Gryphaea

The reviewer stopped by at the Alexandra Palace show in London last month and played in the RQG demo session I ran. Seemed like a nice guy and it was a really fun game.

To be honest the Quick Start is a pretty good, it works well as an introductory set of rules. New players can do a lot worse than starting with those then moving on the full rules if they like what they see in the Quickstart

Second draft is looking much better. Some nice work there. What about travelling to the spirit world, finding a spirit and gambling with them. The Character makes a sacrifice (1 point of POW - though could be other stats) and a game roll is made. If the Character wins they get a Rune Magic point and a rune spell, on a special they get 2 points, on a critical they get their sacrifice back and a rune point on a failure they get a taboo but can roll again and on a fumble the get a taboo (or curse?) and cannot game again with a spirit till sacred time (or a full year?) I personally think that some of the taboos are a bit vanilla, but I do like my shamans to be liminal. No adultery - that's a cultural norm for Orlanthi not a sign that you are apart from the hoi polloi, it should be celibacy or nothing. Being a shaman should carry real cost or oblige you to perform actions that make you a kind of social pariah. I would humbly suggest we need more taboos, and then a few more, and then even more after that. I like never wear clothes as a taboo. in the same vein you could add never eat insects or worms - meaning that the character wears a scarf over their mouth and nose and obsessively checks their food. What about a yearly pilgrimage? Must travel to the chalk man each year, or each spirit has its own spirit place, or several spirit places and if you make a pact with a spirit that gives you rune magic then you need to make a pilgrimage to one of its spirit sites each year - which then gives a hook for further adventurers and also acts a practical limitation on how many spirits you can make pacts with Glorantha is such a rich world I am sure we can squeeze more flavour out of it on this one.

To chip in my two bolgs worth on this one - I really like the idea of gambling with spirits not negotiating with them, that could be interesting... HQ makes use of Keywords which for me implies that characters can be very diverse, everyone has vastly different and very individual skills, talents and magic. RQG is more standardised and characters could end up having the same skills and magics but for different reasons. My gut reaction would be to say that a Kolat shaman could perhaps have all the spells but not all together at the start. Could the cult have different sub cults or families of spirits and the shaman specialises in a one or two of the groups but not all of them - so On my Right and On My Left but not Below me. Perhaps one of the groups of charms is obtained when the character becomes a full shaman and gets their fetch, then the others then have to be obtained separately through different spirit journeys or quests. Perhaps the fetch quest could be duplicated but with a hostile wind spirit instead of the Bad Man? Or would it travelling to a spirit place contacting and negotiating with a spiritual entity to get the extra powers? Could we speculate on what the Taboos associated with the Kolat tradition are? Perhaps each group of charms above have their own Taboo or Taboos. Also what do you think would be the bonuses to skills that a character in character creation would get, and how much?

A thought based playing through a few campaign sessions with the RQG rules Your stories may generate an actual sense of imminent danger to the characters or their world, so your players may want to follow up adventure hooks immediately rather than waiting for the next season. If you are playing 4, 5 or even 6 sessions before the season ends and experience checks are taken (p415), don’t let the players feel they are losing out. Consider letting them have experience rolls during a night’s rest every two sessions . Then given them extra down time to catch up with cult and occupational skills.

Yes, absolutely, very much agree. However, I do like numbers and I do like players rolling the dice. I love the comedy of a fumble and the players sense of achievement when you seem to give them extra information when they roll a special and a critical. Asking for more dice rolls than are necessarily required is perhaps my greatest GMing fault. I happy to own this and confess this to my players. Imaginative, comic or passionate descriptions can enhance the gaming experience for everyone, but I would like to speak up for those of us who get as much out of an honest straightforward number as a well delivered description. Humour us 😁.

Has there been anything written or said about the trade in intoxicating substances in Glorantha? I know that Hazia growth and trade features in the Sun Dome County supplement but I was wondering if there were other references about the cultural norms and sanctions that existed in other regions and cultures.

I would say this is probably the way to go. Magisaurs are also blank slates, they don't have all the culture and hence all the cultural baggage. A new player can be introduced to the world without all the law dumps that would be necessary for a dragonewt. For any new player you want to avoid the law dumps, your wife may well have told you already about the limits to her interest when you start a detailed 20 minute explanation of something - mine does all the time. I have run a campaign with a magisaur PC and it worked out fine - but that was using Mythras/RQ6. There are no guidelines for magisaur character creation, but there is enough in the Bestiary to give you some decent ideas. You could also suggest a human Maran Gor Priestess, what is a better alternative than being a lizard than having an intelligent pet dinosaur.

A piece of advice that I have found useful from Newts books has been; If as a GM you feel the need to give a bonus to player, make it worth it. Don't give a fiddly 5% or 10% give 25% or 50% so the player feels the difference.

The Pot Luck Principle: Just like a meal where everyone brings the food, in an rpg everyone brings something to the table. It is always a good idea to work out what everyone brings and make sure that that isn't too much of one thing and not enough of another. Making use of people strengths and making sure everyone gets a chance to feel needed makes sure everyone has fun. Not taking the time to talk to your players and coordinating their expectations often leads to tensions and misunderstandings later on.

Thanks for the useful post. I have just used this as a seed for an adventure with my RQG group. It was as a foreshadowing of the main adventure in the new adventure pack where the Dragonrise is causing ancient powers to stir. All the young shepherd boys had run off, leaving only the shepherd girls (and any from the other 5 genders) to look after the sheep. The party had to investigate and ended up rescuing a small group of sheep from the ghosts of Star Fire Ridge. The Shepherd boys were all found at a local inn acting all manly and heroic (Wrestling, posing with their chins out and blowing hair in the wind etc) it seemed as though they were under some kind of spell or charm and it was only dispelled when their Mums came and scolded them for running off. Party have no idea of what caused it and I think i will leave it that way for a while.

The Loomes Principle: Offer constant positive feedback and praise to players. Use short phrases such as 'excellent', 'brilliant' and 'love it'. It helps foster a co-operative attitude and the all important sense of fun. *Benjamin Loomes is one of the DiceStorrmers, a group of Australian Role Players who stream. He has a real mastery of giving enthusiastic feedback and worth watching to see how he does it. [Full disclosure: He also works as a partner with Chaosium to produce the official soundboard for Cthulhu, I mention this in passing not plug the product].

Good piece of advice, I find it useful to prepare about twice as many opponents as I think is need so that extras can be brought in as reinforcements. Also allow monsters escape routes and the ability to enter the combat from behind or to the side of the the players. If the players are breezing through the combat and you add the extra monsters, this adds to the drama of the encounter by giving the impression that the players have been out manoeuvred.

While I don't want to deny you the credit for the idea by suggesting an alternative, can I suggest the following The Kermit Principle 'getting there is half the fun; come share it with me'.

Will you be using or quoting the 5 Petersen Rules of Good Gaming? Rule 4 and 5 are about bad things should only result from player choices and giving fair warning if they are about to do something stupid. I think of these as important principles in my games, and I have had feedback from players who appreciate this approach in contrast to arbitrary and fatal rule applications by GMs. But I would want to add a qualified statement or two to the rules as they stand. Also the literary genre of Wisdom Sayings and Proverbs dates back to the very dawn of writing and I think adds to the 'Keeping it Bronze age' feel stressed in the new edition of the game. Teaching and improving the play of the game by the use of short, pithy phrases is a fine idea.

For the Encounters Section There is no such thing as too many Chaotic Features... oh wait there is.

Some GM Bon Mots would be good, how about The Frank Lloyd Wright Principle The doctor can bury his mistakes, .. an architect can ...only plant vines. A GM turns their mistakes into campaign seeds.

Did you mean to have the Apple Lane graphic from pp70-71 included in the supplemental file called map of Apple Lane? Just as you have with Clearwine graphic which is on two pages in the booklet and in the separate file presented as a single image. If not can we make a request that you do, as it would be really handy

Magister Militum actually do ducks and goat headed beast men so we are half way home. I would also add Alternative Armies https://www.alternative-armies.com/ They don't have the very early periods, but they do fantasy monsters and their Dark Age range is usable and usually they will sell individual figures.

A bit late to the discussion, but... As my regular games are on VTTs I use counters rather than minis most of the time. My priority is for decent art that can be adapted into counters and for encounter maps that don't have the number keys or at least have them in a way that they are easy to remove or cover over. However, prepping for a convention game I have been giving the issue of minis a little more thought and experimentation. I have ended up choosing 15mm minis. The more compact scale makes things easier to transport and they are cheaper. 15mm also offers a couple of really useful benefits in its own right; You can use a scale of 1:100, which means measuring scale distances is really easy in metric. No multistage maths calculations required. Bison, Zebras, High Lamas... Chariots. RQG is generous with giving players mounts, which adds an extra layer of epicness. 15mm accommodates a PC on a charging bison or chariot in a way that isn't really practical at 25mm or larger, and I feel that we will (in my case already are) seeing this cropping up more and more in games. There is a reasonably good selection of 15mm 'Biblical' minis that complement the vibe and artwork of the new rules eddition, including a good selection of chariots. It is true that using wargaming minis mean that there is a lack of minis that directly portray women in the way that there are for the larger scale. But the scale is so small that, apart from beards and moustaches, sensibly dressed armoured women and men are indistinguishable. Minis of civilian types also exist if you know the key words to search for (eg Druids and wailing women). 25mm etc minis allow for more detailed, beautiful sculpts and 15 mm is more fiddly - there is no definitive answer here. And, as ever, Your Gloranthan Minis will Vary.

Again, got the supplement and reading through it, and very much enjoying it. What is striking is that despite being a supplement of less than 40 pages it does not shy away from describing the diverse and complex cultural landscape that historians are speculating existed in this region during the 'Arthurian' age. It is able to do this because of the ground work laid by Mythic Britain and Longres, but adds a new level on top of what is there, rather than simply another annex. Bil' is right though Being familiar with the topography both of them, they are at times very similar. But the folk of these Waterlands would not think of themselves as Fenland folk, the Fens are the area surrounding the Wash Estuary, those of the land that border Humber Estuary have different identities. Its a minor point though, about what is really a rather good supplement.

I am imagining that Malkioni liturgists have personal copies of the Abiding Book which have the all 'official' spells contained in it which they then activate individually by sacrificing power. I wonder if there could be a communal 'ordination ceremony' for liturgists were they are inducted and the congregation sacrifices POW to activate their book for them so that they have all the spells their community will need - no doubt someone more learned than I will shoot this idea down. s

Nice list, well researched and well considered, as always. Taxonomy of marginal items can be very useful – I can see what yes to Pendragon but no to HeroQuest. But what about Warhammer 1st and 2nd Editions? I think there is an argument that they have enough 1d100 mechanics to count.