Favorite Flavors of the OSR

[Gynsburghe]

I did a forum search recently for "favorite adventures" and "favorite OSR products" and came up somewhat muddled despite a huge number of potential 'hits'. I was sort of shocked, because this sort of topic tends to crop up periodically - but serious kudos to the atmosphere of not playing favorites! Unfortunately, in my obsessive search into the corners of retrogaming, I'm going to ask it

What are your top 5 'must have' modules (or settings) that are modern OSR products? Feel free to include adventures out of fanzine publications as well. I'm just starting to really ramp up my collection so before I go buying everything in sight, I thought a little insight would be great.

Of the stuff I already have, here are mine - in no particular order. I'm trying to limit to one per publisher (but failed due to republication), but don't feel the need if you are rabid about same press stuff:

1) Rappan Athuk (Frog God Games, Complete edition, S&W) - I regret not backing this one, but a friend did and gifted me his extra PDF copy (I had the series prior). I don't always like megadungeons, but I loved this one (my group are the laziest mappers, so I end up having to draw most of it for them). Still have yet to run it... requires a campaign in itself.

2) Vornheim (LotFP) - Whether you like his outspoken personality or not, Zack remains a pretty impressive writer. All his LotFP material is really enjoyable, and daringly original - honestly, most of Raggi's publications fit my particular taste. There is a great deal more here than detractors would have you believe. In other words, I think the allegations of being nothing but torture porn and misogynistic art are total, absolute BS. "Death Frost Doom" was my other major LotFP contender... so vicious...

3) Fairy Tales From The Unlit Shores (Goodman Games, DCC) - Fairy tales gone Lovecraftian. I have followed the series since I came out, buying them immediately even when life was too busy for RPGs. Clever play on those old Grimm tales...

4) Carcosa (LotFP and before, multisystem) - I've tackled 'icky stuff' in my home games before - I like my villains to be, well, villainous. Geoffrey broke a lot of ground, its not everyone's cup o' tea - but as a Lovecraft aficionado, I really dig it.

5) Transylvanian Adventures (Land of Phantoms, DCC) - I love classic horror movies from all eras, and my preferred genre of roleplaying is somewhere betwixt horror, history and fantasy. TA captures a lot of that spirit, though some of the rules are needlessly obtuse (it is DCC, after all). Whereas this is qualified to be called a rule set, it still requires the DCC book.

I'm sure I missed something, but these are ones that immediately spring to mind. I would love to see more settings or multi-series modules that aren't tied to rule sets in the marketplace.

Best Witches,

Gynsburghe

[makofan]

My favourite by far is Stars Without Number. Mazes and Minotaurs is also well done. Both of these are systems, though. For modules it would be Mines of Khunmar, and The Darkness Beneath megadungeon (my 3e players have explored levels 1-7, and are currently storming the dark troll citadel in level 9).

[geoffrey]

The Random Esoteric Creature Generator by James Raggi (Goodman Games, 2008): This is the only monster book you need. It changed the way I see monsters in D&D. If I could have only one OSR item, this would be it.
www.goodman-games.com/4375preview.html

Eldritch Weirdness by Matthew Finch (Mythmere Games, 2009): This includes 30 D&D spells that are the weirdest, most inspirational spells I've ever seen. It's like Gary forgot to include them in Supplement I: GREYHAWK. I can't imagine my game without them.
www.lulu.com/shop/matthew-finch/eldritch-weirdness-compilation-books-three-to-one/paperback/product-4848615.html

Isle of the Unknown by Geoffrey McKinney (Lamentations of the Flame Princess, 2011): This is my idea of what a setting should look like.
www.lotfp.com/store/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=146

Dungeon of the Unknown by Geoffrey McKinney (Lamentations of the Flame Princess, 2013): This is my idea of what a dungeon should look like. It is available only in PDF right now.
www.rpgnow.com/product/114330/Dungeon-of-the-Unknown

Towers of Krshal by Albert Rakowski (self-published, 2012): This is my favorite city book, and I typically hate city books. It's short, to-the-point, and composed of tables. Krshal is the one city I could run without study beforehand.
www.lulu.com/shop/albert-rakowski/towers-of-krshal/paperback/product-20262562.html

[Falconer]

Mar 13, 2015 10:43:45 GMT -6 Gynsburghe said:

What are your top 5 'must have' modules (or settings) that are modern OSR products? Feel free to include adventures out of fanzine publications as well. I'm just starting to really ramp up my collection so before I go buying everything in sight, I thought a little insight would be great.

My must-have settings are

1. Vanth from Encounter Critical and
2. Hyperborea from Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers.

My must-have modules are

1. The Anomalous Subsurface Environment series by Pat Wetmore,
2. Advanced Adventures #2, 3, 6, 8, 13, 16, and 20 as well as Ice Tower of the Salka, all by James Boney, and
3. Pod Caverns of the Sinister Shroom, Demonspore, Tomb of the Iron God, and Spire of Ice and Crystal by Matt Finch.

[rastusburne]

Besides the OSRIC core rulebook the only other physical 'OSR' products I have are Jeff's Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea box set, along with the charnel crypt adventure. Both are excellent. Even if you don't run the game using the ruleset the 'microsetting' is teeming with imagination and vibes. The associated adventures are great too - dark and pulpy.

I want to pick up ASE at some point too. I always hear about LotfP but I have not looked into it.

[Deleted]

Mar 13, 2015 10:43:45 GMT -6 Gynsburghe said:

(my group are the laziest mappers, so I end up having to draw most of it for them)

My advice?

Don't.

Let them get down into the dungeons... and then try to find their way back with no map.

That's how mapping "came to be" in the first place. You want to navigate the dungeon, you better map. The game is much more fun when you don't hold players' hands.

[Red Baron]

I adore S&W: White Box, Eldritch Weirdness, and cadriel's "The OD&D Setting".

[paulg]

1. Carcosa by Geoffrey McKinney: a challenging and original setting that makes exemplary use of the Judges Guild-style hex description format.

2. Stonehell by Michael Curtis: a good adventure, and the first successfully publishable formulation of a megadungeon, inspired by the One Page Dungeon format.

3. Deep Carbon Observatory by Patrick Stuart: an adventure that makes some well-worn D&D tropes fresh. It's a complex adventure to run, and requires some prep work by the referee.

4. Death Frost Doom by James Raggi: a deft take on the cabin in the woods horror movie as D&D adventure, and it gives the players plenty of rope....

5. Towers of Krshal by Albert Rakowski: a setting interesting primarily as a formal experiment, where the setting is characterized exclusively with a select number of short random tables.

I might well have included Vornheim had the OP not already included it in his own list.

Furthermore, David McGrogan's recently released setting Yoon-Suin setting book looks very promising, although I haven't finished reading it yet.

[dukeofchutney]

1. Astonish Swords and Sorcerers of Hyperborea - this is the version of DnD i play these days. A good mix of basic and AD&D but a cleaner rule set. The setting material and classes are excellent and it has a heavy dose of atmosphere and character which is what I am really after.

2. Towers of Krshal - This is just a booklet of tables really but it brings out that otherwordlyness and unbounded imagination that you don't really find outside the oldschool or OSR catalogue.

3. Pretty much anything by Gabor Lux. Most of his best settings and adventures (that I have read) are spread across fight on! and Knockspell mags. His worlds are really vivid and feel very appendix N.

4. Dungeon Crawl Classics - probably the most pure fun ruleset and I really love its gambling magic system. I tend to find the sessions and dungeons i create have a darker tone though and fit ASSH more.

In terms of real flavour I'm generally shooting for something with a strong sense of the weird otherworldly fantastic with overtones of dread and malice. I usually end up with quite a lot of quasi historical content in there two.

[geoffrey]

Mar 14, 2015 14:47:58 GMT -6 dukeofchutney said:

Pretty much anything by Gabor Lux. Most of his best settings and adventures (that I have read) are spread across fight on! and Knockspell mags. His worlds are really vivid and feel very appendix N.

Definitely. I wasn't including Melan / Gabor Lux since all of his stuff (IIRC) is either free or in magazines. But if we include free stuff and/or magazine articles, then Melan's works are definitely on the short list of stuff to acquire.

[Falconer]

Good call. Anyone care to cobble together a Lux bibliography?

[kesher]

I'm pretty sure there's already one on here somewhere... I just don't remember where at the moment...

[Falconer]

RPG.net actually has a lot (all?) of it listed here.

[Zulgyan]

Melan / Gabor Lux and Geoffrey are my favorite authors by far.

I also believe that the AS&SH is an outstanding game. The best reinterpretation of D&D ever.

I also read everything posted by Falconer, love his way of seeing things.

[aldarron]

In order of Significance:

1) Dave Areneson First Fantasy Campaign Simply the foundational guide to an old school campaign.

2) Dan Boggs The book of Elder Magic - While it was me who wrote it, I do think its the best thing to have for OSR magic "... contains over 42 pages of spells for Clerics and Magic-users including all those found in the Original 1974 Edition, and many more spells inspired by Dave Arneson and the original Twin Cities players including spells adapted from Arneson's Open Game sources. There is also another 10+ pages detailing..."

3) Paul Jaquays Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide Few authors have the old school cred of Jaquays, who wrote all but the last couple chapters of this book. Ostensibly a 2e book, but only superficially, it is filled with great ideas and insights very much in the OSR tradition.

4) Mike Carr B1 In Search of the Unknown The quintessential exemplar adventure by the man who gamed with and worked with both Arneson and Gygax, starting before D&D existed.

5) Judges Guild Ready Ref Sheets You may use all or none of the content of the RR, but either way it is an inspiration no OSR ref should miss.


I know there's only one thing in that list that is stricktly speaking, OSR, but that's becuase I don't know of anything else new that really fits the bill, in my mind. Of course there is tons of other stuff that can be very helpful, depending on the direction you want to take. Tim Brannan's "The Witch: sourcebook" is very useful to me for example, or Red Tide or The Seclusium of Orphone but these may not do much for someone else, depending on their campaign. However, the five I mentioned above are pretty elemental for everybody, I'd think.

Edit: Oh yeah, Barrowmaze by Greg Gilespie is one I should have mentioned.

[Finarvyn]

Mar 13, 2015 10:43:45 GMT -6 Gynsburghe said:

3) Faerie Tales From Unlit Shores (Goodman Games, DCC) - Fairy tales gone Lovecraftian. I have followed the series since I came out, buying them immediately even when life was too busy for RPGs. Clever play on those old Grimm tales...

Yikes! I can't believe that those slipped past me. I thought I was pretty much current with DCC, but I totally missed this. I love the concept of combining Fairy Tales with creepiness. Now I just need to track them down!

[grodog]

Mar 14, 2015 17:58:59 GMT -6 Falconer said:

Good call. Anyone care to cobble together a Lux bibliography?

See fomalhaut.lfg.hu/category/english/

[cadriel]

1. Random Esoteric Creature Generator, by James Raggi. This book encourages a radical take on monsters – create a new one every time it's needed. While I do occasionally appreciate the old classics in terms of creatures, I love coming up with new and weird threats. This book has stood up in those terms and made some excellent ones.

2. Carcosa, by Geoffrey McKinney. Probably the two most infamous things in Carcosa, the sorcery and the dice conventions, aren't quite my thing. The rest of the book I think is a gold mine. I love that it has simple and straightforward rules for everything from Cthulhu Mythos creatures and dinosaurs, to generators for both robots and Spawn of Shub-Niggurath, to space alien technology and weird lotus powder, a neat and tight psionics system, and even a table of mutations. With Carcosa I'm just torn between the original edition, which was a much tighter booklet after the OD&D supplements, and the LotFP version which is an absolutely beautiful artifact with great illustrations and expanded hexcrawl content.

3. Dyson's Delves I and II, by Dyson Logos. I don't run a lot of adventure modules, but I do often find myself using Dyson's maps, both from these two books and newer ones from his blog. Dyson's maps are complex and often have interesting three-dimensional features to them. Rather than draw a dungeon map myself I will take one of Dyson's and put my own creatures and ideas into it.

4. A Red & Pleasant Land, by Zak S. I'm not sure I'd want to run this straight, but it is full of ingenious ideas for adding a distinctly Alice in Wonderland type of "unreason" to D&D.

5. The Pod-Caverns of the Sinister Shroom by Matt Finch. I just love this adventure's structure (it can be run from either "end" of the dungeon) and the kind of B-movie pod people it uses as its main antagonists. I'd slip some of Matt's other work (Tomb of the Iron God and The Spire of Iron and Crystal) in here as well.

Most of these are "early" materials from the OSR. I do like other stuff geoffrey has done, particularly Dungeon of the Unknown, though not as well as Carcosa. I also have to give honorable mentions to some of the attempts at capturing the megadungeon such as Michael Curtis's Stonehell, Patrick Wetmore's Anomalous Subsurface Environment and James Maliszewski's Dwimmermount. And I'm not sure where to fit Rob Kuntz's recent releases, but The Original Bottle City is a brilliant dungeon from back in the day that is available now.

[Gynsburghe]

Heh, ask and ye shall receive!

I've seen more than a few titles in here that I felt bad for leaving off my list, and a few that I did that, "Doh! I forgot about that one!" I see lots of ones I haven't heard of either - and, much to the chagrin of the misses, it will add to my wish list. (Actually - clichés aside - my wife and I starting going out, 25ish years ago, due to our shared computer intro class and her subsequent joining of our AD&D group - she still plays.)

I can't say I blame some folks for both naming the core books or older supplements - sometimes its hard to ignore how cool the inherent setting is (AS&SH, for example). The reason I wanted to focus in on adventures and settings is because it seems like there are less of those than new systems coming out (probably not true in the case of adventures, but I hear more about new OSR systems than regular products). Nonetheless, all the stuff named is certainly awesome! Thanks!

I'm also realizing now, that when I disappeared from the scene a few years ago, I also missed a lot of stuff with 'zine publications. Gotta fix that, and I'm guessing I know where I should be looking.

Geoffrey, your taste and mine run really close - and I missed catching Eldritch Wizardry (probably because I hang about Drivethru more than Lulu). I have been putting off buying James' Random Esoteric Monster book - but I really should stop that. If I had to stack Isle of the Unknown against Carcosa (I have both), I'm not sure which would be my favorite - I gave the edge to Carcosa due to the self published version and its importance in shaking up the 'what you can put in a module' aesthetics.

Just recently grabbed PDF copies of Deep Carbon Observatory, The Pale Lady, Hammers of the God and Ryubix Manor - all very finely done. Ryubix wins some serious points for being a different rendition of Tegel Manor, which is, BTW, my favorite module ever. When you read it, it seems disjointed, vague, somewhat silly and completely impossible to play. Then you run it... it's very different and sometimes characters get extremely lucky. I'm still delving into Ryubix, but it was the one that made me smile the most.

The bleak grandeur and originality of the other three, especially Hammers of the God, is a tone that I really enjoy seeing among these new publishers - one that was turned way down during the 'Satanic Panic' of the early 1980s. Whereas I enjoy the old school stylistic motif, it is a testament to the constitution of old rules being adaptable to new directions. I never thought I'd see a day when players loyal to older editions, were a demographic in the RPG market, and subsequently revive every zombie edition. There's a 'Death Frost Doom' joke in there, somewhere...

Finarvyn, I bumped into the first one on Drivethru - I believe the titles are "Prince Charming, Reanimator", "Creeping Beauties of the Wood" and "The Portsmouth Mermaid". They are a bit more lighthearted than some of the other stuff I tend to mention, but its still DCC too. There's a certain old school metal in their vibe, it's like the Black Sabbath of the OSR...

Keep 'em comin'!

Gynsburghe

[Zulgyan]

I unfortunately lost my original Carcosa Booklet when I moved to a new home... the box got lost somehow somewhere, forever

I also enjoyed everything posted by "themattjon". Too bad he could never publish his stuff.

[tetramorph]

Just ordered my "Random Esoteric Creature Generator," and I am psyched! Can't believe I missed this one. I feel like I did when I was a kid, saving up, sending in the coupons from the back of my Richie Rich Comics, waiting for my Sea Monkeys finally to arrive (within 6 to 8 weeks). When they finally came, I had forgotten I had even ordered them. Random Christmas! I can't believe it isn't available as an instant PDF. But hey, I am looking forward to my future random Christmas moment on the way (standard shipping, 1 to 2 weeks. That is better than those Sea Monkeys).

Here are mine. Some have already been mentioned, but I just want to echo my support:

1. Jimm Johnson's Planet Eris House Rules (austinjimm). I cut my 0e teeth on this. He and his campaign refs taught me old school, so I am forever grateful. Google around and you will find the doc.
2. Dave Arneson's First Fantasy Campaign
3. Tony Bath's Ancient Wargamming (edited by someone else, it includes his "Setting up a Wargames Campaign," which is rad. Hey, @gronanofsimmerya endorses it!
4. The Judges' Guild Ready Ref Sheets. For sure. I will never see statues, thrones and ruins the same way again.
5. All the stuff I have learned from searching around and following folks over here. I don't want to name names b/c I don't want to leave anybody out, but there are a lot of folks here that produce really good content and share it for free and all that has helped me a lot.
6. C. S. Lewis' The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. (Helps me "get" the medieval cosmos and satisfy my "war-gammer's urge" for "accuracy of simulation.")
7. Wayne Rossi's The Original D&D Setting. Just rad: how the Outdoor Survival map, together with the wilderness random encounter tables, etc., generates a totally gonzo 0e game that entails something like vampire hunting in the Land of the Lost!

[Zulgyan]

Some people are including "real oldschool" stuff (published in the 70s), instead of just OSR as the OP proposed.

[rastusburne]

This is a great thread by the way. I've added a whole bunch of things to my 'to-buy' list.

[geoffrey]

Mar 14, 2015 8:17:15 GMT -6 paulg said:

David McGrogan's recently released Yoon-Suin setting book looks very promising...

That it does. I'm thinking of picking one up.