Agentorange

Generally 3 to 6 players. If at the lower end then two characters each as it's very easy to die in RQ/BRP games. If you've got 5 to 6 players then one character each and hope for the best

yeah, and they're Heinz baked beans as well, none of your cheap rubbish ! Joking aside, there's still a lot of stuff that Chaosium haven't released yet that would massively expand the sorcery side of things with very little effort. It would seem a bit pointless reinventing the wheel with magic systems if they intend to release a BRP companion ( or similiar ) with that stuff in. So some judicious mails to Chaosium might clear the waters as to where to concentrate your efforts.:thumb:

No money ? What a lightweight ! It's just means you live on baked beans, water and gruel for a month ( with that diet you'll be able to supply your own heating, the beans should help there )

We didn't get Voltron over here in the UK, mind you we did have the clangers..... www.clangers.co.uk With hindsight it is clear that the Skymoos are in fact green cthulthoid moonbeasts

It might be worth talking to chaosium about this a bit more. The BRP sorcery is based on the Elric game sorcery and the Bronze Grimoire supplement, there's still a lot of spells from those two books that didn't appear in the BRP book and the Bronze Grimoire especially had sections on necromancy and runic sorcery. So if you've got the cash and haven't got the books it might well be useful to shell out the shekels and get copies

I think you're right, specialist might well be a better term, each as you say could be very powerful, but limited by the fields they work in. Your average alchemist isn't going to be big on field work ( thats what player characters are for after all.. ) but could be quite powerful in their way. Did you ever play Pendragon ? A lot of the magicians in that game had a very druidic feel to them yet they were pretty powerful. I think that BRP (and RQ ) have quite a gritty feel to them and Druids casting magical mists and ordering large animals to leap on people and chew chunks out of them always felt like a good match for those games .

Do both, would be my inclination, after all nature isn't of necessity benign and hippy like. Storms, earthquakes, typhoons etc are all forces of nature and there's nothing benign about them....Lions, Tigers and Puma's are all natural animals but you certainly wouldn't want one of them eyeing you up for dinner. I like the idea of a magic supplement for BRP as the magic systems as presented are fairly basic. Do Illusionists, Alchemists etc have to be minor magics though ? I can see where an Alchemist capable of working with magical substances could be a very powerful force, likewise with Druids and so on there's a lot of scope there. I bought Mongoose publishing two druid books for D20 and there's a lot of good stuff there which made the class pretty powerful in it's own way. plenty of good ideas about seasonal magic, holy places, totemic animals and other bits and pieces.

I'm hanging out for the dead tree version, I know this makes me old fashioned but you can't slob out on the sofa with a PDF ( yeah, yeah I know I can print it but it's not the same )

That would be the chap:D

I think this is the solution, just downgrade the sturdiness of the shield and go with the attack and parry matrix. There were two things that made me consider the whole idea. Firstly if anybody has read Bernard Cornwalls swordsong series ( set in dark ages England, King Alfred etc etc ) there are references to wooden shields being hacked apart in combat, and following on from that in The Thirteenth warrior with Antonio Banderias ( cheesy but fun ) you can see this when one of the viking warriors is fighting his duel with one of Hrothgars henchmen ( owain possibly ? )

In the BRP book it mentions that primitive shields are generally made of hide ( I'm thinking a kind of Zulu shield here I guess ) yet they actually have a higher AP than plate armour.....which seems kind of nonsensical to me. I can see them providing cover for a large chunk of the body, but I'm having a willing suspension of disbelief failure with the AP. Any thoughts ?:confused:

Puck, I think the others are right about the need for a name change. As regards the magic section being to big, would it be possible to split it into essential and non essential stuff and simply release the non essential stuff later as part of a supplement of additional material ?

A couple of things confused me when I read through the monograph guidelines 1) No use of third party mapping programmes, since campaign cartographer ( for example ) gives express permission to use the software in both private and professional work, how does the licensing problem occur ? 2) All artwork must be original. If for example I was doing a monograph on the Etruscans, does this mean I can't use public domain photo's and artwork, would I laboriously have to draw every single vase, falchion, bronze helmet etc etc from scratch, when there is ample open source/public domain artwork out there which is miles better than anything I'm ever going to be able to produce? What's the reasoning behind this ?:confused:

Thanks for that Sarah, pretty much explains what I wanted to know. I guess the good thing about BRP is that it's very much a "building blocks " kind of game. That is you can add stuff on and make it as complicated or as easy as you like. So, you could easily have some kind of disease that affected the characters balance or some such, simply do a POT vs CON check and then subtract POTx5% from all agility skills ( or something similiar ). It's never going to kill the character in itself, but try crossing that rickety rope bridge over a crocodile infested ravine .......

For Jason or folks who own the zero edition, how does the new edition of BRP handle diseases and poisons ? I always felt that RQ3 was very simplistic in this regard: Five basic diseases which affected attributes and a simple POT vs POW roll to determine success. In this regard I have to say that I like the way MRQ does it, wider range of illnesses, greater range of potency and a broader selection of effects. So then... ?

We got Space above and Beyond over here in the UK. It was pretty popular...and then that was it ,no more. I can only assume it didn't play well in the states and the series got pulled. I always felt that in tone it was closer to Starship Troopers the book than Starship Troopers the movie ever was.

You start a new swords'n'sorcery book ( The sum of all men by David Farland ) which has an interesting magical system and the first thing you think isn't" hey thats clever" or "nice plot twist" but "now, how do I translate that into BRP/RQ mechanics?" sad......

First edition for me, and no doubt I'll buy all the supplements. I might not use them all but the anally retentive RPG collector in me will give me no other choice.

Completely off topic I know, but veteran science fiction author Arthur C Clarke died last week ( tuesday I think ) aged 90. I thought I'd mention it as lots of folk here seem to like SF ( including me ).

I've taken the plunge and ordered CC3 and The Tome of Ultimate Mapping !

I've more or less made up my mind to go for CC3 I suspect I'll find it tough going to start with as I'm not particularly technically minded ( I think any technology more advanced than a steam engine is the work of the devil ) But the potential rewards and depth of the software seem to be worth the effort. I do have one question though: is it possible to import scanned documents into CC3 ? I have a large hand drawn map of my own game world, and it would be nice to be able to convert it across without having to do the whole thing from scratch.

Thanks to everybody who commented, well.... On the one hand I'll openly admit I've had no experience with CAD software, scraped by at maths at school ( got my 'o' level but pursued it no further ) and from what people here have said there is a bit of a learning curve involved.....so I might be better off trying Autorealm On t'other hand CC3 does seem incredibly versatile, powerful and well supported and most important of all some of the maps are absolutely beautiful. I shall have to mull it over . but at present I can feel my credit card calling out: " use me, use me you know you want to :D" I've always liked maps and it was maps in RPG's that inspired me to start doing my own, specifically the ones in MERP and the one in the back of the RQ2 rule book showing Dragon Pass and Prax. That was a real revelation to me, that whole cartographical style was something I'd not seen before and it made a huge impression.

40, but young at heart * * or is that immature......

I don't know, you fall ill for a week and an entire shared world has popped into existance in your absence:D More to the point I'm considering forking out some money for Campaign Cartographer, I've always rather enjoyed making maps and have been thinking about buying CC for ages. Which folks here have got it and more important what do you think of it ? I always loved the maps done for Middle Earth Role Playing and I see that the guy who did them has done a set of symbols, colour palettes etc etc for CC that allows you to create MERP style maps in CC. I'm very tempted.....

I liked it as well, in fact I've been pretty impressed by Sceaptune Games stuff, I'm working on a review of the first in their Singleton Scenarios series, and also some of the Ronin Arts PDF's.