Lordabdul

Thanks! Oh wow, you know what, I did see that Prax Warrior video a couple years ago, but never put two and two together! Thanks a lot for highlighting the connection, he might indeed be a very interesting guest!

I've been thinking about that, since it would make sense that ganging up on a spirit (or spirits ganging up on someone!) would be more effective than... not. On the other hand, without it, facing a powerful spirit (like the Fiend's 200% spirit combat skill) forces you to flee and come back with your own powerful allied spirit, which brings some interesting adventuring opportunities.

I think there's a bit of miscommunication going on -- I actually almost posted earlier about it to clarify things. I think that what's happening is as follows. The original 2nd question was: "If attacking, the other characters can use their magical infused attacks, but [Question 2] Can they use their spirit combat in case they do not have any other means of attacking the spirit? (in this case the spirit can use his own spirit combat to counter)" This was based on a situation established in the first question, where one spirit is attacking one character (say, Bob), and the question is about the other characters (say, Alice and Charlie) who are just standing around trying to figure out how to help their friend. The spirit has not attacked them (it's only engaged in spirit combat with Bob). In that case, Alice and Charlie cannot initiate spirit combat with the spirit unless they discorporate. So they cannot use their spirit combat, unless the spirit suddenly attacks them too (unlikely). Most likely, Alice and Charlie have to find something else to do (cast spells at the spirit, use magically buffed weapons to attack it, call other spirits, etc.) Scotty, I think you understood this question as based on a different situation, where characters are already in combat with the spirit -- in which case they can choose whether to fight back with magical weapons, or with the spirit combat skill. At least that's my reading of both the rules and this thread...

Don't read too much into the swearing... I'm French, we use swear-words as punctuation 😉

The Journal of Runic Studies #47 is out! An announcement about upcoming editorial changes, our new podcast episode, Campaign Coins discount (hurry!), young Argrath, the City of Wonders, the Hero-Wars, slings, and more!

It's possible that some people play it like this, and if they want to have a laugh then I'm not going to ruin their fun (there's no such thing as "wrong fun"). In my CoC circles, most of us ran into this issue in our early games (back in the 90s for me), figured it wasn't very satisfying nor tone-appropriate, re-read the rules we had only skimmed, and went "oh hey, we're not supposed to roll on tables actually". I can assure you that deep horror stuff like Delta Green wouldn't work well if we did ridiculous stuff like that.

Doesn't feel like cosmic horror either anyway. So don't do that 😉

Episode 11 is finally out! Drew Baker is back on the podcast, as we discuss Biturian Varosh's penultimate leg of travel through Prax... plus: a short interview about Drew's latest community content book, Highways & Byways!

Rick showed us this book during our interview (see the God Learners podcast episode 10). It contains the Dragons Past articles, Son of Sartar articles, and the never-seen-before Pharaoh's Gazette, which Rick found in some random folder one day (so there's at least half a dozen pages of exclusive content for those who have read the hard-to-find articles, plus a few extras like character sheets). The book was for sale at ChaosiumCon. @Eff did a tiny bit of live reading at the time. I'm very slowly working on a review for the God Learners blog.

The Journal of Runic Studies #46 is out! This is a short week (which is welcome once in a while) with a translated God Learner document on the spirit world, RuneQuest VTT update, tattoos, Arkatism, a rare 13th Age mention, some hoplite goodness, and more!

Exactly. To me the question isn't whether the adventurers start the heroquest, it's how the adventurers start the heroquest. Did they start it on their own or stumble accidentally upon it, or did they prepare for it and managed to negotiate the backing of the entire tribe to provide magical support? The mechanics should model this and I'm happy to say that the upcoming heroquest rules do, by representing community support as extra points you can spend in the heroquest to use heroquesting techniques and boost your rolls. FWIW, Arcane Lore had a generalization of the "change planes" spells, where Discorporation is what we have now (1 point Rune Spell to go to the spirit world), but then there was a 2 point version to go to the hero plane, and a 3 point version to go to the god time. I have no idea if that will get used in the upcoming rules. It's easy to handwave and say "it just happens" because there are "converging magical energies" or some bullshit, or there's some priest doing it for you. IMHO the sacred place and time modifiers should go on the magical support you get -- i.e. Worship rolls should get easier, which translates to more heroquesting points to spend during the heroquest. Same thing with ritual practices, to explain why people generally meditate for days before big heroquests.

IMG you probably don't get a Chaos Rune rating the second after you kill your brother. Like I said, I don't see Chaos as a logical state machine, nor do I see Chaos as equal to "evil things". But if that happens in your Glorantha that's fine too! FWIW, see my adventure "A Short Detour" on the Jonstown Compendium, which includes an essay on Chaos, and Chaos taint rules!

The short answer for me is really that things get Chaotic when you want to involve Chaos in your game 😄 But really IMHO everything is scales of grey. Some acts just feed the general Chaotic-ness of the universe. Other acts create bad omens and Chaos attacks or infiltrates the community on the next season. Yet other acts (possibly done repeatedly) taint a person with Chaos in the sense that they get a Chaos Rune at, say, 20% or whatever. So I don't think there's a "line", except for the line that a community draws. For example, most Orlanthi tribes will "draw a line" at secret murder, kinstrife, rape, incest, and so on, in the sense that "it's wrong and you get punished". But it's not a line where suddenly if you do one of those things you become Chaotic. The two are vaguely related but not the same. Society draws a line because past that line is a slippery slope. And how soon that slope leads you into Chaos is frankly up to the GM and the needs of the story. It's *Chaos* after all. It's not supposed to manifest and act in a logical "if this then that" sort of way, that would defeat the whole bit about being, you know, Chaotic.

In my game (set in the Alone Confederation in the years following Harvar's coup), it's actually one of the themes that the Yelmalions of the Alone Confederation have to walk a fine line between their local loyalties (to their tribe, to their kin who got slaughtered by Harvar's men, etc) and their duty to Harvar as head of the cult in the Far Place. NPCs have, ahem, complicated feelings towards the Yelmalions, although they still rely on them for protection against the trolls. One of my players is a young Yelmalion apprentice whose father was demoted within the cult because he stood aside while Harvar was rampaging through the city. There's a lot of fun opportunities for stories around there!

I don't know where you got this from? AFAICT (and in my Glorantha at least), Harvar crushed the Alone Confederation because that's where the Righteous Wind Rebellion went. Harvar was drumming up discord around Alda-chur for a few years, and when the Orlanthi priests became violent towards the Lunar missionaries, Harvar stepped in and started kicking storm-worshipper butt (even though some people had been warning everybody that Harvar was orchestrating the whole thing in the first place, being bankrolled by the Red Emperor... any parallel with any recent political rise of a certain side of the political spectrum financed by a red-coloured state is fortuitous). The Righteous Wind people fled to the east and try to lay low within the Alone Confederation lands, but when they met at Gamla's Leap, Harvar showed up and slaughtered most of them. Then he rode on to Alone, burning and killing everything and everybody he could find until he made it clear that no more rebellious tendencies would be tolerated from this side of the Far Place. IMG (and based on my research) it had nothing to do with Yelmalio/Elmal or any other theological topic. In fact, the Alone Confederation has Yelmalio as their primary sun worshipping cult. They totally embraced the upgrade from Elmal to Yelmalio back when they were still in Tarsh because (1) Monrogh was one of "their" guys (he was an Orlanthi Tarshite, buddies with Tarkalor, and killed at the Battle of Grizzly Peak) and (2) I'm pretty sure Yelmalio has much better light magic than Elmal, which is useful to fight all the nearby trolls of the Indigo Mountains (there are temples in Alone and Amadhall).

The Journal of Runic studies #45 is out, with a staggering amount of annotated articles from Jeff, such as game balance in RuneQuest, Morokanths, the history of New Pavis, and understanding the big NPCs of the Hero Wars! Plus: French maps, pretty drawings, Ducks, Minoan art, sarcophaguses, and more!

I've been thinking of doing that if only because quickly writing down "Bandit #3 left arm 1 HP, right leg 3 HP" would go much faster if I only had to write "1" and "3" in the humanoid diagram boxes. I know it shouldn't take me more than 5 minutes to make a template, but you wouldn't happen to have one ready to share, would you? 😄 (I'm mostly asking because I might find you have a couple of extra interesting things, or have arranged things differently after a couple tries, etc... this might bring some insights)

Ah interesting. So if you flew high enough in the sky, you would be in the Sky Realm *as it is in the present*, where star and planetary deities go about their business, sky entities do their thing, and all that. But you're not there in the God Time where things are golden or water dragons are invading and such? That's the difference?

The Journal of Runic Studies #44 is out! A new episode, our ChaosiumCon report, RQG VTT updates, heroquesting lexicon, tons of information on Praxian tribes, parietal art, columnar basalt, neolithic dwellings, and more!

Episode 6 of the Glorantha Initiation Series is out! Wayne played RuneQuest once in the 80s and hated it. More than 30 years later he returns to Glorantha and talks about riding Praxian mounts, making miniatures, YGMV, ducks, silly location names, and more!

Thanks 😄 Much appreciated!

It either needs to be memorized, or needs to be looked up during the game in the RBoM or in a slightly faster-to-look-up handout the GM prepared. Still, that's work, it takes time, slows the game, and I'm getting old, Andre 😄

Pretty much yeah. The main thing that bothers me is that RQG's magic system requires a whole bunch of ad-hoc knowledge or rules-lookup like that, such as "spells X and Y are incompatible with spell Z". Greuuuh.

Yeah these terms are confusing to me too. AFAICT those spells don't combine in any way (stack, accumulate, whatever) and in fact are completely independent of each other except the order in which they are taken into account. I think the problem is that they don't behave like, say, physical armour does, which acts in layers. If you have a plate armour on top of a leather vest, you first subtract from the damage whatever the plate armour does, and then you subtract what the leather vest does. You can just add both the plate and leather armour values together and use that instead to go faster, since it's mathematically equivalent. It wouldn't be equivalent if we had, say, armour and damage multipliers like in GURPS, though, in which case it would probably be easier to do them one after the other. Now, magic does have multipliers (Rune > Spirit > Sorcery) but I think most people still instinctively think of defensive spells as "layers" of protection, just like with plate armour on top of leather armour. This means that you would somehow subtract the value of the outer defensive spell (Countermagic) from the incoming spell's strength, and then use whatever is left against the inner defensive spell (Shield). But it looks like incoming spells don't "lose" strength the way physical damage does (at least in Rules As Intended), so you only really get as much protection as the highest-value defensive spell you have active on you. The order of those spells is therefore only for order of dispelling (if it happens) and nothing else. I assume that defensive magic works this way to nerf how high magical defences can go -- preventing 10 people from casting 10 spells on one hero and have that hero carry around 50 points of protection.

The Journal of Runic Studies #43 is out, a bit late and shorter than usual because I was at ChaosiumCon! (expect a report on that with a few pictures and stuff) MadKnight's new miniatures Kickstarter, Glorantha tattoos, cuneiform dictionaries, mythology in movies & TV, pants, and more!