rust

Sorry, but Sabine Baring-Gould got it wrong in these two cases. The "Jüdel / Gütel" is actually a regional type of house spirit, somewhat similar to a brownie, from the Erzgebirge region, and the Doppelgänger - mostly an idea of the Romantic literary movement - is actually a kind of evil spirit twin of a person, usually a symbol for the loss of a person's identity.

Meanwhile I have used Mythras Imperative to move my Meridiana campaign to the Mythras system, which turned out to be surprisingly easy, I only had to tinker somewhat with the cultural skills and the skills assigned to my campaign's careers. All I have left to do now is to wait for the full Mythras rules and their "modern" supplements for some more hopefully minor changes.

Now this is excellent news ! As for your question, I am one of those people who prefer PDFs (a matter of storage space in a small apartment ...), so I leave the answer to the potential customers of the printed version.

Very well done, I think I have found the right system for my Meridiana campaign now. By the way, there are two minor layout problems on page 13, one with the first line of the Merchant career in the left column and another one with the first line of the Sailor career in the middle column.

Really a great idea.

The only time I like it is when we play what we call a Monty Python game, where the most outrageous declarations are welcome. I fondly remember one where the villain got killed by a racehorse falling onto him from a cargo airliner with a damaged cargo door, just after he had defeated a herd of trained combat crocodiles in unarmed combat. But in our real campaigns - never, thank you.

GM. "Oh ... of course he is. And he is afraid that you want to 'neutralize' him in order to become the heir to the throne. Therefore he has secretly hired the Grimdeath Clan of assassins to 'neutralize' you first."

Here is a review of it: https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/13/13117.phtml

This is why I adopted the modified Competence rule from the Expendables RPG. When in my Thalassa science fiction campaign a player gives his character a Profession skill which has no general use in the campaign (e.g. "Profession: Aquafarmer" or "Profession: Dolphineer") with a skill value of 50+ %, this character is Competent in the field covered by this skill and in normal situations will always succeed in its use. And the player can also use this Competence to define the character's profession and professional knowledge within the framework of the setting. My intention with this rule was to give the players one more reason to think about the background of their characters and how their occupations could influence their lives and their approach to problem solving ("Your character is an aquafarmer, so he will think like one and try to use his professional knowledge to deal with a problem ..."), but it has also become a tool of "player empowerment", for example when the player of a "Profession: Engineer / Aquatic Vehicles" character uses his character's Competence to decide what the campaign's next generation of watercraft will look like.

Yes, I have no problem with this, in fact I am quite happy whenever players contribute to the campaign and enrich the campaign with their own ideas in this way.

For my purposes a campaign needs three main elements, the setting,the rules and the tools. The setting describes the physical and social background of the campaign, things like geography, history or culture. The rules define and limit both what kind of events can happen against this background, and how they can happen. The tools, like the characters' skills or equipment, define and limit how the activities of the characters can influence these events and how this develops the characters' stories. These three elements have to fit together rather well in order to create and sustain the plausibility and verisimilitude of the campaign. With this in mind I am deeply sceptical of tools which could enable the characters to unbalance the campaign by going beyond the limits I carefully designed into my campaign's rules and character tools. I am quite willing to give to the players any and all "narrative" tools that remain within the framework I designed, but I would not agree to introduce the freedom to shape the campaign's story in a way which could endanger its plausibility and verisimilitude. In my view BRP as it is provides a good balance between the ability to define a campaign and is still open enough to add the specific degree of "narrative player empowerment" required by different types of campaigns, up to and including purely cinematic and Pulp campaigns. I would certainly not welcome any changes which would move BRP towards a more "narrative" system.

The same here. The campaign suffered from a badly structured information overload, the players either became confused and bored or decided to ignore most of the information completely, concentrating on the action at hand (the little action there actually was). In my opinion half the background material density of the original campaign together with more focus on opportunities for character activities would be better.

Yes, this is what I would like to see, too. And this is almost exactly the opposite of what I would like to have for my settings, where combat is extremely rare and could well be handled in a narrative way, while - see above - a good set of rules for handling everything else would be most welcome.

Well, you know, it is certainly a matter of taste, and all that, but in my case ... sorry, yes, very much so.

Sorry for nitpicking, but he was actually a famous Prussian disappearance (too) ...

The German publisher of Call of Cthulhu published an updated Cthulhu Now in 2006. There are a couple of nice articles and descriptions of modern occupations and skills, but overall there is little one could not design in a short time without this or a similar book. Therefore I doubt that an updated Cthulhu Now would really be worth the designers' effort or that it would sell well enough to justify that effort.

Well, I certainly have to get Mythras Imperative. Any ideas when the Mythras core rules and the supplements might become available (yesterday would be fine ...) ?

Yep, Congratulations !

Now I am very interested in it.

I think the community has to thank you for your rescue of the source of our favourite games.

Well, at least the Pulp Cthulhu character sheet is already up at Chaosium's website ...

This must have been some kind of "Freudian Slip", with my subconscious self elevating RQ to the relative dimension of China ...

Comparing D&D and RQ is a bit like comparing the Princedom of Liechtenstein and the People's Republic of China. Instead of looking at D&D and for ways to bring RQ to a similar status by winning over players of other games to RQ we should probably concentrate on the expectations and wishes of the current RQ community.In the end we are the ones who have to like the game enough to support it, and if we are very lucky our enthusiasm will lure some other players into our community.

I see - and I have to admit that the only use I ever made of meta-character organizations with attributes and skills, etc., was in solo play.

First of all, welcome to the forum. This seems somewhat similar to the German roleplaying game Midgard, where characters have AP ("Ausdauerpunkte" = "Endurance Points") and LP ("Lebenspunkte" = "Life Points"). A loss of AP basically means that the character is getting fatigued, while a loss of LP shows that the character's health is seriously reduced and that he will need some healing (time or spell). I think this is how Guard and Health work in Järn, too ? A very interesting feature of Järn is the Clan element. There are similar elements in other games, and they are often treated like a kind of meta-character, with their own attributes and skills and their own range of possible actions. Are the Clans in Järn also meta-characters or purely social networks ?