Lordabdul

Yep that's a strong basis for people who want very simple rules. But going only 80% of that route with what @Akhôrahil might do should also work well (just one move and one action each turn, no hit location, only simple critical hit rules, no special hit rules). I'm fine with the RQG crunch level, but then again my players are the kind of people who ask me "so when are we using GURPS again?". I would however tweak the >100% skill rules and do a few adjustment for fighting big monsters. I think many people would reaaaaaaaaalllyyyyy benefit from taking a look at 13th Age: Glorantha as a great mid-point between HeroQuest and RuneQuest in terms of crunch, and as a great alternative designed by (and for) solid game mechanic nerds. I'd love to see more people using 13AG, actually.

It's funny because my understanding was that, from very early in the life of RQ, it actually differentiated itself by being a lot more than just a series of fight scenes, on account of (1) fights being deadly, and therefore players avoid them as much as possible, seeking non-combat solutions more than in other games, and (2) all creatures in Glorantha being pictured as living and breathing, as opposed to being monsters meant to be killed to get loot. Of course, I might misunderstand RQ's original philosophy since I'm a fairly newcomer. I haven't done it (yet) but I would frankly leave things free-form indeed. Whether I'm running Savage Worlds or GURPS, I actually almost never stat things up. I prepare my NPCs mostly by writing up a description of who they are, what they want, what faction(s) they belong to, what they're good at, etc. Then as the PCs interact with them, I come up with stat scores on the fly based on what this mental picture of the NPC is... you could consider that, basically, I've been doing the "prose method, on the go" character creation from HeroQuest, without knowing it. It does have the downside that I sometimes come up with not quite the correct scores (especially when I'm not totally familiar with how a game system scales up and down), but I don't sweat it, especially since it saves me a fuck ton of preparation, which I can reinvest in focusing on the story. I'm not sure I understand... if the PCs need to dance to impress some King, roll Dance, with maybe some Augment with Charm or whatever. If they need to trade, roll Bargain. If they need to investigate something, roll Scan and Listen and such. And so on... I mean, that's what just using the game system for what it's for. Do you have particular situations to present that you have trouble translating to RQ rolls?

It's easy to miss, but it's mentioned on page 107, in Jonah Kensington's NPC description (look at "Roleplaying hooks").

Woah nice. Do you have more? I can't find much info on japanese versions of RQ material (if you can, you could upload those covers to RPGGeek). AFAICT the artist might be Takuhito Kusanagi, who sadly doesn't seem to be very searchable on the web. Hard to tell if it's a different Kusanagi or not but he might have been involved in the art department of various famous anime like Gundam, Lodoss, etc. He has an artbook called "Innocence" that doesn't seem to be sold anywhere online, but that contains some other very-Gloranthan-looking paintings.

We might mention that WB&RM's entire board game also features a rotated map where the north is pointing to the right, actually. Although I believe it was rotated back with north pointing up for the later "Dragon Pass" edition of that game. I really like the idea that different cultures might represent the world with different styles and orientations of maps... I would love to see (or make!) "in-world" maps, with Lunar maps being widely different from Esrolian or Praxian maps. As for the OP.... what @Kloster said!

Hard to say -- it's like comparing Gmail vs Yahoo Mail vs Hotmail (or whatever Microsoft is calling it these days). They all do the same thing, and it comes down to which details you care about, personal taste, and how they integrate with this or that ecosystem.

It's both an app (iOS and android) to play podcasts, and some kind of portal/directory for finding podcasts and making your own podcast. We're over there on their directory.

I think you wanted to reply to reply to @Travern about this -- I was just expressing that I'm a sucker for urban fantasy. But yes, I think Travern's original post was exactly angels on pinheads because the point was to figure out the extent of one of the clauses (namely the clause about Arthurian characters being off limits). I would probably be equally interested in a "wizards-in-a-dystopian-future urban fantasy RPG" if it was not relying heavily on Arthurian myth... if anything, I would actually be more interested if it was, like, focused on Templars and the Golden Dawn and Dee and Crowley and stuff like that... but probably sooner or later someone might do a sourcebook or adventure where Merlin shows up, in which case I assume a quick chat with Chaosium would clear any questions. As far as I can tell, they already started doing that -- I saw a couple of MOB's posts showing up verbatim in the FAQ yesterday.

Heh I would actually play that!

Thanks for the SRD/OGL Chaosium! This is a new thing that gives BRP fans something they didn't have before, so that's definitely a step in the right direction. Of the 2 problems that have generated 6 pages of discussion, it seems only one is really a problem: whether the license language is clear enough around Prohibited Content. This creates uncertainty that makes potential authors hesitate to use this license, which goes against the original intent of the license. I personally wouldn't sweat it -- even though Chaosium is effectively saying "we would know if we saw it" and others are saying "dude, that's not clear enough", it's not like Chaosium is some giant opaque corporate entity that would sue your ass with a small army of expensive lawyers. I'm confident they would act in good faith if the 3rd party is also acting in good faith, and that everybody can reach an understanding when treading gray areas. We're all human, and games are supposed to be for fun. The other problem is about the presence of Prohibited Content in the first place. It's true that, as far as I can tell, the BRP SRD is more restrictive than comparable licenses. It prevents people from using stuff specific to existing Chaosium games while, say, the Gumshoe license does the opposite and includes most things from Gumshoe games, from TimeWatch's Chronal Stability mechanic to Mutant City Blues' powers and The Yellow King's shot cards and so on. But it's really up to the publisher to decide what they think will work for their IP and business. And if Chaosium wants to give a nudge to game designers to come up with innovative mechanics instead of recycling existing ones, well, that's something that aligns with the company's original DNA, doesn't it?

I think another advantage is that, if you wish to, you can start engaging in melee right away while the opponent is still preparing their spells, and have the allied spirit cast any needed spell (defensive or offensive) at the same time you bash people's heads and sever a few limbs. I was also surprised about the previous answers about this. But I guess that RQG says "Allied spirits are spirits sent by the deity to inhabit animals or sacred cult objects", which seems to indicate that the spirit always comes inside an object or animal, which, I guess, implies that if that animal or object is killed/destroyed, the spirit goes back to the deity. The RQG wording is weird (they say "If an allied spirit is killed or destroyed..." instead of "If the inhabiting animal or object is killed or destroyed..."), but it does kinda feel like that's what they really mean. But I think, for MGF's sake, that it's totally fine to have the spirit become disembodied, and then the Rune Lord has to go through a costly ceremony to re-bind the spirit to a new animal or object (not even counting the cost of finding the "proper" animal/object in the first place, which might be an adventure of its own).

The way I read this in the Guide was that it was more a proof that wizards don't like to have anybody telling what to do and how to do it. My first thought here is that sorcerers might commonly use various subservient spirits to help them manage their affairs, and there might be one "main" one that people around the community know about, but then again they might not, and the relationship between the sorcerer, the community, and that spirit are probably vastly different than with a Heortling wyter. If anything, the sorcerer probably wants the local people to have a loyalty towards him/her, rather than towards whatever this spirit represents. As a sorcerer, I would probably keep it very vague what spirits I'm using or not, making it all seem it's all me... but then again, I haven't researched all this much yet so I might be completely off mark here.

You only really need to "find rules" if you want to use another crunchy system -- one where you can indeed both model orks and uzis appropriately. If you want something "light and fast", however, you don't care as much: by definition there won't be many stats and numbers to crunch. So use FATE, use HeroQuest, use whatever is your go-to light-and-fast system... by virtue of it being a light-and-fast system, there's only a few numbers to write down anyway, so it's easy to eyeball everything.

Nice, interesting. Well, either way, I look forward to the release of your book!

And that's fair -- I was actually thinking about it as I was writing my post. Although in my Glorantha, the Orlanthi range from olive to dark-ish skin, and are a blend of Viking/Celt cultural dynamics and north-Indian landscapes/nature and ancient daily life. Plus some random stuff I make up that I have no idea where it comes from (I'm not cultured enough to have a broad panel of historical influences so it's probably simply coming from my mix of westerner and african upbringing). So it's probably OK. Maybe. Especially if it's not even clear in my games who are the "good" guys anyway! I think where I'm coming from is that I don't know how players would react if I had NPCs tell them, say, that they've been captured and will "brought to the Sultan", and they have one picture in mind, but here comes a white guy in a toga called Sultan Remilius, surrounded by centurion-looking guards. It's... needlessly confusing. To make the confusion "useful", it feels like the Lunars would need more "Sultanish" things than just the one title. It doesn't have to completely overtake their depiction, though... when I was listing those few elements that came to mind, I should have said it was a "buffet" to pick from, not meant to all be applied. I think for my own tastes the "Sultan-ish things" would need to at least take, say, %20 of the general "Lunar picture". I'm not sure what it would be, or even what to think about all this yet (for me it might be easier to call them Satraps or Governors or whatever, and get done with it)... so apologizes if I'm thinking out in writing here.

I wanted to print some HQG character sheets for an upcoming game and realized that I couldn't find any on the Chaosium website... did I miss something? I had to go download the ones on the old Glorantha.com website.

It looks like the WoD text has been replaced by the RF2 text now. What was it that was overturned? Also, I had to look up the original RQG description for the Extension spell to spot the differences. AFAICT, the differences are the new ending sentence ("Rune points stacked in Extension and the affected spell cannot be regained until the spell expires."), and the mention that the spell is "Stackable up to 5 points", which I don't quite understand totally (I guess it's to prevent people from saying "I stack 10 points to extend to 2 years!" ? You can only spend 5 points maximum on Extension?)

My money is ready to go, my mouse cursor is hovering restlessly over the DTRPG bookmark, my tablet is charged up, the PDF reader is loaded up! Hah nice! Still, I would have to think twice naming Lunar officials "sultans" without changing the whole thing to be more Arabian. "Moon" goes well with "1001 Nights", after all. First: renaming the Red Emperor into the "Crimson Caliph"... which is so catchy it might actually be the one main reason to do it. And we need a Grand Vizier somewhere -- I'm not sure who it would be (Jar-Eel?). Then change the weather in the Heartlands to be unusually warm, and the landscape to be more sandy: maybe the Red Moon (being an opponent of the Storm deities herself) adds to the historically local Sun gods' presence and worship, making it even warmer (and the Kalikos effort more efficient and year-round) -- or maybe it was always a Middle Eastern landscape and climate from the beginning (it fits well with the historical local Sun gods' presence). The Glowline might be as much about changing/extending the climate as it is about enhancing Lunar magic. Maybe it even mutates the vegetation over a few generations! And then it's a matter of adjusting all the architecture, changing the Roman-inspired names and armours/weapons into Middle Eastern ones, calling the Lunar currency "dinars", etc.

The problem for me is that "Sultan" mostly conjures up certain images regarding the architecture, people, weather, and surrounding landscape that may or may not fit my vision of Peloria... but since I'm only going by whatever the Guide and later publications say, I haven't seen that term used for anything else than that one Mad Sultan guy. Although checking back now, I see that I missed the mention in GtG p298 about the Lunars adopting the term after Sheng Seleris' reign -- which I think was your retcon explanation in the first place.

Maybe we can release a Rune Fixes Fixes on the Jonstown Compendium 😅 I was also surprised to see that this new document adds to the previous Rune Fixes, as opposed to being a newer, bigger version.

Hey nice I learned a new word today. You should work on Sesame Street

Since only @scott-martin ever used that term, you might want to ask him... but judging from the additional fact that this term doesn't exist in any of the HQ/RQ/etc PDFs, I'm gonna assume this is part of Scott's own (varying) Gloranthan history.

Heh. I have the French Hero Wars hardcovers (I'm missing a couple but currently hunting them down on eBay). It's interesting how different they are from the original books. I also backed the upcoming French RQG, so hopefully I'll be able to review the new material they're writing.

Now that's just cheating! Interesting (if I'm not mistaken) to spot the French version of RQ and Gloranthan board games... I hope you crack them open every now and then to practice!

In the meantime, if you want to see some sci-fi RPG where Chris Spivey is involved, the Dune RPG is supposedly coming this year from Modiphius