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Lordabdul

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    Dumping Argrath

    in Glorantha

    Posted · Edited by Lordabdul

    6 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

    the most recent iterations of the STAR WARS rpgs

    You mean the FFG Star Wars games? That would make sense. I only have Edge of the Empire, though, which doesn't seem to have a chapter on that topic. Maybe it's in the Rebellion or Jedi versions of the game? Do you have some page reference? I'm very curious about this.

    (edit, in EotE I can only find a small sidebar on page 295)

    Dumping Argrath

    in Glorantha

    Posted · Edited by Lordabdul

    Really, there are 4 ways to deal with a metaplot:

    - It's happening. Run adventures related to it, underneath it, or with it in the background. Can you play on Earth? A Call of Cthulhu campaign set in the 1930s in Europe? A Mythic Greece game set in the Peloponnesian War? A Three Musqueteers or Robin Hood campaign set in their respective eras? Yes? Then you can handle any metaplot. No? Try something else, like...

    - It's frozen. The big NPCs are stuck in their patterns, and your campaign is effectively a procedural series instead of a drama. For instance, if you play a Robin Hood campaign, the Sheriff of Nottingham is always the bad guy. Prince John is always on the throne, and King Richard is always missing-but-hopefully-coming-back-anytime-now. The years go by but you don't track them. It's always the early 1200s and we never see any significant event shaking up the setting. The Lunars are always occupying Sartar and New Pavis, your Orlanthi PCs are always fighting them, the Dragonrise never happens. That's not bad! Entire beloved TV series made multiple seasons of this kind of stuff!

    - It's a guideline. You have your key NPCs and some "example" events to play with from the "canonical timeline". But the PCs can directly affect these NPCs and these events, so who knows what will happen! Maybe they're Sartarites who save Kallyr or Leika, and that can change the timeline a bit or a lot. If you're playing Lunars, maybe you help prevent Argrath from taking back New Pavis, or maybe he still does but not as well as he's "supposed" to. This is the fun zone: the GM has toys to play with, the players don't know what to expect. If your GM still forces the "official" timeline down on you, knock them on the head a bit.

    - It's got a PC-shaped hole in it. Dumping Argrath is only interesting (to me at least) if you replace him with the PCs. For the love of gods do not start your RQG campaign with the normal character creation, start it instead with already-powerful PCs, because if you start with "normal" PCs, it will take ages for them to become leaders and heroes, and all you did is remove interesting NPCs and make the setting more static (and not even in the "It's frozen" (see above) way -- at least with "It's frozen" the setting still has all the interesting NPCs!) So start with PCs who are Bison tribe khans and Paps priestesses and exiled Heortland kings. Or keep Argrath but dump Leika and make the PCs into Runemasters of the Colymar tribe who are coming back from exile to fuck things up. Or dump Harrek and have fun play super powerful angry pirates who literally destroy armies and pillage magical cities. It's a whole different game but that sounds fun to me. But again, do not remove Argrath "just in case my PC who has 3 points of rune spells wants to liberate New Pavis". This is like the RPG equivalent of minimum wage Americans who vote against social reform just in case the American Dream works and they become millionaires (which they won't).

    • Like 6
    • Helpful 1

    Dumping Argrath

    in Glorantha

    Posted

    2 hours ago, jajagappa said:

    You've bet on Kallyr and she's dead.

    Or maybe she's not dead. Remember that there currently is zero Chaosium-published material that advances the metaplot (there's only one oblique reference to Kallyr's LBQ in one of the scenarios in The Smoking Ruin and Other Stories). So "canonically speaking" RQG currently has no metaplot.

    Now we know there will be some metaplot material with (at the very least) the Dragon Pass Campaign book (probably only released in 2 or 3 years). But until then, the GM can easily do whatever they want with their Glorantha. They'll probably have finished two entire campaigns of RQG before Chaosium gets around to publish anything that contradicts it.

    So Kallyr isn't dead. Yet. The GM can throw around opportunities to become a companion of Kallyr, Leika, Argrath, Samastina, whatever. See what sticks, what the players are interested in. Say they pick Kallyr. The GM can either go with it or throw a wrench in the player's plans. It's easy to pick the metaplot timeline and mess around with it. Maybe Leika dies before Kallyr. Maybe Kallyr leaves for New Pavis, allies with Argrath, and takes his place because he's too wasted on hazia to do anything. Or maybe it goes exactly as the metaplot goes.

    It also all depends on whether the players know the metaplot or not. There's a big difference between players who rally behind Kallyr if they know her fate vs they don't. It's the GM's job to also correctly manage player expectations, the players' job to tell the GM what they hope to accomplish in the game.

     

    2 hours ago, Eff said:

    And what's more, of course, is that Kallyr has been deemed to have been explicitly wrong, to have been bad at her job, to not be all that good of an Orlanthi.

    That's totally not what I got from my reading of the published material.

    • Like 3
    • Helpful 1

    Plant Rune HeroQuest

    in Glorantha

    Posted

    On 12/29/2022 at 5:45 AM, mfbrandi said:

    So on the one hand anthropocentrism is a problem …

    … but on the other if the humans want to play the elf game, the vegetable people and their tree mother are jolly unsporting to make them go through such a demanding rebirth ritual. Why is that? It sounds like you are saying that humans must be allowed to take what they like from Aldryami culture and magic and that the Aldryami are not allowed to set the terms. 😉

    Nope -- reread my message. I'm saying that elfs are free to join many of the Lightbringer cults, and that the human ancestor god (Grandfather Mortal / Daka Fal) can be initiated into without transforming into a human by using the "alternate version" of him (like Grandfather Baboon). So I'm saying that elfs, trolls, and maybe triolini (not sure) are possibly "forcing" this biological conversion, whereas humans don't. So humans seem much nicer about accepting non-humans than the opposite. It's possible that humans are outliers in that regard, which does say something about non-human races in Glorantha (although there are many other non-human races, I'm not going to do a thorough census of who's doing what).

    But really, it's not about that -- it's about what it means to "initiate" into a cult. My original understanding was that it was about dedicating your life to a deity, and serving a temple. The first one is a personal choice, the second one is a social construct. I can imagine that some (most?) elf "temples" (groves) might be super conservative and refuse initiating non-elfs. But maybe not all. Elfs are people too, with politics and biases and whatever. This is the age-old issue of some Gloranthan material saying "X does Y" and some people interpreting that as "X always does Y" and others interpreting that as "X usually does Y".

     

    On 12/29/2022 at 7:10 AM, Joerg said:

    Aldrya requires that you become a plant entity, not a beast entity. Give up that dragon origin, and she will allow you in. (After all the Beast Rune is a derivation of the Dragon Rune, although a different derivation than the Dragonewt Rune.)

    A forceful transition may make you a plant entity, and you might retain your man rune, but will it make you an elf? And if so, what kind of elf? Will you have an associated tree? (The one your previous self was nailed to?)

    IMHO, initiating into Aldrya as a human (or non elf) you would not have the Plant Rune, and might not be able to cast half of the cult's magic. You wouldn't be as much "part of the forest" as the elfs. But that's the character's/NPC's choice. Again, it's about what it means to become an initiate of a cult.

     

    • Thanks 1

    Plant Rune HeroQuest

    in Glorantha

    Posted

    18 hours ago, Eff said:

    In any case, the problem I have with the Aldrya initiation is the implication that Aldrya's for elves only, which certainly seems to make Glorantha significantly more rigid in terms of how people interact with the divine

    That's my main problem too. It's not like elves or trolls need to be transformed into humans to worship "human" (big quotation marks here) deities. And sure, Aldrya and Kyger Lytor happen to be the ancestor of elves and trolls, unlike whatever other deities non-humans might join (Humakt, Yelmalio, Babeester Gor, whatever). No god besides Grandfather Mortal/Daka Fal fits that description of being "father of humans", and other races tend to worship a different version of Daka Fal to get around the problem ("Grandfather Baboon" and so on). But that shows how this thing is weirdly setup. I blame the 1970s human-centrism of fantasy world-building, which we still have to wrestle with.

    18 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

    I can envision a human initiate to Aldrya as forsaking human society, living in and protecting the woods, and adopting one of the elvish occupations

    That would be my version as well. I don't like this write-up of Aldrya that forces you to become a biological elf in order to become an initiate, as opposed to, you know, a cultural elf. Societal constructs of identity and all that jazz. However, I could totally see the Aldrya cult limiting God-Talker and higher levels of hierarchy to "actual" elves, forcing you to undergo the transformation if you want to rise up the ranks.

    • Like 1

    Charisma ( CHA ) and Broo and Tusk riders ( oh my...)

    in RuneQuest

    Posted · Edited by Lordabdul

    On 12/10/2022 at 12:00 AM, Agentorange said:

    I'm curious why these CHA scores for these and other races are so incredibly low...especially for Tusk Riders.

    As David Scott says, CHA is leadership and strength of personality. Broos and Tusk Riders in particular are, basically, bullies. They have little personality besides how mean and violent their are. Their leaders lead by being the strongest and by threatening others with violence if they don't follow... not by being the most "leadership material". They lead (and generally speaking interact "socially") with STR and CON, not CHA.

     

    On 12/10/2022 at 6:54 AM, Godlearner said:

    The big problem I have with CHA and these creatures is that CHA limits the amount of magic one can know for both Spirit and Rune. 

    While I have my problems with CHA and, in general, with RQ and BRP's characteristics, I actually love this because it explains why, in terms of world-building, the Tusk Riders need to raid other people and capture their souls in their severed hands or tails: it's because that's the only way the Tusk Riders can get more than a few points of magic.

     

    For more discussion on Tusk Riders and why they're awesome, there's our podcast episode on the subject.

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