Chaot

Couldn't have put it better. I love the book for it's break down of magic and I've stolen bits from it's Magic Laws, but the system it presents is plain redunkulous. Note, I have the Steve Jackson Games version. I haven't seen the Chaosium one before.

Always saddens me to hear that you haven't seen money for it. It is an excellent book.

I came in to the BRP family with Stormbringer. When I picked up RQ3 I found static AP to be odd. I enjoyed rolling both weapon damage and armor protection. It felt right and it's one of the things that drew me to BRP.

Agreed about Bronze Grimoire. It basically treats Runes like Sorcery spells. It has rules for rune decay, rune triggers, what sort of objects can hold rune spells and a slew of rune spell examples. Some ideas based on your first post. What about tying rune life to an initial infusion of magic points at the time of the rune inscription? Completely random numbers here to use an example, but say 1 MP equals 1 day, so a fellow with a POW of 10 can write a run that could be active for a bit over a week depending how many magic points they invested in it at the time they wrote it. Say our rune scribe puts 3 MP into their rune? The rune is 'live' for three days and then goes dormant. Runes can be recharged through the act of someone studying and meditating on the rune (while reinvesting the rune with their own magic points). Depending on what the runes do, I'd possibly make it a bit more of an investment. For example, if a rune inscribed on a weapon allows the user to trigger it to temporarily increase their attack or damage, I think the above structure could work very well. If the rune on the weapon grants a permanent +15% or a +1d6 to damage or something to the weapon by virtue of just being there, then I suggest an permanent POW loss of 3 point at the time of inscribing. I see two skills in play, Inscribe Rune (INTx1%), which allows an individual to write a rune on an object. When using this skill, the inscriber of the rune decides how much power they will invest in the rune. This skill involves both artistic talent and skill with common material. If the rune is being written in stone or metal, the Inscriber must have some amount of understanding of the medium they are working with. This is represented by at least 20% in an appropriate Art or Craft skill. This Art or Craft skill is not rolled at the time of the rune inscription, but is necessary for the inscriber to use the medium. Runic Magic (POWx1%) allows an individual to understand and access the power of an inscribed rune. When a character comes across an unfamiliar rune, they may roll Runic Magic. On a Success, they understand the complexities of the rune and can attune themselves to the power of the rune. The rune now acts as a spell resource for the user and the abilities of the rune are fueled by the user's MP. So, say Snoggard the unlucky finds a statue with Rat Vision inscribed on it. Snoggard makes her Runic Magic roll and is attuned to the rune. While the statue is in her possession, she can expend 1 MP and cast Rat Vision. If she looses the statue, or the rune is destroyed she no longer has the ability to cast Rat Vision. In general, I'd also consider including a Luck roll (or Runic Magic roll) at the time of recharging a rune. On a Failure or a Fumble the process destroys the rune and it can not be used again. Also note, you mentioned that this is a low magic world but also say you want the ability to inscribe a rune to be a mechanical process that anyone can do regardless if they can cast it or not. You could restrict the flow of magic by having Rune Magic only usable by someone with a POW of 16 or more, but then you loose the whole 'anyone who can find a rune can pick it up and use it' feel that I think you might be going for. Another way around this is to say that only people with a POW of 16 or more can successfully inscribe a Rune. So, that fire rune stone your character has could be a rune that the inscriber made permanent with a sacrifice of 3 permanent POW points. To refill it, the character would have to succeed on a Runic Magic roll and refill it with MP. But I think this is an opportunity for you to make the fire stone a little bit different, much like that silly ring Bilbo found in Gollum's cave. If it doesn't play exactly by the rules that other magic items seem to play by, it's for a reason... Anyway, if you'd rather not use the Sorcery rules from the BGB you could do something similar with by grafting the BGB Magic rules. If you go the route of runes as skills, I think I would still have an overarching Runic Magic skill. Then, you would start developing sub skills for rune spells. So, say Snoggard found that rat statue. She succeeds in her Runic Magic skill and attunes herself to the rat statue rune allowing her to cast Rat Vision. She writes down the spell Rat Vision in her spell list. She currently has Rat Vision at 00%. However, her statue gives her a +20% bonus on casting Rat Vision, so she effectively can cast at 20%. Characters can carry around multiple runes of the same spell, but they do not stack. A character with a rune at 20% and a rune at 15% of the same spell can cast the spell with a 20% bonus, not a 35% bonus. As she adventures with the statue and continues to cast and contemplate her rat vision rune she develops some level of skill with it. Let's say she's rolled enough increases to get her own skill up to 30%, giving her an effective casting skill of 50%. If her rune breaks (through a Luck roll or some sort of rune degradation system), she can use Inscribe Rune to create a new rune to cast through. Actually, you could tie the the effectiveness of a rune to the Rune Mages' skill in the rune. The bonus a rune gives to the caster is equalled to 1/5 the skill of the original inscriber. The fellow who inscribed the statue that Snoggard found was a weaselly little mage named Hrastal. Loved him some rats and used them as messengers across the city. His Runic Magic: Rat Vision skill was at 100%, so when he inscribed his statue, the Rune gave him a bonus of 20%, bumping his effective casting level to 120%. The rat statue was a gift to one of Hrastal's street informants. Unfortunately, Snoggard the Unlucky put a knive in said street informant's back. It's only a matter of time untill Srastal starts looking around to see what happened. Meanwhile, Snoggard is going to inscribe a Rat Vision rune of her own. Had she not been busy, who would have copied the master rune over while it was still working, giving her another rune with a 20% bonus. Unfortunately, she must now inscribe the spell using her own skill in the spell as her base (30%), giving her a rune that provides a 6% bonus to casting. She can now cast Rat Vision again, but her effective skill has gone from 50% to 36%. If you go this route, I would take a look at adapting the costs for making a staff over to making your fire stone. Just some really rough idea sketches. Just wanted to add that Pete Maranci is a great guy.

Fun. Elric! STR 11.5 CON 12.3 SIZ 13.6 INT 12.4 POW 12.2 DEX 12.7 APP 11.4 average 12.3 Here's the breakdown. STR 12 13 13 12 13 12 13 10 10 10 13 13 14 10 11 12 9 10 10 11 11 11.5 CON 12 14 12 12 14 13 15 12 10 11 13 15 15 10 10 14 10 11 11 13 13 12.3 SIZ 13 13 12 12 13 12 13 16 9 14 13 12 14 11 13 11 9 10 10 13 13 13.6 INT 10 13 12 13 10 12 15 10 12 12 15 12 9 10 14 15 15 13 17 11 11 12.4 POW 10 16 11 12 9 10 16 9 11 11 14 10 9 10 13 16 12 11 15 16 16 12.2 DEX 12 14 13 13 11 13 14 10 11 10 16 13 10 11 10 16 17 13 12 13 12.7 CHA 9 16 11 12 11 10 15 9 16 9 17 10 8 9 12 13 12 10 11 10 10 11.4 I think it may be appropriate to keep in mind that there's a difference in making a random NPC and making an NPC that's supposed to be broadly indicative of a profession. As you noted with the CoC comment, different genres are going to stress different professions, and if you have a list of professions where strength is important, your numbers may be skewed in that direction.

Good looking out guys. A fellow forumite offered to sell me a copy. I'd rather give my money to a BRPer, so I'm going that route.

I missed this when Chaosium had it on their website. If your wife sees another copy, let me know. I really want to pick it up.

"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtian!" Rosen's explaination of my statement was a good and logical one. I'm so tempted to say that it's what I meant. Truth is, it was a mental slip and I was referring to some often used house rules of my own instead of actual printed rules. My bad. Are the combat styles going to be used across the board? If everyone is going to have access to some sort of style then I would say that you'd be fine allowing the styles to increase with a skill check. It will make for a pretty high powered game, which is not a bad thing. If some PCs won't have access to styles your likely to see a marked difference in Player abilities. I really need to take a look at the book again though.

Though I haven't had a chance to get CE, I heartily approve the use of Dragon Lines. That's a killer book right there. I agree with Mankcam in it being one of my favorites. I unfortunately don't have a lot of practical experience with it. I think so. I think it would be a great way of designing 'schools' of combat. Game balance. What dirty little words. I don't think what you're describing would be unbalancing necessarily. Are they neglecting some other advancement to focus on their martial arts style? If yes then I think you're ok.

Know what. Hold on and let me grab my book instead of pulling it out of my arse. Be right back. Edit: I think changing them to power point vs power point is a good idea. I'll buy Dream Liaison is POW vs POW. You could also make it POW vs INT if breaking the spell was more cerebral and less soulful. All in all, I think you've some really solid spells there though.

So, there's already a bunch of great advice here. I'm going to toss in my two groats for the hell of it. I run Elric! rules, so a starting Profession has eight associated skills that the character can distribute 250 points to. In addition, the PC gets to distribute 20 points to groups of skills depending on whether they choose the Athletic, Technique, Intellectual or Charismatic skill package. They can add more points by making an older character, so there are a lot of high skills in my game. I recommend that my PCs start with at least one skill over 100%, generally it's a weapon skill. Depends on what spells you're giving out. If you're giving out 1-3 simple spells than I think allowing the PCs who don't choose sorcery to bump three skills by 20% each or to increase a characteristic by 3 points is a very fair trade. Sorcery can be very useful sometimes. Sometimes it won't see play in a game session. Sometimes it will be a few sessions before the PCs remember to throw a spell. It works well, especially if you're using Major/Minor Wounds. Minor Wounds actually come in handy. If the PC gets enough Minor Wounds to equal half their hit points they make a POWx4 roll to prevent themselves from collapsing. It has the effect of reminding them that they are very much mortal and that they are in trouble. Or, it takes them out of combat and makes them convenient hostages/left for dead. What ever your decision, the key is to play it through a bit so that you see the ins and outs of how it works. I find it helpful to peg percentages with a sort of general description of effectiveness. In my game, a novice is going to rate at about 20%, someone trained is going to be running around at 40%, skilled is 60%, expert is 80%, veteran is 100% and master is 120%, as a sort of rule of thumb. You may be surprised at how much of a challenge a few trained guards at 40% will pose to a PC sitting at 120%. Small changes make a big difference in the feel of the rules. If you're not grooving with the system at first, there are plenty of ways to tweak it, so don't worry. Great advice. Also, take a good look at the Spot Rules. There are a couple of dice tricks in there that can be distilled and used in a great many other situations. If a player comes up with something and is doesn't seem unreasonable, I like to be able to pull out a trick to give them a chance at success. Indeed. Although honestly, for me a great amount of BRP seems to play like AD&D at 5th level or so (though it's not really a true comparison but more of a feeling). One way of getting them into the new system framework is to run a mock battle with them. You could give them some pre-gens and do a sort of intro to your campaign. Then your players will have a bit more of a handle on things for character generation.

My pleasure, sir. Looks pretty good at a once over. Something to consider. Many spells use MP vs MP rather than POW vs POW. The POW rolls are generally saved for things like bindings. Actually, I'm thinking most spells are MP:MP. The obvious affect this has is to make a caster more potent when they begin casting spells and slowly wear themselves down. The thing I would look out for when dealing with POW vs POW is the stat check though. If you succeed in a POW vs POW roll against someone with a higher POW than you, you get a chance to increase your POW. Having a lot of spells with POW vs POW is going to give your players plenty of opportunities to bounce their POW up. Now, this could be a positive, depending on what kind of game you want to run. I wanted to alert you to the issue though, just in case.

The Elric! rules make shields a bit more attractive. In combat when there is a hit, regardless of whether it was parried, the attacker is supposed to roll damage. If the damage exceeds the parrying weapon's hit points by even 1 point than the parrying weapon is broken. A shield is much sturdier and if it is used as the parrying device then, instead of breaking, it's total hit points are reduced by the amount of damage exceeding it's total hit points. Say a shield has 20 points of armor and the attacker does 22 points of damage. The shield now operates at 18 points of armor. If this rule is instituted, shields become much more important to the survival of a character, especially if the defending weapon has been worn down a bit by parrying one or two criticals. Lets say two guys with broadswords are in a tussle. A broadsword does 1d8+1+db and has 20 HP. Say one of them has fended off a critical twice, that drops it's hit points down to 12. If the other bloke has a db of 1d4 and gets lucky with their damage roll. On any successful attack that's parried by the damaged broadsword, regardless of the parry success level, the attacker rolls damage. If the roll is lucky 13, the damaged broadsword is broken. I've seen weapons break by the rules before and it certainly leaves the character at a great disadvantage. It's still an uphill battle to convince players that they might want to invest in a shield. I've even bumped up shield base chances with the shield that they're using; Half 15%, Small 25%, Full 35% and Large 45% and it's not enough to entice players to take a shield.... It's a shame, because with the full weapon breaking rules, a shield is incredibly useful.

Hah! In practice it was much more write your own not very useful skill a la Unknown Armies but I am convinced that aspects can be woven into the BRP tapestry. I quickly breezed through it. Very comprehensive. I see you use Allegiance and Elan together. I like this concept very much and am going to think about including something like this in my game. Please do Marcus! I'd love that. Edit: But if you put the gazetteer thing up, please stress that the prose was taken and condensed from Elric! and Mongoose Elric. In fact, I should edit the pdf to contain a page that acknowledges that. I'll do that tonight and ask Triff if he will swap it out with the one I have uploaded. You know, that's a very good question. I've always felt that the early Stormbringer stuff oozed St. Andre's off the wall energy and assumed that the 'looseness' of the Stormbringer system compared to RuneQuest was directly influenced by St. Andre. I'm betting that things like Goldar and Champion Amulets came from his wonderful brain. I may be remembering wrong, but I think some of the Demon Summoning stuff came from zomben. I think he was the one talking about adapting the Superpowers from Superworld to Demon Abilities. I wonder if he's still hanging around on these boards?

I need to sit down with a book in front of me to do this justice, but here's a rough guide. Quick break down as I see it. 1MP (Three Types) 1. This is a basic spell that will grant they caster a single ability that doesn't directly harm another character. Stuff like seeing through an unintelligent creature's eyes, causing a light to appear or obscuring and area. Simple, one purpose magic tricks. 2. More direct spells than the first example, these spells will increase the caster's chance of harming or affecting another character by a small amount, but there is some sort of save mechanism involved such as MP:MP or POW:POW. 3. Gateway Spells. These spells act as a starting point for much more powerful spells. Things like demon and elemental summonings. 2MP More powerful than 1MP spells, these spells can effect temporary change in the subject. I think Heal sits here. 3MP This spell type either has multiple effects or can do direct damage with a save. They can also cause permanent change (such as repair) in inanimate objects. 4MP are generally specialty spells that are flashy and cause change in the environment or in the individual. 1-4MP These spells generally augment skills, abilities or item effectiveness on a 1MP to 3 Stat increase, a 1MP to 20% skill increase or a 1MP to 1 damage point increase. Sometimes casting the spell at 4MP causes additional effects. Very generic break down.

And the way you meshed Elric! with the magic system from Maelstrom was really sublime. Totally agree on the Digests by the way. I get so much use out of them it's ridiculous. One thing I've lifted from those write ups are the 'throw away' skills that sometimes get included. Things like Always Take a Bet or Piercing Stare. I like to allow PCs to take personality skills that operate in some vague way.

Roosevelt Islands great! I mean, how can you beat commute by air tram? If you're interested in putting something together I'll tray to hammer some ideas into reasonable shape. I overlooked this first time round. I need to pull out my MRQ2 and look at this again...

Do it. I'll drop you some material. In addition to the goal of simulating different time frames, I think it would be valuable to add rules to simulate different genres. Dragon Lines did this brilliantly with it's kung fu/wushu guidelines. Just noticed your location tag. I wonder how many of us are in the tri state area. bardic design and I are in Staten Island.

There's definitely something there though worth developing. All great stuff. Your bit about system goals really hits though. For a while I was entertaining the idea of writing a Combat Options monograph. It would include a wide range of options ranging from quick and dirty variations on combat to more intricate rules. A few different approaches to weapons and armor, including some that were a bit radical to how BRP stood then. Drop in some mass combat rules and some combat oriented spot rules. etc. The great thing about BRP is, not only can you do all that but little changes can make a big difference in how gameplay feels. What makes sense on paper sometimes doesn't translate well to the table. Making time to play the system out to see if it accomplishes it's goal is the tricky part.

I agree. I don't use pre-made adventure much, but I've cribbed from Hall of Risk. I absolutely love springing See Hwarmgaarl and Die!. Fang and the Fountain with some changes and expansion makes for a great Dr. Moreau stand in. While I haven't used it myself, I've seen The Strong Arm become a foundation for two separate campaigns.

Weapon weight or speed? It's all problematic because, unless there's some trick to it that I'm not seeing, you're actually either narrowing the difference gap of what would otherwise be very divergent weapons or greatly increasing the gap between weapons. I'm making up numbers here, but lets look at a dagger and a battle axe for extremes. Say the dagger's Reach 1 (it's small) and Speed 3 (it's light weight and maneuverable). Next you've got your battle axe with Reach 3 (long haft and wide swing) and Speed 1 (big slow hefty thing). These two very different weapons average out to a SR of 4. At this point you might as well be using DEX rankings. Same thing, but looking and Weight. Dagger Reach 1, Weight 1 versus Battle Axe Reach 3, Weight 3.

We are of the same mind, sir! Although there were stirrings of the Eternal Champion line really coming back to life right before the license went to Mongoose, I really think it had become a bit of a stone around Chaosium's neck. They're likely better off without it right now. If you have a chance, there's some really great stuff in the Mongoose Elric and Hawkmoon line. Well worth a look. Two of my favorites from those lines are Magic of the YK and Cults of the YK. The rules in the second edition of MStormbringer look solid, but it's hit locations and strike ranks. Just not my cuppa. What I wanted to really see was an Eternal Champion Guidebook to the Multiverse. A resource for populating the Million Spheres. That would have been a beauty to behold.

This I think. I'd have to check, but it seems to me that the weapon lengths rule were designed with DEX ranks in mind and that the advantage that longer weapons have is a function of the shorter weaponed fighter continually having to position themselves to get a shot in in the flow of combat. I'm guessing your proposed tweak, KingSkin, of keeping closing rules and inverting SR will prove some interesting play. I need to pull out the book to really give it a turn around in my head, but it could be a nice little advantage to those who want to play a nimble fighter.

I wish there were. Even if it were a series of images that could be layered by the user in photoshop, that would be a great resource. While I still don't have a copy of QuestWorld, I love Chaosium's Cities and the Central Casting books. Great stuff.

I've just added some Stormbringer stuff to the downloads section. The first is a player handout gazatteer for those new to the Young Kingdoms. It's largely text from the books edited and formated in order to be a convenient player hand out. It totals four pages, each page details a different continent, the north, west and south as well as one page for the island. The second is two versions of a character sheet for a Gods of Law game. I hope someone finds them useful.