clarence

Here are a few more: - Luther Arkwright - Chronicles of Future Earth - Rubble and Ruin - Mission to Epsilon

That's my impression too. A bit crunchier, but nothing a GM can't adjust. And good support.

Hi all, as some of you know BRP Space (formerly BRP Starships) has been put on hold for a while. To make a long story short, I've been waiting for the new BRP Essentials to be announced. In the meantime I have improved the book as much as possible and my plan was to have an early copy of BRPE for developers by now. I also set this summer as a deadline for the book and for a couple of weeks now I have restarted my attempts to get a license for the core rules. I've been in contact with both Chaosium and The Design Mechanism. The result, as I see it, is two options: 1. Wait for BRP Essentials to be released, without really knowing what it will look like. Release time unknown - perhaps 6 months (my own best guess). 2. Go for Mythras Imperative, available now, making a few changes to adapt BRP Space to that ruleset. I have slowly come to the conclusion that I don't want to wait, and that Mythras Imperative is a very good option. But as many of you here on the forums have been involved in the creation and discussion on the book, I want to extend this question to you. Is Mythras Imperative a good choice for you as the core of the book? Let me know how you feel about all this.

Thanks Colin! I will keep your offer in mind. My knowledge of coding doesn't even cover which languages are used : )

Great! I will probably need both Android and iPhone versions eventually. I might get back to you Questbird when this idea takes more concrete shape.

Are there any coders here on the forum?

Yes, I have thought about turning it into an app too. Here’s what it could look like: Bottom left corner: Tap to roll 1d100. Bottom right corner: Tap to unfold a menu with additional dice (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20). Bottom middle: App menu containing save/load character, create random character, show EDU on/off, etcetera). Characteristics work like this: Tap-&-hold to enter starting value. During play, slide from the left edge to reduce the characteristic temporarily (as in Revolution d100 - I rarely play without this concept of characteristics as “conflict pools” any longer). A character’s overall health can be grasped at a glance by the size of the stacks. Skills are simply represented by their values, entered by tap-&-hold. Base chances for skills should ideally be added automatically. Tap empty box for skill usage to the right; this adds a checkmark. Unfortunately I have no idea how to code an app. All suggestions welcome : ) @Vexthug Aha, pocket mod looks interesting! Stay tuned, more information very soon : )

Good pitch!

I'm happy you like it! With BRP Space getting closer to publication, I could release these too I suppose. If there's enough interest. A simple PDF as a free download and prints to buy. A question for all of you: If I print them, should the back side be kept neutral or contain, for example, rules and tables for the players?

Here's the complete set: When it's folded, characteristics go on the front and player/description on the back. It measures 120x70 mm. For the digital version I tried to place characteristics in the middle, with skills on the pages to the right and combat plus the rest on the left - to minimize flicking. The problem is that most PDF readers ignore the command to open a file at anything but the first page. For now the digital version will have the same order as the printed one, until I find a workaround.

Good work. I'll take a look as soon as I can.

Thanks! It means a lot coming from the two of you.

In recent months I have, for various reasons, kept character sheets on my iPhone while playing. It's worked surprisingly well, using the annotation function in Evernote to keep track of changes. But the constant moving and zooming around the sheets made it a bit cumbersome after a while, so I have designed a smartphone-sized character sheet in PDF. It's made to fit an iPhone screen, but I'm sure it will work fine on most devices. The PDF consists of eight pages: Characteristics, Combat, one page for each skill category, Powers and Equipment. Fonts are big enough for easy reading and empty space generous, to make editing less fiddly on a small screen. Color coding is used to make navigation between the pages easier. Stats are for BRP Space, but as it's based on the BGB it will fit reasonably well with other games too. I also couldn't resist trying it out as a small printed folder - see photos below! I can see this come in handy in a crammed space. Let me know what you think of it. Are smartphones banned from your gaming table or is this solution something you could use? Is a "character folder" an interesting development?

Hmm, yes the Gamemaster’s Apprentice Cards looks interesting. Combining them with Mythic GM Emulator is a cool trick. And I really need to get Classic Fantasy!

Perfect. This is exactly what's needed I think.

It seems geared towards fantasy - how easy is it to repurpose for modern/scifi?

When do we get to see more? : )

Yes, I agree. Some more information on Mythic Iceland and BRP core rules would be nice.

Thanks for summing it up - it truly puts perspective on the whole process. Looking forward to the year ahead of us.

You're welcome : ) I'm putting the entire interview in the second post now for easier reading.

CR: Final question. After a very successful crowdfunding campaign Järn has recieved excellent reviews in Sweden - what are the plans for the future of the game? I’m not completely finished with the crowdfunding campaign. There are still stretch goals to be written, but that’s coming along nicely. We’re looking at translating the book to English, but the cost is rather high. I could translate it myself, but I would need an editor – cheaper than a translator but still a big cost – and it would tie up my writing time to that project. In the future I want to write more books for Järn – adventures, campaigns, setting books, that kind of stuff. I’m not done exploring the world-tree in Järn, not even with the stretch goals. That will just be the introduction. I like Pathfinder’s adventure path concept: a series of adventure books that comes together as a campaign from level 1 to 15ish, with a corresponding setting book and player’s guide. If I can find additional writers, I would like to have a rather high publish rate, like a new book every two months, but as long as I’m the only writer, I think the rate will be limited. I think that the future books of the Järn line should be thin, 64 pages at the most and preferably thinner. One of Järn’s main selling points is that it is not a 500-page tome, but rather 112 pages. I don’t think that I will write an official world book for Järn. The core of the game is the clan and its surroundings that the players create by themselves. It’s their world. I don’t have to dictate how the world is in detail. Instead, I want to give them resources and inspiration, a smorgasboard that they can pick and choose from. I think this approach, and thin books, will work nicely with the adventure path concept. I leave our conversation with a feeling that Järn is a game very close to Krister Sundelin’s heart and that we will see a lot of support for it the coming years. The combination of a stripped down BRP engine together with collaborative storytelling elements, makes it a very compelling offer on the contemporary RPG scene. Let’s hope it will make its journey into the English language soon. If you have any more questions for Krister, I'm sure he will show up here to answer them.

CR: I'm quite picky when it comes to art in roleplaying games, and to me Järn is treading a bit of new territory with its striking graphic illustrations and gender conscious content. But, taking a broader view on illustration, will RPGs in general ever get out of the habit of depicting women as sexualized objects? I read a comment by Neil Gaiman that superhero comics are male adolescent power fantasies - is that where RPGs are stuck too? KS: I think that Neil Gaiman is quite right about superhero comics, and you’re right too: RPGs are to a great extent male adolescent power fantasies. But that is slowly changing. One problem is that the makers of RPGs in many cases are fans of the adolescent male power fantasy, often the same fans that made games in the naughties or nineties, in some cases even the eighties. Many simply do not see the problem since you can choose your character’s gender and do whatever you want. Some even think that they would lose customers. They got it completely wrong. First, both superhero comics and RPGs can be a lot more than just adolescent male power fantasies. Look at Marvel’s X-men for instance: the longest running relation drama in comics ever, and itself a commentary on minorities civil rights (sadly, many never realised)! In RPGs, this realisation is slowly coming from indie games and story games, that actively look to explore a premise rather than just murderhoboing. Second… let me go back to the first edition of Vampire: The Masquerade. It didn’t sell that well to the regular RPG audience at the time. It sold well, yes, but not to D&D players. Nobody could touch that mammoth. By trying to play for the same market, they just couldn’t compete with the gorilla. D&D owned the market. But Vampire did something different: it opened up an entirely new market, incorporating the aesthetes, the goths and the romance novel readers – the other group of lonely outsiders at the time. And half of them, if not more, where female. Yes, Vampire was a power fantasy too, but the point is that it was aimed at a new unexplored market. I still don’t know if it was marketing genious or a happy accident. The lesson from Vampire is that when RPGs (and comics, for that matter) are just **male** adolescent power fantasies, they effectively cut out half of the potential market. It’s not that hard to change. You don’t even have to leave the power fantasy. Pick up your D&D5E PHB, and read that section on gender on page 121 that includes transgender characters. Look at the illustrations: the illustration of humans feature a coloured woman in a role of power and agency. Having people across the entire spectrum of ethnicity, gender identity and many other aspects – not just in illustrations, but in example characters and important NPCs – invites to your power fantasy and enables them to create their own. One person of colour told John, one of the illustrators of Järn, “finally I found myself in a game!” Open up your games like that, and you have practically doubled your potential market overnight. To not do that is just plain stupid from a market standpoint. We’re still not good at it, but we are learning. I learned a lot from Ronja and John, the illustrators of Järn. The only thing I’m not willing to give up is the adolescent. I’m still 13 at heart.

CR: As you mention, collaborative creation and storytelling are big parts of clan construction. Can you elaborate on that; what effects have you noticed around the gaming table in actual play? KS: Well, it’s their clan. They care about it as much as they care about their own characters. They’re emotionally invested in every aspect of it. So when I use a particular person as a villain, they hate that NPC, and they love to hate her. But then, there are the entanglements to people that they like, and those will have consequences, so they can’t just kill her. They stop and interact with the villain, rather than just go “off with her head” at the first opportunity. Instead, they go to political manoeuvering and emotional manipulation to destroy the villain’s character before they can kill her. In a similar manner, if some NPC that they like sides with the villain, they take it very personal. It’s a betrayal of trust. One effect of this particular implementation is that the players get to slot certain labels on relations, for instance “despises”, “is lover to”, “has a debt to”, “hates”. Nobody loves or is loved by everyone. There will be tensions in the clan, and they’re a godsend to GMs. Adventures write themselves in a way, or perhaps the players unwittingly write them for the GM. They’re all there in the relation map, ready for you to pick up. Sooner rather than later, there will be repercussions from the characters’ actions, causing a response from other clan members or from the enemy clan or even the Empire, and boom! you have a new adventure for the next session. I have seen parts of this before, when good GMs pick up on cues in characters’ background stories, when players pick up on the GM's recurring NPCs, or when the campaign grows complicated and you have to build relation maps for NPCs to see the big picture. But unless you start with doing relation mapping at character generation with the players, you rarely get these emotional investments from start. You get it eventually, but not from the start. The drawback is that it’s trickier to publish adventures for a player-generated clan. You simply don’t care about the old mysterious man in the corner of the inn holding an old mouldy map. You have to build tie-ins to the clan for him instead, and as an adventure author it’s hard to make tie-ins to a clan that you have never seen.

CR: Yes, "fail forward" is a beautiful concept! The clan-making rules have been highly appreciated since the release. Could you describe how they work and the role they play in the game? KS: The clan has two distinct roles. From the characters’ perspective, the clan is home, family, insurance policy and retirement home, as well as a political battleground. It’s where you belong, but also your greatest opponent. A lot of the stuff that happens to the characters happen inside the clan. In the meta perspective, the clan is a source for stories, an extention of the characters, and the players’ property. The players create the clan, so they invest in it and care for it. That means that any story that the GM digs out of the clan is a story that the players will care for and be motivated to participate in, as opposed to any mission that an NPC may offer to the characters. Basically, the clan is about mapping relationships. There are some nodes already on the map, to give the players somewhere to start. With a blank sheet of paper, players are often stuck at the beginning. But give them a few seeds and their shared creation will grow. So, the relation map starts off with the characters at the center, and some important clan NPCs around them – the thane, the war master, the weaponsmith, the godi (speaker of the gods), the völva (spirit caller), the shipwright, and so on. At the edge are some important things from the surrounding environment, like the Governor from the Empire, the Underworld, the Mountain, the enemy clan, etcetera. Participants, including the GM, take turns to define these roles and draw relations between them and the player characters. This goes on until the GM can identify at least one conflict that can be used to initiate the first adventure. That first adventure is given in skeleton form: have a conflict – the one that the GM identified – have the conflict lead to a journey, travel, have a fight, and return home. The GM can fill in the blanks using the relation map and all the stories that evolved with the map. The clan is also a living breathing entity that changes and evolves over time. When the characters return home from that first adventure, the fight and the conflict will both add something to the relation map. Until the next session, the GM uses the scheme to come up with the next story, which in turn will evolve the relation map even more. And since the new adventure is firmly grounded in the relationships that the players created, there will not be any problems starting the next session. You will never have to accept the previous unknown uncle inviting you to his mansion, because he was never unknown to you in the first place – you invented him!

You beat me to it, Rust : ) The second page is the character sheet. First page is for combat and the third page is a clan sheet (soon to be described by Krister).