Dark Sun RQ was Re: Urgent! Re: [Rq-rules] Re: MERP

[Nick.Middleton at wrsl.com]

>... I always thought that Dark Sun would have been a brilliant BRP/RQ
setting,
>provided someone could solve the psionics issue, hopefully without a PSI
skill.

Err, Spirit Magic? Trained Psionicists are Shaman (probably borrowing more
from RQII than III admittedly), and one would want to hack the spell list a
bit to turn it in to a proper Psi Powers list, but given just about
everyone on Athas has some Psi, RQIII Spirit Magic always looked pretty
close to me...

>I suppose you could do an almost direct conversion, with PSPs being
STR+CON+POW,
>and all of the devotions etc being skills at 1D6%.

I wouldn't try and re-create the D&D Psi systems directly (it's convoluted,
and in the setting was re-written several times), just capture the feel of
mind-powers. The new BRP would also work of course, but I've always thought
one could do a very serviceable job with just RQIII

>There was another conversion as well, I can't remember who it was by, but
it suggested using Spirit magic instead of psionics.

Indeed... Can't for the life of me remember where it is though, and works
web-screening means I can't search until back at home tonight
unfortunately.

>As for converting the monsters, I would use some RQ analogues such as the
giant
>with a few more powers for something like the braxat (Or even the other
giants!),
>and most humanoid monsters would essentially be human stats with a bit of
zing (Belgoi et al).

Besides, with the RQ/BRP Creatures book and a few other BRP resources
(especially Stormbringer/Elric!) it should be fairly easy to knock up
conversions quite quickly, if not actually on the fly.

>I for one would be glad to see it under D100 rather than the dense and
annoying strictures of levels, classes and alignments!

Oddly, Athas always struck me as one of the few settings where D&D rules
intricacy helped a bit, as the setting always had the feel of an underlying
complex cosmology... albeit the cosmology (and meta-plot) as subsequently
detailed turned out to be poo, and the original feel of the tablelands
would be MUCH better served by RQ/BRP gritty edge.

Damn, now I want to try and run RQ Dark Sun again!

;-)


Cheers,

Nick Middleton