NickMiddleton

19 hours ago, g33k said:

Paging @jsnead -- I think the authoritative source would be the author!
😉

Hopefully he will chip in, albeit he's not posted here for ~6 years I think... however, I did find this: 

Hmm - IIRC they were incorporated into the Chaosium book "Enlightened Magic" for BRP (

 and still available in PDF: https://www.chaosium.com/enlightened-magic-pdf/)

But the only place I have even the vaguest recollection of the files being was they might POSSIBLY have been in the files section of the old Nephilim Yahoo group, and that's long gone I believe.

I can't recall what if any changes were made between the draft Alchemy Rules to the version in EM, nor what exactly  was changed between the rest of the text being published in Liber Ka and its reworking in to EM, but others might.

I have a vague recollection that the GW RQ Monsters folded some typical stats (from the AH Monster Coliseum?) in with the stuff from the AH “Creatures Book” - but that might be a fabrication of my faulty memory?

On 1/11/2022 at 10:09 PM, paladin2769 said:

Hi, I was just wondering if anyone has a master list of all the books and things that Chaosium released for Magic World.  I know it is no longer published but did they also stop selling the electronic files aka pdfs?

Thanks in advance!

The PDFs of Magic World and Advanced Sorcery appear to be still available from Drive Thru RPG, but not direct from Chaosium. None of the planned other full supplements or monographs were ever actually released, and the (non-MW) monographs that were on DriveThru RPG have gone.

The Magic World QuickStart is still currently accessible here: 
https://www.chaosium.com/content/FreePDFs/Magic World/Magic World Quickstart.pdf

8 hours ago, Ian Absentia said:

This is essentially the game I was hoping to see in the pages of the misbegotten Blood Tide.  It's a pity those dots couldn't have been connected.

!i!

Buried somewhere in the utterly woeful organisation of the published version of Blood Tide there's a  lot of good material; it just desperately needed better editing and layout... and probably flensing down to a more focused work (it feels flabby and overstuffed with ideas all over the shop at 240 pages).

*sigh* I regularly get enthused about a nugget of an idea I've had for years for a fantasy BRP / horror (but NOT Cthulhu ) thing that riffs on bits of UK and Caribbean history circa 1680-1690 for which Blood Tide OUGHT to be an ideal resource - and then I try to read the damn book again and get annoyed all over again... ...I still hope that Ken Spencer will link up with someone and do a second edition with better editing and layout (and a sane index...).

... hold on. I might have a PDF of P&G... *exit stage left to interrogate various old backups and external hard drives...*

3 hours ago, g33k said:

Just -how- "not that hard," do you think?   (I recall looking wistfully at the P&G/HoO duo, and thinking that sounded like an awesome combo to run, whipping out the wargame to run the actual naval battles, and the RPG for everything else.  As I recall, my college (or just-post-college?) budget said "no, thank you.")

At this point, however, a really good "1700's Napoleonic/Regency/American-Independence era BRP" game is a goodly chunk of one of my 2-3 low-key / back-burner passion projects, currently only a few notes in the cloud... and a lot of inchoate speculation still rattling between the eardrums...

Found it! Quickly scanning character gen, its very  BRP and combat skills look VERY RQ; melee combat has a vaguely strike rank like system, with hit locations etc. (Cutlass does 1D6+2, Smallsword 1D6 etc).  Non-Combat skills are assigned to a stat and then a simple "roll d20 vs stat, roll under to succeed". There's a fair bit of detail about social status, family, crewing a ship / operating as a privateer or other operations, surviving ship board life (scurvy etc)... 

Definitely worth a look for BRP fans and the PDF is $10 from Drive ThruRPG. Very much an artefact of its times in some ways, but looks to be one of the "good" FGU games.

Bear in mind that the never published revision of RuneQuest planned in the mid 1990’s is known to many as RQ4 and had a DB sequence that went as Baron Wulfraed suggests. One could expand it easily to: 1d2, 1d3, 1d4, 1d4, 1d5, 1d6, 1d8, 1d10, 1d12 …

As soon as the Savage North is back in print, buy it people! The original was enormous fun to run and it’s a glorious homage to both the best of Conan and the “British S&S” feel of early Fighting Fantasy, WD & Slaine etc.

So, a year and a bit on - would anyone be willing to look over a revised set of Weapon Classes and tables I have put together?

I've gone back to the Elric! source(s) (original book and GM's Pack) to try and correct some of the OCR / transcription errors that snuck in, as well as revising the weapon groups a little to make them more logical / coherent - I make no particular claim to the latter changes being "more accurate"! It also includes a few nips and tucks regarding e.g. strangler's cord, burning torch.

Since a chunk of the text describing the weapon's classes is verbatim from Magic World I won't be posting it publicly until its finalised and I've run it past Chaosium but would welcome some other sets of eyes to look over it. Let me know and I'll put a copy up somewhere private and message people a link.

3 hours ago, kross said:

I dunno. Any publishers out there interested in having a look? If so, drop me a PM. (I assume my Xyserdon is the one Nick's talking about, anyway.)

Xyserdon was indeed what I was thinking of. From what Ben was kind enough to let me see, it is a fantastic setting with huge potential. It is a crying shame it has not seen the light of day.

If I remotely had the skills and resources to help get it published I would offer to do so. As is, if any publisher with those skills and resources is thinking of PMing Kevin, I will say I will throw ridiculous cash at any kickstarter or conventional publishing approach and will be VERY vocal in encouraging others to do so.

*sigh* there was a fantastic, original setting planned (and largely written) for Magic World that never saw the light of day, alas.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/110168/Legend-The-Spider-Gods-Bride

The above is the only other thing that springs to mind. It’s for Legend, so easily adaptable to most other flavours of BRP / D100.

5 hours ago, smiorgan said:

It could remind you of Magic World, yes. And in some ways it's what MW could  have been but never was: clean layout, evocative art with a classic fantasy feel, a fully developed setting…

1 hour ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

What's wrong with Magic World?
It's pretty clean I thought ... 😮
(TBH I don't play Magic Word exactly, but I am inspired by it, even for my -still work in progress - scifi settings 😮 )

Smiorgan can obviously speak for themselves, but the three things I’ve emphasised from their post are the most common criticisms of Magic World, and all have substance. The published layout is poor; not terrible, but compared to the compact elegance of the original Elric! it’s disappointingly flabby, unnecessarily inflating the page count at the least. It re-uses a lot of art from previous publications, and whilst much of it is perfectly fine b&w work, there’s no real coherence to the art direction, nor does it really align with the broader tone of the text. The Southern Reaches setting in Magic World was always intended as a sample, an example of what could be done with the game: some (perhaps many) prefer to have a specific setting for a game. *shrug* 

11 hours ago, Scout said:

But, the highest score I have is 25 for Perception (Listen). All others are 5 or 10. Actually, with -5 Stealth, I have a few skills at 0%. That cannot be correct. 

What you have is a raw, entirely untrained 15-16 year old. If you look at pages 25, 34 and others (in the Classic edition) you can see how starting characters can get credit with various bodies for training:

Quote

By long tradition, the guilds, etc., must train those who come before them. There is nothing to say they must do it for free. However, beginning Adventurers do have the privilege of obtaining credit from the guilds.

This credit takes the form of 100 L multiplied by a specific characteristic the guilds are interested in. The diviners of guilds determine how much credit is to be given, and their divination is exact. Thus, Rurik, applying for fighting training, would be given a credit of 1200 L (STR 12 x 100 L) because the fighting guilds base their credit allowances on STR. Other guilds base their training on other characteristics, as will be explained in the chapters dealing with magic and other skills.

It’s a tad fiddly, and scattered through various chapters, but you can get a chunk of training to lift starting skills (and some initial magic): but it leaves you with significant debts to various guilds… …which gives a solid reason for characters to be taking risky but rewarding jobs to try to pay off those debts!

As far as I can recall, we always used the Appendix H rules and had starting characters who were early twenties, rather than kids fresh off the farm.

On 9/6/2021 at 6:29 PM, Al. said:

I think CoC also has a Critical on a roll of 01 (regardless of skill)

But skimming my copy of (2nd edition) I can't find any mention of said rule, so I may have been swayed by a house rule in a con game without realising.

Up to 5th edition, certain weapon attacks could impale on 1/5th rolls, and 5th introduced an OPTIONAL "Critical" on a roll of 01-05 (5.6 page 124) for combat skills. (having skimmed my 2nd, 4th and 45.6 hard copies).

Don't think non-combat skills got enhanced degrees of success in core rules until at least 6th edition, and I don't have a copy of the 1st or 6th editions.

Magic World is incorrect - *sigh* a glitch that made it in to the print but was corrected in the revised PDF (printed page 48, pdf page 50):

Quote

CRITICAL & SPECIAL SUCCESSES, FUMBLES
The lower the D100 roll result, the better the Adventurer’s performance. A special is a roll of one-fifth or less of the Adventurer’s percentiles in a skill. Round up fractions. A critical result occurs on a roll of 1/20th of the skill rating.
It’s always possible to fail abysmally: this is called a fumble. Fumbles happen more rarely than criticals because people practice succeeding, and guard against failing.
For skills of 100 percent or less, a fumble occurs on a D100 result of 99 or 00. For skills of 101 percent or more, a fumble occurs on a D100 result of 00 only. 

I am a grumpy old grognard - I loathe "dice trick" systems that  involve analysing let alone manipulating the actual dice outcomes as other than reading them as a number, and I like the clarity and directness of "roll under, roll low"; and I have a real fondness for the asymmetry of the classic five classification of results as critical / special / success / fail / fumble.

I think it is an important, impactful feature that things we care about enough to test with actual die rolls are a step more granular on the success side than the failure side; but I am also someone who dislikes the simplistic "a fumble is automatically the most ridiculously debilitating thing that could happen to a PC".

I'll happily play other schemes (I am currently playing a home brew Conan D100 game with a distinctly OpenQuest 3 success schema in fact); but I'd never run one out of choice.

1 hour ago, Mankcam said:

Cubicle 7 seem to have trimmed many of their lines in recent times, notably The One Ring, and more recently Lone Wolf. I think Cubicle 7 will be predominantly producing products for their Warhammer and Dr Who licences.

Given that they had announced new editions of both the One Ring and Lone Wolf and then suddenly weren’t doing them anymore I think “trimmed” is generous: for whatever reasons, those licenses unexpectedly ceased to be viable and the relationships were dissolved. Combined with the long silence over the Laundry and whilst C7 retain two very high profile licenses in Who and Warhammer, they are not the force they once were. And Modiphius in contrast seem to be on a real roll… …as a d100 fan and a fan of C7s Laundry as well as the novels, I’d rather Stross found another partner: either with a license to re do the game as CoC variant or one for one of the other d100 family of games.

As for the lines Chaosium have acquired, it will be great to see some of the material receive a new lease of life. Cthulhu Brittanica started a little shaky IMO (I was not that impressed by the Avalon book for example) but massively improved over time; and what I saw of the World War Cthulhu series was very good.

Yeah, from what is posted there they are actively pursuing a wider release or Mournblade in additional languages, but no formal announcement or dates as yet. I imagine the performance of the boardgame will also have some influence, in helping them gauge  wider interest in the IP.

11 hours ago, rsanford said:

Worldwide. Will be called Elric the rise of the young kingdoms if I remember right.

Not yet. Elric the Rise of the Young Kingdoms is a board game:

https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/elric-rise-of-the-young-kingdoms-announced.884590/post-23983768

Quote

I don't know if anything further happened with Sarah Newton's 'Chronicles of Future Earth' besides some fiction... but I'd love to see that setting come back as well.

Fate version was kickstarted a couple years back, Sarah had a huge crisis in her personal life (partner of many years was diagnosed with a terminal illness and passed away) which obviously hugely impacted the project, but it is progressing again: 

3 hours ago, Michael Stockin said:

Thanks everyone.

Another question...

WFRP has a Cool stat which is used for Fear Tests.
What have people done for fear tests with this system?

I know CoC has SAN but that is equal to POW and thus yields only a small % of ever passing, something which does not fit well for me in The Old World.

Err, SAN is 5 x POW, so pretty high chance to make make for PCs with decent POW. IIRC there’s a version in the BGB.

As a simple alternative, set a a “fear factor” on scale similar to stats (ie core 3-18) and have PCs match stat of choice (INT for rational defence; POW for will power etc) against it on resistance table. Calibrate as feels appropriate.

Found a transcription from “the Web of Chaos” chapter in Rogue Mistress in my files:

Quote

Rogue Mistress Fire Arms

The firearms developed and used in the world of Albyon resemble the smooth-bored, muzzle-loading flintlock weapons common to our Earth of a few centuries ago. These guns use a kind of black powder made from the blending of two different plants common to Albyon, flashroot and firethorn. Because of the unstable nature of the powder, it degenerates quickly in worlds more chaotic than Albyon. In the Young Kingdoms, for instance, (using the formula described in the Introduction) the powder has a 20% chance per day of becoming inert and useless.

A partial list of black powder weapons found on this plane is given below.

 

Weapon              Shots/        Damage       Range      AP       

                            Round                               (feet)

Pocket Pistol      1/6              1D6+2            15             3

Holster Pistol     1/6              2D4+2           40             5

Musket                1/6              2D6+2           80             8

Blunderbuss      1/6              4D6            30/60/100  0

 

Loading these weapons is a complex and painstaking procedure. How fast a character may perform this action is dependent upon his skill level. The character's skill level also affects the chance of fumbling when firing the weapon.

 

Black Powder Weapon Reloading Table

Skill                        Ability

01-50%     Reloading takes 6 rounds and a tumble occurs whenever 90-00 is rolled.

51-70%     Reloading time is reduced to 5 rounds and fumbles occur when 96-00 is rolled.

71-80%      Reloading takes 4 rounds and fumbles occur on rolls of 99-00.

81%+          Reloading takes 3 rounds and fumbles occur only on a roll of 00.

 

Fumbles If, when firing a weapon, a character rolls a fumble, roll 1D6 and consult the following chart.

 

Black Powder Weapon Fumble Chart

D6         Result

1-2       Misfire. The weapon does not fire. The weapon must be carefully cleared of the old charge before reloading. Double the time it normally fakes to reload the weapon.

3           Hangfire. The weapon appears to have misfired but 1 D10 strike ranks later, it unexpectedly goes off. The result of this depends on what the character has done with the weapon in the meantime.

4           Underload. The weapon fires but too little powder was used. The shot, underpowered, goes astray.

5           Backfire. Ball is packed too tight and igniting powder flashes back through touch hole. Weapon fires normally but user takes 1 D3 points damage from powder burns and is blinded for 1D10 rounds.

6          Overload. Too much powder was used. The weapon kicks badly, sending the shot astray. The user takes 1 point of damage and, if he fails his Balance roll, is knocked to the ground.

 

Firearm Descriptions

The pocket pistol, as the name implies, is a very small weapon, capable of being concealed in the folds of a coat or cape. Some expensive (but not necessarily well-made) pocket pistols have two barrels with a mechanism for switching the flintlock between the touch holes of the bar-rels. Weapons of this latter type can be fired on two succes-sive rounds but require double the reloading time. The holster pistol has a longer barrel which greatly in-creases the weapon's range and power. It is typically carried in a leather holster on a horse's saddle. The musket is a long-barreled weapon fired from the shoulder, similar to a rifle. The blunderbuss is similar to a shotgun and fires pellets in a spreading pattern. They are not capable of piercing armor. Their damage also decreases as the range increases but, when firing at any range greater than 20 feet, the weapon is capable of hitting more than one target. Anyone standing within three feet of the target will suffer damage as indicated by the range. The character uses this weapon at his normal skill level at any range above point-blank and below 100 feet, damage decreasing past 30 feet and 60 feet. Any distance beyond 100 feet the character's skill is halved, beyond 200 feet, the skill is quartered, etc. 

On 6/8/2021 at 10:32 AM, Michael Stockin said:

Follow up question, I have ready made Warhammer races now.

But gunpowder weapons are a thing in warhammer, I recall a stormbringer supplement had rules for 6 shooter pistols, but where can I find rules for blackpowder weapons?


TIA

There are some brief SB rules for fire arms in Rogue Mistress  which iirc cover both black powered and Maria’s six guns. Iirc there’s some stuff in the introduction and in one of the specific adventures (the “Albyon” one I think?)

3 hours ago, K Peterson said:

I'm not a huge fan of Magic World as a product - preferring its predecessors (Elric!, RQ3) to the lets throw all the BRP shit in a pot and stir it up, slap on some ugly art and layout, and then not support it approach.

Um, you are aware that Magic World is just Elric! with a couple of ideas and some creature stats from prior editions of Stormbringer and RQ3 and without the Moorcock IP, right?

12 hours ago, Michael Stockin said:

Hi.

So I have my original copy of WFRP and am playing a Warhammer campaign but I am using the Elric! system (which is essentially BRP).
However the Warhammer lore and Elric! lore are quite different, does BRP have stats for the typical Warhammer races?
 

You could pick up either of these:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/128323/Magic-World?cPath=74_5621

https://www.chaosium.com/basic-creatures-pdf/

They contain a bunch of monster / creature stats including stuff like more WFRP Elves and Dwarves. Magic World is also basically Elric! with a few tweaks, so highly compatible with the rule set you are using. And the PDF is $3 currently.

Basic Creatures is closer to RQ (it is a reworking of the RQ3 Creatures Book), so a bit less useful, and IIRC pretty much everything from it is in Magic World - but it is ALSO just a creatures.

36 minutes ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

I like the idea of multiplying skill values for difficulty.. however I have few problems with that:

1. the problem to ask my players to do math in game. some people really struggle with simple math, like multiplying a percentage by 2 or 0.5
2. it lacks the difficulty gradient, what if the shield is  little bit bigger or little bit smaller? +20%/+40%/+60% is easier and more gradual...
3. even in BGB sometimes you have a skill bonus/malus, sometimes a difficulty multiplier and I am not entirely clear when I should which and how to combine them

 

Incidentally, for shields, I am contemplating to be inspired by the way they work against arrow. Give each shield a rating and that is considered to be the player skill unless he has a better skill.

I do both: broad assessment of challenge is a multiplier (Trivial / Easy / Routine / Hard / Improbable map to x5, x2, x1, x0.5 and x0.05); Impairments / Benefits are minor adjustments as a result of specific circumstances independent of broad difficulty that penalise or add to final target: minor / moderate / major (10 / 20 / 40).

A Sniper attempts a shot: overall, it’s hard ( skill x 0.5) but player decides to spend 15 DEX ranks Careful Aim spot rule: so gets a +40 benefit. (I’ve largely collapsed all the small adds / maluses into three step impairments / benefits.

No, before anyone asks. There is no rigid universal schema that distinguishes what gets assessed via difficulty and what as an impairment or benefit: they are as much as anything aesthetic judgements that help me and the player communicate what’s key in a particular resolution.

1 minute ago, Agentorange said:

I don't think so, I never saw or even heard of it being published. It was mentioned at the back of the Dorastor book somewhere wasn't it ? Along with a supplement called Gods of Dorastor which also never saw the light of day.

Yup, page 108 mentions both. Given the list of gods mentioned, Gods of Dorastor is just another name for Lords of Terror  I think.