smiorgan

25 minutes ago, DreadDomain said:

There are quite a few things they could announce that would be quite exciting. My bet is on the RuneQuest computer game but I would be even more excited by the first wave of the cults book or BRP 5E or Stormbringer,

I am actually quite glad it is not about Pathfinder.

Could well be the RQ Computer game, but I rather prefer it to be Stormbringer or BRP. 

51 minutes ago, MOB said:

Will save you the time: yes, you are completely mistaken.

If you want to play in Glorantha in that vein, do check out 13th Age Glorantha if you haven't already (one of the co-authors was the author of D&D4).

Thanks a lot for clearing that out, MOB. Now, I'm even more curious of the big announcement! 😅 

Yes, I know of 13th Age in Glorantha and it looks cool. I will surely try it sooner or later - now I'm too busy with RQG, though.

46 minutes ago, Agentorange said:

Doesn't appeal to me at all.

What's your preferred rpg engine for Glorantha?

On 2/22/2023 at 4:02 PM, Chaot said:

Since it hasn't been mentioned yet, See Hwarmgaarl and Die is pretty effective at showing how crazy the Young Kingdoms can be. It goes from a simple diplomatic mission, to bad news to total chaos really quickly.

I've run it a couple of times and always had fun doing it.

See Hwamgaarl and die! I have to check again that crazy scenario!

You have seen the posts on the social media. I think Chaosium (and Paizo) are announcing Pathfinder Glorantha on Monday. 

After the OGL controversy Paizo and Chaosium have become closer and the move makes sense commercially. Of course I might be completely mistaken.

Would you play Pathfinder 2 in Glorantha? Are you excited or worried?

Personally, I am ambivalent. With RQG I already have my Glorantha system of choice. I love RQ and BRP. Yet, it's some time I am curious about Pathfinder 2. I like tactical combat in the vein of D&D4 and I am always curious of trying new systems.

That said I am probably not going to buy a Pathfinder version of the Dragon Pass setting of RQG. But if they decided to develop another area of Glorantha... That would be super interesting. Ralios for Pathfinder would be very hard to resist.

 Looking forward to be proven completely wrong in 2 days...

@Rick Meints Thanks! I'm certainly one of those who like to learn about canceled projects!

18 hours ago, g33k said:

I thought only the bolded items were up for auction...?
 

@Rick Meints ?

 

Ah ah! And why are the others listed?

The Castle of Eyes manuscript for Stormbringer is going to be auctioned at ChaosiumCon! 

 (Excerpt from the full list circulated by Chaosium on FB)

4 hours ago, Mark Mohrfield said:

Re all the replies pointing out Pathfinder; as per my edit I regard Pathfinder as being part of D&D for purposes of this discussion. The question is whether or not RQ can regain 2nd place relative to D&D +clones, not D&D alone. Sorry for the confusion.

Then, it has only to beat Call of Cthulhu...  For what is worth, the latest ORR Group report from late 2021 put CoC at 9% of Roll20 games - over and above Pathfinder ! - and RuneQuest at 0.04%.  As a references, all Warhammer related rpgs together are about 1% of the games.

It's all to be taken with a grain of salt, and we do not have actual sales data. Chaosium has, of course.  But I would not be surprised if the CoC7 corebook had sold 10 times or more the sales of the RQ core.

With BRP 2008 you have everything that was in Worlds of Wonder and more. It's a fine starting point for homebrew fantasy. If I were to do homebrew fantasy now I'd probably start from BRP's generic character generation and then import in stuff from the latest edition of RuneQuest, such as passions, some kind of runes/ traits depending on the setting,  and the magic system. 

And then usually someone pops up in these threads to suggest Mythras. They're right. It's a fine game. Personally, however, I'd rather play something like BRP+RQG.

On 1/16/2023 at 11:13 PM, Mark Mohrfield said:

Given the general response to Wizards of the Coast's new OGL, is possible that RQ could regain its ancient status as the second most popular frpg? First place being too much to hope for, IMO.

Edit: I should have mentioned that I include Pathfinder being part of D&D.

I think that having RQ as n. 2 as in the early '80s is highly unlikely. That would mean to dislodge Pathfinder. But I do hope it will become more popular, especially with the younger generation. That would be entirely deserved. I'm doing my part by running the game for new and younger players.

One thing that Chaosium should do, in my opinion, is to provide VTT support. Having good VTT tools can help a lot nowadays. I think that Roll 20 support would be especially important, more than the more premium platforms such as Fantasy Grounds or Foundry.

RQG can work pretty well in duet too. The solo adventure in the starter set, with its focus on Vasana's story, can be used as an example/ template for duet adventures.

If you have the corebook use the fully fledged character generation and draw from character background and family history for inspiration for adventure. Make the game about personal development and interaction with the character's family and community.

Alternatively Six Seasons in Sartar from the Jonstown Compendium offers you a campaign that starts at initiation and can be very well adapted to duet play.

Delve into character's cult and worship. Make time pass fast and enjoy the end of season and sacred time mini-game. 

Have her interact with leaders and important people. Role play an audience with Queen Kallyr or Queen Leika, for instance.

Go easy with combat. A simple one on one duel with one decently competent adversary or a combat with two clueless idiots will be already sufficient to create the right tension. Give her an animal sidekick, like an Alynx, a spirit or elemental servant and a cool mount. Avoid human sidekick who are too cumbersome and distracting to use.

If combat goes badly have her taken prisoner and ransomed. It creates an interesting story that is unusual in other rpgs.

Be generous with runic and passion inspiration and spend time to role play them.

On 1/11/2023 at 10:35 PM, tooley1chris said:

Coincidentally about a month ago I told my group we were gonna switch from 5th edition back to Magic World. D&D always has the same problems, regardless of edition. I really liked 5th edition for awhile but....BRP is just better IMO

Great! 

I loved that post and I found this interpretation of Ginna Jar very poetic. That said I did not know of the other interpretation - I only knew it was a mysterious figure.

BTW, it's Ginna Jar. The "Gina" in the post was a typo due to Jeff's autocorrect on FB.

Just a short actual play report. New RQ game on Roll20. Four players three of which are relative newbies - two have D&D5 are their only ttrpg experience, the third has played a bit of RQ6/Mythras but never RQ2 or RQ3. We had the first BIG combat: arrows flying, sable riders charging, a shaman evoking a fire elemental, lots of spells cast, pikes sets against charge, impala rider chasing a smuggler who had cast mobility on himself, a good bit of melee attack and parry, Yelorna cultist attempting in vain to control the fire elemental, which was eventually torn to shreds with pikes.

It took a long time because players are still learning, but it all worked. Strike ranks and declarations of intent were not a problem and players always wanted to squeeze as many actions as possible in their round. Sometimes declared actions had to be aborted/ changed due to stuff happening. I basically did everything by the rules but without sweating the minutiae: there were probably one or two occasions were I played fast and loose with SR accounting erring in favor of the players. It all felt very dynamic.

Attack and parry exchanges were more fluid than I expected, but I kept the matrix in front of me on the GM's screen. Damage to parrying weapons created color that was appreciated by players. 

The main slowing factor was the players not knowing their spells, which is not really something specific to RQG.

My players are more storytellers than tacticians, but enjoy a good bit of dice rolling and ass kicking. They were thinking in terms of the fictional weorld and not of, say, the D&D rules and that helped a lot. In retrospect, they were the right types for RQ.

PS. Everyone, me included, was surprised that the salamander was killed with pikes. But that's according to the rules. I have played/ run so much Stormbringer in my life that the idea that salamanders are immune to normal weapons is deeply ingrained in me.   

14 hours ago, Mugen said:

 

I don'r remember anyone mentioning any major rules changes in Hawkmoon.

I've got both Mournblade and Hawkmoon (and Mongoose Elric and Oriflam's Hawkmoon.

Actually the version of the CYD system in Mournblade and Hawkmoon is quite different. Combat in Hawkmoon has been greatly streamlined to the point that the two games are not entirely compatible. Forget casual plane hopping Young Kingdoms  sorcerers in the Tragic Millennium. Generally speaking, Hawkmoon looks a simpler and more immediate game.

It's a new game. Similarities with Oriflam's and Chaosium's exist but the interpretation of the setting is different.  I haven't noticed significant similarities with Mongoose Hawkmoon.

1. Better integration with Glorantha (Runes, Seasonal Play, etc.). Passions.

2. Compatibility with RQ2 and RQ3- a ton of classic stuff I can use

3. Rune points and revised Rune Magic in general - love them rune points!

4. Inspiring art - great to show to players to immediately grasp the setting 

5. Jonstown Compendium - amazing!

6. Colymar - Jonstown campaign setting (GM's book an Starter Set) provide a very playable campaign 

These are the new things I specifically love in the latest edition. But take in mind that this is on top of my deep love for BRP and RQ's previous editions. 

4 hours ago, DreadDomain said:

 

Clearly le Département des Sombres Projets translated a lot of the text from EoM2e for Mournblade.

I don't think they translated a lot of text- the structure of the book and the interpretation of the setting are different- but surely they lifted lots of rules concepts such as runes, gifts, compulsions etc. They got permission from Mongoose for that and they credited EoM2 authors. 

As a whole, the game feels vey different though. Mournblade is its own thing, which is nice - I guess.

On 12/19/2022 at 1:07 PM, Mugen said:

Two editions of EoM have been released by Mongoose. The first one was a standalone game, based on MRQ1 rules.

In my opinion, the Elric and Hawkmoon books are the best two MRQ1 publications. Possibly the Hawkmoon and Elric of Melniboné lines are the only ones I would unreservedly recommend from the whole MRQ1 era. 

On 2/21/2021 at 6:23 PM, Stormwalker said:

Our current game is Elric!/SB5 with the following stolen from EoM:

• Cults
• Pacts
• Runes

And the following stolen from Mythras:

• Passions
• Background Events
• Luck Points

Spells as described in the rules are kind of deprecated, but one player still wanted them so there they are, though I might begin to introduce some consequences for using them, and they seem far too simple and easy to use in SB5 and it's too much like RQ battle magic.

I decided to ignore Allegiance (or at least it's effects) in favour of Pacts but there's something I like about it so I might add it back in some fashion, even if it's only to provide an indicator of the character's past choices and leanings.

The game originally came about because one of the players wanted to play SB specifically (Mythras is my normal go-to system), so we're keeping its core rules like armour rolls and ripostes because otherwise I don't think it would be SB without them (hopefully Luck Points will help avoid the bad-armour roll TPK's from classic SB! 🙂)

It's early days yet though, so we'll see how we go and what needs smoothing out or dropping.  It's just nice to be back in the Young Kingdoms again!

That's more or less the rules I used in my latest Stormbringer campaign and pretty close to my ideal of how to run a Young Kingdoms game.

10 hours ago, Newt said:

I had the pleasure of spending some time with him at Furnace convention weekend at the start of last October. He was in very fine shape, and good humour 🙂

That's lovely to hear.

Today I was reminiscing about things past and I thought of Tom Zunder, a longtime British  BRP and especially Stormbringer fan who used to run The Tavern forums.

I've never seen him in person, but I fondly remember his online persona as an excellent bloke.

I've haven't heard of him in ages. I just hope he is well.

Any news about the Dreamlands?

56 minutes ago, Bill the barbarian said:

Well, as a long supporter of TDM, this saddens me. It is a first stumble by a great group, and I hope this very classy group can come up with a good response and institute an equally classy solution. Good luck mssrs. Whitaker and Nash!

Big corporations stumble on those issues all the time, and are much less forgivable than a small studio with limited resources such as TDM. I hope they will learn from the incident. They continue to have my support as a customer as far as their other products are concerned. As for the book I hope they set up a reasonable response to the concerns that were raised.

From what I have gathered, one big issue stems from the very genericity of the book, which spans the entire Pacific Ocean, inevitably incurring in false generalisations and in bundling together different peoples. This alone  is fishing for trouble. After all, they did Mythic Britain, not Mythic Keltia. And they did Mythic Rome in the late Republic, not from Romulus to the Late Empire (Mythic Costantinople is more of a mess, though). I believe there's a lesson to be learned there.

5 hours ago, dvdmacateer said:

The fix appears to be live now.  Toggle the 1/2 default checkbox to reset  the skill value.

It works just fine. Thanks!