Michael Hopcroft

I don't think Green Ronin's Freeport line has ever been directly ported to a BRP game. This seems like a good system to do it in, actually, because Freeport is a place where death is around every corner. It also has elements of Pirates vs. Cthulhu (although given the sanitary conditions and the avarice of almost everyone involved an invasion of Deep Ones could be described as urban renewal....). The PCs are usually either outright anti-heroes, for whom any actually worthwhile things they accomplish are largely by accident, or trying to make their way as best they can with even a little scrap of morality and self-respect intact. The Pirates Guide to Freeport is somewhat system-agnostic (the setting was originally written for d20, but versions for other systems such as Fate have been released). Few specific spells are mentioned, although magic is definitely present and used in some circumstances by PCs. Some flavors of d100 would fit it in effortlessly, like Renaissance. The main d20 influence is the plethora of Tolkienesque "races" used in decidedly non-Tolkienesque ways (notably the "halfling Mafia" and a brutal ghetto for "goblinoids".) It is a city run largely by criminals -- even the ruling council has many seaborne predators in its ranks. The printing press exists, but few are literate and education is for the privileged only. Black powder weapons exist and are commonly used but people still carry and use swords and archery and crossbowmanship are still in vogue. What few cops there are are even worse than the criminals. Decent people shouldn't live in Freeport. They'd be happier somewhere else. (Probably live longer, too....) Any thoughts on BRP for Freeport?

Yet Hackmaster is still remember with some degree of fondness (by some, at least) while Kingdoms of Kalamar, their attempt to break into D&D for real, is remembered barely at all. In fact, I cannot remember a single distinctive feature of the setting to differentiate it from the many other generic fantasies that were going around at the time. If there is one positive trend in the art of game design in the fifteen years since the OGL genie was let out of the bottle, it's that there is now a greater emphasis on setting flavor even for the most generic of games.

The latter would be nice, and it would be nicer the easier it were to program. Hero Lab has an "authoring kit" that can be purchased (you get it when you get the Savage Worlds set), which mainly describes how the system files can be edited in XML. You still need XML training and experience to actually do the work, though, and that is not as common as LWD seems to think it is. I would like to see more fan-developed game systems for Hero Lab, but that does not appear to be happening on a large scale. Now Excel does that sort of work quite nicely with other systems. The main set of calculations involved in making a BRP character is not a calculation at all -- it's keeping track of what you've spend so you don't run out of Skill Points. Now it would be nice to build an Excel sheet that exports a decent character sheet and can be used with any subsystem desired, including the third-party supplements like Mecha and Dragon Lines (Dragon Lines is on my "I really need to get around to reading this through" list). Maintaining separate sheets for each major subsystem is only a minor hassle for the end-user, though they are probably beastly to format. I would also be happy to see an Excel sheet for RQ6 player-characters.

I don't have the most recent Hackmaster material. The version that cloned AD&D 1-2 (and mockingly copied the art style of those books) struck me as a game that was basically an elaborate in-joke that somehow developed a life of its own. I don't even know that it was actually designed to be at all playable. It was maddeningly complex, probably needlessly so, because the Knights playing a game like that for decades (as opposed to something more sensible) must have seemed hilarious to the authors. The expansive, eight-volume "Hacklopedia of Beasts" was even jokier, with its cannibal faeries and monsters only an eight-year-old could come up with (the in-game backstory was that the author kept inserting hints he got from his child into the game). At the same time the company was releasing a serious licensed world line for the then-new D&D 3rd Edition. It was a license they had paid good money to acquire. The Open Gaming License was in its infancy, and WOTC still dared to dream they could convince the entire industry to go over to churning out material that supported their game. It would be years before the full consequences of the Open Gaming License would come home to roost and even longer for WOTC to realize the fundamental strategic error they had made with it.

I am in the same boat, and have similar problems with the scripting in Fantasy Ground. It's probably easy for someone who codes for a living, but if you are a person who codes for a living why would you go home, have dinner, and then go over to your PC and start coding again?

I would be interested in hearing how it goes. What tone are you trying for? I'm thinking that your PCs are going to be rather fragile compared to PCs in some other supers games....

Cybermen can survive in hard vacuum. In one episode, the crew of a ship under attack was about to de-pressurize the ship in self-defense until the Doctor pointed out that while all the people fighting them in the ship needed air, Cybermen don't. And the Cybermen didn't need anything special to get around on the vacuum surface of the Moon.

The classic space warfare game Starfire from the 1980s, which was released at about the same time as the original Star Fleet Battles by the same publisher, used a system where ship damage was sequential in nature. Your ships had a line of letters indicating the ship's systems, and systems went down as you crossed them off in sequence as the ship took damage. The ship was destroyed when everything was crossed out (or perhaps the entire surviving crew would be so occupied with keeping life support going and keeping the interior free of hard vacuum that the ship was out of the fight). It was great for battles between medium-to-large fleets of roughly equivalent ships. The weakness is that you couldn't target individual systems -- what you hit was what you hit. You couldn't "target the bridge".

Delta Green turned out to be one of the best-selling bundles they'd ever done. Now I actually have to read the books I bought. I wonder if the planned stand-alone game will be BRP-compatible?

One of the first things TV station executives asked Carl Macek when he was pitching Robotech to them was "OK, so how do you bring Roy Fokker back?" The answer, of course, was that he didn't. War is All Hell and dead people stay dead. That was one of the things that made Robotech a turning point in the history of American TV animation. The total body count was somewhere in the high billions if you take into account most of the population of the Planet Earth. Then Gundam Wing came along in the 1990s and the paradigm shifted again. The moral ambiguities of that series were shocking at that time -- but this time the American audiences embraced the anti-heroic Gundam Pilots even with all the innocent blood they ended up with on their hands. In its own way it was equally revolutionary to the point that Cartoon Network aired two versions -- one edited for after-school audiences and an uncut edition for people who were willing to stay up until midnight to get the full experience. In any case, animation on TV would never quite be the same again.

It looks like they all point to the same piece of software, which doesn't really do what I had in mind. I would like something that I can use to add up and balance everything, and ideally that also produces a nice, clean character sheet that I can print out, take to the game, and then edit again between sessions once I start gaining experience and improving the skills. I understand tooley1chris' frustration with Hero Lab. They need to make money, and Pathfinder is what makes them money. I honestly have no idea how many people buy the CoC set they have now. So they have little incentive to do a big upgrade. That said, they put a lot of effort into a set they aren't even charging for (Fate Core) so maybe there's an approach to convincing them to do a BRP upgrade that will work. The impetus, though, will probably have to come from Chaosium.

Information that, were he to receive it, he would completely misinterpret (yet still somehow manage to come up with the right answer, practically by accident). Which should give him an opportunity to display his other defining trait -- which is, of course, his utter sexual incompetence....

I wonder what side of the real/super divide your typical Gundam (such as the White Doll from Turn A Gundam) falls on, because when the Gundams interact with the run-of-the-mill mecha used by their foes, it rarely goes well for the foes. In Wing, the find named Gundams were a LOT better than the Oz and earth mecha they usually fought. OZ needed to use research, special tactics, and fiendish traps to even present them with a challenge. Which is what you will probably want to do in a game. Lull the heroes into complacency with hordes of easy-to-defeat enemies and then give them something meatier that poses a real threat. And then have the player-characters deal with the intrigues, conflicting loyalties and interpersonal complications that define the Gundam franchise (and make it so very Japanese, given how much of the samurai adventure genre it emulates deals with those conflicts of loyalties and court intrigues upon which honorable heroes are dashed).

Cybermen have their own interesting things. The only way the Cybermen can make more Cybermen (which they are always driven to do) is to capture humans or humanoids and "Convert" them. The original personality is wiped clean, replaced by a perfectly logical and reflexively obedient soldier. They will kill in combat, or to get rid of someone who betrays or otherwise annoys them, but their usual goal is to manufacture more of their kind. Like Daleks their armor is very effective ("These men are using the same gun we are. Do you see any of those silver things dead?"). It varies, like in the case of the Daleks, from story to story -- I tend to call the Colin Baker story "Factory Recall of the Cybermen" because Cybermen were being killed right and left by things that normally they wouldn't even have noticed. How someone decided giving them a gold allergy was a good idea is anyone's guess -- what's the point of clogging the respiratory systems of creatures that don't even need to breathe?

Blue Falcon certainly lends himself to a comedy campaign -- heck, that's exactly what his series is: playing the straight-laced and eternally serious superhero against his silly sidekick and his bumbling efforts to "help" any way he can. But even without the robot dog, Blue Falcon's tendency to not get jokes and take everything going on around him with the utmost seriousness is comedy gold. Admittedly, his life actually is at stake, but some of the things he encounters are over-the-top absurd in ways he doesn't quite get. (His voice actor, Laugh-In veteran Gary Owens, was pitch-perfect for that kind of role -- IIRC he also played Space Ghost).

Guardian was a blast. I didn't get any roleplaying in, but I did win a ticket to PDXAGE, a weekend-long game event in May, that could provide decent opportunities to play stuff. The latter is generally for the locals and might not be something people want to cross the continent to attend. But hopefully it'll be fun and my experiences will be nice and varied. I did get to play a diplomatic games called Oh My God! There's an Axe in my Head. (properly pronounced OH MY GOD! there's an axe in my head.). Sort of like what General Assembly session at the UN would be like if a troupe of axe-jugglers invited to entertain the delegates had unexpectedly gone berserkly insane and started hurling axes into the audience randomly, yet with uncanny accuracy...

Actually, I think that's wise. I'm concerned that savvy users who hold off on buying new gaming material until that Bundle or that special on Drive-Thru are affecting some publishers' bottom lines. I'm guilty of that behavior myself at times, having dropped a bit of money at Drive-Thru yesterday on their Tabletop Day specials. but I don't limit my PDF purchasing to those times if I can avoid it financially. And while I will shop for a good price, I am keenly aware that game companies need to make money somehow if they're going to continue producing good games. Thank goodness that the RQ6 hardcopy is back in print. Just seeing it on my bookshelf salves my conscience.

Just two and a half days left as of 1:30 pacific April 6th. I have my books -- apparently delivery has beena problem with Drive-Thru overwhelmed by people buying Tabletop Day specials (and claiming Tabletop Day freebies).

BF has to put up with a sidekick who's "fearless, scare-less, a little too careless...." and probably more powerful than he is. To the point that he drew second billing in his own series. If I were to update the characters for a modern adventure, I'd tone down that character's goofiness a little. He's still careless (although he would probably call it "care-free") and still tends to lose focus, but he would probably be better at controlling the various powers he possesses. He's not going to overwhelm anybody, and is nobody's combat monster, but some of the things he can do have the potential to be very useful to Blue Falcon. His useful gadgets would probably include access to both a first-aid kit and tools to be used in repairing himself (as a mechanical being he doesn't heal back damage naturally but must be repaired, usually by BF).

Can anything prepare you for the terror of -- Space Broos? Broos are vile. They are nasty. They are so obscene they prove that the Universe is evil because a benevolent deity would not permit them to exist. Now imagine a group of Broos stealing a spaceship and somehow learning how it works. So now Broos can go anywhere and do -- well, do the unspeakable things Broos do.

A comic book I was pointed to posited a monster that gained power from the ego of a particular protagonist. The more self-assured and self-important the hero allowed himself to get, the stronger the monster became. And since this particular hero had an enormous ego that he insisted on having everyone constantly stroke and feed, the monster became very powerful indeed. The only way to make the monster beatable was to teach the protagonist some humility. Now creatures that steal and absorb POW are nothing new to BRP fantasy games. Ego -- the sense of one's own importance -- is another matter. Especially if your self-confidence is largely unjustified (you believe you are better, smarter or more powerful than you really are). POW is something entirely different than that -- humble, self-sacrificing characters frequently have very high POW scores, and the POW of the egomaniac warrior-nobleman could well be average or worse. The question is how to make an intangible roleplaying element (the ego of the player-character who believes himself to be more important than he really is) into something tangible (the monster buffing itself as the hero "flexes his muscles").

Which is an interesting approach. Admirals assume the Greek fire-equivalent must be magical, so they try to deal with it magically. But the effects are resistant to traditional magical means of extinguishing flames. Will the enemy assume it's just a much more powerful magic than they're used to dealing with, or will they add two and two and realize that they will need to find a technological method to cope with the new naval superweapon?

I saw this thread title and immediately thought of Musicamancy. What if Bach, Handel, Haydn and Mozart were sorcerers as well as musicians? What if the music itself carries spells? It might give added impetus to the competition among royal courts to hire the best musicians possible, and to the cutthroat competition among the musicians themselves for royal favor and patronage. Then Beethoven comes along in the Revolutionary Age and brings with him a completely new paradigm that brings musicamancy to the people. Perhaps Mozart really was poisoned in such a setting -- but by magic as opposed to chemicals, as a warning to his peers to leave certain things alone....

I would love to get my hands on a BRP Bundle of Holding, but I don't know that it will benefit the publishers all that much. Although I did get Clockwork & Chivalry in a recent bundle and it inspired me to buy Renaissance. How do bundles get put together, and what's in it for the publishers to offer their games at such enormous discounts?

The current Bundle of Holding is a large collection of Delta Green stuff, the modern conspiracy campaign setting for Call of Cthulhu. The end is anticipated for April 7th. I probably won't be able to get it until Friday, but I never got Delta Green before and I am very curious. Especially with reports of a stand-alone, BRP-compatible new game about to go live on Kickstarter.