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Trifletraxor

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    THE LAUNDRY - A RPG based on the Laundry Files novels by Charles Stross

    in Basic Roleplaying

    Posted · Edited by Trifletraxor

    the-laundry.jpgThere are things out there, in the weirder reaches of space-time where reality is an optional extra. Horrible things, usually with tentacles. Al-Hazred glimpsed them, John Dee summoned them, HP Lovecraft wrote about them, and Alan Turing mapped the paths from our universe to theirs. The right calculation can call up entities from other, older universes, or invoke their powers. Invisibility? Easy! Animating the dead? Trivial! Binding lesser demons to your will? Easily doable! Opening up the way for the Great Old Ones to come through and eat our brains? Unfortunately, much too easy.

    That’s where the Laundry comes in – it’s a branch of the British secret service, tasked to prevent hideous alien gods from wiping out all life on Earth (and more particularly, the UK). You work for the Laundry. The hours are long, the pay is sub-par, the co-workers are… interesting (in the Chinese curse sense of the word), and the bureaucracy is stifling – but you do get to wave basilisk guns and bullet wards around, and to go on challenging and exciting missions to exotic locations like quaint, legend-haunted Wigan, cursed Slough and Wolverhampton where the walls are thin. You may even get to save the world. Just make sure you get a receipt.

    The Laundry roleplaying game is based on the award-winning Laundry series (The Atrocity Archives, The Jennifer Morgue, The Fuller Memorandum) by the even-more-award-winning Charles Stross.

    In this book, you’ll find:

    •Computational demonology, summoning extradimensional horrors, and three ways to use a shotgun to banish alien monsters.

    •A history of the Laundry and the other occult intelligence agencies

    •Classified briefings on known threats and monstrous horrors

    •Streamlined rules for character creation, investigation and combat

    •Three ready-to-play missions

    By Gareth Hanrahan, Jason Durall and John Snead. 278 pages. Published by Cubicle 7 September 2010.

    How do you promote "good" roleplaying?

    in Basic Roleplaying

    Posted

    It is a difficult question. Usually I do not punish the players for being the bad guys in a RPG. It might be the way they want to play it and it might be the way they experience fun. The question is, if the way they like it overlaps with yours. So I think you should probably ask them, what their intention is and how they would like to have the way a game moves on.

    The thing is, they're not "evil" in that sense, they just seem to lack the drive to to anything that's not connected to increasing their power.

    The Allegiance rules did a wonderful thing, because I did not need to work out relationships and detailed impacts of their actions, but I simply could roll on the Allegiance to see wether the NPCs recognise the group or not - and what they knew of them.

    ...

    Overall, in the beginning I was ... "emotionally upset" about their actions, but after the Allegiance rules came in, I got a lot of fun out of it. It wasn't that I played against them, no, it was more that I enjoyed them seeing to get over to roleplaying the situations they got themselves into.

    After about two sessions they changed from a slaying group of bandits to a more or less (probably less) group of friendly adventurers. But it was fun, I did see their intention to "not care about others" changing to "I need to do this to archive my goal".

    That said, they sill murdered, robbed or stole from others when in the wild, but they tried to cover their tracks now. I had a nice session where they had to get rid of an other band of adventurers which had set out for bounty hunting - and the players were the targets. It was a game of cat and mouse, many many sessions long, ending very tragic for the PCs in the end. But it was a good ending, and the players (and I) loved every session of it.

    You can play the bad guys sometime, but even then you have to play by rules - rules of the society and people around you.

    Hmmm... Alliegiance could be a thing to use. I'll have to look into those rules more.

    To deal with this you need to talk to your players, explain what you are looking for out of the game and feel like you are not getting. Hopefully, they will meet you somewhere in the middle and change their play style. If not, maybe it is time to let someone else GM for a while or look for players who want the same thing out of the game you do.

    That could be a good idea. I'll do that during the next char-gen, see if someone can be tricket into playing out some other motivations.

    Thanks guys!

    SGL.

    Alternative Experience System

    in Basic Roleplaying

    Posted

    Brave/Cowardly; Chaste/Lustful; Energetic/Lazy; Forgiving/Vengeful; Generous/Selfish; Honest/Deceitful; Just/Arbitrary; Merciful/Cruel; Modest/Proud; Pious/Worldly; Prudent/Reckless; Temperate/Indulgent; Trusting/Suspicious + 'Passions' = Love/Hate/Loyalty for something (by 'ad hoc' I just mean some chosen thing/s - there's not a fixed list).

    Though the 5.1 PDF still has it as Pious/Worldly, errata on Greg's page has changed this to Otherworldly/Worldly. Pious (Piety) becomes a Passion... Essentially Love (God<s>).

    Aren't those the same pairs that appear in the BGB on pages 294-295?

    The pairs in the BGB are: aggressive/passive, impulsive/cautious, extrovert/introvert, optimistic/pessimistic, stubborn/receptive, physical/mental, patient/nervous, emotional/calm, trusting/suspicious, leader/follower, greedy/generous,energetic/lazy, honorable/dishonorable, brave/cowardly, curious/incurious, dependable/unreliable, pious/irreligious, honest/dishonest, clever/dull, humorous/dour and innovative/conservative (at least in the zero edition).

    Okay, now how do you use these traits? The BGB 0 only describes it as something to use for NPCs.

    SGL.

    How do you promote "good" roleplaying?

    in Basic Roleplaying

    Posted

    I'm had some problems with my regular group of players for a couple of campaigns now, which is is that their characters seem to only be motivated by increasing their level of power. I moved over to the Hârn setting (gritty and low fantasy) to lessen the impact of magic, but they're still as amoral as ever.

    I've followed the traits discussion with interest, but unsure if game mechanics to guide play is the way to go. I also like the gritty feel of BRP, so the more heroic narrative games are also out of the question for me.

    What rituals have you used to battle the munchkin curse?

    SGL.

    Deus Vult

    in Legend

    Posted

    It's BRP powered stand alone game based on the Laundry novels by Charles Stross - so I'd say it deserves a separate thread at least -

    Certainly! I just didn't know it was out yet. Cubicle 7 still has as a october release, but the pdf was obviously released at RPGNow first. I'll get around to it shortly.

    albeit I suspect that the "Supplements & Monographs" section should be renamed "Publications"

    Good idea.

    and then sub-divided in to several sections: I'd suggest "Monographs" (content obvious), "Supplements" (non-mongraph books that require a core book - where Deus Vult, Clockwork & Chivalry and Crusaders of the Amber Coast would go) and "Compatible Games" (which is where threads on e.g. Call of Cthulhu, The laundry or Stormbringer should go).

    I'm trying to keep the number of forums limited, to maintain a reasonable activity in those that are up. Creating publication threads for all the supplements from MRQ and CoC would drown out all the BRP supplements and mean a lot of work. I think discussing those products in the main forum should do it, especially as they also receive a lot of attention on other sites.

    SGL.

    BRP Imperial China

    in Basic Roleplaying

    Posted

    And the cover and a new blurb is out:

    The Celestial Empire

    the-celestial-empire.jpgThe Celestial Empire is an old phrase used in Classical Chinese to describe the Chinese Empire. In the original Chinese writing, the phrase literally reads ‘Heavenly dynasty’ – ‘Large country’, which renders both the size of the country and the fact that the emperor was considered as having directly been mandated by Heaven. This book is thus a historically accurate roleplaying game about Imperial China. Yet history-based does not mean boring: depending on the game master’s inspiration, ‘The Celestial Empire’ may capture the exotic bewilderment of The Journey to the West, the virile excitement of The Water Margin, the investigative astuteness of Judge Dee, or the kinetic fantasy from Hong Kong fiction! Included with the setting is also a fully-fledged introductory adventure and several adventure seeds.

    160 pages. The author is Gianni Vacca, aka GianniVacca from the forum. Expected to be in stock at Cubicle 7 from december 2010.

    Deus Vult

    in Legend

    Posted

    I know MRQ2 is not officially a direct descendant of BRP; I would think it could be considered a cousin to the system. Why not have a threads in the Supplements section of the forum to deal with Deus Vult, Elric, Lankhmar, Clockwork & Chilvary, etc

    MRQ is certainly a related system, and together with Call of Cthulhu and OpenQuest, they have lots of supplements that can be used for BRP. There's also many good products for the older incarnations of BRP. The main reason that the supplements & monographs section only have "new" BRP products is that including all related products would just mean too much work. But all these products are open for discussion in the main forum, so just open the threads here. :)

    SGL.

    Gloranthan Classics on DTRPG

    in Glorantha

    Posted

    I had presumed that because the original team haven't collaborated in such a long time, that there may have been 'issues' - I guess not.

    Biggest issues would be copyright issues, but Greg was never fond of RQ for his Glorantha, even killed RQ4 dead in the tracks because of it.

    I love Rick's books, but I suspect that owning the RQ2 ruleset makes them all the better. What about people that can't get hold of the original RQ2 ruleset? There are significant differences between RQ2 and RQ3. Don't know about MRQ2, but I guess this is substantially different too.

    eBay is your friend! Or BRP with the correct options. MRQ2 would be even more different.

    OTOH, the fragmented approach has had the benefit of a lot of new material, with very different focuses, appearing in recent years. And, to be honest, a lot of it can be stripped of stats and used with whatever system you prefer to use. Its not difficult to convert RQ materials to HQ, and HQ materials are almost stat-free, so I don't think the fragmentation has harmed Glorantha at all. I think its strengthened it.

    I'm going to buy Kingdom of Sartar and the Sartar Companion when it's out and give it a go. But I am sceptic. I've tried converting some of the older Hero Wars scenarios before without luck. The type of play was just not what RQ is meant for. And HQ Glorantha is so monumentally different to the "old" Glorantha.

    Watch out for 'Pavis Rises' then... :)

    I'll be giving MRQ another chance when it's out. ;)

    SGL.

    BRP Classics: STORMBRINGER - The Young Kingdoms

    in Stormbringer

    Posted

    ...and Loz has meshed a passion system into this version which explicitally fulfils your PC motivation requirements. ;)

    Does it work? I have had some of the same problems with my group, with some of the players being only interested in money and power, and the characters being amoral at best. I do have some problems with having rules guide the PCs actions though.

    SGL.

    BRP Classics: STORMBRINGER - The Young Kingdoms

    in Stormbringer

    Posted

    Wait, does this mean we can't have multiple Stormbringer threads if they're about different subjects?

    Stormbringer is a topic which is not up for discussion that often, you will f.ex. allmost never see two threads about the old game on the first page at the same time. Once they drop behind the first page they usually disappear, and the forum search function isn't really that good. The in-thread search function on the other hand, is great. This thread is linked to from the first post of the stickied thread, which makes it always easy to find. The intention behind it is to give Stormbringer some more attention, but the strategy can be re-evaluated if people here think it's not really a good idea.

    SGL.

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