Monty Lovering

I like crunchy. This extends to SIZ too. For me, SIZ of an anthropoid is the presented target area and won't change appreciably if it gains strength. I'm a little shorter than most Running Backs, but 20kg lighter, but it's gonna be about the same chance of hitting me or the Running Back if we'd just stand there and take the hit. But if you have a higher or lower STR than average you gain or lose weight. That impacts things like knockbacks. But here are my house rules. Anthropoid SIZ height and weight. All characters are considered to live active life-styles and have an ideal weight for their height if they are average STR for their species, as per the standard SIZ/weight/height table. For the occasional sedentary character who has put on weight, add a +x (where x is the number of SIZ's they are overweight) as a subscript to the character record, and a - x as subscript to CON of the same amount on the record. For characters that are underfed for long periods, the subscript would be -x n SIZ and CON. As a rule of thumb, +1 is mildly overweight, +2 is overweight, +3 is obese, +4 is morbidly obese. Mildly overweight carries no penalties. Overweight reduces MOV by 1 and ENC to 80%. Obese has the same penalties as overweight plus the addition of the character always being Fatigue 1. Morbidly obese reduces MOV by 2, limits ENC as before, and means the character is always at least fatigue 2. Negative values for undernourished characters carry the same penalties. Characters with above average STR will be heavier than average for their height - see below for details as this varies by species. Elves are lightly built and will be the height of a human 1 SIZ larger than their weight would indicate. An elf will be 1 SIZ heavier for every point of STR above 11. Baboons are 1 SIZ shorter than a human of the same weight, but cannot really stand fully erect, choosing to walk on all fours almost all the time. Baboons over SIZ 13 are 2 SIZ shorter than a human of the same weight, Baboons over SIZ 15 are 3 SIZ shorter than a human of the same weight. A baboon will be 1 SIZ heavier for every point of STR above 20. Humans will be 1 SIZ heavier for every point of STR above 12. Agimori will be 1 STR heavier for every point of STR above 20. Tusk Riders should be treated as humans for the purposes of this calculation. Many Mostali are heavily built compared to humans. Those of SIZ 2-3 are as tall as indicated, but those from SIZ 4-5 are 1 SIZ less in height than indicated, from SIZ 6-7 are 2 SIZ less in height than indicated, from SIZ 8-9 are 3 SIZ less in height than indicated, from SIZ 10-11 are 4 SIZ less in height than indicated, and at SIZ 12 are 5 SIZ less in height than indicated. Mostali will be 1 SIZ heavier for every point of STR above 18. Dark trolls are heavily built and will be the height of a human 3 SIZ less than their SIZ would indicate, but any lack of height is compensated for by breadth when considering SIZ for the purposes of resolving a hit. They will be 1 STR heavier for every point of STR above 17. Great Trolls will be 1 STR heavier for every point of STR above 26. Trollkin will be 1 STR heavier for every point of STR above 10. Any other anthropoid species, including those with tails, will be 1 STR heavier for every point of STR above the average of the species. Characters who are below average STR will have lose weight at half the rate for each point of STR below the above given figure. So if they would be one SIZ heavier for every point of STR above average, they will be one SIZ lighter for every two points of STR below average. Any excess or deficit of weight for the characters SIZ due to STR should be noted as positive or negative superscript to the characters SIZ

If there's an instant resolution, fine. But if people are hiding from them, then they won't know that they passed them three hours ago, or spend twenty minutes stalking a bear. I think a character thinking they've been insulted by someone who asked them to pass the salt plays better if the player thinks their character has been insulted by someone who asked them to pass the salt. And it's hard to play a character that you know has fumbled a knowledge roll and now thinks something totally wrong about the Thanatari they are about to attack.

That’s the entire thing. If you roll and they fumble, then they think they’re tight about what someone said, or a fact. etc., and you misinform them accordingly.

Good question and one I need to resolve before my next campaign. I am paying Pathfinder as a player at the moment and that’s got a Spot roll based on the Perception skill. And the GM rolls it. For RQ I’d make a roll based on the highest Scan skill of the party with a bonus based half next highest Scan skill or 2% x party size > max 20%. Things that were not in plain sight would need a roll of x0.5 of the above. Less obvious things x0.25. I’d treat Hidden things like Dodge to an attack. And in general I am totally down with the GM rolling skills where the player will not know if they have succeeded or failed or fumbled until after they roll. Because people hear things wrongly or make a mistake about what they have seen. Or think there’s something there when there isn’t, etc., or think there’s nothing there when there is. You just need to record who gets a skill check.

I assume Oration-based attempts have been made to convince people. Maybe just targeting the women who were not blood kin, as the women of the village would know if he was a wrong 'un. As far as summoning a spirit goes, if it could be proved it WAS his spirit, even if the abductor was in their right mind, as the OP points out, expecting him to say "It's a fair cop guv, I done abducted her, I deserved being killed" is a bit of a stretch. How do you know if a spirit is lying? Dunno. So I say, isn't this what Divination is for? As there are no witnesses, she can challenge them; "Take me to the temple if you think I Iie, pay the priests, let them determine if I lie or not. If I lie, take my head and everything I posses". Obviously this leads to a whole bunch of questions, like how much would it cost, would the priest's want to get involved (maybe they reserve Divinations for actually important stuff not petty bloodfueds), would the caster of Divination tell the truth about what the spell revealed, etc.. And the first of these questions is whether they would call her bluff and actually do it or back down.

The performance is Orate for some types of poetry, and Sing for others. You can't deliver 'If' by Rudyard Kipling by singing. But arguably 'Sing' would be a better skill to deliver Beowulf with. I'd say just decide what from of delivery is used by a culture. For Orlanthi it's probably Sing. Either can be augmented as per normal by an appropriate Passion for the subject of the poem. For writing I would make new skills, maybe 'Lyricist' and 'Composer', Lyricist being used for poems and the lyrics of songs/

In my house rules a special gives a choice of special attacks rather than just a damage bonus. So, for example a 2H spear user specialing can choose to have a follow-up attack (which takes place in the same MR), attempt a Knockback, inflict Maximum damage, or attempt a Trip attack. Other weapons offer different choices. I’ve also tweaked SRs so there a bigger difference between spears and other 1 or 2H weapons, and if an attacker misses and the defender has a successful parry, they can then choose to make a follow up attack. Basically any combat system should make spears a clear choice for primary weapon as that’s what they were in real life.

No, that's lorica segmentata. Not what I meant. What is generally understood by the term splint mail is something like this: Basically thick leather greaves or vambraces with relatively thin strips of metal running along their length. In part the transition period (from full maille armour to full plate armour) they were very much a thing (along with brigantines) and as an ensemble would look like this. Obviously this is as Ancient as a grenade launcher (looks at Mostali), but equally obviously taking heavy leather vambraces and greaves and adding strips of metal is not high tech - they'd just not have couters or poleyns (elbow and knee protection).

Bronze Age rapiers are long blades optimised for thrusting but still with a cutting edge, and a thick central rib down the length of the blade to make up for the relatively poor choice of bronze for a thin pointy weapon (it's too bendy). The handle were simple, literally a handle. They were very distinctive in appearance and in use from the shorter cut/thrust blades with leaf-shaped blades that are perhaps what come to mind when one thinks of a Bronze Age sword. They share a name with the Renaissance rapier, which were longer, thiner, might not even have much of an edge, were made of steel, and had a complex hilt to protect the user's hand. The similarity is they are both very much a 'stick them with the pointy end' sword, as distinct from a cut & thrust sword.

I'd totally agree that studded leather was very much not a tin and is the result of the rivets in a coat of plates being misinterpreted in visual representations. But splinted armour - where strips of metal are added to a leather or linen base - was very much a thing, even if only for limbs and maybe helmets. I'll argue extensively about medical armour as that what I now a bit about. I don't know if there is any proof of splinted armour in the Ancient world. It is not exactly rocket science - making a cuttable material less cuttable by putting ruddy great strips of metal along it. Hard to believe no one thought of it until the transitional period of Medieval armour. Anyone better informed than me about this?

Except ring is noisy and linen problematic in the wet or extremely hot environments.

Yup. And allowing their flyingness to be intrinsic and magical, and their wings to just be feathery oars, also means they can actually have riders. Otherwise they'd be grounded as soon as someone sat astride. It reminds me a bit of the dragons from the Pern books by Anne McCathery. At some point it was realised that they shouldn't be able to fly, let alone with a rider. It was realised they primarily supported themselves by subconscious telekinetics. From then on the answer to 'how much can a drain carry' was "However much it thinks it can". There's no point in treating hippogriffs, griffons, dragons, etc. flying as an exercise in physics. Handwavium, or hippogriff wingwavium rules.

This thread is quite lovely. I've seen Todd of ToddsWorkshop make some cuirbolli (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO_nG6OpCKg), essentially using hot animal glue to soak leather, like using resin to soak glass fibre. This leather hard is enough to cut softwood with, but didn't perform well against arrows, which he thinks is an indication that some work is needed on his recipe to make is less hard. The guy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwGW_qwpxYsThis bloke approaches if from a SCA perspective http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Medieval/Articles/Perfect_Armor_Improved.htm and dips leather in 80C water before forming. Tis produces leather resilient enough to be used in full-contact non-sharp combat. Historically, from cuirbolli shield found in Irish bogs to language (cuirass, as someone has noted) to multiple reference of it being used, cuirbolli was a thing, and a thing used for armour. It seems that we have a classic issue here of people with siloed specialities not getting to look into other silos where people are talking about the same thing. Makes me want to go buy some veg-tanned leather and play... As for ring mail, oh I love 18th Century "research". This all too often consists of someone (well, a white male European) sat at a desk reading and then making stuff up as they went along. The differences the different patterns used to portray armour in the Bayeux Tapestry could be no more than an individual embroiderer's taste. In some of the scenes where it varies from circles to squares it's where one individual partially obscures another, making a choice of a different patterns to show 'armour' an obvious artistic choice. Embroiderers were likely neither asked to show the various forms of armour worm on the day or even knowledgeable of the same. Etc.. Again, with ring mail there's a lot of smoke. I don't mind having ring mail. Seems a reasonable form of armour as does stud, I mean bezainited leather 😜

Well, as everyone knows, there are neither African or European hippogriff in Glorantha. It's Genertelan or Pamatelan, obviously 😛 I think the answer to your question depends on how you see Gloranthan physics and biology. Hippogriff range from 99 to 366kg. They are logically carnivores although they might be scavengers as well as hunters. In the Bestiary it says they are 'tamable if raised from the egg', but then seems to imply that the 'impression' of the Hippochick is immediately followed by breaking it. Which sounds hinky as it implies they emerge from the egg fully grown. Big eggs. I think MG will vary with "Impression" taking place two years before they can be broken. But I digress. Given a value for G of anything that makes sense and an oxygen percentage in the atmosphere that is likewise believable (maybe it's called Oooo-gas, but you know what I mean), they cannot fly. At all. Just no. So they are intrinsically magical flyers. The wings are there because flying things have wings, but the majority of the 'uplift' is magic. So, of course they can hover. I'd say they have an ability to float at whatever altitude they want (like a fish in water), but use wings to waft themselves about. At a hover they probably just lazily station-keep with their wings.

It's good in the upcoming cults book the requirement is simply no marriage. The ones in Storm Tribe would be unhealthy, to say the very least.

Although lip-reading or a handy set of bellows are useful in this circumstance.

Oh if Fred with 2HP left and 10CON takes three arrows in a round totalling 12 damage, Fred dead. But outside of that, anyone who has been incrementally reduced to 0HP, big monsters with massive CON and otherwise (without an 2x to vitals on the way) will take a while to die. I would even give a single CONx1 roll for the character/monster to stop losing CON before death and remain unconscious until natural healing put them in positive HP or a vulture tore out their gizzards. There’s plenty of accounts of people waking up on battlefields after being left for dead, and of big animals shot by hunters being left for dead and then not being there when the bearers turn up to skin and butcher it It’s fun. PC’s have to decide whether to just leave fallen foe, finish them off, or heal them and ransom them. A messy encounter with a herd of buffalo outside of Dykene can end up making future trips through the area riskier as there’s that one bull everyone swore was dead but now holds a grudge against the party. And it means that if a well-loved character dies because of stupid bad luck when scouting ahead, or something, they can be found in time. Rolling up new PCs or having every party eternally indebted to CA is just not fun. You can even have a new party who screwed up and thought they were playing D&D end up on the floor or fleeing survive, as the ones who fled can return to the stripped bodies and find that they’re not quite dead. It’s all about narrative. Bad luck and inexperience can be ameliorated. If someone knowingly takes a chance or knew better I am less sympathetic. People can die easy enough in RQ (many crits on any vital), and my games have a fair potential amount of ‘percussive negotiation’ Violence is always an option. I could not be arsed tracking HP reductions due to losing CON, but I like my HP RQ3 style, so it’s not as much of an issue (and being a duck is risky and big creatures are really fucking tough). I’ve no problem with a character recently healed to postIve HP being weak as a kitten if they took such a mauling they lost CON too. For me, normal healing magic knits together what’s there. It doesn’t recreate limbs or blood lost. It stops the Enegizer/Duracell Bunny syndrome of parties getting hacked up and healing and repeating the process again and again. CON loss can necessitate withdrawing to recover. I’m not too worried about drowning rules as getting stabbed in the guts is every few sessions. Drowning? Less so. I’ve played with reducing CONx% rolls and prefer just docking CON. And I came up with a system for poison I far prefer. Wish I could find where I wrote it down, LOL

I feel characters go from running around right as rain despite being covered in wounds to unfixably dead far too quickly. IMG, characters take damage to CON after reaching 0HP, and when at 0HP or below will lose 1 CON per MR until they hit 0 CON. Then they are dead dead. If they get healed before then, they will stop losing CON, even if it's just a successful First Aid roll and they are still below 0 HP. They can be healed to positive HP as healing magic and first aid allows but are unconscious until then. This stops people dying with such annoying regularity. So, basically an average human taken to 0 HP will bleed out and die or have their brain turn to mush because of not breathing after two minutes (10MR). None of this dead in 12 seconds stuff, it's just not a thing. Unless they lose their head or its contents or have extreme damage to chest or abdomen, people, don't die that quickly. I balance this by making CON healable only by Heal Body or subsequent First Aid rolls taken on a daily basis (I actually treat First Aid as a Healing skill, not solely a First Aid skill), or weekly gains based on their normal CON, or potions. This creates great tension getting to someone in a realistic amount of time to stop them dying rather than the oh well can't do it this MR, and means if characters are unlucky or bite off more than they can chew, then they will be licking their wounds and learning from their mistakes rather than rolling new characters. I run similar 'lose CON when below 0' rules for locations too.

Oh that's a whole can of worms. It most certainly does but those are 1H weapons on the table whereas on p211 it says that the "long cavalry lance about 3.5–4.25 meters long, used with both hands" So we have the lance referred to as a one handed charging weapon that can be used as a 1H long spear when not charging when there is no 1H long spear in the weapons tables, and the lance being described as a 2H weapon, all in the space of 10 pages. I'm a copywriter, I will literally proof RuneQuest stuff for free, just so you know. 😄 I think the problem is that we have a confusion in the Core Book of the later the 'we have stirrups' 1H lance, that was couched under one arm at the charge and indeed, used as a 1H long spear when not at the charge (don't think of the conical ones with hand guards used for jousting, that was much, much later) with the much earlier 'we do not have stirrups' 2H lance, or more properly the xyston or kontos, getting thoroughly mixed up with each other. Maybe different people worked on different sections? Did I mention I am a copywriter? 😛 Glorantha canonically has stirrups, and IIRC correctly, everyone is totally aware that this is utterly anachronistic and many are not bothered by it, which I heartily approve of. So you can choose to have a no stirrups and the lance then HAS to be 2H, and you can just read the line on p209 as saying the lance is 2H, which then makes total sense. Just ignore anything that says otherwise. Or you can choose to have stirrups and to read the lance as being 1H, like it says in the table. But in that case which case STR 11/DEX 9 might be mores sensible for 1H use, and this would allow a new line for 1H long spear as well, which was definitely a thing. Or you can have BOTH, and have some cultures using stirrups and others not. But given the rapidity with which horses were adopted by plains Indians along with all their tack, it's hard to see say, Praxians not adopting the stirrup when exposed to it - unless it's associated with horses I guess.

Roll20 for the virtual tabletop, character sheets and dice plus Discord for voice. In some respects the fog of war feature offers better functionality than playing face-to-face, for example when the players are exploring an area.

Yeah, that's kinda of what I want, but I think I'm just going to handle it with a damage + on a dice for weapons that are better at penetrating armour that only counts vs armour. And all weapons would just get a set die or dice of damage, no plus, normally. And damage bonus would come down to simple pluses rather than whole die. This stops, foe example, daggers doing 4 damage minimum if you have a damage bonus, which is just not right. And it makes it easier than traits, which are kind of deal with by my specials table. So what I am boiling it down to is: Criticals do double WEAPON damage or ignore armour, whichever is more damage. Specials are resolved on a table with a result according to weapon type (varying between a follow-up attack with the dominant hand or offhand, or a weapon specific weapon effect, such as axes pulling shields aside and allowing attacks with no parry from the SR of the axe blow to the end of the round (and that means if it happens on SR7, someone fighting with the axeman can change intent and attack the target who can't parry, which is exactly why axes were so cool). I have a d6 table with columns for Slash, Impale, Crush, Articulated, Shield, Brawling, Axe, 2H Pole and Missile. And if someone hits with say a war hammer which is 1d8+3 on leather they do a d8, it they hit someone with plate they still do a d8 but ignore 3 points of armour. Of course, after play testing I might junk it and go raw.

Eeee by gum. I'd not thoht a'Yorksire accent like. Mayhap m'dwarves will be Yorkshire like en me elves Welsh.

Love the lisping ducks idea! Dwarves are Welsh IMG. Trolls speak like the trolls in Terry Pratchett books, as exemplified in this troll explaining the definition of the troll word for forbidding "lit'rally der time when you see dem little pebbles an' you jus' know there's gonna be a great big landslide on toppa you and it already too late to run", but not in any particular accent that would render if offensive. Elves speak posh English "Oh I am so sorry to disturb you, but you seem to have taken an axe to a cousin of mine and I am going to have to kill you". Dragonewts, just stick your tongue out when you speak...

Good idea, I will advertise here. Reason I go for Russian is I play with a German so using it as the stock baddy accent won't really work that well!

Yeah this is kinda like the spin I put on it. Illuminates are ambitheists; they know gods exist but realise they were once mundane and that the mundane may become gods, so don't think it's that special. Just dangerous entities to be avoided or exploited.