Jason D

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.

As far as I understand it, Charlie is no longer with Chaosium.

I'm happy to see this new lease on life for Magic World and especially BRP. Welcome back to the fold, Ben!

Thanks for the kind words about Slaves of Fate. I quite enjoyed writing that adventure, my first published scenario. I would have liked to have seen it published for one of the d% iterations of the game, but it can't be helped. I'm confirming that there never was a publishable manuscript for Straits of Chaos, as mentioned above. I don't know why a revision was never attempted, but for one reason or another it never went beyond an unusable first draft (if that). It's a pity, as the outline sounded pretty cool.

There's: Mars from Adamant Publishing, which started as d20 and now has been ported to Savage Worlds. Under the Moons of Zoon Space and Steel Cavaliers of Mars

It's still on a back burner, sorry to say. Work intensified, life stuff got in the way, and I did a lot of work on a different project that was a more personal matter and had a limited window of opportunity. That project was Lords of Gossamer & Shadow, a diceless game based on Erick Wujcik's system for Amber Diceless Roleplaying. Erick was a friend and a mentor to me, and I had to put other projects aside to help get his game system back into print. I also did some writing for Cubicle 7's The Laundry and World War Cthulhu lines. However, I'm still interested in finishing the project, but I still need to gauge Chaosium's interest given how late it is. The changes to Call of Cthulhu might impact things, as well. It may end up being a self-published thing, or going through another publisher.

I have to maintain some level of mystery.

I've put the three relevant documents into the downloads section. Character sheet - A Game of Thrones character sheet - Downloads - Basic Roleplaying Central Rules summary - Game of Thrones rules summary - Downloads - Basic Roleplaying Central Character generation summary - Game of Thrones character creation summary - Downloads - Basic Roleplaying Central Just looking at those reminds me what a fun mini-campaign that was.

I would easily run a Westeros-based game using BRP, and already have. When I was working on Guardians of Order's d20/TriStat A Game of Thrones, I wanted to run a mini-campaign of it, but they were still mucking about with the rules. (I was writing content stuff, not system mechanics.) I decided to whip up a character sheet for a Stormbringer-derived game, ran it off the cuff, and it worked fine. The scenario was during the time immediately prior to the death of Robert Baratheon, and the characters were all members of the discredited House Connington of Griffon's Roost. If anyone's interested, I can post the quick rules summary and character sheet. (I'm at work now and don't have access to them.) It was years between finishing that game and playing in a session of GR's ASoI&F, but given the choice, I'd use BRP again, or possibly even Pendragon.

I can confirm that it is still in progress, slowly. It got put on a back burner while I completed other projects, and then many life issues intervened to slow progress. I'm hoping that when my slate clears in the next few months I can get it into the final stretch of development.

That is exactly what the purpose of the rule was. The BRP rule book was designed with a cascading list of sources, in the following order of authority: First Tier: Stormbringer/Elric! Call of Cthulhu Second Tier: RuneQuest (3rd edition) Third Tier: Worlds of Wonder, Ringworld, ElfQuest, Superworld All throughout the playtest and development I was quite clear that it was never intended as a generic version of RuneQuest.

The book would need to be finished first, and it's not quite there. I'll announce when it's done and the manuscript is in Chaosium's hands, and follow through with each step as I hear it.

For some reason I have trouble separating this from Muse's awesome "Knights of Cydonia" video.

Sleeping. In all seriousness, I don't know. It'll depend on sales, I suppose, though this book is ridiculously complete as-is.

Good to hear! That was why I chose to do it it the way I did. Enough setting to have flavor but not enough to be constricting or limiting. Yes and yes. (several times over for the second question)