Lordabdul

Not at all, it's not a race after all! I was just feeling bad because our news items were getting more stale and old with every passing week. But I'm happy to hear there's at least another discussion podcast around. I guess we can still call ourselves the "first and only English-speaking news & discussion podcast on Glorantha"! (and we'll keep on adding more specifics in order to keep the "first and only" title as more podcasts appear ).

It doesn't look point-based to me? (at least not in the version I have) There's an option to spend 80 points in the stats instead of rolling D6's (I'm expecting alternate methods like this to appear in the upcoming RQG GM Guide), but for skills you still pick an occupation and get your skill scores from the list, so I wouldn't say "point-based", really. The good thing though was that it acknowledged 5 power-levels for character creation (novice, trained, skilled, expert, master), which lets people play in various flavours of campaigns, as opposed to, say, RQG, where you can only play characters of a certain expertise. Frankly, having more of a point-based character creation system would make me enjoy RQG character creation so much more... if we had a certain number of points to spend in occupation skills, as opposed to "fixed" occupation skill scores, it would not only remove some of the inconsistencies/imbalance between occupations, but it would also make it a bit easier to create novice or expert characters depending on the campaign. CoC does go a step further in that sense. (to be clear, I reserve the "point-based character creation" label for games where the whole character sheet is allocated based on one point pool like HERO/GURPS/etc... you might have another definition of the term)

So getting paid to do something means you don't really want to do that thing anymore? Wow, that's, like, a super bleak vision of life. Doing it for free doesn't hurt the GM, but doing it for not enough money does hurt them? I don't follow the logic. I have no idea what pro GM rates are but I assume most pro GMs are not doing it as a full time job, and instead do it as a side gig, the same way some people, say, play in bands and still get (poorly) paid gigs in bars and clubs.

I think the OP was just making a funny comment about all the interesting stuff Chaosium has in the pipeline for the next couple years, and totally didn't intend to start a serious discussion about how the hobby is changing in terms of pro-players/GMs

I thought this was a Troll-only spell but actually I got the page wrong, it's a Tusk Rider spell. It doesn't show up in the core rulebook as a spell Humakti (or any PC for that matter) can get access to. Am I missing something?

Same here, space (real estate) is expensive, and PDFs are awesome (especially when you invest in a 13" iPad Pro to get the proper screen size!). As you said, though, we're only going to play a fraction of all that, so really I want the hard copy only for that small fraction -- if I'm not going to run a game, I don't need the physical book, except maybe to show it off on the coffee table because it's very pretty. The Chaosium stuff I know I'll run eventually. Although I never played Harn, nor do I particularly like it besides all its awesome maps, I always found that it was so delightfully nerdy: its books (at least the old school ones) were sold as bundles of perforated pages that you could organize in binders as you saw fit.

I'm confused -- Seal Wound is something the Troll casts on the Humakti. @HreshtIronBorne was talking about the Troll dispelling everything the Humakti cast on himself. That opens up a couple questions for me though: One of the Trolls casts Seal Wound on the Humakti, and another Troll cast Dispel Magic afterwards (bad SR combination, or bad coordination on their part), without any specific target. Assume that, for some stupid reason, the Humakti doesn't have any spell active of their own... would the Dispel Magic go down the priority list (no defense spell, no offense spell...) and eventually dispel Seal Wound? Can you dispel multiple spells at once? Say you stack up 30 MPs in Dispel Magic... would that dispel up to 30 points worth of spells, or would that dispel the first defense spell, which might be only worth 4 points, and then 26 MPs are just lost and wasted? Yep, although there has always been some people (a majority?) who strongly believe that boosting MPs "evaporate" after casting. I don't recall any official ruling or WoD Q&A on the matter though.

I don't know if it's an inferior experience, but it's probably a similar experience to sitting at a table at a gaming convention. Maybe slightly better, because you know everybody at the table except the (hired) GM, compared to the gaming convention where you maybe only know the one friend you brought along (if any). I don't think anybody ever looked down on playing at conventions. So you can think about it as paying for a convention ticket, but the convention comes to your house, sort of.

I think a lot of people are reading the rule/sourcebooks' description of cults as "this is what all initiates in this cult behave like", but that's not how I do it, if only because, otherwise, everybody ends up being a stereotype. I read it more like "this is what most initiates of this cult are told". Priests and nuns are told they can't have sex with anybody, but there's evidence that it wasn't uncommon for secret tunnels to be built under convents for priests and nuns to have nightly visits. Plus, you know, the more creepy things about priests. Another example: women were not technically allowed on pirate ships but we know there were a good portion of women there, including a couple of famous pregnant pirate captains/bosuns. The world is full of rules not being respected. Of course people don't respect rules. Especially if they have sexy sensual Earth priestesses waiting in the next room, and a big axe to show anybody who frowns upon anything they might do. Well hopefully I'm bringing this back on topic, i.e. making my Glorantha vary by treating cult descriptions as simplified high level rules, and having the reality diverge from that, just the same way real people diverge more or less from the rules of the groups they belong to.

You mean the way that Catholic priests and nuns are also banned from having sex, becoming pregnant, or loving anybody else than Jesus? (that last bit I have heard verbatim a few times in Sunday school when talking about nuns, by the way). Yeah, I hear there's not a lot of them around Poking fun aside, why do you think it's implausible? (personally, I probably prefer to have Axe Sisters able to drink and fuck as they please, possibly in a contest with Uroxi cultists... but maybe I'm thinking of Vingans... I would probably leave it up for the player to choose what they want)

I'm also a Frenchie, although I live around Vancouver, BC. And funnily enough, I also started with the Black Dark Eye! (I recently tracked down 2 of the 3 boxes I had back then on eBay.... such an awesome nostalgic experience) Only I never moved on to D&D, I moved on to Cyberpunk, Vampire, and CoC (which I never stopped playing). I bet you're talking about stuff like Reve de Dragon, Nephilim (never quite played that), or the awesomely irreverent original version of In Nomine Satanis/Magna Veritas. But I think a few of those were translated/adapted in English.

I think you just had a good GM (or are a good GM yourself, if you were the GM in that group). As a GM, I have witnessed this kind of boring back-and-forth combat scene and thought to myself that there must be a better way. It took me a little while to realize that this "better way" doesn't involve house rules, but involves having my NPCs make more tactical choices, retreating and flanking, using archers, etc. in order to break things up. Of course, being a bad tactician myself, that meant losing more spectacularly to the PCs, but I guess my players were happy to both win and have more varied combat scenes. Semi-off topic but my other realizations at the time were: (1) come up with more varied terrains than "there's a few trees over there and some rocks here" (more original/varied terrain features mean more opportunities for maneuvers), and (2) start combat without a battlemat, even if eventually we do use minis. The reason for the second one is that unless you have a gigantic custom-made battlemat, most battlemats (including the common biggest models available on the market) are too small to comfortably place archers and other long distance enemies (this is even truer in a modern setting with firearms). This means that by the time we start the combat and place the minis down, the melee combatants only need two or three rounds to close onto the archers. This wasn't so much a problem for my NPCs, which I was happy to see mowed down by the PC brutes, but it was a source of frustration for the PC archers who felt they were not as effective as they should be.

Do you consider Sacred Time not a season because it's listed separately on p140? Even though it says there are five seasons in Seasonal Time, Sacred Time is still described as a season in the first paragraph of p141. I assume that this confusing choice of words is meant to say that "normal time" has five seasons (because Sacred Time is kind of outside of time), and not that a Gloranthan year has five seasons -- it has six. All other evidence points to this, as Sacred Time is otherwise used as a season for dating Vasana's Saga on p19, for Clearwine/Nochet/etc. seasonal temperatures and precipitation on p104/110/etc., and so on.

Well like I said, I don't think, when you account for inflation, that the new books are any more expensive than the old... so if you could afford them back then but not now anymore, that's more a problem of with, say, the erosion of the middle class in whatever country you live in. And sure, I understand, if you feel it's too expensive, that sucks. But I don't know if Chaosium will do anything about it... they have to compete with other high-quality books from the other publishers. My 80s games don't fare so well. The worse, however, are the French versions of CoC books, which had probably the most terrible binding of all my RPG books. Some of them are little more than a bundle of loose pages now.

A book in the mid-80s cost between $10 and $20, with the upper values of this range for boxed sets. When you account for inflation, that's between $25 and $50. The new books are still in this range, with hardcovers replacing boxes (which is for the better IMHO... boxes age horribly). So I'm not sure there's any evidence that modern books cost more than they used to (the only new thing is that there's now a market for premium books, i.e. ~$100 books/sets, which didn't exist until recently). But even if my info is wrong, arguably, the newer CoC 7e books are superior in quality compared to the old books: most of them are in hardcover, with better binding, better page quality, and better art (as in: colour art). Finally, the price of a book isn't just based on the price of printing. It's also based on how much the publisher wants to pay the writers and illustrators. I'm fine having slightly more expensive books if it means better paid creators, especially in a market where RPG publishers have trouble staying afloat, and people go for the slightly more lucrative board game market. So not relying on China? Sure, yes, totally. But I don't think the books are too expensive, and I don't think moving countries for printing will have much of an effect on price.

Yeah fair enough -- so I guess it's up to the GM to decide based on whether they want this kind of direction in their game.... a God Learners renaissance might be an interesting theme for a campaign! Do the players ally themselves with those NPCs who give them new spells and promises of power? Or do they heed the warnings of history and of the other NPCs, and turn on the hand that gives them accessible munchkinery?

Oh sure, but I mean what difference does it make if you're learning the spell from a teacher, and that teacher has invented the spell last week vs. "recovered" the spell from long forgotten myths last week?

What's the difference if you learn from a teacher vs an old document? Yeah good point. IMG it would be mostly about "editing and remixing", the way people can invent new things by creating song mash-ups, funny trailers for old movies, or how the last act of Star Wars: A New Hope was cast in an entirely new (and much better) light thanks to the editing work... although I'm not 100% up to speed as to what the "canonical" God Learners could do exactly, so who knows.

Does the difference matter between: The player/GM came up with a new spell. They interpret it as a spell that was used a long time ago but was forgotten, and found now on an old parchment. The player/GM came up with a new spell. They interpret it as a brand new spell that this priest the party just killed had invented, and written on an old parchment. In both cases the character has the new spell, it's an uncommon or possibly unique spell, and people are going to come after it once they learn about it, and that's what matters IMHO. FWIW I think that Gods' Rune magic has always been in existence (since the God Time), but might have been forgotten. One might "discover" some forgotten or lesser-known deed that some deity accomplished, and use that through Rune magic (probably after successfully heroquesting it to acquire it). The exception here are "new" Gods like the Red Goddess, which only happen once in an era. Spirits' Rune magic might be new, since new spirits exists and might rise in worship over time, but wouldn't be powerful compared to Gods' magic. Spirit magic might also be new, for the same reasons. Sorcery is where innovation happens all the time, although it might blow up in your face.

I wouldn't subject any such Mythos race to SAN checks no, because these are creatures that understand the true nature of the universe: they commonly use Mythos magic, communicate with other races and gods, etc. It might still be scary for them -- the same way tigers and bears are scary for humans -- but not sanity-blasting-inconceivable.

I believe that's called "being on the cast of Critical Role" But joking aside, it's mindblowing to think about it, but we do live in a world where professional RPGers exist. Not only actual play YouTubers like Critical Role, but also professional GMs who rent their services by running games at customers' home parties.

My tongue-in-cheek interpretation of Illumination is that it's what happens when you realize you live in a fictional world. You effectively recognize that everything in the universe both matters and doesn't matter, and is both regulated by rules but isn't really. You only have to care as much as you want to care, and you can manipulate the rules and multi-class and do egregious munchkinery... and when players stop roleplaying, they often act like monsters I mean, my players do some really shitty stuff in order to finish an adventure sometimes So yeah, you would definitely become a monster sooner or later, even if you don't realize it!

Make sure to advertise it here in case you're looking for players... some of us might be interested! I realized that I had thought of Russian accents, but I figured I would reserve those for things like Fronela, where they have big furry coats and big furry hats. Especially the Rasputin-looking Zzaburi sorcerers.

Yep good point, but probably closer to 75% than 50%, even for average Sartarites, no? Yep I mentioned that, saying that, possibly, you need to request a leave of absence to go spend that week at the big temple in the city, and so you need to wait your turn because the elders don't want too many people leaving at random times.