I own all the Gumshoe stuff and played A LOT Trail of Cthulhu since it was first published - I do not see any trouble using the system in Ashen Stars or any of the other settings. (I have some personal issues with superhero settings, but this has nothing to do with the rules). Gumshoe plays great, easy, fast, very simple system, great for first-time roleplayers but also very good for "professionals".
Here in germany, nobody talked about any satanic influence in gaming back in the early/mid 80s, when I started gaming. RPGs were VERY uncommon and you were usually the only one in town when you started gaming. It took two years before I found some other players who were not the ones I "recruited". While my parents were suspicious about me "not stopping to play games though he grows up", they got used to it over the years, going from criticising to ignoring to accepting and to respecting in the following decades (I guess my enthusiasm and engagement in producing own rpgs, making money with it, organizing some CONs, helping some publishers, etc. helped them changing their mind). I did NEVER stumbled over any religious bullshit concerning my favorite past-time, though sometimes I would like to meet one of those fanatics (being a quite verbal-aggressive atheist ... this would be fun). I never kept my hobby hidden - some people do but I really don't care what co-workers or friends think about it. Once in my life, I had a little weird experience when I had a new job - my new bosses asked me, if I like the new town where I moved into for the job, and if I already met some people. I told them, that I had the opportunity to get to know some other roleplayers in advance via an online message board ... some days later they entered my bureau looking quite frightened, backs to the wall, FAR away from me and asked "<name>, what exactly are you doing in your role playing games?" I told them that we sit around a table, experiencing a story together using dice and pen and paper (and chips and beer). "But" they asked "you are not going outside, wearing costumes?" No, I said, there are those who do, but we are just lazy pen & paper people ... then they told me what the sister of one of them had told them: She was just back from some years in the USA and had heard stories about cat-killing, devil-worshipping, cemetery-going roleplayers who do weird rituals and are dangerous. … if they had heard this lie before my work started, I would probably never have gotten the Job I still have since 14 years …
Stefan Hill wrote:
I would like to play ravenloft true20 this halloween - do you still have your conversion notes?
Stefan Hill wrote:
Ptolus of course. I played long enough (26 years) to improvise any rule, so I don't need a rule book On an island, I will see enough of nature not to play a wilderlands game I will finally have enough time to prepare and reread Ptolus Ptolus has enough inspirational power to drive a campaign for eons :)
Louis Agresta wrote:
Cool! If there just was a way to order the printed Cthulhu Books without such an enormous p&h to europe ... :)
We play gurps traveller twice a month - we use 3rd ed for it. Tried 4 for some time, but all books for traveller we use are 3rd. Gurps is our main system since the mid 90s with all kinds of backgrounds - fantasy, Horror, cyberpunk, timetravel etc. The System works excellent for nearly all backgrounds. Nonetheless we switched in some areas to other systems: trail of cthulhu for cthulhu, d20 and rolemaster for fantasy (kalamar and middle earth).
Cap'n Jose Monkamuck wrote: ...Other than that Rolemaster is insteresting. I'd consider 1d100 to be "one die roll". Some of the rules are clunky, power gaming can go overboard easily and there are a LOT of charts. Also you have a choice between altering the exp rules, or watching people get REALLY upset over kill stealing. Yet the spells are flavorful, the classes are neat the items are cool and the crit effects can just plain rock.... second that - I'm new to Rolemaster (there's a new excellent edition here in germany) but the more I read and play, the better it gets - great game, it's a shame that I haven't played it the last 25 years :)
Adventures on the High Seas (or something like that) was a very nice book. The whole "northern wilderness" stuff is great,too (both books were reprinted in the wolfen empire ... or was it northern hinterlands? forgot...) I have them all, played some and read most of it - and like them all, though I don't like the system any more (we played it some years, but better systems came ...).
BlkTemplar wrote:
I'm thinking about using pathfinder for our new RM campaign, but I fear that Midnight - or more likely MERP will be the "new" background. Are you planning on posting your conversions?
Dragnmoon wrote: with all the people from Europe on these forums.. I thought I would get more then one reply :-p I guess it should not be too hard to find english speaking groups in germany, most of the players understand and speak english. Try to get a Con Kalender and take a look what fits to your region. OR choose a con and ask the guys if they knew if someone plays in english, if you want to be sure. F.i. the last earthdawn con in the Ruhr area had some (as far as I was informed) english rounds. In which part are you? You also can ask the readers of some of the german rpg message boards, if they knew of those round at cons - try tanelorn.net, blutschwerter.de, dnd-gate.de or fundus-ludi.de - or the others you may find in their link lists.
some weeks ago, I stumbled over a copy of true20 - and I am more than enthusiastic about it - feels a bit like "advanced d20 modern" on the first look, though I had no time to collect serious experiences with it. But the system looks very good, illustrations are great, layout is mediocre or sub-mediocre (but still very usable, just boring), value for money is high. I will order the other books as well - and maybe play it in earnest in the following mpnths.
ArchLich wrote:
GURPS Traveller - best system, best "real" technology imho - it suxx enormously at the non-metric system, what a *$%§ idea (cubic-inches makes my head hurt). Mongoose is good, but by far not complete enough - and the layout is one of the worst I have seen in the last years. (except maybe the new judges guild books, they are worse). TNE has a good system, but the background was never my kind of traveller.
For Urban Arcana
For Traveller
For Cthulhu
and some Carpenter Soundtracks and of course a lot already mentioned here.
I'm no closet gamer - neither at work nor private is it possible to hide my hobby. Our house is FULL of games, twice or thrice a week new games arrive at work (better at work than getting them from the post office at weekends), our gaming day(s) are well known for the whole agency (the day "he" has to go "acurate on schedule" to "play these games"). The first days in my job were a bit tricky, years ago. My bosses thought, role players would "run over cemetaries and kill chickens and cats", because they have read it somewhere aeons ago ... but they believed my stories about our games *evil laughter* ah - and I'm a mac user AND gamer - consoles work fine, even if you work with an apple. *throws powerbook to pc-heretics* :) edit: Oh, reading the posts above mine: a nice cthulhu-fish is on my beetle ...
Black Tom wrote:
Thanks I'm a big wilderness fan and Barakus is one of the few Necro Books I don't own (but would like to) - preparing Badabaskor right now for a face2face campaign, somewhere near the citystate otio enjoy the game
We try to play every week - though in reality (the hard reality of working people) we play every 2 or 3 weeks Cthulhu with the brp-rules (currently and for the next years: orient express) -the rules are nice for role playing and interacting, but horrible for battles (runequest3 was better in this), though the "run away" and "get mad" rule is the only we should use :)
we played yesterday (d20 modern urban arcana) - but there's a CON in this town this weekend, maybe I visit it sunday (maybe, because I don't know if I can stand this amount of "vampire-life-angst-nerds" and "schtupid players of schtupid-games who want to tell me all about their characters, though I will not listen to it" on one place ...) :-) Getting old ... edit: europe here, no holiday
Mace Hammerhand wrote:
It's just different, but the magic is the same - you still can talk to producers, you can meet people you meet just 4 days a year, these 4 days, but for 20 years in a row (the producer of the citybooks for instance, some extremely nice british sellers, the guys from the online shop you always order from, the sympathic lunatics from highlander games, Captain Fanen of course, your coworkers for RPGs, you normally never meet in person etc.), or sit at a table for hours after hours playing with complete strangers long and complicated games ... and meet them again one year after ... it's huge, but it's part of my life :)
Archgamer wrote: That would be a reason for me to take 3 days off of work and buy the 4 day pass for the entire Spiel... haven't done that in ages, ) That's my yearly routine for ... 22 years now :-) ok, some years had only two das SPIEL in it, but most had 4. Costs me more than holiday and my car is always too small, no matter which car I use :)
... maybe you should do what I did in study - there was no good convention near my town, the best german closed its doors forever the year before, so I did my own CON :-). I repeated it in the two following years with mixed success (two were well visited, one was not so good visited). Made a lot fun - and the amount of work isn't so high as I expected.
Where in europe are you? In the Ruhr area, western-germany near netherlands there are a LOT of cons the next weekends thru the whole summer. In larger cities there are plenty of gamers - the problem would be how to find them (they tend to hurry away when someone switches the lights on) If you happen to be in germany, send me a message and I will share my links how and where to find gamers.
have it now - it's a nice, black book :-) with ONLY the rules in it, no world/history/flavour/third imperium or whatever. Rules seem to be quite classic with some addenda, but as soon as I know more of them, I will give a note. It looks quite complete (except the flavour) - world building, ship building, etc. all in it.
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