What does /tg/ think of Barbarians of Lemuria?

Never heard of it.

>>49754869
Fuckin' awesome

>>49754899
Please elaborate.

>>49754869
Cover art seems decent but unimaginative, with a very mediocre coloring.
Can't say anything else, first time I'm hearing about it.

>>49754907
It's like D&D, but without all the bullshit that gets in the way of being a hero.

>>49754939
I'll check it out then.

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>>49754927
I don't know why they didn't keep the cover art from the last edition.

>>49754991
Pretty sure that is the cover art for the Legendary Edition, which is the latest one.

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Looks metal.

Anyone have PDFs available?

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>>49754959
Barbarians of Lemuria is good rules-light, high adventure in the style of Conan.

>Barbarians of Lemuria,Mythic Edition (current edition) -- https://www.mediafire.com/folder/7llc83r2xf8bg/Barbarians_of_Lemuria_-_Mythic_Edition

>Barbarians of Lemuria, Legendary Edition (earlier edition, fewer details & more minimalist presentation makes it even easier to learn, but the rules aren't as refined) --http://www.mediafire.com/download/p5w885sa9a869ma/Barbarians+Of+Lemuria+-+Legendary+Edition.pdf

>Barbarians of Lemuria, House Rules / Patches for Legendary Edition (if you want the bare bones minimalism of Legendary, but with the rules tightened up a bit) -- https://mega.co.nz/#F!CtQR2bST!y_awB-GHCiL3CdK4iLCV7A

>>49755025
That is the art for Legendary, but the Mythic edition shown in OP's pic is the current one.

>>49754939
>It's like D&D, but without all the bullshit that gets in the way of being a hero.
Eh. It's not specifically geared towards dungeon crawling, and isn't overly concerned with equipment (magic or otherwise), which makes it significantly different. It's also swords & sorcery rather than high (magic) fantasy.

>>49755359
>doesn't focus on dungeon crawling and inventory management
So what you're saying is that it cuts out the bullshit that gets in the way of being a hero?

>>49755472
If you want to look at it like that, I guess. My point is that it's not strictly the same genre of D&D but streamlined and hero'ed up. It's an adjacent but distinct genre.

>>49755626
Can it be used for other genres?

>>49755284
Thanks, anon. I might give this a one-shot.

It's a good beginner/lite system.

>>49756269
Sure, at least to some extent. But games typically play less well for stuff they weren't designed for. BoL is pretty flexible because of how light it is, but you don't have anything like the vancian high-magic of D&D, or the plethora of magic items. 1 point of difference is a pretty big deal in BoL, so even if you can't really have the same sort of statistical nuance that D&D has. Without changing things around, you could definitely run a dungeon crawl, but it would play out a bit differently.

>>49754869
It's ok, if you want to run it you should knock the target numbers down by about one if you don't want the players failing every time they roll dice.

>>49754869

The core mechanic is 2d6 plus (bounded accuracy) modifiers to beat a target number. Characters very quickly start to auto-success on whatever they want to be good at, so this game is okay for one-shots but kinda crap for campaigns.

>>49756512
If you spread your points evenly, you'll have a 1 in every stat. That means 2d6+2 when you roll (+1 attribute and +1 either combat ability or career). The average of 2d6+2 is 9. 9 is the target number. You succeed 58% of the time.

And that's not taking into account that you probably won't distribute your points evenly and will tend to more often perform actions related to stuff you're better at. I'm not saying it would break the game if you made the target number 8, but you certainly won't fail all the time with things the way they are now.

>>49756617
On average, characters get 2 advancement points per saga (a series of adventures with a common thread or greater goal). If you figure that an adventure takes 1-3 sessions and there are 2-7 adventures per saga, you're earning an advancement point every 5 sessions or so.

At the low end, you can raise a stat by a point for a single advancement point, but shit pretty quickly gets more expensive. Going from a 2 agility to a 3 agility costs 5 advancement points, for instance. That's about 25 sessions by my earlier estimates. So you really shouldn't be pushing into auto-success territory that quickly. And keep in mind that skilled enemies will have a defense score that reduces your attack roll, and difficult tasks will give you a penalty to career checks. So even if you do get to the point where you have an 80-90% chance to hit a mook, or perform a common task, that just means you're a badass and are qualified to take on bigger challenges.

>>49754991
That is Conan as fuck.

>>49758004
I know right

How do you adjudicate "Morgazzon’s Curse"? Seems quite open ended.

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>People aren't using this thread as an opportunity to dump sword and sorcery artwork.

What's the point of even having an imageboard?

>>49754869
Pure awesomeness. One of my favourites.

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>>49761000
Your trips speak of a great truth, worthy of contribution... but this is the closest thing I can offer.

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>>49760909
You could always borrow insanity concepts from some other game to at least give you an idea of where to start. I suppose that one easy way to do things would be to set up the insanity either as a compulsion or as a phobia. Either way, they'd have to make a check when circumstances were right to avoid a strong reaction.

For a phobia (unmodified roll vs. standard target of 9)
Failed by 1 = agitated, -1 to most actions
Failed by 2 = fearful, -1 to most actions and shrink away from source of fear (-2 to actions if cannot shrink away)
Failed by 3 = panicked, -2 to most actions
Failed by 4 = terrified, flee as fast as you can (petrified if you cannot)
Failed by 5 or more = petrified, frozen in place by fear (curl into a ball, stand there shaking, etc.)

>>49765497
Some insanity tables from 5e D&D...
https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Madness#content

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Could the system be used for a high adventure campaign about knights?

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2/10 Bought it expecting lemurs, found none. Was severely disappointed, bad show.

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>>49766409
You could create a lemur career that would apply to stuff like climbing and being adorable.

>>49766382
I don't see why not. My only qualm is that armor can get a bit out of hand, in my opinion. Mythic edition improved things over Legendary by somewhat limiting the power of armor, but it's still a bit much at the top end. Just dropping helms (and treating them as a normal part of armor rather than a separate thing which further increases armor) helps a lot, but if you want to keep combat fast and furious, you might also consider dropping heavy armor (and relabeling medium armor as heavy).

Heavy armor doesn't break the game or anything, and in the default setting where most people don't have heavy armor, it's perfectly okay to leave it be, but in a knight-based campaign, where the fluff actively encourages heavy armor, it might slow things down a bit more than you'd want. Of course, BoL plays pretty quickly, so even significantly slowed combat might seem satisfactorily fast to you.

Anyway, pic is the armor in the book followed by a streamlined, limited version.

>>49766773
I'd like to add that I absolutely hate the idea of rolling your armor's protection and think that this sort of clumsy thing runs directly counter to BoL's streamlined, quick and easy approach. So I prefer the flat protection option. You just need to be aware that this strengthens the protection of armor. Against rabble with no strength bonus wielding an ordinary sword, a flat -3 for heavy armor results in an average of 1 damage per hit, while 1d6-1 results in an average of 1.56 damage per hit. Now, that's at the bottom end, and once you start adding in strength bonuses (or using two-handed weapons), the percentage difference gets considerably smaller, but it's still something to consider.

By the way, a flat 2 protection reduces that rabble's attack to an average of 1.67 damage per hit, which is a lot closer to the 1.56 damage that 1d6-1 gives you. So really, the flat damage reduction should be one less than the one listed (except for the fact that this means that light armor wouldn't protect you at all, but you could always drop it and relabel medium armor as light). But regardless, medium and heavy armor have significant disadvantages, so even with a bit of added protection, they aren't the clear choice for everybody. And BoL is fast and loose with any situational modifiers the GM might throw in (a +1 or -1 here and there) playing a big enough role that such mechanical concerns aren't the big deal they might be in other, heavier, more mechanistic games.

>>49766382
>high adventure campaign about knights?
Use Pendragon. Really.

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>>49766773
Goddammit! Let's try this one more time. Here's a corrected version of that pic (where the armor heading doesn't say "no armor").

>>49765497
>>49760909
Or just tell people not to get it if you don't want to deal with it.

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>>49766409
Just make a lemur character.

It's what I did.

>>49767339
Quite right, but looking at the back grounds I found some of the ones I liked the most (more social/city/political style ones) had this disadvantage.

Lord knows I'll probably never play, but it stood out to me due to it being on two of the backgrounds that caught my eye most.

>>49765497
>>49765545
Trick here is some of these are either real light or crippling.

>>49766409
It's almost as bad as the fact that amazon characters are almost never actual river basins.

>>49767455
>Trick here is some of these are either real light or crippling.
You could rule that something has to at least meet some base level of seriousness, while discouraging shit that's absolutely crippling. And you could fine tune things a bit by having lighter things come up more often, be harder to "save" against, and/or have a larger impact within its realm (the character has a mild case of something serious or a serious case of something mild). In the end, BoL is loosey goosey, so you can just let a player run with something and later call him to task if he's cheesing things or it's never coming into play (making him buy it off and henceforth treating it as a mere quirk, or making him expand it or otherwise make it more serious).

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeZL2R9jDJM

>>49767604
One of the best soundtracks of all time.

>>49761000
I support your endeavour and eagerly await the autismos complaining about nipple shields and WY DUZN'T THEY JUST DRAW THE NIPPLES GAWSH

Anyone have any stories of games they've run or been in?

>>49766868
You realize you can roll attack/damage rolls and defense/armor protection rolls simultaneously as long as you have distinct dice. There's no reason for anything to be slowed down ever. I've done this quite a bit in a similar game called Hackmaster.

>>49770403
Seconding this

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>>49770464
>You realize you can roll attack/damage rolls and defense/armor protection rolls simultaneously as long as you have distinct dice.
You may have bonus / penalty dice to roll, leading to a variable number of d6s (2 to 3) for your attack. Depending on your weapon, you may be rolling a single d6, the higher of 2, or the lower of 2. So combining the rolls would result in 3 to 5 d6s with different numbers going towards attack and damage. So I think it's less confusing (and probably no slower) to just do two separate rolls. As for combining defense and armor rolls, there is no defense roll. Your defense score modifiers your opponent's attack roll.

>I've done this quite a bit in a similar game called Hackmaster.
Hackmaster is pretty much the polar opposite of Barbarians of Lemuria. BoL tries to minimize the stats and math, and provide a quick, simple game. Hackmaster revels in the fiddly stats and figures of AD&D and actually compounds them whenever possible.

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>>49772129

It's my groups go to system, I like it a lot. It has its flaws like any system, but every session has at least one awesome laughing fit, so there's that. Playing a Magician is lots of fun.

I made a BoL subreddit recently but haven't had time to actually do it up and I don't know if there would be enough interest anyway.

>>49772377
I love the girl in this one. "Stand back. I got this. I brought a KNIFE."

>>49767604
Not sure whats wrong with your version but it isnt quite the original:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UTBlatoJXA&list=PL6559658E698E288D&index=2

>>49761000
At first I thought the dagger on his hip was a bracelet on her wrist, like she was trying to give him a handy while he fights off danger

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>>49774482
People have also made the same assumption about the BOL cover in OP's pic.

Anyone have a written or recorded play session of this? Really would like to see it in play.

>>49770403
>>49770579
I ran it briefly for a group that unfortunately dissipated for unrelated reasons.

The group started in a war torn kingdom and got swept up in obtaining rare elements for a ritual that multiple factions wanted to get hold of. The scenario

In hindsight, I wish I'd explained clearly that all characters are bloodthirsty/ambitious adventurers of one stripe or another. I wanted to leave things open ended, but this is not the game for that, I think.

One player wanted to run a bookish scholar and was a little put off that she was also a deadly archer. I was surprised that they were all a little timid, and no one made either a mighty warrior or a sorceror. Two had played some D&D a decade ago, and one was totally new to RPG's

I found it difficult to run combat without running into a pattern of *miss...hit...miss...miss...hit...ok, he's dead". I'd chalk half that up to my being new to the system and figuring out how to describe and run a combat, but it is a pretty blocky, abstract combat engine. I think the game would work best in the hands of a group that really loves pulpy fantasy action and wants to ham up the big, brash archetypes of the genre.

If we had run a longer campaign with it, I think I eventually would have started homebrewing some stuff to give it a little more texture.

The long list of professions and boons/flaws was a little daunting for the noobie group too. This is one reason I now mostly run OSR games--you don't need to weigh too many options, you just pick something and go.

I really appreciate what BoL does, but I feel like I didn't quite figure it out as a GM, at least for that group. My highschool group would have eaten it up back in the day--that was the group that relished playing all martials in 3.5 and playing a band of mighty warriors.

>>49775882
>I found it difficult to run combat without running into a pattern of *miss...hit...miss...miss...hit...ok, he's dead".
Reward people for being descriptive. If the description of an attack is particularly colorful or it's tactically clever/appropriate, give a +1 bonus to hit or damage (or maybe a +1 to both, if it's both). More importantly, let people do stuff like trip or disarm enemies. You can improvise how to do this, but generally you can let them roll their attack as normal with a hit indicating success (if the attack doesn't also do damage) or with a -1 (with reduced damage) or -2 penalty (with full damage). Doing a funky maneuver like this when the opponent's positioning is conducive to it (based on your description of combat) can give them a bonus that might offset whatever penalty they might otherwise incur.

Basically, don't let yourself be fooled into thinking that the lack of a list of combat maneuvers limits your options. It's quite the opposite. A list ends up reducing the game to picking options off a menu. You do A, B, or C. As it is, people can do anything they describe and it's up to you, as GM, to adjudicate the mechanics of that. So just throw some modifier at it and see how things work out. You are under no obligation to do it the same way the next time, and you can make it more or less powerful if you feel like you calibrated things wrong the first time.

>The long list of professions and boons/flaws was a little daunting for the noobie group too.
I'm surprised that's the case for the professions, since it's pretty easy to get a handle on what they're about from their description (and whether it fits with your character concept).

With the boons, have people pick where they're from first, and only look over the boons associated with that place. Picking where you're from is actually one of the trickier things, but you, as GM, could narrow it down a bit for people, so if somebody wants to be from a desert, they're from X...

>>49776280 continued
With the boons, have people pick where they're from first, and only look over the boons associated with that place. Picking where you're from is actually one of the trickier things, but you, as GM, could narrow it down a bit for people, so if somebody wants to be from a desert, they're from X, if somebody wants to be from a jungle, they're from Y, and so forth.

If you're really concerned about your players having option paralysis, make a list of maybe twice as many places as you have players, with a single word or short phrase describing each (jungle, pirate city, etc.).*

>In hindsight, I wish I'd explained clearly that all characters are bloodthirsty/ambitious adventurers of one stripe or another.
Yeah, you want people to be on the same page. You could, of course, give people the noncombatant flaw to reduce their combat abilities and build up their careers, but if the adventure is designed for warriors, this doesn't exactly solve the problem. It would, however, address the scholar's being forced to be a badass archer.

>This is one reason I now mostly run OSR games--you don't need to weigh too many options, you just pick something and go.
I think maybe it's already baked into the cultural consciousness, but D&D has a fair amount of stuff you need to understand going in (weapon and armor restrictions, the way spells work, saving throws, which modifiers apply to what, etc.).

*If they're unhappy with something about that place after they read about it, you can point them to another, similar place as a backup.

>>49774482
>>49774943
Hey, a man who fights hard deserves a reward.

I've yet to run i tbut I found the PDF for the Legendary edition in a /tg/ thread ages ago and it's always been something I want to try running.

Reading it through again now, I'd never taken a proper look at the magic rules before, I love the way that works - I like D&D as much as the next guy, but the fussiness of looking up spells and their stats always puts me off playing magic-users and gives me headaches when I DM.

I feel like the system would really suit a Star Wars campaign, particularly just swapping out the 'magnitude' magic system for using the force (I like the simplicity of the D6 Star Wars system but never bothered with force-users since I hate specific force 'powers' in games), switching out career names for their Star Wars equivalent (pirate or thief to 'smuggler' or 'scoundrel', etc.) and coming up with a Boon based on whatever species you choose.

Didn't realise there was a newer edition too, downloading Mythic and taking a look, I'll probably run this next time I get a chance for a game.

>>49754869

I think it's pretty good, and possibly the next TTRPG I will play.

By the way, does anyone have the "premium monster cards" for BoL? What about the Lemurian Legends series of adventures? Both seem nice resources for the fledging BoL game master. Thanks in advance!

>>49778302
Should've been "a man who fights hard needs a hand".

In case you want to learn more about the history of Lemuria in order to better put things into context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwCaZaSon9A

>>49767604
>>49774057
Best version of Anvil of Crom incoming: https://youtu.be/4XsTt3UYYOA

Adds a lot of brass.

By Crom, this thread needs a bump