Welcome to the Old School Renaissance General, the thread dedicated to Gygaxian D&D, their various modern clones, and content created specifically for use with them. Later editions (2e and newer) should be discussed elsewhere.Broadly, OSR games encourage a tonal and mechanical fidelity to Dungeons & Dragons as played in the game's first decade — less emphasis on linear adventures and overarching meta-plots and a greater emphasis on player agency.If you are new to the OSR, welcome! Ask us whatever you're curious about: we'll be happy to help you get started. We also have two excellent beginner guides created by Anons with feedback from the thread, feel free to check them out for answers:>n00b DM's Guidehttps://pastebin.com/EVvt6P0B>n00b Player's Handbookhttps://pastebin.com/XALkXkV0>Troves, Resources, Blogs, etc:http://pastebin.com/9fzM6128>Need a starter dungeon? Here's a curated collection:https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/94994969/#95006768>Previous thread:>>96775865Thread Question:What's your favorite OSR actual play/play report/replay? Hard mode: can't say Gygax's Greyhawk campaign stories.
>What's an OSR?>Don't know how to get started?The friendly n00b guides can be found here:>n00b DM's Guidehttps://pastebin.com/EVvt6P0B>n00b Player's Handbookhttps://pastebin.com/XALkXkV0Want to contribute to the thread but don't know where to start? Use this table.>1. Make a spell>2. Make a monster>3. Make a dungeon special>4. Make a wilderness location>5. Make an urban set piece>6. Make a magic item>7. Make a class, race, or race-as-class>8. Make a 4-10 room lair.>9. Make a trap>10. Roll 2D10 and combine
>>96799332I put the noob guides into the OP already! Nice one though, I forgot to migrate the table.
Now it's on StrictTimeRecords to update the pastebin with the new OP.https://pastebin.com/9fzM6128
>>96799347Oh, right I missed it. Well, we can fine tune these things next time, now we were in a hurry to get a real thread going.
>>96799360>Thanks for your quick effort, OP.No problem!>The main thing is to stop the thread hijacker.Right, exactly. I was intending to wait for page 10, but with the troll OP that wasn't an option anymore.
>>96799350This thread's OP is 85% less faggot than the other one.
>>96799302>TQFor me it's got to be Planet Algol, I still return to those session reports now and then. He just manages to make the environment so interesting, and the players' weird fuckups and shenanigans make the read enjoyable.
>We get this thread>Deep One gets his own thread and will stay there since he now has to keep it alive or admit no one else is in itI see this as a win
>>96799427We'll get some fascinating opportunities for studying the diseased mind as he populates a thread with his own discussion.Anyways, enough about 2efag: onto games. I've seen a few posts over the years that are strongly opposed to too much content in a hexcrawl, but I admittedly don't follow the argument. I've run a game with heavy hexcrawl content and haven't felt it to be an issue. I was wondering if someone against the idea could clarify why they think it's bad for a campaign.
>>96799302>What's your favorite OSR actual play/play report/replay?The Barrowmaze/Stonehell campaign by DoctorDuckButter. Sadly, he stopped sharing the sessions because of trolling in the comments.https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIaJekezJHE8SnlJ6g6n5l6cgbJx9qbNWhttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIaJekezJHE9_jwLB8R0GPzL9_8ssyWY7
>>96799494>trolling in the commentsWTF, is that even possible on Youtube? Can't the video creator just disappear that shit? RIP to the replay though, sad.
>>96799491>I've run a game with heavy hexcrawl content and haven't felt it to be an issue.How heavy?My two Rappen worth of opinion:The thing is, if you have too much stuff too close to one another, the exploration component goes right out of the window.And when the density gets too high, you effectively remove the possibility for lairs, strongholds, and other content generated dynamically at the table. Which can start to smell like the DM having too heavy a hand on the setting for my taste.
>>96799532That's the reason he gave. I don't think the trolling was in the YT comments --- I've never seen one, at least, and I was watching the episodes almost immediately after they came out. They might have been on twitter or some other platform where he shared the links to the sessions.
>>96799372I'll do it in a thread or two, once the fine-tuning is over with.
>>96799575
>>96799491>I was wondering if someone against the idea could clarify why they think it's bad for a campaign.Sure! In brief (okay this didn't end up brief lmao, sorry, I lied), the point of hexcrawling is exploration, but that requires space: room for the PCs to pick routes and for random encounters to occur, quite simply room for the wilderness adventuring to breathe. If you have content in every hex, first of all the exploration never has time to get going: you just move your pawn one step and return to dungeon/town/lair mode. Then if that whole business didn't take too much in-game time, you need to zoom back out and use part of whatever's left of your daily movement allowance to exit that hex and enter the next, where the process repeats. It makes the actual hexcrawling mechanics hard to keep track of and possibly pointless.The other issue is that with content in every hex, the environment loses all verisimilitude and goes from being an unexplored wilderness to a theme park with evenly spaced rides, which many players and referees feel is extremely bad for immersion and just general credibility. Both these problems synergize to create a strange, artificial rhythm of gameplay which is often regarded as distasteful and undesirable.>>96799561Faggotry. Faggotry never changes.
>>96799491>>96799601Oh also, I should add to this that there's one specific exception, the Carcosa Caveat: if you have a large-hex-scale environment and each hex contains an encounter which is basically just a random critter, this works okay because you basically just treat that as a prerolled random encounter and dice to see if the PCs bump into it when they enter the hex. But, as you can probably tell, this is just a way to expedite what you'll need to use tables for once those encounters are exhausted.>>96799575Top notch, not-quite-Anon!
>>96799491LOL, he's actually doing this. Incredible.
Curious question time: I know the original Cleric was meant to be the Simon Belmont to Sir Fangs Dracula, but is there any way to switch it out for a more Friar Tuck-esq role in the party?
>>96799654Yeah, there are a bunch of friar-y variants. IIRC the Dolmenwood book has one although I didn't go in on that Kickstarter so I don't know for sure.
>>96799672Cheers man
>>96799627>the Carcosa CaveatThat's pretty much how Wilderlands of High Fantasy was "stocked" too, except at a lower density and more varied IIRC.
>>96799654Fantastic Heroes & Witchery generated some buzz a few years back for its friar. Can't recall how it worked, but you might want to check that.
>>96799654The Disneywood Friar is just that. The screenshot is from Dolmenwood Uncensored, though.
>>96799726I mean, to my mind the Wilderlands is sort of the platonic form of a hexcrawl, but it's true that many of its keyed encounters are still effectively just a monster. The Wilderlands uses 5-mile hexes, though (which I think of as standard along with 6-mile, not large) and it keys only a small minority of hexes, 1:10 to 1:12 depending on the map IIRC.
>>96799743>class ability to use a sausage as an improvised weaponKek, ol' Gavin ain't all bad ater all.
>>96799791>ol' Gavin ain't all bad ater allSome of his stuff is actually good: I am one of those who criticise him, but much of my disappointment is because of high expectations.
>>96799654Not to come off as a contrarian, but honestly, the Cleric can do it pretty well already, if you don't mind the spellcasting (and if you do, the Fighting-Man might...): in a lot of the stories Friar Tuck wears chainmail under his habit and a skullcap helmet, and the biggest real issue Cleric-wise is that he also uses a sword and bow, which are prohibited to Clerics.
>>96799777>The Wilderlands uses 5-mile hexes, thoughI personally consider 5-mile and 6-mile hexes to be exactly the same. As in, if I'm playing AD&D or OD&D I'll read 6-mile hexes as if they were 5 miles, and if I'm playing B/X I'll read 5-mile hexes as if they were 6 miles.Really no point getting OCD over that difference IMHO.
>>96799791Gavin's a good guy, the main complaint with Disneywood is just that he put too much effort into taking all the edges off to avoid offending hypothetical somebodies. Like renaming the "minstrel" class to "bard" which is changing out a not-racist-unless-you're-retarded name for what is actually kinda racist against the Irish, as it implies Bards were nothing more than traveling musicians and thieves, rather than a kind of rennaisance-man sage who spoke for the law and mediated disputes between nobles and shit. (Shitting on Irish history like that has a long tradition among British racists.)
Have we entered a new era of based janning?! I think we have! I'm willing to risk a warning for commenting on moderation and say MODS = GODS
>>96799821Yeah agreed, that's what I mean. 5 and 6 are both standard, whereas e.g. Carcosa's 10-mile hexes count as "big" by my lights in that PCs will only be able to travel one or two a day.
>>96799654>>96799743There's also the Acolyte from Carcass Crawler, a bolder revision that replaces spellcasting with Thief-like skills, but leaves combat abilities unchanged.If I were you, I would probably do a hybrid of the Friar and the Acolyte.
>>96799844>Carcosa's 10-mile hexesoh, right, sorry
So the Complete Book of Elves was an absolute shitshow. Do we think that the new ACKS book, Before All Others can be a worthwhile replacement?
>>96799806>>96799826I'm not going to disagree with you, anons. I think he did a valuable public service in launching OSE, too. I just wish he hadn't crumpled in the last few years as >>96799826 describes and also by launching Dolmenwood as a standalone game instead of the setting book OSE was always intended to support. Yeah yeah, WotC OGL scare, I get that, but still. I also wish he'd stuck more staunchly on Greg Gorgonmilk's side when that whole shitshow went down, but, IDK, Greg doesn't seem that bitter about it so maybe it's not a big deal. I wasn't impressed though.
>>96799491It's bad because the GM *will* get resentful when the PCs don't engage with his stuff that he seeded the hexes with. "Cool, more monsters? Let's go do something else."
>>96799865Could be, remains to be seen. I do know it will be "boring" and the "worst thing ever printed" though!
>>96799865>Do we think that the new ACKS book, Before All Others can be a worthwhile replacement?I've watched a video in which Macris spends a couple hours discussing the research and ideas that went into it.I don't think I'll be using his shitbrew classes (but I'm keeping an open mind), but some of his ideas seem really good. For example, how he worked out the Elves' relationship with the environment (one hex in which they are friends with animals, surrounding hexes in which they hunt), food production (agroforestry), immortality (lost because Dwarves cut their trees), little stuff like that.
>>96799885I've had a chance to playtest the druid. It was all right. Playing as the evil druid (Hypogean) does kind of gimp you, because you can't rez someone, and the "give up something valuable to you."
>>96799902>I've had a chance to playtest the druidHow does it work, does he have his own spell list within the Divine magic system or whatever the fuck it's called in ACKS, I forget? Or did Macris develop a new, separate magic system and spell list for Druids? E.g. does he have the equivalent of Call Lightning and other attack spells?
>>96799925No, the druid is an arcane/divine caster, meaning he can cast both and has two separate tracks for arcane and divine. The chief advantage is that the divine list is also studious, so you can build your own repertoire, rather than having it fixed.
Haven't been in this general in a while, but last time I was here there was a guy making his own spell casting system for his game inspired by Carcosa. Is Carcosa-bro still here? Have there been updates to that homebrew?
>>96799865I feel like it's liable to be one of those books that has limited utility if you don't set your game in the Auran Empire. I mean, I understand why he does that so I respect it, but, still, it's hard to envision it coming to much use at my table.>>96799885Kek, I get how that makes sense but it's also some comical pragmatism.>Yes, we are brothers of all the creatures of Earth. ...In this sacred glade, but if that deer nigga sets one foot over the boundary I'm busting an arrow in his ass and roasting him for dinner.
>>96799942But do Druids get Mysteries?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JDf2p4GVIg
>>96799942Oh cool, he went back to the pre-Blackmoor OD&D druid!
>>96799968>I feel like it's liable to be one of those books that has limited utility if you don't set your game in the Auran EmpireBased on the Dwarf book, it'd have uses in making a 'Pure X' campaign most likely as well.Who hasn't wanted to do a Dwarfholm reclaimation campaign at some point? I can easily imagine something similar for elves given the chance.
>>96799964I remember that anon! I don't think I saw him post anything since then, might be wrong though.
>>96799942>the druid is an arcane/divine caster, meaning he can cast both and has two separate tracks for arcane and divineOh, I see. Not sure it's very elegant to have to keep track of two separate spell lists, I think I'd prefer something simpler but it can definitely work.>The chief advantage is that the divine list is also studiousFunny, I think I'd have done it the other way around.If that's the case I don't hate it, but I think the OSE-Advanced Druid might be better.
>>96799987Best Dwarf book I've ever seen is the one for Trudvang. Incredible art, great concepts. Shame about the system though.
>>96799968>limited utility if you don't set your game in the Auran EmpireYeah, I'm going to steal a few ideas and that'll be all probably.>but if that deer nigga sets one foot over the boundary I'm busting an arrow in his ass and roasting him for dinnerTo be fair, that's actually the range of the animal-friendship-like effect in B/X strongholds already. He's just taken something that was already there and worked out the consequences. So things like this are going to hold up in a largely setting-independent way.
>>96799990Damn. His posts actually got me to read that supplement. I loved the more ritualistic casting and how scary it made sorcerers, but it's so tied into the setting you can't really plug it into your game neatly.Hope he made some good progress on it. I remember him saying some of it was similarly quite tied it his setting too, regardless I'd still love to see it.
>>96800089>it's so tied into the setting you can't really plug it into your game neatly.Yeah, that's the big problem with Carcosan Sorcery. You can't just lift it, and a version which you could lift would lose a lot of the flavor and interest since a lot of the point is how strongly it's tied to specific locations in the setting, which drives expliration and deepens the setting itself. I think Anon would *have* to similarly rope his implementation into his own setting for it to be worth doing. Still, I really think McKinney set a precedent in terms of alternative magic systems, maybe more important than he realized at the time, and it's an object lesson in how high quality inevitably requires work, IMO.
>>96800023>He's just taken something that was already there and worked out the consequences.Oh, interesting! I didn't realize that at all. Very nice, and good catch, Anon. I stand by the hunting part being funny, though.
>>96800089>I loved the more ritualistic casting and how scary it made sorcerers, but it's so tied into the setting you can't really plug it into your game neatly.Yeah, you'd have to build the setting from the ground up with Carcosa sorcery in mind.I've actually been thinking about it, for my next setting I might remove magic entirely and instead use the ACKS magical research tables to represent being able to research occult rituals that are unique and require you to start with what you want to do then work backwards. Any magic spells have to come from calling up monsters with spell-like abilities, ect. Maybe with miracles for clerics as well. A full on low magic setting would be an interesting thing to run for my group.
>>96800186I've been thinking of something similar, but a hybrid system. Remember how in The Dying Earth it seems that spell memorization is for pleb wizards, whereas the really high-powered ones have sandestins bound to their will, doing the magic for them? I've been thinking that it could be interesting to keep Vancian casting but cut it off at level 3 or 4, with something Sorcery-like required to obtain any higher-level power using summoned magical entities as middlemen for the casting. I feel like it could be kind of a best of both worlds situation.
>>96799846>This allows them to research miscellaneous magical effectsWhat are these? I don't remember them from B/X, but I guess they must be there since the text makes reference to core OSE.
>>96800885It's one of those "draw the rest of the fucking owl" moments in B/X, and early D&D in general. ACKS has fleshed these out relatively well, in my opinion.
>>96799302>Old School Renaissance General, the thread dedicated to Gygaxian D&DWhy is OP misleadingly calling it an OSR general when it ignores huge swathes of the OSR?As Unearthed Arcana is by Gygax, I expect it shall be welcomed with open arms and no talk of "first decade" shall be uttered against it.Since we're lionising Gygax, C&C is in>AD&D per se is as dead a system as Latin is a language, while the C&C game has much the same spirit and nearly the same mechanics.>Gygax, 2006You'll want to accept Gygax's opinion because his post ended with>(never 2E!) :lol:
>>96800965>It's one of those "draw the rest of the fucking owl" moments in B/XPic very related, thanks for the explanation and citation though, Anon.
>>96801011>a brand new attempt at topic sliding via definition quibblingWeak attempt however, fishfag, very weak. You'll need to polish this turd a great deal.
>>96801057Glad to help.
>>96801071He's constructively suggesting that we replace:>Welcome to the Old School Renaissance General, the thread dedicated to Gygaxian D&D, their various modern clones, and content created specifically for use with them. Later editions (2e and newer) should be discussed elsewhere.With:>Welcome to the Old School Renaissance General, the thread dedicated to first decade Gygaxian D&D, their various modern clones, and content created specifically for use with them. Later editions (2e and newer) should be discussed elsewhere.(I've just added "first decade".)I think it's in fact clearer if we do say "first decade", even if it's repeated in the second paragraph, because (1) it makes it explicitly clear for newbies that we're excluding the whole Dragonlance bullshit without having to enter a discussion on the Hickman Manifesto every single time, and (2) the first decade gets moved from the "broadly speaking" portion to the core definition, making it stronger.Then we may have to explain WHY we're excluding DL, but that's only after we've made it clear THAT we're excluding it. It's much better than the other way around IMHO.
>>96801152>He's constructively suggestingYou're giving way too much credit, but sure, that's a decent suggestion
>>96801152Maybe you're right, and he's just trying to help polish the OP text. Very well. I think at the very minimum there needs to be a comma:>Welcome to the Old School Renaissance General, the thread dedicated to first decade, Gygaxian D&D, its various modern clones, and content created specifically for use with them. Later editions (2e and newer) should be discussed elsewhere.(I also fixed the number incongruence)I'm not sure I agree the duplication but I'm also not hostile to it really, if you guys think it'll tighten the OP up, why not.
>>96801173(You could also imagine >Gygaxian first decade D&D or >Gygaxian D&D, as played in the game's first decade; the latter is an even more direct copying of the second paragraph as would require rephrasing that, I think. But that might be for the best anyway)
>>96801071Get a grip. I don't play C&C but it's been OSR from the start of the OSR and if some of you guys don't want to talk about it name the thread better, don't lie and call this an OSR thread let alone OSR general when you exclude OSR games.
>>96801152>He's constructively suggesting that we replace:Thanks for being rational but I wasn't saying that. I was saying this thread lies when it says it's the OSR general, and I was saying Gygax approved of C&C as close to what he did. In other words C&C has>tonal and mechanical fidelity to Dungeons & Dragons as played in the game's first decadeeven though it's immediate ancestor was 3e, because 3e has a common core with OAD&D despite all the stupid stuff it added and changed.
>>96801185Just go suck a cock. If you actually want to discuss those games then go ahead. No one will stop you. At least it'd be less unsightly than shitting and pissing recurrently about a non-issue.>OMG I LITERALLY CAN'T TALK ABOUT THESE GAMES BECAUSE THE OP TEXT DOESN'T INCLUDE THEM PLEASE MAKE IT MORE INCLUSIVE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE!!!!!11!Shut the fuck up and talk about them then. You don't actually want to talk about ANY OSR at all you lala homo dramawhore.
>>96801185>>96801222Anon, you were right. This is a very fine, incisive piece of constructive criticism indicating that we need to further clarify the wording so that it's apparent that C&C, not being a clone, is not OSR. Any suggestons on that?
