/osrg/ OSR General - Barrier Peaks Edition

>github
Explain.

I'm not distinguishing too rigidly between scifi and fantasy. There's city states of technospartans, liquid state-ghost drives, crystalline rainbow pistols and barbarians with sacred astral helms. Looking back on that sentence, 'lots' I guess would be another answer.

Its in the pastebin trove, Lamentations of the flame princess based games.

>How many science fiction elements does your setting have?
"Hey guys we should take a break from our Traveller campaign and play D&D."

"Sure, pick one of those low-tech worlds out in the frontier sectors and we'll play there."

No significant SF elements have come up yet. They're currently dealing with basically a large area full of ruins and barrows and trouble, which has weird shit going on in it. Of course it does. Party m-u's trying to write a paper on how the layout of the graves is affecting local magical flows, because rival npc m-u back in the big city is getting famous for his universal theories of necromantic energy and they're totally wrong and soon he'll have the proof and then they'll recognise the rival as a hack. One of the fighters is mates with the cleric and they came together to update the church's maps of the zone. The other two fighters just blew every penny they earned on their last trip in and have bills to pay, so they're along for the ride.

/osrg/ I want your best stuff on how to make the torches and light feel totally present at the table as a real factor in the dungeon crawl

Running SWN, so lots. There's Dead Space and Destiny level space magic in some parts though.

Get a lantern with a dimmer/flame control, keep track of their light source usage, when it starts running low dim the lights. Depending on your group, if their lights go out, douse it/make it really dim until they get it together and light another. If everyone's on board it could be really fun, but I can see some people getting annoyed with not being able to see their sheets, dice, stuff like that.

Open flame candles are mostly a pain in the ass and you need a bunch of them to light anything well so I'd skip those.

I was thinking more mechanics than mood. Thanks.

What's the difference between a fighter and a cavalier, and between a cavalier and a paladin?

Oops. That reply was unintended. Sorry.

Ohhhhh. There's a few people I've seen do variations on wandering monster/dungeon encounter rolls where some results are their torches/light sources going out. The Black Hack's resource dice actually does pretty well here I think. Into The Odd uses light source as initiative, it seems neat but haven't tried it.

I mostly let the players keep track of who's carrying lights, what their marching order is, etc. and I make little ticks on my notes to keep a rough idea of time. Each light source has 3 ticks per/fuel. If they're mucking about, weather/climate changes, they do something that makes keeping their light alive hard I ask how they're taking care of that.

Time tracking. Use something like that b/x turn tracker, when someone lights a torch you put a token x spaces ahead to make sure it runs out on schedule, assuming nothing else happens.

Resource management is a key element to dungeon light.

Cavaliers aren't multiclassed fighter-clerics, and may have a slightly larger focus on romance and couched lance damage.

>fighter
Joe Hittum, whether that be a samurai, a pikeman, a gladiator, or a farmer's son with a rusty axe.

>cavalier
Traditional knightly knight, stupid rules of engagement and all.

>paladin
Literally St. George.

I'd really like a version of the time tracking that isn't as fiddly. That sheet is good, though. The question is, when do I move it forward? I guess a decent hand waving is to make exploring a room one turn, and moving a couple of rooms one turn (i.e by the book but rounding everything to what feels appropriate)

I like the idea of abstracting it to a degree, I'll check out those rule systems.

>I'd really like a version of the time tracking that isn't as fiddly. That sheet is good, though. The question is, when do I move it forward? I guess a decent hand waving is to make exploring a room one turn, and moving a couple of rooms one turn (i.e by the book but rounding everything to what feels appropriate)
B/X has fairly good time definitions, IIRC, and in general you skip to the next period after combat even if there were still combat turns unused, taking the time to regroup and catch your breath.

I forget how turns/rounds/etc work off the top of my head, though.

Thank you for answering. I was more interested in knowing the specific mechanical benefits (and disadvantages) of being a cavalier though. Why would a player pick it over a fighter or a paladin? What's the niche?

I'll be perfectly fucking honest I haven't actually played it by the book. I saw this one and just found it daunting. I'll try do it proper and come back and see what I learnt.

I met a whitebeard mechanic who saw the dice in my car and started talking about d&d with me.
He referred to remembering "when they started to introduce the d10" and how cool that was.
What time would that have been? He said that for the first year they'd use nothing but d6's and d20's, then "all kinds of funky dice" started to get introduced to the game.

When the basic set came out, they still used a d20 as a d10. Wikipedia referred me to this link regarding d10s: planescape.outshine.com/official.planescape-torment.org/oldnews/greg_0507.html
" The first GenCon I attended, back in 1980, was strictly a pen & paper / board game affair buried in the labyrinthine corridors of the University of Wisconsin, Parkside campus. (The big news of the year was that someone had 'invented' the ten-sided die)."
It might have been after 1980 then.

...

Ah okay. He might have had difficulty finding the other dice and then strongly remembers when "d10's became for real dice and not just modified d20's" He also referenced that they were already playing for a while before getting their hands on a players handbook because it was hard to find.

So it sounds like 78-79 is when he started playing then.

Cavaliers get attribute bonuses as they level, but aren't allowed to run away from fights and have to pick who to attack using a flowchart.
Paladins were a subclass of Fighter, but were retconned to a subclass of Cavalier when those got added. They get a ton of bonuses when using really nice magic swords, but they can't own more property than they can carry.

Also Cavaliers (and Paladins, even without using Cavaliers) get special mounts.
Not that high level Fighters aren't expected to just go out and tame manticores, mind you.

>Why would a player pick it over a fighter or a paladin?
Because Paladins have insanely high attribute requirements. Not quite as bad as Bards, but still really bad.

Is there a conversion of Dark Sun which use an OSR game as it's 'engine'?

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AD&D is not OSR you dipshit.

wew lad

>ad&d
>not osr
Are you a millennial?

>How many science fiction elements does your setting have?

Im running an ASE game. It's very explicitly sci-fantasy.

...

First edition is OSR, but a lot of anons agree second edition isn't. Dark Sun is a 2e setting, so...

>How many science fiction elements does your setting have?

I have a related question. I'm looking for fiction with middle age tech right next to space age tech. So there would be knights and castles, but also lazer guns and surveillance drones.
The one media I know that has something similar is Strife. It was a Doom clone with some RPG elements, and a interesting, if not fully explored, setting.

There might be an easy to google label for this that I don't know of, even that would be helpful.

The books have not aged well, but look up Vampire Hunter D. TLDR, 10,000 years in the future, vampires took over the world and reset everything to the good ol' Dracula days with super advanced tech to let them replicate their old magic.
There's a part in the first book where ghouls are going after a farmers livestock, so he takes down his antique plasma cannon off the fireplace mantle and scares them off.

yeah that's not the one I meant. I was thinking of this one: rpgnow.com/product/110506/Basic-Turn-Tracker

which, of course, I don't know if is available for free, but it was a neat circular clock-style thing. goblinbau.wordpress.com/2013/01/27/basic-turn-tracker-gepimptes-oldschool-gizmo/ may not be written in common, but it has some photos that show off the style even if it doesn't explain shit. You basically have segments for combat turns, exploration turns, and hours, then advance the clock hand each turn. When you light a torch, for instance, you'd put a marker however far in the future a torch lasts for, and slowly get closer and closer to it. Also good for "you need to rest every x exploration turns" (iirc it's one rest in every six ten minute turns in b/x), so you can see the fatigue coming in.

>forgetting about quake

ruinations-rpg.tumblr.com/

The one in the trove is horribly outdated.

>this again
2e is OSR. The DMG is shit, and many of the splats are shit, but it's OSR.

The only complaints about we are that it prefers Epic Fantasy over Swords and Sorcery.
Dark Sun is about as Swords and Sorcery as it gets. Dark Sun is OSR.

Even if it wasn't, the original question was about conversion. And no conversion is needed to use 2e content with AD&D.
So, to answer , there is so such conversion because the Dark Sun content works unconverted in any OSR system.

Why is DCC so divisive when it clearly kicks all kinds of ass? Why are so many people so resistant to the changes it brings to OSR?

It's too close to third edition, bringing in perception checks and spell checks and simple saving throws and such. It skirts rather far away from the true OSR mindset.

I'll agree that it's awesome, but it's not the purest form of OSR.

It's way too crunchy in ways that look fun at first glance but start to wear on you really soon, it tries far too hard, and frankly you can just steal the better ideas and run them in od&d lbb with far less bloat.

>just steal the better ideas and run them in od&d lbb with far less bloat.
Pretty much. Hell, it's not hard to remove 90% of the crunch when you port one of its subsystems in a different edition. DCC feels complicated for the purpose of being complicated sometimes.

Trouble is, I really love its magic system, but I can't really see how to cut it out of the rest of the game and adding it elsewhere: it seems too much trouble for its worth.

>Why are so many people so resistant to the changes it brings to OSR?
I think this question is the wrong question. People aren't resistant to *DCC's* changes, I think by and large they are opposed to most foundation changes. The most popular retroclones (Labyrinth Lord, Lementations, etc.) still rest of the frame word of OD&D, Basic, or AD&D where DCC rests on the frame work of D&D 3rd Edition with a heavy old school flavor.
When you change the skeletal structure that's when you see the most resistance. Dungeon World would be another example of this. It's resting on the Apocalypse Word foundation, with some dungeon crawling flavor. On a personal note I think DW's largest mistake is the reintroducing HP instead of the Wound Clock from AW.
I think a better question to ask is "what is it about the old foundation that catches people so strongly that new system foundations have a hard time catching people in the same way?"
In some ways I think DCC would be more popular if viewed outside the lens of OSR, appreciated in it's own right.

>How many science fiction elements does your setting have?
Not much, but UFO's are always a great inclusion. I quite easily unsettled my players with mysterious lights in the sky, unexplained headaches and lost time. All of which was unrelated to the main plot, other than that they had to traverse a region known for that sort of strange occurrence.

Hey guys, how do you usually deal with a party wipe and/or returning to a partially cleared out dungeons? I'm planning to run a small Castlevania-inspired campaign using Swords & Wizardry, and I thought about the possibility of opening up some shortcuts and passages between parts of the castle to allow for quicker and safer trips back to town, but I'm not sure how I would handle a TPK - should they be able to reclaim the corpses of previous party to get up to speed with their gear? Should they restart completely, with some randomization thrown into the dungeon? Should the characters that die "disappear" completely so they can't just loot their gear? I don't have a lot of experience running retroclone dungeon crawls so I'd appreciate some advice on edge cases.

I'd rule that if they were killed in an accessible place i.e. not under a rock fall or whatever, roaming monsters would either eat the corpses or scavenge the equipment. Distribute the more important gear among the treasure hoards in the dungeon, and have the dungeon change somewhat to accommodate the passage of time between TPK and the arrival of the new party.

Is this game good? Is it OSR like?

It's pretty great, if hard.

>Hey guys, how do you usually deal with a party wipe and/or returning to a partially cleared out dungeons?
Dungeon ecology is nonsense, but you /should/ use No. Appearing rolls to generate factions in the dungeon.
If the PCs kill a whole bunch of one sort if thing, consider how the other factions (including factions beyond the dubgeon) will react.

>opening up some shortcuts and passages between parts of the castle to allow for quicker and safer trips back to town,
Altering the dungeon layout at milestones can work, but feels cheap if you do it more than... twice?
Generally speaking, you want to give shortcuts through secret passages or alternate entrances.
Exiting the dungeon should always be a bigger deal than entering, so things like pitfall-chutes work especially well.

>but I'm not sure how I would handle a TPK -
They should either have multiple characters in reserve, restart completely, or else adventure in the land of the dead (or as undead).
Scattering their old crap around the dungeon is a nice continuity nod, but there's no need for it to be there when they come back.

>but I think warcraft made those mundane.
Not quite the same thing, but reminder that Tolkien's Orcs' shtick was being industrialists.

Really like that little clock thing

>How many science fiction elements does your setting have?
depends on the setting(as I have a lot of different settings), but generally quite a few(for one thing many of my settings have a full Solar System laid out, complete with native races on most of the planets and moons), although when I say Sci-Fi, I generally mean older Pulp era stuff

I keep seeing these characters but I have no idea where they're from

Pop Team Epic, it's getting an anime soon.

I think DCC would be better if it broke off more from OSR. Right now it wants to stay in between OSR D&D and 3e, which is kind of a problem.

Doesn't that make the classes pretty pointless in most cases of standard dungeon crawling games?
Are there any retroclones that do the cavalier differently?

>he doesn't bring mounts into the dungeon

>robot class
tell me more. I'm trying to figure out a good robot class for my setting

I thought of having a table with all the robot parts on it, so you rolled to see what kind of hands you had (fine manipulators, pincers, crude blocks, needles instead of fingers, etc), what kind of "feet" you had (legs, tank treads, wheels, spider legs...)

Then I figured out it was a lot of work and I'm no closer to a solution.

>Then I figured out it was a lot of work and I'm no closer to a solution.
Give them flat attributes (possibly with adjustments from some parts) and it's roughly the same amount of work.

Can someone please recommend a module with good dungeon crawls and some role playing sprinkled in for 2nd edition.

There are plenty of people who are more than willing to rip ideas from DCC, and there are plenty of people who are willing to consider DCC an "OSR" ruleset. There are also people who don't.

The posts before yours were already arguing whether AD&D constitutes "part" of the OSR. The whole thing is a broad movement that's only loosely affiliated over the net at best, and you'll find partisans and anti-partisans for each corner and ruleset.

Part of the reason these threads are enduring is that they're less worried about navel-gazing and arguing about which ruleset to use, but instead talk about actually preparing for and running games.

Castle Ravenloft is perhaps one of the finest modules for AD&D; it really feels ahead of it's time in many ways. The only real issue is that it can be tough to integrate it into your campaign, since it's got a very distinct gothic horror flavour, but from a design perspective it's got a lot of interesting things going for it.

>talk about actually preparing for and running games.
Speaking of which, what's the worst good DCC module?

I despise having to look up inane charts every time I roll the fucking dice.

Zarovich Castle, and by extension Barovia, technically doesn't need to be in Ravenloft to work on its own.

It helps that they came before Ravenloft.

What's the best way to convert from the gold standard to LotFP's silver standard? Just replace 'gp' with 'sp'? Which module had the sidebar about this?

what about the riches? You know, with XP granted mainly for looting, every time they lose the wealth they accumulated, if they appear in that same bit of the dungeon they looted with previous characters, they'll be plainly lower-levelled. On one hand levels aren't THAT big of a deal in S&W, but on the other, fucking hitdice, man. Should I just roll randomly to "repopulate" some caches and containers with valuables to have them advance up, to the point where they left off?

>Altering the dungeon layout at milestones can work, but feels cheap if you do it more than... twice?
>Generally speaking, you want to give shortcuts through secret passages or alternate entrances.
>Exiting the dungeon should always be a bigger deal than entering, so things like pitfall-chutes work especially well.

Noted, but this being a castle, and an adventure I want to model after Metroidvania style, I think it would only apply to SOME parts of the castle. Of course the DUNGEON of the castle will be harder to get out of, but would the tower also be?

>you /should/ use No. Appearing rolls to generate factions in the dungeon.
Remember that No. Appearing is usually meant for wilderness encounters. Can't remember if S&W rejigged it for dungeon encounters, but if you're using monsters from elsewhere you should keep that in mind.

Related to the question in the OP, I was wondering if there are any examples of Sci-fi OSR games beyond Stars Without Number and Mutant Future.
I'm especially interested in anything even remotely Cyberpunk.
I'm especially interested in how one could adapt stuff like "hacking" to the OSR approach of the 10ft pole without needing the players and referee to be actual hackers themselves. Maybe inventory items that allow to surpass certain electronic countermeasures? More complex stuff like an "alternate dungeon" à la Shadowrun seem to be a bit too removed from the spirit of OSR.
>>T. Guy who wants to run a Nihei-esque games but doesn't want to use Veeky Forums's Blam!

>How many science fiction elements does your setting have?

Basically none at all. I even have a dislike for clockwork devices and black powder.

I fully admit this isn't due to balancing or realism or anything, but just because my aesthetic sense is autistic.

Right, but why is that of significance? I thought dungeons were supposed to have wandering monsters as well.

>why is that of significance?
Because sometimes the No. Appearing entry is 30d10.

>What's the best way to convert from the gold standard to LotFP's silver standard? Just replace 'gp' with 'sp'?
Yes. That's exactly what LotFP expects you to do, and it's also exactly what the XP tables are adapted for.

I'm going to speak OSR heresy here. Look into some rules lite or narrative cyberpunk games, cut out the better designed and least intrusive systems and use those.

>I lash my torch to the end of the 10ft pole and use it to look into the dark archway.
>Cool, the flickering orange light reveals carved leering demon faces, cruel mouths slowly dripping green fluid. In the eyesocket of one, you see the glint of a red gem.

>I piggyback my Illuminati:Index on the mnemonic probe and investigate the node.
>Cool, the rush of filtered data reveals a gatekeeper program of leering demon faces, cruel mouths slowly dripping green pixils. In the eyesocket of one, you see the glint of a red encryption key.

You can do it. Someone asks for cyberpunk osr every few threads, there are a few one page's I've seen floating around and the Black Hack has Mirror Shades. Haven't looked at it. SWO# has polychrome specifically for your cyberpunk osr desires.

To me, it seems like while there is some crossover between dungeon crawling and corporate infiltration, there's also enough differences that it doesn't quite mesh up easily. Lots of cyberpunk focuses on being cool professionals with lots of experience before they plan, haveing cool technoshit, and go in being able to do a lot. Most level 1 osr characters are not that competent, experienced or equipped. They're more like the street punks who got kicked out of their habcomplex and need to take over the abandoned warehouse, inhabited by a gang of RaZors, an escaped biowar project and find out the sewer access leads to a deeper black-ops corp research facility. Which as I write it, makes me want to convert the street urchin funnel from Crawl zine. Its workable, but there are some specific genre differences that need to be addressed.

eh, doesn't have to be corporate infiltration. could be fucked-up arcologies, stalker-like zones created by fucked-up experiments and abandoned, iirc one of richard k morgan's novels has a literal continent (on a colony world) full of fucked-up nanotech and warbots that have gone rogue and need to be regularly culled.

shadowrun had renraku arcology, which may be a bit hardcore for newbies, but you could easily have the wreckage of one or one that's more survivably insane and not quite so brutal.

it can definitely still be cyberpunk and osr-style. just, instead of awarding xp for gp spent on booze and hookers, award xp for credits spent on hair dye, new chrome, and gear customisation. if you don't specify brand, model and colours/patterns for your rifle's sling, you haven't truly earned those xp.

>I'm especially interested in how one could adapt stuff like "hacking" to the OSR approach of the 10ft pole without needing the players and referee to be actual hackers themselves. Maybe inventory items that allow to surpass certain electronic countermeasures?
>the decker uses Turn Robot (Off) to deactivate the sentry bots

>How many science fiction elements does your setting have?
My current campaign was inspired by HLD, so that should give you an idea.

>is usually meant for wilderness encounters
Maybe you should re-read Underworld and Wilderness Adventure?
It was meant for generating adventures, not encounters.

If 30-300 bandits operate in a hex, they probably aren't all in one spot.

I've heard good things about Cryptomancer.

>Sci-fi elements
A lot of it is standard high fantasy, but then we got:
Illithids from space
Progenitor races uplifted by another space-race
Lemurians who harness solar power for their tech
Dwarves who harness coal for their tech
Devils and Demons who use guns
Weapons and armor with onboard AI that just appear to be sentient weapons
And lots of old cities swallowed up by the planet

It's fucking amazing, though i don't know if I'd call it OSR-like... It's most clearly a love letter to Link to The Past, with a bit of Dark Souls thrown in (emphasis on reading/predicting enemy actions, good interconnectivity of dungeon regions). So I guess it's OSR to the extent you consider Dark Souls to be OSR

eh calm down, i'll most likely write my own, separate encounter tables for each part of the castle anyway

What OSR game should I use if the 30-300 bandits are in one spot so that the party can go Dynasty Warriors on them?

And actually stand a chance? AD&D 2e.

...

Dark Souls is all about being paranoid, avoiding unnecessary fights, resource management, looting everything, and player skill.
Its a good teaching aid for OSR.

That seems antithetical to the OSR style.

Is there something other than Godbound? It's a bit too Exalted for me.

Eh, that. I mean that sounds fun and all, but not really sword&sorcery at all. Unless we're talking endgame characters, I suppose.