Alex

In play, it'll often work a lot like experience, because players -- being players! -- will often be keen to max-out their character's favoured runes. Nothing exceeds like excess, after all! So if you were looking to exactly roll back that experience, so that when they get to 1625 they look as close to by-the-book characters as possible, that's certainly a way to look at it. Conversely, it's also a personality thing. Young hotheads, or otherwise tending to the unchecked extremes of a particular attitude, which in the population at large might actually mellow or regress to the mean with age. I'd say do whatever works best for you and your group, which could be either of the above. But using it as written has the additional advantage of straightforwardness and not looking like you're short-changing the players if they see those and complain. Also, bear in mind the way Inspiration works, where you get a bene for a success, but also a pretty significant malus if you miss. So if you start those values too low, they don't just get less good, they quickly edge into zero craic territory, at least for that application.

Let's not sugar-coat it, making them unruly anythings. 🙂

Concur. It's once used (as "personality traits") in a context describing specifically Passions, and twice clearly meaning "Rune or Passion". But this is just natural language, not a Term of Art. If you really wanted a quasi-mechanical catchall then "Trait" would be perfectly serviceable, though that might be ever-so-slightly confusing for King Arthur Pendragon diehards. KAP Traits work very much like RQG Power Runes more specifically -- i.e. the "opposed pairs" thing. I commend adding both Passions and Runes to the house! Great addition to the game altogether.

I suspect -- to blue-sky somewhat, rather than opine on how to interpret the existing rules -- that it needs some sort of gloss of how 'normal' illusions work. Over and above the multi-dimensional spell descriptions, some sort of general unifying upsum. (Or maybe just more on Substance, which is where most of the gotchas lie.) Then on top of that, rather more on the scope of Hallucinate. I think for me, on the one hand, illusions generally are very costly and weak, but on the other, Substance is poorly integrated with the other. If it were required that Substance had to be cast stacked with one (all?) of the others, but those were cheaper overall, that'd make more sense to me. And on the third tentacle, I don't really get Hallucinate at all. Not sure how it's runnable without some sort of Toon Session Zero if anyone's playing a Trickster, and a certain amount of self-denying ordinance if the GM is using Eurmal worshippers with that. A feasible halfway house might be other 'package deal' Illusion rune magics that bundle different effects in a somewhat limited but more cost-effective manner, as I think was implied to exist at one point.

You can definitely make bludgeoning weapons out of either form, with enchanted getting a damage bonus. I'm not sure even enchanted is hard enough to make serviceable for slashing or impaling ones. I don't recall it even being said to make a difference for purposes of armour, but there might be more on any or all of this in the upcoming Gamemaster’s Guide.

The RQGCB omits -- to my confusion and shame! -- the RBM addition about using the Substance as a weapon, but I dunno if there's any further distinction about the "damage" thing, which is certainly in the CB, as quoted. On the one hand the Substance thing might be an overall limit, or on the other, it might just limit the damage you can do with a non-wielded illusion, by the Substance+Motion route. On the face of it, I'd go with the former interpretation. Adding additional points of Substance isn't just sheer mass, it's 'fanciness' of the object. If you want more damage, you need a more sophisticated and powerful illusion, whether it's the sophistication of a sack-of-potatoes weight being dropped on someone, or the power of a devilishly sharp and well-shaped and -tempered blade. [ ETA: Interesting, not an addition in the RBM, a substitution. So above speculation on my part entirely incorrect, apologies all for any addition to the confusion on this topic. Guess the CB Q&A on magic really does need to be read in conjunction with the RBM text. (Tricky though that may be if one lacks a copy.) ]

Indeed, definitely not the unicorns, IIRC it's only the five Great Tribes that do 'ride and herd the same animal' thing. They don't always even ride unicorns -- demand will typically exceed supply. Mostly yeah, 'borrowed' beasts from others. Cattle included -- the Pol Joni being the usual 'donor' of these. The tribes raid and war with each other all the time, but not generally on a 'just in time' basis. In fact, very often tribes will have mix-and-match herds including the totem beasts of other tribes, which they'll maintain for as long as suits. Eventually they might trade them, or of course, eat them. Yelornans also periodically gain adult women from other tribes, and depending on the circumstances they might come with some animals, tying into the not only riding unicorns thing again. So it'd be not usual to encounter a group of unicorn-riders herding mostly (let's say) bisons, with some smattering of other animals. I assume the in-the-works Prax Book will give us more detail on them. In the meantime, basically think culturally Praxian, in a similar minor-tribe mode as the likes of the rhino riders, except with a very different take on gender, and with a heavy dose of Sky mythology. Hope some of that helps.

Though I'm reminded of Natalie Haynes' Penelope musing to herself about whether to have assorted mendicant poets flogged...

That those might have customary community acceptance does admittedly fail the credibility test!

Isn't Ragnaglar the perp on both (sets of) occasions? Or is there some ambiguity about the first case? I've seen a couple of references to a version of the myth in Drastic Resolutions -- I assume the Chaos one?

Apparently these days we also have 'customary Tricksters', where the community more generally has a broader acceptance of (and I assume by implication, a degree of responsibility for). Just thought I'd mention that before you traumatise too many children's birthday parties by killing the clown! (Though full disclosure, there was another discussion on whether Sartarites had birthday parties, and the feeling in the room seemed to be "mostly not", and equally you might traumatise the children by not killing the clown...)

Hrm. Interesting. In general I imagine you can, yes -- cheap Trickster-grade set-dressing! But if you're planning on it being your lift home, as in this example, I'd presume it has to have enough Illusory SIZ for that to seem viable. An (invisible temporary) griffin with a subjective SIZ of 12 seems a little... underpowered. Exactly how -- or why! -- you'd make that precise I'm not sure, but let's throw that into the mix of hot-takes to argue over, and worry about systematising it later. Yes, I agree (and wonder) on all these counts. Imagine further that the Trickster is carrying someone over their Hallucination, and part of them or their equipment dangles through the span of the bridge. (Top-slung greatsword belonging to someone being bridal-carried: now there's an image.) Does even the Eurmali start to have suspension (yes) of disbelief issues at that point?

A hallucinatory illusory invisible roc, at that! Though I guess with a 12-point budget, no need to stint too much on the special effects, could throw in some SFX for your own amusement and convenience of reference. Then again, what SIZ is a roc? I was sure we had stats for them somewhere, can't find where. But two or three points of Hallucinate should cover a griffin, seems good enough! And... I dunno. Or likewise the Hallucinatory bridge -- it'll bear you (Wile E.), but can you carry others across on it? If not, then how and why can you even carry other things over it? Whereas if you can, just how much "buffer" do you need between them, and the... thing that's not really there? I'm tempted to suggest the Toon/Roger Rabbit approach: whatever's funny. Logical consistency exits as soon as Subjective Substance enters, and we're left making running repairs. And trying to construct a rough bracket of gameability between Hallucinate being useless (can't affect anyone else by any means), and it making all other illusion redundant (just needs a thin sliver of the Trickster intervening between the purportedly-them-only glamour and the rest of the world). Likely needs Illusory INT (or CHA), which is likely as objectively useful as it sounds...

Very much agree. You don't want every PC to be a random-looking assemblage of magical spare parts, so the concepts (runes, grimoires, traditions) and models for how to translate them into QW are very handy. But you certainly want to allow scope for One Unique Things, quirks, and such points of difference. Possibly even people who "repackage" their magical abilities in different ways, not that I have a great example of that off the cuff.

Ah, my bad, I was going by the RQGCB text, which omits the second clause. As you were on that on any need for "Motion". But main perplexity is the "invisibility is cheap, visibility is extra" thing, which sounds like the exact opposite of past statements about how illusions works in Glorantha. So for my money, it's either a rules glitch, or a fairly large setting change on the nature of magic I missed the memo on. For me, clearly not, as it's going well beyond the scope of "completely undetectable to anyone else". You "detect" Substance by physically interacting with it, so if it acts as solid for other people it's a first-order Illusion, not a Hallucination. But it's not exactly the clearest thing to interpret, as has been noted, so YGMV indeed -- all round!

Not an issue that one with Hallucinate. Well, other than in the sense of the Trickster having violent fantasies of mass deaths. which is a pretty ordinary day's work for 'em. Huh, hadn't consider Substance and only Substance. I think at a bare minimum you also need Motion -- unless you're using it for the final scene of Julius Caesar, with people eagerly impaling themselves on the sword. You also need rather of lot of RPP to do Greatsword-like damage. Does seem slightly perverse that an invisible illusionary weapon is easier and cheaper to create than a visible one, but if any deity deserves 'perverse'...

15m isn't likely to be enough to get you (naturally) healed, but if it's long enough to get you to a nearby healer, that's a good day's triage work...

That's an interesting one! I wonder if that might be running into the limits, not so much of Hallucination itself, but of Illusory Substance itself. Does it counter the venom temporarily, re-poisoning you when the magic expires?

I think (to echo Jeff I think) that changing the nature of an entire species, all at once, is a vast enterprise. A good model (of a heroic effort with in some ways a poor result) is Cragspider's attempt to lift the Curse of Kin. I note that... Craggy is a pretty big cheese. Do you have your own Dragon Pass counter yet? A pet True Dragon? Are you, indeed, a storied demigod from before the Dawn? If not, you're already well behind the curve! She achieved something, but not at all what she'd hoped to. It didn't affect the whole species. It established an 'opt-in' to do the same thing -- the classic hero's path. Others must follow her example if they want to do the same thing, albeit on a smaller scale, via a magic ritual. So the likeliest result -- other than the vastly predominant "disastrous" outcomes -- would be something like the Cleansed One subcult of Zola Fel. Broos can choose to join to try to free themselves of their chaos taint, or some other such partial reversal, mitigation, or other weirding of their... Brooness. The chaos taint, their physical form, their method of reproduction, their passions/attitudes, and so on. If you really wanted a magical means of doing it to Broos, without their active willful involvement in favour, to get an idea of the difficulty, look at other 'permanent transformation' type spells: they're multi-point one-use rune magics, per use per target. And that's after the HQ to establish that in the first place. And reversing the effects of chaos is likely considerably harder than the existing examples,to boot.

I don't follow your distinction between these two days. In the first the rope shares the "subjective substance" experience with the Trickster, but in the second, the horses and charioteers do not? Because the former isn't animate, and the latter isn't? What about the chariot itself, then, does it get smashed, after the horses have gone through the wall? Is it treated as part of the "animate unit"? If so, how exactly are we scoping this in the general case? Personally I'd play the "rope" case entirely differently, and the "chariot" case in the way you suggest. I think this pretty clear exemplifies the problem, rather than any sort of solution.

In both cases it gives a procedure for what happens with hit locations, but it's not exactly worded as a precondition. You could make the judgement that's the intent (much as GL suggests with the POW/MP wording), though personally to me it reads more like a reminder of the standard resistance requirement, rather than an initial one. Then again, it's not like I'm deeply attached to the old-school "agitate them molecules!" interpretation, so if a more detailed gloss happens along that stipulates that it must target a magical entity, rather than a physical one, I'd be happy to go with that.

Don't know I'd allow that particular application. Skeletons are large, discreet, and at least conceptually (as far as the caster is concerned) similar to typical animate targets. If I'm stuck in a room and want to zap the lock, I can target it by touch, concentration, etc. But how am I going to isolate a weapon or a particular piece of armour, especially given that I can't target an individual hit location? Doesn't pass Osi Umenyiora's smell test for me -- and I'm not brave enough to argue with Osi!

Probably. But it's been kicking around in that same form since 1985. Absent any clarifying work on in in the 30+ years between "3" and "4", not the most likely thing to get to the top of the stack in the RQG process, would be my guess.

I'm inclined to use a similar rationale, but to use 0 MP as the resistance, which is also vaguely compatible with the "treat null as zero" approach. While MPs have gone into the creation, that doesn't mean they remain in any form "accessible by" or useful to the skelly. Or regard as "0 MP to the nearest integer", as distinct from wholly inanimate entities with no MPs (or POW) whatsoever. From a rules-drafting point of view, there's a degree of ambiguity about the word "target" which generally presupposes an animate such, and in particular here is implied to have hit locations. But it's also occasionally used in connection with spells that allow inanimate victimisation -- of the Core Book spirit magic spells, only Ignite seems to qualify. Ideally there'd be distinct wording for these classes of cases, but it's understandable there's not when one sense seems to predominate.

Arguably that is a mechanical differentiation, but by way of restricting how "packaging" works, rather than introducing entire new apparatuses for each. Which I personally think is the enlightened/obvious compromise (thank you, Karallan!) based on the way past HW/HQ/QW treatments have tackled it.