Akhôrahil

It's also unclear why he should have Spirit Combat Damage 2d6+3 when the rules would say 1d6 from a Cha of 18.

This seems like an outright error. For instance, the Bestiary says about Vampires, "Since vampires have no POW, they cannot cast spirit magic spells".

Seseine, one would assume?

Famously, DC Comics hold a trademark for "Death". (Slightly less well-known, DC and Marvel hold a joint trademark for "super-hero", which actually does have consequences when other companies are forced to use terms like "meta-human" or suchlike.)

One of the big deals about the Greater Darkness shamanistic cultures is that the dead can't be separated from the living (and worse yet, the undead), and that this is a problem. Both Daka Fal and Horned Man have important tasks to help sort this out.

This is when you switch to the Battle skill.

There tends to be a "mainline" physics that looks a lot like our world, though. Sure, someone with Leaping magic can make amazing leaps, but a regular person without magic leaps the way we would expect a real-world human to leap. Similarly, having a spear (or more rarely, sword or axe) and a shield and keeping close ranks is what I would expect to work in a formation for the majority of formation soldiers (just as in history) - the exception can be there, but it has to have a reason in that case. With dual-wielding Greatswords, even the realism problems fade compared to how ridiculous it looks, and the mockery it makes of any game balance. 🙂 For me, at least.

Greatsword/Zweihänder - older rules had a Longsword which is now removed. It's clearly just one of those D&D weapons that "should" be in an old fantasy game. Everything about it, from size to damage dice, tells you this. It's also described as 150 cm in length and having SR1 and being impossible to use one-handed. A longsword is a fine personal weapon once you pack a lot of armor, but not period for RuneQuest.

Another aspect is that cult spirits tend to be positively inclined towards cult members, and even if they don’t, they have instinctive behaviours. Do you need to control it, or can you get it to do what you want without force?

There are some Japanese bows that are drawn well behind the ear - at this point, you actually may have to have sufficiently long arms. Also, no human-sized longbows for ducks for Siz reasons. But I agree, my point was that Siz probably shouldn't matter for bows.

Shield walls are great if you have a bunch of amateurs that you need to put to some kind of decent use, like the inhabitants of the village when the ghouls come or something. They pay off much better for incompetent combatants, but experienced fighters have no business being in one except perhaps for leading the rest. Also note that one corner (front right) is an absolute death-trap, where you don't get any defence and also can't defend. Put someone you don't value there.

If you fight with a sword on the battlefield in any kind of formation, you're going to want to have a shield. Once you have a shield, forming a shield-wall is a no-brainer. This doesn't apply to champions and some weaponthanes that are out doing solo stuff, but surely the bulk of any Humakti regiment fight in (probably very impressively disciplined) formations?

RPGs are far too lenient with greatswords in the first place - there's a reason the longsword is the size of weapon people actually went for for two-handed sword use. Zweihänders were a super-specialized weapon used for fouling pike formations with limited other uses.

Good grief - the last thing this game needs is dual-wielding Greatswords while under Sword Trance and any Humakti sword gifts you pick. Even D&D rarely allows this kind of nonsense.

I think this is a much better design, agree. For one thing, the bow is only interested in whether you can pull it, so the size aspect of DB seems less relevant (unless it's a really big longbow and you need arms long enough).

Yes, and it wouldn't be at all unreasonable to have higher-damage bows with a higher strength requirement. For the bow, unlike the javelin, the bow itself creates a limit though.

Not quite - it's under "Javelins, spears and darts", but not explicitly described as thrown. As it is explictly defined as Projectile on p. 211, that has to have priority in my reading. Although it certainly isn't obvious why it shouldn't receive DB - it's still just as muscle-powered, only with an extension.

Small rules comments here. First, it’s only half DB for thrown. Second - and very easy to miss - you don’t get even that for Atlatl, as it counts as a projectile weapon rather than thrown.

“The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles -- kingons, or possibly queons -- that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expanded because, at that point, the bar closed.” —Terry Pratchett

While I would have to look, I would be shocked if there wasn't any number of old loot - or new loot that you take from a newly slain corps, for that matter - that includes bound spirits in published adventures. The Windsword has a bound spirit, for instance, although I suppose you could argue that artifatct-level items like those are special cases.

I'm also in a situation where my players are of different minds as regards rules complexity. Probably the easiest Initiative system would be something along the lines where you still calculate SR for your action (this is pretty clumsy, but doesn't require a lot of re-writing), and then you get D&D-style Move Action, Standard Action, maybe Minor Action. Standard Action can be used as Move, and any Move action allows you to make a regular move. The easiest SR system would be where you get to intermix actions freely in a turn (I cast a spell [2], then move to take total cover behind the tree [2], then prep a new spell [5], then peek out [1], then cast a second spell [1]) and the length of a move depends purely on how many SRs you commit to it. You could even have a system without turns and just a long SR track where each one is a second.

I think RQG strike ranks are a mess, probably because they can't make up their minds about whether they're an initiative system or an action point economy (they look like an initiative system at first, but then you can get multiple attacks and spells cast, the ability to squeeze preparations into the round, and so on). I can't make up my mind in what direction to rewrite it (a strict action-point economy is interesting but fiddly, while a pure initiative system offers a lot less tactical interest), but I'm going to go in one of these directions. Otherwise you get a lot of incoherence. Should I look up RQ3 to see how it handles SRs?

Are they, though? In an ongoing manner? The process looks a lot more like beating them up, once, and then locking them into an enchantment. No obvious reason to why that would break upon death. (Spirits kept in your fetch is another matter, I will agree.)

I also wonder why a spirit would be released upon the binder's death. It's stuffed into an enchantment or crystal, and other enchantments last past the caster's death. If I put coins into a lockbox, it stays locked up even if I die. It also doesn't seem very MGF, as there wouldn't be any really old items with bound spirits in them, and it's non-obvious how heirlooms with bound spirits would work. Although it would be kinda fun that upon the death of any shaman, people will have to yell "run!!" as dozens of spirits get released, all at once...

Falling back this way might be bad for your attacking, though - I could easily see a rule that if you do this, you don’t get to attack with a shorter weapon than your opponent’s (as doing this would mean that you have to be closing instead of falling back). But yeah, even though my fighting is limited to boffers, it’s pretty damned hard to get anything done if the other guy keeps backing away.