Garwalf

I was looking for a description of the differences between the two versions of the Starter Set and found this very helpful video:

I just wanted to say publicly that I totally understand the reason for the new policy announced 5/11/22 and I support it. And I say this as somebody who hasn't run a convention game in years (and thus may end up "inactive" soon).

I am also interested. I would appreciate any tools that could help me run Gloranthan games on Roll20--whether it's RuneQuest, 13G, or HeroQuest..

I'm interested in running Gloranthan games online--possibly for Gen Con Online-- but I have never run an online game before. So I've got a random list of questions. Sorry if this is a little disjointed. If I want to run something online--like RQG, 13G, or HeroQuest, which of them works best with Roll20? Are there any materials available for them like the fillable character sheets I see for D&D? How the heck do I get adventure material up on the platform? I've also played on Discord, and I can see that working for "Theater of the Mind"-only play. I was in a game this last weekend where the audio/video chat was over Discord, and it had a useful dice-rolling macro. Does anybody know if that is available to anybody? @Ian Cooper, if you don't mind me asking: What tools did you use to run HeroQuest for the Virtual Kraken? (I was too late to sign up, and the game was way too early for me in the Central time zone.)

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned it here (or anywhere else) before: The day I saw it, I thought Disney's Brave was a great Orlanthi myth: You have a red-headed, high-spirited female protagonist (clearly Vinga) who makes a terrible mistake and then has to try to set things right. And what's more Orlanthi/Vingan than that?

Of these films, I think I've only seen The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, but I like the idea of Glorantha feeling a lot like Westerns. I know that Robin Laws has discussed this on Ken and Robin Talk about Stuff. To paraphrase: RPG adventurers are like the "heroes" of a Western: They are violent and outside the norms of society, but society needs them around to protect against even *worse* threats. Along these lines, can anybody think of good classic Westerns set at a White fort or settlement, and the concern is the conflict with threatening forces outside? Any films like that could have a good Pavis vibe. Forgive me if I've missed it, but has anybody mentioned The Seven Samurai or The Magnificent Seven?

Here's a question I have about the pass/fail cycle: If the heroes have been failing a lot, there's a good chance they will have accumulated penalties, but the logic of the pass/fail cycle* suggests that when the heroes have been failing a lot, they should get an easier victory. The two ideas seem to work against each other. I haven't run enough HQ to see how this works out in actual play. Am I overthinking this? *recognizing, yes, that the pass/fail cycle is a tool, not a rule.

Thank you to the OP and to the respondents who I feel have given me "permission" to use something more generous like 4d6 x 7 to generate ability scores. Lately I've liked ability score arrays for the sake of balance, flexibility, and allowing players to start quickly. For reference and comparison: The 5th edition of That Other Game has a standard ability score array of: 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8 (Total: 72/average: 12). Add another 12 into the mix for your seventh RuneQuest characteristic and you're set--at least for humans. 13th Age in Glorantha recommends an array of: 17, 15, 14, 13, 12, 10 (Total: 81/average: 13.5). Add another 14 into the mix for your seventh characteristic (for a total of 95), and you still have base ability scores that could be generated by "low" rolls (rolled ability scores totaling 92 plus an extra 3 points) I haven't had a chance to form a RuneQuest group yet, but Even though I'm not currently playing, I tried rolling a character to see what it's like and I was really disappointed when I rolled up some truly pathetic characteristics. People can argue all they want that it doesn't have that much impact on the game, but it sure doesn't *feel* heroic to have your avatar in the game world below average in everything.

I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but I've bought the dice to support the following solution: I stick out a huge-*ss red d20 on the table to indicate the difficulty level--a nod to the ever-present Red Moon. (And, no, I don't know how I'll indicate masteries yet.) Each player has 2 d20's of their own--one red (for the narrator/opposition) and one of any other color.

With this sale on, I would appreciate some advice: If I want a copy of Borderlands and Griffin Mountain, is it better to get the .pdf of the originals, or the Gloranthan Classics reprints?

I definitely like the idea of having one stretch penalty rule rather than separate rules for stretches and for specific ability bonuses. Thanks to @Corvantir for bringing this up. This was the next thing I was going to mention (honest!) For me the big confusion was that, as written, I understood the specific ability bonuses to work in different ways, depending on the challenge: Against a personalized opponent, specific ability bonuses/penalties depended on the participants in the contest. For example, if the hero were a Lankhor Mhy sage using her "Heortling" keyword to fight, she would be at a disadvantage fighting a Lunar soldier. Against an abstract resistance, specific ability bonuses/penalties depended on the abilities of other heroes. So if that Lankhor Mhy sage were using her "Heortling" keyword again--this time to walk through snowy woods, she would suffer a -3 penalty if one of her companions had the "Hunter" keyword, and -6 if that companion had the "Walk through woods on snowshoes" ability.

This makes sense, but it is never how I have read the rules as written. Like @jrutila, I have been confused about the MOP rules as written in HQ2 and HQG. HQG, pp. 81-82 explicitly addresses *players* as the ones subject to MOP's, and then goes on to discuss how having followers may affect those penalties. HQG p. 107 talks about bunching militias and war gangs together into a single resistance. I feel like there's nothing in the rules as currently written to square this circle. (And I just realized that @JonL said this earlier and better than I.) Again, the more explicit you can be, and the more directly you can address players and GM's, the better.

Overall, I like the direction this is going. I like the idea of obvious hero improvement relative to challenges, and I definitely like any direct advice to GM's, which is what this sounds like. I have one question: The way you have phrased this, it sounds like all hero "improvement" is really accomplished by the GM fiddling with resistance levels, so the players don't make any changes on their character sheets. Is this correct? If so, that may be a bit of a challenge for players coming from other games where they are used to seeing the improvement in their heroes. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but again it may be something that will need to be addressed directly.

I like the rules of thumb that you I like this rule of thumb, and I think it would be a good idea to lay it out pretty clearly, preferably supported by examples. Your mention of rituals makes perfect sense to me, as somebody pretty familiar with Glorantha. I think newbie players may need some help understanding the distinction between what their characters can do while on the latest cattle raid and what members of their cult or community can do by acting together. In general, I like the idea of stating pretty explicitly what players can do with magic. I know that it's a point of pride that HeroQuest doesn't take up space with stat blocks, but the fact is that sometimes it's useful to set aside a little space to explicitly lay out how certain concepts can be best applied in playing the game.

I like the way that HQ2 suggested handling animals (and, by implication, NPC's): Set a block aside with a description and notation of "Significant Abilities" and "Exceptional Abilities." A quick summary like that makes it easier for a GM to run the heroes' opponents in a contest, instead of having to plow through paragraphs of exposition to find a couple of "gameable" nuggets of information.

Also, please clarify and emphasize that "success" and "failure" refer to the players' rolls, while "victory" and "defeat" refer to the results of a contest--i.e., that it's entirely possible to "succeed" on an ability check and still meet "defeat" in the contest. The last time I ran a session at a con, I found that players had difficulty grasping the concept that their victory or defeat hinged on more than their own dice roll. No doubt they were coming in thinking of that *other* game using d20's. Incidentally, some of the "clever dice tricks" mentioned in the thread of that same name look like they should clear up some of this confusion in play:

Given these options, I would prefer to only give out XP for Major+ Victories/Defeats. That reduces the bookkepping and, more importantly, makes those Major+ victories and defeats that much more special. As others have already pointed out, any variant on the XP system presented here will mean *very* slow advancement for groups that don't play very often. What would this mean for adventures (like most of the existing printed HQ material) where the main rewards come in the form of opportunities to add or improve abilities? Like many here, I personally don't like the idea of setting up a player conflict between "I need to spend this hero point to succeed spectacularly" and "I need to save this hero point so that I can advance the ability later. I think of hero point spends as a moment when the hero is inspired or just plain awesome, so it seems like spending hero points and advancing could well go hand in hand. But, then, I realize you may have your own reasons--and a bit more playtest experience than I.

I like the idea of having different options for how to alter the Base Value. Whether you call this "Resistance Progression" or "Difficulty Progression," please make clear the difference between the difficulty name ("Very Easy" to "Nearly Impossible") and the difficulty number (e.g., 6 to 14 W 2). (I will add that I just drove myself crazy leafing through HQG and HQ2 to see if there was a distinction in terminology in the existing rules--only to find that HQ2 talks about "Resistance" and "Resistance Number" while HQG talks about "Difficulty" and "Difficulty Number.")

Here's the "stupid dice trick" I want to try the next time I run HeroQuest: Make sure every player has 2d20: One red die and one of any other color. When the player is in a contest, he or she rolls both dice. The red die is the resistance roll and the other is the hero's roll. (I stole this from a game of 7th Sea or the new Star Wars, where every single roll was made by the players, not the GM.) I'm hoping this will combine well with the publicly displayed huge resistance die.

I'm not familiar with this kind of die. How is different from the "regular" d20 I've been using since my AD&D days?

I have also heard from Robin D. Laws on Ken and Robin Talk about Stuff that this is a lot more visceral for players than toting up mathematical bonuses and penalties. The next time I run HQ, I definitely want to hand out *something* physical to indicate to players their bonuses/penalties. I had been thinking of just doing index cards. It will take more time, but I can specify what the problem is.

I concur. May I add: It would be useful to have advice for the GM on when it is and when it isn't a good idea to use Group Simple Contests. When I have run demo games, I've found myself using them a lot because I wanted to reflect all the heroes contributing to the resolution and I didn't want to use an extended contest. If it's normal to do that a lot, please make that clear to GM's.

There is an element of the community rules I do not fully understand. It is not clear what to do when the heroes all belong to separate communities. My reading of the community rules is that there is an underlying assumption that all the heroes belong to the same community. The opening sentence of "Gloranthan Communities" in HQG, p. 119 appears to say it pretty much outright. If that is the only way that communities can be used in HeroQuest, please make that specific and give guidance on constructing a party where all the heroes share a community. I can imagine any number of campaigns where the heroes might be working together but all belong to different communities. Consider the typical group of adventurers in Pavis. Pavis:GtA (p. 176) suggests that a hero's community is most likely going to be his or her temple. However, most adventuring parties in Pavis are going to include members of a bunch of different cults.

This isn't a single ruler per se, but a way the rules are presented for play--particularly the tables. I think the best thing that can be done to make the next printing of HeroQuest clearer is to edit the charts to optimize them for clarity in play. Each chart as presented in the text helps explain one particular rule, but when they are all gathered together, they are very hard to follow. For example, in HQG, the "Pass/Fail Difficulty" and "Difficulty Level" tables are right next to each other--but one goes from "Very Low" difficulty at the top to "Very High" at the bottom, while the other goes in the exact *opposite* direction--from "Nearly Impossible" to "Very low." Different players (including me) have proposed solutions to these problems with new tables that bring a lot of related information together. For instance, I came up with a table that brought together the tables for "Pass/Fail Difficulty," "Difficulty Level," and "Base Value." As you probably know, you can find them on the "My HeroQuest Gaming Aids" forum: https://basicroleplaying.org/topic/6839-my-heroquest-gaming-aids/.

My heartfelt condolences go out to Greg's wife and family. Like many others here, I have derived great enjoyment from Greg's work over the years--most notably what he did to create or "channel" Glorantha. I only met him once, and I was blown away. He was a magnetic public speaker and even more, he was gracious, generous, thoughtful, and charming when I had the chance to speak one-on-one with him. In short, what he did and who he was made my life a little better.