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What's the best OSR megadungeon? Stonehell? Barrowmaze? Dwimmermount? Something else?

Other urls found in this thread:

melancholiesandmirth.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-church-old-ways-cults-and-their.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altar_stone
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relic#Roman_Catholic_classification_and_prohibitions
youtube.com/watch?v=9BWEPpCC0xw
coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/09/osr-1d50-goblin-warlords.html
throneofsalt.blogspot.ca/2017/09/play-report-kidnap-archpriest-playtest.html
9and30kingdoms.blogspot.com/2015/03/uncertain-monsters.html
twitter.com/AnonBabble

>What's the best OSR megadungeon? Stonehell? Barrowmaze? Dwimmermount? Something else?
Has anyone here actually run more than 1 megadungeon?

I wanna run a long lasting campaign that is similar to 5e or 3.pf in it's way of players having a single character you get to stick with for a long time using an OSR system. I want death to be looming, but not overshadowing the game. I've ran enough of those.

ie) I like the OSR rulesets, not the excessive time and provision tracking, high-death, etc.

I've been trying to decide on a system and thusfar BFRPG and it's supplements seem like it could suffice pretty well, but I also wonder if I am just better off using 5e since it's somewhat more stripped down. You got any suggestions? Ideally something with race/class separation and enough simple 'splat' to add a lot of player options.

ASE.

> What's the best OSR megadungeon?

pic elated

also this guy

Generate at random is my preferred mega-dungeon. As Gary intended.

...

I don't know if it's deliberate that the post goes >There was also some joy in monastic life. Monks and nuns belonged to community with minimal opportunity for strife and trouble compared to the outside world. Their
and then cuts off there to the picture? I mean, I can kind of see it as deliberate irony, but it mostly looks like your accidentally a whole paragraph.

Maze of the Blue Medusa

YOUR CLERIC SHOULD BE A SCHEMONACH AND VENERATE THE WHITE GOD!

melancholiesandmirth.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-church-old-ways-cults-and-their.html

Kind of deliberate, in a sense. I want to put two very jarring and disonant images of monastic life next to each other: shelter from the world vs repression, acceptance vs. scrutiny, devotion vs. human nature, etc.

Basically, I want to say "look, being a monk or a nun didn't mean just one thing, and there wasn't one way it happened. It wasn't all doom and gloom and secret wanks in the park, and it wasn't all stupid monks getting drunk. There were good bits too, proper and useful bits. But you've got to look at the whole picture and, frankly, it's a mess."

That's all fair, but you don't seem to get my point. The paragraph beginning
>There was also some joy in monastic life.
cuts out very abruptly and mid-sentence. I'm asking if THAT'S deliberate.

Weird, my version goes
>
There was also some joy in monastic life. Monks and nuns belonged to community with minimal opportunity for strife and trouble compared to the outside world. An abbey could also serve as a shelter for the persecuted, the widowed, the orphaned, or people simply unsuited for life elsewhere.

Feckin' blogger.

Aww yeah, you finished it! Great!

That's keith parkinson's work, not Larry Elmore.

Fuck I loved Creature of Havoc.

Loved most of the Fighting Fantasy books actually. But I think Creature of Havoc was my favorite.

Best Megadungeons from best to worst. Keep in mind that my opinions are facts:

-Barrowmaze: Almost everything I want from a megadungeon and more. I just wish it had a second floor.

-Stonehell: Individual areas are fantastic, but the whole thing lacks interconnectivity, making it feel a little too artificial and stitched together.

-ASE + VAD: Fun setting, wish it committed more fully to it's Thundarr the Barbarian premise and ditched elves and clerics. VAD brings more of the science fantasy aspects to the table, but the dungeon itself gets a little goofy on the lower floors.

-Dwimmermount: Fantastic idea with a terrible execution. Turns out the ancient magitechnological seat of power of an all-powerful empire looks like a high-school science lab. All the effort that should have went into making an interesting product was instead out towards telling me what materials the doorknobs and light switches of every room are made out of.

-Maze of the Blue Medusa: The equivalent of Zak. S and Patrick Stuart jerking each other off onto a canvas and selling it for $10.00 USD. I've never flipped through so much content and felt so uninspired.

-Castle of the Mad Archmage: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ been on my backlog for ages. Thing's fucking massive though.

-The Forbidden Caverns of the Archaia: Reading through it now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

>this mechanic that was never in any OSR games barring the Treasure Hunt module proves DCC is OSR!
Dungeon World has alignment in core and race-as-class and funnels as 3p products, ergo DW = OSR

Also, I somehow missed this neat fact in my studies, and just stumbled across it now. Pre-Vatican II, Catholic altars were... fairly metal.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altar_stone

>Before the Second Vatican Council, Latin-Rite priests could lawfully celebrate Mass only on a properly consecrated altar. This consecration was carried out by a bishop, and involved specially blessed "Gregorian Water" (water to which wine, salt, and ashes are added), anointings and ceremonies. The First class relics of at least two saints, at least one of which had to be a martyr, were inserted in a cavity in the altar which was then sealed, a practice that was meant to recall the use of martyrs' tombs as places of Eucharistic celebration during the persecutions of the Church in the first through fourth centuries. Also in the cavity were sealed documents relating to the altar's consecration. The tabletop of the altar, the "mensa", had to be of a single piece of natural stone (almost always marble). Its supports had to be attached to the mensa. If contact was later broken even only momentarily (for instance, if the top was lifted off for some reason), the altar lost its consecration.

>The First class relics of at least two saints, at least one of which had to be a martyr, were inserted in a cavity in the altar which was then sealed

I had no idea there was a secret relic compartment in every altar. That's fairly cool. In an emergency, in a D&D-ish setting, an altar suddenly takes on a whole new aspect.

Also, this is an excellent point to mention the relic classification system: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relic#Roman_Catholic_classification_and_prohibitions
I've also ordered a book on relic thieves so I can write a post about them.

>What's the best OSR megadungeon?
I guess this is a lame-o answer but the one the referee makes to his own taste. Not only because it's easier to run and remember well if you wrote it yourself but also because in a megadungeon-centric campaign the dungeon itself is at least half the game. My ideal is for the megadungeon to be an expression of the individual referee's creativity, I guess.

That said though, if you decide to leave it in somebody else's hands, they shouldn't be Maliszewski's.

t. Easley

What's VAD?

I really enjoy Night Wolf Inn, which is part megadungeon, part setting.

Time tracking is pretty integral to OSR, if time is not seen as a resource then there is no scarcity of time which makes many exploration problems trivial.

What's next, if something else has hit points in it?

>I like OSR rules
>but I don't like lethality, time tracking, or equipment focus and I want lots of player options
So you... don't actually like OSR rules, then.

Besides the base setting book for Wilderlands of High Fantasy (Judges Guild), what else would be considered the best material for running a game with it?

Ready Ref Sheets and the City-State of the Invincible Overlord are the two most crucial products, I'd say.

Prepping to run a game of ACKS. Want to actually get to use the higher level domain stuff. How would you feel if a DM didnt hand out experience points directly, but levelled by adventure, assuming the DM told you this?
Planning on still using the Experience tables, but cutting the numbers by 20-50%. Have played with these guys before and levelling above 10 in new-D&D takes actual real-time years.

before i start myself, is there an extant clean version of the ready ref?

You dolt, you're looking for AD&D 2e. That was the era where Campaign settings and story telling were the "in" thing. It's also probably one of the most survivable OSR in the entire movement.

Should be a scan in the Trove, BUT there's unusually little reason to get a PDF of the Ready Ref Sheets as they're specifically meant to be table-available. A print copy is advisable if you want to use them.

I loved that book. One of the few things that lets you play as an evil character.

The sequel to ASE, covers levels 3 + 4. Features include a circus of mutant cannibal clowns, evil zombie midgets taken directly from the movie Phantasm but no Sentry Spheres, what the fuck, and new classes like Robots, Scientists, and Lion-men that totally aren't Ookla the Mok, we swear.

well... yes. have you seen the pdf though? the entire thing could do with being reformatted in an easier to read format. it's a hodgepodge of lists and tables wrapping around each other. it's a mess.

...

How many of you play homebrew?

the system that Into the Odd's author uses for creating places npcs and loot:

"THE TRIPLE RULE

Everything has Three Purposes:
The Original: What was it originally to be?
The Current: What is it doing now?
The Tangent: What is its secondary use?

PLACES

The easiest way to do this is to give each building a commercial, residential, and civic use, and pick one of them to be its original purpose.
Defunct broadcast tower, now a scrap electric market spread across scaffolds. A cabal of engineers live and worship at the very top of the tower.
Huge municipal swimming pool, now dried up and re-purposed as a landfill. The old changing rooms have been converted into a boozy hostel for youths.
Long row of terraces houses, roofs all blown off in a storm. Now used as stables for luxury-breed pork pigs. A retirement home holds the last remaining covered house, and the old folks get free sausages to make up for the smell.

PEOPLE

Here, consider the standing/body/education they were born into, or a youthful ambition, then the life that they really grew into, plus something unexpected on the side.
Wealthy piano protegee turned greed-filled banker. Does charity work to soothe her conscience.
Ogre of a man, sells tiny metal sculptures. Deeply believes humanity is awful, and we should let aliens rule us.
Lovely old former teacher turned soldier for the Human Union. A font of pub-quiz knowledge.

OBJECTS

Objects can be simpler than people and places, with the added layers coming from previous owners or uses, rather than changes to the object itself.
Giant bird egg, now gilded with gold and jewels. Now property of a cult that worship it, hoping it will hatch.
Portable-Cannon used to kill a legendary outlaw in Deep Country. Has been deactivated and mounted above a bar for some time. Now used to hide illicit substances.
A crank-operated radio. Now broken, only picks up static and occasional incomprehensible voice. Being sold at a curiosity shop as an "Ear to the Stars"."

I propose that we try it here, now. Like making 10 each just to have them as a prep for next games. Are you with me?

1. Hard labor slave, liberated and turned a famous travelling bard. Trying all existing drugs is his passion and inspiration.

Anyome else running ACKS?

It was the only one I ever owned.

I could never work out how to get out of the first dungeon. I could always find pages outside of the dungeon and inside of the dungeon, but never ones that lead outside.

>What's the best OSR megadungeon?
I only played Dwimmermount and MotBM.

Dwimmermount is boring as fuck at the start but somewhat redeems itself as you go down. It's classical and archetypal, but can be fun if you either spice up the first levels or have players unfamiliar with the tropes of dungeoncrawling.

MotBM is a hard sell due to its surrealistic aesthetic that does not bode well with all players. It's great, however, as a social intrigue dungeon : the relationships between NPCs are thrilling to explore. Will be shit if you try to play it as a hack'n'slash dungeon, though.

In terms of TSR megadungeons, my vote would go to WGR1 - Greyhawk Ruins. Tight, themed design, interesting layout, and three whole ultimate goals.

WG7 - Castle Greyhawk is good if you're in the mood for a good silly dungeon, with a whole bunch of references and parodies. EX1 and 2 plug straight into this for even more nonsense.

Undermountain is really overrated, steal the interesting bits and ditch the rest.

Depends on how you define it, but yeah, I use a lot of homebrew rules in my frankenclone.

Might be a problem, the ACKs high level game assumes the characters have the gold implied by GP = XP

2. A mentally handicapped boy born into squalor, adopted by the clergy and raised as a holy idiot. Enjoys crafting soap stone figurines.
3. A skinny nerd raised by wizard family finds true love in studying tactics. Becomes an intellectual but frail archer who commands the battlefield from afar. Has a pet rat named biscuit
4. Hard-Hearted bully goes to war. Returns crippled, dedicates his life to the Goddess of Love. Sleeps with a stuffed dog.
5. Boy with poor manners runs away from noble life, becomes a gentleman thief dedicated to stealing to support a gilded lifestyle. Spends his weekends writing novels.

So most OSR material, as well as fantasy games in general, go for a sort of pseudo-medieval theme. I personally don't have a problem with this, at least for me I have plenty of years left exploring the basic concept of a generic high-fantasy setting before I'll get tired of it.

However, due to all the OSR blogs, materials, and the 'new weird DIY' movement I have seen an almost total separation between a lot of dungeons and the folklore. So many games throw out goblins and ogres for creeping things and walrus men and other gonzo shit.

I guess my question is this; What's more interesting? Generic high fantasy medieval with monsters and threats totally whacked out and weird, or a different sort of setting with those monsters instead?

objects:

11. a rusty sword, the edge polished with little marks; hungs by a rope tied to the pommel on a mountain temple. Those who hear the song that the wind plays on its chipped blade suddently have an old dead hope renewed.

There is already enough generic medieval fantasy material to play for multiple lifetimes.
At least, weird fantasy provides new stuff.

OSR stuff is about exploring the unknown.
And while there are vast amounts of folklore and myth I haven't seen covered adequately, most of the european material is part of popular culture. Everyone knows what a 'medusa' is and what its powers are. Everyone knows you kill a vampire with garlic, sunlight, a stake through the heart and many even know that they can't cross running water. There's no mystery there any more.

So original ideas are needed to retain that sense of the unknown.

12. An old record called "the dark side of the moon"; held with terror by a priest who doesn't know if consider it heresy or a god's work. If you listen to it in darkness, you can see the seven pieces of your soul (or any number of them alive enough to make a stand) arguing about their true desires.

Come up with new ideas similar to the folklore background that would fit into a fantasy setting. Gonzo and weird are both overdone. Goblins and ogres are too.

My table is running my LotFP/5e mashup. Nothing too crazy.

Maybe try this; I mentioned it in the above comment. It's just a tack on for Lamentations that gives it race/class separation, a few new skills, more class options, changed magic, and some minor tweaks to HD and shit. I've been running a pretty long campaign with it.

How suitable is LotFP for a long campaign or high-level play?

A lot of the modules seem geared towards one-shots or short campaigns, and I notice some conventional spells like fireball and resurrection are missing. Also, the Fighter is the only class with an improving attack bonus.

Does this change things much in a long term game?

I was pretty tired of orcs and goblins about six months after I started playing. I think they endure in D&D because they're an enemy you can kill by the dozens without remorse. And they don't bear much resemblance to the creatures of folklore.

If you can breathe some new life into them, that's great, but pop culture has kind of ruined them for me. I hold with Raggi that if you need a straightforward mook, just use a human (at least in most settings).

About as suitable as B/X. I don't think the attack bonuses are a big deal; it just foregrounds the fighter in combat a little more. It may be wise to use fewer monsters that are giant piles of hitpoints, so you don't wind up with three guys futilely tossing rocks while one does all the work.

I think the specialist and magic user are improvements actually; MU can cast from captured spellbooks, and doesn't have to reach a minimum level before he can start doing interesting things with item creation and research. Specialist can evolve during play to become a ranger or something too.

>Trudvang art
Always GOAT, shame about the writing though

>HURR IF YOU FEEL IT'S OSR, YOU CAN CALL IT OSR DURRR
Alright, smartass. If there is no "True OSR© Experience™", then what is stopping me from playing a game of straight up, no changes, 4th edition and calling that OSR?

Nothing, you can do what you please.

Please, Friendenheimer, do not chomp the lures. They are deleterious for mouth and thread wholesomeness.

There will be 4e retroclones in the near future. There will also be 40-50 year old anons saying "aww man I got rid of all my 4e books when I went to college, but now I miss them. 150 bucks for a used copy, can you believe it??"

5e is a perfectly good game of heroic make-believe. Why wouldn't future us want to revisit it?

4e. I type good durr.

ACKS may be more up your alley. It certainly has character options and all the rad downtime options let campaigns last a while.

Anime style campaign rules.
Spellcasters have to announce the name of their spell in some grandiose way.
Bards have to actually sing a couple verses.

I assumed both of those were implied?

Usually people do it for fun.
Add a scoring system which adds +1 or something on a good performance and have spells fizzle if they forget to.

>Spellcasters have to announce the name of their spell in some grandiose way in Engrish.
ftfy
MAJIKU MISSARU
FIYABARU
TAIMU SUTOPU
TSUMONU MONSUTA
BIGUBUZU GIANTO HANDU

Then there's no point in calling it OSR because the name becomes meaningless, you dolt.

I think the bait itself could actually become interesting discussion. What do we really define as OSR?

I don't think OSR is really defined by age. I know we call it old school, but I think most of us play OSR for the experience of this specific time frame of pre-WotC D&D.

Also there's already a 4e retroclone. It's called stirke. It's half miss, half hit.

I think Bat in the Attic says it best for me--

>To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It is about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time.

Maybe it's useful to think of OSR as a fork of early D&D--it will go other places, and draw inspiration from other sources, and perhaps spawn projects that look nothing like B/X. I think an enduring lesson of the OSR is that games can include a "why" as well as a "how".

I think it's a matter of fact (rather than dogma) that other old school games like Tunnels and Trolls or Traveller are peripheral inspiration right now.

That's what it COULD and (probably) SHOULD be but not what it IS.

I have to agree with here. While it's interesting to think about the future, and in no way should we stop trying to improve, I don't think that fits OSR very well at all. Especially because what OSR tries to do above all else is capture the feeling of gaming in the 70s way. Made evident by Class as Race and descending AC being a main stay, even though ascending AC is better, and Class as Race was abandoned early on even by the creators of the games themselves. Controversial opinions within /osrg/ not withstanding, everyone else is completely willing to abandon those concepts for better alternatives.

There is a difference between what you thought DnD was before you played it and the actual clusterfuck of rules made profusely to sell more rules to sell more rules to sell more rules and occasional adventures detailed to cringey extremes to make people feel that they're not learned enough to make their own adventures (I though that making an adventure was pretty hard because of that. Now I know that is in fact pretty easy and that if you cannot improvise a campaign, you'll probably be unable to run confortably any pre-made adventure. Also, extremely long written adventures are impossible to run without this skill)

...

AD&D 2e sounds right up your alley.

Suggestion for Manse / OC user d50 table of Weak Spots and Foibles?

>What do we really define as OSR?
It's all about the original style of play. That's what makes it meaningful to talk about something to return to, and worthwhile to do it. The few local guys who just want their 3.pf with simpler rules notwithstanding, it's all about the sandbox wilderness, the tight, functional dungeon exploration, the setpieces based on environment or character instead of plot. Basically, a game that knows what it is and is *good and functional* at that instead of being just a weird half-clone of a functional game with new objectives scribbled on in marker and totally unsupported by the system.

I love the creativity of the OSR, but it's only useful in service of the play style, and I honestly think it's also enabled by the style -- it wouldn't have happened to begin with without the game to act as a kind of nucleator for creativity, people wouldn't have been drawn in to make all this great shit without that.

How many rooms do I have to design for a single 3-hour session dungeon crawl?

15

>original style of play
You mean DBZ-esque hack-n-slash where Odin and Zeus are monsters of the week?

I'm really interested in watching how an OSR game runs. I'd play one myself but my players barely take the effort to learn 5e (after 6 months of playing), let alone a new system.
Anyone know of any GOOD podcasts/youtube channels for OSR games? There's tons of people recording roll20 sessions on youtube, but most I've ever tried to watch were garbage editing or shit play in general.

A fantasy anime game that feels raw and you can do high fantasy shit while it remains deadly
something like anima but with a different rule system

>What do we really define as OSR?
my preferred definition for OSR(and the one I feel makes the most sense);

A game or supplement is OSR if it's one or both of the following;

1.) an edition of D&D(or AD&D) published by TSR Inc(certain other games published by TSR are also counted)

2.) is broadly compatible with any TSR edition and/or anything else calling itself OSR


or to TLDR it;

>A game or supplement is OSR if interchangeable with OSR and/or TSR D&D.

Some people just want a mechanically light fantasy game with a huge monster selection, rather than the bizarre ritualism and dogma of OSR.

Buddy, I am with you on that one. The ONLY in-person session I have ever seen of some old-school shit was this group
youtube.com/watch?v=9BWEPpCC0xw
And they are fucking obnoxious and don't know what they're doing.

Considering picking it up but cant get a sense of how much work it takes to use it for a game. It claims to be fully mapped, but I dont have a sense of the size. Is it a living urban megadungeon or just another city supplement?

I think that definition is a little vague. Why play TSR D&D, exactly? What makes TSR D&D different from modern day D&D? Those are the kind of questions you should be asking.

For instance, somethings I've noticed about OSR:
>Front-loaded Class design
Nearly all of a class's elements that make them that class are included at levels 1-2, and leveling up only makes them better. Fighters get all weapons and gear, Thieves get all thief skills, and Clerics/Wizards get access to spell casting. This becomes debatable if you consider access to certain spells "abilities" like touhoufag does.
>Small to non-existing level differentiation
Level 1s can and will keep up with level 5s, and so on. Likewise, Level 5s can die on the same shit that would kill level 1s. In modern day games, the idea of a level 1 killing a level 5 even without any magic gear between the two is outright laughable.
>Quick character creation
After rolling your stats, the only things you choose are your race and/or class followed by your equipment, and finally your name. Everything else is either randomly generated or cross-referenced on a table somewhere that you never need to actually mark down except for ease of play

All three of these combine to make a huge portion of OSR, which is the high lethality along with the ease of re-introduction. You can be with a level 7 group, die, start back at level 1, and you won't be missing out on much other than maybe 10 minutes of time for the party to reach the next room with your freshly made character, and you'll be more than likely level 2.9 upon exiting the dungeon.

I think those elements are not only unique to OSR, but are a huge part of it's composition.

Hack something from Stars Without Number, Spears of the Dawn, and Godbound. Use SWN's HP and system while overlaying Effort and gifts. Lesser gifts only and Max Effort that players will get is 5 once they are level 10.

There. Players are still in major risk of dying due to the low HP, but they have a limited capacity to do crazy shit per day.

>I think that definition is a little vague.
that's actually the point for that definition, having it be purely from a system standpoint, and being vague about that as well is pretty much the only way to have an OSR definition that doesn't start pointless arguments

I've personally been turning to Barbarians of Lemuria for that.

Then your definition is meaningless and without merit.

>What do we really define as OSR?
Can it run old TSR modules straight and without any conversion? Is it compatible with the rest of the OSR and old D&D? Can I easily hack an abomination of a homebrew using different games, blog posts, and random musings on Veeky Forums?

That's how I define it. How you play, the lethality of your game, the tone of your game, the grittiness or lack thereof of your game, that's all up to you and your table to decide. It's none of my business telling you how to do shit. It's your goddamn table. Do what works for you.

Oh you guys, always bickering.

Here are 1d50 ridiculous names for Goblin Warlords to cheer you up.
coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/09/osr-1d50-goblin-warlords.html

Hey Skerples, any updates for your "baby's first intrigue" adventure?

Any advice or ideas for thinking up new gonzo races?

I think you can do cool stuff with folklore monsters (who exist to teach moral lessons, like "don't go into the woods" and "don't eat mushrooms") and low fantasy monsters (who have communities and desires and are neither good nor evil) and high fantasy monsters (who tend to be more on the Good or Evil side) and also weird gonzo stuff (weird for weird's own sake, or weird for useful reasons).

Mix and match. Season to taste. Too much variety can spoil your players though. My 1 group is 11 sessions in and they're still fighting the goblins from level 1 (because they keep fucking up the plan and running, but so it goes.)

>OSR stuff is about exploring the unknown.
Also this. Your players shouldn't nessesarily know how to deal with a problem without investigating.

>Everyone knows you kill a vampire with garlic, sunlight, a stake through the heart and many even know that they can't cross running water.
Except my PCs. They went with "decapitation and fire." Might not be the best plan...

>Spellcasters have to announce the name of their spell in some grandiose way.
If a rhyming spell you cast
Your Saving Throw is always passed
(Quite annoying, this can be
I think this rule is not for me.)

Map Guy is getting there, the module went out for playtesting to a very small group of people. You can read 1 version here. throneofsalt.blogspot.ca/2017/09/play-report-kidnap-archpriest-playtest.html

It didn't go super well for them, but I think that's mostly because the GM didn't give them a choice. They were forced to do this kind of game without really having an interest in it. That's always tough.

(My playtest went much better, and also revealed how Gnomes work in my setting: magical trailer-park fairlyland)

I've got a lot of edits to make, but it is getting there!

Could always randomize how you kill vampires and such as 9and30kingdoms.blogspot.com/2015/03/uncertain-monsters.html suggests. I might do that in my game.

What's wrong with the writing? It doesn't seem too bad.

>Some people just want a mechanically light fantasy game with a huge monster selection
Fine, but then they hardly like *OSR* rules specifically, do they?

>bizarre ritualism and dogma
If you run out of words that make sense you shouldn't just start typing random ones. Having a preferred playstyle and a system that caters to it isn't ritualistic in any sense.

I actually went ahead and read these out loud, thanks for the giggle