Roko Joko

Pardon my **** but personally I give very few ****s about whether Joe Cow****er has 53% Animal Handling or 61%.  I want to know what novice, veteran etc. ranges are and how many skills people in different roles will have advanced, and how far.  Then I can improvise it.

I liked the RQ3 skill-points-by-year rules because they grounded skill numbers very objectively, and you knew exactly what they represented in terms of life experience.

Exceptional stats for NPCs would be cool, to know if so-and-so has low SIZ or high Hates Nose Flute Music.  But full traditional RQ stat blocks for everyone sounds like it would be a bit bulky.

Separate thread: https://basicroleplaying.org/topic/6545-using-magic-repeatedly/

Picking up a HQ tangent from https://basicroleplaying.org/topic/6513-traversing-the-lunar-heartland/.

Darius West:  
"If you are using HQ... a Lunar can cast as many spells as they like without consequence."
"in HQ by comparison you have to rely on GM fiat to say, "you can't keep casting the spell because I say so"."
David Scott: 
"HeroQuest doesn't actually limit repeat actions, except augments."

As Tim Ellis said in the other thread, no.  First of all, NPCs don't have abilities.  If you want to use a contest, it's a player contest to evade the Lunar magic.  But if they did, or if a player wants to use magic repeatedly,

"No Repeat Attempts
A contest represents all of your attempts to overcome an obstacle. If you are defeated it means that no matter how many times you tried to solve the problem with your ability, you finally had to give up. You can try again only if you apply a new ability to the task or your Game Master agrees that special circumstances exist."
HQG p. 59
HQ2 p. 24
HQ1 (similar text and the same heading) p. 63
 

Not to be obnoxious but the answer is yes no matter what the premise is.

On 6/25/2017 at 3:01 PM, kaydet said:

Could someone explain the Gloranthan mechanics for spirit magic [snip]

There aren't any.  Different games depict slightly different versions of the world.

On 6/26/2017 at 4:32 AM, kaydet said:

[snip] What I have always pictured is a personal relationship (friendly or otherwise) with a spirit housed in a charm or object (such as a sword). The spirit provides aid and guidance to its owner. e.g., "Strike here, move there. Now block..."

[snip] It just seems flavor-less to me, that's all. I had hoped for more.

That being the case, if I were you I'd say spirit magic spells live in charms and come with a taboo.  (I've been wondering whether they would do that in RQ.  Maybe they still will, but it sounds like probably not.)

RQ still says you learn and accumulate spirit magic, though, and doesn't seem to expect you to swap out charms a lot.  You'd have to fuss around further if you wanted that flavor as well.

On 6/26/2017 at 0:13 PM, kaydet said:

This is Runequest, which to my mind should be [mechanical] 

Can't help you there.

Oh that's interesting, I thought he was just a particularly stylish wind lord.

It's interesting in terms of the setting history because the gods are very rarely pictured directly.

Like, Yelm on the Gods Wall isn't a picture of Yelm, it's a picture of the picture of Yelm on the Gods Wall.  Get it?

I might do it if I could incorporate the outcome into the rest of the 4 sessions.

the tie fighter rune and the versailles rune

Awesome.  It's great as a general-purpose fantasy RPG resource / 5-room dungeon, too.  (29-room, but same difference.)

For the convenience of people using it in certain kinds of games, it might help to size the floor plans at the same scale as the illustration, and/or provide some kind of scale ruler.

Are any windows or skylights in the upper floor?

The 13th Age book preview has sections that discuss what runes mean for PCs thematically and sometimes in terms of personality.  It looks like the same rune list as in HQG, but there's more and different text per rune.

For Light I think there's plenty of personality stuff in the Yelmalio cult and mythology.  (And I guess Elmal is also Light?)  If you want to do Light-but-not-Yelmalio I don't know.  The heat and light parts of the Fire rune don't seem to have an obvious distinction psychically.  Maybe Light is the Truth part of Fire and Heat is everything else.

One bit about Moon I liked was Thomas Iverson's first comment here: https://plus.google.com/+Iskallor/posts/FBiBN148qfH

On 5/1/2017 at 11:31 AM, Byll said:

So how does the Orlanthi up hold his 'Just' Trait when he is being 'Reckless' and 'Violent' ?

I'm not sure what " 'Just' Trait " you're referring to*, but weregild is pretty brutal.  They have their own idea of what justice means.

* Edit: I see, you must have been referring to "Mastery: Proud, Just, Authorative".  ...One thing that comes to mind is from Making of the Storm Tribe myth in King of Dragon Pass where Orlanth makes conflicting promises to get different clans to join up and then when they all get together and complain about it, he "offers to fight each and every one of them".  Ernalda gets him off the hook from that one.

Really interesting chart.  I'll hold off on my lore questions and speculation, but one point of feedback: for practical game reasons it might be nice to see Tradetalk on there.

On 4/11/2017 at 2:33 PM, Harrek said:

The problem is that there's  no Orlanth, or even Umath, in the Green Age. So there's no his lodge nor any normal "portal" to come back.

Do you need to say that you need a portal to come back?

Seems like you could just as easily say that exiting a heroquest is easy, in general.  For example IIRC heroes in King of Dragon Pass often get kicked out of heroquests involuntarily.  Then, the theory might be more like: it takes an effort to remain on the Other Side, and typically what you do on a heroquest is run through a myth and then let yourself drop out either when you've completed it successfully or when things go badly.  And you don't necessarily *have* to drop out when you're done with the heroquest, but you choose to do it because it's dangerous to sit there dorking around on the Other Side without the guidance of a myth.

15 hours ago, styopa said:

I guess it depends on your definition of "official"?  [snip]  Or does the "canonical" world of Glorantha now begin with the Guide?

Moon Design defined Glorantha canon here: Canon and YGWV.  

The article is a few years old but it's still just about definitive, based on a few public comments I've seen since then.

So anyway FWIW S:KoH lists the FHQ with Earth (p. 256) and SC lists her with Earth, Mastery, and... wait for it... Horse (p. 217).  

38 minutes ago, boztakang said:

what are the runes of the Feathered Horse Queen? She seems a pretty clear example of "Earth Mastery" and is certainly worth a look in that respect. (I imagine the info is in the Guide or such, but don't have time to go searching just now)

"What are (some mortal)'s runes" is more of a HQ question than a setting question.  I don't think the GtG gives any three-rune stat blocks for mortals.  S:KoH or SC might have one for her.

IMG they have coins with a cow's head on one side and a cow's rear on the other.

On 3/17/2017 at 10:47 AM, Joerg said:

What I am still mostly unclear about is the difference between the Wastelands north and south of the Snowline.

I agree the main reason Pent is more fertile is just that it was outside the Genert blast radius.  It's not a place where Chaos won.  It's not, because it's not.  I mean, supposedly Kajabor was running around Fronela or somewhere, but that didn't turn into a wasteland either.  Maybe some of the land north of Fronela or under the White Sea did.

Glaciers might have protected some of Pent.

And there are hints about the ignorance sun god protecting it.  There's the glory of the Black Sun, and references to blood rain in eastern myths, and in the dark age map in Book of Heortling Mythology, there's a "Bloodrain" symbol in Pent with a blurb about sacrificing to demons.  So you can imagine blood rain provided fertility and propitiated the chaos armies, ushering them south, while the black sun aspect showed them the hand when they turned east.  Then Kargzant took over in the silver age.

And elf forests, too.

Ernalda, personally I'm not really compelled to put her in Pent.  For one thing Book of Heortling Mythology shows Genert's Garden extending way north, for what that's worth.  Also the GtG characterizes Pent Storm worship as a post-night of horrors thing rather than a prehistoric one, blood rain and sun storm excepted.  If I wanted land goddesses in Pent I think I'd make up new ones.

Tell me your name, what do you do?
What do you want me to not ever do for you?

Probably a lizard man.

Anyway, counting down the days!

One has to admit that Khan of Khans is the definitive visual reference at this point, though.

I'm just waiting for them to revise it again, so they can call it... RuneQuest 2.  Cyclical time.

That would be like saying "the APP attribute is not recommended" rather than "the APP attribute is not used" when APP is not on the character sheet and not in the rules.

Chaosium's Designing the New RuneQuest blog articles, in one convenient list.

1. 2016-02-08 . Part 1 . goals . character sheet
2. 2016-02-10 . Part 2 . combat . 90/10 rule . RQ3 . source material
3. 2016-02-13 . Part 3 . RQ6
4. 2016-02-28 . Part 4 . rune magic
5. 2016-04-27 . Part 5 . deadly combat
6. 2016-04-30 . Part 6 . changes from RQ2
7. 2016-05-24 . Part 7 . character start with background and personality
8. 2016-06-12 . Part 8 . family history
9. 2016-06-17 . Part 9 . just plain RuneQuest . setting scope
10. 2016-06-25 . Part 10 . core rule book . Glorantha Bestiary . Gamemaster Book
11. 2016-08-23 . Part 11 . sorcery
12. 2017-01-09 . Part 12 . progress report . Quick Start . bestiary concept art . Dragon Pass Campaign Book
13. 2017-04-05 . Part 13 . progress report . schedule . book list update
14. 2017-04-06 .  news   . RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha (RQG)
15. 2017-04-07 . Part 14 . runes
16. 2017-04-11 . Part 15 . design team . design vision
17. 2017-04-17 . Part 16 . reusable rune magic
18. 2017-06-24 . Part 17 . changes from Free RPG Day playtest
19. 2017-08-13 . Part 18 . preview edition
20. 2017-08-13 . Part 19 . art sample
21. 2017-11-25 . Part 20 . progress report
22. 2018-02-09 . Part 21 . progress report . character sheet
23. 2018-03-21 . Part 22 . logo
24. 2018-03-22 . Part 23 . final progress report

I was trying to answer questions raised by the first two posts by providing the information that Chaosium is going to call the new one just plain RuneQuest without making an edition number part of the name.  That's not pedantic in that context.  I didn't say it clearly, though.

This is the blog post I mentioned.  They've also said it will say 4th edition on the inside, for example in a comment in this g+ post.

I think the best online RQ history used to be this article, but it's not current.  I've seen several forum posts that summarize the history up to the present; here's one of them.