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Smoking Ruin or Pegasus Plateau?


commandercrud

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NB: the Quickstart and the three GM Screen Pack adventures are also good for players new to RuneQuest. But Andre is right - more adventures are empirically better. 

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"The Smoking Ruin" adventure, in (drumroll please!) The Smoking Ruin, might be a good one for your group, if they're ok with a few sessions that are heavy on NPC interaction. I think it really showcases a lot of Gloranthan themes and shows how a Runequest adventure can be similar, but very different from your standard D&D romp. And I love the "Wild Temple" location that's outlined in TSR. Since your players are experienced with Call of Cthulhu, "The Crimson Petals" in Pegasus Plateau could be a good intro to Runequest and Glorantha (at least Sartarite Dragon Pass), since there's a lot of room for playing investigator and violence probably won't be to the death. "Gloomwillow's Hollow," in PP, looks to be a really interesting and evocative adventure, though several people who've reviewed it or posted actual play reports note that the main villain is potentially, very hard to deal with (so, maybe not for newbies?) If you want to take your players to Prax and/or New Pavis, then get PP and run them through "The Pairing Stones" on their way to adventure in the Big Rubble. 

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Short answer: Yes, but Pegasus Plateau first.

Longer Answer: Both are good, but Pegasus Plateau contains more adventures and on balance contains adventures that I found more rewarding to run as a GM (noting that Crimson Petals in particular requires a huge amount of prepwork by the GM... I wrote up an A3 table summarising which NPCs knew what to help me navigate through it).

The Smoking Ruin suffers from missing a key piece of exposition in the eponymous scenario that the GM has to reconstruct by reading between the lines, and the multi year scenario Grove of Green Rock can be accidentally de-railed during character creation (which happened in one of my games) (DM me if you want to avoid that aspect being publicly spoiled). I also found the final sequence of Urvantan's Tower to be really hard to present well.

So both are good, but I think Pegasus Plateau is better. 

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2 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

NB: the Quickstart and the three GM Screen Pack adventures are also good for players new to RuneQuest.

To me that's the correct answer.... do that first, and then go into The Smoking Ruin or The Pegasus Plateau if you still enjoy playing RuneQuest.  Not only do TSR/TPP build upon the adventures contained in the Quickstart and the GM Pack, but also, well, the GM pack is nice to have for GMing anyway!

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Ludovic aka Lordabdul -- read and listen to  The God Learners , the Gloranthan podcast, newsletter, & blog !

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11 hours ago, commandercrud said:

Which of these two adventure books

Nick Brook is right.

The advantage of the GM screen adventure set is that the setting, the Colymar Tribe, is very vivid, and detailed in full.  Smoking Ruins and Pegasus Plateau are more individual adventures, and lighter on the setting.  The setting's there, just lighter.

Also, the broken tower is a really good adventure and ties in especially well with the GM screen adventure set.  And it’s free.

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