Alex

47 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

That's as much as we've heard.  Somewhere downstream from the Sartar box and the Cults books.

And potentially also from the Esrolian, Lunar Tarsh, Grazelands, Prax and Heortland homeland books, Newer Elder Races, the GM's book, and the Dragon's Eye, if one can infer anything by way of Krakenology from things that Jason namechecked, and things he didn't.  Which might be a fair-sized "if", given the number of "eventuallies" that was sprinkled with...

Ooo, good question, and excellent close reading.

Multiple-round resisting certainly sounds like a real corner case.  It rather implies that the spell being resisted has been really telegraphed, but you can't actually just wander over and <doink!> the caster as a more effective means of stopping it.  Like there's a line of pikemen in the way, or this is some sort of Wizard Duel situation.  Or they've tied you down while they cast Corruption on you, but they're still allowing you to sing your Going to My Happy Place song to help resist...

My take is this is the "time critical" version of augmenting with a skill.  I think you'd logically apply the same sort of thing if you were doing would logically take extra time, as using as skill -- as opposed to a Rune or a Passion -- very often will, and that's not necessarily available to you.  The examples it gives on p144 aren't time-critical in the same sort of way, so I wouldn't normally apply the logic of, the longer this dance goes on, the more my Singing is doing to help.

On 11/16/2021 at 8:50 PM, jajagappa said:

There's no best map available yet, but there are certain things to be aware.

While there are tribes around Whitewall (e.g. Sylangi, Kultain, Bacofi, Curtali, Olontongi) and a large tribal confederation formed by Broyan (i.e. Volsaxi in the Marzeel Valley), once you are south of the Marzeel there are no tribes - they weren't needed/desired while Belintar ruled.

I guess a map with "Here Be No Tribes" on it would be the best available tribal map, then!

On 11/16/2021 at 8:50 PM, jajagappa said:

What you have are lots of Hendriki clans who generally oppose the idea of tribes, or who oppose the idea of any "king".  From the standpoint of clan rituals, Belintar was there as part of their rituals (he was a God after all), and from the standpoint of tribute, that was gathered by the Governor and whatever bureaucracy/tribute collectors they used (from 1460-1560 around Whitewall, the Kitori performed that task - then Tarkalor broke that arrangement).

My possibly-excessively-warm take would be that based on their history the Hendriki, aren't opposed to the concept of kings and tribal leaders, to the point of seeing Elder-Wilds-like situations where there are clans, and that's it, as ideal.  (TBF, I know even less about the EW situation, so who know if even they think that's ideal, either!)  But you don't pick a tribal or high king in conceptual terms, you have to pick an actual person, an actual rite, and actual authority for them -- and there's the whole series of rubs.

When you break down what sort of theory of the case different people might have, I think they might break down a little like:

• The "Dar" model.  Every city, town, or whatever crossroads passes as the centre of a region of customary marriage (triaties and the like) is going to have a Chief, and that person may have some of the trappings of a tribal leader -- or maybe just the notions of being one.  What they'll notably lack is any great amount of authority:  no Rex magic, no High King recognition, no clearly demarcated top-down jurisdiction from any superior.  So this ends up being more like just one more squabbling clan than a Sartar-style tribe or city ring.
• The "High King" precedent.  That'd work great, except you have to have a great candidate with a great claim, to essentially give the uppity Hendriki no choice but to recognise them.  But this is a tough call, as it's not been in operation for quite some time during Belintar's rule, so there's a lack of a candidate pool, and there's a lack of proximate precedent.  There's much less weight behind "well, he's no Hendrik the Free, but at least he's the son of the previous stiff, so he'll do".  Also one of the better recent possibilities is dead.
• Appointing a count/earl/sub-governor/reeve/some fancy Greek term yet to be determined.  Not much of a flier as you can't have one appointed when there's no governor, and you can't appoint a governor if there's no Pharaoh to do that.  But it may have a certain sort of administrative inertia, in that people may be more willing to accept some sort of ruler within those boundaries than some more innovative grouping.  But anti-Belintar types may make a point of opposing it for that very reason though, and want to "knock through" into other Provinces.  But at least they correspond to obvious natural boundaries.  Assuming you see rivers as borders moreso than thoroughfares, which on balance given the geography here seems reasonable.
• Rex-rite tribal kings.  OK, this is obviously WRONG, because filthy Alakoring heresy, we don't have no truck with that northern nonsense here, but bear in mind the whole Kultain/Olontongi plot arc.  Assuming the Kultain ever had Rex rites -- and I know mine did, though there was some coming and going in that in my game in that area! -- then they're a vector for smuggling that thinking back south of the Crossline.  Who knows, it might just catch on.

On 11/16/2021 at 8:50 PM, jajagappa said:

If you grew up in or around Backford, then you are from one of the clans in that area.

Backford's also going to be some of a centre of Loyalist sentiment, I think.  The Guide says, "Backford was the center of the God-King’s cult in Heortland, and was connected to the City of Wonders by a magical bridge. The magical Fish Road still stops here on its run from Deeper up the Syphon River."  Now, the first part of that might be an error or misleading, as the main map clearly sees the City of Wonders connecting to Durengard, instead.  Maybe it's a giant clover-leaf system!  Or some sort of ritually important connection between the two, at least.

11 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

I disagree.  Sure, you won't use a passion of less than 50% to Augment anything.  But as an "ask for a favor" mechanism, it's just fine.

You character met and conversed politely with Dappled Light 2 years ago?  You can either note that in history somewhere, or note it as a 50% or 40% or even 20% Loyalty.  You meet her guards again and say "remember me, please don't kill us!", you can make that roll.

That sounds perfectly valid as a mechanic, but it does sound a little like a recipe for the eight-page HQ character-sheets of legend.  "I'm just adding up my Augments, be right with you."  "If you need me, I'll be in the bar." 🙂 it's also kinda stretching the intuitive bounds of the word "Passion" -- even if you never attempt to take it into the realms of "Inspiration".

15 minutes ago, Eff said:

Even using abbreviated family history, you'll have access to seven: 3 homeland, 1 cult, and 3 personal choice. Of course, unless you double up on the cult one, you'll have only two of those greater than 60%.

Abbreviated being...  skipping grandpops/ma?  Or all ancestors and just doing the character's own "previous experience" events?

23 minutes ago, Eff said:

Might be worth working out an alternate intermediate method...

For me, the ideal version would play out a lot like a 'rules-lite' soloquest.  Which is the opposite of "intermediate" in terms of amount of effort to play through, space to print it, and above all, effort to develop it -- though RQG has done the heavy lifting by providing the actual key events and their sorts of consequences.  Giving just a little more player choice would, I think, get rid of the "bitty Passions" issues on the one hand, and the "stuck with a character having strong views you didn't buy into" on the other.

As for quicker/shorter versions; I have a vague plan to number-crunch the RQG chargen process to get the range of of raw numbers it spits out, and from there, to reverse-engineer something to generate comparable characters in fewer steps, and on hopefully many fewer pages.

On 11/9/2021 at 9:03 AM, Kloster said:

Agreed on most. I spoke specifically of the Aeolians just because the rules to create an Aeolian sorcerer are in the core rulebook.

I randomed across this disclaimer in the Sorcery Q&A:

So depending on just how canon-cautious you're feeling, that could put Aeolians either in the "similar henotheist heretics" category, and therefore essentially (as it were) covered; or as subject to revision as and when we get the definitive Malkioni take.

5 hours ago, dumuzid said:

I wrote a myth a few years ago about Argan Argar and Hyalor absconding with their own black horses from Bijiif's pastures in Hell, Horses for Uz.

Would that be this document?  https://basicroleplaying.org/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php?id=6260

14 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

What if one of your campaign's PC's was an adopted Agmori Aeolian Emali who, of course loves fire and doesn't mind riding a horse, albeit a demonic one?

I'd personally say that's not so much a five-step plan, as about five on-the-face-of-it wildly incompatible things crammed into one character.  OTOH that's the very sort of things heroes do, nothing some moderate-to-high law- and taboo-breaking and if it comes to it Illumination won't cure, and tastes as to high-concept density will, as with your Glorantha, clearly vary.  But what'll you do for an encore, if that's just the opening bid for just one person's Unique Thing?

1 hour ago, Kloster said:

I hope that Santa Claus will be generous, even if I'm not anymore a child and that I'm not always nice. According to my wife, it should be delivered on time.

She gets a Forgiving tick, or whatever the applicable Passion on her sheet could possibly be. 🙂

2 hours ago, Marc said:

You don't really need a PDF editor for that.  Just a way to Print to PDF( included in Windows 10, probably others ).

Yeah, can testify to ChromeOS and Linux first hand.  Like I said, 'just a viewer and a "print to PDF" driver' is what's required.  https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/how-to/print-to-pdf.html  Otherviewersarevailable, here's the Chrome built-in:  

6 minutes ago, PhilHibbs said:

Yes, it's worth bearing in mind that 60% is the very minimum, it makes no sense to have "Loyalty" or "Love" at 50% or less. Anything less than 50% is an anti-passion, you're more likely to fail than succeed. When my game re-starts (hopefully next week-end) I will encourage the players to ditch maybe all but one of their 60% passions. Maybe wait until a 60% passion goes up and start dropping the others.

Yeah, the things that "nest" (individual, family, clan, tribe, city, kingdom ...  geographical macrolozenge, the lozenge, Creation, Cosmic Dragon...) are good candidates for that, in that the overlap on the one hand, but potentially conflict too.  So orchestrate a mini "Karallan's Plight", suggest to the player that might be the "symmetry breaker", offer a decent-sized upgrade of the one in return for ditching the other, bish-bash-bosh.

9 minutes ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

I think your example is the best we can find about all this passionate passion discussion: not the use in the soloquest, but the "misread":

The morale for me being, don't write one paragraph implying the choice had been made for you, and then write the next to say the opposite!  "But wait, there's more..."  What does the the following text put the reader in mind of?

9 minutes ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

** will someone accept that humakti with 100% in honor will not lose some %  after killing an innocent weak hand tied hostage ?,

Given that the rules expressly cover this type of case, and that no-one is saying otherwise, is this really an outstanding question?

9 minutes ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

but I think the point is if you have 10 different hate passion or 5 different love passion, what could mean passion then ? maybe transform the 10 hate passions in one : "hate everybody"  or "hate any foreigner" but if you love Raoul, Richard, Germaine, Sarah and William the definition of love would be special and interesting to explore

I think the question isn't so much, "how do you condense all that detail?" as "does the player even want that much detail?"

2 minutes ago, AndreJarosch said:

Samastina IS the Queen of Nochet, so no conflict there, but what COULD give some problems, is that Samastina is not from the Hulta Clan. 

Potential conflict nonetheless:  personal allegiance vs "the good of the realm".  See premium-cable dramas and current events, ibid.  But that pair are certainly a candidate for a "clarifying consolidation", for my money.

SoloQuest online, para 72:-

SoloQuest online, para 135:-

Example of an annoying use of Passions.  In the SoloQuest: make a Hate Lunars roll, opposed by an Honour roll, then act like an automaton according to the results.  (Also, dear Kallyr, please don't blow your "in urgent need of assistance" signal, then order someone to stand waiting doing nothing in the middle of a pitched battle.  You can see why she might have got on some people's nerves, mind you. 🙂)

[Edit]  Sorry, misread on my part -- and bit of a slow-roll on the part of the SQ.  It reads as if you're being given no choice about which to do...  then the following paragraph restates the "or else reduce the passion to 80% if you act against it".

2 hours ago, Bren said:

To me, adding or increasing a passion that a player doesn't want or decreasing or taking away a passion they do want are just two sides of the same coin. In an ongoing campaign, I want the player and the GM to be in relative agreement with any additive or subtractive changes to the passions of a PC.

I agree that conceptually they're very similar, and in practice with the RQG RAW they're pretty similar too.  There's no "you have a 'famous' Passion, so the GM can dictate that you act strictly in line with it' clause, as there is in Pendragon.  The only 'penalty' in such cases being a rather Yelmic-bigamy one.  "How sad, you decreased the Passion I didn't want to be increased in the first place, never mind."  I just note it's something that some players could get sulky about, so I'd have a "bonjour l'équipe, how're handling Passions, then?" chat before I wandered in the direction of making them less "by agreement" than the shared text.  I might be overly cautious from too many "I hate passions and here's why!" discussions on t'internet, mind you!

2 hours ago, Bren said:

One thing I really liked about the Pendragon traits was that they were paired. This allowed a character to have a trait checked if the character's behavior in a significant situation reflected that trait e.g., they acted Greedy or they acted Generous.

Yeah, we only get this with Runes in RQG, which partially cover this, somewhat moreso if you explicitly note a personality trope with each, in the way Six Seasons in Sartar apparently does with NPC listings.  So your closest standard equivalent of "Forgiving" would be Harmony, if you want to put that spin on it.  So that might be an option in the "somebody burned your stead down, whacha think about that, huh-huh-huh?" sitch.

2 hours ago, Bren said:

In this case the change wasn't automatic, it required a successful increase check.

I have a vague memory of their being some sort of provision for both, with directed increases for the more significant instances, but I'm not certain as to the provenance of the former.  Might be the rules, or published adventure, or house rule, or word of mouth...

1 hour ago, g33k said:

And if you have a PDF editor, you can chop the Broken Tower off the end of it; thus making it easier for you to run the BT scenario for your players.

Indeed so, and funnily enough earlier today I spent longer looking for the file i was sure I'd created by this method than it'd have taken to just do it over again!   But you don't even need an editor, just a viewer and a "print to PDF" driver.  For my extra-credit quest I might now work out how to get the file size below 11.7Mb(!)

On 11/14/2021 at 5:14 PM, Stephen L said:

One thing I noted, in a thread discussion POW gain rolls, in the RQ in G rules (p. 418), both baboons and elves have much greater chance of going up.  At max rollable (18), the chance is min rollable (8) x 5 or a whopping 40% for 2D6+6.

This is an odd rule, especially as it's different from the (also perhaps slightly odd, but more in line wit past practice) "species maximum"  calculation given in chargen, p52.  Not clear to me why they don't use this (or some other common value) in both places.  This seems a little like over-specialisation to the human case, where these just happen to give the same result...

On 11/14/2021 at 5:14 PM, Stephen L said:

Our house rule is that the POW gain roll is failing against the species average on the resistance table.

Seems decent.  Potentially breaks down if you used it for a species where the variability is either way less or way greater than 2D6 or 3D6, but the only real fix for such cases would be to use a different resistance table with an increment other than 5%.

5 hours ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

I fully agree, but if I said that, I would be seen as a "passion terrorist" 😛 , as it is not in the rules (Or I don't remember it), 

I don't think it is, but think of the GM, the player(s), and the rules as a three-member presidency.  If the interested parties at the table are in agreement, then cry Emerson! about foolish consistency with the text of the rules.  It's the trollkin of low-CHA souls, you know. 🙂

13 minutes ago, Kloster said:

Yes. You can even go much higher (The highest I've seen was over 10, with 3 of them at 80% IIRC)

At least there were pack-leaders!

13 minutes ago, Kloster said:

I don't think so. More passions can mark a character with a tortured soul, conflicting interests, or more simply a broad pattern of interests.

Could do, sure.  But 60% vs 60% is less of a tortured soul than a frenzy of borderline apathy. 🙂  If this comes up organically in play, or the player is delighted with it as it arrives out of chargen, then great stuff.  But if they find it bitty, meh-ish, and with a poor ratio of descriptive complexity to "oomph" (as I think I would), I think it's useful and valid to offer them the opportunity to do some consolidation.

1 hour ago, Cloud64 said:

I shall, of course, be encouraging them to pick up at least the Starter Set pdfs on the grounds that it's phenomenal value and three of the four books are usable by players, and please please make my life easier by at least attempting to learn  the rules (yeah, I know, but I can dream can't I?)

This is a cunning and yet noble plan to drum up sales, but players being a cheap and lazy lot 🙂 I feel obliged to mention there's also the QSR version, which is free, and only a couple of dozen pages long.   Should anyone's budget not stretch to $15, or their attention span to 60pp!

11 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

Players should have a high degree of agency in their passions. If a character has a bunch of passions all at 60% then I'd encourage them to drop some of them, clearly the character isn't all that motivated about those issues. I'd certainly not risk rolling an augment on a 60% passion! The skill has to be really low for risking that to be worthwhile, and surely there's a better passion you could use.

Some of them are probably a little overlappy, too.  If a PC has emerged from chargen with a slew of similar-scoped passions but all...  moderate-valued, I think there could be scope to "smoosh two together to make one good one".  You can readily have six different Loyalties, all at 60%.  Fewer at higher initial values seems much more story-driving -- and works better for the PC game-mechanically, indeed.

7 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

By the time the characters get to the level of it being relevant, they'll be able to effectively Heroquest and change all of those mere mortal rules anyway. Especially if Hero Souls become an official thing.

Yes, I think that's pretty much the "in-world" situation normal.  If you've hit your CHA limit mostly you're a Senior Priest and coasting along quite nicely at that level, thanks very much, no doubt in many cases dipping into it for a one-use spell, where applicable and available.  The minority are waiting for the Heroes book to come out, to provide a way to super-increase CHA, to have consciousness-expansion possibilities like the above, additional antics about the "multiple cults" possibilities, or maybe just telling you to go get Illuminated.  Any year now!

1 minute ago, Godlearner said:

Recently had a situation were the party were accused of murder and were put on trial. The evidence was manufactured and stacked against them. Witnesses were bought off. They were toast .... until just before the verdict was announced a Trickster stood up and using the Lie spell shifted the blame on the true perpetrator of the crime.

Definite egregious munchkinism!  😄 Dangerously close to lying with the truth...  I trust they embellished the framing a guilty man with some degree of falsehood, for the sake of good form..

1 minute ago, Godlearner said:

Now Eurmal is a prohibited cult in those parts.

Situation normal, then. 🙂

3 minutes ago, JonL said:

Of course, you could just as easily hold eyeball-size constant and work out the very impressive refractive index and transmissance of Elf corneae and lenses, along with the size and spacing of their optic nerves. 😉 

it's that 4D6 INT, you see!  Massive photo-interferometric cognitive post-processing.

5 hours ago, 10baseT said:

*Do people, non-Clearwine militia or queen's men, wear armor and carry weapons in the city-fort, is it allowed?

If you're a local, then you are part of the tribal fyrd (or a hoplite of the militia, or whatever the preferred term is this week), so you'd go armed if you normally do.  If you're a Stranger (a non-Colymar, or (gasp!) worse) then you'll have been given the Greeting by a member of the tribe en route to the hillfort.  Thus if you're on the naughty step for any reason, any particular restrictions on you will be made abundantly clear at that point.  With all due courtesy...  or calculated insult, as applicable!  "Honoured and noble guest of might and renown, we offer you promise of safety!  No need for that honking big greatsword here.  Noreallyweinsist."  If you don't like it, you can demand to see their manager, or decline their kind offer and leave.

5 hours ago, 10baseT said:

*Can a Humakti cast rune and spirit magic during the week they can't speak due to a Humakti no-speak geas?

As others have said, rune magic straightfowardly yes.  They're like little mini Spirit Bombs just ready to go off at any time. 🙂  I personally think spirit magic is also fine, especially in this particular case where a Humakti is using (mostly, I assume) Humakt cult spirit magic.  But even generally I think it'd be possible.  The requirements are largely "somatic", hence the DEX SR element in using it, and in particular manipulation of the focus to touch or look at it.  I think it's possible that there exist variant forms of spirit magic that are primarily verbal, or indeed sung, say, but they've not appeared as the standard to date.  Special magic you get by non-cultic routes might vary wildly and whimsically, and other cultures even moreso.