Ian Absentia

Not sure if it was intended or not, but Prax (at least the Zola Fel valley) is pretty much the Palouse* of Eastern Washington. The visual and contextual puns on California and the SF Bay are much more obvious. [*Edit: I meant the Columbia Plateau and the channeled scablands in comparison to the Zola Fel. The Palouse might be more like Praxian prairie.] !i!

I thought that Kralorela, geographically, is California inverted. Making the Kingdom of Ignorance...? !i!

(Psst! I think you already have them!) !i!

I'm dead serious. Because when someone mentions Sartarites and the Western US in the same sentence without being specific, I'm seeing hillbillies and Okies and thinking, "Yeah, that's about right." !i!

Well, now we need to define "Western US". Region? Sub-region? Era? !i!

[emphasis mine] So, you mean indigenous peoples of the Western US (Hokan, Athapaskan, Salish, etc.), or, like, rednecks, hillbillies, and displaced Okies? !i!

Too true. The matter at hand is the Needs of the Story. If the Need of Your Story is to create a realistic campaign where anything can happen as realistically as possible, then, yeah, leaving the results of an ambush up to random chance (weighted heavily in favor of the attackers) is right there on the table. If the Need of Your Story is to keep your players' characters alive for more important and entertaining adventure down the road, then you have two options: Don't include ambushes in your adventures. Assume that the party will escape the ambush, and the contest becomes a matter of degree. How well or how badly things go for them. It's a matter of style, and an issue of great contention and argument in some circles. Does the GM just present the game world for the players to explore at their whim? Or does the GM have adventures and/or "stories" planned with anticipated outcomes? !i!

I hear you, but I remind myself that the rolls by the rules are abstractions of the in-game reality. "Parrying" doesn't necessarily mean weapon-to-weapon contact to prevent a blow, but may also be interpreted as intimidating an opponent into pulling that blow that may have landed. I'm picturing how cats fight, for instance -- head back, ears down, paws batting the air in each other's faces and at each other's paws, not necessarily a lot of contact. The contact your hero's sword made with the ghoul's claw may have been a successful parry, but is incidental in all but the rarer circumstances. Maybe it was the flat of the blade that made contact, maybe contact was only glancing, maybe it was just a defending sword point that caused the ghoul to back away at the last moment. !i!

Please. Millet just breaks your teeth and comes out the back end looking the same as it went in the front. Now, amaranth. That's a nasty grain. Why eat dirt when you can eat amaranth? !i!

Which is (kind of) a shame. Because I was just watching Treasure of the Sierra Madre and thinking "Man! Without the RQ3 fatigue rules, this movie would be a non-starter." To be fair, they were difficult to employ and track. They work great in Skyrim, though. !i!

With all due respect, I do understand. !i!

This notion of a sanitised Glorantha is getting on my nerves. This conversation about divine imminence actively or tacitly suppressing base human nature isn't unlike a thread some months back asserting the notion that fires in Gloranthan cities like tinder-dry Pavis are less prevalent because of pacts with local spirits. Not only does it feel unlikely, it feels lazy and boring. By no means am I promoting misery tourism through roleplaying, but I'm simply not on board with the notion that rampant mobs acted only kind of like monsters because they feared imminent reprisal. Unless we're asserting active divine preordainment in Glorantha, the wild chimp will act exactly like a wild chimp when you let it out of its cage. Real history is full of pious, god-fearing people who commit atrocity in times of upheaval and duress. People with at least as much certainty of the imminence of their diet(y/ies) as the people of Glorantha, but who do it anyway, and who may or may not feel the consequences of their actions afterward. Rape is an ugly word, associated with an even uglier act. But it does a disservice to the setting of Glorantha and the people of the real world to squeamishly wave it off and say, yeah, but we're not like that here. We're entertaining jihad and ethnic cleansing in Prax, but hand-waving sexual atrocity? Don't even get me started on sanitised broos and their "stingers". !i!

Individually, I'm sure, but with human behavior there's a threshold of numbers and excitement beyond which common sense and restraint are exceeded. It's how riots and revolts and atrocities are born. The agents of reprisal can't be everywhere at once, keeping a tight, heavy lid on mass deviancy -- even the divine agents. Perhaps the "official account" is that divine influence kept atrocity at bay, but I suspect that, in reality, there's a backlog of reprisal that may span decades once the action dies down. Now there's an adventure hook for you. !i!

(SHAFT!!) Can ya dig it? !i!

Yeah, kind of the opposite of Pulp Cthulhu -- CoC made grittier. Maybe re-tool the Sanity mechanic slightly so the game can document the inexorable spiral down the sink into jaded cynicism instead of madness. Setting-wise, Pulp Cthulhu is pretty much on the money in terms of timeline for early "Noir," with an emphasis on the 1930s. Ignore the over-the-top action, of course. It could easily be interpreted for '40s and '50s Noir, too. !i!

I imagine the population along the Zola Fel might be feeling similarly about the Lunars before long as the religious zealots exact revenge for grudges old and new, holy and mundane. Not to make light of the cycle of occupation, oppression, reactionary violence and lawless criminality that Afghanistan has gone through many times over the centuries. !i!

I'm pleased to see the Praxian parallels to post-Soviet occupied Afghanistan keep piling up! !i!

But -- and I'm not trying to be a dick about this -- isn't that exactly what happens in the comics every few issues? Generally minus the lethality, of course; the GM has to fire a warning shot across the bow to be fair. "What?! His thorium-coated fist punched straight through my invulnerable force field! How can this be?!" Cue several pages of nine-panel drama to either overcome the atomic fist, or to figure out how to eliminate the vulnerability. My addition to any super hero campaign would be to allow augments (and maybe Passions), including augments to assist other heroes. That's the stuff of super teams. Also, augments as rabbit-out-of-a-hat, one-off solutions to unexpected vulnerabilities. !i!

"Alongside" may be a generous interpretation of being employed against the same opponent, possibly/probably on a different front. It's probably fair to assume that there was no unit coordination, and thus the "crushed by hoplites" endgame. Also, no need to speculate the identity of the "Berserkers," because I can't imagine either Basmoli or Storm Bulls were thrilled to learn that broos were fighting on their side, if they were even aware of it at the time. Still, enemy of my enemy and all that. If the Praxians had won the war in 1610 they doubtless would have returned to oppressing and exterminating each other in due course. The bigger question is -- and this is directly pertinent to the original post -- how did anyone aside from the likes of Ralzakark gather together a contingent of broos large enough and cohesive enough to constitute a "unit" on the board of Nomad Gods? And how did anyone parley with them to orgnise against the Lunars/Sables? Or did the broos simply see an ongoing fight and decide that it was the right time to prioritise and focus their aggression against an enemy that the Praxian tribes had put on their heels? !i!

Prax c.1610-1621 was always "my Glorantha". By way of comparison (and we all know how well that works out with Glorantha), I'm far more inclined to play in the Levant under Roman rule than, say, Afghani ethnic cleansing under the Taliban. YGMV. !i!

First I've seen. But am I the first to post this? !i!

Just say "No" to loose canon. !i!

I'm not really familiar with the rules of Elder Godlike - how closely do they track to SuperWorld? Because I developed stats for just about every popular character from the summer of '84 obsessive-compulsive detail and can probably dig them out if you'd like. !i!

No kidding. It was pretty much fire-and-forget fan service. I remember reading an otherwise well written Jack Vance novel (one of the Planet Tschai series?) and out of nowhere the book ended on "And later he made a woman of her." Okay, Late '60s, shine on you crazy, sexist diamonds, but really, more or less out of nowhere. Not even erotica -- just making a woman of her. Maybe the main character implanted a uterus in the woman and they were squeamish on the details. I'm willing to blame the editor. !i!

This can't be emphasised enough, particularly as automated recognition is being developed and employed in law enforcement and social facility (both assistance and control). To revive an early computer programmer's truism, GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out. !i!