Lordabdul

The oldest map from the RQ2 Apple Lane scenario pack does have a compass. As you might expect, North Street goes north, so that will let you orient the RQ3 and RQG maps. This is trickier... I think the Apple Lane Orchards is just completely wrong -- the 4 roads, the orientation, I can't make it fit the other maps. AFAICT the "North Street" is actually a misleading name. The road between Runegate and Jonstown is, overall, going west to east. But does an "S" shaped bend around Apple Lane: coming from Runegate (travelling east), the road bends southward, enters Apple Lane from the North (via "North Street") and then exits it eastward, to continue towards Jonstown. I think the other exit (to the west) leads to Asborn's Stead (see the Colymar Lands map) and probably catches a trail going south from there to Clearwine Fort. Take this with a grain of salt though because I agree it's tricky to figure out how it all fits. I don't know what you mean -- I see the same buildings with the same rough arrangments. Note however that more than a decade (in game) passed between the two maps. The RQ2/3 Apple Lane is pre-Dragonrise, and things have changed. That's why, in RQG, Gringle's Pawnshop and Piku's house are in ruins, for instance.

What David said above. I'll reiterate the recommendation to check out the Red Book of Magic which goes into details on that very topic. For my games: Seeing someone casting a spell may or may not require a perception roll. Rune Magic is flashy and I just describe what it might look like, such as a character temporarily gaining green flowy hair, or blueish skin, or whatever. I may or may not be obvious about it -- they would recognize someone invoking a common feat of a deity they know ("that guy's invoking Orlanth!"), but they might not recognize the invocation of some other pantheon's deity ("that guy's looking all red and maybe you saw a third eye on his forehead for a second? you're not sure") Spirit Magic is less flashy, and sometimes quite discreet, such as quickly focusing on a marking inside your shield to cast some battle magic. I describe something only for spells that have a fair amount of boosting, because the NPC might spend a few seconds concentrating on "something". Most likely I just describe the effects themselves, as opposed to the casting. The effects of the spell are varied and I try to be creative. Players are encouraged to be creative too. Weapon buffs might look different between different types of spirit magic (i.e. spirit magic from different deities) but generally it's just various colours for the same FX (there's not too many ways to say "Bladesharp!" except for "this guy's sword is glowing with shimmering <insert colour here> aura"). But other times it can be very different, such as how a Shield or Protection or whatever might look like -- you can go with glowing auras, floating geometric patterns, translucent armor overlaid on top of the body, Dune-like blurry blocks, anything you like that sounds and looks cool. It can even vary inside the same cult for spirit magic since you might have gotten the spell from different spirits. The players probably described their spells only the first few times, but describing new effects for NPCs help me keep a bit of mystery in the setting, and the players guessing. Although they don't have to guess much because I don't have unlimited imagination, and it's pretty obvious what's going on. Other things might be more meaningfully different. Get healed with Babeester Gor's Heal Rune Spell and you'll be left with a gnarly black scar. Get healed with the same spell from a Chalana Arroy or Ernalda healer and your skin is all smooth and clean.

Very wise 🙂 And what I expected from Chaosium. I would personally go with @David Scott's ideas first (the shaman herself is affected, her powers fail a couple times, bad spirits come after her, etc.), but I would definitely go with these ideas (i.e. the side effects start to affect the broader community) if the transgressions continue. Basically, increasing exponentially the scale of the bad stuff as taboos are broken, or left broken without amends.

So many 🙂 Let's try to keep this short: If you have a "narrative" approach to gaming: you only roll when the situation is dramatic, and if the outcome is interesting either way. You don't roll if it's not. So don't roll for a mundane chemical test in the lab unless you want the possibility that something explodes or the virus gets out or the PCs don't get the advantages of the new chemical compound that protects from the alien mind control or whatever. Most characters would have, say, 40% in Drive Automobile and 50% in their native language. It doesn't mean they crash their car on the way to work 2/3rd of the time, or speak gibberish while ordering coffee at the local cafe half the time! They simply wouldn't roll in these situations! If you have a "simulationist" approach to gaming: in virtually all systems, the stat scores define the chances of success for an "adventurous" action out there in the field. So the 60% Chemistry score is only used as-is in stressful situations or whatever. Give bonuses for proper or extra time (+30%?), access to a fully stocked lab (+40%?), having a lab assistant, etc. Back to the Drive Automobile/Native Language skills mentioned above, you can apply the same reasoning and say that driving under the speed limit on a normal road with nobody chasing you or firing at you gives you +60%, and conveying simple intentions like "I'd like a coffee please" also give equally high bonuses. BRP doesn't necessarily have a binary pass/fail dynamic. Some variants of BRP offer different degrees of success and failure (RQ and CoC have 5 degrees in total). Remember that "failure" is not necessarily what you think it is. A CoC investigator who searches for information on an evil cult in the Boston Library may still find what she wants even after failing the Library Use roll... what was the roll for then? Well, it could have been for finding extra information (which she didn't, she only found the very minimum), or it could have been for finding it quickly (which she didn't... she spent the whole day in the library and now the evil cult has kidnapped another puppy for sacrificing), etc. You get the point. Going back to the "narrative" approach to gaming from (1), if failure isn't interesting and will block the story, don't do it! But, as illustrated above, you can still have rolls and get advantages from a good roll.

It's still a hard proposition for some players, though. Sure, the Earth priestess or merchant or healer may want to avoid combat, and may actively work towards that goal by negotiating with enemies, but the problem is that once combat does start, it can take a long time in a crunchy system like RQG. So the non-combatants end up being involved in combat, because that's more fun than watching people roll dice for 45 minutes. These non-combatants may get involved from a safe distance, using ranged weapons and ordering elementals around, but eventually some Tusk Rider is going charge at them and next combat they'll say "yeah I'm getting some armour on, last time I was lucky to get my leg re-attached". Whether that's "player thinking" or what an actual Gloranthan would do is left as an exercise to the reader, but my point is that using a combat-oriented system like RQG (as opposed to, say, HQG/QW) does make a difference. (arguably yes they could also learn to stay at a safer distance, get better at hiding to stealthily fire missiles and spells at the enemies, move around, get magical armour equivalent to a real amrour, etc... let's not debate the fine points of support roles in combat, I'm very bad at tactics anyway, but I know that most players want to stay involved in the scene) Of the pre-gens, Yanioth and Vishi Dunn are, err, "correctly" wearing simple clothes. On the other hand, the merchant (Harmast) has access to pretty heavy armour, and the scribe (Sorala) also has decent armour. Harmast and Sorala probably only wear theirs when they specifically prepare for a dangerous mission, though, sticking to simple clothes for most of the time (and all my players would play them that way). This difference between these pre-gens maps pretty well with my own experience, where some players are OK going "all the way" with a character concept even if it's dangerous mechanically speaking, while others are more conservative and will always keep a combat option available. For example, in CoC, you typically have the historian who has points only in knowledge skills and nothing else, compared to the historian who hunts in his spare time, or does boxing to relax, or whatever, so that the player can be at least a bit involved in action scenes. I always have a mix of both the approaches in my games. As for the OP: based on the little I know about the ancient world, breasts were indeed not uncommon, so seeing this in the art for an ancient-world-inspired game helps convey the tone of the setting to me. But I'm frankly disputing the claim that RQG's art is "obsessed" with boobs and that "every other picture of the female form is now topless". I count 8 occurrences of visible boobs in the RQG rulebook, and more than half of them are stuff like "Babeester Gor's boobs" in the cults list. Not only are those illustrations directly inspired by actual real-world art, but also that's a really weird thing to get hung up on. Surely Babeester would not appreciate it. Those are definitely not "boobs hurr hurr" illustrations meant to increase sales.... so I wonder who's really "obsessed" here, huh? I did not even blink at those boobs. I'll also second Jeff that I loved the variety of body shapes in The Coming Storm -- that was great work from the artists and art directors.

I did yes, and you may note that I use unmodified scores when only one character is super-skilled. For two super-skilled opponents, however, I don't want to lose the nice success gradient between Criticals, Specials, and Normal Successes. It doesn't seem fun to me if normal successes are happening less than 30% of the time (or even never happen at all if you fight epic monsters!). But I haven't tested these situations and rules enough to be certain of my choices, so I don't think we need to debate this further -- I'm still experimenting, and was merely sharing my thoughts and work in progress.

It's not perfect, but it's still better than RQG RAW as far as I can tell (it sticks closer to the "ideal" ratios as you vary the scores... I can share the graphs in a PM if you want). The best thing would be to compute exact ratios, but that's obviously not playable (at least not for me... if your players like doing math or reaching for a calculator, go for it!). I haven't found any other method that sticks even closer to the ideal curves without heavily sacrificing simplicity, but I'm open to suggestions. PM me! This is going vastly off-topic but yes, as a means to reduce the need for >100% rules in the first place, I also have something similar which (shocking, I know!) is also taken from GURPS 🙂 Feints, deceptive attacks, etc... they all similarly trade penalties to the attack for penalties on the defense. Note however that, at least in GURPS, it's usually a 2:1 ratio to make it feel more risky (i.e. only half of the penalty you take on the attack gets applied on the defense: you take -40%, the enemy takes -20%). I still need to look at the difference between the roll curves of both systems to figure out if I want to keep the 2:1 ratio or go to a 1:1 ratio.

You did it right yes but (1) that's quite the edge case (19 STR!), and (2) I think several people misinterpreted your earlier message about adding +2d6 to damage as "it adds +2d6 to whatever you already had". It only adds +1d6 to the previous +1d6. You were talking about the damage bonus, when other people thought you were taking about the spell bonus to the damage bonus.

Thanks! Ok so then Lightning is on par with other ranged attack spells as far as I can see. It does make sense to me that melee attack spells produce higher damage for each Rune Point, since you have to put yourself more in danger.

I don't know what you mean here. You point to things that, indeed, do not apply to spells.... so that doesn't tell me anything about Lightning's hit location? My point was that Lightning's description says "...causes 1D6 points of damage to a single hit location". It doesn't say if that hit location is random or called.

Yeah. I'm planning to use the GURPS method of (1) only normalizing scores if BOTH opponents have high skill and (2) normalizing around a mid-point score, not a high-point score. That is: If only one skill is above 100%, don't do anything, just roll as usual. If both skills are above 100%, bring the lowest skill to 50%, and remove the same amount from the other one. So 120% vs 180% becomes 50% vs 110% Note that to further reduce combat ping pong, you can apply (2) if both skills are above, say, 80%, instead of 100%. According to my (potentially wrong) math, this leads to a much less "swingy" power balance than RQG's rule, while being about as simple to implement. This is only tangentially related to the OP though so apologies for the thread drift.

Do you people roll a d20 for hit location with Lightning? Or do you just name the hit location and the Gods zap it? The rules don't really specify it but I get the feeling that it's meant to be the former, which means that it's a pretty good way to disable an enemy's limb (or head!) that was already damaged by a previous blow -- a finisher move, if you will.

"Anti-parry rule"? Please elaborate 🙂 But yes, that >100% rule is, ahem, more of a guideline to be used as necessary I suppose. But I mentioned it since we're on the BRP sub-forum so who knows what game people are playing in practice, and what rules they have. So I wanted to point out that other rules may affect the situation at hand.

For completion's sake (and in case you get the opportunity to test my stupid half-assed ideas 😉 ), my other lead was to have a threshold under which the bigger creature can't have its skill go. My simple first step was to try "can't go below SIZ". For example: Shortsword 150% against Allosaur SIZ 50 claw/bite attack 60% means that the Allosaur's attack can't go below 50%. So the result would be Shortsword 100% parry against claw/bite 50% attack. There would be a decent chance for the Allosaur to succeed an attack, and for the Wind Lord to get their sword utterly shattered (and arm broken, probably), unless they get a Special success and gracefully deflect the big dinosaur. Warning: I have given zero thought to any problems that may arise from this rule... I just made a note, and I'm reading it back to you 🙂 Caveat: the need for this rule (or the other one) depends on your particular rule for >100% skill contests. I have RQG in mind here, but for other games, it may not be needed.

The problem is that it doesn't change much when you have high skills on one side. For instance, the aforementioned Allosaur (Claw 60%, Bite 60%) against a Rune Lord armed with a short sword (Shortsword 150%). The Allosaur chance to hit is reduced to 10% so it will most of the time be "failed attack vs successful parry". So no big dinosaur damage is even rolled. That was the problem I was trying to fix originally my this house rule, but I never tried it because my players ended up going another route and the situation didn't come up.

Remember you're parrying a paw, not the entire body of the dinosaur (it might be entirely different if the dinosaur was to charge you). But yeah, I just figured I would point it out because of how it differed from my own rule of thumb. But if you and your players think it's an OK scale of penalties, then you're all good! I frankly have no strong opinion as to which values are more plausible....

I had mused in the past about something along these lines, but without having to introduce a new stat like CoC does. I figured that we could just look at the difference in the "tens" digits of the SIZ characteristic between two opponents, and use that to determine penalties to some actions... mostly parry, since back then I was trying to find a good rule of thumb for the silly situation of a PC parrying a dinosaur with a shortsword. Instead of having to find a "gray" breaking point where "you can't do that, silly" (surely you can do it against a SIZ 15 dinosaur, and you can't against a SIZ 100 monster, but what about in between?). So parrying the clawed paw of a SIZ 60 Allosaur when you're SIZ 12 would be at, say, -50% (if we apply -10% for each difference increment... -100% if we apply -20%... I'm not sure which I prefer yet). So in spirit your rule sounds good since it addresses a similar issues by providing a similar rule of thumb for penalties. However, note how more severe it is compared to mine: parrying the clawed paw of the same Allosaur (damage bonus +7D6) would mean -210% to parry! That sounds.... brutal.

Same. That extra sentence on Bladesharp seems like unnecessary and unnatural crunch.

I'm totally OK, and even supportive, of keeping some creatures, like Dragonewts, non-playable.

It was version 1.9.7 alpha 4, with both a 7 Mothers Lunar Tarshite, and a Dark Troll Zorak Zorani.

I tried to create a couple character using the sheet and I'm not sure if I did something wrong, but I had to populate the lookups by hand for the spirit and rune spells, so that the dropdowns on the Character Sheet work... are those lookups supposed to be done at the beginning when you click the "down arrow" button just after picking race/occupation/cult?

Someone might have the idea to start tossing large crowds of ducks just to see if it does indeed incur Yelm's wrath... because if it does, then it would confirm the origin of ducks! And if not, then you proceed with the other theories until you have eliminated them all... Also, I assume that a common Sartarite adynaton (yes I learned a new word today!) might be "<something unlikely>...when ducks fly!". Which is all the more funny if, at the same time, the aforementioned sylph-propelled waterfowl was to cross the frame in the background. Yeah agreed. My explanation of Bladesharp/Dullblade affecting the wearer's skill while being only tied to the weapon is that, for instance, it affects the perceived weight and balance in the wearer's hand. So for Dullblade, it might make the pommel feel light and the blade feel heavy, or make it feel like the sword wobbles when you move it, which makes it harder to handle. Bladesharp makes it feel more balanced, maybe even feel lighter overall. That gives bonuses or penalties, like any magical item that has magical buffs on it.

Oh I had not understood that -- I thought it was an image of whatever would look nice in the temple (image of the god, of a lesser god, a cult hero, an associated animal, a symbol, whatever). Stone statues are probably the result of the stonemasons' guild heavy handed marketing efforts to draw more people to their business 🙂 The slogan "If your faith is SOLID, make it ROCK SOLID!" was very popular on all syndicated story circles around Sartarite tribes, where the guild paid priests to mention it between episodes of The Lightbringers' Quest retellings. This gave the false impression that votive images had to be rock to really matter. (all similarities with the diamond industry's history are a coincidence) More seriously, the RQG rulebook does list terracotta along with stone and metal. I imagine that these things are made up of anything and everything, although some temples may prefer one or the other. I don't think you'd be very popular offering a very expensive iron votive image to an Aldrya temple...

Wallace: "So you see, Gromit, now any time we may get ambushed, we can say aloud 'I don't like the look of this' and it triggers a condition on a bound spirit that will auto-cast a Control Spirit spell on a spirit that knows Control Spirit itself. It casts it on another stronger spirit and this chains up to 6 different spirits of increasing sizes, until the last 3 ones respectively cast Summon Earth Elemental under us, Mobility on the summoned Earth Elemental, and Command Cult Spirit on said Earth Elemental, commanding it to swallow us and hastily escape in a random direction. Now, at the same time, the original spell matrix will also cast a spell to ignite a candle under this rope that's attached to my backpack. The heat will be calculated so that the rope is severed exactly at the same Strike Rank that the Earth Elemental swallows us. This will make these confetti explode above our head, confusing the enemy while this ferret in this box, who has a bound spirit inside it, casts Befuddle on that enemy just to be sure. Meanwhile, the rope itself was enchanted with a Darkwall on condition of rupture, which means our escape is further concealed! Finally, the confetti box contains an Air Spirit that will be, upon release, instructed to dive into our lungs in order to provide breathable air while we're inside the ground. And there you have it, Gromit! The perfect ambush-escape device! It fits in any resonably sized backpack, with some spare room for a picnic for two! Gromit: ".....woof?"

The wording is indeed backwards and a bit misleading, but yeah, it's just Sorala's CON as the active stat against the poison's POT as the passive stat. Sorala having a 65% chance of success is equivalent to the poison having a 35% chance of success, but it's indeed confusing that the text switches things around needlessly. The first sentence of the second paragraph ("Per the resistance table...") should be turned around. Yep, it's all the same mechanically. Personally, all things being equal, I always lean towards the players rolling instead of the GM rolling. The players curse a lot more when it's their dice betraying them 😄