JonL

Now I want to play through the Colymar Campaign as an Argan Argar follower. I do not fear the long night, for I am of the Darkness. I need no star's light to bring me hope, for I feel others struggling within the Darkness, and know that we are not alone. I shall find the others in their struggles, and exchange with them the words of Unity, so that my friends will know hope as well. United, we shall bring hope to all.

Heortling men will already have experienced the Star Heart myth during their initiation, but there is nothing about it that is specifically man-focussed or would exclude a woman from attaining it. It's not as though she can't stand alone against her weaknesses and flaws. The party questing in the Colymar campaign isn't necessarily questing/identifying as Heort either, merely facing a similar problem using Heort's example (of which all Heortlings know at least the broad strokes). If a player wants an approach to the Star Heart challenge in a fashion that reflects traditional Heortling gender norms and ideas of feminine power (rather than just Vinga-ing through Heort's path), perhaps "There is always another way." provides some guidance. Heort faced his demons alone, but was that the only option available? What if a character strong in Harmony manages to find her comrades despite the Dark, and teaches them to help eachother overcome their flaws, each applying their strength where another is weak. I Fought, We Won. Following in Heort's footsteps is of course a well-trod path, but the deeper lesson of of I Fought, We One was that everyone everywhere was struggling in their own ways, and together overcoming the Dark. Ultimately, it's formost about the character. A woman who walks the path of Babeester Gor, Redalda, or Maran is going to face being Alone in the Dark differently than one following Ernalda would. I could see an Issaries initiate of whatever gender taking the "other way" approach above with through Communication as "easily" as an Ernaldan might carry it off with Harmony. Anyone who follows Eurmal, Humakt, or Lhankor Mhy might also find yet different paths. Many struggles, one victory.

I plan on a proper write-up of this and some other things knocking around various forum posts once the QuestWorlds SRD drops.

Something I've been thinking about lately is leveraging the Community Resource property of risking depletion through use, being bolstered by overcoming appropriate obstacles, and generally fluctuating according to background events into character abilities. I flirted with fluctuating ratings in my Flaw variant post in the house rules thread, and I've come to dig the idea for abilities that represent some sort of personal resource or power reserve. Here are some ideas: Followers/Allies/Patrons - these are very similar to a Community conceptually. Repeatedly drawing on them to solve problems can tire them, hurt them, expend their resources, burn them out on helping you, etc. Taking actions to bolster them strengthens both their effectiveness and the strength of your relationship. Background fluctuation can give them a life outside of their interaction with the character. Wealth - Major expenditures or leveraging assets to attain a goal can make one's fortune less effective meeting other challenges in the near term. Overcoming challenges may bolster one's financial position. Market forces and business activities can be responsible for background fluctuation. Willpower - Repeated challenges to overcome personal Flaws, withstand mind-control, resist temptations, etc. can wear down the character's resolve. Actions that build you up can bolster it. Background fluctuations can represent day to day ups and downs during downtime. Mana - Casting spells can deplete one's magical reserves. Overcoming challenges to gather spell components, bargain with entities, draw power from the Other Side, etc. can bolster it. Actions that build you up can bolster it. Background fluctuations can represent usage during downtime. Vitae - Vampires augmenting their powers and abilities by expending reserves of blood gradually deplete it (and have a harder time resisting their Hunger flaw). Overcoming obstacles to feed or increase one's mortal herd can bolster it. Background fluctuations can represent feeding/usage during downtime. This sort of thing would not benefit every game, and lingering benefits and consequences can fulfill a similar role at times. However, I think the resource dynamics could be a valuable tool for making mechanics focus attention on a particular aspect of play you wish to emphasize. In game design generally, one should ask "What is the core activity or play experience we are aiming for? How do the mechanics guide play towards and support those goals?" QuestWorlds's design remit of portraying story arcs and conflicts as we know them in fiction is a bit broad in terms of answering those questions. They are left open to the designer or GM to implement. Much like many generic systems, part of utilizing it successfully is artfully tuning and adjusting its tool-set to focus on your desired play experience.

OpenQuest is a lighter-than-average d100 system from d101 Games, descending from the Mongoose Legend OGL branch of the tree if I'm not mistaken (please correct me if that's in error, @Newt) QuestWorlds is the pending open-licensed HeroQuest successor, and I too eagerly await all the new twists people will put on it.

"Beginning October 28, you won't be able to upload any more content to the site, and as of December 14 all previously posted content on the site will be permanently removed. You'll have until that date to save anything you've uploaded." Download anything that matters, now. Content you yourself generated/uploaded can be requested in bulk from the privacy dashboard, though it can take up to 30 days for them to send it to you.

You could also conceivably find future (from your perspective) Compromise crises in God Time. If in some crisis yet to come, a god or gods intervene directly within Time, that moment is also within the God Time.

I think the Spirit/God distinction being in the eye of the beholder applies to just about all of them. Exceptions might be abstract or just out-there entities Iike the Invisible God or Kajabor. The polymorphism is explicitly manifest in places like Pent and Prax, and the Guide even specifically calls out West King Wind as Orlanth. On the other end of the spectrum you've got the Aoleans sacrificing baked goods to the Lightbringers instead of animals - and the magic still works. The Other Side responds in reflection of how you approach it. That same principle underlies the Theyalan missionaries exporting their Dawn paradigm beyond Kierofinela & Kethela, Hrestolism & Seshna intertwinement in early Seshnela, the Bright Empire's God-hacking and Pelorian/Theyalan syncreticism, the experimental/transformative heroquesting pioneered by Harmast, Kralori dream worlds, the God Learners' shenanigans, and the development of heterodox practices like Orlanth Dragonfriend, Arkati sects, Carmanian practices, Henotheism, the Chariot of Lightning, and of course the Lunar Way. The distinction only ever seems clear-cut when playing RuneQuest and having to decide which stats or rules to apply. The in-fiction entities are less concerned with mechanical boxes.

If the Uz parent were strong enough in the Man rune, they could breed with a human.

Uz or Kitori, I expect.

I know you're the lawyer & all, but § 6, 9, & 10 all pertain to outside parties utilizing the license itself. The assertion in the preamble that the license itself is not Open Gaming Content is about making it clear that the license text is not subject to the broad permissions enumerated for such in §1, but rather the narrow modifications specified in § 6, and 9 and the inclusion mandate in §10. Really, it's entire raison d'être is for other publishers to use it. §5 specifically calls out releasing original works as Open Gaming Content. Nothing in the text restricts its use to games tracing their lineage to D&D3. As a point of reference from the Open Gaming's antecedents in the world of software, countless non-GNU projects utilize various flavors of the GPL, the MIT & Berkely licenses are used widely beyond those universities' remit, and the Mozilla and Apache foundations are far from the only ones to utilize their eponymous licenses. Perhaps consider whether multi-licensing the SRD might both allow you to gain the comfort and certainty you're wanting from your house-license, yet also allowing QuestWorlds to benefit from inter-operation with the broader ecosystem of OGL works. If you simply want nothing to do with the fruit of WizCo's tree, Creative Commons: - Attribution - Share Alike would be another solid candidate for a weak-copyleft license, explicitly allowing open derivative works to commingle with proprietary content in a single Collective Work much as the OGL does. It's less broadly used in RPGs, but at least it wouldn't be a silo.

Despite the original language, will it be semantically equivalent to the commonly used OGL such that materials can be commingled (possibly requiring both with both license texts be included in distribution at that point)? While I respect your caution and diligence, if rolling your own means that someone couldn't put out QW material that mixes in names of spells from D&D or Pathfinder SRDs, Invoke/Compell mechanics from Fate, or super-power building tools from Mutants & Masterminds, you'll only be in a slightly better position than you were with the HQ Gateway License. Cross-pollination and network affects are a big part of what makes open licenses so powerful. I'd hate to see one silo be traded in for a somewhat nicer silo. If HQ had been released under the common OGL or appropriate CC rather than a fairly open but nonetheless proprietary HQGL from the get go, it might have occupied the market space that Fate does now. Network affects are not to be underestimated.

What's the outlook on POD for these? While I recognize a lot of the pre-/early- desktop publishing era titles in the Vault would require significant preflight labor for a respectable quality POD release, I'd hope the Moon Design era titles would just be a matter of tweaking @Rick Meints 's old layout files for export to whatever specs DriveThru or whomever require. That's a step that would take some of the sting out of being left behind by the new hotness, as well as support current releases like The Coming Storm that heavily rely on those out of print titles for background.

That's why she suggested hiring a professional or equivalent expert.

Welcome! That's great news.

In addition to retaining a proper Elmal, my Gloranthas have more chariots, because the Tain is rad..

^ Yeah, I can never quite square all the talk of justice with Sun Domers' misogynistic mercenary serf-oppressor ways.

There have been myriad changes to the setting over the decades. What I find frustrating is the retcons that contradict the select works that Moon Design explicitly put forth as the foundation for new materials going forward. SKoH and SC are both set only a few years before RQG, and the picture they paint of the Sartarites perspective on the whole thing is materially different from what we are getting now. @daskindt lays it out pretty thoroughly in this post. Whether one prefers the new approach or not is a matter of taste, and Jeff has certainly earned his position as the one whose taste guides what goes in the books many times over, but let's not pretend that contradictions and revisions/retcons to the HQ2/G era materials aren't being made. The new assertion that "Yelmalio is the Sun God of Dragon Pass" and Elmal is some minor niche cult (in addition to contradicting the many things daskindt sited) is out of step with 1kE:3kY in that if perhaps 2/3 of that ~3k is in Sun Dome County, and half of the rest are in Alda-Chur, that leaves ~500 Y's scattered around everywhere else. If you similarly put half the E's in Runegate, the balance most places that aren't a stronghold of either cult starts to look about 50/50. Change my distribution assumptions and you can reasonably still say 2Y: 1E most places if you like. However, if you then add Redalda's ~1k initiates to the Elmal-is-our-Sun-God side of the scale (because ain't no Redalda daughter gonna put up with Sun Dome misogyny) you've definitely got at least as many E+R as Y initiates anywhere that isn't a Yelmalio strongold, and probably more. Who then is the Sun God of Dragon Pass? Further ~1k initiates across Sartar isn't small for any cult that isn't Orlanth or Ernalda. SKoH also counts Humakt, Lhankor-Mhy, Urox, and Yinkin as having ~1k initiates, and we never hear about how they can barely staff a shrine or are inconsequential to the cultural landscape. Let's not further side-track the discussion of changes to the setting in general with E:Y particulars though. For the purpose of this thread, it's enough to say that it represents a change to how Sartarite culture and religion had been portrayed in recent materials. (We can awaken the thread I linked to above, if you'd like to go further down the sun god road.)

How big a deal the Elmal thing is depends largely on how much use you've been getting out of Elmal as presented in Sartar - Kingdom of Heroes and the Runegate chapter in Sartar Companion. ( From the SKoH , "What Sartarites think" on Sun Domers: "The Sun Domers are a strange cult who betrayed Elmal for the Cold Sun..." is very different from what we're getting now, as is the 1k Elmali & 3K Yelmalions in Sartar figure from SKoH - especially when you figure that most of those Yelmalons are in Vantar.) While no spirits of retribution are going to come and steal those books away, future releases conflicting with what you're currently using makes both new and old less useful.This is doubly frustrating if you like to keep your Glorantha varying to local/personal or otherwise self-contained matters and otherwise rely on the published works for the bigger picture. Suddenly, your game is now out of step with what's coming out when you intended the exact opposite. Further, what are Yelm's runes? Or Storm Bull's, Issaries's or Waha's? Guide and HQ books say one thing, RQG says another (though letting Orlanth keep Mastery, but not Waha or Yelm, interestingly.) Sure, one can work out mappings and such, but it's another instance of something you thought you knew and could trust suddenly not being the case. Things once considered reliable, suddenly are not. I'm not trying to edition-war here, but I do feel there is a difference between taking creative license in one's own games, fan works, or even officially blessed deliberate alt-takes (presented as such) vs outright contradictions to established reference works.

I'm a big fan of everyone making a setting what they need or want it to be for their own enjoyment. I get frustrated when official works are contradictory, because they become less inter-operable, and thus less useful/valuable then they would be as part of consistent whole. When I came into all this, this excellent article at glorantha.com was very useful to me in getting a handle on the baseline from which one's Glorantha will vary . For all that it deliberately included ambiguities, contradictions, and insoluble mysteries, there was a common point of reference from which variation could be recognized, appreciated, and understood. Maybe it's just an accident of the timing of my arrival that it even seemed like such a thing existed, but I nonetheless feel its loss. I used to be unbothered by future HQ releases being recast as (more profitable) RQ titles, thinking the setting information would still cleanly fit with what I already have. As the worlds they describe increasingly diverge in more ways than just the time-period though, this becomes less true. As the posture for published works moves away from a common Glorantha among many games to each game line having its own branch of the tree, I hope that means we can see more diverse concepts get attention and support. Let's see some more of the cartoony Glorantha from Khan of Khans. Let's get notes on how to integrate ideas from Six Ages into your tabletop games. If the Guide is no longer etched in stone, let's see about a less stereotype-laden East. While I miss the knowability of what seemed to be a stable corpus, embracing variability also brings opportunity.

My experience has been fewer fights occurring in RQ games, but those fewer fights end up taking more session time at the table than several HQ dustups do. Where a HQ game falls on the gritty <-> high-adventure spectrum is very much a playstyle/social-contract choice. Interestingly, I have of a few occasions run HQ with very gritty detailed injuries and after affects ( including swelling, shock, etc.), realistic healing times, lasting impairments, and the like. As expected, the PCs got properly gunshy, and became more prone to things like arranging ambushes rather than risking fair fights. In a given game, losing a limb or being seriously burned might be Major Defeat or Pyrrhic Minor Victory consequences, as long as everyone at the table understands the stakes.

Say, @John Wick , would you be open to blessing a Houses of the Blooded genre pack for QuestWorlds? I was reading HotB tonight and was struck by the parallels with extended contests, community resources, and so on.

No, he wrote it right. It's just that his love for his mother can move mountains, literally. 😅 Yeah, there's an implied one after the M we dont usually state. If we were being super rigorous, we could start abilities with the also-mplied M0, but that would confuse more than it would clarify, methinks.

I'm just going to leave this right here...

Moving points around between adventures is common in many Fate-based games, giving players the opportunity to decide which abilities they wish to highlight in play.