mrk

If your looking for a really great resouce for " The Green", you should take a look at " World of Kong: A Natural History of Skull Island ". It was written by Weta books( aka Peter Jackson's publishing company) and it's very good describing about all the florna and fauna on the Island and illustrated with some fantastic art. Here's a good review of it over at therpgsite:

http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=2371

Double Post.

Dragon Pass, now, and Prax - those are names to conjure with.Not to mention the fact that just about every games master I've ever known resented being dumped in the deep end with a world-wide background overview compared with a gentle introduction to a nicely detailed local area.

I agree sitting there and reading a bunch of books about a campaign or adventure your about to run and trying to understand as much of the world can be pretty daunting. But the more you know you more about the world, and the more your prepared you are, the better the GM your going to be( as well as being a good storyteller but that's for another thread) That's why I love to create my own game worlds because I get a lot of enjoyment thinking this stuff up( I think deep down I'm some sort of writer or novelist at heart, but nah I'm just a gamer). I know a lot of people think world building is hard, but it's really not-- It just takes time and ideas. A book that I think every gamer should read is "Imaginary Worlds" by Lin Carter and one of the best things in it that he recommends when you want to create a world from scratch ( with a little extra from me) is the following: draw a map of the entire world, draw another map where the majority of the campaign is going to happen( a kingdom is a good example), start thinking,writing, drawing, whatever comes your way about all the random things in the world ( gods, monster, cities, dungeons, histories,a list of good restaurants, ect,ect, ect ) and put everything in a filing cabinet, a binder, anything you can store all of this stuff; Get an idea, write it down. See a photograph that you like, put it in your file. Find a book that you think would be good for the campaign, keep it and use it as reference. And most important of all from the worlds of a Taoist Monk I read long ago: take what you like, discard what you don't like and make it your own. These are the same tricks that writers do all the time and it works very well and easily applies to gaming. Anyway, I'm done sitting on the mountain top :

Very true, badcat, very true. I think the best way to game Zothique is kind of treating it like a dungeon; that the whole world is one very nasty and twisted place but your excited to be there. If done right it could be a lot of fun!

If you want to buy the books get the complete anthologies. I've found the old Ballantine books going for as little as $5 bucks.

One nice thing about reading CAS's stories online is you have very quick access to a dictionary( especially if you use a mac)and you'll need it too! By far, Smith's vocabulary can be Shakespearean at best( he was offered no less then a Guggenheim fellowship at one point in his life) and if you don't know the meaning of the words he's using, you're missing out on half the dark, groovy, fun! One such story is "The Island of the Tortures". Many of the things Smith describes in the protagonist's ordeal is hair-raising just on it's own, but when you decipher the words he's using and understand the full context of them within the paragraph, It's absolutely and undeniably sick, twisted, insane, dementedly funny and totally F %@$*&G brilliant then you could ever imagine! If you think Meliboneans are an evil lot, wait untill you read "Tortures". They're just a bunch of lawful good clerics giving out milk and cookies to the poor compared with them folks!

I agree 100%. Too much weirdness makes the weird mundane. If every village in the world has elves and hobbits in them, then elves and hobbits aren't special no matter what the fluff says. I've always felt that be best way to make a setting feel magical is to start it in a plain ol' nothing special human town or village to give the players a baseline to judge the magical by.

And enough with the wierd names. I still don't know how to spell or pronouce Eberron*. Remember that the name "Glorantha" never appeared in a product name until third edition. Because of this, I don't see the need for a super detailed mega-setting to make BRP work. Give me some good solid adventures set in a small regional area (like Dragon Pass!). Save the world maps and encyclopediac fluff for years down the road and let the setting grow naturally.

Aaron

*If I spelled it correctly here, that was just a good guess.

I don't think there's anything wrong with a highly detailed world. If anything it helps the GM have a better understanding of the campaign he or she is running. Tekumel is full of strangeness and weird alien culture and is fantastically believable. MAR Barker is the closest thing the RPG Industry has ever had to compare with Tolkien. Arduin is another well envisioned land and one of the only fantasy enviroments I've come across that mixes a wide variety of things hand and hand into a single setting yet still keeps their originality intact. Now I do know the little grimores are inconsistent and the rules system is a bit spotty ( ok a lot!), but if you put it all together and look at it as a whole, you'll fine one very cool world with a lot of interesting ideas within it. One such item is the Arduin country map. It's chocked full of some of the best and most original names I've ever found in any fantasy setting, literarlly a hundred plus great names that I have never seen anyone use before. But yeah, I do agree, when a game world is just slapped together for no apparent reason an you have Elves and Orcs hanging around shooting the breese, it's pretty damm cheesy. That's one reason why I don't like to play WOW or any of those online games.

I always wanted to do a "Dirty Dozens/ Kelly's Hero's" kind of game set either in a moden day third world location or an alien planet. theres' a great movie from the 70's called" Sorcerer" where it begins with five guys from different parts of the globe who each get into vaious kinds of trouble and end up in this little s&%t hole of a town somewhere in South America. Be a great way to start off a game,

For the last week or so, I've been kicking around the idea of running some sort of alternative earth in the same vein as Warhammer but with my own original material (except for the obvious orcs, elves, dwarves,ect). I already have a name for the planet, a rough sketch of the world and the main kingdom I would center my first campaigns within. I even have a little bit of a write up on the mythos and some of the countries.

But it dose have a connection with previouse CoC material as both Zothque and Hyberborea have been showcasted in a few soucebooks. So already there is some name recognition and cross pollination that the CoC fanbase might be aware of--besides being some great gaming material!!

Anyway without beating the Zothique :deadhorse: any longer. It would be nice to see some new flagship setting to go along with BRP. If it's not something from the literary world, then maybe someone's homebrew campaign? I've known some amazing GM's in my time so let's hope maybe there's someone out there who has the next Ebberon or Tekumel hidden away behind their Dungeon Masters screen.

Very true, mrk. And CoC has been around for a while at that. There wouldn't be as much wriggle room in Zothique, I feel.

Well, Hedgehobbit, welcome to the grognard club, I guess. I ran 3.0 when it first came out, didn't enjoy it. Or 2e or even 1e for that matter, but I never tried to run 2e. I had latched on to BRP via RQ2 and Stormbringer, and then houserules mixing Magic World and Arcanum to the above two.

I don't intend to try 4e but now that I have an incipient group for BRP again I have quit :deadhorse:

And because you're one of the only single guys in town, if the chick doesn't accept your gaming needs, you don't have to spend "quality" time with her! >:->

. Too many Zothique stories are about some poor bastard who accepts a horrible fate to avoid a worse horrible fate. Not much whacking the bad guys to rescue the fair maiden in Zothique. Usually the maiden turned out to be the head bad guy, as it were. Some of that in Hyperborea too, it just didn't seem as prevalent.

Neither did Lovecraft's characters do to well either. Both HP and CAS were fatalists and favored that their characters lives ended in some gruesome,maddening way. But it's not always the case even in so-called grim and depressing Zothique. The protagonists in" The Charnel God"," The Black Abbot of Puthuum",“The Master of the Crabs” and “The Tomb-Spawn” do survive at the end of their tales. Heck, the two Adventures in' "Black Abbot" even kick some major undead ass and save the girl in the end. I will admit the three blokes in “The Weaver in the Vault” didn't fan out to well. Then again looking for the coffin of a dead king in the ruins of an ancient haunted city prone to earthquakes isn't the best of jobs. LoL!

I wouldn't come to the same conclusion as you regarding the story, but this quote from the story. . .

. . . makes me think he and anybody else who doesn't think gaming isn't cool, can go jump in a lake.

I think the hobby has gotten a little more acceptance and recognition over the last decade. Especialy with the popularity of MMORPG's and celebrities like Vin Diesel and Jon Favreau mentioning the influence D&D had on them.

Honestly, it isn't society that thinks gaming isn't cool that bothers me, but the hot chick at the bar. Oh boy, how I would love to find a way to change that around.

Zothique has quite some room for development though. It's not that many short stories describing it.

SGL.

There's two books. The other is " The Last Continent: New Tales of Zothique" plus a few chapbooks. Even if you worked off of just the original Zothique book, there' so much detail in the stories that any good game designer could easly develope an entire sourcebook out of them. Afterall, look at " Sorcerers of Pan-Tang", they created a whole book on the Isle even though very little was written about it in any of the Elric Books.

You have a large number of people disliking the 4'th edition rules as well. Infact, NPR even mentioned about it in their interview with one of the aintitcool people how a large number of fans are disappointed with the new changes. You can't please everybody...

It wasn't some jaded critic, is was a large number of players, both BRP

Stormbringer fans and new blood alike. I was one of those who thought it

was an absolute hack job. And, it sat on shelves for a long time, as well as

got resold quite often.

It was a very bad book. Chaosium didn't really do much development on it

at all. They could have done far better if they really tried - they just didn't.

-V

Zothique or any of the CAS worlds could be a huge interest to the majority of the people who buy Chaosium products-namely CoC fans.But just because it's dark and grim wouldn't necessary make it unsuccessful. Cthulhu is INFAMOUS for it's high PC mortality rate, but it hasn't stopped people buying and enjoying the game for the past 25 years. Nore am I saying other genre's shouldn't be published. " The Green" sounds fascinating and would be the first time a game supplement would introduce people to a midworld-like setting and a "planetary space opera" could be just as great. However, none of these projects have the kind of fanbase the way CoC and SB have at the moment and starting out with a new product that dosen't try and tap into the interest of this core audience could be a missed opportunity.

Maybe Zothique would suit fine for the Chaosium line of CoC products because of its "dark content". But is this all, BRP can do? Delievering another "dark" setting beside CoC? I dont think so. IMO the majority of people dont like it too dark (me included) and a whole setting full of necromancers and a "dying earth" theme would not be very successful. If done well, maybe such a setting could get a honor medal for beeing "exotic" but nothing more. I would love to invest my money in a "planetary romance" setting, a "mythical history" setting or maybe even in a "the Green" setting. But not in depressing zothique.

And I dont think that Stormbringer is as dark as Zotique (at least not for my taste). SB has alot of colourful and open positive content - like the Mio Spheres, Tanelorn as a city of heroes of the balance etc.

It did? I mean, I know it sold out the first run, but there is a question as to

how many copies were printed. I know Chaosium had plenty left from the

second run, and the reviews of the book were scathing to say the least.

-V

Even just a first run is still good and probably it would of been better to have left it at that as the whole D20 market became incredibly flooded, but that's the risk's one takes. As to the reviews, who cares what some jaded critic thinks. I don't . And no matter how good BRP is, someone is bound to write something negative about it ( like in the Dragon).

Hi Badcat,

There's nothing wrong if you find any of this material dark and not of your taste. What's inportant is creating and playing in a fantasy realm that you enjoy. However, is this day and age where there's so much saturation in the gaming market that it's inportant for game companies to stay original and true to their roots, as when you boil it down, the companies that have done well over the years are known for a perticular genre; Steve Jackson Games has the whole GURPS multiverse, WhiteWolf has their Vampie the Masquerade, Games Workshop for their Dark Medievalism, and TSR for their McDonalds style fantasy that too many people just love to eat up (even if they hate it). What Chaosium has is their reputation for putting out classy "Adult" based roleplaying games be it Lovecraftian horror or high fantasy Moorcockian kingdoms. You could even say that's one of the reasons why the D20 Elric book did so well.

IMHO, Clark Ashton Smith is one of the last literary beacons of classic 20''s and 30's fantasy that nobody has really touched yet that could make a great RPG setting. Heck, even Jason agrees with me :cool:

Welcome, mrk. I guess you like WOTC and 4e about as much as I do. Elric and Cthulhu are too dark for me, too. I always wanted the system without the setting and now I have it.

Meanwhile, Eldritch Dark is an excellent resource for anyone who is interested in CAS and his work. Have a look if you are not already familiar with it.

Double Post.

I dont' think Zothique is any more grim then Elric or Cthulhu. In fact, there's actually a lot of humor within the stories-- although very much dark and twisted. The worlds Smith created are some of the most fascinating and extremely rich landscapes ever published and are certainly not generic. If Zothique were not going to be Chaosium's BRP flagship, then I think the next best step is to make a book dedicted to all of Smith's setings like Hyberborea, Averogine, Xiccarph, Poseidonis, ect. Besides that, I think they have -or would have- an easier time getting the publishing rights as they have already printed some of CAS literary work ( I think some of it might even be in public domain).

Chaosium never has and never should be TSR and it's a testament to their originality by all the great material they have published through out the years. Honestly, if I want to play a vanilla-like world , I would just pick up those 4'th editions books like so many hoards of Dee n' Dee'rs are gobbling up by the bookshelf- you can't get more Haagen-Dazs then that crap.

I think for Chaosium, they really need to look at some of the material they developed in the past and some of the best are the stories of Clark Ashton Smith --most especialy Zothique. Not only do you have two books devoted to Smith's "dying world", but there's a huge number of fans and designers out there who I know would love to be part of bringing Zothique to the RPG world. Maybe if Chaosium plays their cards right and made something really great, they could bring in some " Big Names" like Richard Corben or Guillermo Del Toro who are huge fans of CAS. I know Corben created some incredible paintings set in Zothique and Del Toro might be coursed into writing an introduction--maybe even an outline for a scenario! That's one supplement I would buy in a heartbeat!

Hi Trifletraxor,

I used D&D with a mix of Arduin rules. I, as a few here, admired BRP but didn't want to run Glorantha ( great world, but not for me). As to my campaign world, I've been developing it for around 20 years. It's a meduim level enviroment with a dosage of sci fi and high fantasy. Some of the things that have influenced me over the years are: Zothique, The Dreamlands, Hyberborea, Black Company novels, Fafherd and Grey Mouser, Lin Carter anthologies, Richard Corben comics, Samurai Films, Spaghetti Westerns, Horror Movies , National Geographic, and even the late night news.

Hi all,

I am Mrk and I'm looking forward to the new rules system. I've been a fan of D100 a for many years and am looking forward to converting my little fantasy world to BRP.