Mechashef

I can't see any problem with things like spotting and disarming traps. Can't you just use the appropriate skills from BRP and use any appropriate modifers as specified in the scenario? Regarding opening doors, I don't know. I played MERP a very little bit around 20 years ago and have a copy of the rule book, but can't find anything about opening stuck doors. It does have a resistance table but no mention I could quickly find about using it for such things.

That's a Gloranthan demigod. Red Bull is a subcult of Storm Bull and looks after Sky Bulls. Worshippers can brew a foul concoction made from Sky Bull urine. Drinking that as part of a special ritual provides one benefit to the imbiber. It gives you wings.

Why must a red light district be associated with crime? The crime generally comes about when the activities are illegal. As a modern (and thus perhaps not useful) example, the city I live in (Canberra) has had prostitution legal for a long time, unlike most of the rest of Australia. It is restricted to brothels operating in the red light areas, which are industrial, not residential suburbs so just about no-one lives near the brothels. Prostitution anywhere else in the city is illegal. The (generally) girls are registered by the government, are employees with typical employee benefits or contractors and health checks are compulsory. General crime in those areas is less than that of the city centre and nightclub areas, and while it would be naive to assume that organised crime is not involved with some of the brothels, the same would apply to the clubs in other parts of the city. btw, local lore claims that the bumper season for those businesses is whenever parliament is sitting, and their busiest time ever was when Canberra hosted the World Council of Churches in 1992. Regarding skills, perhaps massage?

Merry Christmas Everyone (Waiting for the last child to wake up so we can start Christmas)

I agree that CoC scenarios are amongst the most well researched historical type scenarios I've seen for any game. My younger brother used to play D&D in the library at school, but some teacher brought in one of those pamphlets by the anti D&D loonies and they were banned from playing it. They then swapped to CoC. As they could argue it is based on the writings of a famous author, they were allowed to play it. Ironically, I think that if you were going to get immersed in a rpg, believe it's real and go postal, then you are more likely to believe in the pseudo-real CoC mythos instead of the clearly fantasy D&D!

Last time I was at the Australian War Memorial I took some photos of part of their Boxer Rebellion exhibit. These two may be of interest to some people:

I think soltakss has given a good comparison. One thing that has been left out is melee movement. RQ2 is less precise on combat movement. It is something that happens, but the GM has to fudge a bit. RQ2 has combat movement based on the melee round with humans moving 8 units per round. “Unit” can vary, but for combat is generally 3m to give a movement of 24m per round in combat. This is fine until you get a situation where it is important to know exactly where moving characters are. RQ3 has combat movement based on Strike Ranks (SR), with humans moving 3m per strike rank. In my opinion, this is better because it means that you can more easily calculate the delay it will cause to an attack if the attacker must move. It also means that in RQ3, all humans don't move the same distance in a round, so a faster RQ3 character can move more metres than a slower one. An average RQ3 human will move the same distance in a round as a RQ2 human, but a RQ3 human with a DEX below 10 will move more, and one with a DEX above 15 will move less. On one hand the RQ2 movement system can give more flavour for other species (a movement of 9 or 10 units) per round is faster than a human, but not blindingly fast where as in RQ3, having a movement of 4m per SR is fine, but 5m or above starts to make the creature exceptionally fast. On the other hand the movement ratings assigned to some RQ2 creatures seem a little odd (though I understand the logic in that combat speed involves more than just moving). I think BRP (which has a system similar to RQ2) suffers from using the poorer system and also from having creatures taken from various members of the BRP family. I suspect that the same creature doesn't always have the same stats in all members of the family which can give some odd movement values when creatures are combined into the generic BRP book.

I knew nothing about Pendragon (other than the game existed) until then. I just looked up the wikipedia entry for it, and yes, like Pendragon! In my (limited) experience, most people I know who have played RQ2 and RQ3 forget that RQ2 mainly used 5% increments. After playing RQ3, the 5% increments seem so artificial and D&D like.

A major (but apparently little noticed) difference between RQ2 and RQ3 is that RQ3 is a more true D100 system. Iirc, in RQ2 skills only go up in increments of 5%, so you could play almost as well by ditching the D100, dividing skills by 5 and rolling D20.

27 Years ago (that seems too long ago to be possible). RQ2. I remember one of the group poked fun at some centaurs who then slaughtered half the party while the rest ran and hid. Running through the long grass towards the forest, being chased by centaurs with lances. It was a bit like the scene from Jurassic Park II where the velocoraptors take out the people in the grass!

Congratulations. And I agree the artist who did Trollslayer would do a good job for Classic Fantasy.

In my (very very limited) experience, this is the core of one of the major roadblocks. It seems that Chaosium doesn't have the resources to produce enough quality publications to keep BRP healthy and expanding. It seems unlikely at this point that there will also be insufficient professional 3rd party products. The best hope is that there will be sufficient quality products by dedicated amateurs. However to be successful such products will have to look as professional as possible. Art work and maps are really important. For those of us who do not have artistic ability, or have a semi-tamed artist chained up in a back room, this can be the most difficult part of creating a quality product. It doesn’t matter if we are producing amazing settings, astounding scenarios, fascinating bestiaries or great tomes of cunning magics, they will all suffer without quality art. The prospect of sending countless hours trawling through the internet looking for suitable public domain images, or trying to find an artist and then paying them more that you will make from your product is one that can be very off putting. Imo, one of the most useful things Chaosium could do would be to provide artistic resources to beautify monograph submissions.

I don't. I just think the SIZ value for dwarves is wrong. I always picture them as being of similar (perhaps a bit less) mass than average humans.

They are indeed. I'm very jealous of people who can produce nice maps. I am seriously lacking in such creative ability :-(

However, compared to little pigs, goat kids, hens, little girls (trying to worm their way into their grandmothers will), and wizened old ladies (who don't have the decency to drop dead or live in a convenient location) he is probably big!

So will this fumble defence stand up in court, or will the other members of the parties spill their guts (actually they probably would have if they had been standing where the dwarf was) and give evidence that the dwarf was chasing after his girlfriend? The rumour on the street is that his girlfriend has a a dwarf fetish (and she's not even a Shaman) and this isn't the first dwarf that has been taken down by this supposed friend during the heat of battle. I think the jury will see that two similar accidents surely puts the matter of intent beyond a reasonable doubt!

I wrote The River Terror.

One of my friends who doesn't play BRP (actually he hasn't played any RPG for over a decade) is a WWII fan. I'm planning on using Mind Storm to try and get him back into the hobby.

I tried to make it generic enough that could be used in a range of medieval fantasy settings. There are some very interesting scenarios in the book. Even the ones that can't be adapted to my campaign will be useful when my group is short a player and we just want to do a one off.

I just downloaded it and will start reading later today. A quick skim through indicates that there are some scenarios I'll find really useful. On the downside, it would have been nice for my name to have been spelt correctly ;-( . Though it is only wrong in the Table of Contents.

Does the scenario have any new beasties, spells or magic items?

I find rpg.net to have a very high noise to signal ration. Most of it seems to be: I think game X sucks. Tell me why it doesn't. I think game X is great. Tell me why it isn't. I don't understand what game X is about. Please it explain it to me. Give me your opinion of my stupid idea for a: (character, bad guy, campaign etc). Then of course there are the people who post long rambling articles on their theory of rpg games. There are two types of gamers. Those who play and those who talk about playing. rpg.net seems to have lots of the latter. I do visit there sometimes and there have been some interesting threads, but not many.

Looks interesting. I especially love how it conjures up an image of little old Victorian ladies embroidering "Chaos and Disorder" on handkerchiefs and napkins! Can’t trust those innocent looking little old ladies! It is good to see evil that has goals other than to just kill prople and rule the world Seriously though, it looks like a good product that could be used in a few different BRP genres.

Sounds really good. I liked what I saw when the material was on your website. btw, the website itself looked good. It has gone on to my wish list.