styopa

To be totally honest, if I were them, I'd be shooting for new figure releases around when the actual RQG rules are going to finally drop (not just the quackstart rules).

(shrug) I guess in that context i've always just used the (roughly) RQ3 mods for SIZ and for unaware targets. I don't think they're large enough based on SIZ, frankly. It should be really impossible to miss a SIZ 40 thing, and nearly impossible to even hit a SIZ 0 thing.

Maybe again it's my age, but this seems odd to me. Has it gotten that boutique? I remember in the olden days of the 1980s when going to buy D&D figures, you had TONS of choices: Grenadier, Ral Partha, and at least a handful of others but they were the biggies. As a consumer, I'd much rather have more competition and choice than 'stylistic consistency'? Do people today care if some figures are 25mm and others are 27mm?

Agreed. AFAIK the minifig mfg biz is at best a middle-small corporate enterprise (maybe whoever is the shop for GW is large) where companies flourish for a few years and then fade out. It only makes sense that Chaosium license this out broadly to actually generate a sustainable marketplace of products. Worst possible choice would be to hand something exclusive out, and then watch it vanish as the "exclusive partner" either folds or is consumed by another. I generally hope that Chaosium might sometime support free downloadable pdfs or 2d printables...I'm old; the prices these companies want for figures is pretty crazy.

When would you use it (defense), though? Just generally for everyone, or just in special circumstances where things are more or less arbitrarily harder to hit?

Even more than you already recognized.... We also randomize, and count down. We use different variable initiative dice, depending on the openness of the conflict space; normally a d10, it might shrink down to a d6 for initiative (making the nimbleness of a player and/or weapon weight much heavier), or a d20 in a flat, open field.

Sure! Our system is based on accommodating the RQ3 canonical movement rates, ie Humans 3, Horses 10, etc. We've also synthesized movement into initiative/first strike. (We have 2 strike rank values per character: quickness and reach. Former is DEX-based, latter is SIZ based. Weapons also have both, but it's easy as they almost always add to 5 - ie something with reach 4 has a quickness of 1; something with quickness 3 has a reach of 2. REACH is used the first round two combatants close, otherwise quickness. Here's the excerpt from our houserules page: Initiative/Movement/Closing: (These rules are predicated on the use of a hex map; not all combats will need to be played out on a hexmap. If we don’t use the hex grid, it’s simply init+quickness goes first, with the principle that meeting-combats first-strike goes to the longer weapon.) Starting on your init, you may move freely 1m/SR to a maximum of 2x your species Move Rate (subject to fatigue limits). (Moving backwards each hex costs 2x; Moving Prone each hex costs 2x, Moving from enemy ZOC each hex costs 3x; CUMULATIVE - always can move at least 1/turn.) If there’s a question about who should move “first” in a SR, NPCs move first. You and all active, aware opponents (i.e. got to roll init this round) have ‘threat zones’ in the frontal ½ arc: i.e. the area that can be hit with the equipped melee weapon – on a hex map this would be the 3 adjacent frontal hexes for an opponent with a medium-or-smaller weapon. Larger weapons may reach more. If you move into a ‘threatened’ zone but your arc doesn’t reach, that opponent MAY spend action for this round to interrupt & attack. If you suffer a serious/major injury, you must immediately stop moving. If you move so that your ‘threat zone’ touches an enemy, you may attack. If your and an opponent’s threat zones meet at roughly the same time, highest REACH gets the ‘opportunity’ attack first. If weapons are same length, higher DEX goes first. If DEX is also the same, attacks are resolved simultaneously. If you move in a (more or less) straight line you gain your hexes moved this round/2 (until contact) as a +damage modifier for melee.

Defense was, in my view, way too powerful. It essentially was giving the defender a THIRD inherent layer of protection: in addition to their armor and an active parry opportunity, they got the passive 'defense minus'. Not to mention, while its logical underpinning in melee kind of made sense, I'm not sure it was quite as valid vs missile weapons? Finally, it had an entirely unique increase mechanism compared to every other skill. IIRC I don't believe there was anything in the rules about defense only applying when the target was alert and aware...implying that even asleep you somehow got your defense mod? I sincerely hope that they have not brought back inherent defense in RQG. RQ3 was pretty concise, and forced players to make tactically interesting tradeoffs: - dodge (negates ALL incoming damage on that strike incl knockback, but is reduced by ENC. Can repeat infinitely against multiple attacks by same attacker.) vs - parry (only negates a fixed amount of damage, may still knock back, ultimately ablative, not affected by ENC) We had a couple of house rules that made it a little more realistic: A.) one can dodge hand-thrown missiles, or any missile firing at extreme range. (We later allowed dodging non-thrown missiles within effective range, but you had to have a success 1 level better than the attack's success) B.) any dodge attempt may move the character (when we fought with minis using a hex grid) - on a dodge, roll a d6: character moves 1 hex left character moves 1 hex right character stays in same hex character moves 1 hex left and back character moves 1 hex right and back character moves 1 hex back (meaning it's pretty hard to hold a line with a bunch of goofballs prancing around dodging stuff)

Maybe I'm cynical, but I doubt any amount of explanation is going to salve people who today - quite frankly - are looking for a reason to be offended.

As mentioned on the Submissions page, Jason said "We want full-length adventures and campaigns for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha! (RQG)" Do you want other Gloranthan materials - such as new ideas for cults, etc - just posted here in the BRP downloadables then, or would you want those as well? If we post them in downloadables, does that preclude them ever being included in a publication (assuming they don't suck)? Thanks!

I'd love to formalize and provide some of the campaign stuff I'd used in my medieval (fantasized) Europe campaign ages ago...but considering it involved the "gamification" of touchy IRL-relevant stuff such as Christianity and Islam....yeah i wouldn't want to touch that with the proverbial ten foot pole today....not publicly. It was some surprise to me when the yazidis suddenly came to regrettable prominence in recent years, for example, as I'd used "the cult of the peacock angel" as a malignant underground organization. Yeah, translating stuff from real world history into a game is fraught with risks, 1000 years ago isn't nearly enough time for hard feelings to subside.

When I have beer and burritos, a couple of hours later I'm nearly an avatar of Orlanth. Because there's a lot of ... air... involved. I think I'll tell my wife that: "sorry honey blame Orlanth, I'm just embodying the Air rune right now."

Oh I don't disbelieve you at all, just didn't remember it.

OK now I'm going to have to go dig through CoT CoP to see where they mentioned Western Wizards.

It's all a matter of how hard you want to squint. Squint really hard, and all you see is the rough outlines: the general map, broad sweeps of historic events and eras, masses of population; this leaves maximum flexibility for you to adopt the world as yours. Likely expansions and supplements will require a comparable squint - leaving out great swathes of the (almost certainly extensive) expository stuff but still mostly being useful as 'situations' with monsters/npcs in different contexts that your PCs will be involved with. After all, Rabbit Hat Farm or Dyksund Caverns could be *anywhere* from the Zola Fel region to the coast of Medieval France. As has been said many times, Your Glorantha Will Vary. More than that, I sincerely doubt ANYONE uses everything canon in their games. Anyone.* *well, aside from the Chaosium guys, whose games tautologically define canon. But I bet not even all of them. Don't be even slightly intimidated by people who react explicitly or implicitly negatively to your ideas. Share them all you like. Whether I or anyone uses them or not is up to us. Personally I can almost always find something to steal no matter what the peculiarities of someone else's setting are... I would say that we're necessarily going through a little current of One True Worldism right now (commercially necessary because I think one of the fair slaps at Glorantha has been the lack of an empirical true narrative over 30+ years of canonical wandering), it's not that big a deal.

I think a lot of us are waiting for the quickstart to generate content. I know I am. Why pump out an adventure or anything for RQ3.9 (ie my homebrew version) when an actual, living, supported version is right around the corner? So we wait. Impatiently.

Nothing substantive to add to a great post, except to explicitly include Roll20 and whatever other online game systems there are - specifically including (and I'd even submit this needs to be simultaneous with the core rules release, yes, even if that delays the core rules by a couple of weeks!) templates, online tools, generators, etc. It's one place where D&D *severely* dropped (and continues to drop) the ball. Given the prevalence of online play today, as soon as Billy or Mary gets their grubby hands on the rules that they can open a browser and have those tools available would be HUGE.

Let's not forget that those are both intended IIRC to be very much 'beginning adventures'? For me it's sorcery. My players like it, and as one of them has started a campaign with his own friends, in their party of 4 there are 3 with varying levels of sorcery and 1 shaman. I get the sense that shamanism will (hopefully) be covered reasonably well in the Dragon-Pass-focused RQG, but it sounds like sorcery will barely even be an afterthought (only included because of the retcon of Lhankor Mhy use of sorcery). I think to Yelm's Light's point there is a clear and strong anti-standard-magic-items theme in Glorantha, cf the God Learners, the Clanking City (Greg's not much for utilitarianism, or empiricisim apparently). In my view this was nothing more than a meta reaction against D&D's gobs and gobs of more-or-less-standardized 'bucket o magic'. The D&D approach cheapens the importance and meaningfulness of magic items in context when players are digging through forty different weapons filling their monstrous bag of holding, trying to decide "do I use the +2 spear or the +1 bastard sword or the +4 glaive without proficiency?". Further most items (in D&D) even had NO game mechanical underpinning either; how would one even make a +1 sword in D&D? (shrug) to say nothing of the more esoteric items like a decanter of endless water or deck of many things. RQ(3 at least) systematized it, explaining pretty clearly how such items were produced, and thus constraining magic items conceptually to those that could indeed be made. The crux here is how you run the use-constraint: either the default is caster-use (and POW can to be spent to make it generally usable) or the default is everyone-use (and POW can be spent to constrain who can use it). The former makes for a very magic-item poor world since even if the characters kill the big bad guy, likely her Super Awesome Magic Weapon can't be used by anyone but her. I don't believe magic items have to be astonishingly scarce to be meaningful; I believe a world like Glorantha *suffused* with magic everywhere would have lots of people (whoever could afford it) toying with more durable uses of magic than a 5 minute spirit magic spell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

PERSONALLY, no, me neither. But I'm 50...it's my opinion that gaming groups in their 20s are characteristically different not only in their different expectations/desires of RPGs, but they approach and play them pretty differently as well. At least that's what I've seen.

I'd second the spell cards idea too - I've noticed people like those a lot (although they'd be of more value in the current divine-spell paradigm, where you use THAT SPELL up until you get it back). I was thinking of 'sets' of cards for available spells generic and by cult, so everyone would have the generic, universally-available 'deck', while each cult would have a sub-deck just for them. I have a daughter who's a professional graphic designer so they'll possibly look a lot better than if I did them.

If only there was a massive compilation of all Gloranthan lore? I have to expect that it would be at least two really big books. Probably a whole additional book just as an atlas. Jeff, get on that.

D&D3 had a lot of roots born explicitly from RQ mechanisms. "Jonathan Tweet's own words: "I never could have done D&D 3E without a lot of pro experience. RuneQuest in particular was a big influence on me and my design approach."

Not another game system, but there's a crapton in Star Trek DS9 https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.die-sns.de%2FSchattenSeiten%2FGlorantha%2FArtikel_Glorantha%2FGlorantha_in_Star_Trek%2Fbody_glorantha_in_star_trek.html&edit-text=&act=url Cataloged by Andre Jarosch. Actually mentioned by Chaosium http://www.chaosium.com/blog/star-trek-and-glorantha-both-turn-50-years-old-and-theres-a-connection/