Thalaba

I recently read the entire Howard Conan works - I don't remember any Cthulhu mythos in his Hyborian work. Sure he wrote Cthulhu stories, but they didn't take place in Hyboria.

(face saving caveat: my memory isn't what it was when I was younger! :ohwell: )

And while I heartily agree with Steve that you can mix the SAN rules with fantasy as he's described, i'm thinking that the result won't jive with what a lot of people think is 'traditional' fantasy.

One of the reasons CoC works to capture the 'bleak, hopeless feeling' is because the creatures are, for the most part, unbeatable by the investigators. They can only hope to banish them - and even then it's not a permanent thing. Furthermore, the rest of the world is blissfully ignorant that these creatures even exist, so the investigators work in a bit of a vacuum - it's them, by themselves, against unbeatable foes and nobody else believes them.

Traditional D&D style fantasy is quite the opposite of this. For the most part everyone knows the creatures exist and the prolification of magic users can really ramp up the buff power of the PCs to the point where your players will know that one day they can defeat the creatures. What's more, with healing and ressurection magic available, the fear of player mortality drops quite a bit, which doesn't help to keep that grim atmosphere.

So, somehow, you have to find the right line between the two genres. I think there are several ways you might do this. One that I can think of is to drive a wedge of magnitude between the danger of a normal magical creature and a Cthulhu creature. If earthly creatures cause HP damage, perhaps CoC creatures cause damage directly to CON or other charateristics in addition to HP. Or perhaps they cause damage to total HP which can only be healed by the expenditure of permanent POW. This would really make the characters think twice about how they engage them. Another tool might be to have the Cthulhu gods slowly killing the earthly gods off. This would be without fanfare, but maybe one day the clerics of a minor god suddenly find themselves without access to their god or spells. Then, maybe a year later, another one goes, and so on. This would take care of the 'impending' part.

I'm not sure how effective sanity will be, if you want to use it. It's a little harder to justify when normal scary creatures don't cause sanity loss. Maybe you could replace sanity with something else, like a kind of taint. Use the sanity rules, but as your 'taint' increases, you become more noticeable to the CoC mythos creatures and they start to pay attention to you. The lower your sanity, the more noticeable you are and the bigger the creature that comes a calling for you. I suppose you could use the allegience rules for this, too.

That's all I've got right now, except that I also wanted to say that you can get a bleak game without using either sanity or CoC creatures. And here I'm going to also plug Ashes to Ashes as one interpetation which has a setting somewhat like what you describe, except that (IIR) humans are the only playable race (elves have gone insane, dwarves and halflings are in hiding). In that setting, all fantasy creatures are just different types of demons (and CoC creatures could be, too).

Good luck with it.

Ok - what are we talking here? Russia, 1904-1924?

A Gama world type setting would be my guess, based solely on her adventure in BRP Adventures and the title.

Even if there are plans for the Bronze Grimoire to be re-released I'm sure you could still work on "Auld Reekies' 500lb Gorilla Liches" as a niche product.

(did we lose a bunch of smilies again?)

(Rubbing hands) Did someone say "Liches"?

Can you give me an example of how you would use these skills? I having trouble grasping the concept of distilling 'reconnaissance' down to a single roll - surely reconnaissance is an adventure, not a roll?

Oops - comprehension fail on my part

Hi, and welcome!

I'm learning about this too, a little. One interesting source is Wikimedia Commons, where you can find quite a few images that have been released into the public domain. Here's a link to the page that discusses various public domain licensing categories:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Reusing_content_outside_Wikimedia

Not enough time in the day?

Sing it, brother...

I wouldn't quite classify Pendragon as historically accurate as much as I'd classify it as thematically accurate. When you play Pendragon, you feel like you're playing in the legends surrounding Arthur. You don't necessarily feel like you're in 5th century Logres per se. I think that's the same feel that should be attempted with a Heroic Age Greece game. It's less about staying true to an Ancient Greek timeline and more about staying true to Homer or Hesiod.

Quite right - Pendragon is based on the medieval mythical tales of Arthur, not the historical figure (who's existence is still hotly debated). Same is true for Homer writing supposed ancient greek history.

Another useful Pendragon tool is the Passions and Loyalty. Characters in Pendragon are as much defined by their Passions and Beliefs as they are by their physical stats. That would carry over very nicely to a Mythic Greek setting. You have Achilles' consuming rage that laid waist to the Achaeans, Icarus' unbound hubris, Hector's loyalty to Troy. All those things could be nicely replicated in Pendragon (or Heroquest.)

It sounds very intriguing - I guess the question is can it be (should it be?) replicated with BRP?

By the way - I'd love to see a 5th-6thC. authentic Arthurian Britain done up, with characters romping around in post roman Powis, Dumnonia, Rheged, Strathclyde, Gododdin, etc. Usually, what work I've seen on the period looks at it from a Saxon perspective - not a Brythonic one.

I'd completely forgotten about that; you're right, that would work well in a Homeric setting! I now charge you with writing it.

(See how I passed the buck there?)

I thought YOU wanted to be a writer - why are you passing the buck?

That's not what I was getting at, but that's a pretty creative interpretation of what I thought I said! You must have a big frontal lobe!

It does sound intriguing. I'm not especially familiar with Pendragon (the game), but maybe you could have a go at concretizing the idea and explain it? There is a definite similarity between Homer and Monmouth/Mallory.

Of the ancient settings, Greece would be the one with the most appeal and probably also the easiest to do. It's the first of the ancient civs that has a body of truly heroic literature, and this can be drawn on for gaming material quite easily. This same literature is also widely known (if misunderstood) today and is inspiring for heroic action, so it's not surprising that it gets the most votes - it's the easiest for people to imagine. Ironically, when someone says 'bronze age' most people think of archaic and later greeks.

Their prolific literature also makes certain aspects of greek culture easy to understand, and would help a great deal in writing it up as a setting, too. Hesiod's 'Theogony', for instance, is a period work which organizes and puts a period perspective on the greek pantheon of gods. Since there is no comparable work on the Hittite gods, for instance, anyone looking back at them from the present is faced with a confusing mess.

Maps, with period appropriate details are always useful. I was lucky enough to stumble upon three period correct maps for the setting I'm working. Importantly, none of them are on the internet. I plan on adding translations and either using them as-is or redoing them.

Translations, ah-ha! Hmmm (makes note).

Yes, you should. Not all have Google maps available when they play, and some sort of filtering is needed on the information that come from Wikipedia and the Internet in general. Some stuff is just plain wrong, and other is not so easy to find with google.

Bingo!

Heh - I've had a similar experience over the last two years of campaign playing weekly. Two characters have died - both the same player. The first one was a spectacular chariot crash followed by a trample of horses (ouch!) and the second time the player didn't actually die, but was mauled so badly in the head by a panther he was effectively maimed (which we treated as a coma). We also play with hit locations, but we only play with normal HP. Now, keep in mind out party has magic healing available - if we didn't have that there would be more casualties, for sure.

But this new way of handling damage sounds interesting - what are the effects of the various wound levels? What if your opponents can only cause damage of, say, 5-8pts, but the character has 17 total HP? Will the character ever die?

Oooh - very cryptic

Is your period revealed by reading through some of the excellent material in the BRP Adventures books? IIR one of those babies was yours and was historically inspired...

now do a poll of which era people would most want to see:)

We did one of those recently: http://basicroleplaying.com/showthread.php/1720-Historical-settings-poll

Your monograph sounds really promising. If you can come near the quality of Outpost 19 (which, by the way Nick, I think is great), then you can count on at least one sale! How many of those 30 alien species are intelligent, BTW?

I voted 'maybe', but I should qualify that. I'm not interested in all periods of time, so the specific period would be important. I'd also like to have background material included in the scenarios. This doesn't have to be comprehensive, but it does have to provide everything I need to make up NPCs and run the scenario properly. - and that would vary from one setting to another. If the setting is medieval or later Europe, I could probably make a good go of it without much background material. If the setting is Easter Island, I would need a lot more. If the setting was Inca America I'd want the whole sourcebook.

Thalaba

In all fairness to "the posters here", you could have been. There are numerous BRP settings/books and all take varying amounts of time to create characters, and yes, require reference to the rule books. Yes, I can create a character for COC in 5 minutes. But it takes decidedly more time to create a spell using non-human character in a fantasy setting, as well as a super hero for a Superworld campaign. And don't forget equipment, some settings rely more heavily on it than others. In COC, I may buy a .38 revolver and be done with it, while in a fantasy campaign I may buy chainmail, a kite shield, broad sword, backpack, bedroll, riding horse, saddle, bit and bridle, saddlebags, rations, waterskin, and a crossbow with 12 bolts. With these purchases I have to note all the game information for each on the character sheet which requires referencing the various books and is itself time consuming.

And don't forget, character creation usually involves coming up with a satisfactory character background, at least in my campaigns. If you can do all of that in 5 minutes, I applaud you. :thumb: But if you show up at the table with a bunch of blank lines on your character sheet your going to be sitting in the corner finishing your character while everyone else is playing. ;)Rod

All this is true, of course, but I think what people are objecting to is the assertion that people aren't playing BRP because character creation is inherently time consuming. The fact is that Selecting spells, picking out what equipment you have, and especially coming up with a character background are all rather independant of the system - they are a question of setting and the kind of game you want to run (detailed or not). The amount of time you spend on a character background for your political medieval fantasy in your homebrew world is going to be the same no matter whether you use D&D, Talislanta, Savage Worlds, Reign, or any of the other systems BRP competes against. Since BRP can be both fast and slow for making characters, it is up to the GM who is concerned about such things to choose the fast options, or better yet, if you want to run a one-shot at the local gaming store, the GM should make the characters up themselves and let the players pick from the pre-mades. 'Slow character creation' is not inherently a fault of BRP - it will do what you want - but for now, at least, the GM must do the work.

Remember that BRP is the tool-kit. Its up to the individual projects to tailor those tools to fit a particular niche. So perhaps there is a need for a product that streamlines character creation. Maybe that's another product that can be produced: BRP for One-Shots and Tournament Play.Why not?

Strange ... for me it just downloads the PDF when I click it. :confused:

Yeah, but Triff is a known internet agitator and probably sets off red flags wherever he goes...

The product looks great, by the way - Kudos for setting setting a high bar for art, layout, and quadricomy.

From a 'story' perspective, I could post our camapaign log, if enough people were interested. This would take the form of a fictionalized summary of what's happened in our campaign. I suppose it would get updated more of less every three weeks. I already write the summaries for our game group so the most recent session would be easy, but the campaign is two years old and so I would probably go back to the beginning rather than post the most current stuff. There are some gaps in the summaries that I'd have to try and fill in, too. If there's support for this idea let me know.

What about a rating system like Amazon has - wherein people can give a simple star rating to a product and those are automatically tallied, and people can also leave a short (or long) written review, too. Is that possible?

One issue that I can see is that this is a friendly community, and people will probably be reulctant to write reviews of products they didn't like for fear of offending their friends. This could result in a lack of reviews. I'm thinking the anonymous star system might be a way to get around that. It wouldn't replace actual in-depth reviews, but could maybe supplement.

If the reviews are buried in threads, new people will never find them. They need to be somewhere that's easy to find, which means they need to be in a dedicated section that you can link to from the product main page.

I suspected as much - just being thorough.

Hey Triff,

I was just in the Ashes to Ashes thread. In the product description it points to some reviews with a link, but the link is broken. Also, I'm not sure how else to navigate to those reviews - where are they kept?