Alex

8 minutes ago, ffilz said:

I've never considered when to not allow POW gain roll, but rather than saying 0 MP/POW means no gain, I would say no gain if you have a 95% chance of success, or maybe have a mathematical 100% or better chance (which pegs at 95%). Someone with a single digit POW deserves all the opportunities they can get to improve.

Y(RQ edition)WV, but RQG covers this explicitly.  "Spells that have a 95% chance of success against an enemy do not provide sufficient stress to allow a POW gain roll."

Probably so.  I think there's some legacy baggage where they came up with a good mechanic for Affinities, then decided to make things crunchier in an ad hoc manner, hence spirit magic and sorcery -- and mysticism, my goodness -- had to be different for the sake for being different.

10 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

The Initiate used their goddesses' power to kill someone!** That's full on excommunication!

I guess the question is, does the goddess even (appear to) "notice" this?  The death is outwith the immediate scope of the use of the magic:  the divine blessing is invoked, happens, ends, all pretty much instantaneously, everyone is still alive and well.  "It's not the fall I'm worried about, it's the ground."  This is also "common" rune magic, which seems like it's be less somehow less intensely scrutinised by the Otherworld when and as it occurs.  Or in the extreme case, say a CA initiate does this, but using a different RPP in the process.  But regardless, CA does potentially have "eyes on" this via the perp themself, whether or not she discerns their motivation for the magical act itself.

And the secondary question is, do any other CA worshippers notice this?  Either first hand (in which case it's all yet-more visible to the goddess, as in the first case), or when the rumour-mill reaches the local temple.  Other Lightbringers might have scope to magically meddle here, to a lesser degree, or anyone inclined to tattle by mundane means.

If there's a pattern of behaviour here, the goddess will eventually "notice" it if only via the initiate's applicable Runes'n'Passions.  Unless we're back in the Illuminated case, of course!

Just now, Dragon said:

An intriguing prospect. I do not recall a RAW method to achieve Runes much above 100.

OK, "bad example", as Colonel O'Neill famously (and repeatedly) said. But you get the general idea!

Just now, Dragon said:

Hence, you must be saying that said character did some nefarious or extremely unusual runic manipulations to achieve those runes. Much heroquesting!

Now you've got it! 😄

Thought experiment:  what sort of "Air" rune rating would someone like Lokamayadon -- said to be trying to supplant the god himself according to his detractors, maybe actually largely responsible for the modern cult, if you believe his revisionist defenders -- have in his pomp?  Or Argarth Orlanthsson/Orlanth Argarthi at a similar point?  Or is there there some other mechanic entirely at work here than Rune ratings, or have we just thrown away the RQ completely at this point?  (Pass the Questworlds rules, or 13thAG, or Fate, or AW, or Dragon Pass...)

6 hours ago, davecake said:

My favourite Gloranthan ghost story by far is the HeroQuest one where you deal with the village of ghosts by undertaking a lawsuit on their behalf against their neighbors. 

Which story is that, remind us?

10 minutes ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

Not for me (I don't know if it is my glorantha, or the "core glorantha" however, you may be right RAW or not, don't know 🙂

I suspect I am! 🙂  For example, from RQG on divination:  "The god does not know what a Rune Master or initiate is thinking and cannot deduce motivations."  I think that's pretty consistent with how it's been written since Bernard Hinault was a fresh-faced young cyclist.  (Bonus French reference!)  Now of course, one could give oneself some wriggle-room by arguing that what a deity knows, and what a deity is telling for the purposes of divination are distinct.  Or that "motivations" and "thoughts" are in a different category from "thing I specifically want to accomplish for the purposes of this use of rune, in which the goddess and I are in a sense temporarily one".

10 minutes ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

I consider pc paid with 1 POW to "open" a channel with their god and now know how to ask the god to gain this power. but the answer, here and now, is not automatic

Sure, I think that's a valid way of looking at it.  But at least in the usual case (RQ rune magic, all happening on SR 1) there's no "oral arguments" phase of pleading the case here -- it's a pretty snap decision, on whatever basis it's made on.  There's indeed a roll involved, but it's an "incarnate the god" -- or that runic portion the worshipper and the deity have in common, to take the rules literally on that -- thing, not a 'second-guess the worthiness of the action taken in that capacity' one.  You could certainly factor that in, but logically that'd be an additional roll (or a penalty to the first one, or the like), rather than a rationale of it.

10 minutes ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

So what understand the god ? what its follower believe and... show : the ernaldan initiate is not an ernaldan initiate but an eart goddess ennemy initiate or thing like that.

Or an "imperfect vessel" of Ernalda.  Others are available!  Looking for manifestations of my wife in aaallllll the wrong places...

But look at an even simpler example.  Orlanthi initiates knock lumps out of each other on a regular basis.  Does Orlanth have a myth about beating himself up?  (Actually, I guess there are stranger things one could be asked to imagine...)  But we don't find ourselves asking, "which side does Orlanth want to win here?" in the process of deciding of whether rune magic activates or not.  

10 minutes ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

In this approach, illumination provides a better power than what is described by default in the rules :

if you are not persecuted by any spirit of reprisal, that is because you are able to persuade your god that you are a good worshiper. In the same manner, you are able to persuade your god that everything (rune magic) you ask must be done because that is a good request. The others persepective is not an issue, you able to convice the god that what you are experiencing, seeing, ... is not the same situation than others.

That seems a little convoluted to me.  I think if anything, Illumination underlines the fact that deities are indeed pretty limited in what they know of their worshippers' minds, and that turning into a cross-legged levitating type simply makes that moreso.  They're still seeing other perspectives of what you're up to, but your own initiatory state is even more compartmentalised to them.  "I see your Air rune is 90%, and your Movement one is 70%, excellent!"  <fails to take cognisance of the 120% Status, 140% Fire, 160% Earth, and 210% Moon>

21 minutes ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

no spirit, no runic, no sorcery

incomprehensible draconic surgery

But no magic other than spirit, rune, and sorcery!  So, some incomprehensible mixture of those (and some "time me, gentlemen!" quack with a dragonbone saw).

22 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Sorcery is your friend for this: Accelerate Healing. Dreadfully overpriced spell, but a wound like that probably takes your head location down 1D4+1, which with a good constitution will take you a week to recuperate from. Possibly a strip of fresh willow bast to separate the two halves.

This probably should be done to you while you are in deep meditation anyway, and possibly for days.

Ermagawd eXtreme physical austerities!  (Or whatever the old Greg jargon for that "misapplied" mystical path was.)

10 minutes ago, Baron Wulfraed said:

Count me out... How long is one on a liquid diet while the two sides of the split heal? I wouldn't think any healing spells would help as they should see the split itself as the injury and rejoin the edges.

Old jokes about meddling in the affairs of dragons and ketchup spring to mind.

Maybe healing magic would work if you "bind up" or otherwise physically separate the halves in the process?  Or maybe the patience and suffering involved in natural healing is a desirable or necessary part of the process.

1 hour ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

As GM-goddess, the divine blasphemy to me is to use my/goddess power for a bad reason, I did not grant you my power to restore order, that's others gods job.

IIRC, the Gloranthan deities don't have access to their initiates' intent, broadly speaking -- much like mortals in that respect, except that unlike mortals, when they don't know, they won't presume!  They'll be aware of whether they're acting in an affine manner, a contrary manner, or a "seems tangential to me, who know? mortals gonna mortal!" one, and that's about it, I think.

45 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

Humakti can handle ghost to an extent - Truesword cuts them up but good, and even more so with Sword Trance - but aren’t as flexible with it as shamans in general and DF shamans in particular. Which seems like how it should be.

Certainly.  Humakti can "handle" all sorts of entities and problems...  all in pretty much the same way. 🙂  (What was that line about "taking care of" something -- in the Robert de Niro sense.)  But there's things they're especially mythologically and temperamentally opposed to, and things that might just happen to get killed -- sooner or later, at least!  Undead are the former, spirits are the latter.

24 minutes ago, svensson said:

Several posters said something to the effect when discussing ghosts and spirits.

i.e. when discussing ghosts and spirits.  Not when discussing undead.  Thus, not to the same effect at all.

2 hours ago, Dragon said:

I loved Asimov too. But, the entire idea that a certain robot can override the Three Laws by inventing a Zero-th Law was certainly rules-mongering in my estimation.

That's kinda like them Gregging the previous set of rules. 🙂

38 minutes ago, soltakss said:

Hellions, those flying head things from RQ3, they didn't have POW but were not necessarily undead.

Thanks, I'd have been a long while remembering those (and a while before thinking to check RQ3 Book 4).  Are those even Gloranthan?  Generic?  Sandy cheese dream? 🙂

1 hour ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

I learned a new thing about ur-english 😛

i.e. German? 🙂

4 hours ago, Darius West said:

Strangely enough, we can actually refer to plenty of old records about harvests.

I was about to say something along the lines of, "but do we have Bronze Age Andean maize harvest records?", but that's kinda a contradiction on its face. so I'd better not.  

4 hours ago, Darius West said:

The rules at present can cope with 1 crop per year AFAICT.  And if we are going to allow the Lunars to bring in 3-4 crops a year of maize, will we also give them the nutritional problems associated with a maize diet's poverty in trace minerals?

I doubt it's beyond human wit to tweak to rules to fit it, I'm just not seeing it as fitting either the desired correspondence, or the desired connotations.  And if it were to have that many annual crops as a matter of course, doesn't it dilute the significance of the human sacrifice element?  Or are we going to have six crops, as long as the blood keeps flowing?  If I were making a hot-take suggestion, if anything it'd be a one-crop baseline and additional blood crops at greater and greater sacrificial cost -- you known there might be another Gloranthan eurogame in there!

4 hours ago, Darius West said:

I am well aware of the whole Glorantha bison =/=Earth bison, Glorantha bronze =/= Earth bronze, but I don't like it.  If it isn't a bison, why call it a bison?  If it isn't maize, why call it maize?

It's the eternal struggle of too much analogue vs not enough.  If something is being pitched as a mythology that speaks to a modern-day sensibility, the tensions and contradictions are built-in.  Inevitably, some people's most dearly treasured choices will sound bum notes for others.

20 minutes ago, Stephen L said:

Turn undead spell, P101, red book of magic:

Oh yeah, in fact that's covered by that same route in the core book, p347.  Should have remembered that, after quibbling about "POW vs MPs" rolls as against "POW vs POW" ones.

13 minutes ago, Jeff said:

Resurrected folk (even self-resurrected folk) are not undead - they Living beings that have defeated Death.

Can't help but imagine some Humakti muttering a little about that.  "Very nasty, but we can't touch you for it."

3 hours ago, soltakss said:

The defining factor seems to be that they have Magic points and not POW, but not everything that has Magic Points is necessarily undead.

Help me out here...  are there also, say, enchanted creatures that fall into this category?

3 hours ago, soltakss said:

I can't think of any undead that have POW, though.

I believe we've had statements -- for example in the RQ3 Bestiary -- that this is a defining characteristic of undead.  (A necessary but not sufficient one.)  One can imagine some sort of lichoid counterexample -- a ghost bound into a non-living body, or permanently dominantly possessing a living past the point of extinction of its original consciousness? -- but evidently these are either cosmologically impossible or pragmatically non-occurring.

18 hours ago, soltakss said:

There was an Isaac Asimov story where he was exploring the Three Laws of Robotics.

I was very fond of Asimov in my impressionable youth, but as a model for a legalistic set of "laws" for how theistic magic should work in Glorantha, I really can't think of a worse model one might follow.

13 hours ago, Ironwall said:

So my players recently gave a donkey with the moon rune painted on it head to lieka black spear as an insult. So I'm now wondering. The orlanthi seem to be a society that wouldn't take being insulted lightly are there any insults in Orlanthi society that WILL result in violence 

"Will" is a strong threshold.  "Your Will Will Vary."  As Rodney says, always an option, but remember the converse, that there's always another way.  One other way being, being the "bigger person"...  another other way being, coming up with a bigger insult in return.

What's a good generic insult been I think pretty well-covered, kudos posters.  Question their cultural virtues and compliance with social norms.  But if you really want to enrage someone, make it personal.  Tell some brazen lie about their dearest claim to fame, or say something that's a little too close to the bone about their generally known flaws.

I'm sure we're all aware, and is maybe even implicit in the question, the Orlanthi don't have a "sticks and stones" attitude to verbal insults versus physical force.  Or a even hard and fast legal distinction, in terms of one being a "criminal" matter, and the other a "civil" one.  If you're provoked into killing some cur for vilely calumniating you, and there's a subsequent suit, you might not merely argue that in mitigation, you might counter-claim for the offence against your honour, and assert that one tenth of your wergild is greater than the the full amount -- if correctly assessed! -- for their worthless hide: they owe you, stump up.

9 hours ago, Zagmuk said:

Introducing a few new players to RQ this week, here are the minis I kitbashed for the game.  I use the metallic painting as it takes a minute or three vs. hours for colour. 

The fantasy Bronze Age has never looked bronzer!  And pretty fantastic, too.

19 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Yeah, speaking personally as a newer fan of Glorantha, it feels a bit unnecessarily specific to bring up the Praxian term for institutionalized ancestor worship (ie. Daka Fal) when discussing ancestor worship in general, but I recognize that this is an artifact of how RuneQuest publications have taken form.

While my personal preference is generally for the lower-sodium options on the Monomythic buffet, bear in mind there's scope for actual cultural contact here.  In particular between Sartar and Prax, so that's likely a very generally accepted correspondence.  And via the God Learners, of course:  not always right, but rarely bashful in having spread their ideas around!

1 hour ago, Akhôrahil said:

Will be interesting to see how this is handled, as the CoT rules absolutely were this.

My hot-take is this will ultimately come down to what happens at the table.  Illumination finesses a lot of the "god's eye view" restrictions on what you can do magically, but does nothing -- or worse! -- for the human side.  And there's inevitably going to be a lot of different ways that could end up being played out.

Just remember what Arkat said.  No powergaming without respect and understanding!

On 1/6/2022 at 9:53 PM, jajagappa said:

"[...] This is a bigger limitation for horali than for dronari (mainly because as long as the dronari feed everyone and do the work, it is rare to ask them questions)."

Enjoying this image as something of a companion-piece to the producers of Star Wars recounting their practical and mental struggles with the '70s British film-technician unions...

1 hour ago, Ali the Helering said:

Which is a true advantage!

Hence the well-known saying, "To err is human, but it takes a deity to really f-- ...oul things up!"