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7 hours ago, Whisker89 said:

Hey, I'm just passing by to say that your Thalassa setting is very appealing.

Keep up the good work! you've got a new fan in me

Thank you very much indeed, I will try to do my very best. 

12 minutes ago, clarence said:

What does the "streets" look like and what is the feeling of those places? Are they technical, with submarine-like corridors, or green/blue open domes with actual streets and squares? Or something else entirely?

The first seafloor domes of Port Rose are designed much like submarines, later domes are designed to be more comfortable, with streets, squares and parks. Each settlement consists of several domes of different sizes, connected by tunnels under the seafloor. I have to admit that I have yet to write a good description of a seafloor dome. Below is an attempt to give an impression of a major dome from a previous setting, the domes of Thalassa will be very similar.

1 hour ago, clarence said:

With M-SPACE, I think (and hope) I have found a third path. My own results so far have been very good. 

One more good reason for looking forward to M-SPACE. 

5 hours ago, Mechashef said:

.The Americas and other places such as Africa and Asia which have creatures like wandering bears, lions, tigers etc are much more dangerous.

Not to mention the most dangerous creature of all, our Alpine Wolpertinger. 

4 hours ago, Mankcam said:

Crikes! I wonder how much Sanity we lose by actually living down here.

I am surprised that you have left any Sanity at all. I mean, viewed from here you antipodes live with the earth above your feet and your heads hanging down into the air, this cannot be a sane stance ... 

1 hour ago, rsanford said:

I live in Dallas - want to trade? :-)

No, thank you very much, not enough mountains around Dallas ... 

10 minutes ago, RosenMcStern said:

Amazon is a retailer, exactly like your FLGS. Just a little bigger than your FLGS...

Living in a little town in the Alps with no brick and mortar FLGS anywhere near, Amazon actually is my FLGS ... 

1 hour ago, RosenMcStern said:

... no Alephtar BRP title is still distributed to shops or online stores. Period. No exceptions.

However, a couple of online stores, including Amazon in Germany, still seem to have some copies of Dragon Lines available, at least they still offer them.

2 hours ago, clarence said:

Now, if we still make totally unexpected discoveries like these, what surprises shouldn't a newly colonized water world present...

Thank you very much for the link. 

Indeed, and my main problem with this is that whatever I may come up with will certainly be less fascinating than a real Thalassa would be.

1 hour ago, rsanford said:

Who wrote the book of Enoch (Enoch?), and what do we know of him? Was the book of Enoch one of the Dead Sea scrolls?

Here is what Wikipedia has to say about the Book of Enoch ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Enoch

3 hours ago, soltakss said:

If RQ cannot simulate a hero fighting in a battle frenzy then it is not a good simulation. RQ needs to cover the whole gamut of human experience, from those who do not fight, those who fight cautiously to those who put caution to the wind and embark on heroic battles.

Well, yes, but ... The RQ combat system is designed to provide a comparatively high degree of verisimilitude, and I think that RQs ability to simulate a "heroic battle" ends where the verisimilitude of the original heroic fiction ends. After all, many of the heroic stories are seriously exaggerated myths and would require a rather silly system to simulate them.

20 minutes ago, rsanford said:

Do you think Shadowrun has the best setting material overall?

I am fairly certain that Shadowrun has by far the most setting material of all the cyberpunk games I know, but whether one considers it the best material is of course a matter of taste.

It depends on your preferred flavour of the game. If you lean towards science fantasy, with magic as a part of the setting, you could take a look at Shadowrun. I do not like its system, but you intend to use Revolution D100 anyway, and Shadowrun has the advantage that it offers a very well developed setting. However, if you dislike the idea of magic and mythical creatures in a cyberpunk setting, Shadowrun would be a rather bad choice.

7 hours ago, styopa said:

But I can easily see how other gamers could find Mythras to be their go-to game.

Well, it is a system which does what I want it to do, and it does it for very different settings, without requiring a lot of modifications - which I cannot say about any of the other d100 systems I know. 

10 hours ago, clarence said:

Aha; what was it that didn't work in CoC? Is it Mythras' rules for passions you're missing?

The main problem was Call of Cthulhu's limited set of skills, I would have had to add a whole lot of additional setting specific skills, which in turn would have forced me to give out a rather high number of skill points in order to enable the players to give their characters meaningful skill levels in all the necessary skills. Mythras feels more "generic", its skills can cover what I need for the setting almost without changes. Plus, I was indeed missing Mythras' rules for passions, in a game with a diplomatic / political tendency they make it comparatively easy to define where a person stands, how strong the person's feelings for that cause are, and how much effort it might take to convince the person to change his / her mind. Overall, my impression was that Call of Cthulhu's implied setting just is not really compatible with my ideas for the Bhotana setting.

Ah, well, it seems I made a mistake. 

While working on the Bhotana setting I had to realize that the Call of Cthulhu system does not really fit the setting - while the background informations about Tibet etc. certainly are excellent and most useful, I simply cannot get the system to create the feel I want for my setting. After several days of tinkering with the Call of Cthulhu / Pulp Cthulhu system I finally decided to give up on this one and to try instead to use the Mythras system for my revived Bhotana setting. Provided this works better, and it seems so, you may perhaps read more about Bhotana in the Mythras forum in the not so far future.

Bhotana is a setting where the characters know very little about the actual setting at the start of the campaign, their first impression is not the campaign's location in Bhotana but only a person from that location, their new employer and patron Prince Thinley. Here is what they can find out about him.

Prince Thinley Sangay

Prince Thinley Sangay was born in 1897 as the second son of King Soman Sangay of Bhotana. He was educated by private tutors at the royal palace in Timpho and then studied law and philosophy at the University of Calcutta. He is married to Prathana, a Thai noble woman, they have no children. His marriage to a foreigner removed Prince Thinley from the line of potential heirs to the throne. In Europe the prince usually cultivates an image as just another wealthy, carefree and nonchalant oriental noble with a beautiful trophy wife. In reality he is a very clever and hard working diplomat dedicated to the development and modernization of his homeland, and he is supported by his equally intelligent and dedicated wife. The prince is almost always charming, friendly and very polite, but he has a tendency to react with sarcasm to people he considers stupid. He is known to keep his promises and to reward every success of those who work for him. Prince Thinley speaks five languages, Bhotu, English, Assamese, Bengali and Thai. He has become famous for his excellent knowledge of history and international law and his high social skills.

12 minutes ago, rsanford said:

Chris Tooley (who hangs out in the magic world section of this site) uploaded a truly gigantic bestiary that converts D&D monsters to BRP. I forget the name but maybe someone else can speak up. You might consider downloading it.

It is the "Big Damn Book of Monsters". 

A couple of years ago I designed an alternate history setting where I replaced the real world's mountain kingdom of Bhutan with a more fantastic version named Bhotana. And only a short while ago I bought first Secrets of Tibet and then Pulp Cthulhu, remembered my old Bhotana setting and decided to revive it. Instead of describing the nation of Bhotana, which I will perhaps do somewhen later, I will begin by posting here the outlines of the first three adventure situations of the new campaign: The Voyage to Limpho, which introduces the characters to a view of Bhotana from the outside, The Valley of Demons for a first view of Bhotana from the inside, and The Legacy of Nalanda for the role of Buddhism in Bhotana.

The Voyage to Limpho

When Prince Thinley Sangay arrived in Geneva in 1921 the British diplomats seriously underestimated the young Bhoti's intelligence, his social skills and his desire to change his father's mountain kingdom from a backward British protectorate into an independent and modern state. Two years later the prince had finally outmaneuvered the British diplomacy and had gained a membership in the League of Nations for Bhotana. And he was ready to start his next project.

The year 1923 is a very bad one for Europe, which is still recovering from the Great War. It is especially bad for Austria and Germany, the losers of the war, which suffer from hyperinflation and unemployment. This makes it easy for Prince Thinley to hire two Austrian engineers, specialists in mountain engineering who ha ve honed their skills in the brutal mountain warfare on the Italian border. Their task will now be to design Bhotana's new network of mountain roads.

The British still want to keep Bhotana as a preferably primitive dependent buffer state on India's northern border and strongly dislike the idea of any foreign influence there, especially any Austrian or German influence. The prince therefore has no doubt that the British authorities in India will do their very best to prevent the Austrian engineers' arrival in Bhotana. Someone reliable and resourceful has to accompany the two Austrians and to deliver both them and their equipment safely to Phontsho, Bhotana's border town with India. And the prince already has an idea who could succeed in this mission.

The Valley of Demons

There is a remote valley in the far northeast of Bhotana that is more easily accessible from Tibet than from Bhotana. It became known as the Valley of Demons after a minor tribe of Tshosho from Tibet, suspected to be demon worshippers by the Buddhist Bhoti, wandered into the valley more than a century ago and forced the few Bhoti living there to leave.

The previous kings of Bhotana never cared much about the loss of the valley, it was too remote, too inaccessible and too infertile. But now Prince Thinley Sangay does care, because he is convinced that a modern Bhotana has to control its entire territory, especially along the borders. Besides, the Tshosho have a bad reputation as bandits, and the prince does not intend to tolerate such people in his realm.

The prince's plan is to build a road, or at least a good mountain path, from Bhotana's interior to the Valley of Demons and then to send a unit of the Royal Guards into the valley to establish a permanent garrison as the core of a new Bhoti settlement. He thinks that this should be sufficient to encourage the nomadic Tshosho to retreat to Tibet, and Bhotana will then close and guard the pass to Tibet. Before all this can happen, someone has to cross the mountains between Bhotana's interior and the Valley of Demons, to explore the valley and to gather informations about the anarchic and potentially dangerous Tshosho there.

The Legacy of Nalanda

Nalanda was the greatest Buddhist centre of learning, a magnificent university town founded in the 5^th century and destroyed at the end of the 12^th century by India's Muslim conquerors. The huge libraries of Nalanda, now lost, contained the oldest Buddhist scriptures and were visited by famous scholars from as far away as Tibet, China and Korea.

Prince Thinley Sangay is normally more interested in politics than in religion, except where religion becomes a political problem. There are two Buddhist schools in Bhotana, one heavily influenced by the colourful Tibetan Lamaism, the other leaning towards the more philosophical Theravada Buddhism of Southeast Asia. The followers of Lamaism are rather conservative, the followers of Theravada are more inclined to accept Prince Thinley's vision of a modern Bhotana.

The prince would of course love to strengthen the Theravada school, but he lacks the means to do it. That is, he lacked those means until recently, when he learned of a rumour that an unusually early version of the Pali Canon of Buddha's teachings from Nalanda's libraries has been found in the ruins of an abandoned monastery in Tibet. This ancient scripture, containing the true roots of Buddhist philosophy before it was tainted by other influences like the Lamaism, would doubtless support the Theravada school. Therefore the prince, who urgently wants this ancient Pali Canon, plans to send someone to Tibet to find it, buy it and bring it back to Bhotana.

28 minutes ago, Numtini said:

 I realize this means I probably failed a SAN roll somewhere.

This is just a normal long term consequence of playing Call of Cthulhu ... 

4 hours ago, Mankcam said:

However you might find that many people buy Legend for it's supplements and play them with the RQ6/Mythras rules.

The same here. For example, I very much like Land of Ice and Stone, but I also prefer RQ6/Mythras to Legend.

6 hours ago, Falconer said:

 I just hope there isn’t a culture here where it’s taboo to be pro- any other edition. 

Certainly not, so no need to worry. 

10 minutes ago, Falconer said:

Is everyone really on board with the new edition, or just being polite because this is the company board, and the editors post here? Hope this isn’t a taboo question, and I don’t mean to offend; I just assumed most people were sticking with 6e or earlier.

No, I am really using the 7th edition now, although I have to admit that I began to use it only because of Secrets of Tibet and then Pulp Cthulhu, which are both very useful for my campaigns. However, I also still use the 6th edition, mainly because of the excellent German supplements published for it, like the ones for the Dreamlands or for the Gaslight era. 

I think you could start with the 7th edition Rulebook, the 7th edition Investigators Handbook, Pulp Cthulhu and perhaps a collection of adventures like Nameless Horrors to get a feel for the Cthulhu setting. I would not recommend the Keeper's Companions and Malleus Monstrorum because I think that they still use the 6th edition rules, in my view it would be better to wait for the 7th edition versions.

1 hour ago, Belgath said:

How compatible is Pulp Cthulhu with CoC 7 adventures?

The rules in Pulp Cthulhu only make the characters a bit more powerful, so there should be no general compatibility problems.