EpicureanDM

12 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

Your new adventurer may be battling grunt Trollkin, but a Rune Lord will be taking on a Dark Troll warrior who’s a Death Lord of Zorak Zoran, with the full panoply of Rune spells, enchanted lead armour, zombie and skeleton hordes, etc., and a clan or warband backing them up (with specialists, healers, trained battle-insects, allies, and the like).

And they have their own mythology, which in RuneQuest means there are special rituals they can do to “power up” or thwart their enemies, entities from the Spirit World and God World they can bring into play as disconcertingly powerful allies or manifestations, holy days and sacred places and temples and artefacts that carry special meaning for them.

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).

4 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

For a few coins in a run-down shrine - keep it small, almost negligible.

Or you risk having them try it regularly and expect greater rewards.

Besides which, if there was a greater reward, then everyone everywhere would be doing it. - and that's not how worship works.

To me the question is actually - do you make it clearly known to the players, or keep it a secret until something occurs? And, once you play the bonus, do you let them know what it was for - or maintain the mystery?

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. 😀

10 hours ago, hemulaformis said:

Does anyone have any thoughts on what might be an appropriate blessing? I don't want it to be something major - I thought perhaps the next time one of the PCs tries to augment with Harmony or Movement they can have a bonus to the roll or it can be increased by one level of success.

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.

On 12/3/2022 at 11:43 AM, Jeff said:

Which were never even glanced at by either Greg or I. 

Hardly a strike against those rules.

22 hours ago, Jeff said:

1) not really. A heroquest is when a mortal interacts with the God Time in any sort of prolonged manner. Because we are mortals, such interaction takes place (or forms, depending on your perspective) in what is called the Hero Plane - a Ven Diagram overlap of the Mundane World and the Gods World. Now such interactions are dangerous - as you are interacting with the primal stuff that is Glorantha. Screw it up and you might disappear forever, or everything you touch dies, or your grain becomes inedible, whatever. So normally people stick to what they know, what their ancestors have always done, etc. Such things we know - that's Rune Magic. Go to the God Time, sacrifice that point of POW, learn a new spell.

But for the really cool stuff - for the stuff we don't already have routines for - you need to go deeper into the God Time. And that's where it gets interesting! The only paths we have are what our Heroes have done (which is pretty few actually) or what we know the gods did in the God Time (lots more there). But again, we don't usually know each step they took OR even worse - we know many versions of the steps they took.

2) your story is what you experience. That experience is true, at least for you - and you might be able to teach others how to experience it as well. Somethings are hard-wired in all the stories - there is a basic structure to these stories. But even then there can be differences. In every story, the Storm God uses Death on the Bright Sun. That's why the Sun sets every evening and enters the Underworld. But maybe it wasn't the Emperor Yelm that was struck down, maybe it was Yelm's son, the Golden Emperor, who was killed and Yelm just collapsed out of outrage! Same basic story, but lots of variations.

3) Changing existing stories operates within that framework. We've all heard the story how Orlanth killed Yelm - every version of that story contains some elements of that archetype. Maybe Orlanth has help. Maybe Orlanth cheats. Maybe Yelm tries to cheat. But in every story, Yelm is killed. That's a cosmological truth - an archetype regardless of who we call the gods. Glorantha has lots of these. The Sword Story. Orlanth and Aroka. Magasta and the Homeward Ocean. Storm Bull and the Devil. Etc.

But you can also create new stories nobody every knew before. And they are also true. Like the time Orlanth slew the Mover of Heavens. Or that time Eurmal saved everyone in the Underworld. You have more latitude with those. The downside is they are more dangerous as you are likely experiencing them for the first time.

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.

9 hours ago, Darius West said:

I personally house-rule a local "permeable veil" state where Spirit Sight sees the local world, but slightly distorted and full of nature spirits, like dew babies asleep in the soil or floating asleep (and somewhat invisible) in the air.  Objects with spiritual power are larger, as are powerful living things, as in keeping with tribal (and even medieval) art.  This is called the "Local" Spirit World, and is completely accessible to Spirit Sight at a Shaman's whim, but some spirits can impinge on Spirit Sight regardless such as Hearth Monkeys

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.

52 minutes ago, Wheel Shield said:

But release schedules is not something you're talking about. You are suggesting that I won't like the heroquest rules that they will provide. Because I said I didn't care for HQG? I do struggle with it but it could be resolved with editing? It's dense like Grandma's fruitcake. I've also played Amber for decades. I've run Blades in the Dark. I've played Mutants and Masterminds. I'm reading City of Mist right now (along with the RQ Starter Set Book 1 PDF). I run a weekly Pathfinder 2E campaign (I was running on Foundry last night). I've written a ton of Pathfinder content for Paizo, not as a 3PP. You're jumping to the same conclusions as the people you call conservative. I do both simulationist and narrative gaming pretty effortlessly. I guess I'm Gaming Illuminated.

I wrote the paragraph above because you've suggested I might not like Andrew Logan Montgomery's contribution to the heroquest rules. I don't know that to be true. I have looked through Six Seasons in Sartar and I'm seeing a quality product, and it's a RQG product with RQG Stat Blocks. I've been reading his blog and he seems smart, creative, and sensible. I'm not trying to suck up to him but I am telling you that I'm not seeing any red flags.

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.

3 hours ago, JRE said:

Maybe it is my age and that of the people I game with, but the rules system does not really matter much to me anymore, except in those parts that really interact with the setting, which for me in this case are Runes and the Magic System(s). The rest is a simulation, and we will change whatever we do not like.

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.

23 hours ago, Wheel Shield said:

It is important to me to know the scope of Runequest Glorantha, because I don't need another game that goes to the point that RQ3 did and just stops. I appreciate that Jeff and Co. made the game more authentically Gloranthan and made playing easier, but I wanted to know if game system was going to let my players interact with 'the Hero Wars OR, if this was a system best used for running the 1979 version Snakepipe Hollow or.. grubbing for armor with baboons. Mr. Richard answered that question for me. And there is nothing wrong with the latter, but I don't need another edition of Runequest for that.

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.

2 hours ago, Jeff said:

Umm, the rules for heroquesting are due to appear in the GM sourcebook and have not been published. We needed to get them in there, because the Sartar Campaign Book gets into heroquesting very quickly. But none of the scenarios we have published have at their core fighting a super-monster (unless you consider Redeye, but he's certainly within the range of the pregens to defeat, let alone a more experienced party). 

Perhaps, but neither are the scenarios you’ve published so far about:

3 hours ago, Jeff said:

[Throwing] characters into the realm of Heroes fast and early. Let them Discorporate and wander the Spirit World, or enter the Hero Plane to confront the magical archetypes of the Gods Realm. Here it is their Runes, their POW, their CON, their Passions, their Rune spells, and any Hero Points they have managed to accumulate that matter, not their skills or items. 

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:

Quote

This [hero]quest is designed for adventurer-tier PCs.

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.

4 hours ago, Wheel Shield said:

Nick also said, "The problem is, you’re not really playing RuneQuest the way the rest of us do at that point, and anything Chaosium brings out won’t easily work in your games." Is this true?

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:

Quote

I have reached the point where I take the RQ rules as being binding on my players, only…Essentially, my players are playing with a fairly rigid RuneQuest simulation, while the world they’re in can be run using HeroQuest’s more narratives assumptions.

Nick Brooke has no credible claim to how “the rest of us” are playing RuneQuest if that’s how he’s doing things.

Deleted.

19 minutes ago, Jeff said:

Why are you fighting alongside with untrained militia? Why haven't you trained them? Is there some reason why a trained linesman is fighting outside their file mates? I'm sure there is a reason why they are doing something far outside of their temple and cult strengths - which makes it a good story and a good source of adventure. 

 

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.

1 hour ago, Eff said:

Like, is the ideal Runequest state that playing a Praxian male character who's a typical member of his society (an initiate, not a shaman) means that you should have less useful magic available to you than a typical Sartarite or Esrolian (playing Orlanth or Ernalda cultists, or maybe Lightbringers) for the situations of a typical published scenario? If that's so, it should probably be a bit more obvious than it is...

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.

34 minutes ago, Jeff said:

Nor did Orlanth. Or Ernalda. Or any other deity. 

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. 

On 5/14/2022 at 8:36 PM, Jeff said:

Yelmalio did his greatest deeds after he was stripped of most of his power, after most every other god was dead. And that was to not be extinguished. He remained, a Last Light in the Darkness, when everything else had gone.

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

10 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

I think it would be better to wait for the HQ rules to come out first. The possible rewards will be significant for this discussion.

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. 🙂

8 hours ago, soltakss said:

So, would you like me to go through the Personalities from Secrets of Dorastor and list the tactics that I think they would use in combat?

Would that help?

We playtested the NPCs in an RQ2/3 Campaign that lasted about ten years. I am not sure how much playtesting I can do.

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. 😉

8 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

While making it to superhero level (and take on Harrek, Argrath, etc) should be possible - the actual chances of that should be extremely low, and I don't think the GM should be saving them just for this outcome.

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. 😉

8 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

Game balance isn't supposed to be a think in RQ. There are things that will kill your PC in a second. There are clearly things that stop almost anything that your PCs can throw at them.

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).

4 hours ago, davecake said:

b) a bit off the main topic. In suggesting that what I consider high level play is doable and fun, I just wanted to add the caveat that I think high level play starts a long way below the Superhero level, and there is a huge load of fun to be had without ever getting to the point of kicking over the furniture of the setting. And if we ever did get to the point of PCs directly taking on Harrek etc, I’d like it to have several more layers of adding expanded layers of complexity to the game, whole extra rules sets that we are a fair way away from, rather than just like an RQ fight with bigger numbers. You should at least have to, I don’t know, find Harreks secret horcruxes or something. 

Agreed on all of this. It makes me wonder about what you mentioned in a subsequent reply:

3 hours ago, davecake said:

Actually my feeling was that Brangbane on his own was quite vulnerable for such a classic villain - he has only one defensive combat option, parrying with his sword at 110% (really, far too low for an ancient horror). He can maybe overwhelm a single opponent with two attacks, but if multiple opponents survive his howl, especially if they have beefed up attack %ages (such as Berserk or Sword Trance, but Bladesharp 6 will do it, and always punch right through his armor). He also has no physical defences beyond ok armour (people taking him 9n are likely to have shield), and no magical defences either. He is also very vulnerable to spirit combat. And while the howl is a great ability, his other tough ability, paralysing venom, requires it to hit, to not be parried, and then to overcome Con with venom Pot - mostly, it will get parried, if he uses it at all. He also has no normal magic at all, and no healing of any kind, so could be befuddled, Mind Blasted, etc. He is unpleasant, but against a competent ‘rune level’ party able to take him on, he should go down very quick. 

He struck me as having been statted out by someone with limited familiarity with high powered RQ combat. He looks dangerous, but he is a bit of a glass cannon. [emphasis added]

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.

4 hours ago, davecake said:

What does this have to do with high power play? Not much, except that high power play is sometimes the only way to test some rules to see if they work as designed. The tactics cults encourage their warrior leaders to use should be effective ones for high powered play. 

Definitely.

7 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

Mongoose is hated as a publisher ("creative differences" between Mongoose and Chaosium relating to Glorantha lore), but we shouldn't hate the authors themselves, particularly for the second incarnation of MRQ2 (by Lawrence Whittaker, who has done some good RQ work).

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.

6 hours ago, soltakss said:

You use standard RuneQuest rules.

• Using missile volleys, hoping for Criticals, to ignore armour
• Boosting your skill level to get enough Anti-Parry to overcome their high skill
• Using Demoralise to reduce their skills
• Using Fanaticism to reduce their chance of parrying
• Combined attacks to reduce their chances of parrying
• Dispelling their spells (As we said in our game, Dispelling them down to their undies)
• Having Healing and other healing rune spells on tap, using Allied Spirits
• Engaging them in Spirit Combat
• Using Elementals against them (Heatshock causes massive damage,. Fear/Madness can disable or kill them, Opening and closing a pit can break their legs, tossing them off a cliff can hurt when they land, Drowning them might be useful)

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.

59 minutes ago, Shiningbrow said:

Except that there are officially published rules... just most people here don't want to talk about the oft-hated Mongoose publications.

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

9 hours ago, Dr. Device said:

I'd say skill progression in RuneQuest is one of the system's stronger elements. The problem is with rune levels being locked behind strict skill and passion thresholds in a system where your ability to progress any of those individual statistics is both gradual and inconsistent. It might even be worse in RQG given how much closer you start to reaching rune levels. You're agonizing over those final steps right off the bat.

But then, heroquesting is a perfectly fine solution here. Having a tool to translate directed efforts for character advancement into the basis for an adventure is probably a net positive for the game.

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.

7 hours ago, Darius West said:

Add to this the fairly gripping story told in Cults of Terror about the war against Ralzakark, and you have the basis for an interesting campaign that can potentially kill overly-powerful characters.

I do like this "Dorastor is to Glorantha as The Tomb of Horrors is to Greyhawk" take.

7 hours ago, JRE said:

Checking old files, some RQ3 characters in my extremely old campaign reached combat skills in the 200% range, by simple frequent experience use. But the players would never have voluntarily traveled to Dorastor. Just because you have a fighting chance does not mean you want to run terrible risks. The Coders were more up to their league, and they were scary by their flexibility and magic.

They probably would be considered murder hobos now, and that also meant they were much weaker than an equivalent skills well integrated Rune level. No Rune magic, except the true murder hobo Eurmali killer. No iron equipment. No DI (a big disadvantage). As unaffiliated strangers, no "military equipment", such as heavy armor, shields or crossbows.

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. 😉

4 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

The core rules do not cover high level game play. The rules for heroquesting are not out, and whilst there are some obscene stats occasionally on display they are not intended as combat opponents at the level of play that the core rules cover. There is no need for above 200% in anything for any of the material that Chaosium publish.

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. 🙂

10 hours ago, Darius West said:

Pages 201-202 Combat with skills above 100% and (more importantly) splitting attacks.  You may have 300% but unless you are mighty fast, you will never deliver 3x100% attacks, and those 150% attacks might net you an 8% Critical and a 30% Special, but you can't rely on either showing up when you need them.

Ah, right. I must have a blindspot for that section due to RQG's inconsistency allowing split attacks but not split parries.

32 minutes ago, Nick Brooke said:

There’s a genre expectation that heroic adventurers could heroquest / obtain tomes & blessings etc. to bump up skills that would otherwise be slow or tedious to increase.

The alternative is No Fun, which is in direct conflict with MGF and is therefore deprecated.

I dare say that another alternative is to design the game so that bumping skills isn't slow or tedious. 😉

4 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

If you look at the starting stats for Vasana, it is absolutely clear that Chaosium "magic" was involved for her to make Rune Lord in roughly a year.  So feel free to do a little magic yourself for MGF.

After seeing "MGF" in this and the Glorantha forum, my brain finally dredged up its meaning.