NickMiddleton

So, hard on the heels of the Magic World and associated announcements, Chaosium now reveal that they ALSO have a Pulp genre source book for BRP in the works for this year - Astounding Adventures... Interesting... Nick

Publish it - a book of "Stuff" with a unified look and feel, even if the setting specific have to be filed off for copyright reasons is still very useful and, I suspect, will have far wider appeal than any "gear head" design sequence system Or BTRC's Stuff! or any one of the numerous other such systems... Cheers, Nick

All only available as PDF's - which strongly suggests they are VERY niche products... And, by the very nature of Savage Worlds, pretty abstract as well. GURPS and Traveller have fan bases established over 25 to 35 years that have a large contingent of fans who are very focused on "gear heading" - and it is pretty well established amongst both fan bases that there is also a significant chunk of fans who are NOT gear heads, and who find the emphasis on gear head stuff problematic. Traveller in particular has always had a tension between the presumption that that the VDS / "Design Sequences" are central and need to be detailed and those who were quite happy with the detailed systems being optional... How many people ACTUALLY build vehicles or worlds or weapons using these systems? How many buy the books to read, but actually use the gear catalogues for "off the shelf" details? How high amongst general Traveller fans is the regard for Fire, Fusion & Steel... Given that Traveller and GURPS (and Hero, Spacemaster, Alternity, Shatterzone, Star Wars, Star Trek, Star Frontiers etc etc) have ALL been there before and in many cases are still available (not to mention the great swathe of generic and small press PDF only stuff at DTR etc) for world creation, gear etc, what on earth makes it worth while doing a "BRP" badged re-hash of the same generic stuff? If I want to run BRP 2300AD (or something similar in feel) I can just use the BRP rules and plug 2300AD kit in as necessary (pretty much what I HAVE done in the past in fact). Tech is an intrinsic part of a setting. Build a setting, THEN it's worth trying to sell a SETTING SPECIFIC Vehicle / Equipment Guide - but a "generic" system won't appeal to the gearheads (they already have their preferred system(s)) NOT the non-gearheads (they have no interest in spreadsheets, they want the setting). I disagree - BRP's weakness as a science fiction game is that it doesn't (and never had has) compelling SF settings, or at least reasonably well supported ones - if people buy in to the settings they will buy in to the idea of BRP as an SF game. I had copies of Other Suns and Worlds of Wonder in 1983 - so BRP has ALWAYS been an SF game for me and I was quite happy to use supplements for otehr games to patch the gaps (2300AD Equipment Guide; the starship rules from Space Opera; World Generation from Alternity etc etc) as required for the SETTING I was playing in. Cheers, Nick

Whether your knife is made of napped flint or ever-sharp ceramic, you can only swing it SO fast... For modern and hi-tech combat 12 seconds works fine - the problematic area is handling realistic rates of fire, the over effectiveness of armour and player habits built up from playing RPG's and watching Hollywood films.... Make firearms capable of full auto fire and appropriately deadly, make the compromises in effective armour more apparent and combat changes A LOT: much more use of cover etc. Having said all that, house ruling that combat rounds are actually 6 seconds will have virtually no impact on the rules (unless you are making extensive use of Powers, in which case durations may need adjusting) and a few tweaks can make BRP combat feel pretty good as a tabletop approximation of modern / hi-tech combat. The Superpowers section of the Powers chapter of the Big Gold Book has one which can be used with a very restrained character point budget in any genre, not just Superheroes. The new Cthulhu By Gaslight 3rd Edition has a "traits" system that is specifically designed to add something similar to an ads / disads system to CoC. Cheers, Nick

This. A thousand times this. Cheers, Nick

Chaosium.com: News - 2012 Chaosium.com Adventure Contests So: no Halloween contest this year, and the BRP contest is specifically focused on SF . Interesting... Cheers, Nick

And then a supplement for the other game entitle Legends of the Wayfarer... Nick

I adapted some ideas from GDW RPG's and the Stargate d20. Basically you have full auto area fire (which fills a "volume" with shots and requires fear checks / will power rolls for those in the volume not to dive for cover and if they stay exposed they risk getting hit by random shots) and then controlled burst fire in either wide bursts (makes it easier to hit a target by spraying shots at an area, but unlikely to land multiple shots) and narrow bursts (harder to hit the target but more likely to land multiple shots). There was a write up on the web at one point - I may republish them in Uncounted Worlds at some point. Not sure it's particularly realistic as a system but I've found it a playable system for a variety of BRP games... Nick

Possibly there was something on the Chaosium Digest... Alas I'm away from home, where I have a complete archive of that in *.txt form I downloaded some years back and every incarnation of the BRP/RQ sailing rules in book form - I'll check when I get home if some one else hasn't come up with an answer before then, but my instinct is there's a typo in there somewhere... Nick

IIRC it originally started out as generic / non-Gloranthan. Greg Stafford liked it so much he co-opted it for Glorantha... Nick

The PDF appears to be on sale now - Horror Roleplaying in 1890s England Chaosium Inc. Cheers, Nick

BGB = "Big Gold Book" - the core BRP rule book from Chaosium. There's a section in the Equipment chapter covering "Artillery" in three broad time periods - Ancient (non-firearms); Historical & Modern (Cannon and other firearm designs) and Advanced (Energy Cannon's, Railguns etc etc) pg 264 - 268 Nick

The Basic Gamemaster monograph from Chaosium has sailing ships and pre-firearms ship weapons / siege engines. IIRC the BGB has cannons and they are fairly easily integrated in to the ship rules from that monograph. Nick

With a default baseline that is a synthesis of two games - one of which is Call of Cthulhu 6th edition... Err, the BGB is neither a "hodgepodge" nor is it out of print - which is the point. The revisions as I understand it (from cryptic hints at Yog-Sothoth.com so I may be entirely wrong) are precisley aimed at making incorporating options from BRP easier, and in addressing some long standing incoherences in the CoC rules (stuff like skill levels, degrees of success, how Dodge works etc). From what I have heard NONE of these changes are aimed at adding complexity to CoC for the sake of it: it's about clarifying areas of long standing confusion, easier adaptation of stuff from the BGB toolkit and refining the CoC specific implementation of the BRP engine for a modern audience. Let's be fair - the text of CoC hasn't changed significantly since the mid nineties and large chunks of that text were directly inherited from Sandy Petersen's original text which is now over thirty years old. It is passed time to stop constantly tweaking that text in to new layouts and actually methodically re-edit the whole thing in to a coherent whole again - and doing so presents a golden opportunity to address some long standing areas of contradictory information or opaqueness in the currently published rules. Cheers, Nick

My understanding is that it's currently with several groups invited privately by Chaosium to test / develop, so unknown. But from hints I've heard, it's a bigger step than 5th to 6th or 3rd to 4th, and also pays more attention to the existence of the "BGB" edition of BRP... But it's still obsoletely a BRP game and fully compatible with the back catalogue. Nope - an with no completed ms in house, why would we expect one? One advertises a product one has for sale: advertising the possibility of a product that one MAY, at some undetermined point in the future, be able to sell, is a recipe for disaster: as Chaosium have found to their own cost before with various projects (Pulp Cthulhu being the current big example). I wouldn't expect to hear official confirmation of it's existence until it's in house and art assignment / final layout is under way or indeed nearly completed. Cheers, Nick

Errr, that is exactly the intent and legal principle of the OGL: to define text that can be used verbatim under the terms of the license. One of the reasons being that copyright does NOT protect rules - so anyone can copy ANY rule from ANY RPG publication, provided they do not copy the exact text expressing the rule. Then bluntly, you should have designated the bits you didn't want copying as closed content, or not written the book using the OGL. IF you designated the whole text as OGC then it's OGC and is freely available to anyone to use under the terms of the OGL. Nick

Empty of living people? Imagine a large Cathedral, with all those graves / sepulchres but each contains a quiescent undead. When the PC's walk in "out of hours" oner can legitimately describe it as empty - once they wake the undead and every tomb and sarcophagus empties it will be pretty full... Nick

Err, the point as I understood it of the "... of Legend" series is precisely that the entire text is OGC. So it would be an entirely legitimate thing to do with "Monsters of Legend" or the new "Arms of Legend" but NOT with e.g. "Age of Treason" (that's not an "... of legend" book so none of it's contents is OGC). Legend compatible products don't have to work that way, but obviously have to acknowledge the OGC nature of any content used from the Legend core books. Nick

The BASIC Creatures monograph is the Creatures book from the AH RuneQuest III boxed sets and is very easy to use, albeit references some specific sub systems you may need to ignore / tweak (hit locations, fatigue points etc etc). All The Worlds Monsters were generic monster supplements published in the mid-seventies - the PDF's are scans, the "stats" are very generic (and aimed at use with D&D, although there's conversion guide for using with T&T in volume 2 and RQI in volume 3), so would require considerably more work I suspect. Cheers, Nick

Very much so. My group had an absolute blast with it in the summer / autumn of 2010 with it. Be aware that it has a couple of long "dungeons" early on that you'll need to adjust a little and I'd apply some "heroic" tweaks (I ran with "Heroic" Hit Points and a few other things, worked well). WE got to the end of the Ice Giant fortress thingy and I'm hoping to return to that campaign in the spring... Nick

That looks awesome! I have, thanks to the endless waves of d100 versions being promoted / announced / released recently, been getting very cynical about the state of BRP / d100 gaming as we appeared to be going through a period of pointlessly re-inventing the wheel to no good purpose. Swords of Cydoria and the stuff like D101's River of Heaven give me hope. Cheers, Nick

Re-read his post - he specifically refers to "the MRQI taint". Not really (and I say this as someone who is far from a Gloranthaphile) since no previous edition has been available so cheaply - the Legend core book is £10, $1 in PDF. If the MRQII rulebook (or RQ3) had been that cheap who knows how well they might have sold... Cheers, Nick

That is a very fine piece of work - and a striking cover image, whether one knows the original or not. Set yourselves quite a bar for the interior art with that one... but somehow I'm not worried Cheers, Nick

Ever since Aces High was announced I've been struggling to bring in to focus and finish a multi part weird west scenario that starts during the Civil War near Sante Fe and then has the survivors return a decade or so later... So I'm really looking forward to this and hopefully it will help me get this scenario finished. Cheers, Nick

Badger McInnes is I believe doing the layout (he did the layout for the new full distribution version of the BRP Magic book as well). From the sound of it the most recent delay has been sourcing art, but to be honest, I don't fret over Chaosium releases until I see them in the catalogue with a release date... Cheers, Nick