/osrg/ OSR General

>Just out of interest, how do you feel about Tomb of the Iron God and Tower of the Stargazer?

Both are fun low-level adventures. Usually when you have only a few hours to play with a casual/one-off group.

How do you feel about them as tutorial modules? Did you feel something was missing when you wrote Tomb of the Serpent Kings?

Don't take this negatively, I really like TotSK. I'm just curious since both books were intended to do what you're doing here.

Sorry I'm not the user you were originally talking to. Just wanted to respond to your question when I read it in the last thread.

I don't like B/X's encumbrance rules, which games have better rules for it?

I like both, but I think their design choices are opaque. I tried to make ToTSK as open as possible. That's the main difference.

Reposting for the new thread.

I've put all of the Tomb of the Serpent Kings stuff into one post here, and created a PDF for quick play.

The goal was to build a dungeon that anyone could pick up after reading (or even skimming) an OSR-style rule book, required almost no prep work, and taught some valuable lessons. Mostly I wrote it because there was a "dungeon crawl tutorial"-shaped gap in the OSR-verse, as far as I could tell. People in this thread kept asking (and will keep asking until the sun goes out) "What should I run for my first session?" or "Are there any good introductory modules for [X] system?"

Well now there is one, I hope.

If you don't like it, or if you notice errors, or if you have questions, let me know. If you run it, tell the thread how it went. It's not perfect, but it really does work.

coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/06/osr-tomb-of-serpent-kings-megapost.html

Your blog is so fucking good dude

Thanks! I do try.

youtube.com/watch?v=9HLua_tfJ7U
Here's a really cool interview with the creator of Braunstein. He talks a lot about the creation of role-playing games and D&D.

I have some questios for you, as I want to DM a OSR game for my players:

You used The GLOG, right? Did you use its encumbrance rules?

How did your players manage hirelings and henchmen? My players come from a 5e background, and I'm afraid they will just ignore the existence of hirelings and never use them

How do you deal with dead characters? How long do you wait to add a new PC into the game?

Why do you like The GLOG magic system? I actually find vancian magic cool

What classes did you allow for your players? Did you create new ones?

Do you prefer grid or theater of the mind?

On my current "to write" list

General:
-Spell compendium
-Spell design guidelines
-Potion design rules
-More Dungeon Meat

Classes:
-Garden Wizards
-White Hand Wizards
-Other ones I missed
-God Eater Paladins
-Customized knights

Adventures
-Steam Hill with map (learning dungeon based on horror)
-Kidnap the Pope (learning dungeon based on a heist/politics)

Anything else I need to add to the list?

Kidnap the Pope doesn't sound conducive to learning.
An adventure can just be an adventure, you know?

>You used The GLOG, right? Did you use its encumbrance rules?

Correct. And I did. I printed numbers from 1 to 20 on the back of the character sheet and made the players a) cross out all slots higher than their Strength and b) fill in the rest of the slots. It works pretty well.

>How did your players manage hirelings and henchmen?

I reminded the Knight's player that he could hire people for that. They haven't embraced the idea fully, but next session, they're hiring a small army. After taking casualties and seeing how good a door-opening servant is, they want in on the leadership game. I wouldn't introduce hirelings in the 1st session. The PCs need money and they need to know danger. But you can straight up say "you can hire people for that".

I roll on my table of races and then on my table of professions. Dungeon hirelings get a share of the loot if they fight, or a fixed rate of 5gp / day ($500 bucks!) if they don't fight, or 1gp/week if they just stay in camp, or 10gp/day if they are experts, craftsmen, or experienced.

>How do you deal with dead characters? How long do you wait to add a new PC into the game?

Same process as hirelings. It takes about 5 mins at most to make a new character. If I need to introduce them outside of town, I use this table. coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/03/osr-table-of-replacement-pcs.html

Basically, the new PCs needs a reason to want to go into a tomb and get treasure. The rest writes itself.

I wait until it make sense, but generally, not longer than 30 minutes, unless the session is about to end. Nobody comes to game to sit around.

>What classes did you allow for your players?

Assassin (deleted later, didn't like it), Barbarian, Fighter, Knight, Thief, Summoner, Paladin of the Word, and 10 kinds of Wizard. And yes, sort of. They're just edited and improved version of Arnold's classes. They're on my blog.

I'd love a list of secret doors.

Did you ever get around to finishing the summoner's entities? Those were some good shit

>Do you prefer grid or theater of the mind?
I make the PCs draw a map and tell me where they are, but I don't use a grid for combat.

Oh absolutely! But this one will be (if I ever get my ideas in order) designed to teach

-disguises
-stealth
-bluff
-cunning plans
-politics
-mapping and scouting ahead of time
-more politics
-a dungeon you have to run through rather than loot room by room

Essentially, imagine the God that Crawls, but with mercenaries and cardinals instead of a squishy giant. It's designed to teach a bunch of stuff that ToTKS doesn't, but that's also very OSR-gameable.

occultesque.com/2017/02/1d100-secret-doors.html

This other guy has a super cool blog and he's done it first!
occultesque.com/2017/02/1d100-secret-doors.html

Oh right, yeah! I'll add it to the list.

He hasn't and it's not high on his list.

It's a long list, and writing good Entities is really hard. I do try, but only one in five drafts make the cut.

No idea how I missed this, it's amazing. Thanks guys.

>my table of races
could you post it? And thanks for the answers!

What do you not like about the Assassin?

>Assassin (deleted later, didn't like it)
Not the same user who asked originally, but mind if I asked what you disliked about it? I've always liked the character type, but I've been interested in trying GLOG (mostly because of the way you did wizards, t b h), so if there are practical problems with the Assassin rules I'd like to know about them.

killmind

Yeah, the Occultesque guy needs to a) write more good stuff and b) promote it shamelessly.

Sure! Attached. The stat listed is the one that the race rerolls at character creation and picks the higher result.
It just... didn't work for my style of dungeon. A lot of the bonuses are built around studying a target for days, not exploring. There's no loot-related skills. No dungeoneering. Just... patiently waiting while the party does other stuff. An all-assassin party works. In a political game, it works. But for my game it felt like a sub-optimal choice.

Fucking online gaming. People don't care to come to session. After first session of Labyrinth Lord half of the group left. I don't know if it's my poor refereeing or they just don't like old-school.

You could remove the word "online" from your post and it would still ring true.

It's online gaming. There's no sense of community or commitment. You can't forge deep social bonds or react in real-time to subtle changes in your players and their moods.

Sorry to hear that though. Any chance you can recruit some non-gaming friends in real life?

Also... do you know any of them well enough to ask? There's no sense in operating off of half the info. Ask them what they liked and what they didn't like. It's only responsible, as a GM.

>There's no sense of community or commitment.
>commitment

This is the worst.

Offline:
>"One of you will need to map."
>"I'll do it."
>players feel committed because of the effort they put in

Online:
>"One of you will need to map."
>"Ugh, isn't that YOUR job?"
>hours 'played' in Roll20: 200

I could try recruiting people in my city's RPG facebook group, but there are fewer people than in online community and chances to form a group are smaller.

I think my refreeing was good this time, it's just that players were distracted by side quests and interacting with town NPCs, so they didn't even enter the main dungeon (Barrowmaze), maybe they thought that they didn't accomplish anything during that first session. But they actually completed some side quests and it was interesting in my opinion. Whatever was the reason, maybe I should try less open-ended adventures for now until I find good players for sandboxing and megadungeoning.

At the beginning of my career I tried to force players to draw maps in roll20, but these lazy fucks wouldn't do it even if I placed a gun to their heads. So now I upload the map from the adventure module, turn on fog of war, and reveal relevant fragments as they explore. It works well and everyone is satisfied.

Yup. Plus, people get distracted. I've banned phone from my table and I'm trying to get my wife to stop knitting. She's so cute though, I can't really bring myself to be mean.

Anyway, online, you could be savagely molesting a goat, with two tabs open to foodnetwork.com, while sitting on a stationary bicycle and wearing only a kimono.

Plus, to go to a physical game, you need to be presentable enough to leave your house. Not so online.

For Barrowmaze that sounds pretty solid.

Even in Barrowmaze Complete there isn't much outside the main village and dungeon, apart from a few vague hooks and sites you can flesh out later.

Throw in a few of the rumors or hooks, maybe have one of the factions do something. The dungeon itself is great but it's nice to have stuff going on outside of it (especially if players get sick of undead and dungeon crawling in general).

Lamentations of the flame princess

See, that's a slight problem. It's like posting an add in a game store. The only people who are going to see it are people who read ads in game stores.

But why are you throwing side quests and stuff at them out of the gate? It's session 1. Give a nice clear direction. Layer stuff on later, sure, but it's completely fine to say "for whatever reason (tell me later), you decide to venture into Barrowmaze" or "your party stands before the Cave of Tits".

Also, I meant it when I said to recruit non-gaming friends. Get that cool guy from Accounting, your old friend Shirley, and Dave from the apartment down the hall. Ask them if they've ever heard of D&D. Since Stranger Things and Community and a bunch of other shoes did episodes with D&D in it people are really intrigued.

I've been looking for a starter adventure to play with several small groups of varying experience (as an experiment to see how different an adventure can be with different people), and I'm pretty sure that I'll use this one. I'll write down how it went on my blog once it happens.

Trouble is, most of those maps show secret doors and traps. They're for the GM, not the player.

The sad part is that the drawing tools in Roll20 are great for drawing maps. They're very limited, but when you're drawing corridors and doors with snap-to-grid and the occasional freehand parts, it's the best thing short of pen and paper or learning vector graphics software.

Your wife isn't knitting while you play D&D, you're playing D&D while she's knitting.

thealexandrian.net/wordpress/3987/roleplaying-games/encumbrance-by-stone-legends-labyrinths
That's what I have done, I fleshed out the hooks and made side quests from them.

Why don't you like them?

Add a few numbers, then everything else is 80 coins. Carrying 801-1600 coins or wearing metal armor AND carrying treasure, you slow down (no extra math).

It's pretty elegant, especially coming from later editions (where you have to micromanage every pound).

Please do! I'm always interested to see how it goes.

>Your wife isn't knitting while you play D&D, you're playing D&D while she's knitting.
That's definitely not true. That woman knits whenever she has her hands free. She can read and knit at the same time if someone turns the pages for her. She's a darn good player too. It distracts me, not her.

>low_CHA_high_WIS.png

I'm working on more stuff, and my current business projects should wrap up by the end of the month at which point I can get back to my pleasure-writing. As for promoting it shamelessly, I probably should, but that's more effort than I can work up for the time being.

Still, your words are kind, and I appreciate you!

Is she the Paladin? Or the fish?

She's actually not in my D&D games at all. She's in a separate fate game. She's too wise to my tricks and she'd warn the noobs before they had a chance to learn. The OSR games were designed for noobs only. It's taken them six sessions to learn to listen at doors.

This made me picture your wife playing an also knitting old witch lady who follows a pack of adventurers around and doesn't do or say anything except warn them whenever they're about to do anything stupid. No powers besides extreme wisdom and witchly insight.

What's the idea behind legendary/emblem spells in GLOG? I can't work it out from the written rules, I'm sure I'm just overlooking the relevant part or something.

They are the big flashy spells that a given school is known for.
What commoners would imagine "powerful wizards" doing.

Okay, but how do you get them? In the GLOG wizard rules I couldn't see any way to do that. Are they loot-only?

Not a bad idea. Maybe I'll have her play a sage in town. The PCs can spend money to get advice.

As you level, you get new spells.

Level 1: 2 spells from the 1 to 6 list.
Level 2: 1 spell from the 1 to 8 list
Level 3: 1 spell from the 1 to 10 list.
So by level 3, you have 4 spells (assuming you haven't been stealing any from dead wizards0).

At level 4, you can /choose/ up to 6 spells from the whole 1-12 list, or invent a new spell.

That gives you a lot of flexibility. It lets you fill in most of the school's spells (you'll always be missing 2 unless you find them elsewhere). And it lets you get one or both of your school's emblem spells.

These are the spells that make you stand out as a wizard of that type. Elf Wizards get "turn one arrow into a thousand arrows". Orthodox Wizards get "fireball." Animist Wizards get "curse you to suffer horribly" and/or "die in 3 turns."

It's the capstone. Those are the spells that make you what you are, as a wizard class.

Yeah, I think Arnold has them only show up as treasure. My interpretation is a little different.

Arbo a'Real, Slayer of Deserts can send a forest a thousand leagues with the brush of his hand.
Björn Smellton, the hedge wizard at the end town, can find your lost cat on a good day.

This is why I just threw the doors wide and got 10 people to join my campaign

5 people are actually active, maybe 3-4 per session, but even if only one guy shows up they are welcome to run through a solo session (usually heavily supported by dogs and retainers)

Hey OSR, working on a custom magic system again.

The quick rundown;
>No spell levels
>unlimited casts per day, preparing any spell costs a turn
>MUs have 1 at first level and +1 every even level in spell slots
>MUs get +1 to spell power every odd level past first level

Due to the usage of this system, spells obviously can't be able to be spammed due to it's unlimited nature, and I want spells to be weaker but immediately useful to compensate. So what are some good spells to use or tweak for this system?

What is the latest (or only version) of the GLOG? 1.0?

Check Punch's blog.

These are mostly combat focused, but they're a better starting point than most.
>necropraxis.com/2013/09/22/spells-without-levels/

What would your party do if they found one of these in the dungeon?

Throw it away, and not eat it

Hold on to it. Might be good poison.

I've made a magic item like this before.

>Evaporation Cubes
Little white cubes, made of a very dry sand or salt like material. When thrown in any body of water, evaporates up to a small pond or at least lowers its water line by a few feet. No effect on a big lake, river, or ocean.

If eaten by a creature, rapidly dehydrates and deals a lot of damage. 4d6 damage on medium creatures or smaller, 2d6 if on a horse or bigger. Throwing this into the body of a slime counts as it being eaten by the slime.

Is the DCSS Lankhmar Box Set out yet? I want to run a game of it for some friends if so.

I can't find pic related in the Trove, and the rpgnow preview won't load.
Does anyone know what Marvels & Malisons is like?

I remember that! You posted a "prepare items in place of spells" thing a while back.

Not only that, but if you meet a high level Garden Wizard, you can be pretty damn certain he can throw a tree at you. If you meet a high level Orthodox Wizard, you can expect a fireball. It's their calling card.

If they could read the outside, at least one of them would still eat it. If not, they'd probably all eat it.

>If not, they'd probably all eat it.
You need to find smarter retards.

>You need to find smarter retards.

They are convinced that eating things they find in the dungeon will eventually give them superpowers.

They aren't /entirely/ wrong, but the things they will eat, or debate eating, are a little startling.

To be fair, bird beaks aren't exactly sensitive.
And are lined with shreddy teeth.

Most birds-stomach can grind things, too.
That's what gizzards are for.

True, but gulls are notoriosuly stupid for dying after eating pointy or deadly stuff.

I once watched a ring-billed gull eat an entire big mac box and wrapper. No food in it, just the box and paper. And then try to eat a plastic fork.

> youtu.be/w_MSFkZHNi4

Put them in a new dungeon

>You posted a "prepare items in place of spells" thing a while back.

Yes I did! I still like that concept but I wouldn't use it for MUs now, maybe for an artifice class or something.

That was pretty cool, though I'm not sure what it has to do with the subject at hand. Are you saying that birds are mindlessly covetous?

Just reminded of it by the bird on the right in No.53755342

Good animator though: youtu.be/adi9Ijhvn1Y
youtu.be/vlUR09yRHZU youtu.be/ongZC94g7Xc
youtu.be/OFF9eg2cHc0 youtu.be/9RHFFeQ2tu4

Also, useful for Animist Wizards: coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/06/osr-animist-wizards.html

youtube.com/watch?v=0vgSMFLt_No

Hey OSRG, how do you guys handle mounts being left behind while the players are in a dungeon?

Would signing the Horse Armistice help the situation?

well if we're posting inspirational animation;

Wow A Talking Fish!
youtube.com/watch?v=kmB4DfG-3K4

Very Bluebeard
youtube.com/watch?v=_pVX32r6RFM
youtube.com/watch?v=nogY0Y2rjwM

>Ekh wears Adidas
Gets me every time.

Depends on the dungeon and surrounding environs

The main large mchuge megadungeon is actually beneath town, so for delves that last long enough that the horses would even roll for MAYBE having a random encounter are low because dungeons outside town are mostly just 1-6 room mini dungeons.

Also on a meta-level I the GM am unlikely to have fun if the players lose their mounts because I like my players exploring fast, so I am unlikely to kill the horses offscreen.

Great trick for running away:
9 times out of 10, you can fit a horse in the dungeon.

Donkeys sure

Horses? Either your dungeons are weird or your horses aren't actually horses, they're weird quadrupeds that neither think nor move like horses

...

I don't really like 'Magic Users' as a class name. What's a better name?
>Sorcerer
>Wizard
>Magician
>Mystic?

Wizard, Mage or Arcane-User

Wizard or mage, I'd say.

What's wrong with Sorcerer?

Sorcerer in later editions of D&D is its own thing

>my group is entirely online
>all our sessions everyone has been on time
>they want me to try and add a second day to our weekly schedule
I have no idea what you guys do to fuck up online games.

I like "Wizard" or "Magician".

I've always liked warlock, personally, but I also feel like it should be a matter of the player's preference. That's why I keep magic user as the de jure name for it.