Madrona

I TBH, would take between 93 and 95 as a point buy thing. But I'd probably, if my players objected to rolling, just tell them to take the D&D elite array +an average score and deal with it. ( 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8. ) + an 11. Cos 83 is A-O-K by me.

I think that depends entirely on the form of illumination within Glorantha. (I'm not gonna touch it on a real world level. Don't expect me to use any particular dialogue tailored towards Buddhism, my cultural word basis for this kind of thing comes from a very different source.) Lunars seem to be based around understanding the fundamentals of Glorantha at a mystical level, noticing the patterns, the flow and the realities that are hidden. Because of this it must include an acceptance of the place of Chaos as a non-invasive force.The Void itself is chaos. Past everything is dissolution into the stuff that made up reality, it can't be described, because description is part of reality. It can't truly be visualized, because visuals are part of reality. Its not formless, because form is a expression of reality. It can't be any thing one can possibly consider, because you don't have the grounds to consider what it is/isn't because it can't be not something or is something. Its like the language particularity in English that both 'Naught' and 'Aught' can hold the same meaning when spoken within certain contexts. In the grand scheme of things, nothing can matter as concepts such as something mattering, or something being, are not present when beyond the confines of reality, and reality itself is nothing but a expression of the _______. That is not temporary, as temporarily itself is an expression of reality and not the void, as is permanency. As far as rational understanding from a in reality perspective goes, if the void reclaims? Alters? Adjusts? The nature of Glorantha, it won't have. Because Glorantha will have never been. Nor will any of the concepts Gloranthans have ever had to conceptualize Glorantha. There won't be a 'end' because there will have never been. Hayden Christensen was always Darth Vader, Han Solo never shot first. Cyrodill was never a jungle. However at least in a lunar perspective, there's no implication they consider souls and god plane entities as not meaningful, at least to the average Illuminate. They're extra meaningful. Your soul has six parts, you, with the power of the Moon and the Red Goddess, are able to awaken your seventh part, and then you seek to merge those parts into a singular soul and become part of the divine, rather than a mortal. Something else that has occurred to me, is that occlusion seems to be the state of mind many broos are in. They're aware of the all to a level that would drive most people mad, and their takeaway that life is completely unimportant. That the only real goal is temporal things that please them. Terrible lusts, exacting their hatred and self loathing on others, and reverence for the only concepts in reality that maintain some ability to care for them. (And they don't agree on what that is either, if its anything. But is usually Malia or Thed) But because they're aware of futility, in most broo it just enhances their unhappiness and leads tothe traditional broo belief that the 'best' they can hope for is annihilation from having existed. Because at least then they're free. I actually think Draconic Illumination is the same route as Lunar Occlusion, but with the understanding of dragons as being part of infinity at an innate level, using Draconic ego to power through any sense of being crushed under the weight of the all. After all, as a dragon, its like a skyscraper down there, the All should feel beholden to ME. That may just be because its funnier to me to think of them that way.

Up it to 90 if you feel that's too weak. (It should be about on par with an average person but RQG is ridiculously generous on those rerolls.) Is it weird I've not played with a group that's used pointbuy, even in D&D, for 10 years? Everyone got sick of it and quit it after 3.5 D&D.

Ya know, you're probably right. I think I got misled by some descriptions I was taking too literally. But you're right, likely tapping the 'life' from the air makes more sense? The thing that allows breath to be made. (The spell is ridiculous as heck, though. I kinda get the feeling it wasn't written with the duration rules in mind)

It taps air, I think traditionally tapping takes away something. Air is an element, you breath it and it makes up the Middle Air. You are literally converting the elemental form of air into magic to feed yourself magically. I think you're thinking too literally! If there's no air somewhere, its not a void. Just as when there's no fire, there's no void. There's simply whatever makes up the universe that's not air. Ether, if you will. Even the description strictly states it converts the air into magic. Meaning, the air is gone.

My understanding of it is... Yes, you have a spirit rune, you just don't call deeply into it unless you're not corporate. (Though your Fetch could represent your mastery of separating your internal spirit from your physical to a level that the spirit-rune of a person is a separate thing and not only present when discorporate. But Spirit isn't particularly important to mundane life as it is corporeal. On the other hand your form runes gain a 'spirit' equivalent when discorporate and are more a manifestation of what you are, rather than who you are.

I don't want to get into a huge argument here, Narnia is a weird thing. But to back up the allegory statement... If you followed Narnia's 'teachings' as Christianity... You'd be a gnostic henotheist (Or monolateralist) non-trinitarian No-Heller who believes in karma and reincarnation, has no idea what transubstantiation is, wouldn't need any concept of Christ-Sacrifice (this is just a magic spell), has their Christ as a living god in the sense of a immortal physical entity, and due to some really shaky passages that would totally get some interesting interpretations put to them, likely a sex/pleasure cultist. Which would transform Christianity into a religion so different I don't think it would be recognizable as Christian.

Most of the pictures seem pretty easy to follow if you either follow the Vasana's saga things on the side, or read. Except for like, pg. 22 (mentioned) and probably pg. 12. (at least as far as exact identities of everything there. I'm probably going to look really stupid and say, TBH, I'm not sure of them all. (Mostly the light on top of the spike, is that Taraltara?) Though the pg. 20 image of the Lightbringers Quest... I... never thought Flesh Man would look like how I generally envision Teelo Norri. I guess a mortal would look small and weak next to gods, but he's so sad he makes me think he's a frumpy little girl.

The Sable riders fleeing past Vulture's Country and into the wastelands. (I think specifically fleeing into vulture county. They're driving their herd while some watch guard.The woman in the foreground is looking to the lands they are being forced to.

Could also probably adapt Odayla pretty easily to the Moon Bear for Sylians.

I get the feeling that Vasana is a hugely unlikable woman. So many of the pictures everyone's just lingering behind her giving her the stinkeye. Heck, even Yanioth looks upset when Vasana is offering her service to Argrath.

TBH you could probably just use the Mythras monster genner if you want to run a game right now. Just takes a moment to shift Strike Ranks over and change skills. Otherwise, in all honesty they seem really close to 2nd edition and 3rd edition monsters/NPCs, you could use them without much difficulty.

Yuuuup! Been marathon-reading it since like, 30 minutes or so after launch. I think it successfully did what it needed to do. Its eye-catching and distinct. It also reminds me of Logan's Run's Renew ceremony thing. But it is super pretty. The interior art I think is honestly, even better. The broos are adorable as pee too. Remind me of the 'weird monsters' from the old Tales of the Jedi books from Dark Horse, which I have a huge soft spot for (I.E. I just see Odan Urr). The illustrations of gameplay concepts visually is a nice easy to reference shorthand. Generally from a graphical standpoint, its lovely. Little iffy on the maps though. They're not the worst maps I've seen, and they look great, but they're a little hard to reference and take some time to scry information out of.

Does the dance. Sings the song. Screams uncontrollably. BUYS AND READS THE BOOK.

Oh geeze. Other Suns was a BRP influenced thing? Color me surprised. I just knew it as The Furry RPG in the early days of the Fandom, (when it was an offshoot of Sci Fi, TBH, before my time) But its influence is felt today among the serious side of furry. Old fogeys regularly still hold Other Suns games at cons and stuff, its kind of really famous among said folks. It was if I remember right, also the preferred system to adapt Albedo/Erma Felna: EDF to among the real frickin old folks in the fandom who still remember that furrydom grew out of...Hard Military Sci Fi drama. (Cos, TBH, as much as I know designers who talk up the Albedo game system, I don't know anyone who played more than a few games of it.) However! Be ready for some terrifying links that may be interesting if you're hunting Other Suns down. http://www.space-opera.net/GB/goodies/othersuns.htm ^Hosts an to an unpublished Expansion by Neil Shapero: Iceworld, as well as some other rules and races and bits and bobs. http://ermine.macrophile.com/html/other_suns.html ^Please oh lord Forgive me for linking a Web 1.0 furry site. There's a link that says its to NSFW stuff (and its clearly marked) but its not actually got any stuff hosted. Its just empty. Either way, it was a Other Suns page, it has some defunct links to Furnation which is long dead, but you should be able to scan over it with the Wayback machine. I don't know whats there. This used to hold a BBS based (what I assume) was a play by post campaign for it, but that link is long dead. http://www.hoboes.com/pub/Role-Playing/Future/Other Suns/ ^Already linked, but some explanation. According to old fansites, these are the notes for Other Suns 2, rather than a direct Other Suns posting. I don't know if thats true. Finally, if you're just looking for similar...furries in space? Or just furry RPGs, look at everything by Sanguine Games, which I believe has a couple different flavors of anthros in space? There's also the original Albedo RPG. (Which is just weird. Squad based hard mil Sci Fi RPG about morality and human drama...Uh. Focused on interpersonal relations, with nothing but animal people. Its at least worth looking at. I love my copy and I'm sure I'll never get anyone to try and play a session of it)

Most British fantasy really doesn't seem to me to be...dark, at all? Tolkein is basically free of grim. It has 'dark' themes, but they're as dark as any other fantasy writer. (I.E. the Midkemia Books, Dragonlance books, Wheel of Time books, etc, are filled with death doom despair and destruction) Some of his books are a bit 'grimmer' but they're not really...Dark. Similarly, to name the other big British fantasy authors that come to mind? C.S. Lewis? Ok, maybe you got me there if you include The Screwtape Letters but not in any of his other writings. Brian Jaques' books arei filled with death but I can't imagine anyone who'd think it was grim. (It certainly wasn't intended to be grim.) Diana Wynne Jones, Terry Pratchett and J.K. Rowling certainly aren't Dark Fantasy writers. Neither is Timothy Zahn. (Though does he count as a Brit or an American? Do any of us want to take credit for that one?) The only British 'grim' writer I can really think of is Michael Moorcock. (note, I'm discounting the Urban fantasy genre as part of the point of it is to be a bit grim, for the most part. Either way British Urban fantasy tends to bias towards young adult and due to that seems to be a lot lighter than American, which tends to bias towards sex, drugs and suicide.) Warhammer isn't really...grim as it is humorous much as humorous. Its more like a joking exaggeration of the many years rationing the Brits had, a snicker and a prod at the 'Stiff upper lip!' Of wartime Britain. Its hard to really consider it particularly, truly grim. though 40k ups itself to GrimDark, which feels at least as a Cascadian, to be more of a elaborate running gag. End Times and Mordheim are pretty grim, but they're not Warhammer as a whole, they're as core Warhammer Fantasy as Bloodbowl is. (Even then, are they grimmer than Midnight, Tribe 8, Eclipse Phase or the entire 'Weird' genre that's sort of an American staple, ala Poe, Chambers, Lovecraft, and to an extent I'd include Richard Sharpe Shaver as an example of that too. But he also ~believed~ everything he wrote so, little different.) North American fantasy I'd even say tends to have more examples of particularly grim writing? But that's probably just due to there being a lot more Americans than Brits. The only writers who i'd say bias massively towards 'dark' fantasy, would be Eastern European. However if you want true existential terror in an absurdly grim portrayal of a fantasy world, look at Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth books! Objectivist Fantasy! As far as making Glorantha dark, its not hard to. Play up the horror present in it, defocus off heroes and onto the weaker folks and linger on things that normally get passed over. (All those people devastated by constant raiding! Sex slaves, Everything To Do With Darra Happa.)

There's definitely a mainstream RPGer. Its kind of shocking and heart-warming to hit big gaming stores. 13 year old kids looking in awe and wonderment over Star Wars mini games. Slightly older kids playing D&D 5, One of my friends is a professional GM. As in, paid and sponsored to GM games as a hourly 6 days a week job, and while I think D&D 5e has done wonders to market RPGs to people who weren't RPGers. Heck, two years ago there was a Filipino language bi-weekly D&D game that popped up in a discount uniform store in a local city. It was marketed at Navy Wives and their kids for "Family adventures." But I don't think those are exactly the people Chaosium's marketing to, its marketing to the people who come ~out~ of that mainstream. If I was to pretend to divine what an ideal place for say, RQG and CoC, it'd be in that row of 'other RPGs' next to a table next to the big D&D stand. The one you look over when you're realizing that you're not really that interested in buying the next D&D supplement, and you prod at those *Other* books. It needs to look distinct, different, and enticing. I know a lot of people who bought Dark Heresy with little to no knowledge of Warhammer 40k, just because the book was so damn pretty and presented itself with such much flavor. I don't know anyone who has bought GURPS, say, who wasn't already pretty invested into gaming.

Dobre den tovarysh! I bring the word of Comrade Nestor Ivanovych Aelwrin! We Are all us! Workers of the Empire unite, we will throw off the moonson and their filthy empire, and rise up as laborers. No gods, no kings, only The Lunar Way! Join the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Char-Un! Already, though, the far off empire is sending the general of the Red army, Jar-Leon Trotsky the "Razoress" to fight us, do not believe her false words! Seems about right.

I'd try the quickstart, to echo other folks. As far as the world... Glorantha is very mutable. Its part of the point. Belief and culture matter more than any attempt at locking down the 'truth' of the matter. Its focused entirely on the 'cultural' belief of someone. "Where am I from, and who are my people, and what do they believe?" is the normal foundation of a character. Followed by then, "Who am I?" So, really, the world as written can suck it. Its always written from a biased in world source. You want something to be different? It should be. You want Ralzakark to not only maintain his position as the sexiest man in the setting, (which is of course an impossible to argue against FACT) but to also form up a party of illuminated chaotics and make them responsible for saving Glorantha from the third age via manufacturing that 'Argrath' character and working to engineer all the catastrophes? Frickin great. The only place that I see little immutability is in the 'feel' of the setting. Its a place where magic determines 'why' things happen, and people have not seriously begun thinking of real physical laws beyond "The gods say so" and "Because that's how it is". It can be grim, it can be malevolent, it can be light hearted and a little absurd, but its not modern. I think thats really the only really immutable bit.

This, exactly this. I'm not going to pretend I'm a great swordsman or anything or a master of ancient weaponry. But I took some martial arts as a kid, and did some SCA stuff. Moreover I spent most of my childhood beating my friends with large stick weapons. Even the tiny lessons learnt of a 12 year old with a long stick, a wicker 'pelta' and a few javelins made out of sword fern stalks taught me this. The only time defense on an individual level doesn't matter as part of offense, it has to do with ranged combat or formation combat. But a hoplite still needs to train in how to fight out of a formation, and the line-infanty of the 19th century still emphasized how to properly 'duel' with a bayonet. Those dueling manuals, look them up sometime, Russian, British, french, American, what have you! They're all the same. Parry, parry, parry, attack when you have the defensive upper hand! Here's how to parry against a tall man, here's how to parry against a short man, here's how to parry against a mounted man! Once you parry or have gained a defensive upper hand, thrust, lunge, gunbutt!

I may sound terribly, awfully rude, but as someone who spent some time trying to traverse Glorantha in relatively recent years, honestly? I recommend against trying to go straight at the Glorantha Sourcebook. Guide to Glorantha is a little better but obscenely long. The sourcebook especially seems to turnoff people I have try and read it and honestly its a little frustrating of a read in general. (If you've ever read the Something Awful review of it on F.A.T.A.L. And Friends, its a good illustration of why.) Basically, the Guide and Sourcebook both feel more like interesting sources for people who know Glorantha and a really bad entry-point to it. Its like picking someone up who's never heard of Star Wars, and throwing them at Wookiepedia. Some people like to do that, but others may be a little confused when they read about Green furred ninja bunnies and oddly overpowered garbage collecting squirrels in space. As far as things that are actually obtainable outside scans floating around the Internet or used book stores: The Heroquest books are good, readable, and feel like they were designed in a way that attempts to instruct people who haven't lived Glorantha for 30+ years on the setting and themes. They're narrative systems and not my personal cup of tea, but the books are very worth reading. Otherwise, the Runequest Classic books are a great place to go. (Cults of Terror/Cults of Prax are great.) Though I recommend not trying to run a RQ2 game at any point. The system's fundamentals are fantastic... But its till a book from 1980. Thats five years before Unearthed Arcana let the AD&D world know that mimicking working a cigarette lighter with your thumb and uttering the magic phrase 'Zippo' is how mages light fires. And while one of the best-aged products of its era, its a system that everyone houseruled back when it was in its prime and in my experience, even people who want to play in Glorantha tend to grit their teeth, clench their hands into fists, and scream at the heavens when you start having to patchwork systems together too extensively. Gamers expectations have changed over the last 40 years. Or just do like me and watch your email subscription box daily with lust in your heart and hunger in your eyes, waiting for RQG to launch, salivating with want and need.

You know I'm pretty sure part of that got mixed into my memory, I'm kind of wondering if it was a 'snippet' taken from that and edited in some campaign notes into some kind of adjusted Quest This was quite a while ago and at the time my introduction to Glorantha was the Glorantha book in RQ3's deluxe box, and I was growing outwards. Or my mind has filled in blanks from vague memories and drawn conclusions. Memory is a strange thing.

There was a website from the web 1.0 era somewhere around that had a bunch of chaos heroquests on it. I remember reading it before it vanished a while back. Mostly I remember it had a bunch of varieties and internal interpretations of aspects of Thed's life. Now, I'm suuuper foggy on details as this was a while ago. The one I remembered was a cult-initiation thing in the mortal world and was the Rape of Thed (and in this version, this specifically is from which the broos were first born, even before they were chaotic) and Thed's legal case to the gods and the injustices of the 'evil' gods as they denied all her requests as the weakness of womenfolk. Having to ask certain questions and beg certain things until the gods relent and grant her 'power of rape' (which they didn't believe existed/couldn't understand or something) I think its reward was supposed to be the 'special child' born of the priest who sired the unfortunate broo female who got to play Thed. There was also something about a different reenactment, specifically, the broo being responsible for weakening Ragnaglar to a point where Storm Bull kills him, by breeding some holy totem goat out of existence out of revenge for Thed. I'm however, not sure where that story comes from, I've not seen it in a book or zine I've read since. Or I may be having a complete brainfart.