bturner

The jungle trolls worship Moorgarki, but I had thought that they also still worshipped Kyger Litor. The fact that she isn't preeminent in their religious practices definitely speaks to the loss of connection. Perhaps the only jungle trolls who are able to initiate to her are those who have undergone a ritual to reestablish the connection? This sounds like a heroquest, though maybe a minor and well-known one. On that basis, any jungle troll who did worship Kyger Litor would be at risk of having trollkin children - yet another Dark Secret of the jungle trolls.

I admit that my interest in CoC 7th ed has strengthened not least in part due to the fact that its publication will give the new Chaosium crew more time to work on other projects. :-)

Any goddess who has both dinosaurs and earthquakes in her portfolio is not to be trifled with. The personal habits of her followers do nothing to counteract that reputation as well.

I'm willing to accept all of that, unlikely as it seems. :-)

I have the physical object in my hands and can report that it is put together quite well. Some illustrations (e.g., page 24) show some pixilation, but the majority are cleanly printed. No issues at all with text or binding.

I think I did get a premium hardback. IIRC the standard hardback had a B&W interior and the book that showed up has a color interior.

As one of the long-suffering "standard hardback" backers, I was truly overjoyed to see my book show up in the mail today! Many thanks to you for your persistence, and to the hard-working folks at Lightning Source and DTRPG! It is a beautiful book and worth the wait!

I'm eagerly awaiting the day when the issues with the standard version are ironed out. :-)

Very nice work!

I've been reading using Adobe Acrobat on a Google Nexus 7. At normal reading speeds it resolves just fine. It does take time to resolve (first from white screen to blurred, and then to readably sharp) if I move through the file rapidly.

I did notice that the table of contents is structured oddly: there is one hierarchy, then after "Fatigue" the mark points break into three new hierarchies: "Pirates & Dragons 2.pdf", "Pirates & Dragons 3.pdf" and "Pirates & Dragons 4.pdf".

RuneQuest itself never really offered any formal rules for heroquesting, and provided only the barest of suggestions on what it might look like or how it might proceed. The core trouble I've always had was that a heroquest is about emulating mythology, specifically fictional mythology. Most of us have read or seen a lot of adventure stories and have no trouble coming up with convincing adventures that at their core could be reduced into the plots of Yojimbo or The Seven Samurai. Getting into the mindset of a (fictional) mythological world is a lot harder, and fundamentally demands a lot more from both players and referees.

I think the act of 'heroquesting' should be a rare, maybe once or twice per campaign, event.

RPGs were a way to get inside the novels we read. Most novels I read would be about 'adventures.' What kind of novel could you use an example of 'heroquesting' activity?

But then there's my potentially threadjacking assertion: most novels I read are also not about a sedentary community of farmers or shepherds, propitiating local spirits as the seasons cycle through.

I'm the guy who reads Fafhrd and the Mouser, Cugel the Clever, and Dumarest of Terra. I play adventurers who are thrown up against terrible adversaries in exotic places.

Got RPGs?

The hints of seafaring rules and the description of cult structures that diverge significantly from the traditional RuneQuest model are quite interesting.

That is too cruel, sir! Tempting us for a moment, then drawing the prize just back out of our reach! :-)

(I have no doubt that it will be back for real soon enough...)

IIRC, Pendragon moved from percentile skills to a 1-20 scale. The simplest way to apply the resistance table plan would be to divide all skills by 5 and use the result as if they were attributes. This will mean that a 10-point superiority will mean basically automatic success - but that's not going to work out too differently in the standard rules (e.g., 25% skill vs. 75% skill).

The original did a good job of evoking the Book of the New Sun (though I think the map scales between city and world were off by a bit), with a wide variety of additional bits and pieces tossed in besides. The marketing description of the new version suggests that it will contain substantially more material, and I'll be very interested in seeing what gets added - and how the move to RQ6 impacts the flavor of the setting.

Hey, not a problem. Keep us all informed on what you decide, and how the conversion works out in actual play!

Duplicating the actual odds of an attack-and-parry combo in BRP this way involves a bit of math, and isn't going to be a static effect. The actual chance of a strike occurring for some attack chance A% and parry chance P% is A% * ( 1 - P%). In the specific case of a PC with a 50% attack skill and an NPC with 50% parry, the effective penalty the PC suffers is -25%. If the PC's attack skill is higher (say, 70%) the effective penalty is higher at -42%.

So the first truth of this mod is that the results won't exactly match BRP results no matter what. However, the simplicity of having only PC's roll is still attractive. I think you will need to impose larger penalties if NPC's are going to represent a similar threat level to the PC's as they do under the unmodified rules. I recommend identifying a "baseline" PC skill level, a level that represents a reasonable skill level for a competent PC, and then using that and the equation above to determine the penalty levels for specific NPC skill levels.

Working from this plan, if the baseline PC skill level is 50% then the penalty value associated with an NPC is half of their skill.

Regards!

I'm fascinated by the history and struggles of the Eastern Roman Empire and its successor states, but have never felt that I knew enough about them to really run (or play) a game set in the region. Mythic Constantinople sounds like an excellent way to remedy that problem.

I just downloaded and skimmed through it. My first impression is that it makes me glad to have backed the project - it does a nice job of evoking the world, and the layout works well with the flavor of the text. I'm very much looking forward to the final product!

Successful dragonslayers didn't always "fight fair" themselves. In one version of the tale, Sigfried found the trench Fafnir used to reach water, dug a hole in the mud, then stabbed him in the belly as the worm slid over him. Crusader John Lambton wore spiked armor so that the Lambton Worm impaled itself when it attempted to crush him. Daniel poisoned the dragon of Babylon with doctored barleycake offerings. Beowulf, who insisted on battling a dragon mano y draco, "won" but was fatally wounded in the process. St. George fared better, but his foe spit poison rather than flames, and George had the advantage of a lance or spear to keep the thing beyond arm's length.

Personally, I think a squadron of F-18s would be just the thing to teach Smaug some manners. Persaude the dwarves such a thing is possible and they'll figure out a way to build 'em.

Those are very good examples, and really point out that there are only two good ways for a hero to defeat something fifty times his size: be clever, or have a very remarkable edge in his favor. It entertains me that Tolkien visibly borrowed from the Volsunga Saga in describing how Turin slew Glaurung -Turin's approach was nearly a copy of Siegfried's.

Dragons are also, generally speaking, too smart to fight fair. IIRC Smaug didn't exactly "fight fair" when he took over the Misty Mountain. A dragon who is both a living WMD AND a tactical and strategic genius is a force to be reckoned with.

You would have to be a fanatic to take one on and the stuff legends are made of to win. If you do it for the fame, or the glory, or for the promise of a great reward, you can be described in one word -- Lunch.

Agreed.

To take a slightly different tack (and make the idea of dragon-slaying more likely in games), consider the idea of a dragon race that pursues a low-Q reproductive strategy. This is very much not in the spirit of either Gloranthan dragons (who don't have a "reproductive strategy" in the sense that mundane creatures understand it) or Tolkien's dragons (who were originally an effort in embodying malignant spirits by Morgoth), but certainly would fit into normal fantasy tropes. An adult dragon lays a huge clutch of eggs and then abandons it somewhat before they hatch. All of them hatch around the same time and turn into a veritable plague of dragonlings. They'd spread out pretty fast to sate their hunger. Anybody in the area would very quickly be in the market for aspiring dragon-hunters, who might need only be able to kill a worm 3 to 4 meters long.

Whether characters who end up facing dragons should expect any chance of survival is much more a story consideration. The dragons Tolkien wrote about were much more like natural disasters than monsters: they consumed armies and laid wrack to cities, and to stop one demanded the capabilities of a hero (often a doomed hero). If that's the portrayal your game takes, random mercenaries should hardly expect to win in a fair fight. But then, who says dragons need to be fought in set-piece fashion? :-)

That is a very nice cover. Can you share any details on the product that will be underneath it?

Agreed that the absence of Magic World on RPGNow doesn't make much sense - I've bought a lot of PDF's there, including a fair number produced by Chaosium, but I don't make a habit of monitoring their website. There's no question that they could make more money from me if their stuff showed up on RPGNow more promptly.

Mine showed up a few days ago. It is truly a thing of beauty. There is no mistaking the care and effort that you put into your work. It has been quite a few years since I last ran a RuneQuest game, and I very much appreciate the fact that the Design Mechanism's products both speak back to those fond memories and spark inspiration in my mind to put a new group together. Thanks!