svensson

Well, an Orlanthi OGRE maybe... 🤣

And it looks even MORE 'disordered' than when you started. There's just something 'Stafford-style' elegant in that 😂

First off, yeah, I got shit for my Alice Cooper and Killing Joke records too. Second off, I deeply appreciate talent and musicianship, even if I don't necessarily like the style of music or the artist themselves. It's the AUTOTUNE that object to! So much 'processing' goes into so-called 'singers' and so-called 'bands' nowadays that the little SOBs can't do a concert by themselves. How many groups have you heard in the last 20 years whose Top 40 hit was so autotuned that they have to lip sync their own work because they don't know how to harmonize with each other? For example, I loathe boy bands as a genre but the Backstreet Boys have my [reluctant] respect because I heard them a cappella six of their songs without missing a beat or a lyric. Skill is skill, period.

I'm convinced that this is how 90% of US Top 40 music gets made... 1. Record a random animal noise 2. 'Process' it 3. Find an Instagram model who lip syncs well

Very true. Otter is also a local trickster, but is more concerned with comforts and family than the clever teacher role

The trick with advancement is being lucky. A few good rolls of the dice and you can max your POW pretty frikkin' quick. So, both you and @Squaredeal Sten are both correct. I've often told the story here on the board of how my character in a long running RQ2 campaign stayed an initiate while everyone else in the party advanced to Priest or Rune Lord because I couldn't get one required skill to bump past 85%. Sometimes the dice are simply not your friend and you have to RP that lack of success.

Well, Complete Griselda was published LOOONG after Big Rubble. Big Rubble was written as Griselda was still appearing in Different Worlds, in media res so to speak. The Big Rubble statistics are accurate insofar as people understood her at that time. So you're not wrong necessarily, you just didn't have all the information. And for all I know, it's been changed since. Besides, the question you posed the place/role of uninitiated adults is still a good one.

OK, responding to @smiorgan's actual question... I personally had a lot of fun in the RQ2 days earning my initiation. It can make for a fun campaign as a group of random layabouts who met at a bar [Gimpy's for the WIN!] sort out which deity they'll follow based on their skills and interests. But you're right, RQG starts the players at a much higher experience level than either RQ2 or RQ3 did. And a large slice of those previous experience percentage points comes from initiation, probably 5% of the total percentage-points-above-starting-values. HOWEVER, this concept of initiation does have the benefit of being logical in a 'religion as an aspect of culture' sense. Most Earth religions initiate [confirm, baptize, bar mitzvah, whatever] their young people somewhere between the ages of 14 and 18. In the modern world, that's to solidify the young person's religious beliefs before they go out into the big, bad world and find other influences and other ideas. So it makes sense that a Gloranthan young person, whose family are members in good standing of a given cult, would initiate at age 16 and have a body of Rune Points /Spells and spirit magic spells to start with. But for those people who insist on being outliers... it could be great fun to have a character be from a Daka Fal background but have to earn their way into the local cult [Orlanth, Yelmalio, 7M]... having to pass RP the tests and so forth. I'd LOVE to play a game where a Darkness-friendly Sartarite clan lets my Dark Troll character stay at the tula, take instruction, and eventually initiate into Orlanth. If the campaign runs long enough, being a Dark Troll Wind Lord would be freaking awesome.

Griselda IS initiated. Just not in any cults that the locals are familiar with. OD says in The Complete Griselda that she's fully initiated in both Lanbril and Eurmal the Thief. And she's friendly with most of the other Lightbringers, if not an actual initiate. Glorantha is a place of LOTS of different archetypes for heroism. In Grizzy's case, it's a very 'Godfather' type arrangement. Muck with her family and she'll go the extra mile and three-quarters to make sure you regret it..... right before you die.

Magic is unreliable in the EQ milieu... the farther you get from the High Elf genotype, the less ability with it you seem to have. Because of that, I would suggest that you use Sorcery instead of Spirit or Rune magics from the BP/CoC/RQ line. - Each spells has a skill percentage and the more advanced spells would naturally have lower percentages. - Each caster would have a VERY limited repertoire of spells. - POW or MP recovers VERY slowly, one-half to one-third the common rate. - There are VERY few magic items, and those that do exist like to malfunction. Use of an item's power requires a POWx5 roll and fumbles happen on a 90%+ instead of 95%+. - There are few, if any, POW/MP reservoir crystals or items. Most spell casters have to rely on their inborn ability alone. - I would probably avoid the RQG mechanic of basing spells on the mastery of a Rune. That would lead to too many complications for a setting like EQ. I would divide magic into three basic categories: a] Life-- Living items like plants, animals, and people. Wooden items, which once did live, counts here. b] Things -- That which never has lived like stone, metal, ceramics, fire, water, etc. c] Minds -- Sending and reading thoughts, guarding thoughts, influencing thinking

Coyote. Trickster, teacher, and fool all in one.

Hey, it's Seattle. You could probably find a high school kid who'd do it for free... lol!

Just kidding. THIS is, no joke, Buoy the Kraken Mascot And I honest to God don't know WHAT to make of the eff'ing thing... [BTW, it's a hockey stick, not a harpoon]

The Seattle Kraken NHL team have just revealed their new mascot.

Yeah, I understand that. As a publisher, guarding your copyrights/franchise/IP is naturally a major concern. SOME game magazines have allowed old material out into the aether but not everyone can be so generous, and there's nothing wrong with protecting what's yours. Am I disappointed? Of course I am. TotRM and HiG had some of the absolute best 'approved for use with' writing ever done by anybody. And at least some authors [MOB for example] are returning to their older works and expanding on it.

@Jeff There is a whole crew on the board here who only see [or just continually mention] the negatives of Argrath. Some have even questioned his Hero status. Argrath was a man of many parts, not all of them good to be sure. I see Argrath as the modern Arkat, the harbinger of great change and ending of an Age. That much is obvious to anyone who's read The Glorantha Sourcebook, much less delved into the apocrypha arcanus of Glorantha. Parse his motives as you like, but Greg Stafford didn't build paragons of virtue. Glorantha was built by relatable personalities, by human beings, with all the warts and all that come with it.

Achilles was a much trouble to his allies as he was to his enemies. Anybody think of anybody else who might fit that description? 🤣 Folks, Argrath was developed to be a Hero that gamers could empathize and identify with. He was specifically NOT designed to a Persival or Aragorn. Argrath has faults, blind-spots, past mistakes that come back to bite him in the ass, and all the other symptoms of being a human being. He is not an iconic statue or an ideal. I've been a military historian since I was 12 years old. Like most us, I cut my teeth on the World Wars. I was very, very lucky to have a mentor early on in the process who taught me a very important lesson when dealing with historical figures [especially the villains]... He said, 'Remember that each of these people was a human being, not some statue or a representative name for a given trait. Hitler isn't the archetypal 'Racist'. He was Adolf Hitler, son of Alois and Klara Hitler. He was human. He had a temper. He had PTSD, which fueled his hatreds. You have to look at the whole man to understand how he became what he was, not just the summary.'

Holy Mother Frog-hopping Crap. No, really. As many of you know, I'm in the Puget Sound area, near Seattle. One thing we could always depend on in Seattle was that the Seattle Mariners [or 'Munglers' as I've called them for 20 years] sucked ass. Where the Sonics [when we still had them] were perennial contenders in the NBA, and the Seahawks [my beloved Superchickens] were always up and down, the Mariners haven't even been relevant for 20 years. Well, all that changed last year. They missed the MLB playoffs by one quarter of one game in the 2021 season, a historically thin margin, and it took until all the games were final on the last day of the season for them to be eliminated. And this year, they made it in. The Mariners are in the American League Wild Card series with 5 games left to play in the regular season. They'll face the Toronto Blue Jays on October 7th in a best 2 of 3 series to see who faces our nemesis the Houston Astros in the Divisional series. Thank you for your patience in reading the ramblings of a gob-smacked fan.

Well, remember that the Houses in Minas Tirith [which haven't even been founded yet - - Gondor doesn't exist until the very end of the Second Age] was as fallen an institution as any other in RotK. Gondor's colonists and Numenorean refugees were of a more physical 'practical' type than Arnor's. Arnoreans were more spiritual and mystical in temperament than Gondorians were, and therefore retained more magic and kept a stronger faith in the Valar. This isn't altogether bad, btw. Had the Arnorean temperament been face-to-face with Mordor for 3500 years, Gondor might well have fallen. Tolkien's analogy here is that wisdom and faith must... MUST... be combined with working physicality and the intelligent application of force for a people to prosper. Yes, Tolkien was an Imperialist in his own way. Not quite a 'Mountbatten' or 'Kipling' Imperialist, but a loyal subject of a strong and vibrant Crown nevertheless. Remember that the two key issues of his time were a] how to wisely rule the Empire and b] the defeat of fascism. These are the most important allegories and themes in his fiction.

I'm a HUGE Tolkien honk, so this is my take on the conversion points... 1. You'd have to find a way to convert the RQG emphasis on Runes to concepts more Tolkien-esque. Maybe binding their concepts to the Valar would work [Earth, Plant, Fertility bound to Yavanna, for example]. This would form the basis of your magic system. 2. As the power of the Shadow grows stronger, or in strongholds of the Shadow, you'd have to consider what the consequences of drawing the attention of Sauron might be. 3. Homelands would have to be set up. A Noldor Elf from Eregion is gonna have different skills than one from Lindon, after all. 4. You'd have to write a SHORT 'Intro to the [Whatever] Age' package, no more than 3 pages, that briefly discusses the history, the powers, the conflicts of the setting. 5. Starting equipment would be limited to Race /Culture of Origin, and many characters will feel this is unfair. It is. No matter how well crafted a Dunlending bow is simply not going to equal a Sindarin or Noldor one. A key aspect of the Second Age is that Elves are still very powerful, the Numenoreans are reaching the height of their world-spanning powers, and the Dwarves are as yet undiminished, so there has to be some kind of bonus for those who choose not to play the Great Races. Maybe some bonus skill points or something. 6. You'll have to invent some kind of Morale mechanic with benefits and deficits. Much of Tolkien's morality play is taken up with how a society handles itself when Hope is hard to come by. 7. The Equipment lists will be important. Certainly every Numenorean won't start out with a magic sword, but the quality of their gear will seem magical in later eras. Some Mannish cultures will be in a Bronze or Iron Age technological level even as the Numenoreans have-tube hollow titanium bows as standard issue. Anyway, those are the issues at the top of my head. I'm sure there's more. Keep us up to date on this project. I for one am VERY interested on what you develop!

"If you're supposed to 'always look before you leap', how come 'he who hesitates is lost'? I'm just pointing out that grandma may have been as full of shit as your drinking buddies." -- George Carlin

I was a cook for many, many years. Cooking would be a great job if it wasn't for customers..... 🤣 So yeah, I know what you mean.

Another 'pride goeth before the fall' comment from your faithful correspondent: "The problem with the moral high ground is that it lets everybody see the dog shit on your shoes. Acting like you're better than other people makes those other people work pretty hard to find the dirt on you."

"'Experience' is what you get, when you don't get what you want....' -- Randolph Pausch "'Adventure' is somebody else in deep shit far, far away from your comfy chair." -- Raj Whitehall [Dave Drake and SM Stirling] "If 'ignorance is bliss', why are there so many pissed off stupid people out there?" -- George Carlin And the one true 'words of wisdom' phrase that I can honestly say I came up with: "Remember that on any given day YOU are the idiot ruining somebody else's day. Just because you're a genius doesn't mean you can't be stupid. Stay humble."

Alright. I'd always considered Devise as more 'mechanical' than just simple devices... something involving gears, frankly... but alright. I can readjust my thinking on that one.