styopa

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

On 12/18/2019 at 6:47 PM, Sir_Godspeed said:

Lots of more Glorantha sculptures in that instagram gallery as well, including Uz!

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.

On 12/2/2019 at 6:54 AM, Jeff said:

my wife's very active Earth priestess ("she never misses a temple orgy!"). 

That'll certainly sell more copies in Des Moines.

13 hours ago, lordabdul said:

Doesn't RQG have interwoven attacks/parries/magic too? (and yes, I realize that RQG has 12 SRs instead of 10, and has different SR modifiers for DEX/SIZ and weapons and such, but AFAIK all actions take part in the SR system)

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.

1. It's SIMPLE as hell.
2. 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.
3. It's die rolling.  Everyone likes rolling dice.
4. 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.
5. 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.

11 hours ago, SDLeary said:

 

I believe that BWP is talking about  the separate hit location tables for Melee and Missile combat.

SDLeary

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.

On 11/23/2019 at 9:01 PM, Tindalos said:

The storm contains many winds.

All are part of the storm, all are separate, all are connected. They are both the storm and its children.

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:

3 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

. HQ is a much more narrative game, yet many RQ fans prefer RQ to HQ, to the point where MRQ and RQG are things desites years of being told that RQ wasn't a good fit for Glorantha. Frankly, had they gone narrative   it probabyl would have crashed and burned.

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.

3 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

 He did reject Arduin for it.

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.

10 hours ago, lordabdul said:

Is it because you're playing "in real time"? I think the game was mostly design for a 2-phase gameplay:

1) Play a "short" adventure, as in "it only lasts between a few hours to a couple days in-game". The PCs are focused on the adventure, and have virtually no time to bother with any worship/cult duties.
2) Fast forward to the next season. Look at the calendar for any Holy Days between the end of the adventure and the start of the next, roll for improvements.

It indeed doesn't work super well at first glance with a more "free flow/real time" campaign, where Holy Days become a logistical burden for the party. It might also punish parties who are staying out in the wilderness/borderlands/etc. far from any big temple.

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.

10 hours ago, Crel said:

That sounds heretically close to being "spend an hour each day with your spellbook" mister...

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

9 hours ago, Jeff said:

It certainly didn't help sales. RQ2 did significantly better than RQ3 in terms of sales.

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.

On 11/17/2019 at 4:34 AM, Jeff said:

But not, interestingly enough, the people who wrote it - most emphatically Greg. Greg strongly believed that RQ2 was the superior system to RQ3 and that although RQ3 had some useful rules fixes (like magic points instead of temporary POW), it went too far in many areas and that its "generic" approach was a huge step backwards. 

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.

On 11/17/2019 at 1:46 PM, soltakss said:

Yes, but for the cults that were not described in RQ2, we used the RQ3 spells for our RQ2 Campaign.

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. 

On 11/15/2019 at 8:08 PM, weasel fierce said:

"Rune levels" is nothing, honestly. 

To be a full-blown priest, all you need is 4 skills at 50, plus 50 points of ritual magic. 

You don't even need to commit to priesthood. Acolytes get re-usable rune magic as well. 

If you use the freeform character creation, you can easily start off at that rank and even if you don't, if the campaign is such a meat grinder that getting four skills to 50 is literally impossible, the problem is not the system but the GM.

 

 

Like, everyone understands that the priest rules in 2 and 3 are different right? 

 

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.  

On 11/15/2019 at 7:16 PM, Glorion said:

Atgxtg: actually one area I totally agree with you is that the biggest thing wrong with RQ3, worse than anything else, worse than everything else combined, was trying to take it out of Glorantha, for which Avalon Hill has some but not all of the blame. We all hated that so much that in posting here, I managed to forget that. Well, that is fixed in RQG!

 

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.

On 11/11/2019 at 7:50 PM, BWP said:

Supposedly we're getting some sort of major errata/overhaul in the not-too-distant future? 

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?

On 11/10/2019 at 8:36 PM, Bill the barbarian said:

Now we are getting to the nut of the situation and a tough nut it is. A fair sized group with a diverse cult membership could keep the holy days hopping off the calendar pages. I like the idea of the strategy of keeping track of the calendar days on paper but the reality could entail much more book keeping than I thought. Definitely granular, but all those holy days and associated cult holy days times adventurers. Wow!

"Break out the spread sheet app, Martha! This one’s goin’ ta be a bear!"

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).

On 11/11/2019 at 9:06 AM, Akhôrahil said:

I'm considering this as well - you have to sacrifice 10% of your income to the temple, but it's not clear exactly how this works out - is it net or gross?

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...

On 11/11/2019 at 9:06 AM, Akhôrahil said:

Second, I would think that maintaining non-priest thanes and the war-band would not be included in regular Temple maintenance. 

Oh I'd certainly see this as possibly included for Stormbull, maybe Humakt mercenary company, etc.  For Flamal?  Yeah, no.

On 11/11/2019 at 10:11 AM, weasel fierce said:

As far as the repeated upselling of RQG - Thanks guys, I get it.

(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.

22 hours ago, tobarstep said:

Now, if they ever do a TBC version of "classic", I might be all over that.  

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.

On 9/30/2019 at 4:19 AM, Quackatoa said:

Ha!

We've had great fun with Classic! I still very much enjoy Retail, but find I go through patches – particularly after playing for a dozen years plus. The time and memories invested in my main characters tend to draw me back, though (and not just in terms of sunk cost). (The bumblebee mount might help, too...) Even the kindest critic will say BfA has 'issues', but I've still quite enjoyed it, overall (if not to the level of Legion, Mists, Wrath and TBC).

Still not made the journey to Wailing Caverns yet, sadly, and I fear we're a bit overlevelled now. Had good Goonies fun in the Deadmines, though! I am looking forward to doing massive Blackrock Depths runs when the time comes. That for me is the ultimate dungeoneering experience...

 

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.

On 9/22/2019 at 2:22 PM, deleriad said:

Which is all to say that the results of a failed roll don't have to be death. Sometimes, it just time. That's fine until time is critical.

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.

1 hour ago, soltakss said:

We got to Rune Levels and beyond in RQ2. It is relatively easy, especially with good access to Healing and Resurrection.

It's not nearly as hard as some suggest.  Just different campaign styles.