Roko Joko

1. Polytheistic swords and sandals fantasy, if you want some words. It's hard for me to tell what you're asking. 2. Cults are like classes. You probably should be pious, but it depends on the exact rules and the GM. Being less specialized might be viable. 3. There are human cultural groups that are associated with pantheons, kingdoms, and races. In the Dragon Pass region there's the Lunar Empire, a couple Orlanthi kingdoms, the Praxian nomad tribes, and some petty territories. Each nonhuman race is like a faction; races are more segregated than intermingled. Cult are sometimes played like mini-factions. Groups survive, develop philosophically, and sometimes conquer each other.

Ian Cooper has a Sword and Planet interpretation of Jaldon here:

If you're trying to list them all . giant insects for trolls and wasp riders . probably some hsunchen like reindeer, maybe yaks, deer, snow tigers . kralorelan dragon mounts . dinosaurs occasionally and for giants in the slon outback . lopers . rinliddi bird mounts . occasional griffins / hippogriffs / pegasi . caladraland hippos a la the scoriaguard rumbleriders, and other stewart stanfield inventions, to taste

Bogus shading, no Chaosium announcement, seller just launched, ships from China. Seems legit.

For anyone interested, the miniatures rules linked to by that eventful listing which is from 2007 are still up on the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20150306030208/http://www.lightofaction.com/Rules/FyrdnPhalanx.pdf .

I'm interested in whether CRQ spirit magic spells will have the trappings of HQ charms, like requires an object or tattoo to house a spirit requires negotiating a spirit into the fetish with something like "Tell me your name, what do you do? What do you want me to do for you?" requires a taboo

Sounds like you've done your homework but just in case: What's not all over the place is Gloranthan Cult Onepagers which is a big fan project to collect adaptations of writeups for RQ6. (IIRC it does require you to refer to the sources for spell descriptions.) There's the Encounter Generator thing http://skoll.xyz/mythras_eg/about/ If you find get one, there were distributed ~50 (?) pre-publication copies of Adventures in Glorantha (the second unfinished Adventures in Glorantha, not to be confused with the much earlier and also cancelled project of the same name which was AKA RQ4) which was Glorantha rules and stuff for RQ6.

I'll answer without having read the Mongoose elf book, although I bet it's very good. Races made from the man rune are supposed to be like humans even if they have alien qualities, so I think Aldryami have a language that uses mostly spoken communication and that humans can learn pretty well. They also have the Song of Aldrya that I'd describe as "like Twitter, but with real birds". Actually I think it's a combination of animal and plant sounds, wind, and telepathy. I think humans can learn it up to a low level of proficiency. Forest hunter-gatherers in particular are going to be good at interpreting the sound of the forest. Humans probably can't pick up detailed messages or send them into the group mind without magic from Aldrya.

If I may use this thread to do it, I've been looking for an opportunity to state my preference for gaming material that I can use all across Glorantha, for what it's worth. Most of my Glorantha gaming interests are not in early-Herowars Dragon Pass. I didn't really like how HeroQuest: Glorantha focused on that setting and I dislike how 13th Age Glorantha is designed in a way that requires a lot of design work to adapt to other regions or eras. I'd prefer broader or more generic or adaptable coverage across regions, religions, magic types, races, etc.

Ascetic isn't a huge stretch in some contexts, like if you think about how the owner of the life rune is Uleria. It makes sense to infer that a vow of chastity, in particular, would increase your death rune affinity. It just doesn't stretch so far as to cleanly apply to every association one might have with the idea of asceticism.

No, it's a misstatement to imply that the books definitively instruct you to associate asceticism with the death rune. I think he was just riffing off of what HQ2/HQG do say about it. Anyway, 1. there are concepts such as creation, trickery and others that are associated with more than one rune and 2. some concepts don't have a particularly strong association with any rune. In the context of personality and behavior I would not trust the core runes to fulfill anyone's desire for a complete psychological inventory. They're just not that great for that purpose. Maybe they could become such if as much fluff were written about them as say the western zodiac, but realistically I think that's neither here nor there. Meanwhile HeroQuest and Chaosium RuneQuest have spaces on the character sheet for personality traits that aren't runes.

You can play HQ2/HQG just about by-the-book without saying that runes are universally recognized by people in the setting. It's not hard to think of them like STR, DEX and CON and give them culturally particular skins. If anything forces it, I'd say it's the art where everybody has the same boring rune tattoos.

I'd probably go with the latter and say that they don't have taboos against the Praxian animals, but their favored gods and traditions work better for cows and horses. When Moon Design put a picture of a Sartarite weaponthane on an antelope into the HeroQuest Glorantha book (IIRC), Jeff talked about Praxian mounts being common in Sartar. But I think you could make up explanations for having it the first way, if you preferred that. "Orlanth never herded anything but cows, so it would be impious for us to do any different." "Oh yeah? Well we're obviously more virtuous than that other clan, because we won't even ride an antelope."

Yeah! I'd interpret the demographic numbers as averages, and really, just a reference point to start from.

Sure, but no, let's take it seriously. The ideas were partly inspired by Dragon Pass and my desire for a clean way to use freeform HQ stat blocks in mass battles. They put a bit of a wargaming spin on everything, which might or might not be what you want in a game. They also feel hierarchical and socially elitist - they don't say it explicitly, but they feel like they suggest that heroism is the fated possession of an elite class rather than a more fluid and spiritual thing. Also, they're community-friendly in the sense that a hero can get a bonus by teaming up with a community, but they show heroism as being a form of personal power, and don't speak to the idea of heroism being something that is done on behalf of a community. I think a full set of rules would benefit from mechanics for social factors, like relationships, leadership or other abilities that promote team cohesion, or teamwork in a specific contest, that make the team-up mechanics work most effectively.

What really interests me about the second idea is its potential for running HQ1 group contests with any number of participants by abstracting groups into single entities. Contests like, * battles at any scale * heroquesting contests with community support * community-vs-community contests that aren't battles Then, you can * handle single contests, individual assists, group contests, and community support with the same mechanism * run community-oriented stories with no "band of heroes" plot devices required. If it makes sense for the whole fyrd to be there, they can be. * put the wars back into the Hero Wars The best idea I've had for that is the following outline for HQ1 house rules. The only polished thing I have is an outline, and I want to present the idea concisely anyway. First, simplify abilitiy levels from 20 levels per mastery to four levels per mastery. (Alternatively, two levels per mastery could make it feel like Everyway or FATE depending how swingy you make contests.) This has some consequences that I like (simpler numbers, simpler dice, more meaningful modifiers) but are unrelated to group contests. To the point at hand, four levels per mastery makes the table that I'll describe in the next paragraph easy to memorize, and not call for a lot of fractions. Make a table that applies the "one master equals ten men" exponential heroism scale to those ability levels by writing down a manpower for each ability level, corresponding to the number of average-0w1-people it's equivalent to. level 1 05w0 manpower 0.2 level 2 10w0 manpower 0.3 level 3 15w0 manpower 0.6 level 4 00w1 manpower 1 level 5 05w1 manpower 2 level 6 10w1 manpower 3 level 7 15w1 manpower 6 level 8 00w2 manpower 10 level 9 05w2 manpower 20 level 10 10w2 manpower 30 etc. Then you can abstract individuals into a group by: 1. get the ability level of each participant's contribution to the contest at hand, with any modifiers included. 2. convert it to a manpower. 3. add up the manpower contributed by each participant. 4. convert the group's total manpower back into an ability level, rounding off. (Alternatively, use a contest mechanic that works directly in manpower.) For example, 4 regiments and their officers in a melee might be: 4000 people contributing a level 4 ability (w), total manpower 4000x1 = 4000. 200 people contributing a level 7 ability (15w), total manpower 200x6 = 1200. Total manpower = 5200, which rounds to 6000, the manpower of ability level 15 (15w3). Then you have a lot of flexibility in running group contests. If you want to run a group contest as a one-roll simple contest, you can. Or if you want to only abstract some groups (the fyrd, say) and then use group contest rules, you can do that too.

One master equals ten men The idea is that when you go up one mastery in an ability, you become the equal of a group of 10 people with one less mastery in the same ability (or an ability that could match yours in a contest). It's just a general idea, and it's not mechanically detailed. So for example, to use the idea in HQ house rules you would have to lay out exactly how relationship abilities and augments would play into it, and I'm not trying to do that here. You can lay it out in a table similar to the above, but it's independent of the assumptions in that first table. It represents a pretty powerful form of heroism: going up a little on the ability scale makes you a lot better. It is very roughly in line with the probabilities in HQ Glorantha, with its "high roll wins ties" d20 mechanic. Here's a very simplified analysis to show that. Suppose you have a master at ability level 10w contesting a group of 10 people, each at ability level 10. The master has a one-bump advantage. Let's assume that the group wins if any one of them beats the master's bump, and that this will happen if and only if they crit. The chance that none of them crits is 95% to the power of 10, which is about 60%. 60% is in the ballpark of 50%, which is what I'm trying to show. It also get you in the ballpark of the mechanic in the Dragon Pass board game where Harrek (with his entourage) is the equal of four heavy infantry regiments (with their officers). An article about that equivalence used to be online.

One man in a hundred achieves mastery This is a simple model that describes how many heroic people are in Glorantha. It abstracts a person to a number that represents something along the lines of the level of their highest HQ ability, on the HQ1 scale. I'm noncommittal as to whether that would include HQ relationship abilities, but the idea is that it refers to personal heroic power, not political or economic power unless that power is directly tied into the person's heroism. Don't take the abstraction too seriously: it's just a model, for a specific purpose. The 3rd column means, "1 in X adults are at this level or higher." The main idea is that for people with any given best-ability level, 1 in 100 have their best ability at least one mastery higher. 10w0 9 in ___,___,_10 novice 00w1 9 in ___,___,_10 professional (9 in 10 adults are novices or professionals) 10w1 1 in ___,___,_10 master 00w2 1 in ___,___,100 master 10w2 1 in ___,__1,000 champion 00w3 1 in ___,_10,000 champion 10w3 1 in ___,100,000 hero 00w4 1 in __1,000,000 hero 10w4 1 in _10,000,000 superhero 00w5 1 in 100,000,000 superhero You can use this to answer questions like "how many powerful people are around here?" Here are some answers, using the standard Glorantha assumption that 50% of the population is children, and taking "people" to mean beings with the man rune, in the Middle World. It includes all man-rune Elder Races, and all runes or heroic specialities - farming, everything. * Sartar clan: 1.2K people => 600 adults => 60 masters at 10w+; 6 masters at w2+; maybe a 10w2 champion. * all of Sartar: 125K people => 60 champions, maybe a hero. * Dragon Pass: 1.5M people => 8 heroes. (To taste, add the "DP has many heroes" idea to this.) * Lunar Empire: 15M people => 80 heroes and a superhero. * Genertela: 55M people => probably a few superheroes. * Glorantha: 120M people => probably a few more superheroes. It's mostly a nice clean exponential scale, but at the very top end, YGWV: at that level many people are immortal, and not exactly "people" any more. And at the bottom end, I'd editorialize that are plenty of people with their best ability above 0w1 - at least 1/4 of the 9-in-10 adult population has it with an average of 5w1. The words champion, hero, etc aren't perfect descriptors, and I'm not trying to state an exact meaning for them. The idea of a "clan champion" probably extends down into what I called "master" in the table, for example. But they are pretty consistent with the HQ1 book, and with comments that Greg made online, in the context of how to interpret HW/HQ1 ability levels, that he meant 10w3 to mean "hero" and 10w4 to mean "superhero".

Here are two ideas for Glorantha: 1. "One man in a hundred achieves mastery" 2. "One master equals ten men" They can be taken abstractly, but I'll use concepts from HQ1 to describe them, and the second idea can be applied to game rules.

Maybe, I'd want to know time and premise and then think about it. EST, best nights I think Wed, Sun, Tue/Thu.

Woah.