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Saguaro PI posted:I keep hearing that OSR adventures are amazing but every one I've read is garbage and boring? They all seem to fit in the category of A) boilerplate sword and sorcery poo poo with maybe a dash of Lovecraft if you want to call your game "weird"* or B) A classic children's tale but with violence and loving. Like, the OP asserts that the OSR's adventures are way better than WotC stuff but I haven't found an OSR adventure that's even close to engaging as something like Tomb of Annihilation or Red Hand of Doom or whatever. Even Paizo's overblown adventure paths have a bunch of ambition. The only adventure I've seen that even had mildly engaging elements was Better Than Any Man with the broad Wurzberg setting even if it was slathered in Raggi's wannabe artist provocateur bullshit. Saguaro PI posted:I don't want pages of backstory or read-aloud text, I want something a bit more than a hole in the ground with some orcs in it. Like, Juntu's Floating Ice Hell for Dungeon World is only slightly larger than Mines, Claws, Princess and yet manages to be far more interesting. Okay, I bought both of these, since I've read nor run neither. Mostly to try to contribute to this iteration of the thread, as I've got more modules that I want to run than I'll ever get through even if I found the perfect weekly game group. I'm don't think its ideal to review stuff you haven't run, but my initial impressions are: Juntu's Floating Ice Hell: This is pretty good and If it fits into one of my campaigns I'll run it in a system I enjoy. I've always been a sucker for the hoary old cliche of a mad wizard's magical experiment gone wrong causing something weird and spooky to happen and it's a drat neat twist to turn the idea of a ghost ship into a "sticky" ghost iceberg.. The environmental hazards are well described and adaptable, and the monsters are appropriate and interesting. This one gets the dash of Lovecraft sticker out of the two, just for the tentacle quotient. Survivors warped by continuous exposure to magic is a well worn theme, but done well here. The teenage damsel/hostage in magical slumber is a nice spin on the old fairy tale idea. Kind of creepy though. I do like the nods to the logistical problem of how to get some of the treasure out of the site, as well as the fact that a lot of it can be missed, irretrievably lost or forced to be handed over to the government. Good proportion of empty rooms and worthless items well described. 4.5/5 Lots of violence, gore and weird stuff, no loving. Excellent module that does a nice job setting up a situation and letting the GM throw the players at it. Kinda reminds me of a Fritz Lieberesque sword and sorcery story. Good stuff. Mines, Claws and Princesses: Ugh, landscape three column layout... okay, my dislike is a personal preference, but I'll set that aside. Cool in media res start. A damsel in distress is traditional theme, if a bit overdone. I adored Red Hand of Doom when I got to run it and I'm a sucker for adventures with timetables, so that's appreciated. Pig headed Orcs! It is a pretty cool hole in the ground with multiple levels, competing factions of monsters and a good amount of potential dynamism as the monsters have a definite agendas. As a site based adventure I like it, but it is reminiscent of KOTB and particularly of Forge of Fury, but more potential dynamism. Lots of nice weird touches A magic wish granting fish being held captive by troglodytes that is being forced to act as a judge for a trial on the utility of art. Lots of treasure, assuming the party methodically clears out every pixel of every single room like they're playing Baldur's Gate, but easily adjusted. 4.1/5 Violence and gore, lots of off screen fuckery (+.1 for male frontal nudity, something we need more of in fantasy art). I can see how the authorial tone might put some people off, but its not a deal breaker for me personally. Very much a dungeon crawl, but that's probably what the reader bought it for, and its a good one. So I like both of these, MC&P isn't as novel a setting as JFIH, but they're both site based adventures that are easy to drop into an ongoing campaign. I'll give the edge to JFIH, as it's a specific scenario I haven't encountered before and therefore was of more utility to me as a DM. MC&P has some stuff I'll steal and use elsewhere, but it's a well done rendition of a theme I have a lot of material on already. Anyway, I personally love the DCC adventures line, though I adjust them quite a bit. For reviews of them I think Raven Crowking/Daniel J Bishop's DCC Trove of Treasures blog is a good non-spoilery source for jumping off. Some that I'd recommend are: Blades Against Death DCC's "Quest for it" aesthetic applied to raise dead. Sailor on the Starless Sea Yes, I know, it's the moathouse, again, groan, and yes it was cooler when I saw it in a small club no one has ever heard of. This is my favorite DCC Funnel adventure and while it doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it showcases how to approach a low level dungeon crawl in the system its written for. I've run it multiple times and it was well received except by a grog who wouldn't shut up about how it was ripping of Village of Hommlett. Fate's Fell Hand A magical deck of cards that doesn't suck. A neat demi-plane. A timetable, multiple victory conditions. Allusions to Jack Vance and Clark Ashton Smith. One of my favorites. The Chained Coffin Do you want to run DCC with a nearly complete Manly Wade Wellman re-skin? Cool, I did too and it's awesome that this got made. Both a module and boxed set with campaign materials, this sets up an Appalachian horror themed mini-campaign. The kickstarter hardcopy came with a pretty awesome spinning wheel puzzle handout, I'm not sure if that's still available. I had a blast running this for my last group before I moved. Rock God Death Fugue Behind the Music the module, if the band is a hybrid of sacrifice and dethklok. A pretty neat looking one shot that I haven't had a chance to run. I'll try to think of some non-dcc adventures I've adapted and run to post later. I'm fond of campaign wrecking adventures and their continuing aftermath, so I'll probably post up a few of those. Nothing like the party's main quest being to find a gate to get off the loving planet before it collapses into a singularity.  I will honestly try to find stuff not written by assholes, but if so I'll note it with a * and move on.Re: OSR adventures vs WOTC/Paizo stuff. I like modules that focus on being made to be run, rather than being made to read, I read somewhere and usually think of it as the difference between a script for a play and a novelization. I like OSR and Indy game adventures when they focus on this design style. Not to derail into industry thread topics, but at this point I think Paizo is basically focused on publishing books to collected and read more than they're meant to be run. I'm not sure about wotc, as I haven't read any of their stuff since early 4th edition. Some OSR and other indy writers do this as well, and their stuff is equally not what I'm looking for in a module. I like pure fluff setting books like the old Terran Trade Authority series and things like that, but I'll mine them for inspiration and write my own stuff - with a module I'm looking for more specific things to run with/steal/adapt. Glorified Scrivener fucked around with this message at 19:12 on May 29, 2018 |
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May 29, 2018 19:09
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andrew smash posted:I grew up playing D&D with my friend's uncle's pile of 1st and 2nd ed AD&D books and just recently found this thread and discovered OSR stuff. What's the easiest of these to jump into? I played 3e in high school and college and am relatively comfortable with it so DCC looks attractive, especially given the amount of published material for it. I'm also relatively unfamiliar with the non-A old D&D stuff, but don't really care if one system is particularly good. I would put a high value on approachability for new players / ease of picking up for old guys getting back into it like me. I love DCC, but I've heard a lot of good things about Swords and Wizardry Complete being a good fit for people who liked 1st ed AD&D, but its being cleaner and easier to get started with than OSRIC. You could start with the continual light version of S&W and then switch over to the Complete version if you liked it. My personal favorite old version of D&D is BECMI; Dark Dungeons is an excellent retroclone of it and the Rules Compendium is now on Drivethrurpg if you prefer. BECMI and its derivatives can be just similar and different enough to be confusing if you have strong recollection of AD&D. I.e. It's a branch where race-as-class is a thing. There are some great adventures for it though, regardless of what system you end up using. Converting stats between the different editions of D&D pre-3rd is pretty easy to get the hang of once you've got some practice, to the point where you can do so on the fly if you're comfortable with that sort of thing. And if you played and liked 3rd edition, DCC is fairly easy to get into. It has a different feel than D&D, so it might not be what you're looking for to run old modules with or recapture a particular feeling. It's worth checking out though!
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May 29, 2018 20:43
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Saguaro PI posted:Thank you for doing what I thought was a fairly straightforward request (recommend me some cool adventures) instead of assuming that I just don't understand the lost art of moose head searching, or that I just wanted adventures with tons of backstory and read-aloud text because that's clearly what someone would enjoy about modern adventures. Well you gotta see that the thing about moose head searching is - yeah, sorry you run into that sometimes. Anyway if these are helpful, cool! Happy to give back what I can, as I've gleaned a lot of cool stuff from this forum over the years. Okay, so a few more adventure recommendations: More DCC: Peril on the Purple Planet Do you have any fondness for the Planetary Romance genre, particularly Sword & Planet stuff like John Carter of Mars? Did you like the Heavy Metal animated film? Does one of the folks in your group like the Gor novels unironically? If you can say yes to all of those questions loving  the gorean from your social circle ASAP and get ready to to take the rest of the party on a trip to the purple planet.Another module that is also a boxed set with campaign materials, and that has a few additional modules released for the setting. This one focuses on hurling your DCC characters to a weird world where the light of the sun is envenerating and strange monsters roam amidst the ruins of ancient civilization. Plopped into the midst of clan warfare between factions of a servitor race long since free of their progenitors control, the default assumption is the pc's will want to find a way home, though this is easily tweaked. (In one of my games the party went, returned and later escaped back to here after they caused the end of the world in another adventure). This one is set up as a hexcrawl, and I'd elevator pitch it as something like "D&D on an alien gamma world." LOTFP: A Single Small Cut: Author: Michael Curtis (author of the Stonehell megadungeon): This is a super short ambush adventure, basically an encounter, but I liked it for it's brevity and adaptability and have reused it a couple of times, once in DCC and once to great effect in a Savage Worlds Solomon Kane game. The PC's visit a church and while there are a couple clues that something is amiss, they'll like be ambushed by the henchmen of an evil sorcerer disguised as clergy. Said evil sorcerer and his crew killed the priests of the church this morning have been working on breaking into the sealed tomb of an ancient evil. In the fine tradition of basically all interesting adventure literature ever, the moment of the pc's arrival is coincides with the villains getting the tomb open and summoning a deadly monster. A disgusting monster with toothed sphincter tentacles, because yeah, it's LOTFP. Barebones and simple, but shines after about 10 minutes of work to link it into your campaign world. As with all LOTFP stuff adjust gorn and lethality seasoning levels to suit your own tastes. Death Frost Doom: Author: James Raggi * Yeah, I'm not going to spoiler tag this one, it's been discussed ad nauseum elsewhere. I'm also not exactly recommending it. So yeah, an ancient death cult built a necropolis into the side of a mountain. There's a cemetery built on top of it and a kinda stupid Evil Dead inspired Cabin, and oh yeah, a crazy guy that warns that you're "DOOMED!" like in an 80's horror flick. Spoookkkyyyy poo poo happens around the cabin and cemetery for reasons. I ignored most of that stuff when I dropped this into a campaign. Yeah, not a ringing endorsement, I know. Actually having just re-read it, it's a pretty bog standard dungeon full of some stupid in-jokes. So I'll just say this: The adventure makes it pretty easy and likely that the party will trigger a zombie apocalypse type scenario - causing thousands of undead to arise. They may also free an ancient vampire general who can command some of the undead. This is actually cool and led to a great campaign shakeup in my case. If your group can't handle events that fundamentally change the campaign world, don't run this or use the preceding idea in a scenario. And let me know, because I'll add them to my list of groups I don't ever want to join. Actually let me go recheck the adventures I have for this system, I don't want to just give a list of ideas worth stealing.... ....Huh. Okay, turns out a lot of my postive recollections of Raggi's adventures boils down to forgetting the dross and remembering what I stole, like the imprisoned wizard and the telescope from Tower of the Stargazer. I also consider Monolith Outside Space and Time something that's meant to be read, not run, so I won't review that despite my previous statement about liking campaign wreckers. I'll dig up my notes from the time I used The God that Crawls, but I have a sneaking suspicion they'll end up being "An unkillable acidic blob that's actually a cursed saint is imprisoned in a dungeon under a cathedral. The Priests won't kill a saint and are covering it up. Go."
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May 30, 2018 19:04
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Megazver posted:Now, I have to defend this a little. The original is typical early Raggi and it's somewhat dumb. The Revised version is a lot better, adds a lot of cool little ideas and fixes the Gotcha and some other structural problems, so that, if the players are smart and/or the DM is somewhat merciful, you can get in and out with just the macguffin and pantsfuls of terrorshit. Yeah, I probably came off a bit harsh. I didn't know there was a revised version either, good to know it fixes some of the issues. The zombie apocalypse is still my favorite part of it though.
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May 30, 2018 20:39
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Luna posted:I love ODD but don't get to play much as there are no local games and Roll20 is hit or miss, more miss actually. Are there any good modules/Adventures for 2 people? I know it's a difficult way to play but it's the only option right now. I haven't used it, but I think Scarlet Heroes is an oft recommended way to play a 1-1 game. It's designed to allow a character to solo a lot of stuff with some clever mechanics that increase a single characters power level, so modules written for a party should work with some tweaking. I also vaguely recall TSR doing some 1-1 adventures - they might be up on drivethrurpg by now.
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May 30, 2018 21:04
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Pham Nuwen posted:I got a book and the cover art is one of my favorites: Not representative of most days at the office though.   Humanoids! Actually, I've always wondered if those are supposed to be a specific monster? Goblins? Imps? A Xvart?
Glorified Scrivener fucked around with this message at 22:11 on May 30, 2018 |
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May 30, 2018 22:09
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Halloween Jack posted:I think I need to give DCC another shot. I became aware of it during a time when the toxic aspects of the OSR community were really getting on my nerves, and the nostalgia marketing just rubbed me the wrong way. I guess I'd pick The Sword as the band that epitomizes DCC; somewhere on the hard rock-stoner metal continuum with fantasy and sci-fi concept albums. LOTFP is definitely trying to be church burning Scandinavian death metal murder music though.
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Jun 8, 2018 19:26
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Halloween Jack posted:On reflection, I realized that I was really just asking the age-old question "How do I make magic rare and special in my high fantasy setting," just replacing "magic" with "high-tech." (Ironically, petty magic will be all over the place.) I'm totally on board with just treating a crysknife as a dagger+1 and a lightsaber as a bastard sword+3 and a grenade launcher as a wand of fireball. Late to this, but since I still need to get my commission check from Goodman Games this week, I'd say that DCC handles this well. I like the its take on Vancian casting and the Purple Planet boxed set and Mutant Crawl Classics both have different rules for advanced tech. I haven't dug into MCC's yet, but I like the relic rules and descriptions from Purple Planet. But yeah, just reskinning everything and managing encounters is the way to go. Xotl posted:I really think that blurb at the start of every DCC module really does the game a disservice, to the point where it implies pretty much the opposite of how it works. Agreed, but they've had that blurb in every single adventure since Idylls of the Rat King for 3rd Ed, so at this point it's Tradition!  My copy of Greenwood of the Fey Sovereign got here today, good impressions on skimming it, I'll post up a mini-review later.
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Jun 8, 2018 20:13
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Hollismason posted:Our group rolled up characters in Roll 20. That took a while . The DCC game is gonna be our go to game when someone is going to miss that weeks session possibily so we can still game that night. Seconding Sailors on the Starless Sea, but i've also run Portal Under the Stars from the core book a few times now when I needed a funnel that runs shorter. Sailors seems to take my groups two sessions minimum, but Portal has always been a one and done. It is simple, but polishes up nicely if you add ties to your campaign world.
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Jun 21, 2018 14:36
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Dagon posted:gonna do this. gonna did this: https://macroscopicapproach.blogspot.com/ I'm really enjoying these, thanks!
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Sep 20, 2018 20:49
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 10:12 |
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thotsky posted:Another annoying line in the Starless Sea specifically is "Have the PCs make a Luck check; on a DC 15 result, a character feels a strange compulsion to inspect the base of the pool, then pick up and carry off a skull" So I read the intent of the sentence as "Have the PCs [each] make a luck check, DC 15, if they fail they feel a strange compulsion to..." But yeah that could be worded better. I've always felt like Sailors is a bit overlong - Portal under the Stars feels like the right length for a funnel. When I've run Sailors the party has leveled up mid-adventure. I think I'd been reading this blogger's thoughts on the issue the first time I ran it.
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May 2, 2021 01:59
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