JonL

This what Ian's season-of-a-TV-show/year-of-a-comic/volume-of-a-trilogy/etc. approach is meant to address. During a given story arc, the base resistance stays steady, allowing the characters to start at a disadvantage to the major obstacles and gradually advance in effectiveness to the point where they have a decent shot at overcoming them in the endgame. Only at the conclusion of the arc does the base resistance jump, letting the resistance level get ahead of the characters giving new threats and challenges some teeth as they appear in the new arc. The characters can once again gradually pull ahead in the ratings race over the course of the arc. The cycle repeats for each chapter in the campaign. It's kind of like the Pass/Fail cycle implemented at the macro-level. This dynamic is specifically addressed with catch-ups even now. Where I do see a gap though is the rating for new abilities sitting at 13. In a long campaign, escalating base resistance will leave those behind. Doing something like making new abilities start equal to your lowest-rated ability, the lowest-rated ability among the party, or one point below the base-resistance would be a good tweak there, IMO. More broadly, I think swapping HP/advancement models is a big opportunity to orient your game towards the sort of play you're looking for. Saving HP for advancements rather than spending them in play rewards different behavior than getting an XP for every HP you spend. Getting XP for Major/Complete defeats encourages taking bigger risks. Flaws as hero-point generators make for yet different reward structures, as would something like milestones in Cortex+ games.

Advancement & escalating resistance are one of the big warts on HQ2/G as written. Laws's "Why advance Characters at all?" side-bar in HQ2CR is a totally legit approach if you're leaning more towards "Ratings are relative measures of abstract problem solving power" and away from "Ratings ratings reflect in-fiction capabilities and effectiveness." In that context, I'd let players shuffle points around between ratings over time to reflect what aspects of their character they wish to emphasize in play, (Many Fate-based games take a similar approach.) In HQ1, the static resistance TN benchmarks made for a more traditional RPG power scale against which to compare your heroes, and the broader range of ratings gave more room for fiddling with bonuses & penalties for various things. Some still prefer it for that very reason, but that approach also carries more cognative load, prep effort, etc. like any other medium-crunch game. HQG splits the difference though, as rating-thresholds in your runes & grimoires gatekeep tiers of magical status, so the tension is somewhat baked in. In QuestWorlds, Ian is discarding the resistance-rising-by-session-count idea in favor if the resistance-rising-at-the-end-of-each-season/arc idea he sketched out here. Games built on its generic foundation may of course implement a different approach that suits their specific focus.

A Venerable Lord with racked up a 25+ Spear Expertise in his youth though remains one heck of a glass cannon in the saddle, as his steed still lends him damage dice on a charge. He would not survive a protracted fight, as his faded SIZ & CON mean one good hit is going to put him down, but for as long as he can "charge, fight defensively, withdraw, repeat..." his Last Ride will be a hell of a show. Hopefully, the grandson of a long-dead Saxon, a former-foe who became a friend and ally after the Venerable Lord spared his life in the name of Christ's mercy, can seek him out with the gift of a Raven Banner.

I'd expect more opportunities for restorative justice through labor within communities, partly because much of the property is held in common, but also to hopefully give people a chance to interact in a structured way once tempers have cooled. Hookups at steamy religious festivals also wouldn't usually count as adultery, providing something of a pressure release valve for inconvenient sexual tension within the community. There are surely variations in severity otherwise though.

Fornrit is the kind of thing you'd want to talk through first. I was once in a historical Rome game where a player quit after being squicked out when another player's character (a Patrician) casually bought some slaves to bulk up his retinue. No rage outs, just a "You know, I think this game is not for me. You guys have fun." note between sessions.

In the South, sure. But it was only just catching on up North in the 5th Century, and then there are of course the surviving Saxons to convert after their defeat. It's been years since I ran the math, and the annual passive Glory rules may have changed since then, but at least at the time I crunched it out, a sufficiently pious and chivalrous knight with many notable traits, significant titles and estates, etc, who upon reaching middle age starts putting Glory boosts into his lowest stat at every opportunity could, with a bit of luck, stretch out his gradual decline into decrepitude over an implausibly loooooooong span. Thanks.

My Platonic Ideal Pendragon Campaign would start off very historically Post-Roman, with merest hints of the anachronisms to come. Tribal identities and bloodlines matter, alongside remnants of Roman villa culture here and there. There are no "Earls" or "Barons" among the Cymri, but "Wledigs" or perhaps "Domini" or "Comiti" where Roman culture lingers. Names all Latin or Cymru, "Rhydderch" rather than "Roderick." More Mabinogion than Mallory. The game would open with the characters becoming part of the very first cohort of Emrys Wledig's elite and innovative new Ordo Equestris, formed to restore him as Ambrosius Aurelianus Verum rex Britannia, bringing new ideals of virtue, discipline, and valor to the war-torn land. The hated Saxsons call them "cniht" - meaning "servant" - in mockery of their devotion to the true Wledig, but the Equites Ambrosius have begun to claim it as their own, wearing their enemies' scorn as a badge of honor. Things would stay pretty Dark Age until the sons and squires of the Emrys Knights who have survived the Anarchy behold the arrival of the Boy King, at which point Britain's embrace of Christianity brings divine blessings of prosperity that allow rapid advances in technology and culture. A generation comes of age who has never known a time where the virtues of Chivalry were not the norm. This then is the Mallory-esque era. Another comes thereafter who have never known civil war or Saxon raids have time for Tennyson-ish Idylls of romance and errantry... until it all comes crashing down. Then, in the end, when someones current PK falls to a flukey crit, that player's grey haired old PK, perhaps the last survivor of Ambrosius's Knights, with enough annual Glory from virtues, holdings, etc. coming in to slow the ravages of aging rolls enough to still be up and around (if but a shadow of his former stats) mounts up for one last battle.

If your players are interested in having more interaction with how a battle plays out (even if the overall outcome is scripted) while still keeping the basic structure and high-level view of the Book of Battle, take a look at the reworked battle rules I put together a few years back.

Alas, I have no better copy of the maneuvers table. my group's last Pendragon campaign was three years and a replacement computer ago.) If Chaosium does something similar to the Jonstown Compendium or Miskatonic Repository for Pendragon, I'll put the time into a properly laid out write-up for this, with some more details and examples. Perhaps that would be the time to finish up my Book of Battle-inspired rules for Character-Focussed Sieges too, where you've got week-long Siege Rounds, each side can pick an action for each round (Dig In, Sap, Storm, Sally, Construct/Repair, Forage, etc), PKs/Wives/Stewards can make relevant skill rolls to influence the result, and you track things like Provisions, Ammunition, and Morale. Choosing half-rations for a week conserves your Provisions, but Morale suffers (and can penalize your action roll) - but maybe your PK can make an Orate roll to counteract that. If you're planning to Storm or Sally, choose full rations to put your forces at full effectiveness. PKs fighting in Storm/Sally skirmishes can influence the outcome just like battle rounds. If disease breaks out, Stewardship or Chirurgy might lessen the effect. That sort of thing.

Given the timing, the Missing God could be one who was utterly un-made by Kajabor or the like, such that none remember its name or stories.

Yeah, the odds of someone at your gaming table having been a victim of post-decapitation necromantic enslavement are significantly lower than the chance that someone has experienced sexual assault. Common decency should take that into consideration. The development of things like X-Cards, and agreed upon Lines & Veils (possibly even to the extent of players submitting the latter anonymously) are of great value for this sort of thing. I mostly play with people I've been close to for decades such that we all trust one another and have a good handle on one another's boundaries and needs. When playing with people you don't know as intimately though, addressing content expectations up front and employing common sense safety tools is a wise practice. When I've (rarely) used Broos in game, I told the players that their characters know them as malevolent disease monsters that reproduce like parasitic wasps crossed with Giger aliens, and left it at that. In character, an NPC might say something like, "<grimly>Broos did this.<spits> When we find them, no quarter, no mercy, and no one left behind."

Deciding how gritty/deadly vs cinematic/forgiving contests are going to be is another important inflection point in how you tune your game experience. In cinematic play, the GM can decide from the get go that Bond is definitely going to survive the challenge, with the level of Victory or Defeat on the contest representing a range of results from being captured after passing out from blood-loss on a Complete Defeat, to not only evading their fire but also baiting them to shoot some nearby combustibles to thus prevent them from pursuing him on a Complete Victory. Precious seconds, wounds, resource consumption, fate of allies, etc. can all dramatically hang in the balance of that contest, even if Bond is making it past the guards on 399/400 rolls. In the other direction, you might frame a battle or other serious peril such that the PCs are only completely unharmed on a Major Victory+, with Major Defeat including things like loosing a limb, being blinded, an NPC ally dying, etc. (If that ally was an Ability, it should transform into a new Ability somehow relevant to the loss of the ally, a new squire, a lust for revenge, getting promoted to succeed the fallen officer, being given the ally's magic sword, etc.) The key is to make it clear to the players what the stakes are.

There is a difference in result distributions between those systems, in that while +1 is always a 5% difference in success chance when rolling a d20, the opposed rolls in HQ make the impact of a +1 to ability rating vary depending on the opposing resistance rating. See below the increased chance of obtaining a Marginal Victory or better result as ability rating increases from 13-14 and 18-19 with respect to resistances of 14 and 20: 13 -> 14 18 ->19 vs R14 +4.25% +3.5% vs R20 +3% +4.25% (odds calc spreadsheet here)

Do as little or as much NPC detail as you find useful and worth the effort.

Ah, I see she knows the Enferalda Drops a Jerk secret.

Part of how you adjust the dials for your desired play experience is deciding how much ability ratings concretely measure in-fiction capability vs measure abstract plot oomph. This goes hand in hand with the complementary choice of setting resistance based on how credible in-fiction it is for a given ability to solve a particular problem vs setting resistance based on narrative pacing.

The tale of Tam Lin comes to mind as well. Tam's savior doesn't have to beat up or kill the elves to win. She instead has to find the steadfastness within herself to hold fast to her love in the face of all the horrible glamours. Standing firm in the face of terrifying craziness is a solid (so to speak) Earth approach to the Alone in the Dark challenge.

I expect that the number is low, but not zero.

That is the current line, yes. I nonetheless find both her myths and her playable cult details more interesting as a distinct entity who could nonetheless switch-hit and participate in the Orlanth excitement. I preferred when she could do all the Orlanth things without being Orlanth in the literal sense. She could do them by being awesome in her own right, rather than because she was really Orlanth in womanly guise. (This is of course a matter of taste.) The picture is Osara, daughter of Elmal & Ekarna. The modern Heortling conception of Elmal's wife Redalda does have a fair bit in common with Osara though. It's a good example of how these family relationships among the gods get blurry real fast.

One thing I dislike about the "Vinga is Orlanth" interpretation rather than "Vinga is Orlanth in the same sense that Barntar is also Orlanth or Muzarharm is Yelm." is the Storm Tribe era Vinga with Death affinity in lieu of Mastery. In my Gloranthas Vingans may still approach her that way, though not if they wish to have children. Mastery can still be awakened by performing Making the Storm Tribe as Orlanth. Some say that Elmal had a daughter too...

Notably, when Heortlings vote, the women bring either a big spoon/ladle or a distaff as their token of franchise.

A quick Googling finds it in print at least as far back as Thunder Rebels. It also appeared in the Mongoose RQ books.

It's a peculiarity of Orlanthi/Theyalan culture. The Orlanthi All means that when they make generalizations like "All of our men follow Orlanth, and all of our women follow Ernalda." it's understood contextually that "All" really means "roughly six in seven."

I wouldn't generalize from Orlanth:Vinga, except perhaps to the parallel Ernalda:Nandan relationship. The Orlanth & Ernalda cults as practiced by Heortlings are how a lot of their culture's performative gender norms get exemplified and taught and are at times tied specifically to reproductive sex roles. Even among the Heortling cults with strong gender role components, they are at the extreme; compare to Elmal:Redalda at about 1:1 (unless you count the Yelmalions in with Elmali, which I expect most Redaldans do not, but even then it lands around 4:1, not 25:1.) The more gendered cults also tend to be the ones that have/need a complementary-gender sub-cult to begin with. Others, like Issaries for example, are much less conceptually tied up with gender or sex. As Identification with the deity is important to theistic practice, you'd expect a majority of initiate+ followers to be of the same gender as the deity, simply because it's easier to identify that way for most people. Probably again the 6/7 "All" on average, but with some being more strongly gender-skewed and others less so. It's similar in some ways to non-Uz joining cults like Argan Argar or Zorak Zoran. Sure, most of their followers are Uz, but just about anyone can join if their heart is in the right place, especially so for the former. WRT Humakt in particular, being a Humakti pretty explicitly has nothing to do with being a father/mother/husband/wife/farmer/homemaker-etc. You sever yourself from all that. I'd expect it to be much closer to 6/7 (or even less) than 25:1 My Gloranthas also have things like an Asrelia sub-cult that's less about being a wise and kindly grandmother and instead geared towards prospectors and gamblers.

It's worth remembering that "all" means 6/7.