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Lordabdul

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Everything posted by Lordabdul

  1. Yes, but it doesn't specify from who to who. When you write "Loyalty (Colymar)" on your character sheet, it can mean "I'm loyal to the Colymar", or "the Colymar is loyal to me", or "we're loyal to each other". I think it's meant to be used either way depending on the situation (95% of the time, it would be "to each other", I expect). I do understand how confusing it can be, though. Devotion, I think.
  2. I'm actually now getting confused with what "stackable" means In the general Magic chapter, it says: All Rune magic spells have an initial Rune point cost. If a spell is stackable, then more Rune points can be expended to create greater effects. Some spells have limits to their stacking, given description. If a spell is nonstackable then additional Rune points cannot be spent. But then in the Rune Magic chapter it says: Rune magic spells can be stacked (combining several castings into one) if the spell is described as stackable. This provides a much more powerful effect when the spell is cast. I'm not sure what this "combining several castings into one" means -- does it mean you can cast multiple different spells on the same round if they're stackable? And if they're non-stackable, you need to cast them one by one? In which case, Transform Self would give you a 1-round casting of all 3 shapeshifting spells... because otherwise, Bear's Skin/Bear's Strength/Claws, being non-stackable, would have to be cast one by one, which would take 3 rounds... is that what Stackable means? There's a Q&A on this subject on Well of Daliath and... it doesn't clarify much There are non-stackable spells like Axe Trance that do include boosting. I'm thoroughly confused. Oh, interesting.... but I doubt that you can cast a Touch spell on multiple targets for the price of one, can you? So the Rune Master would need shitloads of Rune Points from their associated spirit and other magic items. I doubt they would do that -- instead they would transform only themselves to show how bad-ass they are to everybody else. It might be overpowered but on the other hand, you're not getting back many of these Rune Points until the end of the season anyway... and there's a mention somewhere in, err, Sartar Companion (I think?), about an Odayla guy who spent 5 years in bear form. I'm wondering if maybe I'm going at this the wrong way? Like, maybe what I should do is make house rules where you can reduce the cost of Transform Self if you spend a whole bunch of time in meditation/worship/etc.?
  3. I'm not sure that's a problem -- you can probably be a wandering murder-hobo who still stops at whichever temple/shrine they pass by, giving out parts of your plunder, no? There used to be wandering monks for many sedentary cultures and religions, historically speaking. I'm sure they were still in somewhat good standing with their churches and temples.
  4. I think you're getting confused because "Loyalty" has a certain implication about the relationship being from the character to the other character/temple/etc ("I'm loyal to the Colymar Queen and tribe"). But it's really more of a bi-directional relationship, depending on the situation and on the roll. In some cases, it might be better to consider this Passion to be called "Standing" or something ("How much standing do I have with the Colymar Queen for her to lean in my direction"). In the case of the Cacodemon priest trying to infiltrate institutions, it represents how loyal people think he is ("I heard he just gave 100000L to the tribal council! He's so awesome!") and, therefore, how much he can use that to his advantage to sway people's opinions and get favours. Victims of ransoms roll under Loyalty or Love to see if their people are going to pay... obviously this isn't to measure how much you love your people, it's to measure how much your people love you (and therefore how willing they are to pay your ransom). The Cacodemon priest might invoke his Loyalty with the Colymar Queen and, with a good enough roll, plus some augmented Persuade ("I swear, my Queen, they're crazy, they're lying! You know me! I don't worship demons, I'm a good, gift-giving, Orlanth worshiping member of your tribe!"), he might actually get away with the tribal council paying his ransom. The Queen surely won't be happy when she learns the truth 2 seasons later. In other cases, the Loyalty might be just that -- proper bi-direction relationship, and an adventurer might end up with conflicting loyalties, and she might roll to figure out which one wins. And in yet other cases, like, say, you think you work for this Orlanthi patron but he's really a Cacodemon fiend, you might want to invoke a Loyalty against him, only to inexplicably fail that 80% roll because, really, the GM secretly knows this guy has -100% against you and is maneuvering behind your back. It's time to go tell the Colymar Queen about this and gather up some weaponthanes to kick that guy's butt.
  5. I don't see any PoD option on DTRPG. Is it only enabled based on geographical location or something?
  6. Fair enough -- at that point it might be just easier to do like @Runeblogger and ignore Transform Self completely -- you would become the beast when you cast all 3 spells, and you can extend it to 1 hour with 1 point (Extension) instead of 2 (Transform Self). If you're nice, the 1 hour extension comes from free when you cast them all together. But that still puts the shapeshifting fantasy out of reach of players for a long time... there must be a good middle ground between too cheap and too expensive. I'm not sure about this -- Wolf Brothers can cast 1 or 2 spells out of the 3 if they want, there doesn't seem to be anything that prevents it. Also, I don't think they can transform "whenever they want". Even if I look up the Telmori in the Red Cow books, to figure out how they're supposed to behave narratively speaking, it looks like "only a few" actually transform into wolves outside of Wildday.
  7. Oh right, I didn't think about Extension -- that does indeed create a different mechanism for affecting duration... but I guess it was already a bit weird since RAW Transform Self lasts 1 hour instead of the usual 15 minutes anyway. I'm not sure what you mean by "not worth getting" -- you get all of it, it's just that the spell lasts different times based on how many points you invest in it. Maybe you meant "not worth casting at that level", and yeah, I did mention that in my commentary. To make the spell start at 15 min, it would have to still be fairly expensive I think. Like, just 1 point less than RAW.
  8. Ok thanks everyone! What I'm considering is changing how spells work as follows: The pre-requisite for Transform Self (Whatever Beast) is to know the 3 cult spells that make up the beast. You can of course cast each of the 3 component spells separately to get any aspect of the beast of 15 minutes (or whatever duration those spells are). You can cast Transform Self by itself, and the number of Rune points you put in it drives its duration. Base cost is the sum of the costs of the component spells, divided by 2, rounded down. Duration/spend levels are: Base cost: 1 melee round. You seem to transform into a beast for a few seconds but it looks more like a blurry vision. BC+2 RP: 2 minutes. Probably good for a whole combat. BC+4 RP: 30 minutes. BC+6 RP: 5 hours. I'm still tuning those costs (I'm not 100% happy about the math yet) but basically, for an Odayla initiate, it would be 3/5/7/9 Rune points. Because of rounding, Wolfbrothers would have the same cost levels. The first level lets you kick ass for 1 melee round, but is probably not that worth it compared to just casting, say, Bear Skin for 15 minutes (which means it not only lasts for a full combat, but it's also useful for pre-emptive casting like before infiltrating an enemy camp). The second level gives you kick-assery for a whole combat, but will only be accessible after a couple seasons of adventuring. It will also probably leave you drained of most/all your Rune points at first, so I imagine people will keep that in reserve for the final boss of the adventure. The third level is like casting all 3 component spells, but lasting twice as long. The fourth level is a bit equivalent to RAW in terms of costs, but lasts a lot longer to make the duration curve progression between levels not totally wonky. The goal is obviously to make shapeshifting more accessible by adding more milestones on the way to "1+ hours beast mode!", while also still providing a feeling of accomplishment for when you get it ("you need to worship the Wolf Father some more, young cub, you have made progress but you're not a wolf yet"). What do you think?
  9. Hey RQG people, The "Transform Self" spell (RQG p347) seems weirdly overpriced and limited to me. First, you need to stack it with 3 other spells that, together, complete the alternate form you want to turn into: This spell must be stacked with the three cult specialty spells. For example, an Odayla cult-member caster would use Bear’s Skin, Bear’s Strength, and Claws. That's a total 9 Rune points to transform into a Bear. Not only is this expensive, but it's a long way to go (~1 year of regular gaming?) to even get this kind of Rune points pool for a player who originally picked an Odayla initiate because of the cool factor of transforming into a bear for an hour. The worst, however, is that RAW say this spell can only be cast on Wild Day. How is that ever going to line up in actual play? So: Am I correct with the price of shapeshifting? Are players with Odayla initiates really expected to "wait until next week" to use a power that took so long to acquire? Wolfbrothers automatically transform on Wildday. Is that free on that day for them? (it's 8 Rune points for them according to RQGB, which I assume almost nobody can afford, except for Telmor Rune-Lords, so I guess it makes sense for it to be free) Thanks!
  10. I don't remember Rolemaster (haven't played that since high school... and I'm not gonna tell you my age!), but I've played a whole bunch of GURPS and I think GURPS actually gives you "more crunch for your buck", so to speak (IMHO of course). By going with just "1 round is 1 second", instead of the hybrid "melee rounds + strike ranks" systems, it makes things a lot simpler... although the downside is that, with such fine grained combat, some things like reloading or using unbalanced weapons might take a turn or two, which means characters skipping turns (equivalent to "skipping ahead" to later SRs in RQ3), and some players just don't like skipping turns. But stepping/moving, attack/defense maneuvers, weapons' reach, etc. is IMHO better modeled and more elegant in GURPS. If you like combat with tactical options, GURPS has the best and most playable I've encountered so far IMHO. But it doesn't model spear vs. shortsword the same way, for example, so some tactical gaming aspects will play vastly differently, which might not correctly emulate the narrative tropes that RQ is going for, or the way you want it to feel. It also doesn't have a very satisfying impaling rule, but that's easily fixed by mixing RAW and RQ. Actually, since we're in the RQ house rules thread (more or less), there's an interesting thing about impaling weapons. RQG introduces a rule where an impaled target that moves around takes half damage while doing so. GURPS has a different rule where the target takes half damage when you forcibly unstuck the impaled weapon. If you want combat to be totally bad-ass and increase mortality rates, use both rules! Impale a trollkin on a spear, use him to bludgeon the other trollkins, and then take out the spear. Damage every turn! Yay!
  11. If you want to cheat for a game, you can grab any random event from KoDP and improvise from there
  12. Thanks for the replies! Looks like this is a house rule, I can't see anything about a x3 sprint distance. As far as I can tell, this "call out Strike Ranks one by one" thing is only RQ3. RQ2 and RQG both have the old-school melee round split in 3 phases (statement of intent, movement of non-engaged characters, resolution of melee/missiles/spells using SRs). I'm seriously thinking of using some RQ3-inspired house rules here though, I'd like melee characters able to step around a bit so the combat environment becomes useful (like cornering someone). Oh right, yes, it would take another round before you can keep moving again, I forgot about that.
  13. I was confused for a while about what you meant -- are you having problems with the mechanical details of how many points of damage are exchanged, or are you having problems with the underlying principle of a parry damaging the attacker? If it's the former, I'm not sure if you want more or less points, or what the problem is. If it's the latter, then yeah, it's all about the fact that the defender is parrying with a blade or pointy thing or hard thing. If the ghoul's claws get blocked by the flat of the blade, it's like punching a wall that's moving towards you, and that can hurt your hand. If the claws get parried by the edge of the blade, that can potentially hurt a lot more! Also consider that some parrying techniques actually include attacking as part of the same movement (parry/riposte). Bruce Lee famously made this a pillar of Jeet Kune Do -- he isn't blocking your attacks as much as he's punching your incoming fists. I can totally imagine some bad ass like King Leonidas doing something similar, where he's deflecting attacks by kicking people back and powerfully striking their hands and weapons with his sword, all the while screaming stuff about Sparta.
  14. There's also this page from the old Glorantha website, which includes a super detailed map. I'm not sure who wrote this, though, and if this material has ever made it elsewhere.
  15. While, again, I definitely agree with you that Chaosium should fix the marketing of RQG, my joke about D&D wasn't totally off either. WotC doesn't make it super clear either: the PHB never states on the back cover that you need the other books (although it does reference them for "when you're ready for even more, expand your adventures..."). What makes it OK in the case of the PHB is that, for instance, it has an appendix with 8 pages of monster stats, so indeed you're not completely out in the cold with only 1 book, unlike RQG where there are zero examples of monster stats. Yes, and by the way I'd be grateful if you could answer my earlier questions about combat and movement!
  16. I don't remember how it is in previous editions (it's been a long time now!) but in CoC7 you can actually move up to MOVx5 (so ~40 meters for an average human, like I said). It's just that if you move MOV (no multiplier) or less, you don't get, say, penalty dice on your Firearms roll, and so on.
  17. It's also hard to know exactly if those distances are plausible or not because we don't exactly know how long a combat round is in CoC -- by design, it's an "elastic unit of time", but based on many other games, we can imagine it's about a dozen seconds long on average. That's 35 to 40 meters in one round without being a particularly fast runner, and if nobody's bothering you. Math seems to check out.
  18. Good question, as I'm preparing myself to do the same for some new players who don't know Glorantha. The first thing I'm planning do is basically keep an eye on the calendar and play through most of the important holy days, whenever the players happen to be in the village/city. A short scene each time would describe the appropriate rituals, and maybe a couple rolls for the players as they partake in the festivities and end up in small-scale heroquests along with the other people. Roleplaying downtime, so to speak. I don't know if it would get tedious quick or not, though. The Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes and Sartar Companion books are must-have for this, when it comes to Heortling culture. Another thing I'm preparing, which you seem to be doing already, is having a pack of index cards with various events, rumours, and encounters. The difference is that you give out the sheet to your players, whereas you might get better results by keeping them behind the GM screen and having them actually discover this stuff through short scenes -- they hear about the silver tower from drinking at an inn, they learn about Belvani because they somehow had some business to conduct with him, they might learn about the armour price increase by walking by the market and hearing someone complain/argue loudly about it, etc... To some degree, that's what the Eleven Lights campaign book does. In practice, some of those index cards would have events/encounters that highlight what's going on in the world (like your examples), while some would just be local slice of life stuff (kids stealing apples and husbands cheating on their wife and so on)... of course, players being players, you never know what they'll do with it. They might (will?) follow a hook that you originally wrote just as "local colour", and then you have to improvise the beginning of an adventure. At this point, I think it's frankly equivalent to writing down a whole bunch of scenario seeds and figuring out how to expose them to the PCs -- same idea, different methodologies. The old-school RQ way of doing that is with encounter tables, like the one in Startar Companion or Snakepipe Hollow and such. The main problem with this is that you can't just say "let's fast forward 2 months, here's the sheet describing what's been happening, and once you've read it, we can start with you all being woken up by screams and sounds of battle nearby". But I believe it's possible by to do by making lots of small iterative jumps, using each short scene as a jump point to go to the next which is a couple days later. I'm not sure yet though.
  19. I lost track of who's who between the real names on those books, and the forum handles, so I can't properly @ them to shower them with gratitude for their work... but I'll make sure to get those PDFs on day 1! Meanwhile, I'm looking at the pitiful half page of notes I have for a potential Compendium scenario... shame! shame!
  20. Yeah my point was that, for the price of RQ3, you could get the entire RQG slipcase, since you said you didn't like to be "forced to buy another book". If you were talking about the hassle of going back to the shop a second time, as opposed to the problem of paying more, then yes, I agree, Chaosium should have made that clear for potential buyers.... but it's probably more of a marketing problem than anything. There's a little known game from WotC that also puts things like creature stats in a completely separate book.
  21. I couldn't quite grasp the RQ3 rules about movement -- the wording wasn't clear at all to me -- until... ...which basically helped put everything in place. So the whole thing about "Attacking on the Run", for instance, which reduces your movement to 2m instead of 3m per SR, that's only for the SR on which you attack on the run, then, right? Like, in a melee round, you could be running full speed (3m/SR) for a few SRs, then attack an enemy you're running by (only moving by 2m on that SR) and then continuing to run in the remaining SRs until SR 10? That's kind of funny to me that RQ3 is using these big, abstract melee rounds that are a dozen seconds long, only to actually use Strike Ranks as, effectively, smaller combat turns, down to a resolution of around 1 second. Basically slashing the granularity of combat down to a GURPS-like level of 1-second turns. Doesn't that make combat combat much longer to play, as the GM needs to go through each SR one by one, checking with every player what's going on and how interwoven actions resolve exactly? Also doesn't that result in combats where characters are frenetically running around each other like a bad Benny Hill episode? What prevents me from always attacking and running away, then running back/attacking/running away again? Yeah like you might have guessed, one of my groups is composed of GURPS crunchy-loving players, and they really enjoy these types of tactical options. That's why I'm interested in various RQ rules throughout the ages
  22. I would definitely prefer if we focused the discussion on "here are the rules I like, and here's how they work" rather than unproductive back and forths of "it was wrong to remove this" and "it was wrong to add this" By the way, are optional rules OK as content for the Jonstown Compendium? I would assume it is, since the 7th Sea community program does contain such content (I frankly wouldn't run 7th Sea without the optional naval combat rules from there!)
  23. Yeah I talked a bit about this in a more recent reply. I've been quickly going over the RQ3 combat rules and yes I would agree that, at least on the surface, RQ3 seems better at making the SR system into an action-allowance system than RQG, where it's a good initiative system but things break down after the first action IMHO. Thankfully it's probably going to be easy to bring those rules back onto RQG... although my next RQG game will include a couple people that are fairly new to RPGs so I'll probably go the other way and completely simplify combat, using SRs only for initiative, and limiting everyone to only one action (I think Jeff and Jason did something like that when they ran intro adventures on Twitch a year or two ago, where they barely mentioned/used SRs at all). I also spotted some rules for long vs short weapons/close combat/etc. in RQ3, which is very welcome -- I might steal those too! (I was under the impression that RQ3 didn't have that based on other threads on previous RQ editions, but I must have misunderstood... this is another area where my grognard/crunchy-loving players might complain with the existing RQG rules).
  24. Oh I see, this is about the whole thing about "Multiple Activities Outside/Within Melee" rules? Yeah I'm not a big fan of arbitrary limitations like these, although what bothers me more is how, when you're engaged in melee, you have no movement options until you disengage -- this feels like it would make melee combat very static (both combatants stay in the same spot and hit each other), and so you can't force an opponent back in a corner to get the advantage over him, for instance. What does RQ3 have to fix this? I had actually some notes for potential house rules for this, but I'm not satisfied with them yet. What do you mean here? It seemed to me RQ3 was same as RQG in that regard: 3 meters per SR. It's tricky because it depends on what we think hit points and damage actually represent. When you get struck by a mace for 7 points of damage, does that represent how much bones and tissue were damaged, which can then be "resisted" differently by different people because they handle pain differently for example? Or is that person's body resistance already factored in and this is what they actually "feel"? In one case, I would actually argue that STR would play a big role, as it measures how much muscle mass you have to cover and protect your organs. In the other case, you might even argue that it's a matter of CON and POW, as it measures how much you body and mind can resist stress (CON isn't just about being healthy). So I could argue equally in favour of at least 4 different formulas for HP if I wanted.... as a result, I don't care too much That's because it doesn't need to. Any trait can effectively be a Passion -- and they generally are. If you look at the example PCs in HQG, a good chunk of their traits read like Passions. Makes sense to me. But I'm not sure that intent (i.e. biasing towards center mass while shooting) translates to effect (i.e. that the arrow or spear point hits the chest/abdomen significantly more often). If stats about gun fights showed me anything, it's that the latter (effect) has very unintuitive reality checks. The other thing is that I'm not sure I would want the added complexity of 2 location tables for this. If RQG was doing optional rules, that could definitely be one. But RQG doesn't seem to want to do optional rules.
  25. I'm curious, actually -- if you were to play as yourself, what cults/homelands would be interesting to you? I'm trying to compile a few notes about things like these, since I know players from various ethnic groups or minorities might ask me (the GM) things like "I'd like to play a <whatever>, what do you have for me?". I was actually wrong about Heler, that deity gets a full chapter description in Sartar Companion! They do go into more details about the whole "dual gender" thing. I'm not sure that there's a lot of existing iconography of Heler to begin with, though, at least if you're talking about illustrations in the books. Sartar Companion describes Heler as such: Heler is blue, and whenever Orlanthi speak of the Blue God or Blue Goddess, they speak of Heler. Images usually depict him as a handsome, blueskinned man, or dual-gendered god with the right half male and the left half female.
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