/osrg/ OSR General

What is a good OSR game for Victorian era combat? I.e. Everything on this guy's channel: youtube.com/channel/UCK-MdBJJw-0glJZgw8dO1Ag

See "God-Walkers" in Godbound, you can easily replicate this within said game.

I mean, that happens all the time in Exalted.

How often do you guys try to make quests and adventure tie into a characters class. Like, having everyone go looking for a spell that the Magic-User really wants to do or just have an ongoing thing where someone is really trying to be a druid or a bard if it's more AD&D?

All the time.

Just right now finishing an adventure where the party fighter wanted a magic sword.

Mystics only got 9HD.
Totally unplayable.

I can't make my fucking PCs leave this fucking castle alone. They've spent 130k gold on it so far and they keep trying to turn DCC into ACKS and won't even play ACKS. I actually reduced the entire thing to ruins with a massive giant attack and they were like "Oh man this must have something really valuable in the catacombs if a giant army wanted it." And rebuilt it. Dragons blow up towers and they have them rebuilt. They've been doing this so long they're on their third set of PCs, with around 19 level 10 pcs that just sort of wander the fuck around being walking demigods. I have this entire world built and all they want to do is hang out in this castle and "investigate the mysteries." I made the fucking mistake of having one of them, after 10 sessions of digging into the god damn ground, actually find a hidden chamber with a shitty +1 sword and now they've got armies of craftsmen in there, tunneling, holing out and making a small subterranean city. Had them bump into a dwarven thaig or whatever and get invaded, ruining all of their progress. Fuck it, we got lots of gold let's build it all again but this time with more shit. I can't fucking handle this anymore. My players. Will not. Leave. This castle.

>third set of PCs,
>around 19 level 10 pcs
How big is your group?

7 people?

dont reply to bait user

Keep on the Borderlands or Horror on the Hill?

How am I doing now?

I'm glad this is catching on

c

Do the Aenied instead. It's more coherent and better.

>Totally unplayable.
If you only play from 1st to 14th level it's not that bad

I'm not.

They still have the janky advancement past 9th level (i.e. when they should be getting bonus HD).
And frankly, they're garbage at low levels.

I suppose they're fine around mid-level?

>this meme again
This is sadder and more tired than the castlepasta or getting buttmad at Skerples.

Bring back Peter Purplestripe.

I'm glad you fucking asked:
1d20 Clouds/Sky Terrain Wilderness encounters (Clouds are as firm as cotton candy But can be walked across like in Super Mario)
---
1. Bandits (some guys from below who are way out of their depth)
2. Lapitain Redoubt (a bone white tower filled by pilgrims who left into the sky, they have guns)
3. Floating Thalid (fungus hot air ballon)
4. Prismatic Owl (massive, eyes like search lights)
5. Zephyr (angry north wind man)
6. Giant Bird
7. Derelict Ornithopter (like in MTG but made of iron and wood)
8. Dark Kingdom Moon-folk (as from Sailor-moon gem based and throw curses)
9. Silver Millenium Moon-folk (as from Sailor-moon astrology based)
10. Atavist Moth
11. Winged Swallower (hybrid of a Pelican and a Whale 4 wings)
12. Oar Fish (like in the abyss only swimming through air)
13. Manowar (Portuguese)
14. Dragon
15. Nergal (as the Levant Diety mixed with an angel)
16. Raiju (fox, horse, weasel thing that can teleport via lightning)
17. Kheldonian Dirigible (Bowser's flying ships, can be entered like a dungeon)
18. Panopticon Fragment (downed Satellite with stats as Lich)
19. Dead _____ (roll again)
20. Conflict of two (roll again twice)

What happened to the trove?

...

>What lurks in the clouds of your setting?
Read page 3
I should really finish these but I got burned out.

>What lurks in the clouds of your setting?

Floating wizard towers.
When it's not floating giant mutant fortresses.
Also there's a balloon in there somewhere.

>What lurks in the clouds of your setting?
Ghosts.

>better
NO U DIDN'T

>clouds
BBEG, he kicked the gods out of heaven and they're now a bunch of petrified islands in the ocean. He sends out his minions (think ghost riders in the sky) across the expanse every night to spy and wreck havoc on the world

A question for medievalism-minded GMs, don't you get bothered by the rpg tendency to treat smithies as grocery stores where you go in with money and come out with plate armor? How do you deal with it in your games?

Another question: How do you feel about swords being commonplace in most settings?

>according to the 1e DMG almost ALL magic swords are constantly glowing

Isn't that a drawback?

A character can get anything up to splint mail done with a reasonable amount of time, but anything more than that will take a good while and a good smith.

Swords are fine to be around: they're the most versatile of the weapons, after all.

Magic can be a drawback in many ways

Here's that post about Giants. For every one else it also contains mechanics for stalking predators.

melancholiesandmirth.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-giant-despair-horror-isolation.html

wtf i hate magic now

>Anyone who spends a turn gazing at them may ask one of their answers a question.

What did he mean by this?

Fuck me, should read ancestors

As usual ACKS has some help here - settlements are assigned a "market class" based on population which gives a rough guide to how many items of a given GP value you might find in a given settlement..

It's fairly simplistic and you could probably go more in depth than ACKS's tables if you wanted, but I find the market class tables provide a strong baseline to work with. Simple tweaks might be adjusting a settlement's market class due to extenuating circumstances (for example a market day festival at a small town might bump up it's market class). More involved tweaks would be setting the percentages and quantities yourself to represent a very abnormal market.

If you want to do a more medievalist-minded campaign, ACKS has some tools and advice to help, especially in the GM-focused chapters.

As a Giant-centric post I rate it 6/10

As a setting/general monster post I rate it 8/10

Swords were extremely common/cheap towards the 2nd ½ of the medieval period.
Plate was always a bitch to get.

Yes, but it's also free torches.

The typographic error was better than your intent.

I made a mana points system. I think I made a decent amount of really simple, dungeon crawling focused spells. Any suggestions?

Which system/supplement/whatever has rules for parlay? I remember finding rules about it once but I've forgotten where.

1hp for 2 mana seems low to me, but I'm not sure how damage works in your homebrew.

How is radius determined?

In my setting, the 'arbitrarily evolved to live everywhere with elemental powers' isn't dragons, it's Krakens

Therefore clouds have cloud krakens. They've also got a lot of other things like wingmen and wizard castles and giants, but cloud krakens are both uncomfortably common and horrifying enough that they get a lot of attention.

>what do they farm?
>...us
>Oh. That's bad.

I like the treasure the most. Not sure how the idea of revealing the player lost to shadow when people try to talk to them though, I think I like it, but I'll have to try it. I'm assuming they're not allowed to speak to anyone/the note should tell them to be quiet?

To those in these generals who do 3d6-down-the-line ability score generation as well as roll-under ability score saves, how do you deal with the fact that this creates immensely unbalanced character?

Pfft BALANCE IN AN OSR GAME?

Lol go back to Pathfinder and 3.5 and 4e and 5e you fucking kid lmao.
>strokes tiny cock to Into the Odd playbook despite the original intention of 3d6 being to make ability scores matter very little in comparison to character class

>melancholiesandmirth.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-giant-despair-horror-isolation.html

top stuff putting a single Etan shadow in an empty but puzzle/obstacle-filled dungeon sounds like a good time.

>Remember the good old days, when adventures were underground, NPCs were there to be killed, and the finale of every dungeon was the dragon on the 20th level? Those days are back. Dungeon Crawl Classics don't waste your time with long-winded speeches, weird campaign settings, or NPCs who aren't meant to be killed. Each adventure is 100% good, solid dungeon crawl, with the monsters you know, the traps you fear, and the secret doors you know are there somewhere.

What did Goodman Games mean by this?

this but unironically and my dong is very huge

Although! I do have that Jekyll-juice from whoever's blog that turns people into their opposite as well as reversing their stats into 20-Stat, so uniformly awful characters can become alchemical ubermensch if they make an effort.

Or they can realize that stats and level don't matter, 'not being a dumbass' matters

It means
>are you over 50 years old and yearn for the good old OD&D games but don't want to bother with any bookkeeping whatsoever and want only the cool parts? Then play this and pretend you can have those days back.

That they missed the forest for the trees

Then why don't you play without stats and levels?

Tired copypasta is tired.

Merge both together. B2's Keep is superior to B5's Fort. B5's adventure is far more interesting than the meat grinder that is B2.

Needs some B4 too.

You've heard of Race as Class.

Now try Class as Race.

>Your men look like women

What did he mean by this?

youtube.com/watch?v=nf0oXY4nDxE

So, basically none of DCC's mechanics are OGC, right?

I usually NEVER do that for an OSR game but I just ran a session and I'm curious how would you adjucate it. Scarlet Heroes has damage applied directly to monster's HD. But does the attack bonus get reduced together with HD, like dragon's breath in OD&D?

I would have the monster attack as though it had max HD

I like all of this, the only problem really is it seems like there should be a fifth race of regular joes, since a lot of the thing implies the classes living among others -- but all of them are the outsider, so...? (MUs live in ghettos, Clerics are from Paradise, Fighters are barbarians, Thieves are shiftless and little trusted -- so who's doing all the not trusting and living in the towns, outside the ghettoes?)

Did just that but not sure if it's in the spirit of the heroic solo shit. We're not changing anything, but I'm just interested in opinions.

>takes damage directly to hit dice

What does that mean?

>But does the attack bonus get reduced together with HD, like dragon's breath in OD&D?
Nah, that doesn't seem like it makes sense. And given that there's a typical way these things work in OSR generally, I'd expect anything like a decrease as the monster is injured to be stated very explicitly and clearly in the rulebook if it was meant to work that way.

What is the best OSR system for playing heroes? not regular adventurers?

Scarlet Heroes is a system for one-on-one play. The gist of it is that you don't inflate the numbers, you change the way die result is read.

So you damage not monster's hp but its HD. So 4 HD monster has effective 4 hp. That is coupled with the damage, which is done as:

1 - 0 points of damage
2-5 - 1 point of damage
6-9 - 2 points of damage
10+ - 4 points of damage.

So I can kill 2HD monster in one hit with 1d8. At the same time, monsters count damage just like that but it applies to PC's hp. There are some other adjustments but that's the main thing.

Playing as heroes is a bit outside the concept of OSR, where life tends to be shit and then you die. In order to find an OSR system where you get to play one, therefore, you need to skirt the lines of OSR.

AD&D 2e is probably closest to what you want, or maybe Dungeon Crawl Classics if you don't mind your heroes dying a lot too.

Oh, sorry, should have been more clear. The issue isn't "couldn't" as in "could not have this change occur". It's "shouldn't" as in "this change would not suit the players or campaign goals."

Purplestripe for President

Made 2 changes: 1. there's a rural and urban cost split. Some stuff can't be bought in the country and 2. made it hella expensive.
>Another question: How do you feel about swords being commonplace in most settings?

Depends on the proximity to and nature of the nearest War, but yeah, if you really, really want a sword, you can get one easily enough. Getting away with it forever is less easy in orderly times but the times are disordered.

Neat! Reading it now.

Anyway, to get some shilling out of the way, here's 1d100 Horrible Peasant NPCs and 1d100 Horrible Peasant Smells

coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/07/horrible-peasant-npc-generator.html

THE GLOW CLOUD

Seriously, stop posting these without the trove link

pastebin.com/QWyBuJxd

Maybe it's just them?

Fighters are Barbarians but many of them live in castles and forts, surrounded by villages of queer magic people or shiftless thieving peasants. Clerics live in paradise but many travel to bring the word of their Goddess to others, and must live among them. Maybe Magic Users live in tribal villages full of Fighting people, just a few hermits on the edge of town brewing love potions for lovers and magic lion-calling horns for hunters in exchange for not being lynched.

You could also just make a 5th race of average joe, or maybe mixed race people end up being the 'average joes' of the world.

...

youtube.com/watch?v=xzpndHtdl9A

>Anyone who spends a turn gazing at them may ask one of their answers a question.
I've been reading way too much basicredrpg.blogspot.ca/today because that shit almost made sense.

>What lurks in the clouds of your setting?
Heaven.

use the 'evil twin' rule. If you roll bad on your 3d6 down the line, you can invert your scores. 3 becomes 18, 4 becomes 17 etc.

Any requests?

I just watched Dredd.

Shitty floors in a fantasy slum block.

>read S&W Quick-start and Light
>like them both
>read S&W Core and Complete
>bored to tears because they're basically AD&D-lite

huh

Dual-classing in 2e, the human race's way to play two classes: is it OP, or not? Can you think of an example of a dual class character that is OP?

Yeah, pretty much. The idea there is that they would exist in a vague sense of proximity until someone asked where they were and they wouldn't make any sounds as the other players searched for them.

Here are 20 villages to fill with your horrible peasants and their horrible smells.
melancholiesandmirth.blogspot.com/2017/07/20-villages-and-what-goes-on-within-them.html

People clearly sneak into Hell all the time in your setting, but how many people have broken into Heaven?
Unrelated: what happens to the bits of Heaven when clouds break apart or disperse?

Lilty, Clavat, Yuke, Selkie

I had some very early faps to those Selkie models desu

So all adventurers just are greedy and see for themselves in osr? would you say that in osr characters are more like in real life?

>How do you deal with it in your games?

Play on a proper time scale instead of the kill-Orcus-in-6-weeks-or-your-money-back time scale a lot of games use.

> How do you feel about swords being commonplace in most settings?

Swords were pretty commonplace so I don't see the problem.

So, Wolfpacks's revised/improved/deluxe/2nd ed version is getting close to done. Shit that's going in it:
>Denisovans, Floresiensis and other hominid races
>more monsters, some classic and some weird
>actual rules for morale and chases!
>more in depth cave stuff
>liches and hollow ones and eloi and other stuff you can turn into in play
>full-page illustrations
>a bunch of other shit I've probably forgotten about but that's in the pdf.

But, Imma do some market research. Have you read or played Wolfpacks? What's it missing? What does it need? What needs fixing? What would be cool? What could be less confusing?
Any advice y'all have is gonna be incredibly useful in getting the second version to be as slick and well-polished as it can be.

Nah. OSR characters tend to be a bit too mercenary.

>in osr characters are more like in real life?
nah. OSR characters do shit that no sane sensible person would do, like going into caves full of skeletons and giant insects and hoping there's treasure. That's not normal behavior.

I've bookmarked this to add to my own village post. Thanks! It's quite good.

>Villagers want it to leave so they can return to making loud sounds.
Is a great line. It's not "their usual activities". It's "loud sounds." These guys just love wandering around ringing bells, kicking goats, banging pots and pans, and howling, but then this fucking /bear/ turned up...

Quite a few. Why do you think wizards have towers on mountaintops?

Figure out what a single medieval-ish person needed to survive over winter. How much meat, how much salt. Make it scalable and reasonably abstract. Maybe use arctic expedition records?

No, but I hear about it a lot.
Dump or link the old version.