Dr. Devici

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Prior to Harmast Barefoot, Orlanth myths didn't include a Lightbringer's Quest.

Stereotypical Humakti traits do seem feminine coded from the storm perspective, even if it is meant as an inversion of the air rune.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

This interpretation is why I've been scratching my head wondering why Yelmalio doesn't have the morale spell. Yelmalio didn't just survive the Darkness, he made friends and settled feuds by being the guiding light for everyone battling the Darkness. Having morale available to Light Sons seems like a proper mythic representation of Yelmalio the leader. That now makes a lot more sense if we're taking the interpretation of rune magic being archetypal, but then there's a whole new set of head scratchers, as @Eff noted above.

Those tainted with chaos are not precluded from comporting themselves with honor. When dealing with non-intelligent or feral chaos, there is no expectation or demand on your behavior. When dealing with, for example, broo who offer a parley, or a group of scorpion men mercenaries who attempt to surrender, your obligations against chaos and your obligations of honorable conduct are put into conflict. This is from when Chalana Arroy took the name Natyrsa, and unrelated to the honor passion.

Honor doesn't stop being a factor even when your opponent is clearly tainted with chaos, and fighting chaos foes dishonorably will still carry the usual penalties. Some Orlanthi will break the rules of honorable engagement in order to kill chaos, but they aren't saying "it isn't dishonorable," they're saying "it's too important not to do."

I also scrapped the adjustments for skills over 100%, and also considered that it was a pretty big boost to earth shield. I settled on it being a feature, not a bug. I cannot say that it has bothered me. As an extension of this, it's worth keeping in mind that your NPCs are supposed to represent agents in the broader world who do not want to be hurt or killed, or needlessly expend resources. Forcing a rout or surrender resolves faster and feels better than dragging a combat to total annihilation.

In the RQG bestiary, wraiths are not considered to be undead. They have the Death rune at 100% and no Undead rune. They are described as friendly toward undead, but I'd read that as a natural impulse, an opposite of their natural malignance toward the living, rather than any sort of kinship.

Karlak's mention of a close quarters condition had me thinking about using scaling penalties for weapons based on weapon length to incentivize the shorter weapons (and also give the weapon length statistic some value beyond just calculating WSR), but I didn't land on a concrete guideline for the numbers. The basic thought was something like "in close quarters combat, weapons up to 0.5m in length fight at no penalty, with a scaling 10% penalty for every 0.1m above that." If it reduces your skill to 0, that means your weapon is too big for the situation. I also want to do something with weapon length in general, like maybe longest weapon gets first strike on a new engagement. Because man, the rapier needs something going for it.

I personally find this solution to be unsatisfying in the context of RQG. In a story game where the focus is on genre tropes and narrative developments rather than the particulars of combat? Sure, a weapon's a weapon, it does weapon damage, you use your "melee" rating. In a system like RQG, which has an entire subsystem dedicated to the particulars of combat encounters, I find stripping most meaningful choices out of weapon selection to be anathema to the core design. At least in my experience, dropping 6 RPs on a shield is a huge investment. I've seen it happen, but only in response to engaging a thing that's very likely to hit you for 25+ points of damage. Anyone dropping that kind of magic in a man-to-man combat is marking themselves a a prime threat, a shining beacon that says "please direct all enemy spellcasters and grapplers this way." And at least in the context of a combat encounter, the heaviest armor available should nearly always be the obvious best choice for frontliners. I'd relegate most of its headaches to out of combat dilemmas. Your overland walking speed is slower in heavy armor. You probably can't wear it for long in hot weather, and may need to swap it out for specialized gear in extreme cold snaps. It penalizes your ability to hide, both in terms of sneaking out of sight and blending into a crowd. Etc.

One issue with this is that HP is a compound stat that measures both how durable a weapon is, but also how good it is as deflecting a blow from you. We could reduce the broadsword HP a bit to make the shortsword a more attractive defensive option, but how would we extend that to daggers? Surely a well-made dagger should be pretty durable against receiving damage by our "shorter weapons are sturdier" logic, but do we want them to be the king parrying tool? If we just try to rewrite the weapon table, we're going to run against the problem that once you settle on a general weapon type, say one-handed swords, there's only 3 "major" variables left to consider with damage, HP, and WSR. HP represents multiple things and is complicated to mess with, and within a single weapon type, WSRs probably aren't going to differ by more than 1 or maybe 2, so it's hard to build an interesting gradient with those.

I'd say a natural 200% in a weapon skill is already plenty ridiculous as it is! The Crimson Bat, a god in its own right, has 100% as its highest rated attack skill. Despite such a modest attack rating, I would still recommend not getting into a fight with the bat under nearly any circumstances.

I could be completely wrong about this, but given the current stat blocks we have for RQG, I'm guessing that characters like Harrek don't have a natural 1000% in any weapon skill. I wouldn't be surprised to see a stat block for Jar-eel at some point that gives her a natural ~200% in her main weapons, with the addendum that she also has a couple dozen retainers whose jobs are to load her up with every kind of magic before she ever enters combat. The real heavy hitters of the setting will probably stand out because of community support, personal magical reserves, and specific heroquest gifts rather than just having 2000% in their skills across the board.