Questbird

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.

A variation on this topic is described in Accelerando by Charles Stross. The starship is the size of a box of Coke cans and contains the uploaded personalities of a number of crew, who exist in a virtual world on board. This solves the problem of acceleration to high speeds and keeping meat bodies alive, though not the one of colonising an alien world at the destination. (In the book the starship was journeying to meet an alien router).

You can also use fate or hero points to change rolls or avert death. Do skill increase and allegiance checks at the end of every session but award fate points at the conclusion of each chapter (kinda like the experience points in Paizo).

It's not more work at all. You don't roll damage -- you use the maximum for the weapon, adjusted for armour (don't roll that either). You roll a resistance roll of baddie's HP vs. the damage. Success - keep fighting; failure - Down for the Count. No more tracking how many nicks each pirate has received. I don't particularly care if some NPC pirate is going to have ugly scarring or long-term breathing difficulties from a major wound either. I guess it depends if you are a fan of the Resistance Table or not. You still track players' health (they use average of POW+SIZ+CON instead of just HP to resist damage), but you only find out how healthy they are after the fight. Your suggestion also abstracts out HP -- but only for the players. It creates even more bookkeeping for the Chronicler who now has to track players' hitpoints secretly as well as run the adventure.

I can give a partial report on this. While en route from Tagrum to Pyrnis via the Strangling Sea, the aeroship Tears of Chador was ambushed from the clouds above by a fast pirate aeroflyer. Nine pirates were aboard armed with cutlasses and ballistic pistols (powered by compressed air), and their captain was a skilled pilot who soon closed. Unfortunately for the pirates, the Tears of Chador was transporting a group of Norukarians, well-equipped with alien weapons. Two Norukarian nobles and their bodyguards had Plasma Pistols, and a cyberdroid (one of the PCs) was armed with the expedition's registered Plasma Rifle. Others had ballistic weapons. So, the results were somewhat one-sided. The plasma weapons had greater range and maximum damage than the ballistics, and were aimed with good skills. The pirates had wore ineffective armour. Within two rounds, five of the pirates had been taken out, and the pirate aeroship disengaged. My observations: 1) It was quick to resolve the fight and continue play. I didn't have to use any special 'mook' rules to achieve the same effect. 2) It was easy to keep track of the pirates -- nine boxes; when I crossed them off, they were out of the fight. After a while of being punished their captain decided to flee 3) Because in this case the pirates were outgunned I can't yet say how the system will work in a 'fairer' fight. (But no one says life or RPGs are fair...) More as the campaign continues...

There's various in-play ways players can find out about the powers of items. Research, legends, oracles, dreams, visions, lore. But then, my campaigns are generally low-magic and I tend to use only a few special magic items in my campaigns, each with history and a reason for existence. For the equivalent of a D&D +1 sword, I would just say it's particularly sharp or well-made or something and tell the player as soon as they used it in combat or inspected it with some sort of craft skill. Your mentalists might be able to get some insight into an item (past owners, powers, a vision of a dramatic moment in the item's past) by handling it.

In a Classic Fantasy campaign I've been playing, one of the characters had a special power. He was a barbarian and he could do a Power Shout or something once or thrice (I can't remember) a day. He would make a POW x5 check for it to work and if it did it would stun a whole rank of enemies. Unfortunately he only had 8 POW...

I have a lot of Harn stuff and have used it in the past with Maelstrom and Dragon Warriors games. It's probably the closest thing to a recreation of medieval (not really renaissance) Europe on a different planet. It's a very detailed setting for politics etc. but very specific to itself. The religions are quite nicely done, and fairly easy to transplant to other settings. There is a lot of outdoors in Harn, though once again fairly world-specific.

I agree you have to be careful with magic systems. Desired magic level is usually quite specific to campaigns. Having said that I have quite happily integrated Rolemaster's Spell Law into my low-magic Elric! campaign. Spell Law has many spell lists and uses a level-based spell system but it's easy to convert. Each list becomes a magical skill, which increases by experience as usual. I give the spell caster access to all of the spells in the list, but at a penalty to cast of 5% per spell level. The magic points to cast is equal to the spell level. The good thing about this is that you can make very diverse wizards (different mixes of magical skills) but they don't have to grub about for every individual spell (which in my experience tends to make wizards rather one-dimensional like a superhero with a single power). If they improve in their skill they get access to (or rather, gain the skill to cast) more spells, which in Spell Law are often just variations or improvements on the original effects anyway. And there's my beloved Maelstrom magic system too, but that's another story.

But I still play Elric! because I think the physical size of the rulebook is perfect. For me, Magic World is just a little too big, and the BGB is way too big. That is a great set of hard science-fiction rules in the vein of Alien. It's probably under-appreciated because of the Cthulhu title (most people probably play Call of Cthulhu in the 1920s because of the volume of source material). You can leave the Cthulhoid stuff out of Cthulhu Rising with no problem (maybe a name-change would be required; you'd have to call it Rising ;-). I would like to run a sci-fi game set in the Solar System (no FTL, no hyperspace) and it's good for that. I've used its good psionics rules too, sort of BRP meets Traveller.

I always said that about Elric! and I still play it.

Well it's not *quite* Barsoom, but I can heartily recommend Swords of Cydoria for some sword and planet swashbuckling feel. It has monsters, aeroships, blasters and swords. I have started a Cydorian campaign, though it is but a fledgling, so I can't exactly say how it will turn out. (It is visible at https://rebels-of-cydoria.obsidianportal.com). One decision I made for that campaign was to try a hitpointless combat system (detailed elsewhere on this forum). Swords of Cydoria recommended a 'total hit points' option but I prefer to try my hitpointless system for the same reason: to allow heroic blazing gunfights and swords to co-exist in the same battle. (Gunfights in BRP are mostly messy and very unheroic). The Runequest Firearms PDF could be useful too. So far the Swords of Cydoria monograph has been sufficient, though I might use some material from the Chronicle of Future Earth. For Barsoom that might be handy for the sense of an ancient and senescent civilisation. However I can't think of anything particular in COFE that I'd use.

The publishers of the Harn game world tried that approach - making everything fit into 3-ring binders. I've tried the same thing with my campaign notes in the past. However, in my experience it does not work: material just accumulates beyond the ability of a single binder to contain.

Thanks Pansophy. I got your program working on Linux (Debian 8) with the addition of one more library: pyqt4-dev-tools, which provided pyuic4. It looks good -- great work. Do you have a github (or similar) account to enable people to make code contributions? I've worked with Python but not so much with Qt. The only suggestion that came to mind when I looked at it would be to allow different groups of BRP options to be enabled for particular games. For example I believe Swords of Cydoria, Rubble and Ruin and maybe Classic Fantasy (I) have lists of Big Gold Book options used. Thanks again for putting in the time for this, and for delivering a real cross-platform solution.

A few years ago I found our roleplaying sessions were being crowded out by boardgames so I organised a monthly roleplaying-only session. It would be nice to play more but we all have families, other commitments etc. However having a regular fixed session has been good for other reasons. The 'show must go on' on RPG night, which helps faltering campaigns, wannabe GMs, tired GMs, disorganised GMs and occasionally trying new games or one-off adventures.

I took the same path. I came from AD&D to Elric! (one of Magic World's parents) and found it not only easy, but easy to never go back to D&D.

My biggest problem with the BGB is the first 'B'. It's just too Big for my taste, for the core rules I use from it. Magic World is better, but the size and quantity (ie. 1) of the old Elric! rulebook is just right for me. (That publication also contained statted NPCs, a small bestiary, an adventure and setting information for the Young Kingdoms.) But I find I usually only need to reference a few pages of the BGB anyway. Swords of Cydoria and Rubble and Ruin are two others I've bought physical copies of which are of similar size and therefore pleasing to me.

Huzzah for the monograph authors and their content! :-)

I agree, but this tells me more about the dysfunction which formerly reigned at Chaosium than about the continuing validity of the monograph publishing model.

The monograph idea was interesting and it did allow a way of getting non-Cthulhu content out there when the company was really struggling, but it dragged on too long.

Vent des Steppes était très bon (et merci!). Je pense Uruk sera bon aussi. Courage!

I don't have a problem with having three forces. Characters always have choices and the allegiance points represent the consequences of those choices. Even if you accumulate a lot of points for one force or the other, you are never *required* to swear allegiance to that force (though agents of the force may increasingly try to woo you to their side once and for all). Balance is difficult to achieve not because you have to do equal amounts of Chaotic and Lawful deeds, but because it is just hard to always act in a way that is true and free and human -- just as in the Elric saga, and in real life. In my long-running Nehwon campaign I have had 2 characters which have achieved Apotheosis: one for Law and one for Chaos (see the Apotheosis thread). But no one has ever become a Champion of the Balance, though some have tried. One reason is that serving the Balance is more of a roleplaying reward than a mechanistic one -- the min/maxers will always prefer the rewards of Law or Chaos. This is as it should be. Allegiance points are a good mechanistic way of rewarding *consistency* of behaviour (ie. roleplaying in character).

I agree, though I don't ban them at my table. People get distracted by their phones (as always). I like to use an e-reader or tablet -- something fairly nondescript -- if I have to for a pdf reference or adventure. I've also written adventure notes, converted them to EPUB format and popped them on my ereader for use in session. Advantage of that is it's quite quick and the ereader is good at paging back and forth quickly and conserving power (PDF *not* so good).

Well, my French is bad, but interesting setting idea, so thanks for posting.