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Except for the high minimums. Someone with a two dice db is still going to do at least 4 points of a sword hit. Yes. And it's really only a BRP/CoC problem, too. What happens is that, thanks to db, strong characters, animals and monsters end up doing more damage in melee than a firearm can do, making firearms less desirable in game terms. Realistically, the big advantages of firearms were shock value (which doesn't translate into game terms), ability to penetrate armor (which is moot when you got a really high db), how easy it is to use (it's not much different than other missile weapons) and how much eaiser it is to improve compared to a bow (the same in BRP). I think variable armor is part of your problem. You just can't rely on it. I think you need fixed armor, or at least some sort of bell curve. 2d3 instead of 1d6, 2D6 instead of 1D10+2. It makes the armor more reliable. Okay, I'll bite. Tell me about the Axis modified Gorillas. I must of missed that episode of Nazi Mega Weapons on the History Channel. I think the problems are due to: 1) The db is a flat mod, and so applies to all weapons equally (so a penknife wielded by a troll hits like a Greatsword) 2) That the db is independent of success levels (turns a graze into a kill, and minimized the value of skill.) 3) The db is multiple of d6s ( that gives a high minimum, so you can never get a light hit, a bell curve, and 3.5 point increments. 4) The game only has lethal damage (so getting punched is just as bad as getting stabbed with a weapon) 5) That everyone always uses their full db (not realistic-especially with animals. While the random roll helps, the bell curve starts to flatten out just when you need more variance). 6) The weapons can actually take a full db (i.e Superman might have a +13d6 db, but I doubt there is a sword that could withstand the force of the blow) I think the reason why no ones done much about it, or even cared is that the problems don't really start until you get past the normal stat range for characters. With the db at +1D6 or less things work out. Monsters are supposed to be monstrous, and big tough animals aren't too bad if you are smart about it (ranged weapons, shields, battle magic), so it's still okay. To really "fix" the problem, I think we need a smoother db progression, and to integrate the db into the weapon damage. That way it also gets tied to success level. Something along the lines of what they did in the Bushido RPG. Basically you shift the weapon's damage die up. Another option, I'm considering (from another RPG) is to assume that stronger, larger creatures have more muscle to cut through, and thicker bonus to support their weight, and tend to get better partial parries, and to have dbs cancel out. Sandy Peterson did this to some extent in Gateway Bestiary, by linking most creatures armor to db, and they kept that in RQ3. But if db just canceled out, then most of my problems for Amber would disappear. Cowin's and Eric's db's would cancel out and the'd just being doing their normal weapon damage. Factor in a high CON and more hit points and it all seems to work. Except that high skill handles that. And if you got Land of the Ninja, you got Ki skills, which solve the problem nicely. Add to that the fact that unarmed attacks in BRP are already doing too much damage (a kick does the same damage as a club), and the lack of non-lethal damage, and it's just overkill. Yeah, and BRP is pretty much lethal. It takes some work to scale it down. Funny you should mention that. I've been looking at The Princess Bride RPG Quickstart. It's written for Fudge (where Fate came from, and mostly the same system), and where I got the idea of DBs canceling out. I was thinking that PB might be a good fit for Amber. It's got enough to pull of the fencing, the attribute ladder and scaling would handle Amberites easily enough ( I'm thinking Human +0, Chaos +4, Amber Rank +6), automatically factoring in for the Amberite's STR and toughness without warping things, and, IMO it's easier to port stuff from the Amber Diceless RPG to Fudge than to BRP. But I'm a big RQ/BRP fan, so I'll probably stick with BRP and maybe port over a few things from PB. Tricky. I think it depends on how much you want the characters to pull off. Both in terms of quantity and quality. Here are some options off the top of my head, maybe some of it will help: 1) Most Power casters characters in BRP/RQ/MW have some sort of way to store some extra power (Fetch, Aliied Spiriit, Familiar, Staff). 2) You could let them use something else other than/or in addition to POW to pay for the spell cost. For instance is spells made the casters tired you could use Fatigue Points to power them or give the caster the option of using Fatigue and/or POW in some combination. 3) You could just double the effectiveness of spells (1 POW in= 2 POW out) 4) You could give extra POW for high magical skills. This is like the "free mana" approach, only more limited. So if someone got a magical skill up to a certain point (50%), he'd raise his POW by 1.

Oh, lots of those around. I didn't even bother to include them. WJ Graves has two sites along the Dunwich-Arkam route. In addition to the thematic nae, they also subdivided and sold off some of their land for houses (great way to hide some cultists, right). Check out their website. And there are quite a few construction companies too. But I think many of them buy the stone from someone else. Say a company is putting in a marble floor in a government building and a slab drops from a crane or something and breaks. They collect the broken stone and sell it off to a crusher. Pretty much. Better still, if you pick a town in Mass. that you like and just goggle it with quarry or cement or crushed stone and you will probably get some hits. Back before we had the infrastructure to transport tons of rock, if you wanted stone, you had to get it locally. So there was probably a quarry or three in every town in New England. Its just that most were either "used up" or went out of business as things advanced. But there are still some small ones

How about Bolton? Lovecraft even used a Bolton in some of his stories. Population is about 5,000 today and there was a Lime Quarry that is on a river near a conservation area. They have a bunch of trails you can walk, and there are maps available online that you could use and adapt for CoC. Basically the whole area is so hilly that the terrain isn't tough to find. The tough bit is the isolation. We have the 15th highest population crammed into the 44th largest state. Pity you can't use downtown Fitchburg where there were six quarries around Rollstone Hill, that used to have this big rock on top that they moved, or go out of your way to Beckett, where there is an abandoned quarries that's now owned by a group of locals. Both are ripe for Mythos stories.

There are a couple in the area. Fletcher Granite would be one of the closest. It's in Westford, which is near the Merrimack, and thus reasonably close to where the Miskatonic would be. The company has a website and there is at least one video of it on Youtube. I used to work near there some time back. I think they might have shut down a few years ago, but they might be open, since their website is still up. They've been around for over a century too, so you could use them in the 1920s. They provided granted for some famous buildings in Boston and Washington D.C. so something happening there could really make you campaign interesting if you want to go in an Secret Society/Illuminati direction. Massachusetts Broken Stone is another place that's been around awhile and it also has a website, but it would be a bit out of the way. There are a few other places with 20-30 miles of the area, and there probably were more in the past. Considering where Dunwich is supposed o be, I'd be surprised if there wasn't some sort of quarry around. Western Mass, especially on the New Hampshire border is very hilly. There's probably not one mile of straight road or perfectly level land within 30 miles of the area. Oh, and it's not a quarry, but if you wanted to go a bit further south, to Sutton, there is Purgatory Chasm, which has a legend that you could use as the basis for a Mythos adventure.

I can't swing an elder sign without hitting a Dunkin' Donuts now. I think there are at least a dozen in Worcester.

Hmm, is it better to get your butt kicked by a naked guy covered in oil with a big club, or framed for theft and commit suicide? Tough call.

Yes. Orginally the place was set up to hide the important artifact/McGuffin Stay at the manor or in the shadow? At the start of the campaign the characters will have no knowledge of other shadows, so they won't have any reason to want to leave the one they are in, or know that they can. Thety might want to leave the manor and go find the way in the world they are on, and that's perfectly okay. No, for the most part they have free reign. They were brought here when they were very young chidren, perhaps infants, and were only supposed to be kept here until Oberon returned. But Oberon died during the War and never returned, leaving the children in the care of retainers. Now that the children have reached adulthood All possibilities. Considering that the shadow was set up primarily to hid the McGuffin, and that the characters have been here for a very long time, it seems unlikely that anyone from the Courts know about them, or that they would have waited this long to act, but...this is an Amber campaign, and people do play the long game. AFAIK (meaning this is how I have set things up so far, but like any good Amber GM I'm perfectly willing to recton this if becomes necessary, convenient, or just plain appealing to do so) no one off shadow knows of the characters, their parents being dead (I was thinking of using Deidre or Eric for the Amber family connection). Some members of the Courts are looking for the McGuffin and sent minons off to find it, but between the difficulty in entering this shadow, the nerfing of those with Chaos blood (thank you) and the rate that time flows on differernt shadows, nothnig has happened until now, when the PC reach adulthood. I also have it set up so that some of the Amberites, probably Fiona get some clue as to the McGuffin and possibly the characters and can show up just when the baddies at the Courts get the location and can make a real effort to get here, when things start to go crazy. Sure, if that was the set up that I had chosen to use. Since I wanted to use this as a "backdoor" Amber campaign, and since my players are not familiar with Amber or how things can work, I set things up so they don't have many strings attached to them. If I had wanted to I could have flipped the whole thing around and have them kidnapped by someone at the Courts and kept here as hostages (unknowingly) to use against Amber. Probably be a better story that way too. But I don't want to start this off by completely screwing over the PCs. Yup, it does. Kinda like how Corwin starts off in a hospital bed that isn't all that good for his heath. Its probably a better Amber-ish start too. But I think if I did things that way I'd probably lose the players and they would feel like I was messing with them instead of the NPCs messing with them. I thinks it's better if I keep their guardians benevolent. That probably gives thing more impact when Chaos intrudes. I can always swap out an NPC with a Shapeshifter later, once everybody is up to speed. My players have been playing in a fairly easy D&D campaign, and haven't played a D100 based RPG, or really had to think at the gaming table in years. I got to give them time to get familiar with the game system and stretch their mental muscles before I can pull something like that on them. As it stands now it's going to be a bit tricky to run. But if I can pull it off, it should be epic. Thanks for the posts. I've got a few good ideas from them, and have started to get suspicious of my NPCs, which is the right frame of mind to write something like this. Maybe there is something more to one or two of those retainers after all? I think I might just want to pull a Unicorn in here somewhere...

I don't it's so much that someone couldn't do the conversion on their own, just that it would save time. For instance a character with CON 9, S1Z 17 would have 11 hit points in RQ2/RQG, but 13 hit points in BRP/RQ3 and similar games. Now the 2 points isn't a big deal, but the difference in points per location could be, as could the different armor values (plate is either 6 points, 8 points of 1D10-1/1D10-+2 depending on variant). And some things aren't so easy to convert, and it might be nice if there was some sort of semi-standardized way to doing it. That could be handled with a small table somewhere. In fact, if it weren't for hit points and hit locations, I'd consider just doing of a table of NPCs with the significant stuff in it. For most NPCs we probably just need the relevant Combat/Magic stats. Possibly. I was just thinking that such an approach could help. It could make a lot of the adventures easier to adapt to different, but related systems.

Interests & Hobbies: Since the PCs will be wards of the Estate, they won't have to work for a living, which can make for some interesting chargen. I don't want to just give them all a Noble Occupation to put points in, as in Magic World, as that might make all the characters too similar, skill wise. Nor do I want to just let them dump a bunch of points wherever, as can happen in BRP. What I was thinking of was to let the PCs pick interests & hobbies, as skill packages. For instance, they could pick Sailing or Hunting, or Courtly Graces, the Occult , and get a number of points (20%-25%) to break up among a handful of skills (i.e. the Sailing interest could including Boating, Shiphanding, Swimming, Climbing and Rope Use). Picking an interest could also include a few bits of gear appropriate towards that interest (spyglass, sextant, oilskin coat, skiff, cutlass, tattoo, scrimshaw: pick any three). One of the hidden benefits of this approach would be that it could help to tip the GM (me) as to what sort of challenges and adventures they players want. For instance, if someone takes Fencing, then they probably want (or at least want to be prepared for) some swordfighting, and if all the players take it, then they probably expect a lot of melee combat in the campaign. It would also a kinda of backdoor method of putting in items or animals of exceptional ability, similar to what PCs can buy in the Amber Diceless RPG.

You wouldn't have to reprint statblock, just expand them a little. Add in SR or Combat Actions, put in RQG and BRP Hit Point values, alternate damage bonuses for games that use a different db progression-just add in the handful of things that are missing. I think it would make things easier for all those semi-experienced GMs. Great. That will make it much easier to adapt the rules to specific settings as opposed to shoehorning the setting to fit the rules (think AD&D) I prefer SR since it is one of the few methods where someone with a loaded and ready gun or crossbow will get a shot off before an opponent can cross the room and attack in melee, but with me it depends on the setting and style of the game.

Thanks. Ihad no idea, but it certinaly looked funny in that index. Yet it was still written by the same guy who wrote RQ2, Steve Perrin. I think that if someone from AH had written it, it would have had bunches of number paragraphs (7.6.2.15: Walking While Chewing Gum) and read like a wargame-like Powers & Perils.

Yeah, I think he did. TOR also has a mechanic for having a heir and passing things on to a new character, much like Good. So they won't do like the did in the past and we won't get RQ Viking, Land of the Ninja style cult writeup. There is stuff like Strike Ranks/DEX Ranks, ripostes, Hit Point formulas and such from the various iterations of the system. I suspect some settings would work better with some of the alternate game mechanics.

Me too! It's definitely something that can go bad really quickly. The problem is with the PIke, though, not the shield.

LOL! Yeah had similar experiences. Did tech support at a school and computer science teacher couldn't get his PC working. No lights, no beep, no monitor, nothing. I asked him if it was plugged in and he said yes it was. I got to his classroom and he had everything plugged into a power strip (good) including the power strip itself (unbelievably not good).

That doesn't prevent Chasoium from doing their own Britain or Rome supplements. Or even making a deal with the guys at DM to do RQ versions (unlikely, but possible). Heck, with all these D100 mostly compatible games out there, I'd love to see the companies get together and do cross-system supplements like in the old Thieves World days. It would probably be fairly easy to do a book compatible with BRP/Mythas/OpenQuest/Revolution/etc. At least easy mechanically. It might even help the companies involved too. OGL did wonders for WotC and D20. Not that I expect that to happen. But then we'd have to adapt the setting to RQ, which, currently, is heavily integrated with Glorantha. We might not want Rune Magic, Spirit Magic, Rune Lords, etc. in a setting. Historically, that's been the approach that Chaosium did when adapting stuff to RQ. BRP, however is generic and would be easier to customize the rules to fit a setting or genre. Now, once Fantasy Earth comes out and we see what its' like (i.e do we get RQ style cult writeups for Norse, Greco-Roman, Egyptian, or even Christian religions ala RQ2/RQ3, or something different)

I have no distain for it. I just thought it was funny that the Deluxe rules are only 2 pages. As far as the 1000 pages of rules go, considering that the index give above listed some scenarios and stats for various vehicles and ordinance, I don't think it's any worse that some of the more popular RPGs. RQG is 446 pages, toss in the GMs book and Bestiary and it will be bigger than ASL without any scenarios!

Three Musketeers? ( I just want to open up the Public Domain stuff outside the Victorian Era-although I would add Jules Verne into the Victorian mix.) For a licensed setting Castle Frankenstein has been licensed out before and would adapt fairly well to RQ mechanics. Although I think BRP/RQ3/CoC is better for this sort of thing that RQ2/RQG.

How about Horatio Hornblower?

All that and yet Deluxe ASL is only 2 pages longer!

How do you know it was never done? And, if you are in the right circumstances, say a narrow corridor where the opponent can't try to outflank you (i.e. standard dungeon crawl), then 2H Spear and shield isn't a bad option and probably better than the three you mentioned. 2H Spear and Shield isn't suicidal for a lone warrior fighting a single opponent, or where the terrain favors such tactics.. Where it gets suicidal is in small groups in the wrong terrain. Two or three people attempting Pike & Shield on an open battlefield, because the Phalanx has to slow down to maintain the formation and the enemy can outmaneuver them. Even in large groups a Phalanx is vulnerable. Historically, the Phalanx dominated the battlefield until the Romans figured out how to put together a more maneuverable formation, the cohort. That pretty much spelled the end of the Phalanx, but it did evolve into the more flexible Square. Were it not for firearms and vehicles, Pikemen with shields fighting in a Square formation might be a real possibility. In Glorantha, something like a Square formation could actually work for small groups using 2H Spear & Shield.

Yes, and I'd like to see it get out the door this time. I think we have to consider just how many lines they can support at one time. Three or four, maybe. Or do we just want a lot of one off stand alone games? Maybe a mix? say they support RQG and Fantasy Earth, but pretty much the rest are one-shots?

Yes, and let's not forgot coming up with generic/own stuff. I'd like to see Fantasy Earth become a reality.

Hey, since some of you think 30 is too high for Amber Rank, how would this scale look? Human (10.5), Chaos (18), Amber (23) Corwin and the other elder Amberites would still have higher stats, but then they are ranked above Amber Rank. But it would bring most characters down closer to the human scale, while still giving the Amberites a definite advantage in stats-especially in opposed STR rolls.

The other day I thought that it might be a cool idea if some ship wanted into the area during a storm and that the PCs go out to ship only to find the crew dead and a monstrous animal on board. But, Bram Stoker beat me to the idea by over 100 year. Still, I think it might be a good way to open up the campaign world. The PCs get onto the ship and encounter a couple of the big cats (that speak and then attack). The idea being that the cats used the ship to get to this shadow (I'm thinking that is one of the restrictions to entering/leaving this shadow) to search for the McGuffin. In light of recent events, I think I'll name the ship the Ernalda.

I agree. One of my most memorable RQ adventures was something I ran before I had gotten most of the books. I was running Hellpits of Nightfang, and lacking the Vivamort cult writeup, I had to sort of wing it. As a result I ran the vampire as a more tradtional folklore/horror movie type vampire. The players were holed up in a house, and the vampire couldn't get inside without an invitation (again, traditional vampire stuff). One of the PCs was trading insults with the vampire and I had the vampire reply" Why don't you come out here and say that?" The PC actually got as far as "Why don't you c-" before his eyes widened and he realized he was just about to issue an invitation. Spooked the hell out of him. To this day the player reminds me about it.