deleriad

tl;dr. I'm sure it works perfectly well but it's not for me. Just to reduce the strength of any fire runes around here there are judgement calls and preferences in the sorcery outlined mentioned that I personally don't like but it doesn't mean they are in any way "broken." There are some game design decisions that don't work for me: particularly augment hunting when those augments are in the tiny percentage range. I do realise that some people get a real kick out of optimising their skill chance by chaining together a whole load of small bonuses but I really don't. As someone who mostly GMs I particularly dislike it because I don't want to have to be constantly dealing with multiple small bonuses. I'm relieved that at least small dice roll bonuses have gone. For what it's worth, my personal preference is that the power of a spell is based on the skill of the caster not on access to Magic Points. In the latter case, a contest between wizards is mostly settled by who has the bigger machine gun and the most ammo. That however is a personal preference for how to model magic. So my dislike of the sorcery system is a mixture of personal preference for how to model it and a dislike of tiny-augment-hunting skill systems. The other issues for me are indications that there are characteristic buffing spells (Enhance INT) which I dislike in a game intensely because they add yet more fiddly skill changes and that despite handfasting the system to Glorantha we have vanilla names for spells. That final point seems like a missed opportunity. Spell names don't have to be florid but I would much rather see them rooted in the setting than the game function.

Sadly, this just unsold me on sorcery. It reads like all the worst parts of AD&D combined with the worst parts of RQ3 sorcery. There's a sorcerer carrying around all manner of gee-gaws in order to give himself micro bonuses to a skill and extra Magic Points. His ability to cast powerful magic seems to have nothing to do with skill and mastery and everything to do with the number of magic doodads containing Magic Points he's acquired over the years. Basically, a sorcerer's capability is defined by their gear. Then the spells. Enhance INT. Really? Are we going back to RQ3 days of sorcerers buffing party members and themselves to stupid characteristic levels. And then to cast a spell you first roll all your doodad based micro bonuses. Then you roll for the spell. Then you roll for its effects after doing the old RQ3 SRs carrying over calculation despite the fact that nothing else in the universe carries over. For what its worth, I thought the idea sounded good (bar the micro-bonuses) in the blog. It's always seemed cognitively wrong that we kept approaching Gloranthan sorcery through improvised magic or pseudo ars-magica verb+noun manipulations when the lore always said that a sorcery spell did one thing and one thing only, precisely, exactly and without variation. This description of how it works, however, does nothing for me.

I don't really understand the following: "four of the six Techniques are arranged as two sets of polarities; the other two, Command and Tap, are implied in all other techniques. Knowledge of one technique provides insight into its opposite. A character can cast spells using the opposite technique to one they have mastered at double the magic point cost. Thus a character who has mastered Summon can cast Dismiss spells at twice the magic point cost. Note that every technique provides insight into Command and Tap - and vice versa." Does that mean if I know Combine that I can use Separate, Command and Tap as well but only through paying double Magic Points? Relatedly, the Intensity of a spell is equal to the number of Magic Points in it so if I'm spending double Magic Points to cast a spell does that mean the Intensity is equal to the number of MPs I actually spent or half the number of Magic Points? So, if I am understanding correctly. Every spell is a skill that must be learned and improved separately. You can only learn/cast a spell that has a technique+rune that you know. However if you know, for example, Command you also know all the other techniques but must spend double Magic Points to cast spells that use them. You can learn a combined number of runes plus techniques equal to your INT-12. You can learn a number of spells equal to your INT but only that subset of spells which you have a rune+technique match with. It's certainly not what I expected. Reminds me of D&D/Vancian style magic where a very specific thing done in a very specific way leads to a very specific outcome or none at all. It would be interesting to see a couple of spell descriptions. Sorcery in RQ3 and beyond has largely been an effects-based system while this seems not to be. E.g. Smother had a specified effect but a load of different ways of skinning it depending on the sorcerer's background. Finally. +1d10%? Really? It sounds like the 80s is back and RQ is going to revert to RQ3 style augment hunting. A 5% here, a 5% there, a d10% here a minus d6% there. Right you have +13% to your skill. Oh, can I get another +5% from this? Yes, I forgot about that but that reminds me that because your finangle is dooded that you have an extra minus -1d10. Roll. Fail. Damn. Oh, hang on a second, I forgot about the Miggeldypoon that should have given me +10%. What was your skill? What did you roll? Um, no, you still failed. Or my favourite question as a GM in the 80s. Is that a special?

Going back to the OP I have a very different take on this. If you are running RQ2 under Roll20 for D&D and/or RQ6 players and you don't know RQ2 very well, it's not going to go very well. Both you and the players are going to have system shock. RQ2 is unforgiving and deadly, not in a gritty interesting way but in a random "oops there goes my arm" kind of way. I grew up on RQ2 and RQ3. Hell I even had an article published for RQ3 in Heroes. I wouldn't play either of them now. RQ2 was lightning in a bottle for its time. When we used to play it we used to laugh at PCs getting their limbs hacked off on the vagaries of a dice roll or when they would spend round after round missing each other then fumble and kill a friend. When you're 17 and this is all new, it's funny. After a while it stopped being funny then, as a GM, I learned to roll my dice behind a screen in order not to expose the PCs to quite so many criticals. When I wanted to keep a crit I would move the screen to one side so the players could see it was legit. Otherwise I would call it a fail. I also ended up with some quite poor rolling gem dice that I would use as GM dice. As games, RQ2 and more so RQ3 aren't very well designed. They were a revolution for their time but the only reason I would play them now is if someone else was running them for nostalgic LoLs. Personally I would wait for the new Chaosium RQ to scratch that retro RQ itch as from the sounds of it they're addressing many of the rough spots. Issues around the link between characteristics and skills are always contentious in all d100 games. In many ways, the link is deliberately weak because there's a premise that learned skill (largely) trumps born ability. In summary, I very much doubt you did anything "wrong." Rather I suspect that you and the players were caught out by how differently RQ2 plays to D&D and RQ6/Mythras. You could add a whole load of healing potions and other doodads to keep PCs alive and stick their arms back on but if you want to try again, go with the flow. Starting PCs are pretty useless, owe a shed load of money and will probably die or be crippled in the first 1-3 sessions. If anyone makes it out of that alive, then celebrate and take it from there.

I like the idea behind heroes as expressed there. I was never keen on heroes being uber-skilled characters with 500% broadsword and 100 points of rune magic. The explicit tying together of heroes and the otherworld is far more interesting to me so I'm looking forwards to seeing this in more detail.

One thing I will say is that Legend is not cheaper than Mythras/RQ6. The Legend core rulebook may be £1 but Mythras Imperative is free and the RQ6 core fantasy book covers the content in Legend, Monsters of Legend, The spirit magic supplement and a whole lot more besides for the cheaper than buying the Legend content. (Prices all via PDF from Drivethru. RQ6 is even cheaper if you stick to printed products.) Legend's supplements are horribly over-priced. For example Book of Quests (RQ6) and Spider God's Bride (Legend) are both S&S campaigns with similar page counts. BoQ is £6, SGB is £15. System wise. Mythras/RQ6 is a refined and smoother and has a lot more depth out of the core book. For Legend you have to buy multiple supplements to get the same depth but then have to stitch them together: something that is already done for you in Mythras. About the only advantage to Legend is that the core book is less intimidating than the RQ6 core book. However with Mythras Imperative you have a good simple core book that is ideal for players who don't want to spend ages learning a system. Really, at this point, I don't even see why anyone would spend even £1 for the Legend core book. The exception being that you want to self-publish Legend products using the OGL.

I am biased, being one of the authors, but Book of Quests was designed to be as easy as possible to pick up and play. Each scenario is self-contained and demands a minimum of background and prep. They're also designed so that players and GM don't need any kind of in-depth knowledge of the RQ magic systems. All in all it pretty much meets all your demands. Monster Island is a lot of over-the-top fun but there will be more prep involved unless you're really comfortable improvising sessions around encounter tables and seeing what happens next.

I do enjoy charts like these. As I understand it, Elric!/SB5 was basically Lynn Willis's attempt at making a fairly light, generic fantasy system which would be different from RuneQuest. It was hampered by Chaosium's subsequent implosion. Jason resurrected it in the BGB and added a lot of toolkit options so you could create other Chaosium games to various degrees. The new Magic World was then Ben Monroe's new edition of Elric!/SB5 with a few updates and a new implied setting. Essentially, the idea was to create a light, quick to play fantasy game but the company just never had the resources to devote to it and now the new management has different priorities. It's been a long time since I read GORE but I think it is basically the old MRQ1 SRD converted into CoC. I remember it causing some bad blood because it looked to be undercutting an extant game rather than retro-cloning one that was out of print. I don't remember there being much Elric! in it. Finally, MRQ1 was in many ways a reaction against RQ3, as is the new Chaosium RQ by all accounts. Mongoose were more interested in trying to recapture the UK success of RQ2. It was meant to be a slim, quick to learn, simple to play game book. It was a horrible mess of a product but that's a whole other story. It does rather indicate though that in many ways RQ3 was something of a dead end.

I really like Revolution's Advantage mechanic. In my own idealised d100 system I like to use "success & ending in 1" as a critical and "failure and ending with 0" as a fumble with blackjack opposed rolls. I used to use doubles but they have some quirks I don't like. The 1s&0s technique has the advantage of maintaining the traditional 01 = critical and 00 = fumble. If I were starting from scratch I would use Advantage as my favourite level of success mechanic. The other thing I'm mulling over now is replacing difficulty modifiers with a difficulty die (currently a d12). This has the advantage of meaning that the skill value never changes. for example if the task is "easy" then you roll a d12 along with your skill roll. If the d12 comes up 1-4 (i.e. 25% chance) then the skill automatically succeeds even if you would have failed normally. Likewise if the difficulty is hard and you roll 1-4 on d12 then the skill fails even if you would have succeeded normally. This way it is also fairly easy to say things like "I would have climbed that wall normally but the conditions made it too difficult" (succeed at skill but d12 difficulty die came up fail). It's kind of odd because it feels as though it's independent of skill even though it isn't. E.g. on 76% skill a hard roll (1-4 on d12 = fail) turns your 76% chance of success into 54%).

I think that RQ3 was conceptually simpler to understand because they unified everything into the SR count. In RQ2, melee action, non-melee action and movement all acted in subtly different ways. The problem RQ3 had is that SR were never meant to be a tick system; they sort of drifted that way. I taught a lot of RQ3 back in the day. I ran a uni rpg society with a lot of members and was always the person who ran intro RQ scenarios. SRs were always one of the bigger problems. They were ok as long as no one tried to do anything unusual and could be treated as an initiative number - as it were. They tended to be more of a problem for D&D players trying out a new system as opposed to complete newcomers for whom it was just a mysterious number. For what it's worth, when MRQ1 came out I started to run it with mostly ex-D&D types. I didn't like the initiative system so tried switching back to RQ3 SRs. That was not popular and I quickly switched back.

To stick purely to the question asked: I don't think there's much to choose between RQ2 and RQ3 strike ranks. They have the exact same overall strengths and weaknesses. I personally preferred 12 SRs per round over 10 as it led to slight extra variability. Didn't like the idea of SR 0 or spells that could take 0 SRs to cast and preferred 1 SR as a minimum. I preferred 3 SR (out of 10) as the default action length rather than 5 out of 12 Had no real preference for the exact breakpoints of weapon SR, SIZ SR and DEX SR. All in all then I had a slight preference for RQ3 but I would say that both iterations are equally viable. To go beyond the original question: these days I find RQ2/3 SRs to be an awful lot of fiddling about for relatively little gain in actual play and to be a pretty clunky system in general.

That was pretty much how I played my first year of RQ2. It went something like screw up depending Gringle's pawnshop so you now owe money to him and the guilds. Agree to explore Rainbow Mounds to get some loot and go into more debt needing healing potions. Run into the occasional Lunar patrol as a random encounter who "tax" you of your pitiful supply of loot. Have so many debts and obligations that you spend your time being sent to explore death traps that end up with you dead, limbless or even more in debt. Rinse and repeat. Life as a RQ2 adventurer was short, brutal and indebted. The characters occasionally made it to initiate level. One did once make it to 3 points of rune magic until he had to blow it all and then ended up on 2 POW after a DI.

"RuneQuest 4" and "Adventures in Glorantha" are cursed names probably better never said in public again. For me RQahem was when I rebelled against detail levels in RPG. It was essentially "adventures in book-keeping" and sent me down a different path. It makes an interesting read these days (along with RuneQuest Slayers or whatever it was eventually called.) Those were dark, dark days in the d100 verse.

That is an edge case. Most normal RQ6 attacks take fewer dice rolls than any other edition of RQ. RQ6. Roll attack. Roll parry. If parry successful no need to roll for damage or hit location because damage blocked. RQ2 Roll attack. Roll parry. Roll damage. Apply damage to parrying weapon (in some cases). Check if weapon breaks and any damage goes through. If so, roll hit location then check damage versus armour points. If any go through, apply damage to locational hit points and general hit points. RQ3. Roll attack. Roll parry. Roll damage. Check if damage exceeds parrying weapon armour points. If so reduce damage by weapon armour points and reduce weapon armour points by 1 (in some cases.) Roll hit location then check damage versus location armour points (remember to choose between melee and missile hit locations). If any go through, apply damage to locational hit points and general hit points. And to answer the OP's original question. I'm buying it to look nice on my shelf. Nostalgia is a powerful force when you're a 50 year old gamer whose first game was the GW box set of RQ2. (I'm hoping that as an add-on they can get a version of the GW bikini armour cover as an alternative.)

Actually that's a key point and one that I had overlooked. I don't have any strongly held views about this. I think if there's a certain amount of goodwill and the forum is able to develop organically then I reckon it will continue to thrive regardless of agonising over a name.

Why not just stick with BRP Central? My understanding is that this isn't Chaosium's forum. Trif offered space on this forum for Chaosium to use. He's built a strong and vibrant community here which is about more than just Chaosium. Conversely, if the forum looks like it belongs to Chaosium then visitors may end up wondering if the various publishers here (Newt, Cakebread and Walton etc) are publishing Chaosium products. Chaosium are rightly protective of their IP and anything which makes it looks like this is the "official Chaosium forum" runs the risk of confusing matters. That's my 2p worth.

I thought the stuff by Robin Laws, Loz and Gareth Hanrahan was great. Full of atmosphere and really playable. Blood of Orlanth is probably my second favourite Glorantha campaign. Truth be told, I found the Second Age (when it was done properly) reinvigorated my interest in Glorantha.

Love the Google translation of Stormbull as "Toro Stormy." I think that's going to make it into a NPC quirk somewhere...

agreed with @Baulderstone. Let the game world adapt rather than trying to enforce behaviour change through rule change. People wear helmets and use shields for good reason. Also, use the other SEs aggressively against the players. Thing is, having a NPC hit your PC in the head is worrying but providing you have good protection the worry is over the second the damage is rolled and you still have positive hit points. Being tripped, on the other hand, causes ongoing worrying. Nothing players dread more than feeling helpless or at a disadvantage. Put them through the wringer a few times and watch their behaviour change.

It's a good rule so I would keep it. I use it in my house rules. Currently any successful roll with a 1 for units and any roll below the number exceeding 100 is what I use. That said I tend to play fairly low powered games so it doesn't come into play much. Very tempted to switch (or at least try out) your system as it smooths the breakpoint at 100%. Are you going to allow stacking advantages? e.g. skill 130%, roll 21, advantage from being less than 30 and for having tens bigger than units. Or is advantage simply binary: you have it or you don't?

I like this idea. It is very cool and I think I might steal it mercilessly for my own homebrew. (Currently using 1 on units as crit and 0 on units as fumble.) I guess the obvious question is what happens for skills over 100? That may have been answered elsewhere. Also, do you plan on having "disadvantage"?

This too. Cards can be a nice touch for those who like such things and the idea of a random pile in the middle to avoid decision paralysis is also good. Generally whenever I've taught RQ SE's to new players I've given each player a small selection for their character and introduced other SE's only when relevant. One of the key things about RQ combat that is, I think under appreciated, is that SEs are really the core of combat with Damage almost secondary. Most people tend to assume that enhancing damage is the primary role of SEs (i.e. that SEs are the icing on the damage cake). I think it's more accurate to say that damage is the icing on the SE cake (bar some edge cases like giants stomping on pixies.) Bruce

I think there's a couple of issues here. Elfquest rpg actually predates RQ3. As Sandy Petersen explains: Steve Perrin used it as a testbed for developing the RQ3 rules. https://rpggeek.com/thread/687987/what-went-wrong-elfquest-one-authors-comments Also I'm pretty sure Ringworld predates RQ3. Ringworld is a very different beast to RQ3 and is very much its own, unique deadend in the BRP world. The impulse system, tree and branch skills and so on never showed up anywhere else. Other than that I think this is great.

I was the same but updated to the new link and that is fine.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the monographs. With a few honourable exceptions they are of poorer quality and production standards than hobbyist works that are given away for free. In my mind, they are emblematic of Chaosium's failings over the last decade or so. If some of the best remaining content can be repurposed into high quality, well produced books then that, I reckon, is the best thing for them.