Inventory — Advanced Old School Revival

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OSR+ is an inventory-light system that relies on a Schrodinger-esque concept of supply to lighten the mental load for players and the GM alike. In the game, gear is categorized as follows:

Armament, which includes weapons, armor, and shields;
Treasure, which includes magic items and magical armament;
Declared supply, which are items that take up space in your inventory;
Supply, which are undeclared items that do not take up space in your inventory.

The core rules specify the value in gold for each of these different types of gear.

Discovering Supply

When players interrogate the fiction (such as "loot the body" or "search the room for supplies") and there is good reason for "stuff" to be found in the room, have the player roll a d6 to determine the type of supply they find:

1 - 3: The PC discovers a consumable;
4 - 5: The PC discovers a cheap;
6: The PC discovers a luxury.

You can also "type" the supply if you think that the supply they discover would only yield items of a specific type. For example, if they discover supply in an alchemist's laboratory, you can tell the player they've discovered a consumable of the type "alchemical," which means the player can only declare items from this type of supply that have something to do with alchemy.

Discovering Treasure

As an optional rule, you can permit players to discover treasure as well. If they roll a 6, have them explode the die. If the exploded die is also a 6, then the PC discovers a treasure rather than a luxury item.

Inventory Slots

The core rules specify that PCs have a number of inventory slots to carry gear equal to 10 plus their Mighty attribute before they are encumbered. This represents all the space available in their bags and on their person, not a treasure chest they might be bringing with them on a horse-drawn carriage or their pet Clockwerk who carries their extra belongings in its robotic belly. For those special contexts, grant the PC additional inventory slots commensurate with the sort of space afforded by that storage.

If you're playing on paper, it's probably easier to treat inventory slots as 1:1 with items—a single item occupies a single slot. The Character Creator follows optional rules where each type of gear occupies an amount of slots equal to its size, as indicated in the Item Size in Character Creator Table.

Slots & Common Sense

Although you can use the slots system to determine exactly how much a PC can carry, don't let the rules-as-written override the common sense of the fiction. For example, a particularly strong PC (let's say their Mighty is 7), has 17 slots to work with—10 plus 7 from Mighty. A suit of armor only occupies 5 slots, but that doesn't mean it makes sense for the PC to be carrying around three suits of armor just because the rules say they occupy fewer slots than the PC has available in their inventory. The GM is well within his rights as an arbiter of the fiction to apply the rules of encumbrance when a PC's inventory gets out of hand like this.

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