/osrg/ – Old School Renaissance General: Gnole Edition

1. Golem blocking the doorframe; in order to get through you need to convince it to move, probably by provoking it to attack.
2. Empty room with a smooth-sided hole straight down in the center; magical darkness prevents you from seeing what's at the bottom.
3. Flesh-eating jelly at the bottom of the pit; cushions fall damage but you'll want to get out very, very quickly.
4. Dead wizard, body animated by the spells trapped in his head at the time of death, throwing off dangerous sparks of magical radiation.
5. Secret laboratory with spellbook, minor magic items, potions, exotic and valuable equipment.

>Anyone have suggestions for what I should put in it?
Gnoles, obviously.

More seriously, I'd use another thing shown in the picture: the light coming out from between the shutters of the front-room window. In an obviously-abandoned, spoopy village, light coming from one window of one house is bound to have a good spoop effect, as well as pick that house out for attention.

I never understood how to use 5-rooms-dungeons well. How do you avoid making them into straight linear railroadfests?

They're deliberately designed to be straight linear railroadfests for use in impromptu one-shot dungeons. Or that's the basic concept, at least.

To expand upon it to be less linear, you need to make it more than five rooms. But you're probably better off making a more complex dungeon if you want something more in-depth, really.

>What kind of gnolls do you use? Hyena men? Gnome-troll hybrids? Something else?
most of the time I use Hyena men, but at the same time since in most of my settings Gnolls have an origin in being alchemically crafted(along with most other Beast Men/Monstrous Humanoids), the formula for their creation does in fact use Gnome and Troll blood as well(although the Troll part is far from unique, Trolls in my settings are often the only "natural" Beast Men, and their blood is considered an essential element in creating the breeding pits most Beast Men are created in, along with all the other uses it has in Alchemy)

What are some interesting games that aren't in the trove?

Didn't me to reply to

Adventure Fantasy Game / Chthonic Codex
Macchiato Monsters
Troika
Mageblade

Hey OSRG question for you. Given how long it can take to get stuff done in games like Pathfinder I was curious what the average pace of dungeon exploration is like for you and your group. I'm not sure the best way to measure it but something like rooms or encounters per real life hour might be good.

10 rooms per hour on average for me.
Can be sped up or slowed down depending on the group.

I bought the premium reprint of the AD&D DMG. It's so damn handsomely made

It depends on how much of an emphasis you place on combat. With Pathfinder and 3rd ed in general there are a lot of mechanical shortcuts to non-combat actions. That is, you don't have to describe shit if you don't want to: it's perfectly normal for a 3rd ed player to say "I roll my diplomacy" or "I check for traps" and then roll and that's that. That's a lot quicker than an OSR game's "describe everything you're doing to the DM" methodology.

However, when you get to battle this often reverses. At that point many OSR games are just rolling to hit, whereas 3rd ed games have a lot of tactical positioning, attacks of opportunity, and the like that generally makes battle take way longer. This is a generalization, of course: not all 3rd ed games use the mapboard (where a lot of the tactical considerations come into play), and there OSR games are very dependent on DM and player style, which means that some of them have players describing all sorts of weird tricks and the DM arbitrating them on the spot, which can make things take as long as any 3rd ed combat.

In conclusion, D&D is a game of contrasts.

What actually happens most commonly in your own experience while playing?

In your opinion, which is the better way to handle firearms in a game? Which feels right?
Guns do 2d6 damage, because a consistent powder charge gives a consistent amount of force, so psuedo-bell curve.
Guns do 1d12 damage, because nonstandard powder varies wildly in effeciency, burn rate, and those sorts of things.

>"I roll my diplomacy"

nigga what the fuck is wrong with you

When I played 3rd I used the maps (I came from a Champions background where tactical battle maps were something I had already learned to expect and appreciate), and I was okay with "roll to do the thing". Now that I've moved into Basic games I'm the polar opposite -- pretty low on combat detail, and I want people to describe what they do. So I'd have to say that they've tended in the long run to average out to the same under my style of GMing overall (depends on the individual session, of course).

I didn't say it was me.

Most HP are basically just drama points anyway, so one way to think of it is like "when people get shot at in my setting do I want that to be a highly unpredictable experience or to be a pretty consistent amount of bad news?"

Another way is to consider that like 3 or 4 HP actually are meat points and to ask yourself how frequently you want people to survive being actually physically shot with a bullet.

Pick your favorite, I guess.

I mean, I prefer the 2d6 myself. I was just curious how others would do things.

The ongoing adventures of my ACKS campaign:

thedicemustroll.blogspot.ca/2017/09/adventurer-conqueror-king-system-1a.html
thedicemustroll.blogspot.ca/2017/09/adventurer-conqueror-king-system-1b.html
thedicemustroll.blogspot.ca/2017/09/adventurer-conqueror-king-system-2a.html
thedicemustroll.blogspot.ca/2017/09/adventurer-conqueror-king-system-2b.html
thedicemustroll.blogspot.ca/2017/09/adventurer-conqueror-king-system-2c-one.html

Many have died and few have made it past level 1!

For magic systems, is there any OSR equivalent to spheres from WoD or Ritual Path Magic from GURPS?

That is; flexible, powerful and inventive (in that you can create new spells more or less on the fly) but fairly slow and involved.

I saw one blog with something called "magic words" that operates on the same principle of a lot of highly regarded magic systems. You learn magic words, which you then combine into spells. Then the DM tells you what level the spell is based on the desired effect.

It's basically the same way Ars Magica works, if you're familiar with that, except it makes new OSR compatible spells instead of directly causing the effect in the moment.

Noticed I was a little vague. For example, you could combine two Magic Words you've learned like Fire and Snake to make a spell that casts a giant snake made of fire that attacks your enemies or something like that.

The guy who made it had it so you could only invent new spells between sessions but you could do it more improvisationally for sure.

>It's basically the same way Ars Magica works, if you're familiar with that
I am! Very cool. Thanks for the description, I'll take a look.

This is the best I can think of right now

...

This is not exactly what you're looking for, but it's a lot more flexible then the original system

Hm, interesting with cool flavor but not quite what I'm looking for. Thanks anyway though.

How many total rookies were you playing with? I'm going to start a game with three complete newbies to tabletop (and one with some experience) and I'm tempted to give them two characters each so I can be more freely lethal. Did you find the new player to be overwhelmed tracking two characters?

I kind of like the unpredictability of 1d12, emphasizing the primitiveness of firearms. But either way works, and honestly the balance between 6.5 damage and 7 damage would probably be my primary motivator for picking one over the other.

Daily reminder to delete MUs and Clerics from your game, and make them into Sages instead.

Truly, the patrician way to play.

Nobody was generally overwhelmed. The newbie has lost the most characters due to tactical blunders usually, having lost Agra and Kishtu. But one of the 3aboos plays Tiglari/Gharim amd plays them blindly recklesdly.

>He doesn't play B/X by the book
shit taste right there senpai

Just read through all of these. Thanks for taking the time to write them up. They were a blast! I'm looking forward to reading more.

How do I entice my players to explore my hexcrawl map? Any secret to really good sites of interest design?

offer them a merc company to work for with far-flung jobs

Link them somehow. Make exploration and travel interesting, not just punishing. Give them a deliberately beneficial encounter early on and they'll remember it later.

Drop little hints of secret tales (a guy with a sword from X city, a trader from X city riding a centipede) and then the PCs later get to go to X city and oh man, the payoff! It's great.

Otherwise, just remember that 6-mile hexes are huge and full of stuff. Also, print off a ton of tables for all kinds of stuff and use it as inspiration.

That's pretty solid advice, any pointers for useful tables? At this point I really don't feel like my wilderness has a "genre" yet (I could settle for a standard Larry Elmore-esque aD&D blend of fantasy)

random x tables. monsters, encounters, people, fuckin random trees

There's a bunch of cool steppe-crawl stuff here
udan-adan.blogspot.ca/

But the grand archive is here: campaignwiki.org/wiki/LinksToWisdom/Location-Based_Resources

Also, if y'all didn't know about this:
campaignwiki.org/wiki/LinksToWisdom/Player_Character

I feel sorry for you. Because... yeah. It's useful.

>first link is coins and scrolls
Hmmmmmm

Wait it is?

Huh, he must have updated it. Neat. Also, it's not like you guys don't know about the medieval-ish stuff by now, so sneaking in another spam reference seems excessive...

The links to all the other stuff is just really useful to have in one place.

It's okay skerples, identity theft and hacking are inevitable stepping stone in OSR blogging. Just let Jeff off the basement now and everything will be alright

He's keeping Greg company. I plan to accumulate all the OSR bloggers one by one and meld them into a content-spewing hydra.

We're likely to take 2nd place at the Ennies.

T-t-thanks user. :)

Would it be too powerful to scatter loot items in my game which grant spell slots to characters who use them? I'm thinking of them as psy training scrolls or books, and reading them gives you a random low level spell usable 1/day.

Anybody have a torrent for that hex kit thingamabob?

>Tao of D&D is unironically included on the list
Into the sphere of annihilation it goes.

Freebooters

Raiders of the Lost

Every blog has a good:bad ratio. Tao has some pretty good stuff like:tao-dnd.blogspot.ca/2013/03/scale-on-ground.html

To counterbalance the utter madness like: tao-dnd.blogspot.ca/2010/07/lets-try-it-from-beginning-again.html
And, you know, the salty grognard rants.

On the topic of terrible blog content, here's my monthly, blatant shilling attempt.

occultesque.com/2017/09/gnomes-1d50-gems-more.html

Donjon

Alexis unquestionably has the lowest good:bad of all fairly well-known OSR blogs. There's much more insane dogmatism and bizarre rants than good content; it's not like the dogmatism doesn't infest the content he puts out.

>Alexis unquestionably has the lowest good:bad of all fairly well-known OSR blogs
This I can agree with. Dude has the Orson Scott Card brand brain rot pretty bad.

d6 damage, same as everything else.

Tao's great for his own crazy stuff. It's nice to see someone doing all that work to make himself happy.

Occasionally there's something usable.

oc

took another swing at this oc

It might be a little masturbatory, but I like it.

Are there any OSR games out there inspired by Tunnels and Trolls rather than D&D ?

I actually liked his economic stuff.

I've seen you people, multiple times in fact, post in these threads about T&T and how you wish it was discussed more.

If you actually wanted it to be discussed more, why don't you post about the rules, the books, the gameplay instead of just whining? Most people here play oldschool D&D, if you want them to care about another game you have to make them acquainted first.

which is the first edition of t&t in the trove? Just curiosity, to see how it diverged from D&D

You're not supposed to think about it about physical rooms if you don't want; but about levels into the dungeon. Each metaphysical "room" can actually be a handful of caves.
As a example, The guardian room can be the house of a lord that is built over the monster's lair. The whole house has many rooms and the guardian is the very mad lord; along his feverish servants.

The raid at the snake temple!

1. Giant Snakes hatching eggs custody the entrance. They used to be worshipped here in their sacred pond, but now they've taken over the temple

2. The location of the temple was already unknown; PCs must find it through either an ancient map or following one of the monks that still pray there on their secret pilgrimage

3. The actual map is useless once inside as the temple is now sunken. They must find a way to reach the inner stances through an underground lake.

4.Undead monks who vowed to protect the three treasures after death

5. Many of the treasures can be most valuable if you present them to the actual snake sect, now worshipping in clandestinity in a different city (there are some clues about their activities in the area). You can either join, gain their trust or blackmail them showing them the otherwhise useless manuscripts found at the temple; next to a pile of gold and a snake-ornamented poleaxe

cont. also, each room is allowed to have their own wandering monster table; and lesser traps between them.
The 5-rooms are like the crunchy bits of the dungeon.

I think it's interesting but completely useless and a massive time sink. In every way, it's the epitome of masturbatory worldbuilding.

For lower levels, sure. But once you get to the point where players are starting to think about domain-level play... What happens if they decide to found a town in the middle of the wilderness far away from everything else? What if they start a trading company and trade routes? What happens to the world if they use some sort of divination to find a gold vein and set up a mining town to mine the gold? His economic stuff helps to answer those sorts of questions.

>Tao has some pretty good stuff like:tao-dnd.blogspot.ca/2013/03/scale-on-ground.html
Shit, I've just been thinking about this kind of stuff and it's kind of destroying hexcrawling for me. I might as well ask, how do people here change their crawls with this in mind?

It's all relative. Go look at the same size area of Kazakhstan or Botswana and see how many villages there are.
India is one of the most densely populated places on earth, doubly so today as opposed to historically.
There's no point in hex crawling a populated area. What are you going to discover?

If this does grind your gears too much you can just use 2-3 mile hexes. Gonna be a hell of a lot more work though.

The Tao post isn't as relevant as it might seem because it assumes people are adventuring in well-explored, thoroughly settled lands, whereas hex crawls are best out at the edge of civilization, at the unexplored edges of society. You just need a clear deviation between settled areas and the frontier.

At the same time, if (probably due to living in Canada, Australia, or the US) you assume that one town every 50-100 k *is* a settled area, then yeah, you need to recalibrate. Look to Europe, China, and India for better population densities for long-populated areas.

>Are there any OSR games out there inspired by Tunnels and Trolls rather than D&D?
By definition no. T&T isn't an OSR game.

>I might as well ask, how do people here change their crawls with this in mind?
I don't change my crawls at all.

First: there's nothing new in this for me. I've known for ages that e.g. the domain clearing rules are retarded and based on Gygax's experience with fucking Wisconsin rather than anything medieval. Pic related is the map I myself use when I want to get all angered up about it.
So, in civilized lands I just expect there to be a shitload of villages per hex and 2-4 hexes between towns/cities.

Second, a quote from the post:
>In the 17th century, it was famous for its dense forests
That is, a lot of the problem fortunately goes away when exploring the wilderness. And yeah, it's extremely hard to comb a forested hex even for something you know is supposed to be there, but not where exactly. I'm 100% okay with this. Maps and guides are not bad for the game.

Third, it's a gameplay abstraction. Do HP make perfect and easy sense if you break the system down and examine it in detail? You and I both know they don't; there have been forty years of flamewar over that fact. Where they make sense is as a *simplification that eases gameplay*, which they do beautifully. Hexes, exactly likewise.

>Your god tires of your inability to follow his creed. No spells today.

I would love to try and force my players to follow all the ridiculous demands of the silly Gods they come up with (I've been letting players who roll Cleric make up their own minor deity to worship and adding it to the setting), but I feel like it would really rub them the wrong way.

This meme is supposed to be a little more absurd. For example:
>campaign setting generated from tables; just happened to be a perfectly coherent world

There is no better feeling in the world than the nervous laughter and looks players give me when I pull out the greatest table of all time at the start of the adventure.

It already misses the point of the meme by agreeing with popular opinion in the general. The virgin is supposed to be normal and somewhat relatable, the chad is supposed to be a nonsensically over-the-top contrast. A more proper application of the meme would be something like "The Virgin OSR" vs "The Chad True AD&D"

Oh, you use that? I've been thinking of using it for my game. Why do they get nervous though? If anything, it's a benevolent mechanic.

>A more proper application of the meme would be something like "The Virgin OSR" vs "The Chad True AD&D"
Exactly, that's what I've been saying since a couple threads back. I've been thinking of doing it myself, but I don't remember how the True AD&D copypasta goes.

>Fort save
Trash

is godbound good for emulating exalted?

Yes. High level play, fun all around. It works wonders.

If you end up running it, discuss it in the thread sometime. I wanna compare notes.

I just finished a 10 sessions campaign, ask me whatever.

What is the most high flying epic shit your pc did?

What would you do different if you had to do it all again?

I originally used it when we had some newbies in the group and I didn't want them getting too discouraged from dying. It was a good way to teach them to be more cautious of traps. Now if I pull it out it tends to mean there's a good chance of some really nasty traps at some point. Also I just like to make them squirm.

>I don't remember how the True AD&D copypasta goes.
If you want to fully immerse yourself in his lunacy, start here and ctrl + f "true ad&d" every page. This is at least the earliest that's still in the archives. No idea when his posts in /osrg/ begin

archive.4plebs.org/tg/search/text/true ad&d/order/asc/page/2/

Also, he starts off slow, but once you get to page 8 or so he starts revealing his true power

>Only the hardcover rulebooks went full retard with "2.5E / Revised AD&D"...real authors at TSR / TSR under WotC continued to print material for the real game, 2.0E...every writer of consequence ignored the changes in the black cover books. Some of those monstrosities were even written/edited by the Sage Advice columnist Skip Williams (known for his abortions of rule interpretation).

>2.5E was basically a way to test their new edition by churning out a bunch of cheap hardcovers and getting feedback. A lot of the early printings of those new hardbacks were just the same pages over and over, massive errors. Cheap and shoddy like the rules. But the rest of the material continued to be first rate and for the real edition, 2.0E

>2.0E lives, for what's dead will never die. It didn't die then and it lives now as True AD&D, informed by all content printed prior to 2000. Someone actually asked the other day for rules in 2E for construction of holy water...and was referred to Skip Williams' DM's Option: High Level Campaigns book rather than Gygax's 1E DMG! Laughable...Williams would never have the balls to print the full information regarding the casting of one's own wastes / excrement in order to take the place of a bless or curse spell in the basin/font's defilement. True AD&D knows that to rule in this case, the earlier information is more valid.

>remove 2.5E you are the worst edition. you are the edition idiot you are the edition smell. return to seattle...black cover book burning best day of my life. take a bath of dead black cover. Tupac alive numbr one #1 in 2.0E We have GP now due to Tupac. 2pac alive and real strong wizard kill all the false editions with rap magic

This is one post

Has anyone successfully ran a story-driven campaign using your OSR system of choice?