JonL

There may be an echo of Waha's net in Derik's use the Black Net.

I think that sentence is being misread here, and misapplied outside its intended context of Catch-Ups. It's really saying two different things whose only business being in the same sentence is that they both pertain to Catch-Ups and Keywords interacting. As I read this, the first phrase, "You can’t raise abilities under a keyword," ...forbids raising breakout abilities with the three improvement points you get from a Catch-up. The second phrase, "nor gain a catch-up when the effective value of a subability reaches a mastery (since it’s the keyword, not the abilities under it, which has a rating)." ...tells you that a breakout crossing a Mastery break doesn't trigger a Catch-up, only the Keyword's actual rating reaching 21/41/etc. does that. To rewrite it more to more clearly state what it's saying there: The three points from a Catch-up may not be spent on breakout sub-abilities under a Keyword, nor does raising a Keyword to a rating such that a breakout sub-ability's net rating crosses a mastery break trigger a Catch-Up - since in both cases it is the Keyword, not the breakouts under it, which has a rating. Soooo.... You can raise Archery as much as you want via spending Hero Points towards improvement. The "maximum value" is a mis-reading of the rule. However, you can't raise Archery by itself with points from a Catch-Up. That's what the first part of the rule is actually forbidding. It would not, as you are raising the Keyword's rating rather than the breakout. However, you would not gain a Catch-up when Hunter+Archery totals 21. Only stand-alone Abilities and Keyword ratings trigger a Catch-Up If my read is correct, sub-abilities can go as high as you like, you just can't raise them with points from a Catch-Up. If again my reading is correct, while it is never possible to raise Archery with points from a Catch-up the net value of the Keyword+breakout rating has no bearing whatsoever on raising Archery with Hero Points. The bit about crossing Mastery breaks only means that breakouts don't trigger a Catch-Up. tl;dr The whole thing is two rules: 1) Points from a Catch-Up may not be spent on breakout sub-abilities under a Keyword. 2) The net value of a Keyword + breakout sub-ability crossing a Mastery break does not trigger a Catch-up. The first point is probably because Catch-Ups are supposed to broaden you, not make you more specialized, but wouldn't really hurt anything apart from that if you dropped it. The second point is more important, because it means that raising a Keyword with four +1 breakouts underneath it from 19 to 20 must by no means suddenly give you four Catch-Ups worth of improvements from all those breakouts hitting 1w. Rather, you would get a single Catch-Up the next time you raise that Keyword and its rating goes from 20 to 1w.

13th Age is one of the better fruits of the d20 tree, IMO. It sort of takes some of the more fun parts of D&D4 and mixes them with some more traditional D&D-isms, but also with some cool qualitative things like you'd see in HQ or FATE. For people who find RQ too elaborately fiddly and HQ too vague and mechanically samey-samey, 13A might well represent a fine "Goldylocks" approach to Glorantha.

That might be an angle you could work as well. Their enemy presumably had a road back in mind. It might be an unfriendly road for you two, but if there's no Death yet...;)

Please do not equate improvisationally Varying Your Glorantha in a way you wouldn't enjoy with rape. Part of what Chaosium is doing right at the moment with Glorantha is encapsulating it in three different game systems that appeal to different gamers' desires & tastes. RQ, HQ, and 13A all do different things well, others less so, and reward different player competencies and play styles. Some players' eyes glaze over at the thought of calculating percentages for a big list of skills or groan at the prospect of tracking hit-points per limb. That doesn't make RQ a crappy game. It just makes it the wrong game for those players. I actually dig the old crunchy style games too, hell, I own multiple editions of Rolemaster & Car Wars. The people I usually play with OTOH are either fellow old hands who are nonetheless much more into lighter fare like Warbirds or Dungeon World these days, are young adults who have only played computer RPGs or maybe D&D/Pathfinder before, or are children who haven't even learned what "percentile" means yet. I have had successful fun games with these players, often getting through character creation in under 15 minutes with people who have never played a tabletop RPG before. I can see where HQ delivering something other than what you were hoping for and that was a poor fit for the way you & yours like to play left a bad taste in your mouth. By all means, keep playing & enjoying RQ as it is clearly the game for you. Please try to remember though, that this is a big tent and we should endeavor to treat one anothers' tastes with respect.

The Coming Storm is more geared towards down to lozenge struggles, but is itself more of a setting book than a campaign book. The forthcoming The Eleven Lights book is going to be the structured campaign to place within that setting. The Colymar Campaign goes into the deep end of the pool much more quickly than you want if you're wanting to focus on day-to-day struggles rather than epic quests. It's better for a four-month time frame than I expect T11L to be, given that Ian has compared it to The Great Pendragon Campaign in terms of having several in-game years worth of adventures. As I look back over what you wrote now though, perhaps I read wrong and you're looking to be ready to start playing in four months once busy season at work passes rather than looking for a four-month campaign. In the Tales of Mythic Adventure podcast on the subject of TCS, a suggestion that Ian made for those wanting to get started with the Red Cow before T11L comes out was to start playing with TCS a couple of years prior to the presumed start date. Perhaps play through some basic adventures around the TCS sandbox with young freshly initiated clan members. Taking their first steps into adulthood, the characters will be learning about the world and people around them just as the players are meeting the new game world piece by piece. I've started more than one game off with some still-wet-behind-the-ears new adults being called before the Clan Ring and tasked with solving some problem that popped up the same week they were initiated since clearly must be their destiny to prove themselves by facing it. This sort of approach can work well combined with leaving some abilities undefined and improvement points unspent at the beginning of the game, as these young adults can then use them to discover new strengths within themselves as they face adversity, initiate into new cults, form relationships, etc. (It kind of gives the old "Zero-to-Hero" feel to your first few adventures.) Do that sort of thing at the start, and by the time T11L drops, you'll have both players & their characters seasoned enough to start digging into the meat of the campaign.

I think "Killing is the Goal" has it's place. If your goal is to assassinate Lord Honda and your means is to infiltrate Honda Castle in the night with your "Ninja" ability and slay him where he sleeps, any victory result should bring about Lord Honda's death. A Complete Victory would represent something perfect like sneaking in smothering him with a pillow without waking Lady Honda, and being on your way home before anyone realizes he's dead. A Marginal Victory might mean that you had to fight your way through, were wounded, and that while Lord Honda is mortally wounded, he is still able to arrange for a stable transfer of power to his heir and extract oaths from his mightiest Samurai to avenge his impending death a twenty-fold against your clan. A Marginal Defeat might mean that Lord Honda's doctor had an antidote for the poison you dripped into his snoring mouth, but that he will be mostly unconscious for weeks as he recovers, and that you were not identified. A Complete Defeat could mean that you were captured and tortured into revealing the name of your client and the location of your clan's village before being executed. (If you risked invoking Pyrrhic Victory results, you might also slay Lord Honda at the cost of your own life.) The key thing here is that this contest is explicitly framed as achieving a specific death at the risk of your own. However, a lot of the places where people struggle with this are when the're caught up in the idea of RPG combat and mistake violent means for the actual goal they are trying to achieve. Those cases are where Hurt, Injured, etc should come into play as consequences for your violent means failing to achieve your goal. Really, most fights with intelligent foes or animals shouldn't end up being a grind to the death anyway. Most opponents will surrender, flee, or just drop from pain after taking a serious wound.

You know, if someone at my table tells that story - and it's GOOD - reflecting on Seperating trees into planks and comparing it to Utuma moving the tree to it's next stage of existence , and incorporating a lesson of some sort for how good Humakti should handle the difficulties inherent in being both part of the community and yet apart from it, and the folks at the around the table are caught up and entertained by it - I'll give that player the augment! If it's bullshit he's getting a Stretch at best and more likely just told "No" with an admonishment about not abusing the rules. "Not to your taste." and "Crappy" are not the same thing. At any rate, I've looked through a couple of the MRQ books. I find the physical rune tokens to be a huge conceptual misstep. OTOH, I really enjoyed reading the in-character parts of The Clanking City.

One of the things that initially drew me to HQ was having more nuanced gradations of success and failure compared to the three-and-a-half (miss/botch, mixed result, hit/win, win+ from a special move) from PbtA. Misses in PbtA are harsh, and are common anytime you step outside your character's favored attributes. Having the Minor Defeat state where you've lost but aren't necessarily wrecked in the process takes away the Sword of Damocles sensation of rolling with less than a +2 in PtdA can produce.

As I noted in the "Fictional Parameters for Sorcery" thread, the examples for Sorcery in the current materials are very thin. I did find the feedback in there very helpful though, it's worth reviewing that tread. This thread has some grimoire examples and links to threads on the old glorantha.com forums with still more. This one has a good breakdown on Lunar sorcerers, who may have some magic tied to their Moon rune and some not. Yes, Lhankor Mhy followers can hang Grimoires from their Law rune. That's the only cult-approved way for them to do it as the cult is found in Dragon Pass, but followers from different traditions (Warlocks or Henotheists for example) might also have a profession keyword with grimoires under it or grimoires as stand-alone abilities. Having your grimoires all hanging off your Law (or Moon) rune is nice from an advancement standpoint, but having them in more than one ability opens the possibility of doing things like using your Law rune to augment a grimoire you have as either a stand-alone ability or as a breakout under a profession. You don't need to have either rune yourself. See the Debaldan Grimoire example on HQG p174. It's hung from the character's Law rune, but the grimoire itself combines Water with various other runes for its spells. The character doesn't need to have any of the runes from the spells themselves (though having them could make for handy augments). There are also grimoires that have a less rune-focused theme, such as the ones in Pavis Gateway to Adventure. They still have a solid thematic thread running through their spell list though. That's the key. I used that as my compass when making HQ grimoires from AD&D spells. Things that I needed to work through in my head (with lots of help from the older hands here in the other thread) was deciding how to set resistance for magical effects. You can always fall back on Pass/Fail or whatever, but for the sake of a coherent story you need to have a handle on what sorts of things a journeyman Sorcerer should be able to reliably accomplish more-or-less at will, what things are more challenging, what can only be attempted with assistance/augments from fellow cultists-sacrifices-holy dates-sacred locales-etc., and what things are basically a heroquest in and of itself just to cast. (With the AD&D grimoires, I loosely mapped spell levels to HQ difficulty bands.) The Colymar Campaign in Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes is probably a good fit for that length of time, and has the adventures fairly structured for you.

Neat stuff there. I've had a mind for a while to try out solo play HQ as a mental exercise using the Pass/Fail Cycle to set difficulties and some combination of Rory's Story Cubes, my soapstone Rune Dice, and a deck of Tarot cards. I'll take a good look at this now too. Another thing that I'd like to try with that idea is to take it a step further and do GM-less troupe play. Use Pass/Fail for difficulties, the above mentioned semantic randomizers, and maybe have the person sitting to across from you narrate your results. I think that the conceptual guidance that the "and/but" ideas provide could be very useful in that sort of context. HQ doesn't need to go so far as mandating/regimenting/enumerating them the way that PbtA games do, as that would conflict with it's more open and interpretive nature, but I think incorporating "and/but" explicitly into examples and such would be a good thing. Most especially, there's not really an option as written for "You won the fight, but are also wounded." or similar costly successes in Simple Contests as written. I also think that the "just scraped home" marginal result should remain in the toolbox too though. The needs of the narrative flow can guide you in the moment as to whether play would be improved by further complications or not. Sometimes the steady flow of trouble from 7-9s in PbtA games can make for a stressful death-of-a-thousand-cuts feel that can make players a bit gunshy. The "You achieve your framed goal, but receive no further benefit beyond that." is a good option for when you just want to keep things moving forward and a further complications would disrupt the flow of the scene.

Now I want to re-watch Gangs of New York.

While more expensive than most RPG single purchases, I believe that the Guide is appropriately priced for all that it provides.

Having come to HQ after already spending a few years with PbtA games, I gravitated to this approach right out of the gate. It's the major innovation in resolution mechanics to hit the table in the years since HQ2 came out, and incorporating it definitely leads to richer play, especially with Marginal results being the most common when opposing ratings are closely matched. Examples from the last session I ran: PCs sneaking into another clan's tula - Marginal Defeat: They were spotted, but were aware of the fact that they had been spotted. (They changed gears to approaching openly.) PCs trying to scale a fortress wall between patrol passes at night -Marginal Victory: They made it inside, but their rope-ladder fell down behind them. They were not spotted, but they knew next patrol would see that someone had come over the wall. A lot of the death/injury particulars comes down to the tone of your particular game. HQ can do breezy fairy tale or grim & gritty with equal facility depending on how one frames contests & interpret results, but everyone at the table should have a clear idea as to what feel is currently in play. In that vein, another PbtA thing I like is "Announcing Future Badness." If the stakes are high (physical or otherwise), that should usually not be a surprise to the Players. HQ has the advantage of explicitly laying them out much of the time, but even before a conflict comes to a head, it's a good practice to telegraph what sort of trouble they might be getting themselves into. If an NPC has killed 30 men in duels, the Player ought to hear about that reputation before issuing a challenge. The path to the particularly nasty monster's lair might have remnants of previous battles foreshadowing the level of threat in play. Getting turned to stone completely out of the blue does not make for fun play, but if you saw all the twisted statues in the White Witch's courtyard earlier, you'll know what's on the line and to be on your guard. (Even in a dungeon crawl like good'ol B2 - Keep on the Borderlands, the surprise Medusa in the jail cell is at least initially trying not to petrify the PCs so that they can help her escape.)

Blackjack style is where it's at. If the low roll wins, it priviledge the lower rated ability or resistance, to the extent that a 17v14 matchup is just over 10% more likely for a marginal result to go in favor of the lower rated opponent if you're using low-roll wins ties. Since HQ already has a strong pull to the marginal results thanks to every roll being opposed, high-roll wins ties gives a better spread of results. I take it a step further and have criticals occur when you roll your rating exactly, a la Pendragon. That's not only more consistent with Blackjack style, it lets you resolve tied criticals in favor of the higher roll. In the case of a 20 rating, I ave them keep critting on 19 and have 20 become a regular failure instead of a fumble.

RQG also makes for nice symmetry with HQG.

I'll confess to finding it limiting. With Law being required for the sorcery, that's 2/3 locked down for starting characters. That excludes a lot of interesting combinations. There is a Sartar Magical Union style Warlock among the HQG professions. The flavor text along with it seems to skew closer to an EWF revival than to sorcerery, but does use the term "magician" repeatedly.

This. If it's just "Not-China," nobody needs a sourcebook for that. If you're going to do a deep dive into Kralorela it needs to become it's own thing in the same sense that the Orlanthi aren't just a Celt/Viking mashup and Dara Happa is not just Babylon or Assyria.

Quoting from the old Issaries-era GameAids.pdf: There was also a table of distance/duration/targets modifiers that ranged from -3 for 100 yards/30 minutes/2 targets, through -20 for a mile/a day/10 targets, to -80 for 125 miles/1 year/1000 targets. (Interesting that it had higher resistance for the former and an ability penalty for the latter. Resistance modifiers for both makes more sense, IMO.) These numbers don't translate directly, as HQ1 was scaled differently in terms of masteries & resistance than 2, but give an idea as to what sort of things were thought to be pushing the limits. Also note that inherent abilities like shapechanging for Hsunchen or invisibility for Blue Moon Trolls didn't face the same difficulty bumps. I think that moving away from such concretely mechanized things in HQ2/HQ:G was a good design decision, as it opens up much more room for flexibility between different sorts of magic and nuances like having ritual correspondences for distant subjects. However, absent the mechanically defined parameters, I still feel there's a dearth of fictional guidance in the currently published materials to guide players & GMs on the application of the general rules (the responses in this thread did help though). As a relative newcomer to all this there still seems to be a great deal of assumed inherited context from Runequest as to what sort of things are supposed to be commonly achievable, possible with great effort/support, or the sole province of great heroes/demigods.

This seems apropos:

A game I ran recently had a player whose Ernalda-following character has Life, Earth, & Mastery.

Being the crossroads between the Theylean and Western cultures, full of rival factions and intrigues (but with the Seshnegi, Dorastor, & the Kingdom of War all lurking nearby with the potential to unite the rivals), Ralios calls out for further development, in my view. I'd rate the Holy Country as a close second though.

Way to go, Ian! The game is in excellent hands.

I'm glad to hear Charles is still in the game, even if that game isn't HQ. NS is a great piece of genre-focused design, and I look forward to seeing what he does going forward. Speaking of the HQ Gateway License, is that still an available thing? The Chaosium licensing page currently says, "Chaosium is not currently accepting unsolicited submissions or licensing requests while we are reviewing our processes. Please check back later."

Don't sweat the face, it's glorious. It is a face that says, "I am about to cleave this gods damned rock lizard's face in twain!" Look at the runes on her sword, Vinga's set + Mastery, Luck, & Fate? She fears no mere beast! Nobody looks at a Frazetta Conan and says, "It could use a bit of doubt in his eyes." Similarly, I prefer the "Steel in her veins!" Eowyn from the old RotK cartoon to the "On the verge of panic!" Eowyn from Jackson's movie.