GAZZA

IMHO Substance is where the problem starts. Throw away Substance and you can make them actual illusions - that is, not the quasi-real hybrid that they currently are. Actual illusions that can be spotted with an appropriate Perception roll could be made a fair bit cheaper. But once you throw in Substance you're really not dealing with what I would traditionally call "illusions" any more, you're treading on to the domain of conjuring/summoning at that point. And while I would certainly agree that if it works out cheaper to actually summon and control (e.g.) a fire elemental than to make an illusion of one with similar powers then something has gone wrong, I can appreciate that it tricky to write balanced "quasi-summoning" spells and that it's usually safer to err on the side of "too weak" than "too powerful". Which is not to say it can't be done - just that what we ended up with was essentially just copy/pasted from RQ3 (as @davecake noted in the OP): it's the older edition that introduced the problem, RQG just failed to fix it.

Y'all know what the internet is like - if you forget to copy something on Monday, by the time it's Tuesday it's gone. (Perhaps a slight exaggeration). Long ago, I had located someone's RQ site where it had some house rules for task resolution. I recall several pieces of it, but not details: The basic mechanic was that tasks had a difficulty, typically between 1 and 100. I believe the idea was that you take the PC skill rating, subtract the difficulty rating, subtract an additional 100, and add a d100. For example, let's say Joe Average has Swim 50%. He's trying to cross a turbulent lake with difficulty factor 30. 50-30-100 = -80, he adds the result of a d100 to that. A positive result is success, 0 or less is a failure. In some cases there were thresholds that needed to be passed as well. These were treated as armour points. Divide a successful total by 5 (rounding down) and subtract the threshold to see how much progress you make, with a task requiring a certain total to succeed. This was used primarily for extended tasks, such as crafting. If I recall correctly it also had a similar system for 3d6 based systems. Does anyone know of anything like that, and if so can you either shove me the document or the URL? I am pretty sure the above is enough to use, if need be, but there were a lot of interesting details in the original that I'd ideally like to review.

More or less, except that RQ3 pretty much everyone starts as an initiate (as in RQG). In RQ2, becoming an initiate was likely to be something you achieved after at least a few sessions of play, depending on whether you started with prior experience or not.

So I understand. It will likely be several months before my campaign starts, and I'm certainly not handing out the likes of Harrek as pre-gens - but I always plan for the PCs to be the stars of the show, and if the show is called Hero Wars, well... they will potentially eventually be very bright stars indeed.

(shrug) That's more or less what I was asking - whether it was a local custom or not.

Eh. If you let PCs become illuminated - and a lot of GMs won't, which is absolutely fair enough - then you at least need to be prepared for this sort of thing. I think @soltakss website describes a campaign where all of the PCs were illuminates; one of them (a dark troll, the name escapes me) had an overall goal of breaking the Curse of Kin, no matter what it took. If I recall correctly the troll became a Thanatar Hero, in addition to what was presumably more normal cults such as Zorak Zoran. One can envisage a Storm Bull illuminate that wants to permanently kill the Crimson Bat with a similar level of fanaticism, such that they are prepared to use the weapons of Thanatar in the fight. I mean I'm not suggesting it's particularly likely but I would be astonished if, having become an illuminate, no player was at all interested in joining a Chaos cult with their new found "undetectable" status. It's no different than an illuminated broo becoming a Chalana Array priestess after all, and if I recall correctly there is such a character in a published supplement somewhere.

I don't have a campaign going yet. I'm hoping by the time I finish prepping for the first few sessions the campaign guide and maybe Gods and Goddesses of Glorantha will be available (I don't consider RQG sufficiently complete to be playable yet). But, should such a situation exist, I will certainly not be disallowing it on a silly basis like "unfortunately your tattoos blow your cover".

Can we agree at least that using the phrase "initiated into" to mean "become a lay member of" is needlessly confusing? RQ3 largely did away with lay membership; pretty much the first rung on cult membership became initiate instead. RQ2 didn't; there were cults where you had to have been a lay member for X years before you could even try to become an initiate. One can certainly argue about which of these previous versions got it correct, but from the standpoint of RQG it seems that lay membership, at the very least, is not important in game terms. If "initiated into the cult of Orlanth Adventurous" really is intended to mean "became a lay member of the cult of Orlanth Adventurous" then that is a bizarre decision akin to D&D's varied use of the term "level" - a needless barrier to comprehension from new GMs given that alternative language is readily available. I submit that most new GMs that see the phrase "initiated into" are going to assume that means "becomes an Initiate of", and honestly it's hard to say RAW that they're wrong to do so. Certainly as I'm converting over Borderlands and Beyond for my upcoming RQG game I'm redoing the NPCs initiates as having Rune Points, even though they rarely do in the (RQ2) original.

Those look like entirely reasonable "house rules" to me, which I will likely adopt. The advantage of requiring initiates to buy access to specific common Rune spells is that it will avoid analysis paralysis for new RQ players; they won't have as many options to start with, which means that their introduction to the options can be gentle. And we know it isn't crippling, because RQ2/3 initiates had it even worse. I'd probably open up all the common spells once you hit Rune level and, if I was in a nice mood, might even allow a former Humakt initiate that had sacrificed for access to Heal Wound to trade it for a Humakt special Rune spell upon becoming a Sword.

That being true, why do the stigmata for the PCs in River of Cradles raise such comment? Wouldn't the common existence of cult tattoos imply that most observers would simply assume the PCs were Zola Fel initiates, at least at first glance? I think I will keep tattooing for things like matrices and the like IMG, though I do appreciate the comments.

"Miniscrule" and "rare" are often synonyms for "PC" though. And frankly, I don't really care about the demographics of Illuminated Storm Bull/Thanatar cultists so much as I care about what happens when a PC Storm Bull Illuminate decides to join Thanatar - does the new Chaos tattoo she'd apparently get immediately give the game away? So yeah, I'm sticking with the "auto tattoos are silly" IMG.

Some really good stuff here. Personally I don't think the Lunars are bad guys at all. Let's look at Orlanth. This is a dude that got his mate to nick Death so he could murder the Sun. Sure, he felt bad about it once the world was almost destroyed as a result, but guilt doesn't wash away sin right? In favour of making Lunars not "equivalent to broo" is that there are some cool rules for Lunar magic, Illumination, and some cool variant gods that seems honestly to be a waste of effort to stat up if it's just for NPCs. GMs are never going to be as creative with Lunar Sorcery (for example) as players might be, and players will enjoy it more - isn't it all about MGF after all? On the other hand I'm not saying the Lunars are exactly good guys either, but there are published examples of good guy Lunars (the Coders spring to mind, Duke Raus is a decent bloke, and so on) so it seems entirely fair to me to let individual PCs decide who they think are the good and bad guys in any given situation. To me, the important reason that Lunars are the enemy to Orlanthi is that the former are conquering all their land more than that some of them use Chaos, though the latter is obviously useful to Orlanthi propagandists.

I am the same - not because I dislike the story, but because I want to run a game. Cool things should be done by PCs, not NPCs.

The funny thing to me is that this is one of the cases where RQG copied RQ3 instead of RQ2. Initiates are not common in RQ2; you can play for (game time) months before becoming an initiate and getting any Rune spells at all, and there's none of this "success is automatic if your parents were initiates" stuff: you have to pass the test, and it is entirely possible to fail and have to wait a fair while before you can try again. A possible house rule: only PCs (and special NPCs, which would include Godtalkers, Rune Priests, and Rune Lords) get Rune Points; everyone else is stuck with spirit magic. Maybe you can only sacrifice POW after some sort of special service or something, which is assumed to be true for PCs at character generation. I'm also not entirely convinced initiates really need weekly holy days; maybe you need Rune Level for those. (Heck, maybe initiates can only get them back on the High Holy Day if you really want to pull it back). That tones it down a fair bit. I'm currently reading through Borderlands And Beyond prepping for a new campaign and even the likes of Duke Raus don't have any Rune magic, so it is a change and it likely does mean that the compatibility is not necessarily as trivial as is claimed by the conversion document.

The Gloranthan Bestiary seems to be missing some fairly vital notes for Lesser Hydra. Firstly, as written, it doesn't say that losing heads doesn't instjib it as would a creature with only 1 head. Secondly, it doesn't say that hydra get to make bites with all of their heads (a single Bite attack is listed, and there are no notes before or after it that say "per head"). Obviously anyone who's played with hydra in virtually any gaming system can probably intuit that, but it still seems wrong to omit it regardless.

I'm going to skip the whole thing I think. It seems kind of silly to me.

There doesn't seem to be anything specific regarding this, but for example the Prince of Sartar comic has the initiation process of Argrath resulting in him getting magical Movement and Air tattoos, and the Razoress is covered with them. This contrasts at least mildly with RQ3 River of Cradles (where the stigmata of Zola Fel are curiosities) and more specifically seems to make Illumination a lot less dangerous. If an Illuminated Storm Bull decides to become a Rune Lord of Thanatar, he's going to be spotted by the new tats even if Detect Chaos can't see him. (Or possibly Illuminate tattoos can be visible or invisible as the Illuminate desires, I suppose).

One of the signature abilities of broo in prior editions was that they were immune to all diseases (though they could and often were carriers, they suffer no symptoms). I cannot see anything in the Gloranthan Bestiary that states this is still the case (even though it does say that they might be a carrier of a disease, it says nothing about immunity). I see three possibilities: I've missed it. Entirely possible, though I did check a couple of times. Broo are no longer automatically immune to diseases, though presumably a given broo might be due to a chaotic feature. The disease immune property was accidentally omitted. I assume it's case 1 or 3, right?

That is a reasonable argument that some form of Rune magic making Humakti good with swords should exist, but it does not translate to "so therefore they can spend a handful of magic points on a 1 point Rune spell". With a few simple find/replace instructions you can say that Urox did a pretty decent job of fighting Chaos in the God Time, but he doesn't get an I Win button - he gets Berserker, which is a 2 point Rune spell that is less powerful than Axe/Sword trance with a relatively small magic point investment and not only still lets you parry and dodge, it actually boosts your parry skill as well. Plus, what you're implying there is that the Humakti should face some sort of penalty if they do use it for "fancy swordplay", but no such restriction appears on the spell. As written a couple of PC Humakti could bust out Sword Trances and fight to first blood to decide whether or not to go left or right at the T junction. And frankly, fair enough - "only use this when your god would" is a Hero Quest thing, the mundane world should have looser restrictions. (IMG, that's why Uroxi can cast Berserker even when faced with non-Chaotic foes - it may not work as well, because true Uroxi should be battling Chaos, not trolls/dwarfs/elves/whatever - but it still works, because this is the world of Time, not God Time. It might be a very different story if a Uroxi Heroquester busts out Berserker to kill the ferryman rather than pay the toll, or whatever). Of course YGMV, but saying that players can only use Rune spells in "mythically appropriate situations" - which is, to be fair, a little further than you're saying here, but I hope you will accept it is not an entirely unfair extension - is essentially trying to use roleplaying considerations to balance mechanics - not an idea that has historically been very successful. Ideally the rules should work more or less shorn of context - you and I might prefer to play RQ in Glorantha (and if I seem at all negative, let me reiterate: I think a lot of things in RQG are awesome, and I wouldn't waste my time arguing if I didn't care about it; bad products earn my scorn at best, good but flawed products earn my desire to fix the flaws), but there's nothing innately wrong with lifting the RQG mechanics and using them to play in a home brewed world. In such a world Sword Trance might be given to pretty much all warrior gods and the Death god might be an assassin type that doesn't have Sword Trance at all. The rule of thumb ought to be, "How does this 1 point Rune spell compare to other 1 point Rune spells?" The designers know this - that's why they pretty much say that's the rule of thumb to use when designing new spells. So it comes down to either the designers think that Sword Trance/Axe Trance is roughly equivalent to, e.g., Heal Wound or a 1 point Lighting spell, or that they made a mistake here for some reason. Now, given that RQ3 (per Gods of Glorantha) included Axe Trance pretty much word for word as it is in RQG, my feelings lean toward the latter. (The general consensus in RQ3 was that Axe Trance was grossly overpowered. Even if you disagree with that in RQ3, the fact that it now boosts parry as well is, at the very least, a possibly unintended side effect). Yes, this is that accursed "game balance". But pearl clutching "RQ doesn't care about game balance" objections aside, of course it does. If game balance didn't matter at all, why are some spells more expensive than others? There seems to be a few misconceptions here. Nobody is demanding that every character be the same, or even equally valuable - that's not what game balance means. Game balance just means that the game is internally consistent - and even there, it needn't be (and likely cannot be) perfect. The idea that Humakti should be able to boost their sword skills in some fashion would still be true if Sword Trance, say, was a stackable Rune spell that boosted by 10% per point (or whatever). Nobody is saying that Humakti shouldn't be good at swords. We're noting instead that the specific spell is broken. Arguing that it isn't broken because of a God Time event that doesn't exactly name check Sword Trance is not particularly convincing.

Um. Generally speaking, spell or spell, would you always use a bow/sword/AnyObjectAtAllByDefinition for things you would normally use a bow/sword/AnyObjectAtAllByDefinition for? If that was the description of the spells I'd be scratching my head and wondering what you can do with a bow/sword/AnyObjectAtAllByDefinition without casting that spell. More specifically though, the fact that Arrow Trance doesn't let you parry is a pretty big deal, in line with similar restrictions on similar spells (Fanaticism, Berserker). Axe Trance in RQ3 was gross enough when it didn't affect your Parry skill. To be absolutely clear: I do not consider that the Trance effect would balance Axe/Sword trance even if it was in the rules. A "can't do anything not Axe/Sword related" trance effect would be better than the current version - that's a low bar to clear - but it is not presently there, and until appropriate errata is issued, it would not be my preferred way to balance the spells. YMMV of course.

And not, in fact, defined. RAW, it is entirely fair to say that the Berserker simply no longer has access to his highest Loyalty passions. Look, I played RQ2 back in the day as well. I'm well aware of what Berserker used to say. I'm pointing out that it doesn't say that anymore. Was it supposed it? Possibly - maybe even probably - but it doesn't. Should it? That is debatable... for 2 Rune points you get something that acts as Fanaticism with a bunch more disadvantages and some minor buffs (Countermagic good - though again it is unclear whether the Countermagic provided by Berserker would be blown off once it countered a 1-3 point spirit spell; Shield says it wouldn't, Berserker doesn't - immunity to exhaustion etc. very situational). Remember the context here is that you can probably get a much better boost from Sword or Axe Trance and not only can you still parry, but you can parry better - and both of those are only 1 point Rune spells. I submit that it is, at the very least, on the table to consider that the RQ2 "Berserker turns around and whollops his mates" interpretation is unnecessary to make Berserker the sort of spell you don't use every day. Sometimes editing omissions - if that's what it was - can be fortuitous.

I mean, I don't see how that works for your interpretation at all: In a game that has specific Loyalty mechanics it would have been even easier for them to point out what these mean in the context of the spell. And they didn't... What about characters that don't have any Loyalty passions? So no, I do not think that is a reference to mechanics. Of course you are free to run it that way should you so desire, but from your point that you allow PCs to metagame and get the Uroxi to waste his Berserker rage on already dead opponents, I really don't think you fundamentally disagree with me - you've just chosen the "run it the RQ2 way but defang it" rather than "this was a poorly described spell that left out the crucial bit from RQ2" way. Again - it's a 2 point Rune spell that is barely better than Fanatacism. Barring errata, my gut tells me that it doesn't need the "attack friends" bit to be balanced. Someone else mentioned that there's no point to the CA ability to calm Uroxi without it - again, I disagree, because Berserker does impose several limitations that are, frankly, bad enough (inability to dodge, parry, use magic... put it this way, people cast Fanaticism on bad guys all the time to make them easier to hit. If Berserker could be cast on your foes, it would be a way better version of that tactic in many cases, even without the possibility that they'd turn on their friends). FWIW though I suspect that this is just another cast of poor editing.

To be clear I'm not saying that I don't find these rulings reasonable. But they're not really obvious from the text. Could possibly use some clarification.

I would argue that this is, at the very least, unclear. All it says is that the weapon attack is resolved as normal, but the spirit uses its Spirit Combat skill. Though for what it's worth I'm inclined to think that the idea of hurting spirits with normal attacks is questionable at best.

(shrug) It flat out does not say you will attack your friends. I even gave you what the text should (IMO) look like if it was supposed to imply that. Evidently YMMV, but I do not agree that RAW says that the disadvantages to Berserker include danger to your friends. I don't see why it should, personally - a 2 point Rune spell that is barely better than the spirit spell Fanaticism unless you're up against Chaos doesn't need that sort of disadvantage to be balanced.