/osrg/ Old School Renaissance General

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>Thread Question
If you could add one random table to the rulebook...

Other urls found in this thread:

goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2014/11/god-hates-orcs.html
selfportraitasagiant.blogspot.com/2017/05/godkiller-rocket-orcs.html
kludgewitch.blogspot.com/
mushroompress.blogspot.co.nz/2016/09/goblins-as-nasty-maggotmonsters.html
throneofsalt.blogspot.ca/2017/10/goblinwatch.html
youtube.com/watch?v=ilRbcBhD9_0
youtube.com/watch?v=f55CqLc6IR0
knights-n-knaves.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?nomobile=1&f=2&t=14851#p233698
necropraxis.com/2012/11/29/2d6-fantasy-game/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

First for the defence of Frank Mentzer

>Defending Frank Mentzer

Why not?
He dindu nuffin wrong. Gets his good name dragged through the mud because he has an ego and flirts poorly. Big fucking deal.

Tiny, blurry words for ants?

A "how you delivered the final blow" table based of weapon. Piercing, bludgeon, slashing etc.

dude was being weird at a lady. Whatevs.
On the other hand, the correct response would have been to apologise politely and move on, not declare that cringeworthy flirting was THE HILL THAT I SHALL DIE ON and dig in for a fight. Which is what he did.

I still don't know how much rope is too much rope.

>too much rope
no such thing has yet been found

What is this

I'm working on my investment rules at the moment, and I'd like to get a feel for what people think is reasonable.

Assuming that there is a week of in-game time between games (which are usually also a week of out-of-game time apart), how long would you find reasonable for an investment of money to double in value, if there is no risk of loss or bankruptcy associated with the investment?

Likewise, assuming there is (low/moderate/high) risk of loss and/or bankruptcy, how long would you expect that the average investor would take to double the value of their investment?

All investments fail. It's just another form of carousing, except you make friends with merchants instead of barbarians.
Any other way of doing it is way too involved and detracts from normal gameplay.

What if it's part of normal gameplay?

There's more to sandboxes than spelunking and tomb robbing

I'm working on an adventure where there are three elements, a town, a dungeon and an "event" that escalates and first alters and finally destroys the town and also seals the dumgeon if not dealt with.

I was wondering if there are good prior examples of player running against the clock when the deadline is not exactly stated and can only revealed by investigation (though if the players are not complete retards they will notice things going to shit eventually).

He was a paranoid prick on an industry board. I don't give two shouts about his flirting.

The pm what got him banned from dragonsfoot.

In "The Forbidden Caverns of Archaia" the monster tribes in the caves are working towards some terrible event that players aren't told about but may notice.
But they don't give you a time-table, it's just "when the PCs get this far, the monsters should be about this far along".

That's exceedingly dumb.

Deep Carbon Observatory operates on this principle.

I was wondering if I should tie the time to player progress, be strictly linear or some fashion of rng which might be really unfair if the players aren't given time to do anything.

For sending it, or for sharing it?

>I don't give two shouts about his flirting.
This, nobody gives a shit about the flirting allegation. Nobody would give a shit even if the woman were reliable, but the cherry on top is that she's a well-known SJ spastic who got too difficult for even Paizo to want to deal with.

What matters is Frank's shitloss about just being mildly questioned -- not even criticized!, his ridiculously petty "revenge" and his insanely overblown Kickstarter.

Any interesting blogposts on orcs?

>how long would you find reasonable for an investment of money to double in value, if there is no risk of loss or bankruptcy associated with the investment?
5-15 years, maybe 20 if there's literally no risk (although that's essentially impossible).

goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2014/11/god-hates-orcs.html

ASE orcs
selfportraitasagiant.blogspot.com/2017/05/godkiller-rocket-orcs.html

Sending.

>goblinpunch

There's a blogpost where someone refluffed orcs, drow, and mindflayer.
It was a REALLY good post. I can't seem to find it now.

Mentzer deserve everything he's gotten.

Next you'll be hating scrap.

I agree that GLOG is garbage but some of his other posts are good.

The typical early modern investment in european banks was 5% afaik (penny to 20) so like, don't expect significant improvements short term.

>Next you'll be hating scrap.
(s)he is, anyone can draw like scrap

>(s)he
There's pictures of her on her other blog.
>anyone can draw like scrap
Make a piece in her style.
Dump 4 of her images plus yours.
See if we can tell.

I like goblin punch but not a scrap fan.

Does anyone use arenas in their game?
If so how do you implement them?

>nihilistic god hating orcs that build ships to go kill the gods.

Sounds good to me.

>other blog
what?

kludgewitch.blogspot.com/

scrap princess is absurdly overrated.

here's a good one;

mushroompress.blogspot.co.nz/2016/09/goblins-as-nasty-maggotmonsters.html

true

I'm working on tracking wealth in my modern-era game without tracking it by the dollar.
Since XP is gained by recovering treasure, I figure that a character's wealth is proportional to their level.
To buy anything significant (new weapons, grimouires, explosives, etc) you roll to see if you have a contact selling that stuff (contacts is an x-in-6 skill, like LotFP; it's used for some other stuff, like finding safehouses and gathering rumours).
To see if you can afford it, you wanna roll your level or less. You roll a big dice like a d20 for expensive shit, and a small dice like a d4 for cheap shit.

Thoughts?

I’m not sure the benefit of the abstraction. If you are in a city, I am assuming the DM has prepared it - there are only so many dealers that can procure flamethrowers for you on demand. What’s the benefit of abstracting it to an x-in-6 skill vs. the players actually needing to make contact with a particular dealer? You could have the specialist class start play with one free contact.

>What’s the benefit of abstracting it to an x-in-6 skill vs. the players actually needing to make contact with a particular dealer
The idea is that PCs are figures in the occult-criminal underworld. The roll is not so much 'do you find somebody with a flamethrower' as 'do you find somebody with a flamethrower *willing to sell you one right now*'. A failed roll doesn't indicate that there's no flamethrowers out there, it's that the arms dealer you're going to isn't selling you shit: maybe their supply is cut off, or you got blacklisted by a mob boss, or whatever. It means there's /complications/ now.

That said, this is useful feedback. How would you do it, user?

For things like dealers, that to me sounds like a referee-side thing. Who you can get guns, explosives, flamethrowers etc. from are significant NPCs that should be created beforehand. If you want there to be complications (which makes sense and sounds fun), I would think it makes sense to have the DM roll or decide in between sessions to see if something is messing with the dealer. If there is a complication, then rolling something like a reaction roll modified by past interactions to see if he is willing to get it for you anyway makes sense to me.

However, I did kinda skip over a more important part of your post. You said you don’t want to deal with tracking money… I guess I am failing to understand how that would work. I understand the desire, but this seems like an awfully leaky abstraction. Will supposed millionaires be failing to buy cars while toughs on the street are able to buy attack helicopters when rolling a 1 on their d20?

>contacts is an x-in-6 skill, like LotFP
I think this calls for a 2d6 degrees of success roll.
Maybe you get an adventure hook.
>What’s the benefit of abstracting it to an x-in-6 skill
You buy ~lots~ of stuff.
>there are only so many dealers that can procure flamethrowers for you on demand.
That's "more prep spent that play time" levels of detail.

>That's "more prep spent that play time" levels of detail.
Do you not write minimal details for who the blacksmith in the town near the mega dungeon is? That’s all I’m talking about. This dealer’s name is Honest Yuri, he mostly sells ex-soviet hardware. He is trying to keep a low profile from the FBI after one of his guns was used for a mass shooting. The Rust Gang extort protection money out of him. Simple details like that.

>this seems like an awfully leaky abstraction. Will supposed millionaires be failing to buy cars while toughs on the street are able to buy attack helicopters when rolling a 1 on their d20?
The idea is that your level is your resources, and you can just trivially buy stuff appropriate to your resources. The 'find a dealer and see if you can afford their prices' stuff is for when you need a crate of C4 or a first edition copy of the Cultes Des Goules or what have you... dodgy shit you need to hit the black market up for.
>I think this calls for a 2d6 degrees of success roll.
>Maybe you get an adventure hook.
I like this a lot. I'm more thinking a 'so your players look into /why/ their contacts aren't selling them stuff? Here's why' table you roll on for developments on the black market.

City have boatloads of craftsmen and merchants.
Singling out who sells what and tracking what they're all up to would be a tremendous pain.

You know a few guys, and you see to roll if they know a few guys.

>the idea is that your level is your resources
>2d6 degrees of success roll.
I swear I've seen this rule in some other game like pbta or something.

I've not seen 'level=resources' before, which puzzles me because it's so fucking obvious when you think about it.
Thieves and fighters level faster than clerics and MUs, and that makes sense, because they aren't wasting cash on tithes to their cult or buying weird-ass magical reagents.
Honestly, I play a lot of VtM, and so I'm nicking a bunch of stuff like how it handles money and social status and stuff. A lot of WoD's rules are a huge mess of dice and numbers, but their social backgrounds are really neat.

I guess this is where we don’t see eye-to-eye. People able to get unorthodox equipment doesn’t sound like something that exists ‘by the boatload’ to me.

I see it abso-fucking-lutely everywhere as

2: Very Bad
3-5: Bad
6-8: Average
9-11: Good
12: Very Good

which I think comes from shamelessly repurposing Men & Magic's monster recruitment table?

>want to write a mini-splat for halloween
>but I'd have to rush it through in 1 day

The people you go through are countable, and the ref should have a sense of what they're up to.
The people those people go through are not; hence abstracting them away with dice.

o n e
p a g e
d u n g e o n

Oh no wow this game mechanic is like in another game

Why do people think this kind of post means anything? So what if they looted it from another game, that's what the majority of OSR is to being. It doesn't have to be original.

I wasn't saying it was a bad thing.
I was wondering if anyone else knew what I was thinking of so I could go see it again myself.
Or you could just assume I'm an asshole.

>Next you'll be hating scrap.
Not that user, but I do hate scrap princess' art. It's literally scribbly dog shit. Anytime I see it in a book it makes me question the quality of the content and I lose interest.

I mean if I knew a game already doing this, I'd look them up and nick their mechanics.

>2: Very Bad
>3-5: Bad
>6-8: Average
>9-11: Good
>12: Very Good
that's literally the encounter reaction table, don't think I didn't notice.

Mostly I think that 'buying gear' is boring enough to be abstracted away, because as a GM I fucking hate RPing as Shoppo the Shopkeeper while players try to haggle with me.
But making getting gear unreliable is good; it means PCs sometimes have to improvise because they can't get the stuff they need.

Apocalypse World has a different 2d6 degrees of success mechanic. It varies for what it's being used for.

How do you handle exploration without either using a detailed hex/point crawl, or just handwaving it with GM fiat?

Myself, I just go with access rolls. I just divide it by if you're in the boonies, a town or a large city. Anything worth over a certain amount of value, a player has to spend a day looking and roll CHA. It might end up being twice the listed value if they succeed on a second day, not available if they fail 3 times in a row, etc.
I mainly use it for "Yes there are horses in this village of 50 people but is anyone willing to sell you a horse here?" but it could be useful for a more modern game. I'd probably spruce it up by having npc contacts in different areas can give a bonus to access rolls.

>I didn't notice
and?

I suppose you could stick a tack in a topological map. Sounds like hell though.

>o n e
>p a g e
>d u n g e o n

Player skill.
Travel is only done inbetween sessions and all the players wear pedometers.
The combined distance they walked is how far they get.

have you tried a pointcrawl? Basically, you have sites of interests and routes between them as a network the players navigate.

Here's 5 cards. Scan your rough draft within an hour.

I forget which one, but I could see one of the LotFP 'artists' doing this.

1. Steading of Nightmare
These swamps are the home of Nightmare and its 24 thinking zombies (treat as zombies with Int 6). Half the zombies are submerged in muck and waiting for Nightmare's mental command to launch an ambush. Their initial reaction is unfriendly but a significant bribe (apx. 1,000 gp value) is enough to ensure passage into area 2. Nightmare will demand another bribe to exit. Nightmare will use her zombies to defend herself, fleeing if reduced to 25% hp or less. She will return when healed with 5d4 thinking zombies and on subsequent visits. 12 hours of careful searching of trees will reveal Nightmare's hoard: 18 wedding rings (worth 250 gp total), lost love-letters (GM's judgement), and a life-sized iron replica of a heart with a 50-ft. aura that protects against all spells and powers that control emotions but makes those affected roll twice when saving against other spells, taking the worst result.

2.The Titan's Spine
These cyclopean bones ring with weird power, making spellcasters cast as one level higher than normal but also giving each spell cast a 15% chance of failure. Full of noisome mud, odd plants, and dripping water. Reaching the end of the spine takes 2 day of travel.

Random Encounters - Roll 1d6 every 6 hours
1- human or demi-human corpse (inanimate); has low value items and chump change
2- 1d2+1 osteovores (treat as a rust monster but eat bone instead of metal)
3- pool of living bone dust (treat as black pudding)
4- human or demi-human skyll with a clattering jaw
5- 5d10 feet ceiling and floor burn with a heatless green flame that deals 1d4 supernatural damage per round
6- a freshly killed human or demi-human; body still warm, cause of death indeterminate; normal treasure for an NPC about the same level as the party's average.

>one of the LotFP 'artists'

The pretentious one, or the hack one?

Trick question.

See that actually sounds cool.

> how you delivered the final blow
Remember to account for any decapitations on the next morale check. On the other hand if the orc goes out slowly with a gut wound he should maybe get some last words. He could ask his comrades to give the wolf-tooth necklace he was making to his daughter even though he didn't quite finish it and apologize on his behalf he didn't live to see her sweet sixteen and urge her to be a good girl and never copulate with humans.

So, what did I miss?

>Using MtG cards to generate a dungeon
This is actually really neat. Makes that cardboard crap worth something.

>I miss Skerples.
Aww, I missed you guys too.
The moving was easy. The renovations were not so easy. Removed 800 square feet of 1930s rotten hardwood, replaced it with new hardwood. Painted three floors. Removed stucco on an entire loft. Did plumbing work in both bathrooms. Built so much Ikea furniture. Learned how to order custom hardwood furniture. All in ~3 weeks.

But now I have a nice little house, and it's great.

>I hope we'll get to see his next adventure.
You will for sure! The main priority for the next 2 weeks is integrating playtest feedback and getting the maps ready.

This one you will have to pay for (art is expensive), but you guys will just pirate it anyway, so that's fine.

Anyway, sorry for the non-content posting, but people seem to want to know. I have no content of my own to shill, but this festival is pretty good:
throneofsalt.blogspot.ca/2017/10/goblinwatch.html

And this radio play is pretty good too: youtube.com/watch?v=ilRbcBhD9_0

t. Recluse

>she's a well-known SJ spastic who got too difficult for even Paizo to want to deal with.
Given that Paizo unironically considers any right-wing opinion to be on the Evil side of the alignment axis, this is a rather damning condemnation about her.

>Since XP is gained by recovering treasure, I figure that a character's wealth is proportional to their level.
This makes sense to me, but it does make me wonder: if you don't track wealth to the dollar, how do you handle giving out the money and XP? Maybe I'm just sperging out here but it seems like we'd need to know in order to be able to say how the buying ought to work.

>map
Shiiiit, nice!

>but you guys will just pirate it anyway
youtube.com/watch?v=f55CqLc6IR0

...

d50+50 or d20+80 on the rolemaster crit tables?

why is this tiny, blurry, and for ants?

here's the source: knights-n-knaves.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?nomobile=1&f=2&t=14851#p233698
I'm more interested in why No.56131908 downloaded that image from imgur twice.

necropraxis.com/2012/11/29/2d6-fantasy-game/

>how long would you find reasonable for an investment of money to double in value, if there is no risk of loss or bankruptcy associated with the investment?

20-40 years.

>Next you'll be hating scrap.
For what it's worth I really don't like scrap princess's illustrations. It's the art world equivalent of death metal - fine if you're into it, but indecipherable noise to everyone else. I suspect this is why the fans of scrap princess tend to be part of the "D&D punk" niche that congregates around things like Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

I doubt medieval burghers would have investments that safe, but has the right of it.

It reminds me DW's shopping move (you roll to see availability) and Fate's Resources skill (you make a skill check to buy things, except in this case you make a level check to buy things).

Abstracting shopping is part of a lot of games, though.
I think it's because levels and money are semi-redundant in D&D. Since gp = xp you might as well just use gp because you've already counted it all to figure out what level you are anyway.

I've done it. It works fine. Better to find a pre-made map, though; making your own is a pain in the neck unless you like cartography as a hobby.

Looking for a fantasy module or setting that has ancient/alien items that are more than just reskinned laser guns or modern technology. Maybe some sort of organic biotech. I’m open to anything. Expedition to Barrier Peaks has become a worn out trope and I’m looking for a fresh take on it for a Dungeon Crawl with mysterious technology mixed in.. Thx!

Check out Carcosa. It's in the trove.

>Next you'll be hating scrap.

Not that user, but I don't hate scrap's art. At the same time it is very limited and as such fills a limited niche. For obvious reasons it seems appropriate for some of the LotFP modules it enhances, but I wouldn't want to come back to it over time.

As someone who likes Otus, Trampier, etc., scrap's work at times just looks edgy for fuck's sake. Otus' drawings that enhanced C1 for example are well drawn, but also convey menace, fear, and depth. I would be curious to know if scrap has range beyond the abstracted scribble-style. Not that anyone has to change for me.

I want to run original Tomb of Horrors for documentation purposes. Unfortunately, my experience only goes back to AD&D 2e, but I'd like to go deeper.
What retroclone would you recommend for my endeavor?

What's the best OSR game to play in the planescape setting that's not AD&D?

AD&D 2E

It's not really sperging to point out that his logic is circular as fuck. "Since you get XP for money then what if you got money for XP rather than ever acquiring money?"

I imagined that the system would have a different way of leveling, and the gp=xp wealth just sticks around as a legacy feature in order to use that dice-rolling mechanic.