NickMiddleton

Google "420" Cheers, Nick

Cool! Admittedly, I'm pretty sure I DON'T have the time right now, but an idea has occured for something "brief" that I can maybe get written up before the July 31st deadline but AFTER I've got some of this other stuff off my plate. And I think the "no Call of Cthhulhu/Lovecraftian" restriction is a good thing - there is a LOT of that sort of material available already, so seeing some stuff that showcases BRP in other genres / styles, especially now, is good idea. How about doing a purely cold war espionage scenario set in Berlin, and then here or elsewhere publishing soe notes about "plugging" that scenario in to the B61 setting by adding a 'mythos' element? Cheers, Nick

Chaosium printed 420 copies of the "Advanced Reader's Copy" (aka BRP Zero) final proof edition of the new BRP manuscript in final layout with a nice albeit temporary cover and sold it exclusively via their website. Some of us who bought a copy quote the number of our copy out of 420 in our signatures here. Cheers, Nick

Your best bet is to talk to Chaosium direct - no one here is a Chaosium employee nor any sort of official spokesperson for them. I'd recommend contacting Dustin Wright in the first instance. But supporting BRP without using the MRQ OGL is certainly possible. So far, three types of product are on the horizon, as far as I can tell. Firstly, Chaosium are obviously going to do their own support material. They have also released a specimen BRP license for third party publishers wishing to produce BRP supplements, a copy is hosted here . The specimen license is explicitly for supplements only - clause 1 states that the license is for "supplements to the Works" and that "You can not, for example, create a stand-alone roleplaying game." Thirdly they have licensed at least one third party publisher (Seraphim Guard) to produce a stand alone BRP game. So Chaosium clearly will consider licensing for standalone products, but for the one we know of at least, the licensing arrangement is specific to that product line, and separately negotiated. Cheers, Nick

The new BRP contains a version of the system, based on the version in Chaosium's Thieves World set for NPC personality - page 290 in BRP 0. We were having a discussion in another thread about adapting / expanding the Allegiance mechanics as well IIRC. Cheers, Nick

When I was bloody minded teenager, the combination of angst and excessively obscure words hit the spot for me and I absolutely adored the Covenant books. But I haven't re-read them in many years. But I can forgive Donaldson an awful lot for teh short pieces: "Unworthy of the Angel" and "Reave the Just", both of which I think are brilliant. In contrast, thanks to a recent thread at RPGNet (following one here) I started trying to re-read The Verdant Passage, first volume of Troy Denning's Prism Pentad novels in the Dark Sun setting - and god, I'd forgotten just how flat and turgid the prose was... Cheers, Nick

Hmm, so currently (as of 457 votes), we have: SF has pulled back out in front (by a narrow margin), and SF / Fantasy continue to head the field by some margin. Although Post Apocalypse has surged back ahead of Horror again... Interesting. I must confess I assumed that Fantasy would lead the field easily, with SF/PA second spot and Pulp / Horror and Historical brining up the rear... Cheers, Nick

Chaosium updated the BRP Character sheet on the 24th of May, so they may have sorted out the problem Chaot was having... Cheers, Nick

One of the (very few) benefits of my job is having access to a suite of A0 colour and black and white scanners and plotters... I'm still working on justifying the company buying a wide format laminator though, although we do often have A0 width self-adhesive clear film (sticky-backed plastic to UK gamers of a certain age...), which is how I made several hand crafted dry wipe battle mats with square and hex grids. Cheers, Nick

Yes very easy - tone done the Cthulhu Mythos stuff by tweaking the SAN mechanics, and Call of Cthulhu could do it now, but the new BRP will give you more options (including a psychic powers system that would work very well). The biggest challenge with "urban supernatural" / "modern fantasy" is getting the atmosphere right - I think the new BRP's powers system would need tweaking out of the box to help with that, but the core system is a boon because it's so straightforward and fades in to the back ground so elegantly. If you can get hold of Chaosium's Nephilim, and especially the Liber Ka supplement about western magic that would be a very useful resource and compatible with BRP in the broad sense. Cheers, Nick

Funnily enough earlier this year I took a run back through Mythago Wood, Lavondyss, the Bone Forest and the Hollowing - and I must get round to reading Gates of Ivory as well. I love the Mythago books - I'm still not entirely sure that Lavondyss is as successful as it could be, and the Hollowing, for all it's by far the most approachable volume is also perhaps the least profound; but a wonderful series of books, well worth reading. Cheers, Nick

It's in PDF 1.7 format (Acrobat 8.0+), which Panther may well not be able to render. I'll email to Dustin tonight about a conversion back to PDF 1.4 (Acrobat 5.x+) which most peopel should be able to use. Cheers, Nick

I'll email the copy to work and have it look at it in the standrd version of acrobat I have there, see if I can spot anything odd about it... For reference - I'm using Tiger on an Intel Core 2 Duo. Cheers, Nick

I think the $25.95 page is for the PDF download, but they haven't amended the text as yet to say so. Rendered fine in Preview on my iMac when I downloaded it just now... Cheers, Nick

Jason's mentioned the new BRP itself and Cthulhu Rising, so I'll name check a few other possible resources: The files section of this yahoo group: brpsystem contains several files you might find useful - the RQIII Technical Expansion (fan conversion to RQIII of GDW's T2K, 2300AD & MegaTraveller weapons and tech), Striker Weapons for BRP, and a few others. If you can track it down, one of the volumes of the Worlds of Wonder set is Future*World, an SF BRP game. Also worth looking for, but potentially pricey are FGU's Other Suns, Chaosium's RingWorld (painfully expensive unfortunately) or Other Worlds Games Worlds Beyond. Cheers, Nick

Nephilim makes extensive use of the resistance table, and I'm sure I remember someone in the playtest (possibly even Jason) talking about a variant they'd looked at where everything was resolved via the resistance table... I actually find that one of BRP's trengths is that it has multiple resolution systems - it provides me as GM with flexibility and the different mechanism emphasise raw capability (Stat rolls), the oppoistion of raw qualities (resistance table rolls) or training and experience (skills). Cheers, Nick

If it's from wiki its probably wrong... Or at least, if it's from wiki and involves any significant amount of opinion, it's probably wrong. The HPL copyright situation is complex and I'd be wary of assuming stuff was public domain... But even if Chaosium were to follow Marcus L Rowland's example and do a setting based entirely on intellectual property entirely in the public domain, would that be a good thing? From a commercial point of view IP is a valuable asset, and is worth defending. If it's not PD it costs to use someone else's IP (both in raw fees and time to publication for approvals etc) and if it IS PD, there is no easy way to defend your particular IP. I remain firmly convinced that unless an RPG company is set up to deal with licensed IP (as Mongoose clearly are, and Green Ronin) it's really not worth tangling with, and given how many RPG publisher's have had grief from licensed IP (FASA, ICE, AEG, SJG, Mongoose, Chaosium off the top of my head) I'm sceptical that, especially for Chaosium these days, they are worth it. YMMV. Cheers, Nick

Err, yes! (Couldn't actually remember for certain earlier!) Hold on, I have a copy here.. RQII page 55 - Combat benefits lists 4 advantages / "powers" of Combt Skills of 100%+: You can reduce you opponents Defence score by the amount your skill exceeds 100 An opponents parry is penalised by the same amount your special and critical chances are increased (note - for a skill of 120 this means that your opponents are penalised -20 from Defence AND Parry against you, AND you get specials on 24 or less and crits on 6 or less.. Splitting Attacks or parries down in to blocks of 50 or more. Non-Fighting skills help you using the RQII opposed skill mechanic - so Hide 120 penalises Spot Hidden attempts against you by 20 points... Why not use existing skills? The appropriate weapon skill or Dodge for feints, Fast Talk or Perform for verbal bluffs / intimidation (with perhaps bonus for high stats or flashy skills, depending on the specific tactics), Throw for tossing sand (or a bowl of gruel or a handful of food scraps) in someone's face (and that's surely simply a thrown attack not intended to cause direct damage?). Reading the deception would be a matter of Insight, or Spot, whilst avoiding the stuff in the face is a Dodge. As I suggested earlier, I'm really not sure BRP needs anything adding to do all these things - it just needs spelling out for players and game masters to see how to use the existing rules and skills to achieve the same effect. Cheers, Nick

Ah me! Lens and force swords and powering a ship in to TISA or FTL all by ones lonesome... Happy memories.... Oops! Sorry! :focus: I have somewhere some half finished notes on re-jigging RQIII Spirit magic / Shamanism as a psionic powers system (for a DArk Sun conversions). I'll see if I can find them tonight. Cheers, Nick

The mass market is in broad high fantasy still though, and BRP did do that. Glorantha might well have always had more depth than Greyhawk (and these days spends interminable reams of paper lovingly caressing every minutia of how different it is, *yawn*), but originally it's popularity was that it was a fun and different place to kill things and take their stuf, with a system that actually made trying to kill things feel as risky and heroic as it ought... I think what BRP needs is a new Glorantha, as Glorantha was in 1978 - somewhere with distinctive flavour, but not opaque and unapproachable. Somewhere that someone who has just read Lord of the Rings, or Conan, or Until they are Hanged could get to grips with quickly, but which DOESN'T feel like Greyhawk / Forgotten Realms-lite... And BRP used to do well with Elric! / Stormbringer. But to be fair, S&S is at one end of a sliding scale with Forgotten Realms style High Fantasy at the other and AD&D used to adapt reasonably well between them, and BRP still does. I'd favour something more towards the S&S end of the scale, but I think being too dogmatic about it would restrict it's appeal. I think these are lovely ideas for supplementary settings, and certainly blending more influence from these non-European sources can add flavour - but as exotic settings from Glorantha onwards have discovered, stray too far from the European paradigm and sales (which are to a largely European descended demographic after all...) aren't so good. This to me is the obvious direction to take a "revival" of Nephilim, or rather, a revival of Chaosium's interest in modern occult / fantasy gaming (as opposed to Horror)... The challenge is in building a setting that isn't blatantly obviously "Neil Gaiman" the RPG without Gaiman's permission, or Buffy / Angel -lite. I think one could do something building on what was in Nephilim, but it would require such a radical re-imagining that it would be a different game in most respects. [*]Pre-Tolkien fantasy literature (e.g. Oz, Gormengast, the worlds of Lord Dunsany)

I have a copy of JAGS and Wonderland somewhere in PDF and I have read them both but hadn't made the connection to it until you posted but beyond the suggestion that DaVinci's heir's might sue (albeit I'm pretty sure that his original is out of copyright anywhere in the world, what with it being a bit more than seventy years since his death) I don't see anything to be suspicious of - so two people independently came up with the idea of using Da Vinci's "Vetruvian Man" as the basis for an image promoting a multi-genre RPG - big deal. As Jason rightly alluded to, BOTH could be construed as copying Hero games Logo, which itself clearly echoes the DaVinci pic but was around before the JAGS illustration and the BRP cover. And whilst the JAGS and BRP images are more closely derived from DaVinci's original than something like the HERO Games logo, they are clearly different executions of a similar concept, nothing more. They have different numbers of limbs / appendages, the weapons are different (the JAGS chap appears to be holding some sort of revolver), the armour is distributed differently, the BRP has a tentacle coming in... *shrug* I really don't see an issue here... Cheers, Nick

I like the idea of tricks, and started roughing out some ideas for a BRP system - then I thought again: So the lucky farm boy (POW 18) is better at Intimidation than the veteran Soldier (POW 12), the smart kid (INT 18) better than the average adult hustler (INT 12), the graceful apprentice (DEX 18) better than the normally co-ordinated Guard (DEX 12)? I concluded after some thought that a) a lot of this stuff is covered in the new BRP in the Spot Rules and they are functions of skill (i.e. experience and training) not raw ability (i.e. stats). If I was to implement a generalised mechanic for non-combat skills aiding in combat I'd use a variant something like this: a character with a sufficiently high skill (e.g. Fast Talk 50+) can use it in an opposed test vs. an opponents appropriate skill (e.g. for a bluff, or taunt use of fast Talk, probably Insight) and if they win either penalise the opponents defensive skill or add to their attacking skill an amount equal to their special success chance with their winning skill e.g. in the Bluff example, one fifth of their Fast Talk could be applied as either a penalty to the defenders parry or Dodge, or as a bonus to the Attackers weapon skill. There are Entangle and Knock-back rules in BRP already - I think the issue is as much getting players to THINK about what their characters options are in a combat as it is a rules issue. And, funnily enough, I know of at least one Savage Worlds GM who has had problems getting players to engage with SW combat properly because they didn't know or understand the options available... I think much of this is, as I said, already covered in the BRP spot rules, and that the vast majority should be skill based... But I still want to sit down with a copy of SW and the BRP Spot Rule chapter as I think I think a "Guide to BRP Action Sequences" with suggestions for both players and GM's on how to implement and exploit the Spot Rules stuff might be useful. This is covered in the optional "Fate point" mechanic in BRP. I've yet to try them in play, but I know Jason and others have used these sorts of things a lot and think well of them... I think it's worth looking at skills over 100% and considering how big a deal it is: in an SB style game, skills over 100 are sufficiently common that they don't nee extra rules. In a RQII/III game where skills over 100 are theoretically possible but rare and noteworthy then I think some extra benefits of exceptional skill would be good - whether something like Land of Ninja's ki skills or MRQ's Legendary Abilities done right. RuneLords in RQII got specific unique abilities for weapon skills over 100, which might be a source of inspiration. Cheers, Nick

Err, care to condense that a touch? Or at least break out the key things you think MIGHT be useful / relevant to BRP? I'm afraid I don't particularly rate Mike Mearls as a designer (most of his d20 work I've read I find overly fiddly and poorly thought through) and most of the rules ideas in 4e seem aimed at taking the game even further back down the "tactical skirmish wargame" road than 3.5 - a shame as the flavour text and such has been a marked improvement over 3.0/3.5 - but frankly, if I was to run something in a 4e style "points of light" setting, from what I've heard so far 4e is pretty low down the list of possible systems I'd choose to use... Cheers, Nick

It's a bit of a quick straw poll effort, and I suspect one would need to get in to some rather lengthy discussions to clearly define Modern Horror and Modern Fantasy as distinct from each other - AND explain how both aren't already to some degree addressed by Call of Cthulhu. But I'm sure Chaosium would listen to / read a pitch on either one - and they might revise the poll in response to an email. Be interesting to see what the results look like when it has more respondents...

Yes - basically you can add more levels to a spell and for spells where it makes sense, those additional levels can be applied to different aspects of the spell. So a level 6 change spell could last 15 minutes and affect one SIZ 18 individual, OR affect TWO SIZ 9 individuals (six levels of it's basic effect, split between two targets) OR one SIZ 9 target but for a duration of one hour (3 levels of basic effect last 15 minutes, and three levels of additional duration). The spell list is virtually unchanged from Magic World, but there is a Conjure Elemental spell, and as you say, it would be very easy to improvise additional spells. I'm also hopeful that an early supplement for BRP will be some sort of "magic system anthology" based on the RQIII Magic Book but also including material from the Bronze Grimoire, Nephilim, Liber Ka, Land of Ninja and some new ones... Cheers, Nick