creativehum

Hi Rick,

Thanks for all the info so far.

Do you know what the cost will be for the slipcase set? (The base price. I've bought PDFs so I will use my coupons against the base cost, of course.)

13 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Well, the Book of Sires is supposed to do something similar with Pendragon. I think something along those lines could work for Glorantha-at least for a particular region, say Dragon Pass, and for a certain number of years, maybe a century or two. In some ways it could be easier in Glorantha, because the calender and date for given events more firmly established, and there is less contraction among the sources. 

It would be a project though. And even if someone did start earlier, there'd be little support material to help them. All the older RQ stuff only goes back about a decade in Gloranthan time. So if a GM pushes the clock back by 20 years, he won't have much to help him work up adventures. 

I suspect, reading your posts, you haven't had a chance to look at RuneQuest Glorantha yet. 

If this is the case, you should know that the core book provides a timeline for grandparents and parents that begins with the birth of the grandparents in 1561.(The default beginning of a campaign in the book is 1625.)

So the Family History Timeline (similar to the one found in King Arthur Pendragon) already stretches back few decades. I am only asking for a few decades more. That is, far enough back that one could ramp up into play to the earlier years found in various Gloranthan products (to 1613 or so; Apple Lane, The Sartar is Rising Campaign). This only requires another decade or two of additional material.

Your post suggests two things:

1. Going back a century "or two." That seems an extraordinary project, and not one I would advocate. Again, in my post I suggested going back a few decades. Maybe only one or two. I have no idea how or why you expanded the notion so greatly. Such a thought could only discourage anyone from thinking about this notion at all.
2. There is little support material. I find this a strange comment. Going back a few decades one finds a great wealth of material for the history of a Sartar campaign history scattered across many, many publications. Some extrapolation for finer events and details might be required. But it can be done.

As for myself, I'm really much more curious about going back to the collapse of Heortling resistance at the Battle of Grizzly Peak. I'd really like to explore time with a Sartar tribe that knows trouble has closed in, but hasn't yet arrived. What do they do? Attack? Build up defenses? Go on with their lives with the hopes the Lunars will stop. It would mean adding Family History material going back to 1520. Which is still only four decades more than already included in RQG. But that's my own obsession.

All in all, what I am suggesting is much simpler than what you are proposing, both in terms of scope and information available.

5 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

You mean something like Pendragon's Family History tables, where you can see what happened in Dad's and Granddad's day? And which could be used to jump in anywhere in the timeline?

Actually I mean mean something like RuneQuest: Glorantha's Family History tables, where you can see what happened in parent's and grandparen's day. And which could be used to jump in anywhere in the timeline. Except going back a little bit further for more elasticity. 

Some of us are coming to Gloratha without having played through all the terrific history and material others have chewed through in previous decades.

If and when I get a chance to run a game in Glorantha, I would want to do it while the Lunar incursion is still underway.

One of the coolest things Chaosium could produce, in my opinion, is a booklet offering life paths going back a few decades, so a group could choose where to start play while integrating directly into the RQG rules.

1 hour ago, Atgxtg said:

Take a look at the thread  where someone was asking about the game and how it took several posts from several us us to really drive home the point that KAP is about playing Knights, period. Itsomething that most gamers just won't understand until they play the game and start to see how the standard FRP characters and themes don't fit in the Arthurian world.  Yes, both characters and the game can be adapted to accommodate such characters, Pagan Shores, Saxons, and Land of the Giants do just that, but all do so by shifting the focus of the game away from knights.

Magicians present another problem is that you have character parity issues to deal with as well. Most standard FRPGs are constructed so that all characters of equivalent experience have equivalent capabilities. That is a 10th level wizard is supposed to be just as powerful as a 10th level fighter, just in different ways. But that';s not necessarily the case for something like Pendragon, where Magicans can do things that are impossible for knights. Ars Magica solved this by focusing the game on the magic with everyone else a supporting character. KInda like Pendragon but with magi instead of knights. 

Like I said... yes.

And keep in mind, I was specifically referencing the review linked to at the top of this thread. The reviewer took the time to read through the entire game carefully... and then made the complaint I mentioned above. Given the detail the reviewer offered, I was surprised he made this complaint. 

That's all.

On 12/24/2018 at 10:22 PM, Atgxtg said:

I think it's a case of not really understanding what the game is about. One the surface KAP appears similar to many other FRPGs, so many people think that it should have playable wizards and such.

Well... yes.

I really don't get the complaint that people can't play sorcerers or wizards as so,e sort of weakness. I mean -- get that some people will expect it and be frustrated that they can't play a magic-user of some sort.

But I then think of the game as is and ask, "Why would you want to fuck that up?"

In terms of decision making of characters:

i can't counter your point -- in part because I don't know what the decisions are that you are referencing... and also because once you pointed them out I might be like, "Yeah, it makes no sense the character made that decision."

But in terms of what I carried from the books:

Annihilation makes it clear that the characters going into Area X have been manipulated even before they cross the border. The book is very upfront about this. Later books dig deeper into the question of these maniplations and why they were done and what the effects on expeditions might be. But it is clear in the first book that the judgements of the characters were compromised before the expedition even began. The affect Area X has on them is the jackhammer to the biology that follows.

Further, I think the books have an interesting take on the whole notion of being "objective". It puts to question the entire notion that we can work from some sort of objective point of view, always rising above all the factors influencing us in our various environments that we literally cannot be aware of as we are inside them.

Some people are willing to get on the Our Brains Are Slippery Train... and other people are certain they can look at the world with Cold Clear Eyes If Only We Think Correctly.

This difference might be one inflection point (among many) as to how one responds to the books.

The second two books are in many ways different than the first... but that's from my reading of them, and what I considered the qualities of the first and second books. But for all I know you might consider them the same, since you will view the first book in a certain way, with certain qualities that you emphasize in your reading that might not be something that really stuck with me.

I'm not trying to be a dick here. It is simply a complicated issue.

So: Can you describe what the "same" is for you in the first volume that might mark the later volumes as "more of the same." What are the qualities you are talking about?

Further: What are the qualities that made the first book not engaging for you, so I might be able to tell you if these same qualities are in the later books.  It is the only way I can address the question, "Are the later books "more of the same" or are there enhancements to the story that made it more engaging for you in later volumes?"

55 minutes ago, Rick Meints said:

We at the Chaosium feel great passion for the Pendragon family of games. Many of us played it back when it first came out, and still do on and off to this day. Our excitement at seeing the Chaosium logo on it after an absence of 20 years made us pause and reflect on how much we missed being its caretaker. Over the last few years Greg told us how he hoped it would one day return to Chaosium, and now it has. Stay tuned. We intend to do far more than merely reprint and POD the current and back catalog. So many things to do...

Thanks for the update... and these wonderful words!

Take your time. I'll sit back and wait. There's enough material to keep anyone who loves King Arthur Pendragon busy for literally years.

But looking forward to what you all create for this terrific game!

My own thoughts on several of these matters:

I hope not too much is incorporated into the next revision of the GPC (whenever that happens) from the current crop of supplements.

I am so glad the supplements are there for people who want more detail, more history, more... everything. 

But the fact is KAP (and the GPC) work as is. They were built from the mythical and storytelling foundations of Le Morte D'Arthur. By focusing the game this way, the GM and Players can skip over lots of historical/reality details, focusing instead on the tales found in Le Morte D'Arthur building with a sense of story. (Note that even the GPC warns GM's that if the additional Winter Phase economics become too much one should drop them.)

To layer more and more details into the two key books would be to suggest "This history and this detail is required to play the game." And this isn't the case at all.

As for the timeline, yes, one can start earlier... and the material in the Book of Uther looks compelling. But how many years do new players really need to play before the Sword in the Stone shows up? I think the periods Uther and Anarchy are enough to make the point that Arthur's reign will be a Really Good Thing. And if a Referee want to add more years, the Book of Uther is right there for him to use if he wishes.

David, as you are reading this:

I'm sure Greg's ever-curious mind dove into all sorts of elements and ideas and history and facts as he researched all things Arthurian. But most of us don't need to cram Greg's decades-worth of research into our game. To have core game elements that allow the game to be played as is, with additional elements as a GM or group desires, is an excellent way to set up the line in my view. And let us keep in mind KAP is already crammed with historical detail for the GM and Players to absorb. 

Full disclosure: KAP, GPC, Book of Knights & Ladies, and the Book of Feasts and Cards is all I think really need. I also really love the Book of Uther for the grounded context of the early years of the campaign, even though, after some consideration, I don't need to run the additional years in the game.

I look forward to seeing whatever supplements come out in the future... but I heartily suggest letting the core books remain core, and allowing people to add supplemental material from supplements.

While I won't begrudge people wanting to buy new things... my own focus would be playing the game with what is already available. 

All you need, after all, is the core book and "The Great Pendragon Campaign" to have two or more years of play. Most of the supplements are there for folks who want more historically driven detail in their games... which may or may not be what many people want or need. 

For my own druthers, shared advice on how to play, tools to help play, and shared experience of how games have gone would be the real win for forums.

To be clear: I do have the Book of Knights & Ladies, the Book of Uther (for a smattering of historical grounding for the first two phases), and I want to pick up the Book of Feasts (and the cards) because it seems like a blast. But these are garnishes for a game that is really complete in two volumes.

35 minutes ago, SDLeary said:

I agree. After all it it is a full line of product, with a history to it. 

SDLeary

Agreed.

And for what it's worth (which may not be much), while other people, when they think of Chaosium, think of Call of Cthulhu or RuneQuest, I will always associate Chaosium with King Arthur Pendragon. It is one of my favorite RPGs and one I have spent the most time with. When I think of Chaosium, it is the game I think of.

Also, Greg considered it the pinnacle of his game design. I think it deserves a shot at getting more attention and love.

A big addition to RQG from plain old RQ is the addition of Adventurers having runes out of the gate, and those runes being tagged with Personality Traits. And if an Adventurer has a high value in a rune, the Trait is often serves, per the rules, to drive behavior or put the character into moment of crisis that test an Adventurer's Trait, and thus test the runes.

Also, Passions have been added to the game, which can serve to inspire, but also demoralize an Adventurer.

Both of these features have been ported over from King Arthur Pendragon -- but altered to tie them to runes. I'm familiar how Passions and Traits in KAP (it is one of my top three favorite RPGs) and I think they work very well in that game.

I'm curious how they are working in play for people with RQG. How are they being used? Are they working straight out of the box or being tweaked? Are there any memorable moments anyone can share? Any thoughts in general about using them effectively? 

Thanks so much!

Well, the QuickStart is a quick start. It is bare bones rules to get everyone into play with the least amount of explanation possible.

However, once you pick up the Bestiary you'll be all set to create PC of many different races.

RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha encourages campaigns to use all sorts of races for the PCs.

3 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

It's when you roll the traits that it opens the potential to go haywire.

Yes. Exactly. That's what I wrote.

I just took a look at the Knights & Ladies rules for randomly determining Traits and all those modifiers. YIKES!

There's no way I'd use those... for all the reasons Atgxtg notes in his posts. The possibility of everyone running around with those huge modifiers is out of control.

To be clear (again) the rule never changed. Apparently a few people did complain about the issue -- though to be honest I have now tried several google searches with different terms, and I can only find a couple of commenters addressing the issue.

If one goes to the 5th Edition Errata Greg created, one only finds this:

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Page 117, Unburdened
I’ve been asked about this so many times, wherein players attempt to exploit it beyond its intention, that I suggest just eliminating the entire 2-paragraph section. There is no bonus for going without armor. If the GM must do something, then give a penalty to wear armor if not trained for it.

Note that this was never Greg making a change. It is Greg saying, "If you are having troubles with this in your game, drop the rule."

Some people have had a problem with their players on one point or another in any given game... and assume it is a problem for all players. I don't know how or why people think this way... but they do. 

Honestly, I can't imagine unarmored knights wouldn't be cut down at least every third fight if they weren't wearing armor. But I suppose some groups have very lucky knights!

One important point, however: I went and took a quick look at the Nocturnal Forum. Some people were concerned that bandits would get a +5/-5 advantage when fighting against knights, since bandits seldom have armor.

However, in this matter, everyone should look at the actual rule: It is KNIGHTS that receive this benefit when fighting without armor... not anyone who fights without armor. This distinction is, of course, tremendous in terms of game effect.

On 11/22/2018 at 9:22 PM, Atgxtg said:

The Unarmored Bonus got dropped in KAP5.1 or 5.2 because, apparently, quite a few player were trying to exploit it.

Quick note: The unarmored bonus rules was never dropped. It appears, in the same wording, in every edition, including all three 5.x editions.

Here is the text from page 119 of KAP 5.2:

Quote

Note: Encumbrance affects Skills as well as movement: Whenever a knight fights without any leather or metal armor, he gets a +5 modifier to his Combat Skill.

6 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

Hold it. Back when I first chimed in about the hazards of the "D&D" mindset when bringing D&D players into an RQ game you went on for several posts before claiming that "game balance" was a recent thing and not part of old D&D or the retroclones the have popped up in the last 15 years. So we went back to AD&D, where it existed (Wilderness encounter aside). Now you retreated all the way back to the OD&D White Box edition, where, once again, it existed. 

Again, I see no point to continuing this conversation in this thread. But regarding this passage of your post, which seriously pisses me off, I think if you look back at my posts in this thread you will find you have conjured a fantasy of your own making. 

I'm tapping out... because Atgxtg is talking about AD&D... and I referenced games published before AD&D. And Roko Joko is making claims that are flat out wrong if anyone bothers to look at the encounter tables in OD&D. We're not talking about reality anymore.

If anyone is interested in the rules of early RPG play I suggest looking at the actual text. It's interesting stuff.

As an addendum (as this is a thread about advice for starting a campaign, albeit a campaign of RQG) here is a blog post about how I introduced my group to my Lamentations of the Flame Princess campaign.

Note that the group contained people I knew, and people I found from a Meetup page I set up for the game. The players range in age from early 30s to early 40s. (I'm early 50s). None of them had ever played any edition from before AD&D 2nd edition. (The game we were about start playing were based off B/X D&D, so it was unlike most RPGs they had played.)

Here is the email I sent out to the six players before the first session:

Quote

Lamentations of the Flame Princess is part of the Old School Renaissance of RPGs. A clean and sleek version of the early Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, the game focuses on exploration, danger, and weird fantasy. The setting will not be Tolkien-esque, but a warped 17th century Europe where the strange and magical is rare, inexplicable, and invasive.

OSR games in general, and Lamentations of the Flame Princess specifically, work from principles that are different than a lot of game in recent decades. In general…

• The Referee has environments and situations, not a pre-planned “story” of any kind
• Players drive things forward with their choices
• The game is dangerous. The Referee is not there to kill your characters, but neither is he there to protect them. Dice are rolled out in the open. Death is part of the game. (Luckily, new characters are easy to roll up!)
• The situations you encounter are not “balanced.” You might want to avoid encounters, you might want to flee encounters, and if you choose to engage them you’ll want to have the PCs manipulate the fiction toward your advantage (Short hand: Think of conflicts as asymmetrical warfare, not as engaging in a sport.)
• In this kind of play the Referee presents the players with an environment that is as solid as possible, that would continue existing if you weren’t there.

I tried to be as clear as possible about what kind of game the Players were getting into. And in the first few sessions I reiterated and expanded on some of the points. I gave fair warning to the Players (again, none of whom had played this kind of game before) so they could make choices based on the kind of game were playing rather than simply knocking their heads in the hopes they'd learn their lessons.

The blog post itself goes into greater details on these matters.

39 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

Yes, but system tend to influence styles of play. 

I agree 100% and often make this point.

Quote

Actually quite the contrary. The player in that adventure, was a samurai who was on a mission for his daiyo. He had no reason to divert from his assigned duty to go chasing tigers.

I have no idea how this information changes my guess as to why the Player had his Samurai become distracted from his daiyo's mission to chase the tiger.

Quote

Where system cones into this is that D&D players assume that anything that appears in the game is "balanced" for their characters and thus scaled to their capabilities. I've had similar results with dragons, with people warning the PCs about a dragon, and even having it marked on the map. So what happens? The PCs go off to kill a dragon, with unfortunate, but predicable, consequences. 

You're making a bunch of assumptions when you say "D&D." Encounter balance does not exist in original Dungeons & Dragons, B/X D&D, and most retroclones published in the last 15 years. I understand that later editions of the game have rules and mechanics for balancing encounters -- but it isn't the definition of "D&D."

I've been running a Lamentations of the Flame Princess (based off B/X D&D) campaign on and off for two years with my Monday Night Group.

The players know there is no encounter balance. They know they're hear rumors and monsters will come at them or they'll encounter guardians in front of treasures... and I have no one iota of concern if they can handle the creature in a standup fight. It is up to them to decide if they want to pursue a conflict; it is up to them to come up with clever plans and strategies to bring the odds of survival into their favor. They pursue rumors and goals as they wish. I have no agenda or expectation or what they will do or what conflicts might arise or what plans they might create. I know they their PCs can die. And the Players know it too.

The game has gone great. The players have been having a blast. And, importantly for this thread, it does not play at all in any manner along the lines of "D&D" as you have described it. This is not to say people don't play D&D as you have described it. Simply that the your description is not the only way people use the game.

All we can is "When people play D&D, sometimes the DM balances the encounters, and sometimes the DM does not balance the encounters. Different groups play the game different ways."

I suspect such a statement is going to come as a shock to a lot of people on this forum. All I can say is... it's true.

I also think there is some confusion in this thread.

Everyon is focusing on system, when in fact many of the issues here come down to scenario design. Or, more generally, styles of scenario play.

The issue with the tiger had mother really to do with system.

The player heard the GM mention a tiger and assumed he was suppose to pursue it. Why? Most likely he had played in games in which if the GM mentions so,etching he is supposed to pursue it.

Meanwhile the GM was filling out the world and the sense of life and concerns of the people of the world. In no way did he assume that mentioning some people were having trouble with a tiger was a subtle way of saying "Here is a quest for your PC."

But this has nothing to do with the system. This has everything to do with unspoken GM techniques and expectations of how PC interact with a world that literally does not exist except through words spoken by the GM.

In D&D, course, one could drop the story about the tiger in front of a PC and the PC would know a tiger was too big a problem to deal with. That, in fact, the GM often mentioned problems that would be too powerful for them to deal with on their own. Because that is how the GM established the world and introduced possible scenario material. It has nothing to do with the rules.