rust

You could keep it as the forum's area for longer reviews, and perhaps provide links from there to the discussions in the products threads ?

As far a I know, the forum's review section went down with the upgrade and has not yet been transferred to the new forum, Triff is still working on this.

It seems we had somewhat similar "roleplaying careers", with the main differences being that Traveller was my main rival for BRP games, and that I never went after those goth girls ...

So do I, it is one of the best supplements I have ever seen. We once used its excellent background informations for a kind of "Cadfael Campaign", located on the Severn River during the Anarchy.

Good, and if there should be any language problems, you know where to find me.

This is really a strange difference. :confused: However, it is not the only one, there also seems to be a difference in the percentage of female roleplaying gamers. On Fundus Ludi about 10 % to 20 % of the active members are female, and from what I have seen the percentage is similar at the gaming tables over here (lower where D&D is played, much higher where Vampire is played ...), while it seems somewhat rare to meet a female roleplaying gamer on a forum that is based in the UK or USA.

Unfortunately I have found no reliable data at all about the average age of roleplaying gamers in the UK and the USA. There seem to be few studies of that kind, or I did not understand how to search for them. Over here the majority of those gamers who are active on the various fo- rums seems to be between 20 and 30 years old. Fundus Ludi has more than 1,400 members, and as far as I know I may well be the oldest one (:eek:).

It seems that an account with Amazon.de would be the better solution in the long run, since it would enable you to order things in the future without any more need for help. So, what can I do to help you to get that account ? And once you have the account, this page should enable you to order from Amazon.de without problems: http://www.amazon.de/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&nodeId=505532

Yep, the SPQR website has been updated for the last time in 2004, and it seems that the project is rather dead.

I have been reading such dark predictions for most of thirty years now, and I have never found any evidence that they have any tendency to come true. For example, here are the results of a still ongoing poll over on Fundus Ludi, where I asked the users when they did start with roleplaying games: 1974 – 1980: 2 1981 – 1985: 6 1986 – 1990: 5 1991 – 1995: 8 1996 – 2000: 13 2001 – 2005: 7 2006 – 2010: 5 Of the 46 people who answered until now, 25 started after 1995, and 5 started with- in the last 5 years. The results for a "dying" hobby would look much different than this.

At the beginning of the campaign, almost all of the colonists - including the player characters - will be employees of the colony council. This suits me well, because as the referee I can send the characters on missions that will enable them to "learn the ropes" of the setting. However, I want the characters to become "freelancers" soon, because other- wise the "sandbox" idea of the setting could not work, I would have to provide adventures and the players would not really be free to decide what their cha- racters are going to do. Therefore I need some incentives to encourage the player characters to become independents. One incentive are the colony shares. Once the characters give up their steady jobs with the colony council, they will still have the benefits of the colony shares: Free room and board, free use of the infrastructure, free medical care. They will only lose the monthly income of 2,000 Credits and will have to find another way to pay for everything beyond their basic needs with their services or products. Another incentive is that every new freelancer or newly founded company on Varun will not have to pay any taxes during the first five years of their existence, and there are a few more similar incentives built into the game. ------------------------------------------------------------ By the way, as mentioned elsewhere, I plan to use Runequest Empires and Runequest Guilds, Factions and Cults for the "background metagame" to make it easier for me to develop the background's ongoing history. To connect my setting's economy with the Runequest system, I had to convert the set- ting's Credits into the WTH Points of the Runequest system. This was easy enough, the only problem was that the Varun colony (played with Runequest Empires) and the orga- nizations within the colony (political groups, unions, etc., played with Runequest Guilds, Factions & Cults) use different "currencies: A WTH Point on the colony level is the equi- valent of 100,000 Credits, a WTH Point on the level of an organization is the equivalent of 5,000 Credits.

Over here RQ 3 is by far the best known version of Runequest, simply because it is the only one that was translated into German.

The economy, once more ... BRP does not really help with the design of a plausible economy for my setting, so I used the ideas from Call of Cthulhu for this. I started with the average wage on the planet Shiva, where the colonists of Varun come from, and decided that it is 3,000 Credits per month, or 36,000 credits per year. According to Call of Cthulhu, the average property of a character would be five times of his yearly income, which would make it 180,000 Credits - a lot of money, far more than I want a character to start with. Therefore I decided that 150,000 Credis of this are his colony share, used to estab- lish the colony and to buy its infrastructure, machines, vehicles, robots and all that. In return for this colony share, each colonist gets board, food, medical care and the use of the colony's basic infrastructure for free, so I do not have to care for these costs during the campaign. Another 20,000 Credits are used to buy the basic outfit of the colonist (clothing, hand computer, communicator, tools, first aid kit, identicard and all this) and to fi- nance his passage from Shiva to Varun. This leaves the average character with 10,000 Credits to spare, for example to buy what he needs for his profession, and as a financial reserve. Calculating the profit from the crystal exports from Varun to Poselok and the running costs of the colony, the remaining surplus is sufficient to pay each colonist a monthly wage of 2,000 Credits, which he can use to pay for everything beyond the basics provided through his colony share. This is not bad, his standard of living is approximately as it was when he lived back on Shiva, with 3,000 Credits per month, but having to pay for everything. The 2,000 Credits per month give an average hourly wage of 12,50 Credits for each of the 160 work hours per month. People without a steady job have to demand more per hour to cover the hours when they have no customers, so I decided that the average price of services will be some- where between 25 and 50 Credits per hour - a labourer will ask for a little less, an ex- pert for a lot more. Since Varun is a much too small economy to have its own price structure, the prices of equipment do not have to be in a direct relation with the income - almost all goods are imported, with high transport costs, and therefore can be much more expensive than one would expect because of the wages of the Varunians. This suits me well, because I can set the prices of all kinds of equipment arbitrarily, pro- vided the prices have a plausible relation to each other. In other words, I can use the equipment prices from GURPS and Traveller with slight modifications. Yep, that is it - I hope that it works.

I would not compensate the character for his lack of wealth, because the characters's player did not have to "pay" for the wealth level in any way, like he had to "pay" for the skills with skill points. The wealth level is a roleplaying aid, not a part of the game mechanics, and it is only a suggestion, nothing hard and fast - history has seen lots of impoverished nobles, not only wealthy ones. If you want a system for increasing or decreasing the wealth level, you could start with the connection between wealth level and status and the table on page 79, I think.

What you have there is Mongoose Runequest I, the not exactly recommended First Edition. The much better Second Edition has been published just a few weeks ago, the core book looks like this: http://www.mongoosepublishing.com/home/detail.php?qsID=1755&qsSeries=39 If at all possible without any financial loss or serious other problem, try to get rid of the First Edition and to get the Second Edition instead.

Happy Birthday, have a good time - and thank you for this forum.

Well, perhaps it was bad wording. What I did mean is that no IP holder can prevent the use of the creatures, or can claim a copyright infringement after the use of the creatures, or can with- draw the license for their use, provided the person or corporation using the creatures adheres to the rather simple conditions of the OGL. I just thought that latter part was obvious.

I do not know The Abbey, I only asked someone who does. He said that it is a sourcebook, and that most of it is generic background information without much of the Mythos - whatever that might mean.

Wikipedia lists the Broo as Gloranthian creatures, together with Aldryami and Mostali, so they are probably original Runequest creatures. If Broo do exist in the White Bear & Red Moon board game (which I do not know), they are doubtless original Runequest creatures, because there was not much else published earlier.

Since the Mongoose Runequest SRD (see Downloads) is under an Open Gaming License, all the creatures included in its bestiary should be fair game. Only creatures added to this with the new Runequest II could be problematic.

It seems the only somewhat reliable speed measurements of animals are those of fleeing animals, which run at their maximum individual speed to escape some dan- ger - otherwise you can never be certain that the animal really runs as fast as it can, even if it is hunting or attacking. This makes it difficult to get any useful speed measurements for many predators as well as many of the big herbivores, simply because they rarely have to run for their lives - there is not much that could threaten an elephant, a tiger or an orca enough to make them flee in panic.

I am beginning to doubt this, because the first 10 answers to the poll over on Fundus Ludi seem to show a different trend: 1974 – 1980: 2 1981 – 1985: 2 1986 – 1990: 0 1991 – 1995: 3 1996 – 2000: 2 2001 – 2005: 1 2006 – 2010: 0 Edit.: Yep, the trend continues and becomes more solid. The majority of the roleplaying gamers on Fundus Ludi began playing when BRP was unavailable as a system, so there are almost no BRP players among them (in contrast to players of BRP "clo- nes" like CoC), but there is no sign of a general "aging" of the community. 1974 – 1980: 2 1981 – 1985: 4 1986 – 1990: 3 1991 – 1995: 8 1996 – 2000: 7 2001 – 2005: 3 2006 – 2010: 0

I have now posted the same poll ^^ asking for the year people began to play roleplaying games over on my German "home forum" Fundus Ludi, I think the results could be interesting.

Thank you very much. There seem to be various versions, and they could indeed well become something like the "private cars" of Varun: http://www.deepflight.com/

Well, actually ... I am only sophisticated, I am not old. True, I was born when Sputnik was started, but this just means more time to become more sophisticated, it has nothing at all to do with age. :cool: