seneschal

Triffids for BRP Triffids are genetically engineered crop plants harvested for the oils in their man-tall woody stalks. They are topped by a flower “head” that contains a deadly poison lash and walk slowly on three thick, flexible roots, tripod-style. Despite their carnivorous tendencies, Triffids were harvested safely by many of the world’s developed nations until an international disaster (meteor shower blinded most of the world’s population) enabled them to escape their pens and reproduce unchecked. In areas where they multiplied without resistance, they quickly devoured most animal life. For plants, Triffids display an uncanny intelligence and cunning. They hide themselves in foliage near the doors and windows of people’s homes, waiting for the inhabitants to open a sash or step outside, or post themselves along roads and walking paths. Once potential prey has been located, they notify other plants by means unknown, with hordes of Triffids literally coming out of the woodwork to surround and capture victims. Triffids’ reproductive parts can lash out to a distance of two meters, usually aiming at the target’s head. Although “thrown” at near-bullet velocity, the pollen pods do little physical damage. However, they smear a sticky, fast-acting contact poison on prey, paralyzing and asphyxiating it so it can be “eaten” by the Triffid’s roots. There is so far no known antidote. Heavy clothing, gloves, and some sort of facial and head covering is often sufficient protection from Triffid poison -- as long as the frond slaps don’t knock a human’s face mask aside to enable skin contact. STR 1D6+8 (12) CON 2D6+3 (10) SIZ 2D6+6 (13) INT 5 (5) POW 3D6 (10-11) DEX 2D6+3 (10) Hit Points: 12 Move: 4 Damage Bonus: +1D4 Armor: 3 (woody stalk) Attacks: Flower Slap 65%, 1D3+1D4, POT 25 poison, takes effect after 1 combat round Skills: Hide 75%, Sense 70%, Stealth 80%, Throw 65%

Also, for genetically modified cornstalks, Triffids were disturbingly clever. They'd hide in the decorative foliage around the doors and windows of people's houses, waiting for potential victims inside to step out or open the sash, then lash out with their poison flowers.

I second the Triffids idea. Zombies have become as overdone as ninjas were in an earlier gaming era. Triffids, like zombies, eat people, travel in increasingly large packs, and tend to be slow movers. On the other hand, they can easily blend in to any environment with foliage (Hide 75%) and can attack at (limited) range with their poison pods, which lash out with enough force to knock an unwary PC off his feet. In the book The Day of the Triffids, simple improvised protective gear (face mask, gloves, thick clothing) was enough to protect against their poison, and a shotgun blast could easily cut one in half. On the other hand, there are gobs of them; how much ammo do the PCs have? Book Triffids were genetically engineered crop plants cultivated for the pharmaceuticals produced in their stems. They were manageable until a meteor shower blinded much of Europe's population, enabling them to escape their pens and reproduce out of control. Movie (1962) Triffids were alien organisms that arrived with the meteor shower and were generally tougher than the literary version. But sea water unaccountably dissolved them into mush (in the book, humans just had to deal with it). In either version, Triffids ultimately cleared areas they overran of most animal life, since all but the smallest critters became plant chow. The Day of the Triffids (1962) - IMDb

Thanks for the update. (Gotta squeeze in Ducks somehow, despite the mixed fan reaction. RuneQuest without Ducks is like McDonald's without Big Macs. Love 'em or hate 'em, they're part of what makes the game different from Brand X.)

But it's not fair to knock dmccoy's Gruff without offering an alternative. BIG Billy Goat Gruff You know the story. After his smaller, younger brothers talked their way past a bridge-haunting troll, the monster confronted Big Billy Goat Gruff when he attempted to cross to eat the fresh, green grass on the other side. The fresh, green troll offered to eat him instead. Big Billy Goat Gruff shook his horns and promptly knocked the troll off the bridge, sending it into the river far below. So, how big and bad does our proverbial goat hero have to be to accomplish this feat? The Big Gold Book gives trolls a STR of 22-23 and SIZ of 26, 3-point armor, and Regeneration. On the other hand, the average troll is slow and clumsy. Our comparatively fast and nimble bovine protagonist could easily catch it off guard, especially if it was in the process of trying to climb onto the bridge. Still, your average petting zoo ruminant isn’t going to be able to get the job done. Fortunately, the same Norwegian mythology that gives us the Billy Goats Gruff tells us that the mucho macho Norse hero Thor had a chariot drawn by – you guessed it – a pair of goats. Naturally, these supernatural beasts had to have possessed beefier (goatier?) stats than your run-of-the-mill barnyard animal. I’ve borrowed elk STR and CON from MurfinMS’s write-up. Goats are also more curious and intelligent than cattle. Thus: STR (3D6+16) 26-27 CON (2D6+6) 13 SIZ (3D6+18) 28-29 INT 5 POW (2D6) 7 DEX (3D6+6) 16-17 Move: 12 Hit Points: 21 Damage Bonus: +2D6 Armor: 1 (hide) Attacks: Bite 35%, 1D3+2D6; Head Butt 40%, 1D8+2D6, Kick 25%, 2D6+2D6 Skills: Climb 65%, Dodge 34%, Hide 60%, Jump 40%, Listen 45%, Spot 30%

The Curse of the Double-Post strikes again! Darn slow Internet connection!

The Mongoose RuneQuest (I) SRD is available for free download from this very site and includes a starting selection of critters. The wiki section contains further creature write-ups done by fans. Also here are links to related games such as Renaissance (if you want to add a little Musketeer flavor to your fantasy) and to various helpful BRP-related web sites. My local game shops (in the central United States) have a similar dearth of BRP material. One doesn't carry it at all, the other has a handful of Call of Cthulhu supplements but not the core book or BRP's Big Gold Book. RuneQuest has disappeared in the wake of the licensing switch-ups.

Thanks. Grrrr, a solution so obvious I didn't see it. It's all about the setup and window dressing rather than the actual stats.

Not necessarily too modern. Scientists used to believe things on Earth burned because of a mythical substance called philogesten (or something similar) existed within matter which had a tendency to spontaneously combust. No knowledge of oxygen at the time, so the plausible-sounding theory was utterly bogus. I take it Phalanos is an alien world with an unbreathable atmosphere. The "magic" masks are ancient aqualung or rebreather equivalents. Assuming it has an atmosphere, are there critters there, and can they endure the atmosphere and gravity of Glorantha?

How would you stat up Arthur Machen/Robert Howard/George McDonald style "little people"? Things That Were Once Men, they have dwindled in size (or SIZ) during their long subterranean exile but have increased in ferocity, decadence, and occult knowledge. They may not even look very human anymore (it varies by author and story) but are much stronger than their child-like statures would suggest. But they still like human women (or men, depending on the fairy's gender).

The challenges of real life have delayed my efforts. But I also got stalled on my write-up of Trap-Jaw for mechanical reasons. The Big Gold Book gives us an excellent cyborg template to start from. However, the superpower rules as presented don't have a provision for gadget pools or variable powers or anything like that to represent the villain's Nasty-Weapon-of-the-Week rotating arsenal. Ideas?

We've had a similar discussion in the superhero thread. As others have said, "pulp" encompasses a variety of sub-genres. BRP's gritty mechanics handle pulp horror (Call of Cthulhu) and pulp fantasy (Conan, that is to say, RuneQuest plus Call of Cthulhu) well. And they'd fit the pulp detective/noir sub-genre (Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Fantomas, the Fu Manchu novels) well, too. But they're less of a good fit for other, more heroic and cinematic, sub-genres. Ace G8, Secret Agent X-1, The Shadow, The Spider, Doc Savage, The Avenger ... these guys fed into and were supplemented by newspaper strips, radio dramas (I Love A Mystery, The Green Hornet, I Love Adventure, Chandu the Magician) and again by the movie serials of the 1930s through the '50s. Throw in early South Seas adventures by writers like Louis L'Amour, too. This multimedia mix of the action/adventure sub-genre is what many gamers mean by the phrase "pulp adventure." In these tales, the heroes often get captured and beat up by the bad guys, but they aren't killed outright (because the Big Boss wants to know what they know before offing them). They think or luck their way out of innumerable deathtraps than can and have killed lesser men (and occasionally, lesser women). And they always manage to pull out the stops to defeat the villains -- and survive. Associates (NPCs in game terms) may die but the heroes and their immediate companions (the player-characters) almost never do, though they escape peril by the skin of their teeth. To emulate this sort of adventure, you would have to use some of BRP's options and tweak the rules a bit (CON + SIZ Hit Points for starters). Now, it is possible to do this as an "attitude adjustment" as others have said. My Classic Traveller games (a system as lethal or more so than BRP) were very cinematic, with my players allowed to get away with all sorts of crazy heroic stuff. But that's because as GM I was bending, breaking, or ignoring the rules to enable them to do so. If we'd played the game as written, the heroes would have quickly perished. My indulgence enabled them to be the Flash Gordon and Captain Kirk types they wanted to be. When we played with other GMs, they quickly became sneaky Harry Mudds in order to survive. Neither play style was wrong, but cinematics weren't supported by the rules as written. It's always assumed that John Carter, Indiana Jones, Sky Captain, The Shadow, Tarzan, James Bond, et. al., could die like any other mortal, but they somehow manage to elude the opportunity in adventure after adventure. To pull off a pulp adventure campaign with BRP, we'd need to find a way to emulate that instead of the old school "die at any moment, roll up a new PC" mentality left over from D&D.

At least, John Carter doesn't. He just wakes up on a different planet. Saw the Disney movie tonight, IMAX 3-D. As all adaptations do, it took liberties with the book's events but was faithful to the spirit of the Buroughs novels. If "suffered" is the right word, it suffered from the same problem as Voyage of the Dawn Treader; Disney script writers felt compelled to produce a master villain to unify all elements of the story rather than let the hero's episodic adventures just happen. In this case, they imported the Therns from God's of Mars as orchestrators of all Barsom's problems -- with Carter's advent messing up their well-laid schemes. Despite pre-premiere concerns about the actors, Carter was sufficiently manly, Dejah Thoris was gorgeous (even if she did possess more brains, martial prowess and clothing than in the books), and the Tharks were beautifully realized. Woola the calot, Carter's Martian watch dog, was both ferocious and adorable. So it was faithful enough not to annoy the purist in me, was well and lovingly done, and leaves things open for a sequel should the film be a winner at the box office.

The John Carter of Mars movie opens in two days. Do you know where your zitidar is? Interplanetary is the BRP supplement that I most anticipate.

Oops! Double post. Darn slow internet connection!

"Players did NOT dig the "junk is loot" aspect and it fell apart sadly enough." The scavenging to survive aspect, more than goofy mutations, really is the role-playing challenge. Especially in the West, surrounded by cheap high-tech consumer goods, it can be hard for players to imagine a rusted toaster or ancient microwave oven as a valuable archeological and scientific find. I guess it would help if they had a patron who was able to repair such things and demonstrate their usefulness (and compensate the adventurers accordingly).

Well done! I like your creature write-up.

I was expecting an authentic troll-trashing sheep rather than a Broo-light. As a certain TV commercial once said, "I work hard all day and all you can give me is a light Broo?"

"Sorry, Seneschal, no onions and cheese, either." Awwwww.

But any entries in last year's BRP adventure contest apparently aren't on the list. At least Chaosium has a busy publishing schedule, 12 books in the pipeline. That can only be a good thing. I'm still eager to see Interplanetary. A revised version of Superworld would (hopefully) end all the debates we've had about powers and campaign possibilities. Magicworld? Eh, BRP already has more magic systems than a Swiss Army knife has gizmos. Why another? A Fifties supplement, with or without Cthulhu, would be fun. "I Married a Teen-aged Communist Monster From Outer Space ... in 3-D!"

Can we have toast, onions, and cheese with that Spam?

That's the long-term question, isn't it? Thought-powered vehicles of all descriptions. Would make driver concentration (and the danger posed by distractions such as smart phones and other devices) all the more important. On the other hand, it might make drunk driving impossible, since a person with booze- or drug-scrambled neurons might not be able to focus enough to move the craft an inch.

We've had mecha and car threads. But what about this? http://www.chaoticmoon.com/labs/chaotic-moon-labs-board-of-imagination/#!prettyPhoto The first vehicle to require a POW roll. Reminds me of the old Clint Eastwood movie Firefox, except you don't have to think in Russian.

I think rust's Picts example is a good one. It's all very well for the Emperor of Gatan to claim sovereignty over the Savage North. But he's a long way off, travel is difficult and slow, and Gatanese courtiers willing to take on the dangerous and relatively low-paying jobs of provincial officialdom are few and far between. As long as the tribute/tax money arrives in a timely manner, the Imperials will happily draw maps depicting the region within their borders and leave the actual territory and its savage inhabitants alone. Of course, the actions and misadventures of your player-characters could change all that. Once they (accidentally) rouse the dragon, (inadvertently) resurrect the sorcerer-king thought laid to rest centuries ago, or send hordes of refugees fleeing into the Empire proper with their carefree pillaging ways, all bets are off.

I recently re-watched the Planet of the Apes with my kids and searched around online for appropriate miniatures. After six pages of discussion, I was curious whether anyone ever did anything with this, and if so, what.