Lordabdul

Mine looks solid for now. @frodolives could you post pictures of your book?

Ah right, thanks for the advice, especially about Humakti followers. I'll check back on all those cults and dates so I can give appropriate recommendations to my players when they create their characters. Cool, good to know I'm not the only one I think that, besides the players wanting to replenish their Rune Points before heading off on an adventure again, you make a good point that they might also want to work a bit at whatever occupation they have, just so they can earn enough money and, possibly, support their relatives and dependents. If an adventure didn't bring enough loot, too, they might have to work a bit to get enough stuff to offer/sacrifice to their deities... which, in itself, can also occasionally be a short adventure!

Everything you describe here makes sense to me, and that's actually how it works in GURPS (which is the system I'm most familiar with) : depending on whether you only take a step, move half your move, or move your full move, then you have different options for what it means about the quality (bonuses/penalties) of you attack and/or of your defense. Of course, GURPS can get quite crunchy if you apply many of its optional rules, but my point is that I might take a couple ideas from there and, indeed, apply them as house rules over the Strike Rank system... all the while realizing (as noted above) that RQG does tend to keep things relatively simple by making many SR mods and rules "fixed". I think RQG will be quite fun to house-rule around!

Great, exactly the type of information I was looking for, thanks! Oh wait, you actually let them roll for experience and such between each session? Or did you mean between each adventure?

I didn't say that either -- running, say, Broken Tower, might take 3 or 4 game sessions with my group. Yeah that might be the way I do it -- prepare in advance a list of shrines/temples/etc. they might know (or not) about, give them a Gloranthan calendar where they can track their characters' holy days, etc.

Hey there! I'm still slowly figuring out my plans for an upcoming RQG campaign -- most likely something around the Red Cow/11L campaign books but with some slightly modified Broken Tower and/or Cattle Raid thrown in at the beginning. One of the main concerns I have is the default "seasonal adventures" mode that RQG is modeled around. I know that, based on my player's knack for getting in unnecessary additional trouble, there are always loose ends after an adventure, regardless of how simple and straightforward it was. When you combine that with my GMing style, where I absolutely love exploring the consequences of the characters' actions, you end up with a lot of follow up adventures that pile up one after the other. So I'm wondering: - How incompatible that is with the default "seasonal adventures" assumption in the rulebook? For instance, you run Broken Tower and there's some loose ends about whether any NPC escaped back to the Greydog clan and what they will say or do. How do people deal with that? Do they resolve it only the next season, making that next season's adventure about the consequences? Or do they combine it with the next season's adventure? (it's a new storyline, but it factors in where the Greydogs are based on last season's actions) Or do they resolve it all in a summary/non-played way, like "so here's what's happening during the rest of the season" (with maybe a couple of broad skill rolls to figure out how things go, but without playing it per se as an adventure) and then it's all (mostly) wrapped up? - If I was to go with pseudo-real-time gameplay, what kind of problem would encounter? For instance, say I play a few adventures per season... it's not totally real-time because I would definitely ellipse a few days here or a week there for traveling back, resting, praying, training, talking to clan elders and waiting for them to deliberate, etc... but we might pop back into adventure mode for when the players want or are ordered to go spy on the Greydogs, or when some Greydogs messengers come in with a blood feud declaration or asking for reparations for the death of their members, or whatever, and then that might kickstart a related adventure right away because the players want to play through that themselves. One of the first problem I can think of is the replenishing of Rune Points, since you have to wait for a holy day for that. This means that, compared to a group that sticks to seasonal adventures, a group that does pseudo-real-time adventures can use less Rune Magic per encounters... but on the other hand, that might be pretty cool since (just as in the KoDP game) the players might figure that they have to wait until after this or that holy day to do a raid because they need Orlanth's favours or something. Did anybody do that? Or did anybody tweak Rune Magic grants to make it less hard on the players? Anything else besides Rune Magic that might be a problem with a pseudo-real-time campaign? Thoughts? Feedback from experience? All will be appreciated!

I haven't tried RQG yet but I know that in other games, it's never really been about "from zero to hero" in terms of stats. You might describe it better as "from nobody to hero". My players would start with significantly better stats than the NPCs they face. For instance, in GURPS, they would start at 150 points while most NPCs are 100 points or less (and, on top of that, I'm quite bad at optimizing points anyway so my NPCs often suck). The differences are: There are a lot more NPCs out there than there are PCs. They won't feel like heroes if the numbers are not in their favour. I generally tune it so that they still have more chances to win than not, and they generally do, but funnily enough from behind the screen I think I often end up making it too easy for them when, really, they often tell me it's too often a close call. I guess I'm doing it right? When you're a nobody, you don't have allies, followers, etc. The path to "hero" isn't about getting past some threshold score in stats, it's about where you end up in the story -- are you leading armies or freeing countries or destroying ancient evil threats or fulfilling prophecies? Or at least, is anybody (not another PC!) writing/singing about you? If so, you're a hero. If not, you're just some random adventurer/mercenary/murder hobo that's gotten very strong. AFAIK, RQG tries to start you off not completely as a "nobody", by giving you a couple accomplished feats that people might know you from. If the players prefer to really start as nobodies, the GM could cut off the last bit of the character background creation. Maybe, remove a few skill points but that's probably not necessary, like I said, from past experience. But my point is that it's all about the narrative, and how the GM frames it and presents it. Sure, you were born as a Colymar tribe farmer but you decided to leave your homelands and ended up participating in the liberation of Pavis. Big deal. You didn't play that as an adventure, so you don't start as a complete "zero", but that's maybe you starting as a, what, "5% hero"? That's still a long way to go. Right now you're just this kid who left, leaving other, now jaleous/pissed off kids to do the labour you were supposed to do on your parents' lands, and has to deal with that when they they come back, or maybe they don't come back and they still need a way to get food and lodging while on the road. If anything, starting after this "liberation of Pavis adventure" is more of a narrative shortcut that prevents having to play through the whole "call to adventure" stuff. It's like playing a super-hero game where everybody has already been a super-hero for a little while, so that you don't need to play everybody's "origin" adventure, because that would be tedious. But, if that's how the GM chooses to spin it, everybody is still definitely a newbie super-hero and there's a long way to the Defenders Of The Galaxy membership.

Cool, thanks... so yeah that's what I mentioned in one of my posts, that you can also hand-wave why a flat world looks like a curved world if you say it's the light that's curved. In which case, I think you can take my drawings, invert the curvature of the ground, and that's the curvature of the light? (I didn't lay down the math but it probably boils down to that) I'm pretty sure the God Learners or somebody similar came up with a universal constant like, say, the YSF (Yelm Strabismus Factor) which represents this curvature

Here's the 2 proposed "bulging cubes" with magasta's pool inserted at rough scale! (what I inserted is actually around 700 km wide... 500 km for the whirlpool itself, plus a 100 km "margin") As before, Earth is curvature first, double curvature second.

It's a bit ironic that I'm basically saying "I don't want to have to debate star-based navigation with my players because I want to get on with the adventure" but then I end up debating it here anyway I thought I read somewhere that the sun path was actually varying between seasons... something about the trajectory arching northward in the cold seasons, and back towards the centre of the sky dome in the hot seasons? (which sounded to me like basically the mirror of what we get on Earth's northern hemisphere). Did I misunderstand that?

Oh yeah, that reminds me that one super-hand-wavy way of explaining a horizon in a fantasy flat world is to just say that light doesn't work the same way it does in the real world, and that it bends in a way that makes ships disappear behind the water in the distance and so you still need someone in a crow's nest to spot them better. At that point, it's really about choosing whether things appear to behave more or less like on Earth (and then you can hand wave the explanation if needed), or whether they perceivably differ, in which case I'm afraid to end up in debates about night-sky navigation with my players, which is why I'm leaning towards "it's the same as on Earth as far as you can tell" (especially since the players will already have enough stuff to deal with, like magic and spirits and traditions and whatever).

Oh yeah good point -- although in my Glorantha it might just be very local, i.e. the curvature inverses only, say, 200 km from the edge of the whirlpool (Magasta's Pool itself seems to be less than 500 km in diameter). When you go "over the bump" and see it, it's too late! Yeah I mentioned that atmospheric effects play a big role. As far as I understand, there are even light refraction effects that commonly let you see things that are technically just behind the horizon? I haven't looked too much into that. Ah right I forgot Sramak's River. I still stand by my joke

Because the math is a LOT easier to write when you're dealing with a sphere Even for a, ahem (checks notes) oblate spheroidal like Earth, approximating it to a sphere gets you pretty close to what we need, given that we just want to know if you can see this mountain or this castle from a distance -- not setup a laser with a precise target. And AFAICT, it's not necessarily useful to go into more precise shapes because at some point, atmospheric light refraction will affect visibility more than the rest. But yes, if I was to make the Gloranthan cube into a funnier shape, I would probably make the edges more round, i.e. make the curvature increase exponentially until it ends up vertical on the face of the cube. In Glorantha, the recession of glaciers is not caused by climate change, but is actually Valind's Glacier slowly sliding off the top and falling down the North face

Glorantha is supposed to be a flat world, so in theory it doesn't have any curvature, but this week-end I was wondering what that means for visibility distances and horizons and all that. It looks like it was briefly touched upon in a discussion in the old forums, but it wasn't really conclusive, and it was more of a meta question about whether the whole "the earth is flat and gods exist!" was an in-character or out-of-character "truth" about Glorantha, which frankly doesn't matter that much and will make your head hurt pretty quickly. So here I'm just noodling around with some basic math and figuring out what a Gloranthan character might expect about a few practical things. It's as serious as it is tongue in cheek -- I'm mostly thinking about how long I should let players debate how far away can they spot a pirate ship at sea before I get Water Lizards to sink their boat because I'm bored. But also, I don't like the idea that Glorantha is perfectly flat. The text box in Strangers in Prax (p36) about crow's nests being useless in ships, for instance, highlights how a flat world kills some cool adventure tropes. Flat worlds suck. So I wondered: how much curve can I get away with? (since this involves some math, I might have made a mistake, so if you feel like something is off, feel free to ask for details or correct me!) The first thing that I did was figuring out what Glorantha would look like if it had the same curvature as Earth. I took Pamaltela, which is roughly 4200 miles long (GtG, p540), and eyeballed the space around it from the general Glorantha map. That looks to me like roughly a quarter of its length on each side, which gives me a rough distance of 6300 miles from one side of the Gloranthan cube to the other side. With a radius equivalent to Earth's (6371 km), that actually gives an angle of only around 91 degrees... which means that the Gloranthan "cube", as viewed from the side, would look like this: Not too bad, I think! You could frankly almost go with that and have Earth-like visibility, which means you don't need to argue about useless things with your players! Yay! I'm frankly tempted to do it (although I don't need to tell them, I can still say "as far as you know, it's flat... I mean, can you see the curve? Shut up and listen to your priests!"). Glorantha is described (RQG, p16) as "a slightly bulging, squarish lozenge". That's more that "slightly bulging" but it can do! Now, to make it a bit flatter, what if we double the "radius"? That ends up pretty much halving the angle (to around 45 degrees), and now our Gloranthan cube looks better (and definitely "slightly bulging"): Ok so what does that mean for visibility? I took the Quivin Mountains, in Sartar, for reference. Their peak is around 6500 ft (GtG, p187), so around 2000 m. Let's see how far south we can see those mountains... of course, other things like atmospheric interference (haze, clouds, etc.) will have to be taken into account on top of everything else, but let's put that aside for now. Whitewall (70 miles/110 km away) looks like it's maybe 3000 ft high (900 m). The centre of Beast Valley (Creek-Stream River, 100 miles/160 km away) is maybe around 2000 ft high (600 m). These elevations are based on the very loose colour coding in S:KoH (p8). At Earth's curvature, the Quivin Mountains seen from Whitewall's elevation will disappear from view around 130 km (80 miles) away... so you can barely spot the top of the peak from Whitewall at best. Beast Valley is too far away, however, with the Quivin mountains out of view, at that elevation, at around 140 km (87 miles) away. At the half-curvature (twice Earth's radius), the Quivin Mountains seen from Whitewall's elevation can be seen as far as 180 km (110 miles) away. At Beast Valley's elevation, it's 200 km (125 miles). This means that the area around Whitewall probably has a few nice viewpoints, while Beast Valley can get a glimpse of the peaks on a very good day sometimes. Here's a rough comparison of how far you can see the Quivin peaks from a Sartarite elevation (900 m, like Whitewall) at Earth's curvature (orange) and at half-curvature (blue). Doesn't make too much difference, so I might fudge it here and there for dramatic purposes, and keep in mind the Gloranthan cube is bulgy. Am I overthinking this and do I have too much free time? Yes, possibly. But hey, this is what passes for fun around here

Which is why CoC saw at least two scenario books (Blood Brothers 1 and 2) entirely dedicated to taking cheesy B horror movies tropes and turning them into one-shot scenarios! It's super fun to run in between big campaigns, or when a key player can't make it to the table one night.

Sounds like a reason to actually use it And more seriously, it will keep sounding like BDSM until it doesn't, after it's used in non-BDSM contexts long enough.... so what I'm saying is, someone's gotta start. About the French title for the GM kit (and that's probably feedback we should send to Studio Deadcrows) it does sound a bit weird to me too, although it's not for the same reasons as @Julian Lord. The term "meneuse" seems OK to me -- I've never heard of "meneure", and the Larousse dictionary doesn't seem to know about it either. The problem to me is that the term "meneur/meneuse de jeu" is not very common AFAIK, I've always heard "maitre/maitresse de jeu" ("game master" instead of "game leader", basically). It's typical in French to just say "maitre" ("master") as a shortcut (the same way you say "GM" in English... although we also say "MJ" in a similar fashion). D&D/Pathfinder/etc. generally use that term for their French editions ("livre du maitre", as in "master's book", for instance). I think what Studio Deadcrows figured is that gender-swapping that term directly ("livre de la maitresse") sounds like "teacher's book", and decided to use "meneuse" instead. I would personally have gone with using the full title ("livre de la maitresse de jeu"), as that's what sounds more natural to me, but maybe there are also typographic considerations there (as it makes the title longer). Either way, I'm glad to see a French edition with inclusive writing

Probably for historical/nostalgia/respect-for-the-original-material reasons. But yes, that's why many groups don't use the "roll the dice" rules for character creation, and instead use house rules -- because players know they want to make a warrior or a thief or a priest or whatever, and they don't want to leave it up to chance to have appropriate scores. That's why CoC has no less than 6 alternate character creation methods (see the Investigator Handbook), and why, most probably, the RQ Gamemaster Guide will have similar options (it's mentioned in RQG that it will have such options). In a purely logical sense, there's not much difference between having different stat rolls for gender and having different stat rolls for species in a fantasy game. However, we don't exist in a pure logical plane of existence, and some things have context and history. There are a whole bunch of other incendiary topics that also fly above my head, so don't feel too bad about it as long as you do recognize that these issues exist (which you seem to). The goal of the GM is to make sure everybody at the table is comfortable and is having fun, after all. That said, on a purely abstract game design level, making up a character takes several steps that have a specific order. This means that the order between choosing your sex and determining the stats is important. For example, there are some Rune Cults like Eiritha's or Ernalda's which require you to be of a specific gender, which then poses a problem: At a table where players have to roll dice for character creation (without any optional/house rule), you roll your stats, and then you know if your character will "look" like a warrior or a shaman or merchant. But if dice rolls are predicated on sex, by the time you know if your character might be a good Ernalda Rune Priestess or not, you already had to pick between male or female! This means that some options are effectively "closed" to the players, and players generally don't like that IME. At a table where players are using a house rule that lets them (re)distribute points between stats, or re-roll low dice, or whatever, the whole idea of having dice rolls that have any statistical relevance flies out of the window, so make sure to not mix the two. Finally, as Jeff pointed out, we should recognize the fact that the point is not to make statistically accurate characters in the first place (we are supposed to play heroes after all!). And even assuming that's what players at your table really consider "fun", then it should start with the elephant in the room: you don't really choose how you're born, so if anything, that house rule should be preceded by a coin flip to determine your sex randomly (and that's already ignoring some "corner" cases of human biology... it should probably be a D100 on a table... also to be followed by another D100 roll on another table to determine your gender! Humans are complicated...). So anyway, assuming you know for sure nobody at your table will be upset, I'd say you can run your game as you want, but, I think, for that house rule to make sense on a game design level, it would indeed need to be preceded by rolls to determine sex/gender. Have fun!

Thanks! But yes, I had seen those before, and that's why I was curious about getting some similar notes for the RQG books... although those old notes are very detailed, so I would even be happy with just a couple or handful of lines.

Sorry, bad phrasing on my part... I meant to say that yes, I know it can happen in extreme cases, and that this feels unbelievable to me, as in "the fact that this is possible under the rules as written breaks my suspension on disbelief". Thank you for the suggestions everyone! I think I'll still try to go with the slightly more crunchy weapon bulk modifiers house rule (my players generally like crunchier rules), if only because I plan to have one of the early adventures have a fight in a temple, with a possibility of fights in small spaces (less than 3m wide). This would force players to use smaller weapons. The whole "statement of intent" also sounds to me like something that would slow down combat a lot, for not much gain. I believe ORE games like Godlike also do something like this -- players declare what they do from lowest to highest initiative (so that "faster" characters can decide what to do based on what "slower" characters said they were doing), and then everybody rolls. We ended up going with a more conventional mechanic because it felt more like "going around the table twice as much per turn", which I'm afraid would be the case here too, so it's good to know that several of you already dropped it. I'll also check back on the closing maneuver in CoC, thanks!

After reading the different chapters on SR this immediately bothered me too. I can maybe understand that someone with a giant, bulky, 2 handed Greatsword will connect earlier than someone with a little dagger (and even then, I'm not convinced... the Greatsword is longer, but also takes longer to swing)... but I can't believe that, given high enough skills, the Greatsword fighter might be able to swing successfully twice before the little guy with the dagger can get anything done. I tried to explain it this way (the little guy with the dagger is having a hard time reaching the big guy with the Greatsword because it's hard to find an opening when there's a giant blade swinging your way), but I think it mostly started making sense when I realized that the granularity of movement in RQG is 3 meters! For people using battlemats, usually, a hex or square is 1m, so that's what I had in mind originally when reading the combat rules... but if you imagine that a round of melee involves 2 fighters doing footwork as far as 3m wide, then it makes a bit more sense, at least for me. Now, it still bothers me that SR mixes melee combat initiative order ("how fast can you get your first opportunity at a good strike") and action points ("how long a strike takes before you can strike again"). The way SR seems to be computed in the RQG book seems to be entirely based on the weapon's reach, which applies to the first aspect, but (in my opinion) not the second aspect -- I think the second aspect is mostly driven by "bulk". So a dagger-using fighter with a 150% skill will take longer to get into close combat (i.e. get a good opening) against someone with a Broadsword, but, once she does, she should be able to use this one opportunity to land multiple stabs (3 stabs at 50%) during that round. I think the rules assume something else, which is that she just lands one hit and then the whole footwork/evading/feinting dance resumes between each of her 3 stabs... she effectively has to find 3 good openings! I'd love to get feedback from the designers and from people who did play RQG, but I get the feeling this makes smaller weapons way too weak against big bulky weapons, instead of making it more of a compromise: "I'm going to stick to daggers and short swords... it's going to be very risky against someone with a bigger weapons, but if I can get past their first hit, I can land more blows than them", vs. "I want a big ass hammer. I'll only strike once a round or so but, by the Gods, they won't even reach me with their puny little weapons". I'm actually not sure what is the advantage of using small weapons with RAW, except for maybe having less encumbrance and carrying more other stuff. So as a result, I'm thinking of using these house rules, and I'd love to get feedback on them: Start with a simple rule like: when splitting attacks, your first attack happens on your normal SR, but subsequent attacks happen every (2 + DEX SR) (so every 5 SR for some average human). If I want to get fancy, I might modify the above interval to be (DEX SR + Bulk SR) to model weapon "bulk"... maybe: 0 for daggers, +1 for most swords, +2 or +3 for most 2-handed weapons. The good thing with that second point is that, once you have some "bulk" modifiers, you can also apply them in other situations. For instance, I assume it is common for fights to happen in confined spaces, like an underground tunnel or small room. I would apply the bulk modifiers above in those cases so that characters with smaller weapons have some tactical advantage when leading lance-wielding enemies there.

Yeah I have only GM'ed one short adventure with the 7ed rules so far, but it's the first time ever that I feel CoC has a "proper" system. Before, I would usually use a different system, with house-rules for making sanity rules feel "CoC-y". But now, with 7ed's better combat system, better fleshed out magic system, and all kinds of other tweaks, I actually want to use the rules as written.

It might be modulated by how grandiose or important the event is generally speaking (so there are multiple factors at play), but what I meant was that how long ago it happened has a direct correlation to how many times people have been able to celebrate it and re-enact it. Something that happened a season ago might not have been part of any cultural celebration yet, whereas something that happened 200 years ago has potentially been done several hundred times. I have no idea what your point is, here In other news, I started flipping a bit through Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes and Sartar Companion and I found the Law Staff Quest adventure which is interesting, as it starts in the mundane world and then moves on to the hero plane only later, and has a bunch of other interactions between the two on the way there. That will let me ask more concrete questions about heroquesting: I didn't quite understand if the Lawspeaker was an alternate manifestation of Orlanth, or if it was some other entity? (looks like it's the latter) In the first part of the quest (when you're still in the mundane world, AFAICT), you can be attacked by one of your "enemies". Say it's the Grey Dogs clan. How does it look like from their side? Did they just happen to be there by some kind of cosmic coincidence? Or did their priests receive visions from their gods and spirits, and those visions somehow compelled the clan leaders to send someone in the right direction for intercepting you? When they show up, surely they recognize that you're on a heroquest, since, in the "Road to Rich Post" section it is mentioned that Sartarites will immediately recognize what you're doing and who you're dressed up as. Would that typically be extra incentive for them to attack you ("if we mess up their quest, they will endure many hardships and will make it easier for us to take over their land and cattle!") or would they think twice about it ("shit, we don't want to get sucked into a hero plane event!")? Since the text says (in "Who are the Hero and his Companions?") that, for the duration of the quest, you are the god (Orlanth or possibly Heort), wouldn't the Grey Dogs freak out that Orlanth himself is over there on the road? Would they even be able to tell that, underneath it all, there's a Colymar tribe member? (and not someone from a friendly-to-them tribe, doing the same quest?) In the last part of the quest (when you've crossed over to the Other Side), you're up on Arrowmound Mountain. Again, you're supposed to effectively be Orlanth, so wouldn't Jarani recognize you instead of saying "Halt Stranger!"? Similar question as before: some of your "enemies" were brought into the hero plane through the Summoning of Evil. But do they actually know it? Again, say it's the Grey Dogs. Since they're Sartarites, they probably know about this Law Staff myth (since it's a general Orlanthi myth, not one specific to the Colymar tribe). They probably wouldn't willingly heroquest as "the bad guys". I don't imagine their priests would receive visions that tell them they need to launch a "villainquest"?! Or maybe it's not them, it's just a personification of them? (if you cut one of their warriors' arm off during the Battle of Arrowmound, if you went and spied on their village the next week, would you see a one armed warrior recovering from the wound?) Or maybe the Grey Dogs indeed launched into a heroquest themselves, but they also believe they're on Jarani's side? Would they see you in Gagarth's army? What if the Grey Dogs have other more important enemies than you that should show up for them?! Or what if they're not in a good position (resources-wise) to run a heroquest in the first place? Is it actually a viable long term tactic to try and keep your enemies busy or low on POW so that there's less chance of them showing up in your next quest? Last, shouldn't the quest go 2 different ways depending on how you prepare for it? If you dress up as Orlanth, Harand should be the one showing up and fighting you. If you dress up as Heort, Gagarth is the one that shows up. One last thing to note (which was also a factor in my misunderstanding what can be quested and what can't) is that I didn't realize how much of Glorantha's "history" actually happens in God Time. I thought that as soon as you've got kings and nations and stuff, you're already in the Dawn Age or later, but apparently not: for instance, pretty much all of the Vingkotling culture developed outside of Time! That was unexpected.

Oh yes you're right -- funnily enough, I do mix-up those 2 regularly and, before posting, figured I would check back on my PDFs to get it right, and I still managed to mix it up My excuse is that I frankly just skimmed those quickly while making up my mind about what I want to focus on for my first campaign.

Oh that's a very interesting point. A quick research shows that Pinyin was only adopted as an ISO standard in 1982 so when the early Glorantha material was written, the prominent romanization system in the US must have been the Wade-Giles system, which indeed (if I'm reading this table right) was using "hs" for the, ahem (adjusts non-existent glasses) "voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative" sound. Woohoo who knew linguists had such fun names for sounds.

I find myself that podcasts are easier to fit into my schedule than YouTube channels -- I only have a short commute to work, and a bit of workout/running to let me eat chocolate like I used to, so I listen to podcasts during that time. In comparison, YouTube channels require your full attention. But there are also written-word feeds you can follow if that's more your jam -- I follow some filtered version of RPG.net and ENworld news, and receive the newsletters/follow the official blog feeds from Chaosium and other usual suspects (Pelgrane Press, Arc Dream, etc.). Back to the OP, I think another good book people might buy pretty soon after the Starter Kit and Core Rules book is the Pulp Cthulhu book. I've seen people get into Cthulhu with the wrong idea: they thought you could create characters with magic powers from the get go, or they didn't think it would be as hopeless and bleak (expecting action/horror instead of cosmic horror for instance). I think the Pulp Cthulhu sourcebook lets non-HPL/cosmic-horror fans still have tentacle-rich fun, and that's probably an option they need to know about early on.