EpicureanDM

This is perhaps true in the abstract, but Chaosium has published little guidance to help GMs actually run battles of this complexity. It's no surprise that newcomers can't grasp this sort of nuance when the game's publishers don't support it.

Mythras (with some RQG-ish house rules).

I agree with all of this. As a newcomer to RQ, keep my suggestions in mind for the future, but, in this context, permanently gaining a spirit magic spell's probably a little strong. One-use Rune Magic would be borderline, but OK if you're a more generous GM. (Nothing wrong with being a generous GM. Embrace it if that's your thing.) A one-time bonus to invoking one of Issaries' runes feels more and more like the right approach, probably +10-15%, which is lower than the +25% I recommended earlier. The message it sends is that Issaries appreciates the PC acting like Issaries and wants to make it easier for the PC to act like Issaries in the future. 😀

One-use Rune Magic is a classic RQ reward. Choose an Issaries Rune spell and let them cast it once without spending any Rune points. Once they cast it, they lose access to it. So it's like a scroll or potion in another game, like D&D. If you want to stick with a spell-based reward, the PC might permanently learn one of Issaries' cult spirit spells. If you're going to use a bonus to augmentation, I prefer increased levels of success. It's a more powerful and reliable effect. But it might be said that this is just a shrine and it's hard to channel a lot of Issaries' power through it. If that makes sense to you, a +25% boost to the next Harmony/Movement roll would be a nice reward.

Hardly a strike against those rules.

This is exactly the sort of obscurantist answer that really confused me for a long time as someone trying to play a game of RuneQuest with my friends. You're on the right track, @mattcgso. What makes the discussion about heroquesting frustrating is that over 40-ish years of being in print, RQ has never really published rules to support heroquesting. Chaosium has never published rules to establish what Gloranthans "can do", as you say, with heroquests. So if you're new to the game and you're trying to use the game's rules to understand how parts of the setting work, you're sort of adrift. I will try to answer your questions by referring to game concepts you might know (whether they're in RQ or some other game) as much as I can. Hopefully, that allows you to get your bearings. 1. This can definitely be heroquesting, but it isn’t always. Gloranthans definitely do a lot of LARPing and embody their gods as they tell those ancient stories. Your Harvest ritual example is the right idea. I think of these rituals as a community getting together to try and create year-long “buffs” for their community. If you do the Harvest ritual correctly during Sacred Time, your farmers get +20% to their Farming rolls throughout the year. (Maybe not that high a bonus, but that’s the idea.) A Gloranthan community might have all sorts of stories/heroquests they might want to perform at different times of the year to get those buffs. But these rituals cost time and resources, and they’re dangerous. You can fail them, maybe leading to a penalty to all Farming rolls throughout the year. Once you think of hero quest in this way, big rituals to get in-game buffs, you’re in the right headspace. Instead of the annual Harvest heroquest, your community (or just you and your party!) might try to enact a heroquest about war before they launch an attack against a nearby Lunar force. You might hope to get buffs, or a bunch of free Rune Points, or some unique, one-use Rune spells that you can only gain through succeeding on the heroquest. The Gloranthan purists might quibble and say that not all heroquests have to be about getting buffs. That’s fine, but it’s hairsplitting and not really relevant to someone trying to actually play RuneQuest as a game. 2. Sometimes it’s by living the stories, sometimes it’s by changing them. It’s more common to get these buffs/feats/boons by living the story, since you know what the outcome will be in advance. You know that you’ll get magical sandals at the end of a particular heroquest/story, so you play through the story to get magical sandals. Changing the story isn’t always about getting a buff or reward. Sometimes, it’s about denying a benefit to your foes. You could change the heroquest in which a Troll god gets fire spells. Once that’s done, your assault against the Troll warlord will be safer, since you’ve extinguished their access to fire abilities. You might think of heroquesting like netrunning in other games. Gain access to the code (myths and legends) that underwrite Gloranthan reality, and you can change them. You can make yourself rich by adding a bunch of zeroes to your bank account or you can delete your opponent’s identity from the megacorporation’s server, so they lose access to its resources. 3. Folks with a better grasp of that part of the setting can chime in. My fuzzy understanding is that the rise of the Red Goddess involved heroquests by the Goddess herself and the Seven Mothers. I think the Seven Mothers sort of discovered an old story and modified it to make the Goddess. That’s where the hacking analogy becomes helpful again. They found and assembled old bits of code and ran it on the mainframe, i.e. the Hero Plane, to try and make it real in the world. The big thing to internalize about Glorantha and heroquesting is that the myths of the world create the reality of the world. So those who can interact with those myths, whether to reinforce those myths, or to change them, or to create new ones, are tinkering with reality itself. There’s a little bit of White Wolf’s Mage: The Ascension in it, if that’s a familiar touchstone. Again, Chaosium have never published actual rules to make this stuff concrete 4. Yes, definitely, people can change myths through heroquests. As you can imagine, it’s harder to change stronger myths than weak ones. Changing the myth about Orlanth killing Yelm? That’s pretty fundamental to the setting, so most GMs would probably shy away from it. Change the ownership of the Crimson Bat? Make it have the Fertility Rune? Most Gloranthan folks will tell you that most of the lore’s pretty important and should therefore be hard to change in the game. But, again, we don’t have any rules for what “hard” would look like in a RuneQuest game. 5. Yes, you’re right about all this stuff. Just as some groups/communities/empires might try to use “heroquest warfare” to fight their enemies, their enemies are using “heroquest warfare” to reinforce their important myths, strengthening the connection of that myth with the real world (the Mundane Plane). This is where the analogy to Mage: The Ascension comes in handy again. In that game, the mages have the ability to tamper with reality through their use of magical Spheres. But they’ve got to fight against the resistance of mundane reality trying to prevent the mages from creating paradoxes. So if your community works and survives because certain myths are strong and true, it’s in your best interests to keep reinforcing those myths during Sacred Time every year. You might get the magical community buffs, but at the very least, you’re reinforcing “mundane reality” for your community so that it can’t be weakened by outside threats. You don’t want your enemies weakening or neutralizing your Shepherd goddess, because then your flocks will suffer. In game terms, heroquests are where your players can get magical items or abilities that are stronger or more exotic than what’s in the book. Your best resource for understanding heroquests and how they might fit into your game is 13th Age Glorantha, published by Pelgrane Press. It was released at the same time as RQG, but uses a different system. It has a big chapter on heroquesting and, most importantly, describes how to do heroquests using game rules. Not the rules of RQG, but it’s very helpful to see how some rules interact with heroquests. As a bonus, you’ll get some good insight into the vibe of Glorantha by seeing how authors who aren’t connected to Chaosium interpret it.

Recent replies might have overlooked that this thread is three years old. I was very surprised to get notifications about it over the past few days. 😉 This is essentially what I ended up going with.

Has anyone ever produced something in that style for the Pavis Cult, either officially or unofficially? I'd be keen to see it to avoid reinventing the wheel.

If you're convinced, then you're convinced. I just want to clarify what I said, since I think you misunderstood. I don't know if you're going to like the heroquesting rules Chaosium publishes, or whether your eventual assessment will be based on how similar those rules are to HQG (if they're similar at all). I didn't remember that you don't care for HQG when I wrote my last post. Because I didn't have your HQG opinion in mind, connecting Montgomery to HQG wasn't intended to sour your expectations for the eventual design for RQG's heroquesting rules. I meant to suggest that there is a disconnect between how Chaosium's designers appear to play the game at their own tables and the rules they publish for others to use. You seem satisfied that gap will close when new books are published.

It's great that you're redesigning RQG into the game you want to play, but this thread seems predicated on the OP's interest in what game the publisher's going to design.

You may not realize how close to the truth you are. Under Chaosium’s current management, RQG and Glorantha have a strong conservative streak. Not politically, but in the sense of being traditional, resistant to change. This manifests in both the game’s design and the setting’s development. As far as game design goes, RQG is essentially RQ2 with a little Pendragon/Stormbringer bolted onto it at an obvious angle. If you remember your history, RQ2’s main competitor when it was first released was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, i.e. AD&D 1e. So in The Year of Our Lord 2018, Chaosium decided to essentially reprint a game designed in 1979 with better art. A lot has happened in RPG design since 1979, especially after 2000. We have all of the games that emerged from the Gaming Outpost/Forge/Story Game era, including Burning Wheel, Powered by the Apocalypse, FUDGE/Fate, Cortex Prime, and Blades in the Dark. We even have a series of games descended from RQ2 that tried to build and improve on what Steve Perrin and Greg Stafford began: RuneQuest 3, Mongoose RQ, Runequest 6, and Mythras. But the designers in charge of RQG both ignored the last 40 years of RPG development and rejected the design efforts of folks who tried to improve RQ while preserving what made it unique. They went all the way back to 1979 and basically printed that game again. I don’t know how to describe that except as deeply conservative. I concede that RQG made some cosmetic, largely quality-of-life changes to how RQ2 works. But how it plays is pure 1979. You see that reflected in the published scenarios. I mean, they’ve republished classic RQ2 scenarios like Apple Lane and Rainbow Mounds. RQG characters resolve those RQ2 scenarios the same way the RQ2 characters would in 1979. Those are the scenarios that Chaosium explicitly marks as being for beginners and newcomers to the game. I’ve watched Actual Play YouTube videos in which Jeff and Jason Durall, another credited RQG designer, have introduced RQG to new players. In both cases, RQG’s putative game designers avoided using the Strike Rank system when the PCs got into a fight. They just managed the battle narratively, coordinating actions based on the fiction and player enthusiasm. In one case (I can’t remember which), one of the designers answered a combat-related rules question by quoting the RQ2 rule rather than the new version of that rule in RQG. It’s telling to me that the people who controlled what rules would be printed in RQG didn’t want to use those rules with new players. Who better than the game’s own designers to shepherd newcomers through the rules that they endorsed and published? Why not use Strike Ranks, their game’s centerpiece rules about combat, the ones that structure combat itself? My answer is that the game’s own designers probably don’t use the rules they’ve published. They probably house-rule or handwave parts of it. They just rely on the traditions and memories they’ve built up over forty years of playing RQ2. Based on what’s been published so far by RQG, I see no reason to think that the people steering the ship have any intention of moving the focus of play too far from where it sat in the RQ2 days. Are they going to design (or approve freelance designs) rules that expand the mechanical powers of PCs to include things that only Gloranthan Heroes can do? It looks unlikely to me. RQG’s designers don’t seem interested in any sort of game design that happened after the mid-80’s. So we probably won’t see anything terribly new. When RQ players try to model Heroic characters within RQG’s current rules design, Jeff and RQ’s other defenders sneer about the desire for PCs with skills at 500%, “Super RuneQuest”, and red herrings about a return to the bad, old days of Deities & Demigods. Deities & Demigods was published in 1980. That’s the frame of reference for RQG’s current stewards. Is Chaosium going to take a chance and publish some new, innovative rules for heroquesting so that your PCs can stand on the same footing as Jar-Eel? Given the disdain for high skill ratings and Super RuneQuest, we’d need rules that are very different than RQG’s old chassis from 1979. I can imagine a set of heroquesting rules that draw strong inspiration from how Heroquest (now QuestWorlds) works. Didn’t I read that Andrew Montgomery is designing the upcoming rules for heroquesting? That guy loves HeroQuest. But if you’ve got to translate your RQG’s character’s stats into quasi-HeroQuest stats in order to do the new heroquesting stuff, then we’re not really playing RQ2/RQG anymore, are we? And RQG’s current designers really seem to like RQ2 and that mode of play. Ironically, creating heroquesting rules that work more like the old HeroQuest game seems like how the game’s current designers and fans actually play RQG. But there doesn’t seem to be any awareness or consciousness of this (mild) irony in the halls of Chaosium. So I don’t know what in this thread reassures you that Things Are Going To Be Different, @Wheel Shield. From where I’m sitting, I think you’ll end up where you don’t want to be: back in RQ2.

Perhaps, but neither are the scenarios you’ve published so far about: If RQG PCs are meant to get into spiritual worlds “fast and early,” that information should be in the core book you published four years ago. That information might be helpful to RuneQuest GMs, but, alas, there’s no GMing section in the core book. 13th Age Glorantha (I’ll abbreviate to 13G in future) was published in the same year as RQG and they’ve got Heroquesting rules in their book! The Heroquesting rules in 13th Age Glorantha are designed to be used with low-level characters. One of the prewritten hero quests published in the book is expressly for low-level characters. The designers explicitly tell the GM that in the text: Your name is in the credits of 13G, @Jeff. You knew they were doing that and you could have done the same if you thought that heroquesting should happen “fast and early” in an RQG game. I don't blame @Wheel Shield for drawing the conclusions in the initial post. What’s telling about how 13G is that their heroquesting rules are designed to work with the rest of the rules. None of this nonsense about discarding skills and items, and shifting to just using POW, CON, Runes, and Hero Points (whatever those are). 13G reflects a design ethos that prizes the game’s rules as tools to produce the sort of experiences you imagine your game to be about. What should be made explicit to you, @Wheel Shield, is that RQG’s designers don’t really put much emphasis on the game part of it. It’s not where the juice is for them. Glorantha/RQ veterans always shift the goalposts to talk about "high skill ratings" or "Super-RuneQuest" because they don't think of game design the same way that you (and I) do. As for Nick Brooke, @Wheel Shield, I don’t think he necessarily deserves as much deference as you’re extending to him. In his Gloranthan Manifesto - Part One, he writes: Nick Brooke has no credible claim to how “the rest of us” are playing RuneQuest if that’s how he’s doing things.

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My PC Yelmalian is fighting alongside untrained militia because the "untrained militia" are the other players around the table whom I couldn't convince to bend their own character choices around optimizing my formation-loving Yelmalian PC. I haven't trained them because my friend's Praxian shaman character concept doesn't also include learning how to use the pike next to my Yelmalian in a shield wall. My PC Yelmalian is fighting outside their file mates because I didn't know that the game's designers expect that my character requires an entourage of dozens of NPC henchmen to match the fictional puissance of the Yelmalian Templar. It's like you've never played a roleplaying game before.

This is absolutely correct. If there's a published adventure whose success depends in significant part on a successful Peaceful Cut or Ride roll, or the use of Axis Mundi, I'd be grateful to be pointed to it. There's a real disconnect between the designers who think that it's important for PCs to have the Farming skill and the ones sending players into The Smoking Ruins.

Right, so let's not confuse a fictional deity's purported achievements written using a word processor with what a PC might expect to achieve using the game's rules and dice. I can quote Yelmalian scripture about how their Templars achieved outsized success using their famous phalanx tactics against magically and numerically superior foes. That's useless to a PC Yelmalian who's in a party with three other non-Yelmalian characters, none of whom is trained in formation fighting.

Yelmalio didn't have to use the rules of RQG to make his mark.

I agree with you on this one, while agreeing with Soltakss, too. I don't think Heroquest rewards need to be identified in order for the RQ rules champs to flex their mastery of what's already on the table. That's mostly what I'm interested in, since RQ2/3 and RQG have never had official Heroquesting rules and we've seen folks in this thread who have The Secret Knowledge without those rules. But if there's ever going to be a time where the game expects players to kill The Crimson Bat using the game's rules, we'll need the HQ stuff. 🙂

I think it would be very valuable to folks with less experience using the rules than you do, but this is a silly thread on an Internet forum. I'd be glad to see whatever you've got time for. What I'd be more interested in seeing (and willing to pay money for) would be a Jonstown Compendium book where veteran RQ players shared their knowledge about high-level RQ combat, with specific references to RQG's rules and how to combine them to pull off incredible victories against worthy foes. Not just boss fights (one party of PCs against a single foe), but squads of Rune Lords facing off. 😉

I appreciate the sentiment, but as a player, there's no functional difference between "extremely low chance of success, although mathematically and logically possible" and "no chance of success." It's one thing to roll your 10% Mineral Lore skill to see if you can identify the real gold mixed in with the pyrite and another to risk your PCs life on a 10% chance of beating a foe. 😉 I don't think that "game balance" is the same thing as "fights against foes that outclass you." Where I think we agree is that if a stat block's published in a game book, the designer should be able to describe the PCs and different tactics they might use to defeat it (hopefully because they've playtested it).

Agreed on all of this. It makes me wonder about what you mentioned in a subsequent reply: Even before this thread sharpened my ability to analyze stat blocks, I felt the same way about some of the published antagonists/bad guys/bosses I've seen in RQG. Not with this degree of depth or precision, more of an intuition. It makes me discount many of the published stat blocks I read. I don't get the sense that anything's really that tough for a group of RQ PCs or fun for the GM to run. Because of how this thread's gone, I hasten to add that it's not that his numbers are too high or too low, but that there's nothing really behind the numbers. Definitely.

I'm a big fan of Whittaker and don't feel as protective over Glorantha as most. I'll definitely see if I can track down those books somehow. As I said elsewhere, RQ old-timers might be surprised by how what they think of as "obvious" or "standard" isn't perceived that way by people with less RQ experience.

Oh, is that right? RuneQuest was entirely off my radar when Mongoose ran the show. I should track those down.

I very much like RQ's skill progression system. I also like the idea of keeping Rune levels barred behind high skill requirements. I like how those two design elements work together. Many GMs apparently saw the need for Heroquesting rules for MGF purposes back in the day because their definition of "high level game play" obviously didn't match the designers' definition. It's a well-worn joke among RQ's fans that a game whose setting leans so heavily on Heroquesting has never produced game rules to actually do Heroquesting. It's weird to me that RQG's designers decided to raid the pantries of Stormbringer and Pendragon to update RQ2 rather than plug this obvious, 45-year-old gap in the rules. Even the 13th Age Glorantha designers gave it a shot. I do like this "Dorastor is to Glorantha as The Tomb of Horrors is to Greyhawk" take. Another interesting data point. Seeing PCs with 200% combat skills without any of the usual Rune-level bells and whistles doesn't seem very common to me. 😉 I do think that the new RQG products have kept a lid on stat blocks. I opened this thread with discussion of a Jonstown product with numbers far beyond what's officially published - except for those exceptions in the Bestiary - so that continuing distraction's my fault. That's why I've tried to reinforce the point that my interest isn't necessarily in high numbers, but in the complex strategies that come from combining different resources. 🙂

Ah, right. I must have a blindspot for that section due to RQG's inconsistency allowing split attacks but not split parries. I dare say that another alternative is to design the game so that bumping skills isn't slow or tedious. 😉 After seeing "MGF" in this and the Glorantha forum, my brain finally dredged up its meaning.