Rurik

Are you not going? I thought you were running a game there. I really must move forward with my plan to drain the Atlantic Ocean, making it easier to get to Europe from here. Tentacles sounds like great fun.

Though the d2 bugs me too I still much prefer the random bonus and the MRQ progression over fixed bonuses. A fixed bonus rapidly sets a minimum damage threshold that proves quite lethal - especially when used with hit locations. A creature with a +3 damage bonus is pretty much goint to always take out an average persons arm on every hit, even with a relatively weak damage attack (say 1d4). If the same creature instead had a +1d6 damage bonus the average damage done will be slightly higher, bit there is still a chance that it will do only a 2 point wound. The opposite holds true on the max damage side. That d4+3 damage is never going to do more than 7 points, were it a d6 bonus it could do 10 (and hence do some real damage to a heavily armored foe). Though this 'max threshold' doesn't bother me as much as the high minumum damage value.

Just popping in to say hey and that I have not abandoned all of this - I just have been very busy lately. I have been only barely able to keep up my responsibilities to my pbp games over the past bunch of weeks. I'm going away on vacation until the end of April but will be back to writing and posting in May. I'll finish up Portal/the Cult of Unity and the Akershule and also have some ideas for a steppes race and a savage mountain race. See ya'all in a couple of weeks.

Well, here are some random thoughts on it. They should be carniverous or omnivorous (I saw a thing on PBS about how 'lucy' evolved/survived in Africa that said that herbivorous diets don't support large enough brains for sentience - take that vegitarians! - not that we really require real scientific feasability thogh). They either ignored or maybe herded their humans (or whatever rides them) for food before training them to ride. Maybe they ran into traditional horse barbarians who moved in ontheir territory and used archers and lances and barding giving them a distinct advantage in combat, so this new mount race needed riders to be able to effectively fight back. They need some way of controlling their riders, so mental powers or magic makes sense. Maybe some tribes treat humans as slaves and oppress them, while others are more 'enlightened' and treat their humans much better, almost as equals. The lizard/dinosaur thing sounds cool, or maybe big lions or something like that. Such a creature would probably need to be able to kill an armed human with natural weapons to risk arming humans (maybe not with mind control - sentient horses would work just as well I suppose). Any thoughts or comments or ideas to add? I've been away for a bit and want to finish Portal and have some Ideas for an Orc-like race I want to get posted as well but I'll give this all some effort once those things are done.

Hows this for a wacky thought (just poo-poo me away if I am getting too off kilter here ) - Intelligent riding beasts who are the masters of their riders. They are smart and possibly have magical/psychic abilities but alas have no opposible thumbs, so use humans (or another race) to do things like construct things like armor and shelter and ride on their backs and shoot arrows and use long spears.

Maybe he spawns them then skins them. Gotta replenish the supply after all...

That is the way i'd kind of pictured it. From east to west - Sun Mountain, Desert, plains/stepps, Portal/River Jule, Foothills, Mountains, Green. That is the rough placement I was picturing. More mountains to the north of Portal, probably a branch off of the same range as borders on the Green. Hmm, this possibly creates a problem with the boiling oceans creating the moisture for the Green. Will think about that. Maybe the sun mountain/boiling ocean should be to the north or south instead. Same barbarians seafarers is exactly what I had in mind. I look forward to exotic items and races from the green visiting the markets of Portal.

None of those are formats that can be imported into CC as far as I can tell (I was just looking for filters of some sort without luck - I'll dig some more in mapping forums but the fact that CC is a CAD based vector mapping program and most cheaper/free/easier to use alternatives are not CAD based means interoperability seems pretty poor). The easiest method to 'import' an existing map to CC is to save it as an image file and literally trace it in CC.

No, any random world will do at first, I'm just curious to see what FT outputs so I know what to expect if we go this route (I'd like to see what it outputs even if we don't).

I don't think AutoRealm exports to a CC usable format unfortunately. CC is a CAD program (hence it's complexity) and if I recall AR only saves as images. I'll see if there is any kind of import filters available but pretty much maps from other programs need to be traced to get into CC as far as I can tell. I can take any CC2 format and bring it into CC3. No flat planates - what were they thinking? :shocked:

FIrst half is up. The rest will be tonight hopefully, though reality often intervenes. The wife and kids are away wednesday though, so I feel a burst of productivity coming on...

I was away over the long (here in the U.S.) weekend, but will post what is done to the Wiki and try to finish up my overview of Portal, and add more when I get the chance (hopefully this evening).

I'd be very interested in getting a copy of some FT output saved to CC3 format just to see what it is like. I have no idea what the options in FT are but I know the two are supposed to play nice together.

CC3 uses extensive bitmab symbols and textures that are much more appealing than the old CC2 vector symbols (which are still supported). Of course the bitmaps don't scale anywhere near as well as the vector symbols, so a "Master" map should probably be all vector based, and from that master map you can make all your 'pretty' maps using the new symbols and effects. Well, the sun is much smaller than ours, so should be closer. If it were 93,000,000 miles away it would seem roughly the same temperature across the whole world, not a firey/boiling waste immediately below it and growing gradually cooler the farther away you move.

CC3 Produces much better looking maps than CC2. The advantage to using CC3 in conjuntion with something like Fractal Terrain is that you end up with a master map from which smaller details can be created from without giving having to worry about the scale or features matching up from map to map (Glorantha's scale problems between different maps are numerous). The Sun lives at the top in his palace and comes out to illuminate and warm the world every morning.

I too see a lot of similarities between the Akershule and your ideas. I'll upload my history of Portal to the Wiki. All of this of course is open to reconcilliation. The Akershule were not expansionist in my original concept, though they could well be one enclave of a race that in fact is in many parts of the world (connected by gates) or some such. I completely envisioned them as coming back as undead in my original campaign storyline. Good Ideas, keep it all coming!

I've got Campaign Cartographer 3 which integrates with Fractal Terrains, but not Fractal Terrains itself. It seems like a nice product and it is easy to make maps with CC3 from worlds made with Fractal Terrains (or so I hear - easy is a relative term when used in conjuntion with CC). Do we really need Fractal Terrains though? It will make landmasses, but we don't need a spherical world with reality based geography and weather patterns for the fantasy project do we? Whatever we do for a world, there is a style pack from the Cartographers Annual that emulates the style of the Islandia map we can use. Link here: The Cartographer's Annual 2007

Been away for a couple of days and a lot has developed here. I do have to say I'm not a huge fan of basing the map on fantasy europe - is there a good reason to do so? On the one hand we are designing a world very different than earth in the way myth replaces natural science and developing a distinct feel. To use earth geography kind of goes counter to the idea of making something distinctly different than bog standard middle ages earth resembling fantasy. Just my two cents, I can live with it if need be, but am not taken with the idea.

I am very much for the pure fantasy as well. I like the idea of the sun god living on a tall peak. Heroes could go visit him - of course they would need some kind of protection from his glory (or have to stick to staying out at night time). I very much want mythological explanantions for the world, and sci-fi hampers that. One thought I've had is that clouds are floating realms inhabited by cloud men or gods, and can be visited. They 'sail' their clouds around and make rain and snow. When they fight amongst themselves - or take vengeance on the people below for some reason - great storms occur. Different tribes inhabit different areas, and so the weather patterns beneath one sky realm is different than in another, based on the power and personality of the cloud people/gods above. A great war in the sky that disturbs the balance of power would change weather patterns on the world below. These men/gods can be bargained with or even worshipped to provide good weather - on the other hand a few earth men who get caught stealing powerful artifacts from them could bring down great wrath on their people. Whether that idea get used or not it is a good example of of the type of mythological world explanation that would be very hard to justify against a hard sci-fi background. Also, while I like throwing around these fantastical ideas, I very much want the emphasis to be on a gritty down to earth world - this whole project kind of started as an idea to try to recapture the feel of early eighties Glorantha, and I'd like to stick to that vision. Cool reasons for the sun and clouds are great, but in the end we want rich, plausible reasons to wreak great violence and reap fantastical rewards (kill things and take their stuff).

My fear with the hard sci-fi background described is it can become limiting. I like the idea of cults being able to affect the world's tides/seasons etc. - a whale getting stuck can explain wacky tides, but how about when the sun cult really socks it to the night cult or whatever? I think having party quests affecting the 'natural events' of the world is more plausible with a fantasy background than a sci-fi one. I'd also like a spirit world with ghosts and the like, and an underworld (possibly the same as the spirit world). I don't want as many otherworlds as say current Glorantha, but would like something like the old RQ2 spirit plane.

Fantasy BRP can be tough on assigned/bought attributes though with the way different races generate their statistics. I've always used rolled stats at the table but assigned or bought stats seem very common in PBP. I think the fair and balanced thing is more important when you may not actually know any of the other players than when gaming with a group of friends. In my PBP RQ game though it was just unworkable with the different races involved. How do you point buy a Dark Troll or Minotaur compared to a Human? The average scores are already unbalanced, and the ranges very different.

Well MY farmer girl... ...aww, never mind, this is a family forum.

I am entirely ready to CC this. I will get my notes organised and ready to post on the wiki - all of which is open to reworking to fit the concensus. I'm very open to any licensing. CC for fluff and OGL for crunch seems like a good solution to me though. In all honesty I'll go along with what is quickest - I'd just assume move on knowing that all I am due from anything I add is my attribution.

Well, yeah, if you try to walk on the bottom of it - duh! You've got stay on the top - it's not like we're suspending reality here. Well, perhaps the sun is directly over the water, and the ocean below it boils during the day, casusing it to expand and the tidal surge to radiate outwards, and at night it cools, and the tides recede back towards the spot below the sun. Or maybe it just has to do with some gods battling at the bottom of the sea or something. All good ideas. Or it could be that the world is a sphere, and the moon is in orbit around it, and the gravitational pull of the moon affects the tides or something over the top like that - or perhaps that is too far out.