PhilHibbs

Splitting this off from another thread... In a cartoon like OOTS, it's funny. If that's what you are going for in your Glorantha, great. I've played in campaigns where that kind of humour would not be out of place. It's the same as when an actor changes in a TV series. No-one asked Dario Naharis how he managed to grow that beard so quickly. How did he do it? Does Planetos biology have different folicles than our world? Is stochastic beard growth related to the unusual seasons? No, there was no change in the world, merely in our depiction of it. The old depiction was inaccurate, or the new depiction is inaccurate, but the underlying "reality" didn't suddenly change. Same for RuneQuest mechanics, or any other game world where the mechanics change from one edition to another. Unless you believe that all game worlds have to incorporate into their cosmology an explanation for sudden global changes to the rules of the world.

Good question. RQ2 had a few things like that, some of the treasures in The Sea Cave are similar, there's a potion that swaps points of characteristics around. Troll drinks and bee products can have some funky effects. There are some unique magic items in the Gamemaster Adventures, in one of the graves, but nothing like that.

Lets not go down that road. Not in this thread anyway, the OP already said it's not up for discussion, and I respect that.

Yes, we talked about that as well, but I'm not convinced. Who are these questers and what were they trying to do? If you decide you don't like the new rules and go back to a previous rule system (which we did, JRQ4 was too fiddly for us), does that mean that the changes didn't take hold, or that someone else quested to change them back? No, that's not something that I'm interested in incorporating into my Glorantha. I can see why some people love the idea though. In a different game world, I might enjoy that conceit. In theory, every game world has this possible question whenever new editions come out, and OOTS covered it brilliantly.

RQ2-Glorantha, RQ3-Glorantha, HeroQuest-Glorantha, RQG-Glorantha, 13th-Age-Glorantha, these are all the same game world. It doesn't change depending on what game system you are using. We had this discussion in my old RQ3 group when we started playtesting the Jovanovic RQ4 rules, "If he can't cast all his spells with a duration of 6 weeks any more, my character would notice the change!", which I reject entirely.

That's not necessarily true, since the rules are for adventurers. When you create an adventurer who has been a member of a cult all their adult life, and who can be assumed to have ambitions to advance to Rune Master, you are assumed to have access to all the common rune spells by the time you are 25. I'm not sure that that applies to all initiates, that everyone gets all the common spells right out of the gate. Although, it does say "An adventurer gains access to all common Rune spells available to the cult at initiation". And it repeats it in the Initiation section of the Rune Cults chapter. So I'm probably wrong. I think this is just a simplification, though. Do you really want to have to write down all the common spells that you have access to? And if you join a second cult, you will have separate access to the common spells through the new cult. You might know Extension, Heal Wound, Divination, and Multispell through Issaries, and when you join Orlanth you might learn Extension first, then Spirit Block, maybe Heal Wound again in case you run out of Issaries Rune Points, etc. It would be a nightmare of bookkeeping. So just because it's a RuneQuest rule for adventurers, doesn't mean it's a universal rule across the world. Game systems are necessarily an abstraction, a simplification, a focus on what is important in telling the story. Gloranthan reality didn't change when Jeff woke up one morning and decided "screw it, lets just give them all the common spells, that's so much easier and it encourages people to find uses for the more obscure spells".

It had never occurred to me that you might gain POW at a wyter's holy day worship ceremony (I know, I'm terrible at being a munchkin). I think it's likely to be on the same holy day as the clan or tribe's main deity, so nothing extra in terms of POW gains.

Is there any reason that a fetch's CHA can't increase in the same way as an adventurer? If the shaman accomplishes some famous deed in which his fetch plays a prominent roll, I think the GM could give a point to the fetch.

Actually that's a very good point - if you just read the Discorporate spell, it doesn't say that you travel into the Spirit World at all. Another thing that occurs to me is that a literal interpretation of the rules would imply that a shaman who casts Discorporation with Extension can regenerate magic points, which shamanic Discorporation disallows. The spell says that the discorporate adventurer "is treated in all respects like an ordinary disembodied spirit", and disembodied spirits recover MP don't they? Again, literal reading, and I wouldn't feel deeply burned if my GM said no.

If it were one point per point per person, there would be no "point" in the rule other than to reduce dice rolls. It clearly is per spell, not per point of spell. You could call that munchkinnery if you want, and some have taken that particular ballenlo and attempted to run with it! You're the traditional referee, go kick them! (For those not in-the-know, Joerg is really tall and often officiates at convention live-action Trollball games as the referee, see if you can spot him) I think that this will mostly be reactive rather than proactive - the wyter has to spend some POW in an emergency to fight off some threat, so the community leader exhorts the people to worship extra hard to restore it. Clans have them, and tribes have them, so in that sense yes. We know that regiments, war bands, and SMU units have them, I think families have them as well. I think the rulebook says once per season, Jeff said once per year earlier in this thread but he may have meant for a really big worship to replenish 40 spent POW.

The adventurer creation process will never result in a character who is actually qualified to become priest. That has to be done through play. Some people have managed to find ways to create adventurers who are already qualified for Rune Lord, but I think Priest is impossible. And if that makes you think "well how do NPCs become priests", the Adventurer creation system is just that. It's for creating "Adventurers", not all Gloranthans.

Ok, it's an assumption. But I'd rather make a reasonable assumption that backs up the mechanics presented than an unreasonable one that contradicts them.

That's what the Priest occupation is. It's someone who is training for the priesthood, like Yanioth. She is created using the Priest occupation, but she isn't qualified yet.

Some people seem to approach it from a purely mechanical point of view - the two game mechanics are different, therefore they cannot be combined as if they were the same. But if you approach it from a Gloranthan point of view, they aren't necessarily different, they might just be two different ways of modelling the same thing. We don't know that, though, it relies on making an assumption. This, I think, is really down to what is more fun for your group. If you want to go gonzo, then great. I certainly have done sometimes, it depends on what I or we want out of a particular game.

You're right, and I think that that is because we have a modern view of how economics work and Glorantha just isn't like that. RQ2 did have some silly adventure loot rewards and that brought with it silly prices for magic items. Picking the two apart is not easy, though, and we have the big unknown of the ingredients for healing potions.

I would be inclined to use the wyter's POW, but sure, it's really high. Shamans have a way of shrugging off mega-high POW attacks, maybe Rune Masters need to have a similar mechanic as well, in order to be able to potentially attack a temple. Or even another clan. Then again, a wyter would get a lot more benefit from its resources by buffing its own heroes, rather than attacking the attackers.

They have, but the process has always been unique and one-off, not something that can be given a trivial game mechanic that any group of people can do. I must have missed something, in what way is it not a spirit? I don't see how it is contentious, can you go over it one more time? It is a spirit It has a maximum POW based on the community side, on an exponential scale Community members can sacrifice POW to it It sometimes needs to spend that POW, so it will rarely be at full capacity Seems ok to me.

I've never seen any precedent for a mechanism for mortals to stack up POW in an unlimited manner, in Runequest terms, or more broadly for worshipers to create an entity of unlimited power in Gloranthan terms. That's simply not how the game or the world work. All decisions on game mechanics are arbitrary decisions. Wyters have a limit to how powerful they are, that's not arbitrary, that's Gloranthan metaphysics. Some game designer had to decide on a numerical way to represent that limit. How can that decision ever be made in a way that is not arbitrary? In principle I agree, but if there are in-world reasons why something has to be balanced, then the game has to implement balance. In this case, moderating the relative power of temple, clan, and tribal wyters, these things clearly are in some kind of balance in the world and so it is legitimate to model that balance.

Hang on just a second, a shaman doesn't need to expend RP to discorporate. Ah, I see, the other characters have to spend a RP to cast the spell. That wasn't entirely clear, so I don't find it odd at all.

Since the OP specifically said he doesn't want to use shamanism at all in his game, these comments are kind of off topic for this thread.

Splitting off to prevent further topic drift Surely if you are in Hell, then you are by definition dead already.

I don't know, but in my games life, death, time, causality, all these things become less clear the deeper you go. Certainly if you quest back to before Death came into the world, it makes no sense to die. Again, don't take my musings as anything official.

Dying in a Heroquest or other powerful otherworld ritual isn't necessarily the same as dying in the middle world (often, or usually, it is, but there are exceptions). More to the point, there is already a cost ascribed to learning a shamanic ability, "Kolat himself will dismember him, throwing his spirit to the Seven Winds so he can be remade" is just a narrative for the process.

If you want to self resurrect, you probably have to die to learn how to do it.