soltakss

Which is a great shame as my first true love in roleplaying was, and still is, RuneQuest. I can see a reimagining for BRP being on the cards, expanded and improved.

Merrie England and Stupor Mundi, at their core, are compatible with BRP. However, it is not, currently, a BRP game. This means that if you compare skills then it will be different, Strike ranks are different, magic is different, hit points and armour scores are different and so on. However, if you don't really care that such and such a weapon does 1D8 not 1D8+1 or this armour blocks 6 points not 5 points then it is usable with BRP. What I tend to do is to use the NPCs as written and work out what I need in terms of Strike ranks and spells.

Stupor Mundi is good. It is a medieval game set in 13th Century Europe, normally around southern Italy/Sicily. Character generation is good, magic is good and seems to work well for a magic-low setting. There are two very detailed scenarios, one of which could be used as the basis of a small mini-campaign spawning 5 or 6 scenarios. It is written for RQ but is pretty compatible with BRP, especially if you are not overly concerned with Strike Ranks. Merrie England is good as well, but that's mine so I would say that.

What do they know? I thought that GORE was good. In fact, I didn't see any Mythos stuff in there otherwise I'd have run a mile. GORE seems to be a good hack at a modernish horror RQ-Style ruleset. I wouldn't touch CoC with a bargepole but I'd use GORE for a twenties/thirties/later game.

Personally, I consider BRP, RQ, OpenQuest and so on to be different versions of the same fundamental game. Rules are not that important, settings are far more important. That's why Glorantha ia still going strong after all these years. By the way, RQ2 and RQII are different terms and are, hence, not confusing. As a programmer, they are different (have a different length) and contain different characters. As a roleplayer I see them as being drastically different editions of a game. I've no objection to GORE or RQM being different from BRP. So, they are similar, so they are based on the same core rules, so what? The more the merrier. As to which direction third-party publishers can go, I'd like to see supplements produced that would be broadly compatible with all the major D100 systems. How to do it? Use the RQM OGL licence to produce something similar or use a variant on BRP to do the same. Introduce different rules to make it different to BRP and RQ, or to make it similar. Write something then worry about what it is compatible with later.

I don't even know what it is. I could Google it, I suppose.

That's the best way to make me never buy that product.

Lovecraft's talents cheapened? They must have been bad.

There are troubadours, of course, and minstrels (not the same thing) but I have downplayed the Occitan influences for the main book, except to highlight the tensions between the Normans and the Angevins and to illustrate briefly that Richard the Lionheart is virtually a Troubadour himself. If I do Merrie England:The Court of Love then it will be heavily into Courtly Love, Chivalry, Troubadours and so on, but that is based in Aquitaine rather than England, so it will have a different flavour.

Merrie England:Age of Eleanor has a very nice cover, beautiful deep colours. My opinion of artwork in supplements is that it takes up space that text could better fill, but the cover is stupendous and the internal artwork is very good indeed. I'll be at Dragonmeet, for the first time, having ventured out of my cosy Conjunction/Convulsions/Continuum/Tentacles convention corner. If you want to ask me about Merrie England then go ahead. I'm not so sure about the signing thing - I don't normally deface books - but if Paolo insists ... There are two or three Merrie England supplements sketched out for next year which I should hopefully be able to finish. Maybe Alephtar Games can be persuaded to publish them, if so they could be coming out in 2010 or 2011. If there is enough interest I'll probably do a couple more, if not then I can always publish support material online.

Try Traveline - Public Transport Info - there is a coach that runs to Leicester and a train that runs from East Midlands Parkway.

I think I stayed there last time. The rooms are good, the kitchen area is excellent for playing games, as long as you can get enough chairs. The key fob is a bit fiddly, but I was never locked out. Students have it easy nowadays ...

Personally, I don't use battle maps for movement. In fact, I don't use miniatures at all, just sketches on a piece of paper. However, it all depends on how detailed and exact you want to be in combat. If you think that it is important to map every yard/metre of movement, whether people make half-turns or full-turns, whether people are side-on, facing, behind or whatever then a battle map is probably a good idea. The scale isn't that important. If I use them, I use a map that is one hex per 1/2/3m, depending on the size of the hex relative to the size of figures used. So, if a hex is about the same size as a figure then that's 2m, if it's larger then 3m, if smaller then 1m. Everything else flows from that. Normally, I say that movement means a PC will be in position "at the end of the round", "at the beginning of next round", "halfway through this round" and so on. If SRs or DEX Ranks are important then the PC gets a starting SR as to when he can attack. Actions such as drawing a weapon can be done during movement, so don't impact on SRs etc. It works for me and the players seem to like it.

Give "Rules" a capital R and it looks fine. As everyone has said, nice cover. How are you doing it? As an extension of BRP, as a RQ OGL or simply as another version of something that is similar to RQ?

From memory, the film of A Boy and His Dog was very true to the book and didn't gloss over things. It's still a teenager trying to get laid, helped by his telepathic dog and avoiding being killed in the wastelands. If Rubble and Ruin is anything like this it should be good.

The article for Birchbark Chronicles made its way across the Atlantic where Mark Galleotti is going to chop it up and put it through a blender to make it fit with his other articles, so that's one down. Merrie England is, after a host of rewrites and additions, almost ready to be published. I remember why I prefer to write things for a website rather than for other people - it's a lot, lot easier. Still, I have ideas for a couple of follow-ups for Merrie England and should have them ready for the end of the year, in one form or another. The Gloranthan Campaign is still going and seems to be back on track as the players have spawned new ideas and taken it into new directions, which is always good. I have had some ideas about a Sci fi setting, but it might not be very original. I need to work on the SciFi SRD to tidy things up and expand/improve on certain areas. Maybe I'll do something about a setting some time next year. My website is still stalled. I have lost a lot of interest in Glorantha, mainly because the new Glorantha is heading in a direction that I don't particularly like. For me, the future is with Alternate Earth and that's where I think I'll concentrate. I've been sent a contributor's copy of Trade Talk 17 for the Unicorn Quest, which also appeared in something else from the Chaos Society, so that's nice. Something for nothing is always good. Next year we have Continuum and the Eternal Con in Germany and hopefully I'll be able to go to both of those. All in all, I am feeling a lot more positive about things. See Ya Simon

I saw it once with a Humakti who took his own head off in combat and once with a troll who fumbled badly, got a "roll twice" and got "Hit nearest friend in the head doing max damage" and "hit nearest friend doing critical damage", rolled for his friends and killed two of them in the same swing. Back swing - kill a friend, forward swing kill another friend. They were runelords so came back angry.

When I wrote up the Bashkorts for Mythic Russia's Birchbark Chronicles, I had the same problem. What I decided to do was to keep some Russian/Bashkort terms where their words were short, easy to pronounce and meant a single, specific thing, but use English terms for the majority of words. So, I used tamga for the clan sign/markings because it is a specific term, and batyr for a mounted-warrior-hero, as it is a very emotive term. If you have a lexicon then people will either continually refer to it or learn the terms. I wouldn't make it too long, though, just a single page is probably about right. You'd probably need a guide as to how to pronounce the terms as well as I might have a stab at qínná but wouldn't have a clue at yuèyáchǎn.

I'd say that Paralysing Touch sounds better than Paralysis Touch. Mutism Touch? I'd say that I can probably work out what it means (it strikes you dumb) but it doesn't flow very well. Muting Touch doesn't sound any better, though, and I can't think of a better phrase.

DEX-based skills can normally only be increased past 75% by experience, not training. The idea is that you can only train so much and the rest has to be done by yourself. So, if you have Ride at 74% then you can train it, but Ride 75% means you can't.

Yes. I've seen two or three of these done in Kung Fu demonstrations and have seen incredible pushes using Chi manipulation, so why not?

I printed a copy in Booklet mode and it came out as a nice, small, readable A5 booklet, perfect for slipping into a bag and using as and when.

Friendly Local Games Store

A breakdown of a typical 3.5 hour RQ session in our gaming group: People arriving and having something to eat - 30 minutes Discussing how our real lives are going, jobs etc - 30 minutes Discussing anything good on TV - 15 minutes Relating humorous anecdotes - 15 minutes Reminiscing about old RQ sessions - 15 minutes Making tea/coffee/orange juice - 15 minutes Gaming - 1 hour 30 minutes Would that make a good podcast?

Since Uncounted Worlds will not accept RQ material, that may exclude a lot of the Alephtar range. In any case, competition is good, isn't it? I, for one, would buy both.