I’ve been officially published! Guild Adventurer #2 is now for sale and contains the Selkies Secret adventure that I’ve been working on for ages and finally decided to finish this year. The Guild Adventurer is a 79 page pdf which sells for $8.00, a real bargain.
It can be purchased at: http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=50289

Here’s the advertising text:
The second issue of The Guild Adventurer has arrived!. The Guild Adventurer is a compilation of original adventures and adventure-related material for Rolemaster, Shadow World, Spacemaster, and HARP. In this, the second issue, we have two double-length adventures, two normal-length scenarios and one adventure location:

* “Rose Petals and Snow Lions”, a double-length Shadow World adventure set on the continent of Jaiman, and written by Terry Amthor himself, the creator of Kulthea. Dual-statted for RM2 and RMFRP;
* “The Echoes of History”, an adventure set in the stunning Echoes of Heaven setting (but usable in any world!) by Echoes creator, Robert Defendi. Dual-statted for Rolemaster and HARP;
* “Hunting Season”, a Spacemaster:Privateers adventure by Robert Defendi, author and designer of the entire Spacemaster:Privateers product line;
* “The Selkie’s Secret”, a HARP adventure by Brent Knorr, frequent contributor of articles to The Guild Companion.
* “People, Places and Paraphernalia: Vorlori’s Rest”, an adventure location for HARP by Allen Maher, contributor to the HARP character compilation, Friends & Rivals and to the first Guild Adventurer

with original artwork by Rick Hansen, project artist for Friends & Rivals and Guild Adventurer #1, and layout by Andrew Ridgway.

The Guild Adventurer #2 ransom is now over. 82 pledges were received, which was short of the 100-pledge target, but The Guild Companion will be publishing the second issue of The Guild Adventurer. Now it is just a matter of waiting for the layout and final approval to be done. Stay tuned!
As mentioned previously, I’ve got an Adventure in this issue, it’s the first paid work that I’ve done for an RPG game, so I’m extremely pleased to hear that it is going to get published.

Added a whole bunch of information to the Database version of the ICE Product list, in fact it is probably more up to date than the regular lists. Started using thumbnails that are 100 wide instead of 80, it will take a long time to update them all so they will be mixed for awhile.
Added entries for the PDF and Hardcover versions of the Rolemaster products, still need to go and add in those entries for the other Product Lines.

Guild Adventurer #2 is now up for ransom. It includes an adventure by yours truly, so please pitch in and commit to buy it

Details can be found at:
http://www.ironcrown.com/ICEforums/index.php?topic=4004.0

The December Guild Companion has been posted for awhile now, and amoung other interesting articles, it contains an article that I wrote for playing Dolphins as Player Characters in HARP, admittedly an odd notion, but a GM could also use it as a method of creating some interesting NPC’s for characters that might be adventuring on or under the oceans

The November Guild Companion is now available and contains an article by yours truly on Aquatic Elves for HARP.
Take a peek, and if you feel ambitious, leave a comment
http://www.guildcompanion.com/

I’ve been doing some work on setting up a HARP campaign that would end up underwater. One of the things I want to do is develop Dolphins in more detail as a fantasy race that has spell use. I’m going to be creating some spells specific to the underwater environment, possibly specific to Dolphins. I posted a question about this on the ICE forums to get some ideas

http://www.ironcrown.com/ICEforums/index.php?topic=1127.0

The list of Spells I’m going to start with is:

Replenish Air
Resist Pressure
Retain Moisture
Disentangle
Detect Predator
Locate Food
Sonic Blast
Sonar Enhancement
Water Sheild - Scalable from basic sheild to full sphere
Warm Water / Resist Cold
Bubble Wall
Shell Skin / Coral Skin (similiar to Stone Skin)
Navigation / Location
Create Wave
Absorb Sound

Some of these, or very similiar spells may exist already, next step is to look through the HARP books and see which of these already exist and which I’ll have to create from scratch.

Star Wars has always been one of my favorite settings in which to run Roleplaying Games. With the playtesting I’ve been doing with the upcoming HARP Sci Fi game, I naturally started wondering what it would be like to try and run Star Wars under those rules.
I figured that the major difference between Star Wars and other Sci Fi settings is the Jedi Knights and the use of the Force. If I can handle those in HARP, adapting the rest of the setting shouldn’t be to hard.
I started by posting a question over on the ICE Forums ( http://www.ironcrown.com/ICEforums/index.php?topic=2301.0 ) asking people what they thought the Top 5 Force Powers were.
From that I’ve come up with a list of a dozen items that I’m going to focus on handling. And some suggestions on how to deal with them.
The next step is to look at the existing HARP Sci Fi rules, determine which items are already handled and which aren’t, some of which Nicholas Caldwell, the author of HARP Sci Fi has already pointed out for me

Suggestion - “Power over Weak Minds”
Telekinesis - for lifting/chucking objects around, and choking hapless Empire officers
Enhanced jumping/gymnastics
Precognition
Force Lightning
Projected communication
Living beyond death as a slightly blue glowing ghost mentor
Parry laser beams with your power sword - and aiming them at someone else
Deflecting Blaster Bolts without a light saber (al la Darth) and deflecting Force Lightning (al la Yoda)
Blind Fighting (Guidance by the force - in melee and space fighter piloting)
Detection of / Sensitivity to the Force - “The Force is strong in this one”, “I feel a disturbance in the Force”
Force Shield (When Qui-gon was melting the blast doors with his light saber,the heat had no affect on him)

And, a couple suggestions on how to handle some of them:
Existing Telekinetic effects: Telekinesis & Telekinetic Hand (latter as much inspired by Gil The ARM as Vader)
Telepathy - all there in Field of Telepathy
Force Lightning is Energy Bolt
Force shield (multiple flavors Cyrokinetic Field, Pyrokinetic Field, Kinetic Field, Energy Dispersal)
some of the enhanced jumping could be Psi Agility etc, but not all

Although Precognition is in the rules, you’d probably need a Precognitive Defense discipline, patterned after the Psi Defense Tiering (e.g. +1 per skill rank to DB at Tier 1, +2 per rank at Tier 2, etc.) Similarly Precognitive Piloting, giving bonuses to Piloting skill on same pattern, perhaps.

Yeah, to follow the movie, you’d have a skill “short term precog” which added a bonus to all skills involving reaction time, but likely you’d want to make it more specific skills per Nick to maintain game balance. Unless you made the bonuses tiny, and stacked them. . .

Like
Short Term Precog
Enhanced Reflexes
Spatial Location Awareness

each adding something like +1 per rank to all associated maneuvers

Well, it’s vacation time for me, have a couple of weeks off work and I’m only leaving town for part of one week, so it’s a chance to plan to get more done than I’ll actually have time for

There’s a couple of projects to work on, I’ve got a project for ICE that I spent a good part of today working on, need to do somw more work on that tomorrow too (don’t ask, I can’t tell), but I think the main focus tomorrow will be getting some things done on my HARP Sci Fi Playtest game over at RPGResources. I need to post a summary of the players involved, a summary of the story so far. I definitely need to work on creating the “Psychic Pack Rat” race so I can do up a character sheet for Gustav the rat.
Also need to start a couple new threads for the next part of the story, and come up with a basic map.

The other thing for that site will be to update my character Jordon in the Kraken World game to third level.

Some of my other vacation plans, Thursday will likely be spent at the Calgary Stampede, then take off to Fernie for an extended weekend, leaving Friday and coming back sometime Tuesday. While I’m out there I’d like to finish reading “Deadhouse Gates” by Steven Erikson, then start (and probably finish) reading “The Traveler” by John Twelve Hawks. The problem with “Deadhouse Gates” is that I read the first half of it about a month ago, and haven’t read much of it since, so I’ve sort of lost track of a few things, I might have to back up a couple chapters to refresh my memory. I enjoyed the first book in the series quite abit, and I’m enjoying this one too, but I think he writes the sort of novel that you really need to be able to devote the time to read them from start to finish without too many breaks.

When we are out in Fernie we’ll probably play a couple games of “Killer Bunnies” and hopefully try out the “Zombies” game too, as well as doing a few hikes and maybe some day trips to do some of the mine tours or something similiar. Might do a little work on some parts of my HARP Sci Fi campaign as well.

Once I’m back in town, it will be time for my annual tour of the local used book stores. I like spend a day at least once a year and hit as many of them as I can, looking for interesting novels and of course good finds for gaming items.

Some of the other things I want to get done are to get some of the extra copies of gaming items that I’ve accumulated over the years listed on ebay and see how the selling end of things goes for me. I’d also like to do a little more playing around with WordPress and experimenting with Php and MySQL to see what the best method of converting the product lists to be database driven might be. That will be a really long term project and I don’t really expect to get any real changes going right away. Right now I just need to learn more about using customized fields and Page templates in WordPress and compare doing things that way to doing it as a seperate Database. Since I don’t know alot about WordPress, PHP or MySQL, some reading and playing around will definitely be required.

I’d also like to work on doing up the Aquatic Elf as a race for HARP as a Guild Companion article, as well as doing somemore work on Dolphins as a character (or at leas NPC) race for HARP, complete with spell use and creating several spells unique to the underwater environment. Really part of a larger project for dealing with Underwater in HARP, and possibly Rolemaster as well. Again, something I don’t expect to work alot on on the vacation, but would like to get at least something done on it, even if it’s just collecting the various notes I have scattered all over into one area.

And, mixed in with all of that, there’s some yardwork that I’d like to get done and a garage that is sorely in need of some rearranging and cleaning out.