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Dear You posted:I've been playing a lot of Chronicles of Mystara a lot lately and it's got me wanting to play some old-school D&D. The problem is, I'd like the classes to have a bit more combat flavour (like 4E or something). Are there any games/hacks out there that incorporate this sort of thing? I'm going for a beat-em-up style of class. I'll probably end up doing silly stuff like giving Elves unlimited arrows but it'd be nice if I didn't have to do everything from the ground up. Dungeon Crawl Classics does this and I think ACKS does too.
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Jun 26, 2013 05:47
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Winson, I'm fedora-ruling you. You can't say that and not run it. Dooooo it.
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Jul 3, 2013 17:46
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Evil Sagan posted:OH gently caress YES! I am so apping for that! I really can't not play in it, since I fedora ruled him. 
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Jul 4, 2013 18:44
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Balor is the public-domain name taken from Irish mythology, so it's still used; the issue was a demon called a Balrog in the D&D books back then.
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May 26, 2014 19:04
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That makes me a lot more interested in running ACKS; it seemed really dry and fiddly to me in contrast to what really speaks to me as a retroclone (DCC.)
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Jul 30, 2014 23:05
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A Strange Aeon posted:I don't remember--are the SWN tags for random planets sci-fi specific, or are they general enough you could just tailor them slightly to come up with hooks for random settlements, lairs, and dungeons, if you were doing a fantasy version? They're generic enough. He also already did the work if you want a fantasy version - check out Scarlet Heroes, which is just amazing period.
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Aug 2, 2014 18:27
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So I'm looking at running my first sandbox-style game with a hex map and locations/dungeons/features scattered around for the PCs to get way over their heads in. Here's my problem: where do you get hex paper to draw out maps on? I'm familiar with graph paper, but not hex. Does Amazon sell it? Is it used for anything besides elfgaming / where else could you find some?
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Sep 1, 2014 14:10
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PeterWeller posted:What kind of FR nerd are you where you don't have half a dozen of those clear plastic overlays lying around? Haha yeah I totally thought about those a little while after posting. It's not perfect since I want to add terrain features to fit the hexes, not just use a prepublished map, but it will work just fine.
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Sep 2, 2014 11:52
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I'm curious, aldantefax - how did you decide what was the right amount of rumours to present? One for everything immediately relevant in the setting, or? I'm trying to get a grip on this sort of play since the project I'm working on is a hexcrawl in of all things Pathfinder. So while I've got the rules (including Pathfinder's own hexcrawl rules) and a good portion of the setting down, I'm looking for general tips and resources on running a hexcrawl. Any recommendations? I was going to check out ACKS and maybe the 1e DMG but beyond that I'm not sure.
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Sep 14, 2014 06:56
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No retroclone is going to match Pathfinder's options. They spit them out like crazy, in multiple books a month even. ACKS for example has plenty of options with the Class Compendium, but they don't match Pathfinder remotely. I'd almost suggest 2e for the other bullet points (and it has a lot of options) but I'm not sure if there's an xp for gp framework. There's plenty of retroclones where you don't suck at level 1 - Darker Dungeons, S&W, whatever - but at least the ones I'm familiar with don't fit what you're looking for.
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Sep 20, 2014 14:06
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:How your DM treats paladins is a good litmus test for whether you should ever play in his games ever. Just emptyquoting this.
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Nov 23, 2014 02:43
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drrockso20 posted:Look up Adventurer Conquerer King, it should fit your needs perfectly(and is one of the best and most complete OSR games in my opinion) Don't buy ACKS, unless you want to support the misogynist transphobe shitlords behind a good portion of Gamergate.
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Dec 18, 2014 10:44
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drrockso20 posted:Eh doesn't really seem enough to boycott a game over in my opinion, even if this whole Gamersgate thing is kind of an awful thing(and the links between Escapist and Autarch are kinda skeezy on a business level), especially since nothing in ACKS itself reflects these issues Macris himself assembled the "game developers talk about Gamergate" interviews at the Escapist, which was not only misogynist and sexist in its setup, but was editorially positioned as a hit-piece on the targets of Gamergate and other women. It gave a pulpit to Desborough, "Xbro," RogueStar (or whatever his name is) and a number of other misogynist devs with questions specifically positioned to come off positively towards Gamergate. Greg Tito (also part of ACKS) spoke about this, even though he was part of it himself. If you think trying to ruin women's lives, kill them, and push anyone marginalized out of gaming isn't a reason to boycott something, that's your privilege showing and you should be ashamed of yourself.
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Dec 18, 2014 12:44
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:AD&D has a Forgotten Realms book called Faiths & Avatars that is essentially just "do literally anything with a cleric." This isn't true. Faiths and Avatars (and was pointed out, its companion volumes of Demihuman Deities and Powers and Pantheons) aren't "do anything with a cleric." Quite to the contrary, the writers spend a lot of time digging into what each priesthood can and can't do, bringing in and connecting a lot of disparate Realmslore to flesh out each deity and their faith's concerns, duties, and powers. What comes off as "do literally anything with a cleric" is the Realms' basis in faith brought to the forefront as it should be. Azuth's magistrati can cast wizard spells because Azuth is the god of wizardry - all wizardry is in his portfolio (in contrast to other ways of accessing the Weave through Mystra) and it only makes sense that his faithful can bring his power into bear. If you take a really myopic view and only consider Azuth out of context this seems really unbalancing. But Azuth submissive to Mystra, fighting with other deities, et cetera, is far more interesting. It's worth remembering that core Realms design stretching back to the Campaign Set in 1987 has always focused on the sandbox and intrigue-filled model of Realmsplay Ed proposed; in that sort of model, trade and politics have a lot more importance than in many other D&D games. A magistrati may be unusual in an adventuring party, but are they really more helpful than a good priest of Waukeen in sorting out your little town? Stuff like that.
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Dec 28, 2014 21:37
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drrockso20 posted:That's a pretty drat bold claim that only a handful of OSR products are any good, got anything to back that claim up? The sadly high amount of racism/sexism/transphobia in the community? You throw a rock, you hit 3 oppressors.
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Jan 18, 2015 11:13
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drrockso20 posted:I'll admit I can't think of many examples of that, besides The Escapist and Autarch being connected, and LOTFP and some of the content made for it being pretty skeevy in nature Here's just two off the top of my head: The "good" publisher, Dungeon Crawl Classics, has a set of dice that were "magically charged" by rubbing them on a black woman's hair. The worst of the worst was the creators of Castles and Crusades talking about how projects are like "modern dungeons" and people should be given licenses to go monster and treasure hunting inside.
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Jan 18, 2015 11:54
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obeyasia posted:I think by "projects" he means government subsidized housing and or the "ghetto". Not so thinly veiled classist or racism. She, but yes. @ascendance: lol. mad one of your icons turned out to be poo poo?
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Jan 19, 2015 17:05
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CountingWizard posted:36 pages in and this thread is absolute garbage. All I've read for the past few months is how to make playing D&D less like playing D&D, how to add tedious overly complicated rules to relatively simple systems, and how to shoehorn in modern rpg systems into the retro systems. I'm sorry are you mad that we're not stuck in the 1970s? Are you mad that black people want equal rights and women don't listen to their husbands, too? How much of your "entirely different line of thinking" is from A Voice For Men and Stormfront? You should go back to therpgsite. Don't worry it's a safe space for whiny old shitlords like you. They'll even nod at you and pretend they care about your opinions to your face, unlike us. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jan 29, 2015 20:17
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Libertad! posted:You don't think that's a little far? Nope. Not really interested in coddling whiny cis men.
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Jan 30, 2015 02:23
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FRINGE posted:There was a FR supplement that had a bunch of info on merfolk/aquatic elves/other sea things. This is correct, but that supplement is meant for 2e, not 1e. It does contain rules for playing merfolk (page 80) but they specifically reference the Monstrous Manual. Probably not helpful in this case.
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Feb 16, 2015 00:35
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gradenko_2000 posted:Were the "character kits" from the Baldur's Gate / Infinity Engine games released in books, or were they made specifically for the CRPGs? Kits were originally produced for the printed game first, although I don't know exactly where each one comes from. I pulled the Complete Bard's Handbook off my shelf at random, and the Blade, Jester, and Skald are all in there. If you want to find the rest of the kits used in Baldur's Gate, they're likely in these places: 1) Each class had a corresponding 2e Complete Class Handbook. Most of the kits are most likely from those, except 2) The cleric kits are probably from Warriors and Priests of the Realms. If not that, then they'd be in Faiths and Avatars or Powers and Pantheons as appropriate. 3) The wild mage kit comes from Tome of Magic (Tome of Magic's table may not be what BG2 used; also check Forgotten Realms Adventures and the revised Forgotten Realms Campaign Set) 4) The kits added in the Enhanced Editions of Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II are NOT from 2e. They're all from 3e, rewritten for the 2e kit system. (For example, dragon disciples and shadowdancers are directly taken from the 3e DMG's prestige class section.) Arivia fucked around with this message at 08:05 on May 10, 2015 |
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May 10, 2015 08:01
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As far as I remember Lightning Lord Return to White Plume Mountain was actually published in Dungeon, that's why it's not included.
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Jun 16, 2015 03:38
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As a follow up to talking about Jennell Jaquays: if you're looking for FR stuff to convert for 1e play, you want the actual 1e supplements and materials. The Forgotten Realms Campaign Set (called the Old Gray Box) and the FR# series of accessories are older, sketch overviews with lots of room for your own details and additions. For example, DON'T get the North. It's actually a really bad box set, and the good parts of it (Ed Greenwood and Steven Schend's work) are probably of limited use to someone who isn't engaging in the Realms for Realms' sake. Instead, get a copy of FR5, the Savage Frontier. It covers most of the same areas, is better written and tighter, and is much more approachable for people not familiar with the Realms. Jaquays' work on it was specifically called out as being in the OSR spirit by the Grognardia guy way back when, if that means anything to you. edit: and as a general note, trans people are trans men and trans women as applicable, not transmen and transwomen. It's an adjective, not a noun. Arivia fucked around with this message at 08:27 on Jul 15, 2015 |
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Jul 15, 2015 08:25
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The Moonshaes weren't retconned into the published Realms, actually. They were incorporated as part of the original publishing and editing work for the Old Gray Box, like Kara-Tur and so on. Doug Niles' first Moonshae trilogy novel was actually the first Realms product released. As an addendum, Ed Greenwood has gone on record as saying out of the mentioned two adventures he wrote, he'd choose N5 Under Illefarn as an introductory adventure over Haunted Halls of Eveningstar. Make of that what you will, but they're both very good. Additionally, there's two box sets (Ruins of & Ruins of II), three adventures (Maddgoth's Castle, Stardock, and one I can't remember), a 2e supplement (Skullport) a 3e adventure (Expedition to), and a 4e adventure (which I forget the name of) for Undermountain. If you're just looking to do your own thing with Undermountain, get Ruins of and either Expedition to or 3e's City of Splendors: Waterdeep for a good overview. If you're actually wanting to run Undermountain, you need all of the above except the 4e adventure, and there's some old Dragon issues by Steven Schend about Skullport that have important details. ("Sing a Song By the Deep-Water Bay" being one.) Undermountain is the most detailed mega dungeon in D&D and yet still not all of it has been published. It's incredibly massive.
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Jul 15, 2015 11:21
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Evil Mastermind posted:N4 Treasure Hunt is one of my favorite modules, because it's about starting as a zero-level shlub who washes up on the island after a shipwreck and getting stuck in the middle of a bunch of pirates trying to find an ancient treasure, and earning your first "real" level along the way. I kind of want to grab this and run it as the lead in to Pathfinder's Skulls and Shackles adventure path. @LL: My bad about N5. Must have confused it with something else then.
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Jul 16, 2015 08:08
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Well, with an undefined next part, here's a Treasure Hunt pbp for whoever wants to play some 0-level OSRIC.
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Jul 17, 2015 02:25
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gradenko_2000 posted:Did 2e and 3.5e ever have random dungeon generation tables? I've found the ones for every edition except those ones. 3.5's were idk, second party? They're in the Dragon Compendium by Paizo, so sort of first party.
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Jul 19, 2015 10:08
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The Google Earth desktop app does a bunch of other projections and stuff that are probably what you're looking for.
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Jul 29, 2015 20:53
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JonBolds posted:This also fits your 'lots of base classes' situation because if someone says they want to be a lizardman sorcerer, you can just whip that poo poo up using their class creation rules in the splatbook. Are the expanded hexcrawl rules in the core rulebook or the supplement?
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Aug 18, 2015 19:22
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gradenko_2000 posted:The only other thing I'd mention is that players have armor and monsters don't, so even if you were rolling similarly against each other, any rounds that you win as the player will likely start dropping the enemy MR/adds ASAP, whereas any rounds you lose only matter if the damage dealt is strong enough to get past your armor's absorption/soak. This is really surprising since I remember that a big thing about Tunnels and Trolls was that it could be played solo. Oh, old RPG design...
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Jan 14, 2016 01:41
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OtspIII posted:I like to divide my stuff up 1/3 monsters, 1/3 empty, 1/3 misc. Misc includes things like traps, unguarded treasure, or pretty much anything interactive/designed to be the focus of a scene. I mostly run a megadungon, so I really like just filling it with weird useless tools and hoping the players think of a way to use them--I don't know what they're going to do with a machine that swaps all the blood between two people, but it's almost 100% certain that they'll find some use for it that saves them from a TPK and lets them do something brilliant. Yeah, you definitely need empty rooms to balance things out - empty rooms just need dressing most of the time to be vaguely interesting still. Like people noted there's tables for dungeon dressing in the 1e DMG, and then there's also the good resources of Frog God Games' Tome of Adventure Design and the Ultimate Toolbox by I forget who. In empty rooms I generally roll a d6 - 1 to 2 is actually empty, 3 to 4 is "common" dungeon dressing, 5 to 6 is unusual dungeon dressing. Couple more tips for using the 1e DMG random dungeon generator because it's one of my favourite things in D&D: 1) Like a lot of stuff in the 1e DMG, there's poo poo organization in this system too. Specifically, it's buried somewhere in the book that only rooms have doors; chambers just have passages leading out of them. This makes them very different spaces in addition to their size, and makes a lot of the generation results make more sense (generate a chamber in a corridor, the corridor obviously just goes through and then you check 30' after because it's still the same corridor.) 2) As Gary says, follow the dice but make sure everything fits. Don't get stuck on an idea that this room is going to be this or that; just mark down that it's a monster and some treasure and come back to it later. The reason is that you may end up generating other rooms or areas around this first one that make it come across quite differently when you have more of your map filled out. Some of the results are very different things in context: a door leading to a 10' by 10' room with a couple exits is one thing, but what about when each of those exits is more 10' by 10' rooms with more exits? Suddenly a small room is a warren, or a maze. Stuff like that. 3) To that end, the DMG generator is very good at filling space but doesn't put things together well. You end up with lots of long, ropey corridors that go around but don't connect things, which works pretty well in giving a mad dungeon feel. You won't end up with something that feels very liveable or encourages good play because it's all cut off from each other, though. What I do is do "punch-throughs" when appropriate. if two corridors roughly meet their ends, connect them feasibly. If two spaces (corridors, rooms, whatever) have a wall between them, roll a d20. On 1-5 there's a secret or one-way door there. You add a bunch more doors but it works a lot better I think. 4) One thing you might not be familiar with is that D&D prior to 3e/2000 used 10' squares, while D&D after that point uses 5' squares. 10' works really well for the random generation system with stuff like the warrens above, but I'd redraw my maps at 5' to use them for actual play in more modern systems. Essentially, 10' is good for an overview, but 5' is good for a really detailed, hands-on map. Up to you which fits your game. 5) Feel free to swap out contents tables to fit your game. Like for the S&W game on Saturdays, I rolled on table V.F. to determine the room contents, but then rolled according to S&W to determine monsters and treasure. Mix and match to see what fits you best.
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Jan 29, 2016 17:39
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DalaranJ posted:No one has answered this yet, so I guess we don't have any chart experts. Here's a cool example of this. Forgotten Realms random encounter tables in 3e specify dragons, either directly on the table or in a subtable. So a given region can have a young green dragon, a very old red dragon, or a juvenile song dragon. Those listings are actually telling you which dragons are active in that area. edit: And adjacent regions often have the some of the same dragons active in them, so forth and so on.
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Mar 22, 2016 15:51
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Does anyone know of any good room-by-room dungeon generators that you roll by hand, like Gygax's in the Strategic Review #1/DMG 1e? Gygax's is great, but I'm curious to see what results you get with a different system.
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Mar 31, 2016 19:14
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Found another one in the 2e Dungeon Builder's Handbook, so that would be 4. Would people be interested if I worked up an example of each of these and compared them somewhere?
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Mar 31, 2016 19:44
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Think I'll do it as a weekly blog feature, since it's going to take awhile to tear through these (each map takes about 4 hours). Here's my list so far in rough order: 1e DMG (this goes first, because it's the gold standard) The Strategic Review #1 (handful of important differences from the 1e DMG system) Dungeon Geomorphs for D&D (the collected book) Dungeon Builder's Guidebook for 2e Engineering Dungeons for Castles & Crusades 5e DMG If anyone else has any other random dungeon generators they know of, please tell me. Geomorphs are fine.
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Mar 31, 2016 21:35
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DalaranJ posted:I have another dumb OD&D question. Do spells with a given range (say 6") become super long range on a strategic map or are the ranges intended to always by applied at the dungeon map level? I don't know about OD&D, but Gygax calls that out as intended design in the 1e DMG.
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Apr 2, 2016 20:59
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Working on the 1e DMG results. Tables are wonderful things: 17. This one takes some explanation. It was first a single passage coming out of the one way door, then it split into a Y. The left fork of the Y then generated a side passage heading back into the space between the Y, and the width of that side passage turned out to be a FORTY FOOT WIDE RIVER. So I decided the river filled up the space between both parts of the Y, and lead out the left fork of the Y until the river was forty feet wide. So despite how large a space this is, it's actually three passages stacked next to each other, and not a room.
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Apr 3, 2016 07:18
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gradenko_2000 posted:Modular Polearm Combination Creator is my favorite dumb hypothetical fantasy wargaming supplement Not hypothetical. There are tables for that in a Dyson's Dodecahedron issue, and it is glorious.
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May 6, 2016 12:47
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Terrible Opinions posted:Quick question if any of you guys would know. Are there any big premade lists of effects for the Machine of Lum the Mad? 2e's Book of Artifacts has one I think.
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May 16, 2016 11:05
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gradenko_2000 posted:1. Do you have a preferred method of random dungeon generation via table? The AD&D DMG of course has one, but it feels far too fine-grained to be able to quickly do. 1. Gygax's tables are meant for solo play or as an aid for campaign preparation. If you're going to use one on the fly, I'd use a geomorphs system instead, like the Dungeon Geomorphs for OD&D. 2. DCC 87.5 Grimtooth's Museum of Death is definitely a spiritual sequel, if a bit tongue in cheek.
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Aug 4, 2016 20:12
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