Questbird

I got RQ3 as part of a bundle with 'River of Cradles' and 'Dorastor: Land of Doom', long after I'd become a player of Elric! I was impressed enough with River of Cradles to run it as a campaign, which required quite a bit of back and forthing with RQ3 rules. It didn't make me want to stop playing Elric! The main thing I like about RQ3 is the extra stuff like how much it costs to hire a translator etc. etc. I might still refer to it for those (Fantasy Earth) tables, and some spells. A couple of NPCs from River of Cradles ended up as long term players in my campaign; so I am reminded in each session about the small frictions between RQ3 and its cousin games.

Sounds like a good way to do it.

Nevertheless, this one is where you'll get the most sympathetic hearing.

In normal BRP, if you roll ⅕ of your attack roll you get a Special success. This causes extra effects, depending on your weapon. The Big Gold Book list these on pp.194-7. The only one I've changed for the hitpointless system is the Bleeding one (for edged weapons). Instead of causing extra hit points of damage -- not measurable in a hitpointless system -- it requires an extra Resilience roll each round to stay conscious, until the bleeding is staunched. Example Two street brawlers face each other in Knifer's Alley in the city of Beelzebahn. Let's say they each have Resilience 11, and otherwise normal abilities. They are wearing heavy clothes (armour factor 1). The first rolls a special success against the other, who fails to parry. The Special effect will depend on the weapon the first thug is using a bleeding effect for a slashing weapon. Resilience roll for the second thug is normal: 50% + ((Resilience – (damage - armour)) x 5%). If it was a scimitar (base damage 8), this formula would be: 50 + ((11-(8-1)) x5 ) = 70% chance of the second thug staying up. However the 2nd thug must repeat this 70% roll at the end of subsequent rounds (even if he doesn't get hit that round) to see if he can resist collapsing from blood-loss. +4 damage for a club (base damage 6). That is, the damage bonus is increased to the next level. In this case, damage bonus is raised from 0 to 4. Resilience roll would be 50 + ((11-((6+4)-1))x5 = 60% chance of staying conscious after this blow. The effect of this special is to make it harder for the target to make the Resilience roll; there is more chance of being knocked unconscious by a crushing blow. An impaling weapon doubles the damage, but doesn't ignore armour (need a critical for that). Say the first thug wasn't a thug at all but a militiaman with a spear (damage 8). The Resilience roll would be: 50 + ((11-(16-1) x5) = 30%. There's obviously quite a difference between weapon types. In this case a spear is very effective in expert hands vs. a lightly armoured foe. By contrast a normal hit with the spear would result in the same Resilience check as the Scimitar above -- 70% for the target to stay fighting, but without the bleeding effect.

Depends how many times you want to run the End of the World scenario. It lacks finality if you repeat it again with the same characters. That said, Moorcock himself did imagine a kind of spiral time where the end is also the beginning (see Stormbringer and also the Dancers at the End of Time). I reckon only a Champion of the Balance could survive more than one iteration of the End Times though.

The system doesn't do instant death. It does 'knocked out of the fight'. If you are bleeding out, you might not be very active at the time. I also incorporated bleeding into the system by using the BGB specials: a special attack (1/5) has the normal effect for the weapon, ie. Bleeding, Crushing, Entangling, Impaling or Knockback as per BGB pp.194-7, with the following changes: Bleeding Instead of inflicting extra hit points, it requires a Resilience check each subsequent round at the same level as the original, until staunched (see BGB p.195) Crushing Base damage increased to the maximum for the next damage bonus level, as per BGB p.195. Impaling Doubles max weapon damage, as per BGB p.196. Armour still counts.

As Atgxtg said, the HP of a character are already factored in as the Resilience roll. The higher your HP/Resilience, the more likely you are to stay in the fight after a blow. So on average a person with high Resilience will be able to take more blows before being knocked out (mirroring the normal system with hit points as much as possible). Being knocked out is a little bit like being reduced to 0 hit points in your system, except that the hitpointless system separates ability to keep fighting from degree of injury.

Looks great, thanks. Love a good Sword and Sorcery adventure. Have downloaded, will likely play.

My justification for it is that I based this system on Ray Turney's Fire and Sword, and he has given some thought to it already. From his (gold) design notes for the game: I'm using this system in a science-fantasy setting, so the magical healing in combat doesn't apply. I haven't yet adopted it for my fantasy game, but even there it is a low-magic setting where healing spells are uncommon.

Hard to base it on hit points in a hitpoint-less system! The heal spell as written heals 1d6 HP per 3 MP expended. So it is roughly equivalent for an average human (Resilience 10). The average roll of 1d6 is 3.5. Let's call it 3 to get a rough equivalence to the hit point system. 3/10 hp -- minor wound (walking wounded) 6/10 hp -- major wound (badly wounded) 9/10 hp -- unconscious (dying) 12/10 hp -- dead (dead) If you found it was a problem healing larger creatures, you could certainly scale up the magic point cost, relative to the hit points or resilience of the creature. I don't think this would come up in my games. I would simply say that healing is applied after the battle only; therefore the problem of bringing large creatures back into the fight wouldn't occur.

I would say Heal or first aid would be applied after the fight, before the injured person makes their recovery roll . Successful first aid roll improves the recovery roll success level by one, up to a maximum of 'success' (Walking Wounded). Therefore a successful First Aid means that a character can avoid immediate death. A special success first aid roll improves the success level by one; a critical success by two (in each case to a maximum of 'Healthy'). A Heal spell automatically improves the injury level; it costs 3 power points for each wound level, up to 'Healthy'. 12 points for a 'Dead' character (only possible with immediate attention after the fight) 9 points for a 'Dying' character 6 points for a 'Badly Wounded' 3 points for a 'Walking Wounded' Of course you could partially apply the Heal spell if you didn't have enough MPs to get someone to 'Healthy'. * based on Heal spell, BGB p. 98, also similar MP cost to Heal Wound in RQ3, p.118

Well that was an omission on my part if it wasn't clear. The CONx5 roll at the end of the fight is only for those who have failed a Resilience check and been knocked out of the fight earlier. Everyone else is assumed to be healthy enough, though they might have taken a scratch or two.

Maybe it was an enchanted sword -- the guy was fighting a dragon, after all!

How injured are you? At the end of the fight, make a CONx5 check: critical or special success – Healthy (knocked out by pain only) success – Walking Wounded failure – Badly Wounded special failure (failure with 1 or 2 on the units die) – Dying fumble – Dead Yes, you could die with one blow in this system. But first you'd have to: get hit by attacker fail to parry or dodge take the blow and fail a Resilience check and then roll a fumble So if all of that goes wrong for you, I guess it is literally Bad Luck. You can also die in one blow in the normal combat system with hit points. Since you roll after the fight I would allow successful First Aid rolls and so forth to help by raising the roll by one success level. In some ways this makes the system less fatal than the normal one. Remember that if you need to roll a Resilience check you have been hit by a weapon, and most likely injured in some way -- if you fail the check it means that you have at least been knocked unconscious or semi-conscious. The hitpointless system just triages these injuries into 'still able to fight' or not. All but the most bloodthirsty characters won't really care if their defeated opponents bleed to death on the battlefield or crawl away later to live out their lives quietly on a farm somewhere.

There's also the Ice Gnomes, the Invisibles of Stardock, and of course the Rats of Lankhmar below. -- Thanks to http://www.scrollsoflankhmar.com/rpgguide:nehwonmonsters

White magic is basically magic which avoids the hateful energies which make black magic more powerful and effective. In my campaign, different regions are more or less 'magical'. Divine magic (black or white) works better as you go further south.

I had no intention of being patronising. I've used chunks of Spider God's Bride in Nehwon (using Elric! rules) already (most recently 'Eidolon of the Ape' in Lankhmar city). It doesn't all translate but it's pretty good. I think the non-human races in Nehwon aren't really playable as characters. Having said that, I have had PCs in my campaign playing an elf, a centaur and a Quarmallian over the years. No Simorgyans though.

Correct, race generally equals species in many RPGs, but in the Sword and Sorcery genre (term coined by Leiber I believe) eg. Lankhmar, Conan or Elric, race often means different human cultures because humans dominate, and those cultures are given very stereotypical features which can translate to RPG mechanical differences. For example the Stygians in Conan are an old decadent sorcerous 'race'; the Pan Tangians are crazy Chaos worshippers (very boorish and crude ones according to the Melniboneans whose culture they try to imitate). RPG examples are Xoth from The Spider God's Bride and OpenQuest's The Savage North (these two are modelled on Conan). Some of the 'race'=culture stuff comes from the time these works were written, when skin colour and culture was regarded as unbridgeable differences between humans, the ultimate 'other'. In Nehwon, non-humans are very rare. Even the Quarmallians and Ghouls are described as very weird and isolated but mostly human societies. Fafhrd had a Ghoul girlfriend for a short while (Kreeshkra). Remember there's also the decadent Eastern empire of Eevanmarensee, where even the cats and dogs are hairless; the people of that kingdom are human but still weird and different from other Nehwonians. The Simorgyans may look human (?) but they are true aliens, and inimical to humankind. The flip side of all this is that there aren't any 'baddie' races like Orcs, the point being that in a dark and gritty world humans are bad enough.

It's more of a sword and sorcery setting, with different human races, rather than non-humans. Off the top of my head: Lankhmarts/Eight Cities folk, most common humans Mingols, wild horse (or sea!) raiders Northern barbarians, tough viking like warriors Easterners, Arabian/Asian cultured empires Quarmallians, tunnel-dwelling sorcerous race, former overlords Ghouls, transparent-skinned desert warriors You could add Simorgyans -- ancient watery nemesis race (Atlanteans/Deep Ones) To the distaste of some purists, I have elves in my campaign, a remnant of its D&D origins. However I treat them as an ancient, xenophobic semi-human race like the Quarmallians, with whom they are engaged in eternal cold war. They don't associate with humans and are unknown in Lankhmar or the northern lands.

A Resilience roll of 01-05 for named characters only is always successful (could make it 01 for anyone else). Success means keep fighting, failure means they are out of the fight at the end of the current combat round. A fumble always fails. So even big monsters can be felled that way. The rules as I wrote them say that a critical attack ignores armour; resulting Resilience check is also Difficult. But maybe halving the Resilience target would be better. Example The classic RQ3 Dragon (CON 35 SIZ 70, POW 20), it would have 53 hit points in RQ, and a Resilience of 42 faces a warrior with a long sword (damage 14*). The warrior scores a critical hit on the dragon A critical hit ignores armour and the long sword is an impaling weapon so it does double damage (24) Resilience roll for the dragon: As written: A difficult resilience roll. 50% + ((Resilience – damage) x 5%) half of 50 + ((42 - 24) x 5%) = 70% chance the dragon is still able to fight. OR A standard resilience roll with half the dragon's resilience 50% + ((half Resilience - damage) x 5%) 50 + ((21 - 24) x 5%) = 35% chance the dragon is still able to fight. Obviously the second way is more devastating. By contrast a normal hit from the warrior would be unlikely to do anything as armour would count so Resilience check would be probably be about 220%; only a fumble would bring the beast down. It looks like halving the target's Resilience on a critical might be a better approach than halving the Resilience roll. * calculated from max sword damage 1d8+2 plus max damage bonus, in this case 1d4

Yes, that is an effect for large critters - hence the huge thread about it. I think some sort of cumulative damage thing might be necessary for them -- which is annoying because it defeats one purpose of the system (to minimise bookkeeping). There needs to be some way of handling them though. I don't mind the 'cumulative damage for the combat round' approach I guess, though not overjoyed. However the system is modelled on human scale so for human vs. human it's quite possible to drop an opponent with one hit, and I'm happy with the way that works.

Yes it's not too bad. There is also an upcoming Lankhmar release from Goodman Games, who have recently crowdfunded a huge Lankhmar thing. Their system is 'Dungeon Crawl Classics' but I like to collect any Lankhmar-related RPG material.

BRP doesn't use hit locations by default. Neither does Magic World, and neither do I. This formula might work if you want to apply this system to hit locations though.

Hurrah! Another who recognises the wonderful nexus between Lankhmar and Magic World! (Well, in my case, Elric! MW's progenitor but the idea is the same.) I've been running a Nehwon campaign using these rules for more than 20 years. They are perfect for a 'low-but-powerful' (I like your phrasing there) magic, swords and sorcery campaign. My latest campaign notes are on Obsidian Portal if you are interested: https://nehwon.obsidianportal.com/ I've not yet run ghouls as either PCs or NPCs in my campaign, which has mostly taken place around the southern Lankhmar Continent and the Inner Sea, so I can't give any insights there. As for sorcery, I've always thought that Nehwon allowed for many magical traditions, but my game has boiled down to three: 1. basic 'battle magic' spells as written in Magic World 2. a freeform magic system based on the Maelstrom magick system, which I've talked about elsewhere on this forum and am always happy to go on about 3. an adaptation of RoleMaster's Spell Law, where players acquire aptitudes for spell 'lists', one per skill. This allows for very different magicians who nevertheless have a number of spells at their disposal. As for Allegiance, I use it as is with Law, Chaos and the Balance, albeit with less direct interference from those forces. However rather than awarding Chaos points for every use of magic, I do so only for particularly Chaotic reasons. However the accumulation of Chaos points is like the corruption gained from using black magic. This is sword and sorcery after all. I have had two characters in my campaigns achieve apotheosis: one for Chaos and one for Law. The Chaos one has basically become an NPC evil sorcerer villain. The Law one has reclaimed a kingdom from the Quarmall Barrens in the south.

Resilience (as opposed to HP) is the average of (CON + SIZ + POW); super huge creatures might not have high POW and therefore not as high Resilience as you might expect. Dragons, I suppose are the exception here, being traditionally tough, large and powerful. But dragonslaying has always been difficult in literature.