smiorgan

17 hours ago, Wheel Shield said:

@Rick Meints.....I don't expect this post to change anything. It was just cathartic and self-clarifying. Plus, I like to define myself and/or not be mischaracterized. I tried my best not to make it personal or be overly sarcastic. I ask the same in return.

And I do appreciate The Lunar Way video, sincerely.

I have deleted my reply. Last thing I wanted is escalating things. Happy gaming to everyone.

On 4/3/2024 at 1:48 PM, Loicll said:

I know this is an old topic, but maybe you can help me...! I'd like to know if there is a module to play old BRP settings using FoundryVTT.
Actually, I would like to play Hawkmoon NE, which is the French 2nd edition of Hawkmoon, which shares the Elric! system.
What would you advise me to do?
Thanks!

I don't know anything about Foundry, but there's a pretty decent Hawkmoon NE sheet for Roll20.  By the way, it's a great game.

Quote

"pirates who shapeshift into dinosaurs in order to protect Mars from the undead."

I'm sold.

On 2/26/2024 at 8:39 AM, Ravenheart87 said:

I'm keeping an eye on this hoping you will do a conversion of Stormbringer's magic system.

Sorry. Real life hitting hard on me these days. But, I'll go back to this experiment as soon as I have a bit of time. The first objective will be to solo my way out of Hwamgaarl using Stormbringer scenario "See Hwamgaarl and die" and Dragonbane's solo rules. 

4 minutes ago, smiorgan said:

Trovis Nightstabber - Lormyrian thief has been created.

I'll do a proper scan asap.

 

Number and type of trained skills are determined as per Stormbringer. Bonus and trained skill score as per Dragonbane, using skill categories as a rough guide to decide the relevant characteristic. 

Generally speaking, he's a bit more competent than a regular Stormbringer 1-4 character. But not much! His best skill is 12 (60%).

Trovis Nightstabber - Lormyrian thief has been created.

I'll do a proper scan asap.

Here we go! (to be continued).

You made me want to roll up an Hawkmoon character.

1 hour ago, Mugen said:

@smiorganno, I have neither Mournblade nor le Département des Sombres Projets's version of Hawkmoon.

I read one other game using the CYD system, and I'm not really interested.

I was also a great fan of Oriflam's version of Europe, and I'm a bit sad le DSP could not use it.

From just reading the books, the CYD system is nothing to write home about. Functional but not great. As for their version of Tragic Millennium Europe I know too little to judge - first impression is: Not Tragic Enough (it does not help that real world Europe has become more tragic and bizarre in the meantime).

5 hours ago, Mugen said:

Was it in the core rulebook ? Then I should re-read it. To be honest, I was quite disappointed by the new rules, as I liked the approach of first edition, despite their complexity. I should take some time to make an example of how it worked.

Yes, it's in the corebook. I've never played the French version of Hawkmoon 1st edition  - I have only seen the supplements - but my impression is that the science system of 2nd edition is very similar to the 1st. Minus the skills originally brought from the English edition.

Hawkmoon NE corebook was great, packing a lot of content.  

By the way, have you seen Sombre Projet's version? I have it (I did the kickstarter), but I'm still reading through it. I'm still undecided whether I like it or not. Science and mutations seem to have been de-emphasized. The rules are much streamlined version of the Mournblade system. Very rules light, which is not bad in itself. But the corebook, despite being long, is a bit sparse in terms of content. And the whole thing seems to be too clean and lack a bit of the darkness and baroque crazyness which I associate with the setting.    

On 2/17/2024 at 12:50 PM, Mugen said:

 

Second french HawkMoon game used a completely different system. There were no more skills involved. Science was more akin to magic, where you learned to do different things without really knowing how they worked.

Yes, science made French Hawkmoon into an entirely new and more complete game.

I have played mostly the second edition (Hawkmoon Nouvelle Édition) several years ago. I'm Italian and I was playing with Italian friends. My French is pretty good, but knowledge of the language of Molière is not that widespread in Italy. But I was so enthusiastic that I managed to convince the whole group to play with the French character sheet, even people who had little or no French. Written French is largely understandable for an Italian, but not always, which lead to funny scenes at the table.

Hawkmoon NE was a very good game, based on the Elric! rules. As Mugen said the second edition took away the various science skills opting for a system  where tech secrets and scientific lores where learned from ancient documents a bit like spells from a grimoire. Each secret and each lore had a complexity score. The sorcerer's INT will limit the complexity and number of secrets and lores that could be learned and technological creations would have a complexity score resulting from the sum of secrets and lores employed. The  creation process was a series of Devise or Potions skill rolls modified for complexity and for the quality of the lab used. It could end up in success, failure or partial success with production defects. There was also a generic skill Technology Mastery, which was used to learn how to use found technological object whose secret of creation was unknown to the scientist/ sorcerer. It was a fun system. The feeling was a little bit like devising and summoning a custom demon in Stormbringer 4th edition.

On 2/19/2024 at 8:12 PM, joen said:

I would give my right arm to get a Stormbringer reissue. I won't hold my breathe though.

Same here. It's a pity.

It seems Sombre Projets is doing an English edition of Mournblade: provided it comes to fruition, it's a good game, but it's not exactly Stormbringer.

" I know several of them poisonally" - that's a lovely typo.

16 minutes ago, Geoff R Evil said:

Voted. The guy who created the sheet played in a game I ran for a while. Something happened and his work was taken from him … not clear on the details, but I know they guy who created it is no longer maintaining or managing it officially, although he fixed a couple of things we spotted when we played.

That's not good news. 

I've posted the same message on Reddit right now..

But, FB is decidedly a bigger audience...

I'm running a RQG campaign on Roll20 and having great fun with it. The RQG sheet is really what makes the whole thing possible and I'm deeply grateful for it.

Who else is playing RQ on Roll20?

That said, I'd love to see more support for the game on Roll20 by either Chaosium (as they did with Pendragon - bravo!) or by Roll 20 (as they did with CoC). 

I've seen that Roll20 has set up a voting functionality for players to indicate which sheets should they support in their Roll20 Characters tool. I have no idea what kind of numbers are needed to get noticed, but maybe voting for the RQG sheet is a good idea.

Go to this page:

https://app.roll20.net/characters/create  

Search for RuneQuest in the Search box (top right). Select the RuneQuest Glorantha sheet and vote for it to be supported.

It takes two minutes.

On 1/14/2024 at 10:51 AM, NickMiddleton said:

This came up in the BRP thread about Call of Cthulhu and BRP as an engine for the Hybroian Age and I said there I'd extract the relevant bit from the larger work it is currently part of. Enjoy!

Excellent stuff! Thanks 👍

But now I'm curious about the larger work.

12 hours ago, Renfield said:

What do you prefer, D20 or Percentile? 

I generally prefer percentile, for immediate transparency and for granularity (you can have those 01 crits and 00 fumbles). That said, I'm fine that Pendragon is D20 and I might be tempted to use D20 for certain settings (e.g. Middle Earth) where it seems aesthetically fitting.

12 hours ago, Renfield said:

What do you think the future of BRP games is going to use, just D20s now?

 I'm pretty confident most BRP games will continue to use the d100. The newest Chaosium game "Rivers of London" is d100, the new edition of generic BRP UGE fresh from the presses is d100. Two BRP games in development (Lords of the Middle Sea, Mythic Iceland) are d100 too. There are two main "dialects" of d100 BRP: the Cthulhu dialect and the RuneQuest/ UGE dialect. My bet is that most Chaosium games will continue to use variants of these two. D20 has been used for Pendragon and for the licensed Pendragon-derived Paladin.

Outside Chaosium, most BRP-inspired games use d100 (e.g. Mythras, OpenQuest, Jackals, Delta Green). One notable exception is the Swedish game Drakar och Demoner, now published in English as "Dragonbane", which switched many years ago to D20. 

12 hours ago, Renfield said:

I have a homebrew modern magical mystery setting and I want to use BRP for the rules. 

You could either base it on the generic BRP UGE ruleset (which has plenty of rules for magic and a lot of support for modern era weapons and stuff) or you could try to adapt the new Rivers of London Game or the old Nephilim game (still available in PDF). Both are modern "urban fantasy" games, with very different styles. All these options are d100. 

I don't know about the Big Damn Book, but if you mean the BRP Big Gold Book (BGB) of 2008 it was always in one volume. It had a playtest print (which was missing some parts) and a final version that was published in softcover, hardback, POD with the exact same content.

Before that there were the BRP monographs (ugly tape-bound things with a random Stormbringer cover on them), but these were just a repackaging of RQ3 rules stripped of the Gloranthan bits. So, completely different content.

@DreadDomain I think it's mostly writing cleanup where RQG could be improved. Personally, I'm VERY happy with the game. Still, the corebook could benefit from integrating errata.

Does it show that I'm a Chaosium / BRP fanboy? 

18 minutes ago, Malin said:

Also, playing it online through Roll20 does a LOT of the heavy lifting when calculating criticals, specials, damage, and the like. I might have had to simplify more in a person-to-person setting to get the flow going.

Yes, that's my experience as well. It's very handy especially for one of our players who is very much into the story, but not so much into learning the rules. In person it could take a bit more time, but not much, especially if I'm ready to help that player.

 Interestingly, the player who does not remember the rules behaves exactly the same when we play in Middle Earth with LOTR 5e rules, which is arguably a less detailed system.  

Another thing that I have noticed. I've said this on Facebook but it's worth repeating: the strike rank tracker that comes with the starter set is an amazing tool. Very useful to teach the rules and to keep focus.

In general, the starter set is well worth having. 

I'm currently running a group of 4 through a RQ campaign, 3 of them relative newbies to the system and I am not having propblems with RQG with all the bells and whistles on. It works. We do forget to apply this or that other rule from time to time... and nothing bad happens. Which brings me to my main point.

BRP in general, and RQG in particular, is not a tightly designed system. It's a system with a super simple core and layers of detail that hang loosely to it and are there to add color and granularity. If you strip the layers you will lose color but the system will not break down. In other words, BRP degrades nicely. That's in my opinion the single most important unwritten rule at the mechanical level.

That makes RQG very unlike other rules heavy systems - e.g. Pathfinder or D&D4 - that are tightly balanced with very interdependent parts that would break down the system if taken away. In my view, RQ6/ Mythras is an attempt at making RQ a bit more tightly designed, while RQG went cheerfully in the other direction.

As I said, I'm not having issues with RQG full on, but my plan B was to start taking away parts and reduce complexity in case my players were overwhelmed. And it's very easy. You can go pretty extreme without destroying the system. Obviously, the game becomes less fun, at least for people who like detail. 

0. Ignore character history in generation. But that's already written in the rules.

1. Ignore sorcery. We're in Dragon Pass, after all. And those Lankhor Mhy scholars will be fine with just Rune Magic as in RQ2.

2. Ignore weapon strike ranks. SR1 for Rune Magic, Dex SR for missiles and spirit magic, Melee SR for melee. 

3. Ignore locational hit points and effects of wounds althogether. General hit points only. Just use hit locations for armor and to record individual wounds for healing. Yes, that means that you can have 1 hit point left and a 10 hit points wound at left arm and be fine. 

4. Ignore damage to weapons. Just use weapon HP to determine max. damage parried. 

5. Ignore effects of criticals and/or specials and fumbles in combat. Ditch the attack-parry matrix except for the cases that involve normal success and failure.

6. Ignore multiple defenses and/or the -20 penalty. You can parry or dodge once per round (for a deadlier game). Or you can defend as much as you want without penalty (for a less deadly game). 

6. Ignore levels of success althogether. Remember to still use the subtraction rule for skills over 100. In opposed rolls, if both parties succeed you roll a second time remembering to apply the -25 penalty. If it's still a draw, higher skill wins. If both parties fail, the GM narrates a suitable outcome.  In every case, opposed rolls are the most overrated mechanic in rpg design history. Just have the players roll their skills - represent opposition with a malus.

7. Ignore the resistance table. Use opposed rolls of the stat x5, or x4.

8. Ignore penalties for failed augments. Note that if you ignore levels of success successful augments are always +20. 

9. Ignore passions. Unless you use a spell to create them.

10. Ignore runes. Rune magic does not need a roll.

11. Ignore augments althogether.

It might have escaped some of you guys that Advanced Sorcery, the only supplement ever published for Magic World, is now available print on demand on DriveThru.

https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/128316/advanced-sorcery

It repackages a lot of magic from Elric! (corebook, Bronze Grimoire and the Unknown East) and adds a few extra spells and interesting skill based powers.