Nerval

Charisma rolls are good for first impressions. One's Etiquette roll might succeed handily, but if the Prince doesn't like you for some reason, no amount of using the right fork is going to sway him to back your faction. On the other hand, if your Charisma roll was a critical, the Prince might be willing to laugh off breaches of Etiquette as harmless eccentricities. I've used POW vs. POW on the resistance table for a police interrogation. The PC was being obstinate, but hadn't been accused of anything. The detective wanted her to reveal what she did know, and she was trying to get the detective to give her clues for her own private investigation. It wasn't so much Persuasion as sheer bloody mindedness, so I used attributes instead of skills.

I use simple multiplication. If the die roll x5 is less than or equal to the skill %, it's a Special success. Even as maths-averse as I am, years of figuring Idea, Know, and Luck rolls for CoC characters have taught me the x5 table up to 20). For Criticals, just multiply the roll by 20 (or count 2,4,6,8 and compare to the 10s digit of the skill). I do Fumbles on 99-00 if the skill is 50 or lower, otherwise just 00.

If I roll low I multiply the result of the dice by 5 to see if it's at or under the skill level for a Special. If I roll less than 5 I multiply by 20 to see if it's a critical. After years of calculating Luck and Idea rolls, I barely have to think of my x5 tables.

My trick is multiplication. If I roll low, I multiply the result by 5 to see if it's a special success (i.e. the result comes in under the skill roll). If I roll really low (under 05), I multiply by 20 to check for a critical.

D&D characters are expected to have a pile of magic items, so giving them ways of making their own is perfectly fitting. They could also just go down the market and buy them. The items themselves seem a bit regimented, and a lot of players who've played D&D for a long time get bored of them. There's a marked difference in tone between discovering the Mirror of Suasions after months of questing and finding another +2 sword that no one in the party has any use for (but keeping anyways in case you can trade it for +3 armour in the next village). If I wanted PCs in Magic World to craft magic items, I'd use the RQIII magic book rules -- probably with an Enchanting skill (Base 0%, INT modifier).

As a long time Call of Cthulhu player, I made my Read/Write Egyptian Hieroglyphs roll. Line by line, the text reads: Runequest is filled with mortals and gods, myths and cults, monsters and heroes. The* *I assume that's 'the'; the bolt (Gardiner: O34) seems to be used consistently for 'th'. The Egyptian reading of the last word would be s3 (sa).

I had a blast playing through XSOLO Lathan's Gold as a RQIII nautical adventure. I also used the setting (but not the adventure) of I8 Ravager of Time for more RQIII adventures.

It looks like a cross between the arcitecture in Timbuktu and Cappadocia.

I found an old article published by the Penn Museum that talks about ancient maps in general: https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/ancient-cartography/ Check out the Egyptian map of gold mines especially. I also found a doctoral thesis: Terrestrial Cartography in Ancient Mesopotamia It contains (inter alia) numerous plans of canals, city quarters, houses, and temples, so it's perfect for your next foray into Pavis and/or the Big Rubble. There's also a chapter on the Babylonian world map that @Hijabg mentioned above, including complete translations of the text, front and back.

Here's a 3rd century BC Roman itinerary engraved on silver cups (and a modern, flat re-creation to get a sense of the whole thing). I always envisoned the Lunars using something like this (though usually on a papyrus or linen scroll).

I seem to have made a successful R/W roll in a similar vein to the "speakers also know Earthtongue at a ratio of 1% to 10% Esrolian" rule.

"Combat in runequest is visceral and always potentially deadly. Players should be mindful that even the least trollkin can take out your..." Then it cuts off.

scribal errors aside, I think the incipit is “combat in runequest is visceral and always potentially deadly”. but I can’t check as I’m not home at the mo.

Maybe the third line should be read as : a-l-a-z pa-ta-n-ta-l-i ra-d = alas, potentially rad! But probably not...

I had a go at translitterating with a sign-list, but it didn't seem to make a lot of sene after the first few words (unlike the cuneiform text on Mythras Imperative, which had a few wrong phonemes due to, I presume, key-mapping on the font they used, but was entirely comprehensible). ka-m-ba-t i-n ru-n-(e)-ku-(e)-s-t s vi-sa-ra-l = combat in Runequest is(?) visceral(?) But after that...