Pentallion

The term "Highway Robberty" was coined to describe unethical merchants.  Merchants can and DO rob customers, hence the other term, "Buyer Beware".

It's misguided, IMO, for GoG to have verbage inferring that all Issaries merchants deal honorably and honestly.  That's not seen anywhere in Glorantha supplements up to now.  Just look at the Bandits encounter in Borderlands where they sell fake treasures.  And there are plenty more.

Lanbril should be listed as an associate cult of Issaries.

That can only happen under extremely rare circumstances.  Spirit Combat is an opposed roll.  As it says on page 368:
 

Quote

 

An opposed roll may thus result in a winner and a loser, a tie, or two losers:

. .Winner and a Loser: The winner succeeds and
the loser fails. The winner does spirit combat
damage to the loser.
. . Tie: A tie (where both participants succeed but
achieve the same quality of result) means the situation
is temporarily unresolved. If both participants
rolled a critical success, the result is a tie. Both
parties do spirit combat damage to the other.
. . Two Losers: Both participants fail their roll.
Nothing happens unless one of the rolls is a
fumble (in which case, roll on the Spirit Combat
Fumble table).

 

So unless both crit at the same time, it's not possible for both sides to reach zero mps simultaneously.  In all other cases, either one side or the other loses mps or neither do. 

3 hours ago, jajagappa said:

Yes, Maran can also be Voria but whether she ends as Asrelia or Ty Kora Tek is another question (or most likely she ends up as both).

 

Don't forget PelOria.

Yes, she is.  It's noted in the Eringulf and the Vanak Spear quest.  In HQG p. 195 "He met Maran Gor before he met Asrelia, and though the pig-dogs that guard her doorway removed his six
allies; they captured one of them, bound it with iron rope, and returned with it."

But it also says on that same page:  "Maran Gor is the fighting guardian of the Underworld. The pig-dogs do not normally appear with her, but do normally appear in the Underworld."

So you may be inferring too much from that reference.

Flanking is an advantage and should be reflected in the rules.  I would make a flanking attack impossible to parry if not using a staff.  If the defender states he wishes to maneuver so as to parry it, then he can parry the flanking attack but not the attack from the person who initially was not flanking, unless all he does is parry. If he's trying to parry both at the expense of attacking, I'd give him the standard -20%.  If using a staff, I rule their is no flanking position.

On 8/31/2018 at 4:03 AM, PhilHibbs said:

Nonsense. We can ask the "should" question if we want. Believe it or not, there might be mistakes in the RQG rules!

I never said you couldn't ask, I said you should be asking the other question.

Oh for love of Eurmal you're all going about this backwards.

Midieval prices: irrelevant.

Bronze age prices: irrelevant.

Gloranthan prices in RQG:  CANON.

Therefore the only question is: why, IN GLORANTHA, are bows so expensive?  Not should they be.  Why ARE they?

I remember hearing about a plan to give huge amounts of money to trollkin who are sent out to buy farms and start farming.

The economy crashes plus trollkin cant farm. Economic collapse coupled with a sudden food shortage presage a troll invasion.

3 hours ago, HreshtIronBorne said:

Could you make a 'new' spell by combining something like a Matrix for Truesword and a Matrix for Thunderbolt with a trigger when you shout 'by the power of Orlanth' and thrust the sword in the air? The desire is a lightning sword. I dunno what needs to be combined. Or does one HQ for something like that?

So he holds his sword in the air, shouts "HE-MAN! yada yada" thunder strikes his sword and he goes all epic?  Yeah, that's got flavor for sure.  Truesword isn't orlanthi, however, so He-Man would have to belong to a cult that worshipped a god that gave Truesword and Thunderbolt.

Really good myth.  I would steal it if any of my players ever played a CA.  I agree with jeffjerwin.  The "aha!" moment is realizing that the real sickness is the need for vengeance.  Then healing that.  And theres no spell to do that.  Its not a mechanical solution.  Only roleplaying solves it.

14 hours ago, Bohemond said:

If we're talking about heroquests in film, Moana is almost explicitly a heroquest. Grandmother Tala issues a call to adventure and shows Moana the secret cave (crossing into the hero plane) where she discovers a lost truth, that her people were once seafarers. She sails the ocean and finds Maui, but Maui refuses to return Ta Fiti's stolen heart. They have to fight off the Kakamora and she realizes that Maui needs to recover his fish-hook, which requires them to defeat Tamatao in the Realm of Monsters (the Underworld?). Maui then teaches her the secret of sea-faring. Together they sail to confront Ta Fiti, and Moana realizes the secret that Ta Fiti is the benevolent Te Ka without her heart. Restoring the stolen heart heals Te Ka, who in turn heals the oceans of the blight that has poisoned them. Moana returns, establishing herself as chieftain, sea-farer, and culture hero. 

It couldn't have been any more a heroquest if it had been written by someone at Chaosium. The crossing over point is obvious and the stations are clearly defined. It seems likely that the fight with Tamatao is the Heroquest Challenge (it's because of that success that Moana acquires the ability to sea-fare, although not directly from Tamatao). One might imagine that the Kakamora are clan enemies of the Motonui people, pulled into the quest by Moana's involvement. And it's a really nice example of a women's quest, where the secret is the villain is not violently defeated but rather restored to benevolence (Ernalda's Other Way principle). 

My friend got me to watch this by telling me "It's a gloranthan heroquest.  Totally.  You have to watch it." 

So I did and it was.  Totally

2 hours ago, Jon Hunter said:

OK there is an extreme lack of understanding on the nature addictions , the triggers and cycles of addiction being displayed with the thread.

My ex wife from a 23 year marriage doesn't even recognize her own children half the time.  I know the nature of addiction intimately.  But we are talking a game here.  A fantasy setting in which we ask how the rules mechanics work.  That's not a place to get too detailed.  Keep it simple.

5 hours ago, MOB said:

Yep...

He said 5E, not 4.0.  I bought 13th Age and it is definitely 4.0 which is most unfortunate.

6 hours ago, styopa said:

The fact is that as much as AH is *constantly* maligned for abandoning Glorantha as a setting, licensewise they had NO CHOICE.  Let's not forget either that Chaosium themselves were dabbling in non-Gloranthan settings with the uninspiringly-titled Questworld.  As much as AH richly deserves brickbats for its failures, it's Chaosium that made that choice in the first place.

I wasn't blaming anyone.  I was simply pointing out the truth.  Then came Avalon Hill.  Both sides made mistakes, that's not the point.  D&D back then was crap.  D&D today has improved.  And the way it improved itself was by stealing from RQ.  If Chaosium had focused on coming out with more content the way TSR did, then we wouldn't be having this conversation today, RQG would have come out 30 years ago and we'd be discussing modern changes to the rules.  5th E would have been decades too late to matter.

In the end, it's boring compared to RQ any edition.  There's a reason why most TSR products can be had on Ebay for $1 and most RQ products go rapidly up in price.  Even the GtG is almost double what it came out for a few years ago.  People don't sell copies of RQ products because they treasure the stuff.  TSR stuff is mostly hack and slash.

Hell, 4.0 was a boardgame, not an rpg.

I'm an old schooler.  I remember when D&D was just hack and slash.  Runequest from day one was the superior game system.  Better mechanics.  Better adventures that accentuated incorporating the world the PCs lived in.  A classic example was the Dragon magazine, I forget which issue, that came out with reviews for both Chaosiums Borderlands and TSR's D3 Vault of the Drow. 

D3 got knocked as being nothing but a hack and slash adventure.  The reviewer remarked that there was plenty of information given about the different intrigues and factions of the drow in the undercity but that none of it mattered to the PCs who were just killing every drow they saw.  It was wasted if you weren't running a drow adventure instead.  In other words, Fluff.

Borderlands, by comparison, got mad raves as possibly the best rpg supplement to come to print at that time.  They went on about how the PCs had to deal with foreign cultures, get acclimated to a new world.  Nothing but glowing praise for what was definitely "the future of rpgs".

Well, we all know how that turned out unfortunately.  cough **Avalon Hill** cough.

But I played both systems and the biggest and best reasons to play Runequest was

A:  Skills.  D&D didn't have any.  By the time Wilderness Survival Guide and Dungeoneers Survival Guide came out, TSR was desperately playing catch up with Chaosium and introduce "non combat proficiencies".  Oh, you mean my character knows how to DO things besides hack and slash?  It was a limited list.

Runequest, of course, had a huge list of skills a character could implement.

B:  No character classes.  You weren't set in stone.  Game play could decide what skills you improved upon and what kind of character you had.  None of this D&D nonsense where my 5th level thief picked one lock the entire level and used not a single other thief skill then went up a level and got better at pick pockets, which he'd never once done his entire life.  No, I got better at what I DID.  And I wasn't locked into being a thief.  I could learn to become a warrior, a shaman, a sorcerer.  All I had to do was learn it through game play.

C : combat.  One day a few years ago, my son, who up until then had only played Runequest his entire rpg playing life, sat down with a friend of mine and I and played a game of D&D.  I'll never forget the look on his face when my friend rolled a d20 and declared he'd hit my sons character.  Several times, my son reached for his own d20 only to be told, no, you don't do anything, you just get hit.  "Where?"  He'd ask.  You just get hit for points.  "Everything is 'to the gorp' " he later said.  We quit rather quickly.  D&D is really boring, was his impression.  Why did it become the big hit, that game sucks.

I could go on, I should go on, about mythology, about culture, about depth, about roleplay, but I'll let others toss in their own two cents.  D&D excels in one area only:  volume of adventures.

I think it's an augment to a current skill.  Make their genetic memory roll and add a modifier to the skill being used.

On 8/16/2018 at 12:53 PM, Marc said:

I hadn't really paid a lot of attention to the Sorcery rules at first, because I didn't think I would need them right away. Now, however, I have a player that wants to run a Sorcerer, so I've taken a close look, and have a question( actually, I suspect I'll have many questions 😁). I saw in several spell descriptions references to ivercoming a targets magic points.  I thought in RQG spell were resisted with POW, not magic points. Are Sorcery spells handled differently?

 

Marc

I would say that where the spell differs from RAW, the spell wins.  So if the spell states mps, then it's mps.  If elsewhere the rules say POW, then if not stated otherwise, it's POW.

Thank you David.  It's -10% to enter each region the further you get from the Inner.  That clears everything up and your fantastic example is an inspiration.

Bad guys are always fun to play.  Our recently completed Lunar Diaries campaign was full of very dark, twisted individuals.  We had a blast.  Last time I played a bad guy, however, was pretty funny.  The Ogre saw my vampire had been run through the chest with a spear.  So he left me there in the cornfield.  "Vampire didn't make it."  Was all he told the others.  I was like, "you big idiot!" lol.

But I agree, Chaosium shouldn't write it into their game.

So can someone explain how the spirit travel modifiers work with an example?  Inner to Frontier to Outer and back again?  Please.

8 hours ago, Aeric said:

The fact that you have to reason it and explain why you would do consider it your way proves that RAW (Rules as Written) the question is not clear.

No, it only proves that someone needed it clarified for them. Sometimes something crystal clear to others is totally mystifying to me.   Times like those, someone explaining how it works helps.  Doesn't mean the rules need clarifying, just means it wasn't clear to me.

that's why we ask questions on forums.

6 hours ago, Aeric said:

So this topic genetates as many doubts for everybody than for me.

No, I'm absolutely sure Womble and I have spelled it out correctly.

Yes, he would, but then, he might be adivsed by his GM not to take a philosopher if he's that stupid and stick to a scribe

Maybe I'm wrong, that's what I always thought.  Seems like too much work to research it on a fine sunny day however

2 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Without wanting to jump in on the issue of whether career and cult should add up (the same question will crop up for other sorcerous cultures), is it exactly beneficial to know more than one technique?

There is no way you can unlearn a mastered rune or a technique.

Is there some other advantage than paying half the MP for having exactly the required technique(s) for a spell? (And, in resonance with the unfortunate way "misapplied worship" and "concentrated worship" worked out with Hero Wars and HQ1, wouldn't using a different technique than exactly the one used for the spell be the normal situation? Would "you save half the MP when using the exact technique or rune demanded in the spell" have been a good way to describe the game mechanic, doubling the basic cost as the standard case?)

INT cannot be raised (permanently) by non-exceptional means (although you could work on your Fire Rune development). That means that learning additional techniques will limit your ability to manipulate your magic even more.

Spells can be "tucked away" by inscribing them (blowing a few points of POW, which can also add to manipulation). Runes are the real bottle-neck. In order to be able to cast just about any spell, you only need one technique (if it is command or tap) but a dozen runes or more - two elements (not counting moon, and overlapping only in one derived element) to cover all five, four powers to have all four pairs, four forms (man beast plant spirit) and two oddballs (chaos, moon). That is of course beyond normal human ability - you'd need an INT of at least 24 to learn this many.

Every extra technique reduces your ultimate flexibility wrt mastering runes.

Roleplay may suggest you to take choices that go against this minmaxing, too, but it would be nice to know whether the rules offer incentives to learn more than either Command or Tap as a technique.

E.g. researching spells. Can you research spells using an inferred technique, or should your character have exactly the techniques and runes for that spell?

 

If there is no such benefit other than saving MP, can a sorcerer receiving multiple techniques decide to leave extra points unused in favor of more Runes to master?

 

Free INT is only reduced by known spells, not techniques.  Your INT limits the number of techniques you can master, but the techniques you have mastered has no affect upon your Free INT.

And you're not already dead when you come to the river Styx.  You're dead on the other side, as the Styx is the border between the land of the living and the land of the dead.  I could see the Gloranthan Styx wiping your passions away from you as you swam across.  But I'm pretty sure some publication has it drain your power, I may be wrong about that.

If it drained your passions, however, that would be so fitting from a dragonewt perspective as they don't cross the Styx, they get reborn in their egg so they have to go through that entire process of erasing their own passions to evolve.  I like that.