BWP

Really, haven't we all been killed by Sandy Petersen?

A baffling, baffling publication decision. Granted, the TAHGC Deluxe set was astronomically expensive, but at least it was "complete" (within its own context) -- and the "Players' Box"/"GMs' Box" options were available, if not ideal. The GW books were like being drip-fed the game in random order IMO. I bought a set long after they were out of print, mostly just for curiousity's sake (I certainly didn't spend a lot to get them) and am glad I never needed them to actually play the game. And you didn't even get a version of the Glorantha book! I bought HW when it was released, and a couple of the initial supplemental works. After I spent some time trying to work out whether it was actually a game, I decided that it wasn't, and that it was actually just a "brave" new way of marketing new Glorantha background material. Unfortunately it seemed to me to be a lot of work to try and retrofit this new material back into RQ, and I wasn't even playing RQ at the time, so it became easier to just shelve the whole thing. [I know I'm not being "fair" to HW by characterising it in this fashion, and for people who play it (and/or HQ) and get enjoyment from it, well, great! More power to you! For me and my regular gaming friends, though, it was (and is) "wrong" in pretty much every way possible for a game to be wrong.]

Not my program, it just printed out a table, like the one printed in the RQ3 rules -- only, you know, accurate. The output fit on a single sheet of standard computer paper and could be folded neatly and stored inside the rulebook. Where it still is, some 30-odd years later, IIRC. The "modern" spreadsheet version has alternate coloured bars and rows and so forth, but that's just to make it look pretty.

I started with RQ2, which I liked just fine, but it always felt a little incomplete ... but I like my games crunchy and detailed. So when RQ3 came along, offering a lot more "crunch" and (mostly) refining what I already liked about RQ2, it quickly became my favourite system. However, as we all well know, as a way to game in Glorantha, RQ3 was a disappointment for a long, long time. It wasn't a huge deal -- the existing RQ2 supplements were still perfectly usable -- but the lack of anything really new for Glorantha was frustrating. That, however, is a separate issue from the system, which compared to RQ2, was lacking very little -- other than some desperately-needed errata which, again, was a long time in coming (at least as officially published -- fortunately very early on I had a long list of questions that had been answered by Greg and Sandy covering everything I considered important, touching on many topics that the official errata remained silent about). One funny thing that sticks in my head is that I noticed quite quickly that the rules version of the HP-per-location chart didn't match the stated 40%-33%-25% breakdown in many areas, which just didn't make any sense to me -- so I wrote a simple program on the university mainframe to print out an accurate chart. Nowadays, of course, it's comically easy to do the equivalent in Excel. After some time I of course came up with all manner of house rules and extensions (particularly for combat) which I compiled into my own personal "RQ3.5". That document has a lot of needed work remaining still, but with the imminent release of RQG I don't see much point in completing it now. I'm sure I'll adapt many of those house rules into the new game. It's what we do! As for other versions ... like many people we got a chance to look at the draft RQ4 and liked many things in it, but never made any attempt to play it. And there things remained until the first Mongoose edition was released. We tried it and we hated it. Hated! There were one or two interesting ideas that I contemplated retro-fitting into my RQ3.5 but motivation was a bit lacking at that time. I hear that Mongoose's 2nd edition was a considerable improvement, but the 1st edition had destroyed my interest in it pretty thoroughly. (I wasn't wildly impressed by Mongoose's publication strategy, either.) A little later some of my friends tried RQ6 and were generally positive, but I never got a chance to see for myself and had pretty much dropped out of the whole RQ thing (and role-playing in general, to be honest). I thought I had lost all interest in Glorantha, too, until the announcement of RQG proved how wrong that was .... So I await RQG and the associated publications to see if we really have gone full circle over nearly 40 years ....

So I can't help but picture the following "scene": MORTAL WORSHIPPER: "Oh mighty Orlanth, I sacrifice to you so that you may enable the awesome destructive power of this hula hoop of death." ORLANTH: "Wow, that sounds rad! And it will fly through the air and everything! Yeah baby, let's DO IT!" LHANKOR MHY: "You know, the rules don't let you do that kind of thing." ORLANTH: "Aw man. Stupid God-Learners ...."

That T.E.D. Klein issue was the first one I had. It inspired me to go on and read some of his work, so I guess mission accomplished! It was that tricksy Mark Morrison, back when he was working at Minotaur (and I was still living in Newcastle), who convinced me to subscribe. That man has a lot to answer for!

This past weekend I was able to pick up a copy of the Classics' Griffin Mountain (softcover) from a local retailer. (I have no idea how long it's been there.) I noticed that the table of contents got a bit messed up with the player handouts etc. not being present, although I found the PDF download of the handouts so that's OK. I was curious though -- there's no reproduction of the original version's large fold-out maps with the hexgrid overlay? Is that correct? I fully realise this was probably very difficult to reproduce in the reprint format, and I'm not overly bothered since I have the original (a little worse for wear after all these years); and of course the smaller maps sans grid are present in the book. I just wanted to make sure that I'm not missing anything. (Assuming that the PDF copy is no different, someone might want to amend the descriptive text on the Chaosium site -- it's slightly dishonest to claim that it contains "all of the original supplement".)

In Australia, it cost A$90 for the Deluxe set in 1984, which was indeed staggeringly expensive for an RPG. I seem to recall your typical boxed RPGs at the time being in the A$25-30 range, which itself was pretty daunting for a poor Uni student (although I managed to buy an awful lot of them any way ...). I was (so far as I know) the first person in my home town of Newcastle to buy the RQ3 box and at the time I wondered if this was going to be a good investment .... I didn't mind or even quite liked most of the system changes in the rules, and while I wasn't impressed with the production values I coped. (I laminated the covers, but it didn't help much.) What bothered me is that it took a long, long time to get anything meaningful and new for Glorantha. Don't get me wrong, Vikings was very well done, but it didn't have a lot that was of much use in a DP or Prax campaign (at least as I understood things at that time). In the end I would rather have spent my $90 on new boxed supplements equivalent to Trollpak, Pavis, etc. Oh well.

xxx

Sorcerors have cannons now? Overpowered much? I guess the important question is, is it part of the canon? (Sorcerous cannons I mean.) Sorry. Personal bugbear. (Are bugbears canon?) Slightly more seriously ... is the Dwarf's Cannon a product of sorcery? Or is Mostali sorcery now not "sorcery"? (It gets hard to keep track of all these things ....) Personally I'll accept any systemic improvement on RQ3 sorcery rules. There were few things more depressing than generating a new character under the RQ3 rules and discovering that your beginning character came from a sorcery background, and thus started with no spirit magic and one sorcery spell that was (for all practical purposes) impossible to cast and did virtually nothing any way.

Just curious -- are there "standard" methods of increasing Free INT (other than "forget stuff")? IMO one of the problems with RQ3 Sorcery was that to be "powerful" (in even a generic fantasy sense, not just Glorantha) a sorcerer needed a lot of Free INT available, and there weren't any obvious ways of getting more than you start with -- except maybe through Familiars, and even that was not an especially easy path (bordering on impossible). IMO if the Sorcery rules are to "work" then this sort of issue needs to be addressed with clarity. I seem to recall that various unofficial fixes like Sandy's "Saints" system offered solutions in this direction, but I gather they're all ex-Saints now so wondering where we will be at. (Not that I'm suggesting that increasing Free INT should be easy, just that there should be an identified process (or more than one process would be even better).