Aycorn

AS far as Fantasy I've read but disliked.... well I've got a love/hate relationship with Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. I loved the initial first four or five books. After a while I got pretty pissed that he was ignoring the main characters and to a degree the main plot.

Well, I guess Jordan got HIS didn't he?

I read the first of these, and found it enjoyable even though it is schematically painfully similar to "Fellowship of the Ring."

I don't know much about gaming in general - I rarely buy games except RQ/BRP/HQ and I don't go to gaming clubs. So, I can only really speak about my own experiences in gaming.

One thing that has changed is that games are a lot more commercial nowadays. When you look at the lithographic prints of games such as White Bear and Red Moon they look so amateurish compared with the glossy games of today. Also, with the advent of PDF publishing and print on demand companies such as Lulu there are a lot of small publications coming out.

I am like soltakss - I rarely buy any other kind of game stuff. I know a little about d20, and next to nothing about any other current (or even more recent than say, 20 years old) systems. I don't go to gaming cons or clubs. So I can't comment on a lot. I don't know about the anime influence, but anime is so popular now with college-age and below that I imagine it has influenced games.

But certainly, the games are much more polished now. Sometimes, I think they lost as much as they gained. Sure, the artwork's more polished - but I wouldn't say a lot of it is "better." The books are cosmetically nicer but a lot more expensive as a result.

The really tricky part is that I think some of the imagination has been stifled. Having these very detailed, heavily-supplemented settings - they're very nice, very impressive, sometimes even awesome - but it's taken some of the creativity out of the players. In a way, old D&D or AD&D had an advantage - you had spells, monsters, magic items - but no backstory. It was up to you to assemble them into a coherent (or incoherent) world or setting. I took it as a challenge to my imagination, and creating my first D&D world-setting was one of the most fun things I ever did with the game.

Ah well ... maybe I'm just a ol' fart.

Dark Shadows and Highlander are two of the core sources for an idea I've had bouncing around since the early 90's. Of course I was originally thinking of using GURPS, though in the past few years that idea has switched over to using BRP.

I'd be interested in hearing about that.

"Highlander" would seem to lend itself to a typical RPG. The problem with doing a DS game is that, to capture the feel of the show, you're pretty much stuck farting around Collinwood all the time, and if you're really gonna be faithful most of the game would be people talking and wringing their hands.

The other day I found some old notes of mine - I was once thinking at one time of doing a BRP campaign based on "Dark Shadows."

Betcha no one else thought of THAT one!

I still dip into that well of ideas... Arduin has been just about the biggest influence on my gaming... in one way or another... since I first got those little books long long ago.

We never used all or most of the books at any one time... never played by those particular rules... but the flavor of them, and the ideas... there was no way to keep those out of our games.

If there was a way to do 'official' Arduin with BRP I'd jump right on it...

Are those new books for it in the same vein as the originals? Do they keep that same wacky cosmic-sink sense of recombinant adventure? Or did someone sit down and try to lay it out so it all made 'sense'?

Count me in, too. I love those little Arduin books. Even just to leaf through them and steal ideas.

RPG's may have gained a lot of polish and sophistication (although an argument could be made that it's all cosmetic), but they've lost that gung-ho amateurish enthusiasm, which is kinda sad.

(*) Not politically correct and even possibly offensive, but you can't have a Wild West setting talking about Native Americans.

Yuh mean - INJUNS? >:->

Did I miss anything?

Who knows, maybe this will evolve into a actual supplment?

Looks good - but what about a bibliography/filmography?

Also - a discussion of typical themes/cliches/etc found in westerns as ideas for a GM?

"Do you want to live forever?" Valeria- Conan the Barbarian.

Yeah, I hear ya. I stopped reading the X-Men because they kept screwing them over so royal that I got fed up with it.

hehe...I knew this thread would be interesting. Peoples tastes and opinons vary greatly, but that's cool. I think that diversity is the spice of life.

I loved the Shannara series. Albeit, I haven't read many of the latest books. I read the first six books. Many of my friends bash on it as well. I call it simplistic fantasy- just not as involved as Tolkien-esk fantasy.

I also liked some of the Xanth books. Again, I didn't read the whole series; just three or four I think.

I think that the age you were when you read a particular book or series, and the time period in which you read, determines or shapes your like or dislike of a book or series.

True. I love the comic books I liked as a kid, even though there are things in them that I now find pretty hilarious: in one old "Spiderman" I have, a super-villian named The Beetle, who used a suit of high-tech armor that allowed him to fly and was loaded with weapons, has been paroled from jail and has his suit with him. Leaving prision, he's thinking about all the crimes he's going to commit now, crowing to himself - "there's no law against a man having a costume!" Well, no, there isn't - but there is against him having a bunch of illegal weapons!

On the other hand, today's superhero comics, which aspire to such "seriousness" (but are really just as dorky) I don't relate to at all.

Anything by H.P. Lovecraft.

Seriously.

Hiero's Journey and The Unforsaken Hiero by Sterling E. Lanier.

Apocolypitc alternate earth future centered around Great Lakes area. A mutant priest's adventures. His companion and mount is a giant mutated moose. It has a grim-and-gritty Gamma World feel to it.

Yeah, "Hiero" is a blast.

Some faves - fantasy: Gene Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun," Leiber's "Lankhmar" stuff. Lovecraft and lots of the Arkham gang (esp. "Who Fears the Devil" by Manly Wade Wellman). "The Mists of Avalon," "The Once and Future King." Recently I really like Jim Butcher's "Harry Dresden" books (forget the recent TV series).

Non-fantasy - "Lion of Ireland" and "Red Branch" by Morgan Llewellyn; "The Wanderer" by Henri Alain-Fournier, "The Magus" by John Fowles; "Lord of the Flies" - I probably re-read that one every 5-6 years. Also love the 1963 movie - one of my all-time favorites.

It sort of works that way in combat. We've been conditioned by films, TVs, RPGs to think that if you get shot one or twice, you fall down dead. Truth is, over 95% of wounds don't kill you outright, but kill you over time.

Some of us have talked about using some sort of wounding/delayed fatality mechanic for BRP, but others don't like the idea.

But realistically, it is more the "Oh my God, I've been Shot!" feeling that goes through people when the realize that they've been shot that takes the fight out of them rather than the injury.

The blood lost, damage to organs, and infection generally get you after the shootout.

Yes, but I think most RPG's are more like movies or TV than real life. And I suspect most players would rather have their heroic character die on the battlefield than waste away in a bed somewhere. But I could be wrong.

But, if we were doing a western RPG, I would strongly recommend using one of the new Luck rule options to reduce lethality. People could and did get hit multiple times and survive. That would be hard to do in CoC with the fat adds that some firearms get.

This conjures up visions of the old Gahan Wilson cartoon of the gunfight - there's just been a gunfight, and one cowboy is lying dead, while the other, a huge hulk of a man, is lumbering off, riddled with bleeding bullet holes. Two old-timers stand by, commenting: "the trouble with ol' Claude is - don't matter if ya do draw first!"

The Darksword Trilogy written by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.

Another baddie - "Mention My Name In Atlantis" by John Jakes. Supposed to be a parody of Conan-style sword-and-sorcery - but it just ain't funny. I also remember his "Brak the Barbarian" stories as being nothing special.

However, last year I read the first of the oft-maligned "Circle of Light" series by Neil Hancock, and I actually did like that one. Very weird and somewhat incoherent (like a mish-mash of Tolkein, "Watership Down," funny animal stories and some sci-fi mixed in), but it had some really evocative moments and I found myself fond of the funny-animal characters. Some day I'll read the rest of `em.

Weapons are easy. I could get some price lists from some other western RPGs. Could Probably uses professions to get some background skill packages.

It will be another project for the burner.

This leads to the interesting possibility that people on the list could collaborate on projects, for official or unofficial use.

Yeah, I can't say I've read any examples of the genre that weren't overtly sexist... I'm sure that can be overcome without too much trouble, but I still want to rescue a green princess...

Try the now-obscure 70's DC comic "Starfire" - with a hero(ine) who was not only female but Asian (interestingly enough).

Of course, she did wear skintight clothing that showed off her assets. But then she also ran around skewering green bad guys with a sabre, so, y'know...

This is exactly what I would not buy. I would be interested in either a realistic western setting, or in a version that allows to represent one of the categories of western movies (spaghetti, gritty, classical,...), but not a supernatural western. Perhaps I'm too old for the mainstream tastes.

Runequestement votre,

Kloster

Unfortunately, I think that's part of the problem. Older gamers may still have grown up at a time when cowboys were the big heroes (that was still going on when I was a kid - late 60's/early 70's - but it was the tail end of it), so I think the interest in a straight western setting is very limited.

Of course, the beauty of a western setting is it could go in any number of directions - straight, supernatural, steampunk ("The Wild Wild West" anyone?).

That because Tolken elves are derived from Finnish folklore, whereas as Anderson's elves were based or Nordic elves.

Anyway - "Broken Sword"s a helluva book

I guess it boils down to whether they fit a "gritty sword and sorcery" setting ala "Conan."

I would say that they could, if handled deftly enough.

I can imagine Conan wandering into some huge Hyperborean forest and encountering something like Lothlorien - but it would be depicted rather differently than in LOTR - it would doubtless be hopelessly alien (and probably pretty dull) to Conan.

There's nothing wrong, per se, with elves/dwarves - or, for that matter, with LOTR-derived settings, or D&D type settings, if that's what you want to play. And, of course as others have said, there are other ways to interpret elves/dwarves, if one so chooses.

Check out the elves in Poul Anderson's "The Broken Sword" for elves that are in many ways very much cut from the same cloth as Tolkein's, and yet very distinctly different.

In my "pseudo-Celtic" campaign, I'm not going to be using elves. I plan on having a race of dwarves which will be pretty much standard D&D-ish dwarfs (grumpy miners with battle-axes). They will be pretty minor - as I kinda figure a race of underground-dwellers won't be a fixture among aboveground city-dwellers. I basically decided to have this type of dwarves because I like them.

I'm not doing elves, though.

I really like his horror fiction... he's got some great stuff that centers on The King In Yellow... kinda reminds me of Thomas Ligotti... or vica versa.

Wasn't KEW a doctor? I thought I'd read that somewhere...

Oh, and what characterizes 'pulpy combat'? Just curious...

He was - there's a pretty fascinating memoir about him which you can track down on karledwardwagner.org - a very worthwhile site.

Me either. The one that came closest was the Elric! sheet, but since I wanted skill categories and bonuses even it fell short.

So the sheet in this new book would not get used by me, but is not a particularly negative factor in my decision whether or not to buy it.

It's really not hard to cook up one's own character sheet in Excel or Word or similar programs (in my case, FileMaker Pro).

Wagner was great. I recently re-read "Reflections for the Winter of My Soul" (Kane in a snowbound castle with a werewolf running loose) and it definitely is a winner. He managed to have the pure blood-and-thunder adventure page-turner thing going, yet a more complex undertone to the stories - deeper character psychology and themes.

As good as his "Kane" books are, his horror stuff - especially the collection "In A Lonely Place," is even better.

Hmmm ... an early introduction to fantasy - watched local horror movie show ("Creature Features," with local legend Bob Wilkins) faithfully. I think my first exposure to the kind of "sword-and-sorcery" fantasy was in a children's novel called "The Changeling," about two girls who make up an imaginary world of magic and monsters. I was fascinated by their concepts. Lots of comic books (Marvel's "Conan" comics were going strong back then). Gradual growing awareness of the whole world of fantasy fiction (Moorcock, Tolkein, etc) in late elementary school and junior high. Played "Dungeon" game (an ultra-simplified dungeon crawl) in `77 and loved it. Got exposed to D&D the next year. Rest is history I suppose.

yeah, I saw that article as well and wondered about BRP in Japanese. Sounds like BRP was translated into horror, apocolyptic or supers, and science-fiction versions in Japanese. It would be interesting to see their take on BRP and those genres.

Oh, don't get me wrong; so do I. I was just noting it didn't have much to do with any real-world past religion that I knew of.

Oh, I know. My response was terse, as I'm at work and supposed to be working .

I like The Primal O model, plus the RQ model plus the Stormbringer "elan" model married together, because they give an in-game rationale for the whole thing - gods get something out of having more worshippers, temples built to them, etc (Primal O); worshippers get something being devout and carrying out the rituals (magic, divine intervention) and worshippers get an improved chance at divine intervention by doing things that please their deity and potentially increase their deity's power (elan).

But there are other potential models. What if the gods aren't real? What if they're just power sources and people only imagine them to have faces/personalities? What if they're something else entirely?

The Mythopoet's Manual helped me understand real-world religions (ancient and modern), but it also helped me understand that for the kind of model of religion I'm talking about above - where, for example, Zeus might indeed pop up and throw off a few lightning bolts - there is no real-world example. So, you gotta turn back to your imagination to figure how such a religion works in your imaginary world.