Prime Evil

I'm interested, but as I'm in Australia the timezones probably wouldn't work out

Awesome news! Expect my money soon

I dunno. They've produced some excellent work and some real stinkers. But you'd think that with the frequent concerns expressed on their own messageboards about issues such as proofreading, indexing, etc they would have made a stronger push to address these issues. Personally, I think the real problem is that they have a punishing release schedule and struggle to maintain quality control while meeting production deadlines. There are some good people working for Mongoose and some of their books are excellent, but the quality of their products is still all over the place. The good news is that Design Mechanism seems to be adopting a slower release schedule and pouring a lot of care into each book. This bodes well for the longevity of their work, even though I suspect that it may have a smaller audience than Legend. Incidentally, for me the model of excellence for PDF publishing is Steve Jackson Games. Ever since GURPS became a PDF-based system, they have maintained a strong release schedule without sacrificing their production values. All of their PDFs have extensive bookmarks and are well-indexed. In addition, their proofreading is superb - it's hard to find a single spelling error or grammatical faux pas in any of their releases. MGP should look at how companies like this handle their workflow and implement a similar strategy. Yeah...I do the same thing. The security model used by Acrobat is fundamentally broken. I suspect that it's fear of piracy that causes publishers to lock down their PDFs.

The price is a bit steep, but we need to recognize that the days when roleplaying games were mass-market publications with large print runs are well and truly over. Pretty much all RPGs are niche hobby products these days and print runs above 10,000 units are extraordinarily rare - and even breaking 5,000 units can be a struggle. In this climate, the price of RPGs inevitably go up. In the long term, print-on-demand may change this situation, but the technology and distribution networks aren't quite there yet (although they are very, very close!). I'll definitely be picking up a dead tree copy to support the work of Design Mechanism, even though my preferred format is increasingly PDF*. Also, the quality of the layout and presentation of previews released so far has won me over. These days, my bookshelves are so full that a product really needs to impress me before I will consider buying the paper version**. Which says something about how much I am looking forward to RQ 6. * As an aside, it drives me absolutely crazy that Mongoose still can't get the bookmarks in their PDFs right - hasn't anybody on their production team studied how to use InDesign and Acrobat properly?!? It's really not that hard.... ** To conserve bookshelf space, I've adopted what I call the "Thunderdome policy" - one book enters, another book leaves....

That's a shame - I'm looking forward to this release. Will this also delay the revised version of the OpenQuest rulebook?

The only thing that's missing is a set of guidelines for adjudicating the use of the general skill (e.g. Influence) rather than the specific skill (e.g. Intimidation). Personally, I'd keep this as simple as possible by using the existing rules for Difficulty and Haste on p39 of the Legend rulebook. I'd argue that when using an Advanced skill that is a specialization of a Common skill, simply reduce the Difficulty of the task by one or two levels in circumstances where the specialization applies. Thus, a character might need to make a difficult Influence roll (-20%) to intimidate a street thug, but could perform the same task by making a routine (+0%) or simple (+20%) Intimidation skill roll instead. As an added bonus, I might also be tempted to allow characters with the specialized skill to perform the task in a reduced time rather than with a reduced difficulty if the player wishes to take that option....

It also always struck me as a bit strange that Seduction was a separate advanced skill. However, this makes perfect sense if you regard certain advanced skills as specializations of Common Skills. You can break out Influence into a wide range of individual advanced skills, but there's a trade-off involved - the Advanced skills allow you to ignore certain Difficulty modifiers that might be applied to a broad common skill such as Influence, but their use is more situational. Thus, you could allow an adventurer to use Influence to flirt with an attractive barmaid, but if he wants to seduce her to spend the night with him after her shift ends he either needs to make a Seduction roll or take a hefty difficulty modifier to his Influence roll. In the same way, you could also easily add an Intimidation skill. And the beauty of this approach is that it might be based upon different characteristics than the basic skill. For example, intimidation might be based upon CHA + STR (or even CHA + SIZ) rather than CHA x2. This also allows you to create specialist characters such as an enforcer for the local gang who can intimidate the locals without being gifted with all forms of social interaction. And if you aren't giving the players extra Improvement rolls, then they need to make a choice whether to sacrifice a certain amount of general utility for increased aptitude in a limited area. In effect, they can either pursue a path which is broad but shallow or narrow but deep. This corresponds well with the real-life situation where professionals tend to know more and more about a narrower and narrower field as they advance through their career and specialize in a particular area. It's potentially an elegant approach that is implicit in the existing rules.

It sounds like the mysticism rules will address a hole in the system - RQ has never really simulated these forms of "magic" very well. It will be interesting to see how you work them into Glorantha when you publish material for the setting.

Cool. Has this been updated for the new edition (not that major updates are required...)

Thanks for those links - now I'm tempted to start tinkering with the system again I've got a copy of the MechASsemble SRD (v3) and have made it available here: MechASsemble SRD (v3) The author (Jamie Borg) also started to draft a fourth version of the SRD, which I've made available here (in OpenOffice / LibreOffice format): ASsembler Core 4.0 RC2 And he was working on an early draft of a different system for superpowers (also in OpenOffice / LibreOffice format): http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6610085/PowASsemble All of this material is Open Game Content, so now we just need somebody to port the Mecha rules to Legend or OpenQuest (My choice would probably be OpenQuest, since Legend might be a bit to fiddly for fast-paced Mecha fun. But I can imagine that OpenQuest could be tweaked to do the anime genre without too much effort.)

This sounds cool. Hopefully you'll give us some more information as you develop the setting

Well...you can't market it as the Action! system any more as the trademark license required you to contact Gold Rush Games (which no longer exists). However, all of the Open Game Content from the rules is still available for misuse... Somebody did do a mecha system for the game that could easily be modified into a vehicles system.

Please....tell us more

The contest is a very smart move. BRP could use some more support for the SF genre.

I always liked the Action! System and thought it was a shame that Gold Rush Games vanished. At one point, I seriously considered putting together a cyberpunk extension using a modified version of that system. As the bastard child of the Fuzion System from R. Talsorian and the Tri-Stat System from Guardians of Order, I suspected that the Action! could handle the genre well with a few tweaks.

You're a bad, bad man. Fus Do Rah!!!

Damn, I'm looking forward to this book. But I'm happy for the delay if it means more time to polish the finished product. Still...it just won't be RQ without Ducks

I just checked, and the Griffin is in the MRQ I System Reference Document - so the original MRQ stats are OGC. If you plan to release this in a compilation down the track, you should update section 15 of the OGL accordingly. Other creatures released as OGC in the MRQ I system reference document which could easily be updated to Legend include the Catoblepas, the Hippogriff, the Pixie, the Sea Serpent, and the various nymphs (dryad, hag, naiad, and oread)

Has anyone bought this yet? Any first impressions?

I've got to admit that reading this book was a real nostalgia trip for me - it reminds me of why Glorantha was one of the best examples of a coherent campaign world in the early days of the hobby. Pavis has many of the hallmarks of old-school play, but it also maintains a sense of internal logic that many contemporary products could not beat. The whole thing feels very "grounded" compared to other products of a similar nature and a similar age.

You have form for a great many things, Matt. In fact, it might be faster to list the sins that you haven't committed yet! I've recently incorporated a a few bits and pieces from the MRQ I version of Merrie England into my homebrew variant of Legend - there's some good material in that book. If it's any consolation, I recently bought the BRP version and think that it's even better than the original.

I think that's the heart of the matter - if you adopt this approach, you can't go far wrong. If you think about the Cults of Glorantha, one of the things that helps to distinguish one cult from another is the availability of unique cult spells. It might also be a good idea to include a couple of unique Heroic Abilities as secret techniques taught to senior members of the faction.

I've made a own personal copy of the Legend rules so that I can edit them with house rules. However, I am not sharing this online at the present time as I don't want to harm the sales of official Mongoose products by providing a "free" version. I suppose that may change down the track if I make enough changes for it to qualify as a new variant of the game. But it would have to constitute a major revision before this occurs. I'm not interested in providing freeloaders with a way to avoid paying for the official version - especially when the current pricing for the PDF is very reasonable. Nonetheless, I am a big supporter of the OGL and prefer to buy game products that include some OGC that I can rework to incorporate it into my own personal "Frankenstein" game. As somebody who makes a living off open source software products, I also have a strong ideological bias towards open licensing schemes. The OGL isn't perfect, but it has widespread acceptance within the industry and it is unlikely to be displaced by an alternative license at this point. I probably have a slight preference towards buying OGL products over non-OGL products, but that isn't a hard and fast rule - I own plenty of both. [begin rant] I understand that many game companies don't want to open up all of their intellectual property for third-party reuse and that's cool. They are commercial enterprises and have a right to make a profit. But I don't understand the outright hostility that some folks have towards the OGL - even though they don't publish any products under the license themselves. If you don't like the OGL, don't use it - but don't publicly disparage those who choose to do so. As far as I can figure out, these publishers object to the viral nature of the licence, bemoan the fact that games published under the OGL have dominated the industry for the past decade, and feel that the industry is in decline as a direct consequence of the OGL - that argument goes that the existence of an open licensing scheme devalues the amount of work that publishers put into their products and encourages consumers to expect their products to be available for free. Needless to say, I disagree with all of these points. I respect the right of individuals to hold those views, but don't like it when they try to shove them down other people's throats. And then there is the elitist criticism that products containing OGC must always be inferior to those produced under a closed license. The assumption is that material produced under the OGL is rushed out to make a quick profit while material produced under a closed license is always of always better quality because the people developing it actually care about their work (with the elitist implication that anybody who uses the OGL is a mere hack). I think that this criticism is demonstrably untrue - there are outstanding products that have been produced under the OGL and publishers who have flooded the market with poor-quality crap under a closed licence. I always think it is wise to remember Sturgeon's Law in these cases - basically, 90% of everything released will be crap, with the excellent products making up the remaining 10%. [/end rant ]

Personally, I think there's room for a variety of different approaches to the game - the idea of 'generic' faction write-ups may not appeal to everybody, but they certainly has a place. As Loz points out, sample factions may provide useful examples for newcomers. Even if they choose not to use the pregenerated ones, having worked examples can be valuable. It's uncertain what the economics of releasing such a book would look like. Legend has been a bit of a surprise hit and so far no third-party publishers have tested the waters. Judging from the Mongoose forums, my guess is that many of the people picking up the game at the moment have little exposure to RQ or BRP and are discovering the system for the first time. This is awesome for those of us who have been involved with the system for a long time - an infusion of fresh blood is always welcome. It's also good news for Design Mechanism as they prepare RQ 6 as there might be a larger audience for the reboot. But it also means that these people don't have as much of an investment in the 'old ways' and may need some guidance to understand the ethos behind the system. For these people, providing some solid faction write-ups to get them started might be a good move - especially if the book ends with a discussion of how to create new factions of their own.

I've actually been extracting the text from the Legend books as they come out and placing them into a master document so that I can add in my house rules. This also allows me to fix a few of the inconsistencies between books and add a few ideas from OpenQuest that I think are improvements on the mechanics in the Mongoose edition. It's slow work, but in the long term it will enable me to build my own custom version of the rules.