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I also have something I would put together as a submission.

For the record, I did a little paper on vakunja back in grad school and I’ve always felt they are a very beautiful animal.

I saw on Dustin’s blog that he is swamped and figured it would be better to ask here then hit him with yet another e-mail. I do hope it floats to the top of the to-do list – even if mine doesn’t make the cut I still want that monograph. Thanks for the news.

While the BRP adventure contest was under way, I keep thinking “gee, I would like to write one of those”, and then two weeks before the deadline – bang, I had an idea – wrote it up (my first ever attempt at writing an adventure for print), submitted it – and never heard another word. Has anyone else heard if their submissions were accepted? Just wondering…

Me too – that’s why I came up with the work-around of giving everyone POW/2 points which could go for magic or skills.

I downloaded the PDF – it is a 36 page free-be for an Indy game called “Donjon” – I have never heard of this game myself, so I can not say anything about it. The module (on page 25) states that it is a “homage” to D&D’s Hollow Earth setting. It appears to be about talking plants fighting talking bugs – but maybe I’m missing something. Although there is a little similarity between this and my mental image of your upcoming monograph – it seems to me that you are both just picking up the same underlying theme. I would think a simple change in the name and away you go. I still plan on buying your monograph.

Minor Omission: Page 48, the skill list by category table should list Perform as having specific specialties.

I hit on this problem from a slightly different angle a while back – basically as I read the Core Rules the balance for having Magic is that you start one power level lower; in a heroic level campaign your wizard starts as a normal level wizard (I’m looking at page 87 Powered Characters vs. Non-Powered Characters). This is a problem if you are running a normal-level game, as there is no lower level to drop the powered character to. I have been fiddling with this, and for my post-apoc game I have settled on letting everyone have access to the same laundry-list of powers, but adding to the list some “non-power” powers. For Example: All PCs get POW/2 points to spend on the following: [list of cool cyberware with point cost] [list of biological modifications with point cost] 1 Point: +25% in one skill 1 Point: Expert: The character can raise one skill to 90% rather then the usual cap of 75% during character generation. 1 Point: Gifted, the character gains a +3% special bonus to one skill category (Combat, Communication etc.) This way, if I do not want to run a cyborg or a mutant I can just dump my POW points into skills.

I am glad people like this – in my line of work the saying is “the third time you do something, automat it”. As I was porting all my old “house ruled” BRP games into the new system I just kept needing that doc. By the way, there is an error on the table on page 48. The skill “Performance” should be labeled as “Performance (Various)”. It is just a little thing I stumbled across while putting the template together.

I like that -- thanks!

I am going to include a version of the transform spell that has a longer duration, but only allows you to transform to a single organism – and I (as the GM) will keep control over what versions are available. Example: Transform to Wolf: Subject maintains mental attributes and skills, but has the body (and fighting capabilities) of a wolf. No equipment travels with the subject. Duration is casters POW in hours. Another version: Transform to Orc: All the subjects’ attributes remain the same – he simply becomes, physically, an orc for POW hours. Note: Each time the spell is cast, the subject is recognizable as the same orc he/she was the last time. This spell would allow the caster to explore a section of an old forest or sniff out a bandit lair without drawing too much attention – but in the game I run, a wolf is not likely to be a preferred form for fighting. Likewise, the orc spell could be used to infiltrate a group of orcs or even to create an alternate persona – but it doesn’t give the caster any combat advantages. The transformation becomes more of an information gathering spell.

Hello, I wanted to draw everyone’s attention to something I have added to the download section. I call it the “game template” and it is a MS Word doc that can easily be edited to create a players handout detailing certain unique elements in your game. There is more detailed discussion about the template on my blog (look on the boring blog – a players handout for character generation is a useful thing, but it is boring). Thanks, Rich

I hate it when I make a character that has useless skills. I’m not talking about skills that I failed to make relevant, but rather skills that had no chance of ever coming up in play –particularly when the skill is one that the GM doesn’t believe in. To combat this problem in my own games, I always supply the players with a skill list during character generation that includes “every skill I will call for, unless the action is driven by a player”. By this I mean that left to my own devices, these are all the skills that I think the PCs could possibly need, and if you the player take anything else, the burden will be on you to make it relevant. I don’t see this as limiting the players, but rather helping them. Many players do not want to push the bounds of a setting, and for them they have a simple guide in the form of the skill list, meanwhile those players that do have a good idea have a tool to help focus character development. For example, one of my “cannon” fantasy worlds I have been running for the last two decades has all the action focused in a high mountainous region called the Highpass. Now hundreds of people have played in the dozens of different campaigns that I have run over the years in this world – and the action has never gone onto the high seas. When I run high seas adventures I usually have three of four different seamanship related skills (ship-handling, navigation, boating, etc.). From time to time someone will want to run a sailor who has made his way into the region – that’s cool – but I don’t want to penalize the player by forcing him to buy three or four skills that will never be used just to fill out his back-story. So instead, we invent one skill, Sailing, and he puts some points into it and then focuses his remaining development on those skills on the list that would be relevant for a sailor. Following from my habit of curating the skill list, if you are using professions they all need to be modified to reflect the available skills. Additionally, since I am usually gaming at university clubs or other large groups and didn’t really have a single group of players – until recently, my occupation required me to move every year or so -- I like to provide some additional documentation about the game; this makes it easier on everyone, and we can all get to the fun faster. To that end, I have created a “Game Template” file which is available in the upload section. This template lists all the skills and professions form the BRP Core rules. For each game that I start, I would take the template and fill in the required bits, remove any unused skills from both the main list and the professions and add any new skills. I though others might find this a labor saving tool so I have made it available for down loads.

I hear you. I am working on converting my cannon fantasy world with the idea of putting it in the download section – that way new folks would have a “ready to go” setting if they wanted one – and I am porting my old FGU Aftermath world to BRP. Welcome to the BRP Central-Blog space.

It was just what I thought was meant by EDU being affected by “background”. The only other thing I could think of was that each character story would get its own base EDU and that didn’t sound very BRP-like to me.

Yeah, you are right – this is an error. I had taken it to mean “…your character’s age (described in step 3 page 19) and profession.” I figured it was up to the GM to concoct a little table like: [table]Age Range|Base EDU 15-19|7 20-24|8 25-29|9 30+|10 [/table] [table]Profession|Bonus Cop|+3 Scientist|+5 [/table] Hopefully some of the more knowledgeable types on this forum will clarify this.

I can’t say if it is fair or not, but that sounds like something I would do. The one caveat is, given the extra points, I would worry about people dumping on a stat and really jacking up the others; but I usually handle that with gentle correction during char gen. Have fun, Rich

Thanks! I’m hopeful that people developing some of the more complex submissions (like large worlds or conversions) will start using the blog as a way to highlight their work.

I wanted to add this to the record. After following this thread, I went ahead and picked up a copy of “Vagabond Voyaging” – including shipping it was less then $10. I ride a train to and from work each day and was able to read the book in just a few commutes. IMHO this is a great source book, not only for 1920’s and 30’s, but for classic Traveler. As I was reading the book it seemed to jive exactly with my impression of the typical Traveler adventure; a group of people thrown together on a ship having adventures. Of course, the author was suggesting much more mundane (particularly by 2008 standards) adventures, but the idea was there. Actually, I think even the tonnage of the ships was about the same – maybe a little smaller in Traveler. I have gotten more out of this $10 book then from many supplements costing a lot more.

Dude, you wrote 1,000 words on normal dogs – are you some sort of dog-freak? Not really, I don’t even own a dog. But I have been running a reasonable realist PA game since the dawn of time (think more like ‘Alas Babylon’ and less like ‘Mad Max’), and one thing that has come out of thinking about the setting is that dogs would regain their old place as mans best friend. In my game the world slowly fell into dysfunction over about 15 years (long back-story for this) and then the game is set 20 years later – my preferred game-play involves normal people who find themselves in interesting (and dangerous) situations. These games, like many, escalate in power but during the early phases characters are doing things like sneaking into gang hideouts or escaping from evil overlords (“release the hounds”) and the like. To that end, I have found having a little more detail regarding dogs as very useful. In practice, the tracking and guard dogs see the most game play with the occasional attack dog used by an NPC. Guard dogs are easy to keep, and not to hard to train – they create a simple alarm system for watching your hideout. Likewise, if you can afford the time and energy, some tracking dogs are useful if you need to follow someone through the ruin. In practice, my games are too deadly for a PC to keep an attack dog very long – sooner or latter he will use it on someone with a pistol, or even a security robot and that is the end of the dog.

Hello, If anyone happens to read this, I thought I would use the blog-space to explain what I am doing in the download section. I have run a particular Post-Apocalyptic game reasonably regularly since about 1981. This is not to say I have run one continuous game, but rather I have run countless different campaigns with different mechanics and different groups of players but always keeping certain core elements of the world that I would adapt and (hopefully) improve over time. This has left me with hundreds of pages of hand written notes, and about a hundred or so of typed notes. Much of the time my world has been run as either Aftermath, homebrew BRP or with mechanics I wrote myself. With the release of a new “cannon” BRP I would like to convert my world solely to BRP – just so I can have a game that is run in mechanics that are currently in publication! In a perfect world I would organize all this and finish typing it up and propose to Chaosium that it be published as a manuscript. But since gaming is my hobby and not vocation, I am not sure I will have the time to do that properly, so instead I am writing up one section at a time (particularly the sections that I think will be useful to other players) and posting them as I go. To begin with I am writing the mechanics that I need for the world – detailed firearms rules, and my next posting will be “normal dogs”… I hope people find things they can use, Rich

This is so funny – I just got to the battle of London tree this morning on the train, and here is a new thread about a world based partially on “Integral Trees” – I can’t wait!

The Encyclopedia of Arda does not have an entry for them (and it has a lot of entries), but they are still cool! Encyclopedia of Arda: Search

You know, downloading stuff only encourages him… Since no one has said anything particularly negative about my firearms upload, I thought I would try my hand at writing up some common weapons of WW-II. I hope people find this of interest.