Fergo113

Very cool, looking forward to more.

Are "Barghests" actually mentioned anywhere in Tolkein's writings?

FunGuyFromYuggoth is right, no there are no Barghests in the Lord of the Rings mythology, but they are kind of cool and are in the Lord of the Rings Online game. This game has been one great source of inspiration (and screenshots) when doing this chapter.

I have been determined to only add creatures that would fit into Tolkien's universe, not just add in fantasy based creatures. The Barghest is a creature from Celtic folklore and Tolkien drew on a lot from Norse and Celtic mythology in his works. So I want to keep in the spirit of his works. As such you will read in the creature descriptions (especially under the creatures powers) references to Spot Rules that will appear in a later chapter. These Spot Rules will help to keep Tolkien's feel and flow to Middle-earth BRP. The chapter on Magic will be especially like this.

But bleeding heck, it's a big job!!! :shocked:

So please be patient. I am about half way through the creatures I need to transcribe, so this chapter will probably be about another month before its completed. Then I have to complete all the rest.

I am so looking forward to MEBRP! I am curious as to how you plan to do the PDF layout? Will there be art and coulmns and tables and charts, or will it just be a text document?

EDIT: Guess I should have looked at the samples first! LOL

There will be art and formatting, tables and charts. You can get an idea of this fromt the City of Heroes layout in the downloads section. This is one of the reasons that its become such a big job (and a huge file!). I want to produce as professional a looking document as I can. :thumb:

I thought it was high time that I gave an update as to where this ‘little’ project of mine is up to... so here goes!

Currently I am about half way through transcribing my numerous notes and ideas into a legible, understandable, and more importantly, playable format. There is a wealth of material for me to draw on thanks to the many excellent Lord of the Rings books and rpg games that have been produced over the years, especially Middle Earth Role Playing (MERP) and Deciphers Lord of the Rings (LotR).

I have been promising on this site for some months now to upload the first chapters of this work. Much to my annoyance :mad: I keep falling behind in meeting up to this promise. So I have decided to give those of you interested a sneak preview into what the first chapter will look like. :thumb:

I plan to post a sneak preview creature each week until I complete the Creatures chapter for posting here. This will be the first of the chapters for my take on a Middle-earth Basic Roleplaying game. The idea is that at the very least, it will push me harder to finish this chapter for posting and to get on with the rest of the project, but at the same time give anyone interested a chance to have a look into what this will eventually look like.

I have opened the sneak peak with two creatures; the terrifying Barrow-wights :eek: and the Barghest :shocked:

So for those of you interested, hope this wets the appetite. :thumb:

You will find them in:

BRP Central > Downloads > Systems & Settings > Other settings

Enjoy!

I second that :thumb:

For City of Heroes, use my gmail account: sverrelarne [at] gmail.com

For the middle-earth stuff, pm me your email-adresse, and I'll send you a link.

Cheers,

Sverre.

Thanks Trifletraxor. :thumb: I'll do the errata to the City of Heroes pdf and then send it to you over the next week so you can post it. That way at least the file will be updated to the new BRP rule book.

Also thanks PK Games for the link as well. Really appreciate the help with this.

Cheers,

Fergo113

That's a software restriction I have not been able to fix. For some reason, there is a size restriction on the files that people can upload in the download section. It can be circumvented though. If I manually upload a file, I can link it to the download section, and then there's no size restriction. So, if you send the file to me, I can fix it. 34 Mb is bigger than the attachment limit of most email-providers, but I have an online file folder with no size restriction you can upload it to, which I can give you a link to. Most emails can handle at least a 10 Mb attachment, so those can just be emailed. I can also just download the city of heroes quickplay pack, join it together with adobe acrobate and edit the file in the download section (if thats okay with you). Of did you have a new edited version of it? SGL.

I can send you the complete original City of Heroes BRP Quickplay Pack pdf if you want to give me either the procedure I need to follow or your email address you want me to send the file to. At just over 8meg I can email it easily enough.

For the Middle-earth stuff, I'll have to send it to you by some other way than email. Let me know which is easiest and I'll send them to you.

Where are they located curretly?

City of Heroes is already in the Downloads section as two pdf files (City of Heroes quickplay pack).

The Middle-earth BRP stuff I am still working to update. So it's not on this site yet. I'm currently working on the Creatures chapter which is around the 35 meg size now.

What was the reason you divided this excellent pdf in two? Was there any problems in uploading it as a single file to size restrictions or anything? SGL.

I had real grief in trying to upload that file as one pdf document. :mad: As one pdf file it's a little over 8 meg. After about the tenth try and the upload timing out, I decided to split it into two smaller documents.

Currently the Creatures chapter for Middle-earth BRP is around the 34 meg size and so I'll have to probably split that into smaller documents as well. If I zip or rar the file, it still comes out at between 16 to 17 meg.

If anyone has any suggestions as to how I could upload the whole file as one pdf rather than splitting them into several files, I would appreciate it. :confused:

I am enamoured with the new BRP corebook, and curious to see what everyone is doing with theirs.

KoOS

Working hard to bring my Middle-earth Basic Roleplaying to a format I can post for others to play with. Been playing this with my RPG group for over a year now and its gone through some drafts/re-drafts. :ohwell:

With the BRP core rules though, I have had to check through it all to bring it into line with the the core rules. The core rules though have also allowed me to ditch some of the chapters I have already done (eg skills) and to rework others (eg making a player character). It's become more of a project than I had expected, :deadhorse: but I'm working to get the creatures chapter up on this site soon

Also did the City of Heroes BRP stuff but haven't playtested this yet with my RPG group. I will need to revisit this at some stage too as I have noticed some errata in the PDF's I've already posted

Hmmmm,

Check this out:

CoC/BRP/Artwork Deadline September 30th, 2008

Chaosium.com: News - Halloween Adv & Art Contest

Didn't get to finish my BRP Adventure for the adventure contest so just maybe...:thumb:

It reads...

The Fourth Annual Chaosium Halloween Adventure & Contest has begun!

We're happy to announce that we're now taking submissions for our fourth Halloween Horrors monograph. Send us a short Halloween adventure for Call of Cthulhu or BRP and you could be one of our winners. As in years past, the winning entries will appear in an upcoming monograph. Now that we can sell PDFs, the odds of seeing this material in time for Halloween 2008 is pretty darn good.

Winners will receive two copies of the monograph, a t-shirt of our choosing, and a copy of the upcoming Voodoo Virus zombie novel by William Jones.

Not a writer but an artist instead? No problem. This year we're also opening up entries to those of you who are graphically inclined. Send us a Black & White or Greyscale image we can use on the cover or as an interior image. If we choose your entry you'll win the same prizes listed above. Since we're always looking for new artists here, you just might end up working with us on a future book or two. You never can tell.

You have two months!

Its looking good Binder. Nice layout and starting to take shape. Keep up the good work. :thumb:

Looking forward to some of those out of print Stormbringer Chaosium supp's you've got permission to load up there.

Cheers :happy:

That would be the work of one of my chief artists, Robert Schoolcraft. I use guru.com to find up can coming industry artists who are willing to work fairly cheap.

Thanks mate. I thought you may have used some software for the maps but couldn't identify what software it could be. Tell them very nice work (and that they deserve a pay rise hehehe).

I suppose Im the most qualified to respod to that question, since I am the author of both books.

I just bought this (hehe doing my bit to keep Chaosium alive in 2008, especially at the 30% off sale ).

Nice layout and great work! If it's not asking you to give away a trade secret, how did you do the maps for Museum Island?

Astrosynthesis is a cool piece of software which allows you to generate star systems. It comes with a data file for all star systems within 20 ly of Sol IIRC, but on the downloads page there are downloads for the following, provided by Terry Kepner (who has written books on extra-solar planets etc):

Three data files of real universe star positions in .csv format that can be imported into AstroSynthesis. Files included are:

* All stars within 50ly of Sol

* All stars within 100ly of Sol

* All stars within 1000ly of Sol

* A text file describing the source for the data and methodologies used.

Astrosynthesis: AstroSynthesis v2.0

Kepner data sets: AstroSynthesis Downloads

This is a great product :thumb: from NBOS and you can also load in planetry maps from the Fractal Mapper companion software into Astrosynthesis thus building a link between star mapping and planet surface mapping.

Very Nice!

Thanks everyone for some great input.

I have been eyeing off CC3 so it will probably be the winner, but I didn't want to take the plunge to only get burnt on the price and find that it stank as a product.

Cheers :thumb:

Nice! Just bought Berlin 61 and Once Men.

This may be a little off the BRP track, but can anyone give me some advice as to what, in their experience, the best rpg mapping software tools are. I know of DriveThruRPG has a load of different software mapping tools for sale, but just where do you begin??? :confused:

Most of the campaigns that my group are involved in are either of the fantasy or modern genre. What I am interested in are mapping tools for designing countryside terrain for player characters to adventure through, townships, floor-plans (fantasy and modern genre, heck, why not even throw in future/si-fi floor-plans for good measure as well :thumb:) etc.

With so many options available, what have people bought that they thought was really worthwhile and that gave good additional support, updates and value for money (oh, and produced really nice maps!). :happy:

Would the greater number of powers from Superworld be translateable to BRP now? The super power section seems a bit thin.

It would be fairly easy to translate the Superworld powers to the new BRP format (though the Superworld format is clunky as I said before). I planned to do just that when I drafted the CoH Quickplay pack but there are a lot of powers in both Superworld and the SW Companion, and no doubt I would probably infringe copyright somehow by doing that.

To be truthful, not all the powers appeared to be that useful for gameplay. I haven't GM'ed a game of Superworld though so it's just my opinion only .

Chaosium hint at the end of the Powers chapter that there will be expansions to the BRP powers section in later supplements, so I would say that a lot of the Superworld powers will eventually get a look in then.

Question to those with knowledge of Superworld and how it stacks up to the new BRP. QUOTE]

The mechanics for Superworld were a little clunky.

In my opinion, the new BRP mechanics are much better for running a superhero game. There are a lot of super powers detailed in both the Superworld PDF and the SW Companion PDF but again, a lot of these don't flow that well when compared to how the BRP superpowers are now written. Superworld also doesn't have a campaign world setting, just a few adventures.

I must confess though that I never ran a campaign using the old Superworld, always meant too but never got around to it. One of the reasons I wrote up the City of Heroes Quickplay Pack in the downloads section was that Superworld didn't really translate easily, without some work, into the new BRP ruleset and that BRP is a superior system. That and also the fact that Paragon City is a great setting for a superhero world.

Superworld is fine as a background reference document and to give you ideas on a superhero campaign. But other than that, the new BRP superhero powers are much better IMHO.

I'll look into modifications for strict BRP (including options) and perhaps

a Stormbringer only plug in.

Excellent. I'd be keen to give it a try. From the looks of it, due to the lack of posts regarding this subject there isn't too many character/creature generators for BRP out there sadly. Either that or no one is really interested in this topic. :shocked:

Thanks V

I got confirmation from Dustin that the books that have been shipped already were from a first run that was intended for Tentacles.

Unfortunately, they ended up arriving a day after the convention.

Ah, mystery solved then. Thanks for that Jason. I should have thought to ask Dustin myself. I guess they must have shipped in the order that the pre-orders came in to Chaosium. Otherwise it wouldn't really make sense that it arrived in some places and not others.

Bad news for Tentacles but GREAT news for those who got a copy.

Where's the pre-order for the hardcovers?

I think he meant hardcopy Dredj, not hardcover. It's not available in hardcover as yet. Not that I am aware of.

My copy is softcover.

Ah, well, it probably was just the usual Australian problem with datelines,

time warps, and all that - or that cross-Earth tunnel from the USA to Au-

stralia has finally been completed ... :eek:

Damn it, I knew our governments were working on something! The public's always the last to know :mad:

So has anyone else recieved a copy yet? :confused:

perhaps, it is some sort of omen or portent. Do you have a strange birthmark under your hair line or feel the need to walk on water, turn water into wine, that sort of thing ? Are you the messiah ? Or just a very luck boy ?

"He's not the messiah! He's just a very naughty boy." Nope, not the messiah. Though maybe divine intervention had something to do with it.

Hey, maybe I was just the only one who made a pre-order? :eek: hehehehe

Perhaps I should do readings for everyone until they get their copies?

How very odd since Dustin's blog (from Sun. 15th June) says, "Last week, they promised the book would ship to us on the 17th. Sometime tomorrow we'll know if that's true."

I'm confused. The publisher (only 3 days ago) is stating they don't have the print copies yet you have received yours. Sounds like the left hand is not telling the right hand what it's doing.

You're not wrong there. It's got me stumped.

On the 12 June I recieved an email from Chaosium saying that the item had shipped. Got a second email saying the same thing on June 14. It usually takes around a month to get to me from overseas. Yet this morning it arrived.

I have no idea what's going on. I'm a little surprised that no one else has said that their pre-orders have also arrived. :confused: