Questbird

I thought the EPUB was great: fast to load, good quick table of contents. More RPG stuff should be in that format. Thanks Gianni!

It's well-written with nice illustrations. It gives detail and adventures for certain Dreamlands locations including Sarkomand, Sarnath, Lhosk, Iquanok, Ulthar, Illek-Vad and the Underworld; all tied together by a plot which is simultaneously railroady and open-ended. In this it's quite similar to The Dreaming Stone, which I played as a fantasy campaign. There are other similarities too. Each has the investigators transported physically to the Dreamlands, ultimately at the whim of Nyarlathotep, and seeking a way home, beset with complications. Certainly you could use the material in other Dreamlands campaigns, or cherry-pick the adventures. I would be more likely to do that than run the campaign exactly as written. I have three dreamers who may one day be reunited for more adventures, though one has since died in the waking world, and another is a space navigator from another galaxy.

Well, you had a choice of playing a pensioner with several skills or a strapping young person with just a few. Also you could kiss goodbye your chance of getting a starship if you retired young.

I remember reading an early draft of it before it was a kickstarter. It is interesting, but I agree it has a very railroady start -- to the extent that you would probably want to run it as a standalone campaign rather than use regular investigators. But I do like the Dreamlands as a setting and I use it quite a bit. There's not much campaign material out there so I tend to accumulate it, and I might have another look at The Sense... I played the Dreaming Stone campaign in a fantasy context. (It was also a little railroady, as written; maybe authors need to find a way to 'imprison' characters in the Dreamlands for a time). My curiosity was aroused so I bought Sense of the Sleight of Hand Man in pdf form yesterday.

I pretty much did this. I ran the River of Cradles (RQ3) campaign and pasted a chunk of Prax geography (flora, fauna, tribes, cults etc) right into underexplored southern Nehwon, using Elric! rules. I didn't have much material about Big Rubble at the time, but I can see how it and Pavis could be a glorious sandbox. Some things changed of course -- in my case the wider Lunar Empire became a lot smaller and more constrained (i imagined it as a mountain-based kingdom like the Inca). But it was great fun.

Celestial Empire is also worth a read for status and its effects. Basically once your 'honour' drops below a certain level you can only exist as an outlaw. In a Japanese style culture you might even be required to kill yourself if your honour drops too low (kind of like your SAN dropping to 0 in Call of Cthulhu). That should help impress on your players the importance of honour in your setting! Mechanically, I reckon using Allegiance is fine. Have 2 scores: Honour and Dishonour. Problems start when Dishonour is higher than Honour. Societal benefits happen when Honour is 20 points higher than Dishonour. Asking favours from your superiors costs you Honour points (like 'face'); you could even trade Honour points in this way.

Healing in D&D comes mainly from highly available healing spells/potions, which are so ubiquitous that no one ever heals naturally. So you could make healing spells equally easy to come by in BRP... or you could just relax into the BRP ways of fast and dangerous combats which aren't necessarily the best ways to solve problems (unless you are a swashbuckling master). As Mankcam says, mook NPCs (however you run them) will basically fight until they take one blow and then lie on the ground screaming. So that's one way to allow lots of swashbuckling without (hopefully) too much damage for your PCs. Some variants of BRP allow double hit points for players (CON+SIZ instead of (CON+SIZ)/2) for heroic Conan-like battles, which is sort of the opposite of the mook approach. You can also use some sort of morale system: fight your way through a few mooks on the deck until you get to the Captain; fight a serious battle with him and if you win the mooks surrender/jump into the sea. The main difference between combat in D&D vs BRP is that tough and skilled fighters will cut a swathe through lesser ones in both systems, but in BRP the lone tough fighter is more likely to be brought down eventually by overwhelming numbers and/or lucky blows from his enemies.

Coming from D&D (I assume..) your players may miss the rush of the experience point handout at the end of the adventure and 'levelling up'. Instead, you can hand out experience checks for skills which have been used, and optionally Allegiance points or checks (if you use for your game), Fate points (if you have a particularly dangerous campaign), or some kind of Status reward (like allegiance but to a particular cult, guild, temple or faction with which the players have interacted positively). As skill checks are the major 'reward' for the end of a session, some players will try to use all sorts of wacky skills to get a check. You'll also get a bit of 'me too' skill checks where everyone wants to try a skill roll. Some referees get annoyed by this but I'd say, let them. They'll grow out of it, and they may think of solving in-game problems in some new ways. BRP adventurers are generalists, or they become so thanks to the skill check system. As mentioned above, fighting is more deadly and it takes longer to recover from wounds, so don't necessarily plan for as much fighting as you would have in a D&D adventure. There's also no direct experience reward for fighting, so you'll probably find players become a bit more smart about avoiding fights they don't need.

+1 for Dolphin

It was done pretty well in Corum too; no actual magic just perfectly crafted objects. I like the rest of your list though.

Nader Atassi (Darth Nader):

Mythic Iceland does allegiance to specific deities and religions, rewarding high allegiance with certain powers. Celestial Empire also does well at representing allegiance to multiple (real-world historical) religions. I use allegiance to power priests' magic: 1 power point from the priest and the rest from his allegiance points to his god. Even if you run a no-magic campaign you can exchange X allegiance points for a favour from your temple or tribe.

I really enjoyed playing the River of Cradles campaign (the RQ 3 version). Its conclusion took place in the Big Rubble, but I remember being disappointed that it didn't have more detail about the rest of the area.

Or even Elric! (still my game choice).

Today's 'original settings' are tomorrow's licensed intellectual properties. The difference is merely degrees of reputation and potential income. Glorantha itself is an example of a game world which has turned into a licensing behemoth. M. A. R. Barker's Tekumel is another which seems to me rather precious about its licensing to the extent that no one can actually make a game of it. Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars books are out of copyright even in the United States, but still a company manages to hold on to John Carter et al. as trademarks, making game production difficult. There are some great and original settings for BRP written by the fine folks on this forum: The Green and Swords of Cydoria are two of my personal favourites, but of course there are others. Those two were published (but unfortunately, not particularly supported) by Chaosium. I guess if those settings were ever to become wildly popular, their authors (I cannot speak for them) might also riddle them with trademarks, licensing agreements and intellectual property tags. Though I hope not.

Cthulhu Rising is great for hard sci fi. I bought it (and Jovian Nightmares) to use for a hard sci-fi no-FTL game in our future Solar System. (I was going to dump the Cthulhu stuff). I haven't run that game yet, but one day. The psionics rules were good too, reminiscent of Traveller. I did use those. Speaking of complete BRP games by John Ossoway, what about River of Heaven? That would have a dotted line from OpenQuest I guess.

This poor Magic World forum has already been relegated to the 'Other Fine d100 games' section.

Well, the site is called basicroleplaying.org so there is probably a bit of bias here

Holy crap, that looks like Rolemaster! I'm a fan of the resistance table (I use it for my hitpointless combat) but..uhh...this looks complicated.

Thanks. Simple is best for BRP!

I happily use Spell Law in my BRP games. I treat each spell list as a particular magical skill, which can increase with use as normal. To cast a spell you roll your skill - (spell level x5%). Magic point cost is the spell level if it works, or 1 if it doesn't. As your skill increases in each list you automatically gain access to the harder spells in the list. Works quite nicely, and the diversity of the spell lists allows you to make very different spell casters. For Channeling spells (equivalent of Runequest Divine spells) they automatically work. The magic point cost is 1 from the caster and the rest from Allegiance points to your god (go do some deeds your deity approves of to get more). For Mentalism spells there's no magic point cost. You use (POW - spell level) x5 to see if it works. If it doesn't you get more and more Fatigued, as per BGB p.32 (except I added one level). If you want to learn to cast the most powerful Mentalism spells in Spell Law you'd better work on increasing your POW. Fatigue levels: Psychically drained: Mentalism skill rolls Difficult Tired: All skill rolls Difficult (equiv. CONx3 rounds of physical exertion) Spent: Stamina roll required for any activity; skills at one quarter normal (equiv. CONx4 rounds of physical exertion) Exhausted: Difficult Stamina roll for any activity; skills max = POW x 1 (equiv. CONx10 rounds of physical exertion)

The average of 3D6 is about 10 or 11. Player characters are generally assumed to be above average, so they roll 2D6+6, which changes the average a bit. So Rurik is of average intelligence for the normal population, and possibly a bit less intelligent than the 'average adventurer'.

As one of those older gamers you mention, I do have more disposable income than I did in the 80s. I still regret not buying Beyond the Mountains of Madness when I saw a copy in print. But at the time it was $80 (this was in the 90s) which was expensive then, and I had lots of unplayed Call of Cthulhu campaigns (and still do). I do buy new and 'vintage' RPG products more readily than I would have back then. Still, there are constraints. Shelf space is one, and currency conversion rates, and shipping. I'd have to think about a $120 super Magic World bundle. It's not out of the question. For my ultra RPG product I would look for a well-written large scale campaign in a setting which could be slotted in somewhere -- not a whole world. I'm not particularly interested in a megadungeon, unless it has a really good reason for existence. I would want Magic World statted NPCs and creatures, cults etc. Location maps and maybe player handouts (Cthulhu style). Examples of what I'm talking about: The River of Cradles (Runequest 3), The Traveller Adventure (GDW), Masks of Nyarlathotep (Call of Cthulhu), Against the Giants (AD&D). I understand the 'Enemy Within' Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay campaign was also pretty kickass, though I've not played or GM'd that one.

He's not cheap and he'll never work for free. But he's still around, still working. He is doing illustrations for the Fabled Lands kickstarter The Serpent King's Domain.

When you mentioned you were converting the Fiend Folio I chimed in, but lost the post. I enthused about the Githyanki, Githzerai, Slaad, Death Knights and Sons of Kyuss, many of which were written by Charles Stross (who later wrote some interesting science-fiction and The Laundry I believe). Another reason to like them was that they were illustrated by Russ Nicholson in the original book.