This, at least, is not entirely true. OD&D does not have any distinction at all between male and female characters in the original 3 pamphlets.
Pretty sure that stuff came in later, post-Greyhawk. It certainly showed up in fanzines of the late 70s, though...
Haha, I've been pulling your leg, the confused response was just too funny to ignore at first. I have a new comment that explains it.
You're good, and yes, it is older than 2e.
OK, time to come clean. I had assumed the other old people would have this at the ready, but when the confused responses came in, I just rolled with it and now I'm bored with the joke.
This is for BECMI. The question itself is real, though, I've heard of better Thief progressions, and I don't want to just top out at 14 like most people do since I never got to play with the Masters or Immortals sets and I want to try it at least once so I know how it plays.
Definitely not AD&D, I have those too and they're much heavier books -- these are more like magazines.
I should note that I have a blue one in here labeled expert rulebook. One of my players is bringing more that go with these.
I searched for the text on the box and mine is this one
https://www.amazon.com/Dungeons-Dragons-Basic-Rules-Set/dp/0880383380
Just the basic box set? We wanted to try playing to max level since none of us have ever actually done it.
Not a zoomer, but I am on the youngest edge of millennial -- the first computer I remember using was running Windows 95, and our first home computer was a Pentium era HP. My love for the older stuff didn't start until I was much older.
I've never understood the "these people hate Star Trek!" take I've seen around the new shows. It's clear that nobody working on these sets out to intentionally make a bad show. Some of the Easter eggs and references are deep cuts, so it seemed obvious to me that the people working on these are big fans.
To give credit where it's due, RotS and many of the Disney-era Star Wars products have gone a long way to fitting the glamorous, shiny prequel aesthetic into the gritty, used, "lived in" aesthetic of the OT. I'm not the biggest fan of The Last Jedi, but I actually think the implicication of the shiny galaxy just being a property of the rich inner rim planets was a great move in unifying everything.
Just to kind of push back on this, you're probably taking in and processing a bunch of information about your interactions subconsciously. Not all of us are able to do that effectively despite our best efforts.
It may be simple, but it really isn't easy for everyone.
I'm going to be honest, Klingons in the TNG era always felt too goofy to me. They weren't a proud warrior culture so much as borderline clownish space vikings who spent more time getting drunk than actually conquering anything. A redesign and change in how their culture(s) present on screen was welcome for me, and I think Discovery did a great job. I even liked the way they recontextualized the Klingon language, to make it sound more alien and more threataning than the staccato, oft-mispronounced mess that we got in the TNG era.
That said, I also think there was a missed opportunity with them. For a long time, I've had a head canon of the different looks of Klingons throughout all of the eras could be chalked up to these all being distinct peoples from within the Klingon Empire. It stands to reason that over a long enough time scale, an empier spanning multiple stars would start to consider people not originally from their homeworld "Klingon," even if they might be genetically different. I always thought it would be cool if the TOS smooth forehead Klingons were actually just one species that were culturally Klingon, where the Worf-type were another, and the General Chang type was yet another. It would provide a way to smooth over the aeshetic differences with an in-universe explanation that doesn't require any retconning except for a handful of episodes from ENT that die-hards didn't like anyway.
But oh, well. One can dream.
Xfce might be the choice here, since most of benefits of Wayland won't really apply to this machine (from an end user perspective) and it is relatively lightweight.
Been hearing a lot about Hyprland, will probably check it out even if I don't end up using it on this build.
How does loading up a game through steam work with that? I'm a big fan of Sway (and i3) but I don't use them on gaming focused systems at all, so I'm curious.
Not counting the Steam Deck, since KDE isn't actually turned on while you're running games.
Normally I'm a Gnome guy, but I'm building a tiny low power portable computer and wanting to keep resource utilization low, so I'm investigating other options.
I've bound a few PDFs, but I typically leave the cover looking very simple.
For zines, I print them on nicer paper and sew them together instead of stapling. For things I intend to be more durable, I make stiffened paper bindings with actual front and back cover boards (usually covered in construction paper).
I love doing this with PDFs, it's much nicer and more personal than putting them on an iPad or something.
I'm still reading through both of the resources you linked, but I think the OD&D setting in particular is going to help me a ton. I also think I can pull some structure from the unofficial Dark Souls ruleset -- Age Creation in particular.
Thanks! These are perfect!
I probably should've been more clear, but I'm not looking for systems. I don't think trying to replicate the mechanics of Souls leads to the best experience. In fact, I think most mechanical aspects of the games would make for an actively bad experience when transferred to ttrpgs, because player skill (the ultimate Soulsborne level up mechanic) doesn't really come into play in the same way, and fighting a boss half a dozen times isn't all that fun in tabletop games.
The parts I think ttrpgs can replicate are setting and level design, and that's what it seems is in short supply whenever people talk about Souls in tabletop form. That's why I gave the example of Vermis I which seems perfect, I just want more things like that.
Checking out Vaults of Vaarn, though, it might be a good fit. It's hitting some of the notes I'm looking for in its setting. Comes with lots of random tables too!
Make a city setpiece
Mountain Greatbridge Ruins:
Visible from any point in the city is the towering support of a colossal bridge that once spanned the nearby valley and connected two mountaintops. There is a matching one on the other side of its span, and several fragments of its deck can be found in the valley below. It is made of a material unlike those common to the region, colored a deep blue-gray and unusually heavy. Both the supports and fragments of the bridge are adorned with geometric patterns reminiscent of but not identical to ancient architecture that can be found in the city's nearly-forgotten catacombs. When viewing the bridge support during a nighttime storm, it's said that a a faint blue glow can be seen coming from the patterns.
Nobody knows who built it or why, and the collapsed bridge has stood in its current state as long as anyone can remember. There are some rumors that the city of today was built atop the ruins of a previous civilization, also responsible for the catacombs. Those people, whoever they were, abandoned this region long ago.
Hi all,
As the title, I'm looking for an adventure module that hits on similar notes to a Soulsborne game. The kind of crumbling dying world aeshetic, mixed with misty forests and long (possibly perpetual) nights and vague hints at factions or individuals from a time before. You know. Soulsy stuff. King's Field counts too, even though those games are quite different, since the worlds they portray have similar aeshetics.
I've found Vermis I, which I'm very excited to (hopefully soon) get a copy of so that I can finally actually read it, but as you might imagine, this is kind of a difficult thing to formulate search terms for. There are a lot of people who try to capture these games' mechanics, but seemingly not so many that I could find trying to capture their worldbuilding.
System compatibility doesn't matter, since I plan to just mine it for ideas
I've never actually run any of the old modules like Keep on the Borderlands or anything like that. I'm much more used to homebrewing a setting entirely or at most grabbing a few elements from a published adventure (I took a bunch from Willow, for example). I think this is why most of my favorite systems tend to be more in the NSR camp; I just never end up needing compatibility with older material.
Is running retro adventures in their entirety the most common practice for OSR tables? Or is the homebrew approach how most people are doing it?
I posted that I've been working on my own system (as probably a lot of OSR fans have), but this post isn't really about that so much. As I've been working, there's a nagging voice in my head that keeps asking "does the world really need another system?"
And that got me thinking, with the massive breadth of options from hardcore retroclones to modernized reinterpretations, does the world need another system? Is there a more useful or needed thing I could be spending my writing time on?
So I guess my question to the group is whether you're tired of seeing new systems. If you are, what would you rather see? Dungeon anthologies? Old school modules? Micro-settings? Something else?
Personally, I like new systems that either add something fresh, or just rearrange a bunch of existing systems into something that takes aspects of all of them (more what mine is), but I could also do to see more collections of small hexcrawls, zines full of one-page dungeons to drop into a game, or even things like Vermis I, just fun lore books or micro fictions that I can draw inspiration from.
So how about you?
I like games of all types and sometimes try to make them. IT Professional who likes mechanical keyboards and weird hobby electronics too much. He/Him.