lawrence.whitaker

Judging by Jason's qualification about payment, I think Gwenthia will stay where it is, publishing direction-wise. I'm also still waiting for my monograph payment for Hawkmoon... I wrote it off at least a year ago, but if Chaosium can't even manage to meet a $500 agreement for something I put all the creative, editorial and layout effort into (and they had decent sales from), then I've no confidence in getting a solid position on a formal book for Gwenthia. Very, very sad.

Yep, I know...

It would be very sad if all the effort that went into making BRP a reality took a nosedive through lack of 'official' support. Monographs are all well and good, but something straight out of the Chaosium stable door would be much better all-round. I don't think a licensed property is the way to go. The world has changed a great deal since Chaosium blazed the trail back in the 80s. Film and computer game rights make RPG licensing difficult and costly, and I doubt Chaosium's in the financial position (bank loan/no bank loan; credit crunch/no credit crunch) to pursue the option. To make a licensed property work you need collateral, a sound business model, some industry clout and the ability to churn-out supporting product at a decent and steady rate to please both fans and licensor. Its not easy. A new, Chaosium-brand setting is the way to go, I feel, and Chaosium was interested in using Gwenthia. That never took off because the group behind Gwenthia never received promised proposals and contracts, despite having several talks with Charlie K. I'm honestly not sure if there's mileage in revisiting that as an angle, given Jason's comments on Interplanetary. Gwenthia, as a project, has stalled owing to other commitments elsewhere, but there's a huge amount of material that could, in the right circumstances, be easily prepped and handed to Chaosium for production. It all boils down to communication, commitment and evidence on both sides to make it all work. I'm going to ponder on all of this. I talk to Charlie quite regularly, but I need to talk to the Gwenthia Design Mechanism too. I know that everyone in the Design Mechanism is a big BRP fan, and although a consensus had been reached to use the RQ SRD, things have changed, so maybe its high time we thought again. But everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, would hinge on some solid commitments from the Chaosium side. There's always hope.

The license was pulled not long after the original game was published. Film rights were sold and they precluded the license to the gaming rights. Hence, an entire campaign pack planned for Ringworld never saw print, even though the components were commissioned and written. So this was circa 1986/87. The passage of time clearly hasn't changed matters, which were investigated in 2004 for a possible Known Space game. My understanding is that the SF Channel had commissioned a Ringworld mini-series for TV broadcast, but I've no idea where that stands. Clearly though, the licensing ties-up the whole Known Space IP, and not just Ringworld.

Incredibly unlikely. A few die-hard Ringworld fans encouraged Lynn Willis and Charlie Krank to pursue this option as part of an attempt to perhaps writing a Known Space game. However, although Larry Niven had no problem with the idea (or of reissuing the Ringworld RPG), his agent, who handles the licensing, instructed that various film and TV contracts preclude a roleplaying game version from appearing. Obviously the Ringworld rules could be stripped from the Ringworld-specifics, and some have for use in BRP, but you'd be left with a very vanilla-flavoured SF game. But a PDF version of the full Ringworld just won't happen: its not only out of print, but the license lapsed, and can't be renewed, many years ago.

Heresy though it seems to suggest, the MRQ Games Master's Handbook has a section dedicated to alchemy with rules that will easily port across to BRP.

Didn't 'Villains and Vigilantes' have a similar idea - that your non-super/secret identity was based on your real-life persona, with a suped-up version as your hero?

Echoed by me, too. I know you've been working on this idea for at least a year, and I think its great you're looking at producing a monograph. I look forward to seeing it!

They'd be Smallniboneans... I'll get me coat.

Seconded. Deal with it, and move on...

They do? I must have been playing a very different game then. Traditionally, in Elric/Stormbringer, sorcery is the preserve of that handful of sorcerers mad enough to risk the soul and sanity destroying power of sorcery. Just about everyone else gives magic a very wide berth... In Elric! there are some low-level spells available to all, but they're heavily caveated and come with penalties in the form of creeping Chaos points. In MRQ's Elric, magic is heavily restricted, very powerful, and takes its toll very quickly. You literally need to bargain your soul in exchange for power. The sensible characters steer well clear of it.

Its the eternal dilemma of the RPG writer. Leave out the stats of the sagas protagonists: howls of protest. Put them in: howls of protest because they either don't a) fit how individual readers see that hero in their mind's eye or the stats have difficulty fitting with the character's actions in the books. You can try and get close - I think I did with MRQ Elric - and I still got some flak from some people who thought I'd devalued Elric's prowess with a sword...

As Pete says, these items can be replicated using the rune magic system found in the Magic of the YK book from Mongoose (was meant to be in the main rules but got cut for space reasons). I agree that mundane items with sorcerous powers certainly occur, but actually being bound demons - sentient or not - is exceedingly rare. The rune magic rules were consciously designed to achieve the effects of Jagreen Lern's armour and the pirate captain's axe, and Pete and I worked very closely together on developing the system.

Glad you like it. I think the system's eminently portable to a divine cult, and I can see devotees/Rune Lords sacrificing POW as part of their dedication, with the resulting gifts being things that make you channel your god. However the gifts and compulsions from Elric probably aren't portable as they stand, because they're designed to reflect the Elric stories. You'd probably want to tone them down or create new ones to reflect the god being worshipped.

Its been interesting to read this thread, and it reminds me of precisely why, when sitting down to tackle magic for Mongoose's Elric of Melnibone, I wanted to... a) Make it far more streamlined, recapturing the flavour of SB1 Remove some/all of the grossness that bound demons can create c) Get back to the way sorcery appears in the Elric saga - so, with the exception of Stormbringer, no bound demons. Same is true of the Allegiance system. I've never used it in my Stormbringer games - it was just more bean counting that didn't, for me, reflect the saga. So for the MRQ Elric I went for the Pact system where you choose a god and mortgage your soul to it. You can get lots of kewl powerz (reflecting the kinds of powers you see similar damned souls, like Gaynor, exhibiting in the saga), but your god takes a hefty price from you.

Hurray! Arrived this morning.

Still waiting for mine.

The intention is very much to build upon the original. There won't be a bulldozer in sight.

Thanks for such a detailed and considered reply, Simon. I appreciate the points you make. I think the quote above kind of summarises things. There's no deliberate urge to cover the whole of Glorantha and then move on, but there is a design to cover as much as possible in appropriate depth before returning to already detailed areas to add to the canon. S&P is a good place for adding material to any of the settings so far published - I know of one scenario for Dara Happa for instance, and I think the Fronela book will generate quite a bit more (because its such a huge region to cover). Pavis is a very interesting example because, as you say, its at the very heart of Glorantha for many people (perhaps us old skoolers). For HQ we took the decision to revisit Pavis as the first Gloranthan setting for the new rules because it has such a strong place, and because we knew we could extract a lot more unexplored detail that's hinted at in the classic boxed set/book. I'm working through all thaty material now, and having a fun time working on things hinted at or mentioned in passing that you know can be worked up into something fun and informative. There is also a plan to detail Second Age Pavis for MRQ - which is a very different place to Third Age, and I'm looking foward to that project (though it won't be for a while yet).

I've no problem with criticism, unmoderated or otherwise, but if criticism is to be taken seriously, and to appear constructive, then it really needs to be fair, supported by facts and evidence and not simply unqualified opinion and general system snobbery. Dismissing MRQ as X% crappier than something else requires something to qualify that statement. Dismissing MRQ's output as substandard is every bit as bad, especially if you haven't bothered to read that output and assess it properly. You might not like the way MRQ handles certain things, or spot faults in it that have an impact on your game or playing style, but that doesn't automatically mean that game doesn't have merits in other areas. And, if you haven't read supporting material that's been produced, how can you possibly comment on its standard? Hearsay and personal prejudice against the parent company just aren't convincing arguments. I'm not attempting to defend the company that pays my wages - just to point out that pretty much every game system has merits and flaws and its a question of assessing those on their merits in relation to what you're seeking to do with the system. There's plenty about MRQ I'm not personally happy with or like. But the same is true for BRP, CoC, RQ2, Bushido, HeroQuest, D20... And, ultimately, any roleplaying system is a framework. Don't like something? Change it. Like a combination of different things from different systems? Combine 'em. But arguments like 'X is a 90% better than Y period...' or 'everything produced for system X is substandard' is just snobbery. And snobbery never informs. As to whether or not BRP Central is 'Revenge of the Beetle'... I sincerely hope it isn't. I'd always seen it as a place to discuss BRP in a civilised, constructive way: and that means BRP in all its forms. The site certainly succeeds to a certain extent, but the level of unmitigated system snobbery that pervades is highly disheartening, as are the attacks that occasionally get levelled. I still recall the extensive and disheartening thread that caused Jason Durall to decide to withdraw a few months ago. I can see this thread going in a similar direction. I hope it won't. I like hanging around here and I think BRP needs a discussion forum. But I hope that the forum will reflect the kinds of values BRP has at its core: common-sense, pragmatism, flexibility and open-mindedness. When it doesn't, it saddens me considerably. Sorry for my rant. Please feel free to move this post to its own thread because it actually doesn't help answer the very reasonable questions posed by the OP.

Okay, I'll bite. I'm not going to waste time justifying why I think Frogspawner and Paolo are wrong in their various assertions that MRQ is X% worse than BRP/RQ1/RQ2/RQ3 or whatever, because its essentially a pretty pointless argument. Its your choice. But I would encourage anyone reading this thread to actually compare the systems for themselves (and the MRQ SRD offers a free basis to do that) and reach their own conclusions rather than accepting blanket assertions that one is X% crappier than the other. There's a lot of system snobbery on this forum, and its not exactly pretty or helpful to those who genuinely want to know which system will suit their particular playing style. Soltakss writes: and Jrustela, Clanking City and Dara Happa Stirs are all very detailed books that will sustain lots of prolonged play - if GMs are prepared to put in some work for themselves. Whilst people are wrapped in the cosy warmth of Nostalgia for Griffin Mountain, Pavis and Borderlands, I'd suggest people actually take a good look at these old classics (I've got 'em, BTW, and am very fond of them). I don't think any are half as detailed as people actually think them to be. For their time, they were, and they without doubt broke new ground, but if you scratch beneath the surface, the detail there is quite thin. And, if you want to continue playing in these regions, then yes, GMs are going to have to write their own scenarios. That sounds like heresy to some people (on this forum and elsewhere). People certainly seem to consider it so for some weird reason. I don't understand it. Any setting book is there to convey a place in enough detail to let you understand it and inspire GMs to create their own campaigns. Dara Happa Stirs, for example, provides about 100 pages on background, history and description that should work in precisely this way. It also includes a campaign that offers detailed single scenarios, and ongoing campaign arc, and a broad-brush extended campaign outline that allows GM-written scenarios (inspired by the background material or elsewhere) to be dropped into it. So I really don't understand Soltakss's comment that 'No area is covered in depth' or 'and none covering the same area in more depth.' I'll tell you now: no RPG company can afford to devote a huge amount of resource to continually developing and deepening one small part of a wider setting like Glorantha to the exclusion of other areas. It might be what one GM wants, but a games company has to consider a wider market. Mongoose could develop Dara Happa to the 'nth degree, but it would be at the expense of Fronela, Ralios, Seshnela, Pamaltela... the list goes on. Its a damned if you do, damned if you don't argument for Mongoose or any roleplaying company. If a line or setting is to survive, it requires both breadth and depth. I think Mongoose does a very good job of achieving that. It has a small team of dedicated writers that want to achieve that balance because they're gamers too and actively play in these settings. So yes, the point is precisely that Mongoose has created books that aim to inspire GMs to write their own scenarios and give them the tools to do it. I reckon its successful too. Sure, I'm biased. But I also write this from the position of having written a fair chunk of published roleplaying material and knowing the effort and scope that has to go into it. At some point in his career, a GM is going to be faced with the task of having to write or think-up his own stuff. No RPG company will keep spoon-feeding him with scenarios for just one area ad-infinitum. Its just not commercially sensible. And even if it was, isn't it better to provide the tools for GMs to create their own works? I know that many GMs don't like or feel confident in writing their own scenarios, which is why writers like me continually try to offer a whole slew of ideas in settings books that will, hopefully, make that job easier. But ultimately, if you want to explore one region very deeply, you, as GM, are going to have do some work. The RPG company can only go so far. Oh, and for the record, I'll be working on Fronela for RQ very soon, and am working on Pavis for HQ. Both books are aiming for precisely the balance (breadth and depth) I've been discussing above.

There's also 'Cults of the Young Kingdoms' coming out in the next few months for Elric, which expands on the basic cult rules from the main Elric game. Its a very different beast to Charles' monographs but again highly compatible with BRP. It also covers lawful, chaotic, elemental and some other, less-easy to categorise YK cults. And, sometime next year I'll be working on a mega-campaign for Elric.

No - or rather, extremely unlikely. Most GMs will want to plan their games around the schedule, so pre-registration and sign-up is very, very rare. As I said before, its a bit like Tentacles: GMs will complete their sign-up sheets just before Continuum or at the event and then drop them into Con central for us to post. The only games we DO know that are set are Newt's D101 Games (HQ, SQ and Monkey). Newt has a room and a timetable.

When the games run is down to the GM. Every GM completes a sign-up sheet with day, time and location. Generally, gaming slots are 4 hours apiece (but can be longer, if both players and GM agree) across the weekend. There are early slots on Friday afternoon and late slots on Sunday. But which slot games run in is not scheduled by us. Its down to the GM.

Its less rabid than Tentacles, but a similar system.