Mankcam

The RQ6 book is briiliant, and well worth all the praise it gets. In my bookcase CoC 7E and RQ6 have pride of place. RQ6 feels like a worthy successor to RQ2 and RQ3. The resources are also great, I am still in awe of Mythic Britain, and I can't wait for the upcoming Mythras books over the next few months

Power Points could be used for additional purposes, predominantly for exertion (or fate) - basically allow skill re-rolls but it costs a PP to do so. That was a common BRP house rule, so it could be applied to any BRP game such as RQ or CoC.

There are a few pages devoted to Invictus 7E character gen & setting synopsis in the Cthulhu Thru The Ages book, so I don't think it is entirely off the table. Although I suspect that it will be a lower priority than Gaslight 7E. It will be interesting to see what is on the horizon for CoC 7E for the next 12 months

D20 is for Hit Locations, D100% is for ability rolls, period !!! If anything I would hope to see Pendragon get published as D100% instead of D20 based. I know this will never happen, but its on my wishlist! I would possibly go for 5% increments like RQ2 for simplicity, but generally prefer things as they are

I pretty much agreed with Trippy's statement. Characteristics need to be meaniful, and there are a few other inconsistencies that need to be addressed. I think it is important to remember that RQ2 is from the early 80s so it is bound to have some nuts and bolts that may not work as smoothly as we have come to expect. I tend to like it more out of nostalgia, although the setting rocked and still does. However BRP moved on and some things got better, others worse, and a lot just changed for the sake of it. Although I love my RQ Classic book, I don't think I will inflict that character sheet on green players. If my old troupe was around then we would probably use it for old times sake, just like the mature D&D crowd returning to D&D OSR. However I will wait until CRQ4 is published before I run any more Gloranthan games. I expect that may be next year, but I have CoC 7E to run before then, not to mention Mythras and also a return to a few other RPGs. So my advice is not to exert too many efforts into fixing RQ2, and just wait to see what CRQ4 brings us.

Definitely hope to see more of her depictions in upcoming Gloranthan products, regardless of whether they are for HeroQuest or RuneQuest

I guess this is all about creating the right 'vibe' to portray the Orlanthi, rather than sterile uniformity. So the Indo-European Bronze Age feel is the main thing to go for when using real world analogies to help players create a mental picture of the Orlanthi. One thing I really like about The Coming Storm is that there are so many pictures of a wide variety of Orlanthi people. This is a very practical tool for showing the players who they are. Those b&w drawings are great. Also the trimmings of the book edges feels more Thracian than british saxon/celt, so all these things add up to create a good visual of who these people are. The warrior on the front cover would not look out of place from the Mycenaean Age, just like the RQ2 cover, so this nicely ties it back a little closer to my original impressions of the Orlanthi from all those years ago.

I am thinking that the more urbanised the settlements are, perhaps the more Mycenaean and Etruscan flavour they have; they more regionalised or rural they are, life gets a bit more rudimentary and the more Dacian they get. Not sure if this helps others, but this spectrum helps me visualise things a bit. For those that had the original RQ2 box, I am thinking that even old Apple Lane works so much better now fitting in with this kind of analogy, rather than trying to re-trap it as a saxon/celtic style village. There is something vaguely Villa Novan/Etruscan about it in my opinion, so I do like these contemporary Orlanthi depictions.

The images of Orlanthi in The Coming Storm are certainly a lot less norse /saxon/celtic than RQ3/Hero Wars illustrations. Much more Dacian, Thracian, Mycenaean, Etruscan influenced like the suggestions above have indicated. Some great pictures of Orlanthi throughout the book, I get a much better sense of their overall look now. The houses in the region covered by this book are longhouses, but if you picture them with tiled roofs then it helps with the visualisation of a Bronze Age culture flavour, particularly that of Indo-European origins.

yeah I could also see Zol Fel Riverfolk living something like this

I can't remember. When I played RQ3 if an action took that long to complete then I think I may have ruled that it occurred at the end of the melee round on the last SR. Not sure if that is canon or not. In truth, I can't remember what we used to do now. I played RQ3 until the late 90s, took a break and played a few other rpg systems, and when I returned to BRP I used the BGB for my Gloranthan setting games (except with a mish-mash of RQ3 magic and ideas from HW/HQ). In more recent years I replaced the BGB with RQ6. which seemed to have Initiative Order calculated along the lines of the BGB, but it also reminded me of the old RQ SR system which took weapons and armour into account. So RQ6 has a good way of doing it. I liked Strike Ranks back in the day, but it's all a bit nostalgic and foggy now, and it may seem a little weird returning to it. However it will definitely remind me I'm playing RQ, as no other rpg in my collection has anything like it in regards to resolving Initiative Rolls.

This sounds very much like how we used to play it, and I'ld be happy if CRQ4 follows something similar to this. (I prefer RQ3's 10SR/MR, it just feels better to me, but it sounds like the design team definitely prefer RQ2's 12SR/MR. However it's no biggie either way for me)

I'm unsure, but I think Jeff may have mentioned that something like this was discussed, but rejected by the play test group. Which is a shame, as I think that it may have been one of the better solutions as it can appeal to those who like the idea of a reasonable sized skill category modifier, yet who don't want to see (stat+stat) as a base chance for each particular skill. I think it's a great compromise between previous RQ versions, and if the goal of the system design is to create a 'clean' system, then you can't get much more simple than this approach, unless you ignore Skill Categories altogether. Personally I would really dig it if Skill Categories were calculated this way. (This is getting off topic to the title heading of this thread: 'Chaosium's RuneQuest 2 vs RuneQuest 3 (Avalon Hill)'. However it has shown up within several threads that it may even deserve it's own topic thread, although the conversation regarding it is almost exhausted now, and it does not sound like it is going to be explored further by the design team)

I always thought you got an attack on your SR, which often could mean more than one attack per melèe round when using the old Strike Rank system. I thought that you were able to Parry only once in the melee round at full skill, then parry in subsequent actions within the melee round with a culminative -30% negative modifier until you ran out of the ability to do so. I may be mixing up RQ and BGB rules however. I may need to check when I get back home ...

I personally don't mind either RQ2 or RQ3 Skill Category calculation methods, although RQ2 feels simplier. It's the values of the bonuses that I am concerned about, as they feel too small to be of much influence. I personally would like to see values two or three times the values from RQ2 or RQ3. That way you could also have a chance at unskilled actions by rolling under the Skill Category scores, and it makes the core Characteristics more relevant. This is pretty much the only concern I have. Everything else in the design notes works for me.

All good points and ones already discussed. I guess the issue is regarding why the descriptions of longhouses were discouraged earlier in the thread (which was the general presumption), and then this was reinforced by posted floor plans of square shaped houses with court yards. It was stated that the longhouses of earlier depictions would not be seen in The Coming Storm, which does not appear to be the case. We had seen previous references for the Earth Rune shaped housing design, but presumed it was an Esrolian thing. However then it was presented as being a more widespread Theylan design, made with different materials according to region (wood & daube thru to masonary). I feel that due to their size it may be an indication of wealth, likely to be seen amongst Thanes and Chieftains etc, although it may be more widespread in urban settlements as well. I guess its important as it does help present a cultural description to a settlement. Maybe more on this in The Coming Storm Part Two?

I just want to make Characteristics more meaniful, and the Skill Category Modifiers are the place to do it, but you are probably right about that scale.

I do slightly prefer the simplier way of calculating the skill category modifiers from RQ2 to the way RQ3 does it, although RQ3 was the game I played much more. However I just feel that it would work better if the bonuses were much bigger. Rather than have 5%, 10%, etc it may be more versatile if they were 10% - 30% so you could try to roll under a Skill Category for purposes of untrained abilities. I do see the point of making the RQ back catalog supplements compatible with both RQ Classic and CRQ4, that does make a lot of sense.

I started with RQ2 in my early teens, and updated to RQ3 solely due to it being contemporary at that time, but I preferred the RQ2 supplements for flavour. RQ3 remained my mainstay fantasy RPG, long after it went out of print. Years later when I saw MRQ I strongly disliked it for some reason, and kept playing RQ3 instead. Which is weird, because I do like OQ now, so it must of been all the MRQ trappings that put me off. MRQ2 was a big improvement in game mechanics and I did like the non-Gloranthan suplements. The portrayal of 2nd Age Glorantha didnt work for me. I still played RQ3 or used the BGB for fantasy, although I bought a few MRQ2 products all the same. Vikings was one of my favourites. RQ6 was great however, and managed to capture alot of the flavour of RQ2 and RQ3. I do really like it, although I have a love/hate thing with the combat options. They are great, but sometimes overwhelming, so my troupe may prefer a simplier rule set in some ways. Also I did not dig the 'roll high but under' opposed skill resolution, it seemed counter-intuitive to us. I am glad that RQ2 and RQ3 are the main influences on the next RQ, but RQ6 also has many good points to consider.

Well I share some of these concerns, paricularly with Skill Category Modifiers. Skill Categories are a handy way of organising skills on a character sheet, but if the bonuses are kept in the new edition then they ought to at least be much more meaniful than they were in RQ2 and RQ3, otherwise they may not be worth all the effort. I also don't think we need to calulate Hit Points like in RQ2; I have grown used to calculating (SIZ+CON)/2, like it has been in all BRP games for the past 30 years. It also seems a little unusual that, at a core rules level, CRQ4 may play very different to CoC. I would of thought that, like previously, the BRP core rules remained more or less the same, and the various games had different rules plugged into the base BRP mainframe. Considering CRQ4 is not finished yet then I am unable to really comment beyond speculation. I am happy to say that most of the new features that have been discussed in the design notes seem pretty cool to me, and I am really looking to this next edition.

Perhaps RQ shouldn't be a generic system, I think it will benefit by having mechanics that tie it to the setting of Glorantha. However, as stated in another thread, I would also like to definately see Chaosium producing a generic ruleset that has some common ground rules with both RQ and CoC. I still think there is some market for that, and personally I love having a toolkit I can use to power my own off-the-cuff settings; it is the very essence of roleplaying.

I dont think so, but I will check later today and get back to you. From memory the default HP = (SIZ+CON)/2 for all BRP games except RQ2 which was based on a table which used CON as a core indicatof, and had SIZ as a modifier, or vice versa (I probably need to clarify that as well)

Chris Tooley's pdf is for BRP Magic World, although considering its totally free then that's not much of an issue as you can pretty much convert on the fly. During an actual game you only need to know Hit Points values, and skill scores, and they should port across pretty seamlessly from BRP MW to BRP OQ. As far as Dungeon Crawling goes you dont need Classes for OQ Basic. Just allocate skill points according to your character concept and it will just end up falling into a niche. It's pretty much the same in the full OQ rules, except it provides an optional build for magic specialists in those rules, and you get access to a wider range of magic. To play classic old school, dont allow non-magic specialists to start with spells, and allocate double the listed spell points as pts in 'magic potions' instead, uding Basic Magic for the potion effects. That is fair and provides a very OSR flavour. Make sure they choose at least one healing potion each! OQ can do classic fantasy quite well as a nice simple game, I really like it for such, and as an OSR game it sits somewhere between Fighting Fantasy and Basic D&D, yet also plays like a less complex RQ. But if you want a little more meat on the bone, then Mythras + Rod Leary's Classic Fantasy is obiviously excellent as well, it plays like RQ with AD&D trappings. So it depends on the complexity of OSR that you are after. Botb games are great.

Mythras Gateway License - that's gonna turn out to be a good move I reckon

Yes MOB its great how it all looks like panning out. I first came across Moon Design with the Gloranthan Classics reprints, then saw how the company replaced Issaries Inc in regards to HQ, and bought HQ for the Gloranthan content. The Sartar and Pavis books are definitely a return to form, and the G2G is nothing short of magnificient. It seems quite fitting that Moon Design is doing this new version of RuneQuest, and knowing that Greg Stafford has some influence feels much better than if another company just had the licence and no direct communication to the origins of the setting. Also quite impressive that the RQ Renaissance is about to happen again, of which you were actually part of once Sun Country hit the shelves not to mention the fanzines). Glorantha as a setting is definitely in safe hands. I think the only queries people have is regarding the RQ system itself, as everyone has their version of the sacred cow now, which is understandable given the age of the game. Its easy to see that it is not just another job for you guys, but a labour of love for the rules and setting. That kind of intensity is hard to find these days, and greatly appreciated.