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26 minutes ago, Mark Mohrfield said:

I'm wondering just when Runequest became easily available to the public. What was the print run for the first edition, and when was the second edition printed? My old beaten up copy 2nd edition lists copyright 1978, 1979, and 1980.

1st edition did have a small print run (it's documented somewhere out there on the web...) but it was reasonably available, I picked up my copy in the Boston MA area in 1978. I also got all the early modules (I was in college and my budget was more limited by the time Pavis and Big Rubble came out so I didn't get those originally).

14 minutes ago, Rick Meints said:

Back in the early 80s most of my friends were happy to try different systems and in many cases the rules weren't the deciding factor, it was the setting. If you wanted to play in Space you tried Traveller. If you wanted to play in the Wild West you played Boot Hill. If you wanted to play as spies you played Top Secret. For Horror you played Call of Cthulhu. If you wanted to play in a post-apocalyptic wasteland you played Gamma World. Sure, there were other games in those genres too, but they were often harder to find unless you lived near a really big game store or were really into mail order.

For Fantasy settings you had a bigger range of options, such as D&D, RQ, T&T, and a handful of others. Because D&D had more modules available than the other games, and it was in a LOT of stores, it was often the easy choice to get into and keep playing. We stopped playing a number of rules systems because in the early days for that system you couldn't get a lot of ready to play modules. For RQ you only had Apple Lane and Snakepipe Hollow, and the very hard to find Balastor's Barracks. If your GM was happy to make up their own adventures this probably wasn't a factor for what you played, but it was amongst my circle of gaming friends. 

In the 90s I tried to get other gaming friends to play RQ, but most of them had played a fair bit of D&D and didn't want to bother with learning a new system. 

Lots of parallel to my experience. Though between White Dwarf and Judges Guild there were a few more modules for RQ, but it wasn't until the 1990s that I got a campaign going that lasted for more than a few sessions. By that time I had enough experience with adapting D&D modules to other systems that I was easily able to fill out a campaign (and in fact, only ran a fraction of the RQ modules available...).

1 hour ago, Rick Meints said:

I played the original edition of Traveller from the late 70s and remember its experience "system". It had a brief section on experience in book 2 on pages 42-43. You could pick one of 4 areas of general improvement and then spend FOUR years honing a few skills in that area. If you stopped actively focusing on those skills they often reverted back to their former levels. To me that's not really a "system", or even much more than an extended footnote.

Once you throw in the word "technically" you might as well just say D&D had the first system for improving skills. They did it via experience points and going up levels, which improved your combat skill(s).

I agree that the Traveller skill improvement is barely there, but I point it out because so many people believe Traveller had no improvement at all which is simply not true.

On the other hand, the little known Space Quest clearly has skills that are separate from its character classes and are clearly improvable with training, so even if we discount Traveller's improvement system, we still have another example that predates RQ.

BUT RQ IS still the first system where skills replaced classes and provides for character advancement as a regular part of play

There's also more to the revolutionary nature of RQ than just the skill system though, so it certainly is a revolutionary system when taken as a whole and compared to the other games that preceded it.

16 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

Applecline notes how it was the first game with skills that could be raised. That’s a big deal!

Thought that's technically not true. Traveller (1977) has a mechanism for improving skills though it is very slow. It's so common for people to forget or not be aware of this.

RuneQuest IS the first game though where skill improvement is a major feature of the game.

EDIT: SpaceQuest (also 1977) has character classes, but it also has skills available to all that are trainable (doesn't look like they can be improved with experience or use though).

Still, RQ still really does look like the first game where skill improvement through training AND experience is the primary mechanism for character improvement.

1 hour ago, EricW said:

Are Thanatari severed heads undead? While in the possession of their owner, and afterwards as insane ghosts?

In my campaign I'm considering them undead, or at least undead in Humakt's eyes. Thanatar and Humakt are enemy cults per Cults of Terror.

I'd love the source code for this to see how easily I could back port it to RQ1.

On 12/31/2021 at 4:38 AM, Stephen L said:

I guess we can now add the Northern Sartar Map from the Starter Boxed set, and see how that measures up...

Alas the scales don't agree with those I'd been using as the reference, the Dragon Pass Map and Darya Dragon Pass Maps from the RQG GM's Screen pack, which are close enough to each other for me.

I get Alda-Chur to Boldhome to be 89 km from the Northern Sartar Map, but 140 km from the GM's Screen pack Dragon Pass Map (although that's 88 miles).  So if I read km on the Northern Sartar Map, as miles, then I'm happy.  (Although I'm beginning to suspect that this might be the wrong way round to do it, as I've a vague recollection that the  Pegasus Plateau Locaem map on p29 agrees with the Northern Sartar map...)

However, I'm quite possibly getting confused, and getting my measurements wrong.  Anyone else noticed it?

I could swear I've noticed some scale inconsistencies over the years. It would be an interesting if laborious project to pick 10-20 (or more) landmarks and measure the distances between them on as many maps as possible and put out a table of comparisons. If there really are some "different" maps, it would be cool to know, and then be able to adjust distances or scale as desired if using maps that differ from your campaign's "gold standard" map (which is RQ3's Trollpak for me).

1 hour ago, Baron Wulfraed said:

I'd suggest starting with a reverse of the guidance in the RQ:RiG back pages...

Alternately -- compare the prices of weapons in common between the two rulesets, and determine a conversion factor...

Yea, those will be starting points. I'll be curious though if different items seem to have different price adjustments between editions.

Are there any previews? What sort of content will be in this? On the one hand it sounds like it could be really useful for my campaign, on the other hand, how many weapon stats do I really need? Also, I understand there have been changes of costs of things between RQ1/2 and RQG, how easy will it be to convert back to RQ1 prices?

9 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

Well, you still have a 5% chance, but it does make it a lot harder.

But the post I quoted said: "The other house rule I considered was failing a resistance roll against your initial rolled POW.  Effectively you can only increase up to 10 POW greater than your initially rolled POW" so no 5% chance of increase no matter what.

On 11/15/2021 at 3:41 AM, Stephen L said:

The other house rule I considered was failing a resistance roll against your initial rolled POW.  Effectively you can only increase up to 10 POW greater than your initially rolled POW (pegged at species max), and some characters who start with high POW are just more magical than those who don’t.  A bit like DEX can only be 1.5 times initial DEX.

The one problem with this is that characters who rolled less than 8 POW could never become Rune Priests, and those who rolled less than 5 could never become Rune Lords (and if applied to RQ1/2, a character who rolled between 8 and 10 POW who wants to be a Rune Priest had better sacrifice for at least some rune magic as an Initiate, especially with an original POW of 8, while rolling less than 11 POW, you need to get all the 3 point spells you want BEFORE you become Rune Priest... This is less of an issue with RQG, but still, an original POW of 8 would limit a Rune Priest.

I checked the elf’s character sheet. No misses on skills to make initiate. Also since we play RQ1 we use defense not dodge and the character has a 45% (or higher) defense and a real easy increase roll on it with the really high INT. 

3 hours ago, Baron Wulfraed said:

Lay membership is automatic in RQ2, Initiate is difficult.

For a bog standard elf (are there elves living in bogs 🙄) {that is: one with exact average characteristics), and using the RQ2 previous experience section to jump from 16 to 21 years, still doesn't qualify for initiate (at least, by my interpretation of the rules, a GM might modify it some). Using the Lt. Inf. mercenary category I (in a quickly done exercise) got Bow, Hide in Cover to over 50%, but ID Plants, Listen are stuck at 30, Move Silently, Climbing at 35. The Militia category focuses on spear/shield, not bow (GM might rule elves focus on bow) but only trains the primary weapons "It will be equal to 900 Lunars worth of training for the first five years, split between the militia weapons of one-handed spear and medium shield." (is that 900L per year, or is that total, for 180L per year? Given that going beyond five years provides 200L/year)

The elf in my campaign was a rich noble with practically perfect stats. Many of his ability bonuses were +40% and he could afford to train up some skills. He also got some stat bumps from the previous experience system. But I may have also missed something. 

15 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

 RQ1 only exists as a facsimile reprint, and I’ve only ever heard of one person still playing it (but he talks about it a lot).

Who me? 🙂

2 hours ago, Baron Wulfraed said:

GM at the time didn't use the experience supplement -- all of our characters started out as 16 year old brats finally allowed out of town...

From RQ2/Classic emphasis is mine:

While the elf bow doesn't have strength/dexterity requirements, the self bow has 9/9 for those, and since Aldryami strength roll is 2D6+2 (and even using a best 2 of 3 D6) still makes it somewhat easy to roll STR <9.

From Cults of Prax, benefits of Initiate status in the "Elf Cult" branch of Aldrya's cult.

Getting initiate status:

While the "lay members for at least 2 years" doesn't apply to an elf, since my GM started us as 16yo rookies, it took some time to get the listed skills up to 50%. Since one only gets an elf-bow after two years as an initiate (presuming you managed to grow and finish the bow in those two years), a new aldryami character is forced to use a regular self-bow. My character didn't have the strength to use a self-bow -- hence the expensive training in strength just to get a usable missile weapon.

OK, that all sounds reasonable. I thought your original comment was aimed at the elf PC in my campaign where with previous experience all that was pretty much washed away (though MAYBE we missed a 50% skill, unlikely though with all the +40% ability bonuses the elf in my campaign had).

41 minutes ago, Baron Wulfraed said:

RQ2... Aldryami...

Who had to earn enough money to afford to have at least one stat, if not two, trained up a point! This was an elf that could not use a bow as generated. Had to train the stats to use a mere "self-bow" since it would take some time more to get to the point of growing an elf-bow.

 

I used previous experience which grants some stat improvements. But not sure why the elf as rolled couldn't use a bow. In any case, the previous experience left the character all ready to go with an elf bow. Oh, and I use RQ1 not RQ2 (well, I do use some bits from RQ2, but not weapons and armor unless I need stats for a weapon not in RQ1).

The elf mistake...

The mistake was partly forgetting that I had dropped elves as PCs for previous campaigns due to their uniquely high INT which, especially in RQ1/2 is an uber stat, impacting almost everything. Then combine with how I utilized the RQ1 previous experience by adding ability bonus to the skills that came out of it with near perfect rolls on the players part (STR 14, CON 14, SIZ 11, INT 21, POW 17, DEX 25, CHA 21? no that must be modified...) and rolling Rich Noble. The result was that all he had to do was make one POW gain roll and he qualified for Rune Priest (because previous experience +40% knowledge bonus gave him read/write Aldryami at 90%). And recently he qualified for Rune Lord also... AND then combine that with a young (college kid who just graduated) player who was always bragging about his abilities. I had one player rage quit early on (though that player based on previous history would have eventually rage quit) and a couple more players who were close to quitting because of the uber-elf. Fortunately for us, the player post graduation became super flaky and I asked him to leave because it wasn't fair to the others for him to be taking up a seat that he was rarely in, combined with just vanishing from a couple sessions (he was also time zone disadvantaged, which was probably fine while a student, not so great with a real life job to go to in the morning). Oh, and the player seemed to have no interest in actually engaging the setting. So here was this uber-elf priest slum murder hobo adventuring with humans and baboons with no obvious reason why the Aldryami would give two hoots about what was going on.

I've not played any RQ, but PCs in my campaigns have been Ducks (one or two), Baboons (several), Elf (one - allowing this was a mistake on my part), Pixie (one), Dwarf (one), Newtling (one).

That's pretty much the run of what I typically allow. I would consider Troll PCs, but I've not run any campaigns where it made sense to allow them.

2 hours ago, Alex said:

As best as I can recall, you often have long lists of things in Glorantha you ignore.  Just not in the "bits of Glorantha you ignore" thread!

Have we talked somewhere else?

I have shared in this thread what I ignore. 

This most recent bit about the creatures happens to be an area where at least from RQ1/2 I am happy to use everything. There are some creatures in RQ3 Glorantha material I don’t use. I have the RQG Bestiary but haven’t done a deep dive to know if it has creak wouldn’t use. 

17 hours ago, Alex said:

That's quite the plot twist.

I’m confused…

2 hours ago, Ali the Helering said:

Badly written Tolkien Knock-offs?  Sooo much better than the Mostali.....

Sorry for offending anyone... I run/play what I like to run/play... I've been running RQ 1st edition since 1978. Some of how things work in my campaign is due to starting to run RQ and Glorantha before there was much written at all about the setting, or at least not much I had read. The RQ1 book gives no hint of the later Mostali and actually sounds vaguely Tolkienesque - D&Dish. The Dwarf of White Bear and Red Moon has a little more hint, but still not much. Of course I read Different Worlds so read the infamous article which destroyed dwarfs for me. In my current campaign I have reclaimed them.

1 minute ago, Akhôrahil said:

I love to hate the Mostali - they're just the worst.

I don't want to hate Mostali, so in my Glorantha they are more like D&D dwarfs.

3 hours ago, Rick Meints said:

I don't tend to think that deeply about whether any fantasy creation makes total sense, though. That's just not my thing.

That's where I tend to go. If a fantasy creations makes the game interesting, I'm not going to worry too much about specifics. I don't have problems with any of the creatures that were written up for RQ in the RQ1/2 era. I'm less fond of the things that got added in RQ3, on the other hand, most of them are from outside the Dragon Pass/Prax/Balazar region that I run my campaigns in so they are very easy for me to ignore.

I love Ducks. I love Jack-o-Bears. I love it all. OK, I don't like how the Mostali wound up and am ignoring "Why I Hate the Mostali"...

Hmm, my campaign is set before all the Hero Wars stuff, so most of the timeline is ignored by me. We've also kept mostly to Sartar (and really not much South of there) and Prax (mostly Pavis, Dead Place, and along the Zola Fel) with a bit of exploration of Balazar. I haven't followed all the cultural changes post the RQ2/3 era.

Since I have been running RQ1, the shaman rules didn't really make sense so we never used them. The shaman rules in RQ2 make a lot more sense. I think there is supposed to be a way for shamans to get rune magic but it never made sense. You might want to look at the shaman rules from RQG.