JonL

Not house rules exactly, as they're in HeroQuest Gateway Licenced products, but... Chained Simple Contests from Mythic Russia: Used as an alternative to Extended Contests when zooming in to blow-by-blow exchanges. Results of each roll are applied immediately, and bonusses & penalties stack up throughout the conflict. It makes for more open ended conflicts compared to the Extended Contest rules in the core books, but also has a bit more bloody grind/death-spiral feel for combats. That can be a pro or con depending on the situation and your goals. Chained Simple Contests are also a little easier to grasp for players new to the idea of conflict rather than task resolution. I have used both approaches in the same session. Nameless Streets (sadly now out of print) introduced the idea of deliberately failing a Flaw contest to gain a Hero Point, similar to compells in Fate, along with several alternate advancement schemes that are very nice.

If any good folk here are planning on attending Archon 41 at the end of this month month, I plan on running "Red Moon Rising" from Pavis: Gateway to Adventure there on Saturday afternoon. (After having made a set of the masks for Gen Con, it would be tragic to leave them sitting on the shelf.)

Critical on rolling your rating exactly, rather than on a one. In the case of a 20 rating, they still crit on 19, and 20 becomes a regular fail rather than a fumble. Makes for fewer ties, and lets someone who crits occasionally pull off a marginal victory when at a mastery disadvantage, e.g. Someone with a 17 rating who rolls a 17 scores marginal victory against 10w2 opposition rolling 12, as a critical at 17 beats a critical at 12.

HQG takes several things that are options in HQ2 and specifies choices for its particular implementation. Mainly, those are: * Umbrella-style Keywords * High-roll wins tied success grades * List-style or mixed list/as-you-go character creation It also gives a clearer treatment of things like Soercery by way of presenting it in a Glorantha specific context.

I think that the cultural keyword will imply a species in most cases. I also don't think that Ducks, Minotaurs or the like need the Beast rune any more than Humans need to take the Man rune.

Those crewes hauling an Orlanth Adventurous idol around in the back of a wagon like a carnival float are crazy like a fox.

Re. Painted Ships: The Rule of Cool says painted ships are great, so various sailors' cults, Waertagi, Vadeli, and so on have ritual practices that maintain the decorations their ships need need to embody sea spirits, appease Magasta, etc.

It wouldn't take much work to just invert the success ranges; criticals starting at rolling your rating exactly (or 95 for very high ratings) and going down from there, specials from the bottom of the critical range to 80% of your rating. In addition to being a more pleasingly consistent blackjack/price-is-right approach, it also makes higher rated rollers more likely to win ties on crit-vs-crit & special-vs-special opposed rolls, since their elevated success ranges will be farther along the number line.

I'm very much digging the way that augments & passions have been back-ported from Heroquest & Pendragon. The passions in Pendragon are one of the best things about it, but they tend to be a bit of an all-or nothing "I Win!" button or not get used (since the stakes for failure being quite high lead one to only risking rolling very high ones), or turn things into rocket-tag if opponents are both inspired. Crossing that with the RQ success grades and consistent application of the principle across Passions, Runes, Skills, etc like you see in HQ is a very slick design move. I still find rolling-low for better success grades but rolling high to break ties within success grades on opposed rolls to be a bit incoherent, but I respect that maintaining fidelity to classic RQ approaches is also a design priority here. High roller winning when success grades are tied does at least privilege higher-rated abilities much like a more consistent blackjack approach would, especially in the case of large mismatches where the higher-rated roller's special range is eating up a lot of the lower numbers that might otherwise present an opportunity for an upset. I like permanent POW sacrifice to gain Rune Points but regular worship & sacrifice to replenish them quite a bit. It makes them something that can't be trivially replenished in the midst of an adventure, while also providing more access to the cool toys than the old POW economy did, especially in shorter campaigns.

I could see using HQ1 if you wanted the sort of game where you have more quantitative and granular measures for strengths, speed, etc. I think HQ2 is better if you want to follow more Comic Book Logic where The Flash doesn't effortlessly defeat guys like Captains Cold & Boomerang. Both approaches have merit.

I'm using the framework I posted last year for characters, and will have some ready to go Sidekick, Community, Ally, and Enemy (Flaw) options specific to the setting on hand-out index cards for anyone making new characters or customizing the pre-gem ones. I'm tweaking the Group Contest rules slightly to incentivize switching foes mid-battle and assisting/augmenting teammates somewhat - as that's very de genre for comic-books. We're also going to use the Flaw/Ability-polymorphism and Flaws as Heropoint Generators options put forth in Nameless Streets. The (currently full) HQG games will be the "Red Moon Rising" scenario from Pavis - Gateway to Adventure and the debut of a new Red Cow scenario from The Eleven Lights.

Well, that was quick. As of this writing, the two Glorantha games are full, but there are three seats still open for the HQ2 supers game. Thanks, all.

I'll be running three HeroQuest games at Gen Con this August. Two will be set in Glorantha, and one will be a supers game. As they were late additions to Chaosium's programming, they only hit the catalog the night before registration opened, and as such they are wide open for players even after the big rush. I hope to see you there.

You know what, I wish I'd thought of it before, but my (free, and thus worth what you're paying for it) advice to @Ian Cooper and @Jeff is to hire Chris Chin (Bankuei) to do a Kralorela book. He has deep knowledge of both Glorantha & HeroQuest He has run Kralori campaigns. He has shown the ability to critique problematic racial aspects about Kralorela that most of us may not otherwise notice while remaining constructively engaged with it. His output is good and conduct professional. The Blood Monsoon is rad. Much as I'm itching for a Ralios book, Chris's critique that the further away from Dragon Pass you go the more shallow and stereotypical the cultural presentations become is on-point. That's not to point fingers, there's a ton of practical and historical reasons why it ended up that way, but the opportunity to do better is there. Hopefully it can be seized.

It would be legal. It would only be just is he deserved it.

It strikes me that this is part of the point of breaking from the RQ6 branch and making RQG stat-block-compatable with the RQ2 classics. They don't need to publish RQG versions of those supplements, since they're largely usable as they are.

This kind of got lost in all the edition warring earlier. I'd like to not only reiterate but broaden it further. For those of you who played it, are some things about the Second Age as a setting made for particularly good game experiences for you? Somebody mentioned enjoying Blood of Orlanth, that's a very Second Agey concept from what I read about it. What are some things that the Second Age brought to your table that you wouldn't have experienced otherwise?

Lots of interesting concepts there. I'm imagining using it for something like John Carpenter's The Thing, or maybe a murder mystery playing out on a space ship falling towards the event horizon of a black hole. WRT Glorantha, it might be a neat way to play out a Heroquest where you're supposed to "lose." Hill of Gold is an obvious one, but even something like the Lightbringers' Quest involves everyone failing at what their best at one by one. The recording feature wouldn't be appropriate in all contexts, though letters left to be found, notes drawn in blood on cave walls and such could fill a similar role.

After a while I internalized most of the charts.

Something I would love to see would be an adventure where the Mostali from the Dwarf Mine find out that a cadre of elite Lunars are preparing to heroquest to the Siege of Zistorwal, which thanks to Orlanth's intervention within Time is accessible through the Other Side. The Lunars plan to take on the role of Zistorites and allied God Learners in an effort to to tip the scales such that Orlanth was defeated, and thus gain a powerful anti-Orlanth(i) blessing for their faction in the here & now. The Mostali want no part of Zistor's power to re-erupt in the current era, and so recruit Orlanthi allies to counter-quest to the Siege as EWF Orlanthi to stop the Lunars. It would be an opportunity to have some meaty playable Second Age lore put together without hacking together an entire world-book, and an opportunity to play with some of those toys in the Third Age if characters bring back a touch of forbidden mojo. The setup could also support PCs as the Lunars or Mostali, with all the forbidden and dangerous powers flying around being an excellent opportunity for intra-faction conflict as well. I mean really, how can that Illuminated (Occluded?) Irippi Ontor (N?)PC not try to bring home the Secret of the God Learners from such an expedition?

I really like how this myth has evolved in the telling, actually, with the lessons that while playing against type is possible at need the drawbacks reinforce why the different groups best serve in the roles that they have. A contest where gods switch jobs, do each others jobs in a funky way that sort of works, yet realize that the community is better off with people sticking to what their best at and respecting one another's contributions to the community is a good story and an instructive myth. I could even see Humakti using it when an army in the field is foraging for supplies or constructing fortifications. I also love the complimentary version helping a fyrd of Barntari break apart an enemy phalanx like a plow cutting the earth into rows, having found a bit of Separation of their own (and perhaps later getting Maran Gor's blessing of fertility on ground where blood has been spilled like in KoDP.). To elaborate from before, if somebody brings something of that quality out, they're fulfilling the spirit of the rule you don't like and entertaining the rest of the group. They don't get to just add their PC's hellacious Death Rune rating to the default "No Applicable Ability 6," but rolling it as augment could reasonably boost that 6 up to a 12 or 15 where it's on par with a starting character's lesser abilities. A mediocre myth OTOH, would at best get to roll the augment attempt as a Stretch (cuz really, Death for this?), meaning the best bonus achievable is only +6, while a shameless/boring/uncreative attempt to use one's best rated ability all the time when inappropriate gets told "No." and reminded that augments are supposed to do some or all of: elicit an excited or emotional response, further illuminate (small 'i' )the character, create suspense, and further define Glorantha. One person's "fast-talk the GM" is another's "collaborative world-building." Not everyone's cup of tea, sure, but with the right group in the right frame of mind it can make for a grand time. Looping to the SA material, has anyone played a game where you were God Learners exploring/exploiting the Other Side? Did the MRQ materials give you any helpful tools for that sort of game? If so, are the ideas helpful for other sorts of experimental Heroquesting?

I think it might be fun to do something like icons for saints of a semi-lost religion, or maybe Espers/Materia from Final Fantasy.

Did you ever hear how the idea of the rune tokens came about? It's so out of left field like, "The game is called 'RuneQuest,' so let's make it so people go on quests to get runes!" Yet clearly somebody thought there was something of value to it or it wouldn't have been there. What was the perceived benefit to the game from that in the mind of its originators?

I'll say this for Mongoose, they had the balls to put out an entire Ducks book. It's a mixed bag like most of their stuff, but still, that's some serious commitment.