nclarke

The new CoC 7e uses the 3-18 characteristics multiplied by five to get numbers in the range 15 to 90%. Not quite what you're looking for but interesting anyway.

Because all humans have had an identical movement rate for thirty years and it's ingrained. YMMV

Derived characteristics and skills.

You could also look at the RQ6 firearms rules for information

So go on then. Then you just need to get approval from the IP holder (s) and set up a kickstarter/indiegogo campaign.

If you don't OCR the text you can't search it or copy and paste it. The whole point of having a PDF is being able to use the text as a searchable form or you'd buy a copy of eBay. You also can't correct the spelling in a picture which is what a scanned but not OCR'd book is.

Producing a PDF requires either the original electronic document or a good clean paper copy. The first being extremely unlikely to be in a format currently supported if even it's in any sort of electronic format and the second requiring painstaking scan and OCR with hours of correction from the OCR'd document is probably going to cost more that the cost of a licence and what you'd get in income. TL:DR Don't hold your breath.

Try checking the posts that people seem to have been starting every few days about this same topic. You get all the help you need if you put in a little effort yourself first.

Err you may not realise this but C0C already has a two book system. The basic rulebook and the Investigators Companion are effectively the earlier editions of what is on offer for the 7e kickstarter. On you last point I see that a production edition of HoTOE is now on offer as part of the kickstarter.

Err there's a thread here specifically for magic world and a sub thread for errata both monitored by the author. In my mind communicating directly with the author (and a lot of BRP authors are here) is better than communicating with the publisher. (Note dictionary definitions of those two terms). Chaosium is IIRC two or three people and maybe some interns/part timers. I don't expect the level of communication from a company like that which I'd get from WOTC. The shopping function of the site is almost completely automated (as a computer professional you should be aware that this is possible) and as such has nothing to do with their (in)ability to function in other ways.

Ok, let's see if I can help out. You should know what sort of range your PC's skills are (at least for combat) so if they are at 85%, roughly, you look at your NPC's (I tend to have a few sheets printed out with lists of lowish level NPCs on (bandits, undead, thugs, etc.) and find that the average bandit on your list has combat skills around 45% so one-on-one they'll get whipped. So examining the ratio of skills I judge that I'll need twice the PC's number of bandits. Now if they have missile weapons and stand off and shoot they'll be harder to beat so let's instead add 60% more bandits over the number of PC's i.e. 1.6 times the PC's number. Some of these could be in hiding and either come in later or snipe from cover or run away depending on how the situation goes. With my list of bandits I can easily add more if I need to. You can keep a list of PC skill levels to assist you making these decision on the fly. There's no point in calling for a skill that only one character has and that's so low as to be used only for a 'hail mary' situation. Re: the list of npcs - I put the standard stats at the top of the sheet and the variable HP and armour in a table so that I can see at-a-glance that bandit 7 has leather armour and 11 hit points and cross off those HP as he takes damage. I do that in pencil so I can erase it for re-use.

If you get a chance look at Cubicle 7's Laundry hardback. However sales wouldn't have justified a full colour interior. I worked out some numbers wrt publishing and came up with the following. They may be in the ballpark or possibly not. "Legend $12,000 + printing costs - 3500 copies to one address UKP8000 unit cost UKP2.20 236 pages 3500 copies $3.43 plus printing $2.10 if reformatting old copy. Writing - 2pgs/hr @$50/hr $5900 UK Min wage UKP6.08 = UKP717 Copyediting - basic 5 pgs/hr @$30/hr $1440 UKP6.08= UKP286 Proofreading - 11pgs/hr @$30/hr $660 UKP6.08=UKP130 Indexing - 14pgs/hr @$45/hr $765 UKP6.08=UKP102 Layout - 6pgs/hr @$60/hr $2400 UKP6.08=UKP239 UKP1475 at UK minimum wage say UKP1 for 1500 copies plus UKP2.20 for printing= UKP3.20 Runequest 6 $21465 + printing cost - 3500 copies to one address UKP18000 unit cost UKP5.05 456 pages 1000 copies UKP5500 unit cost UKP5.20 3500 copies $6.15 plus printing 1000 copies $21.47 plus printing Writing - 2pgs/hr @$50/hr $11400 Copyediting - basic 5 pgs/hr @$30/hr $2760 Proofreading - 11pgs/hr @$30/hr $1260 Indexing - 14pgs/hr @$45/hr $1485 Layout - 6pgs/hr @$60/hr $4560" So for something like Legend you have got to sell enough copies at a tenner to cover costs, so at least 550 copies before you break even. RQ6 is sold at about UKP 40 (CDN$62) so you need to sell some 400 copies to break even. However I suspect that Loz and Pete don't get paid for writing and do it for love rather than money (and their names in lights). A more knowledgeable person than I wrote somewhere else. "A 150 page book. I'll throw some rough numbers at the wall. That's about 100,000 words in a typical White Wolf format. Right now, industry standard for "the big guys" is about 3-5 cents per word, depending on how established you are. So the average is $0.04. That's a base $4,000 writing budget. Development costs about $0.02 per word, depending on the developer. That's another $2,000. Then editing's another half cent a word, there's $500. So just in text, we've got a budget of $6,500. Art needs to hit about every fourth page. If you have less than that, you'll have whiny internet trolls complaining about production values and yadda yadda. Art goes for about $100 per page. Between about ten splash pages, and 40 quarter page pieces (this factors in some half pages as well) you're sitting on $2,000 more. You need an art director. They'll usually net half that, so $1,000. Cover art? Another $500, unless your artist has worked for Wizards, in which case double it. There's $3,500. We're already at $10,000. We've got a book, kind of, right? Well, no. All that bullshit we've written and doodled needs laid out. That's about $3 per page. Layout tends to get shafted, there's $450. But hey, if they get repeat work, at least they've got templates to work from, right? We're at $10,450. Now keep in mind, these are all freelancers. You haven't even considered a staffer salary yet, if you're talking about an actual publisher, like White Wolf. But we've got a pretty pretty PDF. You could just sell that if you wanted. DrivethruRPG takes a straight cut of 30% off the top. So if you're selling a book for $10, that's $7 you get from every copy. Just to hit budget, you need to sell about 1,500 copies. This is not something you can expect most books to do in a reasonable time frame in the RPG industry. Particularly not for a supplement, whose absolute, maximum number of sales is equal to another book. In practice, it's rarely half that other book's sales. But you want the dead tree version, right? You like the smell? Awesome. This is where the numbers get sad. If you print, say, 5,000 books, you're going to be paying about $6 per copy after initial print costs and shipping. Alliance, the only major distributor in our industry, charges a whopping 70% markdown from MSRP. So for example, if you sold that book at MSRP of $30, print copies would make you (drumroll, please,) $3 each. Most game publishers tend to go toward $35 for their books these days. That means through Alliance, you're looking at a profit of about $4.50. Four dollars and fifty cents. To break even from shelves, you have to sell 2323 of that initial print run. Pretty sad, right? It's even sadder when you think that Alliance deals with about 500 total game shops. Even if each sold four copies (which they won't,) you won't break even. An aside: If you're in the business of making stuff, and distributing it to Walmart, they want 50% off MSRP. Walmart isn't known for its kindly business practice. Alliance wants 70% off. So there's a book, in a white room, with no context. Now, factor in the books that flopped. Your stronger titles have to subsidize those, because when they don't sell, Alliance ships them back at your expense. Say a book only sold 1,000 copies of the needed 2,500~. You need to sell 1,500 of another book to make up for it. Does this start to shed a little light on why they're priced where they are? Any more, and the market wouldn't bear it.?" You can see why RPG publishing will not make you enough money to spend it on marketing and word of mouth is the best that can be expected.

Actually I'm British and converted from Imperial to Metric at college so did exams in both newton metres and foot lbs. I was only responsible for getting the things off the ground nothing to do with in-flight cock-ups. A sales rate 100 copies/month of a non WOTC game would be mega sales for most RPG companies. Typically an RPG book will sell in the 10's per month unless it's a winner of some sort of industry award and even those are skewed by mass voting of fanbois. A cross-over game like Settlers is popular because it's like Monopoly in that the rules can be explained to a newbie in five minutes and a game only takes 30-45 minutes. There is no investment in understanding the nuances of a game if you are playing it in the 'two couples after dinner' situation. Anyway to Magic World. Chasing down a review may not be easy but arriving here and locating Ben's threads should give you the information that it's an update of various earlier edition of the BRP engine with certain options switched on and others switched off. By extension reviews of these earlier versions should give you more to go on. Alternatively you could spend a day at one of the UK conventions and find someone to give you a taster game to see if you like it.

Ah-ha a pissing contest. Having built a UK101 in the 70's and written satellite and space shuttle code for NASA in the 90's and set up firewalls and developed web pages by hand in the early day's, I was running part of Lucent's world-wide corporate network in this century, I'm just as well qualified as you are. :-) If I were looking for a specific type of game I'd use the sites relevant to the subject of games to pinpoint options and not rely on a random search that is only good for turning up porn and advertisements :-)

tgcb, I'm not sure that you understand exactly how search engines work. Putting all those terms into the search requires all of them to be present in the highest ranking results. Chances are that someone typing up a review isn't going to put those words in to their review and hence a lack of results. Using the search terms "magic world" review chaosium I get much more targeted information. As with all search engines putting the right terms in gets the bets information out.

To be honest I don't like random rolling resulting in player characters being put into a slave position unless they all are and the scenario is written around this. All too often other players will decide to order the 'slave' around and the player has no in-game choice because their actions tend to be dictated by others. In something as far away from players modern experience as Heian era Japan it's hard enough to get them to play in accordance with any sort of accuracy regarding culture without putting any added stress on players.

There you go Paul. I posted on the Mongoose site and up popped Loz with the answers. We aim to please :-)

You could hope that Loz (the author) sees your post or put the question up on the Mongoose Forum for Legend and maybe hope that someone there has figured it out for you.

The table you are looking at seems not to have been laid out well. Columns one and two, Allied Families, Allied to are related as far as I can tell. The Allied To Families in column two comprise the more powerful families that others (Column one) are Allied to. Column three and Column four are just alphabetical lists of family names as far as I can tell and unrelated to the contents of the preceding columns. Think of the four columns as a pair of columns and two single columns and it might help. However I just noticed that there are at least a couple of clans who appear twice in column three so there must be some other relation between columns three and four that is not apparent to me. Sorry not much help I'm afraid.

I was thinking of the negative hit points that result in a Fatal Wound p209. If you don't know how negative your hit points are then you can't know how much healing will bring you back to one HP allowing you to recover. I didn't check the book to see what it actually said and confused it with the negative hit points per location found in Legend etc.

The number of negative HP's which you need to hit to be dead and they put the minus sign in for you.

By Thimpsons I presume you refer to the use of SMG in the OP. You perhaps aren't aware that WWI saw several varieties of weapon that would later fall under the sub machine gun term. Starting in 1915 we have the Villar-Perosa, an Italian SMG firing 9mm pistol ammo and the later Bergmann MP18. An earlier, but non production weapon, was a pistol caliber version of thr Maxim used for demonstrations where a full length range was not available (no doubt some to be the weapon of choice for CoC players).

As players will inevitably go for the largest weapon they can I expect that they would be armed with something doing pretty high damage. If they try to fire it from the hip give them a massive penalty and a broken wrist. SMG's and sawn-off shotguns would be best for house clearing but be sure to allow for rounds spraying everywhere and read up on the rules for solid slugs rather than shot in a shotgun.

Pistols etc. while smaller are also inherently much less accurate. There are plenty of examples of police officers emptying their service weapon at close range <10m and failing to hit their target. I suggest having a player move round your apartment carrying a broom in a ready to shoot position and see how difficult it is. Then apply some modifiers to their weapon use indoors if they insist on using a rifle. For example have someone carrying a rifle and try and open a door without kicking it in. Firstly they would have to point the rifle away from the door to reach the handle easily, they then only have one hand on the rifle - can't shoot one-handed. Anyone ready with a weapon inside the room is going to almost certainly get the first shot. If you've done the walk round the apartment thing then you have a ready made third-party who will back you up regarding the difficulties inherent in using a rifle indoors. If you've got buy-in from the players then the issue won't arise. If you penalise them with making it one or two degrees harder to use a rifle at close quarters you've got it about right. A rifle round is likely to go straight through drywall. Add in some collateral damage by injuring the neighbors and having them arrested for reckless endangerment might be a wake up call.

I've been accused of looking like one of the protagonists on the cover. Alas not the young woman :-(