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ffilz

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Posts posted by ffilz

  1. 20 hours ago, GAZZA said:

    By "pay homage" I meant "other RPGs"; specifically, it is extremely rare to find a modern game that includes the possibility of dying in character generation.

    And you can talk about all those other RQ versions here - by all means!

    Oh, ok, I'll grant you that. Death in previous experience actually was pretty unique to Traveller (I'm not sure though, it may still be a part of Traveller 5...). On the flip side, a lot of the things common in the early RPGs that are no longer common is one of the reasons I tend to gravitate to the early games

  2. 23 hours ago, GAZZA said:

    An old favourite is the original Black Box Traveller, which I believe was the first RPG where your PC could literally die in character creation.

    This is not an idea that has aged well, nor found many willing to homage it. :)

    Should I be pedantic about death in chargen in Traveller? One read of the 1977 text indicates that chargen is complete with the rolling of attributes and naming the character. The previous experience system where death can occur is optional.

    As to finding folks willing to pay homage to these early games? I have had no problems recruiting players for RQ1 (1978) Classic Traveller (1977) and Original D&D (1974).

    What is astoundingly difficult is finding places to talk about RQ1 or RQ2 or even RQ3.

    • Like 1
  3. For my RQ1 game, I have been using the previous experience (which was changed for RQ2). I've also house ruled/made it clear that ability bonus is added to the percentages that come out of the previous experience which boosts them up a bit more. I also roll an extra die and keep the best for attributes (i.e. 4d6k3 to use modern dice notations) plus 2D6+6 INT for humans (and at least some other non-humans).

  4. Thanks for all of these. Very cool and helpful to understand where adventures are set.

    Locating all the pre-RQG fan scenarios would be cool, but clearly a lot of work and many of them aren't reasonably available.

    • Like 1
  5. On 4/16/2019 at 12:34 AM, Ellie said:

    What helps new people?

    Keep it RQG focused. Ask yourself if a new player actually needs to know this to play before hitting post. If it’s not in the main RQG book the answer is almost always no. (Or HeroQuest book given the circumstances.) The old stuff might have been great, but new players don’t have it, so it’s not helpful to tell them about it.

    I have a little quibble with this... I was strongly suggested I really should be here not other places for discussion of ANY edition of Rune Quest. I actually use RQ1 as my primary rules source (with many bits taken from RQ2 and some from RQ3) and use most exclusively the RQ1, RQ2, and RQ3 setting material.

    I really wish there was a separate "official" forum for RQ1/2/3. I peek in at things here and ignore most of it as not relevant to my gaming. But this seems to be the place to be to be sure of finding out about things like the recent release of Wyrms Footnotes (though that WAS well advertised other places).

    One Facebook I have had to fend off folks who keep pushing RQG is better than anything before. For me it isn't.

    Right now I'm actually in the midst of comparing RQ1 and RQ2 in detail and I'm finding other changes I don't like beyond the big changes I've long known about with weapons and armor changes (though my reason for sticking with RQ1 in 1980 was purely price...).

  6. With various things coming out, I've been thinking it would be really cool to have a map that showed you what areas are covered by which products through the history of Gloranthan publication. Regional products might be a bit tricky but more site based could easily be a marker. Clicking on the marker or region boundary could pop up details about the product and where to find it.

    Sort of a visual "Meints Index to Glorantha"...

    Frank

    • Like 6
  7. On 1/22/2020 at 3:28 PM, Rick Meints said:

    Greg contributed a series of campaign write-ups in the Wild Hunt APA. For those of you unfamiliar with the nature of an Amateur Press Association publication, basically you could be a contributing member or just a subscriber. They were published monthly, and would contain 100-150 pages of material submitted by the contributing members. Being before the internet, and even email, each contributor would type up their own pages on a stencil, and then mail them to the main editor. In the case of the Wild Hunt, that was Glen Blacow and Mark Swanson. They would use all of the stencils submitted to use a mimeograph machine to make copies, and compile an issue. They also added a table of contents and front cover to each issue. Each contributor wrote on average between 2-12 pages. Not only would each contributor write up some new material for whatever game(s) they were interested in, they would also devote a lot of their page space, sometimes almost all of it, to commenting on what other people had published in recent previous issues.

    Because they precede home computers, at least prior to some point in the 1980s, and the fact that maybe 50-200 copies of each issue were made, they are rather rare. They also don't particularly stand up well to the ravages of time either, plus of course many copies have been lost to people throwing them away at some point over the last 40 years. 

    Most of the authors got into the habit of giving a title to their regular contributions, and Greg called his "Dragons Past" and "Son of Sartar". I am still researching the exact number off issues Greg contributed to the Wild Hunt, but it is probably at least 6-12 times, mainly between 1978 and 1980.  As has been said, some of these WH articles were later published in Wyrms Footnotes and Different Worlds. I believe his 4 Son of Sartar write-ups appeared in issues #42, 45, 46, and 47 of the Wild Hunt. I am only certain that Dragons Past #3 was published in WH #38. 

    Fortunately, I believe we have all of the Dragons Past and Son of Sartar articles in the archives. Stay tuned for more on what we may do with them. 

    BTW, I finished going through my RQ zines from A&E and The Wild Hunt. Since they have all been unstapled, I can't tell you which issues they appeared in, though I might be able to use the comments sections to narrow it down.

  8. 6 hours ago, Richard S. said:

    How much were those fleshed out? There was a thread on them a while back that produced some interesting stuff, and based on that I've homebrewed up some rules. It'll be interesting to see what exactly Greg wrote about them in those old articles.

    They were pretty thin, you can see they are an ancestor of the RQ3 Sorcery rules, but interesting to see and compare.

    I'm looking forward to seeing all the zines because I'm sure I don't have them all.

    I hope Sandy Petersen's and Steve Perrin's zines can be collected also.

    I'd also love to see collections of the significant RQ zines from non-Chaosium folks also, yes, even John T. Sapienza's, but also Chuck Huber (who first published Caladra and Aurelion in his zine) and Mark Chilenksas.

  9. 6 hours ago, Rick Meints said:

    I have issues 1-150 of A&E, and have been going through them for RQ/Gloranthan related material. That is going to go into my updated MiG 2020 edition.

    We have all of Greg's 10 Dragons Past in the archives and all 4 Son of Sartar. I have OCR'd all of those, plus the Pharaoh's Gazette issues we have and put them all into a single MS Word document. Ultimately that will be available soon in PDF and probably as POD.

    Cool. Good work. People will surely be interested in Greg’s early Sorcery rules. 

    • Thanks 1
  10. On 1/22/2020 at 3:28 PM, Rick Meints said:

    Greg contributed a series of campaign write-ups in the Wild Hunt APA. For those of you unfamiliar with the nature of an Amateur Press Association publication, basically you could be a contributing member or just a subscriber. They were published monthly, and would contain 100-150 pages of material submitted by the contributing members. Being before the internet, and even email, each contributor would type up their own pages on a stencil, and then mail them to the main editor. In the case of the Wild Hunt, that was Glen Blacow and Mark Swanson. They would use all of the stencils submitted to use a mimeograph machine to make copies, and compile an issue. They also added a table of contents and front cover to each issue. Each contributor wrote on average between 2-12 pages. Not only would each contributor write up some new material for whatever game(s) they were interested in, they would also devote a lot of their page space, sometimes almost all of it, to commenting on what other people had published in recent previous issues.

    Because they precede home computers, at least prior to some point in the 1980s, and the fact that maybe 50-200 copies of each issue were made, they are rather rare. They also don't particularly stand up well to the ravages of time either, plus of course many copies have been lost to people throwing them away at some point over the last 40 years. 

    Most of the authors got into the habit of giving a title to their regular contributions, and Greg called his "Dragons Past" and "Son of Sartar". I am still researching the exact number off issues Greg contributed to the Wild Hunt, but it is probably at least 6-12 times, mainly between 1978 and 1980.  As has been said, some of these WH articles were later published in Wyrms Footnotes and Different Worlds. I believe his 4 Son of Sartar write-ups appeared in issues #42, 45, 46, and 47 of the Wild Hunt. I am only certain that Dragons Past #3 was published in WH #38. 

    Fortunately, I believe we have all of the Dragons Past and Son of Sartar articles in the archives. Stay tuned for more on what we may do with them. 

    I really need to finish my inventory of RQ material from The Wild Hunt. I know I never got some of the earliest issues, but I did get a bunch of back issues from Glen Blacow at one time. Due to the size of the collection and the difficulty in referencing it, sometime in college I unstapled mine and collected similar material together, and I pitched stuff I had zero interest in (that's too bad, I probably pitched stuff I'd like to be able to go back and read). I did keep pretty much all the RQ stuff, so I should have MOST of Greg Stafford's zines.

    Did he also contribute them to A&E? If so Lee Gold might be a resource to collect any missing ones since she has a complete archive of A&E.

    • Thanks 1
  11. Gosh, just saw this on The RPG Site. Greg will be missed. I wish I had had the time to play in his game at Gencon, but I'm glad I at least was able to chat with him for a few minutes and surprise him with a young looking guy with a well loved copy of RQ1 to sign.

    Frank Filz

    • Like 2
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