/osrg/ Old School Revival Specific

>I don't know any of these people
discord.gg/qaku8y9
>Trove:
pastebin.com/QWyBuJxd
>Online Tools:
pastebin.com/KKeE3etp
>Blogosphere:
pastebin.com/ZwUBVq8L

Previous Thread:

Other urls found in this thread:

blackmoormystara.blogspot.co.nz/2011/01/bishop-carr-first-d-cleric.html
melancholiesandmirth.blogspot.com/2017/08/dungeon1-steeples-of-erythroxyl.html
youtube.com/watch?v=Wr2iBbApeq0
jrients.blogspot.co.nz/search/label/Vaults of Vyzor
jrients.blogspot.co.nz/search/label/A Surfeit of Lampreys
repositoryofthewyrd.blogspot.com/
occultesque.com/2017/08/generating-familiar-npcs.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orford_Castle
youtu.be/-abUtRbUS_U
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

How did your last game go, /osrg/?

See and So yeah, pretty great.

My group finished up a dungeon, went home and caroused for awhile. Now they're trying to decide whether they want to hunt down a dragon or go investigate rumors of treasure to the east.

I was going to say but didn't have time before the last thread got overrun by The Schism That Shall Not Be Named, your game and the module sound awesome! Reminder that encounter sighting distance is 20-80 feet though, so presumably PCs could theoretically escape even after the so to speak doomsday timer if they spike/Hold a lot of doors, Turn heavily and so on? Maybe not from Spectres though.

(Don't get me wrong -- from your description it sounds like you were already putting the encounters at the right range, I was just thinking of that one thing you said about staying down too long)

the PCs Thermopylae'd my encounter

I'm not going to link to anything because I don't want to import the 'tism, but to the anons who asked last thread:

The Cleric class came about because Dave Fant's character Baron Fant, the Baron of Blackmoor and thus one of the good guys, got bitten by a vampire and became Sir Fang, also a vampire. It turned out that his powers were stupid brutal and actually a bit unbalancing, so one of the guys on the good side, requested that he be allowed to play a Van Helsing-type vampire hunter, which he was. The character usually cited as the cleric in question is Mike Carr's priest Bishop Carr, but that probably isn't correct for various reasons.

This is probably the best place to start if you want to dig deep into this shit: blackmoormystara.blogspot.co.nz/2011/01/bishop-carr-first-d-cleric.html

They kicked 3 different hornet's nests at the same time and are currently caught between:
A technospartan garrison that is low on supplies and thinks they're under attack due to explosions the party is responsible for.
A chromelitch who was allied to the technospartans but the party surprise threw a bunch of explosives down its lab, so now its pissed at everything.
A tribe of mutant fly/ogres who were besieging the garrison and lich for desecrating their god-tower, but the explosions agitated them enough to start an all out attack.

They're probably fucked. Currently hiding in a hut arguing about if they should use the confusion to flee or to loot.

>explosions the party is responsible for
Is there any other kind?

Not in my experience. I'm counting when things try to blow them up as at least part their fault.

It was pretty fun though.

>That image
You know the rules, OP

Shhhhh. The image is secretly about him.

I think it went pretty great! I ran a public game at a bar for free drinks and had 4 random people show up. It was the first time playing a RPG for 2 of them and for the other 2 it was their first time playing an OSR game. They made an effort to focus on things to steal and sought to avoid enemies rather than fighting them. I had one of them map (pic attached) and I think it really made them focus on what parts they had explored and had yet to explore.

I ran the module detailed below:
melancholiesandmirth.blogspot.com/2017/08/dungeon1-steeples-of-erythroxyl.html

How do you guys do knowledge checks?

>Do you have any sauce or reading on that? I would love to read up on someone's lessons and experiences learned from that.
Unfortunately I don't have any canned reading on hand, but a lot of it can be derived from common sense. A megadungeon level conventionally covers or mostly covers one page of 5 squares/inch paper; that makes for between 100-200 rooms. It's obviously unreasonable to expect PCs to dig through all of that in order to level up, even if most of the rooms are empty as the early random stocking tables imply; moreover, it doesn't leave room for other groups to expand exploration into later (as you yourself noted). It's also nice in and of itself to have levels be expansive and mysterious.

Similarly it only makes sense that new creatures would eventually move in if a level became too cleared -- or just if something is going down in the levels below that causes a disruption in the status quo, like the orcs migrating from their level in Dungeon Meshi because the Great Red Dragon becomes active.

Since loot requirements to level up increase very rapidly you normally don't have to worry about players grinding low levels too much, either; if they do end up doing so, or if you're just worried they will (it might be easier to declare such a rule upfront at the start of the campaign), you can just use the rule from OD&D about gaining fractional XP from loot gained on too-shallow levels, so for instance a level 4 character exploring level 3 would get only 75% XP for his treasure, and on level 2, 50%. That'll push them right the fuck on as soon as they can. (The converse, lower-leveled parties exploring levels "too deep" for them, is never a problem; that's a risk/reward tradeoff, pushing their luck, and it's totally fair to attempt since they're in horrible danger the whole time.)

Oh, and another thing I forgot: I *think* but don't know that the 3-4x multiplier just comes from estimation based on the map size and various people's experience of running games -- how much loot players miss, how many PCs tend to die and such; trial and error, basically, to find the sweet spot between too much and not enough required risk and exploration. Does it make sense to expect the PCs to explore a quarter of the map? One-third? How much hidden shit are they liable to miss, or just fail at getting for whatever reason?

And of course it's long-established refereeing practice to just draw in a new secret door leading to a hitherto-unknown(=just-drawn) sublevel and pretend it was always there and previous players just missed it. You could even give new PCs a treasure map leading to this door as their initial impetus to enter the dungeon. (And of course you can do the exact same thing should previous parties genuinely miss part of a level, or some good loot.)

>100-200 rooms on a single level
Oh yikes, no. The first level wouldn't be any bigger than 20x20 squares. I don't think 100 rooms would be breached until maybe way, WAY deeper down.

Or it's about people who get upset by 2e.
It's pretty ambiguous.

youtube.com/watch?v=Wr2iBbApeq0

More precisely: how do you handle players asking for information?

Got a few questions that I hope you guys can answer.

1) I have literal B/X D&D. Should I use a retroclone like Labyrinth Lord or LotFP for ease of use?

2) I also have the literal Rules Cyclopedia. How does this compare to B/X. Are there pros and cons or is one better than the other?

3) I have some AD&D both 1e and 2e. I understand that they can be blended. What are popular ways to do this? How do you personally mix them?

4) Between B/X, BECMI/RC, and AD&D which is the best to introduce a group to?

Thank you for any and all answers in advance.

If it's reasonable for them to know, you just tell them.
(More wiggle rooms at higher levels, as with everything.)
If it's easy for them to find out, you just tell them.
If it's tedious to find out, you narrate finding out and then tell them.

If it really doesn't matter, you can just say "Your character knows."
Not all in-game knowledge need be out-of-game knowledge.

If you can't be assed to answer, and you know they aren't a cunt, tell them to make something up.

LL is identical to Bx, armor and Cleric spells aside.
LotFP makes some wild departures in the combat rules, and is actually slightly harder to use.

Rules Cyclopedia has some fucking stuff in it, but there's essentially no harm in using both.
Regardless of your choice, DO NOT CONSULT THE BOOKS DURING PLAY.

Blending AD&D and 2e takes exactly no effort. They are 98% compatible.
You probably patch any discrepancies by mistake without noticing them.

BECMI. Those books are a lot of things, but you can learn it just be reading them.
That said, all of them are easy to teach. My recommendation is AD&D.

>The first level wouldn't be any bigger than 20x20 squares.
Okay, well, I don't know why exactly you're set on that, but it's still big enough to fit a hundred 20' square rooms, so with a dense layout you'd probably end up with at least 30-50 individual rooms unless they're preposterously cavernous on average. On the other hand, if you use 10' walls you won't end up with much space at all; pic related is a 21x21 dungeon I cooked up quickly on donjon.bin.sh as an example.

It's your game, of course, but I might still advise you to reconsider, since you want to run a large persistent dungeon; that dungeon in the picture doesn't look too mega, does it?

Oh, and either way I did find some links to reading for you; these are the tags for Jeff Rients' new and old megadungeon campaigns run online, respectively. (And by the way, if someone knows how to make Blogspot start with the oldest post on top, let me the fuck know.) Rients is an OSR fixture and good at the format, so hopefully you'll find something worth reading.

jrients.blogspot.co.nz/search/label/Vaults of Vyzor
jrients.blogspot.co.nz/search/label/A Surfeit of Lampreys

FUCK I forgot the picture like a mong. Here it is.

>1) I have literal B/X D&D. Should I use a retroclone like Labyrinth Lord or LotFP for ease of use?
You should not. There is 100% no reason to use LL if you have the real books, and LotFP is an edgy-guy remake of B/X that again, you shouldn't start with if you're unfamiliar with this stuff and have the option to use the real B/X.

>2) I also have the literal Rules Cyclopedia. How does this compare to B/X. Are there pros and cons or is one better than the other?
The Rules Cyclopedia is more complete, covers more levels, shits on the Thief skill progression and has a by-the-book combat round rule that's so ridiculous almost nobody even notices it, but also has a ton of extra content like monks (called Mystics), Weapon Mastery and other good stuff.
For *your purposes* just using Moldvay Basic to start is probably the best way, as it's very light and digestible and doesn't bother you with any of the shit you need later, but personally the RC is my favorite edition of D&D period, so I'd move to that eventually with some judicious fixes implemented from B/X. Whether you do the same or just tack Expert on as you get comfortable is really a matter of taste.

>3) I have some AD&D both 1e and 2e. I understand that they can be blended. What are popular ways to do this? How do you personally mix them?
Run 1E. Avoid 2E rules like the plague, except kits if you like them. Use 2E settings if you like those. That's the best way I know.

>4) Between B/X, BECMI/RC, and AD&D which is the best to introduce a group to?
Unquestionably Moldvay Basic. Mentzer Basic comes in second; it's pretty universally reviled as an inferior Moldvay here but if nobody who's going to be playing including you knows anything at all about the rules or roleplaying, it's the superior teaching product IMO. Plus the art's better.

Was just reading the previous thread and damn, the guy could apply "a fighters skills are needed" but he couldn't apply "a rangers skills are needed" as a survivalist, guide, or scout?

Like come on, son. Even before you set foot in the dungeon you need to get there safely.

I don't want to give Clerics spells, but keep them with supernatural powers that are similar to what they can do. I'm thinking giving them a sort of supernatural healer, warding against evil, divination magic kind of suite of abilities.

Is there anything here that I'm missing?

Could we not rehash this? I'm not saying I disagree, but try not to drag any given old thread's spergout into the new thread. Nobody wins.

>Regardless of your choice, DO NOT CONSULT THE BOOKS DURING PLAY.

Why not?

Part of one's job as the DM is to make rulings. You should get used to doing it without the safety net of the rulebook. If you make a mistake or misremember, that's okay. Fix it next time. Eventually, you won't need the rulebook.

Sixteen Hit Dice
eciD itH neetxiS

Bogs play down to hell and back, and the game is simple enough that you know everything* offhand.
*statlines and tables aside, which both belong on your notes or screen

They also tend to talk to god or at least get really fucking high.

I made a blog for LotFP. Mostly consists of Adventurer Builds, images I find intriguing, media suggestions and supplements I've made or that have caught my eye. I guess check it out, if you're into that sort of thing.

repositoryofthewyrd.blogspot.com/

You realize it's not going to be single floor right?

Anyways, thank you for the links, I'll read up on it.

Alright, here we go.

At the beginning of each combat round, each class rolls their Combat Die. The combat die is based on class.
>Fighters get d10
>Clerics get d8
>Rogues get d6
>Wizards get d4

Add your strength to this roll. If you're using a light weapon, like a knife or club you get +1 but have low damage. If you're using a medium weapon, no bonus. Heavy weapons grant -1 to the roll, but you get the most damage.

The highest score goes first. You can choose to attack or defend yourself. Attacking rolls d20 vs armor class, roll damage on a hit and all that. Defending lets you add 1d6 to your AC for this round. You can step in front of someone to take attacks for them, but obviously if a monster has a higher score then you, you can't defense anyone against that monster's attacks. If your score is at least 6, you can attack with advantage OR give all your attackers disadvantage this round. If you get a score of 10 or better, you can attack/attack, defend/defend, or attack and defend. Basically two moves.

>What this means
Fighters almost always get to go first and get a 50% chance base to attack with advantage. At the start of a round, everyone will be attacking with big chances and bonuses to hit, and after that things will become a desperate struggle which I think is fitting.

This is a write up of that idea seed from last thread. Please rate, and offer suggestions for improvement.

What problem does this solve?

That's a good one.

>You realize it's not going to be single floor right?
Of course I do. But if you want to run according to the classic megadungeon conception where PCs "belong" on the dungeon level equal to their character levels, you need some horizontal space. There's also no real, obvious reason why vertical space (e.g. making 40 levels down and expecting the PCs to still be level 1 on the fourth dungeon level) is superior to horizontal.

Either way, good luck! I hope I haven't sounded too dogmatic so you've taken offense, I'm just trying to provide play-based advice.

I appreciate the design of the website. Haven't played LotFP though so I can't really comment much on that part.

>Fighters have more impact in combat
>Classes that are meant to be ok at fighting (clerics, rogues) feel alright at fighting
>Less modifier bloat
>Easier for new players (just roll your combat die for everything)
>Combat is dynamic, every round has new initiative so sometimes you go first and sometimes you go last
>More things to do in a fight (defend)

Just a few. I also liked the idea of giving each class their combat die as their basic damage die to simplify further, and would also be the die rolled to add to AC, so Fighters are still really good at everything and magic users are still kind of shit at fighting.

...

Cant find an echo resounding in the trove. Where did it go?

That's because it's in the wrong spot.
It ought to be in the Supplements for Labyrinth Lords.

Instead, it's in
03_OSR Games |||| Sine Nomine Publishing ||| Red Tide

Sounds neat.

Wasn't it under Sine Nomine press, or did it get moved?

Thanks dude. I tried to make it aesthetically pleasing.

>plebs think they're playing True AD&D™ by ignoring 2nd Edition
For what purpose

...

Time to shill. It's another shitty set of tables for generating NPCs related in one fashion or another to your player characters.

occultesque.com/2017/08/generating-familiar-npcs.html

Any requests going forward? The game design stuff gets a -lot- more views than the xd100 table content, so I assume people are attracted to that more, for better or worse.

Why AD&D? Is the Rules Cyclopedia standalone?

>DM gives us plenty of opportunities to avoid a hard fight
>we walk into it anyways
>it's an ogre
>we beat the ogre without casualties

nice

Rules Cyclopedia is BECMI BUT MORE

>Rules Cyclopedia is BECMI BUT LESS*
Fixed

>>Rules Cyclopedia is BECM* BUT LESS*
>Fixed

Last thread people were discussing alternate fluff options for classes. Personally, I really like Clerics being something other then just not!Paladins of a fantasy religion. This also does not have to be the ONLY type of Cleric in a setting, just an alternate way to think of one.

Imagine something like this;
>Ascetic monks and wise men
>Must live outside of society and live off alms
>Shaolin style kung fu body exercises explains d8 hit dice
>Healing powers come from wholeness of mind and body, maybe their hands just 'heal' people inexplicably
>Can command evil beings to flee or be undone and they must obey from character's purity or personal aura of great strength
>Not always chose this life; weird kids with milky birthmarks sometimes forced to live like this
>May not worship a God but may hold a concept in high regard, like detachment from the universe, reincarnation, becoming one with the healing force that runs through all of their order, etc.

Fun fact : some chinese martial schools actually did that to students they considered unworthy.

So none of you are gay enough to make dragons that don't breath fire, right? Nobody on /osrg/ is gay enough to have stupid frost and acid dragons and shit, probably based on color, right? Because that shit is bad and you shouldn't do it.

You didn't even change the fucking acronym

Unfortunately for the party, there are absolutely no doors in the crypt. Maybe they all got rotted away already.

There are plenty of tunnels to run away along, and the worst of the zombie hordes usually won't be ahead of them if they don't backtrack, but the map has a lot of dead ends.

We'll see how they manage.

How are your starting adventurers' living accommodations. Good, bad, rural, urban? Do they even live together when they aren't out on a quest? Do they have neighbors? I have mine holed up in a cramped tenement building with families or other adventuring parties. It's dim, dusty, and damp, but it's said that sharing adversity creates stronger bonds.

My party is camping up in a small kobold settlement at the top of a megadungeon they're exploring. It's some pretty squalid shit, even all of the standard equipment not available, no one that could afford buying all the loot they keep finding, and no bars or whorehouses that could handle thousand-gold carousing.

They're going to need to find the drow city lower down to do most of those things.

>two /osrg/

Why

Are these retconned draconic Kobolds or the original (and best) dog faced Kobolds (see pic)?

The other forgot to announce itself at the end of the old thread. Nobody knew it existed.

Skerples is exactly that gay.
One of his dragons breathes cannon balls.

two is better than one

Dragonbolds, of course. Dogbolds are shit - just even weaker goblins with no racial identity of their own at all.

>no kobold whorehouses
Don't let the towergirl anons hear this, you will suddenly have an influx of mad entrepreneur pimp knights showing up.

Theyre unable to leave the dungeon?

You forgot an important bit:
>that could handle thousand-gold carousing

Would you pay thousand gold pieces for a night with a kobold whore?

No, but the entire surrounding countryside isn't much better. The closest legitimate city is a week's journey away, and even that's not too big. So they might as well stick to the kobolds for as long as they have any business in the dungeon.

For -A- kobold whore? No. For all the kobold whores in town? Sure.

>thousand-gold carousing.
The fuck are they doing? Buying rounds?
>going to need to find the drow city
Neurotic elven gigolo. Not even once.

>The fuck are they doing? Buying rounds?
This is a good question actually. If you use carousing rules, then what kind of a party would you get with a thousand gold pieces? As a player you'd buy experience with it, but what does the -character- get?

1000gp is enough to outfit four knights with war horses and plate. That's a baronial obligation. A party at that level of expense is something that would leave a crater.

What level is Mansa Musa?

How much do you pay characters for a quest?

"Find this particular shit for me/us/them and you keep any other shit you find. Here's 3d6x10 coin to get yourself some supplies."

>A high-level party is throwing the mother of all keggers. They've hired you to find catering, a suitable location, orc strippers, all the dwarf nog you can haul, and enough people to make the party worth it.

isnt there a better formula? like
3d6x10+20 per player character

Do you let your players roleplay downtime activities like taking some beers at the bar and buying stuff? if not how do you mange it?

No.

Who gives a shit? That's petty pocket change for getting food and other garbage.

>what kind of a party would you get with a thousand gold pieces? As a player you'd buy experience with it, but what does the -character- get?
To expand on this , it's extremely hard to determine questions like this for the simple yet frustrating reason that the D&D price lists are totally fucked.

For instance: if we assume that the rules about gold pieces are correct, i.e. that they are indeed gold and ten of them make a pound, then 1000gp equals 100 pounds of fine gold, more than two thousand pounds of silver. That's enough to build this castle and have six hundred left over: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orford_Castle (make sure you scroll down to the old drawing of the entire works and don't just assume it means the keep)

However, given the costs of castle building in various editions that's obviously wrong, so we have to assume that the gp rules were written by an idiot with no concept of the value of gold.

Instead, if we assume the gold piece is gold but equates to one gold noble, then the individual coin is worth 6/8 or one-third of a pound silver; the 1000gp are a more moderate £333/6/8. That's still a fuck-ton of money, keeping in mind that one suit of plate armor in the mid-14th century cost about £7 and a cheap sword at the same time cost six pence(!). A pipe of best wine would set you back about £5, and that's 126 *gallons* of top-shelf claret or burgundy. An average wine would be half that or less, and the price of ale was commonly fixed a penny to the gallon; so you see that even with this gp value the party is an exercise in logistics that would probably take weeks and special calls on merchants to arrange. (A whole ox cost 13 shillings in the same period, a pig two shillings, and a sheep was 1/5 or if you prefer, 17sp. Two chickens for a penny, sixpence for a goose, two dozen eggs per penny. There need be no lack of food at the party.)

You only stop giving a shit in magical tea party storygames. You're supposed to track individual coins for a reason.

1/10th of a # of gold (1 gp) is ~$1853 and 2 bits
Lower bound estimate is that he had $400 billion
215,836,938 xp?

In AD&D, that's a level 859 Fighter

Assuming average CON, average up, and worst case damage, he back survive 21 back-to-back falls from orbit
Or 25 falls, if he's a level 612 Paladin

As an addendum to this, if we assume that "gp" is just a remarkably consistent typo and is actually supposed to mean silver pieces, a lot of stuff makes far more sense. In that case the 1000sp party equates to £4/3/4, which still gets you a tun of ale (252 gallons), a puncheon (83 gallons) of wine, and a pile of meat large enough to stun a band of giants. That's still an insane party, but it's not the kind which constitutes a novel engineering problem.

No. I track light, time and encumbrance. I don't give a shit about coin weight unless it's found in a chest or some such thing. I am busy playing D&D, not Monopoly.

Coins are heavy, if you're not tracking their weight then you're not really tracking encumbrance.