Nick Brooke

2 hours ago, ChrisWentWhere said:

I wonder if they wait at Tourney Altar and the Issaries Merchant acts as an emissary…

Sounds perfect. Base themselves at a Humakti holy place, and collect the ransom there. SOMEONE will be watching the transaction closely and making sure nobody gets any silly ideas…

If your campaign is set in and around Jonstown and the Colymar lands, and you only use the characters, scenarios and setting material published in the RuneQuest Starter Set, Core Rules, Colymar Adventure book and various other "canonical" books from Chaosium, then Your Glorantha Will Still  Vary. It's inevitable! As soon as you start playing with this stuff, doing anything original and creative with it, you varied and broke with canon. So you might as well embrace it, and have fun!

So, realistically: is Chaosium about to publish its own city books describing Nochet, Furthest, Glamour, Boldhome, etc. in gazetteer-level detail?

Magic 8-ball says "Very doubtful."

Is Chaosium about to publish its own identical-only-better, somehow-canonical replacements for all the awesome scenarios from the Jonstown Compendium?

Magic 8-ball says "Don't count on it."

Do you want to have fun playing in Glorantha today, rather than waiting for the mythical "Next Year" when everything magically appears all at once and makes your game experience 100% orthodox and wholly compliant with 2025-era canon?

Magic 8-ball says "Signs point to yes."

Everything on the Jonstown Compendium is original creative non-canonical fan work, which adheres to Greg Stafford’s foundational principle that Your Glorantha Will Vary. Chaosium is in no way obliged to make its own publications conform to non-canonical fan works, and of course it can’t simply copy them. Chaosium does not review or approve JC creations prior to publication, or limit creators’ creativity in any way (other than the obvious: no plagiarism, no ‘extreme adult content,’ etc.).

Now, some JC authors and artists also work with Chaosium in various capacities, and many of them are extremely familiar with their own Gloranthas. Some authors go to great lengths to conform to the latest orthodoxies, whatever they may be, while others enjoy sticking to familiar but superseded versions, or exhuming ancient texts, or blazing entirely new trails. Your Glorantha Will Vary, and it can and should borrow widely from stuff you love. Not all of which will be in official, “canonical” Chaosium publications, unless you take a rather blinkered and un-creative approach to the setting.

Of course!

That’s because Magic World is an accessible compilation of good old stuff that’s no longer on sale. There’s no point in sending people to look at ancient RQ3 or Stormbringer publications nowadays: when the same content is available in another book, that’s what we recommend.

1 hour ago, Jason D said:

I'd love to see that work back in print in some fashion…

Your wish is my command! We brought out print-on-demand editions of BRP Gold, Magic World and Advanced Sorcery around the same time Wizards screwed the pooch by putting a gun to the OGL’s head this time last year: I’m sure it was a coincidence.

While I’m convinced this is essentially a malicious troll thread, here’s me and Sandy chatting 28 years ago:

Quote

 

NB: “Jim Chapin seems to have missed the point. Like poor old Dara Happa, the cultures on Sandy's list are generally considered dull and boring and monolithic and unchanging and patriarchal and hereditary and hierarchical. This does not mean they have no dynamic potential, or are not undergoing rapid change, or are bad places to set interesting and exciting stories.

SP: Consider: take a time machine and visit central Peloria every 500 years:

• 1 S.T. -- Mongol-like horsemen rule the land.
• 500 S.T. -- everything is sweetness and light under Nysalor’s Bright Empire.
• 1000 S.T. -- Dragon magic fills the air as we are one with the EWF.
• 1500 S.T. -- the Lunar Empire

And by visiting only every 500 years, we miss out on lots of exciting stuff, like the Carmanian invasion, Sheng Seleris's rise, the wars between Dara Happa and the First Council, and so forth.

Now let's visit Heortland every 500 years:

• 1 S.T. -- Orlanthi tribal culture
• 500 S.T. -- Orlanthi tribal culture
• 1000 S.T. -- Orlanthi tribal culture
• 1500 S.T. -- Orlanthi tribal culture

Of course, they have a series of different absentee kings (the Only Old One, the Pharaoh, Lokaymadon, etc.), but nothing really changed, not even the language.

 

There is wibbly-wobbly timey-wimeyness involved, I fear: Sun County says Garrath won the Garhound Contest in 1604, when Argrath is canonically eight years old (per word of @Jeff). I suspect we’d treat this as a typo for 1614, nowadays, and might just suggest that to @MOB…

(It’s serendipity, really: @MOB included the map in his blog post, which is when I noticed that it isn’t the current version, and if he hadn’t done it you wouldn’t have pointed out that I have no idea where Nochet is, and so it grows. Happy ending, anyway. I do hope a Rhigos book is on the cards!)

If anyone out there sees anything else that “needs” fixing, please get the details to me by this weekend or else it’ll won’t be corrected in the paperback edition.

I honestly thought Nochet was a bit further south. In my defence, I put that white box there more than 3.5 years ago, and never thought about it again.

11 hours ago, jajagappa said:

Just thinking how if the white text box wasn't there in the bottom left of the Dragon Pass map, you could see Nochet, note the source materials there, and people could see how close the city is to Dragon Pass....

Like this, you mean?

Thanks for the feedback, I can get that correction in before we go to print.

This is why they call us exceptional GMs, Rodney.

29 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

"An Elemental Rune may be used to augment the adventurer’s chance with a single non-combat skill within its skills category..."

Sure: and nobody has said it can't. But the competent, experienced GMs here are saying that an Elemental Rune can't ONLY augment skills within its skills category: if a player can make a reasonable (non-minimaxing, non-pettifogging) case, see above for examples, then a GM can be reasonable too.

The thing is, RQ has a load of situation-specific skills, and can kinda break down if an adventurer is missing one, so we patch this with reasonable workarounds (characteristic rolls, augments, substitutes, etc.). No sensible GM would say "under no circumstances would I allow an Elemental Rune to augment a skill that isn't within its skills category." You can see the difference, I hope? We are trying to be helpful, here. This isn't a game of "gotcha."

I was describing two notional player character archetypes, not poring over the statblocks in the printed Sandheart books. But I thank you for your concern, and for what I am sure was a generous and well-intentioned offer. We have no plans to "update" any of our books, and encourage you to scribble "corrections" in the margins, ideally using green and purple ink.

Treat the rules as fractal: when action isn't important, you can easily speed through it. You do not have to apply all of the rules, all of the time, especially to unimportant situations. The Football Fight scene in Black Spear is a good example. I would hate to try running that scene with strike ranks and hit locations and all that jazz, so instead I give you shortcuts and explain how to keep the session moving along briskly. If you would prefer to set up a tactical battle-map with 250 friendly and 250 hostile NPCs, I can't really help you, but you have to recognise that this is your choice.

Similarly, if you read a scenario and immediately think "this monster is too weak for my players," just increase its hit points, armour points and/or damage output. "The monster is too strong for my players?" Halve its hit points, armour points and/or damage output. Your oblivious players will not notice, but if they did, they would thank you. You're the game master, you're meant to quietly balance this stuff so that your group has a good time. It's not a wargame, you're not trying to "beat" them or enforce "realistic" outcomes if that results in unsatisfying sessions. ("Another TPK? Let's generate new characters and try again.") 

22 minutes ago, Malin said:

I'm also pretty quick to say no to players. For climbing, for example, I would allow air on a windy cliffside where the wind is actually an issue. Or Earth, if that's the element of what they're climbing. Might allow darkness if they do it during the dead of night. Even movement if there's a race element involved and they need to do it fast and take big risks. Just... vibes at the moment. Not allowing the highest one just because.

That's the essence of being a Game Master, right there. These games take place in a social context. You will know, sitting at the table, if your friends are making reasonable bids or are cheekily "trying it on" (and coincidentally using their highest rating, every time). I can't teach you that. It's not about "interpreting and adjudicating rules": it's about the flow of the session. Rulebooks can't defend you against pettifogging rules-lawyers: only GMs can do that. It's their job.

3 hours ago, soltakss said:

That is a good start, as the Adventurers can make a connection with Argrath by helping him to escape from Hell, if he has become trapped. 

It’s from “Black Spear,” Simon.

Thanks, I’ll fix that.

20 minutes ago, Stephen L said:

the expectation (shared by the players) is that the Lunars are gathering their forces northwards, to shortly sweep away the rebels.

King Pharandros the Tarshite
By the Red Moon he swore
That the great house of Hon-eel
Should suffer wrong no more.
By the Red Moon he swore it,
And named a trysting day,
And bade his messengers ride forth,
East and west and south and north,
To summon his array...

I know some people have created and are working on Balazar supplements for the Jonstown Compendium. Hopefully they’ll have some neat new art and cartography.

Updated again on 27 December:

• The Good, the Bad & the Rowdy, by Ian Thomson & Friends: the fourth Pavis & Big Rubble Companion returns to the Big Rubble and presents game masters with a mix of Old City strongholds (with floorplans and descriptions), supporting characters in various categories (many of them with full RuneQuest statblocks, including Garrath Sharpsword, Sor-eel the Short and Gim-Gim the Grim), a campaign framework that pulls the first four volumes together (A Fistful of Lunars) and several detailed scenarios, many involving iconic locations in the Big Rubble. Of particular interest is an eclectic range of material co-created by Greg Stafford covering Mani’s Clan, the history of Zebra Fort and the Black Fang cult, and various notes on Griselda and friends in collaboration with Oliver Dickinson. If you’ve been following the series, you’ll know what to expect: extrapolations from the previously published material, always with a focus on playability. (274 pages for $20.75)