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Viktor

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Everything posted by Viktor

  1. Viktor

    YGWV

    And driving on river beds means no wreckage of the sparce grasslands.
  2. Viktor

    YGWV

    Well we need cows because we can't plow fields well without them. Morocanth need humans because they don't have thumbs. XD
  3. Not much point playing epic fantasy then XD Despite the low power beginnings, with its huge complex myth RuneQuest is epic fantasy. Guess what epic fantasy has? Heroes.
  4. Viktor

    YGWV

    And as we know, rivers are spirits or maybe even draconic (?) so they could be both the seasonal rivers as a metaphor for Ronance's power AND the actual chariot pullers literally. Pretty cool.
  5. .What is so narrow about it? All cultures in our world had runic, symbolic language that they would daub onto themselves and build into their jewelerry and weapons. The languages varied far more for us because none of them were demonstrably true. Yes you have a unified rune system in RQ, but given the fact that everything in the mythos is literally real, that makes sense. Runes are the language with which the deities speak. Or, at least the language with which Gloranthans understand and interpret them. If all gods interact and all are real then that language would have to be pretty much the same. In our world, symbology differs widely because of a human tendency to go: no, you cannot prove that, you are wrong and this is the symbology I believe in. You can't do that in a world which factually represents proveable beings. There isn't room for 'my religion is the One and yours isn't' and therefore the language of runes would have to be pretty consistent. There is room for depicting runes a little differently and many interpret it that way. Runes shown in the books are the basic form. Also, the God-Learners did just that, they learned of the secrets of the universe and the way it works and again, runes are the language via which to understand the gods. What is a HeroQuest? It is delving into myth and learning the secrets and stories of earlier ages and the gods. OF course there is an element of God-Learnerism to it all, that makes PERFECT sense because that is what HeroQuesting is. The only actual differences are A: being allowed to do it as opposed to sneaking the secrets. B: Doing it the proper way as opposed to cheating and C: Intent once one learns the secrets. The gods hated the God-Learners not for trying to learn their secrets but for doing it without permission and outside of the proper ritual way. So yes the new runic mechanics are God-Learnerish. Heroes are God-Learners with permission.
  6. So either just a true breed to baseline or some sort of horribly inbred, vaguely goat-like person? Yeah that makes sense to be fair! I am now envisaging a furred human with horns, really badly arranged facial features and as both broo and humans are very susceptible to mutation, probably other dire mutational features.
  7. Fantastic suggestions and help there guys. I will have to track some of this stuff down, I have some ideas going now and can improv well but having solid adventures and hooks would be awesome. Your names shall be sung of in the stars!
  8. I understand that when broo er, propagate the offspring are part the parent broo and part host animal, with obvious odd hybridisation and chaos mutations in many cases. E.g. a chicken broo that uses a cow would presumably make a horned chicken or a cow with a beak maybe. So what happens when broo use humans as a host? Let's say a goat broo used a person as host?
  9. I wanted and have always wanted to play a Humakti duck and become a hero as that character, to show his viability as a character. To play him totally seriously. They are an interesting race.
  10. Viktor

    YGWV

    Well there we go, Waha gifts intelligence to a single group of herd men because the Morokanth tribe that own them break the covenant, possibly even forsake Waha as a god utterly. So he gives intelligence to these herd men, to rebel and kill their Morokanth masters as punishment. Once that challenging task is complete, the players must struggle to be seen as true men and to gain status in society. Once it is known Waha gifted them intelligence they could probably do okay but they have the stigma of having been herd and not all would believe their origin necessarily. Even when religion is True, you get deviators and doubter.
  11. Say something like, he can enchant the item and sacrifice the POW but every time it is used, it takes another point in order to properly bring the person back to life. If he complains, point out how he is trying to god mod the game and that you have to place limiters so that your story can survive.
  12. At the end of the day, every roleplaying game source book I have ever read says if the rules get in the way: dispense with them for greater gaming and story-telling and greater fun. I think serious mythology, world-building and theurgy can mesh just fine with fun, playable fiction. In fact what else is it? Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings as a love letter to his own linguistic genius and to Norse sagas. Pratchett wrote Discworld as a way to satire just about everything that humans have ever said or thought. (Alright, Discworld is much less serious and lofty anyway, but later it took on real, tangible history and myths) I think any long-term world-background eventually becomes very very substantial and weighty, Gloranthan is one of the weightiest but it is still fun. Do things like runic affinity and other HeroQuest mechanics break the game? No. HeroQuesting is essentially a way for heroes to learn more about the myths and the gods (so to be . . . god learners) and to accelerate their own mythological standing through comprehension of the hard science mechanic of the universes physical laws. Something can be mythic and magic and esoteric and still have hard physical laws. This happens in all fantasy because eventually something is either: comprehensible at a finite scale and therefore can be given rules values and percentages, allowing prospective heroes to do HeroQuests and gain abilities that work in the rules or totally wild and incomprehensible deliberately, and mythic in a vision-questy, dreamscape manner that is great for story but cannot be used in any gameplay based manner to give bonuses, abilities, and weight to the character. It depends on what you want. Do you want your players to be able to become heroes and have these high-level, superheroic characters that through rules can do great things (done via runic affinities and the importance overall of runes and magic, because how else would you work superheroic level abilities in RuneQuest?) or do you want to just tell a story together, forgoing HeroQuesting rules and just system rules for characters in general. Everything they do becomes an experience and part of a story and is much more mythic and much less nailed down but it also takes away that satisfaction of rolling to use an awesome ability and it takes away the random factor of rolling and having something totally unexpected happen. You can make up unexpected and I am quite good at it, but I guarantee you it is never as good as something you rolled randomly on a table or because of the intrinsic weirdness of game mechanics on a nitty-gritty level. When you really get down to it, you have to have those dice and those abilities written down in black and white or you jut aren't roleplaying, you're camp fire story telling. (Which is great but not the same) I think you are bemoaning not the incorrect progress of a game world, but the fact it progressed at all. I have not read a huge amount of the new rules but it seems to me the only way they could have taken it without being like everyone else. You have games like D&D who do mythic by giving you 800 feats and special talents in your three to four prestige classes. You have on the totally opposite end, Fate which allows you to be mythic by having barely stamped down Aspects and Stunts, and allowing you to blag your way around the game if you can A: pay a point for it an B: convince the ref. it makes sense to his story. Somewhere in between that is RuneQuest where you don't need 800 abilities or classes but still need a few, made to make sense through runes and their long standing importance to RUNE quest but at the same time you can use the open ended nature of runes to be a little like Fate. If my Orlanth Thunderous hero has affinity to the right runes can I blag with the ref to call down a thunderstorm that emboldens the Orlanthi troops AND terrifies and attacks my enemies? If the ref agrees, I make the necessary rolls and it can be described. In D&D I have to have Thunderstorm at Caster Level 8 which I can only get by being a level 20 Orlanthi Hero, but I also have to prestige into Thunderous and have the spells Shout, Clap, Thunderclap and Storm first. Or some such fucking nonsense. It all gets very tedious. Whereas in Fate it is all insanely open ended and essentially a story, not a game. You cast in your chip, which is a bit like holding the speaking stick and just ad-lib crap. As I say, RuneQuest now seems somewhere comfortably between.
  13. Viktor

    YGWV

    See I like this idea of them being almost like Agimori but due to evolutionary and mythic needs as herd. Just as other herd animals are bred to become bigger, fatter, etc perhaps it is not impossible that this could happen with herd-men. What if certain Morokanth have bred stronger humans that could carry more and pull more. Humans have a usefulness other herd animals don't, hands. They can carry things another beast couldn't in a different manner. I came up with what I thought was an interesting idea once for a campaign. That the players actually play herd-men that by some accident, function of myth or other strange circumstance a certain few have started to gain intelligence. Yes this would violate the pact and I never thought of the reason for why, but if you suppose for a moment that it could happen because many spectacular things can happen in Glorantha that are not what they ought to be then it soon makes for a very interesting game. Playing herd-men who lead a rebellion of a herd against their masters and then try to gain independence and become men. Would they, if succesful take on herd beasts themselves? Would they askew such things and value freedom of all beings above anything? Could they succeed at all or would it be a horrible, dark story?
  14. That is an interesting idea. Perhaps one way to do it is to give every weapon a simple, special critical ability. Weapons in games can often feel very similar to each other, but many are very different in function even if they look similar.
  15. I have the Sartar Companion which is what made me think of having them go to Starfire Ridge, but don't have Kingdom of Heroes. Cheers Pentallion I will have to look for it.
  16. I have always viewed them as being sort of the Donald Duck type, but with proper arms and varying in feather patterns and colouring much as ducks do. So not all white, you might get a brown and black duck or one with an emerald head like a mallard. I don't go too far with the duck diversity as there are other avian men, but just a little goes a long way. I kind of view them as feathered, duck faced hobbits with bad attitude. Ducks in my game are very cynical, depressed and angry at life. A lot of discrimination and a genetic curse will do that. On the subject of baboons, I once had a Daka Fal/ancestor shaman baboon called Hamadrayas who was adventuring in the Holy Country. Rather fun to play I must say. I was travelling with an Orlanthi sailor, a sorceror and a centaur. Weird bloody party.
  17. So I am soon to begin a new campaign of RuneQuest, reffing for my two best friends and girlfriend. They are all fairly green players so I am very much looking forward to introducing them to the wonders of Glorantha. I'm planning to set them in Sartar, near Starfire Ridge just after the initial, but not complete domination, of Sartar by the Lunars as Orlanthi that get embroiled in rebellion. It's looking like I'm getting two Babeestor Ghor initiates (played by the two most brutal women in my life, fittingly) and un-confirmed on the other friend but probably an Orlanthi warrior. My initial plan is to have the two Babeestor Ghorians at the Ernalda Temple by Clearwine, and have them tasked to escort an Ernalda priestess to the made up village of Broken-Sword, the sight of an old Humakti fortress (now ruined) which has been moved into by a small clan and turned into a village. My premise is, the crops are failing and the priestess is coming to pray for their renewal. There they meet the other player and begin adventures in Sartar, probably starting with a hunt for some missing villagers (it ain't going well for the people of Broken-Sword) that ends up with them on Starfire Ridge fighting broo. Beyond that and a couple of random ideas, I don't have a massive plan for how they end up embroiled in anti-Lunar rebellion or on general adventures for them. Anyone got any thoughts/concepts that have worked for them or they think would apply?
  18. I have always done it as this: Special attacks allow the player to describe an effect of their attack such as impaling, knockback, causing the opponent to be sickened or staggered as long as it is nothing to big. Critical hits allow the player to: choose a location and do damage, do maximum damage to random location or describe a major effect AND they get to describe their attack in flashy glory. E.G. Eltonhepe rolls to attack the broo. He gets 03, special. He sinks his blade into the broo's gut, sickening it and causing it to shriek in agony. (Rolls damage, target also suffers minus 10% to strenuous actions. (unless he's dead obviously) Eltonhepe rolls to attack the broo. He gets 01, critical. (Assuming damage kills the broo) Player chooses the head as location. Eltonhepe's player: I turn on the broo, shouting to Urox that I am sending a sacrifice his way. My blade bites deep into the broo's neck, cutting his head clean from his body. As the head drops, I turn my blade to its flat and strike his head, knocking it as high into the air as I can, sending it to Urox. If the player doesn't care what effect they cause or cannot think of anything good, I will just improv. something simple for specials, such as impaling, sundering, concussion depending on weapon, or for a critical something cool and gruesome like the above. Another major effect of a critical instead of choosing location could be, choosing to break the enemies sword, dealing all damage to that even if they had not previously declared the sword as a target. In my eyes criticals represent the turning of tide in battle, blessings of the gods or the sudden inspired renewed vigour of the character surprising the enemy. Maybe all three.
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