Lordabdul

I was thinking about this earlier, trying to draw parallels to a cyberpunk/futuristic society where you can have physical implants like cybernetic eyes and neural implants and cognitive booster drugs. Depending on how advanced or dystopian you want your setting to be, and how widespread the use of cybernetics is, you might have "no enhancements" zones but frankly, once you get "cyberpunk enough", it's so pervasive that any corporate business meeting or drug sale negotiation or whatever is expected to have everybody around the table using a whole battery of implants to observe, evaluate, and outmatch the people on the other side. I believe that's how Cyberpunk 2020 used to handle it. So no I don't think it I would do that in my Glorantha, the same way it doesn't make sense (except for special circumstances) to say that a business meeting should have no technology allowed whatsoever (i.e. no laptops or smartphones or internet access). Some actions are frowned upon, like deceiving people, or spying on them in between council meetings, but that's the case whether you're using a spell or not (or technology). Maybe banning some spells, or monitoring spell activity, makes it a bit harder to do those things, so depending on your views about how (in)effective those policies might be, they could be used in your world. My personal opinion on the matter is that I don't like it when a world gives me a toy, but the story removes the toy from me. "It's a world where you have access to lots of magic spells!" the GM says... but when we want to figure out who killed the innkeeper, we can't interrogate the ghost because the killer used a special weapon that destroys the victim's spirit. If we want to locate the kidnapped innkeeper's child, we can't use a scrying spell because somehow the bad guys are using something to block it... there's no point in having access to magic if it ends up being useless or unusable. But yes, it means it's a lot harder for the GM to design adventures, and that's why I hope there will be lots of well-designed scenario packs and GM advice coming from Chaosium soon

I don't think there's any difference in that case compared to a similar situation where the PCs and NPCs just used "mundane" skills like Bargain or Fast-Talk or whatever, no? If the PCs are playing guards and an NPC Fast-Talks their way through them, you end up roleplaying the PCs realizing a few minutes later that they've been had and now that need to catch up, whereas if they had made their rolls, they could have arrested the thieves on the spot. I think the point is that, for Gloranthans, it's just "abilities" -- stuff you can do well. It might not matter how you're doing it. There might be no big difference whether you're good at talking your way into/out of a situation because you grew up as a orphan in the streets of Boldhome and you learned to use big puppy eyes, or because your parents were wandering merchants and you developed that special smile and way to hold people's shoulder, or because you learned some Illusion Rune Magic from some Eurmal The Trickster worshipper. It's all different ways to achieve the same thing and none is more or less legitimate than the other in a world where magic is part of every day life.

I'd like to see rules for HeroQuesting. Then I'd love a whole bunch of additional rules for all the "social" aspects of a campaign -- it's often said that how you manage relationships inside your clan, or between your clan and the neighbouring clans, is often as important, if not more, than just hitting people with a sword... so I'd love to have more crunch there, whether it's stuff mentioned in this thread (communities rules and other clan management stuff) or other stuff like, say, advanced social interaction rules for big negotiations (like, diplomatic encounters that require multiple rolls and a bit of tactical choices on the player's part to "win" the argument... social skills as combat, basically). Last, lots of tips for running Glorantha, like how to portray Gods and cults or, generally speaking, handling "mythical stuff". Tips on managing single-clan parties vs multi-cultural parties, too.

Yep, I think the question of whether spells (in general) have a visual effect or not is "yes, maybe" (YGWV and all that). While some obviously have some visual effect (like Claws), some others obviously don't (like Lie, which actually says "undetectably" in the description), while the rest is up to the GM. We ended up debating around the Charisma spell specifically as an example, but whatever different GMs decide about how to handle that spell shouldn't be mistaken as the way they would handle all other spells. Charisma is an interesting case though, and I originally also figured it would be an "invisible" spell. But after thinking about it more, I like the idea of it having some visible effect indeed (although I think it might vary depending on the situation), but I realized that "visible" is different from "noticeable". For instance, if a character uses Charisma to woe the daughter of a neighbouring clan, it might indeed have a visible effect -- time seems to slow down, the light falls just right on your character's hair which is caressed by the warm Fire Season wind, the runes on their neck seemingly glistening... (and yes I totally want to write Gloranthan erotica now). The effect was visible, but the target didn't notice, that was the whole point... it just looked that way at that moment... because really what's the alternative? You cast the Charisma spell, and there's nothing for the GM to describe, it's just about getting the extra CHA points? Seems a bit bland to me. But again, it's fine for different GMs to do it differently.

That would be my view on this too. Who are we to differentiate between "the priestess on the left made a better spell roll" and "Ernalda seems to be a lot more supportive of the priestess on the left". Maybe the dice don't decide -- instead, the Gods move the dice to support their unfathomable schemes! Also, for trained debaters, merchants, cult leaders and other related scammers (self-improvement organizations, etc.), there's actually already a lot of tricks that can be used to manipulate other parties (Wikipedia has a short list, the most famous one is probably the FITD technique). You might catch someone trying to employ one of those techniques, or try and use a thinly concealed fallacy to bring you to their side or make you comply, and you could could react either by going "don't you try that on me!" or, most probably, "oh, you're not an amateur are you? <cracks knuckles> this is going to be good". But it's not so much of a "trick" if everybody in the tribe council does it already, and has been doing it for generations (people obviously have been using those tricks I mentioned for a long time here on Earth). It's part of the political game... on modern Earth, the game is played by trading favours with other politicians, catering to corporate sponsorship, or whatever... on Glorantha, the game is played by trading favours with other clans, catering to the Gods through long held traditions to get their support in return, etc.

Remember that GURPS uses Hit Locations only for attacking, i.e. whether the attack roll should have any kind of penalty for hitting a specific spot. Once you hit, the damage still comes off the global pool of Hit Points (with some threshold and additional modifier based on the location). In comparison, RuneQuest has separate HP pools per Hit Location, and that means that it's indeed more ingrained into the rules than in GURPS. Defaulting to the chest would actually be an advantage since you would bring more attrition to a specific body part. If the people you want to introduce to RuneQuest are GURPS players, I frankly wouldn't worry too much, they can probably take it If they're used to more abstract rules, you could consider using HeroQuest instead... but maybe it will just be fine! After all, there's a nice little body drawing on the character sheet so "you take 2 hits in the left arm" is actually very fast to write down.

Okay I shouldn't have used the word "canon", that was a poor choice 😀 What I meant was "cite a source if possible". This way, I know where to look to find out more details... but frankly at this point I already started building cross-PDF indices so I can search for something across several dozens of PDFs to solve this problem (most often to follow half of the references from a @Joerg post 😅)

Maybe it's not an "either/or", and more like a gradient, a beacon that shines with more or less strength. The story of Sartar becoming King might be too recent to be a myth, but give it a few centuries of people retelling the story of its most impressive feats and it might get there. Similarly, ancient myths that were central to a whole bunch of tribes centuries ago might be all but forgotten now, a place in the God Plane that's only a shadow of its former self, with the Gods and other figures attached to it now dying or waiting to be rediscovered (like, say, the Stone Woman from the Broken Tower adventure). Now whether those half-formed and half-dissolved myths are easier or hard to heroquest is up to you, I guess. My naive approach would be to make "myths-in-the-making" easier to reproduce but without much benefit in the end, if at all (i.e. it takes a lot of effort to make it "take off"... like a whole nation starting to celebrate it on a regular basis for at least a couple generations), while "forgotten myths" would be extra-hard to access, have extra-unforeseen consequences, but have extra-awesome benefits (i.e. it's hard to "reach" them, and awakening old myths might displace new ones and displease the present Gods, but the older Gods, even given their reduced capacity, would be extra invested in you).

Sure, and I'd love to hear what other people are doing with their Glorantha, but in order to decide whether to integrate it into my own Glorantha or not, I need to know where the information came from. This is because the source will determine how I perceive how compatible it is with "canon" stuff, what direction/feel it's going for, etc. Ultimately, it's about keeping my Glorantha consistent when I take things into account.

Sure but "it's super bad-ass" isn't quite the requirement for an adventure being a heroquest? Apparently you can go in the Underworld to accomplish any arbitrary deed (save someone that was never saved before, like Hofstaring, bring back a rare plant nobody brought back before, pet a bunny, whatever) and still be able to "piggy back" onto a variety of mythological quest that went down there even though those myths went down there to do something different. This does indeed sound to me like you can turn any adventure into a heroquest if that adventure's general outline is "close enough" to an existing myth, no? It also begs the question of what qualifies as a myth vs. what's "just" a super awesome historical occurrence. For instance, any event that happened during God Time probably qualifies as a myth. However, what about great feats accomplished during the First or Second Age? Especially those accomplished by human heroes that might still be celebrated by many tribes to this day? (maybe I should just wait to see what Chaosium has in store for RQG's heroquesting and go back to reading basic background info and rules )

It sounds like you have an interpretation that's close to the way I originally understood heroquests.... from one of my messages from the other thread before we took the conversation here:

Cool, so going back to S:KoH and the 3rd mission from the campaign in that book, how come that adventure is considered a heroquest? (since the PCs can ask for a heroquest challenge at the end of the mission). Is it because it's so bad-ass that, if they succeed, it will actually constitute the original event that the tribe will later celebrate every year with other heroquesters retracing the PCs' steps?

(I also repeated @jajagappa's message above) I have the Red Cow books but I only started reading The Coming Storm in between all the rest, and hadn't touched Eleven Lights yet. I went and quickly read the chapter about the Red Cow heroquest and that one does make a lot more sense -- indeed, this is about a local myth that the clan perpetuates every year through tradition and festivities and, most of the time, by actually (re)doing the quest to reinforce the benefits they got from it. So if you want to do that quest, you can basically do it once every year at a specific point in time and space (more or less... you could attempt it somewhere/when else but it might not work as well, or might even create a backlash). It does however feel a bit like a "side quest" though (a potentially hard and long one), in the sense that it could sound a bit like "hey, it's Sacred Time again, how about we do this heroquest since we have a bit of downtime in between 2 campaigns?". But I suppose a good GM would manage to weave it into a broader narrative So it's basically Glorantha's take on traditions like Anglo-Saxon Halloween or Aztec sacrifices to the Night God, but in a highly mythological world where these things exist and you actually have to make sure the ghosts don't cross over, or actually have to make sure the real Night God is pleased? Oh I didn't know there was heroquesting in there (I thought it was mostly a resource management game), but in light of what I found in 11L I guess it makes sense, as it's part of the seasonal life of your clan. Thanks!

Because Glorantha is a world where myths are real and it is important to reinforce the myths, sometimes in This World, sometimes in the Other World, in order to keep Chaos at bay (as well as other things). Consider Christmas. Every year, millions of people reenact/retell the same story. We put lights on trees to keep the Darkness at bay. We celebrate a rebirth within the world. We see gifts brought to honor the birth. We call for the Sun to return and fight back winter and the ice. Most years that is enough. But some years the omens are bad. Some years, more is necessary. Some years, you must cross over and enter the myth. The omens say the Hell Mother is coming this year to devour the lights, to eat the newborn/reborn one. You must be there to drive her off, or to ensure that the three wise women arrive with the gifts and blessings, etc. And if you fail, your community is in for a very, very bad year. This is more than just going to Jonstown to the market, or going to Snakepipe Hollow to kill some Chaos and maybe return with a treasure. This is interacting with the myths that define you, your community, your relationships with the gods, and reinforce your belief in how the world does or ought to work. The HQG core book has one: the quest to restore Orane, the Earth Goddess, who fled from the world in the midst of your holy day rituals when enemies attacked. It's a quest into the Underworld to convince the goddess to return and bring life/fertility/harmony back to your community (for without her, the fabric of your community is unraveling). The Eleven Lights has another which is to go into the Underworld, find three dead stars, then bring them all the way to the Crown of Heaven to resurrect/relight them. The heroquest in SKoH is the rescue of a soul trapped in another goddess' Hell. Most of the Underworld quests have common elements: descent into Hell via some path; crossing Hell through a world of nightmare and trials to reach the place where the dead soul/spirit is; rescuing/recovering the soul/spirit; then returning. This is very much along the lines of Joseph Campbell's basic mythic outline in a Hero With a Thousand Faces. The Eleven Lights also has the myth to Gain the Red Cows. In this one, the heroes cross over to the Otherworld and follow the mythic path to reach the Giant's Stead, outwit the Giant, and Steal the Cows to bring back to your clan. Pavis Gateway to Adventure has the myth of the Emperor Naming the Gods. The heroes are thrust into this somewhat against their will as among the foes who will be named. If they fail, they are effectively thrust into a Lunar Hell and the powers of their gods are diminished. If they succeed, their gods are strengthened. There are varied places where other myths are described, though not necessarily in scenario form: the Slaying of the Sun by the Storm God; the End of the Green Age (aka Innocence); the Coming of Death; the Birth and the Banishment of Drought; the Survival of Light through the Great Darkness; etc.

Thanks for the explanations. I'm still wrapping my head around this, and I'm sorry if I'm hijacking the thread (although I think it fits a bit into how RQ relates to HQ and how future sourcebooks may or may not work with both systems). I think it boils down to understanding why a "heroquest" concept exists at all in the HQ rulebook? Like, I understand what you're saying on a purely narrative/scenario-design aspect but, again, coming from the CoC side of the Chaosium offering, I'm wondering what does this actually bring to the table? CoC adventures might make you experience time in a weird way, send you to another planet or dimension, and even weirder things, face Elder Gods and so on, but that's all just part of the adventure itself, there's otherwise no "OtherwoldQuest" concept: the rules just let you take a flashlight and a magic book, and you're on your own. Are there good examples of heroquests? (what you're saying about affecting God Time sounds super interesting, is there any published material with such adventures?) The only one I have so far is the Colymar Campaign from Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes, and even then, I don't quite get it. The third deed the PCs are supposed to undertake is to go free Hofstaring Treeleaper from the Underworld -- seems fun enough. But I don't see why this is a heroquest, and why it couldn't have just been "a very dangerous adventure where you go to weird places". Maybe it's a heroquest just because it has a hero challenge at the end? Another way to phrase it is that "heroquest" is a label you can put on some adventures and not others, and the simple fact that the label exists means there needs to be some criteria for doing so... but these criteria are very unclear to me.

It doesn't line up perfectly when you're a bit OCD like me and get annoyed by very small details You can see it in your picture where the vertical stem of the "E" shows up twice, and the baselines are not totally lined up (in your case it's definitely caused by the damage on your cardboard base, but even in my picture you see a bit of the same issue). Oh, did I turn the Masks one around? Haha, I didn't realize it I'll check when I'm back home, but yeah, good idea, I'll turn the Runequest one around too then!

Thanks for that -- it's still very hazy in my mind though. I've re-read the Heroquesting chapter in HQG and frankly there's not much that's HQ-specific in there except for a bit of mechanics about the final quest challanges (how you lose your wagered ability or gain boons and other abilities). Other than that it seems system-agnostic and, therefore, equally easy to do in any system (apart from the fact that there's no Heroquesting chapter in the other systems of course 😅). The main thing that's confusing to me is where a Heroquest comes from. I understand that the GM and players can either draw from the myths written in published books, or invent their own, but can you make any adventure into a Heroquest if you want? Or only specific adventures that are designed to be Heroquests from the start? Like, say the current adventure is about your clan being at war with a neighbouring clan, and they have stolen your cows. Their chieftain is known for riding an auroch, and has multiple wives who are also fierce warriors. You could just go across the hills, get the cows back by force or stealth or diplomacy, maybe kill or capture the chieftain, and that's it. But maybe this is a big deal for your clan... you talk to someone with deep mythological knowledge, and they tell you about hero XYZ who climbed to the top of a mountain to slay the giant ABC, known for riding a bear, and his entourage of Chaos harpies, and brought back some kind of fertility boon after dragging the giant's head by its beard all the way down to the valley. It's not quite the same (mountain vs. hill, harpies vs. warrior wives, bear vs auroch, etc.) but it's similar enough that with enough ritualistic preparation you can complete your mission at greater risk but with greater reward (you don't only bring back the cows, they're now especially fertile cows that will give your clan a stronger, larger herd). So you have to convince the clan to get along with it and perform the ritual. Then, of course, time and space will behave weirdly during the quest, some unexpected event will occur, and, to increase your chances of success, you'll have to (among other things) specifically behead the clan chieftain and drag his head across the hills.... Can you do that? Does that mean the enemy clan effectively gets sucked partially into the Hero Plane or something? Or you can't, and the only Heroquest you can undertake is to actually retrace the steps of hero XYZ and go up the same mountain and kill the same giant ABC? The former sounds more interesting to me (again, I played a bunch of Unknown Armies in the past so that probably shows here), while the latter sounds more... "video-gamey" to me. Maybe I'll understand it better after reading more HQ books, though...

I totally agree on that point. That's why I got the PDFs for some of those HQ books you mention. They do indeed provide more in-depth information on some specific things, and I don't think they're very hard to adapt to RQG so they're useful for those who seek more details. I just don't agree that Chaosium needs to hurry up. I'd rather see them focus on growing their audience -- that could mean starter kits and other "beginner" material, but that could also mean something like the Red Cow books (as a Glorantha beginner, the Red Cow campaign is what catches my eye the most for what to run after the first couple intro adventures). I'm totally OK with that if that means more budget later because there's more people buying. Also, it's not like it went fast with HQ either. Even when you don't count HeroWars and only start with HeroQuest, there's a 7 year gap between the rule book (2003) and S:KoH (2009). Then there's an 8 year span for releasing all those cool books (P:GtA was 2012, TCS/11L was 2016 and 2017).

I don't see this as a problem -- it is backstory because the whole point is to not play those events, and instead play what happens next (hopefully because it's more interesting!). If I want to know more about the backstory, I can play a couple of "flashback" adventures where the players play their characters' ancestors' companions, and if I'm more interested in that era, I can just go and play that instead of the "present" era. It's like, say, playing Star Wars characters in the times of the original trilogy, with some cool backstory about what your parents did during the Clone Wars and the fall of the Galactic Republic. It doesn't matter that you don't know "how bad it was when Naboo got invaded", because hopefully you have enough interesting things to do now (but hopefully it's still useful and plays a role in the adventure). And in this specific case, you could argue that it worked better indeed as a backstory than when they actually told those stories That's one thing I hope they change a bit from HQ actually. Maybe I'm not reading it right, but from HQ, it really feels like it's almost an "either/or" affair: you either go on some normal adventure, or you go HERO-QUESTING! And that feels a bit arbitrary to me, where I consider it more like an after-the-fact thing: "it all started with a simple herder complaining about missing cows, but somehow we ended up having to go to the Underworld, channeling the myth of the Seven Lightbringers". It's maybe because I'm mostly coming from a CoC angle here, where some scenarios have you running around some New England town, shooting cultist and avoiding monsters, while some other times you end up going to Australia and then opening portals to Carcosa and postponing the apocalypse. I also have a fair bit of Unknown Armies experience, so that's my reference for the whole "taking the roles of mythical figures to help achieve your goals". So unless I have it completely wrong (which is possible, I'm a Glorantha n00b), I'd rather "hero-questing" be just a set of GM recommendations and tips about how to incorporate a little, a lot, or a whole bunch of mythology into the adventures (themes, archetypal roles, historical journeys, etc.) rather than a special type of adventure.

Yeah I get the feeling that RQ is better for "ground level" characters, which is often what I prefer (I'm coming from CoC after all, where you're supposed to start as mundane and insignificant 😋). It's interesting to me to explore what a high fantasy/mythology world means for the people living in it, as opposed to the great heroes and legendary figures that show up in said myths, and a crunchy system often helps me with that, to feel "grounded" or something. I do however wish RQ had also more crunchy bits for social interactions, and not just combat. I like that HQ has pretty much similar "granularity" whether you're swinging an axe or negotiating, since that sets better expectations about what's important in a HQ game. In RQG (the latest version, as opposed to the previous ones), they do indeed have a few adventures where combat takes a back seat, but that doesn't quite show as well in the mechanics. I'm considering coming up with some house rules for that, inspired by stuff like the "social combat" in Bubblegumshoe and GURPS Social Engineering. But yeah, at that point, I've probably said enough to make HQ fans horrified

Well, it will get easier after I remove that piece of paper I mean you can just try it: keep the paper and try to find, say, the Apple Lane map without having to remove everything and putting back again. Then remove the paper and repeat the operation. I find it much easier the second time, when the paper wrap isn't squeezing the things you're trying to sift through.

got a weird browser or forum bug... ignore this...

Can you expand a bit on that? I'm in the process of reading (for the first time) both the new RuneQuest and the last HeroQuest, and I'm actually surprised to see how very similar they are to each other. The way characters are modeled in RQG strongly echoes everything that's great about HQ (occupation, runes, tribe culture, cult, passions, etc... all being available as gameplay mechanics). It seems to me like both systems aim for the same goals of translating the highly mythological Gloranthan life into rules, and do it with very similar mechanics... it's just that one does it in a high-level narrative way, while the other does it in a crunchier way. Or maybe you're talking about the sourcebooks in which case yes, I agree, but then it might not be fair to compare the 21st century HQ books with RQ books written in the 80s and 90s. I'm expecting future RQG sourcebooks to follow the high quality expectations set by 11L, GtG, and other "late-stage-HQ" publications.

My Masks slipcase arrived late January and it’s fine, although frankly I haven’t touched it much — I read a few parts of the books since, when I received it, my group was already playing the campaign and we were in the Kenya chapter, so I looked that up in the new edition to find interesting twists or revisions to add at the last minute. So I didn’t touch the GM stuff much except for the screen which, obviously, I had to show off Not having the flimsy paper around the GM material makes it easy to flip though it (while it’s still all in the cardboard base) and pick up what you’re looking for. In comparison, I still have the whole package for the RQG slipcase and looking for something inside it is trickier since you can’t bend the papers as easily: you can only bend one corner (does that make sense?), and so it’s easy to rip/damage that piece of paper. That’s why I gave up with Masks and threw it away (I had actually damaged it a bit I think). One thing to know is that, for the Masks slipcase, the cardboard base is actually mostly black, so it looks ok even without the paper wrap. The RQG one however has the partial spine print on it so it doesn’t look as good — but frankly even with the paper wrap, because it doesn’t line up perfectly, it’s a bit weird too anyway. So yeah I think I want to prioritize making it easy to find a map/sheet/whatever quickly over making pretty, basically. Here’s a picture! Did that answer your questions?

As a newcomer to the forums and to Glorantha, I have to say there's a fine line between "intimidating well actually'ing" and "fascinating glimpses into how much more detailed Glorantha is", and the difference between the two will most likely vary between people, if only because the written word is so bad at conveying tone. But I still would say "keep it coming!" to the grognards 😋 What I generally find more intimidating and/or confusing is really figuring out where the information is coming from, how authoritative that source is, etc... so I know what to think about it for my Glorantha. I often see big rants about some aspect of some Praxian tribe culture or whatever, all written in a very factual way, and I have no idea where that's from. Maybe it's from the author's own campaigns, maybe it's from some long OOP sourcebook, or some obscure Stafford Library book, I don't know. And the convoluted history of Glorantha-related publications (I recently learned about the term "Gregging" 😅), doesn't help obviously. What does help is that there's definitive word that the Guide To Glorantha is the "baseline" and that this will not change ever -- but of course it's going to take me a looooong time to read and digest it all (but I loooove it, those 2 books are totally awesome).