JonL

I can see where the approach is less of a good fit for that use case. I'm glad to have it in the toolbox when it does make sense though. I once ran a session at a con where, thanks to a terse description on a scheduling whiteboard, half of the players thought they had signed-up to play the Milton Bradley game, among which two had never played a tabletop RPG before. I handed them what I call "half-baked" characters - basically unfinished pregens. They have an essential concept and enough meat on their bones to start playing, but with some room for the players to customize and develop to their liking once they get their feet wet. Having fewer things on the sheet to take-in at first also helps a newcomer absorb what's there. I keep meaning to share the half-bakes on the Cult-of-Chaos forum, but they're all just hand-written at present. I've got two Gloranthan sets (one for Dragon Pass, one for Pavis) and a set of super-heroes. Each group contains some characters with personal/familial/professional connections to others in the party, which also helps an ad-hoc player group at a con or demo game gel.

It's a big help for players unfamilliar with a given setting and how their players fit within it.

I think that particular bit is one of the warts on HQ as written. It carries an implicit assumption about how many Hero Points get spent for advancement vs how many get spent in play. If your players' behavior is our of step with the assumed expenditure balance, the base resistance will be out of whack. A thoughtful GM can compensate, but it's still a pitfall. I haven't run a long-running campaign yet, but when I do, I might look at having the base resistance reflect the median ability rating of the PCs in the party. Something like that would work with whatever sort of advancement scheme one might be using.

RW bronze is an alloy of copper and tin and is rarely if ever found in nature. G bronze is the fragments of dead gods' bones and you can dig it up out of the ground where they fell. Their properties are somewhat different.

In the absence of a specific ability, I'll often go to a culture/background keyword for catch-all "thing that everyone has some innate capability for even if you aren't specifically developing it" use. It may end up being a stretch depending on how intricate the challenge is, or may suffer from broad-ability-alongside-specific-ability disadvantage, but it still bares remembering that in most cases the culture keyword also implies a baseline of things an otherwise healthy adult member of your species can do. I wouldn't usually make someone go with the "Nothing Relevant 6" unless the challenge was something completely out-of-context for them, requires specialized training/knowledge, etc.

Zooming in to task-level challenge instead of conflict-level challenge is ok when it suit's your purpose, but don't let old habits draw you in to doing it unintentionally. You'll find yourself suddenly wondering how your game just got bogged down on minutia instead of highlighting cool stuff. On the subject of perception tests & such, let's ask Robin Laws... In that light, does this contest have interesting results either way the dice fall? I can see situation where perception-related contests can be that way, such s two stalkers playing cat-and-also-cat trying to get the drop on one another. On the other hand, if the question of whether they notice something or not closes off a bunch of interesting bits - let the characters spy the loose thread (in a way that makes narrative sense) and decide for themselves whether they want to pull on it. Just be sure that you're not only describing things in any detail when it's a hook like that, or it becomes the little dot floating over a tally NPC in a video game.

I'm a bit put off by a lot of the belittling Elmal as being a lacky or whatever. A dedicated warrior path that requires neither the seperation from family and fertility that Humakt does nor the wild recklessness to which Orlanthi are prone is a Good Thing for a community to have, doubly so with a specific emphasis on protecting the community. I expect Elmali to be disproportionately promenant among Heortling cavalry as well. There's no need for them to be diminished any more than any other path that isn't Orlanth or Ernalda. I also agree that Elmali's base level magic ought to be better than Yelmalions'. Elmal is whole. Yelmalions' greater powers come from overcoming loss and suffering. They must become better fighters to survive without the Fire magic. Enduring geasa brings special gifts. Giving up individualism brings discipline and teamwork. And eventually, for the greatest among them who have been tempered and tested by enduring all those other losses, comes transcending death itself upon the Hill of Gold. There's an element of all that in the Elmal tradition as well, as seen in Elmal Guards the Stead, but not to anywhere near the same degree as in the Yelmalion approach.

That would have quadrupled the frequency of tied-rolls. Ties are bad.

I take that idea a step further and have criticals happen when rolling your rating exactly rather than when rolling a one. This makes the rolling a bit more coherently blackjack-like, and more significantly makes it easy to resolve tied criticals. As a further bonus, it opens the slim door for someone without a mastery to upset someone with a mastery edge on a critical, e.g. Player with a 17 ability rolls 17, GM rolling 5w resistance rolls a four. Player's crit-on-17 beats gm's crit-on-4. In that situation (which came up in the last game I ran), narrate something really awesome for the double crit, even though it's still just a marginal victory. In the recent instance, I had the PC's sword shatter as she struck a killing blow against an opponent charging her on horseback. The only tricky thing to handle with that approach is abilities rated exactly at 20. I handle that by having the critical continue to happen on a rolled 19, while treating the rolled 20 as a regular fail rather than a fumble. The 20 bit usually comes up with a 17-rated ability rolling with a +3 bonus from an augment or lingering benefit rather than 20-rated abilities, as players will usually raise a 20 to a 1w at their first opportunity.

When the dice go hard against them like that, do your best to come up with consequences that lead to more opportunities for exciting challenges to come. The "fail-forward" concept is your friend there. Make the situation more dire and the stakes higher with each failed roll. If they pull through and succeed in spite of all the setbacks, it will be that much sweeter. You can also make use the angle of the idea of not applying consequences until the end of extended contests. There's no "death-spiral" of piling on penalties from exchange to exchange, but the pile of rocks waiting to fall on you if you lose gets bigger & bigger (sometimes making an Assist action worthwhile to diffuse the threat). Sometimes the extended contest makes more sense from a dramatic fun standpoint, other times serial simple contests with consequences applied immediately is better, especially if you're aiming for grittier action rather than a pulp/high-fantasy/four-color feel.

In addition to the above, Augments occupy that mechanical space. "I'm going to try something with this other ability to give myself a leg up in the main contest."

Some of the HW/HQ1 era material seemed to conflate game mechanics & in-fiction metaphysics in ways I'm not thrilled with; totally separate Other-Sides, misapplied worship penalties, and so on. Thankfully, the current paradigms are more fluid.

I'm very much of the opinion that the various powers are elephants being pawed at by blind men. Not even the Arkati, God-Learners, Grey Sages, Henotheists, or others who come at them from multiple angles have the whole picture.

Latest word is Q1 2018, per @MOB.

As a GM, if I find things are a bit murky after a player tells me something, I'll ask "What is it you're trying to achieve, and how are you using one of your abilities to achieve that goal?" That helps the Player and myself zero in on the difference between "I'm going to sneak up and stab the guard." and "My goal is to keep the guard from him raising the alarm. I'm going to try to sneak up and stab him before he notices me." In the former case, it looks as though the stabbing is the important part, but in the latter case it's clear that the stabbing is a means to an end, and that the overall victory or defeat is more hinging on taking the guard out silently. In this context, Marginal Defeat for the PC might well mean that he successfully slew the guard, but that the guard did not go down quietly. Conversely, a Marginal Victory might constitute a successful silent-kill but there's a fair amount of blood and signs of a struggle in the dirt. The party can get in cleanly for now, but the next time someone comes by here they'll recognize what happened. The goal is achieved, but the benefit is momentary rather than enduring.

I still don't know from this weather the first syllable is supposed to sound like "hyo͞o" or ""ho͞o" - the pronunciation guide at the top of your posts suggests that the "E" should be a short vowel, which would really surprise me if that's accurate.

That's right. A Breakout Ability under a Rune can also be an exception to needing 1w to use the Rune for overt magical effects. You for example could have the Communication Rune at 17 with +1 "Can Understand Anything Said About Me." hanging off of it. That's advancement-efficient compared to having a separate Ability, but you give up the ability to Augment it with the Rune. Similar trade-offs surround hanging a Grimoire to Law/Moon rune, to a Keyword like "Warlock," or taking the Grimoire as separate Ability. If for example a Loksalmi hangs a Grimoire from a "Man of All" Keyword instead of the Law Rune, Law could thus be used as an Augment when casting spells with that Grimoire.

The HQ1-era Lunars books are available in The Vault. Some of it is less relevant with the newer rules or superseded by the Guide, but the remainder is still a lot of gamble material for $5 a pop. A Lunars book of the same quality as the Pavis & Sartar books would be great though, especially with current-style Cult write-ups for Hwarin, Hon-Eel, Yana Aranis, and the like.

They are Breakout Abilities, but also follow the additional rules for Feats on HQG p139. They imply greater fictional permissions to do awesome stuff, but also have strings attached. The Feats described in the cult writeups are also a handy benchmark for the border between Initiate-level magic and what Devotees can do. Any Orlanthi Initiate who approaches Orlanth through the Air Rune could conceivably fly, but it takes the secret of Vanganth's Breath to carry your companions with you or traverse the highest mountain peaks like Alakoring Dragonbreaker.

Be sure to put a space between "Other" and "Worlds" when discussing HQ's cousin. Otherworlds™ is an entirely different game by Vincent Baker (Not Apocalypse World author D.(avid) Vincent Baker, this entirely different Vincent Baker.) I got to try out Otherworlds by accident at Gen Con this year when I saw in the event catalog that Vincent Baker was running Otherworlds and immediately bought a ticket, only to discover upon arrival that the event was for both a different game and different Vincent Baker than I was expecting. Despite this practical illustration of the importance of trademarks, I had a lot of fun playing Otherworlds with (No-D.) Vincent Baker.

I'm now toggling my reading between the highbrow lore of History of the Heortling Peoples and the sword & snarkery of The Complete Griselda. Thanks, Chaosium!

I had a moment of inspiration while discussing The Colymar Campaign over on RPG.net. The bold section could be used in any sort of story where you've got a PC in the "Main Character" role, even temporarily. If you're following a Star Trek:TNG or superhero-team-comic style pattern where different members of the ensemble come to the forefront from one story to the next, you could rotate the Main Character status accordingly, perhaps in concert with adventures that prick at that character's Flaws. I've been toying with similar ideas for use in running superhero games where two players decide that one's character is the other's side-kick, or where it's super-effective for characters to switch opponents or help one another in team-battles. I'll share those once they solidify some more.

It also bears mention that resistance relatively close to the character's ability tends to pull the results towards Marginal or Minor contest results, while very low or very high resistance opens up greater chances of Major or Complete results. That can guide the choice as well, especially if you work "and/but" factors into the Marginals where appropriate.

This is the key bit. If you have an ability called "Acrobat," our experience in the real world gives us a solid handle on what an acrobat can do in our imaginary worlds. With imaginary abilities like magic and the like, we have no such common frame of reference. As such, their capabilities either need to be well defined in the fictional framework of the world and characters, to the point that the GM & Players understand the dynamics and capabilities as well as a non-acrobat might understand acrobatics -or- you can break the "Ability ratings are just abstract measures of problem solving effectiveness." idiom and use some game mechanics do define things, as we see in the Glorantha magic rules. For benchmarking supernatural capabilities, I want to know: What magnitude of effects can be done quickly and easily vs what can only be done with great effort, ritual, support, or risk? What can only be done nearby vs at a distance, and do things like having a token from or ritual correspondence to a subject transcend that? Are certain sorts of acts particularly well suited to the ability vs others that may be foreign or even impossible? Does this capability have any applications that are unique in the fictional world? What things are rare, difficult or impossible for any and all supernatural abilities? To what extent do the above vary for a novice, journeyman, or master actor? Answering those questions lets you and the players know what's solidly in their characters abilities, what's going to be a stretch, what they can do with lots of time & effort, etc. Some of those answers also give you guidance on the overall impact of magic in your world. For example, in a pre-modern world, long distance communication or transportation via magic is a world-changer. Knowing how common or capable those effects are is a big deal for understanding the world in which you're playing. To your example, if you're running an investigation-centered game you need to know just how common, practical, and effective things like post-cognition, clairvoyance, mind-reading and the like are. If your world has secrets, these things either have limitations/costs/risks attached or there are discrete countermeasures available. Compare being able to detect lies at will vs being able to detect lies when standing between the pillars of your sanctum at high midnight. It matters to your game which of those is typical. Similar dynamics surround being able to evade pursuit or hide from authorities. If anyone with a college-degree in magic can arbitrarily teleport people from anywhere to anywhere without even knowing where the subject is to begin with, then this is not a world with fugitives (especially given the quantity of magicians implied by a college with a degree program in magic). If doing such a thing is possible, but only after overcoming significant challenges to obtain the necessary ritual correspondences, sacrifices, information about the target, angelic allies, and the like, then it becomes the climax of an adventure rather than short-circuiting one.

The waters in Dragon pass have stopped short of the Upland Marsh, eh? Lord Edbert undertook "Orlanth and Aroka," but instead of slaying Aroka, mastered it with the secrets of his Left Hand Power. Rather than releasing Heler, Elbert bade the great Blue Dragon to devour Daga as well. Rather than return victorious from the Other Side, Edbert then rode Aroka (with Heler still within) across the strange and turning tale paths until they reached the battle of the Vingkotlings against the Worcha Rage. Without Heler's power bolstering the Water Tribe's host and deprived of Aroka's blood filling the Rozgali Sea, great Worcha was utterly routed by the Storm Tribe. Upon Edbert's return, the inundation halted, and when he and Ponsonby (who had brought warning from the South of the coming peril) led their followers Southward, the waters receded before them. So it was that Edbert Muddyplucker turned back the Great Flood of 1652.