Tell me about your campaigns?

[Karlak One-eye]

On 4/22/2022 at 1:16 AM, styopa said:

1. Which version of Runequest do you run? Or perhaps even another system? 

RQ3+heavy modification

2. How long have you ran your campaign? 

I think we're going on around 17-18 years?  My sons were 10 when they started, and in late 20s now.

3. What time period in Glorantha did you start? 

1600ish

4. Where in Glorantha did you start? What regions has your campaign covered since? 

Pavis, but they've gone west to Sog and Yggs, north to Valind, south to Pamalt, east to Technos

5. Where are your pcs from? 

First 2 are River of Cradles folk, one is a troll from Fronela, the other a Hsunchen from Jonatela, the last a shaman from an Eagle tribe high in the remote Eastern Rockwoods.

6. What products from any version of Runequest have you used? Which were particularly useful? 

The RQ3 Renaissance products are absolutely excellent.

7. Is it a sandbox or more plot led campaign? 

Sandbox, but so much is happening that they have no choice but to deal with, sometimes it's a little linear

8. How much have you followed the arching events of the time period or has your Glorantha varied? 

Nearly no attention to canonical events.  Couldn't care less what happens according to canonical timeline, what happens in my campaign is what needs to happen for my story.

9. How would you describe your campaign? 

Sandboxy, dungeon-crawly, high powered, action oriented, loot heavy.  We use miniatures and maps for all interesting combats. Hopefully fun.

10. What advice would you give newbie gms to runequest and glorantha? 

I think far too much effort is made to try to stick to canon.  Glorantha's a wonderful place with some terrific stories, but there's also some silly and dumb stuff.  Too many putative 'experts' who will cheerfully tell you why (whatever) obviously can't be true because of something Greg vaguely alluded to 35 years ago. 

Feel free to add, subtract, multiply, or divide.  It's YOUR game, do what you want.  The point is your players' MGF.

As you can tell from an overview of my campaign below, I cheerfully steal from ANY game I feel like, any adventure that has an interesting story.  Instead of reinventing adventurous wheels, I use those resources and then spend several hours per adventure bending to fit the situation, finding ample character portraits for every NPC, building soundscapes for the setting(s) (they got heartily sick of the jungle in Chult, as well as of the mosquitoes and rain - and legions of undead ...and dinosaurs ...and Fonritian sorcerer-led expeditions looking for the same stuff they were...oh and snake-men....hahah)...

 

To copy a post from the old Glorantha forums (https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/wp-content/uploads/www.glorantha.com-forums/www.glorantha.com/forums/topic/a-practical-guide-to-gming-runequest-3/index.html) from 7 (!) years ago...

In summation, I just talked through it with one of my sons (they were the 2 characters that lasted through the whole campaign and various roster-changes of the party), the players did (sort of going by published adventures, but there was plenty of “stuff” in between)
River of Cradles series – they find the glowy ball
Sun County series – one player really wanted to be a sorcerer, so he found an amulet that gave him essentially basic sorcery skills
Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan – one of the main characters got a super-axe, but it was turning him into a vampire over the next year. It did really incentivize him to work to get Rune Lord status, so he could DI and get rid of it.
More Sun County
They encounter Arlaten in Pavis, did some stuff for him, he helped train the newbie sorcerer who eventually took the glowy ball (they still had it!) and turned it into one of the most unique familiars ever.
Some Borderlands campaign adventures
White Plume Mountain
Some ‘helping the Sartars resist the Lunars’ stuff; set a grudge vs the Lunar Coders when they killed one character's allied spirit.
The entire A1-A4 series of dungeons
Lord Skypens Mansion
a Mission to the Block
Forgotten Temple of Tharzidun
Some Lunar Coder stuff
The whole G1-G2-G3 series
Rabbit Hat farm, etc – more Borderlands (Hunt for Muriah, Dyksund Caverns)
More Sartar/Lunar stuff in Pavis, ended up fighting some of the Coders directly, they actually killed Nose-Ring (rezzed the same day, of course)
Fleeing from Pavis 🙂 escorting young man named Garrath to Whitewall.
Getting into Whitewall
Crimson Bat approaching, to power ritual to drive it away, they gathered the elemental stones (The Doomstones Campaign; I converted from WHFRP only finding out later that it was, ironically, originally an RQ scenario that someone had converted to WH and published.) and returned to Whitewall through the Lunar siege
Up to the swamp, Delecti stuff, encountered Death Knights
Snake Pipe Hollow
More Death Knight trouble
Coders…again?
Flee west, find strange place in mtns – expedition to barrier peaks
Continue NW, up into Dorastor, meet Razlakark
He sends them back in time to 2nd age Glorantha Ralios
Dodging armies, they save 2 members of Jrusteli expedition from slaughter by troll ambush\
fight a dream dragon in an underwater cavern
help Jrusteli complete their expedition into a really nasty tomb ahead of approaching armies (Tomb of Horrors – end of that was Lich Acerak as GUARDIAN of entrapped Razlakark whom they then accidentally freed, which then returned them to the present)
Unhappy at saving him, they head NW out of mts, save local monastery from ongoing curse in ancient dwarven tunnels
Hints that Coders might still be tracking them
Go to Sog City do stuff there, not as interesting as they expected (campaign was winding down, people were starting to graduate high school and move on)
D&D adventures C4 and C5 except for the last bit
…campaign finally ends with a wimper, sadly, with the only two remaining players (my sons) relatively crazy-powerful (making adding new players really hard), and all their friends having gone off to college in other states or cities, we just stopped playing. Really sad about that but not sure how else to end it.
They were landed counts (having been granted title to the Rabbit Hat farm in exchange for bringing more settlers there, as well as to Skrypen’s mansion and lands) but couldn’t go back to either because of the bounty on their heads by the Lunar authorities. They were in Sog City (the sorcerer had finally, after 8+ years of play, reached the College of Magic Arlaten had explained to him, and he managed to join) with nothing much to do.

Subsequently, campaign DIDN'T die.  They eventually did things like WHFRPs Bogenhafen (whups, major failure, demon gate opened, lots of effort to close), Tomb of Annihilation took them close to a year of play to complete (6-8 hour session every other weekend; amazing how easily Chult  =  Elamle in Pamaltela) turns out the Grung are a great opponent en masse, as grung-supremacist Nazi frogs, more or less.  They also spent a long series of adventures going through a heavily-modified RQ6 book of quests (some decent ideas but man that needed a lot of work).

As those characters were getting too powerful to really be fun, they also created a bunch of new characters (so they could try new approaches themselves) that also operate in the same world, doing a little less world-saving sorts of things.  That group had a wonderful maybe 4-5 months accidentally getting sucked into a magical snowglobe and doing a cascade of adventures ending with the entire Desert of Desolation series, reformatted to be a sort of endless-loop trap for a massive chaos lord of fire that a Brithini wizard had built, but his instructions to them against even faintly suggesting to the inhabitants of the place that it wasn't real or the whole thing would fail prematurely, releasing the ifrit.  Now those characters are tasked with trying to find a home for the society of thousands who had been trapped in that bubble more than a 1000 years ago (they feel those people are entitled to be rescued from that purgatory).

Still going strong in 2022.

You have no idea how happy this post makes me, the use of multiple scenario packs and source material reset in Glorantha is perfect. My players have through hero-questing fought in many non Gloranthan places:

"Defend the stead" took then to the halls and fountains  of last hours Gondolin where the Yelmalians defeated a Zorak Zoran winged troll wreathed in stolen fire, which the Yelmalian took back as the troll perished, and now he can use fire magic and wear red! Then as they fled through the tunnels under the city they emerged in a great seven walled fortress to fight against the million hordes of steppe nomads on the Walls of Dros Delnoch (bloody "Pentans"!).

Separately a young shaman from Swan vale was flung through the spirit worlds to fight in a yellow flowered marsh and over high snow topped mountain passes, alongside a swan-wing helmeted squire who was struggling to take his master's broken sword back to his only surviving son hidden is a secret forested ravine guarded by handsome almost human Aldryami.

In sacred time the most powerful group of Characters in the campaign, a Sword, a Yanafali Curia priest and a Storm Khan (long story), fought "I fought we won" against dark knights, hideous horned men, foul sorcery and magic while standing back to back with silver knights, wearing the rune of a great cup, on the windswept gorse hills and fairy rings of the Gower peninsula in Arthurian Britain.

We spend most of our gaming time in Genertela but have had a blast with one offs "away from home" that we have weaved into various myths.

 

 

[Godlearner]

41 minutes ago, Karlak One-eye said:

My players have through hero-questing fought in many non Gloranthan places

We dip heavily into Middle Earth, Young Kingdoms, Ancient Egypt and Connan setting.

[SevenSistersOfVinga]

On 7/28/2021 at 9:28 AM, Deanjday said:

None of them have much experience with Runequest 

Same 

On 7/28/2021 at 9:28 AM, Deanjday said:

1. Which version of Runequest do you run? Or perhaps even another system? 

RQG rules as intended hopefully (this forum and the q&a really help)

On 7/28/2021 at 9:28 AM, Deanjday said:

2. How long have you ran your campaign? 

12 seasons 

On 7/28/2021 at 9:28 AM, Deanjday said:

3. What time period in Glorantha did you start? 

The one on the book 

On 7/28/2021 at 9:28 AM, Deanjday said:

4. Where in Glorantha did you start? What regions has your campaign covered since? 

Esrolia, then sartar

On 7/28/2021 at 9:28 AM, Deanjday said:

5. Where are your pcs from? 

Estolia and sartar 

On 7/28/2021 at 9:28 AM, Deanjday said:

6. What products from any version of Runequest have you used? Which were particularly useful? 

RIG, the bestiary

On 7/28/2021 at 9:28 AM, Deanjday said:

7. Is it a sandbox or more plot led campaign? 

No, it's a mess. 

On 7/28/2021 at 9:28 AM, Deanjday said:

8. How much have you followed the arching events of the time period or has your Glorantha varied? 

None, it sort of molded the world but we're guided more by vasanas travels than the overall political situation 

On 7/28/2021 at 9:28 AM, Deanjday said:

9. How would you describe your campaign? 

Scooby-Doo where everyone is either shaggy or Scooby against the forces of evil

On 7/28/2021 at 9:28 AM, Deanjday said:

10. What advice would you give newbie gms to runequest and glorantha? 

You can have a rune spell be something everyone does or a miracle that changes the battle, if you go the first route there are not enough rune points in the game to make players happy. Go low and let them use their miracles and change the wold. 

On 7/28/2021 at 9:28 AM, Deanjday said:

When replying to the thread, don't feel you have to answer every question, just the ones that intrest you. Really curious about how long term runequest gms run their campaigns. 

 

Edited April 24, 2022 by SevenSistersOfVinga

[JRE]

On 7/28/2021 at 10:28 AM, Deanjday said:

1. Which version of Runequest do you run? Or perhaps even another system? 

RQ3 with some MRQII, though we are implementing changes to a RQG - RQ3 Hybrid with house rules.

On 7/28/2021 at 10:28 AM, Deanjday said:

2. How long have you ran your campaign? 

10 years, but it is PBEM so it advances slowly. Roughly a day takes from 1 week to one month. This means the ten years have been three seasons and a Holy Time, with a couple of seasons travelling off-screen.

On 7/28/2021 at 10:28 AM, Deanjday said:

3. What time period in Glorantha did you start? 

908 ST, in the middle part of the second age. Initial aim was to weaken the EWF / Orlanthi alliance against Zistor.

On 7/28/2021 at 10:28 AM, Deanjday said:

4. Where in Glorantha did you start? What regions has your campaign covered since? 

Kethaela, specially Nochet, Karse and Kethaela. Took part in a plot to raise the Orlanthi against the EWF. Now fleeing Delecti's kill squads and traveling to Pavis.

On 7/28/2021 at 10:28 AM, Deanjday said:

5. Where are your pcs from? 

A Jrusteli student, masquerading as an Issaries herald and a Slontos Trickster graduate, just enjoying being an Eurmali. The Jrusteli has become a draconic illuminate and is convinced he cannot return back home.

On 7/28/2021 at 10:28 AM, Deanjday said:

6. What products from any version of Runequest have you used? Which were particularly useful? 

Guide to Glorantha is my bible. Some MRQ material on Jrustela, Sandy's sorcery, Revealed mythologies. As Sartar interests me only marginally, very little recent material beyond RQG.

On 7/28/2021 at 10:28 AM, Deanjday said:

7. Is it a sandbox or more plot led campaign? 

Fully player directed. It was expected to go to Kralorela, but the players are convinced Pavis will be both safer and Orlanthi / familiar enough. Missed the Rough Guide to Pavis 894 ST the first time, so looking forward to the new publication.

On 7/28/2021 at 10:28 AM, Deanjday said:

8. How much have you followed the arching events of the time period or has your Glorantha varied? 

Not applicable in this case, though I both try to respect the limited sources, while using the gray areas to do whatever I want.

On 7/28/2021 at 10:28 AM, Deanjday said:

9. How would you describe your campaign? 

Twoflowers in Glorantha, growing up fast, with Hannibal Lecter as the Luggage trying to keep him safe.

On 7/28/2021 at 10:28 AM, Deanjday said:

10. What advice would you give newbie gms to runequest and glorantha? 

Decide from the beginning what is important to you, discuss it with your players, and do not try to fit your game to the published data, but the published data to your game. There is too much, so it is better to pick and choose what you like. RQ is not the only way to explore Glorantha, but it fits well.

As you can see a bit unusual but I am sure there are other people that spent years in the Second age.

[Soccercalle]

1. RQG

2. 3 months

3. Sea Season 1619 (The main campaign is "Six Seasons in Sartar" but I add different other scenarios. We started with the "Broken Tower".

4. Colymar land. They have travelled to Duckpoint, the Upland Marsh, Jonstown and Boldhome.

5. The Black Stag Vale in eastern Colymar Land.

6. "Six Seasons" (most important), "Sartar - kingdom of Heroes" (second most important) and the Starter Set. Other books (like "Company of the Dragon" will be very important as the campaign moves on.

7. Mostly plot led.

8. They are following what is happening but is not yet a main part of the larger history. 

9. Epic. But also political and fun/humorous.

10. Have fun. Use the setting for information och inspiration. But dont let it be a burden. Dont let the characters be to creative when they create characters. It may seem fun to have a Mostali, Aldryami or a Troll character. But most source material is made for Orlanthi humans. Try to have at least one Orlanth/Vinga initiate in the group (I have one Vinga and one Orlanth Thunderous). Avoid cults that are hostile to Orlanthi. Good cults are Orlanth/Vinga, Ernalda, Humakt, Storm Bull, Babeester Gor and Odayla. Other Earth, Sky and Lightbringer Cults are also good. Avoid PCs being sorcerers and be careful with shamans.

 

SPOILERS IN THE REST OF THE TEXT!

The plan is to use the campaign books of @Andrew Logan Montgomerybut to add extra scenarios. I allow experience rolls for every scenario and usually have 2-3 scenarios every season. I added the "Colymar Campaign" from "Sartar - kingdom of Heroes" to get some high drama into the more gritty Haraborn saga. The Broken Tower is a great intro adventure so I had my PCs looking for Andrin (first part of the Six Seasons book) outside the vale. One of the PCs wanted to visit relatives in a neighboring clan and found them being robbed of their cattle, the relative was also murdered to give the PC a great incitament to pursue. On the way back to the Vale they passed thru Clearwine at the time of the "Feast of the Beasts" - the first part of the Colymar Campaign.

I plan to postpone the Forging (start) of the Company of the Dragon so that the characters can move east to Prax/Pavis (being hunted by king Kangharl). I plan to let them play some parts of Borderlands and the Cradle (and maybe some more scenarios from the RQ3 books set in Prax/Pavis) before they move back to form the company. I use Ernalsulva (the princess in the Colymar Campaign) and the Rainbow Worm (from Six Seasons) for some soft railroading between settings. I am thinking of making Duke Raus a friend of Ernalsulvas family and a logic host in exile.

My main reasoning behind adding extra scenarios is that the official/canon materials about the years 1626-28 may take some years for Chaosium. By adding scenarios its easier to have a lot of gaming before we dry out of new source materials.

Edited April 27, 2022 by Soccercalle

[Garrik]

After my youthful random gaming, I've run two RuneQuest campaigns of note. One in a medieval setting of my own, and one in the Hero Wars period in Glorantha.

1. In both campaigns, I started with pure RQ3, but soon moved forward. The medieval campaign ended up using hybrid HârnMaster/GURPS-inspired rules (HM is basically RQ with more stuff; GURPS has more character background and world-interaction rules), whereas the Hero Wars campaign first grew the RQ3 rules to include Heroquesting and heroic feats, and then was abandoned in favour of a HeroQuest/FATE hybrid.

2. The medieval campaign I ran for about ten sessions. The Gloranthan campaign for anywhere between fifty and hundred sessions, with some concluding sessions a year after.

3. My Gloranthan campaign started in 1618, so Third Age, on the eve of the Hero Wars.

4. My Gloranthan campaign started in the Far Place (Northeastern Dragon Pass, including places like Alda Chur, Snakepipe Hollow, Alone and Indigo Mountains), but the characters were involved in all of Sartar and did a trip to the Elder Wilds (Votankiland), Prax and Heortland.

5. In the Gloranthan campaign, the heroes came from a single clan in a single tribe in the Alone Confederation.

6. Too many inspiring sources to mention, really. I found the Issaries erea Orlanthi cult books especially useful. I mostly used the different cult descriptions directly as prominent characters. They are very useful for that, being so intricate and personal. Of course, RQ3 with its generic world description is always very important for RQ games. We even used the encounter tables there quite extensively, and sometimes that created adventures and long-term plots.

7. I always run very sandbox-like games, and allow the players to create agendas for the characters. In the medieval game, they owned a ship and could enter islands, harbors etc. at will, so basically the campaign saw them visiting places they thought interesting. In the Gloranthan campaign, I followed the early Hero Wars timetable quite strictly, but the characters still had agendas of their own, e.g. trying to create an Orlanthi-Storm Bull herocult that could "tame" the Storm Bull madness and make members of the cult more sociable, but still keep the "Sense Chaos" trait.

8. Glorantha for me is very importantly the events that take place there. My interest of using Glorantha in my games sees me using the Gloranthan plots and timelines quite diligently.

9. The medieval campaign I'd describe as an open-ended, character-driven sailing campaign, with player-chosen focus.
The Gloranthan campaign I'd describe as a warlike local reiteration of the early Hero Wars, with clan matters and heroic aspirations colliding.

I have a tendency to build a lot of plots and run them simultaneously. What emerges as the main plot(s) is an in-game experience (or "discussion") between the GM and the players. Some themes will just wither and die, while others grow into defining prominence.

10. RQ3 is quite deadly for beginner characters, so decide how you want to use/fudge it, and be open about this choice. Glorantha is a super-tense setting, especially in the Dragon Pass region during the Hero Wars, with tons of information available. So be ready to study, be ready to accept you don't know everything, and most importantly, carve out your own thing and be true to that, as that is what you share at the gaming table with your players. Don't mill around and retcon, if you learn something new about the setting. Leave that new understanding for the next campaign. Start small with big aims, let the players work it through to the level of understanding and heroism they prefer. Support their interpretation and their fun!

For example, I had the dragon knowledge and dragons figure quite large in my Gloranthan Hero Wars campaign, but the players (and their characters) just avoided the dragon things and virtually ran away from the dragonewts when met. This meant that some of my ideas just didn't materialise, and maybe it also meant that the characters missed an opportunity to philosophize and meditate and understand some deeper truths. I also introduced the elder races: Trolls, Aldryami and Mostali, but the players/characters avoided those too, just accepting Trolls as allies in wars. Nevertheless, the players had their heroic campaign and made the most of it. And I had a blast seeing their character wreck Glorantha and wreck themselves too.