Aycorn

I wasn't aware that Tolkein was drawing from the Finnish; but then, I'm not terribly knowledgeable about Finnish myth and legend. I always figured Tolkein's were pretty Nordic, too. 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.

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

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.

I know that both Glorantha and COC have Japanese followings.

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.

The concept of gods getting some (not necessarily all) of their power is, I think, a pretty old fantasy trope - the idea that when men no longer believe in the gods, their power on earth will fade away. Check out the 1963 film "Jason and the Argonauts" for example. I've read the infamous Primal Order and boiled it down to about 10-12 pages of usable rules for a campaign I would play. Basically a god has "flux," which functions a lot like POW in RQ, and gods get it in thousands of points. They have a certain amount automatically generated (just by being a god), and that amount is increased by such things as how many worshipers they have, how many priests, how many temples, etc. Thus, a popular god is more powerful than an unpopular one - o.t.o.h, a less popular god is not powerless nor does it cease to exist. I like this for a fantasy setting. It's not "real-world," nor is it the only possible model - it works if you've got a scenario where (a) gods are real ( they're active in the world © they're interested in some semi-concrete form of power. I also think it works neatly with both the RQ and Stormbringer religion models.

I'm sure ancient cultures WERE the same - absolutely. Some creatures were just symbols (as a friend of mine likes to say facetiously - "how do we know that wasn't the sign for the men's room?") - some were things that some people actually believed in and some didn't (like the chupacabra today). Just as I'm sure there were total atheists walking around saying "Aah Odin (or Ra, or whomever) is just buncha bunk!"

Oh hell yeah! Chaos will be found in my pseudo-Celtic world. I think the whole "Slaine" "battle-warping" thing is a perfect match. And I'm gonna transplant Dorastor (or parts of it) into the setting in some way.

Not sure how much coversion you'd need to do on "Thieve's World/Sanctuary," as there's already an official RQ version of it (albeit out of print).

I too think a BRP Gamma World would be great. Someone did it once, too. But I think the link is long gone. I am seriously toying with the idea of doing a BRP "Metamorphosis Alpha" at some point. Re: the anthropomorphs - dog- and cat-people figure in Gene Wolfe's "New Sun," books and are detailed in "GURPS New Sun," a great resource for a "Gamma World"-ish setting. John Wyndham's "Chrysalids" is a great model for a "Gamma World" setting, too.

I've always wondered about the possibility of a truly "Oz"-like campaign. Doing something along the lines of Abadazad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abadazad for the uninitiated) would be cool. Maybe someday I'll work it out.

And ,well, no sooner had I suggested it then I found a d20 treatment of Zothique. Guess I better warm up my converting fingers... http://www.eldritchdark.com/articles/criticism/30/zothique-d20-system-game-guide

How about Clark Ashton Smith settings? Chaosium may even have the rights to `em: ZOTHIQUE "Zothique, vaguely suggested by Theosophic theories about past and future continents, is the last inhabited continent of earth. The continents of our present cycle have sunken, perhaps several times. Some have remained submerged; others have re-risen, partially, and re-arranged themselves. Zothique, as I conceive it, comprises Asia Minor, Arabia, Persia, India, parts of northern and eastern Africa, and much of the Indonesian archipelago. A new Australia exists somewhere to the south. To the west, there are only a few known islands, such as Naat, in which the black cannibals survive. To the north, are immense unexplored deserts; to the east, an immense unvoyaged sea. The peoples are mainly of Aryan or Semitic descent; but there is a black kingdom (Ilcar) in the north- west; and scattered blacks are found throughout the other countries, mainly in palace-harems. In the southern islands survive vestiges of Indonesian or Malayan races. The science and machinery of our present civilization have long been forgotten, together with our present religions. But many gods are worshipped; and sorcery and demonism prevail again as in ancient days. Oars and sails alone are used by mariners. There are no fire-arms—only the bows, arrows, swords, javelins, etc. of antiquity. The chief language spoken (of which I have provided examples in an unpublished drama) is based on Indo-European roots and is highly inflected, like Sanskrit, Greek and Latin." Hyperborea would be a good one, too. Averoigne would adapt simply.

http://www.rpgmud.com/WorldBuilding/Mythopoets/tmm.html This online book will help you out tremendously. It's excellent. Really helped me think about religions in fantasy settings.

Depends. In the fantasy game I'm setting up, you're unconscious at 0, at negative hp have to make a CON rolls after that to keep from losing more, and killed or dead when your negative hit points exceed your CON. In COC, it's when you're negative 6, I think. I'd have to look again.

I always figured the tables were just suggestions and you could freely improvise.

Resistance Table? Or am I dating myself? I'd prefer CHA to APP, but that's my trip and it's been addressed anyway.

The FileMaker Pro database I use prints the %, the critical chance, and the fumble chance, each in a different color, so it's right there for ya.

Y'know, I've often heard RP in general described as "let's pretend, with rules." And the thing is, as a kid, I distinctly remember my best friend and I, when playing games with toy soldiers or G.I Joes or whatever, used to establish this rule where, if a situation arose where one of them would believably be killed in real life (i.e. the pillow we were pretending was a giant boulder fell smack on them), then they were "killed" and that was it. No second chances. It added an element of vicarious risk that we both liked a lot. And I think the same element is there in RPG's. As a GM, I have always said - I do not KILL characters. I do not, as policy, set up traps that can't be escaped or pit them against foes they can't possibly defeat. BUT - I do not prevent them being killed in the course of things, either. I won't kill characters, but I will allow them to be killed.

Hmmmm ... I'm not familiar with the whole "fate point" or "hero point" thing, but it sounds suspiciously similar the old "Top Secret" "fortune points," which I always thought was kinda cool, and adopted into all my games since, hell `81 or so. As I have used it, characters had a random number of points 1-10. The way they could be used was/is: IF the character was killed by a very narrow margin (i.e. a couple of hit points - it wouldn't work if you'd just gotten blown to smithereens in some way), you could get back just enough hit points to be alive (barely) if, and only if, you could give a convincing/compelling rationale as to HOW you managed to survive whatever happened ("the bullet actually hit my badge, reducing it's momentum" or some such). If you did, it cost you a "fortune point." Fortune points were not replenishable - once gone, they were gone for good and you didn't earn any extra in the course of the game. There was only once that anyone ever invoked it. That was after his character blew a climb roll and fell a short distance. Since the climb wasn't relevant to the adventure anyway, I agreed, Everyone I ever played with liked it.

Tools for BRP, no. But I myself have put together FileMaker Pro databases that handle characters for COC, Nephilim, and my fantasy game (Stormbringer/RQ-based). They don't generate characters, but they do all the math calculations. All I have to do is input the characteristics, character name, a few other details. I allocate initial skill points and then add more as experience comes. It does all the math and puts it into a character sheet. Then I just print it out - voila!

Make a decision based on what you know. If there's information there that you can extrapolate from (you have some sense of how big/small the creature/person is), just choose what looks right and works for you. If there's no information - wing it!