svensson

SO much lead line... MUST NOT TELL JOKES!

So, a couple things here. First off, I am an Old Geek. Started RPGs in the 70's. I've seen the female body portrayed in fantasy art all sorts of ways, from covered head to toe in bulky robes to hentai. Yes, there is a problem in this hobby with bimbo armor. There are two reasons for this: tradition and the simple fact that sex sells. Tradition in that willing, compliant females are supposed to be a warrior's reward goes all the way back to 'Gilgamesh'... for every Eowyn there's fifty Red Sonjas. My wife used to work for a major RPG producer and constantly complained of the level of 'sugar-cookie' armor used in order to sell products. And nowadays, I have a table full of girls [niece and grand-nieces] teaching the One True Way of Runes, and I wish to teach them that women warriors are covered up and that there's no combat bonus involved with cleavage. Compared to other offerings in its industry, RQG is actually very good. Women are portrayed as the full equal of men, involved in every aspect of life from hearth to craft to priesthood to politics. This is excellent progress when considering many other FRPGs. The artwork is designed to be Bronze Age, so Ernalda is intended to be voluptuous... a fertile source of life in any and all respects. The Gor Sisters, not so much... they're portrayed pretty unattractively, which is sensible given their roles. In the artwork, it's clear that the artists took historical images of the ancient Donu /Gaia pottery figures, Minoan frescoes, and depictions of Ishtar and Isis as their inspirations. This is wholly appropriate. This does NOT mean that women in Sartar go about with their tits hanging out. It means that Sartar cultural standards are supposed to be different to modern Western cultural standards. Sartar doesn't have internet porn. Sartar warriors never refer to the woman raising his children as 'the little woman' or 'the ball and chain'. Sartar doesn't have Instagram models shaking their ass for money. Where I agree with much of the board is this.... the armors often depicted on women are stupid. Boob plate is dumb. How do I know this? Because I used to fight as a 'heavy fighter' in the SCA, the largest medieval reenactment group in the world. I've watched many women get into armor over the years and EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. who ever used boob plate complained that getting swatted in the boob by a near miss hurts like Hell. The point of a breastplate is to not only provide rigid protection for thrusts [spears, arrows, etc.] but to spread the impact of other weapons over a larger area thereby protecting the ribs and heart /lung unit. Yanioth and her shield-sisters should be portrayed in a bronze cuirass that curves over the bosom, deflecting impacts to the shoulder and hip anchor points. A proper female warrior should look like this SCA squire. Note, I found this picture in a search of 'modern women in armor'. I have tried to find out who she is, but have been unable to. Otherwise, I would happily credit her. According to Photobucket/Pintrest credit, the fighter is Lady Valora. The red belt she wears indicates a that she is the squire to a knight, but this can and does change. THANKS to Kloster for finding the reference.

I would suggest that a CA initiate would NOT willingly accept forbidden spells from any source. Again, the 'spirit rather than the letter of the law'. A lay member, perhaps, but not someone who has dedicated themselves to the White Lady. HOWEVER[!], there is a bit of leeway... Bladesharp to conduct surgery for instance. But **never** for combat purposes, no matter what opponent.

OK, there are several consequences to violence in modern games, 'modern' in the sense of firearms being reliable, reasonably cheap to acquire, and relatively easy to use. Firstly, we have consequences in regular society: - headlines reading 'SHOOTOUT AT MISC U!' and accurate descriptions of the PC's given by grad students up late studying are NOT the kind of thing most investigators want in their lives; - the police and the criminal justice system. If PC's aren't careful, they'll end up finding a sketch of their face on the bulletin board in the post office with the word 'REWARD' in large block letters above it. Secondly, we have underworld consequences - there's the whole vengeful relatives /cult /crime family /organization. That can become very inconvenient very quickly; - too much heat on the PC's and suddenly underworld contacts dry up. All the sudden Master Wong, your handy-dandy mystic adept doesn't know you anymore, your sources on the street dry up, your fence [*cough*, uh, 'appraiser'] won't do business with you Lastly we have the mystic consequences - bad guys start being immune or mostly immune to firearms - cultists in surplus trench armor from War One - not to mention cultists infiltrating your barber shop for your hair sample for that ritual that you'll be the star attraction for on Sunday night Now, I freely admit that most of my investigator characters don't feel comfortable going to the bathroom without a .45 pistol and a 12 ga. shotgun. But I can honestly say that these items have only helped against the lower tiered Mythos bad guys... cultists, Deep Ones, ghouls, etc. Once you start mucking around with Mi-Go, Hounds of Tindalos, and Colours from Space, you might as well poke them with a stick for all the good a lead-chucker is gonna do you. At some point in every Mythos story arc, all those points you put into firearms skills are gonna end up being points you needed for some method to save your sanity and your soul.

Well, Glorantha's mythic imperatives are nothing if not inconsistent 😁 The setting makes a point of proving that 'not everything is what it looks like -- until it is!' I do see your point about draconic thought though. But I think that an average player character level person [as opposed to an average human or Major Hero] would need to demonstrate more than just one odd characteristic before everyone starts gossiping about 'dragon worshiper' accusations. OTOH, if a PC were left-handed, with a widow's peak hair style, had different colored eyes [blue and green, for example], and practiced an odd form of magic, well, that'd be all the evidence anyone would need, right?

This isn't a Humakti or Yelmalion Gift/Geas table, man. So long as the shamanic taboos are a serious inconvenience to the shaman that marks him out as someone different from the rest of his society, then it's all good. Clearly, some taboos will not work. 'Never eat meat' for a Basmoli shaman is a non-starter. But 'Eat only vegetables every Clayday' would work out fine. Use your imagination and be creative with it. As a couple of examples, a Sartar Kolating might have 'Never speak on Windsday'. An Earth Witch might have 'Always protect mothers and children'.

So are there any plans to do a Sorcery rules or sourcebook in the future? I've seen multiple threads with the odd and sundry question about sorcery discussed and occasionally answered, but I haven't seen much about any expansion on the rather limited RQG discussion. Maybe I missed an announcement or something?

I wonder just how prevalent the anti-left-handed bias is. From personal experience I can see a bias for those cultures with an organized military tradition that relied on highly organized formations and shield walls [Lunar hoplites, Heortling thane shield walls, etc.] because nothing buggers up a shield wall like a lefty in it. But for cultures with a more 'open-order' style of warfare [Praxians, Sartar fyrd-bands] it wouldn't matter so much. Yes, the 'Newts are lefties. Yes, there is a bad taste against anything that smacks of the EWF. But does it sink to level of handedness? Several Sartarite Knowing Men /sages /Lankhor Mhy cultists are authorities on the EWF with little or no cultural backlash, so it seems to be a matter of debate. But then, I could be wrong. My mother had to write my school district when I was a child and tell them to stop making me write right-handed. It literally gave me headaches as a first-grader. So some of the cultural prohibitions can run pretty deep.

The White Healers of Chalana Arroy may not do harm for sake of malice, but they know well that sometimes healing comes with scars. All of them know how to wield a knife for sake of their arts.

Speaking as a fellow member of the Secret Society of Sinister Southpaws, YES! Or as Gun Jesus [Ian McCollum] calls us, 'criminally left-handed' 😁 And let me tell you, fighting heavy in the SCA as a lefty is an, um, experience. Watching two lefties fight sword and board is almost painful to watch. Fighters that you always thought were competent suddenly look like cows on ice.

Thanks RB. I hope this does for RQ what Kingmaker has done for Pathfinder.

In regards to burning a Rune Point to finish an annoying fight... I was running a Twilight 2000 game [a World War Three post apocalyptic setting in Europe ca. 1985 or so] and one of the players had a Jeep with a TOW antitank missile launcher on it. He had two missiles for it... Remember, there is NO resupply. The players have only what is listed on their load out sheets. And the odds of finding another TOW missile are somewhere between 'nil', 'nichts' and 'none'. The PCs are being plinked at by a sniper. The sniper has them dead to rights in open ground, but is a lousy shot. So far he's hit a headlight, a windshield, and a lucky shot bounced off one player's helmet for no damage. The player then proceeds to lose his mind and fire the TOW missile into the building he thinks the sniper is in. He doesn't know for sure, but he thinks that's where he is.... Well, it turns out he was right and brought the whole two story wooden structure down, using one irreplaceable missile to take out a one guy with half a magazine of ammo. And the player looks at me in triumph.....

When converting d20 heathens to the One True Way of Runes, I tell players the same thing! Everybody, no matter how skilled or unskilled, has a minimum 1% chance of killing your happy ass outright. Conversely everybody, no matter how skilled or unskilled, has a 1% minimum chance of buggering the whole thing up. You might be Joe Uber, Grand Poo-Bah and Rune Lord of the Great God Broot, but when that 00 comes comes up, you're still gonna slip and get a face full of mud 😁 There is no such thing as a 'warm up fight' in RuneQuest, young padawan. Enter every fight as if it was your last, because it might just be.

Well, to be fair, we had portable nukes too. I've met a couple of SF guys from the 10th SFGA who had that 'chore' on their bucket list. But yeah, we didn't entrust the security of damned things to pissed off KGB types who got RIF'd with no pension...

That has the makings of a proper 'Far Side' 'toon 😁

I wish I could say that I had a hand in 'raising' them, but sadly that isn't the case. I have combat related PTSD. One of the symptoms I have to contend with is a short temper. I can get mad at really trivial stuff on occasion. So when it comes to people I care about, I try to limit my contact to positive situations and events. I've had some influence on the boys and have tried to give them good advice. I've been supportive of them and complimentary in their work and skills. But I'm all too aware of my black humor and cynical mindset, so I've tried to distance them from that part of me. I like to think that I've been helpful, but I can't honestly be sure of that. But thank you for your kind words. I appreciate them. And yes, we could all do with less war, that's for damned sure.

**Absolutely** When 'converting' d20 players to Righteous Way of the Runes, I'm very VERY careful to explain that 'trolls' are just as smart as you, have a culture just as deep as yours, and will beat you like a tent peg and eat your corpse if you mess with them. When dealing with Uz, remember that you can't walk soft enough and their big stick is WAY bigger than yours 🤣😁

OK, with the proviso that material in previous editions may not appy to RQG [which is annoying as @#%@$@%@ when you're trying to figure out canon], even those Aldryami species that mate with dryads are born of seeds. I may be wrong, that's been my impression for some time.. Either way, it'll be interesting to see how the Aldryami arrange lineage and ancestry. It's kind of like the way Mongoose RQ did dragonewts. Much of the material isn't canon now, but some of the writing was pretty interesting and funny in spots.

Cathartic? Hmmm.... No, I don't think 'cathartic' is the word, but neither is 'No shit, there I was' stories either 😁 But yes, I do have some emotions about the article. You are right that The Military [tm] is often portrayed as a monolithic entity, and I can see where you might infer from my article that I see it that way. However, I'm well aware of how different different services and different nationalities are insofar as service life goes. In my gaming experience, most civilians who wish to play military characters want them to be hardened combat veteran types, so that's what I focused my article on. And I admit that I took some of the 'zero-fucks-given' attitudes I've encountered at my local VA hospital into account. But I certainly agree with you that each service member's time will be different. If you're in a good unit with good leadership, even a lousy tour can be endured. I also focused my article on the attitudes of someone in the combat arms [primarily Infantry, Armor/Tank Corps, Artillery, and Engineers] and those troops who might be directly deployed in said units [signalmen and medics, for example] where a lot of these negative issues are prevalent. Lastly, and I think this is important in a Call of Cthulhu context, if one is running a 1920's campaign it is almost guaranteed that a male character in reasonable health will have served in the military during the Great War. Great Britain and France were so depleted of eligible recruits by 1917 that even only sons were being drafted to serve. And the VAST majority of draftees were fed into the maw of the trenches in some manner.

OK, the Sazdorfs appear in the RQ3 supplement The Haunted Ruins. They're an Uz clan in the gray zone between Dagori Inkarth, Sartar, and Prax. They dwell in an old Dwarf mansion in what has become called 'Battle Valley'. They're an interesting bunch. While all worship Kyger Litor, there is a fair spreading of other cults as well, including Humakt[!]. There are four lineages or sub-families but all descend from one Mistress-race matriarch. It is an exemplar of an independent troll clan fully detailed out. All major NPCs are statted up, a fully generated genealogy for all clan members, roles and lines of authority for different situations, really the whole nine yards. If you're interested in a game with Uz this is pretty much required reading, along with TrollPak. Beastmen and their ancestry will be covering new ground. Not much has been said about them in previous editions, so that'll be VERY interesting to see.

Ah, didn't see the PDF part. That'll be interesting. As for Non-Human Ancestry, several things some to mind. - Dwarfs: It would be difficult to play a Faithful Mostali in a consistent campaign given the cultural restrictions of the Octamony /Decamony. And a Dwarf with the heresy of Individualism [and therefore a playable PC] wouldn't necessarily have an 'ancestry', given that Dwarfs are a created race. They're not golems or nilmergs, but they are not birthed either. So whatever ancestry they may have would be within the lifetime of the Dwarf, possibly beginning when it became an Individualist. Which is not to say that it wouldn't be kind of entertaining to play, say, a Quicksilver Dwarf... "No, I have no combat skills, but drink this!" 😁 - Aldryami: Also a toughie... given that they're bred from seeds, do Aldryami have the familial /parental connections? Obviously they feel a great connection with their Forest [in a clan and cult sense], so would it follow that in place of a human family they feel the same connection to an initiate group? - Trolls and Ducks: As usual with Glorantha [because everything is NEVER the way it seems on the surface], the two most unusual races are the easiest to translate into human terms when it comes to Ancestry in character generation. Trolls can look to the Sazdorf Clan as an example of what Ancestry means to them and Ducks are Heortling in organization, so there is a direct 'oranges to lemons' translation there. Sure some events would be different ['Roll to see how your Clan reacted to the Duck Hunt'], but a great many events in the Sartar ancestry tables would apply. - Other Beast Men [Centaurs, Minotaurs, etc.]: THERE'S where things get interesting... The Hero Wars events could pass the Centaurs [etc.] by with barely a whinny. So a whole new series of ancestral major events and their effects would have to be written.

The Developer Diary doesn't list any non-humans in the pre-gen characters, sorry to say. Link below

I'm glad you liked it. The jokes I put in it were intended to amuse the civilian audience [a good joke often helps information stick] and give veterans a chuckle too. I personally live in an area with a large veteran population, so most of my groups have included at least another vet than myself. Obviously mileage will vary with the reader, but if it helps then my purpose was met.

So, a while back there was discussion of a RuneQuest computer rpg, something along the line of Baldur's Gate, etc. Has there been any word about it since?

I know of it. From the Eisenhower /Kenndy 'Our Friend, The Atom' era...