Lordabdul

On 7/6/2022 at 10:01 AM, g33k said:

Knowing what I know now -- having used my case vs. other (smaller-wheeled) wheelie bags -- I'd likely go for something with even-larger wheels! 

The one I linked to has indeed flimsy wheels. It's not a big problem for me since I wasn't rolling it very far. If I had to take public transit to my games I would have definitely reconsidered -- so thanks for the tip about the existence of bigger wheels!

On 7/5/2022 at 2:13 AM, David Scott said:

Odayla is both the hunter and the hunted.

In my headcanon, he is the cult for FBI profilers -- I have a book of "outlier" NPCs I might never finish, and the Odayla character is inspired by Will Graham from Red Dragon/Manhunter/Hannibal: he can put himself in the head of those he hunts, to a disturbingly intrusive and psychologically dangerous degree. He can indeed become both the hunter and the hunted.

The Journal of Runic Studies #55 is out! Our new podcast episode on practical ancient warfare, ChaosiumCon 2023 announced, some sadly un-annotated Jeff notes, kit-bashed miniatures, ancient disasters, and more!

Episode 13 of the God Learners podcast it out!  @Joerg and I discuss practical ancient warfare with Lloyd, from the excellent Lindybeige YouTube channel. Weapon reach, attacks of opportunity, and the usefulness of shields are among the many topics we talk about!

On 7/1/2022 at 3:19 AM, PhilHibbs said:

Does anyone have any good recommendations for a bag to carry books in? It needs to hold the RQG slipcase plus about the same amount again.

Until I went all online-gaming with the pandemic, I had been using this travel case for a few years on a weekly basis.

It's great because:

• It's got wheels, so you don't have to carry anything!
• It's one of the very few travel cases that has a flat bottom, so you can pack it with books and stuff without the wheels casing getting in the way.
• It's got extra space for your dice, notes, a couple extra books, a laptop, a bag of tokens or whatever.
• It's pretty sturdy, it hasn't shown signs of fatigue in those years.

2 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

I would even allow learning a spell without increasin RP pool, otherwise when you've reached your CHA limit you can't learn any more spells without throwing away POW.

I would allow that too, unless someone can think of a downside.

3 hours ago, Soccercalle said:

Is Command Cult Spirit a spell that you buy once (for the price of 1 POW) and stack for medium or large Elementals. Or do you have to pay more POW to be able to cast larger elementals?

AFAIK you have to acquire the appropriate elemental size summoning spell (small/medium/large) to summon the elemental of that size (some cults or ranks only have access to small or medium sized elementals). Once the elemental shows up, it does whatever is natural for it unless you command it. To command it, you stack the Command Cult Spirit spell to the summoning spell (unless somehow you want to command it only later), which spends an extra two Rune Points, regardless of the cult spirit type or size. Note that you need to overcome the spirit's POW to order it around. Also note that the Command Cult Spirit spell is a common spell, so almost everyone has it, you don't need to sacrifice POW to get it. It works on all of the cult's spirits, including elementals. The problem is that it's expensive and requires a POW roll.

4 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

I can’t help thinking that if the core rulebook gave you a Sailor profession, the next “strange omission” you’d highlight would be that there aren’t any ship rules....

...or that the starting playable area is pretty much land-locked anyway (Esrolia is a starting homeland but IIRC, the maps shown in the core rulebook only feature a little bit of the Mirrorsea Bay)

On 6/25/2022 at 4:54 PM, PhilHibbs said:

Yes, the French edition gives them an extra 60 points of skills. No Survival though!

FWIW, the French edition did the following changes:

• Fisher
  • increased: Swim +40%
  • added: Craft +15%, Animal Lore +20%, Bargain +15%
• Hunter
  • increased: Scan +15%, Hide +25%, Listen +15%
  • added: Move Quietly +25%, Craft +10%

There are also tweaks to other professions. I personally don't really care about different occupations getting a different amount of points (it's the same in Call of Cthulhu), but I do appreciate the changes that let fishermen know a little bit about fish and devising baits, or hunters knowing how to move around the forest  and devising traps. Like many players, I was confused by the absence of those bonuses -- enough to wonder if the designers had been traumatized in their youth, being forced to spend many boring days fishing with their dad or something, and now taking it out on the game stats 😄 

On 6/24/2022 at 8:59 AM, soltakss said:

Yelmalio fans never stop whingeing.

Well it checks out -- Yelmalio is all about keeping up the fight, even when they have nothing left to fight with 😄

10 hours ago, David Scott said:

my Pacific Rim / Glorantha mashup

wait wat 😄

The Journal of Runic Studies #53 is out! Our latest Glorantha newbie interview, Chaosium's writing workshops, changes to upcoming RuneQuest books, East Isles pirates, nobody trusts Kallyr, non-humans in Genertela, Aztec mythology, tapirs, and more!

Our new Initiation Series interview features Scott Rinehart, recorded back in October 2021. Scott had only played in a couple of one-shot games, but he has flipped through quite a few books! He chats with us about the challenges of discovering Glorantha!

11 hours ago, Darius West said:

You're right, of course, but that does make Pavis' half-elven status even odder.

I count him and Arkat (half troll or whatever he is) and other such NPCs as the exceptions. They are heroes (superheroes maybe even) who clearly did something totally unique to become who they are. My point is just that "half-whatever" isn't a biological thing, otherwise we would have all possible variants of ancestries, like "well you see I'm 70% human and 25% elf on my grandmother's side, but there's also a bit of pixie in there somehow, and I'm also 3% troll from my great-great-great-grandfather but we don't speak about that and we haven't eaten mushrooms for 4 generations because of that story, it's a long story"

11 hours ago, Darius West said:

I mean we all know about the Green Age Man Rune conspiracy of the Godlearners in Prax which produced him, but...

What Man Rune conspiracy? Is that the thing Joerg brought up in the episode? (I don't know anything about it, or I forgot)

For those who want to get a sneak peek at the heroquesting rules in RQG, Bryon has recorded the game that he and I played with Jeff Richard at ChaosiumCon (with a couple other players of course). The adventure was almost entirely an accidental heroquest, using the RQG pre-gens. You can cross-reference it with the previously shared heroquesting character sheet, and a previously shared map of the Hero Plane. If you have a burning curiosity and don't want to listen to 2 hours of bad audio and horrible French accent, PM me and I'll share you my notes.

On 6/16/2022 at 1:29 AM, Darius West said:

For the record:

Old Friend

Hah where is that from?

On 6/16/2022 at 4:39 AM, Joerg said:

They prefer the poop from earthworms.

Worm composting is interesting because worms are probably creatures of Darkness... another dichotomy! Which, Shannon says, we need to make into a trichotomy...

On 6/16/2022 at 1:29 AM, Darius West said:

why half-elves are so rare? 

Half with what? Elves are their own species. This isn't D&D with its silly and somewhat offensive approach to ethnicity. IMG the only way to get cross-species offspring is by going into the God Time, where weird sex stuff just seems to work.

On 6/15/2022 at 1:13 PM, Imperial_Solaire said:

The same problem always comes up though, my players either

1. Go into this as a game where the PCs are the main characters of the world and fight everything with no plan and die. (The D&D players)
2. Are too scared to fight ANYTHING and want ask to do Library Use rolls. (The Call players)
3. Turned off because they think you must know ALL the lore before setting foot in Glorantha. (My anxious players)

This looks somewhat familiar to me 🙂

1. If you have played Call of Cthulhu with D&D players, you would have had the same problem. You can warn the players in session zero that combat is deadly, that you can always ransom enemies and that enemies would often ransom you, and that NPCs will hold grudges. If you are a "tough love" GM that would have no problem killing CoC PCs with a Dimensional Shambler or Great Old One, then you would probably also kill the RQ PCs with some Broo shaman or Crimson Bat, and then you tell the players to be more careful with their new PCs. If not, you can have the NPCs take the PCs hostage and ransom them back or send them to a Lunar slave camp or they're sold at Pimper's Block or whatever -- this might be the opportunity for a cool adventure, where they escape with new companions.

2. The Call of Cthulhu players tend to be very careful indeed. In my experience, they always try to get other people to do the dangerous stuff, asking for tribal thanes to go check out the dark creepy cave and such. The CoC way of solving this is to have those NPCs get killed, which makes things worse in many ways. I've heard some people let the players play the NPCs who get killed, like playing a quick one-shot or even just one scene with them. This might be a good way for players in this case to try their hand at combat while not putting their PCs in danger. They might like it. The other solution is that Library Use rolls require finding the right library, which means they might have to travel left and right to find the information -- and lo and behold, the PCs are adventuring! Maybe they're not getting into fights, but that's fine, it's still good story.

3. Tell them you don't know much more than them, and that you'll make shit up on the fly for all the stuff you don't know, so they better help out. It's very effective to let them take responsibility of their corner of the world. Is one of them a, say, Odayla initiate? Regardless of what you know about Odayla, keep it to a minimum, and tell the player that they can come up with everything else (either by inventing it or by reading up on Glorantha lore). So the player comes up with, say, what happens on Odaylan holy days, what a shrine looks like, and so on. The GM says "I know there's a Great Hunt at the end of the year, but I don't know anything about it... tell me what it's like?". This might create problems with players who freeze up when they need to participate in the story (rather than just play a role in it), so for those you just tell them what they need to know and try to keep it to a minimum again. It wouldn't be different to playing in any other known setting while being new to it.

The Journal of Runic Studies #52 is out! Struggling newtlings and other community content updates, GregAnth maps and other notes from Jeff, painted miniatures, 3D reconstructions, and more!

My new RuneQuest adventure is up on the Jonstown compendium! Help some newtlings fight off a horrible threat and join a water cult! Get it here!

And to celebrate the release of Bog Struggles, my previous RuneQuest adventure, A Short Detour (which I just realized is now Silver best seller, thank you very much) is on sale at almost 30% off! Get it here!

Thanks a lot to my usual partner in crime, @Crel.

2 hours ago, davecake said:

she has Cyclical Characteristic cast on herself

What's that?

Nice write-up, by the way, although I personally wouldn't have the time or energy to prepare my NPCs so thoroughly 🙂

Episode 12 of the God Learners is out! We welcome Shannon Appelcline, author of Designers & Dragons (among many other fine books) and expert on the Aldryami, the elves of Glorantha. We talk about their culture, religion, myths, psychology, and all the other material we'll find in the upcoming "Elfpak" sourcebook!

11 hours ago, Jeff said:

Most of my players are not Gloranthaphiles. The main difference is that I simply what everyone through the character generation process in the core rules and usually do that collectively - which means, pick a culture first, then do a family background.

We go through the character creation in order of course, yes, but that doesn't change the fact that some of my players are the kind who, whatever the game, have an idea in mind as soon as they've heard the elevator pitch of the campaign. So each step of character creation is about guiding them into realizing this idea. This also means that rolling characteristics in order generally doesn't work for them either, so they either roll and redistribute, or I give them a flat amount of points (that's valid for the other BRP games we play) (of course I've got other players who love going with the dice)

My experience is even more anecdotal than yours, but my main point here is that reverse engineering homeland and cult choices based on a player's idea is a valid and probably not uncommon way of creating characters. As written, some cults are pretty easily grasped by newbie GMs, who can therefore make the connections (Storm Bull, Ernalda, Lhankor Mhy, Issaries, etc.), other cults have lots of overlap with unclear ways to figure out which one is best for a given desired gameplay experience (the Odayla/Yinkin/Foundchild trio), and yet others got me scratching my head until I dove into more Glorantha material (Argan Argar, Engizi, and to some extent Daka Fal).

6 hours ago, Jeff said:

Almost always they start with a culture, then a background, then pick the Runes that appeals to them, then pick an occupation - and only then pick out a cult that would work for them.

Of note, I think this is possibly a very Gloranthaphile approach. The newbies in one of my campaign, and the newbies for which I've GMed some one-shots, of course know almost nothing about Glorantha (by definition) so they don't tend to start with the culture. It's not like they go "I'd like to play some sort of Minoan erudite, is there anything like that in that bronze age world of yours?" and I go "oh sure, that sounds Esrolian, so let me tell you about Nochet". Instead they start with the gameplay experience they want (a scheming merchant, an angry scholar, a shy healer, a warrior poet, etc.) and so we figure out what cult and homeland fits that. And sure, occasionally, someone will start with the culture, because in my 10min overview of Glorantha they pick up on, say, the Praxian Nomads or whatever, but that's the minority in my (arguably limited) experience. I think it's important to keep in mind because it's not always clear to a Glorantha-newbie GM what gameplay role(s) a cult is able to fulfill, and so without clear guidance about that it's not always easy to give the best first experience to the players either.

On 5/30/2022 at 9:18 AM, David Scott said:

It's a cut and paste from the main cult write up...

Could a correction go on the WoD Q&A errata, please? I'm pretty sure most people would get it wrong.

4 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

Is it worth it? From a game system point of view I still don't think so. It's an additional complexity, and an additional die roll to make. It's a bit like an augment really, but one that is unlimited in its utility and is in addition to augments.

I don't think it's very useful either mechanically speaking -- or, rather, it doesn't feel to me like an elegant or efficient way to mechanically represent the in-world phenomenon it tries to model. If I was so inclined I might look into something else like, say, take the geas and gain the ability to remove the Ride skill limitation by rolling under your Fire/Sky Rune or something.

However, I think the way you looked at Kuschile archery benefits was misleading. I wouldn't look at it through the lens of "average bonus to weapon skill over multiple battles". I would look at it as "sometimes you get the limitation, and sometimes you don't", and then spread that to an entire army. Assuming a bit of past experience and a bit of skill category bonuses, you could consider that a third of your army is shooting arrows with no penalty from their mediocre Ride skill. That suddenly doesn't sound too bad. And if it was tied to something like the Fire/Sky Rune as per my half-assed house rule I made up 2 minutes ago, it could rise to a half or two-thirds of the army.

3 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

Do we know that Kuschile Archery is based on a real life thing? Surely mounted nomad archers will just have a high Ride skill, no need for a special mitigating skill.

Yeah I agree, it's not based on a real life thing. Kuschile archery is not the mere fact of shooting arrows from horseback. Everybody who's got, like, a bow and a horse can try and do that. And they can get better at it by improving Ride and Bow. It sounds to me like Kuschile is something else: it's about spiritually getting closer to your sky/horse deities and (in exchange for a geas) getting better at bow and horse stuff, without having to train for it. It's a fantasy/magical skill.

And this actually makes me think of another half-assed rule: if it's spiritual, what about allowing ritual practices with it? You get your army to pray for an hour before battle, and that raises their Kuschile skill by +35% for that battle. Maybe your first attack has more preparation and they get +50% (one day of praying). Suddenly it's a lot more effective, except for when you have to fight multiple battles a day or when you get ambushed or surprised.