g33k

I think you're referring to the modern jaded POV. 😉 Nothing's shocking anymore. Nobody loses SAN. Oh, Dread Cthulhu has surfaced in the Atlantic? Errr... drop a bunkerbuster nuke on him. Pity about the environment thereabouts (but DC was probably pretty toxic anyhow, so... even-steven?).

I love this idea, though I agree that the double-variable on fire damage (roll a d6 to see what die you roll for fire-damage) is an unneeded complexity. But the following is particularly inspiring... This makes me picture the target/victim who ALSO knows how this spear operates, who catches it and throws it back! Then the original attacker has to "catch" the spear to re-throw it... etc...

Hmm. How closely are you adhering to the "feel" (and particularly the comms & drive tech) of MOO? As I understand it, MOO players are essentially "realtime-omniscient" about their own empires: C3 (Communication/Command/Control) isn't an issue, galaxy-wide communication is ubiquitous. This is sometimes called "ansible" communication (after an old LeGuin story, adopted by other users). This has some notable implications! MOO FTL travel is via "warp drives" (like realspace travel, it's a continuous journey from any one place to any other, with ability to "drop out of warp" en-route, to swerve off-course, and otherwise to change your mind as you go), as opposed to gate/wormhole or "jump" tech, which is point-to-point (and sometimes instantaneous). === Take Traveller, as a counter-example to MOO -- the OTU (Orig. Trav. Universe; I'm less familiar with later settings) had no FTL communication, and FTL travel only via "Jump" drive, following specific mapped jump-points; each Jump lasted about 1 week, with different drive powers from 1-6 travelling (up to) that number of parsecs in a week; so 1pc/week for J-1, 6pc/wk for J-6 (and ships needed another engine to move in realspace, instead of Jump'ing). The very fastest a message could travel through the OTU Imperium was by way of a courier-network of Jump-6 ships, which would jump into a system and transmit their data (via normal-space / lightspeed radio/etc) to a new ship, which departed again on Jump-6 to the next step, where the process repeated until it got to the destination. Because couriers were re-fuelled at every stop, and pre-fuelled at each stop to jump out as-needed, the URGENT communications could outstrip any physical fleet (which needs to refuel)... but not so much in advance that a military (or criminal) operation couldn't get substantial advantage by hurrying! By the same token, if someone departs from the network of courier'ed stations, they can sometimes go weeks or months before getting any new information from the more-connected parts of the galaxy... Because of the lack of FTL, and the relatively long duration of journeys, Traveller adventures have often been likened to "age of sail" adventures. I believe this was an intentional design goal of author Marc Miller: with ships (and players) regularly operating beyond the easy reach of any possible "High Command," the players had much more freedom to come up with their OWN solutions to problems, face challenges with their OWN reactions, etc. === But with open & instantaneous communication, someone can control forces ahead of an oncoming fleet as soon as the fleet moves in that direction, someone can call an "All Points Bulletin" about fleeing criminals, etc... the "feel" of the setting becomes very very different. NOTE that this implies your own players MAY sometimes face oversight from their organization (if any), and generally thus have less "freedom" ... but more safety (in the form of backup), presuming they and/or their mission are important enough. There's also the cyberpunk notion of freelancers doing "plausible deniability" missions for anonymous (usually megacorp) "patrons" via Mr.Johnson-cut-outs; obviously, no backup (and sometimes even the patron will try to end the freelancers, afterward). And as @seneschal says, there's also the "Western" -- Magnificent Seven, etc. -- and the "divided loyalty" of working for a consortium; etc etc etc... There's an interesting M-Space setting, Elevation (https://www.enworld.org/threads/stay-on-budget-search-for-new-life-in-elevation.666520/, http://www.frostbytebooks.com/elevation ) that seems like it could be highly relevant and/or useful to you. === MOO is a 4X game (in fact AFAIK "4X" was coined for MOO) -- eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate... Would your RPG be pursuing all of these? Exploration of unknown worlds/systems, expansion into newly-explored ones, exploitation thereof, and extermination of rival races/empires/etc? From a "realism" and/or "suspension of disbelief" POV, I would mostly expect those activities to be carried out by different organizations, or at least very-different divisions/departments of a larger org. Where (which of the 4 X's) would you see being the focus of your campaign? Or would you try to generalize & do multiple, or all?

Rather famously, one of the early proto-Yakuza groups was doing law-enforcement... Itinerant peddlers, when they set up markets, often found the local law-enforcement didn't adequately protect them and their goods. So these peddlers paid a few of their own to serve as de facto law-enforcement (instead of pursue sales on their own behalf).

Here's the problem with that approach: how MANY different kinds of bite do you want to model? We have already mentioned wolf & sabre-tooth in-thread, what about venomous snakes? Shark bites? Huge bites like from Allosaurus or T.rex? Beaks like a parrot -- big ones can snip off a finger! -- or Huge beaks like on a Triceratops? Each of these, it seems to me, could be treated as different kinds of Special damage, if one wanted to. Nature's methods of mayhem are more varied than humans' more straightforward habits of combat...

Cool! If it's possible, could you share a bit "how much / if / in what ways" Ben A. is going to be involved? I mean, I get it, that he's not an RPG designer -- mechanics &c are outside his wheelhouse. But I presume his input could be very valuable! TYVM.

<points at Ernaldan's actually becoming Orlanthi> What is this "V" you are speaking of? This is RAW canon! };-D>

Hellow, Rukbat, and welcome! I agree that wolves' fangs just aren't long enough to Impale -- the fangs don't penetrate far enough to do extra "impaling" damage, even though they are "puncture" wounds. Properly speaking -- that is to say, for maximum accuracy -- teeth like that should probably do a new type of damage on a critical, "tearing" damage or the like. Another possibility is to roll some extra crushing damage -- some of those bites can crack bones! I would (just off the top of my head) define a "tearing" critical as -- does normal damage, but destroys the armor in that location (rips it loose from the bodypart hit), leaving the piece flapping loose, attached by a few straps; it will probably foul movement (on the legs) or actions (on the arms), etc. === Finally -- you handled the issue perfectly, actually! Chaosium has made it clear that they don't think the rules should cover every conceivable case or condition; they think the GM should make a ruling and move on.

Lots of good Ernaldan "home and hearth" types find, in a crisis, that they can henna-up and go Vingan. Ernalda becomes Orlanth! 😮 There is always another way ...

Birdcalls have, presumably, diversified a lot since (the rest of) the dinosaurs died out. Everything today descended from those few species of birds that survived the Cretaceous extinction around 65 MYA (birds as a whole having diverged from non-bird dino's about 140MYA; but leaving plenty of feathered dino's not pursuing a bird-ish track). Dino vocalizations may have been a LOT more diverse than that... they had a lot longer to diversify!

I believe additional family-history information is planned to some of the upcoming supplements (e.g. Robin's P&BR), but I could be mistaken...

I imagine one could loosen the pancake, then toss it in any given direction (zero G, all directions equal), and quickly move the pan 'round to catch the 'cake; the raw dough should adhere to the hot surface, at least moderately well, and you return the pan to the heat. It'd probably take some practice, but should be do'able. Of course, pancakes have this "bubbles rise" effect that you won't get in zero G, but I think most of the cooking there is conductive rather than convective, so pancakes may still work OK. Sort of. Waffles would probably do better, with the simultaneous 2-sided cooking...

Personally, I regard tactical maps for combat to be very useful & appreciated, but not quite essential... Maybe "highly advised?" Basically, there just aren't all that many ways that position and facing &c engage mechanically with the RQG rules. d20's "flanking bonus" and "attack of opportunity" and "reach" weapons and such give certain tactical-combat options that are less represented in RQG (much as RQ's hit-locations and armor and such represent things d20 does not). All the same, there are SOME things where a precisely-mapped battle does engage with a RQG rules; particularly limits of movement, ranged-attacks, attacking from where the foe will be "unaware" &c. And more than once, I've seen TOTM combats break down when it was discovered that people at the table were engaging in combat in wholly-different "theaters:" suddenly, something ONE person wanted to do was immersion-breakingly-impossible for another person, or the GM stated something (which clearly would have been self-evident) that nobody at the table had found evident; etc. Resolving those and getting everyone back onto the same page is IME/IMO are a real buzzkill. Edit: but I'm neither pitching to run a game, nor asking to enter one; just reporting my own experience FWIW...

I'm inspired actually by the title of the thread, I'm picturing a a cultist modeled after the Dos Equis "world's most interesting man" commercial. This guy has been in various cults all over the world. He's had cults shut down by Delta Green, by The Laundry, by stick-up-their-ass New Englanders, by the Church, by rival Cults, by failed rituals consuming the entire priesthood. He has looked away just in time from more Sanity-Blasting-Horrors than anyone else has even heard of. At the end of the day, he only asks one thing... Drink responsibly, my friend.

In some ways it's unimportant and irrelevant... but I still get the "warm fuzzies" from this. TYVM Rick, and other contributors (and to the OP for asking!)

Well, I was gonna say "Uleria..." But then I realized that was wimping out. It's Hon-eel.

I'm a BRP grognard, myself, don't know the 7S fandom. Is there maybe some other more active site, a FB group or something, where such things ARE known? Or is this "the place"? Given that it IS Chaosium's "official" forum space these days, maybe it's worth doing a summoning... @John Wick, is that you? @MOB I do know that's you! Should I @someone else? @OldSoldier -- something I've found lately from Chaosium is that their policy seems to be, "give updates when there are updates to give" (i.e. news, changes, progress, setbacks... you know, a change in the status of a project). If things are in the same status they were at last update (still getting art, still in layout, still at the printers... I dunno, what WAS the last status?)... then they don't really seem to see the point of "updating" with some weasely version of "nothing new to say" pretending to be news. Or so it has seemed to me. If they have another policy, I'm happy to be corrected. Edit: The OTHER thing I've gotta point out: Chaosium is really good at this. They may be slower than we fans would like, but I'll place long, l-o-n-g odds on them having first taken a good hard look at the 7th Sea product line, the sales history, the KS obligations, their own resources, and have a really solid footing & business-plan for the project. It may not be the top priority, but I'm sure it IS progressing; that's just how they seem to operate. Edit2 -- I think I do recall that John Wick is currently pursuing the "New Gamemaster Month" in support of 7th Sea; I'm betting that's where he's most active right now.

uhhh ... Skaven?

You know... this strikes me as really spot-on. Nicely called! You'll need to add the "iconic WH" non-human races, but that's easily done!

Neither of us is doing it, unfortunately! We clearly know far better than they do. 😳 I'd hope they'd even be open to someone in their late teens... I've seen some really good performances from the young set! James Marsters has remarked that moving to TV from stage meant adopting a LOT of new techniques & abandoning favored and familiar ones, and that it was really challenging. On stage, actors all need to go big, fill space, project loudly & articulate/enunciate in a similar way, even in the quietest scenes. Because of the initimacy provided by camera views, that comes off as wildly inappropriate in tv & movies. (This was in the context of him being the voice-actor for some audiobooks, where he found the voice-acting let him roll out some of his favorite vocal techniques he used to use on stage)

This is an excellent point. What's more: if the producers &c have the guts & the vision to lean-in on this, they could cast someone with that sort of "odd" look that ISN'T a hugely attractive "leading man" image, and give someone a leading role who'd normally only be up for "character actor" roles. I think that'd be a really good sign that they "get" the stories, and that they understand how much this can't follow the formulaic tropes if they want to stay anywhere close to true to the Elric vibe. I was (and remain) really annoyed at the HP directors casting Emma Watson as Hermione Granger. One of Hermione's defining traits in the books was that she WASN'T a "cute" girl, but plain at best and maybe below-average in looks -- and she was self-aware of this -- it was one of her major personal issues -- and she didn't let it stop her. Sitting in the theater watching Emma Watson introduce Hermione, I said "that's a really cute girl, she's going to become a very attractive teen and have beautiful 'leading lady' looks; before they film the final movie, they'll have a raving beauty. They blew that, on multiple levels."

Hmmm. Paging @Ian Cooper and @Jeff The question was asked a while ago, and the ONLY feedback so far is folks hitting the "Thanks" button ... Which I presume indicates that they share the puzzlement... Which sort of suggests that Someone Official may want to answer.

I would presume this to be an allegorical account of the same facts, or maybe a record of some sort of vision/oracle/etc (which so often comes in allegory).

That'd be the dragonewt instance, that we already knew: "neotenic" means the adults never gain fully-adult features, keeping "juvenile" (aka dragonewt) features into adulthood. Someone upthread alleged (I thought) an actual "devolution" path -- where a dragon strayed from the Draconic Way, & became a Dino -- existed in canon. But maybe I mis-read...?

I think the "pragmatic" reason is that Orlanth is real. And he and Yelm don't get along ... The mythic reason IS the pragmatic reason! Good Orlanthi dan't stay good Orlanthi if they actively worship Yelm, and Yelm frankly can't stand the Orlanthi anyhow... they'd need to convert -- and change their behavior! -- to be acceptable Yelm worshipers. Fortunately, the Orlanthi have "little sun" deities; and even more -- they worship Ernalda, who can manage that bastard Yelm (because she's just that awesome). So the Orlanthi worship Ernalda, and get their bountiful crops and their healthy flocks and etc (all relying on Yelm) and Ernalda manages the unpleasant stuff about Yelm.