icebrand

16 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

Interesting question. No, I've never seen a player do this. It does seem to me that spirit spell matrixes are right at the bottom end of useful things to spend POW on.

Yes, so much this. Like, some people do them to free int/cha or to pass around the spell. I'm shocked they spend 5+ pow (some even spent 10+?) For a spirit matrix... Imho no spirit spell is worth POW; my players always used spirits or just picked their spells more carefully If they didn't have access to.

Hi guys, i have a question:

Has any of your PCs, ever, spent pow in making a spirit magic matrix?

If so, why? 

Also, I'd like to hear about your PCs self-made enchants, please share!

11 minutes ago, Brootse said:

Thanks, this is a nice clarification. I didn't know that initiates could hold their own worship ceremonies.

We used that rules back in the 90s (for rune levels only) but i must admit it was a totally murder hobo campaign and we glossed over cult time requirements. Heck the group didnt even have a community until the campaign was like 10 years on. Cult stuff happened offscreen and maybe there was a ceremony roll or something.

Still had the fun of my life btw.

Anyway, you just changed the way i play Runequest!! 💕 Thank thee *so friggin much* i guess I'll scrap the travels and just let them train and do social stuff at the fort while i come up with some duck stuff and foreshadow the kidnapping and maybe the broos

23 minutes ago, David Scott said:

 

The humakti is going to tourney altar because daine (who is a full runelord not former) is going and it's taking the groups Humakti with him.  In the future ceremonies may me narrated/abstracted but this is the first one and gods/ceremonies/cult and community stuff is more important than killing some random ducks noone mentioned before. Also the duke is an (evil) orlanthi petty king that totally gave up his god for a piece of worthless land in nowhere, prax and allying the ducks in some way is totally something i see happening.

And the yerlornan needs to attend the seasonal worship ceremony to remain initiated. Also gives me the chance to show her unicorn again (she saw an unicorn drinking water at the easy ford but 🦄 ran away when she tried to approach.

She'll see Ricardo 🦄 (working name, but i think I'm keeping it) wandering in the long dry or something)

4 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

Ummm, this might seem to be a silly question - but why do they need to travel all that way just for one Holy Day?

It's the seasonal holy day and initiates need to do initiate stuff, like recover rune magic and actually interact with other cultists.

Both places are quite close afaik, why wouldn't they go?

So, this is the deal: after the next session the group should finish "scouting the land" from borderlands & beyond, and both the Humakti and Yerlornan will have 6 days until their holy day (fire season/death week/fire day).

So I'll have to split the party (fml) and they will have to head to tourney altar and the big rubble respectively.

I plan on rolling random encounters for their journey (maybe i finally get to kill someone for butchering my deinonychii); after that i need to actually do the festivities. Any ideas are welcomed.

For the Humakti I'm thinking ritual duel (I'll let him pick a 50, 75 or a 90% opponent with some trinket if he wins -im open to suggestions).

For the yerlornan I'm clueless; I'll read the raid on yelornans scenario again (it's been a while) to see if there's something there, but I'd appreciate the help!

After that Ill give them 2 weeks of R&R before Outlaw Hunt so they can roll their xp checks and stuff. Anyway that's it for now, thanks in advance! 🙏

2 hours ago, David Scott said:

except it's a roleplaying game of fantasy high adventure in a bronze age magical world, not a roll-playing game of dice values and probability analysis.

Tell that to the enemy that just sent your brain flying out the newly made crack in your skull because you had -20 extra to parry 😁

I started running borderlands yesterday and... MAN WHAT A GREAT SESSION!!!

The adventurers are a Yerlornan from the unicorn people, a Humakti berserker from (somewhere in dragon pass) and a Lhankor Mhy from Pavis. The 4th player couldn't make it this week sadly.

Players were new to Glorantha and Runequest, with only DnD experience.

I just pulled the OG map of Prax and started telling them how it was the holy land and a paradise, but then the storm god murdered the sun and... Well you guys know how the story goes. The players got hooked instantly and I couldn't have been happier! I mean they literally asked me to keep GMing while we were eating pizza 😮

First session didn't have any combat (except that one time the Humakti 1-hit a caravan worker with a gut punch with 7 out of 7 possible damage btw) the PCs just did stuff in horns gate and went to the secret orlanth altar nearby that the chalanas are helping hide. There they got hired by the duke (which is orlanthi and evil in my version). 

Daine provided a metric ton of roleplaying; the yerlornan figured he was a psycho killer (which... He totally is now) and everyone was super wary of the orlanthi; they only got to that point because the (pc) Humakti kinda figured out these guys wouldn't go through all this trouble to kill some random nobody adventurers they have no beef with.

The Amazon was *this* close of using shooting star on Daine, anyway she ended using soul sight on the Duke, Daine and the priest (which is a priestess now) and confirmed they were who they said they were, very magically powerful and very evil 🙂

They gladly accepted the mercenary contract because *food and board* haha and so next time they'll start scouting the land for real (but they are going with the priestess instead of Daine; she's way weirder and they'll regret it when all their fears turn out to be... maybe be true? (Let's see what they come up with). Anyway i didn't want sword guy with the group since they already have a sword guy of their own.

So far it's a horror campaign and i plan to keep it that way; maybe I'll add a chaos "random" encounter to make things creepier? A gorp approaching the camp at night sounds just what I need to turn the horror up to 11, it will probably eat a horse or something?

1 hour ago, David Scott said:

If you are going to run Apple Lane, then the RQG GM Screen Pack is far better than the old adventure pack. It doesn't have the Gringle's Pawnshop or the Rainbow mounds. What it does have is an up to date setting and adventures that integrate the players into it, It even links to the other new adventure books. You can reset Gringle's Pawnshop to a later date and location (I'm going use it as Sora Goodseller's house in Clearwine) and the Rainbow mounds is an easy add on once the players are settled.

Rainbow mounds is a dungeon crawl, whereas Defending Apple Lane is the opposite.

I've a new group and that's what I started with. I thought of going back to older material, but I've played it all before and although Borderlands is excellent, Raus will be gone in  a few years. 

I'm skipping gringle's (griswold's 🤣 whoosh). I don't like that scenario; I'll just run rainbow mounds from horns gate and call it a day.

The PC s are the surviving members of a mercenary company that will be looking for work at horns gate. Then bam! Rainbow mounds.

14 hours ago, Dissolv said:

Risklands is awesome in its concept, I had great fun with that one....for a short time.

Borderlands is possibly the best introductory campaign pack ever published for any game.  For new players there just isn't a contest.  Work up to Risklands, and use it as an outlet for Rune levels who insist on annoying the Lunars.

I'm worried about the first scenario being pretty weak for a new group and second kinda horrible too (ducks don't work as your first ever opposition, and they are awesome at shaking things up, change my mind)

I should open with rainbow mounds. It will make scouting the land 100x better. And i can run gringle's pawnshop 2nd session...

Dammit icebrand, you are pulling a reverse apple lane again... I hate myself sometimes 😞

18 hours ago, David Scott said:

I've run both. One was grim, one was fun, run Borderlands (then Griffin Mountain, they are linked)

Griffin mountain? I think you misspelled snake pipe hollow 🤣

1 minute ago, jajagappa said:

Assume you meant Borderlands here,

Yes, thank you!

Players are (almost) complete newbies to RPGs (but they are getting 2d6+6 all stats and RQG rules, not Classic). I think most played very few DnD. 

If i run borderlands they are a band of adventurers the duke recruits at horns gate. I'll start with them negotiating the contract with the duke.

Maybe make them run rainbow mounds as 1st adventure (and maaaaaaybe griswalds pawnshop as 2nd)?

If i run Land of Doom... I never ran it before 😕 but the first spider encounter seems amazing and the second one with the scorpion men is to die for!

IMHO the sorcery rules on RQ:G are a straight downgrade from RQ3, and those were not very good to start with.

I use RQ3 raw for sorcery, with whatever handwaving i need to make the encounters deadlier (since sorcerers in that ruleset are not very deadly compared to other magic users), unless you like your sorcerers to be guys with high stats that hits for high damage, then all you need is MP crystals and high base INT, % casting is irrelevant.

Of course I don't allow sorcery for my PCs because, quoting me from the last time they asked "the magic system f***ing sucks and i would need to nerf the few useful broken spells so you would have a s***ty character overall".

On 12/23/2020 at 9:17 PM, Rodney Dangerduck said:

What if everybody stands back and pretends to be casting Sorcery?  What do the trolls do then???

uzko: Casts darkwall and laughs at the pathetic humans; further actions determined by cult.

The food trollkin rain stones on the party to create suppressing fire. 

Superior trollkin will peek and cast extinguish on the group light sources.

That would be my 1st statement of intent in a situation like this.

59 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

I don't pick on a particular PC.

If the Dark Troll leader picks a more or less random PC, and says "shoot at 2nd hooman from the left", and 10 of the 12 trollkin understand and target that PC, that's fine.

If the Dark Troll always says "shoot at Joe's Sorcerer", that's bad GMing.  Both that player, who feels picked on, and the other PCs, who are belittled. "What am I, chopped liver?  I'm not worth of their attention?"

The "counter" to sorcery is disrupting the caster, since spells take 2+ round.

If you let the sorcerer cast, it's already over; you had 2 rounds to make them fail concentration or disabling them.

Looking for a "counter" at this stage is like looking to a counter for the weapon that just hit you. You just trust your armor/pow keeps you alive and if not maybe your friends can take you to a temple to get resurrected.

If you let the enemy spellcaster free, you give them a pass to unleash all their potential. It's the same why you shoot at archers, not melee fighters.

Unengaged characters should naturally go for the spellcaster / ranged attacker (but there they have the chance to join a melee where the archer can't reliably hit them. Unless they are animals or dumb creatures of course.

On 7/21/2020 at 1:45 PM, ffilz said:

I thought I'd pull this stuff out of the "I Want to Love Glorantha" thread because it isn't helpful to the original poster there, but it's still a subject I'm happy to continue to discuss...

I don't remember if I saw ads for RQ, or if I just found RuneQuest 1st ed. in my FLGS, probably mostly the latter. I looked through every new thing that showed up on the shelves there (and in 1978 there wasn't much, I think they had 2 maybe 3 36" shelves of RPG stuff with the magazines in a separate rack). So I bought RuneQuest 1st. ed and soon after Apple Lane and Balastor's Baracks. And White Bear and Red Moon. Between Apple Lane (and later Snake Pipe Hollow) plus WB&RM, I ran a Sartar campaign (and didn't really realize Balastor's Baracks was set in the Big Rubble). I had been playing mostly OD&D and actually in 1978 mostly Chivalry & Sorcery (though I ran some form of D&D on our cross country trip in summer of 1978), a bit of Metamorphosis Alpha, and I'm not sure what else. I had started role playing in October of 1977 with Holmes Basic D&D which we immediately outgrew. My early RQ play was pretty sporadic but soon Cults of Prax and Snake Pipe Hollow came out, and The White Dwarf had RQ content, oh and Trollpak and Griffin Mountain, but still I wouldn't actually start a serious campaign until the 1990s. But, probably due to college (which I started in fall of 1981), I didn't get Pavis or Big Rubble. I did get and try to run Borderlands in college. I also didn't get the Solo Quests.

I did start buying the RQ3 material and eventually used some of it in the 1990s campaign.

But all through that, I gravitated to treasure seeking monster bashing, pretty traditional gaming though maybe with a bit more characterization than with D&D, and certainly smaller "dungeons." And that's the type of gaming that still interests me. I initially bought heavily into Hero Wars and Hero Quest, but never played, and never got what the game was supposed to be like. It definitely did not look like what I expected Hero Quest to be like (and really didn't look like the Hero Quests Steve Marsh had written up in his zines published in The Wild Hunt). In the 2000s I went wild acquiring Glorantha material of any sort, but have since divested myself of some of it as it became clear that too much was too much, and especially much of the HW/HQ stuff was of little use to me.

I dunno if I'll ever get RQG. RQ1 (plus bits from RQ2 which I do now own as of 2005 and RQ3) is the game I want to play. I'm NOT sold on the newer style tribal centered play. I'm not sold on what I've heard about the RQG rules. But Glorantha is big enough for all of us. It's had enough gonzo and wacky stuff that it makes the way I play still "fit". And that gonzo and wacky stuff is part of the appeal to me. I like ducks. I like some of the silly stuff that shows up in Trollpak.

If people ask ME for MY opinion of how to get started, I'd say pick up RQ1 or RQ2, Cults of Prax, and Apple Lane. if that grabs you, look into Griffin Mountain or Pavis/Big Rubble for more extensive (and available) content, or pick up some of the newer Sartar centered material and make a game of it. Borrow from whatever source you want (I'm always borrowing D&D and other games content) or make stuff up on your own. But that's my opinion based on my interests. If you are looking at how to get started in Glorantha from a perspective of current support (official publications, fan publications, and fan discussion), go with RuneQuest Glorantha (which comes with some starter adventures) and if the adventures there aren't enough, pick up something official or from the Jonstone Compendium, but ask someone else for suggestions...

Originally I stuck with RQ1 because I wasn't going to pay $12 for a bunch of errata... Now at the time I didn't really realize how many differences there were. Recently I completed a paragraph by paragraph comparison which I had hoped to share, but it's impossible to do the idea justice without copying too much text to work under the fan license so I will be working with Chaosium (probably over the next year) to polish it into something that can be offered as a more official document.

Sometime between 1980 and 1995 or so, I did come up with some changes I don't like:

1. I don't like RQ2 armor, in part because of the AP stacking on the abdomen and chest, partly because I like to just say "this guy is wearing chain".

2. After playing with John T. Sapienza's unified weapons tables of the early days (published in The Wild Hunt and Alarums and Excursions APAs), I have come to prefer RQ1's quirkier weapons table over RQ2.

3. From the paragraph by paragraph comparison, I don't agree with all the spell changes.

4. While it is nice to be able to look up creatures alphabetically, I also like seeing the creature groupings in RQ1, plus I noticed a few changes (and since I use RQ1 I have the Ambush and Sense Ambush skills).

That said, I had never really looked at Shamans very closely, in part because RQ1 Shamans are sort of confusing. If I run Shamans now, I will use the RQ2 rules.

I have long used Protection as a variable spell instead of RQ1's Padding and Protection spells.

I wonder how many other folks in the world still use RQ1... Am I some weird holdout? Of course one might ask how many even still use RQ2, it seems like most folks migrated to RQ3 when it came out (or at least once it had decent Glorantha support).

I'm like you but with RQ2.

I actually started with RQ3 in 1997, but I always dreamt of playing rq2 in the early 2000s; every single bit on every fansite i adored and preferred over rq3.

Finally I got hold of rq2 in the 2010s. We have ported several rules from brp:

Intx10 skill points, 1/2 cha cult battle magic for beginner characters. Initiates recover all/half magic every season (powx5), priests always get it back. Further parries are at -30%. I also added dodge as Dex x5 (works like rq3 dodge, but you can't attack if you dodge).

One session is one season. You usually do social stuff at your clan, then something happens, and you get to use skills and stuff. Then there's a BIG FIGHT with a battlemat and printed minis and I play each and every NPC as if they were a PC of mine. Combat is hard and bloody and limbs go off and people gets murdered horribly while their scream. 

I also try to get a different gimmick or mechanic each fight scene.

Rewards are plenty IF you survive, and most times you will get ressed if the group beats the encounter.

Oh, and then there's always the dreaded random encounter roll when they come back home. They don't want to fight so hard it warms my heart.

Then they can spend their riches training and paying their priests to get spirits and buying gear, rinse/repeat.

Sessions are usually 120-150 minutes long, and many times people go back home heartbroken because their initiate was so close to being runelord and got thrown to their death by a condor.

In return I'm super chill with the roleplay phase and they have it easy (chax5 / oratory / skill unopposed) to make "changes" to their homeland.

On 12/18/2020 at 8:00 AM, Kloster said:

I don't think the offer would be so high. Between the Rune Points, the gifts to Wyters and some diseases, not counting all the people that would not accept selling part of their POW (like I would not , if given choice, sell a part of my body), the enchanters will not have access to a so high number of sellers. And I can't envision (except for jokes) a POW Stock Exchange.

Easy: Don't provide too many sellers.

Yeah when I Instituted this rule back in my rq3 campaign (that anyone can supply pow for an enchant) one of my PCs, an orlanthi petty king tried to Institute a yearly "pow tax".

He got shot down by threat of uprising, and quickly learnt his political power was pretty weak.

On 12/18/2020 at 1:59 AM, Rodney Dangerduck said:

Sure, the PC sorcerer won't feel "picked on" when that happens.  Great solution.  Not.

Wait, you *don't* pick on the PCs?!?

He would feel what? Just kill them so they learn the lesson. You shouldn't hold back against PC, unless you are one of those people that fudges rolls etc.

I mean, if there are trollkin slingers with a troll master, surely the troll trained them to shoot at a called target. Why do you make your NPC soft-suicide?

Hi there, im a Classic GM (been gming since 1997). I could tell you why classic is the best and why *all day*...

It's a beautiful game really, but just buy RQG + Bestiary (bestiary is kind of a must buy to play).

An appropriate ammount of blunt force trauma works wonders as a hard counter to sorcery. 

Have 3 trollkin slinging stones at them, or simply use your maul (downward strike or a sweep both do it). 

In a pinch sever spirit is good too, but it kind of ruins the meat.

Source: Death Lord

29 minutes ago, Darius West said:

There is for the most part, a somewhat strict caste delineation between Talari, Zzaburi, Horali and Dronari.  In most sorcerous societies the warriors don't know any sorcery, and nor do the other castes.  Now this is obviously not true of all sorcerous societies, but sorcery is tied primarily to the rune of Law, so processes of logic and order are pretty intrinsic to the thinking of these societies I would argue.  To become a reliable sorcerer is time consuming, and as with most things, if you spread your efforts too thin across too many disciplines you become a jack of all trades and a master of none.  I am not saying that dilettante sorcerers can't exist however.

Yes, Gerlant and Ethilrist are both likely related to Arkat by blood, and likely raised somewhat Hrestoli due to Arkat's pragmatism.  Meriatan is also a Hrestoli.  These guys are also heroes, not your average Zzaburi caste born Joe Sorcerer.  I also don't see any of them exercising the raw magical power of Zzabur, like closing the oceans and separating Brithos from Glorantha.  Arkat was pretty much a Brithini convert to Hrestolism by the time he left the West and became a Humakti, and this was the company he kept.  They are westerners and knights before they are really sorcerers I would argue.

I would agree that those of Hrestoli background might not be afraid of fieldwork, but they are your classic dilletantes.  They spend X years trying to master agriculture, then X years trying to master fighting, then X years learning sorcery, then X years learning how to rule.  You need to ask yourself, how many smart kids get out of the farming caste only to die in battle before ever becoming sorcerers because they had low HP or no damage bonus?  And how much weaker will a 40 year old Hrestoli sorcerer be, who might have been a sorcerer for 8 years, as compared to a Rokari who has spent 25 years  on sorcery? 

The Hrestoli system is great in terms of its fairness and apparent (but hugely overstated) social mobility, but when we scratch the surface we find that the rich families can pay to have their children tutored while the poor cannot.  Also, ultimately the system promotes people to rise not to the level of their greatest competence, but to the level of their incompetence.  Some people fail as farmers and stay as farmers.  Some warriors die, but others will stay as warriors because they are too incompetent to rise.  Some will make it to wizards, but then some of them will fail to rise any further, will they be great wizards therefore?  I think not.  Finally the cream of the crop will rise to be the Talari caste of nobility, and while they likely don't have a stat under 15, you still have to wonder how these noob nobles who rose purely on their merits will actually handle their new power.  You also need to worry about the lack of recognition for artisans and merchants, as well as miners and timber workers etc. within the Hrestoli system.

In short, while I like the career path of the Hrestoli and their meritocracy better from a player perspective, I think their sorcerers will be way too handy with a lance and sword, and like good jocks, will be struggling with their sorcery homework.  For sorcerers they will make damn good warriors, but are they really sorcerers?  Really they rise to the level of their incompetence and then stop.  I like meritocracy, but the simple fact is that caste specialists who have 17 years more experience in their born field will be better at their jobs, and they will like archiving, and order, and fear fieldwork.

And still they have the best system in Glorantha, unless you like licking the boots of the emperor or being an ignorant savage.

Clearly Hrestol revealed the true way; yes, social mobility may be low, but this is only because only the best rise.

And hear me, we don't rise to any level of (in)competence, but to the level of mastery.

True, many bright young men are taken from us at an early age, but that clearly means Malkion took them to solace in order to better serve the invisible god!

And with contempt i tell thee, if the outdated Seshnelan way were any better, they would be able to beat us in battle, which I don't see ever happening. 😂

2 hours ago, Jeff said:

The problem is that you are clearing basing everything off the very small amount of information about the West in RQ3. There's a lot more information and lot more to come.

We also have black horse county keyword from HW, where sorcery is not slower -nor weaker- than any counterpart, but i didn't bring those much because game systems are very dissimilar. 

According to HW they use sorcery (they even have grimoires) not "creative heroquesting" / rune magics like proposed earlier in this thread, and mechanically they are not disadvantaged in "normal playing scenarios" as sorcery appears to be in RQG (though they can be more "specific"). At least they don't fail at combat, which is a core part of fantasy RPG. 

Also, you seem to imply the very little RQ3 material is going to be retconned, or maybe i misinterpreted you?

3 hours ago, Darius West said:

Sorcerers are scientists, philosophers and alchemists, unequivocally

(...)

He likes order, and archiving things, and is secretly a bit intimidated by field work and its risks.

(...)

It is also hard to become a successful sorcerer.

(...)

The upshot of this is that sorcerers fear going into danger

(...)

Another thing it is worth really making an issue of is that sorcery stacks with other magic.

> Sorcerers are scientists, philosophers and alchemists, unequivocally

I'm sorry but sorcerers can be a lot of things. Several Gloranthan societies use sorcery as their one and only magic system. 

Saying this is akin to saying theists are warriors. It is not correct with the setting as published (at least pre-rqg)

> He likes order, and archiving things, and is secretly a bit intimidated by field work and its risks.

> The upshot of this is that sorcerers fear going into danger

I'm sorry I don't see gerlant flamesword or sir meriathan or ethilrist as "liking to archive" or "intimidated by fieldwork" or "fearing danger".

> It is also hard to become a successful sorcerer.

> Another thing it is worth really making an issue of is that sorcery stacks with other magic.

Moot point. Becoming a runelord is also hard and their magic also stacks.

3 hours ago, Jeff said:

This is all pretty much spot on. The Loskalmi army is one of the most powerful in Glorantha because ALL Loskalmi zzaburi are integrated into it. The irony is that in general, the New Hrestoli zzaburi are less skilled and less powerful than their Rokari counterparts (probably much more so), but they are much better at coordinating with the other castes - precisely because they had to have experienced being soldiers in order to become zzaburi. It also means that their magic is primary focused on martial enhancements. 

So when the Loskalmi army goes to war, it brings a lot of zzaburi with it. These zzaburi are responsible for maintaining sorcerous blessings on some number of soldiers. So maybe every two weeks the zzaburi casts Dampen Damage 4 on each soldier in his unit. Then before the battle, each zzaburi casts Boon of Kargan Tor 8 and Neutralise Magic 6 on one elite soldier (giving him an extra +2D6 damage), with an all day duration (let's assume that between crystals, bound spirits, etc. the zzaburi has about 40 magic points to play around with(. After casting these spells there is a big a Worship Invisible God ceremony to replenish those magic points. Then CHARGE!

I understand YGWV and gregging, but the loskalmi zzaburi are called grand knights (wizard knights by outsiders) and have combat skills on par with a runelord. Having them cast buffs on soldiers and knights is akin to using your death lord to cast buffs on trollkin an initiates. This is not how loskalmi worked.

37 minutes ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

I may have misunderstood something about loskalmi but as zzaburi become zzaburi when they "succeed" as soldier, aren't they themselves the elite solidiers ?

Or a soldier becomes zaburi when he/she fits skills requirements but also "age" requirement (time to retire ?)

Afaik rules for casting changed, making sorcery less viable for direct confrontation, so the whole west needs to be gregged.

2 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

Page 246 is interesting.  Seem that you want to sing for a couple of rounds.  But not totally clear when this applies. 

For a spirit? Instantly. Same as burning fish heads(worship? In any case, spirits hate fish heads too).

Same when a runepriest of jesus tries to exorcise a demon from Linda blair. He doesn't need several rounds of prayers before the combat, otherwise the skill would be kinda useless wouldn't it?

What does needing minutes or whatever the rules say in order to boost spirit combat with dancing, singing, playing the guitar (because why not have a blues duel spirit combat with the cacodemon?) worship or whatever actually do?

If you enforce RAW, you lose the opportunity to have skills like dance, sing, play instrument, oratory, and whatever odd skill to be used in (spirit?) Combat. This makes the game... Less rich imho.

Also, from a mechanical point this gives value to those less important skills (because, let's face it, sing does not have the same weight as 1h sword skill for 99.9% of groups).