Jason Farrell

Nice job getting to the finish line on it, Austin! I'm sure it's well worth the wait.

Received earlier today. Thanks so much!

There's nothing particularly intelligent about it, but a natural language interface for internet searches isn't a terrible thing in and of itself. It's the people convincing themselves that it actually substitutes for creative work that worry me.

good thing we're all immortal, eh?

"very soon"

From what I know, which isn't everything, the Sartar book will (of course) look specifically at Sartar, and Boldhome in particular. I don't know how detailed it'll be, but I'm thinking along the lines of the treatments of Pavis in the past. It will include scenarios (I know this from things Andrew Logan Montgomery has said, as he worked on it) The Dragon Pass book is a gazeteer, a broad overview of the entire region. Probably no scenarios or any mechanical game info. There has been at least one Dragon Pass gazeteer published in the past (in the Heroquest era, I think), and though it may not be identical in structure to that, I think it will be along those lines.

That's just this page from the Well of Daliath: https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/home/catalogue/publishers/chaosium/runequest-gods-of-glorantha-previews-2019/

The Lightbringer one. Humakt is specificially mentioned in the teaser.

I can't imagine what you possibly mean by "the log jam is clearing" when these 10 books are currently scheduled to come out from 2023-2025.

It's worth the wait, folks. Chock full of good and imaginative stuff.

"Your path changes in 3 days" Doesn't sound like it to me. We'll see.

Not to pick on you, but I'm going to take this opportunity to mention something I'm often confused by: it doesn't require that you set your games in other areas of Glorantha, because people in those other places can travel to you. There's also nothing regional about the division of cults in these books. There are Lightbringer worshippers all over. And there are lots of cults that won't be covered in the first four books released that are prevalent right there in Dragon Pass/Sartar (Yelm, various troll cults, etcetera, etcetera)

Actively discouraging people from wanting new books for their chosen game system seems like a frankly baffling stance for a game company to take. It's one thing for the random fan to do that (I've been told on here that "Orlanth" gives you everything you need, so I shouldn't care about any other cults, and I've been told that I should just use 20 year old rules), but it's quite another coming from the president of Chaosium. The point is not that we can't play the game without these books. The point is that we shouldn't have to, not when cults and heroquests are two of THE most fundamental things that make Glorantha unique compared to other settings/rulesets. I expect to get people telling me I'm whining, I'm wrong, I'm dumb, etc but that's fine. I'm very secure in feeling that it's a terrible idea to come out with a starter set in 2021 (and then discount it to 99 cents this year) and follow that up with nothing but a Weapon & Equipment book, while constantly delaying support for key elements of the setting and rules. It's been frustrating enough for me that after a couple of years of being very in tune with what's going on in RQ and reading nothing but RQ, I've had to take a step back and largely disconnect from it. Good news for Chaosium though: they're still my favorite game company, so I've stepped back from RQ and into the tentacled arms of my all time favorite, Call of Cthulhu. I ran Full Fathoms Five for 6 friends last Friday, and I'm running it for 5 more this Friday.

I am entirely unthrilled by the continued wait for these books, but I'm not at all sure that this will be less appealing for casual players. If it had been released in one 3 volume set, as originally planned, the price point would have been prohibitive for anyone not already committed to Runequest (probably $200 or so). I was prepared to pay that, but Johnny Curious probably wouldn't have been. If these books ever come out (sigh), someone can lay down $20-$25 (pdf) and get several times more information than is currently available in RQG format.

They're coming out soon... as measured in geologic time.

I don't know what the MRQ2 is so I can't check it, but is it possible that with a defensive stance you don't get an increasing penalty for each parry beyond the first?

Congrats on the release, belated or not!

Associate cults certainly don't. That should be obvious from even a cursory glance at the associate cults. The Lightbringer cults are usually associate cults of each other, for example, and obviously they exist independently of each other.

I said earlier that it might make sense to remove movement from strike rank considerations entirely, but for many reasons, that wouldn't work overall. But what might work is the opposite: adding them. In the example we started with, a character charges a stationary character. Simply and unilaterally adding strike ranks for movement solely to the character doing the moving creates an unrealistic scenario in which the mover is likely to act second, even if they're bigger, have a longer weapon, etc. However, although the stationary character isn't moving, they are waiting for the moving character to reach them, so logically they are in essence delaying their attack for an identical length of time to that taken up by the charger's movement. If the charger is using 6 strike ranks to get to the stationary character, adding 6 to the strike rank of both allows other factors (dex, size, weapon) to determine the order in which they attack one another. I like that a lot better than having a move action/attack action system because you can easily determine things like whether the stationary character can loose an arrow at the charger before the charger reaches them, something a move action/attack action system cannot do, unless the charger can't reach them in one turn.

https://support.drivethrurpg.com/hc/en-us/articles/360036896591-Jonstown-Compendium-Content-Guidelines

Chaosium owns Glorantha and Runequest. The only thing they don't own is the name "Heroquest". The current braintrust doesn't particularly like the direction Heroquest went with tons of subcults, but there's nothing, legal or otherwise, stopping you from using your own versions of that material in a book you put on the JC (obviously simply cut and pasting existing text is always plagarism)

The former is where you'll want to head. The Glorantha thread especially is fairly active. The other Discord is a ghost town.

Granted that I don't know anything about that system but what you just wrote, I don't like that either because it too rigidly defines when you move and when you do other things. It would seem to preclude there being a difference between running across a room and attacking versus attacking and then running out of a room. Both should be possible, imo.

I love the idea of what a character is actually doing mattering in the determination of how quickly they can do it. I much prefer that in theory to the highly abstracted initiative roll in D&D/Pathfinder. Unfortunately, there are some big flaws in the SR system and these conversations are common, for good reason. I don't know that there's any way around adjudicating individual cases on the fly as a GM using the current system as written.

So continuing to think about this and talking out loud now, one scenario in which it makes sense to count movement in strike ranks would be the following: X casts a rune spell at the beginning of their round and does nothing else. Y casts a rune spell but only after running across the room. Y would not cast their rune spell as soon as X would because they are, say, running 18 meters ( so they would cast it on SR 7) There's some common sense at work there that is probably understandable to any player or GM. But it still complicates thing from the standpoint of having a consistent initiative system. I think part of the issue with the OP's example is that it's a melee. It doesn't seem logical that Stevie would attack before Larry because Stevie is attacking Larry himself. Larry having to run toward him would seem to be immaterial once they were actually engaged. On the other hand, if Stevie was attacking Leroy a meter away from him in the opposite direction rather than Larry, it would make sense that Stevie's attack would happen before Larry could reach and attack Stevie.