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It is done! The PDF is on-line!

From the Infonomocon: That is not dead for which new versions come, And with strange eons unknown bugs go numb. --------------------------- Charlie said my latest test rebuild of R&R with Scrybus did not show the problem – I will resubmit the entire document soon.

The point buy system is Rubble and Ruin is the system from The Book in Yellow coupled with a short list of what characters can buy. There are two things that keep it “BRPish” in my mind. First, there are not too many points in play. A maxed out “powers” character (a cyborgs or nanopsionicist) will only have 18/2+3 or 12 points to spend – while the character with the least “powers” will have 3/2=2 points. Second, I included mundane “powers” so that a non-powers character can spend their POW/2 points on character development. If a PC has POW=10 or 5 points to spend, they can get some extra background skills, maybe raise a skill to 90% (instead of the NORMAL cap of 75%) – things like that; a few extra decisions in character generation, but nothing too complex.

Daybreak Tomorrow is based on an EMP attack against the US -- well that idea is in the news today: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/17/electronic-armageddon-emp_n_615638.html.

Wow – that was really nice to hear! The monograph as written was the result of a great deal of play – I mean decades of fiddling with the core ideas of the PA setting; running games with these mechanics or those; fiddling and constantly trying to improve my “signature” PA game. I wholeheartedly agree certain components put too much detail on this or that sub-area of the game. What I did when I wrote the monograph was I tried to create something that had both bits that were usable to the largest group of gamers I could manage and still playable as written. So, for example, the cybernetics and armor rules I had been using forever required damage by hit location, but for hit locations to keep the same “guns can both kill instantly or just scratch the PC a little” I needed the Risk system. Would I be offended if you dropped the parts you didn’t need and used core rules and a little common sense – not at all. Would I join you for a game where you were using your own combination of mechanics? In a heartbeat! My hope is that the monograph provides easy to use tools to allow you to put together your own PA game. There are a couple of points that I want to respond to “for the record”. Two things here – first in my day job I am a senior scientist at “a major Midwestern medical school” so I felt a certain obligation to include a little more detail here – to have a reasonably realistic set of medical mechanics available within BRP for anyone who wants/needs them. As such Health Care is really just a detail added for anyone who cares, likewise for Surgery – I don’t think it will come up that often (except when some PC decides he/she wants to open a clinic – you laugh, just wait, it will happen). Because of the scarcity of healing options, First Aid, EMT and Physician/Trauma Medicine are used to create a “scale” of healers. Everyone has a 30% chance of First Aid to fix those minor wounds. Some players will focus a little and take a -30% to gain the extra abilities of the EMT (EMT is effectively First Aid with a 0% basic and additional abilities like being able to safely move injured people). You could handle this differently of course. But then we get to the big guns, the physician/trauma doctor is a great person for a party that gets hurt a lot to have around – but given the restrictions on the skills it almost always requires a dedicated character. It allows the classic “fantasy” healer character – a dedicated character who can quickly get the group back in the game, but who has to be supported by a large and effective group. I would go a step further and encourage you to share your successes on this forum! The car construction is based heavily on the original Car Wars booklet transformed to 10 second combat rounds. It took some work for me to get use to car-fights in the BRP timeframe. I think it turned out okay. I like the idea of a generic setting that is customized to the game at hand. I arbitrarily restricted it to the US just to allow me to create a few broad “group names” like Free America. Every time a start a new game I carefully pick the location based on the type of action I want – my Rhode Island campaign had lots of boats and some underwater bits, while Chicago was endless expanses of flat rubble. It is a staple of fantasy games, but I like it in a PA setting – for certain campaign styles it is a fast and easy way to get into the game, and allows a players to have an anchor in the world were they can buy/sell and rest. I forgot pigs! See above. I will refrain from telling old gaming stories – but I have used these beasties in a lot of campaigns. Okay, just one. A buddy of mine decided he was going to try gaming for the first time, and he comes to my game. Shinny new character in hand we start the evenings adventure – deep in a partially collapsed bunker a W13 swoops in on the party and grabs the new guy. One of the other players freaks out and empties a magazine from a submachine gun into the beasty – misses the monster and hits the PC killing him instantly. Okay, maybe you had to be there  Thanks! It wouldn’t hurt my feelings if you posted a review on some of the other gaming forums...

Pigs – how could I have missed pigs? Rubble and Ruin started life in the 1980’s as an Aftermath game, and a staple Aftermath “monster” was the razorback. I was going to respond to your post with something like “oh yeah, just use the Boar or Razorback from The Book in Yellow page XYZ” – but when I went to check the page number what do I discover? No pigs in BRP! What to do? No problem, just grab the stats from RQ3 – but I don’t find them there. What about Monster Coliseum (or whatever it is called)? Didn’t find them there – nor even in CofC... So I’m setting watching late night TV and brooding about how I failed to include the noble post-apocalyptic pig in R&R and thinking about how I will have to come up with stats on my own – when suddenly much to my wife’s surprise (that would be my non-gamer wife) – I shout out “pig riders”. I give you now my version of the Razorback – as adapted from the RQ1 Tusker. Razorback The wild boar is a cunning animal with a reputation of turning on those hunting it. They exhibit indeterminate growth (like a gold fish they can just keep on growing) and can develop to a monstrous size. STR: 3D6+12 CON: 1D6+12 SIZ: 4D6+12 POW: 3D6 DEX: 1D6 Gore * 50% 2D6+2D6 Trample * 75% 4D6 to a downed foe * The boar cannot gore and trample the same opponent in the same round. Armor: 4 Point skin

I have not contacted the Dev List – that might be a good idea. I did update to the latest version (which had noticeable improvements in the way it wrote PDF files), rebuilt the test file and sent it off to Dustin and Charlie to see if Scrybus quietly fixed the source of my problem. That was late last week and no word back from Charlie yet.

I’ve submitted a Classic Fantasy adventure.

A good question – the powers in Rubble and Ruin were developed (for the most part) long before the new core rules and are the result of my pig-headed running of basically the same world over 25 years. Thus, they play well with each other (at least in my hands) – but when I ported them to the core rules I did not try to balance them against other powers. A lot of the powers converted exactly to the Book in Yellow, but many of them are grossly under powered. For example someone playing a nano-psionicist in a world with core psionics will be shorted – the psionicist will be able to do a lot more then a nano-psionicist. On the other hand, in a world without other psionic powers, nano-psionics are great; you can see into the next room, TK small objects, or heal wounds etc. Most of the biomods should match the core rules point for point (but I think I did reduce the costs on a few below core costs). If you are using damage by hit location then the cybernetics give more benefit then reflected in their cost, but this benefit is balanced against a lack of natural healing. So, in a game where characters can pop into a repair shop between encounters, the cyborgs are likely to be over-powered relative to other core powers. In the rubble finding parts to repair damaged cyber-limbs is a constant hassle for the powerful cyborgs characters. I hope this helps, Rich

It is completely off topic, but I get a kick out of seeing what you have done with parts of Rubble and Ruin – it was my hope that people would be able to find stuff that they could move over and fit into their own creations. Thanks for sharing, and I am looking forward to the next installment. By the way, how did you do the map?

It is my understanding that train robbers had to pick their locations carefully in order to be able to catch the train. For car chases I introduced the idea of maximum safe speed – traveling faster then the road allows will have risks even if you are under the maximum speed of the vehicle. A curve in the track or even a rough bridge may force a train to slow down enough that the robbers could catch up on horse back.

Oh the tragic tail of the Rubble and Ruin PDF. So when I did the layout I used an application called Scrybus which is an open source application that had all sorts of accolades at the time when I made the layout-software decision (and please note that this was my first book so I really had no background to guide my decision). So I did the layout and sent a PDF to Chaosium – they put together the file to send to the printer which worked great, and a PDF to go on-line. Unfortunately, the on-line PDF had issues – the Scrybus-generated PDF would not accept the objects Chaosium needed to add for the electronic version of the document (actually, it took them, but it knocked large blocks of text off their pages and rendered the book unreadable). I have tried everything I can think of to fix the problem at my end (short of getting a new application and doing a complete redo of the layout), the advise from the Scrybus forum boiled down to “get a new publisher”, and so we are left with hoping that Charlie can find a solution at his end. I asked about the problem two weeks ago and extended my offer to help in anyway I can and Dustin reassured me that they are working on it. I have this feeling that the answer is going to be that I will need to do a complete new layout in another application – but I have not yet brought myself to do that. I will post here as soon as I know anything new. Sorry for the inconvenience (I assure you, I want you to be able to get my book). Also, I can assure you that I will never do another layout in Scrybus.

I added Wilderness Survival to Rubble and Ruin – complete with a specialization in “ruins”... But that is just me.

I would point out that the Modern Equipment guide has a lot of material that would be useful for near-future global war type games. It does not have anything specific to T2000 but useful for that setting.

That’s unfortunate. What does the data look like further out?

As I drew it there, the relationship is from Rated Speed to Log Move. The idea was simple to show the linear relationship between these two variables. A sample calculation: Move 350 gives log(350) = 2.5441 Speed = 18. Y = 0.0593(18) + 1.4363 = 2.5037 which is approximately 2.5441 (within about 2% of the “true” value). That shows Speed to move – except you still have to take 10^Y to get the actual move value from a relative speed. But again, I was more interested in demonstrating the linear relationship between the log Move and relative speed. Hope this is clearer then mud.

I wasn’t sure how to add an image to a thread, so I put it on my blog here. My take is, if you ignore the first three data points you are looking at the log of Move giving the rated speed.

The link to the thread for this image is here

That will teach me to not have files open when I write something: Speed 1 = 10 MPH.

In general I think the mechanics are there to handle two separate events that occur in play – first a vehicle can come zooming through a ground combat, hence the MOV states, and second there may be a classic “chase”. Unless the setting is focused on some element of the vehicles I don’t worry too much about it. On the other hand, for post apocalyptic car chases in Rubble and Ruin I defined 1 MOV = 10 MPH (which is a useful scale for American automobiles), and I extended the chase rules to have a few extra spaces (in effect, it was slightly more complex, but that is the general idea). My goal was to take the core chase runs and add a little crunch that would marry into the car construction rules.

OC got shorted just because I was running in El Segundo and Long Beach – still I would hope you find some interesting material. I tried to present the background in a “city neutral” format, with El Segundo as an “example”. My hope is that each GM can build their own ruin using the book as a guide rather then a “setting”. Let me know how it works out for you.

Thank you -- and thanks to everyone who helped me with the project. It was a long haul but I am glad I did it.

I'll try and nudge Charlie.

Cool setting -- you may find Rubble and Ruin of interest. Also, I think we may have a new meme growing, you have the red mist and I have red sandstorms!