Richard S.

It's a neat idea for sure - I was kinda thinking the same thing, in fact - but it'll be hell to pull off a coordinated effort for this. A lot of stuff can probably be pulled from the BGB, like basic magic for fantasy, spaceships and other vehicles for sci-fi, etc. etc. I was also thinking that maybe something that's just a collection of alternate rules would be neat to have, pulling together ideas like percentile characteristics, d20 based, bonus and penalty dice, hard/extreme successes, and the like.

3 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Tirffletraxor, Proof that not all bugs are bad.

Yeah, those are called features! 

Chaosium wants us to make our own subsystems and stuff, so how about we get those creative juices flowing! Feel free to post full houserules, entirely new rules, small variations, concepts for unconventional things you can do with the BRP engine, and other such things! Hell, I know we got it started on the Making a Magic System thread, but lets even expand on ideas for taking other game's mechanics and making them work in BRP. I know we have some creative minds around here and some people interested in making their own hacks, so come here and show off your best!

So I don't seem like a total hypocrite, here's a few of my own:

1. A completely resistance table based game. This one is probably a big departure from normal BRP, but still works in the system I think. You can either throw skills out entirely or scale them down to 1-20, like in Pendragon. Either way, everything is resolved with the resistance table rather than regular skill rolls, with 10 as a baseline resistance.

2. Reduced or no characteristics. Especially in games without category bonuses, characteristics can sometimes fall by the wayside. If you don't think keeping the standard 7 characteristics will benefit your game, just remove them! Roll 3d6 to determine HP and MP and 6d6 to determine your damage bonus. To replace constitution or willpower rolls, you can take a page from post-MRQ-Runequest-and-descendents' book and treat them as skills.

Speaking of BRP magic systems, I wonder if the rules in the "Enlightened Magic" supplement would be okay to use for BOGL products. A full game based on it could be cool.

25 minutes ago, Simlasa said:

Does that mean Chaosium will be moving off this site as an official presence? (I hope).

What? The new BRP site and this forum (which is run by Chaosium) are completely different things.

All I can answer at the moment is the Gagarth one: He's Air+Disorder. Generally three runes are reserved for the major gods like Orlanth, Kyger Litor, Yelm, Ernalda, etc.

10 minutes ago, g33k said:

I've got to agree with Jeff:  that "a year or so" of work (before this SRD & OGL) based upon these rules seems like a LOT of work on something that may be (c)-infringing.  OpenBRP hasn't changed anything for you.

Like I said, for most of that "year or so" it was just something I was doing for fun, solely for myself, that I initially had no intention of publishing. It was only when I learned that there was going to be a BRP OGL that I decided it could be fun to try and make it into something publishable rather than just a bunch of rules and notes on a piece of paper, and at the time I had no reason to suspect that anything in it would violate said upcoming OGL, since I was expecting that all BRP rules would be allowed like is the case in other OGLs.

13 minutes ago, Jeff said:

Were you planning on publishing this game? In which case, my question is why you put that work in without asking for a license?

If you weren't planning on publishing your game, then nothing has changed. We aren't going to send out the game police to stop you from playing a home-brew variant.

It was originally just going to be a homebrew system for personal use, but when I heard that BRP was getting an OGL I thought "well I might as well make this available once I'm finished, probably just for free or PWYW". Then the OGL comes out, and I realize I can't do that anymore, which honestly doesn't affect how I was going to use it personally, but I still would've like to release it to the public under BRP, if only for the sake of getting a small amount of experience with self-publishing and because I think that some of my ideas are interesting enough that others may want to at least look at them. For the record, my game is nowhere near close to being done yet, just the mechanics are mostly complete at the moment.

2 minutes ago, Rick Meints said:

I'd very much like to know why all of the above options, plus the new option of the BRP license just doesn't work for you, or for that matter, anyone else. All I ask is please be specific, and also mostly speak for yourself. A vague example of "I want to write X, but your license options don't allow it" is far better than saying our license options are (insert vague negative word or phrase).

Like I've said earlier in the thread, I've been working on a game of my own for a year or so that uses pushing and a slightly modified version of RQG's augments (using increments of 15% rather than 25%, capping at 45%, and you can use augments to inflict penalties on people). While I could come up with unique mechanics that fill the same function, especially for augmenting (pushing would be harder since it would probably need a meta currency and I really want to avoid that), I'm just frustrated that these two, non-setting dependent rules have been seemingly arbitrarily declared "prohibited", especially since I've had them in my game since I started. That's pretty much the only problem that I personally have with the SRD.

2 minutes ago, Jeff said:

Passions, Augments, and Pushing were not mechanics in the BGB. Or indeed of any version of BRP (except Pendragon) until a few  years ago. Somehow Chaosium managed to publish Stormbringer, Elric, Ringworld, ElfQuest, Magic World, Nephilim, all of the BRP monographs, and heck, just about everything else, without using them. 

Yes, but now that they do exist and are incredibly good, useful, enriching mechanics, it's frustrating that they're locked out of common use simply because they weren't in the BGB. What is the point of preventing creators from putting them into a new game as long as they don't use them to completely clone a Chaosium game, especially since they aren't very tightly bound to their settings.

1 minute ago, g33k said:

Honestly, I'm fine with not trying to retroclone RQ, Coc, KAP, and other Chaosium products... does that really seem too onerous, too restrictive?

I wasn't proposing cloning any of Chaosium's games. I am perfectly fine with their IPs staying their own. What I am annoyed about are the restrictions on, specifically, the mechanics for Passions, Augments, and Pushing, three rules that in no way shape or form would threaten Chaosium's IPs by their use in other games and settings and in fact would enrich other games immensely, as they are some of the simplest and most effective narrativist rules for D100 games I have come across, and if I attempted to make something "unique" to fill the gap then it will inevitably be more more convoluted and complex than works for my game. My issues lie solely with the fact that I cannot use those specific three mechanics and publish my system under the BRP OGL, despite the fact that there is nothing else in it that even comes close to infringing on the mechanics of CoC and RQG.

22 minutes ago, MOB said:

As Jeff said above, because it is a reference document - the skeleton so to speak. The license explicitly allows derivative works. You can add hit locations, add your own magic system, psychic powers, rock god songs, archetypes, funky mechanics, psychonautical exploration mechanics, alchemy rules, spell systems based on the Sefirot or talking to angels through crystals - whatever, go for it.

You are welcome to add to it as long as you avoid Prohibited Content. Just don't try to create a retroclone of Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, Pendragon, etc.

I think the point that Theodis was trying to make was "why make it with the BRP liscense instead of another one that lets me do the exact same thing with less restrictions?" What do I get from BRP that I don't from some other D100 OGL like Openquest or Legend or Lore 100?

31 minutes ago, M Helsdon said:

The other thing that has struck me is just how interesting the First Age West would be as a setting...

Yeah, it would be really cool to have some more information about it. I believe Greg even considered setting the western supplement for RQ2 back then.

This looks well and good enough, though I do have some similar concerns to others about prohibited content, namely Augments and Pushing. Why are these prohibited? They aren't defining features of the games they belong to, and would hugely benefit any BRP game, yet creators who want to do similar things are now forced to come up with less logical, unique ways. This is especially frustrating to me, since I'd already written them into a project I was working on.

Just now, AndreJarosch said:

Printing one big hardcover book is cheaper than printing multiple smaller hardcover books. 

Adding a few more pages to a hardcover makes it more expensive, but not as much as splitting the book into multiple volumes (at some point you HAVE TO split a book into multiple volumes, otherwise you can´t handle the book anymore... so two volumes are good). 
And more volumes mean more coverartwork to pay for, too.

Fair enough, I can see your point. I was just speaking from the perspective of a player/GM with a tight income, but there are points to be made on the producer side as well. We want them to stay in business after all!

The price is, honestly, the biggest concern for me, especially if we want to be more inviting to new people. Putting such a useful supplement at such a high price can be a bit of a bar for some people, though it is what it is now. I do wonder whether it would have been better to release smaller "regional" books, such as one for Peloria, one for Dragon Pass, one for Prax, etc. I ain't a business person though so I don't know if that would even be economically feasible.

8 minutes ago, Redmoongodess said:

That is very disappointing, honestly, I wonder if at this point we will ever see any of those pantheons be fleshed out like they deserve to be...it really feels like the guys at chaosium are only interested in Orlanthi and the areas around them at this point.

There are books in the works for the east, west, and south. The reason we're seeing so much for the north central region is because that's what we have the most material on - much of the stuff for other areas has to be pieced together from limited notes or straight up created on the spot. It doesn't help that the team doing Glorantha stuff is extremely small and involved in multiple projects at once, so there's not many resources to go around. It's a little frustration that we have to wait, but we know that it is coming at least. And just think, if they did include all the other regions' pantheons in the book it'd end up a three or four volume set, and many of the cults would be useless without write-ups of the cultures they belong to.

I think the closest you'd come to a separation of church and state would be in the west, where the rulers don't necessarily have to be religious figures as well. Of course it's not total separation, but the church and state don't always work completely together.

37 minutes ago, g33k said:

Ygg, Valind...I don't recall, what Runes does the White Princess have in Prax?  She's the most explicitly-snowy deity I recall.

If you're thinking of Inora, I believe she was Air and Stasis last I checked.

Damn guess I'm a spirit worshipper now, time to go and get myself some crucifix charms

On 3/12/2020 at 12:05 AM, davecake said:

The God Learner empire is clearly aesthetically and spiritually inferior, with an intellectual climate that clouds true wisdom. And surely the mighty Lunar army would have proved themselves superior.

You say that until the God Learners use their almighty Runequest Sight™ to prove that the moon rune is just two stasis runes stapled together over a light rune.

3 minutes ago, GAZZA said:

Is there an actual write up for the Lightbringer's Hero Quest? It seems like one of the more useful ones to do (resurrecting dead comrades - indeed, if you go by 13th Age Glorantha, you can even get Humakti back that way) but I don't think I've ever seen it written up in full.

It's useful, yes, but incredibly difficult. If you desperately want to resurrect your comrade, just get them to a healer within a week. The lightbringers quest can grant incredible powers beyond simple resurrection - the gods offered Argrath anything in the world, and the cosmos nearly broke when they could not meet his request. Failure is disastrous, bringing chaos into the world and most likely killing the questers - Kallyr's quest severely injured the entirety of Sartar and ended her reign prematurely. You don't undertake it lightly.

I don't believe there's been any super detailed step-by-step quests but we know the basic stages and obstacles. I believe either the Book of Heortling Mythology or King of Sartar should have a decent outline which you can flesh out. I'd imagine it would be one of the most variable quests, since it takes place during a time of unparalleled chaos and goes across the whole of the world and underworld.

If they're strong in harmony then I doubt they'd be drawn to Eurmal in the first place. Donadar is the choice for harmonious illusionists already. A strong Harmony affinity in a trickster would have to be something that emerged during play imo.

Yes, it has much more art. It also has a wealth of material found nowhere else, much of which is valuable for people trying to get a feel for the "here and now" of Glorantha rather than its mythology and metaphysics.

Once again, can you please move the Babeester Gor discussion to another thread? Discussing what's canon is completely anathema to the purpose of this one.