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Nice, and quite useful for settings with a Celtic feel. The only nit I would like to pick is the name, Cult of the Black Raven would seem to fit better.

In my view this would depend on the type of pulp one intends to play, the rules would only need cinematic elements where the genre comes close to the superhero genre, but not for the average pulp adventure story - while the Phantom would almost certainly require cinematic ru- les, Indiana Jones could probably do with high skill levels, and Profes- sor Challenger would hardly need any rules modifications at all.

Two other typical differences are the use of total hit points or location hit points and the use of skill category bonuses (none, based upon one characteristic, ba- sed upon two characteristics). They can still be used for all situations which are not covered by a specific skill or as a kind of "saving throws" in difficult situations.

By the way, there is a German pulp version of Call of Cthulhu, named "Der Hexer von Salem" (= The Witcher of Salem), based upon the no- vels by Wolfgang Hohlbein and published by Pegasus, the publisher of the German version of Call of Cthulhu. http://www.pegasus.de/hexer.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Hohlbein The typical player characters of this game are witchers fighting the minions of the Great Old Ones with magic, skills and weapons. The background is slightly different from Lovecraft's universe, the mythos creatures are less powerful and can be defeated by mere humans, and time travel and other pulp magazine themes are possible.

Some authors of d100 systems like the Resistance Table, others dislike it an prefer another game mechanic. For example, lifting an object could also be handled by the Encumbrance rules on page 180 of BRP. The use of the Resistance Table or of an alternative game mechanic is one of the typical differences between various d100 systems.

At its core, RQ Empires is a metagame system which treats an empire much like a character with attributes and skills and enables player characters who serve the empire to go on different types of missions. It also has rules for other types of organizations and for the more limited scale of the develop- ment of a noble's realm. In my view the various subsystems are very good, both for the use in a campaign and for solo play, but it would be a little dif- ficult to adapt them to any other genre than fantasy or medieval historical.

True, but over here we had a court case where a publisher accused another one of intellectual property theft with arguments like his ga- me also used an Armbrust (= crossbow) as a weapon and also had a skill named Reiten (= riding). The case was of course dismissed, but the victim had several thousand Euro of legal costs, which most pro- bably was the actual intention of the entire case, to spend some mo- ney from the war chest to make the less wealthy competitor bleed dry.

They are common enough to have a Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_troll I have not yet seen a true copyright troll in the roleplaying games industry, although there have been a few court cases which came rather close.

This is a version of the "orphanware problem", intellectual property where it is impossible to identify or locate the current owner of the rights, but where the- re is always a risk that he suddenly turns up to claim his rights (and to demand money). Quite a lot of interesting material is in this kind of "limbo", where only few people are willing to touch the material because they are afraid of an un- pleasant and expensive surprise. There have been attempts to create laws which make such "orphanware" pub- lic domain after a number of years without any identified owner of the rights, but unfortunately this has led nowhere.

A nice idea, but unfortunately Mylady would most probably force me to visit a psychiatrist if she would find out about me watching canni- bal movies ...

My impression is that much of the hostility comes from publishers who fail to comprehend that (and why and how ...) it is possible to make a profit with products published under the OGL, the entire concept goes against their fundamental ideas of doing business (and quite often also over their heads). Not long ago I had a discussion about the Baen Free Library with a book publisher who proved absolutely unable to see how this concept was meant to create a profit, the words "free" and "profit" just did not go together in his mind.

There are also a couple of excellent games which disappeared because a publisher bought them with the intention to remove a competing product from the market. A few of those games have been kept alive (well, more like undead ...) by their original authors and fans, but without something like the OGL/OGC this is often a borderline illegal thing.

No, but I think it results in a slightly more plausible "biography" of a character, because the player usually tends to base the skill improvements upon those Root skills he has chosen during the character generation, leading to a some- what more "organic growth" of the character than it would do with mechani- cally unconnected skills. True, this is a very minor point, but in my view it ma- kes the setting's characters feel a little more "realistic".

I have a similar problem with my current setting, and I intend to use the modified rules from the GURPS Social Engineering PDF: http://e23.sjgames.com/item.html?id=SJG37-0140 However, I did only read the PDF, and while I think it looks good and will prove useful for my purposes, I have not yet attempted to modi- fy the rules for my BRP setting and therefore have no experience at all with them.

All I can say about the Legend RPG market here in Germany is that I have the impression that it does not exist. The three most frequented German roleplay- ing games forums have only one or two posts about Legend, and until now no one found it interesting enough to write a German Wikipedia entry, or to add it to the lists of available games or games published by Mongoose. Compared to the reactions to other new games, Legend is still rather invisible and either an extremely slow starter or in danger to become an epic fail over here.

First, I rarely play fantasy settings, and I prefer to develop my own setting material, so I would not be a likely customer for this kind of product. That said, I would be sceptical about a book with such a content, I think it would be prudent to first "test the waters" with something that requires less time and effort, like perhaps a few smaller and inexpensive PDFs (as you did previously with Traveller creatures, robots, etc.).

Well, Ringworld's system was designed for a game where characters can be several hundred years old, which made it necessary to introduce more skills than usual to keep the average skill level under 200 %. For my setting I ha- ve modified this system for more "normal" characters, but kept the Root / Branch approach, mainly because it makes it easier to give each character a specific niche where he can shine and get some spotlight with skills none of the other characters has. I consider this useful because my setting has a comparatively very narrow focus, there are not that many different professi- ons available for the characters, and I therefore welcome any other way to make the characters different from each other - other settings certainly ha- ve other priorities.

Thank you very much for the two good ideas.

A potential problem with this approach is that it tends to turn slow characters into fast ones, because those acting last can observe the actions of all other characters and then decide how to react to them. They no longer act accor- ding to the situation at the beginning of the scene, they now act according to the situation near the end of the scene, with the knowledge of the actions of all other characters, and have the "final word" in the scene.

I thought about such an approach, too, but considered it a bit too unrealistic for my settings, because I doubt that the increased knowledge in specialties really improves the general knowledge of the field. For example, an astronomer who improves his knowledge in the specialties of cosmology and stellar classification will not necessarily learn more about pla- netology in the process, and a medic who improves his knowledge in cardiolo- gy and proctology will not necessarily improve his knowledge of gynecology by doing so. However, this is just my take, of course.

The Ringworld RPG also has a nice Research System, which I also intend to borrow for my next setting - I already used a modification for a previous one. There are four basic types of Research Steps, named Armchair Research (the data evaluation and thinking part), Field Research (usually a short adventure), Laboratory Research (working in a lab or workshop) and Library Research (loo- king for useful informations in databases). Each of these steps takes time and, in my version, requires materials to work with. When a character wants to research, develop or invent something, the player proposes a research plan with the number, types and sequence of the project's research steps, and the referee accepts or modifies this plan and also secretly assigns a difficulty for each research step ("absolutely impossible" is an option). The character then spends the time and material and uses his relevant skills to determine his success with each research step, if necessary repeating some of the steps, and once he has succeeded with the last research step he has got the knowledge he was searching for or a prototype of what he wanted to deve- lop - and a percentage of the time spent on the project is treated as learning time for the skills used during the project. The way I use it, a success with an important project also increases the character's Status and even can earn him some money. This is a nice "downtime" option between adventures for engineer or scientist characters, who otherwise normally have not that many things to do during a "downtime phase", and the field research step is a good hook for smaller adven- tures, especially when the project is about biology (e.g. capture a predator ali- ve to study it, etc.). Plus, it gives the characters an opportunity to contribute to the setting's development by inventing and introducing some new "cool stuff" that is not on the setting's original equipment list. Of course, as the referee I decide about the research's difficulty, and that su- per weapon with the time travelling bullet which hits the enemy half an hour be- fore the fight started will remain absolutely impossible ...

A while ago I decided to use the skill system of the old Ringworld RPG for my next science fiction setting, and since the Ringworld RPG has been out of print for a ve- ry long time I thought that some of you might perhaps find a short description of two concepts of this version of the BRP skill system interesting. Single Skills and Root/Branch Skills In the Ringworld game those skills which normally do not have any specialties are "Single Skills", for example Bargain or Fast Talk. They have the usual base chance and are handled like normal BRP skills. The skills which can have specialties are "Root/Branch" skills, for example Biology or Fine Arts. In addition to the usual base chance they have a "Root Maximum", which depends on the skill category and is calculated by adding the two attribu- tes which influence this skill category most, for example Intelligence and Educati- on for knowledge skills. The part of the skill between the base chance and the root maximum covers the character's general knowledge in this field, any skill beyond the root maximum has to be taken in a specialty of the skill. For example, marine biologist Tashari has an INT of 13 and an EDU of 15, so his root maximum for knowledge skills is 28 %. His general knowledge of Biology can not become better than those 28 %, but he can develop any number of biology specialties with higher skill values, for example Marine Biology and Microbiology. Pursuits and Biography The creation of a Ringworld character includes the creation of his biography, si- miliar to the lifepath system of other roleplaying games. There are a number of different pursuits for a character, for example Colonist, Ex- plorer or Soldier, each with a number of related skills and a "wealth value" for the savings from the time in that specific career. For each year spent in a pursuit the character gains 20 occupation points, used as skill points on that pursuit's skills. For example, if marine biologist Tadashi spent 7 years as a Scientific Researcher, he can distribute 140 skill points among the pursuit's skills. This are of course just the bare bones of the two concepts, but I think it demon- strates that there are many interesting ways to tweak the BRP system.

I fail to understand what Apple is aiming at. It seems to me that Apple attempts to prevent the distribution of the content in an Apple format by any other publi- sher, but I very much doubt that any other publisher would accept the content in an Apple format anyway, because other publishers would expect the authors to provide the content in their preferred formats.

No, but it is not very difficult to find a copy on the Internet.

As I see it, there are no really big differences, which makes it a matter of taste and personal preferences concerning the details which of the systems one likes best - while they are different, I do not see that any of them are "better". So my best (and unfortunately not very helpful) advice would be to take a look at all of them in order to find the one you like most.