Lordabdul

Yep, and I'd argue that sorcerers cast at least as many pre-inscribed (or otherwise prepared) spells as improvised spells when out in the field. Or at least, that's how I'd play it. My understanding was that each additional point of POW does pre-manipulate the spell in a certain "set" way. So if you spent 4 additional POW in it to increase the strength, that's how the spell would come out every time. That is, you cannot "redirect" these 4 points of manipulation into range or duration or a mix of everything.

Philosophical question about the RQG character sheet: do you people write the skill category modifier on each category, and then include it in every skill score below? Or do you write the unmodified skill score and add the two on the fly when you roll?

IMHO Sanctify serves a different purpose -- it's to make religious rituals more effective. For instance, worship for replenishing Rune Points. You could ward a treasure room (no religious purpose here), or you could sanctify without warding if you don't expect trouble. Note that the difference is who gets the warning: with Sanctify, the caster is warned about someone intruding. With Warding, the intruder is warned (by way of getting zapped for a couple points of damage).

Nice, thanks. Even more interesting, Steve Perrin adds: "Its main utility is a warning, not a damage producer." (which explains the low damage, and support the idea that more dangerous protections lie inside) And for some "behind the scenes" goodness, some people in that thread muse about the specific inspiration of the warding "wands", which Steve says were a reference to some fantasy literature of the time that he forgot about, which other people then go on to pin point.

A more concisely written version of what I experienced so far, so yes! Thanks. What I usually do is share my screen, with the PDF open at the right page(s). It's the digital equivalent of leaving your book open in the middle of the table. When necessary, I screenshot the tables for a given player and send that file to him/her directly (for example when they need to each have their list of cultural or cult skills, so they can put them on their character sheet). Or they can do their own screenshot while I share. Then they can do their own calculation! And while they do that, I can frenetically write down last minute notes for the first adventure because I just realized there was a giant plot hole in the middle 🙂 Yeah -- it sure would be incredibly dry if the GM was just reading the text for a given year, players roll a d20, write down the event on their sheet, and move on to the next table. For me it's an opportunity to share info about the setting and build compelling backstories. The one time I did it with newbies, it was a good opportunity to share some basics about Glorantha, like discussion prompts for a 101. Also, players often read between the lines, so to speak, and find a narrative that ties everything together. In my most recent game, a player had his dad survive several big battles without seemingly accomplishing much, so he decided he was an arms dealer Issaries merchant who, eventually, got killed because people realized he was always supplying both sides of every conflict. You don't find this kind of stuff in the tables, but it sometimes jumps at you after a few rolls. You could surely come up with the same thing by writing your backstory on a blank page, but I like random tables anyway.

Yes that was my point -- if there's no limit, it's easy to spend 1 POW (as per RAW), regain it, and learn another rune or technique a couple seasons later. And therefore after a while sorcerers would know the vast majority of them. But @Godlearner corrected my misunderstanding, saying that they have other limits in place, both for number of runes/techniques mastered, and for amount of manipulation. Basically, the same rules as RAW but with different limits.

Oh I see you would still do the "above 12" threshold thing. Gotcha, thanks.

What I find makes it a pain to create NPCs are things that have been there all the time: the tables for damage bonuses and hit points and strike ranks, the skill category modifiers (which I really dislike for many reasons), etc. I do follow the philosophy that "NPCs have whatever stats you need at this specific moment", and so I only prepare a couple notable stats and skills in my scenarios (not just in RQ, but in general), so that mostly solves it, but I'm sad they didn't make this explicit in the Gamemaster Screen Pack booklet.

Do you mean you replace "free INT" with "your POW score"? How does that work since POW can go up and down quite a lot during play, as you sacrifice for RPs and such? Also, note that there are 25 Runes and Techniques in the rulebook (there are more in reality, like Dragonewt Rune and so on but let's ignore those). If you exclude Tap, Chaos, and one side of all the Power Runes, that's 18 points. Sounds to me like there's no reason to have "the super bad-ass Fire Wizard of Mountaintop", because any bad-ass wizard can effectively control all the elements and all the techniques? (maybe you only use the original POW score? determined old-school with a straight 3D6 roll?)

Ah but for me the ward is a sphere or a cube or some 3-dimensional shape. It makes no sense to me to make it 2 dimensional only or have no roof or floor. YGWV.

As someone who has never played RQ before RQG: I like it! I generally like games with a "life path" section in character creation, because that helps with making up the backstory of a character when you don't know anything about the setting. If I'm playing a generic spy action game I can make a character because I can draw on the real world and James Bond tropes. If I'm playing Star Wars or some other well known pop-culture world, I can also draw on general movie knowledge, or look things up easily. Glorantha is clearly not like that -- you either know it (because you have the books) or you don't, and if you don't, you can only draw on general fantasy tropes. Those tend to be non-applicable to Glorantha, but surely with the help of the GM you can adapt things. You say "my parents were killed by orcs when I was a baby, and I was raised by some kind of fierce warriors" and the GM says "ok let me replace orcs with Tusk Riders, and maybe barbarians with a group of Storm Bull cultists in a Praxian clan... I'll tell you what those are in a second, but you can add Hate (Tusk Riders) at 70%". That works. But the Family History also serves another purpose, which is to tell you about recent events in memory. So that also serves to replace a potentially equally lengthy bunches of lore dumps from the GM. It front-loads it, however, and you may prefer to do it as appropriate -- that's perfectly valid. Note that the rulebook tells you that you can entirely skip the Family History section (you may still want to roll on, say, the Family Heirloom table). Frankly, the only thing you'll miss are Passions. You could prefer a "blank slate" starting point for PCs, in which case you can just slap some Loyalty (Clan) and Love (Family) passions as appropriate, and you're set. You may only later declare that your character hates elves for some reason, and add "Hate (Aldryami)" when they meet the first elf in play, coming up with some quick backstory on the fly to justify it. That's again perfectly valid. Although I guess you'd have to set some limit for "unallocated Passion points" ahead of time. This method of "discovering" (building) your character backstory as you go is, I think, more appropriate when the setting itself is also vague, and the people at the table also build up this setting as they go. My understanding is that Glorantha was a lot more like this back in the RQ2 days.... but nowadays, it's a pretty fully described world. Hence the possible increased need to find entertaining ways to front-load setting information. Hence the Family History section. If you have the Gamemaster Screen Pack thing, the PDF version includes a "Players Pack" that has a two-pages "character creation checklist". But of course the step for Family History is just "do the Family History p27". The other steps are summarized.

Thanks. I forgot to also ask: with no more Free INT, what limit or diminishing returns prevent sorcerers from learning all the Rune and Techniques? Basically: what is the justification for schools of magic to exist? (Water magic, Fire magic, etc.)

"Any Orlanth initiate"? If you mean "anybody who has Teleportation", that's really far from "any Orlanthi". Maybe 20% at best? (but I'd say muuuuch lower IMG) Also, it's not going to be the only protection that a temple has. Security systems (and in particular cyber security) have a concept of "security layers" IIRC. Basically, not any one layer is impenetrable, but each layer reduces the number of people that can get to the next layer. Nothing is uncrackable, but that doesn't mean it's useless to try and put any protection, because going from "everyone gets in" to "only 20% of people get in" is already a huge win. Put another layer that only another 20% of people can get through and now you're at less than 5% of people getting through (assuming you picked the second layer to be quite exclusive to the people who can get past the first one). So once you've gone past the warding, you also have some spirit guardians, some good old physical traps, and so on. It will take a team of well coordinated individuals with complementary abilities to get past all of them... oh hey, that sounds a lot like an adventuring party going through a dungeon, doesn't it? 😄

Not generally speaking, no, but by virtue of a free-form system that encourages player creation, and a list of Runes that's quite small and vague, there will inevitably be some type of effects that allow more interpretations than others. It's what I said earlier: some groups will embrace it, and some others will have a more strict and literal approach. My guess is that the former group will have more fun or, at least, less frustrations than the latter, but that's probably my own bias. For instance, I think we can all agree that any kind of illusion spell will have to include the Illusion Rune. But "Create Taste", in the rulebook, uses Water, for instance. I can totally see someone arguing for another version that uses the Darkness Rune instead, on account of its affinity to the stomach and (one could extrapolate) the entire digestive system. Trolls like experiencing lots of tastes after all. The two spells might differ quite a bit in their in-world effects, with the Water-based one being "lighter" and giving more "fresh" sensations, while the Darkness-based one is heavier on your throat and stomach, and may even give you gas if you want to get silly. Some groups will get a lot of mileage from these kinds of differences: maybe a bunch of good laughs, or maybe the cornerstone of an insane plan to sneak into the chieftain's hall. What's "Sorcerous Arts"?

I have the same problem and had asked the same question in the past 😄 I'm considering getting the slipcase while selling or gifting the separate books, sometime in the future...

If I remember correctly, some monsters were also removed because they are specific to an unusual setting and will only show up in the appropriate book. For instance: Dreamlands creatures.

Same: I prefer having the players do cool things with their powers. No point nerfing it in my opinion, especially since there's probably only one PC that has it, and given the high cost of this spell they have other issues: either blowing most or all of their RPs to teleport the whole party, or teleport alone and end up by themselves inside the ward, racing to find the stones and destroy them before any guardian creatures get to them. IMHO it's a trade off and will lead to interesting problem solving and cool scenes.

Ah well, without smileys, these nuances will fly over my head! 😉

I'm not sure why knowing how spells are taught is "unnecessary, uninteresting, and irrelevant", especially coming from someone raising issues about it, but as for the last part, IIRC, only shamans and Rune Masters are able to teach spirit magic per RAW. Yep I agree. It's like going to a weapon smith asking for the Glorious Axe of Billy Bob Trollkiller. You don't roll under 2% to see if that item is in the shop -- you make a whole adventure about it. It seems appropriate to me that anything above level 5 or 6 spirit magic would be about finding a very specific spirit that knows it.

Summon+Fire costs 2 points when mastered. Using that spell with Summon+Water costs 3 points because you're going through Water's minor rune. Devising an equivalent spell that uses Summon+Water+Harmony would cost 3 points when mastered, so the only improvement is that manipulation is +1 MP instead of +2 MP.... is that what you were after here? Also, design-wise, did you suggest Harmony because, thematically, it helps "collaboration" between Water and Fire/Sky, and that's how you would justify creating that new spell? In which case, that's an interesting use of Harmony... worth keeping in my notes... I think that, by its free-form nature, sorcery will work better or worse depending on the GM and the players. I could see some groups going wide with many different ways to do things, while others will (ironically, given the nature of sorcery) have a much more strict and logical approach. For example, I could imagine players creating new forms of Enhance INT with Dispel Beast (remove bestial instincts from your mind to only leave higher logic) or with Combine Truth Man (summon mathematical truths into you), or whatever else.... (the cool thing here being that you can roleplay these different spells in different ways, even if the mechanical effects are identical!). But other players will brandish the rulebook and say "no, it clearly says INT is the characteristic of Fire/Sky therefore you can't affect one without the other! You're doing it wrong!".

He mentioned Rune Levels though, so only Rune Priests or Rune Lords would do that -- at least that's what I understand. It makes some sense to me. For instance, a Sword of Humakt at the minor temple a couple clans away may or may not have Bladesharp 6... maybe she only has Bladesharp 4 because she has a different setup of spirit spells within her CHA limitation... but she knows how to get Bladesharp 6, and she can help you get it. Maybe she had it in the past. Or maybe it's one of those "I don't know, but I know how to find out" that experienced people often say.

What do you mean here?

I think it's kind of the point, especially since (IIRC) parts of Ars Magica were designed with influences from Glorantha and RuneQuest in the first place. IMHO, playing actual full-time sorcerers (e.g. Zzaburi) would require large time jumps, or AM-type troupe play to be playable, since sorcerers spend days and weeks in preparation for any one big adventure or battle. So yes, I agree. Another option is to treat the sorcerer as a shared patron PC/NPC between the players -- you play the hirelings and servitors and such, going on dangerous adventures all the time to find herbs and items and information, and potentially having a bit of sorcery, similar to philosophers. And then every now and then the group chooses to "take the wizard out of the tower", and it's like a Voltron thing where the players share control of the character while still playing their PC as they accompany him on something big. All the big spells the group has prepared over the past handful of adventures are ready to be used at that point. And more importantly, I think, it was meant as a sample of spells quite biased towards the only playable sorcerers: Lhankor Mhy sages. There are a few hints about other types of sorcerers (like the short descriptions of sorcery schools on p389), but LM is really the only reason Sorcery was in the rulebook. Some designers and authors have also mentioned in passing that they personally would find it more interesting to play in one of the other Western castes, if I remember correctly. Some are even more vocal about how playing as a Malkioni is a form of premise rejection of what the setting is about. After all, people who want to play wizards with free or malleable forms of magic have quite a few games and settings to pick from already, and don't need to spend decades in RQ being frustrated at the setting or the rules or both.

Woah that's the clearest, most helpful summary I've ever read on this topic in my ~2 years of Gloranthology. Thanks a lot Nick!

Yeah which is why I think there's some confusion between being *actually* a noble, and being someone with a *noble standard of living* or belonging to a *noble family*. I'm just trying to understand all this so I might very well be wrong, but based on what Jeff wrote, the "lowest level of nobility is clan chieftain", so for instance Harmast is clearly not a noble, but he has noble standard of living, ransom, etc. Most of the time, I suppose you get a noble standard of living by virtue of belonging to a noble's household (Harmast's case), but I suppose you can also achieve it by just being a wealthy merchant or crafter or whatever.