JonL

Great. While you're at it, use that Rage like a Flaw if somebody wants to stay calm under provocation, avoid creeping out animals, date non-Kinfolk, etc. I suppose you could do the same for Gnosis as well, if you wanted to mechanize that side of things too. I might just roll that into hypothetical Auspice/Breed/Tribe keywords though, and have Theurge, Philodox, Metis, Lupus, and the more mystical Tribes will face lower resistances for spiritual matters than their more worldly kin. Man, Werewolf: the HeroQuest would be really easy now that you've got me thinking about it. Keywords for Breed, Tribe, and Auspice. Gifts as breakouts under each. Breed can also include your pre-change life/background. Rage and Renown as resource-type abilities. Septs are communities, though you could have an ability representing a strong tie to a tribal faction as well. Garnish to taste with a few more discretionary abilities and points and you've got yourself a Garou. Follow the fiction WRT healing times/regeneration for physical consequences. You could maybe allow a Rage roll to self-Assist during an extended contest if you really want to get fiddly with regeneration. I'd probably just narrate it though, and set either set higher resistance for silver/fire/etc threats (if you're leading with credibility) or introduce those in-fiction elements to justify higher resistances and physical consequences (if you're leading with story-flow). I'd make Renown rating thresholds requirement to challenge for next Rank, Cubs start with 10 (maybe more if they're Silver Fangs or something) maybe: 0:10 1:15 2:1M 3: 10M 4: 1M2 5: 1M3 You could roll your Renown to convince elders/spirits to teach you Gifts, augment social/political contests, etc. You could treat a Pack Totem like a friendly community with resource abilities as well. Maybe tick its ratings up when pack members rise in Rank or otherwise do great deeds.

If I were looking to simulate the Rage Point mechanic, I'd actually look at the rules for how community resources fluctuate when drawn upon. Role your Rage as an augment and you risk depleting it, but things can also increase it over time. You'd need to work out the time intervals and amounts, but the basic framework is there.

There's a bit of rules-mastery possible in deciding which things to group as breakouts under umbrella keywords and which ones to keep stand-alone. They player who loads everything under a couple keywords will find augment opportunities sparse, as breakouts can't augment one another (or their parent). Knowing when and why to invoke things like Phyrric Victory or Risky Gambit can also be rewarding.

Ostrich riding skirmish cavalry aren't going to do well fighting Lunar hoplites & peltasts supported by Crater Maker artillery. They'll do a great job though of avoiding a stand up battle, falling back deeper into the chaparral, and if pursued having some of their toughest volunteer to keep harassing the main Lunar force for a couple days while the rest of the Ostrich Riders circle back and wreck the Lunars' supply train while the Moon is dark. Lacking the power of the Covenant, the Lunars' pack animals can't survive off the land. With their water amphorae spilled and rations scattered or burning, the Lunar army now has big problems. Ostrich Riders and similar don't win by fighting battles where they cant win. They win by not fighting those battles, and helping the enemy fail.

I'm reeeeealy picky about dead tree purchases at this point in my life. My shelf space is mostly spoken for. Adding things probably means getting rid of something else. I bought both Red Cow volumes in hardback.

I can find no reference to Elmal being called "the Cold Sun" prior to this comment. All references to "the Cold Sun" in the Guide are explicitly to Yelmalio or Sun Domers, while the Storm Pantheon entry lists "Elmal: Sun God". The term "Cold Sun" appears in SKoH only in the Sun Domer entry, starting with, "We are the warriors of the Cold Sun." followed by "What the Sartarites think: The Sun Domers are a strange cult who betrayed Elmal for the Cold Sun." The phrase is completely absent from TGRoY, Sartar Companion, The Book of Heortling Mythology, Arcane Lore, and King of Sartar. Having the keys to the kingdom, you're certainly within your rights to change things as you judge best, even things you wrote, even after saying that The Guide would be the foundation for official published works going forward. I gotta ask though, what's the upshot to this? What value do you see in this change that you find to be worth going back on all the above, having published Gloranthas contradict among current game lines, degrading the usefulness of existing reference materials, and so on? How do you see this revision leading to Maximum Game Fun to an extent that justifies the downsides?

While there is clearly a Little Sun archetype that these beings all embody, to say that they are thus the same entity creates a great many more contradictions than it resolves. It's a very God Learner perspective, in that while it does reflect a deeper truth, it is also incomplete in application. If embodying the same archetype means that deities are in fact the same being, the Goddess Swap would have worked. This new assertion that all Little Suns must also have Light rather than Fire is also at odds with tons of existing sources, not just Elmal's HQ writeup. The Little Suns are all missing something compared to the Great Ruling Sun, but they have not all lost the same thing. Truth replaces Stasis among the Little Suns. In the broken world in which they arise, the perfection of the Great Ruling Sun is lost. They can only strive for it by inspiring Truth/Justice/Righteousness. Antirius is referenced in The Glorious Re-Ascent of Yelm again and again as being not only bright and just, but also fiery. His warmth sustains the people beneath the Roof beneath the glacier, he melts the frozen rivers to bring fresh water. Even upon his deathbed, having been mortally wounded in his second expedition to the Hill of Gold, his body self-ignites as his spirit departs. When the prophet Avivath incarnates Antirius, his enemies are repeatedly burned. What Antirius does seem to lose as he is wounded by various miscarriages of his Justice is his brightness. TGRoY describes him as becoming dimmer and lower in the sky with each injustice. By the time of the Roof, the Orb of the Eye was no longer above his head (held instead by the Cruel God upon the Hill of Gold). He lacks Yelm the Rider's closeness with horses, but is connected to birds. What he embodies that Elmal, Yelmalio, and Kargzant do not is his father's Mastery. Antirius embodies and blesses the correct emperors with righteous sovereignty. He prevailed against the rival Little Suns in the Suns Swirl, and overcame Sedenya's challenge. When the people of Nivorah chose to embrace their horse-loving Little Suns rather than join Manarlavus and Antirius beneath the Roof, they were driven from the Rich Land, and while Kargzant's followers would later rule, most emperors enthroned by the Jenarong/Kargzant rites were not righteous and could not maintain order. Kargzant references also have no indication of being Fire-less. Kargzant in particular gathers together the remaining bits of fire & starlight scattered around the broken world, and Jenarong's funeral pyre inflamed the Wandering Sun so as to be seen throughout the Empire. His connection to horses is obvious, but he despises birds. What Kargzant lacks are Stasis/Truth and Mastery. He wanders wildly through the sky and his followers are nomads. The seize power through force, and even after completion of the Ten Tests, their rule is seldom a blessed one. Elmal shares Fire and horse-affinity with Kargzant (though the latter to a lesser degree) but maintains Truth. What Elmal lost is Mastery. Despite being chief of the Hyaloring Gods during the Gods War, he eventually becomes the Loyal Thane. Thus do his people find lands and homes of their own rather than being forever nomads like Kargzant's.

How does this square with differing runes?

What's tricky about the Lunars is that most of their openly Chaotic members are also going to be Illuminated.

Per the Guide, Pelorians "tend to be light-skinned (ranging from pale to olive), with brown to blond hair. Brown and blue eyes are prevalent." Pale Dara Happans wouldn't be particularly remarkable. (@Jenx does a great job following the above direction when the Lunars show up in Prince of Sartar.) Look at higher magnification. He's got multiple parts in his hair between big braid/lock/cornrow type sections that are being held back/down by that wide leaf-designed thing. Overall, they look like Etheopians to me.

This link should work https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YHrlqbe9XvrDYXrDmPN886B2GetxG4AwM2Mr1soxw3Q/edit?usp=drivesdk

You're in a vary different mechanical space at that point, more like how Pendragon plays. Here's a Google spreadsheet that charts the result space for HQ rolls. It doesn't support masteries, but you can enter a PC ability rating and resistance value and see the distribution of results.

Her assessment here is actually incorrect. Because all rolls in HQ are opposed, the distribution of the net Victory/Defeat results are a ramp-like curve rather than a flat distribution like you see rolling a single die vs a static TN. Perhaps let her roll her own resistance die next time so that she can see the effect in action.

To add to the chorus, "What is it you're trying to achieve, which of your abilities are you using to do so, and how is using that ability going to achieve that goal?"

Let's look back to where I was two years ago, in a similar position to the new players. At the time, I'd read HQG, SKoH, PGtA, parts of the Guide, and dug around on the forums some, so I wasn't coming in completely cold. OTOH, I never played or read RuneQuest (though knew some concepts from CoC & Pendragon) and had only previously known Glorantha by reputation. The post below was specifically asking things about sorcery, as for theism looking at the break between Initiate & Devotee effects at least gives some context about magnitude, etc. However, a lot of those questions are fairly open for other magics as well. The boldings are new. Here's the whole thread, for reference, including many helpful answers & corrections. Of particular note to my question about teleportation, and the subsequent mentions of it in that discussion. The word "teleport" does not appear when searching in the HQG PDF text. Here's a post I made a year later, that gets into what someone needs as a practical matter to handle things like magic and superpowers: HQG provides some of the answers to the above, but not all and not evenly. I'm curious as to whether the development and playtesting process included (m)any outside readers who didn't know Glorantha at all - particularly as gamemasters. Studying RQ is helpful in some ways, but not in others. Apart from the fact that you shouldn't have to read (or buy) an entirely different game to understand your intended game's world, RQ also bends the fiction to its mechanics in many places. RQG lists Storm Bull as having Air, Best, and Death rather than Air and Eternal Battle because there's no Eternal Battle rune on the character sheet. Having all the various cults picking from a common library of Spirit Magic spells also creates a level of standardization and mechanistic-ness that bleeds into the setting (ah, yes, they also know the secret of "Multi-Missile"), as does the POW/RunePoint economy.

I suppose blood-drinking and immortality would not particularly stand out in a Vadeli community.

For myself, I wouldn't put too much weight in the calibration of niche RQ3 mechanics when drawing inferences about subtle setting matters. However, the overall setup you describe there made a lightbulb go off in my head: Belintar

The pyramid-scheme techniques employed by the EWF in its later years look a lot like the chain-of-veneration techniques employed by the more hierarchical Malkioni sects. "A lot like" as in it's functionally indistinguishable. The widespread adoption of (Sorcerous) tricks and shortcuts like this and Immanent Mastery-style methods ("Enlightenment is hard, what if I could just magically transform myself into an enlightened being? Oh, hey, Kwl Pwrz!") are the essence of the false-path entanglement problems that marked the end of true transcendent attainment among the EWF.

The greatest Law mandates that those who fail to follow the Laws will age and die. By systematically and ritually defying all of the other Laws, they they empower themselves to defy the great one. The mandate to grow old and die is just another rule to be broken. The Brithini commit to follow all the Laws, and if successful are thus not condemned to age. The Vadeli commit to break all the laws, so as to by extension break the one that says they must age.

I'd be surprised if they were anything like evenly distributed. I'd expect them to be thicker in places like the Quinipolc League or Safelster and thinner in places like Akem or Loksalm where their behaviour would he less tolerated.

I frequently use this approach, especially with small parties. Augmenting one another provides a different sort of feel than Assists (which only reduce harm) do. It's an especially a good fit for situations where one character might not credibly be able to harm a foe, but might be able to distract or hinder it in order to set up a harder-hitting comrade. It also maps nicely to using buff-magic, thatch-weaving fighter-planes, etc.

Let's examine the math on this across the resistance spectrum. For a party of 5 PCs against a resistance representing a single foe, the average resistance across the whole party is 6 less than the unmodified resistance faced by the first PC to rolll:| (I suppose 0 and -3 could be rolled as 20M-1 and 17M-1, allowing for a 5% chance of a success and increasing fumble chances.) I can see where you're getting pleasing results out of this approach at the top of the spectrum, where the 14-20 point leaps make for plenty of room for meaningful gradations between brackets. At the lower/middle tiers though where the brackets are only 6 points apart, it's effectively an entire bracket's drop. Being on-par magnitude-wise with a Stretch or a good Augment roll either way, that's probably an OK result too. Where I'm a bit skeptical about this though, is how it starts to look if you have a larger party or a few followers/sidekicks/familiars/etc as participants. At 7:1, the average drops by 9. Vs High resistance, that becomes a serious distortion. Roughly half the party is now opposed by numbers that make SvsF or CvsF rolls increasingly likely. When you tally the result points, that starts to make a 1-round overall Minor+ victory the most likely outcome against something that is supposed to be a serious-but-not-overwhelming challenge. Major+ becomes most likely if the Players are clever enough to have the early rollers play defense and the later ones take risks like you described. (Moderate resistance would be effectively < Very Low.) For the GM, this presents an inflationary situation, where any sort of single opponent that's meant to represent Moderate to Very High challenge needs to have the Resistance padded (or minions thrown into the mix) to counter the large MOP impact if the level of challenge is to be roughly maintained. At that point, you're going in circles with bonuses & penalties just to get back where you meant to start. (At the other end of the spectrum, it probably undersells the effectiveness of 2:1 or 3:1 odds, but that's less of a problem, IMO) Again, I can see where this made for some fun and dramatic emergent teamwork events at the high end of the scale. However, outside that sweet zone it seems like the impact would much more often range from "About like an augment or stretch, but more complicated." at best to "Making the GM do extra bookkeeping for little benefit." at worst. I suggest rolling numeric disparities into a general and more qualitative framework of situational modifiers, and looking for ways we might enrich teamwork in fun & interesting ways that are more consistently impactful WRT varying player counts and resistance levels. .

I've taken to keeping some much-stronger-than-even-my-middle-aged-eyes-really-need reading glasses around for doing fine-detail tasks; soldiering, sewing, fixing broken jewelry, painting minis, checking the kids for lice, etc. It's like the magnifier on a set of helping hands, but moves with my head.

This approach would work really well combined with placing dice on the grid the way @jrutila suggested above. Give each player an opposed-roll chart and they can do the cross-index themselves.