mrk

I'm not sure what your saying. Have I used the sword in other RPG'S? I've never had a Character of mine ever wield Stormbringer, but one or two "retired" PC's I still own, have a few original artifact cards when they ventured in Dave's home games plus from some other campaigns GM'ed by people who played with him. That's not counting the xerox copies I already have. Never heard of a RPG called Bloodlust.

It's pretty much like how Stormbringer has been written everywhere else: high attack factor, high damage factor, drains a percentage of your life points,ect.

I was fun times indeed. Just to give you an idea, from 79 to 83, David would host "Grimcon". It was the official Arduin convention and he'd have all the top GM's in the Bay Area running a game or two for the entire three days. You also had the "Arduin Tournament Dungeon". Each year, David would create for the Con some new hellish dungeon complex that were hand-drawn on a dozen GIANT-SIZE maps with a GM each running ten or more players who were given a 1st level character to play that David would actually write up himself complete with a bio and history( He must of written over a hundred PC's to give out). If you could survive the first round and make it to the second and third, the final game would be GM'ed by David himself and who ever survived would win some prize and their character would have the title of a lord and marry into the royal family. It's one of the reasons why I like David's CoC scenarios so very much. They remind me a bit of those Tournament Dungeons and what an Arduin game was like: a sinister roller coaster that was fun as hell to ride.

I wholly agree. The Arduin Dungeons could of been a lot better and I wish he would of fleshed them out even more like Gygax did with his great early dungeons like Hidden Shrine and Tomb of Horrors, but he wanted to keep them basic and let the GM fill in the rest. I do know he wasn't completely happy with the final products and I'm sure he would of rewritten them again if he had the chance. An interesting thing about the Arduin Dungeons is their completely different then the one's he used in his home games and some people who were familar with the published dungeons were sometimes "shocked" by the differences when they had a PC entering one for the first time. None the less, there's still a lot of coolness and neat ideas within them. Nobody could fill-in a piece of graph paper like David could! Yeah, he was a huge Moorcock fan and added a lot of Elric material to his campaign. I actually have a copy of Stormbringer he wrote up as an artifact card.

Now that Goodman is publishing CoC material, why not work out a deal and have them do some fantasy based supplement for BRP? I've really liked what they've done with their Dungeon Crawl modules and believe they could put together a supplement that would satisfy the needs for "traditional fantasy". Either way, something needs to be done.

All the special abilities, oddities, ect. Are great fun, but I like the world itself and how different it is to everyone else's. Afterall what sounds like a REAL dungeon: Skull Tower or the Temple of Elemental Evil? I'll take door number one please.

If your using BRP, then you don't need to use much of Arduin's game mechanics. The only thing you might have to work out is how you would convert the spells. Arduin's manna point system works a lot differently then how magic is depicted in BRP.

But that's what's so cool about Dave's CoC work. He went against the grain of a traditional Cthulhu scenaro and added a bit of a dungeon crawl aspect to them. Plus the stories themselves are pretty dam wicked. Like in, "The Carnival" , were the people who work their are much more horrific then the monsters lurking below. Also some of the prose he wrote in the scenarios showed he had the potential of becoming a very good fantasy novelist. He was a rough diamond in the making and I think he had stayed with us longer he would of made it on some sort of mainstream level the way Sandy Peterson did with Id Software and maybe even higher. I heard of one fairly big film producer that's an admire of his work and the people at Blizzard are fans too. He even had a dedication in the credits of the first Diablo game. One last thing about whose CoC scenarios. With a little tinkering and changes, if you take the mound from Black Devil Mountain and combine it with the caverns level from The Carnival, you have one very nasty dungeon complex! One Player I ran it through told me that was the nastiest place he's been in since Tomb Of Horrors. I took it as a complement.

That said, the original rules are ment to be modular. You should use only whatever you want or fits into your campaign. My world is greatly influenced by Davids and I use much of his rules, but I don't use a majority of his monsters or things that originated on his world. An example being his Star Power Mage, I like the class very much but because they never existed on my world I don't let people play them unless the character originated from somewhere else. Same with a tankard of Rumble Tummy ale... ...but it's good tasting stuff I must say

The Complete Arduin books were taken from Davids magnum opus " Arduin, Bloody, Arduin"( what a great title) and edited down to the two Complete Arduin books. Most of it is his, but some things( like the Kthoi write up) were done by one of the editors and there's quite a bit of stuff they left out as they had plans to put a third book together. Can't say the same about much of Emperors choice "new" material. Especially their world book of Khass as it wasn't even written by David and just someone else's "interpretation" who for that matter never even new him or played with any of his key players. What little is actually authentic, was simple pulled out of the AG's, rewritten, and included a rendition of the original map of the main continent were Arduin is located. The rest is someone else's ideas ( sigh).

I was a friend of David's from long ago and even own quite a bit of unpublished material. All of it is wonderful to have, but my my most prized possession is an extremely rare 1st edition of AG 7 that he gave to me containing a write up on the Cult of the Crimson Kiss which was quickly pulled by the publishers on later editions. But that's another story... David really was a great fantasist and game designer. Everything that David wrote in the Arduin Grimoires didn't even amount to 1% of what was contained in his world. He told me once a few months before he died that only 25% of the mysteries of Arduin were actually discovered after 14 years of gaming and maybe about 5% of the world itself. He was a master at creating maps and had not just Arduin, but over half a dozen countries that he hand drew personally plus all the continents, Dungeons, cities,ect. He even had THREE different maps of Arduin that were set in various times and eras. Emperors choice sells the prime Arduin map. It's not as nice as the original was, but it's worth purchasing. Especially when you see how brilliant David was when it came to creating really cool names. One last thing I need to point out is this label that Arduin was always monty hall and over the top. Sure there was some serious power gaming going on at times, but the majority of his game sessions were more in the low and medium level range ( you would be shocked to see just how tame his own PC's were if you were to look at the actual character sheets). Even more important, David had a really good understand of how his world worked and wouldn't just put "anything" there for the sake of it--It HAD to have a reason for it's existence--and a good one at that. Even though he envisioned Arduin as sort of a nexus hub to many worlds and a melting pot for all sorts of races, technology, cultures, ect. There was an order to the chaos.

My Lord of the Zombies in my own campaign world is loosely based on the loa/voodoo demigod Baron Samedi. In a game I ran once, some PC's got into a fight with a group of cultist and lost a fellow adventure in the battle which they didn't have time to retrieve his body. A year later they went back to the same place and sure enough found their ex- comrade had been turned into a zombie. It kinda creeped out the player seeing this dead PC brought back as an undead minion Anyway, here's a great image of what I imagined the Lord of the Zombie would look like ( thank u Marvel ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brothervoddoo.jpg

...i'd even say now it's become undead

I believe things will pick up. With Goodman Games doing CoC books, hopefully more people will be interested in BRP. I'd for one love to see them add BRP rules to their new Death Dealer book!

20'th Century Fox has always had a reputation of micro managing everone to death as well as not having faith in many of their projects. They also are credited for three of the biggest financial blunders of all time in Hollywood that made them loose billions of dollars.