Alex

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?

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

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:

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. 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? Given that the rules expressly cover this type of case, and that no-one is saying otherwise, is this really an outstanding question? I think the question isn't so much, "how do you condense all that detail?" as "does the player even want that much detail?" 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".

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! 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. 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...

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(!)

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... 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%.

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. 🙂

At least there were pack-leaders! 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.

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!

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.

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!

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.. Situation normal, then. 🙂

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

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. 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.

Those two are definitely "separate". There, solved that for those. 🙂 But you're exactly right, wherever you put the line, it's inevitably going to be a little blurry. I personally think the Official line that Thunderous and Adventurous is the same for these purposes seems a little off, and I don't think I'd play it like that. Or for those that would, what about the Thunder Brothers, who explicitly flip in different mythic tellings between being attributes of Orlanth, and his offspring? Which may or may not be reflected directly in varying cult structures, but you wouldn't want to rule that out entirely. Or Mastakos, who is very much like an Orlanth subcult in a lot of places and for a lot of purposes, but gets counted separately for tax purposes because he gets his own CoG writeup? I think for me the rule of thumb would be, are the special rune magics of the two "substantially" different. Y(Elmal)io need not apply. Different names, yes, different cults, most definitely, with different likes, dislikes, and associations, and don't even like each other... But much the same magic (I presume), and the same for common initiation, heroquesting proof and identification purposes. Works for me as Gloranthacentric Consciousness; works for me for game-mechanical purposes, as it stops too much "double-dipping" on the same magic. In fact I might go further and require a particular rune magic to be associated with only one cult, and hence only one RPP, where there's overlap. Or that's my hot take, at least.

I think it's very much in the realm of your game-group will very much vary! If you munch through a season's adventure in a single session, have a lavish supply of Lun-- ahem, guilders for POW training, and it's your regular game for a sustained period of time then -- give or take trollkin critical hits and the like -- then this will happen, and won;t necessarily take an infeasible amount of either your character's or your own life to do it. OTOH, a more intermittent, digressive, or TPK-rich game... I'm much less hung up on that, and I'm happy to say the rules are a player-facing approximation to the SimLozenge. Play more than one ruleset in a Gloranthan setting and see if you don't experience at some sort of Arkati or Crowleyesque moment of enlightenment on those lines! 🙂 Though if I actually statted up an NPC that broke the rule, I'd want to have at least an outline rationale as to how and why that worked, and how in principle PCs could do the same thing. The season "limit" will generally make reaching that point quicker for the players, albeit much slower for the characters. ("Some of whom are very old...") Of course, it's also pretty soft as limits go, especially given that there are explicit rules covering the case where you just ignore it.

It's a great question, and one of interesting even to we grognards (RQ and otherwise) that wonder how our interest is surviving its Aging Rolls. On the other hand, you might be asking in exactly the wrong place! Mind you, it may be that the real "outreach" reaction will happen as physical copies hit mailboxes, and even moreso as they hit gamestore shelves. If it gets good word-of-mouth, and I have every hope it will. You very generous person/sly pusher, you. 😄 Any early signs if they're falling on the "too... much... information..." side, or more in the direction of "this is great, only the lack of chariot rules and character generation is a real deal-breaker for me"?

Fair point and good spot, but again somewhat different from the original context, which is whether "gaining a passion" per RQG p236, and by extrapolation increasing one, should ever be without the "agreement" of the player. "This feels like a case where you need to have some sort of new or increased Passion!" "What about Hate GM at 60%?"

Yes, I prefer greatly "house rule". 🙂 It's a pet peeve of mine when authors and publishers do the "not the droids you're looking for" thing by "clarifying" new rules out of whole cloth, or worse do the "obviously" thing from the old maths lecturer joke. Better not to do likewise! It's a doubling of the total, but of course their second "pool" will be less effective overall if they're Runies in the first cult, and only initiates in the second. Great for building ablative overpowered NPCs, of course. "Yeah, that guy was an Initiate in nine different Chaos cults, . Totally built by the book!" "Whaaaaaaaa..." I think it'd be a weird corner case to be an Initiate/Initiate -- or Initiate/Initiate/Initiate, or Initiate/Initiate/Initiate/Initiate... -- instead of a Rune-level. More likely they're both, though granted the current core book doesn't explicitly address this case, it seems we have sample characters that do this, and it seems highly likely this is possible on some sort of basis. I think it's a pretty safe bet that Argrath isn't "only" a multiple initiate, and Harrek isn't "only" a Rune Lord. To put it mildly! We're a looooong way from a RQ writeup that covers (4!)/10 and (20!!)/ characters, even give or take some "and their companions!" wiggle-room. If anything if we were closer in the HW days, but that's not saying very much. 🙂

That entirely depends how frequently, and whether directed decreases and being balanced out by frequent experience ticks, or indeed by (semi-)directed or "agreed" increases, as the rules do provide some (admittedly indirect) support for doing. But I think the trouble is we're discussing this without any clarity for what "this" actually is, and if it even relates to the published rules for rolling against them for deliberate attempts to gain Inspiration. Just that "plenty of examples" exist, but none of them are to be "called out". D'oh! For the avoidance of continuing to fail to nail jello to the wall, let's actually say what the potentially problematic cases are. To be clear, I was talking about something else there: the idea of "mandatory" Passion increases, over the player's protests they don't want them. Players will not infrequently be somewhat unhappy with "you took away my stuff!" types of development, but that's par for the course in RQ-style games. What some may be a good deal less happy still with is having something added to their character, especially if it's a "telling me how I'm allowed to play my character" one.

I don't think there's any "canonical" -- or even post-canonical -- statement anywhere that it does or it doesn't. Hence the well-known "deuterocanonical" MOB theory as to why it does, the alternative "bezelled top" idea someone else once floated, and the perhaps most common position that it doesn't, obvs, because flat. So this might turn into another "it might be in yours but it's not in mine!" subthread, which is probably better in a post by itself, rather than twisting in and out of this one. IMO, your forum will vary, etc.