rust

We could just have a skill called Skill (STR+DEX/INTx2) and then all of our characters and NPCs could be created in seconds...

Sure, and we could then give each character 100 skill points to start with,

and so get rid of almost all of those unnerving dice rolls, too.

Ah, well, I am guilty of using "Athletics" to cover Climb, Jump, Run and Swim, "Stealth" to

cover Hide and Sneak, and so on.

Actually I am using the Root/Branch skill system of the Ringworld RPG, where a character

first develops a general ability (in the case of Athletics a general fitness and agility) as a

Root Skill and then specializes in one or more of the Branch Skills (in the case of Athletics

for example Climb, Jump, Run or Swim - the character can do all that with his Root Skill,

too, but not very well).

The reason to use the general Root Skills is to avoid skill creep, which otherwise can ruin

especially a science fiction setting rather quickly. There are lots and lots of potentially use-

ful skills, especially technical and scientific ones, but there is only a limited amount of skill

points, so keeping the number of skills low in order to enable the characters to be good at

a sufficient number of important skills is a necessity.

As for the term "Athletics", I see it as one which is easy to understand and to connect with

physical skills which require physical fitness. The original meaning would be "Competitor"

(in the sports of classical Greece), but since few people will know this, I do not care.

There are many ways to use Status, depending on the setting and the intentions of the referee

and the players.

For example, in my current setting I use Status to measure a character's success as a member

of the community as well as the tool to give the character new options for his activities. When-

ever the character succeeds in doing something that helps his community his Status increases,

and whenever he does something that harms the community his Status decreases. A high Sta-

tus is required both to get a position of influence / power in the community (e.g. to become a

candidate for an election) and to be permitted to use certain resources of the community (e.g.

to use the community's starship during an adventure). High Status also gives a bonus for the

use of most social skills with members of the community, and low Status gives a penalty.

As mentioned, this is just one way to handle Status, there are many others.

Sorry about this ...

No need to be sorry, it is not your fault.

Well, I really want to support this project, so if Kickstarter remains unable to accept

my money, I could perhaps just as well send it to your firm's bank account instead.

The River of Heaven Kickstarter is up and running, but Kickstarter only accepts credit

cards, which I do not have - never needed one ...

You could take a look at the Basic Bestiary in this forum's download section:

http://basicroleplaying.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=398

I've always been curious why plate was widespread in that period and then faded from view only to re-emerge approx 1000 years later......

One of the reasons was the change from the bronze used to produce a cuirass by Greeks and Romans

to the iron used for armour in later centuries, neither the available metal nor the available skills were

really up to the task to produce a good iron cuirass at an acceptable cost until the Middle Ages.

Swords have some kind of Renaissance-Victorian mythology to them, otherwise they're by no means obvious choices for a warrior.

I think this mythology is much older. A good example are the various early North German tales

which mention Wayland the Smith, the many famous named swords he forged, and the histories

of these swords and the heroes who owned them. I would find it difficult to imagine a heroic war-

rior of that age without his sword, whether Sigmund without Gram or Roland without Durandal.

I prefer my own settings and rarely use commercial ones, so there was little need to

convert other systems into BRP ones. The only ones that come to my mind are Blue

Planet, D&D 3.5, Harnmaster, Lodland*, Perry Rhodan* and Traveller.

* German roleplaying games

... and that some of the options are very improbable - looking at the past history of the license.

Actually, all d100 options - if Mongoose was unable to keep the license, no current d100 publisher

has the money to successfully go for it. Which I do not consider as a problem, because the huge

majority of roleplaying games based upon licenses were commercial failures which damaged their

publishers.

Happy New Year !

The game I am hoping to play ... well, if real life is kind to me, I will continue to work on my Thalassa setting,

the latest incarnation of my science fiction water world setting, this time with the "Perryverse" (= the universe

of the German Perry Rhodan science fiction series) as the background and a modified Ringworld RPG as the

system.

That's funny, I wonder why none of the editors stopped to ask what 'mail' means. Isn't that what editors are for?

I think it was a translation problem. When one enters the correct German term "Ringpanzerhemd"

or the still common "Kettenhemd" into one of the typical translation programs like Google Transla-

te or PROMT one almost always gets "chain mail" as the English translation. Only the scientific dic-

tionaries, and not even all of them, give a correct translation.

I've never read 'chainmail' anywhere but videogames and rpgs.

Well, actually ...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130910094946.htm

But it is similar in German, while many people call chain "Kettenhemd", and this term tends

to creep even into scientific papers now and then, the scientific term is "Ringpanzerhemd"

(no chain / "Kette" involved, only rings).

I suspect that one of the reasons for the misunderstanding concerning the advantages

and disadvantages of chain armour and plate armour was the existence of mass pro-

duced plate armour created to outfit entire Renaissance armies. This common type of

plate armour was not custom made, and therefore lacked the weight distribution and

flexibility of plate armour custom made for a specific individual. Without the perfect

fit of a custom made plate armour the approximately 25 kg of metal certainly became

an unpleasant burden that hindered at least as much as it protected.

It's rare to see a cheap copy.

True, but it is not difficult at all to find the rules on the Internet and download them,

just like SPI's science fiction game Universe or TSR's Star Frontiers SPI's fantasy ga-

me Dragon Quest is still kept alive by a dedicated community of fans. I would add a

link to a download site, but I am not really sure concerning the legal status ...

While it depends on the specific setting, a good Charisma Roll (APP x 5) can indeed solve a lot of

problems, especially in settings with a well developed background society where the character is

a part of this society instead of a foreign wandering loner. Charming people into doing what one

wants is at least as effective as beating them into it ...

*** BUMP ***

Ming the Merciless

There are many things BRP is good at. For example, it is easy to understand, learn, referee and modify.

One of the reasons I like and use it, especially for my alternate history settings, is that it tends to gene-

rate plausible characters, characters who are still "on a human scale" and vulnerable enough to inspire

the players to play them like real persons, who are aware that brute force does not always lead to suc-

cess and that despite all of their skills there will always be many problems they will not be able to solve.

Instead of infinite locations, let's say the gate leads to a small number (3-5) of harsh but habitable environments -- desert Duat, chilly Thule, and one to three others. [...]

I thought of something pretty much like what you proposed, but my problem with it is that

I am too lazy to develop more than one or two worlds in detail for a single setting.

Since Duat is more or less complete by now, I am currently working on Thule, which requi-

res a bit more research to make it plausible, although I have already done low-technology

arctic settings before. For example, there are questions like which useful plants could be in-

troduced to Thule (hardy trees from Patagonia, the world's southernmost trees ?), where to

find the right kind of livestock for the settlement on Thule (sheep and ponies from the Shet-

lands, perhaps reindeer from Norway ?), what type of fishing boat could be used ("Kochi"

from northern Russia ?), what the ground vehicles (halftracks with skis instead of the front

wheels ?) and the aircraft (if any) could look like, and so on. I am somewhat obsessed with

realistic details, and "getting it right" becomes not much different from the research the Pe-

gasos Society would have to do within the setting ...

So, I think that Duat and/or Thule will remain the only world(s) accessible through the Pega-

sos Society's magical gate, adding another world or two would be too much fun for my taste.

Well, the arid world of Duat is only one of many options, the Pegasos Society's magical

gate could just as well lead elsewhere.

An example could be Ultima Thule, a cold region with a long coastline with rich fishing

grounds, a small hilly coastal plain of land suited mainly for herding sheep, high moun-

tains and inland glaciers - think of Greenland. This would also change the society's sci-

entific and technological fields of interest, it could lead to other allies and enemies (he-

re the proto-Nazi Thule Gesellschaft would fit in perfectly), and the lists of skills and of

professions would have to be modified, too.

I don't know if I'll switch to it, since 6th edition does everything I need.

The same here, from what I have seen of the changes in the 7th edition so far

I will perhaps introduce some few of them as house rules into my games, but

I am not interested in most of them and therefore hardly willing to buy a new

set of core books.

An interesting organization also needs other organizations as friends and enemies.

I have to admit that I was too lazy to design these organizations, and therefore

borrowed them from published material.

The Pegasos Society sometimes cooperates with the Janus Society, basically an

organization of investigators of phenomena which the normal science cannot ex-

plain, organized somewhat like the Freemasons and with branches in most civi-

lized states and some of their colonies. It was published in German as a supple-

ment for the German edition of Call of Cthulhu, and with ca. 200 pages this de-

scription of the Janus Society is rather detailed.

This supplement also describes a link between the Janus Society and the Miska-

tonic University, which has been described in detail in a Chaosium supplement

for Call of Cthulhu, and I decided to use this link for the relations between the

Pegasos Society and the Miskatonic University, too.

The Janus Society and the Miskatonic University are enough "friendlies" for my

Pegasos Society, and they also provide good connections with the Mythos.

I had more problems with the "hostiles", mainly because I wanted to avoid the

usual stereotype of evil proto-Nazis (Ahnenerbe, Thule, etc.) that is so common

in games covering the 1920s.

However, in the end I fell to another stereotype, the evil cthulhoid cult, and de-

cided to use the Order of the Silver Twilight of Shadows of Yog-Sothoth fame as

the main opponent of the Pegasos Society, because both organizations compete

in the search for Mythos knowledge and useful Mythos artefacts.

And then there are the intelligence services of a couple of states which have be-

come aware of strange activities of the Pegasos Society - there have been too

many implausible incidents, too many society members with false identities and

forged papers (Duat passports are not accepted ...) and too many unexplained

purchases of unusual substances and equipment which attracted the spooks'

attention.

You're scaring me, rust. Now I think I'll have to cancel my subscription to National Geographic.

Well, I think it is not general knowledge that the standard textbooks about the

plants of the Atacama desert, about agriculture in arid regions or about the my-

thology of the earliest Egyptian dynasties were written by members of the Pega-

sos Society.

The gate will close in 1940, eh? Since you'd mentioned "advanced" technology and exploring by airplane, I'd assumed the campaign was set in the 21st Century.

Sorry, I just realized that I had failed to mention that this setting is using the background

of Classic Cthulhu in the 1920s. The airplane is an Avro 504 biplane, and the advanced

technology is advanced compared to the average level of technology of the 1920s.

If all this is happening in the 1920s, it is entirely possible that Nathan Kohn's prophecy will come true when the German army invades France in May 1940. Society members might be willing to destroy the gate themselves to prevent it from falling into the enemy's hands.

Yes, indeed. I thought that the players would certainly be aware of the setting's future back-

ground events, and so I considered it useful to make the most important part of it - WWII -

in-setting foreboding to keep player knowledge and character knowledge closer together.

The secretive, elitist Society members on Earth, however, are a different matter. What do they hope to get out of maintaining the gate? The neat-o factor has had plenty of time to wear off, and all they've found so far is rock, sand, and desert soil that responds well to irrigation.

All of the important material assets of the society, like the manor in Scotland, the estate in

France and the company Pegasos SA, are owned and controlled by one person, Hector Collins,

so many of the other members of the society are not really aware how much effort is spent to

keep the settlement on Duat running. As an example, not many members of the society have

access to the information that much of the "input" of the company Pegasos SA is not used for

its production, but is directly sent to Porta to supply the settlement.

Besides, for many members of the society the Pegasos Society is basically an information net-

work that provides them with cutting edge information about new developments in science and

technology, and they are willing to pay for these informations and do not care that much that

the informations were originally aquired to support the settlement on Duat.

Finally, most of the society's important positions which directly have to do with the settlement

on Duat are now held by people who emigrated to Duat or who were born there, and since they

therefore control a lot of the informations handed out to the other members, they are able to

keep much of what is going on more or less secret.

You are certainly right about the often covered activities of the Duat settlers within the society.

A more direct conflict between the two factions within the Pegasos Society is unlikely as long as

Hector Collins remains in control of the organization and supports the settlers, but he is now an

old man, and the society has no clear rules for the leadership in the time after his death - the

content of his will remains unknown. Perhaps the Duat faction will inherit the core of the socie-

ty's assets and take over the society, perhaps the Earth faction will do so and decide to cut the

costs ...

Edit.:

Since you mentioned fuel, this is actually not a major problem for the settlers, because they pro-

duce alcohol from grain as a part of the settlement's agriculture, and small and efficient engines

running on alcohol as fuel are one of the technological fields where the Pegasos Society is at the

cutting edge of technology - and, thanks to Pegasos SA's sales of such engines, even makes a ni-

ce little profit.