CruelDespot

Thanks, Jeff. At least I know to call off the search until the GM Pack is published. I'll have to improvise! I like David's improvisation table. I need to leverage more resources from KoDP

I'm new to Glorantha and I am starting to GM a campaign using the preview edition of the new RQ (earned my copy GMing at GENCON). I am trying to run a campaign for Colymar Tribe characters starting in 1625 (starting with the intro scenario in the quickstart rules). Please forgive my Glorantha newbie questions, but I could use some help from veterans to absorb all this material. Where can I find RQ stats for the important NPCs like Starbrow, Argrath, Fazzur Wideread, etc? Especially Beti Orlkensorsdotter, who I gather would be the current Colymar Queen and therefore the most likely for the PCs to encounter first. I've been reading *King of Sartar* (the 1992 book, not the comic; well actually both) so I am gaining some familiarity with the upcoming events and important NPCs, but where do I get their stats? After some determined googling, I figured out that stats for the Crimson Bat are in *Cults of Terror*. What other references should I acquire to get the stats for other NPCs that they may encounter in and around Sartar during the Hero Wars? Any leads would be appreciated.

So you like conflicts that are "epic" but that only involve small numbers of people.

Nope. I want the community rules from Heroquest Glorantha, but crunchier (as we expect Runequest to generally be crunchier than Heroquest), preferably with the crunch (resources, events, etc) similar to King of Dragon Pass. Perhaps mass combat rules similar to those in Pendragon, but adjusted to reflect bronze-age warfare rather than knightly warfare. Good community rules should provide sources of adventure, not an alternative to adventure. And mass combat rules should provide truly epic adventures.

I need community rules to play, since I want to have adventures that are driven by the character's roles in the community. I guess it depends on what one considers necessary for the game's goals. The recent designer notes regarding family histories give me hope that community focus will be a goal. Heroquest Glorantha has a section in the core book for community rules. Pendragon appears to be a major influence and it has community-scale rules in the core book (mass combat, manor descriptions, etc). Some players, like me, probably learned about Glorantha through King of Dragon Pass, which is about leading a community. Perhaps there might be some very basic community rules in the core book, and later a supplement that provides more detail, as was the case with Pendragon.

Will the new Runequest have rules for resolving events at the community level (tribe, city, etc?) I'm a fan of Pendragon. Since Pendragon is influencing the new rules (passions, family history), I am hoping that Pendragon's manor rules might get mixed with King of Dragon Pass to yield some awesome rules for community-level drama and conflict. Mass combat! Intrigue over succession! Deciding wither to recruit more warriors, buy more cows, or build another shrine!

I was lucky enough to get into "The Taking of Talford" Thursday at 1pm and "The Anarchy" Friday at 8pm. Looking forward to both! The others looked good, too. I had them all in my wish list.

I am about to purchase Achtung!Cthulhu and I plan to run it at a convention. Which of the published adventures do you recommend that I should use? Something that will be fun and can be finished in a three hour session.

I've joined the Chaosium "Cult of Chaos" and run several sessions of Call of Cthulhu 7th edition at public venues. It's fairly painless and I've gotten a little bit of online store credit for it. Dustin at Chaosium is good about responding to emails. I look forward to seeing what sort of demo kits, scenarios, etc may become available down the road.

For the record, I really like BRP both Savage Worlds. They lend themselves to different styles of play. I may use one or the other depending on what type of game I intend to run.

You seem to be arguing with me pretty hard, considering that we are in complete agreement on everything,

Amen. The stats you provided really show the difference between SW and BRP. For example, you put 25% as the equivalent to d4. This is correct for NPCs. However, with the wild die, the chance of success for a PC with d4 against a typical target number 4 is really 62%. This just goes to show that SW is a much more forgiving system in which success is more likely.

I just added a spreadsheet to the downloads area of the website. Your feedback would be appreciated. http://basicroleplaying.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=400 It's nothing very fancy, but some might find it helpful. I was creating a character for an upcoming game, and the GM is using the "skill category bonuses" option. That's a little bit of a hassle to calculate, so I started to do the math on a spreadsheet. Then I kept building on it, and in several hours I had something that provides a filled-in printable character sheet. It reflects the options that my GM is using for our upcoming game: It has EDU, it has a specific power level of skill points, it has super powers, etc. That should be easy to modify. It is locked but doesn't have a password. Hopefully this might provide a head start for someone who has a similar need to crunch numbers to make a BRP character. If you find any errors, please let me know and I'll try to revise it at the first opportunity. Thanks!

I am super hyped to run a post-apocalyptic BRP game. You can see how hyped I am from the thread I started at my home-town gamer website HERE <-Link! I have downloaded reference material from every post-apocalyptic game I can find- Darwin's World, Apocalypse World, Aftermath, you name it. But the one that is most relevant has to be this one: Rubble and Ruin, since I intend to use BRP. Apparently there is some problem with the pdf. Some formatting thing, as I learned from these forums. Here is my question (finally): How bad is the formatting on the pdf? Should I wait until Chaosium fixes it? or is it usable as-is? I'm not super picky.

I stumbled on the Heroic Cthulhu podcasts about a year ago, and downloaded some to listen to on a long car trip. The 2 or 3 episodes I heard were freaking HILARIOUS! One of the characters was just like Borat, and the player could do a spot-on Borat impression. Imagine a Call of Cthulhu adventure starring Borat. It was so funny I could have crashed my car.

Thanks for the link. I just started running Cthulhu again. I'm going to share with my group.

Shazam! Asian Historical Architecture

Good topic idea, Slade. My gaming group takes turns GMing. I run Call of Cthulhu when it is my turn, but the last two GMs have chosen to run 4th Edition (despite my complaints). I agree your assessment of 4E. I just have a couple of refinements to offer: I would convert one square to two meters. A medium size creature occupies one square vertically and horizontally, so I think that 2m is a better fit even than 5'. Besides, this allows you to fix the 4th ed silliness of diagonal movement costing the same as lateral. Instead, say that a square costs 3m of movement diagonally. Easy. I would start the skills at 30% instead of 0%. In 4th Ed, starting characters can succeed with an untrained skill. Since the typical task is DC15, a character with zero skill bonus has a 30% chance of success (rolling 15 or above on a bare d20). What is your method to determine SIZ? I am curious about what you discover through your efforts, so please report back as it progresses. How old are your son and daughter? Good luck!

People, I have to say that this is probably the best thread I have ever seen. A member asked for help with an idea, and got flooded with helpful hints and resources- everything from story ideas to rules to deckplans to obscure references. The idea for such a campaign never occurred to me before, but after reading this thread, now I want to plan in a tramp steamer campaign! Good job, guys. This site rocks!

I'm preparing to run a play-by-post game with Cthulhu Dark Ages, so clearly I am a fan. I have tweaked the rules a bit to suit my tastes, but that isn't a criticism. Of course the author had to adhere to the standard CoC mechanics except where necessary to adapt to the Dark Ages. It could have more info about the setting, but I figure there is plenty of info about the Dark Ages already in the public library, so it isn't necessary to include very much. Besides, if it had a ton of info, it wouldn't be $18!

Indeed. Great minds think alike! The only real difference is that my compromise also uses hit locations for armor. It sounds like they are very similar. If the warhammer chart said that reversed to-hit roll of 50-59=left arm, it would be the same as my system saying that 1s digit of 5 = left arm. The true believers both for (Vile) and against (AikiGhost) hit locations are sticking to their guns. But what would you do if you were a GM with both of these guys in your group? (Other than attempt suicide perhaps)

Some BRP players love hit locations and some hate the idea. I have a compromise that I think offers the best of both worlds. This compromise eliminates the need to track hit points separately for each location, and the need to roll separate dice for hit location. Hit locations are used to see how much armor blocks each hit, and to determine the effects of major wounds. #1: The hit location is determined by the 1s digit of the attack roll. This saves the trouble of rolling an extra die to determine hit location. The system I use is this: X1=head X2= r shoulder (body) X3= l shoulder (body) X4 =r arm* X5 =l arm* X6= chest (body) X7=guts (body) X8=hip (body) X9= l leg X0= r leg #2: Each location does not have a separate pool of hit points. Instead, the hit location serves two functions: to determine how much armor is on the area that was hit, and to determine the effect if the hit inflicts a "major wound" (1/2 of hit points). If the damage is enough to cause a major wound, then the effect is the same as what the rulebook lists for "damage exceeding the hit points of the hit location." in other words, if the normal hit location system were used, each hit location would have something very roughly like half as many hit points as the total hit points characters normally have. So the effect of losing half your hit points is the same as the effect of losing all hit points in one location. It seems to me that this compromise keeps the fun of hit locations, but reduces the hassle. What do you think?

Indeed, if you use the normal initiative sequence for D&D or BRP, one round of combat can take a week or more (assuming that each player checks the boards once a day, which is the usual requirement). The first person acts, then you have to wait up a day for the next person to act, then another day for the third person to act, etc. I fixed this by modifying the rules so that all the PCs act simultaneously. I post the NPC actions, then it takes a max one day for all the PCs to post their actions, then I post the next round NPC actions, etc. = one round per day.

PbP= Play by Post. The DM and players communicate with each other via messageboard. In many ways, I think PbP is superior to F2F (face to face) roleplaying. You get a written record of the entire game, so it is essentially a collaborative novel-writing exercise. You can edit what you write before you click "submit reply" so that the quality of input seems to be higher. As a GM I can take a while to look up a rule or consider the next step without the pressure of having the players sitting there waiting on me. There are different techniques for rolling dice. Some GMs use the honor system. Some roll all the dice themselves. Many messageboards that specialize in PbP offer a die-rolling utility. The main disadvantage is slowness. It can take a year to finish one adventure. On the other hand, it only takes a few minutes each day. So it is like reading a daily newspaper comic vs a graphic novel. It is also tough to find players that are really committed to sticking with a game for the long-term. A lot of PbPs suffer when players flake out- simply quit posting. I have learned some techniques to minimize this through careful recruiting, etc. I think it would be less of a problem with BRP players than D&D players, since I perceive BRP players to be a little more mature on the average Hasbro gamer. I am recruiting on some other messageboards as well. Here is a site that specializes in Call of Cthulhu PbP: Play@Yog-Sothoth • Index page. Here is the PbP I ran previously at Online-roleplaying.com. LINK It ended when the storyline concluded after 5 years of play. Check it out if you are curious about what PbP looks like. But I am not opposed to running it here. I hadn't really considered it since there aren't any other PbPs here. Thanks for the offer! If I get some recruits here, then sure- why not?

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this. I didn't see a specific sub-form for PbP recruiting. If this belongs somewhere else, I trust an admin to move it to where it goes. Anyway... I'm planning to run a Cthulhu Dark Ages PbP set in Croatia in the mid 10th century. The characters would be agents of the king of Croatia. The king would send the characters to perform various missions: patrol the frontier, deliver messages, escort VIPs, investigate reports of strange happenings... I chose Croatia because it is not well known so there is freedom to act without contradicting real historical events, and it is positioned at the crossroads between the Byzantine empire to the South, the pagan Magyar hordes to the East, the Holy Roman Empire to the North, and Venice to the West. Follow this link to the downloads section where I have posted the houserules and campaign info. Check it out and let me know if you are interested. LINK-> BRP Central - Downloads - Despotic Cthulhu Dark Ages House Rules I can run this here if allowed, or on Play@Yog-Sothoth • Index page, or wherever is most hospitable or I find the most recruits. I tend to run games that are very player-driven. Your background will not just be flavortext. It will affect the plot. If your background states that your character's clan was destroyed by the Magyars, expect an adventure where you can rescue some of your clan members from Magyar slavery. Create your own long-term goals, and I'll present opportunities and challenges to achieve them.