Lordabdul

Oh yes good call. When I was writing "Bird Training" earlier I was thinking that there must be a more correct term for this, but I was too lazy to look it up (I should have known given that there's a birds of prey tourist show here on the mountain that I have seen a few times!)

Oh right, sorry Yes, poor wording on my part.

Like many things with RPGs, it's very possible that a lot of people house-ruled this away

How big is the sandbox? That is: is it set across more than half of Sartar, or is it set in a small corner (a couple valleys) ? If it's in a small corner, it might be possible to more or less easily convert between the 2 times, depending on what the focus of the sandbox is. If it's a wide sandbox, then yeah you have to pick a date. Another question is: do you actually have any strong themes to your sandbox? What do you want the stories to be about? You might realize that one date works a lot better than another? All things being equal, like I said I think our goal should be to provide more material to newcomers, and help grow our community (and Chaosium's audience and therefore revenue and therefore longevity of the RQ line). It seems to me that post-1625 better achieves that.

I disagree: the guard succeeded in his search (heard or saw or smelt something), the assassin succeeded in his hiding. But yes, it depends on how you play the guard in the rest of the scene. I don't consider the guard having an advantage here, but you could change the interpretation to "the guard saw that some object had been moved from its usual spot" for instance. People should always feel free to make up house rules or on-the-spot-calls for tricky situations, but I was striving to show exactly how to interpret the rules as written.

Interesting, thanks! But I don't think it's worth it publishing untested rules in a published book... posting them (for now) as an extra resource on your blog/official website seems more appropriate to me. Or even just leaving them here as you did. These rules also smell a bit too much of HQ's style to me.... I have some tentative RQG rules for playing kids too that I think may be more "integrated" with RQ's philosophy (they're partially based on the aging rules from CoC/BRP), and, more importantly, allow for a season-by-season growth into adults (that is: they're designed for interacting with adults while being kids, and for gradually ending up where adult characters are when you reach the age of normal RQG starting characters). However, I have only playtested them by myself by making a few sample characters and doing mock improvements, so they have no real value so far... I'll try to dust my notes up, see what I can steal from your suggestions here, and send that to you in the near future in some form or other if you're interested. Hah well sadly I'm no expert in HQ since I have never played or GMed HQ! (although it might happen in the summer, so I'm getting interested in HQ rules again). Joerg is, as always, the most knowledgeable of our crew! (that's why we hired him, right?) Also, I am definitely eagerly awaiting Peggy and Shawn's book (I was on record saying it was my #1 "looking forward to read" book of the upcoming month), but I'll reserve revealing my thumbs' orientations until after they have been able to turn a few pages (even though I have no doubt it will be an excellent read).

I'm not saying it's outlandish or weird. Joerg however indicated that he "wasn't prepared for it" and that it put him in a "quandary". I suppose it depends on how the player is using it, what the campaign framework and genre was, etc. Generally speaking, I think you can probably agree that HQ character creation requires closer scrutiny than the more classic character creations where picking things from the Player's Handbook only requires minimal GM oversight? It's not a criticism... I'm just saying that I'm more anxious and suspicious of my own GM capabilities when it comes to HQ/FATE/etc. character creation than other more guided and/or restricted systems. Thanks! That might indeed be very helpful.

It feels very board-gamey for a narrative game, yes. AFAICT HQ2/HQG removed it and replaced it with a simpler counting of successes and failures? It's not so much back in the QW SRD as much as it offered again as a rule.... I think QW-based games are free to include either the "Scored Contests" (HQ2 extended contests), "Extended Contexts" (HQ1 extended contests) and/or "Chained Contests" (new to the SRD? I'm not sure). I would argue that it would be overkill for a QW-based game to include all three, and instead the game should just pick the one that fits the genre better... but I could be wrong, I'm not familiar enough with HQ in general. But I guess it does mean the bid system might be back in some of the upcoming QW games, yeah, if that's what you mean. That's actually another thing I'm a bit worried about... and the reason I'm asking all those questions is because I may run my first HQG game this summer. Half the group I trust coming up with reasonable abilities, but I'm expecting a couple of the players to come up with outlandish or weird ability ideas. On the one hand I want to let them do what they want as much as possible, but on the other hand I don't want to get stuck with a power that breaks things or sends the game into a whole different genre. The whole point of systems like HQ or FATE is to let players' imaginations run wild, and out of the beaten path of most other systems (especially class/archetype-based systems). I'm familiar with systems like GURPS or HERO which similarly allow these crazy character concepts but using more-or-less strict mechanics to achieve that.... so because of the point-based character creation and genre sandboxing, there's a limit to what the players can choose. HQ relies solely on the GM and players' common sense, foresight, and understanding of the setting and genre tropes to limit what abilities can be chosen. It's... a bit intimidating to not have any guard rails.

Gaaaah I'm twice blind and stupid! Thanks in quadruple! I shall hide away in shame. Apparently I'm not clever or literate enough to play HQ.

Wait sorry am I getting my Sartar Kings all mixed up? Yes, I got mixed up between the 2 stories. Damn those similar sounding names!

I like that better indeed! Seriously, I was wondering for a second if "duplicity" might have been "diplodocus" auto-corrected by the author's writing software... but there's no diplodocus in the RQ Bestiary...

Exactly, but that's my problem: if the player is new to Glorantha, I don't want to spend 20 minutes doing a boring and half-assed explanation of what so and so did in the God time. I could (with some preparation) compress that to a 5 minute list of the most important stuff, but that's effectively an oral spell list, more or less. Leingod's suggestion to look into S:KoH for such a list works perfectly for me at this point (it hadn't occurred to me to look at the Rune Affinities sections for this kind of information). Now I'm mostly concerned about people picking up HQG as their first Gloranthan game. That is, if both the GM and the player are new to Glorantha. The information that the GM gets from the HQG rulebook is barely enough to make up something useful for anybody but the most confident and imaginative people. Actually, now that I think about it, I'm having flashbacks of when I picked the original HeroWars book (not knowing anything about Glorantha) and having absolutely no idea what to do with it (there was no KoDP or Prince of Sartar webcomic back then for a more user-friendly introduction to the setting...)

"Duplicity" was the name of the dinosaur. Part of a trio of dinosaurs owned by a Lunar general, named Felicity, Duplicity, and Trinity.

Nice surprise to see Jeff drop by here again! Thanks a lot! I can recognize bits of these texts from the usual main sources, but this specific combination of paragraphs, along with a few new extra bits, seems new. Is that something you wrote for some upcoming book, like the Campaign book maybe? Nice, I think this is one of the new bits of information I hadn't seen before. And this was one of my many interrogations, wondering if I should have a permanent garrison in/near Alone, or just a temporary camp or confiscated building as needed when Lunars have business in town... having someone else take these kinds of decisions really helps GM preparation

Interesting... I thought this was just a straightforward HQG book.... why make it also into a QuestWorlds book? Because you have custom house-rules for playing kids and a few other things? Also, the capitalization of "Heroquest" is incorrect in that first header there (I'm available for more proofreading )

The reason I didn't suggest Animal Lore is that it seems to be more about knowing what animals look like, what tracks they leave, what's their habitat, what they eat, etc. But what we want is to be able to train the animals, i.e. take them out of their natural habitat, tame them, make them do stuff they wouldn't otherwise. I see it as a similar thing to the difference between a botanist (who knows how to recognize and where to find plants) and a chef (who knows how to cook them). And RQG uses the Ride skill to train animals for that, so that's another reason to use a Bird-related skill for training birds. But I can totally understand if someone wants to avoid adding more skills and splitting experience/training points. AFAICT, RQ3 required both skills for riding animals? You need Animal Lore at >50%, and Ride at >25%. So the equivalent here would be that you would require both Animal Lore and Bird Training.

It does sound like you're insinuating something here 😄 Do you have any references for Tarkalor being involved in those Nochet assassinations? What good would Tarkalor get from ordering the killing of Jarosar's daughter, for example? I'm gonna say Tarkalor had nothing to do with it... ...although an interesting conspiracy theory would be something similar to the story of pretty much every CIA operation from the 70s and 80s: the Lunars help Tarkalor rise to power in order to get rid of previous anti-Lunar Kings (so Tarkalor is only indirectly involved... maybe the Lunars were more "thorough" than he thought), but after a few years it turns out that the new King they helped get to power is even more anti-Lunar than the previous one, and comes back to bit them hard. A day in the life of "lordabdul reads a message from joerg": "What's a Night Jumper?".... (checks various PDFs, 2 minutes pass)... "ah, yeah, Sartar Magical Union... hadn't read that yet... oh well let's read it now" Twenty minutes later: "Who's house Norinel again?" (checks PDFs again, 5 minutes pass) "ah yeah, right. Wait, they have troll bodyguards?" (searches a whole bunch of PDFs, without success... 10 minutes pass) Ok, well, that's one sentence down, after half an hour! Yay! Only 5 more sentences to go! Is Saronil the "prince" mentioned on Queen Norina's death? ("[Norina] was killed by Sartarite assassins seeking to avenge the death of their prince"). I was wondering about that while I was checking out House Norinel earlier... Norina was killed in 1551. Saronil is marked as King of Sartar until 1552 in the GS Feathered Horse Queens and Sartar Kings dynasty diagrams... but the GS Sartar King list shows that Saronil died in 1550, which works better if that's indeed who those Sartarite assassins were avenging. Are the dynasty diagrams wrong? (it also says that Saronil died "rescuing his granddaughter"... I'm not sure who that is? Did Arkillia's "other suitors" threaten the life of Saronil's family during their expedition, meaning to not just kill him, but his whole household too? mmmh)

Ah nice, I had missed that somehow... thanks!

Is there an actual list of Rune magic spell suggestions that I missed? Or are you using RuneQuest for that, or making your own list?

Awesome! Where did you get this miniature from?

If there's one thing that Glorantha does, it's that its scope and depth makes it easy for a GM to feel inadequate or unprepared, and not running the game "right", yes. The mantra of "YGWV" is awkwardly trying to address that but is only marginally successful as far as I'm concerned. When it comes to my own experience with this, what I realized is that I was mistakenly being anxious about GMing Glorantha "right" in terms of having all the correct facts and cultures and history and NPCs and such when... really it wasn't about it. It was just being anxious about GMing Glorantha "right" in terms of successfully making my players like the setting as much as I do. And succeeding at that has only a passing correlation with getting all the canon right. In comparison, I ran a Star Wars campaign a few years ago for a group where a couple of the players were big Star Wars fans, one of them a qualifiable absolute fanboy. Virtually zero anxiety. Because I don't really like Star Wars and I don't care about Star Wars. If I get something wrong, they'll correct me, we change this and that, and keep playing. It's a lot easier when you don't care that much about the setting, and only care about making the players happy and entertained Common misconception: you're conflating the hopelessness and futility of humanity in the face of cosmic horror with the futility of a character's actions in a predetermined storyline. Those are completely different things. Characters in Call of Cthulhu have as much agency on the world and on the adventure as in any other game -- what makes their actions "futile" is that they can't ever "win" against the horrors from beyond (because, frankly, if they did, that would be the end of the game! ) and, more importantly, because they are "doomed" in the sense that the biggest difference between a horror game and non-horror game is that, in a horror game, player characters mostly get worse with time, not better. But they can definitely do things and affect change. Well, to some degree... if you play in the 1930s (and we often do!), good luck trying to stop the rise of Nazism and the start of WW2... how's that for a metaplot...

How do you approach magic at character creation, especially for people who don't know Glorantha much, or at all? One nice thing with HQG is that it is indeed very flexible, but one bad thing is that, as a result, there is no spell list to pick from, let alone a list of spells appropriate for their cult. The player will most probably go "errr, I don't know? Is there a Magic Missile in this game?". How do you deal with that? (short of spending an awful lot of time explaining what their deity can do) I like the idea of using HQ for introducing new people to roleplaying games, using standard tropes or known settings ("FBI agents against monster of the week", or "wizarding school", or "superheroes" or whatever), but character creation is one of the things that makes me hesitate using HQG for introducing people to Glorantha -- or any setting they're not familiar with already.

I can't find any existing skill that could fit, so I guess I would make up one ("Bird Lore" or "Bird Training" or whatever), and write it down in the "Other Skills" part of the character sheet. I would make that a Knowledge skill.

If you have something like Acrobat Reader, I believe you can select the "arrow" tool, click on any image in a PDF, right-click, select "Copy Image", and paste it somewhere else. Most other PDF readers (Skim, Sumatra) also allow this.

I mostly agree with @Dethstrok9 -- people either have a problem with it, or don't, and that's not gonna get resolved. FWIW I frankly go either way based on game. I'm gonna fudge rolls on occasion in, say, CoC (not necessarily to the advantage of the players!), but I would probably never fudge rolls when playing, say, DCC, because I feel like that's not quite the "style" of that game (and I might even roll dice out in the open instead of behind the GM screen). It all creates a different atmosphere. What I find ridiculous with the people who feel strongly against fudging rolls is that I never hear them talk about all the times the GM is "fudging the story" without rolling. That time the NPC showed up unexpectedly in the room while the party was searching for secret documents? That's completely the GM's call to make the story more interesting and exciting. Where was the roll on the patrol schedule or whatever to see if there should have been an NPC there? Or that time when the boat the PCs are on suddenly hits a rock and their fight with Baron Morgenstein in the ballroom becomes more cinematic, as the floor starts tilting, furniture moves around, and water comes splashing in? Where was the First Mate's Perception roll, or the Captain's Boating roll? If the GM decides to make it happen it's OK, but if the GM rolls to see if it happens, but then changes his mind and says "fuck it, this duel has gone on too long, I'll just make it happen now", it's not OK anymore? Somehow rolling the dice is a quantum event that changes the ethics of the GM's call? I fail to see the difference. Dice rolls are a tool in the GM's box for making stories exciting and fun and surprising. It's OK to take out a socket wrench, try it, and then figure that, hey, you know what, I'll tighten that bolt with a monkey wrench instead, it's easier.