ewilen

It's been a while since I stopped by here but I seem to recall there used to be a main page with a rundown of the major BRP flavors and publications. But now when I go to the base URL, I'm taken straight to the forum. I've also noticed that there are stickied threads for summarizing the various BRP flavors, but again the links in those threads all give me a 404. I understand the site was hacked sometime back; perhaps this is related. Just wondering if those sections will be restored. Thanks.

I think it is also worth mentioning that MW uses variable armor absorption (which I think is an option in BRP core). Like, some armor might absorb 1d6+1, which sort of combines the effects of thickness with how much of your body it covers. Combined with the major wounds rule, I think this gives you the effect of hit locations, in a simpler fashion. Some key combat rules (not sure which ones are already options in BRP core): Riposte, meaning that if you have two weapons (including a sword & shield), then a special parry (20% of skill) with one hand gives you a free attack with the other. Knockback, using either a shield or your body to bash someone and hopefully knock them down or into wall. Multiple attacks, if you have over 100% skill, you can use it for multiple attacks as long as each one is at least 40%. Effects of long weapons in terms of keeping opponents at bay, and then the benefits of closing with a short weapon vs. a longer weapon.

No. The same rule/algorithm is in Elric! Seems the idea is that Allegiance accelerates as you get more allied. Opposite of skills, where the more you know, the harder it is to improve.

That is funny. (The listing of "nonhuman Adventurers" includes "dwarves, wlves, halflings, centaurs, etc." And the "l" in the font looks a lot like an "i".)

Yeah, absolutely you could add impale back or even add the idea of bashes (from RQ III? know I saw it somewhere). Aside from damage to weapons, a difference of dodge v parry in Elric is you can never dodge an impale, at least based on some q&a that I believe came from Chaosium. It's hard to compare because E! uses separate dodge and parry matrices, and has fewer levels of success.

p. 64 of my Elric! says you can riposte with the weapon that didn't parry. So roll a critical (= special in MW) on your sword parry, and you can bash back with your shield. Or roll the crit on your shield parry, and you can swing back with your sword.

I have the fourth printing of Elric! so I guess whatever mistake there was, had been corrected. Looking it over, I see that MW not only brings the terminology into alignment but incorporates four levels of success on defense rolls (critical, special, success, failure/fumble) to Elric's three (critical, success, failure/fumble). OTOH distinctions between cutting/thrusting and other weapons have been removed--there's no separate impale result. Dodge and parry also work basically the same, where in Elric there are some subtle distinctions. It isn't clear to me what the relative effect on play of one rule vs. the other would be.

If you want to speed up chargen more, I think it might help to incorporate the Elric/BGB idea of clustering skills based on a general character personality type (use this instead of hobby skills), and then just add occupation and culture bonuses. Cuts down on the number of decisions. But this observation is partly because I created the demo characters using the "Veteran" guidelines, which give a lot more "hobby" skills. To give a little context without quoting the MW rules directly: Your Culture gives you a list of background skills to choose from; you pick three to get a modest bonus. Culture also gives you a range of occupations to choose, which work more or less like occupations in Elric, though with a little more structure in terms of skill point distribution. Finally you get to assign points to "hobby" skills outside your occupation, again using structured distribution. By "structured" I mean that you don't assign points freely from a pool but instead assign X points to each of certain # of skills, then Y to some more skills, etc.

One thing to be aware of: the riposte rule says you get a riposte on a critical; it should say special but the terminology was carried over from Elric/SB, which uses crit/impale rather than special/crit. I mentioned this to Ben and he said it's too late to fix in the printed version but will go in errata. BTW I ran a drop-in demo session of MW yesterday at Dundracon and I was gratified at how much the players enjoyed it, even though we didn't get very far into an adventure per se. Two guys had no BRP experience and one only knew CoC, and they were all very keen on the mechanics. Another BRP-newb came by later and engaged in a very intent conversation about the game. He seemed very favorable. All of them seemed eager to see the actual book when it comes out.

That sounds great! PM on the way.

Are there any standard systems for overland travel in Chaosium BRP or any of the related games? I know that Elric has good stuff for ships (which will be included in Magic World), and I think Runequest may have had something. Harnmaster, which is very BRP-like, has the Pilot's Almanac. But off the top of my head I'm not aware of anything which adds good detail and systems for over land travel. To give an idea of what I'd look for, the early editions of D&D had some great stuff in terms of hexcrawl-oriented rules in the White Box, AD&D 1e DMG, and IIRC some parts of the B/X and BECMI/Rules Cyclopedia. Dragonquest (SPI) also had some useful stuff in terms of giving concrete overland movement rates and relating them to terrain, encumbrance, and fatigue. Other important factors I'd look to cover include: Cost & usage of supplies Carrying capacity/encumbrance not only of humans but also of mounts, conveyances, and beasts of burden Living off the land Detection & evasion Pathfinding and getting lost Again, I'd most prefer to know about any official BRP publications that cover these areas; next best would be fan works and systems closely related to BRP (such as HM and RQ/Legend). Of course I'd also welcome pointers to other games whose systems could be adapted. Thanks in advance!

Thanks. I just think that if someone is getting into BRP via the BGB, the book should be a good introduction and baseline. From my reading, a player can just specify a greater or lesser demon; while the possibility of having other types is there, you have to fill in some pretty big blanks on how the GM will do this. Comparison with Sidekick is a bit misleading--again, I may be mistaken, since I've only just skimmed the Powers section (having never been too interested in supers), but the Sidekick's powers come out of the PC's power budget, no? Whereas a demon is a big chunk of power whose only cost is a renewable resource (magic points), a point of permanent POW to bind, and a few spell slots to keep bound. The latter could be a big deal, but I don't think it balances the power of a demon.* Also, I know that Advanced Sorcery will include the full-blown summoning system from Elric--some explanatory text will be needed if it's not just an expansion of the BGB rules but a replacement. Thanks for the other suggestions. I have Corum and CoFE, though I haven't checked out the latter. I was surprised at all the praise Corum's gotten for its summoning, though. The most interesting thing was the rule for Chaos Creatures having a price which is (a) entirely at the GM's discretion and ( mandatory for the summoner (he can't refuse it after it's been named). I also like the idea of demon summoning always adding a year to the summoner's age. Those are pretty interesting options to consider when fine-tuning summoning rules, but what I wrote is about all there is, isn't it? (The material on demon prices is good, but it basically just elaborates the negotiation process implicit in summoning a demon to carry out a task without binding it--already possible in Elric!) I also own CoC but I haven't read through that either. The idea of having specific spells for specific entities, though, is appealing, for the type of game I'm thinking of. I'll keep an eye out for Nephilim. To bring this back to the OP, though: as interested as I am in options for magic/sorcery/summoning that experienced GMs can work into their campaigns, I'm most concerned here about the fact that the BGB rules have this issue which can derail beginners and which could accidentally carry over into other setting books. *One way I could see balancing the power of a bound demon would be to not only have it take up spell slots equal to the POW of the demon, but to require ongoing "maintenance" expenditure of POW for as long as the demon is being kept on the character's home plane.

Recently I've been reviewing the demon summoning rules from various branches of "d100" and I just noticed a striking discontinuity between Elric! and the BGB. I wonder if anyone else can confirm this. Summoning procedure In Elric!, and presumably SB5, it costs 9 MPs to try to summon a demon. A point of POW must also be sacrificed if a binding will be attempted. The summoning only works on a successful Luck roll. If the roll is unsuccessful, the MP (and POW, if applicable) are still spent. In the BGB, it costs 9 MP to summon a demon, period. No roll is required. Cost In Elric/SB5, MP have to be spent to define the demon. Eight of the points used in the summoning are credited toward this, but 1 MP must be spent for each d8 of characteristic, 1 MP must be spent for each 10 percentiles in any skill or demon ability, and additional MP must be spent if the demon has multiple modes of movement. The sample demon breeds don't precisely follow these formulae, but the (very weak) Servant Demon is close, and it costs 20 MP to summon. In the BGB, no additional MP need to be spent on top of summoning. There aren't any rules for defining demons, but two examples are given. The characteristics of greater and lesser demons aren't given in terms of d8s, but if you do a rough translation based on averages, a greater demon's cost in Elric! terms would be: STR: 8 CON: 5 SIZ: 5 INT: 2 POW: 4 DEX: 4 APP: 1 or 5 It has two movement modes, so that would add at least 1 MP. Its armor would cost 4 MP, once you translate it into random AP. By my accounting, various skills and powers would conservatively add 100 or more to the cost. In total, an Elric! demon equivalent to a BGB greater demon would require the sacrifice of at least ~130 MP. I have two concerns about this. First, it seems that demon summoning in the BGB is vastly more powerful than in Elric!, and possibly unbalanced relative to other Sorcery spells, other magic/powers systems in BRP, and everything else in the game. We can agree that balance isn't everything, though. Besides, unless the demon is bound, the GM has a lot of leeway via negotiation. If a sorcerer has POW to spare on binding, though, and a decent chance of winning the POW vs. POW binding roll, that remedy is unavailable. Second, the relatively low cost of summoning in the BGB makes the Brazier of Power and Chain of Being spells pretty much superfluous. Summoning is the only thing I can find whose cost could make those two spells useful--provided you use the point costs from Elric! Am I wrong? Or should the summoning rules in the BGB be errata-ed?

The chart is pretty clearly a typo/goof. Why would someone use a chart to summarize a method that's easier to calculate in your head, and not the method that's harder? That said, I would just go with whatever works for you, as long as you're consistent.

It does indeed, thanks. I have RQ III, so I'll probably forego Magic, but I'll keep The Grimoire in mind.

True. I started trying to come up with a way to rescue the method for skills over 100%, but it's not worth it. Oh, well.

I learned HM on 1e, but I think I have 2e/3e lying around somewhere. Although I think its combat enhancements are nifty (including the healing rules!), overall HM combat is probably too much for most players. Even when simplified into 2e/3e, which I feel lost some important nuance. (By contrast, I gather that HM Gold may have fixed some issues with 1e but that it's even more involved.) And I don't think there's much point to it, if combat isn't the main event. After flirting with HM for years, and briefly getting into a campaign, I've swung back to believing that the Elric!/SB5 approach is the best base to work off of for me. (And BRP gives me an in-print book that I can point players to.) I still like the way HM calculates opening skills, though: average several pertinent attributes to get a skill base, then multiply that by a factor depending on the skill and profession.

You'd lose the special effects of some weapons on special results. In other words, a crit is a crit regardless of weapon type, but an impale with a spear has special effects & consequences that are both different from a crit and different from crushing with a club. That said, I think you'll find that it's pretty robust. If you want to compensate at some point, you can just adjust the damages by various weapons. For example, Chaosium Stormbringer (1e-3e) doesn't care about specials; it even uses 10% for crits.

As long as everyone's following the same rule, I don't think that 1% here or there matters. So for AHRQ/BRP, why not just go ahead and use a standard calculation of 10% of the number, round up, and then halve (rounding up) or double? Otherwise I'm beginning to think it might be a good idea after all to use a specially-colored d20 alongside the dieroll. For sticklers, it even provides a more precise frequency of 5%/20% of the base number. (In fact, it's exact.) About the HM/RQ connection. MRQ II might be closer to Chaosium/AH RQ overall, but there are some ways that HM is closer to the roots. One I can think of is that HM doesn't have combat actions or combat maneuvers. Still, HM's has many innovations, like calculation of Skill Base, the way magic works, use of "aim point" when you attack, elimination of hit points in favor of "impairment" and damage saves, and of course the attack & damage matrices.

For 5% do "if it ends in 1, and the 10s digit is even, then it's a crit". For 20% do "if it ends in 1 or 6, then it's a special". That's easy, isn't it? I'm partly joking, but if you color your dice it might be pretty simple. Or you could roll a d20 with every roll, and if it comes up with a 1, it's a critical (or fumble if you fail), while if it comes up 2, 3, or 4, it's a special (if you succeed). Again, color the die for quick identification.

Ah, thanks for the clarification. It sounds like both books will be good value and complement each other. Also, thanks for replying in the other thread.

Does this mean the spirit, sorcery, and divine materials depend on having RQIII, Basic Magic, or zomben's forthcoming Magic book--or are you reprinting those magic systems in their entirety?

Right here Tywyll says regarding Grimoire So it looks like Grimoire is a superset of Magic, but possibly more liberally interpreted. Its unclear whether there will be value in having both. EDIT: unless Grimoire only has expansions for Basic Magic. I guess ask over in Tywyll's thread.

Am I mistaken in thinking these two overlap considerably? I mean, based on the threads on each which are currently on the first page of this forum, both of them bring RQIII-style magic to BRP.

I don't really have anything against Mongoose (maybe because I was cautious about buying their stuff to begin with, so I never got burned). But like others I feel the main value added by MRQ was options and refinements that could be brought back to BRP. For example, the "culture-based character generation" and magic systems in MRQ seem like improvements on RQ3 and, at the same time, nicely applicable to a variety of bronze age/iron age/S&S settings. I've read good things about the MRQ Elric magic system, which makes me want to grab it. Then there are MRQ Empires and (for MRQ I) Guilds, Factions, and Cults. I'll note though that Mongoose has said they'll go ahead and publish Age of Treason, which is apparently an outside/freelance setting and sounds very nice. If either that or the Eternal Champion line generates enough momentum (anyone know, for Elric?), then they could lead with those titles and not worry so much about trying to market a "generic" fantasy system.