rust

Thank you very much for the nice picture, I really like it.

It is not exactly a scene on Enki II as it is "today", but it could very well

be a scene from a later point in time, when the terraforming program has

made the atmosphere breathable and some large and potentially dange-

rous animals have been introduced.

The characters will soon have the rather questionable pleasure to trans-

port a couple of yaks from Terra to Enki II for the research station of the

colony, where the scientists want to find out whether yaks would make

suitable animals for the biosphere of Enki II.

I am already smiling at the thought of characters without any animal hand-

ling experience, a narrow cargo hold of a small starship, and a very angry

yak bull ... >:->

The team from your picture could well be searching for an escaped herd of

yaks, a herd led by such an angry yak bull.

You'll want to plant some trees ...

Yep, this will be "Step 2".

"Step 1" will be a method I have seen in Switzerland, but which I find hard

to describe in English: The slope is terraced and covered with metal nets

(some kind of plastic in my setting, I think) anchored to the rock, and the

terraces are stabilized with "walls" made of "metal cages" filled with rocks.

The earthbag technique sounds perfect if you're building above ground ...

Thank you for a good idea.

I am thinking of a kind of pre-fabricated shelter, like it is used in many SF

RPGs, which is then covered with the earthbag method to provide insula-

tion against the cold, as Enki II still has a very cold climate.

Litter away!

Well, in this case ...

Here is an example of how settlements are designed in my Enki II setting.

The first picture is one of the NASA pictures of Mars that I use for Enki II,

it shows a potential settlement site on the rim of a valley, which will con-

tain a small river once the terraforming program has succeeded to melt so-

me of the polar ice cap.

The second picture is an attempt to show how the future Trelawney City

will fit into the landscape, with the main part of the city built along the

cliff with an architecture somewhat like an Anasazi Pueblo or a Greek Am-

phitheatre, rising in steps.

The third picture is a kind of city map, showing Trelawney City as it will

probably look like a couple of years after the construction has been com-

pleted.

The "real" city will be domed, but I did not include the dome on the pictures,

partly because I did not know how to draw it, and partly because it would

have made the pictures less comprehensible (I think).

Do you think an Ally or Contact would be built equivalent to a Character, and the PC in question spends experience checks based on events in the game to increase that ally's Percentile?

The Allies and Contacts in our campaign are indeed characters in their own

right, although I only write down the informations needed to play them as my

NPCs (mainly their background and motivations, and what kind of information

etc. they can provide to the character), and add additional informations only

as necessary.

We currently treat the Ally or Contact percentile as a modifier for social skills

like Diplomacy or Persuade to increase the character's chance of success in

using those skills with the Ally or Contact, with the restriction that a Contact

will not take a personal risk to help a character, while an Ally may be willing

to do so.

At the moment we do not use experience checks for these percentiles, they

rise and fall according to the GMs (= my) perception of the NPC's most likely

reaction to the actions of the character and the treatment by the character.

In my opinion this is easier to handle, because more than a few of the NPCs

have motivations unknown to the characters, and try to use the characters

for their own purposes, too.

An experience check by the players could give away such hidden motives by

making the success of a check suspiciously easy or difficult, I think.

While we do not use the typical "physical" D&D feats, we are experimenting

with a number of "social" advantages in our system.

One example is the Influence system from the Babylon 5 RPG, which enables

characters to gain favours or resources from groups or organizations they

have Influence in, in our campaign depending on the strength of the Influen-

ce, the group the character has the Influence in, and the distance from his

home world.

So a trader from Enki II with a good reputation and good contacts can quite

easily get support from traders on nearby Kinsun, but less so on distant Ter-

ra. A famous scientist from Enki II might easily convince fellow scientists on

far away Shoona to do him a favour, but the bureaucrats on neighbouring

Horpa would be likely to ignore his request.

Influence is based upon a character's initial Status on his homeworld, and ad-

ditional Influence points (each worth 5 %) are awarded (or subtracted) de-

pending on the character's actions during the campaign.

Other examples we experiment with are Allies, Contacts, Patrons and thelike,

in the way they are used in, for example, the GURPS system.

Those maps of yours are good, too. They just need to be a bit bigger.

Thank you.

The original ones are much bigger, but I downsized the copies for the upload,

because I did not want to litter up the forum.

Thank you very much for the links.

The Earthbag Construction is a very interesting idea for the construction

of most of the terraforming outposts and other temporary outposts on

Enki II, I think.

A short while ago my colonists have begun to use habitat modules for the

set up of "base camps" for the construction of settlements.

Dave Chase has designed a couple of most useful modules for the Traveller

RPG, and they are almost perfect for my campaign's purposes:

SFRPG Art Gallery - Modules for Modular Cutter

Once the "base camp" for the workers and their robots and machines has

been established, the engineers begin to build either an underground habi-

tat, like Circle Hills below, or a domed habitat, like Gerardi City below.

Unfortunately my drawing skill is very limited, but I think it is possible to

get the idea:

Examining the Beasts of Fantasy. 3rd Revised Edition

Thank you very much !

I have been looking for some good ideas to make some of the alien species

of my setting a bit "more alien", and this is full of good ideas. :thumb:

The best supplement of that kind that I know is the "Saxons !" supplement

for the Pendragon roleplaying game:

DriveThruRPG.com - White Wolf - Saxons!

It is unfortunate that BRP hasn't been supported as well as it might. Rven though the BRP rules are very good, it will die as a system unless it has support and new supplements.

Unfortunately this is already beginning to happen. There was quite some in-

terest in the new BRP over here when it was published, but this interest is

already fading away because the system is not very well supported.

Maybe I'm missing something, but if the character is not lying nor is he concealing something, why is an Insight role even necessary?

I would not consider it necessary, but since the player character normally

does not know whether the other character is lying or concealing something,

an Insight roll could help him to discover that.

Example: When a trader tells the character that a horse is so cheap because

black is considered an unlucky colour in this region, an Insight roll could help

the character to find out whether this is true - or whether the low price may

have other reasons (but not which reasons).

See, it's possible to be 'hard to read' without lying or concealing anything.

Frankly, I very much doubt this.

It is a part of my real life job to "read" people, and unless the patient in

question willfully suppresses his body language, this is really not difficult

for someone with the right training and experience (= Insight skill).

According to the rules, "willful deceit" (which in my opinion would include a

"poker face") would force the character using Insight to make an opposed

Insight check against the target's relevant skill, with Fast Talk and Etiquet-

te (good for diplomats, I think) provided as examples.

This seems a good approach to me, I have no problems at all with it.

A very nice fanzine. :thumb:

I especially liked the lifepath character generation article.

Welcome to the forum !

Each of the BRP-based games has its "specialties" to adapt the basic BRP

rules to the setting, for example the simplified d20-system (the biggest dif-

ference of all the games, I think) and the personality traits of Pendragon or

the sanity system of Call of Cthulhu, but the basics remain the same, and it

is very easy to convert from one BRP-based game to another.

So, yes, you could put Elric against Mi-Go with almost no problems. The on-

ly ones I see at the moment are Elric's magic and the Mi-Gos' ability to cau-

se a sanity loss.

I would treat the character as Stunned until he made a successful Stamina

roll.

genetically engineered plant-life, then?

Yep, lots of it, although the biggest species currently are just humble

lichens ...

The look like Confederate soldiers. 'Fighting for the right to own slaves in a galaxy far, far away'.

They will have to fight real hard, because there is no slavery in my setting. >:->

That's an interesting way of doing it.

I very much like the Mongoose Traveller character generation with its

careers and events, especially the additional careers from Spica Publi-

shing's supplement Career Book 1 (they fit my setting almost perfect-

ly), but I very much prefer BRP rules for the actual roleplaying.

I'll use these in an Appendix, if that's OK with you.

Yes, of course.

By the way, there are BRP stats for a SMG in Vile's conversion of the

weapons from Traveller's Striker rules here in the download section,

you would only have to copy them.

Federation Patrol/Rangers in trouble.

Yep, these ones are in real trouble. :shocked:

Thank you for the link !

Have you got anything in your BRP-Traveller system that could improve or add to the RQ-SciFi SRD?

Unfortunately not.

In my system I use the character generation system of Mongoose Traveller

and then convert the characters into a BRP version tailored to my setting.

The only potentially interesting parts could be the skill level conversion ta-

ble and the attribute conversion table, both somewhat "streamlined" to fit

my setting:

The skill levels:

Skill level 0 = 40 %

Skill level 1 = 60 %

Skill level 2 = 70 %

Skill level 3 = 80 %

Skill level 4 = 90 %

The attributes:

Trav 02 = BRP 03

Trav 03 = BRP 04

Trav 04 = BRP 06

Trav 05 = BRP 08

Trav 06 = BRP 10

Trav 07 = BRP 11

Trav 08 = BRP 13

Trav 09 = BRP 15

Trav 10 = BRP 16

Trav 11 = BRP 17

Trav 12 = BRP 18

For the Traveller part of the character generation I also use a modification

of these pre-enlistment options found in another forum:

SFRPG • View topic - Missing a Traveller University

There are also a couple of house rules, for example a modification of the

research rules from the Ringworld RPG, but all this is in German.

I am sorry, but I am afraid I have nothing of value to offer.

It really is an excellent document, and I use it quite often to expand and

improve my own BRP-Traveller crossover system. :thumb:

By the way: Soltakss, would it by possible to post an announcement here

in this thread whenever you have created a new version - I almost missed

the step from version 0.4 to version 0.5 ? - Thank you !

I love think of these things (as you must too), most of the fascination with game mastering is inventing stuff (or in my case using historical stuff in imaginative ways).

I wholeheartedly agree. While I am currently more into Science Fiction, I re-

member with pleasure my historical settings.

I am sure my players won't even find out most of the stuff I come up with, but that's ok. And it's there in case I need it.

A famous author once remarked that his readers would never see 90 % of the

material he had researched for his books, but that these invisible 90 % deter-

mined the quality of those books.

In any case: Good luck with your project ! :thumb:

I guess it would useful to make a distinction between a wise woman/man, and a Witch at this point? Wise women would be your village healer type of persons (but sometimes misthought as witches by the ignorant and narrow-minded), and proper Witches/Warlocks would the ones who have made a pact with the Devil (Satan, Dark Man, whatever), and/or practice dark and blasphemous sorceries?

In my opinion, this would be a very good idea, and closer to historical truth

than treating all practitioners of "folk magic" as somehow allied with Evil.

In fact, I have no doubt that a majority of the wise women / village healers

considered themselves good Christians (until told otherwise by the Church),

and would have been shocked by any accusation to have anything to do

with Satanism.

As for the Renaissance, I think we might have a little "terminology problem".

Over here, the early part of the movement that led to the Renaissance, with

its roots in Medieval times, is usually called Humanism, while the later part,

well after the Medieval Age, is called Renaissance.

So, it may well be that we mean exactly the same phenomenon, but use

different words for it.

I haven't quite figured out yet what I want to do with the so-called Witches. Are they in league with Satan, or are they more of the white magic shaman types?

In my opinion they would be more "grey": Practitioners of old Pagan know-

ledge, but without the true philosophical / religious background, doing what

works well without knowing exactly why and how it works.

To make them Satanic would paint most of the common folk superstitions

and thelike rather "black" and could give the campaign a "dark" streak.

As far as I can judge it (which is not very far), true Satanists were very ra-

re, and more likely to come from the middle and upper class, like for exam-

ple the (in)famous Gilles de Rais:

Gilles de Rais - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

But the I guess at the same time the seeds of scientific and free thinking were already sown in the form of Universities? And in addition, contact with other cultures, trading, the exchange of knowledge or even the Crusades, would broaden the Western people's world view, and eventually lead to Renaissance?

In my opinion, the most important long-term results of the Crusades were

the translations of important Arabic scientific works, often Arabic transla-

tions of important Greek works, which completely changed the European cor-

pus of scientific knowledge.

In fact, Medieval European scholarship was almost entirely based upon those

translations, most of them done by Jewish scholars in Spain.

The Renaissance probably is the result of the fall of Byzantium, centuries

later, which forced many scholars from there to flee to European countries,

bringing their knowledge (and often their most valuable books) with them.