Nick Brooke

10 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

There are stairs in Glamour that lead to the Red Moon (no, really)

Antonia is illustrating them, even now!

1 hour ago, g33k said:

Q - can the Lune's attack (by RAW) cause Illumination? 

In the latest draft of the Nysalor cult writeup I’ve seen, the answer is yes. (Kinda)

That is, you can obtain the Illumination “skill” via madness, and you can become Illuminated by making that skill roll.

Answering riddles is still easier, but you can certainly become Illuminated by going insane.

5 minutes ago, Darius West said:

The Lismelder are primarily Humakti, and Humakt isn't hostile to the Lunars, only to Yanafal Ta'arnils.  If the Lunars were able to keep Delecti off their backs, I think the Lismelders would be pro-Lunar.

You might have forgotten (or never known) that I played in the original Greydog Campaign back in the nineties, and pay keen attention to my old stamping-grounds. The idea that the Lismelder tribe is pro-Lunar isn’t supported by any source I’m familiar with. And they’re included in the most comprehensive list of anti-Lunar tribes ever drawn up.

But YGWV, and I’m cool with that.

In keeping with the best traditions of the Seven Mothers' cult, I can neither confirm nor deny that faithful Lunars enjoy an existence of perpetual bliss dwelling in the bejewelled and radiant palaces, cities, countryside and wilderness of the Red Moon itself.

If all Orlanthi can travel to Orlanth's Stead during worship services on High Holy Days, then I'm sure all good Lunars can travel to the Red Moon on theirs. Makes sense, no?

11 minutes ago, HeartQuintessence said:

There is a city on the Red Moon? Wait what?- There is still so much I do not know about Glorantha.

I guess I'll read this and get interesting idea about Lunar PCs.

There are cities (plural) on the Red Moon. (The Guide to Glorantha, Appendix I is a four-page gazetteer of its surface features, with a beautiful painted map by Eric Vanel - here's a small excerpt). Think Barsoom.

50 minutes ago, g33k said:

...?

you  wear a swan  to awards ceremonies???!?

No, that's a Bjork. He's the outermost layer of the trunk, stem or root of a woody plant.

On 3/31/2020 at 12:19 AM, jajagappa said:

The Lismelder are pro-Lunar.

Them's fighting words. (The Lismelder are listed as a Free Tribe in Barbarian Adventures)

On 3/30/2020 at 9:30 PM, coffeemancer said:

Couldnt find a general lore thread so I will just shoot out a bunch of questions here.

4.which are the pro lunar clans of sartar?

I summarised the pro-Lunar tribes, here:

The Rough Guide to Sartar
http://etyries.albionsoft.com/etyries.com/journeys/liberate.html

Backstory: this reworked an irritating typology from a book for Hero Wars called Sartar Rising: Barbarian Adventures which itemised the "Free" and "Enslaved" tribes of Sartar. I thought turning this on its head for Lunar propaganda purposes was worth doing: the division into "Liberated" (benefiting from Imperial rule) vs. "Oppressed" (still sunk in barbaric despotism) perfectly mirrors the original piece.

The original ended with a propaganda box called Free the Enslaved Tribes!, so of course I inverted that too. It's kinda my job. Hence, Liberate the Oppressed Tribes!

Updated to include today's Humakt, Raven & Wolf and add a price-per-page comparison for every product covered. If you bought it already, the new version is now in your Library.

Cost per page: Bargain = up to 15 cents, Average = 15 to 30 cents, Premium = more than 30 cents. Page count used excludes any covers / credits / ToCs / adverts / blanks.

Now expanded to include a fifth page, covering the Monsters of the Month. You'll find the revised version in "My Library" on DTRPG.

23 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

The Crater is ginormous!!

It’s bigger on the inside...

22 minutes ago, Lysus said:

Affected misspellings are one of the quickest ways to my ignore list on a lot of forums, so I don't care for it at all.

Well, aren't WE special? 😜

3 minutes ago, Puckohue said:

How?

I mean, I would have no problem making anything available as print on demand (POD) if I was allowed to, but I don't think I'm allowed to publish something in the Jonstown Compendium both on DrivethruRPG and on an alternative POD-service.

"We" here includes @MOB, who has been working with Chaosium's partners at OneBookShelf to make this possible.

It would be available on DriveThruRPG only, of course, so POD copies would come from Lightning Source (who print in the USA & UK, to the best of my knowledge).

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

17 hours ago, Stephen L said:

A quick look at Nick Brooke's alternate timeline in Duel at Dangerford, makes me realise I don’t know the Canon timeline as well as I thought.

Whilst I *should* follow Nick Brookes approach, that the Canon is there to inspire and help campaign planning, but what works for a series (or arc) of fun adventures should be paramount, I’d probably worry...

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.

Here's a Wayback Machine link, @Oracle:

https://web.archive.org/web/20061013141849/http://members.ozemail.com.au/~mrmob/jaxandthebisonkhan.htm

Cheers, Nick

On 3/29/2020 at 11:48 AM, metcalph said:

The Son of Light Awakens will be in the forthcoming Rough Guide to Glamour, I think.

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.

On 3/7/2020 at 7:47 AM, Manu said:

I have a player with a fire elemental. They will meet soon an enemy with a water elemental.

If one send his elemental against the other, how do we play this. Fire elemental cannot be drowned. Water elemental cannot be burned.

For a general point of view, if 2 differents (or the same) elementals fight, how to play it?

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?