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Hi all,

i just found this forum and i like it. It is kind of different from others i already know such as Dragonsfoot etc..

Anyway, i wanted to ask you if you know about this seemingly forgotten old fantasy module,

INFO (http://www.waynesbooks.com/leadingedgegames.html)

apparently someone is doing a sort of cover to cover here

SWORD PATH GLORY (http://mesmerizedbysirens.blogspot.com/)

thanks

I think it isn't a module but a complete game.

That said, IMO it's strictly for collectors. I once owned what I believe was a pared-down version called Rhand: Morningstar Missions, and it was just a detailed combat system with hyper-detailed wound effects. And then some basic chargen and skills stuff tacked on. Realistic? Possibly, although detail and realism don't necessarily go hand-in-hand. More important it just struck me as being so cumbersome that you really couldn't use the combat rules and have time for anything else.

Still, I'd be interested in hearing accounts of actually playing Rhand or SP:G.

I have Book 1 of Sword Path Glory - though I've never played it. Its intended as an add-on to an FRPG to make combat more detailed..perhaps for a D&D type game since it makes references to level ("skill level") in places, though it strikes me as being more compatible to something like Harnmaster or Runequest.
 
A good chunk of the book is comprised of weapon damage tables: instead of rolling damage, you roll impact and then use that on a table for each hit location to determine your flesh depth penetrated; this gives you a shock value (i.e. % to pass out), damage points, and whether any bones are broken etc. (based on a sort of diagram below that table that reads e.g.
XXXXXRibXXXXXStomachXXXXSpine ...
 
It also has a round-less initiative system sort of like runequest strike ranks, except that you keep track of weapon, shield (if not fully ready, your parry % is reduced) and movement times separately. It also has a movement system where you get a "base acceleration increment" and accelerate slowly up to full speed, instead of having a fixed movement rate.
 
The inside cover says there is a Book 2, Book 3 and Book 4 but I've never seen those. The last page has an advert for the advanced rules ("Are You Ready To Take The Next Step?"), which left me both terrified and amused at the same time.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;488299The inside cover says there is a Book 2, Book 3 and Book 4 but I've never seen those. The last page has an advert for the advanced rules ("Are You Ready To Take The Next Step?"), which left me both terrified and amused at the same time.

I have Book 1 and 2, as far as I know Book 3 and 4 were never published. I have a soft spot in my heart for games with damage charts, like the ones that were fashionable in the eighties (realistic!!!), games like Rolemaster, Hârnmaster, Timelords, The Riddle of Steel, etc, but Sword's Path: Glory is too much for me, I haven't been able to make heads or tails of this game.

And yes, that advert also terrified me.

Thanks for your answers guys! they were very useful to me.

Claudius and B.S. Johnson, please can you make a snapshot of that advertisement?
or a scan, just of that page...i'm tremendously curious to see that terrifying ad!
i'd be really grateful

thanks in advance

NP. Well the ad isn't illustrated or anything - so I can probably type it out without too much hassle. It does lose some impact if you haven't actually had your brain melted by reading the first book, but see below.
 
 
ARE YOU READY?
To take the next step? The basic rules for Sword's Path - Glory were designed to optimize speed of play while maintaining realistic combat, but there is much more ahead!
 
In the advanced rules, the ultimate in realism was the goal and few concessions were made. The result of years of play, Advanced Book 1 is for those who refuse to compromise in their gaming. It contains over 300 pages of material including:
*194 pages of Damage Tables
*19 Armor Classes
*30 Armor Locations with rules for mixed or layered armour and heavy plate
*Shield Damage and Penetration
*Knockdown and Balance Rules
*Terrain, Visibility and Position corrections
*Hit Locations for attack from the front, rear, left or right
*Target Size adjustments to damage
*Expanded Parry Rules

thanks a lot!!

Same guys that did Living Steel and Phoenix Command, yes?
I was crazy about that stuff for a short while in the Wayback... subscribed to their newsletter, bought everything I could find... including the Morningstar Missions box... but never did see SPG... or that one with the big map of Rhand.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;488387In the advanced rules, the ultimate in realism was the goal and few concessions were made.

The sentence is black is truly terrifying.

QuoteIt does lose some impact if you haven't actually had your brain melted by reading the first book,

Indeed. And you can bet the second book is written in the same style.

Rolemaster and Hârnmaster, compared to Sword's Path Glory, are like Risus or something. :jaw-dropping: :banghead:

Quote from: Simlasa;488454Same guys that did Living Steel and Phoenix Command, yes?
I was crazy about that stuff for a short while in the Wayback... subscribed to their newsletter, bought everything I could find... including the Morningstar Missions box... but never did see SPG... or that one with the big map of Rhand.

Yep that's them. The writer, Barry Nagazono, is a propulsion engineer with NASA.  
 

Quote from: Claudius;488457The sentence is black is truly terrifying.
 
 
Indeed. And you can bet the second book is written in the same style.
 
Rolemaster and Hârnmaster, compared to Sword's Path Glory, are like Risus or something. :jaw-dropping: :banghead:

Pretty much :) So what horrors are contained in your Book 2? That's the "Roleplaying" book in the series?

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;488461Pretty much :) So what horrors are contained in your Book 2? That's the "Roleplaying" book in the series?

According to the back cover, it has an alignment system (similar to the one in Elric), characteristics, skills, rules for training, healing, fatigue, etc. It looks like it makes sense, but I assure you it's written in the same crazy moon language as Book 1.

Its not written in moon language, just by engineers.  There are two book ones, the original red cover and a slightly simplified white cover.  Book 2 covers skills, and learning.  Rhand Morningstar Missions is a more simplified version and contains rules for combat, skills & magic plus a world to play in.  They also did a small arms combat system called Spectrum, and a later version called Phoenix Command.  They have a futuristic game called Living Steel.

J.J.

Quote from: jjwolf120115;579070Its not written in moon language, just by engineers.  There are two book ones, the original red cover and a slightly simplified white cover.  Book 2 covers skills, and learning.  Rhand Morningstar Missions is a more simplified version and contains rules for combat, skills & magic plus a world to play in.  They also did a small arms combat system called Spectrum, and a later version called Phoenix Command.  They have a futuristic game called Living Steel.

J.J.

Threadcromancy!

Also, welcome to therpgsite!

I liked Living Steel a lot, and I'm working on something merging the LS and d20 systems that I'm planning on using to run the Apocalypse scenario for my players back home.  Did you play with PCCS or LS much?

Welcome to theRPGsite!

RPGPundit

I play tested Living Steel among other Leading Edge Games.  

J.J.

Oh, how I love these games.

  Yes, the systems are a little complex...

  I freaking LOVE the Living Steel setting.  Rhand, Swords, Vissers, Spectrals...  I always wished this got a remake or a re-release with rules a bit more streamlined...

  Anybody have contact information for BN these days?

Last thing anyone knows he went to work for NASA or something.

BN works for JPL and to my knowledge has no plans to revise or for that matter reissue any of the leading edge games.

J.J.

Quote from: jjwolf120115;599231BN works for JPL

Hey, its Jack Parsons' old hangout!

RPGPundit

I dimly recall that I played in a Friday night RPG group at Caltech with a JPL guy who was colleagues with the Leading Edge guys.  He ran us through a Rhand campaign, which amounted to finishing one tactical melee over two sessions :)

Of the LE guys, he said they (and he) were JPL geeks in Pasadena who bashed orc heads on weekends, and had access to computer number-crunching back when mainframes were leet.  (This was way before Amazon, Twitter, mobile phones, laptops -- try to envision that.)

SP:G is what you get when five off-duty engineers lock themselves in a room and they want some realism.  It models able-bodied, right-handed :D humanoids (he said it scaled down to dwarves really well, 4'2" guys with 40" vertical leaps in armor) down to 1/10 second impulses, with linear and rotational acceleration rates, and every single swing.  For damage, they modeled weapon tip shapes, body target areas, and the volumetric intersections thereof, and assigned hit point density values based on things like muscles/nerves/brains.  Rhand branched out into quadripeds, with 6-second rounds (note: no hit tables for rocs, centaurs, snakes, gelatinous shapes).

Hence all the tables, which basically cross-index the "impact" you generate (force, to an engineer), weapon cross-section, hit location, armor thereat, to damage done.  (Internally, they must have run scripts to compute the volume of puncture, and integrated the hit point density over dv.)

• Drawback: Hit chart proliferation.  Need a hit chart for every shape of creature in a battle.  That's unbounded (which is why most RPGs elide the issue entirely).
• Drawback: ibid, for weapon shapes.
  
• Drawback: ibid, for armor types.  That's a whole lotta tables.
  
• Benefit: You don't need to model critical hits separately; they're automatically included as heart (1%) or head (5%?) hits.
• Drawback: Hit locations were entirely random, disregarding skilled aim.  Can't Brisingr a Shade.  ("But hey", quoth Durza, "look at it from my side: any random turnip farmer off the field has 1% to throw a pitchfork right there, regardless of my studly defenses!!"  Palpatine nods: "We have felt your pain -- TWICE -- moisture, he farmed")
  

N.B. damage with a penetrating tip (e.g. spear) to the head is non-linear in ghastly ways, e.g. for integer impact values of 1+ vs. chain mail, damage was something like 1, 1, 1, 2, 5, 100, 5k, 10k, 20k, 100k -- a Fibonacci on boosterspice.  I joked about this to our DM: "you can see where it enters the brain".  He replied, completely seriously: "no, 5k is where it penetrates through and the tip is emerging out the back of the skull".  Oh sure, you're laughing now, but --

The system is hit-point-less, but this emerged as a glaring flaw (incompleteness).  These geeks weren't biomedics, so they (I still think) glossed over what it meant to take a "5k" hit.  

• In Rhand, you compute a "hit threshold" from body size, health, CON-like attribute, level, and other willpower factors.  Damage is then probabilistic in the chance to knock you "out", from a minimum 1% for 1-pt dings, to X% when you've taken your HT total.  Since they were engineers, X could have been some geek value like 100/sqrt(2), or a (negative) power of e.
• Note that it's < 100%.  You can exceed your HT, just with an ever-increasing % of the next hit knocking you out.  With a HT of 30, you could even absorb one of those 100k hits from a 30mm depleted uranium ballista bolt through your heart (and out the other side; it doesn't stop) and still have a tiny chance to stay heroically conscious.
• Flaw: Doesn't model central nervous system (broken spine), load-bearing bone structure (broken legs), or fluid mechanics (blood loss).  Abstracting these away into "100k" hits can lead to nonsensical (heroic) results.
• Conversely, you could stub your toe and be "out of the fight".  The second time this actually happened :D, we grilled our friendly DM on the meaning of being "out" -- am I unconscious?  Can I crawl?  Can I point a flashlight?  How long am I out for?  How quickly do blunt impact HT hits decay (habituate)?  Their overly simplistic model explained none of these things; hence, Rhand breaks down about halfway into your first big furball.
• SP:G was, IIRC, similar but even worse.

Now, actually playing SP:G wasn't too bad, if you're part of the original group of 5 geeks who invented it.  Every swing is basically a database join of 5 tables; hence, each of 5 persons opens his own copy of The Book to his section of tables, and you quickly cross-index them all, requiring only about 10 brief spoken mini-messages.  Don't try this alone.

• Drawback (SP:G): Rotational acceleration rates really suck for most people who just want to play a game.  Some tactical air combat boardgames model it, and failed (commercially).  In video games, you get Asteroids-like controls, e.g. Gravitar, which was a successful niche, but with very little cross-over appeal.  In practice, your orcs will run into walls, obstacles, fences, etc. because humans just can't handle the math 80 ticks (of 1/10 seconds each, remember) in advance.

The emergent principle of h2h combat was: impact rules.  In Rhand:

• You have a small number of "swings" per round, e.g. 2-3.  With these, you can pay for actions per round:
• Any number of "parries".  Your opponents' total # of attacks, vs. your # of parries, cross-index into a table with lower hit %.
• Corollary: Zero parries is suicidal; your opponents' hit rates are like 90%+.
• Corollary: All-parries isn't impervious; at best, you lower them to 30-40%.  You'll still die that way.
• As many attacks as you can afford.  You can freely choose between short stroke (1/2 swing, 1/2 impact), normal, or long stroke (2 swings, 2x impact).
• Hence, the vanilla recipe is: 1 parry, 1 short + 1 normal, and you hope you get into the 2 attacks vs 1 parry table.
• Drawback: At low levels, characters have a terrible time landing a blow with enough impact to get above the exponential knees of the damage curves.  My newbie guy (equivalent of 1st level) spent ~4 hours over 2 Fridays doing the minimum 1 damage per hit.  I was 1-v-1 with basically a goblin for 90 minutes, and we stalemated, and both walked away.  That's ... very not AD&D-like.
• Gambit: 1 parry, 1 long stroke.  Then you're in the 1-v-2 table, so your hit chance sucketh like 12%, but your hit will actually do 10-50 damage.  So you're actually outracing the 1-per-swing guy.  But then your opponent does the same, and it's a coin flip.

Rhand melee gets very fun at high levels, when you get the "elemental" fighting skills.

• Fire: Impact x2 (if moving forward --? I may have this confused with the "Targa" specialization).  Sounds bland, until you've labored through the low side of the damage curves for some fights ... like, once.
  
• Water: Every short stroke also counts as a parry.
  
• Earth, Air: I forgot them by now, so they must have sucked in comparison.
  

Nowadays, the concept of a Rhand/SPG-like combat system, done with modern computer support, is tantalizing (or maybe it's already being done?)  Basically, you could revisit the premise of hit locations x value density functions, but compute everything volumetrically, in real-time.  You'd probably need a (more) complete biomedical model to handle the effects of damage and healing.  And, of course, scale up to plasma guns, wormholes, magic, psionics, and mundane stuff like fatigue, food, lefthandedness :jaw-dropping:, poison/venom, ...

SP:G/Leading Edge amounted to a grand experiment, and it probably explored that niche of the RPG idea space as deeply as the inventors cared to -- hence their lack of interest in doing it again.

I never did get to actually teleport a Special Action Team into a Rhand melee.  Sigh.  But we could write that ourselves!!  Who's with me?

Thank you, that was delightful.

Quote from: Arminius;725985Thank you, that was delightful.

Agreed, 100% pure awesome.

Wow...
A labor of love for them I guess.

Rhand, in its various incarnations, still strikes me as a pretty neat setting.

And yet I never really hear anything about it beyond that it's good. I saw a module once, KVISR Rocks! (?) and couldn't understand how it could be connected to Morningstar Missions or any of the other hyperdetailed combat systems. Did people have time to roleplay? And once they got started at roleplaying, did they really switch gears and bring out Living Steel or Phoenix Command for a back-alley fight?

Sounds like what you get if you mix Rolemaster and Riddle of Steel and then add acid...:jaw-dropping:

Quote from: Arminius;726014And yet I never really hear anything about it beyond that it's good. I saw a module once, KVISR Rocks! (?) and couldn't understand how it could be connected to Morningstar Missions or any of the other hyperdetailed combat systems. Did people have time to roleplay? And once they got started at roleplaying, did they really switch gears and bring out Living Steel or Phoenix Command for a back-alley fight?

I've played in a couple games, and people had time to role-play.  To be honest, with the right GM, I never saw it as much different than Rolemaster, honestly.  At least from my perspective as player.

I actually have a copy of Sword's Path Glory, I think, as part of a bulk box of my buddy's Living Steel stuff I bought.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;488387In the advanced rules, the ultimate in realism was the goal and few concessions were made. The result of years of play, Advanced Book 1 is for those who refuse to compromise in their gaming. It contains over 300 pages of material including:
*194 pages of Damage Tables
*19 Armor Classes
*30 Armor Locations with rules for mixed or layered armour and heavy plate
*Shield Damage and Penetration
*Knockdown and Balance Rules
*Terrain, Visibility and Position corrections
*Hit Locations for attack from the front, rear, left or right
*Target Size adjustments to damage
*Expanded Parry Rules

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