NickMiddleton

I'm afraid this is incorrect. Weapons (and Shields) in combat in the Gold book work the way I described previously, by the rules-as-written at least. The rules on p277 are for breaking objects and are distinct from combat - they are in fact pretty much the rules from RQIII and haven't been edited to bring them in line with the core BRP rules in the gold book. Damage to parrying weapons in RQIII worked pretty much as you described but that's not how the baseline rules are in BRP. This might help - http://basicroleplaying.com/showthread.php/1519-BASIC-ROLEPLAYING-The-Chaosium-Roleplaying-System?p=24749#post24749 Cheers, Nick

Err, that's not quite correct. Check the table on page197. Weapons and shields only take damage when both attack AND parry succeed but are unequal in degree of success. If the attack and parry are equally successful the attack is stopped completely and no damage is dealt, either to the defender or either object. But if both attack and parry succeed AND one was a greater success than the other, then one of the objects will also be slightly damaged. Which one depends on the specific circumstances: IIRC the worst outcome (for a Parrying object) is a normal Parry against a critical hit, the parrying object deflects the blow enough to reduce it to a Special hit only but takes 4 points of damage itself. The worst that can happen to an attacking weapon is a normal success against a critical parry, which completely blocks the attack AND does two points of damage to the attacking weapon. Without maintenance most archaic melee weapons did break pretty frequently (and some of them did even with it). The Repair skill will let things be fixed, and GM's could also reasonably allow characters to use their existing Weapon skill as a specific Repair [Weapon], on the basis that in almost all cases if you know how to wield a weapon you know how to effect at least minor running repairs. Bear in mind also that a weapon at 0HP is not destroyed, just broken beyond use as a weapon - again, appropriate Repair (or perhaps Craft) skill might allow it to be reconstituted... Cheers, Nick

My first impression was Lin Carter's Giant of World's End - but that's probably because that was the first such "dying earth" story I ever read. The "cultures of the end times" motif is an old one - in the SF genre alone it goes back to at least Wells - that has frequently been visited by various different authors. Shame about the delay. Nick

Because in the vast majority of real world combat situations, the archer's won't politely wait whilst you nip back and get your shield, and (huge generalisation coming up) "most" shields are too large to be carried casually "out of the way" - and if they are small enough to do so they are of negligible use for missile defence... Nick

Against every arrow in a round my large shield gives me 60% chance of blocking, and in general shields tend to have more hit points than melee weapons (not universally true, but a quick scan of the weapon tables suggests the basic generalisation is sound). I get a blanket 60% protection against all twenty archers on the walls PLUS I get to Parry some melee attacks with it each round (several, if I have a decent skill with it) and even if it takes damage it's likely to take longer to break it than my longsword - and if it DOES break, my longsword is still available for offensive use AND Parrying... And whilst the halberd is a mighty fearsome weapon, it's poorly suited to general skirmish combat (it has a long melee range, making it vulnerable to closing). In Gold Edition BRP RAW as written I think there are reasonably grounds for preferring a shield over exclusively using a big two handed weapon or relying on dodge - mostly in circumstances where you expect to take missile fire. However it certainly doesn't bias things in favour of shields as much as previous iterations of BRP did (in RQIII Dodging was a fools game, RAW, for example and weapons were noticeably more fragile than they are in BRP), especially as it retains the rather beefy Elric!/SBV hit points for weapons. Cheers, Nick

Page 204 onwards is the crucial section on Shields. Basically . So if you are (for example) marching up slope towards the battlements, better have a large shield, especially as Dodge is only any use agains the FIRST arrow and only then if the shooter is visible... Cheers, Nick

The standard definition of a "professional" in BRP is a skill of 51%+ - which is someone who will under all normal circumstances (i.e. excepting fumbles) always make an easy skill roll. Plus, as Thalaba points out, the challenge in crafting straightforward item like a horse shoe is not simply making it - given enough time and raw materials to allow endless retries, even the most incompetent smith will eventually produce a serviceable horseshoe. The challenge is more often something else - doing it with limited resources, or completing the work in a timely fashion. Complex items should require a skill threshold as the will require reasonable command of techniques before they can be attempted - the most fumble fisted apprentice can attempt to make nails but a scythe blade requires more technique. In certain settings as well there may be "secret" knowledges and the like - the cliche is folding steel to make samurai swords, but every craft will have it's advanced and complex techniques... If you can see it, Monty Don's recent series of Mastercrafts is revealing, as would the accompanying book (Mastercrafts: Rediscover British Craftsmanship by Thomas Quin). I created an "extended projects" for BRP (that write up is aimed at Eternal Champion settings, but it's not setting specific) years ago, based on dim and distant memories of the "Task system" from FGU's Bushido. Cheers, Nick

Err, did no one else notice Dustin's Tweet yesterday? The Green is now available in hard copy - http://catalog.chaosium.com/product_info.php?products_id=5085 Cheers, Nick

Still waiting for a Mac OS X version... Nick

It is here - which I struggled to find until I noticed there's a "Search downloads" facility... Cheers, Nick

I also posted at RPGNet - In the UK Dragon Lines is listed in this weeks "New Releases" mail shot from Leisure Games, and Travelling Man can order a copy although I don't believe they have stock at present (they don't in York). Rome was listed by LG a while back and I saw a copy in TM York not long after. Patriot Games in Sheffield have Rome I think... Cheers, Nick

Clearly not for many people. Where the exact utility lies can vary depending on the conversation and participants, but many people clearly either find it useful or at least worthwhile to NOT lump Stanislaw Lem's the Chain of Chance, Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder, Burrough's A Princess of Mars and Star Wars together as the same thing. Most serious discussions of fantasy will very rapidly draw distinctions between different subcategories actually - again because it is useful to be able to discuss REH's Conan, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, LeGuin's Earthsea and Holdstock's Mythago Wood without treating them as indistinguishable from each other... Now, SF has, as the more "junior" genre, more of a chip on its shoulder about being taken seriously and so its fans and practitioners tend to get more defensive when fantasy with ray guns and spaceships (mostly what the mass media refer to as science fiction) gets lumped in with the SF where there is a real effort to respect and extrapolate from our current understanding of (or plausible speculations about) the way the universe works. But then there are plenty of fantasy fans and writers who are openly dismissive of the mass market fantasy that gets churned out by the likes of WotC and get very precious about there particular sub-genre... *shrug* Any field of human endeavour will evolve its own nomenclature to aid discussion - and pretty much all of them go beyond practical utility and use the smokescreen of jargon to build their own protected sense of unique value. The trick is to use enough of the jargon to facilitate communication, but not so much as to obscure the actual object of discussion. Cheers, Nick

Interesting - RQI & II are seventies games, Chaosium did a lot of experimenting in the early eighties, which is when Worlds of Wonder and subsequently the standalone Superworld appeared (along with Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, ElfQuest, Ringworld and of course RQIII). ElfQuest and RQIII's take on SR are essentially identical. Ringworld uses an action point system IIRC (there's a similar system in Niall Shapero's Other Suns), where as CoC and SB used differing variants of DEX rank system... I just picked up a copy of Superworld from eBay - I'll be interested to see how the details of the system differ from the other BRP games I know better. Cheers, Nick

Yes - it's in the section describing the Strike Rank system that starts in the box out on page 199 - I think the relevant bit about powers is on page 200. I like the Strike Rank system - it adds a degree of extra detail but in many games I've found it worthwhile. The original version (in Chaosium's first two editions of RuneQuest) was slightly different and more narrowly focused on sequencing combat between engaged opponents. ElfQuest and RuneQuest III revised the system and expanded its remit to sequencing all actions in combat rounds, which lead to a few oddities. And the re-write in BRP has tweaked a couple of things further... I also thought (during the play test and subsequently) that "Combat Actions" in MRQ were a mistake, and I still think that . Have a read through of the Strike Rank rules, maybe try a few mock combats and post any questions here - there are plenty of us with lots of experience with the previous incarnations of Strike Ranks so we should be able to help! Cheers, Nick

Err - I think there's a glitch in the description / tables. The Bolt Action is listed as having an "Attacks per Round" of 1/2, but a Strike Rank of 1/SR AND a magazine of 5. Since this means (per my earlier post re the long bow) that a typical human firing under the SR system would get TWO shots per round, I can't see how that squares with 1 shot every 2 rounds under the DEX rank system - but I CAN see unclipping and replacing a magazine taking a round or two under typical combat conditions. Further, see page 254 - the sections of Reloading Firearms and unaimed fire should supersede what's on the weapon table I'd suggest, as that's clearly a hang-over from the rather inconsistent Call of Cthulhu firearms table (where there are Bolt-Action rifles listed with RoF's of 1 and 1/2...). I'd just come up with revised stats for the specific weapon. Cheers, Nick

Note sure about "lame", but it's not entirely accurate. Under the Volley Fire spot rule a Long Bow can (in most characters hands) shoot more often than once per round - admittedly the rule is a rather unclear blend of the Call of Cthulhu "unaimed shots" rule and the Elric! Volley Fire spot rule (see previous discussion here). If using the optional Strike Rank rules, most humans will manage two shots per round with a Long Bow. And, from a "historically plausible" starting point an effective clothyard arrow per six (or even 12) seconds is quite an achievement and quite devastating against targets without adequate armour and about right for the Long Bow. I've seen skilled archers push their rate of shot higher, but only against a fixed target and with the arrows prepped specifically to hand (e.g. stuck in the ground directly in front of the archer) and even then not much beyond 15 - 18 arrows per minute... Hmm - not tried it exactly - but I'd be more tempted to first try simply upping the rate of fire of Long Bows. Cheers Nick

The third edition "Role Playing Expnasion" adds what is basically the BRP skill system (crediting Chaosium and Tadashi Ehara "who made possible the form this expansion takes"). Ringworld is sadly never going to see the light of day again I suspect - the rights are tied up in hollywood, which blocked the last serious attempt to get it re-released and I can't se that changing any time soon. Quite why Chaosium have not re-released at least PDF's of Questworld and / or Worlds of Wonder I'm not sure - they presumably still retain the rights to the text. Mind, I've still never understood, given the re-issue of RQIII as the BASIC monographs, what the status of Land of Ninja and Vikings is... Funnily enough, a large chunk of what was to be the Games Workshop expansion material for Questworld and long thought lost was recently rediscovered by one of the authors#. It's most likely that'll now see release for Dragon Warriors I suppose. Cheers, Nick #Dave Morris, co-author of Dragon warriors and at one time editor of "Rune Rites" RQ column in White Dwarf, as well as author of the seminal "Dealing with Demons" article for RQII...

There have been three SF BRP based games - Chaosium's Ringworld, FGU / Niall Shapero's Other Suns and Other World Games Worlds Beyond. Plus the Future*World portion of Worlds of Wonder. All are long out of print and exceptionally difficult to get hold of I'm afraid (Noble Knight are currently asking $50 for a copy of Other Suns...) Likewise, Chaosiums Questworld is rare and expensive. Their boxed set of Thieve's World is a little easier to come by and whilst there's a lot of wasted space (it includes stats fro something like 18 different RPG's!!) there RQ stats are easily converted and the non-system specific material is excellent. Plus, the Green Ronin d20 Thieves World stuff (which ads lots of setting detail and is fairly easy to convert) can be picked up VERY cheap at the moment. Sanctuary has been one of my staple fantasy cities for many, many years... In addition to the Cthulhu Rising stuff some of the other Cthulhu monographs might be of interest - Ripples From Carcosa has three scenarios in three different time periods for example. Nick

Correct Elric! was released in 1993. Largely the same text was released as Stormbringer 5th edition in 2001. There was a previous game of the same name that went through technically four editions with a broadly similar (but notably different in the details) rule system between 1981 and 1991, all from the same publisher... Chaosium - Perils of the Young Kingdoms has some great scenarios in it that could be fairly easily adapted to BRP. Noble Knight Games also have some OOP Elric! stuff. Nick

Well, not sure internet forum polls tell us anything that reliable... The only options were "pick all you want" or "pick one", so I opted for "most preferred genre" and "monograph you most want an adventure for", as the alternative seemed even less informative. Shame I couldn't say "pick n" where n would be a sensible limited value (say 3 or 4)... Cheers, Nick

Oh, don't mind us - there's nothing worse than struggling to do something your hearts not in. If you want to do a Classic Fantasy adventure, go for it! The polls are purely a bit of fun - and Fantasy is the top genre by some margin anyway Nick

Given that there is also a Cthulhu Invictus adventure contest running in parallel, and Miskatonic River Press have a CI campaign in editing, I'd say that, if you are willing to put up with some Cthulhu Mythos in your Roman material (or are willing to de-Mythos it) there should be plenty of Roman material about soon... Oh, I quite understand that apprehension. And part of the fun of these adventure contests is that people can indulge themselves and try anything. I just thought it was an interesting companion question to the one about genre to see which of the current monographs people are keenest to see an adventure for... Nick

This is sort of a companion to the other poll - which of the published monographs would you like to see a new adventure for most of all, whether it's a companion adventure to a monograph that was itself an adventure, or a "how to..." adventure that shows how to implement ideas from a monograph that was purely a rules supplement? Not sure I can fit all the relevant mono's in one poll mind... Nick

So, what genre would you like to see supported with adventures in the next BRP Adventures monograph? This poll has no official status with Chaosium, it's just a bit of fun...

Actually, I just had a thought - is it worth encouraging submissions for a particular genre, or even previous monograph? We have no actual control of course, but purely as a bit of fun and way of inspiring people, we could have a couple of polls: a "which genre would you most like to see adventures for?" and perhaps a "which BRP monograph would you like to see an adventure for?". Run them for a couple of weeks and see what happens? Just a thought. Nick