Puck

I was playing around with the idea of the craft skill. I was hoping to come up with something that would work well in a fantasy setting(blacksmiths, leather workers) and increase higher skilled crafter's chances of making superior weapons, armor, and other items at a regular basis without going too far overboard. The following is a rough of what I came up with: Optional Rule for Crafting. If a character rolls a special roll during the crafting of a item they may add a virtue to the item. If they roll a critical they may add three virtues to the item. Once a character is successful with their initial crafting skill and the item in question is created they may continue to work on and refine the item, attempting to add virtues to the crafted work by rolling a special or critical success. Each further roll a crafter makes, his skill is at –25% and requires an additional amount of time equal to the original crafting. A failure means that the item is finished and no further work can gain any special benefits. A simple success allows a character to roll again at a further –25%, a fumble will destroy the item. On a special roll a the crafter may add one virtue to the item in question. On a critical they may add two virtues. Virtues: Increased Balance/ Function +5% to skills up to 15% Light/ easy to carry/ well balanced: 2/3 normal weight. Superior appearance: Half again normal value. Sturdier: increases hps +20% Weapons: +1 damage up to +3 Armor Virtues: +1 Ap The crafters skill may be increased by the following: Meticulous: Doubles normal crafting time +5%. Superior tools or workshop: +5 to +15%. Superior material, +5% to +20%. certain types of magic may also add to the characters craft skill. Any Suggestions? Would this work? Note: The idea for additional rolls to refine or further increase the results of a skill roll is not my own. It was suggested by Soltakss as a way of increasing potency of herbs and potions by use of an alchemy skill. It seemed to work rather well in play though and I thought it might work well with crafting as well.

I would certainly buy such a monograph. Do not plan on quitting your day job though. Monographs do not pay very much. It will probably cost you more than you get out of it in the long run. Instead just do it because you enjoy writing them up and be glad that someone is willing to print it. I started posting a fantasy setting idea called The Green on the websight and had a great time. I thought it would be cool to get it on the monograph line up and eventually get it in printed form. At the request of Chaosium, I took the notes down off the site and now I work on the setting in a bit of a vacuum (not as much fun). I still wonder if trying to do the monograph was the right way to go and I often wonder if I will ever finish it. The thing is, working on the Green has really given me a whole new facet to the hobby. Anyway, if you enjoy working on the magic systems, contact Dustin at Chaosium and see what he has to say but do not plan on making a ton of money.

Holy smoke! :shocked: That is quit a list Frogspawner. There are several very interesting things you wrote there. I like your ideas for Martial skills and special abilities. Thanks for sharing :thumb:

Whoops I posted the last bit before I read this. I do think... only think that your Rune Warriors would be tougher than your sorcerers. Direct damage spells could even up the pot a little. I have not really played with it but using magic allows a few Potentially powerful spells but may not allow a ton of spell variety. It would make your spellcasters more different from your Rune Warriors than if you use sorcery. A big thing is how much each rune costs and how do they stack and are their limits to stacking? Can a Rune Warrior have a bunch of damage boosting Runes on his sword or only one?

If it would help at all I have been working on a magic system based on Runic or Glyphic or realms. They are adopted to a forest/ jungle setting and each Glyph grants a series of spells. In order to become talented in a Glyph a character must pay 1 permanent Pow. Afterward they may learn spells associated with the Glyph and cast them with a beginning glyphic skill equal to their Int+Pow. In many ways it is similar to MRQ Rune magic, but there are a lot more spells associated with each individual Glyph. Many of the Glyphs are varied animal Totems, granting spells associated with the particular animal types. I realize it is not what you were originally after but if you are interested at all let me know and I can send you a copy. I would post it but it is quite lengthy.

This does not seem so bad. Dedicated Pow was a bit wonkie in MRQ, but your idea would work differently... I think. Now I do not have a BRP Skill of 100% either, and others on this forum have a much better grasp of the rules than I do. I guess a big question is how many Runes do you want beginning characters to have and how fast do you want them to increase? How do they get Runes? Would they start with a number similar to the number of spells a sorcerer would use? Under the dedicated system you have there they could start with quite a few Runes but they could never go over your Pow so they would not increase much after the start. Another question is how much you want the Runes to cost in Pow? If you look at sorcery there are three basic types of spells that have the effects I think you are looking to have: Skill enhancements +20 per point. (Shouldn't include combat skills). Characteristic enhancements +3 per point Weapon or armor/protection enhancements +1 damage per point. Old School Spells also added 5% to combat skill as well but you may want the skill to be a separate rune entirely. If each Pow level did the same thing a spell did. You could dole these out to runes fairly simply. This may get you up and going on the Rune thing until you thought of a few more variable and unique powered Runes. I have not thought of all the damages this could do to game balance though. A big bonus to those using permanent Runes is that they do not have to spend a round casting spells before combat the way other sorcerers do. I believe this is really a huge, huge advantage, at least in the way we play and you may want to adjust their cost in Pow to make up for this difference.

The word that strikes me here is "permanent", and I have been fumbling with similar things myself while trying to work on a less epic, lower powered scale and setting. I may be off base here but what I think you are looking for is permanent powers that are alway "on" in return for a permanent sacrifice of Pow. What I would do is take a look through the Powers sections with an emphasis on Sorcery, Mutations and Superpowers making a list of powers that would fit into your perceptions of what tattoo or weapon Runes would grant. If you are playing soon you could begin with a small list. Then give each of the Powers a point cost. If you want characters to start with a lot of runes, you may want to dish out extra Pow during character creation.

Thanks for the answer That is kind of what I thought, but I was afraid I may be missing an important rule along the way or something. As I generally play or have played kind of lower level campaigns (even in the old days when I played often), the huge damage producing things are somewhat of a rarity. I do remember a few shields getting chewed up in the old RQ3 though. If I remember right we never bothered rolling damage against most parrys to see if damage got through. It was only when there was some beefy monster, someone made a landed a particularly good hit, or someone's shield was already showing wear that we actually rolled for damage. It did not seem to slow things down to much, but then it was a long time ago and my memory seems to be malfunctioning a lot lately.

Two other instances I really loved out of Holywood were The Robert Taylor Ivanhoe where his shield is slowly bashed to pieces by a mace-and-chain, and El-Cid where he uses his saddle as a shield and it get cut to pieces by a two handed sword. They may not be very realistic, but they sure are cool and characterful fights and I like a cool characterful feeling in my role-playing combats even at a little cost of possible realism. I loved the way shields got beat to pieces in old RQ. I kind of like the new(old) rule option. As the rule stands now what is the advantage of Sorcerer's Bulwark? I kind of feel like I am missing something with that spell.

Woo Hoo! Good news. Ouch! I wish you would not have reminded me of this. When I buy PDFs of gaming supplements I never quite enjoy reading through them as much and certainly do not read them as well or often as the dead tree versions. They generally sit in some lost file in the nether reaches of my computer. So now the question is do I buy this immediately or do I wait for the dead tree version?:confused:

What a wonderful work! Great job Fergo. This is very cool, useful, attractive, and fun to read. :thumb:

As I dug through my old gaming magazines and started looking through old Different Worlds articles it occurred to me that it would be nice to see these in print again. Different Worlds was by far my favorite gaming magazine and with the release of BRP much of their content may become relevant or at least in demand again. Is their any possibility of anyone reprinting of any of these issues? I only really have scattered issues, but the content is really first rate. I would certainly buy and reasonably priced reprints.

I have issue 22 but not 23. The Traveler article is 6 (smaller type) pages long and does look rather interesting. The rest of the issue is all fantasy stuff though so may be of limited interest to you. The article itself looks like a real gem though and goes into a great deal of detail and would be very interesting to you. It details Terrax Corporation, a megacorporation who specializes in terraforming. The sections are History, Terrax Policy, What is a Worthy Planet(Subdivided into Location, Unusual Value, Military value, Monied Interest and Whim), and The Initial Survey (large detailed section). It also has the plans and specs for their Long Range Scout and the Terrax Lab Ship.

What is essential and what is non-essential has been a topic I have been discussing a lot with the guy who is helping me edit the project. Right from the beginning we have been talking about a second Green book or at least a web sight or even a section here on BRP where additional things could be posted. We often say "That will have to be in the Green II" half in joking and half seriously. Some of the magic stuff may have to end up there. The problem is that if we mention certain things, say in the cultures or races sections, about magic traditions and then do not cover it in the book it may be frustrating to readers. Originally I wanted the book to be a lot like Griffin Mountain, with lots of characters and few highly detailed settlements. The problem is that Griffin Mountain had the base of the Cults books and other already published backgrounds to draw from. If I wanted to make a group of Goblins for people to encounter or fight I would have to write up their magic, traditions and culture. So the book got longer and I got sidetracked more and more. One of the most difficult and time consuming things for me is the creation of magical items and more complex spells like summonings. I often never really used these things in my own games very much, and only have a weak grasp on how to clearly write them and make them balanced and such (I am afraid this is still weak). I do not know how many times I have re-written some of the magic stuff. It is not like it is terribly new look at BRP magic, but I hope it has lot of character, be pretty simple to use, and reflect the culture of the Green pretty well. It takes up a lot of space though as spells are separately listed for each Glyph, or Totem and have different names. (Hopefully, I can make these quite small to save some space) One thing that turned out quit nice (I think) is Soltakss' Alchemy system. I really needed alchemy. Ichorites(a form of alchemist who are making inroads into the Green to harvest its many medicinal and magical tree products) are a pretty key player and alchemy was a necessity. I just couldn't come up with a good way of working this out and kept re-writing it. Soltakss really helped out with this in a big way and now I think that Alchemy should not only be workable, but also very fun and a little different. I have many of the necessary parts of the book at least to rough draft stages: the chapters on cultures, character creation, races (not a lot finished yet), magic, and a Gazetteer, but I do not have much of the Griffin Mountain type stuff that I originally wanted to add to the book. I am thinking of gathering the stray pieces and threads and trying to put it together as is and maybe do the other stuff later. Even that may take some time as I wait on editing and art. (A other problem is that I have just entered paper correcting season and huge chunks of my time just disappear as I numb my brain reading essays). If we send the book in and it does even marginally well (remember I have never done anything like this before so to be realistic it may be kind of lousy), then we can always add the other stuff later. Thanks for the interest in the project:)

Thanks to all. A lot of reasonable ideas. I sent a message to Dustin at Chaosium about it, but I have not heard from him yet. Hopefully, I can just subtitle, or make the title a phrase as you suggest. That would be the easiest.

I sent an e-mail off to Chaosium a short time ago. I'll see what they say. If I need to change the Name "Into the Green" is a pretty good solution. That way I do not need to change so much. Just enough to be a problem. Theirs is a jungle-like world that seems to be inside a hollow world with lots of insects and several fantasy races and several cool ideas for places within the setting- I have not read the entire thing just yet. The Green for BRP differs in that it has BIG trees, a huge magic section (probably much to large and it always seems to be growing), and plays up a clash of different cultures a lot. I think a big difference is that hopefully mine has a lot of old RQ influence where theres does not. The telling difference is that theirs is done and mine still needs a deal of work before it is really presentable. (It should be a good deal larger than theirs when all is said and done though. Ive have been a little worried about making it too big). They are both jungle/forested fantasy settings for roleplaying games though.

Sorry. I think I was a still a little stunned. I do not know why RPG is down, but I cannot get there right now either. There is a little on the Green here: http://basicroleplaying.com/forum/basic-roleplaying/643-green.html I started writing the Green here at BRP with help from a lot of regulars on the forum. Later I proposed it to Chaosium as a possible monograph and they accepted as long as I took the material off the site. I have been laboring over it for several months now. I suppose I will have to if I intend to go on. The problem is that the name was much more integral to the whole feel of the thing than one would imagine- not to mention it will take some re-writing and the overall effect will be lessened.

I was gandering through Drivethru and came across this rpghttp://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=56873&filters=0_0_0&free=1 My heart kind of fell into my big toe. (For those who do not know I was working on a monograph for BRP called "the Green") Anyway I am not sure what to do. Taking the name away really seems to pull the spine out. I have been trying to think of repalcement names all day and nothing really seems to work. Any ideas?

Whoops Double posted

Wow! These really look cool. Two Months:eek: I wish I could work half that fast. I caught the Geeks/ Fans thing in the intro and spewed coffee on my computer screen.

Sounds cool. Does it take place in basically the same universe/setting that Pharos does? Are basically the same technologies used or can travellers from one world explore the other?

Already done:thumb: I could also use some help from some of the monster and creature creators who have been posting on and off on the forum. It would be nice to have a plethora of creatures luring in the canopies and pools of the Green. I have a number written up, but I have not created stats for most of them. Let me know if you have any ideas or want to help.

Boy I wish I had this problem with the Green (too much art). I have always found that art interlaced through the text helps a great deal with reading role playing or any informational text. This is providing the art helps with the image, mood, or point you are trying to get across with the text. It almost works as an index when you are flipping through books as well and makes it easier to find items you want to reverence. I would try to make sure the art matches the text though and is there for a reason. Really great art can and has often caused me to buy roleplaying material or even paperbacks that were pretty worthless otherwise. I am and always will be a sucker for good covers.

Crom! Sounds like a great idea!:thumb: Howard seems to really be rising in fashion again. I would certainly be interested.

Grayhoss, check your private messages. Thanks.