svensson

BTW, @Vexthug @Atgxtg, I don't mean to poo-poo your suggestions. I appreciate the input and they're viable examinations. My nature is somewhat contrarian and I tend to poke at solutions to try and identify problems that can be resolved before a final decision is made. My wife says I can come across as an arrogant know-it-all when I don't mean to be.

Well, Jeff has flat-out stated that much of RQ3 is not longer viable or canon. Since we're talking about house-ruling here, that's not all that big a deal but I felt it ought be mentioned in passing. The Ki rules in RQ3 LoN always seemed a bit... clunky, I guess.. to me. For one thing, they don't even start to have an effect until skill level 100%, which precludes the vast majority of campaign play.

I'm unaware of a Battle /Spirit magic spell that will directly reduce SR or allow multiple firing over the course of the round. The only ones that approximate, IIRC, are Coordination [Raise DEX to reduce SR] or Multimissile [to increase the number of missiles /bullets /whatever per shot in one SR]. Furthermore, BRP doesn't contain those spells in their basic magic [which could easily be corrected].

That's good to hear. While I don't play 13A, I certainly don't want them to fold.

Huh. Wonder why that is... most developers like having a place to Q&A their games and keep the buzz up. Publisher problems?

So, for the two or three of you that might have missed it, Chaosium has purchased John Wick Enterprises and it's products. This is the developer of the 7th Sea setting. But I have a sick, somewhat derpy sense of humor. In the announcement thread I said something to the effect of 'would anybody who thought Chaosium was going to produce a Keanu Reeves assassin game please raise your hand'. Yeah, I know. I'd tell you that I couldn't help it, but the fact is I really didn't even try, so.... This brought up the question of how to fix 'John Wick' /'Matrix' /'Equilibrium' style firearm martial arts into a system with strike ranks. Well, folks, how could we do that?

Well, Quack, this is for the most part an old RQ grog board. In my observation, there's a whole bunch of discussion about Glorantha trivia that seems to creep in to a lot of discussions. As an old grog in several games myself, I very much appreciate the existence of a portal to ask the deep lore questions of the devs and writers. But that doesn't solve your problem much, does it? Have you looked in the 13th Age publisher forums? You might find what you're looking for there.

Like a lot of us, I'm thrilled that JWE is coming under the Chaosium umbrella. Wick is one of the designers of one of my all-time favorite games, Legend of the 5 Rings RPG, and one of my favorite sets of game engines, the d10 Roll/Keep system. These are, hands down, the absolute best set of rules for gaming the tension and deadly earnestness of a quick draw duel, be it Japanese iaijutsu or an Old West quick-draw contest. But my question regards the 7th Sea game. Is Chaosium planning on changing the basic mechanics of 7th Sea or keep publishing materials as the game currently stands, or do BRP crossover content? I realize that this is very likely too early in the process for any firm plans to have been made, but I did want to put the question out there.

All of them are good ideas, but if we are to bring RQG to a wider public we have to give them more to do than just read more rules. We need scenarios, stat blocks, quests, adventures. The next thing we need is more info on Sorcery. As I see it, those are the two biggest needs at this stage of the process.

Well, to answer your question, one of my favorite TV shows as a kid was 'Tales of the Gold Monkey' But it depends on your gamers' preferences. Some like 'Indiana Jones' and 'The Rocketeer', but some prefer Prohibition and flapper girls. As with any game, your mileage will vary.

I dunno, man. Gonna be kinda hard to fit Gun Fu into Strike Ranks...

OK, everybody who thought there was gonna be an RPG staring John Wick the assassin, raise your hand. *waves* *ducks* But I AM thrilled that a setting as wonderful as 7th Sea is being kept, preserved and added to. It was a damned interesting game when it first came out and I still have warm memories of left-handed Castilian duelist, Senor Rodrigo Maria Theresa de Sanchez de la Punte del Este, caballo legendario [tagline: 'Because I am, of course, Rodrigo!']

Side note, if you're running a CoC game in the classic Roaring 20's era, HBO's Boardwalk Empire is pretty much required viewing and it gives a good idea of the kind of weapons available and their use appropriate to the time frame.

OK, lifelong shooter, combat veteran, reenactor, and military historian here. I'm certainly not saying that my comments are the be-all and end-all on the subject. Just like with everything there's always someone who knows more, but I'm pretty confident of my knowledge. I address this answer to the OP, who stated he didn't know much about guns or their history. I am also not going to engage in any Second Amendment discussions here. This is strictly history as it relates to a game with strong historical ties. I. Firearms Culture in the US between the Wars. America in the post War One era was a heavily armed society, more so than now. While there were fewer guns in private hands in actual numbers, more households owned guns per capita. These were by and large pistols and hunting rifles, but it wasn't until the first Federal Firearms Act of 1934 that actually banned automatic weapons! It was perfectly legal to own a Thompson submachine gun or a Browning Automatic Rifle, for example, and most sales came with a complimentary box of ammo. HOWEVER[!] please note that even the most laid back sheriff's deputy or G-Man is going look very askance at private ownership of a Maxim gun It was not uncommon to see gun ads in everything from Colliers Magazine and Saturday Evening Post to the local newspaper. While the Old West had pretty much faded in the national consciousness, the veterans of the Spanish American War /Philippines Insurrection were still prevalent and many men came home from the Western Front as hardened and damaged as any gunfighter or survivor of Gettysburg ever was. Gun safety was widely taught in the majority of the country, with some schools even having gun safety courses in Physical Education and guns were nearly de rigueur in Boys Scouts, which was growing in popularity. Hunting was not only a pastime but a family tradition and often a subsistence skill. Famous personalities as different as Alvin York and Audie Murphy a generation later hunted to eat, not for sport. This was the era a certain 'muscular Christian manhood', as Kipling put it. A 'proper' man had an outdoors streak that naturally included firearms, although just like with the Old West that was more a myth than a fact. Prohibition did effect all this, of course. Gangsters with guns were making inroads into the American consciousness and the beginnings of gun regulation were everywhere during the Volstead Act era. However, other than in the major urban areas very little actual confiscation was done outside of these areas. II. Game Facts: CoC has always been a little bit leery of unlicensed heavily armed independent monster hunters in service to society [nod to GhostBusters there], and the fact is that a significant percentage of Mythos beings will shake off a burst from a Lewis Gun and laugh at you. Of the weapons that do effect Mythos creatures, the 12 gauge shotgun is favored because it does a whole bunch of damage for one attack roll. Furthermore, the ammunition is cheap and available pretty much everywhere. In the Twenties you could go to the average county store and buy boxes of .22, .45, .30 cal., 30-06, and the various shotgun gauges for the asking. Even teenagers were allowed to buy ammo. Note that this would not be the case in a major metropolitan area with organized crime problems... New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco predominantly. These dense urban areas were already beginning to regulate firearms as early as 1910. So, shotguns specifically. By far the most common shotgun would be the double-barreled shotgun for bird hunting. It was not illegal to cut one down, but if you were accused of a crime and caught with a sawed-off shotgun, you were almost instantly presumed to be a criminal. Pump action shotguns were in the common-to-uncommon range. Many poorer families were suspicious of mechanical things and felt that a pump- or semi-auto shotgun was just another machine to break down and cost money to fix. Semi-auto shotguns were the most rare. in 1925, the first semi- shotgun, the Browning Auto-5, was only 20 years old and still seen as a rich man's toy. As a hunting implement, is was seen as unsporting. Even Teddy Roosevelt said so! However pump actions had wide acceptance, and the Winchester Model 1897 went to war with the AEF with a bayonet lug on the muzzle! I hope this answers some of @sTmykal questions. If you have any more, I'm happy to help. Happy gaming and keep the lights on!

I mean mages in the d20 Forgotten Realms sense of Khelben Blackstaff and Elminster... mages who babysit the world and control entire continents with their plots. Argrath, Harrek, Hon-Eel are all significant magicians, certainly the most significant magical practitioners since Jrustela, but they are not The Harpers or The Circle of Eight [from Greyhawk]. Because we're discussing different rules systems, the discussion of magical power and control are naturally going to be different, if not 'apples and oranges' then certainly apples and pears.

OK, RuneQuest /Basic Roleplay 101 1. No classes. Do what you want to do, expect to fail at tasks, get better at it. There is no magic *ding!* moment of leveling up and suddenly getting powers. If you want to sneak like a ninja, your skill starts at somewhere in the 25-35% range and you practice and train it up to 85+ 1d6 at a time. 2. Magic is EVERYWHERE. Everyone has access to magical training. But magic in RQ is fundamentally different than d20. Magic augments the person's abilities, magic interacts with the Spirit World, magic does not change everything. There are no uber-mages throwing fireballs about, but I wouldn't want to be in the blast zone of a Sunspear with enough Rune Points behind it. There are no Gandalfs, Elminsters, or Mordenkainens in Glorantha. But I wouldn't tug the beard of an Orlanthi Storm Lord if I was you. There IS a Strahd-like character. His name is Delecti and you want absolutely nothing to do with him under any circumstances. 3. Your character is part of several communities; your family, your clan, your nation, your cult. There is no room in Glorantha for murder hobos and lone wolves are usually outlawed from their clans and probably excommunicated from their cults. In Glorantha, actions have consequences and characters are held accountable for their actions. 4. There is no Good, or Evil, or Lawful, or Chaotic. There is Us and Them. 'Good' is defined as 'that which is beneficial to my people' and 'Evil' is 'that which is oppressive to my people'. 5. Combat is without a doubt a deadly affair in RQ. Almost every character that retires does so with no more total hit points than they were generated with [but usually LOTS more scar tissue]. There no such thing as a 'warm up fight' because every trollkin [RQ's equivalent to a DnD goblin] with a spear has no less than a 5% chance of ending your character's life [for the RQ rule wonks out there, that's an Impale to the head with a 1d8 spear that does more than double HP, resulting in a severed 'limb', i.e. decapitation]. RuneQuest is as different from DnD as Starfinder is different from Star Trek. It might be to your taste, it might not. But you'll be a better, more thoughtful gamer if you give it a try... which is something that can be said for all of us. Everybody should give those 'other games' a shot. Your thinking on magic, combat, world building, and everything else will be way different after a session of Ars Magica or Legend of the Five Rings, etc.

Gotta be careful with the Kurosawa references. Too many at one time and players will figure it out

A PC death is NOT 'a mistake', RB. The whole point of adventure games is risk and death is a natural consequence of that risk. In a full-on battle like your scenario, that risk multiplies and sometimes that means a character loss. The real question is 'does the player feel he got jerked around'? If he does, talk to him about it and see what you can do to improve your GM skills. Also, make sure that the character's sacrifice is honored in-game. Perhaps the teenaged liege lord has grown up a bit, seeing one of his honored retainers butchered for the sake of education....

And just because we're talking Toshiro-sama, Japan, and what all else...

Oh DAT FUNNEH! We like!

And the one old NPC standing on the parapet of the castle holding a sign... "Our liege lord is being an idiot and we have to protect him. Please excuse us. We mean you no harm otherwise..." [Like the old retainer holding the sign in the street in the tale of 'The 47 Ronin of Lord Asano'

Okay, confession time. I'm a lifelong military historian and gamer, but just like with every historian there are gaps in my knowledge. I'm very up on the Dark and Middle Ages, I'm OK on the Renaissance, but after about 1500 or so, I completely lose interest until about Queen Victoria's reign. And my real knowledge of Asian military history is pretty spotty. I know some Chinese, a fair bit about Japan, a little of India, and absolutely nothing of Thai, Burma, Viet etc. BUT my wife is a huge Japanophile. She loves anime [which I tolerate at best], is a big fan of Japanese culture etc. Now, I like a Toshiro Mifune movie the same as anybody [and if you don't like Toshiro Mifune, you need therapy], and I love the L5R RPG, but I didn't start putting Japanese military history together until I met my wife. And I did it just so I could have a somewhat intelligent conversation with her. And we have a deal... she doesn't talk to me about Naruto and I don't go into great depth about my concerns about my [American] football team's off-season trades Anyway, be sure to tell us all how your game works out.

Alright, let's go with the 'middle of the night betrayal' scenario. The key here is to present each character with a scene where they're called on to something they're good at AND something that'll be a challenge. For example: While the players are representative of their liege Sugura, they also have a duty to protect the interests of Sugura's ally. Do this with complications and additional goals other than just simple escape. The players are quartered in the castle's guest room floor. The changeover is happening in the middle of the night. Therefore, the PCs are unarmed and unarmored at scenario start. Complication 1: Getting to their gear. That's worth a couple fights right there. Remember, it would be very bad for them to return without their family's ancestral swords.... Complication 2: Wouldn't you know it, also present is Ally's favorite concubine, who was visiting her aged and ill mother. As the changeover begins, the concubine realizes that she'd make a valuable and very damaging hostage for Takeda to take against her lord, Sugura's Ally. She decides to attempt jigai, the samurai noblewoman's version of seppuku. Can the players talk her out of it AND escape with her and her mother??? Naturally, the concubine is on the guest floor with the players and they have to protect her without their full gear. Complication 3: Can the players escape with the supplies Sugura has delivered to their Ally, which would otherwise be captured by Takeda? See where I'm going with this?