Chorpa

Well you can still use the maximum ranges as long as you remember that for each quarter of the maximum range the skill chance is halved. So normal chance for the first quarter, 1/2 chance for the second quarter, 1/4 chance for the third quarter and 1/8 chance for the last quarter. Also the damage beyond half the max range is halved.

Well thats the rule in the BRP book atleast.

Just thought it would be simpler for the players to have the base ranges. Saves them a lot of calculations.

Looks very good!

I assume the ranges are maximum ranges? So I just have to divide them by 4 to bring them in to the BRP mechanics?

Other than that I haven't noticed anything I can complain on. I really like the new availability stat! Most of the stats make much more sense now than the old stats. I'll take my time to study the stats more carefully to see if I have missed anything, but as I have said looks good so far.

Wait, the Brown Bess was a breech-loader? I've only seen it as a muzzle-loader. Were you refering to some rare variant model?

Well I might have been wrong on the Brown Bess. According to my source the Brown Bess replaced the Ferguson Rifle but doesn't mention it being a breech loader so I might have been making some assumptions that where not correct.

But I still need to get some good stats to represent the Sharps rifles. I think I am going with the Rifle Musket stats for now but lower the Attack to 1/2 from 1/4 because of the breech-loading mechanism to take into account for the faster reloading time. This could of course be rushed according to the Unaimed Shots for the Spot Rules for Firearms on p.254.

Kind of. I wasn't really happy with those rules.

It works okay for dual weapon fighting for general fighters (2nd weapon is 5 DEX ranks after first attack, and 2nd attack made at Difficult%). But what if someone is trained in dual-wielding, they should be able to attack much better this.

I see the rules indicate that if someone is trained not to have an off-hand penalty, then the Difficult Penalty is negated, but how does you learn it in the first place? Most abilities are expressed as a percentage, but this indicates that a 'Dual Wield Combo' is more like an Effect - this would be perfectly okay if BRP had additional Advantage/Disadvantage traits like GURPS, WoD Merits/Flaws, Savage Worlds Edges/Hindrances, D&D Feats etc.

But as there isn't any way to calculate it as an 'Advantage', then I thought the nearest way to calculate it would be to express it as a percentile for training/experience purposes, which got me thinking it was more of a Fighting Style rather than an individual technique, which led me back to the Martial Arts rules. This way the character's chance to succeed in dual-wielding increases with the more training they have with that Fighting Style.

That was my reasoning, I feel I'm on the right track, but feedback is appreciated.

So if I understand it correctly you are thinking of having a Dual Weapon Fighting style, and just like Martial Arts it's nothing you roll extra for but instead you just gets the extra damage from the other attack. I am not sure I like it that way since it would be way more powerful than a regular Martial Arts attack if you have damage bonus and such, unless you ignore such stuff for the extra attack in that case it's the same as Martial Arts and I don't see any problems since it's just a cosmetic change.

Otherwise if you don't mind an extra roll you could say that if you roll under the Technique on you first attack you get to make a second attack with your offhand weapon. That way you would still have the normal weapon skills and the third skill for the technique. The extra skill point cost I think would balance the out the extra attack that occurs sometime and the technique would still negate the offhand penalty. And the extra attack roll would sort of balance out the fact you get damage bonuses on the second attack since you can still miss it.

This is otherwise covered by the spot rules on Two Weapons on p.233 in the BGB!

Well to be more specific it is actually the Sharps rifle I was thinking about. The players came along a shipment of Sharps rifles that they gave to the anti-slavery movement in Kansas Territory in one of their previous adventures (of course they kept a pair for themselves). It's was about the time when they where starting to become available (started to sell in the late 1840s). Just haven't felt any of the stats in the BRP book was fitting.

Closest I can think of is the previous mentioned solution with the Bolt-action rifle but with an ammo capacity of 1 or maybe the Musket Rifle but with an improved rate of fire.

Single shot breech loading rifles are not much different from single barrel shotguns, the

rate of fire should be the same. Looking at the shotgun stats on page 255 of BRP, the

shotgun with Ammo 2 (two barrels, probably) has an Attack of "1 or 2" (with "2" firing

both barrels at once, probably). Therefore an Attack of 1 for a single shot breech loa-

ding rifle seems about right - and a combat round of 12 seconds is indeed long enough

to load, aim and fire such a rifle.

I agree completely. The way I saw it was that a breech-loader and a bolt-action rifle really shouldn't have much difference in Attack rating except that with a bolt action you just feed a new cartridge from the rifles storage system while with a breech loader you would have to insert a new one directly into the mechanism. So the thought was to include the extra loading time in the attack rating which already was 1/2 for a bolt-action (errata maybe since it does sound a bit slow for a bolt action). But I guess it was a rushed decision since as you mentioned a shotgun has a attack of 1. So I guess a bolt-action with attack 1 and ammo of 1 would be not to far off for a common breech-loader.

By the way, breech loading rifles became common only around 1850+ in Europe, so I

would be surprised if many of them would have been around in North America before

the Civil War.

I am no weapon expert or historian. But as far as I know several known rifles made an appearance in the 1850s in the states too, how common they where I don't know though. I do know that breech-loading mechanisms was used way before that and even as far back as 16th century for firearms and even back to the 14th century for cannons/swivel guns. There are several muskets using breech-loading mechanisms. Ferguson Rifle and Brown Bess for example! But I guess you are more thinking of the cartridge breech-loaders.

I am playing a pre-Civil War weird west campaign at the moment. I was thinking on how to represent a Breech-loading rifle in the game since they where quite common during that time.

I was thinking about just using the stats for Bolt-action and maybe Sporting Rifles (for the ones with smaller calibres) but reducing the Attk (Bolt-action to 1/3 and Sporting Rifle to 1/2) and the Ammo to 1. The reduced Attk should take into account the extra round of reloading since they don't have a magazine of some sort like more modern rifles have.

Opinions and suggestions please!

I do not see a major problem there. While the character indeed gets less skill points for his

professional skills when using EDU, he also gets the Knowledge roll to represent his general

knowledge about almost every possible subject. With an EDU of 13 this gives the character

a chance of 65 % to know at least a little about whatever comes up, and in the long run this

seems far more valuable than a few more skill points would have been. To give the character

both more skill points and the Knowledge roll would seem too much of a good thing to me.

Was just about to say the same. EDU 10 gives knowledge roll of 50% and 200 skill points. Without EDU you would get 250 points but have to spend 50 points on Academic Lore to get the same type of Knowledge Roll as you would get automatic from EDU. So in the end it evens itself out.

I don't really see the problem. EDU is an optional stat and if you don't think it works as it should. Don't use EDU at all!

You've played the Black Book too! That was the Proto-Aces High scenario and thats a big loose end you have dangling there.

I'm really very interested in hearing how your game progresses.

Are you going to incorporate the western scenarios from Blood and Badges?

Of course I used the Black Book scenario.

Haven't had the time to purchase Blood and Badges yet but I was planning to get the pdf at the end of this month when the pay check arrives. Considering the number of wild west scenarios in there is a high probability that most of them will be incorporated into the campaign. The campaign takes place before the Civil War, and I had first planned to run the campaign through the the war and continue afterwards. Now I have decided that the current campaign will end when the war begins and we will start a new group of characters around 1875 but a lot of the actions that players do now will affect the new bunch of characters and I can still continue to develop some of the loose ends and maybe use some of the current characters as NPCs. Still have haven't planned the details yet.

Well I am thinking about letting them meet one of the old characters (an Indian nicknamed "Meltface" because of his horrible burnmarks) they lost in an earlier adventure. They lost him to the demon Eno from The Black Book (from the BRP Adventures monograph). They failed to defeat the demon in time and escaped the area but leaving their friend who was badly injured in a firefight at the mercy of the demon. Been planning to let them tie up that loose end and an encounter with "Meltface" might just remind them of the threat that lurks out there looking for them.

Ofcourse I like lull them into safety and when they let their guards down I spring something unexpected on them.

Autumn is here and time to kick of the Aces High campaign again on the 21st of August! I'll keep you guys updated!

The first adventure this time is named "Murder in Rasberry Vale" (translated from Swedish) and a non-supernatural one since we ended the the campaign in the spring with a big battle against a family of Big Bat Heads so I figured they needed a breather after that. It's basicly one of those murder mysteries the players have to solve.

I have never tried them. Grown up with using Hit Locations and Fixed AP so that is what we are using.

But if I decide to ditch the Hit Location system I would probably use Random AP since I think it adds and interesting twist to combat.

I am running the adventure at the moment actually. It's a simple short adventure that takes place at a wayside inn named White Wyvern. It's perfect to insert in any ongoing fantasy campaigns. Considering the low price I sure think it's worth it. There is loads of roleplaying opportunities that ends with everyone defending the inn from an attack. I will not reveal to much but so far I have liked it a lot. I think the adventure will take about 2 sessions for us with the second session still to go.

So to sum it up. It's probably not the best adventure around but it's cheap and easy to incorporate into any fantasy campaign and has some interesting mysteries for the players to solve (a ghost musician for one) and roleplaying opportunities. Hope that helps?

BTW If you like running it with miniatures I recommend getting it together with the Black & White map White Wyvern Inn or the Game Pack that contains both the adventure and the maps, then you can print tiles ready to use for miniatures. But it's not needed if you don't want to use miniatures.

It finally happened! Ran my first Classic Fantasy adventure yesterday and I was surprised how nicely everything sort of fell together. I have to admit I was a bit sceptical at first feeling that it was a bit to old school but had planned to use parts of the module for my own campaign. But we decided to try the whole thing as written. This will for sure be the basis for any future fantasy campaign I run. The players liked it a lot too getting that D&D feel but with the grittier but still simple combat system of the BRP system.

We are planning the next adventure tomorrow already and we normally only play 1 session per week. :-)

Can hardly wait for Classic Fantasy II now.

Well after the last winter/spring campaign where that otherwise have been very popular despite a couple of character deaths along the way I found that the original Aces High Character sheet left something to be wanted. Mostly it was formatting issues making it hard to fit the necessary information where it needed to go. So I took one of my already designed Character Sheets I have made myself and made the necessary modifications to make it a Aces High Character Sheet.

Either way the original sheet is still very usable just wanted to tell everyone that I have uploaded the alternate sheet into the downloads section for those that are interested.

You can find it here:

Alternate Aces High Character Sheet

Just wanted to make people aware of this over at 0one Games.

The Spirit of the White Wyvern: Basic RP conversion

What was it Oscar Wilde said... something like 'the only country to go from barbarism to decadence without going through civilisation'...

I am a Swede so I don't care to much about either the Americans or the British but I'll cheer for the Oscar Wilde quote. It's sooo true!!!!!!

Well if you could read swedish it would even be more simple than that.

All of the adventure modules that where translated to the swedish version of MERP where dual statted with Drakar och Demoner Expert (Dragons and Demons) which was basicly a pure BRP system.

Otherwise I do recommend getting one of ICEs Arms Law (pre Rolemaster Classic) or you can just download Arms Law Conversions that should be enough to get you going. But since RM is an inverted Percentile system skills should be pretty easy to convert you just have to find the corresponding skill and keep the skill value as it is. The stats you can use the above downloadable document to convert.

I have converted a lot of ICE stuff for use with BRP and it's very simple actually. Just convert Stats and Skills and then you can just calculate all the necessary Derived Stats as usual.

I have been meaning to ask about the ranges of the weapons in the Aces High book. Have noticed many of them are much higher than the ones in the BRP Book. What are the thoughts about that? For example the Sniper Rifle in the BRP Book has a range of 250 (including the modification for a telescopic scope) that is the same range as the Volcanic Carbine without a telescopic scope and that is one of the rifles with the shortest ranges in Aces High. The Volcanic Carbine was supposed to be a very inaccurate and unreliable rifle.

It does sound a bit high to me to be honest so do many of the ranges of the other rifles. Even though the bullet probably don't have any problems at all to travel that distance, but hitting something without taking time to aim carefully at that distance is another matter at least according my experience from the military even though it was a while ago I did my service.

On most of the rifles in Aces High you can divide the ranges by 4 to get them more in line with the BRP Book. Now thinking about it maybe the ranges are maximum ranges and you just forgot to modify them to the BRP ranges (x1/x2/x4).

From an otherwise excellent module the equipment tables are the ones I think needs the most modifications. The ranges of the rifles sticks out obviously. And some other slight errors that have been discussed previously in this post and that are easily adjusted.

ENC values for the equipment are on the wanted list. A slightly larger equipment table are also on the wishlist and that is maybe something that can be included in a future book.

At the moment I just use the weight from my GURPS High Tech book and halve the weight to get the ENC values for the equipment in the Aces High book. Most of the equipment in the Aces High list can be found in GURPS High Tech and the ones I can't find in there are usually easy to wing. Plus it does contains a load of other equipment not included in Aces High that are usable. The difference in prices are a bit of a trouble but I just divide it by 10 and it usually gets me reasonable prices that fit Aces High.

Aside from those issues everything else in Aces High have been working perfectly. We even have one of the players that play a Caplatas (Evil Voodoo priest). I did allow it since he rolled Voodoo Parents on the extraordinary abilities table. But he is moving from Sweden to USA during the summer so he is not returning in the autumn when we start up the campaign again. Aces High is still one of my favourite Monographs for BRP and can be perfect with some polishing!

Well I just finished the session. Funny thing I didn't see your suggestions until just now but I had already ruled just as you suggested on my own since it made most sense.

The adventure actually played out nicely, at first the players where a bit puzzled and didn't have clue where to start looking for clues. But after a while they started to pick up on some minor clues that lead them to the red skin shaman.

For the showdown in the cave that the Big Head Bat Family used as home I used Medusa Hideout you can get from free from 0one Games. Just removed all the doors and furnitures and then you ended up with a natural cave that fitted the adventure perfectly. Printed out the tiles and laid them out as they explored the cavern and used counters during the combat.

Will not reveal to much of the story here since I don't want to ruin the experience for others. The adventure took us 3 sessions (4-5 hours each) to complete.

Now we are having a summer break and will hopefully start the campaign again in the autumn. We are trying to pull together a new group to play with over the summer but haven't decided yet what game or genre to play yet.

We are just at the end of our third Aces High adventure which happens to be scenario from the Aces High book. I am a bit curious about a couple of things in the adventure since they can have a big impact on how the finale plays out. So any clarifications will be helpful.

• The description of the Big Head Bat Family in the scenario at p.105 mentions that they can Wing Buffet and Bite in the same round. This is not mentioned in the animal description on p.54 in the book. How does this work with the SR system if allowed?
  
• The description on p.54 mentions that they cannot be hurt by any mundane weapon. This seem to be omitted from the description of the Big Head Bat Family in the scenario on p.105. Are they an exception?
  

Sorry my mistake! Did mix up the Devils Gulch and Aces High thread.

But the two modules blend so well together anyway.

Kung Fu wielding Shaolin monks are available for play in the Aces High book.