simonh

> For what it is worth, for me the jury is still out on whether D&D5e is a good or even particularly interesting role-playing game. [I messed up the editing somehow. I’ll address Jeff’s post in two comments] I recently visited my old games club here in London and also popped into a new one in the same area. Both are mad for D&D 5e. From what I can tell it’s hugely popular and the only D20 fantasy game I saw being played, which is a big change from 5 years ago. I completely agree it’s uninteresting as a game. It’s a fairly simplistic, back to basics edition similar in many ways to the best of the OSR clones like Castles & Crusades, but I think that’s why it’s so popular. The vast majority of D&D players want something straightforward that lets them dungeon bash with a minimum of fuss and bother. The vast majority of newcomers to the hobby want to play “Dungeons and Dragons”, because that’s what they think rolleplaying is, and with 5e they get it in a more accessible and functional form than ever before. In terms of innovation and interest value 13th Age beats 5e hands down, but that’s not what everyone is after.

For me RQ is a lens I can’t shake when looking at Glorantha. Even though I read half a dozen H.P. Lovecraft stories before playing Call of Cthulhu, it’s also the lens I see those stories through nowadays. Having played characters in those worlds a certain way for so long, it’s hard for me to shake that. For all that, RQ is too heavyweight a game system for me these days, I’m super happy that it’s back and we’re going to get a ton of new Gloranthan material in that form, but I’ll be adapting it for my own gaming. Having said that, I think the more game systems we have supporting Glorantha out there published or in the fan community the better. HeroQuest gave us a great new way to think about the setting. Pendragon Pass kept the RQ game form and structure but radically simplified. 13th Age is tons of fun and gave us yet another way to make all kinds of crazy Gloranthan weirdness playable. I’m experimenting with adapting Apocalypse World to Glorantha. A Black Hack Glorantha mod would be cool. Let a thousand flowers bloom!

I’ve posted about this before, but I find it fascinating that the Moldvay edition of Basic D&D actually did have a universal task resolution system. The “you can try anything” rule where you roll D20 and try to get less than an appropriate stat. Moldvay Basic is a real eye opener, the generosity of spirit and have-a-go attitude is so refreshing. Unfortunately it was all bulldozed and paved over almost immediately by the next edition. Funnily enough the most interesting new kid on the OSR block, The Black Hack, is based on the exact same game mechanic.

Yes it f course, we know that. The point is they were both lawless enough, compared to modern times, for the writer behind Deadwood to be able to explore the themes of social organisation and community in either. What we’re saying is that, while Deadwood and Pavis are not identical, the social conditions there are close enough to be able to explore those same themes. If the writer behind Deadwood could achieve his storytellbeing aims in either Rome or Deadwood, it seems reasonable to suppose that we can explore similar themes in Pavis. Or maybe even Babylon. You’re probably right, but Adari has magic and nonhuman races and monsters too so doesn’t that disqualify it? The only thing that makes it more similar is it’s smaller. But Rome was the most populous city on earth, and apparently it would have done just fine too, so scale isn’t everything. The important thing is, what kind of stories can we tell there? Deadwood is a great source for that.

I know what you mean, but arguably the Roman system of government at the municipal level had more in common with organised crime than we’d be comfortable with today. Yes they had laws, but even organised crime is, well, organised.

This comment is especially hilarious considering Deadwood was originally going to be set in ancient Rome. But of course Rome isn’t ancient Babylon either...

There were a few things published for RQ2 that really looked out of place - mistaken attempts to shoehorn something into Glorantha for the sake of a mistaken sense of completism or symmetry. Cults have Rune Lords. Chalana Arroy and Lankor Mhy are cults. Therefore Aaron healers and Sword Sages. Thank goodness this trend didn’t reach as far as the Uleria cult. I have a feeling the Lanbril cult for RQG, if it exists at all, will also be pretty drastically reined in. For those who were fans of this stuff that’s cool, I can understand why and the old write up still exist and are very easily adapted to RQG.

I don't really get how that is cheating. We don't always roll for NPC stats, and certainly don't go through the process of rolling for their skill increases, rolling for their POW gain rolls, etc for their whole career, rolling for cult tests, etc. I don't see how waiving all of that is not cheating, but giving them the CHA they need, or waiving the requirement is. NPCs are always created arbitrarily, and given that we don't actually have the full cult writeups in question, you can set the requirements and other details fo the cult however you like perfectly legitimately. None of this is cheating, it's just ordinary conventional GM's prerogative.

The best way to learn HQG and start runningunning it is using HQG supplements and scenarios, and there are plenty of excellent ones to choose from. In my post suggesting RQ stats are easily adaptable to HQG I made sure to be clear that I was not advocating trying to run RQ using the HQ game system. That will give you the worst of both worlds. Specifically I was referring to the detail provided in RQ stats. It’s pretty easy to translate RQ skills and spells into HQG abilities, keywords and breakouts but they need to be interpreted in HQG terms and I would advocate doing that without any reference to how they work in RQ itself. They are very different games. In general I would never recommend a GM who has never run a game system, and is worried about how they should run it, to try to run it using a scenario for a completely different game system as a starting point. Once you’re familiar with your game system and have experience with how it plays, then sure you probably know it well enough to adapt stuff and that’s really what we’ve been talking about.

Personally I have always picked and chosen which bits I used from established material and which I overwrite for my own purposes. My Karse is distinctly different from the way it’s been described, because the way I wanted it suited the needs of the game I wanted to run better. Likewise with Sartar Kingdom of Heroes. I’m considering running a Colymar or Lismelder game. The HQG Sartar books are invaluable resources for that, along with some issues of Tales, but if I do run it the details of some of the clans will likely vary distinctly to suit the inter clan dynamics I want to have in my game. If you consciously decide that you are going to knowingly change certain things, it’s enormously liberating. If you’re reading just to absorb canon I can see the concern for sure. However by avoiding these books you’re also going to miss out on a huge amount of info that will never be contradicted and may never see print again. Also the PDFs happen to be really good value.

This is the thing for me, though one of the main points of HQ2 was getting rid of stats for NPCs and monsters entirely. In fact even running straight HQ2/HQG I get an awful lot more information, ideas and support for doing that from an RQ stat block than I ever get in a HQ supplement. I find most of the opposition in the HQ Glorantha supplements very vague and bland because you don't even get much in the way of help in narrating them. Compare the Dancer in Darkness stats in the Sartar campaign book to their equivalent stat block in Tales of the Reaching Moon. I've got a much better chance of running an exciting and interesting encounter with one of them in HQ after reading their RQ stats. That's not because I'm in any way running RQ with the HQ mechanics, it's just that at least from the RQ stats I get some clues as to what kinds of threat they pose and what kinds of tactics they might be vulnerable to even just as flavour. Coming Storm/Eleven Lights were pretty good in this regard IIRC.

The wiki would be a good home for that, see my sig.

Plenty of options given already. Bear in mind the region has been occupied for hundreds of years, but there are many ruins and abandoned settlements that make great homes for newly arrived threats. Delecti frequently sends incursions of undead to steal away corpses or the unwary living. Chaos creatures can wander u from the Print or down from Snakepipe Holow or elsewhere. Trolls frequently travel through Sartar on their way between Dagori Inkarth and the Shadow Plateau without incident, but every now and then some of them go rogue like Whieteye. Lunar deserters can be a real problem, as can Sartarite deserters for that matter. Outright banditry is a thing. Praxian outcasts are a thing too. Beast valley isn’t far away, and there’s always the Tusk Riders.

Please also check out the free PDF QuickStart for RQG.

I'm not at all worried about that. Game mechanics don't capture everything, for example that question wouldn't make any sense in HeroQuest and yet both HQ and RuneQuest both attempt to simulate the same world. Maybe language use costs magical energy at an extremely low level - hundredths of an MP. Maybe it uses a different form of magical energy not tracked by the game system. Unless we actually want to make a game out of language and communication in the same way that we do combat, it doesn't really matter.

I'l be more specific, the use of language is a consciously executed intentional magical act, but yes I suppose that's a fair point.

I think it's well established in Glorantha that languages are magical by their nature. As for New Pelorian, I very much subscribe to the idea that the language itself has a very specific politico-religious purpose.

I'm not sure I buy that. Neither of the actual cults mentions this, and neither of them asserts an associate cult status with Daka Fal. I suppose it just makes my supposition about ancestor worshiping forms of these cults being assimilated into Orlanthi society semi-official.

The Yinkin and Odayla cults in the rulebook are not ancestor worship. That's one of the points I made in my post, distinguishing the Yinkin cult from the Telmor cult. It may be that some Orlanthi might have descent from Odalya and/or Yinkin, but that is not a condition of joining those cults and it's not the form the cult takes.

It's a good question and you're thinking along the right lines.The Telmor cult is an ancestral religion for descendants of Telmor. On the other hand the Yinkin cult in the rulebook is for Orlanthi people who want to worship Yinkin, the half-brother of Orlanth. By and large the Orlathi are a theistic people and so their worship of Yinkin is theistic. There may very well be shamanic worship of Yinkin, and there may very well be ancestral worship of Yinkin by hsunchen descendants of Yinkin somewhere in Glorantha if such actually exist, but among the Orlanthi of Dragon Pass the dominant form of worship is theistic as described by the cult in the rulebook. Heck it's even possible there was in the past an ancestral shamanic practice of Yinkin worship, which was absorbed into Orlanthi culture. Some Orlanthi might have the blood of Yinkin in their veins, but at this point it would be a distant relationship. It's certainly something that could be a lot of fun to explore in your game though.

That sounds fair enough to me, if it makes sense in context, although as GM the character would have to do something really provocative or careless to have an NPC just go after the sword like that.

If your careless with the sword, or get into situations where it risks getting damaged or destroyed, that's not anyone taking it away.

Fascinating, thanks Rick. Now I know where the name for the OSR game Castles & Crusades came from.

Nobody's talking about taking it away from anyone.

One it's gone, that's it. Better be careful with that sword.