GAZZA

I'd be interested in seeing that if you can find it. My group has finished River of Cradles, and are about to go into Scenario 4 of Borderlands (which is slightly problematic, because the PCs do meet the Duke in River of Cradles, and then see him building his fort in Borderlands... but I just decided he had some sort of temporary fortification at the time they met in RoC). I'd like to use both Sun Country and Strangers in Prax, and I definitely want to run the Cradle.

How does a Humakti fit into this? They are supposed to ritually sever their ties, but (AFAIK) they aren't forbidden from marrying. Would they still be candidates for match makers, or would ironically the god of death's worshippers be the most likely to follow their hearts?

Yeah I reckon they must leave that off the brochure.

Nah I'm pretty sure ABBA are hard core RQ players. You can't write something as profound as "Bang, A Boomer-boomerang" without knowing how Nysalor, Sedenya, and Argrath all fit together.

I don't know what the rule is, but I used their MP + CHA to calculate their spirit combat damage (which means it changes as they start to lose).

Ah right, cool, I had the impression that wraiths were no longer a thing in RQG except perhaps as a specialised form of spirit - which, to be fair, would not be inconsistent with that ruling. So no sorcerously created vampires then? I wonder because immortality is something a lot of sorcerers seem to be after, whereas as I understand it most Malkioni can't use the Vivamort path (please correct me if I'm wrong). I believe there was an RQ3 spell that suppressed aging as long as you kept it active; perhaps that's the intended path for immortal Malkioni.

Yeah sorry dudes, I wasn't serious about the lawyers. I was just ducking the responsibility to parody the entire song.

I can do the whole chorus though: "Sartarites! "We were defeated, you won the war. "Sartarites "Serving Sedenya forevermore... "Sartarites! "Dragon rose up, and we're in the maw "Sartarites "Reaching Moon Temple is on the floor "Woah woah woah Satarites "Still serving Sedenya forevermore." I expect ABBA will be reaching out with a lawsuit should I proceed. Professional jealousy, you know.

It would technically be one blonde and one brunette, but no, sadly, I am bereft of musical acquaintances fitting that requirement. Too late for Eurovision this year anyway.

"Sartarites! "We were defeated, you won the war. "Sartarites "Serving Sedenya forevermore..." Hmm... I can see why ABBA went with Waterloo.

While still very powerful, in RQ3 (even in the core rules, strangely, which had Fantasy Europe as the default setting instead of Glorantha) gods were explicitly unable to answer questions about the future as they were outside Time. One could consider porting that into RQG. That still makes Divinations very powerful, but avoids any temporal paradoxes. I see such Divinations as useful for such questions (some examples from my campaign): "How can I get rid of this Chaos curse of Doubt?" "What enemies can we expect in the Stone Tower?" "How did the Duke's wife contract the Shakes?" "Why is the Duke's wife disease so resistant to treatment?" Note that not all gods could answer all of these questions; I'd further want to restrict it such that: Gods can't tell on each other. You can ask general questions about occupants of a location, but you couldn't ask "where did that nasty Tusk Rider just get teleported to via Divine Intervention?" and expect an answer as that would be Humakt/Odayla/Foundchild/Yelm revealing information about an initiate of the Bloody Tusk. Gods generally only "see" their own domain. Orlanth can theoretically see anywhere the wind blows (I'd make it unlikely he could tell you much about what was happening underground); Ernalda can see into the Earth (so caves, underground bunkers, and the like are her domain - though she could certainly also tell you where to find fertile farming ground and the like), Humakt won't be of great assistance helping with healing, and so on. Gods know pretty well what their Rune levels are doing, and to a much lesser extent what their initiates are doing. (There may be exceptions for illuminates here of course). They are not omniscient. Most/all of these were in RQ3 I think; perhaps one of the upcoming sourcebooks will add in some of this or at least give some similar advice.

Are there vampires in Glorantha that do not worship Vivamort, or is that the only route? (Similar to how you could have zombies in RQ3 that were not ZZ zombies - ZZZs? - if you used the spirit magic or sorcery spells to create them).

Math checks out.

Lord of Light is my favourite Zelazny novel (which is saying a lot, as I love everything the man ever wrote) and indeed my favourite novel of all time. While Nirriti is certainly opposed to Sam (the protagonist), I wouldn't necessarily say they're any more evil than some of the others - the horde of corpses is mentioned fearfully more because of their military might than any suggestion that souls were involved (and souls definitely exist in Lord of Light - there are some "bad guys" that are essentially just souls).

As Joerge points out above, I am indeed referring to the Narrative/Simulationist/Gamist divide (not that I necessarily ascribe to it, I was using it as a shorthand that I really shouldn't have assumed was obvious - my apologies).

Fair points Joerg, but RQ is definitely historically on the S side of the old NGS divide. (Consider how comparatively complicated combat is, for example, even compared to other BRP games - not a criticism, just an observation). The "clan connected based play" that RQG endorses (it's still fine for the old scenario based play - but that's no longer the focus) does make Farming in particular and occupational skills in general more important than it "used" to be, so the analysis of how Bless Crops can essentially subvert that does strike me as both interesting and valid.

It's not that I disagree, but you could argue that stabbing people is just the technological improvement of naturally occurring processes too, and yet we want our Sword skill to be worth something. (Of course you could reasonably argue that Sword Trance is basically the Bless Crops equivalent there, I guess ).

Yeah I need to stop using the Bat as an example.

Cheers, I wasn't aware of that.

Yeah I agree it's fine if it's a CA only spell. It's only the "Harmonise from RQ2 becomes the Harmony Rune spell" bit that threw me.

Well (shrug) it's not in Rune Fixes. That strikes me very much as a "oops, we screwed up, uhh... yeah, that's right, no CHA requirement for that cult! Phew!" moment to me; and honestly I would have thought "oops, I guess Tusk Riders should have 3d6 CHA" is a better correction. I mean, it's abundantly clear that the whole INT -> CHA thing resulted in errors (for example, if you get an awakened small animal in character creation it has 3d6 INT/3d6 POW but no CHA, and yet somehow knows 3 points of spirit magic; my query about that was that, indeed, the animal should get 3d6 CHA too; of course, that isn't in Rune Fixes either). I don't really see this as anything more than an additional example of Chaosium forgetting that just because you had low (or no) APP in RQ3 doesn't mean you should have low (or no) CHA in RQG. That's an easy enough mistake to make, it's a big book, and there's a lot of copy/paste stuff that could easily have slipped through the net. Still, to each their own; if you prefer that Tusk Riders suddenly forgot a bunch of magic when the world changed from RQ3 to RQG, then that's fine too - and I doubt Tusk Riders are an important enough elder race that it really matters to a lot of GMs anyway.

I don't disagree mate, but that's what the RQG conversion guide says ("Harmonise is now the Rune spell Harmony"). You're certainly fair to say that letting CA priests distribute Harmony matrices far and wide, or Spell Trading it, is probably out of order.

Thanks for the tip, so Death Binding is not new and (from what I can see in Elder Secrets) is basically unchanged for RQG. And why do you say that Tusk Rider Rune Lords don't have a CHA requirement? According to RQG pp280 all Rune Lords have a 18+ CHA requirement. Granted many of them repeat this requirement in the cult description, but it does seem quite a leap that we're supposed to realise Bloody Task is an exception implicitly. For example Babeester Gor doesn't mention such a requirement as well, but I wouldn't have assumed that was an exception - merely that it is assumed since pp280 says it's a general requirement for Rune Lords, that it is not necessary to repeat it for each cult. So at the very least, an RQ3 Tusk Rider could throw around spirit magic and Rune magic pretty much identically to a human, and he might well have Death Binding for moar power. His RQG equivalent needs Death Binding to have any reasonable hope of competing at all, and no Tusk Rider can be a Rune Lord of the Bloody Tusk (or actually of any cult) unless you're right that the omission of the CHA requirement should be taken as an exception (which means that Babs just got even more power gamer friendly ). All due respect, I think I'm going with the idea that they should have 3d6 CHA in RQG, and that this was a mistake, at least IMG.

Or an Issaries that casts Spell Trading, or anyone with a matrix that has it... Though I will grant you that this is an alternative to how it is supposed to work; you could easily argue that CA matrix enchanters put appropriate conditions on it, and that they won't trade it. The main issue (and why it came up) is that it used to be the spirit magic spell Harmonise and therefore conversions (such as one of the Tusk Riders in Borderlands) are a bit weird. (Harmonise was far less powerful). I think you've convinced me though; I might just make the matrix that the Tusk Rider has something else.

But you don't cast Harmony on the Bat; you cast it on yourself (as I say, it's an "aura" spell. The Bat doesn't absorb spells etc. in a radius, only spells directly targeted at it. However if it makes the point clearer ignore the specific example of the Bat - I'm more generally suggesting that Harmony allows you to beat the snot out of anyone without retaliation (or at least, not violent retaliation), which I very much doubt was intended.