rust

I'm not very familiar with OO. How do you "copy it" and then work on it ?

Just like the normal "copy & paste" with a PDF: I open the PDF with Adobe Reader, mark the

entire page with the mouse and click on "Copy", then open Open Office and click on "Paste",

and there it is, as a normal Open Office text I can edit.

However, as mentioned, tables and thelike lose the formatting and have to be re-formatted

afterwards - unless one is as lazy as I am, and just cuts them out with the Snipping Tool as

pictures and inserts them into the text after altering them with Paint.NET if necessary.

Most I've dug up are in pdf, but the native formats would help everyone out in making custom sheet.

When I want to edit something published as a PDF, I usually just copy it with Open Office and

can then work with it as I please. The only problem are tables and thelike, which have to be

re-formatted, but it is usually still less effort than working from scratch.

On a battlefield, you would certainly prefer weapon and shield, while in a one on one duel a dagger can be almost as effective.

Yep, based on real world data my choice for "everyday adventuring" and duels would most pro-

bably be a rapier (fast, precise, good reach) and a main-gauche (for parrying and disarming).

For those of you who make your own character sheets, what programs do you use? What fonts?

Most of the players use Open Office to create the character sheets, and sometimes Paint.NET

to "spice them up" with backgrounds, illustrations and thelike. They use different fonts for their

character sheets, but our "standard" for the "official" material for our settings and campaigns

is Georgia.

... and (huge generalisation coming up) "most" shields are too large to be carried casually "out of the way" ...

Many shields could be carried on one's back, for transport as well as protection during a hasty

retreat - some crossbowmen even used to turn around during reloading, with the shield on the

back towards the enemy to protect them from missiles while reloading.

However, to keep the shield on the back during a melee would require to have another weapon

for the off hand, because otherwise one would be at a serious disadvantage against an oppo-

nent with two weapons (e.g. sword and shield), and it would have to be more than a dagger,

because such a small weapon could not parry a sword or a shield.

This leads to a weight problem. More than a few battles were lost because the troops of one

side arrived at the battlefield exhausted because of their heavy gear (armour, weapons, etc.).

So, if one had to carry a shield because of the enemy archers or crossbowmen, one usually

used it as the secondary weapon in combat, instead of wasting energy by carrying yet another

weapon.

And if one had to use it, it was a good idea to have some skill with it ...

Edit.:

This is an illustration of a crossbowman with a shield on his back. For reloading he would

turn around and kneel down, fully protected against enemy missiles by the shield.

There are other advantages of a shield than just the protection against missile fire.

In a single combat or a melee the shield is a secondary weapon (that's why real world shields

had shield spikes and thelike), mostly used to unbalance an opponent and force him into a de-

fensive stance or into retreat.

In a formation combat the shield is part of an interlocking shield wall, a kind of mobile fortifica-

tion, that is very difficult to break. Ancient armies, for example the Roman legions, used diffe-

rent shield wall formations for devastating effect.

A minor version of this is the co-operation of two fighters, where one concentrates on the use

of the shield to protect both of them, while the other concentrates on his weapon to do dama-

ge. Such teamwork can give an important adventage over opponents who do not co-operate

with each other.

The problem is how to model this realistically. I think that BRP covers the the protection against

missiles well and the use as a secondary weapon at least somewhat, but not really the co-ope-

ration of fighters and the shield wall.

I've been reading thru the brp rules and I'm not quite sure why using a shield is worthwhile.

Think of those pesky archers and crossbowmen. A halberd is a very nice weapon, but not

really a good protection against arrows and crossbow bolts. There are situations where a

shield comes handy, for example when trying to get close to an enemy position that is de-

fended by archers, like a castle or something similar.

From The Green:

"THE GREEN is copyright © 2009 as a whole by Chaosium Inc. The text is copyright © 2009 by

Scott Heiney, all rights reserved."

... whatever that does mean.

Thank you.

When trying to use the link to Alephtar Games on the Links page I am asked for a keyword

and then get an Access Denied message.

I know that Alephtar Games is working on its website, but this seems strange - or did I miss

something ?

Edit.:

The problem has disappeared now.

As a player, and GM, I have never seen anyone do their own charactersheets other than for cons.

Well, since Chaosium does not publish character sheets in German, and since I insist that I am

responsible for the setting only while the players are responsible for their characters, they had

no choice but to design their own character sheets.

Well, since the players are the ones who have to like their character sheets and to work with

them, I usually leave it to the players to design whatever they want. I only give them the ne-

cessary informations about the campaign, and they usually come up with something nice crea-

ted with, for example, Open Office and Paint Net.

You could test it with RPG.net's favorite system: Exalted Spirit of the Savage, Hollow Diaspora!

I will definitely not use anything with "Savage" in it ...

Meanwhile I have re-written the setting for the late 1920s / early 1930s, and it really looks

much more interesting and playable now - without modern technology and modern politics

the situation in the remote Himalaya region seems a lot more challenging.

While waiting for Tian Xia, I will make a little experiment. Since the setting is currently writ-

ten in a "generic" way, without any game stats, and since it is now right in the middle of the

Pulp Era, I will try to use it for a short campaign with the Hollow Earth Expedition RPG, a Pulp

Genre game that has been recommended to me.

The activities of the characters of this short campaign could then become a part of the back-

ground events of the BRP campaign started once Tian Xia has been published, and I hope that

they will also allow me to test and improve the setting before the start of the BRP campaign.

Frankly -- just wait until Tiān Xià is published!

Rest assured I am eagerly waiting for it.

Nominally the rulebook covers Imperial China until 1911, but I guess you can stretch it to cover the 1920s.

There should be no problem, the setting does hardly change much between 1911 and 1920 (or

even 1940). While some new technologies are invented and introduced in the "West", it takes

some time before they appear in British India, and even longer before they make it to a remote

mountain kingdom in the Himalaya.

The one major difference I see are airplanes, there may well be something like a DH-4 on an

airfield near Bhonta's capital to make travelling to and from India easier for the British political

agent or members of the royal family of Bhonta, perhaps even for a first aerial photographic

survey of the small nation (a nice way to discover an adventure location).

Otherwise the technology, and therefore the culture and the skills and all that, seem unlikely to

be significantly different from those of several decades before.

I had put the setting aside for a while, and when I took a close look at it yesterday, it turned

out to be the most boring setting I have written so far - an epic fail.

Meanwhile I have decided to rewrite almost all of it, and to move it from the present to either

the classical Cthulhu era or the Pulp era, and to put the focus on the early contacts between

the technological, "modern" Western culture and the late medieval "religious" culture of the

Bhoti, the inhabitants of the remote mountain kingdom that has now been renamed as Bhonta.

With an isolationist Tibet, an ongoing civil war and a Japanese invasion in China, uprisings in

India and the Great Powers preparing for war in East Asia the history of the region and the po-

tential adventure hooks look a lot more promising than in a modern setting, and the limited in-

formations about the region and the reduced "power" of the available technology could also

make it more interesting.

A somewhat unexpected problem is the game system. I am not yet sure what exactly the prob-

lem is, but the Call of Cthulhu system's skills somehow do not fit the "feeling" of the intended

campaign, and my attempts to make BRP do what I imagine also do not look well.

I suspect the difficulties are caused by the cultural and technological differences between the

"Westerners" and the Bhoti, which would almost require different skill sets and subsystems for

the two cultures, or otherwise create a kind of "skill creep" with a frighteningly long list of dif-

ferent skills from both cultures.

While tinkering with this I have also made a sketch for a new map of Bhonta, one that looks a

bit more interesting (well, at least to me):

I think we've established that there are no 'official' terms to classify a genre. Some things only exist because most people define them that way, and that appears to be the case for genres. This means that a 'genre' is whatever most people agree it is.

I think this is how language works.

Take the "genre Bird" and ask people what it means to them. Over here the majority describe

a creature that looks suspiciously like a sparrow. If you want them to think of something more

heroic, like a falcon or eagle, you have to use the "sub-genre Bird of Prey".

The reason for the confusion is because most people don't know the terms used to define/classify a genre. They see spaceships and say "sci-fi". They see someone running around with a sword and say "fantasy". Many terms, such as Horror and Terror are used interchangeably when they actually have different meanings.

I think this article could be quite interesting, it attempts to define the borders between the va-

rious science fiction sub-genres:

http://www.kheper.net/topics/scifi/grading.html

No thats not my recollection of it.

We may well mean different debates, the one I was thinking of may well have been a "local"

one that happened here in Germany only.

The most prominent contributors probably were Alpers, Fuchs and Hahn:

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_M._Hahn

The leading academic among them was Werner Fuchs, who is not mentioned in the English

Wikipedia.

Postage costs depend on the retailer that sells the books. I ship from Italy and Cubicle ships from the UK.

Thank you, this is very good news.

Well rust you sort of concede that at the very most only a minority of academia are interested in the genre issue and I'm afraid your example to support that of the Heinlein debate is quite flawed, since it had nothing do with genre but was part of a broader debate about theme and ideology.

I think it was a "genre debate", because the people involved in it attempted to categorize scien-

ce fiction into distinct genres (e.g. "Imperialist SF" versus "Progressive SF" and thelike). These

genres were based upon ideological / political considerations, not on those of scientific accura-

cy (like "Hard SF" and "Soft SF"), but in my view they still were attempts to define genres.

However, this was of course more or less a fringe debate, and it only became somewhat well

known over here because it was the only theoretical debate about science fiction at this time at

all. Science Fiction otherwise was still considered as "bad literature", and established academic

figures would have seriously endangered their careers by writing about it.

I will be marketing them directly from our new web site as soon as it is up (next weekend I think), and I will offer bundles of physical books and PDF.

Does this mean physical versions of Alephtar Games books without having to pay the high US

postage ?

How do I express a common (possibly known by others) combination of elements using only one or two words (point of reference)?

This is only possible if you and the other person(s) have agreed upon exactly the same terminology,

and then it does not matter much whether you use an agreed upon genre name ("hard sf") or any

other word ("brrblmuth") to get the idea across.

3. Quite the contrary, many authors intentionally try to write something fresh and original that does not fit into any established category, forcing the "serious analysts" to return to the drawing board and attempt to come up with a new system of genres. They don’t care about the categories.

Yes and no. The academic mainstream seems quite uninterested, but there are academics who

take part in the "genre game", although mostly for somewhat surprising reasons and along ra-

ther different lines than our discussion.

An example is a debate about "militaristic / fascist" versus "progressive" science fiction that did

start with arguments about Heinlein's "Starship Troopers", went on for quite a while and was

the base for quite a number of thesis papers. Other examples would be the debates about "de-

mocratic" versus "authoritarian" science fiction or "feminist" science fiction.

So some academics also tend to categorize by content, but their categories follow very much

different patterns or "conflict lines".

If I run a "sci-fi" game session and ask people to play in it (or recommend a book), what type of language or expression do we use to communicate the type of game play and focus?

How do people know if the game session with be of the type of sci-fi they expect?

There are probably many ways to handle this. My way is to give a short description of the story

or setting and to mention what it does or does not include, for example whether there are fas-

ter than light drives, antigravity, human-like aliens ("furries"), psionic powers, and so on.