Lordabdul

Because his "worshipper cry-babies" hadn't gotten to Jeff yet! #BigYelmalio #Conspiracy

Thanks for the heads up! I would actually be super super super awesome if we had a few sticky threads here on BRP, or some page over at Chaosium.com, that somehow communicated when PDF files get updated.

I didn't say it was just people in power. I said that a lot of the NPCs with multiple cults in published RQG books (as listed earlier by Arkat) are in positions of power. So that still leaves it open for all kinds of other situations in my Glorantha... and there might be a few NPCs in that list that don't fit that category, I haven't checked closely nor exhaustively. I loved how Yanioth sounds like a bad-ass in that part of the story but to me that's a whole different (and narrative-driven) situation. Participating in secret rites is not accessible to lay-members, so Yanioth may or may not be a lay-member of Eirithia. She forces her way into the rites on the same level as an initiate of the cult, while obviously not being an initiate of that cult (otherwise she wouldn't have to intimidate/leadership her way into it). So if anything, that mostly shows how, when you're part of a major cult and you roll well enough, you can get into other people's temples and get some Rune points/POW/free meal/hot sex/whatever. This might however be a good story starting point for a character initiating into a second cult -- much more dramatic than picking something from the rulebook between adventures!

Note that it seems to me a lot of those NPCs with multiple cults are people in positions of power... just going down half of your list, I think that I vaguely recognize captains, nobles (or former nobles), and most of the NPCs that are in the inner ring of Clearwine. So it's not particularly rare, no, but it's heavily biased towards the upper class IMHO. The equivalent with the real-world is pretty easy in my head: the vast majority of people have one profession. Some have multiple profession out of necessity or desire, but that's a minority overall. However when you look at upper classes, it's easy to find politicians who hold multiple positions (in countries that allow that), business people who seat at multiple companies' boards or invest in multiple ventures, and so on. IMHO lay membership includes a minimum form of worship, yeah. I imagine some pantheon-wide rites include short tidbits of worship to most deities in that pantheon, and so it doesn't take much extra work to keep your lay-member qualification. A crude and approximate example might be the "associated cults" of Mary (mother of Jesus) and of the various common Christian Saints... doing an extra prayer (with some accompanying MP/POW/etc sacrifice) to one of these figures in particular would qualify has being a "lay member" of Mary or some Saint, and really the main Christian rites already include something close to that anyway (various Saints get a bit of spotlight at specific times of the year). In a truly polytheist tradition, I imagine the pantheon rites give more attention to a handful of secondary figures in a similar way on a more regular basis. As for the original topic about PCs belonging to multiple cults, I basically agree with a bit of everything that has been said: Anything is always OK in my book as long as the players can justify it in-world. Just because something is super rare (or even unique!) doesn't mean it can't happen to a player character. But if it's rare/unique, it will be played as such, with appropriate NPC reactions and such. The player needs to know what to expect there. It's possible that, in the name of MGF, the player and GM actually agree to make their Glorantha vary a bit to allow for something super rare/impossible to be merely, say, uncommon. Then the fun begins, as the group figures out the worldbuilding consequences... (at least that's my idea of fun). Careful with players who just want to double/triple dip. Maybe it's OK for your group, maybe not. When in doubt, make the temple(s) give "enough" (a lot?) chores and missions to the character! That's what temples are for, and that's what sets apart Gloranthan cults from most other (mostly superficial) descriptions of religions in other RPG settings!

The idea of re-using the HQ mastery system is interesting! But I'm not sure it goes well with the RQ philosophy where anybody, even a small trollkin, has a chance to kill you... the mastery/bumping system is more designed to make heroes be able to dominate non-heroes AFAICT. But I'd love to hear the feedback of people playtesting it.... and if you need something graphed, I can do that As far as the baseline in my graphs, though, I'm not sure what to do with it... we need some kind of a baseline to be able to judge if adjusted scores are preserving the "difference of power" represented by the unadjusted skills. The adjusted skills behave the way normal d100 rolls (and opposed rolls) behave. Unadjusted skills behave... whichever way we want. What does 650% vs 380% "represent"? How stronger is one supposed to be compared to the other? Well that's up to us to decide, right? And these scores will behave in practice in different ways depending on what house rules we use (i.e. one house rule will make it into an effective 3:1 difference of power, while another house rule will make it into an effective 5:1 difference of power). What we can at least strive to achieve is to make sure the curves don't have weird inversions of power, roller coaster up-and-down ratio changes, etc... (i.e. I'm less interested in "how stronger is this compared to that" than in "make the progression of difficulty predictable"). Apart from that I'm not sure what else we can do? I'm open to suggestions!

I'm not proposing anything, but yes I think you have the right math. It's basically like the RQG rules, but you lower to 50, not 100, and you lower the lowest skill, not the highest one. Good points, but you're not quite comparing the same things. I was not saying that 80% vs 50% will have twice as many successes as 40% vs 50%. What I was saying is that 80% vs 50% is roughly equivalent to 40% vs 25% (dividing both by the same denominator). But that's not true either, and I was wrong about that... if I get my math right, 80% vs 50% has a win chance of ~47% (when taking into account specials and criticals and fumbles), but 40% vs 25% has a win chance of ~32%. So thanks for that, I'll have to re-adjust my spreadsheet actually. If anything, I think it will flatten the curves at higher points, making the GURPS and SimpG lines even closer to the "ideal" line... we'll see.... stay tuned for updated graphs. Thanks!

Sending us the file by email is good (if the file isn't too big and doesn't get rejected by our email providers). Otherwise, one easy way is to place the file in Dropbox or Google Drive or Microsoft One Drive or other similar service, and send us a link (all these services usually have a simple way to right-click on the file and create a link for other people to download that file).

A d100 is going to succeed twice a much at rolling under 80 than under 40... that's... err... basic math. I'm not sure what I'm missing here about your argument? I'm really just talking about rules, not what the rules are modeling.

Yeah, originally, the main topic for this episode was from Joerg, who pitched it as "obscure facts about Prax, through the travels of Biturian Varosh". I picked sugar totally at random from the chapter I was assigned, but after just 30 minutes of research on spice trade and the history of sugar, it became obvious to me that this was a lot bigger (and interesting!) than expected. Now I want to play a spice/sugar trading campaign!

Yep, the problem is that it's not the right one The email is tribe@windwords.fm ("tribe" singular.... we're not that big! and .fm, not .com, because the .com domain is held by some investors who are asking way way too much for it) Thanks a lot for your kind words (hey @Bill the barbarian, maybe that could be the name of our "Letters to the Editor" segment? "Kind Words"?). We're hoping of course to continue following Biturian's travels in later episodes. Oh my -- after being shamed by @Joerg when I originally forgot about maple syrup (even though I live in Canada), I'm now being shamed by you because I'm actually originally from Northern France where we have a special type of sugar that we share with the Belgians and a few others, called (at least in my hometown of Lille) "vergeoise" (called "cassonade" in other places but it's often not the same thing in reality). This type of sugar is often produced from beets indeed. So yes, it could happen that other types of sugar start being produced in temperate areas of Genertela.... that said, it still relies on crystallisation as far as I know, and so it would probably still be a rare and expensive delicacy, traded by Issaries merchants on the similar price points and volumes as the crystallized sugar from Kralorela. If crystals are a cult secret in Kralorela, it might be a cult secret too in Dragon Pass or Peloria (or a secret your players discover themselves in your game!). Still interesting to think about it... I wonder which cult would be the one to figure it out....?

Nope, it doesn't change the graph much, if at all. If anything, moving the threshold to 100% actually reduces a couple of very small artifacts around the 120-180 range (where it dips a bit below "1" on the 2nd and 3rd graphs... it keeps 2 more data points on "1"). GURPS is 3d6-based, but kicks in with its rule if both skills are above 14 (not 18), because, I think the designers are mostly concerned with making contests resolve faster, not necessarily with handling "always succeeds" rolls (and a 3d6 roll of 14 or less is around 80% chance of success, which is why I chose that threshold here). But yeah I agree that using a threshold of 100% feels a bit more BRP-ish, and is easier to remember. I would probably use that threshold too.

There are a few rules discussions that invariably generate endless debates around these forums, and the rules for over-100% skills is definitely one of them... I saw a lot of complaining, a few attempts at making house rules to "fix" it (assuming you're in the camp who think the rules need fixing... all camps are valid!), but nobody really tried to use Science!(tm) to address the problem. And by "Science!(tm)", I of course mean every game designer's favourite tool: spreadsheets! Disclaimers I started a spreadsheet on this topic a while ago but never got around to finish it... thanks to the quarantine, I now have it in a more-or-less usable state, and I thought I would share a sneak peek here. But before this degenerates into an unproductive debate between RQ3/Mythras/HERO/GURPS fanboys or something, I want to make it clear that the goal here is not to try and find a rule that absolutely everybody agrees on (although that would be nice). My goal here is just to offer a tool that people can use to see how this or that rule scales, and therefore what are the pros/cons of each rule. I have included a number of rules, but I definitely didn't include all known rules... feel free to point me to some rules you'd like to see graphed! I didn't include the RQ3 rules because (unless I'm mistaken?) they are different between normal contest rolls (subtract one skill from the other) and combat (nothing? just... roll your score? I'm not sure). The most important disclaimer however is this: those graphs assume that we are striving for a linear skill curve! This means that, just as 80% skills is twice better than 40% skill (obviously), we want the rules to scale up and stay linear, i.e. 300% is twice better than 150%, and 600% is twice better than 300%. This might seem like a given, but not necessarily: some people might want to have the scale bias a bit "upwards", to help represent super-powered beings without having to go with ridiculous skill scores of 2000%. My spreadsheet can probably model this with a bit of extra work and extra tweakable parameters, but for now that's not the goal. Rules The rules I have here are: The "ideal" rules: these are the rules where you bring the highest skill score down to 100, and take out your calculator to compute the exact value of the other skill score ("lowest*100/highest"). It's not meant to be used at the table unless you're fast with a calculator But it gives us a baseline. RAW: the RQG rules. Lower the highest score to 100% if it's higher, and reduce the lower score by the same amount. JJPG1 and JJPG2: these were house-rules briefly mentioned by @jajagappa in this thread. GURPS: rules inspired by my "go to system" when it comes to great ideas for crunch vs playability. In this rule: In most cases, you just roll as-is. So with 300% vs 75%, you just roll that 300% as-is, special'ing and crit'ing like crazy and wiping the floor with the other character. If both skills are above 80%, to prevent endless rolling until someone crits or fumbles, lower the lowest skill to 50%, and lower the highest by the same amount. If both skills are above 150%, it's not enough to "flatten the curve" (hey, I heard that somewhere else already), and that where GURPS, in typical GURPS fashion, makes you take the calculator out: you lower the lowest skill to 50%, and lower the highest skill by "50/lowest". Note that my spreadsheet allows to tweak those numbers. So if you want to only take out the calculator above 300% instead of 150%, I can do that. If you want the rule to kick in above 100% instead of 80%, I can do that also. SimpG: same as the previous rule, but calculator-free! Just lower the lowest skill above 80% to 50%, and lower the highest one by the same amount. Graphs And now, for the piece de resistance: the glorious graphs! These graphs here show the ratio between the "ideal" (linear) differences in scores, and the effective difference in scores (as expressed by the adjusted skill scores). The graphs take one fixed skill score (like, say, 120%), and pits that score against a range of skills going from 20% to 600% in 20% increments. Because those graphs go to 600%, don't forget to only look at the range you're interested in for your particular style of play. I tend to run more low-powered/gritty/"street-level" games, so I'm more interested in the left half of the graph (<300%). For example, if a data point on the "150% graph" indicates that, in the "150% vs 220%" case (the value on the horizontal axis is 220), the difference ratio is "2.28" (the value in the vertical axis is 2.28), then it means that the difference of effective skill scores is roughly two and half times higher than it should be when rolling 150% vs 220%. This is for instance the case with RAW: the ratio between 220 and 150 is 1.46 (220 is 1.46 times better than 150), but after applying RQG rules, you get 100% vs 30%, and 100 is 3.33 times better than 30... 3.33 is 2.28 times 1.46 so the RQG rules make this particular skill contest 2.28 times harder/easier than what it "should" be... makes sense? Am I making any math errors here? (maybe! please tell me and I'll adjust the spreadsheet formulas... which... are a bit convoluted to account for the minimum/maximum 5% and 95% who are always a success or fumble...). As such, the "ideal" rules are a more-or-less flat line (give or take the rounding to the next integral number) that stays close to "1" all the way through (that is: the "adjusted" scores preserve the difference between the original scores). So the goal here (at least for me! you might have different gameplay goals!) is to find a rule that is a good compromise between keeping as close as possible to "1", while also being easy and fast to implement in play. BUT (yet another important disclaimer), this is all impersonal math! These graphs don't tell you if the rules are going to make things fun and exciting! For instance, you could just use no rules at all! Just roll the scores as they are, but (1) although this would be mathematically "correct", it doesn't take into account the fact that a d100 only rolls up to one hundred, and how you're not actually using the whole range of the skills and (2) some people don't think this is fun because when both skills are above 100%, the characters just succeed all the time (well, 95%) and it just boils down to rolling under your special/critical threshold, making the scene boring, and the results needlessly more brutal than a "normal" combat. But hey, I'm not here to tell you which is better -- I'm just here to make pretty graphs! Ok, so now, here's the graph for a 75% skill: Next, the graph for a 150% skill: And last, the graph for a 300% skill: Preliminary Commentary (before people find any mistakes!) It's pretty clear, given those graphs, why people are unhappy with RAW. It has this sudden "wall" where opponents that are twice as better than you appear in practice to be 10 times better. Jajapagga's house rules delay this effect a bit, which might be good enough for certain ranges of scores (and therefore certain "styles" of play, i.e. low-powered/gritty vs. "medium" heroic vs "we are play Argrath"). The GURPS rules are pretty good, but that's not a surprise since they are pretty close mathematically to "the right answer". I'm mostly surprised by how the SimpG rules hold up -- they are pretty much as simple and straightforward as RAW (just a tiny bit more complex since subtracting 50 is a bit less intuitive than subtracting 100, but really not that much), and they yield a curve that is frankly very good in my opinion. I think I'm going to use those rules in my games.... (and hey Jason/Jeff, if you want to add that rule to the upcoming GM book, feel free to steal it ). Note the small little artifacts around certain combinations of skills. Those are what adds a little spice to life! (but also they're weird). That's it! I hope this is as fun to look at as it was for me to make. Cheers!

That's actually a great idea! It would make a lot of sense.

I was under the impression that most arrangements in Glorantha (or at least Dragon Pass and Prax) would be verbal, with both parties' honour at stake, and the spirits and the Gods as witnesses. Only intellectual cults and organizations like Lhankor Mhy would have anything written.... which is why few cults provide Read/Write. I'm mostly just surprised Issaries doesn't have it, if only to be able to keep track of inventory and stuff... but maybe Issaries traders don't trade enough volume that they can't just keep it in their head, or track it with some ad-hoc system.

Mmmh good point, it never occured to me that it was the case... I think there's still a "loose correlation with the Middle World", though (RQG p.371) so it might be possible to kind-of recognize vague shapes and features, especially for old things like ruins and such around which old spirits and general energies are sticking to. Would you be able to see the spirits of these people? After all, evil spirits are able to track down people, and only materialize a few seconds before they actually want to attack. This means that maybe Spirit World entities can see the material entities' spirits -- a bit like looking at the world through its heat signature with FLIR goggles, I imagine. Or does that all work differently? (because if it works like that, you would at least be able to vaguely differentiate between the prisoners and the guards based on spatial position and grouping of those spirits... a shaman could materialize and attack a guard without fear of attacking the wrong person)

Good point, a PC might start doing this gimmick where they always kill the last enemy by throwing the axe at them, just so they can end the trance early and have all their wits back immediately after the combat. I would say that you can easily throw a wrench into that kind of abuse, by adding a second wave of attack a minute later, forcing the PC to cast a second trance spell. Otherwise, just remove that option -- if they throw the axe, the only action they can take afterwards is to shamble, crazy-eyed, towards where the axe landed, or draw a second axe.

A couple of those pike rules in RQG seem to me needlessly complicated, and easy to forget (no manipulation skill modifier, and no attack bonus from Bladesharp, in particular), so much that I would probably ignore them, just to avoid a 2 min debate with a player who asks why the rules do this (I do understand what they're trying to model, though). Otherwise yeah, those rules seem totally appropriate for fighting back against a charging dinosaur. I like that RQ3 allows other weapons to be braced on the ground, and not just the pike, but at first glance the rules on how these other weapons compare to the pike seem a bit too superficial. IMHO it should be be very dangerous to attempt this with a shorter weapon. I could also see some extra roll, or some extra interpretation of existing rolls, to model the situation where the character gravely injures, or even kills, the charging animal, but due to inertia, the animal still slams into the character.

Back to the OP, I would say that it's OK to throw an axe or a dagger, but: If you have another axe or blade on you, you must then draw it and keep hacking at enemies with it. If you don't have any other axe or blade on you, or if you don't want to draw them, the spell ends prematurely... or maybe you can't do anything except going to recover the thrown axe/blade from the (hopefully) fallen enemy (which might be a dangerous proposition as you need to walk over to the corpse while everybody else attacks you)

Yes, that's how boomeraxes work

Boomeraxe. An Axerang is this, here below

FUCK YES. Although we need a spell or enchantment to recall the axe.... (see below)

No, but it means that if you ever wanted to get inspired by Chaos, you would have a 5% chance of "finding" that 0.1% of Chaos that makes up you and everything around you.

Some people around here mentioned that the farthest you can go is supposed to be 99%/1%, so you could do that instead. Maybe achieving 100%/0% requires the character to exit the Mundane World and move permanently in the God Plane where purity is possible, but then maybe it means you effectively take the place of an existing God as the new owner of that Rune... that would indeed make for some cool high-powered campaign goal. Another way is to say that, just like other percentile rolls, a 01-05 is always a success anyway, so mechanically you never go below 5%, which represent the minimum "bits" of all the Runes that make up you. Only temporarily. It's still possible to go down again with a fumbled roll, or whenever the GM and players agree that a character's actions went against that Rune, but instead of rolling, they prefer to let her do that action and automatically lose points in that Rune.

Awesome! That cover is gorgeous. I've been looking forward to read this for quite a while.

I think it was this link: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/617329008 But it looks like it was only available for subscribers?