Thank you for your questions!
Are you planning to support the game with adventures, or are their plenty of hooks to go on in the book? Any sourcebooks in the pipeline?
A: There are hooks for all kinds of adventures, though not an "adventure hooks" session. Instead, there's a section that has setups for different types of campaigns and guidelines for creating the kind of campaign you would like to run (out of a wide variety of possible scenarios, both fairly orthodox and pretty out-there; everything from internecine squabbling to overthrowing Olympus to end-of-the-multiverse scenarios). Then the individual entries for all the different Primordials, Titans, and Olympians, as well as setting descriptions for the different worlds and realms are absolutely filled with stuff that could make up the material for sessions of adventures.
As for published adventures or sourcebooks, at this very moment there's nothing to announce from me, though I won't rule out that possibility for the future (especially sometime after Arrows of Indra is released). However, Lords of Olympus will be having its own Open License, so this means anyone who likes the game enough will be able to publish adventures or sourcebooks for it!
Being diceless, I assume it's resource management based like the Marvel Universe RPG. In that game, you basically 'blew your load' in the first round of combat then floundered about with little/no energy. It also has a death spiral so that if you take damage and your opponent doesn't you're a bit, then a lot, screwed. Is this system better than that, and in what way does it improve on systems that use dice? In other words, why go diceless?
A: You assumed wrong, at the very premise of this question. Lords of Olympus, like Erick Wujcik's original Diceless RPG is NOT a system based on "resource-management", or what I like to call a 'beancounter' game; thus it doesn't run into the problem you describe. Instead, the system works by the characters having "ranks" in different attributes, which can be utilized to attempt different things; and conflict is resolved by a comparison of those ranks modified by situational effects (environment, injury and restedness, tactical considerations, being team-up on, etc). In play, Lords of Olympus is kind of "chess like"; you can't rely on getting a "good roll", instead you need to figure out a way to beat the other guy, either at his game or by changing the game you're playing with him. If he outranks you at wrestling, you can try to switch the fight to a distance battle, or use sorcery, or try to take over his mind, or if you're close enough in ranking that it might make a difference, try to avoid him till you can get him somewhere that you have higher ground or he can't press down on you with all his force.
The first answer to how it might be better than games that use dice is if you happen to be a very unlucky dice-roller of course; but the less flippant answer is that in actual play this type of game encourages very descriptive action, making greater use of (and consideration of) the environment, and trying to engage in strategic thinking. Its also the common experience of people who've played that the mechanics (from the player's side of things) just end up "fading into the background" in a very big way. No one talks about hit points or bonuses or how many points they have in a skill, or that kind of thing, instead you end up talking about your character and thinking about him in a descriptive way, of what you know he does well and not so well, of what powers and resources he has, etc. If you've ever played games that use descriptive tags and such... well, Lords of Olympus does what those games can only promise to do; it actually comes through with making the game into a deeply immersive experience where you think of your character in a very different way than the typical collections of numbers and bonuses in a more conventional RPG.
Will the system adapt itself to other genres - supers for instance?
A: It'd be very simple to adapt LoO for other kinds of epic or mythic fantasy. It would be possible to adapt it for certain types of "supers" games, but you'd need to do some more legwork; this isn't really a generic RPG system.
Any system for mass or naval combat in there? I can imagine the size and scale of some monsters requiring armies to make a dent in them.
A: One thing to keep in mind is that the PCs, starting-level PCs, are immensely powerful in this game. They START OUT being the equivalent of the kind of power-levels that you only find at the highest levels of most other fantasy game PCs. They are, after all, the children of gods. Some of them could be considered one-man armies.
However, as to your question: the Lords of Olympus RPG is probably something that would be considered a "rules-lite" game in comparison to, say, D&D or certainly GURPS. Its not ultra-ultra-lite, but its mechanics are very streamlined; and the way the system works is not by having a bunch of subsystems or mechanics to deal with different things, but to rely on the core system of Ranks and the environmental modifiers to those ranks to determine how everything physical gets resolved, from a chess game, to a magical duel, to a dance competition, and yes, also a war. So in the game what would be considered for leading armies in battle (against huge monsters, or other armies) would be the character's martial rank (Prowess) along with the in-setting considerations: where does he get its army? What is the composition, equipment, and training of his trooops? How is he getting them to where his opponents are? what does the player say he's doing for an overall strategy; how is he placing his units and using the battlefield conditions?
And you ask all the same questions about the PC's opponent; and compare their relative Ranks, this gives you an idea from the start of who's got the upper hand, and how long the battle is likely to last. Then of course there's the question of what both sides do as the battle is going on, how do they react to situations of advantage or disadvantage, and try to adapt their original tactics? If things aren't going well for the PC, what's he going to do about it?
That's the way Lords of Olympus works.
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