HierophantX

What's the holdup with the editing? I mean, it's pretty cut and dry right, just change some basic rule mechanics and chargen stuff? I'd have thought most of the text would be duped?

That's actually proving to be my biggest challenge. How, exactly to handle Sorcery. I am treating Shek-Pvar as Sorcerers but some of the detail work is ....

My basic assumption is that a number of "runes" correpsond to certain convocations of the Pvaric wheel. And the issue of grimoires is semi-challenging because do I treat each convocation as a grimoire? That's too powerful (IMO). Under the Pvaric system, Mages become attuned to their convocation... ok how would that work in RQ? And then while you get a handful of spells from your master (a basic grimoire let's say), from that point on you're inventing spells and writing your own grimoire. So is that it? It's just opening a new skill?

HM-Religion is fairly straightforward. Agrik is a war-god associated with Fire. Most of the various invocations correspond to spells in the common or divine lists for RQ so no worries. At that point it's simply a matter of charting out the HM Gods and RQ-ing them and providing an appropriate spell list and a list of spells accessible to worshippers they can get from shrines and pilgrimages and what-not.

Chris

So I'm converting some elements of Harn into MRQII. I might ask for some pointers since I've got such excellent resources to hand .

Felicitazioni!

Production values look nice.

Now that Masks of Nyarlathotep is back in print...

The last thing I played was a FASA Star Trek game believe it or not. Sadly one of the players rolled "layoff/sudden migration" on his real world life events table and then our "captain" had some inconveniently-timed reserve duty. So we've been on hiatus but I fear this loss of momentum may have killed the campaign.

Meanwhile, I got to edit a pre-pub draft of a future Harn product and...

Since I have consistently failed to convince another human to play Harn for many years of trying I have been converting a setting to MRQ2. I figure many many people in my area and everyone around here that I've gamed with previously has played Call of Cthulhu (and my old Delta Green group in particular), so maybe I can convince them to do it up RQ-style. Not alot to learn and chargen isn't painful. Success remains elusive. For it seems that everyone on my local gaming meetups only wants to play a version of DnD or Pathfinder (admittedly yet another form of DnD), or something else stupid. (stupid being broadly defined as "not my Viking/Harbaal campaign.")

So I salve my gamer-angst by burning villages in Mount & Blade: Warband and selling prisoners into slavery.

And I'm perfectly happy to shuttle my boy to the local gaming shop to play 4th E with some other 13-yr olds.

Does anyone have a homebrew charactersheet or a good link to one that's 1-page and good for MRQII?

Pete,

Got my copy about a week ago. I am quite satisfied. Of course, the maps could've been better but I am impossible to please on that score.

It's a well put together supplement. The special treatment for magic was a good and needed touch and is key for maintaining the tone of the setting (in my opinion). The art is the best I've seen in the current generation of RQ publications and also improves the quality of the work overall.

Considering that you had RQ: Vikings from AH and GURPS Vikings already in print, I imagine it gets difficult to write something and still feel both original and true to your own voice. I think you succeeded.

I think it's a very approachable supplement, especially for the non-Viking-nerd gamer to get players into the feel of the setting.

I might've expanded the bib slightly, (Orkneyinga Saga, Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Chronicles), and I would've tried to do a version of the Homeland Table, but I am admittedly heavily influenced by Harn, Pendragon and the AH edition of Vikings.

However, I am quite pleased with my purchase. You've given me all that I require to convert my Harn/Harbaal campaign into RQII.

Well Done Sir!

It's just like Call of Cthulhu. You get your skill points for professional skills (250) or whatever points you get derived from the EDU stat if you are using that rule, and then your personal skill points come from the other pool.

When it comes to percentile-based games I always fall back on FASA Star Trek. If you have a 40% in something that's professional competence. Under routine circumstances you shouldn't need to make a skill roll. Also, having skill percentages above 75% for a normal human is still pretty crazy in my opinion. You know how many rounds are typically expended in a firefight in the real world? Normal human infantry shoot worse than Stormtroopers from d6 Star Wars!

I would also recommend Sengoku for all the reasons mentioned. I periodically toss the book at my son when he doesn't understand something he's reading about in Usagi or some samurai manga.

RQ Vikings is one of my favorite supplements of all time and the best for Vikings I think, (and I'm comparing it to Land of the Giants and Saxons! for Pendragon, GURPS Vikings and that green book for ADnD. Though some of the Ivinian-themed Harn supplements are worth looking at also. And I'll post my review of the new Vikings book as soon as I acquire it (later today) and have a chance to meditate.

Yeah that's my problem having previously been exposed to Harn and Pendragon I expect my maps to be better than what I can draw on a napkin. We'll see how it goes.

How detailed is the map (assuming there's a map) that comes with this supplement?

Money for space exploration is not wasted. We need to get off this rock and take it to the aliens and do them like we did the aborigines. Because if we don't then our descendents will end up dying in the aliens' cobalt mines when they show up here.

I guess I never properly introduced myself either though I've been posting for a time. I'm Chris. I started gaming in '84-'85. Actually my start in gaming was by taking story elements from some Warlord and Conan the Barbarian comics and the Lone Wolf (not cub) series and stringing them together and storytelling them in a "choose-your-own-adventure" format for some other kids on the bus. Being the new kid, I figured I needed a gimmick. So the other guys were getting into the story and I was internally congratulating myself over what a brilliant idea I had when one of the other kids offhandedly says "yeah, this is totally like DnD but without dice!" That weekend I got my hands on my first copy of Deities and Demigods, the next weekend we were playing Star Frontiers and a couple months later we were trying to figure out how to use Star Frontiers rules to play an RPG version of the Fortress America boardgame. (Incidentally, a great "man-test" for any of your friends is to ask them to name a movie with Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey. The instant response should be "Red Dawn" and nothing else. Any other response indicates that your "friend" was either born later than "The Empire Strikes Back" and therefore cannot be trusted, or is in the kitchen with his mother making creme broulet). Ah the halcyon days of the Cold War, when childhood's dreams were dominated by fear of global thermonuclear war, and you knew who your friends were, because those were the guys you'd run off into the woods and become partisans with when the Soviets invaded.

I spent better than a decade in the Navy. I lived in the Middle East for a few years and speak Arabic, (so if you would like some language support for authentic and accurate Arabic materials for your CoC game, shoot me an email). These days I'm mourning the passing of a great CoC/Delta Green campaign as our keeper moves away and hoping I can scrape together another group. My interests are primarily in historic esp medieval settings. Things that touch the language/culture/anthro/archaeo-nerd regions of my brain. Unless I catch the Trek bug again soon, in which case my desire to craft a suitably accurate 3D star map will destroy my ability to think about much else. Not that I have the software... any recommendations?

I've got 5.5 and Spell Multiplier is there as an optional rule.

I had a thought towards having SAN as part of the function of Dark Side Points in a BRP Star Wars conversion. Of course, in my 'verse, Illithids were a spacefaring race and being a Force-user and encountering one automatically rated you a DSP just from the encounter with how alien and horrific an Illithid's mind is.

But back to Howard and HPL. I agree with the above post that mentioned treating most non-god mythos creatures as "just another monster." Though I think if you referred to something like the Pastores, that gives you a good template for how a mythos organization could permeate a region and wield secret influence under the guise of legitimate religious authority.

"The only snakes I know of are those of Set and his cursed towers. Their evil has spread to every city. Two or three years ago it was just another snake cult, now... they're everywhere. It is said that they are deceivers... they murder people in the night... I know nothing."

Sure, you've got your run-of-the-mill magic users, but every now and again one of those robed freaks taps into something SERIOUS and next thing you know borders are changing and the dead rise from the grave. Simple answer, that guy's no longer using ye Olde Grimoire, he's found something new, or should I say... really old? I'm not a huge fan of WFRP, (well, not since 10th grade anyway), but I think they had it right with Wizards. That if you use certain types of magic... things start to change. Chaotic effects, cadaverous appearance, strange smells, etc. Those things would all be in accord with Lovecraftian Canon (the Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward, is I think my favorite story). Tempt players with unholy magick and allow them to experience the consequences. Yog Sothoth is the Gate.

Well Simon, we've spoken about both of my suggestions before, but I'll throw them out again for the amusement of all:

Lords of the Isles! - We've got the Jarls of Orkney, Somerled, Gall-Gaels, pirate-Bishops, Danes, Norsemen, Scots, Saxons, Normans, Irish, all going at it! Details of Strathclyde, Man and the Isles. You know it'd be great...

then we can talk about heresy but the time isn't yet right for that.

The RQ3 Vikings set also had the same format, and that was a (pseudo)historical setting. Probably the best RQ3 supplement there was, in my opinion.

I'll second that. Also, say what you want about GURPS, I was rather fond of their Greece and Vikings supplements myself. Though I would rather there were more maps (pretty much in all cases I would rather there were more maps ).

Nothing helps get the players invested in a setting like giving them some details to hang on to. One could always go to far (like some parts of Harn are "known" down to the manor), but the having enough detail so the players know where they are from and how that impacts their worldview and where it sits on the map I find is really helpful all around (I'm thinking some of the Pendragon supplements here). RQ Vikings had this cool table where you could roll where your character came from but aside from whether that was a trading port, seat of a King or out in the forest, there was no other detail about what or where those communities were and how they related to one-another. I mean, one could nowadays cobble together a decent map of medieaval Scandinavia and greater Vikingdom thanks to Google and Wikipedia, but when RQ Vikings was au current, that level of detail was really hard to get. Unless, of course, you lived near a major university or in a Nordic country (or Minnesota, North Dakota, Northern Wisconsin or up in dah U.P. der, aka Finnmark.. ok I digress, but those places really ought to be in some sort of enosis with Scandinavia).

Yeah I started in 1985 with Star Frontiers and ADnD more or less simultaneously. Followed that up with Mechwarrior (to supplement my edition of Citytech, I didn't get Battletech until 2 yrs later!). Then in about '88 I fell into Robotech hard, and other Palladium games and Warhammer Fantasy and more ADnD (only this time it was Oriental Adventures and Forgotten Realms). No dipping sauce will ever taste as good as that which came from the snack bar with fried mozzarella sticks at the rec center on Minot AFB in North Dakota where probably a solide weeks worth of hours of my life were spent playing WFRP, mincing about as a Ninja-Bushi or playing Revised Recon. My penultimate Rifts campaign which involved remnants of the RDF and Army of the Southern Cross commandeering the last submersible aircraft carrier and being launched into a dimensional rift at the moment of the Invid Invasion and reappearing off of the Gulf Coast of Rifts Earth. in '87 I got into D6 Star Wars. Then in 89-90-91 it was all Pendragon, Stormbringer!, Call of Cthulhu and some guy tried to get me into Rolemaster but succeeded in exposing me to MERP and some card game called "Illuminati." Then in '93 I joined the Navy and found myself in Monterey California with nothing to do but study a foreign language all day and hang out with other geeks in my off-time for about a year and a half. More Pendragon and everything else but mostly White Wolf nonsense. I started doing live action (embarrassed), but really the goal was all the trashy goth girls and ... mission accomplished, though only being 18 at the time I had no idea what low-hanging fruit I had been aiming for. And then Twilight 2000. I think it's required that if you are a military linguist that you play Twilight 2k and argue with the GM about how much of a bonus towards speaking Russian you should get for your character being an ethnic Pole from Chicago. Ended up going GURPS in a big way for several years, though really using GURPS was just a way to make EVERYTHING a Call of Cthulhu game. Then came Harn. Mostly since the early-mid 90's I've been constantly returning to CoC and BRP flavored things.

Because I'm considering writing a couple. Nothing fancy, just a 1 or 2 page treatment that would work as supplementary material for Stupor Mundi or Merrie England.

Specifically, I am thinking of a treatment of the Waldensians (being a descendant of one myself, I thought it might be cool), and maybe moving towards something about the Borders, the North and the Isles regions and the Anarchy. Assuming there was enough interest. At the very least doing up the Waldensians would be a good dry-run of the monograph process.

I'm curious if anyone knows if the chargen system used in CotAC will be closer to basic RQ ala Stupor Mundi, or will there be ethnic backgrounds more like Merrie England?

I've been playing around with a few ideas using Merrie England as an example for Gall-Gaels or Norsemen in the Isles for instance. I'm wondering how the various backgrounds would be applied to the Baltic setting.

Piraat

Skull-splitter

most Belgian-style or Abbey Ales

I'm anti-hops.

And whatever my wife and I manage to make.

Clearly referring back and forth between my Avalon Hill, GW, Mongoose editions and Call of Cthulhu has not been helpful.

So, in Merrie Stupor (heh), I'm not constantly using my POW on the resistance table, I'm using Persistance or Piety as appropriate. That helps.

And, my POW characteristic doesn't actually go down, basically just my MP, so Luck, (SAN if I use it which I might), and all skills with a POW contribution are not penalized. That's a big help.

And, if I go on a pilgrimage, I gain a spell slot, but when I complete the pilgrimage, I don't gain an additional spell slot, I just have the option of taking one of the pilgrimage site divine spells into the spot that was previously designated for the pilgrimage itself.

OK things are much less confusing.

I was reading Merrie England *shameless plug* and noticed something. If a character completes a pilgrimage they vowed to undertake, they "have a chance" to increase their POW by however much they invested in the vow.

So does this mean that if my character vows to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land (4-POW), I now, in theory have 4 pts worth of blessings/divine magic spells and my POW is now down by 4. So, my character makes it to Jerusalem (or is it good enough to get to Antioch?), he has a chance to recover those 4 pts of POW, but does he lose the 4 pts worth of blessings he has stored?

Am I correct in viewing the invested pts of POW as more or less permanent spell slots?

So as a Templar I would have a permanent 3 pts of spell slots for my Monastic vows, and if I went on Crusade that's 3 MORE pts of spell slots (of course by now my POW is down by 6! My inner CoC player is really sweating that.). And if I am always losing POW, it seems like my Bless skill is going to be a serious pain to increase over time.

How are all the ways one can regain POW, including those in a Stupor/Merrie setting?

Am I crazy? It appears that the base % for weapon use is missing from my copy of RQ. I have BRP so no worries, but am I doing the right thing in RQ terms by giving PC's base plus their skill (Dex+STR?)

Wasn't there a thread recently about rethinking some armor values? I can't seem to find it. Anyway Mongol use of silk wraps helping reduce dmg from arrows... From every account that I have read on this use of armor, the benefit wasn't that it stopped the arrow, but that it made the arrow easier to remove (or possible to remove if it were barbed), and reduced the risk of infection due to stray dirty fibers remaining in the wound (silk fibers being easy to remove, wool being impossible). So maybe instead of actually increasing DR maybe reducing chance to impale (arrows only) and/or a post combat bonus to first aid %.

It must've been 1991. Stormbringer. I had only recently moved to Wisconsin after a 3-year stint in North Dakota. There was only one gaming store in Minot and all they sold were Palladium and FASA products, so you can imagine the world I lived in. Then I found myself in this small town in northern Wisconsin, nary a gaming store to be found. (actually I found it later but it was run from the back of this guy's law office). So I was off in another city (Wausau) attending an Unitarian Youth-Con when one of the other guys was like "yeah there's a gaming store a couple blocks from here." I ran. Bounded up the stairs and the first thing I saw was Great Cthulhu's tentacled maw next to this wonderful cover-art of the White Wolf bearing aloft a certain nameless black runesword. It completely blew my my mind apart that Lovecraft and Moorcock, two things I had fallen into in a BIG way suddenly existed as rpg-settings. The implication also, was that I wasn't the only other human that thought that this was absolutely awesome. *sigh*