kirinyaga

I may add the characteristics are not that important in RQ:G. Sure, it will help to have them matching your occupation, but it's not that crucial as it can be in other RPGs. I find skills to be more critical. Maybe INT is the best characteristic for everyone, actually. Anyway, you can actually make a warrior with 12 STR and he will be totally playable. He won't use a mace and will probably try to get a Strength spell quickly, that's it. I mean, ducks ...

In a general way, I feel as long slavery (or even indenture) is allowed in a society, the idea of depriving someone from his freedom as a punishment does not really need prison ... And in a place/society where surviving alone is very difficult and groups tend to reject any outsiders (thinking about Prax here), banishment (or casting away from the regular social life at a minimum) sounds like a very natural punishment (and much more practical than prison too). Thus, I see prisons existing only in societies living in big groups accepting outsiders (like big cities) where slavery/indenture is forbidden.

As often in Glorantha, I think magic. Indeed, water elementals, rain, troll magic. Even fire magic (some can control it). I guess those temples/groups are traditionnaly in charge of fire extinction. And if they're not, peoples will naturally get to them asking for help when a fire starts.

Well, as others said, it isn't because you have a percentage in "sense chaos" that you will immediately know for sure someone is chaotic or is not. Stormbullies don't want to be called "kinslayer" because they fumble a sense chaos roll around the son of the khan ... As I see it, sense chaos just give them the feeling something isn't right with this guy, a feeling that grow stronger and stronger over time, with a speed depending of their sense chaos skill (an "average" over time of the result of their sense chaos rolls). And for other peoples, the stormbully who keep saying them "you should not trust that guy", be very rude with him, probably provocating him, is just doing usual annoying stormbully stuff. Specially if the new guy is friendly and sympathetic, they'll just tell the uroxi to shut up and go look if the block is still there in Prax. While meeting total strangers in the middle of nowhere on the other hand, storm bulls will just rely on their first impression and attack on sight every time their sense chaos alerts them.

I don't see how Peloria being so far from sea could have something else that inland continental climate. Ok, I got the gods' role argumentation tho. But not the France/Spain comparison. There is already a huge difference in France between Dunkerque (on north sea shore) and Strasbourg (near Germany), while they are on the same latitude. I suspect even being nearby an interior sea or a huge lake will significatively alter the climate (in our world that is). All that water seems to resist both Yelm and Valind. When speaking about bronze age, I immediately think to mycenians, minoans, hittites, assyrians, egyptians, ... All around mediterranean sea basically, with associated food and architecture. What sedentary peoples were in inland europe at the time ?

The pros and the cons of using miniatures are one : precision. Everyone knows exactly where are peoples, the distances, etc ..., no misunderstandings. And everyone will be tempted to focus more on pushing the plastic rather than the combat narrative, drawn to the technical side . It's a bit like comparing a novel and its adaptation as a movie. Try both and see by yourself what your game group prefers. Also, you'll have to paint them 😋

Well, yes HQ is remarkably playable at any skill mastery level, its system works really well. While we're not supposed to play RQ with characters at 300% in their main skills, in my opinion. So, of course, it doesn't scale as well as HQ, because it doesn't really need to. Important to me here is why that rule for skills over 100% exists, so we know how to apply it when rules are not clear about it.

To me, that rule looks like a transposition to the D100 system of the Heroquest Mastery rescaling. It's just a way to keep numbers reasonnably scaled and nothing more. I'll just do stuff normally, and, at the end, just before rolling the dice, rescale everything to a 0-100 range, so that a 80% parry against a 150% attack is like a 30% parry vs a 100% attack. The spirit here is not to do weird stuff with the rules but only to rescale percentages properly. To me that rule is really only that : a heroquest-inspired way to keep numbers in 0-100 range. And sticking to the spirit is always better than sticking to the letter. That's how I understood it, at least. So, to me, you parry at -100 vs the 200% guy and at 0 vs the 100% one, whatever order the attacks (well plus the -20 for the second parry of course).

Actually, when I received the glorantha books and felt their weight, since my brother was dismantling his roof to replace it, I took a few pieces of wood and started this : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c-JqTR52XV_X_euCxwnnSUo27EBtE8S5FA/view?usp=sharing I still need to build a tiltable table on top to rest the book on. Those books are too heavy to be read comfortably, and my eyes are too bad now to read them on an untilted table.

my main point here is that creating an ad hoc rule to resolve a situation not explicit in the book should obey the parcimony principle and reuse a mechanism already present in the existing rules. It enforces a rule consistency and it helps players to get a sense of how the world works. I always try to reuse stuff like decreasing multiplier from drowning rules for an increasingly difficult situation, attack skill limitation to ride skill for a skill composition situation, and so on ... Here, the augment system is the first thing popping to my mind for this situation. Still, it needs to stay simple, and I feel the chaining augment is not part of the rules. Normal rule is one augment for one PC. Chaining is possible only when you allow one PC to augment someone else. While rules allow this, it should not be used to disable the initial limitation. Finally I think I like the idead to just let the best PC augment the skill of the worst one then let the second best guard augment the best one, and do an opposition roll without further augments. Remember we're talking about a simple situation here, it has to be resolved in a simple way. If you want to make this an extensive scene, you'll have a PC rolling a few skills to make distracting noises away from the other PCs path, maybe a few spells used, and a lot more stuff going on anyway.

Failing an augment give -20%, you don't want an army of incompetents 😉 And, indeed, with 25% in search, the guards have few chances to detect the PCs. I'm fine with that. In practice, you will have 3-5 PCs and 2-6 guards, with close average skill. One/two PCs with a high hide skill will allow the group to pass undetected. Maybe it's a bit too HeroQuesty, but I find it fine. Of course, it depends why this scene is happening, scenario-wise. But I think another way I'll play it will be the opposite : allow the highest skilled PC to augment the skill of the others PCs and make each of them roll against a global search from the guards.

Sure, each successful augment increases the skill percentage, but so it does for the opposing group. So what really matters here is the difference between the average skill of the two groups.

I'll ask the PCs to pick one of them (the one with the best move quietly/hide skill), then have the others roll the same skill to augment him. Same with the NPCs, then one opposition roll. Result should be similar to a sum of the PCs hide versus a sum of the NPCs search.