RogerDee

9 hours ago, g33k said:

Obviously, it can be forced, can be MADE to fit.  I simply find both cosmologies to be weaker for the effort; but ymmv.

If you have one set of timelines running on magic, and others running through science, it is not being MADE to fit at all.

Then just have higher planes residing over both of them (like in Elric). In fact this idea was in Champions: Mystic World, M&M, Age: Threefold. It is a very easy way to solve the problem.

8 hours ago, Ian Absentia said:

But orthodoxy takes the day!

And that is kind of a problem....as it is utterly lacking in imagination

11 hours ago, Warframe44 said:

M&M's DnD roots drive me crazy. I'm really not fond of that game, although M&M has some great parts to it (the wonky damage system notwithstanding).

You're on the money regarding Hero. It's much easier if you get hero Designer, which does the math for you. You just need to watch the point totals. HD is spendy though, considering it's age and clunkiness. You could be close to $100 US for the main books plus the software. and maybe the Powers book. Makes for a large buy in.

Where BRP nails it is the community. Us. The BRP community is very accepting of homebrews and variants on the system. I love that. I moderate the BRP reddit and see it all the time. People support Mythras, BRP, RQ, Pendragon, COC and other great games that aren't BRP "Vanilla" (BRP is anything but!). Using BRP as the base for my own work has been tremendously freeing as a result. Why? Because we're cool with doing things a little differently. With coming up with fresh new ways to do something.

There's a lot of value with BRP

You are right about Hero Designer, it is simply too expensive to shell out on a friggin' hobby, another example of overly expensive was Invisible Sun.

M&M does have some good parts in there, I do like the cosmology, in that it helped me put my own together following some of the ideas in their books. There is some good community in M&M Discord, one thing I do like is that one of the Power Level X villains is basically called Quirk, in essence their own Q Continuum expy (kind of made me chuckle).

My only gripe with BRP is lethality, such that I am tending to go freeform, and allow players a list of traits, etc that they can pick from to make them exceptional, kind of like in Pulp Cthulhu. I am not into games where players are ne'er do wells, I want them to be heroes and all the baggage that comes with that, no matter the setting.

11 hours ago, Warframe44 said:

Because they're all BRP based, the settings and modules could be used as-is, with small conversions at the table.

What occurs to me is having a CoC Great Old One level event snap the barriers between the multiverse, and the Heroes (gathered from multiple planes of existence) are tasked with saving... well, everything

You could have something like the below which I pinched off the Marvel wikia.

Universes: They can be neatly divided up into those that follow the physics of Earth-like worlds with similar makeup, physical properties, and laws of physics. Then there are those that are completely alien and foreign possessing differing physical properties and laws of physics; and finally dimensions that are governed by magic.

So you could literally have one universe run by the Christian god (Aquelarre), and in another universe it is full of Great Old Ones.

Then maybe have some kind of higher dimension full of beings like the Q Continuum which have some kind of affiliation to either Order or Chaos? Perhaps even have some kind of Outsiders, which are the Outer gods?

11 hours ago, Warframe44 said:

Like Kloster I switched from Superworld to Champions in the 80's. Part of the attraction with HERO was how cleanly it scaled upward. It felt more like a comic book adventure. BRP remains my go-to for pretty much everything else. BRP is gritty, realistic, and easier to write for.

I think the main issue with Hero, is that it is incredibly fiddly and maths orientated such that some find the level of crunch difficult (it makes many D100 systems look like child's play in comparison). The end result being that many go to M&M as it is far simpler - but can tend to create broken right out of the box if you are not very, very careful.

On 12/15/2020 at 8:48 AM, HierophantX said:

- It's not a PhD dissertation you have to defend, or a peer-reviewed journal. Unless you are writing a multiverse situation for publication and you need it to stand actual scrutiny beyond your crew, who cares? It only needs to work for your story and if it needs to contradict itself see below

See I am the exact opposite here tbh, and I make sure that I can run Runequest, CoC or whatever, all together if need be and I tend to plan how it all works.But then I can be a bit OCD on this.

Champions Mystic World (and a few other rpg's) really helped me put all the together, but YMMV.

Thing is if you want fantasy superheroes you are simply better playing Champions or Mutants and Masterminds, the latter of which uses a D20. Then there is also the recent 5e Supers and Sorcery. It is also interesting that M&M has a PF / DnD conversion into the full system.

Then there is also Modern Age, also by Green Ronin, and while the magic system is somewhat lacklustre compared to DnD / PF, or even RQ. There are supplements incoming next year to aid in this, and superpowers. The multiverse setting to go with it, Modern Age: Threefold is utterly amazing.

That said I am not a DnD fan, at all, nor for PF 1e or 2e. But there are a lot of really cool DnD 5e settings (some still in KS) which you could easily convert for Mythras Fantasy use, most of the work already done in the Basic and Expert.

1 hour ago, Bilharzia said:

CoC and Mythras aren't settings, they're rule systems which have various settings written for them.

Each rule system has games that carry a default cosmology in many instances, whether CoC (Invictus, Dark Ages, Japan, etc), Classic Fantasy, or Runequest, Elric, so that is not quite true.

So how do you combine the different cosmologies in each setting?

Has anyone tried combining all the D100 universes into a multiverse complete with lore?

Such that things like CoC, Mythras, Aquelarre etc could be incorporated?

Discuss how you would accomplish this.

On 11/10/2020 at 9:34 PM, MoonRightRomantic said:

Fair enough. I still think it would be interesting to explore the concept of immortals who (potentially) have all eight elements or otherwise non-standard arrangements.

A good example of this could be a version of Highlander immortals which would fit really well into Nephilim.

On 9/22/2020 at 4:32 PM, ThornPlutonius said:

Indeed.  Cthulhu has been done to death.  Leave it out of Aquelarre.  One should be able to do much with the Christian mythology, especially as it saturated the minds and lives of those who existed in the covered era.

My point was doing the Mythos through lens of Aquelarre, so Cthulhu does not need to stroll around, but more a case of making the Aquelarre beasties more alien or horrible - which when you look at the some of OT angels - they're particularly terrifying.

Or just making some angels look a bit different, and more well alien, and inhuman.

https://www.artstation.com/bugmeyer

This is the kind of thing I mean. Now these are Peter Mohrbacher's angels, none of which look particularly angelic. What do they look is Lovecraftian, and utterly alien.

Hence a way to make Aquelarre more Lovecraftian.

1 minute ago, EricW said:

Interestingly a few years ago I wrote to the author and suggested a third movie based on an unstoppable ancient disease, which emerged from a corpse buried in permafrost which melted due to global warming.
 

Only one person’s blood has the antibodies, because the immortal is the only living human who ever encountered and survived the ancient disease.

So to save humanity he has to reveal his secret.

Author liked the idea but sadly never got made.

Strangely there are a series of books, e.g. Immortal from Hell. Adam is an immortal around 60k years old. It starts off as a slightly tongue-in-cheek urban fantasy, only with no magic. The races like demons and vampires have existed on Earth. He encounters another immortal, who can enter another dimension, and use it to become seemingly out of phase.

It turns out there are other beings that live there. They worship her, as does hunanity under such names as Kali. Although she prefers the name Eve. She hates Adam, as there was another group of immortals, all dead except her.

Adam killed them all, but he cannot remember doing so. Weirdly a disease has started to afflict her - immortals can only die through violence, and can survive any kind of virus, disease, or bio-warfare; Adam was captured at one point and the government tried.

This strange virus only affects nonhumans, so Adam is looking for a cure. 

Except she seems to have recovered.

On the last book at the moment. It us a kind of fun little series, which also acted as inspiration for this rp too.

On 9/4/2020 at 7:57 AM, EricW said:

I think the risk is if your immortal can just fling magic about without personal risk, what kind of plot could you provide to make things seem dangerous?

You could maybe tone down the power a bit. Your "immortal" could be a wizard who lost their memory and somehow regained some sanity, and has no idea why they don't get older. All sorts of plot lines possible, the peril of regaining memory, strange skills popping into their minds, disturbing nightmares if they encounter the mythos, old "friends" who know more about what is happening than the PC, ordinary folk trying to kidnap the PC for medical experiments, all sorts of fun.

There's a cool low budget movie + sequel, "The Man from Earth", about someone who tells a story to his university colleagues about how he is 30,000 years old. No magic, no special powers other than a claim of immortality, but some pretty wild stories.

Having refined my idea, and having purchased Apocthulhu, perhaps if the players are at the end of civilisation? They find a spell sending them back in time, and can work to stop the end. Only problem here is they change history too much. 

So maybe have them survive through the ages. Heck, may even have them survive history such they end up in a Star Trek type future. Maybe....

The film Man from Earth (guy who wrote it also wrote Requiem for Methyseleh from TOS Trek), and its sequel Holocene Man is exactly what inspired the idea actually.  Great minds and all that. Essentially immortals will get small bonuses to stats during chargen, kind of like in Highlander series how immortals are stronger and faster, but it is marginal. So they are killable but it is not easy to do.

Occult (Aquelarre) magic generally requires ingredients, but for Mythos magic, as per Grand Grimoire, that is absent, and very hard to find a teacher. With it being more pulpy, (Robin of Sherwood inspired too) having an immortal use magic is okay. There will be no permanent attribute expenditures, or san loss. That may be reserved for more powerful nagic, but only temporary. Players will have a hard enough time as it is, being infirm would ruin it.

From a world building perspective, before Atlantis a few humans became immortal, because magic was more common then their powers fell into legend. An age later they became known as Olympians. They're dead now, probably. What killed them? Well who would want to poke that hornet's nest? Any immortal must have some kind of deathwish.

Because we are pulpy, the players are heroes, flawed and fighting a battle they cannot win. But that does not stop them putting out a few fires.

And they are not alone.

Delta Green are also fighting the good fight. Maybe an unchanging immortal that keeps popping up in history may get noticed? Perhaps DG will help them? And there are other organisations are out there too. Most are not benevolent - some seeking power, a good number totally malevolent. Will an immortal get on their radar, and could their unending lifeforce be used to power spells?

Best they don't find out.

You know I had been meaning to re-write some of the stuff for this, for a while now actually.

One version was going to involve essentially space magic, and another version was going to use the four worlds from Gurps Cabal and Champions Mystic World. Maybe do the former this weekend.....time permitting.

There is an episode of Supernatural (season 15) in which this is shown quite clearly.

Both Winchesters never suffer from normality, so when Chuck (God) makes them so they really begin to understand they are different. Dean's car breaks down frequently, they get toothache, colds, cannot take down vampires triple their size. When empowered, they do so, albeit with some difficulty.

Simply put, give them a stack of extra hit points - they're heroes and magic runs in their veins, a load of luck points they can use to shove events in their favour. Boom, done!

Why make life difficult?

You know i have been wanting to run a kind of epic player adventure.

Premise, the beings from Legend Gigas Monstrum were just normal beings once, until they amassed great power to become immortals. So PC's would be able to tap into Divine, Arcane, Rune magic etc in their quest for godhood.

13 minutes ago, Dissolv said:

 I can't believe you quoted my whole post and got this out of it.   No one is there to "kill the players", and we are all gaming for fun.  😀

Some GM' are actually there to kill the players, giving them no chances. So having high lethality is exactly that.

13 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

It's about 40 pages for the new character creation rules (including the list of archetypes and talents), 20 pages for the combat/sanity rules, 10 pages for the pulp magic/gadgeteering rules, and another 10 pages for villains/mook rules. So that's about 80 pages (I had mistakenly counted the "Pulp Organizations" so that removes 20 pages). You can probably compress that to, say, 20 pages, if it's a bunch of random notes and ideas not meant to be usable by anybody but you. You can even compress this to zero pages if you just make it up in your head.

I'm not saying RQ must be lethal. I'm saying RQ has lethal mechanics by design. That's not my opinion, it's a statement of the designers, which they have expressed many times over the years, and just, well, what everybody would figure out by just reading the rules. 

Trying to change one of the core pillars of RQ with 5 pages of house rules seems counter-productive to me (house rules are for tweaking things), and I'm not even sure it would be completely satisfying.... that is, unless you don't totally want a D&D-like gameplay, and instead want something more in between the two. Or even just want to tweak a couple things.

Rules still need writing up as my players will not have Pulp Cthulhu so I will need to present them nice and short form for them to be able to use.

Regarding lethality of RQ, you may have been right 20-30 years ago, sure. Now rules are supposed to be hacked, it does not require a lot to do it. Christ I remember when members of this board got their titties in a twist because Cakebreak & Walton had dared to introduce traits to a D100 game. That was extremely sad that people on this board behaved this way!

Plus do not forget Mythras Fantasy is not too far removed from RQ system, but is essentially D&D / Pathfinder in all but name. Then we have the Legend ruleset conversions of the Tome of Horrors in Gigas Monstrum.

Runequest originally had Legendary, then toned down Heroic Abilities to help the players be even more epic. And it was great.

1 minute ago, Dissolv said:

 

1. A lot of us are -- but with many caveats.  

   In practice, the PC's don't die very often.  They are defeated, ransomed, or (especially) driven away fairly frequently though.  Irrevocable PC deaths tend to happen in one of a very few ways, in my experience (by which I mean in my campaigns) -- 

2. Beginning character not good enough death.  This isn't nearly as common with RQ:G, but the first few sessions often sees a baboon with a rock or a rubble runner kill a player who just can't get out of his own way.  In RQ2 days, it was possibly to go an entire meeting without successfully rolling your weapon skill once.  Now it is possible to start with a 90% weapon skill even for non-warriors.  RQ:G characters are just way better on creation, so let's push past this one.
3. Player makes a stupid decision death.  You know, the classic "while I am stealing the McGuffin from Fazzur Wideread's tent anyway, I may as well attempt an assassination while I am here."  In this case the player has chosen to voluntarily do something extraordinarily risky, or even foolhardy which was easily avoidable.  No punches are pulled in cases like these and I show no mercy.  Sometimes it plays out in the PC's favor, but in cases like these I run the NPCs as if they were my PC's, if that makes any sense.  They try to win, and they try damn hard using everything they have at their disposal.  If the player beats that, great!  If not......also great.  Live free, ride fast, and leave a great looking corpse.
4. Epic dramatic encounters death.  If you build up to the climactic finale, and it winds up being a duel, not unlike Arkat versus Gbaji, then it should be patently clear to everyone that the NPC is again being run in "PC mode" and as a GM I throw the whole weight of the villain at the players.  These are times when the players don't have any plot armor, and tend to be facing a foe who is extremely dangerous relative to their power levels.  Sometimes there are consequences for daring all.  "Don't do it Ralzakark!  I have the higher ground!"  Normally the players will win out, of course, but sometimes they lose a hero along the way.   This is how the majority of my Rune Levels seem to bite it.  But these are usually good deaths, in that they move the narrative, and are seen as a worthy end to an old friend.  
5. You are a Humakti.  Every day you are dicing with death, and then the end comes.....that's it.  

 

However this doesn't mean that the PC's are croaking left and right like in a Call of Cthulhu game, or heaven help you -- a Hawkmoon game /shivers.  It does mean that the PC's don't enjoy a large (game) mechanical advantage over their opponents, and in fact may be outgunned in a straight fight.  A PC starts out about as good, or a bit better than how I portray an elite Lunar solider, for example.  If a situation came about where there was a one on one between them early in the campaign, the Lunar elite may very well prevail.  But that doesn't mean that the PC has to die.  Again,  capture, ransom, healing magic galore, or social considerations may stay the hand of the solider.  If the PC is rudely provoking the Lunar, then he might kill the defeated PC for honor's sake.  Or he might levy a nasty fine against his clan and kin instead.  This is driven by the circumstances of the story, not the fact that the loser is a PC.  If the player really pushes for lethal combat, he gets lethal combat.  He doesn't get one-way violence where there is only win, win, win.  That takes away from the aliveness and authenticity of the world, and even if true, is a truth that must be buried deep beneath the fiction of risk.  I mean The Walking Dead was one heck of a lethal show.  But Rick Grimes wasn't going to die anytime soon.  You knew that, yet you still felt for the character's troubles. 

Role playing in Glorantha is best done like that.  Even if the PC's don't die frequently, their compatriots, support NPC's, relations, and friends might, or even should.  And the players should understand that their precious PC's are not immune.  The heightened risk tends to result in overall better play, more room for non-violent encounter resolutions, and honest appreciation for what different cultures and religions bring to the table.  

Non-lethal combat systems tend to make combat a far too easy solution for the players to strong arm their way around the world with, putting them in the driver's seat from a very early level on.  With old school D&D I don't think this actually happened until mid-levels, about 7-9.  Once the PC's broke into 10+ it was time to pull out the really big guns, because nothing normal was remotely challenging any more.

Okay I clearly have a different method of GM'ing to others here. When I GM i am not there to kill the players - unless that is explicitly the intent of the game. So even in a CoC, or Hawkmoon game, or any other for that matter, I am there to let the players enjoy themselves, but to ensure that they do not take liberties. But even should they make a stupid decision I would usually give them multiple chances. Even give them an friendly GM nudge OOC, so the player knows their character is pushing it.

We are ultimately trying to tell a story,  and have a damn good romp.

We are not in the real world after all - we are engaging in fantasy, and some escapism. As to non-lethal combat, players may not know they will likely not die - whether OOC or IC. So the masquerade is there nonetheless. Make the players run intermittently from danger, with sheer numbers. Sometimes the sheer fun of having a player take on half a dozen men in single combat is reward in itself - as they are then enjoying themselves.

No more, no less.

45 minutes ago, rsanford said:

I wish I was that far advanced with Aquelarre... I haven't finished reading it yet and the first game is likely months away. Sounds fun though!

Cool, thanks mate.

Looking forward to starting it soonish.

1 hour ago, lordabdul said:

Haha no, Pulp Cthulhu stands as an excellent argument for what I said: it contains around 100 pages of custom rules to change the fundamental gameplay of CoC: archetypes with special feats, custom rules for rolling stats, "pulp talents", new luck rules, additional sanity rules, mook/villain rules, etc. That's what I meant by "force the GM to make so many house rules they will probably regret not using 13th Age or D&D or something else that was designed for that kind of gameplay specifically". Pulp Cthulhu is effectively a different game (and a great game too!).

If the GM would not regret writing 100 pages of custom rules (maybe more, because there's cults and magic in RQ to deal with too) rather than picking a different game system, then by all means go for it! And post it online or sell it on the Jonstown Compendium! I'm sure a lot of people will be interested in adopting at least a few rules out of the whole... That kind of extensive system hack, while easy to start, is often hard to polish and finalize, and requires patient and willing players, however.

IIRC, default CoC rules also let you do that. I think the only "ill effect" you can ever get while above 0 HP is when you suffer a major wound (more than half HP in damage in one hit), which makes your character fall prone and require a CON roll to stay conscious. But otherwise, you can merrily do whatever you want until you hit 0 HP (although at my table we do narrate the character limping, grunting, losing blood, etc. when they get low in HP).

Pulp Cthulhu changes those rules only slightly: it removes the "major wound" tick box, but keeps the CON roll for when you get hit for a lot of damage. It also changes the rules for healing, so the heroes can recover faster (with an archetype feat to make it even faster).

An RQ house rule to change the threshold or conditions for a character dying will lower lethality, but it will absolutely not magically change RQ to have the same power curve as D&D. It will not even make the characters any more resilient, because it would just change when they die, but not when they get taken out of combat.

I think you may be confusing the treatment and the mechanics. You can run a game of D&D or Savage Worlds that is super gritty and dark, but it doesn't change the fact that PCs are soon going to be overpowered compared to armies of mooks and other normal NPCs. That's by design (SW even has rules for mooks!). Conan or Batman are dark and gritty, but they're still heroes and they're vastly superior to the rank and file warriors and thugs (well... usually.. there have been many many very different treatments of Batman!).

The main questions are: do you want to play Batman or Conan with a system that mechanically, intrinsically, gives any random mook a chance to kill the hero? Or should danger come only from archvillains, with mooks mostly only adding pressure and point attrition? Do you want to play a hero that gets an order of magnitude better in the span of a few adventures, or do you want to play a protagonist who only got better by 30%? (or, in the case of CoC, a protagonist that can really only get worse!) You can change the treatment as much as you want, but these things are driven by the system's mechanics... so like I said, you either need extensive house rules, or, you know, a different system. These days, there are soooo many systems to choose from that I'm questioning the need to write more than a few pages of house rules but hey, that's just me, I like playing different systems.

Well no, Pulp does not have 100 pages of custom rules. Other than Archetypes, and a few talents. To be fair, you could bespoke that into five pages or less if you were not bothered with nice pictures etc - which is exactly what I'm putting together for my CoC Immortals Through Time Campaign - but simplifying it, and in my own words. Primarily as i do not expect my online players to have the books.

You seem to be very hidebound on the RQ must be lethal schtick. Keep going if you are happy with that, I am not and will change the conditions to make it fit the players being heroes. And it does not take a lot of house ruling, far from it. Just sensible in what rules apply to the players (heroes). No mooks should challenge a hero - boring, too much like real life.

In fact most systems are fairly easy to hack nowadays with not a lot of effort.

I have mentioned about about running a campaign where players are immortals running through the ages. While browsing Raiders of Ryleh, it was talking about Occult magic, and Mythos magic. So it started me thinking....what if I used magic from Aquelarre for occult stuff, and then used the Grimoire for the Mythos stuff.

Has anyone tried doing this? Planning on doing this?

10 hours ago, Dissolv said:

Interesting point of view.    I play it so that my players have to learn to be Batman (hard work, planning, using every angle, little bit of luck) before they can graduate to being Superman.

Absolutely, don't make it too easy, but like I said some random thug should not inconvenience them.

9 hours ago, lordabdul said:

I personally strongly disagree. In BRP games, the PCs are the protagonists, not the heroes (although they could be that if they're lucky). This is mainly evidenced by the fact that PCs health points and damage rolls don't increase that much from the baseline of a "normal" individual. In D&D, once you get up a couple levels, you already have three times as many HPs than a "normal" individual, and can routinely kill human guards or whoever in one blow. In RQ/BRP/etc., you might be an excellent and skilled fighter, but any combat is still going to be dangerous. That's a feature of both the system and the setting. If someone wants a D&D-like power curve, there's 13th Age for that... there's nothing wrong with it (both D&D and 13th Age are very fine games), but trying to retrofit the power fantasy of D&D into RQ is bound to either fail, or force the GM to make so many house rules they will probably regret not using 13th Age or D&D or something else that was designed for that kind of gameplay specifically.

YMMV I guess.

Look at it another way, it does not have to be a feature of the system, nor the setting. And in fact Pulp Cthulhu stands as an excellent counterpoint - in a game where the PC meme is either dying or going mad. The rule in there is that they can keep going until they reach nearly 0 HP - I would have the check to confirm, without ill effects. So the system can easily include such abilities. in fact a lot of the 80's Sword and Sorcery movies show that it can be gritty, and the protagonists can still be heroic all at the same time.

It does not need to be mutually exclusive if you see what I mean?

Thing is Runequest is a sort of D100 version of DnD, further copied in Classic Fantasy. Heck to get technical, Runequest inspired Exalted.

So it should highly lethal for the antagonists, but very low for the heroes. If they face dozens of opponents, running is good just like you see in some of the 1980's S&S films. But facing down two or three should be well within the heroes remit, and abilities. And this includes the GM fudging rolls in the player's favour.

It should not be plain sailing, but neither should they die in a bar brawl, or to some random street thug.

They're heroes.

And the game needs to reflect such.

Okay I purchased my copy last night from Drivethru, and having had a quick skim through I really like it.

There is a beautiful  cthulhuesque setting, the Night Land in there which i will re-read again today (it was 12.15 am last night when I was reading it). But chargen is getting more in line in what i have been doing in my free form games.

1. You pick your archetype, whose primary skills are set somewhere between 40-50%,  with a choice of a few extra skills you can also pick.

2. Magic, again more in line with my thinking. None of this variable cost for different spells that essentially do the same thing. It is a set cost for what you want, the spell is unimportant really. Minor spells cost A point, slightly more powerful costs B number of points, etc.

A couple of very sensible additions to this.

i got the PDF's off drivethru, and now wish i would get the paper copies too.