Lordabdul

Bumping this thread to ask: what makes a given Orlanthi clan have a tradition to have thralls non-free people or not? I'm having trouble finding info on that, it seems pretty much arbitrary. (and for the record: I think "bland" terms are the way to go for generic, Glorantha-spanning gaming tables, but I'll definitely like to see "in-world" terms suggested for the GM to use when playing NPCs)

Thanks! That's a.... errr.... quite big errata to find so late after the publication of RQG Can we hope to see updated RQG and Rune Fixes PDFs? We discussed this a bit earlier in the thread IIRC, but yeah that's my interpretation too -- not only do you save on MP, you also save on Strike Ranks (although it's unclear if you still spend that one full melee round or not).

Yeah I should go back and check that thread in more detail. How old do you consider elders to be? I thought "elder" was anybody above 45 or 50 years old. It sounds like retirement is awfully late in your Glorantha? That's what I mainly had in mind, yeah, but all your other explanations make sense, thanks. Yeah that's effectively the character arc I'm looking for here, where the PCs are growing and moving from helping out around their households, up to staying with some thanes or local temple or even the chieftain him/herself, and then becoming thanes/priests themselves. I think that path is fairly clear in my head when it comes to obvious "assistant" types, but less so for roles that involve having your own property or other assigned property, like farm land. Thanks!

I think most Heortlings dislike Chaos. But they're generally not so... well, passionate about it that they would go out of their way and into a dangerous situation just to get to kill some Chaotic creature. They would definitely get together to prevent a Chaotic threat though. Another way to look at it is this: you and I probably don't like criminals. But only Bruce Wayne has a "Hate (Criminals) 80%" that gets him to become Batman every night and punch criminals in the face. You and I just lock the doors and go to sleep.

Yes I want both, sorry about the confusion. Yeah that makes sense. I suppose that if you're meant to become a weaponthane, an assistant shaman, or even an apprentice <whatever>, it's a lot easier because you probably move to your assigned longhouse (barracks or chieftain/inner-ring household for a solider, or the household of your patron in other cases). Now that we've cleared up the confusion, I also realized I forgot to mention that I skip the additional +20%/+15% to cult skills of your choosing (RQG p73). This means the characters only get half the cult skills (including lore/worship/meditate), which aims to represent what you learned in the first few months before and after you became an Initiate, but without having had time to "deep dive" into any particular skill yet. So far, the character sheets I'm getting with this method seem playable, but I'll report back after I've tried them out!

Why? When you go through cult initiation, don't you sacrifice your first point of POW and get your first Rune point? What would you do with a Rune point without a Rune spell? And sure, there might be some time elapsed between those 2 events, but isn't the whole point of divine magic that you just let your deity do the job, so there's not much to train, really? Which means it might be as fast as a few days before you figure out your first Rune spell... I could see the argument for skipping the cult skill bonuses, but then you probably end up less skilled than a normal RQG character 3 years later (assuming my math is right).

They're in the "Spirits" chapter so I assume they are spirits, yes. They're Underworld spirits, to be exact. They also have the ability to materialize and engage in physical combat at will (3rd bullet point in their description), so I think they can engage in both types of combat, depending on the situation.

If I wanted my players to have "unexperienced" adventurers, how would I change the character creation rules? By "unexperienced" I mean around 17 or 18 years old (instead of the default 21). To keep things simple (especially in the matter of Rune affinities and magic), we will only consider characters that did go through their adulthood and cult initiation, albeit very recently. 1. Skill Points The first thing is obviously to adjust starting skill scores. I'm going to assume that the Homeland cultural skill bonuses are predominantly driven by everything you learn from just growing up there, so I don't think we need to change those. For occupational skill bonuses, I would change the bonuses from 30/20/15/10 to 20/10/8/5 (less time spent doing your occupation). Cult skill bonuses would be halved (round up). Personal skill bonuses: I would change the bonuses from 25/10 to 20/10 (not too much change... you learned most of your favourite things while being a teenager/young adult). The idea is that, at best, you got 30+25=+55% at character creation for a "normal" adventurer skill but, at best, 20+20=+40% for an "unexperienced" character skill. If the adventurers are 3 years younger, that's 15 seasons' worth of adventuring to "catch up" to a "normal" RQG adventurer. For your most useful skills (like weapon skills), you probably roll for improvement every season. Over the course of these 3 years, you might average to rolling above 70%, so with an average 1D6 roll, that's about +16% experience, just enough to catch up. If you can squeeze in a bit of training before you reach the 75% threshold, you're better off! And for the less-often used skills, you might actually come up better than a normal starting adventurer anyway because the starting bonuses don't take as much as a drop at creation. 2. Rune Magic You only get 1 Rune point and 1 Rune spell, although you can of course sacrifice extra POW at character creation to get more. It can get tricky when all your cult's Rune magic costs 2 points (I'm looking at you, Odayla, and your stupid overpriced shapeshifting magic!), so you might have to sacrifice extra. 3. Spirit Magic You only get 2 points of Spirit magic. 4. Base Income I suppose that's the same regardless of experience -- it's just that the younger adventurer might not succeed as often in the first years. But it does open up various worldbuilding questions. For instance, take a farmer. I think it's really implied that you have your own family to look after, and that the base income is used for supporting your household. But if you just recently became adult, you might still be working on your parents' farm? (and your parents get either 80L or 40L, depending on whether they're free or tenant farmers, to maintain the household which includes you) At this point, do you basically get "pocket money", as decided by the GM/player? When does a kid effectively leave their parents' home and builds their own household? I assume there's a process where the clan ring assigns lands, as they become available, at which point the young adult moves in with whichever girlfriend/boyfriend they have at the time (or even gets one assigned as a year-marriage or agreement with nearby clan). But what happens to the previous farm household (probably an elder couple) ? Assuming they're not blood-related to you, do they move out and go live with their own relatives at a different farm? I'm hoping to make this part of one of the early adventures, but I want to make sure I've got this right. 5. Ransom I would be tempted to make that lower at first, but frankly I don't know if it's worth it. Are there any rules to increase one's Ransom as one gets more important/expert/etc? I suppose that's really narratively driven in practice? 6. Equipment No changes. That's it! Does that look fair?

Agreed. I made some pre-gen characters for my players to choose from in case they didn't want to create characters themselves (they had too many questions about Glorantha and couldn't figure out what to do), and one of them was Lhankor Mhy scribe that took the "spirit magic" path (no sorcery). That simplified things greatly.

Wait, you mean there are GMs who don't handle special/critical/fumble results on non-combat rolls? That doesn't seem right. Most (if not all) RPG systems have crit/fumble results as part of the broader game system -- not just the combat mechanics. As for matching combat HP/AP/hit-location to non-combat things, that's exactly what I meant with "social combat" for political discussions or complex trade negotiations, for instance. Check out the optional rules in the Mythras companion, they do exactly this: "hit locations" are for "attacking" someone's passions or personality or logic or whatever. And then you can counter or deflect the argument, like dodging vs parrying. I haven't used anything like this yet in any game but it has been on my mind for the past 15 years or so. In other cases, yes, a bake-off at a ceremonial feast would probably warrant multiple rolls at my table. Something in between "combat crunch" and "just 1 roll", similar in feel to, say, CoC 7e chase rules, where there's still a little bit of resource management, just enough to have between 2 and 8 rolls at the table, and would amount to 5~10min of gameplay. Anyway... please resume gender related discussions, those are super interesting

You just keep fighting with a broken blade. Eventually you just hit with the pummel.

Interesting find, thanks! I'm not sure how that can work in practice though... say I have 150% in weapon skill, and I'm splitting that 80% (against opponent A) and 70% (against opponent B). Do we need to track this so that I have 80% parry against A and 70% parry against B? (dropping either one by -20% for when they come second) And if a 3rd opponent C attacks, which skill score should I use? I've got no idea what Jason means, there.

That makes sense to me, actually. I'm considering it too ...and when I compare with GURPS, which is my go-to "tactical crunchy combat system", this is also kinda how it works. In other news, if people want to be mean to their Humakti players, there is also some potential argument to be made for Sword Trance to be nerfed some more. There's already a consensus that the rulebook text is missing the bit about what the "trance" means, which, in the Bestiary, is described as not being able to do anything else than fight with that specific weapon. But the Arrow Trance text has another interesting bit: "The user can use no other weapon and cannot parry nor use the bow as a club". (btw, can you parry with a bow? what skill do you use? Club?) So if Arrow Trance doesn't let you parry, you could argue Sword Trance also either (1) doesn't let you parry ("you're a Humakti! you shouldn't fear death! let Death strike you, and if the Gods smile, Death won't take you!"), or (2) only gives you bonuses to attacks.

Check my previous explanation, see if it makes sense? (feel free to ask more specific questions afterwards).

That's my opinion too -- one way to make basket weaving/political intrigue/commercial negotations/etc. as interesting/challenging as combat is by giving them the same amount of crunch. HQG does exactly that by making all of those things into the same roll(s). You could also (in theory) do that with RQG if you add "tactical basket weaving" rules, with turn-by-turn rolls I'm only half kidding though -- I would love to have advanced "social combat" rules (Mythras has optional rules for that but I never tried them). It might be worth mentioning that because RQG combat is so stressful and dangerous, a lot of times the players will actually be super happy with having found a non-violent solution to their problem. I know it happens a lot with my players in various RPGs, but I suppose it depends on who you have at your table -- some players really just want to push miniatures on a board. That's a nice scenario idea. I think it can happen even with hetero marriages, since either the groom or bride might have the higher status (therefore suggesting who moves in with who, but it might not be obvious and their clans might disagree), or their clans might also have "incompatible" traditions (matrilineal vs patrilineal). I don't think Sartar clans do this anymore, but there used to also be "triaty" agreements where 2 or more clans come together and agree to only marry people between them. You can see how that can easily lead to problems when some young person falls in love with a stranger.

Oh right I forgot about knockback... the Allosaurus, Cwim, anybody that's big can easily knockback (even knock down) a humanoid. But AFAICT it just pushes the opponent away 1d3 meters -- no damage it dealt to them or their weapons. Did I miss something? 200% won't be enough to help you against Cwim, but it will definitely help against the Allosaurus, making its attacks useless. I still think that some "parrying huge opponents" house rules are the right solution though -- I'll work a bit more on them for use in my campaign as far as I'm concerned. Another potential house rule/tactic that comes to mind for these cases is the ability for big monsters to (in rules terms) grapple you with their mouth and toss you away (for a couple d6's worth of falling damage). Using a sword to parry a mouth that's potentially bigger than said sword is equally illogical and needs some other rules tweaking IMHO. Although it can be disappointing for the players, it can also be a roleplaying opportunity for the other characters to complain that they don't get their share of combat to prove their worth to their gods. Plus, the Humakti only has so many Rune Points (at least at first)... an adventure like Rainbow Mounds or The Smoking Ruins, with many encounters and/or played across several days, will ensure the Humakti can only use Sword Trance/Truesword for a couple of those encounters. Throw in a whole bunch of critters with some big bads in the middle and you can switch between the "Humakti tears through the critters while the others focus on the bosses" tactic (at least 6 critters to make it dangerous) and "we take care of the critters while the Humakti goes 1:1 against the main boss, who's equally bad-ass" tactic. Yeah I had never played RQ before so for me this is just part of learning the game. But for people who have played RQ a lot before, I can understand that it's frustrating that a few rules changes are completely changing the balance. Although my understanding is that it's replacing one frustration ("Rune magic sucks because it's hard to get and only one-use") with another frustration ("Rune magic is so easy to use it breaks the game") ?

It really depends how you picture your Orlanthi society -- which is the point of this spreadsheet If you picture people just getting 1 Rune Point at initiation, and then they just carry on with their lives, then that works if you have a low rate of lay members (<30%). That maps fairly well with how you might imagine real world religions, IMHO. If you picture people actually getting involved with their worship, gaining additional Rune Points, you obviously get a big surplus of Rune Points. This means you can (if you want) make these people be the minority (>60% lay members, who just "go to church on sundays" but don't do much else). This also maps well with another interpretation of real world religions IMHO. If however you punch in the numbers for both low lay membership, and high dedication to the cult (2 or 3 Rune Points for the average initiate), then you realize the clan has a shitload of excess magic points every season (hundreds in various categories). Assuming I didn't forget something.... in this case, you either figure that they keep a lot of points on the side "just in case" (wayyyy more than the 10% I set aside by default), or it means you can start bumping up a lot more things: you can bless 100% of the pregnancies... you can bump the crop blessing to a +80% or +100% bonus, and you can bless all the crops instead of just some of them... you can do one or two more raids per year, and you can boost almost all of of your fighters with offensive and defensive magic, instead of less than half of them.... and you can of course organize a couple more festival ceremonies per year.

In the spreadsheet it's all about the number of individuals, since I then multiple that by the number of average Rune Points for a typical thane, militia warrior, carl, cottar, etc. Ultimately, even bringing down the number of thanes by a lot (down to less than 20) doesn't affect the economy too much. I had to redistribute a bit from War back into Land, but that was pretty much it. It might be because I'm not using these numbers much -- the Rune Point budget is based on how many initiates/rune lords/rune priests/god talkers each cult has.

Ah yeah nice -- p 406 actually confirms that typical clan would have around 200 hides of land, which is in the ballpark of what I have for the Red Cow clan in the spreadsheet. I'm not sure what you mean about the thanes, though. That boxed text is only related to the Orlanth & Ernalda temples, so the "five priests and thanes" is just the thanes for the temple. I took my percentage of thanes from the Red Cow (The Coming Storm, p11, indicates 120 thanes for a 1500 people clan).

This isn't a problem specific to Humakti or Sword Trance or whatever... it's a general thing with being a GM. A GM has to learn to balance encounters for wizards and ranged combatants and netrunners and martial artists and university professors and what have you. What I learned on this topic is to just switch things up every fight (opponents are ambushing, using bows, swarming with lots of swordsmen, using shield walls, using defensive magic, retreating, using different terrain features, using cover, changing tactics, etc.), occasionally break up a fight in a few scenes (fight/parlay/fight again, fight/chase/fight, etc... especially good if the break extends past the 15 minutes mark in RQ), and remember that it's not about fights, it's about scenes, and the point of a scene is to let one or two of the PCs "shine" every now and then. Cwim has a whole bunch of insane things that will let it hold his (their? its?) own -- for example, the fact that he will cast Dispel Magic 18 against your Humakti after the first round to kill any weapon enhancements. Plus he has good armour, can spit out more monsters to swarm his assailants and drive their >100% bonuses down, etc. But otherwise, sure, I mean, nobody said Cwim was unbeatable. If you put your mind to it, you can kill it, or wound it enough that it flees. To me, the problem with Cwim is more the lack of rules for fighting things many times your size... he's 15 meters high, dammit, so you shouldn't be able to hit anything else that his legs, and you should have hefty penalties from the fact you're fighting in the middle of 6 gigantic legs stomping all around you. I would definitely come up with house rules just for that. Same thing here -- the problem IMHO isn't the Humakti being super awesome with a Sword. The problem is that the rules are the same whether you're fighting a Trollkin, another human, or a Mastodon. The way I would solve this isn't by changing the >100% rule, it would be by adding a house rule for fighting things that have twice your SIZ or more. A 10m high, 500 ton giant is stomping on you with his foot? You should be dodging that, not parrying it with a sword the size of his toe! Parrying a dinosaur or a giant with a sword is ridiculous to begin with, regardless of the percentage both players are rolling with. So... for instance (bear with me, I just thought about it 30 seconds ago), maybe for each multiple of 10 SIZ above your own SIZ, you get -20% to your parry? Or some other parry-nerfing rule? Or, if you prefer to go that way, a damage-inducing rule, where, for each 10 SIZ above your own SIZ, you take one die out of the opponent's damage roll (up to his full damage roll), and roll that against you/your weapon when you parry a failed attack (when you parry a successful attack, you get the full damage roll, as per RAW). So at some point, fighting a SIZ 80 giant means there's not much difference (damage-wise) between parrying his foot and getting stomped by his foot... (in the case of the Allosaur, that means at least 3D6 to your sword... it won't parry for very long, and your arm is going to hurt very soon). Otherwise, I don't think I have any problems with the >100% rule when the 2 combatants are human size.

I was lurking around the Well of Daliah and I found this page -- I don't know if it's been mentioned in this thread already? The first couple answers relate to the OP, and Jason describes an Orlanthi society where most people are just lay members, actually. In other news, it was a slow afternoon, so I had fun making a thing (which I posted in the RQ forum since it deals with Rune Points). Feel free to tweak and play with the numbers, but I think you'll find that you need to be careful with your Rune Points, even with a low rate of lay members in your clan.

It was a slow afternoon, so I spent some time making a Google Spreadsheet that tries to put together various stats about an Orlanthi clan in order to figure out how magic is spent for various things from season to season. You can't edit it, but you should be able to make a copy in your own Google Drive, and play with it from there. Get it >> here << 1. How it works Before you play with it, here's how it works: All of the light green cells are the one you can (and should!) edit. The other ones are driven by formulas. The first section ("Variables") has a whole bunch of general variables. The "People & Cults" section is meant to be filled up manually, HQG style, and the formulas will figure out the RQG numbers (this is mostly because I started the spreadsheet by entering the Red Cow clan stats). Punch in numbers in the various cults until you're happy. Note that the total number of cult initiates/devotees can exceed the number of adults reported a few rows below, because you can, and will, have clan people with multiple cult memberships. This isn't negligible: Red Cow clan for instance seems to have more than a hundred people with multiple cult memberships (under HQG rules). Next, scroll down to the "Rune Magic" section and you should be able to see how much Rune Points are spent or "saved" every season for various things. Things are Lands (farming/herding), Families (blessing pregnancies and healing people), War (raiding and such), Ceremonies (holy days, sacred time, and the occasional adulthood rites), and Miscellaneous (for various little things like dealing with occasional monsters). You can adjust how much magic each cult dedicates to each "thing" (for instance, Ernalda spends a lot on Lands, obviously), but you probably shouldn't deviate too much from what I set there. Still, little adjustments to big cults can make a big difference. The next couple tables show how much Rune Magic a clan has, and how much they're spending. The "Magic Willing to Spend" is, by default, 90% of the total magic available, because the clan won't want to spend all its magic every season. This is just informative, to warn you about when you're eating into that last bit of magic, which is probably dangerous. Some things, like adulthood rites (which Jeff said only happen every 4 years or so) are, as a result of the seasonal aspect of this spreadsheet, "amortized" over seasons, where the Rune Magic is taken into account as if you were saving it somewhere so that you have enough of it to spend every 4 years. Below that are sections for each "thing", with various settings for adjusting how you think they deplete a clan's magic. This is where I expect to have made the most mistakes, and where I hope people will point out corrections. 2. Preliminary conclusions Based on the Red Cow clan stats, and on my own modeling of what happens in a year, here are some conclusions, using the first version of the spreadsheet. Feel free to point out things that seem out of place -- they probably indicate either a mathematical error, or a modeling error. Lands are by far the biggest spender for Rune Magic (assuming I've got the right math for the number of hides of land and number of animals... I'm not even counting any other animals beside cattle and sheep) I'm blessing crops for a 60% bonus, but only 3/4 of the fields (not all of them). It's pretty even between magic required for blessing crops and for taking care of animals. Far behind, magic spent on War and Ceremonies are pretty much equivalent. Of course that will vary a lot based on your clan. The spreadsheet allows you to do more raids per year, send more or less fighters, with more or less offensive/defensive magic. Of course you also need to heal them, but you can adjust that too. Different clans might also have different number of small and big ceremonies, and that will probably change the magic spending quite a lot. I think the participation ratio of people spending Rune Points during ceremonies are quite low, to be honest. Miscellaneous things are, again, far behind War and Ceremonies. Family stuff isn't far behind -- it's pretty cheap to bless pregnancies, really. One of the most important settings to play with is the percentage of lay members vs. initiates. It's set to 30% here (totally an arbitrary number), but bumping it to, say, 50% puts you in the red for magic spending, so that gives you an idea of how many less fields you need to bless, or fighters you need to support magically. 3. Changelog I'll edit this post with what I changed, if I do change the spreadsheet. First version (2019/12/27)

I originally read the rules in RQG GM Pack as meaning that the spirit in the crystal cannot act independently, and can only obey the crystal owner (i.e. it can cast spells if ordered, but it can't on its own, unless the owner has more spirits bound than their CHA, in which case spirits can start rebelling). Now I'm not so sure. The sidebar on p60 of The Smoking Ruins makes it look like crystals can actually have independently acting spirits in them. And FWIW, in old RQ2 books like Apple Lane, crystal-bound spirits were also able to act on orders... Gringle had a spirit in a crystal with orders to defend his house against intruders.

Nah, I disagree. "Manipulating a spell" means spending the extra MPs and extra SRs to cast it (it's the name of the section under which you find the tables for extra intensity/range/duration). But inscribing a spell specifically lets the sorcerer cast the spell "without requiring any manipulation". What would that even mean, if you still need to pay the MPs and wait the SRs? At the very least, you should get one of those free, if not both. I suppose so -- but unless there's a specific advantage to inscribe a spell on paper or in a book, I'm not sure it's worth it, since those are a lot less practical to carry around and use compared to objects like necklaces and rings and walking staffs. It might make some of you shake their heads, but I'm actually hoping the extended sorcery rules add advantages to inscribed spells based on when you inscribed them, where, on what, using what kind of ritual, etc. Basically, get a portion of the "sympathetic magic" advantages embedded inside the inscribed spell. Not only does this reinforce the whole "a prepared sorcerer is powerful" trope, it also gives more opportunities for the sorcerer to come out of his laboratory.

Yeah that makes sense! Strange that the system doesn't support faster moving creatures... even without considering spirits, I can totally imagine some animals or creatures going faster than MOV 12. Letting that fast NPC do 2 movements units (6m) for some of their SR seems a bit too much of a jump, maybe? (and you'd have to decide which SRs they get the double move). I would instead experiment with a table where, for them, a unit of movement gets bigger. Something like: 12 of below: unit = 3m 13 to 16: unit = 4m 17 to 20: unit = 5m etc. (for each +4 in MOV, increase unit by 1) You can of course tweak the table a bit to make the rounding fall in a different place (here I chose to round up... which means a MOV 13 creature actually reaches its full move before SR 12... but that's easier to deal with than the alternative, where after SR 12 they still have more movement).