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Here's a question for you, @svensson. Please take a moment to think about it before replying. Note however: I am not arguing the premise of this question, I am positing a "what-if" ... think of it as an "academic exercise." I'll speak specifically and only to the "vegan" issue (let's just presume for the moment that God is in Heaven &c, in something <waves hand vaguely> resembling the Abrahamic view; let us not address the atheist in the room. Alternatively, presume the contrary as it pleases you... or take ardently-agnostic position, "I don't know... and you don't either!" Or we might be presumptive Hindus, or Buddhists, or... Not the topic). ➡️ All that being said... my "vegan" question for you (just as a hypothetical!) is: What if they are right, and you are wrong? ⬅️ That is to say, what if animals -- most if not all, and in particular the commonly-domesticated food animals -- are in fact "people-y enough" to have (for want of a better term) "souls"? What if all dogs do go to Heaven? What if these animals have moral rights largely-equivalent to your own... life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness... If you're at all familiar with meat & dairy production at large scales, you realize what a hideous crime it would be to treat people that way. What if we (all of us, as a society) are in fact treating people that way? For the record: I am not vegan. I'm not convinced of the notion advanced above. But I'm open-minded enough to entertain the idea. And it follows -- if I thought it were true -- that I too would be an animal-rights activist, and be strident about veganism. I couldn't live with myself if I didn't. So, I'm not too critical of those who are. It's more than just a "difference of opinion" here -- it's a deep moral conviction, one that demands speaking up, in the face of atrocity.

If you don't mind this element occurring in another publication as well as yours, I do not believe there are any rules prohibiting it (I presume the "Collected Initiations" book would give clear credit, and an explicit pointer to your Sun County book), though I could certainly understand if you didn't want it to appear anywhere else first! I for one wouldn't object if I had bought this small bit in two different places, and would appreciate the collegiality on display.

@Nick Brooke -- I am very confused now; or maybe you are? You appear to be contradicting your own FAQ, in regards to the "Jonstown Compendium Content Guidelines" document: https://help.drivethrurpg.com/hc/en-us/articles/12723268545943-Jonstown-Compendium-Content-Guidelines As referenced by @The Prettiest Parrot: I don't see that "retrocloning Hero Wars" is under discussion...? They were asking about HQ:G and the QW SRD. But you are explicitly saying to assume the "Content Guidelines" doc is outdated/incorrect??!? You apparently want us "instead" to consult the FAQ: But that FAQ cites (right up front) the selfsame "Jonstown Compendium Content Guidelines" document called out by @The Prettiest Parrot.... Hence my confusion! ### As a probably-unrelated issue: the link in your FAQ is broken for me (cloudflare DNS error "Error 1034 Ray ID: 86ef0f52d8eecee5 • 2024-04-04 05:57:15 UTC"). So, I cannot be absolutely certain the two "Jonstown Compendium Content Guidelines" documents ( one referenced in your FAQ vs. one referenced as "This Page" above) are the same version; but the live document (at "This Page") Is dated just a few weeks ago (March 11, 2024 13:42) so I'd presume current/correct. Remember, citizen: the Computer is Your Friend! Hail Harshax!

Agimori were created by Lodril, I think... do they basically remain (religiously) Lodrili? And of course the Basmoli are Basmol's folk... but without Basmol, and Waha Basmol-Slayer is a foe. Baboons perform Ancestor-worship & follow Daka Fal's ways, possibly worshiping the Monkey King demigod(?), but occasionally one will adopt human practices (tho not necessarily the "Praxian Tradition" (though presumably a few of those occasional human-ways adopters do... leading to the charming idea of a Beast-Rider Baboon)). IIRC the Cannibal-Cult claims to follow the Survival Covenant (and other Praxians disagree, considering it a perverted & blasphemous practice). IIRC the Oasis folk mostly do not. I'd expect the hunt-centric folk would offer (at least some) worship of Eiritha, as "Mother of Prey" ... not identical practices to the Beast Riders, but Peaceful-Cutting, returning tails, and with many other overlaps & commonalities (that any God-Learner would immediately recognize as viable for a Goddess Switch 👹 ) ... Waha seems less-likely, though. Other ideas, etc...?

I can't see that ever happening. The "core rulebook" from Chaosium needs to remain self-sufficient for new players (i.e. with the sample characters, cults, spells, weapon lists, ...) If you own the PDF, I think it's "fair use" for you to edit it down, and have a local print shop re-print/re-bind your newer, lighter book.

NB the project here isn't a campaign for his own table, I think; it's a whole RPG (for the BRP Design Challenge). Yes, show the players (e.g. with your 747 example, above). I think some sidebar-text or similar would handle this well. People tend less to be "spiteful" about their character-creation when it's just RAW from the book, as opposed to GM-set limits on (for example) the wide-open anything-goes BRP:UGE ruleset. I had one group who explicitly made sure to coordinate a broad range of ancillary skills amongst the PC's during chargen... "Whose backstory best justifies taking Pilot(Aircraft)? Drive(car)? Do we need specific Science(X)" skills, or just "Science," and who's taking it (or those)? It's investigation-heavy, do we need "Forensic Accounting" or is that something we'll go to an NPC for?" and so forth.

Disclaimer: I'm a cismale, "of a certain age." If you've got players at your table who aren't cisgender, I would consult with them & follow their lead. Also: get, read, and offer to your players the wonderful "Six Paths" ... https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/395741/The-Six-Paths My own impulse would be to interweave elements of both M & F rites and add some non-gendered elements, with recurrent/interconnecting branch-points where the PC can follow M / F / Neither paths. Talk to the player ahead of time. If they want to play a helering (non-cisnormative, genderfluid) Helering (follower of Heler), then help them pick disparate choices that are "all of the above." If they want the PC to be cisgender (i.e. same as birth-gender) then they should (mostly but not necessarily entirely) follow that AFAB/AMAB path; or M-path for AFAB vingans, F-path for AMAB nandini, etc. See also this thread: https://basicroleplaying.org/topic/17389-initiation-rites-for-rqg

When you look to any line on that table that suggests either the JC or MR programs, you need to consult (and abide by) the specific rules & restrictions of that program. SRD's do not ever permit you to violate other restrictions external to the SRD (e.g. no matter how liberal a "commercial-OK" SRD is, you had better not write and sell a "Pirates of the Caribbean" RPG without a license from Disney, or a GoT/ASoIaF RPG without a license from GRRM). SRD's do not have the legal right or authority to grant such over-broad permissions, despite any "do what thou wilt" language in the SRD/license; that'd be like me granting you ownership over Tesla Motors (I am not, for the record, Elon Musk; I do not own any shares of Tesla Motors; I have no rights to grant ownership thereof. So too with any "rights" granted in an SRD -- an owner/issuer of an SRD (and associated open license) can only grant rights they own). The SRD's obviously cannot list all the restrictions of the JC, the MR, DTRPG itself, or other potential programs (such as the BRP Design Challenge). For one thing, those programs need to be able to change independently, without needing to mod the SRD's to reflect the new changes. So, even though Chaosium owns the Glorantha IP, they rely on the pre-existing JC rules to enforce the JC context for Glorantha. Similarly, you may not write your own complete Cthulhu game (even one based on a Chaosium SRD) to sell via the MR program. Also, DTRPG is a wholly-independent organization, and JC/MR need to abide by any & all rules set by them... and obviously cannot need to alter the SRD & licensing any time DTRPG modifies their rules. I have not done a close reading of the ORC license. I don't know if it explicitly tells you not to engage in such shenanigans (IIRC, the older (2020?) BRP-OGL document explicitly disallowed you from using any IP for which you were not licensed (which struck me as kind of a "duh!" element, but then... I've seen people do stupider, and I think Chaosium wanted to be disassociated from such stupidity (and associated stupid legal risks)). (note: I am not a lawyer. Please consult a lawyer before you do anything with any IP owned by anyone else... especially not owned by Disney, who now employs agents who multiclass Lawyer/Sith )

☝️This☝️ I think; @Saki has it right. Over in RuneQuestLand, they have something called the "Battle" skill. I treat it as a sort of "situational awareness" in cases like these: If your SOI gets invalidated before your SR, a successful "Battle" roll lets you re-target with no SR penalties: you saw it coming, and switched on the fly. If you miss your Battle roll, I use INT instead of DEX to calculate a similar "INT Rank" penalty: how quickly can you figure out a next-best target (which just seems like an INT-y rather than a DEX-y thing to be doing). These are among my House Rules for RQG. I also allow (in fact, I encourage) a simple "conditional" SOI -- something like "I'm gonna move up and attack <NPC X>, but if they go down before I get there, I will ..." (e.g, "attack <NPC Y> to the left of <X>" or "attack <NPC Z> behind <X>" or similar). Generally, I only allow 1 such "conditional" fallback state... not a domino-chain of "if X is down and Y is down, then Z." I believe a simple "conditional" SOI like this to be entirely within the letter & spirit of the RAW. (also note that I apply much larger delays if it's a complete change-up of Intent; all the above presume something minimal, like re-targeting your already-stated attack; shifting from "I swing my sword at..." to "I cast a spell at..." is IMO a much-bigger change, which is harder to do in the confusion of combat)

You might cap the per-source addition to skills, but you also might require "at least 5% into at least <X> number of skills" or similar. So, for example, no more than +20% onto any given skill, from "Cultural Skills," and/or "must put 5% (or more) into at least 5 of these 8 Cultural Skills" or similar rules. These are skills you learn/absorb culturally, growing up; taught by parents, guild-masters, and even by the slightly-older cohort of kids (just older than them). Kids mostly don't "max out" particular skills to the complete ignorance of all others... e.g. even the most-athletic & non-CHA-skill kids likely needed to develop some "Fast Talk," just to get out of some of the trouble their athletics got them into. If you carefully balance the skills-points available and the minimum spends required, you can achieve your desired "more rounded PCs" results very directly. I've also seen some games opt for a less-homogenous suite of "Cultural" skills, where an "Athletic Childhood" gets one set of skills (as a flat suite of bonuses), while a "Bookish Childhood" gets an entirely-different suite of skills, and a "Social Childhood" gets yet another suite... etc etc etc. You could add a smaller of "discretionary" skill-points to individualize (i.e. not all "Athletic" kids come from the same cookie-cutter... some run better, some swim better, some have outside-the-athletic-sphere skills (singing, Craft:Woodcarving, whatever), &c). Good luck with the Design Challenge!

BRP mostly isn't aimed at "Balance." I wouldn't worry too much about this. If you feel the players will just pursue taking the "powerful" races and ignore the baseline races -- and you don't want this -- I'd consider: add "negatives" to the "too-powerful" races (as you suggest) make any "too-powerful" races NPC-only add compensating benefits to humans (and other "weak" races) mix both strategies: advantages for the weaker and disadvantages for the stronger But really, I reiterate: I wouldn't worry too much about this.

Pretty much, yeah... after most of us embrace the Lunar Way comes Chaos. (of course, the order of publication of the books may differ, a bit)

Were you able to see the two images, side by side? One Generative-AI, one (c)? "Worth a thousand words" as they say... But here, have this: https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/ai-joker-copyright-infringement.html

I believe you are mistaken: the owner of the (c) does need to file a claim, but then: -- https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/artificial-intelligence-and-copyright-6563561/ While it's true that "these attempts have all failed," it's not like there's ample case law to cite! It very much is "wild west" (that is, one without much relevant precedent). That is an extremely-limited ruling, and based largely upon technical legal points (with the artists invited to resubmit amended suits).

Yeah, not sure what happened. I had previously read that article; I found it again to post in the other thread (I skimmed it to be sure it was what I recalled). But when I searched again -- to post in this thread -- it was paywalled...??! Not a NYT subscriber... I had presumed they had a few articles outside their paywall, and/or had a 1-article-per-day or three-per-week or what-have-you. Maybe they have an AI which detects popularity, and monetizes their older articles behind a paywall after too many hits ??? 🤣 Google for: nyt joker ai Possibly click for just images. The generated image shows up alongside the (c) original (at least on my search; I know Google filters their results, so YGMV -- Your Google May Vary). I'm pretty sure the (c)-violations are self-evident, without the text; it's only "Fair Use" here as a news-item (that such an extremely (c)-violating use is so trivially-easy to achieve).

For purposes of the "Design Challenge" contest, it's too late. Shifting the goalposts mid-contest will only generate distrust, discontent, and complaints (particularly around such a contentious issue). Chaosium has already made their overall position on AI very clear, and it's unsurprising that they have the same position on the contest they are sponsoring. The balance of the topic remains, though, regardless of the "BRP Design Contest" issue: is AI-generated art "fair use"? Even if the AI training data scrapes the work of living artists, who have not consented to such use of their work? Even if they have explicitly asked to be removed? Here, I think, is the crux of EFF's argument: -- https://www.eff.org/document/eff-two-pager-ai While I generally like EFF & their mission, I find several weaknesses in this line of thought. To begin with, I don't think "done at a massive scale" gets a free pass. "Massive Scale" is not just a quantitative but a qualitative difference... it's kids' sandcastles vs. the Hoover Dam. EFF even says as much in the next sentence: "... where billions of images ... could be distilled ..." This is something no human could do, qualitatively different. And this is the crux of my own objection: the EFF wants to grant a legal right of "fair use" to something that's humanly-impossible. It wants to grant the machinery (and (until true "general" AI is produced (and granted freedom)) the corporations/nations/etc owning the machinery) a right that is previously unheard-of and even unimaginable... a "right" that no human can possess. This seems like a problem, to me. And I'll re-post the NYT article, where an AI created a clearly-copyright-infringing work: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/25/business/ai-image-generators-openai-microsoft-midjourney-copyright.html Given that the generative AI model cannot even tell when it IS creating a (c)-infringement, I'm disinclined to say that the method is presumptively fair-use. Generative AI is brand-new, and exciting, and society is still coming to terms with it. Pre-emptively enshrining a previously-unknown phenomenon as "fair use" seems extremely premature.

As the OP of the topic and the Forum mod team, they can and do trim topics to keep a thread on-topic; the point is that this thread is not the place for that debate, which (being a flamebait sort of topic) could swiftly render the thread useless to the people who want to use it for its intended purpose. We are invited to post such content/discussions elsethread, but not on this thread; it isn't "bad faith" to keep the thread on-topic. I'd be happy to engage with you about "generative AI" on another thread, if you care to start one.

My take is that the biggest difference between the "Gods" vs. the "Greater Spirits" is that the "Gods" mostly either (this list off the top of my head): have distinct interests in mortals / the mundane world prefer to deal with mortals in a theistic way simply find it most efficient/effective to deal theistically (or all of these, of course). It's not that they cannot interact via the Shamanic methods; but it isn't the way they usually do it, and they usually have their own very-good reasons for the way they do it. So if you try to Shamanically-approach a "Greater Spirit" who prefers to be approached theistically (i.e. a "God") it's kind of like going up to a major political/business/religious figure saying "hey, you asshole, gimme some of your time." This isn't likely to be your best approach; take a -50% on all rolls interacting with this "Greater Spirit." As always, YGWV

How much table time do you expect this would take? Could I fit it into one 4-6 hour "one-shot" game (e.g. a convention or FLGS) ? Could I stretch it to 3ish sessions of regular play at home? TYVM!

I don't recall a time when Thed wasn't the "Mother of the Broos." Doylistically, I think Thed gets her goat associations from that: Broo are Goat-ish beastfolk, and Thed is their mother... QED.

Or maybe he links himself with whatever animal is locally derided? The whole "Broo" thing seems very much of a piece with this.

This seems OK to me: the person on the attack is the one "trying to make things happen." If the active/attacking party was more on-parity with the defender, the whiff-factor would ramp up, and I think combats would tend to drag. OTOH, I'm a geek... but not not a Pendragon geek (only played a few times); so I may not understand the combat dynamics as well as I think I do.

??? But Orlanth is the "I can do anything better than you" god, and has a Trickster aspect. Covering up with a wig is 100% in Orlanth's wheelhouse!

Here is good, I think: lots of GMs like&use maps. VTT folk use all the threads, but non-VTT players wouldn't necessarily think to look in the VTT threads for their non-VTT needs.

The "Zebra Tribe" has been a Praxian "minor Tribe" (along with ostrich, bolo-lizard, unicorn, rhino, etc) since at least the RQ2 / Cults of Prax days. I think they're pretty tightly-linked to the Pavis Royal Guard &c... that patronage may be part of what keeps them going (royal treasury buying them better arms & armor, extra food stuff & fodder in lean times, etc).