Markdoc

Re: Third Magic System (Please Help) And here's a unique and combat-friendly magic system from my current FH game: ========================================== Magic of the Forest Man uses the following rules: Followers of this path do not use "spells" as such - instead they have gifts. All "gifts" must be bought as separate powers. No gift may take the Focus limitation and in general incantations and gestures are not permitted (though some gifts might have them as a required part of the magic - a song of enchantment, for example). Unlike spells, Gifts do not cost Mana - they are a part of the character, in much the same way as a magical creature's powers. All Gifts must cost END. While it is possible to have gifts that have the reduced END advantage, they must at least have the limitation "Costs END to start (-1/4)" in which the END cost is only paid when the gift is used All Gifts must take the limitation "Extra time" - to at least a full phase level (-1/2). All gifts must take the limitation "requires a skill roll" (-1/2). Unlike the magic of the Twelve, this is an EGO roll. It is not a power skill, and is not affected by elemental conjunctions. Finally, all spells of the Forest Man must take the limitation "Independent" (-2). This is a very special aspect of the magic of the Forest Man - when a cult member learns a "gift" from the cult, as part of the ritual, he or she pledges some of their life force, releasing it into the world around them and receives a mark or a Geas from the god. Generally this is related to the gift - a cult member who learned a "Dangersense" spell might receive a geas never to attack a foe from ambush. A cult member gifted with supernatural strength might have the mark of a bull branded on their skin. If the mark is ever lost or broken, or the geas is not obeyed, the gift - and the character points spent on it - are lost permanentl. This is not an extra limitation - it is a way of applying the "universal" limitation without a focus. At the GM's option, a quest might be taken to regain the power, but this is by no means certain. There is one other feature of the Gifts of the Forest Man - just as gifts can be lost, so they can also be stolen, or given away. Again the method varies depending on the gift - a strength spell might be stolen by beating the possessor in a contest of strength - or by killing him and eating his stomach (the source of Strength in cult lore). Finding out how to steal another's gift is rarely easy, though. Although a worshipper of the Twelve might cause someone to lose their gift - by causing them to break a geas, for example - they cannot steal the power unless they are also a worshipper of the Forest Man. In addition, no Gift can have any ranged effect - every Gift originates within the possessor.

Re: Third Magic System (Please Help) And it's been heroified here: http://www.geocities.com/markdoc.geo/Gaming_stuff/Runequest/heroquest.htm

Re: Fantasy Adventures Or Why are we always underground...again Perhaps your room-mates are building their own resonant myth-cycle? According to Joseph Campell, going underground is often equated with entering the otherworld, a realm of mystery. The Hero, who is always male, must penetrate the mysterious other through an opening... If you want a less freudian explanation, dungeons are good for lazy GMs because they channel the players. If you set an adventure in a wood or a city the players may decide to wander in all sorts of directions and do things the GM hasn't planned. If the GM can't deal with that, then the players wander around doing nothing much and get bored. If she plonks them down instead in a 10 x 10 stone passage with a ravenous Bugblatter beast at the other end, the choices are a) Fight the ravenous Bugblatter beast, or run away. Lazy players like this too - they don't have to think about their other options too much since there *aren't* any other options. You can actually use dungeons sensibly - if you use the models in fantasy literature: the mines of Moria, or Thranduil's palace in Tolkien, the palace of the Masters in Martin's Game of Thrones, any number of places in Howard's Conan stories. Of course most dungeon-bash gamers don't. My advice - find another gaming group. cheers, Mark

Re: Changing HERO - What are the limits? That's true - but (for argument's sake if nothing else) I would suggest that that's true of any game, even a highly defined one like D&D - as you noted, shifting a character to a new game always leads to some changes since so much is based on shared group experience. I would draw a line (though a slightly fuzzy one) between characters who would have a different game experience, and those that simply cannot translate without being changed. To stick with SPD as an example, your game and mine both have different SPD rules from the core rules, but they both have a SPD stat which costs the same and I presume they both allow the higher SPD character to act more frequently - or something similar. But I played in a game (actually, with Karl, the same GM who earlier had run Ars for us, who I mentioned before) where we had no SPD stat. It turned out to be a frightful idea and we dumped it after a short campaign but those characters could not have been translated to a standard game without significantly changing them (ie: either giving them 20-40 extra points or carving back their other powers/skills/characteristics by the same amount). It's still a grey area, of course, because people will disagree on what's "unplayable" but it works for me as a rule of thumb - and not just for Hero but for any rule system. cheers, Mark

Re: Hero System design considerations Actually, that's probably where I got it from, then. I don't remember that specific mechanic, but we played quite a lot of Bushido in '81 and '82, so it's probably been lurking down in the woodcelllar of memory ever since. cheers, Mark

Re: Hero System design considerations

Re: Changing HERO - What are the limits? To me there are three defining points. The first is if you can simply give another hero player the character sheet and it makes sense to them: that means no really dramatic changes to the basic system The second is if you can discuss your game without needing lots of extra clarification. The third is if you can take a character from one game and move him to another GM's game without making major changes. To take two examples: in my heroic level games I like combat to be chaotic and a little bit scary - so I randomise the SPD chart. That affects the way combat plays out, but it alters nothing on the character sheet: SPD costs the same, and works the same - SPD 4 gets twice as many actions as SPD2 and 2/3 as many as SPD6. It also doesn't affect rules discussions or the relative balance of powers. So a character from my game could move to another FH game without any changes and vice versa. On the other hand, in a recent thread, Zornwill asked for input on a change to damage reduction and almost everyone reacted really negatively until he explained that he had also altered the way damage and defences interacted. At that point, most people responded that it was hard to say what the effect would be, because it was completely out of their experience. I think at that point you've moved to a game based on Hero system, rather than Hero system, because the changes, while not enormous in themselves are cumulative - no other GM could comment meaningfully on any one of them without knowing about the others. That's also going to change chargen - characters viable in that game would not play at all the same way if shifted to another game and vice versa. In the same vein, I regard Turakian age as "based on hero system" rather than a hero system game because magic-using characters in that setting are so divergent from the core rules they would need to be completely altered to move to a non-Turakian game. Valdorian age by contrast is a Hero setting, because although there are many setting specific and chargen rules, all of them are compliant to the core rules or pretty close. The sorcery favour rules are a little divergent but can easily be made compliant to core rules without greatly affecting the way the character plays - indeed, I have done exactly that for my own FH game. cheers, Mark

Re: Hero System design considerations This I pulled off into a seperate answer because it kind of illustrates my point. We also played Feng Shui a few times but it didn't really have any impact on our style of play because we were *already* using powers in heroic games - and there's not a great deal of difference between "Carnival of Carnage" and "2d6RKA, area effect, nonselective". It just has a cooler name. So all Feng Shui did was give us useful phrases (like mooks and shticks and so on). I can see the impact it might have if you were not used to that sort of over-the-top style of play, though. But again - and here's the point - that's a GM style thing, not a rules thing. I've always allowed powers in heroic level games, and always given bonus points for clever combat maneuvers, so the good players learn quickly to be inventive, and I've always used movement and the environment to effect in combat - complete with plenty of property damage! And I've always differentiated between mooks (what we used to call cannon-fodder) and named characters. So Feng Shui didn't change anything for me - the actual rule differences were largely irrelevant, and the attitudes were the same. It is a nifty setting, tho.... The M&M style hero points thing is a good example - we've never done that, but for some games we adopted the non-renewable fortune points thing from Top Secret. Basically you get so many fortune points at inception and can earn more as you advance. You can use them to dictate any roll or specific event, but once used they are gone forever. You don't have a lot, so people tended to hoard them for when you REALLY needed it. For my own Medieval japanese game, I introduced invented Karma points, which were gained or lost by appropriate behaviour. They could not be used - only accumulated - until you died. Then every positive karma point added 5 experience points to your next character. This was to encourage players - especially samurai, which was most of them - to desire a worthy death. I also like to randomise the SPD chart, although I still use SPD. All of these minor (or not so minor) tweaks work well in specific settings, but they don't affect the mechanics of the game much. I certainly don't think it means you are not playing Hero system, because they sit on top of the rules rather than altering them. To me saying "in this game, you may use hero points - one use per session to perform GM-approved power stunts" is no different to saying "in this game divide the real cost of all powers defined as spells by 3" or "in this game we will use a cap of 12 DC on all attacks" But I don't necessarily think they belong in the basic rules-set. Karma points worked for my Japanese game, but I wouldn't want them in my current fantasy game - they're essentially setting-specific meta-rules. And that's what we have GMs for! cheers, Mark

Re: Hero System design considerations Agreed.

Re: Valdorian Sorcerer Tasks Thread Here's one I am going to use... Go the town of Hounskar and try to win the ritual competition of the Champion of the Butterfly Girl. The basic idea (stolen from the famous Garhound Contests scenario) is that this is an annual re-enactment of a legendary event where suitors of a goddess competed to be chosen by her. It's seven days of competition (based on the legend) to choose the ritual champion of the goddess and involves various feats of strength, endurance and cunning - but also charm and attractiveness. Magic is also forbidden in most cases, so if a sorceror wants to win, he'll probably have to cheat. The NPC contestants certainly will... For Valdorian settings you could probably put it on the border of the Cynthian Lands, which would definately make it major. cheers, Mark

Re: [Character] Jaram Glaive The skills question is simply one of preference - some people like to see lots of things like PS's and KS's to reflect things the players might have learned or know - others prefer to see only what's important on the character sheet. I'm in the latter camp - while I can understand the "detailed description" approach, I like to see the things that can or should come up into play on the sheet - everything else is just annoying scurf. So, for example, I don't require players to buy an AK: for the city they live in (though it could very well be useful, especially for a thief) - most people actually don't know the cities they live in very well and an AK - even at a low level - can give you quite a lot of detailed information. Looked at in that light, the character has what he needs. cheers, Mark

Re: Hero System design considerations From my perspective, there's two issues here and they're bleeding into each other in this discussion. One is the "Hero can build anything" line. While that's mostly true (for many people Hero, does Fantasy better than specialised fantasy systems such as DandD) in some cases it's not. Many of the difficult "how do I build this" questions are on how to recreate specific mechanisms from different games (the magic missile the always hits, for example, or how to simulate level-based advancement). For me there's a difference between simulating a genre (something I've never found to be hard while sticking close to core Hero system) and simulating a game - which can often be quite difficult. The second point is "feel" - and that's totally subjective. Statements like "5 points per d6 feels superhero-ey" or "magic should be mysterious and uncontrollable" to me are unfathomable. While they might be true for others, for me they have no engagement at all. Personally I have no particular reason to believe that magic *should* be mysterious or capricious - but then I grew up reading history books aas much as fantasy, and through most of western history, magicians attempted to lay down the basic rules of magic - to standardise it. Sort of proto-science, if you will. That's doubtless coloured my viewpoint. Now that's not a slam on the original point of view. Just pointing out that it's not an absolute, that it's a matter of opinion and - here's the important part - that matters of opinion are perhaps more easily reflected by GM'ing style. It only becomes a problem if the rules directly inhibit you as a GM. To take one example - in my just-started fantasy game there are three forms of magic. One form is comfortably simple and predicatable. You make a deal with a god - he invests you with powers. As long as you obey the accompanying geas, you get the power. If you are careless, someone else could steal your power. Simple and straightforward. One could say that these are "powers in fantasy game" and therefore inappropriate, but this approach gives exactly the "feel" desired. Cu Cuhulain doesn't need to make a roll to do his mighty salmon leap over Formall's wall nor are his powers mysterious or capricious. He knows exactly what they are and so does everybody else. And the "feel" is in the presentation. In this case, I don't say to the player "1d6 RKE damage shield and LS:immunity to cold". I tell them "The Forest Man offers to change your blood to fire - so that any man who cuts you will burn and you'll never be cold in any weather. But in return, you must pledge never to sleep two nights under the same roof until the Black Hand is defeated." The third style of magic offers a much wider range of powers, and more cheaply. But these are granted by beings from outside the world. The system is based off the Valdorian age magic system with some variations, and the player using this system knows that he gets his powers as part of a deal with a higher power. If he fails to keep his end of the deal, he may become warped, or go mad, or be haunted, or ... something. But he doesn't know exactly what, nor how bad it might be. That also uses exactly standard hero system mechanics, but gives both a different feel. In this case, the player both seeks to serve his patron and fears him - but also realises that his power depends on the Patron. A Patron can be capricious, vindictive or even occasionally generous - encouraging the player to interact with his own powers. Magic - to this player - *is* wild, capricious and dangerous, because much of what might happen to him goes on in the background and only the GM has the numbers. He knows how much damage in general terms his Shadow Arrow spell does. But he *doesn't* know what effect casting it is going to have on him. In short, the player behaves entirely differently and the "game feel" is different. To me, game feel is an example of the GM's art. Rules are only a part of it when they actively inhibit the GM from generating the feel he wants. I haven't yet seen any concrete examples of that in this thread, but it could be they exist - can anyone suggest some? Last of all - there's a third completely unrelated issue: some GM's just love to tinker with rules (Chris and Zorn seem to fall into that camp). Ain't nothin' wrong with that, but GMs who do like to tinker, will do that regardless of ruleset. In that case, you often end up with something that "Isn't Hero" or "isn't D20" or "Isn't VtM". But so what? if the GM and players are happy, that's validation by itself. cheers, Mark

Re: Alien Invasion Also Tyrannids - for those who don't know them - are more suited to this sort of thing than a bunch of Space Marines turning up and laying waste to the place. Nid's are bugs. They don't have guns, per se but acid-sprayers or things that launch flesh-easting bugs. They don't have flying vehicles, but wings, etc. Call them "demons" and no-one would be able to tell the difference, except that instead of wishing to wreak evil, they are just going "Yum! Protoplasm!" cheers, Mark

Re: Players And the Strange things they do.

Re: Growing Up Polytheistic There have been cases in history where polytheistic religions did the "my god is better than your god" thing. Egypt is a case in point, where local minor gods such as Sekhmet - originally a one-city cult - spread over the whole country, due to active efforts by the priesthood to grow their franchise. Osiris replaced Set as the God of Death - and the priests had to retroactively explain that Set was Osiris's son, although earlier they had been enemies and rivals (and Set was older anyway...) and then make up some wierd stories about Set's wife dressing up as Osiris's wife and getting pregnant by Osiris instead (this is before his penis was eaten by a fish) and so on. So people probably believed in all of these, but may have favoured one or two "favourite" deities - or at least the priests did. In late Roman times, people joined cults, which seems to have pretty much soaked up all their worship. Worshippers of Cybele, for example still believed in Jupiter Maximus - or at least sacrified to him on official holy days - but they spent the rest of the time with fellow cult members and according to complaints by more conventional Romans, spent their energy and cash on the cult too. I guess they figured Cybele could give them what they needed so they didn't need to expend effort elsewhere. The cult of Mithras likewise seems to have absorbed a lot of members time and energies. It wasn't just religion but also a network. In some legions, if you wanted to have a decent chance of promotion, you had to belong to the cult, because all the senior officers did. Kinda like the Rotarians, but with more bloodletting. So it is possible to have "commited, evangelical polytheists" - the key is that religion (just like today) is not just about believing in a god or gods: it's also about social interaction, developing a community, social history and welfare networks, etc. The Greeks, on the other hand, never seemed to have gone in for the cult thing so much - they had regional deities (Athena for Athens, for example) but that didn't stop the Boetians appealing to Athena, even when they were at war with Athens. So, in some cases, polytheistic societies were more "all gods". Take your pick, whatever suits your gaming style. cheers, Mark

Re: Herophile Fantasy art

Re: Valdorian Sorcerer Tasks Thread Here's one I'm using in my game. "Knock the head off the statue made by Drass in the Temple of the Twelve in Lannoch" That sounds nasty enough, but on reaching the temple, it turns out that Drass (who worked as part of a team) has been dead for a long time - and no-one knows which statue is his. To find out which of the statues is his, the sorceror is going to need to find some way to talk with Drass' spirit. (or if he is smart and reckless, just decapitate all twelve statues). I'd class that as major, simply because it involves a great deal of work and potential danger, but not guaranteed risk of death (even if caught decapitating a statue in the temple, jail, a severe beating, maybe a branding and a big fine are more likely than death in this game world). cheers, Mark

Re: Fantasy University Floor Plans And I ran a FH game where the players - trapped and faced by certain death at the hands of a rampaging demon - used a magic wand to turn themselves into crayfish and escape DOWN the toilet The lost the wand when they hit the river, and had to spend some time as crayfish trying to retrieve it cheers, Mark

Re: Herophile Fantasy art Actually there's a reason I wrote "just threw together" - the first scene is 100% 3D. The waves, town, mountains, clouds, etc are all models, and it involves a fair number of them (several hundred, in fact). The only photoshop work is the sea-foam. It's more satisfying to do it like that - this is a hobby after all, and I like the challenge of making models and generally messing about trying to make it "look real". But it's also more work - the sea and ship image took two evenings to do, most of which was spent on trying to get a sea that didn't look like curdled jello (and I learned a fair bit, in the process). The Forest Man image, in contrast took about an hour - during part of which I was making dinner. It's a simply a photo of forest plopped on a backdrop, with a couple of tree models and a priest of the Forest Man in the foreground. I didn't even spend very much tme on lighting - all the lighting colouring, shading etc was done in photoshop afterwards. It's the difference between building a movie set and doing a blue-screen shoot, I guess. I *am* pleased with the way it turned out, though! Next image (tonight) will be a Temple and some priests of the other religion. cheers, Mark

Re: Sci-fi wear swords? American firearms fetishism, basically. The US is the only developed country in the world where a discussion about ordinary citizens having access to handguns could be even envisaged. Here you rarely see guns on the street (except on cops, etc who are often armed to the teeth, by US standards), because it's illegal to carry them without a really good reason and you need a licence to get them in the first place. You also need a licence to buy ammo, IIRC. There's no arguments about "second amendment rights" to prevent the powers that be from saying "no firearms". Part-time soldiers do keep their weapons at home, but there are very strict legal penalties and social restrictions which mean they stay there unless they are being used on official ranges . Anybody who takes their Diemaco out for a spot of private practice will - quite literally - face jail time on their next weapon inspection. Bladed weapons, however, are kind of quasi-legal (which is pretty much the same as in the US). If you walk into the local 7-11 (or equivalent) in the US or Denmark, with a sword slung over one shoulder, you could well get into trouble for it. On the other hand in both countries, if you're stopped by a cop who wants to know why and you can show that you're going to weapons practice, or something similar, then you'll basically be OK. Europeans are pretty keen on history and most European cities of any size have re-enactment groups. Copenhagen, which is only a million or so, has at least four which do steel weapons training - Fægtklubben (Fight club!) who specialise in Late Renaissance/Age of kings style fencing (think the three musketeers), a branch of the European Historical Combat Society who focus mostly on feudal/medieval combat (and some of these guys are good - I'm seen them going at it on horseback a couple of times) and at least two viking-era groups (who seem to feature a lot of guys with scars and dental repair work....) cheers, Mark

Re: Herophile Fantasy art Heh. I'll tell you in a couple of days - when I've gotten it worked out myself - it's a new site, to host a game which is just starting up, on space kindly provided by BBlackmoor and nothing's been loaded up as yet. I hope to get it up this weekend. In the meantime here's a picture I threw together last night, for another of the pages... cheers, Mark

Re: Gold!!!! "per kilometre" rates are not really realistic - even today you don't pay based on distance. The factors to take into account are. How hard it is to get there. Passage downstream on a large river? Cheap. Passage upsteam? More expensive. Passage across the Desert of Wailing Souls? Really, really expensive or simply not for sale. How frequently people make the trip. If there are lots of boats or wagons going somewhere prices will be cheaper than if it's one fleet every 5 years. How much hassle it is to accomodate someone. A ship that is carrying grain to X, will be full up and probably won't want passengers unless they pay really well. On the way home, however, unless they are also buying bulk cargo they'll have more space and so will be *looking* for passengers. Only last of all will distance figure - and it's the time taken to get there, not the actual mileage, that really counts. And in pre-industial times that time was really, really variable. I've got a nifty book called "Travel in the Ancient world" which focuses on the Roman era which makes this point. One man's nephew went to Alexandria from Italy by sea and made the trip in about a week (!) - unfortunately all he says is they made very good time. The same trip took him 3 months on the way back. He probably paid more for the home trip since the ships bound out of Egypt would have been mostly full, but still.... Add to this, the fact that fixed prices for travel did not exist back then - you got what you could negotiate - and two people on the same ship could share a cabin and still pay wildly different prices. Sleeping on the deck would be cheaper, so that's a third price. Same if you bring your own food or expect the captain to cough up. So it's hard to give any fixed numbers - it's totally variable. My suggestion is to work out if the trip is hard/unusual or easy and then set payment by what in your game is "expensive" or "cheap". cheers, Mark

Re: Herophile Fantasy art and another - this is just a doodle; playing around with the clothing and jewellery. It's something I often do but I liked this picture enough to keep it. Now that I've got it all fitting and moving properly, I need to make decent textures for it cheers, Mark

Re: Herophile Fantasy art Well then, here's a headline piece from the website for my new FH game. I'm doing one picture for each of the important pages which runs across the top, to kind of set the mood. cheers, Mark

Re: Valdorian Age Campaign A Go! Pre-zacktly. Cheers, Mark