Lordabdul

It's a forum, on the internet... we all share our takes and somehow value them since we keep coming back So thanks for sharing, it is indeed useful! Wait, what, how exactly are you doing your estimates?! That sounds pretty bad-ass. Yes, that last sentence is what I understand is happening. One reason Heroquests are dangerous is because they're unpredictable, and one reason they're unpredictable is because you get "matched" with random people. So yes: if you are re-enacting some myth where Zorak Zoran is supposed to attack you, you will end up against some random troll somewhere/somewhen heroquesting as Zorak Zoran. But if there's none available, you might get matched with something else that "fits". Maybe instead you'll go against some other warrior or berserker figure, like Humakt or Storm Bull (i.e. some random person somewhere heroquesting as them, in a myth that's somewhat compatible). Or maybe instead you'll go against some other Darkness figure. Etc. Well if two persons keep running into each other at the local cafe because they realize they have similar shifts and tastes, that's not quite a reason to throw your hands at the cosmos and declare free will a fallacy. At worst, it's a premise for a lame romantic comedy. And given how everyone heroquests at the same time most of the time (Sacred Time), that vastly increases the odds of getting the same people again. Actually, I think the whole reason behind Sacred Time is that whoever is in charge of the cosmos (Arachne Solara?) figured that it's a lot easier to play "connect the dots" if all the dots are playing at the same time. Conversely, it makes heroquests during Sacred Time easier because the cosmos is more receptive to your trying to go beyond the veil, and these quests end up being most consistent (and therefore easier) because all the participants and connections tend to be the same year after year. So Sacred Time is the cosmos' incentive for people to make its job easier.... in comparison, heroquests at more "random" times (like when a tribe suddenly needs something from the God Time) are bound to be super weird and unpredictable.

The first edition of Delta Green from the mid-90s has a very "X-Files meets Cthulhu" vibe to it, so if you track down the original books (Delta Green, Countdown, and Eyes Only, in particular), you'll get exactly that in terms of the sourcebooks, but with only one adventure AFAIK that deals directly with the grays. Spoilers follow:

I personally run with the same house rule than everybody (dead at the end of next round), but I did mention the possibility of something like this (dead after CON rounds). Interesting to see someone running with it. It has the (maybe desired?) effect that bigger monsters will take longer to die. For example, dinosaurs would take more than 30 rounds to die, unless someone puts them out of their misery... do you have anything for this, i.e. a "threshold" past which the dinosaur would die immediately? I think that threshold could probably be "minus CON in HP"... so if you manage to put the dinosaur at -31HP it dies immediately (assuming CON 31). That requires tracking negative HP, but at least you can indeed put someone out of their misery. I'm also curious about the extra bookkeeping. Counting CON rounds until death is simple enough, but actually reducing CON every round has side-effects: CON affects HP, so as they lose CON, their maximum HP also goes down. If you cast the spirit magic Heal spell on the victim, you have to consider that they only gain HP back up to their current (lower) maximum HP. Do you play it like that? CON also affects ENC, so after you've cast Heal, they might not be able to carry their full loadout to go to safety. Do you also track that? CON and damage are also intertwined in other situations such as drowning, asphyxiation, and poison, but I haven't looked too closely at what your rule would mean there. I'm personally a big fan of re-using similar mechanics from one situation to another, so if I wanted to lower the mortality rate of RQ characters, I would probably use a kind of "Saving Throw" mechanism similar to the mechanics for drowning and asphyxiation: Every round after you reach 0 HP or less, you roll for CONx5. After the 5th round, decrease the multiplier (x4, x3, x2, x1). On a failure, you die. If you take further damage, make an extra roll. If you reach -CON HP, you die automatically. ....or something like that.

Random comments from what I can tell from the rulebooks: If the spirit only has CHA and POW, it's probably some kind of animal spirit or other natural phenomenon spirit. These types of spirits tend to only have one function and, therefore, few spells. The spirit is not sentient or intelligent, and can't perceive anything from inside the onyx stone, so it really only acts as a spellcaster for your Strength 2 spell. The character must be in physical contact to order the spirit to cast the spell. You and the GM may want to agree on the set of "conditions" that were put on the Binding Enchantment when it was created... maybe anybody touching the sword's pummel can contact the spirit inside, or maybe it's only when you whisper "Taco cat", or maybe it's only the character can use the item. It may become relevant at some point in play. You and the GM may also want to agree on who did the spirit binding. If that NPC dies, the spirit is freed. That would be a very lame thing to do to your character, but who knows, maybe your GM wants the option to be mean in the future . In theory, that spirit counts against your character's limit for bound entities (CHA/3). You can tap into the bound spirit's POW and use that as magic points to fuel spells, so it's an extra MP storage, too. If your character has the "Control (whatever that spirit is)" spell, they can release the spirit, order it around a bit, and put them back in the sword's pummel. There's probably not a lot of reasons to do that, since you run the risk of losing it, but who knows. According to RQG Bestiary, spirits without INT typically have less than 50% in Spirit Combat skill. That's relevant if, as per my previous point, you want to release the spirit from the stone. On the other hand, the RQG Bestiary also says that when in doubt, give POWx5 for the Spirit Combat score.... so who knows? I guess it can be whatever. In which case it could be quite an effective sidekick for Spirit Combat. If, as David Scott says, you were to add more spells in that stone after visiting a shaman (and doing whatever side quest the shaman asks), I would probably explain it as "the shaman merged the stone spirit with some other spirits who knew other spells"... as opposed to "the spirit learned new spells"... (because, as others pointed, it has not INT). Actually, my understanding of "learning" a new spirit spell is pretty much having bits of spirits merged into you anyway... (the whole terminology of "learning" and "forgetting" is not a good choice IMHO). If the PCs were to try and do it themselves (maybe they have a shaman in the group), the GM would have to figure out how that works, though. Maybe @David Scott has some more suggestions? I would probably rule that they have to find a spirit with the new desired spell, defeat it in Spirit Combat, take out the old spirit from the stone, hold it in place with Control (Entity), handwave some spirit merging mumbo jumbo (at this point the shaman might have rolled enough dice, but the GM might decide on one last roll here), and finally put the "enhanced" spirit back in the stone. I can't find any spirit with only POW and CHA in the Bestiary that we could use as an example, but that kind of spirit shows up all over the place in NPC stat blocks. Just like your character, these NPCs have bound spirits in objects. These spirits tend to only have a nickname, if any, and no description beside maybe the description of the object. That's probably because they never get out of the object, and even if they did, none of them know Visibility anyway. Most of those bound spirits have zero or one spell (in the case of zero spells, it's just for supplying extra magic points). In some cases, they can have a handful or a dozen points of spirit magic (up to CHA). So I guess anything goes. I think it depends more on the author than on any worldbuilding or rules considerations. Occasionally, I see that a bound spirit has a bit of fluff to it. So for instance you can give your bound spirit a bit of personality, or some roleplay hook, like "the spirit wants the stone to be struck against a rock once every night". One interesting example of a spirit with only POW and CHA is the Colymar Tribal Wyter. I'm surprised that it has no INT, since it's supposed to be able to talk and show initiative? I wonder if that's an oversight?

You're probably thinking of Chaosium's RedBubble store, but the Clearwine map isn't on there apparently. You can do that with the PDF: open it in Acrobat Reader, click on the "arrow" button in the toolbar, click on the picture (it will become all blue), right click, select "Copy Image". Now, open some image program (like, say, Paint, on Windows), and paste the image in there (CTRL+V). Save as a JPG file. It won't be high-resolution enough to have a good quality poster-sized print, however (the resolution of the PDF is, of course, set for Letter-sized printing) so you might see the pixels on the final paper. Also, the labels and location names are all embedded in the picture, so you won't be able to get rid of those. Chaosium would have to release the map specifically separately... which they might. There's been several requests recently about releasing "player versions" of maps.

For what it's worth, this is absolutely the way to GM it in my opinion: the player gets to roll, but they don't know how much POW the enemy has exactly. I usually also do a quick narration to give a vague idea if the player's roll was close or wide of the mark.

Rules aren't the opposite of fun, otherwise we would all be playing Amber Diceless (and, well, arguably, everybody should be playing Amber Diceless at least once!)... or, even just straight up freeform improv. Instead, what are rules for? They give structure and texture to a storytelling game. I can hand-wave rules away, modify them, or ignore them. I frequently do all of this. But the farther I depart from what the game was supposed to be about, the less reasons I have of playing that game in the first place. If I find myself adding lots of crunchy rules to a rules-light game, I might as well play the same story with a crunchier system. If I find myself ignoring rules often because they get in the way of the story, I might as well play that story using a lighter system, or at least a more streamlined one. And, depending on the players, changing the system might affect the story anyway, but that's another topic, and we're already hijiacking the current topic. You could slightly better (IMHO) re-express your point in the form of "is your game consistent, or is it story driven?". That is, given the same situation ("X is trying to do Y with Z"), but different narrative contexts (plot B vs Act 1 climax), are you going to make very different rolls? To some degree, all games are at least a bit story driven. For example, nobody except the purest simulationists will do anything about fatigue or the effects of heat until that one adventure where the PCs have to trek for a week through the Forbidden Pits Of Devil's Inferno, because then that's a plot element. Other games completely embrace this story driven aspect, like HeroQuest, where it's actually less about X doing Y with Z, and more about the fact that it's a climax (which, by the way, recreates the narrative tropes where something is super hard to do for the hero at the end of Act 1, but is super easy to do several times in a row in the middle of Act 3). Different game systems might be in different spots along this axis, but a particular GM's style will then move it further either way. I have played in a couple campaigns where the GM used a simulationist (crunchy) system but kept hand-waving things away to make the story go a certain way. I wished that GM had chosen a different system because what some people might consider "more fun", I thought was "inconsistent" (and, once, borderline "I don't even know what I'm supposed to roll for anymore"). You spend time and points to make a character that, say, will be fast, but it doesn't matter as much because you'll be able to move fast enough if the story warrants it... why even play with a system that models character movement speeds then? It often felt like "it's more fun if you can move fast enough to do X in this scene" was actually really the GM not wanting to deal with the consequences of the character not being able to do X, which IMHO could have been just as fun, or the GM not wanting to say they should have advanced the story past this entire scene instead of playing it out. Anyway, sorry, I keep making this thread drift away. I'll try to shut up now

Welcome! You might not have to do it again: https://www.cradleofheroes.net/ https://basicroleplaying.net/rqg/

As far as I can tell, in RQG, there's nothing special happening when changing your Statement of Intent, so by RAW, it doesn't cost anything to drop what you're doing to run and Heal a dying comrade. However, there are still problems: As mentioned previously, there's the difference being mortally wounded on SR10 and being mortally wounded on SR3. Even ignoring every rule except movement, that means someone would have to be within 6 meters from the victim if they're struck on SR10, compared to being able to come rescue a friend from as far as 21 meters away if they're struck on SR3. Or possibly 3 and 18 meters respectively if you count that it takes 1 SR to cast the spell (depends if you're casting Rune magic or Spirit magic), but hey, I said "ignoring every rule except movement" so let's not go into details 😛 In many cases, all the other PCs will be engaged in Melee, so they need to disengage first in theory. That takes a round to happen, more or less, but it's not clear from RAW when exactly the PC is free to run to their friend's side. Using MGF to let a character disengage from melee and run 15 meters in the span of a couple Strike Ranks seems like an incredible abuse of MGF. There is obviously a limit to what a GM should do in a given situation, no? So let's say in that case, too bad, the character dies. But what about 10 meters with 3 SRs to spare? Or 7 meters and 4 SRs to spare? If only there was some guideline to help GMs draw the line in a sensible place.... oh wait Recommending that character death is mostly, or even partially, reliant on MGF is incredibly non-welcoming to newbie GMs and players in my opinion. MGF is just another name for "Rule Zero" or "The Golden Rule" and other names for the same principle, which is that the GM should always feel free to override the rules in special situations or in service of the story. Which means that if we bring up MGF in rules discussions, it should be accompanied by the special circumstances that called for MGF. If we invoke MGF regardless of the situation's circumstances, that's a called a house rule. Stated another way: it's one thing to use MGF for special situations, but it's another thing to have to rely on MGF for what is arguably a very common situation (everyone is in melee, and someone gets badly impaled). If everybody is using MGF for this kind of mortal wound situation, it means the rules themselves aren't maximally fun to begin with, surely? Hence, the house rules. Or second editions of rulebooks. Or whatever. Another thing that some people miss is that it's rare (and, I'll argue, undesirable) that there's only one rule affecting one situation. Rules form an ecosystem that is supposed to work as a whole. So for instance, sure, you have a house rule that the character dies only at the end of the next round, or on the next round on the same SR as when they were struck. That's fine, and that fixes problem #1 above. But your work is not done because there's problem #2 (all PCs being engaged in melee). You potentially need to figure out which SR the character is "free" to go help the fallen PC after disengaging, so you know how much time they have before the PC dies. Maybe you're not using Strike Ranks at all? In which case you need to figure out how your action economy works, and whether allies have, on average, a decent shot at saving a friend. Or maybe you don't even want to bother with all this and your house rule is that when you reach 0HP, you die after CON rounds or CON minutes unattended. That's simple, and it still forces PCs to not leave someone behind, but it means there's less incentive to heal someone right away, which means the player whose PC is injured might have to wait longer, excluded from combat, than with the other crunchier rules. And I'm not even going into the fact that the mortality rate of a specific system does have a big impact on how this system "feels" and whether we like it or not. So again, leaving that up to MGF has less to do with dealing with special situations, and more to do with "make your own rules"...

I'm OK with the idea that assistants can't spend as much time in the Spirit World as a full shaman, except for those who spend a lot of energy (i.e. Rune Points) for it. There's a balance between "assistant shamans should only have a fraction of the powers of a shaman" and "assistant shamans need to be satisfyingly playable". That line probably varies from one GM/group to another, of course. One hour of spirit travel seems OK to me for assistants. Two hours at the very most. Maybe shamans have a special version of the Discorporate Rune spell that has a base duration of 1 hour, or 1d2 hours, or whatever, that they only teach to their assistants. There are many many ways to go about this... we'll see what Chaosium picks when the big books come out.

It's a very intriguing concept for an RPG book, potentially even innovative, but I'm wondering what the emphasis will be here: "Multiple ways to use it in a campaign" is a given for any sourcebook. You get various plot hooks, multiple options for what an NPC or faction might be up to in 1625, or what might happen in the near future if that NPC or faction's agenda was to go one way or another. That's not really "YGWV" in my opinion, that's just a good RPG sourcebook. "Multiple ways to interpret it" can potentially go into deeper variations seldom seen in usual RPG material. For example: detailing how a location might vary if this or that cult is in control, with a couple alternate histories explaining the different ways to get to these different present states... or showing how moving a location here or there on the map can create different story opportunities... that's "YGWV" to me. Whichever it is, I'm looking forward to it!

Delaying death until the next round sounds like a decent house rule. Otherwise, the odds of surviving a mortal wound on SR10 are vastly lower than those of surviving a mortal wound on SR3.

Elsewhere I was saying dumb things that might belong here, in particular that Rune Magic is effectively someone casting some magic ahead of time and letting you use it. And that is effectively "Spell Trading On Steroids". And we all know that Spell Trading is an Issaries thing, so Issaries effectively gets a cut on every single worship ceremony in the universe. Most Gods don't even realize this but Issaries is now ten times more powerful than any other deity or entity. He and his cult have been secretly manipulating the history of Glorantha from the shadows, and he might have to put his foot down if the HeroWars get a bit too out of hand.

So the Bat becomes bigger and more powerful with every passing season of devouring people? But here's the catch: the Bat's behaviour, allegiances, and general intelligence is driven by who makes up the Bat. So if you make the Bat devour too many Orlanthi hillbillies, the Bat would effectively become Orlanthi and, err, that's obviously not what the Red Emperor wants. So for every hundred enemies devoured, the Lunars have to feed three hundred of their own people to the Bat to keep things "balanced" in their direction. And maybe a hundred or so Chaotic creatures, just to keep things interesting. And that's why the Lunars don't just send the Bat everywhere all the time.

Going on adventures for almost a week every season (6 days for 5 seasons) takes up pretty much 10% of the year, so you're still good there. It might not be enough if you play very long adventures, or if you play in "real time"... in which case you have to make the shaman NPC feature more prominently in a majority of adventures, so that "adventuring" does not equate "being away from the shaman". The entire idea of playing an assistant shaman without having said shaman feature prominently seems like missing the point to me anyway, even if you follow the "one adventure per season" structure, so I don't think it would be a problem for me. Like I said before, yes, the short duration of the Rune spell is still a problem IMHO (and why I would prefer the shamanic ability route). I had misunderstood what you meant about sacrificing POW: it's necessary in order to get an RP pool big enough to spend multiple of them on Extension. So yes, I understand now, apologies. Rune magic isn't divine in RQG -- that's an RQ3 concept. In RQG, Rune magic can be handed down from spirit cults too, for instance. It's just that it's most commonly given by deities. The way I understand it is: Sorcery is manipulating the Runes directly yourself. As with many DIY endeavours, there's a steep learning curve... but once you're past it, you can do cool stuff not many others can. That's the one that should effectively be called Rune Magic Spirit Magic is putting something inside you that can cast the magic for you, so you don't have to it yourself. It's effectively Parasitic Magic or Gadget Magic. Rune Magic is joining a commune where someone/something powerful has cast the magic ahead of time (in some cases... literally!), and lend it to you in return for benefits like worshipping. The community's centre could be a deity, or a powerful spirit, or even a hero maybe. It's effectively Communal Magic, or Spell Trading On Steroids.

And you didn't mention it, or post a picture of it, in your own Wind Whispers #3 newsletter, which included the news item about Campaign Coins? Tsk tsk tsk 😋

That's actually an idea I really like -- at least after having thought about it for only 5 minutes When I originally read the rules, I thought it would have been simpler that the "spirit evading" skill was simply Spirit Travel (the same way that to avoid trucks crossing the road while in a car chase you roll under your Driving skill)... which means Spirit Dance goes away, but could indeed be replaced with a skill that can handle both discorporating and reincorporating (if needed). Mmmhh. The downside however is that anybody learning the skill can discorporate, which maybe removes some of the exclusivity of spirit travel.

The spell can already be extended I think? It's just that you have to pay double: extra RPs for Extension (to last longer than 15min), but also extra RPs to go farther out into the Spirit World (more than 5km). So you only need to add the ability to cast it on others.... although it's only an "easy fix" if the shaman teaches their apprentices by only driving around on the empty parking lot, so to speak, and never heading out on the road. But it's also an "easy fix" to change the spell's duration, or add MP boosting to add duration or let you roll for how many minutes/hours you're discorporate, etc. Ultimately, house rules are easy to come up with... what's harder is making sure you don't break something else

There is actually a long running legend that Joss Whedon created Firefly out of a Traveller campaign. It's a great twist, and if it was me, it would be the start of some thriller storyline.... the cryogen'ed NPC is a long missing politician or personality that has been thought dead for a decade. Or it's Jason Bourne (or someone like it). Or it's a few of Immortan Joe's wives (or, again, someone like them). Or it's not a cryogen'ed person, but some Super Important Cargo(tm), like some proof of a world leader's horrible corruption, or some proof that said world leader has been replaced by an evil clone years ago, or it's a bunch of blueprints that some corporations have been desperately looking for, or...

Heh this is starting to sound less like Master of Orion and more like EVE Online or the Elite series! (where your reputation with various factions indeed go up and down as you pick and choose your missions). Note that these games indeed give you a default spaceship and loadout at the start, or after you get blown up. Also check out Scum & Villainy, which is using the same system and framework as Blades In The Dark. They have very interesting mechanics for managing your ship, dealing with your patron and clients, and picking missions and what happens in the downtime between them.

I also can't recommend it enough that the game premise includes a common "patron" for all the player characters (government agency, private mining company, military, "politically neutral" trading organization that spans the entire universe, etc). Not only is it liberating, like Ian said (because a lot of stuff is just given to you), it also greatly simplifies character creation and other Session Zero activities, because now the players have a baseline to work from, and will form a much more cohesive group.

I do! Which is why you need to make plushies of the little fella! (Chaosium people: a Crimson Bat plushie! When?)

Politics and worldbuilding? Difficult? Nah How big is the universe? Vast stellar space opera factions like in Traveller? Or hard sci-fi limited to a solar system or two, like in The Expanse? For a big space opera universe, the usual trope here is that every planet will have different politics anyway... you'd have your usual "fringe systems" that are basically anarchist or communist or weird feudal totalitarian or whatever. You'd have the obligatory cyber-empire with some semi-immortal Transcendence Pope at the helm, or something like that. Then some dying Republic faction. And so on. In this case, unless you can justify that hundreds of solar systems can all have the same society (hint: you can't, unless you make FTL travel super super awesome), there's frankly no point trying to define a single utopian society. Unless the premise is that all characters are from the same world. I assume you're more in a hard sci-fi setting where only parts of the solar system are colonized, or the setting is somehow focused on one system somewhere in the galaxy, with some plot device to explain why everybody's trapped there (maybe this is a system that was colonized by a Generation Ship that arrived in the time of the characters' parents). In this case take a look at The Expense and Coriolis and so on. For example, in The Expanse, the Earth, while far from a utopia, does have universal income and housing, farming communes, and etc. The Martians on the other hand consider the Earthers lazy, having everything handed down to them... that's because Martians are more or less forced to serve in various "useful" roles in their society, which is some kind of engineer-driven communist state that is entirely focused on making their planet livable and sustainable. And Belters have their own micro-societies in various asteroid or moon colonies... so the Expanse Martian model here could work if you're in a setting where everybody is centered around a recently colonized far-away world: everybody is taken care of, but everybody has to work for the communal goal.

Yeah the reason Star Trek is set in a post-scarcity society is mainly because of the existence of replicators, so having that kind of technology widely available would help sell the "utopian future" thing. But really, IMHO there's a basic flaw in the OP: Trying to make any kind of narrative work while avoiding any political message is doomed to failure: everything is political. You may not put anything political on purpose in there, but it will definitely transpire. For example: Is your ideal society providing universal income? Great! So there's still money? Markets? Is it really capitalism with a dose of democratic socialism? Is your ideal society based on the democratization of replicator technology? Great! People can create their food and nobody is starving! Well, maybe? How common is the replicator technology? As common as a fridge? So there's still a small part of the population who don't get one? Why? Do they refuse? Or does the government only give replicators based on some criteria? Can you use a replicator to build a house, or can it only build small things? If so, how do people buy houses? If you still need to pay somehow for a house, are there still homeless people, but it's just that they don't starve because they have a replicator to create their food? Where do they plug it in? Is there free electricity, or self-regenerating power cells, or what else? So maybe the homeless people do starve? Etc... I'm obviously going way too much into details here but this shows how there will be a political message somewhere. Heck, I even disagree strongly to how political messages are "detrimental to a good story". Every well-known story out there, from Star Trek, Star Wars, the X-Men, Superman, Harry Potter, Totoro, and whatever else is strongly political at its core. If you can't spot the political message in these stories, you didn't get these stories. So I would actually recommend that you embrace whatever political message you feel the most strongly about. Now it doesn't mean that you need to make everything political. For instance, Star Trek vastly glossed over anything regarding the consequences of replicator technology, doesn't go into too many details about how society works without any money in it, etc. Heck, it's possible the Star Trek setting was vastly designed out of convenience to avoid having to explain too many things, and only made an unintentional political statement there (but if you know Roddenberry, you very much know it was intentional). Which leads me to the last point: do you want to make things simple to keep the mechanics simple, or to keep the world itself simple? For example, you mentioned money: you don't have to eliminate money if you don't want to.... you can have a world where money exists, but is inconsequential to the players and their characters: It could be that your game's premise is that everybody is wealthy! Boom, done. It could be that your game's trading mechanics are high level... for instance, check Call of Cthulhu 7ed's Credit Rating rules, where you get a "cash threshold" that basically says: if you're spending less than this amount, it's peanuts for your character so don't bother tracking that. It could be that your game hides the minutiae of economics under a layer of gameplay mechanics that are a lot more interesting to your players. For example, if you fly a certain spaceship, the expenses for maintaining that spaceship (and its crew) are all bundled in mechanic that is maybe not even about money: it could be about completing enough missions of a certain "Danger Rating" every year or something (and this translates to earning enough money for everyone to be fed and entertained and taken care of on board). So, err, anyway, sorry for the long message, hopefully it's helpful.

I think you two are talking about different things. The rules do state that you can keep sacrificing POW points to get Rune points even if you have learned all the spells... in which case you get a Rune point and no spell. What the rules don't say is what happens if your character has, say, CHA 8, but belongs to a cult that offers 12 Rune spells. Once you have filled up your limit (8 Rune points and 8 Rune spells), can you sacrifice a POW point to get a spell without getting a Rune point? (8 Rune points, 9 Rune spells) That's up for debate, but it's also somewhat theoretical because not many characters would get in this position. I'm not sure what you're arguing for, here? Yes, belonging to more than one cult is expensive, and yes spending your POW like crazy will reduce your chances. So... err, don't do that? Or maybe (if you started late on the shamanic path) it means you'll be an assistant for a couple more years than someone who starts at a young age? I really don't see a problem here. The only problem I see is the duration one, where an assistant using the Discorporation Rune spell only gets to have fun for 15min unless they spend points in Extension, in addition to spending additional points for going farther than 5km. That's bound to make any field trip very expensive but hey, maybe that represents some in-world reality of shaman apprenticeship that I'm not aware of. I'm a bit surprised by this, too: I interpreted the rules for Discorporation as requiring two rolls: one roll under any appropriate Rune to cast the spell, and one roll under Meditate as per the spell's description. Are you saying that the rules' text should be interpreted instead as the Meditate roll replacing the Rune roll?