Simlasa

I can see that moment when Nightshade, Soltakss, and Badcat all come into stellar alignment on weapons stats... I can hear the harp music and the angelic choir... the glistening golden tablets handed down from on high... But for now I think I'll just keep stealing stuff from Ringword, Future*World, and Worlds Beyond.

Oooh... I haven't gotten to that part yet... Seems to me that a lot of Lovecraft's space travelling races.. the Elder things, Mi Go, etc... while knowing a lot more than humans about the Mythos are still likely to be fairly ignorant of the deeper secrets... and possible more scared/cautious about it than us... "Pathetic earthlings. Hurling your bodies out into the void, without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you had known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would've hidden from it in terror." - Emperor Ming But what changes come over humanity once we are living out there... amongst them? Once we are ALL aware of the mythos to some degree... once we are openly rubbing elbows with the Mi Go and sentient gasses and other wierdness... is it going to look like Traveller with Elder Things replacing the Hivers? or more like Spelljammer... with Star Spawn taking the place of the Mind Flayers? or is it just some weird messed up thing that can't be gamed anymore because it's just too alien?

I own a huge pile of BRP related stuff... most any permutation since RQII and a load of supplements... which makes the new book very important to me in terms of not having to lug all that stuff around when I want to look things up or show things around. It's the BRP equivalent of sliced bread and air-conditioning!

I'm still hoping for the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser movie that was in the Dark Horse rumour mill a few years back...

I think they look ok... but like you said, somehow not as nice as the samples we saw earlier. I had a slightly bigger gripe against the captions under them... I think I would have preferred the pictures be slightly bigger with no captions at all... because the evocative nature of the images is somewhat betrayed by the bland 'game talk' underneath. Still... that's an itty-bitty matter of taste and not at all important in the bigger scheme of this great big book.

As if I wasn't excited enough about Interplanetary already...

Gleeful fawning fanboy message on its way!

I loved Dark Space... loads of great stuff in there. I can see how it was meant to have Lovecraftian elements but somehow the few times we played it it came off as a less whimsical version of Spelljammer... maybe that was just the guys I was playing with. I need to dig out that book and read through it again...

The future I extrapolated from Lovecraft's references was always much more 'psychedelic' and 'weird' than just a 'conventional' SF setting with Cthulhu still lurking in the background. I always took the Tsan-Chan and Dark Conquerors as being examples of humanity slowly... losing it's humanity... of becoming a part of the Mythos... of moving among the stars in concert with the Mi Go and the Elder Things... knowing of them and being part of that 'community'... men moving between the stars by means of 'spells' and 'light envelopes'. Extra-dimensional entities being an accepted part of hazardous reality... like asteroid-fields and black holes... that require proper 'ritual' to keep clear of. Not in some Warhammer 40K neo-luddite way... but as a full on understanding of science/mathematics as 'magic'. I guess I see it as a sort of Transhumanist setting... with the various elements of Mythos reality taking an equal role to nanotechnology and cybernetics/biotechnology in creating the 'new men'. Very dark and cold and... ultimately... depressing.

Wow... I've always wondered about Lovecraft's here and there references to the future in his stories... and way back when I wrote up my own ideas of what the Tsan-Chan and Dark Conquerors were about... It'll be really interesting to read someone else's take on them though.

Couldn't you just put a 'P' or a 'PP' next to the power on the character sheet to delineate which measurement to use?

I don't recall having much aversion to the art... it was nothing fancy but it didn't look like it came out of teenager's notebook either (yes, I'm aware some teenagers are very talented artists). Mostly it reminded me of LBB Traveller... where the art, if there was any, was pretty utilitarian but seldom absolutely hideous. I'd like to see Worlds Beyond get a new lease on life... but I kind of doubt there is much of an audience for it that isn't already satisfied with some version of Traveller. The rest of the science fiction crowd is either on to transhuman backgrounds... or space-fantasy stuff like Dark Heresy and Fading Suns (I myself am impatiently awaiting more news about Interplanetary).

It looks pretty cool... and is 'systemless'... The website is a bit clunky but the artwork is really nice... How big is the background? Other planets? Would it do a Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon type game? or is it mostly WWII with fancy equipment and space battles? EDIT: review here: RPGnet : Review of Rocketship Empires 1936 Core Book

It's not really a product I've got much interest in... Now... if there was a general Pulp supplement for BRP I'd be a lot more likely to buy it.

There seem to be a lot of options in the new book for pulling your punches... among other things there is an option for 'fate points'. I'm not that much in to 'cinematic' games though... so maybe it just feels like that to me.

Yeah, there are a few moves I've seen that involve shooting it forwards then rebounding it back between your legs...!!!

Yeah, I don't want it to be an uber-weapon... more for flavor. I loved those old Kung Fu Theater movies I used to see where a band of weird thugs would be sent out by the villain... I remember one having a dwarf with a blowgun, a giant with a hammer, and an old witch with some sort of poisoned snake staff where the fanged head would shoot out on a chain. Also that old movie 'Masters Of The Flying Guillotine': YouTube - The Flying Guillotine Fight Clip - Chen Kuan Tai Shaw Bros (That sort of weapon seems like it would come under the 'powers' section rather than weapons or equipment...) What I've read about the meteor hammer suggests it might make a sneak-attack weapon... maybe to disarm someone before the real melee starts... a quick blow to the head as the first strike after which the mooks rush in with swords.

I went on a date with one!

That sounds pretty cool... I seem to remember some old AD&D book that set out to do something similar... but it was pretty disappointing (IIRC). The bit of cave exploration I've done suggested that fighting in such an environment might be pretty darn clumsy... uneven floors and horrible lighting (I once fell off a cliff despite having a great big lantern). Taking something like a halberd into such an environment just seems really dumb... and deserving of all sorts of disadvantageous modifiers.

I recently re-watched Kill Bill pt.1 again... and was curious about the scene with Kiddo vs. Go Go... and found that the weapon Go Go is using is actually pretty close to a real world thing called a Meteor Hammer. Meteor hammer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and YouTube - Wushu - Shengbiao - Rope Dart / Meteor Hammer It seems to combine some of the potential of a mace and a whip and a dart (for the rope dart version)... How might you portray such a weapon in BRP game terms?

I've been playing with a new group lately... and sometimes the son of a couple of them comes along... but he doesn't play with us... instead he sits on the couch and plays with his handheld Nintendo. It might be his parents' choice to exclude him... I don't know... but he seems awfully content to just play video games. I wonder if, for him, it's kind of like it is for me when I watch my parent's play Bridge...

I think it's mostly due to news people looking for 'exciting' stories... It's silly to me but it has effected my comfort level around kids... even older ones... because it feels like everyone is prone to assume the worst. Anyway... I didn't see the guys my friend was referring to... I assume he'd find most gamer types 'creepy'... but he's a suspicious sort of guy... he'd definitely find a thread called 'how to get the younguns' suspicious.

Yeah, that's one of the things that kept me playing RQ... never could stand Elmore's art. This discussion of 'how to get the younguns' reminds me of my friend whose only experience of gaming was seeing 'creepy guys in the back room at the comic book store and the little boys they brought with them'... he suspected it was some sort of NAMBLA convention.

Yep, that's the line I'm standing in...

I was reading a discussion about just this sort of thing the other day... but I can't remember where. Jason has covered most of what I remember coming up... pregens, aiming to come in under the alloted time limit... Another thing I read was that it was important to have an idea going in of how many players you can handle and to stick to it... rather than letting things get out of hand. I like the idea of a 'fantasy Cthulhu' game... it's familiar enough to not need much explaining... but is a bit different from straight-standard D&D fare.