[Rq-rules] Re: Continuum 2006/Darkshade Gaming new RQ stock

[Nick.Middleton at invensys.com]

>> Well the new Mongoose will be out then as well. If not then
>> we can still playtest it!
>
>I'll be buying it, finances permitting, but I hope that it is better than
the last playtest version.

I'll be reading a friends copy quite carefully and if by some miracle the
mess that was 1.4 has been transformed in to something that is a
substantive improvement on RQIII/Stormbringer 5 (or is at least "number
compatible") I'll consider buying it. But my scepticism has grown rather
than diminished in the last couple of months.

>> Aaiee! Lost City  of Eldarad! Run away!
>> True. It makes good tinder for starting a fire. Seriously, I remember
>> digging through it looking for material that could be taken out and used
in
>> another setting, and found roughly 1 item that had promise.
>Is it really that bad?

No, but roleplayers like reacting irrationally to things... ;-)

> I recently bought Daughters of Darkness
>(it was cheap and available, what can I say?) and it wasn't bad.
>It wasn't good but it had some scenario ideas that could work in Pavis,
say.
>
>Is Lost City of Eldarad really worse than Daughters of Darkness?

I always rated it as better personally: but it suffers because it is
clearly somebody's homebrew take on the concept of Pavis and the Rubble but
they'd not been able to afford either supplement, so wrote their own
version. There's some OK stuff in there, and it at least feels richer as a
setting than the tawdry dullness of Daughters of Darkness.

>Come to think of it, what are the worst RQ supplements out there? I can
think of a few.
>
>Trolls and Trollkin
>Militia and Mercenaries (if that's what it's called)

Ah, but in the days when most of us DIDN'T have computers pregenerated
stats were a god send. Certainly, the most useful part of my RQII boxed set
was Fangs, and I'd still love to see a software tool that would allow me to
rapidly populate a leader and follower sheet with randomly generated
NPC's...

>Hell Pits of Night Fang (although I ran it in Pavis and it worked OK)

Don't think I have that, although I have picked up some of the other Judges
Guild stuff (Broken Tree Inn, Lei Tabor) and they are pretty dire: if
nothing else, the atrociously low production values make it hard to judge
the content fairly...

>Daughters of Darkness
>RQ3 Character Sheets (how anyone thought it wou ld be a good idea to sell
them, I can't imagine)

But as was pointed out a while back (possibly at RPGNet), some of us have
very fond memories of the GW RQII Character sheets. And the simple fact was
that even in 1984 when RQIII came out, easy access to photocopying was NOT
universal (I had to blag my father into doing it at work, or hope my
brother could afford to abuse the University of Kent's library
facilities...)

I think your proposed list were all pretty weak, but they did have some
redeeming features (if only that they were RQ material at a time when such
material was scarce...) and compared to some of the drivel that has been
peddled for other games, RQ got off relatively lightly I think...

Cheers,

Nick Middleton