rsanford

2 hours ago, Loïc said:

Great time last night running this adventure! Always on Roll20... I had 3 players this time, and all reacted with great pleasure to this one, even if one of the PCs is now as the hospital... Just a few remarks about the preparation and the running itself:

• I modified the god's name (Xhuul), because I was afraid some players could recognize the Ghostbusters allusion and so guess too early there could be a hidden temple in Conrad building...
• as for the previous adventures, I used Roll20 for illustrations, mainly 1930s photos and postcards. But this time I struggled with Google images to find suitable pulp magazine covers (you find mainly jungle adventures and detective stories illustrations). I had to fall back on old horror comics covers (Creepy) and horror films posters I had never heard about (Killer Granny, Sick Boy...). Good atmosphere according to my players, too.
• of the three scenarios of Astounding Adventures book, God of the Airwaves is the one with which I had to improvise more. After the kids' scene, my players took original options, breaking in Ashcroft's appartment and so forth... This was great time. I mean, as a GM, I do love improvising on players' unexpected decisions. And this time I was served right!!!

Next time, I'm planning to bring them on Pulp Cthulhu's Two-Headed Serpent campaign - without telling them, of course, they're now playing CoC... I must tell their original pregens are the official Two-Headed Serpent's characters... and they are of course unaware of it... 😄

@Loïc what is your opinion of Astounding Adventures overall? How are the adventures? I have been tempted to pick that up...

2 hours ago, hix said:

Insight is on my list of deleted skills, along with Listen, Move Silently, Bargain and Jump/Climb/Swim. Combined into Spot, Stealth, (Persuade/Etiquette/Streetwise depending on the situation), and Athletics respectively.

Every study conducted has demonstrated that humans are no better than chance at detecting deception (Ekman & O'Sullivan 1991, 913-920; Granhag & Strömwall, 2004, 169; Mann & Vrij 2004). If you want to read minds, use powers. That's why I exclude insight.

If I want the player to know something about the character's behavior or nature, I don't leave it up to my acting skills. I tell them outright. If it is supposed to be ambiguous, then I don't want it up to a die roll, I want the player to have to make up his mind about this NPC. getting rid of Listen does make Spot more powerful, but I'm running a sci-fi game, so half the spotting is done with Computers anyway.

Athletics is a compromise for my players, allowing them a little more ability. Doesn't include Throw, because grenades.

I mostly agree with you here but just as an aside many sales people train in neuro lingustics programming (NLP) and it greatly enhances your ability to understand how the other person thinks. Maybe it wouldn't be useful in discovering deception but it certainly gives you the ability to analyze and categorize people by the way they think and makes you much more effective when you are trying to persuade them of something.

30 minutes ago, soltakss said:

If the Narrator asks for a D100 roll and I use a Dice app and get 03 I show it to the narrator. They ask again and it rolls 78 and I show it.

If all my rolls are 03 then I am cheating. If 03 then 02, then 01 I am lucky.

Of course, there is nothing to stop rerolls until you get a good role, but the Gm can ask you to stop that.

Anyway, I just trust players.

 

Well if using Discord you could ask for a dice roll and then wait for it to be displayed on the Discord dashboard. I don't remember if it is time stamped or not but you can tell when something has been rolled.

@Nick J. what’s your opinion of the rune/tattoo magic in the book? I  like the idea but I think it would require a lot of development.

It's really sad GMs have to worry about this stuff but the only solution I can think of is to use online dice rolling. There are a lot of solutions for that but if you want something that intergrates dice rolling with audio and video I would recommend Discord. It supports audio and video as well as chat and dice rolling and there is a free version of it.

A game @Nick J. is currently running uses Deep Magic and in a previous game I ran we used Deep Magic with The Second Way revisions.

Cthulu Rising and all it’s supporting material is a masterpiece. Maybe Chaosium could release a second edition someday?

I encourage you to go for it because Cthulhu Rising is worth every penny. However I am going to hang on to my copy - its just to wonderful to give up. However if you do get CR and are looking for some scenarios and additional rules PM me. I have a lot of the free stuff that Ossaway put on his now defunct website.

Moon Design took over Chaosium from the previous management when Chaosium went into big debt and started to fail. The guys at Moon Design paid all the Chaosium debts and among other things improved Chaosium’s quality. They also brought RuneQuest and Pendragon back into the fold. They saved Chaosium.

I disagree that it’s worthless. It’s true the GM needs to roll it but I love roll playing certainty if the GM says my character feels one way or the other. Lots of great roll playing when you get in an NPC’s face because their lying and they aren’t!

Golden Goblin is producing stuff to this day. Pagan, I think, was till last year. There stuff is easy to get on Amazon and EBay. And by the way I would put Pagan in Stygian’s class. Very, very good material

Stygian is great (awesome in fact) but also check out stuff originally printed by Pagan Publishing and Golden Goblin Press,

Wow the art is great!  I hadn't planned to get another copy of Malleus Monstorum but with art like this I may not be able to resist!

7 hours ago, ORtrail said:

After Richard Tucholka passed back in 2017 I decided to run Fringeworthy for Free RPG Day that year.  I was going to use the 1992 edition, but I'd forgotten how complex some of the rules could be.  I switched over to using Supers! Revised instead, as creating pregens was much faster and easier. 

Later, I decided I wanted a system that was designed for normal humans, so BRP was the logical choice for me.  I ran BRP Fringeworthy in 2019 and it went great.  

Now, NONE of the players had ever played Fringeworthy before, so it was the setting that interested them -not the game system.  The game system is more about making the GM's life easier. 

Yeah it's sad this game both Bureau 13 and Fringeworthy seem somewhat forgotten despite shows like X-Files, SG1 and Fringe. The rules don't thrill me so much but the setting seems perfect.

7 hours ago, ORtrail said:

 

Uh, yeah I did play around with one.  Let me dig it out.

 

There are three character sheets you can download with a bit of different art:

Werewolf: http://www.mediafire.com/file/85ndrzruxm91lt8/Bureau13_MasterCS_Wereworf.pdf/file

Spaceship: http://www.mediafire.com/file/o1djhu3clvoa2qt/Bureau13_MasterCS_Spaceship.pdf/file

Zombies: http://www.mediafire.com/file/szti4otmtobwv1i/Bureau13_MasterCS_Zombies.pdf/file

Let me know about any issues or needed corrections.   'Leap-Horse' is a remnant from the Tschai character sheet.  That needs fixed.

Thank you - I will put these to good use.

BTW @ORtrail I just found your Fringeworthy post over on the Tri-Tac form. Very interesting stuff! I have old copies of Fringeworthy and Bureau 13. Would love to play them!

On 4/7/2019 at 1:55 PM, ORtrail said:

I didn't think this needed a new thread, but I wanted to mention what I was up to with RoH.  I used it to run a Fringeworthy adventure earlier this year,  and for Free RPG Day 2019 I'm working on something I've always wanted to run: an adventure set on Jack Vance's Tschai Planet of Adventure. 

I'm in the process of converting the RoH character sheet.  There will be 5-6 of them, all with the planetary map, space for character art, and one of the alien races of Tschai depicted (Green and Blue Chasch, Wanek, Dirdir, Pnume, and maybe one with a Night Hound). 

I finally feel like I have the resources to run a Tschai adventure; with heavy reliance on the old GURPS setting book, but also recently getting the entire series on audio book.  There is a French Tschai RPG that came out late last year, so I'll have to keep an eye out for the English translation (if it happens).  It was based heavily on the French Tschai comic book adaptation I think. 

Anyway, here is the work-in-progress Tschai Planet of Adventure character sheet.  I included 'BRP' in the title for name recognition value, but then again the two players I had for Fringeworthy had never actually played any Chaosium RPG.  They understood percentages though, and had no issues with the game system.

ORtrail you don't happen to have  character sheet for BRP Fringeworthy do you? If you do I sure would appreciate getting it...

I prefer the way Magic World does things over Elric. Elric is great but I appreciated the broad skill category modifiers (even if a bit fiddly) and the extra success level and I use those rules in many other non-fantasy settings.

2 hours ago, NickMiddleton said:

I placed these at roughly a point in the Magic World adventurer creation sequence prior to profession - so logically profession adds go on top.

One thing I went back and forth over was +5/+10/+15/+20 or +10/+15/+20/+25.... in the end, +5 here or there seems to minor to really bother with for Magic World characters, so I went for the larger number. But there 's no reason not to reduce it as you suggest, or perhaps only use the Perspectives with Heroic or Legendary characters.

I like this but I wouldn't do just 5% as it seem too little to me to be worth the extra step during chargen

2 hours ago, colinabrett said:

Don't leave us hanging @smiorgan! Give us some details! 😀

The Stormbringer Demon Magic supplement had rules for sanity, where summoning a demon would force a SAN roll and (slowly) lead to madness. I've always thought the "1 permanent POW for temporary binding, or 3 permanent POW for permanent binding" was a bit steep (as it could leave the sorcerer unable to cast magic). Some of the ideas I have around this are a little too "out there" to go into on a friendly forum.

Colin

I want the Demon Magic book so bad but a good copy goes for more than $100 these days. I understand there is a real kick butt scenario in there called the velvet circle.

I think Chris Tooley converted D&D 3.5 traits to BRP or Magic World several years back. Y'all might want to ping him and see if he uploaded it.

2 hours ago, K Peterson said:

I should re-read it. I never gave it much more than a skim ... 7 years ago... and didn't find it that interesting.

The fact that it combined Elric! + supplements + RQ3 (all material I already had and wasn't pleased with re-buying) and that the layout and artwork were generally awful (IMO) didn't leave me with much of an impression. It seemed like a soup of random ideas thrown together into a shitty package. Might have been a bit too judgmental back then.

Yeah I can see where it repackaging material could be an issue. However for me MW was my first introduction to BRP gaming and remains my favorite implementation of the game despite the warts.

3 minutes ago, Vile said:

I've been looking at MW fairly closely lately, and I have to say I'm quite surprised by the depth of the changes. It's far from the simple re-skinning of Elric! that I had previously assumed it was. It's also becoming apparent to me that the rules and the decisions of what to include in terms of occupations, magic, creatures, etc. actually create quite a distinctive implied setting even without considering the Southern Marches write-up.

One thing that I noticed when I first reviewed Magic World was that the setting featured a resurgent fey influence. However the creatures statted out in the book were really a grab bag of creatures and not a complete representation of what people think of Fey. I think Ben Monroe once said (Ben correct me if I get this wrong) that the Fey Magic World describes is really a generalized term for monsters / creatures. I thought Magic World would have been improved if the beasiary had focused nearly exclusively on Fey.  Here are a couple of reviews on Magic World -> https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/17/17905.phtml

-> https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/16/16300.phtml

I don't have any RPGs from Osprey but I have read a number of their military books and the content and production are first rate. If anyone (besides Newt) can make OpenQuest shine it will be Osprey.

5 hours ago, smiorgan said:

Now we have a cover:

https://www.amazon.com/Jackals-Bronze-Fantasy-Roleplaying-Osprey/dp/1472837428

 

And ordered!