Connallmac

If I was still back in Upstate NY I'd say heck yeah, but since I live an hour east of Indianapolis I think it may be a little out of my way...

Hey folks, I'm getting ready to head to GenCon in a week and a half and I wondered if anyone else here is going as well? --Josh

I love this idea and would love to see it in print, and available on my Kindle!

I would certainly second Dark Sun, which takes many fantasy elements and turns them on their heads. Simple survival can be difficult and the planet itself is one of the PC's major adversaries. I also like the idea of Matchlocks & Magic. I have been toying with the idea of a campaign based around Bob Howard's Solomon Kane, perhaps with a bit more magic. It would also have some influences from the television Supernatural. Though it would probably be more correct to say that Supernatural is influenced by Solomon Kane. Another good example of fantasy taken out of it's usual trappings are Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden novels. Harry is a modern day wizard/private eye who protects the city of Chicago from supernatural threats. Humorous and entertaining, and definitely a good model for a modern fantasy campaign.

If pdfs are a major reason to buy it I would definitely wait. Though who knows, Amazon has a press conference scheduled for tomorrow, and everyone thinks that they are going to announce a larger sized Kindle to make charts, graphs and illustrations easier to handle; perhaps one of their announcements will be better pdf support.

The Kindle doesn't natively support pdf files, and I have yet to find a good program to convert them into a format that it does support. Typically they lose much, if not most of their formating when they are converted over and become difficult to read without effort. The best work around that I have found so far is to cut and past from Adobe to Word and save as rtf file until you get it formatted in the general way you want it, then save that file as a txt file. It's a major pain, and I hope Amazon resolves this soon, as this one of the things I really envisioned the Kindle doing. It would be awful nice to show up to a game session with my Kindle, rather than a big heavy pile of books that I MAY need to consult. It would be especially ideal for convention gaming, if it did a better job of converting pdfs. If this is your main objective, I would almost say invest in a decent netbook instead, at least until Amazon works out this wrinkle. As far as general reading goes though, I absolutely love it! I have found myself reading constantly, and it's great to be able to finish one book and download another in a minute or two and start again. Plus I can check my gmail wherever I go. Heck, I've used Google Maps on the go a couple of times to get driving directions when I've been lost. Overall, it's a great little gadget.

I was thinking about this just yesterday. I think the relatively deadly mechanics of Basic Roleplaying could dovetail nicely with the harsh world of Athas. I am starting to wonder what a conversion would look like. I still have hard copies of the core Dark Sun material, and happened to have purchased the pdf copy of it back in early March to try and put it on my new Kindle. That didn't work quite as well as I had hoped, but I am just glad to have it now. I think the classless nature of Basic RPG would be a good fit, especially in the way it would be easy for characters to study psionics and magic simaltaneously. It would also make it easier to handle the "wild talent" psionic powers that all pc's sport. I'm liking this idea more and more.....

I would be vastly interested in seeing these notes. I love Dark Sun, and I could see where it may port to BRP quite well. I'd be very curious to see what you came up with!

This sounds similar to George R.R. Martin's Wild Card stories, minus the Jokers. I always found that to be an interesting premise.

I have a group in East Central Indiana that I could play test with, should you need more help. Or should you need any help with proof reading, I would be glad to lend a hand!

I would suggest watching a few episodes of Supernatural on the CW. This is a perfect model for a modern horror themed game.

You could also look at the rules for serious wounds from the Worlds of Cthulhu magazine article, "The Good, The Bad and the Utterly Insane". It details rules for more cinematic Wild West games. PC's can be reduced to 0 HPs twice, each time rolling on a serious wound chart to see where on their bodies they take a serious wound, which cause different types of penalties to the PC. The third time they hit 0 HPs they die.