styopa

As Mugen mentioned above, the mechanisms here are very sensitive to play balance particularly where "professional" spellcasters are concerned - people whose primary reliance is on magical tools that burn MP to work. Sorcerers are likely an issue, but we know pretty much nothing about how that mechanism even works. Shamans - with the more functional role they're getting in RQG - would also be a concern. A spell caster normally is going to have a MP source of ~12-15 MP. Increase that by 60-100% with a fetch/allied spirit/POW spirit and you're starting to talk about well-ammunitioned casters. Add ANOTHER 10-15 MP atop that with big MP crystals...

You're right. I guess I ruled a forgettably long time ago that was OP, handing characters what typically amounts to AN ENTIRE ADDITIONAL CHARACTER'S MP to fuel their spells. Or with experienced adventurers that could easily be a handful of such crystals. But then, the follow-on to that was that I likewise disliked the MP vs MP to overcome the target, feeling that casting a hefty bladesharp wouldn't reasonably make an average person consequently more likely to be affected by an incoming spell, either. (So we just use POW vs POW; and spells must be powered either by ones personal MP or entirely from a single crystal - no bridging.) Thanks

Honestly, given the nature of Glorantha, no, I don't see rate of 3 people per 10,000 per week having a bizarre spirit/god plane encounter as being unreasonable. Particularly if you factor in adventurers, who have them at an inordinately high frequency, raising the average.

I'm really looking forward to this but...Ugh - I hope this is only their D&D5e stuff and nothing to do with RQG? Give a Player a Cursed Magic Item for £15! £1/125 Bits: Heal a Player 1d10. If they are Down, you can remove 1 Death Saving Fail. £1/125 Bits: Give a Player or NPC an Advantage or Disadvantage £3/375 Bits: Give a Player or NPC a Critical Success or Critical Failure £5/760 Bits: Give a Player a Wild Magic Surge on a d10,000 Table! £5/760 Bits: Bring in a standard Monster to attack or aid the Party! (DM decides the difficulty) £5/760 Bits: Give a Player a Potion! £10/1250 Bits: Give a Player a Magic Item from Warwick! £10/1250 Bits: Bring in a Boss Monster to attack or aid the Party! £20/2500 Bits: Give a Player a Mount £30/3750 Bits: Give all the Players a Magic Item £50/6250 Bits: Go MAD! Step into the DM seat and tell us what happens next

Just want to say that the pre release stuff is great. Thank you.

That's actually a pretty good way of taking an RQG with a single-skill canon but allowing variability. I don't have a problem with feats; in fact in my experience it's common that someone with a high level of skill in something (not just martial skills, now) often is aware of a plethora of 'tricks' for specific situations that lesser-skilled people don't know....which could very well be expressed as learnable 'feats'.

Excerpt Iirc these are all supposed to be early rune level or nearly rune level toons? Saying they fall in line with beginning toons would really be agreeing that they're underpowered, in terms of spirit magic....?

^agreed. Plus they just feel a little wonky with pretty ample rune magic but skills more like good initiates. Some other observations: If everyone's going to have access to "all common rune spells" wouldn't it be easier to rule it as generally so, unless otherwise mentioned? 10 point mp crystals are a lot more common in your campaign than mine. And a 14? yikes. Elementals crazy OP considering they don't seem to need an attack roll? (IIRC they didn't in RQ3 either) Totally would called-shot Vasana in the skirt (with only 3AP) vs the rest of her body (5AP). Doesn't seem terribly practical. Shadowcats get all their 3 attacks simultaneously? Yikes. inconsistency in Nathem attacks - comp bow only 1 attack on SR6, but javelin is listed as 1/MR...when? 1d10 damage for javelin?

Just want to say that IRL, numbers are apparently everything. https://patch.com/oklahoma/across-ok/pack-wiener-type-dogs-maul-oklahoma-woman-death I'm still trying to parse how it happened.

I did say it was unusual. You're a good bloke Simon.

I don't think anyone would really disagree with this...BUT as a point of practicality, when one asserts 'well, commonly X would have trained not just with a broadsword, but with a broadsword and SHIELD; it's commonsense and realistic" the, er, riposte (pun intended) would be that such an assertion is extremely NARROWLY cultural. IRL a samurai handed a shield would probably be actually *impaired* if required to use that shield. A French saber duellist wouldn't have the first clue about effective combat use of a shield. Extremely primitive cultures - say those using wicker shields vs light missiles but pretty much useless against serious melee items - they're going to have no concept about the offensive use of a shield that would be part of a viking's standard training. And these are all real-world cultures - essentially by throwing in a cultural basis for weapon skills, you're requiring a DM to essentially adjudicate the martial memes for whole cultures and regional variations in advance to be consistent: do trollkin from the Shadow Moon plateau regularly use shields, but trollkin from Kingdom of Ignorance don't? I defer to experts when their expertise seems relevant. I would shut up if we were talking about Chivalry and Sorcery in 1190 Europe. SCA and HEMA are exceedingly narrowly focused on European traditions (HEMA explicitly so). Does anyone believe that Kendo experts would confirm that "oh sure, using a shield is *always* a part of training"? The "one trick pony" may seem a caricature to you, but I can certainly see it in a fantasy setting. I can see a minotaur having a lot of experience bashing things with a weapon. I don't really see them spending a lot of time practicing parring at the neighborhood quintain? Further, even if one can hand-wave away the narrow cultural basis for the "oh well of course a shield would be part of their training" rationale, I personally believe it just throws a host of practical rules-complication into the mix. What weapons are assumed to be 'martial enough' that shield use is assumed as part of the training? Broadsword, sure, easy. Bastard sword that has both 1h and 2h modes? Maybe, sure. How about a mace? Yeah, probably still martial enough. Club? Dagger? Trident? Martial artists? Flail? Flail swung by someone whose entire experience with it is as a farmer? For weapons/cultures without such training, when they pick up a shield what happens? What if ''warrior with sword and shield' loses/breaks her sword? Can she really just attack with the shield at the same %? I find this stuff just a morass of special cases, edge cases, and inconsistencies, frankly. IMO it ultimately seems (maybe contrarily) simpler to have them broken out separately. If you don't like the idea of 'master sword guy incompetent with shield' then just make a rule that shield/parry skills are never less than (50%, or whatever) of the attack ability. Or when they get a skill check with either attack or parry, they can spread the gained % across either. Etc. That's unusually passive-aggressive for you?

One word: Blueface. Every player shaman we have aspires to that, as a GM it makes me shudder in fear.

I'm as hardcore a rq3 devotee as they come, but the contrarian in me insists that I defend rq2 here at least a little. If (imvho) it didn't measure up to the mechanical rigor of its descendant rq3, that doesn't one iota detract from what a groundbreaking rule set it was in its time. I think rq2 was supremely evocative, entertaining, and advanced rpg mechanics light years beyond d&d. Rq3, tightening the maths quite a bit, had a LOT of stuff that was fiddly and rigorous, but simply not FUN enough to be worth using: fatigue for example. I was one of those who felt sorcery was clever and interesting but I can't but admit that it was insufficiently playtested and ultimately half baked*. In short, to me rq3 was a rules set while rq2 was more of a setting+game, if that makes sense? I thought rq3 would have been a better "base" from which to step to RQG, sure, but 1) the logical best base would have been coc7, to preserve the cross-genre consistency that has (had) been the brp/Chaosium hallmark, and 2) it ain't my $ and career, and it's easy to criticize from the cheap seats. *something tbh I'm bluntly rather concerned about the also "ex nihilo" sorcery in RQG, likewise unlikely to have been rigorously tested by people *trying* to exploit the rules...I guess we'll see?

I'm positive that RQG contains a great deal of interesting expansion on shamans and their abilities. Can't wait to see it.

Shamans were very under-explained in RQ3, I think pretty much everyone has had to 'wing it' with much of the Shamany rules. It was one of the bits about RQ6 I *really* liked. As far as how WE answer your questions: YGMV of course. 1a - no, in our view the fetch is the spirit world side of the shaman, not really a separate, thinking entity like an allied spirit, etc. When the Shaman's discorporate, the shaman's totemic spirit - like Great Toad or Bear or whatever - then 'occupies the space' and directs the defense of the Shaman's material-world body. 2a/b - The only spirits that can come into the mundane world are those that can do it anyway (ie ones with attacks, basically). Such spirits can be compelled/commanded to corporate and attack, for example. The shaman/fetch couldn't cause, say, an intellect spirit to exist in the mundane world, no. 2c - I'd say a shaman could certainly use a control spell to force the spirit to discorporate. The fetch then would have to beat it in spirit combat to grab it though. 3) for us, answered with 1. It's not a separate entity, so it doesn't get it's own separate action from the shaman.

Anyone know of a way to drop Andrey a note? A quick Google finds only deviant art, Pinterest, and FB which I try to avoid.

Right, but not for Free RPG day; they'd have had to have that in to printing months ago I believe.

It looks like no RQ in Free RPG Day this year? http://www.freerpgday.com/ Chaosium IS in it, with ChaosiumSilver (5 per box)Call of Cthulhu Adv: Scritch Scratch I was kind of wondering if they were going to go through the substantial work (again) of distilling down another rule set, or even try to muddle through with extra copies of the 2017 Free RPG day version. I had very positive feedback from the gamers playing and people watching our RQ adventure. I mean, I get it. PERSONALLY, no, if spending 40 hours on crunching down a new fresh quickstart rulebook meant the MAIN RQG book would be delayed, no I wouldn't prefer that. But it's sad that this gorgeous new rule set is coming out without the 'splash' of Free RPG day. Or, Jeff/Jason know the economics better. Maybe FreeRPG day ain't that much of a thang?

GoG Aldrya I believe already has camouflage, which forces attackers to pass a spot check before they can even attack the camouflaged target - failure means a lost attack, so a decent disincentive to 'push' attackers to preferentially target others?

I'd like to help, but I guess I'm a little confused? As you said, it's easy enough to figure out relatively balanced mechanics from the source material, ie: Disrupt does 1-3 ignoring armor after winning a pow v pow check, for 1 MP. Considering that bigger strikes are inherently more valuable (as the chance of actually incapacitating the target in one shot rise steeply), one could opine a 2d3 version might be 3 or even 4MP to cast, or it could be only 2 MP, but be affected by armor. Same for healing, it's established that 1 point of healing =1 MP, but likewise that bigger piles of hp are also more useful, so you might have a heal over time spell that heals 1hp per round for 3 rounds only cost 2 MP. Nobody save a developer It's going to have time to play test/balance this, you have to just guesstimate, and roll with the results. If something ends up being overpowered to the point of abuse, I generally find players amenable to retcon...once the npcs start using it just as heavily. As far as applying them to the cults, a couple of observations; - it seems there ARE ALREADY tons of examples in CoP, CoT, not to mention scads of rq3 sources (for inspiration, if nothing else) - ygmv, but I guess I've always assumed that the lack of combat spells for issaries or ernalda is setting-deliberate. That's why they hang out with orlanthi (despite how overbearing they can be), humakti (despite how creepy they are), or storm bull (drunk/dangerous)...because they NEED to in a practical way (if not mythically necessary balance). If you want to give some non combat cults some combat ability, make it topical: issaries might have a damage spell like warding that pops when someone steals their stuff, or ernalda might summon snakes to fight for them. Does that help at all? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you are looking for?

That's one possible rationalization, of course. I think a more practical read would be about the simple space limitations in a what, 144-page? book produced basically on a shoestring? And think about it: if we got rid of ALL the spells there'd be NOTHING for those darn 'minimaxers' to abuse! Would that really be a much better game?

Plus the outworks beyond the fields - unusual for IRL but which in this context recognize the need for at least minor defenses against the everyday-roving-threats of Glorantha. Your farmers need to be in the fields, not being eaten by a grue.

100% this. I've been in towns like this in northern Italy, I immediately recognized it too.

I think that's pretty self-evident: it's deliberately far from the bog-standard pastiche of Fantasy Medieval Europe, thus, people have no internal visualization to work from. That's the source of the (imo, overly-) excoriated identification of various aspects of Glorantha with IRL historical analogues. You can make as novel a setting as you like, but people CRAVE visualizations. Yes, people have historically imagined the Orlanthi as (variously) Teutono-Celtic-Norse Northern Europeans. They have a god that throws lightning bolts, live in steads, and are sword-swinging, cow-thieving barbarians....thus the pretty natural analogy to N.Euro primitives. The massive amount of work Jeff, Jason and crew have put into making sure these products (seem to be now) heavily art-laden is a great, necessary move and will do a lot for spurring players' visualizations and really, comfort level with the setting. I'm sure it wasn't cheap, but it'll be worth it.

It's like you guys have never tried that world-wide web thing: Oliver Sanfilippo (general, not Glorantha) work: http://shosuroakae.wixsite.com/sanfilippo/a-propos2 Link to dimbyd's tweet: Both are well worth a visit.