PhilHibbs

8 minutes ago, radmonger said:

critical: success with an even 10s dice and digits dice of 1

special: success with a digits dice of 1 or 5.

fumble; failure with an even 10s dice and a digits dice of 0.

Zero math and within rounding errors of the rules-as-written result.

if you tone down criticals slightly, you can drop the stuff about the 10s dice and just go with ~10% chance of each. 

Slightly quirky at the low end, in that a 5% chance has double the chance of a success being a special success. 6 also has a significantly higher special rate than it should. Other than that, it's a really interesting idea. It's a lot for some people to remember - my brain works that way, but not everyone's does. On the other hand I've seen grown men literally reduced to tears over critical and special calculations.

Chaos is technically a Form Rune... but is it really like the other forms? It doesn't inherently change your shape or makeup, although it can, if you get a chaos feature.

I think it has traces of all the rune types. It's also listed as a Condition Rune in the Codex Ivesti. It's a Form, because it can change your body pattern. It's a Power, because it opposes Law. It's an Element, because it can create substance, and people talk about "raw chaos" as a thing.

That's an interesting way to handle it (and, of course, individual groups are welcome to roll their own interpretations). Replicating defensive spells over all the friendlies inside, that's pretty powerful. But the alternative interpretation where it would replicate a single offensive spell against everyone entering? Well I guess Warding does that, so there is a precedent.

What this version does miss from the original is the Damage Resistance effect, where anyone trying to enter would have to overcome the Damage Resistance with their STR or be unable to enter. Ward Against Weapons is essentially identical to Damage Resistance so it would be easy to patch that behaviour back in if desired.

And remember, you have to be within the circle to cast spells on the circle.

So we have a Q&A ruling now - offensive spells cast on a Protective Circle only trigger on a single target entering and then they're gone.

This implies that the distinction as to whether a spell is a defensive or protective spell is determined when the spell is cast - this Shield is a protective spell that affects everyone inside and does NOT trigger on enemies entering, this Fanaticism is an offensive spell that will affect the first target to come in (and has to be cast five times to affect the first five targets to come in).

@Peter Hart I'm going to add this content to my character creation sheet if you don't mind (just the runes and skill percentage numbers for homelands).

I would also like to add the character background entries. Would you object to me adding summary text such as "Attended the funeral of Phargentes and beheld the Red Emperor", "Witnessed Moirades’ coronation", "Attended both Phargentes’ funeral and Moirades’ coronation" as pickable options? I asked Chaosium for permission to add this level of detail so I feel I should ask you as well.

I didn't do that for DuckPak though. I just put in some blank boxes for years that had events in DuckPak family history. I'm in two minds whether I should put the events in as pickable text for JC publications, or just blank boxes for years like 1579.

I need a short prefix for all this content - all JC stuff gets a prefix to distinguish it from any other content that might have the same name, so I have "COH Basmoli" for Children of Hykim's Basmoli, "DP Durulz" for DuckPak, etc.

What would you like me to use for this - "ALP" for Adventurers from the Lunar Provinces? "HY" or "HYD" for Hydra, in case there is more Hydra-related character creation content to come?

I think I only have one question about the numbers...

• Should Aggar really have a lower Customs skill than the normal base (20 instead of 25), and Holay a higher base (35)?

Okay I'm done...

v1.10.1 Beta 2:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TOTPT3xOP6FLSXHwfUmvdahwrjPcy0YJenrp4-_mIYQ

• Added Children of Hykim character creation content.
• Changed the Man and Beast calculations to take into account other form runes. If your Dragonewt rune goes up by 10, your Man Rune will go down by 10. If you want to lose the points off Beast instead, then put a +10 in Man or -10 in Beast, or 5 to split the change.

v1.10.1 Beta 2:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TOTPT3xOP6FLSXHwfUmvdahwrjPcy0YJenrp4-_mIYQ

• Added Children of Hykim character creation content.
• Changed the Man and Beast calculations to take into account other form runes. If your Dragonewt rune goes up by 10, your Man Rune will go down by 10. If you want to lose the points off Beast instead, then put a +10 in Man or -10 in Beast, or 5 to split the change.

Okay it's looking good, just a few more minor details to fill in. Plus a lot of testing to do!

When they get "Insight (totem beast)", is that in addition to the normal "Insight (own species)" that everyone usually gets? Or is "Insight (gopher)" applicable both to gophers and to Gord-un folk?

And if it's in addition, do you think they should get "Insight (Human)" or "Insight (Hsunchen)" or "Insight (Akkari)" etc.?

Likewise, Customs (...), Human? Hsunchen? Akkari?

Homeland Lore, I'm going to put the main homeland sections such as Ralios for Alekki, Caroni, Damali. Basmoli will get Prax, Pent for Gord-un, and Puma... I'll leave it blank, the player can fill it in. Anyone can change what gets put in automatically anyway.

Anywhere that says "Bow" I've given Self Bow, and "1H Spear" I've given "1H Short Spear". The user can change any of these values after they've been filled in.

2 minutes ago, Brian Duguid said:

I guess it's also worth noting that we can expect (source: Well of Daliath website) the official versions of the Rathori, Mraloti, Pralori, Basmoli and Telmori cults in one of the Cults of RuneQuest books some time in the next year or so. They will almost certainly not match mine precisely.

Everything from the JC that I'm adding is "optional extra", has to be merged in by clicking a button, and is prefixed with an acronym for the publication, so yours will always be "COH Rathori", "COH Mraloti", and the official ones will just be "Rathori", "Mraloti" etc. so the two sets of numbers can live side by side.

The only complication is if a weapon added in JC clashes name with a new core book weapon as I haven't prefixed those. Maybe I should, such as "COH Quill". I've gone with "Quill Contact" and "Quill Dart" so that would be "COH Quill Contact" and "COH Quill Dart". Those probably won't clash, but "Katana" from Pirates of the East Isles might.

4 hours ago, Brian Duguid said:

I've typed them in above in the forms used in the book: all the names above appear in the book except for the puma people (see below).

Thanks, that's saved me a ton of time.

4 hours ago, Brian Duguid said:

And in fact you could use that as a cop-out throughout, with "Worship (Rathori tradition)", "Cult Lore (Damali tradition)", etc. That might be best.

I could... but that's quite long, and there is limited space in the sheet layout.

Can you clarify something other things as well please:

Do Rathori get Transform Self?
Do Uncolings get Extension?

I'm very close to finishing now... just need to do everything for the Gord-Un, as I was working from the older PDF until today...

3 hours ago, svensson said:

There is always a possibility of death in a duel...

The duel being public serves two purposes: a] it 'clears the air' when two people have grievances for everyone involved [family, clan, cult, etc.] and b] 'secret murder' is one of the gravest and explosive charges that can be brought before a clan ring.

No, killing in a duel isn't secret murder. I think there's some rule that you can't pass more than two houses before approaching one of them to inform them that you just killed someone, and then it's not secret murder, not that it was murder anyway. So you should be able avoid the dead person's closest and most vengeful kin if you're worried that they will just kill you in revenge. Maybe that was a Viking rule, I might be muddling that up.

The key point is "secret". If you murder someone, you don't have to announce it to the community beforehand. You just have to admit it as soon as you can afterwards.

It's still murder, so you're open to some form of comeuppance, but not secret murder.

On 3/19/2023 at 10:51 AM, Joerg said:

Just the one point of rune magic, or the twenty-something magic points put into the percentage?

Just the one point, I'd say. In RQG now you can pump extra MP in to protect a spell from being dismissed, so that might be a good idea if you're investing 20MP in a spell, maybe put 5 of them in to prevent dismissal and live with 15 points of boost. I'm not a fan of being able to boost a spell to prevent dismissal. If you want that, cast Shield on yourself.

Also it takes a long time to cast that Sword Trance. Do you allow unlimited time before the duel to charge up your buffs?

I'm making headway into entering the character creation details into my online character generator.

I'm a bit stuck on what to enter for "Worship (...)" and "Cult Lore (...)" for some of them though! Many are obvious, such as references to Akkar in the text on the Akkari, Telmor is obvious for the Telmori, but some are not. Does anyone fancy having a go at making a list of what the cult name would be for the various hsunchen peoples detailed in the book?

Or you dismiss the other person's Sword Trance.

16 hours ago, SDLeary said:

Wait... you didn't know Greg was the Great Trickster?! 😉

It's always dangerous to accuse a trickster of being a trickster.

23 hours ago, Rick Meints said:

What I would hate though, is if a bot went to some pirate pdf site used all those pirated pdfs to scrape our actual content.

I doubt it, there's a chance that the training data might have stumbled across pirate pdfs but it won't have been by design. And GPT doesn't contain any of this text, it isn't doing that when being queried. It's all blended into a neural net which constructs an entirely new prose that satisfies its word probability pattern. It's more like a brain than a library.

The roadblock ahead for these tools is, what content will future versions be trained on? They aren't good enough to generate new content of the calibre of the content that they were fed, impressive though it may be the output is inferior to the input. There's a spark missing from the magic at the moment, it needs fresh input and that currently can only come from humans. Sure, it can produce working Python code, but when a new language is developed, how will it know how to write that? It might be able to infer a lot of it from the documentation (which will be written by humans, including code snippets). Same for new fiction, new roleplaying scenarios, new art.

There's something that humans are doing to create genuinely amazing and engaging art and prose, and for now we have a monopoly on that.

But it can create a decent ASCII art of Cthulhu:

     ,#####,
     #_   _#
    |a ` ` a|
    |       |
     )\ ^ /(
     / /_ /\
   (__ | | __)
  | | |_V/| | |
 | | |`---'| | |
    / / / \ \
    _/ | | _/
       | |
       | |
       | |
       | |
       | |
 

On 3/13/2023 at 3:43 PM, g33k said:

Rather amusingly, the "ai" shows it doesn't actually have any understanding of what it's doing.

The stats generated included:  STR 75% / DEX 80%
But it also included the text:  "... agile and sneaky, but not particularly strong ..." (they are in fact particularly strong; in core-BRP terms STR 15 is very good (that's top-ten-percent of a 3d6 population), and is their 2nd-highest stat after DEX 16)

GPT is usually pretty good at being consistent within itself, often calling back to things mentioned back at the very beginning of a response, but being unable to keep the numbers consistent with the text is an interesting failure.

I think dismissing it as "just plagiarism" is not accurate. In that sense, me answering a question about Glorantha or RuneQuest is plagiarism. I read it, converted it into an internal representation, and generated something that matches the pattern.

Sure, there are issues, but they aren't simple ones.

GPT style "AI" is a good parallel for the old "short worlds" that Greg was talking about in the '90s. A limited otherworld that has no connection to the infinite and as such will shrivel and collapse when exhausted.

1 minute ago, jajagappa said:

Would it be recognizable as a spell to dismiss? They'd have to recognize that it was: 1) a spell; 2) an active spell vs. some sort of magic doorway; 3) that it was a spell cast by the Trickster walking through it (by which point it's probably too late).

A good opening move if you are jumped by someone would probably be to cast a chunk of Dismiss Magic on SR 1.

On 3/14/2023 at 11:31 PM, jajagappa said:

Why Hallucinate "being" teleported when you can simply Hallucinate that you are in a room in a different city and the door leads out into it (and it does!). Or Hallucinate that you are on the side (or top) of Kero Fin. Etc.  The "transporting" is irrelevant, you simply ARE there.

Sure, but you know who just happened to be on the other side of that door? A paranoid priest who panics and immediately dismisses the Hallucinate spell.

On 3/7/2023 at 9:59 PM, Rodney Dangerduck said:

I respectfully disagree.  The Extension spell does say specifically otherwise: "any temporal Rune spell".  Any means any.  Nor does it say "with the same rune and rune points as the spell you are extending".

Sure, if you want to go with rules literalism, if that works for your group, then great. Other approaches to gaming in Glorantha are available.

On 3/7/2023 at 9:59 PM, Rodney Dangerduck said:

Arguably, you may have to make two rolls against different runes to succeed.  We haven't bothered with that level of detail.

I agree, I'd never ask a player to make two rolls to cast a spell with Extension. It kind of goes against the "rules literalism" philosophy, but no approach should be driven by blinkered absolutism.

On 3/12/2023 at 1:15 PM, soltakss said:

For me, life is too short to bother with "This Extension comes from Ernalda so I cannot use it on a Uleria spell", or "I cannot use Orlanthi and Storm Bull Shield together".

A spell is a spell is a spell in my opinion. So, I can use Ernalda's Extension to make an Aldrya spell last longer, or use 2 Runepoints from Ernalda and 3 from Aldrya to cast Extension 5. It makes the game simpler for me, with less crunchy and annoying rules. 

Entirely reasonable. Same conclusion as "rules literalism" but different reasoning to get there.

On 3/7/2023 at 9:40 PM, radmonger said:

People don't grant spells, cults do.

On 3/8/2023 at 10:01 AM, Scotty said:

Gods do.

Sorcery is something you learn. Spirit magic is something you have. Rune magic is something that you are.

You become the deity, you become a manifestation of that entity in the middle world. Can you be two things at once? Maybe. That could be an illumination power. Or it could be something that you heroquest to be able to do, find or follow a myth where the two deities worked together to achieve something. I'd say it isn't available to starting characters, but that's a choice, and is getting into Gloranthan cosmology rather than the more simple RuneQuest rules mechanics. It is entirely reasonable to take a rules literal approach and just play the game.

11 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

Perhaps a slight rephrasing - could they Hallucinate that they'd been Teleported there, and then be there?

I wouldn't say that they could hallucinate having been teleported, any more than they could hallucinate being healed, becoming illuminated, or having Flight or Bear's Strength or Become Giant cast on them. It's not a Wish spell.

Just think how many points of illusion you would need to truly hallucinate being in a different city. The entire city within your eyesight and earshot would have to be illusionary, that's millions of points of spell. Maybe if you did have Hallucinate 1,000,000 then that would be powerful enough to warp reality so far that the universe decides that it's just easier to pop the caster over there than to run all that simulation. If you want to try it, start saving up those Rune Points and tell me how it went!

15 hours ago, Geoff R Evil said:

I also add the rule the Eurmal cannot self delude itself via this hallucinogenic spell about anything it has not previously experienced….never seen acid, cannot hallucinate about it.

To a certain extent... but I would say that they can inadvertently experience things. They may have seen acid, but not know what it does, so if they hallucinate it then they can find out that it burns.

15 hours ago, Geoff R Evil said:

on the hole question - where someone said you cannot destroy via a creative illusion, I think that maybe true of illusions, but this is self delusion in a way that affects the world for you, so if I believe there is a hole there, there is! What I am doing is creating air where there was rock, displacement not destruction.

thoughts?

Of course it's impossible, but we're talking about tricksters here. Doing the impossible is part of their job. I'd say it's a coin toss whether it's real or not, and they test it beforehand then they don't really believe it so it isn't real. They have to run at that hole full tilt to find out. And yes, I know belief isn't relevant to illusions, but comedy is relevant to trickster magic so that trumps the ruling.

1 hour ago, Shiningbrow said:

Could a Hallucinate create a real enchantment that works for everyone? Eg, the Eurmali Hallucinates an enchantment for a Heal Body spell, and then can cast that spell on someone else?

They might believe it worked...

1 hour ago, Shiningbrow said:

Or Hallucinate a spirit that can cast spells?

They might believe the spirit spell was cast...

Of course a spirit might just appear totally coincidentally to the casting of the spell. And it might not be entirely helpful...

1 hour ago, Shiningbrow said:

Could they Hallucinate being in another city, and then be teleported there?

They'd just see the city around themselves for the duration. Maybe if they didn't intend to teleport then they might get teleported, if it's funny.

I love the idea of hallucinating a pillow strapped to the troll's club though. The inevitable argument with the GM is the best bit, "It's not real for the troll so it can't feel the softening of the blow therefore it isn't softened", "But it's real for me so it has to be softened..." Damned munchkins, don't you just hate 'em!

9 minutes ago, Darius West said:

In most games this sort of behavior is called an "exploit", which is performed by "power gamers", and yes, they specifically exploit the rules to turn their children into superheroes.  In Glorantha they were called the God Learners, and they are likely going to make a philosophical resurgence during the Hero Wars given that their secrets are now known again.

Okay, fair point, it could happen, my point was it's not the only way that such a myth could exist in Glorantha.

I have seen it argued that "this myth doesn't exist, because it isn't in any of Greg's writings, therefore someone in 1600s Glorantha would have to invent/discover it". I assumed that that was what was happening here.