simonh

EDIT - Irrelevant Tangent warning

As a materialist of course I believe we are entirely our physical selves. We can't choose to be other than we are.

My brother phil, who's on this forum, put it this way. If you think you have the free will to chose what you think and choose what you believe, ok, pick something you firmly believe. Something you're absolutely convinced of. Now change that belief to something else. Exercise your free will to not believe it anymore. After all you're in charge, you get to freely choose, right?

I believe that free will, to be meaningful, means that my choices originate from me. The physical me. They come from my memories, my experiences, skills, feelings and needs, etc. If those things do not determine my actions, then my actions do not originate from me, because those things are me. So I am an essentialist in that sense, but strictly at the individual level. 

EDIT - Warning ends - I shouldn't post late at night.

That’s not necessarily how things are in Glorantha though. It seems like the mythological landscape has deep connections into the individual psyche, and this is a mechanism for all kinds of transformations at the individual, collective and cosmic scales.

I had high hopes for the Momoa Conan movie, and he did a fantastic job, but excepting the first 10 minutes it was awful. A miniseries might work.

The Atreides were simply overwhelmed. Its established that none of the noble houses can stand against the power of the Emperor individually, and they are caught between the Emperor and the Harkonens simultaneously. They're not even surprised, they fully expect an attack, it's just the scale of it that is a shock and that even the spacing guild would collude in their destruction.

“I wrote the Dune series because I had this idea that charismatic leaders ought to come with a warning label on their forehead: May be dangerous to your health." - Frank Herbert

Herbert consciously wrote Dune as a deconstruction and criticism of the white saviour trope, and a warning of the dangers and costs of saviour dynamics generally. Here's a guy that really gets this. Paul's triumphant jihad is a bloody catastrophe for humanity that breaks him. On hardly any effort, the Missionaria Protectiva put in hundreds of years of effort into laying the ground work for the coming of Paul, or someone like him. The BG plan is deep and long term. In Dune, religion is social manipulation elevated to an advanced art. He just co-opts it for his own purposes.

The enemy in Dune are not the Harkonens, they're just a warning of how bad the future could be, if they or someone like them comes to ultimate power. The real enemy is the ossified, hierarchical, oppressive structure of human society. It has become so rigid that some of the factions are speciating into different forms of life. Should that happen eventually the wrong people will come to power and we'd be trapped in eternal oppression, a boot stamping on a human face, forever.

So one danger is that this oppressive social structure is permanently ingrained into our DNA, and becomes a perpetual human condition. The other danger is that the cataclysmic conflict necessary to break this status quo also breaks civilisation, such that we lose the ability to fold space, and humanity is splintered into isolated planets that die out one by one. The Golden Path engineered by Leto II in the later books is the plan to navigate between these catastrophic failure modes to a truly open, unconstrained future for humanity.

Greg believed that religious impulses are hardwired into us, and that there are psychological forces within all of us that are parts of out biology and our mental architecture. He was very much an essentialist in that respect. However we are all individuals, and we all vary to some smaller or greater degree from the average or most common human form.

I'm a materialist so I believe our physical bodies are literally what we are, and he very much wasn't. We talked about this a  fair bit. He believed in 'strong' free will, that we aren't inevitably bound by our nature, but that our nature does bind us in many ways and breaking out of those biological, psychological and spiritual forces acting within us and that are part of us is incredibly hard and perilous. However there are some individuals who are born different, or that become different and they can achieve things others might find far more difficult or impossible. We are not slaves to our nature, but we can't easily choose to not be who we are.

EDIT: I should say this is entirely my recollection and personal interpretation from those conversations.

Rather than active/passive maybe another way to look at the traditional masculine and feminine roles in Orlanthi society is external facing and internal facing. Men largely take responsibility for activities outside the stead and dealings with strangers, including war; women take responsibility for internal affairs and organisation, and relations with friendly communities. Obviously there's a lot of crossover.

I've been reading up a fair bit on Celtic mythology recently and it's interesting how many goddesses there are of rulership, war, hunting, etc. They're terrifying, while the male deities seem kind of boring and passive in comparison. Maybe there's a bit of a Germanic/Celtic split here.

11 minutes ago, svensson said:

In reading the Silmarillion, I would disagree that the Numenoreans were as 'multi-cultural' as you imply, certainly the nobles weren't. The Three Houses of Men were granted gifts above and beyond the gifts Illuvatar gave to mankind in general, and the Numenoreans well knew it. I can certainly see some of the Numenorean common folk marrying Lesser Men wherever their ship landed... sailors being sailors, after all. But given their interactions with the Noldor, Sindar, and Teleri Elves and their own interactions in Middle Earth during the Second Age, they were WELL aware of the idea of 'diluting the bloodline'.

That's all fair, I suppose it depends on who these characters are and how they fit into the narrative. It looks like it's going to be a big show.

The Numenorians explored widely and traded with many foreign lands, after all it's an Atlantis analog. They did this for thousands of years. Their ships even glimpsed the "Gates of Morning" in the far east. Also the south is easy to reach from Numenor, it's actually much closer than the northern regions we're familiar with. You just sail directly east. When Numenor fell we know many of the survivors extensively colonised and populated Umbar in the south of Middle Earth. We know from the descriptions of men from the far south in the Return of the King that they had black skin. The Hobbits call them "swarthings" (facepalm). It seems reasonable Numenorian survivors settled there because they were familiar with it, or more likely survived because they were already there. I imagine Numenor would be pretty multicultural and would be extremely surprised not to see at least some black, or even asian characters there.

The Witcher makes very little sense on so many different axes that it would be a bit churlish to pick on it's treatment of race. The whole show is a big bag of "don't over think it and enjoy the ride".

It is very loud, that is true, but it's a fantastic score and soundscape generally. There were a few moments when it suffered from indistinct dialogue, but really only a few.

There was one decision I thought was a mistake, but it may have been deliberate as we're only seeing half of the story. One of the characters was shown displaying weakness at a time I would have showed them displaying strength. However it's quite possible this display of weakness at that time was a deliberate choice and will make more sense in the context of what we will see in Part 2.

Some of the concept art for the Second Age series looks gorgeous. We can hope.

On TV shows, Villeneuve and one of his writing collaborators are involved in the production of a Dune prequel TV series. I've not read any of the prequel books, only the Frank Herbert stuff. We truly live in a golden age of geek cultural invasion of the mainstream.

Everything I could ever want in a Dune movie.

We watched it in Superscreen, which is a wide format laser projector with a high end sound system. I'd highly recommend seeing it on the best screen you have access to. This thing just begs for the full treatment. The deep love of the material from Villeneuve and Zimmer shows in every frame on screen and every second of the score.

If you don't know the book there's no way I can assess how well the film stands on it's own. It's just not possible for me to be objective.

20 hours ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

Everybody routinely ignores drawbacks or restrictions on other cults.  Because of MGF.  Why enforce them for YT?

I'm sure there are workarounds. An officer could be on secondment to a non-YT temple as an adviser, acting as an aide to a regional administrator, working as liaison with local allies, or even on leave or a sabbatical. Scions of a noble house might have an essentially honorary or ceremonial role in the regiment. All sorts of options. However the cult itself I believe is a regimental institution, so that link is really important. 

4 hours ago, g33k said:

Huh.
I recall the GM applying it to (at least some) other skills...

This was frequently house ruled or just misunderstood. The rule on this just says this is what you do for combat skills, it doesn't explicitly exclude it for other skills.

I think the theory is that for combat skills you need practical experience in a stressed situation to really learn, but that argument could be also applied to many non-combat physical skills often done under stressful circumstances.

I think that's post-hoc justification though and suspect the real reason is that having the characters go from mediocre fighters to expert duellists entirely through buying training isn't any fun. On the other hand combat skills get lots of use in RQ, while other skills are much more rarely used, so the same rule applied to them would mean those skills would very soon lag behind combat skills.

If that's correct and this is aimed at improving game play, then if your game is atypical in this respect then it would make sense to adjust the rule.

4 hours ago, Darius West said:

They operate as a sort of Praxian tribal mafia, with operatives in other tribes who have been freed by the morokanth on the proviso that they operate as morokanth agents.

And also on the understanding that the Morokanth are taking very good care of their families. Terrible shame if anything was to 'happen' to them.

14 minutes ago, Runeblogger said:

Since the book will include Yanafal Tarnils and the rest of the Mothers as proper cults, can anyone please tell me if Yanafal initiates have access to True Weapon?

Back in the day the general consensus was to use Humakt cult magic as a guide for Yanafal Tarnils but without Sever Spirit. Hopefully we'll get a bit more to work with in the new book.

2 hours ago, Stephen L said:

However, it might just be that I've never really come across Howard the Duck that I lack the bias that might... engander.

You may have done, but not realised it. He's in one of The Collector's display cases in Guardians of the Galaxy, and I think appears in the end of credit scene. He has a speaking part in the T'Chala/Star Lord "What If...?" episode. That's all I know the character from though.

For the record, i think ducks are great. They're one of the many things that make Glorantha quirky and fun for me. I like the idea that there are other tiny communities of strange beings out there in various corners of Glorantha too, it's just that we know about ducks and not the others because the game happens to have focused on Dragon Pass.

I suspect members of minor cults aren’t evenly scattered throughout the Sartarites population too. If there are only a few hundred native direct Redalda worshipers in all of Sartar, not enough to show up in the stats, they probably all live in the same community. Why not Runegate?

7 hours ago, coffeemancer said:

- the reason for being an outlaw is a part of character generation, so far we have a colymar kinslayer, a sun dome woman who practiced shamanism, a guy who was born into outlawry and a stormbull who killed his family.

All of these people may well have family, friends or allies who might be sympathetic. Maybe the first character's kin had it coming, the sun domer must have had people who taught her shamanism or family that are at least conflicted about her exile, the born outlaw might have some people he helped as well as those he robbed. Even for the Uroxi, if it was done in a blind rage there might be some in the cult who view it as a result of divine inspiration. So there are question I'd ask all the players.

Who most condemns you?

Who supports you or is most sympathetic?

The latter gives the characters something to lose if they double down on outlawry, because those are the people that might finally turn their back on them.

And now I need to watch Primer again.

2 hours ago, coffeemancer said:

At one point, I want to have them score a nice haul like a caravan or something, only for a band of bigger, meaner and rested Gagarthi bandits to come and calmly state that they will be taking it.
If the Gagarthi are impressed by the PC's they may offer some of them to come and try initiating into the cult...

I think that's the way to do it, give them multiple options but leave the decisions to them. I think it's important for them to know they have multiple options though, and that the first choice they face isn't necessarily the only option they're going to get.

7 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Not sure how "canon" it is anymore, or ever was, but I definitely ignore the idea that the symbol of the EWF was, in-universe, literally the three Latin letters "E. W. F." fused together.

I'm ok with accepting it as a strange co-incidence that this magical rune in Glorantha happens to correspond to something for us, but not that the latin alphabet exists in Glorantha.

4 hours ago, JonL said:

Sure, but at least the Boggles voted Remain.

That's what they told you. 😀

6 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

Let's cast our minds to some non-combat moves and non-combat scenes.  How about the jury scenes of "Twelve angry men"?

He makes a series of opposed rolls against his fellow jurors. In QW this would be an extended contest. In Blades In the Dark, or Apocalypse World winning them over would be a progress clock. Usually a long term issue like that would run alongside other activities and challenges.

While that makes great cinema, it’s an extreme outlier. Very few movies get away with working within an almost one room, pressure cooker situation. It only really works because it’s a tightly scripted, constructed narrative.

5 hours ago, HeartQuintessence said:

Ways to do other interesting things in Runequest Glorantha other than combat, that are more than just simple dice rolls.

By simple dice roll, do you mean more than just a single opposed roll?

To be honest when I ran Hero Wars (which I've played much more then HQ), I mostly used simple contests and it was fine. The fact that you get to think about augments and such meant even simple contests often had several stages of dice rolls. That's also pretty standard in RQ as well now it also has augments.

If you want to make contests crunchier, you need to think about how to make the outcome of those multiple dice rolls more consequential. The advantage of a one-roll-resolves-all mechanic is that roll is consequential. In RQ combat every roll matters because they all can have severe consequences. What I found with HW is that most of the rolls in extended contests had no consequences, they didn't individually matter. They were just drudgery on the way to the conclusion.

Yep, it's still D&D. The world is a mismatched hotchpotch of elements, the magic system is bonkers, level scaling is still janky. However running a pretty decent game with this thing is really just a matter of being judicious about the extras you bring in, if any, and what peripheral elements you might take out.

One thing it does do quite well is break out of the class straight jacket. It's system of backgrounds and feats, both of which are selected independently of class, give you the option to grow the character in some interesting ways. I decided to take the Actor feat. There are plenty of more combat focused Feats, but I see him as being fairly playful and gregarious, and I had enough points to give him a decent Charisma. I also gave him a proficiency with makeup and costumes, which seems appropriate for someone who's done some acting. I'm looking forward to putting these abilities to fun use.

Mostly the other players took feats and backgrounds that work well with their class, and so might as well have been class options, but you don't have to do that. There is scope for breaking out of the class tropes.

So I'm actually playing D&D 5e at my local games club. We created characters last week, and played our first full session yesterday. It was tons of fun!

Yes it still has some of the jankeyness of older editions, but it looks far superior to any of the previous iterations I've played. My primary criterion of an RPG is that it should give you plenty of cool things you can do on your character sheet to pick from. Well, mission accomplished. I'm playing a fighter and having a blast.

There are basically two approaches to building a fighter, DEX based or STR based. This is a significant departure from my previous recollections in which STR was the only real option. My guy emphasises DEX, carries a rapier and wears relatively light armour. This allows him to use his DEX modifier on his amour class, while heavier armours get bonuses from STR. So he's a fast moving bladesman that manages to be decently effective. Going the STR route might be marginally more effective in raw damage and armour class, but only slightly and having decent DEX gives me other benefits.

The fighter sub-class I went for emphasises tactical combat. We're starting at 3rd level, so I got to pick 3 manoeuvres I can do. I get 4 "uses" I can spend on these manoeuvres that refresh on a rest. I picked options that let me have another try at a missed attack, try a disarm, and try to knock back an enemy. Some of them can also do extra damage. I also have an ability that gives me one bonus attack between rests, and another that lets me refresh some HP between rests.

I also took options independent of fightyness that means my guy is a master of disguise and good at acting. He has a decent Charisma!

Bottom line is, it's perfectly possible to make fairly capable characters that are interesting to play and have more than just one dimension to them. The rules are also fairly straightforward and consistent. I'm looking forward to the next session.