Ian Absentia

And it's certainly better than being "turgid-era Chaosium". (Mea culpa!) "Doldrum-era" probably would've been more appropriate anyway. !i!

I've just been too polite to say anything about them. Consider them both ragged! It did, originally. Then rather like SuperWorld, it was eventually spun out into its own game...sort of. It was an amalgam of several of the different magic rules that were out there under the Chaosium imprint, most notably from Stormbringer/Elric! and Hawkmoon, (but also notably, not RuneQuest). !i!

Is the thread title a statement or a question? I agree with all of the points you make in its favor, and the several that aren't. It was a repurposed product released with little or no promotion, typical of many releases from turgid-era Chaosium. It's also semi-generic, which didn't reach out and grab a wide audience, following the explicitly generic BRP Big Gold Book, which kind of stole what little wind it had in its sails. !i!

Yeah, I don't know why I blanked on Dreamlands. I used it as the setting for a Tunnels & Trolls campaign that I ran ages ago. !i!

So, really, what you're asking is: Has anyone written a Sword & Sorcery adaptation or adventure for CoC7e? Not that I know of, though there's perennial talk of someone writing up a Zothique setting, and there's Pulp Cthulhu, which sorta-kinda ties in to the feeling of more fantastical and less horrific. You might want to have a look at Cthulhu Through the Ages for the Cthulhu Invictus, Dark Ages Cthulhu, and Mythic Iceland chapters. Each features a far less contemporary approach to the Mythos, though I don't know that it gets you much farther along than the BRP BGB. Still, at US$7.47, it's kind of a steal for general inspiration. !i!

Ask and ye shall receive... https://www.chaosium.com/content/FreePDFs/CoC 7/CHA23135-Conv - Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Conversion Guidelines.pdf !i!

Dragging this thread further off-topic, I've been leafing through several volumes of my set and I'm surprised to be reminded of the page count devoted to the dissection of Nazism and its connection to para-science and the occult. I'm also reminded that when these articles were written in the '60s and '70s, the political and psychic impact of WWII was still fresh in people's minds, as was the shock that a modern world power would so overtly employ occult symbolism and paraphernalia, as well as more covert practice, in a bid for domination. There's a tone of reckoning regarding Light<-->Grey<-->Dark magic, where does modern magic fall on this spectrum? It's definitely a snapshot of the era. !i!

In my home town, the personal collection of one "Manly P. Hall" was parted out to several small bookshops, some more esoteric than others. Crazy magical stuff that just looked goofy and ridiculously earnest to a budding teen skeptic with little pocket change, but that I realise now was kind of amazing. I did, however, stumble into the 24-volume collected set of MMM a few years later during the second round resales of Mr. Hall's literary estate. !i! [Edit: Never thought of looking up Manly P. Hall on the Internet before tonight. Turns out he died in 1990, nowhere near my home town. How his "Ex Libris" turned up in Bellingham in the '80s, I don't know. Also, upon closer inspection, my set of MMM appears to have not been part of his library.]

That's a whole lot of definitely-maybe mixed into one punch bowl. !i!

We can understand the disappointment among those who missed out on the "impromptu" notice, though, yes? !i!

I'd have written a letter to the publisher and/or author, politely requesting a clarification, and some weeks later probably gotten a simple and maybe even apologetic response clarifying the error in print. In fact, this very thing once happened exactly as described. It was a very pleasant experience, gratifying even. I've been lamenting the illusion of immediacy and accountability since I got my first mobile phone a couple of decades ago. A significant page count by my reckoning. !i!

One of the candidates I had in mind! Also, orchids came to mind (though the climate this far north probably isn't right) -- sometimes attracting pollinating beetles by producing odors that mimic breeding females or rotting meat. !i!

I have another entry for the Your Dumbest Theory thread (or maybe a new thread, "Your Dumbest Misinterpretation of Glorantha"): For some reason I had it in my head that the Stinking Forest was a term applied by non-Aldryami to the particular flora cultivated in the forest. Great, vulgar, malodorous blooms producing a perfume intoxicating to elves and the insects that pollinate them, but wretch-inducing to others, even the Uz. And I am totally wrong. Another decades-long blind spot punctured. My misinterpretation underscores the curious intersection between Aldryami and Uz -- insects. The Uz love 'em, of particular note the giant varieties, as semi-domesticated beasts and as food. Aldryami surely appreciate them, even the giant varieties, for their crucial roles in supporting plant pollination. Can't they see their common ground? !i!

Puddins. It really kind of begins and ends there. !i!

I'm enlisting playtesters to organise independent games and provide review. Mythras operates on a fundamentally similar base of mechanics to BRP, so the learning curve will be rather stepwise. I'll send you a private message shortly. !i!

Holy cats, I'd forgotten about Adventure 4: Leviathan. Wasn't that the product of the Games Workshop crew trying to figure out how to play Traveller, too? Sort of GDW's answer to Griffin Mountain. Yeah, the Belgarde Sojourn didn't really pull it all together cohesively. !i!

Dang, I'm not using my emojis again. I was agreeing with you, actually. Or at least disagreeing with the orthodoxy of informing you that your idea is fundamentally flawed while graciously allowing that maybe you enjoy that sort of thing. You know, "YMMV" and all that. Play on! !i!

See? The fact that we've elevated the conversation to the realm of boardgames fills me with joy! Why is Argrath such an asshole? Because he has to be in order for me to win the game. !i!

I've recently begun to think of the nature of gods as thematic templates, that when invoked are overlayed on the temporal world and cause events to trend according to the god's nature or will. Like a mix-tape, put it on at a party and you can expect the people to dance a certain way. The annoying thing about gods is that you can reliably expect them to behave a certain way, but with little or no deviation. Their ability to define the world defines their actions. So where do prophesies come from? To polish an old chestnut: mortals may be dumb, but they ain't stupid. And the gods may be vast, but they're predictable. Every time the gods are invoked on the mortal plane, events reliably proceed along largely consistent paths. Like speculative fiction writers, wise folk apply the predictable themes and superimpose them upon new generations. Plenty of room for error, but like Nostradamus or a 20th century weatherman, if your predictions approach anything like 30-40%, you're hailed as a seer. !i!

Is that the bar of entry for a dissenting opinion? Does actually playing them qualify? For what it's worth, I'm firmly against the misery tourism of playing out atrocity in a roleplaying game. Furthermore, I don't think anyone's promoted such a thing in this thread (maybe I'll need to read a little more closely). But atrocious events are clearly baked into the setting as atmosphere and backdrop by the writers. And, again, I'm surprised by the dismay that contemporary sensibilities might look upon these events and the characters that set them in motion as less-than-heroic. Argrath might well take a page from the infamous Jessica Rabbit: "I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way." !i!

Whew. For a moment there, I thought you were going to cut him some slack. But orthodoxy takes the day! !i!

Ian's and Rick's experiences with D&D-->Traveller-->BRP resonated with me, too. I did a year or so of AD&D 1e before discovering Traveller in the summer of 1980. I was very excited to find a Sci-Fi RPG, and really enjoyed the crisp, professional minimalism in its presentation. Our initial experience was similar to what others described. coming straight from a D&D dungeon-basher mentality, we quickly acquired a Scout ship and Battledress and engaged in a session or two of mayhem before realising that in a modernistic context we really felt like sociopaths. Then along came Supplement 4: Citizens of the Imperium, with a wider variety of character options and -- more importantly -- other rationales for operating ships. Two of our players opted for the Noble profession, both got a Yacht, we agreed to pool their resources to supe-up its performance, and the Spinward Marches were suddenly opened up for touring. Traveller became my stomping grounds as Referee/GM, and is where I really cut my teeth in developing that improvisational skill. It's also the game in which I so thoroughly understood the published setting that I could adapt as it evolved in publication and really see the 1s and 0s cascade in streams before my eyes. I got it. I could do anything with it. I spent countless hours designing ships, subsectors, solar systems, and populations of NPCs to make them spin. Sadly, the same group could never wrap their heads around Glorantha, so my efforts to start up games in that world fell flat, but they sure did take to Call of Cthulhu. From that game, really, BRP became my go-to set of mechanics to model anything in any scenario, and served as the foundation and framework for creating uncounted one-shots and mini-campaigns. !i!

Carbon Copy is currently preparing our v1.1 playtest of White Rabbit Green, a Mythras Gateway license project based in the Mythras Imperative ruleset, for release in the New Year 2021. If you have an interest in participating in early development playtest of a game of spiritual transmigration, transtemporal identity, and mystical transhumanism in the spirit of Cloud Atlas and The Wicked + The Damned, that plays like a mystical season of Doctor Who (only traveling via the Sefirot instead of in a TARDIS), drop me a message. !I!

Small consolation, but I understood you. RQ2 adventures are virtually compatible with RQG. You'd almost think it was intended by design. !i!

@Psullie gets it in One-Two-Three! Prettier art, too. !i!