NickMiddleton

I am biased, but I don't care - I am SO pleased to see this happen, especially when Chaosium clearly have such a huge full slate of higher profile and clearly more immediately commercially rewarding projects being worked on. 

Just so bloody pleased to see this happen!

The contents list somewhat echoes the BGB; and Jason has been working on a streamlined BRP for LotMS, alongside his other duties. And given the timescales, and Chaosium’s wider slate of material, my guess is this is more likely an evolution / streamlining of the BGB rather than an extensive, radical re-write.

I would speculate that some options have been trimmed, possibly for future supplements, and others refined with lessons learned since 2008.

But we will know soon enough.

The BGB uses the generic "power points", Magic World used "magic points" and in both they are an expendable resources used to power spells, with a nominal value equal to the characters POW Characteristic. Permanent points of POW Characteristic CAN be sacrificed fro specific magic effects, but doing so is distinct from expending "magic points" (Magic World) or "power points" (BGB).

12 hours ago, Striker said:

3. For a MP:MP or PP:PP resistance roll (not POW:POW) it's the spellcaster's current total MP/PP compared to the target and the target will use as their MP/PP value a number that is equal to POW if not a spellcaster?  

In Magic World, it depends on the spell description, deliberately so. But generally yes, its current casters personal mp against the targets mp (which is always equal to POW for non-casters). This is why most Sorcerer's have a staff and usually other magic point batteries - so they can cast spells using magic points from other sources than themselves, but over come any resistance with the full magic points...

12 hours ago, Striker said:

4. If a spellcaster is the target is it their total MP/PP or their POW characteristic?  I think it's the current MP/PP so a wizard being targeted after having used almost all their MP/PP would be easier to beat, but I can see the other way.

You are correct - see above! Any remotely competent Sorcerer will avoid casting using their own magic points until they have no other option, precisely because they want to keep their personal mp total as high as possible at all times.

12 hours ago, Striker said:

Ex:  A sorcerer (POW 18, MP:12 after casting) casts babble (MP:MP resist) on an orc (POW 8).  The resistance would be 12 vs 8 and the wizard needs 70% or less to overcome the orc's resistance.

Yes.

2 hours ago, Striker said:

1. the shaman/priest/cultist occupation they get 1d6+3 spell levels.  Those would correspond to the level of spell (ex. Heal is level 2) correct?

Yes: the “level” of the spell is simply the default MP cost to cast it.

2 hours ago, Striker said:

2. Some other books reference a "Religion/Faith" skill.  Do I just add that as needed to the occupation if desired?  Not seeing it as an occupation skill is throwing me.

Yes. It’s not required in core MW by any rules, but if you think it would be mechanically useful adding won’t cause major issues.

2 hours ago, Striker said:

3. In the MW book there is only Sorcery so are a priest's spells coming from the Sorcery spells?

Yes.

2 hours ago, Striker said:

4. If the priest does use the Sorcery spells do I come up with how they are relearned/refreshed?

Spells are not “expended” when cast, only Magic Points. If a priest in MW has magic points for a spell they can cast it, and they recover MP as per MW rules.

2 hours ago, Striker said:

The Religion book and Advanced Sorcery have some methods (I'll have questions on both of those in the future).

Not sure what “the Religion book” is? Advanced Sorcery offers additional spells and several variant / additional magic (or magic like)) systems.

2 hours ago, Striker said:

5. Sorcery requires a POW16 so would a priest without POW16 get spells?

No they would not. But the great thing about BRP based games like Magic World is the rules are not as tightly interlinked as other RPGs and are thus more forgiving of house ruling. Giving the Priest profession a dispensation to get magic with a Pow of 12+ for example would work (Priests with spells would be more common than in RAW Magic World is all). One could devise more elaborate alternatives - in my Ulfland BRP game I linked priests magic to their Allegiance score.  It’s outlined in Uncounted Worlds issue one, which I think is in the file section here still.

2 hours ago, Striker said:

I really like the system and having read a lot of the C&S 5E a lot is at least familiar and clearer.  We have yet to have our first game so I'm limiting skills/occupations/etc to just the MW base book for now and as we get familiar with the rules (one player is brand new to rpg) the additional material will probably be added.  I would really like to avoid having to bolt on parts from other books or settings until we're all set on the MW core book.  Thanks in advance and I really like all the downloads that are available.

I am biased (I helped Ben Monroe prepare the original Magic World manuscript, and wrote a chapter of the Advanced Sorcery book) - but I adore the game and still use it as the basis of all my BRP games. Hope you and your group enjoy it!

2 hours ago, Thaenor said:

I'm just glad BRP has gone PoD on DTRPG- thanks again Chaosium!! 🙂 Still yet to order my copy - but will be done in time. 

Very pleased to see the BGB available in PoD format. Given I have THREE copies already, not sure I can justify a 4th...

I still dare to dream that Magic World might one day get a PoD release too - albeit I am fully aware that it's really NOT on Chaosium's priority list given all the much more high profile (and, lets be honest, commercially viable) titles in their production schedule.

1 hour ago, Mugen said:

That list sounds very familiar.

It seems to me all creatures from RQ3 boxed set and Monster Coliseum have been included, along with a few others.

With the exception of Elementals, of course, which are from Elric! and not RQ.

I'd have to look through ancient emails (if I still have them) but IIRC pretty much what Ben did when revising the Elric! to create Magic World was replace the very IP specific "Creatures" Chapter and "Natural Animals Table" from Elric! with the BRP Creatures / RQ3 Creatures Book material plus some stuff from the "Arena Monsters" chapter of the AH Monster Coliseum Monsters Book. So it still skews oddly "Ancient World / Classical Myth" (with a few standouts like the Chonchon) as a list of creatures for the ostensibly more "western European Celtic"  feel Magic World was aiming form overall: the never released MW Bestiary project was intended in part to address that very issue.

Note: Orcs ARE included in the Magic World bestiary chapter - and as Scotty helpfully points out, both Magic World and Advanced Sorcery ARE still available as PDFs from DriveThru for a very reasonable price.

I've attached a text file listing all the creatures in the Magic World bestiary chapter FYI.

MW Bestiary List.txt

3 hours ago, dead said:

Thanks so much for the clarification, guys. Now I know to avoid Basic Magic.

Are the other two monographs on my list - Basic Creatures and Basic Gamemaster - also reprinted material from the 80s?

Yes: they were the Creatures Book and Game Masters books from the previously mentioned Avalon Hill edition of RuneQuest.

3 hours ago, dead said:

Also, with Magic World, does that include a bestiary? I’m assuming it does if it’s meant to be a self-contained work.

Yes it does include an extensive bestiary chapter (also largely derived from the RQ Creatures book iirc).

3 hours ago, dead said:

Is it true a creatures book was planned for Magic World but never went ahead?

Yes. It reached draft manuscript stage but no further.

1) I believe so, yes

2) The Magic Book (2011) was revised to bring its terminology more in line with the 2008 / 2011 Basic Role Playing. Historically, that material was originally published as the Magic Book in the Avalon Hill edition of RuneQuest in the 1980’s, which is where the terms Sorcery and Ceremony originate iirc.

3) Sorcery in the core BRP rules and the Magic Book are entirely different magic systems. Confusingly, BRP 2008/2012 "Sorcery" is basically the same  magic system from Magicworld (2012), derived from the same source, the system in Elric!

4) Magic World (2012)  is indeed Elric! There are a few subtle revisions that are worth the trivial price of the PDF (a streamline version of cultures, some streamlining and clarifications in skills and combats). Also the spell list is somewhat consolidated to include various additions in other Elric! supplements but the Summoning and Binding systems that were core, and the whole sale new systems for Runes, Necromancy and others are NOT in the core Magic World (2012) book but in its single supplement, Advanced Sorcery.

5) The ships and sailing rules are derived from the Elric! supplement Sailing on the Seas of Fate - these were in turn derived from the Avalon Hill RuneQuest edition in the 1980’s, which are indeed the rules that appear in the Basic Gamemaster book.

New edition of Fantasy, Castle and Village Paths in one large boxed set with modern production values?

…probably not…

On 1/27/2023 at 11:48 AM, RSDean said:

...

A better statement of my original question, I suppose, would be whether a minimalist game based just on 1982 materials would be fun for a while, or whether I would be longing for hit locations, single-percent skill increments, and other embellishments from the rest of the potential source material before the characters got out of the door of the sketchy tavern where the mysterious hooded figure had handed them a quest…?

Whilst I think original WoW Magic World would prove a bit limited fairly rapidly, and in play its magic system I find clunky, I think a big part of the enduring appeal of the WoW set was its relative lightness of rules. I certainly would plan to retrofit hit locations (for example) in to it, and I think that with a some effort and careful splicing of ideas from the other games in the WoW set, and a little bit of judicious house ruling of the magic World rules themselves, you could do a LOT without ever needing to look at other BRP sources.

29 minutes ago, Bill the barbarian said:

TBP?

"The Big Purple" - it is a short hand / nick name for the RPGnet Forums derived from the default forum appearance.

2 hours ago, Bill the barbarian said:

Holy crap! Too bad I already own this!

For 99 cents, despite already owning it in multiple forms, it was worth it to guarantee its in my DTR library. Also, means I have official PDFs of both the original 2008 and 2011 revisions… I can’t conceive of why I might need them, but I at least have them…

😂

10 hours ago, rustorod said:

Hello,

is anyone else having issues downloading from the vault?  I was trying to download the Magic World form fillable character sheets. I’m getting some code with access denied. 
 

Thanks

Mike

"Hither came Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer..."

My biggest issue with Modiphius' 2d20 take on the IP was always that it seemed overly fiddly. I have a huge respect for Jason's knowledge and passion for the material, and he seemed very positive about the whole approach to the lore from the get go, and another gaming friend who is distinctly NOT a fan of Modiphius but is an enormous Conan fan was all full of praise for the quality of the writing and its engagement with the lore. But I do feel that from a game play point of view, the IP needs something fluid and light, that lets each session move rapidly and adroitly. To me that suggests the lighter end of the BRP family: Elric! / Magic World, CoC 6e / 7e, OpenQuest (or the currently kick-starting SimpleQuest).

Albeit it is very hard, given that quote, to look beyond a suitably tweaked Barbarians of Lemuria: which is what the aforementioned Conan fan who isn't Jason used when he ran one of the two best Conan games I have ever played... for other one, he used a very stripped down but custom built BRP variant... 😉

38 minutes ago, smiorgan said:

Today I was reminiscing about things past and I thought of Tom Zunder, a longtime British  BRP and especially Stormbringer fan who used to run The Tavern forums.

I've never seen him in person, but I fondly remember his online persona as an excellent bloke.

I've haven't heard of him in ages. I just hope he is well.

I haven't been directly in touch with Tom for a while - I moved and work dynamics changed my online behaviours, and the Tavern shutdown, migrated to a sub-forum elsewhere, then that died... but it reincarnated and is still around: https://www.gamingtavern.uk/index.php and Tom's still posting (this very morning) along with a number of the "old guard" from the original Tavern nigh on twenty years back... 😮 

If I were to look beyond The One Ring 2nd edition (an exquisitely presented evolution of the first) for gaming in Tolkien’s world, I’d adapt Pendragon for the first age of sun, specifically the stories of the houses of men in Beleriand.

If I wanted something genuinely “Tolkien-esque” in feel and tone but not caught up in the specifics of that work, I’d use Age of Shadows, either RAW or adapted to my tweaked version of Magic World.

"Curse of Chardros" from the Elric! GameMasters pack is indeed by the talented Mr Watts; it is a gem of an introductory scenario: succinct but richly imagined and full of potential for expansion or adaption to ones own game and group. In a few pages Richard sketches a vivid scene and situation that is original, but very much resonates with the style and tone of the classic Elric tales.

5 hours ago, Barak Shathur said:

Is there an archive of Q&A for BGB from around the time it came out? Since the producers don't seem to answer questions about it on this forum, it would be interesting to see what questions were raised back then, and if there were some clarifications made. Thanks.

I was one of the “play testers” (a misnomer as it wasn’t new material that required play testing in the usual sense… but there was a bunch of us who commented on various drafts of the manuscript to Jason and discussed a number of issues); I did some leg work for Jason on going over iterations of the Elric! Attack / Parry / Dodge matrix.

I don’t recall there being a formal Q&A per se, albeit I think Jason did some interviews at the time… I might even have some old emails archived, but given iirc we were commenting on the manuscript in something like 2005 or 2006, it’s not likely (my gmail archive only goes back to 2011). Feel free to ask me questions, but I can’t guarantee I’ll remember stuff, and as I say, I was just one of a pool of volunteers who commented on the manuscript for Jason.

There is a collation of errata in the files section here iirc. Earliest threads here are from late 2007 when, iirc, the manuscript had been delivered but before the book was released? And among which was this 

Mid-seventies Hawkwind at their finest… (not everyone’s taste, admittedly).

20 hours ago, Kloster said:

Yipee. Another fan of 'Damnation alley' (both novel and movie).

What about the song?

12 hours ago, sladethesniper said:

In comparing the two products, there doesn't seem to be anything that MW doesn't do that 5E does except have special names for everything and have more lists of magic equipment and spells...but none of that isn't  D&D specific and can be moved into MW by GM fiat.

D&D's underpinning assumptions and intended play model are radically different. D&D's "zero to hero" progression is much steeper than Magic World's more "Sword and Sorcery Annals" influenced progression and a substantial part of 5e's appeal / "shtick" is the discrete stepped progression (at this level this Class gets X class feature, at this level we all get Feats etc etc), as opposed to MW's / BRP's more organic / graduate development.

12 hours ago, sladethesniper said:

So, if you were a DM, and someone asked you which game is "better" which would you recommend, and why?

"Better" is a value judgement, and ultimately an aesthetic one, that is almost entirely personal preference and has no objective criteria: the useful question is "which will this particular group of friends get most enjoyment from playing?" I have groups that adore D&D 5e; I also have groups that loathe it. *shrug*.

D&D 5e to me feels like a pretty solid fantasy "super-heroes" combat simulation engine that does that quite well and... doesn't get in the way of the other aspects of playing a TTRPG such as social interactions, investigations etc; but it doesn't provide particularly robust or extensive support for them either. Magic World is a fast paced, more grounded game that provides wider support for different aspects of play, but doesn't "out of the box" provide the sort of flashy, colourful set piece combats  / heroics that D&D 5e excels at.

I've run and played both, and enjoyed both. I'm a grumpy old BRP grognard, so my brain uses BRP as the language to express RPG ideas, so I occasionally struggle a bit with D&D 5e stuff. But I have run very high powered, high action BRP before now, and with a judicious re-jigging of a few key assumptions it can handle such stuff very well. 

16 hours ago, Barak Shathur said:

So I think I'll use this thread to bounce ideas and queries about interpretations and clarifications of rules. BRP has two (optional) fatigue systems. One is fatigue points from RQIII, the other is one that requires a stamina roll after CON x 3 rounds of intense activity, e.g. combat, after which everything becomes Difficult. I like the idea of a simpler fatigue system, but for an average person, that's 33 rounds before checking! Doesn't seem like it will have much impact on the game.

Now under the armour and shields descriptions there's an entry for "burden", which is given as Light, Moderate or Cumbersome. It further says that it may be used with the optional fatigue system above, but doesn't clarify how. Does anyone know how it was intended to work?

I've come up with an idea where if you carry anything with a Moderate burden, you roll for stamina after CON x 2 rounds, and for Cumbersome it's CON x1 rounds. But I'm curious as to how others interpret this? 

The  Fatigue rules I wrote for BRP (original published in the Outpost 19 monograph) were predicated on the idea that one assessed the characters level of fatigue and that imposed penalties, and one only used CON rolls if it seemed likely that would change. IF the characters force march 30 miles in a day with full gear etc, they are weary that night. If they run the five miles back to the village carrying heavy loads they have to make a CON roll - if they make it they are tired, if they fail they are weary and if they fumble they are exhausted.

Place the emphasis on the condition / current situation, not on adding another thing to keep track of. That was always my issue with RQ3 fatigue rules: fiddly calculatoin for something else to keep track...

6 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

Do they own the text? I though Avalon Hill (or it's successors) did. Remember Chaosium didn't own RQ3, Avalon Hill did. If they do own the text then I'm surprised they didn't make it avlaible as a PDF like most of Chasoiums other older products.

IIRC Chaosium created the text, Avalon Hill published it and licensed the RuneQuest trademark during the publishing tie up - as part of the dissolution of that relationship in the 1990's, AH got the RQ trademark. Chaosium then confirmed early 2000's that Hasbro (who by that point owned AH) regarded any claim AH / Hasbro had on the copyright text to have lapsed and rights to have reverted to Chaosium as the original authors: hence Chaosium republishing the text of RQ3 (sans Gloranthan content, which the company did not by that point have rights to) as the BRP monographs. My print copies of the monographs (black tape bound) all assert at least a 2004 copyright date; my PDF's all assert 2004 and 2009 dates.

21 hours ago, David Scott said:

My numbers maybe slightly out, but of the 111(ish) Monographs, the overwhelming majority were CoC (82), 4 were Stormbringer (pretty sure a couple were published elsewhere), and 25 were BRP and these could in theory be published using the BRP SRD. Publications like Basic Magic were just the RQ3 magic book with numbers filed off (even included Cormac), so that's never going to reappear. I'm pretty sure that Basic Gamemaster and basic creatures were just the other two RQ3 books similarly treated (i don't have those). 

Yes, the original Basic Characters / Magic / Creatures and Gamemaster were the RQ3 booklets with Gloranthan IP removed. Magic was reworked as a full BRP BGB compatible release and is still available in PDF:  https://www.chaosium.com/the-magic-book-pdf/ There we’re plans to fold a chunk of Basic Gamemaster into a Magic World supplement, but that was never finalised before the line was shut down.

10 hours ago, Rick Meints said:

We do not have a license for any of the Stormbringer/Hawkmoon/Eternal Champion material, so there is nothing we can do about those titles. They haven't been sold for years, any way. As for the rest of the Monographs, they actually do have a few possible venues. We have fan licenses available that could be used for a number of those titles. Those licenses are quite simple to set up and comply with. Those products could be sold on DTRPG. The real difficulty is finding and convincing those creatives to go through the process. A number of those authors have largely gone silent though. We don't have the time to track them all down, especially when many of those titles didn't sell that well for a variety of reasons.

Some of Stormbringer Monograph material has been found a new home by the indefatigable Marcus Bone at http://www.stormbringerrpg.com/?page_id=63 

As for Fan Licensing… Erm… the only general thing on Fan Material I can find on the Chaosium web site appears to contradict the above?

Quote

1. Non-Retail.
   1. You cannot charge for access to your materials or site; nor can you distribute your content through retail channels such as DriveThruRPG, OneBookShelf, Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, App Stores etc (even if the material is free).

The previous “small publisher” commercial license (which DID allow one to charge for material and use retail channels such as those listed, and thus have a way to recover production costs and allow the possibility of PoD) was removed some time ago from the license section of the web site as far as I can tell; the only sections left are those on the Fan Material policy (from which the above is quoted, with emphasis added), Commercial Licensing and Community Content Programs. Or have I missed something?