PhilHibbs

Yes, I've committed all the boardgamegeek URLs for RuneQuest magazine articles to memory. It's the only way. If only there were some kind of engine that allowed things to be searched for, then I wouldn't have to.

https://boardgamegeek.com/rpgissuearticle/20423/rune-blades White Dwarf (Issue 39 - Mar 1983)

IMHO, the laws of Gatametry are not the same as our geometry. Landscapes are magical entities, not just distances and areas. When you look down on the world from on high, the parts that stand out and dominate your perception are the powerful, significant ones, not necessarily the merely physically large areas between them. This is especially true if you are using magic to enhance your vision. Another way to put it - My glorantha really does vary! Also it occurs to me that geometry is a thing in Glorantha, but it's only used to measure the distances between inns and taverns.

Maybe the artist was using Farsee, which foreshortens distances. 4 points of the spell will make everything look 1/16 as far apart as they really are. And it probably makes the rays of vision travel more straight, meaning that you can see Kero Fin which would be largely beyond the "horizon" without the magic.

Yep. (although in this case he gets better... maybe...)

Bad am-dram productions are at the heart of Gloranthan heroquesting! https://kingofdragonpass.fandom.com/wiki/Uralda's_Blessing

Congratulations to us all on reaching 20 pages, we're definitely winning the forum. And that's all that's important in this game. Winning. Yay us!

Like Joerg already said, there's no hard line between "casting a rune spell" and a Heroquest. Any time you cast a rune spell, you do what the God did. You provably become the god for an instant, because only that god could do that, in order to invoke the god's power. When you cast Resurrection, you invoke Chalana Arroy, you do what she did, and for that moment you are Chalana Arroy's manifestation in the world. Of course this is all a bit deep for a game system like RuneQuest, it may be alluded to in the rules, and no doubt will be elaborated in the G&GoG.

If you just shift the boundaries by 10 years, your grandparents get the rolls in 1582 and 1597, parents from 1602 to 1610, and the character on 1613 and 1615. Of course any roll of "died" becomes "nearly died", and the history becomes a little sparse. It would be nice to get some more tables to roll on, so that the adventurer gets at least 4 things that they can have in their own background. I think expanded familty history tables for other regions and time periods would be top of my list for things to see in fan publications.

Well, that's Glorantha for you. Remember that it was not designed to be a game world! According to Greg, it wasn't even designed, it was discovered. He believed that he was revealing something that stemmed directly from the human experience of the transcendent.* Think of it like a Game of Thrones RPG - should the rules explain what gods are within the world and how they work? GRRM has not revealed that, maybe he himself does not know or has not really decided on all the details. *Or some such wordage. Either that or he was trolling us and he's just another Carlos Castaneda, but I choose to take him at his word.

The root of the current problem is that we have a game system with rules for a world that is inherently not rules-based (although opinions on that vary, as ever, I used to be a Hidden Variable Objectivist in my misguided youth). There will always be gaps. Gamers want rules, Glorantha doesn't work by clear rules. If you want to play in Glorantha with hard rules governing the whys and wherefores of situations like this, you will have to decide them for yourself.

I don't see how that helps. It provides at best a fig-leaf of an explanation. Q: "How does Humakt know?" A: "Because of a point of POW!" That's not an answer to me. I don't need or want an objective answer to that question.

Buy another copy and do both!

The big difference is the elective choices, with the +15 cult and +25 free choices you can get to 100% or even occasionally higher. No way can you do that with RQ3. My answer to the OP would be just to remove those options, give just the cult and (maybe reduced) occupation skills. Maybe give some additional points that cannot go on to already improved skills just for some level of personal choice. And no or only 1 free RP, plus from spent POW.

I don't understand what you are asking. If an initiate swears an oath as part of a magical ritual (Oath spell, initiation, taking on a geas, etc.) I think the god does know if they break it. If they just swear an oath with no ritual or ceremony, then the god won't know as the "way to the otherworld" has not been opened, a magical connection from the middle world to the gods world has not been established. Can you give an example of what you are thinking the contradiction is? I'm not saying there isn't a contradiction, Glorantha is full of them.

There is no "god of truth" in the Orlanthi pantheon. There is no "god of hunting" either, Odayla and Yinkin are both hunting gods, or "gods of hunting" if you prefer, although that makes it sound absolute and excusive in the way that you are assuming. There's a certain amount of rivalry and conflict between the two, and some clans will favour one over the other, but they aren't out to wipe each other out. Humakt and Lhankor Mhy are both Truth gods. Humakt is the "owner" of the Death rune, he's the paramout exemplar of Death in the Heortling mythology, some say he IS Death. But he isn't the only Death god, and his worshipers are not all out to kill all other Death God cultists.

They are both tricksters. Or, maybe they are both the same trickster whose "Detach" spell has gone horribly wrong. Always trying to reunite his two halves, always failing.

Getting back to the more general geas-breaking situation, I'm a little torn. I don't want to wreck anyone's character, and I don't want it to be too easy for them to wreck it themselves by accident. It's already too easy to lose a Humakt character to death (no resurrections this time!), if they lose their Humakt initiate status AND all swords shatter when they pick them up, that's a fate worse than death for some players. You're stuck with a character that is useless, and at best the game is derailed by focusing on rehabilitating the Humakti somehow (which could be interesting, or not). Whilst some see playing a Humakti as a serious commitment, it's also very popular among teenagers who just want to have fun playing a super-warrior. None of my group are kids, fortunately, but player of the Humakti has had issues with abusive GMs in the past picking on her characters, so I do have to be careful. If she decides on a course of action that will lead to geas-breaking, I'll of course warn her. If it's something out of her control, then that could be tough. I don't want to risk harming a friendship over a game. The biggest risk is that we both forget, and at the end of the session, someone says "Hey, remember that time you smacked my character on the back of the head in the pub? Wasn't that an ambush?"

Lets not go any further down this rabbit hole, please, jokes about donuts and Jedi have gone on a little too long regardless of the veracity of real world political references. I think we need a moderator to come along and delete most of the last 15 messages in this thread, including this one!

So this isn't an example of "If the player even tries to rules-lawyer or weasel it, its super mega smite time", then. Smite happens regardless of which player engineered the situation.

I don't see a difference between the Humakti's player and another player saying that. If the actions and intentions of the characters in the world are the same, then the consequences in the world are the same.

Here we come to the inherent conflict between Glorantha and RuneQuest (or any game system). Glorantha is a mythology, a mystical experience revealed to the world primarily by Greg Stafford. Even he never really understood all the fine details of how everything works in Glorantha, and RuneQuest will only ever be a simplistic sketch of Glorantha with certain details glossed over. You're absolutely right to go by what the rules say, if you don't want to delve into the arcane mysteries of Glorantha to discover your own truths. But the discussion of such things as "what happens when an initiate breaks a geas", here we're talking more about Gloranthan reality than we are the letter of the RuneQuest rules, which aren't clear anyway on the mechanism for geas-breaking. In that realm, Jeff is the closest we have to an authority in the corporeal absence of Greg. That's what I was getting at earlier. Personally I don't think geas breaking or oath breaking has anything to do with knowledge anyway, so the "what does the deity know" point is moot. The deity "knows" that the initiate has broken a geas because the initiate-deity connection is suddenly severed. Some people (Mundane and Gloranthan) might describe it as the deity knowing and acting, but it's like the blind men describing different parts of an elephant.

That's a pretty bold, some might say confrontational, statement. If you're going to say things like that, would you care to compare your credentials to Jeff's for us? Fine, in your Glorantha you're the absolute arbiter of reality. But in the official published Glorantha... I don't think knowledge has anything to do with it. I also disagree with this, by the way, I think the player is entirely permitted to come up with creative in-world, in-character reasons why it isn't a violation. What if he wasn't wearing boots!!! (I actually once played a trickster who had "Become Pair of Smoking Boots", it was only on the second time he used it that someone in the party thought to ask, "was he even wearing boots?" Turns out he always wore sandals...)

Magic is cheating? Not that old chestnut again... <ducks>

It was 1D6 in RQ3 as well. I've had a character use it once myself, and seen it used once to kill a giant, both in RQ3 where it was one-use to initiates.