creativehum

I ran the Quickstart for friends and we have enjoyed it. I have bought the slipcase and it seems like a lot. I was looking for more information about the product between the Quickstart and the full game. And that was kind of weird.

Can Team Chaosium talk about this as an onramp to the full set of rules? That is: What isn't in the Book 1: Rules? Any thoughts about when or how to expand to the larger rules set? What besides being "less" or "more" what is the advantage of either set of rules? In other words, could one keep playing successfully with only Book 1: Rules for some time? What would one be missing out on? Thanks!

By the way.... I love the cover.

[Moved post to a more appropriate thread]

For what it is worth, for the most part Traits and Passions do not make any character do anything. (Only fumbles and crits demand a specific accordance with a Trait or Passion.) What the Traits and Passions do is track the actions of the character. And if the character keeps behaving in a certain way, the stat goes up. (Or, respectively, the opposite Trait or the Passion goes down.) Independent of that, a player might use a success, failure, or choice of behavior in a specific moment, as a springboard for information about the knight. The above summary is how KAP is written -- not how many people choose to play it. I am not that familiar with the RQG rules to know how this tracks in comparison.

I am appreciating the tales of how people are using the augments to increase character and narrative juice.

Got it! Thanks!

Probably! Thank you! But isn' this kind of paying a ransom?

I remember reading somewhere that Saxons can be ransomed (yes?) Can anyone point me to where that is covered? Can anyone tell me what the values might be? (Most likely compared against the vales of knights.) Thanks!

That is not what I read elsewhere. (The GPC will be split. But I have also read the core rules will be split. But that might be incorrect internet stuff!)

The next edition of Pendragon (from what I understand from comments made by Larkin and gathered by folks online) is going to be three volumes totaling 650 pages. (I might be wrong about this!) As far as I can tell, this means folding some of the material from the Book of X books into the core game. So I assume the next round of supplements will have to be rebuilt. (It also seems crazy and dangerously long for a game that never needed to be that long in its core rules. But that’s me.)

Here's the link to a Drivethru search for Pendragon. The prices listed are for the PDFs. But click on the link for each book an you'll see the options for POD.

Great. Thanks! Can you talk a bit about conflicts? How you set them up and define them? What sorts of results are possible as you translate the results from the die rolls into the fiction?

I'd live to dig more into this topic! Specifically, there is a part of me that wants to make sure to keep the harsh struggles of survival promised by Runequest... but I look at those stat blocks and all those combat rules and think, "Man, I really want to use QuestWorlds!" For those of you who use HQ/QW for your Glorantha games, can you talk more about how you apply the mechanics to build the kind game play and experiences at the table you enjoy? Thank you!

Is the Discord link only posted on Facebook, or also here?

I'm confused by this. One should buy Duel at Dangerford to understand the Smoking Ruin scenario? It completes the Smoking Ruin scenario? Clarifies it?

Hi @Ian Cooper, thank you for the reply. (And everyone else as well!) Like others here, when I bought Traveller as a teen decades ago I did not know what to do with it. Trained by early D&D to think in terms of location specific situations, the idea of a sprawling subsector worth of entire planets (let alone a sector worth of planets--on average 640 planets!) seemed overwhelming? How do write an adventure where the adventures can go anywhere? How do you plan for that? However, and this is crucial, the game had a hold on my imagination! The character creation system, with its compelling life paths; the idea one could roll up worlds with odd combinations of results for their Universal World Profile and daydream about what kind of world the results meant; a combat system that seemed fraught and tense; skills that could help you do things. Staple that to my love of space adventure stories and my childhood fasciation with the Apollo space program and I was definitely in. Even though I never ran a regular game of Traveller, I spent time on and off through the years making characters, rolling up subsectors, and daydreaming about interstellar civilizations. A few years ago, as part of my exploration of the OSR, a I did a deep dive into Traveller Books 1, 2, and 3. After all, if Original Traveller was part of the same soil as Dungeons & Dragons (and it seemed to me it should be)there should be a shared styles of play and techniques for both. Perhaps the OSR would help me understand how to run this game that had never let loose of my imagination! (I would soon discover Miller had a copy of the original D&D booklets on his desk as he wrote Traveller, using it as a template for his own, science-fiction themed adventure game.) I called these three books "Original Traveller" to distinguish them from the entire Classic Traveller line. The distinction matters, I think, since the original boxed set as written by Marc Miller and published by GDW was seen as a complete and done upon publication. They assumed that people would create their own settings and adventures with the toolkit in the original box and that was that. Other material started coming out two years later, when GDW realized there was a demand for new material. Like the rules for Original Dungeons & Dragons, Original Traveller doesn't pretend to be a complete rules set, but rather a framework to begin play, with each group adding to the rules through rulings or specific mechanics as needed. This kind of play and design would not last long in the RPG hobby, but I found that, digging into it, I really liked it. All of which brings me to Ian's point: Traveller is built to be run without prep, but with improvisation. This solves the problem of you Referee an RPG where the adventures can hop in a starship and travel several light years all within ten minutes of play! How do you prepare for all this? You don't! I will offer, however, that the the team at GDW did know exactly what to do with the game. One need only look at the overall design of the game, specifically the ease of creating a stat block for characters and all the random result tables. For the first point, recall that in Original Traveller all one needs is six digits and a few defining skills to stat up an NPC for any encounter. ("Hit Points" in combat are a function of the characteristics Strength, Dexterity, and Endurance.) That kind of ease is perfect for working up any NPC as needed--and in most cases the need may never arise. Most encounters can be played as the Referee wishes, perhaps noting down characteristics with a space pirate or university scientist after the improvised scene has begun and the Referee learns more about who the NPC is through play. Second, inspired by the encounters tables found in Dungeons & Dragons, Miller uses some of the same random tables and adds more. We find random tables for: A possible random encounter with NPCs made on a daily basis A possible random encounter with law enforcement (based on the severity of the planet's law level) on a daily basis; independent of the roll above The type of NPCs (everything from soldiers to tourists to religious pilgrims) The range between the NPCs and the adventurers Possible surprise for one party, or both, or neither, during an encounter Possible moral failure during a violent conflict A random roll to determine the reaction/temperament of the NPCs to the adventures A possible random roll for an animal encounter, several times a day, in specific environments A possible Patron Encounter on a weekly basis if the adventurers are looking for a Patron (this can also lead to hearing of a Rumor) Most of these existed D&D and have fallen out of use over the years. But if one takes the use of these rules to heart, one realizes two things quickly: The notion that one should have "an adventure" pre-planned is nonsensical, because at some point all these random encounters and whatnot will distract everyone from whatever they are "supposed" to be doing and drive the adventures off the course of "the adventure" If one uses these random rolls, and the Referee weaves actual characters and interesting situations from the rolls, a lot of adventure material will be conjured on the fly For example, while Supplement 6: 76 Patrons does, indeed, offer dozens of job offers and situations that the adventurers must respond to one way or another, the Patron table and system found in Traveller Book 3 creates situations of the similar sort... but less fleshed out. The adventurers have been hanging out act the bars of a city outside a local space port looking for employment. They successfully roll on the Patron table and are approached by a "Scholar." Now what? The Referee may or may not have anything ready on this front. What happens now? He starts thinking up, on the spot, in the context of the campaign's events and setting material developed thus far, who the Scholar is, what he might want, what the opposition might be, and off we go! We can also see a more open-ended style of play revealed and expected in Adventure 1: The Kinunir. Yes, there are deck plans of the Kinunir class ships. But most of the play is not on board that ship, and significantly, it isn't about exploring ships of that class. As James Maliszewski noted in his retrospective of the module on his blog: Not only are the four outlines only sketched out in the book, they are are barely connected. Adventure 1 assumes the player characters will be moving in and around the rest of the subsector doing other adventures, picking up more rumors about the Kinunir class ships before the encounter a new patron among other patrons that leads to an adventure involving a Kinunir-class ship once more. Ultimately, a Referee using Adventure 1: The Kinunir would be responsible for working up maps, NPCs, encounters, buildings, security systems, the reactions of marines, nobles, and planetary governments on the fly. All of this bogged my brain when I first encountered Adventure 1 in my youth. In the first outline in the book, The Scrap Heap, involves the adventures gathering two corroborating facts from three possible sources about the nature of the decommissioned Kinunir-class battle cruisers once manufactured by General Shipyards of Regina. One can hack into the General Shipyards computer systems; bribe an employee or former employee; or break into the shipyards and gather the information off a scrapped hull of one a Kinunir-class ship. With three possible routes one would expect a great deal of information to follow to help the Referee along. In fact, as Maliszewski states, the Referee is given a sketch of some possibilities about how the adventures might approach the three routes and some possible ideas for resistance and fallout. For example: "If a bribery attempt is turned down, the authorities will be alerted, and security at computer banks and at the scrap yard will be increased." What does that mean? What happens if the adventurers are caught by the authorities? What happens if the authorities end up in pursuit of the adventurers? Adventure 1 has nothing to offer for such situations. It is assumed the Referee will figure it out. Ultimately, and this is important, I think the rules of original Traveller are not particularly suited for "dungeon crawling." Once the ball gets rolling when using Adventure 1: The Kinunir, the key thing that is going to happen is characters talking with character, making plans with characters, bribing characters, trying to get a better deal from characters, making alliances with characters, threatening characters, and so on. The key inspiration for Miller when he wrote Traveller was the Dumarest series. These pulp science-fiction books were about a traveling mercenary who goes from one world to the next on a quest to get back home to Earth. On each planet he encounters strange and unique cultures and gets caught up in struggles of characters, siding with or opposing different people or factions as he sees fit. Dumarest is a "traveller" (a term from the novel, as the author was British) who navigates his way through strange societies and people with competing agendas. In other words: It's all about the people. I think the sweet spot of Traveller, then, is about the interaction of character with each other. And this, too, lends itself to improvised play. The Referee doesn't have to have well drawn maps with cleverly constructed traps, or whatnot. He needs to have characters with agendas in conflict. And then, like a good western or detective story, the adventures insert themselves into the conflict and make choices about how they'll respond and which side, if any, they'll take. That Marc Miller had faith in people to sort out improvised play can be seen in issue 40 of The Space Gamer. I wrote a blog post on the article so I won't sum up everything here. I'll simply say that Miller, without any prep beforehand, reads a planet entry from Adventure 4: Leviathan, and from a string of Universal World Profile digits and two paragraphs of text describing the planet's culture in the briefest of terms, spins an entire evening's entertainment on the fly for his players. Inspired by this research, I ended up running an improvised Traveller session at a local game convention, and another improvised session using the Traveller rules but in a mythic setting during an eternal Winter. My point of all this: I don't think this kind of play was "revolutionary." I think, drawing on the early experiments of Dave Arenson and others, this is exactly how people played in the first few years of the hobby. What was revolutionary, and then commonplace, was building detailed and plotted "adventures" that the payers and their PCs were supposed to follow along with. While not all players went down this road, publishers realized that people wanted this sort of clear plot structure "to run their players through" and obliged. And certainly some writers and companies liked writing adventures this way. (Most modules and scenarios for almost all of Chaosium's game lines work very much this way.) This is why, I think, many of the Traveller modules after Adventure 1 leaned more toward being something like "dungeons crawls" or scripted scenarios.It is easier to publish something like a dungeon or scripted scenario that feels useful to the buyer than offer up some sketches of ideas for scenarios that leave a ton of work on the part of the Referee to sort it out. Of course, this "work" only needs to happen if you think you need to have everything worked out ahead of time. In the earliest days of the hobby this was not the case. And as Ian notes, the Story Now crowd (of which I consider myself a member) picked it back up heading into the 2000s. I would credit Ron Edwards' Sorcerer, back in 1999. The game made explicit the idea the GM should have no plot of any kind prepped, that the GM should put the PCs on the spot with obstacles and opportunities that demanded choices on the part of the PCs, and that the direction of play ("the story") should be driven by and created by the choices the players make for the PCs. Edwards didn't invent any of this, of course, but he argued for this kind of play not only in the rules of Sorcerer by in general online. It might be hard to remember that twenty years ago this kind of play was crazy rare in the wild. When I was talking about Sorcerer's style of play on a popular gaming forum I was told to take my outré talk of improvised play to the Game Design Subforum. The idea that the GM would not have a pre-planed story for the PCs to encounter was too much for some people to consider. But Edwards was only trying to return a lost form of RPG play back into the hobby. That many of us didn't know what to do with Traveller when we first got it speaks to the fact that we weren't part of the initial experiments of the hobby before the publication of Dungeons & Dragons, and that many of encountered Classic Traveller after getting used to dungeon based play or modules with firm "stories" in them.

Thank you for your comment. Some more context: I moved along with the game line with each new edition. It has been in the last few weeks I’ve begun comparing the different versions of the Hero Wars/Heroquest line that I realize I found the earlier versions easier to run. Given that a lot of thought has been put into the SRD I though I’d check with Ian on the matter. I would like to run a Glorantha campaign using Six Seasons in Sartar and am deciding which rules system to use (RQG or a version of HW/HQ/QW) and wanted to ask Ian about using multiple Aguments.

A question about Augments and the Bump in relation to this clause: "Given you get one augment for an augment ..." I understand "one Augment" has been the law of the land for some time. But honestly, my sweet spot was back in the Hero Wars days, where a CP could stack as many Augments as he wanted as long as they made emotional and narrative sense. I didn't have any problems with anyone scanning their sheet endlessly for Augments. It was all intuitive and emotionally based. With that in mind,@Ian Cooper, do you have any thoughts about what would be the proper set of bonuses for augmentation? Or does the whole thing become too elastic for you, without any sense of grounding to work from?

I think that's true. But it's been a loooong time for me. So simply pulling down the latest file makes sense.

Hey @Bill the barbarian we're talking abut two things here: Getting the coupons Getting updated PDFs. @lordabdul was answering my question about getting the updated PDFs.

One more question: How does one download the latest versions of PDFs purchased from Chaosium? Thanks!

Thank you so much! Yes, two of the books are for the slipcase edition of RQG, so thank you for the heads up on that.

@MOB (or anyone else who can help!) I know this has been covered elsewhere, but my search-fu has failed. I have three PDF purchases I've made for Runequest books. I was mailed a coupon code for one of them, but not for the other two. I'm ready to pull the trigger for a holiday gift to myself. Who do I contact about getting the codes for the other two books? Thank you!

Hello @Ian Cooper, pinging this once more. Reading Coming Storm right now, by the way, and enjoying it very much.