Chao

The way I think of it, Humakt owns the Orlanthi concept of Death, and to the Orlanthi, Death in combat is the most honourable pursuit of all. I'm sure a Humakti Swordlord visiting a battlefield would actually see it as an immensely honourable place where hundreds of warriors had been granted entry to the afterlife. That said, there's definitely plenty of room for interpretation, if your player wants to be more of a ruthless killer then there's no harm in altering your Glorantha slightly to make the Humakt cult run more along those lines. Even better, use your player's unorthodox approach as a seed for a side story in which they shake up the old Humakti traditions, possibly forming a subcult of more viscious warriors.

Oh wow, I actually was not aware of this, thanks! I'll definitely have to try it out next time I'm making a character, looks like it'd speed things up a lot.

Oh yeah, this is nice, though it still has a bunch of the number copying busywork I'm trying to avoid. Another idea I've had is to create different character sheets for all the different homelands with the base skills already filled in. Still would require copying down the occupation skills, but it would help make it a little faster.

We've always just taken the excessive amount of skills as a part of that anachronistic Runequest charm, but yeah I can see how the sheer quantity of them could get annoying. I kind of like the idea of keeping the skills and personality aspects of characters relatively separate, making the moments where they do cross over all that more magical. We get a lot of augments in my group, which in my opinion is a great use of the runes. When things get really intense we'll often just roll straight on runes or passions, for instance we've had Storm Bull wrestling rituals where all the participants are just rolling on their beast runes.

I run a large drop-in-drop-out style game in which we have newcomers every couple of sessions, and as such I've become quite familiar with the lengthy character creation process, and the difficulties it presents to new players. The length of character creation has always been one of my gripes with Runequest, and I've been thinking for a long time about how it could be improved. As I see it there are a number of key issues with the process: There is a lot of referring to tables and simply copying over information from the rulebook, e.g. homeland base skills, ability modifiers, HP calculations. Interdependent parts of character creation are not situated next to each other, the most glaring instance of this is the cult selection appearing on step 6, while rune affinities are selected on step 3, long before the player knows what runes they will be needing for their cult. The most interesting and important parts of a character are chosen towards the end, which can result in the player feeling rushed through what should be their most thoughtful decisions. Over time I've reordered and made changes to the character creation process, however after a recent particularly laborious character creation, I decided to have a go at making some more far reaching and radical changes. I've written them down in a step by step process, however It's a little too long to comfortably fit in a forum post, so I've attached it as a PDF to the post. For the most part it's a reordering of existing steps, however I have also made some changes to the way that things are calculated to try and strip away the reliance on tables. You'll also notice I don't mention the family history section. Personally I haven't found this section to be all that interesting, however I'm sure others disagree, and it shouldn't cause any trouble to add it on as an extra step at the beginning of the process. I've definitely made some rather far reaching decisions on some of these steps, so will do my best to explain the motivation behind each of them below. I am yet to try this with any actual newcomers, however running through it myself it took me around 30 mins, which is a lot less than the usual hour+ I'll write these comments assuming you've got the PDF open, I don't expect they'll make much sense otherwise 🙂 1 - Choosing homeland, cult and occupation right at the beginning makes sense to me, as these three choices fundamentally define who your character is going to be, so should be taken into account right from the start. Assigning cult runes here is mostly just a matter of making sure they satisfy the requirements of entry to their chosen cult. 2 - I find that very few starting players end up sacrificing extra POW for more rune points, so I've made it an explicit choice here to highlight that it's an option. We play with the common rune magic list tacked onto the special rune magic of each god rather than it's own permanently available thing, hence the reference to the common rune spells here. Also, the magic selection is here because magic is cool, and should be a thought out process of selection rather than rushed at the end. 6 - I've been thinking about ways to improve the player characteristic generation system for a while, and this is my latest attempt at simplifying it. INT and SIZ both have base 3 to get their averages close to their rules as written (2d6 + 6 avg is 13, 3d6 + 3 avg is 14.5), while also ensuring that they can not fall much lower than the rules as written minimum. 7 - I like giving starting characters access to all weapons rather than restricting them to their homeland choice, as I feel it produces a much more interesting variety. Really though it's because I got sick of everyone using broadsword and shield. 11 - These formulas are all rough estimates of the tables that they are replacing. For a while now there's been a running joke in my groups that one should be wary about increasing their characteristics, as hitting a skill breakpoint will result in recalculating all of your skills. After a couple years of running the system, I am no longer sure if this is a joke, so I've had a go at creating some formulas to remove the necessity of consulting the modifiers table every season change. Also, you might be wondering why this is after skill selection. We often play with our skill modifiers not added to our skills, and add them together when we're actually doing the roll, however if you don't do this putting it before skill selection would be a good idea. 12 - I like putting all these calculations right at the very end, since they're the least interesting part of the whole process. A lot of this is just tables copied out from the book, but I have simplified some of them into formulas. Alt Character Creation.pdf

That sounds good for a 1 pt fissure spell. I am by no means a Runequest master, so it's possible that there are rulings for building armour, I've just never run across them. There are unfortunately a number of absences like this in the core rulebook, in general I wouldn't spend too long looking for specific cases like this and just run with what makes sense and what works for your table. They don't cover this specific case, but if you haven't found them yet there are some "rune fix" documents that answer some common questions up here: https://www.chaosium.com/runequest-rune-fixes/

I'll usually go rule of cool when I run into situations like this, and try and match my player's expectations without going too overboard. Is your player spending all their RP in this spell? Then it should probably do what they intended, as long as their not trying to bring down a fortress or something. If it's just a one or two point fissure, then maybe collapsing a wall or two would be sufficient. If you really need a more concrete ruling, maybe your player is really into the crunch, I'd look for something similar that is ruled, and go from there. If your building is made of stone, the Mostali construct Jolanti are also made of stone, and are maybe about double the size of a person. Their HP is around 30, so it might be reasonable to rule a small stone wall as having about the same. As a general rule of thumb, I've found that inanimate materials, like stone or wood usually have equal HP and AP, so ruling the AP of a wooden wall as a couple times the HP of a large wooden shield, depending on its thickness, could also work.

I just give every player a POW roll each season, regardless of whether they cast any spirit magic or penetrated any magic defense. There's a section in the rules that mentions that players gain a POW roll on the holy day of their god, and we also abstract that out to every god has a holy day each season (so that everyone recovers their rune points at the start of each season). I give experience rolls for failed skill attempts as well as successful ones, because why not. On the topic of experience, we also never apply negatives to the gain dice whenever it's mentioned, as soltakss mentioned the experience of succeeding the experience roll to then increase by 0 is a terrible one. I've also been playing around with the idea recently of having failed attacks still hit, but as a grazing blow that doesn't get any strength bonus. I instituted this after one particular session where a non combat focused character got into a fight with a trollkin, both having fairly low weapon skill, and they spent the whole time thoroughly missing each other. Failed ranged attack rolls do of course still miss. Haven't been using it long enough to determine whether it's a good change or not, but so far it's been interesting.

Oh I really like this one. You could do something similar to Heroquest's character creation even, and say only half the array entries need to be entered when making your character, and the other half can be figured out as the game progresses. It might make 100% skills a little more exciting as well if you're not able to start with them, the intricacies of 100%+ skills can sometimes be a little complicated to explain for new players too, so denying those to new characters could help simplify that as well. Main issue I can see is that it brushes over the specialities of each cult and culture, which is a pretty big issue. Could work well though, especially if you make sure each skill choice is justified by background, it could work to help the discussion on what each cult is about.

Well said. Mmm, I was thinking more that pretty much any character that wants to do melee should be a tank, since it's so easy to get instantly killed in Runequest. I guess you could draw some distinction between someone who defends themselves with parry/evasion and someone who just can take hits. Hey, that's actually a really nice character creator, this is definitely a lot simpler and more approachable than the full character creation process. Kind of pivoting onto a different topic, but I've been looking for ways to speed up character creation in general, especially all the cultural and occupation skills. Just from a new player experience perspective, it kind of sucks to have one of the first things you do be, copy a bunch of percentages down. It'd be nice to defer some of it, maybe only fill in the starting skill percentage the first time they use it or something, so the character gets gradually filled in as the game continues. If anyone's experimented with systems like this in the past, it'd be great to hear about them.

Mmm, I've also not been using that section. I haven't noticed any huge problems with low power characters though, but perhaps I'll try throwing some stronger characters into the mix and see what difference it makes. That is an interesting side effect. I've found that my players tend to like big characters, if they're planning on doing any kind of melee fighting. I'm also curious what you're referring to when you say a tank, I wouldn't have expected that archetype to work in Runequest, for a variety of reasons. It definitely is more sensible to have a broader spread of characteristics, but many of my players are unable to resist the urge to run dumb gimmicks :). One or two characters with ridiculously low stats is fun, but a party full of them can be an issue. It is for this reason that I try and stay away from points buy systems. I find the experience of rolling characteristics to also be really fun in general, definitely more so than just selecting numbers anyway. I really like this, and luckily I have enough d6 lying around to try it out. Gonna be creating a new character on Sunday, might try this out.

Ohhh yeah, a points buy system would be nice. I'm hesitant to have it be straight 1 to 1 though, I'm not sure if I want to deal with 18 STR 18 SIZ fighters walking around. If you've had success with it though I might try it out.

I've kept away from the 4D6 drop lowest result for Runequest just to try and stay in line with the rules as written, but perhaps I should try it out. I really like the, roll more 3D6 groups than you need and drop lowest of those idea, especially to make the 2D6 roll a little more varied. True. It does feel a little weird though, as it implies a world where everyone is either large, or smart. Statistically I don't think this is actually true, the two 2D6 dice rolls are still totally independent, but the decision definitely feels that way.

Hi all, The question of how to generate stats came into my head pretty much as soon as I started playing Runequest, and pops up like a thorn every time I've gotta run someone through character creation. I prefer not to use the base "roll the required die for each of your stats" because of how little agency it gives to the player, but finding a good alternative has proven quite difficult. Currently my approach is to roll five sets of 3D6, and choose which of STR, DEX, CON, POW, CHA those go into, then roll two sets of 6+2D6 and split those between INT and SIZ. This works okay, but it does create some weird situations when a player rolls really high on one of their 2D6 rolls, and they then have to make the decision of whether they want to be really smart or really big. Another idea I've tried in the past is to roll a baseline 1d6 for everything other than INT and SIZ, and then roll 7 sets of 2D6 to add to that, with INT and SIZ getting their baseline of 6. This is all also only accounting for human players, I haven't even started to think about what I'd do if someone wanted to play a non human character. If anyone has already figured all this out, and found the perfect, simple and elegant way of generating player stats, I'd love to hear about it. Simplifications of other aspects of character creation are also welcome, any tips and tricks to shorten character creation times would be greatly appreciated.

Ah yeah, it does doesn't it. I suppose being denser, the sound would travel further, but also be harder to make. That Jal Tarang water instrument is also quite cool, and definitely something I can imagine fitting well within the setting. Beautiful stuff, I can only imagine how the Lightbringers story would sound performed in such a way. This was a really good watch. I'm still a little skeptical of how accurate this really is, but regardless it's a very unique sound. This is a really interesting consideration, especially withthe connection between magic and music in Glorantha, having musical instruments on campaign may be even more important of a strategic consideration than in real world armies. Perhaps great care would be taken to protect these instruments, mounting them on armored war carts, or just armoring the instruments themselves directly. Imagine how many runic augments could be provided by a well situated piper playing hymns honoring Orlanth in the middle of a battle.