Jakob

Me too. I think there's actually still a chance of that. The Mythras CoFE is off the table (which, on the other hand, is a pity ...), and Sarah Newton seems very involved with Chaosium right now.

I'm actually quite with you there - I tend to prefer playing in "inspired by" settings, since that way, you don't feel restricted by setting canon. Also, with a setting like Middle-Earth or the Star Trek Universe, players often come with quite clear expectations, which might not be met by the actual campaign ... However, I'd just like to remind everyone that I didn't suppose this to be a "chaosium should do ..." thread. I'm certainly not saying "forget about Fantasy Earth, do Bas-Lag instead"; I'm just asking what you think would be kind of cool if it just happened like that, disregarding questions of economic viability or anything like that.

Certainly interesting! I'm not sure which of those would constitute a setting and where you could only go with "in the spirit of", but on the other hand, I never explicitly stated that this thread has to be about settings ... of course, if you put all of these together and add a d100 system, you get Unknown Armies!

Just a thread for idle speculation: What licenses would you consider interesting for new BRP games? Since a return of Stormbringer since unlikely (albeit not impossible), I was thinking of other groundbreaking fantasy literature that would be a good fit for BRP. I don't really care if something is likely or comercially viable, just curious which settings you would love to see if it were up to you ... Me, I'd be intrigued by China MIeville's Bas-Lag at Chaosium. I'd actually consider it a good spiritual sucessor to Stormbringer in a broader sense, in that like lots of Moorcocks work, it's Kind of part of the "Mervyn Peake" tradition of English fantasy (as opposed to the Tolkien tradiiton). EDIT: BTW, I really think that BRP could handle races like cactus pople or mosquito men as player characters better than most other Systems out there.

Thanks - I think I was just a little frustrated, since I thought about running a game with the quickstarter while I'm waiting to get my hands on a print copy of the book ... anyway, good to know that the adventure is worth reading!

I downloaded the MW Quickstart to get a general idea of the game (even tough I already have a pretty good idea from playing Stormbringer) ... however, after surveying it, I have to ask: Is there anyone who could make head or tails of it? Especially the combat chapter seems to make no sense at all - it pretty much says "everything happens in DEX rank order, including parries, and if you want to do more than one thing in a round, the next one happens at DEX-5.", and that's it. Going by that, I would assume that you can only parry a blow if you happen to act at exactly the same DEX rank as the attacker, and that you can do as many attacks and parries as you like in a round, as long as you don't run out of DEX ranks. Now coming from Stormbringer/RQ etc., I'm pretty sure that is not the way it is supposed to be. I hope the quickstart is not indicative of the writing quality of MW ...

Makes sense ... it is still kind of a pity, and I would say that MW is a victim of how it was handled by the previous Chaosium. For example, due to the BRP logo on the cover, I never even suspected that MW was its own product line - I thought that it was actually a fantasy suppelement for the big gold book, and since I wasn't interested in a toolbox system, I gave it a pass and instead turned to OpenQuest. Had I known that MW was actually a stand-alone fantasy system based on Stormbringer (which kind of used to hit the sweet spot for me in terms of complexity), I would have definitely bought it back when it came out. I've been reading about MW here on the forums for a while now, and it just seems to offer a lot of the elements that I always liked about Stormbringer (rolled armour, major wounds instead of hit locations). At the point when the new team came in, cancelling the line was probably the only logical step, because really, there was not a game line to speak of. And since they keep selling it and have opened MW up to community content, they're actually doing more for MW than the previous chaosium team, despite having officially cancelled it. Anyway, I'd say MW probably doesn't really need to be a product line, anyway. It's nice to have a generic BRP fantasy ruleset by Chaosium out there (I like OpenQuest, but some of it is a little too simplistic), and that's it.

Thanks! I wasn't aware that the print edition is still available.

Thanks! I'll guess I'll go with the pdf than and print it out ... it doesn't have to be perfect, I just want the version that has the least mistakes!

I'd like to get Magic World to round out my BRP collection, and also I think it might actually work well for me ... however, I don't read digital, so if I get the pdf, I'll need to print it out and have it binded. The alternative would be to hunt down a used print copy. So does anyone know whether the current digital version has been improved in any way? There's lots of talk about the many mistakes that ended up in Magic World, mainly due to copy&paste from previous BRP games; were some of these problems adressed in later digital editions of it?

I think at least in that case, it's the other way round. I don't have a lot experience with previous editions of RuneQuest (I played Cthulhu and Stormbringer and very little RQ3 back in the day, and a few sessions of Mythras and OpenQuest now and then, but I have no experience with RQ2 an Glorantha, which are the main reference point for RQG); and I find the parry rules perfectly easy to understand. The problems seems to be people coming at them with certain expectations from previous questions and also the notion that there should be a special incentive for using two weapons.

Very excited about this - personally, I'm hoping for an original modern space opera setting, something in the vein of the novels of Ann Leckie or Iain Banks; something that deals with interesting concepts of culture, empire, AI, alien life ... I oculd definitely see that from what I've read in Harlem Unbound.

Very nice article! Btw, shouldn't d101 games be just the right publisher for a brp game in the spirit of stormbringer?

While you're entitled to your opinion, I'm pretty sure that Moorcock would disagree. It's hard to believe that a person with such strong political views as him, who also happens to be obviously obsessed with English history, would write a story about an decadent (former) island empire with at least a passing thought about British imperialism. Probably, it was more than just a passing thought - just have a look at Moorcocks quite blatant take on the ecological and social evils of capitalism in "The Revenge of the Rose", or his use of the history of the Second World War in "The Eternal Champion" and "The Dream-Thiefs Daughter". Elric may be one of Moorcocks more subtly political works, but it is certainly a political work, at the very least by intention. The beauty of it is that you can also just read it as a haunting and unique work of Sword&Sorcery and still enjoy it tremendously. That is, of course, what the appeal of Stormbringer the RPG is mostly founded on (since mixing politics and RPGs often doesn't work out that well ...).

Wow, this is all beautiful! I can't quite put my finger on the style of some of these works - i'd say they have something from certain animated movies, but not Anime and not Disney ... anyway, they seem to trigger childhood memories.

Yes, that's it! Sorry, I've seen that abbreviation so often in the last few years, I just use it without thinking.

I get what you mean with regards to Moorcock (even though I think you're getting carried away a little ...). That's what I meant earlier when I mentioned that Moorcock doesn't revel in the violence perpetrated by his heroes, and he doesn't depict it as necessary, either. Elric's actions are simply an outcome of him having grown up as the member of the ruling class of an empire. Even though he's pretty philosophical-minded and actually thinks about ethical choices, he has never developed an ability for true compassion and largely plays his role as harbinger of the apocalypse, killing everything and everyone he loves on the way. He might look cool, but in the end, he is mainly a tragic character, as tragic as the world he lives in. I think reading the first von Bek novel, which is set in the Thirty Years War, gave me a clearer grasp of what I feel Moorcock is trying to accomplish with his cynical anti-heroes. They're all "heroes" doing atrocious thing under atrocious circumstances; this is not justified in any way, it's not serving any greater good. It's just how heroism works. If there's one thing exceptional about these heroes, it's the fact that they tend to reflect to a certain degree on their actions, without being able to actually change anything meaningful about them.

@Joerg: That actually comes retty close to what I was thinking of ... no please turn it into a flashy product that I can buy! Midgard (the German setting) borrows a lot of Moorcockian element, but has a totally different tonality as a setting - that's why I'd actually prefer something that doesn't borrow too much Moorcock-mythology elements, but does it's own thing, but with a stormbringer flair. The whole order/chaos thing has been done to death in many contexts. Elements that I consider vital to the Stormbringer flair: The world is part of something bigger - a universe, multiverse, a cosmic order -, but in a tragic sense. In the end, everyone is at the mercy of that bigger cosmos This backdrop should be nearly or actually sfnal. The big powers are decadent. No EDO - creatures and non-humans are supposed to be original and often bizarre. Places that are emblematic of something - Nadsokor, Tanelorn, Melniboné - they all stand more or less explicitly for certain concepts of the world or of society. I actually have my own take on this as a setting. Hope I'll get around to sharing it later today.

I never read the Brust books, but I kind of wish someone would do a "spiritual sucessor to Stormbringer" thing. Different setting that catches its spirit, preferrably without just copying the Chaos/Order/Balance cosmology. It would probably be hard to do, but on the other hand, there seem to be tons of Sword&Sorcery settings out there that supposedly "get" the world of Conan without depicting it outright (I'm not that much of a Robert E. Howard fan, so I wouldn't really know ...). For some reason, I just don't really like playing in settings from literary/movie sources anymore, but I love settings that somehow get the "essence" of some source material while also doing their own thing. Like how "Ashen Stars" just gets "Star Trek", for me, but offers a different mode of play than one might expect from a Star Trek rpg. Not just filed-off serial numbers, but something that is truly in the spirit of Stormbringer, the whole package, setting and rules, and still set apart from Moorcock's universe.

I don't know if it is okay to advertise for crowdfunding projects here - it's just that I'm desperate for this one to succeed, and it only has two days left: An Atlas of the Horizons The system has little relation to anything BRP (but still sounds neat), and the setting looks like a truly original, non-edo fantasy world with fairy-tale and science fantasy elements mixed in. I blogged about it here. If it's not cool to advertise here in this way, please let me know; I won't do it again.

The German translation of Stormbringer (I think it was first edition) was really my first contact with any BRP game (CoC followed shortly thereafter), and it also introduced me to the workds of Michael Moordock, so I guess I can't be thankful enough to this game. Rules-wise, it was an eye-opener, since until than, I had only been familiar with games where you level up, like MERP or the old German The Dark Eye. The idea that you didn't increase your hit points and that everything was "learning by doing" (and often failing) was such a big thing for me that I remember that moment of sheer incredulity even now, close to thirty years later, like it was yesterday. So, Stormbringer has a special place in my heart, even though I have to admit that I actually didn't like it that much. A lot of that was down to one player, who was also our GM most of the time, and who always had to play the arrogant badass types - in MERP, he played a Dark Numenoan, in AD&D 2nd, he was a Drow, and of course, in Stormbringer, he had to be a Melnibonean. (I kind of remember that we rolled for races, but I think he still ended up with a Melnibonean; or he was actually game-mastering and just had a Melnibonean NPC accompanying us as stand-in.) Anyway, I experienced Stormbringer as a game that catered to this very annoying aspect of his playing stile to the extreme. (I have to say that, apart from that, he was actually a great GM in many ways. But he also had a lot of authority in our group, and that made it difficult to challenge him on his often toxic PC/NPC choices.) So I ended up labelling Stormbringer as "one of these games for mean people" in my head. However, I played it years later with a different GM and noticed just how much I really liked the system and setting. If you leave out the high-powered nonsense, at least for PCs, it's just simple, gritty and fast in a way that RuneQuest could never quite be. Kind of the "quick and dirty" RuneQuest. I feel like OpenQuest does a pretty good job at replacing that for me, but Stormbringer really got me there. And yeah, Moorcock. I love his writing (sloppy as it might be), his ideas (overwrought as their execution might often be), his strong moral compass (reading Moorcock closely, you'll notice that he never revels in the darkness and violence of his worlds, but depicts them as a fundamental tragedy), and the role he played and still playes for the sf/fantasy community. I hadn't even heard his name before picking up Stormbringer, and he really changed the way I look at sf and fantasy.

Looking forward to this. I love the RoH setting - one of the few rpg settings that feel like they come straight out of the kind of sf I like to read.

That's the great thing about looking randomly through this forum: You stumble on stuff you would have never, ever heard about that might be right up your alley. Most Tech-Fantasy-Settings I've seen yet have been a disappointment in one or the other way; and since Sarah Newtons new edition of Chronicles of Future Earth keeps me waiting, I guess I should take a closer look at this ... it's probably just the one book and nothing more ever came of it? I coulden't find any product called "Blade of Takasha".

It's funny that that's the only thing that really stuck with me this long after reading the campaign ... probably it's really just such a radical scratch-off-the-record moment.

I guess I'll just have to read a few of these reviews, then, to get a better picture ... Ken Hite and Dennis Detwiller are certainly two names that I associate with great rpg design. I just wondered whether the love for MoN might mainly be a nostalgia thing, or whether the campaign still feels exceptional and relevant. As I said, I'll probably have to give it another try. Still, if anyone feels like sharing what makes the campaign great for her or him, I'd appreciate that very much!