Conrad

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.

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

ROTFLMAO;D

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...

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?

Can you give us an estimated time of arrival?

Thats one long honeymoon! 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 Blade TV series was good. 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?

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.

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. 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.

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

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.

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!

Welcome back.

Perhaps because it is a bit too much like the setting in the Aliens movies for comfort and Chaosium don't want to be on the receiving end of legal action? It isn't a conflict of terms when referring to the Aliens movies/setting meets the Cthulhu mythos, which is what I meant when I used the term "Cthulhu meets Aliens.":P

Why do you call being interesting "threadjacking"? I think an XCOM/UFO setting with the serial numbers filed off would be a fine addition to BRP. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8RfzkhqBLY

They've already done that. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3JBnRh8OCc