/osrg/ Old School Revival General

Both, depending

If I've set up an encounter where spacing and exact footing matters, and/or the area is complicated and relevant, I'll use a grid

But most of the time theater of the mind is plenty good.

I feel like doing some random tables. Anyone have anything they'd like to see?

>I can't keep track of anything without markers on paper.
same here

Off Brand Healing Potions?

Constellations and their blessings.

Neither.

Expired treasure.
Subtable for expired magic.

>1d8 nearly adequate healing objects

1. Snake oil. Make a wisdom save; on failure, the drinker believes their injuries have been completely healed. They are not.

2. Abominable sludge; residue scraped off the bottom of a cauldron used in preparing healing potions. Heals as a normal potion if you can stomach consuming it; requires a CON save to choke down. You can repeat the save every time you take another injury.

3. Fairy-flesh. 'Heals' all injury with dreamstuff, but vanishes after the passage of a full day; the injuries return. Lasts forever in the timeless kingdoms of the fey. Song and story records many instances of mortally-wounded men taking revenge on their killers with it, expiring dramatically at dawn.

4. Potion of regeneration; accelerates the natural healing of the body 3x for a day, also increasing the consumption of rations 5x.

5. Pharmakon; made of improperly purified poisonous materials. Save vs. Poison or take damage equal to the potion's strength (in addition to the normal healing; even if you fail the save you may end up with a net gain.)

6. Some sort of egg. Swallow it whole. The thing inside will hatch, and restore your missing limbs to you. It will take flesh from the rest of your body to do so. Have conventional healing magic at hand. Something like a single finger is survivable for a man at full health. For something big like a leg, it will scoop out all of the organs in your torso.

7. Fraud. Registers as a normal healing potion to all common forms of detection, but does nothing.

8. Homeopathic. There is perhaps a single drop of genuine healing potion in this flask of water labeled as a healing potion. Still restores 1 hp, primarily through the placebo effect.

Your fairy flesh reminds me of how I do painkillers.

>d10 expired treasures

1. A cache of iron weapons and armor, buried to hide it for some future uprising. Sealed against the elements, but improperly. Nothing left but rust.

2. Art treasure. Urn, small statuary, tapestry, something of that nature. Of a long-past artistic movement, now considered hideously ugly in today's fashion climate.

3. Alchemical explosives. Unstable after long neglect. They are (d4):
a. Completely inert.
b. Mostly fine. Make mishaps a bit more likely.
c. Mostly inert. Damage is halved.
d. Volatile. When the players try to use it, roll on a mishap table.
A trained alchemist will be able to determine which.

4. Debased currency of a now-gone kingdom. No merchant will accept them as tender and the metal of their construction is mostly worthless.

5. A man, dead in an old spike trap. A diary on his person reveals him to have been a skilled duelist and minor nobility.

6. Some sort of clockwork bolt-thrower, like a crossbow but better. Years of abuse by dungeon denizens have taken their toll; it simply, sadly, falls apart when you try to use it.

7. Sensitive political documents, grade-A blackmail material. The people it concerns are all long dead.

8. Complete map of a nearby dungeon, including traps & secret passages. Dungeon has already been completely cleared of loot, likely by the same people that made the map.

9-10: roll on subtable.

>d8 expired magics

1. Vorpal enchantment came unglued and re-attached itself to a random object. In this case, a stick. Enchantment remains totally functional but it still has all the durability of a stick. Also, there's no way to pick it up without risking slicing your fingers off.

2. Magical dexterity-boosting ring. Inscribed 'to my beloved butterfingers' on the inside. Registers as magic but has no discernable effect when worn; the enchantment has all but faded away.

3. Hollow cane with screw-off head. Can accept most human-portable objects through the opening, somehow. Seems to have been intended to function as a bag of holding, but spits out any object placed within it after about a minute.

4. Contraption of hinged metal rods labeled 'crowbar'. Comes with attached instructions on how to open a temporary hole in a wall by arranging the device properly next to it. Does not work; instead, violently rips everything within ten feet, including itself, to shreds. A wizard may realize this beforehand with careful inspection of the apparatus, although repair will be much more difficult.

5. Some... thing? It is actively painful to look at (save to try and inspect it closely with sight, 1 damage on success). Inspection, probably tactile, reveals it to be a cloak. What it was supposed to do, you may never know.

6. Rack upon rack of potions. They have all been left unattended too long, and have turned into tiny oozes. Still trapped in their bottles. The bottles are clearly labeled with their former purpose; an impetuous drinker may gulp one down before realizing the labels are no longer accurate.

7. Magic Sword +1 vs. [x]. [x] changes every d6 days; assign a bunch of entries in your monster manual a number, roll a dice, that's what it's +1 against. An inscription on the side identifies it as 'Orcbane'.

8. Self-updating map of a nation that no longer exists. Vast swathes of nothing. Erases anything you try to write on it; the ink just slides off.

I'm doing a Carcosa game with a heavily house ruled LotFP. I'm doing a "HP is superficial bruises, everything after goes to CON which heals at like 1 CON/ day" thing. Should I give every monster an extra Hit Die or something?

The hell are you given both sides extra hp for?
If you don't want to only buff one side, you're better off buffing neither.

Are you using some other system's monster manual?

Not my best work here, but here you go.
>d8 Constellations and blessings

1. Constellation: The Roaring River. In the east, near the horizon. A river flowing around stones, creating eddies.
Blessing: You are as the rock in the rapids, unmoved amidst chaos. +1 to morale checks.

2. The Sun's Herald. In the west. Quite bright, the last stars to disappear in the morning. A man holding a scroll.
Blessing: Light shall never be your enemy. Blinding light counts as one step lower.

3. The Rabbit. To the east, high in the sky. Relatively faint. Caught mid-leap.
Blessing: You will always be swift to dive out of danger. +1 to reflex saves, -1 morale.

4. The Astro-Liches. Six 'stars' orbiting around a central seventh. An artificial construction, mystic telescope for ancient wizards.
Blessing: You hear the whispering of alien spheres. You do not know what they're saying, but at some level you understand. +1 wisdom, -1 charisma.

5. The Hammer. In the east. Bright. Head down towards the earth, handle towards the sky.
Blessing: Crush all in your path. Hammers do one additional damage in your hands.

6. The Fallen Son. A Human figure, limp. In the south, near the horizon. A spear stabbed through him.
Blessing: He wants you to join him. -1 to saves vs. death.

7. Starvation. In the south. An abstract shape. Named and given shape by some nonhuman culture. Almost no human can point it out in the sky. Even carrying its blessing, you likely do not know of it at all.
Blessing: Creatures of chaos perceive you as kindred. +1 to reaction rolls with chaos-aligned entities, where applicable.

8. The Void. In the south. High in the sky. A region with no stars. It grows slightly, over time. Slow enough that people do not perceive it. Only an old stargazer can trace its expansion.
Blessing: Death holds no mysteries for you. +2 wisdom, -1 saves vs. death.

Hmm. If I were doing something like this, I would end up making significant revisions to the system. I'd probably slow hit dice progression so that every other level, you just got a +1. So 1st level you have 1 HD. 2nd level is 1+1. 3rd level is 2. 4th is 2+1 and so forth. That would keep hit points from getting out of hand (which is at least a bit of an issue in normal D&D, and is a bigger one if Con effectively adds 3 hit dice to every character). Using this slower progression, you'd end up with the same effective hit points (including Con in your system) at 7th level--though I'm guessing you'd have non-Con in your system healing go faster, so you'd really still have more at that point.

So in addition to this, I'd probably up weapon damage by at least a die level. d4 becomes d6. d6 becomes d8. d8 becomes d10. d10 becomes 2d6. 2d6 becomes 2d8. If I weren't slowing the hit dice progression, I might even just double damage (a longsword goes from d8 to 2d8), and eyeball damage spells, adding 1 die of damage to them on average. 6th level fireball? 7d6 damage. (Sure, this boost low-level spells more, percentagewise, with magic missile doing double damage, but the higher level spells would still be clearly superior, and a magic missile would be a lot less capable of dropping an unwounded low-level person even with the damage increase.)

Regardless of which way I did it (slowed hit dice progression with die-level boost to weapon damage, or standard hit dice progression with double weapon damage), I'd be tempted to increase monster hit dice to correspond to the boost characters got from Con. If you still wanted 1 HD monsters to go down fairly quickly, you could do something like this: add 3 HD to all monsters, but the number added cannot exceed their hit dice. So 1 HD monsters get +1 HD (bringing them up to 2 HD), 2 HD monsters get +2 HD (bringing them up to 4), and all other monsters get +3 HD. Or just give all monsters +2 hp per HD, up to a maximum of +10.

>Or just give all monsters +2 hp per HD, up to a maximum of +10.
Or just say "fuck it" and up the hit dice that monsters roll by 1 die level (d8 to d10). This means that monsters wouldn't catch up to PCs until 10th level, but there's no particular reason monster toughness has to parallel PC toughness. (If I used this with double weapon damage, I'd also add an extra hit die on top of everything, so a 1st level monster would have 2+2 hit dice, a 2nd level monster would have 3+3, and a 3rd level monster 4+4)

I should have mentioned that, aside from unique ancient monsters, most of the rank and file enemies will be a bit lower powered. PCs, too.

I'm basing stats for creatures mostly based on their size, because most creatures will be randomly generated.

AC will never normally go beyond 18, small things have 1/2 HD, Huge things probably as much as 8-12 HD, and +1 to hit for every two HD. More vicious things will get +1 to hit per HD.

A bit light, but I dig it. Some nice ideas. Thanks.

I used to just keep track of it in my head, but when I started to use grid I couldn't stop.

How long does crafting take?

What are you making?

Armor. Chain mail at the very least.

Chain mail takes a long damn time to make. Probably like 60 hours of work if you have the wire already smelted.

That seems like it would be measured in weeks to months.

I prefer minis, measuring tape, and an ungridded layout. That seems closer to the intent of OD&D.

Theatre of the mind is what I prefer and what I use most of the time.

If combat is going to be complex, it helps to throw down some tokens to help everyone stay on the same page

Grid. Ask the mapper to draw the current room based on what he's got, DM makes the corrections if any are needed.

When you hexcrawl, what movement weightings/terrain penalties do you use for travel in different terrains? How well do they work for you?

Aren't they the same in all editions (2 in woods and desert, 3 in mountains and swamp, -1 multiplier if there are roads)? Anyway, those work fine.

>handle towards the sky.
Isn't the hammer inscribed on the sky?
Are you saying the top of the head faces the world while the handle faces orthogonal away from the world?
Someone was tripping balls when they first connected those dots in the sky.
(or are these lines clear as day, a la. Animal Crossing?)

Maybe up to 80 manhours, so two-four weeks maybe, but remember that apprentices are a thing for a reason. Chain mail especially is sped up tremendously by having some more people that can form the links.

Depending on what you're playing, there might also already be applicable guidelines. OD&D's Armorer (100gp/month), for instance:
>Unassisted he can make one suit of armor, or three shields, or five weapons per month. With two assistants (one must be a Smith) he can double this volume, and with six assistants (two must be Smiths) the volume can be trebled.
(Smiths are 25gp/month. Also, note that a "suit of armor" is plate.)

B/X has pretty much the exact same stuff on X21, although weirdly enough they forgot to write anything about Smiths. Despite mentioning them in the Armorer write-up.
They also cut out the Assassin hireling, for whatever reason. Huh.

For those curious, costs for OD&D/B/X are
>Plate 50/60
>3 shields 30/30
>5 weapons max 75/75

Since it costs 100gp to get that, you initially lose money on it - but with one smith you're making 25gp profit on the two-handed swords and with two smiths you're even breaking even on plate armor. It'll help to equip an army, I guess, and keep the armorer useful when he doesn't have anything else to do to earn his paycheck.

It's weird. OD&D does what you said:
>Swamp, mountain 3; forest, desert 2; road -1
B/X (X20) does
>Mountains, jungle, swamp 2
>Forest, hill, desert, broken 1.5
>Clear, city, trail, grasslands 1
>Road 2/3

I think outdoors movement might also be higher in B/X in general?

Mentzer is the same as Moldvay, except adds some more terrain modifiers and moves trails to the level of roads.

Also, both have it as multipliers - roads give 1½ miles per mile spent, forests 2/3, etc. I just converted it for reference' sake.

AD&D (DMG p.58), meanwhile, has it as roughly
>Normal terrain 1
>Rugged terrain (forests, steep hills, snow) 1.5 / 2 / 2
>Very rugged terrain (broken ground, heavy forests, bogs, mountains) 3 / 4 / 5 (could be x4 rounded down)
The slashes are for light/average/heavy burden on foot.

Very rugged terrain also slashes down mounted movement something terrible - light horses go from 60 miles to 25 miles to 5.

Basically, no, it's not really consistent. I'm pretty sure that the only reason OD&D has what it has is because those values are stolen directly from Outdoor Survival, and even then they changed some IIRC.

Huh. Well, I like the OD&D ones, anyway, they're simple and relatively plausible. (I'd use a movement factor of 3 for jungles as well, personally.)

Together with the simple movement rates given in numbers of hexes it really makes crawling top easy.

>OD&D's Armorer (100gp/month)
Honestly I always thought this was one of the big flaws in OD&D even considering how shit the price list generally is: the fact that hiring an armorer specifically just to make armor is somehow a losing proposition, or break-even at best. Sages are way too expensive as well, not that that's related.

The head faces the horizon, while the handle points up towards the 'top' of the sky.

>Honestly I always thought this was one of the big flaws in OD&D even considering how shit the price list generally is: the fact that hiring an armorer specifically just to make armor is somehow a losing proposition, or break-even at best. Sages are way too expensive as well, not that that's related.
Eh, they're mostly just there for the +100gp/50 fighters thing. And smiths +25gp/50 horses.

They're not really balanced around the armor production, which I suspect is mostly just there for when you have an excess of armorers for whatever reason since they can't both maintain armor and make new stuff.

Or maybe they're balanced around the idea that you're out in the wilderness and probably far from towns where you can buy stuff en masse? I dunno. The actual arms & armor seem to be a secondary consideration, at any rate, with their primary purpose being so that players need to Construct Additional Pylons if they want to enlargen their armies.

>54615128

They're shitty if you're going to try reloading them, but if you carry four or five pistols strapped to belts they're pretty awesome. Up to +5 to hit, more damage than any other ranged weapon except heavy crossbows, and cause the enemy to make a morale check. Unlike crossbows, though, you can shoot each of your pistols each round - carrying multiple loaded crossbows is ridiculous in comparison.

meant as a link

I tend to use more realistic topographical maps than hex maps, but generally speaking I go with 4km/hr for 8 hours a day on good terrain (relatively flat fields), 5 on roads, 3 for ok terrain (open sand or hills, light vegetation), 2 for close terrain (forests), 1 for godawful terrain (swamps, mountains).

You can go faster or for longer, but you exhaust yourself or otherwise risk injury. Mounted speeds for long distance travel are those same speeds +1 km/hr each - horses are faster than people, but not much over long distances (unless you want an exhausted horse).

I based those speeds on research into army marching speeds (army manuals from the late 1800s and early 1900s are great for this), hiking speeds, long distance horse races, and so on. Works pretty good, but might be more detailed than you need.

That makes more sense for pistols, but the larger weapons still look pretty sucky. As in, a fighter with +2 to dex using a flintlock musket or what have you would be effectively using a very expensive heavy crossbow that inflicts morale checks. The armor piercing would even out against heavily armored opponents, otherwise, you need to make it even more expensive and slower by adding rifling for it to match crossbow accuracy

And isn't the arquebus exactly the same as the musket, except lighter and less expensive?

> And isn't the arquebus exactly the same as the musket, except lighter and less expensive?

They ignore armor at all ranges instead of just short range.

> the larger weapons still look pretty sucky

They do still ignore slightly more armor, which I'd say probably makes them better at short range if the morale check comes into play. Also consider "scattershot," which can turn your gun into an AOE weapon.

You're probably right that they only seem roughly comparable, and that's probably not quite entirely realistic as you advance through the 1600s. Guns in real life were superior to even the strongest bows because they could shoot multiple shots at once, had a MUCH deadlier effect (especially at long ranges), less work to load and fire, and had relatively flat trajectories making aiming easier in spite of loose tolerances. The last two probably don't apply, what with adventurers being exceptional and all, but the others matter a lot.

I don't think guns are quite as dire as you made them out to be, but I would probably make crossbows lose their armor reduction at long ranges instead of guns (pistols probably would too, though), and probably amp up the full sized gun damage to a d10. Maybe increase gun range brackets a bit too. That sort of thing.

>They ignore armor at all ranges
They = musket, not arquebus.

But is it a given that a player should be able to profit from starting up an armor factory? I don't necessarily think of armor as a consumer item with a good profit margin--it's a capital investment necessary for the profitable enterprise of making war.

I like to think that if you're buying armor from a market stall at list prices, you're buying used and repaired gear. Serviceable stuff, but nothing fancy. Mail can be repaired with new links for years.

An arms merchant probably sees better profit margins from buying in bulk from cash strapped nobility, or scavenging from battlefields.

>But is it a given that a player should be able to profit from starting up an armor factory?
To be fair, I'm pretty sure that someone is profiting 100gp/month or so from the enterprise.

It just isn't the guy outsourcing the work, it's the guy whose interests lie in keeping prices close to guild guidelines.

I ( / ) used ot do this kind of detail as well, until I realized it literally added nothing to the players' enjoyment of the game, as none of them was anywhere near knowing about realistic marching speed. So now I use the simple and fast OD&D movement.

Yeah, 9 times in 10 making something realistic is for your own personal benefit of feeling good as the GM I find. If you don't have a pressing need for detailed realism it's best to cut it back wherever you can to keep book-keeping to a minimum.

I happened to be running a game mostly about exploring the wilderness so I wanted something more detailed for my own satisfaction, but in most cases it's just not necessary.

>But is it a given that a player should be able to profit from starting up an armor factory?
I don't think profit exactly (for one thing I don't know where the hell people would be buying that much armor), but it seems reasonable that you shouldn't lose money per suit or at best break even by having them made expressly instead of buying what's available. (It's true that it's unlikely there'll be a middleman to shit things up; realistically, in a medieval setting you'd buy directly from a master armorer of the local guild, but it's weird all the same.)

>I like to think that if you're buying armor from a market stall at list prices, you're buying used and repaired gear. Serviceable stuff, but nothing fancy. Mail can be repaired with new links for years.
That makes sense for mail, but it's less true for plate, which you need to have fitted.

>Yeah, 9 times in 10 making something realistic is for your own personal benefit of feeling good as the GM I find
Agreed, I'm a huge sperg about the idiotic price lists in pretty much every D&D, using silver standard and so on but my players couldn't fucking care less either way, I just do it for my own sake because I have to scratch that mental itch.

bump

What do the different kinds of lines mean? They're not all labeled.

Who here pre-ordered Mutant Crawl Classics? I'm so hype.

No need for hype. The pdf is already floating around.

Dotted lines seem to be for direct restatements, expansions, and games that are somewhat inspired/influenced by other ones.
Hell if I know what the unlabeled solid lines are for, though. OD&D has solid lines to Dungeon World, Arduin, Microlite 74 and Swords & Wizardry. Mentzer has a solid line to Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and the Rules Cyclopedia has a solid line to Wrath of the Immortals of all things. Both of which then go into Dark Dungeons and its followups.

2E has a solid line to Diablo II, but this one is labeled as a revision - the only solid line that's labeled.

D&D 3.0 has a solid line to the non-D&D attached OGL, but 3.5 has a dotted (unlabeled) line to the D&D attached OGL.

I get the feeling that they're mostly just arbitrary. Do anyonw know who made that, by the way?

I did. Got the PDF a bit ago. Haven't ran it yet but it seems killer.

Anyone willing to help me get that pdf?

What the fuck is going on in this tree.
>Dungeon World is a retroclone of OD&D
>AS&SH is a retroclone of OD&D

It's not "retroclones" as much as they're just birthed from that, I guess? 3.0 leads to OGL leads to Spycraft leads to Stargate SG-1, for instance, all solid lines.

Except even then it's wrong with Dungeon World, because that's way more inspired by the Red Box and AD&D (racial class limits! Human-only paladins! Elves can be rangers!)
It's supposedly "D&D As We Played It", IIRC, and I somehow doubt that was OD&D.

Unfortunately it's from 2013 and the guy who made it doesn't have a blog anymore and doesn't seem to have posted anything about it later, so its old flaws will be eternal.

What is a good system to feel the despair of being stucck in a dungeon with little food and one torch left?

Dungeon Fantasy.

Anyone else here have the problem of PCs always finding a single chokepoint to hold the enemies in? I've had about four such fights in a row, with neither the foes nor even all the player characters having the space to do what they wanted to do.

I kinda want some guys to ambush them from behind as this goes, but I don't know how to do it properly.

Make your dungeon have loops and secret tunnels, then have dungeon denizens exploit this. Go read The Alexandrian for tips and tricks on dungeon design that implement this.

The Nightmares Underneath would probably be a good choice for that

If the PCs retreat don't oblige them. Chase until they get good ground, then the monsters run away themselves to their own good ground.

What's your favorite zine?

Torchbearer, maybe. (NOT OSR, REEE)

While D&D is pretty hard on the resource management, food isn't high on the list. Rations are by day or week, and you'll only lose them by throwing them at monsters.
Being out of torches will fuck you up, but it's also not a concern after Continual Light.

Something like Torchbearer, though? That resource management is the game itself, in a way. Every skill check ("test") you make (avoidable through Good Ideas, but no backsies if you say that you do something; negotiation is explicitly banned) advances time in the dungeon by one turn.
Every two turns, a torch burns out and up to four people are plunged into darkness. (It gives light to two, dim light to two more - dim light increases the difficulty of all tests except riddling.)
If you're in the dark, you can only flee, riddle, or argue - and you have increased difficulty in all tests except riddling, so you'd better be good at your Bilbo impression.
Also, if you ever fail a test then the DM can decide that you succeed, but your torch is also snuffed. (Candles last for four turns and light 1+1 dim, but can be blown out at a whim in addition to other results.)

Also, every four turns you turn on The Grind. You get hungry and thirsty, then exhausted (-1 health), then angry (can't use your good trait bonuses), then sick (-1 to skills, can't improve them), then injured (-1 to skills), then afraid (can't help or use skills untrained), and then you suddenly drop dead of exhaustion.
Also, if you're sick or injured and fail a test then the DM is allowed to kill you at a whim - although they need to tell you before you roll the dice. Which is after the point of no return, of course.

Eating the food you have cures your hunger, wine can be used to cauterize wounds, and you've got precious little of either. Other conditions need magic or tests in camp (by making it more likely to fail tests) or in town (by racking up a tab).

D&D plays fair. Torchbearer is not a nice game.

Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Longname is an AD&D retroclone as well.

Fight On! is the best I've read, or Knockspell. AFS Magazine is the best I've heard of but have never managed to track down.

Or, you know, use your favorite system and just incorporate bits and bobs from other systems. The most OSR of ways, really.

Hey, , what does Dungeon Fantasy have to bring to the table when it comes to resource management? Is there anything worth nicking?

Resource management is a pretty broad topic. At its core, it's tracking the weight of individual items and your encumbrance limit for equipment (potions, rope, arms and armor, food, arrows, torches, etc.) and less concrete resources, like HP and FP, the latter of which is used for spellcasting. Encumbrance can be quite harsh, since it penalizes how fast you can move and some defenses, depending on what skills you're using. Fatigue can be lost by not keeping up with three meals a day and something like a quart of water, darkness penalties are particularly harsh for those that don't have something like infravision, etc.

Combat is also deadly for even professionals, so it really ramps up tension. All of the modifiers add up. Darkness, bad footing, hunger, pain... just start with a lower point total and you can really capture the despair of being in a shit-filled troll cavern.

There's multiple approaches to this and it really just boils down to how intelligent the monsters are and how well they know or how well prepared the area is.

As always remember one counterpoint is "let them" - chokepoints are used exactly because they're effective. But breaking a chokepoint falls into three major categories.

The first is simply to not enter the choke and wait out your opponent. Generally speaking since the PCs are the ones doing the exploring, foes can fortify. Alternately, if the enemy can cut off the PC retreat, they can besiege them and just try to starve them out.

The second approach is to try and approach from an alternate angle - using pre-prepared passages, existing passages, or supernatural abilities (monsters that can fly or climb on walls for example)

Finally, you can try smoking/pushing out an enemy chokepoint through the use of some substance. Explosives, fire, poison gas, a solid object like a giant stone, or sometimes just rushing in with a monster that is too big to simply physically hold at bay (ex. a golem, dragon, or other great beast)

All of these approaches can be combined, of course.

Adding to what the others said, try this one next time:
>Room with say 8 hobgoblins
>The PCs retreat back into corridor
>The hobgoblins back off into the chamber
>Two of them pick up crossbows and start plinking the PCs
>If the front-rank PCs draw bows, the other hobgoblins gleefully charge the melee-disarmed bowmen
>If the PCs charge the crossbowmen, they're flanked by the other hobgoblins

>PC's stand in chokepoint at the entrance to the room
>Monsters fuck off to fortify and group up with other monsters in other rooms.
>PCs have to move forward into a much harder encounter or leave the dungeon.

I don't pay for zines so & Magazine.

So I shilled the idea last thread of using a sort of combat point or battle point system, where each class rolled their Hit Dice as a way to determine stuff in combat. Obviously this means that Fighters get the most and have the best combat actions like this.

What's a good way to implement this? The original idea was to roll once at the start of combat, after initiative, with characters able to bid for going first with combat points, having to take a breather every couple of rounds to recover their 'stamina'. I really like the idea but it needs some work.

I liked your idea tb h but I don't have anything to add about implementing it offhand, sorry. Still, kep it going! I'd be interested to see a system that works. And remember, OD&D gave fighters one attack per level each round, that's the standard that spells were balanced against, so just... fuckin' go hog wild.

Ive run two funnels. The pdf that went out to backers has some typos and that pushed back the full and print release. Better they catch it up front. Also didn't have info for new players on what certain DCC game rules actually mean.

Complaints:

1. There is no middle ground between stone age spear and ray gun. More middle ground weapons Could have been easily included.

2. Character occupations are lazy 01-50 Hunter, 51-100 Gather. Come the fuck on. At least Frozen in Time DCC adventure made an attempt.

3. Book intro: "Not even your players would be able to recognize the amazing artifacts of the ancients". Artifacts are power armor and laser guns. GTFO.

The book could have been a better, more varied post apoc tool kit then it turned out to be its very focused on a Thundarr the barbarian type post apoc set so far in the furture it might as well not be the fucking post apoc. I also think that the page count should have been closer to DCCs massive 480 pages vs MCC's 280.

4. 4th and 5th Level Shaman Spells are not included I can't even recall if this is explained but Jim Wampler said on Glowburn 009 that 4th and 5th lvl spells will be featured in modules. This is rather inexcusable imo.

5. A Shaman only gets 1 spell per level. There is no others to choose from. NONE at all! The excuse from the creator is that spells are very are powerful. Yes they are powerful spells but not much variety. For example there is no reason to have 2 Shaman's with the same patron AI. Because they are exact copies of one another. This bodes very poorly for the longevity of the game.

6. The Pure Strain Human (PSH) Classes are very boring compared to their DCC counter part. They would have been better off doing a direct port of the DCC classes because frankly they are more interesting.

New spells OC from last thread.

I am looking for the AS&SH adventures, i cannot find them anywhere. Can someone share them with me?

Hooly shit page 10 bump

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What are some OSR games where I can throw out the experience and magic system without too much issue?

Stars Without Number

kingdom management in games without support for it it is usually done with monstrous ACKS hacks, right?

Any recommendations for some Appendix N inspired settings?

You can also use An Echo Resounding, which is a supplement written for Labyrinth Lord. It's somewhat abstract and hand-wavey; very back-of-the-napkin type stuff.

f you want an approach that actually tries to model where the money is coming from in detail you'll probably have to hack ACKS's method in some way or come up with one yourself.

First, write up your setting with a shit ton of races and cultures.

Then, write up 'race as classes' for all of them, with each race potentially having a few different race-as-classes, like elf swordmage from the high elf city and elf archer from wood elf tribes, etc.

THEN you use THOSE as your classes.

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See, the problem with that question is that Appendix N is pretty varied. Still, though:
>Lieber, Fritz. "Fafrhd & Gray Mouser" Series; at al.
Actually available as a setting - check out various Lankhmar stuff.
>Howard, R.E. "Conan" Series
Also available in a thousand clones and a couple licensed versions.
>Lovecraft, H. P.
So many versions of this out there, although few hew close enough to the themes IMHO.

Now then, the more sci-fi stuff.
>St. Clair, Margaret. THE SHADOW PEOPLE; SIGN OF THE LABRYS
Sign of the Labrys is a wiccan-themes post-apocalyptic sci-fi story, and also probably the inspiration for dungeon levels.
>Lanier, Sterling. HIERO'S JOURNEY
Post-apocalyptic psionics, one of those "you thought it was medieval fantasy, but it was actually post-WW3 America!" stories. Gamma World's also inspired by this.
>Zelazny, Roger. JACK OF SHADOWS; "Amber" Series; et al.
Amber is, of course, the plane-hopping demigod stories. There's a somewhat well-known RPG.

Poul Anderson has three books listed, and I'll comment on them out of order:
>Three Hearts and Three Lions
Pretty well-known, this is one of the primary sources for Alignments and Paladins. WW2 engineer gets isekai'd into a fantasy world where he becomes a Paladin and fights against Chaos, later returns to fight the Nazis.
>The Broken Sword
Imitation Norse saga, with elves and men fighting.
>The High Crusade
Aliens invade 14th-century England; having long since abandoned CQC due to their advance weaponry they are soon defeated, and the invaded village launches a counterattack with their stolen spaceship.

People have the impression that Appendix N is mostly just Sword & Sorcery, and the shortlist Gygax gives of "most immediate influences"
>de Camp & Pratt, REH, Fritz Lieber, Jack Vance, HPL, and A. Merritt
holds up to that assumption to some degree... but there's also some historical fiction, post-apocalyptic stuff, generic fantasy... The "Ring Cycle" is on the list, FFS.

If your setting has so many races, and their cultures are so deep and well-thought, you're better off just using race-and-class.

Too much preparation for too little payoff unless you make a system for building classes. Why make ten races with two classes each, for twenty classes total, when you're only ever going to actually use maybe half a dozen to their fullest?

It's a classic example of overpreparing. Better to have some method for building classes on the fly, and then using that when it becomes relevant.