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You could ask for that, but the results probably wouldn't be what you wanted. If I recall the way DI is spelled out in RQ, you have to be more specific about what you want. Your god doesn't want to have to look over the situation and try to figure out just what you need to accomplish the task, as opposed to what someone else might need to accomplish the task. Depending on your god it's possibly that he might just decide to give you a one use divine spell like Sunspear or Sever Spirit to fulfill your wish. You would, technically have the divine power to kill your enemy-just no guarantee that it will work out that way. As for how much divine power he could give you, well that would be lots and lots. But, since DI costs a loss of POW, I'd assume you wouldn't get much more out than the POW sacrificed or your POW score. Just because a character rolls and 01 for DI doesn't mean he's going to get enough POW to nuke the Crimson Bat. You might get more under the right circumstances, that being something that is really more in your Gods self interest that your character's. Typically, if you want nasty offensive magic, you should just sacrifice for it. DI is more of a special get out of dodge perk granted to worshippers for dealing with something they otherwise cannot. Some of the stuff printed in old issues of Wryms Footnotes indicate that Glorathan Gods are not ominponent, and in fact don't really "get" things and people that are not directly tied to them, such as worshipers or friends and enemies from Godtime. That seems to be why characters have to heroquest in order to really get what they want from their deity.

In RQ that's a no-no. You see, there was an agreement made between the gods called the great compromise which prevented a god from directly attacking/targeting those who were not his own followers. It's fair game to get your followers to kill another's gods followers, but gods can't do it themselves. Most rune magic did an end run around this restriction by giving the followers the power to cast a spell, and thus be the acting party. Divine Intervention, on the other hand, is different because the god himself acts directly.

Because how quickly do the PCs advanced in non-magical power in RQ was left to chance. So why would you single out magical power? I dislike the method used in MRQ where advancement rolls are doled out as some sort of reward system by the GM. That's too D&D ish for me.

RQ2 wasn't really all that complete. RQ was firmly set in Glorantha is those days, yet the game gave very little information on the setting. Oh, and Healing-6 matrices were not the first thing GMS gave out. I think you are missing the point behind RQ. Combat was supposed to be a more serious affair than in most of the (D&D variant) RPGs of that era. PCs who got limbs hacked off or mauled didn't necessarily get them back. Fights in RQ tended to be short and bloody. Characters didn't go through as many battles as a D&D group would have, and players were encouraged to use their brains rather than just standing there trading blows. As far as Usagi goes, it has some nice options that I'd love to port over to RQ. For instance when a character is attacked, he can opt to counter-attack instead of parry. This basically allows him to oppose the opponent's attack roll with his own. The winner gets to hit first. If the loser is disabled or killed, his attack doesn't get completed, but if he is able to act, his attack hits second. So the tactic is risky. Characters are restricted to one counter-attack or parry, but there are ways to get more parries and to recover your counter-attack to use again. Most polearms have a rebound critical where they get to keep their counter-attack as a critical (read special in RQ) hit. So someone skilled with a polearm can fend off several attackers. RRebound and counter-attack also open up the possiblity for a character to act like a hero in a Samurai film, since in theory, someone who can rebound could counter-attack multiple times iand cut down a dozen oppoents or so in a round, if he gets beating them and getting critical to rebound with.

I doubt there is any official errata for it, simply because they didn't see it as something that would crop up during play, or that a GM would apply common sense.

Why? In RQ2/3 there wan't a limit nor was one needed. Characters were usually "restricted" by the vulnerability inherent in having a low POW. And I suspect some of the more powerful spells are probably not reusable.

This looks pretty good. As far as temple go, instead of limiting what you could learn, temples might affect how fast you could regain RPs. Prehaps something like 1 point/week at a small temple, 2 for a medium, and 3 for a big (or especial holy) one. Or maybe the temple could give a boost to the casting roll for a particular spell? I wonder how allied cults work now. Does a worshiper automatically get access to the spells of a allied cult, or does he sacrifice to get RPS in the associated cult?

It is pure nonsense. As GM you could rule that either the Halberd couldn't be thrown because it is a two handed weapon. Or you could rule that since it isn't designed to be thrown. that it's damage would be that of an improvised weapon or club, rather than that of a halberd. Realistically, the reason why a Halberd gets such a high damage is because it is swung, which makes it a form of lever. A thrown halberd wouldn't get this and at best would probably be like a thrown spear. A naginata is somewhat better balanced for throwing, and has a blade that is more likely to penetrate if thrown, and yet it does less damage than a halberd.

Magic and other enhancements also play a big part. In RQ the battle and rune magic would accelerate things. Oh, and the "bog down" in RQ3 ususally wan't all that bad, since the weapons would get damaged. Seeing your weapon's APs getting whittled down does a lot to keep the fight interesting, even if nobody is getting hurt. In fact, at high skill levels, it's a viable tactics to try and trash an opponent's weapon if he keeps parrying. Oh, and since you are inexperienced with BRP, one thing to remember is that combat is much more dangerous than in most level-based RPPGs, such as D&D. Where in D&D a character can loose most of his hit points and still be up and in good shape, in BRP said character has probably had a hit location disabled, is unconscious, or at least, is in real danger of dying on the next decent hit. And, in most cases, dead characters stay dead. No dragging the bodies back to town for a raise dead.

A couple of things. First off, don't overlook specials and criticals. Then become more common at higher skill levels and will help in getting past defense. Secondly, parrying weapons can take damage which can lead to a character with a high skill not having a weapon left to parry with.

Missiles can be parried with shields.

Yeah. I liked quite a few things in Sanguine's Usagi RPG. It's streamlined quite a bit from Ironclaw and more playable. I really liked how the combat system incorporated character movement, and how the gifts system actually allowed character to develop a fighting style. Not like most games, when the weapon wielded pretty much dictates the fighting style. If facing a skilled opponent, it actually made sense to try and "feel out" you opponent's abilities over a few rounds.

In the real world they use mass (SIZ) as the baseline to resist toxin. What we did in our critter/dinosaur project, was to base a toxin's POT rating on the LD50 rating of the toxin. FYI the LD50 rating is the amount of an ingested substance that kills 50 percent of a test sample. The LD50 is not only fairly easy to obtain a POT rating for a variety of substances (even water! It takes about 6.93 litres of water to get POT 12 ), but also the methodology matches up with the way the RQ resistance table works.. Since attributes and the resistance table work on a +8 points per doubling formula, it made it very easy scale the POT rating of a toxin based on the dosage. , and also to adjust for SIZ, simply by using hit points for resistance.For example a POT 12 toxin that had a 50% chance of killing an average man (SIZ 13, CON 11, 12hp), would need a dosage about 32 times as large to have the same lethality against a SIZ 53 giant. Or half that, if we factor in for CON (because the giant's doesn't increase as much as SIZ).

Back when I was working on the dinosaur/animal project. I and my parter worked out some rules of thumb based on real world physics and the square-cube law( it turned out to be the same approach paleontologists used to estimate values for dinosaurs, but I didn't find that out until after I did it). Anyway, in RQ3 terms, and without going into the math, it seems that CON and STR increase at 2/3rds the rate that SIZ does. So if an average man was 6' tall, SIZ 13, CON 10, then proportionally scaled up, 19' tall giant at SIZ 53, should have a CON of about 37. If I were redoing RQ from the ground up, I'd probably lower CON, since there is very little evidence that elephants or whales are all that healthier than smaller animals, but I'd use hit points instead of CON for things like poison resistance, since mass is so important in resisting the effects of toxins.

Except getting a 60HP giant was a lot tougher in RQ2, due to the different Hit Point formula.

You can pretty much adapt material from any non Mythos-based RPG into BRP to get that. CHILL in particular comes to mind, especially for a GM using COC7 rules.

It was pretty much the same thing in RQ2. The percentages were supposed to match up with the tabular values. The only difference between the two is that in RQ2 Hit Points were based off of CON with a slight modifier for SIZ (roughly 1/4 SIZ-3). score. In RQ# Hit Points are (CON+SIZ)/2. Since RQ2 gave most creatures a 3D6 CON, and RQ3 increases CON with SIZ, the HP totals for large creatures is higher in RQ3, and so the spread between locations increased.

Well there is always the Ringworld approach. In that RPG the main kill cateogires were root skills, and what are normal skills in BRP were subskills. Also, some RPGs, combine skills in order to kept the skill list down. in the old Bond RPG, there were only about 15 skills in the game. The Driving skill applied to any ground vehicle, car, motorcycle, tractor-trailer, tank, whatever. Likewise Piloting applied to any sort of air vehicle. Commercial airliner, WWI prop plane, fighter jet, hot air balloon, jet pack, or space shuttle, all used the same skill. That allowed a PC to be able to have a broad expertise. If desired, the GM could apply a non-familiarity penalty if he felt the character was operating something outside his experience.

Okay, I see you point now. What you could use, is the Pain Resistance rule from the Bond RPG. In that game when a character got hit, he had to make a Pain Resistance roll to shrug off the pain and act. otherwise the pain was too great and the character was incapacitated for the rest of the round. The Pain Resistance roll was a multiple of the character's WIL attribute. In RQ/BRP the POW attribute encompasses WILlpower, and you could use POWx5% (willpower roll?) for the base. Then make the roll easy or hard depending on the amount of damage. A light wound (say less that 1/4 HP) would be easy, and a major wound (1/2 HP or more) would be difficult. That would make POW very important in a zero-magic setting.

POW as a dump stat??!!! In any setting with any sort of magical, psionic or other powers, the POW stat is vital. Not only is it used to fuel those abilities, but it is also used to defend against hostile effects. In RQ, especially Gloranthan RQ, a low POW character is vulnerable to disease spirits and spellcasters. And Glorantha is a setting where practically everybody a character might fight can cast a spell or three.

Personally I would like to keep hit locations, but get rid of the specific hit points per location. Just use the Major Wound, 1/2 hit point threshold. It doesn't make much difference in the values for most PCs. and would eliminate a table and some bookkeeping. Oh, and it would make it very easy to have hit locations be optional, since it would essentially be the major would game mechanic. Ironically, one thing that might help would be to add more hit location tables. Aftermath has hit location tables that depend on how someone if fighting. Someone fighting with a rapier, with the weapon pointing forward (presented) uses a different hit location table than someone fighting behind a shield (reposed), and the different tables meant that the guy with the rapier tended to get hit more on his weapon arm while the guy with the shield tended to get hit on his shield more. Oh, and to make things a bit more "realistic" we could swipe the hit location rules from Flashing Blades. in that RPG the attacker picks a target, rolls 2D20 for hit location, and takes the result closest to what he was aiming for. It's quick and painless to run, and really helps.

Yeah, IMO Defense is one of the "broken" rules of RQ2. It was very hard to get initially, require good stat scores, but it could be improved with experience. Once it got up past 15% or so, it started to climb just like a beginning skill and made the fights even more lopsided.

What problem do you have with Hit Locations? They've been part of RQ since the beginning. In fact, I think RQ was the first RPG to get away from generic hit point.

I hope it pans out. I'm still skeptical about this, but I'd be overjoyed to see RQ back out there on the shelves. Or at least available online. Hmm, if there had been an internet back in the 80s we'd probably wouldn't have ended up with the Avalon Hill arrangement.

It would be if this were actually decades of work by said authors. Frankly, Greg, Steve and the rest have been doing other things for those decades. it's not like they've been toiling away on a new edition of RQ all those years, but couldn't get it finished, or published. Most they people haven't even been working for Chaosium in the last decade. Heck, how many of them have even played RQ (or any other RPG) together in the last decade? And Greg and Steve were both involved in MRQ. So just having their names attached to this at this stage doesn't assure quality. Although, at least this time, I doubt anybody involved is going to tell Mr. Perrin that he doesn't know how to write an RPG.