RosenMcStern

These are the rules we use for our Dark Wind Knight campaign. The elements are clearly Gloranthan but the system can be adapted. Substitute Allegiance (Element) / 5 to Darkvalour and you have a template. Balance is not perfect, though.

Wow, such a fanzine was really needed! If and when I have a good BRP adventure that I don't want to self-publish I'll submit it to you, Nick. Just one suggestion: readability is not perfect because you made little use of boldface for chapters, paragraphs, etc. You could also use less spacing in stats blocks. I know it is a pain in hit location 09 to make a good layout with limited resources, but I bet your next issues will be even better than this one. :thumb:

Please note that this is not the case. The OGL makes things easier for third party publishers because it's a no-royalty license, but chaosium's licensing policy does not hinder third party publishers in any way. I have published with MRQ OGL and plan to publish with it again, but the only reason why I am not publishing for BRP is that I do not have anything in the pipeline that goes along better with BRP rather than with MRQ. Had I anything sci-fi or the like ready for publishing you would see it available in a matter of weeks. And I think the same is true for other independent writers.

If I was the GM, I would never kill a character that provided such a good and fun story Anyway, Simon suggested that you could try and kill one dinosaur anyway. Dinos are stupid, try outsmarting them and then pretend you were tired of brute force and tried something different this time. Could work. But above all, since you are playing MRQ, remember to use Hero Points at the right moment. This is your best advantage.

As stated above, if Sorcery (admittedly not intended for friars and nuns) does not fit your needs, use RQ2, RQ3 or MRQ divine magic. At Alephtar Games you can find some free conversion notes devised to use the MRQ SRD with BRP. It says "Glorantha" but you can use them in any setting.

Sounds nasty. Other suggestions might be letting the ZK cast sorcery spells through its zombies under certain conditions (I would say dark moon rather than full moon) at double power point cost, or allowing it to regain power points under certain conditions.

Hmmm, their theology had very little to do with gnosticism. They were more like Lutherans. This could not be true in your game, of course. Ethiopian gnostics are a much more realistic source of fun. Zarathustra has nothing to do with Christianity, and I cannot recall whether there were any more of his followers at that time. Of course some knowledge can have survived, and this is MGF (Maximum Game Fun). Then use Sorcery for this (either BRP or MRQ Sorcery). Doing something similar for the next episode.

Hmmmm, I think it is up to you to decide how many Allegiances you introduce in a realistic medieval world. You can devise one for each Religion, one for each Church (splitting up Muslims and Christians into factions) or just the basic God/Satan dualism. Personally, I think that allegiance works better when your deities are personifications of natural forces rather than with monotheistic religion, but it is a matter of taste. Gnosticism would be a very interesting addition to a game, but be aware that it is extinct in the age of the Crusades (it was common during the first centuries AD), so you are stretching history a bit. If you want to introduce realistic alternate churches and sects you can try the French reformers, who are described (alas briefly) in Stupor Mundi and were common in the twelfth and thirteenth century. They are easier to roleplay than gnostics, too, because their beliefs are more or less equivalent to modern Lutherans. Plus Jews were rather common in Europe at that time, even more than now.

Then, IYRC, the old RQ3 rule of soft armor halved vs. maces can still be applied to BRP as an optional rule. Makes sense.

Well, this concept is correct. But this exists in the RAW, too: if you achieve one less level of success than the attack then you did not parry but block, and your weapon/shield takes damage. The various suggestions made so far just tend to add more details than the flat "2 point damage" or "4 point damage" in the rules (and to allow shield blocks to stop some damage). An optional rule in RQ3 stated that soft armor counted as half vs. maces. But plate is hard armor. Are we sure that maces were so effective vs. plate? Plate is designed to spread the impact, much much better than chainmail. I would say that maces are more effective vs. chainmail, not plate, if you wish to introduce this spot rule.

If you use just the standard divine magic from the MRQ Companion, it does not feel out of place in a realistic campaign. In the last combat during the playtesting Rurik's Teutonic Knight lopped off several pagan limbs with the Blessing of St.George (Truesword) he had cast on his sword, and everything felt ok. You will notice that in Stupor Mundi I have described two famous astrologers of the thirteenth century, Michael Scot and Guido Bonatti. Both are historical, and were believed to be able to make miracles. It is up to you to decide whether they actually have these powers in your game.

You will find the Knight profession in the Mongoose RQ Companion or Mongoose RQ Deluxe. Or you can make it yourself by mixing the noble and warrior professions of BRP or RQ3. There is no difference in skills or magic between Knight Templars and Knight Hospitalers, so I refer to all of them as Knight Templars for simplicity. There are a couple details that differ in Teutonic Knights and they are explained in the text, but there is no need for a separate profession. The next book in the Stupor Mundi series (currently in playtesting) will be all about Teutonic Knights.

RQ3 rules are 90% compatible with BRP, except for the magic system. Mongoose RQ is a different thing. I think you will find a not so difficult way to convert the materials in RQ Pirates to BRP, the systems are similar. Stupor Mundi was originally written for RQ3, which means that the original campaign was 80-90% compatible with BRP. However, the published version was adapted to MRQ, which involved some changes. You can play it with BRP with simple adaptations, mainly for the magic. The Stupor Mundi site (Alephtar Games) contains a list of minor changes you can apply to MRQ spells to make them compatible with BRP, but it does not include sorcery (yet) which is used in Stupor Mundi. The only new professions described are monk and knight templar, the others must be taken from RQ (or BRP). If you want a better idea of what to expect, just download the free supplement "The Hounds of Adranos" from the download section of this site. In general, you can adapt MRQ stuff to RQ3/BRP rather easily, and this is what most old school players usually do.

After an intense holiday week, during which I had three sessions of gaming, I think it is high time to report my considerations on how this new incarnation of BRP works in the field. In the first two sessions, which were part of a long-running Glorantha campaign set in Sartar during the Kallyr/Argrath rebellion and recentlytconverted from RQ3/4 to BRP, I was dragged in as support to the Hero Plane to recover a HeroQuest gone bad. Basically, the Heroes had attracted a too strong Opposition and although they had defeated the adversary, their Uroxi had suffered the adverse effect of a Sever Spirit spell, a fact that can be extremely annoying when you are on the Hero Plane. In the details, all attempts to bring the poor fella back with normal means only resulted in Kargan Tor appearing and saying “He’s mine”, and I assure you that Primal Death can be rather rude when he wishes to. At that point I tried to set up a Lightbringer ring to go and recover the fallen, but all that resulted was the adversary showing up again, entering the quest as Trickster the Betrayer and illuminating our Wind Lord with a lucky roll on just two riddles. Just one moment before we fell prey to despair we finally managed to complete our Ring with a Chalana Arroy priestess and bargain him back from Kargan Tor. Later on I realized that we had re-enacted a “Storm Bull is revived by Earth” myth rather than a Lightbringer, and this intuition turned out to be useful. To cut it short, the Enemy was confronting us again in a final showdown, threatening to kill us with Sever Spirit, Seal Wound and other antisocial magic, when we realized that we were in the mythic forge of the gods, with a very, very big anvil lying around and a very, very big and angry STR 37 Storm Khan willing to take revenge. It was just a matter of invoking our Law affinities on the anvil and turn it into a mythical representation of the Block and we were ready to go for the fun part of the re-enactment. As a reply to those who say that criticals and specials are unnecessary, I can assure you that a good special roll is a non-optional part of the fun. Especially when you roll a special Throw to smash the King of the Broos under the Block. Take that you fiend! As you have guessed, 75% of the rules used were RQ magic and houserules for HeroQuests rather than plain BRP rules. What was the bonus (or penalty) introduced by BRP in this, then? Well, I think there were two points: first of all, dropping Strike Ranks and using just DEX and INT ranks sped up combat enormously, allowing the few scenes of combat to be run in a matter of minutes and giving more room to roleplaying, which is essential in these high level HeroQuests. Secondly, it is when everyone is using really magical weapons that you appreciate the advantages of not using Armor Points to parry. Even though the old “defensive AP” system works well with common shields and axes, it is less playable when the average blow delivers 25 points of damage and everyone has a magic weapon. In this sense, basing the result of a parry on the skill of the defender alone makes way more sense. The third session, which I GMed, was a normal-level post-apocalyptic scenario in which the adventurers had to investigate a disaster area and found out the unexpected (think of the Stalker computer game). We experimented with psionics and mutations and the result was rather satisfactory, as just applying the basic rules conveyed a sense of total weirdness to a setting that I had placed only ten years in the future. Furthermore, I appreciated once again the fact that BRP firearms mix very well with low tech weapons. The PCs had two 7.65 handguns and even managed to kill a monster with them, but even the Delta Force trained PC in the group could not play the superhuman when surrounded by a few mutant guardsmen: with the numbers on their part their spears (and mutations) were more than a match for his automatic pistol and Kevlar armour. For a final comment, I think I can confirm that BRP behaves like I expected: it is faster than RuneQuest, albeit the level of detail is almost the same, and works fantastically well when you introduce technology in the setting. The only problem we found so far is the lack of detailed options for two-weapon combat, but this is a minor problem. Lord Thousand might have some more elements to add to this report, too.

Everything you say is correct, except maybe the fact that you tend to use a hoplite shield to deflect rather than block a blow.. But the point is that you say that whether you parry with a sword or with a shield is not the most important factor, whereas the rules as written state that in melee this has no effect at all. Since weapon nature does have some effect, although highly inferior to skill, I think that if one wishes to sacrifice some degrees of simplicity for some extra realism, then an optional rule for shields in combat is useful.

I have added a new page on the wiki, which summarizes several proposals that were made about Dodge, shield use and two weapon use. It resulted in a nice collection of optional rules with which one can modify the flavor of combat. The rule that prevents multiple parries on the same DEX rank is specially recommended, because it is already in effect if you use the Strike Rank option.

Using a weapon in the off hand is already described as Difficult in the rules. This does not apply to shields. The original BRP rules state that shields do not take damage when parrying. This is wrong: a wooden shield will take damage from an axe blow, while a sword will probably not (though if it does it will probably break). Still, shields should not be inferior to weapons in melee, but rather superior. This point is probably one of the few flaws in the current incarnation of the rules.

This friend of mine has some nice "supers" images, mainly Marvel or DC, that the might be willing to let you use: Alexandre Togeiro's Art

Well, to take rathere than to deflect it. The original rule in BRP was that shields do not take damage when used to parry, weapons do. This is no longer the case. The old rule is incorrect: if you use a weapon to parry, you use it to deflect the blow, not to absorb it, so the weapon does not take damage. If you use a big shield to parry, you are often just placing it between you and the attack, so it is more likely to take some damage, although it may have more HPs than a weapon.

No, it should be available in all weapons for which a master has devised some special techniques. This is true for unarmed combat (where there are several styles), for fencing with light swords and sabers, and for fencing with japanese swords. It is probably true for gladiator schools in ancient Rome, assuming gladiators were better at killing than legionnaires (and again, the bonus applies only to shortwords and tridents, the weapon they used in the arena, while legionnaires mostly used the pilum). It might have been true for medieval schools of fighters, but we have no written record of it, so we cannot know for sure. I am rather skeptical about anyone devising special techniques for pikes or halberds. Except for the fact that they simply do not have the need for a special technique for increasing damage: they have Truesword. So why should they bother? Again, the pont is that you assume that everything non-magical should go into one (at most two) skills, while the MA skill, admittedly unlike all other skills in BRP, represents your ability to achieve ONE kind of special result. And this is clearly stated by the rules, which say that every different technique is a separate skill, not just "Mastery in that weapon".

This was exactly my point, as I stated "there is no guarantee that the Blackbelt will beat the thug in a real fight". So you agree that combat training and Martial Arts (Karate) are not the same skill. The current version of Martial Arts in the rules only works well with Karate and the like. It could be adapted to Kendo/Kenjutsu and Western fencing, but with some adaptations would be useful (Like in Al's examples). I think it works very poorly with pre-renaissance western sword fighting, which is explicitly left out by the rules. The rules also specify that there should be restrictions on which attacks qualify for the Martial arts bonus. For instance, Humakti should get no Martial Arts skill: their mystic techniques for increasing damage are already represented by their magic.

A thugh who has lived on the street for several years can knock almost any foe out with his bare hands in a matter of seconds, but he cannot break wooden planks with his hands. A character trained in oriental martial arts can, with the appropriate preparation, deal incredibly powerful blows, much beyond the capability of a skilled brawler. On the other hand, there is no guarantee that a Karate blackbelt with no real combat experience can defeat the aforementioned thugh. The current rules depict this situation rather well, IMO. Combat skill represents your ability to hit a foe in a real fight (and note that you cannot train this beyond 75% if you only train in a dojo) while martial arts represents the ability to use secret techniques that achieve special results - and not the perfect timing that make you a master of your weapon of choice, as mentioned by Pete above, which are subsumed in your weapon skill. For Karate it is double damage, while for other fighting styles it is not necessarily so (frex, it could be the ability to halve your opponent's defence roll for fencing, which is mainly based on feints, and it could be +1d6 damage for Kenjutsu regardless of the blade size).

There was an interesting Marvel comic book mini-series by Alex Ross in the '90s about a parallel universe where everyone had super-powers, called Earth-X. You could take some inspirations from it. Admittedly, it is a very dark and apocalyptic setting.

A tank is protected with its full 24 points against a laser. At most, you can adopt the optional rule used for body armor (half value against energy weapons if not specifically designed to stop them). I think that the effectiveness against only one type of damage is valid only for "armor" bought as a power, not for actual body armor. Which makes sense in most cases. The body armor assigned to, say, the Hulk, represents the extreme hardness of his muscular mass, which will stop any kinetik attack. Its effect should be lessened against energy weapons, though. As for the fact that you will not see the Hulk damaged by lasers in the comics, the point is that he should be given some energy/radiation armor, too, possibly given by his gamma-ray saturated body. But there are two different "reasons why" here, so it is correct that there are two different powers to buy. That said, I am in favour of introducing a (very costly) power called toughness that simply lets you ignore the first X points of damage from any source.

Okay, now re-read what you and Atxtg have written. Do you really define this method simpler than the official rules (or the SB variant of 10%)?