JonL

I think it is, with Movement. That's from whence the "No one can make you do anything." axiom arises. You could also make a case for Power, given the way Pamalt defied the doom of the world, the Doraddi have a society without heirarchy and empires, and the opposition to Ompalm. It could also be absent from the runes because they are such co-beings to the gods themselves. The gods are timeless and gave up their volition as part of the Compromise. People within Time are not so constrained. Note that Time has no rune either, not even on the big ol HQ1-era list.

Fate is a Condition rune, not a Power rune. It's not in opposition to anything.

Jar-Eel muses upon this as the carves up Belintar in Prince of Sartar, though doesn't think the potential consequences of her action through.

The impact does vary with respect to initial rating, but not by a ton. Vs Resistance 14: Net Rating % any Victory diff %Minor Vic+ diff 19 67.50% 31.75% 16 56.25% 11.25% 28% 3.75% 13 43.25% 13.00% 24.25% 3.75% 10 32.00% 11.25% 20.50% 3.75% 7 23.00% 9.00% 17% 3.75% So the character with a 19 who takes a -6 chance of any Victory drops by 24.25%, while the character with a thirteen's chance only drops by 20.25%. The impact of a -6 on their chances of scoring a minor or better is 7.5% for both of them.

I believe that's part of Movement.

This post on flat-world visibility from the Dormal thread seems relevant: A single arc minute is also very low definition. Legibility of text drops off below 18 arc minutes, and more basic symbols' detail falls off below 16. That's perhaps less relevant to the Closing, but meaningful for spotting distances generally. For example, a 5m high emblem on a sail or large flag will have details visible at around a kilometer, and basic shape and contrast at about double that. Context might still let you reasonably infer more information from less detail, such as in cases where only a certain group used big red circle designs, or similar. Crows' nests are still useful on an uncurved sea, as you can see over the swells, fog, or other nearby ships.

If whatever uniquely-Gloranthan elements in earlier drafts were not essential to the story, an editor or agent would have done well to advise him to replace them with references to the same ancient myths and civilizations that inspired Glorantha, and then be able to own his work outright rather than have to deal with licensing someone else's IP.

One of the things I'm looking forward to with the forthcoming OGL QuestWorlds is the inevitable "Classes & Keywords" D&D mashups.

Welcome to the party.

Yeah, they'd have to do something amazing like go on a perilous quest to the Otherworld and bring Uther back a magic sword that let's him win all his battles for something like that to happen, at a minimum.

If your players are drawn to sort of play, the only way they're still going to be low tier vassal knights by the end of Uther's wars, is if you're deliberately holding them back, particularly if they distinguish themselves in the big battles against Gorlois. If they have maintained Uther's favor (a non trivial task) and pulled off major heroics in battle, it would be strange for Uther to not cut them in on the redistrubution of fallen enemies' holdings among his favored loyalists - SOP for a monarch after a civil war. Even those who remain in Roderick's inner circle will likely be officers of some sort if they've been turning the tide of battles by taking the enemy camp and similar - again, assuming that the players are interested in the lord side of the game. That's obviously not the only way to play, but it's by no means beyond consideration. I strongly disagree with your assessment of the other periods in this respect. Once Arthur triumphs, you're back to needing special permission to build castles etc., intra-Briton conflicts are vastly reduced, and major warfare becomes the exception rather than the rule. Arthur brings stability and prosperity, at least for a time. During the civil wars and Anarchy, it's "Chaos is a ladder." WRT the latter bit, it comes off as a bit judgmental. Who is to say what the PKs should or should not earn through good play? Why presume that a PK with his eyes on lordship who is a lion on the battlefield and a fox at court can only achieve that (after many years of effort, maneuvering, and overcoming various challenges) if the GM is a pushover? That it is a difficult, dangerous, uphill battle against dire odds is kind of the point of fighting it. Adventure RPGs aren't about playing it safe. Playing it safe is for NPCs. It's the PKs job to go out and do the hard things, or again - die trying. That's what makes them heroic.

While nobody said it would be easy, the power vacuum post St. Albans, is precisely the time for PKs to step up and be those leaders. Forge the alliances, build the castles, unite the rivals for mutual defense, put the fear of God into the invaders or die trying. If the Saxons are so unstoppable, why did they stop? If they could effortlessly crush resisting Britons, the'd be continuing to do so. What king is going to forbid this, the same dead one who isn't around to tell you not to build a wall around your manor? We're talking about the Anarchy here. There's time once Arthur arrives for personal tales of star-crossed romance, family drama, fairy forests, meditations upon holiness in a fallen world, glorious tournaments, and all that. The Anarchy is the sole opportunity in the timeline for the PKs to be Big Damn Warlords and take the reins for themselves before the next generation gets back on the plot railroad. The obstacles are as surmountable or not as the GM decides to make them. Why operate from the premise that the PKs must be hemmed in and meekly hope for the storm to pass while doing side quests for the Countess to pass the time? How does that work out without Arthur? We don't have to speculate. That's the world we live in.

HQ2CR is not exactly known for being a paragon of clear and consistent presentation.

My prices from memory were a bit off, but If paying fighters (weather temps or full-time staff) to go take stuff is a net loss, then either the cost of the fighters or the return on raiding is mis-priced, or else no one would do it. Similarly, if anyone who went raiding got pounced on by marauders with incredibly good timing and intelligence needed to coordinate their movements to your comings and goings from the next kingdom over, no one would do it. Looking back over my notes of yore, the magic number was to drop 15 Libram on 10 footmen and 5 Sargeants, bring levies for your foragers (which they can do just fine between planting and harvest) rand then hit several small targets, while leaving hard targets alone. Basically, chevauchée, which is entirely in keeping with the anachronistic Mallory-era military idiom that Pendragon inserts into the Dark Ages. If this sort of stuff is supposed to be part of the game (especially during the Anarchy), why should the GM smack you down with super-coordinated roving bands or retaliations with 10 times your force? If chevauchée is doing-it-wrong, why are we playing a game about Knights? The Cymri during the Anarchy have no expectation that a future savior is in the works. Waiting only makes their enemy stronger. Ulfius's approach only looks sensible because Arthur eventually shows up to save the day. Without that, he'd be doomed, just like Vortigern was. If you're not actively fighting the Saxon menace, you're waiting for the next wave to come and make your lands the next Wessex. If you're not trying to drive them into the sea, you may as well either join with Cerdic or pack up ,go kick some Gaels out of Cambria and become the proto-Welsh, because hunkering down and paying tribute is slow-motion suicide.

The hard separations you're familiar with from HQ1 have been downgraded to more of an "Orlanthi 'All'" in HQG. The typical cases are normative, but not restrictive, and one-off magical abilities like you describe are explicitly OK, either stand-alone or hung off of a Rune (or other sensible ability), and the rune need not be mastery-level in the latter case.

I gotta go with Kipling's assessment here: If Saxons want £3 or else raid, the valorous Knight downgrades his standard of living to Poor Knight voluntarily (since that's what's going to happen anyway if he pays) takes the £3 thus saved plus whatever extra income he's got from manor improvements and hires himself a few scouts and extra decade or two of foot each Summer, and then tells the Saxons that any raids will be repaid three-fold against not only the raiding party but his neighboring allies as well, and that he will make sure they know why. Your peasants will respect you for living lean and protecting them rather than making up the shortfall on their backs. If the Saxons do come to test your mettle instead of choosing some other target that doesn't have the extra protection, you FIGHT! If they want to steal labor's fruits from those you are sworn to protect then, before God, they will pay for it in blood! Even if they roll you for £3 anyway. making good on that promise of retaliation once should make up the loss, the second time will pay for the mercs, and if all three are successful you can hire them back next Summer without going down to Poor Knight, or live lean again and hire even more. (Multiple raids against small-medium holdings you can roll quickly with a +/-5 or better manpower advantage is the mathematically optimal path for the BotE raid rules. You're much better off moving on to pluck more low-hanging fruit somewhere else than sticking around to plunder or ravage for diminishing returns and greater risk of enemy relief appearing.) Maybe do one raid into Sussex even if they don't come after you. Pay for your mercs and put the fear of you into them. That is how you warlord!

Broadly, the character creation approach laid out in HQG is more fully specified than the one in the one in the HQ2 appendix and SKoH with an eye towards guiding you towards qualifying for Initiate status or equivalent at the start of play. That's something a new-2-HQ player can fail to do with the more flexible spec in HQ2 without understanding the implications. The magic approaches are more of an update (though the changes aren't huge), though there's nothing wrong with the earlier approach if it's more to someone's liking. HQ2 examples include using the Package Keyword approach, which is where you see the many discrete abilities included under a Keyword like you're describing there. That method is nice where you're wanting keywords to work more like character classes, whereby they can create niche protection (for those who like that in their games) or mechanically reserve certain abilities that are in-fiction exclusive certain groups in a setting via keyword selection. The "Breakouts are a +1 (or more)" style is referred to as the "Umbrella Keyword" approach in HQ2. HQG, being a specific implementation of the HQ framework rather than a generalized toolkit book like HQ2CR, standardized on the Umbrella approach. With Package style, the distinction between a keyword and a stand-alone ability is major. With Umbrella, it's more arbitrary. An ability becomes a keyword when you add a breakout. Otherwise there's not a big difference in play.

I'm of a mind that guidance on when to use more rules, when to use fewer, and why with respect to the sort of play experience you're aiming for is of great benefit. Placing mechanical detail beyond the baseline on something is a signpost telling your players where to focus attention in play. Runes in HQG are a good example of this. Their implementation in HQG contradicts the core HQ abstractions in several ways, but in so doing they focus the game on key Gloranthan themes. The QW SRD, talks a bit about those sort of choices in the context of being an implementation reference for designers, but a future full toolkit book will hopefully dig in in more depth.

He can augment with it already, enhancing his Thirstless Society magic where appropriate, even augment things he can otherwise do to degrees that are overtly supernatural ("No one can swim that fast!") thanks to having it at mastery-level, but not use it independently for magical things without some other fictional foundation.

In HQG, I don't see a necessary hard separation between the different magical practices. It makes sense to approach Zola Fel directly via Water rather than at arm's length via Spirit if he wishes to become closer to Zola Fel, embody Zola Fel on HeroQuests, and so on. In-fiction, the things one might do approaching Zola Fel through Water will also be different than having river spirits do things for you, even if the end-result is often functionally equivalent. Sometimes this matters, sometimes not. "Something you have" can be taken away or interfered with in ways that "something you are" cannot. "Something you have" can also offer more variety at times than "something you are," despite Theism being generally more flexible, as you can have things that are contradictory or less like yourself. There are Theists who only approach their god through a single rune also, but either way it is beneficial to not put all your eggs in one basket with a rune just like with other keywords. If you develop Spirit and Water, they can augment one another. The Devotee-level Theism feats are also something of an implicit ceiling on what one can accomplish in their domain through other means, all things being otherwise equal. Sorcery or Animism may be able to match or exceed them in certain instances, but only with a larger investment of resources.

QuestWorlds is the forthcoming open-licensed successor to the HeroQuest Core Rules (HQ2) toolkit. The linked files are an excerpt from the SRD, currently released to only developers using it as a basis for upcoming games, such as Ron Edwards's "Cosmic Zap!" Glorantha-specific implementations, will continue to use the HeroQuest name (and reserve that term as non-open product identity) with QuestWorlds becoming the identity for the system family overall.

What's maddening is that just looking at it in a different format I immediately caught two mistakes that I didn't see previously: No line break before section 1.4, and section 2.2 being skipped in the numbering. <sigh>

This is an area where I would clearly separate the ship's in-fiction capabilities from its ability rating. If the PC's ship is clearly over-matched by an opposing ship, factor that into the resistance. Spending money or elbow grease can improve the ship's in-fiction capabilities. Spending hero-points can increase the problem-solving power of the ability, represented by its rating. Those can go hand in hand, or not. You don't even need to have the ship represented in game mechanics if you want. You can just take the fiction surrounding it into account when assessing plausibility, stretches, and resistance for contests with the characters' relevant abilities (pilot, engineer, etc). Another approach would be to treat the ship as a community. This makes sense for bigger ships with larger crews and facilities. Choose 3-5 resources that fit the style of scifi you want. The interval for resource fluctuation might be a single voyage, a week, a deployment, etc. depending again on your needs.

What sort of feel are you aiming for? Epic Sagas? Realistic-ish? Somewhere in between? What do you want to focus on? Local politics and family drama? Exploration and trade? Raiding and conquest? Slaying monsters?

Oh, yes. Autocorrect snuck past me there.