Austin

1 hour ago, Shiningbrow said:

Unless you're saying, "because these skills are harder to acquire in-game, these occupations get more skill points". Possibly a good argument - but it only really works for the Scribe (and Philosopher).

I think that's the argument which was being made previously, and I think it's a reasonable argument.

I also agree with your take on some of the no-experience skills, but I don't think it is a good argument when trying to determine what the design decisions were based on RAW. And I'm in agreement that it's mostly relevant for Scribe & Philosopher. I also suggest Assistant Shaman, to an extent; basically where the occupation's core functions don't typically overlap with cultural or cult skill bonuses. E.g., none of the cultures give a Read/Write bonus.

1 hour ago, Shiningbrow said:

" Scribes have harder skills (if not impossible) to gain by experience alone. See Mugen's post above.. "

While true, firstly I'd argue against that rule... To me, it really seems silly that a person can't increase a Lore skill through 'experience' (although it may be semantics). ... (yeah, ok, I know that's really a separate thread...)

If you're gonna address things RAW, I think you've gotta handle everything RAW, not just say "well, that rule's silly, so let's ignore how that factors into the design decisions..."

On 1/31/2020 at 8:18 PM, Rick Meints said:

I have been pondering Print Options, and it turns out that a 520+ page book could be done.

If we did these as a two book set I think the binding would hold up better though.

An additional discrete page number could be added to each page so you could more simply turn to the page you want.

An index could also be added to the end of each book.

My bookshelf says "yes please!"

@jajagappa if you're still looking for players, I'm game to try this out. I haven't played in a PbF game in ages (and TBH none of those were particularly successful), but I've been wanting to try out HQG for some time now. Plus, someone's got to balance out Bill's quackery.

Just let me know. 

16 hours ago, Richard S. said:

I'm starting a petition to rename Yelmalio to the Cool Sun

At this stage, I'm starting to wonder if Elmal is actually just a misnomer for Eurmal the Bright.

1 hour ago, prinz.slasar said:

I'm very interested in the PoD conditions [format, price...], too.

Likewise. Similar to Martin Helsdon's Armies & Enemies, this is something I expect to (eagerly) wait for in POD+PDF so I can peruse it in my armchair.

At some point, I'm just going to need to face facts and get a new "Glorantha stuff" bookshelf.

1 hour ago, Manu said:

Why do disease spirits attack humans? Why not doing a covert possession (or even full possession) on animals (like horses, donkey or even chicken, sheep, ...). it is a lot easier (they should have very low spirit combat) and as they are close to humans, it is easy to contaminate. And every animal infected that dies (it can be quick) creates a new disease spirit.

Because disease spirits aren't intelligent enough to do so (they have no INT characteristic).

But that just begs the question—why don't Mallia shamans do this?

I suspect the answer is "something something wyter fighting disease spirits in the tula." I don't know enough to speak more authoritatively.

2 hours ago, Mankcam said:

Not sure how to contact the authors to give this another look, so I'm posting it here as suggested by the editor.

I think @Puckohue was involved in this project? But I'm not sure.

SPOILERS BE HERE FOR THE SMOKING RUINS!

So, something that's been sort of grinding my goat lately is the estimated value placed on Ernalda's Mirror in TSR: 300,000L (page 86, sidebar). It feels so out of place to me, in comparison with how the core rulebook presents items and value. In particular, what's in my head is the "Value/10" rule of thumb in the RQ2 conversion appendix—and even placing its value at 30,000L still feels like a gigantic sum. Using 60L=yearly income of a free household as an estimate, 300k is 5,000 free households of value, for a little context.

At this stage, the amount of value getting tossed around just starts to feel preposterous (not even to mention if a location outside maybe Nochet or Glamour has that quantity of coin sitting around). Like, I feel like "value of kingdoms" or "cities" would make sense to me, but trying to attach a cash value to the Mirror just feels really odd to me and my understanding of Glorantha.

Point of discussion: what do y'all think magical artifacts, when sold/traded/etc, actually are exchanged for in terms of value? Is there really stuff out there which would make Argrath go "Yup, here's the keys to Pavis, thanks for the bling," or which a tribal chief would trade rule of a town in exchange for? And how often do these kinds of trades actually happen?

I can't help but think that this sort of value is a little like the items from D&D3.5's Epic Level Handbook, which had magic items valued in the millions of gold. It feels like, although RQ typically does scaling in ways I like better than D&D, this is a place where that similar "everything has to keep going up and up and up" gaming mentality creeps in.

I've published the first installment in my Monster of the Month series! Monster of the Month is a series of new bestiary entries for Chaosium's RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. In addition to statblocks and behavior, most entries include supplemental detail and advice for gamemasters and/or new adventurer options for players.

The first installment, Spirits of Madness, is available on DriveThruRPG here. This new bestiary entry includes:

• Description of the behavior, powers, & possible locations of madness spirits
• Gamemaster advice on using disease spirits
• The Madness disease, and sample afflictions ranging from paranoia to chaophilia
• An example narrative describing an adventurer's combat with a madness spirit

2 hours ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

Auld Wyrmish --> "clever" humans devised a written form to bypass the physical limitation of speaking. Why learn something you cannot undersand (25% max speaking) ?

Starting here cuz this one's easier. Vocalized Auld Wyrmish includes components (normal) humans literally cannot perform, like making specific odors or noises the throat can't perform (Bestiary 37). Maybe a human could attain "Understand Auld Wyrmish" above 25%, but not speak it. Dragonewts have a similar problem speaking human tongues (see the entry for "Slave to Lies" in the Gamemaster Adventures book, page 42) which can be ameliorated with surgery.

I suspect the EWF has magical techniques to overcome this language barrier.

2 hours ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

Is there a stormspeech read/write skill (like firespeach) or do we use "THE" theyalan script skill ?"

This honestly is somewhat vague in my reading of the core rulebook as well. I think the RAW presented is that you just need to use the Read/Write Theyalan skill to understand any text in Theyalan, and that RAW what languages you Speak don't matter.

I play (and I think this seems to better match the world's presentation as intended) that Read/Write Theyalan just says how well you can read the three Theyalan scripts (per the sidebar on page 181 they are not separate skills, although including the Elasa script surprised me slightly since it seems meant to be magical and exclusive). I play that the adventurer uses Read/Write Theyalan to essentially "sound out" the syllables, but whether those sounds are meaning-carrying depends on what languages the adventurer Speaks. Now, because of the overlap rules, this means that most folks reading something in Theyalan should be able to figure out its meaning, at least to some degree.

For a modern parallel, say I have Read/Write Roman Alphabet 90%. I can recognize writing in the roman script. I can even sound out languages I don't know, like German. But even if I can make German-ish noises (or French-ish, Italian-ish, etc.) that doesn't mean I understand that combination of sounds, or that I'm actually putting the sounds together in the right way.

50 minutes ago, Shiningbrow said:

I'm under the impression that Argrath is trying to combine magical styles, including having people have something similar to awakening a Fetch, without the formalities of true cult-ural shamanism - hence this thread.

Small potential spoilers for the adventure "The Grove of Green Rock" in TSR ahead:

15 hours ago, g33k said:

OTOH, it's true I haven't seen any really munchkin-style players hitting the Shaman rules.  I don't expect to have a problem.  I guess it remains to ve seen, at my table.

That's very interesting to me as well, since it seems to me that the shaman rules-space has some serious munchkin potential. Which might be why my own adventurer is shaman-track, on those rare occasions I get to play instead of GM...

As to game balance, at the very least I suggest that any adventurer who learns the spirit magic spell Summon Disease Spirit will quickly be run out of town. No one wants folks dabbling in Mallia living in the hut next door. Discorporating and seeking disease spirits out in the Spirit World remains an option, but as a gamemaster I'd make it clear to the player that they may run across something much bigger and scarier as they progress into diseased (and probably chaotic?) regions.

19 hours ago, Manu said:

I'd like to know why PC get a free POW increase (1d3) every time they defeat a disease spirit? Why these and not the other type of spirit?

Ultimately, I don't know. I can speculate a little.

Why don't disease spirits have CHA or INT? As entities with only POW (per the Bestiary), it seems to me that they're just whatever illness they embody without either cunning or personality. This feature could represent them as being more fractious, maybe as a sort of "temporary" spirit? Once a given disease spirit's POW withers away, in that model, they no longer exist. Thus, capturing and forcing a bound disease spirit into spirit combat with sufficiently prepared individuals could become, in a way, a "virtuous" act. A way of reducing the disease in Glorantha. Contra to this is that a typical disease spirit's POW roll doesn't allow for less than POW 9—so where are the weaker ones?

Another line of thought is that this POW is the means by which the victorious adventurer becomes immune to the disease. In this case, the immunity is a sort of benign covert possession, mechanically represented by gaining POW. However, that POW doesn't go away after a year... but I think some element of this line of thought still feels applicable.

Does anyone know if this is in some way a hold-over from a previous edition of RQ?

Quote

However, any ability listed on the adventurer sheet at or above 75% with an experience check box cannot be trained— it must be improved through experience.

RQG 416 seems relevant to this conversation. Most skills can't be trained at the point where they should drop off extensively. Issues still remain for Knowledge skills & a few magic skills.

13 hours ago, lordabdul said:

it's how limiting it is for character creation. If you go with RAW, you will roll the dice for each characteristic individually... which means when you get to INT, you get what you get ("and you don't get upset!"). Someone who has high hopes of making a famous priest can get by with a poor POW roll, as you can increase POW fairly well. But if you get a poor INT roll and you wanted to play a sorcerer, you're fucked. AFAICT, you have to re-roll characters unless you get lucky enough to get a 16+ on the INT roll, otherwise you start with such a disadvantage that I'm not even sure it's worth it.

IMHO, the issue is that RAW doesn't reflect the writers' play process, nor does it reflect the characteristics of the pre-generated adventurers. Can't recall where at this time, but I seem to remember one of the writers (Jeff, I think?) noting that they just asked players to basically describe their characters (Vasana et al) and then assigned characteristics they felt reasonable.

Literally, the game could just have different default rules for characteristic generation, and I believe this dimension of its difficulties would be resolved.

I feel like a 95 or 100 point-buy would be reasonable, based on the 92+3 sidebar in the section, or 100 based on the characteristics of the pre-gens. All over 100 except Vasana, IIRC, at 99.

For some context, Mythras's point-buy is 75 with the same characteristic array.

3 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

Now, having 4 INT  points in inscriptions (14 POW) however, would be extreme munchkinnerry! (If GM allowed).

I think this is really the key point. If you know Enhance INT (and I struggle to imagine a proper sorcerer who wouldn't), and can just survive long enough, you can dump truly tremendous amounts of POW into an inscription which allows all the rest of your spells to get incrementally better as your Free INT increases (regardless how that interacts with mastering additional Runes). Sort of like how a shaman can become ridiculously powerful if they just keep dumping POW into their fetch (except that someone can nick a sorcerer's shiny bauble).

I've been reading the Mythras rules on and off recently, and I wonder if their crafting rules (which involve multiple skill rolls based on the number of Task Rounds needed to complete a project) could provide the foundation of a way to set up more complex conflicts between Ernaldan characters. Sort of like a HQG extended contest?

My thought process is basically that in tabletop games, generally speaking more dice rolls = a more dramatic/tense situation. In RQ combat, you're hanging on the results of every roll because each roll matters. So trying to make things like weaving a tapestry or painting a vase feel more dramatic by breaking it down into sub-sections, where a rival crafter could be exceeding your work.

Design Mechanism's Sorandib also has some interesting magic rules for guild work songs which could provide interesting adaptation opportunities. Perhaps the whole priesthood of an Ernalda temple working together on a single project.

I don't think such a sub-system is something you'd want to use for every crafting project, but maybe it's a way to make Ernaldan tasks "feel" more dramatic (or at least more crunchy a la RQ's simulationist tendency) than relying on a single die roll.

1 hour ago, Shiningbrow said:

Although I wonder about the mechanics of mastering something, and then losing the INT later..

IIRC it was confirmed that if you increased your CHA magically (such as Charisma+Extension, or a shaman's spell extension on Glamour), sacrificed POW to gain extra Rune points beyond your usual CHA, and then the spell later went away, was dispelled, etc. that the adventurer would flat-out lose those additional Rune points.

I suspect the "official" ruling in this case would be that if your INT goes down, you lose the additional mastered Runes/Techniques.

22 hours ago, Jeff said:

THere's a huge list of ways to spend money in RQG. Did that not work?

I mean, it sounds like it didn't? Plenty of fancy stuff to buy, but less in the way of homesteading stuff the OP's player is interested in.

@buckwheats I figure most of that sort of stuff is slated for the Gamemaster's Guide (or whichever book that got transformed into now), since the stuff in the core rulebook seems more in the vein of "things you can carry around/poke around with a stick."

I seem to recall greater Glorantha buffs than I suggesting somewhere that it'd be damn hard or impossible to just buy a hide of land. Sort of as an "un-Gloranthan" concept (although of course YGMV ) due to clan dynamics regarding control of land and whatnot. Of course, if this is 2,000L in inheritance that inheritance might have come down as land, a house, etc., so who knows...

On MGF, maybe take a look at what the Thane of Apple Lane gets in the Gamemaster Screen Pack, and consider offering your player that package (or slightly reduced?) as an equivalent, and a warning about the sorts of challenges having to take care of tenant farmers can lead to—but hey, plenty of story hooks, and a place for the rest of the adventurers to bed down! I've got no real clue what 2,000L should equate to in terms of tangible property, but that's double a priest or noble's (starting) ransom, so...

Hrm. Double a noble's ransom. "Everything I have!" as ransom if someone won't provide surety to pay, so maybe a Thane's package for 1k?

I'm fixating on the Thane bit because it seems simplest and to involve the least math. And, it's the only example I think we've got of a minor noble's possessions being written up.

52 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

No the Battle skill is for being part of, well, a battle. As in: being just one person in a whole army, as opposed to being in a party of half a dozen or less people involved in a quick skirmish.

I feel like the Battle skill would still be a decent place to start though, if you're looking to abbreviate fights. It has rules for randomized wounds which could be useful. Winner is victor in an opposed roll.

I don't know if I'd give all the rewards for a successful roll for a short engagement, but using Battle as a fiat "combat's over" seems more appropriate than choosing a single weapon--plus it's already got a wounds system built in if you flub the roll.

2 hours ago, lordabdul said:

how to figure out how badly hurt any character is after the encounter, etc... I realized that, to be fair to the players, you'd have to come up with "proper" rules for quick encounters,

Like rolling the Battle skill?

3 hours ago, Videopete said:

Claiming to be chunky unicorns.

Something something unrealistic beauty standards...

I love the character idea personally (although admittedly that's in part because it's coming from a child and not my decidedly munchkinny players...).

I suspect you'll be wandering into YGMV territory anyhow with this, so why not just ask the player what his nature is? "You're a talking rhino, and want to go to the city. Why? The people there don't wanna let you into the city (you're a big grumpy rhino after all); what do you tell them?"

It may be better to harness your nephew's creativity than to look for a canon-friendly answer.

8 hours ago, Bill the barbarian said:

Not trying to pee in your cornflakes, anyway you know my fetish against spoilers...

Please, I certainly hope you don't take it personal. I will say that many times to come to many others so consider it an honour

No worries, nothing personal taken! My view is that this thread is pretty much "Here Be Spoilers" (like dragons, but with fewer teeth and more Chaos features) so it's not something I feel/felt especially worried about. I do think generally that TSR is within spoiler-protection territory.

10 hours ago, Bill the barbarian said:

Careful on the Spoilers..

I mean, it's literally in the OP (along with a heckin' big Spoiler Warning notice from Joerg). Was just restating in attempt to be helpful.

1 hour ago, styopa said:

I wish I could upvote this more. Well put.

I haven't read TSR so I don't know about the items this particular Rokari has, but I think one of the first lessons a GM learns is: "never give an NPC magic items that would be unbalancing in in the hands of characters". 

Simultaneously, I've always found the "this magic item can only be used by this bad guy and nobody else"* to be a cheesy way to essentially cheat players of rewards.  Particularly when the game has a penchant for magic items that are otherwise essentially rule-breaking or there's no conceivable way to make them given the game mechanics available.

*as mentioned, I haven't read it so I don't know if this is even relevant to TSR specifically

I jammed TSR in the first few days it was out. Urvantan's got a ton of magic items, but most of them are jewelry with inscribed spells (hence why actually figuring out how the heck inscriptions work matters). So on the one hand some of his good stuff is owner-only (but at least using a method players may be familiar with), but on the other his other stuff is pretty wild (like a Teleportation matrix for 6MP).

Now, Urvantan's supposed to be a "good guy" and supposed (I think) not to die during the adventure, so adventurers seem to be supposed to not get his stuff...

But, y'know... players.