Dyvim Matt

Finally, Arioch answered our prayers!

I'm with Nick here. Even with the penalties you mention, there are still some very overpowered spells. As a grossly exaggerated example, let's say one misguided player chooses Call Azathoth. Of course, the associated SAN loss is prohibitive, but the day Mr Player decides he has enough balls to cast it, all the SAN loss in the world won't change the fact that Azathoth is here to stay. Of course, I picked the worst possible example, but magic in Call of Cthulhu is designed to be the province of madmen, and for good reason. In fact, back when I ran my CoC campaign, I kept saying, all in jest of course, that some of the players spent most of their time learning spells they were too afraid to use. The group's official "magic expert" (Cthulhu Mythos around 50%, and a whopping two spells) could not agree more. Speaking of Nick, I would suggest you follow the Uncounted Worlds link in his signature. Issue Two has some good advice on running sword-and-sorcery games straight out of the Call of Cthulhu core rules.

My own attemts at a BRP-Hârn adaptation led me to drop the convocations for the Shek-Pvar as well. For flavor, I would avoid mixing angels and demons into Pvarism, because I prefer reserving divine and semi-divine entities for clerics, but this is nothing more than my own opinion. Do I understand correctly that religious magic consists solely of Divine Interventions, with no Invocations (aka spells) per se? Also, do you track Allegiances for specific deities in addition to Magic World's Shadow/Balance/Light scheme, or do you replace the Allegiances entirely? Or, do you classify the ten deities under the three basic Allegiances? Lastly, how do you determine if a character has psionic talents? And do you play with latent powers, or does the PC start with his talents already active?

It is not to everyone's tastes, but I find Call of Cthulhu is one of my favorite versions of BRP. I highly recommend to try a modern day game, maybe with bits of the Big Gold Book included to taste, or Cthulhu Dark Ages. I am not a big fan of classic era (1920s-1930s) CoC, but then again, I played quite a few excellent games in the 1920s.

Very, very much this. I have tried to convert various game worlds to BRP over the years, some more easily than others. My attempts included HârnWorld, the World of Darkness, Shadowrun, Ravenloft (a pretty popular choice for conversion! ) and Dark Heresy. The common denominator in most cases is that you can't perfectly emulate all the rules of every game. I find that overall, if you want to play a game that is just like another game, but with BRP, it's pretty easy to do, but translating every minute detail can require some homework. In both cases, it is very much worth it. Oh, and welcome aboard!

Last time I ran Call of Cthulhu, I started with the CoC version of the rules only, but I gradually added rules from BRP over the course of the campaign, to fill in some gaps. I feel Call of Cthulhu really puts the focus away from combat by making the rules as "minimalist" as possible. Since the BRP book caters to various genres, it has more complete combat rules to cover as many situations as possible. It's up to you to figure out what you want to use, depending on the feel you want for your game. My players are more "action-oriented", so I added bits from the BRP book to cater to their tastes. Some other group may be more "investigation-oriented", in which case the rules from the CoC book are more than sufficient.

I can see how the Terrans might be caught off guard by Sorcery at first, but it's only a matter of time before a sorceror is captured and the secret is tortured out from him. Or, some rogue sorcerors join the Terran forces and work their magic in exchange for protection. Either way, the Terrans are now on an equal footing with the people of the Southern Reaches in terms of sorcery, and of course, since orbital strike beats rock, the Southern Reaches are in deep trouble... Oh, and about that gate... what are the odds that, while all of the above is happening, the Fey are seeping through it? I don't know about you guys, but I think we have a campaign. Sorry Mr Monroe, but your Southern Reaches are going down in flames...

Yeah, small world! HârnMaster used to be our main game when I was in high school. My brother ran a HM campaign last year, and this year I thought I would run one as well. I'm doing fine, but I sure have problems managing all the rules. I keep wondering how I could make it simpler, like, you know, something like BRP...

Oh please! Anyone who is serious enough about creating gates will only use the far superior Liber Ivonis, not the "kewl" new, modern-language-speaker-friendly, English edition! (What? This thread was clearly lacking a Book of Eibon edition war! )

I finally bought Magic World this week-end, and I am happy to say I was very pleased. I confess I have popped up on threads, here and on rpg.net, for no other purpose than to ask if Magic World was getting published already, and I must say it was worth the wait! My only complaint is that the stuff I am really looking for will be in Advanced Sorcery, so, yeah, will Advanced Sorcery be published already? I have wanted to make a BRP adaptation of HârnWorld for a long while, but I find the Southern Reaches game world quite intriguing. Are there any plans for additional material on the setting?

A couple of years ago, I was running a Call of Cthulhu game, and since not all the players could be available every session, we made an agreement that PCs whose players could not show up would be sent to do "behind-the-scenes" stuff like long researches in libraries, watching the car outside while the others explored a mansion, etc. An unfortunate side-effect of this is that most of the time, bad stuff only happened to whoever showed up to the game, while the abstentees were basically immune to it. In other words, while they were missing out on the fun, missing a game meant their character was safe for one more session. Players started joking that nothing could happen to their characters as long as they missed the right sessions. Until I decided to get rid of their comfort zone. I decided to wait until the next time someone would miss a game. That night, the other players decided that the absentee's PC would watch over the car while they were exploring some cave below Dunwich. I let them joke that nothing could happen to their car without ever cracking a smile. Then, when they came back to the surface, I told them that their car was in the same place they left it, but their friend had disappeared. Nobody could figure out what had happened. Cue panic and pleas of "but she wasn't playing!" During an email exchange between games, the player was informed that she had disappeared without a trace. Cue some more pleas of "but I wasn't there!" I didn't explain anything for a whole week, despite all the frantic "BUT WHAT HAPPENED?!?" emails I received. The next game, I started the session by explaining to her that she had been kidnapped, tied up and thrown into a car trunk, that she didn't know who attacked her, and simply asked the usual "so what do you do?". She managed to get out of that situation, but from that point on, missing on a game wasn't such a safety net anymore...

I'm not well equipped to handle PDFs during games, so I'll have to wait another month I guess. Oh well, at least there is hope!

With regards to the handling of demons as Sidekicks, perhaps one way to increase the cost would be to build the "Sidekick" using only as many "Power" points as the MPs invested in the summoning. If my estimation is right, one lone sorcerer would only be able to summon pretty minor demons, while the more powerful ones would only be accessible through group summonings, therefore making Chain of Being a very valuable spell for would-be summoners. Any thoughts?

It has been some time since I came here, but I thought you guys might want to know Lynn Willis passed away.

And mine makes 95!

I have considered trying my hand at running HârnMaster at some point, and I am still undecided about the rules I will be using. Assuming I don't use the HârnMaster rules, I may run a HârnWorld campaign with straight BRP. In terms of magic, I have considered the following: -For Shek-Pvar: the basic Magic rules from Big Gold (the Order of the Shek-Pvar would not be divided by convocations) -For Psionics: Psychic Powers (who would have guessed?!?) -For Priests: the basic Sorcery rules (just to give them something different. Still not sure if I would divide the Sorcery spells by religion or just resolve priest spells on a case-by-case basis) Others may disagree with my choices for very good reasons. To be honest, unless I settle for the actual HârnMaster rules, I don't really intend to create an exact copy of the magic rules. I would probably port over the Piety Points system straight from HM, because it is pretty easy to do and I am not sure how to apply the Allegiance rules to the Gods of Hârn. Ten different allegiances sounds like a lot more than the system can comfortably handle... I am not really a fan of the RuneQuest magic rules, but I am mostly familiar with the first edition of the Mongoose version, and I do not know how it differs from older versions. My only other BRP resources are Call of Cthulhu, but obviously, the magic from that game has a pretty different feel... I haven't looked there yet, but I am sure that the gentlefolk at the lythia.com forums would be glad to help!

Not really. There has been a few tweaks in the rules from one edition to the other over the years, but overall, they have been so minor that they don't have a major impact. Most changes from one edition to the next consist of reorganizing material, importing material from a supplement to the core book, etc. You should have no problem whatsoever.

Same here, I must say reading that struck a chord with me (I lost my daughter a couple years ago, though in different circumstances...) I wish the best to you and your daughter, Mr. Middleton. On a cheerier note, I LOVED End of Days and Tombs & Tentacles! I'm a big fan of Call of Cthulhu, and the two articles gave me great ideas for a homebrewed setting à la Hawkmoon-meets-Cthulhu. I'm not sure when I'd use it, but who knows? Thank you very much!

Let me add my voice to the chorus and say: 1) Congratulations on the fine work with Witchcraft! I had a good read, and am anxious to start using it! 2) Yes, a necromancy book is a very good idea! I always need more villains who are into necromancy, demon summoning and other fine hobbies.

Hi Loz, Pete, Please excuse my drooling over this synopsis of the new version, but this all sounds very promising. Do you think it would be easy enough to play using BRP instead of MRQII? It looks like it would, but I'm curious.

Seneschal, I didn't think about it, although it is tempting! I actually had something in mind for the PCs to be transported to sometime around 1700 at some point, because my campaign revolves a lot around Keziah Mason, from The Dreams in the Witch House, and the PCs aren't completely convinced yet that the "old lady" they keep crossing on the street is REALLY old! Two time travels in the same campaign sounds like a lot to me, but you never know! EDIT: Then again, my Val-du-Loup campaign will probably involve the Cthulhu Mythos. I guess it's just a matter of choosing between the existing PCs or new ones.

Pete, Are you talking MRQII Elric specifically, or the generic magic rules?

Hi, Taking advantage of the Chaosium Thanksgiving sale, I just bought BRP Wichcraft and Val-du-Loup. Congratulations to Gheedon and Byron Alexander for some very nice products! I'm not finished reading the books yet, but I've had a very good look, and so far, I like what I see! BRP Witchcraft does a great job setting just the right mood, and the potions and talisman rules will certainly come in handy. Val-du-Loup looks really promising. There seems to be a lot of research put into it, with very good results. I'm presently running a Call of Cthulhu campaign, but once it's finished, I can't wait to run a campaign using those two books!

I've never played MRQII, Elric or otherwise, because Mongoose came up with it not even a year after I bought the MRQ Elric books and I couldn't afford the switch. I agree with sdavies, the rules were not working very well, especially, in my opinion, the combat rules and, to a lesser extend, character creation (too heavy for my tastes.) However, the MRQ Elric magic system was very good, I think. Pacts, summonings, dreamtheft and the whole rune magic/alchemy/necromancy rules from Magic of the Young Kingdoms all made it by far my favorite magic system. From the comments I've read, combat is a very strong point in MRQII. I wonder if the magic rules are the same as in the old version?

Normally, I try to avoid creating new rules and just adapt an existing rule to the situation, if possible. For alcohol, I usually resolve drunkenness the same as fatigue, depending on the game system I run at the time. For BRP, I would probably play it the same as poison POT, but subtracted from Fatigue points instead of Hit Points. The point at which you start getting skill penalties is the point where you start being drunk per se. Or, have the player actually drink as much of the same drinks as his character. Surely the player will start being incoherent and clumsy, which will reflect on his character's behaviour. What could possibly go wrong?