wombat1

I would be extremely interested in seeing the re-issuance of Runequest Cities and would be willing to work, gratis, on such a project. It is, perhaps, the most useful and interesting sourcebook and most used sourcebook i have ever owned and have used it to map any fantasy cities I have needed for any system.

I don't necessarily disagree, but the OP wanted no oddly shaped dice. My point, and I did have one, was that you can, in fact, do everything you need to do with d100 and d6. Except to sub out the d4, which I find problematic, I don't usually use any of these.

This answer may or may not be what you want as it will sound complex, but it isn't, not really. Bear with. The other dice can be simulated as follows: 1. A d 4 can be simulated by a pair of d6's as follows. Let's assume there are two color of dice, similar to a d100 pair. Indeed, I prefer using a pair of dice to an actual d4, which never seems to bounce very well on the table, so I wonder if it is really random. Dark die. Light die Result 1-3 1-3 1 4-6 2 4-6 1-3 3 4-6 4 2. A d 8 can be simulated by adding a 3d die again, 1-3 will give us that d4 range, 4-6 will give us 5,6,7, 8. 3. A d12 can be simulated by a pair of dice again, with the 1st die, 1-3 2d die, 1,2,3,4,5,6 4-6 7,8,9,10,11,12 4 A d20 can be simulated by a d6 and a d10. 1-3 1st 10 numbers 4-6 2d 10 numbers. 5. I've lived happily forever without even thinking of a d32, but it is, ahem, a d4 and a d8. I'll let anyone curious work out the d tails. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)_

I come somewhat late to this chat, however, Privateers and Gentlemen is a very good sort of rules set both as a stand alone role playing game (on a BRP model, a person who is familiar with another BRP system will have no problem grasping everything) and as a wargame rules set. There is a very good link between the two things, so you could have the players as officers on a plausible ship and have that 'work' well.

I'm sure it will turn out to be a very nice product, and I wish the developers phenomenal success, but for my money the sailing role playing game to beat, leaving tentacles entirely to one side, is still the Privateers and Gentlemen/Heart of Oak rules set published all the way back in the 1980's. On the sailing side and on the cultural side, since Late Stuart and Early Hannoverian period isn't familiar as an RPG topic for most of us, that is the target the kickstart writers have to meet to my way of thinking. In that game everyone has to think about how a ship actually moves in wind to be successful and that is a deal of the roleplaying flavor. Otherwise you just have some very damp tentacles, and we've seen it. I have toyed with the idea of using Privateers and Gentlemen as an engine for CoC play in the early Republic (think Barbary Pirates meet Tentacles). My players remain wary that everything I run involves tentacles at some point. I can't curb it, I dunno why. The authors of Privateers and etc. had the sailing ship side of it down and rules for that to the extent that those rules alone were very popular as a miniature wargaming rules set simply for the naval combat side of it. What Privateers and Gentlemen did NOT do (despite advertisement) was to extend the role-playing and ship sailing aspects back to the period before 1750 that the Kickstarter rules seem to cover. So, tentacles still to one side again, if the authors of this project can devise the naval combat side and the sailing side as well as the roleplaying side, it will be a welcome addition simply for that alone.

When I had to do a battle for my Cthulhu Invictus game (Germans with a po' attitude team up with Mythos cultists and everybody goes over the frontier), I found that DBA/Hordes of the Things could be adapted to what I wanted (with some increase in the number of bases so that every player in the campaign could get a little force.) Given what you describe, could SAGA reasonably be adapted to your needs? It posits a "hero" and his warband, which could be expanded out to "heroes" and their somewhat smaller warband, well, actually the guy who carries the sacks and the other guy who leads the donkeys, but they also seem to have a module now for magic. https://www.grippingbeast.co.uk/Saga.html

As for the creating mistrust among the players of the party, I find they do that well enough on their own without further intervention on my part. The most recent example was a standard fantasy role playing game in which one of the players (character, a thief, masquerading as a dog trainer/kennel master) found the missing loot in a murder mystery scenario and promptly palmed it (entirely in character, he had only been running the same type character in various guises and games for 30 years to my certain knowledge). ALSO par for the course, not one of the other player characters was keeping an eye on the activities of anyone. So this went undetected. Now, as one of the criminals was a bear trainer, the party eventually ended up with the bear, and without the cash. I, of course, took the chance to make a juvenile joke, about the bear, being out of the woods, being unable to 'go' and so, constipated. Eventually a different player began chattering. "I know why the bear can't go. I know why..." Finally, I asked him, "Ok, why do you think the bear has problems." "Because the criminals fed him the loot and he has a blockage." The other players thought this was brilliant. I thought so too. It was analytical. It used all of the available facts. There were no facts left over. It satisfied Occham's Razor, and had, in my eyes, the virtue of still being completely and utterly wrong. It had to be rewarded. Thus was born "Bearnanke, the silver pooping bear of North-West Donara" and a new definition of 'quantitative easing.' The players thought their characters had a finite resource. Everyone else thought otherwise. So it was quite easy to get them to trade the bear to a passing orc chieftain in exchange for a magical elf-killing axe, which they then handed to the elves in exchange for an empty box (for a relic) and the information that the elves never had the relic that went inside which was the "Wonderworking Finger of Most Holy Antwelm the Least.") When they realized they had been duped, and were victims of their own misunderstandings, the howls were wonderful.

If the player can be counted upon to be a stand-up participant and not give the thing away out of character, by all means take the player aside. When I've needed to heighten the suspense of matters as a Keeper, I always tried to come up with some small thing, and take each player aside with a slightly different item of information. Character 'A' might have a disturbing dream. Character 'B' might look in the corner and find a small bag of $20 gold coins with an address (in a 1920's game) (to chum the waters for the next scenario by setting up an NPC contact/patron) and so on. Everybody gets a little thingumy, nothing that unbalances the game too much, so no one thinks anything of it when Character 'C' suddenly gets taken aside.

It could be worse. A blazon described as "gules, a pair of underpants, argent" is altogether better than "gules, a pair of underpants or in the front and tenne behind."

If we are writing a one-time scenario, we start the action with something drastic; either of the posters above are good examples. If we are starting a campaign of linked scenarios, we might start with a slower pace--in the Roman campaign I ran, a Non-Player Character patron invites the player characters to a dinner to see if they might be of use to him. He has a very simple problem, he has to locate a missing individual he wishes to prosecute. (Because, Ancient Rome, honest motives don't enter into it). They find the individual in question with a severe case of death, having been sacrificed on a cultist altar installed by his young-ish wife in a room of his own house. The young wife and the victim's son by the first marriage have disappeared. This could be a simple case of elopement or it could be something more nefarious. And so we start. The beauty of a grouping such as this is that as characters are lost through one way or another, we can always stage another dinner party or meeting, or have the patron send a letter of introduction if they are in the field, and introduce the next character of the player, without having to resort to "The player character's sister's-friend's-cousin's-aunt's-poodle's-veterinarian's-chiropodist's-former teacher has fallen and the next character steps into play to take up the banner of the fallen.

Campaign Cartographer is probably more than you need, but it looks good and does all sorts of maps, but you would also need their City Designer for city maps. That would be on the Profantasy company site. I always got by looking for historic maps and simply using them. Can you load images onto the roll.20 site?

So years and years ago, I submitted a scenario to the Chaosium Call of Cthulhu contest that they used to run called Great Old Ones on the Great White Way, which involved as one might expect a very bad broadway show produced by a not quite transformed deep one hybrid. If you remember that the opening line of 42nd Street is Julian Marsh is doing a show, everything else will follow logically if you also think of the plot of the Producers. Of course one needs a song or two as a hand out. So, with apologies to 42nd Street "What did we come for, Come on the Shore for, Truth to tell we came to spawn with your human girls.... Our wives, nightmarish Can only scare fish So we fawn and spawn till dawn on your human girls. First we go and have our big sea change, Then on stage we have our big, KEY CHANGE And when this bores us We'll leave the chorus And we'll Swim Back Down to Innsmouth's Debbil's Reef Where Pa Dagon Bares his Rocky Teef Sing and Dance and Dream of Your Human Girls! You can easily sort out the tune by reference to the relevant video or sound track from 42d Street

It is an interesting take, and to answer the direct question, if there are two basic percentages, and the "style" which I am visualizing as a skill, not too fiddly at all. I would refine it even further, since one has both a Brawn %-ile and a Finesse %-ile (probably radically different) I would advance "Style" separately as Brawn Style and Finesse Style. (Ranged combat?)

A mystery role playing scenario is very much (but not identical to) a mystery story. So I have always been able to profitably draw from tips in writing mystery stories and varying them to account for the fact that a role playing scenario is indeed not identical to a mystery story. Here are three sets of rules to look at, by S.S. VanDyne and Raymond Chandler that have helped me: http://www.thrillingdetective.com/trivia/triv288.html http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/chandlerart.html http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/raymond-chandlers-ten-commandments-for-writing-a-detective-novel.html The difference between the two forms that is key for the scenario writer to my way of thinking is that in the scenario, the player characters and the detective are the same thing. In the mystery story, the reader is a very different figure from the detective character and so any rule found that refers to the reader needs to be reconsidered accordingly.

I of course wonder why I didn't have university classes like this back in the day, but then I remember that when I was an undergraduate the alphabet only had the three letters in it, which made it very difficult to flunk, but also was somewhat limiting in the curriculum. I appreciate the original poster may not wish to do this for professional reasons, but I for one would be curious to see the syllabus and course materials, and the assignment sheet for the course. I also look forward to reading the scenario and reviewing it.