/osrg/ - Old School Renaissance General

youtube.com/watch?v=y8OtzJtp-EM
youtube.com/watch?v=nJBHYlHaDr0
youtube.com/watch?v=yPUzxMnmhkQ
youtube.com/watch?v=v1wt5_lO6rA

Elric is good, my dude, but these days my Moorcock favorites are Corum if I'm wanting to feel melancholic, or Hawkmoon. Because Hawkmoon.

>Suppose we could drop the whole Zak thing forever now?
I don't think so, Zak

A Double Sun
Three Hearts and Three Lions
Demon in the Mirror

RPGnow

>Three Hearts and Three Lions

how far along are you? I have thoughts, but they involve spoilers and I don't wanna.

How do you even get characters that are straight up heroes, 2e style?
I find sword and sorcery a lot easier to write for but I tried my hand at a more high fantasy deal lately and it worked only because I spent the first 2 hours of play focusing on getting the players motivated, getting them to really want to be heroes rather than "We showed up for D&D night and this is the hook."

Anyone else like high fantasy type stuff but find it a lot harder to make adventures for than "tomb robbers and scoundrels" d&d?

youtube.com/watch?v=iL9pye8pmgA

How about this as inspiration for a sympathetic fallen paladin NPC?

...

>yPUzxMnmhkQ

Ddin't someone write a campaign setting based on Blue Oyster Cult's lyrics/album art?

>Anyone else like high fantasy type stuff but find it a lot harder to make adventures for than "tomb robbers and scoundrels" d&d?
You need to saturate your players with the right type of literature.
Using Aspect-like tags from Fate might help (even if they do nothing mechanically or give a really minor bonus).
But yeah, it's tricky. The real world is closer to tomb robbers and scoundrels. People don't often play games to be better people.
I should read more fiction. Just finished Byron's "Don Juan". Still working on Jewish Travelers in the Middle Ages.
>Seal - Kiss from a Rose
What... kind of content did you get out of this?

Attached: dylan-scher-goblers.jpg (1507x720, 131K)

Do the Corum/Hawkmoon stories have their POV when the Eternal Champions come together? I remember when Elric went to like his first crossover and one of the others was like ELRIC, BRO, IT'S YOU MY MAN and he's completely weirded out because it's the "first" time they've met from his point of view.

Well put. I like Elric because of that and because I understand where he's coming from when he makes his decisions. Like I understand why he does this irresponsible incredibly stupid thing and I'm ok with it because that's who he is and his flaws stem from the same place as his strengths. Also because the events in each story are batshit insane.

succubi are related

Attached: succubus4.png (400x634, 177K)

>to which it would be irresponsible to send unnecessary traffic
This comment makes me wonder if he's been here for a while. Anyone who knows anything knows that you don't ever send people here if you can't help it.

Let them feel how good it feels to do good and have NPCs happy and grateful.

I'm working on some heroic fantasy, and it starts with a prologue that tells a man's whole life in short form. His mother dies giving birth to him. His father is cruel to him as a result, and tells him he did evil coming into this world and he knows he'll do evil going out of it. The boy grows up cruel and selfish, becomes one of the cruelest pirate captains ever known, and one day his crew turns on him and maroons him on an island, where he slowly dies of thirst.

In the afterlife, a being of made light shows him an extremely unbalanced scale. On one side, the massive amount of evil he's done weighs it down. On the other, the tiny amount of good sits, just a couple of flecks, with no real effect on the scale.

"Because of this," the creature tells him, "you will be born into suffering and misery."

His eyes are wide, and he looks from the scale to the being, and he says, "You mean I can do good?"

The story starts with a boy in an orphanage who dreams of being a hero.

>Succubi
[yawning intensifies]

Ah, I thought you meant stuff that we've already read and keep thinking about. I usually hate isekai shit but it's great

Currently reading through an anthology made to cash in on 90s dino-mania called Dinosaur Fantastic. It's got a handful of OSResque stories about psychic dinosaurs and a lot of shitty stories featuring cameos by dinosaurs.

Attached: megalosaurus.jpg (600x545, 190K)

Related to what? Each other?
Have you ever seen cavegirl and zak in the same room?

Attached: harem protagonist density.png (1248x3360, 562K)

What... kind of content did you get out of this?

01.14 - the Graying Tower: This crumbling edifice juts skyward like the last protesting finger of a titan's clenched outrage. Once claimed by a wizard of some renown, it was abandoned when his ill-fated romance with a dryad caught him the bitter attentions of a Witch that desired his hand (and his resources).

02.21 The wintry grove: A gnarled willow holds court here, the moss growing from its twisting trunk giving the impression of an old man's melancholic face. A flock of ravens of both unusual size and cunning pecks at the tree, tearing its bark and spoiling it with their noxious droppings. While the seasons around pass as normal, it's always stark, bitter winter in the grove.

01.15 The Witch's Cave: Here be the angry witch. In the heart of her labyrinth-manse there's a dryad's tree, transplanted by magic and infested by infernal termites. She's in constant agony and only she can transform the tree mentioned above to the wizard's original form.

Corum, yes. Hawkmoon I don't actually remember but Jerry O'connell shows up and lays it out.

I'd say start by letting them care about others. Take the usual immediate opener where the party is at the entrance to the dungeon, ready to risk their lives for loot.
Then ask them. "You're doing this for someone else's sake. Who is that and why?" No need for them to wax lyrical or write a doorstopper, just get them into the mindset of helping others. Hell, let them build relationships with each other if they want (PC 1 and PC 2 are siblings hoping to cure their little sister's illness, etc).
They don't have to succeed at their lofty goal, but let them know they could (should) be aiming for more than ale and whores and leveling up.

>Ah, I thought you meant stuff that we've already read and keep thinking about. I usually hate isekai shit but it's great

I was. Will spoiler anyway.

Did the ending feel... rushed? It felt very 'welp time to tie up the word count without actually resolving things! Admittedly it's been 6+ years since I read it.

>What fiction have you been grooving on, Anons
I'm reading a lot of Algernon Blackwood. It's pretty fucking good.

Volume 1 is a bit painful once the jokes wear out, but it starts OK and the rest of this series is pretty good.
yoraikun.wordpress.com/i-really-dont-notice/

'Algernon Blackwood' is really the most incredible name for an author of weird fiction.
It's almost beyond parody.

Are doing music-inspired OSR stuff now?
>the wizard Edigran seeks a portal to the elemental plane of electricity from his copper fortress-ship, The Avernus Electric
>a gold-skinned crocodile runs a racket that prevents people from crossing "his" river unless they offer a person or lots of tobacco
And I statted up some baddies from the Protomen too.

>What fiction have you been grooving on, Anons?
Pride and Prejudice. Probably not something you can turn into a hexcrawl, exactly.

>And I statted up some baddies from the Protomen too.

Attached: give 'em.gif (270x150, 256K)

Attached: yawn.png (800x635, 615K)

>youtube.com/watch?v=yPUzxMnmhkQ
Good on you for posting BOC, but at least post good BOC.
youtu.be/PGmJaHsL62g
youtu.be/ta5pgK4Msx4
youtu.be/4buaY1ikkJ8
youtu.be/jUwh-C5w7II
youtu.be/l5uqatdNu1I
youtu.be/HybiybhETew

Why not? Beats the usual shitposting.

>Did the ending feel... rushed?
Eh, it "felt" right to me but structually speaking I guess you could say it was rushed or anti-climactic.

Blog post ahoy
buzzclaw.blogspot.com/2016/12/light-up-last-night-of-2016.html

Well huh. Not bad. I think you can condense the descriptions a bit without losing any flavour. "Here is" and" this tower" aren't needed if the hex name also explains part of the contents.
His actual name was Ed Lamb, oddly enough. Changed it before he started publishing.

Attached: 1444195626840.jpg (1000x1644, 1.8M)

This isn't exactly on topic, but it's a question about old-school D&D.

What would be the best AD&D 2e module to showcase the worst of the things that started to become prevalent in the 2e era? Namely, stuff like heavy-handed railroading, forced morality and other plot-centric bullshit?

I've gotten my wife into old-school gaming over the past few years, and she's basically learned that D&D is synonymous with player-driven sandbox play that emphasizes freedom and player choice. I've also remarked a couple of times about how bad some of the stuff over the years has been, especially regarding some of the aforementioned railroady badness from the 2e era. I don't really even want to talk about later stuff, but I myself grew up with 2e, so I remember it well.

Lately, I've been humoring myself with the idea of giving her a taste of what I'm talking about. Basically, just playing a railroady, plot-heavy game of 2e as close to the books as humanly possible. For context and some humor at the excuse of the bad parts of the hobby's history.

Now, what would be the best module for something like this, to really showcase the worst of it? I've been thinking about using the Sword of the Dales series of modules, since it's pretty hilariously heavy-handed in the railroading. Some pages are nothing but read aloud text, and it's just full on railroading. For example, the module literally tells you to force the players to sleep at a certain inn so that they can have a cutscene about a nightmare in that inn.

Still, any other good suggestions?

>Condense yo shit, nigga

Oh mos' def. Since I'm the only one who'll ever see this in the long term, I tend to just give myself stuff to latch onto. If I ever put out this map for others I'll tighten things.

>What would be the best AD&D 2e module to showcase the worst of the things that started to become prevalent in the 2e era?
Castle Spulzeer, the last pre-WOTC 2e module.
And just to give 2e a fair shake, the 1e Dragonlance modules are also railroads, with I6 Ravenloft as a partial railroad.

I'm sure you could trawl tenfootpole for something. Check his dungeon magazine reviews - lots of awful modules there.
tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?p=2888
But running a deliberately bad game... eugh. Seems like an exercise in frustration.

Attached: gather information.jpg (1000x350, 201K)

Very fair.
>Castle Spulzeer
Ah, it's all flooding back. Oblivion Stone, How The Mighty are Fallen, or maybe Undermountain too?

Attached: 1517458428659.jpg (900x1349, 186K)

>His actual name was Ed Lamb, oddly enough. Changed it before he started publishing.
Interesting. I can't actually find anywhere on the internet that confirms that. But the name is almost too good to be true.

Attached: 1tFLZMR.gif (312x230, 4.93M)

I just listened to all of the videos at once, it was an...interesting experience.

>Oblivion Stone
Yeah, the NPC has literal plot armor.

>How The Mighty are Fallen
That's not really a railroad though. They can refuse or accept missions and even if they accept there are multiple ways to accomplish them.

>Undermountain
The box set or the splats? Because I remember the splats being okay to good

I think the box? I drank to forget.
At the same time?

Attached: cave temple.jpg (1871x917, 285K)

>Sons of Perdition
>on my Veeky Forums
>in my /osrg/
You're a good man, user. You can fuck my cheeses

>You can fuck my cheeses
Can we... not?

Attached: ech.jpg (240x180, 7K)

>I just listened to all of the videos at once
I mean, how else would you do it? Listen to them one at a time? You know how much time that would waste? Minutes, user. Minutes.

Do I have to post THAT

I'm thinking of having race and class for my game, but I don't like traditional fantasy races.

What races should I use instead?

Attached: feathery race things binder sketches.jpg (523x700, 177K)

Well I mean it's got holes for a reason

Pars Fortuna.

Let the players pick what they are, then let those be the main races

Everything from Rice Boy, Order of Tales, and Vattu

>What races should I use instead?
Yes.

Attached: Revised Race Table.png (1239x1048, 101K)

Saurials, Thri-kreen, and Draenei

Definitely not Undermountain. It's not a great dungeon or anything, but if the poster wants the worse of the railroaded worst, some dungeon you can wander around in isn't going to cut it, even a shitty dungeon. You need DMPCs, boxed text a mile long, villains that can't die until the right time, places where every spell annoying to DMs don't work because fiat, and so on.

>At the same time?
Yes, I was bored.
Yeah, but half of those aren't really playable, or don't have anything interesting going for them. Playing in the Rice Boy-verse would be dope, though

I can think of several adventures and modules like that but they're outside of D&D entirely. Deadlands or L5R shit, awful stuff. I think I remember some evil-aligned convention module for 2E where the pregenerated PCs were actually given lines to say at particular moments of the module though.

Is there an OSR game that doesn't treat Lawful and Chaotic as synonyms for Good and Evil? I'd settle for something that focuses on Alignment, period. Alignment is often a footnote and pretty underutilized.

What do you want alignment to do?

>Yeah, but half of those aren't really playable, or don't have anything interesting going for them.

>The Horned, who fucked up a dragon
>The Machine Men, who ruled for ages
>The Sirpah, dragon-coatls.
>whatever Koark's race is called
>Merfolk of Ten Shells
>The Blackbirds
>The Frogfolk of the marsh
>The Shadefolk
>The boots. The. Boots.
>The Surin, mastering self and unweight.
>The Grish, truly the only good form of Kobold to exist.

I'll grant you the Fluters are kind of hard, but they're halfling expies anyway.

Yes, it's called AD&D

Go Dragonlance. Dragonlance is fucking amazing and you can basically trace all of that back to it.

Dragonlance doesn't even have a fucking conceit of player freedom. Did your PC die at some point? Fuck no they didn't, they need to be alive later on. Your PC will return at the plot critical point and declare they were simply wounded earlier. Then you WILL enjoy the cutscene and feel wonderment and adventure.

>for a while
You should figure that out pretty quickly, really.

It's a shame that comic's on presumably indefinite hiatus.

I want it to be a cosmic principle that affects the setting. People know about it, people fight about it. Alignment changes should be a big deal and really rare.

I haven't been reading much but I drove across the US and spent some time living innawoods so it's given some good ideas for how to better describe wilderness. Also a hankering to put more areas inspired by the southwest into my game.

Led Zeppelin, No Quarter -- youtu.be/wdqDmJbm2eY
Wishbone Ash, King Will Come -- youtu.be/Tna0Mmu1XlI
Testament, Alone in the Dark -- youtu.be/n9PoclFhiUc
The Police, Tea in the Sahara -- youtu.be/VDslMNF_1Hk
Def Leppard, Overture -- youtu.be/NBBbNMK1v4w
Duran Duran, Night Boat -- youtu.be/3fDXvO8KK7k

LotFP has:
>Law=Fate and the divine
>neutral=mundanity
>chaos=magic and the unnatural
It goes to some lengths to point out that being particularly lawful or chaotic makes you basically insane by human standards, that that sort of insanity is needed to be a cleric/MU, and that most normal humans are neutral.

I grew up in the Ozark foothills, love me some wilderness stuff. Hate the Southwest though, so you are a kinder user than I.

If you can stomach looking outside of OSR, look at how Stormbringer handles Allegiance.

It seems brutally inhospitable but there's some really jaw dropping scenery when you drive along i-40. I spent some time homeless in the woods out in oregon and that's really given a lot of inspiration for gaming.
I actually wasn't that big a fan of the ozarks. idk, arkansas and oklahoma were pretty boring until I started getting near the north texas border.

>Dragonlance
>Literal cutscenes with no player characters, dramatic moments mapped out in advance, prewritten epilogues for characters

Oh man, Dragonlance. And I don't even mean dramatic moments like ambushes or such. Dragonlance modules literally dictated what your characters would do, straight-up, at a given point.

One of the modules just states that two of the characters marry later on.

Even in the modules that supposedly feature some sort of dungeon exploration, any wrong choice will instantly be met with the usual "The PCs are captured and brought into the correct place", and par for the course no disruptive spells work at all.

Have you considered SMT?

Was homeless in Phoenix back in 06, spent a lot of time hitching between it and Flagstaff. No thank you.

I'm from Oklahoma, the Ok/Ar border. I love wandering the hills and hollers. Can do that all day every day.

Aside from Elric it was the first thing that came to mind.

Oregon was way too wet but it wasn't that bad a place to live out your car in the winter.
The area between pheonix and flagstaff has some great places for driving but I knew instinctively that I needed to get the fuck out of there. I had one point when I reached the top of one of those desert mountains, I could see storms brewing 20 miles ahead, rock sculptures off in the distance, a row of crosses on the side of the road, the preacher on the radio was screaming about how the end times are here. I really want to figure out how to turn that moment into an adventure.

What's your favorite utterly obscure monster from the Fiend Folio or MM2?

Attached: 1300588969806.jpg (600x500, 65K)

It sounds like Ghosts Wailing On Keyboards.

the user who makes legit good RATs is also osrg?

>it was [...] experience.
Story goals were a mistake.

Attached: after ten thousand years i'm free.png (436x604, 232K)

I'm a sucker for stupid, fuck you monsters like nilbogs, adherers, or that not!ghost that gets smaller as it flies at you so you think it's going away

I like Lava Children. Just grinning manbabies that can't be touched by metal and might kill you by touching you because they're so hot. Not hostile, just stupid.

>I'm thinking of having race and class for my game, but I don't like traditional fantasy races.
>What races should I use instead?
go through every official D&D Monster Manual(and the monster sections of Basic, Expert, and Rules Cyclopedia, as well as the Creature Catalog) across every edition, and mark down every race you find interesting, once you've done that, then narrow it down to 20, than 10, and from there narrowed down to however many you want

/osrg/'s opinion on the Basic Fantasy rules system?

>fallen paladin
What did he mean by this?

Attached: Untitled.png (946x797, 88K)

Meh.

That's fair as well. Can't fault people for doing what they're paid to do.

Attached: 1520637426963.jpg (1278x2000, 1.02M)

honestly Gygax was pretty smart in some regards but I wouldn't take moral advice from him

>A paladin is likely a figure that would be considered a fair judge of criminal conduct.

SOmebody (zak I think?) wrote a blog post about designing modules which had a points-scoring system that rewarded useful details and penalized bloated fluff.
IIRC stuff like: every time the book tells me something I can work out for myself, -1 point.
Anybody know what I mean and able to link it? Google is failing me.

Overall? Pretty decent if you want B/X with split race and class, and ascending AC. It screws up the high-level saves by not having them progress quickly enough, but that really only matters at high level, and it's not completely broken like Castles & Crusades's saves are. I really hate that it puts all the spell descriptions in alphabetical order rather than grouping them by class and level, but this seems to be the standard way of doing things these days, and Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardry, LotFP, and Castles & Crusades all do them this way. In fact, I can't think of a single retroclone that does them the old-fashioned way, which is too bad.

>What races should I use instead?
Gnomes.
Not D&D gnomes though. Straight up garden-sized, red cone hat-wearing gnomes.