Lordabdul

So far I've only had broos as "ugly beastmen creatures" in my games (plus one instance of "ugly beastman shaman who likes to collect the souls of your family"), so their mating habits haven't been mentioned. But this "broo as Alien" is pretty much what I had in mind from beginning. It's just as gross, without the gross (if that makes sense). Although frankly if you only read the RQG material, the text is vague enough that it could be considered canon-compatible. I would ask that question for every character, whatever they pick. That's because Glorantha is a complicated setting, with atypical concepts like cults and with atypical cults on top of that. Choosing you cult affects your role in society, your magic, the way you replenish your magic, and so on. Some of it also greatly depends on how the GM runs things (e.g. it's a lot easier when you just hand-wave that everybody has replenished all their Rune Points between adventures), but you get what I mean. So I would ask that question to make sure that the player will be happy with the GM's version of Glorantha, and if the two don't match, do a bit of shared world-building to make it work.

The Journal of Runic Studies #20 is out! RuneQuest Starter Set release date, Katrin Dirim gets a well deserved award, a Kraken panel, small stories, new Jonstown Compendium releases, Orlanthi marriages, clan adoption, made-up deities, and more!

The Journal of Runic Studies #19 is out! Runic Rants with graphs, French RuneQuest, Jonstown Compendium sales, MAAAPS, sex and gender in Glorantha, amazing props, and more!

The Journal of Runic Studies #18 is out! Which means I forgot to post here last week 😄 (you can find #17 over here) Anyway, this week is a big one, with Chaosium Con, more Starter Set unboxing, LOTS of annotated Jeff Notes, a quick miniatures roundup, and a rant on the metric system in RPG rules! Feel free to provide feedback (here or in private) about whether the notes and comments on Jeff's posts are useful or not. They are fun to write, but I can just keep them in my head if everybody skips them and goes read the posts for themselves. 😉

Yep, so it seems like we basically agree: you can succeed in getting into the heroquest with very minimal preparation and gear, but you might have issues getting identified correctly, the myth might get off the rails, etc -- very dangerous. But possible. Thanks!

I was obviously talking about using 2 sticks and a piece of rope to go on something big, like the Hill of Gold, or Orlanth & Ernalda's wedding, or whatever.

There's not necessarily much amount of magic getting thrown around. If at all. That's why one of my original questions was "can you go on a heroquest by yourself with just two sticks and a piece of rope?". Yep, @Crel had pointed me to it for a few reasons when I told him what I had in mind. Tradition is actually one of the very few scenarios that addresses the action of getting into the heroquest. A lot of other scenarios either reduce it to a Rune or Spirit Magic spell (I'm not super convinced by that), or hand-wave it completely with a ceremony the players have to do that succeeds automatically (leaving me to wonder "but what if they don't do that ceremony"). In comparison, Tradition does more or less what I had in mind, which is that the better you do the ceremony, the more powerful you are when you start the heroquest (modelled here by the "Sear the Dark" points you accumulate in the ritual... my only criticism being that it's a bit too "specialized" a resource for my taste, but the idea is easily generalized). So if the players half-ass the ritual, or make bad rolls (probably because they didn't prepare enough), they still go on the heroquest but will more likely fail it and suffer the consequences. This sounds great to me because it mechanically represents some of the narrative tropes of heroquests. For instance, the fact that you shouldn't start one lightly, because once you start there's no stopping and failing will be very bad. In this case, this is represented by how, once you start the ritual, you will almost always go on the heroquest, but a failed ritual will have you mis-Identified, or lacking extra "points" to spend (whatever that is), or encountering more surprises, or whatever. Another thing that @Crel and I like is that Tradition uses your personal Magic Points as your main resource in the heroquest (basically hit points). We like it because it says that your willpower is effectively what lets you stay on course (which sounds appropriate), but also because it further forces the players to prepare for the first ritual: if we assume that the ritual to go on the heroquest is a Worship roll, then you can get bonuses to that by spending MPs. But now you won't want to do that because you would be weaker during the heroquest... so you need to find other bonuses, such as ritual preparations, sacrifices, holy days and holy places, and special items. So once again, the mechanic reinforces the narrative tropes.

Ah 😮 interesting point of view.... thanks! I'll have to re-think about this... 😅 Thanks for the pointer to the Magic Road/Cragspider reference too. I'll follow Jajagappa's hunch and search through the WF PDFs but if anybody has an exact reference that would be nice! (edit: I think it might be WF 13 p21)

Fair enough! I guess this is more about campaign pacing, gameplay styles, and so on at this point. But good to keep in mind.

You two seem to think that PCs can only try something once and in one way. If my players wanted to get invited to Count Evil Vampyski's Masquerade Ball by posing as Russian nobles guests, even though that sounds awesome, I would still have them roll for it. If they fail just a little, they get refused entry and have to get in through another way -- possibly by infiltrating the catering staff, which is even more awesome because they get to see what's going on in the kitchen... and if they fail bad, they... well, they get to see the kitchen but from another perspective, if you get my drift. Which is also awesome (they escape and rally the victims to storm the party and set the drapes on fire, for instance). Either way, there was no "slamming the door", or at least not in a definitive way. So similarly, I was wondering if anybody would have played a failure to invoke the God Plane as a "sign", somehow, which leads to... well I don't know, but hopefully it leads to other ways to get into the heroquest (or even leads to doing a different heroquest? I don't know). I'm not sure yet what would be the equivalents to my Vampiric Masquerade heist scene example here... which is in part why I asked. But I guess nobody else knows either since nobody seems to do it 😉

Thanks everybody for their answers! I get the impression that getting into the heroquest is generally a rather automatic thing in your games. Doing the heroquest (successfully or not) is more interesting than whether you can start it in the first place. So it looks to me like most of you are OK with adventurers getting at least into some kind of heroquest with two sticks and a bit of rope. Everything else is gravy on top. I would still probably make a roll or two because not rolling at least once before doing something important in RQG seems weird, but it wouldn't be a pass/fail roll, it would likely be to see how well the PCs get into the heroquest (and, conversely, how bad I can mess with them with more or less surprises). I have some ideas here but we'll see how it goes in play first... I'd like to encourage the players to do more preparations than the strict minimum, and take some risks like, say, doing a short adventure to recover a piece of regalia to use in the ritual. I know that half my players would do it just for fun, but the other half would not unless there's some benefit, either narrative (maybe) or mechanical (best). I guess it's similar to getting to Count Evil Vampyski's manor -- the locals will point to it and say "don't go there, Count Evil Vampyski lives there and he eats children", so going there isn't exactly the problem. It's surviving in there. And that's why you want to spend a few days recruiting farmers with pitchforks and torches to help you on the way. That is, unless you're suicidal, stupid, or super powerful. In which case you can waltz in there unprepared.

At a very high level, radiation is an area-based effect that weakens you and kills you... in Glorantha, everything is spirits... so I'd start with the vague idea of some kind of spirit vortex that attracts a certain kind of Disease Spirits, and they just hang around there, killing vegetation and animals slowly. And if you come too close, a few of those spirits grab on to you and start sucking the life out of you. No need to necessarily model it on real-world radiation (these spirits could make you turn purple and and suck your INT for what it's worth), but that's still what's familiar to players so I think it would be some kind of death spiral mechanic around rolling/losing CON and/or DEX and/or CHA.

...or for people whose language has the word "lance" verbatim, but it means "a generic long thing with a pointy thing at the end", and encompasses everything from javelin to pike to everything else that looks like that. Not that any of the players of the Glass Cannon are francophone, but just sayin'... I don't think RQG should expect players to know bronze age weapons any more than a space travel RPG should expect players to know basic astrophysics concepts, or any modern military RPG should expect players to know which automatic weapons require a tripod or not. It's weird to me that you would argue against a simple note that makes things clearer. The Starter Set is supposed to lower the barrier to entry. That's the entire point of its existence. (and btw in RQG you can use a Lance while on foot)

Haha no, this is a mistake of the character sheet IMHO. If I wonder what I'm going to attack with, I look at my character sheet under the weapons list, and pick what looks cool. The lance with the giant damage roll looks definitely cool. There's no caveat, asterisk, note, or anything. The burden of knowing what a "lance" is exactly (in the real world and in the world of this game, and whether the two match) is not on the player. There should be an asterisk with a footnote saying "includes Bison charge damage bonus".

Well they're far for being "D&D players" -- they play a lot of other games and, in some cases like Tanya, they also design other games. But the lack of familiarity with the rules here tells me that either (1) somehow the game was rushed too much (maybe they received the Starter Set material later than planned, or they had conflicting schedules, or whatever) or (2) they realized that RQ required way much preparation than the other "New Game, Who Dis?" games they've tried. I could totally believe that they went "well pretty much all the games we've played so far required a couple days to digest" and then when faced with RQ it was "oh shit, no, this would have required at least two weeks, woops". Which, again, goes back to my opinion that RQ could benefit from being simplified. Only the RQ2/3 grognards would complain about it. On a more personal note, every time my group tries a new game, none of my players have the rules. As the GM, I'm the one who teaches them the rules during session 0 and 1. It's nice to know that other groups out there have players who do homework, but that's just never been my experience except for one or two edge cases. So it seemed natural to me that the players didn't know the rules very well here.

Hah, I didn't pay attention to that actually. I was already busy shaking my head at the confusion over strike ranks, the addition of the bison charge's bonus to the Lance damage, the needless complications with language skills, and so on. And I want to make it clear I'm shaking my head at RuneQuest, not at the Glass Cannon crew. When you combine these mistakes to the many times Troy is doubting himself, it reinforces my opinion that RuneQuest is too complicated for its own good, especially in today's gaming market. I'll be over there waiting for a "CoC 7th ed. treatment" to RQ rules.

There has been a lot of stuff written about playing heroquests: the "SuperRuneQuest" rules, the "stick to the stations, watch out for surprises" play-throughs, the "weirdness and ad-hoc narrative mechanics all the way down" approach, and so on. That's all fine, but I want to know what different ways people handle going *into* a heroquest in the first place? And for this thread I specifically want to talk about so-called "Hero-plane" and "Other-world" heroquests, i.e. when you actually leave the mundane world. How do you trigger the heroquest voluntarily? I've seen it done with either a Rune Spell or Spirit Magic Spell that lets you "go through the threshold". I've seen it done with a simple Rune affinity roll at "some opportune time". I've seen it done basically automatically given "some" appropriate situation (whatever that is). What do you use in your game? Does your Glorantha have involuntary heroquesting? In which case, how does it happen? Is it automatic (gamemaster fiat/railroading), or is there more to it? Do your players have to be careful when they cast too much Rune Magic or when they quote a popular folk song about Orlanth while waving a shield? What kind of resources do you need to start the heroquest in your Glorantha? Can you trigger the heroquest on your own with two sticks and a piece of rope? Does a clan festival, a cult temple, some regalia, the right time of year, and other such things simply increase your odds of succeeding, or are they absolutely required? Thanks!

The Journal of Runic Studies #16 is out! Previews of the #RuneQuest starter set, Griselda teasers, free-form LARPing, shamanism, and undead centaurs! Oh my.

I has always been a cult matrix, and localized one at that. For instance, it has been said by the authors a few times that the matrix in the old Cults of Prax is quite specific to Prax, especially when it comes to cults like Yelmalio or Storm Bull. These two cults will potentially have slightly different relationships in the Sartar cult matrix.

Jeff and Jason were actually asking for ideas about it several months ago on the FB RQ group, because a 100x100 matrix doesn't really fit on one page. There were several (IMHO) interesting leads, but I'm pretty sure they'll just partition it into 4 pages of 50x50 or something like that.

I would say that "having a child" does not necessarily imply mammalian birth. A dinosaur can have children -- I mean, Littlefoot had a mother! 😄 IMHO the Ernalda cult just wants its priestesses to go through the process of creating life. If you're looking for edge cases, the answer will always be: it depends. If the player is into it, make it require an appeal, gathering allies for the hearing, going into Divination, asking what Ernalda herself thinks of it, finding some precedent with a former priestess, finding some precedent from the God Time, whatever. Edge cases are meant to be played.

That's an interesting analysis, thanks Phil. Here are a few notes: Augments don't necessarily last for only one roll. Runic and Passion inspiration last a whole scene, and skill augments last for however long you can keep doing the thing that the skill augment has you do (which could be the whole scene too). So it's possible that with one augment roll, you actually augment many rolls. This is especially true for combat, in which you will augment several of your attacks with a weapon (potentially all of them!), or whatever. That compounds the interest of getting that bonus in a way the spreadsheet doesn't represent (although of course it can compound the penalties, but not necessarily, see below). Runic augments have no downside for the thing you were trying to augment on a failure. A failure only means that the Rune rolls themselves (such as Rune Magic rolls) will get a -20% penalty. A Fumble is bad, and may have some consequences on your actions (such as preventing you from acting in accordance to the Rune), but it doesn't give any penalty to your skill rolls. So it's "somewhat safe" in that sense -- you cast your Rune magic, and run into combat while screaming "FOR ORLANTH!" or something (i.e. roll your Rune augment after). Again, the spreadsheet info must be used with this in mind too. Passion rolls are the most risky IMHO. If you fail a skill augment, you get -20% for the next roll, but then you just stop doing the augment if possible. So if you were singing to try and motivate your troops with a Battle roll, you just stop singing after you realize everybody is holding their hands to their ears, and you got -20% to just that one roll (unless somehow you're oblivious to your failures!). But for Passion augments, that doesn't work, you're going to be depressed for the whole scene. However, the more you use your Passion, the more it has a chance to go up. And you can use it for other things such as getting resources from your clan and such. So it's still a good idea to use it at least a few times every adventure. Plus, probabilities be damned, it makes for some good action and excitement around the table!

Woops indeed, my mistake. Fixed now, thanks!

The Journal of Runic Studies #14 is out! GenCon, the #RuneQuest Starter Set, YouTube actual plays, and more!

I sent Martin a PM, we'll try to figure this out... In other news, the Journal of Runic Studies #13 is out, with more commentary on the Battle of Queens in Chaosium's actual play, many "Jeff Notes", Thirsty Sword Vingans, French #RuneQuest, real-world Rainbow Mounds, cheating merchants, and more!