Shawn Carpenter

I think the SRD could use an example like the one that Jajagappa gave. Clear, concise, no hoop-ti-doodle.

I definitely have it wrong. Section 2.3.5.4 Bump Up with Mastery outlines the process in the SRD. Sheesh.

It may be me that's confused. It wouldn't be the first time! The question has been raised to higher powers. We'll see what they say.

You may well be right - but I read the "unless opposed by similarly exalted resistance" to mean that their mastery level cancels my bumps. If I were fighting someone with no mastery, I would critical on a 10 or less AND be able to bump down my opponent's success. If I were fighting someone with equal mastery, I'd still critical on a 10 or less, but I wouldn't be able to bump up an ordinary success or bump their success down. If I were fighting someone with W2, I'd still crit on a 10 or less, but they could bump my success down a level because their mastery is higher than mine.

I read this differently. I think it means that if I have 10M, I now treat any roll of 10 or less as a critical, no bump required. All my rolls are successes (other than rolls of 20), and I can use Mastery to bump those to critical unless my Mastery is canceled by my opponent's.

Rule Number One for Good Game-Mastering (or at least in the top 5)!

I can't comment on the rules. I don't actually play BRP. I was just attracted to the topic by its title and thought Mike's answer was reasonable within the context of game rules. Guns are tough to write RPG rules for, especially if those rules use hit points. I think you're correct in differentiating between "contact" range and "point-blank" range, though.

Nice to see such a reasonable treatment of the use of handguns or other close combat firearms!

A game that captured the feel of DeLint's Moonheart would be fantastic. Faerie Tale and Talisman were also great - but Moonheart was my introduction to urban fantasy back when it first came out in paperback. I've got a huge soft-spot for it. Maybe I should re-read that and some of his other works.

This is almost word for word what I said to my players after the session.

Here are my thoughts on whether or not Piku's use of some mysterious branch of magic is supported by this rule or that: Story always trumps rules. When I agreed to let Piku create an artificial arm for Koltic's nephew (also named Koltic) who lost his due to some poor prioritization on Koltic's part, I didn't worry about whether the HQ rules supported something so fantastic. I asked my self these questions instead: 1. Would it be cool? A minor NPC (later to become a PC, due to the troupe style of play we use for our house campaign) gets a magical arm. I think that's pretty darned cool! 2. Does it add to the story? Heck yeah, it does. Not only does it show a regretful Koltic the elder resorting to foreign magic to correct an injury that is indirectly his fault, it also gave me the excuse to pile some extra scenarios on the group and demand that Koltic surrender some very special iron and a valuable spirit crystal to Piku. It also expanded on Piku's mysterious nature and got the PCs to wondering just exactly what this strange foreigner is. In other words, Koltic the younger's magic arm and Piku's part in it was MGF for my group. 3. Does it break or detract from the tone and character of the setting or campaign? Nope, not in my opinion. Weird stuff occurring in an otherwise grounded setting is the bread and butter of Glorantha for me. YGWV. If I'd have answered no to any of those, and particularly to #2, I wouldn't have allowed Piku to create the arm. I might still have had him claim that he could do it and send the PCs off on wild goose chases for exotic materials that he'd use for his own mysterious projects, of course.

Gorgeous artwork. I aspire to reaching that quality someday.

Story obstacle resolution is definitely an adjustment from task resolution, especially for old-timers like me who have been answering the question "what do you do" with an answer like "hit the orc with my sword" since 1976. I still stumble from time-to-time, but I'm getting the hang of it!

So why do Orlanthi in Apple Lane adore Valeeda's goat patties? That's a good question. Note that they not only like them, but their taste brings a smile to everyone's face. Couldn't be sorcery, could it? Sorcery performed by the town's ugliest woman who is married to a weird blacksmith whose forge bellows is operated by an unearthly creature that looks like it should be a walking spear and arrow target among the Orlanthi? Nah. It's probably just the blend of eleven special herbs and spices she uses to prepare the patties.

So, Piku . . . Here he is in a key moment of one of my Sartar home games. He's just "installed" Koltic the Younger's replacement arm.

Absolutely. I wrote a fantasy naval novel that hinged on that. Why build chronometers when you had magical clocks? Why worry about longitude and latitude when you can pin point your location with soil samples from three different points? And these considerations expand to impact other tech: if you don't need chronometers, you don't need delicate and consistent springs, minute hardened gears, etc. Not only are those things not developed, neither are the tools and techniques to make them - or to make the tools used to make those tools. It snowballs gigantically in a very short time.

I'm all for that, too! I'm already working on a QW Glorantha project for Jonstown Compendium. I like to design for different settings, though, because it keeps them all fresh for me and often the insights gained on one project will directly impact another. Plus its fun and I'm a grown up ADHD kid!

Social upheaval or sea-changes make great "inciting incidents" for a setting. "There's so much action now because of (the filthy levelers and their mad ideas, the rise or fall of a patriarchal empire, the rise or fall of a major religion, a cultural shift in world-view, etc.). I have a seat in this boat, too. I like new settings to be broad enough to leave room for me to put my own mark on things during play. Spots of detail help add depth to the world in future publications. Thanks for the great input, Jakob!

Agreed. It's fun to see something that seems straightforward escalate. It sounds like you have a great world of your own in the oven. Is it for personal use or do you have larger plans?

I'm primarily interested in seeing what people other than me and the folks I play with look for in a game setting because I'm nosy. I've posted this several places, so I'll get several skewed subsets to look at. It's been fun to read people's input so far. I agree 100%, no both this statement and the one on Harn. When I ran Harn, I stripped all the fantasy out of it other than the gods and some fey stuff I jammed in for my own entertainment. Feudalism is "transparent" to most players. It also gets a knee-jerk "just another western European medieval game" shrug-off from a lot of gamers because it's been so widely done. Still, I love me some barons and house knights. Absolutely! Thanks for taking the time to play along!

You and me both, buddy! You and me both! Dang it, I posted before I was ready. I also wanted to thank you for the input! It's all good and we line up on the majority of points. Thanks for your time humoring me.

There are a lot of fantasy worlds out there for gamers to choose from. D&D offers several official settings and a slew of licensed worlds, Pathfinder has its own world, there’s a cornucopia of “system independent” settings, and there are the massive old grandfathers of fully-fleshed out worlds: Glorantha, Tekumel, and Harn. All of these worlds have things going for them. The lore of the D&D and Pathfinder worlds are tightly linked to the rules of those systems, relieving the GM of any work in figuring out how to represent the effects of setting specific elements, such as monsters or magic. If you’re not into D&D or Pathfinder, though, they may not appeal to you. System independent settings get around this by designing the world first and either providing guidelines for using it with different rules (Primeval Thule is a good example of this) or simply leaving it to the buyer to sort out. The looming Old Ones of game-world design (Glorantha, Tekumel, and Harn) offer players dense lore accreted over the decades of their existence. they can also be a bit intimidating to new players and GMs. None of these worlds offer everything a player could want, because that’s an impossible task. For me, Glorantha and Harn come closest to ticking all my boxes, but neither is exactly what I’d like to see in a game world. That’s not a criticism of either setting, because even I don’t know exactly what I want from a game world. Despite that lacking that critical piece of self-awareness, I’ve always wanted to design a commercial game-world. I’ve designed several worlds for my own use, but most of those were comprised of little more than a couple of maps, a few notes, and a relatively firm feel for the setting in my head. I aspire to going whole hog, though, and would like to create a world that GMs and players who aren’t sitting at my table could stomp around in and make their own. I have some ideas of what I’d like to see in that world, but I’d be grateful to hear what kinds of worlds other folks would like to plant characters in to watch them grow. I’m not trying to crowd-source a setting by any stretch of the imagination, but I would like to know what elements other players and GMs would like to see in a game world, particularly things they can’t find in other published works. To that end, I’ve put together the annoying questionnaire below. I don’t expect anyone to fill the thing in completely, I’m just offering it as a framework to shake loose opinions that might not have occurred to you. Now, on to the annoying questions: What level of “fantasy” are you looking for in a fantasy world? High fantasy where magic, monsters, and elves are common place? Medium, where such things exist, but they’re rare and remarkable? Low, where magic is scarce as hen’s teeth and monsters and fey folk are the stuff of fairy tales (that may be true)? What level of technology do you prefer? Stone-age? Bronze-age? Iron-age? High medieval, Renaissance? Some mixture? Swords only? Swords a muskets? Swords and early revolvers? How wild do you prefer your fantasy world to be? Tribes and clans struggling against nature and the unnatural to survive? City states surrounded by howling wilds and roving nomad clans? Feudal kingdoms sprinkled with wild places and separated by swaths of wilderness? Stable kingdoms and empires with wild lands beyond their borders? Do you like medieval European feudalism in your world? Or would you prefer a more tribal organization? Or territories ruled over by satraps appointed by a royal or imperial bureaucracy? Something else? Are the gods real in your ideal fantasy world? If so, do they interfere directly in the mortal world, or do they work through mortal intermediaries? Do you like your gods wearing black or white hats or do you prefer them to wear dove grey? What are the ideal stakes of your world? Are they high, with a big bad that will destroy the world unless your character finds a way to stop it? Or medium, where the threat is often aimed at one of the world’s kingdoms/city-states/tribes? Or they low, with the threat usually directed at the PC group itself? Do you like a game world to be strangely familiar (like Harn or Glorantha) or utterly alien (like Tekumel or Jorune)? How much effort are you willing to sink into learning a world as a player or GM? Are you okay with reading dozens or hundreds of pages of lore and exposition to get your feet on the ground, or do you prefer a world that gives you the high points of the setting and allows you to fill in blanks as you play? Do you want your world to have a well defined future history? Or would you prefer a loose guideline of optional ways the world might evolve over the next few decades? Or do you want history to end at a given year so that you and your players are free to develop it as you will through play? That’s it for the questionnaire, although I may come up with follow-up questions based on your responses. Again, you don’t need to slavishly provide answers to each question (feel free to do so if you have the time and inclination, though). Answer the ones that jump out at you or hit one of your hot-buttons if that’s all you feel like. Any input is good input!

Magical barriers make it easier for us all to tend to our own gardens.

Nothing is outdated, IMO. The Glorantha in your campaign can include or exclude whatever you want. Canon-shmanon.

HeroQuest's "problem" for some groups is its embarrassment of riches. Players (and GMs) who are used to the rigorous limitations of choice in search of "play-balance" of other systems suffer from system shock when presented with a set of rules in which pretty much anything goes. I've seen it with two different groups now (or at least two separate sets of members in the same group). There are ways to mitigate the shock, though. A cool character sheet like this one would certainly help, especially if its presentation were mapped to the CGEN portion of the rulebook's text.