Cloud64

At the table I often just quickly draw the scene out on a sheet of paper to provide an easy ref.; it provides a bit of clarity for everyone. Online, we couldn't be bothered with anything fancy and just held a scrawled page-sized whiteboard to the camera to give an idea of the scene. It's not fancy, but it provides a bit of clarity and gives folks enough to work with. You can use round magnets labelled with a dry-wipe pen, assuming your whiteboard takes them. Might not be flash, but imagination overcomes all.

40 minutes ago, g33k said:

Some players don't do it to their own detriment (and the table's); 

This. It can be painful with some players. As a player I prefer to roll all my dice at the start of the round, once I know I'm attacking, then when it gets to me the sums are all done and I know where on the results table I'm looking. If anything changes before my action, it's simple enough to rejig/reroll/recalc as necessary. Tricky as GM of course, but rolling all dice together helps. All I need to do now is get my players to do the same and combat will whizz along – OK, not exactly whizz, but at least be considerably more efficient.

Only disadantage is it can confuse GMs – they aren't used to players doing this and, on occasion, they can be distrustful if they don't see you roll. Me, I assume my players are trustworthy.

Thanks for the hi-res image. I won't say it's encouraged me to buy as this is already very high on my shopping list when it becomes available. Lovely, finally Arkham done justice.

But OK, I'll bite: unless there's been a Mandela Effect event since I last looked*, Unvisited Isle is in the wrong place. It should be between the West St. and Garrison St. bridges, not between the West St.  and rail bridges.

* Checked the Arkham maps in my books, there doesn't appear to have been.

4 hours ago, Jose-san said:

This is a neat idea! 🙂

It's easy enough, if a little fiddly. A quick google will turn up a transparent hex grid png. Use an image editor to put it in as a layer and tweak the size till the hexes are the size you desire, then you may have to tile the grid to get full coverage. Once done and exported as a flat image the resizing problem that @soltkass mentioned goes away, and the scale doesn't disappear off screen when you zoom in.

4 hours ago, Jose-san said:

I did some comparisons with distances with other maps and I got an approximate scale of about 1.6 - 1.7 km/cm

Which, for those of us who work in Imperial, is 1 mile to the cm.  1.6 km = 1 mile.

That suits me as I prefer to work in miles when in Glorantha.  Kilometres I find too modern and a bit jarring, and being a Brit it's easier for me and my players to use miles as that's what we're attuned to. We use the starter set map, over which I've put a 3 mile hex grid to make estimates even easier; crossing 1 hex takes approx. 1 hr on foot, 6 hexes travelled per day. 
 

I'm not averse to using km and switch happily between most metric and imperial measures, and use km for my sport. That said, when driving in Europe I still find reducing km distances to 2/3 to give me approx. miles easier as all my estimates for time taken and fuel used are attuned to miles.

To my mind, the only thing 'tidy' and 'trolls' have in common is the letter T. Trollpak, IIRC, will tell you that the olfactory sense is the trolls' favourite. Cleanliness would be a barren environment for a troll, much as an overly minimalist environment seems unstimulating to most of us modern humans. Troll art is based on the orchestration of odour to delight the nose. Smellscapes are their thing, something squalor provides in abundance.  I suspect that, as creatures of darkness averse to light, trolls would find the human penchant for colourful displays of art, draperies and furnishings to be as unpleasant as humans would find the stench of their squalor. 

If there's no change in written content, I shall wait for the new artwork to appear in the oversize coffee-table collection of all the fantastic art in the various RQG books. C'mon, gotta be on the cards in a few years time – this quality of illustration  deserves a large format that will really do it justice 🙂

Indeed, it does sound like there's an issue. It was worth posting here to find that out.  I shall email Dustin on the morrow. 

Edit: Now raised with Dustin via Chaosium website form.202310191741BST

A question regarding distribution of these two volumes in the UK.

I pre-ordered these from my FLGS on 17 Aug, release date. They are yet to arrive in store. The Prosopaedia and Mythology have arrived. The store orders these through Asmodee (nee Esdevium) who seem to be distributors for most things gaming in the UK these days.

I note that even a couple of the big box shifters in the UK that I tend to use, e.g Gameslore, haven't had them. Leisure games, who specialise in RPGs, did get them, but it took a long while. 

My question is: what's going on with UK distribution? If I order on release day it's not unreasonable to expect to have a copy in my hands within two months. I appreciate the issue may not lie with you, but if you could shed some light I'd be grateful.

I can't address someone running it who doesn't know the books as I know them well. I'd say get the first book and read it - it's a page turner, so won't take long and will demonstrate the tone that suits the game. 

I've run it for players who weren't familiar with the books, a mixed group in that respect. It didn't pose any problems. It's set in the modern world, so there's no lore standing in the way, except perhaps the methods of UK policing (watch some of our many excellent cop shows to get a feel for it). It can give a nice simulation of the first book where the main characters first learn of the magical world.

I'd suggest the players who aren't familiar are given, or create, everyday characters who know no magic. Those familiar can have characters with magic who are in the know. 
 

Dear Santa, I have been a good boy this year and really really really deserve this, honest. I admit I have said nasty things about the government using lots of naughty words, but now you have to apply for a visa to enter UK airspace I'm sure you understand. Please can I have this for Christmas…

Trunab tabletop RPG Adventurer's Bag

2 hours ago, Jeri said:

Thank you for your thorough review of The Smoking Ruins (Runequest 7 E). I am about to run it.  I would love to have what you put in the dreams about Organvale Summer to also hand out to my players. Yes, it is one complicated module. any other helpful tips would be greatly appreciate.

Jeri

I echo Jeri, as I am – at the moment at least - planning to run this in May. And as the PCs have recently completed Dragon of Thunder Hills, I too would be interested in any useful dream content. Similarly, if anyone has fleshed out Treya's story, or has suggestions as to what it might be – anything gratefully received.

I'm almost put off running it given the issues, but I get the impression that it's worth the effort so will take on board what's been said as I do my prep. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say.

One thing that would really help is an idea of how long it takes to run. I will effectively have 16 hours of play (a club slot where we have eight sessions of two and half hours). Will that be adequate? I get the impression it can be made so, but I do need to fit in a couple of other threads in from our campaign that my players are keen to follow up – the fact that they involve travel is in part what drew me to this scenario as I can slot them in as encounters on the way. I suspect I will be hacking it around somewhat, but needs must I guess.

Now, I'm not going to be a grognard about this, honest. I will certainly be getting all the books, and the fact that the cost is going to be spread over a good few months will make the expense slip by with less wallet pain. One of my players has just msged me, having noticed the announcement (rather backing up Jeff's comment about the interest it's generated) and had a couple of things to say. (See' I'm not being the grognard, it's my player.) 

• They wondered if being ten books to get all the cult info would be off-putting to newbies, if they feel they need to get all of them to have everything they need. Yes, we know there are good arguments that that is not the case, but newbies won't know those.
• They said they wouldn't be sure about buying a whole book just to get the info for their PC's cult.
• They also opined (they GM as well) that players don't buy stuff anyway. That said, 3 of my players have bought the core rules, another seriously considering it.

So, here's a couple of thoughts.

• How about PDF only releases of each cult? Then a player only has a small expense to get the info they want. Might bring in more sales from those who wouldn't otherwise buy. i.e., players.
• Maybe a volume that includes the core cults that we all know and love, and that all the lovely pre-gens have, and some of those that will likely be encountered. Something that could be marketed to a newbie as 'all the cults you need to get started'. OK, might dent sales of more complete pantheon books, but won't be off-putting.

Anyway, I intend that as a constructive feedback and very much look forward to getting the first three volumes this later this year.

Edit:  My player has just learnt what a prosopaedia is. Marketing truly can work miracles. Interestingly, that appeals to them.

What I can tell you is that Gooseberry Sprig, resident chef at Apple Lane's Tin Inn is not amused by requests for plum sauce with a meal. He's heard the joke a thousand times, it's not original to him and be thankful that his professional pride is the only thing stopping him from p**sing in your stew, that and the fact the PCs had just done the hamlet a big favour. Yes, it was inevitable that my players would go there. 

2 hours ago, g33k said:

Might I humbly suggest that you not have the armor automatically fade entirely away?

You might indeed, and thank you for a lot of creative ideas. I shall shamelessly nick them. I know the player will enjoy such shenanigans. 

7 minutes ago, Jeff said:

BATTLE SIZE AND INTENSITY

Fabulous, that is very helpful. Many thanks.

@Jeff While you're paying this thread some attention, I have a quick question. I'm organising the Battle of the Queens for my players tomorrow evening. Your notes elsewhere have proven useful, thank you, and I am using them as my base to work from. But, there's one thing that sounds good but I'm scratching my head over what to do with it – Battle Intensity. Any elucidation gratefully received. Other stuff I'm happy to make a good guess at from the examples.

8 hours ago, Bohemond said:

It seems to me that the PCs earned the armor (especially if you require them to do some work to figure out how to actually make armor out of it). Taking that away by having it fade away or having dragonewts come after it feels a little mean-spirited to me. 

Indeed, how long it takes to fade needs careful consideration.  I'll probably align it and the time the dragon's body takes to fade - I'm letting it hang about as evidence of their deeds, and Orgovale wanting it as a reminder of the dangers of dragonkind. 

8 hours ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

Very good move to have Berevenos take back the anti-dragon items.  This really should have been suggested in the scenario.

Certainly as an option. That the scenario outlines costs of getting it altered to fit, the intention seems to be for a character to keep it. 

8 hours ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

Our group has the same problem, just with elementals instead of cult spirits!

Well, not being familiar with cult spirits, that's what I let the player summon, a small fire elemental. I need to look at the spirit lore more, but this sort of issue is what I expect the GM's Guide to cover. Or maybe cult spirits will be in the cult tomes. 

8 hours ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

Sounds like you are on the right track for your group.  Good luck.

Thank you.

9 hours ago, svensson said:

1. No insult is intended in any way, shape, or form. 'If it were my table' is just another way of saying 'if it were my decision'. You will do what you think is good for your group and there isn't a single thing I could do to stop you - - and I never intended to stop you to begin with. Your Glorantha Will Vary.

2. I apologize that you feel insulted.

3. Yes, I sometimes do trip up and misread or misinterpret the OP. It's a bad habit and one that I work on.

Thank you. Apology accepted. 

I am very aware that casual online writing can be misinterpreted because, without emotional nuance, it often sounds harsher than intended. One of my university psychology lecturers actually studied this for her PhD, specifically in email, and that was at the birth of the www. Still, my ire did rise. We all need to be careful and considerate how we write, and I'm no stranger to accidentally getting it wrong myself. I have a policy of: if you've nothing nice to say, say nothing. Sorry I broke that. It'd be a pleasanter world if humanity learnt to apply that to social media. 

56 minutes ago, svensson said:

Were it at my table, I would … 

In fact, if you were ref'ing a clan relationship properly…

Well, it's not at your table is it and, frankly, this isn't the first post of yours that I take as insulting the way I run my table. Not only that, you are making assumptions and don't seem to have paid much attention to what I've actually said.

So, let's look at what's actually happened at my table. King Berevenenos loaned the players his dragon slaying gear on the grounds that they return it after slaying his ancestral enemy. This they did, and now being aware of the Dragon Rise and the potential return of dragons the king's ghost has taken guardianship of the weapons until such time as they are needed to slay more dragons. So no, they don't have an iron panoply and the rest of his armoury. They also honoured the dragonewt pledge and returned the utuma klanth and others they found to the dragonewts. 

This is the first decent reward haul they've had in, let's see, five scenarios so far. They've previously made money, used it to fix up a damaged property in Jonstown as a nominal base, got a couple of spell matrices.  Why did they need a base? Because I'm letting them choose their Starter Set pregens and of my six current players five have chosen non-Sartarite characters. This is arguably problematic, but they arrived to drive the Lunars off at the Battle of Dangerford and stayed after making themselves useful in Jonstown.

Context: This is a club game.  Since Jan 2021, and because of the way we run that's 24x2hr sessions so far, I've had 10 players and the table size is 6. Personally I think that's too many, 4 would be my ideal for a number of reasons, but it's expected and does introduce more players to the game and the joys of Glorantha. Of the ten players, all but three have been new to RQ and Glorantha, and if I'm honest, I was pretty rusty having not played it myself since the 80s. And how it's moved on since then.

So, they're a disparate yet honourable bunch who've made themselves useful to two tribal leaders. Their relative neutrality has been useful in aiding communication between Orngerin Holdfast of Jonstown and Queen Leika. One thing I'm working on is giving them attachment to Sartar. The Old Tarshite, Nathem, has become Thane of Apple Lane after being asked by the people and seeking Leika's permission, which she granted on the grounds that having a link to the people of Tarsh could be useful in any upcoming troubles. The land she granted them for slaying the dragon is shared between six - gawd knows how we'll work that out, but it's hardly making any of them lord of the manor. What it does do is give them something to tie them to the area and the Colymar which will give their time adventuring in it more meaning. Aranda, Axe Maiden of Nochet, has taken on rallying worshippers for Orgovale Summer, a suitable task for an earth cultist, looking after the granddaughter of the goddess whose temples she is sworn to protect. Again, another tie to the area, and one the player is enjoying after feeling that Aranda was bit of a one trick wonder. In fact, running the cult may end up feeling like bit of a burden to them - we'll see how it goes. 

Now to the dragon armour. The player had the idea as they had in hand the utuma klanth which would make the cutting of the hide easy. Not one to stand in the way of a player's entertaining idea, I gave it a 'yes, but' (I prefer that to 'yes, and' because it is more often what we mean in game terms). I could have just said, 'Oh dear, the dragon's stopped dreaming of Yerezum Storn and the body suddenly fades away, skin an' all.' That would've been fun, wouldn't it? Of course not. Am I going to just let them walk into an armourer and say, 'Make this into a suit of armour for me, and by next Tuesday my good man'? Of course not. It's not going to be easy finding out how to do it, it's not going to be easy getting the ingredients to do it, and even when they've managed that, the process isn't going to be easy, could well go wrong and even if it works the armour will fade away before too long. I thought my OP made most of that that pretty clear. Plenty of entertainment to be had here, which could have been killed by two little letters, n and o.

I do find issues with how powerful PCs can be. All starting at initiate level and having a whole bunch of Rune spells is an overwhelming headache, for players and GM. Everyone has super healing; great, where's the real combat threat now? 'They've got a cult spirit, can I have one? What will it be?' I don't f%^7*%g know, there's nowt in the rules that tell us. Vishi the shaman is in the hands of a player who likes to power build and comes up with great and entertaining creative solutions that threaten to kill encounters flat, but bless him, he does give the table some great moments. I've not been afraid to retcon away some of his character choices for the sake of the game. 

I have a table of players who are bemoaning that we won't play again for two months (how our club system works), but I'm glad of that: it's the most demanding game I've GM'd since getting back into the hobby, and what I need is a rest. What I don't need is someone insinuating that I'm doing it all wrong. Me and my players have muddled through together, learning/relearning the rules and the setting and having good times and frustrating times as we've gone, and their enthusiasm suggests to me that between us we're getting our quest for MGF about right  

My thanks to all who have made some great, constructive suggestions in this thread, many of which I'll take on and bend into a shape that suits how my Glorantha varies. I'm open to constructive critique - it's the only way to get better at something, but gatekeepie negativity… Time for me to bite my tongue.

Time can be weird in Glorantha. Let's face it, it's a relatively new thing too. The simplest thing to do is assume that year for year people in Glorantha are physically the same age as us real world humans. And keep a day 24 hrs long. I play Numenera, and that has a shorter year in days, but they have 28hrs, so the annual duration is that same as our real world year. We pretty quickly gave up on 28hr days: they become confusing because we are so hardwired to our 24hr daily cycle that thinking outside it just causes brain ache. It's pointless and adds nothing to play other than suggesting the world is a bit weird. 

Though RQG defaults to metres and kilometres, I use feet and miles for Gloranthan distances. I'm perfectly happy to work in either in real life, but to me they just don't fit in a Bronze Age setting. It could have been cubits and leagues, perhaps, but then we face the the same problem as with 28hrs days – we just don't naturally work in them, so they'd only detract from the game experience.  That said, I have overlayed a 3 mile hex grid over the Starter Set Sarter map to give an easy reference for travel times - so we are effectively working on travelling 1 league/hr <shrugs> 

31 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

I'd take this approach as well. And it could have interesting effects: perhaps one day they find that one particular location is missing altogether (1 specific hit point), or in another place it has "thinned" (still covers, but 1 less AP), or perhaps the dragon has dreamed something further and now a location is thicker, but doesn't allow certain mobility.

One possibility is to go find Farang Forash at Tink and ask him since he lived in the days of the EWF (or possibly Delecti knows too, but his price might be "high"). Or perhaps there is some ancient treatise or fragments of one at the Jonstown LM temple (or one of the other LM temples). 

Let's assume Craft(leatherworking or armoring) is the base skill needed. You could either apply a substantial penalty (e.g. -50%), or require a special/critical to succeed, or determine that there is a new skill Craft (dragon armor) that starts at 1/5 of their base Craft (I might lean towards the last).

Additional knowledge from a treatise or someone who knows would either counter some of the penalty (even all of it if you take that approach), or adds to their base chance at the craft thus increasing the chance of a special/crit, or adds some % to the Craft (dragon armor) specialty skill.

 

All good stuff, thanks. Farang Forash is not someone I've heard of. Time to go off down another Glorantha rabbit hole I guess 🙂
 

Edit: What a fascinating character, and perfect for my needs. The write up in Pegasus Plateau seems to hint that he was not originally human: '…he is reasonably friendly to humans', and he 'is guarded by six beaked dragonewts'. Lots to work with there. Sorala (Lhankoy Mhy pre-gen) is in the party, and she is fascinated with EWF, so the party have multiple motivation for this trip; sure I can find more to tempt the other characters. 

6 minutes ago, John Biles said:

This suggestion is based on how lizard skin is processed into lizard leather.

<slapsforehead> Why didn't I think to look that up? Got a bit fixated on it being horn and thus hard to work, I think. Thanks v much for the detail. It's a good starter-for-ten for a process. 

10 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

We ruled that the dream ended a day or two later, and the skin disappeared.

If you prefer, have the PCs put in a lot of time, effort, and money, then have the real dragon stop dreaming at a key time, and the armor will disappear.  🙂

Thanks. Well, the Bestiary entry suggests that rather than rotting, a dream dragon body takes a few years to fade. At the moment I'm letting it lay outside of the Queen's Temple (as the PCs have renamed her tomb now Orgorvale is awakened) as evidence of the great deed of the 'Wyrm Slayers', as the merry band have now egotistically dubbed themselves.

I think rather than brutally having it disappear in an instant, having it fade over time, reducing in efficacy as it does, could be the way to go.