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I think it would be key for the Evil Empire to be able to control the gates. Basically, you have to figure that once we start using modern tech we will completely annihilate the intial force. Any survivors will pretty much be be design- so we have somebody to interrogate (BTW, it could be chilling if prisoners were somehow eliminated right in the middle of an interrogation). If the Evil Empire does use necromancy or some sort of contagious monsters (i.e.vampires, werewolves), they could "recuit" more troops from the ranks of our fallen. "Turned" ex-soldiers, now-vampires could be a devastating weapon, since it would give the Evil Empire a way to get rapid intel and troops experienced with modern tech and tactics. Plus they'd be able to infiltrate our ranks. and cities. If the Empire started by picking off some secuities settlements and military bases, it's possible that they could catch up with tech early on, and even start their first real battles with modern tech. Not as much of it as we could field, and probably not be able to replace or repair it easily, but.. Imagine if the initial attack was with modern weapons and then the nasties monsters came out after we took out thier tanks and guns. For instance, we shoot up a Empire tank, reducing it to a burning wreck, and then, unbelievable, the hatch opens, the crew climbs, uninjured, and begin to transform into bats, wolves and what not. The dead rise up and stagger forth. Could be a great shock way to reveal the true nature of the enemy. The PCs could be part of the mop of team, who suddenly have to fight their way out and report back to HQ.

You will probably need to figure out a way to prevent modern heavy weaponry from working. Dragons aren't quite so difficult to deal with if you are in a supersonic jet fighter equipped with heat-seeking missiles that can shoot the thing down while still a couple of miles away. I don't think the normal magic system in BRP is going to be able to offset the differences in firepower. A 15D6 tank gun is pretty much a autokill even on a giant or dragon. You will probably need to use one of the more powerful powers systems (sorcery or superpowers) to be able to ramp up the magical defenses enough. You might want to consider having fantasy creatures have some sort of detrimental effect on high tech. For instance, maybe they can't be detected with modern radar, sonar, IR imaging and so forth, and therefore can't be locked onto or tracked. Or maybe they even warp reality a bit around then, scrambling or knocking out high tech in a fashion similar to an EMP burst. Another possibility might be to make heavy use of those creatures than cannot be harmed by normal weapons. If could really scare the PCs if they open up they spray a bunch of werewolves with machinegun fire, artillery barages, and even call in an air strike and the blasted things get up unharmed and keep coming. But however you do it, you are definitely going to need to address modern firepower.

Four metrical feet per line?!! EEk they're mixing Metric and Imperial measurements! No wonder the buildings have non-Euclidean geometry!

Cultists attack you when you crack open the spine. Then reading the forward summons Cthulhu, who eats you before you have to go through the pronunciation guide. If, you somehow survive all that, you know enough of the plot so that you don't actually have to read the book.

Yeah, but the realism vs. playability thing is something of a sliding scale and not everybody agrees to where to place the slider. For example, back in the 80s a lot of people who played D&D thought that RQ sacrificed too much playability for realism. And, as Rosen noted, more realism doesn't necessarily slow the game down. In fact it can often speed things up. Generally I've found that familirity with the rules, whatever they might be, tends to speed things up more that just about anything else.

Well, considering that you needed a 90%+ skill to be able to riposte in Stormbringer, and that criticals were 1/10th of skill, you should have been getting oneriposte after about every ten parries. SB didn't have special successes either. So I could see adapting the rule to apply on a special success. That would make ripostes about twice as common as they were in SB. That means about 3 ripostes a year for you, and about 1 per 5 parries for the rest of us. Geat idea. In fact RQ did sort of have this worked into the parry rules already, with the degree of success affecting how much damage got through and what damage the parrying weapon suffered, but since they've opened up the special rules for attacking to allow for multiple types of specials, why not the parries too. I could see that as a way to really differentiate between weapon and shield, single weapon, or weapon and paired weapons. And despite your Leporidaephobia the game mechanics in Usagi worked independent of long ears, cotton tails or fur. And quite a bit of it could adapt well to RQ.

Sounds a lot like the problems that exist today with older pistols chambered for .45 ACP and 9mm Parabellum rounds.

Commercial ammo of that era, which used smokeless powder typically reduced the amount of propellant in the cartridge so there shouldn't have been a problem. And the more powerful rounds were in new calibers. So again, there shouldn't have been much of a problem in the 1890s or early 20th century. The problem areas would be if someone was reloading their own ammo (too easy to overdo it), and/or adapting a pre-cartridge weapon to smokeless powder (smokless powder required a jacketed round to prevent damage to the barrel).

There was a fencing supplement for the Lord of Creation RPG, printed over a couple of issues of HEROES magazine that did just that. Each combatant had a number of points to spend on maneuvers each turn. You had six maneuvers a turn, and those with high skill could leave one or two blank and write them in as necessary. Each attack maneuver had a defense that stopped it, another that stopped it and gave the defender the advantage, and a third that also acted as a riposte/counter attack. It was a really cool supplement. You could pick a lot of attacks, but then could be rendered useless if the opponent got the advantage away from you, and then kept you on the defensive.It was even possible for combatants to take a bad mix of maneuvers and spend most of the round waiting for each other to attack. We actually played with the fencing system a lot more that we played Lords of Creation.

Yeah, but I believe smokeless powder wasn't available in the older calibers. I think they all used new custom calibers for precisely that reason. So the chance of winding up with one of the advanced powders in a black power weapon were pretty slim. Someone would probably have to go out of their wave to get the more powerful powder, ignore the multitude of warnings that they would get while doing so, and then have a way of loading the powder into a weapon like an old muzzle loader- a really really bad idea. I suspect that the problem of too powerful a propellant is a more modern one, since modernn manufacturers have introduced more powerful propellants into older cartridges such as the 45 ACP and 9mm Parabellum, so there is more of a risk of somebody loading a hundred year old firearm (such as a Colt M1911) with a round it can't handle (like a .45 ACP +P+ cartridge), and blowing the gun up. Most of the pre-cartridge firearms weren't all that reliable either. And even some of the early cartridges weren't all that safe. Volcanics come to mind. Blowing your own gun up was more commonplace that today. I've read that during a firefight, it wasn't unknown for a soldier to accidentally double load a muzzle loader.

That might be how Warhammer handled it, but isn't the only or best way to do so. Frankly I don't consider Warhammer to have done a good job of anything other than pushing lead. In a real swordfight the "advantage" usually tends to shift between combatants. So while "as long as you have the upper hand" might be true, actually keeping the upper hand isn't so easy to do. For example, in RQ if the parry was read an an opposed roll, then any time the parry won, the "upper hand" could shift. You might not like it, but a riposte system has worked very well in Stormbringer. There are also other ways to handle ripostes and counter attacks. For example, in the Usagi Yojimbo RPG they have a neat way of handling counter attacks. Basically, you do a counter attack instead of a parry. If you beat the attacker's roll, your counter goes off first. but if you don't score a good enough hit to prevent the attacker from swinging, you then get hit. So it's a bit risky. Of, and on a tie, BOTH hit at the same time. You were also limited to one counter-attack per round, but some weapons were able to keep their counter-attack when you scored a special success. In UY a riposte is something a character can do to sort of "upgrade" his parry, to a counter attack. after the rolls are made. There were limitations on how often you could do it. Either or both of these ideas could be adapted to RQ.

Yeah, but RQ tends to downplay the effect of reach. It's hard to close in on a group of guys who are pointing a bunch of long, overlapping spears at you. At least not without getting skewered. Of course,it was just such a set up that killed the formations mobility. Expect they didn't need the reach. The idea was for the front rank to advance in a solid line. If the opposing army is in formation, then there isn't much they can do to keep out of reach without breaking up the formation. If the opposing army isn't in formation, then the Roman auxiliary cavalry and missile troops will probably tear them apart.

But the Greeks were using long pikes not shot 1H spears. Their shield walls were mostly for use against ground troops, especially calvary. Against missiles, pikemen could stand their pikes straight up. This created a loose "fence" that could screen out or at least slow down missile weapons. Typically archers weren't shooting at the front ranks of a phalanx, but doing volley fire at the mass. The mobility thing wasn't an issue at first, mostly because formations that were more mobile than the phalanx usually weren't all that effective against the phalanx. It was the Romans who really figured out how to defeat the phalanx with a more mobile formation. As for the Romans, their scutum shields were curved to cover the body, and the gladius was a thrusting sword, so the legionaries didn't expose much of a target area. Just part of of an arm.

In real swordplay, when someone parries an attack they knock the attacking weapon "out of line". This causes a slight delay as the opponent must correct the problem. This creates an opening for the one who parried, allowing him to make an attack. In fencing, it is just such a parry that sets up a riposte. The same sort of thing can be applied to a "hard" block, including a shield block where the defender uses the parrying weapon to push the attacking weapon aside, The idea is that when the parries is performed successfully, the defender will gain the advantage and be able to attack before the original attacker can do so again. This is why I suggested something like allowing the parring character to swap Strike Ranks.

Yeah. The problem here is with the TKO formula. It's really designed for hunting, and so focuses more on the ability of the round to take down prey. The problem being that what might work best for a bear or tiger might not work as well on a human. A lot of the heavier hunting rounds will just go right through a man, and dump most of it's energy into the tree behind him. Also, a lot of light, fast bullets that can take down a man are not very effective against something big like an elk. That's why I suggested tweaking the TKO formula by raising the velocity component to a power of 1.5. This would shift the damage ratings a bit away from the older, heavier, slower rounds, and a bit closer to the faster deeper penetrating rounds used in modern firearms.

There are a lot of things that could be modeled, but aren't. For a variety of reasons. There are some possibilities. One method would be that if the parry result got a higher degree of success that the parried attack, the parring character could switch SRs against that attacker. basically bumping in in the sequence of events next turn.

So we're not going to go fly a kite?

Depends mostly on how many points of Butter and Salt the attacker uses. Makes me view Aldryami in a whole new light.

I agree. I think the problem is that the TKOF is designed for hunting purposes. The idea being that the round has to drop a game animal with a single shot. A lethal wound that fails to incapacitate the animal is more of a burden to a hunter, since he has to track down a kill an very upset animal. I also think that the reason why TKO doesn't work as well for modern weapon damages is because modern rifle bullets are narrower than modern pistol rounds. Against people, especially those with body armor and/or cover, penetration becomes more important, and a wound that incapacitates or kills a opponent might end up doing more actual "damage" that one from a bullet with a higher TKO. Hence a 9mm Parabellum round ends up with a higher TKOF than a 5.56 NATO round. Plus lighter smaller bullets, make it easier to carry more rounds, and a guy with 200 rounds is probably going to be more useful in combat than a guy with 6. Older firearms come out better because the old musket and rifle bullets had diameters as big or bigger than the old pistol and revolver bullets. Basically the TKO formula is a compromise between bullet energy/area and momentum. Is probably on the right track as far as "damage" goes, but probably a lies a little too close to momentum. But like you said, weapon damage is not perfect and never will be. Personally, I'd like to raise the bullet velocity factor in the TKOF to a power of ^1.5 and see if it matches up a bit better for modern firearms.

Another good source is The Knuckleduster Firearms Shop : a Compendium of Weapons for Western Role-Playing Games. It covers firearms from the 19th century, and rates them on a relative scale in several categories. It not that difficult to adapt their generic rating scale to game values for specfic RPG systems. In fact, the book even gives you a conversion sheet to do just that. Not surprisingly, the biggest point of contention with it is probably the damage scale used. Knuckleduster seems to emphasis bullet mass and diameter over other factors in determining damage ratings. As damage is treated as penetration ability in BRP, the rule can make some firearms more effective against target behind cover than they should be. But it pretty difficult to get a damage scale for firearms that can handle every weapon all that accurately in BRP. Realistically, you need to add in some sort of way to differentiate between penetration, damage, and stun/shock( "stopping power") capabilities of the various rounds, and even then user skill is usually a far greater component to how effective a firearm is than the round being fired.

No, a an impaling attack is a thrusting attack. So it's not like cutting an orange, it like stabbing an apple. They key to the impale is that the attack is supposed to produce a deep puncture wound. If it is just a surface cut, it wouldn't do all that much damage. Keep in mind that the average impale does more damage than the weapons normal max damage is a slashing or swinging attack.

Not really. The steel used in most modern swords is fairly cheap stainless steel, which looks pretty, resists rust and pitting, is fairly difficult to put a good edge on, and not designed for actual use. Most are made of only one grade of steel and are either too soft or too brittle to rely on in battle. They also tend to have a poor quality tang and hilts. Basically they are designed for looks and price over function. Since actors are not supposed to actually hurt each other their swords are not up to field use. Now it is possible to make a sword with modern materials that is a superior weapon than a medieval blade, and some people still do just that, but they are very expensive, and of little practical use on the modern battlefield. Nor would the be of much use to the film industry. Now if anybody here can provide some evidence that shows otherwise, please post it.

There was also a article in Heroes magazine for RQ3, which gave stats for shields that had no metal in them, and they tended to have lower AP scores than ones with metal framing and reinforcement.

An Angon could probably penetrate a thin layer of metal, but I suspect that a layer thick enough to make a shield virtually impregnable would probably also make it too heavy for most characters to wield. Even something like a metal buckler couldn't be all that thick. The data I can dig up suggest a diameter between 8 and 18 inches (20-46 cm). Since bronze and wrought ion both have a specific gravity of around 8. That means that a 1 cubic meter (1 million cubic centimeters) of sg 8 bronze or wrought iron would mass 8 metric tons (8000kg or about 17680 pounds). So a 1 kilogram buckler would have a total volume of about 125 cubic centimeters. That means that a 1 kilogram, solid metal buckler with a diameter of 30cm (12 inches) would have a surface area of 900cm2, would only be about 1.4mm thick. Now actual values can vary a bit depending on the quality and type of the iron or bronze, the diameter of the buckler, size of the boss, and how many layers it is made into, but the numbers above are in the right neighborhood.

I agree. I was trying to give a good visual on just how nasty a hit an impale is supposed to be. The rule was inspired more from accounts of battles with spears running people right through.