NickMiddleton

In the Southern Reaches I'd make Demons dark spirits of the bleak and forgotten places, tortured denizens of dark and abandoned lands, the bitter children of the misdeeds and vile ambitions of great lords and high princes of ancient times (Fey and Mortal) that sowed poisoned seed on twisted soil.

In other settings I'd stick with a more Moorcockian take and similar. I am very fond of the Malazan setting, and in Midnight Tides(the ffith book in the Malazan Book of the Fallen) there's a whole thread where a character befriends a summoned / bound demon - and discovers that is just a citizen of another plane, dragged to the characters home plane and bound in service. Some are also just comedy monsters... (spoilers, obviously!):

https://malazan.fandom.com/wiki/Lilac

https://malazan.fandom.com/wiki/Kenryll'ah_demon_princes

Cheers,

Nick

I'd contact Chaosium directly and privately - and this is a good starting point:

https://www.chaosium.com/fan-use-and-licensing/

Copyright, trademark law and good practice are almost always more complex and subtle than fans generally assume - and fans always seem to underestimate how important these things are to publishers. Conducting these sorts of discussions publicly thus often gets confused and fraught - best to go to the source, understand the publishers _actual_ requirements and discus with them directly.

Cheers,

Nick

3 hours ago, Tywyll said:

Having two variable factors to achieve the same narrative results is clunky and unnecessary, as well as time consuming.

Except that in my experience it’s none of those things and adds descriptive richness. Please stop generalising your personal preferences into universal objective truth: they are not (neither are mine, obviously).

11 minutes ago, Tywyll said:

The random amount of damage rolled dictates how much protection relative to an attack. You also have Specials and Criticals which often/always negate armor as a factor, therefore handling the whole 'you hit a weakspot' narrative. You don't need all of these things together to achieve modeling the effect of armor versus attacks. 

In a fixed AV system plate armour always stops e.g. 7 points. There is no variability in the performance of the armour, only in the rating of the strike against the armour (the damage rolled). In a variable AV system the random amount of damage rolled represents the strike; the random AV rolled represents the passive defence achieved when / where the strike lands.  You clearly don't find that description / concept compelling. Others do.

On 5/1/2019 at 10:32 PM, rustorod said:

Hello,

was wondering if Cthulhu Dark Ages and Cthulhu Thru the Ages would provide some Cthulhuian goodness to Magic World?  Want to try Magic World and have a fantasy based Call of Cthulhu game.

Thanks.

Mike

In the dim and distant,before Cthulhu Dark Ages was formally published, it was a fan thing and IIRC back then it was clearly drawing quite heavily on Elric! (the game magic World is based on) for stuff not covered in the then core CoC rules.

Jason Durall also provided an essay on doing Sword & Sorcery  in Cthulhu - "Tombs & Tentacles" - in Uncounted Worlds issue 2 (https://www.chaosium.com/content/FreePDFs/BRP/UW001 - Uncounted Worlds Issue 2.pdf)

Cheers,

Nick

40 minutes ago, Tywyll said:

Yeah I am not a fan of hit locations per se. I find them far too fragile for the 'reality' they are trying to emulate. 

Quantifying physical action down to that level seemed a really cool thing back when I first played RQ - and it tended to chime with the reality of my HEMA experience. But after a decade of HEMA and a couple of decades of RQ and similar systems I came to find the execution unnecessarily fiddly. More abstract systems could capture the feel, and descriptive and narrative logic could supply the colour that location charsets were providing. I haven't run anything using hit locations for over a decade.

51 minutes ago, Tywyll said:

However, random armor as written is dumb. If armor gives you six points normally you roll a d6? So your armor is categorically worse than usual, even in a full suit?

Just because one doesn't agree with or understand a model doesn't make it dumb. An armour that provides 1D6 protection _by definition_ provides a range of protection - that armour gives you 3-4 protection typically.

If fortune favours you / your opponent is unlucky / your position yourself well, you get 6 points of protection (the blow lands absolutely perpendicular in the centre of a piece of armour, maximising its ability to spread the impact / provide the highest resistance to the blow). If it all goes poorly for you / well for your opponent you get a single point of protection (the blow angles in to catch the edge of a piece of armour / gets funnelled in to a gusset or other weak point). Now if your opponent has fluffed their strike (only rolled minimum damage) how you position your body / how lucky you are probably wont matter that much... but if they have executed their swing perfectly (got their full weight behind the blow ) you need to hope  fortune favours you...

A lot of the factors hit locations  are trying to model (but for some get too fiddly / to fragile as a result) are abstracted in the interplay of variable armour values with variable damage rolls

50 minutes ago, Tywyll said:

 No thanks. I don't understand what's wrong with a flat value.

There's a  separate argument that if using armour value rolls ALL values should be multiple dice (so the distribution is biased to more common value), which would give armours a somewhat more predictable value. But I've generally found that it falls in to the "pay off not worth the effort" pot, as I'm happy with standard values.

For me idea that armour provides an absolutely consistent level of protection / damage nullification I find deeply counter intuitive. I like their being a variable element that "belongs" to the defender (AV) as well as one the "belongs" to the attacker (damage dealt) and I have found variable AV and major Wound levels to be _much_ faster / easily communicated to new players / flexible in play.

Nick

13 hours ago, Nick J. said:

Somebody is going to have to explain to me what photon torpedoes have to do with Elric vs. Magic World?

Not a lot really - the underlying assumption, that one can in any useful sense matriculate between disparate fictional sources (by different authors) to reach a codified taxonomy of exactly how mcguffins and characters rank in some sort of "objective hierarchy" is a nonsense, and has been since the first play ground argument about whether Superman can beat the Hulk.

BRP is more than capable of describing different settings: one of the seminal Stormbringer supplements was the Rogue Mistress campaign, and I like many fans I knew had been running plane hopping / multi-dimensional games for a decade or so prior to that seeing release. It can also adapt to far more than the "gritty" style people assume is its only mode (and which is unquestionably its metier).

How "powerful" Stormbringer is relative to anything else is a question, like how fast is the Millenium Falcon or how strong is the Hulk that actually has no definitive answer other than "whatever the plot requires at that particular moment". They are all tools of fiction, subservient to authorial intent. And thus are fundamentally NOT amenable to the sort of "objective" codification a game requires, where by definition the outcome is NOT determined by authorial fiat. Good writing provides the illusion of underlying consistency to how something behaves in fiction; great games _in retrospect_ are full of moments that resonate and affect the participants like great fiction - but they get to those similar destinations by fundamentally _different_ means.

If a GM decides in their version of the multiverse Stormbringer can cut the One Ring that's fine and true for their multiverse / game - but it is an arbitrary GM decision. Just as it is an arbitrary decision that in _my_ multiverse the gods of Law and Chaos (and Sauron and Stormbringer) flee in terror from Dragnipur... and Stormbringer _cannot_ cut the One Ring, because it can _only_ be harmed by the fires that forged it.

Cheers,

Nick

On 3/26/2019 at 10:07 PM, colinabrett said:

How would you handle this weakening of the Unbreakable Bonds? Or, indeed, any other spell weakened in this way?

Perhaps the spell's duration could be reduced? Or perhaps the STR vs. MP (in the case of Unbreakable Bonds) would be against one third of the caster's MP (the Bonds are weakened by 2-out-of-3 Levels, so it seems reasonable that the Bonds are now "powered" by 1/3 of the caster's power).

Given that duration is pretty consistent with standard Sorcery spells in MW (and Elric!), and Undo Sorcery "weakens" target spells it, I generally favour reducing the effective power (so an Undo Sorcery 1 would reduce Unbreakable Bonds to 2/3rd caster power, an Undo 2 would reduce it to 1/3 caster power, and a 3 point Undo would eliminate it) rather than duration... but I can see arguments either way...

Actually Nick J's suggestion is probably best - when casting the Undo Sorcery one has to specify either shortened duration OR reduced power. An Unbreakable Bonds on a mighty-thewed barbarian type one would go with power (they get a chance to break free every round, and you'd expect a Conan type to be able to pull that off in short order); but a sacrificial victim (say a child...) held in place with an Unbreakable Bonds? Might be better to just cut short the duration.

Cheers,

Nick

I've always tended to make do with the equivalents for Elric! / Stormbringer 5th edition (virtual dientical rules wise to Magic world):

http://www.stormbringerrpg.com/?page_id=2533

Although I always intended at some point to use a PDF editor to extract the key tables from Magic World to create a separate "reference" document for use as well.

Cheers,

Nick

14 hours ago, SDLeary said:

Not really a problem if you remember to do a clean install every 5k miles! 😉

 

Still remember getting stuck with my kids in a shiny new Virgin Voyager train in Bristol Station in the South West of England ~15 years ago. Train crew struggled for 40 minutes with various issues with the on board systems, we pulled ~200yards out of the station and it conked out, we spent another 40 minutes with lights coming on, going off, information boards blanking and scrolling through, then a disgruntled guard came on the tannoy: "Right, we have tried everything except turning the whole train of and back on again - if that doesn't work we will have to get shunted back in to the station and put you all on a different train"..

Apparently it WAS running a version of Windows , because after a hard reboot it ran fine all the way to York... My kids will never let me live that down as I work in the rail industry.

Nick

10 minutes ago, Sean_RDP said:

Well with the support of the community, who knows what can happen? I certainly will not complain if ABaB leads to more interest in MW. How that translates into the future, no one knows. 

Here's hoping!

1 hour ago, Sean_RDP said:

How would you incorporate sorcery into your Houserule? I would think that there would be some magic, both sorcery and shamanic that could help with sea voyages.

I was wondering that and weirdly having trawled through both MW and Advanced Sorcery there's really very little in the way of spells or other magical effects that directly influence Navigation and the like. There are  a few generic skill boosting spells / effects but nothing beyond that.

Having recently re read most of the Malazan novels I have a hankering to work out how to do a Falaran Sea-Witch in Magic World... Hmmm.

Nick

2 hours ago, Chaot said:

One huge reason to have the Elric! book in addition to the Magic World book is the Elric! Digest. The write ups of major NPCs as well as some more typical examples of various professionals is invaluable to a GM in my humble opinion. Nothing really exists like that for Magic World.

*sigh* yet another thing that was going to be in the Chronicler's Companion. Hmm - I should contact Ben about them actually.

1 hour ago, Rick Meints said:

Out of curiosity, I see a number of people in this thread use phrases like "lots of people" and "loads of people" when it comes to the number of people interested in purchasing MW material.

Pretty sure only Soltakss did, actually - I said “Lots of people post stuff in the forums or to the downloads section.” Which has a somewhat different meaning.

What I’m getting at is I don’t think we (in a general sense) are making the mistake that there’s some huge untapped market for Magic World - I think precisely the issue is the general awareness of how niche it is, and difficult a prospect making a success of any sort of support product would be.

*shrug* Depending on how things go this year with real life ™ I may finally get round to doing something with what I have left from the unpublished Magic World projects I was previously involved with. What I couldn’t say, and it’s equally likely that work or other commitments will eat my time. But MW (or my personal hack of it for SF) is pretty much the only D100 game I play or run these days, so I’m likely to always be lurking on the fringes at least.

39 minutes ago, Thot said:

Why would a full commercial license be beyond the scope of what we're discussing?

Well, speaking purely for myself, having actually read the section on Chaosium's web site on Commercial Licenses, I had taken the tenor of conversation here so far to be entirely of the order of a few fans / former contributors get together to get some previously unreleased material out.

Chaosium's own thinking on Commercial Licenses (https://www.chaosium.com/commercial-licensing/ ) indicate that for such a license they are expecting (and only interested in entertaining) substantial serious and credible proposals.

18 minutes ago, Thot said:

Actually, the upfront cost of publishing something on drivethroughrpg is not that high, if you can live without expensive art.

One cannot use  DTR ( or Lulu or similar distribution platforms) with the Fan Policy - it specifically prohibits them. So would have to be full commercial (I think we can all agree largely beyond the scope of what we are discussing here right now) or the Small Publisher Limited License. That has a flat $100 per year up front fee (or $200 for the full three years if paid in advance). Not a huge sum - but it is per project.

55 minutes ago, soltakss said:

It's a shame, because it is a Catch-22 situation. Magic World isn't supported because there clearly isn't a demand, as nobody applies for a Licence. People don't apply for a licence because there are upfront costs and the returns probably wouldn't be great.

The SPLL iirc is time limited (3 year period - I assume it could be renewed if both parties wished) and limited to a gross revenue of $2000 per year and a fee of $100 per year (or $200 for full three year period upfront)... the logical consequences of that is a project needs to sink that $200 plus any costs for art / layout etc. Not insurmountable, but non-trivial by anyone's standards.

55 minutes ago, soltakss said:

It may well be that posting in forums and on fan websites is the way forward for Magic World.

Indeed. But the allure of "proper" "real" support (PDF / PoD books via DTR at the very least) is very strong. A substantial portion of gamers have always had this weird obsession that a game is some how less valid of there is not active provision of new material from some sort of official endorsed source.

On 1/9/2019 at 6:48 AM, Coronoides said:

How do you describe/ use the three forces in your games?

Loosely and largely descriptively rather than as a specific mechanical thing when I ran Southern Reaches games. I could see myself using it more in some settings and even less in others, just as with Elric! the whole Law / Chaos thing was quite central in the Young Kingdoms but far less so when running something set in Hawkmoon's World. I largely took the MW Allegiance rules as illustrative of how one could conceptualise and reinforce such a metaphysics for a setting, rather than a required part of the rules. But that's largely how I treat all "rues" anyway.

3 hours ago, soltakss said:

And this is the problem. Lots of people, apparently, want MW material but nobody is prepared to apply for a Licence.

Lots of people post stuff in the forums or to the downloads section. Doing something under the Small Publisher Limted or Commercial licenses would be a more substantial commitment: the former has an explicit upfront fee associated for example.

On 1/13/2019 at 4:36 AM, Coronoides said:

Culture

I allow the Priest/Shaman occupation for State cultures. I suspect its absence is a hold-over from Glorantha. Is that true? All the historical Iron Age to Medieval states I can think of had strong religions and therefore priests.

From the MW rule book: "The occupations are a listing of suggested typical occupations associated with that culture." I always read it that if the Chronicler & player agreed a player could have ANY profession irrespective of culture, the list of occupations against each were a prompt / inspiration. 

Quote

Languages are not discussed much.  All the cultures in a setting could have their own languages if you wanted but then you better  ensure all PCs have at least one language in common! How have you handled languages in your setting?

I vacillate between trying to capture the feel of a polyglot setting and exasperation with how easily it can become a frustrating and pointless extra faff that fails to add anything worthwhile to the game. I worked quite hard on an interrelated language tree for my Ulfland setting; there's basically ONE active human language (and one dead one) in the current fantasy campaign I'm developing.

Quote

There are four broad categories of culture in the book (MW18) and I created a new option ‘Solitaire’ (see below).  A setting might define specific cultures with their own languages within these broad categories. Has anyone done this? What categories would you put well known fictional and historical cultures into?

I had started looking at the idea of a Solitary / Solitaire culture for my SF games, but never wrote it up in any detail.

Quote

Solitaire ‘Culture’

Some fantasy species live as solitary individuals. This ‘culture’ represents a lackof culture.  Any parental education is minimal. These individuals are educated mostly by the experience of surviving alone, and thus lack sophisticated knowledge except of the wilds they are familiar with. We do assume that before play they have had enough contact with others to pick up a language, or know it instinctively as dragons do in some worlds.  By necessity a solitaire PC is self-reliant in the extreme.

Examples: Abandoned in the forest as a child and perhaps raised by wolves or other beasts. Those who have gone mad, utterly forgetting civilised ways and living like a beast.  Wild talking beasts especially solitary predators like crocodiles, eagles, and panthers. In many worlds dragons, fachans, and other solitary monstrous predators.

Skills: Climb, Hide, Move Quietly, Nature, Sense, Swim, Track.

Occupations: Fisher, Hunter, Lost/Forgotten, Nomad.

What do you think?

Very elegant, like this a lot.

Quote

Culture and Race 

Note that while many cultures are dominated by a species, culture and species need not be synonymous as they are in Tolkiens works and much modern fantasy. A setting could allow any species to can come from any culture. If you want to play a dragon living among elves you could in such a world. If this is true then species still determines your base skill %. This could be for several reasons. The physical and mental differences between species affect base skills. Additionally, species cannot interbreed and so families and communities of a species tend to pass some culture down through the generations preserving traditions that emerged on the origin land of the species millennia ago before the great diasporas.

How do you handle species and culture?

Not sure I have hard and fast rules, as things can be so setting dependent. For example "...species cannot interbreed..." is a setting specific assumption - in one setting I have the "Tall" species (Humans and Elf / Melnibonean like Shanescue) can interbreed, as can the "short" species (Meldek and Brotan) but the short and the tall cannot. In another setting, each "background" is tied to a specific species and culture - so there two very distinct Elven backgrounds (one state, one tribal) to describe the two very distinct cultures of Elves in that setting. It would _theoretically_ be possible for other species to be adopted in to one of those Elven cultures, but for the other it is in setting such a remote possibility I wouldn't allow it. 

4 hours ago, Coronoides said:

Another peak behind the curtain...

Reputation: this is a new skill used to determine if others have heard of you. Since magic use is rare and important in this world, base reputation is (number of spell levels known)%. Reputation is a Communication category skill. Unlike other skills other people roll on your skill to see if they have heard of you. A special success will also have heard of the character’s most notable deed, their flashiest spell, and recognise them from description. A critical success will recognise them, be able to list the caster’s three most flashiest spells, and be able to list the several of their noteworthy deeds. In places you have never been these levels of success are reduced one step or two if there is no shared language. A critical failure mistakes the character for someone else entirely. Reputation is checked for experience only after completing a notable deed that had witnesses or recognition. Adventurers thanked by the count with a feast after slaying a dragon would qualify. 

Note: I have just changed the Base % from 0 to number of spells known. Spell casters posted prior to this should add spell levels know to reputation. In my world spell casting is a rare and important skill. Spellcasting education is available at about the same rate as literacy in Europe's middle ages (about 1% of the population). Only about 1% of those with POW16+ know how to cast spells. PCs with POW16+ are assumed to be among those lucky few.

I rather like this - I am normally wary of this sort of skill (Credit rating, for such a long standing an apparently innocuous part pot Call of Cthulhu has caused a surprising amount of confusion over the years in various groups). But this is a straightforward and elegant way to handle things. I'd want to consider how character backstory and "campaign level" at character generation would interact with it, but that's a minor detail.

1 hour ago, Thot said:

But also: They will happily support people who want to do something based on Magic World. So, anyone wanting to do something with it, I bet they'll give you the license for cheap! At the very least, it's worth asking.

https://www.chaosium.com/fan-use-and-licensing/

7 hours ago, Nick J. said:

That would be really easy to model if you used a Casting Skill to make magic work. Just tie the removal of somatic or verbal components to the arete system in Advanced Sorcery.

Hmm - that reminds me if some ideas I had for BRP / MW spell casting spinning out of the Jorune conversion I did a way back when...

Nick

On 1/8/2019 at 2:30 PM, rsanford said:

Chris,

Do you happen to know if the magic systems described in The Magic Book is the same as that described in RuneQuest 6? I am laboring under the assumption that I don't need The Magic Book beause I have RQ6...

Not Chris, but I have the Magic Book... it is the RQIII Magic Book translated (not as rigorously as it should have been, alas) in to compatibility with the BRP BGB.

Cheers,

Nick

See MOB's post here: 

"...we have no problem with ... other MW stuff that was in the works coming out under license, whether as a fan work or by another publisher."

That was 2016, but I don't believe their position has changed.

Cheers,

Nick