NickMiddleton

If Chaosium, the only English language RPG publisher from the original wave of RPG publishers in the mid seventies to still survive in anything like its original form, "blew it completely", I dread to think how one might assess FGU (basically dead) or GDW (shut up shop rather than gamble on rebuilding after a combination of factors hit the business hard in the early nineties) or TSR (owned the original Golden Goose, ended up bankrupt and bought up by a fan made good, who sold the IP on only four years later for a huge profit) for example. MRQ is an adequate BRP variant produced to generally very poor standards, Mongoose are a company whose track record is such that I will not buy from them, nor anything released under their "RuneQuest" trademark license. SO for me the difference is simple: BRP is a game I am prepared to pay for, and MRQ is not. Cheers, Nick Middleton

Where exactly do these figures come from? And when? There's a dearth of reliable figures in the industry, so I'm intrigued to know what these numbers actually represent. This is sales in France, correct? Up to what date? Cheers, Nick Middleton

It's RQIII. The software's home page is here . It's currently up to version 4.1, and there's also a Call of Cthulhu Character generator at version 2.0; alas both are Windows software. I used the BRP one quite a bit when I was running RQIII over the summer and was pretty pleased with it but I've switched to a Mac and have yet to commit to a software method of accessing Windows programmes as yet, so I can't use either package at present. Cheers, Nick

In the sense that GORE uses the MRQ SRD to copy RQII/BRP as closely as possible and still remain legal... Has anyone actually bought PDF? I'd be interested to here informed opinions. Cheers, Nick Middleton

Further to the meandering of the Q&A thread, what sort of controls does the board software used here afford us? For example, would it be possible to create a specific thread (or redefine the Q&A thread) as a "moderator approval required" thread, such that posts only appeared if a mod approved them? A pain for the mods, but it would allow them to directly "weed" the thread, and for it to retain its focus? If nothing else, a modicum of imposed discipline would do us all some good in terms of helping reinforce good posting etiquette... Cheers, Nick Middleton

More seriously I agree with both of you: one needs lots of setting detail to explain why Mages haven't utterly dominated the setting (unless of course they have...), but those ar eseparate from addressing what its like in play. Now I think you can make a wildly imbalanced party work quite easily - some of the most fun I've ever had in RPG's was playing mundane humans around mages in Ars Magica and many other games have some degree of discrepancy in PC power level. Magic free PCs are not a problem either: I've had no complaints from players in various Fafhrd & the Mouser-esque BRP games I've run where basically none of the PC's had any significant access to magic, but it existed in the setting (an dit's FAR easy to control th epower level in such circumstances of course). What I most like with "magic" is that it feels part of the setting: the little wrinkles that evoke its particular world. And I dislike "ubiquitous" magic where it is ubiquitous to the point it ought to radically affect the culture (most D&D settings). frankly, any man can pick up a sword or bow - I like mages being a bred apart. Of course, I also like the whole "simple prayers to the Spirits" feel one can doing with RQIII style near universal access to Spirit Magic as well... Cheers, Nick Middleton

:eek: We obviously play very different styles of BRP... Nick Middleton

OK, spun out of recent discussion in the Q&A thread (and as a counter to the ludicrous inference that ALL such rules are solely artificial game restrictions to balance warriors against mages) - what settings have people used / considered that coincidently restrict the frequency of mages / magic use in play? I always liked the Stormbringer 1st edition INT+POW > 32 idea: that to be a Sorcerer you just fundementally had to be exceptionally intelligent and strong willed / magically attuned (an dthat to progress to higher power levels you had to become inhumanly Intelligent and Powerful). Another idea I'd really like to try in a BRP game comes from the D&D setting the Scarred Lands - arcane magic taps the raw stuff of magic and thus casting spells releases a LOT of heat and even having spells memorised raises ones body temperature. So casters in the setting never wear armour or even heavy clothing (providing a neat explanantion for all tha tFrazetta art work...), even in cold climates and there are rules for penalising characters who do with fatigue from over-heating. I've toyed with converting the D&D Dark Sun setting to RQIII for a while. Sorcery in that setting is powered by bio-magical energy gathered from the living entities surrounding the caster (primarily plants but really powerful, sophisticated sorcerers can draw energy from living creatures). Drawing energy too quickly kills the organic life and sterilises the area (hence the sobriquet "Defiler" for Sorcerer's who cast so brutally). Since "Defilers" are hated (and feared) in the setting, using Sorcery (even as a "Preserver", who casts carefully, such that they draw energy slowly enough that the surrounding life is NOT destroyed) is a risky proposition, and achieving high power effects highly dependent on the surrounding flora... My Ulfland RQIII campaign used the RQIII rules pretty much straight, but also emphasised the importance of literacy in learning Sorcery, and it's scarcity in the setting - with very few people able to read, and reading being an essential underpinning of the Sorcerer's art there were just very few Sorcerers. Cheers, Nick Middleton

I did, waaaay back in eighties, use the variant of SAN from the second Stormbringer Companion for a few games, which worked reasonably well. I've also used, with RQIII, a variant mechanic designed by Ben Monroe called "Stress" which is designed to do the sort of "mental collapse" one often sees in various horror films (which differs from the erosion of mental stability SAN depicts). Ben's mentioned that it may see print at some point. The Blake's 7 RPG that the B7 fan-club did was basically a BRP variant and had an interesting variant on the SAN idea: a character accumulates stress points from stress inducing situations and as their accumulated stress level passes predetermined levels (multiples of their Will, a characteristic analogous to POW), they suffer increasing ill effects, until their Stress exceeds their Will times 5, at which point they suffer a Mental Breakdown. Drugs and therapies can reduce Stress. Another possibility would be to rate how "shocking" something as a number and then make players make Pow vs. Shock value rolls on the Resistance table - if they succeed they are fine, if they fail they are "shocked" (GM determines severity of penalties and duration perhaps?) and a fumble gives them a specific problem? Just an off the cuff thought. Cheers, Nick Middleton

The "Spells levels in any spell limited to 1/2 INT, or 1/4 INT for non-mages" is in the playtest draft the playtest group saw, and Jason's indicated that it's still the case in the final manuscript - so I think we can safely say that IS what's in the rules... The playtest draft didn't inlcude the old MW limit on mages Combat skills to DEX x 3 AFAICT - but since a mages spells are bought from their skill point pool at character creation, and training time in later play is a fixed resource, I'd say Mages were pretty effectively prevented from becoming combat monsters as well. If they spread their skill points too thinly they won't do anything well, and most professions that give access to Magic won't give access to a lot of combat skills, and in later play they havea limited amount of training time to spread between skills and spells... I am intrigued by the fact that Blast is 3pp per level now - that's a change from the playtest draft I have (and MW IIRC). Can't wait to see the finished book! Cheers, Nick Middleton

Just rename it? After all, the Elric! derived system only gets called "Sorcery" to distinguish it from "Magic" (have I mentioned that should have been "Wizardry"? ), so the RQIII Sorcery could become "Thaumaturgy" perhaps... I wonder if Chaosium still have the rights to John Snead's Liber ka magic system for Nephilim? Cheers, Nick Middleton

It would be a start - but bear in mind that Call of Cthulhu doesn't actually have vehicle combat rules, it has car chase rules. IIRC Jason's included a more generic version in the new book for "vehicle" based pursuits. I'll have a look in my copy of the playtest files when I get a chance... Cheers, Nick Middleton.

I think everybody posting in the thread would - at one point in one of the BRP yahoo groups we kicked several ideas around for a while as well IIRC. I must dig out my notes on adapting the RQIII ship rules - they weren't particularly brilliant but they'd be a start... Nick Middleton

Plus of course, the RQIII magic systems are still available in print from Chaosium as the BRP Magic Book monograph... Cheers, Nick Middleton

Only at such an abstract level that you lose any setting specific colour from including starship combat in the first place: in which case, why bother? Star Trek space battles involve large damage control crews rushing about the ship, and critical command decisions about angling deflectors (or shields) in particular directions, energy allocation and involve primarily beam weapons: it feels rather like naval warfare of the late nineteenth century. Babylon 5 space combat on the other hand has predominantly projectile based weaponry (with preposterously short ranges, but that's a separate topic), and no forcefields / shields (on earthforce ships at least), plus small fighter craft providing screens for the larger capital ships: it feels like WWII mixed naval and air engagements (BSG goes even further and explicitly models Naval aircraft carriers directly). If it's worth the effort of including Starship design and Combat in the game with rules, then those rule sshould surely capture the distinctive features of the Starships in the setting that make them interesting? One of (few) things they got right in the Serenity RPG was the extent to which Ships have personalities. But the same rules would be entirely inappropriate for say a B5 game, where ships are treated as technological tools. And rules that would work for B5 or Serenity would struggle to represent starships from Blake's 7 or Dune. Starships need a bespoke solution, tied to the setting IMO: a BRP Space book would need, as the core book does with "powers", to provide several different but easily adaptable example systems that all build on the core BRP systems but address some of the different archetypes of Starships from SF. A Star wars/Babylon 5/BSG "small fighters, dog fighting combat" type setting, a Star Trek / Honour Harrington "navies of sail in Space" feel, a CJ Cherryh-esque "Jump-riders and FTL distortion universe", a Niven / Reynold's style NOT FTL universe and maybe a Dune style "starships never fight" set up should cover it... So, who wants to write it then? Cheers, Nick Middleton

I've noodled away at something on that basis, actually based of the stuff in the RQIII GM's book, which also formed the basis of the stuff in Sailor on the Seas of Fate and IIRC I believe Jason has also done the same briefly at some point. The problem comes when you try and apply the rules to multiple settings. How do you generalise from those rules in such away that they are useful for most SF settings? Even ignoring setting with no ships, or where ships are irrelevant in immediate play (there's no starship combat in Dune for example...), how do you generalise a set a rules to cover Babylon 5, Star Wars, Farscape and Alastair Reynold's The Prefect? The answer is you don't, because you can't. Any combination of Starship design and combat system has to make assumptions about ship and weapon performance, irrespective of the techno-babble used to justify how the ships behave. Small ships in the B5 need to use Jump gates to enter and exit Jump space; in the Revelation Space setting no human faction in the main timeline has FTL (well, Skade's Conjoiners try to experiment with it with disastrous results). I think a far better approach to trying to come up with generic systems that are inevitably NOT generic is to design some example systems: spell out some criteria (both from a setting point of view and from a a game play point of view) and then provided a BRP compatible system that meets those criteria: that's always been BRP's strength in the past, that it has concrete solutions that are easily adapted or rebuilt for different situations... Cheers, Nick Middleton

He's popped up on the RQ Rules mailing list a couple of times and seems a thoroughly decent chap - I love Other Suns back in the mid-eighties and was completely oblivious to the whole "furry" issue at the time - but I was never comfortable with the excessive mathematics in places, nor the starship system. Actually, the "ancillary" SF subsystems in Space opera (Starships, Starship Combat, Planetary generation etc) are pretty good and not excessively baroque IMO, its the rest of the game that's bizarrely complex. But then, I'm one of those people who don't think starship design and combat systems are essential for an SF game... Cheers, Nick Middleton

FGU's Space Opera - the rest of the game is an archetypal FGU mess of over complexity and ad hoc design, but the Starships are glorious pulp SF creations: Trans-gravitic Inter-phase Sub-space Anomaly (TISA) drives! Star Torpedo's! Blast cannons! Star ships blatting around asteroid belts at (non-relativistic!?!) large portions of C. Ah me, happy memories. They're also far more approachable as I recall than the more sober (and excessively mathematical) equivalents in Niall Shapero's Other Suns (the other BRP SF game). Cheers, Nick Middleton

In the Play test draft I saw there were only the five systems Jason's listed (Magic, Sorcery, Psychics, Mutations and Supers).There was no specific Spirit / Battlemagic like system (albeit the Sorcery system, derived from the Elric! / Stormbringer 5th edition magic system isn't hugely dissimilar), and the explicit assumption in the character generation and setting chapters IIRC was that if Priestly backgrounds granted access to powers those powers would be modelled off one of the provided systems. Having said that, the BRP Magic Book monograph is currently in print from Chaosium, fully compatible with the BRP book and contains three (technically four) magic systems for use with BRP - and since it's the Magic Book from the boxed Deluxe RuneQuest you may well already have a copy... Cheers, Nick Middleton

If I was that bothered I'd prefer to see variable armour done as follows: fixed - variable 1 - 1d2 2 - 1d3 3 - 2d2 4 - 2d3 5 - 2d4 6 - 2d5 7 - 2d6 8 - 2d6+1 which a) puts the average on a par with the fixed value, and second puts all remotely substantial armour (3+) on a multiple dice roll, thus biasing the armour value significantly towards that average value. What always bothered me about some of the SB values was that they were single dice, with entirely flat distributions. Having fought steel weapon re-enactment battles in full harness, that variability flatly contradicts the subjective experience of where the variability lay in the outcomes of combat - one could, in the vast majority of circumstances, rely on the full harness (within its limitations - mostly visibility, audibility and heat retention), it was ones own skill (and ones opponents) and our mutual luck with our weapons that determined if, where and how hard we hit each other... But mostly, if I want "gritty" I use fixed AV and hit locations, if I want slightly more heroic I use variable armour and MWL, and that has always seemed to work out with my previous "lash-up" BRP, so I see no reason they won't work with the new BRP. Cheers, Nick Middleton.

Have to say I agree with Jason, don't like the "off centre" look, and much prefer it either with stuff down both sides, or only on the left... Personal settings would be ideal. Cheers, Nick Middleton

Try Ben Monroe's Yahoo Group - http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/rq3 or the RQAddicts Group - http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/rqaddicts Cheers, Nick Middleton

Which I have, but I also have all of the stuff Green Ronin did for their d20 conversion, and it would at least need some thinking through of the power levels and magic available to PC's... But its one of the easier settings to just pick up and run BRP in, I agree. Cheers, Nick

It's the basic FTL mechanism and a couple of races from Future*World, and some of the background texture from the Revelation Space books - the planet Sky's Edge (as shown in Chasm City) is the closest thing to a direct influence from Reynolds. Mostly its the contrast between the planet bound cultures and the space borne ones: the Ultras and Conjoiners particularly; the sense of not so much different branches of the species as different stages along divergent evolutionary paths co-existing and interacting. Plus I have fond memories of reading Heinlien's Tunnel in the Sky as a teenager and I'm a firm believer that the best RPG SF settings are like good TV SF settings: they are not weird, high concept extrapolations of obscure bits of current science, but rather take place "20 minutes into the future..." Perhaps not literally, but somehow, the technology and cultures are familiar enough to be quickly grasped. This is even more important in an RPG where several players and a GM need to have a shared understanding of the parameters of the world for the game to flow smoothly. Cheers, Nick

In no particular order of likelihood to be actually done in any form: Tales of the Long Night - high fantasy Island sailing through the void between worlds Children of Leviathan - Gritty science fantasy battletech-ish set in the asteroid field containing Earth's last colony The Shattered Lands - high fantasy post-apocalyspe in the Underdark Nations of the New Blood - a relatively conventional Sword and Sorcery fantasy setting Realm of Yrethe - Planetary romance Mars reimagined as the central Asian plateau and points east The Last Refuge - Nightland meets the Sunset Warrior Ulfland - my 1980's RQIII campaign setting, Mount Lookithat as a fantasy land... Gate Warden Universe - a hard edged re-imagining of Future*World with liberal doses of Alastair Reynold's After the Scouring - my current RQIII campaign, a near future SF/F post-apocalyspe game set in England Most of these are conversions - I ran "After the Scouring" over the summer and, once we've finished the winter run of Call of Cthulhu, I'm expecting to go back to it next year, but we agreed that over the winter I'd rework it from RQIII with tweaks to BRP. Similarly, Ulfland was my RQIII campaign setting back at university in the late eighties, and was resurrected around 2001 for a D&D game, so porting it to BRP should be a synch. Others however are just ideas I've been noodling away at but have very little concrete material (e.g. Children of Leviathan). Plus of course there are existing worlds / settings that I've regularly said I'll run with BRP but have done little or no conversion work on (Actually, that's a fib, I've quite a lot on converting DS to RQIII and all my Gwenthia notes for actual play are for RQIII): Gwenthia Freeport Thieves World / Sanctuary Ptolus Star Trek (based of the FASA stuff) Dark Sun Space:1889 Skyrealms of Jorune Cheers, Nick