OSR: Dungeon Meat, Part 2

This post has been made obsolete. Please see the Monster Menu-All.

OSR: the GLOG Review

Fantasy Hearbreakers Galore

I decided to run my OSR game using Arnold K's fantasy heartbreaker, There are a few things that recommend it initially.

• It's free
• It's short
• The author clearly put a great deal of thought into it
• It's compatible* with other stuff on Goblin Punch
• *provided you are willing to spend hours compiling and editing it
• It feels like something a normal human wrote, rather than a divinely inspired game designer from planet Esoteric Brilliance.

Plus, like most OSR systems, you can bolt other things onto it as needed.

Scary Demon Armor, Alex Brock

The Rules

Things I Appreciate:

• The classic 6 stats, and the way at least one Major Thing is tied to each stat.
• The template system that emphasizes the first 4 levels, and then flattens afterwards.
• The skill system. It's a fairly weird one (to me). Each skill has a rank (1 to 6). You roll 1d12-1d12 and take absolute value. If it's less than or equal to your skill rank, your succeed. You start off with about a 25% chance and end up with an 80% chance at rank 6. Skills are basically "careers" or "hobbies". They're wildly unbalanced, but that's fine. I like it because it forces the players to hunt around for the damn d12s, which makes them less likely to roll skills like "History" for everything they see.
• Checks are "Roll under your Stat" 
• The inventory system is extremely easy and satisfying to explain to new players.

Oddities:

• The core mechanic is strange. It's [Your Stat] - ( 10 - [Your Opponent's Stat]. Want to wrestle an Owlbear? Well, the statblocks don't say what an Owlbear's Strength is, but it seems like 16 is reasonable. Your Strength is 8. You need to roll a... let me see. 8 - (10-16) = 2 or under. After one session it becomes completely natural, but it's still slightly inelegant. It's a compromise, to allow the Stat checks and Defense values to work.
• Natural 1s are critical hits. Natural 20s are critical failures. This is the only problem with using this system for novices. TV says it's the opposite. The issue vanishes after a few satisfying crits.
• A bunch of rules are missing. Reaction rolls. Travel rules. Consistent terminology. Useful, minor definitions and explanations that would make the whole thing easier to use.

Magic:

• Fuck yes. Wizard Level (up to 4) = spell slots = magic dice. Use magic dice to cast spells. More dice = more power and more chance of mishaps and disasters.
• It takes 30 seconds to convert a spell from ANY system to the GLOG system, and it usually makes the spell more interesting and versatile.
•  Wizards are weird. Paladins are weirder. Elves are special. 
• Wizards can do a lot of things, but they have a fuse on their lives. They introduce excellent weirdness. 
• The Wizard Schools are neat. It's trivial to make your own.

Other Notes:

 
HP regenerates quickly, but the numbers are low. You heal at lunchtime as well as overnight. The system explicitly encourages lunches and comfortable campsites.

Eyes in the Dark, Ariel Perez

It's fun. It's fun because it's quick to teach. It's fun because it has a bare minimum of rules. You can chuck out whole sections if they aren't to your taste. I dropped the Conviction section, and while I enjoy the Durability section, I forgot to implement it.

The roll-under system also makes sense. You have a 20 sided dice. You have a Stat that goes from 3 to 18 at character creation. These two things should be directly related. It feels intuitive to new players, although mine kept adding their Stat "bonuses" to all sorts of rolls.

The Skill system is weird, but it works, and considering it's a very minor part of the game I'm inclined to leave it. It has few dependencies, so if you don't like it, you can swap it out for any other system.

Defense (the AC replacement) is good, but it's never explicitly stated what your base Defense is. I've assumed 10. I also disagree with armour and Dexterity both adding to Defense at the same time. Low Dexterity is already penalized by Stealth, Move, and various Dex-based checks like leaping or avoiding some traps. Armour is amazing all on its own. Also, there's nothing to prevent wizards and spellcasters from wearing the heaviest armour they can find, which is fine by me. When your spells are spirit-ferrets, your spellbook is ferret jail, and your mind is a canon, it seems strange to make bathrobes mandatory. Sorcerer Kings are a thing. They should look suitably impressive.

Untitled, Rebecca Yanovskaya

The formatting, spelling, and "print and play" ability of this system... aren't excellent, but that's part of the fun. It's written in a very stream-of-consciousness style, as if the author just wanted it done and on the page so he could go off and do more interesting things. If you want to use it, you're going to need to put in a bit of legwork.

The version I wrote is called Spiked Goblin Punch, and it steals ideas from all over the place. I might eventually put it up as a PDF.

OSR: Firewood and Forestry

Why is your D&D town surrounded by trees?

If the town is small enough, local consumption of wood is less than the forest's replacement rate. If the town is larger, you need to have an excuse. Back of the envelope calculations: people who burn wood for heat use about 2.5 kg per person per day. For the sake of this discussion, let's say the average per-capita consumption is 1 cubic meter per year. All the papers I've found seem to think that's an acceptable value.

This seems way too small, but hear me out.

With an average household size of six, the boxes form an impressive stack. That's just firewood. Add fencing, roofing, flooring, crafts, and extra firewood for charcoal and the forge, and the stack of boxes gets bigger.

So if you have a large town, and it's an old town, there had better be a good reason to have a dark and ancient undisturbed forest less than an hour's walk away. People love cutting down trees and turning them into fire and timber.

1. The King's Forest. There's a fence or a stone marker or a natural boundary, such as a river. Everything on the near side is picked down to the turf. Everything on the far side is the King's Forest. It doesn't mean it's all trees, but it does mean you'll hang if you take wood from it, hunt game in it, or try to live in it. Local farmers might also be banned from using fences or enclosing their land. What a lovely source of tension.

2. Druids. They hate you. They hate your cities, your language, your tools, your dogs, and your culture. They want to slice you open. The forest is their forest. You might be able to steal some deadfall, or even a tree or two, but everyone knows that if you go in and lose sight of the plains or the road, you're dead. They'll find your head on a borderpost.

3. Resettlement. The town is old, but it's much smaller than it used to be, and the forest has grown back. War and plague killed seven in ten families. Or maybe it's a new colony, freshly hacked into the dark forest.

4. Monsters. People don't like living next to big scary things that will kill them. Crocodiles can be monitored. Tigers can be hunted or driven to the wild places of the earth. Hippos can be avoided. A lot of large dangerous animals didn't make it to the iron age. We probably hunted them to death and felt damn good about it. If there's a monster in the nearby woods, there's got to be a very good reason the locals haven't burned it to the ground, called in the army, or fled. Maybe it's a helpful patron. Maybe it's dangerous, but only in a very specific area.

5. Religion. The forest is holy. Even the poor and desperate would rather freeze than break the rules and collect deadfall.

6. Lively. The forest grows back very, very quickly. You need to salt the earth to clear a space for a house. You need to cut down the trees every summer, or every season, or you'll lose your fields and your roads. Maybe it's natural. Maybe it's magic. Maybe someone from the village made a badly worded deal with an elf a few centuries ago.


EDIT: This article is well worth reading if you think there are forests untouched by human action. We've mucked with quite a lot of the world. Paradigm shifts may ensue. Hold onto your hat.

OSR: the Elderstone Marches

The game I'm running isn't a hexcrawl, or at least, it's not a hexcrawl yet. It's still nice to have a map.

Nothing is finalized. I'll change names and locations as needed.

1. Some unnamed port village, accessible only by sea. Good location for: "track down the wizard", "there's a sea monster", "oh look, these people are all weird", "we accidentally started a war and need to hide out for a while" plots.

2. A large town, in decline. Maybe it's built in the ruins of an older settlement? Not sure. A dark mirror of the energy of Elderstone, but still prosperous.

3. The Big Marsh. It's big. It's a marsh. There are monsters in it. The PCs need to travel through it. There are stone circles and druids to the east.

4. The Watchtower. Built on a rare dry point to mark where the King's Road forks. It's also an inn.

5. The Village of Bogrest. Less than a hundred people. An Inn: the Black Stone. Eel farms.

6. Something. Another watchtower? An old aqueduct? What's 6 miles out of town, on a hill, and made of stone?

7. The large town of Elderstone. Possibly a city. It's a major port. Most of the trading takes place by sea, not overland. Towers, like Barcelona, but curved like seashells to shelter from the wind. Intermittent wizards.

8. The Tomb of the Serpent Kings. In the middle of the Loathsome Hills. While it might look like a short ride to (2), you'd probably be safer coming back the way you came. A fire a few years back cleared off the old Snakemen road to the fort. Or maybe it was a rebel army, who rebuilt the fort and cut a secret path along the old road? Not sure yet. The fort needs more backstory, and quickly, as the PCs are going to rebuild it and turn it into a Tomb-Robber Hotel, if they get the chance.

The entire area is recently resettled. Maybe there was a plague, or a war, and the population is slowly recovering? The hills are forested once you get away from the major towns. Druids live in them, and wolves, and worse things as well.

Despite the arid palate, the Marches aren't a desert at all. It was just nicer to look at than greens and greys. In terms of climate and vegetation, it's closer to north-central Canada, or the Highlands before they were cleared of trees.

OSR: Dungeon Meat, Part 1

This post has been made obsolete. Please see the Monster Menu-All.

OSR: Wizard Schools Stolen from Goblin Punch, Part 2

This post has been made obsolete. Please see this post.

OSR: Wizard Schools Stolen from Goblin Punch, Part 1

This post has been made obsolete. Please see this post.

OSR: Table of Replacement PCs

Why is your replacement PC in the Dungeon?

Roll	Reason
1	Fell down a crevasse while gathering mushrooms
2	Captured by trolls. Currently alive and marinating.
3	Got black-out drunk and wandered down here.
4	Testing a scroll of teleport.
5	Put on a cursed ring found in an antique shop.
6	Searching for a rare herb, following a scry spell.
7	Searching for true love, following a scry spell.
8	Found a treasure map. Was woefully underprepared.
9	Found a treasure map. Was well prepared. Provisions stolen by ex-friends.
10	Attempted suicide by dungeon, changed mind at last minute.
11	Preaching to an unlikely audience (goblins, trolls, dryads). It’s not going well.
12	Preaching to an unlikely audience. It’s going too well. Needs to escape.
13	Pursuing lost cat for reward money.
14	Pursuing bandit tribe for reward money.
15	Pursuing bandit tribe to join them.
16	Left in dungeon as part of initiation ritual.
17	Hoping to rescue a prince or princess.
18	Hoping to meet and work for a powerful dragon.
19	Pissed of an elemental spirit.
20	Pissed off a minor god.
21	Pissed off a major, but empathetic, god.
22	Enthralled bloodslave of a vampire who just died by falling off a cliff.
23	Trying to find a new place to farm illegal mushrooms.
24	Farmhouse uprooted by tornado.
25	Farmhouse downrooted by earth-nado.
26	Valkyries grabbed wrong guy, dropped them off in dungeon in disgust.
27	Kidnapped and held for ransom by gnomes.
28	Last survivor of a now-dead party.
29	Last survivor of a presumed-dead party.
30	Last survivor of a presumed-dead party. They are still alive and they are assholes.
31	Turned into water by an evil wizard. Trickled down here and reformed.
32	Deserter from the front, waiting out the war.
33	Elected as king by mayfly people. Entire kingdom  just died of old age.
34	Cursed to wander the earth until they solve (incredibly trivial) riddle.
35	Cursed to wander the earth until they solve obtuse mathematical problem.
36	Cursed to wander the earth until they get laid.
37	Prospector looking for rare ores.
38	Cultist willing to give up cult and evil ways for a hot meal.
39	Severe agoraphobia.
40	Goblin reincarnated as a human by confused goblin druids.
41	Devoured by a purple worm by wearing a very useful, now destroyed amulet.
42	Specialist hired by underground kingdom to fix a forge, now lost on way home.
43	Specialist hired by underground kingdom to fix king’s madness, now exiled.
44	Specialist  hired by goblins, as a cruel joke.
45	Went swimming, caught in underground river, deposited in dungeon.
46	Lost a bet with a wizard.
47	Archeologist. The tomb-robbing kind.
48	Archeologist. The boring pottery kind.
49	Miner trapped here after an earthquake.
50	Trying to visit home of ancestors. Did not memorize the directions.