Joerg

That's for Vivamorti who have human (or other mortal, sentient) cultists (that also fuel the worship MP to make rune points regainable). How do Delecti's Dancers in Darkness do it?

Ninja'ed by Harald, so editing duplicate replies. Sort of. You'd be taught Heal 3 rather than "one additional point of Heal". Accumulating a range of useful and powerful spirit spells for yourself and your spirit companion is indeed one of the ways to "level up" your character, besides skill increase and (rarer, more time-consuming) characteristic increase. Learning spirit magic takes comparatively little time. While there is a handful of rune spells common to most cults, the selection of rune spells you can learn is limited by your cult's (or cults') catalogue. Spirit magic on the other hand is an open catalogue. The cults may have limited spell teaching resources, but they will make them available to lay members in good standing, too. (Bring a large enough gift and be from a neutral or better cult, and you'll be in good standing unless you or your ethnicity have some negative history with the temple.) Even less limited is the array of spells that a shaman can teach, but then the shaman can only teach you spells for which he knows the spirits. An experienced shaman may have access to a great range of spells. It might happen that he only has a "Heal 5" spell spirit and no "Heal 4" spirit at his beck and call (or he may be lying about that), so you might be forced to learn the higher version to be able to cast the lesser effect. Small temples might have a similar problem. True. "We hold these truths to be self-evident", you might say, meaning we might fail to point it out to a new player. Keep asking.

When it comes to fighting women, agreed. A woman strong in the fertility rune will probably be better at wetnursing than a female dedicated to death. But I also mentioned adventuring fertility priestesses - admittedly not likely to be of vingan gender - who are a lot more likely to take their infants along on a journey. If a warrior woman has a battle-born child, someone has to do the nursing, and that someone needs to have given birth recently. Not the most likely find while away on adventuring, so even a vingan gender mother might find herself in the situation to tag a nursing infant along.

Yes. Although without a vampire body, he lacks most of the regular vampire traits. He doesn't seem to have any need to drain blood (or souls) for his magics. He does require recently slain corpses to raise his undead armies, and that process appears to draw on the life force they lost in dying, or perhaps on the onset of decay in their corpses. It is a power stolen from Zorak Zoran and amplified to crazy dimensions. When he receives sacrifices to join his service as new undead, His ability to jump corpses means that he doesn't need to take many precautions to save his body as long as suitable dead bodies are available to jump into. He might run an ice house for maintaining especially promising bodies, and at worst a herd of donors to be killed whenever he desires a new physical shell. Ideally by Steal Breath or a similar Tap spell that doesn't alter anything about the future corpse that matters to Delecti. Besides that, he does appear to use sorcerous techniques to create special undead. His run-of-the mill zombies are the ZZ variety of identity-less shamblers that have at best herd-man awareness to follow orders (and whose orders to follow). I wonder whether they are Vivamorti. They do have the bite attack and the blood drain to increase their hit points, but they don't appear to have any Vivamorti lore, and they don't appear to have the ability to reproduce by converting victims into one of their kind. They seem to rely on Delecti to replenish and expand their numbers, and they worship him as an incarnation of Nontraya the Taker and Waster. Unlike their masters, the Dancers don't appear to suffer from decay, or if they do, they don't turn up as dancers any more. The Dancers don't appear to retain any personal runes from a potential previous human existence. All of them are of a beautiful appearance (at least to human observers, human traits of beauty may be lost on newtlings, ducks, tusk riders or minotaurs). There are a few subtle differences between Dancers and Vivamorti. The Dancers react already to the presentation of a Death Rune with a damage equivalent to Disruption, and that is damage which they cannot regenerate (in smoke form, I suppose - drinking blood should remove that damage, otherwise your average Dancer would be minus a few hit points in 1D6 hit locations). Vivamorti vampires must be touched by the rune to take that kind of damage, but forcefully displaing the rune to them will make them want to shy away. Dancers lack the beast forms of Vivamorti - no bat or wolf shape. And likely no jewelry in that style, either... The Enthrall ability appears to be the same for Dancers and Vivamorti, although the details for it are only found in the Vivamorti entry. Dancers lack the Darkness rune. (Is that why they are called Dancers in Darkness rather than Dancers of Darkness? Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes calls them Dancers of Darkness) Delecti's means of recruiting or creating the Dancers remain unknown - for all we know, he might father them onto his captured nymph. But then: If Delecti recruits future Dancers through seduction, he might have to maintain a small harem of apprentice dancers before he could transform them. The Vivamorti certainly maintain a cult (or maybe herd) of living lay members and initiates who donate magic points and blood on a regular basis to their cult masters. The initiates probably get their personal runes changed into the cult runes upon initiation? Sartarite women aren't usually pale skinned. (Slanders about their beauty are a different topic...) They also appear to wear highly visible tattoos in their faces, something none of the Dancer pictures (WF15, Bestiary, S:KoH p.234) shows (the upper right one wears a band on her left arm that might be a tattoo, but the lower right one wears a band of some material there, so I assume the other is wearing an item of clothing or jewelry there, too). They are undead, however. In S:KoH they communicate in Auld Wyrmish, suggesting great age or intense training by Delecti. I don't recall any notice to that regard. Nobody is nagging, but it would be nice to have. IMO yes. Or at least different from the minion cult as presented in Cults of Terror. To me, the question is whether Nontraya is dominantly a vampire tradition, or is his cult a general form of identity-keeping greater undead and their minions which may include vampiric entities like the Dancers in Darkness. I still don't see Delecti as a vampire, given his corpse-jumping existence. It is unclear whether original lieutenants of Nontraya are regarded as vampires or whether as vampiric underworld demons. They probably had Vadeli magics in addition to the vampire powers they gained from the dark border of Illumination. (The Rokari might have this Vadeli portion of their heritage, too.) Both wolf and bat are associated with Death - Telmor ate the sun, the Bat helped slay the Emperor, and vampire bats are a clear manifestation of vampirism. Both are (now) associated with Chaos - not necessarily, but at least tainted, and in the extremes (Crimson Bat, Chaos Wolf). Let me ask a bit heretically how the wyter - an entity unable to regenerate Magic Points, whose (in the end drained) POW only marks the upper limit of their MP reservoir, and which relies on a select group of supporters - might be seen as a vampiric entity.

Any adventuring female with children would usually leave them with the other women of her (or rather her child's) household, even fertility priestesses. While nursing, she might carry them along on journeys that aren't clearly adventure expeditions, e.g. when visiting the off-household side of the family (could be her own childhood clan or the in-laws if the partner moved into her clan). While there are households that resemble a modern core family, most Orlanthi households will be multi-generational, and often several couples (siblins, first cousins) sharing a hearth. Childcare of weaned children up to the middle primary school age is the task of the hearth, not the individual mother. In fact, quiite often it will be the task of a grandmother or grandaunt who may call in the assitance of other women busy around the hearth, or one of the mothers doing the day care for the lot of the stead. Even the sleeping arrangements may put all the children of this age group together onto one big wide piece of bedding. As the children graduate to pre-apprenticehood - accompanying the various workers on and off the stead to assimilate the skills needed for those duty - the mothers may become even less involved in raising the children, and the males take a greater share in tutoring the stead's next generation. In an urban environment with smaller family units, a female servant of the household may step in if no blood kin is available. Long established families will have a sufficient range of kinswomen to provide at least a kinswoman in an overseer position. Many young vingan-gendered women (women choosing some typically male life-style which will lead them mostly off-hearth, like warrior, hunter) are fairly likely to remain unwed. Without a husband's or wife's stead to choose, their children will be raised by the women of her birth stead. In case of a married Vingan having given birth to a child, her marriage stead's females are likely to look after the child.

True. Quite a few of us who are complaining about how Mongoose presented the world they had licensed like to think of ourselves not just as fans of Greg Stafford but as friends of Greg, and that makes the disregard displayed in the production something personal. The Glorantha Tribe is a network of people who have met on many an occasion, often in Leicester or at Castle Stahleck on the Rhine, at Chateau de Buoux and in recent years also at Schloss Neuhausen, and at the game fairs/general conventions like Gencon or Essen Spiel. And numerous other places which I haven't had the chance to visit. Sure. But you don't start preaching in Latin in a Southern Baptist church, do you? We have a forum for the Mongoose incarnations of RQ, and apparently that's the place to discuss the merits of that system even when comparing it to RQG, or discussing Glorantha in that context. If some people prefer not to step into such discussions, fine. "I've seen this in MRQ products, and I think it might work in RQG" is actually a good way of probing the waters. Jeff seems to prefer this forum to deal with the current editions of RQ (G and classic), so I guess we can use the Legend forum (which doesn't see that much activity) to discuss such things, and everybody will be happy. If you think a rule or method would work with RQG there is no problem presenting this as house rule presentation or as a home-made cult adaptation for RQG. People are trying...

I prefer Glorantha over Gloranthish every day. I've had my own wild deviations, which, while interesting to pursue at the time, in the end were based on misleads rather than leads. I really don't see value in taking a rich, interrelated setting, then sever all these interlinks for the ease of telling a story that doesn't quite fit the setting. Why start with the real setting in the first place, and not use some pastiche that has all the elements but none of the depth? Some settings have premises that contradict their promise to me. The Second Age book was one such setting. If I want some unrelated setting using Gloranthan names, I can watch Star Trek. To be fair, the book was written true to the sum of published Glorantha knowledge from about 17 years prior to its publication date, sprinkled with a selection of names dropped from a fact sheet given to the publishers. Now I happen to enjoy a lot of the stuff that had been developed in the intervening 17 years, and I don't want to miss that. The EWF is a phenomenon that got my curiosity since I first saw its mention in Dragon Pass. Seeing its treatment built on misleading details that weren't that well formulated all that time ago is fairly damaging to suspension of disbelief, and thereby enjoyment. To say it with Gary Oldman's character in the Fifth Element, I was disappointed. Still am. So: I really don't see value in bowdlerizing Glorantha's publishing history. Different focus, different values.

Did they even have any formal structure back then? Their common experience was "I Fought, We Won", discovering the sum of something greater than themselves on their own and alone (and greater than their people's previous success over Wakboth's invasion that had failed to open the Dara Happan dome roof before meeting their joint forces, and which let itself be deflected eastward, to face Genert and his host). After I Fought We Won, there were other, important things to be done, like unfreezing his (future) wife, separating the dead from the living, and sending them to their rest (or at least sufficiently strong holding pens). Neither the Only Old One nor Heort himself were given as council delegates.

You mean other than the Wildcards anthologies by George R.R. Martin and his Superworld gaming group? The webcomic GRRL Power has a number of fairly fragile characters, especially in their intelligence branch. Lethality mainly on the side of the villains, so far, though. While more of a steampunky Mad Scientist setting, the web comic Girl Genius is quite generous with lethality. There are other webcomics in the Supers genre, at many power levels. Supers are not quite my genre, and quite a few are behind a paywall, but there should be some rich choice out there.

I wrote that before actually looking at the MRQ1 pdf bundle. The flaws in the rules execution would have been tolerable for an original setting dedicated to these conditions for magic. Yes, it used the Gloranthan runes... so did I for my Viking-inspired RQ3 fantasy setting (basically, the runes were present as constellations, with Storm a bunch of stars falling around a nearby massive black Hole, and Chaos a dwarf planet-sized comet on a highly ecliptic orbit). I noticed the marked increase in canonicity in those products, but how did you deal with the basically flawed premise on the EWF that you were dealt by the 2nd Age book? By the time of Dara Happa Stirs for MRQ2, we get the Third Council with IsgangDrang and the other known Dragonfriends of the era, and of course the history of Obduran demonstrating the compatibility of Orlanth worship and draconic mysticism (at least at that time), and if there still was a senile Vistikos overseeing the Great Dragon experiment, that wasn't all-important any more. The second edition of the Glorantha Book did get a good update that agreed with Greg's material (now published in History of the Heortling Peoples) at least in the history section. I guess we have to thank you for that re-write? How much time (and space) were you allotted for that? The Vistikos stuff did remain in, but with the correct rulers named in the history section, at least you could produce the subsequent works like Dara Happa Stirs. I missed most of your efforts at the time. There was a Second Age Glorantha community, but it had few links to the HeroQuest-dominated Third Age community. (And I would probably have come across as a troll. Not the uz kind.) Still, there remained quite a bit of material based on flawed assumptions, and the dates in History of the Heortling Peoples required quite pointed attention to detail to get e.g. the role of Tharkantus right, or the non-EWF Orlanthland leadership. Your fix worked to jumpstart the chosen period of play into the right directions, but it left the history and the bitterness in the rise of the dragonfriends against the traditionalists in the dark. Of at best secondary importance for the game line, so commercially of no interest at all to Mongoose. The more or less non-treatment of Greg's suggestions at drama and action for the Clanking City remains a shame. The plunder of Lylket could have made a great uz scenario, and a side quest. Preliminary warfare ravaging southern Heortland could have made a great community survival game. There were a number of other interesting hotspots which would have deserved attention. The collapse of the Umathelan university cities due to Closing and riots. Godunya's story. The naval campaigns in the east. Melib and Teshnos, and the Red Sword Saga. Valkaro. And a pity that the Six-legged adventure had already faltered by the chosen setting date, Ivy Kang's war could have been another great campaign.

I don't think that Theyalan gender considerations are anywhere except within their own marriage range. Cross-species marriages do occur for ritual reasons, and in exceptional cases may have offspring, but that more or less requires these separate species to participate in the same system of social reference. There are rather few "pick from all species" rings or organisations (read: few if any Fellowships of the Ring). The Unity Council was the great exception. (It just dawned on me what great influence the Heortlings had on the Theyalans despite not being represented on that ring: the Unity Council is an Orlanthi ring, and while it may have given itself a different internal structure (like not having a chieftain but seven co-equal ring members, except in matters of certain expertise, like war) than the usual Orlanthi ring, it seems to adhered to its rites. The kingless ruling ring of Orlanthland appears to have used the same structure.) There are a few Heortling rings that may have the occasional or permanent non-human on them - the priesthood of Pavis has the (half-)dwarf Ginkizzie, Sartar High Council of 1613 had the durulz Jonathan Greenbeak. The Daughters of Pavis are (or have become) completely ungendered, with the (finally complete again) 1613-1621 complement having a single female among them (plus whatever Ginkizzie is). There aren't that many places where different species co-exist. Some of the Holy Country ports have a more or less permanent Ludoch presence (Seapolis, Nochet, City of Wonders), a small number of cities has full troll communities (Nochet, Boldhome, greater Pavis, possibly some more Esrolian cities) rather than a few individual resident traders/resident mercenary agents/bodyguards/transient mercenaries, and a few cities have more than a handful of duck families or individuals alongside humans. The continued duck presence in Apple Lane is quite exceptional for a place of that size. (They might have a "monkeys on Gibraltar" problem there...) Newtlings don't really share many communities with humans, other than river or sea cults like Zola Fel or Choralinthor, or possibly human (Pelaskite) worshipers of Amphibos the Wanderer. Other than the Unity Council and the Kralori empire, I have no example for an organisation where the dragonewts are part of a community with other (non-draconic) species. Even in the EWF they appear to have remained mostly apart from the human antics. Dragonewt sex may be quite different from the binary (ok, four stages, yes or no for both male and female in all combinations) choices for humans, but then the contribution of the various stages may be spiritual rather than bodily to engender the new clutch of eggs. Propagation among neuters, except for the dragon-form participant laying the eggs. There's even the possibility that the eggs of all the unfinished newts are used up in the process to create a (much higher) number of new eggs.

But then Jar-eel will probably have gifts that raised those maxima, too, or give her an effective multiplier to some of those characteristics.

The reason to go to Dorastor after the liberation might be to notify your kinsfolk there of the possibilty to return, only to find them honor-bound to solve the problems of the Riskland campaign, and yourself embroiled in this. (Provided you have no duties in a certain hamlet to fulfill...) What exactly is the time-stamp of the Paulis Longvale stories (in Cults of Terror)? The Guide says it starts in 1623 (p.344), but how long does this campaign stretch? You might be able to stretch them out long enough to ride on some of those events.

Not necessarily. An alternative would be that the wyter object is destroyed, and that survivors who failed to participate in the mission can re-summon it and build up the regiment again. The Lunar "vexillum" alternative wyters offer another solution to this. Yes. But then, just because the wyter is destroyed doesn't mean that the pre-existing entity who took on the duty of the wyter is destroyed in the afterlife. Still, my proposal of destroying the wyter object to allow a recovery of the wyter by absent friends sounds like a reasonable way to deal with this. BTW, this is not my idea, it is the concept behind David Gemmell's Order of the Thirty in the Drenai series, a group of suicidal warrior mystics quite similar to a magical regiment of the Sartar Magical Union or the Imperial College of Magic.

I'll stick to my initial judgement, I think. Full of ideas, no fact-checking for consistency with canon, sloppy editing. Illustrations on a semi-professional level, with occasional abysmal aberrations like e.g. the small image of "Lodril" in 16th century garb holding one spear in one hand and two in the other, in the cults book. And not actually cheaper than RQG so far, despite considerable differences in production quality. A decent variation of the generic RuneQuest rules with a cute but non-Gloranthan idea how to bring runes into magic. A weird "memorized divine magic lowers your effective POW!" rule that goes against any previous forms of how RQ handled that. Sorcery without obligatory familiars (as expression of the sorcerous "spiritual organ". A system to raid the hero planes that may be related to insider heroquesting by usurping the same jump-off sites (though obviously at less fortunate times, or the home religion would be there holding a rite - I wonder how the authors could miss that error in their correspondence magic) and abusing the myths normally maintained there. That's because "there is a product with RQ on it that says X, therefore X must be true in RQG, too". I am content to show the flaws around those statements, to acknowledge the more creative deviations, and to point out that it is a good try at an alternate Glorantha, but not a serious try to write for a Glorantha consistent with the presentation it has accumulated. The Second Age Book is probably largely consistent with published Glorantha information up to Elder Secrets of Glorantha and a few of Greg's preparatory notes given to Mongoose. The misplaced locations are ones not shown correctly on any map. If that is your jump-off point for your involvement of Glorantha and you don't care much about more recent additions or clarifications, then you will have none of my "this is sooo wrong" reactions. It's like Bobby Ewing remains dead and gone in Dallas (or for a more recent popular phenomenon, the Blood Wedding never happened in Game of Thrones). You'll have to accept that new publications will follow a different continuity, and in case of the presentation of the Malkioni (and more recently the Morokanth), you will have to live with a continuity break that may be much weaker than the different conclusions you drew on the earlier presentations. I just stumbled over a few of my digest posts from 1994, about initiation, Iron Age Glorantha, Malkionism, Elmal... stuff that was debated here on the forum in the last few weeks or months. The stuff where I was wrong (given today's knowledge) usually was based on reasonable but false assumptions. Some of that different knowledge may have come into existence by refuting those ideas. Currently I don't have them. They simplify some things and make other things more complicated. To me, the character sheet of RQG has way too many "you can't do this/you don't have any reasonable chance in hell to do this" entries in the skills and weapon list. I would be a lot happier to see broader skills, from which you can take narrower specialisations, and possibly narrower specific ineptitudes, too. I am actively unhappy with the "opposed powers add up to 100%" rule, and at the very least I am inclined to add a rule that Illumination allows you an overlap of those abilities that totals up to no more than your illumination/enlightenment/whatever score, so that an illuminated rune lord of Yelm could have both Life and Death above 50%. Or a divine gift that you can use your cult's power rune at 20% above your personality score - another way to de-degrade those power rune-based cults.

That's why I put it in front, yes. First impressions are important. Mine were from playing the Dragon Pass boardgame, and playing a whacky scenario which put us in a fight against ducks on a boathouse (pretty much like the one in the Leatherstocking TV production about the abducted girls) where they had all the terrain advantage. Pretty exasperating... So I got drawn in by the big magical battles, rebels vs empire. Not quite. I had the chance to play one of several Wolf Pirates with Loz as GM using MRQ2, and it was a fun experience, with the rules alterations vs. RQ3 not that big a deal and the new combat options fairly nice. I have its successor RQ6 (which became Mythras) in both English and German. I genuinely enjoyed reading my way through Dara Happa Stirs. The Mongoose stamp doesn't have to mean that the content is off-course. Oh, I am perfectly fine if there are whacky versions of Glorantha which has Elmer Fudd as Gringle. The problem I have is when a setting like that is marketed as "This is Glorantha" rather than "This is our idea of Glorantha". There have been other attempts at describing official Glorantha that I have been thoroughly unhappy with, and others that managed to irk me enough to keep grumbling about them. What I don't quite understand about 2nd Age is how following the God learner timeline for Jrustela and the God Learner phenomenon as a whole could accept the starting date for the movement in the middle of the 7th century and the rise of heroquesting in the middle of the eighth, but still insist that it was from God Learner activity that draconic speech emanated from Esrolia into Dragon Pass. The God Learners needed Arkat's secrets to discover the Other Side of non-Malkioni, so how would they have been able to influence events 170 years before the fall of the Autarchy with such heroquesting and knowlede theft? More important would be the enhanced pieces of armor. The rules are unclear, however. If an enhancement requires step 3 in quality improvement, does this allow another step 2 improvement and a step one improvement on the side, or does it block all three slots? Perhaps that's the one point where a clear canonical statement about the mass produced bladesharp 1 swords of the Machine City should preclude your run-of-the-mill Gloranthan enchanter from producing this. The source is a caption for a rather mediocre illustration - from memory either in the RQ3 Genertela Box Glorantha Book in the Second Age history or RQ3 Elder Secrets Secret Lands section near the Clanking Ruins entry. Nothing wrong with the generic MRQ1 rules offering such enchantments as an option for other settings, mind you, but just because something is in the generic rules doesn't mean that it has to apply to each and every setting where these rules get to be used. There is no setting reason for making this a case of individual rolls, although I notice that David Scott used a very similar take on Discorporation of assistant shamans in his narrative how a shaman might learn a new shamanic ability. Personally, with the rules offering of MRQ1 I would use a reverse team roll mechanism for the heroquesting party if they have formed the equivalent of a hero band, i.e. created (and initiated or at least significantly sacrificed to) a hero band wyter, or a loaned wyter received through an "Arming of <Protagonist>" preliminary rite. Cult lore or perhaps specific myth instruction lore can be upped a lot by sticking to a narrowly defined role in the "Arming of" rite. The lead quester(s) receive all manner of ritual items, and each item may be represented by an individual or even a group of suitably uniform assistant questers, and their performance in this also gives them an edge for interactions on the heroquest involving this activity. Thus, when Orlanth receives his sword Deathbringer, that's how to include Humakti or Telmori bodyguards into the ablative meat team of questers. From what I read elsewhere (possibly in MRQ products) on Jrusteli heroquesting, ablative meat heroquesting was part of the God Learner method of exploitative heroquesting. That would explain the insane numbers of heroquesters produced by the universities of Umathela in the mere 150 years before riots destroyed them - after the Closing, but long before the destructions of Old Seshnela, Old Maniria and Jrustela. Runes and Battle Magic haven't been linked in RQG. Given the terminology in RQ2, I find it surprising that the commonly available Battle Magic of the previously available magic systems ended up being the one tied to the runes. On the whole, the rules for the Blood of the Gods in the shape of magical crystals has been established at least since the Bertalor article in Elder Secrets, although the live and dead crystals of the Gods had been quite ubiquitious in RQ2 NPC and plunder descriptions. RQ3 re-introduced them rather late, and they didn't catch on much in the RQ Renaissance NPC and plunder descriptions, IIRC. So integration of physical runes as per MRQ1 would be attuning live Crystals of the Gods when it comes to physical objects. For the other side of a person somehow aquiring a rune there is RQG's use of the runes as personality traits or as sorcerously mastered knowledge. Either could be a form of heroquest award. Especially the element runes of powerful heroes could have impressive percentiles, beyond 100. Such values might be necessary to offset hostile environments. There used to be mention of a technique in Hero Wars and possibly HeroQuest 1 about integration of spirits to acquire those abilities - IIRC related to Kralorela (possibly eastern Hsunchen) or Sheng Seleris. Now, with elementals we have one type of runic spirit entities, and healing spirits might be considered Harmony spirits. To recap: the generic parts of the MRQ rules covering "the world" issues aren't terrible at all. Whether and how much you want to simulate this is part of personal and party preferences - there are players who thrive on empire-building in their rpgs, and the MRQ rules offer many a tool (and indeed splat book) to play that. RQ3 tried that with the Monster Coliseum, and didn't succeed so well. The addition of 50 pages of a gladiator-themed game in a Lunar place - why not Furthest or Mirins Cross so you can use Orlanthi and Seven Mothers - would have made all that generic bling into useful background for Glorantha, while still offering enough gaming for people playing elsewhere, and a Dart Competition campaign could have been built off that. (Yeah, AH era RQ3 had its less useful bits, too. The AH reprint of Midkemia Press "Cities" on the other hand was just the preservation of timeless roleplaying gold.) The Ship rules are a continuation of the RQ3 sailing and vessel rules. I haven't gone into detail, but the RQ3 rules (which I did use in earnest, given my Viking themed backstory) work sufficiently well, so I don't expect the MRQ rules to do a significantly worse job. No points for innovation there, though. The rules for invasive heroquesting using enemy sites look fair, but they disregard the community effect that regular Gloranthan heroquesting is about. Not even Jar-eel inserting herself into the Holy Country magic or Hon-eel entering the Tarshite Earth rites use such methods. Acceptable for God Learner brute force methods, but that's it. Looking at the MRQ product line which showed some serious lack in that department already just skimming through the basic rules book, I wonder how much Jason Durall is bogged down with rulesy consistency checking, and whether he has volunteer or professional aides. Gloranthan fact checking is another criterion, and the one where the MRQ line made the IMO bad decision to keep creating Gloranthish rather than Gloranthan products for sake of their rapid-fire publication strategy. Parts of the Glorantha audience can be extremely nit-picky. (Look who's talking...) Allowing the authors to follow their fancies did result in a number of unusual-awesome concepts that would be totally fine in stand-alone products or less developed settings. I still wonder how animated metal plated skeletons become living machines. The Clanking City book used the material offered by Greg in History of the Heortling Peoples. With the chief Zistorite described as "to a great part a machine", why aren't the living lesser instances of Zistor cyborgs? The Machine Wars could have been flying magicians vs. Battletech. Avatar was published only in 2009, so dragon riders vs. robots would have been fresh and original at the time of publication. And Mongoose could have continued with Machine War episode books sufficiently similar to Avatar to appeal to that fandom without having to pay much if any additional royalties, having clear evidence for prior publication.

I wonder whether there is either some suppressed magic for Alkothi to turn into Shadzoring Hell denizens or otherwise some ritual marking to transform them symbolically into these Zorani entities. Unlike mainstream Zorak Zoran, it is possible that their body modification to a normal Darkness Man Rune entity wasn't burning but flaying, similar to the Bat that at least according to one story used to be of a slightly darker (and bluer) color before Arkat overcame and flayed it during the Gbaji Wars. No idea whether it would have been nearly as chaotic and glowing as it is today, and whether its hunger was as chaotic as it is now. There are other such Zorani entities. Lodril as Monster Man, Deshkorgos, shares many such attributes. And maybe that's the explanation why the Pamaltelan cognate of Lodril is associated to the Red Planet. But the very least modification I expect from Shargashi is some form of Third Eye and a few lines indicating a skull face, a hell denizen face, or both. Scarification ritually exaggerated by cremation ashes would work for me. Possibly scarification through selective flensing. An accident with a concrete surface left an almost Harry Potter-like area of discolored (unpigmented, often sun-burned) skin on my brow. Shargashi might do this ritually - at first displaying the raw, bleeding wound (which does give a really gruesome appearance), then leaving these indelible lines of reduced pigmentation.

I think I'd better make this a new thread. Over on the Help me sell RQG to my players thread I asked Could you point those out, please? They didn't scream out to me between the things that were, in your words, stuffed up badly. When MRQ appeared, I had been happily soaking up a wealth of new Glorantha material for HeroQuest and the Stafford Library, could go on with my localized world building and campaign exchange, and felt I had what I wanted to play in Sartar (which neither RQ2 nor RQ3 ever delivered beyond Apple Lane), and still had my own distillation of RQ3.5 with many of the refinements procured on the digest and from the AiG project, so I didn't feel in a rush to invest my rather sparse money at the time into that second line that promised to be Glorantha material. For those of you who appreciated the MRQ Second Age line, what was your previous exposure to RQ and Glorantha? So I have looked through my archives, and I found the bundle containing the MRQ1 rules. Skimming through them right now. Runes... enough has been said. Cults... The Storm King (and his worshipers) as presented in the rules book has thankfully little to do with the cult of Orlanth. The Brotherhood of Mithras, Childers of Hama-Dreth - yay, generic RuneQuest. (Though it has to be said that any game in the historical period that knew Mithraism in Europe has a lot of sympathy from me, thanks to works like Rosemary Sutcliffe's The Eagle of the Ninth Legion or Poul Anderson's King of Ys series. Long before The Design Mechanism renamed their RuneQuest game to Mythras, too.) Usable as Fate Points, or can be saved up to buy Legendary Abilities. On average you were supposed to earn 2 per session, and if you spent half of those as fate points, you'd take 12 sessions or so to reach the hero point cost for rune level rank prerequisite Legendary Skill. You'd still have to learn the other, specific skills. My original decision to go for RuneQuest rather than continue with my previous system of five years of intense campaigning and various offshoot campaigns in other corners of the world run by other folk from my gaming group was because I could get rid of experience points and silly training cost only recoverable by economy-breaking (and back-breaking) influx of ancient riches. This low amount of points is tolerable, but not desirable to me. I had vastly expanded and modified the setting originally coming with the game, leaving the original concepts and local geographies just sufficiently intact to be able to use any material produced by the publisher of that game or its supporters (which came in a semi-professional gaming magazine) for a new setting designed for the rules-set at hand (with some additions in the style of the BGB) inheriting from Viking Age Europe and fantasy versions of other real world areas, some of my favourite fantasy literature at that time re-skinned, and the concepts from Glorantha also re-skinned to my overall world (and universe) history and myth. WIth that background in my use of RQ, I'll try to give a fair assesment of the rules as they come, and not just why they don't feel Gloranthan. Ok concept. You can accumulate them (unlike the One Unique Thing of 13th Age) and create Greater Than Life characters while still playing BRP. As requirement for Rune Level - ok, if you have them anyway, why not. This leads to Super-RuneQuest at manageable percentages as you start again in the 30% range for these skills. Divide modified crafting roll by 2, 4, 8, 16 or 32 to achieve a Greater, Exquisite, Marvellous, Surpassing, or Heroic weapon. Another outlet for Super-RuneQuest abilities offering another avenue for the arms race. Sure, why not, if you like a worker placement/resource management game within your roleplaying campaign, or possibly even vice versa. I'd probably be willing to try this out, and the equivalent of Wayland or Ilmarinen is known in past Glorantha (e.g. Sestarto, Panaxles), so why not in the Hero Wars? As with the Alchemy skill, this kind of production chain may be interesting for people who admire Wallenstein and want to re-create his rise in the 30 years war as one of the units or minor factions in the Hero Wars. E.g. Goldgotti, or maybe the Free Philosophers. Or more likely, somewhere in Ralios. I wouldn't say no to a supplement that deals with the details of such economic processes in Glorantha, but I'd rather see RQG provide more directly gameable stuff for the Hero Wars activities foreshadowed in King of Sartar and the Guide. Something a licensee of Chaosium might produce. An easy way to get a permanent Bladesharp 6 weapon. And to equip the opposition with such tools of dismembering characters, so that for the price of an arm and a leg you can save the POW to enchant them. Yay. Good for a setting that has mass-produced magical swords without the flaw that they only work in the magical field of the magical city that produced them. That setting is not Second Age Glorantha, though. Yes, I am very fond of the setting design realism that was written in the Gamemaster's Book for RQ3, and the makers of MRQ obviously were, too. Their generic splatbooks probably expand on this. I have to say, presented with a setting designed for these rules, this magic concept would probably make an excellent game with some serious proof-reading and original setting design. But then, you'll probably have to go out of your way to turn BRP into something unplayable. Finding the rules for Heroquesting has eluded me so far (checked the MRQ1 rules, the Glorantha 2nd Age Book, skipped the Spell Book and had a look at the Companion). Details on Dragon Magic and specific God Learner stuff is hidden in later supplements, too. The Glorantha book never fails to shock me again and again with its inattention to well-documented sources (and well-indexed, at the time of writing, even if I say so myself). As much as I admire Robin Laws and his approach to writing rpgs and supplements (the first person narrative for the cultures is one of those touches which show his mastery), his research into Gloranthan lore for this book appears to have been a text marker in the Genertela Box and some of the pieces procured by Greg for the Mongoose authors, and writing the rest from inspiration rather than checking the written sources or consulting Greg or someone deputized by Greg. Since History of the Heortling Peoples was published in 2007, I am fairly certain that the data collection was available to the authors of MRQ. Perhaps too late for Robin to change his version of the EWF, given the timeline in this book, but there was a functional index online with the earlier mentions of Obduran. The color illustrations inside this book (apart from the maps, which are nice and fairly accurate where based on published versions of Greg's maps, and ... inspired rather than factual in other places, like e.g. Brithos) look like they were made for Settlers of Catan rather than Glorantha. Those in the rules book remind me more of the Warhammer Fantasy setting than of Glorantha. I don't take exception at the churchy bit for Malkionism - that was the doctrine at this time, as present in HQ1 as in MRQ, alongside the strict separation of the Otherworlds. A lot of that is present in Middle Sea Empire, and somewhat less of the churchy stuff but even more of the separate worlds in Revealed Mythologies. I advocated de-medievalizing the chivalrous West already on the RQ-Daily, suggesting Roman (Western) Empire parallels instead, with Viking Age forms of knights as the pinnacle of armor technology. Still too medieval for a brand identity when Arthurian late Roman period has been occupied with 17tj century chivalry in popular fantastic history, so good bye to chainmail, hi to bronze-scaled linothorax since we got the Guide. Fine with me, as long as we get some Ernaldan specific magic for flax and linseed farming, and possibly some tribes or Esrolian houses famous for this product. Pelorian, too, and likewise for cotton. Ok, the page count I worked or skipped through was about that of the RQG rules book, but on the whole, RQG has delivered about as much in the terms of rules and setting info as MRQ did with its first four books, at about the same price. GaGoG and the GM book appear to be mostly out of the writing phase and passing on into the "special effects" phase where the magic of copy editing, art acquisition and layout happen. That's how we got Hero Wars and the entire rebuilding of Glorantha as a commercially viable setting, so I don't disagree. But consistently putting out subpar production value in terms of basic quality standards like consistent use of game jargon terms doesn't really keep a game line alive. Ok, found in book 7 of the MRQ 1 bundle I have. This seems to be written from the Jrusteli "let's enter some other peoples' myth with as minimal knowledge as the players possess and stumble our way along." So yes, it has rules that make sense in the God Learner context, and the myths as a menu of plunder targets. The rules fail to even mention the community aspects of heroquesting, other than frequency of the ritual use of a site. So yes, there are rules for a type of breaking and entering the Hero Planes. Rules which (as written) are bound to break up your party into people who made it across and people who must remain behind. Talk about splitting the party, hard. Currently, freeforming heroquests using the examples in Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes with the community stakes and consequences would be a better approach than following that first edition MRQ method. So yes, house rules it is, as far as RQ is concerned. Yet. When RQG Heroquesting rules come out, I trust we will at least find mis-spellings of Eurmal inconsistent and intentional rather than just sloppy.

http://yetisports.org/ ?

is slightly ironic, given that Chaosium has had products "coming" for decades, and now doesn't even give ETAs... This isn't just my complaint, but one I've seen specifically mentioned by other lovers of the game on this very forum). Don't confuse authors' deadlines with the time it takes to put out a finished product. Imagine you have four weeks to complete a 60 pages roleplaying supplement, from the first time you hear about the project to delivering your finished text. And then the artist has had at best eight weeks for the first assignments (two weeks into the product you should have given the artist(s) all the art direction for your major illustrations) and four weeks or less for filler art to make the layout more pleasant. A serious process of editing should include at least one back and forth of the edited text to the author(s) and back to the editor, then to proof-readers (ideally doubling as fact-checkers), before even being submitted to layout. And the text going from the author to the editor had better been proof-read and ideally fact checked before going to the editor. The author can submit art direction, or, if sufficiently talented, even prototype art to go with the text. All of that is time consuming. For an example of how much effort goes into such a project to approach a minimum amount of flaws, look up Martin Helsdon's Glorantha military thread here. I have produced a few scenarios on demand, usually with a good idea what I wanted to write about and the structure of the scenario already in my mind, then taking pains to lay off the railroading. I've been on the editor's (and even lay-outer's, 1990ies hobby standards only) side of the equation for a few scenarios, too (tossed in without prior experience). There is a huge difference between creating a great scenario or even campaign arc for your own perusal, and doing so for someone who doesn't have all that background you bring into this project and who needs to be fed with the necessary information in a way that remains fun and readable. Chaosium's early "coming products" often were the consequence of Greg Stafford being a visionary game developer who shared his visions with his friends and supporters. Unfortunately, the difference between a vision and a finished product is a lot of effort by a team of people against a great number of obstacles thrown into the way. We are better off for Greg taking that visionary approach as it provided us with that crazy complex setting that is Glorantha, but from a publisher's perspective in an era of direct feedback easily causing a huge stink or shitstorm giving ETA projections that can't be met for whichever reason is problematic. One such bunch of problems which just managed to overcome most of the obstacles is Sandy Petersen's Gods War boardgame. Admittedly a project with a crazy scope and execution, but after Cthulhu Wars and the first test runs of Gods War, something within expectation of the backers. Sandy and his folk coined the term "China ready" for such kickstarter projects, and their experience in fulfilling the Gods War kickstarter has made them re-define that criterion twice. Some of the commentary of impatient backers was ... typical for internet phenomena, to say it politely. Dealing with such issues can distract from productive work. Avoiding ETAs, and instead admitting to process stage statements, is a wise policy of NuChaosium, as far as I am concerned.

Sorry about another deep plunge into grognardia. With almost the entirety of RQ2 material available again (lacking only the reprint and pdf of RQ2 Trollpak) as RQ Classic, this is relevant for both official lines published by Chaosium. RQ 2 provided Sartarite NPCs for Apple Lane and for Snake Pipe Hollow, plus exiles long away from their communities in Balazar and on the River of Cradles. While I started roleplaying just before Chaosium stopped selling their own RuneQuest material, I didn't manage to get my hands on RuneQuest before 1989, and then it was the Games Workshop edition of RuneQuest. I was aware of the game since 1985, when there was a German book by multiple authors presenting a number of game systems, RuneQuest among them. That didn't affect its availability in German shops, though. Yes, the firmly assigned rune spells were "overthrown" only with the rune power proposal by David Cheng, around 1994 or so, and the RQG rules for rune power are pretty close to my variant of that suggestion. That led to my proposal of pantheon initiation (also around 25 years ago), which I would nowadays amend to "initiation to your wyter". Since rune spell re-usability was zero for initiates (and apparently POW gain was way more reliable than in my games), these stats reflected initiates with their annual farming rune spells already cast. RQ2 did use cult membership as an identifier, so you are right, "lay member of..." indicated non-initiates. But then, all the cults that were published were mainly martial, healers, or otherwise potentially adventurous. The first mention of Barntar was in the last part of the Gods and Goddesses of Glorantha series, and where to find them was mentioned in the Holy Country overview in RuneQuest Companion. My answer to that is that is that while there were a few scenarios set in Sartar, there never was much published information on Sartar in the RQ2 era books. Apple Lane is the only RQ2 publication located in Sartar proper, and it is one of the least typical places in rural Sartar. Where is the Uleria temple in Clearwine, or the outlandish iron worker? Snake Pipe Hollow may start in northern Sartar, but is located in a chaos den. The Sazdorf ruins are located in the no mans lands on the Praxian border. The best coverage of Sartar in RuneQuest terms was in the Pavis Box. RQ3 did little to amend this. The main additional info on Sartar were the Staves of the Storm Priest and the What My Father Told Me Varmandi stuff. All of the previous editions of Chaosium-written RQ had their main focus on Prax and the Zola Fel Valley. Balazaring hunters got a better coverage than Sartarite farmers, and they had no story line in Griffin Mountain. So what are these earlier sources that have Sartarite farmers presented as lay members? Looking at the Adventure Book, we get the tenants of the Thane of Apple Lane presented on p.87. Yeah, there are two cultic affiliations mentioned, for tenant family 2, the scribes who left the service of the Jonstown library - lay members of Lhankor Mhy. Notable abilities: decent scores in Read/Write Theyalan. One thing leads to the other. Other than the fifth tenant, Kalla, all the tenants are Orlanthi. Do these farmers use Bless Crops, or is it up to the Thane or one of his followers to provide them with this magic? Interesting question, really. At least Kalla wouldn't have a good reason to have access to the Bless Crops spell. Each of the families has about an acre of tilled lands to provide them with something other than a cash crop. All of that put together would probably be covered by a point or two of Bless Crops. But then, these tenants are explicitely working the orchards, not plowing or anything. This is far outside of the normal primary production of Orlanthi farmers. Each of the families has about an acre of tilled lands to provide them with something other than a cash crop. All of that put together would probably be covered by a point or two of Bless Crops. This rather aggressive dissatisfaction of mine with the coverage of Sartar in previous Chaosium RuneQuest publications hasn't changed much in the last 25 years (and that was after I got my hands on the RQ2 era products alongside the RQ3 stuff, indexing and fine-combing them for obscure details). For all its miserable history of producing translations of RQ3 material into German, there have been two authorized (though of course not exactly canonical) publications for RuneQuest 3 set in Sartar in German language which (to my knowledge) were the most detail available in print for RuneQuest in Sartar until the publication of the RQG Adventures book. (Some of the authors of those are part of Jeff's gaming group in Berlin...) King of Sartar was our first source to tell us about the Orlanthi beyond what the Pavis Box, Genertela Box and the scenarios provided. It is the source of terms like "the Orlanthi All" (six out of seven), the prevalence of initiation, the term "wyter" and numerous other things we take for granted nowadays. It also brought us Elmal and Vinga. Nothing of that was present in the earlier sources. But King of Sartar wasn't a RuneQuest product. Any consequences drawn from King of Sartar and applied to RuneQuest were the work of fans, and never made official. (Including the RQ4-AiG playtest draft.) Hero Wars and HeroQuest 2/Glorantha have expanded vastly on the Gloranthan information for Sartar, and the coverage it has in HQG is fairly good, if limited to two hotspots (Orlmarth and Red Cow clans). Again, none of that is for RuneQuest. (HeroQuest 1 continued the Sartar Rising campaign started for Hero Wars, but didn't complete it, so we only got to the maiden voyage of the boat planet and never to the dragonrise or the battle of Dangerford.) The value of lay membership in the cults was not really made clear in RQ3. Cults and their importance were measured in number of initiates only, not in number of worshipers. RQ2 didn't have the meta-rules for temple size, agriculture etc. that the RQ3 GM book (either book 2 in the De Luxe set or the main book of the Advanced RQ box, or the GW Avanced RQ book) provided. Even RQG continues along those lines when it comes to temple defenses, only counting initiates to determine the amount of rune magic available for temple defenses. I used to interprete these meta-rules for temple size and magical power thereof along the lines that the initiation (the sacrifice of POW) creates the individual's presence in the realm of the deity the worship magic goes to, making the obligatory (and additional individual) sacrifice of personal magic (MP) of an initiate way more effective than those of mere lay members. That's why I advocated pantheon initiation for Orlanthi, based on the examples of Yelm the Youth and Aldrya's Children of the Forest, and the use and presence of the (clan and/or temple) wyter in the worship services to the deity. I would still argue for an initiatory POW sacrifice to the primary wyter(s) of the community (usually clan or urban guild, but also city god, regimental or war band wyter, rather rarely tribal wyter unless that doubles as tribal warband wyter) in order to make lay members as magically effective as initiates. The RQG rules thankfully measure temple sizes in the sum of lay members and initiates, a significant difference from RQ3, so maybe that workaround isn't required any more, but then I would see the donation of POW to the community wyter as the initiation equivalent. RuneQuest is marketed as the system where monsters and NPCs develop just like the PCs do, which is why we are having this discussion at all. The previous experience for player characters and their access to reusable magic seems to be worrying you when it comes to NPCs. The rune spells in RQG include a few rune point traps that block rune points from being regained - Bless Pregnancy, Safe and Create Market are primary examples of this. Rune Points used in Spell Trading are another such case.

Sure, How about a friendly match with rubber foam LARP swords? With helmets, no stabbing, no magic, no audience support (aka water bombs), "blade" length and number your choice, otherwise pretty much as you like it. (Did I mention that I am more than six foot five?) You need giant referees for that. (My usual role in these games...) But without penalties for when your club happens to interact with other players.

Yeah, sad face. How bad of me to ruin your game for now and all future, taking all the fun of massacring folk in bar brawls. There are other legitimate ways to beat the shit out of people related to you that you don't like very much - e.g. invite them and their friends to a "friendly" game of stick ball, aka full contact golf, as suggested by Roderick Robertson on the digest 25 years ago. Orlanthi laws are surprisingly full of holes when it comes to ritual activity. Not that the Lunar occupation laws agreed to that (the duel in Boldhome in Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes), but who cares about that. Attorneys and Accountants has been the theme of many a session around Orlanthi law suits.

Could you point those out, please? They didn't scream out to me between the things that were, in your words, stuffed up badly.

Of course, the accomplished trickster will use the Lie spell openly to spread truths, especially uncomfortable truths. It will cause those opposed Lhankor Mhy lawspeakers and Humakti oath guardians to tear their beards and bend their swords trying to disprove what the trickster said.