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Crel

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Everything posted by Crel

  1. I'm super excited, because Treasures is getting damn close to its Gold medal! As it's just nine sales away, I've decided to put together a promo code for nine copies of the Print On Demand edition: http://tiny.cc/treasures-gold Here's to hoping it'll get over the edge soon! As an added incentive when it hits Gold, I'll go ahead and share my current list of items slated to go into Volume Two. 😉
  2. I generally agree that the bigger the benefit sought, the more difficult the quest. Simon's post has plenty of good ideas for handling this situation. The only thing I'd add is that, IMO, the "main" benefit an adventurer gains from a heroquest should be in some way connected with their deeds. So for me defeating a Rune Lord of Thed wouldn't necessarily gain an adventurer Stormspeech 90% (though it might get a hefty bump to the Air Rune, to one's Battle or Broadsword skill, or some other special skill or ability related to that victory). Mastering a magical language like that seems to me like the type of boon won by seducing the queen of the Wind Children, talking a granddaddy storm ram into carrying you to the Gates of Dusk, or some other feat involving communing with the Storm powers.
  3. Some friends of mine just released a Batman fan film, and I really enjoyed it. Send some love (or ten minutes of your time, anyway) their way, eh?
  4. As someone who has bumbled himself into a parallel quagmire with my latest project, I'd recommend against splitting yours into two releases. It doesn't take much to throw yourself off-track, or it can take too long to realize if your scope's more than you intended. Maybe aim for a late December or a January release? I'm not much of a stats guy, but it seems to me that the month or so after Christmas does well for sales because folks have holiday cash (or a gift card) burning a hole in their pocket.
  5. To Hunt a God, Part Two is in beta release! The update is about 30 pages. If you already bought this publication, this file should be available in your DriveThruRPG library. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/382256/To-Hunt-a-God?affiliate_id=546342 I'm still working with the editor on refining, then proofreading, the text. Art production is ongoing, but likely will not be completed until I'm further along in the final book's graphic design, so I know what additional pieces are most needed. Thank you all for your patience. This unbearably slow process hasn't been how I wanted to release this work, but it has been the reality of the past year for me. I'm looking forward to seeing the last puzzle pieces fit together into the completed book.
  6. I ran a playtest of one of my JC adventures one-on-one, with my player running two adventurers. Combat-wise, my experience suggests you should focus on "heroic duels" rather than melee fights. Abstract bigger combats with Battle rolls. Maybe have a crew of "mooks" which tag along with the adventurer, then just assume "my mooks tangle with your mooks" while the Hero throws down with the Baddie. One idea I've had, but never tried, is basically giving the adventurer a Passion or other ability for their NPC buddies. So something like, "Orlanthi Bodyguard 60%." So anything which makes sense that an Orlanth Adventurous bodyguard would do on the Ernaldan adventurer's behalf, he has a 60% at. Something like this could help make one non-fighty character still feel that fights are THEIR win, rather than their NPCs' win. One-on-one play works well with more narrative, rules-lite stuff. Focusing on social conflict, over monster-fighting. Magical conflicts too, spirit stuff, flashy "look at me, I'm a powerful embodiment of my god" things roll well. One of the upsides to a one-on-one game is that you don't have to divide up the cool moments, so a game like that can work well with a single "I'm super amazing" adventurer. There aren't additional players to feel left out. I think a few people who I see over on the Chaosium Discord have one-on-one (or two) games going, but can't recall which community members that is. Modules... From the GM Screen Pack, I'd try re-framing the Apple Lane adventure as a duel between the adventurer and Xiobalg for the fate of the village. "Cattle Raid" should be able to play more-or-less as written (emphasizing the social side of that conflict), but I think handling the boss in the third adventure would be hard solo. I think the following adventures from The Pegasus Plateau & Other Stories could be fun one-on-one: The Pegasus Plateau the Grey Crane Crimson Petals The Pairing Stones Each of those adventures has social (or social-ish) elements, or should be relatively easy to tweak for solo play. Reducing a group of baddies to two or three, teaming up with obvious NPC options, stuff like that (without getting into spoiler territory). I wouldn't try running anything from The Smoking Ruins & Other Stories. The investigative adventure in the Starter Set could be fun, but the first and third adventures seem difficult to run for one player. From the JC... I'm not sure I can really recommend any of my own material. Diana Probst's Jallupel Goodwind (which I published, and edited) could be good story-wise, but the "monster" is a bad fit for solo fights unless tweaked. The Throat of Winter should be doable with a small down-tuning, if the adventurer has combat tools. The adventures in Beer With Teeth's Dregs of Clearwine and Cups of Clearwine are flavorful, and not intensely fighty (if memory serves). They should work well, in addition to being plain good books. As I think through things, I would actually consider looking at Company of the Dragon, too. Because the focus is on playing both adventurers and a community, I actually think that campaign has some real potential for one-on-one play. It would probably involve a bit of work tweaking moments, adventures, etc. I'm sure there's other JC stuff which would play well one-on-one, but we're in this beautiful time where I can't actually remember every RQ adventure off the top of my head! So I'll call that a win for the JC, but maybe a loss for this post. 😄 Hope that gives you a few ideas and threads to go start with!
  7. My friends and I are all under 30 (if I'm just barely under, by now). While not "kids," I do think we qualify as being on that younger end, the fresh blood. We discovered RQ through a friend's father before RQG published, but as the main GM I've been primarily playing the new edition. My experience is that the analogy "5E/Pathfinder is to Skyrim, as RQ is to Dark Souls" intrigues pretty much everyone I've asked, who is familiar with D&D. The idea of difficult-but-fair combat is generally exciting for people I know who are familiar with D20 systems. Also elements like everyone has magic. The lore and setting, in my experience, tends to be less engaging for a majority of players. The exception is when it translates to "cool stuff I can do." For example one new player I had picked up a newtling trickster with Become Heron (Become Other Shape) because transformation felt cool to him, and herons eating newts added a fun weird twist. I don't have lots of experience playing in shops, but when I have, I found that the RQG core rules does spark curiosity about the game. It's very colorful, illustrated, yadda yadda, and that grabs attention. I've never seen it on a shop wall myself, but have let players paw through my travel copy. Art budgets attract readers' eyes. This was pre-COVID, haven't played a FLGS game since. The biggest turn-off to new players I've experienced has been that the rules are complicated. Calculating crits versus specials, POWx5 (or other characteristic rolls), resistance table rolls, figuring out which spells or other character options to use when, all tends to overwhelm newer players. Some players also dislike that RQG's focus is on playing humans, coming from D20's plethora of species. However, I've never cared much for insisting on human-centric games, and the variety of species in Glorantha does engage new players. Phrases like man-eating tapirs, what if Achilles was Donald Duck, Food-caste trollkin, and talking plant people definitely prods the curiosity of D20 players.
  8. Always happy to help. 🙂 All I ask is that if you come across any useful tips yourself, you'll share them with the rest of us!
  9. I've played a fair amount of non-RQ adventures using RuneQuest, and I've GM'd some RQG using non-RQ adventures. Our old campaign ran through a number of classic D&D dungeons in RQ, and Glorantha. We nowadays call that system "RQ Bastard" because it's RQ3, but with ~20 years of oral houserules. The original campaign we got the rules from is still going, though our own campaign ended awhile ago. Some fun adventures we ran which stick out include Lost Shrine of Tamoachan, the Caves of Chaos (I believe?), and The Lost Island of Castanamir. I'm told the other game completed Tomb of Horrors and White Plume Mountain. We didn't worry about trying to bend setting stuff much. Just pop and go. If something doesn't fit, well, that's weird magic stuff beyond mortal ken, ain't it? Personally, I've run some Pathfinder and D&D stuff, and also some stuff from Forbidden Lands (by Free League) within my RQG campaigns. The Spire of Quetzel for FL was a lot of fun; it has the right sort of over-the-top crazy to feel like an uncontrolled jaunt on the Hero World. Also the Mellifluous Mage, or something like that, is interesting. A bees-themed dungeon with interesting secrets and weirdness. FL has a lot of good sword and sorcery vibes, which reskins pretty OK into Glorantha. Plus, its treasure values don't require much fiddling to fit Gloranthan economy. Another adventure I enjoyed running was I believe The Spire of Iron and Crystal for Pathfinder. Not certain the name, but I think it was by Frog God Games. I reskinned the adventure as a God Learner ruin on the coasts of God Forgot. One of my rules of thumb for mechanical conversions is to take an attack bonus, and multiply it by 5 to get an RQ skill percentage. Damage values can remain similar at low D20 levels, but require more tweaking at high levels. This x5 trick works pretty OK with D&D 5E, though I've used it mostly with Pathfinder 1E. Another useful trick for playing adventures out of the book is to take any difficulty class (DC) effect, and make it either a resistance roll (POW against the DC), or an opposed roll using the DCx5 against like, Dodge or Scan or whatever. These tricks don't get you all the way, but they'll cover like 50% of "winging it" when playing an adventure written for D20 within RQ. Magic is a bit trickier. It depends on how comfortable you are with the system, if you want to ad hoc stuff. I'm pretty OK with going "Eh, 3 to 5 points of spirit magic, made up as I go along" because I know that's usually a few points of Bladesharp, Heal, or Protection. Those are your staples, IMO. Other spells might wind up on the list, but are they actually gonna get cast in a combat situation? Hard to say. Bigger magic is tough, because it's hard to have fluency with the whole RBM to sort of sideways guess at similar magic. Remember that everyone has common magic, though. And sometimes, it's more dramatic to keep an antagonist with the D&D-style magic. A fireball spell is VERY FUCKING SCARY if you're an Orlanthi fighting a weird enemy sorcerer. Area effect attacks? the horror! A rule of thumb which comes up less often is assume a Big Magic Dude has 18 MP (or maybe an additional 10-20 MP from enchantments), and that a D&D spell costs MP equal to its level. Disruption replaces basically all cantrips or magic missile or other basic damaging things. To be frank, with the speed of many RQ combats, casters with bigger magic shouldn't bother with Disruption - just bring out the big guns first. I like to take notes first, but that's because I like having a good written skeleton before GMing. Not everyone's going to need as much support as myself, and not everyone's going to have fluency with the material for this prep process to be relatively quick. Lore translations are hard, but honestly, a lot of the time we got away with just not worrying about it. Looking back, I think it's sort of a Gordian Knot. Shit's weird and strange and your problem is survival. This works well coming from adapting adventures out of the D20 publications because of the heavy use of combat, conflict, and dungeons. A lot of the time, you can place a dungeon within a broader Gloranthan story context. Feuds and rivalries are common setups, and you can adapt those to Orlanthi-style blood oaths and High Drama without too much labor. So what if dungeons don't always make "ecological sense" or some garbage - they're fun, yeah? Like, there's a reason people have been dungeon-crawling for over 40 years. The best dungeons do make sense, but don't let that deter you from using adventures which have fun ideas with middling execution. I know this is kind of long and definitely rambling, but I hope it has a few useful insights. We've had a lot of fun using RQ's system to play non-RQ adventures, and I definitely encourage other people to do the same. There's tons of cool stuff out there, and in my experience the dangerousness of RQ's combat makes playing through combat-junky D20 adventures more exciting, not less. Oh, one last note - make sure to trim down the numbers in pretty much every D20 adventure you run. Equal number of antagonists to the adventurers is a good rule of thumb. Up to x1.5 for weak mooks like trollkin. And remember that a big baddie which can soak damage in D20 games is at a pretty serious disadvantage during RQ games, because of action economy. If you have 30 hit points instead of 150, you go down quick.
  10. There's not much media outside books or pen-and-paper, though the amount of stuff on YouTube is slowly growing. For the general aesthetic and "vibe," my go-to film is Bahubali. It's a Bollywood epic in the vein of Lord of the Rings, although it's about Love and Hate rather than Good and Evil. Great film, but long. I think one odd, but flavorful, "elevator pitch" would be "The Iliad featuring Donald Duck," especially with the recently published community content books about the noble durulz (anthropomorphic Death-worshiping ducks). (Not that you have to play ducks, but it's a good example of some of the cool weirdness available for games in Glorantha. 🙂 )
  11. Oh, and I'm pleased to share that To Hunt a God has earned its Silver bestseller medal! 🥰 Thanks once more to everyone who has purchased it so far.
  12. Well this has taken me much too long (and in all odds, will continue requiring more time than I'm happy with), but I've uploaded the first text from Part Two of To Hunt a God. This is a "beta" release, still awaiting final edits, then graphic design + artwork. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/382256/To-Hunt-a-God?affiliate_id=546342 The update is 15 pages, and includes 13 short encounters. It is, as promised, free to everyone who has already purchased To Hunt a God. You should find the additional PDF in your DriveThruRPG library. While written for this adventure, several of these encounters are also, hopefully, worth stealing for use elsewhere during your campaigns. 😉 Material ranges from stern Aldryami to wily tricksters, moral choices to monster mayhem. Hopefully, a little something for everyone in the Glorantha community. ❤️
  13. I've only skimmed through the new PDF, but so far I'm impressed. I agree with Godlearner - this is a wonderful update to a good product.
  14. Hey all, I've finally got some news to share about my next publication on the Jonstown Compendium, Part Two of To Hunt a God. You can learn more over on my site, but I'll give the short version here. Basically, my work's been delayed due to a mix of personal stressor, encouraging writer's block. But I've FINALLY finished the manuscript, and we're now entering editing and production. I'm hoping to release a quick-and-dirty layout of one chapter soon (about a third of Part Two). To everyone who has already picked up To Hunt a God, thank you, so much. I appreciate your patience. If you haven't snagged it yet, this year's Christmas in July is probably the cheapest you'll ever see this book. The price is going up once I start publishing Part Two material. (Reminder, Part Two is entirely free to anyone who buys now.) Finally, enjoy this piece of art by Yulia Zhuchkova! But if you're curious what it depicts, you'll have to click the blog link. 😉
  15. It's Christmas in July on DriveThruRPG! Treat yourself to a buffet of Glorantha's happy little monsters. 😇 This bundle collects all twelve issues from Volume One of Monster of the Month. Beasties include: Cannibal Clowns! Zombie Ducks! Covetous Spirits! And of course, the terrifying Quacken!! At the low, low price of $14, this bundle nets a whopping 142 pages of content for your RuneQuest game (including a complete adventure).
  16. Glorantha Book Club — 4/13/22 I recently learned about an unfamiliar complete Roman epic from a footnote, Statius's Thebaid, or "Song of Thebes." The translation I found by Jane Wilson Joyce was a brilliantly fun read. (Well, I'll admit "fun" might be qualified by "fun for a certain type of reader.") The Thebaid is a Latin retelling of the war between Argos & Thebes driven by the sons of Oedipus, Eteocles & Polynices. While before & after the Thebaid are fairly well known from the plays of Sophocles (Oedipus Rex, Antigone), the story of the Seven Against Thebes itself isn't one I was familiar with from standard lit/Classics readings. The book is filled with heroics and melodrama; super-human heroes overwhelmed by rages and passions, as the gods drive warriors on both sides to frenzy. There are few moral heroes here, and for me that was part of the attraction. A gory war story which views the war as a horrible evil, not as embodying martial honor. I think there's a lot of Glorantha and RuneQuest in this book. Maybe even moreso than the Iliad or Mahabharata! Well, for my Glorantha, anyway. On a trivial level, the combats feel somewhat RuneQuesty; there are many, many severed limbs, at any rate! 😄 But also the way Statius frames each hero's spotlight feels to me like "ah, yes, this is when they've cast Shield, or True Weapon..." and then you can also tell when the spell has run out. One hero is swallowed whole by the earth (Create Fissure), another wrestles with the local river-god after polluting him with corpses. Book VI, a series of funeral games at the epic's mid-point, could be grabbed nearly whole and used as a game session to honor a fallen character. Throughout, the humans feel, to me, especially human. I think it's because most of the heroes don't feel idolized. They're lamented. Like most epics, the gods are omnipresent even (or especially) when the humans reject them. They feel more active than Glorantha's gods, but throughout the tale their actions feel like the type of thing we'd expect in Glorantha when adventurers break social taboos. In particular, the Thebaid very much emphasizes treating slain enemies as people, not carrion (something I now plan to remember for my own players). A lot of the stories in Glorantha have a basically positive "spin." Sartar's pacifism, Lunar equality, Orlanth's honor & heroism, Ernalda's generosity. But we're entering the Hero Wars, and that means a lot of people are going to die. That thought was in my head through much of the piece. It's a brutal, sorrowful, unnecessary war, and it's a war which spawns more war, and yet more still in the following generation. The Hero Wars can be seen this way. An adventurer from 1625 ST might, by the end, feel very much like Nestor in Homer's Illiad; an old man who has seen terrible conflicts for his whole life, and yearns hopelessly for more level heads to prevail. The Seven Against Thebes was just one of many such conflicts for Nestor. I imagine the Dragonrise, or the Battle of Heroes (1628 ST), might be looked back on as the opening salvo in a similar way.
  17. Sounds like that's the source of the confusion, then. Because the Prosopaedia was highlighted and identified as a full-length hardcover, the announcement made it seem like the Prosopaedia was getting an independent release prior to the full Cults of Glorantha.
  18. To be fair, I didn't say it was a good choice - just that my players did it. 😉
  19. I've played some RQ3/RQ3-ish (lotsa house rules), and more recently RQG (with varying levels of house-ruling; currently attempting to play "Rules as Intended" for good or ill). Some things are genre/setting/GM expectations. That's the whole "can you kill Gunda/Harrek/Rurik Runespear?" debate. Personally, I'm soundly in the "Yep, take the fight to 'em" camp. Doesn't mean it'll be easy. I generally tell my players, "the meta-plot of King of Sartar is going to happen, unless YOU do something about it." I don't see much point playing a game where you can't impact the world - and one way players like to impact the world is by being utter bastards. For the most part, I'm interested in keeping skill%s under 200. Without magic mods, anyway. I think you can do lots of cool SuperRuneQuest stuff without them, and also without saying God Plane/Hero World is "skill / 5" or whatever. I think the big factors in getting skills that high, from what I've read in this thread, are: How often are you playing? an 8 hour session once per week gets a hell of a lot more done than a 4 hour session once a month. How many experience checks can be gained at once? How often do you roll experience checks? Sometimes, it's relevant to have an "intermission" in the plot where the adventurers have a few days of rest, because they've all gained experience in their relevant skills. This incentivizes them to go out and do more risky things to gain experience, instead of trying to resolve the adventure in a "safe" way. My games have gone from low to mid-power. Our previous RQG campaign ended around mid-power. I have a friend who has played a very long RQ3-ish campaign, still ongoing, which is definitely a high-power game. RQ combat is fun when it requires tactics and/or strategy. Tactics being in-the-moment decisions using what magic you have on hand, and strategy being how you and the other players make broader choices about skills & magic learned in order to keep yourself alive. The more magic you have, the more fun RQ combat is. Magic is what gives you a variety of things to do. High-level combat is fun because you have a lot of choices you can make, giving you many ways to tackle dangerous situations. Getting an attack percentage into the hundreds temporarily is hard, but not impossible. Easiest way is to borrow the entire party's POW Storing crystals/Magic Point Enchantments, and cast one huge Sword Trance. In my last campaign, the Humakti broke 1000% this way - over 100 MPs spent. I described it as being roughly like "grinding up the Death God and snorting him like coke." It was a life-changing experience, but very very effective. A way to defeat or survive high-POW entities is by augmenting the POW v. POW resistance table roll. My players defeated Gloomwillow (TPP) that way, with a special augment using one of their Runes when she cast a big spell at them (exact spell excised because spoilers). If you're POW 18 against POW 30, a successful augment effectively increases your POW by 4 points (+20%). A crit, by +10 points. This isn't a sure-fire guarantee, but it's another tip which helps mid-game adventurers start reaching their late-game options (like frequent DI, heroquest boons, and so on). Don't underestimate Earth Shield. Earth Shield is huge, especially against Kaiju-type enemies. 15D6 dinosaur attack bonus? Bonk. Sorry, I cast Earth Shield this morning. I'm not sure what RQG's rules are, but in our RQ3-ish game, big foes could still deal damage through Earth Shield via knockback - basically, no damage goes through, but you're still knocked around like a bowling ball because that giant was really, really big. My friend basically went questing for a heroquest boon just to be immune to knockback, because it was one of his few weaknesses. The attrition game becomes more fun when the players have partial control. Time to recover magic points, to rest up, needs to have consequences. What happens during the adventure while the adventurers are recovering from their most recent ordeal? What happens to the McGuffin, for example. The players need to know their choices have consequences. The attrition game also becomes fun when roleplaying is added to it. Getting that feeling of being worn down, out of resources, trapped, scared, and desperate. Of course, that's true for any RPG. I think it's worth reiterating here, because at all levels of RQ combat resource attrition is relevant. If you want to test-drive mid-game combat, I suggest running a one-shot (BWT's Stone and Bone would actually be great for this, it has a combat I think would work well) with "old" new RQG adventurers. There's a sidebar where new adventurers start with additional skills and - importantly - Rune points. Testing it out is a good way to get a feel for how the game plays. Elementals are super scary, especially for weak opponents. A medium or large air or earth elemental typically one-shots non-Rune Master opponents (and can definitely give them a run for their money). Large earth elemental deals a ton of damage to all of a normal human's hit locations, simultaneously. And if they survive that, they start suffocating underground. Fun stuff. If you're an aspiring Rune Master, get your elemental into a Binding Enchantment or POW Storing crystal as soon as possible. It significantly reduces the Rune point cost to summon it. Plus, elementals are a decent source of MPs, because when summoned they don't really use the magic points. Trouble with a big elemental with big POW? Summon it, then ask your local priest (POW 18) to use Command Cult Spirit to stick it in the binding. 2-point spell, 40 L. The priest can use an hour or so of ritual practices to add +30-+50 to their roll, without all that much time increase. This is something every single player I've had, who has access to elementals, has prioritized. At most levels, RQ combat is really swingy. The attrition especially comes in from multiple combats, not really as often from long fights. Experience players are paranoid. Fuck with them, strange sounds, illusions, being purposefully vague, etc. Encourage paranoia - it keeps players alive. The "Teleports behind you" tactic is popular in my milieu. My friend has a special ability to do so I believe 1/day, and reserves it to open boss fights. Stack your spells, then ambush and try to erase someone. Preferably multiple someones. I've used a Multimissile'd Javelin exactly once, and whoo boy, that was fun. Absolutely obliterated my target. Felt bad for my GM. Spirit magic buffs are hard in RQG compared to RQ3, because they last 2 minutes (10 rounds) instead of 5 minutes. When I played RQ3-ish, my character was a Knight-Sorcerer. During combat, I thought about who the strongest opponent was, who I had to prioritize. We spent a lot of time thinking about movement, thinking about flanking. Ganging up on someone, while seeing who could hold off others. Sorcery buffs cast beforehand helped a lot. In RQG, Boon of Kargan Tor fills this roll, as Hresht mentioned. Disrupt and Befuddle are very cheap, and very important. Demoralize too. Pretty much everyone in groups I GM gets their hands on one of the above. Often Disruption + one of the others. Befuddle takes someone out of the fight. Disruption's important because that's how you bypass heavily armored foes. Lots of little pings, if you don't want to wait for a crit or call down some Rune magic. You have to think about what you can do, and what your friends can do. A shaman with Distraction is really helpful, because spirit combat is a reliable way to get rid of many warrior-types. As a front-line warrior, I focused on killing the dude in front of me, and calling out how I needed support. Sometimes that was healing my broken leg; other times, that was telling the Yelmalion to stop shooting me in the goddamn back. An important strategic aspect of mid-to-high level RQ is how you spend your POW. POW is a resource, and if possible, you want to stay relatively low so you can earn it more easily. 13's the sweet spot in RQG, because then you get +5% to a bunch of skill categories, and a 40% chance to improve your POW on a POW Gain check (if I'm not screwing up the math - I'm getting pretty sleepy haha). Early on, spend it on Rune points. Rune points are your "awesomeness pool." It's important that each adventurer has a spirit magic spell which lets them try to fish for a POW Gain check, even if they're not a super magical character. Enchantments after, if you're buddies with a priest willing to cast them. It's a big bonus in RQG that someone else can offer a lot of the POW, and that not all the POW needs to be sacrificed at once. Linked enchantments help flexibility. Linked enchantment + Multispell lets you put that short-term spirit magic on the whole party, easing up your buff-and-charge time. By the by, the types of stuff my friend's group plays through now is usually D&D/AD&D long adventures. Some highlights include Tomb of Horrors and Tomb of Annihilation; they're starting Storm King's Thunder soon. When he GM'd our RQ3-ish game, we ran a lot of similar stuff. Dungeon-crawls in RuneQuest are a blast. They aren't the gameplay style currently being pushed by Chaosium's publications, but I think people should try it. Really fun stuff, scary and dangerous, but that's what makes the game exciting. I suggest browsing the D&D 5E collection Tales from the Yawning Portal. It's got a lot of good stuff, and I've survived several of those adventures in RQ. Starting point for conversions is Modifier × 5 = percentage. Some house rules we've used, which I think are cool and honestly we really struggle to play without: Multiple experience checks: You get checks based on your highest success during an adventure: 1 for normal, 2 for special, 3 for a crit. I haven't been playing with this rule (and I think it's offset somewhat by how huge an RQG skill category modifier can get compared to RQ3), but my players constantly ask for it back. I think I'll re-introduce it during the next campaign year. Or, perhaps during heroquests as a treat. This is multiple experience checks during the same adventure. Hero Points: Basically, extra lives. You get less and less, the more skilled the adventurer becomes. This was helpful with RQ3-ish, but I haven't really felt the need for them in RQG. They were nice in RQ3 because the starting point was much lower. Currently, I've decided to give my group as a whole (rather than each adventurer individually) a small number of hero points, because the adventure I'm playing has some Phippian (parallel to Lovecraftian) tier stuff. Magic Point replenishment: You recover 1 MP per hour, instead of your POW over 24 hours. Just a quality-of-life improvement, really. I don't know that it impacts the game that desperately, just makes MP replenishment less fiddly.
  20. I just finished reading The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy by Alain Bresson, and I want to babble about how that might relate to Glorantha & the Hero Wars. So I'm gonna do that, and none of you can stop me. 😛 I found the book interesting, but I would only tentatively recommend it to folks who are similarly over-the-top nerdy about the ancient world (such as Jeff, Martin, Ludo - looking at you, Mr. Spreadsheets - Joerg, and myself). It is, after all, a book making an academic argument about the role of market economics within the ancient world (esp. the Athenian Empire, and the Hellenistic period). Beware - Here Be Mathematics! Fairly readable, but not something I'd recommend to a broad audience. But screw all that, going into detail's probably not helpful or interesting. I'd rather muse on Glorantha while staring at the book's reflection. What are some of my takeaways? As I've generally suspected, Archaic/Hellenistic Greece doesn't seem like a good cultural model for Esrolia or the Choralinthor region. A major factor is climate. Esrolia's harvests are much more stable than, in particular, the harvests in Attica, which drove development of the Aegean World. Problems demand solutions. The silver from the mines at Laurion was more important than I anticipated. Now, a military historian is going to see history as battles, and an economic historian as economics; but the thesis that Athens's mines at Laurion were the "engine" which developed the Aegean region makes sense to me. Transitioning from the ancient world to the mythic world, this makes me wonder "Where's the silver come from in Glorantha?" A mission to wreck the Red Emperor's silver mines - ruining Lunar trade - feels like the seed of secret missions. Or, establishing a new source of value for any faction. This takes on a mythic cast when I remember that metal is the leftovers of gods. How do poets talk about silver, and it's celestial associations? (In RQG, Moon; personally, I see it as the "celestial feminine.") Heroquest to kill a Star Maiden, and establish a new silver mine? Or, find the mine (her corpse), then quest to ally with her and have access to the mine? Free her from dwarves living in her left shin? It seems like Nochet and Esrolia have an analogous relationship to Athens and the Black Sea. Grain goes into the big city, and the big city creates stuff to trade back to the farms. The challenge is that Athens has Laurion, whereas I'm not sure what Nochet has. It's not clear to me how the cycle of trade got started in Nochet. In 1625, the engine keeps chugging because that's just where you go. But what started that process? What began the magnetism in Dormal's day? Given Esrolia's general uber-prosperity, the Great Winter must have hit even harder than I've generally felt. I might explore this with a flashback adventure sometime. Or, just exploring Esrolia strategies and experiences more deeply during that time. It feels to me like the notion of "A failed Esrolian wheat harvest" is colloquial for "the impossible happened." My brain wanders in this direction because in ancient Greece, strategies for scarcity/famine drove a huge amount of economic activity, and also regulation (Ex: in many city-states, it was illegal to export grain). Perhaps the general "flow" of economics is silver from the north (more dead celestial deities in that area?) down south for goods created by artisans living off Esrolia's grain surpluses. Goods go north, silver does Stuff. Maybe people come from the west to trade for said silver? And Dormal just made it easier. This could lead to another economic element in the Hero Wars - the Red Emperor goes a-conquering because of a massive trade deficit in silver. What I'm thinking of here as a terrestrial parallel is the economic pressures/silver deficit which contributed to British colonialism in India. I suspect the Esrolian grain surplus is locally productive, not internationally productive. This is because central Genertela is not the Aegean ocean (shocker, eh?). Transport of meaningful quantities of grain is slow and cumbersome, mostly overland. Possible exceptions for the other former Sixths, along Choralinthor Bay. I don't see Esrolia feeding Sartar, Tarsh, Maniria, etc. That's all at the moment. If more thoughts burble to the surface, I'll post 'em. What have y'all been reading?
  21. Two artists I work with frequently on the JC are Ludovic Chabant (@lordabdul) and Kristi Herbert (I don't think she's on BRP Central? But her Beer With Teeth conspirator @Diana Probst is). Katrin Dirim also does great work, although I haven't worked with her personally (yet, I hope!). No clue if Katrin's on here, either. Finally, I've also had a good experience working with Alexandre Gauthier (also unsure if he's summonable). I don't know what any of the above's art schedule currently looks like. Over on the JC Creator's group on Facebook, there's a "creators helping creators" resource spreadsheet, which could be worth checking out too.
  22. Assuming a city god is basically a big wyter, I think this text from page 286 of RQG is interesting and probably relevant: So I imagine some sort of magico-logical Rube Goldberg machine kept running off the locals' magic points feels on-theme. Maybe the hoi polloi give the thing a "name," but its engineers know better.
  23. Just throwing my voice in to concur with everything Nick has said; his numbers are spot-on for my own experience. I aim a little higher on my price-per-page (at the $0.20 mark on my longer stuff, like Treasures of Glorantha), but that's also because I like pretty pictures and want to fill the pages with them. I suggest budgeting based on 100 sales, and then everything after is just gravy to slather onto the art budget of your next volume. On the topic of art, budgeting, etc., the most important cost is a good cover. Good covers sell books.
  24. Crel

    [WIP] Sylthi

    I enjoyed my 1-on-1 games of RQG testing To Hunt a God, but it was really fun having a full house in my session yesterday. I've missed it. I'm rebooting my Esrolia game with Chaosium's "The Smoking Ruin," and plan to expand the "dungeon" portion with John Lawson's Secrets of Korolstead. My group loves a classic 80's/90's dungeoncrawl. I'll post notes on traveling from Esrolia to the Smoking Ruin after my players have done the trek themselves, but TLDR the distance is a little longer, but most of the encounters en route still fit in well. We've got a few players who are new to Glorantha, which is also a lot of fun. One expressed he felt intimidated by both the setting and the game's complexity. He's playing a Lhankoring scribe from Lunar Tarsh, so kind of jumping in the deep end. His core concept is "cryptozoologist." I love it. During the opening scene of TSR, the performer Treya seeks someone from the crowd to help complete her performance. I told my player he knew the story, but a different version of it. Then, I invited him to tell the table what that version was -- whatever he said, would be true. I think it helped.
  25. As far as I know, this is accurate. The PDF of Moon Design's "Glorantha Classics" series is available, but the most accessible physical copies are the "RuneQuest Classics" softcovers. That's the editions I have on my own shelf.
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