/osrg/ Old School Revival General Beholder Edition

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Previous thread: Beholders are very iconic of D&D, but how many times have you faced one in a game?

Other urls found in this thread:

coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/08/osr-tomb-of-serpent-kings-30.html
goblinpunch.blogspot.ca/2013/10/dinosaur-clerics-new-class.html
maisonstclaire.org/resources/pricelist/pricelist.html
archive.fo/1AQvC#selection-2275.0-2279.0
melancholiesandmirth.blogspot.com/2017/08/dungeon-construction-and-stocking-in.html
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>Beholders are very iconic of D&D, but how many times have you faced one in a game?
Never :/

>Beholders are very iconic of D&D, but how many times have you faced one in a game?
Never.

>Beholders are very iconic of D&D, but how many times have you faced one in a game?
Never.

Twice. The players are going to find a variant of one today.

And then they're probably going to eat it.

c-c-c-combo breaker

Reposting from last thread.

V3.0 of Tomb of the Serpent Kings is up: coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/08/osr-tomb-of-serpent-kings-30.html

It's got an improved map, better layout, and a hundred other useful tweaks and changes. Nothing's changed substantially from 2.0, but it's a much more useful and coherent document now.

So. I ran Lost Mines of Phandelver for my players (using me 5e/Lotfp hack) and after the module ended, I had them be invited to join a secretive group Sildar was a part of; The Viridescent.

Made up of Keepers (ex-soldiers), Seekers (wizards and historians) and Reclaimers (people like my players) they're trying to solve an ancient mystery. Far below the Great Library in Not-Neverwinter, are 8 massive green crystals and strangely enough, 6 of them contain people that look exactly like my players, and 2 that do not (a man and a faerie).

They know these crystals absorb magic. They know they are aeons older than the city. And they think if the crystals fade from not being fed magic, something awful will happen (think Lost and typing the numbers). Their best Seekers are pouring over historical and arcane texts while they send Reclaimers to find magical artifacts to 'sacrifice' to these crystals. On a Reclaiming mission, my group found one of the Seekers diaries explaining he had discovered a Shadowstone in his possession can act as a conduit for these crystals, but he doesn't know what will happen.

What it will actually do is send my players into the far past.

Now here's where I'm losing ideas. Do I pull a Shannara/Wizards and have the ancient past be an Earth-like, post-apocalyptic jungle? Ruined buildings and massive vault bunkers? Unrecognizable tech that may as well be magic to them? This is a good excuse for me to run Anomalous Subsurface Environment and add some gonzo lazer rifles and shit into my game. Or do I have it be just more of a bizarre, unrecognized past and use something like Putrid Island of the Whatever-it's-called?

Throw me some ideas anons, you guys always impress me with your cleverness and I need help.

Time flickers!
Other time travelers!
Closed time loops and mini paradoxes!
Paradox Angels (pissed off and firey)

Also, you have a legitimate excuse to use: goblinpunch.blogspot.ca/2013/10/dinosaur-clerics-new-class.html

Which is a WONDERFUL opportunity.

>And then they're probably going to eat it.
Are you Skerples? Any terophidians yet?

Have straight up magic AND unrecognizable tech, plus a very few sci-fi items that use both.
As far as adventurers are concerned, it's all the same thing.

>Do I pull a Shannara/Wizards and have the ancient past be an Earth-like, post-apocalyptic jungle? Ruined buildings and massive vault bunkers?
Whole planet was a desert. MUs lived there. Moon vomited up the sun. Sunlight dispels magic. They all went underground.
Non-magic society develops on surface. Agriculture and forestry eventually choke out desert. Tech gets pgood. Nuclear war, or whatever.
Massive earthquakes. Techy ruins overrun by trees. Half morlock cities crushed, half surfaced. (both are now dungeons)

>a very few sci-fi items that use both.
Broken tech and dispelled magic leaning on each other.

>Under consent of King?
Consent from the prince, but not the one that's the heir. They've thrown their hat in with the wrong camp.

>Didn't rotate the numbers on the rotated crops
>Those sacks are full of something though..
Winter food for the local orphanage, they'll parading it around to steal belief.
They vaporize and snort it for (false) prophetic visions. Also to get stupid high. Not super helpful, but at least you know what WON'T happen.
The fatter monk has 800 grams of the stuff in a bag on his belt.

>Cheshire Displacer Beast
Stat it, OSR.

Same stats as displacer beast, only difference is that it's striped.

>Cheshire Displacer Beast
>1 HD, 10 Morale, Claws deal d6
>+2 to hit and AC every round when it warps
>Only fights for as long as things are funny.

>edgelord party enters dungeon
>cheshire displacer beast doesn't even bother

The closest I ever got to facing a beholder was a spectator in 5e. Every other DM has shied away from anything beholder related.

What is the easiest way to incorporate psionics into B/X?

>54844526
>No offense but I think your approximation is a bit off. That's an extreme lowball on the price of a medievalish horse.
For a draft horse or a war horse or even a good horse, for sure.

It's like "$1,000 is way to low to buy a new car. But I can get a decent used car that works for 6 months or more for $1,000, easily."

We have a warhorse going for 75 tournois here
maisonstclaire.org/resources/pricelist/pricelist.html

I'd say 1 tournois = 1 fantasy gp, give or take. So a warhorse, by my approximation, is $7,500 (which is low, of course, but then again I've got citations of famous warhorses selling for thousands of pounds, so it's really the difference between a Willys Jeep and an sports car.)

>>Didn't rotate the numbers on the rotated crops
Didn't make the map and didn't want to needlessly bother map user. Could be worse, user. You could have to pay for it.

Isn't that a gasbag?

...

80 seconds in MS Paint

I wrote those up ages ago.
archive.fo/1AQvC#selection-2275.0-2279.0

>This work is licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA
Plus, I also didn't make 3.0. It was this guy. nthdecree.blogspot.com
Who is very nice. and did a lot of work for free, so don't be mean.

So is it not?

No, it totally isn't a gas spore. I thought you were being silly and imitating metagaming players arguing about stuff.

>somebody uses OGL
>doesn't designate Product Identity or Open Game Content

STOP DOING THIS REE

I feel like doing some random tables. Anyone have any requests?

Toxic fantasy flora that only druids can grow.

Unusual pastimes, be they sports, board games, card games, etc.

A "good omens" table to go with teh ill omens one you made for me a few months ago?

Dead bodies on a space station.

>d8 Spaceborne corpses

1. Old and vacuum-scarred, an obvious veteran of the high frontier. Dead at his post, slumped over a control board that's edge-to-edge red warning lights. (Assuming gravity; in microgravity, he's floating in the vicinity.) Cause of death: a bolt from a rivet-gun through the temple. His face betrays nothing but surprise. The control console is smashed beyond usability.

2. Spacewalker. Somehow locked out of the station while on EVA, attempted to cut his way back in with a welding torch. Running low on oxygen, panicking, the clumsy gloves of a spacesuit- he accidentally got it turned around in his hand and sliced open his suit. Dead of decompression.

3. Medical bay, strapped down in preparation for his monthly bone-density treatments. Someone sabotaged the autodoc; his wrists and ankles are bruised, almost broken, where he struggled against his restraints as it initiated its 'autopsy-a-cadaver' routine. Everything is eerily, surgically clean; the vacuum-array easily sucked up all the stray blood.

4. Half a body, legs, pelvis, and stomach up to about the navel floating in the middle of the engine room. He was deep in the middle of some massive and complex machine, repairing it, when it suddenly reactivated itself. His body jammed it up, and now it's throwing sparks everywhere. Smoke and blood fill the room.

5. A charred husk floating in space alongside the station amidst a debris field. An error in the life-support system- a cabin filling with excessive amounts of oxygen- the release of a cloud of aluminum dust- a spark- an explosion. It's a miracle the entire station didn't depressurize.

6. A man drifting far away from the station at high speed. Kitted for extended EVA- the throttle of his thruster-pack somehow became jammed open, sending him rocketing into space. Everyone back on the station was too preoccupied or too dead to try and rescue him. Death was by hypoxia.
-

7. A man, in the accessway to the central computer core. Carrying a rivet-gun with the safeties stripped out. Hacked to death by a fireman's axe, neither quick nor clean. Arterial sprays all across the accessway.

8. A man in the central computer core, carrying a fireman's axe, dead of bloodloss from multiple holes punched in his torso. The computer is hacked to pieces, diagnostic screens displaying crazed messages. Droplets of blood hang in the microgravity like a necklace of rubies.

Can someone sell me on AEC for Labyrinth Lord? I find it very uncomfortable as a referee to add a half-dozen classes that remain human-only, while simultaneously keeping up the appearances of having race and class separate.

Of course I don't have any nostalgia over AD&D but I'm sure that there must be some reason for people to prefer it other than rose-tinted glasses. Right?

What is "game design"?

A lie we tell ourselves to feel better about playing pretend as a hobby.

Several times

First ever was the Spectator ( )
in L1 The Secret of Bone Hill

Roughed it up with Xanathar and his crew in Waterdeep

Went to a city of stone pillars policed by gargoyles and BAM
two beholders were running the show
got petrified and smashed to pieces on that one

I wrote an adventure where the foil was a innocent woman infected to become a brood mother. Pinched that from an old Savage Sword of Conan.

And I remember an encounter with a bloated, headless corpse that was being driven around by an Eye of the Deep like a meat puppet from Half-life.

But I haven't put eyes on a beholder in years since...

So like fantasy football but for nerds

So is a more or less 'freeform' magic system a bad idea, even if the power level is limited and actual uses of power or restricted per day?

Fantasy football is for sports otaku.

Most of the game is already freeform desu, but freeform magic can be a problem because wizards can make a solution to anything, given the resources. I suggest making people specialize in a school of magic in addition to whatever restrictions you're using, just to make sure they can't overcome everything with spells.

If - IF - I was going to do a "Freeform Magic" system, I would assign each attribute a different thing it controls - say, Strength is Earth, Dexterity is Air, Constitution is Plants, Intelligence is Animals, Wisdom is Water, Charisma is Fire.

Then I'd give the wizard a number of "spells" per day equal to his class level.

To succeed on a "spell" he tells me what he's trying to do and which stats govern it. I then make him roll under the lower of the two stats. If it succeeds, OK, the spell goes off. If it doesn't, whelp, sucks to be you, backfire time. Or maybe it just fails and uses up the magical energy.

Basically magical stunts in the form of a resource to manage.

I don't really like this, though. I think the Vancian, or Vancian-like (I'm the guy who did the Scrollcasting thing two threads ago), is kind of important to the OSR, and you'd need a freeform casting thing that somehow still felt "Vancian" in nature.

Maybe if you could write spells as programs, and when the wizard prepared spells he was literally "readying" effects and committing them to be cast?

So he wants to have a Fire Stunt that's a projectile ready, a Water Stunt that lets him walk on water, so on, so forth. He spends eight hours, he writes what he's doing down on a piece of paper and hands it to me, and then when the time comes I call the roll?

That seems like a good idea. I'll dick with this later, I feel like there's potential here not to slow down the game enormously. Maybe I'll put it on my blog and then I too can be an OSR biggie-wiggie and get meme images posted about me.

I don't know what otaku is but I know a nerd when I see one

>I don't know what otaku is
Wait.. and you're on Veeky Forums?

WAT

go to bed, dad

...

yeah, probably should do that

yr mom needs her dicking

I wrote up the SAGE class magic idea from last thread.

she really does

probably not gonna get it from you, though, faggot

>probably

I like those odds

Whoever wrote this is a legend in my books.

Nice try skerples

Have you considered resubmitting this to 10FP for a re-review?

Is it wrong to give the fighter 'stamina points' which can be spent to deal bonus damage or get extra attacks, and can take a turn out of combat to catch his breath and restore it?

What balance problems might come of this?

No balance issues. Just boring upkeep.

>Is it wrong to give the fighter 'stamina points' which can be spent to deal bonus damage or get extra attacks, and can take a turn out of combat to catch his breath and restore it?
No.

>What balance problems might come of this?
It's obviously a boost to fighter strength unless you compensate for it somehow. Depending on which edition you're playing, fighters may be a bit limited though, and this might not be an issue.

Pic is a method for doing multiple fighter attacks by drawing poker chips. You start combat with a certain number of chips, and draw 1 per round. You can spend 2 chips to make an additional attack, and can never hold more than 3 chips at a time. Starting with -1 chip simply means you don't draw a chip on the 1st round, like you normally would.

This may be a bit more limited than what you're talking about since it only relates to additional attacks (and is designed to parallel the extra attacks fighters get in AD&D), but it's a least a step towards it.

>Party enters a goblin market
>"I'd like to buy a ring of invisibility, a gauntlets of ogre power, and boots of elvenkind."
Legit almost gave me a stroke.

Why are you getting so butthurt?

All you've got to say is "Sure, and they ask you to pay for it with a captured moonbeam, the crown of the king everyone has bowed to, and the firstborn son of your firstborn son for the next 85 generations."

Oh, sorry. I was kind of tired when I made that post.

>>eons

An aeon is not a measurement of time

>a unit of time equal to a billion years.

It is, unless you're using it to mean 'an absurd amount of time' in a hyperbolic manner.

I was asking if they'd come up in play.

I have, but it's not urgent. I mean, v 1.0 got an 11/22, which is pretty OK in my books.
Thanks!

I don't really use Arnold's stuff in my games, other than his rules. And skeleton jellies, arguably. So no, sorry.

2 times.
One was a friendly one we called Frank and he traveled with us until GM got bored and killed him in an arena.

The other was the BBEG of a oneshot.

>party enters a magical market known for having ogres, elves, and rings of invisibility and want some magic shit
>one dude drops to the floor and starts screeching autisticly.
Why are you here, also, see

The actual pdf has that very page look different, with the map untouched and aligned properly

If I get the chance, I'll go full retard for the next map.

Anyone played the game The Forest?

It's a survival/crafting/horror game, not an RPG, but when I get to the caves or stumble on a cannibal tribes camp I get a big OSR vibe from it. Resource management, discovering better things as you take bigger risks, etc.

Sounds good. Practice your building and interior mapping. This one is a castle, and not a ruined one.

It's also tricky, because the windows on the outside of the building matter, and will be labeled with the room #s inside. Luckily there aren't many, but it does mean room arrangement is important in 3D. Eugh. Fun times.

Anyone got any similar maps on hand? There's nothing more inspiring than this kind of stuff.

More color.

I wish I could find this in a bigger version.

...

Like this?

I have a few, but this is my favourite.

>Your world map will forever be a shitty MSPaint drawing

reminds me of silmarillion

Tired of searching for one page dungeons to populate your hex crawls? Do you want to make small dungeons more or less on the fly? Then read the blog post below and tell me how what I've written is trash and how to fix it.
melancholiesandmirth.blogspot.com/2017/08/dungeon-construction-and-stocking-in.html

You need to explain that explanation better.

You say that if you roll a 4, or
>1d4+1 Rooms + Visible Stairs from Level 1a to Level 2
you get
>2 levels. The first would have 2d4+1d6+1 Rooms, 1d4 Rooms hidden by a secret door, and 1 set of stairs going down. The second would have 1d6+1 Rooms.

Where do all of those 1d6s come from? And the secret doors? And really everything about that explanation needs explaining. Because from what I can tell from it, rolling a 4 means that you get 2 floors, one of which has no rooms and the other of which has 1d4+1 rooms.

The rest kind of indicates that maybe you do some sort of "as above, but ..." and such, but it's not clear and the numbers are probably messed up even if that is the correct interpretation of things there.

>Then I'd give the wizard a number of "spells" per day equal to his class level.

Talk about being weak in the early levels and powerful in the late ones.
>To succeed on a "spell" he tells me what he's trying to do and which stats govern it. I then make him roll under the lower of the two stats.

Relying on chance for every roll is a great way to make players rage quit.

It seems like a walk-through example both of the mechanics and how you fill in content as you go would be useful.

Just a 1 or 2 sentence about what you put in each room, how they link, a map, etc. It'll make it clearer and demonstrate how you tailor the descriptions to your campaign world.

It's gone!

...

Oh fuck me, I published the wrong draft.
Yeah, give me like 5 minutes to fix everything.

>Yeah, give me like 5 minutes to fix everything.
Heh, given your previous posts, that'd be a miracle.
I kid, I kid. Should be good. :)

So I got BFRPG printed out for my new group and I was wondering if there was any campaign settings that would be compatible with the system that I could use for our game?

Made another Druid class, this time based on Monks.
pastebin.com/2GkNFBZU
I have two more like these left, one is just a storm based retooling of the Zulon Druid and the other is a retooling of this one except more weapons and armor. And since I like my elves squishy in my setting, I'm going to remake the elvish nightblade into a proper thief and add an elf class that's strictly mage but better.

Any fantasy setting should work as BFRPG is geared towards that. Where BFRPG differs is not in the settings it can support, but the difference in game mechanics from other systems. Think of BFRPG as BX D&D with a few 3E conceits (e.g. ascending AC) thrown in. Once you have that down, it's just a matter of what other source material you want to bring in and what it would take to convert it.

Alright thank you

If that argument held water, nobody would play the game. It's exactly the same as making a fighter roll for attacks with a bonus up and down for stunts and descriptions, except the fighter isn't allowed to declare that his sword spits a gout of fire and roll an attack roll.

10-20 spells depending on the edition that can do literally anything he describes as long as he rolls under one of his stats is not overly-punishing when he can do literally anything as long as he can slightly justify it within one of the six paradigms suggested.

It's not PERFECT but the arguments you made don't really address the actual problems (scaling freeform magic to begin with, the limits of effects and level, the problem with making magic rely on attributes).

If you have a magical answer to these, please, tell me. I'd love to know.

this is a brutally retarded setting but i love it every time i see it

I fixed it!
melancholiesandmirth.blogspot.com/2017/08/dungeon-construction-and-stocking-in.html

Should Sages get -1 to spell rolls after rolling a 1, which almost always ensures a failure on that roll, or a 6 which always ensures a success on a basic roll?

It works! It's handy. It's not amazingly interesting to me, but it does work!

Much clearer. Although you still have the 1d6s which I assume is just a typo.

Neat. The diagrams helps a lot. Format wise I find things easier if the images are next to the mechanics but that might just be me.

Your travelling outlands bits are good stuff too, thanks.