PhilHibbs

Okay yeah it's me mis-reading the headings. I thought Duck Point was a sub-heading within the Colymar.

Is Duck Point in Colymar lands?

It seems a long way out of the way, the far side of the Lismelder. Yet RQG P.107 has it under the Colymar section. P.108 says under the Lismelder that they "are noted friends and allies of the ducks," so why isn't Duck Point in the Lismelder tribe rather than Colymar?

43 minutes ago, Scotty said:

Divine intervention! Rune Lords can effectively use DI once per season once their Rune pool reaches 10:

That's one down side of Ernalda, Issaries, Lhankor Mhy, Chalana Arroy, or other cults with only priests. Also Waha shamans.

I suppose if the party has a RL of another cult, they could use their DI to help out a friend. Or it could be a reward for exceptional service. "Thanks for saving my nephew from that disease spirit. Have a point of CHA for your fetch!"

On 10/9/2022 at 9:21 PM, Erol of Backford said:

How deep is it below the surface, are there some spaces which still have air, who are the inhabitants? "Still populated by the descendants of the original Eurmali."

1 hour ago, Lordabdul said:

Where did you get this quote from? The Guide only says that it's mostly underwater, and populated by schools of fish and Ludoch.

The only source I can find is @soltakss in a recent thread here: 

But it's obvious that their descendents do still survive in the sunken temple, because that's the awesome answer.

Page 3 made me LOL:

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I advised and tested, sat in on discussions, and made outrageous demands ("Whaddya mean ducks?!").

Also this is insightful:

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I always expected to make some changes in the RQ rules when I really started
rolling on my own campaign. In fact, I always figured that everyone who played the
rules would make their own changes. This may have been naive, but I'd been reading
APAs and knew that such was often the case, at least among the ‘vocal’ crowd.

Your Game Will Vary, and this dates back to 1974.

16 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

No I think Gods of Glorantha Trickster is it. And no common divine.

3 hours ago, David Scott said:

except for Divination, Extension, Multispell. (RQG 295)

We were talking about RQ3, hence the mention of the Gods of Glorantha Trickster cult writeup.

1 hour ago, Scotty said:

As Jason said:

So just 1 Rune point.

20 minutes ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

 Jason said it can have rune points, plural, and at GM discretion a "reasonable number" of rune spells, which indicates a matching rune pool.  And it will need more than one rune point to cast its Adventurer's better rune spells. 

Giving an allied spirit with  just one rune point would be a pretty frustrating gift.

It would start with just one RP, but can sacrifice POW for more. And it can use its adventurer's RP and vice versa so it can cast decent spells right out of the gate. And it isn't really a gift, it's just what a new initiate starts with. I wouldn't even give it that, but it can sacrifice its POW for RP as part of the ceremony that forms the bond to the PC.

Okay so this scotches my silly suggestions about rune priest allied spirits:

RQG P.277:

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An allied spirit is an initiate of the cult and can sacrifice
for Rune points, just as a normal initiate. Allied spirits
cannot be Rune Priests, Rune Lords, or God-talkers.

So an AS has a separate rune pool to the adventurer, presumably limited by its own CHA. They can both access each others' RP.

So if you have an AS with a high CHA, then you have effectively doubled the RP available to you. That makes the initial 3D6 roll super important! Make sure to bling up your AS with fancy items, and find a way for it to get get the credit for heroic deeds, to get that CHA up!

14 minutes ago, svensson said:

As for the initiate AS being off performing cult duty,

Yeah that wasn't a serious suggestion! Just there to exemplify why an Allied Spirit isn't an independent entity and so should not fit into the normal cult hierarchy. I mean, are they also going to try to qualify for priest? What if your Allied Spirit makes it to High Priest before you do, is it in charge of you now? Again, not really a serious suggestion! Just a bit of reductio ad absurdum.

13 minutes ago, svensson said:

Supposing that Allied Spirits are the privilege of Rune status, I would think that serving an ordained member of the cult 24/7 would be 'cult service' enough! 😁

Yes, and another good example of why the normal rules for initiates do not apply to allied spirits!

5 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

Illuminated trickster...

As a GM that would be a hard "no". In theory if someone had an idea for a character concept that involved starting off illuminated I wouldn't just shut it down, but "I want to powergame a trickster and have all the common spells" doesn't quite cut it.

In any case, in RQ3 they would be one use.

8 minutes ago, svensson said:

It's not too crazy to assume that an Allied Spirit is an Initiate of the deity you got the AS from.

So yes, I'd rule that your Allied Spirit would have 1 Rune Point and an associated spell. It would also have access to the Common Rune Spells and may choose to sacrifice for additional Rune Points and magics.

I don't think that those two things necessarily follow.

Like the other discussions about companion animals, I don't hold to the opinion that the cult writeups that we have are the only way of relating to a deity. Those cults are created by and for people, specifically the writeups that we have are written for player-characters.

So whilst yes an AS is an initiate, I don't see that as directly expanding the range of rune magic that the player has. The AS is an assistant sent by the deity, not an independent worshipper of the deity.

"Sorry, your Allied Spirit is off doing cult duty. Well, it's an initiate, so it has to follow the rules just like you, so it's not around this week!"

42 minutes ago, Erol of Backford said:

As we'll be RQ3 unless they make acolyte that's not the case for most. Eurmali would be but it doesn't seem that they have standard rune spells? Besides the G of Glorantha Book is there an Eurmaili cult write up?

No I think Gods of Glorantha Trickster is it. And no common divine.

9 hours ago, EricW said:

I think its important to hand out power in tiny drabs, otherwise Eurmal players can power game up to pretty much invincible very quickly.

Everyone runs out of rune points eventually, and with everyone having reusable rune magic nowadays this is now more or less the same for everyone.

Big Rubble p.13:

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V. INITIATE MEMBERSHIP

...Those that are not female humans or female Aldryami subtract 10 from their Charisma for this test.

Seems pretty clear to me.

p.14:

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VII. STAR MAIDENS (RUNE PRIESTESSHOOD)

The great majority of Yelorna’s priestesses (called Star Maidens) are female.

If it's only "the great majority", then there must be a few non-famales.

But this is straying a little from the topic... as I've said before I don't think the cult writeup is suitable for unicorns. I'd certainly draw the line at a unicorn becoming a Unicorn Rider.

9 hours ago, Bill the barbarian said:

Interesting, the priest mentioned above has (according to the rules) less agency than most on the lozenge. (90 percent of their time and income is spoken for). His or her behaviour also has restrictions, and he or she is obligated to fulfill certain roles and duties in society. 

Depends how you define "agency" - yes the priest's time is spoken for in a general sense, but day to day the priest decides how to allocate quite a bit of that time. If a town or village priest decides that it is their cult duty to lead a band of heroes to slay a giant demonic boar that has terrorised the hills for decades, then that's entirely reasonable.

So in the case of the wyter, I'd interpret the question of "within the bounds of serving the community, can the wyter decide how to do that in a day to day sense, or is their every action more or less directed in detail by their priest". There's a lot of scope for variation within that.

On 9/29/2022 at 5:38 PM, David Scott said:

No just one, the stolen one has lost its connection to the shaman's body and disappears from the Spirit World.

The other possibility is that the magical part of the matrix is in the spirit world, and the thief has a worthless trinket. But that leads to the question of what happens when the shaman returns to his body with the spiritual matrix component... where does the magic go? Does it teleport to the stolen matrix and reactivate it? Does it hang around in the spirit world, unusable, until in the middle world until the physical component is restored to it? Does the magic disappear and need to be re-cast into it?

David's answer is probably the simplest from this point of view, but not the only one available.

And since @Scotty has not given an authoritative opinion, @David Scott's is merely a fan conjecture.

My take is that the cult writeups that we have are largely for humans, or humanoids who live in societies with individual responsibilities to the collective and all that goes with it. There was another thread that touched on this recently, about awakened companion animals like alynx and bears and such. Opinions there varied, but this was my opinion.

If awakened companion animals do join cults, I think that the nature of that cult, or at least the relationship of an awakened animal with the cult, will be very different from a civilized human.

With the "standard" cadence of one adventure per season, and six weeks or so of occupation in between, you get occupational skill increases. I forget the details. If instead of an occupation you are travelling through foreign lands then I'd write up a "traveller" occupation to use instead of the adventurer's regular occupation so you can pick homeland lore, culture, language, etc. skills to get increases in.

v1.10.1 Alpha 8: 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1auJ5kYULlf_iZi4WG-B7_cNjEcNcmslWGaSFaQV1WN8

• Added all the core runes to the CharGen tab. When changing race to one with a different opposing Man Rune, the two rune names get swapped (but at present it doesn't swap any numbers apart from automatic cultural bonuses, because you really should do that before creating the character).

12 minutes ago, Erol of Backford said:

Now if it had the demonic steed head and breathed fire with wings we'd be in business... with pink feathers.

PLEASE STOP! 😭

4 hours ago, Brian Duguid said:

It is described in the sources we have as "poison gas", in the same way as those sources refer to the existence of "natural gas" rather than "flammable air". I'm happy to take those sources... 

To me, that's just an artefact of translation into English.

22 minutes ago, Erol of Backford said:

8 legged flamingo with a stinger and wings? Chaos really does allow for maximum game fun. Can't stop  laughing about the centaur thingy! Maybe it should have 8 hooves like one of those Greek or Norse god's mounts was it?

Oh if you insist, we've come this far...

Go on then, make a hit location chart for THAT.

2 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

please imagine this but with a flamingo. preferably standing only on one of the flamingo legs.

So a Flamingo Queen ate a Centaur, which hatched into what... this?

Come on, this is getting silly now.

Known Issues

• The "Extra" column in the Runes box is supposed to track experience after character generation. However, this column is after and not included in the opposing runes calculation, so experience in for example Death does not figure in to the Fertility rune calculation as a negative.

I liked Mad Sweeney in American Gods, he had some lovely come-uppance scenes when he lost his luck. Although those weren't really his own tricks backfiring, just perversely bad fortune and potentially the sign of an abusive GM!