/osrg/ - Old School Renaissance

Treat them like ships.

Include modern hipster content?
Serve as a framework for including underground content (like Cyclopean Depths?)
Be free?

I like Gangs having HD. Feels kind of like Apocalypse World. In fact, if you haven't, those rules might be worth scanning for ideas to nick.

>Each SHP is equal to 10 character hit points

Hmm, maybe after you get done killing some gangsters the total HP of damage the gangsters had gets counted up and for each 10 you remove 1 HD from the gang's pool? Or just reduce the gang's actual hit points by -1 per 10 character damage you do to them?

The ship rules are interesting but not super helpful.

Sounds okay. Make the black lines even thicker, and maybe some rules about how to add to the hexcrawl. Light system makes sense and I now have a movie to watch. Nice to know that it's free.
You don't need to use your /IRC spacing/ when every chunk is just one line.

Good points. Not much I can do about the map at this stage. It's mostly for reference, but it'll get there.

Fuck off back to /5eg/ thanks in advance

The hexcrawl seems like an inelegant choice for subterranean space. A hexcrawl is meant to map out open, 2-D space; the Veins of the Underdark is closed-off, 3-D space. A party exploring a hexcrawl can climb to a high point and survey the landscape. It can decide to go north or southeast or whatever. You can't do any of that underground. A spelunking party is just following tunnels and has lost all sense of direction beyond forwards and backwards. If I was making a subterranean exploration map, I'd make it a pointcrawl.

Also, looking at your civilizations, it seems pretty...lethal.

The people who made this didn't use Vancian MUs at the time.

>Thieves. How would YOU have implemented the concept, you goddamned know-it-all?
A mix of 2e and ACKS thieves

Healing aside, it's strictly less generous than
cyclopeatron.blogspot.com/2010/03/gary-gygaxs-whitebox-od-house-rules.html

Reminds me of udan-adan.blogspot.com/2016/09/bx-class-extras.html

Sorry buddy but Skerpshit is beyond criticism go back to /5eg/

Hey man I love Skerples as much as the next guy, but even the greatest /osr/ poster is not above criticism. Now back to r/Pathfinder with you.

Skerples disagrees.

In order of lethalness, I'd eyeball it as:

Least
-Dvergr
-Olm
-Antlings
-Ghouls
-Dracospawn
-Fungids
-Archaeans (by accident)
-Illithid
-Ruins
-Drow
-Cholerids
Most

But there are ways around the issues.
> If I was making a subterranean exploration map, I'd make it a pointcrawl.
Considered and tested. The issue was tracking rations and time. Each hex is 1/6th of a ration and 12 hours.

Yeah, it doesn't make it feel very 3D to the GM, but imagine it this way. Each hex is connected to the others. And there are ways to sense direction. Water flow for one. Depth and heat. Guides.

>The issue was tracking rations and time.
Stick numbers on the line segments, you dense bastard.

Not even slightly. user has very valid points and I appreciate them.

The "getting lost" bit is something I'm working on. How do the players decide where to go next? Rumours? Smells? Scrying? Compasses?

Flights of fancy.

>be user
>don't have argument
>piggyback on someone else's constructive criticism so my zero-effort smarmy reply looks witty

If all you can contribute to the thread is mindlessly shitting on OC because there's something similar published, you should, in fact, fuck off back to /5eg/

crosslink examples or stop falseflagging

...

Did. It became messy, didn't look how I wanted it to look. It also didn't give a good sense of relative sizes of different areas without me redrawing the map... and at that point, it was just a hexcrawl again.

The lines and routes made it feel linear and safe. The lines felt like roads.

Draft it with CADD, then print off a top-down?

Could run a kickstarter to print models of the whole thing in 3D... but that'd be expensive and kind of pointless. Nerds accrue plastic knicknacks like a dresser accrues dust bunnies.

Think of the hexes as accessibly adjacent rather than exactly physically adjacent. The whole thing is folded and lumpy and twisted around... but since the players won't see the map, it's fine.

>but that'd be expensive and kind of pointless
Even cheapo free stuff would work. You're literally just using it to draw a graph.

Hadn't you posted something about making 3d maps with clay to replace the cave generation in VotE?

I did! It was fun. Doesn't work on a large scale though, but it makes exploring fun in short sessions. The players really like it.

You could give each hex a depth rating, and stack poker chips in them for representation as you go along. Probably vary the colours for different types of terrain, density, etc.

But I already did that with the light-dark grey thing... with the added bonus of portability and immunity to cats. Fuckin' cats. Tried terrain density markers (hatching or symbols), but it ended up being too busy. I figure I can include some of that info in the hex descriptions.

All really good ideas though. Who knew mapping could be so hard?

Since this business came up again, I recommend watching the Planet Earth episode on caves, both for game reasons and otherwise. Features things like ecosystems fueled by hundred-meter piles of bat guano and the cockroaches who live on it

>cat countermeasures
Might not work as well for this, but I went hex&chit wargame style with those little magnet clips on a metal backing. Does not stop the cat from trying though.

For your hexmaps. Do you prefer having a predetermined encounter or two for every hex that players can discover, or do you prefer a few predetermined encounters but mostly rolling on a random encounter table?

But how do the players explain their moves to the DM? I'm trying to envision how it would work and I don't see it. In an overland hexcrawl, the players say "We continue south towards those mountains" and the DM moves them one hex down. The map smoothly corresponds to how the players want to explore.

Now how does that work underground? The party can't say what cardinal direction they've moving toward. They don't have distant landmarks they can use to navigate. They don't have six choices on where to move. I suppose they can follow their guide, but getting led around by a gnome defeats the whole point of the 'crawl.

The way I imagine subterranean exploration is you're in a tunnel. You can move forward or backward. You come to a fork in the tunnel. You tell the GM you want to go through the left fork. Now how does the GM know which hex to put you and your friends in? I'm confused.

(PS: Congrats on Steal the Pope, I'm really excited to see it.)

Hexes as indicators of travel time seems off--how do you account for the underground terrain, for the difficulty or ease of traversing different cave areas? Like, some are big open galleries or old lava tubes all on pretty much the same plane, but others require a lot of climbing and rapelling, and others are cramped warrens with lots of narrow squeezes and ways to get lost, and others have rivers and sumps to ford, swim, or go around. I think that at the time-scale you are using for resources these sorts of distinctions of difficulty are relevant, rather necessary.

At first glance, that's what I thought your greyscale was for--darker=harder/longer. In fact, that is the method I came up with for my version of this project. It's an elaboration on the D1-2-3 large scale hex map with its primary/secondary/tertiary passages. You just do different maps sheets for the different levels of depth, like you do for a basic dungeon.

(Sorry if this is redundant--I have not yet read Stuart's VotE. Also, Blind Descent, The Quest to Discover the Deepest Cave on Earth, by James Tabor is pretty nifty.)

Looking forward to seeing more of this and your Pope-thingy too.

Current cat countermeasure is inviting one player who is allergic to cats. The cat, of course, sits on them the entire session.

I'm considering going with a Main encounter in each hex, a Secret encounter in each hex, and a table of random encounters for each zone.

>But how do the players explain their moves to the DM?
I think it's more describing their general goals. "We want to go up" " We want to go towards the drow city." "We want to follow the river."

And, hopefully, there will also be following the links in each hex.

>he way I imagine subterranean exploration is you're in a tunnel. You can move forward or backward. You come to a fork in the tunnel. You tell the GM you want to go through the left fork.
So the hexes are for abstracted, high level movement. If you roll up a random encounter that tells you to generate a cave and put some enemies in it or whatever, /then/ you generate a tunnel with a fork and all that. But until you need it, the party is moving through a nebulous superposition-cave-space.

>-how do you account for the underground terrain, for the difficulty or ease of traversing different cave areas?
The good ol' Random Encounter Table. Some encounters will be with the terrain. Some might speed you up, but the vast majority will slow you down. Climbs, rappels, falls, sumps, dead ends - all on the Table.

A roll on the table could put the entire party in the middle of a climb when the light goes out or on a narrow ledge when bats attack.

> first glance, that's what I thought your greyscale was for--darker=harder/longer.
This will factor in. The lower levels will have more "delay" results and more severe terrain encounters too.

Well that makes a bit more sense. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around it though; mapping 3D space onto a 2D surface is very unintuitive. Also, I'm not sold on "We want to go up". What if you can't find a passage going up? Even worse, what if you find a passage going up for a half mile, then down for a steep five miles? Exploring underground puts you at the mercy of weird tunnel systems that could move you around in a way that doesn't happen on the surface. Maybe you could put in a mechanic that dumps you in the wrong hex from time to time. The drow city example makes more sense, although it presupposes you have some directions.

Babby's first OSR system?

Spawn of Fashan.

>; mapping 3D space onto a 2D surface is very unintuitive.
Ah, true! This isn't quite a map of space though. It's a map of proximity.
>What if you can't find a passage going up?
That's the obvious assumption. You might be able to migrate one band up (so Abyssal to Profundal or Profundal to Littoral), but if there's no higher band next to you, you just move to the next hex over (randomly assigned, if there's no other direction given) and stay at the same level or drop.

B/X: ages 10 and up

Well Skerples, you've certainly thought this through. All I can say is best of luck and I'm looking forward to seeing your ideas in action.

Also, this discussion inspired me so here's my attempt at a subterranean pointcrawl that uses to color to determine how many rations you're using.

To compliment the underground hexcrawl thing, here's my take on Noble Ghouls.
coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2018/01/osr-ghouls-of-illiam.html

Nothing too out-there, but it might be useful.

Why do you people always talk about skerples he doesn't even namefag and you still bring him up.

Do you want namefags in this general or something?

He shills a lot and has a very distinctive posting style, plus he is the physical incarnation of OSR hipsterism. When isolated the best this thread can do skub-wise is stuff like thief skills, so Skerples is a bottomless source of shitflinging on a pinch

>he is the physical incarnation of OSR hipsterism
That's not fair. You have no idea what I look like, and Lungfungus is swole, tattooed, and beaded. He's definitely got this one sewn up.
How did I miss this?

The only source of shitflinging is the autismo that keeps harping his skerples boogeyman complex. I assume that is you.

Hey, that's for ADULTS ages 10 and up, mister.

OSR Art book recommendations? I have all the TSR art books.

The Art of Dragon Magazine
The Arof of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons
Worlds of TSR
The Art of Dragonlance
The Art of D&D

Fucking lizard kobolds. *Sight* dogfaced kobolds are the path to OSR enlightenment

Lizard and dogbolds are both shit.
The patrician choice is a fantastical chimerical creature that defies description and neat real life categories.

Basic Fantasy

It's free (or cheap if you want the book), it's written in easy to understand, unpretentious english, and it's got everything you need in the core book

Down in the Dungeon

Pic related was just a very influential film for me.

The only reason I use it and not LL (+AEC) is because BFRPG was smart enough to move to ascending armor class.

Does anyone have a pdf of B/X Essentials ?

...

Without all the tactics and options of later editions, how do you keep combat interesting?

How many sessions does the average DCC character actually survive, and how often do people get agitated at having to start over with 0 level characters multiple times?

By making the players use... tactics.

A draw of OSR is that combat is quick, lethal, and relies on players not being ubermensch and actually using their brains. Modern D&D combat takes ages because of HP bloat on both sides.

It requires a bit more "design" in the dungeon crawl and a little more detail in the wilderness, but the goal is to get the players to use tactics. Prison fight vs zombies where the fighter braces the door while the thief and magic-user shoot through the bars. Push the minecart into the horde of goblins. Even something as simple as spiking the door shut or dropping caltrops exist because it gives the players an advantage.

House rules, well, more accurately (and truer to OSR sensibilities) rulings.

The newer editions have tactics because they have clearly codified abilities and processes. The OSR doesn't. What OSR games make up for with that is near infinite possibilities. Combat is so lethal and quick that everyone, monsters included, will be doing everything they can to survive. Goblins will try to screw you over by dipping serrated blades in shit and planting traps everywhere, orcs swarm you en masse, bandits ambush you, nobles rely on their superior gear. The odds are stacked against you, and in this stacking, you create a tactical situation.

Note: You don't have to make it brutal, that's just the quick and easy way of getting to it.

So a player says, hey, what happens if I jump on top of this guy. And you say, well, make an attack roll at a penalty and then split the fall damage and stab him. The list goes on and on.

I'm another user but, the formatting in that pdf is criminal. You shouldn't start a new section at the bottom of a page or just cut up tables haphazardly, makes it super hard to read.

Please tell me this whole "skerples sucks" is just one person meme'ing hard.

skerples definitely isn't the end all, be all of osr.

It's the free RTF pasted into Word converted into PDF
Beggars can't be choosers

What’s that there old school gamer radio about?

HD recordings of your mom yelling at you to stop playing that board game and asking if your friends are staying for dinner.

Old Man Finch feeling the spectre of old age a-calling and trying to convert 20something hipsters to the True OSR path.

to user in the last thread asking about Plot In Wolfpacks
It's totally doable, but not the style of play the GM's stuff is designed for. So you'll need to do a /lot/ more work before running the game compared to running it as a sandbox, which can be done with 0 prep.

Wolfpacks's system doesn't facilitate games that aren't fundamentally travel-based. The way the game's set up works well for a fellowship-of-the-ring style game; a sort of dangerous journey adventure.
I ran a decent length campaign where the PCs were pilgrims making their way to the lost shrine of their god, restoring it to functionality. Which is not a PLOT plot, but gave the PCs more direction than just 'here's a sandbox, have fun'.

Other advice, if you or your players are coming to this from pathfinder: Hammer home early on that the game isn't fair. Make them read the 'tips on running the game' page, and then kill a PC or two in session one to hammer the point home. Lethality happens. The world is not balanced to your party level.
If you try to wrestle the system into having appropriate CR and four-fights-per-day, it's not gonna go well because a) the game's far more focussed on exploration and b) I hate that style of game so deliberately put no tools for balancing encounters in.

Martian tech sounds like the kind of thing that players will have loads of fun with. In my experience, 'anything made of metal' is the sort of amazing treasure players will do a LOT for, so alien technology is going to motivate them well.
If that's a thing, remember that Contact Other Worlds (or whatever it's called) exists, so players can literally phone up martians for advice if they get the right spell. it might be worth putting some thought into what the martians are up to, and what they think of all this. Perhaps even end with a tripod invasion if things get out of hand.

Oh, and for fucksake post here how it goes, my ego needs massaging.
Any questions?

Yeah, that's what I figure, too.

I have a pile of randomly generated lv 1s. You should too.

fucking namefags. GRR.

desu, I quite like skerps' stuff. The mechanics are fucking useless to me because I don't run GLOG stuff, but honestly mechanics are the least interesting bit of the game. The world-building and ideas and content is always useful.
Plus, you know, somebody posting OC is always a plus.

then again, I have no idea why people get all upset about 'hipsterism' in the OSR. New ideas and weirdness is good and useful; if we want the traditional D&D experience, that exists and it's good, but it's been done so much there's very little else to do with the concepts beyond the New Weird stuff that goes around.

Nothing wrong with new ideas. Just things wrong with pretentious people, 3edgy5me things, and the like.

As one of the people I am pretty sure there are 3+

This is meant to have hyperlinks to other random tables but they aren't finished yet, so I'll just post this by itself for now. Intended for modern fantasy.

Has anyone run a Stars Without Number game using the Darkness Visible rules for an agency game? How did it go?

THx I have that too. Looking to expand my collection. My kids love looking through them too.

It's all part of the fun to me.

No Fire on the Velvet Horizon in the trove? I'd like to try before I buy.

The trove hasn't been updated in ages I think, but Fire on the Velvet Horizon was one of those books that were impossible to find online last thing I heard. There was a bundle that came with a pdf of it a while back, but I don't think anyone's uploaded it

Actually, nevermind, it's on da archive. But for some fucking reason it's almost 600 mb

>S&W Monstrosities is OD&D stat blocks stretched to fill 1/4 of a page with shitty adventure seeds to fill another 1/4 and unnecessary 2e formatting
Who the fuck greenlighted this.

You forgot the 5” of white space on every page. I was dumb enough to buy it too (on sale for $38) Never again will I buy a book without viewing a pdf first.

>how often do people get agitated at having to start over with 0 level characters multiple times?
Not at all. Each new character is a chance for a fresh start with new stats and a new personality to roleplay.
If you don't like that, then you should have your character retreat more often when the odds aren't in their favor.

>If you don't like that, then you should have your character retreat more often when the odds aren't in their favor.
Let's face it - OSR characters will die even when everything is in their favor. Not every death is a player error, I'd say not even most.

Has anyone used the spells in Wonders & Wickedness for an actual game?

Oh look, it's another "only one person could possibly be annoyed by Skerples using the general as his personal adspace" post

You claiming everyone who doesn't hate skerples is skerples samefagging is exactly as retarded

He provides material which folks are free to use or ignore. I really don't see the problem. As far as I can see, it's the anti-Skerples people who shit up the thread.