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benwaggoner

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Everything posted by benwaggoner

  1. Wow. Me and my crew were avid superhero RPG players in high school. And we played them all: Champions, Marvel Super Heroes, Advanced Marvel Super Heroes, Villians and Vigilanties, GURPS Supers, and maybe others. So thinking back 30-35 years, I recall SuperWorld being a little over-specific. Like a fire blast was just a fire blast. The Hero system with Champions gave you an Energy Blast power and then lots of modifiers to make it fire or ice, a beam or a cone, etcetera. That made it much easier to create all sorts of heroes not tied to a particular game world. Really, almost any Marvel or DC character could be done in Hero (although not at standard starting character points, often) Pure points-based character creation with extra points for taking disadvantages was also great. Rolling dice just seemed weird for superheroes (and could yield some astronomical power differentials in V&V for an extreme example). I also remember that BRP style 3d6 stats didn't seem to scale sensibly. A new SuperWorld based on BRP mechanics probably needs to be tied to a specific setting that has some sensible restrictions on what's possible. Skills tend to be specific, and cosmic level powers like Superman or Dr. Manhattan should be off the table as playble. Superman in Superworld should be like the Crimson Bat in RuneQuest; the numbers are just nothing that can be grappled with as numbers. Doc Savage, John Carter, The Boys, maybe 60's Marvel power levels, sure. A Rune Lord is pretty superheroic. So, reviving 30-35 year old memories.
  2. In that infant and childhood mortality rates would be a lot lower with magic availability? High fertility rates are really tied to high pre-adult mortality rates, so with a more secure assumption any given child is going to live long enough to start their own family, the "womb bearers" would be under a lot less pressure to all be pushing out as many babies as possible. This allows for all women to spend less time pregnant, and for women who "go Vinga" during childbearing years to not seem like a threat to the future of the household/clan. Higher adult male mortality rates don't matter as much, particularly without taboos around widows remarrying. Also, a lot of the cultures seem like they're somewhat at Malthusian equilibrium, in that famines happen periodically that kill significant number of people. So it's not like tribes are trying to outbreed others unless they are also aquiring more farmland at the same time. I'd expect that households that already have a lot of kids relative to the adults and resource availability probably discourage everyone trying to get pregnant at once for a while.
  3. Wow, thank you for an answer more comprehensive than I could have imagined! Glorantha people are really the best people.
  4. Is there any more detail/documentation about his strong feelings? Androgeous was there from the very start, certainly, and gender was treated as both more relevant and less determinstic in RuneQuest than other systems of the era.
  5. So, going back to when I bought 2nd edition RQ in the early 90's, fonts have been drawn with ragged edges to the strokes. At first I thought it was trying to emulate how Norse runes looked carved onto the horizontal grain of wood (which is why there aren't any horizontal lines in the runes, IIRC). But the little divits or whatever follow the stroke, like perhaps it's supposed to look like a quill pen? I suspect most of us just use the font or graphics that have been around forever and not really think about it. But someone I know wants a Harmony Rune tattoo, so it's become an important question. So, in-universe, are the runes normally drawn with ragged edges like that? Or is that just an Oranthi thing or something, or just a creative artifact from 1970's California? Thus, would a Harmony rune carved by a master stonecarver in Glorantha have nice straight stroke like old Roman stone carved text? That's my tentative answer for my Glorantha, but I'm curious if anyone has other or deeper takes.
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