Lordabdul

Good stuff! The only problem is that I have no idea what this expression means?

Oh right good point -- I forgot to check the cult's special magic. Good stuff.

Yes, good point about the Chaos Rune (which I guess is a prerequisite to initiate in a Chaotic cult anyway). So I guess the Storm Bull senses that? It could be rolled on the Resistance Table as the skill vs the Rune score, actually. If you engage in cannibalism/rape/etc. you might get a few percents in the Rune, which only very sensitive Storm Bullies (don't call them that) would detect? That means that the undercover Cacodemon priest needs to call in sick every time a Storm Bull initiate walks in.

Mmmmh... Storm Bull cultists have Sense Chaos which tells them that there's a Chaotic thing close by... as in: something tainted by Chaos. That probably translates, in game terms, as something with a Chaotic Feature, right? I don't think Storm Bullies would sense if someone had committed a Chaotic act? (not unless that person did it enough to, indeed, gain a Chaotic corruption?). I don't imagine that you suddenly sprout horns and tentacles immediately after engaging in your first act of cannibalism or rape or whatever? It only happens after a few times, as each occurrence has an increasing chance of letting Chaos into the world? (although I guess there's a non-0% chance that it does indeed happen on the first try). Storm Bullies only detect it when that happens, I think? Before that, you're on trial for doing things that can let Chaos in, even if it hasn't yet, and that's where cultural differences get involved, as different cultures have different opinions about what's a slippery slope, and how slippery it is. I mean, otherwise, there would be a Storm Bull on every trial committee, who gets to sniff around the accused, no debate or deliberation needed... in reality, the Storm Bully can only probably tell you when the accused has indeed reached the bottom of the slippery slope... which everybody can probably tell because the accused has a third arm. Or maybe not, as I think you can be a Chaotic agent without having any Chaotic feature? For instance, I don't think Cacodemon priests necessarily have any Chaotic feature, which lets them infiltrate society and get to positions of power... would a Storm Bully's Sense Chaos work on such an NPC?

Ah thanks. That actually let me find some info in Volume 2 of the Guide to Glorantha (a book that I haven't opened very often yet). There's a chapter on Chaos that seems to indicate that Chaotic acts are basically anything that goes against whatever your culture says. So kinstrife is indeed Chaotic somehow: Chaos can also enter the world through the actions of people. For example, in Orlanthi rituals participants regularly summon and face their foes, overcoming them to recreate the world. If they fail in their trials, Chaos may enter the world. Chaos can also be deliberately summoned, as when the Unholy Trio brought Wakboth into the world. Chaos may enter through violation of divine laws, such as when Orlanthi commit kinslaughter or Dara Happans rebel against an emperor who has passed the Ten Tests. Tragically, even the best of people, desperate to save themselves and the things they love, can unwisely invite evil into the world.

What did Beat-Pot do? (I'm not aware of anything he did -- I just know he's a character in White Bear & Red Moon) Good question! My humble proposal is that it's a Chaotic act if the "bad thing" is done in and of itself. So killing, spreading disease, making undead creatures, etc.. are all non-Chaotic if they are done in the pursuit of another (potentially "noble" goal). It doesn't mean these acts are "OK" -- in general they are not, but that's up to society to decide. So killing someone or spreading disease in order to gain political power, push back enemies, and so on might be judged to figure out what happens next. Killing Lunars is definitely OK, sending disease spirits to Lunars can be argued to be OK (depending on how successful you were and who is presiding the tribal moot that is settling the matter), but some people might look at you funny, like you're on a slippery slope. However, if you kill people and raise undead and spread disease just for the fun of it, just for... well, spreading chaos around... then it's a Chaotic act. Mix that with a few "taboo" subjects, like disease, rape, Broos/Scorpionmen/etc. to give an auto-Chaotic taint to any given act from the point of view of most people around you. I'm not aware of any god of slavery/torture... who are they? (there's nothing on that topic in Cults Compendium for instance)

Yeah I think the goal is to mostly get everybody back to full RPs before the next seasonal adventure. As an alternative to making house rules, you could also make PCs go through 2 adventures per season, or have adventures that require being out in the wilderness for longer. Are you talking about how sacrificing all your magic points (which are regained by the next day) gives you an almost guaranteed success? There was also some discussion on the Facebook group recently about how the "offering" tables for Worship bonuses were not totally making sense to everybody, with small/medium/large offerings between the 2 tables not being remotely equivalent, and being mostly irrelevant since MP spending gives you almost the maximum percentage anyway. I don't remember there being any consensus on the matter though.

Nah, check the title on page 85: "The Riskland Campaign: A Campaign Setting for Low- and Mid-Level Adventurers". And yeah you're right that it seems RQG makes adventurers a bit more powerful than RQ2/3, so it means having to modify old modules. Again, good to know.

Actually, checking back on some NPCs stats in the RQG GM Pack, I guess 7 RPs is right on spot for mid-level, since 14 RPs and above are definitely "high-level" (on par with Leika for example).

Fair enough. It's actually interesting that Lightning (1pt) requires a POW resistance roll, while Thunderbolt (3pts) doesn't. It's 3 times more expensive, and therefore does 3 times more damage (3D6 vs 1D6)... but the absence of POW resistance roll makes it indeed more than 3 times more powerful. I wonder if the authors meant to make both spells consistent here (either both have POW resistance, or none of them have it), or if that's on purpose. Thanks for sharing! This kind of stuff is always good to know. I'm not sure what to think of this, but: Blowing a combined amount of 13 Rune Points to smite enemies is pretty hard-core so yeah, they probably deserve to kill 3 or 4 scorpion men with that. You might have a bit of room to nerf the spell since you said the players were surprised to see it work so easily... but now that they've experienced it, they might oppose nerfing As far as I can tell, D:LoD's campaign assumes low-to-mid-level PCs. IMHO, PCs with 7 or more RPs to spare are not really "low-to-mid-level", so maybe the encounter might have benefited from more enemies, or more powerful ones? It's hard to balance encounters though, and I suck at it, so I would probably have made the same mistake. One thing I would have modified though was the number of enemies. You seem to have 6 players. Unless noted otherwise, I assume that published adventures are made for 4 players.

What do you mean here? If you mean "players are more effective when they know how to use their skills/weapons/spells", then...errr.. yes, obviously? You're talking about spells that "invalidate" the opposition, but then talk about Thunderbolt, a spell that very much doesn't do that. Just like Truesword and other offensive spells, it just makes you temporarily over-powered.... shouldn't it then be OK in your view? Also, do you have actual-play experience to support that those spells are a problem? I don't, but it seems like the economics of Rune Points play a big part here. Using your Thunderbolts to quickly end a combat means spending 3 RPs or more -- that's not a lot of RPs left for anything else in the current adventure. Being awesome once over half a dozen encounters isn't so bad IMHO, and come at a risk. In my experience, my players tend to go the other way: they hoard those RPs until the end, only using Rune Magic when they feel that the end of the adventure is near. They rely mostly on Spirit Magic. But my current players tend to be a lot more cautious than the average player, I think.

See what Mythras does there -- I'm not familiar enough with that system to know. As an additional point of reference, I know that GURPS for instance uses post-armour-modifiers. So crushy things do more damage than other weapons, but you take away the armour rating and inflict that on the opponent. Slicy things do less damage, but if that's somehow enough to go through armour (i.e. there's still damage after subtracting the armour rating), then they get a x1.5 or x2 multiplier, meaning that whatever is left after subtracting the armour gets deadly. Some food for thought. Make sure you don't overdo it with them -- I would actually recommend you simplify the rules instead of adding house rules. Remember that your players will already have to get used to a different initiative order, to having to roll low instead of high, to not necessarily hit their enemy when they make their attack roll (as the enemy gets a defense roll), and to having to choose their defense maneuvers. Depending on whether the GM handles it or not, they also might have to handle computing special/critical thresholds. Adding more rules for conditional damage and all that might be way too much for some of them, depending on what other games they've played before Pathfinder. But hey, you know your players, so that's your call -- I have just been bit before by D20 players finding it difficult to go to other systems, so I thought I'd give a friendly warning.

LOL yes, wow. It's like taxes in North America where you have to do all the useless bookkeeping and calculation, when really the government already knows most of it already

Also, even though I think Jason might have misunderstood the question, if we were to consider the Q&A as "correct" (I don't), remember what it says: Q: In the case of trading one-use spell, when will the original owner be able to cast the one-use spell? A: As soon as desired, as per the rules. ...which only means that the owner can cast the spell at least once after the trade -- it doesn't say anything about how many times the owner can cast it. So even if you believe that "one-use spells" are, indeed, "one-use" (and not "RP-sacrificing spells"), it doesn't grant the original owner the ability to cast that spell repeatedly after having traded it. It just means that trading it away somehow doesn't "consume" your one-use.... which doesn't make a lot of thematic sense to me because the receivers are using your RPs and Rune affinities, so it's really like the original owner has indeed cast it, and therefore should have "consumed" the one-use during the trade... Similarly, if you believe that "one-use spells" are "RP-sacrificing spells", then you should lose those RPs spent on it while trading it away. But RAW doesn't mention that.

Not completely true: RQ2 uses a mix of "one-use" (with or without hyphen) and "non-reusable". If you look into RQ2 scenarios like Pavis, Big Rubble, Griffin Mountain, etc., you'll see that the number of "one-use" increases while "non-reusable" becomes mostly extinct, as (it seems) Chaosium settled on a standard terminology. It's only as well balanced as the GM wants it to be Getting a traded Resurrect spell not only requires the party to have an Issaries initiate who can get a CA priest at a market, it would also most probably (in my game) require doing something for the local CA temple -- so a whole adventure's worth in payment, in addition to money and all that stuff. What is your source for this point about common rune spells? It's interesting to me because I've got a house rule for exactly this, although my house rule is for playing "unexperienced" characters, and is designed/tuned so that by the time your character has ~3 years of experience, like "normal" RQG starting characters, you do get pretty much all common rune spells, so that it's backwards compatible with RAW.

Chalana Arroy initiates can get Resurrect as a normal spell. You're thinking of Daka Fal maybe? (initiates do get a one-use version of Resurrect).

LOL yes, this. How many times did I create the Next Big Awesome Combat System when I was a teenager, complete with logarithmic scales and, basically, ever-increasing Strike Ranks to model characters 1.4 times faster than their opponents (I didn't know about RQ or SRs back then so I thought I was a total genius). Of course, I never played with any of those systems because when I finally decided to run some test combat I realized that it was playing very poorly... but yes, it was super fun to design. I guess it's the GM equivalent to players who enjoy creating plenty of new characters that they never play. But anyway, concerning the OP: yeah, not my cup of tea either, as RQ is near my upper limit for rules complexity. So you would have to ask yourself: are my players able to handle it? Am I able to handle it as the GM? Is it going to make combat more fun? (making it more realistic is only more fun if your players' idea of fun is indeed more realism, which is the case for some people but far from the case for all people). Now in the spirit of giving constructive feedback: Special attack roll: Is that second roll on a table? If so, you can potentially save having to make a second roll. You could for example make a table with exactly 10 entries, and use the attack roll's unit die to determine the special effect. Move the mechanically best/expert results up the table (towards the 8, 9 entries) because people with less than 50% in a skill will never be able to reach them, since their special threshold is less than 10% and therefore they don't access all the unit numbers. Is it really necessary? Half of what you're talking about is describing something cool, which either the GM or player can do. But the other half is actually mechanically and narratively relevant: if you get a special result which is "knockback" but that sends the enemy flying down a cliff when the player really wanted to kill him to steal an item, that will be annoying -- most likely the GM can say "sure, roll for another special effect" but this is opening a can of worms you may not want to see opened. Weapon damage: I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish here? Do some weapon get +1/+2 only against armor, and don't get that bonus against unarmored opponents? Are you sure you want to go there? I can see a lot of debates regarding whether the damage bonus applies or not again this or that type of armor (leather, metal, chain, plates, etc.) or natural defense (dragonewt scales, dinosaur skin, etc.). You'd have to figure out exactly what gets those bonuses or not. Strike Ranks: As per RAW, weapon SRs are already between 0 and 4. What do you get by increasing the range by 1, except exposing you to arguments with the players about a 1 SR difference between your house rule tables and RAW? Doesn't seem worth it to me, especially when you consider that DEX/SIZ SR are making it all more variable anyway. Parry multipliers: I would recommend making your own variant of the character sheet, with extra room to write the pre-computed parry skill score, so as not to further slow down gameplay with players having to make divisions on the fly.

Sure, if you were to abide by the "one-use spells can be used repeatedly" rule. Which I don't because, indeed, it can leave you a destitute lay-member even though you were previously a God Talker with a whooping 9 points Rune Points pool. Makes no sense to me.

Oh you mean if you initiated into a cult by sacrificing only 1 POW to get only 1 RP for only a single one-use spell? That's a hell of a corner case... huh. I guess I would worry about it when it shows up? Either keeping the character as an initiate, or bumping them down to lay-member, both sound fine to me. (but I might never end up in this situation anyway since I don't like the non-replenishing RP thing, so I might house-rule it away)

Err it's totally a big difference? Empty Rune Point pool: To have obtained the RP pool in the first place, you previously sacrificed POW to a deity, thus establishing a link between you and them. You're an initiate of their cult, and get a bunch of benefits (like discount on training, etc.) You get RPs back by rolling Worship. On a success, you get between a few and all of them back, depending on where and when this happens. The bigger the party, the more RPs you get back. No Rune Point pool: You have never sacrificed POW to that deity. There's no link between the two of you. You're not an initiate of their cult. You can crash someone's party, but no amount of Worship rolls, beer drinking, making out, or dancing will give you anything else than a headache and a potential visit from the Sexually Transmitted Disease Fairy from Mallia.

Yes, that's the kind of weird thing that led me to quickly mention that I didn't agree with one-use spell Rune Points not replenishing. It opens up a bunch of cans of worms, and adds unnecessary complexity. Plus, how does it work if you get a one-use spell from a source that doesn't require POW sacrifice? Like for example you paid to get taught the spell at a temple, or you paid to get it through Spell Trading... you cast the spell and lose one RP forever? That's harsh, unnecessary, and doesn't make much sense IMHO. It's just fine and it's your problem. What keeps a connection to your god is that you have a Rune Points pool, regardless of whether it's empty or not, and that you will come to its temple to pray and replenish pretty soon. That's what differentiates you from a lay- or non-member, which have no pool to begin with.

Yeah, and if that was how it worked, it would be called "non-replenishing spell" or something. If that's how the rules worked, then the problem would be a terrible naming choice.

I'm also new to RQ -- I've never GM'ed any edition before RQG. When I read "one-use spell", I assume it is, indeed, a "one-use spell". I read that small section in the rulebook as additional information to answer the question of "what happens to the Rune Points I spend on the one-use spell" because, personally, without it, I would have made the spell disappear from the character sheet (because it's "one-use") but would have made the RP replenish (I would actually argue that it doesn't make much sense that the RP doesn't replenish, but that's another debate). But hey, if some people somehow interpret it another way then sure, adding another sentence to that paragraph is cheap and easy so they should definitely do that for future hypothetical release.

LOL. I mean, sure, I agree that RQG has several occurrences of "copy/pasting" from RQ2 without an appropriate editing pass, but this argument is ridiculous. The spell is one-use, that's it. It's pretty clear to me. You have a nicely clever interpretation there, @Akhôrahil, but that interpretation belongs indeed to the Egregious Munchkinery thread.

We don't "fancy" the Orlanthi culture any more than we "fancy" any other thing we play. Playing as Vikings or CIA agents or Conan characters or British 1920s investigators doesn't mean we "fancy" northmen culture or American foreign policy or bloody barbarians or pre-WW2 imperialism... in many ways, playing as these characters is actually a way to deconstruct all the things that are bad about them and the system that created them, and sometimes explore themes that are relevant to today. If I only wanted to play characters that belong to groups or cultures that are obviously "good" and "nice", I'm pretty sure I wouldn't own 95% of the RPG books I own. Yeah they have a lot of good reasons to see the Lunars as vile and abhorrent. But the Lunars also have their own point of view and are far from being objective "villains". If anything, the Lunars are probably the closest to what we can understand here on Earth. I imagine that plenty of people in the Lunar Empire are disgusted by many things the Red Emperor did (like Chaotic alliances), the same way plenty of people on Earth are disgusted by the many things their governments did in the past couple centuries. To me, a Lunar storyline/campaign is the best way to use fiction/gaming as a way to reflect on real-world issues -- more so than playing as Orlanthi (they have relevant themes, but less so IMHO).