jonboywalton

Thanks, Trif, great to be here I might be able to help here - the Sharpe novels follow the progress of an officer in His Majesty's Army during the Peninsula Campaign against Napoleon's invading forces (well the early ones at least; I haven't read all of them). They've recently been rereleased in glossy little paperback format, no doubt on the back of the apparently very good telemovie series from the UK - to the best of my knowledge they haven't screened here in Australia <sigh>.

Our GM is a mad Harn-fiend and a keen rules-tinkerer. We're currently playing a game set (intrenched?) in Harn but using the new Savage Worlds rules. It's really sped up the combat resolution and general play - we've whipped through a chapter a week lately, and squeezing in sometimes two combat sequences in a single session (we began the game using a hybrid combat system drawn from Harn (2nd ed. I think) and Maelstrom. I like the card-draw system for sorting initiative in combat. It means that the dedicated fighters or superior opponents don't always get the first attack in, and the joker rule adds an extra degree of randomness to the mix. And it keeps everyone engaged. I don't think it would work as a drop-in for just any set of rules, but it does fit the "fast-furious-fun" ethos of SW. JD

Hi there folks, My name's Jonathon (I also go by JD) and, like so many, I started with D&D when I was young and impressionable and fell in with the wrong sort of gamers. Some things that left me dissatisfied with D&D were the ecological inconsistancies (running into orcs, kobolds and a vampire(?) in the same dungeon), and the obvious fillers for the monster pantheon (don't get me started on the gelatinous cube). I was a sci-fi nut still at this time (around 1979-80) so I went in hard when I discovered Traveller, but I also really enjoyed playing 1st/2nd edition RuneQuest, SPI's DragonQuest, Tunnels and Trolls, some Gamma World and Top Secret, and a little Star Frontiers. I owned a copy of Universe, but never got around to playing it. I even had a couple of sessions of Call of Cthulhu before the kid with the only copy among us moved town. There were probably a couple of other rules-sets in there as well, but we didn't play them on a regular basis. At eighteen I moved to a little town where I didn't know anyone and stopped playing after a fairly solid six-or-so years. I also lost track of my game-gear collection which I'd left at home (thanks, Mum). After a hiatus of nearly two decades, I'm back in the game, so to speak. I've recreated my Traveller LBB collection (through the magic of reprints) and I'm exploring other rules sets as well. The landscape has changed a lot in twenty-odd years, and I'm still finding my feet to some degree. I've fallen in with another group of ne'er-do-wells who spend most sessions playing Harn, but break it up four or five of times a year with other games. Some of my best game memeories were of playing RuneQuest, and I've turned into a bit of a rules-junky in my dotage, so I'm really looking forward to the release of the new Basic Roleplaying set. I'm also new to the forum (obviously), so I'd be very interested to hear anyone's impressions of BRP, especially any playtesters that may be tuning in. Cheers, JD