
I think what people were saying was that, while you might think that it's nonsensical, there might in fact be some sense to the whole thing. At the same time, OSR is all about changing stuff and there are clearly people here that just love changing things because it just feels better to them to do things a certain way.

I see, for some reason I couldn't find it in the player's handbook until I searched for it. And yeah, I kind of imagined that spell to work that way.

I was looking at the 2e spell, but you're right about the 1e spell. I guess they changed it because they felt it was too unforgiving, or something.

You may be misreading the 2e spell, as well. The 'one day per level of the cleric' limit is NOT "how long they are alive after the spell" it is 'the maximum length they can have been dead *before* the spell'. In both cases the spell is permanent, meaning you are just alive.

I'm fairly sure the CON loss is automatic.

>Rod/Staff/Wand = and device or effect that isn't under Death or Polymorph and it reflects you getting out of the way of the beam of the attack, so you use it for laser pistols, too.
That seems plain wrong. It should be similar to spells, but since the spell comes from a wand it is "weakened". Since people can find a wand and just walk around blasting everyone with it, they made it a bit easier to avoid than normal spells.

At the same time, you need to save versus wands when a flind tries to knock your weapon off with a fantasy nunchuck.

How's that a weakened spell?

Shit, you're right, I did misread it. Thanks for pointing it out.

It is. If you fail your system shock you stay dead. Forever.

No, that would be resurrection survival.

If you look at some of the older adventures where you ran into things like killbots and aliens ray guns had a 'save vs. wands' mechanic.

I have to get some value out of playing the game since the 70's

Notice that it's "as against wands". The developers probably thought that the vs. wands probability was around the same as what they wanted to have when attacked by a flind, so they just used that.

How old? Is it temple of the frog? Wasn't the thing with that game that magic is just incredibly advanced technology, making ray guns a wand?

Why wouldn't the ray guns just have the shooter make an attack roll, like with bows and arrows and shit?

>K. Why not use a better designed system though?
D&D isn't perfect, but you're not going to get everybody to agree on which direction you need to move in to improve it. Also, if you're only familiar with new school D&D, you might be making certain assumptions about what D&D is that aren't necessarily true. (And even if you're familiar with AD&D, you may be making assumptions about Basic and OD&D.)

There are certainly things I'd like to change about old school, but working with a light system like Moldvay/Cook Basic, it's really easy to tweak things without unforeseen or unintended consequences. And I can talk about those tweaks with other people here, because they already understand the context. I don't have to explain the entire game to people for them to be able to see where I'm coming from. Old school D&D is a lingua franca that allows me to communicate with a large number of other people. And OD&D, AD&D, and Basic all operate on the same core system, so even an exclusively AD&D guy is probably going to have a pretty understanding about the tweak to/problem with Basic I'm making/having.

I'd also add that a lot of the problems people have with D&D seem to come from trying to use D&D for something it wasn't designed for. D&D is actually a rather niche game, and functions a lot less well outside of its proper context.

Frack. I mentioned system shock about petrification and kept using it. My error

It should all just be one score anyway, seeing as most of the time they're exactly 5 percentiles apart (until you get to 90% and the increments reduce to keep from slamming into the ceiling). It's unnecessary clutter to have two different scores when they're that close to being the same. I like the added options AD&D has over Basic, but the amount of unnecessary bullshit is ridiculous.

I've sometimes thought that vs. rods and vs. dragon breath could be removed and moved into another saving throw, since that would make the numbers be a bit more further apart.

One of the interesting discovers the OSR has made is that "design" isn't always a good thing.

Just look at 3e: it was "designed" around a "core mechanic", ostensibly so that it would be easier to grok. One rule to rule them all, a single d20 + modifier vs. target number mechanic to handle *everything*. And in spite of that, the system is a total shitshow, full of unintended consequences, some of which (like the way saving throws work in 3e) just plain break the game off the shelf. All because of the need to serve a top-down design paradigm.

OD&D wasn't so much "designed" as "grown". The process was more organic. They started with the idea of single-man units/figurines exploring a dungeon, played until they needed a rule for something, made up and canonized the rule, and kept going until there was a game. Certainly that was the case with Arneson's Blackmoor campaign, and then Gygax carried the process further in creating Greyhawk and OD&D.

The resulting game isn't full of unintended consequences because it was made by working backwards from a consequence to a mechanic. It just werks.

And even a little bit later, with Tunnels & Trolls and AD&D, you can see how starting from an armchair design principle first can really bungle things up.

>Just look at 3e: it was "designed" around a "core mechanic", ostensibly so that it would be easier to grok.
I don't actually think there's anything wrong with the core mechanic, itself. It's just that they fucked up everything they stacked on top of it. You could, for instance, express the OSR systems relatively accurately using the unified mechanic. Sure, there might be some rounding involved (2 out of 6 is 33.33% and the closest you can come to that on a d20 is 35%), but that's nothing major. I do agree with you about the unintended consequences though. They obviously didn't fully appreciate the ramifications of the changes they were making, and why things were the way they were.

Yeah, old school saves could stand to be pared down.

I'm just doing "save vs magic" and "save vs non-magic" now. Less book keeping

I don't even remember although I'm sure looking at WOTC's Old Edition Archive almost a decade ago certainly helped. I know it's why I like Maztica and Raveloft.

Some people will say it's an examination of the roots of the hobby and an appreciation of Old-School games but in practice it mostly AD&D 1e wankery (most of the internet) or B/X wankery (here). And for a lot of people it's a huge cashcow (cf. that guy who made five different versions of basic that he sells for $10 each).

I made this map for OD&D wilderness using the tables from delving deeper -- but the stocking tables suck. Help me fill it with gameable weirdness.

I know plenty of people that either use the higher one or ignore it.
Remember Rule Zero!

So a save vs. death is just as likely to fail as a save vs. dragon breath in your game?

That is an incredibly fun map.

having different mechanics for different things = no biggie, to me. Especially since there aren't that many mechanics

What do you want us to stock? Wilderness encounters? Or do you want us to name and describe the numbered structures?

I started playing in '77. I've been running games since '79.
I have played and/or run over 40 different game systems.
Here is the only *real* difference I see between Old School and New.
-Describe the place; describe the situation, and ask 'what do you do?'
>Old School Player tells me what his character does
>New School Player looks at his character sheet to see what he can do
It is a completely different mindset. I see young players writing things like
>"In AD&D onc your first level wizard cast his one spell a day there was literally nothing else for him to do, no mechanics for any other action"
Where an old school player thinks like this
>"My mage has 3 flasks of oil with wicks, 12 darts, chalk, 4 doorstops, a jar of jelly, a jar of bacon grease, and 3 iron spikes. I might not need my spell!"

Yeah I feel the same way. Like there's so much focus on making classes awesome but then players don't even bother buying a bunch of cool stuff for their character. Also, it's nice to see that actual grognards hang out around here.

The latter, but if you wanna do random encounters go ahead.

ty. I've been doing lots of these, some fairly big (20x40 or so) I might post more later on

Number 1 is an ancient engineering project, a device intended to purify the river water poisoned by the fallout of magical warfare upstream. These days it just sits, slowly rotating and looking like an imposing and baroque piece of industrialized fortification.

It is inhabited by a species of rat-people who call it 'the pin on which the world turns' and protect it from outsiders with a religious reverence that involves kidnapping and blood sacrifice. There are rumors of a vault deep within where the remains and personal effects of these sacrifices are piled high. Bounties would be paid by the surviving relatives of victims for confirmation of what happened to their loved ones. Plothooks attached to other areas might also be found within the moldering stacks.

I wouldnt say that 3e's problems stem from its core mechanic, its actually UNDER designed from a philosophy perspective.

>but being killed or turned to stone is going to get you out of the present situation just as surely, and if the battle is lost, no one is going to be there to ever turn you back to flesh anyway.
If everyone else dies while you're paralyzed, what do you put your chances at surviving until the paralysis wears off?

>Save vs breath weapon is made against unavoidable large area damage (such as dragon's breath),
Unavoidable damage in general... which is, mostly, large area attacks.

>The best explanation I've gotten are that it's just written that way, or that it's a leftover from when breath weapon was just against dragon's breath.
And that's the best explanation you'll get. The earlier books were never well edited, and the latter books were made by different people.

>but I wonder what made them come up with such a weird and self-contradictory way of dealing with this stuff to begin with,
Most of the rules either go back to Arnerson's contrivances, or were adapted from rulings Gygax kept having to repeatedly make.
Not sure which one the saves are from, but I would guess the latter.

>Further muddling the issue is the claim that I shouldn't change it, lest I break something I don't understand.
That Chesterton's Fence guy was talking out of his ass.
Chesteron's Fence is about accidentally breaking /other/ things by changing something. Changing saves will, at worst, break saves.

Alright then.

#2 is The Tungsten Tower Over the Magma. Heated gnomes have set up an observatory at the top. They find and eat photons of far away stars. They know the movements of all lower celestial beings. They will tell you what the weather will be for all of the next month, if you help them find more tomes of forbidden astronomy.
A rocktitan keeps the tower from slowly sinking, but he has been put to sleep by imps who wish to have the tower sink down to their underground lavacave. If someone awakens the lavatitan and deals with the imps, the gnomes will reward them with a long-lasting lantern of starlight.

>What brought you to OSR?
My parents owning AD&D 1e and 2e (and Mentzer Basic, but I never read that).

#5 is a barrow of an ancient king and his royal household who were entombed alive. He is now a king-wight and they are now wights. They spend their days in imitation of their living day feasting on fantastic roasts, drinking barrels of wine, and watching dancing-girls (also wight) in their luxurious tomb.

If someone points out that they have now way to get wine or fresh meat since they stay in the barrow all the time, or that all the furniture and tapestries should be rotted by now then all food and wine suddenly turn to dust and the decorations seem to age 1000 years in an instant. The wights will be infuriated and attempt to kill whomever pointed this out.

Those who behave themselves might catch tidbits about the inhabitants of areas #6, #7, and #8 and clues to ancient dungeons and history.

lomion.de/cmm/wighking.php

do you think that change of mindset was because of the simplification brought by cRPG's?

i would like to know your opinion because if you're playing since '77 you sure saw first-hand how D&D was translated to rogue and all his offspring.

In fact, from video games perspective i would say that roguelikes and dungeon crawlers are the digital OSR.

>The earlier books were never well edited
I disagree. I see more spelling and grammar errors in contemporary works, for example, and this is post spellcheck.
In reality, they left it up to you to explain or change.

When the first computer RPGs hit the collective response from TRPGers was
>'FRACK! If it isn't coded I can't do it. THIS SUCKS!'
and I think now people that grew up on them think
>'if it is not explicitly defined in the rules, I can't do it - let's try to define EVERYTHING!'
Which is impossible.
dungeon crawlers are close, but they're still like a badly translated dating sim compared to, you know, actually interacting with girls.

>In reality, they left it up to you to explain or change.
No, in reality they left it up to the guy who'd brought you into the hobby to explain. OD&D traveled more by word of mouth than anything else.

>'FRACK! If it isn't coded I can't do it. THIS SUCKS!'

so it began Toady's Quest.

OSR blogs poll, URLs taken from the Pastebin:

strawpoll.me/12856929 (1/2)
strawpoll.me/12856933 (2/2)

#8 is an ancient burial complex of frost giants who live far to the north of #2. The stone entrance is magically sealed with ice 100 effective hitpoints that can only be damaged by magical fire; the seal "regenerates" 1 hp per hour. The complex contains four levels of burial niches, each containing about 30 frost giant corpses of various ages and appropriate treasure (although any food that was buried within has rotted). The interior of the complex is as cold as an average winter.

The reason this burial complex is so far away is to prevent dead spirits from returning to wreak vengeance. In fact, the complex contains two such creatures, both dreadful undead called frostmourns (cf. Dragon 254; undead frost giants that radiate extreme cold and can turn into snow and ice). 10d60 minutes after the ice seal is broken, one of the frostmourns will rise form its torpor; Roll 1d6 and on a odd roll it will be the frostmourn on level 2 of the complex, on an even roll it will be on the one level 4.
If it is closer to the PCs than the entrance it will attack the party ; otherwise it will exit the tomb to wreak havoc, eventually trying to reach its living kin. 2d10 minutes after the first frostmourn awakens the remaining one also awakens.

To add more color to the encounter, the frostmourn on level 2 is an elderly balding male named Ragnar and the frostmourn on level 4 is a middle-aged female named Hallgrid.

Hey user, are the dark-red parts of your map forests or something else that isn't lava? Because if that's the case, I'll have to change my description at

Yeah. I know. I was there.

WIP of my first ever hexmap, done with Renegade Crowns. It's okay I guess, but I'm probably going to go back and replace some of the copius scrubland with something else.

>What brought you to OSR?
Despite barely any experience in rpgs ( only been aware of the hobby since 5th edition ) I quickly became disillusioned with the game design. I want something closer to Rogue than Skyrim.
I haven't actually played any OSR either, but I like the elegance of the rules and am waiting for a desperate DM to post a game
Meanwhile I'm the shittiest of shitters and trying to write my own OSR despite zero play experience with any of the systems, and scarcely any better from reading some.

Better some ease of bookkeeping than a 5% difference in the odds.

Maybe you could assign some individual penalties, like a -1 to show how much harder that Finger of Death is to save against.

>5% difference between save vs. death and save vs. breath weapon
It's more like a 15-25% difference. That's significant.

Looks good to me so far. How hard was it to generate that using Renegade Crowns? Time it took?

Personally I always just eyeball it, like pic related.

Just a few hours so far. It's pretty easy since the actual major map generation is just 2 tables. Honestly I think yours looks way more interesting; mine is mostly just huge stretches of boring grasslands. I'm gonna try again with a smaller map once this is done.

They are forests, but your entry is cool - you didn't say how DEEP the tower goes. Or maybe it has like a lava moat, (draw)bridges over lava are fun.

Try DMG page 173 if you want something lighter/faster than Renegade Crowns.

A love for all things d&d brought me to osr. Plus I'm old. Huzzah!

>What brought you to OSR?
Pretty new to it, but it was the batman/hero over superman/superhero dichotomy that sold me. Somehow getting a slightly above-average joe (not much different from myself) to riches, fame and fortune through wit, luck and elbow grease, is incredibly cool and fulfilling.

Alright, I guess it still sort of works. I guess the tower can be on some sort of boiling, hard bog with a lavacave underneath.

Trade out that 3-tile forest for a lava lake.

RC is working out fair enough at the moment, I just gotta tweak some stuff later so it's not just african bushland as far as the eye can see.

Just play sinenominepublishing.com/collections/spears-of-the-dawn

Would you introduc enon magical high tech civilizations into Spelljammer?

Sure, there's spheres like that. Spheres with no magic, only the truly powerful artifacts (and spelljammer helms) function in such places.

>(and spelljammer helms)
I thought Spelljamming Helms didn't work in Penumbra?

On the subject of maps made semi-randomly with Renegade Crowns, I've been looking into this one a little more now and I feel like I could add some more flavor to the big patch of mountains covering nearly all of the eastern half.

Any thoughts? Anything that could fit in there and look good?

...

They are powerful items that often ignore local rules. From what I've read of going to other 0-magic spheres, the helms still work.. and are likely all that works. It's designed that way so you can get in and out. Perhaps there are spheres where even that doesn't work, but then you're fucked because you are in the middle of space with a rapidly fading air-envelope and no way to move. Wouldn't be any stories about that sort of sphere, because you'd just die.

Pretty sure the helm "works", but the MUs don't have spells to lemon-press juice out of.
So actual travel requires series helms or lifejammers or orbi or whatever.

I think you still have spells, they just serve NO purpose save as motivating force for the helm in such a sphere.

You can never go wrong with more swamps and forests IMO. Maybe some steppes.

Anyways, I'm almost done with the terrain.

Isn't it a bit too north for swamps, though? You notice the glacier right on top.

(Each hex is three miles.)

>(Each hex is three miles.)
for what purpose.png

Explain further. What's wrong with three-mile hexes?

I'd figure all that glacial runoff has to go somewhere. So in the summer months you'd get cold muck marshland that would freeze over in the winter.

That makes sense.

>What brought you to OSR?

As a general trend, I've always had a habit of digging backwards into older, more obscure stuff in any hobby, because I'm always interested in returning to the roots, seeing how things used to be, and DIY etc.

Ultimately it was a huge mess of reasons that all culminated in me showing up to /osrg/ with a first impression of "holy shit, I'm home."

I started with 3.5 way back when, played, hell, like a decade or so of 3.5, PF, 4e, 5e, lived through the 3.X vs 4e edition wars on Veeky Forums. With either system, the more I tried to change how, say, magic or gods worked in the setting, the more constrained I felt by the system.

It started as an interest in 2e AD&D with a book I found at a thrift shop and Planescape. Then I found out about LotFP, started reading Jason Thompsons adventure walkthrough comics (white plume mountain, god that crawls, etc.). Those made me curious as to how older mechanics worked, as well as reading through modules like God that Crawls and Death Frost Doom which I thought were fucking cool.

One thing led to another, I found OSR general. Hexcrawls, DIY D&D, Weird Style, simulationism, over the top and pulp fantasy that sounds like it was written by a 70s metal band, as one user last thread put it, van-airbrush wizard aesthetic fantasy - all this shit was like a breath of a fresh air to me. I'm fucking reveling in it.

I'm still working on figuring everything out but holy damn I feel like a kid in a candy shop.

>What brought you to OSR?
Bought Death Frost Doom and Fuck for Satan on a whim. I started to look around the lotfp and LL books and found alot to like.

What's a nice small essentials-town I can use for a 10-15 min prelude before a dungeon crawl? Mostly just to ease in the session, and to give opportunities for some rumor rolls by roleplay and walking to places in the town (talk to blacksmith, talk in tavern, talk down in the harbor etc.)

Raging Swan Press has done a whole bunch of Village Backdrops: they're for Pathfinder, but converting them to an OSR system of your choice is pretty trivial.

Village of Hommlet, from the module of the same name.
City State of the Invincible Overlord, if you want something a bit bigger.

>Village of Hommlet

How much do you need to do to remove the Temple of Elemental Evil leanings and tie it up to a plot of your choice? Just ditch or replace the cult from the lower level, or is there more?

I like that term for it, that describes pretty much what I was going for. Thanks!

If you miss a hook, you can always repurpose it once the PCs bite.

I mean, what should the hook be to begin with? I'm not really interested to do Temple of Elemental Evil: it's nowhere near as good or fun as Hommlet is.

I have a few pieces of content I want to post and share, but I have two conflicting beliefs that I want to get some input on. Part of me gets frustraded when an user posts something cool but it's not in a fixed location (such as a blog) that i can return to and see more work from that person if they happen to make more. However there's another part of me that wants to share without the pressure/commitment/expectation that I actually will make more content. Like what's the point of posting something to a blog if it's the only thing on there?

Post the first couple things only here, then if it turns out you love doing this stuff and it only feeds your creativity, put up a blog.

>when you're writing up encounters tables for the sun and moon

I might be going too far in some places.

Ain't nothing wrong about encounters on the moon. Moon adventures are great.

Sun is just a small chunk of the Elemental Plane of Radiance. Also adventure-worthy for higher levels.

coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/05/osr-minor-angels.html

More weird angels!