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Ducks are so easily overlooked. Pektok, a Humakti Sword, was coming up a spiral staircase and was hit in the head with an impaling Arbalest bolt. the Player argued that Derak the Dark Troll was coming up the stairs immediately behind Pektok and would have been seen way before Pektok could be seen. The GM agreed and killed derak instead of Pektok. So, yes, Ducks are easily overlooked.

I did play an Aldryami Humakti Assassin once, in Balazar, which was fun. So if the hippogriffs wings are knocked below zero HP by enemy spells or missile fire, would you rule that they "keep flying"? Nope, that comes under "Silly", but not "Silly in a good way". If you look at real world physics, Hippogriffs cannot fly, as they are too big and heavy. What I would say is "OK, the physics in Glorantha mean that Hippogriffs and Dragons can fly" and go with that. Other things come from that. If a flying creature falls, use the falling damage from the point of the start of the fall. Assume that they can hover and manoeuvre. Assume that they can't carry massive loads, unless they should be able to. So, an elephant flapping its ears and flying will be able to carry a fair amount, because it is an elephant.

Doburdan inserts his Addi* and sends a bolt of lightning through it. * It's a club, for those who were wondering.

There is a Cheers episode, a long time ago, where Sam is challenged to read a book and accepts, so he reads War and Peace. eventually, he finishes it and everyone is surprised that he managed it and wondered why he didn't just watch the film. "Oh, there's a film?" he says, "I didn't think anyone would have bothered to make one". And yes, you must watch them. It's the Lore. I humoured him. Taking one for the team.

Nah, that won't get you banned. in our last Gloranthan campaign, the PCs were doing a ritual to resurrect Genert. As part of that, they had to make a cube of sacrificed corpses, 10 wide by 10 deep by 10 high, so 1,000 sacrifices, to provide Genert with enough POW to return. They spent a whole session working out the logistics of gaining 1,000 people to sacrifice and who would do the sacrifice. Not once did they wonder whether they should be sacrificing people at all, or consider the morality of human sacrifice. They did question whether the sacrifices had to be human and were relieved when I said no, as that widened the pool of available victims. I am sure that whatever we think of pales compared to what the liked of Ana Gor has aldready done.

I should have included it in Secrets of HeroQuesting. Thanks! That is one of the dangers of HeroQuesting. You can identify with something and, by doing that you open yourself up to being vulnerable to what you have Identified with. If they are better prepared, you can pull them into your HeroQuest and find that they are better at it than you are and they have pulled you into a Heroquest trap. The trick with HeroQuesting is to use the Myth creatively. In one way, no Myth will ever be good for HeroQuesting, as you are not the Only Old One, or Esrola or any of the other participants, you are not doing what they did and the myth doesn't fit everyone exactly. Any Games Master or Player going in with that attitude might as well not bother with HeroQuesting, as it will never work for them. Instead, you take a Myth and mould it to your situation. You overlay the Myth onto the current situation and participants, which creates a HeroQuest that is unique because it has the combination of Myth, Place and People. The Myth moulds itself to fit the participants and the participants mould the Myth to fit with what they want. That's the way to do it! HeroQuesting is all about hippy bullshit and bending the Myth to suit the situation. The Unity Battle and I Fought We Won are very similar survival myths and can be used for very similar situations. I Fought We Won is more about different groups surviving independently but inadvertently helping each other along the way. The Unity Battle is about enemies coming together to fight a common foe and creating something out of that.

I'm guessing that you have never been there. Summer in southern Russia regularly tops 40C or 100F, the steppes can be higher. And the steppes are covered in flies, or they were when I went to Sol Iletsk the first time, not so much the second time though.

Doburdan is a minor, useless god, full of hot air and bluster, probably why he is my favourite Gloranthan deity. His best myth is where he became Ernalda's Husband Protector in the Darkness, but meekly stood aside when Orlanth returned. That describes him perfectly.

That sounds like a good reason for a HeroQuest. The beauty of HeroQuesting is that you can take a myth and bend it a bot to fit the situation. So, you don't necessarily need a myth that fits completely. Have a look at my Secrets of HeroQuesting for more ideas on HeroQuesting. Donandar is all about Harmony, so would be a good way of getting a HeroQuest about peace. You could even use some Stations from Donandar HeroQuests to substitute for Stations on the main HeroQuest, or to add some new stations to force the peace somehow. Tricksters can be useful, as they can use outlandish devices on HeroQuests to get what they want. Tricking someone into accepting peace might be a short-term solution, but it is still a solution. The targets would then have to break the peace agreement, which has consequences. Ernalda has some peace-making HeroQuests, I seem to remember. There is one that has involves Ernalda as a Weaver, using a Peace Rug. They might be useful when building Peace. This is something that happens quite a lot on HeroQuests. There is a concept in HeroQuesting that I call Identification, but Chaosium might use a different term. You can use this to Identify two groups, so they can stand in for each other. It is quite possible to use Identification to Identify another group with the Dark Tribe, or to have different clans of Trolls, one as defenders in the peace and one as attackers. You might want to use Tusk Riders as the attackers, as they are darkness-oriented. Alternatively, you could use chaos from a chaos nest, as you have suggested, in this case the chaos is Identified as Enemies Who Attack. Have you played using the Hero Wars or HeroQuest games? They have an idea for chargen where you write a 100 word essay and underline or bold key sections that then defines your character. You can do the same thing with Myths, so in the Myth you use, it might say "After the People agreed on Peace, the Dark Tribe attacked them, but they all fought together and drove the attackers off", if you bold certain sections, you could get "After the People agreed on Peace, the Dark Tribe attacked them, but they all fought together and drove the attackers off", so you emphasise what is important to you on the HeroQuest. There are probably many Myths that could be used. Skilled HeroQuestors use several Myths at once, overlaying them in certain ways, so you take bits from one and bits from another, to get a better result. But, that is the point of HeroQuesting, you Identify different people with the mythical roles. Otherwise you could never use the Unity Battle, as you are not fighting Wakboth.

It is a Harry Potter book. A Hippogriff helps Harry by flying as explained. If you watch the film, you can see how it flies.

The "Falling Damage" table on page 156 proves this wrong. In the real world, you reach terminal velocity after a certain amount of falling. When you reach terminal velocity, the damage taken by falling should no longer increase, as your velocity and hence momentum does not change. So, the Falling Damage Table falls down if you fall for over that distance.

Whew, glad I don't use them, then. I would not want to annoy Lesser Dryas Atlanteans, they have long memories and a longer reach.

I can see Issaries cultists being really condescending to Etyries, treating her as just another Subcult of Issaries. Etyries cultists, on the other hand, emphasise her nature as Pathfinder for the Lunars, how she achieved enlightenment and so on, with the Issaries people saying "Oh, isn't that nice?" As for Lhankor Mhy/Irrippi Ontor, that is more of a rival cults, vying for the same knowledge, with Irrippi Ontor having access to some of Lhankor Mhy's Library, but not vice versa. For Humakt and Yanafal Tarnils, it is a bit different, as Humakti think that Yanafal Tarnils cheated when Humakt's comp[anions ran off to chase the Young Elementals (I think) away and Yanafal Tarnils and his Companions attacked Humakt on his own and fought him to a standstill. They also claim that he cheated, as he was brought back to life in the battle, so he was killed and returned rather than just fighting to a standstill. All of these Lunar Cults have, in my Glorantha, marked differences between them and their parent cults, as if the cultists have deliberately gone out of their way to do things differently.

I am trying to find the culture from which Dorastor was appropriated, mainly because it would be a great culture to read up on.

and then be weighted down to the ground? If they want to pick up somebody or something roughly man-sized, they will quite likely send in one of their sylphs to do so. I mentioned catching men, not what to do with them afterwards. One problem at a time. You fly in with a hook on a stick, drag someone off a horse and throw them to the ground, pull someone up into the air and drop them, drag someone over the edge of a cliff and drop them, grab a horse's leg and pull it over. Lot of ways to use a swordstick in combat.

My advice, for what it is worth: Don't bother with edges and handicaps. Just treat them as a +N or -N adjustment to skills. The absolute worst thing in Hero Wars, for me, was the bidding mechanism for Extended Contests, I dislike that very much. Edges to increase the APs lost is just another way of making a complex system even more complex.

I don't think it is case sensitive, but you have to get the spelling right. [spioler]but this doesn't. [/spoiler] It doesn't like multiple spoilers on a single page, as they bleed into each other.

I have heavily adapted and expanded it to fit in with the magic in Revolution, so the version I am using isn't like the version in the Arcana of Legend: Blood Magic supplement. Mine is far more freeform, as that is how I use magic in my games. The supplement covers sacrifice and how it fuels magic, ritual cannibalism, blood miracles for theists, blood sorcery for sorcerers, concert magic for group castings, enchanting rules, summoning magic, random tables to create demons, and bloody campaigns that include how to use Blood Magic in campaigns. It is a pretty good supplement and the rules hang together well enough to be used. Sacrifice is a ritual act and should be cast out of combat, as you would expect. Divine Blood Magic requires a sacrifice of blood to gain the Divine spells, then a further sacrifice on a daily basis to retain them. Casting them is simply a case of rolling your Invoke (Deity) in combat, as you would a normal Divine spell. Sorcery Blood Magic involves spending blood (HPs) instead of Magic Points, otherwise works as normal sorcery. There is a rule that spending HPs to cast magic means the HPs cannot be healed magically, but I would specifically allow that.

Many years ago there was a Games Convention in Burton-on-Trent and a couple of my friends (Stuart Hunt and Andrew "Tom" Taylor) went along (I couldn’t as I was working or otherwise engaged). Even though I was not there, the tale has been related to me on so many occasions that I could retell it word for word. As the session was so good (Stuart and Tom say that it was one of the best they have ever played in) I thought I would share it with other people. After half an hour of wandering around the Convention looking at figures etc. they came across a RuneQuest game being set up. They got chatting with the GM and found out that the game was for two teams and he already had one team. "What’s RuneQuest? Is it like AD&D?" they asked, having only played RuneQuest for 12 years. When he explained they said they would give it a go. The Scenario was a simple one - a group of Chaotics had stolen a Yelmalion artefact and a squad of Templars had come to get it back. Victory conditions were: The Yelmalions had to get the Artefact back, in which case they scored a huge amounts of points. The Chaots got a number of points for each Yelmalion they killed. It was possible for the Yelmalions to get the Artefact back and still lose if they took huge losses. "What are Yelmalions?" When the GM explained, they said "So, they are like Paladins. We’ll play the Chaotics - are they Chaotic Evil?" The GM explained that Chaos was different in RuneQuest. "OK, we’ll still play the Chaotics, they sound fun." The Yelmalions had a number Templars and a couple of officers on horseback. The Chaots had a load of broos, a Jack o’Bear, a Scorpionman Lay Member of Bagog and could summon a Chaos Demon from a Chaos Pool if they sacrificed a living person to it. Stuart and Tom looked at the stats quickly and asked if the Chaots could have a couple of stone buckets. "OK" said the innocent GM. "For a couple of weeks beforehand, these two broos spit their acid into the buckets at night, building up a supply of acid." "You can’t do that!" (I don’t know of any GM who has allowed player Chaotics to do this (except me, of course - I allow anything) but all of them have had NPC Chaotics use the perfectly valid tactic.) "Why not?" "You just can’t!" (Falling back on the age-old GMing strategy.) "What are Diseases?" The GM explained. "Ok, the broos all crap in a pile and wipe their weapons in the dung heap to get the diseases on everything and to get them really dirty." "You can’t do that!" "Why not?" "It’s against the Spirit of Roleplaying!" "But they are Broos, they do that sort of thing!" "Well, you can’t do it!" Having the tone set, Stuart and Tom gathered that they were going to lose, but that they would have fun doing so. When the session started, two broos started grappling with each other, ignoring everything else. The Templars came marching in as a few groups with the officers on horseback. What they should have done was to go straight for the Artefact, put it with an officer and have him ride away as fast as he could, with the Templars covering his retreat. Session won. However, things went badly. Tom spent a while looking at one of the cards. "I don’t understand some things here. What’s special about ‘Iron’? All my weapons are just ‘Bastard Sword’, ‘Spear’ and so on but this says ‘Iron Spear’." The GM explained that Iron weapons had more armour points and did not take damage as easily. "OK, what is Carapace?" The GM explained that it was a Bagog spell which increased armour. "And Jabbers?" The GM explained. "I suppose that ‘Venom Boosting’ increases the Scorpionman’s Poison." The GM agreed. "OK, she casts all her spells and charges that group of Yelmalions." At this point the squad of Templars broke and ran with the players complaining bitterly that the Chaots had a Rune Lord of Bagog and that this was not fair. By far the best piece of psyching out I have ever heard of. The two broos were still grappling and ignoring everything else. A couple of Yelmalions cast Fireblade and charged into combat. "Ahem", said Stuart and Tom, "how can they use Fireblade as they are in Yelmalio" and made the GM look at the cult in Sun County. True enough, Yelmalions could not cast Fireblade. This may have blown their cover that they knew nothing about RuneQuest, but it was too late now. One of the grappling broos succeeded and the other failed. "I offer this willing sacrifice to Thed". "I’m not willing" wailed the other broo as he was thrown into the Chaos Pool. The GM was horrified. The broos should have tried to capture a Templar, dragged him to the pool and thrown him in. This should have taken rounds and rounds, he did not expect the Chaos Demon to be summoned at the end of round 2. However, he could not complain as only a sacrifice was needed. Several tentacles snaked forth from the Pool. Then the Master stroke. The Jack o’Bear Harmonised a Templar. This held no fears for anyone as Harmonise is a 2 point effect which could be dispelled by Dispel Magic 2, which both officers had. No problem. However, a broo ran up to the Templar, lifted his skirts and proceeded to bugger him senseless. "You can’t do that!" cried the opposing team and the GM. "Why not?" "It’s against the Spirit of the game." "But they are broos, it’s what they do." This they could not argue against, because it was indeed what broos do. "But they don’t do it in the middle of combat!" "Normally, but we know that you are going to win, this makes sure that you won’t boast about it!" End of discussion. Next round, the Jack o’Bear harmonised someone else and the same thing happened. And again. And again. The funny thing was, all the buggered Templars took no further action in the game, even though the Jack o’Bear was killed and the Harmonises removed. They were not touched by the opposing players. Maybe they were deemed to be in a state of shock, maybe the players were so disgusted about the Broos' actions that they couldn’t bring themselves to use the Templars. Who knows. Anyway, the Templars decided to kill all the broos. This they could do as they were the stronger force. However, they got no Victory Points for doing this and they lost Templars in the process, increasing the broos’ Victory Point Tally. When Stuart and Tom had killed enough Templars they could relax, confident that Victory was theirs. True enough, the surviving Templars got the Artefact away but did not brag or boast about it. I wish that I had been there as it was exactly the kind of game that I enjoy. If anyone is reading this who took part in the Session, could they PM me with their recollections of the Session as I would like to include the Opposing Force’s comments.

To catch men?

I made this exact point earlier in the thread. 🙂 So good, it was worth repeating.

I thought that Pumpkins were created by Flamal and one of the minor Goddesses. One day, Eurmal was bored, so he wandered through Aldrya's Forests and came across a giant, bloated orange mass that was sucking the energy from the forest and growing bigger and bigger. Immediately spotting it an dangerous, he did was any self-respecting god would do and took out his trusty dagger, that he kept hidden from Humakt, and started to cut away at the great beast. He cut and cut until he was satisfied that it was no longer a danger, for now it had two eyes, a nose and a smiling mouth, so could not be a threat. as he walked away, the pumpkin called out to him not to go, for it wanted a friend. laughing, Eurmal went further away and the pumpkin called again, but more insistent this time. Drowned out by Eurmal's laughter, it called a third time, even more insistently, as Eurmal disappeared. However, other creatures heard its call and came to see it and be its friend. They weren't its friends, though, as they were not Eurmal. as they got closer, the beast realised that now it had a mouth it could sate its hunger a different way and gobbled them up. Since then, Hungry Jack has attracted those foolish enough to stray near to its lair. As it got bigger and bigger, Jack realised that it just had too much of itself within itself, so strained and strained until part of it burst, throwing small chunks out into the Forest. This took root and grew, becoming smaller versions of itself, called Jacklings. They also attracted people, as they were as lonely as their father. Eurmal wandered past and saw the Jacklings. Intrigued, he moved closer and recognised what they were. "Ah, aren't you cute?" he said to one of them, "Not like that bloated thing you call a father. I'd like to be your friend, but we can't stay here", so he took one of them and pulled it up, he pulled and pulled until its straggly roots came free with it. He put it under his arm and wandered off, but soon found that it was heavy and not great company. He put it down and scolded it, "Look, of you want to be my friend, you have to walk with me" and it got up on its roots and started to walk. Happier, he walked out of the Forest and happened upon one of the Dark Men who had recently appeared. The Dark Man rushed towards him and Eurmal cowered, until his friend roared and rushed the Dark Man, shocking it into stillness. "Wow, you were so scary, you looked like a bear", Eurmal said, "so that's what you are, a Jackling Bear", but that sounded odd, so he shortened it to Jack o'Bear. Eventually, he lost interested in his Jack o'Bear and they parted ways.

Yes, my current Revolution D100ish Dark Age Prydain game has a healthy dollop of Blood Magic, taken from Legend. It makes for quite a dark game in places, but sometimes confuses the Players, as their enemies and allies both use Blood Magic and one of them has a connection to the Grail and realised that it is based on Blood Magic.

No, it is the difference between relying on wandering Riddlers and having established a core of static people who build up their knowledge of Illumination. A similar effect happened in the established schools of Illumination, sages built up a number of Riddles and techniques, teaching them to their followers. Logically, given a — to all intents and purposes — infinite number of blind men grabbing at thIs particular elephant, one of them must surely have stuck his head up its arse. Looking back over this thread, I have my suspicions as to whom. And, hilariously, I’m sure he has his own. Let’s leave it there. Me, me, me, me! Nysalor, Gjaji, all their followers, Arkat and his followers, Talor the Laughing Warrior, all the members of the various Illuminated schools, the Great Sister, Red Emperor, Red Gooddess, Ralzakark and his followers, possibly the Lunar-loving Orlanth Priest in Pavis before it fell.

A very good example, thanks.