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Baulderstone

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Everything posted by Baulderstone

  1. Yes, between the core and whatever specfic setting books you are using (Griffin Mountain, Borderlands, etc.), you have all you need. At a quick count, the RQ2 book has over 60 stat blocks in the Monster chapter. In addition to raiding hkokko's excellent encounter generator, you can also take a look at Tooley's free monster guides on this website. Yeah, they are for Magic World, not RuneQuest, but if you want to use a D&D monster in your game, its an easier starting point than the using original D&D stats. With all the mechanical bits and pieces in those resources, you should have an idea of how to put together any monster you want for RQ. And it you still get stumped on how to represent something, asking the collective wisdom of this forum will likely solve the problem.
  2. That's a great point. Players feel the use of Hero Points as a consequence. They may not be hurt, but they feel how close they came. To drift off-system a little, Savage Worlds allows both PC and Major NPCs to have Bennies, which are basically Luck Points. It was always a debate over whether it was fair to spend Bennies for an NPC to counter PCs. I used counters to represent Bennies, and when players fought a major NPC, I always kept their pile of Bennies right there in the open, letting the players know what it was. I would have the NPC use them to defends himself, which might block a PCs action. The players never felt cheated though, as forcing the NPC to spend Bennies was weakening him, and spending them defend himself was better than spending it to make sure he landed a blow on them. It was a visible sign that they were wearing him down, which added to the excitement.
  3. I like that. The only potential issue I can see is if its a setting where some character are spellcasters and others aren't. It would seem like non-spellcasters would have little reason not to use Luck as their points would sit idle otherwise, while spellcasters would be sacrificing a points that could be used for spells. It depends on the game. In Classic Runequest or Call of Cthulhu, everyone has the same access to magic so it would work fine (assuming you wanted that kind of luck in CoC). A setting with more delineated fighters and wizards could be an issue. Actually, I could see it being explained in the setting. Users of magic are often looked on with suspicion in many settings. The fact that wizards often have worse luck than others is seen as a sign of its cursed nature. It's still a little unfair, but in a way that makes magic more interesting.
  4. That's a good point, and its certainly debatable. It doesn't bother me as the character is still effectively losing. They are just surviving the loss. Still, if I were playing in someone else's game of RQ6 and they wanted to do away with Luck Points, I would be completely fine with it.
  5. It was a real problem in early Deadlands, especially as they could soak damage as well. If you had a nice pile of bounty chips, you would know that you could simply shrug off a shotgun blast without real risk. They changed the way bounty chips worked in that game to make them random at some point, and the revised version is what carried over into Savage Worlds.
  6. In RQ6, at least, Spending a Luck Point simply lets you re-roll a die. They don't provide any guarantee of success.
  7. In a way, you are really blending the tick rules and the experience roll rules. You get x amount of experience rolls for the session, but can only spend them on things that are ticked. The issue with giving bonus checks for INT is that a lot of skills are physical. A high DEX character should have as proficient at learning physical skills as a high INT players is at learning academic skills. Here is my 1 AM, untested, barely thought about idea: Have each player pick any one stat they want at the end of each session. If they can make a successful roll with that stat, they get one more experience roll in a skill tied to that stat. It seems like a quick and simple solution to me at the moment.
  8. Yes. It really is one of the easiest things to mod in the system. If you want to add ticks to RQ6, you can just do it. If you want to add experience rolls to CoC, it's not an issue. I'm never going to lose sleep over how the designer's plan to handle it in an upcoming BRP game, which means I feel no great need to get into passionate arguments on the Internet to convert people to my way of thinking on it.
  9. In some cases, it might actually be less of a pain. If the GM is policing ticks anyway, it can mean a lot of skill rolls get followed by a question from the player about whether they can make a tick. Making a quick tick yourself might be less work then fielding all those questions. And if a player feels they earned a tick you didn't give them, it's discussed after the session, not during, which helps pacing. Players are also only going to question omissions they remember too, which should filter out some truly trivial rolls. Next time I use a BRP variant with ticks, I think I'll do that.
  10. That's a solid review. Like Pundit, I was a bit surprised that the book details a colony rather than full-fledged city-state, but once I absorbed the book it made sense. Thyrta is right on the brink of becoming a city and forming its own Goddess cult and developing its own government. Players can be movers and shakers as the institutions of the city are formed. It can be their city-state, letting them feel they are making a lasting mark on the setting. As for forthcoming books, I did some searching on the TDM forum. There is indeed a forthcoming book called Assabian Rites that will detail sorcery of the world. Manuscripts for the adventure campaigns in the Legend books are also in the process of conversion to RQ6, so it doesn't seem worthwhile to pay the currently inflated costs for the older books. You'll be able to get the same information at standard retail soon. The fact that the out-of-print Thennla books have a higher price than most of the books in the old Mongoose line does seem to indicate their is some real love for the setting. I've had no problem getting copies of other out-of-print Mongoose titles below retail.
  11. Thennla feels like a setting made with RuneQuest in mind. It has an ancient world setting with lots of cults woven into its societies for players to interact with. Korantia has a Greek vibe as a culture of competing city-states. Korantia used to be an empire. The island at the heart of the empire was devastated in a magical cataclysm, with the city-states have descended from the surviving colonies. There are two attempts to reunite the cities. One of the most powerful city-states is trying to empower a council with representatives of all cities. There is also line of the Imperial family, which currently has a lot more respect than authority. Korantines are a nautical people so the book comes with full rules for ships and ship combat. You also get cool fantasy ideas like binding elementals to ships, allowing ships to fly or even submerge. There is plenty of room for exploration as a source of adventure. It wouldn't be hard to drop the RQ6 island adventures Sarinya's Curse or Monster Island into Thennla. Each city has a patron Goddess that are all aspects of the same Goddess. Theism is the primary form of magic. Sorcery is looked down on as an anti-social form of magic not fitting for a civic-minded Korantine. Folk Magic is replace with a Rites skill based on your culture (Korantine Rites, Assabian Rites, etc.). They can also be used to augment ritual castings. The Taskan Empire is the neighboring threat that may absorb Korantia or unite them. That's not to suggest they are the bad guys. While Korantines are more deomcratic, they practice slavery, which is outlawed in the Taskan Empire. As an Empire, they have a much more diverse population, which gives a more cosmopolitan feel. It makes it a little harder to sum up in a paragraph though. I'm not familiar with the Legend books. I've never found them at a price I was willing to pay. Shores of Korantia is the first Thennla supplement for RQ6. It's the larger of the two books and gives an overview of the world despite concentrating on Korantia. It's meant as the starting point for someone new to the world. It also details a fairly new colony as a setting, with three adventures that can be woven into a campaign. I'd say it is the best place to start. I believe that The Taskan Empire is the RQ6 replacement for Age of Treason, although AoT has adventures that aren't reprinted elsewhere, so it might be worth picking up for those. Both books give you a lot of crunchy bits in the form of custom cultures and professions, cults, combat styles, and variant magic rules. They each also have nice Encounter sections, many of which are adventure hooks in their own right. Even if you never use the settings, there is plenty of stuff to steal for your own homebrews. It's also interesting to see the RQ6 rules put to use for a setting not made by one of the game's designers. I bought the core book along with Monster Island and Shores of Korantia on the same day, and it was great to have the toolkit of RQ6 along with examples of the different ways you could play with it. TDM has said there will be more Thennla in the new year. I don't believe they have announced the next title. If I were to guess, Assabia seems a likely choice. It's the home of sorcery and has an Arabian Nights vibe. What I like about Thennla is that it feels like it was made for RuneQuest, but that doesn't mean it feels gamey. It balances being an inviting setting to play in with having a rich classical feel.
  12. It's also worth pointing out that the game the OP is using doesn't use ticks. Characters get a number of Improvement Points every session that they spend to make Improvement Rolls.
  13. I think starting archetypes are an entirely different thing to niche protection. I like starting archetypes because it can be a hassle as a new player to have a big fat pile of skill points to distribute. I don't have Classic Fantasy, as I am waiting for the RQ6 (or whatever its called now) version. It doesn't sound any more restrictive than being a member of a cult in RQ. To me its only niche protection if you pick an archetype and are stuck in it.
  14. Niche protection also suggests to me a style of gaming that I find boring. It sounds like something you need in a game where you sit around waiting for the GM to ask you to roll a particular skill and hoping that you are the only one that can raise your hand, so you can get some attention. I can almost see people fiddling with their phones between their chance to roll the dice. If I am an invested in a game, I am moving forward with goals that I want to do. If I am genuinely interested in getting to the other side of a door, it's not going to ruin the game for me if the guy sitting next to me is as capable of picking the lock as I am.
  15. Yes. People often think of The Traveller Book as a collection of the original LBBs, but it has its differences. It also makes a lot of changes to center the game specifically on the Imperium, whereas the original books are more generic in nature. As I started gaming in 1983, I first encountered percentile skills in Star Frontiers and various Palladium games. I still managed to be impressed with the way BRP did it when I discovered Call of Cthulhu, even though it's a weaker implementation of the idea due to lacking training rules. It's seemed odd to me as CoC is such a downtime heavy game. We'd usually have months between run-ins with the Mythos to preserve plausibility. Of course, recovery times were a factor too. I spent a few months in a coma after my first adventure thanks to that damnable Walter Corbitt.
  16. To continue G33k's point, I think niche protection makes some character types less fun. Playing the stealthy character in D&D is always an awkward compromise. Your skill only works if you split with the group which means the rest of the group might have to sit on the sidelines, or you might end up alone and in serious trouble. Stealth characters are much more fun when you have a whole group of stealthy people. Niche protection has some benefits, but its a mistake to pretend its a necessity of game design.
  17. The systems are so different in the way the categorize characters, I can't even begin to think of a standardized conversion method. Just do what Baron says.
  18. It should be noted that the Dreamlands of Realm of Shadows was drawing Clark Ashton Smith's fantasy work.
  19. I can see the sense in a stand-alone Dreamlands game. Lovecraft is working with a completely different palette in the Dreamlands stories than he was with "The Whisperer in the Darkness" or "The Mountains of Madness". I don't have a problem with it being a pastiche. As the Dreamlands stories are journeys to fantastical places, I think it defeats the purpose a bit if you narrow it down to places that Randolph Carter went to in his dreams. Clark Ashton Smith's and Lord Dunsany's fantasy fits the mood of the Dreamlands well, but I don't find that Lumley's work fits in as well for me.
  20. Most BRP games have some kind of rules for training, and access to trainers is frequently a way to tie the player into belonging to the society he lives in rather than being a wandering nobody. Renaissance has rules for Teachers, which improve how fast you learn a skill. Have one character be a member of the Thieves Guild. He has access to teachers in a list of relevant skills. Another character might belong to a Fencing school, which has its own set of skills it teaches. Another belongs to society of academics, and so one. You can even blend this with the Renaissance Faction rules as well, making each source of teachers its own faction with all the mechanics that brings. Factions are another way to make players interesting beyond the skill numbers they have. Another thing to bring up is that BRP fans see the simplicity of characters on paper as a virtue, not a shortcoming. Your character is defined by they things you do in the game, not the things you buy out of a book with points between sessions. That's not a slam on Savage Worlds. I love Savage Worlds. It just scratches a different itch than BRP. In any case, in the close to 30 years I have been playing BRP on and off, I haven't seen players ever complain about not being able to tell each other apart. I don't think you will find it an issue when you sit down to play.
  21. You might also have something like orcs, that are mooks, but with a little bit of toughness to them. You can set a threshold number, like 4. Any hit that does 4 or more damage puts them down. Anything below that is shrugged off. Either way, the GM doesn't need to write anything down.
  22. I don't know if we can blame this one on the instability of the RQ line. I already had the impression her attention had shifted away from before any of this started.
  23. One thing to keep in mind is that these books were originally written as supplements to HQ2, which is largely generic, despite having a short Glorantha appendix. That meant that S:KoH was presenting a lot of the basics of making characters and using magic in Glorantha. Some of that information is redundant now that there there is an actual HQ: Glorantha core book. I can't say specifically how much though off the top of my head. I don't think you can go wrong getting the Sartar book though. Sartar culture is an important element of Pavis. It's also not far from Pavis, so it opens up more of the world to your campaign.
  24. Let's be blunt. At least one of those copies is going to end up scanned and floating around the Internet. It would be nice if Chaosium were to allow it to end up on the Internet in a way in which both they and Pete could actually make some money off the thing.
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