/osrg/ - Old School Revival General

Hello friends. I'm writing my very first chunk of rpg content, it's an encounter table, it's based in creepy British backwoods folklore. But I've come up 4 encounters short. Please don't think I'm being lazy, the table's over 3000 words and many of the encounters have their own sub-tables). I have resisted the urge to look stuff up or get help but I'd like to get it finished.
Any suggestions?

>Any suggestions?
write less, improv more. You only need a dotpoint of a few words for random encounters. Time spent reading is dead time when running a game.

I read it. I think it's quite interesting, the Arcana make sense though at first I thought a magic user could only cast their chosen arcana + their opposite arcana, which didn't make a ton of sense. Seems inspired by that "clerics without spells" blogpost or those Sages with the 2d6 and negative modifiers to future roll mechanic, but that's just what I noticed.

As for balance concerns; a magic missile that deals 2d6 damage and can be spammed more easily then magic missile seems pretty strong. Maybe your intention was just as an example, and a method to scale up from low level damage spells to things like fireball and have something inbetween.

Oh well. It's mostly written now. I'll finish it, let /orsg/ rip it to bits then write a better one.

Animeposters must be destroyed to the last

>Thot
Fuck off back to where you came from

>being a salty faggot

Like the other guy said, the mistake you're making is assuming the rules are laws of nature. They're not. They're rules for PC progression. NPCs don't follow them. If you expect them to, you're going to have a bad time.

OD&D uses five-mile hexes, AD&D uses six-mile ones IIRC.

don't make 'brandishing a holy symbol' a PC-feature that you can do. Make 'can't approach a brandished holy symbol' a feature of the monster. The way different monsters react will vary.

Were you restocking *with new loot*? You're not supposed to do that. Restocks should be mostly or only monsters, pure lumber for dungeoncrawlers.

And if you weren't restocking with treasure, how the fuck did your PCs get to level 4 in the shallow end of Barrowmaze? I don't remember it being that overstocked.

I sympathize with you for having such grindy-ass players, but you *must* be enabling them one way or another or this situation would basically not be possible. Pedantic retreading of the same rooms over and over is an unrewarding slog by the books, and for a reason.

gtfo /pol/fag entryist

BEGONE THOT is a tumblr meme, for Christ's sake. If you're going to be mad at people repeating that meme, you mock it for being leddit/tumblr instead of insisting upon it being a /pol/ meme.
Of course, you're probably just a shit-stirrer hoping to have a re-iteration of the same shitcano that happens whenever someone accuses another of being from /pol/, aren't you :^).

Visions
Bizarre but otherwise harmless phenomena
Aliens (Flatwoods monster is kino)
Something completely out of left field (samurai demon)

So when is Soyboys and Sorcerors coming out

>Visions
Check, I have a whole table devoted to fairy-circle trips. Other vision encounters too.
>Bizarre but otherwise harmless phenomena
Check, I've got a table of tricks if the party angers a mischievous spirit. Also a dedicated fairy weirdness table, like getting a stone thrown at you at from the woods.
>Aliens (Flatwoods monster is kino)
I do have UFO's.
>Something completely out of left field (samurai demon)
I'll have a think about this one.

I need some travellers and one more encounter and I'm finished.

3d6 in order. Prime requisite must be 12. Elves have two prime reqs.

>Soyboys
I want Reddit to leave.

What's with the hate for gnomes?

Yes, I made it with Sages and Clerics without Spells in mind. The thing to sacrifice ability scores to gain bonuses is right out of DCC Spellburn, although I restricted it to a single stat rather than 3 to make it less powerful since the range is smaller
>Maybe your intention was just as an example, and a method to scale up from low level damage spells to things like fireball and have something inbetween.
Yup, although you are right that 2d6 may be too much. The idea was that spamming spells over and over would be discouraged by the magic roll penalty and catastrophic failures, but it still gives you a fairly ridiculous amount of castings. Should I cut it to 1d6?

Can't handle the truth, huh cuck?

Go back to sucking your girlfriends husbands dick

Posting it again to get more feedback

Because they're supposed to be RARE. None of this 3.0+ bullshit where everyone is an elf and nothing is exotic

There are other non-D&D games if you want to play human dung farmers who will never see a single elf in their lives. "muh rare elfs" is itself nuschool pseudo-realistic garbage.

>Go back to sucking your girlfriends husbands dick
Engaging yaoi goggles.

Animals doing human-like things. Shit like a group of rabbits putting a fox on trial for eating them.
Old women in shacks in the woods. Not witches, per se. Just wise.
A man with a goat's head and black claws at the ends of his fingers. Accepts blood sacrifices from local youths.
An appletree with a local folklore figure buried under it after his untimely death. At night, the tree lifts its roots up and goes looking for REVENGE.
Something creepy down a well. It tells you secrets in return for coins.
A disreputable welshman (is there any other kind?)
The spirit of a slain fairy, trying to put a new body together out of twigs and muck.
A gaggle of ferrets wearing human clothes, pretending to be a man.
A knight with no head who sees and talks out of the face painted on his shield.

>You're not supposed to do that.
t. RPG cop

Kircheis what did they do to you??

A reputable Welshman would be a spookier encounter

Bad things, user.

What resources are there for space fantasy adventure? No SWN/White Star plain sci-fi but something more in the line of Spelljammer or the old CRPGs like Ultima or Wizardry where adventurers got on spaceships like it wasn't a thing.

Why don't you go look for an OSR thread on Something Awful.

If penalties choking out the possibility of a roll are the natural end to a day's ensorcelling and attacks/healing don't take a roll, what's to stop them from getting spammed?

Listen to some Metal.

Sorry, I thought I was in the OSR thread, not the snowflake circle jerk. There's a reason the non-Humans are reduced to classes.

So, the major factor which makes a product OSR or not OSR is whether it is mechanically compatible with other OSR products.

What, specifically, does it need? Is this solely that monster stats need to be usable, or do other things need to be as well --- such as the ranges for AC, the treasure scaling, the classes and class mechanics, how certain types of treasure work, and things like that?

I ask because I am interested in at some point publishing my rules, and there are several places in which I change things to make the game work better in my opinion. Ideally, I would like my game to still be considered OSR when/if I do.

>What, specifically, does it need?
Hit Dice
Hit Points
Saving Throw(s)
Armor Class (preferably descending)
Movement ins multiples of 10 (Basic) or 3 (Advanced)
Traditional vancian casting with spell slots and levels (this doesn't other casting systems)
Lowish XP values for monsters.

No one drew the line early on and we're not centralized enough to draw a line anymore.

If you outline your big changes, I could barf up my gut feeling?

Does anyone here run zero/just about zero preparation games? Lately, I have found myself becoming too obsessed with perfectly understanding a module before running it. So to stop myself from doing that, I am just going to throw modules out the window (except for stealing ideas).

Does anyone have any blog links on running extremely low prep adventures. Maybe you have some tables you would like to share that can give guidance at the table? Or just favorite tables in general?

Grab Red Tide, then use one of their one-page Lairs, pick a dungeon at random and start the game. Don't reason things out much, just put down monsters and treasure as the party proceeds, then figure things out post-game. Why was this exiled noble and their retinue hiding in these caves? Why did the orcs take over these particular ruins? And so forth.

Do HD 1-1 (1d4) monsters attack as HD 1 monsters?

Also, how do you convert ad&d (I think) movement to moldvay/lotfp? Like 12 move, I guess, is 120’ per exploration turn - the same as an unencumbered man?

No

nerdwerds.blogspot.com/2012/09/movement-and-travel.html

For magic items and treasure:
- Changing wands and staves to be more interesting than just mana batteries, although I haven't decided how yet.
- Merging scrolls and spellbooks because I don't think it should matter on what medium you write your spells, be it a spellbook, a scroll, clay tablets, or carved into the walls.
- Copper standard.

For classes:
- Several sets of rules depending on what you want to use, including one for classless role-playing.
- Elves, when used, will have their spell list changed and their way of casting spells changed because it's always felt weird to me that elves use the same magic that humans do. I don't know if you'd count them as still Vancian or not --- their spells are X/day abilities. It's like Vancian in that you can't just cast anything, but it's unlike Vancian in that you can't change your loadout daily.
- Clerics will use some sort of Clerics Without Spells variant.
- Thieves will either be removed or heavily modified, although I don't know how.
- Halflings will be removed unless I modify thieves, in which case they will be modified and changed to ratlings.
- Some miscellaneous changes to classes so that everyone uses the same XP table.
- No hard or soft limits on level.
- Optionally adding in bard.
- Optionally a few subclasses such as paladin, white mage, blue mage, cultist, and druid.
- Only fighter types increase in combat ability. (I'm told LotFP does this too, and apparently WP&WS does as well.)

General rules changes:
- AC is limited to between -1 and 10.
- No XP from monsters.
- But XP from non-dungeon acquisition of funds, with the exception of theft.

Pretty sure anything of less that 1 full HD attacks as 0-level human

(B/X MV/10) x 3 = Advanced MV
(40/10) x 3
4 x 3 = 12

>- Only fighter types increase in combat ability.
>No XP from monsters.
Trash, don't even bother publishing it.

I'm thinking of running a Post Post apocalyptic Campaign. Does anybody have OSR systems that would be handy. I'm going to take MCC level 0 funnel system to get there characters but after that, i would like to find a system that deals with surviving in a dangerous world.

Any ideas are good.

I've done it. Currently the party is exploring a dwarven city, which I am literally making up as I go along. I've prepared precisely nothing for it.

Before that, the party (with different characters) was hexcrawling at far too low of a level for it to be reasonable. I did more prep for that, by at least generating dungeons ahead of time using Lungfungus' method and/or donjon.

Anything specific you want to know?

You'll never fit the blue mage in and Gary did the spellbook = scroll thing for a while.
But yeah, that's OSR.

>Trash, don't even bother publishing it.
Why? The XP gained from monsters is so low that it's basically insignificant in most games, what's wrong with getting rid of it entirely? And with my limiting of AC, you don't really need great ability to hit.

Here it is. My first ever piece of content, an encounter table based on British folklore. A 4000 word D20 encounter table! not as wordy as it sounds. Hopefully there are some ideas you might find entertaining.

Please tell me what you think of it.

I have never heard of a lungfungus method haha. Sounds goofy. I have used Donjon before though! I guess my only specific things would be what tables you get the most use out of at the table.

Tables would be something I can lean on heavily.

Ooo, I kind of like this. Figuring it out after the session. I'll check out Red Tide in the trove now.

Players wondering about dual wielding again. I know of a couple methods, like divide AB between two attacks, or roll damage twice and take higher (which more less amounts to a +1 damage). How would you do it? Would you allow sword + torch to have a benefit?

>OD&D uses five-mile hexes
While this is true, I'd like to note two things:
1. The five miles are measured across the WIDEST distance, so corner-to-corner rather than the side-to-side some modern variants prefer;
2. Hex size doesn't matter at all, really, since everything that cares about it just measures in hexes rather than miles or whatever (much like 1:1 distances are measured in inches) and difficult terrain is a cost to ENTER a hex, so you never have to bother with fractional hexes either.

Lungfungus is a blogger who is often around here I think. Here's his dungeon generation.
melancholiesandmirth.blogspot.com/2017/08/dungeon-construction-and-stocking-in.html
It's pretty good all things considered, although the dungeons it creates do tend towards the smaller size.

At the table I usually have:
- a hexmap
- a grid of graph paper
- paper for notes
- dice

And these tables:
- random 1st level spells
- calendar tables
- uses for money
- downtime activities
- yearly/seasonally/monthly/weekly/daily/hourly/turn/round procedures
- on entering a new hex and on entering a room procedures
- interpretations of saving throws
- prices for things, including accomodation
- effects of starvation, dehydration, and exposure
- terrain line of sight
- weapon type vs. AC chart
- morale and reaction tables
- psionics chart
- encumbrance rules
- lairs table
- hex generation tables
- Lungfungus' method above
- navigation and getting lost
- travel times by terrain and race
- procedural weather tables and algorithm
- moon phases table
- temperature table

AC can be finessed by simply stating the armor worn.

Silver standard is harder.

>I'm thinking of running a Post Post apocalyptic Campaign. Does anybody have OSR systems that would be handy.
Yes, it's called "OD&D + Supplement I"

You may have gone a little too far in some places.

+1 to hit. Two-handed weapons get +1 to damage, shields get +1 to AC.

>Would you allow sword + torch to have a benefit?
Torches burn Trolls and prevent them from healing, and maybe something about some of the oozes unless the "eats anything that touches it" thing kicks in, I dunno, you'd have to consider that on a case-by-case basis.

In any case, torch+sword already has a pretty big benefit in, you know, letting you see?

>have gone a little too far in some places.
As long as it's not phantom of the menace bad I'm happy.

Exactly the same as normal fighting, but getting disatmed is less of a concern.

>it's based in creepy British backwoods folklore.

This is relevant to my interests.

Quick comments:
>Is this solely that monster stats need to be usable,
Take a minimalistic outline of your monster, or an official, monster, and see if it can be converted to your system. The more stuff you need to manually convert, the further you are from being directly compatible. (Do note that this can be stretched pretty far, though.)

For example, consider these eel-men from The Hyqeous Vaults:
>Eel-men (6) – AC 6; MV 90//180; HD 2+1; hp 11 each; #AT 1; Dmg 1d6; SA surprise; SD toxic blood; AL CE; XP 42; new monster.

>or do other things need to be as well --- such as the ranges for AC,
To a rough degree, this is probably important: ascending/descending AC doesn't matter, that's a design switch, but if your ACs scale from 10 (unarmored) to 51 (3E's epic Atropal) then you might have issues. It's hard to include a creature with AC:-31 in an adventure, because nobody not using your system is really able to use it - BECMI's Immortal rules scale to AC-27, for instance, while IIRC AD&D tried to stick to AC-10 or thereabouts.

(cont.)

Here. Hope it doesn't disappoint.

>the treasure scaling,
Only in that you probably shouldn't hand out really big modifiers, for the same reasons as above. It breaks compatibility for other systems and will harm adventure sales: people might not play your Original System Do Not Steal, but they might buy Original Module Do Not Steal if it's compatible with their preferred system.

So, for example, stick to +1s and +2s for lower-level stuff and reserve +5s for the best of the best.

Handing out truckloads of treasure (or no treasure at all) will also harm compatibility a bit: in the former case your modules become Monty Hauls that unbalance other campaigns and gain infamy from that (e.g. Barrier Peaks' sci-fi tech), in the latter modules from other systems do the same for yours and your modules get blasted for being cheapskates.

Similarly, you'll want to keep monetary treasure on similar-ish levels, perhaps with conversion guidelines if need be (e.g. silver standard, shave a couple zeroes off because you're running a demigod system, whatever). For example, that horrible PF conversion that got blasted on tenfootpole last weekish said that it would give a party enough XP to gain a few levels but, because it wasn't adjusted for a S&W scale, did not give Swords & Wizardry characters enough XP to gain even one level.
This goes both ways, again: don't make a system go with a copper standard and then use a module unconverted, since that would give your characters 100x the experience.

>the classes and class mechanics,
You pretty much just need to have classes named after the core four for strictest compatibility (e.g. a module says that a character is a 4th-level Cleric), but this is easy to convert with simple guidelines. (e.g. when a module says "Cleric", replace with "Crusader")

>how certain types of treasure work,
This really depends on what you mean. Scrolls are infinite use? Yeah, that'll work without needing any conversion (but will change balance considerably).

I liked that movie

That dungeon generator looks fun and simple! Will be bookmarking that blog for sure.

Thanks for the list of tables. Will be piecing some of this stuff together soon and will start running a game later this week.

>Yes, it's called "OD&D + Supplement I"
>+ Supplement I
You sicken me.

Seriously, though, postapoc stuff works with the entirety of OD&D, it's just mostly built into the base assumptions in the LBBs themselves: Wild West wilderness with ruined castles dotting the landscape and powerful items within.

I agree with but fuck me if it isn't exactly the tone I'm looking for.

Maybe trim it down and break it up into different tables instead of subtables. Also the grammar isn't consistent: "You see..." one entry, "The PC's see..." the next.

The important thing to remember with OSR is that it's essentially just branding: you're advertising that your product is OSR Compatible and thus can be used with other OSR Compatible products, and so people who use other OSR Compatible products should buy yours as well because they work with what they already have.

At some point you might want to jettison the label entirely, just be aware that that cuts down the number of customers a bit. Someone playing B/X might buy a module for LotFP or S&W or whatever since it's broadly compatible and something they can use, but if they buy an Exalted adventure it's probably not because they play B/X.

You get similar results from 5E's DM's Guild or the 3rd party Pathfinder adventures - you're leeching into an existing market rather than having to set sail on your own.

This.

>AC
>as leather

>Silver standard
>10 gp becomes 50 sp
>50 gp becomes 100 sp
>100 gp becomes 100 sp

(just the first three examples of treasure from Tower of the Stargazer vs the reprint).

How can 100 sp be worth 50 gp /and/ 100 gp at the same time? I'm gonna assume that's a typo.

WEIRD FANTASY ROLE-PLAYING
Probably a typo.

It's all across the board. Presumably Raggi changed his mind about what the serving china and bottles of wine are worth, in order to fit the newer rules. Unfortunately, that means there's no easy formula. LotFP is becoming less and less compatible with the OSR, and more of its own thing.

Yeah, but we're dealing with THREE different conversion factors there, 1gp=5sp, 1gp=sp, and then 1gp=10sp. Which one are we supposed to fucking use, given LotFP's prices?

>In any case, torch+sword already has a pretty big benefit in, you know, letting you see?
No, I mean should a character attacking with a sword and torch simultaneously have some mechanical benefit over just holding a torch and striking with the sword.

Give them a 1-in-6 chance to set their enemy of fire. Maybe some extra damage from smacking them with a torch.

>No, I mean should a character attacking with a sword and torch simultaneously have some mechanical benefit over just holding a torch and striking with the sword.
I figure that the point with having a torch is the light, and that it's not really all that useful in actual combat except to ward away stuff scared of fire (and perhaps attack things weak to it, cauterize wounds, heat metal, assorted fire-related stuff).

Generally I just assume that the 1-minute combat round just absorbs all those abstractions - after all, sword+torch almost certainly shouldn't do more damage than sword+shield (shields are basically a weapon, you know).

Are you sure?

>"Hit dice" also gives the level of the monster and the dungeon
>level on which it is most commonly found. In general, a monster's
>level equals its number of hit dice, ignoring any pluses or minuses.
>EXAMPLE: A monster with 3 + 1 hit dice is a third level monster,
>and is most commonly found on the 3rd level of any dungeon.
>Note: if a monster has several special powers, the DM may consider it one >level greater than its hit dice.

>"Hit dice" also determine both the chances of a monster's attack
>being successful and the number of experience points a character
>will get for defeating it. The Monster Attacks table and the Experience Points for >Monsters table are both arranged by the monster's hit dice.
B29

The table is on B27. Monsters' HD "up to 1", which to me includes 1 as well as 1-1, have THAC0 19. "1+ to 2", which I read as including 1+1, have THAC0 18 and so on. A normal man has THAC0 20.

This. Otherwise why not carry a torch even in broad daylight for the extra damage it does?

In B/X, a torch does 1-4 damage and a sword does 1-8 damage. You can hold a sword for attacking and a torch for light, but you still get one attack. I don't get all the fuss about dual wielding.

That's correct in most editions I'm aware of, yeah, although there might be some retroclone that changes that.

2e gives monsters of 1-1 HD or less THAC0 of 20

Just checked my 1e DMG and it does the same.
B/X nerds BTFO

>muh speshul
>muh snow
>muh flake

...

Monster stats seem usable, I'd just have to change AC, remove XP, and change alignment. Although you could easily use the AC as is. And I don't know if I need to do anything to movement or not, since I don't have a good handle on how OSR movement works yet.

>the treasure scaling
Well, I don't plan on making modules at the moment. You'd have to change the treasure if you wanted to run other modules in the system, though. Which is somewhat unfortunate, but I don't know many people who consider a silver standard not-OSR despite that large amount of conversion required.

>how certain types of treasure work
As I said here it's mostly just changing wands and staves to be more interesting and merging scrolls and spellbooks.

Who is cavegirl and why should I care

How would I turn Basic D&D into GURPS

I thought someone was working on it

She's my waifu

She published a LotFP clone with Neolithic elements caked in. Not much changes, but it's really good.
She's working on a LotFP clone with modern elements caked in. Doesnt look good so far.

I guess the main reason to care is she usually gives good advice and she knows TroveGuy.

Just pretend she's not posting with a name if it bothers you.
She (usually) doesn't post with a name when it's not relevant.

Use Player's Option: Skills & Powers

You're not wrong, but I wish you the worst.

You're my waifu

Use Dungeon Fantasy. Or maybe just Melee & Wizard? I dunno how easy it is to track down PDFs of those.

>LotFP clone with Neolithic elements

I like the neolithic period
What's it called