Martin Dick

Didn't they get bored out of their mind on the many, many occasions when a sword skill was totally inappropriate for the situation?

What happened to Hera?

I did this a long time ago, so it's a bit dated and not 100% finished, but it might spark some ideas. It's a cult of Orlanth Rebellious. It wasn't aimed at PCs either. The Cult of Orlanth Rebellious.pdf

Nysalor is a god of liberation, but maybe more at the individual level as opposed to a societal level

Cool! I look forward to buying it 😄

That sounds interesting, any chance you might post it here?

Ernalda might disagree 😁

Looks great!

Have you guys thought about doing a video of one of your sessions, I think it might be illuminating 😃, especially for old fogies like myself who are mainly in a more traditional style of play.

What I think you are missing is: RQG doesn't try to balance things out in terms of rules, yes, it's unfair that the BG and H are the best at melee combat, but that unfairness is baked into Glorantha, and personally I think that it is a good idea that the rules reflect that Gloranthan unfairness. And if you don't think it's a good idea then the changes to remedy it are pretty easy in this case of Odayla/Yinkin as hunters as of course there are a whole bunch of new rune spells out there for PCs to find and learn and adding some new cult skills/spirit magic is very easy. Your cult while important is just one of the factors in determining your capability, so yes a Babeester Gor could become a good hunter and that's not even a bad character conception. A BG who is focussed on hunting down malefactors and enacting vengeance upon them would be an interesting character to play. But if they do, then they probably won't be as good at the standard things for BG. It's quite possible to develop a character to be good at a particular occupation without necessarily being in the optimal cult. Humakti scholars, Orlanthi hunters, Lhankor Mhy duelists, Chalana Arroy vampire hunters, Issaries healers etc. etc. etc. It's a strength of the BRP system as a result of it being skill-based and not class based that you don't have to follow the stereotypes, if you don't want to be.

But I'm not seeing the story hole here, any competent player who wants their starting character to be a reasonable hunter or better and who initiates to Odayla or Yinkin can definitely create such a PC through the character creation process. And they will definitely be better hunters than an Orlanthi who has focussed on being a warrior. This is speaking from experience.

I play the Orlanthi tank with heavy armour, lots of protection and Shield when it gets serious and seriously I wouldn't like to fight either of them. Now, if I could trap them at the end of a corridor, I'm pretty sure I could take them, but if we're in the woods, I'd have trouble even seeing them and you can't parry missile weapons, so not faint praise at all, they both hold up their part in combat perfectly fine and actually give us options a Humakti or Babeester Gor wouldn't. Of course in the campaign, we never dungeon bash, if we were playing that kind of campaign, then they wouldn't be anywhere as effective

Can you elaborate on this? As a 40 year plus RQ player, I'm not seeing this, but that's entirely likely me being in blinkers. Do you mean things like not wearing any head armour or taking a Yelmalian character to be a top-line warrior?

The Odaylan might be a RuneLord or the GM might have allowed them to be a Runepriest or maybe they are just a strong Initiate. It's a bit hard to tell a strong initiate from a new RunePriest and we haven't had to use DI recently. But the reason why there are lots of RunePriests is because it's much easier to reach the qualifications for RunePriest than RuneLord in general. 50% is easier than 90%, especially with the current character generation system. As an example, my Orlanth Adventurous initiate was planned to become a WindLord and he's still a way off that (5 skills at 90% can take a long time, especially if the dice don't roll well) and when the Orlanth Thunderous character qualified for RunePriest, I thought, if they can do it maybe I can and sure enough, the character also met the qualifications for an Orlanth Thunderous RunePriest, so a double initiation into Thunderous and some roleplaying and use of reputation, and he became a RunePriest first. As the long term goal was to be a RuneLord/Priest, it just reversed the order in which it was done. As for your specific question about strictly following cult writeups, personally I've always treated canon as guidelines/suggestions. I like canon because it gives me a baseline to work from and indicates what the designers were trying to do, but I feel no compunction about changing/ignoring canon if I want to, so unless you are writing for Chaosium or if you want your Jonstown Compendium product to stay within cooee of the Chaosium product, for me there's no need to strictly follow anything in the rules book or the other products.

But PCs are always going to be an exception and hunt down new spells for their cult/PC once they've got all the standard ones and any GM aiming for MGF will support this. And once the HQ rules come out, it's really not going to make any real difference which cult you are in in terms of special powers for your PC. Now of course which cult you are in will still make a difference still in terms of social position and types of special powers (e.g. it's probably going to be extremely extremely rare for a Karrg's Son to get Sunspear like powers or for an Eurmali to get Rex type powers etc.) but in terms of valid primary identities for long term players in a regular campaign, things like the number of standard rune spells in a cult aren't really that important. In the campaign that I currently play, we have an Orlanth Thunderous Runepriest/Orlanth Adventurous Initiate, an Orlanth Thunderous Priest, a Yinkini Runepriest, an Odaylan Runepriest and a Chalana Arroy High Healer and the Yinkini and the Odaylan (despite not having the same spread of rune spells) don't pale into insignificance even in combat situations and if I had to single out a character as being a bit dominant, it's the Chalana Arroy and that's primarily built on the social role that Chalana Arroy plays in Sartar, he rarely, if ever, plays the "I won't heal you if you don't do what I say". Of course the GM, being a good GM, is open to and likes this type of play and all of us players are all in to the social/community side of roleplaying, so it works well for us. If we think about things in terms of GM attention to my character, in fact the player who runs out of rune spells in session 2 is at an advantage, because the GM is going to have to come up with interesting ways for the PC to get rune spell 4, 5, 6 etc. meanwhile the Orlanthi can be told just pick one of the 422 spells you don't have.

Haven't seen that at all, I don't play them, but the Yinkini with a bow and the Odaylan with a sling are both lethal hunter/warriors and don't seem to have any particular problems when it comes to hunting. Which is good, because my Orlanthi Thane has a negative Move Silently.

Very few of the Gloranthan Heroes fit in to the mould of what we 21st century people would call a hero, but one only has to look at the Greek heroes to realise that most heroes are mad, bad and dangerous to know, and the Gloranthan Heroes pretty much all fall into that categorisation, perhaps the only exceptions being Sartar and Elamle-Ata. I don't know what defines a Hero in Glorantha, but I'm pretty sure there isn't some modern moral standard as a prerequisite, so I'm sure there were many GodLearner Heroes and that's not a problem at all from my point of view.

I think this is a key point, tragedy like this needs to be either a collaboration with the relevant player or the players have agreed in Session Zero that's the style of the campaign, in which case its not going to be bullying but fun/interesting. If the GM had just killed a PC off like that without any consultation, then that wouldn't be any fun. Though by playing RQ, you are to a certain extent accepting the random death of your PC at any time.

I've never really understood this point of view, my view as both a GM and a player is that the whole point is to make the PCs life interesting. Now sometimes that's interesting as in the curse and sometimes it's interesting in a positive way, but if you try and have a PC with no social ties that can be played upon, it just seems a bit boring to me. Though I guess if you are treating it just as a tactical combat game, then I guess that stuff gets in the way. And I'm not sure it's really a fair point because of course, if the GM actually had malicious intent (or even without it), then a background where you had murdered your whole family would definitely bring more hell down upon your head than just having a family living in the village, well in any campaign I ran it would. But I know that PCs love to be orphans, when I helped run a roleplaying MUD, we had to ban player backgrounds where the PC was an orphan. Orcs raiding the village and killing everyone and the PC being the only survivor was a very popular first choice of background and the whinging when you wouldn't allow it was painful to read

Yes, Engizi is a great cult if you want to play a fisherwoman as the OP indicated, Orlanth is not a particularly good cult if you want to be a fisherwoman. But as the OP stated, they were worried that the Engizi fisherwoman wouldn't be effective in the campaign as a warrior and give the campaign context that's probably a good call. So, my solution gives the character a bit of a boost as warrior/magician (because as you are aware Orlanth is a good warrior/magician cult) and still allows them to play the fisherwoman character they want.

Yelmalians are mediocre warriors, that's well-established But as you say, it's also well-established that they are good, if not elite soldiers. A warrior isn't the same thing as a soldier. According to Jeff, they are good soldiers because their culture and common mindset makes them good soldiers and that comes from their history and the values of Yelmalio.

Sure it does, start with 2 Orlanth rune points and one Engizi rune point and sacrifice a point of POW to get your third Orlanth Rune Point and also get your third Orlanth rune spell, BOOM THUNDERBOLT away! If you don't want drop your POW, then wait until you make a POW gain roll

Looks like a complaint to me, but if you feel that it isn't, well that's okay. I won't be continuing this part of the thread

So, campaign context matters and aligning your player character to fit in with the campaign context isn't really min/maxing to me, it's just being a collaborative player. So looking at this campaign context, where you are playing classic RQ2 scenarios, then you know that there's going to be quite a lot of combat (and the rest of the party are not exactly combat monsters), so in my opinion it's not min/maxing to want to have a character that can actually participate in the battles and have an influence. So, if you are happy to play an Orlanthi, I think it's not min/maxing. But looking at that group, it would likely be that the character's role will be Combat Monster, so you should be prepared to head down that path. But if you don't want to play an Orlanthi and really want to play the Engizi fisherman, then yes, you are low-level min-maxing (min-maxing is a range not a black or white thing). My advice as a min-maxer would be to use one of your rune points to dual initiate in to Engizi and Orlanth Thunderous (great Associate Cult spells) it's not a problem as they are associated cults and an emergency Thunderbolt is better than an emergency Lightning, make sure you generate a decent combat skill during character creation and get some Protection 😈 plus I'm sure that you could come up with a great roleplaying concept to go along with the min-maxing

I'm not really sure how you perceived that, when I thought I was clear that I think that it's okay to min/max and that I do it myself and that I'm entirely happy with a Glorantha where Humakt and Babeester Gor are the premier warrior cults and just better on average than the others (at least in Central Genertela) and where Yelmalio is weak as a warrior. So, I think my view and Chaosium's view of the fiction and the lack of need for balance are fairly well-aligned And personally I'm much happier to play a campaign where all sorts of skills are valued and mechanically-effective and I don't have to be a combat monster to survive. Many years ago, I played in a AD&D campaign like that where we all played Fighters and Clerics, because if you couldn't wear platemail, you were dead meat. Now, it was fun at the time, but it was 40 years ago and I'm past that. When I get my campaign up and running, if someone wants to min-max their combat monstery and take Humakt or Babeester Gor as their cult they can, and as you say they won't dominate the campaign because the campaign is planned to value other capabilities than just combat monstery. I would prefer them to think a bit about the campaign context and choose a roleplaying conception that is more than combat monster and knowing the likely players, they are likely to do that. So, I'm not 100% behind Shiningbrow on being very strict on having to have a really strong conception before allowing players into those cults, but if you want a really roleplaying-oriented campaign, then you need to start the way you want to go on.