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Dr. Devici

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  • RPG Biography
    I play the games
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    RuneQuest Glorantha
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    USA
  • Blurb
    Minor omnipresent mustache knuckling.

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  1. Though to be clear, the RQG bestiary does specify children born of Telmori parents are automatically initiated into the cult, which is kind of interesting in and of itself.
  2. And I'd be fully game for the local Orlanthi holy man talking big about freedom until people start exercising those freedoms to attempt things he doesn't like. But then, what about Sartar? He was the Orlanth Rex of an entire kingdom, and he happily made peace with the Telmori, made them a full tribe, and even married them into his bloodline, but then drew the line at initiating them into Orlanth? Why?
  3. That bit about Orlanth is especially weird because shortly after it's mentioned that Orlanth judges people by their deeds and cannot sense chaos. That seems incongruous with the stated reason we don't have any Orlanthi-Telmori.
  4. It's worth noting that both Lightning and Thunderbolt ignore physical armor. Sure, they're rune spells but the general logic of "physical armor doesn't protect much against lightning" should probably hold for lightning stroke. Magic defenses like protection mitigating the damage seems like fair game though.
  5. The basic core was always important, but unless I'm misremembering this was believed to be the Lifebringer's Quest to save Ernalda prior to Harmast's time. I imagine they mirrored each other in several ways, but ultimately Harmast's discovery integrated the Lifebringer's Quest into the Lightbringer's Quest, similar to how Monrogh's revelation integrated Elmal Guards the Stead into Yelmalio's Hill of Gold.
  6. Prior to Harmast Barefoot, Orlanth myths didn't include a Lightbringer's Quest.
  7. Stereotypical Humakti traits do seem feminine coded from the storm perspective, even if it is meant as an inversion of the air rune.
  8. I'd lean more toward the mortal understanding of Gods are the stories people tell of them. So when you've structured your Yelmalio Stormfriend subcult to focus exclusively on when Yelmalio walked the world and aided the Storm tribe, Orlanthi ask their god what he thinks of that and he comes back with "yeah that was pretty cool of him," then they warm up to and become friendlier with your worship practices. Or I guess in the context of the broader Yelmalio cult, Orlanth likes the stories where Yelmalio is a friend, and dislikes the stories where he is an enemy. Taking all those stories together, it leaves the cult as something you can't fully trust, but also can't bring yourself to dislike. Their perspective is alien to you and their actions are unreliable, but they have a history of being cool when it really matters. Comfortably neutral.
  9. I reread the combat section of the starter set. The organization is much cleaner, which is convenient for parsing information. Including the results of damage directly in the combat section instead of burying it in the chapter prior is also a welcome change. It is very trimmed down compared to the core rules, but this is probably part of why it feels more consistent. It does still share some of the same unclear passages that the core rules have. For example, it says that a character in melee cannot both attack physically and attack magically in the same round. Does that mean a character can cast a spell and attack physically as long as the spell isn't an attack? And in that case what exactly counts as an attack spell? The text suggests bladesharp and fireblade don't require a free hand and thus just add your DEX + MP cost as an SR modifier in melee, but that section's heading suggests they're considered magical attacks??? And none of these distinctions make much sense anyways, because the limitation on casting and attacking implies this is because physically attacking is a full round action and doesn't leave you time for anything else besides defending. So why would it matter whether the spell I'm casting is shield or thunderbolt? I shouldn't have the time for either based on the stated justification. This is a pretty big issue. A brand new GM going purely by the printed rules isn't being given clear information regarding a core element of the game's action economy.
  10. I would call this aspect of it strictly for the worse. Despite some hangups, I do broadly like the core mechanics of RQG combat (or at least how I think they're intended to work), and think its relative grittiness and meticulousness is a nice balance to the more out-there elements of Glorantha as a setting. But man, every handful of months I give the combat chapter a re-read and I always finish more confused than when I started. Sure, maybe starting with more powerful PCs throws the GM into the deep end of combat complexity much sooner, but the real barrier I worry about for new GMs is how much of a struggle it is to learn all those rules in the first place given how frequently unhelpful the rulebook is. I have played more complicated games than RQG and found them easier to run because they are much more clearly written and better organized, and that's despite me being three years deep into running RQG at this point.
  11. My reading of the RQG rules is that bound spirits cannot cast spells on their own, though the wording is a little vague. Pg. 366 has: "The binder of a spirit can use any spirit magic the spirit possesses and the magic points of the spirit to fuel spells." I wish the wording were more clear (it is in RQ2!), but I still comfortably interpret that as the binder casts the spell, using the MP and knowledge of the spirit. This would cut the Rune Lord's action economy in half.
  12. I would guess most of the discrepancy is how quick enemies are to rout in different people's games. When I was running lower level encounters, enemies only had a few rune points at maximum, and most weren't going to rejoin the fight after using Heal Wound unless the tables dramatically turned in their favor. Heal wound to them was for making sure their legs were in working order to run away.
  13. Agreed, and would add that beyond just the superlinear scaling of time to resolve is the tedium added past a certain point, where the GM is now stuck repeating the same actions several times. The repetition involved in a 3-on-1 fight against a PC makes it feel less intense than a 1-on-1 duel. I am curious, what do you identify as the pain points in this list? Because my experience has been that Rune Lords are more or less fine to run, but a relative pain to stat up during prep.
  14. I do want to echo this, because coming from other trad games with features like defined power curves, experience levels, and HP scaling, designing enemies in RQG is both easier and more intuitive. I do wish the various tools and guidelines like "what does somebody's skill percentage in a weapon represent" were better organized and maybe even repeated in helpful locations, but then, organization is one of my biggest criticisms of RQG in general. I understand and empathize with that lack of confidence and nervousness about putting your own work out on the table, and there's plenty to be said about how damaging it is that the trad space largely gave up on teaching new players straight from the book and instead adopted the "older cousin" model. But ultimately, people making their own content in a pen & paper game are taking up the role of game designers, and are going to have to get used to messing with numerical buttons and dials because that's part of the process. Everyone's going to break things, the most well-thought-out designs never survive first contact with players, and that's all OK. And if you really fuck something up, the events of your game aren't inviolable. If your combat encounter kills somebody instantly and you suddenly realize it's mathematically absurd and borderline unwinnable, you can just say "my bad guys, let's roll back the clock a bit" and adjust things on the spot. I've been there and I've done that, it works out fine. (I would still love to see some guidelines for RQG combat design and agree "just don't worry about it RQG isn't supposed to be balanced" isn't helpful. I just don't think it's a replacement for convincing people that they're just playing pretend with their friends, and it doesn't really matter if the pretend fight in the pretend game isn't perfectly tuned.)
  15. The current OGL drama could maybe drive some of the market away from WOTC's ecosystem and toward third party solutions for supplemental material and running games, but it seems very unlikely that a significant market share will give up on D&D entirely.
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