whitelaughter

If the multiple opponents rule doesn't apply, then any battlefield can have a sorcerer throw a magical circle over all of the friendly dead, and then a single Resurrect used to bring back hundreds or even thousands of allies.

That's not necessarily a bad thing - certainly epic - but something to be considered before making the ruling.

On 1/26/2023 at 4:13 PM, Shiningbrow said:

Do elementals have a sense of self-preservation? And able to ascertain danger?

Given a shade will flee from light...sort of.

Standard way to deal with elementals in the past was to dispel the control spells on them, so that they became the summoners problem...

Archaeology book I read years ago claimed that stone weapons were *sharper* than metal; spoke of experiment in which a professional butcher was given a set of stone knives and asked to use them to butcher a game animal - he was apparently highly impressed, and said that he would have had to have sharpened his tools twice during the process, while the stone tools did not need sharpening.

Ever since I first crossed RQ in the late 80s I've thought that the Repair spell would keep many cultures in the stone age simply because the advantage of being able to reforge metal doesn't matter when your broken stone tools can be fixed magically.

Given an magical object gives twice the bonus, the obvious for Life is another PC with a tattoo for a heal spell....

On 12/20/2022 at 10:39 PM, PhilHibbs said:

It'll end up somewhere. When my Trickster was beheaded, everything that he had ever swallowed came out the other end.

He didn't have Remove Head?

A complication for Tricksters is how damage is changed by removing organs. A spear through the head is still going to be agony, but if there isn't a brain there any more, it stops being a fatal injury. The number of different vital organs in the torso though makes calculating the odds of avoiding a fatality complicated.

On 12/18/2022 at 3:14 PM, Shiningbrow said:

Nice, except Logician is Active, and only affects 1 Knowledge skill at a time.

Gah, missed that it is Active!

That gets annoying. Suppose you are travelling - planning to use Survival to locate the plants IDed by Plant Lore as useful for Alchemy - with only one boosted at a time, no matter how much Free INT and magic points you've got, it'd be a nightmare...

Quite likely, but the spirits of dried up water holes could get interesting - since many creatures, including humans, are going to die there during droughts. Perhaps you have spirits that are naiads when there is water, but hags when there is not?

Oh, linguistic question - people prefer 'billabong' or 'oxbow lake' for ponds created by a river losing a bend? (@#$ cannot see how to add a poll!)

On 12/20/2022 at 6:59 AM, soltakss said:

Derak the Dark Troll bound wraiths to the bones of his living lead skeleton, just because they made a really scary special effect.

In earlier editions, Wraith+Skeleton+Disease Spirit+multispelled Enhance anything made for a cheap, incredibly scary familiar. Wraith+Shade+Enhance DEX was also fun, and could be done by Hags, as they could Control a Wraith and summon a Shade.

May all fellow cultists make their Worship and POW gain rolls!

On 12/9/2022 at 1:17 AM, JRE said:

To regain RPs at an associate you need a seasonal or high holy day, and I would only allow it either if the associate is in the CA temple, or CA is present as an associate in the other deity's temple.

Nuh. The other cults are specifically written as going out of their way to help CA, and everybody goes to CA temples for healing. The first thing the CA cult is going to want is for you to ensure that they can recover RPs on your holy days. With 7 associated cults, 2 of whom can change their holy days to be more convenient, the healers are going to be getting more RPs from allied gods then from CA herself.

On 12/15/2022 at 1:31 AM, Akhôrahil said:

Berserk protects you from drowning.

Yes, it occurred to me that if you tie a Berserk up, you could use an extended Berserk to overcome a disease!

Ideally, there should be a sliding scale of rules knowledge required for different character types. This is why early editions of D&D did really well. Fighters required nothing, thieves some knowledge, clerics a reasonable amount and MUs needed to memorise pretty much everything. They goofed that in later editions, requiring people playing fighters to learn about feats, and then wondered why people stuck to the earlier editions.

Runequest doesn't have a character type that only requires minimal investment: although the spinoffs do; CoC's expendable PCs comes to mind. If a character could 'lease' out their Free INT/CHA to other spellcasters, as a sort of human familiar, that would remove the need to worry about spell selection. Replacing Runes and Passions with a flat 'bonus to X rolls' ability would further simplify things.

What weird thoughts have you had on spells?

While reading Geomancy, it struck me that a glassmith could use molten glass as the symbolic representation, and so duplicate almost anything by asking 'where is the material in this item'. (Ok, my first thought was for a cool map, telling the glass to show the local mountains, rivers, roads etc).

The spell is Temporal, so the glass can cool into the magical form.

How about you?

On 12/1/2022 at 1:46 PM, Shiningbrow said:

I don't get why you'd have to "try really hard to convince" your GM... I would consider them fairly basic spells. As you wrote, there are Spirit Magic equivalents already in the game.

And Enhance in the previous boxed set edition covered every attribute except INT and POW!

On 12/1/2022 at 12:21 AM, Akhôrahil said:

While this kinda works, if you’re already doing resurrection, finding someone to Dismiss that Spirit Block shouldn’t be too hard.

perhaps: if you know that it is there before you cast the resurrection, and if you can target the soul with the Dismiss spell.

On 11/27/2022 at 3:50 AM, Mugen said:

But there aren't half-dwarves either.

AFAIK, there are only half-elves, half-orcs and half-trolls (which I hope none were born from human mothers...).

Where are half-trolls from? Those wretched movies? Or were they something Tolkien was considering when working through how he wanted the stone giants be?

Given Tolkien references multi-headed trolls in The Hobbit, the simplest way to have trolls reproduce is by budding.

On 11/29/2022 at 7:25 PM, Joerg said:

Which begs the question whether there is a POW-dampening sorcery for lowering your POW temporarily in order to succeed in the POW gain rolls...

oh yes, this is easy. Restore Health isn't one-use in this edition, and Lhankhor Mhy gets it from Chalana Arroy. So lose the POW, make the POW gain check, use Restore Health to regain the lost POW. Just need something that can damage your POW rather than making you sacrifice it.

If the assassin is serious, they're going to want to kill the soul of their victim. There are multiple ways to do this; frex a sorcerer summons the target's ghost within the Crimson Bat's Glowspot.

Reducing any stat to zero will prevent resurrection. Since characteristics decay while dead, Tapping a targets CON down to 1 is an efficient way to soften them up for a killing stroke and means you only have a day to resurrect them before they are beyond help.

But, the easy way - available to any PC, I'll point out - is to hit the target with Spirit Block, backed by Extension, before killing them. This both makes it easier to kill them (since they can no longer be targeted with Shield etc) but means that anyone trying to resurrect them is going to find making them lose magic points hard.

The fun way is to have the local Eurmalite tell everyone that the murderer is a local stray cat!

Mechanically, RQ's fumbles are going to turn up in an elf's history. Using Passions regularly for thousands of years: sooner or later, you'll get a run of fumbles, and completely obliterate the Passion.

Loss of Loyalty or Love could also mean the complete destruction of what inspired Love or Loyalty; an elf may have lost *all* relatives millennia ago. Loss of Devotion means being cut off from the undying lands. Loss of all Fear will kill them sooner or later. Loss of Honor: you are the elf who has been selling secrets to Sauron!

Perhaps the 'age' of an elf should not be measured in years, but in how many types of Passions have been obliterated?

On 11/23/2022 at 3:29 AM, Baron Wulfraed said:

That's the easy part of the job... What about the /collection/ team? 😱

yeah, could be an issue:

15 minutes ago, Shiningbrow said:

I prefer my egregious munchkin act -

Yes, that was quite awesome.

Markets and Wards are large enough to be slept in, so timing of the attack not a great issue.

The slander risk is always a problem, true, but somehow people are less inclined to accuse you of doing evil things if they suspect you can do evil things to them.

On 11/22/2022 at 8:45 AM, svensson said:

Well hunters start with very poor armor, so anything that adds to their survivability is a Good Thing.

What's more, in most parties the hunter is the 'sneaky guy' [cuz, duh] so adding physical armors that decrease his Move Silently isn't optimal. Most players try and balance the two... enough armor to prevent an instant-kill by an unaugmented weapon but not enough to severely impede his work. By removing his armor and casting Bear's Skin, it usually results in a net gain in AP and the penalty for SIZ vs armor tends to remain the same. So I can see the utility of Bear's Skin. [snip on target comments on Claws]

It's only bronze that drops your Move Silently though. Layered leather, coirboilli and turtleshell is comparatively cheap, Armor of 4 to 5, and no penalty.

Bear's Skin is granting you some temporary HPs, armor, and possibly some damage bonus or improved SR, but likely with penalties to stealth and agility:

Unless your SIZ is 15, you are reducing your SIZ strike rank by 1.

SIZ      Agility          Stealth        HPs

8/14    -                  +5/-5%         -1/+1

9/15     -                    0/-5%         0/+1

10/16    -                   0/-5%         0/+1

11/17  -5%                 0/-10%        0/+2

12/18 -5%                 0/-10%         0/+2

13/19 -5%                 -5/-10%       +1/+2

14/20 -5%                 -5/-10%       +1/+2

15/21 -10%                 -5/-15%       +1/+3

16/22 -10%                 -5/-15%       +1/+3

17/23 -5/-10%           -10/-15%       +2/+3

18/24 -5/-10%           -10/-15%       +2/+3

19/25 -5/-15%           -10/-20%       +2/+4

20/26 -5/-15%           -10/-20%       +2/+4

21/27 -10/15%           -15/-20%       +3/+4

So 1-2 HPs; which may increase your HPs in each hit location by 1. These go away at spell end, but could well keep you alive long enough to get healing.

Penalties to Stealth could be worked around by sneaking up, then casting Bear's Skin; however this means neither the invocation nor any augment can be spoken aloud.

Penalties to Agility include Dodge, Jump and Swim: although you are increasing your maximum Jump distances.

Bear's Skin stacks nicely with Bear's Strength, possibly granting you a full 1D6 damage bonus. However, that requires STRx2 + SIZ >= 35 and <= 40. Then, have to consider damage bonus without Bear's Strength (frex if you are still in combat when Bear's Strength wears off, or if you are using your last Rune Point to keep yourself alive).

STR and SIZ totals above 57, between 41-50, 33-34, 25-26, or below 18 grant no additional damage bonus!

Eventually, you will hope to have a STR of 21, doubled with Bear's Strength to 42. Either training or DI can achieve this. SIZ of 8, or of 15+, will grant no additional damage bonus. SIZ 15 also doesn't increase strike rank, so a particularly unfortunate combination.

Bearing in mind that simply keeping the POW can grant you a HP for similar penalties to Agility and Manipulation, and bonuses to all other skills? For many Odaylans, this spell isn't worth having. Go the enchanted Extension on your beloved Bear's Strength spell.

As a GM, I'd be inclined to drop it to being a 1 point spell, if I wasn't so resistant to changing rules.

[EDIT] Can't help noticing how much more powerful, and simpler, this was in earlier editions. In boxed set (the one I know best), +6 SIZ would be a flat +3 total HP, +1 HP every location, -3% to Agility and Stealth, irrespective of the starting SIZ.

13 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

Increasing CHA through deeds is doable, but the rules are pretty clear it has to be about leadership. Save the community through a harsh winter, win the day by beating the enemy Champion, or lead the defence against Broos, that should work.

Most hunting is done in groups, leading a force against a large prey animal would require teamwork. If the Odaylan is the leader, and in competition against another group? Seems to meet the rules criteria.

The other efficient way for a lone human to take a large prey animal is a low cliff, say 6-8 ft.

Annoy the animal. (Yes, it appears that there is a reason humans are inherently annoying)

Flee from the animal over the low cliff. You can land, and then keep running.

Being much larger than you, the fleeing animal can't slow down and goes over the cliff - and being larger than you, goes splat.

I have been told by a very unreliable source that we know this because the fossils of an early hunter, complete with broken ankle, were found intermingled with the fossils of the bear that was chasing him; while I've seen no evidence of that, the basic technique seems sound. The good part of the strategy is that if the plan doesn't work, you are nowhere near the critter; it has either given up chasing you or turned away from the cliff.

4 hours ago, Percarde said:

Is it different from than to "Philippa Gregory" the story?

Sorry, haven't read those