rsanford

13 hours ago, Old Man Henerson said:

Where can one find enlightened magic?

Yeah SDLeary has it right. Its for sale at Chaosium. A couple of things to know about Enlightened Magic. FIrst it's written by John Snead a practicing WIccan Priest. Second he added a lot of umph to the spells but they are still far from flashy. Using an Enlightened Magic spell it wouldn't be too hard to have your enemy slip on some steps and break his neck (something thats plausible but unlikely) but creating a fireball would be hard. The magic is VERY subtle. THe third things to know is that most of the magic is ritualistic. Highly recommended if you want something to model what we think of as today's occult.

I recommend Enlightened Magic. With it I have always wanted to duplicate the magic in The Craft.

On 7/10/2020 at 9:35 AM, derekkinsman said:

👋 hey, hi. Hello.

I"m new to the forum. I've lurked it for a while. But figure I'd join up and say hi. I've been RPGing for ~30 years. Started with a copy of 0D&D that I played with a babysitter when I was 7 or 8. A month later found Hawkmoon at the comic store, at the same time I was reading The Secret of Runestaff. Managed to convince my parents to get that for me. Been BRP ever since. With a healthy side dish of all the other cool indie/diy rpgs on the market.

Welcome to the pub!

I haven’t read Legend but Blood Magic sounds the most cool 🙂

An RPG with Mathilda May on the cover? I’d buy it!

PS - I like the idea of using Lifeforce vampires.

I am having a hard time to get my group to commit to year long campaigns. How many sessions (say 4 or 5 hours) would you expect this campaign to take. I can probably talk them into a game a week for 3 or 4 months might be challenging beyond that.

Occam's Razor is a collection of mundane investigations that seem otherwise. Kind of in the vein of True Detective. It will be put out by Stygian Fox. Its coming along but its way behind schedule.

Waiting with anticipation...

59 minutes ago, twofeet said:

What I'd love to see are shorter campaigns. Something we can run in say 6-12 sessions, or 20-40 hours instead of 90+. For a lot of groups, I suspect this may be more achievable then some of the awesome-looking but difficult-to-actually-run mega-campaigns. 

I agree with this totally. Scenarios that last six to ten sessions would be perfect for us.

9 hours ago, Nikoli said:

Hey,

I’m not sure what a WIR is! 🙂 But I imagine it’s a review.
 

I’m currently still reading M-Space, and ordered The Companion, received Cthulhu Rising (the older edition) and Worlds Beyond (disappointing), and ironically am having trouble with my eyes lately - I think from too much screen watching in lockdown. So pdfs are giving me trouble. I’ve tried filters and all sorts, to no avail. I might just need rest!
 

But from what I can tell New Horizon seems to essentially have the Cthulhu Rising chassis with some additional aspects, like demons and luck points, and a separate characteristic - Bravery - which means that one can have low POW, but be brave. I like that POW x 5 is now an intuition roll. I really like it. It’s little touches like that which give me a new sense of how the basic BRP system can be used to greater narrative effect. (I’m not aware if the intuition roll mechanic is from another BRP variant ruleset.)
 

My first port of call is the character sheet, and as I’m on a Star Trek buzz lately I’m constantly looking for a game that can emulate that. I like the New Horizon character sheet - just enough detail to reflect various Star Trekky careers (and so relevant to sci-fi and starships generally) but still elegant, with an integrated approach based on primary and secondary characteristics as per RQ3. I find it very appealing and it instantly gets me thinking of characters and adventures; and the New Horizon banner heading is sufficiently vague that one can project any kind of setting into it. (I’m personally NOT a fan of character sheets that say ‘Basic’ on it. Who wants to play basic roleplaying? I love the system, but the brand needs updating.) 

Some people may find the RQ3 skill modifiers niggly, and while I do like the simpler Magic World approach, I don’t mind this either - it’s just for generation and it’s nice to feel that everything on the sheet is significant and integrated. I think the classic CoC approach was always too two dimensional; this yields, admittedly via mechanics, more of a sense of depth. 
 

There are no occupations with skills: instead, you have career classes, of sorts, which determine the characteristics you use to generate skill points. You seem to select the skills you then find appropriate.
 

The starship combat looked, upon glancing at it, somewhat like the Star Wars 1st ed approach. But it seems a weakness of the book is the lack of examples, so I’m not sure if all ship weapons are fired on the firing phase or just one. But my first brief read through liked it. However it wasn’t a focused read, as I found it by accident and was already reading some other material and trying to judge that. There are no rules for aliens, as the setting is centred on humans vs horrors, but there are rules for being born on worlds with different gravity, which affects your characteristics. So it’s rather like The Expanse.
 

As a source for ideas, or a base for a sci-fi game, along with a skill list, it seems excellent. At 570 pages, for just the core book, it’s a lot of content. Then a 170 page sourcebook. I have’t gotten through it all. Not by a long shot. The android stuff seems like Cthulhu Rising but with extra Bioroids, too. I’m not convinced of the distinction, but it’s synthetics versus biological replicants. The bioroids in this sound a lot like lab-grown and genetically engineered humans; I guess I never saw replicants quite like that, though they did have flesh and blood. I haven’t looked at the cybernetics, yet.

What I will say is the inclusion of Forbidden Science as a skill (like Cthulhu Mythos) and the inclusion of magic, along with psychics, has made New Horizon a rather unique compilation that seems to fit very well together. I think one would likely choose whether to use demons OR the mythos (if either; both together seem tricky to integrate), but the compilation presents a very workable system, with all the extra subsystems one might need, along with some additions (I like the Luck stat - it regenerates and you spend it 1 for 1 to alter percentile die rolls).

My first impression, and still my impression, is that New Horizon is the kind of fully fleshed sci-fi horror game that BRP could produce if the will or market was there. We have seen great indications, like Cthulhu Rising, oddly vanish, so I’m thankful that some fans got together to compile such an impressive tome for any GM looking to run a sci-fi BRP game. At the same time I’m surprised that it takes fans to do this, rather than having such a book for sale. Then again, because material is perhaps sourced from many places, maybe it takes the best of all worlds. I might personally use the M-Space ship rules if I did use NH, partly because I can design my own ships (New Horizons doesn’t seem to have design rules), but the rest of game looks excellent. Whether one plays it exactly as is, it’s a fine repository of BRP-based rules to use as a toolbox for sci-fi gaming.

I’d definitely pay for a hard copy. I wish it was a real product, because I’d love to present that bad boy at a table.

WIR stands for "Where I read". It's just a summary of each chapter. Still it can be a lot of work. A review is great too!  Chaosium has been planning to do a Science FIction game maybe New Horizons ould be the start of that.

Would you be interested in doing a WIR? I bet a lot of us would appreciate it!

On 6/11/2020 at 1:27 PM, g33k said:

Another thing that often doesn't occur to new players is an "emergent property" of the Action-Point system.

It's pretty obvious to most players how the 3-AP character has an advantage over the 2-AP character, etc.  What many don't realize at first is that a series of 1:1 duels which use 1:1 AP superiority is often a sub-optimal way to fight -- the entire party has an AP total, and this can be leveraged to great effect.

Sometimes it's as simple as "our party has 17 AP's, theirs has 15 AP's," but look closer:  which character(s) 2 AP's do you want to bring to bear?  Where do you want to apply them?

Sometimes it's as simple as "ganging up" on a foe.  Sure, a couple of over-100% characters may be in for a long-ish duel... but if one of them has an ally or two, such that the foe has to spend AP's defending more broadly (even if the allies are lower-skill)... well, it doesn't bode well for the outnumbered combatant!

Sometimes -- and I'll allege it's pretty frequent, actually -- having one character "step in front" to parry, or otherwise "defend on behalf of" another is a HUGELY advantageous action.  It frees up the defended-person's Action Point(s) that they may then be able to use to MUCH better advantage, e.g. if they have a ranged-attack, or an area-effect attack, Etc Etc Etc.  Sometimes you want them to apply their AP outside the immediate duel-like constraints (of the guy coming at them with a sword) -- they need to pour the flask of Holy Water over the Candle of Undeath, or whatever.

 

Wow! That was very insightful. That signals a depth that other BRP games don’t have.

On 6/17/2020 at 7:17 AM, timbolton said:

The British Museum are running a series of blogs called Historical City travel guides that may be of use for Jackals gamers.

https://blog.britishmuseum.org/historical-city-travel-guide-thebes-egypt-13th-century-bc/

https://blog.britishmuseum.org/historical-city-travel-guide-athens-5th-century-bc/

https://blog.britishmuseum.org/historical-city-travel-guide-rome-1st-century-ad/

https://blog.britishmuseum.org/historical-city-travel-guide-nineveh-7th-century-bc/

 

That travel guide to Athens you provided a link to will be quite helpful for a game I am preparing. Thank you!

2 hours ago, clarence said:

The original plan was to include sleeves and ghosts in the Companion. But everything took longer than planned, and I had to drop that chapter, unfortunately. I have the basics in place, so it will hopefully not be too long before it is finished. 

What would you like to see in terms of bioengineering?

I would like to see rules and setting material for something like Blade Runner's Replicants. So setting material about companies or governments making vat grown humans (pseudo humans) specifically engineered certain tasks. Normal tasks (police officer, blade runner, etc...) might not require anything special in terms of characteristics or special abilities but others such as replicants designed to live on a space station or explore space might be different (size might be different. maybe the occasional prehensile tail, perhaps claws instead of feet). Likewise replicants designed to work underwater might be amphibians and replicants designed for manual labor might be stronger than normal. There is a HUGE amount of information and ideas on this in GURPS Transhuman Space.

New art for The Fall of The Children of Bronze -> https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/jackals-the-fall-of-the-children-of-bronze-9781472837691/

So Clarence when are you going to add stuff for bioengineering and transhumanism?

And ordered!

On 5/29/2020 at 2:24 PM, ajtheronin said:

Auto buy!

 

Questions:

Asturies Medievila y Fatum Sperantia will get physical book releases?

Will you give the game its own sub-forum?

You can get these now, in English, on DriveThruRPG. I picked up both in hard cover.

Just received Aquelarre today from Chaosium. All I can say is WOW, what a piece of art! And know if you translate more of the scenarios into English I will buy them all!

13 hours ago, davewire said:

When you play CoC, do you prefer traveling to the fictional towns and cities of Lovecraft’s Massachusetts, far off places you’ve never been or only visited, your hometown or places close to home, or do you like to invent your own locations?

We typically play in and around New Orleans as the group has strong ties there and everyone loves the atmosphere.

Hi all,

Does anyone know if the English translation of Aquelarre from Chaosium was done on an offset printer or is it POD?

Also does anyone know if the scenarios written for Aquelarre will also be translated to English

Seriously thinking to pick this up!

Thanks!

2 hours ago, Karl Frost said:

I have similar feelings - the fully-automatic fire rules seem pretty clunky compared to the other firearm rules, to the point that you might keep such weapons out of the game just to avoid using them. Has anyone else come up with/tried a different system with any success OR have any comments on using these rules?

I haven’t used it yet but the new Delta Green assigns lethality to a weapon and if you roll under that, the target is dead. Seems a lot more simple and intuitive than the way CoC does it.

2 hours ago, Bud's RPG review said:

I actually don't have a copy of GGP's Cthulhu Invictus, but I do have the original monograph and the 5th(?) edition version - neither of which I have ever read.  As @klecsersaid, I do have a lot on my plate at the moment, but it could be a nice one to do as it's fairly short and not one I had thought of doing.

Bud do you have a patron account or a way of accepting donations? Love your stuff!

2 hours ago, timbolton said:

The Bloomsbury page for the games has updated with a cover image for the second Jackals book, "Jackals: The Fall of the Children of Bronze."
Looks rather nice, very exciting
 

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/jackals-the-fall-of-the-children-of-bronze-9781472837691/

Very nice!

Welcome uglifruit! I am impressed with what you accomplished on your first try! You are going to be a master keeper!