Why Magic World Failed

[Atgxtg]

On 1/31/2021 at 2:58 PM, soltakss said:

The beauty of these is you can write pretty much anything.

OH, well if the powers that bee are okay with there beinga collection of free stats for stuff , then I'd be all for it. Heck I've got a lot of anirmal and vehicle stats from various projects that might be useful to someone. 

On 1/31/2021 at 2:58 PM, soltakss said:

So, there is a lot of overlap and people seem to be OK with that.

THat would make sense. D100 has already had a bit of "bleed through" between game systems. Generally speaking, you can drop a RQ3 bear into Streombringer or CoC without altering much, if anything. 

On 1/31/2021 at 2:58 PM, soltakss said:

Yes.

Hmm, I've got some notes left over from a bestiary product that I did with another poster who I later lost contact with. I think some of the stuff we did, especially in terms of working up general guidelines to scale creatures based on analogs could prove helpful to other GMs who need to stat up some new creatures, and help to put our stats on the same page. That way my Kodiak Bear stats would be the same (or at least very close to) yours or anyone else's. 

On 1/31/2021 at 2:58 PM, soltakss said:

It could be, but doesn't have to be.

Well the closer we can keep it to some Chaosium game or other, the better. No sense changing things if we don't have to. 

[Atgxtg]

On 1/31/2021 at 2:33 PM, rsanford said:

Well Chaosium has allowed a good bit so far.

That's nice. I'm just concerned about stepping on their toes. I mean obviously a beastiary has high potential as commercial product.

On 1/31/2021 at 2:33 PM, rsanford said:

 

And by the way there is a huge beastiary available for MW on this site called The Big Damn Book of Monsters  by Chris Tooley.

Ooh, I'll have to look that up. 

[soltakss]

1 hour ago, Atgxtg said:

On 1/31/2021 at 7:58 PM, soltakss said:

The beauty of these is you can write pretty much anything.

OH, well if the powers that bee are okay with there beinga collection of free stats for stuff , then I'd be all for it. Heck I've got a lot of anirmal and vehicle stats from various projects that might be useful to someone. 

The Jonstown Compendium is for Glorantha.

We would need another community Program for Magic World, or BRP to do this.

[Jakob]

Just to add another "Why I (at first) ignored Magic World" story: I actually thought it was a Magic/Fantasy supplement for the BGB; and since I tend to have relatively little interest in toolbox systems (I do tinker, but I like to start out with something that is playable out of the box), I gave it a pass. Only much later I found out that it was actually a reworking of Stormbringer/Elric! (had I known earlier, I would have ordered it right away.)

[Agentorange]

For me it felt more like lack of support coupled with irrelevance than anything else. i know the production  values weren't great but I can forgive that if the crunch factor is high.

The main thing though was I just couldn't see the point of it. It seemed like a rehash and re issue of the BGB for no apparent purpose. What I would rather have seen was an expansion book for the BGB. Imagine Advanced sorcery but with extra stuff for the other powers from the BGB as well, maybe throw in some geographical , place and seasonal magical stuff Pendragon style as well and that'd have made a cracking supplement. Do a comprehensive  bestiary as well and I'd have bought that.

On the settings front I felt that some of the Monograph settings had the legs to be developed. The Green and Swords of Cydoris spring to mind.I like both of those a great deal. so to sum up, for me more than anything else Magicworld didn't feel it had a purpose.....

 

Edited February 7, 2021 by Agentorange

[Questbird]

9 hours ago, Agentorange said:

On the settings front I felt that some of the Monograph settings had the legs to be developed. The Green and Swords of Cydoris spring to mind.I like both of those a great deal. so to sum up, for me more than anything else Magicworld didn't feel it had a purpose.....

 

Yeah The Green and Swords of Cydoria were two of my favourite monograph settings too (also Rubble and Ruin).

[Chaot]

On 2/7/2021 at 7:14 PM, Questbird said:

Yeah The Green and Swords of Cydoria were two of my favourite monograph settings too (also Rubble and Ruin).

Lords of Tarsa was really good too. Fractured Hopes had huge potential but was too short to due the setting justice.

[Jason D]

On 2/6/2021 at 9:43 PM, Jakob said:

Just to add another "Why I (at first) ignored Magic World" story: I actually thought it was a Magic/Fantasy supplement for the BGB; and since I tend to have relatively little interest in toolbox systems (I do tinker, but I like to start out with something that is playable out of the box), I gave it a pass. Only much later I found out that it was actually a reworking of Stormbringer/Elric! (had I known earlier, I would have ordered it right away.)

Let me know if you should ever want to play some Elric!/Stormbringer. 🙂 

[DimensionalRambler]

If they want it to succeed, they need to continue to support and beef up the BRP SRD, hire some quality artists like Poag, Gary Chalk, etc. and put out some quality, well organized, nicely laid out products with that old-school flair. Plenty of guys in the OSR would be up for producing stuff under the OGL, and BRP could certainly claim its rightful place amongst the titans of the old-school movement. Also, with Call of Cthulhu being the second most played game on Roll20, there are plenty of potential converts that could be lured away from 5E that are already familiar with the d100 system. The customers are out there, Chaosium just needs to improve their marketing game.

[albesias]

We are ready to travel through the multiverse again!

[Jason D]

9 hours ago, DimensionalRambler said:

The customers are out there, Chaosium just needs to improve their marketing game.

You might be the first person to have said that in years. 

 

[Rick Meints]

11 hours ago, DimensionalRambler said:

If they want it to succeed, they need to continue to support and beef up the BRP SRD, hire some quality artists like Poag, Gary Chalk, etc. and put out some quality, well organized, nicely laid out products with that old-school flair. Plenty of guys in the OSR would be up for producing stuff under the OGL, and BRP could certainly claim its rightful place amongst the titans of the old-school movement. Also, with Call of Cthulhu being the second most played game on Roll20, there are plenty of potential converts that could be lured away from 5E that are already familiar with the d100 system. The customers are out there, Chaosium just needs to improve their marketing game.

Thank you for the advice. I agree that if we produce an awesome product by top people and spend a lot of money on art and marketing it, we will increase sales.

[Jakob]

I‘ll risk going on a tangent here:

For me, this is not about marketing at all (and btw., I‘m pretty sure that Chaosium did a superb job when it comes to marketing in the past few years).

I just feel that Magic World is ideally suited to fill something that I perceive as a gap in the chaosium line-up (and in BRP in general): A simple, flexible set of rules that will allow people to just publish whatever scenarios they come up with.

Yeah, I know, we have the BRP SRD. But that one is so bare-bones that it is really hard to use without creating and providing your own supplemental rules to it. Which is fine for people who want to use the BRP SRD to create their own, deep setting, but it doesn‘t really help if you just want to write a niftly little scenario without having to devise major portions of the rules yourself.

I think Jeff Richard mentioned elsewhere on this board that it makes no sense to have something like magic rules in an SRD, because you‘ll have to create those based on your setting, anyway, but that is just one way to look at it; it is true if you want to create a deep, consistent setting. It is not true if your focus is on creating a self-contained scenario that could be dropped into all kinds of settings, leaving the question about how it all fits together to the GM and her or his players. There‘s „Your Gaming World Will Vary“, but there‘s also the more radical notion of „The only gaming world that there is ist the one created while we play.“

The Old School D&D players create all kinds of scenarios and worlds using the highly idiosyncratic magic system of D&D – it might not always be a good fit, but everyone using the same magic system and roughly the same spells means that you can frankenstein all of this stuff together any way you like with no effort at all. Whether the result is beautiful or ugly is in the eye of the beholder, but it‘s nice that it can be done so easily. (At least if you‘re into D&D, which I‘m just not …)

In the same way, people could make the magic system from Magic World work in all kinds of settings or non-settings.

I think Magic World has just the right amount of crunch and summons up the right level of Stormbringer/Elric nostalgia to work as a catalyst for people to create all kind of weird or not so weird BRP mini-settings and scenarios (you could say: a multiversum of them). I‘m not sure if this would be better served by turning the rules part of Magic World into the „fantasy BRP SRD“ or by creating another Community Content Program. Either way, it would be great if there‘d be an invitation to do things with it that goes beyond „we‘re open to it, come ask us“ and sounds more like „We want BRP gaming to thrive beyond the specific settings provided by us, we want people to do all kind of crazy stuff with it, and we want to give you a slightly bigger toolbox for that from now on!“

 

To be honest, I‘d be absolutely happy and stop nagging about this if Chaosium just were to drop the rules text from MW in the BRP SRD, along with something like: „Here‘s the more expansive fantasy version, you can use it under the same terms.“

[DimensionalRambler]

On 2/19/2021 at 5:41 AM, Rick Meints said:

Thank you for the advice. I agree that if we produce an awesome product by top people and spend a lot of money on art and marketing it, we will increase sales.

I sounded like a bit of a dick there, but I really do feel that, having seen what Call of Cthulhu 7th has achieved (plus with the release of the BRP SRD), Chaosium could really eat up their fair share of the fantasy RPG market if they pushed the old-school/DIY RPG angle. I mean, there's a ton of third party DCC RPG stuff being produced, and Goodman STILL manages to sell a buttload of their own stuff. Chaosium has the lineage, they've got the quality systems, and now they've obviously gotten the exposure (2nd on Roll20 is huge). 

I dunno. I'd buy a new fantasy line; especially if it had the vibe and looked like it was going to receive support in the form of high quality modules. 

 

[DreadDomain]

On 2/20/2021 at 2:27 AM, Jakob said:

To be honest, I‘d be absolutely happy and stop nagging about this if Chaosium just were to drop the rules text from MW in the BRP SRD, along with something like: „Here‘s the more expansive fantasy version, you can use it under the same terms

It'd make me happy too.

1 hour ago, DimensionalRambler said:

dunno. I'd buy a new fantasy line; especially if it had the vibe and looked like it was going to receive support in the form of high quality modules

I believe Chaosium might see RuneQuest occupying that spot.

[Jakob]

12 hours ago, DimensionalRambler said:

I mean, there's a ton of third party DCC RPG stuff being produced, and Goodman STILL manages to sell a buttload of their own stuff. Chaosium has the lineage, they've got the quality systems, and now they've obviously gotten the exposure (2nd on Roll20 is huge). 

I dunno. I'd buy a new fantasy line; especially if it had the vibe and looked like it was going to receive support in the form of high quality modules. 

 

I see where you're going with DCC - I do associate a lot of all-out gonzo elements that DCC has strongly with BRP, and especially, Stormbringer. I don't know if it's the same for other people. Stormbringer was really a unique experience for my group back then, it felt like nothing is as expected and everything is possible in that setting, with that rules; so weird stuff like DCC coming out for D&D clones/offsprings but not for BRP is kind of disappointing.

On the other hand, Chaosium has something great - and totally different - going on both with the Jonstown Compendium and the Miskatonic Repository. They might run the risk of watering that down with a less focussed "just all kinds of fantasy" CCP.

Still, I feel someone should try and put some momentum behind the idea of an "Open BRP Multiverse" that taps the Stormbringer nostalgia that is certainly out there and does more with it. It might be happening with OpenQuest, anyway, or maybe with Mythras, but it hasn't yet, so it might as well happen with the Stormbringer/Elric/MW development line of BRP.

Edited February 21, 2021 by MOB

[rsanford]

I wonder if Osprey would be willing to do something like MU with Jackals. It has a lot of the same appeal as Magic World but much better production values. Jackals might be the new Magic World. What do y’all think?

[Jakob]

12 minutes ago, rsanford said:

I wonder if Osprey would be willing to do something like MU with Jackals. It has a lot of the same appeal as Magic World but much better production values. Jackals might be the new Magic World. What do y’all think?

I"m still waiting for my copy, and I'm definitely curious about what it will bring to the table in terms of rules.

[Nick J.]

On 2/21/2021 at 11:50 AM, rsanford said:

I wonder if Osprey would be willing to do something like MU with Jackals. It has a lot of the same appeal as Magic World but much better production values. Jackals might be the new Magic World. What do y’all think?

What makes it, "The new Magic World" in your opinion? I know it's based at least in part on OpenQuest, so I assume that means Total Hit Points, static armor damage reduction, etc., but isn't it fairly well fixed in place as a psuedo-Bronze Age setting game? What does it do to fill the niche that Magic World might occupy as a less complex, general purpose D100, fantasy game?

Edited February 25, 2021 by Nick J.

[Simlasa]

I think Magic World is still 'The New Magic World' as far as I'm concerned... in that I wasn't looking for a replacement.
Also, Osprey seems to only put out further support for a few of their games... Frostgrave being the main one I see. The rest seem to be one-shot rulebooks, which is fine.

[rsanford]

17 hours ago, Nick J. said:

What makes it, "The new Magic World" in your opinion? I know it's based at least in part on OpenQuest, so I assume that means Total Hit Points, fixed armor damage reduction, etc., but isn't it fairly well fixed in place as a psuedo-Bronze Age setting game? What does it do to fill the niche that Magic World might occupy as a less complex, general purpose D100, fantasy game?

Yeah I guess it's according to what your perspective is and what you think Magic World's niche is. I was thinking of the fact that it's a rules light BRP implementation that uses total hit points. It also has a detailed setting, far more detailed than than the one in MW, but you wouldn't have to use it. Plus a big campaign book is coming out in May. I should also mention I really like Sword and Sandals so its a natural fit for me.

Edited February 22, 2021 by rsanford

[Simlasa]

I'm glad to hear Osprey is going to bring out more stuff for Jackals. I'll assume it's all of use for BRP even if not used for Jackals itself.

 

[rsanford]

50 minutes ago, Simlasa said:

I'm glad to hear Osprey is going to bring out more stuff for Jackals. I'll assume it's all of use for BRP even if not used for Jackals itself.

 

Let’s hope so. I preordered so I will know in May (if it is on schedule).

[SDLeary]

3 hours ago, Simlasa said:

I think Magic World is still 'The New Magic World' as far as I'm concerned... in that I wasn't looking for a replacement.
Also, Osprey seems to only put out further support for a few of their games... Frostgrave being the main one I see. The rest seem to be one-shot rulebooks, which is fine.

There is supposed to be a campaign setting for Jackals coming out, but have' t heard of anything beyond that.

SDLeary

Ninja'd again! 🙃

Edited February 22, 2021 by SDLeary

[SDLeary]

Now, apparently removed from Chaosium's site, though still on DriveThru

SDLeary