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al-azad posted:Yes. Thanks!
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Dec 17, 2017 04:07
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Speaking of Nightmares Underneath, I've been making a few monsters of my own for an alternative (if a big more normal and boring) setting. It's mostly an excuse to do something with some of my artwork that is sitting around, but they mioght be of use to someone running TNU, or they can probably be converted to a different retroclone easily enough.   Last one spoiled for being NSFW 
thefakenews fucked around with this message at 05:08 on Dec 24, 2017 |
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Dec 24, 2017 05:04
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Anyone know if there is a quick reference for Darker Dungeons (Not Dark Dungeons, Darker Dungeons)? Plan on making inserts for my custom GM screen and running it live. Also, why has Darker Dungeons vanished off the face of the internet? I can only find it on for 4plebs now, 4chan's download site. Good thing I have a physical copy from Lulu. Covok fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Jan 1, 2018 |
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Jan 1, 2018 20:00
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Blacky the Blackball didn't like the job he did of the layout, IIRC, and considered it more of a rules hack for Dark Dungeons/BECMI than anything else. It's also one of my favorite ways to play basic, so I was bummed when he pulled it. If you need access to it, though, I think he still gives it out on request. You can still get the hardcopy on Lulu. http://www.lulu.com/shop/blacky-the-blackball/darker-dungeons-hardback/hardcover/product-17969355.html http://www.lulu.com/shop/blacky-the-blackball/darker-dungeons-softcover/paperback/product-18744017.html
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Jan 2, 2018 00:44
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LeSquide posted:Blacky the Blackball didn't like the job he did of the layout, IIRC, and considered it more of a rules hack for Dark Dungeons/BECMI than anything else. Oh, I still got my pdf and physical copy. I'm surprised he didn't like it. Sure, the art stinks and there is like 3 places he forgot to update from Dark Dungeons to Darker Dungeons, but it really is a marked improvement over BECMI. It's everything good about BECMI but with A MUCH BETTER basic resolution system and, you know, uses a simple resolution system for almost everything without losing what makes BECMI work. The only major downside is AC is still negative bonuses and positive penalties. So odd to me, personally, that he'd consider it a failure so bad he'd need to hide it.
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Jan 2, 2018 00:48
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What's a good OSR setting? Trying to set up an IRL Darker Dungeons game. Can't think of what setting to use. What do y'all like? Thinking just pretty general fantasy and I'll let skyships let us go to more fun worlds later. Also, how do you get an IRL group together if you know only one player IRL and no one else who likes games or anyone else in the area who does or even a place to look?
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Jan 2, 2018 03:30
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Covok posted:The only major downside is AC is still negative bonuses and positive penalties. Nope. Darker Dungeons uses "Target 20". As per page 128: quote:To determine if an attack hits, take the total bonus and add a roll of 1d20 to it. As with any other check, if the total of the bonus plus roll is greater than or equal to 20, then the attack hits; otherwise it misses. AC values are still descending/lower-is-better, but: * all to-hit bonuses are more intuitively expressed as positive numbers/addends * all to-hit penalties are more intuitively expressed as negative numbers/subtrahends * higher rolls are still better
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Jan 2, 2018 04:13
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That's what I mean: AC bonuses are negative (subtract your Dex mod, for example, to determine your AC) and penalties are positive.
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Jan 2, 2018 04:21
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Covok posted:That's what I mean: AC bonuses are negative (subtract your Dex mod, for example, to determine your AC) and penalties are positive. Gee you'd think I'd save myself a lot of time if I had just read your post closely enough! I'm very sorry.
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Jan 2, 2018 04:25
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Covok posted:What's a good OSR setting? Trying to set up an IRL Darker Dungeons game. Can't think of what setting to use. What do y'all like? Thinking just pretty general fantasy and I'll let skyships let us go to more fun worlds later. Yoon-Suin is a pretty good one
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Jan 2, 2018 04:54
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Covok posted:What's a good OSR setting? Trying to set up an IRL Darker Dungeons game. Can't think of what setting to use. What do y'all like? Thinking just pretty general fantasy and I'll let skyships let us go to more fun worlds later. Hot Springs Island, Yoon-Suin, Maze of the Blue Medusa, Perdition, Hubris, Veins of the Earth are all considered p. good.
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Jan 2, 2018 11:54
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Megazver posted:Hot Springs Island, Yoon-Suin, Maze of the Blue Medusa, Perdition, Hubris, Veins of the Earth are all considered p. good. Maze is less a setting than a dungeon. It could fit in any setting, your characters just need to stumble through a painting.
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Jan 2, 2018 12:13
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Covok posted:What's a good OSR setting? Trying to set up an IRL Darker Dungeons game. Can't think of what setting to use. What do y'all like? Thinking just pretty general fantasy and I'll let skyships let us go to more fun worlds later. I'm gonna throw in a recommendation for "The Smoking Pillar of Lan Yu". It's set in Crawford's "Red Tide" campaign setting, which is heavily Asian-influenced. It's free, which is cool and good and important if you're cheap and are only looking for a basic outline, and if you like it, then the full Red Tide book is right there.
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Jan 2, 2018 12:28
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Covok posted:What's a good OSR setting? Trying to set up an IRL Darker Dungeons game. Can't think of what setting to use. What do y'all like? Thinking just pretty general fantasy and I'll let skyships let us go to more fun worlds later. gently caress the "R", use something actually old. Mystara has general fantasy of whatever flavor you like, somewhere, including skyships and fantasy nukes and a website full of everything you never wanted to know.
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Jan 2, 2018 13:56
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So, Stars Without Number 2e is out! In preparation for an upcoming game, I've been working on some material for it. Eventually it'll probably include some more Foci, an Adept class, and some more space magic stuff on the player facing side, but first I wanted to tackle player character cyborgs. The setting I’m working on now is designed to have cybernetic augmentation be fairly common, and full-conversion cyborgs present across most of sector space. I want these characters to be available for PCs from the getgo. While deluxe SWN does a fine job providing cybernetics as an option for well-heeled characters and a variety of mechanical bodies for transhumans and AI, both those present some problems if I were to port them directly. If a player wants to play Briareos, I don’t want them to have to wait to suffer a traumatic accident in four levels when they’ve saved up enough money, and if someone wants to play Cobra, I don’t want them just chomping at the bit to cut off their own arm once they have enough money to get a prosthetic limb and body arsenal array. In a lot of the sci-fi I’m drawing from, being a cyborg is a major character defining trait, rather than something one picks up when they have enough cash. The shell and armature rules generally assume a level of body-swapability I’m not looking for here, as well as drastically changing the assumptions for how a character’s stats would look compared to one who used the normal array (my preferred method of SWN character creation), so I’m hesitant to adapt those wholesale. So, instead I’m going to try and use an Origin Focus to enable the sort of characters I’m envisioning. I’ve decided to go with two levels enable characters like Adam Jensen or Glory on one level, and characters like Briareos, Raiden, or even Major Kusanagi on another. Cyborg Whether by choice or by fortune, you’ve enhanced your body and abilities with cybernetic enhancements. They may be the result of military service, experimental installations, or self-experimentation, but they’re yours now. Through your contacts, you can keep yourself on the cutting edge of cybernetic technology. Level 1: Chromed up. You can take half your level of System Strain in cybernetic systems without additional monetary cost, rounded up. When you gain more points of cybernetic available after leveling up, any downtime in a culture with sufficient technology and resources allows you to gain your new upgrades. During this time, you may also replace existing systems with their equivalent in System Strain if you so choose. You may choose to take any number of prosthetic limbs or purely aesthetic modifications at character creation for free, without counting against your points of “free” cybernetics. Level 2: Full Conversion. Your body has been almost entirely replaced by a cybernetic shell, leaving only a few select organic components keeping your brain alive. Your nearly-closed biological system requires food and water only once a week, and can survive with your internal air supply even in a total vacuum for up to eight hours. Your cybernetic shell can be healed with spare parts and the work of someone with Fix-0 skill. You can even without the requisite skill. Each unit of spare parts heals lost hit points equal to your character level and takes fifteen minutes to apply. If your body is reduced to 0 hit points, your brain can survive to be rescued for up to eight hours, though any deliberate attack targeting your organic parts after your body is disabled will mortally wound you. Full Conversion Cyborgs cannot normally be affected by biopsionic healing effects that restore hit points; any trauma that successfully affects their remaining organic systems is almost always enough to kill them, though biopsionic powers can stabilize them. Your hitpoints and maximum System Strain remain the same. If your appearance is obviously inhuman and cybernetic but don’t have any cybernetic systems increasing your defenses, your AC starts at 13 but does not stack with armor. If you have a covert appearance unidentifiable from human, your AC starts at 10. Any thoughts?
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Jan 3, 2018 05:47
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Covok posted:What's a good OSR setting? Trying to set up an IRL Darker Dungeons game. Can't think of what setting to use. What do y'all like? Thinking just pretty general fantasy and I'll let skyships let us go to more fun worlds later. Red Tide by Kevin Crawford is a pretty neat pseudo-China with a pastiche of other fantasy counterpart cultures who retreated to an island due to a world-devouring demon-mist which took over much of the rest of the setting. There's also the Northlands Saga, which is an adventure path in a Dark Ages Viking era world. But the book alone has enough material for its own standalone setting. It's pretty good and derives a lot of Scandinavian cultural tropes beyond just Hollywood tropes, like the concept of kennings in poetry, weregilds, the social structures of pseudo-democratic Things, etc. A fair warning is that it is published by Frog God Games, whose CEO was in the middle of that PaizoCon harassment drama. The Nightmares Underneath is a pseudo-Arabian setting in a kingdom which is undergoing an age of innovation and prosperity on the surface. But nightmarish realms from beyond reality are popping up as cancerous dungeons across the land, and the PCs are one of the few souls capable of visiting those realms for extended periods without suffering its taint (that does not make them immune to the myriad other dangers, however). It is higher magic than other settings, in that the scholarly class and many priests possess knowledge of spells, and there's a pseudo pagan/Islam metaphor in that there are many cults who worship forgotten entities who may or may not be connected with the nightmare realms. And although I have not read it much, Dreams of Ruin is less a setting in its own right and more a high-level planes-hopping sapient forest meant as an "end game" scenario.
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Jan 4, 2018 22:58
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Personally while I do think Red Tides is a good setting, I also think it's a terrible fit for D&D style systems, would be much more at home as a Runequest setting
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Jan 5, 2018 08:33
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There's something about Red Tide, unlike Godbound, which completely fails to grab me on every level. It's just so... dry and joyless. Also, Crawford is way more enamored with, how do I put it, the East Asian aesthetic than I am. I feel it even bleeds into Godbound, with the Court generators, for instance, kinda being Asian-y and the only two released adventures being pretty much full-on UNF CHINA UNF I LOVE CHINA with some lip service to "uh you can run it in the other areas I guess". At this point, I am a little surprised he did Ancalia instead of Dulimbai as the one released setting book.
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Jan 5, 2018 12:33
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Here’s another existential D&D question for you, presented with as little biasing as possible. Why is cleric a class option?
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Jan 5, 2018 20:16
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DalaranJ posted:Here’s another existential D&D question for you, presented with as little biasing as possible. For the sake of countering another player's Vampire character from what I heard.
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Jan 5, 2018 20:19
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Almost everything in D&D can be attributed to an early design quirk that got cemented into the game through inertia and appeal to tradition.
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Jan 5, 2018 21:33
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whydirt posted:Almost everything in D&D can be attributed to an early design quirk that got cemented into the game through inertia and appeal to tradition. See: Polearms
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Jan 5, 2018 21:45
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remusclaw posted:For the sake of countering another player's Vampire character from what I heard. A pity things like Vampire and Balor characters didn't really continue on to later editions, unlike the Cleric.
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Jan 5, 2018 22:24
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Going back to interesting OSR settings, the Midgard Campaign Setting has a Swords & Wizardry conversion planned for its Kickstarter. For those not in the know, Midgard is a bit of a dark fairy tale setting with quite a bit of high power and high magic. For example, the world is flat disc surrounded by the coils of a dragon-god and whose blood flows through the world akin to ley lines. It also has quite a bit of animal people and more fantastic races, like kobolds, minotaurs, centaurs, and ravenfolk among others so I'd be interested in seeing how they translate to the mostly humanocentric aesthetics of OSR D&D; the most powerful empire in the setting is populated by the scaly races who are ruled by dragons. It also had a pretty cool pseudo-Arabia/Africa continent called the Southlands: Midgard's main creator was one of al-Qadim's writers, so there's a bit of influence in that vein, too. Libertad! fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Jan 5, 2018 |
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Jan 5, 2018 23:07
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Dumb question - how does osr licensing work? They're all more or less Basic D&D, right?
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Jan 5, 2018 23:36
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What’s wrong with the cleric? It fits much better than the Druid which was stripped of all politics in later editions and just became nature priest. slap me and kiss me posted:Dumb question - how does osr licensing work? They're all more or less Basic D&D, right? OSR isn’t a license, that’s OGL which specifies you can use certain terms and passages provided you include the license. Most people modify the license to include what is “open” and what is intellectual property. For example last time I checked Swords and Wizardry let you copy the monster entries but you had to include their alternate attack and armor modifiers.
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Jan 5, 2018 23:49
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DalaranJ posted:Here’s another existential D&D question for you, presented with as little biasing as possible. While it’s origin is an opposite of a vampire, clerics work as a magic-user/fighter hybrid with more support-oriented abilities, filling a niche pretty well.
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Jan 6, 2018 01:20
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Ryuujin posted:A pity things like Vampire and Balor characters didn't really continue on to later editions, unlike the Cleric.
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Jan 6, 2018 11:57
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whydirt posted:Almost everything in D&D can be attributed to an early design quirk that got cemented into the game through inertia and appeal to tradition. Yeah, there's a lot of idiosyncratic stuff that stuck in D&D. Which I can't fault them for too much. al-azad posted:What’s wrong with the cleric? It fits much better than the Druid which was stripped of all politics in later editions and just became nature priest. In the first group of three or four classes Cleric stands out (to me at least) as the one that makes me say 'What is this doing here?' In the later group of six classes it's definitely Monk that makes little to no sense. As for Druid, if we take Cleric as Generic Medieval Character Type #2 then I think that Druid makes fine sense as Generic Medieval Character Type #5, especially in the Arthurian sense. Where it falls down is that Druid is basically just a Cleric variant that slapped being a bear right over scaring zombies, and there should be any need variants in a game with only six classes. What? Thief-Acrobat? rumble in the bunghole posted:While it’s origin is an opposite of a vampire, clerics work as a magic-user/fighter hybrid with more support-oriented abilities, filling a niche pretty well. I agree this is true. But I think that the thematic contribution of the cleric is even more important that that. This is a thing that I just thought up today, and once you realize that it immediately stops working after the first four classes you can see that it is a retroactive explanation of reasoning for classes, but I still think it bears out at the very beginning of D&D even though it wasn't intentionally designed this way. Each class tells us something important about what D&D is about as a game. The fighter tells us that D&D is about killing, or more generously, about war. The wizard tells us that D&D is a game about fantasy and magic. The thief tells us that D&D is a game about 'getting paid', or that it is picaresque in nature. The cleric then, tells us that D&D is about more than that. It's about character beliefs and ethics, and sometimes it can be about the struggle between gods, or between people and the gods.
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Jan 8, 2018 03:10
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This is a really videogamey interpretation of it, but I like the idea of the Druid as a switch-hitter depending on his current shapeshifted form. _____ On a somewhat separate point, there's a bunch of classes in D&D that are really only different "how?" interpretations of being a Fightymans. The Monk and the Barbarian are examples of this. The Paladin and the Ranger are kinda examples of this, but I'm also setting them apart because there's a mechanical merit to classes that split the difference between being a full Fightymans and being a full caster. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 03:23 on Jan 8, 2018 |
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Jan 8, 2018 03:21
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DalaranJ posted:Yeah, there's a lot of idiosyncratic stuff that stuck in D&D. Which I can't fault them for too much. Amusingly, the thief was the last core class added to the game, in the first official supplement, Greyhawk. Their entire niche was taking things that characters were assumed capable of doing already and making it their shtick to the exclusion of everyone else. remusclaw fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Jan 8, 2018 |
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Jan 8, 2018 03:23
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So I was reading old Prince Valiant comics awhile ago and noticed something that I haven't seen noted elsewhere. In a storyline from 1940 Prince Valiant runs into a giant who briefly menaces him before Val realizes he's a misunderstood human oddity and befriends him. The giant's first appearance is here: Which brings to mind how the D&D Stone Giant has been drawn since first AD&D monster manual:  which actually matches up fairly well with the first head shot of the giant in Prince Valiant:  Later editions seemed to keep the weird proportions of the head, but not much else:  Later editions mostly keep the distinctive head but go off in different direction with the body. None of the editions match the Valiant giant in that he was basically an oversized normal human and wore clothes and armor into combat. I should note, not much in the text of the AD&D stone giant bears any similarity to the giant in Prince Valiant. Two things might possibly be similar - one is that the giant in Prince Valiant was a lover of animals, while AD&D Stone Giants have an affinity for cave bears. That seems like a coincidence, though. The second is that the stone giant is grey and their skin blends in with the mountains around it, which seems similar to the first picture the Valiant giant appears in. He never again appears quite as grey later, though, and it's probably a coincidence once again. I just find it interesting that the artist was likely thinking of that first image when he put the D&D stone giant to paper. I'm sure someone on Dragonsfoot or another old school haven has found this already but I haven't seen it.
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Jan 8, 2018 05:42
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To me the cleric, prior to the focus on deities and their domains, represents superstition. Turning the undead, blessing and laying on hands, and wielding "bloodless" blunt weapons. They were vampire hunting warriors first, the move to magic tanks with strict adherence to their deity came later.
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Jan 8, 2018 07:57
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DalaranJ posted:In the first group of three or four classes Cleric stands out (to me at least) as the one that makes me say 'What is this doing here?' The monk highlights what might be my least favourite thing about old-school D&D: weapon & armor proficiency as part of the foundation of the combat rules locks it into a very narrow set of genre assumptions. How do y'all run, like, John Carter or swashbuckling pirates in OSR?
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Jan 8, 2018 17:24
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Halloween Jack posted:The monk highlights what might be my least favourite thing about old-school D&D: weapon & armor proficiency as part of the foundation of the combat rules locks it into a very narrow set of genre assumptions. How do y'all run, like, John Carter or swashbuckling pirates in OSR? Uh ... not enforce them? Weapon and armor proficiencies aren't a thing in OD&D / BECMI.
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Jan 8, 2018 17:28
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EverettLO posted:So I was reading old Prince Valiant comics awhile ago and noticed something that I haven't seen noted elsewhere. Oh, that remind me, I think the Prince Valiant Storytelling game remake is probably coming out pretty soon. al-azad posted:To me the cleric, prior to the focus on deities and their domains, represents superstition. Turning the undead, blessing and laying on hands, and wielding "bloodless" blunt weapons. They were vampire hunting warriors first, the move to magic tanks with strict adherence to their deity came later. Oh, yes, excellent thought. This meshes well with the underground otherworld of OD&D. I think this idea will help me out, thanks. gradenko_2000 posted:Uh ... not enforce them? Weapon and armor proficiencies aren't a thing in OD&D / BECMI. I think one part of this is that armor is the only way for close combat, which doesn’t match so well with swords and sorcery. Things are so dangerous that you need that AC as
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Jan 8, 2018 18:41
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The original 1989 Prince Valiant game from Chaosium used coin flips for its combat and skills system.
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Jan 8, 2018 20:19
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The original Trollbabes.
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Jan 8, 2018 20:27
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OtspIII posted:Alright, I've decided to try something new. For the last few years I've mostly just been running my megadungeon "Palace of the Sun King" for people, and I'm at the point where I want to use what I learned from it for something new. I have a pretty hard time getting a regular group together (pretty much nobody I know has a reliable schedule, so hitting a rhythm is real hard), so the vast majority of the running I do is for first-time groups--one of the schools I teach at has a Games 101 course where one of the recitations is to play D&D, so I get to do a ton of running people who have never played the game before through the basics. This means that I've had a ton of people running through the same basic starting areas of the dungeon, and doing a bunch of communicating with each other via written messages on doors/running into signs of what previous groups got into/etc. I want to make a dungeon that's built explicitly around that sort of asynchronous inter-group contact! Also if I can find a way to make restocking make more sense it'd make this style of play way easier. I've run two sessions of this setting (and another scheduled for later this week), and it's been going really well, so I figured I'd start an online campaign journal!
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Jan 8, 2018 22:04
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OtspIII posted:I've run two sessions of this setting (and another scheduled for later this week), and it's been going really well, so I figured I'd start an online campaign journal! This sounded really cool, I just had nothing to contribute so didn't respond before. Looking forward to reading how it's going!
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Jan 9, 2018 02:39
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