styopa

@M Helsdon thanks for that. Curious that none of the examples bear more than a vestigial crossguard, suggesting to me that (considering how trivial it would have been for even primitive sword smiths to add) a blade parry was basically never even considered.

I think such is the work of ages. I'd contemplated trying to modularize the RQG system - using that sort of approach, but without the constraining "grandpa must have been born on year X" that RQG is stuck with...I don't think it's impossible, but it would be a prodigious amount of lore-crunching. What I'd postulated was essentially going BACKWARDS (Feynman says we can go either direction), starting from the character's immediate family - basically building an ancestry tree from there up into the past. Anyone peripheral to the direct lines backwards would be generated but not really 'played out' beyond sex, birth year, death year; maybe children/spouse. There are some terrific FRPG resources already out there for much of the mechanics of it: http://rollforfantasy.com/tools/family-tree-creator.php for example The kicker for lore would be essentially a chance for each individual of at least one "something interesting" happening in their lives. If that flags, then you'd check against a massive table of 'generic but interesting' events - fought/won/lost vs monster, house burned down, drafted into military, found a treasure, etc. A sort of 'downtime random event' chart. Finally, for those who have something interesting, and then hit the small% chance of 'unique event', one would have to have a massive db of Gloranthan events, and who (generally) participated; if it happened during the person's majority, and they're one of the participating groups, they'd have a chance of being a participant; if not, they might only be a witness. There could be some sort of metric for "involvedness" (if it matters), which wouldn't precisely tell the player SPECIFICALLY what happened, but that could be left more to the creative juices of the player/GM to embroider. But yeah, that's a hella big job.

I'd say Glorantha is less materially oriented ...certainly, there are ample magic items but far less focus on items particularly. Think less "King Arthur and Excalibur" and more Gilgamesh. It's less about the stuff, and more about the individuals, the "hero's journey", and now with RQG, the society and their place in it.

Pure game-mechanics wise, I've enjoyed presenting Pamaltela generally as a graduated challenge 'tougher' than Genertela - in ways that aren't exportable (otherwise Pamaltelans would have taken over the world). My players have a party that needs challenges and even a slight tweak like halving the mp recovery rates is having a cumulative effect on how they approach problems.

There's a famous bardic epic about the Lunar invasion of Sartar, where a primadonna Lunar General Mon-tee, angry because he was relegated to the left shoulder of the Lunar advance, devised a daring (some would say ridiculous) plan using a picked force of Lunar Legionaries to drop from Moon Boats and seize an important river crossing at the Hem of Arn. The original assault failed when the relief force of the Lunar Army couldn't quite reach them in time, but those Legionaries' heroism in defeat was even recognized by the Sartar forces that eventually overwhelmed them.

While I agree with you for modern bows, I'd disagree with you for this-era: - every arrow has to be crafted. This is not a trivial amount of labor. Nobody wants to essentially 'throw away' an hour's work (at least) not to mention the materials. "Disposable" for most of human history only meant "it can't possibly be repaired or used for something else any more" - I think the effect of this flexing is FAR more prevalent with today's compound cam-action throw. An archer needs regular practice and musculature to hold a 40#+ recurve for any length of time, while a 60#+ compound is actually fairly common (ie holding maybe 12# at draw). Not to mention thowing faster, I'm not sure if it's proved but personally I feel like a compound bow is 'snappier' than a recurve...where the recurve has a longer, gentler acceleration on the arrow, a compound is more like a crossbow's forceful short throw. https://sites.google.com/site/technicalarchery/technical-discussions-1/arrow

Aside from all the terrific advice above, I'd only add for the D&D-experienced: strongly recommend humans only for pc's to start. Everything available for RQG is currently *very* humanicentric (despite this, understand that RQ generally is a great system for letting characters be pretty much anything!)...and imo this lets you as a gm really make sure the non humans come off as alien as they really are...a nice shortcut to a "we're not in Kansas anymore" moment for your players. Later, once they get the sense that character race selection can really be a much more meaningful choice in RQ than other systems, then freely let them splash around in that richer/deeper end of the pool... Personally I hope you check in occasionally and let us know how it's going. I think longtime RQ fans can occasionally (myself included) be a little insular and even misanthropic, scarred by our decades in the wilderness having to zealously carry a torch for this occasionally-moribund rules system that we nevertheless love. I personally am DELIGHTED to see posts like yours and am invigorated to see the enthusiasm and energy new fans are bringing to the game. Enjoy!

Yeah, for spirit magic, the cost is for knowing it, not casting it. Dunno of the top of my noggin if RQG has caps to spirit magic, but trivial castings (1-3) imho would be essentially free for cultists in good standing or on an errand for the cult. 4-5 are going to be rarer, thus more $, while 6 (thinking of that whole reattach-limb breakpoint which is so...artificial?) would likely be rarer still. Spells above 6 would be like hens teeth, imo...more a matter of finding someone with the spell in the first place.

SO what's the pleasure-mechanic of eating an ice-cream cone? Which is UTTERLY realistic, and why IRL people spent so much time/effort getting that first hit in. You're right, it's something that RQ has missed pretty obviously since the beginning, but then you wouldn't have epic/heroic slugfests...IRL long drawn out melees I believe were more about who lands that hit and starts that spiral, more than enduring a beating.

It's pretty simple, punching attacks just do way too much damage, and the consequence of 0hp-in-your-head is too drastic. (By that measure, I'd also say chests are much too fragile as well, but that's another post...) The whole concept of non-lethal damage is a kludge long ago born in d&d. Damage is damage. Getting hit with a padded club is just less damage, nothing intrinsically different. A simple club is just a fist with another arm's length of leverage that doesn't hurt you if you hit something badly. For example, I could see the following simple changes: - fist attacks do 1 point plus damage bonus. Anything above 1 point of damage is applied also as damage to the puncher's arm (hand), armor protects. (This is regardless of if it penetrates the targets armor, as well.) - kicking attacks do 2 points, otherwise the same. Personally I'd say the threshold for self damage for leg should be higher, maybe 3, but that might be excessive niggly complication. Kick attacks vs humanoid use d10 for hit location, unless target prone or using martial Arts. - head at/below zero = unconsciousness, not death. This would mean bare knuckle fighters have a reason to called-shot head, as it's the quickest route to downing an opponent. Unfortunately, at the low levels of damage we're talking about, pain is the main thing that stops fighting...and if you want to invent some system for motivating a targets behavior through the granularity of pain (ie damage less than incapacitating), that's substantially more complex. An endemic problem to rpg games generally is that there are no pleasure/pain mechanics...there's no mechanical "reward" for having a pleasant beer with friends, though I think we'd all agree it's something we'd definitely seek to do in the real world. Likewise, and more relevant here, there is no pain in RQ...nobody really cares about injury except insofar as it pushes them incrementally closer to losing function in that limb. It's a HUGE omission in rpgs that afaik nobody's ever satisfactorily solved. As long as someone heals the hp, we are like lepers, insensate to harm until actual function fails...

Some people may find the idea of consigning Sorcery to sequestered gnostic aesthetes "fun". Then again, some people find role-playing the managing of a stead "fun" while others are entertained by the compelling cut-&-thrust of a grocer & farmer negotiating the price of leeks... My players? Not so much. Relegating sorcery to more of an NPC function like 'magickal alchemist/astronomers' is not only dramatically uninteresting, it's not narratively persuasive either? As I understand it, sorcery is one of the three principle magical 'pillars' of Glorantha: Divine, Draconic, and Sorcery (with spiritualism and spirit magic potentially a fourth pillar, or more of a magical 'underbrush' depending on your viewpoint, and Lunar magic is...a new exception). I *certainly* don't see the mighty Jrusteli Empire, the Brithini, the Mostail, Fonrit, and pretty much the western 1/3 of 3rd age Genertela as feebling along on what amounts to dilatory buff-spells. None of those societies could have become what they were without a rubber-meets-the-road PRACTICAL magical toolbox, and it just doesn't seem consistent or credible that they were actually tossing around divine spells and spirit magic to get stuff done. How...drab? This presentation of sorcery of course is deeply colored by the deliberately-occluded presentation of RQG as "pretty much only the Dragon Pass area" - there, sorcery may indeed be relegated as described in this thread. No, while I CERTAINLY can see the narrative justification to sorcery having much broader intellectual underpinnings, scholasticism, and a theology based on deduced magic (rather than the 'revealed' fixed-effect magic of Divinity), I think the imagined constraint of Sorcery to only that is pretty badly mistaken and inconsistent with Glorantha as presented (barring more retconning). While I fully agree that viewpoint is perhaps common in some circles, your quote itself pretty strongly implies that there ARE in fact practical applications of sorcery out there, no matter how much they are dismissed by ivory-tower elitists committed to preserving their narrow worldview?

In many cases that's narratively interesting and can/should be used as such; but there are roll-offs where really the result should be decided (and mechanically it would be odd that a system has no real way of simply deciding between two opponents in binary fashion).

Not seriously; I fooled around with them in high school. I'd concede the speed (maybe) on the basis that with an atlatl you're basically not going to have more than 2-3 shots (ie no 'quiver' of atlatl sticks). My opinion of them is based on practicality - AFAIK no culture continued to use them once they figured out how bows could be made reliably...this would lead me to suspect that this is inferior to a bow in basically every respect except ease of manufacture. I think in use they're certainly less wieldy than a bow, in pretty much every circumstance. I did just check RQG and it does have a 1/MR rate vs S/MR so that's enough penalty. Both wiki and several videos refer to them as darts, which is probably misleading. They're certainly neither spears nor javelins, either. (shrug) I don't know what reasonably to call them. Right now it's Javelin (1d10)+1d6 (plus, ostensibly, Strength damage mod).which is crazy - 2x the damage of a bow? No, basically I'd say that since the "javelin" used with the atlatl is pretty much useless (like a long flexible arrow without a bow), I'd just call the atlatl a weapon in & of itself. I'd give it a damage of 1d6+1 (comparable with a selfbow, but you can add 1/2 your dmg mod of course), a range of 40 (half that of a selfbow). The javelin proper is then an entirely different weapon (I still think 1d10 is pretty flippin high for that, but that's another conversation).

I'd lower the atlatl rate to 1/2MR or maybe even 1/3MR. Personally, I'd have issues with both the damage bonus (much too high) and the range bonus (much too low). I'm not an anthropologist, but all the atlatl I've seen used essentially lengthy darts, not fullweight javelins. Personally, I think the 1d10 javelin is more of a pilum, which is CERTAINLY not representative of even the heaviest atlatl-tossed spears.

Malkionism

Very nice find! Thanks!

That's a good suggestion. It's off-beat enough to break the Tolkienesque expectations, but still descriptive. But, like most pre-modern concepts, one has to recognize and maintain it (confusingly, to moderns) as astonishingly non-objective. The illustration I give to players is that medieval roads weren't objectively named, like they are today. We all look at a map, and all agree "That's route 18A". But it doesn't take much time with ancient cartography to see that the road between Happytown and Greenville has multiple names: from Happytown it's called 'the Greenville road' and to the inhabitants of Greenville it's the "Happytown road"....obviously, because to each of them that's where it goes. In a premodern world, mostly illiterate, there is no effort to universalize, nor any sort of consistent taxonomy. (I mean, the God Learners tried it, and we all know how that turned out...) Our village calls those violent weirdos in the forest 'Sheepkillers' because every time our stock accidentally wanders out the other side of the meadow, they keep them and kill anyone stupid enough to try to get them back. I heard the village in the next valley over calls them something like Husband-stealers as in grandpa's time a bunch of men vanished, one was found and dragged back to town raving about beautiful women...nobody here has ever seen pretty girls, just an occasional warning arrow (if you're lucky).

Sadly, I know of a campaign where they recently did just that. "Let's go back to pathfinder for a couple of sessions" sigh. That's it in a nutshell. Same deal years ago in our campaign, ALSO, coincidentally, with a tiger. Player decides to send their archery-heavy toon - alone - well out into heavy brush (8'-high grass, scattered scrub & light trees) to pursue a known tiger. He actively decides to follow a deer trail - using tracking to stay on the deer trail.. (You might guess where this is going). He said nothing about even keeping an eye out for an ambush (from which I'd have given him a bonus, probably) but nevertheless I did give him a scan roll which he failed...as he walked under a heavier tree branch. Yeah...pretty quickly dead character. As you observed, D&D very quickly trains players that it's the responsibility of the DM to provide them with appropriate challenges, not ever their responsibility to make sane choices. Gads, after all these years...that's explicitly putting a finger on one of the key reasons RQ always just "felt right". I think the problem isn't so much retraining as acquainting them with the idea that there ARE other approaches. That D&D approach has been carried even further into MMORPGs (which, tbh, where I see most tabletop game competition coming from) where not only are characters the heroes, but: If they're even offered any choice by the quests/NPCs at all, they're rarely meaningful and none of them are non-tenable, ever. Player agency is limited to "either I do this, or don't"...(and for main-story questlines, they likely don't even have that choice, if they want to continue playing). Character-related development choices are almost never irreversible. Can you conceive of not only telling your players they need to give you (each) $5 per session to play, but that they can re-do their character for another $5 whenever they want? Character simply never die. They might take an xp hit, they might be inconvenienced (both of which are largely falling out of favor now), but they always come back. Given those bases from which to approach 'avatar-based role-playing' it should be no surprise that RQ can (to them) feel almost a little bit masochistic.

It sounds negative, but honestly when I have players coming from d&d, ESPECIALLY if we're experimenting/learning with pre-gens...don't hesitate to kill them. For players from other games it can be startling how quickly a character can go down, esp if outnumbered. That's a needful lesson before they're playing a character that they care about. If they learn to treat combat with the respect/fear it deserves in d100 systems, it's something that will serve them well.

There's some great stuff in there.

To be clear: Pls understand where I'm coming from: I care fairly little about nuances of canon, ie what might be found in the deep recesses of the guide or in some obscurantist comment from the Digest circa 1988. They just don't weigh that much for me compared to making a compelling setting now. For me, Glorantha is about building a realistic high-fantasy world. It's one reason I discourage new players from "I want to play an elf!" or "...dwarf"...or "...dragonewt". I think that Glorantha - in strong opposition to D&D and pretty much every fantasy MMO - elder races are fundamentally alien in their their psychologies. The (to me) hand-waving rationalizations about rootless elves or openhandist dwarves is just that: rationalizations to make them playable by people. While I keep them, I don't think most new players would comprehend they they are, to their kind, literally insane. Dangerously so, to some. Compared to D&D, where the other races are played pretty much like normal people with an elf-mask and some different stat mods, I'd like Elder races to be weird on the verge of fearsome. I think Trolls are relatively easy for people to get into their headspace. Elves less so. Mostali even less so. Dragonewts basically impossible. "Not caring at all about children" for Aldryami is both an easy-grab to highlight how downright alien Elves are to humans, with (relatively) little game-bending impact.

I think one striking characteristic that would mark the departure from beast and adoption of the plant rune would be the removal of sentimentality. Plants care nothing for their young, ever. They create thousands, perhaps millions, and spread them into the world, caring nothing for the consequences. The closest might be serotinism, when the plant holds seeds within itself to express them only when the environment is more favorable. It doesn't mean willful infanticide: everyone still wants to spread their genes successfully, after all. For my players, while elves can experience joy and happiness, the removal of personal affection and a lack of deference for baby things makes them plenty alien and creepy.

Great explanation of the realistic consequences of acid, certainly. Absolutely I recognize this isn't real-world acid behavior, but we're also postulating creatures that spit/spray/exude/excrete acid as part of their offensive/defensive arsenal. Acid - as it acts in the real world - is nearly pointless in this role. I believe the only animal that actively uses acid in any way like this would be ants (formic acid, which is more or less a low-grade toxin more than an acid unless at really high concentrations). In most other cases, it's more like a capsaicin-like reaction than anything. "That horrifying black dragon lurches into view, inhales and spits ...something that's really not that much different from water. You're almost entirely unbothered by it, it might make your eyes sting a little if you had them open...." - not particularly fearsome, IMO. Of course, what "RPG monster" acid is like is more imagined to be akin to Alien(1979) blood: Finally, in a game-mechanic sense it's useful to have something that is particularly damaging to equipment. (Without resorting to the even-more-kludgier Rust Monster...) Why apologize? It was a good question, and I think the discussion is interesting.

I don't believe it does. This simplest way is brutal: damage done by acid simply destroys everything physical. 4 points of acid damage on 6 point armor turns it to 2 point armor. More realistically, even for the nastiest acid, there's a time factor - maybe it will burn 1 point PER ROUND until it reaches 4 points. That gives victims a chance to throw water on it, etc to mitigate the damage. I've seen some people make a resist roll out of it for that result, ie that 4 point acid has a 40% chance to do 1 point of damage to armor. If it's not stopped by armor, it does the remaining POT (after armor mitigation) to skin. Some rule it as ongoing damage until diluted/neutralized. There might even be magical acids that do nothing to physical object, but burn through magical protections and (when they hit a living creature) MP the same way.