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Lysus

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Everything posted by Lysus

  1. The Iron Age is usually considered to be the time period in which iron was in wide use but before there was a strong historical record. 420 BC in Greece isn't early Iron Age, it's after the end of the Iron Age.
  2. It's worth keeping an eye on Half-Price Books as well. I picked up nine of the old RQ2 and RQ3 box sets there last year for between a quarter and a half of what Noble Knight was asking for them.
  3. I wish my Gencon 2019 previews had these covers. 🙂
  4. You could always try contacting him on RPGnet, seeing as he's the administrator there.
  5. Will this ever be available in PoD like what's planned for the Rough Guide? I've really enjoyed reading Andrew's blog in the past and I'd love to get a print copy.
  6. I have exactly the opposite opinion. The fact that Runequest NPCs and monsters have those massive stat blocks, most of which will never be used, is a big turnoff. I prefer systems where NPCs have only the numbers that are absolutely required for when they're interacting with players. Many systems that I enjoy don't use stats for NPCs at all.
  7. Greg went to school in Beloit, WI which is only a hop, skip, and a jump from Lake Geneva. It makes sense that he'd have friends still in the area even after he had graduated and moved to California.
  8. I've never cared for critical hits in any system for this reason. There's also the fact that player characters face many more attack rolls over their lifespans than monsters and NPCs and are thus much more likely to eat a debilitating or instantly fatal crit at some point.
  9. To be clear, El Runeblog is a bilingual blog, but unfortunately for us English speakers, this happens to be one of the posts in Spanish.
  10. Affected misspellings are one of the quickest ways to my ignore list on a lot of forums, so I don't care for it at all.
  11. It means that the rainy days in Fire Season are more likely to be brief storms which dump a lot of rain, while the Sea Season days are more like overcast days with a lot of drizzle. More rain falls overall during Early Sea Season (15 cm) than in either Early or Late Fire Season (8 cm and 5 cm, respectively).
  12. Lysus

    Is it possible

    You'll be the death of us all! 😉
  13. From my perspective, if there aren't meaningful consequences for both success and failure, nobody should be rolling any dice. If your apply this standard, all rolls should count for checks.
  14. For me it's both - I want the PCs to be the most important people in their story and I think Argrath is a big Marty Stu.
  15. This is a bit of a quibble, but you don't actually have to fail any tests to advance. At higher skill levels (and all stat levels), you do have to attempt tests that aren't possible to succeed without metacurrency, though.
  16. I toss out pretty much every suggestion of a timeline post-1625, for one. King of Sartar is definitely going into the shredder. Argrath can go with it.
  17. I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding my position if you think I'm only against a metaplot from the player side of the screen. I find it far more restrictive when I'm running a game than I do when playing one. My preferred GMing style is almost exclusively "seat-of-your-pants," as you would call it, reinforced by Apocalypse World-style fronts, and I find it far easier and less stressful than trying to follow along some predetermined story arc. The things that I find useful when doing this are written locations or NPCs. The kind of material that isn't is a prewritten campaign. I'm not fundamentally opposed to that kind of product existing (and to be frank, I'll still buy whatever Chaosium puts out, even if there's zero chance of chance of me using it as is), but the thing that really bugs me about the arc that's outlined in King of Sartar and which seems likely to be followed in the upcoming book is that it resolves the central conflict of the setting conclusively for one side. That's something that makes Glorantha far less interesting to me.
  18. I think the first paragraph there is a rather uncharitable reading of my position - I'm not asking for a picaresque of largely unconnected encounters. If I'm using a system where I might be rolling random encounters, one of the key things to do is to make changes to the world (including encounter tables) based on what has happened in the campaign. I definitely prefer scenarios with a strong sense of time and place, but I despise metaplot. What I'd want is content set in many different locales but all at roughly the same time. That way I can make changes to other scenarios based on what my players have done before they encounter them. I don't know if you're familiar with Apocalypse World's Fronts mechanic, but I find that it works wonderfully for clarifying what's important, thinking about how things are likely to change (especially if the PCs don't intervene), and pushing the song forward in a way that makes it feel alive. This plays into your last point - an antagonist's goals are one of the central things I'm going to use to create a Front and what I use to update that Front after the PCs get in the way. As Fronts resolve, it's time to bring in new antagonists with new goals. The number of active threats varies but I usually want it to be high enough that the PCs aren't comfortable but low enough that they don't feel completely overwhelmed.
  19. Much like @prinz.slasar, I'm waiting for the PoD version to go live before I purchase. The sad truth is that most of the PDFs I buy go unread because of my preference for dead trees and my sizeable physical library which already contains plenty of material yet to be read.
  20. I didn't care for The Eleven Lights nearly as much as The Coming Storm, no. While it's not quite as rigid as the Colymar Campaign published in the HQ2 ETA books (I don't recall whether it was in S:KoH or SC), it's definitely less flexible than I'd like. The interactions with Argrath surrounding the Eleven Lights themselves stand out in that regard. Regarding my preferences making it difficult to publish a campaign, I'd agree. That's content that I'm only interested in to the extent that I can mine it for setting elements. Trying to run something with a plot feels like wearing a straitjacket and playing in a game like that feels even worse, like nothing I do actually matters. It strips away my agency as both a GM and a player, suffocating the fun I'd otherwise be having. Sandboxes are my favorite kind of campaign for this reason, and I think there's plenty of places in Glorantha that could support great sandbox play, but it's really hard to do with the Hero Wars timeline as it exists. Either I follow it and give up my agency or I reject it and essentially remove anything like it as a possibility which feels like cutting something plausible out of the potential directions the campaign could go.
  21. The central tenet of my gaming philosophy is "play to find out what happens," which rather flies in the face of the idea of using a predetermined timeline or plot. To answer Joerg's question, the kind of content I'd like to see is setting books that describe an area and the people there (The Coming Storm is a great example) or scenarios/adventures that have a setup and inciting event, but no written conclusion. Sure, you can say you could ignore a pre-written conclusion, but it's always going to be there, coloring your play.
  22. I am so sorry for your loss. 🙁
  23. I think you've misunderstood, then. Only the first attack is reduced by 85%. All following parries add a cumulative -20% modifier to the Sword Trancer's Sword skill for the purposes of parrying, meaning that the penalty shrinks with each consecutive attack targeted at the Sword Trancer.
  24. I'll point out that Eclipse Phase is definitely not pay-what-you-want. Their products all have set prices, it's just that people are free to share them if they like.
  25. I couldn't agree more. A lot of the naming in Glorantha drives me nuts, and I say this as someone with no formal education and only a passing interest in conlanging. Wipe the slate clean on a lot of those names.
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