styopa

I wish I could upvote this more. Well put. I haven't read TSR so I don't know about the items this particular Rokari has, but I think one of the first lessons a GM learns is: "never give an NPC magic items that would be unbalancing in in the hands of characters". Simultaneously, I've always found the "this magic item can only be used by this bad guy and nobody else"* to be a cheesy way to essentially cheat players of rewards. Particularly when the game has a penchant for magic items that are otherwise essentially rule-breaking or there's no conceivable way to make them given the game mechanics available. *as mentioned, I haven't read it so I don't know if this is even relevant to TSR specifically

Any idea when this will be out as a published dead tree edition?

And Harrek. Really remarkable talent on display, amazing. Edit: Love the use of lego as mold-form. My absolute favorite is Jar-eel vs Harrek, her pose vs his pose says everything about each of them.

That'll certainly sell more copies in Des Moines.

RQG has IMO funky initiative/movement changes based on "if you're in combat" unless that's been errata'd out now. Oh, and re fatigue I tried one out the last session that was fairly successful in my opinion. As my players were slogging through a vast swamp with literally no solid surface to sleep...as the day turned around 4am they all got a 'fatigue' roll: roll a d10. Keep that die atop your character sheet at the number you rolled while we play. Whenever you roll that number on ANY die, roll that die again and take the worse result of the two. (ie if your number is a 4, and you roll a 54, re-roll the 4 giving you a new result of 54-59 - remember you only take the WORSE result). Had they been out a second day, there would be a 2nd d10 roll. Etc. It's SIMPLE as hell. It's a constant reminder "you're tired" just because of the inconvenience of having to move the die every time you want to look at your sheet. It's die rolling. Everyone likes rolling dice. There's a gradient of "suckage" to the result so there's some variable impact between players (rationalizing how well they were rested in the first place, etc). 9 is probably the best roll. If you roll a 9 in a percentile, unlikely any other result will be worse, and as most damage dice are d8s, it doesn't even affect them. 0's are pretty icky, meaning unless you can reroll it again, you're probably not critting anything for a while; same with 1's and specials. 6, 7, 8 are fairly bad as that can be worse in %iles, and definitely hurts damage rolls. It certainly makes it interesting for the players as they try to compare who's gotten the worst result. It's "bad enough" to strongly encourage players to get sufficient rest, but not immediately crippling. I picked 4am because in college I used to work 6pm-6am security shifts and that 3am-4am span was when it always hit the hardest. In the future, if they sleep less than 8 hours in 24, I'll probably have them roll 2d4...if they roll higher than their hours of rest, they get a fatigue die for that day. Still considering that. I do wish I could come up with some sort of tactical fatigue system that wasn't kludgy but in my belief adrenaline makes most of those moot unless we're talking multiple days of grinding combat/lack of sleep...which the thing above basically does.

To be clear, it was 2 separate hit location tables for each creature-type in the game, one for melee attacks (which we also used for falling damage) and the other for missile AND THRUSTING weapons. The latter point might seem nitpicky, but it provides players with an interesting tactical choice when choosing a weapon. A thrusting weapon might do less damage (I never really understood / accepted why longer spears INTRINSICALLY did more damage...nonsensical) BUT got to use the latter table where 11-15 was chest...5x the chance to hit a 'one shot kill' location could be an attractive choice.

Some people dig constant retcons and reimaginings. Some people don't. I will say that if you have any familiarity with Glorantha, none of this should be surprising. Not the SPECIFICS, but that things change constantly. (shrug)

https://acidcow.com/pics/113869-just-try-to-draw-a-duck-32-pics.html Acidcow showed the results of a contest where people were given just the beak and the feet to fill in with a duck drawing (this person added just an eye) But there were a few that were actually fairly interesting inspirational material for Gloranthan ducks, depending on your silliness level: For example: Quisarian now called Dracofriend: a quiet, odd duck who has said for years to his neighbors that he is in fact merely the current form of a Dragonewt soul experimenting with this cycle as a duck. Whether this is how he describes his true form... or if this is the form that the town drunk INSISTS he took when some local toughs tried to rob his Curio Shoppe, is unclear. The toughs apparently fled town as nobody has been able to locate them to corroborate the crazy old man's description. One of the many ducks that came back (sort of) from that regrettable expedition to Snake Pipe Hollow: and another Vath the High Clouddancer - Orlanthi Rune Priest Hooji the Explorer, a famed but mysterious traveler from the east. Reputed to be a Keet but has never answered the question.... Umbra, the implacable demon duck spirit of retribution and vengeance Crux Quicksmash, duck brawler: or Fizzisha, the aging (retired) Ernalda (or maybe Uleria?) priestess who was somewhat of a disappointment to her temple:

Well that's the conundrum, isn't it? Just going by what (I think it was Jeff) said, HQ's narrative-mechanics were commercially unappealing and RQ was more successful. Yet ... here we have RQG (and TBH, Glorantha) in which the round peg of narrativism is being shoved incredibly hard through the square hole of a simulationist set of rules. Some might say painfully. Thank the flippin' Lord. Knowing the game and (the) personality involved, yeah, there were some quite good ideas there but that would have been a marriage made directly in hell.

Yes, absolutely. To put it bluntly, what I've found is that whenever there's substantial downtime my players want to train more obsessively than some steroid-crazed 'builders on instagram. The "oh they still have to have real jobs to support themselves and their lives" becomes meaningless the first time they manage to find even a rather trivial treasure...not that they can necessarily live like kings forever (unless you mistakenly give them some of the piles of loot from RQ2 scenarios without first seriously editing them...sheesh!) but 'daily bread' really ain't their concern any longer (even giving 90% to their cults). So no, our campaign runs pretty nearly like the tv show 24...it is a constant barrage of happenings that they could ignore but I know they won't. Not unrealistically, I think, I expect that a world like Glorantha with ACTIVE MONSTER POPULATIONS, actual inimical evil cults, atop all the normal human drama of crime, war, families, etc. if a local potentate finds a reliable band of 'fixers' to solve a lot of blunt-force problems, he/she is going to use them extensively. If they're NOT reliable...well then sending them off to their doom isn't a bad idea either. And then there's going to be the fact that anyone inimical is soon going to recognize these individuals as "something that they'll need to deal with if they want to X" ...the plotlines just write themselves. The idea that a group like that can only find essentially one "thing" to deal with per SEASON is ...unrealistically sedate for such a world, in my view. And downright dull. FINALLY, I very much liked some advice I read from Orson Scott Card about writing that a single plot line is fairly dull. Really interesting stuff happens at the INTERSECTIONS of things...so take your typical classic "hey there's a spooky tomb we should explore" vanilla adventure crawl. But then intersect it with a local violent rebellion in full swing in the same area and you can get some interesting plot twists that even I as a GM didn't even faintly expect. I did bow to a general request from them at one point that they begged for downtime...not that I was forcing them down rails, but I was perhaps a little too effusive with plot hooks that they couldn't ignore happening when the previous "thing" was only 75% done so they never felt that they had a time to catch a breath. I wasn't sad about that but I did try to give them SOME breathing time lately.

It does. I don't think playing "spell recovery" should be more elaborate or game-focus consuming than casting them. 😕

I'm not sure about that comparison. RQ3 selling in the mid 1980s at the PEAK of D&D's early apogee, vs RQ2 in a totally different market environment? AH's utter bungling of well, everything having to do with marketing, pricing, boxing, product values, target buyers, I'm not sure I can list all the places AH failed. In simple raw numbers? D&D did better than RQ3 OR RQ2...I don't think anyone wants to go there.

I can completely see that. I utterly agree that RQ2 carried the spirit of "what Glorantha should be" into the game more substantially than the otherwise-sterile RQ3. That makes perfect sense knowing Greg. At the same time, people have different priorities. I don't know that Greg cared a great deal about things like mathematical consistently, repeatability of results, precision: he was a "big story" guy not a "make sure the jots and tittles all line up" person. He certainly wasn't a wargamer (not intended to be a slam, that's just on observation) except insofar as it let us experience the grand sweep of events in Dragon Pass and Nomad Gods in a PARTICIPATORY way that wasn't other wise available in 1970. That said, I have many, many times wondered why in the heck Perrin's crunchy quasi-realism ended up connected to Glorantha. They seem like entirely alien bedfellows. When Robin's HQ system came out- THAT, indeed, seemed to better encompass not just the Campbellian approach that seemed to underlay everything Greg wrote, but the story-driven narrative that are the (lack of) gears behind the entire Gloranthan storyline. I admit over the years I have always seen that tension - between an empirically-based, mechanics-driven rules system that is so perfectly suited to simulationism, underlying a subjective, impressionist, imprecise GAME - and even wondered why RQG went back to RQ2 in the first place instead of HQ. It's like putting a pair of old rigid hobnail boots on someone at burning man who'd be much more comfortable barefoot or in moccasins. EDIT: these are my IMPRESSIONS of Greg. I was merely an acquaintance, we'd corresponded a bit on Gloranthan weather and maps, occasionally over the years. I'd say my "know what Greg was like" skill was certainly 15% or lower. Maybe I was totally misreading the guy, others would know vastly better than I do.

There's nobody that's played RQ(any) for any length of time that hasn't become adept at more or less CONSTANTLY repurposing everything from RQ2, RQ3, MRQ1/2, RQ6, and now RQG into whatever niche-flavored rules they're using. CONSTANTLY.

I'd houseruled that the 'tests' had to be in application, not on the character sheet. So if a cult requirement was "90% with bow attack", then they put up 10 arrow butts and the character had to sink 9 of 10 arrows to pass that test. FAR more interesting, FAR more stressful for the players, FAR more fun imo.

Amusingly, that was something I liked. I liked that RQ3 was a gritty, 'realistic', d100 system that was portable. Ran a campaign set in a fantasy Europe back in the day (but I will agree their default RQ3 quasi-Roman setting was a rubbish mess; Vikings was an amazing supplement as was Land of Ninja). I've grown to accept it better over the years but I'll admit the heresy that I've never LOVED Glorantha as a setting. It IS the most logically-consistent fantasy setting I'm aware of in which magic is really, truly, intrinsically linked to the setting - not just "faux Medieval with magic bolted on but not meaningfully rationalized" as in most cases. But I'm a little too empirical to love it as much as some.

Please by Lhankor Mhy the ever-organized, please let there be at least some effort at version control and identification. SOMETHING that says "this is version 6. It was updated Oct 10, 2019" so as to distinguish it from "version 5, updated Sept 2, 2019" so people know when it's worth downloading a new version. And maybe even a changefile?

TBH it's just considered as part of the "resting" process for us. You wake up, and if you're a Rune level that last hour before you start your day is a worship service. We don't play it out any more than most of the mundanities of daily life. (shrug). Vagueness works here. This is YOUR GOD. They're not sitting on your shoulder counting your pennies, they're in your bloody head and heart. (You invited them in.) So if a Hykim and Mikyh Shaman (ie a RL role) donates 90% of his share of a big haul to the buying of properties in Sog City to basically make a vast city park/natural area/refuge for the animals of the city, I'd say H&M would smile on that. If she instead lets the "party" pay for all sorts of her own housing etc out of the group's kitty so that she has to pay less out of her remaining 10% share but meticulously donates the official 90% from the "official gross"...that's going to be a frowny face and maybe that next divine spell DOESN'T do everything it's supposed to... Oh I'd certainly see this as possibly included for Stormbull, maybe Humakt mercenary company, etc. For Flamal? Yeah, no. (snort)

We allow the return of divine magic to rune levels with the conduct of a worship service (points) number of days after casting. So lightning 3 could be re castable in a worship service conducted at least 3 days after casting. Of course you have to have the worship service which can be challenging in some contexts. For severing we use 3x the limb up in damage, after armor.

Not sure if it's serious or just wishful fanbois, but it seems that's not impossible. https://www.wowhead.com/news=291725/burning-crusade-and-wrath-legacy-servers-possibly-in-wows-future Several interviews published today on WoW Classic confirmed that Blizzard isn't opposed to the idea of other Legacy servers in the future, such as The Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King--their development may depend on the fans' interest and the fans' reaction to WoW Classic. Considering that the Classic buy-in was 50-60x their expectations, I have to imagine they're considering it. Their servers with layering hold easily 10x what earlier vanilla ones did, they have 56 servers up, and there were queues the first couple of weeks of over 150,000 players waiting to get in. The math's pretty compelling, considering in another interview they said that TBC would be vastly easier to do both because they actually have the code, it was written from the start more along what they're running today, and they've already BUILT the migration tools they needed for Classic.

Yeah, BRD is amazing. A testament of what Vanilla was about. Good thread if you can tolerate reddit:

Haha, I like how this got shifted to Home > Other Stuff > Alastor's Skull Inn. Pretty sure it didn't start there, I mean, it's not even listed under "chaosium forums" now (how are these NOT Chaosium forums, generally?)... sure, it's for 'other discussion' and not at all where we'd like to see threads die.

Was there ultimately a reply? My $0.02 would be that it would have been nice to have more generic traveller-style background development tables for players in RQG, and then have CAMPAIGN BOOKS for the regions that then offered detailed chronologies for the various relevant cultures. Honestly, among the other to-do's that are on my list if I were to adopt RQG wholeheartedly, would be to make Traveller-style background tables for the backgrounds in RQG, plus maybe some more. (No, unlike LBB traveller, you couldn't DIE). While I like the concept, I found the way RQG presented history gen was not terribly satisfying (TBH I thought it was a bit-off-more-than-can-be-chewed moment; to try to parse the span of events of -arguably- THE MOST INTERESTING BIT OF GLORANTHA into a unified set of tables might have been a little...ambitious. It was either going to sacrifice characters on the altar of a more-or-less linear timeline, or sacrifice the timeline to really be dynamically interesting).

Sorry, we're a collection of various hordies on Pagle. Loving Classic btw. Like coming home again. I bailed after Cata, and have only been back for occasional 2-3 week spans when a new expansion comes out (and they give you all the previous content for free), so when WoD came out I tried Pandaland, etc. Last retail was when BfA came out my son and I started 2 gnome monks - me tank/dps, him heal/dps - and we proceeded to level from 1-cap (120?) within a month of casual play INCLUDING 2-manning at-level (!) every. single. non-raid instance. Which if you think about it means its STUPID easy. Just tanked WC last night on a 22 (slightly overleveled for WC) and it was 3 hours that went by like a moment, and was vastly harder than any of that 1-month run of monks in retail.

I think it matters if you consider "climb" as actual climbing vs "climb" as negotiating high passes more of a general skill. Every time I'm rock climbing time - ie fatigue - is ALWAYS ticking away.