This was my favorite thread on the old r/OSR. So is your favorite system/systems?
I’ll start:
Basic Fantasy - BF gets overlooked a lot because the print books are sold at cost so I think it ends up being a lot of peoples introduction to OSR, but I keep coming back to it. The modules are really well written.
Old School Essentials - Just got the Rules Tome and I love it, though I haven’t had the change to dig into a game with it yet.
Swords & Wizardry my review of Revised - OD&D rather than B/X which is very cartoony. Much more, uh, complete than White Box, much simpler than AD&D, really a great sweet spot.
Advanced Fighting Fantasy, Troika!, etc. - great simple game, minimalist rules, setting-as-system in Troika’s case.
Monsters! Monsters! is replacing Tunnels & Trolls, which has been bought & sold a couple times now and is in limbo. M!M! runs all the T&T adventures, esp. the solos, and is a great pick-up game.
I love the adventures for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, but the system’s been neglected, the Referee book is still not out, there’s no monster book, etc. But the adventures work in any OSR game with minor tweaking.
I’ll have to check out Swords and Wizardry. I have played some Lamentations before. That game always yields … unique results. :)
There is a monster book, but it’s a book about generating monsters rather than using existing ones. This is a deliberate choice that’s explicitly stated in the guidance Raggi gives to writers interested in submitting new content you can find posted… uh… somewhere.
I am aware, I have Random Esoteric Creature Generator, been playing LotFP stuff since the original DFD, Grindhouse, & Green Devil Faces. But the problem is RECG helps you stock an exceptional monster or two. If you want a dungeon with many monsters, where the challenge is more strategic than “how do we stop the unstoppable armpit-licker from licking our armpits?”, you need a bestiary. And its game balance is different enough you do want stats customized to it.