RosenMcStern

The fury of Lodril has ended, and printed copies of the book have reached Britain. Cubicle 7 should have shipped pre-orders or will do so very soon. We should start shipping the books ourselves in a few days. The PDF is available on OneBookShelf, YourGamesNOW and Arima. Chaosium should have it in stock in some time, too. You can check the various options on the product page.

Many thanks to all who partecipated in this project (Dario, Tiziano, Pete, Charles, Simon, Colin, Miguel, Nicolai, Cao Viet, etc.).

Before someone becomes too excited after what sdavies said, please note that most of the above advantages must be learned one at a time: in Dragon Lines you get one new "goodie" per each 10% you have in your Martial Arts style. This is why I suggested that Heroic Abilities are not needed: you must be over 100% skill to learn all that stuff together, and many styles require 16+ in one characteristic, which is in itself more than the requirements for most Heroic Abilities. The difference, with the Dragon Lines method, is that you start learning "cool" powers as soon as you learn the basics of the style. Just not _all_ the cool powers.

I am a but unsure about Chi Powers in Dragon Lines translating to Heroic Abilities in MRQ2. The mechanics for advancement in DL grant some balancing themselves, so I see no need to limit them to heroic level.

I would rather see them translated into Combat Manoeuvers available to Martial Artists only. And only if you have the correct Martial Art skill and learn the Power.

Some quick considerations:

When you use the "A weapon cannot attack and parry on the same DEX/Strike Rank" rule, do not forget that a cunning two-weapon user can wait until his opponent's DEX rank in order to exploit this effect. It is a tactic you would use in a real combat.

The real drawback of 2-handed weapons is that they are in fact unfit for anything other than mass combat. A guard or soldier can use a halberd, but there is no way an adventurer could practically walk around with one. It simply cannot be sheathed. And you don't enter a tavern with one. So the idea is that your adventurers walk around with swords or short axes/maces. Long weapons and shields are used only in the wildernes or in battle. Note that this is true of a large shield, too.

That said, the fact that the rules incentive using two weapons, rather than weapon and shield, is not a flaw. Using two weapons is a good technique. On a battlefield, you would certainly prefer weapon and shield, while in a one on one duel a dagger can be almost as effective.

The problem here is that the rules do not cover two-weapon combat very clearly. If you have a look at the Strike Rank optional rule, it clearly states that you cannot attack and parry with the same weapon on the same strike rank. This means that if you have only one weapon, and you suffer a counterattack on the same SR, then you cannot parry! Having a shield eliminates this problem. This rule is very realistic, we have playtested it in mock combat very often. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent to this rule if you use DEX ranks.

As soon as you see it as labeled as "In stock" on Alephtar Games site, pre-orders will ship.

Now available from Chaosium, too.

http://catalog.chaosium.com/product_info.php?products_id=5087

I just sent the PDF to Chaosium, so you will also be able to get it from them tomorrow. But such a beautiful book really deserves to be on your bookshelf as a physical product.

No, your Spot skill is good as usual. It was just a matter of Joomla not "liking" zip files unless you explicitly enable them. The package is now ready for download.

The link presented on the BRP Central link page still points to stupormundi-rpg.com , the old page. Everything is now redirected, but some DNS may still have some a cached address. For any trouble you experience, please contact info@alephtargames.com .

Trif, it could be a good idea if you updated the links. And the link to Inspired Device is wrong, too.

The reply to the first question is: no, it is not necessary. This also means that my invitation above can extend to people who have Fantasy Grounds and not the ruleset.

Ther reply to the second question should be: yes, they can. But I never tried this one, so it is better if Smiteworks or Foen clarify this.

There is also an interesting forum hosted on www.fantasygrounds.com that can provide this kind of advice. Note also that having the ruleset installed everywhere is faster, as clients do not need to download contents from the server.

Is anyone who already has the BRP module willing to try The Hounds of Adranos for Fantasy Grounds over the weekend? If anyone is interested post here or PM me. Please note that for technical reasons you need hamachi to connect with me, but it takes 5 mins to install it.

No, but we can still change it this way in the PDF: "One thing that all of the major previews have in common, is that they are expected to follow Murphy's Law: if anything can go wrong, it will, and it will show in the preview".

Crusaders of the Amber Coast is finally coming.

The page linked above contains a short PDF preview. The book is now in stock at Cubicle 7, so any preorders should ship soon. Take advantage of Cubicle's anniversary sale and get a copy at a discount price. PDF sales will start as soon as the book is in the shops. And I still hope I can add a little surprise to the electronic version of this book.

At last! It is a very nice gaming tool and allows you to run your adventures online very smoothly. Foen did a very good job with this module.

Alephtar Games will add some goodies to this product soon, so go get Fantasy Grounds at once!

These blurbs were written for this site or our shops, so the info is not included. And no one thought of adding it before submitting the blurb to amazon. But at least it is categorized as RPG.

What I really like is seeing that "Only one copy left" label on the Rome page on Amazon. People are actually buying this stuff.

On a side note, we approved the final print proofs for Crusaders yesterday, so we will have three BRP books in the shops next month. Two more are scheduled for Autumn, and The Laundry will be out in Summer. Enough for you, people?

128 pages. Dario managed to squeeze more content per page than we expected. The data on our web pages has been corrected after we realized this, maybe this is not the case elsewhere.

Dodge reducing damage by a fixed amount is fine.

Please provide an example of a game system outside your house rules that uses this method.

Fast attacks aren't necessarily weak, and slow ones aren't necessarily heavy - that's just your assumption. There's no connection with attack-speed in that rule. Larger weapons may be harder to dodge due to longer reach..

They are not necessarily slow because they are heavy, but if they are slow (and with swung melee weapons they usually are), your houserule creates unrealism. As with the old parry rule, you are arbitrarily relating damage done to difficulty of avoiding the attack. The actual factors involved in this are others. Not that other systems model everything perfectly, but using damage as a measure is one of the worst ways of modeling this.

I don't see how this is so. Could you explain more clearer?

If you give an amount of damage that a Dodge can avoid, then it will stop fast but weak attacks but not very heavy, but slow, attacks. It should be the other way round.

I'll certainly get it, but I'm waiting for Continuum so I can get it signed by the authors! However, I don't really see what the MRQ2 dodge rule adds if it's still only good against the most powerfull attacks. As I said, that's how we allways used it in RQ3.

I was not referring to the Dodge rule in MRQ2, but to the parry rule. So far, it is the best compromise i have seen on the subject, as it separates the damaging ability and damage resistance of weapons from their ability to block blows, yet it allows big weapons to deal some damage through parries.

The trouble with halving damage is it means Dodge isn't that great for the unarmoured (or lightly armoured).

Not only that, it is that dodging Fast Nimble Halflling stabbing with Dagger is more effective than dodging Slow Clumsy Troll telegraphing blow with Maul. Why?

The rule in MRQ2 is, well, get the book and read it. It is the best compromise I have seen so far. And I have played with all sort of variations.

The current trend (our houserules and MRQ2) is to penalize attacks in the round you Dodge. This way, you will resort to Parry in all situations except the ones when the GM declares the attack is too powerful to be parried. Again, MRQ2 is superior in this because it provides a rule for this and not only GM judgement.

Armor already has a fixed penalty listed for Dodge, so the old Encumbrance rules are obsolete. They required too much bookkeping.

No, because last time it ended up with me carrying two luggages full of books up to the Castle. Whoever has been to Castle Stahleck knows what I mean

The second option (the current BRP rule). The RQ3 way discourages dodging too much.

Yes, Chi is a synonym of Power Points. It is explicitly stated in the text, but if you just skim through the book it is very easy to miss it.

Dragon Lines is now available on DriveThruRPG and RPGNow. I will upload it to YourGamesNow and Arima in a few hours, too. Charlie now has the PDF, so it will become available throught Chaosium soon, in case someone wants to buy it there.

A free PDF with the character sheets is now available at our new web page www.alephtargames.com . The maps will be available there as a free download in a few hours, too. Oh, and we did it again The maps are by Colin Driver, but we forgot to put his name in the credits.

I do not have physical books in stock, yet, so you must order through Cubicle 7 to get the printed edition shipped immediately. If someone wants to purchase the print+PDF bundle and really, really cannot wait, email me or post here and I'll make it available somehow - you will only have to wait a bit before we ship the book. The bundle is 23,95 EUR (plus postage) for book + PDF.

We are now in the process of transfering all the free goodies from the old site to the new one. Once all the download sections are complete, you will find the character sheet and a colour version of the maps on the Dragon Lines web page. This will take no longer than 24 hours.