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Might still be hungry, but they could tell it not to eat the walls of the pit and the command would stick... Just cos they're still hungry doesn't mean they have to eat, or, indeed, get any benefit from eating inanimate matter like rock at all.

Well, just from the teasers seen here, I hope Chaosium pick it up. Maybe it could be more constrained in scale, if you're getting up there into Cosmological scales... having explored the boundaries, just publishing enough to give life and light to the militaries of a mere continent might be a more manageable publication. But Chaosium don't seem petrified of large format, niche books... maybe the whole hog would be possible! We can hope!

You could use 'one who made it by the most' rather than 'highest roll'. If people hate arithmetic so much they can't be bothered to take a rolled 2-digit integer away from the target 2-digit integer, RQ probably isn't for them, anyway. Keeps the direction of 'hope' consistent.

The paranoia about stacking starts in the rules in RQG: No augment stacking; restrictions on frequency; spell combination limits (countermagic/protection/shimmer; bladesharp/fireblade; speedart/multimissile/firearrow). I was making a more general point, rather than saying the bad guys should have exactly the same gear: they'll have abilities that should stack and 'synergise'. The argument not to give the opposition Nice Things because the players might get hold of them doesn't hold water. You can easily have 'powerful' enchanted things restricted to a subset of user which will exclude the party, or have the special maguffin be a thing that the players would have to work so hard at being able to use that they'd rather keep using what they're already good at, because the new thing will never catch up (how many Wind Lords would trade in using their 120% broadsword/shield combo for a +20% maul with a total chance to hit of about 40%?)

It has been ever thus Both the 'more than I would like', and that it's easier to spot them on paper!

I think people fret overmuch on stacking. There's almost always an opportunity cost which can inhibit it, and the 'fear of spending all your consumables and it not being necessary or useful' is a good rein. And the balance for it is the opposition can do it too... A bit like the balance for "crits" isn't "fumbles", it's "the other side getting to have equitable chances to crit".

Absolutely agree.

Yeah. That might be right too. I'd much rather see the two spells combined if that's the way it's meant to be, so "Summon (Cult Spirit)" would have the bits about needing to cast Command Cult Spirit to get the wee beastie to do anything other than slope off again in most cases. I think the existence of that paragraph in the "Summon Elemental" body text supports the interpretation that "Summon Elemental" is actually a variant of "Summon Cult Spirit".

Yeah. DnD's AC/HP construct, vague and primitive though it is, involves a level of parrying as part of the abstractions, so the +1 to-hit involves some bypassing active defenses, which in RQ means bonuses to attack skill. Still, it'd be simpler if it were just a flat magic damage add... I think I'll see what my table think of it...

How would that affect the 'attractiveness' of the spell as a Spirit Magic choice? Would it make it unviable compared to, say Fireblade (assuming the character could have either)? How would it stack up against Speedart and Multimissile (Speedart 'should' give benefits to hit, as a shorter flight time makes shooting easier)? Protection and Shimmer were always different things: making Bladesharp just damage, and adding a 'to-hit booster' spell would be kinda consistent.

And a wagon driver would be substantially unfamiliar with driving a vehicle using their body as an anchor for the reins/the reins to anchor them in the car. The number of times in the grand canon of all RQ games of any edition where someone leading an ox wagon/cart by the head of the lead animal needed to make a "Drive" roll is, I submit, so vanishingly small as to make having a skill to manage it very close to pointless; most times it'd be a 'handle animal' roll, so 'Herd' or 'Animal Lore' in RQG. You can lead draught horses by the head, too... It's more 'leading' than 'driving'; in fact the word 'driving' implies being behind the beast in the first place. Actually, Herd seems like a good stand-in skill, since it's about getting domestic beasts to go where you want when you're not riding them or sat on a vehicle behind them. Sure, there might not be much commonality between rigging the harness for oxen and for 'others', but if you're having to rig ox harness under pressure, then you're being pursued by a very particular kind of adversary...

That does seem a logical conclusion to the fact of the existence of the spell... It's probably the fluff text of Summon Cult Spirit that's a bit overenthusiastic.

I disagree that chariot driving is very similar to driving a cart. How many carts need you to tie the reins around yourself and use your bodyweight/position to guide/control your draft beasts?

Hmm. Driving a two wheeled vehicle in a 'stressful/risky/consequential' situation (which is what the skill addresses: you don't need any skill to mooch along on the bench of a wagon) is different from driving a four-wheeled vehicle. Driving sat on a bench as opposed to standing in the car is different. Driving different numbers of animals, and different animals is different. They should all be different skills. But practicing driving an ox cart in combat should be difficult and risky, because once oxen get to needing actual 'driving', you're in a world of peril, not easily left again. I think you could assume that the training to harness of different beasts tends to mean they respond to the same command inputs and usefully divide it into chariot-driving (covering any number of beasts, standing in a two-wheeled car built for speed) and wagon driving (2 or 4 wheels, sitting on a bench, 1-2 animals) and 'coach driving' (4 wheels, 4-plus animals - controlling each animal individually to get the best result - it's pretty specialised, and might not even exist in Glorantha).

That's a pretty big offshore tank farm...

I think you could use Orate, for example, to augment a Passion roll. You'd have to be in a fairly specific narrative (the Orate might well precipitate the attempt at Inspiration, as well as 'assist' in its efficacy), but it's not too hard to think of other uses of Communication rolls: Dance leading to, and augmenting a Fertililty vs Death check, say to see whether a seducer's attempt to break down their target's resistance; Sing is pretty general purpose at provoking emotion, as is Play Instrument; Act would have to have some preparation to a 'performance', to get a script right that evokes and supports the desired emotion - in its more day-to-day pretence, 'faking' a Passion to evoke it in another (or even yourself) might be a valid use.

Aye. If you don't want to be constrained, don't put your Runes/Passions up past the threshold. Taking experience from Pendragon, attempts for Inspiriation don't often get made at less than 80%, because of the cost of failure. That cost is lower in RQ, so I'd expect more rolls on lower abilities.

There's also "augmenting someone else's skill" (AKA 'helping')... For me, skill augmentation makes so much eminent logical sense that I couldn't see leaving it out. Want to improve your singing performance effect? Play an instrument along with (or get someone else to do so - see above re: 'helping'...) I wonder why no one thought of that before. Better get in touch with EMI!!!

Doesn't flame (cooking) usually inhibit regeneration? I know trolls don't normally care to take the time to cook their dinners, but perhaps they'd make an exception for things like Walktapi, to avoid indigestion while their alimentary corrosives did their work?

While Time is way too young for them to have formed after the first Dawn, God Time gives an indeterminate duration within which the metamorphosis could occur, and the metamorphosis doesn't have to follow Tellurian mechanisms; the formation of ores doesn't, after all. I agree here, but mostly because the near-primal woodlands in most places give ready access to wood for charcoal, rather than having to hack coal out of the ground. If coal is used, I think it would be either where there has been widespread deforestation, or where there are easily accessible deposits of coal near, or at, the surface. Having coal as an alternative fuel certainly gives options for adding flavour to locales. Mostly sulphurous ones Having 'mineral' oil as an option is also interesting: the secrets of purifying useful compounds from raw petroleum would be jealously guarded by alchemists who knew them. Edit: there's a risk of evolving into some sort of Diesel-/Steam-Punk hybrid of RQ though, which could be fun, or could be vile anathem, depending on your Glorantha...

Insight (relevant species) may well be a skill that permits, in the right circumstances, the (at least partial) determination of a being's Passions.

Adamant, though... I can see them swallowing it if it's in small enough chunks, but (absent Swallow) how big is that? And even with their "Miffic Gnawing", surely Adamant is the one thing they can't bite into smaller chunks...?

Well, I think both those interpretations are wierd... Proper confusing. I'll be playing that they both co-exist, but cancel each others' effects out (rather than negating the conflicting spell) on an ongoing, point-for-point basis. Reading the description again, I'm wondering, too, whether the to hit bonus actually ought to apply 'last' to any attack (after splitting): it doesn't affect the wielder's skill per se. The converse, of course, would be that the negatives of Dullblade would apply after splitting, too.

Technically they polished turd, rather than polishing a turd. They crushed it up and reconstituted it... But that's probably more about making it proper spherical, so good on 'em! Makes wombat-guano (mosaic) floors look doable with a Dwarf's perfectionist outlook, if that's what's needed to fix the World Machine...

I had always wondered whether if you let it dry long enough... and there's always coprolites, taking that to an extreme. Lacquer, though, is cheating...