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In my view, that is the point. For example, I am currently using BRP to design a hard science fiction setting, which would have been quite difficult with the original Runequest rules. And if you take a look at the various monographs that have been published for BRP since 2008, you will see that almost every possible genre is present there, which would also have been difficult with the old Runequest rules. For me, BRP is a "toolbox" system that can be used for almost any genre and for most styles of roleplaying.

Unless I made some mistake, the most pretty option now looks like this:

This would be most welcome. A while ago I recommended some monographs to someone, and meanwhile he has attempted to contact Chaosium about the ship- ment charges four times without any reply.

Yep, I agree - if it otherwise makes sense for the character in question (= he has a reason to have that skill and enough other opportunities to use it during the game), Knowledge (Mi- litary Hardware) would be a good choice.

I think to throw the grenade where one wants it to land is purely a matter of physical skill, and therefore of the Throw skill. The other questions, what the grenade does, the kind of fuse and timer or the best placement, are matters of general or specialized knowledge, for which I would use either a Know roll for the more common knowledge (e.g. to distinguish a fragmentation grenade from a tear gas grenade) or the De- molition skill for specialized knowledge (e.g. to decide where to place the grenade for maximum effect).

Thank you very much, I like the idea. :thumb:

You would not treat a turtle badly, I hope ... >:->

Thank you all very much for your ideas. I agree that most comparatively simple consumer goods do not require much familiarity to use them. However, I was thinking of the more "professional" stuff, in the case of my setting for example something like a new type of artificial gill or diving hardsuit, or a new kind of weapon ( a gauss harpoon is under development ...). A time factor or, in the case of weapons, an "ammunition used" factor could be a possibility. On the other hand, I have seen people attempt to get some- thing to work, or to fire guns on the shooting range, for hours on end with- out any kind of success, or hit. As for training, this is a good idea. At least I could give the characters a num- ber of opportunities to use the device and score a success in non-dangerous situations. Thank you again.

Thank you very much.

During our next campaign I intend to introduce a number of new technologies and pieces of equipment into the setting, in order to give it a little more colour and the "feel" of a continually changing and developing world. The player characters will of course be unfamiliar with the newly available gad- gets, and I am looking for a simple rule to make this unfamiliarity felt during the game. Since I did not find anything in the BRP core rules, I think I will make the use of an unfamiliar device one step more difficult than usual (e.g. from Automatic to Easy or from Average to Difficult) until the characters has used the device suc- cessfully at least once. Does this make sense, or do you see a problem with this ? Thank you.

Since Varun's culture is based on the Indian culture, which is rumoured to be a very status conscious culture, status and the influence it gives will be important elements of the setting. A player character will start with an average Status of 40 %, but this value can get higher for someone with an advanced education (engineer, scientist) or a position of authority (security officer). The maximum beginning value will probably be 65 %. Status gives influence. Within the Varun colony, the normal Status value will be used for this purpose, but outside of the colony the value will be reduced, depen- ding both on the distance from Varun and the kind of people the character tries to influence. Within the Demidov Cluster, the value will be reduced by 20 %, and in the Far Ava- lon Region by 50 %. If the character attempts to influence someone from a diffe- rent field (e.g. a scientist attempting to influence a politician), the value will be redu- ced by another 20 %. So, a Varunian marine biologist with a Status of 65 % who attempts to influence a CDA bureaucrat on Lubeck Station in the Far Avalon region has his Status value re- duced by 50 % because of the distance and by another 20 % because the bureau- crat is a non-scientist. With the resulting Status of -5 %, the bureaucrat will obviously not be impressed by that strange egghead from some unknown remote colony ... Status can be gained and lost during play. Since the Varunians respect their elders, increasing age gives a Status bonus. The actions and successes or failures of the player characters can increase or reduce their Status value, depending on the im- portance and consequences of their activities for the colony's community. While increases through age affect all uses of the Status, increases through success are more specific, they can affect only the character's status in certain regions (the merchant who is well known and respected on Poselok) or with a certain group of people (the starship captain who rescued a CDA official from certain death and now is the CDA's local hero).

In this case I would prefer MMMMM, the Miraculous Monstrous Marsh Mellows Man ...

I used something very much like this in an earlier setting, inspired by the book and movie Solaris, an "intelligent primordial soup" with telepathic abilities.

He has to trust them not to make and distribute copies anyway ...

Rod, you could use You Send It, the free trial version, and upload the file there. Once people have confirmed that they have bought the print version or the PDF, you could send them an e-mail with the download link, and they could download it whenever it suits them (within 14 days after you uploaded it, that is), which would take the burden away from your server.

Not really Aliens ... Having used various kinds of more or less "furry" aliens in my previous settings, I think I will design the Varun setting without any real aliens at all. Instead of true aliens, the as yet undiscovered neighbours of the Varun colo- nists could be humans, the descendants of a colonization attempt that went wrong because of a hyperdrive failure and stranded the colonists far from their planned destination - a "lost colony". However, while "lost colonies" usually are described as "neo-barbarian", this one could have developed in the opposite direction, "forewards" instead of "back- wards", and could now have a technology far superior to that of the worlds of the known space. I am not yet sure whether I will really use this idea, but if I do so I will probably use the Darrians of the Traveller universe and the Minbari of the Babylon 5 uni- verse as the base of my design of the "human aliens" society and culture.

Yep, I used it to design the various basic creature types of my setting, which I then used to design and stat the different species of each type. For example, the basic shape of all "Type A" creatures (warm blooded, radially sym- metric, six limbs, and so on) was designed with Flynn's Guide to Alien Creation. Then I worked out a "family tree" of these "Type A" species, assigned some special feature to the members of each "branch" of that family tree, and finally used the design system Frogspawner uploaded to the forum's download section to decide upon the BRP stats of each species. The result looks like this, with one "branch" still left "missing", just in case that I will have a good idea I want to introduce later during the campaign as a new group of species to be discovered by the characters:

One of my former patients, a historian, wrote a book about the "Umkaufbücher" (= accounting books, I think) of merchants from Augsburg who traded with Italy and the Netherlands. It must have been a mindboggling task to handle all the various currencies invol- ved in a simple purchase of goods in Florence, its transport across a landscape of tiny semi-sovereign states with different currencies (= same names, but dif- ferent values, depending on the silver or gold content on the coins they minted), tolls and taxes, and finally its sale in Antwerp. I once attempted to design a "realistic" trade system that simulated this kind of trade, but gave it up very soon - even players very interested in playing a mer- chant character and willing to do some accounting would have run away screa- ming, probably never to return to our gaming table (and also not to sanity).

Yep, for example the Holy Roman Empire did not use gold coins for about the first 500 years of its existence, the standard currency was the silver Pfennig. There were simply too few goods with a value high enough to justify the use of gold coins. This changed only in the High Middle Ages, when the merchants of Florence and others began to build their "trade empires" that handled a sufficient vo- lume of goods to make payments with gold coins reasonable. But even then the average citizen did rarely see a gold coin and would have found it a night- mare to try to spend it, because hardly anyone in town would have been able to change it. Values changed a lot over time, but as a very rough estimate a tiny gold coin with a weight of about 3.6 gram was the equivalent of two monthly incomes of a normal labourer ...

My personal setting and campaign design nemesis are background events, the unfolding history of the setting that influences the "feeling" of the cam- paign and the options for the player characters' activities. Our campaigns usually consist of up to three adventures during each game time year, with each adventure dealing with some important event in the setting's ongoing history, and much off time to allow the player characters to work on their jobs (e.g. research projects), found and raise families, im- prove their skills, and all that. This means that our campaigns tend to cover a lot of time, our record was more than 120 game time years, and as the referee it is my job to come up with the major background events during that time: Wars, epidemics, na- tural desasters, inventions, megacorps takeovers ... While designing all this tended to be a chore, I have now discovered that it can also be fun, by using Runequest Empires and Runequest Guilds, Fac- tions and Cults. These books contain a rather generic system that treats states and orga- nisations much like characters, with characteristics and skills, and provides rules for their interactions - a system that creates a background history as the result of a "background metagame". Meanwhile I have created the stats for the Varun Colony and its most impor- tant organisations (Jain Alliance, New Society, Aquafarmers' Cooperative, Miners' Union ...), and the stats alone already provide a lot of ideas for fu- ture conflicts, alliances and so on that may have consequences for the cha- racters.

Thank you, another good idea.

Indeed. Unless one is willing to invest some time and effort to create a plausible economy for the setting, the simple method proposed by Sdavies2720 is the best approach, because a more complex trade system could well damage the setting. For a medieval or fantasy setting, there are a number of supplements that help to create a plausible economy, for example this one: http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=19294&it=1&filters=0_0_40050_0 (- but read the reviews, not everyone likes that style)

Yes, I think I see your point, and I agree. In my view the Mishap Tables should only include very general notes on possibilities of what could happen, to serve as an inspiration that allows me to tailor the result to the specific situation, for example the specific mission the character is on. The only main difference is that I intend to make a fumble situation dependent on the skill roll of the "buddy" diver, because I want to force the characters to avoid their usual "I can go it alone" stunts and to encourage teamwork.

Thank you, a good idea - it could become the main entry of the Diving Mishap Table. If I use a bell curve like 2 D6 for the table and make it entry number 7, it would be the "standard problem" caused by a failure, with other and more serious problems somewhat less likely.

Ah, you know, mathematics and me was never a love affair ... But you are obviously right, so the sentence about having to end the dive after a failed skill roll will be deleted.