Akhôrahil

We had to destroy the world in order to save it? 🙂

We have very little idea so far how the “non-standard” runes will even work.

Since I mentioned the Rune Point cap, there’s a nice munchkin move if you want to cast the biggest Rune Spell you can and also Extend it. Rune Point caps are per cult, so pick up a second utility cult and get yourself 5 RPs in it. Nothing says that when you extend a spell, the Extend has to come from the same cult, so with 21+5 Rune Points in two different cults, you can cast Shield 21 with year-long Extend. Make it Shield 42 if you have a maxed-out Allied Spirit. Obviously defensive-boost with every MP you can scrape together - at this point, it should be hundreds.

By the way, the White Bull Society, that hasn’t aged well. The local primitives can’t get their act together, so they require a white (well, kinda white) saviour to reach them how to do their own culture right? The trope is commonly called ”Mighty Whitey” or ”What These People Need Is A Honky”. (It worked so much better with multiple Argraths, when Argrath White Bull was just a Praxian warlord.)

Genocidal villain who helped ruin the world because of his life’s obsession. Kallyr was the real hero, fighting for freedom instead of vengeance.

Given Chalana Arroy's association with peace, white really might be seen as the color of peace even in Glorantha.

I would probably say diseases, poisons, and limbs. Regular old damage healing, and even characteristics healing using easily accessible Rune Magic, can be covered by regular folks.

Well, I mean... let's say someone is going up against a better opponent in a Humakti duel. While these things aren't supposed to go to the death, they easily can. I think it's completely reasonable if the player pulls out all the stops trying to win it, and that includes pushing Sword Trance as high as can be afforded. RQ isn't fair nor balanced when it comes to the opposition, and I wouldn't want to tell a player to knock it off when they're doing things that are completely supported by the rules in order to survive and that the PC would be fully aware of. It's the business of the rules to be written in ways that make them difficult to abuse. Saying that the GM can keep all that in line is just lazy rules writing - the GM can do anything, and we're buying rules so that we don't have to make it all up, and should be able to expect that they're functional.

13 is a really great number - you have okay spellcasting and POW gain, you're not yet above 95% chance to overcome POW for typical POW 7 enemies, and you just hit the skill modifier threshold. Although aiming for 18 is important if anyone is looking for God-Talker.

Sure, but if they did, you agree that it's good if the rules cover it and don't break down? It was what I did in one campaign, since some PCs would start out older and the rulebook tells you to do it this way. In retrospect, it's a bit much - it weird how you get very little skill increase but a ginormous RP increase from age. One of older PCs aged out of his Damage Bonus during play and could no longer wear a full bronze armor, which was a fun effect. No-one is yet, but it's certainly not Rune Points that holds them back (both 18 POW and 18 CHA are harsh restrictions). One PC could get his shaman initiation at any point, and I believe one PC qualifies for God-Talker but needs to get the framework and economic support into place first. No-one is Humakti, so no. Problem spells so far have been spamming Thunderbolt (when two PCs just pour on the Thunderbolts, virtually nothing can stand up to it) and how a Bless Crops 10 basically invalidates the need for any farming skill whatsoever. The house rule I'm using now is that no-one can spend more than half (rounded up) of their RPs on a stackable Rune Spell. I know someone else had players doing a +1000% Sword Trance, which nets you a crit of 50%!

I see it mostly as flavor - it makes sense that priests need to have high Worship. Plus it can result in funny effects like how one PC kept critting Worship rolls and got a reputation as unusually holy. 🙂

Crystals are common as dirt in published adventures, and if you’re going to cast a hugely boosted spell during downtime, you can borrow everyone’s. A couple of hundred MPs shouldn’t be a problem for a party with some experience and loot. MPs are also trivially regained, so the opportunity cost is minimal. You can start with 9 Rune Points if your GM allows older starting characters, and you could expect 2 more per year. 10 RPs isn’t a lot in a medium-length campaign. As soon as you hit Rune Levels, your allied spirit starts to help out and will eventually almost double your Rune Points (it has the same progression you do). And this is long before we get to the Great Argrath Campaign and hero-levels. Even just three Rune Points and 70 MPs can net an all-day Sword Trance at +500% as a spell that takes 22 points of dispelling to get rid of.

The potential speed of the boom will be affected dramatically by mortality numbers, especially child mortality.

GM approval. ”The inspiration lasts for the time it takes to complete theactivity or task, such as the duration of the combat or battle.Generally, inspiration should have a maximum duration ofone day. The gamemaster determines the duration of theinspiration if otherwise”

We need to see the cult published first, but if it has no Cha requirements and no Rune Points requirements (because RP reqs also can’t be met with 1d6 Cha), then it could potentially be an unusually easy cult to qualify for Rune Lord membership in? And that kind of thing might be leveraged for munchkinnery.

That was a fun one - the "clarification" was that it worked the opposite way the rules text explicitly says. 🙂 Agree, it's so weird how they get instantly defensive about these things and try to make up any convoluted explanation of why they didn't make a mistake. Like the initiate percentage thing - instead of admitting a mistake, there was an almost unreal reasoning that there's this big difference between having initiated and being an initiate...

Add to this its two huge writing problems - large amounts of text have just been copied and pasted from earlier texts, and then not edited for consistency. I thought I was going crazy until I realized it’s just bad. It’s a bit silly that Chaosium has created a game that is so complicated and with so many niche rules that even they themselves can’t get it right in adventures and rules QA. If they can’t handle it, they should have written a simpler game. I think the decision to maintain RQ2 compatibility was a giant mistake. For a game of this calibre and quality of writing, the rules editing is just awful. Needs a 1.1 version yesterday, IMO. And someone on the team doing dedicated rules quality assurance, because I can 100% promise you no-one had that job.

It was never possible in any earlier edition, so I didn't think it would be added (the designers like to stick hard to RQ2), and when it was brought up, it was shot down by Jeff. Although like you say, strictly going by the most likely interpretation of the text itself, the best interpretation is probably that it should work.

In melee, you're highly limited, as per the rules (it's super unclear whether you're allowed multiple spells while in melee). Outside of melee, you can do whatever you can afford within your SRs (and within restrictions like missile weapon reloading times and not mixing Rune and Spirit Magic in a round ). Remember that you have to prep Spirit Magic - no Disruption machine guns! It's ridiculous that a game with this many rules flaws doesn't have an official errata out yet! It honestly makes me angry - it needs to be very high priority!

I’m surprised as well - I have maintained that it’s a legit reading of the rules, but I never really thought it was intended, and Jeff shot the idea down hard on Facebook. I don’t believe the left hand knows what the right is doing until it’s time to get stuff into the actual published erratas. Jason for instance seriously tried to tell us you can’t cast two spells in a round and that SRs isn’t an action economy!

Shield is what makes First Aid an important skill. :-). Also, when you have the MPs to spare, just cast a boosted big healing spell to punch through, if necessary.

Similarly, p. 24: "Resists spells and spirit combat with POW rather than Magic Points" The former is already in RQG, the second is governed by Spirit Combat skill.

My interpretation of Argrath is that he doesn't sacrifice his followers and allies needlessly, but definitely sacrifice them needfully. Nothing in the universe is anything except a tool for him. In RQ terms, anyone who is worth 3 points of POW can be fairly easily resurrected (assuming time-span, access to body, and so on) - even Ernalda can do that! With CA available, it becomes so cheap that one has to wonder why it doesn't happen constantly (my interpretation would be that CA cultists heal so much that they tend to be constantly low on Rune Points, and while healing is a religious duty, resurrection isn't, so it will often take the back seat). Fun fact: While CA of course has usable Resurrect, when you really want someone back, Daka Fal shamans are more likely to manage to browbeat the soul to come back due to much better Spirit Combat.

Interestingly, for Free standard-of-living, the "5% annual child mortality until age 15" actually does come out to a reasonably historical 50% (although not nearly as slanted to the first few years). I think this makes sense, and gives the setting a feeling of reality - average of 4-6 kids per family, 2-3 survive to adulthood... that makes sense to me! If child mortality was dramatically lower, the whole social framework would look a lot different, and the situation would be even more malthusian. (The other Standards of Living don't work out this well, though.)

Two of my players seem locked into "Odyala".