rsanford

All,

I wanted to make a shout out to Colin Brett! I found his Golden Grimoire campaign on the web recently and it is the best material I have seen for Stormbringer in forever! Thanks for sharing!

You can find Colin's campaign at http://www.colinabrett.me.uk/htdocs/storm.html.

Well said!

I am at best an intermediate level GM and still have a lot to learn. Having said that I found out about BRP/MW last last year and haven't looked back since.  It is just seems sooo much more intuitive than D&D.

Nakana,

Your suggestion to think of dex ranks as a pool of points that that you use to fund actions makes a lot of sense. Having said that is that what is described in the BGB? I ask because I am under the impression that Magic World (RAW) only allows one attack no matter how much dex you have... The only exceptions I can think of are in those cases where you have more than 100% skill point in a weapon (and you want to split them) or in the case where you are executing a riposte. Let me know if I am completely delusional :-)

Silver7 one nuance that I found interesting is that irrespective of dex rank if a character armed with a short or medium weapon attacks a character armed with a long weapon the character with the long weapon goes first.  It makes the decision to arm your character with a short sword a little more troubling :-)

Awesome! Thanks so much Pansophy!

Hey Ben,

I understand that the company shake up likely impacted Chronicler's Companion but can you tell us if the Companion and Monster books are still a high priority?

I just ask because if they are close to coming out I will avoid any RPG purchases for the moment in anticipation of buying them...

Thanks for all you do!

Pansophy indicated you could edit the skill list but I am not sure the tool will force some number of points to be allocated to cultural skills and others to occupation skills. Also it's likely complicated to allow "any" skill to be allotted points as part of a character's occupation personal specialty. 

But if it does do that - that's awesome!

Pansophy,

Related to skills, would it be a lot of work to support other BRP rule sets? I am thinking of things like Mythic Iceland, Magic World, the excellent Rome book, etc...

I only know the rules for magic world and they might be problematic given how they split skill allottment between culture and occupation but flexibility is good.

No pressure from me though! I'm just happy such a useful app is available.

Pansophy,

Just an fyi... It doesn't seem to generate negative damage bonus whatever the STR value...

Best,

Ronnie

Pansophy check your PayPal account.

Best,

Ronnie

I will send something as soon as I get off work. Thanks for all you do!

Ronnie

Pansophy,

Do you prefer a paypal or pdf voucher? If the answer is PDF what info do we need to buy you a voucher?

Thanks so much!

Pansophy,

One question and one request (if I may)...

i am currently playing my first game ever of Magic World / BRP but in that game there are magic points which I don't see in your screenshots... Are they perhaps displayed in the powers section?

Also in my Magic World game we have foregone rolling characteristics in favor of giving everyone a fixed number of points to spend. Any chance we could get that type functionality in your program? I would be happy to contribute a PDF to the cause if we can figure out how to do it!

In any case wonderful stuff!

I'll echo what some others said above with respect to learning how to d100 after being a lapsed D&Der fifteen or twenty years ago. MW was the only set of rules I immediately understood intuitively.

Similtaneously I picked up RQ6, OQ, BRP, and MW on PDF and MW turned into my Rosetta Stone for understanding the others.

Yeah me too. I started with RQ6 and even though it may be the best written book RPG I have ever read it was slow going with, from my perspective, lots of moving parts. Since I have read MW I have gone back to RQ6 and BRP and am making good progress. I recently ordered Delta Green and I am hoping that my knowledge of MW will allow me to run a game despite not having CoC (I don't require the game to have the exact right flavor as long as it's fun). We will see!

Thanks to Ben (author of MW) and all the wonderful people on this forum that have helped me in my transition from D&D to a more enlightened system. I wish it hadn't taken 34 years :-(

Whoops I just realized I replied to an old post. Keep up the good work anyway!

I've started working on a conversion of AD&D Monster Manual II to be compatibile with Magic World!

This is a slow, arduous project but I'm converting about 10 critters a day, with some neat fan art and some of the old School art as well. Currently on the letter B, alphabetically...

Go for it Chris! I love your work and have already leveraged it in my first Magic World / BRP campaign. On a related note I just purchased the cuthlhu monster book and was a little disappointed with the limited amount of art. Normally I don't care anything about art but with a monster manual you want to see what creatures look like. We will see what comes with the new edition of all the world's monster but I suspect your monster manuals will be my "go to" resource for a long time.

3.5 is a fairly internally consistent rulebook. The bgb is not internally consistent. It presents a ton of options, some of which are completely incompatible with each other. That would confuse a new person to no end. Even other generic rules like Savage Worlds are internally consistent because it was designed from the ground up. The BGB came ex post facto.

Most of us on these forums learned BRP through Runequest or CoC or Superworld or Worlds of Wonder or ElfQuest or Pendragon etc. Those are all settings that contained the necessary, internally consistent, rules. I know that if I was confronted with the CoC setting book that references a ton of random pages of the bgb, I'd still be playing D&D.

For all the awesome in the BGB, it's not friendly to newcomers.It's for the old hands who already know the system.

So what do you think of Magic World? I have only been involved with D100 since September last year but when I made the move from D&D I was looking for the easiest way to break in. I bought RQ6, BGB and Magic World all at the same time but now 9 months later I have read Magic World twice and still haven't finished the others. I admit I found the BGB daunting and even more so RQ6 but Magic World was a dream and in my opinion easier to break into than either D&D 2e or 3e. And I think that's true despite it including only modest setting info.

I started with AD&D in high school but I really got involved In role playing when I joined a club in college. We played practically everything on the market (late eighties) and put on multiple mini-cons a year. I wonder if it would be productive to contact role playing clubs at colleges near design mechanism to put on Runequest themed mini-cons? The club I was in had nearly 200 members and we bought lots of games...

All,

I have updated these rules to the latest 1.7 version.

As before these rules are inspired by Deep Magic and Ars Magica and tweak Deep Magic's spheres and glyphs and add rules for specifying spell range, area of effect and duration as well as for affecting mass, affecting character condition and casting spells against multiple targets. For maximum benefit I highly recommend readers purchase Chaosium's excellent Advanced Sorcery book.

The are a lot of small changes in this update but the bigger changes include:

• Added to the laws of magic section.
• Added costs for enhancing or diminishing armor, protecting against fire & frost, creating planar gates and accessing the past and future to the common modifiers & cost table.
• Added rules for extended casting times for complex creations to the optional rules section.
• Added the chronicler notes section.
• Added a sample spell index.
• Clarified and expanded sample spells.

You can find the rules in the download section at

Please let me know if you find errors or typos.

Thanks!

Hi all,

While I REALLY like the deep magic rules published in Advanced Sorcery, I have been tweaking (some people might call it an overhaul) them in preparation for a Magic World campaign that my group will start later this year.

The tweaks are to provide the following:

1. Mutable parameters for elements like spell range, duration and area of effect.
2. A “more” intuitive way to define spells.
3. An expanded set of possibilities for spell casters in terms of the type spells they may cast.
4. Potential for the spell caster to affect things on a grander scale.
5. Rules aligning categories of spell effects, such as creation, transformation and control with power levels.

The homebrew rules developed address 1-4 above by changing the spheres and glyphs used by Deep Magic and by supplying costs for various spell ranges, area of effects, and durations. However addressing 5 above has been more difficult.  Currently the way I am doing that is to provide two tables the first of which supplies costs for creating, transforming or controlling various amounts of mass and the second which provides common spell modifiers (like curing insanity, curing magical disease, opening a portal,  etc...) along with associated costs. I can't reproduce the tables here (I tried - any suggestions?), but you can download the rules at if you like. The tables are number 5 and 6 on pages 14 and 15.

For example table 5 deals with the costs of creating, transforming or controlling various amounts of mass and goes from 0MP costs to 13MP costs in increments of 1 MP. As an example it specifies:

• Controlling (lift, move, resist) a mass of 35 pounds would cost 1MP while transforming the same mass would cost 3MPs and creating the same mass would cost 4MPs.
• Controlling a mass of 554 pounds would cost 4MPs while transforming the same mass would cost 6MPs and creating the same mass would cost 7MPs.
• Controlling a mass of 8,652 pounds would cost 7MPs while transforming the same mass would cost 9MPs and creating the same mass would cost 10MPs.
• Controlling a mass of 135,181 pounds would cost 10MPs while transforming the same mass would cost 12MPs and creating the same mass would cost 13MPs.
• Etc, etc...

Similarly table 6 deals with the costs of common spell modifiers (like curing insanity, curing magical disease, opening a portal,  etc...) and goes from 0MP costs to 10MP costs in increments of 1 MP. It specifies that:

• For the costs of 1MP you can affect (add or remove) 2D4 hit points, 2 armor points, 2 MOV points, 10 skills points, 1 characteristic point, 1 POW point or 1 MP point.
• For the costs of 2MP you can affect (add or remove) 3D4 hit points, 3 armor points, 3 MOV points, 15 skills points, 2 characteristic point, 2 POW point, 2 MP point or cure or cause disease.
• For the costs of 5MP you can affect (add or remove) 7D4 hit points, 7 armor points, 7 MOV points, 35 skills points, 5 characteristic point, 5 POW point, 5 MP point or cure or cause hearing loss or blindness, create a planar gate, access the future by 5 minutes or access the past by 5 days.
• For the costs of 6MP you can affect (add or remove) 9D4 hit points, 9 armor points, 9 MOV points, 45 skills points, 6 characteristic point, 6 POW point, 6 MP point or cure or cause insanity, frost or fire protection, access the future by 6 minutes or access the past by 6 days.
• Etc, etc...

I have two challenges. 1.) Identify and address common game situations where a spell (costs) modifier might be called for BEFORE I get into a game and have to hand wave it. 2.) Rationalize some of the modifiers I have already identified.  With that in mind I have a couple of questions for you folks:

1. The conditions & special occurrences listed in column 3 of table 6 equate things like disease, hearing loss, planar gate and magical disease to MP costs.  These are the costs to create, provide or cure these things with a spell.  Do the values I have assigned for the various effects look reasonable?  Are there other conditions or special occurrences that I’m missing? What improvements would you make?
2. One of my players proposed the spell “Raise Newly Dead”. He designed it comprising two parts. The first part used the spirit sphere and the control glyph to force the recently deceased spirit back into its body (subject to a POW:POW contest on the resistance table). The second part used the body sphere and the control glyph to heal the body of 5D4 hit points. It seems to me that forcing a spirit back into a body is much more difficult than curing insanity (or something like that) and should require some additional costs in MP points. What are your thoughts? How many points should something like this cost? I was leaning towards an extreme amount like 16 MPSs (which has the benefit of making raising the dead much harder). Also do you see a problem using a similar approach (without the healing part) to create a spell to capture someone’s soul and put it in a jar (Magic Jar)?

So that’s it!  What suggestions would you have? 

Thanks!

PS - Sorry for the missing tables.  I couldn't copy them over...

Big Book of Monsters also has some of my money waiting on it.

Me too! The AD&D monster manuals Chris converted are great but I would love to have a polished product with a lot of depth!

All,

I have updated these rules to the latest 1.6 version. I apologize for having two versions (1.5 and 1.6) but I wasn't sure how to delete the previous version 1.5.

As before these rules are inspired by Deep Magic and Ars Magica and tweak Deep Magic's spheres and glyphs and add rules for specifying spell range, area of effect and duration as well as for affecting mass, affecting character condition and casting spells against multiple targets. For maximum benefit I highly recommend readers purchase Chaosium's excellent Advanced Sorcery book.

The are a lot of small changes in this update but the bigger changes include:

• Changed the rules for wizardry skill rolls to account for spell level and wizardry skill penalties.
• Added optional rules for spells causing multiple effects.
• Revised and expanded wizardry fumble table.
• Added a description for the sample spell Shape Change.

You can find the rules in the download section at

Please let me know if you find errors or typos.

Thanks!

Wow, that is exactly what I have been looking for as a BRP/Magic World supplement, thank you for sharing!

Hey - thanks a lot!  I really appreciate the call out!

You might want to click follow on the file as I will soon post a minor update that addresses how to handle spells that create more than one effect and there may be other updates as well.

Also you might want to check out Deep Magic Rebuilt which takes a different approach but addresses many of the same concerns. Moonowl67 has uploaded his rules to this site as well.

Happy gaming!

Yeah thats no problem. I like deadly battles and little healing.

 

As I said I will be DM/GM-ing and I think there will be few battles (that's partly up to me and partly up to the players, since they can go around attacking everyone if they so desire) and when battles occur the battles will probably just be one at a time, similar to how things are in the sagas. If they die I will probably let players play one of their relatives, similar to Crusader Kings.

I have only been playing BRP (Magic World specifically) a few months (and have very little experience) so take this for what its worth...

My longtime, seasoned, highly intelligent D&D group moved over to BRP and I took 15 minutes of game time to stress that this was a different game and that it was much more realistic.  I told them if you would avoid a fight in real-life you should avoid it in the game world as well. I even explained the various tactics available to them in combat... It didn't do one bit of good.

In the second game they attacked a party that I meant for them to avoid. Two of the party members got killed, one was captured, and two ended up running. Now after putting a new party together they are much more careful and never blindly rush to battle.  I am just sorry it took two character deaths for them to figure that out.

Since I want my characters to be a bit tougher than normal we use the rule for heroic hit points. It basically doubles the number of hit points and it still didn't save the party in their first battle.  You might want to consider doing the same..

Good luck,

I am REALLY enjoying BRP...

C'mon guys. You could at least toss the page some "likes"

I already liked the page. Btw - nice job! I think Chaosium offers something like a quick start guide for Magic World. Maybe it would be a good idea to link to it on the Facebook page?

By the way guys check out my home brew rules for free style magic Magic World style. I would love to get your thoughts!

Best,

Ronnie

Hi all,

I have uploaded rules that tweak Deep Magic's spheres and glyphs and adds rules for specifying spell range, area of effect and duration as well as for affecting mass, affecting character condition and casting spells against multiple targets. For maximum benefit readers will want to purchase Chaosium's excellent Advanced Sorcery book.

You can download the file at

Please message me if you find typos or unclear rules.

Best regards,

Ronnie Sanford