threshold

Picked up the pdf on a monograph binge and I have to give it two big fat thumbs up. I'm not a big fan of the dungeon crawl and have been all snooty about only running games with lots of plot, characterisation and angst. This product is light on all three and takes me back to the good old days of kicking down the door, getting plugged full of green slime or crossbow bolts 'cause I knew i still had a potion of healing in my back pocket and the hot little cleric had a resurrection scroll stuffed in her decolletage. Well done. Can't wait to run it. Keep em coming.:thumb:

Yup,

I have the same range of emotions about Nephilim as you. I got the game and I had so much hope, reread it a dozen times thinking there was just something I missed, some key phrase or concept that would just make the whole mess fall into place. Then I realised that it wasn't me. I ran a couple of campaigns using the themes and settings, even some segments of the magic system were pretty cool. What I wound up doing was using the basic despcriptions of the five (six really) forms of Ka as the components of a Chomski-esque transformational grammar of magic, where each Ka could be either an action or subject or both. A spell or magical effect could be improvised by describing its effect using this syntax. Characters had skill levels in each Ka which would have to succeed in order for the effect to go off. An example might be "Seek Uranium" which in my interpretation would be the use of Air Ka (perception, knowledge etc) and Earth Ka (Uranium as a mineral). The Power point or Ka costs of each effect was determined using the Hero Point cost of an equivalent power available in Superworld (one of my all time favorite games, so glad its out again in pdf). The maximum number of Ka one could spend on any single effect was equal to their initial elemental assignation as part of the intial character generation. The other thing I did was give a hell of a lot more skill points for each reincarnation, that way people who were essentially a thousand years old were ridiculously competent at stuff (they should be). Shouit I handled as a modification of Cthulhu Sanity rules. The whole thing came off like some kind of "Highlander" thing with flashbacks to past lives, but with a lot of byzantine secret society stuff. It didn't last long but it made it through a whole summer, and it was pretty fun. That was going back maybe a dozen years or more. NOw that I've reopened that repressed area of my psyche, I might just have to dust off the old game and unleash it on some unsuspecting gamers.>:->

Thanks for jumping on the grenade for me on this one guys. I recently went on a monograph shopping binge (bought lots of great stuff, highly recommend Aces High, BRP Adventures and Vale de Loup) and had to pause at "Basic Magic" and "Basic etc etc" because I'd been burned before, buying Chaosium monographs that were just the same old bits and pieces of a better bygone Runequest age repackaged to look like a new product.

I think all the available versions of magic out there are pretty cool and have their uses depending on the flavour of campaign you're running. I had a lot of fun running Tekumel with the free RQ conversion out there. A lot of cool ideas and so similar to RQ sorcery that it made its adaptation into my campaign trivially easy. Some really great spells too. "Sandy's Sorcery" is something that I keep running into out there, I think it's still available on "Runequest Lite". It's free, pretty well ready to go if you don't mind the Sorcery rules of RQ (I've always kinda liked them because they were so easy to abuse, as a GM I tend to look favourably on creative rules perversion). All this by way of saying that there are other options out there instead of spending hard earned cash on stuff you might already possess (like I did). I have to scratch my head at the reasoning behind trying to rip off your very small core group of loyal fans. I think it's probably due to oversight rather than malice, at least that's what I'd like to believe. A little more transparency in the product's description or a little more effort put into creating a product that someone like me would buy (and I would buy it) would go a long way. Sorry about the rant, folks. Too much nyborg.

I have to agree. In previous campaigns using Sorcery, we set an prereq for INT to use Sorcerous magic, probably because we went straight from Stormbringer to Elric! rules.

CJ, you rock. I've pasted half of the south western Ontario gaming community :cool:with Wassups using this website. Hopefully this is the start of a kick ass gaming group.

Cheers

Just thought I'd introduce myself.

I'm Paul and I use the handle Threshold on-line. I live in southern Ontario, Canada and have been gaming for going on thirty years. You name it, I've played it and probably Gm'd it as well. I started with Dumb & Dumber, switched to Runequest and have been a Chaosium junkie eversince. Right now the group I'm playing with has a World of Dorkness fetish and I can't seem to shake them from it. I don't mind it but my favourite system (despite it's quirks and limitations) is still BRP. I have played with the same group of peope for most of that time, with a few folks coming and going as life dictates.

I'm a married professional with a three year old and another on the way. I like to keep my nerdity on the lowdown. I dig these blogs because it's nice to know there are others out there. Recently bought Aces High, loved it, dying to play it. Having trouble finding a BRP group near me. I'm in KItchener Ontario, but currently travel two and a half hours to get to my gamng group. A situation that is not sustainable, so if anyone out there in my area is looking for a player/GM, I'm your man.

Cheers

Hi folks,

I too would love to get my hands on Other Suns. First one to post it in a format that can be successfully grabbed gets oodles of positive karma directed at them from me and my loyal (but blissfully deluded) followers.