Lord Twig

Well this thread has taken an interesting turn. There are now several things to reply to. First, someone asked how I like the book. I like it a lot! It really is a toolbox book though. So I am spending time deciding which rules to use and how they will work in the game I want to run. Character creation has everything you need, but there are a lot of options and none are set in stone. Right now I am thinking of using Epic level Stat generation using point buy. Allowing other races, all of which I am making from scratch. Normal level skill points, I wanted the characters to start young and inexperienced, but with a good potential for power later. Powers are an interesting challenge. I wanted all characters to have access to some powers, but also wanted to allow for someone who wanted to focus on them to have some advantage. Right now I am thinking of allowing Magic and Sorcery, but I am making some changes to get it to do what I want. Primary magic users (wizards) will start with 4 spells and can hold up to 1/2 Int in spells. Dabblers in magic will start with 2 and can hold up to 1/4 Int. To allow for growth, instead of immediately being able to cast a spell at a level equal to 1/2 Int, instead the can cast a spell level up to 1/10 their skill. So with a 43% you could cast up to level 4 spells and a 67% would allow you to cast up to level 7. Maximum would be level 10 at 95% or higher. Sorcery is already a bit more limited and I am wondering how to balance it with Magic. I might just start playing with it as is and retcon it later as needed. One thing I was going to ignore was the 16 Int (or was it Pow?) requirement to cast sorcery. Primary sorcery users (Sorcerers) would start with 8 levels of spells in sorcery and dabblers would start with 4. I also thinking that I would make up some more demons for them to summon ranging from low-powered, easier to summon demons and on up to the greater demon in the book. Sorcery in the game would be a rather dark form of magic. Other options that I am going to use that are pretty easy are stat category bonuses and most likely hit-locations. Though I might just stick with HP and major wounds to see how it plays. Anyway, there is actually quite a bit of work that needs to be done before you can start playing, especially compared to D&D. Campaign books might make this a bit easier and should definitely be published if Chaosium wants to capture a larger share of the market. Okay, that was a long answer to a rather short question.

Quick question. What is SotC?

I can't remember when exactly I ordered mine. I think it was the Thursday before free shipping expired. My book shipped USPS Media Mail and was shipped on the 19th. I received it on the 22nd. It is number 30. It arrived in perfect condition. I thought I read somewhere that they had trouble with there ordering system before they got things straitened out. So it sounds like those who put their orders in first had to wait while they fixed things while those that placed their order later had everything go smoothly and therefore quicker.

Cool, so we know they sold at least 70 of the 420 that they had printed. We will see how much higher it goes.

I thought the Sword of Truth series was worthless. Don't know what people see in it. There was another book I can't quite remember the name of. Wizard War or something like that. One of the few books I stopped reading before I got to the end. Then there is the Deryni series by Katherine Kurtz. It was interesting that she introduced characters that had no relevance to the plot and their only reason for existence was so they could die in horribly tragic ways. Actually I find I don't understand many books written by women. Their minds just work to differently. The will spend page after page describing how people feel and you won't even know what they look like. :ohwell:

Well we will see what Jason comes up with in the final draft. There are many ways that it could be done to make it less deadly.

It looks like the default BRP method to gain power rolls is if you overcome someone with a higher power than yours OR if you successfully resist someone with a higher power. Which sounds pretty good to me.

Great! Thanks!

Here is something that is a little different. You can look up the chapters in either decimal or binary. If you look at the bottom edge of the page you will see four dots. Some are grey and some are black. Chapter 1 *000 Chapter 2 0*00 Chapter 3 **00 Chapter 4 00*0 Chapter 5 *0*0 etc... Remember, there are only 10 types of people in the world. Those that understand binary and those that don't. :thumb:

Looking at my copy, I am concerned about the Control spell. Am I reading this right? One level cost one Power Point and allows you to take control of one person with a POW vs. POW roll. If successful "This control is total - the target cannot speak or perform any voluntary action other than those specified by your character." It says nothing about actions that the character might be violently opposed to, such as drawing his own dagger and slitting his own throat, or forcing a mother to toss her baby in front of a speeding carriage. This seems pretty harsh for just one power point! Add more levels and it just gets worse! 5 power points and you can have 5 people commit suicide simultaneously! :eek: In the hands of a villain with a high POW this can be a total party kill in one round. Is this being changed in the final draft? I was thinking maybe the spell could only effect one person and each level of the spell allowed you to effect 3 POW. So in order to effect a person with 14 POW you would need to put 5 points into the spell AND overcome his POW with a resistance test. Oh, also I was thinking of allowing a resistance roll every round to break out. Plus another one if you wanted to force someone to do something really horrible. So it would take three rolls to get someone to commit suicide. First roll to get him under control, then next round he would try to break free (subconsciously of course) then you would command him to kill himself. He would make a final resistance roll, if he failed that, he's dead.

I looked it up and a Str of 75 would probably be toward the upper limit, though if you rolled well and didn't spend points on anything else you might get to 100. Even with an 18 Siz that would be a Damage Bonus of 5d6 with 75 Str and 6d6 with 100 Str. For Superheroic you get to add all your Characteristics together and that is how many points you have to spend. Super Characteristic (Strength) costs one for one.

When you get them I would be curious to know what numbers you got.

Great news. That is what I received and my book showed up a couple days later.

I think something was definitely up with their ordering system. I waited until the last Thursday before they turned off "Free Shipping" to order my book and I received it on the 22nd. I also received an e-mail when it shipped and the web page showed the status as "Shipped". So my order went through like clockwork. Since I am essentially a nobody to them I highly doubt that I received special treatment. Something just made my order easier for them to ship. I am inclined to believe that something went wrong with their system and they had to work through it to get to everyones order. Just a theory, but that's all I can think of right now. Here is a question, do you know if your card has already been charged for the book? I also noticed that Zane posted in a new thread that he received a reply from Chaosium, so that is something.

I never read any planetary romance books and actually never even heard of it until this thread. So I decided to check it out. Gor actually made me curious because people were panning it, but after some research I can see why. :shocked: I think I will pass on Gor. I did find A Princess of Mars on-line for free at thefreelibrary.com. I am on chapter 8 and it is a fun read so far. Burroughs died in 1950, so it has been more than fifty years. I guess the copyright has expired? Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess of Mars: List of contents - Free Online Library

I bought both Rolemaster and Spacemaster and looked them over, but both systems seemed too complex and chart heavy for me. I have played Ars Magica a couple times and it seemed pretty good, but no one was willing to put in the time to develop a campaign.

Its okay. Simple counting game, very random. My son, Jack, liked it. He's three. Downside is if you bump the board, cherries go rolling around everywhere and can be a pain to try to put back where they belong. :ohwell:

I received mine just today. 30 of 420. I wonder how many they sold? I'm hoping they sold them all, as that would be a good indication that the final product would also sell well. Of course I know some of the people here are waiting for the final product. All of mine friends are waiting as well.

I recently mentioned in the BRP yahoo group that I didn't think MRQ and BRP were really compatible at all, but if a good portion of the book is background and setting information it could work alright. Having it's own magic system will certainly help. Still, I have had such a negative experience with MRQ that it would take a lot to get me to pay money for a product that supports their line. :ohwell: Best of luck with it though! I will take a look when it comes out to see if it changes my mind.

We always made sure to have an offensive spirit spell when we made characters. A little on the munchkin side, but hey, it worked. Plus spirits were common, so we received power rolls that way as well. Plus we gave power rolls for participating in religious ceremonies. As for alternatives, I like the roll for successfully resisting spells. We never used the luck roll that much, so it wouldn't be ideal for us, but you might like it. In RQ we came up with our own rules for truestone, and one of them was that you could put permanent power into a blank truestone and then someone else could take it out to use for ritual spells, particularly enchanting. Eventually we got hold of some and then went around buying power from people. It wasn't quite that easy though. Basically you were buying small parts of a person's soul, so it was kinda shady. We typically approached down-and-out sorts and offered them a large sum of money to participate with no questions asked. We also did this far from home so if someone started shouting about "Soul Stealers" we could run for it. Of course we were powerful enough that we probably could take out the whole town, village, hamlet, etc., but we really weren't evil and didn't want to harm innocents if it could be avoided.

I've played Candyland and Hi Ho! Cherry-O! recently. :thumb:

Interesting topic! First, the games I played a lot of. BRP games: RQ 2 and 3 for many, many years (in Glorantha and Questworld). CoC, several adventures, needed a new character each time. Non-BRP games: D&D 3.0 and 3.5 Champions ShadowRun The Fantasy Trip (Wizards, Melee and Into the Labyrinth) Other games that I played for a while, but not really a full campaign. BRP: Stormbringer 1 Ringworld Non-BRP: AD&D 1st (What I started playing RPGs with) Vampire: The Masquerade Fading Suns Paranoia Middle-Earth Role-Playing (MERP) Fantasy Hero Cyberpunk Psi World Palladium Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG (Uh, well, I was in high school and well...) Robotech RPG (Damn, this is embarassing...) I'd better stop. Seriously though, I have some of the original TMNT comics and graphic novels and I have the entire Robotech series on DVD. They were pretty cool when I was 15 or 16. I have a ton of other games, some of which I played once or twice and some I ended up not playing at all. Won't bother to list them all.

Fair enough. The table of contents is nice, but the index looks like it will be really helpful.

Looks absolutely great! Don't change a thing! Seriously, I couldn't ask for anything more. :thumb: I really don't understand the font thing. To me it is like not liking the color red. Fine, you don't like red, that doesn't mean that other people shouldn't. I would also like more previews, but if you need to get the book back with those corrections, by all means do that instead. We need that book published as quick as possible. Thanks again!

Were Dragonlance fiction books were successful? yes. Did Dragonlance have RPG and supplements? Yes. Was the Dragonlance RPG successful? No. At least not compared to GH and FR. WotC did put out a campaign book for Dragonlance D20. It just didn't sell well enough to continue to support. I think I got the book at 80% off when they closed the WotC/Game Keeper stores. (Damn Hasbro!) Indeed, "successful" is a relative term. So I can not understand how you can say that D&D settings are not successful. Compared to every setting ever produced, for any RPG ever, FR has out sold them all. How is that not successful?