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.

I really like this idea of hyper low bass notes for troll music, sounds very alien while still being something completely describable to a human perspective. I'll have to remember to include this next time one of my groups runs into trolls. I've never heard of water filled tubes being used on a wide scale as a musical instrument, but that might just be a reflection of my own ignorance more than of a lack of historical precedent. Are there a lot of land based water cults in Genertela? Going just off the RQG book, the only water god mentioned is Engizi, and I guess there'd be a number of rain gods and local gods/spirits of rivers and lakes, but that hints to me that the water rune isn't something that gets a whole lot of worship. The main water worshipping cultures make more sense, at least to me, to belong to the Triolini or other underwater dwelling race, and in that case they might not even have music, or at least not as we know it, given the significant differences between how easily sound travels underwater compared to in air. That said, the Triolini manage to speak underwater, so maybe they've got a solution to that (or perhaps this is just one part of physics that doesn't map so well onto Glorantha). I know what you mean, Eastern European folk songs do sound quite different, though no less beautiful. There's a youtube channel, BEK, that I listen to quite often that sounds like it does a similar thing, showing off musical traditions from around Russia. Thanks for the video, very cool to see a recreation like this, especially of those double flutes which I've always kind of wondered about. I wonder where they get the source for the dances from, if little music has survived I'd be surprised if there were many dances that were well documented, but perhaps dance is easier to describe than musical notation, and therefore more likely to survive. Yeah, last time I was looking into this I think I found a couple sources that claimed to have accurately recreated some music, but it definitely seems like one of the parts of ancient history we really have lost. That said, I've never considered historicity to be all that important in my Glorantha, so seeing all these recreations is great, and definitely fantastic inspiration.

Hey, Recently I've been transcribing the seasonal music from King of Dragon Pass - they're nice tunes, and pretty simple to play as well - and that's got me thinking about Gloranthan music in general. I assume music would have a highly spiritual and religious function, and each Cult would have its own set of songs for holy days. Do we have lyrics for some of these, or is this an area that past material hasn't really covered much. For more performance/entertainment focused music I've found a bit about the Donandar cult, but there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of information on them from what I've seen. Of most significance is his association with Harmony and Illusion, which raises the question whether these are the runes must associated with music, or whether it's more reflective of a professional performers desire to bring harmony to those around them through illusion, and the most relevant music runes are whatever runic affinities in particular are conveyed by the song being played at the time. For any like minded muses, let me know your thoughts, and if anyone else is working on a similar Glorantha inspired musical project, I'd love to hear about it.

I might not quite qualify as the experienced GM you're addressing the question to, but that does give me the advantage of remembering clearly the struggles that I ran into when I first started out, and getting around check farming was definitely one of them. A couple other people have mentioned it, but the solution that I eventually landed upon was to only roll skill checks in stressful situations and/or when the success or failure of the roll would have a particularly interesting effect on the course of events. Really this is something that you should be keeping in mind as the GM anyway, so it's neat that the game has a mechanism built in to remind you of it. I dunno what it's like with your group, but I find that stripping out all these redundant dice rolls really helps to improve the flow of the game, and ideally if you're doing it right, your players will be far too invested in whatever is happening to try and metagame the experience system. As far as an average number goes, it's really very variable. Sometimes if it ends up being really low I'll hand out some experience checks for things achieved during the session, for instance if the party as a whole negotiates a really good deal, but only one of them made the bargain check, I'll give some appropriate experience checks to the others as well.

Thank you for the feedback! The mathematical analysis is especially appreciated, the nature of the success system makes it a little harder to calculate probabilities than some other systems. The narrative flow disruption is one of my biggest concerns for sure, I'll report back on how badly it's affected once I test out the change. Ah yeah, can't believe I forgot about that one. I've been going through the Hero Quest rules recently and I remember being pretty impressed with the system as implemented there, which is pretty much the same, I'll definitely try it out after I've tested this one. Haha yeah that's one of the big draws for me too. With the current resistance table, a contest of wills between two individuals at POW 10 and two individuals at POW 30 plays out precisely the same mechanically, I'm hoping that having these extra rolls and expenditure of MP will help to emphasize the epic clash of power. I'm a little hesitant to try this one, having to recalculate your success chance after every roll could be frustrating. Perhaps though instead of spending an MP, you could choose to sacrifice a point of POW for +20% or something. Thank you 🙂 Thank you all for your feedback, it's greatly appreciated. I'll make sure to report back with the results once I've tried out the rule.

Hi all, I've been GMing Runequest Glorantha for about a year now, and I've been really enjoying the system. It gets over a lot of the issues that DnD 5e (which I have much more experience with) has, and the greater level of simulation aligns way more with what I try to get out or Role Playing. There are however a number of rules that I've found either frustrating or unnecessary, and have replaced with homebrew versions that much better suit my group. There is however one rule that I've been thinking about how to replace pretty much since day one, which is resistance rolls. I really like the success level system employed throughout the game, it really helps the flow as for most interactions I don't need to know what my players skills or attributes are, just whether their roll was a success or fail. Resistance rolls however break this mold completely, and every time they've come up in game (which is a lot), they've always been kind of awkward. I've been trying to think of a less awkward solution for quite a while, but I've never managed to come up with one that would achieve similar results. I think I've finally got one though, but I thought I'd run it past the forum before trying it with my group, just in case there's some horrible consequence that I haven't considered. So the main reason as I can see it that resistance rolls don't use contested rolls like everything else, is that contested rolls have the possibility of a tie, which doesn't really work for what resistance rolls are trying to achieve. This gets even worse when high power creatures and players are around, as ties tend to become even more common as skills increase. Perhaps we could get around this by just redoing the check whenever there's a tie, but such a system would surely destroy the tension whenever any more powerful opponents are faced due to the sheer number of rerolls required. But what if we reintroduce the tension by making the reroll a choice on the attackers side, and a choice which they have to spend one magic point for each time they make. This would make contests between individuals of high power still feel significant, rather than the current system which treats all equal power contests the same, and although large amounts of magic points could end up getting used I figure it wouldn't matter much, since high power players have a lot of MP anyway. So in summary, my replacement rule would be to make a contested roll and in the case of a tie, the attacker may choose to conduct another contested roll for the price of one magic point. I'm yet to consider how this would work for other kinds of resistance rolls, but they are far less common in my group than POW vs POW. Let me know what you think, and if you see any glaring issues that I've failed to consider. Advice on how to use the resistance table more efficiently would also be appreciated, I'm fully open to the possibility that I've just been missing something this whole time and it's actually really convenient to use.