bturner

I never had the opportunity to meet Greg, but his works inspired me from a young age. His genius and creativity were rare treasures, and I am humbled by them. He will be missed.

Very nice!

I've had good experiences running REIGN and playing Numenera on Roll20. The idea of support for the upcoming RQ there is quite appealing.

21 hours ago, Rick Meints said:

Chaosium will be working with volunteers to stat these HQ supplements for use in our other game systems, like the new RuneQuest and also 13th Age in Glorantha.

How much that happens depends on the volunteers. Chaosium is not currently looking at making these "stat packs" official books, but making them available as free downloads via our website and similar.

That's quite good to hear!

The new address is good - I was able to log in right off and the content is migrated over. The Mythras branding still looks odd to me, but I'm confident it will grow on me. Thanks for developing and supporting such a good resource!

The new address is good - I was able to log in right off and the content is migrated over. The Mythras branding still looks odd to me, but I'm confident it will grow on me. Thanks for developing and supporting such a good resource!

The idea that morokanth are ritually obliged to eat meat, but don't necessarily have the digestion for it, appeals to me. One way they may manage this is by embracing their Darkness nature - they're not trolls, but Darkness does incorporate hunger as one of its aspects. A morokanth particularly strong in Darkness might well learn appropriate magical tricks to allow the easier digestion of meat.

On 2/11/2016 at 8:42 AM, Baulderstone said:

Compare that to RuneQuest, where you may lack a skill to perform an action, but if you can find a bag of treasure and trainer, you can pick up a new skill in a new field without it limiting you in your other endeavors. 

While I am not the biggest fan of using your character sheet as a menu to decide what to do, at least in RuneQuest, the menu options are a lot looser, and you are a lot less constrained in what you can add to the menu. 

These are excellent statements. RuneQuest provides lots of opportunity for characters who never knew that (for example) they were going to learn how to build and use (magical?) hangliders to do exactly that. This is a huge strength of the game. The fact that the standard skills list provides a good 90% answer to most typical situations is another strength - having a completely blank character sheet can mean that in an unexpected situation a player's mind can just go blank for lack of hooks to work with (not good for MGF). If the player knows that their character has good skills to fight, to raise horses, to cook, and to tell plausible lies they will use those as building blocks. It's the referee's job to ensure that those elements don't also become straitjacketed limits.

5 hours ago, Joerg said:

In RQ3 there was the strange effect that you did not gain any "common" rune spells at shrines, only at temples. For a spell really to be readily available, it has to be available at shrines, otherwise you won't find a Heal Wound anywhere in the Elder Wilds except for Yelmalians, in one citadel.

Agreed! Add that to the numbers requirements to maintain even a shrine and it seemed pretty likely that most communities would have access to almost no rune spells. The distribution of temple sizes needs to be balanced to expected population.

23 hours ago, MOB said:

Here's something interesting: unlike RQ2, Heal-6 will not put a severed limb back on. For that you need what Jeff calls "big healing magic" (Rune Magic like "Regrow Limb" or "Heal Body")

Whether that's good or bad depends very much upon the availability of magic. and how conservative the referee wants to make the players. Effective healing really blocks into three categories - "prevent death" (e.g., stop bleed effects), "return to action" (bring hit points back) and "erase crippling / lethal wounds". In most RQ games, getting to that third stage usually requires significant specialization (learning Heal 6 cost a fortune and a half in RQ2, wasn't easy in RQ3, and doesn't exist in RQ6). Making it harder to manage crippling wounds will either make players more cautious or serve as an irritant to the one guy whose character loses a leg 20 minutes into a session and ends up sitting on the sidelines. The balancing question is the difficulty involved in getting "big healing magic" - and removing the path of battle magic is likely to make it quite a bit more difficult. The various actions taken to make rune spells easier to acquire and use for initiates will hopefully balance the matter.

I've gotten a lot of mileage out of Shores of Korantia. The Korantines have colonies all around the Inner Ocean, a feature that can be used to justify their presence just about anywhere.

I'd always wondered what the "Padding" spell that a couple of NPC's knew in some of the RQ2 supplements. Now thanks to RQ1, I know - apparently Protection didn't start off as a variable spell, it was just the 4-point version and Padding was the 2-point version. Go figure.

Just now, MOB said:

Runes are an inherent part of the new sorcery rules!

That should be worth the price of admission. Not that there was too much chance that I wouldn't pay it anyway. :-)

13 hours ago, MOB said:

Yes, the new RQ features non-toad sucky sorcery rules, which will fit quite nicely with what we know of the Aeolians!

The idea of non-toad sucky sorcery is quite appealing. The RQ3 sorcery rules had their charm, but they were very difficult to use in play and had a very specific flavor to them, one that didn't seem to fit a lot of things (not just Glorantha). The RQ6 sorcery rules are a lot more configurable and I've had a lot of use from them in a non-Gloranthan game (Shores of Korantia), but again they don't inherently have much to do with runes.

On 1/15/2016 at 8:29 AM, Harshax said:

I know there is a mechanic for improving Ability scores in RQ, but the game heavily dissuades its use. Ability scores improvements must be maintained with constant Improvement Roll expenditures and there is a racial maximum that an Ability score can achieve.

I looked at the rule of requiring improvement roll expenditures to increase ability scores and immediately discarded it. The optional rule for permanent stat increases (cost = 1 + [current] - [minimum roll]) is much better. It doesn't require players to do nearly as much accounting, and it doesn't leave me worrying that one player is permanently stunting their character for the sake of a temporary gain.

I really like the implementation of Runes in HQ, but I find myself somewhat unwilling to completely abandon the standard theist and sorcery skills in their favor. Allowing Rune ratings to be used as augments for spells is compatible with the rules. Using Rune ratings in place of Folk Magic skill for appropriate folk magic spells is very much in keeping with the HQ idea of using Runes for augments.

One of the advantages of Heal Wound was availability - it was a common divine spell and thus available to a lot of folks whose cults didn't have convenient access to the spirit magic Heal. And as Joerg points out, it's just about the most efficient way for a rank-and-file soldier to become a single-shot healing specialist out there. I don't expect to get eviscerated often, but when I do I am much happier when I know that one of every four folks in the fyrd have sacrificed for a use of Heal Wound.

I've got an RQ6 game going, and in the near term I'm not going to step away from it. Sometime in the future, maybe.

12 hours ago, Mankcam said:

I would love to see this content reprinted for RQ6 rules, perhaps even reworked with content from HQ Pavis Gateway To Adventure. However, as much as I like idea of classic reprints, I agree that the way forward is to support updated or new content for the contemporary rule sets.

I'll second the interest in reprints, or "updates" to RQ6. Either way, you publish them and you'll have my money. :-)

The idea of a society's elite all having Fire/Sky and Disorder as runes just doesn't seem sustainable to me. I suspect that the Veskarthan priests and ranking cult members who run Caladralander society tend to mix Fire/Sky with power runes that aren't Disorder - Fertility and Mastery seem like good alternative choices, choices that might actually resonate with aspects of Veskarthan. Of course, that would also mean that most of the cult hierarchy would have very bad access to Veskarthan's Disorder powers. The occasional cultist who shows up with very powerful Disorder is probably a subject of some concern to the more staid rulers - how can his power be harnessed in ways that don't result in a (metaphorical) massive explosion that destroys everything around him?

3 hours ago, Runeblogger said:

If the next chapter depicts the Cradle scenario, I think it's going to be a big spoiler for everyone who hasn't played it yet... Don't you think? 

In one way or another, that scenario has been published for over 20 years. I think it's okay to write about it in a comic... :-)

On 11/14/2015, 3:38:04, trystero said:

I agree on rules design, though I think RQ6 lacks a little of the clean, systemic design that I associate with RQ3; there are more tables and fewer computations in the newer version.

However, while I like RQ6's layout, I do wish it used a slightly sturdier typeface; I'd honestly rather have RQ2's plain look or RQ3's layout than the small, thin Warnock Pro type used in RQ6. I find the PDF nearly impossible to read without doing a lot of zooming, and even the printed book is a bit more strain on my old eyes than I like.

(Some of Moon Design's books have similar issues for me; the spidery Adobe Garamond type in HeroQuest Glorantha, for instance, makes that book harder to read than I think it needs to be. Perhaps it's just me.)

I can completely sympathize - reading the electronic editions on an older Kindle Fire also requires a lot of zooming. This is an issue that has come about relatively recently (<5 years), hopefully the folks doing layout for Moon Design and Design Mechanism will recognize and adapt, as none of us are getting any younger. :-)

18 hours ago, tgmoore said:

I just bought a hard copy of MagicWorld. I really like the rules. I am coming from primarily a D&D background, all editions. But I fear I have hitched my gaming cart to a dinosaur. 

It's fortunate for all of us that RPG rules don't expire like fresh fruit. :-)

If you've found something good, something that you can use to create excellent worlds and adventures, then in the final analysis it doesn't matter if the publisher ever prints another word about it. Granted, I know that my own hopes for the new Chaosium are, "Publish more of everything!" but I also know that the reality is that the is a lot of work to be done, that the Moon Design folks are going through it as best they can. They have a good track record, but they've taken on a very big challenge.

RQ6 is a cleaner game than the original, considering only mundane issues of rules design, physical layout, and the like. Where it cannot stand against RQ2 (at least for an aging grognard like me) is the sheer sense of wonder and discovery. Sure, I may be trying to recapture lost youth, but there are worse motivations. :-)

Now think about the fact that they can be abnormally stealthy (Darkness, plus lead armor that doesn't clank) and that they *prefer* to attack at night. It's no question why the folks to the North in Peloria just lump them into various categories of "horrible monster" (digijelm, krjalki). It's also clear why Yelmalio (in spite of the fact that the RQ2/RQ3 versions of the cult offered such paltry magic for direct combat) was so popular among Darkness fighters - Catseye (12 hours) plus Sunbright (15 minutes, more with Extension) could easily spell the difference between utter devastation and a slightly fair fight for a group of human warriors opposed by a troll horde.