Jeff

As I said before, I got very familiar anew with RQ6 in the early stages of this process. We early on concluded that we wanted to go into a different direction - one already laid down in part by Greg's unpublished Dragon Pass Campaign notes and rules and his Epic rules (not to mention all the material David Dunham and I developed for the Taming of Dragon Pass campaign).

When I am designing anything, I try to get as much good inspiration as possible. I got myself VERY familiar with RQ6 during the early stages of this project, and we fairly quickly determined that it went it directions *we* did not want to go. That's not a criticism of it as a rules system, just a different artistic vision. My main sources have been RQ2, Troll Pack, Cults of Prax, Cults of Terror, RQ3, Arcane Lords, Greg's Dragon Pass Campaign material, the Chaosium House Campaign folder, Greg's unpublished cult writeups for RQ, Epic, Pendragon, Pendragon Pass (the Enclosure edition and the Tentacles edition). To a lesser extent, King of Dragon Pass, Nephilim, Stormbringer, Elric!, Call of Cthulhu 1-7, Ringworld, HeroQuest Glorantha, BGB, Advanced Sorcery, and even Ars Magica have all influenced the design. I'm sure Jason, Chris, Sven, Ken, and MOB all have drawn on additional sources as well.

You have no idea how awful that license ended up being. Avalon Hill was a festival of pleasantness in comparison. For Greg and I, just seeing the Mongoose logo is like offering walktapus soup to a Storm Bull.

We're going with the RQ2 skills category calculation approach because after copious testing with people who are not from either a RQ2 or RQ3 or RQ6 background, it was the consensus for being more meaningful than RQ6's approach (having only one or two stats modify a skills category was strongly criticized), and quicker and easier than RQ3. I can still do the RQ3 calculations in my head ("primary, secondary, negative...") but it got strongly negative reactions. Given that we just put SPH, Troll Pack, Pavis, Big Rubble, et al back in print, forcing GMs to recalculate hit points to use those scenarios with the new rules seemed a lot of work for little gain and much downside.

No it is not a shame. Every time I open them, I get a splitting headache just thinking about that licensee.

Ours would be radically different. Mine goes (from best to worst): RQ2 RQ3 RQ6 The MRQ books I don't even consider worth reading.

I'm personally not a particularly nostalgic person. I'm interested in rules that support the stuff I want to write and publish. Ken, Chris, MOB, Jason, and myself all agree (for a variety of reasons) that RQ2 was generally superior to RQ3 and is a better foundation for the new rules. Our first line of testing is with players who have no background with RQ2, and much more background with CoC or HQ than with RQ3.

Yes, magic suffered by being generic. Spirit magic and divine magic were largely unchanged from battle and rune magic (although rune lords were gone, rune priests were made far more difficult to become, etc), but magic should be, in my very strong opinion, setting-specific. Generic magic is like like generic religion or culture. The magic of Glorantha should be different from the magic of the Eternal Champion which should be different from the magic of the Norse sagas which should be different from the magic of the Greek epics which should be different from the magic of Call of Cthulhu. And RQ3 sorcery had some interesting ideas, but ultimately fell flat. It was disconnected from any setting, its spells were bland and power-gamy, and from a scenario writer's perspective, it was a nightmare. The new sorcery rules are significantly streamlined, set securely in Glorantha, and far more flexible.

I started with RQ2, played RQ3 whole-heartedly until we discarded it for Pendragon Pass. And now RQ4 has become our housegame - and even Claudia and Kiki have embraced it. Now it may come as a surprise, but RQ2 is generally preferred by the rules writers themselves. RQ3 was a hybrid of rules fixes for RQ2 (that had been kicking around since 1979 or so), plus brand new rules and mechanics that in many cases didn't add much to the result (new ways of calculating hit points and hit point per location, new means of calculating strike ranks, new means of calculating skills category bonuses, etc) or were flat-out broken (like fatigue points or the ceremony/enchant/summons system). Plus the magic system suffered badly by making it generic (the sorcery system was, among its other flaws, utterly souless). That being said, RQ3 was not a bad rules system - just with perfect hindsight, it tried to fix things that weren't broken and introduced new things that were broken. The goal of the new RQ4 is to be the RQ3 that should have been. Jeff

Possibly. Best chance is to show up at the RuneQuest seminar on Friday at 7:00 pm.

Spirit magic no longer requires a dice contest in order to learn. You can learn spirit magic from a cult (restricted to the spells known to its Rune masters), or from a shaman.

As an aside, there are people predisposed towards Illumination. Lunar theorists believe that these are people strong with the Moon Rune. Such people may achieve Illumination as a result of a strange experience on a heroquest, hearing (and answering) a Nysalorean Riddle, or otherwise being exposed to cosmic paradox. Such Illumination is often fraught with dangers and such Illuminates, although respected in stories and tales, are often feared in practice. Most people who seek Illumination do so through one of the many schools of Illumination in the Empire.

I lean the opposite way. I suspect accusations of Occluded is often whispered, but who is to say who is Occluded, when many of the most powerful politico-religious figures in the Empire exhibit bizarre, even deviant behavior.

The Esvulari have three castes (really two strict castes, and then everyone else). There are the nobles (judges) who must belong to a specific lineage and there are the priests (wizards) who also must belong to a restricted lineage. Think of them like the Yazidis or the Levites during the Second Temple. These families marry within themselves (endogamy) - so a noble always marries the daughter of another noble, and a priest always marries the daughter of another priest. The Aeolian sect disapproves of marrying outsiders, so the commoners are endogamous by elimination. The priests are trained in sorcery and the rituals of worshiping the Invisible God and his emanations. Ordinary folk go through their adulthood initiation rights, favor one emanation or another, and might even have (non-"priestly") god-talkers. But the community ceremonies are all performed by wizard-priests. There is no "Church" in the sense of a separate corporate community - it is probably easier to think of the Esvularings as an ethno-religious community like the Druze or Yazidi. The community at large chooses which eligible noble rules them. In places like Nochet, where there are large Esvularing communities, it is common for the community to send to Mount Passat requesting a noble or priest.

Evil Roddy - on the previous page I posted some core canonical notes on the Esvularing. If you haven't read them, they make a good starting point.

Knight Fort iikely dates back to the Second Age when it would have defended the Zistorites and their allies against Praxians and Pure Horse Folk. But I'm not 100% sure of that. King Broyan was not the garrison commander of Knight Fort.

All - although this is interesting it really has nothing to do with RQ Design Questions. Could you create a new thread for this?

We considered and rejected that approach.

If there is a long run. Sure the law of averages say you should get 3.5 gain on average, but the downside of rolling only a "1" is that your character effectively didn't go up in that skill - and it may be quite a while before the GM allows you another experience roll. My experience is that *most* players (particularly newish players) always prefer to roll for characteristics, experience gain, etc.

We experimented early on with using characteristics (multiplied, added, etc) as the base for the skills and ultimately rejected that. It was too wiffy and too cumbersome. And the RQ2 system has the virtue of being easy AND already in place.

By 1D6% increments (although you can always pick 3%). Even though it was disadvantageous to the characters, players universally preferred to roll.

No, I am using Communication (it is in RQ2) and adding Magic as well. The main difference is how it is calculated. RQ3's system of point by point granularity for Primary, Secondary, and Negative skills adds a LOT of time, is real finicky (especially since POW goes up and down a lot) and gets you very little for that 2 to 3 points of added granularity. RQ2 just has you add +10%/5%/0/-5% for a characteristic within a range. It is much quicker and gets you to the same place.

There is an awful lot of new material here. Runes, rune points, passions, revised spirit combat, revised shamanism, new spirit rules, economics, far more social activity, ew character creation process including family history background, and lots lots more. But it was the general agreement of the team, that the core mechanics of RQ2 should be the framework.

There is a temple to Yelm in Mirin's Cross (the Golden Temple of the Brilliant Pillar). In Mirin's Cross, Yelm's wife is Dendara amongst the nobles, but he is also one of Ernalda's lovers. Redalyde has her own temple as an ancient tribal guardian (along with her faithful husband Hyalor). Whether Beren is another name for Hyalor is a question for the First Age, not the Third. Although the Hyalorings were in Saird at the Dawn, their heirs are the Pure Horse tribes of Pent, Char-un, and the Grazelands. Not the modern farmers and cities of Saird, who are a mix of lowland Pelorians and Orlanthi. There are some vestigial remnants of the Hyaloring era with some cults (particularly the Red-Haired Goddess), but keep in mind that is submerged beneath many centuries of later settlement.

RQ3 was copyright of Chaosium, Inc and was labeled as "A Chaosium Game". It was published by Avalon Hill through a license. Slayers, Mongoose RQ, and The Design Mechanism versions of the game are the copyright of AH, Mongoose, and TDM respectively.