foolcat

Thank you, much appreciated. I have thus completed my Chaosium online store order earlier today. Getting a voucher for the printed copy after having purchased the PDF is quite unique AFAIK, and I concur it should be advertised as prominently as possible. Most other publisher stores I know of "only" offer free PDF files with the hardcopy purchase. Alas, I sometimes end up buying stuff I intend to work with for a project or another on DTRPG for a second time anyway, just for the convenience of having it in their library app, which I use across several devices (plus, it keeps file versions current). The publishers don't mind, I guess... 😁

Hey David, do you know whether you will have copies in stock at SPIEL fair in Essen, Germany later this week? I'd love to say hi and grab my copy, especially if I can claim the coupon for my PDF purchase there. 😁

On page 45, skill description for Hide, in the paragraph for System Notes, the fourth sentence reads: Someone hiding should keep as still as possible; moving while using Hide Difficult, and moving more than a meter in a combat round requires both Hide and Stealth rolls. I feel the verb in the second part is missing, and the part should read […] moving while using Hide is Difficult, […]

Nephilim is deeply rooted in the Jewish Kabbalah, and more specifically, in the Hermetic Qabalah. Its use of the Tarot, Alchemy/Astrology, and Western Magic/esotericism for game systems and character descriptions is rather blatant. 😉 This is the exact reason why I was drawn to it like the proverbial moth to the flame when it was published back in the mid-90s. I just wish that Chaosium would revisit it at some point in time, preferably within the century, but alas! And to answer @Zulfikar Zaban’s original question: while I definitely came into contact with Germanic & Nordic myths and sagas during my inadvertently humanistic education, I didn’t find them particularly thrilling at the time (still can’t look a Wagner opera in the eye, they bore me to tears). Later on, I developed a layman’s interest in psychology, viz CG Jung, and constructivists like Watzlawick. I first came into contact with Chaosium RPGs in the early 90s, and I play them to this day; I guess one reason is that their topos revolves around, or even invokes, myths.

Holy moly, I can’t wait to get my hands on this! Thanks for the update!

I’d go with “Herrscher des Binnenmeers”, and then André’s subtitle. And I still would like to get my hands on it rather sooner than later... 🙃

The problem I have with using doubles is uneven distribution: on a better than half chance of success (54%), 11, 22, 33, and 44 are crits (4%), while 55, 66, 77, 88, 99, and 00 are fumbles (6%). Even when defining 01 as a crit as well, it’s still 5% vs. 6%. In RQ, I‘ve always used to ballpark it when looking at dice, telling me at a glance whether it’s even worth checking if a crit or a fumble occurred. Given that it’s relevant to the in-game situation in the first place. Assuming most skills in the lifetime of a competent adventurer are somewhere between 30 and 90%: 01 is always a crit, and 2–4 are good candidates for skills up to 90%. 00 is always a fumble, and 97–99 are fumbles for skills below 30%. Special success are even more easy to determine: just left-shift the decimal point and double the number. 😉

Well, the good folks over at EN World seem thrilled about the return of HeroQuest the board game, and the crowdfunding is doing great. The confounding situation surrounding the term HeroQuest just became a lot less confounded. Good move, Chaosium!

Well, apart from a short, introductory period of playing the very first edition of Das Schwarze Auge (The Dark Eye) in the mid-80s, my roleplaying "career" really started when I went off to university (a.k.a. college) and met with the right people. Campaigning wasn't that much of an issue over the course of the 90s, it just happened. WEG's D6 Star Wars, Warhammer FRP (thank ye gods for Warpstone & Hogshead), RuneQuest (both on Glorantha and in home-brew settings), the works. Granted, my pals and me were all students back then, and playing late into the night on weekdays was a no-brainer. There was ample time for GM prep work as well, oftentimes during lectures (they still haven't managed to find definitive proof whether P=NP btw, but I can't really blame this on my lack of attention back then). The only game that gravitated heavily towards short-lived adventures was Call of Cthulhu, for reasons I quite can't put my tentacles on. Then life, work, and family happened, and roleplaying frequency naturally took a steep dive. One-off sessions, few and far in between, became the meagre norm. For this reason I consider myself very lucky today to have found a group of friends both old and new, 8 people including me, which has been a staple to stable RPG session provisioning over the past four years. We usually manage to meet for two days on a weekend, every five to eight weeks (even in times like these), and people literally would have to be too sick to join in by Skype to miss it. Four of us infrequently rotate in and out as GM, with a somewhat broad portfolio of interests, genres and systems. Among other things, we've terrorized the Deadlands (SW), sunk flying ships in Sundered Skies (or did we fly sinking ships? SW again), involuntarily laid waste to Middenheim ("Waddayamean, we brought an artifact of Khorne into the waiting hands of a chaos cult?!", WFRP 2E), had a stunningly frightening police procedural in 1948 New York City (Film Noir RPG), a catastrophically dysfunctional road movie in 1974 California right afterwards (well, we did play started out as a group of drug-running white trailer trash; Film Noir RPG), and for the last year and a half or so, smote infidels and heretics left and right in the name of the Holy Inquisition (WH40k Dark Heresy, with a pinch of Rogue Trader, Deathwatch and Only War thrown in). It's been fun!

...aaand bought! Print version as well, I‘m sure it will look nicely next to the core rule book in my shelf.

One could imagine a fictional weapon system that, prior to firing its actual damaging load of electricity (arc weapons) or plasma (blaster weapons), ionizes a tunnel of air in between the muzzle and the target by deploying a burst of a high-energy beam first (like a UV or x-ray laser).

Ah, whatever. It won’t be shipped via USPS, so my copy of the M-Space companion is sold anyway. 😄 Looking forward to it!

I wouldn’t mind b/w printing, at all. What I do mind are shipping costs in relation to product price; but IIRC, both Lulu and DTRPG fulfill POD orders from Poland (for EU orders, that is).

Will the companion again be available as POD via Lulu? I was quite happy with the quality and price tag of the M-Space book.

Oh, a tarot skill fits wonderfully into the world of the Mythos. Excellent tool to give characters some insights, frights, red herrings, or paranoia. Adds flavor and atmosphere to the game. But if players start to rely too much on it or try using it as a shortcut too often, well... there is The Key and Guardian of the Gate out there, who jealously guards ALL knowledge. Gaining his attention isn’t necessarily in their best interest, lest this card may come up more frequently: “Does this black blob look like Hastur to you?”