Conrad

With the risk of annoying someone by posting in the wrong thread.

This thread has meandered along various paths, so a little more variation will probably keep things interesting.

Gentlemen, Newt has just shown us that having to roll for Speak or Write Own language is not a redunancy. You can actually fail the roll. Thank you, Newt

I suppose it was Summer 2011, isn't it?

Redunancy? Don't you mean redundancy?

... but I'm pretty confident you see it by Summer 2010 at the very latest.

So in short its not vapourware, but you'll have to wait a little bit longer.

Temporal (and spelling) anomalies aside, I wish the whole venture good luck and hyperspeed.

By the way Newt, I always thought it was "toodle pip".

The word on the interstellar grapevine is that it has been delayed somewhere in hyperspace till next year, if anyone is interested ( or are you just being "anal"?).

Two bannings and a threadlock later we are 'safe' from infantile ridicule, but now we have to worry about Big Beetle watching over us.

Infantile ridicule? And I suppose that when your boyfriend calls someones' actions "anal" that isn't being infantile?

I should stop pestering you Leon, and try to help out with the project but I've had a lot on until recently.

Cubicle 7 and Alephtar deserve a medal for their brilliant efforts in BRP publishing.

..there is a "machine" race written up,but havent decided whether or not to include them.

With luck they'll have laser beams on their heads too!

We will not be including “sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads” among the player character species, maybe in a follow up (but don’t hold your breath).Sorry Dragonewt.

ROTFLMAO;D

We are still fleshing out the “new species” section of the book, so if there is a particular type of alien you would like to see included, speak up now.

Errrr off the top of my cranium.... energy beings are always good to have in a setting, errr a race that uses bioships and biotech equipment, a race of jovian balloon beings, a race of plasmoids that can live in space or close to the surface of a star....a race of vacumorphs that eat cometary material and can eat ship hulls...

It's never a good idea to give release dates, IMO. Once everything is ready, you can bet you'll find it's only half-done!

I agree, but asking is a good way to find out if the project is still being attended to, and shows that someone is interested in the final product.

"D101 Presents “The River of Heaven”

It is the dawn of the 28th Century.

The Third Renaissance, or Bright Age as future historians will call it, is at its zenith.

After the catastrophic first contact with extra-terrestrial life that led to the horrific Solar System war, humanity clawed its way back from the brink and finally reached the stars. For millions of people, Earth’s sun is no more than another star in the night sky, a mote of light, a spiritual birthplace that they will never visit in their lifetimes.

It has been over a century since the Machine Civilisation gifted humanity technological marvels such as the Visser Cube, allowing wormhole travel across the vast chasms of interstellar space. Now interstellar distances grow ever shorter. How the myriad of splintered cultures view this gift varies. Some see it as a blessing, a way to draw humanity into a united whole. Others see it as a curse, robbing them of their individuality. And then there are those who would use it as a means to subjugate humanity and impose their own will upon all…

Across the river of heaven, humanity clings to a scattering of islands in a sea of stars. Players can take on a multitude of roles in this future: a crew member on an interstellar trader, a member of the mysterious Engineers’ Guild, a body-hopping Intercessionist agent – out to manipulate human cultures to its own secret ends, a Renouncer Zealot – intent on destroying Artificial Intelligence in all its forms, or perhaps one of the Reclaimers – planetary engineers dedicated to terraforming any viable planet they happen upon…"

Is this project still on track for a late 2010 release; anyone in the know?

Operation Ulysses is nearing completion.

Can you give us an estimated time of arrival?

I hope to resume in the next few weeks after my honeymoon.

Thats one long honeymoon!

A super hero addition would be cool.

It would be cooler than cool. It would be sub zero!

CotAC could have done with a decent proofreader. There were far too many typos. More than the other BRP Alephtar supplements. Sack your proofreader and employ me.

LT, as they say in the Rome supplement "Sunt facta verbis dificiliora".

Is there any chance that The Merchant's Scale will slither back into activity as a viable project?

It looks like the insidious supervillain Dr Vapourware has exiled this project to Limbo!

The movie version punked Dracula...

One of my many issues with Blade 3...

The comic version of Blade wasn't all that badass until after the movies ......

The Blade TV series was good.

(I realize I've put this thread to bed)...

It was put to bed several pages back but is wandering about like a lively somnambulist.

“If the parrying weapon or shield is destroyed during the parry attempt, roll the attacking weapon's normal damage and subtract the points of damage used in destroying the parrying weapon or shield. The remainder is damage which penetrates the parry attempt to damage the defender (armor still protects). If the attacking weapon is destroyed during a successful attack, damage is still inflicted on the defender but the weapon is broken at that moment”

Maybe Jason Durall could clarify this?

.

That said, despite all the shiny new product BRP has only minimal shelf space at my local game stores. I can find the Call of Cthulhu core book and one or two of its most recent supplements. But the Big Gold Book, BRP Rome, Merrie England, et. al., are absent. If I wasn't a regular on these discussion boards, I'd never know they existed. One can argue that online sales are supplanting brick-and-mortar shops, but that's preaching (or selling) to the choir. You have to have attractive product on retail shelves to draw in the next generation of players and customers - and to persuade the old farts that you're still alive and worth playing.

My local games stores all have plenty of BRP stuff on their selves. Two have all the BRP stuff (Big Gold book, Alephtar products, and huge amounts of Mongoose products, and the Open Quest stuff ) and one has plenty of CoC products. From my local viewpoint, BRP in all its forms isn't doing too badly.

The Jesuits were, in fact, among the first scientists. The whole Galileo trial wasn't so much a battle between religion and science as a matter of tenured professors squelching a researcher who didn't hold to the current scientific orthodoxy..

Don't forget the Moors and their scientific search to reveal their god's design in the universe.

I don't hold to your rose tinted view of the Galileo trial there Seneschal, after all professors don't refer their researchers to the Inquisition or put them under permanent house arrest.

You might want to get an education in history before you go off painting theocratic tyrants as tenured professors.

Whew! Sounds like I ruffled the Lizard Wizard's scales. But I stand by my analysis; Star Trek overall had a subtle but consistent bias against faith in general and Judeo-Christian religion in particular, not unlike other American TV programs of the era. But arguing about it isn't going to help the OP with his campaign. My point was that in building his campaign society, religion need not be ignored or vilified.

It seems that you are ruffled a bit too by ST's not placing Christianity to the fore. But it wasn't biased against faith in general. Religions were given a place in the stories, but ST isn't a vehicle for evangelism.

While I agree that religion can be an interesting part of a far future background, if someone wants to ignore it, then they can do so without the Spanish Inquisition paying a visit. I can see why some gamers steer clear of real world religions and their overly sensitive fanatics.

It was a little more aggressive than that.

Sorry Seneschal but I didn't see any aggression towards any earthbound religions at all.

I also didn't see any Enterprize crew screaming "DEATH TO ALL PRIESTS!" whilst waving a copy of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and burning down a church; which would be aggressive.

TNG took things a step further. Now we have French martinet Picard as a captain who makes occasional favorable references to Man's supposed perfection via evolution..

Since when has evolution been against religion, unless you happen to be a creationist idiot like Kent Hovind? Even the Catholic church embraces it nowadays. There are even Christians, like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, that believe evolution will eventually make us all fuse with a divine creator.

..a holodeck instead of a chapel..

If they’d have had a holodeck program called “Kill a priest” then maybe it would have been more prejudiced and aggressive.

When Picard is mistaken by ignorant alien natives for a god he is outraged and anguished, not only because he doesn't want to deceive the locals but because the very notion of deity is childish, superstitious nonsense. Mankind has evolved beyond such things and he doesn't want to infect the aliens' culture with religion...

So one character is an atheist, and voices an atheist opinion. The prime directive also is part of Picard's indignance. For him to pretend to godhood is to lie to these aliens, to interfere with an alien culture. And we all know how badly religions can be when it comes to starting wars and changing cultures.

Likewise, when Lt. Riker is temporarily given Christ-like power to heal and raise the dead by Q he ultimately chooses not to use it to restore colonists (including children) killed and maimed by an accident. Instead, he relinquishes the ability and apologizes to Picard for nearly succumbing to immaturity. ...

So by not playing God he does the right thing, since after all no mortal can be a god, right? So that is neither aggressive to religion nor antireligious. Riker knows that he lacks the maturity of a god, therefore he successfully veers away from making the mistake that men are gods. I see no prejudice against religion in that at all.

Meanwhile, on the Enterprise-D we have exactly two people we know are married: Chief O'Brien, whose marriage is troubled, and Dr. Crusher, whose husband is dead and who sleeps around despite the tender presence of her tweener son. In fact, everyone sleeps around. Troi ultimately turns down Riker's marriage proposal; likewise Worf's proposal to his girlfriend (with whom he has had an out-of-wedlock son) is rejected. Career and jollies trump marital commitment. Man has evolved beyond such things ... except for, you know, typical human foibles such as lust, pride, fornication, murder, lying, etc.

...

Since there is plenty of lust, pride, fornication, murder and lying in the Bible I guess its okay for ST characters to act like normal human beings too. “Fornication” being a word mostly used by aggressive and prejudiced preachers, annoyed that other people are getting laid regularly.

While all this is going on, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (featuring the TOS cast) postulates that the whole biblical Garden of Eden/Judeo-Christian God thing is a hoax perpetrated by an imprisoned alien evil entity who wants to use the faithful to enable it to escape.

The movie was complete dross. I hated it. The imprisoned monster was a dead ringer for Jehovah; wrathful and manipulative. If only the tribes of Israel had had photon torpedoes. Or maybe it was Satan masquerading as God? It isn’t the first time the Enterprize crew have brought down a false god. I remember a Greek god getting the treatment in the early ST.

It is only in Deep Space Nine that faith finally gets a little respect. Not that humans have rediscovered God, mind you. But the Bajorans, whose planet is strategically close to the wormhole the DS9 crew seeks to protect, practice a vaguely Eastern Star Wars-ish mysticism and Federation personnel are loath to offend them.

Moral: Organized religion is bunk but primitive shamanism is tolerable as long as it feels good and doesn't place any demands on your behavior.

So your main beef is that ST doesn’t big up the Christian religion. Shamanism is still a religion, and the Bajorans did have an organized religion, by the way, which was based on real entities within the Trekiverse, giving credibility to godlike beings. As for placing demands on behaviour I guess you might not remember the manipulation that these wormhole entities put the humans through, creating prophets and antiprophets.

Humans are predisposed to worship and have done so through the entirely of recorded history. The idea that mankind will suddenly somehow "grow out of it" is dated and a bit silly at this point.

I can see a bit of “prejudice and aggression” here towards atheists from you Seneschal. Some of humanity has already gone beyond supernatural explanations of the universe. Maybe not all will, but it is neither dated nor silly to break the strictures of religious dogma.

So, if Man does make it to the stars, travel through time, colonize the ocean floor, survive a global holocaust chances are pretty good he'll take his religions with him. And there's nothing wrong with your science fiction role-playing campaign reflecting that, if you want it to.

I agree. Theocracies make for ideal villains in SF scenarios, providing that not all religious NPCs are portrayed as Taliban like nutjobs, or aggressive and prejudiced preachers. Future religions can be a lot of fun for a GM to invent too. Especially taking trends in today’s religions and extrapolating them, or mashing two distinctly different religions together to make a strangely workable one.

http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/inconsistencies/religion.htm

That religious belief equals ignorance is an 18th century prejudice that wiggled its way into Star Trek The Next Generation (Captain Kirk in TOS certainly made periodic references to God).

And which episodes were these? I can't remember any prejudice against religion in ST:TNG. In fact religions always appeared to be based on alien entities residing in the Trekiverse and were thus given some credibility.

Phonetic: anal nathrak, uthvas bethud, do che-ol di-enve.

I think we've had enough anal, what with Soltakss's comments. Can't we change it to:

oral nathrak, uthvas bethud, and so on!

.... I think it ran out of steam when the 80s generation of player from middle school to college had to grow up. I would say it is safe to say many of us are back.

Welcome back.