Jump to content

Warthur

Member
  • Posts

    27
  • Joined

  • Last visited

1 Follower

Converted

  • RPG Biography
    First RPG played: AD&D 2E. First BRP RPG played: Call of Cthulhu 5E.
  • Current games
    Call of Cthulhu, Clockwork and Chivalry
  • Blurb
    23 years a gamer.

Recent Profile Visitors

The recent visitors block is disabled and is not being shown to other users.

Warthur's Achievements

Newbie

Newbie (1/4)

24

Reputation

  1. Is this a PDF first/print a while later sort of deal, or is this arriving in both print and PDF on June 29th?
  2. I bought the ebook release of Sisterhood with the intention of getting the print release when it dropped, but it's now been comfortably over a year. Is a print release actually planned? I realise the shipping/printing apocalypse has hit a bunch of products, but even so there's been other recent products which made it out of the gate in less time, and I would have thought that getting a print run of a conventionally sized paperback would be much easier than, say, a boxed set project like CoC Classic.
  3. I quite liked Blood Tide, at least in concept - but it very much felt like one of those products which was essentially a monograph given a fairly bare-bones art and layout job and pushed out the door. Perhaps more work went into it than that - but if so, that work doesn't seem to have been reflected in the end product. I don't miss that particular era of Chaosium's history - too many products which had some really interesting ideas but were hampered with standards of editing and presentation which might have passed muster in the 1990s but were increasingly sloppy and out of step with the rest of the market, and a fair few products which just didn't merit release at all. The monograph idea at least was an early pass at the sort of thing you get now with the Miskatonic Repository and similar schemes - but actually printing the damn things rather than selling them as PDFs was absurd. Blood Tide was a victim of sloppy standards, and failing to give it better direction and a better editing job in general was part of that. I don't blame Ken Spencer at all for how it turned out.
  4. Was looking over the PDF haul from the Call of Cthulhu Classic Kickstarter and was glancing over the reproduction of the Winter 1981 Chaosium catalogue they've included, and I was interested to see listed as a forthcoming game none other than Privateers & Gentlemen. For anyone who's not heard of it, this was a Hornblower-esque RPG of adventure in the age of sail, which was originally published by Fantasy Games Unlimited along with Heart of Oak, the associated naval wargame rules. Checking my FGU copy, I note that it's designated as a second edition, with the first edition having come out in 1978. I guess the Winter Catalogue is evidence that at one point Chaosium had been planning to publish P&G - which would make sense given that its system is clearly based on BRP - but eventually let it go to FGU. I'd be super-interested to hear about the history there, because given that its first edition came out before CoC or Stormbringer, Privateers would be the first published adaptation of the BRP system to a non-Runequest context, so it's a pretty interesting "missing link".
  5. I broadly agree. I think it would be sensible to have the percentile stats as an option - a bit like how some retroclones of old-school editions of D&D include concepts like ascending Armour Class as an option - for those that want to use them, but to have the SRD not use them as the default. I think, as you say, percentile stats are a poor fit for games where superhuman levels of ability are going to be common - but I think they're a somewhat better fit for games where PCs are built on a more mundane scale, and where making Stat x5 rolls would otherwise be common enough that it's simpler just to convert to percentile stats and then divide for the occasional harder-than-average task.
  6. Ah, and the announcement that's just gone out about the Jonstown Compendium is the other shoe dropping. Looks like the deal is that if you want to put out your own RQ or CoC material, you go via the Jonstown Compendium/Miskatonic Repository (or seek a third party licence if your plans are more ambitious), if it's your own bespoke thingamuffin you can use the SRD. Seems pretty reasonable to me. (Dare I hope for a similar solution for Pendragon - a Troubadour's Gallery, maybe?)
  7. I'ma repeat TrippyHippy's question: does this include Paladin? I dunno whether the rights to that are held under the overall KAP umbrella (since it's a spin-off game using the same system) or not. (I assume Aquelarre, being an entirely different game connected only by virtue of being another Nocturnal project, isn't part of this deal.)
  8. As I said to others when passing on the news, "pretty much anything you enjoy in RPGs which doesn't directly derive from D&D or D&D-like play can be traced back to something Greg did or influenced". Chaosium's games have been the standard against which I measure all other RPGs for a good long time now, and it's rare that a game has beaten Chaosium on its own turf. On top of that, I think it's no accident that of the list of games at the back of 1st edition Vampire: the Masquerade that are cited as influencing that RPG, three of the ones listed are Chaosium releases (RQ, COC and Pendragon), and two of those are very much Greg efforts. You take everyone that Greg and Chaosium directly influenced, and then you add on everyone that those folks influenced in turn... and it's hard not to conclude that Greg was the most important and influential thinker in the history of RPG design since Gygax - and without Greg's contributions our hobby might have been much more narrow than it would have otherwise been. The sense of place, of belonging to a community, of your character having an existence and stakes in the world rather than being a mere visitor who didn't care about anything beyond personal enrichment, even the idea that what we do in our hobby could be considered to have literary or artistic merit, or could touch us on a deeper emotional level than the mere rush of getting a good roll in combat - I trace that largely back to RuneQuest and to Greg. My deepest condolences to his family and friends. I am really glad he lived to see Chaosium pass on to new, steady hands, and to see RuneQuest return home to Glorantha in the new edition.
  9. So, query (apologies if this has been answered elsewhere, good faith attempt to find it did not turn up answer): in what respects does the Glorantha Sourcebook differ from the Guide to Glorantha? I mean, obviously it's shorter. But what in particular does it include? Is there stuff which isn't in the Guide?
  10. I wonder if Chaosium, if they don't want the risk/expense themselves, could see their way to letting the current publishers try their hand at an English release of that new French version? It looks absolutely gorgeous.
  11. I just finished a retrospective review of (most of) the Nephilim line here. Looking back to it I'm struck by how neat a little game it actually was, provided you were willing to really commit to its conceits, and how substantial and useful the improvements in the supplement line were. I genuinely think a second edition that incorporated some of the ideas from the supplements into the core and gave a much clearer steer on "What do you do with this game?" could have a decent shot, though I suspect the low sales of the original might put off Chaosium from repeating the experiment, which is a little unfortunate. Either way, it certainly doesn't deserve the "poor cousin" status it often has. (Poor thing isn't even represented in the banner up there!). Aside from here, is there a good place to go to catch up on the Nephilim fan community? *Is* there a fan community, or did people just walk away from it?
  12. Yeah, Pulp Cthulhu isn't my personal jam, but I can 100% see how it would fit the style of Mask perfectly, and if the new version includes suitable support for using it with Pulp Cthulhu then that makes it decidedly worth the update for those who like Masks and/or Pulp. I don't resent the existence of the product and think it's a sensible move, I'm just disappointed that Cate and Pete's story got me set up for something that it wasn't about.
  13. Hrm. OK, so I've just seen the blog post on Chaosium.com and I see that this process was a teaser for the new Masks of Nyarlathotep cover art reveal. Which is, admittedly, a really cool bit of art... but I feel like I have to gripe a little. I got really into #thegreatpicture and was very excited about it because all of the teasers were set in the modern day, and I greatly prefer the modern day as a setting for CoC - to my mind the sort of emotional separation and distance you get when playing a distant time period is exactly what you don't want in a horror game. Precisely because all the teasers were modern-day stuff, I was all excited for some sort of interesting modern-day product being announced, so discovering that it's a reprinted 1920s campaign feels really deflating. Possibly the fault is mine - I did, after all, jump to conclusions. But I'd argue that it was an entirely fair conclusion to jump to given the format of the teasers - an entirely logical conclusion from the information given. (It's possible that I could have picked up more hints from the teasers to suggest that this was Masks, but it's been long enough since I ran it that I don't remember a lot of the fine details.) So I guess I have a little request: please, Chaosium, the next time you do one of these teaser campaigns, try to present them in a way appropriate to the milieu of the product they're teasing - it helps with managing expectations and stopping people getting keen for something which isn't actually getting delivered. (Caveat: I'm probably part of the minority that really doesn't like Masks of Nyarlathotep as a campaign - I dislike globetrotting campaigns generally because I don't think they are true to much of the source material short of Derleth's Trail of Cthulhu, a novel I profoundly dislike, and I feel like Masks steers slightly too hard into a "heroic Westerners save the world from evil foreigners" mode which sits especially uncomfortably with the 1920s late Colonialism setting. It is possible that some of my grump comes from disappointment there. But still.)
  14. Exactly. Tickboxes are great for prompting players to step up like that. (It works brilliantly with the personality traits in Pendragon - if you want your knight to be the most courageous in all the land, he's going to have to behave consistently courageously.)
  15. I thought Chaos explicitly wasn't part of the Great Compromise, and the various incursions since then have been the result of outright violations (Gbaji) or loopholes (the Red Moon, mmmmmmaybe)?
×
×
  • Create New...