#OSR

[gluesenkampart]

Lighthouse illustration for a ttrpg book I'm working on.

[franciscolemos]

Lady Oblivia, her tears are sorrow and poison.

[agesendart]

Colored pencils on mixed media paper..

Follow me on bluesky too if you'd like!

https://bsky.app/profile/agesendart.bsky.social

[prokopetz]

Was watching a video of people playing R.E.P.O., the players struggling to move a tall, thin box that gains damage if not kept upright, and was suddenly struck by the memory of posts you've made about old-school D&D having segments regarding the logistics of getting loot out of dungeons.

... I don't really have any greater thought to expound on there, unfortunately.

I maintain that you haven't truly played old-school Dungeons & Dragons until you've found yourself trying to to recover an 11th Dynasty aristocratic dining table from the fifth level of a dungeon without scratching the finish and all of the encumbrance, travel, light source, and random encounter rules are in play.

[alicelufenia]

So I checked out Whalefall

I saw this recommended and thought "oh another dungeon crawler based on 1970s D&D. Wait inspired by Darkest Dungeon, Below (okay these make sense), also Disco Elysium and Dark Souls?? Alright I'll check it out, don't expect anything from it-

Alright you have my attention

So yeah, in going one step further from the meatgrinder tradition of classic dungeon delving, you literally play a ghost that body hops when you die. Also a very unusual use of a hex map for a game, as the dungeons you explore are basically two dimensional, and each floor is one dimensional; you go from hex to hex in a line, similar to Darkest Dungeon. Keeps it easy to track at least, and also hints that it's not the layout of a floor, but the composition of each room and hex (which are all randomly rolled when you uncover them) that matters.

A tabletop rpg with a difficulty selection. I gotta admit, that's a first for me. Also with the way some of these rolls are and needing to roll under, a d12 is going to make them an absolute bitch to pull off, fitting for the highest "difficulty."

Ah yes, the corpse list. That's a thing.

Many, many years have passed.

Probably the most metal part of this game, you literally fight the big dungeon boss while falling, to either be swallowed by the Depths forever, become the Crypt Worm, or climbing out, one floor at a time. Holy fuck

As with any classic style rpg, there are many, many tables to roll on, their unique contents being something I'll leave for the reader to discover for themselves.

Also, gang of 1d6 thieves. Something menacing to me about that.

Your spirit is basically your class. The one constant between bodies.

...William?

Oh hey found my favorite class. And very transgender too.

Also the fucking medic class levels up by killing the patient.

😨

yeah I can believe it

Anyway this shit rules

[heelycular-manslaughter]

You've forgotten how long you've been doing this. Dungeon crawling. There is no longer a world above, just a mass of lines and colors, without end. With a rusted blade in hand, you drop down holes dug long ago, exploring ancient caverns with modern design. Rats, bones, worms, worms, worms. You'll find gold eventually.

Whalefall is a dungeon crawling system inspired by the OSR movement, Disco Elysium, and Fear & Hunger. If you're a fan of any of those or stuff like Dark Souls, Dungeon Meshi, Below, Darkest Dungeon, The Lighthouse, or working at a job in real life, you might like it (no guarantees).

[level2janitor]

am i doing this meme right

[losttrailsmaps]

City Streets Map Pack

Greetings everyone, welcome to another map pack! It features 12 total maps, including city streets, bridges, cathedrals and much more.

Patrons get access to gridded/ungridded and watermark-free maps. The grid size of each map is 30x40.

Check out the map pack here.

[domjordanillustration]

career-ending injury

[lord-soth-dk]

[franciscolemos]

Failed escape

[agesendart]

Dragon - dip pen

[prokopetz]

I love this alternate universe "what if OD&D had been a shitty late 1980s zine game" thing a certain segment of the OSR crowd has going on, but my problem is that even when they're going out of their way to emulate the characteristic jank of the era, the production values are way too slick. If we're really aiming to capture the spirit of the times, where's the grotesque line breaking and the paragraphs that end in mid sentence? Where are the illustrations that were clearly drawn on line-feed printer paper in ballpoint pen, complete with visible edges where they were cut out and pasted into the master document? Where are the layouts where no two pages have the same margins? Where are the parts where the text is randomly canted at about a five degree angle off horizontal because somebody fucked up when feeding that particular page into the Xerox machine and couldn't be arsed to redo it? I want an end product that's barely readable, is what I mean to say.

[vixensdungeon]

My hasn't-played-anything-less-rules-heavy-than-Blades-in-the-Dark ass has today acquired an OSR style game rulebook. (Black Powder And Brimstone, if you're curious. Derived from Mork Borg, not that I'm very familiar) I was inspired to take the dive largely by yours and @thydungeongal's posts, so I now come to you asking for advice Namely, any general tips or advice for shifting my GMing paradime from the rather rules-loaded BitD, Lancer, and modern DnD into the OSR-style gameplay loop? How to structure a campaign, what sort of play experiences to be aiming for, mindset, that sort of thing? I've got some sense of it being not very narrative-centred, and about a bunch of driven fuckers stumbling around dungeons on their own initiative, and letting dice and Big Stupid Tables take the wheel, but it's all very broad-concept level stuff

I think @thydungeongal pretty much covered all the actually good advice, so let me just spout some nonsense:

Assume the powerful Wargamer Stance. Cast aside your pretensions, this isn't drama club, this is a game. Backstories happen during the first few levels. If someone doesn't feel like naming their character before they've survived a few levels, that's fine, I've done it myself. Put obstacles in front of your players and don't expect them to succeed or fail. Never let your game hinge on any one character, whether player or non-player, surviving.

Nothing is certain. Everything is possible. Go forth and conquer.