hkokko

Horoscope Personality Traits for Gloranthan Cults

Runequest and Glorantha recommend the character to act like one's god. Cults and gods are associated with runes and many of the runes are associated with personality traits.  If character does not act like the runes one's god represents she is not likely to succeed in Glorantha nor in the cult - in fact she might suffer the displeasure of the cult or one's god.

Personality traits are from Heroquest Glorantha. I felt that there are some runes that should have personality trait information that do not officially have it and added those to Moon, Law and Spirit as per discussions on the Glorantha.com forums and Basicroleplaying Glorantha forums.

Orlanthi character has the runes Movement, Air and Mastery. Those will bring the personality traits:

Mastery: Proud, Just, Authorative
Movement: Adventurous, Dynamic, Impulsive, Reckless,
Air: Passionate, Proud, Unpredictable and Violent.
If one acts against those  that might cause divine unpleasure and society's unapproval for not emulating one's cult / god and vice versa. Depending on game system this can be handled many ways.

This brings expectations that player characters might also have about the cult members in Glorantha.

Decided to create a document providing a single page view what each cult's runes would expect from cult initiate or rune lord

The list contains all the cults that have Glorantha Cult One Pagers which means all the ones that have cult information in various Runequest editions (Cults Compendium, Cults of Terror, Cults of Prax etc). The runes have been updated based on the research done in this document so should be up to date with the latest information. Changed Ompalam's rune to be Law instead of Harmony. Gloranthan Cult One pagers will be updated shortly with this information.

https://notesfrompavis.wordpress.com/2017/05/01/horoscope-personality-traits-for-gloranthan-cults/

Many of the runes affect (or should affect if character emulates their god) the rune holder's personality in a way that is described in the HQG. Not all the rules need the description or guidance but there are some runes that do not have a description and I thought that it would be interesting to have it. I like Harald's response below and have adapted it to my campaign. 

I added also one for Unlife rune

"soulless, fiendish, relentless, cold"

Moon and Light rune would perhaps benefit of personality traits. What have ascribed to them if you have done so... 

----

Harald Smith responded like this in the Glorantha forum for Law and Spirit: 

While there isn’t a formal ‘personality’ for Spirit and Law, those tend to lead the character towards certain magical outlooks that could easily be described as part of their personality.
Law logical, rigorous, materialistic (as in desiring to use/manipulate the runes/magic to their own ends), judging (or judgmental)
Spirit ecstatic, spiritual, connected (with the spirit world), aware
And your players can probably riff on those thoughts to align with their characters.
As for Communication and Illusion together – sounds like someone who might be smooth-tongued, lying, etc.

Thank you. This was most enlightening. 

17 minutes ago, Oracle said:

Cult rules or Cult runes?

Runes. Grr, spell checker, quick fingers and late night

Does anybody recall what are the cult runes for the following cults

Blackfang

Dorasta

Geo

Gerak Kag

Lamsabi

Selarn

Hykim & Mikyh

Bolongo

Shargash

Third Eye Blue

2 hours ago, Spence said:

Oh, I understand it is an extensive world.  But there are old worlds written with the idea that there are people that want to be able to retool to their own world and there are games that go out of their way to throw up road blocks. "What? Giggle-man is mentioned 2947 times?  Gah."   I seem to remember (though I may be wrong, it has been a long time) that even the included gods were close enough to myth to be easily compared.  It made it easy to bring in new players and have a sense of what was happening. 

 

 

You can restart with something from here https://notesfrompavis.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/starting-a-glorantha-rq6-campaign-before-adventures-in-glorantha/ there are several guest posts by newer and older players(hi  @Joerg)  about how to start. They might be useful even with a restart. 

It is quite easy to fit in... The richness of current material is fabulous at many levels. You do not have to sweat it though - this is a game, not a university exam in comparative religion,history and xenology :-) Having in an earlier post said that one can "ignore" background material. Well - spent one weekend in studying everything possible written of Fonrit for creating background material for new player joining the campaign and for once and all creating the background creation set so the next one will be easier.

In the midst having most enjoyable romp on a wizard tower with very little direct tie-in to Glorantha background and history but having new player enjoyable settled in with nice background.   Then spending this weekend countless hours on an obscure non-canon Fonritan healer cult so it fits well with the rest of the campaign.

At the same time tuning my rune magic house variant on top of limited run RQ version (no it's not available) - this required walking thru quite a bit of spells, cults and magic system growth and interactions. This required looking at multiple versions of RQ rules and books. Could have done it without the research but just wanted to...

When we started - it was just Apple Lane and RQ2. Later on Pavis was the one that blew our minds.

There still remains after 36 years in Glorantha lots of books on Glorantha I have not completely (or even at all) read thru. They (I think I have most of them)  look at me with accusing eyes from the shelf nearby and I hear scffling pages plotting something. A day will come when I need the info and even the unread book will be opened. 

Even with this wealth of material I have not sweated it. Sometimes I read something (sometimes a lot) to research for a game session, tool or background, sometimes I just invent - surprisingly lot of activity can be surprisingly little prepared and still be enjoyable. Sometimes there is a whole Greenland worth of preparing and just a tiny bit of that is visible in a session. There are whole disciplines of thought that I just skip. The world is great, material is great and getting better all the time but the game goes on and most of the memorable moments are there because of the game we play not the material I read or don't read. 

Our game seems to be traveling farther from the well walked paths of Prax, Pavis, Balazar and Dragon Pass. Fonrit is where we currently are, we may return to more established areas or not...

Glorantha is lovely, YGWV.... 

24 minutes ago, Spence said:

 

Will the “known history” throttle back to be less stifling and specific.  Far vaguer to allow for the players to actually explore the great unknown and the GM to actually be creative?

 

heh - probably not. Too much detailed stuff now available - too many grognards to argue about it :-)  What you can do is what I mostly do - ignore it in the my campaign's and players context :-) YGWV. I read it, am influenced by it but do not feel strait jacketed by it (I may be in strait jacket for other things) - I read (some of /most of ) it for inspiration and collect it for fun. Glorantha is a world - these histories are like others - they are viewpoints and many times written for specific readers by the victors and the writer's cannot be omniscient - they have been usually been paid by somebody (the victor's field marshal) and are working in tight deadline with limited and unreliable sources. 

The cards are not really interesting to me.

as long as we are near the wishing well..

what I would like to see is first one  sandboxy campaigns of Griffin Mountain and original Pavis/Big Rubble scope and quality. Several introductory one off type scenarios droppable 'anywhere'. One railroady campaign of Borderlands / River of Cradles quality and scope. then books of Sun County, Shadows on.Borderlands type expanding on those areas. Then another sandboxy one. Areas where they are set does not matter too much as long as it is relatively reachable from Dragon Pass and Prax with reasonable moving of characters. Tarsh, Esrolia, Prax maybe Dragon Pass area which we have not seen yet...Maybe wolf pirate saga spanning the world.

all of these should be original not rehashes or reprints of already sometimes published material. All of these exposing something interesting from Glorantha.

I would prefer that these not be sartar cattle raiding stuff but that is just me.

Many of the encounters in pavis and sartar are in encounter generator.have not done anything for coming storm

Old Apple Lane is also good for RQ. In the same place there exists Rainbow Mounds which can be easily run - it is quite brief. Snakepipe Hollow is fine as well for RQ. Griffin Mountain has some threads leading south to Dragon Pass. If you are looking for RQ stuff there is quite little currently for Dragon Pass so you may need to adapt from the above mentioned area. I thoroughly recommend either Borderlands or Griffin Mountain for the first campaign areas for RQ. Pavis & Big Rubble  is great as well.

33 minutes ago, mikuel said:

I don't understand what your talking about here.  Could you explain?  

Sorry, I was unclear.

you have two options for folk magic. 

Option 1. Use the folk magic from Mythras book as is

Option2. Search in the net Progressive folk magic house rules. They make few of the folk magic spells progressive (bladesharp 1, bladesharp2...bladesharp 6) with each level bringing one extra point of damage for example in the case of bladesharp. If choosing to use progressive- this proved to be excesively strong in our campaign compared to theistic magic (which is called rune magic in Glorantha). we ended up toning the effect down a bit by making it variable as in AiG 

your campaign will be fine with either option....

3 hours ago, Joerg said:

With Mythras you can lean on the preparatory work done by Loz and Ken for the Adventures in Glorantha primer that saw a distribution of 500 copies at Gencon 2015 (IIRC) which has been the base for e.g. @hkokko's contributions to the Encounter Generator.

Actually Loz and Pete and it was 50 copies only. 

32 minutes ago, Joerg said:

The Dragonewt magical effects are a form of mystic power, correct? They use a mechanic similar to divine magic to acquire the effects, but differ in duration and other aspects.

Do you mean monasteries or hermitages?

Arcane Lore p.41 mentions Dojos of draconic martial arts even for the Dragon Pass area, and from the text apparently in Modern Age Karse.

Have to research the meaning of the difference :-) 

I meant in the traditional context of Shao-Lin+ and their mystical varieties in popular mindset transmogrified to MGF YGMV...

draconic martial arts were in my mind... Thanks for the reference...

I guess in my Glorantha there are monasteries in the mountains - deeper mysteries in Fonrit and farther into the Pamaltela, Fonrit is dotted with old ruins and hideaways surrounded by jungle - who knows what secrets Pamaltelan plains and the East isles hold. Mystery that is Kralorela, Vormain, Teshnos and even Lunar might know. Ban has opened up and Kingdom of War appears, surely there is room there. So plenty of room to put Mystics in... 

1 hour ago, Mankcam said:

Although the new RQ is definately going to be very tailored to Glorantha, I also see hardly any issues using RQ6/Mythras pretty much as written. RQ6/Mythras feel like an updated RQ3 anyway.

Folk Magic is Spirit Magic, and ports directly across. Divine Magic ports across to Rune Magic, and Sorcery remains as is.

Sorcery apparently has the most changes in the new version of RQ, but that doesnt mean you need to alter the Mythras rules to portray it.  Mythras Sorcery is a more recent version of Sorcery as initially presented in RQ3, and I feel it is a better version of those rules.

If setting the game in Central Genertela then you don't need to worry too much about Sorcery anyway.

I think anyone beyond Initiate rank in a religious cult may be referred to as a 'Godtalker' in Glorantha, so I would probably use that term instead of Acolyte.

I would definately introduce Runes using the Passions rules. HQ Glorantha describes the Runes quite well, so you can easily see what aspect or traits are associated with particular Runes.

So you could get the Passion bonus with any action relevant to the traits associated with that Rune, as well as any Rune Magic that uses that Rune as a trapping.

I would probably start an individual Rune at the suggested starting chance for a Passion which is a concept or ideal, so 30%+(POW+INT). Pethaps you could possibly replace INT with CHA, I'm unsure.

I cannot see anything that would need to change with the character gen as written in the core rules. Mythras is designed very well in regards to evoking ancient and medevial settings, so you just tailor what you want depending upon the region the character is from in Glorantha.

So in addition to the usual Passions, just add 1D3 Runic Passions and you would be pretty much good to go.

Works really well like that. This is pretty well how we have played it for the past many years in Rq6/Mythras- since it was launched. The additional Gloranthan weapons and shields you will find here

https://notesfrompavis.wordpress.com/2014/02/04/rq6-charts-and-tables/ (see the Gloranthan update link + shield link there. 

If you want to see local weaponry and combat styles used and available you might want to take a look at https://notesfrompavis.wordpress.com/2017/04/16/pregenerated-characters-for-pavis/ and infer from there (Sartar, Esrolia, Fonrit, Pavis, Prax...) - that is of course only one view. 

https://notesfrompavis.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/starting-a-glorantha-rq6-campaign-before-adventures-in-glorantha/

There used to be floating around the progressive spells (folk magic spells) variety which we used prior to AiG. We thought the float around variety was a bit too effective compared to rune magic - you might want to tune that to be die roll based or just stay with the bog standard folk magic. 

Are you considering any Pamaltelan weapons - for example Fonritan area.

5 hours ago, Joerg said:

I got the fork handle when the seller did, but the next few were too hard dialect.

the same. omg

It is 10 Candles. The premise is always one shot scenario. It is quite dark and definitely on roleplaying end of the spectrum. Was thinking of doing a scenario for it in Glorantha and thought that some of the people would have tried that out already. The mechanics are superb, lightweight. 

Has anybody tried 10 Candles (from Cavalry games) with Glorantha. We played an introductory scenario (modern times) with our RQ Glorantha group and everybody enjoyed it enormously. Has anybody tried to write a Gloranthan session module for it. 

I will buy the game. Cannot judge it before  I have seen it and played it.... cannot really compare it to anything before that.  More than the rules (much more)  I am waiting the scenarios and campaigns. There is perhaps too much concentration on the rules sometimes - I have always been more interested in quality campaigns, sourcebooks and scenarios - I buy many more of those than rulebooks but this rulebook I will buy...

1 hour ago, jezreel said:

that's useful advice too - thanks

Out of interest, do you set up encounters where the PC will likely need to AVOID confrontation to prevail? and if so, do you allow them to use  their wits/ skill rolls or do you tend to drop heavy hints that taking on that large Ogre when your character is unarmoured and at 50% with a boomerang is likely going to end in tears?  

I guess it depends on the player group as to whether they want their hands held or whether they want it hard and direct

Like the hint when they need to jog quite awhile from tail end of the dragon to see the head of dragon. Or the time they realize that the mountain they are seeing is actually part of a sleeping dragon. Or when they do full blown lance charge with max critical damage and the opponent says 'clink' - I had forewarned them about that for awhile - several scenarios... Sometimes I do give warning...

17 minutes ago, styopa said:

Not precisely your question, but I'd posted earlier in this thread something like it:

"Becoming a Rune Lord (RQ3) generally involved becoming 90% in what, five or six skills?   Generally, those would be things that the character is doing/enjoys doing (otherwise why pick that cult?) so we could assume they 'start their Rune Lord effort' at better-than-middling skills

Starting at a base of 60%, with a skill mod of 5%, getting to 90 takes 32 skill rolls (st dev 12 - I only ran about 170 iterations, that would settle down with more)

Likely the character is going to try like hell to get a skill check in every one of their primary target skills at least once each play session, certainly.  Let's say they only manage that in 80%.

Playing 2x monthly, then would be 40 sessions or a little more than a year and a half of play."

So maths support that it is relatively straight forward and easy to get into the 90-100 range in a year (give or take) of play. 40 sessions to get to a level where things started to get bogged down (see "clink" above). I have had a minimaxing player that uses training every chance he gets so things would require even shorter session amount (on the above it could be 20+ sessions if he could use it after every skill usage increase) to get to 90-100's range.  That would cut the calendar time to well below a year. Getting the iron armor (to get to fully protected clink) and the spells might take longer than that of course as this could be protected by questing and GM stinginess which I can provide in plenty...

So if there are long running campaigns (=more than 20+or 40+ sessions) it can be important that the system does not get bogged down mechanically (the clink) if the players continue and expect to have crunchy satisfying fights (with no sudden death spells). Of course it might be that campaigns are shorter than <40+ sessions and the style of play among those is different...

This "clink" can of course be tested by creating few high level characters with (ordinary characteristics - no indecent damage bonuses and just ordinary cult specific weapons) with high level armor (iron armor) and protection spells (shield 4 + protection 4 comes to mind :-) and having them duke it out in practice... Then tuning it with lesser armor and spells. At rune levels you would expect rune level protection spells and armor.  That would be interesting to test out....

Oh my... going down the analytics rabbit hole :-). Too many vacation days...

It depends a bit on the length of the character's career in the game and how many games the character is expected to be in thruout the campaign. Perhaps someone with mad statistics skills will run the maths and see how many games would a character stay at various percentage levels 40, 45,50, 55, 60...100,105,110 and so on if they have skill increase possibility at every game and use the skill successfully at every game. If the increment is something else than 5% that can perhaps also be calculated. My campaigns tend to be long ones but that is not usual I guess. 

This is of course a bit academic as many of the d100 games use similar mechanic for skill increases but it still might be enlightening. We might be straying far from the original topic :-) 

On 4/15/2017 at 0:15 PM, Ebaninth said:

I am keen for the new version to address the high 90% skills.  Our games would get to rune levels but we then tended to immediately retire as we were sick of the attack/parry/attack/parry/attack/parry/attack/parry/attack/parry/Fumble Attack or

attack/parry/attack/parry/attack/parry/attack/parry/attack/parry/Fumble Parry.

Please address this.  I always thought limiting skills to 80%, with anything higher reducing the opposing skill had potential...

Regards

This "clink" syndrome was frequently encountered worry in our long campaign with RQ2/Rq3 from 1983 onwards. We played in the first intensive stretch of a campaing about once a week very regularly for almost 20 years or so. Eventually all of the players were rune lords or rune priests with iron armor and shield + protection spells - which means a lot of protection to go thru if you pass the parry. Few of the players managed to get several of their consecutive characters to be rune lords. With enough playing that eventually happens and does not have to take years to do. I think the highest fighting skill number was in the 160s for a Lanbril with Orlanthi and Humakti not far behind. 

Individual fights with high skilled opponent or even with multiple opponents often became quite boring and long with attack/parry sequence lasting for a night or with Cradle scenario - multiple nights waiting for the failure in parry + critical attack combination to get enough thru the high armor and magic to cause any real harm. So "prepared" fights - (players have armor on and are looking for trouble - the opponents as well) became a thing to avoid - go for faction intrigue, mysteries, constrained scenarios (being in a city without your massive armor and weapons), non fighting missions, stripping you somehow of the weapons or tactics, restarting with novice characters and many other things that helped but caused sometimes dissatisfaction from many of the players who liked to be powerful in fights, liked the fights originally and earned their experience and equipment with long play with their well loved characters. Players liked the crunch of the system - that is why we play RQ - but the original RQ2/RQ3 fights broke down into a grind in the above scenarios. Players liked Glorantha - that is why we still play there. 

 Your mileage will vary (and must have done so). 

There is guidance in the Mythras book if I recall correctly.

Outside of that: 

https://notesfrompavis.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/starting-a-glorantha-rq6-campaign-before-adventures-in-glorantha/ has some pointers for RQ specific things. 

John Fourr is a wealth of a source: https://roleplayingtips.com especially loopy planning  http://roleplayingtips.com/readissue.php?number=488#F1 and this https://roleplayingtips.com/rptn/rpt642-30-minutes-prepare-game/

Justin Alexander another good blog: http://thealexandrian.net

http://www.campaignmastery.com/blog/

Books: http://www.enginepublishing.com/complete-trilogy-never-unprepared-odyssey-and-focal-point This is a good trilogy

Robin's laws of good gamemastering is a classic and is mandatory reading I guess. 

This http://www.chaosium.com/sharper-adventures-in-heroquest-glorantha/ is for HeroQuest but can be useful in others as well. 

All of the above are opinionated and depending on your style and your players wishes.  some people like to and can prepare a lot and some people like to and can just wing it. It might depend on a day...

I have sometimes ran half a year's games with nothing more than five or six bullet points, a few npc's  and an overreaching idea that players invented : "There has to be a mole/traitor in the inner ring of rebels in Pavis - nothing else can explain the events so far" and so the molehunt was started. 

The Encounter generator can help quite a bit... https://notesfrompavis.wordpress.com/2015/05/31/game-night-supported-by-rq6-encounter-tool/ Many of the parties (especially at cities and monster island) contain additional seeds for adventure. 

Keep a log and record your ideas somewhere - loopy planning helps. Evernote has been good for me but before that I used just cards. 

https://notesfrompavis.wordpress.com/2016/01/23/spotlight-cards-for-rq/ spotlight cards will help you in planning.