Eff

2 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

But the Humakt cult didn’t have a problem with Chaos, surely, just the misapplication of death. So Vivamort and Thanatar are the big non-nos, and Mallia almost as bad (disease-victim spirits of disease as undead or the wrong kind of/misbehaving dead?), then ZZ (for skeletons & zombies).

Seven Mothers because one of them is a Humakti apostate.

Orlanth is the weird one. Very forgiving of the Humakti, that “3”. Or maybe they are grateful to O for kicking off the Forever War and keeping them in work. (More cynically, because they are both popular player character cults.)

What is the problem with Krarsht? Maybe — just maybe — the dead cultists’ tendency to fuse with the Devouring Mother (filed for future reference), rather than scurrying off to the appropriate Hell falls foul of the misbehaving dead strictures. (Or it could just be a professional thing: assassin versus counter-assassin. Nothing personal. Maybe.)

But the eternal agony of being devoured by the Bat is fine: maybe that is just going to an appropriate Hell — eternal suffering is character building, after all — it is unpleasant, but there is nothing funny going on.

Don't be ridiculous, the gods have always had the same relationship to Chaos unless they were Lunar or Chaotic (but I repeat myself! Bazinga!): seeing chaos as inimical to all life and engaged in perpetual struggles against it but not necessarily violence please don't take the things that we've said as implying that massacring Telmori babies is justified by their Chaotic taint sorry, don't know what that was, but yes. Constantly fighting Chaos. Uniform opinions on the subject, no matter what those satanic verses may tell you in your "textual sources". Next you'll be saying there was a time when we weren't at war with Eastasia.

8 minutes ago, Eff said:

There's a kind of interesting logic to the compatibility table as it exists as a textual object in Cults of Terror, rather than with the intent as perfectly and flawlessly transmitted by the holy prophet GS more than thirty years later. The "cults" all seem to have logical, consistent worldviews... that aren't all that compatible with the further revelations that all of Glorantha was a grand Manichean-but-sexless struggle against Chaos that was simultaneously totally amoral.

Seven Mothers are studiously neutral to the potential targets of conversion, with the exception of Krarsht and Thanatar, and the only entity they really are enemies with is Mallia. They're associated with Primal Chaos, but fortunately the prophet GS didn't put that horned rune into their panoply before everything calcified on the runic symbology front, so we can have the delightful specter of Orlanth, Ernalda, etc. being too stupid to understand that the Lunar way is an ideology and that the Seven Mothers are not separable from the Red Goddess, the one leads into the other.

Bat cultists appear to be friendly to Eiritha and Daka Fal, but this surely must be a misprint, it contradicts the received authorial intent of GS.

Kyger Litor despises Chalana Arroy- I'll have to check Trollpak to see if this is contempt for wussy "healing" and "medicine" or what, but it's fascinating to think of KL as a "hateful" cult that might be hurtful to a White Lady. Studiously contrary to the eternal GSian intent, to be fair.

Ah, my oh my, I forgot Daka Fal, associated with Thed, friendly to Seven Mothers. Satan-Wakboth must have been whispering hard that day, to think that the judge of the dead might have a strong connection with Chaos, despite Chaos always having been planned as purely an unraveling or disintegrating force.

Just now, scott-martin said:

Arguably the compatibility table is the compromise as currently constructed. That can change. We've seen it.
 

There's a kind of interesting logic to the compatibility table as it exists as a textual object in Cults of Terror, rather than with the intent as perfectly and flawlessly transmitted by the holy prophet GS more than thirty years later. The "cults" all seem to have logical, consistent worldviews... that aren't all that compatible with the further revelations that all of Glorantha was a grand Manichean-but-sexless struggle against Chaos that was simultaneously totally amoral.

Seven Mothers are studiously neutral to the potential targets of conversion, with the exception of Krarsht and Thanatar, and the only entity they really are enemies with is Mallia. They're associated with Primal Chaos, but fortunately the prophet GS didn't put that horned rune into their panoply before everything calcified on the runic symbology front, so we can have the delightful specter of Orlanth, Ernalda, etc. being too stupid to understand that the Lunar way is an ideology and that the Seven Mothers are not separable from the Red Goddess, the one leads into the other.

Bat cultists appear to be friendly to Eiritha and Daka Fal, but this surely must be a misprint, it contradicts the received authorial intent of GS.

Kyger Litor despises Chalana Arroy- I'll have to check Trollpak to see if this is contempt for wussy "healing" and "medicine" or what, but it's fascinating to think of KL as a "hateful" cult that might be hurtful to a White Lady. Studiously contrary to the eternal GSian intent, to be fair.

36 minutes ago, Eff said:

To be fair, back in Cults of Terror, Chalana Arroy was also hostile to Zorak Zoran. But you're right! Unless you take a level of extremely cartoonish moral relativism, puffing on a bubble-pipe and declaiming "who can say whether healing the sick is good or not?", positioning the Chalana Arroy that in Cults of Terror had a clear line drawn between "chaos gods with actual mortal adherents" like Bagog, Krarsht, Thed, Nysalor, the Bat and "gods who deliberately work to undermine me" like Mallia, Thanatar, Vivamort and Primal Chaos as hostile to the Red Goddess despite her mortal adherents indicates either that Chalana Arroy has gone all problematical on us when we weren't looking... or that the Red Goddess is worse by far than any of those, such that Chalana Arroy's beliefs about healing and mercy are overridden.

Of course, that crazy old sourcebook has some weird stuff in that cult compatibility table, doesn't it? Crimson Bat cultists are neutral towards Orlanth, while Orlanth cultists are enemies of Crimson Bat cultists. They're hostile towards only four other cults in that wild book, in fact: Storm Bull, Zorak Zoran, Thanatar, and Vivamort. Imagine, if you will, a situation where you have one group of people who are studiedly neutral towards a second group and another group are frothing-at-the-mouth hostile towards them- which would you think was likely to be in the right? In fact, the first group is only hostile towards berserk murderers, vampires, and people who secretly murder other people to eat their brains, metaphorically speaking.

Of course we know that in Glorantha it's simply a matter of perspective, and there's no way to step back and consider the actual situation that is happening here and what it might mean and how we might think of the people involved. Furthermore, even if you do that impossible action, you can't pull back yet further and consider if you want to mold or change that situation, adjust the entries on the sacred chart in the holy books, such that perhaps the situation is less ambiguous or has more room for the second, totally nameless group of people to be less rabid. There's simply no way to do this. If Glorantha varies, that happens without any intent or thought or consideration from anyone.

The easiest and simplest solution, I think, in the absence of holding property rights by law, is to simply declare that mischievous entries like Humakt being neutral to Primal Chaos, Pavis being friendly to Seven Mothers, and the like, well, they were simply whispered into the author's ear by Satan. Or Wakboth. Or whatever you call it.

6 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

If Chalana Arroy, the most merciful and "good guy white hat" cult on Glorantha, is actively hostile to the Red Goddess, and groups her with cults like Cacademon and Mallia, then the Red Goddess is not "problematic".  By this take, she is objectively evil and must be destroyed.  Which seems a profound shift from my understanding of earlier, more "nuanced" views of Glorantha.  YGMV.

This is not necessarily a bad thing - it makes it simpler for authors, PCs, GMs, and campaigns to focus on the Prax / Sartar / Esrolia homelands, and the typical Air / Earth cults, for which there is much more material both available and upcoming.  I understand that Chaosium has limited resources and must focus their energies.

To be fair, back in Cults of Terror, Chalana Arroy was also hostile to Zorak Zoran. But you're right! Unless you take a level of extremely cartoonish moral relativism, puffing on a bubble-pipe and declaiming "who can say whether healing the sick is good or not?", positioning the Chalana Arroy that in Cults of Terror had a clear line drawn between "chaos gods with actual mortal adherents" like Bagog, Krarsht, Thed, Nysalor, the Bat and "gods who deliberately work to undermine me" like Mallia, Thanatar, Vivamort and Primal Chaos as hostile to the Red Goddess despite her mortal adherents indicates either that Chalana Arroy has gone all problematical on us when we weren't looking... or that the Red Goddess is worse by far than any of those, such that Chalana Arroy's beliefs about healing and mercy are overridden.

17 minutes ago, Erol of Backford said:

So are broo who would turn around and do interesting things to "her". I thought the healers could use offensive magic against Chaos and would do so without hesitation? Per Gods of Gloranth, how is that neutral?

Foes incapacitated by a healer’s action (usually through the use of Befuddle or Sleep) are under her protection. They may not be harmed in any way, though they may be disarmed and captured. Chaotic foes are exempt from this protection.

Yeah, it is a puzzle, isn't it? Some of this is because the neutrality is from Cults of Terror's cult compatibility chart, of course, and Gods of Glorantha was written later. But if you want to take my little idea seriously, then go ahead and work out a reconciliation!

(In that chart, Chalana Arroy is neutral to Bagog, Krarsht, Thed, and Nysalor as well, while being hostile to Zorak Zoran and Thanatar and an enemy towards Primal Chaos, Mallia, and Vivamort. It's fairly easy to see a pattern here- Chalana Arroy in Cults of Terror will heal scorpionfolk, krarshtkids, and broo in need, along with illuminates, but disdain the two murder cults and oppose vampires, sickness, and primal chaos. The outlier is the recent revelation that CA is hostile to Red Goddess.)

21 hours ago, John Biles said:

Living things have a body and a sol.  Spirits have no bodies.  They don't eat food and they don't reproduce in the way that living things do.  Physical beings can't even interact with spirits in a physical way, only by magic and spirit combat.  Things like Heal, classic life magic, doesn't work on them.

 

So there's this word "animism", derived from Latin anima, which refers to the quality of being alive, or of breathing. It is typically used to refer to a set of religious beliefs that assign qualities of life and animation to inanimate or even incorporeal, abstract entities, along with qualities of personhood to those entities and to animate beings that are not human. This word is also applied to "spirits" and the religious practices around said beings in Glorantha. So it's a little strange to argue that animism means precisely the opposite of its common definition here- that it means interacting with entities that are not alive, not truly animate.

But that's a metatextual observation. Within the illusive realm of treating Glorantha as a concrete thing, it is worth pointing out that gods don't have "a body and a soul", they have multiple bodies and none. Some gods are even spirits explicitly, like Kolat. And gods very much can die, and the whole Lightbringers Quest revolves around this fact. And maybe you can die without being alive, but it seems like a difficult ontological position! So that's why I question the idea that spirits are clearly not alive, because if they aren't alive, we are faced with some interesting problems.

The reason Chalana Arroy is Neutral towards the Crimson Bat, it is said, is because the Bat is capable of being healed. Chalana Arroy is Hostile towards the Red Goddess. This, some might say, is because the Red Goddess is beyond any healing, irredeemable, CA has muttered "unforgivable" in Japanese in response to some Red Goddess antics before, etc., but there is another answer. 

The Red Goddess is incapable of being healed because she has a clean bill of health. Chalana Arroy hates healthy people who have no need for her services. All the gods CA has good or neutral relationships with are perpetually injured, and those she disdains are hale and hearty. 

13 minutes ago, John Biles said:

Not in the same way as corporeal things.  

Why not, apart from it being inconvenient for the argument? 

7 minutes ago, John Biles said:

Micro-organisms don't exist to cause disease; disease comes from spirits, which is a different rune.

 

Are spirits not alive? 

4 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

There are some really fun things: Chalana Arroy is neutral to Thed, the Bat, and Nysalor, but draws the line at the relatively innocuous Primal Chaos, the untainted power of random change. I guess the demonization of Thed and Nysalor hadn’t reached its current level, yet. (Although some pretty harsh things had been said about chaos, already.)

Back in 1980, it was still possible to believe that Thed and the Crimson Bat were wounded beings in need of treatment. Of course, nowadays that's unthinkable in a literal sense- even writing that sentence caused a rain of frogs to patter down outside just now. 

24 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

So we can take it that the Yelmalio (or Lightfore) cult was neutral toward — and exploited by — the Nysalor cult back at some point in the First Age.

Rolling back the IRL chronology — but advancing the Gloranthan one — in Cults of Terror, we have Yelmalio neutral to the non-chaotic Seven Mothers and toward the chaotic Nysalor and Crimson Bat cults. Obviously, no Red Goddess cult write-up back then, but suggestive of Yelmalio as a cult unfazed by Lunar cults, even chaotic ones. This suggests a little retconning to get old OY hostile to Sedenya, perhaps, but in principle that is harmless enough, and the idea of the Yelmalio cult as so old-school and die-hard (or not at all), that the cult will have no truck with newfangled nonsense like Time and balance has an appeal. I wouldn’t want to join it, but it is an amusing thing to have in the world. When a bunch of other gods were in the underworld being suckered into Arachne’s plan, was Yelmalio still alive and shining palely on the surface? Surely so. I like to imagine at least some Yelmalio cultists insisting that their guy never grabbed hold of any cobweb, no matter what anyone else might say, and that the Compromise is as alien to them as any other compromise. (I can even imagine Yelmalio surviving the carnage of Argrath and the Devil, because he never showed up for the showdown. In the Fourth Age, forgotten and fading like Tinkerbell, but never quite gone. “Do you believe in fairies, children?” And the remnant Yelmalians with one voice reply, “OG! OG! OG! — OY! OY! OY!” (It’s a Max Boyce thing.))

If the Yelmalio cult is still neutral toward Nysalor, perhaps it is because — per its original description, anyway — it is not an organised threat in the Third Age: on its own, nothing to worry about. I don’t usually like to ask Chaosium for anything — they should just get on with their plan at their pace — but an all-singing all-dancing online Cult Compatibility Chart with the myriad cults from the upcoming ten volumes would be an amusing resource for dorks everywhere.

I mean, it seems very obviously the case that this is just getting the protagonistic ducks in a row. Yelmalio, like Orlanth and Ernalda, hates Red Goddess, like all the right-thinking gods and goddesses do. The orange side of the board game, opposed to the pink side. You can get some interesting questions out of carrying forward the 1980 text- why are people neutral to the Seven Mothers when they proselytize the Lunar religion that the Red Goddess is at the center of, if these are on the level of gods and not the convolutions of human beliefs? But that questioning has no answer when I ask it, it's aimed at thinking about how to play with these bits of textual statements in the context of a game. 

3 minutes ago, radmonger said:

A rune cult, by definition, must have rune priests or lords, and, unless using some special-case workaround, will have temples. A keen Orlanthi may well be able to name as many thunder brothers as a comics fan can superheroes. But there isn't the population, or level of economic development, in dragon pass to give every thunder brother their own full-time religious hierarchy.

Instead, there are clans who honor some particular ancestor, as the Haraborn of Six Seasons in Sartar do, getting their own unique rune magic in return. And there will be transient spirit cults, led by an individual shaman. These provide access to one or another this year, but as to next year, who can say.

Otherwise they are just a name and set of stories. Like some minor marvel superhero, they _could_ be turned into box office magic, and they very likely have fans who think that _should_ be done[1]. A single creative can drive the publication of a comic book so long as they retain interest in it. Some of the people who do this literally call themselves shamans[2].

But there are, even in the modern US, not enough directors, actors, movie theaters and audiences to make a movie for every named superhero.

[1] make Dredd 2

[2] https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_etd/send_file/send?accession=bgsu1302288940&disposition=inline

 

 

I don't see anything in the RQ2018 rules that indicates that a cult needs more than god-talkers or explicitly needs temples in order to exist. As far as population goes, you only need a few hundred people for cult ceremonies, in those few instances where that's been specified, and there are hundreds of thousands of people in Dragon Pass. It seems like population isn't a problem either. I dunno, it seems to me that it might be easier to use an out-of-universe answer. 

One of the more interesting implications here is that Yelmalio is/was N towards Nysalor but is H towards Red Goddess. Clearly that  Rune Nysalor sports wasn't a deal-breaker in the past, so what might be the reason for the hostility towards Big S? 

Fertility as gendered feminine is interesting because it's a kind of inversion of certain RW historical beliefs about reproduction- where there they understood women to contribute nothing to the child but a place for them to grow, here we have the semen as unrelated to fertility except perhaps as a food source for the embryo. Intriguing. 

There's a pretty interesting metaphysical question underlying this one- ''What does the Cult Compatibility Table represent?" That is, does it represent the relationship between gods, the opinions of the cult membership, the opinions of the cult leadership, the opinions of the broader community, some combination of these? If we take it the first option, which is certainly how we tend to talk about matters- Orlanth is opposed to the Red Goddess, not the Orlanth cult leadership to the Red Goddess cult leadership, Orlanth cult membership to the Red Goddess cult membership, or Sartar's population to the population of the Lunar Empire, is how we tend to talk about that H in the table. 

But if we accept that Yelmalio and Elmal are the same entity, and Yelmalio is N on the table and Elmal was F with regards to Orlanth, how does that work? Did the gods, residents of the Godtime that supposedly only changes when Lunars are using their salacious Lunar Ways to alter it, change with Monrogh's revelations? Weren't these revelations an attempt to salvage the relationship of Elmal worshipers to the dominion of Orlanth? So why would they make Yelmalio less friendly to Orlanth? 

Should we assume that Elmal also was N on that table? Doesn't that require significantly reinterpreting or Xing out the Elmal mythology that actually exists? Maybe we should understand this as a social phenomenon instead. After all, isn't it meant to be a method for shaping the initial interactions between members of different cults? But then we must ask "Which society?" and "Should these initial interactions dictate the ability of cults to interact with one another period? Shouldn't there be room for differences of opinion?" Many questions. 

On 2/28/2023 at 7:20 AM, mfbrandi said:

That is the trouble with “illumination” being required to cover a lot of ground. The extreme ascetic practicing austerities in search of “yogic superpowers” — more Kraft than Macht? — doesn’t necessarily have a lot in common with the person spontaneously achieving insight through accidental exposure to riddles/koans, no?

“I have undergone unimaginable torture; now I am a terrifying living weapon” — boring.

“So that is the difference between a Durulz; now maybe I can start to purge hatred and fear from my life” — shows promise.

In the real world practice of Zen, "austerities" like sitting zazen or monastic life generally are an important component. In fact, typically the process of achieving "enlightening moments" of kensho as recorded in koans only comes after a prolonged period of preparation through austerity and study of sutras and so on. 

Gloranthan mysticism is much more occult-tinged, in large part because Greg Stafford both was in that crowd and also was getting his cultural knowledge of Buddhism from a very mid-20th-century Californian filter. But it's fairly easy to understand its mysticism in the terminology of mystic traditions in Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism... without even dipping into the Thelema or Theosophy wells. 

A couple of thoughts here:

My preference is always going to be Option 1 on that list, because I think that I disagree with the idea that there is a story to be messed with in the sense you seem to be using the word- if the PKs kill Agravain or Mordred, what's happened is that you've ended up in a different branch of Arthurian possibilities... but there are a lot of those out there. It would take a lot more than that to even get close to Camelot 3000, Seven Soldiers: Shining Knight, King Arthur and the Knights of Justice, etc. 

So with that in mind, I think there are also a couple of interesting points to talk about. The first one, which has already been lightly invoked, is that murdering either of the two problematic ones among the Orkneys is going to mean that the surviving brothers will be forced to pursue some combination of justice or vengeance against the murderers, and if it's not done very carefully and stage-managed to reveal some unutterable perfidy from the victim, Arthur is also going to be forced to act against the murderers. Now, to play out some of the implications of a Malory subplot, the Orkney brothers do manage to survive their group murder of Lamorak de Gales and Gaheris's matricide, but they are also extraordinarily important political figures, and in the former case they are pursuing the apparent murderer of their mother, and in the latter case, the truth is effectively concealed. That said, player characters could try to get the protection of a major noble or petty king or round table knight first. Perhaps Mark of Cornwall. Who, in the later medieval traditions, frequently was the actual destroyer of Camelot after Mordred and Arthur kill each other. 

Which is to say, this action very straightforwardly and directly could be a proximate cause of the fall of Camelot and death of Arthur and destruction of Britain in civil strife. You maybe lose Camlann, but the Italians (in La Tavola Ritonda) had Mordred survive Camlann and end up killed by Lancelot later. You're well within the skein of tradition there. The tragic rise and fall of Arthur is still there, though the causes and the meaning are different. 

So the second point here- what's the player intent with this proposed action? Why do they want to kill Mordred, Agravain, or both? I'm not asking in a character-knowledge/out-of-character-knowledge sense, to be clear. If their intent is to protect/preserve Camelot, or to try and break Arthuriana, there's actually nothing wrong with that! But it does require having a conversation as a group about why, and what the premise of the game is meant to be, and whether Camelot's eventual destruction is a fixed aspect of that premise or not. 

And then from that conversation, everyone can have a better idea of where they want to go from there. I'm not even talking about ceding authority over backstory and setting to the other players, although that's an option. I'm just saying- talk about it, make it clear where everyone is and then move forward from there. Maybe they agree that, yeah, they want to see how long they can hold Camelot together even though it's impossible for it to last. The Last Temptation of Christ it up. Or maybe they just want to throw some bombs and make things happen, and they decide that they're going to pick a different direction to throw the bombs in. 

Third point- Agravain and Mordred are, of course, scummy villains, and part and parcel of that (being only mildly tongue in cheek) is that they might well have a cool head in the midst of battle and be able to throw down their weapons and beg mercy. (And in the Welsh Triads, Mordred is associated with calmness, clever speech, and the ability to get his way through talking, though usually positively.) This is mostly an option for players explaining that they want to whip Agravain's little ass because he's a jerk or whatever- there's a way for them to get that victory, that concession, without seriously risking Agravain becoming the Franz Ferdinand of Camelot. But it's just hanging out there- this opportunity for these two to win the sympathy of the crowd by working the refs- if you want to play the culture of Camelot that way. 

Fourth point- there's some weird parallels between Mordred and Jesus in the Post-Vulgate and then in Malory. Whether these are to be read as Mordred being divinely blessed (which is consonant with his Vulgate depiction and earlier) or as Mordred being an Antichrist figure or as a sign of Arthur's corruption under Merlin's baleful influence or as a strange rhyme with the New Testament without much meaning is mostly up to the reader, but if you have a fairly "magical" game, it's entirely possible for Mordred to be miraculously (or diabolically) resurrected after death. This can push things well into spooky apocalyptica if you let it. Caveant lusores. But I do think it might be fun. 

11 hours ago, ffilz said:

Hmm, is part of the problem here the increased power level of starting RQG characters such that they need more advanced opponents?

When I started playing RQ1, I cut my teeth on trolls and trollkin with a few battle magic spells each. By the time I was dealing with more advanced NPCs, I had the combat system down well, and got to see what PCs did with their growing array of battle magic spells. Playing at that level, rune spells rarely saw action. And as I have mentioned before, balancing encounters was never much of an issue. Sure, some encounters were probably over powered versus the PCs, but TPKs never happened, so the PCs found a way to win, or disengage before losing too many PCs.

This is definitely a factor. I think it was Ron Edwards who pointed out most recently for me that in the RQ1-3 method where starting characters had low skill %s, combat really does work like the example with Rurik getting into a barfight and both combatants mostly whiffing- and not affecting each other in the process. And then when you get up into the more experienced characters with much higher skill %s, what's more likely to happen is that both combatants are more likely to parry each other, which means that weapon damage becomes far more of a factor and round-to-round combat becomes even riskier- but you're eased into it. 

And obviously, in RQG, it is quite doable to have starting player characters with 90% in skills, and 70% or more in weapon skills, parrying is folded into the base skill, etc. so you're already in the mode where the most likely outcomes are mutual parries and weapon damage is a factor, etc. (My vivid experience of RQ combat was a one-on-one duel in the Munchrooms scenario, with a marginally improved character from baseline fighting a Karrg's Son, and it was nail-biting even playing pure defense and with a Passion going.)

13 hours ago, Dr. Devici said:

Agreed, and would add that beyond just the superlinear scaling of time to resolve is the tedium added past a certain point, where the GM is now stuck repeating the same actions several times. The repetition involved in a 3-on-1 fight against a PC makes it feel less intense than a 1-on-1 duel.

I am curious, what do you identify as the pain points in this list? Because my experience has been that Rune Lords are more or less fine to run, but a relative pain to stat up during prep.

Pain points for running, as opposed to prepping: 

-allied spirits and bound spirits and remembering what they can do

-DI and the breadth of magic options

But most of the pain points are in prep. 

So the initial question that led to this thread being created was: 

"How do you expect new RuneQuest GMs to both "[take on] a Dark Troll warrior who’s a Death Lord of Zorak Zoran, with the full panoply of Rune spells, enchanted lead armour, zombie and skeleton hordes, etc., and a clan or warband backing them up (with specialists, healers, trained battle-insects, allies, and the like)" and also understand which of the rules in the 400+ page rulebook they just bought should be ignored when running this fight at the table?"

with some additional clarification:

"GM that Zorak Zorani Rune Lord fight, with trollkin or skeleton/zombie henchmen and an allied spirit, against a suitable group of PCs. Strike Ranks, tracking magic and Rune points, NPC allies providing magical support, paying attention to damage done to specific body locations, splitting attacks and parries, all according to Hoyle."

Which is to say, the question is not about "how do you organize battles", this is a more specific question about how to run powerful opponents with a great deal of resources, and doing so according to the rules. With that in mind, there are two difficulties here. The first one is the "handling time" of the combat rules and the extent to which it increases nonlinearly. That is, if you have a group of five PCs against the same number of dark trolls (ten combatants), and you have a group of five PCs against a Death Lord, four skeletons, an allied spirit, and two NPC allies of the Death Lord providing magical aid, (thirteen combatants), does it take 1.3x as long to run each given round, or does it take longer? 

This leads into the second aspect, which is- how should GMs play someone like a Rune Lord in battle? Let's step away from ZZ for a second here and focus on, say, a Wind Lord, because I've spent more time thinking about what an Orlanth cultist can do. So by default a Rune Lord will have 90% in a relevant Rune, which is to say, they can cast their Rune magic at a 90% chance absent anything else. They will have 18 CHA and so will have access to up to 18 points of spirit magic. They will likely have high POW to cast said spirit magic with, and thus a plentiful reserve of MP. They have a 90% or better Passion related to their cult or deity. They also have a heightened chance to use Divine Intervention. Finally, they have 90% at a minimum in a relevant weapons skill, quite likely multiple of them. 

Their allied spirit will also be an initiate of the same cult and have their own pool of spirit magic, rune magic, and MP to work with. And we have NPC allies casting their own magic in support. 

Now, whatever goons or henchpersons are brought along probably aren't quite so kitted out with magic. But even on a basic level, within a given round, the GM does have to think about the combinatorial effects of having the Rune Lord, the allied spirit, and whatever allies are casting support magic interacting with one another. They also have to consider when the Rune Lord might call for divine intervention, because that's a far more practical option than for mere mooks, something which the Rune Lord would reasonably consider invoking. 

What, then, would people do to make this specific kind of combat, of PCs versus a Rune Lord in full kit, with some support casting and some goons, run smoothly without glossing over the things the Rune Lord can do? Even a spell like Leap, hardly the first to come in mind, offers the option for an expeditious retreat or a circumvention of PC defensive positioning. 

15 minutes ago, svensson said:

And they were WELL rewarded for the effort. The haul for killing Yerezum Storn [the antagonist in 'The Dragon of the Thunder Hills'] is as significant a reward as I've ever seen in an RQ game. Let me show you:

- +2d6 REP [3d6 if the party keeps the head and betrays the dragonewts]

- +1 CHA [+2 if they keep the head as above]

- An open-ended favor from a Tailed Priest stage dragonewt. +1d6 REP when it's used [assuming the party doesn't betray him]

- Founding a cult of their own, +1d6 REP +1 CHA

[total CHA reward limit of +3]

- An enchanted tempered iron helm, breastplate, and shield, each of which is already famous as a dragon-killer's panoply

- An enchanted tempered iron spear and javelin, each of which is already famous as dragon-slaying weapons.

- 4 additional hides of land

- a herd of 20 cattle from the royal stud

So let me ask the question again, what do the players need as a reward?

None of this explains why it would be a problem if they had dragon-hide armor out of it too, if killing a dragon is such an unprecedented accomplishment. 

4 minutes ago, Beoferret said:

This seems like one of those player vs character experience/knowledge issues. One possible solution is to allow the characters to make an INT check if they encounter something they've (especially the players) haven't seen before. I see no reason why characters trained in fighting (or who are just plain smart) couldn't make a quick observation to size up the opposition (at least on a superficial level.) Hell, even if the players don't think to ask, maybe just tell one of them to make the INT check. Those with a combat or Battle skill better than 60% (just to throw out a figure) get an INT x5 check, while the more civilian types roll vs INT x3. And, of course, anyone with the Second Sight spell is going to be able to assess the magical capabilities of an opponent. (In my game, Vishi Dunn's use of Second Sight on the big baddie in the Rainbow Mounds led to the party promptly retreating to get more help.) My point being that there are in-game means that players can use to assess the relative strength of an opponent. And while that's not perfect ("How was I supposed to know that baby goat could spit acid!"), it's better than nothing and puts more agency in the players' hands (and potentially creates fun, dramatic moments (e.g., when herding said baby goats turns into a fight for survival or when the aggressive, drunk beggar turns out to be a shamed, impoverished Rune Lord in exile.)

Overall, could RQ use more stock monsters? Maybe. There are large portions of Glorantha that haven't been fleshed out all that much beyond the Guide. It might be fun to introduce a couple of endemic races or critters (snake people!), but I suspect that the majority of new monsters in Glorantha would/should be one-offs, such as embodied spirits that are tied to particular areas or unique Chaos mutations. Will characters be able to handle them? That's up to the GM fashioning said enemies and what the GM is trying to achieve. Fairness? Well, give 'players/characters a chance to figure that out for themselves, as outlined above. 

I think you may misunderstand me- the problem that I am outlining there is that the GM doesn't know, or feel confident about knowing, how powerful the monster is, and so doesn't know whether the players should feel confident or afraid or unsure when sizing up the monster. And they don't have particularly good sources of advice on how to make monsters available to them. This is itself more of a problem for RQG than for RQ1/2 because RQG characters take longer to make and are presented as much less expendable, so the instinct is to be less risky with them and killing them off due to a misapprehension means more inconvenience for everyone, putting more pressure on the GM to get the opposition right... or start pulling out the railroading playbook. 

9 minutes ago, ffilz said:

Write up a new monster, and when it kills all the PCs, say "oops" and have the players roll up new PCs. Now they know there's a creature out there they can strive to get what it takes to be able to fight it... 🙂

This is actually not the worst idea! Especially if you're running RQ '78/RQ '80 "by the book" and thinking of it as a sword-and-sorcery kind of play experience where most characters will die ignominiously- on a tavern floor, in the gutters of the Big Rubble, knifed by a trollkin or baboon... If the monster kills off half the party, the other half tells the guild or cult they were doing this job for "no dice unless we get more help", or the players end up going deeper into debt with the free sages to figure out a way to defeat this horrible monster, or they try to reason with it if it's intelligent- there's a lot of room for creative play in that space. 

Now, a lot of people aren't looking for that experience, of course, and it does become its own problem if the "gigafrog" I made up is sitting in the way of The Plot or whatever. But you know, just throwing that whole thing out there.  

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No, I get the need to understand balance, but for that, in RuneQuest, you need more than a bestiary. You need sample scenarios that give some idea where on the PC power curve they are. Note that that wasn't done back in the day, well, maybe Borderlands was a bit tailored towards beginning characters, and Apple Lane was also reasonably suitable for beginning characters.

RQ players should also remember that surrender is meaningful in the setting. Ransoms can get paid. Oh and ask Dave about Resurrection... Poor Dave, his PC died of fright enveloped by a Shade in his first session. His PC died I think twice more... Fortunately they were in the Big Rubble and Chalana Arroy healers were handy (and I was generous). Eventually his PC was the one whose butterfly net "invention" (wielded by another PC) bagged the floating skull Thanatar priest that had summoned the shade, his axe smashed the now trapped skull... After more than a year of play... We play mostly every other week for 2 hours. The skull had fled the Rubble for Dyskund caverns, connecting with the Thanatar temple there). Oh, and yea, I probably didn't run two Rune Priests and numerous Initiates to their full potential as pointed out, a GM will never gain the familiarity with his NPCs that players have with their PCs. Oh, and the skull was another made up "monster" created from a Roll20 freebie token... Cults of Terror doesn't mention anything like it, but it seemed like a fun thing that maybe a Thanatar Priest could achieve...

As to GM advice, yea, it would be cool if we could collect some GMs ways of running things. I'm sure my way is different from others, and I don't know that I could manage to get my way of running down on paper, but over nearly 45 years of running RuneQuest (RQ is the ONLY RPG I have run EVERY decade since I first bought it sometime in 1978, even counting all editions of D&D, I didn't run any D&D in the 1990s), I have definitely developed my own techniques.

I think some kind of project to collect these different play cultures for RQ '78/RQ '80 would be very interesting both in "academic" terms and in practical play terms- people have been exploring the space of what that little book and whatever addons they could find for it allowed, enabled, and encouraged for decades and I'm pretty sure they've found and made some really exciting and interesting things! 

5 minutes ago, ffilz said:

And as is mentioned, there's nothing stopping anyone from creating additional bestiaries so long as they don't copy something they don't have permission for...

I suspect that the broad stopping point for many people when it comes to this is simply not being confident in what constitutes a fair challenge, what the ranges of characteristics and AP and the like are for a given opponent for a given set of PCs. And there, of course, all too often the answer to requests for clarification is that there is no guideline for this, that RQ "isn't balanced", and that, by implication, you simply cannot create your own foes that people can fight fairly without playing vast quantities of RQ and learning by doing. 

Now, I've read RQ1/2 and a few other 70s-vintage games closely, so I know that's wrong, but there are several layers of failed communication going on making dissemination of this more difficult.