rust

I think the Chinese did not use ship names, but numbered them using the Stems-and-Branches system ...

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

ships ...

...but the playtesters didn't provide much feedback, so it is hard to complete it.

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.

Incidently, how different are Mongoose's RQ II rules from BRP ones?

Take a look at this thread:

http://basicroleplaying.com/showthread.php/1935-MRQ-II-compatability-with-BRP

The campaign I have in mind has patrons, but not organized worship.

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.

Who can we write to about it?

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.

Or you could look here.

http://www.jiawen.net/Chinesenames.html

Thank you very much indeed.

So Captain Fan Wenlong commands the junk Hegong Hao ...

I think you need to wait until Gianni is back from Bacharach.

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

Maybe these exist in some supplement I don't own...

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.

Which goes back to the main request...any suggestions on how to handle periodic miraculous healing w/out formal healers/priests AND still keep a Greek myth feel?

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.

Historically "housewife" was 50 professions in one.

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.

So is this available someplace?

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

available through DTRPG.

Hopefully that helps somewhat.

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.

Like Battlestar Galactica is your daddy's sci-fi show?

More like Space: 1999, I am afraid.

I think it would have been better if it wasn't a hodgepodge of Medieval, Roman, Viking, and High Fantasy.

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.

I'd recommend anyone interested in the era to go out and buy this, though.

This is the one point I did not quite understand: What exactly is the era ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakka_architecture

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.

Not sure if we are talking about the same thing unless there are published post-apocalyptic settings in Germany.

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.

One suggestion for research I would make is to look at the Chinese from Fujian province.

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.

A unique and well developed setting such as post-apocalypse or sci-fi could expand the audience a lot as there are few sci-fi or post-apoc type settings for RPG's in general.

Well, we have a real deluge of post-apocalyptic settings over here, some people have even coi-

ned the new term "New German Endtime" for this subgenre of extremely dark (and often rather

silly - think of Roland Emmerich movies ...) settings ...

If I'm not mistaken, Chinese merchants nonetheless were sailing around the Indian ocean; I think Singapore was settled fairly early by some number of Chinese merchants.

Thank you very much, I like this idea.

Meanwhile I settled for about 1625 as the starting date of the setting, but my little research

showed that most of the important ports around Sokotra were already under foreign control

at that time - Aden by the Ottomans, Surat by the English of the East India Company, Goa by

the Portuguese, and so on.

These nations would probably not welcome another bunch of Europeans on Sokotra, especial-

ly the Portuguese might well decide to eliminate this potential competition immediately. There-

fore it would by prudent for the colonists to avoid such contacts and search for other trading

partners and potential allies, and the Chinese would be a very interesting and colourful option.