Lordabdul

AAA games are typically announced only a year before or so, even though they have 3 to 5+ years of development. In the AA and indie world, it really depends a lot, but lately a lot of studios have been sharing less and less because of the potential/precedents for utterly toxic and violent backlash from angry gamers.

It's remarkable that a CritRole video would warrant the use of a word like "pummelled". I expected a blip or two in the sales, but it sounds like it's really significant jump?

Haha yeah that's a nice idea, but, at least in RQG, I don't think the order matters, and techniques seem to always be listed last in the runes list. But that's something to keep in mind for potential house rules....

I think the idea was that everybody thinks he's dead, including law enforcement, and he now has a new identity or something? What I'm more concerned about in this case is that I believe he would be 60 years old by the time Masks starts. I hope he stayed in shape so he can outrun the baddies! (and yes, I know, "you don't need to outrun the Hunting Horror... you just need to outrun a few of the other characters")

Sure but what I meant was: 1) The Condition Runes are not mentioned in the RQG Sorcery rules so I'm not sure they ever apply? Isn't it implied that you're just using the Magic rune under the hood and that's it? 2) Even if the Condition Runes were used, wouldn't you need an extra column for the Techniques? "Command Plant Death" is different from "Summon Plant Death" for instance.

Assuming The Sundance Kid is built on the same point totals as everybody else? I think "just as scared as everybody else" (actually, even if that character was somehow more powerful than average, I'm pretty sure the player will still be pretty scared when they meet the Chakota in session #2!)

Maybe you should, now... would be a shame to kill so many famous people

Nice -- although I was a bit confused at first because you called it "Life" instead of "Fertility" (which is the term RQG uses). Also you have some "Conditions" instead of RQG's techniques? (Command, Combine, Separate, Summon, Dispel, Tap). Was this for a previous version of RQ maybe? I think that assumption will very quickly be proven false. Take the very first sorcery spell in RQG for instance: "Accelerate Healing" (Fertility, Command). I'm pretty sure we can come up with at least a couple other spells that would have the same runes as their base.

Yeah I'd rather a "0 warning point" be delivered via PM first, and then (if the private discussion doesn't go well, for instance) actual bans all be handled similarly privately.

What do you mean? Sorcerers can learn both "sides" of opposed runes. If you only know one side, you can still cast spells using the opposed runes at double the magic cost.

My limited understanding of the Sorcery stuff is that it lets you play the Ars-Magica-like fantasy of the alechmical sorcerer who studies for a long time in his mysterious tower, experimenting with spells and components, asking their servants to go fetch esoteric ingredients, until they eventually come out and show immense displays of power. On that front, I think it's totally the point that characters using spirit/rune magic have it easier than sorcerers -- it's like comparing people who shop at Walmart/BestBuy with people who do DIY stuff. The interesting thing is that, because sorcerers take a long time to prepare their stuff, Ars-Magica popularized the "troupe" gameplay style, so that you have something to do while your wizard is spending time in their lab. It might be trickier with RQG but that's probably why the authors encourage "seasonal" gameplay (with seasonal rolls for character improvement) as an alternative solution. Anyway, so the point is to have a sorcerer that starts "slow" and then becomes more and more over powered (I guess it's kind of like D&D?). Plus, it looks to me like there's a whole bunch of augments you can use to make your sorcerer playable and useful. Pretty quickly, you'll be inscribing spell on a whole bunch of trinkets you carry around (many sorcerers carry a plate on their chest with a bunch of runes inscribed on them... do those typically contain their favourite spells? or is it just for show?). I haven't playtested the Sorcery rules yet, nor have I done the math, but it looks like that's the key to being a badass -- casting spells on the spot looks very unproductive but that seems by design to me. The only thing I would add are rules that let you "improve" an inscribed spell iteratively, so that you can build up its strength over the years and, 5 years later, end up with something more powerful than you could cast in one go. I'm not sure if that would break everything though? I'm also wondering about "secondary runes" and "true names"? It seems like sorcery (according to GtG) gets more effective when you're using more "specific" things in the spell casting. So for instance, using the true name of something/someone you want to summon would grant you bonuses (it seems like that's what Malkioni did at some point to summon some water elementals against... err... the Waertagi I think? Can't find it right now[1]). Also, there's a bunch of runes that existed in previous editions of RQ that are not listed in RQG -- assuming they haven't been completely eliminated, I'm wondering if a future sourcebook on sorcery will reintroduce those runes as "more specific" runes that are more limited in use-cases, but offer you, say, double the intensity for your spells. If you learn such a secondary rune, use a "true name", add some affinity components, wait for the right season, prepare your lab, etc.... well... you might be able to inscribe a pretty fucking awesome spell in your hat! [1] edit: found it, GtG p 48... it's not "true names" but "identification", for instance through "genealogy" like "runic precedents".

Are you talking about the Darsenites? (they're nowhere near the Blue Moon plateau, I'm not sure what they have to do with anything). I can't see anything about "Darsenians" otherwise. Either way, sure, there was some time between the two events, but it's probably hard to forget when those people dropped a whole planet onto your ancestors. I guess it depends on whether the political/religious leaders at any given time want to actually use that or not to gain or consolidate power. I guess the Carmanians were a bigger threat and so there was not point in bringing up old bad blood.

Wooohoo you're citing your references now? (I'm teasing but I guess most of the time you must be reciting from memory, which is why you don't mention the sources? It's super useful when you do mention them though!) Now that I'm looking into this a bit more, I realise that the many suns of Glorantha don't have the monopoly on confusing multitudes... So for instance, there's also a whole bunch of moon goddesses. The "blue moon" is just one aspect of the moon in general -- we mostly know the moon as "Sedenya" just because that's how she was reborn in Time and that's how the Lunars call her now (mainly), but she had a whole bunch of names and faces before that. Ok, sure. But strangely enough, GtG (p648) doesn't list "Lesilla" as a name for the blue moon, even though that's the name GS (p147) uses when they talk about that time Dara Happan Emperor Lukarius shot her down from the sky and she crashed onto her own city of Mernita (he was pissed that they were worshipping something else than the proper sun god... that's how the Blue Moon Plateau was formed). The Dara Happans then figured the place was inhabited by the "demon" Annilla (GtG p346) so I guess everything is a matter of perspective... but from GtG (p674) it seems that, when Mernita was a thing, Lesilla/Annilla was called Verithurusa, and is more described like some kind of land goddess? (in GtG p95 she is "lord of the North"). And to add more confusion, Verithurusa is listed as one of the 7 moon goddesses of the Lunars, which also lists Lesilla. Is it me or does it look like the Lunars effectively appropriated a bunch of goddesses from previous cultures, declared those goddesses as different faces of the same moon goddess, and that's how they got more people to join their ranks? But wouldn't that have been a problem since Lesilla/Anilla/Verithurusa worshippers and Dara Happan people hate each other? Yet they must have fought together against the Carmelians, unless my timeline is wrong? (maybe the Lunars are just that good at negotiation?) That's very true.... in this case. I think I mentioned this in the past but I would love a list of "N Things Your Players Absolutely Need To Know About Glorantha". Like, for instance, you need to know that there's a 10 km high needle of a mountain to the west, or that there's a red moon to the north-west that's just hanging, fixed, in the sky, all the time... it will be a lot harder to tell the players about it on game session #12, because they might object about not having known such an "obvious" thing before.

My (less useful) tip, if you have a whole bunch of RQ/HQ PDFs and Acrobat Pro: make an index and search whatever names are brought up. It's often illuminating because, for instance, a name might have 1 hit in the Glorantha Sourcebook, demonstrating that book's little problem with gratuitous name-dropping. Other times you get some interesting hits all over the place, and you can see how something is used, in practice, in, say, Sartar Companion or something. And yet other times you mostly get hits in the "scholar" sections of the library (i.e. the "translated" Stafford Library books), in which case I often ignore it as "only for the advanced Gloranthaphiles". It's still fun to do most of the times. For instance, @Joerg just mentioned Annilla, which I don't know at all, and I find this bit in GtG1 (p.97) where she's responsible (at least according to the Uz) for the ocean tides of Glorantha. That's kind of cool. You can drop that in an NPC dialogue in a game.

Huh, I didn't know there were such people... I think the whole Greg/Sandy/Moon Design takeover was the best thing that happened to the company -- I haven't been that excited about Chaosium products since the early 90s when I actually discovered Chaosium (and CoC in particular). One other thing to think about with regards to moderation is how much of it is visible. There are forums out there that look like they have "light moderation" when, in fact, there's a whole bunch of it that goes on behind the scenes (and you learn about it only when you start hanging out on the companion Discord server, for instance).

Oh nice I didn't know about this scenario. In the past I also pretty successfully ran "The Murderer of Thomas Fell" (from Trail of Cthulhu) to introduce new people to either horror RPGs or to RPGs in general.

For those of us who don't necessarily spend a lot of time on many different forums, can someone elaborate on what they think TheRPGSite, RPG.net, and/or RPG Pub (or even, for that matter, ENWorld) are like? From my limited experience with a few of them, I frankly can't tell much, besides maybe that RPG.net is quite moderation heavy? I don't know. So yeah, RPG forums 101 would be welcome And sure, everybody wants a nice, safe, friendly place to discuss nerdy RPG-related topics, but I think that, as the community size grows, so does the need for moderation. The number of "incidents" (whatever that is) will even outgrow community growth if they go unmoderated, since at that point your forums will be known as "safe" for whatever was that behaviour, attracting more similar people. The only moderation "abuse" I can think of would be if posts criticizing Chaosium were to be locked or removed, but I don't see this happening any time soon. Most common scenarios of moderation are to keep tone/politeness/trolling in check (maybe that's me being Canadian but I think it's pretty hard to have "too much" of it), getting in front of problems (say, by locking a topic where arguments are going in circles... it's debatable whether that's desirable but IMHO it is), and doing general cleanup and maintenance (like splitting topics that are going off on a long tangent, closing duplicate topics, etc... again, it's debatable, but IMHO, assuming there's enough moderators, it's a good thing because it makes the forums easy to jump onto for newbies)... so... what I'm saying is, I don't have a super extensive experience with many forums, but I do have experience with a couple of long-running communities (15+ years), and I have never seen "too much moderation".

So it does sound like you're asking players to justify taking Read/Write 😅 (at least if they're Orlanthi) I think the limiting factor is really time and money -- even if the party somehow finds someone to teach them, they would need to stay around for at least a couple months to learn anything usable, and unless they have enough resources to pay for living expenses during that time, that might not be practical. And there's also the need to justify a "jump forward" in the campaign to skip this downtime.

I thought Lhankor Mhy temples offered Read/Write lessons for a price but I can't find any mention of that in RQG so I must have imagined it... I would probably do that as a standard way for those temples to get income anyway (and since you need 50% in Read/Write to become a member, that's the perfect scam!). Another option (especially if they don't have enough money) would be for such a temple to instead ask them for a service in return, like a side-quest of sorts. Maybe they have some missing cult member they need found, or maybe there's an item they need to acquire, or whatever. One last option would be for them to meet some philosopher or scribe NPC (maybe they're hired as escort for that person) and that eventually leads to that NPC teaching them some Read/Write basics (as a "thank you" or, again, for a price). I like the idea of writing as a form of magic, to make it "special", but I'm not sure how that would work since there's no limitation on getting that skill as part of your character creation. If anybody can have literacy, maybe it's not so "special" after all and there are lots of opportunities to learn Read/Write (it's just than some people have better things to do). Actually, more than half of the pre-gens have one Read/Write skill, if not 2 or 3. Do you have a house-rule that players need to come up with a background justification to take Read/Write on character creation?

By the way, @MOB, is that explanation about light rays going back up to the sky a "house rule" of yours or is there any mention of it in published material? (I like it, it's very Gloranthan) About distances, I've actually always found it weird that American designers would make maps in metric (but in a good way since I'm European!), but I'm not sure about that "key mile" theory since they also used the metric system in other places of the early RQ1-2 texts like weapon lengths and stuff. But they could have somewhat unconsciously messed up their mental images, I guess.

(now that I think about it, adding "Keeper Ruleboook" on the main book is also new, it didn't use to have this...)

Nope, "investigator" == "player character". From the core rulebook: In Call of Cthulhu, each player takes the role of an investigator, someone whose mission is to unearth hidden secrets, etc... So it's really the "Characters' Handbook" so to speak. And I mean, sure, I'm splitting hair, and I totally understand that it's still confusing and all that... but I also imagine that, for Chaosium employees who have been dealing with this CoC-specific vocabulary for several decades, it probably made sense at the time 😁 Looking into it more, I also realize that, although an Investigator-focused sourcebook of some kind has been in print since 1993, it was called "The Investigator's Companion" in pretty much all editions of CoC until the most recent one. I'm going to theorize that replacing "Companion" with "Handbook" made things more confusing than not... maybe we'll get some funny behind-the-scenes story from @Mike M for why they changed the title? 😅

You're 43 posts in this forum and you're already writing stuff like this? (and judging from your posting history, that's pretty much all you ever posted about). Congrats, you're the first member I'm muting.

One thing to note is that it's called "The Investigator Handbook", and not "The Player's Handbook". It's not any more for players as, say, a hypothetical "1920s Weapons Handbook" or a bestiary book or whatever. And actually, an early version of the book had the subtitle "A Core Game Book for Players" -- I'm pretty sure it was removed because it was causing more confusion along the same lines. So yeah, lots of games are not like D&D and lots of games have core books divided in various numbers (up to 5 books! hello Unknown Armies! is that the record?), but I do understand that the CoC book titles are not great. Just remember there's only one core book -- everything else are optional sourcebooks and adventure modules. Easy!

The new edition of Masks of Nyarlathotep, which (among other cool things) fixed some of the most obvious problems with sexism/racism, just got Gold in Best Adventure, too. In the meantime, feel free to support the FATE Accessibilty Toolkit, which is currently in "prototyping mode".