Quote from: Rithuan;894091This is truly a sad story. In other topic, what was this book about? Was an adventure or a source book?

It was an adventure, working title Jolly Jongleurs, about a traveling circus. If featured around 30 fully-statted Non-Avatar Characters. It was the be the first in a series of adventures.

QuoteI have been working on a Spanish translation (and summary) for LA encompassing most sources available (LR4AP, LML, Erratas and Lejends).

That would be great!

QuoteI have to confess that I loose momentum: I reach over 50 pages, all Orders, all Abilities but I got stuck at Activations... there are so many!! I would love to see a retro clone, but at the moment I don't feel capable of writing one yet. Please consider me interested to see additional material for LA.

I have absolutely felt that. Even just the list of Orders, when you compile in all the optional ones that were published officially, there's twenty-something. I have done THAT much already, because I found it to be helpful reference information. I've also created a document with all of the LA Abilities which can be a helpful reference for newbies, but I've played the game enough to have them all committed to memory.

As for activations, this is certainly not the way to go if you want to set as a goal to have a retro clone created by the end of the year, but allow me to suggest this: Any time you create an Avatar who uses extraordinary abilities, type out each of the powers your Avatar possesses so that you have it as your own reference. As you continue to do so, just copy and paste it to a master list. Even if you never finish the list, you can produce a delux version of a retro-clone that narrows the list of powers according to what which were chosen for actual play. That in itself would be a valuable list.

QuoteAbout Perilous Journeys... yeah, is not my cup of tea. The thing is, there is no mention to Lejendary Adventures (or reference), and for me that's a no go. The author recognized is based on LA in other forums, but when the book does not acknowledge that I feel uneasy.

In general, I saw a lot of this. So many people joined the LA community wanting to port in their own quirky ideas, which of course is fine for their own campaigns. However, many were convinced that their quirky play was just better than what LA presented and that it should be the new standard. So that's the direction Perilous Journeys went.

Now that could have been awesome if it was packaged as its own game world, rather than a game system. It could have said, "This is how you CAN play LA" rather than "This is what you should play instead." It could have bragged being compatible with the Lejendary Adventure RPG, rather than not even mention the game.

Quote from: Lunamancer;894266It was an adventure, working title Jolly Jongleurs, about a traveling circus. If featured around 30 fully-statted Non-Avatar Characters. It was the be the first in a series of adventures.

That’s a really cool idea! A classless system allows to create this sort of variety. I’ll love to see it when finished (if you want).

Quote from: Lunamancer;894266As for activations, this is certainly not the way to go if you want to set as a goal to have a retro clone created by the end of the year, but allow me to suggest this: Any time you create an Avatar who uses extraordinary abilities, type out each of the powers your Avatar possesses so that you have it as your own reference. As you continue to do so, just copy and paste it to a master list. Even if you never finish the list, you can produce a delux version of a retro-clone that narrows the list of powers according to what which were chosen for actual play. That in itself would be a valuable list.

That… that’s actually a really good idea. I’ll certainly take it into account.

Before creating a retro clone, I was thinking to create an addendum to the Quick Start rules. For example, create a few characters and an additional story.

I would love to play more and let people discover LA before creating a clone. But if I create one, this should be 100% compatible with LA.

Quote from: Rithuan;895109Before creating a retro clone, I was thinking to create an addendum to the Quick Start rules. For example, create a few characters and an additional story.

Frankly, the QS could probably stand a complete review and rewrite. When I wrote it back in the day I thought I'd done a pretty good job of explaining how everything worked, but some parts (like activation times) are clear as mud and aren't consistent with the core game.

As to the different powers, shoot me a PM. I have some files that might help.

Tom

Wow, I didn't know you were involved on the QS. If I have my first draft of the QS addendum, I'll bring it here for comments.

Quote from: Rithuan;895273Wow, I didn't know you were involved on the QS. If I have my first draft of the QS addendum, I'll bring it here for comments.

Yup. Pro-Bono work. Never asked for a name credit. I was just doing it to help out the community.

Tom

I just recently reacquired the Hekaforge books after mine were "permanently borrowed" years ago.  I've been digging into them and I really want to run it; I never got a chance previously.  This thread is a very interesting read.  I have PJ and I can appreciate what it does but it is not LA.  I've seen a little discussion of cloning the game and was wondering if anybody has done any serious work on this material?

In my case, I have mostly worked on a translation of the game to Spanish. I have often wondered how a clone should look like.
Before cloning, I would like to play it more and learn what a clone could bring tho the table.

I'd been considering making a clone, my intention would be to be faithful to the game while clarifying the thing--I played LA a lot. And I played it practically from the beginning. We assimilated the errata as it came out, so the understanding I have of the game is in line with what Gary was trying to create. We even emailed him a few times when we had questions about the game we couldn't figure out. And I keep saying we because almost everyone in the group owned at least a copy of LR4AP. And even though I ran most of the games, one of my brothers had a near encyclopedic grasp of what was written in the book. One other player also had all the core books. Between emails to Gary, keeping up with errata, tons of actual play, and the ability to ask a member of the group who was more knowledgeable in one area whenever our knowledge was lacking, it's pretty spot on.

Now all that said, one thing I don't like is reinventing the wheel. The direction I decided to go in is to focus on building a campaign for the Lejendary Adventure game. It will included original material, updated official material, house rules and the like. The original published material is out there. More importantly, however, I'm being humble in saying this is just my take on playing LA. It will still be a more faithful treatment than PJ.

Just to give you a taste of what I'm doing, a couple of decisions I've made about the campaign:
1) I want a more ancient feel than medieval. Gods walk the Earth. So I added a few house rules for hero, demi-god, and god level of play. I expanded the merits table for buying up abilities, so it doesn't just top out at 400 merits for Abilities 101+. I also add benefits for uber-high BRs that Avatars normally don't achieve but come with built-in effects for higher level play. For example, each point of Speed above 25 adds one point of armor protection the same way each 10 points of Minstrelsy, Unarmed Combat, and Swashbuckling do.
2) I want it to be a "Dynastic Campaign", which is my own term for what I call the style of campaign that spans many, many years of game time, and players often play the offspring of the original characters and so on. So I've elaborated on some merit award formulas that have Avatars earn merits faster than the original rules suggest. But on the flip side, I also include aging affects for older age Avatars.
3) I made an ever so slight tweak to the common orc, so they begin with weapons at 80% of BR and physique at 70% of BR instead of the other way around. That way the common orc's primary Ability is Weapons rather than Physique.
4) I've created a meta-procedure for how to do persuasion and character interaction in RPGs. It's system agnostic, as it really is more of a guide on how to roleplay out these situations, or for GMs how to adjudicate them, and doesn't constitute any new rules in itself, but I'm including it because I feel these sorts of character interactions become more important in the style of campaign I'm running. And of course, when it interfaces with the specifics of an RPG, it gets even more interesting. Imagine how certain knacks, quirks, and extraordinary abilities could affect character interactions.

I really want to see this. A new campaign that present a clarification to the rules sounds awesome.

Best regards,

Lunamancer, your ideas sound like just the thing LA needs to thrive.  I would buy that game!

LA is my goto RPG currently. I'd love to get more into LARs and also would love the later documents. I have the older ones in binders and used them for reference when dealing with other genres. In that way alone, the LARs docs show the versatility of LA.

I've run modern, Murphy's World, hard sci-fi, and various one-shot things.

What I learned was similar to something Greg Ellis said to me years ago. LA is a skeleton system that you plug your genre/setting into. It can do pretty much anything.

Lunamancer and I had many an enjoyable debate over the years about various things, but mostly combat. I plugged a totaly different combat mechanic in. The key was that LA allowed for such plug and play easily. I suspect that's why the books came across so confusing. The 2e books that were never published would have been beautiful. Having been lucky enough to see them, I suspect things would have been very different with them on the market.

My other great interest was the LA version of Elder/Eldar? Worlds that was being worked on heavily near the end of Gary's life. As well, when Gygax Games initially started, there was a rush to finish it for publishing. The game was complete but needed to be ported into LA. Unfortunately I lost all the docs for EW back when gygax.com fell.

Welcome to theRPGsite, kersus!

Quote from: Kersus;954619LA is my goto RPG currently. I'd love to get more into LARs and also would love the later documents. I have the older ones in binders and used them for reference when dealing with other genres. In that way alone, the LARs docs show the versatility of LA.

It's a huge disappointment that LAR never made it to print. Just as much as it was that Unhallowed for Dangerous Journeys never made it to print.

QuoteI've run modern, Murphy's World, hard sci-fi, and various one-shot things.

What I learned was similar to something Greg Ellis said to me years ago. LA is a skeleton system that you plug your genre/setting into. It can do pretty much anything.

It certainly can function that way, thought I think the case is over-stated. LA was designed to have its own spirit. Playing it as is is actually a pretty interesting system. The problem is (and this is with gamers/gaming industry as a whole) is everything is D&Dized--everything is expected to be crammed into that D&D feel. Even if I go out and grab, oh, say, Legend of the Five Rings, a completely different system there, it's content seems as though 90% of the research that went into the game was reading Oriental Adventures. I feel like it fell way, way short of being the stuff of Samurai Culture in favor of being the stuff of Gamer Culture. People tried to stuff that "skeleton" that was LA into the blubbery flesh of Gamer Culture, but I found taking it for a spin in its own skin to be a breath of fresh air.

QuoteLunamancer and I had many an enjoyable debate over the years about various things, but mostly combat. I plugged a totaly different combat mechanic in. The key was that LA allowed for such plug and play easily. I suspect that's why the books came across so confusing. The 2e books that were never published would have been beautiful. Having been lucky enough to see them, I suspect things would have been very different with them on the market.

One of the things I find endlessly fascinating about LA's combat system is how the feel of it and how you play it changes dramatically as you approach very high skill levels. Again, this is the antithesis of Gamer Culture, where everything is supposed to be the same boring dial along some endless continuum. I think the bullshit term is scalability. LA's combat system "fails" the scalability test because it transitions from being a system of "risk", where the match between roughly equal opponents is determined by luck of the dice, to a system of "uncertainty" where you can pretty much forget about the dice since "success" is practically certain. It then becomes more of a psyche-out game, like rock-paper-scissors meets chess.

QuoteMy other great interest was the LA version of Elder/Eldar? Worlds that was being worked on heavily near the end of Gary's life. As well, when Gygax Games initially started, there was a rush to finish it for publishing. The game was complete but needed to be ported into LA. Unfortunately I lost all the docs for EW back when gygax.com fell.

Even a lot of the docs that are floating around from the old days are corrupted. I've got copies of all things LA I could get my hands on. It kills me that I was dead broke when Exotic Realms of Hazgar was released and I never got a copy. But I do have the Elder Worlds stuff that was posted on Gygax Games. There's not really much there. It's an interesting seed of an idea. I've never tried running it, though.