It's graphically very interesting, though it doesn't make it immediately clear exactly what it is (it's a RPG) nor how it's played (still don't know).
I'm hoping that close examination of its grunge-magazine aesthetic will reveal its inner nature.
I do really like its presentation, even though I have no idea what's going on.
I think that one of the things that I am most disenchanted with is the underpinning idea that the Underdark is supposedly malevolent, terrifying and dangerous, while simultaneously making sure that none of the things that make it so are at all relevant to player characters of almost any level.
GM: "The darkness enfolds you, cloying, suffocating, claustrophobic....."
Player: "Oh, I have darkvision. Also, I can fly. And make delicious food at will from thin air. And light."
"The Sacred Well of Garlo is an intriguing archaeological site located near the village of Garlo in Pernik District, Bulgaria. Constructed between the 12th and 11th centuries BC, this ancient structure is nestled in a small valley rich with natural springs. The well's design and function bear striking similarities to sacred wells found within the remains of the Nuragic Civilization (1600–730 BC) on the island of Sardinia, Italy."
Also, it is clearly the entrance to an underdark dungeon of immense scope. It's obvious.
These are full of spells and potions and what-not — magical shenanigans for a Fantasy Hero game.
There's nothing in either of them that any half-way competent GM or player couldn't come up with themselves, but it's handy having all the maths already done for you. The spells are designed for their Turakian Age setting, which is their bog-standard high fantasy roleplaying milieu, but there's nothing completely setting-specific there and they could be slotted into pretty much any fantasy campaign.
In truth, I have no particular need for these books, since I haven't run a Fantasy Hero campaign for many years, and to be honest it's not that likely that I will again. But they weren't very expensive, even with the swingeing postage the USPS charges these days, and they add more bulk to my Roleplaying Bookshelf of Doom.
The Hero Games webstore for the 5th Edition stuff is at https://www.herogames.com/store/category/3-hero-system-5th-edition/
This is the King Arthur of Thomas Malory, of the movie Excalibur or the book The Once and Future King, not the 6th century Dux Bellorum who defeated the invading Saxons at Mount Badon. It's medieval, but mythic medieval. Arthur's knights ride around in highly polished 15th century plate armour and have jousts and quests and what-not.
It's a generational game, in which time passes and your character ages and may die, of old age or the sword, and you carry on playing your heir. And so on.
Many, many years ago I was introduced to another medievalist game, Chivalry & Sorcery.
It was developed by a couple of medieval recreationists, and they wanted to be as historically accurate as was feasible in a game that included dragons and goblins and spell-casting wizards. We used it mainly as a resource for prices and wages and things like that, though a few of my friends have run C&S campaigns over the years. I still have a copy of my own around somewhere.
Although the idea of Arthurian knightly roleplaying appealed (and still appeals) to me, I found C&S too dense. And the typewritten text was really small.
Anyway, fast-forward to the present, and I got myself a copy of the Pendragon 6th Edition Starter Set from DTRPG in PDF form, just to have a look at it and see whether or not I'd be interested in playing it. It's only twelve YankeeBucks or so.
As a starter set, it's an impressive piece of work. However, it uses a different task resolution mechanic than any of Chaosium's d100 systems, which is a mark against it in my book, as I was really hoping for something that slotted into the generic BRP ecosystem. I can't really be bothered learning a bunch of new systems any more — it's never really floated my boat, but I was (grudgingly) more open to it in the past.
It looks like, once again, this is an Arthurian game that would mainly be useful to me as a resource for home-brewed Arthurian gaming in another system. Which is a shame really, because what I've seen of it looks pretty good, if I only had the energy any more to figure out a whole new rules system. But life is just too short.
Similarly, I do like Runequest (and the generic nature of the d100 system in general) as a system, but I'm not fond of its attachment to Glorantha and its cults and what-not.
So, I thought I'd give Mythras a go for my fantasy roleplaying,
The Classic Fantasy supplement is designed to make the game feel more Gygaxian, for those who like a heapin' helpin' of dungeoneering in their FRPGin', and the Unearthed Companion extends the power levels available.
I haven't yet organised an actual Mythras campaign, but I do have the glimmerings of an idea on the horizon. What's the worst that could happen?
Because of the unusual format of the layout, the finished book, when the signatures are printed on my A4 laser printer, is only about 148mm square. I've found it to be an unexpectedly comfortable size for a RPG book — it takes up very little room, and doesn't get in the way on the table, while still being pretty readable. The page count could have been dropped quite a bit with a traditional page dimension I think (and by leaving out the huge black toner-eating full-page illustrations that I think are there mainly for padding) but the 240 pages of this one are a manageable size.
I just used the heavy brown manila paper from supermarket bags for the covering, over 1mm grey board (2mm would have been better). I screwed up the paper first and then ironed it out flat again, to get the crumpled surface texture — I think that if I'd also given it an acrylic glaze over the top it would probably look quite leathery. Maybe I'll try that another time.
The rather light 1mm grey board warped quite a bit under glueing. I'll just live with that I think.
The actual publisher's copy arrived unexpectedly early, so I have that now, but this one will be very handy I think, for slipping into a bag or pocket.
I am in the throes of preparation for reviving the mouldering corpse of my old space opera campaign. When it was last active, some considerable time ago, I was using the Hero System 5th Edition to run it. I did like the Hero System in many ways, but it was not the simplest game to run or to play in.
This time I'm planning on using Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying d100 system, though the milieu will remain the Star Hero Terran Empire. I have a d100 sci-fi game, based on the Mythras Imperative rules, called M-Space that I will pull all the character generation and equipment and what-not out of, since all the definition work has already been done there.
Rather than spending hours and hours painting 3-dimensional miniatures for the game, I'm once again making use of Okum Arts paper minis, which are great and cheap and pre-coloured. The pile to the left are all robots; the rest are various humanoids. I'm printing them on some 150gsm inkjet paper, so when folded and glued they make quite a stiff and sturdy miniature, still easily cut out with a little pair of decoupage scissors. Plain 80-90gsm printer paper is usable, but the resulting minis are still very thin even after being folded and glued, so they need card reinforcing strips applied along their bottom edge so that they don't fall out of the standee bases.
The last few months of 2023 I was away from home, due to some family stuff (my mother was dying). After I got home in December, we ran into all the scheduling issues that the Xmas period always brings. And this month, January, is also pretty much a dead loss as various members of the group, for one reason or another, can't play on our normal game night. Me included.
I suspect that the campaign is just dying a death, which is a bit of a pity really. Still, these things happen.
I found my old copy of Runequest. This is the English softcover version of the third edition, produced by Games Workshop back in the day. The day, in this case, being 1989.
I was interested to note just how little of it there is compared with Mythras, which is essentially the latest edition of Runequest. Once upon a time, 96 pages was deemed to be plenty to present a one-book roleplaying system, including monster stats and what-not. Mythras weighs in at 304 pages for essentially the same purpose.
I make no moral judgement one way or the other, though I do suggest that maybe a large hardback costing more than a hundred bucks isn't necessarily as essential to the function of a RPG reference book as publishers these days seem to imagine.
I've spent the last couple of days making some new shelves (the small rimu shelves standing on top of the still small but larger pine shelves) so that I can reorganise Roleplaying Corner.
This is not all of my roleplaying books by a long chalk, but they're all of the ones I consider useful to have right at hand.
It's 400 pages, so quite a job for my elderly Brother laser printer, but I eventually got through it, twenty pages at a time.
I decided to print it myself rather than take it to a printery, because all the printeries want to charge about ten cents per page. However, as it turned out I had to replace two toner colour cartridges in the course of printing, so it would have been cheaper (and a lot less trouble) to have got a professional to do it.
I suppose I would have had to get new toner cartridges eventually anyway, but not quite so soon.
It's a very simple binding: just glued, then drilled and stitched, and glued into card covers. With the stitching, it should be a fairly durable item (I hope). The red outer is just a card slip-cover with a print of the cover art glued in place. The pages are attached to the covers by glued paper strips, but I haven't glued in actual endpapers — someday maybe, but it's not a high priority.
I was poking around on DriveThruRPG and found that they had BRP available by print-on-demand, so I ordered a copy pretty much on a whim. And today (2023-05-17) it finally arrived, with the outer packaging rather the worse for wear.
It looks like the original address label had been pretty well washed away, so in a sense I'm kind of impressed that it got to me at all. Fortunately the contents didn't seem to be badly affected.
So, now I have two copies.
I also find that Chaosium have (or are just about to) release a new edition of BRP, all shiny and in full colour like their other recent releases. Apparently there are a few minor changes in the content, but the main difference is in the presentation. I may or may not get a copy, depending on how much money I have to spare at the time and what sort of mood I'm in.
In general, I find dice towers more a novelty than a necessity, though they can be handy if you're dealing with massive handfuls of dice. They do take up a bit of space on the game table, and I doubt that I'll use it very much, but what the heck. What's the point of having a 3d printer if you don't use it to make pointless crap for yourself?
The original design has a very shallow parapet, and I was finding that unless a degree of care was taken with putting the dice into it, they had a tendency to skip out. So I whipped up an add-on crenelated parapet to deepen the loading well and glued it on top.
I also remixed the whole top floor of the original model, adding the deeper parapet and larger funnel-mouths at the entry of each chute, so there's less flat space on top for dice to inadvertently rest on.
That's also now on Thingiverse at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5814665
It went through several iterations, the latest of which is (I believe) Runequest 6. Mythras, as far as I know, is pretty much RQ6 renamed — there may well be some minor differences; I haven't kept up with the changes in Runequest through the ages.
I just ordered a copy of Mythras, though whether I'll ever actually use it to play a game is uncertain. There were elements of the Runequest milieu that I didn't much like, the heavy emphasis on cults and their relationships being one of them, and I think that when played straight, Mythras carries that on. But I don't know for sure to what extent — I shall have to read the system in more detail.
In common with others of its ilk, it's intended to allow you a "try before you buy" experience. It contains enough information to get into character creation, and to run the beginnings of a campaign.
I guess, if you were willing to put in the work yourself, you could use it as the basis to create your own fully-fledged game, but I think that would be a lot of work to save a few dollars on the complete rules.
There's a companion volume called Classic Fantasy which is basically intended to enable those who want to play AD&D with the Mythras mechanics.
I also ordered a copy of that, because I've found in the past that I tend to end up trying to force whatever fantasy game I'm running into a D&D mould. And that's why I've been running an AD&D campaign for the last few years — because I figured that I might as well just use AD&D to play AD&D.
However, something I don't much like about D&D in any of its manifestations is the way that characters fairly rapidly become enormously overpowered. If you want to play a game in which characters can mow their way through armies of mooks without breaking a sweat, and completely ignore the perils of curses or disease or what-not it's fine, but I prefer a less superheroic campaign style. Unless I'm playing a superheroic campaign, of course.
There's a possibility that a Mythras-based AD&D-style campaign might be a solution. Maybe.
I nabbed the PDF of it from DTRPG because it was on sale for 99 cents, but I really prefer physical books when it comes to RPG manuals. It's available in hard-copy from Chaosium, but they want to charge an additional $US85 for postage, and though I'd like a copy of my own, I don't want it that much. It doesn't seem to be available in print anywhere else: Amazon lists it, but as usual when they're listing a book they can't actually get but don't want to delist, they show it at a massively inflated price, in this case about $350. Absurd.
I know that some people just absolutely love this sort of thing, and more power to them, but I find it actively unpleasant, and it destroys any enjoyment I may be having in the game at that moment. It may be lame of me, but when it comes to this sort of thing I'd much rather just rely on whatever social skills (or lack thereof) are written down on my character sheet and roll some dice.
When it becomes really irritating to me though is when the games master just ignores the character's supposed abilities. If I have a character with a high charisma, or a whole bunch of levels in skills like persuasion or intimidation or just plain outright fibbing, I expect to be able to get some benefit from those stats. Otherwise, why have them at all?
The two-handed sword, for example, is commonly brought up as an example. In real life, they tend to weigh somewhere in the region of seven to ten pounds, though their listed encumbrance value (from memory) is 25 pounds.
Let's ignore the encumbrance value for the moment, since as well as its raw weight that's also supposed to take into account the fact that a two-handed sword is a big, awkward thing to carry around all the time. The minimum strength required just to use a two-handed sword without penalty is (again, from memory) 15.
"15 STR needed just to swing an eight pound sword?" I hear them cry. "Ludicrous! I can swing an eight pound wood axe easily, and I'm puny!"
What these carpers and moaners fail to take into account is that the strength required is not just to lift and swing the sword, but to do that again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. And again. And do that while ducking and dodging and maneuvering for advantage. And do it with enough muscle to be able to steer the thing with enough finesse to ever be able to hit anything, or to defend yourself from being hit. Exhaustion can set in surprisingly quickly, even when using a much lighter weapon than a two-handed flamberge.
Fighting is tiring, is the point, and swords get very heavy very fast.
I bought it pretty much on a whim, more in a collectorish spirit than with any intention to actually make use of it. I got the hardback version because it only cost a couple of bucks more than the softcover.
BFRP is one of the oldest 'retroclone' games out there. It makes use of the d20 Open Game Licence to more or less recreate Old School D&D/AD&D, using some of the D&D3.5e d20 SRD mechanics and definitions. The PDF is free, the physical POD books are sold at cost.
It's nice to have it in physical form. I've had it sitting on my hard drive for years and years.
Now, when I want to find out what stuff our murderhobos can loot from a ship's captain's cabin, and what the name is of the cabin-boy now bleeding out on the cabin threshold for the crime of getting in their way, I can find out with the roll of a die or two. Huzzah.
As I've mentioned before, I've been experimenting with cutting some FDG DragonLock cavern bits off their tile bases, and also with mashing some of them into new forms. Now I've got some off the printer and painted up.
Behind and to the left of the portly friar is one that I've cut a crack through; smaller than the FDG "Small Entrance" wall. The friar himself probably couldn't fit through it, but his companion could probably squeeze past. And kobolds or goblins certainly could swarm through it, if they chose.
The stalagmites in the left foreground have just been stretched out a bit to make an intermediate size between the little ones from FDG, and the giant stalagmite column.
Lastly, I've mashed three wall sections together to make an alcove with a crack at the back. Blender's Boolean operations have improved enormously with recent updates, so this sort of thing is easy-peasy now.
The pieces are quite stable, free-standing, but I've added magnets underneath so they stick to a steel sheet underneath my wet/dry-erase battle-mat in case any clumsy clot inadvertently knocks the table.