Dredj

Amazon.com: 21st Century Pirate: Sean O'Reilly: Books

The link above is to a book that might be good for modern day smuggling. Why just keep it in the 30's or 50's? And what if a group of players don't want to follow the straight-and-narrow?>:->

Yep, I have a question, or perhaps a proposal:

It is quite possible that Mr. Shewmake and / or Chaosium are not interested

in publishing an updated print version of Worlds Beyond, for example because

it would be a lot of work to do, or because a commercial success is conside-

red unlikely.

In this case, could it be possible to publish Worlds Beyond as an e-book PDF

for downloading it, for example from the Chaosium website ?

This approach has been used for a couple of older and less popular SF RPGs,

for example FGU's Space Opera, and it seems to work quite well, and to earn

the author at least some money ...

The question about it becoming a pdf would be my question, too.

Also, the book does have some editing issues. If they were to reprint it, those would probably have to be taken care of.

By the way, blood has a metallic flavor and, according to cannibals worldwide, human flesh tastes like pork>:->

It's interesting thinking that to cannibals, we're all just big slabs of Spam.

There's potential at the college level, sure, but those are adults (or near enough) and with rising college costs, they are probably working even more than the high school kids. Plus, I don't know about you, but I don't think pen & paper can compete with discovering the joys of coupling and partying and, oh yes, studying. The gaming group at my university were not good and hopefully they're not representative of what college organized gaming is like and my impression is that they didn't do any better job of keeping gaming alive in the U.S. than the rest of us.

One idea, though, is to get these games to college books stores and to have the product placed prominently alongside other books. With the death of the FLGS, the college bookstore may be one of the few bricks and mortar outlets for gamers that hasn't been fully exploited by gaming companies.

There's always a number of people on the college level who will play rpgs. I think putting BRP into college book stores would be a very good idea.

Dredj, before you do that you may want to contact Frank Shewmake to ask if it is okay.

Come to think of it Mr Shewmake might still have the missing chargen tables still knocking about in a file somewhere. It would also be interesting to ask him if he intended to publish any more products for Worlds Beyond.

Can anyone give me a name and e mail address at Chaosium so that I can inquire about contacting Mr Shewmake? Since this thread shows that there is a (small) amount of interest in contacting the author I may as well try to do so. At the least we may get an interesting interview with Mr Shewmake out of it.

I will dig out my book, today. But I'll hang on, since I'd rather not get into any legal issues.

The gaming group at my university were not good and hopefully they're not representative of what college organized gaming is like and my impression is that they didn't do any better job of keeping gaming alive in the U.S. than the rest of us.

.

The gaming group at one of the universities I attended had all the women around them. They were the only people who had something going on besides hitting on--or trying to impress--women. I think there's a promo opportunity that most--if any--game companies are not picking up on.

Oh yeah, some of those women would actually join in the role playing.

I like and use both systems, BRP and Traveller, and I will "translate" the

excellent character generation lifepath system of Mongoose Traveller into

BRP as soon as the German edition of MGT has been published.

From what I did read on other forums, there are at least some people with

similar ideas, and who also would very much welcome something like an

updated Worlds Beyond as additional material for their SF roleplaying with

both BRP and Traveller.

An updated Worlds Beyond would need better editing, though it could be sold as is as a pdf.

Soon, after I dig through my stuff after a move, I will post the Worlds Beyond FTL rules.

Thanks, I will be downloading Conan soon:)

Gianni's work prosthelytising BRP always makes me feel slightly inadequate. Posts in fluent English and casually mentions some great resources in French or Italian which I am then entirely unable to access due to linguistic laziness on my part.

Deep down part of me is hoping that someone bilingual will translate these for me (as happened so brilliantly with the French to English Conan BASIC game).

Al

There's a Conan Basic game? Can it be downloaded for free?

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.

I mostly agree. I would rather see a pulp supplement that just handles straightforward pulp (even though I realize CoC is pulp) and allows some suggestions as to how to integrate it with the mythos.

However, if it covers weird science and all the trappings of fun pulp, I won't complain.

The first British percussion musket came out in 1839 a converted Brown Bess

Brown Bess - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

How long these took to get to troops in the field I dont know.

Many of the British troops would have been marines. Rifle would have been few and none I think would of been standard issue, but ship Captains where know to buy a few on their own for selected marines.

Not sure about the Chinese , but as late as 1895 (Sino Japanese war) many Chinese still lacked fire arms and where using crossbows.

The Chinese were also using lots of martial arts. The Boxer Rebellion was called that because the term "martial arts" hadn't been invented yet.

Boxer Rebellion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And there seems to have been some American military action, as well, during the Boxer Rebellion.

Thought I'd mention that according to Amazon my copy shipped today; they must have never updated their estimated shipping (happens a lot with pre-orders involving small companies and them in my experience).

Amazon FINALLY shipped my copy, today. At least I saved some money. I can't wait till it gets here.

I got me a copy of it. I think it's pretty nice:thumb:

Dredj, did anything come of this?

Sorry, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Chaosium would've done something on their own with it. I don't think my input would have made much difference. We probably would need to petition them, or something, for the game to be released again :ohwell:

And don't forget that some European armies had sniper units using air guns:

Air gun - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And the Austrian models were roughly the equivalent of a 9mm and .45 ACP as far as penetration is concerned.

And Amazon STILL doesn't have an estimated shipping date:mad:

I don't have my copy of BRP yet, but if there's a listing for air guns, those were around for centuries, I believe. And they were great for the settlers to use when hunting small game. Napoleon Bonaparte outlawed them because they supposedly made good sniping weapons!

I'm still waiting for my order to come from Amazon as well. If I don't get a delivery status, soon, from them, I will cancel my order and order from Chaosium.

If someone doesn't beat me to it, I'll fire up one of my galaxy generators and post a map. Then we can carve up the galaxy and populate with all of our ideas.

Would that be ok?

How realistic will it be? All the Star Wars maps I've seen have populated planets in the galaxy core. All the scientific stuff I've heard about galaxies say that would be impossible, since the closer you get to the center of a galaxy, the faster the stars and stuff rotate. Matter near the galactic core rotates near the speed of light.

When I have some time, I will dig out Worlds Beyond and post the FTL travel guidelines from that. Since the travel in Worlds Beyond had the use of star maps already in mind.

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.

I'm running into an awful lot of people like your friend lately. Also, I agree about your above comment about people assuming the worst. Pretty much everyone I know has had their comfort zone effected from people assuming the worst about this kind of thing.

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.

I've noticed that the word 'creepy' is being overused for EVERYTHING that's unusual in recent years. Usually, the people who use it are sometimes people who need to get out more, but definitely need to interact more with people outside of their narrow range of social interactions. I don't know your friend, of course. I'm just saying that's what I notice from people who use that word often for things they don't understand.

Also, what's this fixation with pedophilia that almost everyone seems to have, nowadays?

What about a combination of the declining and rising Empires ?

I could well imagine an old Empire with a declining core and and a vibrant,

rising rim. Or two Empires, like the old declining Vilani Empire and the young

rising Terran Empire in Traveller.

A combination of decadence and renewal. Sounds good to me:thumb:

Personally, I could go for an empire on the rise. I'm more into the exploring the unknown than dealing with cleaning up the already known:)

There is already a rather good Perry Rhodan RPG, although the system is com-

paratively complex. It is a d20, originally published for the German fantasy RPG

"Midgard", decades before D&D used a d20 system:

dorifer.com

However, the Perry Rhodan RPG is no success, not even over here. While the

fans of the series like it because of the many background informations, most

roleplayers obviously find it too difficult to "get into" a background universe

which has developed over more than 40 years, with literally thousands of ra-

ces and a timeline of more than 2,000 years.

That's too bad that it didn't do well, as it sounds exactly like the kind of universe that I would like to play in (where anything can happen). At least you'd never run out of aliens to run into. Maybe, if Chaosium did actually get the license for the game, they could have random alien generators (like some SF games have).

But, according to Wikipedia, the series had every theme related to space opera in its series, so I can kind of see how it would be difficult to get into, since it sounds like a generic space opera setting. But I think that could be good, in a way, to have a sort of generic space opera toolkit to pick and choose which themes you want. Especially one that's based on an established series.

:focus:

I definitely want to pick up a copy of Shock, for the world/adventure building tools, but not for the game system.

Then you might be disappointed with Shock, because the system revolves around a grid where people decide which issues are going to drive them and come up with a world based on those issues. There are examples of gameplay from reviews on the Shock homepage (links) that will help you better judge if you still want to buy the game.