/osrg/ Old School Renaissance General: Moldvay > KnKA Edition

Read the OP

>critical damage
Roll an extra damage die on top of your regular one.
So someone with 1d6 gets to roll 2d6 instead.
>dismemberment
I don't use them.

This was recently made.

>dismemberment rules
The clear line between Swords&Sorcery emulation and Postmodernist wank.

Never such a meaningless statement had been stated so meaningfully.

I like them because it gives me an excuse to have limbs chopped off, and etc. without it seeming like dm bullshit.
If it only happens after the point where the PCs would have died anyway, I don't see a problem.

Anyone splurge for AS&SH 2e? I just got the pdf and it's a fucking huge 600 pages. Looks great from a simple glance.

I like the idea of a more classic S&S DnD clone but I'm not sure if it'll replace LotFP for me yet.

I was just going to look into it.
Looks like a pretty cool 1E clone with a strong S&S implied setting.
I expect i'll be ignoring quite a lot of it's rules once it actually hits the table though, but then we did that back when we played regular 1E too.

Flesh & Grit. a 20 or a surprise attack goes straight to flesh. It's pretty brutal.

boards.fireden.net/tg/thread/52588687/#52610734

No death/dismemberment for me, necessarily.

>When you are dropped to 0 HP, roll a Save vs. Death
>If you fail, you're dead
>If you succeed, you're unconscious and will die after 1d10 rounds have passed
>If you receive medical aid/a cure spell, you stop dying and are at 1 HP
>If you're hit at all while you're dying, you die
DM may decide by fiat whether or not you received a relevant injury based on the attack that dropped you to 0 HP.

I'm just overly lenient, I suppose.

Physical challenges

>In order to convince the guard to let you pass you must be able to make a convincing argument.
>So now in order to climb over the castle wall you must be able to climb the wall of your house.
Genius.

It seems pretty tongue and cheek with a lot of obvious references to the literature. The player races being mostly just human ethnic variants as in Conan.

I like the whole Base class with sub-classes thing whereby picking a class that isn't one of the big ones you're merely specializing.

You joke about that, but I've seen similar.
I've been to larps where they used things like jenga to simulate dangerous processes that require agile hands. It actually works out pretty well.

Is there really anything good to take away from this clone? I see a lot of people praise because Moldvay but what's actually so interesting about it?

One time I used rebated rapiers and fencing masks to resolve a duel, does that count?

mate, all the larps I go to have live action combat with padded weapons (see picture). So that's not unusual. Unless it was in a pen&paper game, in which case YES VERY UNUSUAL.
Cool either way.

>Unless it was in a pen&paper game

It was Baron Munchausen, so yeah it was a pen & paper game (albeit GMless indie story game tier).

Its pretty much just AD&D. He made it for the same reason OSRIC got made: to dodge licensing fees on modules.
He wrote a series of 3 modules for it, and some rich collector has all of them, but only the second one ever got published.

The only notable differences from AD&D are
• convenient to reference
• simplified initative
• BAB instead of THAC0 (might be the earliest use of it?)
• simplified demi-humans (+hobbits instead of halfings)
• optional rule for degrees of hitting or missing

Oh missed one
• a single unified save

OSR mechanics > OSR gameplay.

Obsessively tracking light sources and the weight of every coin or the minutia of hours travelled before rest or rations sure is boring. But goddamn do I love the lightweight mechanics in Old school rulesets.

That's mainly in dungeons and even then it's a bit overstated.
Tracking light is somewhat relevant for long dungeon expeditions, encumbrance is often handwaived until you actually get to the point of hauling money out and rest/rations generally don't pop-up unless a situation occurs. (like running out of spells or being stuck down a pit waiting for rescue)
Of course you can play with people who think every line of text in the game should be played as RAW as possible, but then your problem isn't the game but that you're playing with faggots.

>blissfully ignoring the char gen rules

2d6+6 nine times, arrange six to taste
all 6 attributes roll d% on 18

Is this a revised version of Courtney Campbell's death & dismemberment system?

Yeah, it gets rid of most of the most of the status effects, changes internal bleed to trauma, and adds a table for bleeding to death.

Dang, those things are actually pretty cool. I'll check it out then.

>BAB instead of THAC0

Hate to contribute to the endless, unproductive, version comparison debates. But does anyone here play OD&D with d6 damage and hp? Does it feel like it lacks something?

I think I'm attracted to OD&D because I'm weak-willed and superficial and like the lo-fi vibe. I can't play LOTFP because I hate the overly slick graphic design, for real. B/X feels to 80's and reminds me of the official D&D cartoon. But at the same time I'd like to thing that OD&D a fun, viable system.

>But does anyone here play OD&D
No. But we armchair theorycraft sometimes

Ask odd74.proboards.com/.

odd74.proboards.com/thread/12405/early-blackmoor-documents-where-handy
Huh.

Who'd suspect that a bunch of sweaty virgins in a basement in the 1970s would come up with the idea of erotic roleplaying, eh?

>Treasure (Miscellaneous Magic)
>Cloak of Poisonousness
>After it's effects are known, a small label saying "Nessus Shirt Company" might be seen at your option.

???

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirt_of_Nessus

A single google search would prove illuminating.

bettermyths.com/the-moment-you-have-all-been-waiting-for/

I didn't think anybody here knew about Myths Retold.

...

Ah. Based on the presentation I had assumed it some obscure 70's pop culture reference.

>BAB instead of THAC0 (might be the earliest use of it?)
Moldvay is /ourguy/

I want to write a table, encounters, monsters, classes, etc. Give me an idea.

>table
10 gruesome discoveries in the village & environs
>encounters
What's in the old barn at night?
>monsters
magiccards.info/random.html
>classes
The Living Dead

Read MAR Barker's "Create a Religion in your spare time for fun & profit" and use it to create a full theology for an Aztec-like God, a specialty Priest class (Wizard or Cleric-based), for monsters make some supernatural beings aligned with the god, low and high-ranking NPCs of the religion, a temple dungeon (built along the lines of that partiuclar god's religious symbols) and a table of potential shit and/or wandering monsters you could get into in there.

Does anyone have PDFs of the 3 modules released for DCC's Lankhmar setting?

Is Swords and Wizardry a good base, especially as a Race & Class kind of guy?

>table,
Tables for tables in dungeons, by room.
Sub-tables for what's on them.
>encounters,
youtube.com/watch?v=7p-5CgWP7Iw
>monsters,
I can't seem to find the details,
but there's this Anglo-Saxon (or Celtic?)
myth about a monster that can turn around
under its skin, without the skin moving
and can turn the skin around
without moving its muscles or bones.
Stat that.
>classes
A shapeshifter/summoner class.

It's decent enough. If you want something super basic then the S&W Core Rules, if you want a couple of more classes on top of that like Druids and stuff then S&W Complete.
Just avoid the 3rd Printing with it's awful art and vagina cover.

mega.nz/#F!ARlTTRqR!Q68aIiLEvFzyiQSVtdQfyw

If I were aiming for OD&D, I'd start with Holmes.
But you sound like you'd be fine with Bx.

Does anyone else have the problem of constantly wanting to switch between systems?

Some days all I wanna run is BFRPG as a classic D&D game.
Other times I crave LotFP and weird supplements like Last Gasp provides.
And other times I only want to run DCC because of how goddamned off the wall it gets.

There's death knights, cursed warriors. There's liches, undead wizards. But I've never seen a take on cursed/evil/undead thieves, at least not one that was particularly noteworthy. Wanna give it a shot?

Bonus points: theme them off Hammurabi's executions for thieves.

Kind off, but it's mainly between AD&D 1E, AS&SH, EPT and DCC.
Eventually i'll probably get around to stealing the bits of EPT I like (system and setting-wise), use either AS&SH or classic AD&D as a base and steal a shitton from the other and then only switch between that for my pulpy and vanilla games and use DCC for more gonzo stuff.
Then again I might change my mind if DCC's Lankhmar changes turn out as great as i'm expecting them to.

>but you know actually i was pretty surprised to find out who her parents were
>because i just did not expect
>that zeus would ever have any kids with his wife

I've seen the ghoul=grave robber thing played up.

I haven't seen a whole lot of that.
I had an idea for a demonic corruption of the thief.
Basically, a thief who dies in the act of attempting to steal cursed treasure might become an "Umbra", a type of shadowy demon. Not only does the curse disfigure the thief and corrupt him entirely, part of the curse is that he is bound to guard the treasure no matter what; an ironic punishment, of sorts. Moreover, he would also have the special ability to magically compel would-be-thieves to betray one another, among other spell-like abilities.

It's a half-baked idea, and originally the Umbra was just a random demon guarding an old evil cathedral my players were tasked with clearing out. It was also the first time any of them had been on the receiving end of a Domination spell, and they weren't happy about it.

>Modern Americana OSR

Makes me want to run an exploration style campaign with liberal influence from stuff like Over the Garden Wall or Harrow County. Besides Dolmenwood/Chained Coffin/Chromatic Soup, is there any more material in that sort of vein?

I'm trying to write a ghoul class atm. It's pretty much a thief with some added abilities revolving around consuming bodies. I'm just waffling on if I want to delve into other sorts of ghoulish archetypes ie, Ghoul Lords, Feral Ghouls etc.

Stat me. Monk?

>Monk?
Psionic Fighting-Man with Body Weaponry.
Body Weaponry is the tits.

Monks have no place in OSR.

Doesn't placing a PC under the effect of a charm interfere with player agency?

Extra Things to use to fill up a hex
--- roll 1d? for how many and 1d6 for what
-populated 1d10
1 Lumberyard
2 Hunting camp
3 Trading Post
4 Mine
5 Farmland
6 Village
7 Estate
8 Church
9 Temple/Altar
10 Roadside Inn
-ruined
Ruins of a (populated filling roll 1d8+2)
-desolate 1d6
1 Road
2 Sign/Route Marker
3 Campsite
4 Fountain
5 Idol of Favor
6 Well
-wet 1d4
Waterfall/Wellspring
River (1 in 6 chance of a bridge)
Stream
Pond

Polite lands:
1-3 populated, 4 ruined, 5 desolate, 6 wet
Wilderness:
1 populated, 2-4 ruined, 5 desolate, 6 wet

They're in AD&D 1E PHB so yeah they have.
I dislike them strongly and don't use them though.

Gygax added them in Master Set and the showed up (heavily nerfed) in the Rules Cyclopedia.
Also, aside from X-Men, psionics was originally meant to have an eastern vibe.
That's why Fighting-Men lost strength and followers by wasting too much time doing yoga.
are pretty much monks.

Not if you're clever with it. Basically hand the player a note saying "you are charmed by so and so, you have to act in their interests" then encourage the player to act that way. Whenever they try something that goes too far, you can tell them, "sorry, nope" or have the make a save. This represents the original psyche conforming to the alien influence yet still being true to it's original intentions. Of course, if the player is dominated, all agency goes out the window.

>interfere with player agency?
Just the opposite! You slip them a 3x5 notecard that says, "you can kill your teammates."
You don't even need to say must, social obligation id the only thing restraining them.

Are you the same person and if so are you me?

Nah, I just binge read Courtney's blog multiple times over the summer. It wouldn't surprise me if I started talking about player agency in my sleep.

Check out Seven Voyages of Zylarthen.

Monks first showed up in Supplement II, you dumb nigger. Read OD&D before posting, my man.

Technically, none of the official D&Ds are OSR.

Begone, Satan, you do not belong among our ranks. Spread your wicked lies elsewhere. PCs are a merry bunch; begone, away from here.

They're the basis of the OSR, my man. Monks are older than any of the basic sets for D&D. Monks certainly are OSR.

Anyone here got UK-S01 Blood of the Dragon for Crypts & Things?
It doesn't seem to be up on their store anymore. (guessing they're revising it for Crypts & Things Revised or the S02 release)

Would OSR exist without D&D?

Monks are cool, so fuck you.
You also don't get to personally decide what is and isn't OSR, so fuck you twice.

I bet your players don't even hide treasure from each other.

Stick to one OSR system and use that to run whatever modules. It’s the module that gives the game flavor anyway. Of course DCC is a completely different game that warrants different rules.

"Technically" OSR sucks balls without the old school games and sensibilities inherent to them.

I emailed the C&T guy about it, but he never bothered replying.

>You also don't get to personally decide what is and isn't OSR
Neither do you.

So can you tell me why you think OD&D isn't Old School?

This. Many newfriend kids think it’s all about the rules but then have no idea how to actually use those rules.

I’m not that monk poster and OD&D is old school.

Monks are retarded shit that should have never been published though.

Hey, that's an argument at least.
For as much as I enjoy monks, they certainly do clash with everything else in D&D.

Monks have no place in a traditional fantasy, unless we're talking about real monks or friars that follow a religious order. None of that mystical Asian shit.

They don't really as D&D is already a mish-mash.
Monks got in because of the 80s Monk-detective and Bruce Lee craze, but Clerics came into existence because a Vampire player, Sir Fang, became too stronk in the original Blackmoor campaign so they decided to make a Van Helsing-type character modeled after Peter Cushing in Hammer Horror's Dracula film.
They arguably clash with D&D's implied setting of fantasy Europe by inviting Asian concepts in, but that's about it.

70s*.

Ah well, there's always more adventures around.

Which is to ignore half of them and take a greasy wrench to the other half according to grogs, which makes you wonder the point of buying the rules in the first place.