70 pages of goodness, wow!
Now I have to find some time to actually read it (=
But it looks really good. Grab an awesome point.

Update!

This book has been fine-tuned further, answering some difficulties I had with the previous draft. Nine more templates! Even more talents, including the group and swarm combat talents!

* Concepts for half-breeds and unusual circumstances growing up.
* One-page reference with all 37 template level titles 1-4.
* Adventuring motivations for all templates.
* New robust equipment at generation, including an "adventurer's pack" to pull unexpected items to hand.
* An updated list of open and restricted talents.
* Occupational talents, for non-adventurers and characters both--the middle ground between a day job and an inherent ability.
* 37 templates, so you can randomize on 4d10 if you want.
* Streamlined character creation including how to learn languages, arts, and musical instruments--everything you need to make a character here.
* More!

I'll have a blog entry on this later, but for now, you are welcome to go check it out for a sneak preview. If you have any thoughts on this updated book (an additional 17 pages of content) I'd like to hear them.

I have greatly benefited from logging some actual play time with this system. I hope you like the results.

This is interesting, lots of content here! :)

That said, I'm bothered by some of the terminology. Also, I feel like the new talents weren't written in the spirit of OSH. There seems to be more detail in undesired areas where abstraction would have been fine, among other things.

Of course, everyone is drawn to OSH by different things so maybe how you view the game's spirit doesn't mirror my own vision. Regardless, great work. :D

Of course different people have different play styles. My main rule of thumb was to leave room for interesting usage, while answering the questions that I think players and DMs would have when the talent comes into play.

What is NOT fun is players and DMs spending game time disagreeing about how to interpret a talent, especially if a player (or DM) takes actions assuming one interpretation and the other interprets totally differently. I'm more interested in clarity and flexibility than flexibility through ambiguity. Still, people can adjust usage through house ruling (or just not take things that don't seem to fit.)

If a talent is too ambiguous, and a DM interprets it one way in a session, the DM must either interpret from scratch next time and lose consistency, or remember how the ruling went last time. That's not fun, for me.

For example, the Hunter talent "Butchery" gives information on value and timeline and food servings for animals. Sure, the DM could make something up, or just say "it works for this situation." The talent description detail shouldn't make that usage impossible. But sometimes the DM wants a little more help in knowing (ballpark) how much food they can get from a deer, or the players get enthusiastic about skinning a displacer beast and think they can do it in 10 minutes. At that point the DM can shrug and say "yeah, sure, but I'll need 3 Awesome Points" but also has the talent description to fall back on for general guidelines so the DM isn't forced to make up how the details work each game session--and remember what the DM made up last time. (If it took an hour to skin a deer two weeks ago, it should take about an hour to skin a deer next time too.)

If a DM interprets a talent one way, regardless what the book says, and the player disagrees, a fast way through is for the DM to shrug and say "well that's how it works this time" and toss some Awesome Points into the bowl.

A central design principle as I was working on this was to make characters that players would think were totally awesome. Ideally every player thinks they are getting away with something because their character is so cool and meshes so well with their play style, and they are eager to play.

All that being said, I'm interested in what detail seems unhelpful and out of step with the spirit of the game. After all, I'm doing a big revision right now tidying things up, so this is a chance for me to improve.

The Beastmaster Animal Empathy talent is an amplification of the inherent "Master of Beasts" ability. The inherent ability allows empathic communication and a measure of control. Animal Empathy gives more detailed empathic information, and also source of the emotion, animal gender, and animal goals.

Thanks for checking in!

The "details that don't interest my players" bit is hard to estimate, in my experience. Good players tend to push the envelope and explore what they can do and how they can use their various abilities. OSH has a great counter for that, with the AP economy, so a minimum of rules can be very flexible. Still, I like to help out with some structure. =) I have dealt with many players that want to argue about my interpretation of the rules, and like to sulk if they don't get their way--not in the spirit of OSH at all. If I can minimize that friction I will.

You bring up an interesting point with the idea of using wound boxes as the basis for the saving-throw-style resistance. I use that for both people and animals/monsters. Consider the example of a dragon. If it had 15 health levels, it would get 1d12+15 on the roll. The Beastmaster would have to count on the dragon rolling low and the PC spending lots of Awesome Points to affect it. However, if the dragon got pounded on and reduced to 5 wounds, the chances of affecting it are much higher.

The DM doesn't have to stat up the dragon's Commitment--the wound bonus is probably enough. This gets back to Basic D&D in some ways, with saving throws based on hit dice. Another real advantage is, an injured animal is more vulnerable to the Beastmaster.

So, if the DM doesn't think the dragon should be controllable, the DM could give the dragon +5 Commitment, as well as 15 wounds, and be willing to feed the bowl for bonuses on the roll--and if the dragon is injured, it could flee rather than surrender. Or, if the DM agrees it could be interesting to control the dragon, NOT give it a Commitment bonus, not boost its roll with APs to the bowl, and see how it turns out. (This could depend on the personality of the dragon in question.)

As for minions and guards and character/monster level, those titles aren't needed if you go straight to wound boxes. It preserves some balance, with "tougher to put down=tougher to control." Also allows flexibility, with "injured=easier to control."

A system-wide consistency is also helpful here. Consider "Companionship." By limiting the wounds of the companion(s) to the Commitment attribute, in general you keep it to 5 wounds or less to begin; otherwise that could be unbalancing--if one character has a dragon mount with 15 wounds, that might irritate the other players. Working by tier, could a low-level character get a very big monster as a companion? I'd hesitate to say "yes" or "no" too quickly. Using wounds a the criteria, the Beastmaster could keep raising Commitment to make space for a bigger companion. If the Beastmaster starts with 5 Commitment and 10 levels later has 15, then yeah--a dedicated 10th level character could have a dragon mount.

Also, using wounds allows for more than one animal companion without allowing too many or getting complicated. A big cat might take up 5, or you could have 2 ferrets, a hawk, and a horse (2 wounds) for 5. Looking at "Vitality" it makes sense that borrowing your big cat's vitality (get 5 APs) is more effective than borrowing from your ferret (1 AP).

Why go deeper with Animal Empathy? Animals will mostly be pretty inarticulate, and being able to get more information faster is important. "Master of Beasts" will tell the character the horse is frightened, was threatened. "Animal Empathy" will tell you the horse is spooked--because of a rattlesnake over there, and it wants to go back to the camp over the ridge that way. Knowing the dragon is pregnant is an important piece of information to add when going hunting! Of course, the Beastmaster can drop 3 Awesome Points and use Animal Empathy without having purchased it, so that further information is always available for a price.

Talent interpretation and usefulness will always have a lot to do with preferred play style. None of this is intended to be defensive, but instead to show how I got where I ended up.

I am pleased that you like the necromancer and ninja. Sure, go ahead and use the Flashbang Exit--it's core ninja stuff. =)

I put in the death talents but also put in a cost--giving up the attribute bonus on a level is serious stuff.

Anyway, thanks for continuing to look through my material and continuing the discussion.

"Fictive's Talents and Templates, 2012 Edition" is on my site for you to enjoy.

http://fictivefantasies.wordpress.com/old-school-hack-resources/
http://fictivefantasies.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/fictives-talents-and-templates-2012.pdf

Forty templates. Hundreds of new talents. A deeper magic system for clerics and wizards. Backgrounds to add to characters, so they can learn languages, musical skill, arts, contacts, ruling domains, making your gear magical, switching base templates, riding horses, and so on.

Now you can play an in-depth campaign well past four levels. You can improve existing talents (including spells!); the rules for doing so fit on less than a page, and I underlined all the easily adaptable bits on all the talents. I split talents into open, restricted, and exclusive levels of availability, and provide summaries of available talents. I even included a single-page summary of how to pick and choose from the available material to do specific settings and genres!

All the original rules that the players would need (everything but monster rules) are in the book, so you only need one book handy as you play.

Seriously, folks, if you enjoy Old School Hack you should go have a look. It's free!

Merry Christmas.