Lordabdul

Ah I see. Mmmh... my reading is that you actually keep these (mis)appropriated MPs for as long as you want. It's the points that are over your total MP that disappear when Steal Breath has expired (or is interrupted, depending on how you interpret "duration"). So my understanding is that if you have a total of 16 MPs but you're currently down to 9 MPs, and you suck in 10 MPs from someone, you have 19 MPs until the spell goes away. Then you're at 16 MPs for a few hours during which you're not resting (maybe you're hiking back to town or something). These 16 MPs are made of 9 "normal" MPs and 7 "stolen" MPs. Eventually, you sit down and rest, so the 9 MPs start going up, pushing the stolen MPs out -- your total stays 16 MPs. But if somehow Steal Breath was still active, you could go all the way up to 26 MPs (your regular recovered 16 MPs + your 10 stolen MPs still held tight). So an evil wizard could keep a bunch of prisoners chained to the wall outside his tower, cast a 1-day duration Steal Breath, and repeatedly asphyxiate these poor victims, letting them breathe again every few rounds by moving the "air sucking" volume away from their heads and back again[1]. He would accumulate large amounts of MPs that he can hold onto for the rest of the day, and then work his evil magics. Maybe that's for the munchkinery thread? (Edit: Steal Breath has been already mentioned and productively abused on that thread of course!) [1] note that you don't need to asphyxiate anybody, the spell would would work even on empty air, but it's more fun that way no?

I'm not sure where you're reading that? Steal Breath is an Active spell. If the caster loses their concentration, wants to move faster, or needs to deal with an enemy coming into contact with them, the spell is gone. What is this "going on in passive mode" thing? For me, if an NPC suddenly can't breathe and sees a bearded weirdo gesticulating in their direction, the solution is for them to hold their breath for a round or two while running in the sorcerer's direction. They don't suffocate in the first round, actually, so casting Mobility and getting into melee in one round might be possible! Maybe throw an axe or fire an arrow in their direction in the hope that it will break their concentration, for good measure. Or count on the other NPCs to charge the sorcerer who, in turn, will have to count on the other PCs to form a line of defense if the spell needs to be maintained. Of course, such a line of defense adds distance between the sorcerer and the NPCs, so that would potentially require moving some MPs away from Strength/Duration and into Range. The last option is for the NPC to hold their breath and go hide -- breaking line of sight prevents the sorcerer from maintaining the spell too. Oh good catch, yeah. It looks like Rune Magic can brush away sorcerous spells a lot more easily than Spirit Magic. However this is contradicted by the boxed text on p260 which says that "Dismiss Magic works the same way but is twice as powerful", and where all the sorcery-related vocabulary uses "intensity" and not "strength". Yeah but asphyxiation starts at CONx5 on the next round. The NPC will most likely be fine for about the same number of rounds as the sorcerer, maybe one more round, even.

If 2020 told us anything, it's that the air immediately around a disease-carrying individual is full of bad stuff... 😷 but yes, I'm just coming up with artificial consequences only to nerf someone's spell... still, now that it's out there, that I kinda like that idea. Yep make sense, thanks!

Being marked as an outlaw by Malkioni factions and getting an angry visit from Orlanth Rex thanes who heard complaints from their constituents makes sense to me (because these are humans following their societal taboos). But what is the rationale behind angry wind spirits getting involved? Is it because these would be ghosts and cult spirits that also do follow these same traditional taboos? Does that mean the Lightbringer cults (or Lhankor Mhy specifically) also have a specific rule against tapping? (not just Malkioni schools?) It doesn't even need to be looked at in an RPG-murder-hoboy-way... it's right there in the spell list, and just looks like any other offensive spell. There are no caveats about using the Tap technique either that I can see in the rulebook, so one would have to read the Guide or something to learn about that. In fact, the example of learning a new technique on p384 shows a character learning Tap! Without knowing about the taboo around tapping, common sense would dictate that if it's ok to hit someone with an axe, then it's also ok to attack them with sorcery spells, be they fireballs or asphyxiation. But the OP was about the sorcerer making combats too easy, so the social ramifications of using Steal Breath wouldn't help if the problem was that the party goes through Chaos monsters too fast. It does occur to me however that Stealing Breath from a Broo may be a bad idea... you're drawing the creature's breath into you to convert into magic points, but that breath is full of nasty stuff. A mean GM may ask the sorcerer to roll against some disease, with varying difficulty based on how much foul smelly breath the sorcerer absorbed....

What's that about the Rainbow Mounds? I can't find anything about a truestone or Argrarth in the couple versions of that scenario. Also, if your players don't know what Argrath is supposed to do, that's not a problem (and if they are, then changing what he does is almost mandatory at that point) That's an interesting point, yeah. I guess they were the "environmental villains" as opposed to the actual antagonists. The Lunars-as-bad-guys probably grew out of the push for clan-based campaigns where the PCs are supposed to care for their community as opposed to being murder-tourists on a tour of Dragon Pass. Once you focus your campaign on a clan under the oppressive rule of Lunar invaders, the Lunars immediately become bad guys in a majority of games. It's not any more of a problem than playing in a modern setting, where 95% of the population have boring occupations and uninteresting (gaming-wise) skill sets. But just as you play FBI agents or vampire hunters or whatever in a modern setting, you'd also play the small minority of "interesting" people in Peloria, like Lunar assassins and such. It will only provide a couple years of material I think?

While you wait for the next Wind Words, may I point you to Neil Gibson's very nice podcast series where he interviews Jonstown Compendium authors? The very latest one (episode 6) features Jon Hunter. (to be clear: The RuneQuest Project used to be an actual play podcast, but Neil has made a spin-off that does interviews, which you get from the same feed)

That was my initial thought too yeah.

Yep. IIRC, while Jeff was writing the Cults book, he compiled a list of all the spells that he could have on hand. And then someone (Jason? Jeff?) came around and figured that could be useful for players too. It was originally planned as the 3rd book in the Cults slipcase but I don't know if that's still the plan. Some Chaosium people might chime in to give more juicy background details... Last I heard we would get the PDF for the holidays. Then if the process is still the same as with the other Chaosium books, there would be a "tribal editing" thread here to catch last minute typos, and then a few months for the printing to happen.

Even if this book provides a summary of all the spells, or even categorized tables of spells (which I hope it does!), that wouldn't help your players much because these would be big tables with a lot of spells they don't have anyway That would indeed be very nice. Chaosium has some experience with this kind of stuff since Call of Cthulhu has several decks of cards for NPCs and equipment and such. Depending on how successful these products were, they may look into doing it for RQG.... I wouldn't hold my breath though, as I think these CoC decks were rewards they had to deliver as part of the 7ed Kickstarter which was handled by the previous management. I'm not even sure they sold well after the KS, since I've only seen them once in a store. The best that could happen is maybe a print-your-own cards PDF... but hey, that's the kind of prep stuff I like doing as a GM.

That's awesome, thanks! (by the way, one of the things I find the old HW books super useful with are the short descriptions of holidays and celebrations... I really hope the upcoming Cults of Glorantha will have room for those in the write-ups)

Yeah the updates won't come from here since the project is now over with Spivey entirely, and he's busy finishing his Weird West game at the moment. As for Chaosium, maybe they were also freeing up resources for Rivers of London, in addition to Lords of the Middle Sea. They have a lot on their plate!

I do like the multiple-Argrath theory. I wonder if the upcoming Dragon Pass Campaign book will leave things open to interpretation there, or if it will have a "conventional" take on Argrath. I thought Greg had already written a lot of notes and freeform stories and poems in the years before that, no? And then he looked for a medium to "express" it, making it into a board game? (before immediately realizing that this new thing called "roleplaying games" might even be better). So maybe Argrath was written before there was a board game in Greg's mind? I don't know. It's especially difficult when there's so little about him as a person vs what he did. I think there's a quote in KoS that says "hey, this direct quote from Argrath is the only quote we have, ever". The difference between a tragic hero and a Mary Sue is how well the writers succeed at hiding the deus ex machina. "This bottle was going to fall sooner or later. I shouldn't take the blame for facilitating the process." -- my cat, an asshole, after pushing a bottle off the table There's indeed a lot of old RPG material that, when looked at again with more modern eyes, kinda looks like it's pro-colonialism or pro-police-state or whatever. I haven't been in the Gloranthan circles long enough to know much about Argrath except the highlights (it takes a loooooong time to read all that stuff you know!)... but I suspect that people wouldn't care so much about Argrath if there wasn't so much stuff attributed to him that directly impacts the player experience. In the end, it's very possible that RQ players don't like Argrath just because he embodies the meta-plot. If not, he would have been an NPC like Kallyr and Broyan and Harrek and there wouldn't be as much debate.

To expand on that statement, this is of course one of the biggest issue people may disagree on : that the Lie spell makes you believe what the caster is saying, but doesn't make you forget who the caster is. So on the one hand you totally believe that Humakt has said, one way or another, that your geas has changed... but on the other hand you are still aware that it's a Trickster delivering the news. And you should always take the word of a Trickster with a grain of salt... This is why I was saying earlier that the Trickster should be as careful about the wording of the Lie as they are of who they are impersonating (if they do impersonate someone) as they do it. In most cases, without any disguise or illusion, they will be easily identifiable as a Trickster -- from the tattoos to the clownish body paint, to the inside-out clothing or whatever other silly dress-up they have. I think someone already mentioned it : the best Lie (capitalized) is a good lie (lowercase). It shouldn't obviously be a lie (i.e. something that goes against their other assumptions that are unaffected by the spell), otherwise even though they believe you, the target(s) will still hesitate to act upon it, seek more information, or whatever. I could imagine some other people wanting to make Lie more powerful by also making the target "forget" that they're listening to a Trickster, but I think that way lie (ho ho) the more broken or, at least, trickier-to-handle situations for the GM. I guess it also depends on how silly the groups want their games to be... my guess is that this should be discussed during session zero. Either way, remember that one of the golden rules of RQ is that if the PCs can do it, so can the NPCs! Whatever the GM rolls with, remember to warn the players that it will come back!

These two examples are fun! But in my opinion, Lie doesn't rewrite everything you know about the world in one sentence, any more than it has mind control powers. So while the target would indeed totally believe, at first, that Humakt or Chalana Arroy have said this, they wouldn't suddenly forget what they know about their deities and cults, or about themselves. For example, the Healer might believe that Chalana Arroy commands this horrible act, but would still be totally shocked at it. This would go against everything they know about their deity, and, more importantly, against their entire personality. They initiated into this cult partially (or entirely) because they have some Passions or other personality traits that make them compassionate and caring enough to want to dedicate their life to healing. Upon hearing this, they would be incredibly upset, and some inner turmoil would probably erupt in their core being. As a GM I might ask an opposed roll of Passions or Runes or something. Most likely it would end up with the Healer running to their temple, asking "wtf?", or casting Divination, or some other similar course of action. Or they might plain refuse to do it, having a crisis of faith that might have them believe they're on the verge of quitting their cult because it turns out their deity is fucked up. Last detail: it's important that the trickster is impersonating the correct person in addition to using the Lie spell... or have a good story prepared. Saying that "Chalana Arroy commands to kill that sleeping baby" is all fine and dandy, but that doesn't shield the Trickster from follow-up questions. How do they know? Did Chalana Arroy speak to them? How is that possible? And so on. That's why Lies that are more in the form of "I heard this" or "I saw that" are much better because they don't tend to have a lot of hard-to-answer follow-up questions. Heh, yes.

It would be best if you uploaded the code to a codeforge like github or gitlab or sourcehut or whatever, if possible?

Come on, this is the DUMBEST theory thread! The Humakti were in on the scheme all along, and helped Temertain fake his death! Temertain is really an Eurmali Rune Lord who infiltrated the Lunar command, and turned several dozen Humakti Swords into followers after demonstrating to them that Eurmal is Humakt's boss because he handed him Death and takes it back when he wants. The real questions are where/when did Temertain surface again after 1624, what identity did he use at that point, and what was his real name before he became Temertain? Heck, maybe it's Eurmal himself!

If you have the RQG Gamemaster Adventures book, or the Glorantha Sourcebook, there are historical summaries of the Grazelanders repopulating Dragon Pass, followed by what became the Colymar tribe and what happens (in large strokes) during the first few generations. This includes a few passing mentions of how the Colymar started splitting up and how other early tribes got created. That wiki is especially nice because it lists all the events and missions, so you can use those as scenario seeds almost directly.

I don't think any of this would be particularly disputed by anybody -- that sounds like by-the-book Humakt to me. This kind of "esprit de corps" that compensates lower magic with military might and group discipline sounds more like Yelmalio phallanxes to me. While Humakti fight in battles, they also are routinely hired as mercenaries for various expeditions, as bodyguards, or engage in duels (see Biturian Varosh's travels), and so on. So it would be very common to see a lone Humakti, or a couple Humakti, out on a mission in my Glorantha. YGWV from mine, of course. But if they can replenish their Rune magic only once a season, this has repercussions on some in-world stuff IMG: Maybe they charge very high rates for their services, so that if a particular assignment requires them to spend a lot of their magic, they can afford to spend the rest of the season recovering (which means as a GM you need to fast-forward more often). Alternatively, maybe they use their magic very sparingly, relying instead mainly on their highly trained skills (which means players need to learn to spend wisely). I haven't had to come up with a solution yet, though, so I haven't made up my mind.

IIRC Orlanth has one but wasn't mentioned in the rulebook. I think it will be in the Cults book. Yeah associated cults are really great for that, and when the players venture into far away lands where these cults are less common, that gives a good sense of being "away from home" (although they may be able to recover *some* RPs from the *equivalent* cults there?). I think the only cult that suffers from all of this is the Humakt cult because it has no associated cults.... I wonder if it would be cool, instead of giving Humakt minor holy days, to give it some alternative way of recovering the equivalent of a minor holy day's worth of points, like, say, by doing a solitary Worship roll after a honourable combat, or something.

Possibly only tangentially unrelated, but it might be fun to have a mixed face-to-face/play-by-post game where the main group's characters are thanes and inner ring members of their clan, doing the usual adventures and politics in semi-real time. But the play-by-post people are playing the inner ring "NPCs" from all the other clans. Occasionally, they could show up in a "real" game if the main PCs temporarily ally with them for a specific adventure, or visit for a diplomatic meeting.

Yes, I agree, for me in that case it was more of a byproduct of having a point pool do 2 things (something which I think has been fixed for the upcoming QuestWorlds rules). There was a similar problem with my group when playing the Cypher system (Numenera), where stats are used to spend effort and as hit points. Ugh.

While this ties into a group's specific psychology and into the potential need for meta-knowledge (like knowing vaguely how long is an adventure, whether there will be downtime or not, etc.), I agree that it is something to watch out for. It takes a bit of training and thinking on the GM's part to handle this particular issue, and for me, interesting thing is that it translates into in-world considerations. Basically, I was thinking about the usual KoDP line you get from your clan ring: "We only raid in Fire season! We need our people and magic for other things the rest of the year!". And then I figured I could apply it to an ongoing RQG campaign. For instance, the PCs' temple or chieftain would not send them on big missions too often in a season because, well, they would run out of divine magic. While Rune Point per se aren't a thing in Glorantha, there is such a thing as "being out of favour", and so the party's patrons would need to manage that, being indirectly aware of Rune Point economy. Similarly, if the PCs have responsibilities, like being thanes of Apple Lane, that also comes into the equation: "We can't do this until 3 weeks from now because we've taken on too much recently... or maybe we need to hire some help". This could get interesting, especially if waiting to do something can make it harder because, I don't know, the Tusk Riders have built a better settlement during that time.

Thanks!

You mentioned earlier how you handle "spirit visibility" at your table and I'd like a bit more information on that if possible: Do you only ask for a Scan roll to additional people joining in the spirit fight? That is: would the spirit's original target be able to use their weapon against the spirit without rolling for Scan because somehow the spirit is more clearly visible to them?

Ah right I thought you were explaining your take on Lie earlier but I realize I misread and you were talking about other hypothetical spells... sorry, carry on!