Quote from: KindaMeh on December 24, 2023, 04:43:47 PM
One of my friends has essentially called dibs on Rappan Athuk for part of his 5e setting. It's been in every single campaign our groups have played there, in theory or in reference, but has yet to actually be attempted or explored. Looking forward to it, but pretty much everybody else regularly gets scared off by its in-game rep for lethality and size. Which is kinda weird, since a lot of those same people are now signed up for Arden Vul. But it might also just be that the guy runs a very good sandbox, and folks are less interested in a prebuilt dungeon when quality content of that sort is the alternative. 

We ran about 10 levels of Rappan Athuk a couple years back, then the party hit a teleporter that took them to Necropolis, which we went all the way through.  Looking back, I liked Rappan Athuk a lot.  There are a ton of levels, but most can be completed in one session so you can pull them out or run it in serial fashion.  I would like to try and run it as a campaign.  As it turns out so of my grad students, who are all 5e players, are interested in trying old school play.  So I'm leaning towards Swords & Wizardry for the system.  I may go Rappan Athuk, but if my copy of Dark Tower from Goodman Games comes before we start, I may run that, since I've never played it and they've added new material so you can start at low level with it.  Just seems right running an old Judge's Guild adventure with S&W.

Let us know how it goes, for sure! Especially if you go Dark Tower. (Not to put any pressure that way, just haven't seen much of Judges Guild personally, so would be interested to know how a related adventure might run.)

I'm just going to shoot my opinion blindly into this, after having listened to one of RPGpundits live streams.

OSE and other retroclones still have a niche

Pundit was a tad dismissive towards it in that he viewed it as merely another repackaging and art redo of Basic Expert, and in some sense that is true.

What he and others fail to understand is that there is still a great deal of room for improvement of presentation, and OSE hit the peak in my opinion, comparing it to OSRIC, or Basic Fantasy, it runs circles around them in value per page and effectiveness of conveyed rules.
I know for a fact Basic Fantasy was made in libreoffice with ODT files which is just gross.

While OSE is clearly a really well thought out LaTex template, simply the step from visual text editor to a script based one is an astronomical improvement.

Layout, presentation and clarity of language can make or break a ruleset, it's why retroclones exist because TSR's books are kind of ugly and shit by modern standards.

I find it more amusing when Pundit implies it will be merely be supplanted by some other B/X retroclone with different layout and new funky art, which is missing the point on what made OSE win.

While genius in a design sense, Pundit's opinion on layout and presentation is subpar, case and point Invisible Collage having light brown text on that fake parchment look, it's garish as shit and hard to read. Who ever started the trend of  fake ass parchment textures in a book should have their eyes branded with a cattle prong.

I hate it so much in fact, I'd buy Invisible Collage again if there was a black and white print version,  preferably titled "doesn't rape your eyes edition"


OSE will remain the king of the retroclones.

To me it somewhat perfected the formatting and thus I can't imagine anything anyone could do that would be considered objectively better layout or editing. that said I can imagine a slew of house rules published as retroclones that ape OSE style, which is good because it's layout and format kick 12 degrees of ass.

You can actually make perfectly awesome-looking books in LibreOffice. I recently switched to Affinity Publisher for technical reasons. A dedicated layout program is designed to handle lots of images in large files. LibreOffice started to have performance problems for me as I worked on larger projects, and of course it doesn't handle re-flowing text as well.