fmitchell

Happy New Year to all. Actually I haven't been in a game since 2012, owing to school and family health issues. I'll be happy if I can get something going. Ideally I'll get a Magic World game going, or my long-threatened Erebus campaign (maybe both). Failing that, there's maybe a Numenera game starting up nearby -- like the concept and core design, hate the D&D emulation layer on top -- or perhaps something OSR or Cthulhu-esque brewing.

I'd start with Allegiance to represent the chance of divine intervention. The prayers might be equivalent to spells that require an Allegiance roll, or might be skills in their own right capped by Allegiance. The one problem I see is that some prayers cost more Character Points than others, representing more profound effects. That probably would translate to a system of "levels". What the "levels" mean is the big question: Each level represents an increase in difficulty; level 1 is a straight Allegiance roll, level 2 is Allegiance x 1/2, level 3 is Allegiance x1/5, and so on. Each higher level prayer requires knowledge of lower level prayers, either specifically or generally. For example, the maximum number of prayers at level N is one less than the number of prayers at level N-1. Thus if you want a Level 3 prayer you'll need 2 level 2s and 3 level 1s. Prayers require a number of Piety Points equal to the prayer level. Priests earn Piety through sacrifices (e.g. animals or wealth), services to their religion, or divine quests. Higher level prayers require higher rank in one's religion, which means greater duties and greater expectations. Take a look at Theism in RuneQuest 6th edition, which incorporates the latter two mechanisms. Curiously, HarnMaster Religion is remarkably similar.

According to the Magic World rules-as-written, "A vampire loses 2D6 Magic Points every night just to keep its undead body running." Later, when describing the vampire's bite, the rules state, "For every 2 points of CON drained, the vampire may regenerate 1 HP of damage." So, if I'm a vampire under these rules, my best strategy is to drain MP by touch from unaware or incapacitated victims; doing so, I'm unlikely to get damaged and therefore unlikely to drink blood at all. Some vampire. Looking at other rules derived from RuneQuest a/o BRP: Basic Roleplaying states that blood drain converts STR or CON into MP. Vampires in the Gold Book regenerate 1d3 HP per round and lose only 1d6 MP when arising. Vampires in Call of Cthulhu, 6th edition, have regular POW and presumably regenerate MP normally. Draining blood (STR) has no direct effect on the vampire. Vampires in RuneQuest, 6th edition drain a Fatigue level per round, which progressively reduces all skill rolls until the victim passes out. Not consuming blood imposes a Fatigue level after each week. They're also "immune to most non-magical attacks, its flesh instantly re-knitting together or invulnerable unless specifically decapitated in a single blow". Fire, sunlight, and wooden stakes also work. Of the various approaches, I'd suggest the Big Gold Book's; it's the most minimal change and forces vampires to actually drink blood. One could, however, change vampires around however one likes, even have different strains or species of vampires. I'd be tempted to write a book about it, if Steve Jackson Games and Eden Studios, among others, hadn't already done so.

It's Glorantha. Cacodaemon is both a fragment of the Devil and a remnant of his army; the Devil looks like a Faustian devil and a displacer beast.

It's been a while, but IIRC DragonQuest has very little similarity to BRP (at least in the 1st edition). It's a hybrid of class and skill systems, more like Star Frontiers. On the plus side, BRP is a lot easier to understand.

So far I haven't pitched this yet, but I'm experimenting with a wiki-like structure, using an actual wiki. (example -- yes I'm posting the link again.) The "main page" contains the who, what, why, when, and how, with links to specific details should anyone be interested. When I was pitching a "fill-in" game I offered to run several different games, with summary tables of each and links to drill down. We eventually did Tunnels & Trolls ... for one session, before the holidays hit and the group scattered. (We were sort of on our last legs anyway; two members only attended occasionally, and the fifth members changed as often as Murphy Brown's secretaries or Spinal Tap drummers. Plus I suck as a GM.) Perhaps the pitch isn't as important as the number and quality of players.

I get most of my stuff as PDFs, due to space restrictions and cheapness. Half of the few physical books I get come from Kickstarters or patronage campaigns: Lords of Gossamer and Shadow, the upcoming Guide to Glorantha, CoC7, the Thrilling Adventure graphic novel ...

Mechanics aside, how do people portion out languages in their actual campaigns? I can think of a few patterns: 1. D&D: there's a "Common" language which nearly everyone speaks, and a bunch of languages specialized by species, religion, "alignment", or subculture. This implies a huge Empire imposed its language on the known world(s), but monsters, barbarians, isolated regions, and secret cabals retained their own. Most SF games take this approach. 2. Nation-states: each of several large regions or nations has its own language. The players come from one such region, and have no problem communicating within it. Cross the border into enemy territory, though, and you'll need to know the language. 3. Balkanized: different cultures with their own languages are intermixed, or at least live within walking distance of each other. Travelers need to know several languages just to get by. This seems to describe Glorantha, from what I know. It also resembles medieval and early modern Europe, for which James Raggi devised the Languages Skill mechanic in LotFP. Each of these is a matter of degree or scale, and one can mix and match. Tolkien resembles a mixture of 1 and 2: the world of Men speaks one language or a few closely related ones, given how easily the Shire folk communicated in Gondor and understood the Mordor Orcs, but Elves and Dwarves are still powerful nations, and the greatest war machine on Middle-Earth speaks Black Speech. A LotFP campaign I've yet to pull the trigger on assumes a powerful empire conquered other peoples but fell to other conquerors; everyone speaks the original language of the region, educated and powerful people speak the Empire's language, and wizards and priests speak the language of their school or liturgy. A Magic World game I'm planning now assumes a similar "fallen empire" setup. There's one Common language with multiple semi-intelligible dialects, including Old Imperial. Non-humans creatures (a minority) have their own languages ... but so do the "barbarians" to the North, traders from the South, and assorted human pagans/traditionalists spread across the former Empire.

Well, I sunk $90 into the Kickstarter, so some of you might argue this is cognitive dissonance in action, but CoC7 might be worth picking up. It's not for BRP purists, definitely. Then again, King Arthur Pendragon departs far enough from its BRP roots that it's an entirely different game, but in doing so fits the genre and source material more closely. Also, CoC7 borrowing mechanics from another game doesn't mean that it's "becoming" that game, any more than rolling a d20 in KAP or HeroQuest makes those games just like D&D. I'd like to see all the rules finalized and in context before deciding whether it was worth my investment.

Bought AH but haven't read it yet. Looking at the numerical range I'd guess Armor Points. Most other BRP/RQ versions give Hit Points for weapons. Maybe this is analogous: strike the weapon with at least that much damage and it breaks. Most weapons are iron, so it might make sense that less damage simply bounces off, and treating them as Armor Points means not having to track HP for weapons.

EDIT: Here' I'm talking about the standard fantasy/historical/modern/science-fiction world, where everyone in the same country or region uses the same alphabet. It sounds like a skill per writing system might be necessary in BRP Steppes where everyone knows Mongolian but the few literate people are divided over Uyghur vs. hPhags-pa vs. Latin vs. Cyrillic. While I agree that categorizing reading ability by alphabet/syllabary/whatever makes more sense, in most cases I don't see the need for a skill for each writing system unless said system is complicated. Something like Japanese Kanji or Chinese Hanzi would need a skill, certainly, and Sumerian Cuneiform, even in its latter syllabic stages, looks horribly complex. On the other hand, the current Latin alphabet has 26 letters, Greek 24, Arabic 28; even adding diacritical marks used in Latin-based alphabets or extensions to Arabic's vowel system that's still not a lot to remember. Converting those 26 letters + marks to sounds is fairly straightforward in most languages, English being a glaring exception. Even Japanese Kana -- hiragana and katakana -- is forty-eight basic forms and two marks that change, for example, HA to BA or PA. That's why I treat alphabets and simple syllabaries like kana as on-off switches, not skills: either you learned it or you don't, and if you're literate and learned the language you probably did. Then again, dealing with languages in a game in even a semi-realistic fashion is not fun: if you don't know the language or flub your die roll, you don't get the information or ally you need. (There's a reason why sci-fi movies and TV assume that everyone in the galaxy speaks English.) That's why I find the LotFP solution or my former GM's single skill so appealing. I also envy systems like GURPS or some D&D versions in which languages have four levels: can't speak, speaks badly, speaks adequately, speaks like a native. In BRP, the "speaks badly" condition might indicate a Difficult roll to communicate, and "speaks like a native" is required to blend in. BTW, two sites I've found very helpful in understanding writing systems are Ancient Scripts and Omniglot. Wikipedia's linguistic articles are also quite good, although I'm sure they'd make an actual linguist apoplectic.

How do other people on this board handle spoken and written languages? The RAW say each language is a single skill, and (in the BGB) each written language is a different instance of the Literacy skill. One GM I respect gave all of us a single "Languages" skill; a skill check determined whether we understand whatever is being spoken. IIRC we only rolled when encountering someone from/in another country. Lamentations of the Flame Princess (Old School D&D) goes a step further; a check of their Languages skill determines whether you speak a specific language or not; players maintain a list of languages they can speak and another list of languages they definitively can't, but you clear the latter list when you gain a level. For that matter, how often do you make a language check? I remember one Murphy's Rules mocked RQ3 for giving beginning characters a low chance to say anything in their mother tongue. (The caption was something like "Grbsh Smrzl, Mom and Dad!") Do you check every time someone begins speaking? Every statement? And what about dialects which are somewhat intelligible? And then there's the rules on reading and writing. Is literacy in Spanish so different from literacy in Italian? It's the same Roman letters, with a few extra diacritical marks and slightly different pronunciation rules? For that matter I learned the Greek alphabet in about a week in high school; I sucked at grammar and vocabulary, but given a Classical Greek text at least I knew what sounds to make. FWIW, my own readings on linguistics have led me to the following semi-realistic approach: Somewhat unrealistically, we'll categorize each form of speech as either a dialect or a language. This is distinct from the "official" designation; Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish are mutually intelligible "languages" while the "dialects" of Chinese are related only by the writing system (which is essentially a transcription of Mandarin). Each language is a distinct skill, as in the RAW. Each dialect defaults to half a related dialect/language (maybe more or less if we want to quantify relationships), but characters can train them up just like any other skill. Literacy may be a single skill or a simple yes/no question (as in modern times). Literate characters can usually read any language they can speak, using the lower of the Literacy skill (if any) and the spoken language skill. The written language counts as a separate skill from the spoken language if it's not a straightforward phonetic transcription, e.g. Chinese characters or English spelling. The written language may count as a completely separate language (e.g. Japanese) or a "dialect" (e.g. English, French, or any other language where spelling and pronunciation have drifted apart.) Certain languages may have unique rules. For example, some languages have no written form, or at least none used by native speakers. If they later encounter a written form invented by another culture they may have to take it as a separate skill; alternatively, if (say) someone invents a way of writing Cimmerian in Elvish letters someone who already knows (written) Elvish would pick it up for free. A similar situation occurs if the same language switches alphabets, e.g. Turkish switching from Arabic to Roman letters. Anyone who writes/speaks Arabic and speaks Turkish could read older documents using Turkish-in-Arabic-Letters. Or perhaps the new written form is straightforward enough to anyone who groks the concept of reading, like Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics apparently were to the Native American tribes they were invented for. In medieval Japan, women and other minimally-educated people could write Japanese phonetically using hiragana characters. Truly educated men, on the other hand, used the more complicated mixture of Chinese characters (kanji) and hiragana in use today. In our system, then, literate Japanese speakers get hiragana writing for free, but need to learn Kanji with a different skill. Maybe the language is dead, so that all we have is the written form. The spoken language is a scholar's reconstruction. Should a native speaker return from death, the stars, or an alternate world, he might hear the conventional spoken form as an incredibly bizarre dialect. Other fantasy languages might have a logographic written form that normally counts as a second skill, but (as in the myth about Chinese) a whole group of languages use the exact same written form. Anyone writing in one of those languages can be read by anyone who speaks one of those languages and knows how to read the logograms. In a fantasy world I'm working on, Aklo has separate skills for speaking and writing, but since it's the language of sorcery all characters who start as sorcerers receive Aklo Logograms at the same skill level as the spoken language. Other non-human creatures write Aklo the same way but speak Aklo according to their vocal apparatus, so there's different skills for Human Spoken Aklo, Ghoul Howled Aklo, Elder Thing Piping Aklo, Mi-Go Colour-Change-and-Buzz Aklo ...

Will those general files be available to those of us who pre-ordered RQ6 the first time around, in 2012? And if so, how? I checked Glorantha.com and DesignMechanism.com and neither lists the order I made back then.

This is correct, but on the plus side Magic World has a distinct "Magic" phase before mundane actions. E.g. Eilonwy the Enchantress (INT 16, DEX 11) casts a spell at an attacking cheetah (DEX 18). Assuming her pal Athelstane the Armored can fend it off for the rest of the turn, her spell goes off before the cheetah can make a second attack.

Any setting outside Europe, the Middle East, China, and Japan would be cool. Spears of the Dawn did a (mostly) sub-Saharan African fantasy mashup for Classic D&D; I'd like to see another starting from original sources. Russia, the Byzantine Empire, and/or the Balkans would also be cool. (Yes, I know of Mythic Russia for HeroQuest.)

There's a couple of tables in the Big Gold Book, on p 26 (for characters) and p 296 (for inanimate objects) that translate SIZ into height and weight ranges. That said, it is abstract, intentionally so; it's less about precise height and weight and more about leverage and inertia. Think of it this way: a SIZ of X means that a STR of X has a 50/50 chance of shifting it.

It's been a year and a half in our world, but how long has it been in the Southern Reaches?

To elaborate on my response to the survey: I'm unlikely to use the Southern Reaches as is, although I'd probably cannibalize SR stuff for parts. (Recently I started designing a MW-based setting, and I could adapt my old Tunnels & Trolls setting to MW with some changes.) So I'd prefer one of the following 1. Adventures not heavily dependent on the Southern Reaches, possibly settings elsewhere in the world of the Southern Reaches. James Raggi of Lamentations of the Flame Princess decided to set all his adventures in the real world, albeit with (warped) fantastic elements. You might take a page from him, Ars Magica, Clark Ashton Smith, and Lord Dunsany and set adventures in your very own Forest of Averoigne or fantasy Earth. Most fantasy worlds are anachronistic reflections of the real world anyway. 2. More general resources like expanded magic (maybe called something like Advanced Sorcery), tips and techniques for seafaring adventures, subsystems for managing a feudal domain when PCs get one, a pulp fantasy plane of existence construction kit, a sword & planet expansion (not to step on Jason Durall's toes), and so forth. If you must, you could put out a monster book, but I'm not a big fan of monsters; I'd prefer either a "build your own monster" section or something like Monster Island for RQ6 which integrates a bunch of monsters into a setting or adventure.

Yet that's how most GMs and players treated them, when I played Champions back in the day. One GM I knew discarded them all together. That even the rules set an upper limit was kind of telling. One guy perusing the GURPS rules at the time looked at the disadvantages and said "Wow, these are real disadvantages" because the rules spelled out actual consequences. (Another player of my acquaintance considered that a failing of GURPS that it enumerated all possible Psych Lims ...) In any case, my current thinking is that Aspects in FATE, Complications in Mutants and Masterminds, and Foibles in Swashbuckers of the Seven Skies are the way to go. That is, benefits for limitations accrue through a Fate/Fortune/Hero/Drama/whatever Point economy, rather than build points up front. The reward for the player's self-imposed "kick me" sign is then directly proportional to the number of times the GM actually kicks him. Bringing this around to the topic of this forum, I suspect it's easier to integrate Complications (and Aspects, to be honest) into BRP, simply because it's a self-contained system. Want a talent outside the Characteristic/Skill/Spell paradigm? Screwed by the Dice Gods? Need to cheat death? Pay Drama Points. Need more Drama Points? Take on extra trouble, and chew the scenery a bit. It's not appropriate for every genre, play style, or group, but it's easy to try, and just as easy to ditch if it's not working.

I had to read the OP's description twice (or more?) before I understood what was happening. Arguably one can restate the rule as "a skill in a specific weapon also applies without penalty to similar weapons." But just because a solution is venerable doesn't mean it's optimal. Most people think one sword is much like another, but I can imagine arguments about whether a khopesh, gladius, or scimitar is sufficiently like a falchion to use without penalty. (Maybe, no, and yes.) Also I wonder why weapon skills get singled out for this "simplification". Why not have Fast Talk, Harangue, Blather, Browbeat, and Glibness all functionally equivalent? Isn't that simple? One of the prime virtues of BRP and family is that a character's chance of success for every action requiring a dice roll is right there on the (single) character sheet. It seems counterintuitive to me that one narrow skill implies an identical value in a dozen other skills that aren't recorded. Yes, it's flavorful if a character carries a falchion instead of a sword. But if the Falchion skill is functionally a Sword skill, if the distinction has no meaning, then it's an unnecessary mental step, however small, to remap "Falchion" to "any one-handed sword I'm carrying". Players need all their head space for tracking the game; translating what things on their character sheet mean is a distraction.

If your skill in a Shortsword also applies to other forms of sword, why not call it "Sword" instead of "Shortsword"? Why "Glaive-Guisarme" instead of "Polearm"? Why have the extra verbiage explaining that specific weapon skills transfer (unmodified) to the general class? If using a longsword with the Shortsword skill imposed some sort of penalty -- which would make sense since one would use different techniques -- I could see how naming a skill after a specific weapon made sense, but if "Short Sword", "Long Sword", "Bastard Sword", et al. are all just aliases for "skill with any sword", it's simpler and easier to explain if there's just one "Sword" skill. BTW, MRQII and RQ6 combat techniques reflect a particular way of using the weapons involved. There it makes sense: Shortsword and Tower Shield denotes a particular technique of advancing under cover and stabbing one's enemies. One can't use the same technique with a Hand-and-a-Half and a buckler, so being specific matters.

Isn't this just a complicated way of having one skill for all weapons in a class? Am I missing something?

About the Ten Minute Test? Rules in poetry? Dactylic hexameter? Lyres? Sing to me, Muse, of Roleplaying Basic, Of skilled characters and the the ten-sided dice, which, hundred-fold, bring success or failure.

Writing? Are you mad? You'll ruin your memory! Put rules in poetic form -- dactylic hexameter is best -- and recite them to your players while strumming a lyre. They'll never forget. (This isn't wholly a joke, BTW. Most people today are too busy to read even 50 pages of rules. 11 maybe, which is where BRP/CoC/RQ comes in handy. My general rule is that if I can't explain the basic rules in 10 minutes to players who haven't heard of it before, I'm not even going to try to run it.)

When they decided to retire the Resistance Table, converting to percentile characteristics made more sense. Not only can you directly oppose a skill with a characteristic (or vice versa), you render Stamina %, Idea %, Know %, and so forth superfluous. As a side effect, INT, EDU, and SIZ are on the same scale as the other stats. (The 3d6 vs 2d6+6 vs 3d6+3 always rankled a bit, even though I understand the reasoning.) I'm not sure how this compares to the MRQ solution of adding parallel skills -- Brawn, Endurance, Persistence, Evade -- but I'm willing to give it a try. BTW, the character sheet has three boxes for each characteristic or skill: percentile, half percentile (hard success), and 1/5 percentile (extreme success / old-style characteristic). The latter two are half-size and stacked atop each other.