nclarke

I'd love to come Paul but it's along trip for a couple of hours even if the bar is that good :-)

Proper fanzines had to be mimeographed on to various coloured paper and assembled by hand in your bedroom/basement to be acceptable fan material.

Why are people replying to a five year old thread? I know that Gianni was asking about the Runerites that Simon had, but surely Simon has sold his White Dwarfs in five years and needs no further advice.

You might have better luck posting on the Design Mechanism forum as I think there's a thread there already about actual ply podcasts.

Another point to note about a pdf is that it's harder for your partner/spouse to find how much gaming stuff you actually own. There's no tell-tale bookshelf groaning under the weight and the man cave is lighter and cleaner needing less supervision from the non-gamer in your life.

You really need to get a copy of John Ossoway's Cthulhu Rising if you are going to do Alien or any of it's progeny. It works extremely well and has the right amount of crunch for a military tech game if you pick the marines chargen thing from his CR website which has a ton more background and some adventures. If you want to go more investigation then use one of the other chargen routes available.

I've taken a look through my Laundry rulebook since originally posting and it has this to say (note one of the authors did some of the BGB stuff). This is the text of the Grapple skill therein, hope it helps. Your character must make a successful Grapple roll to establish a hold on their opponent. Grapple attacks can be parried using the Grapple skill or avoided with the Dodge skill. Once a hold is established, your character must make a successful Grapple roll each round to maintain a hold. Taking any action other than one of the grappling actions listed here breaks a hold. Each turn that your character has someone in a grapple hold, they can perform one of the following actions: Choke: Your character tries to choke their opponent. The opponent must make an Endurance roll each round or suffer 1d3 plus your character’s damage bonus in Hit Point damage. This continues until the opponent breaks free, falls unconscious, or dies. If the Grapple roll is a special success, the Endurance roll is Difficult. Disarm: Your character matches their STR against the opponent’s STR on the Resistance table. If your character succeeds, the opponent drops any weapon or item they are holding. If the opponent wins, they do not drop anything but are still in the hold. Immobilise: Match your character’s STR against the opponent’s STR on the Resistance table. If your character wins, the opponent is immobilised and cannot act until free. If the opponent wins, they can take an action, though they are still held. Injure: Match your character’s STR against the opponent’s STR on the Resistance table. If successful, your character hurts the opponent using brute strength, inflicting 1d3 points of damage plus their damage bonus to the opponent. This can be attempted until the opponent breaks free or wins the Resistance roll. Takedown: Your character automatically makes a Resistance roll with their STR vs. the opponent’s SIZ, dragging both characters to the ground. The opponent must make a successful Agility roll or suffer one point of damage. If an Agility roll fails, the opponent is on the ground in a disadvantageous position and all actions against them are Easy until they are up or change position. Throw: Make a Resistance roll of your character’s STR against the opponent’s SIZ. If your character wins, the opponent is thrown 1d6 metres, is automatically knocked down and must make an Agility roll or suffer 1d6 points of damage. Throwing a target releases a hold. If the opponent wins the Resistance roll, they are released from the hold and remain standing. Once in a hold, an opponent can attack your character if they have any free limbs, using Brawl (punches or head butts only) or any small weapon (knives or handguns). If two hands are free, the target can attempt to Grapple back. Multiple attackers can attempt to grapple a single target, though no more than two attackers can hold any one location. Combine the STR ratings of both attackers in all contested tests.

The frequent difficulties with both Grapple and teh Martial Arts skill are part of what prompted the changes in 7e. But sorry, can't help you get to grips with your problem :-)

Have it as part of the explanation - "the tunnel mouth only opens for short time, like something breathing" should creep them out. If they try swimming do a count down - "you swim forward for 30 seconds and see no sign of the end, you start to feel like you need to breathe. There's barely enough time to get back to the entrance before it closes again. You could tug on the rope to get your companions to pull you back and you should make it through the entrance before it shuts again. If you continue you know that you have to find air before the entrance closes on the rope and traps you." Have a timer as a prop and the buzz/ring should startle someone when it goes off as the door closes.

Do you really need an exact speed or should narrative speed work just as well? Wouldn't 'it takes you three rounds to swim that far or four/five if you fail your swim check' work just as well?

AFAIR both of the 'of Legend' books have their contents listed in posts on the Mongoose forums. Here's a partial list of the natural animals copied off the index of MoL. Baboon...........................................................103 Bear, Brown...................................................104 Bear, Polar......................................................105 Boar................................................................106 Cattle..............................................................107 Chimpanzee...................................................108 Deer................................................................109 Dog.................................................................110 Elephant..........................................................111 Gorilla............................................................112 Hawk..............................................................113 Horse..............................................................114 Lion................................................................115 Mammoth.......................................................116 Panther............................................................117 Rhinoceros.....................................................118 Shark..............................................................119 Tiger...............................................................120 Tiger, Sabre Tooth (Smilodon).......................121 Wolf................................................................122 Monster Island is indeed mostly a sandbox on the same lines as Griffin Island and the earlier Griffin Mountain for RQ. The Monsters of Legend book was available in SB, I've seen copies. MoL2 should be in SB print soon. Your best bet is the BASIC file on here translated from the French. However if you can get hold of any old RQ or CoC core or bestiary books from a local game store and flick through them to check you should find something for natural creatures.

I'm not sure if RoH requires a copy of OQ2 to play or if it's self contained. The Cthulhu Rising monograph that was John Ossoway's previous space game used BRP but didn't require the BGB to play it. If you're lucky Newt will stop by to let you know if RoH requires OQ2 to play. AFAIK the OQ2 book is just a fantasy rule set. It's pretty but I haven't read through it yet.

Leon, Cthulhu Rising uses the BRP rules with various 'switches' enabled so anything that you can lift from there is fully compatible.

Nick, I believe much of the functionality derives from the templates for various creature/adversary types. Not sure how much the rule set makes a difference. The main thing would be the weapon/armour/special ability stats and how skills are derived I suspect. As-is it would work for Legend (MGP RQII) though. The author has some folks helping out with data entry but does the coding as an 'ad-hoc, as and when he can' type of project. When he's added the material from MI and the new features list he might be open to crowd funding development of the work to other D100 games.

The "failure is meaningful" obviously comes from playing too much FATE recently :-) Still if the failure doesn't mean anything then why roll for the action at all. Example: Creeping up on the guard to silence him would be meaningful if failed - he shouts the alarm. If however the door to the warehouse is locked and time spent dealing with it will not bring the bad guys why roll, just tell the lockpicker, after x minutes (depending upon the level of skill) you get the door open. You can ratchet up the tension by narration rather than a failure to roll a low enough score for lock picking. If they ask you could offer a chance to speed up the lockpicking at a more difficult level and make them roll at that point.

This, a thousand times this. Way too many people claim not to like certain games because of 'too much' die rolling but if the game is guided by the skill levels in BRP games and the dice are only rolled if the action if performed under stress or a failure is interesting or meaningful then the average BRP game runs so much faster and cleaner.

Luck is used and described in the QS basically the same as it's always been. In the playtest version of the rules I tested you could spend Luck as an optional rule. I don't expect any of the optional rules to have been presented in the QS rules for obvious reasons even though the character sheet allows for the reduction in Luck as you spend it.

I have no idea what you might have found unclear in the PS backer version that came out originally so I couldn't tell you if anything's been cleared up.

When I hear complaints about the length of time taken to publish things I have to wonder if the people asking don't realise how small Chaosium actually is. Most jobs are subcontracted out - proofing, editing, layout, writing etc. and the few people actually full time have to deal with all the admin plus the website (although the design and coding is contracted out). For a long time cash flow was, AFAIK, primarily used to pay off huge debts still around from the days of the CCG fiasco leaving little to go towards buying art and paying writers and printers. Now that they have used kickstarter to get themselves a cushion of cash from Horror and 7e they can produce good material and return to putting out more frequent product. They just hired someone to partly replace the late Lynn Willis as Cthulhu product Line Manager but he's AFAIK only part time rather than full-time and in the UK rather then California making for less than easy co-ordination. This is a lot of mostly speculation but based on what I see mentioned in a bunch of places so take it with a hefty pinch of salt but it does explain why product is slow to market for Chaosium.

You could always get the one dollar pdf of MRQII from RPGNow and try the combat out. It's pretty similar to RQ6 combat and one dollar shouldn't break the bank.

Why don't you try gaming with an on-line group that is interested in Superheroes then?

If you go and read the thread on the Mongoose Legend forum regarding the rewrite you'll get most of the answers you seek and in depth.

The type of torch beloved of fantasy gamers that burns for a couple of hours would be a wooden core wrapped in flammable material, maybe rags, maybe vegetable material, and soaked in pitch. Not something one could easily find in even a Gaslight period game. Surely such a man of the cloth would rely on his faith rather than a material device to ward off evil. Perhaps brandishing his holy book or blessed water or even a saint's relic to bolster his faith.

The possibility of said torch still being alight after being hurled 20m is almost certainly very low. Why do you want to make a torch hurling character especially for CoC?

Funny, that's like the thinking for that change in Call of Cthulhu 7e.