rust

Just to make sure that people know what you mean ...

"Son number one only travels on ship number one, only number he can count to and remember."

Thank you very much, I think in this case I will indeed use the ahistorical version ... numbered ships ...

Guilty, Your Honour, and no valid excuse, except that I was lured into historical settings and away from spaceships and vehicles ... But I think what you have is good enough to show and to use the input from this forum to improve it and complete it.

I have just downloaded BRP Rome, and from what I have seen so far I am almost convinced that it is by far the best historical supplement I have ever seen - Congratulations. My only problem is that it is a little difficult to read on the screen, especially the black on grey quotes in the margins.

Take a look at this thread: http://basicroleplaying.com/showthread.php/1935-MRQ-II-compatability-with-BRP

I was thinking of friendship, not of worship. In the Age of Heroes, Asklepios is just one of them, the best healer in Greece who happens to be a relative of one of the gods. To have him - or one of his daughters - as a friend means to have access to his skills or, if he is not near, to his truly wonderful ointments, potions or sal- ves. In fact, with Asklepios around one does not have to worship the gods, begging for their favour to get some rapid healing - one only has to stay on the good side of the healer and his family and to avoid trouble with his father Apollon.

From what I have heard, RedBrick is in the process of writing a new edition of Blue Planet, al- though they have recently postponed the decision about whether and how to publish it to later this year, but I doubt that they would be willing to use another system after having discussed the necessary changes of the old system with the fans.

Thank you very much indeed. So Captain Fan Wenlong commands the junk Hegong Hao ...

No problem, it is not urgent, the setting is still in a very early design stage.

Not really, but Atgxtg here on this forum has been working on something very interesting, per- haps he could be convinced to complete it and show it ...

For my Sokotra setting's first major adventure, a trading voyage to Mogadishu, I would need a little linguistic help with the name of a Chinese junk and its owner - the colonists will meet the Chinese trader in Mogadishu and will have a chance to establish a friendly relationship. Unfortunately I have no idea of Chinese naming customs for ships, and do not want to end up with something ridiculous ... and while we are at it a plausible name for the ship's captain-ow- ner would also be most welcome. Thank you very much.

Healing would be the "portfolio" of the demigod Asklepios, a son of Apollon, and his daughters. Therefore you could use a character's relations with Asklepios (or, more fun, one of the daugh- ters) as his access to healing, keeping in mind that other deities might interfere and either ask Asklepios to help or to stop helping - Apollon would probably have the most influence with As- klepios.

Yep, I am aware of this - but how to handle it in the game ? At first I tried to give each of the wives a long list of low percentile profession skills, but that does not really work, because they would fail or fumble too many of their skill rolls, while in reality they almost certainly succeeded most of the time. Now I think I will introduce two new skills, Craft (Stewardship) and Knowledge (Stewardship), to cover all the "sub-professional" tasks of a normal household, and follow SDavies' advice to give all or most of the wives one or two comparatively high professional skills to individualize them by showing where they are especially skilled.

Any FLGS that has Mongoose's products should have it, or be able to order it, and the PDF is available through DTRPG.

Thank you very much, it helps a lot - I think this was exactly the advice I needed to see the so- lution to my little problem.

Working on my Sokotra Colony setting, I ran into another minor problem: The professions and skills of the colonists' wifes. While it was no problem to distribute the necessary professions and skills for the creation of the colony among the male colonists and to make most of them different and interesting by this, it seems that in a historical setting almost all of the female colonists will have to remain "generic", without true professions and with only a narrow field of household skills (Cooking, First Aid, Se- wing ...), plus perhaps some social and artistic skills and the basics of their husbands' professi- ons - in the end their stats all look very much the same. I suspect that this is historically more or less correct, but it also makes it rather difficult to play these non-player characters in a way that turns them into individuals the players will remember, and I do not want to ignore them and treat them just as background, as for example Pendragon handles almost all of the knights' wifes. So, any ideas that could help to give those female colonists a bit more colour and individuality without changing history too much (= no female musketeers and thelike ...) would be most wel- come. Thank you.

More like Space: 1999, I am afraid.

We usually played Harn as a pseudo-medieval setting by concentrating on a small part of the world, for example the Laranian crusade against the Solori, and so avoided the "hodgepodge problem" - quite easy, since Harn with its great depth of detail seems designed more for such "local" scenarions than for characters who travel across the entire world. However, most of the time I use Harn as a "reference" for other settings, borrowing things like the seafaring rules from the Pilot's Almanach, the price list or the crafting rules for other set- tings, because only very few systems offer such elaborate and well thought-out rules.

Thank you.

Very nice review, thank you very much. This is the one point I did not quite understand: What exactly is the era ?

Thank you very much for the link, a really fascinating architecture - and perhaps an idea what a Chinese trade post on my Sokotra might look like.

There are, and lots of them - which is why I was so surprised when you mentioned a lack of such settings published in English, I was not aware that this "post-apocalyptic trend" is a German phenomenon only.

Thank you very much for the tip, I will do that. I also hope that Gianni Vacca's Tian Xia supplement will be published in time to give me a few more informations on Chinese culture and history, which I do not know very well.

With the location, the island of Sokotra, determined and the general background sketched, I would build the actual setting around some personalities. Here is an example: Charles Ferguson The leader of the expedition to Sokotra is Captain Charles Ferguson, the owner of the merchant ship Orkney Lass. He knows the Indian Ocean region quite well, as he took part in the siege of the Portuguese fort at Hormuz in 1622 and found and explored Sokotra on his voyage back to Scotland. Soon after his arrival there, he met and joined a protestant sect, the New Covenant, and also befriended their leader, Alan Docharty. Together they developed the plan to found a colony on Sokotra, both to escape the expected re-introduction of Catholicism by the new king Charles and to build a community that can follow its religious ideals without outside interference. Ferguson and Docharty convinced most of the other members of the New Covenant of their plan and began to prepare the voyage to Sokotra. The Orkney Lass was modified, the few experien- ced fishermen among the sect's members were trained as the ship's crew, and the necessary equipment for the new colony was purchased. In early 1625 the Orkney Lass left Scotland with 58 men, 51 women and 31 children, hoping to arrive at Sokotra within about 90 days.