Lordabdul

Jeff said in a recent interview that it's a possibility, since there's precedent for Chaosium to translate foreign licensee material back to English. It's not planned for now AFAIK, especially since that book isn't even out yet.

If I'm reading the table p311 correctly, Seven Mothers (of which Etyries is part of) and Issaries are "Neutral" to each other.

Note that depending on how tattoos are made in one's Glorantha, it has some consequences on worldbuilding and possible scenarios: In a world where tattoos appear magically after adult initiation, someone might come out with the "wrong" Rune on them (Sun or Darkness Rune, or a rare Chaos Rune). So there's probably some contingency plan for that in the clan's traditions (exile, execution, dealing with the parents, etc). It's also harder for agents of Chaos infiltrate society so you have to make sure they have proper disguise spells when you run an adventure with them. It also affects Chaos detection magic like Storm Bull's a bit too. On the other hand, in a world where tattoos are drawn, one would have to decide how the Rune are chosen. Does the tattoo artist, or a clan shaman or priest, know (through magic or aura reading or whatever) what someone's Rune are? That also has some repercussions on society (including similar ones to the previous point). Do the recently initiated get their Runes "revealed" to them during their initiation, privately? In which case they can lie and get something else tattooed if they want. Or maybe people don't know their Runes at all for sure, and just get tattooed the ones with which they *think* they have the most affinity. Or maybe they just get the tattoos for the cults/deities they like. I think all these approaches can work as long as the GM deals with the world-building and narrative consequences, which is the fun part (at least to me).

We all have voices that we think suck when we listen to them, so believe me, you're not going to to be worse than anybody else (and a voice appropriate for Mongolian throat singing sounds actually awesome to me) Most importantly, at this point, we have enough prizes that you can send in almost anything and you're quite guaranteed to win something!

Yeah I love that illustration... the messy hair and bare feet, the weird looking axe (what kind of axe is that by the way?), the hanging severed hands that are probably not practical at all but definitely make some impression... it really says "don't fuck with me, don't even look at me". I don't think I want to know what's that bundle of hairy stuff hooked to the axe head... (still, my point is that this kind of maniac is just one type of Axe Maiden... players should be able to come up with other takes on it)

Heh, I also discovered RPGs with the boxed version of the Dark Eye! My neighbour got it as a gift and we played 1 on 1 without even really knowing what a "roleplaying game" was (to us, it was just a marketing tagline on the box, not an actual genre!). Last year, on LeBonCoin, I tracked down 3 of the 4 boxes we had -- what a rush of nostalgia to see the vinyl map of Havena! After that I didn't get into D&D. I have vague memories of playing quite a lot of Rolemaster, a couple of other random things, and then Vampire, followed a couple years later by Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green. That lasted a long time This was almost exclusively with friends from school, where we had a gaming club. Growing up, other schools had other gaming clubs. Then, as an adult, moving across cities and countries and continents, I mostly relied on online ads to find other players. This would often be the first thing I'd do when arriving to a new city. I never have any problem finding players who want to do longer campaigns because I recruit first with a CoC one-shot. That tends to bias heavily towards gamers who are "mature" and enjoy big epic campaigns at least occasionally. Huh I really don't remember it being a Satanic panic to the same degree as what happened in the US. Maybe it was more tame in my hometown but I only remember a few "issues" being raised on TV news, but not much else. I remember a lot more air-time dedicated to the "threat" of japanese anime, or video games. But maybe I was too young, or just not paying as much attention.

Unless I'm misunderstanding something, it seems to me you're mixing up how Babs herself is pictured, and how Bab-Gorites are pictured. Babs is pictured as a raging lunatic with penises for a collar. Her cultists, however, are not described at all, either in RQG or in Jeff's posted prosopaedia. And that's good: it just says what they do, which is guard Earth temples and hunt down people that wronged these temples. It's up to the player to come up with a particular character's way to follow their cult's traditions and missions. There will be as much variety between Bab-Gorites as there will be between any other group of unique individuals. There's no need to take a two paragraph write-up to the absolute letter and consider all members of that group as all being the same (especially when said paragraphs don't even describe these people anyway). There will be multiple specialties within any given cult. For instance, you've got the Lankhor Mhy sages that are all about staying indoors and classifying dusty books, while others are Indiana Jones type adventurers who go look for long lost artifacts in caves full of Chaos monsters. Once upon a time this would have been handled by several sub-cults, which I find incredibly annoying, almost to the point of being offensive. Nowadays, we can just say that there's diversity in any cult, guild, or other group. So yes, some are guards, some are hitwomen, and some are whirlwinds of blood and severed penises.

I'm sure someone can run heroquests as just straight up adventures in a parallel world, the same way, say, Call of Cthulhu investigators can suddenly have weird reality shifting experiences where they go to the Dreamlands or to Carcosa or whatever, in order to find some magic artifact to banish an Elder God or fight some other evil. In fact, I had previously asked specifically what the difference is between a heroquest and an "adventure in a strange place" in an older thread, from which @Joerg created a dedicated thread. That thread may be of help to others, but it mainly shows how I struggled to understand what a heroquest is/can be. I was initially very confused when reading the heroquest chapter in HQG, because that text (and other texts I've since read about the topic) do hint at heroquesting being much more than an "adventure in a strange place". It's not quite natural for me (and, I assume, most people) to dismiss half these texts and say "I don't understand it, so I guess I'll just treat the God Time as a parallel dimension set in the past and be done with it... everybody roll for initiative against Zorak Zoran!". It can be just as fun to treat it that way. In fact, it's possible that the Gamemaster Guide presents different "takes" on heroquesting based on the GM and players' familiarity/interest in mythology. And the same can be said about any other normal adventure, really: people interested in drama and storytelling would have profound underlying themes in their adventures, while others might just play it straight up "get the McGuffin, kill the monsters, save your clan". It's just a bit more complicated with heroquests because the rulebooks we have on the topic actively present it as something complex and deeply significant, but without giving people the basic knowledge to understand it. I mean, just look at some recent threads where Jeff actually came out and said "this myth is about this and that" and even experienced gamers were like "oh really? interesting! I didn't get that at first!". We need more of this meta/no-nonsense/101 sidebar content. Anyway, I was mostly sharing my own experience as a recent newbie so that other equally confused people don't feel like they're stupid (or, at least, can feel like they're not alone being stupid ), and even maybe hopefully remind Chaosium authors that this needs to be presented in a friendly way. No worries!

IMHO that's definitely the right way to run it for "street level" games where the PCs are initiates or lay members who are going along for the ride. At higher levels, however, the PCs are the ones starting the heroquests consciously so there's probably a lot less confusion about it (even if it can still be confusing, like, say, how experienced oneironauts still have to deal with the weirdness of dreams, in a hypothetical Inception-type setting). For my own RuneQuest games, I think that kind of crunch is still necessary IMHO to keep with the spirit of the system. Resources gathered during the preparation of the heroquest (when it's initiated and managed by the players) should be as quantifiable as the magic points of a wyter or the stats of an army. I like things to be consistent so when I want a rules light/narrative heavy system for my heroquests, I also want a rules light/narrative heavy system for the rest of the game anyway (and that's what HQG is for). Note that putting numbers and crunchy math on a specific bit of gameplay doesn't "intrude" on the storytelling, because those are two different things. Take RQ combat, for example, which is very crunchy. Some people might GM it in a very "dry and to the point" way, with rules-heavy dialogue ("roll to hit", "I do a critical", "failed parry, roll damage", "awesome: 11 points", "cool, the monster is down to 5 points, who's next?"), but others would GM it with suspenseful and dramatic scenes, using the numbers and rolls merely as the tapestry on which to weave the tale of an epic battle, its stakes, and its outcome. The reason we occasionally indulge in some crunchy system is to have the story be told to us as much as we are telling it. Not just you. It takes a minimum amount of familiarity with myths to be able to grok this whole thing. Trying to run a heroquest without knowing much about myths in general (or Gloranthan myths in particular) is like trying to improvise a guitar part on a blues song without knowing the structure of blues, or maybe even without really knowing how to play guitar. There's a bunch of basic 101 stuff that needs to be learned, like the reason/significance of the Storm and Sun pantheons being at odds, the role of the fertile Earth, etc. Often, this can be explained quite quickly (the clouds block the sun, the sun chases the rain, the earth wants both sunlight and water, etc.) but someone has to write it down somehow. We shouldn't set a barrier to entry for Gloranthan gaming which is "you need to read these 3 academic books on comparative mythology". I'm hoping that one day some RQ sourcebook (maybe the Gamemaster Guide?) will have this kind of "applied Gloranthan mythology 101" written plainly on the page... Maybe Sandy Petersen could write that, actually, he's great at explaining things simply, from scratch, in a total no-nonsense way.

My eBay notifications were triggered by some new listings this morning that are relevant to this thread. It's only a subset of the early Roots of Glorantha books (not the Moon Design reprints), and they seller is of course asking for a high price (although I'm not sure how high it is compared to the already high price of the originals? how pricey were they?). That would be interesting to see indeed. Once Chaosium has their POD e-store and pipeline up and running with the RQ classic books, it might be possible to see the Moon Design Roots of Glorantha books on there as POD, with a high price tag to respect Greg's wishes. I would only get one every year or so as a fancy birthday gift to myself, but I would probably get them eventually.

Yeah, that's what I mean when I mention the D&D "power curve". If that wasn't clear, that's my umbrella term for both the fact that character progression in F20 games makes you orders of magnitude better than you were only a few adventures before (vastly different from BRP power curve), and for the fact that this same character progression gives you access to special class mechanics that make the character even more heroic (vastly different from skill-based/classless systems like BRP). F20 games do indeed way more than give PCs more HP, or less chances to die. Therefore, giving more HP to RQ characters, or making house rules around knockout/death won't work to make RQ more like D&D in terms of feel/gameplay.

Biturian Varosh did But yes, I agree -- I don't use the rulebook terms "in-world" either (and attributed Biturian's language to an "incorrect translation"). I'm going with something a bit like this for my Bachad tribe saga game where the PCs start as kids. I figured that the Common Rune Spells are what most people know if they have been initiated into a cult for 3 years or more. So I divided the list by 3, and then further divided that by the number of seasons and notable holy days per year, to figure out how to hand them out. I can't remember what I ended up with (I don't have my notes with me here), but you can vaguely see where this goes.

It's about 40 pages for the new character creation rules (including the list of archetypes and talents), 20 pages for the combat/sanity rules, 10 pages for the pulp magic/gadgeteering rules, and another 10 pages for villains/mook rules. So that's about 80 pages (I had mistakenly counted the "Pulp Organizations" so that removes 20 pages). You can probably compress that to, say, 20 pages, if it's a bunch of random notes and ideas not meant to be usable by anybody but you. You can even compress this to zero pages if you just make it up in your head. I'm not saying RQ must be lethal. I'm saying RQ has lethal mechanics by design. That's not my opinion, it's a statement of the designers, which they have expressed many times over the years, and just, well, what everybody would figure out by just reading the rules. What I'm possibly hidebound about is that if you want a different gameplay (i.e: not fear for your character's life in every combat, regardless of the opponent's level), you can already use a different system. If you're looking for something with a D&D-like power curve and lethality level, I'm just confused why you wouldn't just pick 13th Age Glorantha because that's one of its core pillars and, frankly, its entire reason for existing. Trying to change one of the core pillars of RQ with 5 pages of house rules seems counter-productive to me (house rules are for tweaking things), and I'm not even sure it would be completely satisfying.... that is, unless you don't totally want a D&D-like gameplay, and instead want something more in between the two. Or even just want to tweak a couple things.

Haha no, Pulp Cthulhu stands as an excellent argument for what I said: it contains around 100 pages of custom rules to change the fundamental gameplay of CoC: archetypes with special feats, custom rules for rolling stats, "pulp talents", new luck rules, additional sanity rules, mook/villain rules, etc. That's what I meant by "force the GM to make so many house rules they will probably regret not using 13th Age or D&D or something else that was designed for that kind of gameplay specifically". Pulp Cthulhu is effectively a different game (and a great game too!). If the GM would not regret writing 100 pages of custom rules (maybe more, because there's cults and magic in RQ to deal with too) rather than picking a different game system, then by all means go for it! And post it online or sell it on the Jonstown Compendium! I'm sure a lot of people will be interested in adopting at least a few rules out of the whole... That kind of extensive system hack, while easy to start, is often hard to polish and finalize, and requires patient and willing players, however. IIRC, default CoC rules also let you do that. I think the only "ill effect" you can ever get while above 0 HP is when you suffer a major wound (more than half HP in damage in one hit), which makes your character fall prone and require a CON roll to stay conscious. But otherwise, you can merrily do whatever you want until you hit 0 HP (although at my table we do narrate the character limping, grunting, losing blood, etc. when they get low in HP). Pulp Cthulhu changes those rules only slightly: it removes the "major wound" tick box, but keeps the CON roll for when you get hit for a lot of damage. It also changes the rules for healing, so the heroes can recover faster (with an archetype feat to make it even faster). An RQ house rule to change the threshold or conditions for a character dying will lower lethality, but it will absolutely not magically change RQ to have the same power curve as D&D. It will not even make the characters any more resilient, because it would just change when they die, but not when they get taken out of combat. I think you may be confusing the treatment and the mechanics. You can run a game of D&D or Savage Worlds that is super gritty and dark, but it doesn't change the fact that PCs are soon going to be overpowered compared to armies of mooks and other normal NPCs. That's by design (SW even has rules for mooks!). Conan or Batman are dark and gritty, but they're still heroes and they're vastly superior to the rank and file warriors and thugs (well... usually.. there have been many many very different treatments of Batman!). The main questions are: do you want to play Batman or Conan with a system that mechanically, intrinsically, gives any random mook a chance to kill the hero? Or should danger come only from archvillains, with mooks mostly only adding pressure and point attrition? Do you want to play a hero that gets an order of magnitude better in the span of a few adventures, or do you want to play a protagonist who only got better by 30%? (or, in the case of CoC, a protagonist that can really only get worse!) You can change the treatment as much as you want, but these things are driven by the system's mechanics... so like I said, you either need extensive house rules, or, you know, a different system. These days, there are soooo many systems to choose from that I'm questioning the need to write more than a few pages of house rules but hey, that's just me, I like playing different systems.

Very possible yes. I frankly have no specific knowledge or reference for one way or the other being more effective... but we agree that upbringing and social norms will go a long way to make sure that, say, 90 or 95% of couples are following the clan's traditions. The OP was specifically about having a kid out of wedlock... so effectively "fooling around and stuff" and finding yourself pregnant. As I said, I don't think that's a big deal by itself, and it sounds like you agree? It's a big deal only for other reasons (same bloodline, enemy clan, etc.). I think it could also be a big deal if one of the parents belongs to a notable family, since the kid may 20 years later show up in a claim to some throne or land or magical item (and possibly after said kid has made sure all the other pretenders had unfortunate incidents).

I personally strongly disagree. In BRP games, the PCs are the protagonists, not the heroes (although they could be that if they're lucky). This is mainly evidenced by the fact that PCs health points and damage rolls don't increase that much from the baseline of a "normal" individual. In D&D, once you get up a couple levels, you already have three times as many HPs than a "normal" individual, and can routinely kill human guards or whoever in one blow. In RQ/BRP/etc., you might be an excellent and skilled fighter, but any combat is still going to be dangerous. That's a feature of both the system and the setting. If someone wants a D&D-like power curve, there's 13th Age for that... there's nothing wrong with it (both D&D and 13th Age are very fine games), but trying to retrofit the power fantasy of D&D into RQ is bound to either fail, or force the GM to make so many house rules they will probably regret not using 13th Age or D&D or something else that was designed for that kind of gameplay specifically. RQG p244. All spells require a POW resistance roll if they are directed at a target that doesn't consciously accept the spell. We've been over this already: just because some spells sadly specifically call for a POW resistance roll doesn't mean that the other spells don't (although many spells don't have a resistance roll because they don't target anybody in particular). We have also gone over how to effectively deal with beefed up Humaktis and such multiple times. There are a couple threads with a lot of good advice and insights. We can take it to those threads if there's anything new to this debate, but I doubt there is.

Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes: ...and: So my understanding is that: Having a kid between two members of the same bloodline is considered incest and the parents are in big trouble. Whether the kid is in trouble too (for instance it gets exiled along with the parents, or worse), or whether the kid is considered "innocent" in the matter (and therefore kept and raised inside the clan anyway) probably depends on the specific situation, and on the specific people being in charge of the ruling at the time. Having a kid between two members of the same clan (different bloodline) seems frowned upon, or actively discouraged, but it doesn't seem to be considered taboo to me ("largely exogamous" means to me that there's a minority of internal unions). If anything, it seems quite unrealistic to think that in a group of, say, 600 adults, there's never going to be two of them that are attracted to each other. Trying to prevent this from ever happening seems doomed to failure and to a number of nasty undercover affairs and associated scandals... but I could imagine the "guidelines" being stricter in a small clan than in a bigger clan. Different clans will have different traditions imprinted onto their children and teenagers, to a point where intra-clan unions are kept to a minimum by virtue of social dynamics. I'm thinking for instance of boys and girls in a clan being separated most of the time for their daily activities and chores, and having most of their mingling time with the opposite sex to be part of activities/festivities/sports events/etc. that are organized with some other select clans... thus vastly improving the chances of couples forming between the clans, rather than inside them. There's also the possibility that arranged marriages dominate anyway, in which case it's just simpler. So IMG having an affair or a kid inside the same clan is OK -- it's just uncommon. If such a situation is considered problematic, it's for other reasons: the two lovers are part of the same bloodline, or the two lovers belong to clans that are "forbidden" to get together, or one of the lovers had some kind of contractual obligation like a year marriage, or some other thing like that.

Not having character classes doesn't mean everybody's equivalent. Humakti and Babeester Gori are professional warriors. There are no character classes in real-life, but there are still professions. I'm gonna leave the serious combat to professional soldiers and bodyguards in real life, if they're around.

...unless you're the type of GM who doesn't make up NPC stat blocks anyway I've been making up NPC stats on the fly for all manners of crunchy and non-crunchy games for the past 15 years. Half the time I can't remember all the rules and spells and stuff so I make things up that are not even "properly" from the rulebook, but the more I'm familiar with a game, the closer it tends to be to the "real" stats of course. Having some cheat sheet is useful though. For GMs who don't want to/can't improvise stats, yeah, it's either intimidating or tedious to use HQG books for RQG games. But there's probably enough RQG scenarios out there already for them, so it's not like they're stuck -- the HQG books are simply a bonus.

Doesn't mean they aren't super super useful Congrats on the new release! It's going into my next batch DTRPG purchase.

The best introductory adventure IMHO is the one in the Quickstart booklet (which is good since it's the whole point of it). The adventure is called The Broken Tower and it's not only great, it's also a good jumping off point in case you later pick up the Core book and the GM screen pack, which contains other adventures in the same area. It's not a very lethal adventure, and the only real danger is in the final scene anyway. Depends... how did the characters die? (Dissolv's recommendations above are very good, and actually valid for most other RPGs too) If it was a fluke of the dice (the GM just rolled some awesome critical hits), then the GM can either fudge the rolls behind the GM screen or, if that's not acceptable, use a few house rules. For instance, it's a very common house rule that a character dies at the end of the next round when they reach 0 HP (instead of the end of the current round). This gives a little bit of time for the other PCs to run to them and perform healing. Remember that everybody has some healing magic, as part of the Common Magic spells. But as previously said, the RuneQuest designers and the majority of its players consider it a feature, and not a bug, that anybody can suddenly die from a (un)lucky blow. This makes players think twice before attacking anybody, and, instead, seek other ways to solve a problem (negotiation, stealth, etc.).

Ludospherik is where I found the Cults Compendium, if I remember correctly. NobleKnight, WayneBooks, and Shop On The Borderlands have all provided me with many old books in very good shape. For the rest, it's eBay.

On eBay I always see at least a couple items for almost any book from Classic RQ and Hero Wars / HeroQuest. A few (like the Glorantha Classic "Pavis & Big Rubble") have ridiculous price tags, but I think most of the rest is decent. Using Saved Searches helps, and making sure to look for, say, both "herowars" and "hero wars". But then again, there are the PDFs on Chaosium's website. I also agree that if you really have money and shelf place to spare after having bought the RQG books, the Sourcebook, and maybe the Guide to Glorantha, then The Coming Storm and The Eleven Lights are the best first books to get from the HQG line... that is, unless you're interested in checking out the HQG rules themselves, as a narrative and rules-light alternative to RQG's retro-crunch.

I'll second the live plays with Mike as the GM -- he's really good: just enough narration to get in the story, but short enough to keep those videos from going too long. As for Discord, there's an unoffical Chaosium Discord server, on which you'll find obviously people playing Chaosium games... there's also the Discord servers for a couple of CoC-related podcasts: Miskatonic University Podcast (scroll down and check out the Discord widget on the right), and the Good Friends of Jackson Elias (scroll down until you find the Discord icon).

Are you talking about the 3rd volume of the Red Cow saga (which, in this case, is indeed a HQ book) or the "Great Argrath Campaign" which, frankly, I'm not even sure if it's a setting book (like the Glorantha Sourcebook) or if it will have RQ stats in it ?