Yelm's Light

I dunno...looks to me like even that sword could snap the blades of the buckler like twigs. I like the 1H staff, though.

Heh it's been decades since I GM'ed a newbie. Benefits of being in a big city...the hobby store I went to had a group of about 30 RP'ing regulars, many of which could be roped into a campaign if they liked the game. Also, odds were good that someone would take on the hot new RPG as a pet project and run a game for the rest of us. I ran most of the BRP games (except for Ringworld; I couldn't drum up enough interest in it), RQ, and Champions. The latter two turned into long campaigns, but none of the others did except for CoC, which somebody else ran. There was a large complement of RP'ers in SCA that might be open for a game, too, a few of whom were regulars at the hobby store (how I got involved in SCA in the first place). With a half-dozen experienced RP'ers and GM around them, I wouldn't think there'd be much difficulty in guiding newbs. (Besides, none of my games started 'cold;' there was always a background session to kick off the game, so that people had some idea of what they were doing, the setting, etc.)

Yeah, the sword-buckler is interesting too, if completely unsuitable for melee.

What you end up with are characters that are situation-based. Need to make that persuasion test? Oop, new ability. We need someone who speaks <insert language here>. New ability. And then there's that ludicrous origami-folding character from HQ1.

A blue broo? Come at me, broo.

In my experience, SCA events were seldom about the war leaders' strategy. (And I'm also a Navy man, not that that has much of anything to do with land combat.)

I was never a fan of the as-you-go generation anyway. It rewards players for having no idea for their character.

Five books down, only one left to research: The Other Wind. The light approaches. After having increased the margins to make hunting for entries faster (and thus reducing the total number of pages by about 15%), the notes still grew to over 140 pages. Tales From Earthsea has by far the most notes of any of the books. Alright, so why am I doing this research, anyway, if there are numerous wikis out there on Earthsea? Well, I'm glad I asked. Three main reasons: first, I didn't want somebody else's filtering getting in the way of the content. Second, I've read entries from a few of them, and none provides much of the information that would be useful in RP'ing, that the books do: physical description, motivations, mannerisms, etc. Mostly the wikis are about history, "X did this, then he/she did that." Or "X was Master of Underwater Basketweaving." Finally, it immerses me in the world to an extent that wikis just can't, so that I have the proper mindset when I start writing. OK, now for some ground rules. You've all read the books, right? Good. About true names: in keeping with the practice in the books, the only true names that will be used in the variant itself will be a small selection of names of objects or animals so that GM's can have some kind of baseline to extrapolate other names, and those personalities whose true names are public knowledge (Lebannen, some dragons, the old Kings/queens). If they really want the other names, enterprising wizards (and GM's) can go through the lore-books. Of course, sneaky bastage that I am, I have a master list of names. (I never quite got why kings would want their true names bandied about; it seems like a security risk to me, at the very least. They're not that well-protected, especially in a world chock full of mages.) Next is physical combat. I think there are a total of three such fights in all the books, excepting the last, which I haven't gotten to yet. While occasional mass battles or dragon-on-wizard violence are mentioned in passing, none of the stories focuses on any kind of melee, or archery, for that matter. Magical duels are much more common; even wizards' staffs aren't used to beat on people, other than the occasional recalcitrant student. So the rules will tend to work accordingly. Besides, a warrior isn't going to be much good when the mage he's fighting binds him. There is one type of magic (wizardry), not three as in Glorantha. The two examples of organized religion, both Kargish, are about temporal power and politics; there's no evidence in the stories that any magic derives from them other than calling the Old Powers in particular ways, and they're limited to the proximity of the Power. Theism otherwise is dead except for the semi-pagan rites of the Long Dance and Sunreturn, and they don't seem to have much practical or spell-like effect. They're more a way of retaining and passing on the oral history of the world. Spirits don't play the same role as they do in Glorantha, either; they generally don't have much effect in the physical world other than informationally. And witchery is just a weaker offshoot of wizardry. So that's where I am right now; at this point I only have general impressions rules-wise, since most of my effort has been doing research...and the dull brain which it tends to engender. Once that's finally done I'll be able to apply more brainpower to synthesis.

I was talking about doing it in Glorantha; and I came up with a refinement: instead of a cylinder, use a cone-shaped form like jewelers use to size rings to fingers. You could hammer out a bunch of mail rings first, thread them one by one, slip the cone in to its furthest extent within the ring, and bang it shut. The rings in the article look to be about a half-inch in diameter and maybe a sixteenth in wire diameter; shouldn't be much of a problem to hammer, certainly easier than using needle nose pliers, if slower. Of course, the form would have to be sturdy enough that it wouldn't break at slightly less than a half-inch diameter where you were hammering away.

There's another way to do it that wouldn't take nearly as much strength, nor inventing a specialized tool, but would probably be even more time-consuming: hammer the wire around a cylindrical form, leaving a small space between the ends, thread the mail ring, and then hammer it closed around a slightly smaller form that allowed for space for connected rings.

Confirmed. I have both a softbound and hardbound copy of RQ2; the softbound version has the dots and the leatherette hardbound has the lines. Unfortunately, there's no info about printings in either, and the copyright dates are the same. My suspicion, though, based on the condition of my softbound copy, is that that version was printed before the hardbound. Of course, the hardbound would survive better anyway...

I didn't get a harrumph outta that guy...

Combat is one sphere, and RP'ing is another, and generally never the twain shall meet. It all depends on the focus your game has. Logos only wins out over mythos when that focus is combat. If the majority of your game time is spent moving miniatures around and rolling dice, your focus is probably the former. Sure, I'll fight to the death over realism in combat. But that's only for the portion of the game in which there is combat, which, in mine, is a minority of the time. I hardly ever do major battles except as plot devices or background, Warhamster notwithstanding.

So...a few weeks ago I learned that one of the seminal fantasy authors, Ursula Kroeber Le Guin, had passed on into other realms. Earthsea being one of my early fantasy influences, and never having done much with it other than reading it, I determined to create a campaign using the setting. Doing some preliminary research, I soon realized that the Heroquest 2 core rules would be a fine system with which to run the game, and would eliminate a lot of time spent in reinventing the wheel just to be able to play it. Now I'm around 800 pages into the initial research phase, with over 100 pages of notes. Suffice it to say that there will be no shortage of material for this project. It balloons beyond where I thought it would go. But that's putting the cart slightly before the horse. Let's go back into the mists of time to the '70's, the land of disco (bleh), Rocky, the Bicentennial, gas lines, and Watergate. My father was an avid reader, and, like many readers he was a packrat. He had stackable strawberry crates filled with paperbacks, including fantasy, mythology, fiction and nonfiction, sci fi, and a veritable library of the sci fi periodicals...Analog, IASFM, that sort of thing. (Not particularly good for preventing aging, but then the books weren't nearly that old then.) And, of course, he had a full set of Tolkien's books from The Hobbit to The Silmarillion. One week I was home from school, in sixth grade or so, I think, with chickenpox. Feeling like crap and having nothing better to do, I rummaged through his boxes and pulled out his Tolkien books and, in the space of that week I'd read them all. Thus began my fascination with reading, and fantasy and sci fi in particular. I was soon devouring every book in sight. Flash forward a few years. My grandparents had given me the princely sum of $150 for my birthday (it really went a long way then, especially for a teenager). As far as I can remember, it's the first time I'd ever even held more than a $20 bill in my hand. So what did I do? I blew it. Only I blew it on something that would last...mostly, books which would become the core of my fantasy collection. There was a bookstore about a half mile from home, and I walked back with a large box filled with paperbacks, some new, some used. Stephen R. Donaldson, Roger Zelazny, Fritz Leiber, Piers Anthony, Michael Moorcock, Robert Silverberg, Robert E. Howard, Anne McCaffrey, Patricia A. McKillip... I still have most of them in somewhat less open-to-the air boxes, or replaced some of the more treasured ones with hardback collections. And among them there was a set of three thin, grey books with interesting art and enticingly simple but evocative and thought-provoking storytelling. You guessed it, the Earthsea trilogy. I read and reread them over time, as I occasionally do with my favorites. This was roughly the time that my interest in RPG's developed, as sort of a natural offshoot of my reading. But I wouldn't do anything with this particular combination for 40 years. Back to the present. Having decided on a course of action, I hunted the internet to ensure that there weren't any books that I was missing. I went rummaging through my book boxes for the trilogy, and the few continuations that Ms. Le Guin wrote later. This was a project in itself; I have a lot of books and, though they're categorized and the boxes marked, I still had to dig through stacks of boxes to get at them. It took me several hours to find them all, mostly because there was a book of short stories (Tales from Earthsea) that I knew existed but wasn't with the rest for some reason. Which brings up another interesting vignette. I finally found that book sitting with some others in a box, all of them in mint condition. (In my collection, if a paperback is in mint condition, it means I haven't read it.) As nearly as I can figure it, I bought those books on one of my occasional binges to replenish my reading list, and moved soon after. The books went into a packing box and I forgot about them, and there they've sat for over 15 years. You can imagine my delight at finding an unremembered and unread gem. I'm just opening it now for the research, and am looking forward to exploring new territory. As it turns out, that short-story book looks to be the most important to the project; it has a fair bit of background material that Ms. Le Guin wrote in working on the newer novels. And now, a note about research. There is no more drudge-like drudge work. Book to word processor, back to book, back to word processor... It does tend to limit my enjoyment in reading this time. The fun stuff won't really come until later, when I integrate the notes with the system. But work is work, a set of obstacles to be pushed through. Part of the motivation for this blog is that if I write about it, and people read it, it puts an onus on me not to procrastinate or, worse, let things go altogether. So, that's where I am right now. Further entries will touch on processes, difficulties, and other related things. Reader beware: Here there be spoilers. If you haven't read the books yet, and have enough interest to be reading this blog, shut down your computer, get into your car or go to Amazon or whatever your favorite online bookseller is, buy them, and read them... and wait until then to look at any future entries of mine.

Very reminiscent of Petra, sans shrubbery.

It may be how people think, but it's not how combat works. 7 seconds would be a ludicrously long time to get off an attack with a longsword, unless you were parrying in between. Not to mention that all maneuvers with a particular weapon don't take the same amount of time to complete. Any kind of absolute time frame is bound to run into these issues; hence the SR system, which is relative.

I'm not going to say what it looks like the statue (or whatever it is) is doing...

Funny...I actually used to do work on a PDP-11. Much easier and neater to copy the Sapienza sheet, though.

Xerox, baby. A dime a copy, unless you had access to one at work. (Who, me?) I still have a few sheets left over from the original run of 100 that I made, hiding in a campaign notebook...and that was with handing them out to players over the years.

Interesting. I've never played Apocalypse World, but the playbooks are reminiscent of the occupational keywords from HQ1/2/G. I'm not thrilled by the overly-simplified combat, but then I never am.

The only place that's relevant is in determining a modifier for the roll. I'd have no problem with figuring out a modifier on behalf of the player involved in that particular case, having them make their roll, and adjudicating as necessary. ETA: also applies to the base skill to be used. I forgot about that one.

Vaguely like Zelazny's fugue, but all the time. My ears are burning...

For those interested, the Earthsea thing is some months away. I'm barely into the research (10 pages of notes from the first third of the first book), and there are a few legal issues that I need to ensure that I've cleared before it's done. It's in the pipe, but not guaranteed yet. Work continues, whether it's for solely personal use or more public dissemination.

In the RW, they were often based on the value of herd or work animals (surprise!).

Considering that a talent was at a minimum just under 60 pounds of gold, I'm not sure how applicable that would be.