Help! Need Gadgeteering Rules

[KaosDevice]

We settled (after much yelling) on CoC rules for the steampunk game. We are in a bind now and need some gadgeteering rules we can easilly tack on to BRP. Any suggestions?

 

[Stormborn]

I'm not very familar with the BRP rules, but one way to treat pulp gadgets is to think of them as spells in the form of items. Rather than based on "magic" the object is based on pseudscience. The creator must first make a research or "Science!" roll to replicate the spell, he then must spend a number of hours making the object as determined by the DM (basically the more powerful the spell the longer it takes) making rolls either every hour or at the end of the process., one done he has an object that can replicate the "spell"'s effects. Charging the item is up to you. Either he could make some kind of use check everytime to activate it, power it up with whatever powers spells, or create it with X number of charges (which should be calculated into the difficulty of the spell). I realize thats not a great or highly detailed system, if it was d20 I could probably work it out for you, but maybe you can adapt from there.

 

[Turanil]

need some gadgeteering rules we can easilly tack on to BRP.

Hawkmoon game by Chaosium. It is based on the BRP CoC system (or the reverse), and thus would fit perfectly. Hawkmoon has extensive rules for creating weird technological devices of mad scientists. You can find Hawkmoon either as a PDF from DTRPG or on ebay for a printed version.

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

Hrm. Yea, not knowing enough about BRP here, either.

That idea is about as good as I'd come up. "Gadgets" work best, it seems, in a system where effects are very simplified ... because they conceptually "do anything", the smaller that pool of "anything" is, the easier they are to handle.

CoC spells are usually pretty thematic and less-than-general, however ... I can't think of any "simple" way to do it.

--fje