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Psullie put together this really good list of Glorantha trade goods.

Campaigns where merchanting is a thing - whether you're doing it with Our Heroes are paid caravan guards, or where every player, each with their own cargo, has come together and hired a captain and their ship - need goods to trade.

From a rules perspective, I'd suggest using that list, with a roll against Evaluate with Homeland Lore (Source) to identify a sales opportunity, and a roll against Evaluate with Homeland Lore (Destination) to know who to sell it to on the other end. A normal success indicates a probable 20% profit. Special successes indicate more opportunity for profit (50%), with criticals indicating even more opportunity.(100%) You then get Bargain rolls at each end to get a good buying or selling price(normal, 5% better price, special 10% and critical 20%).

Additionally, as a quick and dirty method I'd suggest that for every "culture" you go through between source and market, you get a 50% bonus to your skill - for example, sourcing Esrolian goods to sell in the Lunar Empire's Heartlands has Sartar and then Tarsh between them, so you'd add 100% to your skill.

Of course, this means you have to get the goods from Esrolia to the Heartlands, which presumably wont be either easy or cheap

32 minutes ago, simonh said:

No, but if you want to use a law rune rating in a rule, you will also need to come up with your own rules for assigning it a rating.

Part of learning not-culturally-appropriate Sorcery - as for example something other than a mystery cult within the cult of Llankor Mhy - would be expressed in rules terms as developing that link to the rune.

9 hours ago, soltakss said:

Sure, they are incompatible with their beliefs, but that does not stop them being able to do it.

Someone with a religious aversion to blood transfusions is not physically incapable of having a blood transfusion.

Similarly, someone in a theistic cult that bans sorcery is not incapable of learning sorcery, it is just forbidden. The fact that it is forbidden means that it must be possible, otherwise why go to the trouble of forbidding it?

Given we now have mechanics for how in-tune a character is with their gods, I'd suggest this.

To learn Sorcery, you need to roll the better against your Rune of Law than your highest Rune score of any of Divine cult you are initiated in to that does not teach Sorcery to it's members.

So, our apprentice Philosopher is an Initiate of Orlanth, and wants to learn Sorcery.

She has Law Rune of 40% and her highest of Orlanth's runes is Movement at 75%. She therefore probably will have issues learning it, because she knows the Universe is fundamentally at flux and thats how it should be.

On the other hand, if they are the other way around, then she will probably see that the Universe does indeed work by knowable,. usable physical laws, and these laws can be systematically manipulated via magic.

13 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

It's not about price, but about how much food you can transport how far. Past a certain point, your cart animals will eat more food than they can pull. 

 

Again, I'm not talking about why the Sartarites are in trouble and will face mass starvation, I'm talking about the Lunar army who

(a) know this is going to happen,

(b) have a not-in-famine food supply in Tarsh,

(c) will probably need to suppress a desperate revolt sometime in the near future, and

(d) have access to magic that doesnt care that Orlanth and Ernalda are dead.

They've also got access to a bunch of specialised anti-winter magics through Kalikos Icebreaker who - again - is not affected by Orlanth being dead.

Now, that said ...

I think it's a pretty good story for 'How did our tribe survive ? We bribed a Lunar supply officer, and stole food meant for the soldiers'.

19 minutes ago, Furry Fella said:

Actually it doesn't really matter. Shifting bulk food like grain other than by water just doesn't work short of railways.

Unless you have famine and the price of food goes up by a factor of between five and ten. As a side point, I wouldnt try and use water transport while the rivers in Sartar are frozen

The key with the Fimbulwinter and the Lunar Army of Occupation is that it does not affect within the Glowline, and food supplies within the Lunar Empire are still plentiful (note Esrolia is short of food as well, because p39 gives them 25% Nearly Starved To Death, probably on account of Ernalda joining Orlanth as victims of Lunar magic).

Per this, http://agriculture.vic.gov.au/agriculture/livestock/horses/feed-requirements-of-horses

We can assume 10kg of feed per horse per day. Therefore, a 4 horse team needs 40kg of feed per day, and can be staged outward. It'll take work but, importantly, the Lunar Empire knew the Winter is going to happen and can plan appropriately, so only the Sartarites get to starve.

Nope. If the Lunar Army in Sartar starved, it's because it's officers and/or supply officers sold their food on the black market.

4 hours ago, soltakss said:

I haven't got a problem with it. In fact, I can think of no good reason, not a single one, why a Theist cannot learn Sorcery. Your god might frown on it and there might be cultural reasons why you don't, but no reason why you can't. A spell is a spell is a spell, it's just a different type of magic to me.

We call people like you 'God Learners'.

1 hour ago, M Helsdon said:

The material I've pillaged is all under Chaosium copyright. It probably amounts to less than a twentieth of the material, probably less, but is virtually impossible to extract. I have considered asking for a license, but as the material includes artwork, would probably be too expensive for something I'd be releasing for free in PDF format, unless Chaosium create a means of publishing Gloranthan fan material under their aegis.

Seriously, talk to them.

From what Ive seen, it's of a quality that it should be licencef and sold as a pdf on their site.

7 hours ago, Joerg said:

This may be a thing of the past. When Tatius takes over Govenor-Generalship, the revanchist faction of the Dara Happans takes control in Sartar, and if those rebellious Orlanthi die by the droves, they'd probably sell tickets for their fellow nobles to watch. No more hearts and minds,

 

If even the Lunar garrisons verge on starvation, will there be any grain to be spared for luke-warm sympathizers of the Lunar Way?

 

It depends how much they are paying, really.

I like your Uz idea a lot. Maybe a Argan Argar 'face' and a value trollkin slinger ?

I'd suggest having the Lunar Occupying force have paperwork for the trolls - which ideally should be a foriegn-language form the players can't understand

I'm not sure Id throw Orlanthi *illuminates* at Our Heroes - just normal Orlanthi should be enough.

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2 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

Hm, I wonder if this could be extended to do Cult and Occupation as well... might not be perfect when it comes to multiple skills, but it should take care of most of the grunt work...

And thus making that whole 'extended family character creation' a lot simpler and easier ...

23 minutes ago, simonh said:

Otherwise known as the Ernaldan rune spell Bless Champion.

I think the magic we have is precisely what you are talking about, just expressed in game mechanical terms. If you asked an Ernaldan priestess casting Bless Champion, or a Humakti uncle casting extended Truesword what they were doing, they would describe it exactly as you do. None of them would give names of spells, and may not even have recognisable names for those spells to give you. Any names they did use would likely be descriptive, inconsistent and vary locally.

Yes, but it shouldn't last until the next High Holy Day ... it should be so that you can Go Do The Thing.

17 minutes ago, PhilHibbs said:

At what stage is it not working? When you try to select a culture, or when you click the "Culture Skills" button? The button can take time to operate, and pops up a permission box first. And the macro will not work in Excel or Open Office, the macro language is different. I might re-implement it for Excel at some point.

I see what I was doing wrong - I hadnt clicked the dropdown before I tried to press the Culture Skills button.

The best thing about this edition of Runequest is that Our Heroes get integrated into the world by doing the stories of their grandparents, then their parents and then themselves.

And, if they start in Sartar or nearby, they are all going to share a very traumatic event that happened when they were a late teenager - those two years of winter in 1621 and 1622 when all the crops failed, at the same time as when all the magic of food and hearth failed because Ernalda was proclaimed dead.

This is put front and center in character generation.

Rules as written show a 45% chance one of Our Heroes parents either froze or starved to death.

Rules as written show a 45% chance of Our Heroes "nearly" freezing or starving to death, which pretty strongly implies that people they knew and loved did freeze or starve to death in this time.

Sartar got liberated by Kallyr in 1625, so this is all happening under Lunar Occupation.

Therefore, at this time, the Lunar Authorities are going to be tut-tutting at decisions that they were no part of, and making sure food aid gets to friendly tribes.

At this time, the Seven Mothers are going to be feeding anyone who will sit down and eat while the Red Goddess is being thanked for her bounty. Hon-eel's maize will still grow, by the way. Did your tribe eat the red grain ?

At this time, Bad Gods like Valind the North Wind are going to get worship. You will even see people who will not accept the public shame of treating with Chaos to be fed at the Seven Mothers temple treating privately with Chaos to make sure they, and perhaps their kin, survive.

But it's going to be a foundational event of Our Heroes, and the people that went through it will have a different view of gods, men and food to people who did not.

What Im more concerned with is that, because this is a rules set that tries to integrate Glorantha into the rules, it means long-duration magic - the Wizards blessing the Knight and their equipment with a spell that will last through their whole quest - is no longer solely a Western thing.

In My Glorantha, Orlanthi cultures should be about ritual preparation by, for example, the Arming of Orlanth (ie wife ties a ribbon in your hair, best friend gives you a shield, uncle gives you a weapon etc). If the Rules As Written allows stacked Extentions to run to the next Holy Day, at which point worship ceremonies can allow them to be renewed, then we are dealing with something else.

Dammit, if you are going to have game-breaking superpowers, at least heroquest for said superpowers and put them into a tattoo or something.

1 hour ago, PhilHibbs said:

v1.5 beta 1:  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QB0VKX-NnoHegCuHqTf84kpERxw6ew1iHhhp5Unt3K0/edit?usp=sharing

Pick culture from the drop down list, click "Culture Skills", and it fills them all in. You can adjust the order of skills by selecting a skill and clicking the arrow buttons (only works if both the current row and the row in the direction of the arrow have a Skill Detail box). Useful for selecting which shield appears on the CharSheet shield box.

 

The drop-downs dont appear to be working for me, either in google excel or when I import it into Open Office.

Would it be possible to get a set of these with the Cultural skills already "baked in", so we have a Sartarite sheet, an Esrolian sheet and so on ?

5 minutes ago, metcalph said:

The Orlanthi do have several mythic fights against the sorcerors of the west.  Zzabur even pops up with a spell to kill all the Vingkotlings.  The spell works but kills nobody because people had stoppped being Vingkotlings.  But this is largely Stafford Library material as the Sartarites don't really have any current need for myths about fghting sorcery - unlike for example the Ralian Orlanthi.

 

Yes, but the Orlanthi also have several mythic fights against everybody - but it's the difference between 'Its a boring Saturday night, get the lads together' and 'This is the enemy'.

20 minutes ago, metcalph said:

But the Heortlings know that Lhankor Mhy is Mostal's son so any strange magic are part and parcel of him being a son of a strange god.  And we all know how Orlanth found friends in the Pit of Strange Gods.

Wait, what ?

4 minutes ago, Iskallor said:

Isnt it a bit of knowing one's enemy and being able to counter their sorcery?

 

The thing about the Orlanthi is that Western Sorcerors aren't the enemy - the enemy is Chaos (and maybe Yelm).

To Orlanthi, sorcery is something that has happened inside Time - it isn't part of any of their core myths.

One of the things about Orlanthi culture is that All Orlanthi despise sorcerors.

As we all know, All Orlanthi means 85%, and that other 15% now appear to be the Knowing God's cult. Now, apart from the possibility that the modern Lhankor Mhy cult is a God Learner leftover together with "spell trading is just another phrase for cultural appropriation" Issaries, how does this change Heortling culture ?

2 minutes ago, GianniVacca said:

I let them use Augments all the time. The risk is theirs to handle (see p145).

Agreed. But it's a major change in this edition, so I figured a heads-up for GMs was in order

Only a very few schools of sorcery are dealt with.

I'd be expecting Armor and Life enchantments to be back, when material for the West is introduced.

1 hour ago, Furry Fella said:

I too have looked at this and I'm not so sure it's that straight forward. The question is who / what gets to count as an initiate - cause that's where the (even limited) rune magic starts to fly. Should the Rock Lizard Mother have Rune Magic - probably. The RQG PCs will likely have more and better skills than RQ2 (even those with previous experience) though Spirit Magic will be well down. What dose reusable Rune Magic mean to Whiteye's defense and tactics? Warding, Sanctify, Multispell, Extension etc are Common Rune Magic's.

Starting PCs are substantially more capable than they used to be - you can expect an out-of-the-box warrior to have combat skills in the 90% range, which can easily go to 120% with spirit magic and an Augment. This is without the fairly-resusable 3 points of Rune magic they will all now have.

I'd suggest bumping up the skills of opponents by ~20% and making just about everything count as an Initiate, unless you want the players to kick ass and take names (which may not be a bad approach for a first game).

8 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

Yeah. Everybody will generally use the best armor they can afford. When your life is on the line you don't go cheap. 

Huh? A broadsword or spear doing 1D8+1+1D4  averages 8 points, which is 2 points more than 6 point plate (the best you can get without rune metals or magic). Toss in the  impales, and criticals, I don't see how they can ignore those attacks. 

Now throw six points of Protection onto that 6 point armor ...

6 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

Okay, my RQ2 is out of date. Do shields just block missile attacks outright? I thought you just took the shield points off the damage. 

"Use of Shield Against Missile Weapons Thrown weapons can be parried if the target is aware of the attack and is ready to parry. Missiles shot by projectile weapons cannot be parried. However, a shield can be used to provide coverage against projectile weapons, if it is not used to parry that round. An adventurer may specify in their Statement of Intent (page 192) that they are holding their shield in one place, covering specific hit locations instead of parrying. If struck by a projectile, the shield protects those hit locations. If a shield is slung on the back of a missile target, the shield provides half its hit points as protection against chest hits when those hits are made from the rear." p219