Thread: Contents of upcoming Magic World Supplements (what has been revealed)

Hi,
I want to make a summary of what we know about the upcoming stuff. Please, correct and improve. I will integrate the info by editing the first post.
Of course, Ben, feel free to reveal us all kinds of exciting news!


1- ADVANCED SORCERY (officially announced) contains: summoning rules and demon powers, demon breeds (from Elric! and Bronze Grimoire), rune magic (BG), necromancy (BG), herbalism (Melniboné), special focus skills (Gods of Law), High Magic (unknown East). That's quite a lot of stuff.

[GM PACK. I guess the screen contains the usual tables etc. I hope it will have cool art (Ben: "I predict you’ll love the external art"). Ben also said it contains a booklet with the RQ Gamemaster Book (RQ3) and a very substantial NPC digest (from all Elric! books). I think this has been divided into two separate products.]

2-MW BESTIARY. I guess it contains monsters. Taken from what sources? Elric books? The old "Gateway Bestiary" for RQ2? Brand new ones?

3-CHRONICLER'S COMPANION. I' think this is the same thing as the GM booklet originally to be part of the GM pack. So, it's RQ Gamemaster Book (RQ3) + NPC digest (from all Elric! books). Plus, Ben said it contains a section on using Allegiance to create cults for MW.

4-CHRONICLER'S SHIELD- The other part of the GM pack.

5-UNTITLED SETTING AND SCENARIO BOOK. Part setting, part scenarios, tied in to the Southern Reaches. It takes a sandbox approach reminescent of Griffin Island. It does not say anything about the world beyond the Reaches, which is lefts to the imagination of GMs.



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Originally Posted by smiorgan

1- ADVANCED SORCERY (officially announced) contains: summoning rules and demon powers, demon breeds (from Elric! and Bronze Grimoire), rune magic (BG), necromancy (BG), herbalism (Melniboné), special focus skills (Gods of Law), High Magic (unknown East). That's quite a lot of stuff.

Essentially, yes. Note that the demon powers were culled from -all- of the Elric! and SB5 supplements. There's no special focus skills, per se, but we do have a new system "Arete", which is based on the old "Land of Ninja" Ki-powers system, but broadened a little bit. It's pretty cool, and gives non-sorcerers something do do with their Magic Points.

Lastly, we pulled all the spells from Gods of Law and Gods of Chaos, and put them in the intro chapter, "Advanced Sorcery".

It really is a pretty massive book. It's one of the reasons I decided to only use the single Sorcery system in the core book. I get annoyed by games where the 'powers' system takes up more than half of the book, especially when an inverse proportion of PCs can actually use the material (D&D and Pathfinder, I'm looking at you...). So, we decided to put one robust system in the core book, and then put everything else in a follow up.

Originally Posted by smiorgan

[GM PACK. I guess the screen contains the usual tables etc. I hope it will have cool art (Ben: "I predict you’ll love the external art"). Ben also said it contains a booklet with the RQ Gamemaster Book (RQ3) and a very substantial NPC digest (from all Elric! books). I think this has been divided into two separate products.]

Yes, and see below.

Originally Posted by smiorgan

2-MW BESTIARY. I guess it contains monsters. Taken from what sources? Elric books? The old "Gateway Bestiary" for RQ2? Brand new ones?

Yes, we pulled all the critters from the Gateway Bestiary that didn't appear in the core rules, and then reskinned a lot of monsters from the Stormbringer and Elric! books. I then dug into Hawkmoon, Elfquest, etc. to pull over anything useful. Finally, I got some guys to write up a ton of new monsters. I'd say it's about 50/50 recycled and new stuff.

Originally Posted by smiorgan

3-CHRONICLER'S COMPANION. I' think this is the same thing as the GM booklet originally to be part of the GM pack. So, it's RQ Gamemaster Book (RQ3) + NPC digest (from all Elric! books). Plus, Ben said it contains a section on using Allegiance to create cults for MW.

Yes. Some stuff was pulled from the GM's book, because it doesn't apply specifically to Magic World (cost to buy pieces of armor in different levels of industrialization), or because it just wasn't anything anyone actually used. The Cults material is really neat. I think people are really going to like it.

Originally Posted by smiorgan

4-CHRONICLER'S SHIELD- The other part of the GM pack.

Yes.

Originally Posted by smiorgan

5-UNTITLED SETTING AND SCENARIO BOOK. Part setting, part scenarios, tied in to the Southern Reaches. It takes a sandbox approach reminescent of Griffin Island. It does not say anything about the world beyond the Reaches, which is lefts to the imagination of GMs.

It's about half setting, half scenarios, and has some of the usual 'extra junk' to use in your MW games: probably some new occupations specific to the southern reaches, a couple of new monsters, maybe some new spells, etc. When we originally conceived of the book, we were using the classic "Keep on the Borderlands" and "Village of Hommlet" as inspiration. We came up with the idea of creating a 'campaign-starter' area, where PCs can begin their adventures, and then detail it, and the immediate surroundings. I can't recall the exact size of it, but we've got a little town that's more important than it's size would suggest, and then maybe 25 or so miles around it.

And in addition to that setting material, there's 5 or 6 full scenarios to use in the area.

Hope that helps!

Originally Posted by zomben

... There's no special focus skills, per se, but we do have a new system "Arete", which is based on the old "Land of Ninja" Ki-powers system, but broadened a little bit. It's pretty cool, and gives non-sorcerers something do do with their Magic Points...

Minor correction - "Arete" does NOT use magic points at all. Although the starting point was Land of Ninjas ki skills (which do use mp) those are explicitly just another form of magic, and I thought it was more interesting and more appealing to have a system that purely rewards exceptional skill. It also provides a method of explaining, stating and allowing characters to create legendary items.

Bit more explanation here - [Magic World] Let's talk about it!

Cheers,

Nick

Originally Posted by zomben

Hope that helps!

This is very exciting. It looks like a really neat, self contained game line. Not that I would not like even more stuff for MW, but the corebook plus these 5 supplements really look like the complete package.

What made me mad about the MRQ1 line was that after several releases it all looked incomplete, missing essential bits.

I really hope the MW line is a smashing success.
Smiorgan

Originally Posted by smiorgan

I really hope the MW line is a smashing success.

Me too!

A plea..... I know MW doesn't use hit locations, but please consider doing an appendice for the Bestiary BRP doesn't have a bestiary and this could fill a big role for both MW and BRP straight

pretty please

As I mentioned when you asked that before, I'm looking into how that can be done. I can probably put together a small appendix listing what creatures in MW use which existing hit chart from the BGB, and then create a few new ones for those that don't have analogues in the existing charts.

I don't know if this would be able to fit into the Bestiary, but worse comes to worst, it could be a freebie download on the website.

Originally Posted by zomben

As I mentioned when you asked that before, I'm looking into how that can be done. I can probably put together a small appendix listing what creatures in MW use which existing hit chart from the BGB, and then create a few new ones for those that don't have analogues in the existing charts.

I don't know if this would be able to fit into the Bestiary, but worse comes to worst, it could be a freebie download on the website.

Would it be that much hard work to fit it into the bestiary ?

I do think it'd be worth doing. Consider: at the moment BRP doesn't have a bestiary, now it's highly unlikely that having published this one that Chaosium are going to do another with with hit locations, strike ranks etc etc just for BRP vanilla. Which means that by default this is pretty much going to be the BRP bestiary. Now consider the idea of hit locations, they are very popular. I think all the Alephtar Games supplements use them. All three Chaosium BRP settings (Trollslayer, Chronicles of Future Earth, Mythic Iceland ) use them. All of the monograph's I own use them. They may be an option but for all practical intents and purposes they are the default setting for BRP supplements. So if this is going to be the only BRP bestiary then it'd be a real wasted opportunity not to put them in. Not only would it appeal to those who use Magic World ( and lets be honest here it does sound like the supplements are going to be pretty damn good ) but It'd reach to a wider BRP audience as well.