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Lord Shag

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  1. Lord Shag

    At The Crossroads

    By Lord Shag,

    Well its been quite awhile folks and I am entirely to blame for that. I won't bore people with the details except that I am on the move again residence wise, not as far as last time but a decent distance nevertheless. I had been hoping to finally upload BRP Star Wars in the next few weeks but I am going to defer once again. It does pain me to do this since I detest nothing more than vapourware and all sorts of needless spruiking and its partly due to my sensitivity to this issue that I am uploading a BRP conversion of Harnic beasts for our cohort of fantasy gamers that I have worked on to at least prove that I am actively working on stuff and not just a bag of wind! Rodney better known as our beloved threedsix from the forums can testify to my seriousness in regards the BRP star wars project since so far he is the only other person who has seen a working copy of it, albeit an earlier one.

    During this summer the current version 1.2 has seen a fantastic amount of play testing from within my RPG group the problem is that the more i ran the games the less and less I was happy with the conversion. It just lacked that star wars feel that I wanted it to have and the more I played it the less i liked it. Considering that i have been working on this for a good 18 months this was somewhat of a bitter realization that I disliked my own spawn. Consequently the other night the group had a meeting and we discussed some ways to get some zip back into the conversion. A popular alternative was to mine the old d6 system for some inspiration. I have been busy doing so and I have identified some possible ways to bring some concepts from that system into the BRP system.

    The dilemma is and this is the crossroads bit, is that its quite a bit of work to do those changes and I am kinda wanting to throw in the towel more than make them and just go back to playing d6. So I am thinking, thinking and thinking as to what to do. Even though I am unhappy with aspects of 1.2 and its still a bit rough in parts I might upload it anyway and see what people think. Let me know, and enjoy the Harn conversion.
  2. Lord Shag
    When I first got my hands on the new BRP rule set a number of vistas opened up that could finally be explored. The first was that my kids now had the capacity to play RPG's that didn't have mind numbing complexity (d20 anyone?) and secondly it was possible to develop a number of games that I had enjoyed over the years into BRP rules. Fantasy was my first port of call and anyone whose had contact with me last year may have been aware that I was working on some fantasy resources which I wanted to upload but never got round to. When I turned my attention to sci-fi last year it was to traveler that I wanted to do a BRP conversion for. I actually got a good way into the process but unfortunately my kids were not that interested. However they were interested in star wars which was OK since i wanted to eventually do a conversion for it as well. In the end a lot of the traveler stuff (starship combat rules) ended in star wars so a kind of cross fertilization occurred which when I finish the star wars book may end up working in the reverse when I go back to doing traveler.
  3. Lord Shag
    Well once again guys its been some time since a post but today I can happily report that I have now completed my very last examination for this semester and the last obstacle in the path of progress has been set aside. Now the obvious up shot of this is that I can turn myself back to the fruits of BRP Star Wars and get the bloody thing done. So I am hoping to provide happy tidings soon. Please be patient and hang no effigies. For those north american brethren who have been hassling me because they want something to do in their long summer break you will soon get your hearts desire. Unfortunately for those BRP comrades in the southern hemisphere we have to do without the long summer break but at least we may game as a consolation.
  4. Lord Shag
    Well its been quite sometime since I posted a blog so i must apologise for the absence. So whats been going on? Where is the damned book? Well Rodney's been busy in the last few weeks working on some of the chapters. He has proofed up to chapter 8 with 9, 10 and the equipment annexure left to go. I haven't hassled him yet for the rest because I've just finished my amendments and I'm still incorporating his suggestions which at the moment are nearing completion. At the moment I am confident I'll have his last lot of changes complete in about one week. After that if Rod gets the remainder of his work back to me around that time (no firm plans yet) we could be looking at an up-loadable version by the end of the first week in June. So for the time being I'm going to return to the final edits and the rest of my university course and hope the next blog I post is the announcement of its impending release!
  5. Lord Shag

    Wanting to Inhale

    By Lord Shag,

    Despite the title this has nothing to do with Clinton, dope or Whitney. Its simply been a long week and unfortunately most of it hasn't been about role playing. I've been busy trying to produce three 2500 word law assignments which I can assure you that you do not want to hear about those. Well a quick update on the more interesting stuff is in order.

    Version 1.1 was completed last weekend and is now in the hands of Rod. Rod's edits are being worked into 1.2 and a big thanks for that if your reading this. At the moment however nothing appears set to interfere with its release this month but Rod and I have normal lives so timing on this could change if we don't get the opportunity to make the best edits possible.

    The reason for this is that I started the project with producing the very best possible book. Homebrew material at times can look and play terrible and in all circumstances i wanted to avoid that. Some have commented to me on the how good the character sheets look and thats a consequence of my approach. So basically it doesn't go out if its crap!

    On other fronts I've had one opportunity to run a playtest on starship combat. Generally all ok there are some minor issues with facing and position. Ionization is still a problem which is going to have to be resolved but that is quite a minor issue. i'm just not happy with how it works.

    Now in terms of the next project I've not heard from anybody about this so for the moment I'm going to proceed with the sourcebook idea. The GM's guide is as large as the players book at the moment and realistically I couldn't expect getting it out to people until July. A sourcebook though with a simple compilation of ships, droids and other stuff is a bit less of challenge editing and development wise so for thats where things will go for the moment.

    So far I've had no requests in people wanting to review the final product. So if you have an interest and you would like to see the rules before anyone else PM me.
  6. Lord Shag

    Future Directions

    By Lord Shag,

    Trying to come up with catchy titles for this bog is quite demanding but i will keep on trying! Well a brief progress report. I am 99% certain we will be able to release this month if there are no horror scenarios that emerge. Now just a word about the revisions.

    Version 1.1 is almost complete which has resulted in some major changes. It will be done this weekend. Rodney (aka threedeesix) has been busy with reviewing and providing suggestions for edit. For a variety of reasons these changes will find themselves in v1.2. For those of you who are confused I was intending on releasing 1.1 but since rod has come on board this will be v1.2 with maybe some additional changes depending on what comes out of additional playtest. Any additional changes are likely to be cosmetic at that point. Anyone who is interested in coming on board as a reviewer or helper is still welcome

    Now the next thing I wanted to address is what comes next? I have two things floating around that could be the next release after the players guide. The first is in rough edit at the moment which is a GM's guide and that was going to be next release. The third which is only at concept stage at the moment was to be some kind of sourcebook with ship, vehicle and equipment stats. However after some thought it began to be apparent that the sourcebook may be more useful to people at this stage. Anyone who has an opinion about this drop me a line because i'm leaning more to the sourcebook idea all the time.
  7. Lord Shag
    Trying to remember which movie i last heard this line from the title of this blog post), i think it was a comedy. Well its been a busy weekend! Some good news and bad. Firstly lets have the bad. I have stated that I wanted to get this puppy out sometime this week. I'm going to have to push this back to probably sometime in April. The reasons for this are (this is the good news) is the extra play testing i did on the weekend went so well that the quality of the input from those sessions is worth taking the time to reproduce in the rules.

    Most of the issues arising were quite simple ones like unclear expression of rule concepts and so on. I know that some will gnash their teeth over this delay but i can assure everyone its worth waiting to incorporate the changes. My goal is to put out a good quality product thats going to be a gift to the BRP community and i personally want that gift to be used and enjoyed and not marred by gibberish prose.

    I did have other reasons for delaying which include a teenage daughter with a dislocated knee and both a full-time Bachelor of Laws degree and job bearing down on myself. So for those fans (like threedeesix) my apologies. If you like deesix, i can chuck you a consolation chapter from the first version - just PM me.
  8. Lord Shag

    Progress Report

    By Lord Shag,

    Well as promised a review of how things go. Firstly the play test of the starship combat rules is continuing. No further problems are being encountered. Now progress overall. Instead of posting this here I will place it in the forum.
  9. Lord Shag

    Play Tests

    By Lord Shag,

    Just a quick update. Ran a limited play test on the starship combat rules and immediately ran into some minor problems with the sensor rules. Some issues also arose with the concurrent use of the Piloting skill and starship weapons skill. This will require a little more work to fix than the sensor problem, however it won't affect the overall combat modelling. Generally things are proceeding well. Will give a more comprehensive review tomorrow on the editing of version 1.00 BRP Star Wars.
  10. Lord Shag
    At the moment I've been contemplating the exclusion of the Education characteristic from my "developing" book on BRP Star Wars RPG. At the time I didn't really think about it much and its exclusion was due to oversight and nothing more but I'm beginning to think it was an error. At the time I was also thinking about including a new Willpower characteristic which I ended up dismissing and substituting it for another mechanism which i later discarded. Even though Power in the generic rules reflects the willpower aspect of a character, (which in my version becomes "Force") I was not entirely happy with how this plays out in the context of star wars. Take Han Solo for example. Low force ability but plenty of Willpower. Anakin Skywalker is of course the reverse. This what interested me in a Willpower characteristic as it became a useful way to model a characters temptation to do use the dark side.
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