Questbird

My copy finally arrived the other day and it is impressive. I've had a bit of a glance through the PDF but I don't love that format so I'm looking forward to leafing through the physical Lyonesse tome. My first impressions: it is much thicker than I expected and the colour maps are lovely.

Years ago, when I was thinking about where to base my campaign, Lyonesse was one of my top 3 choices. It lost out (to Fritz Leiber's Nehwon) simply because of the terrible map in my tattered Lyonesse paperbacks and that I would have to do the adaptation work which you have now done!

I'm looking forward to reading it in detail.

On 10/29/2020 at 12:29 AM, Warframe44 said:

I believe they do. Half a kilo over a long march makes all the difference  

 

 

Ok, I stand corrected. However it's still a pain to do so in RPGs. Players don't want to because there are only penalties to be had for carrying too much. And it's a lot of extra work for GMs to monitor it, so they don't either. Items accumulate on player's sheets and before you know it they are waltzing around with tons of stuff. And most of the time it doesn't really matter anyway.

I do think it's funny that most RPGs regard coins as having negligible weight too.

I've played a few games of Rubble and Ruin and really enjoyed it. As far as I understand it it's meant to be closer to Mad Max than Gamma World. The apocalyptic war is still a live memory for most. There is some high tech stuff in it, things like BEPs (Biologically Engineered Persons -- accelerated growth clones trained to fight) and various horrific weapons. But mostly it's scrabbling for bullets, water and dog food in the Rubble.

13 hours ago, Newt said:

As a thank you to the backers who have stuck with the campaign during its slow period (or the slump as us publishers call it), they will now all be getting a Duck based adventure with six pre-generated characters called Angry Ducks. This has now been upgraded to a full book , with the working title of The Book of Duck, which has been upgraded by the generosity of a backer who within minutes of me posting the following update pledged at the special or of a kind Mistress/Master of Ducks level.

• Read the full update about this here.

Also related to this sudden bout of Duck craziness is this post on openquestrpg.com, which explains why I'm so captivated by Ducks as a non-human race.

• Ducks, why?

I must admit that I'm not captivated by ducks, though your explanation is fair.

They were always a thing which made me shy away from Runequest and Glorantha, and it gave me pause when I saw one on the front cover of OpenQuest 3.

1 hour ago, Coronoides said:

Not being familiar with Elric! I'd probably use fewer skills, maybe 6, and then 'steal' those points back by reducing the free choice allocations after occupation by the same number of skill points. Then again maybe I'm stingy. I agree +10% is the sweet spot for the size of the bonus.  

The first 4 Outlooks correspond to those in the Elric! rulebook though they didn't have names; @NickMiddleton has added the last two. +10% works pretty well, especially if you are including culture bonuses, which aren't in Elric!. That game was designed to make rather overpowered characters. The end of the world is near and there isn't time for characters to slowly develop their skills. That's reflected in a few design choices, from the +20% skills for 'Outlooks', to encouraging beginning characters to start with >100% skill, to adding +1d10% on successful skill checks (instead of +1d6% in standard BRP). There's also the rapid progress to Apotheosis which is possible, especially for Chaos, where Chaos allegiance points can be gained for casting spells and used to cast more -- an unvirtuous circle.

12 hours ago, dieselpunk said:

Communication

1. Fast Talk (Deceive) MANIPULATION (G)
2. Persuade (Rapport) also MANIPULATION(G)
3. COMMAND (A)

Manipulation

1. Art no equivalent except maybe CULTURE (A)
2. Fine Manipulation (Burglary) TECHNOLOGY (A)
3. Craft (Craft) also TECHNOLOGY (A)
4. DATA DJINN (A) -- basically cyber hacking

Mental

1. Medicine MEDICURGY (A)
2. Science / Knowledge (Lore) SCIENCE (A)
3. SURVIVAL (G)
4. CULTURE (A)

Perception

1. Insight (Empathy) no exact equivalent, but there is MYSTIC POWERS (A)
2. Spot (Notice) OBSERVATION (G)

Physical

1. Dodge DEXTERITY (G)
2. Athletics (Athletics) probably also DEXTERITY (G)
3. Stealth (Stealth) INFILTRATION (G)
4. Pilot/Drive (Drive) PILOT (A)
5. FORCE (G) basically a strength check

Combat

1. Firearms (Shoot) RANGED COMBAT (G)
2. Melee (Fight) MELEE COMBAT (G)

 

Interesting. For comparison, here are the 16 skills listed in the space game Coriolis, which is not a BRP game -- but neither is Fate. In Coriolis there are 8 General skills (G) and 8 Advanced (A) skills, where you can't succeed without some training. As you can see, there is some crossover; I guess that's inevitable when you try to condense the skill lists. Of course, it's a sci-fi game so there are some things you won't find in the 19th century.

Alexander the Great's mighty empire shattered after his early death. He did have an heir but he was only a child. Alexander's trusted generals each considered themselves Alexander's chosen heir, and none of them either trusted the others or had the power by himself to seize the Empire. At certain points in history ambitious people realise that they can take power by force, and then it's on for young and old.

On a related note, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay had the concept of winning the round. If your side inflicted more damage on your opponents than they did to you last round, you got a +10% bonus to attack, and your enemy would fall back slightly. A round-by-round mini version of morale. It's less predictable than 'morale hit points' which is an interesting idea but sounds like another thing to keep track of during the fight. Maybe if one side won the round three times in a row it might be a morale break point?

On 8/27/2020 at 7:29 AM, g33k said:

If you have no interest -- even "negative interest" -- in Glorantha itself, then maybe just the corebook in PDF; but the new RQG edition has some interesting new mechanics, if you are gathering interesting BRP/d100 mechanics.  Look in particular at all the ways Runes are used, and Rune Pools.

But don't look too hard if you ever want to release a BRP-variant game.

9 hours ago, rsanford said:

I just spent about 30 minutes skimming through Warlords of Alexander. Wow! This is immpressive. As you indicated it has the weapons and armor charts used by the Greeks in the Hellenistic age but heck the whole thing is oriented towards playing Hellenistic Greeks. I think I would probably be better off playing this than trying to tweak Magic World. Thank you!

Yes the technology doesn't change much throughout the period.

You could check out Warlords of Alexander.

I think it is a good way to go. No one in real life measures how many kilos of gear they are carrying, not even army types who are expected to carry a whole lot without complaint.

The video talks about tracking items instead of pounds as a way of managing encumbrance in a playable way.

We have chatted about the same, right here on this forum -- even you @Lloyd Dupont 😄. In the thread below I mentioned such a system, inspired by those old gamebooks, Dragon Warriors and a sci-fi one called Shadows over Sol.

There was a CoC adventure called Ripples from Carcosa which had three Hastur-related adventures set at different times, from medieval to the far future. The investigators in each were linked by a kind of 'past lives' effect. The Dreamlands can also be a nexus which can link different realities, and even allow them to co-exist.

My experience of Call of Cthulhu characters has always been somewhere between 'they die in the first session' and 'they survive an entire campaign'. I've found that you need some sort of connection between your old investigator and the new. If a character dies mid-campaign, there needs to be an excuse for a new person to associate with his or her presumably increasingly crazed and paranoid former colleagues with minimal friction. Old friends or relatives of the deceased adventurer are quite good picks, or someone who might have been in close correspondence with them. That way the new Investigator can justify knowing some things the former one did etc. You could also use some kind of past lives/nephilim or mystical (maybe via the Dreamlands) connection.

Referencing the Eternal Champion, remember that there was also an Eternal Companion to the Champion as well -- a Moonglum for every Elric. In Call of Cthulhu, characters are ordinary men and women. Not everyone has to be the Hero. In game terms that gives every player (at least) two mystical analogues in every plane.

3 hours ago, smiorgan said:

Yes! I love some Nehwon in my Elric! Cthulhu pastiche!

Who was the antagonist in your campaign?

 

Hehe. All the PCs were drawn into the Dreamlands by chasing the bumbling acquaintance from the Dreaming Stone adventure. However each had a different reason to follow him. He had been duped by (maybe Nyarlathotep) into luring wizards into the Dreamlands. One character, a shaman, was trying to stop that behaviour. Another character who had survived the River of Cradles campaign (there's some Glorantha in my Nehwon Elric! Cthulhu Dreamlands pastiche!) noticed that the mysterious stranger had the mark of the River God, and was curious (in fact he had been marked by the god but ran away from his 'responsibilities'). The third player, the psionic pilot was just a drugged out dreamer who was curious as to how the guy got on board his ship and followed him down an access ladder to the Cavern of Flame.

In my campaign Nyarlathotep was more of a menacing presence than a manifestation (fantasy Dreamlands rather than horror Dreamlands), though the moonbeasts were real enough. The players realised they shouldn't keep the Dreaming Stone by themselves. The pilot offered to shoot it into the sun in his universe.

On 5/11/2020 at 12:25 AM, smiorgan said:

Yes, these are the two.

 

I ran a slightly revised Dreaming Stone campaign as part of a fantasy RPG (yes it was Elric!). Ten great sessions. One of my players was a psionically gifted space-pilot; the other two were shamans from different parts of Nehwon. It's interesting because the Dreamlands is similar to a fantasy campaign world but tonally different, though maybe not so much as from a normal Call of Cthulhu horror setting. I've got the Sense of the Sleight of Hand Man and it is well written but I've not played it.

On 7/2/2020 at 2:49 AM, Atgxtg said:

Oh, and if you want to really keep the weapons tech under control, remember that the more high tech something is, the more that can go wrong. Imagine if some high tech society could generate a EM field and that it messed up most electronics. The military would have to use "obsolete" tech, as mechanical stuff would be reliable in a EM field. 

My suggestion is figure out what you want the setting to be like, then reverse engineer the reasons why it would have worked out that way.

Yeah, like Frank Herbert did with Dune. He wanted a universe where human factors were supreme: the Butlerian Jihad made "thinking machines" unacceptable to society. He wanted personal conflict with melee weapons: the personal shield rendered a soldier invulnerable to most projectile weapons and made using powerful laser weapons dangerous; atomic weapons retained their power but were also outlawed due to social convention.

Classic Traveller had laser rifles/laser carbines with huge backpacks for their power source and limited shots. They also had (on starships) the meson cannon, where you calculate a beam of subatomic particles to decay just inside the boundary of your enemy's starship, at which point they explode (for a reason I can't remember the pseudoscience). Advantage is that the beams normally ignore matter, so no armour penetration required. The meson cannons didn't work on planets though.

In Dune Frank Herbert didn't want the Guild to have any power from space over Arrakis, so he made the whole lasgun+shield = big BADA BOOM thing (and also made shields not work too well on Dune beyond the Shield Wall because they attract sandworms). It's a literary handwavium thing because he wanted personal combat and human factors to decide victory, not technology. It's not even clear that a Dune lasgun even is a laser; it sounds more like one of the high energy radiation beams mentioned earlier.

8 hours ago, hix said:

This is not a terrible idea, actually. Come to think of it, I can't recall ANY rpg system that had a method for determining aggro. I guess Shadowrun has "geek the mage", but I can't think of an actual mechanical system in any book that I've read. Maybe a wargame?

I just thought of it for this thread but I'm going to start using that one. 😆

50 minutes ago, Kloster said:

In RQ3, we did the SOI by ascending INT order (sometimes ascending INT+DEX), then resolved by SR with descending DEX order within each SR.

 

Yes I meant Ascending INT, Descending DEX. I've edited the post. 😀

There is a bias towards beautiful people in the world. When I'm GMing BRP I usually write down my players' DEX ranks to make things a bit quicker in combat. However if I also wrote down their APP (or CHA) I could use it in subtle ways:

1. NPCs always first address the person with the highest APP, unless another character is clearly the leader (and even then..)

2. Whenever an NPC or monster has an otherwise equal chance of attacking one of two characters, they attack the one with the lowest APP (I normally determine this by random roll, but this could be intriguing). Unconscious bias at work!

BTW speaking of stats in combat I really liked the idea from the 'Stormbringer Action Economy' thread of declaring your intent in a combat round in ascending INT order, then acting in descending DEX order

13 hours ago, seneschal said:

You go someplace you where don't know what to expect.  All you have is old initial telescope or robot flyby data at best.  Or, you visit someplace supposedly settled but it has been a while since anyone else has been there -- and your years-old travel brochure doesn't match what you're seeing once arrived.  The locals may not be happy you are there.  Or they may be too eager to greet you.  Or they may not be there at all, or may have relocated to another continent for some reason you will discover only too soon.  Its drama time!  That's an exploration scenario.  

 

 

Also, to return to 'staple' adventures, although every planet in the galaxy may be 'discovered' It may still be that this particular planet X knows nothing (or not enough) of that remote system Y 30 light years away. Why do they want to know? Scientific studies, a desire to expand, family history, find a new home, or a 'space race' with rivals. Maybe the society on Planet X has been forbidden access to the Galactic Archives for some (t)reason.

In any case they will pay for the data. A simple system scan. What could possibly go wrong?

Universal knowledge is not...universal 🙃

That's right. An organisation can hire a bunch of freelancers for a hard job, then if they succeed can give them juicier, more lucrative and more sensitive ones.

Elite Dangerous had another interesting concept which might be worth exploring. As a reward for completing missions you could choose between different combinations of:

- cold hard cash

- tradeable goods (maybe rare, maybe usable in other missions)

- Reputation with the hiring faction -- you go from neutral to cordial to friendly (or the other way for enemy factions: If you help faction A a lot then faction B may not regard you highly)

- Influence. This is an interesting one. This affects how much power Faction A has in a particular system. So if a faction's influence in a system increased enough they could become the local bigwigs. If you happen to be friendly with a group who started as a bunch of borderline terrorists but who now rule the System, it could be very lucrative. In game terms this would mean foregoing the above rewards in favour of increasing the local power of your patron. You help them, they don't pay you so use the money to get stronger themselves.

Factions can operate across jurisdictions too, so Faction A might have lots of power in one system but be a new kid on the block on Planet P. But the rewards for doing missions could change that.

If you're PCs are mostly space-bound there are options too.

These are inspired by Elite: Dangerous, an open-ended spacefaring game

1. trading

- planet X needs a supply of Y. But we don't know where to get Y

- take this (harmless!) cargo to Z. Ah, there may be someone who doesn't want it to get there or wants it for themselves

- salvage. Pick up this escape pod/illegal goods/remnants of a space battle in sector Q. How do we know it's there? Just a hunch..

- passengers. Transport these nutty demanding tightwad pilgrims safely to planet P without going crazy (thanks Jack Vance!)

2. mercenary/bounty hunting

- Faction A is warring with Faction B in system Z. Kill a bunch of Faction A/B's ships for us! You'll be a hero (for our movement)

- Take out this particular pirate or space monster who has been hassling traders in system Y. You'll need to track him down first (try the dodgiest bar planetside)

- Destroy a target on planet X belonging to Faction B. But watch out for Faction A!

- Rob the cargo holds of traders from this lucrative system (hey that's piracy!) Well do it in the name of Moff Tarkin then (OK, that's just privateering, no problem)

3. Exploring

- sell data about distant planet P to local planet X

- take a scientist or explorer to a distant alien ruin

4. mining

- look for the motherlode, an unexploited system with rich deposits. Watch out for other prospectors and pirates

8 hours ago, smiorgan said:

More than anything I'm interested in checking something that is not written in the rules but seems clearly implied and necessary to make them work. Namely, that there is no move followed by attack in the same round: if you engage as a result of your movement you attack in the next resolution phase, i.e. the following round. This is completely different than Elric! 

STORMBRINGER ACTION ECONOMY DISTILLED FROM THE RULES 
A round is about 12 seconds if you really want to measure it.

1. Declaration of intent 
Method 1: GM and players alternate
Method 2: reverse DEX order.

   

I always forgot about the declaration of intent in reverse DEX order but that is a good idea. It means if you are fast you can see what the opponent is doing and react to it. Although most of my fights were 'he attacks you' or 'he runs away' so the intent didn't vary much.

It's an interesting point about moving in combat too, which I certainly never noticed.