Jason D

Hi folks! Yes, I was one of the people giving feedback on the BRP Essentials booklet. As far as I know, Jeff & company determined that it would be more expedient to begin with a core system (RQ4) and summarize it into an Essentials-style booklet than it would be to build a summarized game and try to expand it from there. I have done copious feedback on the in-progress first draft of RQ4, and have been working closely with Jeff. As we both live in Berlin and game regularly, it's been quite convenient.

The introductory adventure for Assault on the Mountains of Madness is a nice little standalone scenario featuring an Allied raid on a seemingly-deserted German submarine base on a remote Atlantic island. The campaign itself is much too beefy, but the intro would be a nice one-shot.

You're no doubt aware of this, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over_Nuremberg

I should have read your second post before making my own! A French game called Bloodlust is based on the premise that the players do in fact take on the roles of the weapons, and their human bearers are subsidiary vessels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlust_(roleplaying_game) IIRC, Derek Pearcy (of Steve Jackson Games at the time) was working on an English translation of it, but I don't think it ever got very far.

Some thoughts: What about a number of campaign options, where the GM and players could pick whether they'd like to play novice characters, seasoned adventurers, or Sphere-hopping badasses? Another option would be a campaign mode where the players could do the "one Champion" and the rest could be a Companion and other associated heroes/associates of varying levels of competence. Maybe an option where a player gets to play a sentient weapon, borne by the Champion? I think Passions and Personality Traits are a must. I agree that a proper Eternal Champions game should have a degree of planar travel, though how much would be up to the campaign framework chosen, I suppose. To me, the doom-haunted aesthetic of the Young Kingdoms is one of its more interesting selling points. Perhaps different campaign settings, such as when Sadric is on the throne and Melnibone has not yet fallen?

Hypothetically, if you (meaning anyone reading this) could start over with a game based on Moorcock's Elric books, what would you do? How would it differ from Stormbringer 1-4, Elric!/Stormbringer 5th edition, and the Mongoose editions?

It would be far easier to run Achtung! Cthulhu and use World War Cthulhu scenarios and source material than it would be to do the reverse. The high magic, weird tech factions in Achtung! Cthulhu would be seriously out-of-place in World War Cthulhu.

On a completely clueless note, what is this site "Reputation" stat based on?

Personally, I'd love to see a situation where the new Chaosium mends the fence there and Moorcock grants a new license, allowing access to the entire Eternal Champion IP. I'd happily work on such a line. It's odd that in two days at Essen, I had two completely different conversations with people who said they'd love to see a Jerry Cornelius-based RPG, which was amazing to me because (superficially, at least) it feels the least approachable of his settings.

If it's of interest, we're readying the print run for Assault on the Mountains of Madness for Achtung! Cthulhu, written by myself and a company of other fine and talented authors. It might rival Beyond the Mountains of Madness for size, and is certainly grander in scale.

I'm fairly certain that Straits of Chaos never reached a state where Chaosium considered it complete and ready for publication. I saw a manuscript for another long-unpublished campaign, but in my opinion it was tonally not right for Stormbringer.

I might be missing something here, but what new product lines? RQ/Glorantha, Call of Cthulhu, BRP Essentials, and what?

I voted with feedback.

Hi! I don't have a ton of time at the moment, but wanted to drop in, clarify some stuff, and offer some hope. After BRP, I had to quietly put Interplanetary on a backburner for a number of reasons that should be obvious by now. I won't bother explaining all the details. That's in the past, and forward movement is better than reflection over what could have been. I had thoughts about publishing it with one of the other BRP-based publisher, but due to my limited bandwidth, other commitments, and life issues, I wasn't able to put forth much effort there. With the change in management at Chaosium, some of those options are no longer viable. On the other hand, I expect that the coming months/years will see me actively involved with Chaosium and BRP than any time in the past six years, so suddenly everything has changed. This might mean that it becomes a Chaosium release again, or I do something with one of the remaining licensees. And in one of those crazy side coincidences, I may also be working with Modiphius on their upcoming John Carter of Mars RPG, which treads the same alien path. In the worst case, Interplanetary will get cannibalized for that product. However, I suspect strongly that Interplantary will see the light of day sometime in the future, with that title, and for the BRP game system.

Jeff asked me to do a review of the manuscript in its current form, and it is assuredly not based on the existing BRP quick-start rules.

I need to update it a bit, but here's the current copy of the Interplanetary bibliography:

I quite enjoyed Fringeworthy when it came out. We played all of the Tri-Tac games back in my high-school days. It wasn't an inspiration on the Big Gold Book, though it would be easy to run such a campaign. However, one big inspiration was an article that appeared in Different Worlds magazine about a multi-dimensional campaign where the player characters were world-hoppers. I can't remember the reason they were going from world-to-world, but I remember that they had high-tech watches that signaled when/where dimensional rifts would be, and there would always be some signal to them where it was... like a giant pillar of blue light that only they could see, emanating from the crossworld gate.

My bad... they're called the Arcana, and are based on the cards of the major Tarot. Some folks love the Arcana, but to me they always felt very gimmicky and tacked-on to the setting. In a world of occult conspiracies, it seemed to me that being a Nephilim in and of itself was enough of a distinguishing characteristic, and further sorting them into Tarot-based factions diminished the cohesion of the world and put barriers between the PCs, rather than unifying them.

Personally, I'd do one of two approaches should I run a Nephilim game these days: Nephilim-focused: Start at the beginning. Begin with all of the Nephilim in their primeval guises way back in prehistory, and then each session, run a one-shot or limited campaign where the players portray one of their Nephilims' incarnations during that era. If the player isn't present for a session, their Nephilim didn't incarnate during that section. This way, when you reach the modern world, the Nephilim are fully fleshed out, are well in command of their abilities, and have longstanding connections to one another, as well as a variety of dangling plot threads that have followed them throughout time. Human-focused: Start at the present, with the human incarnations first and foremost. Let the players roleplay their lives, as they experience strange phenomena and inexplicable events, hinting that they have powers and experiences they do not understand, and memories that they cannot explain... events from history they witnessed firsthand, with astonishing clarity. The humans are all brought together in a support group for people who claim to have experienced past life events. While talking to one another, they begin to slowly realize that they know each other, and that some hidden memory links to a danger... an ancient mystery that threatens them all. After moving things forward, play the prior era incarnations as flashback episodes, with the same rules. If a player is present for the session, they incarnated in that era. I'd also ditch many of the Nephilim organizations (the Tarot), and make each Nephilim unique, the last of its kind.

So do I... so do I.

Inspired by Ben's own enthusiasm, I'm going to be running a session of Elric! at The Kraken later this year, along with a Magic World/BRP science fantasy and demos of the new Conan game.

Given the recent news, I'm quite interested in seeing if your Stormbringer enthusiasm carries over into something new for Magic World.

I wrote that.