Nick J.

As a lifelong AD&D/d20 gamer up until my last group fell apart five or so years ago. I can say that when I started getting interested in coming back to gaming a couple of years ago (but wanting a new system) it was unequivocally Magic World & BRP that made the most sense to me out of all the d100 games I looked at and it clicked right away (I had owned the pdf of the Runequest 6 rules through a bundle of holding purchase for a year at that point, and while I liked it, I'll be damned if I could suss out how to make it go without being shown how to run it/play it). So I voted for the BGB because of its generic nature, but I suppose I mean MW just as much if not more.

In my humble opinion, if the new "Chaosimoonmechanism" wants to lure away disillusioned D&Ders (and other old and new gamers alike), then I think the BRP/WoW/MW model is perhaps just a bit more intuitive than RQ6 for d100 newbies (of course I say that having not read RQ6 Essentials).

I'm remaining patient. I'd love to hear something about the fate of MW (and BRP to a lesser extent) but I get why it can't be a priority for the new management.

Regardless, I'm glad I've got a table copy of MW to loan to prospective new players (I've created three converts from d20/Pathfinder in the past couple of months) and I don't intend to stop playing any time soon. I only wish I would have learned about Stormbringer/MW/d100 years ago.

You kids with your fancy metric systems and feet and iches. Give me cubits or give me death!

My casting skill roll works like this: Criticals allow the spell to go off without costing magic points, Specials reduce the cost by a point and fumbles double the cost of magic points. I don't replace the resistance roll.

As for magic being a support role that hasn't been my experience; my players are usually pretty clever about trying to select the ground they fight from and do a decent to good job of protecting characters who use sorcery.

Mechanically, I just like the idea that magic can be done by anybody (with training). The 16+ power requirement is fine, but as a fan of Fafhrd and Grey Mouser, I like the idea of novices dabbling with magic and running the risk of mucking it up.

Alright. I've looked things over multiple times and I'm not spotting any more errors, that said I'll be uploading all three files forthwith.

Update:

I'm pretty sure I have just about all of the bugs on the run, but I'm in the middle of a move. I'll upload these to the download section next week.

For the curious, I noticed and corrected a formatting error in the 'Major Wounds' calculation that was returning an invalid number. Now I'm just going through the forms and making sure that I didn't overlook anything else.

Once I'm reasonably satisfied that the sheets are bug-free I'll be uploading them to the downloads section I suppose. 

Cheers

As a long time fan of Thieve's World stories I think it could fit most of the criteria you are looking for. The Green Ronin d20 sourcebooks are still pretty useful and easy to find and there are still some old Chaosium box sets floating around on Ebay if you want to go old school.

Glad to hear it.

Auto-magical, form-fillable adventurer sheet for Magic World. 

The sheet has been tested pretty extensively by myself, and others have reported success with it. The latest version 2.0.0, is for all intents and purposes "final." The PDFs were created in Foxit PhantomPDF, and use a fair number of javascript functions to calculate all kinds of stuff throughout the sheet, to save you the headache of having to do all of the tedious data entry.

Update 5/20/2019

Very minor bug-fix. Changed the way the armor penalty applies to perception skills. Insight is no longer affected, because a helmet that you can't see out of enough to read someone's body language doesn't seem like a very awesome design. I also uploaded the custom sheet I use for my home game that's set in the B/X setting of Dolmenwood by Gavin Norman, that I adapted for BRP/Magic World. I use social class, and a reputation system (nicked from RuneQuest: Glorantha). I can't imagine why it would be useful or interesting to anyone but me, but if you want a game with goatmen, grimalkin, moss dwarfs, woodgrue, wodewoses, and whatnot. Maybe it's something you can pull apart and edit in Adobe or Foxit Phantom yourself? Who knows, the world is your oyster. If you really want the 20 pages long gazetteer and house rules document I whipped up, PM me.

Update 12/22/18

Created a version of the sheet that has no calculated fields. All of the form fields are still there, but you'll have to enter everything manually. Hopefully useful for those people that like to house-rule the hell out of their game (you can still import an image file into the portrait box if you want).

Update 6/19/18

Lots of changes under the hood and some cosmetic flourishes. This is about as "final" as it gets (unless somebody reports a show-stopping bug).

Changes:

• More easily track weapon skills in the weapons section (no need to use Miscellaneous entries)
• Type in a weapon type in the skill name field (swords, bows, spears, etc. and it should automatically apply the correct characteristic bonus (uses regular expressions with wildcards, so maybe it doesn't catch every permutation, but it captures a lot).
• Biggest change: base skills change based on species selected from the drop-down menu based on the default values in the bestiary.
• Fancy version with a decorative border (royalty-free, open-source art) and a plain, no-art sheet that's a little smaller (about 2mb vs. 1mb respectively).

UPDATE 5/12/18: Hi guys, I figured out a way to somewhat elegantly combine the two sheets I was maintaining into one. You can choose standard Hit Points or Heroic with a toggle button now. Additionally, I added some check boxes to make it easier to adjust armor penalties on the fly (without having to zero out values or do the math in your head). and you can check a box if you become a champion of Light, Balance or Shadow and it will adjust Hit Points or Magic Points respectively and no longer references the Allegiance points in calculations. Also some other quality of life improvements, like an extra entry in the species drop-down menu for "human+" that will change the dice roller to 2D6+6 for all characteristics (Elric! style). Lastly I cleaned up some of the code so it should calculate fields faster and the file footprint was reduced by about 15%.

Features:

• Characteristic Generator button (invisible when you print) for 9 species: Human, Elf, Dwarf, Halfling, Beast-man, Orc, Ogre, and Troll (Human+ uses boosted dice: 2D6+6 for every characteristic)
• Automatic calculation of derived characteristics like HPs, Major Wound, Characteristic rolls, Characteristic bonuses, Magic Points, MP regeneration rate, and damage bonus.
• Fields for tracking temporary changes to Characteristics, extra Hit Points, extra Magic Points.
• Distributed skills summed up to easily reference how competent your character is and for free form character generation.
• Extra fields for custom skills
• Skill penalties for armor automatically apply to Agility Roll, as well as Physical, Manipulation and Perception skills (toggle buttons to turn apply the penalties or remove them)
• Total Hit Points recalculated for characters who have become Champions of Balance (CON + SIZ + POW)
• Automatically recalculates MP for Champions of Shadow (get POW x2 MP)
• Grimoire section with fields to help you track spell levels in memory and Free INT.
• lots of hover-over tool-tips

The sheet is in the style of the official adventurer sheet at the back of the book. It's unprotected, so if you have PDF editing software like Acrobat or Foxit Phantom, you can edit these however you see fit.

The most up to date sheet below.

Like Nakana, the thing I most eagerly anticipate is the Chronicler's Companion and I'm not sure I have enough space on my bookshelf for another monster book, but if there was some way to do it, so it's not just another monster book I might be inclined to give it a look - perhaps a micro-setting with a bestiary and some spells unique to it?

I think what Magic World needs is something to really show off its system and get it in front of more eyes. I practically stumbled into it by accident as a very recent d100 convert and if I wasn't a DIY GM I probably would have never given it serious consideration. What I'm wondering is if some adventures that highlight the setting and rules and give novices a nice jumping off point wouldn't be worth putting out there? I don't run modules much myself (although I borrow maps and ideas) but I know a lot of gamers that only run canned stuff and without that support I'm guessing that's a barrier to MW ever broadening its appeal.

Off-hand I look at a company like Goodman games and its very deliberate and clever marketing strategy with Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG and the way they have carved out a niche in a very crowded marketplace with their modules (and their very distinctive look & feel) as an example of how to build hype or The Design Mechanism's approach with RQ6 is another good example brand building. 

Pretty much by the book, but I have some special rules for my homebrew setting when it comes to cultures and non-human races with respect to Characteristic adjustments, skill affinities and the like. The most notable exceptions are that I use some of the optional rules like Heroic Hit Points and I have a casting skill.

I'm very relieved to hear that.

Funny. I didn't use your BRP character sheet (and I wasn't even aware there was a MW version). I did all of the stuff from scratch, but thanks for the heads up I'll take a look and thanks for your generosity.

FWIW, I've been working on a form-fillable pdf for Magic World that auto-calculates a ton of stuff with some javascript. It won't be a fully automated character generator, but it will make it pretty easy to just fill-in some characteristic rolls and skill points and have the sheet handle the rest. I started with the official pdf sheet, but to avoid any issues with copyright or trade dress I'm going to build another one from scratch.

Hopefully I'll have it complete in about a month (currently in the middle of a move, so development has had to be set aside for a bit).

Funny. Looks like switching to Basic Roleplay and never looking back some 6 months ago or so was perfectly timed

Oh well, hopefully the change in management means good things ahead, but like it is for most people change and the unknown is always uncomfortable.

I looked for that too and didn't find it. Being somewhat new to BRP/MW all I can say is that I know I read that rule somewhere, but I want to say it was a house rule in somebody's blog post, or maybe it's in the BGB? (I'd check the latter, but I'm moving and it's packed away in storage so I can't). At the very least it's a rule I really like.

Indeed. I just needed to add the 'PYTHONPATH' %PYTHON%;C:\Python27\ environment variable to my system variables (I also appended C:\Python27\lib and C:\Python\lib\site-packages to make sure that reportlab got picked up).

Works like a charm.

Looks like it was an environment variable issue. Not sure what happened since it seemed I could run the previous version of you tool without a problem. Oh well, thanks for all of your hard work.

Is anybody else having trouble getting the newest version to work (yes, I was able to get v.1 to work without issue)? Reportlab seemingly installed just fine, but when I click on the gui.py it flickers and then bombs out. I'll try running it in a command line environment and see if I can't get some sort of error message.

EDIT:

This was the traceback message I got from python shell:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "D:\Progs\BRP\gui.py", line 18, in <module>
    from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas
ImportError: No module named reportlab.pdfgen

If you read the description on page 224 of the rules, the implication is to let it be "learn-by-use."

Personally I don't like the idea of magic items having some kind of "glowy" aura (ala D&D and every video game ever), but I try to make it clear that an enchanted item is set apart by its physical qualities - unique forge marks, strange metals, physical properties that defy physics/explanation, etc.

If you want to tie identification to mechanics I've had success using a "world lore" skill check or an "evaluate" check to help the player suss out at least a few clues about an item's function. I'm a big fan of letting an item's powers emerge through play. How else am I ever going to get them to put on that cursed Ring of Berserk?

I feel like I should toss in my two cents. Most of my gaming is via VTT these days and I've found Fantasy Grounds with a modified BRP ruleset (for Magic World) does a pretty good job of keeping track of combat and really minimizes the amount of time I have to flip through the book when it comes to looking up fumble tables and other references that I can just have hot-keyed.

The only thing that has confounded me is that rewriting the lua script that governs skill category bonuses has never worked for some reason; the base ruleset always overwrites my attempts to use Characteristic/2 for its primary stat . . . which isn't that big of a deal, since I like the category bonuses from the BGB better anyway.

I'll echo what some others said above with respect to learning how to d100 after being a lapsed D&Der fifteen or twenty years ago. MW was the only set of rules I immediately understood intuitively.

Similtaneously I picked up RQ6, OQ, BRP, and MW on PDF and MW turned into my Rosetta Stone for understanding the others.

Is there a separate errata doc for those of us with a print copy?

It's pinned at the top of the MW forum here.

FYI, I noticed a pretty serious formatting gaffe on pages 97 & 98. Part of the text column on page 98 got cut down the edge and that text in the margin of pg 97.

Also wanted to chime in and say thanks to Ben and Dustin for sorting out my old order.

@fmitchell

That's a shame you can't find your receipt. I used to delete stuff like that too, but once I started archiving everything in gmail my life has had a lot less Pepto Bismal in it.