Shaira

...mmmm.... Dreamlands.... I sold my paperback copy many, many moons ago, and have regretted it ever since... ...mmmm.....

I'm certainly down for a copy of BRP and Interplanetary, and probably one or more of the other sourcebooks too - will check them out as they come. Jason - you mentioned spirit combat rules *drool* *drool*... any chance of a hint or two? Essentially the Ghostly Combat on p339 of BRP Zero, or something different? Inquiring minds (in search of corporeal embodiment) wish to know! Cheers, Sarah

Looks great Sverre - very neat and tidy on my machine. Nice job. Cheers, Sarah

My impression is that BRP is going to be extremely well supported - not only do we have the 4 (off the top of my head) already-announced supplements and sourcebooks on the front page of this site, but I believe that there are at least a couple of other proposals on Chaosium's desk right now, all for publication in the short term - over the next year or so. Kick-ass settings and sourcebooks is where Chaosium is going to win friends and gamers, of course: the BRP rules themselves are great, but I'm optimistic that we'll see lots of cool follow-up, both from Chaosium and also with licensed settings. Chaosium haven't actually been in this situation before, with a generic ruleset in the published domain which multiple settings, sourcebooks, and scenarios can be written for - hopefully they'll be lavish in the attentions and permissions they bestow on it! Spread the word!

Warm sun? Beautiful scenery? Crystal clear seas? Outrageous! Have a good time, rust. We'll expect a full report of how well BRP reads on the beach when you get back! Cheers, Sarah

Ah, yes... three white bulls on the morning of the equinox, as the duwafi bullroarers sound out from the Temple of Lord Regos before the serried ranks of the Legion in White and Gold. It is a *good* sacrifice, Jarulf! Thanks for that link - I'd never seen the site before, and there's clearly a fair bit to digest. It looks very promising, though - I think I'll take some time to work out what's going on! Cheers! Sarah

Thank you! To be honest, I've never run any games by email or across the Internet, but have wondered about it. I wouldn't mind participating in some PBEM games to get the flavour of how it's done before attempting something on my own, though. Likewise I've played around with KloogeWerks, and have an embryonic BRP DEF file which works well with some of the cool maps you can produce with CC3 (etc) - but again I've never actually played via online tabletop to understand how it's done. I'd be willing to have a go though! Cheers, Sarah

I think this is the way I'm going to go. Especially with a view to "interoperability", what with BRP, optional rules, GORE, MRQ, and what have you flying around these days, it makes sense to separate out the game-specific bits so that they're easy to mod and also easy to reuse, as you mention. I think somebody has already mentioned this somewhere, but I could certainly envisage scenarios being made available with "web enhancements" of the critter stat blocks in the various game systems out there. That would be very cool, and create some humongous synergies for us scenario-hungry gamers! Frogspawner - I take your comment about brevity! I'll still work on including a "Tactics" section, but will try and keep it down a bit. I do have a tendency to go on, and on, and on... Cheers, Sarah

Hi Nick, Just noticed a bristling saddleback soaring past my window, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to chip in... Theoretically, then, it could be possible for Moon Design to produce something like a "Magic of Glorantha" supplement which would be "Compatible with Basic Roleplaying", or some such... Or, subject to the Issaries Fan Policy, one could publish a set of 3rd Age Gloranthan scenarios compatible with BRP? Presumably that would require the Chaosium sign-off, but (again, theoretically) everything else would be in place to do that - does that sound right? Just wondering. Given that BRP can basically emulate RQ3 sans-magic enough to make existing RQ scenarios playable with little or no modification, it's really only the magic systems (and possibly bestiary - though the MRQ bestiary SRD is out there somewhere) which are lacking... Just brainstorming... Cheers, Sarah

Using the optional rules, I would say virtually indistinguishable. The differing magic / powers system is the main difference. The skills are named slightly differently; the weapons are slightly different. But with the optional rules you basically have RQ3. Cheers, Sarah

Hi Sverre, I know this is a bit OT, but if you're talking about Campaign Cartographer, my advice would be to work with the size of map you need right now. It's always a temptation to have a humongous master map and zoom in and in on that map till you get to the area you want, but IMHO it generally leads to a huge, unwieldy, and rather unaesthetic document! :eek: I find in my own mapmaking it's much better to have dedicated purpose-driven maps, each in their own "sandbox". That way too you can tinker with the aesthetics to fit the scale of map - different projections, etc. Once you get a certain amount of experience with CC, it's actually easier to run up a new coastline / river set / whatever, than to try to have to manage a map which is meant to be viewable at widely different levels of zoom. All IMHO of course - your mileage will definitely vary! Happy mapping! Cheers, Sarah

Hi Sverre, Looks great to me, and works fine in my IE on Vista! Just from the POV of aesthetics, you might want to recolour (or get rid of ) the blue outlines of the sections in the RH column. They look a bit jagged on my machine and might work better either in black or just removed. Also (but this is really just IMHO), maybe change the font colour of the "Basic Roleplaying Forum" text at the top of the page to match the warm-earth tones of the new look n feel - maybe browns or maroons or even black rather than the current dark blue? Anyhow, looks great. I like the parchment effect and the neat bas-relief backgrounds to the section headers in the RH column! Cheers, Sarah

You know, I've certainly played RQ3 and Stormbringer in a D&D dungeon-bash kind of way without too much PC death. You just need someone with some killer healing spell and enough POW, plus some reasonably decent skill levels in weapons, dodging, and First Aid. If you're dealing with hardened D&D dungeon-bash types, you can always use the "Total Hit Points" option in the BRP rules - effectively HP equal to SIZ + CON, without the division by two. That really beefs things up. Create your characters along D&D class stereotypes, make sure healing is available, and - blam! If Major Wounds become a problem, make some "Major Healing Magic" available in the form of potions,new spells, "staffs of healing", etc. They'll learn to love the D100 in the end! Cheers, Sarah

I think this is basically the RQ3 way of doing it. You make a single roll; if you are under your unarmed skill but over your martial arts skill, you succeed in a standard attack; if you roll under your unarmed skill AND your martial arts skill, you succeed in a martial arts attack and get the extra damage. Cheers, Sarah

Hi all, First of all - thanks to everyone for the really, really great feedback! And I've gotta say it first - DirkD, what a heckuva job! Wow! It just shows when somebody with an eye for these graphic design thingies gets a hold of my humble scrawlings, that a thing of design beauty can be born! I was over Urth's blue-green moon this morning to see that PDF! Seriously, that's a very professional job. I think I'm landing firmly on the side of either example 3 or 4 as my personal preference, and probably example 4, as that indent might just make things a little bit more accessible in the heat of play. Plus, the whole stat block doesn't actually seem to take up that much real-estate the way you've done it - I daresay it's shorter than my own PDF version! Excellent! I have one question for you, Dirk: how would you differentiate the stat block from surrounding descriptive text in a scenario? At the moment I'm toying with either placing the whole stat block in a light greyish box and leaving it more or less inline in the scenario body text, or grouping all of the stat blocks at the end of the scenario, which obviously frees up formatting options a lot. I wonder what's best from a graphical and also actual play perspective? What do people prefer? I absolutely agree with you. I think a lot of the longer RQ NPC writeups were hard to take maximum advantage of "on the fly", and required a lot of prep to work out how you were going to make use of them - often just too much information. I'm thinking of actually including a "Tactics" section at the end of the writeup - more or less just above or below the "Notes" section. Just a few lines to jog my memory during play as to how this particular NPC can be used. For example: That sort of thing. Hopefully at the least it'll be a memory aide during play, and may go some way to making the stat block's complexity a little less formidable! Thank you! I'm a linguist by passion and training, and wanted to give Chronicles a bunch of words which would hopefully seem unique and at the same time accessible and hopefully strangely familiar - it's so easy when creating new words to use the "random syllable dice" and come up with something unpronouncable and quite destructive to the game's atmosphere. For example, "Babisiya the Night Hag" is actually the human (Low Sakaraic) name for the darkness goddess: the P'Tek actually call her "Durgha", which in their language means "The Dark Mother" - hence "Durghat", the name of the language, means "The Tongue of the Dark Mother", or some such. She's their principal deity. I haven't actually had chance myself to playtest the full Ulega-Bagu scenario yet, & would be interested to see just how much of a threat she and, say, four or five P'Tek minions would be. I've a suspicion that if used in a kind of commando-mode - especially when they surround themselves with darkness and confusion - they could probably tear through an average beginning party, and hopefully give a reasonably experienced party a run for their money. Also - RosenMcStern, I was about to take pretty much of your design comments on board, before DirkD provided his opus! :happy: Oops - long post. Thanks again to everyone for comments, very cool indeed to have such good feedback. Cheers! Sarah

Hi all, Here's where it starts getting a bit more complex - this is the writeup for the P'Tek (read: Troll or Orc type thing) Darkness Shamaness with bound elemental and demons. You'll notice some new Sorcery Spells (hopefully relatively self-explanatory) and "Demon Powers", which are derived pretty closely from SB5, with new power writeups as appropriate, and one magical item - a "Mana Shard", basically a PP battery. Everything else is straight from the BRP Zero rules book. It's not quite as messy as I'd feared, although there is a lot of info there. Having said that, I've departed from the strict BRP stat block format regarding the POWERS writeup: strictly, you have a POWERS row in the writeup, which then has separate subdivisions for Spells, Mutations, etc. I did try this, but it got horribly messy very quickly, especially when you have Sorcery Spells, Bindings, and "Other Powers" in the same critter. So, I've broken Powers out into their separate headings, so theoretically you'd have sections for Sorcery, Magic, Mutations, Super Powers, and then a catch-all "Other Powers". For the Bound Demons and Elementals I've just kept it as a blanket "Powers" for now, but am wondering if I should change that for consistency. On the whole, I'm not too disappointed with the layout and the info density, but I do think it's rather *long*. Maybe I should roll-up the Elementals and Demons into the parent stat block, rather than giving them separate blocks? You'd lose some GM-friendly granularity like Hit Locs & full Characteristic Block detail if I did that, and would have to refer to the master critter writeups in the Bestiary (or whatever) for skills, attack effects, etc, but you would save a lot of space on the page in a scenario. Anyway, feedback is very much appreciated - I'm just trying out BRP with my own Chronicles campaign right now, and these stat blocks haven't been playtested yet. I'm trying to find a standard format I can use which includes key optional rules and necessary detail without splurging all over the page and using up loads of dead trees . Cheers! Sarah

You're quite right! Unfortunately this forum doesn't let you post table info in HTML, but in its own markup which (AFAIK) doesn't allow col widths or anything that flashy - it was hard put to stick the data in a table at all! My initial question was more regarding the content of the block rather than the specific look n feel in the forum message, in particular with ref to combining optional rules such as SRs and Hit Locs into a standard stat block without eating up too much space. I can certainly stick a line under the weapon table though - that'll look cleaner! If there is a way to pretty up the layout in messages, I'd be very interested. Cheers, Sarah

Thanks for the kind words, guys! Strangely, I seem to be finding critters & NPCs easier to stat up in BRP than in RQ3. Not sure why - it could be my advanced age and obsessive brain - but my hunch is that it's something to do with the Powers system. It's acting as a "special abilities" list for critters with darkvision, etc, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time round, plus the magical abilities (Sorcery and Psychic abilities, in my case) are a lot easier to deploy than the RQ3 magic. I'm going to be creating a P'Tek (Chronicles Troll) Shamaness with a bound darkness demon (and maybe a darkness elemental) and a pile of sorcery spells shortly - that should provide a good shake-out of the stat block & chargen system! I'll post the results here if they look like they might be interesting. Cheers, Sarah

Thanks for the recommendation! To be honest, I've always found the "Orks in Spaaaaaaaaace!" part of WH40K to bring me out in a rash - that plus the "Rather Heavy Gothic Darknesse" bit. Having said that, that was all back in the olden days of Space Marine and Space Hulk and the 1st edition WH40K rules (I'm assuming there have been other editions since then... ), plus having one of our group members who was completely obsessed with the Whole Shebang when it first came out. I'm willing to be reconvinced I'm still toying with the idea of something Cordwainer Smith-ish - it's the best science-fiction I've come across, though you'd probably have to dilute it somewhat to make it accessible! I'd be very interested to see any BRP SF stuff, though - Fading Suns, Dune, whichever. A good BRP-derived space combat system would be cool. Cheers, Sarah

Very cool summary, Jason! I think it also says boatloads about the ease with which BRP can handle a huge variety of settings. It's almost formulaic - stat up critters, powers, equipment, "special organisations" (cults, guilds, etc), and any chargen specifics - and then the rest is actually background. The implications of this are quite cool - with relatively little work you can adapt any existing setting to BRP. I guess we all knew/know this, but actually speccing out the work done makes you realise how "little" work would be required to run, say, Greyhawk, Gamma World, Traveller, using BRP. The game system is very "thin client" indeed! I'm still looking for my all-time perfect SF setting: Dune doesn't quite cut it for me cos I love space-fighter dogfights and trade-based tramp-freighter campaigns. Star Wars... well, maybe. A bit toonish of late with weirdo rubber monsters popping up too often losing some what little hard edge it had left. Traveller - well, space isn't flat. Nuff said. Something Stainless Steel Rattish, maybe... Cheers, Sarah

Hi Jason, Glad to hear Interplanetary is proceeding. Did you ever come across Leigh Brackett's work before? I'd never heard of her, and just got hold of a copy of her "Seas of Mars" in the Fantasy Masterworks series. Haven't read it yet, but it looks like classic pulp-era Sword & Planet stuff. Just thought I'd mention it just in case - I've also just "discovered" Clark Ashton Smith at my wizened age, believe it or not, and am having a ball (not that's he's Sword & Planet, mind ;-)). It's funny - I guess through him being fairly out of print for so long I'd just never come across him before. Same with Leigh Brackett - thanks be for series like Fantasy Masterworks! Cheers, Sarah

Thanks everyone for the ideas and input! My goal at the moment is to have some loose rules in the background for me to be able to use potions in play, rather than immediately having lots of alchemist PCs trying to make potions - I need to work out what potions are and how they work in the BRP rules rather than strictly speaking how to make them. That said, I'm leaning towards a "Science (Alchemy)" skill, and having an alchemical equivalent to the Sorcerous Grimoire where alchemists keep all the formulae for their brews. I've divvied up potions into 4 types: i.) Poisons ii.) Poison Antidotes iii.) Herbal Potions (slow healing, augment certain skills or characteristics, etc) iv.) Magical Potions (potion of flight, etc) Within those categories, I'll create some basic "formula descriptions", analogous to spell descriptions. There'll be a generic "Create Poison" description, for example. Poisons, Poison Antidotes, and Herbal Potions don't require any magical energy to create, just time and the correct ingredients, plus knowledge of the formula and sufficient skill. Magical Potions require the knowledge of one or more Spells, plus may require some very arcane ingredients (eye of medusa, etc), and - depending on formula - will require at least PP expenditure, and maybe even POW expenditure in some cases. Hopefully this should be flexible enough to emulate what a fantasy campaign needs in terms of potions. The standard "Spell Potion Formula" is probably the most important to work up into a formula, as that's the one that's trickiest to tie in with the BRP rules. For that, I'm toying with three ideas: i.) Require PP only, and no permanent POW sacrifice ii.) Require PP and POW sacrifice for a large number of doses iii.) Require an initial POW sacrifice to enchant parts of the alchemical lab to make a specific potion, then PP after to brew individual batches. I'm leaning towards (iii) - it actually follows (more or less) the BRP "Equipment with Powers" rules, plus allows relatively unlimited amounts of potion to be brewed as long as PP and ingredients are available. It also has the added advantageous side-effect of making alchemical labs very personalised and therefore valuable to the individual alchemist. I'll keep brainstorming and post a draft when it's a bit more complete. Feedback is very welcome! Cheers, Sarah

Neither of the supplements are essential for Gloranthan gaming, though they're clearly nice-to-have. A large proportion of the Bestiary is critters from Pamaltela, which means either you don't use them unless your game goes to Pamaltela, or you fudge and use the critters in unusual circumstances in Genertela. Nice to see stats for Slarges, though! The rest of the critters were initially valuable for their RQ3 writeups, as prior to the Bestiary many monsters had only existed with RQ2 stats and had to be converted by GMs. Now that's a moot point - if you have RQ2, MRQ Monsters, etc, you may find you already have lots of the critters already available. Personally, I'd get it (price depending, of course) - just for Gloranthan critter completeness. Elder Secrets is remarkable for the appalling artwork and some really good content. The Secrets book itself contains some excellent essays, though these days you might find a lot of it published elsewhere (GSA, the HQ Glorantha Book, etc). The Elder Races book again contains writeups of Trolls, Elves, Dragonewts, and some cults, etc, which you might find elsewhere, although there are some tidbits which you won't find anywhere else. It's certainly useful for a writeup of how Gloranthan metals and crystals (especially iron) *should* work. I'd grab it, again price depending. Incidentally, have you looked at some of the HQ books, in particular Anaxial's Roster and Introduction to Glorantha? You'd have to more or less write your own stats for the monsters in Anaxials, but it's v. good Gloranthan info. Cheers, Sarah

Hi all, I've been putting together a scenario for my fantasy campaign using BRP Zero, and thought I'd post one of the sample stat blocks, as it seems a pretty good example of how you can include multiple rules options without massive overkill. The following example uses the optional rules for Hit Locations, Fatigue, Strike Ranks, and Separate Attack and Parries. It also retains the default Major Wound score. It doesn't explicitly mention the Skill Cat bonuses, but at this level it doesn't seem relevant - they might already be factored in, they might not. In other words, with this stat block you can pick and choose which optional rules you use - hopefully without too much disagreeable extra text for those who want to play a stripped-down game! Cheers, Sarah (incidentally, a "P'Tek" is a large, cave-dwelling, dark-skinned, darkness-worshipping humanoid similar to a D&D Orc / Goblin or a RQ Troll. The guys in my campaign generally call them "trolls"... )

Hi all, I've been working out how to make magic items using the BRP rules, and also what kind of items the rules-as-written allow. On the whole I've been able to spec up the bulk of the standard fantasy-genre magic items (swords, wands, magic armour, that sort of stuff) - however, on the subject of Potions I've not made much progress. The RAW enable, for example, something like a "wand of healing" (costing permanent POW to create), but currently to make a potion would require the same outlay. I'm aware the BRP rules are just a skeleton, and that genre-specific detail is going to be coming later, but just wondered if anyone had come up with any neat solutions (no pun intended ). I may end up drafting something along the lines of the SB5 Potions skill for use in my own campaign... Cheers, Sarah