Ian Cooper

On 1/11/2024 at 12:44 AM, g33k said:

*cough*cough*BRP*cough*cough*

As Chaosium's narrative (and universal) game system, perhaps?
🤡

 

("storyteller" being a specific other game-system from another publisher; "narrative" seems to be the preferred term for engines like HW/HQ/QW & Fate &c)

I prefer storytelling. I don't want to pull in a term from GNS, and Greg used the term storytelling as far back as Prince Valiant.

8 hours ago, Robin "RoM" Mitra said:

Ok, thanks.

And how do I distinguish whether my publication is also available under the ORC licence or whether the entire publication (except the SRD parts) is protected by copyright?

You need to add any copyright information for your text, but your rules contents is automatically covered by ORC which is viral. You may choose to highlight your Reserved Content so folks can be clear what is not rules content.

16 hours ago, Yazurkial said:

Huh. I had forgotten that page exists!

No one who has been playing in Glorantha for 40 years is going to agree with all the editorial decisions that have to be made.

Something I have realized over time is that Greg saw Glorantha as quite mutable and tended to shape it for the stories that those he was collaborating with wanted to tell. A lot of material that is not canon now was co-created with Greg, and for those creators that Glorantha seemed to represent Greg's viewpoint and was "canon" at that time. But when Greg then went on to work with another creator (or even work by himself) then Glorantha would shift for the needs of that creative endeavor. Understandably some of those creators felt betrayed that the vision their work derived from had changed. Hence the name "Gregging" and the notion that he was an Arkati Trickster shaman.

I think this is the truest meaning of YGWV, that even for Greg Glorantha varied, depending on who he was collaborating with, and what they wanted to create. HW/HQ but also RQ were all YWGV representations by Greg.

With Greg's passing even more so. Perhaps we should regard older visions not as "wrong" but simply different inspirations (to borrow that term from Glorantha).

Chaosium/Jeff is the current creative force, and so our current Glorantha represents that inspiration. The point is that it is entirely in keeping within the tradition of Glorantha that it changes to reflect its creative leads.

If we do get to publish a QW Glorantha - and that is an "if" - then it only makes sense for it to be based in the current inspiration from Chaosium.

Nothing stops you using an older inspiration, but for most folks the latest inspiration is that one they want. As someone who worked on older inspirations I have chosen to make my peace with changes from the inspirations I worked on, I hope others can too.

10 minutes ago, Yazurkial said:

Ian:

Are you trying to reimpose the three (and a half?) worlds view as well? It's not so relevant for beginning players, obviously. But the HQ mechanic lends itself to the higher-level-player complexity that Greg talked about in Arcane Lore. Even at low levels, the treatment of great spirits as gods in RQG rubs me wrong. But it works OK as a mechanic at low levels. I haven't tried it at high levels for an animist yet.

The world view is that of RQG

I have a rough draft that I use which leans into Glorantha as presented in RQG. My goal is to make it easy to use RQG books with a QW Glorantha genre pack.

I also realized from playing with D&D players, that rules that are too "improvisational" are hard for folks that don't know the setting. So you either end up writing a treatise on metaphysics to guide them or you just mirror RQG spell lists. The heart of this is the "credibility test" which we emphasize more in QW. What you can do with "incredible powers" is defined by the table understanding of the setting's "rules" for that power. RQG defines the rules for Glorantha then for our purpose.

Some notes from my current draft:

Quote

In RuneQuest your character has skill ratings for all the elemental and power Runes. Because QuestWorlds focuses on a smaller range of abilities that your character is renowned for, rather than rate them at everything, we recommend only taking abilities for their most defining runes.  In earlier editions of QuestWorlds your character’s personality and magic was defined by Three Runes; you can use three runes as a default, but feel free to have any number of rune keywords.
    •    In RuneQuest, your Runes are used as the direct ability to cast Rune Magic, but separate skills are used for spirit magic and each Sorcery spell. In QuestWorlds we always use your rating with the breakout from the Rune you know the spell under. This approach is a simplification which is consistent with the different focus of a storytelling game.
    •    RuneQuest quantifies spells with numbers for duration, range, and effect. In QuestWorlds, with its storytelling focus and use of ‘theatre of the mind,’ we provide broad guidelines about what is credible, and modifiers for difficulty, but we don’t quantify magic.
    •    RuneQuest has Rune Masters, which have not existed in prior editions of QuestWorlds. To better align RuneQuest and QuestWorlds we have added the Rune Master status to QuestWorlds.
    •    Becoming a shaman or sorcerer requires possession of specific Runes. This requirement does not exist in RuneQuest. It is added here for alignment with how these magic systems worked in prior editions of QuestWorlds and to indicate the uniqueness of these statuses.
    •    RuneQuest uses the term Allied Spirit, but previous versions of QuestWorlds used Divine Companion. We equate both terms here but use allied spirit in preference to match RuneQuest.

Quote

Write a spirit magic spell on your character sheet as a breakout from the appropriate Rune.

g Air Rune 10
Spirit Magic:
    Sharp +5

Quote

Write on your character sheet: Initiate of (Deity) under the Rune you use as your divine connection to the god, e.g. Initiate of Orlanth.

g Air Rune 17
Initiate of Orlanth

 

Quote

Write a rune magic spell on your character sheet as a breakout from the appropriate Rune. You can learn a rune spell if it is common or listed for your god.

g Air Rune 17

Rune Magic:
  Lightning  +5

Quote

In QuestWorlds we treat invoking divine aid as spending one or more story points. Your GM should decide how many story points dependent on how great the miracle is that you are asking the deity to perform. Regardless of the number of story points you spend, the actions must be within the capacity of the deity and the GM.

 I have some notes on rituals, illumination etc too.

But the key here, and as always with QW when creating a genre pack is to emulate the "feel" of the existing game, and make it easy to translate the materials.

Of course, you can just use an earlier HW/HQ approach, if you have that and prefer.

On 12/11/2023 at 6:29 PM, Robin "RoM" Mitra said:

Ok, so if I verbatim copy the whole paragraph of 0.1.2 QuestWorlds ORC License Statement from the QW SRD that would do it? Or would that be too much? I guess I am confused what/who "this product", "our" and "you" refers to.

--------------------------------

This product is licensed under the ORC License held in the Library of Congress at TX 9-307-067 and available online at various locations including www.chaosium.com/orclicense, www.azoralaw.com/orclicense, www.gencon.com/orclicense and others. All warranties are disclaimed as set forth therein.

This product is the original work of Moon Design Publications.

If you use our ORC Content, please also credit us as follows:

QuestWorlds © copyright 2019–2023 Moon Design Publications LLC

Along with our logo

[logo 1 and 2]

Reserved Material elements in this product include but may not be limited to all artwork, illustrations, and graphic design, and trade dress, and all trademarks, including Call of Cthulhu, Chaosium, Future-World, Magic World, Pendragon, RuneQuest, Superworld, and Worlds of Wonder, and all other elements designated as Reserved Material under the ORC license.

QuestWorlds SRD with annotations for individual contributions can be found at GitHub: https://github.com/ChaosiumInc/QuestWorlds/

You don't need most of this, as this is about protecting our content as @JonL points out.

What you should do:

* Understand the ORC license which is viral. If you publish under our ORC license any rules material you publish falls under ORC too.

* Protect your reserved content with a Reserved Material statement.

So you will need:

"This product is licensed under the ORC License held in the Library of Congress at TX 9-307-067 and available online at various locations including www.chaosium.com/orclicense, www.azoralaw.com/orclicense, www.gencon.com/orclicense and others. All warranties are disclaimed as set forth therein. "

and as described above you need:

"QuestWorlds © copyright 2019–2023 Moon Design Publications LLC

Along with our logo

[logo 1 and 2]"

and then your own Reserved Material statement.

@JonL is right that we don't really need the Reserved Material statement in the SRD as there is none, it's an artifact of us writing the book at the same time that we can relax at some point.

There is a separate conversation around group contests, but for clarity:

• Player A gets success, opposition does not. Add one success to PCs total
• Player B gets failure, opposition succeeds. Add one success to Opposition total
• Player C gets success, opposition succeeds, but higher roll to the player. No advantage to either side. PC individual outcome to defeat opponent.

Despite the player getting a success over their opponent, they do not contribute meaningfully to the outcome

For anyone who really dislikes counting successes, then just use the older approach of awarding a point that is one greater than the number of successes.

This would change the outcome to a tie:

• PC #1 gets zero successes and the opposition has zero successes (but the PC has the higher roll): 1 Point to PCs
• PC #2 gets zero successes and the opposition has zero successes (but the PC has the higher roll): 1 Point to PCs
• PC #3 has the opposition getting 1 success versus PC #3's zero successes (but the PC has the higher roll): 2 Points to Opposition

 Both sides have two points, and the outcome is a tie. Which is either, something happens to change the terms of the contest, or give a zero degree victory to the PCs.

The trade-off here is what you want to be more decisive in the fiction: the fact that a couple of PCs scrape a victory, or that one is beaten. IMO the story about the PC losing decisively trumps the direction of the narrative from the two who hold off their opponents, just. I think that is how fiction works. YMMV.

But yes, how we tally the outcome in this case, is different to a sequence. If you wanted those individual scrape by results to have more meaning, then perhaps run a sequence instead.

On 7/17/2023 at 12:58 PM, radmonger said:

The simplest approach is to apply a variant of the  costly victory rules. If a PC doesn't want to accept the result of a decisive roll, they have to take 1 wound level for each success the opposition has scored. Doing this resets the contest.

 

 

 

 

 

This is what Chained Contests are for

On 7/11/2023 at 5:22 PM, Stan Shinn said:

Over on RPG.net, @Ian Cooper had summarized QuestWorlds as follows:

Is "If you tie for successes (including zero) high-roll wins" only applicable for a simple contest (one PC rolling) but ignored in Group Contests? Consider the following:

3 PCs are having a group contest. The rolls come out as:

• PC #1 gets zero successes and the opposition has zero successes (but the PC has the higher roll)
• PC #2 gets zero successes and the opposition has zero successes (but the PC has the higher roll)
• PC #3 has the opposition getting 1 success versus PC #3's zero successes (but the PC has the higher roll)

If you're simply going off of total successes, then the opposition would win (1 net success vs. 0 for the PCs). 

Yep, the PCs do not get the prize. I would probably treat as No..But result. You lose, but you get some insight that gives you advantage next time. We go more into that kind of concept in the Core Book.

But note that individual outcomes would be that PC#1 and PC#2 have a zero degree victory, but PC#3 has a one-degree defeat. So PC #3 would suffer a worse personal consequence if that was important.

From the Core book:

Mastery Notation

QuestWorlds' notation for masteries runs right-to-left: number of masteries then target number. Where there are no masteries, we can simply omit the mastery symbol and just record the target number, so 17M0 is just 17. Where there is just one mastery we can omit the number, so 17M1 is just 17M.

When speaking out loud, we usually swap back to left-to-right and say target number and then number of masteries. So 17M is 17 and one mastery and 17M2 is 17 and two masteries. Some folks like to remember this by thinking about the way that we represent an exponent in mathematics. So 17M2 is 17 to the power of two masteries.

Some find this notation a little confusing because we read them right-to-left, and not the conventional English left-to-right, particularly as it swaps when spoken out loud.

For anyone who finds the default way confusing, we recommend an alternative notation—the mastery dot notation.

Under this approach write the target number, followed by a dot for each mastery.

17 is 17 and no masteries.

17● is 17 and one mastery.

17●● is 17 and two masteries, and so on.

For a given genre, you may want to use a more evocative symbol than ●. A SF setting might use ☆ to represent a mastery, and a setting like Chaosium’s Glorantha may use an in-world symbol like the mastery rune W to represent a mastery.

On 8/16/2023 at 7:54 PM, Stan Shinn said:

In simple contests, you resolve ties by the higher roll getting the victory. Does this also apply to Group Contests and rolls in Sequences?

Here's the QuestWorlds SRD rule for Contests and ties:

"2.3.7 Outcome ... If you both have the same number successes, including if you both have zero successes, then the higher roll has a victory and gains the prize. If your rolls tie, then there is a standoff with neither side able to take control of the prize."

A contest follows the rule for a contest. A contest within a group contest follows the rules for a contest. A contest sequence, whether a round or exchange (for wagered) is a contest.

The rules for contests apply regardless of framing.

All that changes is how we interpret the outcome.

We just don't do dates, it's a Chaosium thing. Marketing wants to control the messaging, not have one campaign interfere with another. But it really is imminent.

On 4/8/2023 at 6:32 PM, Lordabdul said:

Their own main cultural hero is Arim the Pauper, who founded the Kingdom of Tarsh a long time ago, his wife Sorana Tor (a sort of Earth demi-goddess), and their twin kids who started the Twin Dynasty of Tarsh. Not Sartar and his dynasty like in, well, Sartar.

When we were working on the HeroQuest Dragon Pass Gazetteer, Greg told me that the Tarshite cultural hero is Yarandros. He likened Arim to Moses, leading people to a 'promised land' but Yarandros is the King David, and the extent of his conquests, Greater Tarsh, which reaches as far as the Quivin Mts. is as much a touchstone for many Tarshites as are the borders of David's Israel.

Not sure if that is any help to you.

On 3/30/2023 at 1:08 AM, radmonger said:

part 2. tie breaks

The tie break mechanic is built into the description of the basic contest, although it is not actually used by some of the contest varieties. I find this perhaps a bit confusing; I think it really logically belongs in section 4.3, _Multiple Contestants, One Prize. 

Certainly in both reality and fiction, let alone sport, it is pretty normal for things to end inconclusively for now. In act 1, the villain shows up, fights with the heroes for a bit, and then departs unscathed. This works much more naturally if the dice say 'it was a draw' rather than the gm having to say 'you win, but nothing happens'.

Without any tie break rule, the chances of getting more success than the resistance are;

 

This is a lot less regular, with the effects of mastery boundaries evident.

 

 

So a tie usually means - the contest is inconclusive; it's only a PC victory if the GM can't decide on an interesting story reason why the contest ends in a stalemate.

>Maybe allow those numbers to creep up every other time -- or every third time, or whatever -- the players get to advance their characters.

Advancement is optional. So you could decide that it doesn't seem credible that certain abilities can rise above a certain level in your genre pack, because there are no "incredible powers" to explain it. Feel free to do that. Be aware though that some of a superior skill is how you use it to resolve problems over sheer raw talent.

>I for one am fascinated about how to run missile combat in HQ.

It's pretty much like any other contest. Remember the 'credibility test' for actions, which is usually what folks forget when they do "thought examples" over real play.

10 hours ago, Khelbiros said:

The resistance roll. Maybe it's just my brain, but it was a bit taxing to roll against each player action, compare successes etc, adjudicate the result. In the end, I was running it like a game with a static difficulty e.g 0 successes = Failure, 1 success - Okay success (Yes BUT), 2 successes - Awesome! That worked pretty well for the purposes of the demo and everyone had fun. 

Thanks for the feedback.

One observation is that I would tend to roll only when there was conflict. Otherwise I would tend to give an assured success if you had an appropriate skill. I might make you roll if you were stretching credibility as to what you ability could do.

In other games, folks tend to roll whenever you try to do something you have an ability for. Hence the need for an 'ability check'. In QW I would ask whether it will add drama to see if you succeed or not, bearing in mind you might fail, and if not move on. Picking a Lock? If adventure lies beyond it's really "do you have an ability for that", then it is an assured contest and you do it. Usually the resistance is whatever consequence you face from failure, and once you figure that out, you understand how the story will branch, and understand why you, the GM, are rolling.

17 hours ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

@Ian Cooper  Interestingly, our timeline will also include stealing the Red Cows. but from the Cinsina.

Your concept that because all the Telmori heirs are dead, it's not "kinstrife" so it's legal for Argrath to order the killing of the other Telmori and wipeout an entire Tribe of Sartar, is very, well, cynical and somehow very Argrathy!

BTW, I haven't played 11L, who is it that kills off the Telmori heirs?  My inner cynic / conspiracy theorist thinks some of it is Argrath or his cronies.  🙂

Spoilers for 11L

I moved the timing of the seminar, in case that helps: https://tabletop.events/conventions/chaosium-con-2023/schedule/245

Just now, Ian Cooper said:

So I had a plan for this as part of the direction of events following the 11 Lights. It was intended as subsequent parts of that campaign.

It goes like this:

- Agrath needs to fulfill a prophecy that the Aurochs will return to Dragon Pass. "This was accomplished because Argrath had brought aurochs back to the land." (PS It's not clear what 'this' is though it seems to be about defeating the chaos hordes so perhaps it is help from Urox in some way, perhaps via awakening some powers of the Black Spear??)

- The Stealing of the Giant's Cows that the Red Cow clan perform is a quest to birth Aurochs. But they only get their famous Red Cows. Why? Because they cheat and go in through the back door.

The Cinsina cut a deal with Agrath. Kill the Telmori and we will take you on the Stealing of the Giant's Cows heroquest. Gather enough troops and we can avoid the 'cheat' and our cattle will birth aurochs.

Now, all the Sartarite heirs amongst the Telmori are dead (this happens in the 11L game - every Telmori heir dies - in case you missed it). So Argrath no longer risks kinstrife by killing the Telmori. He needs to fulfill the prophecy, so he does the deal with the Cinsina (and presumably other tribes of the Jonstown Confederation).

They murder the Telmori.

I imagine that the Wolfskinners, the Cinsina warband, form the core of the Wolfrunners after that.

One day I might get this all out via the JC, but this is where I was going with that campaign, in case it helps you.

 

 

PS One aspect of the quest Argrath has to do, is that after driving out the giants, he has to hold "Red Cow Fort" on the heroplane against a counterattack, and it comes from the Red Broo (who get mentioned in the 11L as a possible Heroquest Suprise). I imagine it is a fairly brutal affair.

So I had a plan for this as part of the direction of events following the 11 Lights. It was intended as subsequent parts of that campaign.

It goes like this:

- Agrath needs to fulfill a prophecy that the Aurochs will return to Dragon Pass. "This was accomplished because Argrath had brought aurochs back to the land." (PS It's not clear what 'this' is though it seems to be about defeating the chaos hordes so perhaps it is help from Urox in some way, perhaps via awakening some powers of the Black Spear??)

- The Stealing of the Giant's Cows that the Red Cow clan perform is a quest to birth Aurochs. But they only get their famous Red Cows. Why? Because they cheat and go in through the back door.

The Cinsina cut a deal with Agrath. Kill the Telmori and we will take you on the Stealing of the Giant's Cows heroquest. Gather enough troops and we can avoid the 'cheat' and our cattle will birth aurochs. (Remember that those amongst the Red Cow who have done the quest are counted among the "Auroch Bringers").

Now, all the Sartarite heirs amongst the Telmori are dead (this happens in the 11L game - every Telmori heir dies - in case you missed it). So Argrath no longer risks kinstrife by killing the Telmori. He needs to fulfill the prophecy, so he does the deal with the Cinsina (and presumably other tribes of the Jonstown Confederation).

They murder the Telmori.

I imagine that the Wolfskinners, the Cinsina warband, form the core of the Wolfrunners after that.

One day I might get this all out via the JC, but this is where I was going with that campaign, in case it helps you.

We'll update you when we can. Sorry I can't be more specific than that.

Still looking for players for this one: https://tabletop.events/conventions/chaosium-con-2023/schedule/251

11 hours ago, creativehum said:

Hi @Ian Cooper the links above lead to 404 errors

Cheers

Christopher

Fixed. There were ellipses inserted into the links, which broke them