radmonger

People don't grant spells, cults do.

Within a rune cult, spells from associated deities goes in the same rune pool, and so can be extended and stacked. This is where the terminology of the rules is super-confusing, sometimes even to chaosium staffers. Cults and subcults and hero cults and subservient cults and probably another type of not-a-rune-cult that just got added.

Also, extension is common magic, so RAW doesn't have to be learnt, you just have to have the RP in the right pool. I personally use a house rule that that only works for ritual castings, and you still have to explicitly learn how to cast it instantly. For my players at least, this cut down on a lot of analysis paralysis that came form having a too long menu of casting combat options.

To be more precise, if you make a spirit cult up, you are also free to make up its cultic associations. The paps is an earth temple complex, so Earthrunning Girl being a granddaughter of Ernalda seems entirely plausible. i'd go with that unless you have some deep plot reason otherwise.

The spell seems pretty useless without extension; maybe it should have a base level of built-in duration anyway, like catseye?

16 minutes ago, Darius West said:

Pardon my skepticism at this interpretation.  The Hill of Gold is not Orlanth's Stead.

Well yes. That's a large part of why the Yelmalist presentation of the underlying mysteries tends to win out over the purist Elmalist one. 

To what degree do worshiped celestial bodies like Polaris provide a satellite's eye view of glorantha?

I note that Kallyr's personal guardian is Rigsdal, commonly taken to be a cognate of Polaris. Is that how she found out where the dragon was sleeping?

51 minutes ago, Eff said:

You don't understand. This is a little rude to say, but you simply do not understand what I am saying and referencing and I want to make that clear.

This is true, I absolutely don't.

in play, a character gets initiated at one temple, and can worship at others. The set of such temples they can use is called a 'cult'. It will rarely be ambiguous to them which temples they have access to. If unsure, they can very likely just ask someone. people know what their religion is, and (illuminates aside) they believe it to be true. 

The exceptions are going to be things like minor cults far away, and secretive cults that hide their true nature.

I did know a guy once who only found out he was jewish on his 30th birthday. Such cases are going to be even rarer in glorantha .

I know nothing about who the Theyalan cult of the lesser sun is in Wenelia, if there is one. if i needed to know, i would make something up. Maybe what i made up would then get published on the Jonstown Compendium. if it was cool enough, maybe it would catch on, and even form a part of official canon by the 2035 20-volume update to the cults book.

i am pretty sure what i would make up wouldn't be that it used to be Elmal and then changed to Yelmalio in synchronicity with dragon pass. But something that shuffled the mythic themes around in a way that resonated with the material culture and influences of the region. And something that made internal sense to the people who followed it.

Famously, when Argrath asked his adviser 'and how many divisions does the High Priest have?,  he got the answer _3_.

Noone is quite sure why that apparently mundane exchange is so frequently quoted in literature. Probably something to do with mythic resonance. 

8 hours ago, Eff said:

The Greg Stafford quote is instead about how there are two (plus) ways of making Gloranthas, one where the Elmal material of King of Sartar is used and one where it isn't, and that these are both equally true.

That's the great cycle of creation and play. Someone published something, people play it out in ways that vary. some of those people then go on to publish their own stuff. Those varying published sources confuse newbies. Someone finds a way to mostly reconcile the varying ways those things played out. Pavis in 1615 was like _this_, rural sartarite clans in 1621 were like _that_,, sartarite cities in 1625 are like _this_.

It doesn't really help anyone to say 'well you could run strike ranks in the rq2 way, or in the rq3 way, or you could make up your own way'. Those who understand don't need permission; those who seek understanding need clarity.

Once they are playing, then maybe they are playing at the scale where they get to decide what sartar in 1632 is like. Including maybe a future where the light of solar truth burns up the lies of the lunars. 

But the starting point of that play is one where the lunar armies were actually eaten by a dragon. and the sun dome templars are a military force that no Sartarite leader would wish to see on the other side of the battlefield.

4 minutes ago, Eff said:

What on Earth are you talking about? 

On Earth, all matters Gloranthan are equally ineffable. We have no reliable way of knowing the truth of any of them.

However, in Glorantha itself, this is not so; some things are thoroughly effable. The current location of Boldhome is in a different category from the current location of Brithos.

Similarly, it is never going to be a deep and unanswerable mystery to any inhabitant of Dragon Pass whether Yelmalio and Elmal are the same or not; it will likely be a matter of the personal lived experience of someone they know.

So to me, it is a mistake to obfuscate the presentation of Glorantha to create artificial mysteries or controversies that can't exist in the setting. Like 'now it is 1627, who is the current prince of Sartar? What is their personality and reputation?'

Save that for the stuff Gloranthan's actually disagree about, like who was Arkat. Or 'who should we worship'?

5 hours ago, Jeff said:

Humakt is in general neutral towards most deities, except those that misuse Death or sanctify betrayal.

it seems to me that the root of both Humakt's and Chalana's hatred of the red moon Goddess is the same, and has nothing especially do with her chaotic links. it is that she came to be via what they both consider to be perversion of resurrection magic that broke the rules of what could be brought back. Sedenya was certainly dead for more than 7 days....

Humakti warriors barely tolerates resurrection at the best of times, when it is done within the bounds of the compromise. Some Humakti think all red goddess initiates would register as undead, if there were not illuminated. And, in truth, the illuminated lunar aristocracy adopting vampirism is indeed a thing that happens.

To Chalanan healers, the red goddess is not a wound in the world to be healed, or even a maggot infesting the wound that must be cleansed before healing can proceed. She is a rogue healer, one who takes one life in order to return another.

Every healer will have faced such demands to bring back someone who can't be brought back, from grief or political necessity. And they will know they are lying when they say it can't be done.  To a ghost, any intact and sufficiently fresh corpse will do.  There may be mental and spiritual trauma from coming back in someone else body, but that too can be healed. Or embraced, if madness is what you aspire to.

Teelo Norri missionaries will say that she consented to the procedure, and they have met her personally and confirmed that. Chalanan's will sigh and say that's not the point.

There are two competing definitions of what a heroquest is, above and beyond 'a magical thing that happens in Glorantha'.

• One is 'a magical thing that is not expressible in the current Runequest rules'.
• The other is a 'a magical thing which the RQ rules gives a percentage change of success, and the GM decides would be more interesting to play out instead'.

Under neither is going to a weekly market to purchase commonly available goods a heroquest, at least unless your gm has very unusual opinions about what counts as interesting.

Under the first, initiation is not a heroquest, as it is covered by the rules. Under the other it can be, if and when the gm decides to make it so (as in Six Seasons in Sartar).

Under both, any really big and risky magical ritual is a heroquest, if only because there isn't really any current rules for community-scale Really Big Magical Rituals, or ones that can result in Unique and Unpredictable effects. This means you can't abstract them. But, under the second interpretation, this doesn't stop you playing them out.

if you insist on defining anything that can be played out using rq;g rules as not a heroquest', then obviously you can't run them until a new dedicated heroquest rules system comes out. if you think they are just a way of playing out a magical ritual that could succeed or fail, then you can. And maybe run them better later, when some book comes out with more explicit advice on how best to do so.

For a god learner, you could have them tell the party a long string of runic coordinates that they have to memorise. They will say that any minimally competent sorcerer will be able to bring them back, given those numbers.

Their idea of what a 'minimally competent sorceror' actually is will likely be a little off for 3rd age dragon pass. if a friendly visit to Delecti is off the table, a few months in a  good knowledge temple library may lead to something that can guide a shaman to their ghost.

From there, the same options as for any other spirit apply. Sanctify[1] a shrine to them,  create some kind of golem body, or have them take dominant possession of some street orphan. Simply binding them into an object or animal is likely not what they would think of as being 'brought back', more 'recycled into raw runic energy'.

1. The duration of a sanctify rune spell is 'as long ass the ritual lasts'.  So a  shrine tended daily could be interpreted as not actually requiring any other magic.

5 minutes ago, soltakss said:

Most of the Thunder Brothers are Sub-Cults of Orlanth and have Shrines in Orlanth Temples. In my Glorantha, worshippers of Orlanth and the individual Thunder Brother maintain the Shrines inside Orlanth Temples. 

Not sure what we are disagreeing about; that is exactly what it means to not  be'full cults'. They don't have their own independant temples, or magically-enforced initiation status. The RQ;G rules about leaving and joining rune cults do not apply. They do not have their own entry in any planned cults book. They are not playable cults to be chosen by a player; noone should be writing 'initiate of  thunder brother #43' on their character sheet.

Orlanthi are not monotheists and are perfectly capable of worshipping multiple deities at the same temple, as most real-world polytheist religions do. They just have temple wyters who do a bit more visible and obvious magic than most real-world religions claim to. This includes magically knowing who is, and isn't, a cult initiate.

The distinction between aspects and distinct deities only comes up once you go beyond a simple shrine. OT and OA are aspects as they can share a temple and have everything magically work out. in contrast, Buserian and Irripi Ontor are canonically known not to be aspects of each other, despite their many similarities.

This is demonstrated whenever the lunar empire stations its imperial clerks in the local knowledge temple. It doesn't matter how long that arrangement continues, you still have two distinct groups of people, not one unified organisation.

I do look forward to the 100-volume 'sub-cults of Sartar' that will no doubt come out one day. But I fear the audience for that might be somewhat limited.

12 minutes ago, Eff said:

As far as population goes, you only need a few hundred people for cult ceremonies, in those few instances where that's been specified, and there are hundreds of thousands of people in Dragon Pass. It seems like population isn't a problem either.

A few hundred people meeting regularly in one location is a clan, not a cult. Even with Sartar's roads, you are not going to be pulling from anything like the full national population, only a single city[1].

Boldhome has a (perhaps implausibly high) population of 25,000. Once you split that between the cults in the ten books, it's hard to find room for another 60. In fact, some of the ones included are going to have a job to do of plausibly justifying themselves.

Of course, it is always GM's privilege to add that one cult you need for a scenario, or for that one player who has a fixed concept for a character[2]. But Chaosium would find it hard to interview your players and create them each their own personalised cult. 

[1] travelling merchants, soldiers,  and wilderness hunters and a few others will kind of be an exception here.

[2] i kind of suspect this happened with Lanbril, back when ninjas were cool.

15 minutes ago, Darius West said:

I agree that they are like Maruts, but they are also cults in their own rights

A rune cult, by definition, must have rune priests or lords, and, unless using some special-case workaround, will have temples. A keen Orlanthi may well be able to name as many thunder brothers as a comics fan can superheroes. But there isn't the population, or level of economic development, in dragon pass to give every thunder brother their own full-time religious hierarchy.

Instead, there are clans who honor some particular ancestor, as the Haraborn of Six Seasons in Sartar do, getting their own unique rune magic in return. And there will be transient spirit cults, led by an individual shaman. These provide access to one or another this year, but as to next year, who can say.

Otherwise they are just a name and set of stories. Like some minor marvel superhero, they _could_ be turned into box office magic, and they very likely have fans who think that _should_ be done[1]. A single creative can drive the publication of a comic book so long as they retain interest in it. Some of the people who do this literally call themselves shamans[2].

But there are, even in the modern US, not enough directors, actors, movie theaters and audiences to make a movie for every named superhero.

[1] make Dredd 2

[2] https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_etd/send_file/send?accession=bgsu1302288940&disposition=inline

I think it is important to ground this topic in play. Each cults book announces  on it's front page 'xx playable cults'.

The minimum criteria for a cult to be potentially playable in a campaign is that the character has easy access to a cult shrine, and some access to a cult temple. For a city based campaign, like that in the starter pack, this will be not be an issue for, I think, any cult in the first two books.

When  the sea book comes out with something like the cult of wachaza, GMs will have a decision to make, as to whether to disallow players picking that cult, add an excuse to have an implausibly-located temple, or set their campaign somewhere else. But that's a future-RQ problem.

Things get a bit trickier with a clan-based campaign like six seasons in sartar, assuming that clan has the usual 0 to 1 temple to anyone other than Orlanth and Ernalda, You can't really quietly fully accommodate all possible cults; you get a temple and you get a temple, and so do you too. But you can always plausibly add a shrine to any deity a player worships, if it is at all plausible they do worship it. And you can always hand-wave a visit to the closest city in campaign downtime.

I think all the cults in the RQ:G main rules can plausibly have such a shrine; Yelmalio is about the hardest to accomodate. Or would be, if Elmal did not exist, or Yelmalio and Elmal were magically-distinct deities.

Not having had access to the drafts that some people have had, I do await finding out how things work in practice. 

To pick a different example, the lightbringers cult book apparently will contain Waha. In Prax, he is, for most tribes, the dominant tribal cult. In Sartar, and likely elsewhere, he is the patron deity of the butchers guild.

Everyone acknowledges that Praxian Waha and Sartarite Waha are the same deity. They even have the same name; presumably it's a loan word in one or the other language. But the book series isn't called deities of glorantha, but cults of runequest.

How do you write up a single cult description that applies both to the ruling class of a praxian tribe and one low-status craft guild?

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

Dendara is the patron deity of Stepford wives. Clearly, “she” is a Mostali construct. What are they up to?

Yelm sulking after Ernalda left him was causing an unsustainable level of critical systems failures. Crafting him a replacement was simply a logically necessary part of the solar repair process.

The bestiary description of dwarven castes has, alongside the material-based occupational castes, a description of the 'clay' caste based on origin (biological versus divine) that actually applies to 99.9% of the members of the other castes. So who actually are the clay caste?

Given dwarven squeamishness about such things , the thing they are clearly hiding is that the clay caste are those who make sustenance and reproduction their occupation. So foodstuff manufacturers, life support maintenance engineers, and  reproductive technicians. Consequently, their caste magic is associated with fertility and life.

Though few outsiders know, Dwarven mastery of those techniques is as complete as is that of ironworking or alchemy. Hence Dendara is of surpassing beauty and unquestionable faithfulness because the Mostali designed her to be that way. And she never speaks because the dwarf forming the matrix core of the mythomagical construct doesn't know Dara Happan. 

3 hours ago, Agentorange said:

But for longer documents I find hardcopy easier to navigate and easier to use.

Correct me if i am wrong, but printing your own copy of a pdf you own, for personal use, is legally ok. More expensive and probably lower quality than the explicit drivethru option, and zero legal resale value. On the other hand, if it gets worn out from overuse, you can just print it again.

Also, there are plenty of web services that will let you upload a pdf and have it posted to your door in a variety of bindings. Technically, due to the upload, this does require the publisher's permission; I've not seen Chaosium give that anywhere. 

it's the bane of all Mostali that the current state of Glorantha is a result of a series of catastrophes and partial recoveries, from the earliest myths to recent history. It is not a thing that would ever have been created by following sound engineering practices.

The same rather applies to the Runequest combat rule system.

Of course, another Mostali principle is that nothing is so broken it cannot be fixed, so long as the knowledge of what it should be like remains.

34 minutes ago, Joerg said:

It's all logical, trust the watchers.

Proof of the ability to do caste work is better proof of parentage than the word of any woman. Especially the child's mother. who rarely applies sounds logic to their consideration of the issue. .Often there is screaming and wailing.

if there was a great need in the land for peasants, we could search for them among the aristocracy. Have them work the fields for 6 months, and see who sickened, and who complained. Those passed the test would be true dronali.

Amusing as it would be, it is zzaburi we need, so zzaburi we search for.

8 hours ago, EpicureanDM said:

I'll do this myself. I'd be very grateful if @Jeff , the first credited designer of RQG, gave it a try.

In the interest of jeff working on getting the next books out, i'll try answering. As such,  the caveat applies that i play with house rules that, for combat, are probably closer to rq2 than rq;g. And i haven't actually ran the scenario in question.

There are three key pieces of advice given in the scenario that are always relevant.:

• incapacitated foes surrender or run away; the trollkin in particular have very weak morale
• a successful battle roll gives a player who makes it an accurate assessment of the situation.
• either the number of enemies should be matched to the party, or the players allies should come to their aid. Personally I prefer the latter, because eventually the players will notice if they always face one less dark troll when Bob can't make it. And getting more allies is an action the players can take, whereas facing less enemies isn't.

it also has a consequences of failure section, meaning the battle is there to be fought, not necessarily to be won. The story continues either way.

Using the default setup, there are 11 combatants, ranging from weak to strong. Some people (not me) do play with 8, but IME a party for a combat-heavy campaign like this requires 2 to 4 combat specialists and 0 to 3 support characters.  For the sake of the example, we will assume 2 and 2.

In a system like 13 Ages, such a battle would be balanced by some of the PCs being high enough level that they can be expected to take on two or more foes and win. This is a difficult calculation, and the fact that it can be done at all is one of the arguments in favour of such systems over D&D.

In Call of Cthulhu, fighting such a fight could be a scenario failure condition you should have avoided. Or it could be an exercise in trying to survive running away, or applying the thing you found out about during earlier investigation .

RQ can be run like Call of Cthulhu , but it it's a poor fit for the 13 Age style. if you find yourself wishing the rq2 treasure factor system was more accurate, you are probably slipping into the 13 age style. if you do prefer that, you might well be better served by that ruleset.

But there is a RQ style that is its own thing, This is based on the assumption that most of the enemy are too strong to fight at any odds worse than 1 on 1. So, as a battle roll will reveal, to have a fighting chance, there needs to either 11 combatants on the players side, or a corresponding number need to be 'taken out' before engagement, by  tactics or strong magic.

The trolls are using good tactics, attacking from stealth at night. just fighting on a level playing field will requires light rune magic. So winning just by tactics is unlikely. The players do get given a one-use magic item that will take out one combatant. And elementals can engage some more, and maybe lightning takes out another but all that is unlikely to be enough. So if they just all attacked together, they would almost certainly win. But that would be neither realistic nor fun.

in the fight, there are, in jeff's terminology, two encounters. These may happen multiple times each, if not decisive.

In the first, the 8 enemies than can use missiles attack. 1d2 engaging each PC. the others are counted as out of position. The trolls have the numbers here, but this is unlikely to prove a decisive advantage as missile fire can be freely healed from. If light magic is available, facing a skilled archer, or one using ranged Rune magic, they will likely take losses. Meanwhile, the PCs, realising they are outnumbered, should call for help.

in the second encounter, the non-trollkin advance to melee. There, the 4 pcs face 3-4 enemies, depending on how well the previous encounter went, and maybe a battle roll by the troll rune lord. The others are counted tied up fighting  war trees and the other mercenaries. In the grand scale of things, this is still a small, pc-focused fight, so if the players win, their side does, and vice versa. Though you could have some NPC mercenary rescue them from a defeat, if you think that would sit better with your players.

Combat starts with the PCs picking their foes; any who don't get selected then get to choose a PC to engage. it proceeds until one side gets a 2-man advantage. For those without allied spirits, healing is not available unless that side has an unengaged combatant with the right magic.  It also ends early if the troll rune lord is taken out, but that is unlikely as he does have an allied spirit.

hope that helps.

1 hour ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

What I don't see is fights being anywhere close to "decided" after a couple of rounds.  I'm not saying you all are lying or anything!  Not at all.  Just that something you do is very very different than what we do.

The basic math of RQ combat in a 1 on 1 fight ends is that it continues until one  combatant rolls a sufficiently greater degree of success than the other. Hit versus failed parry, special versus success is one, special versus failed parry is 2, and so on. If the losing side doesn't have enough armour to absorb the blow with only a superficial wound, they are out of the fight, at least temporarily. 

Loss by attrition of general hp is on top of this, but should relatively rarely be a factor before the fight is over for other reasons.

Depending on the armour and weapons involved, for normal combatants the required difference in number of successes will be 1 or 2. Really tough monsters (dream dragon)  only die to an unanswered critical, and mythic ones (crimson bat) not even then.

The exact number vary, but for evenly matched opponents it is going to be of the order of 20% for 1 degree, and 5% for 2. In a free-wheeling skirmish, that is per participant per round, so the chances of an even 6-a-side fight between armoured opponents staying that way are something like .95^^12, or 54%. And the chance of that happening for 5 rounds in a row is .54^^5, or 4%.

Once the fight is not even, then the dynamics change drastically. First,  one side will have 1 person who has to parry twice at a significant penalty. RQ:G is more generous here than rq2, but that still greatly increases the chance of them going down. Secondly, and probably more importantly, the winning side has the ability to heal a casualty without anyone being able to finish them off, or force them to yield. So to reverse an advantage of 1, you need to take 2 people out of the fight in a single round, without suffering casualties. And correspondingly more for the bigger deficit you will probably be in next round.

Violence is an option, not an obligation. Sometimes the other way is surrender, or retreat.

in the extreme case, this math means any fight against a single monster less than the crimson bat is very likely to end with the defeat of the monster. Even if the monsters takes out 1 player per round, then 4 people get 10 chances to roll a critical, 5 get 15, and so on. More with missile fire, which allows 2 attacks per round. Unless the monster has the ability to no-sell a critical, or engage all opponents, it is  probably going to die to an arrow in the eye. Once it is dead, all surviving pcs heal up. The open question is whether anyone died, and if they have the magical resources to do that again if they continue on.

If things don't work that way for you, then i'd be interested to hear where the assumptions break down. Is it that your players are running lots of defensive magic, and no offensive magic, so that an unparried special doesn't take someone out of the fight? Are you being generous about letting people heal themselves from incapacitation while engaged with an opponent? Is it specifically allied spirits that break things? Or something else?

6 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Unless you bring in terrain and other such limiting factors. The Munchrooms from Trollpak are a classic example of such a case.

Yeah I need to explain that a bit better, because what i mean by outnumbered is something like 'outnumbered in active combat'. Using terrain to limit the number of enemies who can engage you at once comes under tactics. Which I count as prior to the actual mechanics of combat.

Most of the time you are going to play that out; expect the players to actually pick good tactics, and have them fail if they don't. But it's also fine to have one player make a battle roll and say 'ok, you succeeded, half the enemies are not going to be relevant to this fight'.

i don't think it makes sense to chain augments in that way. Not least because some player will end up arguing for an infinite loop of augments:-)

I posted this to the runequest reddit on this thread on the first starter set adventure. 

Rules as written, the system is equally dangerous to the NPCs as to the players. Nothing in the rules would have prevented the scorpion men destroying your PCs as quickly and thoroughly as vice versa.

Assuming your players wouldn't have found that fun, it's your job as GM to prevent that.

Game balance is a little different from Pathfinder-style systems, in that there isn't really a 'default' winner, one who is statistically 99% likely to come up on top if no tactics are used and everyone just slugs things out. instead it more smoothly varies from 'very probably will win' to 'very likely will lose'. Without large hp pools, there isn't a 'rule of large numbers' effect to reduce the effect of random chance.

A related point is that, while combat rounds themselves take longer in RQ, fights are usually settled by the end of the second round. Once one side gains a decisive numeric advantage, there isn't much coming back from that. The survivors from the smaller side are both having making more parries, and at a penalty, and also getting fewer attack rolls. Unless you completely outclass your opposition, time to surrender or run away.

The starter adventure is unusual in that, for obvious reasons, it doesn't actually require using any clever tactics or roleplay to start the fight with that decisive advantage. For most scenarios, the actual gameplay is largely in getting to that point. Perhaps using stealth or tactics to reduce their numbers, perhaps using politics to increase your own.

Character progression in RQ is also very different, in that a starting PC who is an initiate of a dedicated combat cult, and allocates everything to weapon skills, is within a shade of being as good at doing what they do as any mortal human is. Think of such PCs as 21 year old professional football players; they may have a small amount to still learn about football, but they have a massive amount to learn about life.

Some GMs don't like that, and prefer to take the RQ2 approach of starting the players at 16, where they are clearly not yet old enough to play for the first team. This give the campaign a simple central focus of a coming-of-age story; how and whether they prove themselves. Others want to tell different stories.

Anyway, they key takeaway is that for a pathfinder-style system the easy mistake for a gm to make is to set up an unbalanced fight where the players are unexpectedly mechanically doomed to defeat. The equivalent mistake that a RQ GM can make is to set up a balanced fight where the player's story cannot continue following defeat.

Because whether due to a tactical mistake, or just a bad run of dice rolls, sooner or later that will happen.