21st Century Moose

Hail Harshax!

The taxonomic names are obviously just a humorous nod to RQ3, seems perfectly OK to do.

The big one that I've seen people have difficulty with elsewhere is starting characteristics. I get the sense this comes from familiarity with other games where starting characteristics are more important, and where the values you start with are - barring magic or other special events - pretty much what you're stuck with forever. With the exception of SIZ and INT that's very much not the case in RQ, and those values can and will change over even quite a small number of sessions. So the message is: don't be too attached to, or disappointed in, your starting characteristics because in a month or two they'll likely be completely different.

This is one area where my Glorantha is happy to vary. My Morokanth are meat-eaters, they eat herdmen and other herd beasts, and the other tribes will quite happily eat herdmen too, because that's in the survival covenant and herdmen are not men, they're beasts.

I view Ducks as being the Gloranthan response to Hobbits. They're short, they live in isolation from the "big people", they have their own distinct part of the world, and they hunt screaming undead in the Upland Marsh. Well, maybe not that last part, but otherwise, "Ducks = Hobbits" seems a good enough place to start. Daffy was always the coolest anyway.

Splitting off the "Agility" category; separating Magic Points from POW; 2d6+6 for INT and SIZ. It's definitely not a case of "RQ3 bad".

In RQ I don't see this being as big a deal as in other games, to be honest. It should be obvious from even a cursory glance over the rules that characteristics are designed to have values that will change, the change can and will be in both directions, and that design is very deliberate. Training, disease, the POW economy, etc: starting characteristics are not something to be so hung up on.

Just to re-emphasize. It's also worth noting that the four Gloranthan races are explicitly described as "Glorantha’s four major human racial types" (my emphasis). Presumably, and in a similar manner to the Tribes of Prax, there are also many more minor types.

Avalon Hill edition was clearly written by the Chaosium team. I think I'm just gonna say "RQ2017" - nice and unambiguous.

Not quite. 1. The original Chaosium edition. 2. The Chaosium second edition (this is widely considered the "classic" edition and was the subject of the recent Kickstarter). 3. The Avalon Hill edition. 4. The cancelled and unpublished 4th edition from the 1990s. The first Mongoose edition was just called "RuneQuest" and didn't have an edition number. It was commonly called "MRQ", or later, "MRQ1". The second Mongoose edition was called "RuneQuest 2" (which was a little confusing as you now need to be explicit about which RuneQuest 2 you're talking) and was commonly called "MRQ2". 6. Design Mechanism's first iteration. This was the sixth published edition, and was commonly called "RQ6". Mythras doesn't have a RuneQuest edition number because it's not a RuneQuest edition. It remains to be seen what we'll settle down to calling the upcoming Chaosium edition, although IIRC Chaosium themselves are calling it "RuneQuest 4" on account of it being the 4th edition with which the original team were involved; IIRC they may also be simply calling it "RuneQuest". We may end up calling it "RuneQuest 7" or something else; who knows?

Fortunately this kind of thing is really not a problem for RQ owing to characteristic increasing mechanics and previous experience.