Greville

On 4/7/2024 at 3:08 PM, Peter John said:

Hi everyone, I’m pleased to share a RoL casefile with you called “Lost River”.

Description: ‘Someone’s started burning wicker men in Battersea park. The first slid neatly into HOLMES 2 as “public vandalism, minor”, as 10 square feet of Battersea turf is not what police careers are made of. But after last night’s burning it is now Operation Letterbox and possibly a career maker. Three corpses have been found in the ashes, thus the new characterisation of the incident as “murder, possibly cult/sectarian” requires a full Falcon Assessment. Your team is called on to investigate this crime, and its wider implications for the powerscape of the Thames River Valley.’

Download the PDF here: https://cutt.ly/Bw8VGYUp

Thank you. This is a really good case file, I like the options it gives for bringing new villains into the mix and setting up an ongoing campaign. The tone is perfect, I'm looking forward to running this with my group.

The number of high quality case files people have posted here is really encouraging.

On 3/1/2024 at 11:36 AM, Nick Brooke said:

BRP is a massive pick-and-mix buffet you can use to roll your own RPG.

I love this, it also helps explain the differences in RoL. "Today I only feel like gummies, let's leave the chocolate and hard lollies alone."

RoL is where someone has looked at BRP with a laser focus and jettisoned anything they felt didn't fit the game. I posted a read through of RoL on RPG.net where I list the differences (some of those choices are why RoL has pride of place in my collection).

2 hours ago, Crazy Canadian said:

Sorry spam this thread, but I have another casefile to share. This one includes the opportunity to delivery a PowerPoint deck in character as a banker and a unnecessary amount of information about banking culture.

I really enjoyed reading this. I think it'll be fun to run. Thanks for sharing it.

I like both of those ideas. I do think killing Chorley like that does show how far over the moral event horizon Lesley has traveled, and how she is no longer anything like the person she was before. Your players may end up with some broken pedestals by the end of the campaign.

Lesley is a fantastic antagonist, you could do almost anything with her. I think there's also a lot about Lesley we don't know. Why did Punch choose her? Is her current rage a byproduct of being possessed by Punch, or did Punch posses her because it was already there? We always see Lesley through Peter's eyes first as an amazing Police Officer destined for greatness, then as someone who was forced to join the bad guys to get her face back. The revelation that it was revenge that Lesley was after, rather than just a new face, shows there is more under the surface than Peter realised.

I was looking for some weird stories from 2016 and came upon the Hull Werewolf. I thought these might be a good option for sending people further afield.

The first two stories report sightings of a strange creature, an eight foot tall wolf with a man-like face:
Townspeople gather to hunt werewolf in Hull known as ‘Old Stinker’ - Metro, 15/05/2016
8ft Tall Werewolf ‘Old Stinker’ Prowling In Hull Industrial Estate - Huffington Post (UK), 16/05/2016

Both articles state there are local legends and folk tales referring to 'Old Stinker'.

However here is a column from 2021 that says they couldn't find any actual legends about a werewolf near Hull before 2015.
Unmasking the Old Stinker: The Hull Werewolf - Skeptoid, 02/11/2021

I still haven't decided if, in my game, there really will be a werewolf or if it's a hoax trying to drum up a new tourism 'monster spotting' venture. Of course the werewolf could be real, but the old legends also be fake tourist bait.

I've had a quick try out and made a character. Creating Ol' Testie McPrototype was pretty straight forward.

There are a few calculations that seem to be missing, but I'm chalking that up to the disclaimer and it being a work in progress.
It feels very polished for such an early build and I think it has a lot of promise. Thank you this is fantastic.

11 hours ago, Dangermouse said:

This is a very early beta test version of BRP for Foundry It is just a character sheet at this stage, but it does come with skills, weapons etc There are no dice rolls at this stage, very limited automatic calculations and limited automation. This will all come in future release as I develop the system

1 hour ago, WisdomOfWombat said:

The screen is beautiful. I am awed. 

Thank you! I had a lot of fun making it.

I've made the GM screen available in the downloads section, and also posted the file with the tables. I'm not sure about the font used for the headings, I wanted a 1920s kind of feel and I don't think it's quite there yet.

I've been pottering away on a GM screen for our group. I've got a three panel layout (each panel is a A4 size) and after typing out the tables I managed to fit the following in:

Panel 1

The 4 E's
Stages of a Criminal Investigation
Which Characteristic Should I Use
Skill / Attack Results
Fumble/ Impairment Table

Panel 2

Melee Weapon Chart
Firearms Weapon Chart
Ranged Attack Modifiers
Cover Protection Table

Panel 3

Other Forms of Damage Table (This takes up most of an A4 even using Calibri 10pnt)
Mastered Versus Unmastered Spells

There are no tables on the player side as none of us would be able to read them from where we sit. The only thing I couldn't fit, from the list above, was the vehicle table.

Here's a snippet of what the tables look like:

(I am having a lot of difficultly getting them to line up nicely.)

I'm waiting on some answers to a couple of questions and once it's ok'd I'll share the GM Screen and the LibreOffice file with the tables to the downloads section.

Most of my gaming is online, using Dangermouse's excellent Foundry module, so I'll put the chase rules and the vehicle table on a one page and throw it in a journal for the players to access.

On 8/28/2023 at 6:39 AM, JohnK said:

Hullo, Greville,

Appendix B is useful to have for the GM, though there's some info in there that the players shouldn't see or know. 

As for combat, the Rivers of London game doesn't focus on combat, of course, but it happens.  Over the now eight game sessions I've run, there have only been three combats and a couple of "subdue the guy running away" incidents.  But having the combat tables handy on a GM Screen means one doesn't have to keep flipping to those pages in the book.  The range mods for spells is, of course, useful to have. 🙂

As an aside I meant to ask which parts of appendix B you think the players should not see? I had a look and must be missing something that you are not. Maybe the last page on Demi-Monde magic?
 

This looks fantastic. Could a mod merge this with the Useful Resources thread and maybe pin it/make it sticky so we can keep it visible and have all the neat things like this in one place?

7 hours ago, JohnK said:

When it comes down to it, the player isn't playing the Rivers of London: The Roleplaying Game or basing her character on the series of books, she's created her character because she likes a current urban fantasy system that she's been reading and wants to fit that square character into a round player character space.  And this, despite the Session Zero discussion we had on the subject.

*sigh*

So the problem isn't really with how you can make her character work, but that she wants to play something different. That's tough because it sounds like no matter what accommodations you make the character will still not fit.

I've had my fair share of session zero discussions that have then been ignored by players once character generation has started. Less so now, but I've been playing with the same small group for a long time.

One thing I've taken to doing when introducing people to a new system is to run a few sessions with some characters I've generated. It gives them a good introduction to the rules and provides more context when they make their characters, they have a better idea of what their choices mean. It also allows me to set the tone more effectively, which can help when the player has a different idea about the campaign than you do.

On 9/14/2023 at 4:18 PM, g33k said:

But AFAIK the Folly isn't its own whole micro-police-department within the larger one; don't they have to rely on services from the larger force (like Forensics) and face the limits associated with standard rules&regs?

Yes and no, the Folly is officially in charge of British magic. Prior to WII they were basically the magical part of the old boys network, with some members assisting the government as and when they saw fit. After the war Nightingale believed magic was on the decline and lived in semi-retirement, helping the police on the odd case here and there. He's a police officer and is part of the police hierarchy, but still follows a lot of his own rules. There is scope for investigators that are completely outside the police altogether. Peter notes that they get away with a lot because all of their operating budget is provided privately by the Folly, not the Met.

Quote

Non-clued-in cops are liable to raise their eyebrows, and report others who violate regs too badly...

This is a big yes. In terms of mundane forensics they have to rely on normal police departments, and in the novels Peter is careful to follow the rules. They get flak from normal officers of Chief Inspector or higher, but that's as much because magic related crimes have a terrible clear up rate. In one book they wipe out a nest of vampires with the aid of friendly ex-paratroopers that Nightingale has on hand for such occasions. Peter notes there was no way that could go on the books so the missing persons files were kept open/marked unsolved.

Peter is often troubled by how much the Folly is a law unto itself and that the various arrangements that hold it all together are very fragile. 

Thanks, that worked perfectly this time. I had been opening the skills and the changes wouldn't stick, but now they are.
Generically named skills here:

Perfectly renamed on the sheet:

It works fine. I even closed and reopened Foundry several times and the changes have remained.

Again really loving this implementation of Rivers of London it has everything I need.

The kind of modules I'm going to try out:

• Monks Action HUD (and others like it) to give the players an easily accessibly skill menu.
• Shopkeeper mods, I plan on creating a number of weird and wonderful recurring locations for the players to visit (I haven't had good luck with these outside of DND so not holding my breath).
• Maybe some better drawing tools for whipping up quick diagrams.

You could make them junior forensic techs. Guess who gets sent out for all the fieldwork? Or you could have a contrived evidence related snafu and have the higher ups decide the teams needs some support from forensics team to make sure it doesn't happen again.

I haven't used it to run a game yet, but I've made up a bunch of characters, and I really like this module so far. Using the built in item system to create skills etc made character creation easy. I just stuck them all in coloured folders to help with grouping.

The instructions are straight forward, the rolls look like they're handled well and the rest is up to the GM and the players.

There was only one 'gotcha' for me, and this could be operator error, I had trouble fixing mistakes I made during character creation if I dragged the wrong skill of advantage onto their sheet. I also couldn't rename skills once they were on the sheet. I had made some generic art, language, and science skills thinking I could rename them once they were on the sheet. The way around this is to set up your generic skills, duplicate and rename them in the item list as needed and then copy the desired skills to the sheet.

This is a fantastic piece of work and already has all that I'd need to run a game. Thank you for all your hard work.

Are there any specific modules you'd recommend as a good fit? I found one that lets you have a whiteboard in your journals.

I wonder if it's because in other Chaosium games you resist spells with both magic point vs magic point rolls and POW vs POW rolls on the resistance table, depending on the spell. So even characters without magic needed to track their magic points.

In Rivers of London it doesn't matter because POW rolls are used to resist spells and magical effects. I had some big feelings when I saw the resistance table wasn't present in the game.

I'll probably not write down the magic points for non-practitioners and only record them if they save their development points and buy the Magical advantage (as per jp1885).

My plan was to print out Appendix B from the Core Rules section onward (8 pages) and put that in a clear file with the tables and also give a copy to my players. How often did you end up using the combat tables? I'm not planning on having a lot of combat, but I guess you need the range modifiers for any spells?

On 8/23/2023 at 7:27 AM, JohnK said:

If not, has anyone in the game fandom created a GM Screen for the game, and if so, would you be willing to share?  Pretty please! 🙂

Which are the tables and charts you find yourself using the most? I'm getting ready to run this for my family and might throw something together.
I had planned to just print out the relevant pages from the PDF and put them in a folder until Chaosium put something out.

I saw the Tube Smell Map on the RoL Facebook group and thought it would be a good addition for here. Might help with building case files from vestigia on the line and in the stations.

11 hours ago, Runeblogger said:

What previous Chaosium game had the sorcery rules that are included in Basic Roleplaying?

What about the magic rules? Were they first published in the BRP book or were they originally from a previous game?

I'm very sure the sorcery spells come from Elric, they look like they've just had some name changes e.g Hell's Armor (Elric) = Sorcerer's Armor (BRP). I'm not sure about the magic rules - they seem like a very streamlined and cleaned up list of some of the spirit magic spells from Runequest, but there are enough like Blast that seem different as well.

1 hour ago, Zit said:

there is a psychically disturbed albinos baabester-gori female durulz in our group, nobody laughs twice at her.

Both PCs in my game were Durulz, including one very skilled Humakti who takes insults to his honour very seriously. After a few adventures their (positive) reputation outshone any anti-Durulz baggage people had, it also helped that we started off playing in a very small area and then branched out.

4 hours ago, JRE said:

We do have a duck character, and the main thing in our experience is to play it straight faced but  without pulling any punches, being always ready for spontaneous comedy. Sometimes it is the duckiness, sometimes it is the small size, sometimes it is just the player being fed up of people talking to the humans in the team (besides the two PCs they usually move with a teamster, a wagon driver and two guards, whose main role is to protect the mules and the wagon while the players worry about other things).

We found the same.

14 hours ago, jp1885 said:

Quick thought: is it worth making a pinned topic to collate fan-written case files in one place?

Or a dedicated space in the Downloads section? Although that might be a little out of the way.

I've used Allegiance rules to determine magical corruption before. This could easily be tweaked to show Dark Side influence, especially as you say 'There is The Force and the Dark Side.

https://grevsspace.wordpress.com/2021/07/28/when-they-turn-bad/

The TL/DR version is that you get corruption points for doing bad stuff/using evil powers, and the more corruption points you have the harder it is to resist the corruption. There are benefits as well, but if you use those abilities you get more corruption points. It becomes a vicious cycle as someone descends more and more into evil.

There are also examples of how to reduce the allegiance to the dark side and ways back to the light. This would need to be included as Star Wars has plenty of examples of people who fell and then returned from the Dark Side.

There are some excellent scenarios by John Price in the Case Files thread. I also plan on mining the tabloid press for ideas as well.

13 hours ago, jp1885 said:

I've attached my first case file, 'Lollipop Lollipop', which I'm rather proud of. If anyone runs it, I'd love to hear your feedback 🙂

I'm currently working on my second: 'Why Was He Born So Beautiful?' - stay tuned...

Lollipop Lollipop.pdf 1.87 MB · 6 downloads

I've had a read through and found it to be very impressive. In particular I like that there are multiple ways to approach the story and to get to a resolution. It's nicely structured and I think would be lots of fun to run.