Sven Norén

Binding an allied spirit in an animal of this size will provide its own challenges... I like it!

He is not a full shaman, not even close: he is a Student currently trying to up his skills in Plant and Animal Lore and First Aid enough to be accepted as an Assistant. Giving up the man rune would be a problem, true, and keeping it while in beast shape will be tricky to say the least. Hmmm...

My players were nipping across the Donalf Flat when they encounter a random dinosaur. A brachiosaurus, a large, lumbering, but ultimately inoffensive beast that it would be easy to avoid.

I should have known better.

In true PC fashion they decide that this would be the ultimate Beast of Burden! A discussion followed about how long it would take to tame a beast that is too thick-skinned and slow witted to even notice a bunch of humans in its path. Suddenly the wannabe shaman pipes up: "I know Discorporation! Can I possess it?" Sure, but you'll lose your old body since you don't return to it before the spell is up. "It might be worth it. Can I still cast magic when in the new body?"

And that question stumped me. A brontosaur body is incapable of speech and of gestures, any familiar to a human at least. Does that preclude use of magic? Spirits can cast spells without a body of any form, but... What say you, the collected sages?

G is the seventh letter of the alphabet. Just saying...

I'm in! I had that (together with the Results table and the Fumble table) on my Referee's screen.
I had some plans to use it for all contested rolls, but we never got around to playtest that variant. We did however make up one based on the actual odds, since we felt that 8 versus 5 should have a better chance (62%) than 18 vs. 15 (55%).

BRP fans are nothing if not patient, and there is the saying "If it is late, it is late once. If it is bad, it is bad forever".

Take the time needed.

Am I the only one getting flashbacks to Worlds of Wonder? BRP core rules plus Magic World, Superworld, and FutureWorld?

That would make an awesome Bundle!

Yup, dug it out yesterday. Interestingly Chaosiums "own" continent, Kanos, stretches from the equator to about 75 deg. south; I don't think I've seen a setting map where the action takes place in the southern hemisphere anywhere else!

I like the way Mini Six handles Complications: you don't get "Character Points" at chargen, instead you get a CP every time a Complication hinders you in some way. CP:s can be used to increase attributes or skills between adventures. I would also use them as Hero points, that can be spent for a reroll as needed (even when rolling for experience).

I seem to recall that the old Chaosium Gateway boxed set had something on worldbuilding, specifically what mountain ranges did to rainfall and such stuff. I have to dig it out of storage...

RQ3 says that Wyverns are relatives to dragons, but that Wyrms "bony armour and draconic head show a relationship to dragons".

I have always thought that Wyrms are a kind of Dream Dragon, or are the product of a Dragonewt who has taken a different path to Dragonhood.

Wyverns might be hatched from immature dragon eggs that have either become tainted with chaos or have been hatched by a sorcerer.

One of my players (I'm running RQ2 again, yay!) is a Lhankor Mhy initiate, who has decided to study dragonkin for his thesis, so I have to come up with something to write about...

Aren't dinosaurs dragonewts that has strayed from the straight and narrow? They turn into a brontosaur if they let Sloth overcome them, allosaur if anger, etcetera. So what causes wyrms then? Curiosity? Indulgence? Hmmm...

What is your take on the relationship between wyverns, wyrms and True Dragons? Are they related, are they odd-shaped dream dragons, or something elese entirely?

Hmm ... The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is the title of the debut album of Pink Floyd,

Yah, that's where I got the phrase from (I am tha old. That's why i play RQ2)

and they took the phrase from the book The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.

...and that's where THEY got the phrase from. Hmmmm...

Did Yelm need some help to find out where to leave Hell?

Well, he didn't get out of there until Orlanth came to get him!

Did a son of Donandar travel to the Gates of Dawn to find his true love and play pipes for his true love to follow?

Did Yelm hear the pipes and find the way out of Hell?

* Pipes being wind instruments ought to be a favourite of Orlanths.

* Finding a missing person, perhaps a Sun worshiper, where no one else can reach him.

* The Sun god himself cannot see the shadows, as Ratslaff (wasn't it?) once pointed out.

I think I can twist a simple Search and Rescue into a HeroQuest. Thank you all.

(If anyone has more ideas, please do not hesitate to jot them down here!)

This phrase has been bouncing around in my head for some time now. I feel there is the seed of an epic Glorantha campaign here, but how would you do it?

1981. A friend of a friend introduced us to AD&D. After a couple of sessions I went down to the game store to get my own books, and found that I had not the money for PHB + DMG + MM, so I picked up another book. It promised to be a complete game in one volume, and reasonably priced too.

It was RuneQuest 2nd ed. I never looked back.

I bet you had to fight off wolves on the way to school as well didn't you ?

Nope, they had all been eaten by the rock lizards... luckily they get sluggish in winter, being reptiles and all, and we had winter 11 months of the year. Summer was a couple weeks of bad skiing.

I'm with the school of thought that says the dragonewt, er, that is, big green thing is actually his pet and just doesn't want to let go of it's stick. So I voted no.

It's a Rock Lizard, dammit! Doesn't anyone else know the RQ2 creatures list by heart!?!?!

Dragonewt, pshah! Youth of today, think they know everything, mumble grumble, Back In My Day....

Please note: the rock lizard is chewing on the mace, not on the trollkin.

It obviously prefer the crunchiness of a wooden mace haft over the skin and bones of a lousy trollkin. And who knows what said trollkin has been eating? Huh?? Do you really want to know???

The picture does not show the 2.472 other trollkin only a few meters away from the scene ...

...still trying to make their minds up whether to help or flee...

Divine Intervention table? Why?

Because my players had to resort to it with distressing frequency (usually just after consulting the Fumble Table).

Hit locations are optional and should be optional on the screen,

Sure, I was just listing what was on my screen for RQ2, where Hit Locations are non-optional.

Here is what I put in my Referee's Screen for RQ2; it is four A5 size panels in landscape orientation.

Ref's side first panel from the left: Melee Sequence, Combat Sequence, Combat Results, Divine Intervention Table, Parry Fumbles, and Hit Location Chart.

Second panel: Fumble Table, Probability Chart (Crit, fumble and impale chances by % needed to hit), and Definitions of crits, fumbles and impales.

Third panel: Resistance Table.

Fourth panel: Non-humanoid Hit Location Tables.

Players side: Two middle panels are the same as first and second panel of Ref's side, the two outer panels are blank.

"Bulldozer: A sleepy Storm bull initiate."

-- the Dictionary of Eye-watering Words

I'm surprised how different the whole thing looks from RQ2 - I'd always got the impression that RQ2 was basically the same as RQ1, but with errata. From the character sheet they do look like quite different beasts.

Uh, how so? It doesn't look that different from the one in my copy of 2nd ed. Just more compact. The latter has the skills listed together with space for modifiers, and the body outline has the hit location numbers on it, but otherwise not very different.

I would handle it something like this:

You are trying to pick a lock built by a Master Locksmith with 120% skill? That's a minus 20% to your skill.

Oh, you are using a bent paperclip instead of proper tools? That's makes the task Hard; roll against 1/2 skill.

To many of them BRP is indeed an expulsion of gas.

To some extent, I think that BRP may suffer from a poor choice of name. The acronym is second only to GURPS for poor sound, and the "Basic..." part makes it look like something you start with before going on to grander things.