styopa

I'd say that's a pretty unwarranted fear. I don't really go for these sorts of commercial gewgaws myself, but even games that require 'tokens' or special dice ala FATE are pretty easy to work around. *that said, the props in Chaosiums Orient Express were astonishing.

Great!

I presume they're sold out?

I was in SE WI earlier last week, was going to go to UW Parkside, hopefully they still have some iconic landmarks, take a selfie with them in the background with the comment "Gen Con's 50th? Phht, I don't see any Gen Con around...." But while it seemed like an amusing idea, it wasn't amusing enough to blow the 45 mins it would have taken when I had a 5 hour drive home anyway...

It was actually born of my attempt to make a simple gun-combat 'resolve with one roll' system using a clear template with a radial graph that you could overlay on the picture of any target, and with one roll get both the location of the hit and seriousness of the injury. Greatest hit location table for missile fire ever that wasn't really ever usable: Phoenix Command had IIRC 65 different hit locations (such as left or right eye, throat (vs neck) etc). (Not to mention, who wouldn't love a system where the aim time modifier "a" at a number of combat-actions of aim t is given by a = x*log(t)+y, where x=b*log(w)+m and y=c*log(w)+p, for the gun's weight w and some constants b, c, m and p, which are things like the length between the given weapon's front and rear sights... http://pccs.understairs.nl/weapondesign.html ). Part of me is still, oddly, a little bit in love with that objectively terrible system.

^ should be the new logo!

I hate to admit it, but I'd thought about it. :/ What I quickly realized is that any increase in some sense of realism is lost ANYWAY unless you have different hit loc tables for front, back, left side, right side, top, etc for each of the 30-some creature mythologies morphologies in RQ...so I didn't bother.

I'd say that the 'special' roll (or the crit, for that matter) represents a strike that happens to hit a particularly vital bit of anatomy and/or a gap in the usual armor of the target, not some additional super-damage. Approached realistically, when one was hit, one would roll for one's armor coverage and the failure of THAT roll would indicate if the hit was then a special/crit - but that's the sort of detail that slows everything down, when in fact the current mechanism represents it adequately well.

You mean, aside from saying "Maybe that's ... an encouragement that everyone should be buffing with that Protection 1 or 2 before every fight..."? Using Paris as presented in the Iliad is about the equivalent of using Batman as an example of real melee skill. Not super persuasive, particularly compared to the actual documented performance of actual English longbow men in actual battles. Not sure what you're talking about "long bow of steel piercing"...the d8+1 of a long bow write certainly will nearly pierce plate armor with merely an average roll. The self bow pretty significantly differs from the longbow, Iirc d6+1 vs d8+1. Not sure how it matters that they're found elsewhere? No other culture mythologizes the longbow anywhere near the English, which is what i was referring to. In none of those example cases are archers historically referenced as overwhelmingly dominant as English archers at the famous French battles. Again, you might as well reference Batman as your "authentic example of reality". /silly A sword master could be trained in a handful of years. It was generally regarded that a master Welsh longbow man really had to do it his whole life from a young age.

Firstly, not sure how much RQ you've played; certainly it is simply more lethal than any other mass-market RPG. This is a purposeful disincentive to get players to avoid combat to a degree that could be described as realistic: combat is pretty random, thus combat is unpredictably lethal even for heroes (& the characters in the QS are pretty wimp-brigadey 'heroes'). Secondly, without dropping too many spoilers, there's just not necessarily that much direct-combat in the QS. Well, there doesn't HAVE to be. Finally, I personally found this in running the QS to be more impactful for enemy creatures (who have little armor and don't have protective or healing magic, and are thus astonishingly easy to knock out of the fight). That said, I think RQ2 (and thus the QS) makes this worse than necessary *a little* by capping worn armor at 6 points. Maybe that's an acknowledgement of bronze age tech limitations, or an encouragement that everyone should be buffing with that Protection 1 or 2 before every fight, but considering that the most heavily physically-armored character in the game will be injured by even an AVERAGE hit by a battleaxe (assuming a 1d4 damage mod) seems shaded just a touch more lethal than realistic for me. Even an average-damage arrowshot is nearly enough as well. RQ3 upped max armor to 8, I believe, which made a LARGE difference when the damages of so many things are 1d6-1d8+1.. Ultimately, (the QS and RQ2 armor limit of 6) does* is it makes ranged damage more lethal - you can dodge or parry melee blows, after all, but there's nothing one can do vs missiles. Yes, you can use your shield to block hit locations (at least IIRC that's in the QS) which protects them more-or-less utterly *BUT* if exceeding the hp in any location leads to incapacitation of the toon, how much value is blocking your chest & abdomen? Sure, that shot didn't KILL you, but you're out of the fight anyway. *coupled with all the other too-typical RPG disregard for the constraints on effectiveness of missile fire IRL (likely born of our Anglophone worship of the mythical power of the longbow from tales of Crecy and Agincourt, and then a reactionary semibuff to other missile weapons to keep everyone from always choosing the longbow...): the major effects of wind, the pernicious harm of omnipresent moisture on bowstrings and staves, far-too-charitable rules for firing into melee combat, and ultimately the trivialization of the crazy amount of time/skill it takes to learn to shoot the bloody thing.

FYI I've taken the original hard-to-read/print/use web format, and plunked it into docx and pdf forms. https://basicroleplaying.org/files/category/40-classic-runequest/ This is WITH Dave Morris' permission. Thanks to him for the terrific resource.

Somebody does. Professional logo design starts at $200 and the sky's the limit. This monstrosity cost $625,000: This cost $280,000: Then again, some pretty good ones were free: (Nike's was $35 in 1971) https://www.simpliowebstudio.com/most-expensive-logo-designs/

Well yeah, the irony of using the original DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS typeface for the RUNEQUEST logo was not accidental.

How about this one? Pretty sure nobody used this font in a while:

I have to say "Ghost Rider Flame logo" is the best name I've heard, anyway. Wow. Nice collectible. /envy Of course, we have to recognize we're talking about what seems to be essentially minutiae. Nevertheless - particularly when we're talking about a new rules set which is supposed to (we all hope) re-invigorate a nearly-moribund franchise and launch a brave new era for the game and for Chaosium - I don't think it's irrelevant to opine that the logo/trademark that's going to adorn scores of products, hopefully for YEARS, should be striking, novel, memorable, and carry a brand identification strongly? Branding is pretty important.

Was that actually original, or the recent re-release? If it's an old one, I'm amazed: I didn't even KNOW there was a hardcover version originally. I think what people are commenting is the embossed stone and typefaces in the new one feels overused although, TBH, I checked EverQuest, EQ2, Runescape, even Lineage, Evony, and LotRO and it's not used in their logos. It IS quite clearly almost exactly ELVISH lettering from LotR.(http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Elvish_languages). (Look at the N, the E, the U, the S, and the T, for example I'd strongly recommend at the very least - if this is what you're going with - you make at least SOME effort to change the typeface a little more generally from that. Only the R and Q are substantially distinct. The quickstart logo was striking because it was very much unique. I'd disagree with the folks that feel it's too overtly 'Norse'; so what? While we're no longer aping historical IRL cultures, it doesn't mean we need to run from them, either. I doubt *anyone* would look at the QS cover and say 'oh, that must be a game about Vikings'. It was striking, and quite different than the LotR-simulacrum logo here. The point of a brand logo is to 1) make a statement, and 2) remain in the mind, become iconic. I think the QS did that far better.

What about a gay hero? Would he (or she) have a crouching nude same-gender sex object at their feet? Logogate. I believe the president will tweet "Chaosium has released new logo. SAD."

Agreed, I like that one as a "new one" best.

We're probably going to go with what was discussed in the SR thread, where you have 3 possible stances: - all out attack; you can attack & move according to available SRs. No defensive actions are available. - normal: you can attack, parry, dodge (pick 2) in a round. If you move more than 1/2 your move, you may only pick one. - all out defense: you can parry and/or dodge a total of twice without penalty - you may do either any number of successive times, at a cumulative -10% penalty. If you move more than half, you may only do ONE without penalty. Berserking gives you the attack bonus, and compels you to all out attack. Demoralize (or failing a morale check for NPCs) compels you to all out defense. NPCs may not pick anything but normal UNLESS they have a trait that implies it should be available (like Minotaur berserkering when injured), or are the subject of demoralize. Of course, those will all likely be tweaked once we've played with them for a while.

Or, don't sweat the mechanics so hard? Simply say they all go on their designated SR, but tell the player getting whacked that 'they're not all coordinated, so you can parry X of them" (where X is an arbitrary number you come up with, or roll a d6 or 2d4 or whatever) PERSONALLY, while I initially liked the 'additional parries at penalty' thing, the more I dislike the particularism of it. I hate special exceptions, particularly where the motivation is likely game-based, not reality based. If you want to parry a couple of times in a round, get your parry over 100%. Or, if you can parry extra times at penalty, why not attack extra times at penalty? If you're attacked by 4+ things at once, the key to survival is to either be: - heavily armored, and/or - a master combatant, or - running.

I don't think that's intended as cover art? It's a wonderful picture, don't get me wrong, but WAY too dull for cover art.

First, yes: at least AFAIK doubled damage is simply rolling your full damage, twice. Incl pluses and/or damage bonuses. Re the parrying: Did they change the QS pdf text? Last version I had before Open RPG day was "...If the attack is a failure, the parrying weapon or shield does its full damage against the attacking weapon, breaking it if damage exceeds its weapon’s current hit points..."