Jarulf

I agree, this sounds like a great setting. It'll be interesting to see a bit more as you develop it.

I hope you haven't memorised that... :-) Hm, it isn't on the menu, I thought it was.

Gooseberries.

I haven't seen much of what Chaosium has done in the last 15 years or so and haven't played GURPS between the time it was still called The Fantasy Trip and 4th ed, so can't comment really. As far as I can remember my impressions from that time though Chaosium's art was usually decent and occasionally wonderful. As for lush art, I really prefer a book to read not something to put on the coffee table to brag about. Should I say something about margin art and watermarks again? Nah, that horse is dead. EDIT: I remember one cover I really loved, Questworld. I can't remember exactly what it looked like any longer (lost the box) except it was am aerial view of a huge forest and a small settlement. It really worked for me.

I remember Lisa Free very fondly

That's pretty nice. Nothing fantastic but capturing a game like this and not having space ships, ray weapons, warriors etc is probably not the easiest thing to do...

I actually have OpenRPG installed, which was a bit of a chore, but haven't tried it properly. It looks a bit clunky to me. But again, being available on Linux is a definite plus for me.

Looks interesting, and not Windows only which is good for me. Thanks.

That actually sounds like a very good idea to me.

Three's my pick.

There's quite a few tools around now for playing rpgs on-line, with integrated chat, maps, dice-rollers and so on. Does anyone have any experience with these? I played in an IRC game some years back (HW/HQ set in Prax and Pavis) which was fun, but haven't tried any of the newer tools.

Probably just as well or you'd get possessed by a wasting disease spirit or something equally fun. :-)

*shudders*

<rant>As long as there are no 10cm borders with heavy artwork and swirly gray watermarks to render pages unreadable.</rant>

I had WoW and bought this out of interest when it first came out, not knowing a thing about it. Imagine my surprise when I held in my hand a poorly translated version of BRP and the fantasy book from WoW. I ran a short campaign with it, mostly because some of my players found English a bit of a challenge. I think it was the third edition that dropped the D100 for a D20, but we'd stopped using it by then.

I really couldn't say. I've not kept up with Chaosium for over a decade (I don't play CoC) and I'm new to GURPS but what you say sounds very likely. That's what I hear from a lot of people. They want the crunchy stuff (tech books etc) and the fluff (world books) and generally show little interest in adventures. These, I think, are all things that would probably work as PDFs, perhaps collated and updated at a later date into various books if they sell well.

Hm, yeah I got that :-) Doesn't everyone have the perfect book they'd want Chaosium to publish? I do, it'll never get written of course but there is a setting book in my head. Well, some vague kernels of an idea anyway... It would sell like ice-cream in Hell. I really hope you are right. And let's not forget that in spite of some pretty big changes in the industry, Chaosium have managed to stay in business for over three decades now so they are at least doing something right. I don't know how many companies started in the 70s are still around, but I doubt there are that many. So I have faith that now they have a little extra cash (I understand they got some for the Eternal Champion licenses) they will plod along much as they always have. It's obviously impossible to try to predict the future or what their plans are for BRP and what mix of buying licenses, selling licenses, original settings, CoC they will have. I do think there will be PDFs to buy though. It'll be interesting times though.

Re the good sales of adventures for CoC I think SJG have said they don't want to produce adventure books because they don't sell all that well (PDFs may be a different thing though as they are much cheaper to produce and can be any size you want). Everyone says they want adventures but no one actually buys them or something to that effect. Now CoC and GURPS are two very different beasts and probably don't compare all that well. IMO CoC aims at GMs who want good adventures for their players and GURPS seems to aim at GMs who like to tinker and build worlds. So where will BRP fall between these (extremes)? I agree that BRP could use good books about designing your setting (similar to the GURPS Fantasy and Space books) and running campaigns of particular types, but I'd also like to see world books. It'll be interesting to see at any rate. I'm hoping for a couple of settings (original or licensed), supported with source books and adventures. The only problem with that is I might hate those settings, and thus won't buy anything... I do want to see short PDFs from Chaosium though, at $5 or so, with rules variants, small drop-in settings and adventures. They already have the infrastructure in place with their new catalog and the Tuesday Terribles and I imagine the risk would be low. I wouldn't be surprised if they are planning something like that. Sorry to ramble.

And I must stop ending every sentence I write with :-)

I did, but it doesn't really say anything about their plans. Just that you can use it for pretty much anything you want, but we already knew that :-) A financially strong Chaosium would be a very nice thing to have :-) And I hope your dreams come true, I'll even buy a copy if it's even half-decent ;-)

If they don't have a setting, how will they make more money on the book once sales go down (i.e., we've all bought our copies...)? More rule books? Licenses? I don't know a thing about the game industry, but to keep the game in the public mind, I assume they need new products. And high if rumours are true ;-)

I really like a lot about Glorantha, but sometimes I feel it makes for better reading than playing. :-)

Include me in that minority. I'm definitely more interested in a new setting than one based off of books as long as it was reasonably different to all other generic settings out there. I'm not a huge fan of Harn, but they got it right when they said they'd never publish stuff about what happens after a certain year. Any setting with a future history presents some potential problems for a group, and perhaps more so if it's based on a series of novels. My main objection though is that there are too few really innovative settings designed just for games, well that's my impression at least This is a niche Chaosium have a good chance of filling now. That said, there are certainly some fictional settings that'd be interesting to see for a game that haven't been mentioned yet. Steven Erikson's, The Malazan Book of the Fallen is one. The Roland Cycle as we've mentioned repeatedly here now. I wonder if anyone from Chaosium is lurking in the shadows here, twitching their tentacles and writhing maniacally in insane laughter at our discussions...

Actually, I think Steve Jackson Games have stopped doing licensed setting books for 4th ed of GURPS. Traveller is the only exception I think. :-) I doubt they'd need a special license to do a Fantasy Earth type of thing they did with Vikings, Land of Ninja and Monster Colosseum. And wasn't there rumours of a Rome book in the works? Apart from that one, someone was working on a setting with everything thrown in (i.e all the powers). The BRP answer to Infinite Worlds for GURPS I guess.

It would be fun to see a game that focused more on the French chansons than the English matter. I always want more when I read the book, there's this whole world hinted at I want to explore. And of course it's similar to the Arthurian stuff, what I don't want for this game though is the generational theme of Pendragon or the particular magic of his reign. I love the idea of the different powers of Law and Chaos, as represented by Man (and God ultimately) and Faery struggling for supremacy over a no-man's land of wooden forts in untamed Germanic woods, mountain lochs with nixies and so on. From what I remember of Ars Magica they do that bit pretty well with their different dominions, Divine, Magic, Faery and Infernal. It's such a short book too, and I'll finish it tonight...