soltakss

Not really. No chest/abdomen, all hit locations have the same chance. So, different dice for different body types. It takes the simplicity away from a very simple concept. I like the D20. If I were to change it, I'd use a D100, especially if I needed to roll crunchier locations - hands, feet, limb sections, areas of the body etc. But a D20 is quick and easy and we have hit locations for a lot of body types from older versions of the RQ rules.

Yep, I'm coming and I am bringing my wife this year, so I probably won't enjoy myself

Oh, I could

You haven't changed the cover picture for BRP on the main page yet. The new one is much more evocative than the old one.

and Clever Clogs! But, well done for the concept.

RQ3 Sailing is very similar to those from Sailing on the Seas of Fate (SSF), although SSF has more tables (Disasters and Fumbles). Mongoose RQ develops the RQ3 sailing rules very well and are an improvement, in my opinion, and Pirates has some good ship building rules additions. You can use ship stats from all four sources pretty much as written and all should be compatible with each set of rules. As for cities as characters, I liked your rules from Age of Alexander. HeroQuest goes a step further where everything and anything can have stats and be played as a character, whether it is a city, town, clan, tribe or nation. I've got HeroQuest stats for cities and rivers in Mythic Russia, for instance. I'd welcome BRP rules for playing cities, clans, tribes and nations. I'd prefer it if similar rules were used for armies as cities so that they could be interlinked. What I'd hate is for an army to besiege/attack a city and have no easy way of resolving the battle. If they had similar rules then resolution would be very simple.

By the way, will BRP be ready for Tentacles (in May)? I'm hoping that you'll have some advance softback issues ready.

Wow! The cover is really nice. It's evocative, simple and covers all the settings without being too corny or cheesy. Well done whoever thought of it and drew it.

Wahay! I get a free drinks card for every sign-up, so I'll be able to afford to buy you a drink! Look forward to meeting you there. Simon

Is there any reason why Basic Roleplaying isn't the first article on the Home Page? I'd have thought it would make sense to have this as the first one and the others following. Unless, of course, BRP Rome and Fractured Hopes are coming out before BRP.

Glad you could join us. The mechanics of Call of Cthulhu are slimmed down from RQ3, but the mechanics in CoC aren't that important as the atmosphere and background are the most important thing in CoC. But, yes, to an old RQ-Head like me, RQ has a very tich set of mechanics that CoC just doesn't have. BRP seems to be able to have the same richness of game rules/mechanics if you use the optional rules.

If you wanted to go that way, the RQM SRD contains Rune/Divine/Sorcery which is pretty much RQ3 with a few changes. Using an OGL Licence, you could easily change it back and retrofit it to an improved RQ3 Magic Book. Of course, that makes it RQ with OGL rather than BRP but that's just a technicality, surely.

Well, I'm going to miss the Continuum Early Bird Registration, so it'll be an expensive Con this year. Hopefully I'll sign up before the end of April.

From memory, the Honoured Matres were the bad equivalent of the Bene Gesserit. They had similar abilities but used them to do bad things. It's been a long time since I read Dune, though. No, google confirms my failing memory Honored Matres - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia gives an overview of them.

I'll probably buy it at a Convention as they usually offer some kind of discount. I'll also buy the Rome and Iceland supplements for sure and possibly the SciFi ones, but that depends on how expensive they are and what comes out at the same time. At the moment I am spending roughly between 40 and 60 pounds a month on RQ/HQ supplements and it's a lot of money. I see it as the equivalent of two pairs of shoes. My wife sees it as two pairs of shoes that she could have had.

Wahay! I'll see you there, hopefully.

There's a Front Page? I keep forgetting. I go straight to the Forum normally. It looks OK. I prefer a plain background as colours confuse me but it's not too confusing. It would give me a headache if the backgrounds in the forum were the sam, though. I just re-read the Upcoming Releases and it struck me that there would be some overlaps between Fractured Worlds and Interplanetary, both having some kind of space travel in a SciFi setting. How much correspondence will we have between the two settings? Will the technology be compatible, even if the technological levels are different?

They are fine for typical Forest Children, but you probably also need some basic chances for people who want Forest Children PCs. Sure, pilfer away. Anything I include in this, or any other forum, is freely available unless I say otherwise - and I very rarely say otherwise. I'd include that kind of thing "Cloak of Green (Cloak of Night)" in the Magic Section but then just refer to the Waelding spell name everywhere else. That way people who don't know where the spell is described can look in the Magic Section and know what to look for in the rulebook. I can't believe they have spells such as Sorcerer's Eye or Sorcerer's Speed. How ultra-generic is that?

The stats look fine. Physically and mentally they seem about right. The skills look a bit high. Are they basic skills or are they for "normal" Tree Children? Are the spells generic from the BRP Rulebook or are they spells that you have made up? The names of the spells don't really work for me. The spells don't really have any flavour, you couldn't tell they were Waelding or Forest Magic from the names. Even changing the names from "Sorcerer's" to "Forest" would be a start, so you'd have Cloak of Green, Forest Leap, Forest Sureness, Forest Speed, Forest Armor, Sharp flame, Make Fast, Forest Ear and Forest Eye. As for having the stats in a Code section, it looks OK. I've also put them in tables but I'm not at all sure that it looks any better. It would probably look better if the Weapons were pulled out to be below the stat block and above the skills, but that's the classic RQ layout. I've also included a sample Hit Location table, but I don't have the BRP rules so I haven't got the correct values. It's only an example after all.

Legendary Abilities are from Mongoose's RuneQuest product. They are included in the SRD (page 86 in the current version).

To tell the truth, I've tried to steer clear of describing magic for several reasons: 1. I don't have BRP Zero 2. BRP is not out yet 3. The SuperPowers rules in the BRP Playtest left me cold 4. I rather hoped that someone would incorporate a version of the RQ3 Magic System as an option for BRP Superpowers/mutations are fine if you can come up with a rationale. Inherent magic is also fine as is magic that is derived from a source. As for the example, I like the idea of the Grove Guard. +3 STR/SIZ or +3 Armour for -1 DEX sounds OK, you could get good armour (9pts) for -3 DEX and RQ Troll SIZ (+15) for -5 DEX, so that makes you pretty big and tough for -8 DEX, so providing they start off with a high DEX then they should remain fairly useful rather than becoming tough but immobile. I think +6 STR/SIZ is too much as +18 STR/SIZ for -3 DEX seems too good to be true. It also gives you a mutation of Were-Tree that allows someone to naturally take on Grove Guard form without the use of magic, depending on the mutations taken.

The Dune setting would be great if you wanted political scheming, harsh battles and a fast Sci Fi game. I don't particularly think the powers described in Dune are just skills. They seem to be natural abilities or extensions of skills. Mongoose's Legendary Abilities (LAs) would suit Dune down to the ground and should be imported to BRP as soon as BRP is finally published, even if they are just a fan conversion. The Voice would definitely suit a Legendary Ability as would hyperspace navigation. The Bene Gesserit and Honoured Matres would also have a number of special abilities that LAs could easily model. Some of them would have Spice as a component, some might not. Unfortunately I no monger have my copies of the Dune series, so I can't pull out examples, but I have thought for a while that Dune would suit Legendary Abilities really well. In fact, Dune is a good candidate for a fan conversion as it only has a handful of Backgrounds (Fremen, Imperial Shocktrooper (can't remember their name but it began with an S), Bene Gesserit, Honoured Maters (can't remember the organisation), the chappies who could take on other people's appearance, the chappies who could grow pretty much anything from a genetic model, the individual houses (Harkonnen and Atreides but there are probably more) and whatever others I can't remember off hand). So, you only have 10-15 Backgrounds, a few professions within each background, descriptions of the few worlds that figure in Dune, rules for the tech/weapons, rules for the special powers, rules for Spice, stats for the Sandworms and God-Emperor and that's about it. You'd need the books as well, which rules me out.

Of course, not everyone is buying the BRP Zero. Some of us are waiting for the real thing.

A bit late, but yesterday (8th March) was International Women's Day and it was more than my life's worth to go on the PC. Elder Secrets is good, lots of information about some of the Elder Races. It also has an updated Cacodemon cult with Vomit Acid, Fiends and stats for Cacodemon himself. It also covers Mostali, Aldryami, Uz, Baboons, Beast men, Centaurs, Giants, Grotarons, Jelmre, Keets, Luatha, Ludoch, Motocanth, Newtlings, Ogres, Slarges, Timinits, Tusk Riders, Voralans, Waertagi, Wind Children, Dragonewts, Dinosaurs, Magisaurs, Wyverns. Wyrms, Stoorworms, Cult of the Bloody Tusk and Cacodemon. There are stats for Cacodemon, The Crimson Bat, Cwim, The Mother of Monsters, the Hydra of Dragon Pass, The Chaos Gaggle and a Roc. Theer is a bestiary that contains Amphisboena, Catoblepas, Hippogriff, Nasobeme and Redcap. It also covers inaccessible areas of Glorantha and several secrets that are not covered anywhere else, to my knowledge. Gloranthan Bestiary has a few cult outlines that aren't found anywhere else (e.g. Kaarg) and a lot of creatures in RQ3 format. Most of these were in the RQ2 Gateway Bestiary and other RQ2 products, but they were updated for RQ3. Of the two, Gloranthan Bestiary is probably the more useful as it has all the common creatures that you would need stats for. Elder Secrets is the more interesting of the two, however. There are PDFs knocking around of these and all the other RQ2/RQ3 products, if you can get hold of them. They also appear fairly regularly in games shops and at conventions. You can get them on eBay as well, or so I am told.

Thanks. They should be mean and nasty, big and bad. Not the normal "noble beasts" or cuddly beastmen.