Dissolv

Man. If I had been charge of that one, I would have said no way. You can heroquest to the mythic realms/plane/godtime whatever, but once Time is established, the rules of the Compromise apply. But the example of trolls going back to try to refight Gbaji are canon, so I have a hard time sticking to that -- UNLESS -- it was allowed precisely because the Great Compromise had been violated in the first place. Still, in general the "time travel" criticism of Glorantha hero-questing I think is a very valid one. Experiencing a mythic, timeless, universal event like the Hero's Journey, okay sure, I get that. Specifically traveling back in time to the year 379 ST to muck about with historical events seems a mistake. A bit too sci-fi "timey-wimey" for the mythic genre.

I'm still of the mind of following the Pendragon example. Or classic mythology if that's your thing (and it is mine!). Take a look at (1981) Clash of the Titans. Perseus heroically fights with Calibos -- wins. Perseus heroically fights with the Medusa -- wins, despite her awful powers, thanks to the mirror shield and being generally a hero. Perseus has a return encounter with Calibos, now supported by giant scorpions. Perseus fights heroically and wins, but loses all his party. Perseus is basically defeated at this point, but Divine Interventions to Zeus. 😄 Perseus has zero chance against the Kraken, and must use the scenario plot hook of the Medusua's head to prevail. The way I see it, this is a great plot structure for a bigger than life, mythic adventure. Perseus engages with, and defeats everything reasonable for a human to deal with. He has to resort to DI once, and needs a lot of help along the way (Invisibility helmet, mirror shield, magic owl of distraction and hooting). But in the end, he doesn't tackle the Kraken all Beowulf like. No human can, not even a hero. He has to use what was in the scenario to prevail. Otherwise it would also be a very short story as he just goes down to the shore to fight it. This structure allows the GM to vary the content, and the challenge of the various encounters, while still allowing the possible of a mortal "overcoming" a Titan. It avoids the whole "I'm so awesome that I just parry Smaug with my wooden shield" problem. Basically a Rune Lord can run the quest very reasonably and prevail, no need for Harrek the Berserker level PC's. I am looking to see how the higher level Hero questing might offer tools for dealing with oversize opponents, but I suspect suppression of attack skill is ultimately the answer there. Mechanically, that is.

Very fair. Anything that powerful needs a scenario hook. Like the pepper of sneezing that drops the chance to hit down to 30% or something. A lot of classic glorantha supplments were VERY casual with attack and parry skills over 100%. Everything works much better if things are either toned down to start -- allowing the players to work within the current game mechanics. If not, you have to have a scenario maguffin for the players to get to counter the super powered 150% attack 14d6 monster. Pendragon is excellent for this type of adventure. Glorantha on the other hand, has teasers of mechanisms where to players can combat such insanely powerful foes, but not so much in practice. It's either all or nothing, too many times.

This used to be a major thing in my Viking/Griffin Island campaign. Eventually the viking heroes were face to face not just with draugr or trolls, but with their giant adversaries, and in the lower magic setting, it was impossible to parry and survive. They dug deep, found some old King Arthur references where he took off his armor to face a giant, and copied his example. Since the Giants had roughly a 50% chance to hit, an 80% dodge meant that they were surviving the vast majority of the time, all while trying to hack through that wall of hit points. One giant they got sleeping, and that was a quick one. It all worked. Dodge or die isn't unreasonable, or unplayable. RQG characters have the options of earth shield (available to Orlanth Adventurous, btw), and Humakt and Babeester Gor have the ()trance spells. There is also lightning and sever spirit. My viking campaign players had none of those things, and still made it work. For Thor! For Odin! I have little sympathy for a Glorantha player who can't work something out for those sorts of situations. Options exist!

To the Strongest! A miniatures game for Ancients and Medieval warfare created by Simon Miller. It is designed for convention games, so features lightning fast play, and supports very high concentration of troops without bogging down (hooray, double infantry lines finally!). It is excellent, losing none of the period flavor while stripping the game system down to the essentials by eliminating both dice and measuring tape. This was done because Simon noticed that the bulk of the time "playing" the very long historical games were spent either shaking, rolling, and chasing dice down, or carefully over-measuring some protractor angle for a charge. While not his current focus, Simon is a noted Glorantha-phile, and you can see quite a few Glorantha based miniatures on his blog: https://bigredbat.blogspot.com/ The name of the blog alone is a bit of a clue 🙂 I very much hope that his long awaited Fantasy rules set has a nod or two to Glorantha gaming, as opposed to cleaned up WFB type gaming, which Oathmark may have already cleaned up anyway.

@borbetomagnus First let me say that I LOVE the Walktapus conversion. That was some clever bit of work, and I think the final results are excellent! Similarly, I never noticed the plant broo -- I've got two different broo packs still unopened as I focused on mass producing a box of GW Beastmen and Scorpion conversions back in 2017. I don't think that I've ever posted photos, so maybe I should get around to that? Sadly, the military action that you see is plain old terrestial Rome vs. Dacia. We gamed out the entire Dacian wars using TTS! some years back, not just the major battle, but the reduction of the various hill forts, German and Sarmatian interference, and a couple of Roman do-overs when the Dacians had the temerity to "win". However waaaaaay back in the day one of my very best scenarios was "The fall of Runegate". I didn't have miniatures, but I did have Dragon Pass, so we used counters to demonstrate what was happening where, and the players frantically rushed around trying to shore up the defenses. It was pretty epic, and way better than typical dungeon crawl. The whole thing was made more poignant by the eventual arrival of the Crimson Bat, and the destruction of Runegate and all of its inhabitants, a major blow for the PC's as Runegate was their home base! So literally what they were fighting for was all the NPCs that they had known and relied upon -- and these were all food for the Bat! The next session was a straight up Miyamoto Mishashi "escape from the lost battlefield" scenario, which saw the players decide that the Upland Marsh was probably the safest bet..........resulting in another epic, and well remembered session even after all these years. These days, I have enough Ancients experience (and armies) behind me to know what a spectacle massed forces really are, and how well they would fit into gaming in Glorantha. Glorantha is rife with warfare. Existing within a bigger world is one of the main draws and signs of maturity of the setting, imo. That means that the PC's can participate in, or get caught up in, the sweep of larger events -- it isn't always just duels, gang warfare, and rubble hunting. However for the game itself, both structures were scratch built out of cheap stuff laying around. They were fast and easy to construct, and eventually disposable. We could make another couple out of styrofoam pretty easily, although I have ordered a Palisade and Earth work hold out from infinity engine. https://www.infinity-engine.com/index.php?id_product=80&controller=product No eta on that one, as I am working through the various armies first. Bottom line is cool terrain can be fast and easy to construct. The ramp was created in conjunction with the wall and earth mound, which is why it fits so well. It was then cut into sections which the Romans (representing a Testudo around engineers) had to build, turn by turn, as the Dacains showered them with long range missile fire (Ballista), and then eventually arrows on the final approach. The game was epic and drew quite a crowd whenever we ran it (there being many hill forts requiring reduction--and even one time the Dacians were the attackers, a la Trajan's column) but was quick and easy to game out thanks to the ultra fast playing TTS! Anyway, I actually did pull out a full game of TTS! during a RP session, but we were so into it that I didn't take any pictures. The action revolved around Prince Tarkalor, still merely a Prince, with his hero band, some Pol Joni acting as an honor guard, and the local Orlanthi militia putting down a broo incursion. The players were shocked by the full game system laid out in front of them. I made very minor modifications to the "hero" rules and each PC was a hero. They wound up putting the storm bull bison rider PC's and the PC shaman with the Pol Joni, and rolled up a flank with repeated cavalry charges. Meanwhile, they sent the Prince and his bodyguard straight into the center with reckless abandon -- "follow me! To Victory!", but didn't realize that in TTS! you might not get to move every unit. The militia froze, and the Prince wound up surrounded on three sides, eventually punching his way completely through the filthy horde, only to turn around and charge them from the rear, shattering the Broo mobs when the militia finally engaged them from the front. Prince Tarkalor is now revered as a nearly King Arthur like figure by those players. 🙂 I have held back military heavy sessions since then, as I want them to be bigger and more epic when they happen, plus the players are off with more traditional "small scale" adventures.

I originally ran RQ "back in the day" with literally nothing over than the red book (RQ2) to work with. It worked just fine. That book remains an amazingly tight example of good rules writing with very few exceptions. These days I try to stay as close as possible to established canon, so as to allow players to be "exploring" the world, rather than just something I whipped up. That does take some work, but really not too much. For getting started I cannot recommend just reading the Prince of Sartar web comic enough. Fun and easy, it's all you need to get started on the major established theme. http://www.princeofsartar.com/comic/introduction-chapter-1

Bit of bad news on the Rapier front. His web site has been down for months, and his friendface reports some type of health problem. I don't know what it is about Glorantha and miniatures, but they seem to have the darnest luck. According to the comments this well pre-dates the current health concerns, but at some point mail order was cancelled for the remainder of 2019. 😞 If they get through whatever is going on, there is some hope. This is from their Facebook page as well. No idea when, or any type of eta.

TTS! It has pretty much fired all the other Ancients and Medieval games at my club. I was also able to incorporate it into a RPG session without problems, helping set up the whole "oh in Glorantha whole armies will go at it." However some of the armies are quite massive in scope. Cheap plastics helps fuel the armies, but also taught me that anything that slows you down is bad. This has been my main hesitation for "fixing" or "hobby-chopping" my own. The time involved is okay when you are looking at a 20-50 miniatures project. However I am looking at upwards of 500 figures for this project, as I wish to be able to portray whole battles in the Hero's wars in miniature format. It sounds worse than it is, as I've got a number of completed historical armies, like the above generic barbarian, which looks appropriately Orlanthish enough for a mass battle. Undead force large enough for Delecti? Check. Bison riders? Done. Trolls and trollkin? Done and done. Broos? I can and have fielded a whole army of them, plus some scratch-built Scorpion man allies. What I am really deficient on are the Lunar infantry, and I am cranking away on those. Other forces are really small on the mass unit scale, like trolls or dragonnewts, so the quantity that you would paint for a RPG is more than sufficient. Like 8-12 for a unit of anything. Where I am perpetually frustrated is Sable riders and Impala riders. The impala clan are pygmies, so finding a cavalry pygmy figure at all, let alone an impala to go with it, is proving completely impossible. Sable riders are critical plot wise, and are great adversaries for a Prax/Pavis setting, and while they are of normal human height -- allowing me to use various historical cavalry figures, the sable itself is just not turning up no matter how hard I search. I keep hoping that MadKnight will crank out a unit of these, but so far, no luck. Actually taking stock of the project, I think that I need about 6ish Lunar Hoplite units (10 hoplites each so far less than 2 Victrix plastic boxes), misc. Lunar cavalry (I will use various Persian and Arab plastics already owned for this), and then it comes down to some highly specialized units, if I care to depict them. Rules wise very few modifications to TTS! are necessary, although flavor changes are great. Simon has been slooooooooooooooooow at getting out Fantasy rules, and these are being forced to wait behind TTS! v.2, so realistically, I'll be making my own rules modifications for the foreseeable future. (It's like heroquesting. Long promised, but after multiple campaigns, you know it just ain't coming.) For a taste as to "why" build this for what is currently mainly a RPG. Well, I hope soonish to be able to do events like these with Glorantha troops. Ideally as part of a campaign!

Yep, back on page 2. I've had my eye on them, but most of the line is far too fantastic to mix with my own more historically grounded figures. However I've got through enough of my current backlog to order some of the more interesting ones....... @Neil Patterson I'll check that stuff out when our FLGS can re-open. As a rule, I try to avoid any step that consumes a lot of time, but you never know until you can experiment. Thanks for the tip! And since this is the miniatures thread after all....

I had a PC captured by the Lunars and sent to the Gladitorial pits to die. He was intended to lose and was given tougher and tougher fights. The final one was a Telmori werewolf, and all of his (Lunar supplied) weapons were useless. But he was an extremely well rounded character, in this case with a very high grapple skill, so he went berserk, and and wound up satisfyingly killing the werewolf in hand to hand combat. This was right out of Robert E. Howard and even the Lunars had to declare him the victor. The Humakti isn't under any obligation to come down to your level of preparedness. He just has to let you get prepared. If you choose to show up naked, well maybe you have some special power that lets you fight better that way. No matter. Death comes for all. And Humakt has a history of getting the better of Eurmal. 🤪 The real trickster talent is getting a Humakti to agree to fight you sans armor without realizing it. But for Glorantha, I would argue that an honorless killing of a Humakti is probably the correct way to go about solving that problem.

This really hits the nail on the head for something missing in Glorantha gaming, and particularly Runequest. It's clear that there are pathways to becoming much more than the rules will current allow. It is also clear that pursuing these paths of power is a major tenant of (and probably reason for the terribleness of) the Hero Wars. But there is nothing mechanically on how to actually get there. It is 100% sorted out between the players and the Gamemaster. My most high powered campaign to date was really "Soltakss level out there". It featured dimensional travel, PC direct assault on a Temple of the Reaching Moon, a recurring villain with a sword that used the Mournblade stats (and he was considered a minor villain!), geometric sorcery -- a la Pythagoras, etc. A major problem was that many of the players tried to improve in power in a manner similar to D&D or most other fantasy RPG's. They played the game and passively collected their rewards. A new sword with a better matrix, iron gear, another power crystal. These things add up, and can eventually make the PC's Coder level. Eventually. I've been very hesitant to game at that power level ever again. As GM I was just making things up as I went. While it made a good story, I wasn't sure it was the Glorantha story after a while. Luckily I've learned that there is plenty of drama and good gaming at power levels that can barely change a village, let alone topple the moon. My big observation was that the players who were really all about it did it differently. Once they hit the basic upper level prescribed in the rules (Rune Lord Priest, generally) they actively pursued power gains. Fortunately for me, they were in pursuit of larger goals, like the overthrow of Lunar occupation, rather than trying to just build up a Harrek killer PC as their objective. So the campaign went smoothly for a very long time, initiate level, the first Rune Priest, then a Rune Lord, then a couple of Rune Lord/Priests and a shaman, but the players hit a wall where they just could not do the epic, heroic level feats that they wanted to do. In RQ2 you generally only got to parry one or two guys, so five or six high level Initiates of Yanafal Tarnis, say 80% skill with two handed sword, and a willingness to burn one use truesword spells were a mortal threat even to a Rune level character. If they got him isolated there often was 2-3 un parry-able attacks coming in. And of course I always GM'd lunars as ultra sophisticated munchkin types, with maximum advantage taken from every possible rules angle, be it poison, acid, dedicated support casters (dispel that Shield spell!), robbing key items from players on the lam, whatever it took to get the win for the Empire. To beat that head on, the players needed to be something more. This is tantalizingly always offered in glorantha role playing, but never actually covered in practice. The mechanistic challenges of Apotheosis are obvious to anyone who has ever run a high level campaign, but well........it is the Hero Wars. I generally had to make up my own rules mechanics as I went, but there is a clear need for a "next level" to aspire to. And perhaps more importantly, difficulty, dangers, and guardians thereof.

If you want the historical perspective, even a sword was generally a side arm to a "real" military weapon, like the spear. Pretty much anyone in antiquity would be carrying a knife of some type. Likely they could put up a fight with it, but not many cultures would consider them "armed". Those cultures that might and generally so poor as to not have a strong honor concept, at least in the sense of nobly waiting for your foe to arm himself. In fact, that phrase generally meant weaponry AND armor. Which is how it works in Pendragon. No knight would consider it honorable to attack another who was not "armed", by which they meant armored and weaponed up. Glorantha however, is a more savage place, and standards are a LOT different than High Chivalry.

Say what now? I have never heard of this stuff before!!!

Too late! I had already gone back and painted them black. Looking up actual lions on google was pretty convincing. Black noses. FWIW, I generally paint to the "two foot rule" and use speed painting techniques. You can get bogged down for hours on just a few figures "building up highlights", which is great for a professional painter, but my goal is more to use the miniatures to bring the world to (visible) life, and possibly use in a Glorantha themed miniatures game, such as the various To the Strongest! games that we have already done with them. But there are a LOT of things to represent in Glorantha, and economy of time is a factor that I consider heavily when working. However close up photos like these often have me examining my efforts and going back to touch up details like eyes, teeth, basing vegetation, etc. I don't really like to do this, but sometimes you just can't unsee a flaw, lol. The current, and possibly final state of the lions:

My latest efforts: First.....a duck! My second duck, this one has a sword, so a clear Humakti. Next up is the main course -- Tusk Riders! These guys are the Otherworld games "Pig faced orcs". They are very large figures and much too menacing for an orc. Tolkien orcs are quite short, as I recall, with even the Uruks not as tall as a Gondorman. However they make excellent Turk riders, who actually are supposed to be large and physically imposing. The bigger and badder of the bunch. The chainmail was a problem, as it is with so many figures. In this case I painted a metallic blue, and am just fudging it as "magical Glorantha *mumble mumble*". Holding the heart. Again, that's a Tusker Shaman/Priest. Just nasty. This is a close up look of the mixed "magic blue" armor and the regular bronze. I think it worked out great visually, which trumps actually being anything representative. And the scrubs. Even Tusk Riders have scrubs.

Alright, I just finished a massive backlog of Glorantha based reading. I popped into this thread to say that I LOVED this one in particular. The writing style, the Cinniatus at the bridge concept, and the fun, almost-but-not-quite irreverent writing style -- all great. All Glorantha. This is obviously a super fun night of adventure waiting to happen, and it was also a super fun read. Well done!

I gamed Runequest for 10+ years solid, fairly hardcore with multiple gaming groups (I lived in a boring small town) starting waaaaaay back with Dragon Pass (the game) and the 2nd Edition Red book -- and no other clues on how to work the setting! At one point I had to guess what was west of the Holy Country, and without a clue, I decided that it was Glorantha Pictland. A tremendously fun adventure (I'd read all of Conan, and the players had not, so they didn't realize that it was a pastiche of several Conan adventures against the Picts). Then....a whole lot of real life, and almost nothing fantasy. Lots of computer stuff. Beep. Boop. These days I belong to a very active miniatures gaming club, and role playing games are very difficult to get the guys into, or me for that matter. However my old gaming group is "in", and I'm trying to get the miniatures guys heads around as well. It's tough sledding, but one thing that is helping are the incredible models that are available for fantasy gaming these days. Bronze age stuff is still challenging, but I'm gradually taking a "tour" of the world of Glorantha, and my broos, and my Delecti undead have both seen the table as part of To The Strangest! games, in addition to being fun visualization for Role Playing. I'm hugely enjoying getting back into the setting, and have been doing a ton of reading of the many published works, official, Jonstown Compendium, Greg's mythology stuff, the works.

Holy good gods! That's almost absurd overkill......or completionist! Sometimes I forget that this is a setting as much as a game background. However all the various cults will help tons Gm'ing areas other than Sartar and Pavis/Prax. Just be sure to include some type of regionality and popularity as a guide. Sheesh!

I thought it was quite excellent.

My thought would be no, it can't be that simple. My yardstick is Cragspider couldn't do it, so it has to be hella hard.

How rare is iron? I recall that you weren't really considered a "full" Rune Lord until you had a full set of iron gear, but that's from a long, long, long time ago. These days I like to play iron as rare, and an accomplishment to acquire, but I'm not sure that's accurate, thematically. (I get that I can always YGMV it.) Edit: I found the answer while searching a Prax question: https://www.glorantha.com/docs/metals-in-prax/ The answer is expanded to Glorantha in general, and even metals in general. This is a fairly big deal for me as: 1) I have been trending towards a lower and lower armor/metal world for years in general, and 2) I have to know to buy figures with or without metal armor. 😛

The vast majority of posts in this thread are about fighting spirits. This is certainly an adventure activity, but it should be one that a Humakti is good at. Adventures where shamans have major advantages or perhaps even be indispensable would involve placating, befriending, rescuing, or discovering spirits. These are activities where a Humakti might assist, but wouldn't be of primary importance. He would be able to act as a heavy and clear away hostile opposition, like always. But spirit communication is nearly the sole realm of the shaman. Try to focus on adventures that have spirits as critical elements of the plot, but not as monsters to overcome. More Orpheus, less Hercules.

Okay, I'll bite! Why is it important that some bits of Glorantha lore be kept secret from the players? (Like the God Learner secret, and whatever the others are.)

I'll give you an example. RQIII, relatively low magic Fantasy Europe campaign. Three adventures in, our hearty Viking heroes discover the lost continent of........Griffin Island. There they encounter and are attacked by savage man like creatures, the orcs. Thorfin is a bit of an archer and starts shooting his self bow at the orcs, only to discover that they have quite good armor, much better than the leathers that the native tribesmen were sporting. A few rounds into the combat and he just can't down his orc, who was shooting arrows into a thick melee, but is now shooting back at him. Then Thorfin fumbles, and his bow string breaks! Grinning the orc puts an arrow right into his breastplate. Not enough to kill him, but enough to cause him to bleed every round until treated. Leaking blood all over the field, disarmed, with no nearby allies and no time to spare, Thorfin rises to his full height, unsheathes the Greatsword on his back, lets loose a fearsome Viking howl, and charges the orc, who is now frantic at the size and ferocity of opponent. He gets off another arrow at the charging Viking, then a second, but before he can nock and loose the third, Thorfin is upon him, and cuts him clean in half at the waist. Only then does he pull out the arrow, and treats his wound himself with a fish bone needle, some thread, and plenty of alcohol. We didn't know it yet, but Thorfin went on to become the most pivotal person ever to set foot on Griffin Island, and he started a long climb to glory that day. The dice told his fate...........