rust

If you have all the books you need for your campaign, there is no problem for you. Mongoose's decision only means that there will be no new Glorantha 2nd Age books published, and that those already published will cease to be avai- lable this year. Otherwise the game system of Mongoose Runequest 2 will be continued, now renamed Wayfarer, but with other settings. However, I doubt that Wayfarer will have a long life.

Yes, I agree. The partners have to be informed at least an hour before any press release, not after a press release - this is really very bad style.

It is not my habit to defend Mongoose, but I am not sure whether there really was a choice, because announcing the end of Runequest before the agreement with Greg Stafford was finalized would also have been a questionable and poten- tially risky decision.

I am not surprised, for Mongoose the Runequest line turned out to be a kind of black hole that made lots of money disappear. I am just not yet convinced that Wayfarer will do much better, there are many excellent competing fantasy sys- tems out there, and at least in my view Wayfarer does not yet have a setting that could attract a sufficient market share to the new game. In the end I would probably be quite surprised if Wayfarer would survive for much longer than the Runequest line did.

Sorry, no. Grimm mentions the Valravn only in a single sentence in a paragraph about the mythology of ravens, where he claims that it has basically the same mythological role as a troll. Otherwise there is no useful information. The few German sources I am aware of share the opinion that the Valravn is a very late (18th/19th Century) relative of Odin's intelligent raven Huginn, who ate the corpses of slain warriors, and who somehow got mixed up with were creatu- res into a raven-wolf. Edit.: Thinking of it, Odin had two ravens and two wolves as companions, so the combi- nation of raven and (were) wolf could indeed have such a mythological background - of course pure speculation. Edit. 2: Interestingly the raven is also called "wolf-bird", there are quite a number of such references to be found via Google. Here is an interesting site about the ravens, it also mentions the "wolf-bird" thing: http://www.druidry.org/obod/lore/animal/raven.html

Nice. My own way of confusing players with ancient texts is to use normal texts, but to replace some of the common words and phrases with archaic ones from Me- dieval German, with a meaning which is either unknown today, or has changed a lot over the centuries. As a result the text usually seems to make perfect sen- se, it is just not entirely clear what that sense is. As an example, in modern Ger- man a "Schalk" is a witty person who likes to tell jokes, while in Medieval German a "Schalk" was a dangerous criminal.

Unfortunately not. The way we handled it the character could increase any of the "other" skills as much as he liked, provided he found a teacher and had the money and time for the learning.

Yep, the more complex the culture is, the more choices the player characters should have. By the way, cultural skills can also be used for the various profes- sional specialities, for example a Craftsman of the Asor mentioned above could get a cultural skill bonus of 20 % for Art (Ivory Carving), increasing his income and making the otherwise "fluff" skill more useful for the character.

For my settings I usually give each of the cultures two cultural skills with a free bonus of 20 % each, for example the Asor as arctic hunters get 20 % each for either Drive (Dog Sled) or Pilot (Kayak) and for Throw (Harpoon). I try to con- nect the use of such cultural skills to equipment or situations typical for the cul- ture, in order to give the culture some individual "colour".

You can always try one of the free online translation programs ... By the way, you should perhaps have asked whether someone here can read Danish, as there is at least a chance that a Norwegian or Swede might give it a try. But to speak Danish is impossible for foreigners, even Danes admit that it is more like a severe throat infection than a pronounciation of words.

Not quite, the Minoans and some of the people of the Anatolian coast had very old high cultures, while the Mycenaeans and some of the Indoeuropean newco- mers on the Anatolian coast remained true barbarians for a couple of centuries. These cultures only began to merge after the desaster which almost destroyed the Minoan culture, most probably the explosion of the Santorini volcanoe, which made it possible for the Mycenaeans to occupy Crete and take over the previ- ously Minoan sea trade routes. Until then the Minoan culture had more contacts and similarity with the cultures of Egypt and Phoenicia.

While I have no problem with any special resources used before a roll to improve the chance of a success, such resources used after the roll to enable a re-roll or any other change of the result are in my experience anti-immersion tools which take much of the tension out of the game and harm the verisimilitude of the set- ting's events: "You failed your Jump and fell into the canyon." - "No, I can make it undone and try a second time." - imagine such a scene in a book or movie, far too much like a silly cartoon for my taste.

An excellent supplement, congratulations. I downloaded it to see whether I can find some informations and ideas for my Bhotanta setting, a fictional version of Bhutan, and was very pleasantly surpri- sed to find almost truckloads of most useful stuff. There are a few typos, but only one jumped out at me, the Tibetan "Plateu" on Map 2 on page 28. I gave The Celestial Empire its well deserved 5 stars on DTRPG and wrote a ve- ry short recommendation, hoping that this will help to spread the word.

By the way, if you are interested in a more modern, but very "Conanesque" example of the genre, I would highly recommend Barbara Hambly's "Sunwolf" novels, especially "The Ladies of Mandrygin". It has all the genre typical ideas so excellently described by Seneschal, plus a dry sense of humour.

You could take a look at Warlords of Alexander in the forum's download section, it is quite close to the time period.

The first twenty years of Torava's game time have passed, and things are going well - almost too well. The main character, now Baron Richard Herriot, has rea- ched a noble standing of about 120, the population mood is at about 300, and the island's meanwhile six settlements have become almost luxurious, because there was so much money for building projects and other improvements. The on- ly problem are the many rivals and enemies Lord Richard made during his various otherwise successful political missions to the royal court. Fortunately Lord Richard will soon retire to his new manor on the Willowplain Ri- ver, and his son Andrew will be knighted and take over the administration of To- rava. Since he is young and inexperienced his skills are far less well developed, and so the chance for interesting failures and fumbles increases. Of course I do not hope that he will ruin Torava, but a little more tension and uncertainty after the hugely lucky and successful reign of his father would be welcome.

Look at the bottom of this page: http://basicroleplaying.com/downloads.php?do=cat&id=33&page=3

It seems that Conan BRP does exist, but to use it would require either an uncom- mon language skill or a good translation program and a bit of work to make sense of the program's results. Since Conan is not among my favourite genres, I never tried to find out what exactly this Conan BRP is, but if you know someone who understands the language ...: http://smartfox.wordpress.com/conan-brp/ Edit.: This is an example of the results of a free online translation program for the steps 1 and 2 of character creation: While it seems possible to make sense of it and "translate the translation" into a functioning system, it would be a lot more work than I would be willing to do.

You are right, the PDF somehow slipped into the wrong place on my backup CD.

I usually wait a little while and watch the reactions here on this forum before I decide to buy a monograph, and until now this has served me well, I did not buy a single one which I would consider useless or bad. My favourite ones ... this list would include (in alphabetical order): The Green (BRP), Kingdom of the Blind (CoC), Modern Equipment Catalog (BRP), Mysteries of Tibet (CoC), Outpost 19 (BRP), Secrets of Morocco (CoC) and Witchcraft (BRP). I very much liked the Cthulhu Rising material by John Ossoway, which was at the core of one of my previous campaigns. And I also very much like all of the historical supplements from Alephtar Games, although supplements like BRP Rome are in my view no monographs. The one monograph I bought, but never found a good use for, is First Book of Things (CoC). It is certainly not bad, it just does not fit into my games.

I think I would just create two new skills, Seduction and Tumbling, and add them to the skill list. In my view both activities are different enough from the ones covered by the al- ready existing skills that it would make sense to handle them as skills instead of subsets of existing skills. This would also ensure that the character remains special. For example, if Seduc- tion would be treated as a special kind of use of the Persuade skill, every other character with a high Persuade skill should be able to seduce just as well as the "special" character. Besides, if the player wants her character to have unusual abilities, the character should pay for these abilities in full, and not use another skill's points to reduce the cost of the special abilities. So, no use of "Persuade points" to make the un- related skill Seduction easier to get.

Ah, yes - the population panics because the patient speaks in a nasal voice, a completely understandable reaction ...

BRP does indeed have quite a few less clear parts, where decisions are left to the referee because the rules are ambiguous. It sometimes shows that BRP is more of a toolbox for the design of games than a single well defined game. In the case of the major diseases it would not be difficult to introduce a little variation by changing the times between the recovery rolls for the different dis- eases, or by otherwise playing with the rolls. Just do what you think fits your game best.

As I read it, you first determine with the resistance table whether the POT of the disease overcomes the CON of the character, and if it does he is infected and loses the first characteristic point, with the type of point lost depending on the disease. The character then makes his usual recovery rolls, but each time he fails his CON roll the severity of the disease increases by one step. So, as I read it, there are no separate rolls to determine the severity of the disease, it is determined through the failures of the normal recovery rolls.

My problem with a static defence is that it takes a lot of tension and uncertainty out of the combat by making it far more predictable. Since I am definitely on the simulationist side of gaming, I very much prefer a more realistic approach, where even the best swordsman can misread his much weaker opponent's tactics (e.g. fumble his parry) and can be killed by a mere beginner, because this is what oc- casionally happened in the real world, too - and it gives even seasoned veterans a reason to think twice before they start a fight. But, well, this is just a matter of taste.