Thalaba

Hi Rich,

I'm finally giving this book a thorough read (been on my shelf since it first came available, what over a year ago now). I really like the tone of the book - it does a good job of capturing The Road Warrior and even The Road. The gritty tone is exactly what I want from a post-apoc. game. I may have more questions later and I progress through the book, but one question is burning a hole in my brain right now:

How do you pronounce "Spikemo"?

In Scotland two additional locations spring to mind: Candida Casa/(modern Whithorn) and Trimontium/Eildon Hills.

I played in a historical game that did something similar. It wasn't straight up BRP (a hybrid), but the game used the concept of 'Piety' on the one hand and 'Heresy' on the other. The game had a Christian oriented viewpoint, so the Jew in our group used Heresy when praying for his miracles, and everyone else used Piety.

I think the question should be: what do you plan to use the allegience scores for - what effect will high or low 'association' or have? I can see how being a devout member of a god-fearing society will have its benefits, but what are the benefits of being 'against'? Members of a religious groups form (usually mutually exclusive) associations that you can ally yourself to, but atheists usually don't.

These days I prefer supplements that describe a world*: a Gazetteer, Scenarios, Timelines (a place needs a history), and variant or new powers if necessary. (I'm never happy with generic magic or psionics; tweaking those is another way to make a world different.) The other stuff, if present, should flow out of the world description, or events in that world.

Yeah, this. I'm looking for inspiration. So give me your creative output and feel free to push the boundaries in doing so. Feel free to include anything off that list that furthers that goal. Chances are - if its something I haven't really seen before and fires my imagination, I'll take it.

I just got mine, too. Overall, the setting looks very evocative - I wont be able to comment further until I read it, and this will be some time from now, so consider this a mini style review.

The illustrations are really nice and seem to do the setting justice. I especially like the cover.

But my first impression on opening the books was 'Gack! What's with the hideous borders?' Seriously, they detract from the rest - they're all stripey and dominate the page, visually - which they shouldn't. The 'Chronicles of the Future Earth text across the top of most (why not all?) pages is also pretty cheesy.

Some other oddities:

a) The same picture of the chimaera (and a few other illos) appears at least 3 times in the book. It's a good picture, but once is enough. I'm sure this is a cost saving measure, but the space saved by the double and triple pictures could have been used to add more creature stats (see next item);

An elephant-like beast of burden appears on the cover and on page 4. This beast seems to go without a name in the text, though, and gets no stats - which seems like an omission to me if it was important enough for the cover. A number of animals are listed under prices (Chelothor, Orn, Chambriother, and Bantoor) but they get no description or stats at all;

c) The text entries for Gimmerling and Chaos Crawlers have the wrong pictures (should be switched).

d) The index is incorrect in places

e) No credit is given for the illustrations (that I could find)

All this after a 10 minute look-through.

The maps are quite nice. I especially like the hand-drawn ones that are associated with the adventure. Wish I knew who drew them, though. The map of Korudav is also very good, though in quite a different style. The names on this map really make you want to explore!. The Hivernium map is good, though the scrolly text is a little hard on the eyes - easier on the big copy included with the book.

I wish I had time to read more of the text so I could say more about it. I don't really like to say negative things about books that I know people have worked hard on - but at the same time I think all the glowing words are a little misleading - this isn't a perfect product and (sorry Kruvil) definitely doesn't deserve a 5/5 for style. I'd probably give it a 3/5 for style myself, but then I really hate needless watermarks and ugly borders with a passion.

I know this isn't scientific, but - observing things at RPG.net, which is a pretty well rounded community as far as taste in games goes, BRP and Savage Worlds usually seem to be pretty much neck-in-neck as far as popularity goes in the 'what's your favourite' or 'what's the best' polls.

Lately, BRP supplements like The Laundry and Chronicle are getting a lot of attention.

Runequest in general, and specifically the latest iteration, almost seems to be an 'RPG.net darling' these days.

The system hasn't changed one bit since this thread was started, and yet BRP seems more popular now than it did a year or two ago. All that's changed is quality material put out to get people's imaginations flowing and get them excited.

For further evidence, look at this board. When I joined it was pretty much only grognards around here. Now I see a lot of new blood, and people saying they're new to BRP. These are all good things. Far from being marginalized by other games, I'd say BRP is growing at a reasonable rate.

I did just order a 2 issue trial print subscription to this: http://www.blackgate.com/ thinking it looked pretty cool.

I'd decided I'll probably never buy a PDF (or at least - it would have to be something I REALLY wanted and couln't physically purchase). Thanks to the various charity bundles over the last two years, I've got loads of PDFs of games I'm legitimately interested in that I've never read and probably never will. I just don't like reading on a screen that much, especially when I've got a least a 2 year backlog of print material on my bookshelves I haven't got to yet!

I would, and have, bought POD from Lulu and I suppose I would from DriveThru too.

As for colour vs. BW: I don't really care. I'd much rather have a BW book with tasteful layout (no clunky margin art or giant watermarks) and good illustrations that actually have something to do with the text (or perhaps a series that stands alone as an expose). I want the art to be mature and evocative. If it looks like it was designed to appeal to children or teens, I'll be turned off right quick - even if I might like the rest.

As for content, you mention you were thinking of 'including BRP' material - which means it won't be a focus by any means. I'm personally not interested in a lot of the big systems out there. I have no interest in D&D or WOD anymore, for instance, though I do like a lot of indie or smaller games. Whether or not I purchase a magazine of mixed content would really depend very much on what the contents were - something, I suppose, that would have to be evaluated on an issue-by-issue basis.

I know that makes me a tough sell, but fwiw I hope it helps.

...books about armoured trains...

!?!?

So is this something that Chaosium or third parties would be interested in? Would Chaosium be prepared to license other publishers to produce games Bowered By BRP? Would third parties be prepared to do the work of building the BRP system into their product and paying for the privilege?

Isn't this what Cubicle 7's The Laundry already does? I think Chaosium's system is already set up for this.

MRQ2 is a very solid rule-set with some very interesting ways of doing certain things. It does some things better than RQ3, but for other things I still prefer the RQ3 way of doing things. At this point, I think it's impossible to say one is better than the other - your would pick the system based on the particular flavour of game you like, so there's probably some trial and error involved on your part.

In terms of layout and illustration (and feel, as Rust said), I RQ3 is the clear winner. The MRQ2 art director wasn't quite clear on the concept. For many people this doesn't matter, but these things are important to me. It also lacks the bronze-age feel the RQ3 had, and I really miss that. On the positive side, I'm sure the MRQ2 book will last a lot longer before the pages start falling out! The RQ3 books were flimsy inside that box, and my box, at least, has taken a beating.

Thank you, guys. How about in the original RuneQuest format. Is that worth the cost? Are they obsolete due to Classic Fantasy? Sorry for all the questions, but you guys are very informative.

The original format for those three monographs is the RQ3 Deluxe box. The $60 some odd bucks I spent on that back around 1990 remain the best RPG expenditure I've ever made. We recently ran a lengthy RQ3 campaign and one of my players liked it enough to find a copy for himself on E-bay, too. The original RQ3 Box contained five booklets:

1. Players book (which had core rules)

2. Magic Book (which outlined the four types of magic - Spirit, Divine, Sorcery, and Ritual) This is the Basic Magic Monograph.

3. GM book (which had rules for ships, advice for encounters, cities, prices, and I don't remember what else). This is the Basic Gamemastering Monograph.

4. Creatures (which basically had the bestiary). This is the Basic Creatures monograph.

5. Glorantha (which had an introduction to that setting, including the stats for some of the better Glorantha creatures like Scorpion-men and Walktapi).

6. The box also contained two play-aid booklets that were useful, and a nice big map of the Ancient world with evocative names on it.

Of the three monographs, I'd say the most useful are Basic Creatures (but only if you don't have creature stats from anywhere else, otherwise you might duplicate) and Basic Magic, which gives you the magic systems mentioned above. These three monographs are basically just reprints of the original with some stuff stripped out and a poorer layout. This is why, if you think the contents might be interesting for you, you should get the deluxe box instead.

Classic Fantasy doesn't have much to do with the three Basic monographs at all. It presents rules for playing a D&D style game using BRP as the rules. This is very different from the classic RuneQuest style fantasy.

Well, that's quite an impressive contributor list and a nice diversity of topics! I'll have to check it out.

This may be premature, but... any thoughts on the next issue? Are you working on a theme or any such thing? Just curious...

Congratulations, Nick!

Care to post a table of contents? The Lulu site doesn't list them, and the link at the bottom of your sig goes to something that hasn't been updated in over a year.

Uhm, it is not exactly the concept I am looking for. Look at the definition: a Skill is what you can do, a Trait is what you are.

Let us go for a concrete example: the Traits for Robin Hood would be:

English, Noble, Horse, Sword, Bow, Forest, Hide, Sneak ... and some others, like Jump or so. They would probably also include Crusader and/or Bandit.

Would you call English or Crusader a Gift?

I'm confused. If traits are what you are, then why is Robin Hood a horse, a sword, a bow, a hide, a sneak, or a jump. Surely, these are skills - what someone does - not what someone is.

As far as naming goes, I would suggest 'Talents' for abilties that are innate, and 'Skills' for abilities that are trained.

@ Pete: How long did each match last?

That is a very good question. Long post follows...

<Snip good answer>

Ok, I'm convinced on the validity of choosing the location from a simulationism standpoint. I think the part that worries me a little is that it might take some of the fun out of mixing and matching armour - which is really more a game play issue, and probably a minor one at that.

In close formation battles however, limbs are remarkably difficult to strike. For example its nearly impossible to hit at the enemy's legs - if you are using a spear you are risking losing (control of) the weapon as the two side close, and if you have a sword then there is no way to cut at anything below the waist once the lines engage. This same 'press' makes swinging at arms difficult too, since there are a lot of other weapons in the air snagging your swing. Shield arms are near invulnerable due to the tightness of the situation. When you consider a thrusting weapon, then realistically hitting a moving arm is a matter of luck and its much better to aim at the static head and torso.

I could have added rules for such things into MRQ2, but I didn't think it was worth the added level of complication and to be honest most PCs don't normally fight in close order battlefield formation anyway.

Actually there is. There's the defensive CM of Redirect Blow allowing the defender to choose where the blow will land on him.

After thinking about this for a few more minutes, I think I would in fact restrict this CM to Critical hits. I would also, however, introduce another CM that would allow High or Low hits; location being determined by 1d10+10 for high hits, and 1d10 for low hits. For me, this would solve the issue of "aiming" for a part, and then having combat circumstances shift things around a bit.

I like this, too - giving a gradation of aim. The pieces are starting to fall into place.

EDIT: I would just add that you learn a lot when you start to try and take a ruleset apart about how well it was put together. I always admired RQ3 for being very tight - some many things interacted with others in subtle ways that it was hard to 'improve' on the rules, because making one thing 'better' often made something else 'worse'. I have to say that, now that I'm looking at them more closely with a sculptor's eye that the MRQ2 ruleset is probably just as tight - and that's a remarkable thing.

Nice to see people I recognize from the RQ Rules list coming in to BRP Central!

Warning: Potentially incoherent rambling ahead:

Although I trust Pete's experience (actually, it mirrors exactly that of one of my players who is a live-steel reenactor) I can't help but wonder how it effects historical roleplaying. In many periods, combattants and skirmishers were only lightly armoured. Egyptians and Sumerians basically only protected the head and abdomen. Ancient libyans had little other than a loin cloth and a rug-like cape that they used as a shield (what size weapon would that be?). These were not exceptions - this is how front-line troops were protected. They didn't all have shield, either. In a situation where some locations are unarmoured - being able to hit the location you want seems like it would end all combats in the same, rather predicable way - which is a bit of a story killer, it seems to me. Would Achilles last long in an MRQ fight? The choice of location hit goes entirely to the attacker. The defender cannot choose to defend one location more than others. There is nothing in the model that allows the defender to leave his armoured bits open while he uses the shield to protect the unarmoured bits. This, to me, makes the MRQ method sound more dangerous than I'm comfortable with for our campaign.

How about 1 CM per Level of Success difference, but regard Fumble just as Failure for the calculation?

Yes, I thought about that, but what I don't like about it is that every successful hit gets a CM - so in effect even a normal hit is an impale. There are no normal hits anymore. This makes some sense in MRQ2 because impales etc. no longer cause more damage, but still it seems weird to me that there are no normal hits.

As Rosen says, what happens is that CMs become vanishingly rare; rarer even than specials in RQ3. In RQ3 you get a special result if you roll 1/5th. In your system you have to roll a special result and your opponent has to fail a parry. Note also that in MRQ if your attack is 120 vs a parry of 100 then the extra 20 is deducted from both sides making it 100 vs 80, increasing the likelihood of failures therefore increasing the chance of a CM. The final result is that combat becomes far less tactical and cinematic because CMs virtually disappear and you now have no way of trying to disarm, damage weapon and so on. Personally I think you need to use the skills over 100 and crits on 1/10 if using CMs.

They may be rarer than in MRQ2, but not compared to our usual game. We played the last campaign with the BRP rule that a successful parry would drop a special down to a normal success. Using this rule we still had a lot of specials and criticals, it seemed to me, so I'm not that worried about it. However, it's a good point, so I played with the percentages on a spreadsheet just to see what the likelihood of a CM occurring is:

By my proposed method, if both attacker and defender have 50% skill, there is a 17% average chance for a CM to occur. If both skills are 90%, this drops to 14%. This counts both attacker and defender CMs.

By the MRQ method, they are higher: 62% at mid skill and 36% at high skill.

By Frogspawner's method, we get 74% at mid skill and 57% at high skill.

So, the question is - am I comfortable with a 15% average chance of a CM occurring (on top of regular attacks, which also still occur). I think the answer is yes. And actually, numbers above 30% seem too common to me.

I'm also not worried about skills over 100, as nobody will likely get there. We play a pretty gritty game. I expect to see weapon skills in the 50-60 range to start and about 80-100 by the end.

The only other option that might work is to have 3 bands of CMs. Crits, specials and normal CMs. You could have special CMs be: Choose Location and the weapon-specific CMs.

This is certainly an option worth considering.

Thanks for the great input from all so far.

Unfortunately, I cannot release BRP Mecha yet. It would be a great promotion to have something hard sci-fi to go with BRP alongside the usual fantasy and historical. But playtest is only 25% complete, and some rules need further elaboration.

BRP Mecha is Hard Sci-Fi? Interesting.... Does it come with a setting? Near Future or Far?

Things are kind of slow in my office today, so I thought I'd explore this a bit as a brainstorming exercise.

For our next campaign, I'm toying with the idea of incorporating MRQ2 Combat Manoeuvres into our primarily RQ3 game. I think the two should fit together rather seamlessly, but there are some fundamental differences between MRQ2 combat and RQ3 combat.

For one thing, the RQ3 Strike Ranks and MRQ Initiative are very different ways of looking at time in combat. I don't think this will have much impact on how CMs work, though it might have a minor impact on which CMs are available.

Another difference is 'degrees of success'. In MRQ there are 4: Critical (10%), Success, Failure, and Fumble, and the first CM is gained at 1 degree of success difference. This means one gets a CM at success vs. failure level and 3 CMs at Crit vs. Fumble. In RQ3 there are 5: Critical (5%), Special (20%), Success, Failure, and Fumble. I would prefer to keep the RQ3 five levels of success, but I don't want to increase the maximum levels of success to four (Crit vs. Fumble is four levels different). So my thinking is that you only gain a combat manoeuvre beginning at 2 levels of success.

-Thus Crit vs. Special, Special vs. Success, Success vs. Failure, and Failure vs. Fumble all allow for a normal, undefended attack to take place.

-Crit vs. Success, Special vs. Failure, and Success vs. Fumble all allow one normal attack plus 1 CM.

-Crit vs. Failure and Special vs. Fumble allow one normal attack plus 2 CMs.

-Crit. vs. Fumble allows a normal attack plus 3CMs.

Next we come to fumbles. I like the RQ3 fumble table, so I'd like to keep it. But I don't really like the idea of rolling fumbles on top of getting all those CMs. So I'm thinking of making 'Invoke a Fumble' as a CM that becomes available whenever the opponent rolls a fumble. If the winner chooses this as a CM, the looser must roll on the fumble table.

Now, as far as the actual Combat Manoevres available go, they would have to be tweaked or modified, some removed and probably some added. I don't have me books with me now, so I'll probably address this later. I'd like to add more weapon-specific CMs, too, to give a little more differentiation between the weapons.

As for what's above - anybody foresee and problems? Have I overlooked anything?

Thanks.

Was there anything in the tweet about incorporating the errata, clarifying the things that have been confusing people, etc.? In not, I'll probably wait for a new edition, myself.

Sounds awesome! Congratulations, Ken.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for something on Elephant Combat!

I got to thinking about this because we have a new campaign coming up and it would be a chance to start fresh from the beginning. I've never done an actual play before, but there are quite a few at RPG.net in their own subforum. I've often wondered if people actually read them other than the people who are in the game.

I already write fairly detailed summaries of our sessions. I send these out to the players a night or two before the next session to remind them what happened and get them in the mood. I've occasionally sent them to other people who inquired about our campaign and received favourable comments. Plus, people usually ask to learn more about my campaign - perhaps because of it's bronze age inspiration. So it seems like a reasonable way to share.

In order to turn the session summaries into something more useful to outsiders, I would have to add the GM commentary about the mechanics. I was curious to know how much mechanical discussion would be needed, because I don't really need to add extra work to my life. It seems, from the poll, that it needn't be too heavy, though.

In the end, I find I can't quite make up my mind about whether it would be a worthwhile exercise.

You're right that shields are not as effective in this edition. If you want to make them more effective, I can think of a few ways.

1. Separate attack and parry skills. The main advantage that parrying with a sword has over shield in the game is that you've already trained with the sword. Forcing the character to train separately for parry takes away this advantage.

2. Reduce the HP of swords, spears, and other weapons so they won't last as long as shields. This will make shields look more attractive.

3. Remember that shields protect against missiles better than other weapons. Also, parrying weapons are not subject to armour penalties the way dodge is.

4. Re-introduce the 'slung shield' rule. This rule granted a certain amount of protection to the location it was slung, acting like armour.

Alternatively, you can create combat styles the way MRQ2 does. Thus 'sword and shield' would be a style, 'spear and shield' would be another, 'sword and axe' might be another. This allows you to put all your attacks and parries into a single skill. Now that you don't need a separate skill for shield use, they'll become attractive to players again for parrying. You could even have a combat style that doesn't have a parrying weapon at all, and give users of that style a bonus (say 10% or 20%) to dodge.

Hope that helps.