Simlasa

Sails On The Horizon... I like that much better. Strange Sails... I like that too Flying the Skull... meh Red Waves Names I wouldn't go for: Blow the Man Down Arrgh!... Where's Me Parrot? Scallywag Surprise Barnacles n' Booty

Yeah... that's a pretty minor effect for the bookkeeping involved... I was just curious... I've been on a jag against 'character progression' lately... wanting to play without the carrot-on-a-stick of 'leveling'... and curious if anyone did any anti-progression stuff.

I'm trying to remember if there were any of the various BRP variants that had rules for LOSING skill ratings... basically 'use it or lose it'. Not necessarily completely forgetting stuff but getting 'rusty' at it. I seem to remember reading such a thing somewhere but no idea where. I was kind of thinking there might be a way to flesh out a character by having some skills be current and others past... such as if you used a rifle in the army, but that was 10 yrs ago... so you're not such a good shot anymore but it will come back to you faster than someone who is a complete novice. Maybe list the skill as 10 (60) with 10 being the current/active level and (60) being the past level that could be reached in about half the normal time for gaining such a skill... and letting people buy up such skills at a lesser cost. Any ideas? Does anyone do this sort of thing in their games?

Is Nick really of Chaosium? I'm fine with time travel/elves/magic beans/whatever in my fantasy fare as long as it's consistent with the setting and story... but it's bad storytelling to have time travel elements just to shore up a weak storyline or because the author couldn't think up another solution to the mystery... It's the fantasy/science fiction equivalent to 'it was all just a dream!' Not to say that the monograph in question does any of those things... but quality fantasy/SF needs its own internal logic just like any other story... There's a difference between Tolkien and the stories my 4yr old friend likes to tell me.

I've never seen Heroes so that quote goes 'swish' past me... but glad to know it's relatively low-powered. I'm determined to have it now...

For whatever reason news of this monograph had escaped my notice until just now... I was a big fan of the LXG comics (less so the movie... but it was fun)... and this seems ideal for setting up a game of that flavor. How high powered are these 'Aether men'? I'm fond of relatively low powered superheroes... much prefering The Avenger/The Shadow over Superman/Spiderman. Does the book have much to offer for a game of heroes who are NOT 'aether men'... just an odd collection of talented adventurers like in LXG? Maybe leaving the 'Aether men' as a rarity in the background... Supersystem and the Superfigs are great so I'll probably grab this regardless.

I'd think that it's also a matter of how much 'balance' you want in your game... sometimes 'balance' is a wild-goose chase to nowhere.

Ok... I wasn't gonna say anything... cause most likely I'm the only one of this opinion... but I kind of hate the name you've chosen... 'Arrrgh Pirates!' I like pirates games as much as anyone but that name just sounds silly to me... if I saw it on a book at the store I'd expect that it was a lite comedy pirate game for kids. From your description it sounds a lot more interesting than that... and it sounds like it's got a bit of inspiration from On Stranger Tides and the PotC movies... but really, even if I owned it and was gonna play it I'd be tempted to cover over the name cause it's just kind of lame. Other than that I'm excited about it. Really.

Thumbs up for giant monsters and Shogun Warriors!

Cool! That's just what I'm hoping for... I'm a fan of all those GURPS sourcebooks that give you lots of tools for emulating a genre/setting and give you their example setting to play in/tweak/ignore.

Seems to me that the interplanetary romance genre had a lot of crossover with the lost world genre... IIRC John Carter was always finding the remnants of this or that old Mars civilization... Carson Napier found haunted alien ruins to wander through. Similar to a lot of fantasy stories it seemed like the glory days of most of those exotic planets was in the past... with the hero often putting the final nails in the coffin... with some promised, less tyrannical future on the horizon.

Interplanetary is still sitting on top of my 'most anticpated' list... Last weekend I was reading a crappy adventure book, The Descent, and even though it sucked... the fact that it was about a lost culture lurking in the bowels of the Earth plucked at my ERB heartstrings. Unfortunately there was no fencing in the book... maybe that was part of why it disappointed so.

I'm with the sentiment that if RQ/BRP had been the top of the pile it would have gone the path of D&D... namely, it would be crushed by it's own ponderous ponderousity... bought up by some huge corporation and sapped of what had me playing it in the first place. Sometimes it's better to stay in the shadows.

It didn't initially offer me a download upon paying... but that's been cleared up now. I haven't read it through but the illustrations are quite a bit better than I'd been expecting... not the most important element but nice nonetheless.

I've never been a huge fan of 'Tolkienesque Eurofantasy'... and going to Renaissance Fairs really gets on my nerves (but friends still try to drag me there). A while back I ran a couple of one-shots set in a Napoleonic fantasy setting... ala The Brothers Grimm... with the Napoleonic wars in the background... and the Black Forest full of the very real, very nasty, critters from the local folklore. There are elves, but they are small, and not very friendly. I always wanted to base a short campaign around GWAR's necromythology... but I could never come up with anything that wasn't pretty much all battle all the time. A setting like the one for Glen Cook's 'Black Company' stories would be familiar enough to play well, but not full of the same old standards. Ravenloft, with modifications, always looked fun as well.

Will the Mecha book be just generic rules or will there be some sort of setting... or suggestions for settings/storylines ala the GURPS books?

Seems pretty simple to me... maybe it's just not to your taste... which is different from it being 'horrible'.

Yeah, 'Pulp' can mean a LOT of different things depending on who you ask... Isn't Berlin '61 a COC monograph? I haven't read it yet but it seems like it would be a decent sourcebook for setting up a cold war espionage game.

I'm glad they got around to doing this. Having a 'lite' version of the rules to toss at newbies is always helpful, and it's good PR.

So... kind of DaVinci Code, American Treasure, Indiana Jones... with a bit more mystical, magical, mythical-ness to it? Friday the 13th: The Series crossed with Lonely Planet? Not that it's in anyway relevant... but I've long been wanting to set up a campaign that stole from The Ninth Gate's battling bibliophiles... world hopping antiquarians competing to find powerful trinkets... but now that I think of it that describes most of the CoC campaigns I've played.

Huntik appears to be a mix of The Matrix, Pokemon, and The DaVinci Code... in a kind of bland 'let's market some toys' kinda way... at least from what I've seen so far... maybe it gets more involved in later episodes huh?

Interesting... I need to go watch me some Huntik! I also need to dig out my copy of Nephilim... Your right about changing the name... I like what it describes but it's too specifically biblical for my tastes, and for that reason kind of throws the brakes on portions of my creativity. EDIT: Huntik episodes online here... I think (once I wade through all the advertising) http://www.4kidstv.com/huntik/a-seeker-is-born/101

Normally I'm not into 'cinematic' type games but... In Deadlands... at least the version we play... the Marshall (GM) gets chips (fate points) when PCs use theirs (well, the more powerful chips at least). So... the more the PCs bend fate to their own purposes the more power builds in the hands of the NPCs to bend it back against them. From what I've seen it works pretty well in setting up interesting choices... a run of 'good luck' has a kind of foreshadowing edge of trouble on the horizon.

Originally I wasn't all that interested in Pulp Cthulhu... I mean, Cthulhu started out as pulp... so how much pulpier did he need to get... Oh, unless you mean 'Pulp' the way they use it over on RPG.net... meaning wacky cinematics with inviolate heroes... kind of Lumley's style of 'Guns Against Cthulhu'. Anyway, old prejudices aside, now I'm wondering if it might be a good resource for playing other sorts of pulps... ala The Spider, Doc Savage, The Avenger, The Shadow, The Phantom, and The Crimson Clown. I'll keep my COC horrific... but I'd certainly be up for some slap-happy gunplay with Justice Inc.

So call it Witchkraft instead...