Glorion

Atgxtg: actually one area I totally agree with you is that the biggest thing wrong with RQ3, worse than anything else, worse than everything else combined, was trying to take it out of Glorantha, for which Avalon Hill has some but not all of the blame. We all hated that so much that in posting here, I managed to forget that. Well, that is fixed in RQG!

I actually like POWx5 to cast spirit magic, keeps the players from sacrificing all their POW for rune points. (I also require Luck rolls as much as possible for the same reason. But them I'm the GM so naturally feel that way). And I let rune points be regained on seasonal holy days as well as high holy days. But then I'm coming out of our house rule set where we were so annoyed by the RQ3 rule that we made all Runespells except for certain exceptions regainable for initiates, converted some spirit magic to runespells-and abolished spirit magic altogether. The idea of all magic except sorcery and shamanism being rune magic was one we liked.

I am somewhat bewildered by anyone wanting to go back to RQ3. Speaking as a longtime player of RQ2, RQ3, the briefly existing RQ4 of the late '80s and early '90s, which I GM'ed, and a house ruleset my group came up with as we couldn't stand either 3 or 4 anymore, all I have to say is that there are reasons why RQ3 died, it was highly problematic. The two worst things were runespells being one use for initiates, which turned using runespells into an ordeal, and the godawful, horrendous RQ3 sorcery system. RQG is IMHO a vast improvement in every way, especially in that the name "runequest" actually means something now. The sorcery system still needs more work, it really isn't very workable as it stands IMHO, but at least it's a big improvement over RQ3. Small fixes, like the one I advocate of only spirit not sorcery spells subtracting from your Free INT, could make it playable as well as interesting. Which it already is, unlike the RQ3 sorcery fiasco.

I'm hoping we can at least get some vague hints as to what the official Chaosium line will be, so that I don't have to revise everything if a new Pavis book comes out, or go off on my own tangent, which I'd rather not do. Jeff, are you listening?

My campaign, currently about to move in to 1626, is headed towards Pavis in the nearish future. As GM, I need to decide just what Pavis is like these days before we get there. Yes, I know, YGMV, but I'd like to be at least vaguely consistent with what Chaosium comes up with when something finally gets published. What I am very unclear on is just what officially happens to Pavis when the Lunars are overthrown. KOS says that all Lunar soldiers are killed, and the city is sacked by Praxian barbarians. What happens to the considerable Lunar civilian population, and the even more considerable number of locals who prefer Lunar occupation to Praxian, according to the old published materials? Are they too all killed? Does something get worked out by Argrath so that they're all just fine? Something in between I assume, but I'd like to have at least a vague unspecific idea of what, and of course what Argrath's role is in all that. When my party gets to Pavis, do they see a happy bustling liberated town, or piles of rotting corpses, or what?

Ray had a stroke in 2011, and is still alive and still playing Fire & Sword, but over the phone in our house campaign game, which is Lunar. I'm attaching his last updated version. We've made some house campaign changes since then, and gotten approval from him, but this is the last "official" version BTW, this has also been sent to the folks working on RQ4, so hopefully some Fire & Sword ideas will be incorporated. Fire and Sword.oct2010.doc