Subject: MYSTARA-L Digest - 1 May 2002 to 2 May 2002 (#2002-119) From: Automatic digest processor Date: 03/05/2002, 17:00 To: Recipients of MYSTARA-L digests Reply-to: Mystara RPG Discussion There are 13 messages totalling 434 lines in this issue. Topics of the day: 1. MISC: Dwarf lang. (2) 2. ESDs (7) 3. Psionics in George's Campaign (3) 4. VS: [MYSTARA] Magic and Society ******************************************************************** The Other Worlds Homepage: http://www.wizards.com/dnd/OtherWorlds.asp The Mystara Homepage: http://www.dnd.starflung.com/ To unsubscribe, send email to LISTSERV@ORACLE.WIZARDS.COM with UNSUB MYSTARA-L in the body of the message. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 04:13:51 -0700 From: Larry Subject: MISC: Dwarf lang. Has any one here done any work on a working dwarvish language? If so did you use Tilkens system or a difrent system? My source of the lang. is the insert for the "Players Survale Pack/Guide". ===== "Happy Hunting!" My web site: http://www.geocities.com/boonedale/ My Robotech game on Yahoo! groups: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RobotechGame/ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Health - your guide to health and wellness http://health.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 16:43:39 +0200 From: Giampaolo Agosta Subject: Re: MISC: Dwarf lang. Larry wrote: > Has any one here done any work on a working dwarvish > language? If so did you use Tilkens system or a > difrent system? My source of the lang. is the insert > for the "Players Survale Pack/Guide". There were some bits of dwarven developed in the Rockhome gazetteer, though certainly not enough to call it "working". Tolkien's dwarven is amounts to a few phrases (the battle cry, and the words on Balin's tomb, IIRC), so it is not of great help as well. -- Giampaolo Agosta agathokles@libero.it agosta@elet.polimi.it http://digilander.iol.it/agathokles ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 11:16:11 -0700 From: macnerd Subject: Re: ESDs Hey, I know people are bashing TSR/WotC/Hasbro, but you really have to understand that they have to run a business. I think they wish they could distribute them to everyone, but you know sometimes governments make it difficult. Especially, since e-business is such a new thing. Also, you have to look at the numbers game. We are too few unfortunately. I know that is harsh to accept, but that the truth. I am just grateful that the PDFs exist at all. I inquired about licensing the material and other dead-campaign material and seeing if I can rescue it. I haven't received any word from them, but for this summer, I will see what is involved. In the mean time, let's just create cool material, and in the future we can integrate popular jewels of creativity into the whole umbrella. ciao, Joaquin ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 11:28:51 -0700 From: macnerd Subject: Re: ESDs Generally, I really do not support getting illegal copies of stuff. I guess as I get older, I feel more strongly about this than in my youthful days, when I did not have regard for the stuff I get. Now however, I feel really bad that there is no way for Mystara enthuisast to get material. I think that if there is absolutely NO WAY to get the stuff and pay for it, then by all means get it from wherever. If Hasbro does not have the infastructure to sell it abroad, then they are not really losing any revenue. Also, for other material that is not available. I am for scanning/ocr'ing the material to an electronic format. This is simply because it is not available anywhere. :-\ Though, I hope that if people can purchase the material, that they will do this at some point. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 11:31:58 -0700 From: macnerd Subject: Re: Psionics in George's Campaign > 1- I use the “They Always Existed” and “The March of Science” > themes found > in GURPS Psionics to explain the presence of Psi Powers . What exactly is this. Elaborate for our curious ears (or eyes rather). > 2-I use the “Magic and Psionics are different” idea from the Complete > Psionics Handbook. Have you check out 3rd Ed stuff. It's really smooth and well integrated. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 11:36:25 -0700 From: macnerd Subject: Re: Psionics in George's Campaign > GAZ 4-The Kingdom of Ierendi* > -Low ; Psionics are unknown to exist by society in general, > and if they do > learn of its existence, many will think its just another form > of magic. I had an alternative non-canon approach for Honor Island. There's a curse that when people stay there too long, they go insane. However, for some odd reason, psionically gifted people are immune. Now, there's a group called Mentats, which have an ability to link their collective PSPs amongst themselves and use the powers at greater levels. Perhaps this can be a prestige class in 3e and a kit in 2e. (I got the idea from the Mentats in Doctor Who. Also, perhaps some ideas of the Borg collective can be used. Apparently the Borg can rapidly heal through bio-energy by been linked... :) ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 11:41:15 -0700 From: macnerd Subject: Re: VS: [MYSTARA] Magic and Society There are my favorite games like Masters of Magic, which is a army based game where wizards compete to capture elemental nodes and bind them to their spirit, thus increasing mana pool. This game had many army, unit, world encompassing, and city spells. Something D&D lacks severely is world and city spells. There are spells that can affect a city or area, like increasing crops, etc. In this game one can see how spells on all levels affect production, economics, and a military campaign. Another good game is Warlords (some versions are bad) and Age of Wonder. Both of these have similar ideas for spells and how they can affect society. > >This one's my favorite. By Uncle Figgy: > >http://members.aol.com/essuncius/cover4.htm > > Very useful article. I read it a few days ago and it gave me > many ideas for > my game. It also served as an inspiration to write a future > email dealing > with magic in society ,which I plan on writing soon. > > The GM Guide was VERY helpful, and the Players Guide I am > going to email to > all my players as soon as I get ever ones emails addy. (G) > > George > ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 12:42:52 -0700 From: Chris Furneaux Subject: Re: Psionics in George's Campaign > I'm curious about one thing: what was the Inhuman > War? Does it have any > relation with the Inhuman Wars from Spelljammer? I believe it is just a campaign specific war that George is useing as background to create some turmoil in the Old world. So I wouldn't think so. The details were posted on the list so it's in the archives: http://oracle.wizards.com/archives/mystara-l.html Specifically: < http://oracle.wizards.com/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind0204C&L=mystara-l&P=R3630 > Hope that helps. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Health - your guide to health and wellness http://health.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 21:28:19 +0000 From: Agathokles Subject: Re: ESDs macnerd wrote: > > Also, you have to look at the numbers game. We are too > few unfortunately. I know that is harsh to accept, but > that the truth. I am just grateful that the PDFs exist > at all. Uhm, if they exist but we can't get them, it is not much better than it would be if they didn't exist, is it? BTW, Hasbro not having (or not being able to raise) the infrastructure to sell abroad is simply unrealistic. More likely, it's just that the revenue would be too low (compared to Hasbro's size) to be interesting for them. -- Giampaolo Agosta agathokles@libero.it agosta@elet.polimi.it http://digilander.iol.it/agathokles ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 23:35:14 +0200 From: =?us-ascii?Q?Andres_Piquer_Otero?= Subject: Re: ESDs I don't think governments are too much to blame for Wizards' selling abroad policy... for any company who doesn't, you'll find ten more, as well as shops, that do sell worldwide. It's all a matter of considering the significance of prospective buyers: 1) for hardcopy products, it's not very logical to have a world-wide Wizards' shop. Distribution of D&D is quite good, specialized stores don't take long to have copies of stuff in stock (here in Spain, about 1-3 weeks after publishing in the US). Wizards never carried a big stock of old catalogue items... they sold off for a while to get rid of the old stuff (I was quite mad when I could not get a bunch of GAZs for 9 dollars each), but stock liquidation is not enough to set up an international e-buying premise. Even in places where there are no good game retailers, it's hard to compete with the big work at e-selling which amazon.com and similar businesses does worldwide. 2)Out of Print: that's not quite a small chunk of the moneyflow going around RPGs (just check online auction places and specialized www retailers). It is logical to think that many prospective buyers are American, and that many of them will want to get their hands on a hardcopy version of the product, so either: a) they are US buyers, no problem with the current ESD b) they want to bid, or buy from a OOP retailer, so no ESD interest The thing is that, for non-US buyers interested in OOP stuff, access to ESDs would have almost no competence. I've gotten some stuff from ebay, and it's really not such a good deal... even if you manage to get a good auction amount by wise bidding, being abroad forces you to pay with some complicated and expensive system (most sellers are US or Canada based), not all countries have standard mail order service with America and you have to use Western Union, MoneyGramm, etc... big tax payment... plus, shipping costs are huge. And those shipping costs are even bigger if you're buying from a OOP retailer. So, not ruling out some collector love which makes you buy OOP items here and there (I have done and still do when I see a good bargain), ESDing would attract the vast majority of the non-US population out there. I don't know if Wizards have made big market surveys about how great that foreing "gamer/collector populace" is, but I cannot but think that quite a big majority of such a populace would fall in for ESD downloading (and buying!)... So, either outside US is quite meaningless at Wizards' figures (and that's not blaming them, business is business) or it's just some kind of idleness based on their hardcopy-oriented sales systems which prevents them for accessing a non-overwhelming, but nevertheless meaningful slice of the market. Andres ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 16:04:43 -0700 From: The Stalker Subject: Re: ESDs On Thu, 2 May 2002 11:16:11 -0700, macnerd wrote: > Hey, > > I know people are bashing TSR/WotC/Hasbro, but you really > have to understand that they have to run a business. I > think they wish they could distribute them to everyone, > but you know sometimes governments make it difficult. > Especially, since e-business is such a new thing. > > Also, you have to look at the numbers game. We are too > few unfortunately. I know that is harsh to accept, but > that the truth. I am just grateful that the PDFs exist > at all. > I could accept this, except that it is not what WOTC told people. In short, they were not honest with us. Two years ago they told me they were looking into it. Just how long is that going to take? Because it's still what they're saying... As for difficult governments, well, I might accept that in my own case, but the sheer list of nations they won't do business this is shocking, and not all of them have problematic tax laws. That's not the problem. Besides, I've been able to do business over the net with stores like Cyberdungeon when buying old OOP stuff. Of course you can argue, "yes, but that's actual books, not net-ware you must download". Okay, but there are ways for WOTC to solve it. They could, for example, offer us the solution of putting the ESDs we want onto a disc (including its cost, obviously), then send it to us. That would be no differently than me doing trade with Cyberdungeon because whatever I import into my country is my own problem. However, WOTC don't do that... ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 16:08:12 -0700 From: The Stalker Subject: Re: ESDs On Thu, 2 May 2002 21:28:19 +0000, Agathokles wrote: > macnerd wrote: >> >> Also, you have to look at the numbers game. We are too >> few unfortunately. I know that is harsh to accept, but >> that the truth. I am just grateful that the PDFs exist >> at all. > > Uhm, if they exist but we can't get them, it is not much better than it > would be if they didn't exist, is it? > > BTW, Hasbro not having (or not being able to raise) the infrastructure > to sell abroad is simply unrealistic. More likely, it's just that the > revenue would be too low (compared to Hasbro's size) to be interesting > for them. > -- > Yep, that's it precisely - we're few so we don't matter. They won't make enough money on us, so they don't care whether we get screwed or not. So much for customer support. Fine if you live in states or one of the "select few" countries, but "well, tough - deal with it!" if you don't. And they don't even have the decency to say that. *THAT* is what I find contemptible. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 21:54:32 -0700 From: Chris Furneaux Subject: Re: ESDs I just have one technical question. What the hell does an ESD's shipping policys have to do with getting the product. Of course it cannot be shipped, it's electronic. It is coppied or transfered. If someone can put up a decent case why shipping has nothing to do with the price of fish (hey, bad pun) we might all be able to get them. But then I am not a lawyer... anyone? __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Health - your guide to health and wellness http://health.yahoo.com ------------------------------ End of MYSTARA-L Digest - 1 May 2002 to 2 May 2002 (#2002-119) **************************************************************