Jakob

First of all, it's always good to hear some news on OpenQuest! I'm really in three minds about the question - I think I tend toward the OQ3 option, simply because I already have OQ2 and while it is close to my sweet spot for a go-to d100 system, it's still not quite there (not that I'd know where exactly that sweet spot lies ...). So getting something a lttle more revamped simply means a chance of getting something new out of it. I've been playing RQ:RiG lately and reading a lot of Mythras, and while I like both, I still want something more lightweight for my own GMing needs. OQ2 works, but OQ3 might turn out even better, so let's have that! However, I guess I'd also prefer to get everything in one book ... still, this is a secondary concern, and I'm a sucker for bestiaries, so of three books means an expanded bestiary, I'm all for it. Things I'd like to see changed: Make it a little more consistently customizable - it has awlays bugged me that the idea that you could specialize a little more in magic or in general skills seems to come in only as an afterthought ... also, it never really made sense to me that you just get skill Points in divine magic or sorcery for free by choosing that you are a priest/sorcerer. Why not pay for that with build points? That's the minor thing that comes to my mind first - there's also major stuff like taking a page out of Delta Green and removing SIZ, or a return to the "learning by doing and by finding teachers and spending seasons on training" approach that I thought I loathed, until I recently found out that it's quite intriguing. But I guess most of these ideas would mean turning OQ3 into a different system, which in the end might make little sense ... EDIT: And if you ask me, make it B/W. For some reason, most black and white books by d101 games look great (especially C&T 2nd), while I don't really like the design of the color books (RoH, OQ). EDIT 2: I also quite like the renaissance take on major wounds/hit locations (though not necessarily on hit point totals before you die). Basically a "get a hit location when it matters, and without an extra roll of the dice."

The more I hear and read about this project, the more promising it sounds. David Brin (expecially with his Uplift books) is a good touchstone for hard sf that doesn't go over the top with scientific detail. There's far too little rpg stuff in that vein out there; I'd say that River of Heaven, another BRP game by D101 games, comes lose, but feels a little undercooked ... something along that lines, but with a little less space opera and a little more hard sf, authored by Chris Spivey and in current chaosium quality might really turn out to be something quite unique on the rpg market.

I know that this thread is not about the artwork ... however, I have to mention that it's such a pity that, to my mind, 5.0 has by far the best cover of the three. Giant boars and arthurian knights, that just belongs together!

I'd interpret it as "The weapon becomes perfectly balanced and might also seem to actually want to hit it's target." I wouldn't see it as the spell magically increasing the blade's sharpness and the user's skill, because that way, one spell would target to different entities with two different effects, which seems strange. Just making a weapon "better" in pretty much every regard and also giving it a slight "will to hit" makes more sense to me.

I'd go for adding the Bladesharp bonus first and then splitting. My argument would be that while at first glance, it seems strange that you would halve the Bladesharp attack bonus, but get the full Bladesharp damage bonus both times on a hit, this is actually due to the fact that the rules treat attack skill and damage roll fundamentally different. You get a full damage roll (depending on level of success, sometimes more than that) any time you hit, period (armor reduction is something that happens on the receiving end, so I wouldn'gt count that). However, you don't get your full attack rating any time you attack someone - especially when you split your attack. So with split attacks, attack skill and damage are handled differently already, without bladesharp coming into play. You have to split your attack chance, but you don't have to split damage. Having Bladesharp add to the attack skill before the split sticks with that principle.

I‘m going to be the one to claim that the Guardian has it wrong. The thing is that Cyberpunk has moved on – to the point where most of its elements have become a staple of the greater science fiction genre. You‘ll elements typically associated with cyberpunk in the space opera novels of Iain Banks, Alastair Reynolds and Ann Leckie. You‘ll find them in near-future novels like Annalee Newitz‘ Autonomous. And if you‘re looking for that Cyberpunk novel that opens up to positive potential for social change, look no further than Cory Doctorow‘s Walkaway. For intense body modification, go and read Justina Robson‘s Natural History. We don‘t call these texts Cyberpunk for two reasons: First, there‘s nothing (or very little) that‘s „punk“ about them. Punk was a movement very closely tied to the 80s, to the idea of no future, to not fitting in in a f***-up world but still navigating it. Punk is an attack on the status quo, but always a cynical one – it say‘s „hey, world, you‘re beatifully f*** up, and I‘ll mirror that by being beautifully f*** up myself!“ (John Shirley and Jack Womack need to be mentioned here; although Shirley even promoted the idea of a succesful political struggle against the status quo in his Eclipse Trilogy.) Second, and that‘s of course tied to the first reason, Cyberpunk has long become a nostalgic genre. At it‘s most recognizable, it describes neither a future that might come to pass nor the world we are living in, but the world we would be living in now if the visions of the 80s had come to pass. Yes, the notion of corporate power seems timely, but the way it is usually being depicted in Cyberpunk texts seems dated. And the whole Cyberpunk aesthetic is a deliberate throwback to the 80s – I mean, our present is not the age of big neon advertisements; it‘s the age of pop-up windows (interestingly, the novel Altered Carbon actually takes note of this – I don‘t remember any descriptions of big neon advertisements, but I remember advertisments popping up in Takeshi Kovacs‘ head as soon as his ad-block is inactive). Cyberpunk has moved on – but it couldn‘t do so and remain cyberpunk. So now, we get nostalgic texts like Blade Runner 2049 or games like CP 2077; and we get science fiction that encompasses most of the elements of cyberpunk and does all kinds of new things with them. By the way, I‘d say that Shadowrun is an interesting case, because it has slowly moved away from its cyberpunk roots; while many cyberpunk rpgs deal in 80s nostalgia, Shadowrun, by continually updating its setting and bringing it in line with the present, has very much become a near-future action rpg that has relatively little cyberpunk left in it. I‘ve heard it being called the „cyber hipster rpg.“

I knew Greg Stafford first as the author of Pendragon, which blew my mind in all kinds of ways back then ... more than twenty years later, I finally made up my mind to take the dive into Glorantha, and again, Greg Stafford blew my mind. The first thing that came to this thoroughly blown mind of mine when I read the news of his passing was something selfish: I own a copy of the Guide to Glorantha signed by Jeff Richard; I always wanted it to become a copy signet by Jeff Richard AND Greg Stafford. My thoughts are with Greg's friends and loved ones. I can only imagine how much he has enriched their lives, based on how much he has enriched mine by his writing.

I'll answer anyway: HeroQuest and Fate are totally different types of rpgs with a very different focus; I'm not even sure I'd say that Fate is for playing "story-telling wise". It is very crunchy, in a way, and while it's fate point economy tends to enforce certain dramatic rhythms, I really think that a comparision with HQ does a disfavour to both. They strive to do different things.

Since Sarah Newton is quite simply an astonishing worldbuilder, I'll get this one regardless. I'm not the biggest fan of Fate (though I might give it a few more tries; I like the concepts behind it, but I seem to be unable to make them shine at the gaming table - it all seems so mechanistic ...), however, I'm an fan of the setting and have been waiting for it for a long time.

I think the Dreamlands are missing.

I, for my part, had a great evening, and I'm pretty sure that goes for all the other people who where there, as well. I'm still amazed how many rpg designers either live in Berlin or happen to drop by there. Not only were Jeff and Jason at the party, but also Gavin Norman, the author of the Dolmenwood OSR setting (as presented in the Wormskin magazine), and Francesco Nepitello, Designer of the The One Ring Roleplaying game, who happened to be in Berlin at the time. (I jumped at the opportunity to get a signed copy of the revised edition of TOR - it is one of miy favourite rpgs in terms of how the rules are designed to fit the setting.) It was a very rewarding evening for me and the Otherland staff in many ways - and in a way, the coolest thing was that the copies of RQG that Jeff and Jason had brought from GenCon were exactly the right number to meet the demand. By the end of the evening, they were all sold, and no one who wanted one was left without a copy. That really was an "everyone is happy" moment. We hope that we'll get the opportunity to host similar chaosium events in the future!

Jon Hodgson is certainly always a good reason to get a book ... (BDP cover is by him, too, isn't it? I think that's my favourite Hodgson cover yet!)

Good to hear - I look forward to more OpenQuest adventures! Though I must confess that I like the new cover and was about to get that edition in addition to the deluxe 2nd ... now I'm not sure whether I shout wait for the next edition. EDIT: And BTW, even though this is not a BRP question - any indication about when the Beyond Dread Portals crowdfunding will start?

Will the second edition also feature the Gumshoe material? Or will that be omitted?

We actually didn't think about that yet ... I'll talk to our friends at chaosium about this, and I'm sure we'll be able to give you the discount; if you can, bring a receipt.

If you happen to live in Berlin, Germany (or if you can make it there!) - we'll have a release party for the printed edition of RQG on August 11th at our Bookshop - Jeff Richard and Jason Durall will both be there, and if all goes well, they'll bring a box or two of the core rules and the Glorantha Sourcebook. The Otherland Bookshop is in the Bergmannstr. 25, 10961 Berlin-Kreuzberg, and the party starts at 6.30pm - for more information, follow the link.

I guess you refer to the first movie of that title, and not to the whole weirdly interellated movie-tv-universe that stopped making any sense before even trying to start making sense ...

Actually not, I remember them announcing sometime around the beginning of 2018 that their license is at an end and that they will keep selling published material, but won't and can't publish anything new. I guess they'll try to make up for it with the Expanse license ...

Very cool! I recently played a Dolmenwood one-shot using LOTFP, but if I should ever get to set up longer campaign (which I definitely intend to - it is one of my favourite fantasy settings, period), I'll probably go with something non-D&D as well. Magic World might be a good fit.

That was actually one of the things I was thinking about when I started this thread - what kind of Fantasy (or sf) setting from a book or a graphic novel or whatever is as radically different and yet easily accesible for most fantasy readers as the Elric saga was in the 70s and 80s? Elric, for some part, was pretty conventional Sword&Sorcery, but it also had tons of political subtext, and in the later Elric stories, especially the novels, Moorcock was doing more and more experimental stuff. It worked on many Levels. (However, it also turned into an ugly, unwieldy construct at some point at some point - as much as I love both Elric and von Bek, I wasn't at all a fan of the crossover - Now With Evil Chaos NAZIS! - in "The Dream-Thiefs Daughter". That one felt really forced and on-the-nose.) Anyway, I'm rambling ... I asked myself: What more recent fantasy novel series had a similar Impact and would make for a cool rpg setting. First thing I came up with was China Mieville's Perdido Street Station/The Scar/Iron Council, but maybe they're alread old news again. Maybe the thing to go for would be N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth series, which I haven't read yet, but which gets all kinds of awards and recognition and is supposed to be stylistically and thematically different from most of what came before in the genre.

I really love that one and had already thought about mentioning it here. A great Sword & Sorcery setting with lots of weird creatures and magic ... of course, the main thing is the beautifully tragical story of Bragon. I read them at a much too early age, which might be part of the reason why they stuck with me. I was really creeped out by these memory-sucking little creatures. I think these graphic novels are relatively popular here in Germany, too - or at least, they're considered a classic by most people who i know who care about "the funny books".

I'm sorry to hear that - let's forget that I said anything negative about them.

Would certainly be nice if something came of it! I had heard about the Adamant Entertainment license before, but it really seems like a company that doesn't do anything at all ... and actually, it looks like their website is down at the moment.

I think he actually made that explicit - "The Darkening of Mirkwood", the big generational TOR campaign, has been inspired by the Great Pendragon Campaign. And there's also some quote from Francesco Nepitello about RQG out there, where he praises it along the lines of "taking RPGs to a new level."

It's a really great RPG, and it actually has a lot in common with RQG - regional focus, how it stresses the importance of community, seasonal play ... I'm pretty sure that the chaosium team took some inspiration from Francesco Nepitello's The One Ring when designing RGQ.