Some of my fellow countrymen still harbour ill-will to our French , but I’ve always had a soft-spot to our neighbours across the channel. And it turns out that the French have a soft-spot for OpenQuest too, with not one but two games based off the OQ SRD 🙂

If you want a copy of the OpenQuest core rules in French, a team from the Le Scriptorum have made your wish come true!

• OpenQuest in French

My thanks go out to the following people involved:
Translation : Arasmo, Mugen, Kurgan
Layout : Etory

There’s also Alamander, which is a complete game with gorgeous art and layout based of OQ with bits of GORE and MRQ1 added.

• Alamander

Back in Feb I wrote a charming little adventure for OpenQuest, called the ‘Road to Hell’. Spurred on by the nastiness that I was creating at the time for Crypts and Things and a huge guilt that I had nothing lined up on the OpenQuest front, I sat down and hammered RtH out.

Currently its a 10 page adventure, a small viscous thing that is designed as a Dark Fantasy adventure, to showcase the Major Mental Damage rules and how to do horror in D100 fantasy. Quite simply play starts with the group on a road to nowhere in the middle of an idyllic countryside, something is spotted off the roadside and they find themselves literally sucked into a small Hell, inspired by the stomach churning blood soaked horror of Clive Barker. Also a classic RQ monster has found its home there and to it is literally Heaven. Oh and I managed to get a reference in to one of my favourite bands, Killing Joke, so all is good on the pop-culture reference stakes too 😉

In playtesting with my home group a couple of weekends ago, the 4 hour game racked up one heart attack, one near death mauling and one death, but for the grace of spending a Hero Point (so for all you hard-core D100 players who refuse to use Hero Points, that would be new character being rolled in your game 😉 ). They beat the scenario eventually, by bringing the ‘gruesome’ and by being even more devious and depraved than the evil inhabitants of the hell, but it was a challenge even for their twisted little minds. One of my player’s Guy said that a group that played it ‘straight’ would get mauled, and I have to agree. While I’m not a fan or creator of Killer Dungeons, I like my adventures to be challenging and push the players. This adventure with its simple premise and twist, hits that for me. Oh and I gave them veteran level characters, best skills 85-100 and 9 pts Magic, and it was still tough 🙂

I’m running it again at Furnace Convention in a couple of weeks time. Art has already been commissioned, so some time before Xmas it will get pdf release.

I’ve had a couple of folk ask me if the lovely character sheet that Andrew Farman did for OpenQuest final was available for download.

I had a quiet moment last night and uploaded the character sheet.

Its now in the downloads section, listed as “OpenQuest character sheet v2 ”

https://d101games.com/downloads

Just posted by Ken Walton one half of Cakebread and Walton who publish have just posted this gem that warms the cockles of my dark soul today 🙂

In brief Clockwork and Chivalry getting a second edition using a new system based off OpenQuest called Renaissance, with lots of tweaks and rules changes (such as blackpowder guns, careers and factions rules). Not a lot of people know this but C&C started of as a OQ based game, until Cakebread & Walton got a MRQ2 license, so for me its like the game is coming home 🙂

But enough of my wittering….here’s the full announcement from Ken.

1645: England has descended into civil war. Prince Rupert and his Alchemist-Cavaliers fight on behalf of their exiled king against the clockwork war machines of Oliver Cromwell and the New Model Army. Between them, a host of political and religious factions struggle for survival.

First launched to critical acclaim as a series of supplements for RuneQuest II (“The best British fantasy setting since WFRP 1st edition” said Newt Newport), Clockwork & Chivalry now returns in a standalone 2nd edition featuring the new Renaissance rules, a D100 open gaming system based on OpenQuest and compatible with 1st edition supplements. Fast, brutal, and geared up to a world of black-powder weapons and political machinations, the new rules will also be the bedrock of a series of fantasy and historical RPGs forthcoming from Cakebread & Walton: Purveyors of Fine Imaginings.

Alchemists, diggers, dragons, engineers, mercenaries, puritans, ranters, royalists, satanists, thieves, witches, zombies… which side are you on?

***

As many of you probably know, Mongoose Publishing will cease to support the RuneQuest II license in the autumn, and this has left us with a big decision to make regarding the future of Clockwork & Chivalry. Giving up on the line was never an option – we were determined to finish the Kingdom & Commonwealth Campaign, and have other ideas we want to develop for the game world. At the same time, we value our autonomy as a small independent games company. The new Renaissance system will be based on OpenQuest and Mongoose RuneQuest I, and will aim to be as compatible as possible with existing C&C supplements. At the same time, this rule-set, stripped of the C&C background but incorporating some of the rules (such as Righteousness Points and Factions) will be released under an Open Gaming License as a free download. The rules will be aimed squarely at role-playing in the age of black powder weapons. The creation of Renaissance will give Cakebread & Walton a solid rules set for the development of further games in the future, as well as allowing others to use it in their own games under the terms of the OGL.

Once Clockwork & Chivalry 2nd Edition is released, we’ll be re-issuing the first 4 parts of the Kingdom & Commonwealth campaign with minor tweaks to fit the new rules, and then the last two books in the campaign, Hobbes: Leviathan and London Calling. We’ll also release a small conversion document so that those playing C&C with the existing RuneQuest II Core Rulebook need not change rules to finish the campaign.

C&C2, a 400 page core rulebook including all the rules you need to play as well as all the background in the original worldbook and then some, will be out in December. The other revised volumes and new C&C2 supplements are to follow in 2012. As usual, our games will be distributed by Cubicle 7 Entertainment and will be available from all good game stores!

Taking some time out from the usual fantasy fare here at D101 HQ, me and John Ossoway (my co-author for Savage North and the man behind the awesome Cthulhu Rising) have been hitting warp speed to get his OpenQuest powered hard Sci-fi game, River of Heaven, done by eary November (in time for a Dragonmeet release).

Here’s the cover by Jon Hodgson

Ok I’d be the first to admit there’s been a slight slow down on OpenQuest as I focus on getting Crypts & Things done. Not only that but two scheduled supplements have slipped quietly away from OpenQuest. Here be Dragons has gone to a different publisher, and bigger and better things (which is all I’m going to say on the subject for now) and of course now Empires Rising is a HeroQuest supplement (short story it makes more sense that way). So there’s a slight gap in the release scedule since Life and Death was released back in November of last year (oh you’ve not got L&D? Don’t take my word for it but its jolly good ).

Soo what I’m I going to do about that.

OpenQuest Companion – new optional rules (eg. mass combat, social combat, random character gen), new monsters, new spells and GM’s advice on how to use OpenQuest for anytype of fantasy campaign. This is a book of rulesy stuff. eta end of this year.

OpenQuest Adventures – every month or so a 10-30 page adventure in pdf format. When we have enough of these out I’ll collect them and do a printed collection. “The Road to Hell” a very dangerous trip to a minor hell for the unsuspecting characters is the first release. A tough adventure that requires intelligence on the player’s part to survive. Next up is either Tomb of the Evil Emperor by me (another epic) or Hidden Gods by John Ossoway.

The Chronicles of Erun – I’ll announce this one properly later, but this is going to be my standalone OQ powered game. Its going to have allot of the ideas I wittered on about for OQ2 in it, like social conflict and a single magic system. At its core it will be OQ, but there will be enough tweaks and new rules to make it worth looking into if yo like that sort of thing. If you like detailed settings/characters CoE will be right up your street.  eta next year.

Want to see OpenQuest in action?

Head over to http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=18104 and have a read through Pseudoephedrine‘s In Search of Folly play by post game.