Eff

3 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Now as a human-presenting Ernalda takes over as holder of the skein from the atavistic + at best ambivalent spider woman, what happens?

Uneasy sits the head that wears the Weltgeist-y crown! I suspect that such a situation proves unstable. There might be some rather entertaining wavefunction collapses that come out of it, deeply maternal in their own fashions, but the benefit of AS is that the kiss of the spider woman usually only comes if you draw her attention. You can typically opt in and maybe opt out, assuming you've got a trip attendant and maybe a good excuse to tell poison control. Can the jolly green giantess keep that aloof face?

21 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Greg has written at length about his troubled relationship with the spider mother, let me see if I can find it unless someone has it at hand. "We" tend to imagine her benign for some reason, perhaps reaction formation on display.

Just as we must imagine Sisyphus a happy man... 

A crackpot belief I have here is that there's a subconscious hope that by buttering her up she will bless us, or a subconscious sense that if we define her as benevolent, we will find a Glorantha that has a gentle or benevolent metaphysics. Like blowing on the dice for luck, in a way. For my part, of course, I have personal experience to guide me in a similar but not identical direction. 

3 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

i never want to see vaginal pedipalps ever again, David Scott

When you think about the function of pedipalps for a spider, doesn't that make Gorgorma and Arachne S clearly deeply connected, simpatico on a primal level? 

Anyways, given the origin of the A. Solara imagery, I can't help but feel much about her, appearance or otherwise, is a prank. On whom by whom, I don't know. 

2 hours ago, Agentorange said:

I have been reading about how babeester Gor sprang from the body of her mother ( ernalda ) so on and so forth. And am struggling with the whole timeline  of it all. before we get all metaphysical all things happen at the same time etc etc, just humour me.

In the whole context of lesser darkness, greater darkness, chaos devouring everything etc etc, when does Ernalda die in the whole process.....and when does she come back to life ?

I assume she dies sometime during the Greater Darkness and comes back to life with the rest of the gods at the Dawn, or perhaps a little earlier.

Yes, Babeester Gor does appear before this, but that's myth, etc. (If you want a naturalistic timeline, perhaps there's a Young Ernalda Adventures where she has her first confrontations with Nontraya and Zorak Zoran where Babeester Gor first appears.)

1 hour ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

why do some of you consider Satyr or other beastmen as spirits ?

they symbolize irl some nature aspect, but in glorantha ? yes they are more bestial so more "not tamed nature" than others (I use the words in the description of the man rune) .

They have flesh, they can't discorporate.

they are like ducks or trolls or elves, hunshen, ludoch or human. they are "just" sentient being

I, for my part, am using "nature spirit" as a structural role that's played in folklore rather than a strict category that requires a Spirit Rune or whatever. Not least because, say, a nymph or genius loci has a body that consists of their entire associated location, because they are the place. 

1 hour ago, Noirfatale said:

Hello, I just started to read Runequest roleplaying in Glorantha. P18 : 

is there a explanation why? considering that Orlanth and the other lightbringers had to ressurect the sun god to save the world. Just curious if there is more on this - I only own the first book (for now).

Thanks!

Setting aside the "plot" reasons, here are some of the subtextual or background factors going into this- the very early batches of Gloranthan mythology are being put together from the stuff that was available in a popular context and a little bit of more academic material. Some of the stuff that's going into this mix is Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and the story structure he puts forth in that book which involves a journey into the underworld and a confrontation with a father-figure. Another bit of stuff that's going into this mix, I'm sure, is an outdated theory of comparative religion that was common in the 19th century, which understood religion as following a course of evolution with the progress of society, and part of that theory of teleological religious development was the idea that solar worship was succeeded by worship of storm or weather gods. This was in turn built on looking at Egypt (where the understanding many non-Egyptologists have even today would be that the sun god Ra or Amun-Ra was the head of the pantheon of gods universally) and Greece (where the solar figures Helios, Hyperion, and Apollo are clearly subordinate to the storm/weather god Zeus) and seeing this as a historical evolution. 

Or to put it another way, the storm gods displace the solar gods. The solar gods are older figures of authority. So the Lightbringers Quest combines these factors- the Sun is the father figure that the Storm must confront, which Campbell calls "Atonement". What does the Storm have to atone for? Displacing the Sun. 

And then from there you have mythological motifs like the story of Persephone where something is taken into the world of the dead and the world of the living begins to die as a consequence, and it becomes "kill the sun, go to the underworld, apologize to the sun, the sun returns, life goes on". (Note that Glorantha largely discards the actual teleological evolution aspect- Yelm and Orlanth establish a mutual peace rather than Yelm submitting to Orlanth- but pieces of it remain and occasionally come to the forefront.)

I hope this "background" material is also helpful. 

2 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

This is my take on swearing on the River Styx: There are many different ways to take an oath, and one we know about is the oath to Humakt, backed by the Oath-spell. This "merely" kills you if you break it (and then bad things happen to you in the Underworld as an oathbreaker), but this seems to be considered right and proper among the Orlanthi - taking this oath is surely a sign of honor and dedication, and praiseworthy. But then there's swearing on the River Styx, and this simply isn't the done thing - it seems that it's too much, even for this culture. Too much - when the kosher option is to get killed outright and doomed in the afterlife. What I take this as, is that it's not merely a case of "these are the consequences if you break it" - instead, it twists Fate around the oath, binding the user to it. As a comparison, it could be like the combination of the Oath of Fëanor and the Doom of Mandos... possibly squared. This is what I mean by saying you surrender your free will - it's now replaced with the driving force of that oath that should not be taken. I don't think Argrath could turn aside from it, or prioritize anything above it. He's being wielded by Fate, now.

I think that broadly, I take it more in the sense the Greeks used it- even Zeus Horkios, Zeus-we-swear-by, is bound by oaths by the River Styx, because of reasons that feel like they're probably retrojective explanations of the existing oath by later individuals. So it's meaningful in the King of Sartar original because of that subtitle: "how one man became a god". Argrath is already doing what gods would do, foreshadowing his apotheosis. 

And then this is queasy and spooky because it's tantamount to declaring yourself a god, and it also speaks to the tangle of Argrath between cynicism and idealism. Does it bind Argrath any more than any regular oath would? Well, perhaps his apotheosis is preconditioned on his fulfillment of the oath. Or perhaps it keeps him out of the cycle of death and rebirth and renders him an undead monstrosity until he fulfills it. But Fate, like Luck, doesn't seem to be extraordinarily powerful here. 

51 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

I'm going to differ here.  True, Argrath suffered.  But so did thousands of other Sartarites.  As I've mentioned before, most of our PCs are orphans.  With some parents destroyed by the Bat.  Same for lots of NPC Sartarites.

We choose not to be psychopaths.   Well, one PC has a very high Hate Lunars, but he's no Argrath Destroyer of Worlds.

Argrath's actions, for good or evil, cannot be justified by "Lunars killed his parents, boo hoo".  There's a far deeper reason, whether mystical (e.g., he's the Shadow) or psychological (e.g. he's a psycho David Bowie).

None of that was a justification of Argrath, which is itself a separate matter, it's a way of interpreting Argrath as a person, a character, rather than as a plot function. In this specific instance, someone who's deeply unpleasant as a person, has reasons for being that way, and perhaps can be made to have reasons to be a different way.

One other option, of course, is to use Argrath (or Jar-Eel or Jaldon or whoever) as a fiction suit to project into and experience vicarious enjoyment, which is an orthogonal approach, but one that probably does require more editing to cut down on the grim aspects that I assume aren't in anyone's fantasies. But if you stick to the board game and making swordfighting sounds while moving Argrath and the Sword Brothers in a stack down the Royal Roads... 

2 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

I think one of the problems here is what we see happening in the comic - he swears on the River Styx, and that essentially means revoking his free will and any concerns whatsoever apart from that oath (this is the reason no sensible person swears that way, or is expected to). This is why, as you say, he's a mere object now, a plot-point that walks like a man. He gave himself up 100% to Fate, and this is what happens to you when you do that. It would be a tragedy, except for all the damage he does.

Hold on, though. Who says that this must be the case, that Argrath is required to be this object because of a rule that's straightforwardly an exaggeration from "oaths must be abided by, lest the being you swore by bring their wrath down" to "oaths turn you into a deterministic piece of clockwork if you swear them on the right object"? That, too, is also a choice. 

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

We seem to have lapsed into even one-note Harrek is more interesting than Argrath. What is going on?

You can do similar kinds of analysis for Argrath too. However, Argrath carries symbolic importance Harrek doesn't, as an avatar of the orange/brown side of the wargame board. Pulling at the threads of Argrath means pulling at the threads of Sartar/Orlanthi/Orlanth, because he's been made into this figurehead of one "side" in the factional struggle. 

Argrath is a bastard, a sociopath, an inhuman monster, for many people talking about Glorantha, in part because his function to them is to blow up the setting. To take all that loving anthropological material about the Orlanthi, the gorgeous lozenge in an infinite pool, and smash it into pieces and then let the pieces reconstitute themselves. For another set of people, Argrath is monstrous because fandom discourses around the Lunars from the Orlanthi perspective frequently appear monstrous, and so Argrath is a means to condense this perspective into a figurehead to attack. For some people, Argrath is a force that keeps the setting on a predetermined critical path towards its inevitable end, and they seem to see this as a positive. 

In all of this, of course, Argrath is not really a person at any point. Argrath moves in a unilateral way, operating without doubts or concerns or introspection. Argrath is an object, and there's a limit as to how interesting a pure object can be without some anthropomorphism. So what I think about Argrath is- he's a fraud and knows it. 

Argrath is a guy who's suffered. At the hands of the Lunars when young, and then for an extended period at the hands of the Bison People. Like certain other figures in Glorantha, he psychologically displaces his righteous anger at the people who are currently keeping him in the degraded state of a slave but who he also depends upon onto other figures who have hurt him but that he isn't dependent on. So much so good. In the approach of the boring master planner Argrath, I might then go on to say that the White Bull is simply a means for bloody revenge against his tormentors, extended out to all the Animal Nomads- the eschaton is upon you, follow me and be my cannon (cult) fodder. 

I think it is probably better to understand Argrath as someone who has internalized some of these conditions, such that when he has an encounter with the sacred world of Prax and is treated by the White Bull as if he were Praxian, he can't believe it. He assumes, perhaps, that he's managed to trick this spirit, and that even the transcendent beings are fools, gullible, easily led by the nose, and from there he becomes a conspicuous liar, deceiver... trickster. Not that he's a Trickster, oh no, that's displaced onto the recurrent elusive Elusu. 

So Argrath "tricks" Harrek, "tricks" Mularik, "tricks" Leika, "tricks" Annstad and Onjur... but he isn't, really. People can see who and what Argrath is off of the bat, right down to the very obvious damage. (My Argrath probably has a limp or an unusual gait from having been hobbled at some point early in life.) Maybe some of them even care about Argrath. And maybe there's a certain desire in all of this to gain control over the situation through "acting out", as a coping mechanism for having spent so much time with nearly no control over any situation. Which in turns makes it pretty easy to manipulate this Argrath, though not always predictably so. 

Of course, all of this does somewhat diminish the power fantasy of Argrath as super-GM, planning all of future history out in advance, but phooey on that power fantasy and its inverse. Anyways, healing this Argrath would be a tricky proposition, but I think there are multiple angles and approaches to doing so. 

Now, a word of caution here- this does, I think, require some fairly careful work at the table to avoid racializing things such that Argrath becomes an angry white guy stereotype, or having Argrath be a victim of white slavery or what have you. But that's work that Glorantha always needs to be done at the table.

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

Isn’t it Una who is harlequin-cool and Jerry just a washed-up sad clown failing every audition (the Deep Fix shambolic and out of tune)? The admirable monster — isn’t that Jerry’s mum?

Can we see Harrek in his Pierrot outfit sobbing his heart out at the end of Brighton’s West Pier (post-ruin, I think)? Maybe we can get Liz Williams to do a tarot reading for him (although, presumably, she was on the Palace Pier).

If we see Harrek as the self-pitying hero, doesn’t that go all the way back to Achilles, Odysseus, and Gilgamesh? The “hero script” has always been able to absorb that, hasn’t it? Achilles has his little moment of humanity when he gives back Hector’s body, but then he re-dons his polished bronze — which was only ever for show/plot shenanigans, not practical at all — and gets back on with Plan A: live fast and die young. He cannot deviate; no more can he peel off his own skin/psychological armour: it is just too tough.

Gosh, I am a miserable bastard, today!

Do you have a vision of the authentic Harrek trying to get out, or is the point that he wishes he had some authentic desires he could use as levers to prise open his carapace of rote violence but keeps coming up empty?

Let me use more precise terminology. The multiversal entropy-eating world-destroying Messiah of the Age of Science Jerry Cornelius that you encounter in Final Programme through English Assassin I will call "the English Assassin" and the one in the "real-world"/mundane sections of The Condition of Muzak I will call "Muzak Jerry" and when referring to the multilayered combination of assorted JCs, I'll say "Jerry Cornelius". So, there is a sense in which the English Assassin is a fantasy that Muzak Jerry is having. This fantasy is something Muzak Jerry believes is cool, supercool, ultracool, especially as opposed to the rather deadbeat teen Muzak Jerry. Over the course of the quartet, the unified Jerry Cornelius as this metafictional entity comes to understand a couple of things, and wrapped up in this is the recognition that Una Persson, who unlike Jerry Cornelius doesn't condition her style on allegiance to a particular moment of mass culture, is cooler. 

So when reading Harrek as a Jerry Cornelius-like entity (to go with Harrek as a partially inverted Elric), we have The Berserk as a fantasy, we have Muzak Harrek as a constructed entity fantasizing, and so on. Now, Muzak Harrek doesn't seem to like The Berserk or think The Berserk is cool. Whereas Muzak Jerry imagines himself having kinky genderbending sex, Muzak Harrek sees The Berserk as only able to sublimate sex into violence (eg the story about Harrek going to a brothel and just tearing the place apart and then paying for all the damages afterwards). Muzak Harrek emphasizes the lonely nature of The Berserk, disconnected from all other human beings except Gunda. 

And then to really throw a curveball here, Muzak Harrek (and Muzak Jerry) aren't inherently metafictional disconnected entities at all, they're interpretable parts of the overall Harrek the Berserk/Jerry Cornelius that are dissociated from the public personae they use, and for Jerry as a combined being, his adoption of Pierrot as an identity is a way of accepting that the world has moved on from the years of his youth without having to abandon the selfhood he likes and enjoys inhabiting. 

Harrek doesn't seem to like the selfhood he inhabits. Maybe he does, maybe you can frame him that way, but as far as getting out of that selfhood, well. I can certainly think of many people of my acquaintance or friendship that had a similar understanding of themselves as necessarily brutish, destructive, violent, and animalistic, as needing to put on a mask of hypermasculinity to distract. But as far as voicing how they got out of it, well... it's pretty radical. 

29 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Harrek as Jerry Cornelius?

If he wants some authentic desires, I think I have a few left in stock. Only slightly shop-soiled. Almost certainly not stitched together in a sweat shop in the East End last week. Definitely not 3D-printed and artfully patinated.

If he turns out to be all shell and no flesh, do we stuff him with masticated crabsticks and then peel back the armour?

A Cornelius-like entity, certainly. But a different internal tension- Jerry the eternal teddyboy is unreservedly cool, the kind of cool entropy monster you can admire, and Harrek's Condition of Muzak-self doesn't seem to think Harrek's all that cool. But at least there's an Una, though said slightly differently. 

The Anaxial's Rooster text seems to imply that nymphs can take on the form of a creature like the one the one they're speaking to, rather than must, to me. Presumably with some kind of "tell", but it's the same thing as the sexiness/antisexiness stuff- nymphs are close enough to people to understand how we tick, what turns us on. Maybe even better than we ourselves do. Of course, for the Greeks, nymphs were ambiguous figures who sometimes killed or took people away. The hedgehog's dilemma again. 

2 hours ago, Martin Dick said:

Whether he's authoritarian or not, he's fundamentally an ugly piece of work. While I think there is room to debate the merits and/or otherwise of Jar-Eel or Argrath or many of the participants in the Hero Wars, Harrek seems to have few if any redeeming features and I can't really see where he has had a positive impact on a society (though I guess you could argue making the Wolf Pirates better killers is positive for Wolf Pirate society). 

I think there's room for a redemptive reading of Harrek, but it's fairly radical and dives into the extent to which Harrek is a sharply critical presentation of the alienated sword-and-sorcery hero. He's Elric seen from the outside- a terrifying killer, equipped with a horrifying, demonic magical object that seems to possess a will of its own, he betrayed his own people, he has only one or two friends at a time and he ends up fighting with most of them- but he's also an anti-Elric, big and muscular and described as animalistic. 

That's not the redemptive reading though, the redemptive reading asks if we should understand Harrek as someone trapped in this inverse Elric shell and struggling to break out, to articulate authentic desires rather than passing performative enactment of whims. 

The boundaries between natural and artificial are some of the few things you can say are definitely artificial! When we think about "nature spirits" as encounters with a world that works according to alien purposes, it's worth pointing out that there are many gregarious peoples who would understand urban or constructed environments as "nature" in that sense, with "nature spirits" more akin to Fritz Leiber's paramentals/Our Lady of Darkness, or the demon in the telephone system in Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol, or the implications of the lyrics of the Talking Heads song "And She Was". 

Which opens the door up for two-way "encounters with nature spirits" where the PC is on both sides of the structural relationship. Which is, like the homoerotic desires encoded in Pelorian interactions with Luxites and Lowfires, only natural. 

2 minutes ago, Ormi Phengaria said:

Definitely. There is, however, a Goddess of Nature in the setting, and I should hope that colours how people think of it!

What this implies is that Arachne Solara's will determines the gender balance of "nature spirits". It all makes perfect sense when you put it like that...

Elves and Beast Men are also "nature spirits" in the sense that they are in the same roles as other nature spirits from the real world- a nature spirit doesn't have to be ethereal. And they certainly tend more masculine in their description and definition. River gods tend to be described as masculine also, though really we should expect they're fluid of gender and presentation. But those are some immediate examples that aren't obscure, but are obscured by how the tendency is to assume nature spirits can't be touched.

(An obvious aspect of all of these things is that the gender balance of nature spirits in Glorantha and Glorantha's primary real-world inspirations is driven by the assumption that it's men who are coming into contact with them, and thus the interaction can play upon a variety of fears, anxieties, fantasies, and social obligations related to interactions between men and women. But of course, this is Glorantha and it would be more in the spirit of things to also have homoerotic encounters and encounters where adventuring women encounter passive male figures of nature

Or to put it another way, perhaps some of these oreads and water nymphs are actually just femboys?)

13 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

The fault is in the RAW mechanic. It shouldn't be reciprocal (at the same %).

Writing up a character with a contradiction makes for good RP, and ye olde "MGF" that we keep hearing about.

It's worth pointing out that in Pendragon Passions are very specifically emotions the PK has, and, for example, Love (family) is very much not reciprocal- eldest sons and daughters start with 15, but for younger sons they get a randomized value: between 7 and 17 (average 12) for the second son, 6 and 16 (average 11) for the third, and so on. Even though your siblings have a 75% chance of feeling inspired by their love for you, as a third son, likely to be sent for Holy Orders if you're lucky, you might only have a 45% chance of feeling inspired by your love for them  Loyalty (Lord) is 15 for a landed knight, 2d6+6 for a household knight, 2d6 for a landless knight bachelor, 3d6 for a new lord acquired through play... but Loyalty (vassals) starts at 2d6+6. Not only is it non-reciprocal, it's quite possible for a PK who knights a serjeant for valor to end up feeling more loyal to them than they to the PK.

Pendragon, of course, is Arthurian and derived most principally from Thomas Malory, and Malory himself was a knight in the Wars of the Roses and the questions of mixed and mercurial loyalties lurk under the surface of the Morte. This is a very appropriate system for inspiring dramatic tensions between PKs, as a consequence!

Of course, Runequest's own initial inspirations were sword-and-sorcery fiction most strongly, and while these characters tend to be very loyal to their friends and companions (I'm sure Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser have a suitably platonic Love for one another in a Pendragon-like system of Passions, as would Elric and Moonglum. Or perhaps less platonic.) they tend to be fairly mercenary towards superiors, in part because they are generally paid mercenaries.

In that sense, perhaps what makes more sense would be for the default Passions to be primarily horizontal ones, bonds between "equals", (even if not actually equals) and the game were aware of the player character group being some kind of, well, nascent Hero Band. Or perhaps RQG was reframed to put the player characters in the position of companions and servants to a heroic leader type, but even then, making that loyalty reciprocal by default is, well, an interesting choice.

11 hours ago, Joerg said:

At the risk of thread  meandering:

The Praxians as presented in Nomad Gods take their identification as Praxians from the three tribal deities: Founder, Protectress, and Ancestors. If there is a divine representation of clans inside these ethnic groups, it has to be in the Ancestors section.

Regardless what the rules say, any personal interaction of the character with a group of peeople will create a relationship that the GM might give a rating. All interactions may be tested in the course of a game, but few such interactions need dice rolls, if such rolls are to be reserved for critical (possibly life-or-death or quest-relevant situations).

On the other hand, if a player wants to roll dice, maybe the GM should find out whather the player thinks this will define the character in a lasting way, or whether this is just for creating a memorable situation (establishing a minor plot element) or a small benefit towards an expected future challenge (such as equipment). The FATE rpg has (for my taste way too many) mechanisms towards this end where a RuneQuest GM usually just juggles the NPCs and background situation without much in the way of written preparation or taking down notes. And in a fast-paced, task oriented situation little of that might be wanted.

 

 

IMO the reasoning simply is that RQ already juggles way too many skills on the core rules character sheet. with a lot of "nice to have" information that is non-essential most of the time. The simulationist world builder in me cries out to leave a data trail for each and any interaction of the characters with the world, creating a robust set of data points that may be drawn on later on. The narrator wants to push on the story, providing enough chrome to provide both context and immersion while handing out plot points. The enabler seeks to give the players room (and posibly a currency) to leave their mark on the story and in the world.

I think that the reasoning is that Pendragon starts PKs with the Passions of Loyalty (lord), Love (family), Hospitality, and Honor, as befits a knight in Late Antiquity in Britain, and then when this was imported into RQG, the lack of a feudal context meant an awkward bit of fumbling with Loyalty to the various political entities that ought to be relevant to player characters. The end result was a potential proliferation of Passions and thus the apparent lack of loyalty to clan in Prax, the apparent lack of any intermediate entity between clan and "city" in Esrolia, etc.

Perhaps what should have been done is to set up a set of default Passions that tug PCs in opposing directions in common situations, like Hospitality and Honor or Loyalty and Love do for Pendragon. But this road was not taken.

6 minutes ago, Ian Absentia said:

Which makes Loyalty (Clan) 40% better than no Passion at all.  So crime does pay.

Which I believe is at the heart of the original question.  It's clear that every Praxian begins play with Loyalty (Tribe) by default, but not Loyalty (Clan).  How do you damage a reputation that doesn't exist?  We've had discussions elsewhere about the point at which a low Passion is effectively a flaw, but the problem being that this sort of approach suggests default Passions for anything and everything at 60%.

!i!

I feel like, if Loyalty (Tribe) is supposed to replace Loyalty (Clan) for Praxians, then this really should be -20% to that Passion. But perhaps it's meant to be the case that Praxians have no culturally instilled loyalties to clans, only to the ethnic group of the tribe and their immediate families, in which case this entry makes no sense, they're stealing from fellow clan members already. And perhaps it's just the case that because Praxians have Hate(Chaos) as a default cultural Passion, they got Loyalty (Clan) cut from their defaults because that way every homeland gets three. That last can't be the case, of course, because I have been assured that Runequest is deliberately not balanced and so there must be some other reason why Praxians don't have any clan loyalty. By default. If only we knew the reasoning involved, though. 

1 hour ago, radmonger said:

I agree with the current chaosium line that the whole _multiple Argraths_ idea didn't actually work out that well in practice. Imagine trying to write a wwii scenario where Churchill personally tells you do do something vital for the war effort. But you don't know if that is Cigar Churchill, Steel Churchill or Wheelchair Churchill. Having a fixed name, but no known qualities, loses a lot of flavor, and doesn't actually gain you anything useful.

Much better to have background material that outlines the personalities, ideas and statistics of Churchill, Chamberlian, Halifax and Atlee, And then a scenario that says;

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guns_of_Navarone_(film)#/media/File:GunsofNavarone.jpg

 

So I have a board game, if we're talking about WW2, which is called Empire of the Sun. Now, it purports to represent the Pacific in the Second World War, all theaters. But curiously, it has nothing in its guide to play about how to handle Guadalcanal. There's absolutely nothing to help me with ensuring that, playing as Japan, I can get 17th Army onto Guadalcanal, or playing as the Americans, I get 1st Marine Division onto the island before 2nd Marine Division. The Americal Division might never even land on the island at all!

Of course, this is a very silly complaint I'm making, because the game places the characters in operational command of the whole theater for either the Japanese or the Western Allies and the only guaranteed adherence to history is the 1st turn, where the Japanese player always has the means to execute Pearl Harbor and the sinking of Force Z. The 1st turn is also optional and omitted from tournament play. There are cards that reference historical events and can be used for relevant effects- for example, Hideki Tojo resigning as prime minister affects the victory conditions for both sides- but the players chose when to deploy them and how. It is quite entirely likely that the Japanese and Allies will slug it out in the Solomon Islands during the course of the game, but where the flashpoint is and how it will go will also likely differ quite a bit- I've played a game where, starting in the January 1943 scenario, I was knocking on the gates of Rabaul by April. 

"Multiple Argraths" put the player characters in the prospective position of, to continue this metaphor, Alanbrooke or Pound or Cunningham or Mountbatten or Wavell or Montgomery or Dowding or Leigh-Mallory or Portal or Eden or Churchill himself, with Argrath perhaps as George VI. Would it be hard to have a scenario involving a commando raid on a fictional Greek island if Churchill has been replaced by someone less concerned with the "soft underbelly of Europe"? Sure, but Jason Morningstar's Grey Ranks doesn't focus on Tadeusz Komorowski, commander-in-chief of the Polish Armia Krajowa, either, for a similar reason- the game's ambit is about something other than the decision to launch the uprising in Warsaw in 1944. 

The specifics of this method and its overall effects are of course debatable, but its aims were simply very different from putting the player characters in the role of a ragtag band of Allied commandos in the Dodecanese in 1943, or their equivalent for Sartar in Glorantha in the Hero Wars, and they should be evaluated in terms of those aims rather than how well they did something completely different. 

Lightning edit: And of course, if the PCs are on anything but an inflexible railroad, it helps to know the personality, goals, and beliefs of their superiors so that when the unexpected happens, the referee or GM can play out their superiors' reaction and things can continue from there. 

19 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

But why a waste of time???  That's politics, Game of Thrones, etc.  One leader is gone, and there's a power vacuum.

You've bet on Kallyr and she's dead.  Or you got skilled playing them against each other, and one is gone.  Now what do you do?  Committed to Leika - she's there, but the other tribes are stacked against her.  She needs a new ally (in my game, she sent the PC's on a quest to gain a New Vision for the Colymar, and possibly seek out an alliance in Whitewall, if any there seem strong enough).  Turn to Argrath of Pavis?  Maybe, but Leika needs to define and carve out her role if she's going to be Kingmaker.  She needs an "in" with Argrath - something that keeps his barbarian horde from ransacking everything.  Or perhaps turn to Fazzur and his sons?  She hates Pharandros, but maybe Fazzur would join with her?  Or there's the Sun Dome Temple...  It's a whole new ball game to negotiate.

I'm guessing that the reason why he perceives it as a waste of time is because the answers to the questions being raised would appear to already be answered. Between bold heroism and intellectual pragmatism, intellectual pragmatism's victory is already set in stone. (And then Leika's death is also set in stone, but a bit more remotely.) So choosing Kallyr or trying to find a middle ground- those are the wrong answers. Or perhaps there's no meaning to the events and the time was wasted because there were themes at play and symbolic language in action when those were irrelevant all along. 

And what's more, of course, is that Kallyr has been deemed to have been explicitly wrong, to have been bad at her job, to not be all that good of an Orlanthi. So even if you want to carry the flag of Kallyrist politics forward, this has already been defined as a mistake, a bad trajectory, by statements that are certainly presented as the truth about what Glorantha not only is but in many cases was apparently always meant to be. 

It's sort of like the difficulties in trying to play from the Lunar perspective while still keeping to the metaplot and statements about the metaplot- whatever the Red Moon develops into thematically throughout the course of your game, as something the characters value (or else they wouldn't be Lunars!) it is something that must inevitably be destroyed, and it's something which must be irretrievably tainted with corrosive unreality. So in this fashion, I would say that it is also a waste of time to keep to the metaplot while playing Lunars unless it's primarily to revel in how disgusted you are by the Lunars and their lunatic ways. 

Now, you can and in my opinion absolutely should ditch the metaplot when playing, and then you can ask questions that don't have predefined answers and work out what answers your characters or your group comes to. But then at that point it's a question of whether your Glorantha is varying or being run directly counter to what has been presented as the consistent, unchanging intent of Glorantha from the 1970s or 1980s, and I can't blame people for feeling like there's no point to a game which would appear to be anti-Gloranthan even, or perhaps especially if it's being conducted without any negative intent towards Glorantha. 

4 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

⁶.....

Not if the players and GM want to distance themselves from those meta plot characters.   Yes if you pick up RQiG and generate a character some of the traumatic events in the family history will be relevant.  Note, however, these events  are not forced into game play.  They are prologue.

But it was a choice in my Zoom campaign to use Six Seasons (therefore NOT to start on the generic RQiG date) , in which the Adventurers meet and get to know some of the meta charcters and participate in meta plot events.   That's very popular and a lot of fun.  

But starting in 1625-26 by the book doesn't involve us so personally with the meta characters.  We are on the edge and not being railroaded into  meeting them.  The Starter Set starts us just after Dangerford, no need to run into  Argrath or Jar Eel.  

      It would be a third and equally different choice to run a merchant caravan based campaign in which the Adventurers try to work around the meta plot events and are trading into Caladraland or the Eastern Isles when the Dragon rises or when Argrath moves north.  In this case Argrath and company can just be distant background.  And it is still RQiG. 

 

Yes, it's true that you're not forced into interacting with particular characters, because a book is incapable of forcing people to do things independently. The more relevant aspect, though, is that if you pick up the Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha core book and run the game from the core book, what you will do when creating characters is to start with their homelands and then move to their family history, and in that family history, there are some figures (Fazzur, the Red Emperor, Pharandros, Argrath, the Feathered Horse Queen, Samastina, and Harrek) who you can, and quite frankly are likely to gain Loyalty Passions for.

So when the GM goes to consider plot points to introduce, these are names which have been marked as clearly relevant for player characters as people they did or may have interacted with in the past. If the group decides to use the shorter family history options, they have to invent three Passions for their characters or else they roll in the entries for 1622-1625, which is likely to highlight these characters as well because they're marked as important figures. These figures are marked as relevant and important right off the bat.

To contrast, Runequest 2 generates ties for new player characters to institutions- guilds and cults paying for training and the consequent debt load. It does not generate these ties to specific setting figures, although, for example, it's fairly likely you'll end up interacting with Argrath if you're using the Pavis box because Garrath Sharpsword is a guild instructor. But using that core book alone... it's quite likely you're not playing in Glorantha, but for the sake of argument, the things which are flagged as relevant to the characters are the guilds and cults and developing plot points (along with the firmer character motivations of RQ2- getting a Rune) is more likely to be built off of those guilds and cults because they're already there. And in RQG, the metaplot figures are also already there.

4 hours ago, Martin Dick said:

I really don't get what you mean here, multiple Chaosium staff have commented that canon only matters for Chaosium products, it doesn't matter for our campaigns and it doesn't matter for the Jonstown Compendium. To be honest (even if it is an important message), YGWV gets said so many times that it gets monotonous. What sort of encouragement are you envisaging?

Honestly, Your Glorantha Will Vary has always been an incomplete or inadequate expression, because Glorantha has always been incomplete, for a long time deliberately so. It's not only going to vary, whenever you play with Glorantha, you, the players, must fill in gaps and complete the areas of personal interest. 

This is unlikely to actually be adopted, because there's a strong desire to know more of the lore baked into the fanbase that these games are primarily if not entirely made for. The distinction between Runequest 2's presentation of Glorantha as an example fantasy world you can create using its rules, and Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha's, well, just look at the title, is valuable there. 

3 hours ago, Summersong said:

Seriously? Starting characters in RQG are competent at some of the skills of their profession but that's a huge gap between that, and being a Hero.

A starting character in RQ2 does not start the game in a context where Argrath, Jaldon, Jar-Eel, Cragspider, Ethilrist, or Androgeus is relevant to their personal lives. They don't even start in a context where Flash-Jak would be relevant! These characters can be made relevant to the initial situation, but it isn't baked in. 

An RQG starting character does start with Argrath, or the FHQ, or the Red Emperor, being relevant to their personal lives through the character creation system. By default, these characters are baked in to whatever comes next. 

7 minutes ago, PhilHibbs said:

Presenting Argrath as a central quest-giving NPC is fine as a design choice, because that works for a lot of people. Not everyone wants to take on the burden of being the great hero who defeats the evil empire, nor do all GMs relish taking that on and running a game that enables the characters to do that.

The players and GMs who ARE comfortable with that are entirely capable of ignoring the "easy mode" option presented and going off-piste with their own crazy campaigns.

So I absolutely see why Jeff says that he and Greg came to the conclusion that "Argrath-centric" was the way to go, in order to present a game where the big plot is front-and-centre.

Or, you can go explore ancient ruins all day and forget the big plot.

I think this very firmly reinforces my point in that post. Deviating from "Argrath is consistently present to give your characters orders" is a "crazy campaign", whether it's "being the great hero who defeats the evil empire" or "explor[ing] ancient ruins all day and forget[ting] the big plot". RQ:RiG very firmly sets up its premise as I said, or actually even more firmly than I said, since I didn't spell out that there's only one side to pick.