Raebon

23 hours ago, Alex said:

You're welcome!  I think some sort of 'session zero' exercise is very useful for establishing this sort of thing.  Could be something like a relationship map, a 'community questionnaire' type thing, or just a running-stuff-up-the-flagpole exercise.  "So peeps, I'm thinking of structuring things around Fubar the Windy, High Storm Voice of Somelocation, being the main patron for your PCs -- that work for youse?"

Yeah, most def! I did a session zero but more to set the stage of Glorantha and make sure everyone was cool with dying horribly because a trollkin got a lucky roll. Nobody's died yet, but one player almost died twice in the first session: two rock toads nearly ripped her in half (one had the left leg; the other had the right arm), and then a baboon pegged her in the chest with a stone hard enough to put her down, bleeding to death.

So far they're cool with wandering around finding work where they can. Got an initiate of Lankhor Mhy, two Daka Fal aspirants going to find a shaman, and a would-be Black Fang Brotherhood assassin about to get his first job.

11 hours ago, simonh said:

The restriction on having to learn by experience before you can buy another 5% training is specific to combat skills.

On 9/22/2021 at 5:16 PM, Alex said:

 

Ah, boosh! Thanks Simon! I couldn't settle on a way to handle it and it would have fairly major implications on the game, so it's nice to have that settled.

Also because my lankhor mhy initiate only became one because he spent 45 weeks solid training up his alchemy skill 😛

On 9/22/2021 at 5:16 PM, Alex said:

As Simon says, "cult business" can cover this if the cult is explicitly acting as a patron on an adventure-by-adventure basis, or if they have the status of community champions and get broad licence.

This is only a credibility stretch if the cults are wildly incompatible or actually hostile:  why would the Seven Mothers and Storm Bull be co-sponsoring the same random bunch of adventurers, say?  But that's the sort of thing you can just iron out (or decide how best to hand-wave!) in session zero, I think, if you have buy-in from the players to having PCs from the same community, or otherwise having a clearly understood common purpose of some kind.

For lay members, even fairly major back-sliding is going to have more social than magical consequences.  So if you have either permission or forgiveness from the mundane hierarchy, you're fine.

This is situation normal.  Praxian tribes are constantly at war with each other, and most of the warriors are Waha cultists.  Likewise Sartarite cattle raids:  Orlanth-on-Orlanth crime.  Evidently not a metaphysical problem for the god for his followers to be knocking lumps out of each other.  In social terms, priests are very much primarily loyal to their tribes rather than any separate religious hierarchy, which doesn't really exist anyway.  Except for cults like Paps-Eiritha...  who're not the ones doing the drive-by stabbing, anyway.  Only if the cultists break religious norms (acting against cult virtues, breaking ritual taboos) would they get any sort of religious pushback.  Humakti killing each other in honorable combat:  mythically correct behaviour!  Humakti breaking oaths to each other, nooooo.

Much obliged! I think I'm going to err on the side of cult priority. The origins of my group's characters are ill-defined, so cult loyalty works better methinks. Probably I'll tie it down locally, to an extent. Loyalty order might be: temple-cult-city, or something like that.

One rule question I'm trying to nail down: do you need to learn by experience in between training of non-combat skills? The rulebook didn't seem totally clear on this point to me,and I could see the logic going either way tbh.

7 hours ago, simonh said:

EDIT - Going through the RQ2 classic books again for this thread makes me super nostalgic. In some ways RQ2 was pretty crude, but it's also incredibly atmospheric and is such a great little game. Once you figured out how to handle some of it's odd kinks it was a ton of fun.

Man, right? I took my group straight from 5e DnD and they seem to behaving a whale of a time not murdering everything they meet. 

3 hours ago, ffilz said:

I don't do a very good job of enforcing attendance and such... I guess in my campaign adventurers are exempt... I would definitely agree that lay members should not have much obligation other than in a few very select cults. I've had an adventuring Lhankor Mhy before, though I'm not sure the PC ever made initiate, or if she did, it was near the end of the campaign. Since i never got into the cultural anthropology aspects of Glorantha, the tribal stuff really a factor.

1 hour ago, simonh said:

We never really found these a problem. Often the characters would be notionally on cult business anyway, and even if they weren't there's generally an "if at all possible" caveat that's a handy get-out clause. If you're in the middle of the wastes, clearly it's not at all possible to be at a Temple. Maybe a bit of fudging going on, but as long as the character put in some extra effort to stay good with the cult, it was fine.

To be honest back in the early days we didn't think about tribal politics because we didn't know it existed. The only social context the game gave us was the cult relationships so that's what we focused on, that and chafing against Lunar rule. Yes of course we realised there was a political situation, but at the time the Lunars ruled Sartar and Pavis so we assumed it was a period of relative stability.

Fair enough! Helps to know other people had fairly similar thoughts on how to run things.

Couple of rules questions: does training in non-combat skills require learning by experience in between? It seemed ... odd that if you wanted to improve map making or alchemy, you needed to do it while trying to dodge arrows at the same time.

How did people handle shamans back in the day? Could they become rune level characters? It seemed strange to me that there'd be a career that could never get rune magic. I've basically just inserted shamans in place of priests for some of the tribal cults and created a system for them to acquire rune magic by fighting spirits for it.

Thanks y'all! 

Hi everyone!

New referee to 2e, running some new players through a moderately homebrewed campaign.

Had a couple logistical questions for the venerable grognards.

The cult requirements are a big one. They're all over the place, and some practically preclude adventuring as more than a hobby (looking at you, Lanhkor Mhy and The Seven Mothers). Do you enforce them? I've more or less decided on merely requiring tithes from initiates and rune level characters, the idea being that proper adventurers are rare and valuable commodities to cults. My players are averse to running a rotating cast of characters and, for the moment, I am too. Maybe when someone unceremoniously dies we'll change our minds.

Even requirements for being a lay worshipper can be stiff: mandatory attendance at weekly worship scenarios is tricky in a campaign where I'm enforcing travel times, and random encounters, bad weather and getting lost can all slow you down.

How do you handle cult/tribal relations? While the cults seem to be entities unto themselves, loyalty to one's tribe could come into conflict with cult loyalty. And for cults that are part of tribal life (Waha, Daka Fal, etc), what happens if your tribe comes into conflict with another tribe, but all the leaders are part of the same cult?

Lastly, I've been debating using the optional character creation rules for any replacement characters. But I've noticed sometimes you end up with a character who's ostensibly been trained in weapons they don't have the stats to wield. Any suggestions? Handwavium? Perhaps they were instead trained with a roughly analogous weapon?

Thank you for your wisdom Ancient Ones, and may Arachne Solara bless thee!