Nick Brooke

How do we feel about this spelling, team? Quaintly retro, or a spurious affectation?

OK, here's what really happened. I started playing RQG with two groups of players late in 2018. We had great fun playtesting Chris Klug's The Smoking Ruin (Sea Season 1626), then playing the published Dragon of Thunder Hills (Fire Season 1626), then playtesting Doyle Wayne Ramos-Tavener's The Flowers of Ronance (Earth Season 1626)... and then I looked at the timeline in the Glorantha Sourcebook and said, "Shit." I'd cruised blithely past one major event (the Battle of Queens, Fire Season 1626), and although my players were fairly interested in what the Lunars were getting up to outside of Colymar lands (given that all the Lunars in Colymar lands had got themselves et, or worse), I'd never talked to them about the Battle of Dangerford (Storm Season 1625), which would have answered a lot of their questions. So I said "Poke it," and worked out a retconned timetable for my game that would allow me to blast through Queens + Dangerford together at pace, with our adventurers at centre-stage for both, doing big goddamn heroic Bronze Age stuff that they'd never read about in any sourcebooks (because I made it up), with a guest-starring role for some of my favourite troops and leaders from Chris Gidlow's Tarsh War. And now we're all caught up, and I've dropped some plot hooks that could eventually get us drawn into the Tarsh Civil War. Oh, we've also playtested Jean-Christophe Cubertafon's The Fainting Spirit (Dark Season), and played Helene Nash's published The Rattling Wind (Storm Season), and playtested David Larkins' The Jonstown Palimpsest (Sea Season 1627, and that one's a wild and crazy ride), and my surviving group has just started playtesting what should eventually become my next published scenario, which for now I'm calling Black Spear because it has a black spear in it. (It'll be another wide-screen epic of the early Hero Wars, I'm afraid) At the moment, the timeline events I care about are the ones set out in RQG and the Glorantha Sourcebook, and as long as I hit the right beats more or less in sequence, my players should be happy and so will I.

My index to all the RuneQuest scenarios, HeroQuest scenarios, Gloranthan sourcebooks, Monsters of the Month, Virtual Tabletop Tokens and indeed everything else on the Jonstown Compendium, inc. an analysis of page counts (split between scenario, stats, setting, maps, etc.), characters, settings and complexity, a best-sellers chart and a map showing where every scenario is located. Currently 40 pages long, bundled with a spreadsheet listing JC products, yours for the low, low price of 50 cents. Updated regularly. Link: Jonstown Compendium Scenarios & Sourcebooks

Here's a Wayback Machine link, @Oracle: https://web.archive.org/web/20061013141849/http://members.ozemail.com.au/~mrmob/jaxandthebisonkhan.htm Cheers, Nick

Confirmed.

It's been a while since I dropped in here: feels like a good moment to give you all an update. A Rough Guide to Glamour is quite literally 99.115 percent done. We are just waiting for one beautiful piece of final artwork (and the sketches and work-in-progress I have seen would make you weep for joy), and then we'll be uploading the finished book to DriveThruRPG. I'll let you know here as soon as it goes on sale. It'll be available in PDF right away; we hope to make a Print On Demand version available eventually, but that will likely take us a few months to set up (proofing the first printed copy, correcting n00b mistakes, etc.), and the coronavirus situation might make it trickier than normal. But we will get it done as soon as it's humanly possible.

It's been a while since I dropped in here: feels like a good moment to give you all an update. A Rough Guide to Glamour is quite literally 99.115 percent done. We are just waiting for one beautiful piece of final artwork (and the sketches and work-in-progress I have seen would make you weep for joy), and then we'll be uploading the finished book to DriveThruRPG. I'll let you know here as soon as it goes on sale. It'll be available in PDF right away; we hope to make a Print On Demand version available eventually, but that will likely take us a few months to set up (proofing the first printed copy, correcting n00b mistakes, etc.), and the coronavirus situation might make it trickier than normal. But we will get it done as soon as it's humanly possible.

Congratulations, Jonathan: your scenario is currently the #1 hottest community content (fan-made publication) on DriveThruRPG, across all systems, settings and publishers. (And RuneQuest scenarios have all the medal positions)

Related: Cory Trego-Erdner's elemental wheel, from the RQ Glorantha Bestiary.

Specific advice: on the elemental succession wheel, Water is always expected to defeat Fire: a medium Water elemental should quench a medium Fire elemental. If they're different sizes, the larger elemental would probably win: a large Fire elemental should boil away a medium Water elemental. If your player chucks magic into buffing his Fire elemental or attacking the enemy Water elemental, or finds ways of healing his pet or hurting the enemy, that should certainly skew the results, but you can base this on the cost of the spells rather than on their specific defined effects in RuneQuest. That will give you an outcome that feels properly Gloranthan. Bear in mind that the difference in elemental size corresponds to one Rune point or two points of Spirit Magic, so you might arbitrarily rule that a medium Water elemental plus Protection 2 is equivalent in magic cost to (and therefore expected to beat) a large Fire elemental. (Or maybe you'd set the scales differently. I don't know how much magic is floating around in your games) Just putting that out there. I think you'll find it more fun and varied than adapting SCA duelling rules to the clash of primal elemental forces.

OK, here's where I'm coming from. I agree that the Elementals are quite badly served by RuneQuest, which sorta-kinda treats them (in my opinion) too much as physical creatures and not as weird animated amorphous stuff-of-creation. My personal GM'ing style is to treat the RuneQuest rules as binding on my poor players' characters - they define what anthropomorphic, roughly man-sized persons with normal equipment and normal magic can expect to achieve - but entirely optional for my own purposes: as long as the NPCs and the rest of the world act in a way that seems "reasonable for Glorantha," I don't feel the need to tie myself down with nuts-and-bolts details. And usually, that means RQ elementals and I get along just fine, because I can narrate whatever this crazy-ass creature made out of living water, or tunneling underneath you and reaching up to engulf you, or throbbing and pulsating with weird "colour out of space" lights that would drive you insane if you look at them (but if you don't, how can you fight it?), is getting up to, in some hopefully startling and terrifying way, and my players have to react to these intrusions without ever thinking to ask "what's its Strike Rank?" or "how many Armour Points does it have?" so all is well. But in the specific case where a PC can summon an elemental and use it as a combat pet vs. another elemental, I agree it would be better to have more guidance. My suggested rule of thumb would be that, all things being equal (ie: where two elementals of the same size are in conflict), the elemental dominance wheel on RQG p.8 applies absolutely: "The Elemental Runes are commonly conceived as being arranged on a wheel, where Fire/Sky is overcome by Water, Water by Air, Air by Earth, Earth by Darkness, and Darkness by Fire/Sky before the wheel cycles again." So a large undine would always be expected to overcome a large salamander, but would lose to a large sylph. Every type of elemental can battle every other type, because that is the nature of Gloranthan creation (and always has been): so waters quench fires, which burn away darkness, which engulfs the earth, which exhausts the wind, which suppresses the waters, and so it goes. Skewing that (by casting magic to buff your elemental or debuff the opposition) is the kind of thing GMs rule by fiat anyway - my starting point would be that 2 points of Spirit Magic equals one point of Rune Magic, common sense will tell you whether what you do is helpful / harmful, and detail is for the birds. Just describe an awesome combat between fundamental elements of creation, and you're golden. Expanding that for the secondary relationships (non-adjacent points of the wheel / pentagram / Zzabur's Sigil - see p.149 of the Guide to Glorantha) shouldn't be too hard. Deciding where the balancing Moon fits into the picture will be an exercise in hilarity and propaganda. Maybe I should sketch this out with my own nifty diagram and upload it, before Ultor beats me to it?

If you can't remember where you found it, it'll be in A Rough Guide to Glamour as part of the Red Emperor Cult writeup - they're one of his spirits of retribution. We mention various other demons in passing, as you would expect: the Bat Demons atop the Outer Wall, the Tax Demons in the Court of Sacred Largesse, the demons who dragged the first Imperial Warlord to perdition, the Ice Demons of Valind's Glacier....

Or just bits of you, excised with surgical precision. (A precise pound of flesh, if you will)

*cough* Jonstown Compendium supplement opportunity *cough*

They aren't, but their bosses are.

OMG, it's a small hobby isn't it? My little scenario is currently the #6th best seller of ALL THE THINGS on DriveThruRPG. Get in there!

And "The Duel at Dangerford" is still the #1 Hottest Community Content on DriveThruRPG more than 24 hours later. I must be doing something right...

Oh look: I got a nice gong from DriveThru for >100 sales. That's because all the cool kids are reading my scenario now. Don't miss out! And please don't forget to leave five-star ratings and rave reviews on the product page: it's greatly appreciated. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/307504/The-Duel-at-Dangerford?affiliate_id=392988

Could also be Lunes, Selenes, Madness Spirits (Jonstown Compendium)... I have a particularly nasty Lunar Demon in "The Duel at Dangerford," but that's really just a GW Demon Prince run through a Ray Harryhausen blender. "Demon" is just another name for "hostile otherworld entity," after all.

Well, that's gratifying.

If you picked up my new scenario yesterday, you should be able to leave a rating or review on DriveThruRPG today (there's a short pause built into the system, to make sure you've had time to read any new product before you review it). I'd really appreciate positive customer feedback, or constructive suggestions! https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/307504/The-Duel-at-Dangerford?affiliate_id=392988

Review! Jorthan's Rescue Redux - review.pdf

She lies. All affiliate link money is squandered on gin. It is known.

Yup. Check out Scotty's photos of the contents pages, upthread.

That nonsense always did made me laugh. I needed a Big Secret for the defector to leak, and now I spend my spare time wondering how long it'll be until our heroes infiltrate the sinister ghost palace on the Dark Side of the Moon to take down the shadowy necromancer-lord behind Lunar Tarsh.