JonL

The severity escalation parallels the decreasing likelihood of the result. Minor Defeat is usually 4-6 times more likely than Major Defeat, depending on the specific rating matchup. The big jump in severity between Impared -6 and Injured -M reflects those odds. I do sometimes hand out Hurt or even Impaired on a Marginal Victory for a Simple Contest in situations where physical harm makes fictional sense in the context of "You achieved your goal, but..." The most obvious examples are things like "You won the duel, but you've got a nasty gash in your left shoulder." or "Leaping from the train allowed you to escape, but with a twisted ankle for your trouble." In Extended Contests, the RP scored against the victor provides a similar function.

I'd skip head-sized fake beasts if you're wanting to avoid attention.

As an aside re moving through places unfriendly to evil headhunter magicians: backpacks, sacks, chests, panchos, saddlebags, amphorae...

Even if you tweak this or that conflicting value into consistancy, the core of the assault rules is deeply messed up. In particular, the two specific relationships I mentioned mean that what you've got in the core of the fortress doesn't really matter. The only real effective defense is a large outer perimeter with many towers, as large as you can possibly man, and large stores of assault gear to neutralize attacker assault gear. The large outer perimeter lets you utilize enough troops to be able to use enough assault gear neutralize the attacker's assault gear, and thus keep the perimiter's high DV (thanks to many towers outweighing the gate penalties) intact. Normal sized perimeters indirectly limit the amount of assault gear that can be used to maintain their effectiveness thanks to the max defenders by footage limit and limit to deployablle assault gear by defender headcount interacting. The assault gear an attacker needs to neutralize defenses can be freely replenished between attacks, while the defenders have only what they've been socking away each winter. You thus need to have a high enough outer perimeter DV to inflict massive casualties, as repeated assaults will otherwise deplete the gear you need to maintain then effectiveness of your wall. The fallback to the keep scenario is pointless, because it's smaller perimeter places such a low cap on the number of defenders that can participate, and thus the amount of assault gear that they can utilize to maintain the keep's effectiveness, that holding it against any force that was able to overcome your outer perimeter is highly unlikely from a numerical standpoint. This is not conjecture, I spread-sheeted and graphed all this when my weekly group played Pendragon a few years back. The dynamics that emerge from the rules are simply not desirable from either a fictional or fun standpoint. That's what I mean about the assault rules being an exercise in suffering. You can build a defensible castle under these rules, but it will look more like a Constantinople or Troy rather than anything Mallory would imagine. Moreover, while the fact that an assault will succeed of fail based more on the budgeting for arrows, fire buckets, and oil you did over the last ten years than anything that happens on the day of the battle may be true to life - it is utterly out of step tonally with a game about Knights, (Doubly so so the DVx5 differentials from of a single tower ot the assault gear attackers can improvise in the field numerically dwarf PKs or their wives/stewards' siege skill.) My advice is that any future work on this corner of the game start over from first principles.

I suggest just not thinking to much about the numbers around fortifications DV and assaults. They are not rigorously implemented, have undesirable emergent dynamics*, and seem to have contradictory elements from multiple drafts or the like. Trying to dig in them deeply will only bring woe. I speak from experience. (* The minimum & maximum defenders by wall footage rules, and the assault gear vs dv rules in particular lead to crazy town outcomes and un-fun optimal paths if you actually do the math.)

With a rating of 20, I treat a rolled 20 as a regular fail rather than a fumble. Essentially, it treats the rolled 20 as a bump-down. When a rolled 20 is a fail, that becomes a fumble. In the case that a rolled rolled is a success, the 20 bumps it down to a fail. If you use the Crit-on-Rating rather than Crit-on-One variant, allow a 20 rating to critically succeed on a rolled 19 in addition to the above. That seems contrary to the 20-as-bump-down principle, but preserves the possability of rolling a critical and a fail at rating 20. The other option would be that there is no fail and also no critical in the result set, as the bump up from rolling your rating and the bump down from rolling 20 cancel. This would be cleaner, but would be strange compared to 1M where you can crit again, but also fail comes back at rolled 20.

What did the Lunars ever do for us?

(double post)

There are quite a few wineries here in Missouri. More French-style down the Mississippi towards Cape Gerardeau & St. Genevieve, with German styles more favored along the Missouri. Much of their output tends to be of the sweet & fruity sort, which keeps the lights on and is fine when you're in the mood for such. Most have at least a couple of more sophisticated flavors on offer as well, with a few here and there being excellent.

Who is using whom in this scenario is an open question. The answer is likely, "We all are, us."

Mostly @Ian Cooper, but I and a few others contributed as well. Upcoming open licensed successor to the HQ2 core toolkit.. SRD is pending layout. Ron Edwards is using it as the basis for a new cosmic supers game, and a proper core book is planned to follow.

They often seem to try anyway.

I expect they keep a few Illuminated converts on a short leash for situations like finding out what someone who chose death over capture was protecting.

In the QuestWorlds document, we present "M" as the general case while noting and encouraging that authors/GMs may substitute something evocative and genre/setting appropriate in their more specific works.

It may make good business sense for Chaosium to focus finite resources on shipping new titles (especially hot new RQ & CoC titles) rather than doing things like updating the HQG PDF, but after several years on It seems like there will basically always be something else in line ahead of it. I hope that the structural approach you chose for the SRD drafts will allow more agile response going forward. Even if scarcity of layout worker-hours remains a bottleneck, revisions and corrections in raw text form can be delivered without waiting months for an opening in the production schedule to put finite layout-time into an already shipped rather than to-be-released project or years for a reprint that may never come. SRDs are mostly consumed in barebones html format rather than with pretty layout anyway, though I respect the choice to delay its debut until it can make a well polished first impression.

There were clay pot stills in various places in Classical Antiquity, and even today traditional Mezcal production utilizes the hot-coals+stones+wet-leaves+soil-lid slow-cooker pit that is largely unchanged since the Neolithic. In the final stages, vapors condense down air-cooled reed outflows once they bubble up out of the clay tapered-amphora/pot-still from the lower part buried in the slow-cooker pit into the air exposed upper part. In a Gloranthan context, I fully expect that Lodril, Veskarthen, Caladra, et al cults have rites where they get together with the local Grain Goddess cult to bury His Fire & Her Fruits together in a fire pit for a few days of debauchery fueled by the products of their union within the steaming mound (with some saved in clay jugs for special occasions, no doubt). Perhaps Traditionalist holdouts in Tarsh may even make a point of raiding their Lunarized lowland cousins for maize with which to fortify their mash. The low landers and their Lunar friends may be content with their "moon shine," but only those who wet their grain with the mountain dew from the slopes of Kiero Fin herself can brew the true White Lightning.

I would not use the advancement rules as written for a long campaign, for the exact reason that inspired this thread. The QuestWorlds development feedback thread has some good discussion around this. In particular, here's how I would handle a long campaign:

Forgot to confirm earlier: yes, this is correct.

With battles small enough for tokens to represent individual echilles or other units this can be meaningful. The first way is if a unit gets wiped out during a melee phase, their corresponding token is removed. The other way is narrative. It can be meaningful in the overall story context to know which troops in particular were defeated or routed. Did Lord A lose most of his knights while his rival Lord B lost only a few? Did a particular captain lose face or favor when his forces routed? Story can emerge from the details. There are rules for follower survival in the Book of Battle. The quick numbers in the KAP is more meant for a whole-battle situation. If you're taking 50% losses per battle round every time you succeed, you're going to dwindle to almost nothing in short order. You could do something similar if the follower survival rules in BoB are too cumbersome for your taste, but be sure to calibrate the numbers to the battle-round level rather than the whole engagement. Glad to hear it.

It does seem to have suffered through some rough format conversions. I'll see if I have a cleaner copy. Good question. I would only apply the Disordered penalty to rolls made during the melee phase of the battle round, not to the Unit commander's Battle roll.

To expand on the above, "How many keywords do you get?" is a significant balance question if you're using package keywords, or only allow access to certain things via taking specific setting-relevant keywords. If you're using umbrella-style keywords it's less important, and if you take the next step and let any ability become a keyword if you feel like hanging a breakout from it, it becomes a non-issue. WRT Fading Suns in particular, I would do something like this Monster High setup I put together a couple years back. Give players a few structured choices that help set up their connections to the setting and one another, as well as their positions within both their own factions and noble society more broadly. I would also use some of these expanded Flaw ideas for things like Urge & Hubris, and possibly for and social/political challenges.

I make a point to take the rolled results into account when narrating the aggregate result. I make a Crit vs Crit marginal look like an epic clash where one just barely edges out the other, while a Fail vs Fail marginal will be more of a chaotic clusterfuck (can re say fuck on here?) where the winner lucks into victory by screwing up less badly.

It seems like lots of different bad things can happen due to the Closing, not just sinking outright. In any case, I think that some combination of the Giants, Zola Fel, Pinchenning, and the nymph below decks could between them work a one-off for the Cradle without unravelling the Closing altogether. That's not to say your theory is utterly baseless, but I find it much less cut and dried than you suggest. I think that Dormal's journeys, the Cradle launch, Harrek's great voyage, and probably some other seemingly unrelated things all helped make the Shiprise possible.

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.

I bet there's a proper Thanatar temple in Tinaros.