Jason Farrell

That year being 2012. 😉

Congrats on the release of volume 3. 250+ pages of Praxian goodness for a mere $18. Get yours while it's hot.

I see the Chaosium apologists are rolling up their sleeves. They have said that they have "plenty of copies", so it's a moot point.

if the answer to this isn't yes, I'm going to be supremely irritated.

I can't believe they left out the "Razoress" part in Jar-Eel's entry, aka the coolest name in RQ.

If anything, I think there would be more. As in our world, that's largely a function of whether people have to spend every waking moment just surviving. In harsher climes, I would imagine there are some Gloranthan cultures with little time for art for art's sake. But overall, there certainly would be, and I say I think there would be more because of the existence of magic, which would reduce the drudgery of everyday life, and generally make things easier and faster to accomplish than IRL.

Dying Earth is a very fun RPG to read, and his work on it is how I first heard Ian Thomson's name. Recommended!

Why are there no reviews out there for the first two Cults books? it was my understanding that copies of that book were given to some "influencers", but if they're not talking publicly about the books, who exactly are they influencing?

If you just handed this book to an RPG fan, they would have no idea this was a fan publication. Between this and Austin Conrad's recent releases, and books like Temple of the Twins and The Crimson King earlier this year (and Martin Helsdon's book, whenever that arrives), the bar has been well and truly raised.

Add a review the other day. When do we get our dwarfs? 🙂

The map handout is there. 🙂

Old Pavis: City That Time Forgot (current bestseller on the JC) has an extended heroquest. Ian includes some rules (more in the form of guidelines and suggestions) for heroquesting in general in that volume also.

I hope so. But it concerns me that you're using language (you "think") that still allows you to hedge your bets and not follow through with it. Because I don't agree at all with your conclusion that you "shouldn't do it at all" if it's not perfect. And yes, I'm using the word "perfect" rather than repeating your "done right" because for something that's supposedly a core part of RQ, it's quite amazing that there have never been published rules, not in decades. I can appreciate wanting to do justice to Greg's views and stories, but respectfully, I don't think you can say it's a core part of the game if you're open to never including it IN the game. I'm nobody. Just a reader, a player, and a fan. The game will be what you and your team make it. But I feel like pushing back a bit is necessary if those of us who want to see these rules hope to ever get them, because there are tons of fans who are happy to repeat verbatim what you said above, likely because you yourself have been saying them for quite a while. You can listen or not, but I think it's important that you don't just hear feedback from the echo chamber RQ fandom can often be. Perfect is the enemy of good, it has been said. Thing is, if you release these rules, for some they will be perfect, even if you don't quite think they are. And when the thousands of us have them and use them, our feedback and stories may allow you to fashion them into something more perfect in your eyes as well.

The most recent RQ video posted on Chaosium.com says this: "In this Chaosium Interview, Jeff Richard talks about heroquesting, a core part of RuneQuest and the world of Glorantha." Just saying. Bolding mine.

And I bought 'em. 🙂

It baffles me that anyone accepts as a reason we don't have heroquesting rules after decades that "it's really hard and we want to get it right." At some point, and that point has been crossed long, long ago, it's not a question of "well, don't you prefer to wait for really good rules rather than get bad rules faster?" People only ask that question, in that way, because you sound dumb if you say "I want bad rules." (Objection: leading the witness, your honor) But again, it has been decades. It's a game company. Making games (and rules) is what they ostensibly do. You wouldn't accept such an excuse from anyone in any other profession. Hell, even George RR Martin hasn't taken as long to get his next novel out as Chaosium has taken on heroquest rules. I'm honestly not sure exactly what Jason Durall's wheelhouse is, but Jeff's isn't rules. It's Gloranthan mythology. That's what he's good at and what he's interested in. The fact that he's most interested in the Mythology volume of the Cults series is, to me, telling: it seems to be a book about myths and the big picture, and I don't get the impression that it contains much in the area of gameable material. The people who came up with 99% of the rules for RQ are no longer around and it shows. Agree with Soccercalle on the layout issue. I get that Chaosium is relatively small and maybe can't afford more full time layout folks, but are there no other options? Can they not hire freelancers to push out specific projects? Jeff liked to talk about the bottleneck that Cults created (which isn't gone at all now that they've decided to spread its release over 2+ years, but I digress), but running every single project through one (or two?) layout folks is creating every bit as much of a bottleneck, to the point that we still don't have non human pregens after almost 2 years. That is, again, utterly baffling to me, that a relatively small but useful project like that gets stuck at the end of a very long queue.

Well.... not food! The current take on Mostali, they don't eat anything humans would recognize as food.

More like we can see it if we squint. As we sit here, unless we were one of the 50 odd people in Ann Arbor recently or a social media influencer, we still haven't gotten a new book since late 2021. I'm still not thrilled that the cults books ended up being on a 2+ year release window. There's been no concrete word of any of the other books in development (like the Sartar book or Gamemaster book). Have to assume at this point that they're 2025 or later releases. Not a renaissance, in my opinion. I hope the cults books are great and do very well.

Yeah, they do. Because the people buying those clothes aren't the people who are going to wear them, they're the buyers for clothing retailers who have to figure out what they're going buy and store and ship to their stores ahead of time. Those clothing stores, however, don't advertise such that people can somehow be inspired to wait 3 months to come in and actually buy the clothes.

I'd like to hear it myself. Because if your "obvious answer" is that them talking about the book is going to help sell it, my question is: to whom? Nobody can buy it. Does marketing work that way? Hear about something now, buy it 3-4 months later? It doesn't. Now, if the .pdf could be purchased, or if the book could be preordered, that would make sense. But it can't.

What layout? I recall the pregens being a full page illustration and a template that coud be filled in with whatever text and values. The more I hear about this queue, the more it sounds like Chaosium puts things in a strict first in, first out order, regardless of the relative size of the projects. That seems odd to me, indefinitely delaying something that might take an hour until something that might take 150 hours is completed. I'm open to and happy to be corrected if this isn't accurate. It's something I've thought about several times and I decided to say it out loud this time.

Slumping happens because when people lose consciousness, they often lose it gradually. When my uncle passed out from lack of food years ago and shattered his jaw on the sidewalk pavement, it was because he went from conscious to unconscious instantaneously.

The inconsistent part is assuming her power is sufficient to avoid injury to a standing target, but not to do anything about someone climbing a rock face or swimming in a river. Or how about someone standing on top of a harmful substance? There are too many situations in which you'd have to rule that the priestess would have to exercise caution anyway, so they may as well need to for every situation.

That's not a corner case, it's just a natural extension of the concern any Chalana Arroy cultist would have to have in casting this spell: would the person, having fallen asleep, be put in physical risk by that act. If the spell causes someone to slump harmlessly to the ground, then surely that's part of the magical effect? Because if I'm standing upright and go instantly unconscious, I'm going to fall like a rock. So would you. So I think the OP's rule makes perfect sense, and it also make it so (very logically, imo) a Chalana Arroy cultist would need to be careful in their application of the spell, in a similar way to how they are generally careful to avoid violence. It doesn't make putting people to sleep pointless; there are many ways in which the spell could be safely applied.

Leatherette versions, like Brian said.