Joerg

The ultimate munchkin trick is to become an illuminate or otherwise enlightened and not letting it influence your behavior. Take Sheng Seleris as the ultimate mystic munchkin, or munchkin mystic. 100 years of the strictest austerities, and he emerges only shortly as an enlightened advisor before falling back to his raider chief self.

No, they simply need to be overcome, which can be by intrinsic spell strength (not the case with Dismiss) or by boosting the spell across that margin with some extra MP. Note that a character wearing Countermagic needs to overcome (and destroy) the Countermagic to re-cast Sword Trance. Not a problem with a sufficiently high boost, but that takes down the Countermagic (although not the corresponding effect from the Shield). Countermagic itself is nice because already a 1 point CM will negate a Dismiss once (up to one point stronger will be blocked). If you want it to remain after an un-boosted attempt to Dismiss, it would have to be 4 points. Everything covered by your aura, which would even include a short knife blade or armor, but not a short sword or a hatchet, or a shield of any kind. Shield 5 requires 11 points in total to overcome it (which a Sword Trance boosted with nine magic points would provide just as readily as a Dismiss with a 9 points boost.). To dismiss the shield, you would need 5 rune points (to match the Shield's strength) and a magic point (to bypass its CM effect).

That limits the spell to 11 magic points, or the swordperson will be out of attacks for two melee rounds. And while 110% is an insanely high boost, it is nowhere near the "plus 240%" effects that have been made the strawman here. There are characters who can get into this region with Fanaticism, a one point spirit spell. If you have mooks (like cannon-fodder trollkin or bagogi males), fanaticise them.

Another way may be Vadeli sorcery. The Missing Lands had a boxed text section describing a passenger's experience of riding a Vadeli ship into an unnatural gale called "The Vadeli Smile", p.37.

Living just south of the Danish border and speaking (or at least understanding) Swedish and Norwegian quite well, I was told that Danes understand most spoken Danish from different regions as broken Danish, if they understand each other at all... In those pan-Scandinavian Christmas crime TV series, the spoken Danish usually was quite intelligible. Encounters with people speaking Danish with one another were totally different. One I'll have to check out. I've been lamenting the documented incompetence on the RQ character sheets for quite a while. I always envied the Nordic rpg hobby - they got DoD two years before German language roleplaying lifted off, and they got a BRP based fantasy rpg rather than the Dark Eye. Unfortunately, it wasn't until the coming of the nineties that my Swedish was sufficient to read those.

Dream dragons are more than mere illusions, they are detached pieces of emotion that have an awareness no ordinary illusion has. All advances are accompanied by the Trickster, but this (ritual?) splitting of the brain may be an ancient draconic initiation rite. Some ritual mutilation is common, and mere tattooing or scarification may be insufficient to awaken the ability to think in harmonies. You might as well blame Eurmal for the troll ritual of Rebirth, which is a way to pickle volunteers as especially spicy food for all the (many!) failures.

At this point the keets squawk in outrage that the parrot people of Forng aren't and never were Keets! Why, they don't have any remnants of webbing in their feet! Wouldn't it then have been called "Drakeland"? Having their homeland named after geese is just another symptom of the malady (mallardy?) that the durulz suffer. And how would that differ from your (duck's) opinion on humans in general? Just imagine a late 19th century anthropologist entering your hometown with phrenology calipers and an unshakable air of cultural superiority... of course you would loathe them, especially once they start digging up some of your dead kin (or killing some of your live kin) to take back sample skulls to their institutes for research. Luckily, LM doesn't insist too much on the moustache, and will take the chin beard which may affect only the lower half of the beak.

It would drive the Eurmali crazy as a (true) dragon's mere presence destroys any illusion...

If the tranced archer (who acted like Paris in the raid on the Greek camp, or like Legolas against the Mumakil) runs out of arrows, I would have her dodge towards the closest source of arrows, pulling them out of the ground or out of victims (with no thoughts spared on gentleness) and keep releasing them. Arrow retrieval skill rises with archery experience. While you may miss less, you'll get more of an eye where that miss went. And unless you fire your arrows on highly ballistic curves, they will disappear into less hard ground or below the weed layer very easily. I'd allow casting "Detect Bronze" or "Detect Flint" to find arrows while under Arrow Trance.

There is no "just" way of handling this. Using division harms the party with the high skill value unproportionally, while using substraction cripples the party with the low skill value. (As we are talking RuneQuest, cripples as in limbs will fly.) You could create math that provides a middle way, but that would probably exceed most peoples' unaided numeracy. Substraction is the easier math.

This method breaks down when the skill is better than 100%. This doesn't happen in combat due to that (horribly non-scaling) deduction from the opponent's parry or attack, but may happen in other situations, e.g. a master crafter trying to produce a superior product, or a master household manager aiming to get a superior result from the annual economy roll.

Not mutually exclusive even now, as those were Bull Shahs who may have kept or built up those bull barbarians as their strike force.

And all that outside of the Dart Competitions/Dart Wars between the major houses? From what I have seen (in the British Museum youtube videos on their collection of cuneiform letters), quite bronze age, actually.

The Lunar Way is _a_ way of Illumination, and one of its main tenets is "We All Are Us." That's quite different from other approaches, like e.g. the secrecy of the neo-Arkati sects in Ralios, or earlier Yelmic forms of Illumination. Inclusiveness and solipsism may of course be united in an Illuminate, as such quite divergent expressions of self are no longer mutually exclusive once you're illuminated. The illuminated remain an exclusive club anyway, as their experience cannot be taught or explained, at best only enabled or guided. In that regard it remains a "secret."

You'll just have to initiate them sneakily.

It may be useless for playing RQ, but as far as I am concerned, Illumination is about experiencing the Ultimate as the source of all magic and all derived existence. Any abilities that may result from Illumination is about taking out the middle men (spirits, spells, gods, runes, chaos gifts) if you survived that experience. Does this make a monster?

Can you introduce a new feat for a deity in Godtime? Apparently the God Learners could, although they probably only combined snippets or artifacts from other myths to effect that. Another case for new magic would be the Red Goddess. While Selenes were around in the Gods War, Lunes may be something new, and so are any spells summoning or commanding them.

I would have liked to see a party of hunters and spirit cult followers, at least outlined.

A nice jaw-dropper of a monster, ideally served only from a distance. As the object of a spirit cult, actually useful.

Same for the Gloranthan equivalent. You only sponsor the all-day service (purification rites for the participants, sacrifice, subsequent feast) when you want to regain rune power outside of the seasonal holy day which definitely is a full day activity with a procession, passion play or similar in addition to the aforementioned activities. You want to produce a strong magical effect, you need to put in some magic. It's a bargain, really, as the participating initiates get to restore 1D3 rune points each on a successful worship roll, or 1 point on a failed one. A congregation of 15 initiates will recover about 25 rune points, for a MP sacrifice of 150. Then get your hero worshipers to do the paperwork and accounting for you, and just spend the money. Have a follower maintain the shrine.

Yes, the standards of religious activity have slackened a lot in the last few centuries. People used to spend days in ritual purification to enter the temple grounds. Coincidentally, the Christians following the Gregorian calender are right now at day five in a forty day period of ritual purification through fasting, at least theoretically, in order to prepare for their high holy day. (Western time zones may still be at day four.) You never regained any rune points either. All you could gain was communion, possibly forgiveness , and the blessing to fortify you towards the end of the service - ritual magic done by the officiating priest or god-talker on your behalf. Page 315 offers a way to maintain a holy site through ongoing activity through the lesser rites. Something that adventurers spending time elsewhere for a week or two cannot do. That's why you want an active shrine, or a crowd of worshipers making up for your failure to do every weekly service and minor sacrifice. Or you can ignore the setting in this regard. Those are the numbers I remembered for an operational shrine or temple from RQ3. Have a look at p.284 of the RQG rules about temple size and how that plays into the refreshing of rune power points, there a shrine has a lower limit of 75 worshipers. A site can be maintained using the rules on p.315. But that means unfailingly performing the weekly services yourself (that may take a few hours).

Hoops to jump through are another word for things to do during a game session. If some of your players regard interaction with the community as Minimal Game Fun, then any kind of domestic scenario is going to be a horrible waste of adventuring time. Playing out domestic scenarios will then probably be off the table, too, so you had better play in a setting where your characters are full-time explorers or similar, forget about the annual income roll, and use the seasonal holy days to piggyback on other communities' rites to regain your rune magic. In other words, play RQG as a modified RQ2. Offbeat characters like the exiled 7M do have problems to find an operational shrine to regain their magic. I doubt there are any operational 7M shrines left in Colymar tribal lands, so the few co-religionists remaining might have to gather at Apple Lane or another such "holy place for hire" location to conduct a worship service on their seasonal holy days, or go a little farther. Compare the situation of Orlanthi stranded in Griffin Mountain - you need to do a pilgrimage to Trilus to find an operational Lightbringers worship site. Rune spells would be pretty much one-use until you do so. That sounds like would be unplayable, I cannot imagine anyone playing such a game... or does anybody have fond memories of exploring Balazar with RQ2 rules? This foreigner's dilemma is more or less built into the setting. Imagine you are playing a Grazelander brave worshiping Yelm who has joined an Orlanthi leader as a companion. Where are you going to find a shrine to Yelm? If you are lucky, some minor Yelmalio temple with a shrine to Yelm might be within three day's travel. You are not a worshiper of Yelmalio, so you have to jump through a couple of hoops to be accepted as co-religionist. You want to avoid this "being stranded" for such characters? Tamper with the character generation, create a "Loyalty: XXX temple" skill to enable this character to access his cult. Or simply define a somewhat local Earth temple to have an operational shrine. Unless you are playing a Zorak Zorani, there are few cults that don't have an association with Ernalda. Don't expect weekly services, and you might have to put some effort into maintaining seasonal ones if you need to rely on the local Ernalda cult to boost your numbers or magical energy to a level where your worship can reach the deity. Fifty people offering 2 MP each. Ten people offering 10 MP each may be sufficient. That's personal MP, not out of storage or similar. Worship as hoops to jump through? Sounds about right to me. Remember dressing up for Sunday school etc.?

And teaching IMG means that you experience the deity's action in the Godtime, possibly over and over again until you "get" the feat of the deity that corresponds to the spell. I would rather put pressure on the attendance to the service. You need 50 participants for a shrine rite, etc., who take the time for the service, or you could have participants being zealous enough to pour in way more than the required two MP, making up for defective numbers by more magic and time put into the rite. If your players can sponsor a crowd to stand with them during a weekly holy day (feasting them, etc.), they should get the rune point refill. They might attract a group of dependents if they do this more than once, with all the fun that dependents can give the evil GM. Like cleaning up after the revelers cause some kind of damage or insult, or attracting some greedy folk pressing them for what they saved having attended that feast. The poor and destitute in the clan/village/town will usually jump at the opportunity to get fed in exchange for some magical energy while no other opportunity to better their fate shows up. That's how the Seven Mothers with their soup kitchen make inroads, too. There is likely to be some no-good bunch of stickpickers hanging around as worshipers for hire (well, food and drink and alms).

Continuing the interface advice: In case of doubt, just quote the entire text and trim it down to the part you are referring to in your reply. Just delete everything that you don't refer to directly. Normally, you can cut a quoted section into two boxes by creating a new empty paragraph inside the quote box and hitting return when the cursor is placed there. Occasionally, the editor has hiccoughs when it doesn't support that. In that case, just trim, and hit the quote button again to isolate the other piece of the earlier post that you want to quote in a separate box.

The maguffin is not the explicit object of the quest when the party takes off, only proof of the existence of the holy place. A piece of masonry with inscriptions or a statue would be the expected outcome for the quest giver Daravala. See p.36 which states the objective for the adventurers. I was slightly puzzled how the item that - had its existence and location been known would have been retrieved long ago - is pushed onto the party like that. Daravala appears to have done a bit of research on old Ernaldan myths of Dragon Pass to locate that ancient temple. (I'd like to learn about her sources and connections.) And she must have connected the interior of pre-Vingkotling locations (Ernalda's house, as there are places like the kitchen represented as a location in Kerofinela) with Vingkotling and Dawn Survival ones. I know hardly any Vingkotling myths from their founding time. Any such stories would have been passed on to their descendants, and become more and more diffuse. There is little known about Korol, the (presumed, could have been his children or grandchildren) founder of Korolstead. Off the cuff, Korol was part of the four brothers' great raid into Dara Happa, his daughter became queen of part of the survivors of the Lastralgortelli after the disastrous Lastralgortelli raid, and Heort the Swift is descended from him in direct male lineage. No known domestic achievements like Ulanin's cattle raid from the giants that we learn about in the Red Cow saga. The wedding of Orlanth and Ernalda is a myth that predates the Vingkotling era significantly, and the Orlanthi population would have been the (descendants of) the followers of Orlanth on the Downland Migration from the Spike, Durevings. (The wedding of Durev and Orane is a foreshadowing of the wedding of Orlanth and Ernalda.) Now the majority of the people in the founding of the Vingkotling tribes would have been Durevings following their demigod leaders who dispersed the Vingkot bloodline through the population over a few generations. (Luckily Vingkot was a lot more fecund than Sartar, making the third and fourth generation "House of Vingkot" a lot more populous than the families of Yoristina, Saronil and Eonistaran that make up the House of Sartar.) I wonder whether the temple and the item are really only the place of the wedding of Heort and Ivarne and the props used in that Silver Age event. While there is no information on whether Heort actually lived with the Koroltes during his feats that led to the I Fought We Won battle and his rescuing Ivarne. It doesn't look like King Heort had a fixed seat of power, probably having a moving court that would visit all the Heortling towns on some irregular schedule, but an event like his wedding may have taken place at Korolstead. The Earth remembers, but it is all interconnected, and Godtime events may be "smeared" all over the map as the various scales of magnitude of the mythical landscape correlate to what remains of it after the spider collected the shards.