styopa

Entirely agree. Don't get me wrong; D&D is a great game, and deserves its place as the 'default' RPG in the constellation of alternatives. But RuneQuest/Glorantha brought so *many* novel ideas, concepts, approaches to the RPG table it's fundamental in its own right: - organic character development (vs. classes) - a world that wasn't a pastische of Medieval Europe - damage reduced by armor - location hit points - skills based on stats (or modified by them, anyway) - MP based magic (vs Vancian) (etc.) When someone says "I play Runequest" what does that mean to you? To me, it means in so many words "I want to have a more realistic system" and "I want a gameworld that feels thought-through; something other then Europe-with-magic-bolted-on".

I don't entirely disagree with you; my conclusion to your recitative is that is probably why we DON'T have many mechanics connecting large scale warfare to the RPG scale.* As I mentioned before, it belongs more in the realm of narrative than mechanics and thus is hardly a "game". *with the obvious contrary example of Dragon Pass and WB&RM (board wargames). Those clearly ARE military wargames but my point is there is really NO connection to individuals and roleplaying possible (except for masochists, who want to see treasured long-played characters impotent and wiped from the game because someone happened to roll a '6')

I personally believe that Aldryami aren't constrained to the vegetable realm when it comes to ... culling ... pestilential or inconvenient animal species. They have a special connection to the realm of Life and can employ tools that might be extremely dangerous for life forms other than them with little or no fear personally: let's remember that cancer is simply life flourishing aggressively. (IMG Aldryami are immune to most of the normal sorts of diseases that plague other species in the sames sense that humans have utterly nothing to fear from Dutch Elm Disease or Leaf Rot.)

Which to me leaves the resolution of Gloranthan battles more to the realm of a dramatic narrative than mechanics. Some people might find that more fulfilling in a mythopoeic, Campbellian sense; I find it so subjective as to be actually rather dull. A game is a thing where people play according to codified structures in which the outcome isn't subjective but instead the result of choices made and risks taken, often calculating against impersonal chance. Gloranthan battles of dueling deux-ex-machinas aren't really that.

Name checks out by the way. I think the question boils down to relatability. Gloranthan army-scale combat is either: - more or less like some historical IRL example, with the magic from each side roughly canceling each other out like mega-artillery until it doesn't, at which point the remaining side with it in good order wipes the other side off the field (this magical mega-artillery could be personified in heroes, or legions of mages, or spirits, or any combination), or - something totally unlike anything IRL in which case the utter lack of specifics in terms of mechanics or rules make 'how it plays out' a complete guessing game and almost entirely pointless to talk about. To me it's obvious that people tend to gravitate toward the former, if only because we're here to natter and the latter gives us nothing to natter about.

I was toying with an approach used by some MMOs, which regularizes damage types into categories which then are a little simpler to balance (makes sense for a computer game to quantize these things, but also possibly for a PnP game to simplify the potentially radically complicated variables of combat).* It is the avenue D&D5e has gone down for magical effects only, I believe. For example, damage and effects would always be accompanied by one or more 'flavors', ie X points of FIRE damage; Y points of BLUNT, ICE damage, Z points SPIRIT damage. Befuddle might count as a 2 point SPIRIT attack, which if it affects the target has (effect). This would then simplify and make consistent the various magical effects and relationships: so for example physical armor would count against anything but SPIRIT damage; rigid armor might count as 2x against any physical damage type EXCEPT piercing (or whatever. Spirit Shield would block only SPIRIT damage, and so forth. *this really depends on your tastes, of course; some people might be fine with very, very simplified/rationalized combat in which all this stuff is hand-waved in favor of story - I roll my "combat" skill vs your "combat" skill and we determine who won and by how much, and then just narrate the battle to that result.

Lol "the rules do not cover". Every adventure my players go on, if it was originally a D&D one, when they find loot I just have them log it as "ring, DD3 &4" (meaning module DD3, room Y4) so when they finally get somewhere and can have it identified I can find the damned thing again and figure out in RQ terms how it works. I think we generate 30+ completely new magic items from the trivial to the interesting for RQ every single adventure. Yes, essentially we're playing D&D-style game in Glorantha with RQ rules. Honestly, the biggest challenge is spell-equipping enemies appropriately with RQ magics, and including spirits appropriately. Oh, and WAY less dragons generally than in the printed adventures.

Spell cards. /facepalm. Don't get me wrong, I get their utility. It's just so... foreign.

People buy them? Seriously?

Anything in particular that you want to see is going to have to be house-ruled at this point. If your house rules are overwhelmingly (I mean, more than just this little forum) popular, then you might see them include it in a later edition as something optional.

I did about 14 months in a print shop in the 1980s myself, and was much beloved for my access to tools that could do so as well. I made myself a lovely black and white 'poster' of the 2-page Dragon Pass/Prax map in the back of RQ2.

I don't know that's foreordained. Sure, D&D is the 200lb Gorilla in the industry, but nothing is forever.

Very nice art. Grognards remember when "printing" a document was something you paid someone else to do, so character sheets had to endure sometimes years of constant erasures, etc. Whippersnappers today just fill out the online form* on their phones, tablets, or browsers and dump it to handy color printer s everyone seems to have. *there will be a fillable PDF, yes?

"and don't forget, if you buy the PDFs early, we'll give you the full price of the PDFs back as a discount when the physical books come out, MOB." And when will that be available?

If we want to explore mechanics, a few principles come to mind: - in the same sense that a single entity's power resists and delivers magical effects, I'd submit that there is some mechanism (focused on the unit standard?) by which soldiers in a unit become themselves an entity, and thus resist things collectively. Squads, battalions, regiments, divisions, armies - all might 'collectivize' the POW of their participants at weaker and weaker individual component contribution, but collectively become more powerful. Thus there's the Gloranthan parallel to the most ancient IRL principle of mass and concentration = efficacy. I'd suspect 'collective resistance' is an easier thing to achieve than 'collective offense' thus explaining why the Lunars having figured the latter out makes them so formidable on the battlefield. - formations THEMSELVES may have power. A square/phalanx/schiltron might in the sense of the Earth rune make them stronger, less likely to break/run, etc. - I personally LIKE castles, fortifications, and such in my fantasy world; I have always vaguely handwaved that any such fortification is imbued with powerful magics that make the "just have a 10cbm earth elemental wreck the foundations" functionally impossible (and conversely, still make such fortifications slow, complex, and expensive to build). I'd love to actually have a mechanic behind this. FWIW I'd submit the only spell I'm aware of in RQ3 that implied how staggeringly powerful "unit magics" would be is Xiola Umbar's Group Defense - think about this for a unit of 10 individuals? (10m dia sphere): Group Defense 3 points ranged, duration till dropped, stackable, reusable This spell is active, maintained by the will of the casting priestess. It creates a veil-like barrier which encloses a sphere 5 meters in radius centering on the priestess. All those contained within the barrier lose one magic point into this barrier when it forms-they may not choose to withhold the magic point or to add more points. Any creature attempting to pass the barrier automatically takes damage directly to a random hit location, ignoring armor, equal to the number of magic points in the barrier. This spell is stackable, in which case each person within the barrier spends 1 magic point per spell stacked, and the damaging effect is accordingly increased.

Maybe that's why they rated a coin - "Geez, nobody ever was able to pull that off except them"

I blame Louise. I mean, who wasn't IMMEDIATELY sympathetic to the Air Rune? I still quite like the box sets, rather than just buying a book. It just feels more like a thing to me (and could include neat stuff like maps and non-book components), but I'm from that era where you immediately rationalized the price of a product against how heavy the box was. I know Chaosium still has this spirit in there too - Orient Express box was ...Brobdingnagian.

As long as you survive the almost certain retribution by the angry Mouse King Spirit. All science has dangerous consequences.

http://blog.catherinedelors.com/demystifying-publishing-jargon-galleys/ In the publishing world, galleys, or uncorrected proofs, or advance reading copies, or ARCs, are created by the publisher months before the final printing and release of the book. They are sent to reviewers, booksellers, bloggers and other people crucial to the critical and commercial success of the book. A few stray typos may remain in galleys, and they are bound like paperbacks, though the cover is similar to that of the final book. Some may become collector’s items. They are after all “pre-first” editions.

For example, the God Time being "before time" and thus essentially simultaneous is a direct violation of Newton's 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and causality....except even in our universe there's open debate amongst theoretical physicists (stated simply) if time is actually freely reversible, and entropy only an effect of our limited comprehension of the universe. Did the God Time ACTUALLY happen, or is that merely the 'revealed truth' handed to investigators by entities incomprehensibly more powerful, for whatever reasons they had? (shrug)

Po-tay-to, po-tah-to. As long as physical EFFECTS are consistent - ie things fall down, convection causes movement up, light casts shadows, etc (barring magical intervention - which is almost tautologically the definition of what IS magic, btw) - the rest is just handwaving that can freely vary from campaign to campaign with ZERO impact operationally. EITHER: a.) physics is a thing, and it is merely people in an inherently magical world using magical/mythical explanations to describe the mechanisms by which physical reality is perceived, or b.) the world of Glorantha is truly inherently magical, uses magical mechanisms, and the physical reality perceived is merely analogous in many ways to our world. In the former, for example, things are made up of atoms, molecules, etc. with their relationships the results of what we call physics, chemistry, etc. In the latter, things are ACTUALLY made up of (I'd guess?) something like an Aristotlean 5 elements (Air, earth, fire, water, quintessence (spirit in Glorantha?)) with their interactions and relationships the result of mythic/magical relationships whose RESULTS are merely similar to our physical world. I think if you asked any Gloranthan, they'd almost certainly tell you the latter. Is that the reality? Does it ultimately matter?

Diamond Dwarfs, for example. Mistress Trolls, for example. I don't think there's an Aldryami analogue though? Curious. Meh, I think you can have a magical world, but rationalism and logic are how humans (in my view) ultimately sort stuff out. There's still going to be scientists figuring stuff out, just using fire elementals and not bunsen burners. I still think water boils at a consistent temp across the world, etc. Gravity's a thing. "Magic" doesn't ipso facto mean science or a scientific approach is worthless. Heck, I've always approached Western Sorcery and Sorcerers as much more programmatic and rigorous than the "POOF there it is" 'canned magic' that Divine magicians are stuck with.

Someone tell David Dunham!

It's the easiest/best way to beat the hardest difficulties in Age of Empires (most versions): expand into an area, build a murderous crossfire of guard towers that make it as impossible for enemies to approach as any Somme trench line, and then develop your economy once the area is secure. You just have to have patience.