Warthur

Is this a PDF first/print a while later sort of deal, or is this arriving in both print and PDF on June 29th?

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.

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.

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".

On 10/16/2019 at 3:29 PM, el_octogono said:

If I were given the task to make a new BGB I would add CoC7 innovations, like success levels, oposed rolls based on opponent's skill, maybe ad/disad rolls. Percentage stats don't work for me as visually they get mixed with skills, and they get really large once you cross the human levels.

But most importantly, I'd give a complete functioning version of BRP as base (I think Magic World level is the ideal), and add all the optional tweaks and rules as add-ons. That way you can give a complete playable game for a newbe, and all the other BRP goodness to explore if they want. I think only hardcore BRP gamers have the patience to use the BGB toolkit as it is now. Also a clear explanation of the advantages, disadvantages and impacts of adding one rule subset or another has on the core rules would be ideal.

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.

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?)

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.)

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.)

11 hours ago, nDervish said:

Check-based advancement can cover specialization implicitly:  The one who wants to be the thief does thief stuff.  The one who wants to be the spell caster casts spells.  The one who wants to be the healer heals.  If they're the ones using those skills the most, then they're going to be the ones getting the most checks on those skills and will be the ones who are most likely to improve in them.  The thief is the best at climbing walls because he's the one who climbs walls most often.

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.)

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)?

A speculative bit of definitely-not-canon here, but I was wondering what people thought about this little twist to the setting.

So, you have the endless sea of Chaos, and you have the world as a bubble of not-Chaos within it. Things within the world which are of Chaos want to unmake the world to get back to the sea.

Now, everything in the world was Chaos once, But now it isn't. So perhaps part of the process of transitioning from nonexistence to existence involves the stuff being brought into existence being purged of Chaos? Those things encountered within Glorantha that are of Chaos are entities which either failed to properly purge themselves of Chaos when they were brought into being - the Unholy Trio might qualify as such - or which were brought into the world without any proper attempt to purify them whatsoever (Wakboth would be an example of that).

Some of the legends of the God Time might be understood as the nascent Gods undergoing the process of purging themselves of Chaos so they could be fully manifest in the world - take, for instance, the Initiation of Orlanth, in which Orlanth and most of his siblings succeeded but Ragnaglar failed and thereafter ended up part of the Unholy Trio. Maybe the "evil" uncles in that were just trying to purge Orlanth and his siblings of any vestiges of Chaos remaining in them. Orlanth's hatred of Chaos may in part come down to him taking offence at entities trying to get away with shirking the work of becoming fully real that he and (most) of his brothers did. The apparent paradox of Yelm being associated with Illumination but not apparently having Chaotic affiliations himself may be down to Yelm retaining some understanding of the nature of Chaos after being purged of it.

In the Dawn Age the Council were not fools - they weren't deliberately trying to make Gbaji happen. But in their enthusiastic reverence of their new God they failed to make him purify himself of Chaos, or couldn't bring themselves to force him to, or never realised that it would be necessary to begin with, so the Gbaji Wars happened. Likewise, the Red Goddess successfully brought something new into the world, but either chose not to or couldn't purge the Red Moon of Chaos - perhaps she found it simply too useful to give up. Perhaps the White Moon, once you get past the White Moon Movement's propaganda, is really what the Red Moon was supposed to be if it had completed the process of entering existence properly - or the Hero Wars are in fact that process of purging which will allow the White Moon to be born from the Red, free of Chaos.

The big problem the Lunars have is that they are wrong that Chaos is a necessary part of existence; it is a necessary precursor to existence, that becoming fully extant requires one to give up. A thing that will not let go of Chaos is a thing which will never fully be what it is supposed to be. The living tainted by Chaos will live a life dedicated to undoing life; the undead raised by Chaos are dead things failing at properly being dead.

18 hours ago, Paid a bod yn dwp said:

And whats the official version of the Mudshark? 

A cheeky Frank Zappa reference?

I would say that cults and social structures are enormously important to RuneQuest. Having characters be part of society rather than rootless renegades existing a little way outside it was (one of) the really distinctive and new things that RuneQuest brought to the table; previous games had paid lip service to the idea, but the way cults are set up in the system provides a really excellent incentive to get invested in a character's social connections that previous games tended to lack - for instance, in principle D&D clerics are members of organised religions, but in practice they tended to operate as free agents much of the time.

Other games have come up with other riffs on the same idea, of course. I'd say that Vampire: the Masquerade's clans - and, by extension, all the various splats in subsequent World of Darkness games and similar modern-day horror/urban fantasy games riffing on Vampire's ideas - are a good example of a social organisation that is supposed to give game mechanical benefits and which players are expected to belong to by default. But few have done it as well as RuneQuest, and almost none have done it quite the same way as Gloranthan RuneQuest manages. (Of course, system-wise various BRP derivatives have produced similar organisations, but Glorantha does a fantastic job of really integrating the cults into the very essence of the setting which I have seen few alternate settings managing to repeat.)

So in general I would say that RuneQuest is exactly as dependent on social organisations as it needs to be. Make them less important wouldn't just be a bad idea - it'd be a direct attack on one of the foundational ideas that make the game distinctive, just like if you tried to work in hardwired character classes or abandoned experience rolls and training in favour of D&D-style experience levels.

Would adapting material from After the Vampire Wars help? I understand the setting has vampires and other supernaturals stepping "out of the shadows" more than they do in your classic World of Darkness-type premise, but if the supplement provides a basis for creating vampires/werewolves/whatever who are varied enough that you can support an extended cast of them but clearly related enough that they're the same general type of monster, it might be useful for a spot of monster-hunting, or an "Investigate the hidden society of vampires" sort of deal.

Of course, that said there's perfectly serviceable vampire and werewolf stats in the CoC core books, so you could just take those and adapt accordingly.

I do think it is worth mentioning Legend in connection with Mythras - in part because of the close connection between the systems (Legend being the studio cut, Mythras being the directors' cut), but mostly because thanks to the Legend licence there may be third party products carrying the "Legend compatible" logo that are of interest to Mythras fans.

Should we keep posting stuff about Mythras here, or should it get a new subforum?

On the one hand, RQ6 is still the current RuneQuest and will be for a few months still. On the other hand, it's only a handful of months, and building up a decent body of Mythras discussion in its own forum before the changeover is final will help give the rebranding some momentum.

5 minutes ago, jux said:

OQ2 and Renaissance are the same thing. This is what I prefer and want the BRP Essentials to be based on.

Eh, not really. Renaissance includes a bunch of stuff that OQ2 doesn't. In particular, so far as I can make out Renaissance makes social class and professional mandatory in a way which OQ2 doesn't, and Renaissance has a basic skill/advanced skill split that OpenQuest doesn't do).

But they're very close siblings.

6 hours ago, jux said:

It can be debated how much of a success D&D5 really is, but how they did the development really shows how they did it right. No rush, open discussion with fanbase, free testing releases. I have assumption the 5e is very solid release and fans of the game are generally happy with it. I think Chaosium could learn from them. Also, as the devs are not working together, but are separated and meet only online, is something I am doubtful.

Wizards of the Coast are in a very unique position and I think it would be a mistake for a smaller company to try and emulate the D&D5 design process, which was as only broad, open, and long as it was because Wizards could afford to do it that way. A very few other companies can do it. FFG can on the back of their boardgame profits. Mongoose tried it with their new version of Traveller, but I think Mongoose are in the unhappy position where they have contracted a lot since their D20 glut peak but haven't really come to terms with it yet and like to think that they can pull off the sort of project which really you need to be a larger company with more full-time employees to pull off. (Their constant release schedule woes being a case in point on this.)

I am confident in Moon Design's business model and working practices; it worked fine for their own stuff, and they've been successful enough to buy into the new Chaosium, take on an awful lot of debt, and keep the lights on and get the outstanding Kickstarter commitments the old regime had left hanging moving again.

Yeah, I would say that if you are what the Traveller fandom refers to as a "gearhead" - someone who loves tinkering about with the construction systems - T5 is an absolute boon because it essentially provides tools for constructing absolutely everything.

On the other hand, I'm really glad that Mongoose did an edition of Traveller which didn't focus too much on catering to gearheads, because I think several editions of the game chased down that particular cul-de-sac and whilst that was great for the gearheads it did help sideline the game and paint it into a corner.

On 2/11/2016 at 10:57 PM, Rhialto the Marvellous said:

Thank goodness...not to dump on another hoary game, but just look at the great misfortune that was/is T5: a great brick of a book that is the antithesis of this, and should be an object lesson in what not to do to try and attract a new audience.

Yeah, the contrast between T5 and Mongoose Traveller (which as I understand it were developed in parallel, though Mongoose managed to get their version out well in advance of T5) is... well, it's pretty drastic, to say the least.

T5 does seem to have its advocates and there's an active fan project to re-edit it to produce something a bit less clunky, but it's telling that I've never spoken to anyone who was big into T5 who wasn't already a big Traveller fan through being introduced through some other edition, whereas Mongoose Traveller seems to have been many people's introduction to the game.