Messing Around with Old School Essentials
Added 2022-06-16 00:06:07 +0000 UTCI didn't pay much attention to Old School Essentials until recently. For most of the time I've been playing old school D&D, I already had a retroclone in Labyrinth Lord, and since I also have the original B/X and BECMI rulebooks (and the Rules Cyclopedia), I don't even use it that much. So what do I need another retroclone for?
But I ran one of Gavin's adventure modules for OSE recently, The Incandescent Grottoes (with a different rules system, ha ha ha), and I rather liked some of the layout decisions. Particularly the monsters. He's taken the text-heavy info dumps in the early editions and turned it all into bullet points, so it's really easy to read, understand, and reference. I can see why this game is currently the most popular retroclone around.
And I started thinking I should be writing up my monsters like that too. And maybe swapping out the Labyrinth Lord compatibility for Old School Essentials. They are the same rules, after all. And since we haven't done any dedicated old school monster manuals yet (DFoM is a megadungeon with a bestiary and OMH is a hexcrawl with a bestiary), I thought maybe I should try working on that.
So I'm putting together a staple-bound booklet of monsters in the format of Old School Essentials. It takes a bit of work to reformat them into a new layout, but it's the same game as Labyrinth Lord so the bulk of the work is already done. If it works out good, I could do a whole bunch of booklets. And believe you me, I am real sick of making big fat books.
Also, why didn't I think of the Echo Tourists name BEFORE releasing these guys? It's perfect!
