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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.

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 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.

I think alchemism had a kind of dual nature, on the one hand the religious background you mentioned, but on the other hand also very non-religious proto-scientific background. Many of the Arabic alchemists and at least some of the European ones (e.g. Albertus Magnus, a saint ) had a quite scientific, experimental approach to alchemism - they were far more scholars than mystics, I think. I am not sure what this could mean for your setting, except that scholars with sorcery skills might become a profession, perhaps also a "second career" for certain religious figures (like Albertus). Somehow I have to think of "The Name of the Rose" (I hope this was the English title) and the Franciscan monk played by Sean Connery ...

If you want to introduce Gnosis and Christian "heresies" based on Gnosis into your setting, I would recommend to use Manichaeism as the background: Manichaeism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I think it does make sense. For example, both the Latin Church of Rome and the Orthodox Church of the Byzantine Empire would basically be on the same side, with the same basic (Christian) allegiance, but in fact they were bitter enemies most of the time, and the consequences of an allegiance "to Rome" could therefore be rather different from the consequences of an allegiance "to Byzantium" for a player (or non-player) character - for example during the time when the crusaders had conquered Byzantium. Moreover, more than two dualistic "Good - Bad" allegiances would also give you an opportunity to introduce interesting "shades of grey" when it comes to the relations between crusaders and muslims, I think. For example, the Templars often allied with muslim rulers, and the muslims had their own various allegiances (Sunna, Shia, etc.) that prevented them from being a unified power and that could give them more "colour" than just one ("bad") "Islamic allegiance".

Thank you very much for the links.

Just remember that Knight is a title, not a profession. While all knights usually are considered (minor) nobles, and most are trained as soldiers/warriors, there may well be knighted people from many different professions: Priests, artists and scholars, merchants ... - the higher nobility had a habit of using knighthoods as general rewards, and sometimes even sold them to the highest bidders.

@ Dredj: Thank you once more for the interesting links. @ Fergo113: I used the free demo version of Sky Chart III: Southern Stars Systems - SkyChart III

Yep, looks good, I like them.

My settings usually are science fiction. I have used various BRP-based sys- tems for them, for example Ringworld and Cthulhu, and currently I am using a combination of BRP (roleplaying system) and Traveller (character history, world building, technology). In my opinion BRP is much easier to learn than GURPS and somewhat easier to learn than d20. You do not need minis, there is no advantages / disadvan- tages system, and it is at least not as expensive as, for example, D&D 4e - all you need is the core rulebook, and I hope that there will be a "light" edi- tion in the not so far future. The tactical depth depends very much on your choice of the kinds and num- bers of options you will use for your game. You can have it as easy and slim as in Call of Cthulhu, but you can also give it considerably more depth.

Frohe Weihnachten und ein Gutes Neues Jahr !

Well, in this case: Merry Christmas !

Besides, there are so many famous weaponsmiths and famous named weapons in the various cultures' legends and therefore in most settings that I would hesitate to make all those extraordinary weapons magical ones instead of ex- cellent results of craft skills. For my taste, treating them all as magical could create a kind of "magical in- flation" of a setting, with far too many magicians studying magic to become weaponsmiths ...

The Harnmaster system has exactly that kind of magic, too, so it might be interesting for you to take a look at it.

I would be very interested in it.

In my experience modifiers have a tendency to accumulate unexpectedly, so I would most probably not give any single modifier of more than 15 %. However, I would not introduce a "glass ceiling" for stacked modifiers, be- cause it is almost impossible to come up with a logical expanation for this in the setting. The two modifiers you mentioned are the ones I was thinking of, and in both cases I would lower them to 15 % in one of my settings. There may well be some extraordinary magical materials which would allow even higher modifiers, but I would keep such powerful specials out of the general rules and introduce them only in specific adventures. One way to handle the additional hit points could be to simply connect them to the crafter's skill and add 1/10 (or so) of the modified skill as additional hit points. This would put all the factors (meticulous, superior tools, superior materials, magic, skill level of the weaponsmith ...) into one simple and easy to calculate number, I think. Just an idea ...

In my opinion it would work well, although some of the modifiers seem to be a little high. I would hesitate to give a modifier higher than +15 %.

Thank you very much, Dredj and Solardog ! By the way, here is a picture created with a planetarium program. It shows the view from Enki II, about 300 light years rimwards from Earth, towards the Sol system (invisible in the centre of the picture) on January 1st of the year 2840.

Hello Dredj, thank you very much for the links ! I will take a look at them a little later, I am currently busy designing a num- ber of spaceships based on Mongoose Traveller's High Guard supplement, which became available as a PDF today - feels a bit like birthday. By the way, the Enki II / Tashara Colony setting is doing fine. Meanwhile it has grown to about 60 pages of background material, and the characters of the campaign have already established a first outpost on the desert pla- net, survived some adventures, and will soon encounter their first (and pea- ceful) neighbouring alien species, the Suri Badawi. Not long afterwards they will pick up an emergency call from a planet named Horpa, where they will have to deal with my adapted version of Outpost 19 and their first problems with Precursor technology.

I love very detailed worlds, but I prefer the ones I built myself. Unfortunately my creativity is limited, and I like to offer my players background details in a "style" different from my own, something I would not have thought of. Therefore any "generic" material really would be most welcome as an option to make my setting more interesting and rich than I could create it on my own.

I would buy "generic" or "semi-generic" adventures and campaign material, provided I could fit the material into my own setting without too much effort. In fact, this is what I plan to do with Outpost 19, and I am glad that its setting is "open" enough to enable me to fit it into my campaign easily. By the way, there is quite some "generic" science fiction location material available, from descriptions of starships or spaceports down to lists of fu- turistic weapons. Good adventures like Outpost 19, however, are very rare, and it would be nice to see more of that kind.

Thank you for the information. I will take a look at the FM, it is available on the net.

Thank you for a very useful rule of thumb.

Hmmm ... :confused: I think the armor value of the car protects the passengers inside the car, but I doubt that it is meant to protect the car itself.

First of all: Congratulations, a very nice adventure indeed ! :thumb: I plan to adapt it to my own setting and use it as the first part of a Precursor subplot of the campaign, giving the characters a chance to learn more about the early history of the region and perhaps dis- cover some more Precursor sites (and, if they are extremely lucky, even some potentially useful but mysterious technology). Therefore I am very interested in your concept of the Precursors and their technology. So, if you have already decided upon any more de- tails, please let me know. Thank you !