raymond_turney

Hi,

Have come up with rules for Legendary/Hero Quests {Jason and the Argonauts type stuff}. They are for Fire and Sword, but should be easily adaptable to BRPstyle systems. They are in RTF format, in the downloads section under rules.

Hope they are useful,

Ray,

There are some issues that have not been mentioned.

One is that a group of individually optimized characters can be collectively weaker than non-optimized characters. I remember once in Greg's campaign playtesting Griffin Mountain, we had a large group of about 25 mostly rune levels. My characters were two followers of a Yelmalion rune lord. For reasons that I have forgotten, we split the party. The group on the opposite side of the river was attacked at night by trolls. They were Orlanthi and Humakhti and turned out not to have any light spells {oops}. I can see how that would come about, after all most of the characters only had a certain amount of INT, and it was all used for Bladesharp, Protection, Countermagic, Healing 2, etc. Each player assumed that at least one of the other players would choose spells useful to the entire party, but not the best for an individual character. So they choose the spells that maximized the power of their character in the most commonly encountered situations - and failed miserably against a much weaker force of trolls and trollkin at night.

The second is that very powerful characters who are assigned to something other than a strike mission can be frustrated by enemies who cannot even injure them. A fairly powerful group of PC's, too strong to have random enemies appear and threaten them but escorting a caravan of mules, was very much annoyed by a fairly weak group of bandits. My bandits shot a couple of arrows at unprotected mules, and rode off. The PC's were forced to find a way to carry the goods that were loaded on the dead mule(s). They didn't have the ability to carry the goods themselves, and moved on. The bandits picked up the loot the PC's left behind and a couple of the less skilled bandits took the goods back to the village on their mules. The rest of the bandits got on their horses, followed the PC's, and dropped another couple of mules ...

Another trick can be borrowed from Asian horse nomads. They used expendable ghazis, subject allies, whatever to soften their enemies up. This is a good use for zombies or trollkin. You hit the PC's with these expendables, the PC's put up all their spells, you wait for the spells to go down, and then you launch the real attack.

Finally, players of high level near heroic and heroic and heroic characters can become overconfident. I recall one group, containing all high level characters, that decided to ride straight at an enemy fort and climb the walls. Everyone was much better with melee weapons than missile weapons, and wanted to play a glorious role. As 2/3 of the group ended up pinned beneath dead horses, we ended up parleying with the fort and withdrawing. The characters on the attack easily had more than the 3 to 1 advantage in power necessary to attack, but with most of that power pinned beneath dead horses, we had no hope of winning. Player stupidity can be a very strong equalizing force, but you cannot count on it when planning an encounter:)

Ray,

I've found that it is important to vary the threats characters face, and the things threatened. This does two things: it prevents characters from being optimized to face known threats; and it insures that characters with different skill sets will profit from working together. It also avoids boredom setting in, when the PC's have figured out there tactical doctrine and pretty do the same thing against similar enemies all the time.

For example, in one game I was having a lot of trouble with a very tough rune lord equivalent. Since he was a Yanafali, I kept things interesting for him by having a subplot be people attempting to administer his resources away {transferring troops to other commanders, getting his armor assigned to someone else, etc}. It was amazing how quickly he decided he needed an administrative specialist. {I was working for NASA at the time, and they had something called Zero-Based budgeting, which made an appearance in the game}.

Also, in a game like RQ where a tank is heavily dependent on magical spells, adding some Dispel capability to the enemy mix can make a big difference. Players who thought their characters were invincible often feel less certain when their Shield spells go down. Also, in RQ and BRP {snd Fire and Sword} a fair amount of a character's defense is "active". Overwhelming them with numbers, so that they cannot parry all of their foes, is often an effective tactic. Offbeat forms of combat, such as spirit combat, can also be a problem for the PC's. As you might imagine, when facing high level parties I often use all three techniques, plus a demon or other large monster

In short, by keeping the threat mix unpredictable and sometimes using non-lethal obstacles, it is possible to go a long toward balancing an inherently unbalanced game. On the other hand, by facing the PC's with pretty much the same type of opposition using the same tactics all the time, it is possible to go a long ways towards wrecking the balance of a fairly well balanced game. Game balance is much more a GM issue than a game designer issue, though the game designer should help the GM by making it easy to formulate a wide variety of challenges for the players.

I've noticed no anime influence. But then I don't play the anime influenced games and I've never lived in Japan, nor has any member of my gaming group.

I'd say in evolutionary terms that the original FRP genre has radiated; there are now games for Space Opera, Cyberpunk, etc, which did not exist in 1980. There are a wider variety of games that support different role-playing styles - some people love Herouest, it leaves me mostly cold, and some people hate it. At the same time that RPG was radiating into different niches and becoming a hobby {like model railroading was when I was growing up} that makes you merely slightly odd as opposed to downright weird; it has lost its original niche of weird college students who had two much time on their hands to World of Warcraft.

As for character death, it has probably become more rare for four reasons. The first is that in a fairly complicated system it can take a long time to create a character, so character death costs you something. The second is that as more decisions are made, and characters acquire personalities rather than being simple power gaming avatars, losing a character costs more. The third is that we just have less time to play the games - meeting once every three weeks if I kill off a character it might take 6 months for the player to get as good an understanding of his next character as he has of the one he is playing now. Finally, GM's are now more likely to have something besides character death to create dramatic tension in the game. In D&D 1st edition, the issue was whether you survived and came back with your EP, or rolled up a new character. Once you got to were you knew a cleric with Raise Dead, it was whether you brought back your EP from the current run you were on. LEDA {life energy draining} monsters were often more feared than ones that merely killed you, because they cost the player more.

I'd say that an increase in the importance of settings relative to rules is probably the biggest change. Nowadays, you're playing Fading Suns or Glorantha first; BRP or RQ or the Fading Suns system second.

On the other hand, I could probably find an AD&D game with a dungeon without looking too hard. Most players still play D&D; most of them still powergame {of course I also powergame }. etc. There has probably been less change in the hobby as a whole than people who change genres, try out edgy new systems, and put a lot of effort into their gaming would like to think.

There are several problems with Herouesting, which annoy me when I try to write a system for it.

First, what is it? The concept of the heroic, and thus heroquesting, is actually fairly ambiguous. It tends to include actions that are very significant; actions that are heroic because they are very risky for the character undertaking them, actions that require exceptionally high levels of some skill to overcome obstacles or opposition, actions which are memorable because very flashy, actions which re-enact myth for the benefit of the community, and actions which open possibilities for the whole community by creating new myths.

As best I can make out, Greg's idea of a heroquest is built around the combination of myth re-enactment; or myth creation; with one or more of the other elements. But which other element varies. If a character combines his venture into the world of myth with contending against incredibly tough opposition, he or she will need very high levels of skill. or which are cinematic in nature, he or she will need very high levels of skill, otherwise not.

Partly to handle HeroQuesting, Fire and Sword has seven levels of success - fumble, failure, success, specials, criticals, and cinematic successes. So yes, to handle heroquesting you need higher levels of success.

You also need myths Greg actually produced a fairly small number of myths for either RuneQuest or HeroQuest; so most people end up writing their own. This is a lot harder than it looks.

There's a lot more to be said here, about narrative theory requiring transformation of the personality of the hero {which requires some means of describing the hero before and after change, etc} to the idea behind hero of a faces that a Hero deals with crises that require him to act outside the social consensus.

But I'm still working on how to do this for Fire and Sword, and it is not included in the current version of Fire and Sword.

Ray,

Hard to say, but a few that made an impression quickly come to mind:

Harry Dresden series by Jim Butcher

Three Musketeers and Four Musketeers by Dumas

The VIking Art of War - By Paddy Griffith - not a good "Art of War" book but an interesting look at the Vikings and their weapons nonetheless.

Horation Hornblower serious by Forrester

Falco series by "Lindsay Davis"

Three Kingdoms - Chinese classic, Moss Roberts

I'm not sure these are my favorites, but they come to mind as books I've read at least twice and would not mind rereading;

Hi,

Tourney Altar was named after my brother, Art. He was a playtester of Nomad Gods.

By the way, there are two versions of Fire and Sword. The long version is the detailed version, and is about the length of RQ. It has the interesting stuff; and it is what is posted here. There is a short version, about the length of the first version of Basic Role Playing, written by my friend Morgan when he had to introduce new players to the system and found that the whole thing was sometimes a bit overwhelming. This is what you have to learn first to understand the rest of it. I think that the system is laid out in a logical order, and the basic version is unnecessary. New players tend to disagree with me {the sample size is too small to be sure about this}, and have found the intro useful. The intro is what is at the URL I gave in my first post.

Hope this helps.

My name is Ray Turney {or Raymond - it sounds cool with a French accent, but I'll answer to anything resembling this unless it involves the word turkey}.

I was one of the original Gang of Four authors of RQI, and so have a lot of experience with Runequest. Have also played a little Traveller, some Pendragon, and a fair amount of Call of Cthulu.

Have written a new system, Fire and Sword. which the admin of BRP Central has added to the download page. Work on this system started when the RQIV project ended. I decided that what my group and I wanted was different from what the original designers of RQ wanted; so I started with Perndragon. First I dropped the traits system, because while I kind of liked it, my players hated it.

So it started out as something like Pendragon Pass, but rules for specials and crits, and eventually even cinematic successes made it in there. Long weapon strikes first, then simultaneous was borrowed from Stormbringer. Instead of the traditional FRP "dead vs alive" dualism, we went to a system based on a variety of medical conditions a character might be in after he was "incapacitated". The old RQ I&II Heal 6 and your're fine went away. One of my players noted that in high level RQ, it tended to resolved by the first unparried critical success, so we dropped hit points in most situations In combat between humans, either a blow incapcitates or it does no damage. Further refinements to combat happened.

Their are three magic systems, Spirit, Divine, and Sorcery just as in RQ III but Spirit Magic is focused on spirit combat and shamanism and the rules are cleaner. Casting spells depends on skill with the spell for sorcery, cult lore for divine; spirit magicans do not cast spells in the same sense, but summon spirits using a variety of skills.

Instead of a couple of titles {rune lord, priest} dangling out in the middle of nowhere; there are a whole slew of titles and offices. There are also rules for keeping track of who owes how a favor to whom, influence, and other informal aspects of the political world.

Day to day economics was abstracted into assuming a certain ordinary level of income and standard of living, plus rules for trading and extraordinary resources {things.

The rules have a lot of "social skils, ranging from administration to seduction, and say something about which social skill to use when.

Anyway, I encourage you to look at the downloadable rules here, and decide whether they are either a suitable base for your campaign, or have something worth stealing without adopting the entire system .

A short introduction to Fire and Sword is available at:

Fire And Sword - Condensed Version

Sorry about using this space for an introduction to Fire and Sword, not me; but Fire and Sword is probably more interesting and more important to you than I am.