Prime Evil

I'm looking forward to RQ6, but I'm happy that you guys seem to be taking the time to do it right! My credit card awaits the new edition....

This is excellent news - I can fill in the couple of holes remaining in my collection. Incidentally, I hope that the Second Age setting will continue to see some additional development for RuneQuest 6th edition. I know that many fans want a return to the era of the classic RQ products, but I like the Second Age and would like to see more of it too

I suspect that very few people play "pure" BRP or RQ or Legend or OpenQuest these days. The complex history of the system has led to a situation where most devotees happily mix and match elements from the different variants. In addition, the unhealthy fetishism of "game balance" and adherence to using the rules exactly as written that seems to dominate modern descendants of D&D does not seem to have infected the d100 community (yet). I think that there's a much higher comfort level with ambiguity and on-the-fly interpretation of the system - helped, no doubt, by the fact that none of the d100 variants are particularly complex.

I think that emphasizing the broad compatibility between d100 variants is a good move if we are to avoid the "Crisis of Multiple Runequests" (Does this sound like a crossover title from DC comics to you as well?) And I suppose that it's easy enough to add granularity from Legend or BRP wherever you need it. For example, I'd probably incorporate combat manoeuvres from Legend....and I'm pretty sure that I'll be using the Modern Equipment Catalog from BRP with The Company.

Only the core rulebook of OpenQuest has been released as Open Game Content - it looks like the other genres will be closed for third-party usage. It wouldn't surprise me if we see a second edition of OpenQuest at some point that cleans up a few sections of the rules that are ambiguous and incorporates some of the best ideas from Legend. There will still be some differences between the two systems though - I tend to think of OpenQuest as a lighter version of MRQ / Legend and use it when I want a simple, fast-moving system rather than a detailed system with lots of gritty crunch. Both approaches are valid and there is plenty of room for them to coexist. I suspect that the exchange of ideas will benefit both parties.

I get the feeling that Skyrim has taken out pretty much everyone in the industry right now...lol

I think that this is very true - BRP is less of a coherent universal system and more of a toolkit that you can use to assemble the type of campaign that you want to play. From this perspective, the monograph-based support model adopted by Chaosium makes perfect sense. It's not like the HERO system or GURPS where you get sourcebooks intended to provide a definitive treatment of a particular literary genre or historical period -its more like a smorgasboard from which you get to choose from amongst competing dishes to find a mix that satisfies your personal tastes. And having multiple d100 systems on the market at the same time merely increases the range of exotic dishes that are on offer!

Hmmm....a very thoughtful analysis. I strongly agree that D100 is a shared gaming language and feel that there is room for multiple interpretations. The D100 system is not GURPS - it doesn't need a single unified set of rules that are authoritative in all cases. I also think that the different D100 versions are not competing against each other as much as they are against the D&D / Pathfinder juggernaut that dominates the hobby. In this instance I think there is an opportunity for a rising tide lift to lift all boats by offering a meaningful alternative. And pretty much every d100 implementation is rules-light in comparison to D&D 4e or Pathfinder.... Speaking personally, I must confess that I don't play a "pure" version of any D100 system -I tend to mix and match the bits that I like from the different implementations. It's easy enough to do this on the fly in most cases (although one day I'll sit down and document my house rules properly!). I suspent that many other gamers feel do much the same thing and treat the different d100 sourcebooks as resources to be plundered for ideas rather than holy writ handed down from on high....

AS I've said before, I think the best outcome for everybody would be some degree of synergy between the two systems. Obviously there will be some degree of commercial competition, but the benefits of emphasizing the compatibility of the systems far outweigh the disadvantages. As fans, we have an important role to play in this. There are a lot of people new to the d100 systems who have picked up a cheap copy of Legend and are wondering what else is out there. We can help everyone by pointing them in the direction of BRP and RQ 6, emphasizing the similarities between the systems rather than the differences. Once newcomers abandon the impression that they need to choose one system over another, they will hopefully support all three systems - and probably pick up OpenQuest and Aeon too... The quality of Mongoose books can vary greatly. Some of their books are superb, while others have issues with either editing or (more rarely) physical production quality. Mongoose has slowly been getting better at producing high-quality material, but things like the mess over the Secrets of the Ancients hardcover are still hurting their reputation. Just when you think that they have sorted things out, something like this comes along. I know a couple of gamers who won't touch anything by Mongoose on principal due to some bad experiences in the past. In defense of Mongoose, I will point out that they have a punishing production schedule that few other outfits in the hobby can match. This is one reason that they are still going strong while many other gaming companies have fallen by the wayside. It doesn't hurt that they have also diversified into miniatures gaming around the time that there has been a resurgence of interest in that aspect of the hobby... I really hope that you are right about this. Chaosium deserve a big hit for their work in nurturing BRP through the long lean years - plus they remain one of my favourite gaming companies of all time.

Is it possible to develop a generic set of Traits/Passions rules? Or should these be specific to each campaign setting? For example, could you apply the Traits from Pendragon to an Elric campaign? Or a Clockwork and Chivalry campaign? I'm curious to see what people think a universal traits/passions list would look like. It touches on the difficult question of whether human behaviours are inherent or culturally determined. Also, can you apply the same set of traits/passions to nonhuman characters that you do to humans? To take a simple example, should the creatures of Faerie in a Pendragon campaign have an alien psychology or should they follow recognizable human motivations? What about Melnibonéans? Can human players do justice to nonhuman psychologies anyway?

Hear! Hear!

Agreed...I've been absorbing the Renaissance SRD and there's a lot of cool stuff in there. Hopefully it will be a living document that grows and changes over time to cover additional genre conventions or additional time periods.

Actually, I think that the best thing that we can do is to help newcomers find their way through the range of different d100 and show them just how compatible they are with one another. At the moment all of these systems are seeing a resurgence that would have been hard to imagine only a few brief years ago and people who have never tried them before are starting to show some interest. It doesn't matter whether somebody discovers the system through Legend or RQ 6 or BRP or Renaissance of Aeon or Call of Cthulhu - we should make them feel at home and show them how they can take the elements they like from all of these games to develop something that meets their personal tastes.

Legend is a great system - but at the moment it is simply a reprint of existing content under a new brand name. We don't yet know where Mongoose will take the system once all of the existing MRQII products have been reprinted under the Legend brand. It's possible that Mongoose will sink the line by rushing out a heap of sub-standard products that are poorly written and poorly edited. I hope that they don't do this, but it's a real possibility given past history. RQ 6 sounds like a different beast entirely - it has a strong emphasis on quality over quantity. I also expect it to be more innovative than Legend, addressing some of the shortcomings of the existing rules. It's a pity that Mongoose didn't take a bit of time to clean up some of the ambiguities rules, but I suppose that they wanted to get Legend out the door as soon as the RQ licence expired. I think that the success of the new brand has taken them by surprise as Matt previously indicated that sales of MRQII were not as strong as Mongoose would have liked. I suspect that they were going to pump minimal resources into the Legend product line and may now be re-evaluating their strategy. Personally, I hope that Legend will bring in new players - a percentage of whom will graduate to either RQ 6 or BRP (according to their personal taste). Because the two systems are closely related, it should be trivial to use material from one with the other. The one big advantage that Legend has over RQ 6 is the OGL - if the game builds up some momentum, it is possible that we will see an ecosystem of third-party material develop around it. It's a pity that RQ 6 isn't also released under the OGL, but it looks like Design Mechanism is happy to enter into licensing arrangements with publishers who want to produce RQ 6-compatible products, so it's all good. However, I wonder if we will see a few dual-stat products that attempt to address both systems...

Perhaps it would be good if we could have a sticky thread at the top of each forum containing links to blogs and fan resources for each game system covered by that forum?

Agreed...I was thinking of a product that is a cross between the kind of thing that Raging Swan puts out for Pathfinder and the classic RQ TrollPack. And I think that a sandboxy approach is a good idea too.

Would a collection of pregenerated generic NPCs be useful to people? How about a collection of drag-and-drop opponents such as a typical orc tribe or a gang of bandits?

The beauty is that these systems have a decent level of cross-compatibility, so it is fairly easy to mix-and-match elements from different games. There's a bit of conversion required, but it's fairly trivial - they aren't really rules-heavy systems. Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing how RQ 6 tweaks the MRQII system. Loz and Pete did a great job with MRQII and it will be cool to see what changes they have up their sleeve.

Awesome! I was wondering when we'd see this. I wasn't expecting it quite so soon.

It's a pretty sweet deal. I recommend spreading the word amongst other gamers that you know!

I must say that I like the visual design of the preview. It seems much cleaner than the original edition.

Awesome news! I've bought a couple of your products in the past and look forward to seeing what you can do with the system!

I just downloaded it and have glanced over the contents. Very cool! Any idea what the street date for the new edition of Clockwork & Chivalry will be?

This is very cool! THanks Matt! I notice that the new book is now Number #1 on RpgNow / Drive Thru RPG! Let's hope that the increased exposure will help the game system get the attention it deserves. (The OGL designation is on p.240 of the rulebook - the page immediately before the license itself. It designates all text within the rulebook as OGC)

The digest format was popular in the early days of the hobby, but fell out of favour for a decade or so when faull-colour hardcovers were all the rage. Now that the roleplaying hobby is shrinking, it seems to becoming popular again. I suspect that one reason is simply space - most people (myself included) only have so much room for hardcover books and are getting choosy about what earns a spot on our shelves. The last hardcover roleplaying book that I purchased was the big yellow BRP book. Certainly, releasing pocket-sized editions hasn't hurt sales of the Mongoose Traveller product line at all. And I hope that releasing digest versions of Legend will help to lower consumer resistance to trying out a new system. It seems that as gamers age, they aren't as interested in picking up new rule systems any more - most of us probably own more games than we will ever play in our lives at the moment.