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I am currently working on another version of my old Asornok setting, this time my arctic hunters will inhabit the far north of (a version of) Middle Earth, pro- bably during the late Third Age or early Fourth Age. The magic users of the Asor are their female shamans, the Anganoka, and their magic is a kind of spirit magic. However, the Anganoka are only the mediators between Inguanok, the world of the spirits, and Asornok, the "real" world, they do not have any power over the spirits they can contact - and this seems to require a different approach to their magic. My current idea is that an Anganoka can develop a friendly relation with a spe- cific spirit, for example an Ancestor spirit, an Animal spirit or a Nature spirit, and can ask this spirit for help whenever her clan needs it. The better the Anganoka's relation with the spirit, the higher is the chance that the spirit will agree to help the Asor. However, it is up to the spirit to decide the precise nature of this help, there are no pre-defined "spells" with defined results. For example, when the hunting went badly and the clan is in danger of starving, the Anganoka can contact a friendly Animal spirit to ask him for help. She can describe the clan's problem to the spirit, and depending on the spirit's willingness to help and on his abilities something welcome may happen - like a dying whale stranding on a nearby beach, or a herd of reindeer wandering into the clan's hun- ting grounds. I think (well, hope) that this approach will turn the spirits from "spell machines" into individual nonplayer characters and also make magic less calculable and more in tune with the natural environment of the Asor. It could also give the Anganoka a bit more setting specific "colour" through their spirit oriented social skills and ri- tuals (including their ability to "trance travel" to the spirit world Inguanok in order to contact the spirits there). Any comments and ideas would be most welcome.

It seems that I am using Personality Traits in a slightly different way. In our campaigns they are more like the expectations of the characters' society. The characters were brought up to act according to these expectations, and this behaviour is rewarded by their society. For example, when Just is an expected trait, a character who acts accordingly is well respected and usually has more success when using his social skills with members of the same cultural background, while a character who shows the Arbitrary trait will find that most people of his society will dislike him and often avoid to deal with him. It is up to the player which traits his character really has, but a choice and actions which go against the culture's expectations ha- ve a price, in the extreme they can even result in a visit by many angry people with torches and pitchforks.

Ah, I see what you mean. GURPS recently published a Social Engineering PDF with similar rules. I have not yet had an opportunity to test them, but they look good. My problem with understanding what you wrote was because I was still thinking of the situation with the "problem player", not of players who would welcome that kind of rules as a way to avoid problems.

Then I fail to understand how this could work. Once the player is determined that his character will not change his mind ("No, he does not trust him") any rule which results in another decision ("But now he does") will hardly be accep- table to him.

I very much doubt that any rules mechanic which results in "Your character now trusts my character" would be acceptable to many players, except per- haps where magic or psionics can be used as an explanation.

A mechanical solution would be possible in theory, something like "Lower roll on Stubbornness goes first", but I doubt that many players would find such a solu- tion acceptable when it contradicts their concept of the character. I think I would look for some in game way to change the problem, in your exam- ple with the door one of the characters could perhaps go backwards through the door while still keeping an eye on the other character, or one character could re- treat a safe distance from the door to enable the other one to enter the building without risk, or they could ask a third party to watch over the proceedings, or - you get the idea: If you cannot solve the problem, change it into one you can solve.

In my view this would reduce Conan and similar characters of heroic fiction to invincible combat monsters, which would ignore approximately 90 % of the ac- tual content of almost all of such stories. As for Conan, he rather often only wins very narrowly (otherwise the stories would be extremely boring), and he uses his well developed social skills at least as often as his combat skills. In my view a d100 system would be fine for a Conan game precisely because of this, as in my view D&D (at least D&D 4) has a tendency to treat characters as fighting machines and to handle their social skills and relations not so well. In other words, if you want to play "the whole Conan story", a d100 system is a very good choice, D&D would in my view only be better if you were only interested in the hack & slash scenes of the stories.

Besides, being captured alive and having to find a way to deal with such a situation is an archetypical theme of heroic fiction, the huge majority of all hero's tales include just such a situation, just think of the Lord of the Rings (the companions in Lorien), or of the legend of Robin Hood, and so on and on. To tell a referee that he can never use this theme with one's character is completely ... a very bad idea.

This is certainly true. On the other hand, the tension - and therefore much of the fun - in a roleplaying game is usually based upon the idea that characters have to take risks to achieve their goals. These risks have to be real to make a success meaningful and valuable, otherwise the story becomes a kind of bun- gee jumping, with a fake risk leading to a meaningless fake success. So, if you want a plausible, challenging and rewarding setting, I am afraid you will at least occasionally have to introduce the consequences of a miscalcula- ted risk, even if this means to have the entire party killed. In my view the si- tuation you described would have been such an occasion. Armed people resisting disarmament and interrogation by the authorities in a murder case take a suicidally high risk. It depends on your setting's "plausibi- lity level" whether the characters have a chance to survive such a stupid be- haviour, but under normal circumstances they would be dealt with by a SWAT team, with almost zero chance to get out of this unharmed and little chance to survive a firefight. In other words, I would have killed the characters. While it may reduce the fun in the short run, to me it would seem necessary to keep the setting plau- sible, and through this to support the future fun with this setting.

In our campaigns the player characters occasionally have to surrender and get captured, and this has never been a problem. Whatever the characters' goals were, committing suicide by attempting to resist an obviously far superior opponent or by otherwise insisting on getting kil- led would certainly have prevented them from reaching these goals. Be- sides, surrendering to a superior opponent or to avoid an unnecessary risk of getting killed is also just a very plausible behaviour, as even ma- ny real world elite soldiers did it.

I think the rules for poisons could cover this with only very few modifications for the effects of the various drugs.

Hmmm ... I am not so sure. While nice art is certainly no mistake, I do not see any direct relation between "eye candy" and sales - there are quite a few games which sell very well despite an almost complete lack of "eye candy", just think of Mongoo- se Traveller's black covers. When the huge majority of games uses "bling" to catch the eyes of potential customers, the one that stands out is the one which has no such "bling" - when everyone wears a sexy red dress, the one girl in the plain black dress catches the eye.

While the GURPS Space hardcover and PDF have colour artwork, the GURPS Spaceships series is available only as PDFs in black and white, so both approaches seem possible. I think that a BRP Science Fiction toolkit could perhaps be published first as a PDF monograph and later, af- ter an evaluation of its sales potential (and after the first errata have been made), perhaps al- so as a hardback with black and white or even colour art. To produce such a supplement would certainly require a lot of effort, although some of the material from Worlds of Wonder as well as from the Ringworld RPG could be used for it. Anyway, I will certainly not hold my breath, I very much doubt that Chaosium will produce anything of that kind.

While I would certainly buy BRP Blue Planet, I would be even more interested in a generic science fiction "toolbox" which adds the fields of science fiction not covered by the core rules, especially the technology with a system for the con- struction of vehicles of all kinds (from ground cars to starships).

I am not convinced that it would be a wise business strategy for Chaosium to let their Cthulhu line go the way of Trail of Cthulhu , because this would mean to compete direct- ly with their own licensee, which is rarely a profitable approach. As for GURPS, I see the relation between BRP and GURPS more like a mutual support for a specific style of roleplay- ing than like a situation where the death of one system would in any way help the other system.

A good way to avoid a lot of potentially quite boring bookkeeping.

Of course not, the aim of the system was to force the ship owners to go adventuring instead of spending their time trading, an actually functional trade system was not introduced until the Merchant Prince supplement. However, a plausible setting should have some explanation why there are any small merchant ships at all - it must be possible to make a living that way, or the interstellar economy (and, far more important, the players' suspension of disbelief) would be in serious danger. It makes sense to gi- ve some thought to this element of the game if the characters have a merchant ship, because otherwise sooner or later one of the players will point out any obvious implausibilities and contradictions. Handwaving in- come and expenses is of course an option, but then I would give the cha- racters some other type of ship, not a merchant vessel.

Just a few thoughts ... The type and size of the ship depends somewhat on how you expect the characters to make a living. If they have to pay for their expenses with the income from freight transports and speculative trade, the ship's car- go hold should be big enough that the income from a full shipload of nor- mal freight transported from A to B should be just enough for a little pro- fit after all expenses (life support, fuel, maintenance and repairs ...) ha- ve been paid - but only a little profit, not a "money machine" enabling the characters to buy a battle cruiser after their second freight run. Of course, you do not have to get into much detail or to design a complete trade system, but you should have a basic idea what goods and services cost, because there is a very real risk that the players will take a close look at their characters' source of income and decide to invest some ef- fort to "play the system" in order to increase the profits - and it would make things easier for you if you had at least the framework of a system in place at that point. If the ship is used to carry passengers, it will need some staterooms - and a few staterooms are a good idea anyway, in case a nonplayer cha- racter joins the crew for a while. Besides, passengers - especially myste- rious ones - can be a lot of fun. Armament depends on the setting, if there are space pirates or aggressi- ve aliens, at least some defensive weapons are a good idea. Offensive weapons can become a problem, too many of them and quite a few pla- nets will hesitate to let the micro-battleship come near any valuable in- stallations, including the spaceport. Drives also depend on the setting, their power should be plausible con- sidering the purpose of the ship. A freighter will normally be among the setting's slower ships, merchants are usually reluctant to pay for more technology than is necessary to keep things moving. Then add the bridge, an office or two, the crew's quarters, a crew loun- ge and perhaps a passenger lounge, a galley, a fresher, an equipment store ("ship's locker") and perhaps a little workshop (or even a laborato- ry for that scientist type among the characters), and off you go. Once you have designed the ship in your mind and made sure that it will fit into its intended role in the setting, you should have a good idea which of the ship types (from Star Wars or whatever) will do the job, and you will also have a first impression of what it looks like inside. The next step could be a deck plan of the ship, but this is another subject.

How about "none" ? In my view a "Do as you are told or suffer the consequences" is a lot more impressive if those consequences are not known, because the human mind tends to imagine lots of extremely unpleasant possibilities, and it is impossible to develop any plan to escape all of them. Fear works best when little or no- thing is known about the object of the fear.

Over here boxed sets of roleplaying games have become very rare, because the book shops cannot order them through their normal channels and the on- line shops cannot mail them at the reduced postage rate for books. Almost all of the roleplaying games companies which once produced boxed sets have stopped to use boxes, and attempting to sell boxed sets in Germany would significantly reduce the market share one could reach with books. I have no idea whether the situation in other European countries is similar, but if this should be the case, a boxed set might be a not very good idea.

We use something similar, but until now I did never see it as related to Edges / Feats, only as an additional level of skill specialization, where a special success with a skill roll can be (pre-) defined as one of several possible advantageous results. When his character reaches a specific skill level, we use 75 %, the player can choose the result of a special success with that skill from a short list tailored to the skill in question. For example, the player of a character with a Repair skill of 75+ % could choose whether a special success with that skill would increase the speed of the repair work or reduce the amount of spare parts needed for the repair, and so on.

BRP and weapons ... the only potential advice that comes to my mind is that you should make a few "dry runs" before the actual game to get a feeling for the lethality of firearms in BRP, because depending on the roleplaying games you played until now it may well turn out that combat in BRP is far more deadly than you are used to.

At least over here "G+" is the usual abbreviation for "Google+", and a very common shared whiteboard is skrbl: http://www.skrbl.com/

Look for a user named "Newt".

That company does no longer exist.