Lordabdul

In that case there's only one actual "noble" and that's the clan chieftain, no? The previous Clearwine Earth Priestess, Beneva Chan, would have been a "noble" on account of being wife of the previous clan chieftain (Kallai), but the new one, Beneva Chan, is "just" a super (most?) important priestess. I'm not sure she's initiated into the Rex cult except as a lay member, for instance.

Interesting... I thought other "nobles" might have included leaders of notable temples and guilds... I guess maybe they have the lifestyle and wealth of a noble, but not the "noble" title then? And maybe many of those people fall under the "priest" label instead? That is: they're leaders of some kind (Earth priestess, Issaries priest, etc.), but not part of the actual "nobility" (a bit like a Bronze Age version of bourgeois vs nobles?). A note for other players: parts of what Jeff has been sharing about the upcoming Sartar Homeland book are actually heavily hinted at when you read the "Noble" and "Priest" occupations in the RQG rulebook. I realized that there's great and underrated setting info in that chapter! There's still a bit of a confusion for me between nobles, priests, and Runemasters... especially when RQGMA talks about "priestly nobility" or uses different categories in different places 🙂 It also doesn't help that nobles are priests too! 😄 (Orlanth Rex cult or whatever leadership cult is appropriate in that region). My guess is that a rule of thumb is: Nobles are clan chieftains, tribal chieftains, city rexes, confederation and kingdom princes/kings/queens. All the Orlanth Rex stuff. Priests are God-talkers or Rune Priests (roughly equivalent to "part-time" vs "full time"). Thanes are full time warriors (initiates or Rune Lords). Some might be priests too (warband wyter priest or Humakt temple priest for instance). Sounds to me that "noble" == "initiate or priest in the Orlanth Rex cult" (or whatever leadership cult you have). The thane of Apple Lane is a lay member of the Rex cult and isn't a noble (but might be as rich as one). The family members of a tribal chieftain wouldn't be nobles unless they are themselves, like, clan chieftains or something. The Colymar tribe has around a hundred (weapon)thanes that form the "personal retinue" of the tribal chieftain (Queen Leika currently). I'm sure that this big group of people is divided between people personally close to the chieftain, people loyal to the current particular chieftain (and not necessarily to a replacement one), and people who just want to serve the tribe. I would naively go with maybe between 20% and 35% of these thanes going away/being replaced by new ones when one chieftain is exiled or kicked out and replaced by another one? I think ancestry is different from nobility. Say you belong to the Colymar tribe and you're a simple free farmer with ambition. You have built a following over time and want a shot at the tribal seat. It just happens that you've got some claim as a descendent of Colymar himself. You have ancestry, but you're still just a big-mouthed Orlanth Thunderous farmer. You're not a noble. But yes, claiming a famous ancestor would help.

I vaguely remember reading this in some HQG book, yeah, like S:KoH or the Red Cow. Back in HQG, it seems like "thane" was a title that meant you have some kind of sway in the clan and/or tribe. But it could be anything I think? Either a mounted warrior ("weaponthane") or a non-combative member of the community (priest, god-talker, etc.). Probably most "devotees"? (HQ rough equivalent to Rune levels) With RQG, I get the impression that "thane" is now reserved for the military people (previous known as "weaponthane"). The thane of Apple Lane is specifically there as a military and judiciary leader, defending the place and enforcing the tribal law. The Clearwine Fort write-up in Gamemaster Adventures for example separates "thanes" from "Rune masters" and lumps them under "nobles". Priests and god-talkers are listed separately.

There might be some occasional reasons to negotiate the price down. For example, if the captive lost a limb during the fight and the captors didn't heal it? Or if an important item was lost? Would these considerations factor in the negotiations?

I wouldn't use species max INT either, it doesn't make much sense to me. But @jajagappa's simple "INT minus spirit magic" makes indeed more sense to me than RAW. I have the same reservations as @davecake about Free INT. It's maybe the entirely wrong analogy, but in music, knowing more songs doesn't prevent me from improvising new parts... if anything, it actually helps me improvise more. It is, however, quite possible that Lhankor Mhy PCs have less discipline when it comes to forming memory palaces for sage sorcery. Maybe Free INT will end up being higher for actual wizards? (and therefore retcon'ing Uvartan a bit) Or maybe the RQ designers will just say that Enhance INT is enough for everybody, especially when you have a lower cast ready to sacrifice their life force to you.

Oh nice, I had glossed over some of those conditions in the rulebook, but you can do some interesting (i.e. munchkiny) things with them! Thanks!

I'm confused about this... Multispell is a Rune Spell so you can't put it in a Spirit Matrix Enchantment AFAIK. Also, Multispell doesn't speed up anything (it takes effect at the highest SR of all spells), nor does it prevent you from rolling (you still roll under your Rune to cast Multispell, and I *think* you need to roll POWx5 for each spell? I'm not sure about that). A Spirit Matrix Enchantment likewise doesn't prevent rolling, you still need to roll POWx5 to cast the spell inside. You can't store multiple spells in a matrix without doing multiple matrix enchantments AFAICT. I don't think you can put multiple enchantments on the same item anyway, either for having the matrix pump MPs from a storage automatically, or for having multiple spells (although of course a GM may rule that it's OK depending on the item... having an item with multiple "parts" that touch each other may help, but, again, depends on the use-case). Did I miss something?

That's what I thought too. I think it comes from a liberal reading of this text (emphasis mine): If it says "ritual enchantment", then possibly the "conditions on enchantments" (p250) apply. But my understanding (from the first paragraph of that section p250) is that conditions can only restrict, not expand the requirements. So I'd say inscribed spells are only for the sorcerer and not anybody else. Plus, we already had a thread before about this, and that for instance opens up a can of worms about which spell skill percentage to use when you cast the spell... (I had my own ideas about that). But anyway, people should feel free to deviate from the rules and make up their own.

Also: Lyserian Goodpseech, mayor of Jonstown (Sartar Companion) Eliardo the Plasterer, mayor of Alone pre-1625 (Dragon Pass Gazeteer) Harsandra the Quick, Alone's "interim mayor" post-1625 after the previous mayor fled the city (Pegasus Plateau) Tarnak, mayor of Weis, a small villlage in Prax (Borderlands) Hauberk Jon, first mayor of Jonstown a long time ago

Firefox blocks Facebook ad trackers by default (which is good). The OP linked to the Facebook image directly (instead of copying it and uploading it on BRP), so Firefox sees that the page is trying to load a resource from Facebook and assumes it's some kind of tracker or ad-related thing... so blocks it. No pretty picture for you. You can see that this happened if you can see the "Facebook Container" icon on the left of your URL bar (unless you customized the Firefox UI). It will show an exclamation mark when it blocks stuff: You can temporarily disable the blocking by clicking on that icon and choosing to opt-in to Facebook tracking: It will reload the page, and you'll see the pretty image. But now if there were any other Facebook trackers on the page (such as "like" buttons and such), Facebook will know about what you're doing on this site and add it to your profile, potentially showing you more ads about historical costumes or whatever. Knowing Facebook, they may very well read the origin URL of the image and know where you saw this image from even without any other Facebook widgets on the page. They're sneaky like that. Once you're done, you can disable Facebook tracking again by clicking the same thing: The page reloads, the image is gone, but Facebook doesn't see what you're doing anymore.

No so much wrong as quoting from an outdated source, i.e. the HW Dragon Pass Gazeteer (p20): This stretch of forest has been dead for 550 years. When Lord One Ex died and was refused burial, his dragon-self spoke, and the life essences of all the trees sacrificed themselves to allow his passage. His body, miles away, peeled away from the supernatural fires and he went on to transcendent successes. The woods have never re- covered from that mystical burn; this is a lifeless forest of molder- ing, blackened trees. We've had a few exchanges of ideas with Shannon over on Facebook where I posted the same questions, but it was mostly about what undead aldryami might look like. I don't think anything was said about what happened to the forest there to become this Deadwood, so I guess I'll invent my own backstory for now!

Some magic systems in GURPS work like that (like, say, the "magic as super/psychic powers" flavour), while others don't (like, say, the "schools of magic" flavour where spells are skills). Depends on the flavour, basically. Frankly, the OP could ignore the spell lists in RQG and re-create everything from first principles: Roll your Rune ability and if successful, describe something appropriate for your deity and roll for damage or narrate the outcome or whatever. Put some cap on it if needed. Go and capture spirits (or ask a shaman or Rune Lord mentor to do it) and come up with whatever seems appropriate in terms of magic gained from it. Roll POWx5 to cast it. Put some cap on it if needed. My guess is that between the PCs and NPCs, after a year or two of gaming, they'll end up with a spell list that's at least 3/4 of the rulebook list.

Ironically enough, GURPS Magic has, like, 800 spells or something? (and that's not counting GURPS Thautmaturgy's custom magic systems) So I'm not sure about this recommendation 🙂 GURPS is pretty up-front about its entire point-buy economy being based on _some_ assumptions about the world the characters are living in, and the kind of core activities they're going to do in it. These costs are meant to be modified by the GM if the game world is vastly different from these assumptions.

I think "sorcery" and "spirit magic" are generic enough terms that they would actually be used as-is. I mean, these are not terms unique to this roleplaying game, they're part of the general language, so those would be valid in Theyelan too IMHO. Would it be the exact same words? Well, no. Just like "King" and "Prince" and "Chieftain" are also vague approximations of what the "in-world" term would be (Jeff for instance mused about how many of these titles would be gender-neutral in "reality"). I can imagine these terms are easily replaced by other terms based on regional dialects, cultural groups, biases, etc. So "sorcery" may be "evil magic" or "Lunar trickery" or "Western atheism" or whatever depending on who you are and what you're talking about. "Spirit magic" might be "blessings from the naiad" or "ancestor gifts" and such. Or maybe sometimes generally speaking "forest magic" or "river magic" or something like that. One thing that might very well not be stated as such in-world is Rune magic though... I imagine it will be called "divine magic" in general, and things like "Orlanth's powers" more specifically. I do think there will be pseudo-standard regional or cultural terms for some common spells. Spirit magic spells like Bladesharp, Heal, or Countermagic will be so common that a given region and/or cult might have a standard term for it. There are only so many people that can come and ask for "the magics that make my blade cut deep into the flesh of my enemies" until, a few generations later, you realize that the young people come and ask for "the deep cut magics". In another place, maybe a tribal hero from the Second Age was renowned for pouring giant amounts of MPs into Bladesharp, and so the spell there is known as "Bob's amazeballs blade thing". Or it's tied to a cult's tradition and it's called "Humakt's whetstone" or whatever. You get the idea. The point here is that it's short and clear enough that when you ask for it, people in your social group know what you're talking about. For less common spells, there may be less widespread terms, but specific in-groups (like, say, Chalana Arroy initiates talking about poison healing) will have specialist terminology too (just like specialist jargon in real life). So basically, my recommendation is to place yourself in an NPC's shoes, and figure out where they might know the spell from, how often they might refer to it, etc... and come up with a shorter/longer/specific/vague term. That's what they use. Unless they're an Issaries merchant, in which case they might use the most common term for the region they're trying to sell it in (Customs roll!), or maybe they just enumerate everything they know in the hopes that one of those terms catches a potential buyer's ear. Check out Call of Cthulhu's recommendations on spell names (p242), which is basically what I have in mind. Of course, also place yourself in the player's shoes... it's fun to make a silly voice and say "ooooh I seeeeee, you want ol' man Harekast to teach you the ancient and dark ways of the silent wind, eh? The one that enguuuulfs you into its deceiving mists, conceaaaaaaling you from your enemies' most persistent stares? The very powers that Orlanth himseeeeelf did..." but then: "GODDAMMIT Steve, just let me sacrifice one POW to learn Dark Walk already! Is that what this guy's talking about? I have no idea, it's 11:25PM, I'm tired, jeez". 😄

I never played the previous editions but one thing I can say is that I've been using, on occasion, this short spell duration as a tactic. Basically, combats generally last less than 10 melee rounds, but sometimes I just drop out of combat-time and back to narrative time for a bit. For instance, some trollkin might attack the PCs, realize that they're vastly outmatched by spirit magic buffs, and retreat for a while. They wait it out while hidden in tunnels or behind cover or whatever, and then carefully attack from a distance (throwing rocks and such) to test whether the PCs have more MPs to spend to keep the spells up. Players will of course realize what they're doing and a chase will ensue. Which is all fine, it makes combat dynamic... some melee over here, then some running, then some more melee over there, etc. Of course you can also ignore the spell duration completely, keep it simple, and roll attack/parry until one side surrenders or flees, even if it goes over 10 rounds. Depends on how important the scene is.

It was indeed great! Might as well get the ball started again on reports, for those who missed parts or all of the con. Here are my highlights: The Starter Set will be available in PDF at the same time it comes out in print. It will be a sturdy boxed set with an intro to Glorantha, a minimal rulebook, a solo adventure tailored around Vasana, a dozen (?) pre-gens printed on folio-type pamphlets (with an available PDF template later to print your own), adventures that increase in scope and complexity (like the CoC starter set adventures) and where the last one is a return to the Rainbow Mounds, a new more compact format for NPC stat blocks (I like this!), a city book on Jonstown, a relevant portion of the Dragon Pass master map (which will be in the Sartar Homeland box) and gorgeous, gorgeous art (we got some previews but these will have to remain exclusive to those who were lucky enough to attend). Jeff's GM tip for new RQ GMs was to not use combat as "filler" when action is needed, because BRP combat tends to be deadlier than in other RPGs. Jason's tip was to start in a small region of Glorantha and grow from there. Jason also talked about the underestimated "whackiness" of Glorantha that many people forget, from places' names to silly Chaos monsters, and more. Jeff talked about many things in the "More RQ Stuff" -- these panels often seem to go into lengthy lectures on Malkionism 🙂 I wasn't there for half of it so I'll let other people report on that. I was there however for some bits about the upcoming Argrath Campaign book and how it will approach the "metaplot", what you can do about it, how to diverge from it, etc. Nothing new if you've already read Jeff's posts here or on Facebook about it. However he also clarified a few things about how to approach battles. My understanding is that (in Jeff's opinion) the GM should decide on which way the battle would go, and the players may perform greatly or poorly within the broader battle. Their actions are limited to a small corner of a hundred or thousand soldier wide battle, so they will live their own story there, maybe have an impact on some of the details of the battle, or the degree in which the battle was lost or won. For example, they may succeed or fail in holding a line, flanking an enemy position, killing or protecting an NPC. This could have all kind of fun repercussions even without changing who won/lost. That's it for now. I think the move to Zoom panels was excellent since it removed the need to reserve spots ahead of time in Discord, and allowed us to switch in and out of panels, which is welcome when it's the middle of the day and you have needy children 😉 If the con grows in attendance, it may be good to run more panels on Zoom by default.

And bonuses for day of the year or starting location or community investment, yes. These are the things I also have in mind. For the rest, you can throw a rock at the internet and hit at least a handful of heroquesting rules, whether on the JC or on some random people's websites. That will give you ideas, both for things you want and things you don't want (which is useful too!). My guess is that there will be very little rules you actually like out there... which means the probability of liking the official rules will be low. Expect to be disappointed or underwhelmed, if only on account of having built up expectations over the years that frankly can't be matched. Which is why I don't think people should be this impatient about them. Personally, I don't care too much about the rules because I can make some up myself, and I expect the official rules to not have the crunch where I want it (based on the White Bull campaign on YouTube). What I'm genuinely looking forward to however is the approach for running heroquests. That is, avoiding a boring myth lore dump before the adventure starts. Supposedly Jeff and Chris Klug have figured a way to involve the players (who are potentially newbies who don't know much about Glorantha) in creating the myth "as you go", during the heroquest. I can vaguely picture how that could work but I'm interested to see how far the final text will go. Plus all the cool details about identification/ranging/etc., summon of evils, and magical roads that have been teased by Jeff. Some of these texts actually contain a few tidbits that completely cleared up some of the questions I've had about heroquests, and will be great improvements over everything I've read so far from the older books.

Given the flak they got from, ahem, "impatient fans" for the CoC Malleus Monstrorum(*), I'm not even sure they'll announce anything until the cargo has reached some warehouses. (*) the shipping took a lot longer than anticipated because of a mix of Covid and Brexit legal stuff and other things that I haven't fully followed

Ah ok so you're basically "playing out" the cumulative costs. That is, if the players buy the different levels over time during the campaign, that effectively makes them pay the cumulative costs? But if they're rich enough to buy the high level on the first purchase, they short-cut this and pay a lot less overall? Well, I think that's still the simple "50L * level" of RAW 😄

Looks to me like different people are talking about different things: The OP was about different spells doing the same thing but from different magic systems. So yes, there will be a "make your weapon more effective", or "set things on fire", or "get protection from damage" for Spirit Magic, Rune Magic, and Sorcery. I don't think these are "duplication", nor that they should be unified. The whole point of having 3 magic systems is that they all have pros and cons. A spell in Rune Magic will be quick and powerful, but you're limited to what your god(s) give you, and it's hard to replenish your Rune Points. Spirit Magic requires pausing for a few seconds but is overall decently fast, and less limited but still kinda limited. Sorcery is slow and expensive, you have to prepare it in advance, but you can do everything you want and more importantly you can boost the hell out of it if you know how to (something the other two can't do). So unifying similar spells across the 3 magic systems sounds to me like trying to unify the 3 magic systems into one generic magic system. That's not what RuneQuest is about IMHO. But you can play HeroQuest instead, where it's all unified (but maybe too much for some people 😉 ). Other people (including the OP) are talking about the different similar spells within the same magic system. Like, say, Fanaticism and Berserk maybe? I don't know. People should give examples so we know what they're talking about... Some people like that these variants of the same effect add twists and nuance to Gloranthan magic, and don't mind it adding "imbalance" between spells. Other people don't like that these variants make things "unbalanced", and don't care about the twists and nuance because they could just narrate that instead. I also imagine that yet other people would be simply annoyed at the prospect of having to familiarize themselves with a giant list of spells rather than a simpler list of spell, for purely practical reasons (how does @soltakss holds 600+ spells in his head?? is he a mutant?? 😄 ). Regardless of whether there are too many spells or not in RQ, I think that trying to group them under a shorter list of spells will only result in "cleaning up", what, maybe a dozen spells at best? (there would be a long tail of "miscellaneous spells" that are identical to RAW). It's going to be tricky to decide what stats these "core spells" would have, too. Sounds like a lot of work for not much benefit.

I don't think I understood your description here... Getting Bladesharp 4 is 4*50L=200L. Getting Bladesharp 5 from Bladesharp 4 is 5*50L=250L. That seems to be the same price as just getting Bladesharp 5 without knowing lower levels. What's "cumulative" here? It sounds like you just do the "50L per point" from the rulebook? What are you doing that's different?

There are no HQ/HW products available in POD. Whatever printed books you can see on the Chaosium website (like, say, this one) are generally discounted because Chaosium is effectively liquidating them. They're not POD, they're just left overs of the original print runs. So the short version of it is: RuneQuest Glorantha is the latest version, and all the books are in PDF and print. You get the PDF free with the printed book if you buy on Chaosium, or at a Bit&Mortar shop. RuneQuest Classic books are the "revived" RQ2 stuff, and are available in PDF and POD. The PDF is free with the POD. This is the only official (non-Jonstown Compendium) RQ stuff available in POD. Gloranthan Classics books are compilations of RQ2 material plus some light editing and a little extra material. They're available in PDF only, although Chaosium still has a few printed copies left (like this one). HeroQuest books are, like I said, pretty much only in PDF, and are for a different game system anyway.

I agree it's confusing. I had not understood it that way either. I'm even impressed someone had the idea of asking this question in the Q&A thread. On the one hand: learning Heal 6 when you didn't know Heal before only takes one week, indicating you're learning only one spell. On the other hand, you pay a cumulative price, seemingly paying for 6 spells at the same time. And sure, I understand it's not "paying for 6 spells", it's just that the cost of the spell increases more than proportionally with its size (which sounds like good economics to me), but I think the spell cost table on p257 should be fixed to address the issue. Technically, it should say "50L x the triangular number of the spell level" but that may not be the most friendly way to describe it 😄

Yeah but you still need to have a vague idea of what the base price is. That's how I use those price tables: I can start the negotiation at "rulebook price + 30%" (or more) if the NPC merchant is particularly greedy or doesn't like the PCs, for instance. I think it would be worse if the rulebook did not give any price because then you have zero idea where to start. (and yes, it's not just coins being exchanged, especially for higher prices... a good part of the price would be an exchange of cows or items or favours or whatever... doesn't change the utility of the table, and the need to understand how to calculate prices of multi-MP spells)

Well, first, my tongue was somewhat inside my cheek when I wrote that comment, as several people seem to have noted 🙂 Second, I think another issue was just that, during these decades, nobody came up with heroquesting rules for RQ that any of the Chaosium people were really happy with. At least that's the impression I get from various interviews and mailing list archives. IIRC, Jeff posted a "yes, I think we've finally cracked it" a couple years after the rulebook was published. They possibly wanted to put the new rulebook behind them before tackling that problem. But hey, I started RQ with RQG so I don't have the decades of "waiting" for this. I don't care that much, and I don't need these rules yet (although arguably other newbies who started with RQG might already be at the point they need them by now). Personally speaking, the heroquesting rules I've seen so far in the JC have left me cold. I get a hunch that the official rules might not be my cup of tea either so I casually started jotting notes down for my own rules. They seem to line up with some of what @Runeblogger has on his blog (you can check part 3 of this 3-post series here, it's the one that contains the meat of his rules... use the "Translate to English" button at the top if you don't read Spanish) but it's too early to tell.