Ian Absentia

Yes, yes. I expect to see a report on my desk Monday morning. !i!

It died the miserable little fear-mongering death it deserved, just like all of the No, THEY Did It counter-conspiracies will. There are some very good and very engaging books out there on virology and epidemiology and the very natural and entirely accidental things that happen when humans and livestock live together. Check one or two out, relax, think of others, and be sensible. The CDC link is a nice touch. Google is also pitching in with the very simple Do The Five tips on their opening page: https://www.google.com/search?q=coronavirus+tips&fbx=dothefive Be cool and be good, people. !i!

Dude, no. I think that was supposed to be a smiley at the end there, but now's not the time for irresponsible conspiracy theories. !i! [Edit: In fact, there's never an appropriate time for irresponsible conspiracy theories. I reckon that era of armchair entertainment needs to have the curtain drawn. It's so...'90s.]

Definitely for Griffin Island, which I found perplexing at the time in light of my familiarity with Griffin Mountain. At the risk of revealing a very obscure spoiler (Bill, look away -- I'm not going to use the code) they were odd Mostali, effectively in mecha suits. !i!

Indeed, it will behoove a deeply motivated soul to make the case for moving any proposal up the production schedule. Or to negotiate a license to produce a project independently. If a project is good enough and people want it, it'll find a way to market. !i!

Perhaps more succinctly, @g33k, Chaosium is approaching all current and future projects in a very businesslike fashion. As you discuss above, a project needs to support itself, its developers, and additional product development through actual sales. I can say with a certain confidence that these are still very much works of love, but yes, it's a tough love that pays the bills. I agree entirely with your final Point B, that Future World and the body of BRP mechanics from Ringworld could be the foundation of an incredible Sci-Fi roleplaying game, and that it'll need to be tied to a setting to play right out of the box. Is that another space opera/fantasy setting? A far future, speculative technology setting? Or a near-future, real-tech Expanse-like game as discussed in another recent thread? What do people want these days? And how can BRP deliver that thing that they can't get elsewhere? If anyone has a real vision, write up a plan, and pitch that idea! !i!

The old GDW rules for Traveller -- particularly the standalone Snapshot rules -- were surprisingly solid for hand-to-hand and gun combat in micro-gravity, and could be ported to other games fairly easily as a mini-system. They didn't get wrapped up in the specific physics so much as abstracting: How well your character understood the physics of zero-G; How extreme your actions are; and, The chance that you'll go spiraling out of control and hurt yourself. "Accelerator" ammo turned out to be a great thing -- rocket-propelled ammunition that fires from the gun at low velocity, then accelerates under its own propulsion after exiting the muzzle. It's laughable crap under normal circumstances, until you realise that firing a normal slug-throwing gun in zero-G is like wrapping your arms around a rocket. But none of this is helping out in the immediate sense, is it? !i!

@g33k, you say it's likely to be a "short campaign". Give us a few quick bullets of the Expanse-like features or events you and your friends want to see over a half-dozen sessions. Maybe we can narrow down sources for you. Alot of the appeal of The Expanse is more descriptive in nature, and simulationist rules aren't really needed until you want to stage a space battle factoring in thrust vectors, conservation of momentum, and mass drivers instead of lasers - for which I'd go really old school and suggest Triplanetary. !i! [Edit: Damns! SJG's re-release of Triplanetary is already OOP. I started to think that you could just play that with BRP-based roleplaying sessions tying scenarios together.]

By "for The Expanse" I assume you mean rules for realistic physics in micro-gravity, conservation of momentum, and contained atmospheres? The stuff that most Sci-Fi games gloss over or allow convenient "handwavium" options? I'm not aware of any BRP options, but would die for one if it's out there. When I get this itch (and I do on occasion), I go to my old GURPS: Transhuman Space books. I can't stand GURPS mechanics, but they scale closely enough to BRP to cobble conversions together. And, for the most part, most issues regarding gravity and atmosphere are for setting and theme. Possibly as difficult to find as Ringworld is FASA's Grav-Ball, which might be useful for hand-to-hand combat in micro-gravity. More recently, for Mongoose's lacklustre iteration of Traveller is a homebrewed product called Orbital, which I won't recommend out of difference of opinion with the author. I've seen M-Space, which cleaves very closely to the structure set by Traveller, so I'd recommend it as a start. It doesn't address the crunchy bits I mentioned above, though, which is what sets The Expanse apart from Star Wars. !i! [Edit: Further comments upon reflection... I have Grav-Ball. It's an artifact very much of the early '80s, and fun from a nostalgic point of view, but not very good. Don't waste your time or money looking for it. I'm being petty about Orbital. It may prove a very concise distillation of the Expanse-like features you're looking for, and I think you can find it easily and relatively cheaply. The author has put a lot of effort into assembling rules and background for realistic space adventure (presumably his own work in this case). Definitely not BRP, though.]

My money is on a younger Marlon Brando. But, you know, six of one, half dozen the other. !i!

It's been ages since I've played, but isn't the Troupe Play model where there's generally one GM, but individual players control a rotating cast of characters depending on the needs of the story? Kind of the opposite of the OP. I recall rotating GMs, though, from way back in our 1e AD&D days. Tried it in our Vampire games, too. It worked fairly well, but the problems that arose were twofold: 1) Our different GMs had not only different gaming styles, but different power scales in application of the rules. The same set of rules for imaginary situations can provide significantly different results depending on who's adjudicating them and how they envision and portray the world. So the same characters would find themselves behaving differently in response, sometimes with effectively different abilities. 2) As an outgrowth of the first point, players tended to prefer either one GM over another, or playing a different character when switching GMs. The real practical result was that one player would GM one game while another would run a different title entirely. !i!

For those with an interest, it may be worthwhile to look up some of Greg's public comments on the release of Hero Wars (2000) and HeroQuest (2003) for a more positive take on the backdrop to the story, how he wanted to see Glorantha portrayed in game mechanics. Go straight to the preface/foreword of either edition, and there are several interviews still available online. It doesn't speak to what he disliked about the earlier proposed rules draft, but it does underscore features that we see making a strong influence on the current iteration of the rules in RQG. !i! [Edit: It's also highly instructive to look at King Arthur Pendragon, his other work of love, in which you can also see a strong influence on RQG.]

Okay, but I'm pretty sure "the cruel claws of a ruthless, hostile foreign dictatorship" leans heavily into political territory. So, shine on. !i!

Not speaking for @davecake, the implausibility (and he describes it in his post above) is in the doctrine defining reality without exception. I've known a couple of former Catholic nuns who found love other than Jesus to raise families, and am familiar with at least one Episcopalian priest who did so as well. The doctrine and vows are ideal virtues; their actual behavior is another matter. How the temple of Babeester Gor deals with earthly transgressions likely differs from the Catholic or Episcopalian churches, but I think we're all in agreement that the "implausible" part is that the transgressions simply don't happen. !i!

Agreed, and it isn't necessarily my place to tut-tut Lloyd, but...c'mon. As a fan of moral ambiguity -- heroes who understand the ramifications of their actions, villains who perceive themselves as agents of a greater good -- I'll largely concede this point. Many audiences want clarity in who to root for and against. But the evil king is a tyrant for a reason -- he's trying to create stability among a fractious populace in a violent and uncertain world. The wicked stepmother is trying to secure her own security and possibly that of children of her own by pushing out the woodsman's offspring from a previous marriage. But, yes, they're both definitely still assholes. That sympathy I have for them makes the position I take against them that much more poignant. More to the point, I caution against games descending into misery tourism, the flip-side of violence porn. The "murder hobo" trope you cited is a very real phenomenon, and so are "dystopian futures" with no sensible rationale. I know that some want to just "leave the real world problems behind for a couple of hours" and make-believe with friends while eating snacks, but it's not asking too much for context that makes sense. Just tell me: Why are the space-cops brutes? And be prepared -- as a player, I may ask a lot more questions. !i!

Good lord, dude, even I'll have to ask you to rephrase that. Your thesis in the OP is too simple: The social class/caste/race at the top of the hierarchy are callous and brutal, so who are the candidates for them to brutalise? The more relevant question is: What motivates the ones at the top of the hierarchy to be brutal and oppressive to those lower on the ladder? Real or perceived, what is it about them and their relationship to the oppressed classes that causes them to resort to harassment and violence as a means of imposing social order over more cooperative means? Because the counter-thesis is perhaps even more uncomfortable: Why should we be okay with creating fictitious, motiveless victims of social injustice on a whim for the purpose of entertainment? And why would we want to subject our players to that? !i!

Or arrows... !i!

Rewrite Argrath as a duck and I'll be wholly on board with the post-1625 timeline. !i!

Perhaps the larger question is: Are the Sanity rules in CoC written specifically to reflect human conditions of mental health? The long-standing position on human cultists of the various Mythos gods is that they have Sanity = 0, and while functional as NPCs, are effectively unplayable as characters. Sanity rolls are unnecessary or redundant for them. I'd assume that any servitor race is going to operate under similar assumptions. !i!

It's still out there! Albeit under a different name. I took a bit of heat for criticising it back in the day. It was a weird iterative step farther away from Glorantha. !i!

Yeah, all that grim-dark vengeance... So a Humakti, a Babeester Gori, and a Zorak Zorani walk into a bar. The Yanafal Tarnils bartender says, "Hey, why the long faces?" !i!

Which doesn't mean Bohemond's interpretation doesn't vary from how they're popularly perceived and discussed. !i!

I think that's exactly it. With another day's perspective, I believe I started to get a little too God-Learnery about it, trying to make all the pieces fit together neatly. And that may just be an artifact of mortals trying to look backward into the Godtime. Maybe it's like reading a Philip K. Dick novella in reverse -- instead of being able to see how the present fans out into a multitude of possible futures, you see how a multitude of possible pasts resolved into the present. Or, you know...something. So I'm back to v1.3 as originally presented. The first three paragraphs succeed in answering on a mythological level the questions posed by @Darius West in the OP: Are there dogs in Prax, and what role do they play in society? The main body of the myth presents the story from the Praxians' point of view, how Waha's brother became a dog. The specific identities and origins don't matter that much -- it's just Waha's brother, another child of Eiritha, and he's the source of dogs in Praxian culture. The last paragraph is a bridge myth, how the Praxians adopt the somewhat limited role of the hunter, Foundchild, into their society, and with Foundchild, his canine compatriot. To the Praxians, this makes fine sense: Waha's brother the dog is also Foundchild's adoptive "Brother Dog" -- that's how we got hunting dogs in Prax in addition to camp and guard dogs. To the Balazarings, though, this version sounds a little hinky -- as far as they know, Brother Dog was always a dog, son of Rowdril -- but not entirely irreconcilable. Brother Dog himself is fine with either version, because here in linear Time it let's him do what he does best. !i!

Wait a minute here...I think you may be right. But does that make Waha a herd mammal? I mean, yeah, he's the son of the "mother of cattle" (The Glorantha Sourcebook) and the Storm Bull, but aside from being depicted as wearing a horned helmet I've never read any reference to him bearing a beast-like form. He's a god -- is he fixed to a particular form? And that takes us back to the lineage of Rowdril, the first "true dog". Is he restricted to a conventional canine form, or can he walk about in man-form while bearing the essence of a true dog? Must all of his divine offspring also start out locked into beast-form? This is where my myth played loosey-goosey with the nature of divinity and the Godtime. Things don't start out fixed until a mythopoeic event happens that locks it down. Eiritha had any number of lovers before she gave it up to marry Storm Bull (again, all the way back to Cults of Prax). Were all of them cattle-themed, too? Probably not. And did she have other offspring by any of those earlier paramours? I haven't read anything to the contrary, so...sure. And were all of those other offspring necessarily "cattle"? Maybe not. While marriage to Storm Bull and giving birth to the various cattle of Prax has become her defining myth, there are plenty of other possibilities that preceded it. If some other god came along, like, say, Rowdril, and turned on the charm in the Godtime before Storm Bull, she might have had one or more previous children who, like Waha, are beast-oriented, but not in beast-form. Baby, I'm sticking with v1.4 and putting an Eritha-Rowdril tryst back on the table. !i!

Yeah, I was pretty sure the name Jajagappa wasn't a coincidence. 😄 I realised that roping in Eiritha as the mother of a dog was going to be a stretch, but I really wanted to land that connection to Waha turning his brother into a dog. Ernalda as the mother would make him Waha's uncle. The real rub is that, according to your genealogy, Grodrulf/Brother Dog is born a dog via Rowdril, leaving no room for the Waha transformation narrative. Thanks -- that's where I really felt rubber touch the runway. You may be right, and this is one of those three-blind-monks-feeling-up-an-elephant situations. On the trunk-and-tusks end, the Balazarings remember that Grodrulf was always a dog; on the ass-end, the Praxians remember how he was turned into one by Waha. Hmm. I'm feeling v1.5* coming on. !i! [*v1.4 was the Eiritha-Rowdril connection. I need to ruminate on this "Waha's brother" angle some more.]