styopa

For someone artistically inclined, and considering the Guide calls out specific body-areas that have to do with the various runes, I could certainly see a Gloranthan art-piece like Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, but with the runic associations diagrammed. That's sort of a map, no? And would the map be appreciably different if it was a female than a male?

@Trifletraxor I'm cool with that. My only comment is that it's all a moot point; Jeff's already amply shown us how he wants to illustrate Glorantha in the guide: where even 'fairly' mannikin-y poses are at least given some life and energy: ...to which I don't think anyone has a beef at all?

It's one of the mixed blessings of the lifespan of an ancient game (whose survival in its Dark Ages was very much about 1) fan-produced stuff and 2) the nascent interwebs) that there's ancient stuff all over the web. In this case, it's ancient fan-rants about something long since repaired, in my view.

I don't mind a heated conversation. I don't have delicate sensibilities, so I tend to tread heavily on others sacred cows...perhaps sometimes a little bit on purpose, I admit I don't expect my comments to be taken as personal insults for anyone to cry into their pillow over, either. FWIW, I know very well that g33k would react even more inflammatorily to the dismissal than the picture. He/she wildly overreacted to the OP's post (well, actually to what he/she THOUGHT the OP was saying), and nothing enrages a SJW more than disregard for their righteously-inspired opinion. My apologies to the list for that - no need to do my sportfishing here; that's what Reddit's for. g33k: you might not want to strike so hard at any bait that flashes in front of you. When you take a calming breath, you might *even* notice that you & I entirely agree on your main points. Pro tip: insisting you're not histrionic by repeating HELL NO four times is...unconvincing.

There's a reason stereotypes are a thing. And they're not evil, either. We've all been heavily conditioned in the postmodern era that stereotypes are bad, but the reality is that we don't have room in our head to hold the entirety of nuance and detail of every single person we've ever met as individuals. Hell, I have trouble remembering where I am some mornings. Stereotypes are mental shorthand; in a modern cultural context they're seen as inarguably bad, because they are equated with prejudgement and we recognize (reasonably) that individual variation within a group can make such pre-assumptions ridiculous. But the fact is that they persist because they do predict "well enough" much of the time. And to drag this back on-topic: for some - I'd daresay most - gaming, yes, that too is usually good enough. I personally am about DMing and playing adventure games. I (and the players who enjoy my games) don't have the time nor inclination to care about the nuances of difference between Orlanthi and Cherusci and Celts and Vikings. If the players have a rough idea that the steading they've just arrived at looks *roughly* like a town from the Vikings TV show last night, we have enough shared visualization to let the action proceed. They and I truly don't care if the lead priestess bares her left boob because of an ancient mythic reason - if it's not unusual in their characters' context, I wouldn't even mention it. If the God Learner ruins they've just spotted on that deserted (?) coast ahead looks like that Mycenaen Citadel (nice finds, Mancam), again: good enough!

I'm curious who precisely has "spoken up about it as a style they prefer"? I couldn't find any. You refer probably to the scantily-cladness "style"...but that wasn't even nearly the point. I skimmed back through the thread and one person - the OP of the picture - mentioned that it was more interesting stylistically than the placid mannikin-style figures he/she was comparing it to. They didn't say "I can't wait to hypersexualize women!", they didn't slaver breathlessly over the sideboob potential. They didn't really even say the picture itself was "cool", the point was that the active pose made even the silly, simple, trope-ish costume more interesting. But hey, if one's already worked up their frothing indignation, who bothers reading for content? One vague reference to a pose pretty clearly chosen not for it's sexualization but for it's more dynamic, active-person presentation - resulting in not one but two 400+ word nigh-histrionic rants? That would be the 'delicate sensibilities' I wouldn't bother catering to. I agree with Jeff and goldwheeldancer: the image in question wouldn't be suitable for a Gloranthan game because it's uncontextual and frankly dull. It says nothing. When art has costs in both $ and column-inches, it needs to deliver something more than tits in a rulebook. Yet I also AGREE with Kranted Powers (who's probably been intimidated out of the thread, frankly) that the dynamic, action pose IS fundamentally more interesting. I even agree with g33k in the sense that gratuitous sexualization of women in FRP, while it was delightful to my early-teen self, is not acceptable in a hobby which has thankfully, finally begun to draw more distaff players. That said, as the Guide and Prince of Sartar have both gloriously shown (and everyone here seems to agree), Glorantha is a place with a LOT fewer Puritanical hangups than 21st century US and doesn't need to be freighted with that baggage either: if we're going to have barbarian men covered only in woad hurling themselves at the dirty Lunars, there's ALSO no reason we have to fear having an informative, interesting, DYNAMIC picture of some topless Babeester Rune Lord kickin' ass too - even if all she's wearing is a belt to hang her prizes on (even Thanatari shudder at *that*)...

Yeah, not a great deal of attention really paid to the production value here. Plus, obsess over ducks a little. Glorantha's albatross, basically. AD&D had a decent complement of stupid & silly creatures, but man, this one has stuck to Glorantha.

I think there's quite a bit of distance between the two drawings (mannikin-like display dolls vs scantily-clad bikini warrior) for some common-ground to be available. (http://womenfighters.tumblr.com/post/21173010945/by-bob-giadrosich) Female AND somewhat more engaging than a mannikin. That said, to be 'actively offended' by the second example in the OP...well...I'm not sure any art design needs to try to cater to that level of delicate sensibilities. "Female armor sucks" - be sure to watch to the very end.

Of course, there's the internet... https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fpxmagazine.com%2Fsobre-classic-fantasy%2F (translated version)

So, Picts then? "Orlanthi should look like Orlanthi" (and nothing else!) but what you've just described is a bog-standard Pict: or maybe Cherusci: I'm not attacking your particular vision, not at all. It just seems a little ironic to insist that Orlanthi look 'nothing like' (list of barbaric cultures) and then describe precisely one that's nearly identical. Saxons/Vikings/Celts/Whatever: people generally like visualizations of the world they're playing; the nuances of distinction here might matter to some of us, but I suspect that you show that picture of the Mycenean Warriors above to 99% of American gamers, and they would say "oh, vikings!" (because of the quasi-horns on their helmets) anyway.... D&D is easy because it's such a (imo silly) caricature of an idealized medieval Europe (usually). We have a little higher bar, but hey, many of us abandoned D&D because wanted a better-realized world in the first place. I think Martin's sketches - as much as they may not be canonical - are terrific. I'm adopting them. How far one needs to go down the rabbit-hole of canon is entirely subjective anyway, quadruply so in Greg Stafford's world....

This may sound weird, and not particularly easy, but if you want to see what I believe are terrific representations of Sartarite steadings and culture, play LOTRO and go to Rohan. Ignoring the overtly Equine symbology, IMO it nails it. I'll use screenshots from all over that game as "color" for my RQ campaign: Could easily be Dangerford, viewed from the North. Could be an eastern view of Swenstown. I couldn't find any pics online (if people want them, ill take a few and post them here) but close up the great halls, and the various houses are spot on: (the closest I could find was concept art): Another: And finally (a little off the topic) this could be a great shot of wintertop from the Dwarf Run side (see the entrance)

It's a matter of who wants to invest in the machine, and what they're willing to cut the price down to. How many books printed over time to pay off the machine? What's the "cost" and what's the "price" can be pretty different things. Cost is surprisingly, astonishingly low. Taking out the machine investment, the paper's about $0.80/lb for high quality uncoated fine paper, machine wear, ink, etc - can't be more than maybe $5/book, tops. Early versions were pretty cheap perfect-bounds, but current grades are impressive.

Having seen the new print systems at the last Drupa show, it's clear that soon the production of a paper book in a run size as small as one will be trivial. The all-in systems that go from literally a pdf on a usb to a warm book in your hand, full cover color & internal illustrations beautifully done just a handful of minutes later.

Well there's Debian RQ for power gamers, Ubuntu RQ for newbs, Red Hat RQ is a very nicely polished commercial version, etc.

Yep, for us it boiled down to a few simple points: - the much-more realistic combat was orders of magnitude more satisfying than D&D (initial hook) - the skill system and classlessness was so much more intuitive (set the barb) - a world that wasn't just medieval Europe with magic clumsily bolted on but not even faintly rationalized in terms of impact (not to mention religion; it's pretty important in the history of OUR world where miracles (if you believe in them) are pretty few and far between; how much more overwhelming a cultural force would religion be in a world where the gods are demonstrably immanent) and no alignments. (and...caught) My main campaign ran for around a dozen years, more or less. Not one "heroquest" was done, but everyone had a great time. Every single player, however, has complained to me that they find it tremendously hard to move to other games. D&D5e is a good game, don't get me wrong, but once you've played RQ it sort of ruins you for for the compromises in other systems.

I'm pretty sure the goal of RQ4 isn't just to re-issue RQ2 wholesale; it's to use the core concepts of RQ2, try to capture the feel of RQ2, but Jeff has also said that they will be adopting/implementing good ideas from the breadth of the RQ canon. There are a lot of things in RQ2 that weren't perfect (it was what 1980? RPGs were still figuring out the fundamentals) and will certainly need to be 'updated' to a 2016 standard. I'd say the HP table is clearly one of them for all the reasons mentioned above.

I'd guess the usual POW gain rules apply (species max - current * 5% chance to go up 1d3 points), so yeah. Aside from actually-varying stats like HP and MP, POW has always been the most-variable of core stats. I always DM'd that if your power gain roll was a result of core-cult functions (Storm Bull killing major Chaos, Humakti 'ending' a powerful lich, Ernalda saving a whole steading from starvation, etc) you could choose to either x2 your % chance to gain POW, or +2 to your actual POW gain IF you got it.

1) I very much like the "to reattach a limb you need a heal of the full hp of the limb". Simple. Brilliant. And does away with the archaic flat "Heal 6 needed" that was from the old days of non-scaling rules. 2) RQ has always suffered from check-hunting behavior. Simply saying "that's not what your character would do" simply shows that the rules fail to incentivize players to behave realistically: that's a RULES failing, not 'powergaming'. We came up with the following 'check-tick' system that still hewed reasonably close to RQ canon, but gave players enough incentive not to carry a golfbag full of different weapons for check-hunting. It might seem elaborate, but it's pretty simple in practice (from our campaign notes): (Checks, Ticks, and improving skills): If you succeed at an ability, put 1 check by it; if you get a fumble or special success, 2 checks; if critical success, 3 checks. These checks will be used later for one experience roll on that skill, for each check. Further successes/fumbles/specials/criticals (s/f/s/c) add checks only if it’s an increase to what you had already. Otherwise, if you roll a (s/f/s/c) and already have checks to the appropriate quantity, you get the number of ‘ticks’ instead. Ticks will be used to enhance your experience rolls, so there is always a good reason to keep using a skill, even if you already have checks. All checks and ticks are cleared after the 'experience check' process; you cannot save them for later. (Improving Skills) When the GM determines you’ve had enough rest to contemplate what lessons you may have learned, he may declare that it’s time to perform experience rolls. For each skill that you have a “check”, you get an experience roll. An experience roll is a % roll vs your current skill (base+modifiers, but NOT including your category modifier, such as Agility). Add your category modifier to the roll, if it exceeds your (base+modifiers), you have learned something and you may choose to add 1d6% (or 3%, your choice before rolling) to that skill. If you have multiple “checks” in a skill, you may perform multiple rolls sequentially. TICKS are used to improve your experience roll. Accumulated ticks may be spent: Tick Cost Benefit 1 tick +1% to a specific designated experience roll (i.e. to make failure more likely) allocated before any rolls are made 4 ticks +1 to a single d6 skill-gain roll, allocated after any experience rolls are made. (You may buy as many of each as you can afford with the ticks you have in that skill; note that all unspent ticks are cleared anyway…) For example: Rurik has an attack modifier of +8%, and a sword skill of 82% for a cumulative 90% chance to hit with a sword. In combat he succeeds, and notes a check on his character sheet next to his Sword skill. Later, he manages a special success, which would give him two checks, but since he already has one he only gets one additional check (now he has two), the other un-applied check is recorded instead as a tick. In a subsequent combat, he succeeds two times. Since he already has two checks, he cannot gain more from ‘simple’ success, so he gets two ticks instead. Finally, he fumbles – this again would give him two checks (yes, you hopefully learn something from huge mistakes….if you survive) but he already has two checks, so he gets two more ticks. Finally, when he gets back to town and is enjoying a celebratory ale, the GM rules he’s entitled to take his experience rolls. He has two checks, so he’ll get to roll twice. He has five ticks, so he needs to decide how to spend them. He chooses to spend them all (since he can’t keep them): one as a +1% to fail on his first roll (he must designate which when he spends the ticks, before he rolls), and four as +1 to the d6 for a skill gain roll. He rolls his first experience check. He needs to fail against 82% (note his attack modifier is excluded). He rolls a 76 adds his attack modifier of +8%, and another +1% for the tick spent = 85%, a failure! When rolling the +d6, he adds that tick skill modifier he bought, and rolls d6+1 for skill gain, rolling a 4+1 = 5. His Sword skill is now 87. He rolls a 12 for his second experience check, which is not a failure, and gets no skill gain. His checks and ticks are all cleared from his character sheet and he’s ready for the next adventure. Yes, I know we were non-RAW as far as skill checks, rolling against skill without category mod, and then adding category mod to the roll. I wanted them to skill up relatively quickly.

Personally, I've felt that canonical Glorantha sometimes goes a little TOO far 'down the rabbit hole' of exploring fantastic metaphysics and cultural minutiae. (I don't think the Glorantha Digest is still a thing, but you can probably find the logs somewhere and there you'll see in the 'dry years' that the narrow cadre of Gloranthaphiles spent MUCH energy arguing about figurative angels on figurative pins....). You can role play joining cults and re-enacting the mythic meeting of Orlanth and Ernalda all you want; my players generally thought that was boring as hell. So my longest-running campaign wasn't about that - it was dungeon crawls ("in Glorantha? WHAT?" cried the purists!) and killing bad guys and taking their crap to go kill more bad guys. Great fun.

Formulae work better because they're not only better-scaling, but then it ALSO works for non-humaniform creatures. RQ3 had a comprehensive list of body types, hit location (melee and missile to-hits) AND HP VALUES by location also conforming to the formulas generally. Main body structures - chest, forequarters, etc - were 0.4 Secondary body or strong appendage - abdomen, legs - 0.33 (Head was here also; you might argue it's more like a secondary appendage size/durability wise, but it's also usually somewhat armored like in people. I'd also suspect there was some game-balance reasons for this, because head-damage was of SUCH lethal consequence) Secondary appendage - arms - 0.25 Trivial appendage - legs on a spider - 0.1 and didn't count against body hp.

While the Eyewitness books' layouts were visually interesting, let's not forget in the meanwhile that rulebooks are REFERENCE books too. Visually impactful is great, but if it hinders the basic usefulness of the text, I'm not sure that's the best direction.

"newbie" (guffaw) Thanks GS.

Actually, they take place FAR more frequently in RQ6. Consider a fight between 75-skill combatants. In RQ3, each has a 15% chance of crit/specials and 1% of fumbles. So 16% chance of 'something' happening to each, or (with the two of them fighting) adding probability, roughly a 32% chance of "something" happening. Now, there's a bit of a cancellation effect with some crit vs crit results, and a critical parry or dodge vs any attack isn't a special effect, simply nothing happens. Call it somewhere around 25% chance of something happening, up to maybe 30%. Contrast that with RQ6, where (p143: "...any resulting difference in success levels indicates an opportunity for Special Effects to occur..."), increasing crits to 10%, removing specials, and increasing fumbles to 2% means the math's a little more difficult but as I calculate out of 10000 possible results, more than 48% of them are where one or the other has at least one level of success over the other. (We always said that you had to at least succeed to get an SE, but that doesn't materially affect that 48% actually...) That's a HUGE difference. Not only does it impact frequency of what might be a combat-ending event, but it also might mean that every other combat action someone's got to scurry off and check the table. Unless my math's off, which isn't impossible.

I'm curious if Greg and MAR Barker ever crossed paths? Both men developed elaborate fictional universes leading up to the 1970s with comprehensive mythologies etc that were entirely divorced from the rather-pedestrian Tolkienesque canon. Both men worked on developing role playing rules to experience these worlds (RQ for Glorantha, and EPT for Tekumel). Tekumel is a fascinating world (frankly, I used Sandy's Tekumel stuff as my "Western Magic" fodder, worked great), I'm curious if these two minds ever encountered each other? Seems like they'd have had a lot to chat about.

Then again, I might have just been JOKING a little Loz.