Austin

I find adding minis and keeping track of all the odd tactical movement is fun. Extra decisions to make. 100% valid that others don't feel the same way. A lot of my first games were the old GBA Fire Emblem and Advance Wars games before I discovered tabletop, where positioning mattered a lot. Plus board games like Stratego and chess. Most of the people I've played RQ/D&D/etc with have a similar history, or at least are also wargamers (at least 3 of us in my current group have an active interest in Warhammer 40k). I didn't even realize until these threads that RQG dropped RQ3's tactics and facing rules. But it's easy enough to re-introduce the parts I like and leave out the parts I don't.

Maybe if you did a linked Truesword Rune Spell (from Orlanth) and Fireblade Spirit Magic spell? At least, as a GM I'd allow them to be linked to make an electric-flavored fireblade. Dunno about RAW.

Speaking of arms races and bendy systems... Running some numbers in my head, and here's an example of what seems to me like the craziest horseshit a Lunar sorcerer could get up to; like, if the Red Emperor wanted to destroy Whitewall without the Crimson Bat type of crazy is what I'm looking for. This isn't exactly a Linked Spell shenanigan, but this thread feels closest to appropriate for munchkinery. Using the interpretation of sorcery inscription (p.390 in Core) that the bonus levels given by extra POW don't cost MP, but even with MP costs just means a bigger MP Matrix is needed, or to cast the spell on Full Moon Day. Assume a max-stat, fanatical sorcerer being directly commanded by the Red Emperor. He has 21 POW and 18 INT, and only has the spell Moonfire (p.396) memorized. He's willing to die for the glory of the Red Moon. He has all four Runes/Techniques required for Moonfire mastered. He creates an inscription of Moonfire with 20 of his POW. This makes an inscription which has a base cost of 4MP (the basic cost of Moonfire) and an Intensity of 20 (1 base, and 19 additional intensity because of the extra POW spent). He assigns all the additional intensity to add to the spell strength (for a default of strength 20, for 4MP). He can still manipulate this with his full Free INT. He uses 4 Free INT on strength (bringing the total strength up to 24; base 1, +19 from inscribed POW, +4 from free INT which costs 4MP), and 8 Free INT on range (340m), with the last 6 free INT on duration (160min). This costs +18MP, a total of 22MP (which is the average of a 4-POW Magic Point Enchantment, rolling on 4d10), or 11MP on Full Moon Day. This spell has strength 24, range 8, duration 6 for a total intensity of 38. At strength 24, Moonfire deals 6D6 damage to a random hit location to everything within a 320m radius each melee round. It can be cast from up to 340m away (just far enough!) and lasts for 160 minutes, or 800 melee rounds (at 5 rounds/minute, I believe?). The spell's active, so if the sorcerer is inside it when he casts he'll quickly die and end it prematurely, but at raw strength alone he could effectively commit suicide and cast the spell at strength 36, with two more points for duration (because why not?), to deal 9D6 damage a round to random hit locations to everything within a 2,560m radius. Still costing 22MP (or 11MP on Full Moon Day). Using the interpretation that the bonus POW extends how much the spell can be manipulated (but that it still costs MP) means that this spell requires +19MP, total of 41MP (about 8 POW), or 21MP on Full Moon Day, which is the average on that big-but-plausible 4-POW matrix. Kablewey. (Note: Not saying this is likely to happen in an actual campaign, unless maybe the very absolute end of one. Just theory-crafting.)

RAW, I don't think they're very frail. Sorcery's Neutralize Magic cares about the spell's "strength," not MP. Spirit Magic's Dispel Magic requires 1MP per intensity of the sorcery spell. So the 8-year Boon requires 20+ MP. Rune Magic's Dismiss Magic has the best chance. Each RP of the spell cancels 2 strength of sorcery (and it explicitly only cares about the spell's strength, not total Intensity). So that would knock down a small, long-duration Boon or similar spell pretty easily. RAW, none of them seem to care about the actual number of MP spent in casting the spell, so the free Intensity is generally not worse at resisting countereffects than spells cast without inscription bonuses.

I agree that RAW it should reduce casting time, although it will still take over a melee round, so I'd hardly call it fast. I think speedier casting is probably an intentional feature, to give the sorcerer at least a chance of using his magic in combat, rather than in prep. It's worth remembering that inscription isn't like the spirit magic or Rune magic Spell Matrix Enchantments; all the POW has to come from the sorcerer (instead of shared around, although I think he could get POW from contributors--apprentices, adventuring companions, etc--when casting Magic Point Enchantment), and only the sorcerer can use the inscription. But it is terrifying. Even a more moderate +6 or +10 POW inscription, while still super expensive, gives the sorcerer access to crazy effects, which he can do basically every day. I'll try brewing up a kind-of moderate example: Doric has POW 17, INT 15 (with a Free INT of 14, since he only has one spell memorized at the moment). He's sick of getting screwed with by these uncivilized barbarians in Dragon Pass, so he decides to inscribe his Dominate (Human). He decides to spend a whopping 10 POW on the inscription, giving him a bonus 9 Intensity to add to his spell's base strength or duration. He puts them all in strength. His basic Dominate (Human) will cost the base of 2MP and be treated as strength 10. Without any other items, he could manipulate it up to strength 16 (spending 6MP from himself, with 1 remaining to not go unconscious), although strength 10 should give a good shot at dominating most humans. If he had an MP matrix with 17+ MP in it (2 base + 15 Free INT manipulation), he could cast Dominate (Human) at strength 25, giving him a 70% chance to dominate those pesky Rune Lords (resisting the spell's strength with POW 21). It should also blow through pretty much any Countermagic-like effects in the way. Alternatively, he could use his base strength 10 to try manipulating his full Free INT into duration to give him a chance to dominate a long-term bodyguard. (Strength 10 v. average human POW 11, 45% chance of success, duration 15 for two seasons.) He can cast that anytime he's got the MP available (unlike Rune Matrices linked to Extension).

Ah, I see. I was looking at it as a different reading of the rules, whereas I just buggered the numbers. Those tricksy numbers are always out to get me... Just to confirm, you still have to pay the basic MP cost of the spell when casting through an inscription with no manipulation, yes? I think my mistake is that I thought you were saying either that the first POW gave a free level, or that with an inscription (because POW gives free levels) even the basic version didn't cost MP. Hence my confusion.

So your reading is that the basic inscription always gives a free level of Intensity? When made with just one POW. My thinking is that the first POW just stores the knowledge of the spell (opening up more Free INT) and that it takes extra POW to get bonus intensity.

My understanding (based on @David Scott's explanations) is that the extra POW on an inscription doesn't reduce the MP required, but gives "Free Intensity." So, the sorcerer has to pay for the base MP cost of the spell, then gets free intensity to manipulate it with equal to the extra POW on his inscription. After, he spends 1MP per intensity manipulated (or more with Runes/Techniques unmastered) as normal, to a max of Free INT. To me, this does seem to be an accurate reading of p.390 RAW. Initially, my interpretation was that the bonus POW basically added extra Free INT when casting the inscribed spell. So, an inscription with 3 extra POW could be manipulated 3 additional times beyond Free INT alone. I might still use that as an actual rule when I play, but I think above is a more accurate reading of the text. Basically yes, I think. I'm not sure if you have to assign the bonus intensity into strength, duration, or range when casting, or when enchanting the inscription. But in either case, you'd need to sacrifice 21 POW to make that inscription (1 as the base cost for an inscription, and then 20 for the bonus). There doesn't seem to be a ruling on if that all must be spent at once; my inclination is to take the most restrictive reading and say that since it doesn't say it, the sorcerer can't add more POW later. He'd have to make a new inscription.

I picked that up; I meant to use the Spirit Magic example as a parallel to sorcery's inscriptions. Shh... That may be one of my disappointments with RQG Core Not worth getting into here! Although, I will say that I do like this inscription rule, and just giving it to everyone instead of making it another spell to be learned and mucked with. It seems simpler and a bit more player-friendly than previous iterations. Just to make sure I understand correctly... It requires 3MP because Mend Flesh has two Runes and one Technique associated; this is always the base cost of Mend Flesh. That spell has strength 1. The 3 POW included in the inscription increases this to a total intensity 4 spell, with 4 strength. Due to the spell description, this 3MP Mend Flesh heals the target location for 1D6 HP. The caster could spend additional MP up to his Free INT to manipulate the strength or range higher. I don't understand why the caster would need 4 Free INT to add 3MP (is that a typo?), since the basic sorcery rule is +1MP=1 Free INT required, except when a Rune or Technique is unmastered. Provided that's correct, the interpretation I took ([3] in the OP) was that by inscribing extra intensity of the spell, the sorcerer gets that intensity, plus his Free INT, but still has to pay full MP for the effect. So, if he has 6 Free INT and is casting Mend Flesh with the above inscription, he could cast an intensity 10 Mend Flesh at maximum, which would cost him 12MP. Base 1 (3MP) + Free INT 6 (6MP) + Inscription 3 (3MP) = Intensity 10 (12MP). On this interpretation, the main benefit of the inscription is gaining extra "Free Intensity" to manipulate the spell with (although the caster still needs to come up with the MP required). Two further questions: How much POW does that Mend Flesh inscription cost to enchant? My understanding of 390 is that it would cost 4 POW; 1 for the base, to store the spell within, and then 3 POW for the "Free Intensity." Do you have to choose what the inscribed intensity adds to when you enchant the inscription? At first I read "base strength, range, or duration" exclusively (so, those 3 POW would need to all be strength, or be 2 strength, 1 range, etc), but your interpretation seems to be that it is flexible. Most of my understanding was from trying to draw parallels to the spirit magic version, probably because of my RQ3+Homebrew brain. Very likely I'm wrong! And, of course, thanks kindly for your detailed reply.

So while trying to test the munchkinery of Linked spells (for that other thread) I went looking in RQG's Sorcery chapter for the Spell Matrix Enchantment. There's no equivalent spell description, but rather a generalized section on p.390, "Inscribing Spells." The text I'm concerned with is: My questions are: How does this affect the MP cost of the spell? Can an Inscription be linked with other spell matrices? I see a few interpretations for MP: They do not cost MP, and the inscribed levels are added after the sorcerer's manipulation. They do not cost MP, and the inscribed levels are added before the sorcerer's manipulation (so further manipulations are more expensive, I think?). They do cost MP, and only remove the need for the sorcerer to manipulate the spell. To my eye, (2) seems to be the closest to a RAW interpretation, but as a GM I would probably play with (3), since that seems the most balanced. Interpretation (3) makes sorcery inscriptions basically parallel to the spirit magic Spell Matrix Enchantment (but without an actual spell description, unlike both sorcery and spirit magic's Magic Point Enchantments). I'm curious what others think the correct RAW interpretation is here, as well as if there's other options I've missed. Personally, I think the RAW is that sorcery inscriptions can't be linked with spirit magic or Rune magic spell matrices, and that is part of why they weren't written up as a spell description. As a GM, I'm inclined to allow a linked matrix by an adventurer who has access to multiple methods of magic (such as an initiate of Lhankor Mhy or the Seven Mothers & other Lunar cults) for MGF, but the consequences and potential munchkinery of that choice are best left for the other thread.

This makes me think that maybe a solution is to just say "Hey, y'all can't have more points of spirit magic or more RP than species maximum, no matter how high you munchkin your CHA" (without Heroquest shenanigans?). You'll still have some of these issues about "what quality are my RP?" when CHA changes, but having a flat cap in place might preemptively reduce the amount of rule abuse. (Of course, all that tasty, tasty bonus CHA would still apply toward your skills...)

I know it was being discussed around on the boards, and I'm pretty sure it was included in "Rune Fixes" (in the Dropbox of preview documents). A hotfix was suggested and implemented that when Extension is stacked with a spell, all RP associated with the spell cannot come back until the full duration is up, or it is dispelled, etc. Sort of a "the energy is still in effect" was how I understood it lore-wise. So, if you cast an Extension 5, Shield 3 with all 8 of your RP, you wouldn't get those points back until the spell ended (and so would have Shield for a year, but also wouldn't have RP...). Making a Linked matrix of Extension and a spell sort of gets around this, because you're not using your own RP. Of course, you still need to amass all the POW to make the matrix in the first place, but with the new rule letting others contribute POW that's less difficult (though still not easy in an actual game environment). You mean the Steal Breath cheese?

What about a priest of Eurmal who's also an initiate of Orlanth? (Following the mythic thread of the Trickster swearing to Orlanth, and so that the clan chieftain can halfway control him & is responsible.) Choose Flight as one of his Orlanth spells, gets the Enchantments from being a priest of Eurmal as well as Remove Head.

Though, that matrix does kind of get around the Extension hotfix; if you make an Extension 5, Shield 3 matrix (8 POW, so a lot, but maybe not completely ridiculous) you could get a year-long Shield 3 without having your personal RP empty until the spell ended. I believe you wouldn't be able to refill the matrix until the spell was dismissed/dispelled or naturally ended, but in the long run that seems a pretty small cost if you can work up the POW among 4-5 members of an adventuring party, or sacrifice for it over a few seasons, since it lets you have a great defense and the flexibility of RP.

Oh, I like that better. Swallow's such a dumb spell and I love it. My RQ3 game's trickster initiate plans to learn it soon. And I suppose the Attack Condition would remove that (and RQG doesn't seem to have the trigger conditions I'm remembering about, to activate on the spoken word w/o a cast roll like for that Fireblade example). After all, if there's an attack condition on someone entering an Area Enchant, who's the caster? Unless maybe rolling on MPx5 based on MPs in a linked matrix, or based on the enchanter's POW as he crafted the enchantment. IIRC, the Rune matrixes were supposed to be filled at temples in worship in RQ3 too.

This makes me imagine enormous enchantments cast to consecrate a new clan's temple. Organized by the High Priest, all the clan's priests & initiates of the god sac 1 POW each (say, even just 20 total POW) to divvy up into a 5d10 or 10d10 MP Matrix (User Condition so only priests can use), some linked spells on Area Condition linked to the MP Matrix to Disrupt 5d3 anyone who enters and isn't either an initiate or a clan member, and then maybe a Binding Enchantment or two for cult spirits, healing spirits etc. and a Control (Spirit) matrix so the priests don't need to keep it learned. I imagine this sort of blend would work particularly well for cults like Ernalda or Chalana Arroy (though not the Disrupt), giving a big pool of MP to use in healing the community of wounds and disease. A spell matrix with Detect Enemies, Undead, Trap could work as a general "3MP Is it gonna hurt me?" sweep. Detect Bronze is really good in that regard too. Silence + Darkwall makes your group sneaky. You could probably do something fun combining the Absorption Rune spell and the Summon (entity) spirit magic spell, to summon really crazy big creatures to go wild. Might not even need enchantments, just seems like an interesting gimmick. Use absorption, have allies cast spells at you to boost your MP, dump all of it into summoning a huge Salamander (get a smaller one to start the fire to get space) or Gnome or wraith or whatever, then run, run, run away! leaving it as your foes' problem, hopefully. Beastmaster and Ironhoof makes a horse or Praxian beast extra deadly, and more tactically useful. Maybe some Protection too. Blend it together, turn that Bison into a Bronze Age tank? Again, less a cool blend and more just a straight "Oh, huh," but if you can talk a whole bunch of people into helping out, you could hypothetically make a crazy-strong Create Fissure matrix to use in shattering an enemy city (this is in the "I could see Argrath doing this to take on the Lunars" category). Get 20 POW into that, makes a fissure 100m long and deep, and 20m wide. Depends on if the Rune spell "Matrix Creation" has the same 1 hour/POW time to cast as the spirit magic version. I don't think it does? Also seems to imply that the enchanter & pals could sac the POW over the course of weeks or seasons. If all at once, would be hard to do more than 20 hours of a ritual. But... I can see a large, organized group preparing a nasty 50POW Create Fissure matrix in order to swallow chunks of a city. Like if the White Bull Society had a priestess of Babeester Gor who could cast it, and all of them sacced one or two POW each. Could combine with Shake Earth + a big MP matrix to add to the catastrophe. Remove (Head) and Ironhead linked matrix sounds like a great Trickster enchant. "Hey, catch!"

I would personally rule that Multispell and Spell Barrage only apply to spells being cast from the magician himself/herself, because it seems the least gimmicky to me. I think the part that feels weird for me is that the Linked item has its own source of MPs--if all of the spell's MP came from the magician's personal points, I'd probably allow it (because that's blowing a ton of MP). So, principle needs a bit of work, but I'd say they don't interact. Strict RAW doesn't seem to imply a particular answer, so would probably allow it. Speaking of gimmicks, another good one I've seen/heard of is a ring with a small MP Matrix, a Multimissile Matrix, and the trigger condition to activate whenever it touches an arrow. Bronze Age machine gun!

Fireblade in a sword linked to a 4+ MP Matrix and with a spoken word trigger condition ("Flare on!" or whatever) is pretty classic to my mind.

Someone get Michael Bay on the phone.

True Dragons v. Starships when??

What would you suggest? I personally find all three of those things something which adds to the charm of the system (although we use a different method for SR than RAW), but I'm curious how you think would be a simpler way to do it, especially for hit locations.

Love the analysis, @womble. Thanks for rummaging with the numbers and sharing your interpretation with us. I usually can't be arsed to number-crunch, so it's much appreciated . It seems to me like the next question is: Does this image make for a more or less interesting game world? Personally, as I've been pondering a bit on those numbers, I find it rather attractive. Glorantha's supposed to be a "EVERYTHING'S MAGICAL/MYTHICAL!!" world, right? And these numbers and ideas, to me, seem to support that. This new paradigm where all initiates have reusable Rune magic (with rare exceptions like Resurrection) makes sense for how I understand Glorantha, and sounds like a bonkers world to be playing a tabletop game in. It's obviously not "Everyone's flying, all the time!" like some high-magic settings are written, because Rune points are a limited resource since you only recover them in worship, but the idea that a substantial portion of a village's warriors could fly out to meet invaders if they really, really needed to sounds fun. It's also definitely a murder-hobo deterrent. I guess I'd have to actually play the game in that mode to get a good feel on if random villagers even having 6 or 7 RP feels exciting or feels bland, but it's a gameplay style I think I'd like to experiment with. Methinks that a further step from this pondering would be that characters are of course defined by their cult and their way of expressing piety, but what really distinguishes them from random people is their skill, not their magic. A bunch of Orlanthi might run around able to Lightning Bolt something if absolutely necessary, but most of them won't be able to make a sprinting mount onto a horse and then ride down a fleeing raider at a gallop while lopping off his buddy's head.

Case in point, I'm currently working on writing up a comprehensive rules doc for the nasty mess of RQ3, Petersen's Western Sorcery & Tekumel Sorcery, and some oral homebrew that we've been using in my playgroup's "RQ3" game for the last few years, and the document just broke 30,000 words. I'm nowhere close to done. Now, I love love love the RQ3 approach to sorcery, and it's one of the things which has kept me playing the game for some years. I love this crazy, excessively-complicated tangle of skills and spells and all that, and how flexible everything is. The first time I cast a week-long spell (coming from my 3.x background) was this amazing moment for me, personally. Kind of an, "Oh %#!$, I'm doing real magic!" moment. Plus, actually mathing out all that nonsense feels a bit... arcane. D&D's more "black & white" magic does work well, I think. My subjective experience has been that it feels about the same as spirit magic does in RQ: do the thing for a stated cost (whether MP or spell slots). D&D just goes to a more well-defined top end. Well, sometimes. There are some moments and spells from D&D which just feel iconic to me, like the first time you splatter an enemy with scorching ray or fireball. Classes = Cults Or, perhaps Shaman/Priest/Sorcerer? Then again, RQG is starting to introduce more overlap between those paths, so IDK. (plz no flame!)

How does is this playing out? I've read the PHB and the GM Guide for M-E, and I really like them, but I don't think I'm ever gonna get the chance to run the game. I'm curious how it plays on the table, especially their mechanics for traveling. This is interesting to me, because part of why I find 5E attractive is those reduced numbers. Now, I'm someone who usually plays casters, so I think that affects me less than it would a fighter, but coming from 3.5/PFRPG to 5E's simplification is a slightly strange, lovely experience. Instead of a world where DCs of 30+ are the only ones kind of hard to hit (in main character skills), it's a world where a DC of 30 will almost always be relevant. I'm not entirely convinced by how 5E does AC, but I personally really like the direction they took skills into, even if I personally might not have chosen to generalize them as far as WotC did. My experience is that 5E feels more like a development grown from the 3.5/PFRPG system than it does grown from 4E. But, I didn't play much 4E (I was one of those players that very quickly disliked it at launch). To my perspective, 5E looks like WotC's reaction to seeing Paizo's Pathfinder, and the upcoming Pathfinder 2 looks like a reaction in kind to 5E. I personally understand the threads of those two games as being in a kind of dialogue with one another; I'm not sure where I would place 4E into my understanding. Perhaps as another branch, which interacts with 13A (which I have zero experience with). For what it's worth though, my experience has been the same as RosenMcStern's--I hear more people describing 5E as a return to 3.5/Pathfinder roots than as a good growth from 4E. Where does that term come from? (Not trying to challenge, just curious. )

Interesting point. I guess that part of the explanation is that they're too busy competing with one another? It seems to me that a big factor in the Lunar victories is their unity against the squabbling clans.