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Michael Hopcroft

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Everything posted by Michael Hopcroft

  1. Sounds dreadful. I imagine you could use honey to sweeten the porridge, or butter to add flavor and protein to it. But it can't be fun living off that. But why porridge? Why not bread?
  2. Just p[icked up the PDF for HQG (very impressive book -- I want the hardcover now) and while it's a simple overview there's a lot of fascinating stuff. It occurs to me that Gloranthan campaigns are all about flavor and the players and GM immersing themselves in societies and even ethical and thought patterns that are almost alien to the modern mind. As I was reading through the culot descriptions I started to wonder about food, oddly enough. And when I found that the equipment list did not contain any references as all to it other than the prices for "meat animals", I became even more curious. If you were a guest at a clan feast or cult intitation ceremony, what food and drink would you be served? What do travelers eat on the road, and does anyone make a living preparing food for them at resting places on their journeys? What did you eat growing up, and what will you feed your children when you have them? The answer depends on your culture, and since there are a multitude of cultures there will not be a single answer. One could ask when it will come up in a game, but it's the sort of nice, light touch that adds to the immersion of the setting.
  3. I'm not at all familiar with all the new circumstances of Chaosium/BRP/etc. I still have my BGB and I am not giving it up. But I am wondering, off the top of my head, what Chaaosium's design team or preferred freelancers would so if they were given the task of developing a super-powers subsystem for BRP -- starting from scratch. Superworld does have its adherents. But it gets really clumsy at higher power levels, and at the "best (insert your specialty here) on the planet" level on which many classic characters live. The problem would get even more pronounced if they go to percentile attributes (or however you explain the rules in CoC7, which I sadly don't have yet). It could be that Runequest players aren't all that attracted to superheroes, or that the level of crunch inherent in BRP simply doesn't go along with bench-pressing jetliners and flying to the center of the galaxy in a few minutes. But if you were an RPG designer, and you had been given the task of re-inventing the BRP supers rules, what would you do?
  4. There was an actual book a long time ago featuring conversion tables for at least a dozen of the then-current systems. It was obscure and the conversions were not very accurate, but it existed. Wizards of the Coast was almost sunk before they got started in what would turn out to be an ironic twist. Their first RPG book was The Primal Order, a book about gods and deities, and it features conversion notes for most of the popular systems at the time. Needless to say, Palladium sued them. Somehow they managed to absorb TSR, gained the rights to the D&D franchise, and the rest is history,
  5. Does Anime count? If so, the core cast of Slayers interests me. They're very high on the power scale, though (even the one non-mage in the core group, with a reputation for being "dumb as a sack of hammers", controls a primally awesome weapon and is almost superhumanly skilled even with a normal metal blade). They might break the system, but it would be intriguing to try. On a more human scale, there's Spike Spiegel, the space-faring bounty hunter of Cowboy Bebop.
  6. May I request the Minstrel? His medieval garb and virtuoso lute playing was merely affectation. His real thing was that he was a pre-Internet super-hacker, capable of making computers and electronics do many things they were not designed to do. An updated version would be one of the few people who could even consider hacking the Bat-Computer (probably the world's most secure system) and one of only one or two people on the planet who might be capable of actually pulling it off. And that prospect should really make Batman sweat....
  7. In typical Arthurian legend, Lancelot was a French knight who came to England because he'd heard about Arthur's ambition and befriended him (and became very friendly with his wife....). Since these times don't really have France (not sure what was there at the time), I wonder what sort of exotic locale a Lancelot-style PC could emerge from. There could be great play value in a fish-out-of-water PC who finds English ways (especially the "Old Ways") odd at best. But it's too late for the Romans and too soon for the Vikings/Norse. Who's available?
  8. From my limited reading it seems to look very little like Pendragon. Passions are important, but chivalry as such doesn't really exist. Merlin is much more important here than he was in Pendragon, and there's a lot more genuine turmoil. Arthur's feats are much less grandiose -- in Pendragon he somehow managed to attack and defeat Rome, while in Mythic Britain I don't think he even got as far as uniting the British Isles. The tone is much grittier, much darker, and a lot truer to the period. But Passions are there, and they make things really interesting for PCs. Mixed parties of Pagans and Christians, united against something significant, could provide a lot of tension especially if the Christian displays typical evangelistic zeal.
  9. Question: You have a large number of foes with bows shooting at you at once. You are leading a non-combatant you want to protect at all costs. What style would enable you to effectively protect both of you, at least for a while, from the onslaught?
  10. Yet the case seems hardly hopeless in a good version of a campaign like this. The designs of a "small g" god can be thwarted. You have to be darn clever and darn lucky to do it, but it's possible. Rage of Bahamut's most recent episode has a good example. Favaro has to rescue the person who got him into this mess from a demon prince's flying fortress. The odds against him are overwhelming -- the demon prince and his minions have alarming power levels, the demon prince has tricked the man obsessed with hunting Favaro into doing his dirty work for him, and so forth. How does Favaro win? He improvises. He finds things in the local environment that he can use to slow down his adversaries. He plays his rival's obsession with vengeance to his own advantage. He does exactly what the demon prince (who he doesn't even know about) would not expect anyone to do. And, as is his wont, he does it with style. Thwarting a god or a demon prince is one thing. If you can do it gracefully, it's even better,
  11. One of the more interesting and exciting anime series of the current season is based on a pretty bad PC game. But Rage of Bahamut has some intriguing features for BRP. The series involves a fairly standard conflict between Gods and Demons with mortals caught in the middle. But it's the character of those mortals that makes the show interesting. The show features two rival bounty-hunters, Favaro and Kaesar -- former best of friends until Kaesar's father was hanged and his family disgraced. For this, he blames Favaro, and is hunting him to the ends of the Earth. Favaro, for his part, has no interest in Kaesar's revenge but loves pricking his pride by outwitting him at every opportunity. Favaro is clever, very good at what he does, and (tries very hard to be) carefree -- he also tends to spend his money as soon as he earns it and brag about his prowess to anyone who will listen. But this time it'll cost him, because his boasts are overheard by a mysterious, powerful woman who forcibly enlists him in her efforts to get to a distant city. Turns out she's stolen something very significant from the Gods that both the Gods and the Demons want for themselves -- and will go to extraordinary lengths to get. And soon the forces hunting her are hunting him too. Favaro is in way over his head -- and loving every minute of it... How does this relate to BRP? Well, many BRP games feature obscenely powerful gods/demons/Elder Things/pan-dimensional entities that are totally not on the level of the PCs. They are so powerful and so intelligent that mortals can't hope to cope with them, which frequently results in a grim or even horrifying game. Mind you, this is usually deliberate. But how do you manage a game with all these where the players are playing clever, swashbuckling-like heroes who relish the thought of a challenge that in theory they should not conceivably be able to handle -- whose plans consist largely of improvisation and raw chutzpah -- and they don't get stomped on by the GM for their insolence? How do you handle a player who dares to sass off to Nyarlathotep? After all, if there is one thing CoC Investigators are not known for, it's panache...
  12. Several of the Doctor's adventures become truly horrific if you replace the TARDIS crew with less competent protagonists. There are many times where it seems even the Doctor is in over his head, so imagine how hard it is for people who aren't super-genius, nigh-immortal Time Lords to confront the horrors he faces. For example, I have a hard time thinking that anyone native to 1912 England would have stood a chance against Sutekh. Even a foe as intelligent and technologically savvy as the Doctor was countered and frustrated at every turn, with even his cleverest plans being matched by Sutekh's own intellect and overwhelming mental power.
  13. Got my PDF copy! It looks very good, albeit grim, gritty and not at all what you would expect from an Arthur book. In fact, I suspect that Arthur is a relatively minor character in the setting. I suspect that a one thing PCs might get involved in is a sort of race over the Thirteen Treasures. The Druids want to collect them and put them to use. The Christians, who are building up temporal power even in the absence of Rome, want these blasphemies destroyed. Depending on what would actually happen when the treasured are assembled, the choice might not be as clear-cut as you would think....
  14. It isn't their fault, but a non-BRP order I made from DriveThru earlier in the month appears to have gotten lost in the mail. It did get printed, and it did get shipped, but it's been nearly two weeks. Media Mail is slow but not usually that slow. I'm wondering whether it wouldn't be worth it to pay for enhanced shipping on a larger order. As I understand it, there's no tracking on Media Mail packages.
  15. I can easily see PCs as "scouts" in that situation -- "find the orc/zombie/skeleton/trollkin army, get back and report their position to our army, and hope they don't catch you!". Let the King's army deal with them, and hope you general is competent and not some dilettante nobleman who doesn't know a glaive from a roasted whole pig.
  16. How long does that process generally take? I'm seriously thinking about upgrading to Mentor, but since I know little about HTML and nothing about CSS I can't make my own sheets at all. Is there a polite way to ask for help with it, because there are a lot of games I'd like to play on Roll20 that could benefit from them.
  17. That makes it difficult to rationalize the existence of armies of undead in a campaign. Nobody has THAT much POW. Of course, as a game balance issue in BRP you really don't want armies of undead, especially in fantasy, as they would rapidly overwhelm the PCs. A group of PCs taking on an entire tribe of orcs has the same problem -- take on too many foes, even if they're really lousy, and you're toast regardless of how skilled you are.
  18. (This really applies to all the games, but this is the big forum so....) The virtual tabletop service Roll20 has recently upgraded their character sheet system. Since Virtuacon will be using Roll20 for most of our games (I'm helping out this year) it would be nice to have character sheets for games people will want to run. Right now the only D100 games they currently have sheets for are the 6th and 7th editions of CoC. And I personally am powerless to rectify this situation. The new sheets are functional, and those functions require HTML and CSS programming skills I sadly do not possess. There are instructions on how it is done that I cannot make heads or tails of. I wonder whether anyone does have that knowledge....
  19. You might be interested in Virtuacon 14 in October (plug). It's a global online convention that uses Google Hangouts and Roll20, taking place OCtober 11th-13th, and I'm sure there would be people wanting to play any of the d100 games there. In fact, GM registration starts July 15th. So if someone wants to run some RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, BRP, Renaissance and other members of the d100 family of games, go ahead and thing about signing on.
  20. I'm reminded of the Titanfall tpopic that apparently is going nowhere at the moment. Videogame mecha created for American audiences seems to be a fundamentally different animal. You can (and at some point probably will) customize your Titan in the video game, but it is mainly an extension of yourself. And the same Titans are used by both sides in the galactic civil war that is the context for the game. I can see role-paying situations where telling friend from foe is a challenge, where friendly-fire "Accidents" (including some that might not be quite so accidental) happen regularly -- especially since it's possible to grab an opponent, pull him out of the cockpit, and steal his Titan.
  21. Alternatively, you could play where are no real miracles at all. The actual workings of the would would be completely "rational" and atheistic. There could well be great religions holding vast amounts of temporal power, but their leaders would be either deluded or lying through their teeth. They could cite all sorts of completely natural phenomena as "miracles" and react ferociously to anyone who tries to debunk them. Priests of such faiths may well practice healing by "laying on of hands", but it is no more effective than a placebo (possibly less so). And they may be able to use the force of the state to suppress medical techniques that actually work but violate their tenets.
  22. Perhaps one can do a world where magic is a corruption of the forces of nature and only evil people can use it. Maybe there is a reason witches and warlocks are viewed with homicidal hatred -- maybe all magic is evil and perverse and pursuing it is a virtual guarantee of your eventual destruction. PCs would never be able to use magic themselves in such a setting -- and once they understand what magic entails they probably wouldn't want to. Possibly the mingling of science and mysticism that was a common feature of the Middle Ages would not exist and physics, astronomy and similar pursuits would have much freer reign (and astronomy would be completely divorced from astrology, which would be the province of soothsayers or con artists and generally despised). Perhaps medicine would more rapidly discard things like "humours" and blood-letting and devote more time to figuring out how the human body really works. If religion was a non-starter in such a world, there would be fewer objections to things like dissecting corpses for research and teaching, or to posting new visions of what the physical universe looks like. Earth-centric worldviews might not last nearly as long, and anyone who insisted that the Earth was flat would be looked on with scorn (and a little pity, as he must be either stupid or mad).
  23. I picked it up, but I picked it up on DriveThru which given that they're having their big 10th Anniversary sale may have been a mistake. It's like to be some time before I can actually read it.
  24. If I go with the "Pay What You Like" option on DriveThru, which sorely tempts me, how much money would you prefer me to drop on you (given the comparison in size to the $25 PDF cover price of the main book)? And if you say something like "If you have to ask, you can;t afford it!", I shall snicker.
  25. Presumably Titan Pilots are highly-qualified and highly-trained elite soldiers. You don't give a Titan to a raw conscript. Although I wonder how hard and fast a rule that is in the setting. It's already a bit of a logical disconnect that the rebel Militia has Titans at all, not to mention the capital ships they go from world to world on and the massive technical resources required to keep them running. How do they pay for it all? And as the war drags on and the elite Pilots drop like flies, the standards for troops on both sides might start to slip and less qualified people can get into one. The "government" side (actually a massive natural resources megacorp with all the perks of a government and none of that pesky "I have to check in with the voters every four years" nonsense) has a serious problem apparently keeping its best people loyal -- the defection of their best general (and, presumably, the forces he led) is a major element of the backstory. About which none of the players actually care. They just like to stomp around in big robots (or run across walls shooting as they go) and repeatedly frag each other.
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