svensson

POW is easy to increase with the right spells. POW is increased in two ways, the slow way and the fast, risky way. The slow way is to wait for your seasonal or annual holy day ceremonies and attempt a POW gain then. However, in order to do that you must be in a consecrated place with a full priest of the deity. Not every adventurer can schedule their travels for that, especially in a party full of mixed cults. The fast but risky way is to learn and use spells that attack another being's POW stat. If you succeed in that attack, you gain a skill check on your POW stat just as with a skill. The stereotypical Spirit Magic spells for that are Dispuption, Ignite [if you light a target's hair on fire -- see spell definition], and Sleep. Of those spells, only Disruption is offered in Orlanth Adventurous. Ignite is easiest-found among Yelm [NOT Yelmalio] worshipers, and Sleep is a cult secret spell for Chalanna Arroy, and they will not teach it to those who they believe will do harm to someone with the spell [which is pretty much describes almost every other cult]. Another way to learn these spells is to find a shaman and do him enough favors that he'll teach you the spells. I know from experience that that can be a long painful process. Insofar as sacrificing POW to your deity, that is part of the compact of being a bonded worshiper. Lay worshipers get limited social benefits, Initiates get most of the social benefits and limited magical benefits, Priests and Lords get the full menu. In exchange the worshiper must abide by certain restrictions. But it's a pretty piss-poor initiate who doesn't have 5 or more Rune Points [in RQG terminology] by the time they're 30. The Gods offer you wonderful Rune Spells that are much more effective than Spirit Spells via that POW sacrifice, and most cults think you'd be fool to pass up the opportunity.

[Inserts long litany of old SCA sheep, uh, 'farmer' jokes here]

But the great thing about Traveller was that Miller, Ford, Chadwick, the Keith Bros. and co. specifically constructed the humans with distinctly different cultural imperatives. And, by the by, the stereotypical Evil Humans were from Terra! Miller commented that as the aliens were introduced, they got weirder and weirder... the uplifted canines of the Vargr, then the Aslan 'lion-samurai', then the militant vegetarian K'Kree, then the stagnant, caste-driven Droyne 'bug-bats', and lastly, my personal favorite, the Hivers. And I don't know of one major sci-fi IP with a major race as absolutely weird as the Hivers [aka, 'the Squigglers']

No matter how clever they are at log rolling, I just can't take a teddy bear with the linguistics of Jar-Jar Binks seriously. At least H. Beam Piper's Fuzzy Sapiens had a culture. True words, man. If you want a definition for 'phoning it in' just look at OS' race and culture stuff. Which is sad because political and naval stuff wasn't bad. Whoops. My bad. Got Poul Anderson and Larry Niven mixed up.

It's OOP now, but if you can find it the Guardians of Order FUDGE system Tekumel book is a very good start. Remember, MAR Barker was writing as a technical writer back in the 50's and 60's... that's why much of the Tekumel stuff looks rather like old Morrow Project material. Granted that the presentation is the absolute definition of Wall Of Text [tm], but if you can dig into it it's worth your while.

@Sir_Godspeed And if you really want to take a left on all the tropes, give Tekumel a try! The problem with that is that players can't go any farther than 'Aztec with tech'.... Tekumel has a steep learning curve, more so than Glorantha, but even that can be surmounted.

"I was once acquainted with an officer of Royal Artillery. The man owned a tom-cat that he'd named 'Imperial Cavalry' because, he said, all the damned thing ever did was eat, drink, fornicate, and groom itself..." --Rudyard Kipling

But to your main point, yes, EVERY sci-fi franchise and IP seems to have anthromophic species in it. Cat-, Dog-, Bear-, Ferret-, Whatever-'people' that we're all supposed to take seriously. Fair being fair, Anderson's Kzinti [and Traveller's Aslan for that matter] do not behave as cats beyond some surface behaviors any more than humans behave like monkeys [although you could make a real argument for Facebook being the 21st Century's equivalent of baboons throwing poop....]

Well, my main impression of the Kzinti is of a mangy group of derps-in-space in an old Star Trek Animated Series episode... Kinda hard to take them real serious after that.

RQ is like the Forgotten Realms, Traveller, L5R, and other games... the well of lore and canon is a deep as you want to swim in. For a lot of people, this is pretty daunting. They worry more about being lore-correct than actually getting in there and playing. That is the absolute wrong way to approach Glorantha. Just find a small out of the way corner... Apple Lane, for example... generate some characters and jump in. Introduce the lore in small chunks. The players don't need to know all the meta-plot stuff at once, just what is relevant to them and their adventures of the moment. Let's face it, an expedition to the Rainbow Mounds [a bandit lair in the Apple Lane adventure] has about as much to do with Orlanth and the Red Goddess as stealing mushrooms from Farmer Maggot's Farm does to Sauron in LOTR.

UPDATES: 1. Characters: Decided that the military guys will be one each British, French and German. The Tommy and the poilu are separated from their respective patrols. The Tommy is bringing along the German, who was recently captured. Plot twist: The 'Frenchman' is a Foreign Legionnaire from Bavaria. He knows the German POW from school... "Klaus?! Is that you???" "Uh, they call me 'Claude' now, Hans..." The civilian characters are a refugee farmer, a Red Cross medical volunteer, and one wild card... a teacher or some other mentally focused character. 2. Scenario: It wont be specifically Cthulhu Mythos, but will include mystical elements. A band of deserters [mostly French and Germans] have taken shelter in the monastic basements. They're all more than a little paranoid and with the recent battles in the area, they've been drinking water that's been heavily polluted with arsenic. There are, however, several grains of truth to their paranoia. Firstly, if they get caught by the authorities there is a very good chance they'll be shot. Secondly, the crypt really is haunted by the ghost of a Knight Templar who was denied shriving and Christian burial when he wouldn't give evidence against the order. The scenario involved both dealing with the desperate and somewhat half-crazed deserters and putting the spirit of the Templar to rest.

[This is me not going into a tirade /rant about catgirls, Omaha the Cat Dancer, fuzzies and anime pervs...] [This is me reminding myself that my beloved Traveller game has a long history of 'dog people' in the Vargr and 'cat-ish' people in the Aslan] [This is me recognizing that all this is all somewhat hypocritical, but also acknowledging the *ick* factor] [Your mileage undoubtedly varies]

Nice of you to say /support. Since I'm writing the scenario for an American audience, I'm using American terminology for it. The Great War /'War One' didn't effect America the same way it did England. While we suffered frightful casualties we didn't lose an entire generation to the meat grinding abattoir of the trenches. Therefore the War doesn't ring in our consciousness the same way it does for England, France, and Germany.

Okay, it might be a good idea to submit all this stuff to Jeff, seeing as Gods and Goddesses is still in the production stage. There may be logic that we don't know of, but a lot could be just simple oversight.

1. And the tensions within that organization... You can't put disparate groups like the Pol Joni, Zebra Riders, and Bison People into one group following a Hero-Khan and not have several pissing contests just under the surface. 2. I didn't know he died. Still, the story must be interesting. He wasn't a bad boss in the RQ2 game I played in. 3. The deity and the tribe are two different things. The Berzerkers have enough of a presence on the Plains to hold their own with the Minor Tribes, so there must be something to them. I haven't gotten the Bestiary yet, to I'll take your word for it on the Agimori [extra points for character generation info ]. And yes, more info on the Minor Tribes would be VERY helpful. Not everyone wants to ride with the Big 5 Tribes, man!

The Prax Book needs three things: 1. An explanation of clan politics post Liberation of Prax. 2. What happened to Raus. 3. Writeups on the Basmoli Berzerkers, the Men-And-A-Half, the Ostrich Riders, and Rhino Riders That's it. Everything else is padding the term paper. [This presumes that Pavis and the Rubble get their own book]

RHINOS FOR THE WIN! [In homage to the memory of Grettir Sharpwind's beloved mount, Windbreak]

"If at first you don't succeed, run the Hell away..." -- From the fight song of Miskatonic U [Go 'Pods!]

@Beorne A lot of games have this problem. There's so much lore and canon that it's really easy to get overwhelmed. My suggestion is this: Start small and work outwards. Pavis is a good spot to start a campaign. It has a large amount of lore [if that's what you want], ready-made dungeons all over the place [if that's what you want], and a wide open frontier. It's the crossroads to several different cultures, with every major race present. And it's also kind of out of the way of the major events of the near future [Argrath's assault on the Lunar Empire and the Red Moon], so you have a little wiggle room in order to tie the characters into the main epic if that's what they want to do. As to rules-sets, I really prefer RQG because it does a good job of giving the character a history and a sense of 'place'. In my experience this grounding goes a long way in getting the player invested with his character. You know the people you want at your table and whether they'll accept a random die-roll history [as opposed to one they cook up themselves], but I've put together about 5 characters now and I rather like it myself. Welcome to the net.

Thanks Colin. Yeah, I was aware of much of this. I've other things in mind as well. One thought that occurred to me was that the monastery was 'haunted' by a band of deserters, perhaps aided and abetted by an actual supernatural force. That's all still up in the air.

Side note to the pigeon-handler thing... When the Special Forces went into Afghanistan right after 9/11, they had to have WWII manuals on how to handle mules sent to them. The horses they could figure out, but muleskinning was an entirely lost art in the Army by then

Fair point. I'm a big fan of Tekumel as well, but I'd kind of forgotten because of all the fits and starts with the IP. Like CoC, Tekumel is a heck of a lot of fun, but it's definitely a niche market

I'll look for it. Thanks.

Welcome to the net, EP. There are only TWO rules in RQG: 1. Maximum Game Fun. Jeff explains this handily in the RQG core rules. 2. It's YOUR Glorantha now. The minute that you sit down with your players it becomes your game, to be played the way you like it. As you've seen, there is a whole bunch of lore and canon printed about Glorantha. As you are beginning to find out, there are a whole bunch of grognards [guilty as charged, yer honner] who just love to argue ephemerae, apocrypha, and minutiae until Yelm rises, sets and rises again. Don't let any of us tell you what Glorantha is or isn't [except fun, Glorantha IS fun]. It's your table, and we're not sitting at it. So welcome to the oldest continually developed milieu in gaming. We're glad you're here.

Could even be completely mundane... a band of deserters, for example.