Lordabdul

Interestingly enough, the CoC 7ed rules have a couple paragraphs about "Avoiding Nothing Happening When Both Sides Fail Their Fighting Skill Roll" (p125). While I didn't find that section particularly well written, it does spark a few interesting thoughts. A tie doesn't have to be "everything stays the same" or "nothing happened". It means "nobody got the upper hand", and that can be interpreted in different ways. For instance, it could be that "the 2 contestant both progressed equally towards their goal". If it's a race, a tie would NOT mean both runners stayed in place! No, they kept moving, but at roughly the same speed. The end of race drew nearer, so the situation after the roll isn't the same... there's less time left to win! If the task was somehow dangerous, maybe both contestants hurt themselves (or each other!) in a similar manner (1d4 damage each!)... again, the situation changed a bit, as there's now attrition coming into the equation, in addition to wasting potentially precious time if the task is time-sensitive. That's actually what happens in Spirit Combat! (RQG p368: if there's a tie, both combatants take Spirit Combat damage!) Another interpretation is that the conflict that sparked the roll is now moot. It's like the Gordian Knot of task resolutions. If it was a tie between 2 affinities/passions, it means that either the player is free to choose whatever they want (advancing towards a decision), or that the character surprisingly removes themselves from whatever debate it was, because of a clear conflict of interest (so again, the situation changed as a result of the roll).

Sorry that's kind of my fault -- people mentioned other websites and I was like "oh, what are those websites like?". Have you ever been on the internet? But yeah, in theory, it shouldn't be that hard.

That's a fair question. That's fair. While it's easy to recompute the special/critical success of the character that gets their skill offset down to 100% (it's always 20%/5%), recomputing (or looking up on the table) the special/critical thresholds of the other characters involved in the scene is annoying. But without it, you'd end up fighting, say, Cwim (RQG Bestiary p191) and his Claw attacks (200%) would always be a least special successes (except for when he fumbles with a 95+ roll). I'd say that it's probably a good call to selectively implement that "over 100%" rule. While that's potentially a candidate for either another instance of "RPG systems generally don't scale well" or for a new issue of Murphy's Rules, I'd say that it's a fucking amazing Dodge ability, and I could go with it: First, the character is so fast and skilled that yes, that big giant mouth is too slow and not precise enough to catch it. However, remember that it's not a 0%/100% of the time: you can still do a fumble 5% of the time, and the Bat can still succeed 5% of the time, with a 1% chance of critical against which you'd have to get a critical yourself to dodge. It's still very unlikely though. Also, watch out for the 3 tongues, each offset down to 25% (yes it has nothing to do with the point you were trying to make, but I felt bad for good ol' Crimsie there)

It does but, like I said, such stat scores are for NPCs, as far as I can tell -- I don't see these scores being reachable when the human max scores are around 21-ish, even with a few extra points granted by your deity somehow. And if we're talking about NPC vs NPC, I don't tend to roll, I just narrate. But sure, it could happen... just probably not in my games. The reality is that problems with RPG systems not scaling well down to insect level, or up to superhero/god level, is not exactly new... if anything it's vastly more common than not. Even generic systems have some problems scaling, so I bet that RQG rules don't really care about that because they assume the PCs are going to be humans (exceptional, heroic humans, yes, but still human), so one side of the equation is "always" going to be below mid-20s. A roll of 30% is a special success for 150%, but once you scale it down to a base-100, it's not anymore. That's not a bug, that's... math. The other character in the conflict also sees their thresholds go down. If you didn't offset the scores down, I think it would actually increase the chances of a tie (which, I would tend to agree, is a somewhat problematic outcome... but not necessarily because it lacks value, but more because, well, most RPG systems only have success/fail, so I don't necessarily know yet how to handle that... there was a similar problem for me with FFG's Star Wars system where the outcomes can also be variants like "success but with a negative side-effect" and then you need to figure out what that is in practice). My first idea would be to make the guards suspicious -- like, they start looking around more, walking a few steps to look behind bushes and things, like they heard or saw something but they're not quite sure what it is. This would force the players to stop moving and hope the next roll goes well, while they waste potentially precious time.

A "fully developed adventure" doesn't have to be a railroading exercise with a detailed narrative structure. Actually, good adventures (excluding the ones written for specific situations, like intro adventures or convention scenarios) are indeed written in a sandbox-ish style. Take any investigation based scenario, for example (pretty much anything from Call of Cthulhu). It's totally foolish to try and write it as a linear adventure, but I wouldn't call it a "sandbox" either -- Masks of Nyarlathotep surely has a sandbox aspect to it, but it also has a strong narrative spine. Snakepipe Hollow on the other hand is pure sandbox: a dungeon map, some encounter tables with a few story hooks, and that's it. So yeah, bring on the adventures. The short linear ones for running intro games. The big non-linear ones with a strong narrative spine. The pure sandbox ones. I want them all.

Sounds like a task for... HOUSE RULES! But really, when do you ever need to roll with such stats? Sounds to me like an NPC vs NPC situation, which I wouldn't really roll for as a GM (at best, a fake roll behind the screen!). Unless you're letting your players have God-like characters or something, in which case you're definitely outside of what RQG is about.

The old In Nomine Satanis/Magna Veritas game (at least the French version) used D666 (3 D6s)... if you roll 666, Satan, or God, might appear!

Thanks for the behind-the-scenes glimpse! I had totally forgotten that Opposed Rolls only compare levels of success (resulting in a lot of ties indeed) and not margin of success (which has very rarely any ties). Sadly, with percentiles, computing margins of success is not very friendly, unlike systems based on lower scales (d20, 3d6, etc.) so that's one downside (or at least important aspect) of d100s.

I was considering getting those but (if they're the ones I'm thinking about) I didn't like how they looked and passed on it... I'm hoping they produce different models in the near future though. I also wonder why they didn't go instead with twice the numbers, ending with a D8-shaped dice... someone must really like the D12 shape. Like you said, augments already fill that need, and feel a lot more Gloranthan than pushing a roll to me. Luck doesn't feel Gloranthan at all. I'm pretty happy with that side of RQG. That's one of the things I would have been OK getting rid of. Sure, I understand the nostalgic aspect of keeping it -- after all, that and the strike rank mechanic are 2 of the biggest contributors to making it feel like an RQ2 successor instead of some other BRP game. But, as a GM, I don't really like having multiple mechanics used to resolve similar situations. Choosing between Opposed Rolls or the Resistance Table is weird... at first it sounds somewhat OK: if you're going against something passive (like breaking down a door by overcoming its STR) you use the Resistance Table, and if you go against something active (like racing someone... basically anything that can do a stat/skill roll... unlike a door) then you do opposed rolls. But of course that breaks down when you go against someone with magic spells, where you actually use the Resistance Table... your argument that you need magical resistance's likelihood of success to be predictable is, errr, arbitrary? Why does it need to be predictable to attack someone with a spell, when attacking someone with a sword isn't? Is it to keep the number of rolls down for resisted Rune Magic? (I think that, if it was using Opposed Rolls, a resisted Rune Magic spell would result in 3 rolls... the 2 rolls for the resistance, and the roll for the Rune affinity... but in that case, we could just actually pit the Rune affinity directly against the opponent's stat to keep it in one roll)

FWIW, when I play GURPS or other D6-based games, I use a bunch of "Double Sixes", which are D6s where each number is repeated twice, so as a result they're the shape of D12s, effectively. (if you're wondering "why?", besides "because I can", there's also the fact that they roll more satisfyingly than a bunch of cubes)

Well you might already know it but hey, you've got your dream day job Likewise... I think when people say "modern game" they really mean "a game that includes the latest popular game mechanic trends" (but it can become confusing, or even laughable, given that, with the recent "classic dungeon crawling revival", a lot of the latest trends are actually about going back to old-school tactical/attrition-based/almost-board-game-ish systems). Anyway, whatever the new games are doing, in the immortal combined words of John Wick and South Park, "Greg Stafford did it" Funny enough, I've been playing RPGs for almost 30 years, and I only ever played D&D once. I actually didn't own any D&D book (out of a library of almost 300 books) until very recently (what can I say, there was a big discount for 5e on Amazon). I started with "L'Oeil Noir", the French version of "Das Schwarge Auge" (known as "The Dark Eye" in anglophone countries). It was a German "copy" of D&D that became so popular in its home country that, supposedly, it outsold D&D there. It was also quite popular in neighbouring countries, including France. One of my friends got the boxed set with a few sourcebooks for Chrismas one year, and we played one-on-one for several months, not knowing that there was, actually, a whole bunch of other such "roleplaying games" out there (the term was written on the cover, but we didn't pay attention, to us it was just another marketing tagline). We mostly played with the "basic" rules which were extremely simple (just a character type/class, and 5 stats). Later in high-school and beyond, I discovered a bunch of other games... in no particular order: Rolemaster, Cyberpunk 2020 (my first RPG purchase), and Vampire: The Masquerade. Then, Call of Cthulhu. That was pretty much the end, I didn't play many other games for the next 10 years or so. At that point, I had of course heard of D&D but had not seen a lot of people playing it. The French gaming scene was vastly different than the American one, I think... I saw a lot of people playing "weird" fantasy games, like Amber (diceless), "Reve de Dragon" (4th-wall-breaking FRPG), "In Nomine Satanis/Magna Veritas" (which was a LOT more irreverent and funny than the US adaptation) and other more well-known stuff like Shadowrun, Paranoia, Torg. By the time I looked into D&D, I had spent so much time in class-less systems that I was shocked at how "old" it felt -- "You're limited to a class? you go up in levels and get a fixed set of powers? What is this? A board game?". I didn't pay much more attention to it and dived into GURPS because, hey, remember Rolemaster was my 2nd or 3rd RPG ever, so I'm not afraid of anything! These days, I can frankly play pretty much anything, the quality of the GM vastly overshadows the pros/cons of the system. As a GM there are only a couple systems I wouldn't use. And sure, there are systems I like better than others. But I think what matters to me is not the system, but the, err, I guess, the mechanics? For instance, I don't care that much between a D20-based or a BRP-based game. What I do care about is, say, the SAN and magic mechanics in CoC. The passions/runic inspiration mechanics in RQG, along with the POW/sacred time mechanics. The magic system in Ars Magica. The Bonds system in Delta Green. The Shock rules in Unknown Armies. If any of those mechanics were well adapted to another system, I could play with either system, going with the one I "like" better... which is why it's great that Glorantha has no less than 3 official systems to play with (I don't think any other setting has this many choices, and that's a testament to how good Glorantha is). Most of the time, there's only one system available, and the reason I'm going to play with that system is the specific mechanic(s) that makes that game feel like "that game". Trying to compare D20 and BRP feels like asking the wrong question, because it tries to compare the base substrate of 2 families of games, without considering the interesting (to me) bits that you put on top (RQG and CoC are both BRP-based but vastly different games, even if you ignore the setting). As for personal taste, though? Yeah, I'm with Jeff, I'd rather take a class-less system like BRP where you roll 2 or 3 dice together... Rolling a single D20 feels lonely and anti-climactic to me...

I was.... (rolls Fast-Talk)... talking about another Bill...

Ah sorry -- in French we abusively use the word "diatribe" to mean "a lengthy argumentation", but it looks like the English word has a rather pronounced bias for a negative/bitter rant. I didn't mean it that way. If people are not comfortable with the word "canon", we can use the expression "Chaosium's Glorantha". By that, I mean that, sure, YGWV, so my Glorantha ("lordabdul's Glorantha") is going to be different from "soltakss's Glorantha", or from "bill's Glorantha" or "ian's Glorantha". We might all steal bits from each other as we see fit. But each Glorantha, taken individually, is, I assume, consistent. Now it seems to me Chaosium is not in the business of writing a "Glorantha toolkit" where you get a bunch of elements from which to build a Glorantha, but the sum of which doesn't make a consistent Glorantha itself -- nor is it in the business of publishing multiple Gloranthas ("jeff's Glorantha" and "jason's Glorantha" and such in various books). I think we should be able to assume it's a consistent "Chaosim's Glorantha", which we can take wholesale, or partially. The Jonstown Compendium is where we can upload bits of our own Gloranthas for sharing, and in that regard, that's the "Glorantha toolkit" (we might even see stuff written by Chaosium staff on there). From what MOB says, it sounds like that's the current editorial line, which sounds good to me.

Interestingly, RQG doesn't mention any of this, and actually even says that the Sun Dome Templars are "surrounded by hostile Orlanthi tribes" (p108). So maybe the situation is not what we think it is -- although surely that opens up some questions about what exactly made the Elmal cult decrease. Equally interestingly, the ergeshi (those ex-Kitori people serving the Sun Dome templars) are pretty much only mentioned in 2 places: an "in-character" document from the Jonstown Compendium in SKoH (p254) and an example encounter in SC (p139). Most of the real background on ergeshi is in Wyrm's Footnotes 15 only AFAICT. It seems heavily inspired by the helots, the Spartan serf/slaves. I wonder if this aspect of Yelmalio's cult will be swept under the rug in forthcoming books, or if the story of Elmal initiates converting to Yelmalio will get all the more complicated and interesting...

I don't have the 25+ years of gaming history that makes me have any stake in this whole affair, but I partially agree with that statement. I don't find Yelmalions boring (I actually find them super interesting), but I do have problems figuring out how you jump from an Orlanthi society over to the Yelmalio cult. That's fine if Yelmalio is a fringe cult in Sartar, it would be a bit like "hey did you hear? Cousin Fargrar cut his hair and joined those weird people over by the yellow dome temple" -- the Dragon Pass equivalent of learning about somebody you know joining the Scientology or the Rajneeshpuram... but there has to be something more to it if the Yelmalio cult is a lot more prominent than that. 5% is a big chunk of the population.

First, you're quoting from HQG, and we all know RQG is a lot more deadly 😂 Joking aside, it's not that the maths don't work out -- they do work out because the number you need to "reach" is actually made up, and if the authors really intended 54%, then the maths do indeed work out. There's not any number that's "truer" than any other one. Again, it's whatever number you think makes sense for Glorantha to make sense. If you'd rather have child mortality at 35%, that's OK, and you just need to change the table (I'm not sure what that means for population growth, but who cares). Your Glorantha is maybe less of a terrible place to live than Jeff's Glorantha 😋 (where, maybe, if not for the clan structure, child mortality would be 70+%!?) Now there's a bit of an argument to be made about that table being about the child mortality rates for the dramatic lives of adventurers, and not necessarily for everybody in Glorantha (but yes, that's hair-splitting, I confess).

I would also agree but we tend to focus on the positives of the existence of magic (all the blessing and healing and stuff). What about the economic aspects of magic spending? And what about the negative aspects? For instance, can the local priestesses and shaman really take care of everyone all the time, or do they save their magic for privileged people (kids of the clan's inner circle), for special cases (they have some raids coming up and they might need to heal deep wounds), or special occasions (they have to bless several hectares of crops and several hundred cows, and there's a big celebration coming up for a holy day or sacred season)? On the negative aspects, how often do curses get fired up at people and their kids? Or even at the crops and cows, which requires more magic point spending to counteract, leaving less for treating common sicknesses? How often do kids stumble upon evil spirits and cursed artifacts buried in the nearby forest? And it's not even that you've got magic to cure polio or whooping cough, because there's really no such thing in Glorantha AFAICT. Instead, you've got magic to try and cure diseases caused by spirits, Chaos, curses, divine anger, and Runic imbalance (whatever that is... see RQG p154). So it can very well be that, against magical diseases, magical remedies are just as (in)effective as plant medicine was against bacteria and viruses in the real world's Bronze Age. I guess what I'm saying is that I think we have it backwards: it's not about "fixing" the math so that the child mortality rate improves to.... whatever number. It's the other way around: come up with a number that makes Glorantha "interesting", and then figure out how to justify it. That's what's fun about world-building! And I think, to keep the feel of a "Bronze Age world" (as in: keep overall population down to a low density), we actually need to kill babies. It's terrible but that's what it is. Child mortality is indeed high, and that's a feature, not a bug IMHO.

About the differences in Runes between publications, I can understand the frustration -- I don't mind it too much because I see runes more as a game-system mechanic than an "in-world" thing (I mean, runes "exist" in Glorantha obviously, but so does "charisma" and "ability to swing a sword", and those end up represented differently between HQ and RQ). If anything, the problem here IMHO isn't so much the change, but the inability to set the runes in stone, so to speak, because they're still partially driven by gameplay considerations.

@JonL I must have missed something -- AFAIK most of the revisions were done before SKoH, no? (note that I have the 2nd edition only) I don't see much contradiction between SKoH/SC and GtG, GS, and RQG. If anything, RQG just brushes the surface, only mentioning basic facts about Sun Dome County and not much else. The other books, from SKoH to GS, seem consistent with Elmal being the previous Orlanthi sun god and having been mostly replaced with Yelmalio by the 1620s. According to Jeff's recent post on what to expect for the upcoming Cults of Glorantha on this subject, Yelmalio becomes the prominent sun deity by the 1550s, actually. Runegate being well older than that, it doesn't seem like it's in danger of being retcon'ed... and since it's not like Elmal's cult has been completely wiped out (he will be a sub-cult of Yelmalio mechanically speaking for RQG), it could be that Runegate is his main worship place in Dragon Pass. The bit about what "What Sartarites think" about Yelmalions can still be valid, too -- after all, most Sartarites' grand-parents had friends and families worshiping Orlanth's buddy, and then got gobbled up by some weird vegetarian cult and moved away to do entirely un-Orlanthi things. I'm sure that even after less than a century, they still all think that was weird and messed up, and are still grumpy about it because they lost a useful associated cult in the process. I didn't quite get your problem with population numbers though. Those also look more-or-less consistent, with most Yelmalions in Sun Dome County, and bunch others in Vantaros.

Thanks, I'll check that out.

OMG your players are playing... THE BAD GUYS!

Welcome! And yes, he would have to.

So you mean there are stats (the runes) and, indeed, they don't take much space 😉 I also thought a few keywords were typically listed, but checking back on some of my HQ books, it doesn't seem like that's the case. To those running both RQG and HQG, I'm actually surprised that you're not reporting the HQG campaigns being higher-powered, as in: more grand feats being accomplished, tribes and factions being moved, heroquests being completed, deities and spirits being bargained with/fought against/brought back, and so on... not necessarily because HQG supposedly better handles this, but more because, when given all the nitty gritty stats of RQG, players would instinctively (I figure) have more "down to earth" preoccupations (dungeon crawling! loot! more stuff with stats!) and concerns (let's not do this dangerous thing, I don't want my left leg to be crippled!).

Do you have more details on this? As far as I know there are only minor details that have been changed, like the Law rune or the whole Elmal stuff in the upcoming Cults of Glorantha (yes, I'm rating the Elmal stuff as "minor" because frankly I don't see what the big deal is, but then again I'm new to this). That document from the old Glorantha website that you linked to was, I believed, reposted and updated on these forums a few years ago and, AFAIK, is still valid -- Jeff mentioned no too long ago that this was what he considered "canon" for the purposes of writers contributing to official Chaosium material (although of course, he added, gamers don't need to adhere to this "canon"). So right now, again, apart from minor details and mechanics-driven things, I expect HQ and RQG books to be interchangeable.

I don’t think those are contradictions — the first purple text is trying to show the difference between being engaged in melee and not being engaged. So it’s talking about someone casting a spell while NOT being engaged, but then being engaged later that same round because an enemy closed the distance... after which that character won’t be able to spell-cast and attack in the same round anymore. The second purple text is a lot more confusing, but I think it has to do with spell foci: if you’re casting something for which the focus is on the weapon, and the target is also the weapon, then you can do it while keeping the weapon in hand and no other free hand. But yeah this is all quite unclear, and would benefit from a text revision, or some extensive errata, or something.