soltakss

Soltakiss, ANYBODY who has played RQ as much as you is most assuredly a BRP fan-atic. As for 'rubbish magic system', watch your tongue, sirrah!

RQ had battle/Spirit Magic, Rune/Divine Magic, Sorcery and Ritual Magic as well as various kinds of other magic. What did CoC have? A list of meaningless spells with no links between them. Ringworld and Superworld had no magic at all. Elric had demon summoning but no real magic. No comparison, really.

All in my opinion, of course.

I would also love to conversion rules from any system actually, to BRP. But as there are few people who like to play all the games, there probably won't be that many webpages dedicated to all the systems (I only know of yours!).

That's a shame as well. I hope there will be more.

Funnily enough, when people talk about the BRP community, I'm never sure what they mean.

I've played Stormbringer once or twice, Hawkmoon once, CoC once or twice, never played ElfQuest, never played Ringworld, never played Worlds of Wonder, tried and failed to run a Superworld Campaign and played a hell of a lot of RQ2/3. Of all those games, the only one I have time for is RQ. To tell the truth, I wouldn't play CoC except at gun point and have little interest in the other games. So, does that make me a member of the BRP community? Certainly a die-hard member of the RQ community, but BRP always left me cold (no SRs, no Hit Locations, rubbish magic).

But, D100 seems, with its optional rules, to be a good extension of RQ3, despite having an ultra-generic magic section.

But, I happen to like RQ2, RQ3 and HeroQuest. Despite having reservations about RQM, I've enjoyed every game I played. I will probably like D100 as well. That almost certainly puts me in the BRP camp and also puts me in the RQ camp. So what am I?

I just don't see any peaceful cooperation in our times.

That's a great pity. It really is.

Probably the best thing that can happen is for both camps to ignore each other.

I can't see that happening, at least while I am here to stir them up!

You were in the playtest for this? Can you answer any questions about it?

I was in the original playtest group, not the new one that playtested the actual game.

The version I playtested was nowhere near complete, was full of holes and was drastically changed for RQM.

I can answer some questions, depending on whether I get told I can't.

I've kept all the documents and the emailed digests since I joined the playtest, for what they are worth.

Why is that?

Because I was told that I couldn't.

I asked Nick Middleton specifically if I could submit any articles about RQM to his new fanzine and he said NO because of the OGL Policy and Mongoose's actions. He quoted personal morality, whatever that is

To be fair, he said that I could send them to D100.org, but that's beside the point.

As for why MRQ came out the way it did,

Well, I had heard from some people from the playtest groups as well as some Mongoose employees that the rules were much more BRPish up until the last draft, when Matt Sprange rewrote everything. I also heard that pretty much all the complaints about the system were pointed out by the playtesters, too. If you can mug a playtester and look at some of the playtest drafts you will see a RPG that looks a lot more familar. MOngoose orginally advertised the game as the return of RQ, and played up the involvement of Stafford and Perrin in the desgin on the new edition. I don't know why Stafford doesn't write anything for MRQ, or why Perrin left the playtest. But neither had a hand in design of the game as originally advertised.

There were two playtests.

The first was a Yahoo Group that had various versions of the rules, of which the last version was the closest to a BRP-style game. Earlier discussions were on things such as "Do we need a D100 or should be use another dice rolling method".

The rules that I saw were so full of holes it was unbelievable. I couldn't take anything from those rules and use them in RQ3. In fact, I started a RQ campaign using the playtest rules but my players asked me after the fourth session to use RQ3 as the new rules just didn't work. I kept a variant of Hero Points and Experience Points and a variant of Steve Perrin's magic system which needed a lot of work and isn't satisfactory even now.

Steve Perrin was invited on board to create a magic system based on Runes and Questing for them (Rune-Quest, geddit? No, neither did I) and he came up with a half-arsed system that didn't work as written, in my opinion. (For example, he wrote the cults of Uleria as a Moon Goddess because she had emotion-affecting spells and emotion came under the Runic Powers of the Moon and Waha the Butcher as an assassin cult) There was then a period of playtesting dead time, enlivened only by an exchange between Steve Perrin and Matthew Sprangue where emails were meant to be sent privately but accidentally sent to the forum. The gist of it, as I recall, went something like "I haven't been consulted or paid" and "Did you expect to be paid for what you had written", then things went downhill quite badly.

The second was a closed group for specially invited people, of which I wasn't one, that rewrote the rules and developed them into what is now RQM.

The DBRP Playtest went a lot better, I thought, with actual dialogue between playtester and co-ordinator and ideas being written back into the rules.

Couldn't keep my nose out for long ....

The problem with a new setting is that it had better be good, very good.

Glorantha is a very good setting that a lot of people hate.

What's to stop people hating any brand new setting?

Also, to be a good new setting, you need background, lots of it. Do you think that D100 could cope with producing background supplements rather than scenarios? I don't know, to be honest.

Alternate Earth is one of my favourite settings, whether it is called that or not. Fantasy Europe, Fantasy America, Fantasy Russia, Fantasy China, Fantasy Japan etc. all sound good to me. Plus, you can't stop people producing supplements for a historical/fantasy period of real world history.

For those of us who are system-agnostic, we already have Stupor Mundi (Fantasy Holy Roman Empire), there's a Samurai supplement coming out for RQ (Fantasy Japan) and a Roman one for D100 (Fantasy Rome) and the more the merrier in my opinion. You could even count Mythic Russia, even though it's for HeroQuest, certainly there will be some conversions of the new Companion into RQ and D100 when I have the time to do them.

David Eddings wrote a couple of good series based on the Belgariad which always seemed perfect for a RQ/BRP conversion. But apart from that, I can't think of a setting I would particularly like to see for D100. Any zombie genre film would be good for D100, but you wouldn't make a setting out of it with loads of supplements.

What you need is a setting with many races/species, different magic systems, different lands/countries/worlds and some good storylines.timelines to work with. That way, you could publish supplement after supplement. That's why Fantasy Earth is good - so many lands to cover, so many wars/dynasties/periods, so many cults.

Also, don't forget about licencing costs. I don't know what Chaosium's budget is like, but can they afford to licence big players? Or will they be stuck with licencing comic books or graphic novels? Don't get me wrong, comics and graphic novels have a devoted and large readership, but is that enough to get people engaged? Slaine, for example, has a huge following but the Slaine RQ supplement is not that good at all and didn't engage me. What if Chaosium produced a couple of similar things that didn't capture the imagination? Where would they be then?

Better for them to produce some geenric things first and some Fantasy Earth things with no licence costs, then put out some licenced worlds.

And, no, don't give me Call of Cthulhu as I, personally, couldn't stand the books and the game leaves me cold. So, I personally wouldn't buy RQ CoC supplements.

So, I'd go heavily for Fantasy Earth. Or choose something that is out of copyright, some Victorian gung-ho, Boys Own setting.

As a long-time player of RQ, I was pleased when Mongoose brought out their version, but not so pleased to see the quality of the supplements.

I was also pleased to see that Chaosium were bringing out BRP as well, although not so pleased to see it had a lot from CoC in it.

As I have no life of my own, I visit several, although by no means all, of the RQ/BRP forums and have noticed some things happening time and time again.

People seem to be very supportive of their favourite system and dismissive of the other, similar systems. Quite often, this is not just system based but seems to have a large amount of hostility to certain companies or people.

For example:

1. There are many people who like HeroQuest and snootily dismiss RQ.

2. There are a lot of people who like BRP (or D100 as it will probably be called) and despise RQ, HQ and the companies behind them.

3. There are a lot of people who like RQ and despise HQ.

I seem to be in a minority, for some reason, as I like RuneQuest, HeroQuest and BRP. In fact, I see them as being from the same family of games, yes even HeroQuest, and see them as being very connected.

Other people, however, do not share my views.

Sure, they all have their faults and could be better, but they are all fairly good systems - after all, I've been playing them in various forms since 1982 and don't play ANY other RPG.

What I would like to see is people supporting all these games. I'd like to see websites with conversion rules and examples of how to use Legendary Abilities in D100, HeroQuest Cults converted to RQ, the excellent modularity of RQ applied to BRP etc.

I'd like to see fanzines for BRP also accepting dual-stats for RQ, or even stats for D100, RQ and HQ. I'd like to see fanzines for RQ accepting D100/HQ stats. I'd like to see variants of RQ/D100/HQ rules written in such a way as to be compatible with the other rulesets.

Is that too much to ask?

What I am afraid might happen is that the BRP/RQ gaming fraternity splits up into warring factions. That D100 becomes violently incompatible with RQ and vice versa. That people are forced not to write things in one system because someone leans on them or threatens them with some legal action.

At the moment, I can't submit anything even remotely connected with RQ to a proposed D100 fanzine. So, I couldn't write up a Fantasy Europe setting and say it was compatible with Stupor Mundi, because Stupor Mundi is based on the RQ SRD.

Personally, I think that this is a short-sighted approach.

We all know that RQ only survived as long as it did because of the fanzines and online discussion groups/websites, mainly Tales of the Reaching Moon and the Gloranthan and RQ-Rules Digests. If it hadn't been for them, RQ would have vanished long ago. Similarly, Chaosium probably wouldn't have bothered bringing out D100 if the RQ community hadn't been as strong.

Part of the problem is the Licences the new games come out under. Issaries has the Fan Policy that has driven many websites off the web and has stopped many publishers from publishing. Mongoose has the Open Gaming Licence, which seems reasonable, but makes Glorantha off-limits. I don't know what Chaosium has for D100, but unless they make it fairly open, then they are going to struggle.

In my opinion, Chaosium will need a lot of third-party publishing to bolster D100 as I can't see them matching Mongoose's output on their own. Mongoose is also going to rely on third-party supplements to produce RQ settings outside their own ones. Issaries have had several publishers producing supplements for HeroQuest, but I think they need more and that their Fan Policy is too restrictive.

If people worked together, they would have a lot better chance of keeping the games alive and well supported.

If it came to a battle between Chaosium and Mongoose, I know who I'd put money on.

So, what BRP-style games are out at the moment?

RQ

Stupor Mundi

GORE

D100 (well, out soon)

BRP Monographs (RQ3 in all but name)

How many of those are well supported?

RQ

That says it all, really.

I'm beginning to wander as it's very late, so I'll stop now.

Except to say, please don't start the System Wars as I don't really want to see these games being flushed down the toilet again.

I've put on my tin hat and asbestos flak jacket, waiting for the flames to come ......