Lordabdul

4 hours ago, Beoferret said:

Ludo, thanks for continuing to put this out. And since you've mentioned Lindybeige a few times: did you know that he was a RQer at one point? He talks about how he really liked RQ in one (or more?) of his videos on D&D (and its failings.) He also did a stop-motion short, when he was a wee lad, called "Prax Warrior" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UHWNZ4y-2I . Might be interesting to reach out to him for a Godlearners interview.

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!

20 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

I treated Spirit Combat like a weapon skill, and every incoming attack reduced the next Spirit Combat by 20%. That's not in the book, and I should probably only have done that for the "Spirit Combat parries" and not for the final actual Spirit Combat opposed roll vs Vishi.

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.

7 hours ago, Scotty said:

Yes they can attack the spirit in spirit combat on SR12, if they don't do anything else that round, and have declared it in their SoI other than what's allowed (half move, parring, etc.)

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...

17 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

I don’t see why it’s bullshit.

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!

10 hours ago, soltakss said:

It's how I have seen Call of Cthulhu when I have played it, except at very serios convention games.

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.

On 5/5/2022 at 10:50 AM, soltakss said:

You know, where you see something, go a bit insane, roll a Funny Phobia and everyone else laughs at what you got. That doesn't feel Gloranthan to me, at all.

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!

1 hour ago, AndreJarosch said:

I have MOST of this stuff alreay in my collection, but can´t wait to get my hands on this book, because every little details of Gregs house campaign is a delight (as fragmentary as it might be).

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!

5 hours ago, soltakss said:

To be honest, I just let it happen.

I have little interest in stopping a HeroQuest by having people fail to roll.

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.

5 hours ago, soltakss said:

I just use a HeroQuest as a Runespell that can be cast with an appropriate Rune, nothing more complex than that.

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.

5 hours ago, soltakss said:

If you want to, use the sacred place and time modifiers, anything to boost the chance of starting the HeroQuest. Even if they fail to cast the spell, they should be able to try again.

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.

1 hour ago, g33k said:

Those criminals are vastly more-likely to be Chaotic than is the average Orlanthi. 

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!

13 hours ago, Ironwall said:

Is this even a line or is it a blurry image? Gargathi tortures people to create whirlveshes but they aren't chaos so when is something chaos?

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!

14 minutes ago, Darius West said:

Much of the repression conducted by Harvar Ironfist was to force the Tarshite tribes of Far Point to give up on Elmal worship.

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).

11 hours ago, g33k said:

I've done that, too!  But I find that when I'm juggling more than 2-3 NPCs in a combat, my side of things runs (much!) more smoothly if I have "homunculi" to help me keep track.

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)

3 hours ago, jajagappa said:

These places exist in the Gods World, too, but you can reach them just by traveling far enough in the mundane world.

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!

9 hours ago, Badder said:

this is a rockin' cool newsletter!! 

Thanks 😄 Much appreciated!

21 minutes ago, AndreJarosch said:

Make a list with all the spells the individual PCs know. That will help them as well as yourself. 
Granted NPCs, especial powerful ones with lots of magic ad hand, need more time to familiarize yourself with. 

But nobody expects that the GM has memorized every detail of every Spirit Magic and Rune Magic spell. 
That is why "The Red Book of Magic" is so useful.

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 😄

Just now, AndreJarosch said:

Decide for your gaming table which ones can be used together and which ones cancel each other out.

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.

2 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

Don't those two words mean the same thing? They combine. They stack. The accumulate. Same thing, surely!

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!