trystero

Personally, I suspect I will end up using Call of Cthulhu 7th edition's bonus and penalty dice, which provide meaningful advantage or disadvantage on a roll without having to add or subtract percentiles, instead of the listed modifiers. I was really hoping RQG would go the CoC 7e route on this point.

Fair point: I should have said "for most adventurers".

Readability is almost always the failing of Q-Workshop dice, in my experience; they like cluttered designs in which I can barely make out the numbers up close, let alone from across a table. I got their Horror on the Orient Express set as part of the HOTOE Kickstarter and have never used them. The RuneQuest D20 shown above is actually pretty good by their standards: the numerals aren't obscured, and there's a bit of clear margin around them, so they might be more legible than usual. I'm hoping… Also, given that RQG only has a single hit-location table, I wonder whether the set will include a D20 labelled with hit locations to save one table look-up. If it could be made readable, I'd actually find that quite useful.

In RQ3's Gods of Glorantha, at least, it's noted in the Humakt cult description's Initiate Membership section on p. 41 of the Cults Book: "Note: cult members… may never be brought back from the dead by any means. Their corpses cannot be turned into undead." By comparison, Cults of Prax for RQ2 said (on p. 32, at least in the Classic Edition reprint): "Humakt worshippers are never Resurrected" and "The cult cares little what happens to the corpses of their dead, save that they are… not turned into undead." This sounds more like custom than limits on what's possible. So I guess it depends which version of Humakt you work with.

I'm certainly expecting the GM Pack's screen and/or booklet to contain the modifiers in shorter format. Again, my gold standard here is the Game Aids booklet included in the boxed RQ3 set, which consolidated almost everything I needed into eight pages; I ran most of my games using just that booklet and some stat blocks for opponents.

Not sure there is one. The "Attacking From Advantage or Disadvantage" and "Darkness" entries in the Other Combat Rules section (starting p. 223) seem to cover most of the things that were present in the modifier tables in RQ3—attacking defenseless or unaware opponents, fighting from the ground, fighting in darkness, etc.—though most of the references are in text rather than pulled out into a table.

This doesn't seem to be completely true for The Grand Grimoire of Cthulhu Mythos Magic; some of the problems noted in the errata document (wrong icons for categories and spells, missing space on p. 29) have been corrected in the latest version available from Chaosium.com, but others (Find Dreamer spell missing from Dreamlands spell list on p. 23, tongue-lash damage on p. 48) are still present. Every other PDF I've checked appears to be up-to-date, though, so this seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

My ideal duck is a mixture of personality bits from Donald Duck, Daffy Duck, and Rocket Racoon from the Guardians of the Galaxy films. (Yes, wrong species, but he's a short, irritable, irritating, generally-untrustworthy death-worshiper with no ability to laugh at himself, and thus basically an honorary duck in my book.)

Seems amazing to me. For the example opposed roll given earlier in the thread, with Hide 30% opposed by Spot 30%, the possible results shake out as: Hide wins (gets a better degree of success) 25.16% of the time Spot wins (gets a better degree of success) 25.16% of the time The two tie (get same degree of success and same roll) 1% of the time …and something else happens (same degree of success but different rolls) 48.68% of the time Without meaning to be emotive, I think it's reasonably important to know what the designers intended to happen for the most likely result of this opposed roll, the result which occurs almost half the time for these particular skill levels. The "something else" results occur less often as skill scores increase: for Hide 75% vs. Spot 75%, only 30% of the outcomes are "something else", and for Hide 90% vs. Spot 90%, only 22.88% are. But that's still more than a quarter of the time at 75% skill and more than a fifth of the time at 90%. It's not a rare corner case that is unlikely to come up at the table.

Fair enough, but the Vasana's Saga sidebar on p. 62 suggests that this is not the design intent. Vasana is a Sartarite, and gets Battle Axe +10% per the Sartar homeland cultural skill bonuses table on p. 60; the sidebar on p. 62 shows this as "1H Axe (Battle Axe) 20%", with no corresponding "2H Axe (Battle Axe) 15%" entry. Similarly, the fact that "Javelin +10%" is listed after "Composite Bow +10% or Sling +10%" in the Sartar homeland bonuses table—and that "1H Spear +10%" is listed separately—suggests that this bonus is only intended to be applied to ranged use. Even then, there's a question left open: is this +10% bonus meant to apply only to the Javelin (Javelin) skill, or can it be applied to any skill in the Javelin category? Can a Sartarite start with +10% to Javelin (Dart) or Javelin (Spear, Short) skill? My guess is no, but it's only a guess. I do wish the skills were more explicitly labelled, perhaps with an asterisk after a skill when it's meant to be a category, so that "Javelin* +10%" means +10% to any one skill in the Javelin category, but "Javelin +10%" means +10% only to Javelin (Javelin) skill.

Next time they send anything out to the preview list, the e-mail should include the link to the shared folder which contains all the preview material. (And they've explicitly asked folks not to share that link, which is why I'm not just providing it to you myself.)

I'm interested.

I'm with you here; the art is the obvious standout, but the excellent, clean, colourful layout and graphic design are almost as important. One reason I always struggled to read RQ2 was that its bare-bones layout was much less readable than that of RQ3, the version I started with. And worse, I can remember my heart sinking when I first opened my copy of MRQ and saw its cheap, dire production and layout. (It had cheap art and dire editing, too, so judging that book by its layout turned out to be quite accurate.) Beauty in layout and production isn't just a "nice to have" element; it's part of what makes a game a pleasure (or a pain) to read, and that has a real impact on how I ingest the game's rules and its atmosphere.

Some of us have been waiting about 25 years for a new edition of RQ that re-incorporated Glorantha. Of course we're impatient. 🙂 I'm glad that you put the PDF out now, myself, and am happy—well, let me revise that to willing—to wait for the later books without griping. I hope that comes across correctly as more eagerness than impatience: for all the nits I've picked, and for all the little RQ3isms that I miss, I'm excited about the new game and I (and my players) want to wade into it. I do wish we'd gotten a bit more lead time for the tribal-edit phase between PDF release and print-edition deadline, because it's RuneQuest and I want it to be perfect, damnit. (But on the other hand, additional errata corrections will give me a great excuse to pick up a later-printing hardcover after I get the first-printing one.)

I'm interested to hear what other posters have found interesting, or pleasing, or confounding, in the two Glorantha Bestiary previews we've gotten so far. Air elementals seem to have lost their common names: we're told that darkness elementals are called dehori or shades, earth elementals are called talosi or gnomes, fire elementals are called urzani or salamanders, and water elementals are called veredthi or undines… but air elementals are just called umbroli now, and no-one calls them sylphs. I hope the common name gets restored for the final release. Did I know that uzko are colour-blind? I don't think I did. And female uzko now usually have two breasts, down from the six shown on the sketch from the RQ3 Adventurer Sheets – Nonhuman female troll sheet. (This is not something that will have a huge impact on my game, but it's interesting to see the change all the same.) The stat-block layout is easy to read, and the hit-location and weapon tables stand out from the text nicely. In the stat block, I would ideally like to see DEX SR and SIZ SR broken out separately, along the lines of "Base SR: 4 (DEX 3, SIZ 1)", to save needing to look up DEX SR on the rulebook's table when a foe casts a spell or does something else besides attack. There are a few minor errata (uzko have SR 2 for their Sling attacks, even though their DEX SR is 3; broo have Base SR 4 listed, but should have 5 given their DEX and SIZ), but I'll leave pursuit of these until the tribal-edit thread opens up after the PDF release. Which can't come soon enough, I say.

I think that must be from some other game. CoC 7e has bonus dice (roll two or more tens dice and keep the better or best result) and penalty dice (roll two or more tens dice and keep the worse or worst result), but no swapping of dice that I'm aware of. Clever idea, though.

I'm not sure what mechanic from CoC 7e you're referring to here.

On p. 148, in the Damage Equals or Exceeds Double the Location's Hit Points and Damage Equals or Exceeds Triple the Location's Hit Points sections, it looks to me as though the rules for limb hits apply only if a limb suffers damage ≥ twice or thrice its location HP in a single hit. So if my 3-point arm suffers a 1 HP hit and is then hit again for another 5 HP, I suffer 6 total HP damage, but I'm not incapacitated, because the arm didn't take 6+ HP in one hit, and I can continue fighting (albeit without the use of that arm since it's taken damage ≥ its HP). By contrast, the rules for the head, chest, and abdomen appear to apply whenever one of those locations takes cumulative damage ≥ twice or thrice its location HP, regardless of whether this happened in one blow or many. This is a change from RQ3, the version I'm most familiar with; I'm just checking that I'm properly understanding the intent. All of the examples on this page describe single-hit results, so they don't really confirm the difference in behavior. I've also just realized that RQ:G doesn't have the CON ×5 rolls to avoid bleeding, or the CON ×1 rolls to stop bleeding or be Heroic and keep fighting, that RQ3 had for some locations. Adventurers can still bleed to death if struck in the torso or head; they just do so at consistent rates, without any variability or chance to clot on their own. I'll see how the new rules play with my group; I suspect players will miss having a chance to roll something for their injured adventurers, but I've been wrong before…

So… you started a thread to complain that people are complaining? I might have to complain about that. :-) I think some of what you're seeing as whining or complaining is just reasonable feedback. I don't expect Chaosium to halt the presses or re-write RQ:G to suit my personal tastes, but there's nothing wrong with letting them know which things in the new rules seem off-putting to me (and why) as well as noting the things that I think are improvements to the older editions. And the discussion may help other players to decide which new rules they want to keep and which old rules they want to retain as house rules, which is exactly the "call those rules as I see them" approach you describe above.

I suspect this is "play" as in "create and run a player character", and it's correct if so. The remaining books are ones you probably need if you're going to GM, but players don't need them.

The description of the RuneQuest forum (this one, right here) says, "RuneQuest forum for Chaosium's roleplaying game system, classic editions and the upcoming one." Since RQ:G is thankfully no longer upcoming, could a moderator update that description? Cheers!

The character sheet also lacks a checkbox for the POW characteristic.

This is p. 418 in my PDF. I agree that the "If an adventurer obtains a success either attacking or parrying during spirit combat, POW can be increased or wth successful POW vs. POW resistance roll" is garbled and unclear. The "Spells… do not provide…" construction is correct as written.

"other self" (subject) "awoke" (verb) is correct as is. For p. 374, I'd change "vortice" to "vortex".

All correct as written IMO.