OSRIC Player's Guide(s)

 

Back in 2017, my friend Steve gave me a copy of the OSRIC Player's Guide, which extracted and republished the bits of the OSRIC rules that a player needed to have access to. Character generation, equipment, spell lists and so forth. It was excellent, and a bit less cumbrous than using the Big Book at the table.

For some reason, and I don't know what that reason was, it was withdrawn from publication and was no longer available.

Just this year, a new version of the Player's Guide has been published, with new art and layout, though I think the content is essentially the same. It looks okay, and the text is presented in a large enough font that if one wanted to make an A5 copy from the PDF, (and I might), it would probably be quite legible. Some of the table text might get a bit small though.

The spell descriptions in the first were presented alphabetically, but all lumped in together regardless of class, whereas in the new version they are arranged alphabetically but by class. I don't mind either method really — I just hate having to know what level a spell is before I can find it in the book. I haven't looked at the rest of the content in any detail.

The old Player's Guide was a hardback; the new one I just got is a softcover, and I got it via Amazon. It may well end up being available from other retailers such as DriveThru RPG, but I don't know what the timeline for that is. I don't object to buying via Amazon except that they don't accept PayPal, which I prefer to use for buying toys and tools and stuff from foreign parts.

Dwellers in Dark Places — a New Monster Book

This book of monsters for AD&D/OSRIC by Matthew Hargenrader, Dwellers in Dark Places, has just arrived on my doorstep — at long last; I ordered it from DriveThruRPG a couple of weeks before Xmas last year.

I bought it in PDF format some months before then (about September, I think) and enjoyed it enough to shell out for the PoD hardcover when it was marked down (about 20%) for the pre-Xmas market.

It is, without doubt, the most entertaining book of RPG monsters I've seen in decades. I haven't enjoyed a critter collection as much since I got my brand new copy of the Fiend Folio in 1982.

It's thoroughly illustrated in black-&-white throughout, and generally, the illustrations are pretty good — to my mind, they're of a much better standard than the usual run of fan-published work. There's something to be said for the enthusiasm of amateurs, but it's refreshing to see such a solid body of professional-quality black-&-white artwork. There's nothing there, alas, by Pete Mullen (one of my favourites), but I guess you can't have everything. There are about 500 monsters detailed in the book, and almost (?) all of them have at least one illustration, so that's a lot of pictures.

The paper is a bit thin, and not terribly opaque, but considering the page count (366 pages, not counting the front- and end-matter) if the paper was as heavy as that in the first Monster Manual and Fiend Folio, the book would be about two or three inches thick. Not that I'd particularly mind that.

The organisation and layout follows the precedent set by those earlier works, though in places it betrays a certain amateurishness. The most obvious example is in the tables that are scattered liberally throughout the book; they are all dominated by thick black borders which overpower the text within, and make the whole table less legible.

Another example, and a more serious one from the point of view of the book's usability, is that all too often monster statblocks and descriptions/illustrations are spread across more than one page. That's not really an issue as long as they're on the same two-page spread, or at least start on the same spread, but frequently I see a statblock table on a right-hand page that refers to a monster that is detailed on the following page — and that description is lacking any sort of title or visual separation from the previous entry. That's just bad design.

However, even with these reservations, I like this book a lot. It has obviously been a labour of love for the author, and it's jam-packed full of critters that I'm champing at the bit to use.

I hope it makes him a MEEEELLLION DOLLARS!

These also arrived today, in a separate delivery: ten 24-sided dice from the faraway land of China.

I've made my love of Stupid Dice known before.

I can't foresee very many uses for these, except maybe to randomly determine an hour of the day, so you'd think there would be no point in getting more than one. Or even one, for that matter. Ten certainly seems like overkill.

However, they were only about a buck-fiddy for a bag of five, with free postage, so really I think I should be congratulated on my self-restraint in only getting ten.

New Campaign(ish): Working for Eyeless

Eyeless the Wizard.

I've started up a new AD&D/OSRIC campaign. The basic information is on my website, along with game journals as and when I get around to writing them.

I don't foresee any grand overarching world-shaking plots transpiring out of this game, but you can never quite tell what will happen in a roleplaying game.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last.....

NOTE: This is NOT the actual OSRIC cover.
Which is a pity.

Things have been slowly digesting and percolating in my tiny brain, and I've come to a realization which is long overdue.

Pretty much all my tinkering and messing around with fantasy roleplaying game systems over the years has been, essentially, an attempt to recapture the joy I had in playing AD&D, while trying to avoid the things about AD&D that irked me. Of which there were quite a few, but not so many as to be insurmountable I think. The rules are now easily available again, both as reprints of the original books (expensive) and via the OSRIC project (cheap). I have a nostalgic fondness for the old books, but I think OSRIC is a more useable and accessible resource.

This full-page illustration, in fact.

OSRIC is available as a very convenient A5 paperback for $13.50 or as a full size hardback including a full-page illustration by Your's Truly for $26.00.

So anyway, I've decided to dip my toe back into the murky waters of DMing, and return to my first love..... mostly.

These are the modifications I intend to make to the rules:

1. I discard dual-classing; everyone can multi-class, as long as they have the minimum requirements. You can start a new class when training to go up a level, but from then on all XP (and hit-points) is split between all your classes — there'll be none of this taking one level in a class to get its benefits and then ignoring it forevermore.
2. I am keeping the demi-human level limits, so only human characters will be unlimited in all classes.
3. I will adopt the Character Background idea from 5e to determine the sort of basic range of knowledge the character has, along with the "Good At" skill system at the rate of one slot per 5 whole points of INT and WIS. The idea that a character can only perform a certain skill (like picking locks, or tracking) if they have a certain character class is stupid and dumb, and I'm doing away with it.
4. All characters start with the standard range of Thief Skills at 50% of the ability of a 1st level Thief. Only Thief characters can improve from this level though (though if one or more of the character's "Good At" slots is applied to one of those skills, I guess it could be improved by level gain... we'll see).
5. I will replace AD&D's Descending Armour Class and attack tables with the d20 model Attack Bonus and Ascending Armour Class. They're easily calculated: 20 – THAC0 = Attack Bonus, and 20 – AC = AAC.
6. I intend to adopt the Advantage/Disadvantage system from D&D5e, because it is elegant and works very well indeed.

I've made a new dust-jacket for my A5 copy
of OSRIC so that I can give it the
cover I prefer as well as hopefully making it
a bit sturdier and durable.

There may be some other bits and pieces I've forgotten or haven't determined. For example, I haven't yet decided whether to stick with AD&D's slightly baroque saving throw system (easier to use 3rd-party stuff), or go with a much simpler single save with CHAR-based bonuses/penalties (easier to use in play). Probably the latter.... but maybe not.

The campaign will begin with the party operating as a "snatch" team, working for a Big Fucking Wizard to find and retrieve things the BFW wants or needs. I'm thinking of starting the campaign on about 10,000 XP, but if anyone desperately wants to start at first level, far be it from me to say nay.

Character creation will be by my Character Generation Wheel, using 3d6. For a change, I'm not placing any restrictions on character species.

I'm not averse to trying out Crabaugh's Custom Character Class Creator, though I have a suspicion it could be used for Evil. I'll be keeping a very, VERY close eye on anything created by that means.

More Monsters

Freshly arrived from Lulu is this new OSRIC/AD&D monster book by Rafael Chandler.

I've not done more with it yet than flip through it and write my name on the inside cover, so I can't really comment much yet on its contents. On the outside though, it fits in almost perfectly with my other AD&D manuals — it's clearly been closely modelled on the style of the MM2. The binding is glossier, and I suspect not as hard-wearing as those ancient volumes, but the graphic design is very similar (in spite of the 3e/Pathfinder-style cover critter).

Internally, the layout is basically the same as the MM1 and MM2, though the text is in a larger font (not a bad thing, in my view). It's liberally illustrated in black & white or greyscale throughout, and generally speaking the illustrations are pretty good.

The paper is a smooth, matte, bright-white stock designed for digital printing. It's not as heavy as the rag-paper used in the first AD&D manuals, but it's not as flimsy or shoddy as that used in some of the AD&D2 books. It feels like it should take pen and/or pencil annotations just fine.

On brief acquaintance, I'm pretty happy with it. Now to actually read the thing and see what I can do with it to help in the noble quest to make my players' lives a living hell.

---

A couple of days later.....

Well OK, so now that I've given it the once-through I'd have to say that I'm not completely over the moon about it, but it's not a complete load of old cobblers either.

There are some good, interesting monsters in there, but many of them are clearly designed to suit a very specific campaign style — and that's not really my style at all. I'd much prefer it if they had their campaign-specific fluff stripped out, and to have them presented in a much more general-purpose style.

I'd also have to say that I'm not that fond of being beaten over the head with an author's own politics/ethics/morality, even when I happen to agree with some of it. I get the strong feeling from this collection of monsters that I'd find Chandler's own campaign intolerably preachy.

I wouldn't say that I wasted my money, but I can't see it being as useful as I had hoped.

I shall call him... Mini-Me

A couple of days ago, another purchase arrived in my mailbox. Observe, if you will, the beauty and glory that is the A5 size imprint of the OSRIC AD&D retroclone, from Usherwood Publishing. I show it here with the large-format hardcover and softcover versions of the same content.

It's a Lulu print-on-demand book, and costs $US 13.50 (plus postage to NZ of about $7). With the exchange rate as it is at the moment, it ended up costing me about $NZ 26-ish all-up, which is not too bad at all.

It's terrific, and I can see it being my default version in use. I'm a great fan of smaller book sizes than the traditional US Letter format; they take up less room on the table, they're easier to shelve, and they're much lighter and more convenient to carry around.