Baulderstone

There is just something about BRP that encourages me to tinker with the magic rules more than I do with most other systems.

Yeah, I was just making the point that tomes in Lovecraft's stories aren't innately sinister. They just contain sinister information. I'm just taking that to mean that from a Lovecraftian perspective, they wouldn't have an adverse effect on a computer storing that data. I realize that CoC has a different interpretation of sanity loss than the stories though. I tend to play with the rules a lot depending on the feel I want for a particular game. I don't think there is anything innately better about sticking to pure Lovecraft over the CoC interpretation.

Depends if the data enterer knows the language. I could enter an entire Latin Necronomicon without understanding enough to lose much, if any, SAN. I seem to remember that Illuminated Bibles were sometimes written by monks who couldn't read what they were copying. It would be reasonable to rule that there would be a higher chance of ridiculous typos slipping in if the typist didn't know the language. As for the effect on the computer, you can go a number of ways. From a purist Lovecraftian perspective, their usually isn't anything innately evil about tomes. They just happen to contain some messed-up information. In "The Dunwich Horror", Armitage has looked through the Necronomicon before with no ill effects. He only has a near nervous breakdown when he reads it in preparation to fight the horror, knowing now that it is describing things that are real. In "At the Mountains of Madness", Danforth has read the Necronomicon with no harmful effects as well. Once again, it isn't until he is confronted with evidence in the real world the substantiates its contents that his sanity starts to slip. This suggest that mythos tomes are just books, and that a mythos.doc file would be just a .doc file. Of course, who says you need to be a purist? There is nothing wrong with making tomes in your setting objects possessed of pure malevolence. If we take this route, then the same thing could happen with files. Files in the same folder necronomicon.doc become corrupted and changed, disturbing images are set as wallpaper on your notebook and inopportune times, the letter on the keyboard rearrange themselves when nobody is looking, etc. I could go on, but my computer needs a restart, so I am ending here. Clearly it feels I have said too much.

I dabble in art, but I am not sure I am up to the challenge. I'd consider doing a single monster, but a cover design for a monster manual seems daunting. I'd like to help out on something in the future though.

Yeah, I get what you are going for. The fun thing about magic is that because it doesn't exist, you can take so many different approaches to it. The rules I was working with were based on the idea that magic was deeply intuitive thing where you conscious mind could get in the way. Eroding the conscious mind gives easier access to magic. It's equally valid to go with the idea that magic requires deep concentration and will. In that case, loss of sanity can destroy the mental strength and understanding required to harness magic. Insane mages make up for lack of control with the excess of power provided by a sacrifice. Thinking further on that idea, it could be fun to make sacrificial magic more prone to mishaps. Partly due to damaged users releasing a firehose of magic, partly due to relying on power from a soul that is likely to bear ill-will to the caster for sacrificing them.

Thinking further, my first gaming purchase ever was actually somewhat dreamlike in retrospect. I lived in Kuwait for three years as a child due to a job my father had. In the summer of '83, I was given a copy of the D&D Basic Set as gift. I was completely blown away by the whole concept. That fall, I was with a friend at a bedouin souk (marketplace) that had set up for the day in empty, sandy lot. There spread out on an Arabian rug, next to ornate brass coffee pots, jewelry, digital watches, hookahs, and battered telephones, was a copy of Dragon #45. There were no gaming stores in Kuwait, so it was the first RPG supplemental material I had ever seen. I haggled the guy down to 1 Dinar (about $1.00, my obvious glee on finding it gave me a substantial penalty on my bartering skill check) and rushed home to read it. To make this story BRP-relevant, an ad for Boxed Runequest in the issue was first awareness of Chaosium. It was first awareness that any RPGs at all beyond the boxed set I owned at I started to full realize what I was getting into with this gaming thing.

We'll always have people that play Monopoly. I have a dream game store in my head as well. The location is in a shopping center in a city where I went to high school. It's odd as there were four game stores in the city in various places that I went to, yet no game store was ever in the shopping center in my dreams. The nature of the store varies. Sometimes its an amazing place full of old games and supplements that I have been hunting for many years (even if I never heard of them before the dream began). Other times it might a depressingly empty, picked-over store with only the most mainstream options available. Dreams about the store often involve the journey there, which frequently can involve getting sidetracked. I only reach the store about half the time. Once I am at the shopping center, it can become a confusing maze of other shopping places both real and imagined. Longer journeys to the store seem to correspond with better stuff when I get there.

That may have been an influence.

Yeah, they are not wanting for ideas at the moment. In that age of being able to keep games for sale as PDF and POD, I think licensed products are an even worse deal. TDM can keep Monster Island alive as a digital product forever, bringing in stray sales here and there. Licensed products have a shelf life though. Chaosium is doing a good job of getting its back catalog out again, but so much of is lost to them. Stormbringer, Ringworld and ElfQuest are just lost investments in time for the company.

As someone with 30 years of BRP under my belt, I like the BGB. However, it's a I've spent enough time in D&D forums to know that D&D has one of the most brutal, divided fanbases of any RPG. Because there is always one official, sanctioned edition of the game. people playing other versions develop a lot of hate for it, and players of that version can get defensive and lash out at other versions. The whole OSR vs. Pathfinder vs. D&D thing that went on for years is due to the fact that having an "official" version doesn't make the fans magically agree with it. It just makes them more contentious about what version is the official one. No matter what Chaosium does the their new version of RuneQuest, the community is never going to unite around it. For example, Pete and Loz were on board because it was using their preferred version of the rules. When that changed, they moved on to focus on making their own products using that preferred version. Delta Green just finished its successful Kickstarter, and it's not about to drop its variant. Revolution D100 is taking the system in new directions. I don't think Renaissance would have converted over either. As in evolution, having a diversity of systems is healthy. Most people playing BRP can find a variant that suits them, which keeps them inside the system. Let's compare RQ6 and Magic World fans. Because RQ6 is supported by another company, fans of it the reject Chaosium's approach have TDM to go to. On the other hand, Magic World is just dead. I know a couple of people that are taking a break from BRP entirely over that. If there was another company making a Magic World clone, they would still be playing. It's worth remembering that lots of people support multiple companies as well. I don't play OpenQuest, but I buy OpenQuest games to strip for parts. My basic problem with what you are saying is that you are operating from the viewpoint that BRP is sick. RQ6 has been a successful product, and the system is continuing even without the licensed name. Call of Cthulhu has a strong fanbase as seen from its Kickstarter and the Delta Green one. RuneQuest 2 has a strong kickstarter going. I'm not seeing anything wrong here. Now, Chaosium the company was sickly, and had been for a long, long time. Fortunately, other companies kept the torch lit during those times. The system stayed healthy because it is scattered. Another issue I have with having a "standard" is that it assumes BRP is done and mounted on the wall. The second you can codify every variant of BRP in a book, it means the system is over. BRP isn't over. RQ6 added some cool innovations. Delta Green adds new things as well. Revolution D100 is taking the system in new directions. As long as BRP is thriving, any attempt to fully catalog it will be incomplete within a year, and I like things that way.

Sacrifice as an alternative energy source for magic makes sense. I don't really like the idea of being too crazy to work magic though. However, I have run games where you can't even use magic until you fall below a certain Sanity threshold.

Loz just said over in the TDM forum that they aren't looking to license anything at the moment, so it seems unlikely. It would be nice for the excellent MRQ II Elric rules to get a final TDM polish though.

Having Sanity be the sole cost for magic was the way it was done in CoC D20. The only real issue with it is that CoC NPC sorcerers often have 0 SAN, which means their isn't any metric for measuring how much magic they can use. I can't remember if they addressed it in the book, and I am not sure where my copy is at the moment.

I understand your point of view, but I am actually glad there isn't an 800 pound Gorilla in the d100 world. The D&D ecosystem is mostly just D&D and various designers interpretations of what they want D&D to be like. The BRP scene has never been dominated by Runequest, which has given it freedom to grow in many directions.

This. I came into BRP with Stormbringer in 1984, so there has always been a variety for me. My advice to fmitchell: You can just recommend a BRP game to someone without explaining the whole history. Pick the game that has subject matter that fits best with their interest. No need to drown your pitch in confusing detail. D&D is the most popular RPG of all time, and when you factor in every D20 license variant and ever retroclone put out by the OSR, it makes the BRP/RQ family look tiny. The Storyteller system has plenty of variants in the rules throughout all the editions of its games, and those delineations are a lot murkier than the ones in BRP. It;s only confusing if you try to make it confusing. @fmitchell

Opposed rolls are a great way to avoid flat, binary outcomes. The give you a whole spectrum of results when you compare the PCs roll with the opposition. You can give impersonal effects a skill rating and have the player make an appropriate opposed roll. For example, a mountain might have a rating of 50%. Make an opposed roll with the players Climb and you get a wide range of results. Maybe both rolls were successes, but the mountain had a better success. That means the player was forced to abort the climb when a storm came up. They didn't make it up the mountain, but weren't endangered either. On the other hand, the player might score a critical success while the mountain has a mishap. The player finds a new route up the mountain that provides bonuses to themselves and anyone else the teach it to. RQ6 with its combat Special Effects is another good way to use opposed rolls to give interesting results.

RQ6 is actually crunchier than I usually prefer a system to be, however all the crunch serves a practical purpose in play, so it never seems to actually bog things down in play. It's all crunch that makes the game better. I've been thinking about this weekends announcement more this weekend. Considering the long list of items it is borrowing from RQ6, most of them central to the mechanics of the game (the way skills are determined, the way opposed rolls are made. etc), it looks like the system is still more based on RQ6 than RQ2 in any practical sense. It seems like they are distancing themselves from RQ6 more because Pete and Loz won't be involved than because of anything actually going into the rules.

I understand, Caliburn. It's my hope that the game that was RQ6 thrives on its own, forming its own identity as as versatile d100 system. The RuneQuest name is a double-edged sword. It gives immediate recognition, but it also brings a lot of preconceptions. Having to establish a new brand is always a challenge, but TDM already has a solid base of fans to buy its offerings and spread the word.

Yes, Design Mechanism has had a much faster release rate than we have ever seen from Moon Design. Caliburn is also wrong in suggesting that TDM is purely a two man operation. The two Thennla books are by Jonathan Drake. Book of Quests had a total of nine authors. Luther Arkwright has two additional authors besides Pete and Loz, and four more people credited with "additional material by". The upcoming Classic Fantasy is by Rodney Leary. There is also an upcoming book of Luther Arkwright adventures which is said to be in the style of Book of Quests. That suggests it will have a wide range of authors. Mythic Britain: Logres is being written by Paul Mitchener. TDM has also been receptive to letting third parties make their own products for RQ6. Pete and Loz are entirely capable of growing a game beyond what they can personally write. And how RQ has residual bits of D&D in it, like 3d6 characteristics and hit points.

As i said in an earlier post, the core of this new RQ is mechanically very close to RQ6. It's certainly closer to RQ6 than Chaosium's previous products. While it may not be 100% compatible, TDM and Chaosium's products will be closer than they used to be.

Ticks can work okay in a game with training rules like Runequest. They don't work at all well in Call of Cthulhu. Without training rules, they make no allowance for things that happen "offscreen" or during downtime. They also make a lot less sense for knowledge skills than they do for skills based on physical activity. I can see how climbing a wall can make you a little better at climbing a wall. On the other hand, consider a situation in which a player with a 15% in History make a successful roll. Okay, so that fact was part of the 15% you happen to know. Why does this suggest that because he knows this one fact that he suddenly knows more facts? It's a demonstration of knowledge he already he has, not a learning experience. As for the whole tick-hunting situation, I agree that it varies from group to group on how big a problem it is. Still, the system is rewarding tick-hunting. It's rewarding you for looking for using every skill on your sheet at least once a session, but if follow the incentives of the system, you are a bad player. What I do like about ticks is that they mean players will have skill gains they never would have actually chosen. My feelings on the matter are complicated.

It actually sounds like compatibility won't be a huge issue. Here are the things we know that it is taking from RQ6: combined Attack and Parry skills, opposed rolls, combat styles, hit locations instead of general hit points, 100%+ scalability, actions, adding two characteristics to get skills. That's pretty much all the core mechanics of the system. I'm guessing that Special Effects will be missing, but they aren't something that appears on character sheets anyway. I get impression that stat blocks from this system will carry over quite easily to whatever RQ6 is going to be called.

Considering that their latest statement makes it clear that they are using some elements of RQ 6, it seems very wrong to call it RQ4. That would imply they wanted to pretend RQ6 never happened. I found this part of the statement odd: Seems a bit off to not mention that they are continuing support of the system and its settings under a new name. My takeaway from this statement would be that the line is dead.

Never! I came here wallow in baseless speculation and freak out. The pattern is all too obvious. They are turning on the Call of Cthulhu fans next.

Yes. Given that conventions keep the companies staff busy, they should at least have a written press statement to put up here on the forums to go along with the announcement. Every step of this drama has been them making an announcement to a group at a con, then letting it spread, grow, and mutate over the web for a few days before they show up to try and set things straight. TDM has a clean, simple statement of their end of the situation on their forum. Chaosium should try to do the same.