RosenMcStern

I did provide one, Frogspawner. The problem is that it is not a "the die roll dictates what happens" solution (and THAT would be a mind control) but a "the die roll dictates what options you have besides violence" solution.

Seriously, I think you should all forget that Pendragon ever existed. Debate rolls are not there to tell you how your PC behaves. They are there to tell you how people will judge how he behaves. It is still up to you to decide if your PC will face being declared Anathema ("social" death) for sparing that criminal's life.

All I see is more mechanics and a lack of a more enjoyable balanced rollplaying and roleplaying approach. If you prefer a more balanced approach then rolling for oratory, or fast talk plus listening to the player character plead his case seems more like the BRP game I want to run. No GM has to ditch the dice roll because a player "sweet talked" him. But if a player rolls well enough and roleplays well enough then I don't see what the problem is in giving the player a bonus dice modifier to reward good roleplaying. I've never had any complaints directed at me for the practice by my players as it encourages ALL of them to roleplay, as well as rollplay. I would think that relying too much on "objective" rolling is a MISTAKE which would lead to a boring lack of roleplaying; the players merely rolling dice with no chance to show off the characters they have made. We need a balance.

I never said "do not allow roleplaying" or "do not give bonuses for roleplaying".

I just said "provide a well-defined procedure". You may think that "roleplay and then make one roll with a bonus for what you said" is a sufficiently defined procedure, but is it really? Does your game include only one - and always one - roll for social interactions? Would you find it acceptable for combat?

Would you appreciate a combat in which you are not told how many hit points of damage your attack dealt, but just what skill to roll? Or one in which most of your chances of success in combat depended on how well you mimicked your attack moves, rather than your character's skill? Please note that I produce a game (Aegis) where this actualy happens - if you do not describe the attack in colorful words, it fails - so this is not "wrong" in itself, just not coherent with the BRP game model. But why should Fast Talk work differently?

In synthesis, I fail to see why "simply sticking to a well-defined procedural mechanics based on statement of intent and subsequent die rolls" is considered good for combat and "boring roll-playing" for social conflicts.

Ah, I see what you mean. GURPS recently published a Social Engineering PDF

with similar rules.

I hope we will have something similar for BRP soon, or else we will end up pursuing GURPS once more.

Roleplaying backed up with the players using the relevant PC skills (Persuade/Orate/Etiquette/Status/Whatever) to roll to convince the opposition, is a way out of a perceived impasse. I'd also give the PC a modifier to the relevant skill if they roleplayed the negotiation conversation well. But if you want to go down the road of a more Gygaxian fix with more mechanics added on YMMV.

It is not a matter of "more mechanics" but of "more objectivity". Knowing what skill to use is not enough. In a combat situation you know what skills to use, but also when a conflict is over (one side runs out of HP). This is not true for social conflicts, where you know only what skill to use, and the GM is often tempted to ditch the roll if the players sweet-talked him - which is a MISTAKE as it creates "alpha players" and the suspicition of arbitrarity and railroading. Railroading GMs can oftern give you the illusion that you have had a chance to win a social conflict by asking for more and more rolls, until you fail something and your goal is denied. This is awfully wrong, but it is also a common practice, and it is also rather easy to do it involuntarily if you, as a GM, do not like the result of the rolls.

Games that handle social conflict (example: HeroQuest, Aegis, Dogs in the Vineyard, etc.) tell you exactly how to run the conflict, not just what score to use. BRP is lacking here. This is why I say it is a problem of rules, not of roleplaying. Had evilschemer been playing HeroQuest, the problem could have been avoided.

Social conflict is not about what your character thinks or feels. It is about how he can impose his/her POV on others, or gain insight about the opposition's intentions. It is not about forcing characters to surrender, it is about persuading players that this is the best option available - while leaving them the option to fight.

If you lose a conflict about "trusting a NPC", this does not mean that you trust him if you do not want to trust him. This means that you are absolutely unable to show others that he is not to be trusted. You can still shoot him, if you wish, but this will CERTAINLY make you labeled as a criminal, while shooting him after winning the social conflict would probably make you a hero.

In our case, things could have been handled this way: the guards want the PCs to surrender their weapons. The PCs then attempt to argue with them with two goals:

a) persuade the guards that it would be dishonourable to surrender weapons and let them go with them voluntarily (Persuade/Orate/Etiquette/Status/Whatever)

determine if this is a trick to slaughter them once they are tied up (Insight)

If the party succeeds in a), the problem is solved: no disarming (it's the guards' problems now, as their boss will probably get angry). If the party succeeds in , most players would agree to lay down their weapons, as the risk is reduced. If the party tries a) but fails, they still have the option to fight: however, your average player is much more likely to give up violence as an option once he has been given a fair, objective chance to talk himself out of trouble. There is no perceived railroading if you surrender after a failed try to persuade the guards, if you roll the dice for a conflict. If all you do is roleplaying it out, how can you know the GM did not simply determine the guards would not let you go in any case?

Note that this would not work with the "problem player". But there is no way you can handle a player who says "I will disrupt your campaign if you try and disarm my PC". Nothing can work with such a player. And I doubt that not including plausible situations in your game because of problem players is a solution. Like Pete, I would rather rule the problem player out, not the situation.

While I agree with this, see again this line.

A mechanical solution is good unless your group is one of those that would hate Pendragon because of the Passions.

So, a mechanic might solve the problem, or the players might just hate the mechanic.

This simply means you can't skip the "talk to the group" part, at least not without risking to have your decision making the problem worse;).

A mechanic to solve sociall conflicts has NOTHING TO DO with the Pendragon Trait mechanics you quote. Solving non-violent conflicts involves whether you can sweet-talk/intimidate/persuade your NPC opponent, not whether your character would act in one way or not.

There is no "forcing the PCs to act" in a good social mechanics, it is only used to determine whether a bribe / intimidate works without the alpha player in the group actually trying to sweet-talk/intimidate the GM, which is what actually happens if you "roleplay it out" (see example above).

Coincidentially, there was a thread on RPG.net three months ago where a player asked if losing a non-violent conflict in Dogs in the Vineyard meant he had been mind-controlled. Despite the player's fears, this is not the case. Losing a conflict does not change your ideas, it just means you cannot IMPOSE your POV on other characters. At this point, you can either yield grudgingly or fight to endorse your POV. Which the DitV system does wonderfully, as you can just escalate the social conflict and "draw guns" (and risk that someone gets hurt).

I very much doubt that any rules mechanic which results in "Your character

now trusts my character" would be acceptable to many players, except per-

haps where magic or psionics can be used as an explanation.

Ditto. THERE IS NO MIND CONTROLLING OR FORCING PLAYERS TO CHANGE THEIR MINDS in a good social conflict mechanics. Forget Pendragon Traits, that is NOT a social conflict mechanics. Not at all.

It IS a rules problem. Because BRP lacks a well-defined resolution method for these pre-fight situations where intimidation is more important than actual might. This means that the GM has no real way to enforce a plausible outcome and must resort to the OD&D-esque resolution method of "roleplaying it out", which has a 90%+ chance of resulting in one of these unpleasant outcomes:

- a player trying to bully the GM (see above)

- the GM forcing the players to act contrary to their inclination

- a player bullying an NPC (involuntarily) in such a way that there is no plausible outcome but violence, forcing the player to either break suspension of disbelief or risk an involuntary TPK

Please note that BRP includes the skills necessary to handle these situations (Persuade, Insight, etc.), but lacks the procedures. This is instead easy to solve in Aegis or HeroQuest, and in each and every system that includes non-violent conflict rules. Dogs in the Vineyard has a good system for handling this, as it allows verbal conflicts to escalate in violence if the outcome of persuasion/intimidation is not satisfactory for you, without even having the need to initiate a new conflict.

The reason why I really HATE the Divine Intervention rules in RQ2-3 is that it once happened to me that, when put in a situation where the PCs should have been captured - and the adventure included a mission they were given in order to be released - they DIed out of it. This had a double detrimental effect on fun - they broke the story, and they also broke the characters: try playing a shaman with POW 3, and check how fun it is. I stopped planning this kind of situation ever since.

In any case, the kind of answer given by the player should not be tolerated. Evilschemer clearly stated he had not scripted the capture in the adventure, and the PCs were facing the consequences of their choices. If this includes capture, let it happen.

The great problem here is that classic games are designed to handle only LETHAL combat well, so even with superior forces there are only two options: the PCs surrender, or you butcher them. No "we tried hard but they got us" option on the table, although this would eliminate the sense of being forced to make one precise choice and let the players accept the outcome. Providing such an option (Legend/RQ6 works better in this sense) woudl eliminate most of these problems - albeit not all.

Well, I have some ideas about the people to whom "La Marca dell'Est" (the Italo-Spanish equivalent) was sold, and the average age is 35 or more AFAIK.

Do you REALLY think that you have to include a chapter explaining "What is a roleplaying game" to sell a game to the generation of kids who, in the unlikely event they have never seen "World of Warcraft" in action, have dozens of "Kill Things and Take Their Stuff" available for free on their CELLPHONES?

Yes, Gianni, but to what audience did it sell well? That kind of product (there is an Italian equivalent) has two main targets:

- people who used to play "in the days"

- people who were told about "how great games were when they came in the boxes"

The percentage of people who buy it because it is an autonomous introduction to gaming, without an elder player telling them to, is rather low. All in all, the sales are almost always the effect of a "nostalgia syndrome", whether experienced by the buyer or by the person who persuaded him or her to buy.

I bet that ANY product that leverages Facebook, other social media or mobile platforms would generate a gazillion more sales among the young people (barring children of members of this forum). And now I am starting to have some more "factual" data about this

Boxes are as attractive as vinyl records to young people. They are a leftover from the past that only collectors and old people like us will appreciate. Sure, they are the symbol of an era of great fun, but their time is gone.

Good news! Most of that stuff is really good, so it was a shame that it was no longer available. Now you have an all-the-d100-you-can-eat offer in PDF for as low as $15 (including the Legend PDF, while we are waiting for RQ6).

In Italy, there has been an attempt to market a D&D retro-clone (La Marca del Este, a Spanish game) in a boxed set. It did sell some copies in Lucca, but nothing spectacular. I think the idea is that of appealing to boardgame fans, but I am afraid it will backfire in the end, as the box forces the publisher to charge TVA (now 23%) to the purchaser. Everyone is obsessed with replicating the "winning formula" of D&D in the seventies, not realizing that this happened in the last deca... er, no centu... yuck, in the last MILLENNIUM

Jokes aside, you can easily deduce PDF sales figures from the medals at DriveThru. In my experience, DTRPG sales are proportional to PDF sales. So here is some objective data.

I guess my main gripe is that it doesn't frontload all of the stuff the GM has in their toolkit to the players behind the scenes. Granted, the last time I used the software was six months ago, so there could have been some "groundbreaking" development since then, but I doubt it.

Well, in fact this is exactly what DID happen. You should try the latest rulesets, they work much better, and Smiteworks is trying to keep all rulesets under maintenance and up to date with the last modifications. Most features are implemented in rulesets, not in the core engine, so it takes time to "spread" the positive improvements to all rulesets, and of course 4e and Pathfinder are the first ones to get the "boon".

In the years I used the software, it was always a slog whenever the GM had a large map to present.

The problem is that maps you DL from rpgmapshare and such are BIG - usually some megabytes. We used to play with MapTools with the unaltered maps of Glorantha DLed from the Issaries web site, and we had the same trouble when we tried to share the entire Lunar Empire map. Last time I used an "on the fly" map I DLed from rpgmapshare.org while playing, I had the same problem: everyone had to wait for 10-15 minutes. However, there is no need to use maps larger than 200k. I have successfully kept all tactical maps of the supplement that is coming out this month under the 160k threshold, even if they are 1600x600 or 800x600, and all global maps under 60k. This means a compression factor of 10:1 if compared with the typical map you get on the internet. Like it happens with PDFs, if you pre-process the image, it will be much smaller

So the bottom line is: yes, it can be slow, but only if the mapmaker did not do his homework. If you use a map that comes with a supplement, and the supplement is well designed, you should have no trouble.

And for the record: I have run intensively both MapTools and Fantasy Grounds with a 3G, or even GPRS connection (that is, using a cellphone to connect to the internet), and it worked.

I cannot begin to estimate the number of times that save data has been lost when there is an active session.

Never happened to me in 2 years. Not even on UMTS.

Modifying the ruleset via the xml files for houserules is easy _if you only want to play with yourself_. Out of the six or seven times we attempted to pull this off, it only worked correctly twice, and one of those times it only worked for part of a session. I game with two guys who are professional coders, so this should be a non-issue.

Like all things "programatical", this should be left to professional activity only. And I do not mean just professional people: even a professional programmer needs some time and patience to debug and test the code he writes. You can do it amateurishly or in your spare time, but this will NOT require less time. So you will end up wasting more time on coding and testing that you actually spend gaming, or trying to do it half an hour before the session and - surprise! - it does not work, or worse it works erratically and corrupts the game data. Another issue that is best left to dedicated publishers / maintenance.

I'm guessing that in the next year or three we will get a browser based piece of software that is modular and does everything FG does for less money and hassle.

Infrno is something we are all looking for. However, I really doubt it will do what you hope. There is a slight little problem: web based software that produces a decent user interface costs a helluva lot of money. Only google and selected companies can develop performant AJAX-based interfaces that work as smoothly as FGII or MapTools do. Other softwares rely on Activex or Silverlight or Java or Flash, so they are not really web based, and you always risk that someone wakes up in the morning and decides "I don't wanna no stinking Flash player on my tablet" - just to mention something that actually happened.

So _my_ guess is that we will end up sticking to FGII and MapTools.

Not to piss in anyone's breakfast, but FG is sluggish overhyped software. I have owned FG for about six years and used it extensively. I own a number of paid add ons, including the BRP and CoC mods. IME, FG causes a ton of headaches and makes online games (which are already slower paced than in person ones) grind to a near halt. I have had a lot more luck with Skype/G+ and a shared whiteboard than FG.

Nobody says that software "X" must appeal to all people. I have heard the words "overhyped" used by some to describe several bits of software that are objects of worship for others. FGII is slightly slower than MapTools, and produces more network trouble than MapTools or ScreenMonkey or Google Docs. It is in no way "sluggish", though.

However, there are ways of employing Fantasy Grounds that are non-replicable with MapTools or Google+. It is whether you use those kinds of features that determines whether you will appreciate it or prefer the other tools.

For a publisher, on the contrary, there is no choice whatsoever. At the moment, no other tool provides ANY form of support for publishing. This means that if you want a pre-made adventure to run, you have only one choice.

Just an idea: there was a very good arabian setting published in French in the 80's (Légendes des 1001 Nuits), from the game Légendes (looks like déjà vu ...). Could be translated and adapted to the BRP (or to Legend, we could even keep the tittle!). The only problem is the copyright, but the company still exists (Jeux descartes). This would make a link between chinese, european and steppes settings -not to speak about the crusades. Only Byzance will be missing. Alternate earth will be quite complete for middle ages.

I think Merrie England tells a lot about medieval Arabs. And FYI, Byzanthium is in the making for RuneQuest, so I see no great gain in making one for BRP. The same for Mythic Greece.

BRP ancient Egypt ? I'd buy it without any hesitation

We may try and persuade Andrea (Angiolino, not smiorgan) to update and translate the book.

Can you expand on these two, please? The former sounds like an adventure - what kind of setting/theme? As for the zone, 'post-apoc' is very vague since it seems now to indicated everything from 'the day after' to the far future gamma world like stuff, and even fantasy worlds and zombie games are now considered post apoc. Since we have Rubble and Ruin for near future, Chronicles of the Future Earth for far future, and Ashes to Ashes for fantasy, where does The Zone fit in?

Kidnapping is the core adventure of Stupor Mundi. It is a sandbox dungeon, just taking place above ground.

I cannot say much about the Zone. I have ran it once and it was fun, but it has a very high "spoiler factor". Think of something in the style of "Stalker", but what you get from it is not exactly what you expect. You can also use it as a good scenario source for the Laundry, I think: it is just the kind of adventure Laundry agents would find themselves in.

The ease with which pdfs can be converted into FG adventure modules is amazing.

Oh yes. And with rules-heavy systems like PF, having a machine do all the calculations is rather helpful.

My only concern is with the actual BRP FG ruleset itself. If you have any influence with Smiteworks or the FG developer community at large, please for the future of BRP on FG find someone to work on the BRP ruleset or support it in any way possible. Only with active support and development can the community grow. There are a number of the older published FG rulesets ( BRP not included ), that are absolutely languishing because there isn't anyone to keep the code up to date.

Call of Cthulhu is one of them, as it does not have the latest fancy features that the D&D and SW rulesets now have. But it is not languishing at all.

One of the problems could be the fact that the person who does the ruleset on behalf of the publisher is not really involved with the publisher. Stuart Woodard (Foen here), who did the ruleset, is an extremely active member of the community, but he is no Chaosium employee or collaborator. At the moment, in order to improve the ruleset, Chaosium must either hire Stuart again, or hope that someone volunteers. And volunteers seldom meet deadlines (well, even non-volunteers sometimes miss them). Assuming Charlie wishes to invest in FG now, it would probably be a CoC investment, as that ruleset needs maintenance more than BRP.

This problem should not exist with Alephtar, as I am doing the coding myself, so the products we release will be kept as up-to-date as possible. I hope I can involve some of my friends who do development for Android and iOs, too. But this is not a must.

I would look forward to the possibility of playtesting stuff, and get to the goal of BRP/RQ gaming in the future.

I will launch some playtesting in a matter of weeks, maybe days. Well, let us say weeks because I myself must playtest Harreksaga this week

BRP Egypt is only available in Italian. There were also a BRP West and BRP Dinos, but you can find better alternatives nowadays. There is also The Wheel of Fate for RQ2.

Any plans to work with epub format? I'm trying to see whether a table-less system is feasible, as tables and epub don't mix well.

One of the products we will present in 2013 is already available in epub format (in Italian). But, at the moment, RPG books suck in epub, as you pointed out. One sound principle for the development of electronic products is "adapt the format to your customers' needs, not the needs to the format". Thus, since RPG books actually need tables, at least for equipment, powers, etc. etc., epub is not the best way to go. Besides, there is at least one game that will NEVER have an epub version, and it is D&D. This makes me think that the RPG crowd will stick with PDF long enough to have handheld platforms that can display PDF in a nice way available at a cheap price.

Incidentally, checking DTRPG for your Aegis game I noticed that there are lots of RPG-related things named 'Aegis' out there, including one publisher!

The book was submitted to the contest I got it from in June, long before "The Aegis project" was published. Original names for RPGs are almost over, one must live with it. There is even one publisher named "Stupor Mundi"...

You can spread it out on the table, make notes on it, study it for hours wherever electrical outlets and battery stores are not, easily turn between marked sections rather than having to scroll through lengthy electronic pages, etc.

All of our PDF are bookmarked. And finding a single word in a PDF is quicker than finding it in a printed book, even if it has an index.

Had the dawn of role-playing occurred during the Age of Electronica, there would be no old-school movement, no hard-core love for aging copies of RuneQuest 1-3, no chances of running Elric/Stormbringer (since the files were written for now-antiquated technology). Think about your favorite old RPGs or editions. Now think about your favorite old electronic games from the same era, the ones that ran on Commodore 64 or Atari, or on outdated, unsupported versions of DOS or Windows. The difference is that you can still play your physical dead-tree role-playing games (unless Mom tossed out your boxed sets while you were away at college). But your computer games are mere memories, and the reboot (in the unlikely event that a software company attempts one) is never as good.

During the last month, I have played the entire Eye of the Beholder series, and Ultima Martian Dreams, on Dosbox (which is NOT quirky) on my PC. They work just fine on Android tablets, too. You know what the difference is? Once these games go "abandonware", the number of people who can play them is not limited by the number of musty old copies available on ebay (or Rick Meints' ability to do a reformatting of them), as it is really easy to duplicate an electronic product. The worst thing that can happen is that the publisher declares them "no longer abandonware" and starts selling them again on Steam for a dirty cheap price (it happened with XCom, which is a 1993 DOS game still sold online).

The real problem is with early Windows games, which are sometimes more incompatible with newer versions than DOS ones. As the absence of a working version of "King of Dragon Pass" for Windows 7 or Android shows

Hi Paolo,

Hello Andrea

So I look forward to the FG stuff. Too bad that Loz decided that FG was not a priority for RQ6. I feel it's kinda of a mistake.

However, Lawrence has taken the time to investigate the matter and make an informed decision about it. The Design Mechanism has evaluated the pros and cons and decided it cannot be a priority for them, as they are now focused entirely on playtesting their HQ books and making RQ6 the best fantasy RPG ever. It is a strategy, not a mistake. Although I hope I can make them change their minds.

After the unfortunate demise of the (perhaps over-ambitious) Italian translation of RQ2 it would be great to have some RQ2 compatible Legend goodness in Italian. I'm pretty curious but I bet on something specifically Italian: an expanded version of Stupor Mundi for Legend would make a lot of sense.

Er... did I mention a surprise somewhere?

As Roman things are concerned, the announced Punic Wars campaign is not in the schedule. Does it means that it has been cancelled? postponed to 2013?

I had hoped no one would notice...

Due to an overload of other work for the writer, and the aforementioned slowing of our production process, Generals and Senators is postponed to a not-yet-defined date. I cannot say more at the moment.

I am a bit on the fence on the mecha stuff. I never played that kind of rpg back in the day. But now my children have developed an inordinate fondness for the old Gundam anime episodes - 1st series. So, in the end it could be cool for a straight Gundam game. Young terrestrial pilots against the Zakus of Zion. Cool.

Then you should cross that border in late March and take your children to the "Play" game fair in Modena. I will be there with a lot of nice BRP and non-BRP stuff, and run several playtests (possibily including mecha games), and the annual gathering of the Gundam Italian Club will be held in the same building. So they might appreciate it.

Which is a honest and objective review.

However, you started the title for your review (rule one of journalism: most readers will read ONLY the title) with a "forget the other review" that most readers will see as a sign of bias. Will this help? Well, ignoring the other guy's opinion could have helped more.

And the time it took for you to take the moral high ground, Rosen, and to insinuate that Evil Schemer is a "fanboy" for his decent succint review would be better spent proofreading your products before publication.

I did not speak from a "morally superior" point of view, but from a business point of view. Sometimes, from _that_ point of view, it is a good idea to describe crap as "matter that could smell more pleasantly".

Please read my post carefully - like dougla.s should have done with "Chronicles" : I never accused Evil Schemer of being a fanboy, I just said that his words, in that context, sound as "fanboy talk". There is a difference - a big one - between talking about someone's words and talking about him or her. A point that the aforementioned dougla.s sounds like not understanding well, to be honest.

Speaking of other supplements and the complementarity with 'Crusaders of the Amber Coast', is there any plan to update/expand 'Stupor Mundi' to BRP? The RQ supplement doesn't seem to be available anymore neither in print nor in PDF.

How much of the materials in a BRP Stupor Mundi would be a reprint of things already appeared in Merrie England? If the latter did not include exhaustive information about Islam and Orthodoxy, it could be worth redoing it, but at the moment it would just contain some extra information about Italy (and not much) and two scenarios. I am sure it would make money for a low effort, but our policy is to provide useful stuff to gamers, not "the Kyger Litor cult write-up every other supplement" for hardcore collectors. At this point it is better to focus on the Steppes and introduce some shamanism to Alternate Earth.

The new edition of Stupor Mundi was planned as the default setting for "Parpuzio game system", but the future of this game is currently unknown. It could become a book for Legend or RQ6 one day, maybe soon, but again it is too early to talk about this.

The core adventure, however, will reappear in BRP format. It is scheduled for a PDF and FGII release for February: check the other thread. It will let you test the Djinn rules that are in Merrie England.

Almost all you see on that list will be playtested online - as you can guess from the plethora of Fantasy Grounds titles - so you will have plenty of opportunities to see how it plays, even before it hits the shelves. In your case, however, this could require waking up rather early in the morning, as we live in rather different timezones

Starting a polemic on Amazon.com will not do much good. Even if it is true that dougla.s did miss some important details before posting his review, all comments posted later sound like "Fanboy talk" and will not help increase the popularity of the series. Politely pointing out where the rules for Psychic Abilities are supposed to be, and that this is rather clear if you read the back cover which states "for use with the Basic Roleplaying rulebook" (and not RuneQuest II), without any polemic, would work better. Intelligent people will deduce that the reviewer missed some obvious points even if this is understated.

Polemics aside, this setting is interesting, but in order to produce a "killer setting" you need something more in terms of quantity and support, IMO. Add to this that Sarah's time is now really, really devoted to FATE, leaving her very little spare resources for "Chronicles", and the end result is that it risks to enter a "blind alley". A pity.

Yes, BRP Steppes could fit the bill. One would think that people are totally fed up with all this pseudo-medieval stuff (including Genghis Khan). But apparently, they never have enough of this

Good day all,

Our loyal followers may have noticed that Alephtar Games was less active in 2011, at least compared to what we did in 2009 with our award-winning supplement "BRP Rome" and in 2010 with three supplements for Basic Roleplaying and one for HeroQuest.

Well, in fact it is true that our production time has lengthened this year, and the saddest thing is that this did not improve quality, either. Spreading the editing and review process for books over several months of work did not help quality assurance, and created bottlenecks and peaks of activity at the end of the year. As a result, two of our products, one in English and one in Italian, contained more typos than usual. We are very sorry for this, and we apologize with the readers for this inconvenience. But we have checked whether the books are still usable and enjoyable, and they are.

However, put aside the aforementioned spelling issues, our actual throughput in terms of game contents has not decreased. As a matter of fact, the offer of game materials by Alephtar in 2011 has simply split between English and Italian language producst, with at least two books (Aegis and Nameless Streets) being translated from one language into another in 2011. Moreover, Alephtar Games has finally ventured into the realm of manufacturing complete, self-consistent games and not just supplements. Not only does the Italian version of Nameless Streets include an original ruleset that shares a common design philosophy with HeroQuest but plays rather differently in terms of dice, but we have also published a totally new, fresh, rules-lite game that we expect to carve its own niche in the heart of gamers: Aegis, a little gem with a "fun factor" of 11 out of 10, available in both English and Italian in an e-reader friendly PDF format.

So, this was 2011. What are our plans for next year, then? Well, things are going to work differently in 2012 for us – barring Mayapocalypse. First of all, we will return to a more regular schedule in order to avoid further editing problems. Secondly, we will not produce new game systems in 2012, in order to take some time to evaluate the success of the two systems we published in 2011. This does not mean that we will not support White Rabbit System or Aegis, just that all materials we produce for these games will be in the form of extra scenarios and playbooks, downloadable for free from our web site. The first two additional guilds for Aegis are already in the making.

Sadly, this means also that the development of our own d100 system is suspended for an indefinite amount of time. Some of the elements that made it different from other d100 games will find their way into Basic Roleplaying supplements coming in 2012 or 2013. As they have already been released as OGL, you can freely experiment with these elements in your own games and scenarios.

The result of all this is that Alephtar Games will once again concentrate on a single game system, that is Basic Roleplaying by Chaosium. You might wonder why we chose BRP among the many d100 systems that are on the market at the moment, especially because it is the only one that is not free for third party licensors (!). The reason is simple, and it is the fact that Chaosium is the only company that has a clearly defined – albeit slowly implemented – plan for moving its production to new platforms and technologies. BRP is the only d100 ruleset to have an official online version, with its Fantasy Grounds expansion module, and Chaosium is the only d100 publisher to be actively seeking to expand in the new market of portable devices. As the ultimate goal of Alephtar Games is not that of revelling in the past glories of the Good Ol' Days, but attracting new players and introducing them to a solid, traditional-yet-evolving style of play, our choice is inevitably to look for the broadest possible variety of formats for our products.

As a side note, this means we will not be producing anything for RuneQuest 6, at least in 2012. Which is a shame, as we are sure this game will be superb, and its license is very convenient for all third party publishers and indie authors. But as stated before, our current policy is to favour platform differentiation over quality of the system. Apart from the fact that good ol' BRP is still a good system. We might, however, end up doing something for Legend, but not in English.

Okay, done with the preamble. Here is the 2012 schedule so far:

January 2012 – Veni, Vidi, Vici for Fantasy Grounds

February 2012 – Kidnapping in al-Halisa, ported to BRP, in PDF and for Fantasy Grounds

March 2012 – Aegis for Fantasy Grounds, plus a possible surprise for Italian fans only...

March or April 2012 – Crusaders of the Amber Coast for Fantasy Grounds

April or May 2012 – The Whitlingthorpe Campaign (from Merrie England) for Fantasy Grounds

June 2012 – The Zone, a post-apoc style setting and adventure for BRP, in PDF and for Fantasy Grounds

Christmas 2012 – BRP Mecha, in print, PDF and for Fantasy Grounds. At last.

All the contents that are scheduled for a PDF-only release will be digest size and with limited artwork content, in order to be e-reader friendly. BRP Mecha might be in letter format, but this is not written in stone.

We can fit an extra product in the schedule for a post-summer release. Which means that if you have a good idea in mind for BRP or HeroQuest, it is the right time to submit it.

Of course, other products are in the making for a late 2012 or early 2013 schedule, but it is too early to talk about them.

A happy new year of serenity, joy – and of course gaming – to everyone,

Paolo Guccione