Atgxtg

The players usually don't get to pick their opponents, the GM does. Not do the players have much choice about where they need to sneak into. So if the adventure requires that the PCs sneak into the temple of the evil cultists and steal the Wii of Cthulhu before the cultists use it to raise Rhy'leth from the depths and end the world as we know it, well, that's just tough luck. Players generally figure that thier chances to succeed in any endeavor are based heavily upon thier own skills, thats why they have them. But in this case the differewnce between a 05% skill and a 95% skill is only a 17% difference in success chance. This in a game where the players are all hopeless outclassed by 95% of the Mythos beings. Glad you like it. I don't. I agree with you that Chaosium is aware of the situation, but that doesn't make it a good design choice for a game. As for opposed rolls, the game originally didn't have them. The D100 system used in most BRP games isn't suited to opposed rolls, as it predates it. But I think there has to be a better way to handle this that giving a NPC a two to one advatage when skill scores are the same. For instace: What if the difficulty of the roll was tied to the relative skill of the characters rather than the absolute skill of the NPC? If this situation were, say a half skill or less roll, it would be just a simple but play out a lot better. And still fail most of the time. What crtiera do you use ? As a compromise this is a terrible solution. At the 90% mark it makes the player character's abilities close to irrelevant. A situation where a player has the same or greater skill than a NPC and yet is only going to win about one time out of five, one in three if he pushes it, is not anywhere near what I consider ideal. It's a marked downgrade from the way the used to do it. I'm repulse by it. So much so that I'd play an earlier edition. ...regardless of how proficient you are at sneaking. Because player skills are now secondary to the NPCs skills. Consider a typical game session. The players want to get into a location but there is a guard. The players discuss the situation and try to decide if they should risk sneaking past the guard or not. Based on the information available to the players, which is mostly the environment and their own skill scores they have to decide what to do. The best case scenario for the players would be if someone has maxed out their Sneak skill. But if the guard has a Spot of 50% or higher, the players chances of success drop by 50%, and there is no way for the players to know until they are committed. So they might as well plan to fail because, mathematically the probably will.

Ironically, I think it actually makes the game harder to use. A Player with a 90% skill is going to expect to be able to hold their own against a similarly skilled NPC, and instead, has a one in three chances of winning in the best case scenario.

Okay. Let's see there seem several varieties but I won't go all Holy Grail on you. Hmm, it seems that they have an average weight of around 7.5 pounds, so about SIZ 1. So probably something like: STR: 2D3 (4) CON 3D6 (10-11) SIZ: 1 INT: 8 (fixed) POW: 3D6 (10-11) DEX: 3D6+6 (16-17) Armor: 1 point Hit Points: 6 Bite @ 40% for 1D6-1D4 Skills: Scan 40%, Climb 85%, Dodge 35% Glad to help. Wow. And I was on a roll too. I have never timed one so I don't know, and google isn't being all that helpful, so I'll take a semi educated guess and say they's have about the same MOV as a human. But I'm so far out of the limb there tht only my big toe is is contact with the tree branch, so I wouldn't be surprised if I were way off. I know that Chimps are about as fast as our fastest humans and that Patas are the fastest monkey. but not much more than that. Chimp and Gorillas are slighly slower on the ground than humans in RQ3, but that is probably not true. IMpressive. I just decided to grab a beer, too.

Yeah, I'm seeing Chimps being about for times as strong as a human of comparable weight. Since 4x STR is about +16 STR in RQ3/BRP terms that would means that a SIZ 13 chimp would have an average STR of 26-27. Chimpanzees tend to be smaller than humans though, so the cube-square law would probably apply. If an average male Chimpanzee weights about 50kg/110lb, or SIZ 8, then it would probably only have a STR of around 23. That matches up pretty well with the RQ3 Gorlla, too. It would have 13 more SIZ than a human so about another 9 points of STR over the Chimpanzee, and that matches up well with the 36 in RQ3 Hey, there are Chimp state are in RQ3! Let's see SIZ 12, STR 16-17. So they are a big overweight and weak compared to real world data. But then I wouldn't have thought them to be four times as strong as a man either. Only INT 7, compared to the 8 for Baboons too. Maybe they just sit around and watch TV all day? . Me either, but we can check. Hmm, maybe. the SIZ table is linear below SIZ 9, too. Let's crunch the numbers bit and see what we get. If we start with our SIZ 13, STR 26.5 Chimp and scale down to a SIZ 2, that would mean a 11 point reduction in SIZ and a 7-8 point reduction in STR, for around a 19. But, since SIZ 2 is lower than 8 the progression on the SIZ table no long doubles with every 8 points, so we can covert this to a ratio by using 2^((STR-SIZ)/8) or 2^(17/8). That means it's STR would be 4.36 times it weight (17 lbs). or 74 lbs or STR 5, which is pretty close to the 5 I gave it above. I kinda surprised it worked out so well. Powerball never does.

Now I miss White Dwarf. 😞

LOL!!!. Now I got Coca-Cola up my nose again. To be fair to GW, that was only true after they started making their own miniatures.

Yeah, I did up a track with multiple lanes. The inner lanes had fewer sections to get around a corner , but were more difficult. The outer lanes were easier to ride through, but were a couple of sections longer. Player then had to decide being playing it safe in the outer lane or take a chance in the inner lane. The horsepower thing is real life, and explains why an old VW Beetle wouldn't pass a Ferrari even if you could somehow give it the same engine. I'd suggest you go over the powers and decide what's okay for a car and what isn't. Also, race cars are usually limited by drag, not weight, so lightening a car won't help a lot. If you got the old SIZ table, you can read the mass give as a speed (in MOV, mph, kmh, m/s whatever) you can start off with (POW-SIZ)/3 plus a fudge factor to get the values up to where you want to start. You could swipe my idea of letting them roll for several "low incident" laps at once and let them move forward or back a few sections on the track based on thier driving rolls. For the most part a race on a track is about relative position rather than absolute position. Or you could do what they do in racing and put out a cuation flag and racers can do anything when they have a wreck to pull off the track. Yeah. What if the active zones changed with each lap, or if there was a way for the drivers to shoot a target or something to pick the color to be active or inactive? MAybre mutiple targets. SHoot a color and it turns on, shoot it again and it turns off. Or maybe there are key spots of the track they can drive over to activate certain sections or features and they can be placed in ways to make things trickier for the drivers? The players could plan strategies around what color they want active when. Yup, or it might need to be activated somehow. Or how about a shortcut that bypasses one end of the track, but has land mines, only some of which are active at any one time. This could be tied to the color coded zone thing, and could make it challenging for players to change lands along with the zones. Any maybe the mines aren't everywhere so a driver might still be able to go over a "live" section with a bit of luck? There could be guns, flame throwers, and other dangers there too. You could name it "Death Alley".or the "Gauntlet" or some such. I'm sure it would see tickets. And it would kinda nasty if the "switch" to raise the barrier across the shortcut was on the outermost lane. 👹

That's a lot close to the truth than you know. I'm currently taking a break from Pendragon after a two year run, and am running the old James Bond 007 RPG. While techincally not BRP, it is a distant cousin, coming from the DragonQuest side of the family, and the Quality Rating system is very similar to the success levels used in CoC 7. As the literary Bond spent so much time in the Caribbean, CoC's Bermuda Triangle supplement for CoC is one of my "go to" books, and I recommend it highly as a sourcebook on the area. It's a bit out of date, and Gms not running a horror RPG have to screen out some of the Mythos stuff, but even so it's probably the best RPG sorcebook on the Caribbean. Admittedly it doesn't have much competition, but that doesn't diminish my praise of the book. Yeah, pretty much. my current thinking is: 1) Qualifying Lap: Players make a series of a dozen or so driving rolls get points for each success level. Their lap time will be determined by the total number of points earned, as will their starting position in the race. I have most, if not all of the NPCs go first so the players will know what sort of score they need to get pole position. 2) The Race: Probably handled in 5 lap increments,in reverse order of position (so the driver in first place goes last). Players can adjust their posting up on down based on the success level of their roll. In Standard BRP terms this would mean keeping their position of a success , moving up a spot on a special, 2 or three spots of a critical, and dropping back on a failure.In BRP, I'd consider letting someone push to move up, making their driving roll difficult but allowing them to move up an additional 1D3 positions if successful. 3) The End: This would be the last two or three laps, played out, as the major named sections of the track, stuff like the first turn, the tunnel, etc. There are something like a dozen spots that are noted on the track, and I'd use some or all of those. These sections might have modifiers to rolls, and certain cars might be able to take advance of them. But...for any of that to be worth playing out, I need to get the player characters vested in the outcome of the race. If they are spies on a mission to stop WWIII or some such, they probably don't care about winning the Grand Prix. So I'll need to tie that into the mission somehow. Anyway, that's why I was working on it, and how and why it's set up the way it is, and how it might be useful for anyone running a racing adventure in BRP. Take from it what you will. Happy Motoring!

But would your old boss throw feces at you if you took his armor away? But, since you mentioned it, maybe not. When some of us were working on a bestiary, and I was deconstructing creature stats, I noticed that armor rating was usually some multiple of damage bonus (1/2 bd, bd, 1&1/2xdb, 2xbd, etc.). This actually goes back to something Sandy Peterson did in Gateway Bestiary. But there are occasion one off that just get a point or two. I did all of about 30 seconds research on the Rhesus Monkey too, and could easily be convinced to drop the armor point -- just as soon as I buy a banana, or a peanut butter cup.

I don't believe they ever published any monkey stats in BRP games other than Baboons and Gorllias, however... you can probably get good ballpark figures if you use the cube sqaure law to scale down an existing animal. What that means is: For every three points of change SIZ, adjust STR, and probably CON by two points in the same direction. POssibly adjust POW a little as well (bigger creatures tend to have a good POW to keep them from being easy targets for magic) Possibly adjust DEX up if the creature gets smaller or down if it gets bigger For example, I'll write up a Mandrill, which apparently weights between 42- and 82 pounds. I'll start with the basic Babbon stats I'll start with RQ3 Babbon stats: STR: 2D6 (7) CON" 3D6 (10-11) SIZ: 2D3 (5) INT: 8 (fixed) POW: 3D6 (10-11) DEX: 3D6+6 (16-17) Armor: 1 point Hit Points: 8 Bite @ 40% for 1D8 damage (seems a bit high, I suspect it was supposed to be 1D8-1D4) Skills: Scan 40%, Climb 85%, Dodge 35% Looking at the old SIZ table, I note that 42 lbs would be SIZ 4, 82 pounds SIZ 6, and 62 pounds SIZ 5, and that this matches up exeacly with the SIZ of a Baboon (I didn't plan that, or I wouldn't have bothered with all of the above), so I look over the Babbon stats, and go "close enough" and use those. Now if there were something about the Mandrill that suggested fine tuning the stats a little, I would. For a better example, and not knowing to quit while I'm ahead, I'll write up a Rhesus Macaque Monkey. Apparently the average 17pounds in weight, which would be SIZ 2. Starting with the Madrill Babbon stats above, I'll reduce the average SIZ by three points down to 1D3 (2), and take two points off of average STR , and reduce the bite down to 1D6, and leave everything else the same. What I end up with looks like this: STR: 2D4 (5) CON 3D6 (10-11) SIZ: 1D3 (2) INT: 8 (fixed) POW: 3D6 (10-11) DEX: 3D6+6 (16-17) Armor: 1 point Hit Points: 6 Bite @ 40% for 1D6-1D4 Skills: Scan 40%, Climb 85%, Dodge 35% Is that close to what you are looking for?

how about (c) the mutants were really test tube babies reverse engineered from alien DNA.

Yes, that's exactly what I mean. Just to give you a heads up, it was the first supplement for Pendragon (although the Grey Knight might have beaten it out of the gate). It's a smorgasbord of stuff, like most RPG supplements at that time. They used to put any new stuff they had into whatever they published as they didn't know if they would get another chance to publish another supplement. Most of what is in the PC is outdated, and is covered better and more detail in latter supplements, notable thre GPC, but a lot of stuff appeared in the PC first. It does give a condense timeline with most events given a single line or two. The overviews of the lives of Arthur, Gwen, Lacelot, and Mordred, and the designers notes are still quite helpful.All in all, everything in the PC is still relevant and still works, even though it's from first edition, but almost all of it gets covered better and in more detail in latter books. I am trying to give a fiar view of the supplment without overly selling it. On the one hand it is/was a fantastic supplement in it's day, I'm glad I bought it (twice), and still peruse it on occasion, for useful stuff - such as the random encounter tables when the knight travel. On the other hand it's a 35 year old supplement that has mostly been superceeded by later and greater supplements, and probably won't contain much that you haven't seen in a revised form somewhere. IMO the PDF is certainly worth the $5, especially if you don't have the GPC (and why not???), but at best will be a lightly used reference book, not the "go to" book it once was. I hope that makes sense.

I did something like it before in another RRPG, and RQ3 did something similar with Monster Coliseum. The different number of spaces per lane with modifers forces the players to choose betten a shorter but more difficult path, or a longer but safer one. Design wise, you want the strait aways to have the same number of sections for each lane, but the turns to varry from inner to outer. You might want to have near successes just slide to the outer lane rather than roll on the chase trouble table. If might help to know that if you treat POW as horsepower or kilowatts and put it on the same scale as STR or SIZ, it will take 24 points of POW to double a vehicles speed, or each +1 POW multiplies speed by about 1.03. If players have to buy POW instead of just snagging levels of superspeed, it might be manaagable. You can, if you are the GM and want to do so. It's when the players have access to those powers and start thinking beyond the lines that the problems start. That should be more feasible then. The BGB is a toolkit, that's good, except when someone decides to use a tool in a way the GM isn't prepared for. Okay. Just wondering how many "laps" is a typical race? If you want to run round by round combat then you will need to decide how many melee rounds you want a race to last., and plan accordingly. For instance, in my Monaco Grand Prix situation, the drivers have to make 78 laps, and drive about 160 miles, with the race lasting close to two hours. I didn't want to play all out in melee rounds or else it would end up taking a full game session or even longer. So I came up with the idea of rolling for every so many laps to see if the player improved his position. If you want to have the race last ore than a couple of laps then you might want to restrict the weapons allowed, or what areas they can be used in, or during what laps or some such, so you can squeeze in some racing. For instance, what if weapons could only be used in the turns but not in the straight ways, or what if different "zones"" on the track were color coded and every so often the active zones changed? OH, that's rather straight forward. I'm running a game where the players are spies and I was thinking of trying to adapt the High Stakes Gamble Supplement from the Top Secret/S.I. game. The supplement is set in Monaco during the Grand Prix, and I though the idea of the players taking part in a famous race might be good for an adventure. Then I had to figure out a way to run the race without it taking forever to play out, and would (hopefully, I've still got my fingers crossed) be fun and exciting for the players to play out, with driving rolls, mishaps, and the other factors that go into racing. I wondering if I should throw in a few "key laps" where the drivers have to go through sections of the track rather than doing whole laps at a time. Especially for the last lap or two, when players would be more likely to try something desperate to move up in position. It might give a more exciting finish that just one roll for the last 6 laps.

THe big difference between this and Mythas is that they use a formula for each skill. I'm proposing using the stat rolls as overarching categories. So someone with a high DEX ends up being good with all DEX based skills. Plus 1 point of stat only means 1% in Mythras (unless it's changed a lot from MRQ), where with STX times something it could be worth more. But if you want another approach, let me throw a few more ideas out there:. What if a Stat roll could give a bonus to a skill roll? For example making a idea roll might give a character a clue to something that could help them Fast Talk their way past a guard.THe two stage process might be a bit cumbersome, but it might also give you new ways to present obstacles. Or what if a player could opt to default to a attribute roll at increased difficulty rather than a skill roll? Something along the lines of making a swim roll or making a Difficult (1/2) Agility roll. Or what if a player who failed a skill roll could make a second attempt if they make an attribute roll? For example someone tries to pick a lock and fails. Normally the hat would mean the lock is too tough for them to pick, but if they make a DEX roll they could try again. Generally attribute rolls have suffered when they overlap with skills. Every time there is a new agility skill, the Agility roll loses a little. So it's hard to make attribute rolls better without making skill less important.

One idea you might consider is to make the characterstic rolls the base rolls for skills. For instance if Climing were DEX based then it would start at the Agiliy roll, and then increase from there. Note that if you did that you'd probably want to start the rolls lower, say stat x3%. There was an old article in one of the gaming magazies, perhaps HEROES, which did that. It also changed skills from 1-100 to 1-20. So a character would compare his Climbing skill of, say, 14, against the difficulty of the climb to get a success chance.Or, you could take it a step further and just use the Pendragon method.

What debate? It's just a GM trying to run a particular situation for their group, and several other GMs chiming in with different ways to do so.

Yeah. The first film was a self contained stand alone story by Gregory Widen, who moved onto other things. The sequle fimls and series were all attempts by the Producers to go back to the well to try and get more out of it, and pretty much all meant some sort of alternate universe where the first film wasn't really the ending. Not quite. In the films someone couldn't die and anything other than head/neck damage seems to have come back remarkably quickly. I mention head/neck damage specially as the Kurgan still had a scar from Ramirez's near success. In the TV series the immortals die and came back. Hence Connor cannot drown., but Duncan can, but comes back when he is out of the water. Yes they probably would, if they had a reason to maintain and improve thier skill, as they would in Highlander. There's probably a point of diminishing returns though, so realistically they might not be all that much better than a mortal swordsman, but every little bit helps, and there are only so many master swordsmen to go around. Yes, that's something I was trying to get across earlier. When you mix settings you want to do justice to both. That's fairly easy if the two settings are similar, but more complicated if the settings are differnt or if one setting has a differnt tone or power level than another. For instance, mixing the Maltese Falcon with A Bugs Bunny short with Godzilla thrown is is going to be a tough crossover to do justice to the Sam Spade character. Best case scenario is probably going to look like "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" with late Showa heroic Godzilla fighting space monsters in the background. Perhaps entertianing, but nothing like a Daschiell Hammett story. That crossover might be an acquired taste. I mean I can see Gms crossover over Gossamer with Amber due to the similarities between the games, but mixing Amber with anything else is inherently problematic, as it makes anything else a subset of the Amberverse. THat's kind of the problem with playing with any established history that is set. For instance, a PC who plays or interacts with any historical fighre who doesn't follow histroy is liable to change it, either by accident or design. Fori instance, warning Caesar of the assination plot or something. Or just let five to ten years go back as they pick it up. One of the things with immoral characters is that they don't have any reason to rush, unless you give them one. Yeah. In Trek most of the powerful beings have some sort of moral compass that prevents them from abusing less advances species. Even the Q mostly leave less species alone. And most beings that don't follow that rule ten to get reigned in by those that do (i.e Charlie Evans, or Tremane).

I've done a bit of work along those lines. Here are some of my suggestions: 1) Break up the track into a number of spaces that the vehicles can move through. You might want to have lanes with the inner lane having fewer spaces to get around the board, but be harder to drive on., and maybe an outer lane that has more spaces but is easier to drive on. Doing up some sort of drawn or printed track makes it easier to note relative positions, where any traps or weapons are, and put in special condtions and turn that might modify the driving rolls, like a frozen patch of road. 2) Each turn a vehicle can move a number of spaces equal to it's rated speed (see below) modified by their driving roll (Critical: full value, Special -1 space, Success: -2 spaces, Failure: Half Rated Speed, Fumble: Quarter rated speed,). For instance a sports car with Speed 15 would move 15/14/13/8/3 spaces depending of the driving roll. If you rather have the average distance be the rated speed, just shift the success values up 2 points each. 3) You can and should scale the speeds up or down depending on the number of spaces on your track and how many rounds you want it to take to get around. For instance if you track has 30 spaces and you want it to take an a Speed 15 sports car to take 4 rounds to get around it, then divide the move rates by two. 3) On a failed driving roll you can have the driver roll on the chase trouble table on page 217. 4) Since the progression for Rated Speed in the BGB isn't known, if you build any new vehicles, I suggest going with Speed = 1/10th MOV (down) for vehicles with a MOV of 100 or less and Speed = the square root of MOV for faster vehicles; It seems to be close to the actual values of the existing vehicles and keeps the relative speeds nice for game play. 5) If you don't want to play out the entire race in combat rounds, but would rather handle several laps at a time, then I suggest you have each racer roll, in order of last place to first. On a success they maintain their position, on a special success the move up one position, on a critical two. A failure means the drop back a position (and have to make a track trouble roll), and a fumble means the fall back 1D6 positions and have to make a track trouble roll. 6) For your vehicle designs, unless you are planning on making this a reoccurring thing, I suggest going with the sample vehicle stats in the BGB, then tack on weapons and armor. You might give each design a budget to spend on powers based on it's SIZ. The only thing is, once you open up super powers you wind up with super vehicles..You can give characters points to build vehicles use the super powers rules, but then you will end up with super vehicles. So you will probably have to restrict or ban certain powers, maybe tie some others to the vehicle's SIZ and so on. Without some limits it gets easy to make a semi truck go faster than a sportscar, because it has more points to work with. In real life a vehicle needs eight times the power to move twice as fast. If you want to make this a regular thing, then you will probably need a bit more to work with that what is presented in the BGB. I got a couple of real world formulas converted into BRP terms such as working out MOV by (POW-SIZ)/3 but you probably don't want or need that. 7) Optionally, you could base all the cars on one stock model and then given them some points or options to choose from. For instance they all could get a sportscar or standard sedan and get points to modfiy the speed, handling, armor or whatever. 8 ) Depending on on the course, you might want to track fuel in some way, and allow for pitstops. BTW, Good timing! I've been working on some rules to let my players play through the Monaco Grand Prix, so I sort of had something to work with already. I had it a bit easier as the race cars are all Formula One cars, and the racers don't shoot at each other, at least not normally.

Not every idea/setting mixes well with others. Highlander is great as a stand alone story, but suffers in terms of a series or RPG because it pretty much starts with the Gathering and you can't do much with it without changing the ending. Except maybe a prequel, but even that would be tainted with knowing that all the PCs were going to get beheaded by the 1980s. The game mechanics really wouldn't be all that much of a problem. All you really need is a way to handle the immortals immortality, their healing/regeneration ability, their apparent boosting of their abilities somewhat (probably solved by porting over Hero Points from BRP), and some sort of way of getting POW, and maybe skill/skill checks from those they defeat. All in all it's not that bad. Nowhere near as much work as, say, running Amber would be with BRP. I think the real problems come when you mix in other settings and characters. It's hard to mix them into other settings without either overwhelming the other setting due to sheer skill (someone with a thousand years of sword practice could seriously outclass most master swordsmen), or lagging behind when they run into something more powerful. It's one reason why corssovers are all such a tricky tapdance. Yeah,. It's similar to why my future Amber campaign will be set after the Patterfall war, when the Amberites aren't squabbling over the throne anymore. I suppose that would depend on which figure someone got identified with, or how that meshes with thier character concept. A player mightnot mind his character being the orginal King Arthur, but probably wouldn't want to be Attila the Hun. Fair enough. It was just an idea. Okay, so the magic will be underground then. That can be fun too, since, like with Trek's Prime Directive, you can put players in tough situations that they could solve in a heartbeat, if only they could use magic. What I was thinking of was that the players had it orginally, as it it was shifted them to thier current time, but they don't have it anymore and have to find it again to either get home, or to stop jumping around in time. It just gives you a plot device to nudge the players towards doing something, as you could drop leads to the McGuffin. THe actual device need not ever appear in your campaign, or maybe just show up in the finale. Be careful. Really powerful beings are fun in fiction, but generally suck as NPCs. One of the main reasons why people game is to have agency, the ability to make decisions and do things that impact the world around them. That's hard to have if you got ultra powerful gods and aliens running around.

I think what you want is the chronology in The Pendragon Campaign. Not the Great Pendragon Campaign, but The Pendragon Campaign written for KAP1. It's about a ten page synopis of the major events. For legal reasons I can't copy and print it here, but I can port over a couple of details. In the PC Merlin is said to disappear in 515, and Bagdemanus discovers him imprisoned under a stone in 516. But this was back when Greg has Nimue be the one who locked Merlin away instead of Viviane (they were really the same character under different manes, but over time morphed into the good lady of the lake and the evil one). Later Greg, decided to follow Malory a bit more closely. I suspect what we see in the GPC is a way to blend both stories with Merlin apparently missing in 515-6 with Nimue's help and showing up again later. Since Badon is in 518, I'd surmise that Merlin was dropping off the radar so that he could help ensure Arthur's victory. He probably found that being "dead" made it easier for him to work his plans and so kept under the radar from then on. As Morien pointed out, he seems to be around until 523, when Arthur is secure as High King. Maybe he even did a little behind the scenes work during the Roman War that we don't know of. He would have to have been around sometime after 514 to show the Holy Grail to the assembled Round Table. I don't see it happened during Arthur's wedding as it would get lost in the shuffle of miracles. Anyway, Merlin's disappearance is so shrouded in mystery that you can run it just about whenever you wish, after 515 or so. Considering that Lady Camille uses magic successful on Arthur in 531, it seems likely that MErlin wasn't around to protect him any more. So he is probably gone by 530. Some legends even have Merlin escaping and showing up after Camlaan. Or maybe Merlin "died" in the 420s and used form riding to come back as Taliesin?

That;s good. It would be a rather bad sign if you weren't looking forward to it - the kiss of death. THose seen if the film tell the story of Connor McLeod and the "endgame" of the immortals. The series had to be differernt becuase it not only had a differernt protagonist, but essentially was a sequel to a story that had already been told and tied up most of the loose ends. By the end of the film, there were no more immortals. I was wondering if you were thinknig of something Lovecrafting. An elder power or agents of an elder power in human form for some reason. It wouldn't be all that tough to do it, if you wanted to, although I could see why you wouldn't want to go that route. Highlander would require you to focus on some things that might not work well with the other stuff you've mentioned. There is no real reason for the immortals to work together. I haven't seen Man of Earth, so I can't comment on it. Requiem for Methuselah was an "okay" TOS episode. The character of Flint is a bit cute, but works in the show. Supposedly the ending where Spock uses a mild meld to make Kirk forget Rayna was lifted from City of the Edge of Forever. The whole love triangle is a bit contrived though. It probably would have been better if Rayna was patterend after another Rayna that Kirk had already had feelings for, but they had done that sort of idea already. There is some logic behind that. If someone had been a genius and around for centuries, then went off into space and encoutered other alien species, he might be well ahead of the Federation in some areas. Just think of where da Vinci or Newton might be if they were still alive and healthy today. Some of it would carry over. We still use bits of mathematics and geometry from the ancients, such as Pythagoras theory in geometry. What you might want to do in introduce a tech level rating any apply a modifier to tech that is more advanced (and perhaps less advanced to some extent, too). Speaking of which, are you going to let the players choose to be historical figures, force them to be, or leave it open? One idea I had was that you players could be the survivors of Atlantis, which had devopted medical science advanced enough to give thier people immortality. They could be trying to find some way of restoring the lost continent. You could include Mu as either another such land, or a rival land. Heck, you could even make Mu R'yleth, and the whole sinking of Atlantis a necessary side effect of a spell that keeps Ryleth under, and Cthulhu napping. THe players could then oppose the cultists trying to awaken Cthulhu, as they wouldn't want the sacrfice of Atlantis to be in vain. How do you plan on handling magic being pretty much an unknown in the modern world? If you use a lot of overt flashy stuff, it will be hard to keep it under wraps for very long. You might want to come up with some reason as to why we don''t see people getting zapped with eldrich bolts of magic on the Six O'clock News. Maybe there is some reason as to why magic must be kept secret- either some sort of metaphyscial reason, or maybe the magicians need to keep a low profile and will eliminate those who try to spill the beans? Unless you want the average people to be aware of magic. In that case you might want either some item or the effect of some great spell to be the reason. For example, let's say the players were survivors from Atlantis who escaped by some magical means, but who had to rush the ritual to get away before sinking beneath the waves. Let's say that to escape they had to travel back to a time before the spell took effect, but as the magical energy of the spell weaves it way back in time the wave hits them again and moves them again. So they have to find the Great McGuffin used in the ritual so that they that can establish themselves in one particular point in time. You could also have Altnatis be from the future rather than the past, with the legends of it orginaing from the survors who were transported to the past. It's a workable approach. Generally speaking hyper powerful beings don't really work that well in an RPG. In most stories they work to either put the heroes through the wringer, or explain some sort of morality. All that works great in a story, where the writers get to control what the heroes do and say, but not so well with actual players who might not have the epiphany need to solve the story.

Yup. With this sort of set up you can plut the characters in anyplace/anytime, provided they aren't penned in to be at some other place. Highlander was what sprang to mind to me from what you mentioned so far.. Speaking of which, have you worked out how and why they are immortal yet, and if there is some overarching purpose to it? It wouldn't necessarily even be that severe. Modern scientific thinking thinking postulates that human memory works the way it does, and we forget stuff, in order to help remember the stuff we need to and want to. So an immortal who have lived for hundred of years might recall their past lives much the way we remember our childhoods and infancy. So by the time of "Robin of Sherwood" a player's memory of Julius Caesar might be reduced to that of vague memories such that we might have about a neighbor who lived up the street when we were children.

Are they travelling in time sequentially (i.e. living through the periods as they happen) or do they have some sort of way of jumping from one era to the next? In other words are the eras themselves somehow important tot he story, or are they just being used to illustrate that the characters are immortal and have lived in all this different times and places? The answer could really impact on what directions the game could go in, and there are so many possibilities. Also, with the characters being immortal, are they actually human, or some sort of beings that only resemble humans? Do they keep the same bodies or inhabit news ones? Lots of different ways to go with it.

Yeah the Romans had all sort of of engineers in their military so even Grease Monkey would probably be adaptable assuming the GM is willing to let the players have access to small siege engines and chariots. The idea of the Romans fighting off a horde of Deep Ones with light ballista and catapults could be very pulp-ish -at least as "Pulp" as .any Roman era game could be. I mean Roman Pulp would be a whole new genre. Cthulhu Roman Pulp is just so surreal. I try to reimagine classic Pulp characters, such as the Shadow or Doc Savage in and ancient Roman setting, with Mythos stuff in the background. There's a fresh new RPG in there somewhere.

Yeah to do something like that they would need to use some OCR software to convert the scans into text, fix the typos, and then recreate the same layout by trying to match the original fonts used, along with the original art, assuming they still have the rights for the art. Just how easy and how long that takes varies a lot depending on what OCR software you have. There would probably be some financing and legal issues too as it would probably considered a revision rather than just reprinting the original material. I've done something along those lines with a couple of pages of a magazine to do a handout fro my players and it's time consuming. In the long run it would probably mean a lot of work and time to bring back supplements that were probably superseded in later editions, and probably don't have a lot of fans willing to buy it to make it viable. Not when they have current Pendragon stuff waiting to come out. I'm sympathetic to anyone who desires one of the older supplements, and I'm sure the folks running Chaosium are as well, but I suspect the only way someone is going to get a physical version of any of the older books is either to find an existing one, or get the PDF printed. Again, I can understand why someone would want the old books (I'm glad that I have the ones I've got), but I don't see it making much sense from a business standpoint to try and recreate an old supplement.