Shaira

Works fine - you can use the multiple attacks rule, you get crits more often, and generally deal the BEM a whole world of pain I haven't got there with the new BRP yet, so haven't worked through the new perms, but I've regularly played with skill levels in the 100-200% mark in RQ and had a blast. Now, if you *really* want to know how well high-level skills work, ask Simon (soltakss)... There's a campaign that pushed the envelope! Cheers, Sarah

I think it falls down when you try to parry a brontosaur. I don't know what MRQ's position on parrying *enormous* attacks is, but BRP says "you can't parry a brontosaur". Which is fine, except you start getting into the question "well, what *can* I parry, then?", which ends up with everyone learning Dodge 'cos at least that's usable pretty much anywhere and you only need one skill Admittedly the BRP rule works fine as long as you don't split Attacks / Parries (where Dodge is the fallback for all instances where you can't use your generalised Weapon Skill to defend). Personally - all IMHO of course - I think if you *do* split Attacks and Parries, you pretty much have to go down the old RQ rule of allowing a successful parry to block a certain number of points, and the rest get through, but you can try and parry an airliner if you want to - although unless you've got some pretty heavy sorcery going you're going to end up smeared all over the runway... I'm loathe to houserule things, but as I prefer separate Attacks & Parries, I may have to make an exception here... Cheers, Sarah

I just figured they were either from the Bronx, Dublin, or Amsterdam...

That's quite a cool error message they have there... :cool:

Yowza. That's gotta hurt. We feel your frustration, buddy! Your post just made me run off and backup my files onto a memory stick. Losing work like that is a horrible, horrible thing. Good luck getting it all back together! :thumb: Cheers, Sarah

Well, you have a number of side-effects which are built into the rules. For example, with a 260% attack you can attack 5 times a round. You can also parry nine attacks (each one taking a successive -30% parry chance) in a round. You ignore armor nearly 15% of the time, and do heavy damage. With non-combat skills, 260% gives you a huge edge on opposed rolls, where crits trump specials, specials trump successes; if you use the "effect number" opposed roll, where you basically calculate how much you made your roll by, you will always beat someone with 100% in an opposed roll if you both roll successes. Also with "Complimentary Skills", which work similar to HQ Augments, you can get a +52% bonus to affected skills. I'm very interested in skill use above 100%, but am also very happy to see BRP being able to scale at these levels without having to implement a whole new set of rules for high-level skill use. Thus you don't have to specifically *say* that 260% Climb will enable you do achieve near-superhuman feats, but your character will nevertheless be able to routinely scale a castle wall using only his hands (130% chance)! Cheers, Sarah

I think that's a really interesting point. What little combat I have witnessed has rarely been heroic, and in fact rather grubby, primitive, savage and, well, murderous. I remember the hand-to-hand scene in Saving Private Ryan - two guys with no real weapons trying to kill each other. Nothing admirable - just gritty and all rather sad. That's certainly not the paradigm I game in, nor something I'm trying to emulate in my games - great noble battles a la viking sagas, LOTR, etc. Tales of heroism and derring-do, success against impossible odds, saving the world. So you end up with a contradiction: to a certain extent, most RPGs *don't want* super-realistic combat, but rather heroic, feel-good, adventuresome combat. I agree you can use the BRP rules to simulate "realistic" combat, indeed far more than D20 et al; I personally however am not sure in my games that I'd actually want to! Give me the Battle of Pelennor Fields over two guys scrabbling in the mud any day - the characters in my campaigns are Aragorns, Gandalfs, and Frodos, and occasionally Elrics, not Ted Bundys! Cheers, Sarah

I'd definitely second "Master and Margarita" by Bulgakov - there's a cool campaign idea in there if only you can winkle it out, plus of course it's a masterpiece. Tolkien, Le Guin (Earthsea mostly), Leiber, Clark Ashton Smith, the Lovecraft Dreamlands and Mountains of Madness stories, Moorcock's Hawkmoon and Dancers at the End of Time (the latter is IMHO Moorcock's best work), also Stephen Baxter's Time / Space / Origin and Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy. HG Wells' Shape of Things to Come. Also up for mention: Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising sequence, particularly the "Dark is Rising" book itself, CS Lewis' Perelandra trilogy, naturally ERB's John Carter of Mars (particularly the first book), Earth Abides, Alan Garner's Moon of Gomrath, Herodotus Histories, the Thousand and One Nights, and Marco Polo's Travels for some really mad ideas, Journey To The West. Name of the Rose. Larry Niven's Known Space. Non-fantasy: anything by Dostoevsky, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Evelyn Waugh, William Burroughs, Shakespeare. Jane Eyre & Wuthering Heights. Odyssey and Iliad. Diary of Samuel Pepys. Also just reading The Worm Ouroboros by Eddison - still not sure what I think, but I'm still reading so it must be doing something right! Best novel ever? Toss up between Devils by Dostoevsky, Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, and Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. I'll stop now...

This sounds like how it's meant to work in the RAW to me. The riposte rules aren't in BRP Zero. Cheers, Sarah

This is pretty much what I've done with my campaign - I have a couple of monk-type professions who are able to develop "super-human" abilities (martial and otherwise) as they get more powerful. So, for example, the Tiridat Monks of the Tung Mai have "Body Mastery" powers, which are a short-list from the psychic and super powers lists (such as Danger Sense, Defense, Eidetic Memory, Mind Shield, Super Movement, Unarmed Combat, etc). They use their permanent POW to buy these abilities during play. I haven't playtested it thoroughly yet - I can see a particular bottle-neck around the Unarmed Combat super power, which is POW-expensive, but otherwise things look pretty balanced. I think as long as you don't allow absolutely *all* super powers to be available in all situations, they can blend in fine with the other power types. Cheers, Sarah

That looks very, very cool indeed - what an excellent cover. I second Simon - kudos to whoever came up with the concept (and to Paul Carrick for the execution!), it's just perfect, and a great style to it too. Very elegant - just the ticket, it speaks volumes about what BRP is and what it can do. Jason - congratulations! It looks like the 1st edition is finally here! Thanks for all your hard work, patience, and perseverance - top job! Damn, I like that cover. Cheers, Sarah

The Sorcery summoning is basically the summoning rules from Stormbringer 5 (which I believe are more or less the same as Elric!). The Sorcery rules are extremely easy to use, the summoning is tightly integrated, and to be honest from a D&D perspective could just as easily model divine magic as sorcery. If you wanted to, for example, you could have the Magic rules for Wizards, the Sorcery rules for divine magic, and the psychic rules for psionics... and probably the Mutations rules for Chaotic Features if you wanted. The Super Powers rules in a fantasy campaign for me work best as a list of special abilities different monsters or races have (ie for describing infravision, cold resistance, etc). Cheers, Sarah

That's actually really good news. All we need now is some kind of European outlet - as Triff says, the shipping from the States is a killer. I wanted to order Dreamlands last week in the April sale - appx $20 for the book, $25 dollars for the shipping. :ohwell:

Both Poisons and Diseases are handled very generically in BRP, although I would say with some more sophistication than RQ3. I don't own MRQ so can't comment how it compares, but basically Poison has a POTency and a "Speed of Effect" (which effectively determines onset), and either damages (general) Hit Points or specific characteristics, which it matches against in a resistance roll. You get some common real world poisons in a table with suggested POT, effects & side effects, which is nice. Disease is handled via Spot Rules, and has two types: a "bad cold" or "mild flu" level, basically a malaise which is contracted on a failed Stamina roll and costs a couple of Hit Points over a couple of days and which requires increasingly easy daily CON rolls to recover from. The second type of disease is the more serious plague type, which you can only recover from with a specific CON roll, although medical care can help. These are broadly similar to RQ3 diseases, and can kill characters very quickly indeed; a few examples of generic diseases are given, targeting either HP or characteristic points - these are of the "Shakes" and "Creeping Chills" variety. On the whole, the poison and disease rules are quickly usable as is, and adaptable to most genres; additionally, you can derive more complex effects from them very easily. I personally like them, but in general I've always preferred the RQ approach to poisons and diseases - simple & effective. I've recently been looking at characteristic loss from the point of view of disease, poison, and sorcery, and it's actually quite severe in BRP - any characteristic loss is effectively permanent (barring magic, etc), whereas HP loss will heal. Deciding whether a disease or poison attacks HP or a characteristic (or both!) therefore gives you a very easy switch between chronic diseases, lurgies, plagues, etc. Hope that helps, Sarah

My gut feeling is that you're being overly worried. Chaosium seem to manage a pretty decent publishing schedule with CoC, plus they have the option of publishing monographs on certain products, which mitigates their risk and (presumably) time to market. I'm not sure whether all the announced products are going to be full-colour, monograph, or what, but personally I'm cheered that Chaosium are showing such an obvious will to support their new product. The one thing I think that is clear is that BRP will live or die based upon the support material - sourcebooks, settings, and scenarios - that comes out immediately after the rulesbook release. You can't afford not to be planning for that. Remember too that Chaosium haven't committed to releasing all these products all at once on the same day or anything - it's their production pipeline, and they'll doubtless see the light of day "when they're good and ready", or something like. Having said all that, I'm hoping we'll see an increased amount of fan activity and fan publications following the rules release - the RPG market these days seems always hungry for regular activity and updates to generate and maintain interest levels, so fanzines, websites, and so on would be a great way to keep the buzz going between releases. Cheers, Sarah

The distinction you make is quite correct, IMHO - Status measures a *social* construct, Allegiance measures a moral or supernatural one. But actually, how (and indeed if) to use Allegiance is what I'm brainstorming - and frankly having trouble with - at the moment. I'm very wary making the Divine Powers of a deity contingent upon a priest's Allegiance score - particularly as Allegiance as it stands is basically an optional rule. Currently I'm sticking with the BRP rules as written, and if I do utilise Allegiance it'll be for those additional PP / skill points / etc that the optional rules describe. What I *don't* want right now is to put an optional rule in such a central place. Having said that, the scope for using Allegiance in this way is quite promising. For starters, you could say that only characters with 20+ allegiance to a deity can get divine powers from that deity - effectively defining an entry level for a priest, and stopping anyone else from rocking up to a Temple, paying their dues, and getting heaps of divine benefits. But it's this very bluntness and absolute-ness that makes me nervous of using Allegiance too widely. I think it'd also be profitable to see Allegiance in terms of a skill - or indeed a Passion - and perhaps use it to augment other skills at appropriate junctures. "May Thor protect me!" kind of thing. Then - and this is where I blow away the BRP rules completely and am floating free in "making it all up as I go along" territory - you could actually draw an analogy between Allegiance and the various Runic Affinities which the current HeroQuest and some of its previous, BRP-derived predecessors used. So, for example, Allegiance (Babisiya) actually measures a character's tie to the supernatural forces (Glorantha would call it a "Rune") of Darkness; naturally Babisiya the Goddess approves of this Allegiance, but also, when the Allegiance gets powerful enough (say, "Apotheosis" level in BRP - what's that, 100 points?), characters could start deriving / embodying / incarnating their own supernatural powers. And so you get a path appearing towards Herodom / Demigodhood / whatever. Just brainstorming again, but hopefully you can see what I'm stabbing around trying to describe! Cheers, Sarah

Cool summary Frogspawner! PK Games (I think it was) just asked also about Warhammer Companion and whether anyone knew anything about it's "passion"-style rules. I for one don't, and also it set me thinking if there are many games out there which try to quantify passions / traits / allegiances, other than Pendragon & HeroQuest. I'm sure there must be - I just don't happen to own any of them! Might be worth quickly surveying the existing lay of the land before hammering out the BRP possibilities further - just a thought. One other thing occurred to me today which I thought was quite cool. My Chronicles campaign has a pantheon of gods which all have their own jealously guarded sorcery spells (as well as divine powers, but that's a different story). Under "certain circumstances", priests of those temples can gain access to those spells, and even sorcerors who aren't officially members of the temples can gain access, too. Previously I've had no satisfactory mechanic to simulate this process - a bit like the old "satisfy the examiners" thing from RuneQuest, if that means anything. Then, this week, it's occurred to me that Status (Temple) is the perfect skill to use for this. Priests should have a reasonable percentage, unaffiliated sorcerors will want to develop a decent percentage if they're trying to get access to the Temple libraries. So, as an example, Ulega-Bagu the P'Tek Shamaness of Babisiya the Night Hag (darkness goddess) might have Status (Temple of Babisiya) 75%, indicating she's a notorious and very well-placed shamaness with access to many of the Temple's inner circles and secret factions, and can usually get access to any Temple sorcery which is going round. On the other hand, Lord Efe'enand of Palanqa, Aspirant of the Seventh Circle of the August College of the Seekers Beyond the Veil, despite his high rank in his own sorcerous college (Status (Seekers Beyond the Veil) 70%, has only a 25% skill in Status (Temple of Babisiya), and is going to have to do some pretty heavy favours for the Darkness Temple, or bring some pretty heavy bribes to bear, if he wants to get access to that "Summon Umbrai (Darkness Demon)" spell he needs for his next sorcerous working... You get the picture. It looks like the Status skill might be a biggie in my games! Cheers, Sarah Cheers, Sarah

Sounds an absolute blast - congrats Rod! Are there gonna be tons of cartoon-like illos? I remember back in the Good Ole Days all the "funnies" from the DMG (well, I *was* twelve... being able to dress myself was a major achievement in those days... )... plus the "Troll Jokes" from Wyrms Footnotes... there's an ancient and honorable tradition to follow! My big question of course is whether the tiny girl with the unfeasibly ample chainmail bikini will actually be able to continue wielding the six-foot greatsword day in day out with no signs of fatigue or - perish the thought! - muscle development? Inquiring minds with too much time on their hands want to know! Plus, of course, are go going to include creature stats for that critical adventurer sidekick-cum-pet, the Lert? Chalk me up for a copy. Cheers! Sarah

Hi Loz, I think (perhaps quite unintentionally?) BRP has actually ended up being more than the some of its parts with the new edition, and - for me at least - has taken the rules very gently in quite a new direction (new for BRP type games, perhaps excepting Pendragon) with a decent Opposed Rolls system, the Complimentary Skills rule, the Status skill, Allegiance, and (potentially) a disciplined use of Traits (& perhaps Passions). I'm pretty cool with how to deploy all of the above (well, still a bit undecided about the extent of Allegiance) with the exception of Traits. What I'm trying to avoid with any kind of trait-based rules is a system where everyone ends up with Brave 90% and augments their attack rolls with it all the time - in my experience HQ has a tendency to go that way. I'm not sure if there's a simple answer to that yet (apart from "no, you can't do that", of course), but I'm rolling it around a bit and seeing if anything settles out. Good to hear about the Love/Hate rules thing for Mongoose Elric. Are you restricting it to "just" the 2 passions, or also things like Envy, Jealousy, Anger, etc? Somehow I get the feeling that Passions are more manageable and less pedantic in play than Traits - they feel less like "character micro-management", if you know what I mean, and more like broad-brush character "powers" (to overuse the word). The fact they have to be targeted (ie Hate (Lunars) rather than just "Hate") whereas Traits don't to me deepens the role-playing aspect rather than attempts to replace it (which I often get the feeling Traits can do - they can get in the way, anyhow). Cheers, Sarah

When somebody asks you "What are the chances of that happening, eh?", you can usually give them an immediate off-the-cuff answer, to within a few percent... Somewhere, secretly, you have a BRP character sheet where you've tried to work up your own stats... but you probably lied about your STR stat... and probably POW... oh, and maybe INT, too... hey, it's just a game, is'n'it? You have a pair of percentile dice which have all the corners worn off so bad you can't use them anymore, but you keep them - for "sentimental" reasons. Whenever you see a house plan in an estate agent's window, you think "heyyy... I could use that..." and immediately start imagining numbering each room and working out where the secret doors are...

You track your own SANity points on a daily basis.

The more I think about it, the more I think there's a really cool "relationships" system hiding somewhere in here, struggling to get out. First, no - Status skill is *not* the same as SB5 Allegiance. It's actually a skill, and it has two quite different suggested uses. The first of these is a completely linear, absolute magnitude measurement of a character's overall social standing - depending on milieu, Status 10% could mean "peasant", Status 50% "merchant", Status 100% "king". I'll admit I don't like this system - it seems to try to codify something which in game terms probably should be quite woolly ("hey - you get 3 extra Status as a reward for killing the dragon - you're a knight now!"). It could work for games where the social milieu is very abstracted, but personally I deal with social strata differently. The second use of the Status skill is much more cool! :cool: Basically, it measures your relative standing within your peer group. Say you're a peasant (chorus: "I'm a peasant..." ) - you want to go to the local lord and get some protection against the BEM that's plaguing your farm. Does he listen? How influential a peasant are you? That's where the Status score comes in - Status (Peasant) 10% is some antisocial shepherd who nobody really knows that well - Status (Peasant) 90% is Sheriff Jarndyke who always buys everyone drinks at the tavern. So then you can have Status (Temple), Status (Legion), whatever, which can act as Opposed Skills, augment other skill attempts, and so on. I think there's a fair bit of mileage here. Regarding Traits, I've shied away just for now, wanting to avoid the "quantify everything" approach of Pendragon, but I'm tempted by the Heroquest approach of just identifying major traits - maybe "Hate (Lunars) 75%" or some such. I think as one-off abilities, particularly gained through play, they could be useful. I'm a *little* wary of getting down to too much prescriptive stuff for "Rune-level entry" type mechanics just for now, though. So, the "Allegiance (Babisiya)" stat would represent all of the Cruel, Cunning, Vengeful traits rolled into one (nice definition of Babisiya's traits, BTW - you been reading over my shoulder? ). There's a lot of scope for customisation and flexibility here, though - my opinions are subject to change at the drop of a hat! Interesting topic - worthy of its own thread? Cheers, Sarah

Some people love the Allegiance System, some seem to hate it... You have to keep an eye on it, 'cos it can get out of hand quite easily. Basically, you can create an Allegiance to a particular god, principle, moral code, etc, and if you do something significant which embodies that Allegiance you get an increase. So, you could have Allegiance (God of Death) 12, for example. You can then compare that to any other Allegiances you or someone else might have to see how relatively strong it is. It starts getting interesting when you start allowing special effects from Allegiance. As Nick said, you could even allow "inspiring" from Allegiance; even with the BRP rules, you could conceivably use it to augment another skill roll at an appropriate juncture. Also, the Allegiance rules suggest things like getting extra temporary PP or skill points, etc, from your Allegiance, and even becoming a "champion" of a cause or deity. It can be very flexible. I'm toying with Allegiance Powers in my game, wondering frex whether to require a certain degree of Allegiance to a deity before you can use certain divine powers. Kind of like the Rune Priest type distinction. The problem is that quite easily you can make Allegiance a *very* powerful stat, and I'm not sure about the unbalancing effect of that. I get the feeling you'd have to keep a tight lid on Allegiance score increases. If you also use the Status Skill from BRP (which seems to track your relative standing in your peer group(s)) together with Allegiance, you have the makings of quite a sophisticated "relationship" system. As it's presented in the BRP core book, it's very generic, and you'd have to "roll your own" to quite a large extent to determine actual game effects, but it certainly bears thinking about more. I'm definitely going to be testing both out in-game. Cheers, Sarah

Very nice. I'd second Trif's request for a clearer description of the Corva - in the writeup you say they have 2 legs and 4 arms, but the hit location shows 4 legs and 2 tentacles, which makes them a bit confusing to visualise. Also, I was doing fine thinking "these guys are like octopuses" until it seemed they can also speak "sonically" - perhaps indicate how they do this, and perhaps give a biological note. Everything else seems very well derived from established biological principles, it just seemed a bit weird that you've got a squid-like aquatic beastie with a voicebox - I'll buy it, I just want a description! As far as the whole thing goes, though, it's very nice. You get a good SF feel from the character writeup, and the racial background is very alien, which I like (I tend to dislike Space Cats and Space Dogs... - I like my aliens to be ALIEN). I'm intrigued - do humans fit into this milieu? If so, how? What's the campaign flavour like? Cheers, Sarah