NickMiddleton

Monographs are specifically intended to drive up traffic through Chaosium's web site (on which they make far better margins than normal distribution sales). As such, they don't sell the monographs through normal distribution, but they don' prevent it - Leisure Games of London in the UK (and IIRC FanBoy 3 in Manchester) have previously carried some monographs. But it's an expensive way of getting them. Cheers, Nick

And I managed to make an embarrassingly simple error with the spread sheet... Which I have now corrected... Cheers, Nick

Whilst not one of the writers, I was involved in the play testing of the new BRP. Step six comes from the previous BRP game Elric!, which was one of the major influences on the baseline of the new systems as I understand it. The personality type option in Elric! was assumed to be used, as it was meant to be quite a heroic game. In the new BRP it pretty clearly says that unless notably heroic characters are what you are after, don't use the option. My preference is to use it to emphasise the heroic edge within the wider campaign level. For example, a campaign based on the TV show 24 is arguably a normal game (there's no powers and it's ostensibly set in the real world) - but I'd definitely use the step six for such a game, where as for say a Smiley's People inspired game I wouldn't. Another approach is to make the add from step Six scale with the campaign level: +10 / +15 / +20 / +25 for normal / heroic / epic / superhuman games. Cheers, Nick

Looks likely to me. Also, since the hit point ranges in column one are fixed, the values in the subsequent columns don't always match, as even applying the "always round up rule" in a given THP range for certain specific values of THP you might get different fractional values. Yeah, that's clearly a typo. I've put together a table for 1 to 100 THP in NeoOffcie and exported it as a PDF - here. Looks to me like the table on 369 is simply a copy of the table from RQIII, with and added transcription error. Cheers, Nick

Excellent news Jason! Cheers, Nick

In what I've done so far it's not so much a matter of assuming what will work as picking specific options because I think they suit the details of the setting. Ulfland doesn't have Psychics or Supers, but definitely needed hit locations for example. Given I can't actually psychically tell what GM's do with the material once I've made it public nor can I, contrary to rumours circulating in some circles, call down divine vengeance on those who misuse my holy words , I mostly state flat out which options are NOT being used which ARE, so there is an unambiguous statement of what I was doing, and then leave it to the GM's using the material. Of Coruse I AM compiling a list of transgressors... >:-> Being less flippant, I think most settings are best served by being clear about what fits and what doesn't, and most people will appreciate the clarity of knowing when they are doing something that the original setting excluded or if it's something the setting was always built to cope with. Cheers, Nick

Excellent news! Not someone who attends cons - and since this is the last Tentacles, I leave that place for more dedicated Tentacles fans who want to be there at the final event. You know the answer to that - of course not! As fans we want Rome, Fractured Hopes, Supernatural Western, BRP Adventure Monograph, The Merchant's Scale, Mythic Iceland, The Covenant of Justice, Fantastical Baroque, Desolation's Edge, Sword & Spell, The Green, Gravequest, The God Machine AND Interplanetary now!. And a BRP Magic book and a BRP Bestiary and a BRP Space and several scenario anthologies and... and... and... More seriously though, this is genuinely positive news - and I hope a positive sign of things to come! Cheers, Nick (feeling more optimistic than I have for a week!)

FGU stopped publishing in the late 1980's and has only recently started again. Flying Buffalo are, like Chaosium a niche publisher - but Rosen's not wrong to point out that Chaosium is, (bar Flying Buffalo) the ONLY survivor of the seventies first flowering of RPG publishers to have been in continuous operation since then largely intact and with a noticeable continuity of staff. TSR, GDW, MetaGaming, Judges Guild are all gone, changed out of all recognition or bought up by someone else. Cast the net a little wider in hobby gaming and time and you can add SPI, Avalon Hill, Mayfair Games, West End Games, Victory Games etc etc. The fact is that it's a tough business to survive any length of time in, and Chaosium's track record at basic survival is better than the vast majority. Now they just need to prove they can do more than basic survival... Excellent news Pete. Cheers, Nick

Pelgrane have a license from Chaosium, which technically they didn't have to do (as the copyright situation on Lovecraft's work is complex but much is public domain these days). On the whole I suspect (but have no hard figures) it's probably doing well by Chaosium - there is the license fees, plus ToC doesn't yet have the extensive library of material that CoC does and it's fairly easy to convert ToC and CoC are quite different games. Leaving aside the ludicrously over hyped "flaw" in CoC that ToC allegedly "fixes"§, ToC is a modern "rules light" game, optimised around investigating mysteries. It's so tightly focused on that, to this old style gamer anyway, it felt rather restrictive. I also got very irritated reading the core book, as I had to wade through 50 pages of interminable details about character generation before I got a coherent explanation of the basics of the actual system - without which the numbers on the preceding fifty pages were largely meaningless... The rest however is well written by Ken Hite and very nicely presented. I played a couple of games and realised it wasn't giving me anything that BRP CoC didn't, and didn't feel as easily adaptable to other styles and approaches. Many people on the net are very taken with it however, so see if you can get in to a couple of games at a convention or something and try it out for yourself. Cheers, Nick § basically perhaps the most obvious single piece of advice from GMing 101 - if there is a specific sequence of events your game requires the PC's to follow, the characters must always obtain the necessary information to progress along that path. i.e. Don't hide key clues behind skill rolls the players might fail, give them the key clues and use skill rolls to enhance the details they have have or promote the mood of the game. I worked this out in, er 1982, from reading the 2nd edition Call of Cthulhu rule book...

No one. But then, they did not sell RuneQuest to Avalon Hill. I think Shannon Appelcline's account is pretty reliable, as is Pete Maranici's History of RuneQuest. Lord knows they have got things wrong in the past, and they need to put some immediate things right at present, but could we not muddy the waters by raking over incorrect versions of history, much of it ten or more years old? Cheers, Nick

Are you aware of Kenzer & Co's Kingdoms of Kalamar for D&D 4e? With no particular license or permisions, simply adhering to copyright and trademark law. Legally it's entirely do able - albeit it's not a route I'm particularly happy with contemplating even in the current circumstances. Nick

*sigh* Frankly, I am sceptical at this point and mostly think I'll be building my future plans around supporting BRP as much despite Chaosium as because of them. And I find that very sad. I really hope so. And there WILL no doubt be more monographs, and I'm certainly planning more issues of Uncounted Worlds. Or, bluntly, honour that commitment a few months later... I'm pretty sure that both Interplanetary and Rome would find buyers here, whether they have the Chaosium logo on or not. The sample license says 50 copies up front gratis for print runs less than 500 and I believe they've said that is the category they would consider PoD models in. Plus the right to buy subsequent copies at wholesale rather than retail, but that's a given really - mind the assumed retail mark up is pretty steep. So in terms of raw cash, assuming one were using lulu and say a 192 page perfect bound book with colour covers and b&w interiors, in US letter format with lulu's higher grade paper stock would cost (pauses to fire up lulu's calculator) £151.00 plus cost of shipping those 50 books from wherever in the US lulu printed them to Chaosium. The above assumes Chaosium would still go with the idea that a genuine Print on Demand model (i.e. people can buy EITHER a PDF or the book PoD) falls in the "Print run of less than 500 units". Where that figure falls on the scale of expensive or other wise would depend on ones terms of reference. Depending on how things go in the future, it was a possibility I'd not ruled out for some potential projects: albeit I'd not ruled it IN either, and in current circumstances I'm not willing to commit ANY significant amount of money towards a BRP related project. Gah, this is depressing, I’m just gonna go home, lie down, and listen to country music. The music of pain. Nick

Correct - there are other venues for Gloranthan material, and, being Gloranthan, it's not strictly all your own work, but in part a derivative work of Greg Stafford's Glorantha. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but in general (so ANY pre-exisitng published setting, not just Glorantah), it's an added complication I've chosen not to deal with.# Something like this I would recommend you send Newt's way for Hearts in Glorantha - it seems a natural fit subject-wise and HiG is a great 'zine. Cheers, Nick # If for example Gloranthan material is included in Uncounted Worlds I have to wrap my head around the Issaries Inc Fan Policy and possibly the MRQ STL, and how both interact with my exisitng permission from Chaosium and maybe even the OGL and... Lifes too short and I'm more intersted in new ideas, about new worlds. But mostly, lifes too short...

Yep - here . Cheers, Nick

The all to common fate of small, over enthusiastic RPG publishers - wider economic circumstances changed in ways there fledgling business couldn't cope with. Specifically, Morrigan, like a number of small RPG companies was hit quite hard by shifts in exchange rates IIRC. That lead to some difficulties honouring commitments to freelance contributors and customers and some unfortunate delays in communication. Some of these have now been addressed I believe, but as far as I can tell Morrigan itself is on hiatus whilst Scott Agnew tries to make the numbers add up again. Morrigan did some good work when everything was working - I know several people who speak very highly of the Omni system games they did for example. They may yet bounce back again, and Omni isn't dead yet. For more information I'd suggest looking at the Yahoo Talislanta group(s). Cheers, Nick

RQII & III and Elric! / Stormbringer 5 were the ones I had to hand. Note it's pretty crucial it works that way in RQII/III because you ONLY get 2 combat actions a round: If you Parry two separate attacks before your attack strike rank arrives, you simply CANNOT attack that round. GORE is based on MRQ, and MRQ tied itself in some rather odd knots with combat trying to be different, so GORE does NOT AFAICR work the same way as most BRP games do. Cheers, Nick

That sounds wrong to me. Every version of BRP I've ever played you have to declare whether you are Parrying, Dodging or just hoping the attacker will miss BEFORE they roll their attack (but after they have declared that they ARE going to attack you). The problem I think is the word 'successful' - a BRP character doesn't have to designate who they will Parry against at the start of the round, they can wait until someone attacks them; but they can't wait until they know if the attack has hit them and THEN make a defensive roll, they have to commit to a defensive action (if any) as soon as they know the attack is coming. At which point of course, the fumble entry makes sense - even if the attack missed, the Parry fumble means they do hit. Another alternative is that the result applies to the NEXT attack against the character who fumbled. Cheers, Nick

Thank you. I'm definitely keen to include a wider spread of genres in future issues. I don't have definite plans for specifically 'themed' issues per se, but since issue one was predominantly fantasy material (and fairly conventional fantasy at that), I would like to include more varied material in future issues - and since I'm very fond of SF I'd definitely like to see more SF content. Cheers, Nick

Quite agree - and the only thing I'd add is that, irrespective of the specific legal niceties, quite a lot of cover art etc. that people blithely copy and pass around the internet is art work produced by a living artists and I personally feel one should ask permission and properly attribute ownership of such pieces simply out of respect for the creator... Cheers, Nick

Chaosium are already in the book trade with their Cthulhu fiction line - but as their various forays in to more game related fiction over the years have shown its a VERY tough market to crack. I think a BETTER approach, especially given that the requirements of a role playing campaign setting and a setting for prose fiction are different, would be to build a decent setting, and then get authors to write stories in the setting... Nick

I too agree - part of the purpose of Uncounted Worlds is to build up my skills and confidence, and the reason Outpost 19 went the monograph route is that I originally promised it to them, and it makes use of material from the original Future*World, if only peripherally, so it seemed a better fit under Chaosium's aegis. I have some ideas for stuff I might want to try as stand alone supplements self-published, but I'm not rushing in to anything at this point. Cheers, Nick

Nothing. I assume Lulu get something from their print partners who actually physically produce a printed volume if the seller has chosen to print it at cost, and if I were adding a "profit" element to UW, Lulu would take a cut. But Lulu don't directly charge me anything for the services they provide. The only costs associated with UW have been the domain uncounted-worlds.org, the clip-art library I'm building up, and the physical cost of posting a reference copy of UW1 to the British Library ISSN Centre at Wetherby (a requirement of the ISSN registration), and a copy to Bo Rosen in Sweden as he contributed to that issue. ISSN's (International Standard Serial Numbers) are free, simply contact the ISSN Centre at the British Library - but they ONLY apply to "serial publications" i.e. magazines, newsletters, yearly produced proceedings etc. ISBN's (International Standard Book Numbers) will cost money and apply to non-serial / unique publications - books. Lulu DO do a service where by they will sort out an ISBN for a publication, but that costs: I only looked in to it briefly a year or so back, so the details will have changed. And the Lulu storefront Lulu provide for free - note that I've done nothing in the way of enhancing it - again, there may be "pay for snazzy feature" options, but I didn't bother exploring them. Lulu is ideal, but check their FAQ's to make sure it suits, and bear in mind tat shipping costs on printed editions from Lulu can be high - they print at partner printers (paperbacks for the UK are I believe printed in the UK, but all other European destinations are I think sourced from a printer in Spain) and this produces do quirks - at present for example I believe they can only print hardbacks in the US, which makes they an expensive buy for purchasers in the EU or Australasia. You could also look at Amazon's PoD / Self-publishing arm, Booksurge who provide a similar service to Lulu. Cheers, Nick

Thanks. The more contributions I can get the better! Can you tell I'm very conservative with layout? Duly noted for issue two and beyond. I hope so. And BRP stat blocks are quite complex. I modelled the ones in UW1 on the work that was done here by Shaira and others - but it's another area noted on my list to look at again for UW2. I've also invested in some more clip art and am hoping to break up the layout a bit more in future - it was a deliberate decision to NOT tangle with the complexities of art too much this time round, but I always knew that was going to make the text seem quite dense. So I'm hoping I can address that next time round. Thanks for everyones comments so far and please keep them coming! Cheers, Nick

Bear in mind that Chaosium's level of support for previous games was a) dictated in part but what was financially viable and often concentrated in to bursts of activity. If you look at Elric! in the context of the three years or so it was an active product line, it did reasonably well, compared to similar RPG's from similar sized companies - and the line stopped being actively supported because it wasn't economically viable for Chaosium at the time... What BRP needs is some third party support - which is why loosing Seraphim Guard and Dead World was such a shame. I did email Dustin before I went away at the beginning of last week, so they should know it's out and available, and I did include a copy of the PDF. Need to crack on and get another issue or two out this year though, to get some momentum going. Nick