foolcat

Thank you for this.

To anyone who's thinking that looks way too colorful for the time period, I would suggest a look at Tod's Workshop's video about Dover Castle (it's the third video of a series): 

I heard through the grapevine that a 2025 print release is scheduled, but don't quote me on that. Totally wouldn't mind getting my hands on the PDF version a tad earlier, though. Say, this year? 😁

9 hours ago, Scotty said:

It's not a retail stand:

https://www.chaosium.com/blogchaosium-will-be-at-essen-demoing-horror-on-the-orient-express-the-board-game/

Thank you, much appreciated. I have thus completed my Chaosium online store order earlier today.

2 hours ago, g33k said:

 Any customer who happens to buy from the "wrong vendor" ends up experiencing a virtual "slap in the face" from Chaosium...  😕

Getting a voucher for the printed copy after having purchased the PDF is quite unique AFAIK, and I concur it should be advertised as prominently as possible. Most other publisher stores I know of "only" offer free PDF files with the hardcopy purchase.

Alas, I sometimes end up buying stuff I intend to work with for a project or another on DTRPG for a second time anyway, just for the convenience of having it in their library app, which I use across several devices (plus, it keeps file versions current). The publishers don't mind, I guess... 😁 

Hey David,

do you know whether you will have copies in stock at SPIEL fair in Essen, Germany later this week? I'd love to say hi and grab my copy, especially if I can claim the coupon for my PDF purchase there. 😁 

On page 45, skill description for Hide, in the paragraph for System Notes, the fourth sentence reads:

Someone hiding should keep as still as possible; moving while using Hide Difficult, and moving more than a meter in a combat round requires both Hide and Stealth rolls.

I feel the verb in the second part is missing, and the part should read 

[…] moving while using Hide is Difficult, […]

22 hours ago, soltakss said:

I am not sure about Nephilim, as I have never seen it, but I am sure it has a basis of Mythology.

Nephilim is deeply rooted in the Jewish Kabbalah, and more specifically, in the Hermetic Qabalah. Its use of the Tarot, Alchemy/Astrology, and Western Magic/esotericism for game systems and character descriptions is rather blatant. 😉

This is the exact reason why I was drawn to it like the proverbial moth to the flame when it was published back in the mid-90s. I just wish that Chaosium would revisit it at some point in time, preferably within the century, but alas!

And to answer @Zulfikar Zaban’s original question: while I definitely came into contact with Germanic & Nordic myths and sagas during my inadvertently humanistic education, I didn’t find them particularly thrilling at the time (still can’t look a Wagner opera in the eye, they bore me to tears). Later on, I developed a layman’s interest in psychology, viz CG Jung, and constructivists like Watzlawick.

I first came into contact with Chaosium RPGs in the early 90s, and I play them to this day; I guess one reason is that their topos revolves around, or even invokes, myths. 

Holy moly, I can’t wait to get my hands on this! Thanks for the update!

I’d go with “Herrscher des Binnenmeers”, and then André’s subtitle.

And I still would like to get my hands on it rather sooner than later... 🙃

43 minutes ago, hix said:

So how do you do it? Openquest uses doubles IIRC, what else ya got?

The problem I have with using doubles is uneven distribution: on a better than half chance of success (54%), 11, 22, 33, and 44 are crits (4%), while 55, 66, 77, 88, 99, and 00 are fumbles (6%). Even when defining 01 as a crit as well, it’s still 5% vs. 6%.

In RQ, I‘ve always used to ballpark it when looking at dice, telling me at a glance whether it’s even worth checking if a crit or a fumble occurred. Given that it’s relevant to the in-game situation in the first place. Assuming most skills in the lifetime of a competent adventurer are somewhere between 30 and 90%:

01 is always a crit, and 2–4 are good candidates for skills up to 90%.

00 is always a fumble, and 97–99 are fumbles for skills below 30%.

Special success are even more easy to determine: just left-shift the decimal point and double the number. 😉

5 hours ago, MOB said:

I discussed the history of this famous mark with EN World's Egg Embry:

Well, the good folks over at EN World seem thrilled about the return of HeroQuest the board game, and the crowdfunding is doing great. The confounding situation surrounding the term HeroQuest just became a lot less confounded. Good move, Chaosium!

Well, apart from a short, introductory period of playing the very first edition of Das Schwarze Auge (The Dark Eye) in the mid-80s, my roleplaying "career" really started when I went off to university (a.k.a. college) and met with the right people.  

Campaigning wasn't that much of an issue over the course of the 90s, it just happened. WEG's D6 Star Wars, Warhammer FRP (thank ye gods for Warpstone & Hogshead), RuneQuest (both on Glorantha and in home-brew settings), the works. Granted, my pals and me were all students back then, and playing late into the night on weekdays was a no-brainer. There was ample time for GM prep work as well, oftentimes during lectures (they still haven't managed to find definitive proof whether P=NP btw, but I can't really blame this on my lack of attention back then). The only game that gravitated heavily towards short-lived adventures was Call of Cthulhu, for reasons I quite can't put my tentacles on.

Then life, work, and family happened, and roleplaying frequency naturally took a steep dive. One-off sessions, few and far in between, became the meagre norm.

For this reason I consider myself very lucky today to have found a group of friends both old and new, 8 people including me, which has been a staple to stable RPG session provisioning over the past four years. We usually manage to meet for two days on a weekend, every five to eight weeks (even in times like these), and people literally would have to be too sick to join in by Skype to miss it. Four of us infrequently rotate in and out as GM, with a somewhat broad portfolio of interests, genres and systems. Among other things, we've terrorized the Deadlands (SW), sunk flying ships in Sundered Skies (or did we fly sinking ships? SW again), involuntarily laid waste to Middenheim ("Waddayamean, we brought an artifact of Khorne into the waiting hands of a chaos cult?!", WFRP 2E), had a stunningly frightening police procedural in 1948 New York City (Film Noir RPG), a catastrophically dysfunctional road movie in 1974 California right afterwards (well, we did play started out as a group of drug-running white trailer trash; Film Noir RPG), and for the last year and a half or so, smote infidels and heretics left and right in the name of the Holy Inquisition (WH40k Dark Heresy, with a pinch of Rogue Trader, Deathwatch and Only War thrown in). It's been fun! 

...aaand bought! Print version as well, I‘m sure it will look nicely next to the core rule book in my shelf.

10 hours ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

But it is plasma that is the mystery! as you wondered about and I just dismiss.. no plasma ball would go very far in the athmosphere....

One could imagine a fictional weapon system that, prior to firing its actual damaging load of electricity (arc weapons) or plasma (blaster weapons), ionizes a tunnel of air in between the muzzle and the target by deploying a burst of a high-energy beam first (like a UV or x-ray laser).

1 hour ago, clarence said:

Here in Sweden, I usually get Lulu prints from Holland for some reason. With DTRPG, it seems they print everything in the UK and use UPS for shipping. I hope that combination works for you foolcat.

Ah, whatever. It won’t be shipped via USPS, so my copy of the M-Space companion is sold anyway. 😄 Looking forward to it!

8 hours ago, clarence said:

While I do like Lulu, their full-colour prints have been a bit too expensive lately. As the Companion is in colour, DriveThruRPG is currently hard to beat. (Well, Publit’s colour print of M-SPACE is even better - as you only pay for colour on pages with colour - but their international shipping rates are prohibitive). It seems Lulu is working on a big update for their services, so this might change in the future. 

I wouldn’t mind b/w printing, at all. What I do mind are shipping costs in relation to product price; but IIRC, both Lulu and DTRPG fulfill POD orders from Poland (for EU orders, that is).

Will the companion again be available as POD via Lulu? I was quite happy with the quality and price tag of the M-Space book.

3 hours ago, Ian Absentia said:

And that's why the tarot or a Ouija board or whatever in a game of Call of Cthulhu should be nothing more than a set of tableware that, for whatever reason, you occasionally insert into an electrical outlet with predictable results.

Oh, a tarot skill fits wonderfully into the world of the Mythos. Excellent tool to give characters some insights, frights, red herrings, or paranoia. Adds flavor and atmosphere to the game.

But if players start to rely too much on it or try using it as a shortcut too often, well... there is The Key and Guardian of the Gate out there, who jealously guards ALL knowledge. Gaining his attention isn’t necessarily in their best interest, lest this card may come up more frequently:
 

“Does this black blob look like Hastur to you?”

Culprit in the Spanish flu was the Influenza A virus subtype H1N1. No relations, genetically or otherwise, to the family of coronaviruses.
 

But yes, the second wave’s gonna be rad. This is far from over.

9 hours ago, EricW said:

This is my toy du jour - explosively formed penetrator. Like a compact portable artillery gun. Developed in the 1930s, so historical campaigns could also use them. Powerful enough to give Cthulhu a headache, small enough to fit in the boot of a car. 

This tech is still used in HEAT (high-explosive anti-tank) warheads. Nothing like a high-velocity superplastic jet of copper to ruin your day (and tank).

26 minutes ago, David Scott said:

To help all concerned, here's the helpful pages from the 2014 programme book, I'm sure I've got a PDF of the History of the German RQ society somewhere?

and also : http://www.die-sns.de/SchattenSeiten/SchattenSeiten_English/History_of_the_RuneQuest_socie/body_history_of_the_runequest_socie.html

 

Thank you, David, that was helpful. Seems I lost a year somewhen back then. I consider this a bargain. 😝 But I remembered correctly that the first Tentacles Con was indeed one year later.

18 hours ago, Joerg said:

One minor niggle: the first RuneQuest convention at Castle Stahleck in Bacharach (Rheingoldqueste) was in 1996. The first Tentacles convention followed in the next year, in the same location.

Ummm. That' not quite how I remember it. AFAIR, and IIRC, (German) RuneQuest Con 1994 was that heat-ridden, mosquito-infested inferno held at the former FDJ IndoktrinationsFerienlager near Berlin. That was my first one, because I played with Lutz and Kelly in Cologne at the time, and they invited me along.

The RuneQuest Con (other possible names notwithstanding) next year in 1995 was the first one held at Burg Stahleck in Bacharach. Followed by another RuneQuest Con held there in 1996, which hosted the most infamous FreeForm of times memorable, because some crucial bit of information didn't make it to the players, resulting in a lot of head scratching and mulling around... The first Con called Tentacles over Bacharach was held in the year after that, 1997.

Now, it might as well be that I misremember some (hopefully not all) of this, so take this with a grain of salt. I blame universe-altering substances I was partial to at the time. 🍄😎   

1 hour ago, Runeblogger said:

I've never herad of it. Why was that atrocious? 

Be glad you never heard of it. To begin with, it used a 30-sided die (d30)...

With the sole exception of RuneQuest, I wasn’t that much into German RPGs back in the 90s, original or translated (...come to think of it, neither am I today). I do own some German language Mythras stuff, though, mainly because the translator is the very same who also translated WDS RuneQuest back then: Lutz Reimers. Fun fact: his daughter Julia, by now a member of the Chaosium staff, has translated RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. It still awaits publishing by Uhrwerk Verlag...

Ah, yes, the old German Welt der Spiele edition of RuneQuest 3. Brings back memories.  

Given what else was available in the German language at the time, RuneQuest was a blesséd sight for sore eyes back then. "Ruf des Warlock", and other assorted atrocities...

1 hour ago, g33k said:

Sorry, I hadn't recalled just how different that was.

You're right -- that license really isn't very OGLish.  Thank you for pointing it out!

That's exactly what I said earlier. The Mythras Gateway License is NOT an Open Game Licence.

An OGL like the BRP OGL is a free pass to do WHATEVER YOU WANT TO DO WITH IT, WITHIN THE SPECIFIC CONSTRICTIONS THAT GRANT YOU USE OF THE OGL IN THE FIRST PLACE.

People right now tend to concentrate on the specific constrictions, which is only natural. Once you realize how to work around these restrictions without violating them (which would invalidate your use of said license), you're free to do whatever you want. AND get the right to put the BRP OGL label onto your creation. If that is what you want.

6 hours ago, Richard S. said:

Yes, but now that they do exist and are incredibly good, useful, enriching mechanics, it's frustrating that they're locked out of common use simply because they weren't in the BGB. What is the point of preventing creators from putting them into a new game as long as they don't use them to completely clone a Chaosium game, especially since they aren't very tightly bound to their settings.

Passions, Augments, and Pushing (re-rolls of dice) also exist in Mythras by name. Their mechanics work differently, though. So the "substantially similar" clause wouldn't work on them if you were so inclined to implement such or similar mechanics into your BRP OGL based work (I am not a lawyer, and I refuse to use the acronym for this expression).

Take Pushing, for example: Call of Cthulhu 7th edition states: "By making a pushed roll, the player is upping the ante and giving the Keeper permission to bring dire consequences should the roll be failed a second time. Pushing a roll means pushing the situation to the limit: [...]". The main difference to other (D100) systems which allow dice re-rolls is that it doesn't  use so-called "brownie points" (a.k.a. Fate Points, Luck Points, Bennies, etc.). Mythras implements a re-roll mechanic using Luck Points. So you would be good to go by allowing re-rolls using brownie points; just don't you use the exact same mechanic (re-roll dice for the cost of more dire consequences instead of spending brownie points) that's described in CoC7.

Passions and Augments also exist in Mythras as well and use different mechanics than in RQ:G. So it's not that you can't use them in a game based on the BRP OGL AT ALL, just don't use the exact same (or "substantially similar") mechanics that exist in the relevant Chaosium games. Or just don't use the BRP OGL at all for your D100-based products.