Texarkana

A view on Mythic Polynesia from a Maori game designer living in Aotearoa. My TLDR of the twitter thread, in some places the basic grasp of concepts important to a living culture is okay, in others its colonialist rubbish.

Photos of the card that was available at Gencon.

I didn't get to the Chaosium panel due to exhaustion, but did attend the Runequest one immediately prior to it. Some of this info would be familiar to people reading this forum and following the developer blogs, but I will do a recap from my notes (any errors are mine, I just got back to New Zealand this morning and have only had about three hours sleep over the last two days). The PDF of Runequest is expected around November 2017, the print version in early 2018. No kickstarter for RQ, but there will be one for Gloranthan coins from Campaign Coins in February 2018. There will be an RQ colouring book, like the recent Cthulhu one.The first wave of books will include the core rule book, a bestiary, and a GM pack that includes a Return to Apple Lane scenario. The Bestiary has about 12 playable races. Broo are not a playable race, but Ducks are. Setting wise its not 1621 anymore, the Braveheart era is over and the Lunars are no longer an occupying power - mixed Lunar/Lightbringer parties could be the norm, not the exception. Power level is for extraordinary characters. Time scale is expected to be one scenario per season. Cult Books will have stories like Cults of Prax.The second wave of books will include The Heroes Book to provide support for heroquesting, Trollpack, a second quickstart, Cults of Dragon Pass (the first of several cult focused books) and a Glorantha quickstart (short setting introduction). A good game getting better: core rules are the same, good backwards compatibility weapons damaged more often additions to improve immersion, rune associations and passions that provide augmentations spirit combat overhauled so that it didn't split the party so much sorcery a logical process, not a superpower, less maths requirred avoiding the initiate trap of sacrificing POW for rune spells, rules to support progression to rune level, not to provide barriers. Heroquesting: some discussion about how this is a narrative problem, not a power problem stations approach in HQ was too formulaic, railroady, required too much upfront knowledge, too many deus ex machine HQs based on obscure lore Greg - have fun with mythic narrative, rules provide framework to extrapolate from, don't bother with canon if it gets in the way of fun. Greg also said something like "Two hearts for all the GMs out there". I enjoyed the demo game I played, and it was my partner's first ever tabletop roleplaying game. She was happily telling people about delivering the killing blow to the giant statue for hours afterwards.

There were about half-a-dozen speakers tag teaming at the seminar, and I did not write down who spoke what. Part of the seminar covered the belief that Avalon Hill's marketing and research strengths would allow RQ to grow and allow more boardgames to reach a wider market, but the anecdotes presented made it clear that AH did not really understand roleplaying games and the opportunity was squandered. I would agree that some of the AH era supplements are of exceptional quality, the only rpg material I did not sell when I shifted countries in 2007 was my RQ books.

One of my notes reads "will be getting more writers to draft scenarios". The start of the session featured an overview of the history of the RQ game and "tragic period" of Avalon Hill overlordship in which not enough material was published to support the game. So it felt clear to me that Chaosium were setting goals to improve on past performance, even if it was too soon to tell us what the product line up was likely to be. I wrote down something about a pitch for a big campaign pack, but I cannot recall now if that came from Chaosium or a member of the audience.

Now that I am back in NZ, I can write up my scribbled notes from GENCON. I liked the look of the draft RQ player rules that were available for inspection at the Chaosium booth. Some bits that I wrote down at Friday Seminar on Runequest: The new edition allows you to play a "King of Dragon Pass" style game Chaosium wants to replicate the Call of Cthulhu organised play for Runequest with Glorantha scenarios The GMs book will have heroquest rules in it More new material is being planned than ever before Will be compatible with fantasy Grounds Khan of Khans - a simple cattle raiding card game Other related products: 13th Age in Glorantha manuscript is finished, Godswar kickstarter about to start, new edition of Dragon Pass in the works, and a sequel to the KODP computer game New sorcery rules are intended to be easy to use GMs book will have rules on becoming a hero Default setting has a date change with events out to the 1630s - moving beyond "Braveheart" into a more complex political situation that allows groups of mixed Orlanthi/Lunar cultists to be playing together.

Most of my problems were with RQ6 - the maths required to adjust skill levels with difficulty grades, then dividing another skill/passion by five to get an augmentation, it all made peoples brains melt. Then the long time required to choose special effects in combat (there are just too many to choose from). When I ran "Asterix and the Deep Ones" using CoC 7th edition last year, that take on d100 was much easier for people to grasp. Less edition specific - the RQ character sheets were old school in how they communicate information to players - the actual character gets hidden by the amount of detail on the sheet. For the Asterix game I built my own character sheet and ruthlessly pruned away peripheral information. Where I live in New Zealand, conventions games are largely drawn from the story focused games published in the last decade. It is unusual even to see a D&D game on a convention listing. So when I ran the RQ game I had a bunch of players who really didn't want to be playing an old fashioned physics simulation, and my game was not their first choice of play for the session. I could have pitched my game better, but for me its currently holding the prize for least amount of fun GM'ing at a con.

I have found Runequest difficult to run at conventions, especially for people who have never played it before. It is not as easy to pick up and play as many of the modern game systems its now competing with.

Yes, it dilutes the CHA XP modifier. We discussed that at the start of the campaign, but no one seemed to bothered by it. We never thought you could spend more than one improvement roll on a skill at a time. Reading the rules again, I can see how that is a valid interpretation, but I'm surprised none of my players ever raised this. The "fail and die" nature of a lot of RQ magic/wound checks means my players place a heavy emphasis on increasing Endurance, Evade, and Willpower at every opportunity. When I tried smaller lumps of XP on a more frequent basis they found the tradeoff decision difficult to make. As a side note, my players have never had their combat styles benefit from the +1% improvement from fumbling. They have always used luck points to recheck the fumble (and NPCs don't score critical hits against the players in combat either for the same reason). They will risk a fumble on social skill checks, but never in combat.

The way I got around my RQ6 players always spending their first six improvement checks on Combat Style, Endurance, Evade, Willpower and Magic Skills, was to start giving them 10+ improvement checks whenever a significant quest was concluded (typically around 4-6 game sessions, or once every 2-3 months real time). I thought I had on improvement, but have not actually tried, is to allow a player to increase all of the profession skills the character has (typically around 10 skills in RQ6), and then give them a smaller number of improvement rolls to allocate as they please.