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Jason D

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Posts posted by Jason D

    Is Mythic Iceland still part of the plan?

    in Mythic Iceland

    Posted

    On 10/6/2023 at 1:53 AM, The Crazy Red Scooter said:

    Now that the new BRP book is out, are we going to see the second edition of Mythic Iceland?

     

    20 hours ago, smiorgan said:

    @Jason D Are there any news on Mythic Iceland 2nd edition? Now that the new BRP book happened, is the project going to be affected? I'm really looking forward to see this great setting do a combeback. 

     

    Yep! It's in final proofreading now on the other side of the room from me, and the last of the art is coming in. I'm discussing the cover now with one of our new art team, adding a bit more content on ship-to-ship combat, and then it goes into layout. 

     

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    Upcoming Glorantha publications

    in Glorantha

    Posted

    21 hours ago, Wheel Shield said:

    I have been loving the Cults books but have been concerned about waiting for all 10 of them before we get to some other material. Again, my thanks.

    Once Cults was broken up, we realized it would be necessary to intersperse releases with other sourcebooks and adventure collections. 

    1 hour ago, DreadDomain said:

    I believe there were an updated RQG and an updated Starter Set in the planning. It's it still the case?

    We're working on something along the lines of an "updated RQG" but have no plans to revise the Starter Set, other than making any necessary corrections for future reprints. 

    • Like 7
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    Upcoming Glorantha publications

    in Glorantha

    Posted

    image.png.ca04faf15156ceb22c631cc266b98727.png

    The manuscript is done, edited, and we have many, many photos. It will likely require some additional art, but that'll be determined by the book's design. 

    The only question is priority. It's a niche product and thus is hard to make a case for putting it in line in front of actual game material. 

    When it moves into the production queue, it will come together relatively fast. 

     

    • Like 3
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    Upcoming Glorantha publications

    in Glorantha

    Posted

    On 10/10/2023 at 12:54 PM, glarkhag said:

    There was some talk in the past I believe about Coming Storm and Eleven Lights being rebranded for RQG. Is this still an intention and/or will material from these be in the Sartar and Dragon Pass books ?

    There is no plan to convert them to RuneQuest.

    • Helpful 2

    Upcoming Glorantha publications

    in Glorantha

    Posted

    19 hours ago, Auburnt_Amaranth said:

    After a year of radio silence can we get some kind of update about books like Sartar, Dragon Pass Guide etc?
    The very least I hope for a life sign of the dearly missed GM Guide.

    The Guide to Dragon Pass and Sartar go into layout once the Lunar Cults book is complete (within two weeks). 

    The Gamemaster Sourcebook (title not final) will be 4th or 5th in that line. 

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    Personality Types

    in Basic Roleplaying

    Posted

    If I were to rethink it, I'd go with six classifications, each favoring a particular characteristic. 

    STR - brute force

    DEX - finesse

    CON - determination and resilience

    INT - expertise 

    POW - willpower and luck

    CHA - teamwork and delegation

     

    • Like 3

    Young Player Characters and Skills

    in Basic Roleplaying

    Posted

    On 8/26/2023 at 10:01 PM, g33k said:

    Something that I think is under-utilized in many BRP games is the idea of "EASY" rolls, where the skill is doubled.

    If you try to run kids as "less-strong & less-skilled adults" in "adult-style" adventures (combat &c), of course they'll just be... less.

    And the adventure will be less satisfying.

    Repeated for emphasis. 

    Notice how often the kids in those shows spend their time running away or being overlooked. Most of the time they're just going from place to place, hiding and seeing things, even getting caught and escaping.

    When things get bad, it's the strength of their friendships and loyalty to one another that let them succeed more than any teachable skill. 

    I suggest you keep their skills at the amateur tier, but let them go wild on personality traits and passions, especially loyalty, love, etc. 

    To pull an example from another show in which undersized characters save the world against unimaginable evil, Samwise Gamgee doesn't carry Frodo into Mount Doom because of a STR vs SIZ resistance roll, or a successful Climb skill roll... he does it with his passion of Love (Mr. Frodo) 95%. 

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    BRP's Hit Locations & Other SRDs

    in Basic Roleplaying

    Posted · Edited by Jason D

    11 hours ago, g33k said:

    Chaosium has stated that they *DO* have an issue with the OGL (or they'd likely have OGL'ed BRP previously), so I presume they'd object to a publication that seemed to OGL the BRP rules.  Maybe @Jason D or @Jeff could chime in...?   I don't know how WotC would feel about their (previously-OGL'ed) content appearing under the ORC license.

    I reiterate:  I am NOT a lawyer!
    I strongly suggest you consult one.

     

    Our feelings about the usage of the material are irrelevant. With the release of BRP under the ORC, the material is yours (meaning, anyone's), to do what you want with it. 

    We chose not to release the earlier edition of the abbreviated BRP under the OGL because we saw, several years ago, that it had serious problems that became glaringly evident earlier this year. 

    We don't, however, have any idea what WotC's position on the issue is, so the response to combining material from BRP with anything released under the OGL is anyone's guess. 

    Remember, though, that the OGL is not just the governing document for d20, as many games have been released under those terms that aren't based on the d20 SRD (Fate 2.0, Open d6, FUDGE, etc.), and many games have been released that hybridize aspects of other games under the OGL and Creative Commons licenses. 

    https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Open_Game_Systems#Open_Game_License

    My personal advice is that if you have concerns using material released under the OGL in your ORC licensed game, then don't. 

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    What exactly does it mean when it is said that "a god lives in such and such place"?

    in Glorantha

    Posted · Edited by Jason D

    They are not physically incarnate in those spaces in the same way living beings are (humans, Aldryami, trolls, etc.), but their essence is most focused in the places there are described as living in. 

    They may all dwell in different parts of the Gods World, but they also are plugged into parts of the physical realm of Glorantha by their continued supply of magic points (worship) and their regular minor manifestations (Rune magic). 

    It sounds very godsy-wodsy (to coin a term), but think of it this way... we know that Engizi, the Sky River Titan, dwells along the Creek-Stream River, but would you say that he is also in Prax or the Wasteland?

    So there's a clear sense of "yes there, no there" to where the gods might be considered to "live", so if it is problematic to think "lives in", just think of it as "favors this area." 

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    Atlas of the Young Kingdoms

    in Basic Roleplaying

    Posted

    Unfortunately the license is sitting with Le Département and their plans for the IP in English are unknown. 

    Some licenses allow for sales of older material (even when done by other publishers), such as when Chaosium transferred the license to Mongoose, and when Modiphius picked up the Conan license. 

     I have no information about Le Département's plans, but I highly doubt they include reprinting or making available old Chaosium or Mongoose Elric-based games. 

    • Helpful 1

    Lot 47 - An Eternal Champion scenario

    in Stormbringer

    Posted · Edited by Jason D

    (I ran this a while ago but it just occurred to post it here.) 
     

    Thought you might enjoy this recap of a game I ran at The Kraken last week:
     
    For some reason I was inspired to do something that evoked the Bourne spy thrillers crossed with the Eternal Champion, but I didn't want to flood the group with people who could call the entire plot in advance.It was called "Lot 47", using the Basic Roleplaying system.
     
    The game description stated that the game was set in Munich, 1986, and that the player characters had been hired by an eccentric and reclusive patron to verify the contents of a particular lot in an off-the-record secret auction recovered from a hidden Nazi storehouse found during city excavations. The PCs were a German art historian, an Austrian  professor of regional history, a Jewish-American PI, a German security expert, and a British lawyer.
     
    They were to verify the presence of two items that should have been in the lot - goods that had been claimed from the estate of a noble German family that had run afoul of the Nazis and had all their property seized. The property was originally owned by the Badehoff-Krasny family, but had fallen into the possession of the Von Mincts when the heir to another branch of the family disappeared mysteriously in the late '30s. 
     
    They had a briefcase full of gold kruggerands, English pounds, and enough Deutschemarks to buy a fleet of limousines. They got to the auction, a secret event being held in the catacombs beneath a famed civic theatre. Due to the unfortunate association with Nazi plunder, the auction was illicit, being held in secret but with compliance by bribed public officials. A clandestine black-tie sort of affair. 
     
    With their security agent upstairs, the rest of the team went into the vault and began to search through the goods in Lot 47, when their patron showed up... a man named Michael Skene... tall, thin, sunglasses, very pale, trembling with weakness, strange accent. As only one of the players had ever read the Elric novels and didn't clue in yet, the group thought Skene might be a vampire, which he joked a bit about when they pressed him. "If only my means of sustenance was as common as blood." 
     
    They could not find either of the two objects - an ornate men's ring set with a large stone, and a large two-handed sword of black metal - and their patron became extremely upset, then slipped into near-catatonia. They tried to care for him, and discovered that his hair was bone-white and his skin was the same color.
     
    Meanwhile, upstairs at the auction, a group of men forced their way in, led by a man in modern body armor but a curious medieval helmet that changed colors. These intruders demanded access to Lot 47 and seemed to know that Michael Skene was on hand.
     
    As this went on with the security expert relaying this to the others, their near-unconscious patron held his hand out and a big, ugly, two-handed headsman's sword began to rattle from where it lay on a table. They put it into his hand and as they did so, it seemed to transform into a huge, black sword with runes patterned all down its blade. It began to murmur and the man's eyes opened... showing red pupils. He began to stir, and the sword began to wail.
     
    Meanwhile, the intruders upstairs figured out that their target was in the catacombs, so the player characters tried to hustle their patron out of the place before they were captured. When two of the thugs approached, the black sword lashed out and cut one of them in half, chopping another's arm off. Now invigorated, the white-skinned man leapt at the armored thugs, particularly the one with the metal helmet.
     
    Then Michael Skene suddenly collapsed - a bullet had found him! - and the player characters had to drag his nearly-conscious form out of the catacombs, pursued by thugs. He blurted out "Archicovent der Templars", which was enough of a clue for them to go on.
     
    From here it was to a secretive (and real-life) monastery in Munich run by a group of reclusive Templars dedicated to the von Beks as the holders of the Grail, the appearance of a winged cat, an in-translation copy of the Chronicle of the Black Sword, Jhary-a-Conel showing up and delivering a lot of expository dialogue about the Cosmic Balance, and learning the true name and nature of their patron, none other than Elric, former Emperor of Melnibone and a manifestation of the Eternal Champion.
     
    Michael Skene/Elric then received medical care but needed some illicit materials to make a "revivifying drug", sending them into Munich's black market, which was a lot of fun. He also directed them into making a potion which he dried and broke into small tablets, claiming it would help them resist being shot.
     
    Meanwhile, many of them were having disturbing dreams and flashes of lives not their own, identities where they fought alongside this strange albino, a similar man with an eyepatch and a silvered helm and red cloak, a man with a jewel in his skull, and even taking part in some strange raid led by the long missing lead singer of the Deep Fixx, Jerry Cornelius.
     
    As this happened and the rest of the adventure went on, the PCs realized they had cool new abilities and skills they didn't know they had (I just had them make Idea rolls... a success gave them 75% in an appropriate skill, a critical gave them 90%). This made the rest of the scenario highly survivable.
     
    This eventually led to a raid on Castle Mirenburg and a confrontation with another recluse, a politician named Johannes Klosterheim, working in league with the helmeted man named "Gaynor". Meanwhile, a strange fog had rolled in across the country, allowing them some degree of secrecy for their clandestine assault.
     
    Elric, barely recovered from his gunshot wound, stumbled into a magical circle and was trapped. Gaynor and Klosterheim came out and monologued maniacally, saying that they were going to sacrifice Elric, with Klosterheim showing off Elric's captured Ring of Kings. The PCs were forced to go all Die Hard, take their potion-pills of invulnerability, and take Gaynor and Klosterheim out, with the help of the black sword that Elric had slid outside the circle once he knew it was there.
     
    They slew both enemies, one of them shooting Klosterheim and the other taking hold - but not control - of Stormbringer and basically being the sword's meat puppet as it attacked Gaynor and got a critical hit, shattering his breastplate and drinking his soul.
     
    A little winged cat appeared at a window and yowled at them until they came outside. At the end, they ended up on the shore of the river running alongside Castle Mirenburg. A ship's bell rang, and a dark ship emerged from the mist. The captain offered them all passage, and all but one took it - the last of them being the lawyer/accountant, who decided that he would take his case full of gold kruggerands and try his luck.
     
    (The "real" plot was Elric had been cast through time through some misadventure and had been separated from his ring and sword. Klosterheim knew about the true nature of the lot when it was discovered, and had cherry-picked the ring out of it and left the rest as bait for Elric, knowing he would come running for it. The sword - the family's heirloom Ravenbrand - was disguised through sorcery laid down by the 1930s-era Ulrich von Bek himself before disappearing, and thus Klosterheim and Gaynor didn't recognize it.)
     
    Thoroughly indulgent but a lot of fun. 
     
    Only one of the players had read the EC novels and knew who Elric and von Bek were, but I threw him off with the Badehoff-Krasnys and von Mincts, both names from the von Bek novels as their larger noble lineage. 
     
    • Like 3
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    Thieves’ World

    in Mythic Worlds

    Posted

    While products like Stormbringer, Hawkmoon, Thieves' World, ElfQuest, Ringworld, et al. are all beloved by many within the Chaosium team, we do not hold the licenses for any of these products any more and their re-release would depend on new negotiations, which are costly and, TBH, time and effort better spent on IP we own outright. 

    I am speaking wholly as an individual here, so do not take this as any confirmation, denial, or hint about any upcoming plans: 

    • Stormbringer, Hawkmoon, etc. would be a delight and a labor of love to work on, but this license is held by a French company now (they have the French rights to Hawkmoon and have sent conflicting messages about whether an English version is planned, and they have recently released an English quickstart for their French-language Mournblade game). Moorcock has also said in the past that he is against issuing exclusive licenses to any of his IP. Given that, a Moorcock license specific to either of those titles is extremely unlikely for the time being.  
    • Thieves' World was done by Green Ronin for d20 and I'm not sure how active or well-known the license is. The multi-system aspect of the boxed set makes a re-issue almost impossible. And also, to what purpose?, as the systems covered are largely out of print or so different now as to be unusable.  
    • ElfQuest is probably the most possible of these, as it is owned by a single entity (WaRP) and does not seem complicated with any movie deal or television series. 
    • Ringworld would be pretty cool, but again, I think a new edition would be the way to go, tying in with all of the new material and allowing expansion into the huge amount of Known Space material (particularly the Kzinti books). 
    • Like 2

    Roll20

    in VTT

    Posted

    Right now we don't have any plans to implement BRP into Roll20.

    This isn't because it's not on our wish-list, but because it's something we - independently - just can't throw effort at and get done. 

    If we could get a toe in the door of Roll20 implementation, BRP would probably be low on our list of games to implement, just because there's much less, content-wise, than for our other lines. 

     

    • Thanks 1

    Edition changes?

    in Basic Roleplaying

    Posted

    On 4/16/2023 at 12:22 PM, Susimetsa said:

    CoC etc. are based on BRP, but BRP doesn't claim - to my eye - to include everything that exists in those other titles.

    Indeed it does not. BRP is a middle-ground, the "basic" version of the system, no pun intended. 

    As I have stated many, many times elsewhere, if the CoC changes: a) worked with the existing system, and b) represented all Chaosium games, I'd have included them. 

    • Like 10

    Create. Explore. Play. BRP’s Universal Game Engine is available royalty-free for personal and commercial use under the ORC license.

    in Basic Roleplaying

    Posted

    2 hours ago, BRP Investigator said:

    My first post here… I just have a few questions regarding this. Sorry if it’s already been discussed or explained elsewhere in this forum.

    1. If you create and sell your own game (but with the BRP engine included), do you have to share your profit with Chaosium? I couldn’t find any information about that. I’m sure it’s there.

    No, you do not need to share your profits with us. 

    If instead you choose to enter a licensing agreement with us, then you would need to (or whatever arrangement we made with you). 

     

    2 hours ago, BRP Investigator said:

    2. If you want to create your own Lovecraftian horror game and use the BRP engine, could you do that? That’s not something I’m going to do, but I still think it’s an interesting question. I know that Lovecraft’s fiction isn’t protected by copyright anymore. Of course, you can’t just steal any stuff you like from Call of Cthulhu, but I’m more wondering how much they really own in terms of copyright. As you probably know, there are already several other Lovecraftian RPGs out there.

    You are free to do so. 

    Keep in mind, though, that much of what is considered "the Cthulhu Mythos" extends far beyond the public domain Lovecraft material, and incorporates the work of other authors and Chaosium's own IP, which are not public domain. This includes certain names and descriptions of creatures, classifications of the Mythos gods, names of spells, etc. 

     

    2 hours ago, BRP Investigator said:

    3. Chaosium has taken a clear stance against using AI generated images in their own products. I totaly get why. But I’m also wondering if they will allow third party creators to use AI services like Midjourney in their products. It does cut the cost significantly. I’m not looking for a discussion about this topic, just information about how Chaosium deals with it.

    Once the BRP rules are out in the ORC, you can do with them what you want. We won't be using any AI in our works and will be discouraging our Jonstown Compendium and Miskatonic Repository contributors from using AI art and/or text, but under the ORC, there are no restrictions (unless those are in the ORC itself, and I encourage you to check for yourself). 

     

     

    • Like 4
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    BRP hardcover errata

    in Basic Roleplaying

    Posted

    Just as an FYI, I had thought that these edits had been made to the original files and thus didn't think to look here.

    I'm going through these and seeing which ones are still unresolved and they'll be in an upcoming corrected version. 

    • Like 2
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    Basic Roleplaying: Universal Game Engine—Jason outlines 7 changes in the new edition

    in Basic Roleplaying

    Posted

    1 hour ago, Saki said:

    I would like to comment that for item 2, powers are still nebulous.  For example Magic seems to always require a Pow vs Pow roll to affect a creature, but some spells also require a different kind of resistance roll or allow the target to Dodge.  How those specific cases interact with the general rule could serve to be clarified.  I think Psychic Powers have a similar issue.  

    It would be far more useful to us if you were to specify "I found power X to be unclear" than to paint two entire categories with that brush. 

     

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