Questbird

I like Free League Games. I referee Coriolis: The Third Horizon and I own a physical copy of the rebooted Twilight 2000 and digital copies of Forbidden Lands and Vaesen. I'm eagerly awaiting their upcoming Blade Runner game. A friend of mine has The One Ring. They all look great. However I don't think I need another fantasy game. I have my Elric! and Magic World, and OpenQuest and Mythras Lyonesse. It's enough. I'll pass on Drakar och Demoner.

On 8/30/2022 at 1:43 AM, smiorgan said:

I've gamemastered quite a bit of Lankhmar - pure and pastiche - mostly with AD&D and a little bit with MRQ ( 😱). While I think Lankhmar is a very good fit for "generic" RQ  or BRP, I do not see it meshing with Gloranthan magic and religion at all. So, I might imagine adapting a few tombs, crypts from various Gloranthan adventures and possibly Raus' house from Pavis for an heist, but that's about it.

Mongoose RQ material for Lankhmar, while not outstanding,  is decent enough to be usable, especially the RQII version. If I were to run a Lankhmar game now that's what I would most probably use, rather than RQG. And for the adventures I'd rather convert old AD&D modules set in Lankhmar, or the Savage Worlds scenarios (probably not DCC RPG Lankhmar, whose "tone" and interpretation of the setting irritates me mightily).

Gloranthan material is about the last thing I would consider adapting.      

 

 

Well, I happened to have that 'River of Cradles' supplement and I liked it, and I didn't want to start a Gloranthan campaign. So I adapted it, and in this case it was fine. The dry wasteland ('Vulture Country') to the east of the Zola Fel valley fit quite well for me with the Quarmall Barrens in the SE Lankhmar continent.

I also have Dorastor, but I wouldn't touch that one with a ten foot pole for Nehwon.

As for gods and magic, one character from the Zebra riding tribe, an advocate of Storm Bull eventually made it back to Lankhmar. He even found a struggling priest of Storm Bull in the Street of the Gods there, whom he helped to advance up the street. One more god in the Street of the Gods makes little difference. I just ruled that their powers were greater in the south of Nehwon, nearer to Godsland.

Quote

 

The gods in Lankhmar (that is, the gods and candidates for divinity who dwell or camp, it may be said, in the Imperishable City, not the gods of Lankhmar — a very different and most secret and dire matter)…the gods in Lankhmar sometimes seem as if they must be as numberless as the grains of sand in the Great Eastern Desert.

— Lean Times in Lankhmar

 

 

On 4/23/2020 at 9:49 PM, Lloyd Dupont said:

Mm... I think I only understand today what this thread was about..

I guess this was supposed to be a game mechanic description of Moorcock's imaginary world...
Now it might not fit your imaginary vision as a GM! 😮

 

Correct. Moorcock's work was very much about the conflict between those forces shaping the multiverse. But it is useful for any system which has Good and Evil or Light and Dark (eg. Tolkien, The Dark is Rising), especially since there is a more life-centred Balance option too.

I still use the system in a more gritty Swords and Sorcery setting, just because I quite like it rather than because it's especially fitting.

As a follow-up to this thread I admit I have been quite impressed with the DCC Lankhmar adventures, in spite of low expectations. I have run Violence for Votishal and am in the middle of running (using Elric! rules, not DCC) a somewhat changed version of Unholy Nights in Lankhmar. They certainly have the Lankhmar feel, moreso than most TSR or Mongoose Lankhmar adventures I've run. (I've got, but haven't run, some Savage Worlds Lankhmar modules too).

[I posted this years ago on another site, which I recently noticed had disappeared into the vortex. I recovered it from the Wayback Machine and thought I might as well post it here. It's not exactly a Glorantha post, nor exactly RQ3 but it concerns adapting the River of Cradles/Zola Fel setting.]

I have the old 'Curse of Cthulhu' campaign (3306, ISBN 0-933635-74-5) which is the same campaign with some expanded bits.

Quote

Curse of Cthulhu contains material that was originally presented in earlier publications titled Fungi from Yuggoth and Trail of Tsathoggua, now out of print [in 1990, when this was published]. Curse of Cthulhu also contains two new adventures and six full-color pages of illustration.

 

I started running this campaign in 2004, did a few sessions, and resumed on and off between 2014-2020. I played the two optional adventures ('The Case' and 'Wail of the Witch') and four parts of the campaign proper: 'The Dreamer', 'The Thing in the Well', 'Castle Dark' and 'Sands of Time'. I documented the later adventures on my Obsidian Portal page.

On 7/24/2022 at 2:01 AM, Tentacled Whisperer said:

I keep hoping for foundry support for MW as it looks the most likely way to bring stormbringer to the foundry VTT with its lack of proprietry entanglements

 

Roll20 has support for both Magic World and Elric! character sheets

On 6/18/2022 at 4:03 AM, soltakss said:

Thread tennis has always been an issue.

I generally ignore it, unless it generates good ideas.

Unless, of course, I am playing thread tennis, in which case it is vitally important to get my point of view across, time and time and time again.

 

 

 

If I have a point to make, I try to make it once.

However recently I've been posting less because I'm not playing any BRP games at the moment. I'm only playing online still and the few games I am playing aren't BRP*. I feel I have less to contribute here currently, but I'm sure the wheel will turn eventually.

* As we are in Alastor's Skull Inn I can reveal that I'm playing a couple of D&D5e games and refereeing Coriolis: The Third Horizon, but even those sessions have been a bit thin on the ground recently.

On 4/13/2022 at 1:33 AM, andresni said:

New here and partially to BRP (only played in a few BRP derived games).

Since I love tinkering, and want to run some BRP in the near future, I've been hacking together some different variants of BRP and Mothership (which isn't really BRP I guess). One thing both of them miss is a death spiral, or at least the kind where you get weaker as you take on the weight of pain/chaos/depression, what have you.

For Mothership it's easy to add such a mechanic. Just let damage hit your strength, sanity hits your intellect, and fear/trauma hits... a new stat. For BRP though, it's not so easy.

Three ideas:

1) a negative attribute that is subtracted from every roll. Increases math as one has to subtract something and calculate levels of success.

2) do like mothership where each skill adds to a core characteristic/skill, e.g. to punch someone roll strength + brawl, or General fighting skill (e.g. Str+dex/2) + brawl. Taking physical damage lowers strength or the general fighting skill. This gets crunchy as in option 1, and/or requires redoing some skills and characteristics

3) use wound levels like in Savage worlds, and add a disadvantage for each wound. Increases number of rolls. Unclear how to do damage.

Other thoughts? Any BRP game that has a 'proper' death spiral?

 

 

One BRP way you could use is Fatigue points (optional rule on BGB p.20 and p.32).

Crunchy way is that you have a maximum FATIGUE of (STR+CON). You normally spend 1 Fatigue point per combat round. You could add a Fatigue point per injury sustained, or per hit point of damage if you want a rapid decline. When your Fatigue goes negative, you suffer "-1% penalty to all skill, characteristic and resistance rolls for every negative point of fatigue." When you reach negative your maximum Fatigue you are incapable of action.

Simpler way is not to have Fatigue points at all. After CONx3 rounds of combat all skills become Difficult. After CONx4 rounds you need to make a Stamina roll to even attempt a physical skill, and all skills are at ¼ normal skill rating. At CONx10 rounds you need to make a Difficult Stamina roll to complete any action and the maximum skill level is POWx1.

You could adapt the penalties for the simpler way to relate to wound level. For example, wounded but less than half HP could use the CONx3 penalty, half or more HP could use the CONx4 penalty; majorly wounded or down to 1-2 HP could use the CONx10 penalty.

On 3/19/2022 at 6:07 AM, Atgxtg said:

If I were building a BRP variant I'd consider making shield block an EASY skill, that is it would be rolled at double value. At least for the locations that would get "cover" in RQ3 terms. That would make shields much more useful, and also reflect the fact that it is really easy to interpose a shield in front of an incoming weapon. 

 

I like the simplicity of that. Shields have a lot of advantages in these games but it shouldn't be necessary to 'sell' them to players. So many historical cultures used shields; there must have been an advantage for doing so.

On 3/9/2022 at 5:28 PM, Graeme P said:

If you are happy to go back to the 1610s then River of Cradles has a great advanture which is for beginning characters and introduces the PCs to Raus Fort, so it and then Borderlands would work well.  In my view a campaign with Sandheart, Sun County and Shadows would be large enough on its own to not need to be intertwined with these.  Those three also work better with characters from predominantly sun-worshipping and associated cults.

If your group want to keep running their existing characters and so you are in the 1620s then it makes sense to have a new  Argrath-friendly replacement to Raus.  I imagine that the early adventures would require more work than the later ones, but who is to say that the new person in charge desn't have a headstrong daughter...?  As a start, being an ally of Argrath would change the interaction with the nomads.

Wherever the most fun is to be had is the direction to head towards.

 

The 'Troubled Waters' campaign in River of Cradles was a great introduction to the whole Zola Fel region (though I didn't run it in Glorantha). My players did that whole campaign and one adventure from 'Shadows on the Borderlands' (the Dyksund Caverns). They started the 1st adventure in Borderlands after that, but they didn't care for Duke Raus and his Lunar connection, so they left his service at Horn Gate.

On 2/23/2022 at 8:18 AM, JRE said:

RQ: G, for me has an aspect that does not appear in the essay, that I would call "The tiranny of the setting", or "The one true Glorantha", typical of games where the very rich setting creates its own set of constraints. It can be played as Traditional, but if the GM tries to adhere to the setting, that reduces her agency, with the benefit of better compatibility with other players and with future supplements. Other games also have this problem, and the degree of adherence to the "Canon" can be used to challenge the GMs authority, something unusual within a traditional game. 

I will go further and propose that rich settings have the setting as a kind of assistant GM, as they make the work of the GM easier, at the expense of lost agency, and usually high money expense, to get all supplements. Like Gloranthan gods, limited to their Godtime actions.

 

The cost is not only measured in money for those supplements; the GM must also read and synthesise all that material, which takes time. Hopefully the time invested is paid back by the immersiveness of the setting in play.

22 hours ago, Bill the barbarian said:

Anyone remember Irilian? This is the one that got away. Would have love to play this bad boy! A city module delivered over 5 or 6 issues or WD for A DnD.

 

 

Yes! I ran that one for my players. I got it out of 'The Best of White Dwarf'. I set the town in Nehwon up the Hlal from Lankhmar, near the Mountains of Darkness. It was a really atmospheric town in decay, and the way it was introduced over those 5 or 6 episodes was really good. It was AD&D but it would suit a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay vibe too (or any dark fantasy really). One of my favourite fantasy cities.

19 hours ago, Nikoli said:

Interesting! Looking at the quickstart, I noticed the game uses stats from 1 to 5, and a pool of successes for each 6 rolled. In opposed rolls, opponent 6s cancel out your own.

 

Yes it uses a dice pool system of Attribute + Skill dice with a target of 6. For BRP you would use skill checks and opposed rolls. If you are using dice checks you don't really need cards as an additional randomiser.

19 hours ago, Nikoli said:

The game has cards available, too. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/336970/CORIOLIS-Combat-and-Space-Combat-Action-Cards
Probably just to speed things up. 

 

Yes, they are similar to the Mythras combat actions cards, just showing the options available for each crew station. I suppose it's because ship-to-ship combat might be rarer than personal combat (though in my game the opposite has been true). I don't use them.

19 hours ago, Nikoli said:

 

 

The science-fiction game I've been playing is not M-SPACE unfortunately, but Coriolis: The Third Horizon. It has a pretty good space combat system which I won't detail here in this BRP thread, but I will mention some of the points which make it work, and which might be translatable into M-SPACE or another BRP variant.

The game is built around a group which owns a spaceship, so there are shipboard roles for all the PCs. This is achieved by having a small set of generic and transferrable skills in the game. Eg. PILOT is for all types of vehicles, including spaceships. RANGED COMBAT works for small arms and ship's guns (so your 'grunt' can also be your gunner). TECHNOLOGY allows you to be a shipboard engineer and an electronics tinkerer. And DATA DJINN (the game's hacking skill) is also used for sensor operation (I usually allow some bonus from OBSERVATION, the game's 'Spot Hidden' skill too). There's also COMMAND skill which is used quite ingeniously to make others' skill rolls easier, if they do what you 'command' them to do. So nearly all the PCs will have some role in a space combat, depending on their skills. I think something similar happens with the Star Wars game Edge of Empire. It's important from an RPG point of view to have as many players engaged as possible during a space battle.

Each turn your engine generates Energy Points (EPs) which your Captain allocates between the various shipboard roles. Usually there are plenty to go around but sometimes you might want to particularly emphasise one area, eg. evasive action. Then each role gets a chance to do one action, in a specific order, which uses up some EPs.  A lot of the ship's capability comes down to the skill of the crew, and good choices of actions and tactics.

Distances are abstract, expressed in distance from the enemy ship. The relative range can be altered by fancy PILOTING rolls on either side. Some weapons are more effective at different ranges. This system works fine with two ships, maybe gets a little awkward with more (but I've run it with 3 no problem).

Like M-SPACE the ships are composed of modules, some of which have certain effects in combat. Ships can also have special enhancements and flaws like turbo thrusters or a flaky computer, which can influence their performance in combat.

Ships have Energy Points and Hull Points. Some weapons affect either, or occasionally both. The ships in Coriolis don't have 'energy shields' like in Star Wars or Star Trek.

A lot of Antarctica is below sea level, corresponding with the 'Atlantean' bits of your map @svensson

So if something does happen to the ice, eg. the Thwaites "Doomsday" Glacier, we could get closer to the 'Atlantis' version above pretty quickly.

Nice map, but also a contemporary possibility in the real world.

6 hours ago, tooley1chris said:

So you get to attack until you miss and get very sleepy afterwards. But do attacks still have their % cut following each after the first? Couldn't you do that without a spell?

RIGHTEOUS FURY (5)
Range: Touch
Resisted: No
The caster must possess a positive Light 
Allegiance score. This spell may only be 
cast when knowingly facing a follower of 
Shadow. Once cast, for the duration of the 
caster’s POW in combat rounds, the target 
may continue to make attack rolls until they 
miss. The first such attack is on the character’s normal DEX rank, the next on the next 
lowest rank, and so on until any miss result 
is rolled. The character may not Dodge or 
Parry.

 

I don't think your attack roll is reduced on each roll with this spell. It is Parrying which is reduced each time you do it.

This spell basically lets you attack as many times in a round as you have DEX, until you fail -- which is beyond the abilities of a Master warrior. But it's magic, innit?

1 hour ago, Barak Shathur said:

Which, again, is why I like RQ3's weapons system, where maces halve the AP of mail and warhammers punch through plate by impaling, just as it should be.

 

"Maces halve the AP of mail". I like this simple rule. It's easy to remember and apply to all BRP games.

10 minutes ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

Thanks for the info.

BTW since we are talking about Roll20.. I understand it's quite popular.
In my spare time I am working on a mapping application, what if I want to share it on Roll20? Do I just need to export to png/jpg?

 

Yes, pretty much. I've just used roll20 since the pandemic, to play D&D5e and Coriolis: The Third Horizon. The GM constructs screens which have layers, a bit like a limited Photoshop. There's a map layer, a tokens layer and a GM overlay layer. The map layer has the graphic -- your .png file and you can add a grid if you want. It's kinda zoomable too by anyone. The token layer is where you put little moveable images, like how you would use miniatures. Players can control those if the GM gives them that ability. Then the GM layer is where you can do things like have GM-only visible things like notes about the map, or have blocks of greyed-out shaders which make parts of the map invisible to players.

1 hour ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

"VTT"?!
What's that?

 

Virtual Table Top

Things like Roll20, Astral etc. Usually a set of tools which let the gamemaster display shared maps or images with tokens that the players can control, as well as zoom-like chat and videoconferencing. There's also usually dice rollers and interactive character sheets to make the bureaucracy of running a game a bit smoother.

There are some diverse collections by a mob called Heroic Maps at https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/5371/Heroic-Maps . I've used them for sci-fi games but there are plenty of fantasy options too. Not free though.

For dungeons and locations, there are some fantastic isometric view maps in Trilemma Adventures https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/286792/Trilemma-Adventures-Compendium-Volume-I . They look interesting, and 3d-style maps is something you can use more easily on a virtual tabletop than face-to-face. I'm all for pushing the strengths of virtual gaming when you are using it.

Just my 2c. I'm sure there are other good sources too.

I finally saw the movie and allowed myself to read this thread 🙂

I really enjoyed it. I was surprised at how similar some scenes were to the Lynch version. Probably because those scenes were well-described in the book. I loved the ornithopters and the rendering of Arrakeen. I did find the music a bit too loud at times (though I saw it in IMAX, so it could be just that it was turned up to 11) and overwhelmed the dialogue on at least one occasion.

On 11/15/2021 at 2:24 PM, Ian Absentia said:

@soltakss noted his book for Legend up above:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/139266/Legend-Land-of-Ice-and-Stone

Not exactly BRP, but d100 and a kissing cousin.

!i!

 

And for non-BRP but still Chaosium there's also Würm

2 hours ago, g33k said:

There's The Expanse (books) & The Expanse (tv show); looks to be pretty close.

Proto-EclipsePhase (one of its primary inspirations) "Altered Carbon," also in book-or-tv formats.

Several of the OP's "inspriations" RPGs could very easily be run with their existing rule-sets as "THIS setting, all except for THAT element that I don't want," e.g.:

EP is even d100-based, and ALMOST a BRP-compatible game...  b-u-t not quite!

 

Yes I have several of those games. I think I already have enough material from all of them to make a setting and game. Just haven't done so yet. And I have to bring my players along too.