seneschal

Pick one and run with it. The point of the contest is that BRP can handle anything you throw at it.

I was living in San Diego, home of Sea World's Shamu, when I began reading The Fellowship of the Ring. Since I was familiar with orcas, I envisioned killer whales running around with swords and helmets. When Tolkien mentioned them having hair, I wondered what was going on. Personally I think my orcas were more fun than his orcs. (Hey, if Runequest can have ducks, for Donald's sake, why not?)

The vehicle is a submarine. Harder to escape than a train, cruise ship, or even an airship. Sabotage consequences are worse; if you sink you might not get a chance to swim. Suspect PCs (and the NPCs they suspect) can't simply dump evidence overboard. It's claustrophobic; harder to escape the assassin/spy/werewolf since there are fewer places to run to. Also, you can throw in leaks, irate merpeople, hungry undersea giants, sea quakes, volcanic eruptions, etc.

So the act of trying to build changed the environment and encouraged predators? How would you explain that to the Council and other interested parties? Eek! Any chance colonists could simply avoid the area until the coral has finished doing its job? Then you can move in and be as eco-unfriendly as necessary (explain to the Jain Alliance that colonists are merely harvesting the Alphas for food).

As many of you know, I'm not a RuneQuest grognard but a newcomer to BRP. I've been a Champions/HERO System fan for 20 years. As I've examined BRP, I have to say that it takes me just as long to create a character with one system as it does with the other. Sure, you can roll up the stats in a few moments (assuming you don't re-roll 'em five times to get a set you like), but assigning skill and powers points is just as laborious with BRP as it is with Champions. The BRP task resolution system feels an awful lot like the HERO OCV/DCV dynamic. Both games use DEX-based combat phases in a 10- to 12-second round. And BRP's POW-powered abilities resemble HERO's END-powered ones. For complexity they're roughly equivalent.

Saw this, rust, and figured you'd be interested. It's an "underwater airplane." Sounds like Varun gear to me! http://finance.yahoo.com/retirement/article/108737/branson-goes-20000-leagues-under-the-Sea?mod=retire-planning

For my kids (now 9 and 13), props are essential. HeroClix (or other) maps for colorful terrain; household toys for characters, monsters and vehicles; lots of opportunity to roll those colorful dice whether it is really necessary or not; they need to SEE it to imagine it. It may be heretical to say so, but BRP wouldn't be my first choice for introducing children to the hobby. Something rules-lite with only 3-4 stats and few skill/power options would be better: Monster Island, the Buck Rogers Adventure Game, Mini Six. But if you're holding their character sheets and narrating/hamming it up a lot I suppose any system could work. Fudge the rolls for them if necessary and keep the narrative moving, don't worry about exhaustion or hit points (or locations). Once they got into it, my kids surprised me with the creative solutions they came up with when brute force failed. Good luck. Hope they enjoy it. My kids have participated in two or three one-three session "campaigns" that they say they've enjoyed but they haven't gotten hooked yet.

Where are they going to put those 10,000 head or all that wheat on Varun? :confused:

Why wouldn't those devout Hindu (or Muslim, or Sikh) colonists simply bring their wives (or husbands), who naturally are also mission specialists? Varun is a dangerous, nasty place despite the balmy climate and habitats are just being set up. No food, living space or patience for non-essential personnel. Plus, based on your organizations thread, the Varun colonists will have plenty of visitors to keep them entertained. >:->

Yeah, this thread reminds me of the old TV show Lost In Space. The Jupiter II crashed on a desert planet and the intrepid Robinson family was forced to settle there. But it turned out to be the most well-traveled out-of-the-way planet in this or any galaxy, with strange visitors dropping in weekly to help, threaten or annoy.

How about the equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency, either as an arm of the Colonial Authority or as a separate entity? Its nosy representatives pop up at the most inconvenient times to make sure that the PCs aren't endangering the local wildlife (even though it has been endangering the PCs), aren't polluting, are constructing habitats, farms and other structures according to strict and arcane regulations that were not written with Varun in mind. The adventurers are about to complete some great, lengthy project that will ensure their survival when a fussy bureaucrat bustles in insisting, "Well, according to Regulation XJ14000-B you just can't do that!" Naturally, the PCs will be tempted to shove Mister (or Ms.) Regulations into the nearest airlock and flush ... but there's a catch. The Agency has the ability to hold up delivery of vital equipment and supplies unless its guidelines are met. So the adventurers must seem to be cooperating with the inspector and following Agency policy whether actually doing so is in their best interests or not.

Frogspawner gave a good overview, and the differences have been debated to death on this forum (check the old threads). Also, take a glance at my side-by-side comparison of BRP Quick-Start Edition and GORE in the reviews section. If it looks like a duck and waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck ... then it's probably a cursed Gloranthian denizen best left alone!

Dolphins are durable opponents. In one of my HERO System games, I had the PCs attacked by a squad of dolphins ... equipped with jet packs and dorsal-mounted rifles. They swam up beneath the ship the characters were traveling on then burst from the waves. A downed dolphin begged for mercy in a Day of the Dolphin type squeaky voice, but the PCs killed it anyway. The brutes! :shocked:

They're bigger than us. They're stronger than us. They're brutal, mysterious savages who ride scary wolf things and can call down the wrath of a tree goddess upon us. And they're in our way. Hmmm ... The only logical solution is to kill them and take their stuff! Yep, RPG convention trumps political conversation every time.

You're welcome! Now, when exactly did you say you were coming to my house to run this campaign?

Gee, if you make Varun much more inhospitable, the PCs would be better off asteroid mining. Re: dolphins. Keep them as NPCs only but perhaps they're a lot smarter than they've been letting on. They've had thousands of years to study humans and learn to resent humans at this point. Now they're on a water world where they have every advantage and the humans have every disadvantage. Payback time! What if the "trained dolphins" are quietly staking out colonies of their own and dealing with the locals in their own way. Maybe those "lost" Terran fish stocks weren't gobbled up by native predators. Maybe the dolphins are setting up their own aquatic herds and plankton farms. When they're ready, they'll abandon those despicable (if useful) land-dwellers to their fate, maybe performing a little well-informed sabotage along the way. >:->

Eek! So there's water but no food? Colonists will essentially have to wreck the native marine ecology to support human life? (Not that they wouldn't do it anyway, but still ...) "Look, Captain Rogers, I know we had a deal and all, but the bank's began to reconsider this whole colonial venture thing ...." Seriously, though. If a planet's got breathable air, drinkable water, and gravity humans are comfortable with, wouldn't the biology of its animals be similar enough to our own to be edible? Assuming they're carbon-based life forms like us and not Trekkish sulfur crystal beings. On the financial angle, the Traveller model is based on the colonization of the Americas: Wealthy individuals and charter companies get government permission to create a new colony and bankroll the venture. Desperate, adventuresome colonists risk their necks in the raw wilderness with little actual supervision or support from the company (since the nearest planet is a month's travel away and the stockholders are even further away than that). The financiers are counting on eventually making a fortune on those crystals and whatever other unique raw materials Varun turns out to provide. They'll provide transport and initial supplies for the colonists but won't be good for much else (except perhaps to dump more people on the struggling colony just about the time the minnow tanks fail).

Hmmm, I always thought the thing that shone about Traveller was its vehicle rules. But I played Classic. If GURPS is too complex, there's always HERO System. Buy your vehicle characteristics and powers just like you would for a character. So far, you've got your dark, cold oceans stocked with warm-blooded arthropods of various dimensions. Anything else? What do they eat (besides adventurers and each other)? Are they nibbling nutrients from those deep volcanic vents you mentioned? That could make a challenge for PCs, who need those same vents to power their new colony. As far as infrastructure, you could always have the PCs being the construction crew, trying to figure out where to build it in the first place. Or the initial survey crew trying to determine if it is worth developing. Aside from a breathable atmosphere and plenty of water to drink, what makes sloshy Varun/Pharos IV attractive to colonists? And if it's a month's travel to the nearest place where they can get help or supplies, how do they get started?

Merry Christmas!

Charlie's Angels: Full Shoggoth?

A quibble I have is that, based on your description of Pharos' volcanic activity, surely there would be the occasional volcanic islet or three. Maybe not a continent. Maybe not even anything as big as the Hawaiian chain. But something. And surely coral (or the local equivalent) reefs and atolls would have sprouted on some of those underwater mountains once they got close enough to the surface. The planet would still be 99.9999 percent water. But there would at least be someplace for weary astronauts to anchor their water-tight spacecraft and start constructing those floating or hovering inflatable docks. Also, on Earth much of the sea life depends upon the relatively warm, shallow water next to continents to sustain itself. That's where the thick shoals of fishes, seaweed, and diatoms grow. The really deep water is pretty much a sunless desert devoid of nutrients except for what bubbles up from the volcanic vents or drifts down from above. If Pharos IV is a deep-water desert, where does the food come from for all your PC-munching life forms? :confused:

Sounds like a spinoff from those sci fi settings you asked input for in previous discussions. If PCs arrive by slower-than-light methods, they're stuck with whatever they have on board whether it is appropriate to the all-water environment or not. They'll have to improvise big time since additional colonists and supplies won't be arriving to help for centuries (if at all). Hope they packed their water wings. FTL allows them the possibility of sending back home, or to another colony, for stuff they forgot. If I remember right, you jumped from water worlds to desert worlds to ice worlds. Does Pharos IV has a really, ahem, erratic climate? Hmmm, marine life goes into hibernation during the dry cycle. Or organisms have an amphibious life cycle; land critters during desert season morph into sea creatures during wet (and mating) season. It's a boom/bust ecology.

So far, we've got Ancient Greece and Indian Subcontinent as the leaders ... so if we can just get Warlords of Alexander (aka Alex Heads East, Hey! Wasn't that a kid's movie a few years ago?) into professional trim, we can cover both in one fell swoop!

I Was A Teenage Space Zombie?

Ancient Middle East. The Maccabean era is filled with evil empires, valorous freedom fighters, labyrinthine political skullduggery. It's the action/adventure of Star Wars and the doom of Greek tragedy all rolled together.