Issue 3 of Wanderer Bill’shttps://lkh.sdf-eu.org/wandererbill/grenzland/ just landed in my mailbox yesterday, with, among other things, an NPC class written by me (“The Anointed of Abyssal Slaughter”). It mostly was me combining the given topic of the issue with an interest in NPC classes a while ago.
The ‘zine also contains a one-page dungeon by Alex Schroeder (“The Crown of Neptune”), a game report (“Schiffbruch”), rules for sailing ships (“Salt’n’Tar”), and another scenario (“Eingekerkert”), the latter three all by Wanderer Bill. The ‘zine is a mix of German and English, and you can get it for the phenomenal price of free at the website.
(he does have a few more physical copies for 7 Euros left over though)
The original game Fantasy Wargaming: The Highest Level of All (or just Fantasy Wargaming in some editions) was a 1981 book by Bruce Galloway, a clear variation on Dungeons and Dragons, based on Galloway’s home rules. Unlike it’s competition it was not afraid of using actual historical concepts like astrology and occultism in it’s descriptions, although it also was written so densely it was hard to make sense of it in any shape or form by someone not already familiar with roleplaying games. And, well, it was called Fantasy Wargaming.
Which made this a problem, as the game was published both in the UK and the US by mainstream publishers obviously trying to break into the nascent TTRPG market. The most available version was most likely the one published by the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club, which made the game available to many people who did not have any experience with roleplaying games before.
Unfortunately one has to say, as the game’s size (300pgs) and conceptual denseness made parsing the book quite a feat, meaning if people used this as an introduction to roleplaying, it might not have been very successful.
The Story of Fantasy Wargaming goes into this, and into the development of the game. It could have been a bit more thorough and a bit more critical, but for what it is it’s a nice look into the environment that created it. And well, it’s free.
(I learned about this book from an episode of the Vintage RPG Podcast which had the author on and talked about this project. Well worth a listen)
https://gmkeros.files.wordpress.com/2024/05/warlocks_and_witches_in_a_dance5238827366399506857.jpg?w=1024John Faed, Warlocks and Witches in a dance (1855)I am not a fan of Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition. In fact I am not a fan of the 4th edition either, or the 3.5th edition, or Pathfinder (the 3.75th edition) for that matter. Actually I burned out running 3e and that was the impetus to go back to older edition, retroclones, and the OSR.
Which means I only really was touched by the introduction of warlock peripherally.
It didn’t help that I first saw them done in 3.5 and was not impressed. I still am not. It took them a while to get them into a state where players might intuitively grasp what the class is about. The 5th edition one seems to have managed that though, and I think I get why: warlocks are fun.
They are the kind of power fantasy that has all the hallmarks of a chugging half a quart of vodka with Red Bull and stealing a car. Maybe in the back of your mind you know that this is a bad idea, but right now you are intoxicated and it’s fun and who knows if morning will ever come and who cares about those flashing blue lights behind you?
Warlocks are the bad example your parents warned you about. It’s what lazy kids become when they grow up. But why, do the fighter and the magic user say, do they have so much fun being lazy? What about training? What about studying?
To which the Warlocks answer: “Eldritch Blast!”
But no, I think Warlocks as a character concept are really wonderfully OSR: you sell your soul to… not necessarily the devil, but SOMETHING, and then you can do all kinds of stuff you never learned. That sounds overpowered, and it is. But there is the implicit end of the warlock, which most people seem to forget because they treat it as just another class: this is a class that is completely dependent on some other unknownable being and their whims. There is not really a good ending for the warlock. Whatever actually happens with them when they die, in most cases it shouldn’t be pretty. If you have pledged your soul to the devil you won’t end slurping ice cold drinks at the shore of some scenic lake of fire. If you pledged it to an archfey you might end up as furniture.
I think what is missing from the class as written a bit is that there should be marks of what you are doing on you as well. You don’t become level 5 with no outside mark. I would say that every level there should be a possibility of a new pact marker. Cloven feet? Horns growing? Ears start looking like leafs? Something like that.
Reaction rolls should be affected. People might fear you, but they won’t respect you. You took the easy way and when people know they KNOW. Animals will look at you funny. You might not be able to pass under a horseshoe anymore. Mirrors shatter. That stuff.
Also ages ago I wrote about how to do multiclassing in my opinion. Every level, even the first, should cost as much as the next highest level of your other classes. That still holds up, but I think Warlocks… don’t follow that rule. Because learning another class when you spent your life doing something else shouldn’t be easy. Unless, well, you sell your soul or something. New warlocks just become warlocks.
Morgen leite ich #TheGardensOfYnn (von Emmy Allen) an unserem #osr online Open Table. Wenn jemand mal reinschnuppern mag, gerne melden. Aktuell ist noch ein Platz frei. Wir spielen ab 20:00 Uhr
System: #Shadowdark (old school dnd hack, also known as dnd6e der Herzen)
Bei den Gardens of Ynn geht es um die Erkundung einer extradimensionalen Parkanlage. Die Stimmung des Settings changiert zwischen weird-verspielt und unheimlich.
CN: etwas Body Horror #Valravn
The Bluesky #OSR feed is fascinating as it shows how many people seem to have passionate views on the OSR based upon someone else's Twitter rant and a butt load of weird projection.
At the moment, two lads who acknowledge that Traveller is not an OSR game, are basically harassing some dude for validation because he went low-key viral with a well-phrased observation about the OSR.
Das Modul Lig Bro jetzt ohne künstliche Intelligenz. Nur noch mit meiner. Oha.
Lig-Bro ist ein OSR-Remake des DSA-Klassikers „Das Grabmal von Brig-Lo“ von Hadmar von Wieser. Konkret geschrieben für Swords & Wizardry. Analag zum Modul „Das Nebelmoor“ hat das Abenteuer außer dem Namen und der grundsätzlichen Inspiration nicht viel mit dem Vorbild gemeinsam. Lig-Bro ist größer und gemeiner als das Nebelmoor und enthält ein paar Insider-Witze, die vielleicht nicht an jedem Tisch zünden. Ich selbst finde mich saukomisch und das ist ja das Wichtigste.
Was ich aus den ersten Monaten #pnpde an unserem #osr online open table #Valravn mitnehme (btw, ich hoffe, das kleine Projekt läuft noch lange 🙃):
Das Spiel am Open Table mit mehreren SL war für mich komplett neu. Ich habe das Gefühl, einen ganz neuen Aspekt des Hobbies ❤️für mich erschlossen zu haben.
Pnp ist für mich in erster Linie eine soziale Aktivität. Über das Format open table konnte in den letzten Monaten viele total sympathischer Leute kennenlernen. Hammer-Privileg! 1/n
Die #osr liefert für mich ideale Regelkerne und Prämissen für das Spiel am Open Table. Die Spielregeln der meisten OSR Spiele sind schnell erklärt und v.a. ermöglichen OSR Systeme ein schnelles Spiel. Pacing ist bei dem Format m.E. entscheidend. Mit wechselnden Mitspielenden und wechselnder Personage kann ich ein Szenario nicht langsam anfahren. Man ist am besten sofort mitten drin im Geschehen. 3/n
I'm not sure where i have found this post ( @Xenograg@kyonshi probably among link in some of your finds ) but I feel like I'm reinventing the wheel TEN YEARS after this idea came up to blogosphere. If that's not the perfect example of OSR perpetual archeology then I don't know what is.
Because my OSRish alignments/gods have their saints and aspects and stuff. And all of them may be (probably are) in conflict.
In Just Quest, my OSR rules light game, all PCs are good. And they get two traits where they describe themselves with a keyword or two up to a single sentence. If they try to do something and one of the traits might help the DM can give them plus on their roll.
Morgen bin ich in #TheBlackWyrmOfBrandonsford bei @HeyeBodo mit meiner Halblingsschurkin Ralina am Start. Es schließt sich ein Kreis – egal, wie es enden mag.
In unserer #swordsandwizardry Runde gestern merkten zwei Spielende das Gewicht der Verantwortung. Sie haben einen Frostelfen als Sündenbock dargestellt, der Sigmar-Priester eine öffentliche Hinrichtung einleiten wollen und er merkte erst dann, dass er nicht so eindimensional und fanatistisch denken sollte. Er ist nicht die Gerichtsbarkeit und der Mob verwandelte sich durch die Geschichte des Sündenbocks zu einer blutlüsternen Menge.
I find it super weird that Raffles the Gentleman thief isn't more of a figure in the #OSR bro does burglaries purely in order to buy expensive cigarettes, nice booze, and maintain a nice address.
It's also a series of short stories so overtly queer that when the legendary Catholic spy fiction author Graham Greene wrote a fanfic play about the main characters and made them a couple.
Been thinking about rivers on maps in fantasy games. (hat tip to @kensanata ) Most fantasy maps show just a couple of rivers. But water is everywhere in the real world. This colorful map of England's rivers gives a hint. So making rivers on a fantasy map becomes a question of how much fidelity you want to portray.
Ich hab in einer „Light-Version“ drei Räume vorbereitet und mir die Details on-the-fly wo rausgezogen – und es hat aus meiner Sicht gut geklappt. Normalerweise würfelt man alles adhoc aus, aber fürs erste Mal war mir das zu viel.
Es war hoffentlich kosmisch schräg und unterhaltsam.
A while ago I started playing with some people on an online server. That was about the time when I decided that I should maybe be playing more often than just GMing. Unfortunately life intervenes a lot, and lately there haven’t been that many games in the main campaign to keep me busy. I am also co-DMing a Shadowrun game lately, so there’s that, but I am missing the OSR fantasy fare. So I decided to run a game on the server, specifically with MapTool, which I have been hovering around for a while, but never actually used. In fact I never used a proper VTT to play, so this would be a first.
I decided to use Tomb of the Serpent Kings for it because it’s nicely done and available for free, and I already had it played before, and Labyrinth Lord as a game system because that has been my basic system for a while (yeah, I never updated to OSE even though I use some of the material for it).
Game Report
The group consisted of 2 elves (Damion and Eltariel) and a MU (Frondo) with his torchbearer/muscle (Big Boris). They originally were rustled up by the local bailiff to apprehend the bandit Wild Man Roberts and his two not-so-merry-men, who were seen digging somewhere at a hillside a short way off.
The bandits were easily located inside a hole they opened in the hillside. This turned out to be a hallway going into the dark, with the bandits lying dead just a short way in. Having determined they were done in by a simple poison trap in the ceiling they decided to investigate a bit further (and do some not-graverobbing) when they encountered sarcophagi with clay statues of snake-men inside. Inside the statues were small amounts of treasure and snake skeletons (turning it to actual graverobbing). Also poison gas.
A large door at the end of the hallway was trapped by a mechanism, which they devised to disable with various methods, giving them access to a larger room with three wooden coffins. Soon enough those turned out to have skeletons of snake-like beings inside that started attacking the newly minted graverobbers. Unfortunately a series of good attacks cost the life of two of the party (both elves), and the unlife of two snakes, while Frondo and his torchbearer took off almost immediately.
Out of sight of the skeleton the two decided to rearm the trap outside and trigger it after baiting the last skeleton into it’s area. The giant stone hammer coming out of the ceiling took care of the last opponent.
Frondo returned to give his companions a proper burial (and loot their bodies), then turned back to civilization to collect the bounty on the bandits.
Notes regarding MapTool
MapTool worked great until it didn’t. At the end we had some issues when two of us got disconnected while the others still could see things move around. I think I should have restarted the server in that case, but as it was in the very end of the 2-hour time slot we just played out the rest without it.
MapTool now has a function (marked as experimental) that allows to create a server and connect to it directly from other clients. No more futzing around with port forwarding in this case. Unfortunately maybe not as stable as it could be (see above). Still, the lack of such a function was one of the reasons I did not use the software before, as it would have been too much work to get it running with my network setup. Now that problem is gone, it literally has become a matter of creating a server, having players connect (they are prompted for a PIN), and their computers downloading the media files from my computer.
Speaking of media files, MapTool allows to use media files from the players computers to use in the game. Those are also added to the campaign file automatically. In fact it even allows to run a remote server where the campaign file is stored, I just haven’t been able to try that one yet. But other than that? Want to have a new token? Drop a picture in the related TokenTool, make a suitable token, then just add it in a folder and use it as you will. Nice.
I do find the use of MapTool surprisingly convenient. There are a few things that one can’t do in the tool (e.g. animated maps would be nice, but can’t be done in the current architecture), and some stuff that can be done but needs to be configured properly (no one has bothered to create a script framework for OSR games yet it seems), but I have a lot of options to show the players exactly what I want them to see. Still there are a few things that I still have to figure out.
The dynamic lighting in the dungeon is of course the star of the show. One can add a vision blocking layer and have PCs walk through the dungeon and have them see whatever it is that they have a) lit and b) what they can see. This can make for some interesting tactical gaming where some monster or character can see some things, but cannot see others. I noticed that it also takes a lot of mental strain from me as a DM as I don’t need to track either light or walking order in this case.
The other thing that helps a lot is the way one can organize a scenario here. Players can generally see 3 layers on the screen: tokens, objects, and background, and they can interact only with the first one. Another hidden layer is present, but is only available to DMs. This is useful, as it allows you to drop information (e.g. attached to a numbered token) at the appropriate places, and just call it up by going over it on the token layer. As it’s hidden it is not actually visible for players, and you can have your whole adventure in there, slowly following along as the PCs explore. Incredibly useful.
That said, there was an annoying issue with players moving tokens over specific (invisible to them) GM tokens with information, and me not being able to access them then. I think this might have a button that allows DMs to get a hold of tokens under others. but if it has I haven’t found it yet.
Not every part of the lighting system is perfect though. I still can’t make head nor tails out of elevations and depressions. I don’t quite know what to think about them. They don’t update in ways that I would expect from either. I would for example depressions with a light source inside expect to be lit inside, but they aren’t. The lighting system also takes a little to register someone has updated settings. More than once we got stuck in a place with a newly lit lantern not lighting anything because we didn’t move.
Doors are one of the things I will have to get into more. It is possible to create movable doors, but how is still a bit of a mystery to me.
Notes regarding Labyrinth Lord
we were playing by the book, but that might have been a mistake. The game might need to become a bit less deadly, so next time we should use the splintering shield rules, a death and dismemberment chart, and some rule about helmets I should first figure out (stock LL doesn’t seem to have a bonus for helmets
one house rule I already used for XP is XP for exploration: every new room discovered/mapped gives 50xp
I do wonder if I should have used Labyrinth Lord or maybe have gone even more minimal with White Box Fantasy.
Notes regarding Tomb of the Serpent Kings
I already played this one with another online group at the beginning of the pandemic. Unfortunately that didn’t last long, and we never managed to get to some of the more interesting parts of the dungeon.
I've never done an #introduction post on here and I don't have a pinned post, so here goes:
I'm Nick. Pronouns he/him. I live in Toronto and I work in tech as a... technical artist, kinda?
I love to run #ttrpgs and I'm leaning more towards rules-light #osr#nsr stuff. I play far less often than I'd like.
I also talk about parenting, video games, and sometimes (rarely) post my art.
Heute durfte ich mal wieder eine Runde #OSE am analogen Open Table leiten. Alle paar Montage bringe ich bei mir zuhause eine #osr Runde an den Start. Das Miniprojekt Open Table läuft ganz gut an und ich bin gespannt, wie sich das weiter entwickelt. Heute haben wir #HideousDaylight von Brad Kerr gespielt. Auch voll schön, über das Hobby so viele neue Leute kennenzulernen und nicht diesen Scheduling-Stress an den Hacken zu haben. #RedBoxRheinMain#pnpde
If anyone is interested in playing d&d tonight, I have a spot open.
0:15am UTC (Universal Time)
1:15am BST (London)
8:15pm EDT (New York)
5:15pm (Seattle)
There use to be this thing called the FLAILSNAILS convention. Basically just some verbiage to say, bring any D&D character from any vaguely D&D system to the table and you can play.
So, any level 1 to level 3 character you want to bring. Holmes Basic, AD&D, 4th edition, 5th edition, whatever you want to bring. DM me if interested.