deleriad

BRP currently has options for Hit Points only or Hit Points and Hit Locations. Thought it might be interesting to import a "Hit Location only" toolbox option: as used in MRQ... The premise is that a character does not have any sort of hit point total: instead some dies when a vital location suffers a major wound. Using humanoids as an example: vital locations are head & torso locations non-vital locations are limbs. There are three types of injury. Minor injury - any amount of damage that does not reduce a location below zero. Serious injury - any amount of damage that reduces a location to negative HPs. Location with a serious injury is impaired. Major inury - any injury that means the location has suffered more than double its normal HPs in damage. Doing a major injury in a single blow can sever a location causing instant death if it was a vital location. Whenever you take a serious or major injury you make a resistance roll of the location's normal HPs versus the damage just caused. Call this is a pain test. Serious injury to limb: pass pain test, no additional effect. Fail - dazed. Serious injury to vital location. Pass pain test - dazed. Fail test - unconscious Major injury to limb. Incapacitated. Will bleed out in CON+POW minutes unless treatment received. Pass pain test at -20% to remain conscious. Major injury to vital location: incapacitated and will bleed out in CON/2 melee rounds unless treatment received. Pass pain test at -40% to remain conscious. This may be an option for people who like hit locations but find that the HL+HP can be very fragile. There's a certain "die Hard" vibe because a character can take a lot of damage to different locations yet stay standing. It has quirks - the more tentacles you have, the harder you are to kill and Scorpion Men love it to bits - but seems like it could be a useful addition to the BRP toolbox.

That is what I used to do in my last years of RQ3. I would say that players couldn't have more than X experience rolls to stop them gaming the system. After a while of playing RQM more recently I realised that actually ticking boxes in the old days was something of a fiction. If a player wanted to improve a skill and had a good reason for improving by experience (e.g. maybe they failed spectacularly at something) why not just let them do it? Looking back on it, there's a lot of overhead in ticking boxes for experience rolls that doesn't seem to have really done anything for the experience of playing. One of the other advantages of IRs (which sort of exists with experience rolls) is that you can use them to set the improvement speed of a campaign. If you want characters to start as farmworkers but quickly improve you can a) give out more IRs and give them out more frequently. You can do that with experience rolls but it's a little harder to justify. Personally, I just give out a fixed amount after each session with an occasional premium of +1 for a character who did something unusual and extraordinary. It also makes downtime easy. Rather than counting hours and free time and training costs I let characters spend X Improvement rolls.

Separating out narrative systems (Hero Points) from mechanical systems (Improvement rolls) is, IMHO, essential. Hero Points allow characters to affect the narrative of a scenario both immediately ("ha! That crossbow bolt didn't kill me after all, it was deflected by my whisky flask.") and long term ("after years of searching I've finally found Mad Mack the Decapitator and managed to persuade him to teach me the art of decapitating foes with but a single swing"). Improvement rolls abstract the rate of improvement of character skills and abilities. In practical terms, I find that I pretty much give all PCs about the same number of IRs which means that all PCs improve at about the same rate; it's just down to what players chose to spend them on. On a meta level you could say that, Hero Points give new control over events in the world to players while Improvement Rolls give new control over PC development to the GM. Having been playing RQM for a couple of years now, I wouldn't go back to skill ticking.* * One exception to this is sorcerous characters as they require more significantly more skills than other characters. Skill ticking tends to even that problem out. If I were running games with a grab-bag of characters including sorcerous characters I would probably give the sorcerer an IR premium.

Ah, I thought Harshax had missed that point. But, as you say, if you do remove the 100s digit then the character with mastery has a significantly reduced critical and special chance which is also counter intuitive. E.g. at 100 vs 95 then the character with mastery has a 1% chance of a critical and a 4% chance of a special as opposed to the 95%er who has a 5% and 19% chance respectively. I kept coming across this back in my RQ3 days when I tried various opposed roll systems (starting off with stolen from Pendragon) and the PCs tended to be around 90-100% in their best skills. The problem tended to be huge breakpoints or periods (like the mastery version) where skills went backwards for a while. I can pretty much guarantee you that the first time a player with 110% makes an opposed roll and has to take 100 off their roll they'll balk.

Of course the effect of that is that a character at 100% against one at 99% wins probably 90% of the time while 95% vs 94% is close to 50/50. It makes the 100% break point massively huge in BRP in a way that feels quite out of proportion. E.g. You have someone 90% vs 80% but the 80%er gets a +20% bonus for something. I did try this ages ago and stopped pretty quickly because it was just too extreme.

The problem is this. Say you have two people: Andrew is 51% at singing and Bob is 50% at singing. They enter a singing contest. You would expect them to have a roughly equal chance of winning as the difference in skill between them is minimal. In fact, using the highest skill wins system Andrew wins 48.7% of the time, Bob wins 28.7% of the time and there is no result the rest of time. Basically the highest skill wins system massively overstates the importance of skill. The better you are, the odder it seems. For example 100% vs 95% results in a win for the 100%er 80% of the time.

Just to echo this. Cinematic combat is a mindset and games fail when GMs and players don't share the mindset. As a nipper I remember trying to play a swashbuckler type who was forever jumping onto things, swinging off of things and so on. However, any type of swashbuckling was always counterproductive because either the GM gave me a negative but no positive or required me to make a series of rolls which represented how "hard" the act was. In the end, I was better off just standing there and rolling dice. The basic mindset then is to reward players for "stunts." So, if someone wants to swing off a chandelier and attack an enemy don't require multiple rolls and strike ranks simply say something "ok, make a single roll that's under your attack skill and agility," your enemy has -30% to parry or dodge. Or say, ok it'll cost you a PP and your enemy has -20% to parry or dodge the attack. To go back to the OP's original question. More Hit Points are the standard way of helping characters stay alive longer. Using some sort of Fate Point mechanic will enable characters to pull off stunts or survive damage. MOstly though it's about how you assign modifiers and getting into a "yes you can" mindset.

I must admit that if I were to run any BRP straight I would not tie any form of Fate/Hero Points to POW unless I were specifically writing a world background based around it. The obvious potential case of this being Ringworld where genetic engineering for luck has POW written all over it. The POW*5 mechanic for luck has also often been one of those things that I've seen new players balk at. Basically it confuses character luck (character a being luckier than character and player luck with dice rolls. I've come to realise that 99% of the time in the past when I have called for a luck roll it's really been about player luck not about character luck so I've happily excised character luck from my games.

Purely mechanically, the resistance table gives relative chances while standard dice rolls give absolute chances. Also, you end up with multitudes of different resolution systems: stat * X% to make a characteristic roll stat vs stat on resistance table skill% skill% vs skill% for whatever system you're using to resolve opposed skills. If you're used to BRP this complexity is pretty invisible but it's a bit of a hodge-podge when you're new to the game. I've personally adopted the MRQ system of using just skills and opposed skills. Once in a while it can feel a little confining and I get itchy fingers for a luck roll or something but generally it feels more unified. It's not that I find the resistance table difficult to use, simply that I prefer to have fewer game mechanics.

Actually it does allow you; I discovered it by accident. Basically you need to be editing in the formula bar, select the text you want to change and then change font and, hey presto, it's done. I've used Excel quite a lot for character sheets but never thought of using the tiny cells trick. May give that a try though I'm always tinkering and de-merging cells is always an absolute pain.

They are very enlightening and I have based my ideas on how Gloranthan runes might work in RQ (and, by association, BRP) on them. The concept of people being born with runic relations based on their culture, family, social & religious history makes a lot of sense to me. As does rune matching when joining theistic cults. If I were re-writing MRQ I would make the runic powers table a little more free-form. E.g. if someone has an air rune then at affinity level they can make minor manifestations (making a candle gutter), at integration they can do more and with mastery even more. Then again I would probably also get all sort of nerdy and match runes with skills so your rune casting skill can augment a matching skill and draw up associations with metals, colours, weapons and behavioural traits.

That is a different thread. I think I've seem some chatter elsewhere. It can easily be done by eye with the following caveat: MRQ weapon and armour values are closer to RQ2 than BRP. That said, if a character has a Bastard Sword then they have a Bastard Sword so use BRP stats. MRQ uses hit locations but not general Hit Points. Therefore you will have to calculate your own. That said MRQ uses pretty standard BRP stat skills so you can simply use your favourite option. If you are using hit locations then MRQ does not use RQ3/BRP hit location calculations and you probably need to use the BRP ones to be fair to PCs. MRQ hit locations have 1 hit point per every 5 points (or portion) of CON+SIZ with an adjustment for location (+1 abdomen, +2 chest etc). Average human (CON 10 SIZ 13) in BRP is Legs: 4, Abdo 4, Chest 5, Arms 3, Head 4 if I remember correctly. In MRQ same person is: Legs: 5, Abdo 6, Chest 7, Arms 4, Head 5. i.e. an MRQ character usually has 1-2 HP per location more than a BRP average.

Depends what you're wanting to achieve. If you're wanting to use Dedicated POW rather than sacrifice POW then clearly you'll need to adapt that. The Grimoires and orders from Cults II for sorcery might be useful though that's not open content. Similarly shamanism - though you have to unpick the editing disasters. Other material for the second age would be Draconic Mysticism and God Learner sorcery from Magic of Glorantha. The stuff on HeroQuesting can probably just as easily be adopted from HeroQuest. The Dragonewt and Aldryami source books have a lot of useful material in them. 99% of the stuff can be just copied and pasted. There's the odd spell that needs refining to work without hit locations and/or to take account of General Hit Points but that's about it. Any spells that can be resisted with resilience or persistence become POW vs POW instead.

I do realise that you believe physical runes that can be integrated by someone after the previous host has died ARE AN ABOMINATION AND HAVE NO PLACE IN GLORANTHA AND ANY POSSIBILITY OF THEM BREAKS GLORANTHA AND RUINS IT AND STEALS MY PET TEDDY BEAR (sob, I loved that teddy bear). I think you'll find that players who like to kill things and steal their stuff will do so regardless. If in your Glorantha physical runes are extremely rare or maybe don't even exist, then allow the casting of rune magic without the need for a physically integrated rune. Or ignore MRQ and play with RQ3 or BRP with RQ3 options. If you wish for runes to exist but dissipate after the host dies then that's your Glorantha. I suggest however that if you wish to debate the nature of runes in Glorantha and whether physical rune objects exist or not that a Glorantha list would be better.

This is undoubtedly true though retconning (which is essentially what's at stake) is a major fan pastime. HQ2.0 may or may not surface one day and, afterwards, the Gloranthan magic book may arrive and the authors may or may not specify whether in HQ2.0 physical rune objects exist in Glorantha. I personally quite like the idea of a boom in physical rune objects in the Second Age due to God Learner activities and I like some of the storytelling you can do around this. It would almost certainly be a retcon. That said quite a lot of Glorantha was made up on the spur of the moment to suit the needs of a particular game so there is a noble tradition of it. However, this thread is in danger of spinning off into Gloranthan esoterica.

I got Nephilim at the time and some of the supplements and thought it had the potential to be a very different type of take on the occult conspiracy genre. Basically it is absolutely bonkers in a giant space lizards for Christ manner with a dash of Fifth Element. Rather than delving back into mages in trenchcoats in dark alleys territory I think it has the potential for being something far more psychedelic and, when it comes to it, unsettlingly amoral. I think that a self-contained rulebook which attempts to explore a different tone would be great.

I think the issue of whether or not there are physical manifestations of runes is a distraction when you're looking at fixing the rules for a game. If physical rune objects don't exist in your Glorantha then modify the rules to match accordingly. The default position in MRQ is that runes manifest physically, are attuned for a lifetime, can be re-attuned after death and that rune magic can't be cast without an integrated physical rune object. There is nothing broken about that characterisation. There is a breakage between that characterisation and rune magic for cults which makes the system internally inconsistent. My interest is in addressing that breakage is to allow for the possibility of runecasting without needing to integrate a physical rune object and allowing cults to be able to map different magics to the runes their God possesses based on their myths. Issues like the prevalence of rune objects, what happens to a rune object when its host dies, whether there are non-standard forms of integration and so on are, in my opinion, fluff-led decisions which will vary by game world and player preference.

I actually like Mongoose's linear dice system for damage modifier. It's based on multiples of five so its fairly easy to eyeball it and it tends to slow down at the top end a little. After all there's probably no discernible difference between getting squished by 120 SIZ dinosaur compared to a 130 SIZ one. I don't personally like adding any damage modifier for missile weapons - that is figured in the actual weapon stats anyway. I can see the point for thrown weapons. I have always understood as this meaning roll the die and halve the result. I know with bows that your STR affects the draw you can make but so, also, does your skill, quality of the bow and so on. I think it's easier to just have a weapon damage and not try to micromanage. Again, one good thing in the MRQ weapons system is that if you use a weapon that can be used one or two handed that you get +1 damage when used 2h. So a 1H Bastard sword does 1D8 while 2H Bastard Sword does 1D8+1. Simple and effective.

Re runes: I believe there are supposed to be significantly more rune objects around than normal during the Second Age because of the God Learners. I believe they are spontaneously manifesting during the second age, possibly as if the hero plane were bleeding from grievous injuries. My own take on it is that some of the rune objects are ancestral hand-me downs which the eldest son receives on the death of the father and so on. I suspect that many rune objects get lost. Robin Laws makes the point that many rune objects are considered raid treasures in Orlanthi culture. If you steal it from an enemy then you have stolen some of that enemy's magic and it may sit around in a chest until such time as the enemy dies at which point it becomes unattuned again. I suspect that some rune objects physically embed themselves in a person when attuned while others don't. I personally think of physical rune objects as rare treasures. That's why it makes sense to have relationships with runes which don't require an actual rune object - such as cultural affinities or spiritual integration through an initiation ceremony. Also, by the book, you only get one chance to attune a rune object and it requires a skill that most people only have at base chance - Persistence. In narrative terms I envision the old thane dying and passing on his torque of leadership to his eldest son. The torque contains a motion rune but when the son tries to attune it he fails, leading to whispers from other clan members that maybe the son is not up to the job. So physical rune objects can be an interesting element of Glorantha as long as they are not just kill the broo and take its runes examples. I disliked them when I first read MRQ - lets face it they are power-ups plain and simple - but they can actually be used in very flavourful ways. Loz's section on them in the GM handbook is well worth reading. Finally I don't recall exactly but didn't Powered Crystals in RQ2 have to be attuned to a user and then couldn't be transferred short of death? (I may be wrong.)

Can't speak for RosenMcStern's system but in straight MRQ a runepriest can cast a Consecrate and then pray to receive divine magic of Magnitude equal to or less than the Consecrate as if they were in the appropriate temple.* Additionally, according to the main rulebook runepriests learn cult spells for half the normal cost. The details are slightly contradicted by Cults Vol I but basically I interpret this as saying that runepriests get half price divine magic. Unlike RQ3 where, IIRC, you could pray for a day and spend a small amount to regain reusable spells, in MRQ you basically have to pray for the spell all over again which takes 1 day per mag and costs 100 silvers plus. *I had forgotten about consecrate. Because it is a permanent spell a runepriest can journey to a major temple to learn Consecrate 8, take it home and cast it to create a centre of power. Although only runepriests can use it to pray for divine magic, it does allow them to pray for powerful divine magic without leaving their centre of power. An adventuring runepriest could, then, take some holy symbols with them and create a centre of power in the middle of the wilderness. Of course it still takes several days to pray for magic so it's not great for dungeoneering... **Cunning priests learn Consecrate X, cast it then use it to pray to gain Consecrate X as well as any other X Magnitude spells.

Basically, according to the rules a priest gets to learn magic cheaper; I forget the precise details. I interpret that as meaning that the amount you have to pay to your god as a priest is less rather than your peers in the church giving you a discount. It rather surprisingly fits with the attempts to make Gloranthan magic at least partially community-based in HQ. When it comes to runes and behaviour I agree; if it fits in with play style then you can reward them with in-game benefits (e.g. more Improvement rolls, more Hero Points) and/or use mechanics that represent them having to act against their nature. I just happen to quite like GMing the runes as it were. E.g. When a character with a motion rune says he'll just stay here and look after the camp I am tempted to mention itchy feet, a bit of twitching and so on. I prefer a light touch but for those who like the equivalent of Personality traits in their games, having runic personality traits is a distinct option.

While I'm at lunch... Divine Magic system in MRQ. I think this needs precisely 1 fix. 1. Dedicated POW does not affect skills. i.e. the only effect of dedicated POW is having fewer personal Magic Points. This is pretty much standard in RQ anyway - I notice that Elric (by Loz) uses the rule. I personally would add some extra changes: Allowing the storage of multiple Fixed Magnitude spells. E.g. You can store multiple uses of Berserk through learning the magic at a higher Magnitude. e.g. Berserk Magnitude 6 represents three castings of Berserk. (Learning Berserk 6 would require a pilgrimage to a major temple, however, while you may be able to learn Berserk 2 at a local shrine.) Multiplying the amount of divine magic that can be stored in dedicated POW. E.g. an acolyte can store 2 Mag of divine magic per 1 Dedicated POW, a priest 3 points and so on. (You could make an argument that this is actually some sort of legendary ability.) Dedicating POW to your deity in order to join cults. This is pretty much the same as the Pact mechanism that Loz uses in Elric. In my games, an initiate dedicates 1 POW to their deity, an acolyte 2, priest 3 and so on. What I wouldn't change. Dedicated POW. This is a far better mechanic than I first thought. It is very flavourful (your Magic Points are holding a spell in place or being syphoned off to your god and so on) and a useful crunch enabler because it puts a hard limit on just what a person can do with their POW. Plus, in MRQ, stat gain is an order harder than it is in BRP. Non-reusable divine magic. At first I went back to RQ3 because I thought it was silly having priests needing to re-sacrifice after each spell casting. However, making divine magic one-use to all brings community back into divine magic through economics and becomes more like Greg's stories where people must prepare their magic in advance. The assumption behind this is as follows. There is a cost to learn a divine spell which is measured in money but actually represents goods and services sacrificed to the deity. When you pay a temple to learn a spell, the temple takes a cut but some of that "money" is "destroyed" as part of learning a spell. (I trade you wheat for spells....) Take this to Glorantha and imagine a clan with its God Speaker. The clan wishes the God Speaker to be able to cast lightning magic so they club together to provide the necessary resources. One great advantage to having a rune priest in your clan is that, basically, god gives him a discount thus when you support a priest you as a clan get a discount on magic as it were. If you allow reusable divine magic then that social link through economics is lost. Non-reusable divine magic gives a way of showing how a clan could become magically impoverished and, thus, links a priest's power with the success of his flock. Now I don't think for one minute that the authors sat down and hashed all that out but for me it is a compelling argument for not allowing reusable divine magic for priests, despite 20+ years of playing exactly the reverse...

Well purely my take on the matter is that where rune magic derives directly from the runes, divine magic derives directly from the deity. However, a deity is defined in part by their runes. (Or the runes are derived from deities depending on your mythology.) Therefore there is a symbolic relationship between the types of runes associated with a deity and the types of magic they provide. Therefore when you join a cult and become an initiate you gain access to two types of magic: God-flavoured rune magic and god magic. For example, in my Glorantha, Humakt provides Bladesharp magic tied to the death rune and only usable on swords. This is a flavouring of rune magic. Humakt also provides various divine magics which are great secrets of Humakt and are the result of his activities before time. These magics are so specific to Humakt that after each time you use them, you must rededicate yourself to Humakt in order to use them again. Finally, in order to become an initiate or better, I require characters to "rune match." E.g. if you wish to become an initiate of Humakt you must already possess an affinity (or better) with Death or Truth. The rune you choose to match then becomes integrated into your soul through the initiation process. This is borrowed mercilessly from what I know of HQ2.0 thinking and what I understand to be the most common interpretation of how runes, gods and men relate to each other in Glorantha. Just to say, that although this derives from MRQ, there is absolutely nothing preventing it from being used in BRP. All you need are the runes, spells and runecasting skill all of which are freely available in the SRD. There's no need to port any of the rest of MRQ over. You could also use different rune systems. I noticed you mentioning Futhark (I think) a while ago and you could hang an identical system on Futhark and the Norse gods fairly straightforwardly.

I've been running MRQ in Glorantha for nearly a year now with, mostly, players who are both new to RQ and Glorantha. I would say that the problems with MRQ's publication model in the first year are well known and that's not much point rehashing them here. There are legacy issues in rules as well. However, with the specific point of how well MRQ runs Glorantha, I would say it either currently does or potentially does run Glorantha better than older versions of RQ. That's going to be contentious, I know, but in my opinion it comes from two factors based around magic and runes. 1. Glorantha was never meant to be as rich in magic as RQ2/RQ3 made it out to be. When you look at RQ2/3 stats with barmaids having 10 points of battle/spirit magic it's clear that this simply doesn't reflect any kind of 'canon.' MRQ, possibly by accident, does not feature the same amount of magic prevalence - although anyone can use magic it now requires more effort. 2. The fact that there is cross-over between HQ and RQ authors means that there seems to be more joined up thinking - especially when it comes to runes in society. The caveat is that MRQ Rune Magic, taken RAW from the core books, is tedious and wrong-headed, especially when applied to Glorantha. Add to that the breakages with runic associations and rune spells and what you have is a system that can't be run in Glorantha without modification. However, the rune magic system in MRQ does do two important things. 1. It explicitly ties magical effects into runes; 2. requires a magic user to have a relationship with a rune or entity in order to cast magic. Once you take those two steps, Gloranthan rune magic starts to make sense - potentially more sense than RQ2/3. My house rules for Glorantha is that there are three types of relationship that a Gloranthan can have with a rune: 1. affinity - the most basic 2. integration - as per MRQ but also allowing the possibility of integrating without a physical rune through a cult/worship. 3. mastery. In my Glorantha, everyone is born with one or two affinities based on their culture and background. E.g most Orlanthi males are born with air and/or mobility affinities. In strict game terms, this is simply saying that each character gets one two runecasting skills as part of their culture and profession. Runecasting with an affinity is limited to 2 Mag spells. Moreover, each rune relationship is a two-way effect. If you have an integrated air rune then it tends to push you towards being blustery, rash, brave, reckless etc. If a player wants their character to act in significantly non-runic ways then you must make a Persistence test opposed by the appropriate Runecasting skill in order to act against your runic nature. That ended up being longer than I meant, but what I wanted to spell out is that for all its flaws, MRQ's rune magic system seems to have the potential to be as flavourful and Gloranthan as the HQ take on it and therefore fit Glorantha better than older editions of RQ.

I must admit that I think the Glorantha Second Age book is a contender for one of the best Gloranthan supplements period. Dara Happa stirs is simply superb and the Alkoth chapter is genuinely creepy. The Dragonewt book and the Aldryami book are as good as anything that's been published in Glorantha for RuneQuest and Blood of Orlanth is a wonderfully ambitious campaign. From my point of view, the breakages due to Mongoose's chaotic publishing system actually inspired me to come up with my own fixes and I tend to find, over time and with actual play that I tend to move back to Mongoose's version from mine. Can't say I'm a Mongoose fanboy as they are overly fixated on the bottom line in my opinion but I can't argue that they have managed to survive problems that would have sunk most other games companies and continue to produce erratically brilliant products. I think their rune system went horribly wrong initially - especially for Glorantha. Ironically, the latest work on runes in HQ2.0 shows how easy it is to tweak the Mongoose system into something that is genuinely interesting; something that Loz started in the GM's Handbook. Personally I think this is a boom time for Glorantha that equals anything that came before it.