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  1. Gus L

    OSR This tells me OSR is alive and well.

    But the Beatles did... and so did Lennon's music. More importantly, if one were looking at the change of rock over time, Lennon's death would make a great marker for the end of the dominance of 1960's and 1970's styles of British Rock and the ascendence of harder Heavy and Punk styles ... The...
  2. Gus L

    OSR This tells me OSR is alive and well.

    I know two people who I consider major bloggers have been banned for linking their blogs. QB was warned for posting 2 links in a week (to different videos). It's not a blogger friendly or creator friendly place. Deny my personal experience all you want, but I stand by what I say. A blog...
  3. Gus L

    OSR This tells me OSR is alive and well.

    Reddit actively discourages creators from posting - heck it bans you for linking to your own blog... reddit is for shelfies and fan art, not making things. Okay that's me being catty - apologies to the r/osr fans.
  4. Gus L

    OSR This tells me OSR is alive and well.

    These are great products, but to me they are Post-OSR. Cairn is NSR, OSE started as a late OSR project and continues as a branded retro-clone with its own community. My point is again not to split hairs about the exact dates of the art movement but to point out that what we have now several...
  5. Gus L

    OSR Question about OSE's box sets

    Core OSE is essentially Moldvay Basic Expert (B/X). OSE Advanced takes various borrowings from AD&D's PHB, DMG, and MM and makes a larger game from them - this is where Gavin has done the most editing and transformation ... but again not a huge amount (AD&D is just a bit kludgey RAW and needs...
  6. Gus L

    OSR This tells me OSR is alive and well.

    Not disagreeing with anything said here, I enjoy some OD&D myself, am happy to see and hear people like old games still and I should post here looking for players when I start my next online open table campaign ... but the desire of people to play older editions (YAY!) and the health of the OSR...
  7. Gus L

    Jennell Jaquays posthumously wins SFWA Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award

    Jennell Jaquays deserves as much credit as we can give her. Nice to see the award.
  8. Gus L

    AD&D 1E Favorite Obscure Rules from TSR-era D&D

    Absolutely typical Gygax rulesmithing ... but I think this rule is interesting as it's also another item in OD&D to point to for its use as an adjunct to domain based wargames. How do you get dragons for your armies? Obviously you beat them up in the dragon beat up minigame (D&D) and then...
  9. Gus L

    OD&D Monster alignment was more flexible in OD&D

    Yes this is precisely the period I'm referencing. I think the style of play varied among regional affinity groups (West Coast, Twin Cities, Lake Geneva etc), preferred periodicals - you are right to mention Alarums & Excursion, which has more than one style of play at work in it (though I think...
  10. Gus L

    OD&D Monster alignment was more flexible in OD&D

    My own suspicion having read a lot of the documents from the era of OD&D and then the ones that followed in the TSR years is that alignment in OD&D is meant largely as a tool for determining army lists... In things like Blackmore and other early games (per First Fantasy Campaign, Strategic...
  11. Gus L

    AD&D 1E Favorite Obscure Rules from TSR-era D&D

    Prices in early editions are very weird for a "dungeon crawl" game - or even one about bands of heroes fighting monsters, especially with the general loose encumbrance of those editions. When one combines how cheap equipment is with how much gold you need to level (and the treasure tables...
  12. Gus L

    AD&D 1E Favorite Obscure Rules from TSR-era D&D

    I personally find that simple rules that actually have subtle and interesting effects on the game are the most valuable* My favorite edition and rules are all from OD&D's Little Brown Books (Greyhawk doesn't exits for me - I deny it is real except for the page including harquebuses as ranged...
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  15. Gus L

    BECMI/BX additional material

    I think it's fine to add spells and classes to B/X. Adding ones from newer editions, especially AD&D though... it's been done a lot of times already with varying degrees of success. You can likely find many versions of a B/X (OSE, Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardry, LotFP, or whichever...
  16. Gus L

    OSR New changes are afoot for OSRIC!

    Knights & Knaves and the AD&D community are not places I'm welcome, but I am happy to hear OSRIC is getting a new edition. Personally and I know the AD&D gang wants to hear nothing I have to say I think it could benefit from two different approaches that might be hard to reconcile. 1st -...
  17. Gus L

    OSR What's the best introductory BX/OSR scenario for new players and DMs?

    This is basically antithetical to how I run and play OD&D and B/X. The combat in these systems is messy and it feels important to emphasize to players, especially new players at low levels, that direct, fair, face to face, combat will likely end with the party losing members even if they win...
  18. Gus L

    TSR Having multiple dungeons available to the players

    I think one of the most useful skills one can have as a sandbox referee is the ability to pick and reskin other people's adventure modules. I mention this because it even if it seems second nature to some folks, especially those with a lot of experience with early play styles, I see lots of...
  19. Gus L

    TSR Having multiple dungeons available to the players

    I think this is the basic concept behind the snadbox, but for it to work I think one also needs to lay down a few piece of infrastructure. A) Connection between overworld and underworld (dungeons). Why are the PCs inclined to go delving in different places, how do they learn about them, what...
  20. Gus L

    OSR Baptism of Fire RPG

    It's funny how this first definition has grown since the collapse of the OSR as a specific scene - roughly post 2020 and the end of G+. Having been associated with what would eventually be called the OSR since about 2011, I see it as a revisionist definition of "OSR" that derives from a...
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