Lordabdul

I'm planning on making the players make their own clan, but making some blank room on a map for them to make up the geography sounds brilliant. Do you have any tips or additional info to give on that? Did you impose a specific location in the greater Dragon Pass, and a specific tribe that the clan belongs to?

Oh right, I did notice that when downloading the PDFs the first time. I think you end up with 2 maps of south peloria with the "flat" style (drawn by Darya) and missing the version of that map that's in the more artistic/busy style. Is the PDF going to be fixed on the Chaosium website, so we don't have to all contact customer support separately?

Hey there -- I totally understand where you're coming from. Despite the whole YGWV mantra, there is indeed a big leap of faith in just saying "I'll ignore half of this stuff and make my own", not only in terms of trusting your imagination ("can I really make something better than Greg and Jeff and all these other people?") but also in terms of the perceived wastefulness of not using a whole bunch of awesome sourcebooks. It's really a matter of... going with it or not. If you want to stay in Sartar and play with the whole communal aspect of belonging to a clan and tribe (which I indeed find very interesting, a welcome change from murder-hobo-ing), you can first figure out if you want you or your players to be at, or near, the top of the Hero Wars. If high-powered fantasy is desirable, just don't introduce Argrath at all, but give you or your players visions of whatever destiny the Gods have in mind. In that case, the PCs will effectively take on the role of Argrath and you can use the established history (and the upcoming Dragon Pass Campaign book!) as a bunch of baseline ideas for where the PCs can start and what might happen. If they want to have agency over the HeroWars but don't want to lead them (i.e. they want to be assassins and mercenaries and envoys and messengers and delivery people, not political/war leaders), then introduce Argrath and make them work for him (assuming they want to be on that side of the conflict). They will probably mess things up so the history might quickly diverge, as they fail some mission here and there, but alternate history is part of fun IMHO. If they don't want to get too involved (as in: they don't want to have too many important roles in important events, they just want to make a living and kill tuskraiders), then that's the "how do you survive this stuff" campaign, which is brilliantly executed in the pair of Red Cow books (The Coming Storm and The Eleven Lights), so just run that. To be honest, I'm hoping that at least the first 2 points are addressed in the upcoming Dragon Pass Campaign book, with "what if?" sidebars giving examples of other ways events might go, and lots of adventure hooks giving examples of what Argrath might asks the PCs to do (I would be quite disappointed if it was just a straight-up book with the canon timeline and nothing else). In my ideal world, that book would also have optional rules for mass combat, important political negotiations, and "factions & followers" stuff to determine how your army grows or shrinks (although I imagine those would be RQG rules, not HQG). FYI I'm really hoping to run option 2 at some point next year.

Fair enough -- although it depends on the system. Some systems don't significantly change the chances of criticals with higher stats. Some systems have totally fixed probabilities for criticals. But yes, that's an interesting point. I assume it's counter-acted by the fact PCs have access to bigger armor, and/or better healing magic, or other mitigating factors. Or maybe, well, that's just life at high level (and it surely is that for RQ). To be honest, most of my long term campaigns have been horror anyway, so the PCs don't survive long on purpose I'll leave it to people who had high-powered long term campaigns to reply on that subject. I have no idea why road bandits in a specific part of the game world would, over time, become stronger and stronger. If it happened, it would have to be justified in-game, like some background story about the previous bandits being taken over by more vicious ones coming from the Northern Realms, and the local farmers complaining that things have gotten worse or something. But I wouldn't just make the bandits more powerful just for the sake of keeping up with the PCs' progression -- that would, indeed, be a sure way to make the players super frustrated. Yep, as mentioned before, I don't like that kind of rule, and I'm arguing that applying such a rule wholesale is a bad idea. But I don't think anybody is saying to do that anyway -- AFAICT, HQG says it's a guideline. I assume the table in HQG is therefore more of a reference for the GM to look at and check that the game is progressing more or less as expected (i.e. you play first, and at the end of the session you check that most of the rolls tonight were on average of the "correct" difficulty level).

Yeah I saw that last week and... .well, let's just not go into how much money I spent on the spot. @Dissolv: your latest post doesn't display images for me... does it work for anybody else?

I wouldn't say that. If that happens, it either means that the GM is not correctly balancing the next adventures, or that the GM somehow wants the campaign to change tone and delve into despair and drama. The PCs do get better. Suddenly they're not afraid of bandits when traveling -- the GM might highlight that by actually having bandits attack the party, which the party would dispatch easily, much to the enjoyment of the players who might remember that time, 6 months ago, when they almost go killed by the same bandits. And by the time they get back to their original town, they have such a reputation, such amazingly looking equipment, and such confident demeanor that they can walk up to the castle and make demands out of the local lord that, in the first adventure, was bossing them around. And sure, they'll get whatever clue they need from that NPC and then go over to the Caves Of Doom and will have a really hard time in there, barely making it alive, but those are the Caves Of Doom that they didn't even dream going into back at the beginning. As a GM I often throw random foreshadowing (like the Caves Of Doom, here) at the beginning (it might not even mean anything! It might just be a random name I jot down on a notebook). Half of it will be forgotten, but maybe hopefully the other half will come back and provide a sense of accomplishment to the players. And then, as with that lord NPC or the road bandits here, I also bring back previous characters, factions, or locales, to achieve the same effect. If things go according to plan, the players should have the same difficulty fighting those bandits as level 1, as they are surviving the Caves Of Doom as level 15. It shouldn't feel "worse".

Vishi Dunn (from the pre-gen characters) is an assistant shaman. Apart from that, I can't find anything in any of the RQG slipcase PDFs.

As for character advancement, I agree that I don't like it either when it's the same economy between spending points in game to improve rolls, and spending points between sessions to improve the character. @jajagappa's houserule sounds on point to fix that, but to make it even clearer that hoarding Hero Points is, ahem, pointless (pun intended), I would carefully monitor where unused points are spent at the end of the session. As in: you should generally only be able to spend Hero Points to improve abilities that you used during the session... This way, spending unused points makes it feel like you wasted the opportunity to get a bigger victory when you used that ability in the first place. You would still be able to spend Hero Points on other abilities but those would be special cases, like when a session ends with a time jump and you have in-game time to improve or learn something unrelated to the last adventure.

I only ever used HeroQuest for one-shots, but if I was to it for a campaign, I would simply not use the rules about the base difficulty level increase per session. It's a guideline anyway -- HQG p113 says: "Remember, the table is just a guideline, and the context of your story will always trump it." (about the base difficulty level increase table). But, also, I totally hate that guideline anyway (in part for the reasons @Atgxtg listed). The same thing goes for the pass/fail cycle difficulty levels: "Always remember that the Pass/Fail method for assigning difficulty is a fallback measure. Use it when you have no strong answers to the questions listed above. Don’t let it rigidly override your dramatic instincts, or sacrifice the broader credibility of the narrative to the pacing needs of the moment." I totally understand that this kind of stuff comes all the way back from HeroWars and other games that initiated this narrative RPG philosophy, but it always seemed to me that these kind of rules are (probably on purpose) mixing mechanical and story writing guidelines... like, sure, generally speaking, it's good to make the PCs improve and take on bigger challenges... and it's good to follow some arcs-and-beats structure where the heroes succeed and fail and prevail and succeed again. But it kind of boils down to the same thing whether this should be communicated to the future GM as a set of general guidelines (i.e. system-agnostic advice on good GMing) or as a set of mechanical modifiers per scene or per session... I mean, you can either decide that it's a good time in the game to bring on a big troll for some challenge, or you can look at the table and notice that the trollkin the PCs just met should really have 15W3 so, errr, you need to come up with a justification, therefore here comes the big troll that the trollkin was scounting for, or something. Either way, the PCs are facing a big troll. What came first, the high ability, or the big troll? It's somewhat irrelevant, although I find it somewhat ironic that a narrative system is trying to enforce narrative tropes through mechanical means as opposed to... well.. narration and writing. Funnily enough, "classic" RPGs (especially level-based ones) also enforce this general raising of the stakes through mechanical means, but they do it by making the PCs so good at pretty much everything that things would be boring if the DM didn't throw bigger challenges at them. So it's more incentive-based, so to speak. Other non-level-based RPGs, I find, don't have such a pronounced increase in PC abilities (for instance, trollkins can still be dangerous in RQ even if you're a Rune Lord), and so I find it's more often about raising the stakes of the story, or making the story go to new places, rather than the actual raising of difficulty levels.

Yeah those Broos are really nice although (more shamefully) I haven't assembled them yet (I still need to research what kind of glue I need). But yes I've noticed that their base is uneven -- I think it's because they're not meant to be used as a base, and instead you're supposed to glue that to a "real" base like @Dissolv did.

You would usually just pick which of your 4 grandparents you're going to be rolling for. Basically, "my grandmother on my dad's side". Then, unless you had anything special in mind, you just make that grandparent into the same clan/homeland/etc. as your character. So if you're making a Grazelander, you just say that your dad, and his mother before him, were all Grazelanders. Then you start rolling so that you get to know your grandmother better: step 2, roll... got a 19, uh oh, she was a thief for some reason! And off you go. Of course, if you have some idea that you're descended from, say, some Lunar grandparents, then you could choose to make your "main" grandparent (or parent) have a Lunar homeland and roll their history accordingly... or you can just decide that it was some other, less important parent/grandparent, and leave it (for now) as a one liner on the character's background, to be expanded on later in the campaign.

Wow those minis look awesome, good job. Mine are still shamefully unpainted, because I suck.

To me that's essentially it, yes. The numbers measure how a player will go about influencing the story, what kind of narrative mechanics and themes they will lean into in order to make the adventure go forward. A player with a Humakti character might use violence and fanaticism, while a player with an Esrolian noble might use ambition and politics... in a game like, say, RQ, this is simulated, while in HQ it's measured in terms of dramatic tension. After that, as someone else already mentioned, the character advancement is indeed all relative, in both types of systems, since the GM will either put the players up against higher-level enemies, or against higher narrative odds. In both cases you're going to hit a nail with a hammer, but in one case you're measuring the hit in terms of the hammer's weight/your strength/your dexterity, while in the other you're fighting for your desire to see a story where the nail has been hit, while the GM may or may not want that nail to be hit. I would actually love to hear people's thoughts and experiences about how much GM railroading happens with narrative systems like HQ, since the difficulty for doing something basically ends up on a fine line between "what makes an interesting story" and "whatever the GM wants to happen". Interestingly enough, I find that players are almost living a heroquest in the real world as a result -- they're up against a myth (story) that the GM has in their mind, and they're going through the motions as best they can without failing, but sometimes they can change the myth enough to turn it into something else... mmmh.

My question wasn't really about whether they could do it, but about whether it was common practice. Basically, was deforestation a common thing in the Bronze Age, or is that only something that started in the Dark/Middle Ages.

Thanks Jeff! So it looks like an iteration on the maps from the Guide To Glorantha, drawn at a much finer resolution? I'm curious about the semi-regular dotting of settlements throughout some areas like Esrolia or Sartar. Is there a practical rationale there, like how human civilizations would naturally establish settlements on average between 1 and 3 hours' walk from each other depending on population density or something? Are these maps for a particular book/release, or just a "let's map this thing once and for all at a usable level of detail"? Since I'm a map fanatic, I'd love to see detailed maps released with high enough production values to rival or surpass, say, the Harn maps, which I would say represent the gold standard in RPG map production (they have PDFs with layers and overlays for various things, pretty good, large size vinyl maps to hang on walls, etc.). For instance, a PDF with layers for Sartar tribes, Bestiary creatures' habitats, etc.

I let my players do it when they ask me... if they don't ask, it means they probably don't feel so overwhelmed by the odds and I can add a couple monsters to the next encounter

There's also a few beetle-riding trollkins (live ones). But yeah, I'm not sure about the skeletons either. I'm actually surprised to see the undead used like this in such a casual way... where is this from? Is there some material I missed that establishes reanimated skeletons as a common sight outside of Delecti's swamp? I was surprised to see it mentioned. Last I heard, the Glorantha Skirmish stuff was supposed to be from DishDash Games (who have a bunch of other skirmish game lines), but I thought that deal actually fell through and was officially dead. I don't know if that's incorrect, or if someone else picked it up? (I wouldn't be surprised to see Petersen Games flying down from the skydome to save the day). At first glance I was a bit disappointed by this Kickstarter (I bought a whole bunch of units from MadKnight's previous releases). While it looks awesome, it didn't look like a very generally applicable set of miniatures... but I noticed that you can get beetles without any packs, or beetles with trollkin riders (which would make it appropriate for a general encounter in Dagori Inkarth or Prax or something), along with the troll shield wall minis from a previous Kickstarter that I missed.

Well, I learned 2 new words today. Not a bad day. Would people in the Bronze Age have actually uprooted trees to make room for farmland that they can plow, or would they have just picked a nice place to setup their homes to begin with, with water, space, and trees all nearby?

AFAIK, HeroWars' old supplements Thunder Rebels and Storm Tribe were respectively focused on the "Orlanthi All" (6 in 7 people) and "the rest" (1 in 7 people... I don't think there's a term for those). As such the first book was all about Orlanthi traditions and Orlanth/Ernalda cults, while the second book gave details about the other cults (Chalana Arroy, Eurmal, Vinga, etc.). You can find PDFs in the vault, but they come with a disclaimer that they're no longer considered "canon" (for whatever that means in Glorantha ). In Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes, I don't find any references to the Orlanthi All anymore. They just mention here and there the general rule of thumb of 85% for common Rune affinities, gender composition of adults available for fighting, etc., but don't formalize it the way it was previously.

I'd also be curious to have more details on the subject, but I wonder if this might be a moot point for RQG players because IIRC the upcoming heroquesting mechanics in RQG will feature something where the players make up the "script" as they go, so the player agency vs GM might turn out a lot different.

IIRC Microsoft will pull support from Win7 at the end of the year, so hopefully you'll either upgrade, or disconnect that machine from the internet... 😅

Fair enough! You're right. I only checked the games that I own, where only a couple are available on the Mac App Store. But there are very good technical reasons why game devs are not interested in the Mac at the moment, and very good financial reasons why Apple doesn't care.

The Mac app store is notoriously unfriendly to developers, with many limitations and weird downsides. I don't think I've seen many games (or any game for that matter) available on it, so I wouldn't hold my breath. If you only have a Mac and nothing else, I would really recommend you don't wait and just go with GOG, since at least you get a DRM-free game.

I'm not a Glorantha expert but maybe the Broken Council creating Nysalor pretty much from scratch could qualify? I've also often wondered if Arkat completely engineered an enemy all by himself in turning Nysalor into Gbaji.

In the immortal words of John Landis (and the underlying tenet of YGWV): you can do whatever you want with heroquesting and Gloranthan gods because Glorantha doesn't exist Now, in my humble opinion, you have 2 big things to consider: Does it matter? Will any of your players actually try and prove that Ernalda and Zorak Zoran are the same deity, or some other similarly outlandish thing? I assume not... maybe you're asking because you're considering having some NPC faction with lots of resources and time doing this. Well at least, I hope so (see second point). Either way, one would have to wonder why you would want this in your Glorantha... if you want Ernalda and Zorak Zoran to be the same deity, just make it so from the start... that would probably change a LOT of things in your Glorantha, so that would take a lot of work to figure out, but you would probably end up with some really wickedly original world. My point is that if you want your Glorantha to be a bit (or a lot!) different from Chaosium's Glorantha, you can do that right away, and you don't need to "justify" it by figuring out who heroquested to make it different... ...unless you actually want to play around a theme of mythic transformation, how it wreaks havoc in cultures that previously didn't like each other but now realize they have more in common than they thought, etc. That's a strong theme, by the way, but if that's not what you want your game to be about, I'm not sure there's any reason to go there. Assuming we want to go there, how easy would it be to achieve? As mentioned above, I don't think player characters should be able to achieve any of this type of stuff unless they're playing demi-god-level characters or above. Unless they are indeed super super super powerful, it wouldn't make sense for even Rune-lord characters to be able to significantly change myths without spending decades working on it, because otherwise nothing matters because there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people around Glorantha who can change things as well. Well, I guess you could also go this way, where the Hero Wars is effectively also happening on the God Plane, where people are changing myths constantly, like an ever-changing front-line, undermining their enemies' forces on a fundamental theological level (which would affect their morale, their magic, their social dynamics, etc.). That could be cool too. If PCs can't reasonably achieve it, then you might have some NPC faction similar to the God Learners that are either working towards doing some fundamental changes, or have done so in the past and the PCs "discover" the horrible truth. If the former, then the stakes in your campaign are to effectively prevent some apocalypse of unknown proportions, and, hopefully, the PCs win and not much changes, they saved the world, yay, and it doesn't matter if it was possible or not in the first place (what matters was that someone was going to try and that was dangerous enough). If the latter, it could be some interesting moral dilemma about whether the PCs want to revert that change -- trolls' mistress race are the main Earth priestesses and having good crops require a death sacrifice! But it wasn't meant to be this way! We were meant to have the way nicer Ernalda goddess as the Earth goddess! Somebody re-wired the myths back in the Second Age but almost nobody remembers! Depending on how you present it, it might feel more like a post-apocalyptic scenario where the heroes are trying to go back to some original timeline. Again, that's kind of cool, but maybe not what you want. I guess this is all a very long way to say : "anything is possible if that's what you want your campaign to be about".