svensson

Absolutely! But all too many PCs tend to use NPCs as tools not people. I try very hard to disabuse the PCs of that notion whenever I encounter it. I don't even buy the 'my character has done that [extremely risky action] before' excuse. NPCs are NOT player characters. NPCs have more sense than go poking sticks into dark caves to see how many broo come out. NPCs don't risk their lives on excessively-high-risk-but-only-medium-reward endeavors. They leave all that 'Hero shit' to player characters. So no, Player Character Bob, the kid you hired to look after your horses IS NOT gonna follow your voice into a mysterious cave complex to cast Heal 2 on you unless you give him a VERY [i.e. convincing and lucrative] reason to do so.

There is no way of living that is better or worse than any other, save of course for criminality. Hunter/gatherers are no more 'free' than agriculturalists inasmuch as they are both slaves to weather, disaster, deterioration of natural conditions because of an imbalance of the natural cycles that have nothing to do with the presence of Man. For that matter, let's not over glamorize indigenous peoples as living in some idyll like eff'ing Adam and Eve, shall we? Natives aren't born with an innate and 'natural' understanding of the balance of nature and their role in it. Indigenes over-predated areas, suffered sickness and diseases easily cured by modern medicine, warred for no other reason than the enemy was 'somebody else' and made every one of the mistakes that settled people do. They are and were no more virtuous than anyone else for all the mythological 'simplicity' of their lives. Mind you, this DOES NOT mean that I disrespect any indigenous culture or people. I just don't mythologize them as automatically having a 'better way' to live than anyone else. They're people... human beings... who make mistakes and suffer all the faults and foibles of the human condition. You can find wisdom in everybody's culture. You can also find mistakes. Real wisdom is sorting out the truth from the errors and applying those truths no matter where you find them. Last thing on this subject: there's a lot of 'off the grid' envy out there nowadays where people decide that they don't want to live in society and head out into the boonies to homestead. That's fine as far as it goes, but most are complete hypocrites about it. You see these TV shows where people want to 'go primitive' but they're still completely covered in the products of the society they claim to reject... from wool flannel shirts, to GoreTex coats, to blue jeans and work boots. And that's not even getting into the high carbon steel tools, plastic buckets, copper wiring, glass windows and the rest of it. Look, if you want to go find your inner Cro-Magnon feel free to do that but until you're wearing buckskins made from the skin of your last meal and fabrics made of raw flax and hunting with knapped-stone weapons you made yourself from absolutely nothing but local sources, you're just a poser who just doesn't like to be around other people. You remember that idiot, Christopher McCandless who starved himself to death in Alaska because he wanted to live outside of society but didn't have the slightest idea of how to survive living off the land in Alaska -- and refused help when it was offered? There's absolutely nothing sympathetic or idealistic in such a death. It's not even a tragedy. Yeah, that clown literally died because of a terminal case of The Stupids.

@Shiningbrow had commented 'munchkins gonna munchkin' in the post above mine.

The key point here is that the animal companion is an ALLY and a free thinking being not an embodied Allied Spirit with a cult duty to you. You can't use it's POW or MP any old way you want. You ASK your FRIEND for help, you don't give it orders. And just like any friend, if you treat it too badly your friend can tell you to piss off and head for Wild Temple where it'll get some respect. Munchkins may try and munchkin, but good referees have a whole repertoire of consequences for that bullshit.

Folks, PATIENCE! It will be done when it is done, not a minute before. You literally have EVERYTHING you need to run a campaign RIGHT NOW. You have the Core Rules, The GM's Pack with handouts and a setting, the Bestiary, Weapons and Equipment is shipping as we speak, and two books full of scenarios. In addition, there is the Starter Set with another setting, a Solo Adventure and 3 additional adventures. And that's just from Chaosium itself. The Jonstown Compendium on DriveThru is publishing as much material as you could possibly want, from one-offs to full campaign narratives to 'military histories' that discuss the armies and effects of magic on the battlefield. So Take. A. Freaking. Breath. Chaosium is working their asses off trying to get the product out the door. Fer crying out loud, we [the old grognard fans] waited 25 years between the last RQ3 supplement and the two book slipcase Guide to Glorantha. If it takes another year to put out Gods of Glorantha and the GMs Guide and both are of the same quality, then the wait is worth it. Or would you rather get hardback spammed like Paizo does with a new major addition to the core rules every freaking month? The new edition of RQ, RuneQuest In Glorantha, is a multiple orders of magnitude improvement over RQ3, whereas PF2's supplements have degraded... both the page count and the word count of each hardback is smaller AND they want $45 for the privilege over PF1's $35 for less content [to clarify, PF 1 had more content at a smaller price than PF2]. So with RQG you're getting a high quality product for your money, but that quality takes time to produce.

RQ is not 'generic medieval' like most DnD millieux. It's SOLIDLY Bronze Age. So, movies that provide some inspiration: - Troy [2004] Yes, the Brad Pitt version - The Odyssey [1997] The Armand Assante /Greta Scacchi mini-series OK, these next few are digging back into the archives... - Jason and the Argonauts [1963] Ray Harryhausen Claymation goodness! - 7th Voyage of Sinbad [1958] Ditto! - Demetrius and the Gladiators [1954] A lot of Christian allegory here about the reign of Emperor Caligula and Claudius - decadent empire political shennanigans - The Egyptian [1958] In my mind, this is the Most RuneQuest Movie EVER... -- Honorable Mention: The 13th Warrior [1999] Yes, it's Beowulf-ish, yes all the armor and weaponry are So. Very. Wrong., but it's an RQ adventure with the nameplate scraped off.

Well, the key word is 'awakened'... the critter has full INT and POW [which DOES NOT mean that your friend isn't stupid or weak-willed... you can have an 'awakened' animal with an INT and POW of 8....]. And when folks got to talking about 'Ironclaw' [Bladesharp for natural weapons] and rake attacks, I had the impression folks were talking about the animal not the human. If I was mistaken on that, my bad.

[sighs as people intentionally miss the point and parse missing it for an entire page] The point is to keep your pet weasel out of combat. It's intelligent and can reason. It can judge the odds and decide that getting into melee would be a Very Bad Idea. Clawsharp on something that can only do 1-2 pts of damage to start with is a complete waste of Magic Points and puts your furry at entirely too much risk. Let me put this another way: You're using a friend like a tool... something to be used and if necessary discarded for the sake of your adventure goals. This is a good attempt at meeting the definition of min/max power gaming nonsense. NOW am I making my point?

PROTIP: Alynxes are not stupid enough to get into melee just because you ask it to. It's well aware of the odds in a fight between its 25 lbs. self [that's where SIZ 2 tops out] and a SIZ 12+ Pissed Off Biped With Stabby Thing [tm]. It's an alynx, not a bison or other war beast. They're a companion and a hunting partner. My advice... since you get to pick which spells your awakened animal friend has, select Coordination, Strength, or another of the 'buff' spells [2 pts. each] and either Disruption or Speeddart. Another perfectly good alternative is to have your fuzzy friend memorize Heal 3. There are a lot of other combinations, but in my mind that's the best risk v. reward setup.

The awakened animal you get on heirloom table is specifically NOT an alynx because alynxes are too large. The Heirloom Table specifies a SIZ 1 or 2 animal, though it does say cat. Alynxes are SIZ 3-4 according the Bestiary, so they're too large. As for Hunter occupation Alynxes, they're trained hunting animals not an extension of your personal will. The SIZ Equivalencies Table put a SIZ 4 creature at about 40 lbs. This is significantly smaller than a German Shepherd or Belgian Malinois military/police working dog, so adjust your expectations accordingly. Alynxes are hunting companions, not combat animals. They herd prey into the kill zone, track, and otherwise assist a hunter. And even 'just that much' is a Hell of a lot of help! The intent with the Heirloom table item is provide a friend and a helpful caster -- preferably boosting spells for you rather than attack spells. After all, SIZ 2 doesn't leave a lot of room for hit points. Even having a pet that'll cast Heal 3 on you is a HUGE plus in a fight. The small size of the animal can actually work in its favor. In the flurry of a fight, a small size critter will usually be ignored and can therefore slip into and out of casting range and [hopefully] stay out of melee. What the Heirloom Table does NOT intend is for you to get an Allied Spirit on the cheap.

Oh absolutely! I'm just saying that Orlkarth is praying just a fervently to Orlanth about Ernaldissa as any Divine Intervention request ever made. You remember how you were at 16! EVERYTHING mattered as if your life depended on it, ESPECIALLY anything to do with girls....

Well, bees are necessary to pollinate plants so every major agrarian area has them. How well the locals keep bees and the quality of the honey is an entirely different matter. Most long distance caravan trade will be in luxury goods or non-subsistence 'variety foods'. Wines, honey, dried fruits, vegetables that travel well, all these will be highly desired items the next region over. Most areas Mankind settles will allow them to be self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs, so trade value comes from supplying the things they don't have. Oats are valuable in a place that grows rice, for example. The problem with transporting high bulk food items like sacks of grain is that they have a generally low trade value [especially compared to luxury goods like spices and dyes] and your caravan animals need to eat a fair percentage of your cargo to maintain their health on the trip. As this applies to brewing, well, I can only apply the same basic principle... people like flavors they don't encounter much at home and are therefore wiling to pay a premium for them. It's not unreasonable that honey was exported from an area with an abundance of it and it became an ingredient in beer. Honey travels well, keeps for an extended time [especially when you consider other sugar sources], and different flowering plants have a detectable difference in flavors in honey. I'm not sure how this directly effects brewing specifically, but the logic should hold.

The way I work encumbrance is this: After I show the players all this stuff and give them a sense of the weight and bulkiness of everything, I tell them: "We can do encumbrance one of two ways. The first is that you can respect the load you're carrying and don't try to carry a U-Haul full of crap everywhere you go. If we do it this way you just have to accept that your character is tired when the story demands it. The OTHER way to do it is that I make you account for every quarter-ENC of weight and bulk... every ration cracker, every boot dagger, every spare tunic... and I make your life a bookkeeping nightmare. Your choice." Presented that way, it's amazing how often players see things my way. 😁🤣

Well, first off, welcome to the board! I'm a serious 'real history in fantasy games' advocate, so I couldn't agree more. No matter what game I'm playing, sci-fi to fantasy, I make sure that the gamers understand the resource to product to end user chain and the economics that it generates. While I love me some Star Trek and RuneQuest, I work very, very hard to avoid the post-scarcity * poof! * instant doo-dad trope. In my games, everything from food to plasma guns has a narrative weight and feel to them... somebody MADE these items. They didn't appear out of some aetheric nothingness for the convenience of the PCs. I was a medieval reenactor for a great many years and I still have some bits of my stuff. In my fantasy games, I take the time to show new players some of the gear their characters will encounter. I show them a cuirboulli nasal helm that I made to give them an idea of 'light' armor. I show them my sword and explain just how much it gets in the way. I introduce people who've only worn mixed fabrics what a linen undertunic and a wool overtunic weighs and how bulky a double layered wool cloak is. I'm also a Civil War reenactor, so I show them hard bread [hard tack], salt pork etc. and a 'campaign-weight' blanket The whole idea is to humanize the statistics. People get hot and cold, hungry and well-fed, tired and rested. And that's in addition to making their living poking a spear into the darkness just to see what bites back 🤣 Besides, one of the first translations from the Cuneiform alphabet was a recipe for beer in lieu of bread for taxes in ancient Sumer. Can't go too far wrong with that. As an aside, for those that might be interested, the Anchor Steam Brewing Company of San Francisco bought the recipe for said beer and did a run of 'Sumerian Ale' [link to the story at the end of this post]. [link to 'Sumerian Ale' story] https://www.anchorbrewing.com/blog/sumerian-beer-project/ Photo: Leif Eiriksson Feast, Scandinavian Heritage Center, Pacific Lutheran Univ. AD 2000 Gear: Cuiboulli and strap iron helm, leather scale hauberk, kite shield with steel boss and rawhide rim, steel sword. Linen under-tunic, wool over-tunic, wool rectangular brooch-cloak.

THANK YOU! This is what I've been saying all along. The thing about Yanafal's cult is that it has access to the whole plethora of 7M magics... Magics that Humakt doesn't get access to. Contrary to a lot of expressed opinions, Humakt and YT are most assuredly NOT 'the same cult with Moon Rune on it'. They have separate mythologies, separate associations and links, separate hierarchies. What's more, they have separate godly agendas as well. YT is the defender of the Red Goddess, first foremost and always. Humakt's briefs are maintaining the barrier between Life and Unlife and the glorification of the profession of arms. He shares only the latter with YT.

I can sort-of see your point there... cults depend on a certain reliability from their gods... but I really hesitate to call a deity like Orlanth a 'computer'. IMGU, the gods have agendas in addition to cult hierarchies and the desires of individual worshipers and I perceive all three to be VERY different things. In the case of Orlanth, his agenda is first and foremost to defeat the Red Goddess as a direct threat to his authority and position as King of the Middle Air. The second item on his agenda is to help regrow his cult after 20 years of suppression and inquisition. In order to do either one of these things he requires the POW sacrifices of his cult and his individual worshipers, therefore he must be sensitive to the needs of his cult and the wishes/desires/requests of his worshipers all the way down to the 16 year-old newly initiated Orlkarth Oskarsson who is praying fervently to Orlanth that Ernaldissa Vandanding the next stead over 'notices him'.

Well, I should think that a society so focused on agrarian industry like Esrolia would probably be self-sufficient in woolens, leather, and other animal products. At this stage of the game, [your 1623-25 timeframe] Etyries routes and contacts are now gone and Issaries merchants are working hard to fill the void... both from an monetary and political alliance point of view. I really do think that at this moment a lot of trade is going to be in the small high-value goods... dyes, spices, gemstones, etc. ... instead of bulk goods like metals and cloth. Insofar as bronze goes, I was always under the impression that Sartar was self-sufficient in bronze but it might be an issue of quality of ore too. Perhaps a Lunar source of tin combined with Esrolian copper makes a better quality bronze?

@Tindalos He looks good!

Status of Trade: Likely 'damaged but slowly improving' - Damaged because the Lunars are no long protecting trade routes [their primary motive for invading Sartar and Esrolia in the first place] and improving because open warfare has moved on from Esrolia's land routes. Problems: - Restless Beastmen in Beast Valley - Grazelander raiding - General banditry Summary: Caravan trade has always been a dangerous profession. It's a lot more dangerous now, but the profits from a successful caravan are enormous. There is a friendly government in Nochet, the biggest city in the world, so there is a hungry market for Sartarite luxury goods and oddities. Both Sartar and Esrolia are self-sufficient in the necessities of life but there is probably a solid market for thinks like Orlanthi statuary, ritual items, Sartar styled weapons and armors, etc.

Rune levels are identified by carrying iron or Rune-metal gear instead of bronze /gold-tone. For example, the amount of copper and iron in Ernalina Axe-Sister's equipment. As for the armors, you won't find much Heroic Bronze Age armors in HF [no Dendera Panoply, boar tusk helmets, Minoan dresses etc.]. I've selected the most 'Bronze-ish Age' gear but there's a wide range of stuff I'd like to see myself. They do address the tropes pretty well and are adding stuff all the time. I don't know a whole lot about 3d Printers. The couple that I've been exposed to stank quite a bit and I live in an apartment building. I don't want to be a source of vile smells. I think if HF were to add anything, I'd like them to add more expression to the eyes. With the selections currently available, it's fairly difficult to make a figure look angry, with knit brows and an intense gaze. The expressions of the eyes are pretty limited at this point. But let me say that all this is rather more critique than criticism. I'm amazed with how much you can get done with just a little practice on Heroforge.

My understanding of Sartar is that the locals are of 'Gaulish' or classic 'Irish' coloration and that there's more physical diversity in the Lunar Empire. But HF itself has a wide range of colors, from human to fantasy.

Well, Matt, as you can see by the arguments for and against here, this is very much a 'YGMV' sort of issue. Me, I'm kind of a hardass about it. I see them as two gods having two cults serving two pantheons and manifesting different Runes and so you shouldn't be able to 'transfer' without consequences. I don't see them as enemies necessarily, but IMG Humakti hold YT's apostasy against him and his cult. And I'm also strongly opposed to 'cult shopping'... the notion that PC's ought to be able to join a cult and gain it's spells like stopping off at a bodega for a Slurpee and a pack of smokes. IMG, joining a cult isn't just 'ooh, I just got a badass spell!', it's joining a community and a hierarchy. Just because 'the examiners' didn't accept you for Rune status in one temple doesn't mean you can just go to another temple and try again. Others see the very equivalent roles of Humakt and YT and think, 'why not?'. They're a lot more casual about it because it suits their play style. And either of these approaches are completely fine if they fit your particular table of players or internal vision of Glorantha. I'm still gonna argue for my point of view, but that doesn't mean that anybody else is wrong. For that matter, it doesn't even mean I'm right.... loath as I am to admit it 😆

Thanks very much. My general goal is to have a good representative of the major 'adventurer cults'. So far I have the usual suspects: Orlanth [Rune Level and initiate], Humakt [initiate], Yelmalio [young initiate], 7M [Rune level], Babeester Gor [Rune level], Lhankor Mhy [Rune level] Some cults are difficult because HF doesn't have decals for the necessary Runes, or other Glorantha-ish aspects [adding helmet details, etc.], but that's to be expected. I'm also trying to keep the female characters athletically female without straying over into Victoria's Secret territory.

Delenda Harvest Mother Blesses the Fields Gloranthaisms: - Clothing, metals, and tattoos appropriate to Ernalda Priestess - Inclusion of highlights in natural bone colors - The 'degraded' appearance of the ritual axe with attention to maintain the wood-grain... it is a temple ritual item, not a combat axe [although I grant you the bull that's probably about to get a fatal headache would disagree]

Folks have requested photos of my 'Kesten Blackblade' HF mini. Here's the detes: - Type: Full Color Plastic w/ XL base - Cost: USD$ 80 incl. standard shipping [not express, international, etc.] - The photos are against a backdrop of a standard 3x5 in card for scaling purposes. One photo front and back - Opinion: I feel I got the image I constructed on the HF site. I feel that the product illustrated was the product I got. But I also feel that it was very expensive. Additionally, in order to get a VTT file of the character for r/20, FGU, etc. I would have to become a 'member' of HF at an additional cost of USD$3 /mo. While I'm happy with the quality of my purchase, I think of this as 'Warhammer pricing' and would think twice or thrice before I bought another.