Lordabdul

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On 7/12/2023 at 7:50 AM, Soccercalle said:

To give some context. I run a Six Seasons/Company of the Dragon campaign and my PCs (including THE Griselda) plan to kidnap Fazzur Wideread in his palace in Dunstop. They want to get information and hope that he will be pissed at Tatius et al.

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.

On 7/14/2023 at 2:58 AM, DrGoth said:

It's interesting. HPs are obviously an out of game world abstraction. And no one (well, no one sane) would in world think their skills are on a 100 pt scale.  But the number of steps involved in spells. They could exist in world in those increments. It's conceivable that in world someone might say "I learnt bladesharp. Then improved it three times".

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.

On 7/8/2023 at 9:31 AM, hkokko said:

Has someone done already a travel time matrix or database for travel time between various cities and towns etc - something similar that some modern travel books have. I am of course mostly interested in Pamaltela especially Fonrit, Umathela, Jolar, Maslo, Errinoru

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.

23 hours ago, AndreasDavour said:

Maybe there's a language barrier involved here. Let me try again. Do people talk in game term in your Glorantha? For me that is to cram a big world into a very small RQ box. But YGWW.

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.

26 minutes ago, Richard S. said:

Will Pendragon also get an accompanying wiki for its starter set like Runequest and Call of Cthulhu did?

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

On 6/27/2023 at 4:28 AM, AndreJarosch said:

I invsted the 10 GBP to get access to the video.

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.

7 hours ago, MOB said:

Unfortunately though, we’re still attempting to get our inventory back from the existing Canadian warehouse.

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.

On 6/28/2023 at 9:34 AM, AndreasDavour said:

When I explained it to my players, I just said "roll under the first number" and it made sense as it came first so clearly it was the most important one.

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

7 hours ago, MOB said:

It will be available to order from our US , EU and AUSTRALIAN warehouses.

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.

1 hour ago, jajagappa said:

The introduction of the "+" makes it very clear in my opinion. However, in writing and printing a rule book, that extra plus adds a fair amount of extra text.

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.

6 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

So is there anyone who wouldn’t rather just have a single number and do the maths as and when needed?

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.

7 hours ago, Runeblogger said:

I think I saw mention to that interview on the Yog-Sothoth forum.

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)

On 6/24/2023 at 1:51 AM, David Scott said:

I'd be interested to hear of anyone else who has had a problem with this at their table.

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.

11 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

No, it means it’s irrelevant. Kallyr Starbrow’s alleged posthumous career is not what the OP was asking about. She dies in Fire season of 1626, killed by Lunar assassins at the Battle of Queens.

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

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)

11 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

It’s also gorgeously illustrated.

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?

4 minutes ago, creativehum said:

I went to Lulu

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

3 hours ago, MOB said:

Join us in welcoming Laurence Finch to the Chaosium team as our Ecommerce Manager (a new position in the company).

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.