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!

On 11/10/2019 at 11:42 AM, soltakss said:

I would use RQG rather than RQ3 personally, and I say that as a massive fan of RQ3.

If not, use the good things that have come with RQG and add them to your RQ3 game.

RQG actually does it well. Runemagic Pools work well and are not overpowering. Initiates regaining Runemagic makes sense, if gained on High holy Days.

You could make Runemagic recover on Holy days for Initiates, so once per Season. However, you would need Priests to have an edge, so they can repray them faster. I can't remember the recovery rate for Priests' Runemagic, though.

It is interesting that you find RQG Runemagic too much, too soon, but want Initiates to regain Runemagic faster.

RQ3 had a different pricing mechanism to RQ2 for that very reason. The RQG rules has a Conversion Guide that covers this. Basically it says to divinde RQ2 coin by 5 and RQ3 by 2, I think. Someone will be able to look it up and correct me if I have misremembered.

I used that rule in RQ3. I think that RQG needs the blow to be 3 times the location's normal Hit Points to be severed, which makes it even harder. 

Yes, rolling POWx5 to cast a spell is just irritating.

Have a look on my website, www.soltakss.com, and search for "Mega Campaign", as I did a similar exercise and took the various campaigns from RQ2 and RQ3 and stitched them together. It formed the very loose basis of my recently finished Gloranthan Campaign.

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.

3 hours ago, soltakss said:

Ah, you've got me there!

It could certainly have done with a lookover by someone who knew RQ2 and RQ3 and knew the differences between the rules, to stop, for example, both RQ2 and RQ3 Species Maximums being used in different places.

RQG has sold better than any other version of RQ, or so I am led to believe, so it is certainly getting there.

The RQG rules are quite serviceable. many of the percieved problems are due to the mix of RQ2 and RQ3-style rules sometimes being done without as much care and attention as might have been. I find that if you look at them with an RQ2 or RQ3 hat on, most of the problems go away, as we solved those issues in both versions, as Players and GMs.

Of course, you can port all of the best bits of RQG into RQ3, then you'd end up with something that looks like RQG.

Passions came from what Greg Stafford wanted to put into RQ3 but didn't have the space for, or so I am told, so he put them into Pendragon. Some version of Passions were in Griffin Mountain and in Dragonewts, both for RQ2.

Personally, I played RQ3 almost as soon as it came out, probably in 1986, having bought it in 1985. I played it, with some RQ2 things, until I started adding bits and bobs from Hero Wars, HeroQuest, Mongoose RQs and RQ6, so it became RQ3+, but still held on to it as my main game system, albeit houseruled. RQG was the closest thing to an official RQ that suited the House Rules that I had been using, so it suited me fine.

I am sure that other RQ3 fans would hate some of the things in RQG, though. What people like is very personal to them.

 

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?

On 10/20/2015 at 7:11 PM, Vile said:

Sooo ... has anyone heard from Ray these past years?

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