styopa

Bestiary.

LOL in with 30 seconds left.

The similarities here are a little scary. Almost identical (my 1st Dragon mag was #43). RQ here in MN was (I believe) pretty nearly absent from the gaming community as far as I knew at the time, this being really the core of D&D land. I only stumbled on RQ by joining a pickup game at my 1st GenCon in 82. I always thought it was Steve Perrin that ran it, but IIRC he said he was never at that GenCon so I don't know who was the kind soul that ran that little game that's had me playing/dm'ing it for 35+ years. Looking back now, I can't quite explain how this game grabbed me, with my initial experience being a feeble duck whose primary skill was alchemy in a party getting murdered in the Big Rubble. (shakes head)

That's really great work. Simple, but nicely done.

As I understand, the initial RQG release will be pretty Dragon-Pass focused, I'd assume that's going to be the same for RQG? I don't know that having extended cult writeups for Pamaltelan or East Isles gods would be terribly useful when the game rules themselves are going to be narrowly focused on the 'classical' RQ stomping grounds?

Hopefully there's a note about this in the previously mentioned rq2/3 conversion notes. Some poor new dm is going to run the Sea Cave or Skrypens without editing and wreck their games economy if they don't throttle the loot severely.

I suspect the art direction in this game will set the industry standard. Really, beautiful.

Well if we manage the tech to generate a full grown clone almost instantly, I'd imagine memory-mirroring would just be a piffle to accomplish.

Never mind, not changing anyone's mind anyway.

Or you?

To keep threads on topic, this forum software really needs two separate reply buttons: "Reply" and "Reply starting a new thread"

Seconded, although I'd up that to half or more, or even ALL the of the minor deities. I know that it might be painful to excise gods like Valind from their first substantial treatment in the game, but it's a zero-sum issue of space vs utility to players/DMs more than anything. As much as Glorantha is made to be a living, breathing place by its uniquely (in FRPGs) immanent deities, the simple reality is that we can't have stories without drama, we can't really have drama without foils, and in Glorantha those major foils ARE the Cults of Chaos. To omit them in favor of peripheral gods and goddesses? ... to me it's as important as prioritizing a chapter on combat mechanics over a chapter on architecture - the latter might be very interesting in understanding how Glorantha looks, but is clearly secondary to something needed to make the game work as a game. "...cults that feature major overhauls like Orlanth, Ernalda, Maran Gor, Lodril, and Yelm..." (looks nervously at the term 'major overhauls' and braces self for substantive retcon) Oh dear.

I don't think anyone's nitpicking the art, I think we're pretty solidly loving it. Of course, this comment could be said to be nitpicking your comment.

Internet forums aren't for wandering discussions: you guys are acting like we have infinite space in here.

I'd have to disagree with you. From what I know (I mean, we're all just comparing historical sources, not actual experience), the general technique of lancers is not the couched 'spear under the arm' format we all learned from jousting in movies. That method was indeed used in jousting because it's the most stable and strongest* but terribly inaccurate and worse, inflexible in a situation where last-moment corrections to aim (sometimes radical changes) are critical for the strike to matter. Most lancers I've read historically used either an overhand stab or a sort of sidearm swing relatively out from the body. *The *only* context in which a mount's weight adds any value to the strike is when the saddle in particular is built for it (a high-cantle). Even then, it's only a small portion of the force, or the rider could suffer grievous injury from the torsion forces. Essentially, the limit to the "mounts mass" that could be delivered was the rider's strength. (In that context, I could see that a mounted attack like that might USE the mount's damage bonus, but capped by the maximum of the RIDER'S damage bonus.) Really the only time that sort of jousting was common and deliberate was in jousts where the situation was basically staged to be perfect. The mass of the mount did have many other values making it important in real-world applications - the stability of the platform, the morale value to the target of being in the way of several thousand pounds of charging flesh, the ability to bull-aside/run over secondary targets, etc. But from everything I've read about mounted forces, the "staged" joust was pretty nearly nothing like actual in-the-field mounted lancing.

Whoever drew the broo on the back of the Dorastor book would have my vote. Sure, it's just 'dull' line drawing, but some of the best versions ever of one of the most evocative, characteristic monsters Glorantha provides.

The damage from the overhand spear/lance might be based on the speed, it's true, but the morale check (if there was such a thing) would CERTAINLY be based on the SIZ of the mount.

Pretty sure Beastiaty is illegal in most states. Maybe not Louisiana.

While I understand the simplicity of it, I deeply despise decimalized measures (m/kg/l) in a fantasy setting as anachronistic as talking about germs and atoms. "Common Tongue" and standard-unit currency systems are pretty high up there too.

Given the lethality of RQ, you're not being silly. I'd say the problem with D&D players is that they aren't unlearned, it's just that they've learned in the wrong direction. For the newest RQ players and for former-D&D players, I always set the scenes very, very visually and then ask them directly to picture themselves in the situation their character is in...to emphasize that they're best off choosing the REALISTIC course of action, not the 'fantasy heroic I'm 2nd level with 9hp so a 1d8 sword hit CAN'T KILL ME' mode. Emphasis: realistic. (For gamers used to computer games, this has another meaning, encouraging them to think creatively and laterally. You're not limited to the 3 dialogue options the programmer offered, nor are you limited to interaction only with scene objects intended to be interacted with...) Nice find. I like that.

"Where we could illustrate a concept, we did." FANTASTIC. Visually grabbing, show-not-tell, hits all the right notes. Modern rules sets use more art than old ones did, but I think it's a smart choice to use your 'graphic space budget' functionally instead of just with theme/setting art. Nice. I also like the "rune connecting the chapter" subtle watermark, very nice. My only suggestion (if you haven't done it already) is in the TOC I would make that connection explicit, ie: (RUNE) Chapter 3: Combat ...or something. Looks terrific. Re Rules shown: I like that the min STR to use an item is merely a penalty and not a prohibition. IIRC RQ3 was "if you don't have that STR, you can't use it" which is too breakpoint-y for me. Shields - hide, wicker, wood (no metal?): all shield data (hp, cost, enc, areas covered, etc) like that could be more concisely presented in a table.

ie in D&D terms "roll hit location with advantage"? I kid, I kid.

Yes, THAC0 was intended as a 'simplification' of the to-hit tables from AD&D (IIRC a creation of TSR UK actually), but what always struck me was how nobody apparently noticed that they actually broke a pretty important feature of those original tables. Yes, for the bulk of the tables, it was correct that if a character needed a 14 to hit AC4, they would need a 13 to hit AC5 and a 15 to hit AC3....but the original tables had a key feature in that "20" was repeated IIRC 6 times. That is, if you needed a 19 to hit AC1, and a 20 to hit AC0, that same 20 would also hit AC-1 to AC-5. THAC0 wrecked that, making better AC's much harder to hit.

Ah, fair point. Sorry, I thought you had been - my error!

My suspicion is different, only because I have different plans personally. I think the gaming world of 2018 or so is much different than before - the world of computer games has gotten us more comfortable with total conversions, and we as fans are more interconnected than ever, making communicating such things viable. I certainly plan to strip RQG of Gloranthiana and then start with a total conversion from there. (Shrug)