Questbird

I still prefer the Elric! layout and compactness, and -yes @K Peterson, 'hanging togetherness'. The two-page spread chart about how to make a character is a thing of beauty, for example. However for bright young things wanting to try BRP for fantasy gaming, Magic World is still around (just unsupported).

They did trigger it -- it was some kind of psychological sentry. But Blake snapped out of it because the Federation had been messing with his brain so much that he didn't have any scary memories to freeze him.

My group of Elric! players solved this problem by switching to WFRP when we played the Enemy Within campaign.

There's an Isaac Asimov story (a pretty good one) called "Profession" about a future society where people get 'taped' -- skills are instantly implanted in their brains. The Matrix and Cyberpunk's 'skill chips' use a similar idea. In a high-tech society the huge amount of technical knowledge might be widely available and stored in various galactic databases. Rather than worrying about your base skill in this and your specialised skill in that, imagine you are an engineer on a particular starship. You download a specific set of ship systems skills into your brain by chip/psychic power/alien technology and immediately you have 100% skill in each relevant system. Go to another ship though, and your knowledge is not so great. The "Profession" story examines a society where people don't learn skills from first principles at all. @Lloyd Dupont you could use these 'chipped' skills as your Knowledge slots.

Good luck, and Melbourne ain't that bad (well, at the moment maybe..).

Dave Morris had played some Runequest and one of the things he disliked about the system was the potentially lengthy attack-parry-attack-parry sequences when two competent opponents faced each other. He's even written a recent article about it ( https://fabledlands.blogspot.com/2021/05/cut-and-thrust.html ).

Over at the recently-revived Tekumel BRP thread I mentioned a game by Dave Morris (of Dragon Warriors, Fabled Lands fame) called Tirikélu. This prompted me to have another look at the 1990s free game, which looks inspired by Runequest, Dragon Warriors, and shares some ideas with Fire and Sword. It has some interesting ideas in it which could be applied to BRP. Here are the ones I found, mostly to do with combat. (Spell casting is also interesting but I'll leave that for another post) 1. It uses a d20, roll low instead of d100 (as discussed in another BRP thread) Well, technically you roll 2d10 not 1d20. 2. Initiative is d20 + (DEX above 10) instead of straight DEX rank 3. You count down initiative ranks (like DEX ranks). When it's your turn you can act or defer, except for parrying or evading, which you can do in response to others' actions. Combat actions All actions either take a full round or half a round. Full actions include an attack at full skill a parry at full skill a dodge (called Evade) at full strength plus a few others you'd expect like casting a spell etc. Half actions include parry at half skill attack at half skill and some other lightweight actions like draw a sword, nock an arrow etc. If you do two actions in a round the second action happens at the very end of the round Ripostes Any time you successfully parry a failed attack on you, you have the opportunity for a riposte. This means you get a free attack which doesn't count against your limit and can't itself be parried BUT the target is whatever you rolled to do your successful parry. So in BRP terms if you had skill of 50% with your weapon and you successfully parried an attack by rolling 30%, you could make a riposte attack at 30%. Weapon damage All weapons do between X and 10 base damage. X increases with your weapon skill and is also modified by the type of weapon. For example a two-handed weapon increases X on average, while a dagger or punch decreases it. Your damage bonus is added to this, but in Tirikélu damage bonus is a maximum of +5, dependent as in BRP on STR + SIZ. Parry damage (to people) On a successful parry, you subtract the defender's damage bonus (remember +0-5) from the attacker's and the remainder goes through to the defender. Doesn't really matter for armoured opponents but can make a difference for unarmoured or against huge creatures (in such cases: try to dodge not parry) Armour Pretty straightforward, fixed values from 1 to 9, very similar to RQ3 values. Stops that much damage, except on a special hit (1 in 5). Shields These are handled in a better way IMO than in a lot of BRP variants. A S-M-L shield simply adds 3-5-6 points to your armour value, but only against front or left attacks, on a roll of 1-2 on d6 for S-M and 1-3 on d6 for L. They do protect against special attacks, but at half value. If an attack does more damage than their value, their protective value declines by one. There's also a mechanism for bashing with a shield which requires a successful Dodge (Evade) check and can be parried or evaded as usual -- possibly allowing for a riposte. 'Close' combat Basically Wrestling range, closer than normal combat range, requiring a Dodge (Evade) roll from the attacker which can be dodged or parried as usual by the defender. Once in close combat you can't Parry; only dodge.

There's also Dave Morris' Tirikélu rules ( https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B63rIuFhh29eVHpZVFlGYUNLSXc/view )which are vaguely Runequesty and has some quite interesting ideas, especially for combat. I have the Patrick Brady Tékumel game from Guardians of Order as well as good old Empire of the Petal Throne (which actually holds up rather well). They all have lots of good info. My problem is that my players aren't super interested in playing there.

Ha ha even old threads can rise! How did your Tekumel BRP gaming go?

Swords of Cydoria is a science fantasy which mixes old and new armours and weapons. They have a rule that 'primitive' armours are worth half value vs 'advanced' weapons. You could apply the same rule for any major difference in tech level between armour and weapon. Easier than layering, internal armour points etc.

Blunt weapons halve armour value of flexible armour. That's an easy houserule to remember.

I noticed the same thing. The 'click to roll' thing is very useful when playing online. Fortunately it's not restricted to D&D, although D&D has the most sophisticated player and GM tools. I started a Coriolis game which has a similar feature built into the character sheets. I'm sure there would be BRP versions too. I've been using roll20.

I'm playing the computer RPG Divinity: Original Sin at the moment. It has an interesting system of professions as skills, with levels as @Jaeger mentions. There are eight of these large-scale skills: Scoundrel, Marksman, Man-at-arms; and (magical ones) Aerotheurgy, Hydrosophy, Geomancy, Pyromancy and Witchcraft. These skills are enablers for other skills or spells which you can learn (in the game by finding or buying 'skill books') which are separated into Novice, Adept and Master skills. Level 1 in one of the umbrella skills will let you learn up to 3 Novice skills in that category; level 2 will allow you 5 Novice and 2 Adept skills, and so on. There are also a few other skills (Bartering, Leadership, Crafting etc.) which are separate from those 8 categorised ones. My character, a kind of sorcerer/thief started with lvl 1 of Aerotheurgy, lvl 1 of Scoundrel and lvl 1 of Witchcraft, with starting subskill from each (Thunder Jump, Walk In Shadows and Vampiric touch respectively) As the game progressed I found a few Geomancy skill books, which no one else in the party had, so I learned Geomancy lvl1 to acquire those skills. Later I put Scoundrel and Geomancy up to level 2 as I found more skills for those. But it was quite an opportunistic and organic process; quite a pleasant contrast to the rigid levelling of D&D* * Although the most recent Dungeons and Dragons does allow characters to change profession when they level up, which allows for some flexibility.

The Traveller Little Black Books were designed to be generic, a toolkit to run science-fiction games, like the Big Gold Book for BRP. I think many of us here struggled with what to do with them. I did love the occasional black and white pictures though.

-- Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry But Leiber also mentions White magic, rare and hard to keep pure. The Gray Mouser begins his training (as "Mouse") under a white wizard. I like the idea that not all magic is Black, even in a Swords and Sorcery setting.

I don't use the professions as listed at all, nor do I pay much attention to 'open' or 'closed' lists as defined by Spell Law. When a player wants to make a sorcerer character I am generally happy for them to mix and match from all the lists -- even across the 'boundaries' of sorcery, channelling or mentalism if they can justify the concept. Having said that, I generally only allow about three lists (ie. magical skills) for a starting player.

Possibly true, although it also brings up images of witchcraft and voodoo dolls for me. In Nehwon, Melniboné and other Swords and Sorcery genre worlds, sorcery is generally presumed to be bad news, though Leiber does mention white wizardry too. I like the idea of powerful black sorcery being 'quicker, easier, more seductive' like the Dark Side of the Force in Star Wars, with a corresponding moral and physical cost.

The Mongoose RQ Lankhmar Unleashed (as mentioned by @RogerDee) has a black magic system gets you to make corruption checks if: You learn black magic You cast a black magic spell (I define that as one that causes harm to another creature) You kill someone with black magic That black magic system allows you to make spells more powerful by using Agony (feeding the caster's HP or characteristic points into the magic), Hatred (the more hate the caster has for the victim, the higher the bonus) or Sympathy (the more connected the caster is with the body of the victim, the more effective the spell, eg. using a victim's blood or clothing). In my Nehwon campaign I use the Elric! system and Chaos allegiance points to represent Corruption. But I didn't want to make all uses of magic corrupting. I award Chaos (=corruption) points for magic use which either fulfills the above conditions OR where the caster uses Agony, Hatred or Sympathy to enhance the spell OR where the caster draws on Chaos Allegiance points as extra magic points for a spell. In other words if you choose to call on the dark forces you gain power in exchange for corruption.

Ray Turney decided that the advantage of d20 over d100 came down to just the number of dice to roll. I mentioned Fire and Sword (an offshoot of RQ1 and RQ2) as a d20 adaptation of BRP earlier in this thread. From his Fire and Sword designer's commentary (which is gold BTW, whether or not you play Fire and Sword.) Fire and Sword uses d10 for easy tasks, d20 for normal tasks and d30 for extremely hard tasks. Roll under, of course.

I think what people miss about D&D is the blood-rush of 'levelling up'. D&D characters are like superheroes in combat. They each have their special powers. When you level up you get even more powers. If you have a duel between masters you have a stalemate situation. Each has physical skills which match the other. But if you think about famous swashbuckling scenes (eg. The Princess Bride, Star Wars or Erol Flynn movies) there's a lot of dialogue as well as the flashing blades. There's also opportunistic use of terrain, maneuvers obstacles and hidden weapons to distract. Each combatant is trying to find a psychological weakness for his opponent, a chink in their armour even if it's not physical. The same is true in chess competitions between grandmasters. For masters the one to make a mistake first is the loser. In BRP this will come out mechanically but somewhat boringly if you just roll dice back and forth. It might be more interesting if you incorporate some kind of parallel psychological duel which affects the combat rolls from round to round. How well the duellists know each other would be a factor here, as well as their Passions (if you use those).

@Nikoli has used a variant of this Spell Law system too. I think unlike me he did more work on conversions for the Rolemaster damaging spells, and he also discusses using the critical tables in some detail. Of course we in this thread so far were all party to that one too 🙂

I never played Rolemaster, but I picked up some of the books later including Spell Law which is a huge tome of lists of spells. I made (and use) a simple system which would work with any lists of levelled spells. Rolemaster has Sorcery, Chanelling (like Divine Magic in RQ or clerical magic in D&D) and Mentalism. The main difference as far as I could see was where the magic energy comes from. Sorcery uses a kind of general magical power, like Maelstrom or RQ. Divine Magic comes from the gods direct; and Mentalism comes from the caster's own power. When players want to make a sorcerer character I get them to think about what sort of magical tradition they've come from and pick a few lists to be their collection of magical skills. Their skill in each list determines which spells they can cast because of the levels. As their skill level improves they get access to the more powerful spells in the list -- though not necessarily to the power required to cast them. Spell Law does have a whole lot of magical criticals in it (Rolemaster is famous for detailed criticals per weapon in Arms Law) but I haven't used them.

Looks like we've discussed this before! 😆 The Maelstrom system encourages tactical thinking from the wizard to make events more probable and therefore easier to affect with magic. For example getting a gust of wind to blow someone down is more probable (and dangerous) on a mountainside than in a cellar. In fact the system works best for those mages who can think on their feet and take advantage of their environment. It is freeform magic after all. What the system does not do is duplicate D&D (or even BRP) magic with its fireballs and resurrections and pizazz. If you want fiery effects you need to have a fire source handy (fireballs become probable if you are near an active volcano). The system is subtle because no one else really knows if magic happened or just some freak of probability. Maelstrom also allows for the concept of a specialist in a particular domain of magic, which makes the probability of casting spells affecting that domain one notch easier, and the choice of domain is also freeform. Eg. I had one Maelstrom sorcerer who specialised in shadow magic, so he was often using magic to sneak and conceal using shadows. The Maelstrom system requires both the GM and sorcerer player to be able to think quickly about the likelihood of events. It makes for interesting, improvising play.

The way magic works is quite dependent on your campaign and style -- which is why no one is happy with magic systems as they are written. For my campaign the assumptions are: it is mostly magic-weak, people don't trust sorcery or sorcerers, magic is not entirely reliable, there are many magical traditions, magic requires some preparation and magical power is situational -- extra power can come from certain times, places, objects or beings I use the equivalent of your Magic roll in the various systems I use, but I haven't used critical successes or failures. Systems I use: A BRP adaptation of Rolemaster's Spell Law which contains many lists of spells -- each list translates to a separate magical skill For freeform magic (another tradition) I use a system derived from Maelstrom which is all about adjusting the probabilities of events occurring They both use skill rolls so could easily incorporate random critical effects, but I haven't.

From this I get: Access to certain 'magic' (in the Arthur C. Clarke sense) artifacts from their Old Ones; these could do all sorts of effects 'Trans Dimensional' sounds a bit like the Guild from Dune. Maybe it comes from their artifacts. Maybe allow a teleport to a known or strongly visualised location. Or maybe that power requires a group effort from a number of Trilarians, so it wouldn't be something they could do in combat. "gifted pilots, diplomats, and educators" -- you could give them skill bonuses for those without being too much of a combat nerf Obviously, able to breathe under water indefinitely; maybe even in space?