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Steve3742

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Posts posted by Steve3742

  1. 11 hours ago, Crel said:

    Interestingly, the average on the classic D&D 3.5 and forward roll of "4D6 drop lowest" comes out to 13! 

    Not what I get...

    For 3d6, the average is 10.5, as most people know.

    For "3d6, re-roll 1s", the average is 12.00

    For "Roll 4d6, drop the lowest", the average is 12.24 - slightly higher. But it's not 13, and it's actually closer to 12 than 13.

    Finally, for "Roll 4d6, re-roll 1s and drop the lowest" - which the OP suggested - the average is 13.43.

     

    For both the re-roll 1s, I've assumed they get re-rolled indefinitely until no longer a 1. If you only re-roll once (keeping a 1 if rolled), the averages become 11.75 instead of 12 for "3d6, re-roll 1s"and 13.27 instead of 13.43, for "Roll 4d6, re-roll 1s and drop the lowest"

    If anyone wants to look at the graphs, you could click on this link. (and click the "graph" button)

    • Like 1
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  2. 21 hours ago, Bill the barbarian said:

    I think Larry Niven or Spider Robinson has a treatise on this (Superman and Lois, not Harrek).

     :)

    It was Larry Niven, Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex. A logical enough extrapolation of what happens to Kryptonian Sperm, fired by kryptonian muscles, in the vicinity of a terrestrial woman. It's available here, if you'd like to read it.

    I don't think Harrek would have the same problems in that his strength seems to be magical in origin, not innate, and so you can make the argument that it's not always on, that he has to consciously want to be that strong. At any rate, does he have a girlfriend?

  3. 17 hours ago, Sumath said:

    one thing that would be really useful is a range of paper/cardstock miniatures for Gloranthan adventurers and monsters. Paper miniatures are colourful, cheap, portable and potentially easy to replace. But it's very difficult to find commercial quality paper miniatures that fit with a fantasy bronze age setting, and Gloranthan monster types are even harder to find. This is the sort of thing that Chaosium could licence out to a third party, like they have with their other miniatures.

    Well, apparently the Unspoken Word produced some paper miniatures in 2003. They were on a CD (which shows how long ago it was) and you had to print the tiff files out yourself. I suspect it's long out of print, but the files might be knocking around on the Internet somewhere.

  4. 24 minutes ago, RHW said:

    The opposite, based on RQ3 Cults Book. Waha gets Shield, ZZ doesn't. Storm Bull gets it from Orlanth.

    I don't have RQ3 Cults Book, nor have I heard of it. Do you mean the Cults Compendium (though I always thought that was RQ2)?

    I do have River of Cradles, which gives Storm Bull Shield in his own right (Orlanth gives him Increase Wind). Likewise, I have Troll Gods, which gives Zorak Zoran Shield. And I have Tales of the Reaching Moon 15, which had an official write-up of Waha in it, and he didn't have Shield.

  5. 2 hours ago, Jeff said:

    Zorak Zoran does NOT get Shield (check your Bestiary if you doubt me). The cults that get Shield directly are Manthi, Aldrya, Babeester Gor, Yelm, Gorgorma, Orlanth, Humakt, Waha, Seven Mothers, Yanafal Tarnils, and Hwarin Dalthippa.

    My bad, I was using RQ3 as a source. Zorak Zoran and Storm Bull both used to get Shield in RQ3. Waha didn't, not even as an Associate. Hmmm... so you've taken it from Storm Bull and Zorak Zoran, I can see the logic in that... but giving it to Waha?

    2 hours ago, Jeff said:

    There are many cults that receive Shield by virtue of their association with one of these cults (e.g., Storm Bull, etc)..

    Perhaps Yelmalio should get it from Yelm? (Though that'd probably mean giving up Sunspear.)

  6. 2 hours ago, Jeff said:

    Shield is a very powerful spell and only a handful of cults have it. YGWV, but we have tried to carefully limit who gets it.

    Sure. And I don't think everyone should have it. But it does seem that all warrior/soldier cults should have it and it's hard to see why Humakt, Yanafal Tarnils, Orlanth, Storm Bull and Zorak Zoran have it whilst Yelmalio doesn't. I mean, if there's a mythological reason (Yelmalio lost his shield on the Hill of Gold) then sure, but it seems tacked on - nobody's ever mentioned this before. 

  7. 3 minutes ago, Jeff said:

    Gods and Goddesses has all-new write-ups for the Seven Mothers, Danfive Xaron (a new version, although Mike and Nick were both involved), Deezola, Etyries, Hon-eel, Hwarin Dalthippa, Irrippi Ontor, Jakaleel the Witch, Nysalor, Teelo Norri, Yanafal Tarnils, and of course the Red Goddess herself. Plus the Crimson Bat. 

    Brilliant! I don't suppose you have an ETA for it, do you?

  8. 8 minutes ago, Tywyll said:

    Where are the Lunar Cults beyond the Seven Mothers dictated (in RQ stats)? 

    Well, that's the problem, isn't it? Yanafal Tarnils and Irripi Ontor are said to be like Humakt and Lankhor Mhy respectively (so you could just use their cults with some mods - Yanafal doesn't have the dislike of resurrection and undead that Humakt has (and so probably loses the anti-undead powers) Irripi has Mind Blast, etc.), but the others are harder to quantify. Teelo Norri isn't really worshipped, nor is She Who Waits, but Danfive Xaron - a sort of prison rehabilitation cult - Deezola - some sort of Earth/Fertility goddess - and Jalakeel - an ex-Zorak Zorani into witchcraft - aren't really similar to anything that has gone before (although you could probably base Deezola on Ernalda in some way).

    Issue 16 of Tales of the Reaching Moon had a quite satisfactory RQ3 write up of Danfive Xaron by Mike Hagen, with assistance from Nick Brooke, Chris Gidlow and David Hall. Issue 17 had a very good write-up of Yanafal Tarnils, based on Greg Stafford and Sandy Peterson's incomplete and unpublished version, re-written by Nick Brooke and others (He gets Shield! And Oath, Morale, Sever Spirit (one-use), Berserk and Truescimitar  - which would probably be Truekopis now. Note the lack of anti-undead rune spells.). There was also an attempt at Jalakeel the witch in the same issue, author not credited, which wasn't as good, IMHO. But Irripi Ontor and Deezola remain uncovered, you're right (though, as I said before, Irripi Ontor will be very similar to Lankhor Mhy.)

    But yeah. I suppose we'll just have to wait for Gods of Glorantha (will that be covering Lunar deities?)

    • Like 1
    1. Gloranthan rules supplements e.g. GMs book, sorcery rules expansion - we need the GM book. We also need some Heroquesting Rules - we've been waiting thirty years (Yes, I know they were sort of done in HQ, but something for RQG)
    2. Gloranthan campaign/area sourcebooks e.g. Barbarian Town, Upland Marsh - as someone noted, if we look only at RQ, the default campaign setting seems to be Pavis. That campaign ends in 1621 with the players saving the cradle and having to leave Prax, with a suggestion made that they should go to Kethaela. The next campaign (in HQ) was actually set in Sartar a few years later and led up to the restoration of the Boat Planet after the Windstop. Now, we seem to have skipped another two years and are starting just after the Dragonrise. Is there any chance we could have a campaign or two set in the missing years? Particularly the Holy Country - refugees from the Cradle should turn up there just in time for the civil war to start. (Of course, this could lead to a mega-campaign, starting in Pavis, running through the civil war in the Holy Country then moving to Sartar for the Windstop and Boat Planet and then culminating in the Dragonrise.)
    3. Racial/cultural supplements e.g. Gods & Goddesses, Trollpak - these kind of have to tie in with 2, otherwise nobody's going to use them. There's a wealth of material in the West concerning Fronela in particular that looks interesting - the Kingdom of War and its war with Loskalm, the Kingdom of the Jonatings and their involvement, the end of the Sydics ban and how this affects things, what, exactly, ends up on the Lunar western border when the Syndics ban ends, how the elf reforestation will link into all of this, etc. But if you're going to produce a culture pack for Fronela, you'd need to throw a campaign there as well, at least to start things off, something along the lines of Borderlands or even Pavis. And if it were successful , you'd have to keep producing stuff for it - alongside the Dragon Pass stuff. Can you do all this? Or would the development of Fronela come at the expense of Dragon Pass?
    4. Gloranthan scenario books e.g. easy-to-use scenarios that can be dropped into any campaign - Yes. It's useful to have fillers, where you can forget about the Grand Campaign for a while and just go off on an adventure now and then.
    5. Non-Gloranthan material e.g. Fantasy Earth - I have misgivings about this. Mythras seem to be doing a bang-up job of producing Mythic Earth, what with Mythic Britain, Mythic Rome, Mythic Constantinople, etc. Is there a lot of point in Chaosium producing a Mythic Rome or Mythic Britain? People who want to play there can buy the Mythras supplements and use RuneQuest 6 Mythras. If they really want to use RQG, it's not that hard to convert. I'm aware Chaosium produced Mythic Iceland and have heard it was quite good. I also know you've been promising a second edition with RQG rules for over a year. Maybe do that and see how it goes down. Perhaps you can do Northern Europe and Mythras can do the Mediterranean. 
    6. Game aids e.g. spell cards, miniatures, adventurers journal - useful enough and I might buy them, but not a priority.
  9. On 4/10/2019 at 9:12 PM, Christoph Kohring said:

    Oh & this whole thread properly belongs in the Glorantha part of the forum & not in the RQ part, but that goes without saying!?!

    I dunno, the opening post by Jeff read very much like a Homeland section from the RQG book. Could do with some more details - I'm interested in the Esvular as it would be interesting to see how RQG handles characters from part-Malkioni background. I noticed RQG had no opportunities to create a wizard or even sorcery-using character during character generation, despite have Esrolia as a homeland (as we know there are wizards in Esrolia - there's a whole section of Nochet called Meldektown, albeit outside the main walls). I'd like to read more about the Aeolian church and how it combines Malkioni sorcery with Orlanthi theism.

    • Like 2
  10. 3 hours ago, RHW said:

    But gods help you if you want to play a Sword Sage of Lhankor Mhy or a combat oriented Seven Mothers cultist who's not a High Priest

    The Lankhor Mhy Defend Knowledge spell, given above, might help Sword Sages... though, if I were converting it, I might lean more heavily on the 'Defend' part and make it more like Shield.

    As for Seven Mothers, the way I've always seen the cult is that it gives you a taster of each deity and makes you a Jack of all Trades (and master of none). And that this is done deliberately, to entice you into a 'proper' Lunar cult. So, if you're a Seven Mothers cultist and you want to be more combat orientated, you should join Yanafal Tarnils - the officials in both cults will give you every encouragement to do so. You'll get Shield, Truekopis and a whole lot more - but you'll have to give up Resurrection, Command Lune and a lot of others (though I've always thought that each of the Seven Mothers should get one spell from each of the other six as associate deities. Probably something from Etyries as well.)

    To me, this is the point of the Seven Mothers, the reason the Lunars invented it. Give the barbarians a taste of Lunar culture and, if they like it, you can get them onto the hard stuff.

    Yelmalio/Elmal... I agree that Elmal, as a sun god, should have some fire powers, but not as great as Yelm. He's the sun god of hill barbarians in climates where it's not that hot. Think of Scotland, Wales or Ireland. I lived in Wales for three years and it rained every single day between November and April inclusive (and a lot of days between May and October.)  So that sort of sun god. The sun god of a country where summer is a couple of weeks in July, if you're lucky. Everyone from the UK should know what I mean. Note that neither the Celts nor the Vikings were much into Sun Gods (now it's thought that Lugh wasn't a sun god after all). Nothing to match Apollo, Ra or Shamash, all from countries where summer is a lot more of a thing, countries a lot more like Dara Happa. So some fire powers, but nothing like Sunspear. Firearrow and Fireblade, perhaps

    But Yelmalio should definitely have Shield. I agree with that.

    • Like 1
  11. On 4/10/2019 at 3:19 PM, g33k said:

    If the biomass/bioenergy model is anything close to Earth's, the net grazing goes DOWN -- it takes about 1/10 as much Earthly grass to produce a pound of cow, than it takes to produce a pound of omnivorous human eating stuff that eats grass.

    Hmmm... The reason grazing is a survival strategy in fringe areas is because nothing can grow there that people can eat. So you have to filter the protein contained in the chapparal through an animal that can eat it, which is hideously inefficient (you end up with between a fifth to a twelfth of the protein), but gives you human-edible protein (meat) at the end of it. So there's nothing growing in the wastes (outside of the oases and River of Cradles) that humans can eat, but there is grazing for bison, antelopes, rhinos, etc. and humans can eat them. And herd men can graze on the chapparal, too. And can be eaten by humans.

    But imagine if your herds were running short, due to disease, raids, whatever. And there's not enough to make it through winter. And the tribe is going to starve. And the Waha Khan says he does know of a way that humans can eat the chapparal, but you're not going to like it...

    If the famine wasn't too serious, you could convert, say, a third of the tribe to herd men and they could eat chapparal and the other two-thirds could eat the bison, or whatever. Eventually, you could turn them back. But it'd take a long time to recover that way, a few years or more, and then only if you have some luck raiding other people's herds. Better to convert a quarter or a fifth and the tribe eat them instead of the Bison, meaning the Bison herd stays completely intact and there are less humans to eat it. You'd reach equilibrium faster that way - a year, if done right - and with more Bison. And if the famine was very serious, you'd have to do that, else the whole tribe dies.

    But I wonder about the moral flexibility of the Praxians here. OK, herd men aren't human, I can accept that.. But a guy who, up until yesterday, was Narveesh, a rider with the rest of the tribe and has been unlucky in a lottery... A guy who, if the spell was cast on him again, would once more be Narveesh of the Bison tribe... It's pushing things a bit to say that he isn't human. Or that the tribe would be able to put aside their qualms about it, no matter what Waha says.

    But, I guess that's the price of living in one of the most desolate places in the world.

  12. 55 minutes ago, Videopete said:

    Even in the old RQ 1st and Second edition bonuses no matter how counted as a sinlgle die roll. So 2d6+27 has a species max of 41, not 46.

    42, surely? Max rollable is 39, +2 for the dice, +1 for the addition = 42.

    Done the other way (Max rollable plus Min rollable), we'd get 39+29 = 68, which does seem a mite high. You were using "each +6 (or part) = 1 die", yes? That's workable, but I think the official rules are, as noted, the Bestiary quote, if only because the Bestiary is a) meant to deal with lots of different creatures with different POW; and b) written more recently. So, Max rollable, plus the number of dice, plus another 1 if there's an addition.

    • Like 1
  13. 9 hours ago, Joerg said:

    The Pol Joni do follow Waha's covenant, but I have no idea whether they can awaken their cattle. As they don't ride their cattle, there is a lot less of a point doing so than for the Beast Riders. They should be unable to awaken their horses, just like the Grazers or the Pentans. 

    Well... Neither the Grazers nor the Pentans know the magic, so it's never come up for them. A Praxian Animal Nomad would probably consider it blasphemous to use Release Intelligence on a horse. But a Pol Joni who was a Waha Khan... That might work. That's if we're following g33k's idea that it works on anyone in Prax or the Wastelands.

    Although you could argue that, even accepting g33k's idea, it'd only work on the animals named in the story of the Covenant. Which would mean no horses. No zebras, either, nor unicorns. Only nine specific animals and the Morocanth. And Herd Men, of course.

  14. 21 hours ago, Rick Meints said:

    Being turned into a beast would be a nasty fate for any sentient creature that is a part of the Survival Covenant of Waha. It only affects Praxians, not outsiders or foreigners after all.

    Wait, is that true? The Fix Intelligence only affects Praxian humans? I could see how this might be - Praxian humans are descendants of those humans who survived by adopting the Survival Covenant, other humans are descendants of humans who survived another way - but I've never seen it stated before and I'd always assumed the spell would work on anyone.

    Is this true of animals also? That the Release Intelligence spell would only work on a Praxian Bison, not one from, say, Fronela?

  15. 20 hours ago, godsmonkey said:

    Coupon received; order placed.

    Subtotal£171.79
    $62.00 off the order total-£48.42
    Shipping£10.89
    Tax£0.00

     

    1 hour ago, godsmonkey said:

    So the UK has a high VAT rate for books unlike most of Europe?

    As can be seen from the quote above, the VAT rate (or Tax) is 0. Because it's a book.

    £172 is high, but maybe he bought the leatherette version? I think that's around $229, which is approximately £172

    • Like 1
  16. 3 hours ago, Rick Meints said:

    f you doubt what the actual shipping costs are, please use your national post office website to check what they would charge to send a 4 kilogram package from your country to with the US, the UK, or Australia Choose whichever of those three locations is closest to your country.

    Well, I'm not complaining about my postage rate ($13.95 is really cheap for a 4 kg parcel within the UK). And I don't think Kloster or Oracle are complaining about the €19.95 it cost to ship from the UK to France and Germany. But Lurking Grue - who lives in Europe too - was charged €37.83, nearly twice as much as them, and that does seem a bit incongruous. Maybe they shipped it from the USA instead?

  17. 2 hours ago, Lurking Grue said:

    For the slipcase, my shipping cost comes up at a pretty steep 37.83 Euros. Ouch!! That's quite a bit more than 9 bucks.

    Yeah, €37.83 seems huge, especially as Oracle's was shipped to Germany for €19.95 (mine was shipped to the UK for $13.95, if you're interested, but that's always going to be cheaper). Have you checked it's been ordered from the correct warehouse? It's supposed to default to the closest, based, presumably, on your address or IP address. But 'supposed to' doesn't always happen, especially if you're using a VPN or something... 

  18. Well, that went easier than expected.

    I got 4 different e-mails about coupons. One for each pdf and one for all three combined. This means that I would have had to e-mail Chaosium if I'd wanted to buy the Bestiary, GM Pack and Slipcase cover (as I would have had to combine my Bestiary and GM Pack coupons). I did some rapid calculation and realised that it'd only cost $14 more to order a whole slipcase set (with an extra Rules set along with the Bestiary and GM Pack), for which I already had a coupon....

    What the hell. I'm sure I can find a good home for the old one.

    Now I'll be frantically waiting for the post.

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