soltakss

14 hours ago, Russ Massey said:

But is it of utility to a GM who just wants to run a game of RQ?

It has some useful information that deepens the Roleplaying experience, but is not essential when running a game of RQ.

On 10/10/2023 at 6:44 PM, glarkhag said:

Has anyone experimented with or considered allowing Runic Inspiration in relation to experience checks? It seems to me that those with strong runic associations could find it easier to advance with associated stats and skills.  If any one has experimented with that did they find it unbalanced things at all? I guess ultimately it just speeds up the progression rate and one needs to find one's own balance with their group. 

The idea is good, but, for me, it needs a simple mechanic that does not involve making another roll to get the benefit. In the same way that a Rune Priest gets a bonus to POW Gain Rolls, you could add a small increase to skills tied to a certain Rune, for example if the Rune is 80% or above then you could get a +5 to the Experience Roll, so someone with Death at 80% and Broadsword 70% with a 10% Category Bonus would normally get an Experience Gain if they rolled 61 or higher (61+10=71, which is greater than 70) but the 80% Death Rune adds +5, so a roll of 56 would get a skill increase (56 + 10 + 5=71, which is greater than 70).

Further refinement would be to associate each skill with one or more Runes, then allow multiple Runes to affect a skill, so Broadsword might be Air and Death, Axe is Earth and Death, Climb is Movement, Lores are Knowledge and so on. If you have multiple Runes at 80% then each would give +5 to the increase roll, so Air 80% and Death 80% would add +5+5=+10 to the D100 roll, so the above example means that a 51 would increase the skill.

On 10/10/2023 at 6:44 PM, glarkhag said:

In a similar vein I'm also toying with an alternative to scrolls (for illiterate characters) using magical runic stones/crystals. The character would use the stone or crystal to focus meditative contemplation (and experimentation with the insight gained) over a period of a season. The stone/crystal would act as a teacher effectively (or pehaps allow augmentation of a research roll). The benefits would be dependent on the level of success (or not) of a Meditation skill check (augmented by Runic inspiration). One use only.   Again, has anyone done anything similiar and refined mechanics through play-testing already?

That would be a really cool magical item. I would just give an automatic skill increase after a period of contemplation, to save having to roll and perhaps fail.

I really like this, as it has a few simple and useful items presented very clearly.

8 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

Tiny Treasures: The first RuneQuest release by Smol Snek picks up where Davide Quatrini’s Trinkets from Dragon Pass left off: while this work gives you six custom magical items for fifty cents (vs. 50 largely non-magical trinkets in that earlier compilation), each of them has been lovingly illustrated with custom artwork to indicate some unique features of the item. Smol Snek creations are written and art-directed by a young person with autism, with a bit of help from some other very cool people. ($0.50 for two pages)

I really like this, as it has a few simple and useful items presented very clearly.

3 hours ago, Malin said:

That's actually an interesting point. Is Fertilize (and similar spells) available to Ernalda worshippers everywhere? Or do the associated cults vary depending on where they are?

In my opinion, some associate deities are local in nature and some are widespread with Shrines everywhere. Caladra & Aurelion feels local to me.

If you have a shrine to the associate cult in your Temple then the spell is available to you. However, how many Ernalda Temples would want, or need, a shrine to Caladra & Aurelion in their temple? Shrines to Volcano Deities could well attract volcanoes, after all.

I would expect a Caladra & Aurelion shrine in a Lodril Temple, so maybe having Lodril as a Husband Protector might mean the Lodril Shrine also has a Caladra & Aurelion Shrine.

9 hours ago, JRE said:

Taking things one step forward, what if Third Age Arkat, which Argrath is a part of, has decided just that, after the horrors of the Monster Empire (and other catastrophes all over the place), the only way to break the cycle and stop Chaos being an existential menace is to break the Godtime, which means breaking all gods present at the casting of the net. Therefore the ending of King of Sartar.

To a certain extent, pitting Argrath as Arkat means that Argrath needs the Monster Empire so that he can utilise Arkat's powers against the Lunars.

One big difference, of course, is that Arkat was the result of a Lightbringer Quest, he did not undergo a Lightbringer Quest himself. Argrath performed the Lightbringer Quest to bring back Sheng Seleris, as the only person capable of killing the Red Emperor, then dragged Sheng Seleris back to Hell. Like Harmast Barefoot, Argrath completes the Lightbringer Quest twice but on the second time he kills all the Deities. Does that mean that Chaos won in the end? Maybe in the same way that nobody knows whether Arkat of Gbaji was triumphant in the end, Argrath defeated the Lunar Empire but by doing so allowed Chaos to triumph.

On 4/5/2023 at 7:48 AM, Soccercalle said:

Any news about the adventure Hydra @Peter Hart? Will that be an adventure, a campaign or a source book?

It is a very detailed scenario suitable for medium to high level Adventurers. Some of the NPCs would fit into Dorastor without a problem. I loved the way the NPCs were split out into a separate booklet.

I'd have the majority of them in the Children of the Forest subcult, as that is what they are. Dyads belong to the Elder Sister Cult and Elves belong to the High King Elf cult, with Runners also in the Children of the Forest cult. Of course, there is no reason why a Pixie can't join the other cults if they are powerful or martial enough. 

One of our RQ2 GMs had an encounter with Poleaxe-wielding Zombie Pixies, as he worked out that a max-strength Pixie turned into a Zombie had enough STR and DEX to wield a Poleaxe, so he had a squad of them that flew in, invisible, then attacked from surprise then disappeared again. Oh, how we laughed.

On 9/27/2023 at 8:31 PM, soltakss said:

It's the Only Old One's brains that dissolved a hole in the Shadow Plateau

Sorry, I misremembered, I think it was the Great Serpent's brains, the one whose body makes up the lead hills.

3 hours ago, Zac said:

No worries. Just checking in to see if it was still a going concern 🙂

I have paid for lots of artwork for this, so I want to get it done. I just have so very little time nowadays.

On 9/24/2023 at 10:33 PM, Zac said:

I just checked the page again and it said that the request was still pending. I cancelled that request and initiated another one. Looks like it may have been a glitch

It looks as though you are a member 

On 9/26/2023 at 1:59 PM, Zac said:

Simon was this project released?

Not yet, I've been far too busy with work, my Apprenticeship and other Jonstown Compendium work

On 9/25/2023 at 1:28 PM, jajagappa said:

On 9/25/2023 at 5:07 AM, Joerg said:

The origin of the tar still is a bit of a puzzle to me. It is not a substance I would associate with obsidian, or with a glass tower being shattered.

The dissolved body of the OOO?

It's the Only Old One's brains that dissolved a hole in the Shadow Plateau

36 minutes ago, Zac said:

Unrelated to the OP... are any of the Jonstown Compendium Creators Circle mods on the forum? I sent a request to join the group some time ago and haven't received a response yet. 

I'm not a mod but can see member requests and there aren't any pending. What is your User Name on Facebook?

16 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

Curious where it was located for you in Prax of the wastes?

In the wastes somewhere.

16 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

What sort of idol, jakel, reptile or maybe some sort of giant snake so as to be related to the Earth Cult?

It was a gigantic jackal head. Actually, it was the head of a giant son of Genert, buried up to his neck. They realised it afterwards and excavated him. In my game, he was one of the original River Voices but sided with Chaos.

16 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

Did they repair the copper limbs when they were damaged and when they bled was it... what was it? LOL

Heal worked on the limbs, as they were living copper. When they bled they bled red blood.

16 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

They are like Gold Wheel Dancers but made of copper? Makes me wonder how did the GWD's come to be, were they around in the God's Time as there were some, maybe 10 or so at the Dawn.

They were more like the Copper Army from the Nomad Gods game. I don't know anywhere enough about Gold Wheel Dancers to comment on any similarities.

7 hours ago, Deepest_Lore said:

Hello, I've recently come into copies of the Moon Design published Glorantha Classics Volume 1:  Pavis & Big Rubble. And Glorantha Classics Volume 4: Borderlands & Beyond. And when I put them on my shelf my copy of Borderlands & Beyond is about a tenth of an inch taller than my copy Pavis & Big Rubble. My concern is that one of them is a knock off or POD copy. Both of the book's print are of exceptional quality and don't look POD. Unless POD quality has improved massively in recent years. I don't know where else to turn to find a question to this admittedly strange and obscure question. Thanks on advance. 

All of my Gloranthan Classics are of slightly different heights. Pavis & Big Rubble is the shortest, then Cult Compendium, but Griffin Mountain and Borderlands & Beyond are the same height, so yours is probably a good copy.

On 9/21/2023 at 12:41 PM, Samuel808 said:

Hi everyone! I’m thinking of creating digital RQ adventure books, and selling them for a small fee. Is this legal, if the material includes mentions about Glorantha, creatures of glorantha, and has pre-made characters etc.? Thanks!

Have a look at the Jonstown Compendium Creators Circle on Facebook. They'd be glad to help you and offer really constructive advice. I have an adapted template for Jonstown Compendium supplements that allows you to export headings to PDF that i use for my supplements.

Also, check out the Jonstown Compendium itself, to see what other people are doing regarding adventurer modules.

Adventure books should sell well, especially if they are inexpensive.

On 9/21/2023 at 8:22 PM, Erol of Backford said:

I am really curious... do tell, maybe a new thread?

Not much to tell, really. They found an old, ruined idol in the Wastes and realised that putting a body part into its mouth meant that the mouth snapped shut, biting off the body part, but when they pulled back the body part was intact but made of living copper. They all had a go, of course and gained copper arms and legs Nobody dared put their vital locations into the mouth. Whenever they met people of the Earth, for example Oasis Folk, they could claim to be Children of the Earth, for who else had living copper limbs? Eventually, it became important in the Resurrecting Genert thread. One Adventurer gained an Earth Boon on a HeroQuest and asked to be entirely copper. He then blew a Copper Trumpet that awakened an army of Copper Warriors, which had a bit of a catch-22 in that the trumpet could only be blown by a Copper warrior and the Copper warriors were buried, like the Terracotta Army, so he got around that quite nicely. 

A lot of the threads in the campaign were intertwined, which is how I like it.

17 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

Wondering if you were to somehow befriend a wyvern and it became your mount, how much food does it need each day under normal activity.

How many pounds of meat and how much water.

In my Land of Ice and Stone supplement for Legend, I had it that people needed to eat their SIZ in Food Points per day, with Food Points being derived from many sources, but animals supply SIZx10 Food Points. So, using that logic, a carnivorous Wyvern should eat its SIZ in Food Points per day, or its SIZ/10 in meat per day. So, the Coder's Wyvern would need to eat approximately SIZ 3 in meat per day. Of course, it can eat larger meals less frequently, so it can devour a SIZ 18 person every 6 days, for example. An average wild boar is SIZ 19, so provides 190 Food Points if completely devoured, so lasts for about 6 days.

On 9/20/2023 at 11:08 AM, mfbrandi said:

On 9/20/2023 at 9:24 AM, soltakss said:

Daka Fal variants like Biselenslib and SurEnslib

Interesting. Do you mean that game-mechanically they are Daka Fal variants? In concept, the named entities seem quite different: SurEnslib is quite a grand deity — she “raised the deep earth above the waters and sent the four snakes out to make the rivers and raise the sky” — but poor old Daka Fal is just some dead bloke (not a god, more of a Minos figure).

Ancestor worship has moved on. No longer is it entirely the preserve of Daka Fal, instead some cults have ancestor worship and other magic.

So, both Biselenslib and SurEnslib have ancestor-worshipping properties, , as they are the ancestral deities and their descendants live in their lands. In the same way that Yelm can be seen as an ancestor deity, as males need to have been the sons of cultists, with the exception of being adopted through Yelm the Elder. Similarly, Trolls and Elves have ancestor-worship and Kyger Litor and Aldrya can be seen as aspects, or related to, Daka Fal. That was explicit in RQ2/RQ3 Trollpack, for example.

On 9/17/2023 at 8:32 PM, Erol of Backford said:

What would the stat lines be for the daughter of Pavis and a Pavis garden Dyard? Wasn't Pavis a half elf? For now we just averaged the two parents to find something reasonable and tweaked slightly to make the character as the PC envisioned. 

Pavis was a half-elf, so I'd say to use the stats for an Elf, either a Brown Elf or Green Elf.

On 9/17/2023 at 8:32 PM, Erol of Backford said:

If a human has a shapechange human to troll spell how would their stats change if at all, would they be the same and just look like a troll? Along the sma eline would they gain any darksence ability or would it be just appearance? 

It's up to you, really.

You could use the stats of a Dark Troll, I suppose.

On 9/17/2023 at 8:32 PM, Erol of Backford said:

Say human and minotaur have a child (yes with lots of fertility magic) would the stats be an average of the two races? 

Maybe, or you could roll a D2/toss a coin, to see which Characteristic follows which parent, so you could end up with someone with human STR, CON and DEX, and minotaur SIZ, INT, POW and CHA.

On 9/17/2023 at 8:32 PM, Erol of Backford said:

I imagine you could sway towards either of the parents in any situation or even invoke some old recessive gene to bring out a characteristic trait desired for MGF.

Sure, that could work.

On 9/17/2023 at 8:32 PM, Erol of Backford said:

Think about it, wouldn't a baby minotaur be cute with dimples?

Anything with dimples is cute.

On 9/17/2023 at 10:30 AM, Diadochoi said:

Ian, we are just about to start a Pavis campaign. Before Secrets of the Borderlands came out I had sketched a campaign structure for the first few years. It partly looks like yours and partly like Simon Phipp's, however I have Troubled Waters (River of Cradles) early on (to have the "wider sense of culture and geography" and to allow deeper contacts to be formed with Zola Fel as an alternative to Pavis for some party members).

I had it very early on in my last Gloranthan Campaign as a GM. The PCs started off as a Pavic street gang but soon abandoned that idea. They were framed for the murder of an important Old Pavic priest and were sentenced to a few seasons penal servitude as militia in the Bug Rubble, then toured Prax and the Wastes as caravan guards for a merchant, where they gained copper limbs and became Earth Children, then did something else and were sentenced to a year's penal servitude as militia in Sun County. While being Sun County militia they did the Troubled Waters scenario with Mello Yello and I ran it as an involuntary HeroQuest. Becoming River Voices was a pivotal moment in the campaign, as it opened up a lot of mystical stuff that they could do and gave them a distinct identity. They combined being River Voices and Earth Children , and that shaped most of the rest of the campaign.

I am going to cover the Earth Children side in Secrets of the Oasis Folk, eventually, and the River Voices side in secrets of the River Voices, even more eventually. Basically, they used being River Voices to bring the Zola Fel into the Wastes, joined up the Oases, brought the Giant Cradle down the Zola Fel, found the Boat Planet in Hell and brought it back, sailing it through the Sky, and worked on proving that all the World's Waters were connected.

19 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Or of course — if it is what is meant — just:

• he fetched the Viceroys of the Day and
  the New Sun from the Underworld

Yes, that is what it means, with "returned" having the sense that they had been there and were brought back.

I wouldn't reduce the rolls for attacking and parrying as I like the visceral nature of RQ combat.

However, I would probably not need Adventurers to roll to cast Spirit Magic or Rune Magic on themselves or their weapons, as that just slows the game down. Similarly, I wouldn't roll for Augments, instead I'd just add the skill /5 (drop the digit value and double the result with a minimum of 1, so 58% gets +10) to the skill and allow multiple augments.

Getting up from prone should take a combat action but shouldn't need a DEXx5 roll, although I'd probably allow getting up with a DEXx5% roll for getting up quickly, maybe the rules don't need it, I can't remember.

13 hours ago, Richard S. said:

1. What are the caste restrictions for Holari? I know some of the rules for the other castes (no fighting for Dronars, no manual labor for Talars, big hats for Zzaburi, etc.), but I've never seen even a partial list for how the Horali are supposed to live.

According to the Glorantha Wiki: He was tasked with defending his three brothers, in return for their support; He was forbidden from productive labour other than that of war; He was sworn to obey the Talars and the Zzaburi.

13 hours ago, Richard S. said:

2. What do y'all think the most common form of Talar ancestor worship is? Daka Fal variants like the ones in CoRL, or specific cults like Talor, Gerlant, or Issaries?

I'd go with Daka Fal variants like Biselenslib and SurEnslib, but following particular ancestor heroes. They might have some other spells as well, either divine or sorcery.

13 hours ago, Richard S. said:

3. Similar question, but what cults should the Dronars mostly use? I'm waffling between Grain Goddess (Seshna) and Daka Fal for the primary one, but I'd like some more input.

Maybe Seshna, Orlanth (Humat, one of Seshna's husbands), Ernalda, other farmer deities. They are probably restricted as to which deities they can worship, so no war deities, no trade deities, no ruling deities.