Shaira

Waaah! Mine hasn't even shipped yet! *sob* ;-( Nice one Rod! Go on, tell us all - what's it like?

Scaling systems are unfortunately necessary unless you like rolling hundreds of dice. But, you can probably deal with it in a pretty linear way. Say, have 1 Structural Integrity Point for a vehicle equal to 10HP. Let's say an attack helicopter has 50 SI, which translates to 500HP, and 5 Structural Armour Points (50AP) everywhere except its rotors, which have only 1 (10AP). Let's say you attack the attack helicopter with your 3d6 damage shotgun. On a normal attack (avg 12 damage), you won't damage the copter unless you hit the rotors, when you'll go "ping" and do 2HP (0.2SI) to something which has probably at least 5SI. On a critical, you bypass the armour, and do, say, max damage (18HP / 1.8SI) to the copter's SI direct. Given it's got 50SI, you're going to have to blast 25 shotgun criticals (which presumably hit guidance systems, fuel tanks, etc) before the copter is at 0, unless you manage to hit the rotors every time, in which case 3 good criticals will cause problems. 0SI doesn't mean an explosion, either - it just means the copter stops functioning (for a flying vehicle, this may be academic...). Now, if the copter brings its twin wing-mounted machine-cannon to bear (doing 3d6SI, or 3d6 x 10 HP), it probably isn't going to matter what kind of armour you're wearing - if it hits at all, you're pretty much toast. For Starships, you can go 1 more magnitude up, where one Starship Hull Point (or whatever) = 10SI = 100HP. I've seen games where scaling doesn't translate so neatly, and frankly it's always been a pain.

To be honest I've always thought the BRP experience check system to be the best experience system of any RPG I've come across. Whatever your feelings about the "Skill Check on Success" mechanic, it leads to characters who are relatively specialised in things they're good at, which feels very realistic. I've never felt the need to go for "Skill Check on Failure" - this feels very counterintuitive, and would lead, I'd imagine (I've never tried it), to characters with less specialisation and a greater spread of average to middling skills - not what we find in reality or heroic fantasy ;-) Just my two'penn'orth.

One thing that's worth thinking about when doing Star System design is the amount of cool software that's out there. There's Astrosynthesis, which more or less does 3d starmaps for you, and programs like Fractal Terrains, Worldgen, & some very neat Photoshop plugins like Lunarcell which can create some amazing planetary maps and orbital images. One of my biggest bugbears with Traveller has always been the "space is 2 dimensional" thing - it's just always felt *wrong* to me, especially when so much of the other chrome in Traveller felt *right*. If you can make sure you're Star System Generation rules don't contradict any current science or available cool software, you have something very usable indeed. As far as interstellar travel is concerned, I'm inclined to err on the side of "exciting" rather than "realistic" - although there's certainly a balance. Space Opera by FGU has a cool, very WW2 dogfight, non-vector based space travel system, with the TISA (Transgravitic Interstellar Subspace Anomaly Drive or some such!) or "Torch" drive for sublight, Warp Drives, Nova Guns, and MegaBolt Torpedoes (honest!) which actually all hang together with no more handwavium than Traveller uses - but which feel considerably more fun. 2300AD is very hard-tech on space travel & combat, but a good realistic feel with its "Stutterwarp" drives. And of course Ringworld was very cool with its transparent indestructible General Products Hulls and stasis fields. I think a lot of cherry-picking is in order, depending on the feel you want for your campaign. Which brings me to a question: what do people think, would a SF BRP book be best as a "generalist" book, with lots of modules for people to cherry-pick from as above, or a "setting" book, which makes a set of assumptions about the universe and sticks with those? I mean, star system generation probably can't vary that much, but starships, interstellar travel, and space combat certainly all can.

To be honest in my experience the speed at which POW increases is determined not by how easy it is to get a POW gain roll, but by how easy the roll is to make. Unless you junk the whole experience roll system and do your own thing, the bottom line is that you can only have one experience check per skill / characteristics at any one time, and generally only one per "adventure". If you're campaigning and travelling a lot, you might change that to "one per week". In my experience, this more or less means that if you're out adventuring, pretty much everyone's going to come back with a POW gain roll (I'm talking RQ here), unless for some reason they don't use magic or don't get into magical attacks or spirit combat - in my games you'd have to deliberately try and avoid these things! This meant that at the end of the "adventure", basically everyone would get to make a POW gain roll. Now, *making* the roll, that's another trick entirely... ;-)

There's a case for that, sure. But I LIKE my natural stinginess - it's one of my most redeeming GM qualities. That and my propensity for melodrama and messianic scenario plots... Seriously, it all depends how quick you want your characters to improve. If it's a POW hungry campaign, then by all means make POW gain rolls a bit easier to get.

I think the economic constraints are certainly the way to go with controlling and segmenting the power of AIs. Disregarding the Traveller 1970s SF paradigm, I get the feeling that tech will become so ubiquitous that its power per economic unit (ie cost) ratio will be enormous. This is a bit of an aside (but it fascinates me, so pls indulge ). One of the things that really turned me on about Cordwainer Smith's work was the fact that he really pushed all the classic SF assumptions to breaking point and then went beyond them, so create something totally original. Trying to implement that in a roleplaying setting has been quite a challenge, as RPGs tend to be set in a social and economic reality roughly paralleling our contemporary morals and expectations. Here are a few of the paradigm-breakers which can be very interesting to introduce into a "paradigm shift" SF game: - humans are effectively immortal. Some societies put an artificial cap on this for perceived resource management or psychological health reasons (ie you go bonkers after 800 years of life, so euthanasia then is practical). - AI is at least equal to human capacity, cheap, and ubiquitous. The cosmos is full of sentient beings, many immortal and many in constant fusion with one another. - Linked to the above, human beings no longer perceive of themselves as discrete individuals, confined to one body. You can download your personality into an AI, copy yourself, increase your memory, alter your personality, change your physical form - all cheaply and easily. - Animals can be uplifted to sentience and effectively GMed into people - with some residual animal characteristics, in the same way humans retain primate characteristics. Cordwainer Smith was doing this decades before David Brin - his saga of the Underpeople is great motivational stuff for RPGs! - There is no longer any money. Production of items is automated, and social systems hyperdeveloped. - Interstellar Space is inhabited by enormous beings unconfined by gravity and impossibly fast moving. Spaceships venturing out there don't return. - Therefore, interstellar travel is done by dimension shifting; given that, you don't strictly need a spaceship - or rather, your house could be your ship - you simply shift that. Passenger Liners therefore resemble hotels or small towns, replete with parks and shopping malls. - Some interstellar dimensional travel can be done by the power of the mind only, but it can drive you mad. - Human societies are not Western European societies. Human future history is long, and societies such as Chinese and South American injected plenty of their values into the future human social stock. In many cases individuals are far less important than now. - One last fun point: given a highly polished, sophisticated, technological, safe, secure, near-immortal interstellar society, human beings eventually become very homogenous, then rather dull, and eventually bored and suicidal. So, they elect, quite voluntarily, to deliberately inject danger and unpredictable change back into the mix to keep their edge. They reintroduce economic scarcity, money, disease, aggression. In Cordwainer Smith's novels, this becomes "The Rediscovery of Man", and everyone has to choose a newly reinvented "nation" to belong to. Thus there are New French people travelling between the worlds 17000 years from now and drinking Bordeaux in Bistros on the 4th moon of Beta Hydri VIi . Sorry to digress - hope it was a bit interesting. Whilst I love the Traveller paradigm of SF RPG (which includes Star Wars RPG, Ringworld, and so on), I'm fascinated by the possibilities of a really "out there" SF rpg background! Now - :focus: (yay - get to use that smiley at last!)

I think giving a POW gain roll for resisting enemy magic is definitely the ticket - though I'd only give one if the enemy had a higher POW. I like to be stingy with POW gain rolls, as they're orders of magnitude more effective than skill rolls. You still pretty much end up with one per adventure though.

High Fantasy! I remember that! That had the front cover with the guy with the most unrealistic thighs I'd ever seen... Wasn't there a scenario called Fortress Ellendar also? Actually, if I remember rightly, High Fantasy had quite a neat combat mechanic which I think sort of cropped up later in The Compleat Arduin, but a rather ungranular experience system which bugged me a bit. Blimey... this is turning into a major nostalgia trip!

I know - it's awful, isn't it? I've been gaming for far, far too long, and intend to continue in the same vein! It is funny how the games do date you though - I know so little about games like Exalted, BESM (in fact I find the entire concept of BESM a bit creepy - I lived in Japan for quite some time, and still can't help harbouring a certain image about manga...). But I must admit - mention of The Fantasy Trip & Bunnies & Burrows does probably make me an incredible RPG crumbly! Oh - and I'm still looking for a copy of the old C&S campaign setting "Arden", if anyone ever comes across one ;-) Don't get me started... "in my day..." :eek:

I think another very fruitful aspect of AIs for SF settings is personality. AIs can be given personalities, and even personalities of living (or more likely dead) individuals - possibly even "downloaded" from famous or genius-level people to "preserve" them for posterity. Add that touch of weirdness to the fact that AIs would effectively be immortal, and you can start to see just how strange the future might be... imagine arriving at a Starport, only to find it has the personality of a 2000 year old version of Keith Richards... Naturally the scope for Mad Scientists Taking Over the World is rather spectacular with this type of technology... One thing I do wonder, though (seriously...), is the level of skill an AI should have in the BRP system. Assuming a skill system with no cap (which I would by preference choose, as the only real way to replicate "superhuman" skill levels), how do you decide the limits on an AI's, say, Piloting skill? Presumably you'd have to have some kind of Tech Level cap, but even then you're going to be in the realm of multiple magnitudes without too much difficulty... I dunno, maybe Keith Richards Starport with Missile Attack 400%, Anti-hijack 600% and Crazed Guitar Solo 1200% are the right way to go... You don't mess with those guys... Sarah

Hi Simon, I like your system - particularly the augments. I've been using something similar for general BRP actions, it seems to be a very good addition from the HQ stable of effects. My problem with AIs in general has been they've always seemed too weak - perhaps too slaved to the "1970's sci-fi" Traveller approach to computer hardware, where 1 gig of storage was still hundreds of years away, and the best computers could maybe run 20 programs. Unless you're talking about SF RPG in, say, the next century or so, I reckon AIs are going to be streets ahead of what most SF RPGs say they are. I like the AIs portrayed in the works of Cordwainer Smith. Basically, they're powered by a wafer-thin sliver of laminated mouse-brain (!) with everything else plugged onto a sort of motherboard, and they're easily as intelligent as human beings. In an RPG sense (I've used them in an FGU Space Opera campaign based off Cordwainer Smith's universe), they're essentially completely independent characters, and get treated as kind of heavily-cyborged NPCs. I think if I was BRPing AIs, that's the route I'd take - you'd need to redefine some of the characteristics & so on, but essentially they're free-standing characters instead of hardware. A corollary of this approach is a really productive moral conundrum, namely that as AIs become more and more intelligent and easier and easier to produce, and can be very small indeed, intelligence becomes ubiquitous. Since it's cheap and easy to stick an AI in a microwave oven, people do - with no real thought initially at least for the quality of life of that sentient microwave! Credit cards get intelligent, as do advertising boards, and pretty soon you have this wild and crazy universe where humankind is actually in the minority as far as sentient creatures are concerned. I appreciate it doesn't really match up with the classic space opera assumptions, but it seems a more likely technological future to me. Cheers, Sarah

Currently doing HQ in Glorantha, plus my own Chronicles of Future Earth setting using a BRP/SB5 thing. Significant games played at one time or another (ie campaigns): RQ2/3 (Glorantha) Traveller (classic era, various incarnations) D&D 1e, Blackmoor (First Fantasy Campaign) & Wilderlands / CSIO Space Opera (homebrew campaign) Stormbringer Ringworld C&S Bushido Gamma World (1st and 2nd eds) Metamorphosis Alpha Arduin Grimoire (setting & rules) Fantasy Trip T&T Tekumel (various incarnations) CoC Pendragon Other games played: 2300AD Gangster Hawkmoon MERP Paranoia Games Owned But Not Played: Elfquest Maelstrom Dragon Warriors Car Wars Alternity Bunnies & Burrows Arcanum LOTR RPG Warhammer FRP

Hi Ray - welcome aboard! This place is getting cool indeed - I'd just like to say thanks too for all the cool fun we had with your RQ stuff! Good to have you here, and thanks for the links to Fire & Sword - will definitely be checking that out! One thing I always wanted to know - was Tourney Altar named after you? Always assumed it was...! Sarah

To be honest I've nothing against killing the mad scientist and his evil steam machines, but my problem with Space 1889 scenarios were that they were so linear - terribly so, IMHO. The background was great, although a few clarifications would have been nice (ie what do Martians actually look like - there appeared to be several different versions of each type of Martian, depending on artist), but it was the railroading of the scenarios that meant you basically couldn't run them as written, but rather you had to strip-mine them for sourcebook ideas. No bad thing, I guess most of us do that. But, yeah - something dealing with the Victorian aspect of the setting would have been great - you're right, the printed scenarios were rather... um... basic... Of course, with Interplanetary, I'm expecting to have to traipse half way across the red planet with my trusty sidekick umpteen-legged space dog and unfeasibly long range kill pistol to rescue the hapless but well endowed maiden from the clutches of the Mad Evil Brain-Extracting Scientist any number of times... Or was that the other way round?

Hi Jason, hi all, This sounds great - I've always been a huge fan of ERB's Barsoom stuff, it'll be cool to see finally a game dealing with it on a grand scale! Couple of questions. Do you plan on addressing pre-existing stuff such as Space 1889 in any way? I believe Frank Chadwick still owns the property, but there is still a very sizable fan community out there (out here?) which would probably be quite excited to hear about any possible "Victorian" slant to the Interplanetary sourcebook. I always thought Space 1889 Mars was very, very groovy, as was their version of the Moon, but Venus and Mercury were a bit lacklustre for me - the ERB fan showing through! Second - I don't know how famous this guy is (ie mega or just incredibly ;-) ), but are you looking at any Olaf Stapledon stuff for inspiration? "Last and First Men" and "Star Maker" are 1930's golden age stuff, but with some incredible ideas. They're certainly not planetary romance (in fact, they're hardly fiction at all in the traditional sense), but they're busting with mindblowing concepts ripe for plundering. Just a few thoughts! Clock up another copy sold there!

I'm undecided myself at the moment. I do like the simplicity and Blood & Thunder aspect of the major wound system, but it can all end in tears rather quickly on an unlucky die roll, which can require some drastic GM intervention. I get the feeling it might work quite well coupled with a Hero Point / Fate Point system to downgrade the *splat you're dead* single rolls. But I do like the Hit Locations, too. My old RuneQuest games used to always have someone hobbling around with a badly made wooden leg every now and then - and the walking wounded on the road outside the Pavis gate - oh! heavens forbid! It was always rather fun, in a bloody, sick and twisted kind of way But, it did slow combat down rather, and I did hate having all those "wasted" pages in scenarios filled with monster hit location stats... Like I say, can't make my mind up at the moment.

Definitely option 2 - for pretty much the same reasons as Nick. Base Chance + skill category modifiers + chargen points to distribute (sort of RQ3 / modified SB5) means you can mess about very effectively with species skills and cultural and occupational differences, et al. V.imp for my games. Nice to see the Skill Cats making a comeback. Always was a fan of those. Sarah

I think Elves and Dwarves however much you use them are going to be Tolkien-derived, and therefore produce a Tolkienesque (D&D-esque) atmosphere, especially as Tolkien himself derived his Elves and Dwarves from Northern European mythology, with a bunch of Christian symbolism thrown-in. You could argue Gloranthan Elves and Dwarves are different, but I would argue that they're not actually Elves and Dwarves at all, but rather something completely different - Aldryami and Mostali, with the Tolkien-labels gummed on for shorthand and familiarity. Likewise Elfquest. Don't get me wrong - I *like* the Tolkienesque genres. But other fantasy genres (I'm thinking of Howard, Lieber, and Vance, for example) manage perfectly well without them.

Thanks very much for the preview, Jason - thanks to Charlie too. That looks great - very chuffed to see the page count of the Powers chapter, looks like there's room for a good bit of info there. Also the skills categories being on the character sheet by default - a nice bit of added sophistication without unnecessary complexity IMHO, I'm sure I'll use them. Also liked the section on Chaos Features. Coupled with Mutations, I should have some nasty stuff I can plug into my Chronicles of Future Earth campaign straight out of the box! I'll go back and ruin my eyes a bit trying to read some sections now... But looks very, very good. Can't wait to get my hands on a copy! Cheers, Sarah :thumb:

You know, I may be an old roleplaying fogey these days, but I would love to see the old "All The World's Monsters" see the light of day again. Monster books these days are too po-faced, trying to be zoological textbooks. With ATWM, anything went - you had straight po-faced scientific writeups of giant beasties, and then wild and whacko monsters from just about any source of inspiration - comic books, B-movies, fairy tales, science-fiction, whatever. It fed the imagination and had something for everyone (I still love the "Coachman of Death", if only for the Sleepy Hollow atmosphere). Three books. Everyone contributes something, everyone gets credited. Favourite monsters all over the place. Would be way cool. Now where did I put those writeups for Replicants, Aliens, Daleks, Tusken Raiders and Jawas...? Reckon I can change them names if I have too... >:->

Thanks very much for the answer Jason - that helps a lot, and possibly makes things a bit easier! Looks like I might be rolling my own quite a bit on the Demon side of things - at least it's good having the old SB5 base to work from. One other question occurred to me: the spells in WoW were always very "compressed", ie they did multiple things where other games would have used several separate spells. I think the most extreme example was "Enhance / Diminish", which basically covered 8 different effects (Increase STR, Decrease STR, Increase CON... etc, etc). If you have it cover all 7 BRP attributes, it covers 14 effects! Does this kind of thing still hold with the BRP system? In WoW it was the rationale (AFAIK) behind the fact you could only hold in mind INT/2 spells - you wouldn't really need more than 9 if they were all that multi-purpose! My game world requires much more granularity in its spells, something like RQ or SB, so I'll be splitting the spells back out again and therefore tweaking the INT/2 calc to probably be just INT - it'll more or less amount to the same thing. Just curious! Sarah

Well, I think we agree on the issue of "quality" at least! :happy: There obviously has to be an ideal level - I agree that churning out loads and loads of crap is good for no one apart from the accountants. But take HeroQuest, for example. At the moment I'd say pretty much everything being published is of uniformly high quality - ILH2 Under The Red Moon was one of the best RPG supplements I've ever seen, IMHO. But - they're producing, what, 1 product every year or two, on average? Way too little - almost back to the bad old days of the fanbase keeping the game alive, except Issaries have even jeopardised the fanpubs rather with their intellectual property protection legalese. I think especially if BRP does what it should do, and branch into multiple genres, then you're going to need something a little more than one release every two years (I know that's not what you were saying atgxtg - I'm sure you mean more often than that), no matter how much quality, to generate any popularity or sustainability. There has to be some minimum level of publication, which can include pdfs, fanzine presence, and so on, to keep the game in people's sights. Too little and it just becomes (remains?) a boutique game of minor specialist interest (Tekumel, Jorune - wonderful quality, but...:shocked:) - ironic when it is probably a better contender for global domination in terms of game mechanics than any of the d20 stuff. Personally I think it's best to blast 'em to achieve visibility, and see how it goes. I think most people would like to play a game system that feels supported, with regular coverage and publications, rather than the rare award-winner. That's just my breadhead analysis though...

Hi Jason, I have a question regarding the sorcery rules, which you said were taken from SB5. Do they include Demon Summoning also, with all the various Demon Abilities (like Vomit Acid, all that good stuff), or is it just the spell lists from the Sorcery section? Really looking forwards to seeing the rules! Sarah

I think one of the key aspects of the RPG publishing market these days is churn, and the ability to follow up with supplements, adventures, and so on. No one is going to corner the market with a single rulesbook, no matter how sh*t hot it is - you need follow up, reliably, frequently, and lots of it. I think Mongoose's strategy is churn in spades - often at the expense of quality, to whit the rather nasty MRQ first release, Conan 1st edition, and so on. It's probably considered acceptable loss by a business that, most of the time, gets it more or less right. My gut feeling is that the BRP core rules need to be *right*, ie well-produced & tested, not "broken", and with good production values. Chaosium have always been good at elegant, well-crafted games, IMHO - I don't recall a single one that was ever "broken". Following that, Chaosium would do well to either follow up with a good number of releases - either in full dead tree, monograph, pdf, or a combination thereof, together with a number of strategic partnerships (the old Judges Guild springs to mind) to allow a LOT of stuff onto the market. Allow fan websites and fanzines to spring up, try not to scare off the fanbase with legalese (I won't mention Issaries...) I wont say that quantity is more important than quality - first impressions are very important - but market visibility is key. What I do wonder about is the crossover between the MRQ core rules and the BRP core rules. Products written for the one would be very usable for the other, more or less out of the box. That could work very well if no one gets silly, and, to use a bit of business-speak, create some rather interesting synergies. Just thinking on the fly. Sarah