Lordabdul

Bog Struggles is now a Silver Best Seller, and is part of the Christmas in July sale. You have a couple weeks to grab it for cheaper! A big thanks to everybody who rated it or posted reviews, this is much appreciated!

Ignoring for a while all the guards and wyters and guardian spirits they need to sneak past in order to get Fazzur, they can do it the nice way or the hard way. Nice way: they get to Fazzur and somehow manage to reason with him or appeal to his sense of Honour (if he has any). "We caught you fair and square, you don't have your armour or weapon, let's simply talk and then we'll leave you be. Scout's honour." Maybe the PCs even came prepared with a proposal: "Sorry to interrupt your nap here, Mr. Fazzur, but I think we can help each other." Hard way: they destroy everything that looks like a spirit magic focus, including any tattoos (cover them or burn the skin). This will take him extra time to cast any spirit magic, which gives you ample time to slit his throat if needed. Rune magic is trickier but if the blade is already on his neck, maybe he'll think twice about how fast a Strike Rank goes. Plus, many of the spells he can cast to get away would have to be targeted at his captors, so buffing up the interrogators with magical protection will help defuse any attempts. Bonus points: Bring a Lankhor Mhy initiate. Check that cult's spells: they are great at doing interrogations. Put some Warding around Fazzur. Maybe a couple layers of it.

I once (long ago) wrote an RPG rulebook that happened to be an "in world" item of the RPG's own setting, written by a mad scientist that went insane when he realized the "reality" of his world... which is of course that everything can be described by dice probabilities, and that everybody, except a chosen few, are controlled by an uncaring "god" (the GM). Of course, many years later, I learned about the secret of the God Learners which is called the "RuneQuest Sight" or something, and which might be very well the same thing! So maybe Glorantha does indeed work that way, but only the God Learners ever knew it! More seriously, like others have already noted, it might all be irrelevant anyway. Swords don't "work" by dealing between 1 and 8 "points of damage" (what's a "point of damage" anyway?) But the rules model how the sword functions in "reality". So the spells also model that. Bladesharp doesn't exactly increase the severity of the wounds you deal with a weapon by a fixed amount because there's no such thing as "a fixed amount of wounds". But it does make your sword sharper and more dangerous and more precise. It's a thing that it actually does in Glorantha, and people find that very useful indeed. And some spells do it better than others, so the God Learners grouped all those spells under the same umbrella ("Bladesharp", which I believe is an in-world term used by the God Learners... Biturian Varosh uses those terms!) and gave it a number, just like we give numbers to represent better models of microprocessors or whatever.

Our latest episode is a bit late but it's finally here! @Joerg and myself welcome @Crel to talk about making up your own cults! We chat about the different types of cults, bounce random ideas for new cults, look at Hrunda from Austin's "To Hunt A God", and more!

The only one that I know is Highways & Byways on the Jonstown Compendium, which is focused exclusively on Dragon Pass. It doesn't have a big travel time matrix for the entirely of Dragon Pass because that would be unreadable, given that it gives travel information for all villages and towns that are named in published material. So the matrices as only per region within Dragon Pass. For Pamaltela, you'll have to use the (free) Argan Argar Atlas, or the Guide to Glorantha (same maps) and count the hexes.

People don't talk in game terms in my Glorantha. I don't think anybody's Glorantha involves Gloranthans talking in game terms. The question you're really asking isn't about Gloranthans. It's about the GM and players' portrayal of Gloranthans. What I think you're really asking is "do you always speak completely in character?" When your PCs/NPCs say "I can sell you a very good Bladesharp spell for 120 Lunars, just come to the Orlanth Adventurous temple around 8AM tomorrow", you've got a way bigger problem than just whether Gloranthans would call the spell "Bladesharp" or not. For instance, do Gloranthans speak English? No. So you're already several degrees of separation removed from how "real" Gloranthans speak, whatever the fuck that means. I don't assume you want to invent whatever Sartarite or Tarshite sounds like. We already know that colloquial terms like "Prince" are vague approximations because the (quote-unquote) "original" term in Sartarite has a different gendered connotation (which is why we say "Prince Kallyr"). Do Gloranthans talk in terms of Lunars? Maybe? Depends on the region? There are many "actual" types of coins minted by various dynasties, and many people would also accept payment in kind. But because your players probably keep track of their finances in Lunars, you'll have to boil it down to "120 L please, Alice" for resource tracking. Do Gloranthans talk about "the Orlanth Adventurous temple", or does that temple have a local name? Does the deity itself have a local name? Zeus, as worshipped in various places around Ancient Greece, had a shitload of local names, even if everybody knew it was indeed Zeus. If an NPC says "let's meet at the Temple of Orlanth Sandal-stealer", your players will most probably ask "err wait is that a new sub-cult or is that just a fancy name for my own cult?" if they planned to do worship or acquire new spells. And then you have to explain it, and actually add that "oh actually it's just a shrine, mechanically speaking". Do Gloranthans talk about meeting at 8AM? Certainly not. Maybe they'd say "an hour after sunrise", or "when the market opens", or whatever. But wait 10 seconds and your players will ask you "ok so what time does the sun rise in Sea Season?" or "what time does the market open in Jonstown usually?". And so many more examples. So unless your players naturally speak your own version of "fancy in-world lingo", you'll have to talk in game terms anyway as a complement, to clarify things. The only thing is whether you want to sprinkle it with cool immersive details... which would be great! You can say: "I shall go to the temple of Orlanth Sandal-stealer to learn the secrets of Humakt's Whetstone! I will be meditating, burning incense and animal offerings to my God from the time the Priests of the Talking God open the market place, to the time they close it. You will see me again in a week, my sword imbued with enough power to break a troll's helmet in a single blow!" That's great roleplay! And you can even write down in your notes that this specific Orlantha Adventurous temple has, I don't know, sandal motifs on its walls, and a mural of Orlanth stealing shit from the trolls, and so on. It helps with the worldbuilding! But also, maybe, just maybe, this is only good at small doses (depending on your table... I don't know!). Maybe other times it's just easier to say "hey guys I'm going to the Orlanth Adventurous temple to learn Bladesharp 4. See you later".

Btw, for those wondering, MOB answered my question over here.

It already exists:https://greathall.chaosium.com/

It's nice of you to support the YS community but I think the donations are optional -- that is, unless they changed something about new accounts in the past year.

Ouch, that sounds super annoying. If you need a few of us to fly to Ontario and bring some van and some cutting tools, that can be arranged.... but bad jokes aside, thanks for the update! Fingers crossed.

That's a nice way to put it actually, thanks.

Is there any progress made on securing a new Canadian warehouse? (trying to figure out when and from where I'm going to order this...) Thanks.

It's worth noting that, if I remember correctly, some of the Maran Gor priestesses at the Shaker Temple engage in ritual cannibalism in a way that isn't Chaotic.

It would clarify it indeed, because a notation like "XMY" doesn't make it clear whether the M is attached to the X or the Y. I don't imagine that a single "+" character would affect the text and layout much but who knows... it really depends on whether the number of people this would help is a small minority or a large minority. I suspect that something like this has a very strong cultural component, i.e. maybe the vast majority of people in anglosaxon countries prioritize attaching the M to Y, whereas other cultures/languages work the other way. I've already been baffled in the past by how mathematical notations learned in high-school/university differ between US/UK/Canada and France.

Agreed with @jajagappa : the number of masteries directly indicates the number of bumps (or "successes" in QW parlance) so to me it's important to keep it separate, since it doesn't require any math. My issue is just with the order of the notation. Instead of "7M3" I would have preferred "7+M3" ("7 plus 3 masteries") or, at best, "3M7" ("3 masteries + 7"... but that one is just as ambiguous as the official one) At this point however I assume that changing the notation isn't on the table anyway.

Is that it? (YS forum account required... it's a Vimeo file but somehow the privacy settings on the video seem to make it playable only from a logged in browser)

I have the same problem -- I constantly have to remind myself to "read it the wrong way". I think I even mentioned it to Ian Cooper when I met him. 7M3 meaning "7 plus Masteries 3" is just... nonsensical to me.

Unless you're playing a Lunar campaign and the assassins are the adventurers... we all know the players are going to fuck this up.

I talk to Bryon, who is a long time RuneQuest lover who played in Fantasy Earth until the release of the RuneQuest Glorantha Quickstart in 2017. We rant about the setting's depth, convention games, editing issues, session prep, and more!

In reality, nobody knows -- people living near Telmori lands have a bunch of confused horror stories about giant magical wolves coming out on various given nights of the week, and after a couple generations it's all mixed up. People living elsewhere are hearing second and third hand versions of these tales and probably have completely incorrect knowledge unless they're a scholar who studied this stuff. The Telmori keep everybody on their toes by mixing their Chaotic auto-transformation with deliberate use of their Rune Magic to transform just the same, and confuse everybody as to what day is really the actual "cursed day" of the legends. (people are probably confused because in reality the Telmori transform from 00:01 AM on Wildday to 23:59PM on the same day... giving them more or less two nights to attack the neighbours, which they happily alternate to keep them guessing... Talor was a Malkioni and those people work on strictly scientific timelines... it's probably based on star positions or some other boring shit)

Thanks 😄 Let's spice up this thread with the cover image and hopefully make a few more people check it out! This is @finmirage's first publication on the Jonstown Compendium and y'all *do* want there to be more, right?

Don't go there -- go to the Chaosium website. All the classic RuneQuest PODs are here, including Cults of Prax and Cults of Terror.

@Joerg and I have no guest this month, because Joerg needs to vent some more about the Gbaji War after last month's Arkat episode with the wonderful Bud! Joerg takes us on a tour of all the other major NPCs of the apocalyptic end of the First Age!

Welcome Laurence! Does this job include managing and upgrading the e-commerce platform of the Chaosium website? Because.... I've got notes 😄 ( @Scotty can attest!)

Thanks for the kind words everybody! Very appreciated.