soltakss

I don't like SAN, won't use SAN and hence had nothing to add.

Personally, I don't mind having a number of Science/Knowledge skills. Merrie England did have a number of different Science and Knowledge skills, but they were all different (or should have been once I'd deleted the duplicates). However, I'm in the "More Skills" camp rather than the "Fewer Skills" camp. I can see the problem of having a situation where a knowledge skill is required that nobody has, but the same could apply to any skill - need to pick someone's pocket but don't have the skill - tough! If you apply some common sense to Knowledge and Science skills then they can be used as written in the rules. So, someone with Science (Mathematics) could use it for arithmetic, geometry and maybe simple physics. Depending on the setting, each Knowledge/Science skill would cover different areas and levels of skill, so what is known by a medieval scholar would be very different to what is known by a 25th Century scientist. I am not keen on using a Knowledge roll as a way of abstracting all knowledge/science situations - it makes it a very powerful characteristic and means that the GM or the players need a list of modifiers for every situation. It's a very cumbersome approach, in my opinion.

Yes, I think it was. I'm yet to break even, having splashed out on a number of books for background research, but that's not really the point. There is definitely something about having your name on the top of an article or on the front of a book that makes me feel proud. The amount of work is quite high. It took me six months to write Merrie England and probably about the same to write my parts of Birchbark Chronicles: Golden Horde. Although I usually worked on Saturday nights while my wife was here and all weekend when she was away, it still took a lot of my spare time. The hardest part was fleshing out the background and trying to ensure consistency. If you write up the technologies and background then add character generation then you have most of a SciFi supplement. It might be worth writing something for yourself and then seeing how much extra work would be needed to make it into a fully blown monograph. Relieved that they are finished, pleased that people like them, excited at the next one. It sounds good to me and we need more SciFi for BRP.

What? Sharks with ducks attached to their heads?

Advantages of not using miniatures: 1. You don't need a table to play on, so people with small apartments or without a room to play in can host. 2. You can play the game far more flexibly, combat is far easier (in my opinion) 3. You don't have to have characters that look like miniatures 4. It reduces the cost of playing the game

I played in an excellent BRP Sharpe game at Continuum, thanks to Nathan Bishop, and there was a reload skill that allowed you to reload in a round if you made it and 3 rounds if you didn't. You could adapt idea to ensure that skill plays a part in the reloading process - Critical (1 round), Special (2 rounds), normal (3 rounds), failure (4 rounds) and fumble (1D3+4 rounds). RQ Pirates had some black powder rules, if I recall correctly. And it's about Pirates so it's always a good thing to have.

Honestly, for a wilderness campaign, I'd go for the Moon Design Classic Glorantha PDFs - Borderlands and Pavis & Big Rubble. Griffin Mountai is good, but there's not much to do in the area once the campaign in the book has been run through. Sure, you can make a lot up around it, but for nitty-gritty and heroic campaigns, Prax/Pavis is the best RQ Gloranthan setting.

I'm not sure. Isn't the Laundry sort of a modernday Cthulhu-style detective/investigatory/weirdo/thingy? If so, it belongs with the other Cthulhu-style detective/investigatory/weirdo/thingies. If not, it could be an Alternate Earthy sort of settings.

If you can get RQ Pirates for free then I would do. It's the best Alternate Earth supplements that Mongoose has produced (although I haven't seen MRQII Vikings yet).

I quite like the idea that it would be too much work to include all related supplements - that implies that there is a lot of material out there. Which, of course, there is

Would you like to post any of the details on the Alternate Earth RQ Yahoo Group (See signature for links)? We'd love to hear about it, especially setting information, magic and scenarios.

Having just looked at RQ/BRP Alternate Earth supplements, it is surprising how many are now available. If you look at the companies producing material for RQ/BRP (Chaosium, Mongoose, D101 Games, Alephtar Games, Cubicle 7) there's a lot of material out and a lot more coming out. In fact, there's more coming out at the moment thanI can afford to buy. That can only be a good thing.

Well, I have written more information on Medieval Europe for Merrie England. Ok, so it's not exactly Merrie Vatican, but it does include a lot of the states of Europe, including Ireland, Wales, Scotland, most of France and some of Iberia. Most areas are sketchily covered but allow adventurers to include Christendom in their adventuring. The rationale behind this was that at the time of Merrie England, England was not an isolated state. A recent Pope was English. The Angevins ruled an empire stretching from the Pyrenees to Scotland. Knights and men at arms travelled to the Holy Land and back. All these areas are connected and should be viewed as one. A future supplement will consist of campaigns set in these areas. I'm not sure when it will be, but I am aiming for a supplement with campaigns for Beneath the Greenwood Tree, Albigensian Crusade, Conquest of Ireland, Third Crusade and probably some kind of Templar campaign. Depending on the page count, each campaign might have 4 or 5 scenarios, so the supplement could have 20-25 scenarios. But, I need to talk to Paolo to see if there is a demand for this kind of thing. I might be persuaded to include the Vatican States, but at the start of Merrie England these were small and not very powerful, although they did flex their muscles at the end.

It isn't. Irrippi Ontor is described as part of the Seven Mothers Cult in Cults of Prax, in the Hero Wars Rokeplaying in Glorantha book and in one of the the HeroQuest Imperial Lunar Handbook supplements (I can't remember which one). The description in the HeroQuest supplement is interesting, but radically different from a RuneQuest Gloranthan cult. It can be converted to something more like a RQ cult, but it takes a bit of work. Since Irrippi Ontor is Third Age and Third Age Glorantha is HeroQuest, I wouldn't expect a RQ version of the cult to ever appear. I have a fan conversion of the spells and skills http://www.soltakss.com/hwconv02.html but that doesn't include the newest version and needs the original to add detail. Your best bet would be to get Imperial Lunar Handbook I and II and convert the cults on the fly for NPCs or do a full conversion for PCs.

Don't bother with things like "Marching Order" when walking through a wilderness or scenario location. If something happens to a PC that does not depend on where they are physically, roll randomly to see who is affected, or use common sense to determine the target (A spell mght be used against the biggest warrior, for example, or the sorcerer might be hit by missiles). Sketch out locations on a piece of paper. Don't be too detailed, nobody cares about the exact dimensions or every single little alcove. Use numbered dots or crosses for major NPCs and ask people to draw where they are and what they are doing. That way, you get a rough idea of the mechanics of a combat but don't get hung up over the "I am moving 3m to him, do I have enough Movement?" issues. Don't get too bothered about ranges of things. Use what feels right. If you are throwing a dagger at someone across a bridge it's probably too far, but OK for someone across a small room. Spell ranges are generally OK because most locations are small enough to be in spell range. If, after some discussion, the GM rules that you are in/out of range then so be it. If you finish a session halfway through a combat, then draw a sketch of the situation and keep it for next week. It's easier than trying to remember what is happening.

I've got something that I wrote to generate NPCs for Merrie England. It's not remotely useful for anyone else, though, as it's written in Progress 4GL and cannot be accessed via the Web. The two versions I have are for generic MRQ1 and BRP Merrie England. If anyone wants stackloads of NPCs generated quickly then drop me a line.

No, the SRD is simply the merging of the various Mongoose RQI SRDs, reformatted and cleaned up again. I don't think that the changes have been put in, although there is no reason why they couldn't.

I'm definitely getting these when my bank account cools down enough for me to touch it again. Although I have the originals and the Gloranthan Classics in hard copy, these would be excellent source material for my current campaign, in PDF form.

Only 3 pages for me, but I used the Page-Down for a few of them.

He probably never left it - I thought he was dreaming all the while, he probably invented the whole thing in limbo.

Ralzakark? Yes, you could probably beat him by throwing spirits at him while other people beats him to death. However, you'd have to counter his bodyguard of Humakti Castrati Broos and his pet Godlearner Sorcerers first. Then there's the other broos who hang around him and whatever chaos demons he can summon up against you. Oh, and don't forget that Ralzakark might be a Broo Shaman, a Sorcerer, a Humakti or a Chaos Monster, or all of these at once. He's also very persuasive and knew Nysalor, so he knows a few little tricks. The trouble with heroes is that they have powerful friends and servants. Get them alone and you might stand a chance. Go up against them and their mates and you join the ranks of the fallen. I'm glad you like my spirit combat rules, thanks. In my current game, we've slightly down-powered the shamanic rules, so Spirit Combat does 1D3 + [1 per 10 POW or part thereof], which still makes spirits dangerous but reduces the number of dice to be rolled.

RuneQuest Vikings? Not that good for a Japanese campaign, to be honest. It is good for a Vikings campaign, though. I haven't read "Eaters of the Dead" but I have heard about it and Vikings would fit it very well. There is a new Vikings book coming out for MRQ2 and a new Mythic Iceland book coming out for BRP, so we will have a lot of Vikings material out fairly soon.

Wikipedia says that Pendragon came out in 1985 and Griffin Mountain came out in 1981. Griffin Mountain had Personality Traits for RQ/BRP way before Pendragon did.

Yes, in theory with BRP any character can learn any skills as long as they can satisfy any pre-requisities that the skill has (E.g. high POW for some magic skills/spells). In practice, however, it might be a little bit harder. Some skills are only taught by certain organisations and you have to belong to that organisation or steal the skill in order to learn it. So, certain magical skills might only be taught by a particular school of magic or cult, or only the Thuggee cult teach the Garrotte skill. Some skills are frowned on by certain professions and it might be difficult to learn or use those skills. So, a Medic might not be expected to learn a Flamethrower skill, for example. Apart from that, if you can find a teacher and persuade him to teach you the skill then why not?

Yes, Land of Samurai is well worth picking up. I think it is set earlier than the 7 Samurai period, but for those of us who don't know all the ins and outs of Nippon (including me) that shouldn't matter.