Lordabdul

Adventure/short campaign idea: "Snowpiercer", but on one of those never-stopping/always-moving Doraddi wagons that continuously circle the Pamaltelan plains.

It doesn't show up in the Guide. Crystallized sugar exists, however, even though it's a rarity and cult secret somewhere in Kralorela (I briefly talked about it in a Wind Words episode). Sugar canes are somewhat common in a few places so you can have some sweet beverages.... and on that same Wind Words episode we had mused a bit about the possibility of some nectar called "elf blood", made from.... well... let's call it "tree sap", a bit like Canadian maple syrup. That might be a fancy kind of honey to put in your tea! Of course, it's not because cocoa isn't mentioned in the guide that you can't have it in your Glorantha But it could also be other stuff... just like "elf blood", you could pick any "fantasy" element and declare proudly that it tastes sweet, a bit like chocolate, when you crush it/melt it/whatever. Who's to say that trollkin juice doesn't taste delicious to someone?

Yep. HQG writes it "Heroquest" or "heroquest" depending on the page. Personally I go all lowercase ("heroquest", "heroquester").

Thanks for the praise Brent! Very much appreciated.

While this very true, and a specific version of the more general "magic makes it very easy to ruin a mystery/investigation scenario", I think it's not a problem here? AFAICT, @Trotsky isn't trying to keep the mystery of the man's death intact -- the point here seems more about how to make the summoning and dead interview interesting? In which case, my first instinct is just that there can be any number of adventures on the way to find the man's spirit: Locating a particular spirit is tricky enough that the adventurers might have to go in the Spirit World a couple times at least, with many possible encounters... are there any interesting locations around the place where it happened? Any of these locations could have a hostile spirit or, at least, a spirit that wants something out of the PCs. Maybe one of those spirits attacked and absorbed the dead man's spirit, or made him join their vortex, or whatever. The man's spirit got lost on the way to the Underworld because of some nearby vortices, and is currently gravitating towards some powerful spirit. The man's spirit was grabbed and bound by some weird shaman that happened to pass by. [spoiler] (spoiler tags aren't working? I made the text white... select it to see it) In The Broken Tower, the wandering shaman doesn't seem to have any problems summoning and talking to the ghost of the recently deceased Grey Dog woman, though. If the man's spirit is hanging around, it's probably easy to see it, like, right there, in the Spirit World. It gets tricky if the spirit is wandering somewhere randomly farther away. [/spoiler] Assuming the spirit is not hanging around near the body, I wonder indeed how hard it to find it. Shamans summon particular ancestors routinely, but that's after they reached the Underworld and got their wrist stamped by Daka Fal. Before that happens, it could be that the spirit is "unregistered" and thus you have to actually search for it the hard way, putting up metaphorical "Lost Spirit" posters around the neighbourhood. That's also not to be underestimated indeed. The man's spirit may hold a grudge, want revenge, and so on. In fact, there are probably more reasons for the ghost to lie than there are for him to tell the truth (unless the truth is that the woman wrongly murdered him).

I thought that the draconic connection was just that Aroka (the Blue Dragon) made some lakes (Aroka Lake) and rivers (Oslir) when he was slain by Orlanth? I'm not sure if his blood was water because he had eaten Heler, or because he's the Blue Dragon and so that's his thing (and other dragons might therefore not be related to rivers and water if they are other colours). So the connection might be incidental or unique there, and not a general thing? I might be wrong, since I really don't quite get Aroka's deal (he eats water deities like Heler, but he supposedly commands Water Gods, which he led to try and conquer the Earth according to the Glorantha Sourcebook, but I don't know where more info on that is...)

Congrats @Minlister! It's great to see all your French material be available to a broader audience. This will go in my next DTRPG bulk purchase!

Going with both MGF and MGL ("Maxiumum Gamemaster Laziness"), use the same stats as normal helmets, and explain the different stats with different types of beetles and different levels of craft. Let players have cool looking beetle helmets if they want, without being penalized or advantaged for it via the stats. If the PCs went through the trouble of fighting an actual giant beetle, and then paid some good money to have a helmet made for it, give them slightly better stats as a prize, just like you may (or may not) give them different stats for a cool metal helmet they find in some old tomb or after a boss fight or whatever. That said, different arthropods have different thicknesses for their chitin armour. For beetles specifically, I'd stay in the 1 to 5 range for Armor Rating. 6 and above would require a special kind of giant beetle, or a different giant arthropod.

Awesome! What about those corflu'ed areas and added names like Wolf Hills or Donalf Flat?

Now you're just showing off (but keep doing it! it's awesome!) Nice! Now my framed box covers look lame! (although I do have a spare WB&RM map that I will frame next, once I find a wall to put it on).

There was an informal mention that the website would get an upgrade (from the "problem with the search function" thread, I think), but no actual announcement. And yes, the templates need some love, I'm sure Triff is hard at work on it. Software upgrades are the worst.

....and also given that paperwork began being filed as early as summer 2019 as far as I can tell from government databases. I think it's a good thing overall: The HeroQuest board game is coming back! Yay! (although I have ambivalent opinions about the new WotC-type cartoonesque artwork, and Hasbro's leadership) Chaosium probably got a big lump of money? Maybe? We will finally see an end to years of subtle distinctions between "heroquest" (lowercase) and "HeroQuest" (capitalized). Now it's just going to be about the activity of going to the God Time! No more ambiguity! Edit: I tried to back the HeroQuest campaign.... check out the shipping fees for Western Canada Maybe I'll wait until it naturally shows up in my local store then

I'd love to see you tackle something based around architecture, from big structures (buildings in Boldhome, the Paps, Glamour, Nochet, whatever) to small ones (Pent huts, Lunar outposts, wahtever).

Physicians will apply real-word (-ish) physics to figure out if the hippogriff can hover or not. Logicians and sorcerers will look at Rune affinities to figure out if the hippogriff can hover or not. Mythologists will look at thematic links in related deities' myths to figure out of the hippogriff can hover or not. Gloranthan scholars will search various books, fanzines, and mailing list archives to figure out if the hippogriff can hover or not. MGFers recognize that all 4 previous people are actually the same, looking for a truth that doesn't exist because it can be made up. Instead, MGF starts with the result: is it more fun to have the hippogriff hover? Or is it more fun to make the hippogriff do a dive, swooping past, turn around the air and dive again for another attack or another attempt at picking up someone, or whatever the hippogriff is trying to do? Then, if someone asks, they can retroactively explain it with whatever source they want, be it physics, Runes, myths, precedent, or even just hand-waving ("who cares? would your character even know why hippogriffs do what they do? ask a sage next time you're in Jonstown!"). When in doubt, remember the wise words of John Landis, who asked his son how does one kill a vampire. His son started: "stake through the heart, decapitation, ..." but his dad interrupted him: "You can kill a vampire however the fuck you want, because vampires don't fucking exist!"

I had also interpreted it this way (any level of tie = both damage), but Jason has mentioned in the Q&A thread that the intended reading of the rules was for damage to only occur on a critical success tie. I think I still prefer it with damage dealt on any tie, although I may play around with making it half damage. At least, those 5 consecutive ties in David Scott's example would be a bit more interesting. Are the Wide Plains and Fireground some custom thing you made up, or something from an upcoming book? Is the Fireground a vortice, in which case this hour of travel was the result of a 1D6 roll, or was it just a GM call to keep it simple and make it take one hour? Do you generally have any advice on choosing travel times in the Spirit World? (it looks like you just make most location changes last one hour) Shouldn't the shaman have rolled Spirit Travel (at -10%) first, and then fought a small spirit along the way, and then arrived at the Fireground? (the reason being that if the players gets a special or critical success, they can reach the Fireground quickly enough that they don't have to fight anything) Where did the second hour go? Thanks a lot for this example!

Ah OK, makes sense. In that case I would probably keep it simple and let them create whatever character they want, but require that they have been part of the Colymar tribe for a certain time (a couple years at least maybe?)... enough to gain a Loyalty passion or something in the same vein. It's also common to use session zero to either come up with how the PCs came to know each other, or for each PC to know at least one other PC (again, as per Nick's idea, you can piggyback off the Family History to find ideas for that). I know several people around here had, indeed, baboons and ducks and more as PCs in their groups, so expect a deluge of anecdotes

You may just be like me : bad at both coming up with challenging NPC stats (I keep under-stat'ing them, regardless of the system), and also bad at actually making them fight effectively

Yep! Session Zero is super important and makes everything easier for a campaign. Yes, as a GM I might set limitations on what players can pick for homelands, cults, and so on. Another way to do it is to put the responsibility on the players: let them choose whatever they want but they eventually need to justify why they're all friends, or part of this clan, or loyal to this patron NPC, or sailors on this one pirate ship, or whatever is the premise of the campaign (or at least first scenario). I think Nick's idea of using the Family History to find times and places to get together is great! If I understand this correctly, you have a bunch of characters that were created for and played through Six Seasons in Sartar, and you want to find a plausible way to move them over to the Gamemaster Adventures? So I assume that all the characters are born or adopted into the Haraborn clan? That clan is part of the Colymar tribe so it should be very straightforward to have them work for Queen Leika and other Colymar NPCs? Those are the character's bosses, after all, and them seeing Leika come back to the throne should give them ample motivation to go pay their respects and ask if they can serve her in anyway. What kind of actual problems are you having in this case?

Interesting, I wasn't aware they were going as far back except for rare hardware. I remember as a kid in the late 80s when my computer engineer dad replaced one of the two floppy disk drives on our computer with a hard drive. I ask him "what's that thing marked 'C:/' here, dad?", and he says "ah, that's our new hard drive". "What's a hard drive?", I ask. "It's like a floppy disk, only you can't take it out", he says. With my 10 year old wisdom, I reply: "well, that's obviously completely stupid". That's indeed where I would start for long distance trade between broad nations. I'm a big fan of "trader" campaigns where the main PC (or, possibly, NPC patron) is a merchant, and the rest of the party are associate merchants, bodyguards, rangers, etc. I have yet to run such a campaign in Glorantha, though. It's worth pointing out that the crunch for the trading rules really depends on what the focus of the campaign is. If the focus is to get from point A to point B safely and with as much merchandise intact, then there's not much need for crunch for the actual trading... one can keep track of the percentage of cargo lost to Tusk Riders, Wolf Pirates, tornadoes, taxes, and whatever else happened on the way, and then we sell what's left with a fixed markup and the possibility to get a bonus/penalty on it with some skill rolls. For a bit more crunch one could keep track of where small-but-expensive-items are vs bulky-and-cheaper items (front/middle/rear of the caravan, or different decks/cargoes on ship) so we can better track what gets lost, stolen, or confiscated. Rolling for hiding illegal goods against, say, a Lunar patrol, also adds a bit of tension. But anyway my point here is that the focus is on getting the stuff to the places where you can sell it. It's not so much about the spreadsheet sums and margins, and more about the adventure of transporting valuable merchandise. Another focus can be on actually finding good trade routes with good margins. In this case the crunch might still not be on what's valuable here vs there and by what percentage. It might be more about establishing political and commercial agreements to get less taxation going through a specific area, maybe even bribing a few key people. It might be about taking a shortcut through what is thought as being a dangerous path but somehow we manage to befriend the trolls or placate the spirits or whatever is making this path unused. It might be about eliminating some competition, getting your stock featured more prominently at the market by bribing the city officials, and so on. Again, this can be done as a fixed markup for the trade route, but with bonuses/penalties for each advantage/disadvantage we accumulated. Of course, one can still go and make up tables about, say, what bear pelts are worth here vs. there compared to Tarshite patterned textiles or Praxian knives or Lunar jewelry... those are fun to make! But I'm pretty sure it can all be abstracted into a combination of bulkiness ratings and value ratings (which in turn lets us compute the total value and volume of our stock, so we know how big a ship we need, how many mules and guards we need, etc.). Figuring out exactly what goes in the "Bulk 1, Value 3" amphorae vs. the "Bulk 4, Value 2" barrels can be mostly improvised, as appropriate for the supply source.... mmmh.... I should check back on a few RPG books and come up with a real system now

I wonder why Chaosium is re-issuing the RQ2 classic resource pack in a collected edition, when they had them as separate booklets since the RQ2 Kickstarter. Is it not practical to do POD with low page counts?

Interesting that someone translated the map title and key (I had previously seen the French version). I love that the shadows give an indication of how high things go. But someone should really go on with the works to rebuild the missing parts of that wall!

I wasn't aware of that post, thanks for the info I might update the RPGGeek database, I don't think they have all those editions listed (I wrote my post quickly only from memory... apologies for making you do the work!)

Yes, as far as the 2nd edition is concerned, I'm aware of: The UK Games Workshop edition (top left) The "fat" and "skinny" boxed sets (top middle), although I think there are other variants of those boxes with different Chaosium logos? Some monochrome standalone softcover books (I think there's one red and one green? Are these the 2 below the 1st edition, top right?) And then some mix of softcovers and hardcovers, with an added mix of the old/new logo (probably the ones on the bottom row?) The Kickstarter reprint hardcover

Wow that's unrepentant completism indeed Mr. Suitcase! There's a couple in there that I'm not even sure what edition they are...

I see you have some spare copies of RuneQuest... when I built up my RQ2 collection a couple years ago, I came across some damaged spare copies of boxes (some of which a seller just sent me as free extras because he wasn't going to do anything with them besides throw them away... they were unsellable, being incomplete or empty in addition to being damaged). Anyway, fast-forward to last week-end, when I figured I would turn these boxes into nice frames to put up on the staircase going down to my man-cave: Now the only thing is that I have spare pieces of those boxes, which I'm considering turning into bookmarks, unless someone has a better idea?