NickMiddleton

A version of the system from Elric! is in the Magic World supplement Advanced Sorcery . It’s been a very long time since I looked at them side by side so I can’t recall all the differences between the SB4e systems and Elric! nor whether Ben made any significant changes when he put the Elric! / SB5 demonology rules into Advanced Sorcery as the Summoners Art.

My experience is these sorts of lags are rarely about raw resolution but most often to with file _complexity_ (layers, comments, fonts, scripting etc). Also, probably your most direct route to get a response is via the Chaosium website?

I am very much a fan of fast and fluid rules for this sort of thing, and have most of Brancalonia for 5, so I’d start by looking at what I could tweak from a stripped down BRP core such as Magic World: but I’d ALSO heavily consult https://thedesignmechanism.com/fioracitta/…

Because they didn’t exist in the original source material is my guess. Magic in UGE is adapted from Worlds of Wonder: Magic World : which doesn't mention Grimoire at all and says this about the staff ”A magician may pay an enchanter to have a staff made for him. The ritual will take about six months of the magician’s time and he will have to pay for the enchanter’s upkeep and expenses at a rate of around 1.000 silver Crowns a month. The magician cannot make other commitments because he must assist in every stage of the ritual, and the final ceremony will cost him a point of POW, permanently subtracted from his characteristics. A magician who gains a staff is officially a sorceror.” And elsewhere in the same rules (WoW: MW) it explicitly says those rules do not cover “enchanters”. So it doesn’t document the enchanters process / rules at all. Sorcery in UGE is adapted from Elric! which does mention Grimoires, but not staffs per se, and in that system (source and in BGB / UGE) does not have specific Spell/ Magic Skills but does have a hard requirement of a minimum POW stat. I defer to Jason, but my guess is that it was a detail that wasn’t picked up when originally adapting the sources to be the BGB#; or if it was, it wasn’t judged a big enough issue to delay delivery of the finished MS. And when Jason was revising the BGB to create the UGE, similarly I imagine it either was missed or not judged to be worth the time / effort to resolve, given that as others have said the BGB / UGE are a baseline framework. # I certainly don’t recall it coming up in the discussions of the BGB I was party too as one of the group of informal commentators Jason had convened back then: but it was nearly twenty years ago!

If I may invoke Murphy's Rules (Fantasy Gamer 3 - December / January 1984, from the 1988 anthology volume):

What’s the chances that it will be available from the Chaosium stand at UKGE?

With fixed AV and hit locations after determining whether a target is hit and what damage is done, there is still the variable of where they have been hit. With variable AV and no hit locations, there’s the same number of random rolls. But, with locational hit values and fixed AV, more outcomes producing impairing results (limb out of use, or destroyed etc); variable AV and no locational hit values allows GM and players more latitude in how they narrate and interpret the more results of a blow, with only Major Wounds directing how we imagine the outcomes to any specific degree. For games that need a greater degree of fluidity and speed in play, that are tonally more heroic / “pulpy” I would always choose variable AV and Major Wounds (and often Heroic hit points). I was originally a huge fan of hit locations when I first played RQ, but experience over the decades has taught me that they are a poor fit for many (but not all) the games I run: frequently too fiddly, impeding the flow of the game and too often throwing up weird statistical anomalies (e.g three rounds in, everyone has their left leg disabled). I am considering revising my BRP monograph Outpost 19 currently: and a major choice is whether I keep the hit locations in NPC stats, because they push the tone and feel towards BRPs more gritty and detailed orientated mode and I’m unsure now if that’s the best fit for the adventure and setting… It was originally partly inspired by the original Future*World which didn’t use them… but another major inspiration was the early Revelation Space novels of Alastair Reynolds, and hit locations and that gritty, detail focused style of BRP seem (as they did nearly twenty years back when I originally wrote it) well suited to the setting. Ultimately, like the overwhelming majority of these sorts of debates, there is no “objectively correct” answer, because it’s an aesthetic judgement.

In SB5 Fast Talk is the "one to one" communication Skill (where as Oratory is the "one to many"), and an adventurer gets a 10 point bonus for a successful Charm (APP x 5) roll - so from Intimidation for the menacing Barbarian I'd use Fast Talk with a bonus form a successful STR x 5 or SIZ x 5 (or APP x 5 - pick the most appropriate - small, non-athletic looking people can with the right attitude project a LOT of menace and threat...) As pointed out, in SB 5 sleight of hand is explicitly a specialization / subset of Craft and explicitly covers picking pockets / purse cutting.

Jason posted a pic of session prep for his ongoing latest game back in February this year in the Lords of the Middle Sea Facebook group but made no comment on where the production cycle was…

What sort of automaton? What context: historical, steampunk, fantasy? Magic World has a set of “enchanted Clockwork animals” (page 226). BRP:UGE has some stats for Robots (page 239) that could be adapted.

Because I am idiot, I forgot to also mention the Magic World Quickstart which includes the scenario "The Fishsinger's Daughter" and some pre-generated characters.

Any system has to balance ease of use, for all players at the table, with the atmosphere and texture of play the mechanic's evoke. My experience with "improvisational" magic, from 2e Ars Magica "spontaneous casting" onwards is that managing it generally takes a lot of GM and player bandwidth - if everyone at the table is comfortable with it, then great; if not, it can be a problem. And avoiding magic being formulaic / excessively predictable is a laudable goal, but again requires finesse and judgement or it can become a burden to the game. For some settings, magic being "science like" is appropriate, and for some tables, magic being easily quantified and consistent is to the benefit of everyone's enjoyment... Completely off the cuff: I think a limited set of skills, or even a single skill with a list of specialisms / sub-domains, and then a set of spell lists as a set of guidelines is a good starting point. Ars Magica's distinction between formulaic spells and spontaneous spells. A set of lists of specific formulae in specific disciplines / categories to get people started (and provide a baselines for adjudication) and then skill rolls to allow variation. Sticking to the formula of a "known" spell is easy; push the formulae modestly (+/- 3 points in effect from a baseline) is routine ; radically pushing the formulae (+/- 4 points in effect or more ), or coming up with an entirely novel spell is hard...

The old BRP QuickStart or here has a bunch of short adventures in different genres (at least one is fantasy iirc) and most would work as one shots and at least some have pre-gens: I wrote 2, and they both do. It’s not 100% BRP:UGE compatible, but it’s entirely usable with the latter. As regards fantasy specifically: I recently adapted Richard Watts seminal “Curse of Chardros” for Magical World as “Ancient Shadows”, which is pretty much (but again, not 100%) compatible with BRP:UGE (and the Sorcery power system), but has no pregens. I bothered to convert it because I really rate it as a intro / starter scenario. User Hexelis posted a conversion of the old 1982 Magic World scenario “Vault of Sarkanth Han” to the more recent edition here: again, no pre-gens and not 100% but close to with BRP:UGE and specifically its Sorcery powers system.

...I speculated about doing so years (... erm, possibly decades...) ago, and more recently (a few years back) I started noodling away at a Sword & Planet-esque BRP thing with touches of Spelljammer (ships powered by a variant of the Rune magic in Advanced Sorcery / Bronze Grimoire), but that morphed in to its own thing, and switched systems to become AGE powered. Its odd - I can think of resources for Greyhawk, Dark Sun and Eberron using BRP (or Mythras) and as g33k says, "generic" D&D, but I don't recall ever seeing a specific Spelljammer adaptation.

Neither of the monographs is available any more, nor the original CoC based material from which they derived, but the author replaced the support material (scenarios and other add ons) back on the internet here: https://www.ragingtrifle.com/jn/

I dislike adding additional rolls in to the flow of the game, which has always been my misgiving about augmenting skill, so I exclusively use the first method. I prefer the focus of the "drama and tension" to be on the primary roll, so a player makes a pitch to myself / the group of what skills / passions (or "passion like things" in the case of my usual house rules) and where I / we agree they make sense they get to add the special chance of the relevant skill / passion (maximum of one add from a skill and one add from a passion or passion like thing). Given the success of RQG, it clearly works for many, but it'll do no harm changing the details.

This might be of interest: It’s an overlay for the “full” version of BRP Sorcery system from Magic World & Advanced Sorcery but is entirely compatible with the concise version in BRP-UGE (and Magic World & Advanced Sorcery are useful adjuncts to that system). It owes a clear debt to RQ3 Sorcery, but is also highly streamlined compared to that, but might provided some ideas?

Yup - I think pretty much everything from the RQ3 Monsters Book / BRP Creatures Monograph made it in to the 2012 Magic World book. I listed them for some reason here:

In Magic World, my general touchstone / baseline for implementing BRP, each Cultural classification gets a list of 6 - 9 skills and a player chose three from that list to give a +10 bonus (think in my tweaks of MW CG to bring it more in line with the BGB I scaled the adds for culture to +10 / +15 / +20 / +25 for campaign power level)... Your figures seem roughly similar, and I'd say they were perfectly fair.

https://basicroleplaying.org/search/?q=screen&quick=1&type=downloads_file There are a bunch in the files section here that could be printed out and used with generic screens - I think most are for specific BRP games, or for the older BGB edition. This one's not bad: and the InDesign files for it are I think also there. But as you say - a single screen covering all the options in UGE is not really practical.

(My emphasise)… as said elsewhere, it’s a VC-like pitch for seed funding new BRP powered games as commercial ventures. It doesn’t specifically exclude supplements, but it is very hard to see how such things would qualify. In so far as it stimulates an increase in the diversity and variety of BRP powered games, I’m intrigued to see what the outcome of the contest is. Doesn’t appeal to me at all, although it will be interesting to see what games result from this. But this, on the face of it, is not in the immediate future going to directly stimulate the publication of supplements one could adapt to one’s own games.

They serve a function, in that they provide a quantification of a characters raw capability / natural talent distinct from the skills and knowledge they have acquired through their upbringing and training, formal and informal. Whether that function justifies their existence for you only you can say. There is a grand gala, which all the adventurers are attending. They are hoping to connect with the Crown Prince, who it is widely believed will be attending incognito, looking to recruit... Rather than relying on any particular skill, a GM could ask for everyone to make a Charisma check... Because they are not making a Bargain, issuing a Command, putting up a Disguise, picking the correct social mores (Etiquette), Fast Talk-ing someone, Perform-ing a role, Persuad(e)-ing anyone, flaunt ing their Status or Teach-ing anyone... they are trying to project their presence as appealing and hoping the prince will pick them. Now, one could easily see a way to look at interpretations of a specific skill that would serve instead, but equally one can see that a more generalized assessment of how charismatic a character is has value. Whilst many historical and real world figures we talk about as being "Charismatic" have specific talents in terms of the named skills that are in default BRP, many of them don't have obvious strengths in those specific areas, but do have a more generalized quality that draws attention, that lets them dominate or stand out in social situations that we happily gloss under "they are very Charismatic...". The key thing is that the characteristic rolls are very broad evaluation of qualities. So a GM should always give less information / benefit from a successful characteristic roll than from a successful skill roll. My go to example: any character can make an Idea roll to see that there are tracks on the ground. But only a successful roll against the Track skill should reveal anything about / from those tracks.

Via the BRP-UGE SRD thread I found this:https://github.com/raleel/basic-roleplaying-UGE/blob/main/BRP-UGE-Logo.png see:

Yeah - this was never intended as a rigid tool for specific casting thresholds / limits: I stopped doing such things in my BRP games a long time ago; which is not to say one couldn’t build such a system from these suggestions of course. This is intended as an overlay to the existing MW / AS Sorcery rules to add a little more interest and colour. In the previous Sorcery document I uploaded there is a (very loose) sketch of a taxonomy of “types” and “orders” (as in “orders of magnitude”) for the full MW/AS published spell list. One absolutely could create specific skill level requirements to access specific types / orders of spells etc: but it’s not something I want in my games, so I haven’t done it. It’s a long time since I’ve run RQ3 sorcery, but my recollections of doing so and my house rules for it were unquestionably factors in coming up with this.

Before the end of the original active phase of Magic World Ben had raised the idea with the informal mailing list of contributors (of which I was one) about a "Magic World Companion" book, modelled after the original RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer Companions Chaosium did way back when. I floated a few ideas, and sketched a few more; some of those sketches gradually morphed in to house rule notes in the the intervening years; during early lock down in 2020, casting around for things to do (I was still working full time from home, but was not socialising or F2F gaming) I started working on them, with a vague notion of doing something using the then still available Chaosium "Small Publisher's license" (couple of years previously Marcus Bone and I had chatted about doing something with that, but we both then got busy with other stuff). Basically, I have a Companion-esque compilation of addons, variants, revisions, supplementary material and a scenario that amounts to a 124 page book. I am currently mulling what to do with it - the "Small Publisher License" is no longer an option, but I am hopeful that something may happen on the Community Content Program front, but nothing has been formally announced as yet. The book has sat on my hard drive, basically finished, for most of the last year, so a few more months will do no harm. I'll take a stock of my options in the spring: retooling it all to be strictly ORC compliant currently looks like a lot of work that doesn't appeal; the free / at cost PoD via Lulu route remains viable in principle and is least challenging at this point, but if there is to be a CCP and it covers MW that's where I'd like it to be. One way or another I'll do something with it by the end of August this year.