Necro-thread, what did you Like about RQ3?

[Malin]

I loved character creation and the detailed supplements, but I don't think I ever played a single session that wasn't hacked all to hell with other rules systems. We were very into that around that point in time, eventually devolving into almost going rule-less (sorta pre-hero wars style). So this thread had me "oh, yeah, that was in the rules" often.

[Godlearner]

On 11/8/2023 at 12:25 AM, metcalph said:

I always liken sorcery as being best performed with a clear head and knowledge of spirit magic to be under the influence of various intoxicants and narcotics.  

That is one way to look at it, but I see it as an artifical method to limit player character access to magic of different forms. From my understanding, and from what I gathered stated, sorcery, rune magic and spirit magic all come from the same source but use differnt so to speak resistors so that the raw power can be used/manipulated by mortals, who are otherwise to fragile to use it. Therefore, one should not limit the other. If you got the knowledge and the magic points IMO, go for it.

[Jens]

9 hours ago, Godlearner said:

spirit magic all come from the same source

Spirit magic is quite different in RQ:G- you’re not learning a spell, you are making a connection with a spirit that you then use to impact the material world (see https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/magic-systems-i/ ). That’s why your CHA is the limit- you can only befriend so many spirits. And I find it perfectly reasonable that the more spirit helpers you have hanging around, the less you can concentrate on casting sorcerous spells (which involves the direct manipulation of runes, as opposed to divine magic where you are channeling the power of your god). 

Now, it you’re a sorcerer and want to cast lots of spirit magic, you do it the right way- dominate a bunch of spirits that know spirit magic and shove them in binding to do your bidding on command. 

Edited November 18, 2023 by Jens

[Godlearner]

15 minutes ago, Jens said:

Spirit magic is quite different in RQ:G- you’re not learning a spell, you are making a connection with a spirit that you then use to impact the material world

No its the same. The source for all magic is the "mana" which underlines the universe and the Runes which are manifistation of this pure energy. The spirits dampen the flow and channel it into useful form. Rune magic does the same thing by enforcing construct. These are fixed and stable. A bigger bang for your buck so to speak, but at a price of attuning oneself to a limited amount of patters. Sorcery is 'free form' great flexibility, but the caster needs to create the architecture on the fly. Same energy, different paths.

[Joerg]

8 hours ago, Godlearner said:

No its the same. The source for all magic is the "mana" which underlines the universe and the Runes which are manifistation of this pure energy. The spirits dampen the flow and channel it into useful form. Rune magic does the same thing by enforcing construct. These are fixed and stable. A bigger bang for your buck so to speak, but at a price of attuning oneself to a limited amount of patters. Sorcery is 'free form' great flexibility, but the caster needs to create the architecture on the fly. Same energy, different paths.

All magic ultimately comes from the Source, the interface to the Ultimate at the high energy end of the Gloranthan cosmos, beyond Dayzatar's realm or the upper outer draconic realms, beyond Atrilith of Vithelan mysticism. Filtered and/or flavored by the Runes, these energies resonate in the living beings of the Middle World who then can share them with the entities of the concurrent spirit world (who partake in that mechanic, too), share them with the deities bound by the Compromise, or with resident deities and wyters, or they can shape them into magic of their own - usually through spirit magic or added to rune magic, or to construct and cast sorcerous spell weavings. 

Sorcery spells are different from Spirit Magic - they act as entities of their own, constructed and controlled by the trained minds of the sorcerer(s).

One symptom of this is how meeting the innate mana resistence of unwilling targets is handled - with Spirit Magic and Rune Magic, the caster's POW has to overcome the resisting POW. With a sorcery spell, the magic points in the construct dedicated to its magnitude are the force overcoming the resisting POW. 

The sorcerer dedicates a portion of their (his or her) intellect to run the algorithms of the spell. The sorcerer may employ the aid of inscribed POW to extend the mind-space for this specific type of spell. Spells that aren't active can be left alone, following their last set of instructions, or just their nature. (For instance, Tapping is active while drawing magic points out of whichever target the spell has storing the magic points in the spell structure, but the spell structure sticks around while the duration lasts and there are magic points stored in the structure once the sorcerer stops holding it active. Activating the spell again is commonly regarded as unfeasible, but advanced sorcerous spell construction might be able to overcome that problem.

[Godlearner]

11 hours ago, Joerg said:

Sorcery spells are different from Spirit Magic - they act as entities of their own, constructed and controlled by the trained minds of the sorcerer(s).

One symptom of this is how meeting the innate mana resistence of unwilling targets is handled - with Spirit Magic and Rune Magic, the caster's POW has to overcome the resisting POW. With a sorcery spell, the magic points in the construct dedicated to its magnitude are the force overcoming the resisting POW. 

I do not see a difference. Same source different path.

[svensson]

I liked two things about RQ3...

1. EVERYTHING you needed to play a game was in one box /book, character generation, the mechanics, spells, bestiary, starting adventure, everything. None of this DnD TSR/WotC hitting you up for $200 [PH, DMG, MM, and adventure] before you could sit down with your friends and start playing.

2. Once the 'Glorantha Renaissance' started, I LOVED the detail and depth of the material. Chaosium should put pdfs of River of Cradles, Sun County, Shadows on the Borderlands, and Strangers in Prax up for sale because those resources are as big a step towards where we are now as Tales of the Reaching Moon was.

[Joerg]

5 hours ago, svensson said:

I liked two things about RQ3...

1. EVERYTHING you needed to play a game was in one box /book, character generation, the mechanics, spells, bestiary, starting adventure, everything. None of this DnD TSR/WotC hitting you up for $200 [PH, DMG, MM, and adventure] before you could sit down with your friends and start playing.

At the time AH produced the box, its price range felt like that 200$ hammer (it was well above 50$ at the time, IIRC, with a production valley that was adequate for complex board games but even at the time it appeared subpar to rpg material. The production value of RQ2 Troll Pak far exceeds what Avalon Hill put into the DeLuxe box.

My own first contact with the game was the more affordable Games Workshop licensed books, with all its Citadel miniatures high-gloss weirdness. Nice if not extremely durable hardcovers. IIRC their version of the Bestiary included the pregens from Monster Coliseum, making it the go-to resource for monster data.

In hindsight, if Chaosium had struck a deal with Games Workshop rather than Avalon Hill, the history of RuneQuest could have been very different. I guess that never was an option, as Avalon Hill probably was in a different financial weight class, and no such offer was made.

 

5 hours ago, svensson said:

2. Once the 'Glorantha Renaissance' started, I LOVED the detail and depth of the material. Chaosium should put pdfs of River of Cradles, Sun County, Shadows on the Borderlands, and Strangers in Prax up for sale because those resources are as big a step towards where we are now as Tales of the Reaching Moon was.

The Renaissance sure re-awakened RuneQuest for a while.

The new Glorantha source material (booklet 5 in the De Luxe box, Gods of Glorantha, Genertela box, Gloranthan Bestiary, Elder Secrets) and the slight expansion of troll lore in Troll Gods was nothing to be scoffed at, as opposed to straight or at best slightly reworked reprints (like the stripped RQ 3 Trollpak with its cults, Into the Troll Realms and Haunted Ruins separated out, Apple Lane, Snake Pipe Hollow) or the de-Gloranthized Griffin Island. Sure, getting the troll lore back into print was a good move, but did nothing to expand the Glorantha explored by RQ2.

The Renaissance material had some of this reprinting going on, too.

• Sun County reprinted selected portions of the Pavis box in the just right amount to provide context for those who had missed the Chaosium offerings.
• River of Cradles was a bit heavier on the reprinting with its presentation of much of the New Pavis GM book, but had an original campaign and the long absent long cult formats for four of the Lightbringers and Zola Fel - themselves "reprints" from Cults of Prax or the Pavis Box, but significantly expanded and updated or redacted (loss of superfluous rune levels for Chalana, Issaries and LM).
• Shadows on the Borderlands supported these two books with two epic scenarios and useful background on the Chaos cults in separate booklets (a bit pre-empting Lords of Terror).
• Dorastor: Land of Doom broke out of the Zola Fel valley and revisited the backdrop for the Paulis Longvale story in Cults of Terror with a somewhat incongruent mix of historical background, Kaiju monsters of Dorastor and Risklands, a gritty farming campaign on the edge of apocalypse.
• Cults of Terror almost slipped back to what had been done with Troll Pak. Getting the RQ3 treatment for most of the Chaos cults was nice, expanding this by the antithesis of RQ2 Rune Masters for Chaos baddies in RQ3 format was a bit of original material (not quite on par with all the new cult material in Troll Gods).
• Strangers in Prax returned to the Zola Fel Valley ghetto, with brand new RQ3 material, new story material. Great stuff, although overshadowed by the attempt to progress to a new edition of RQ - this time without Chaosium as writers. We would have been happy to see more material of this kind, but the attempt at updating the game system ten years after the last revision made the already reluctant publisher more reluctant to continue this line.
• Early on in this period, we also got a (state of the art) softcover edition of the first four books of the DeLuxe rules, too, a long overdue offering.

With Ken Rolston moving on and his successor a lot less involved in the tribe (which by then had formed up through the conventions in Leicester, the US, Down Under, and Germany, as well as through the daily exchanges on the mailing lists), we got listless contract fulfillment from Chaosium (Daughters of Darkness, Eldarad). RQ4 AiG failed to get approved by Chaosium, and then the project leader became a victim of defamation.

But then we also got Greg's deep Glorantha background writings - King of Sartar, Glorious ReAscent of Yelm, The Fortunate Succession, the Entekosiad, and

The tribe and the conventions continued, fanzine activity bloomed. Fan publications included glossy Reaching Moon Megacorp products (sorely missing reprints like Wyrm's Footprints and Collected Griselda, and the non-RQ Tarsh War) and foreign language edition supplements (like German Schatten in den Hügeln and Ort ohne Wiederkehr - the only new game material set in Sartar throughout the RQ3 period).

 

 

[svensson]

@Joerg

Excellent summary, including information that I didn't know. I would have been VERY leery of RQ's ties to GW had it gone that route. Glorantha offers something that all WH franchises purposefully avoid: Hope for the future, an opportunity for the good guys to win. Tying Glorantha to the WH publishers would have REALLY increased the price point, and I really feel they would have tried to chain their vision of Chaos to Greg's version. And while there are clear equivalents between the two milieux [Malia and Nurgle for example] I think that the differences are equally important and I'd prefer not to 'cross the streams'. The last thing I want to see a bunch maniacal of  cultist-tribesmen boiling out of Snakepipe Hollow screaming 'Blood for the Blood God!'

I had no idea about the defamation issue with the [Mongoose?] project leader. I DID like Eldarad very much as a RQ Gateway setting, but the other offerings weren't up to that par. Some of the writing in RQ Second Age was very good, but there were some real drek in there too.

As far a Pavis being a 'ghetto', it's no more a ghetto than Sanctuary, Greyhawk, or Shadizar the Wicked... it's a hub from which bands of unauthorized mayhem makers in service to [insert cult/nation/motive here] venture forth to loot tombs, do underhanded semi-legal fetch quests, and otherwise jab the darkness with a sharp stick just to see what bites.

Edited November 19, 2023 by svensson

[Joerg]

3 hours ago, svensson said:

I would have been VERY leery of RQ's ties to GW had it gone that route.

The Avalon Hill deal was made before there was a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (all there was at the time was the skirmish game Warhammer Fantasy Battle). The GW RQ3 license may have overlapped with WH FRP.

3 hours ago, svensson said:

I had no idea about the defamation issue with the [Mongoose?] project leader.

The case made it into Wikipedia. This was before the Mongoose license.

 

3 hours ago, svensson said:

I DID like Eldarad very much as a RQ Gateway setting, but the other offerings weren't up to that par.

Eldarad wasn't bad and had a few useful ideas, but people already had a RQ city next to a ruin field that was very much alive.

Daughters of Darkness was neither original nor very useful, except in its inflammatory service as centerpiece of community building at conventions.

 

3 hours ago, svensson said:

Some of the writing in RQ Second Age was very good, but there were some real drek in there too.

The Mongoose era was built on an interesting idea but created in undue haste and as a result near complete absence of quality control and not enough research of the available sources. Since the license fees were late and/or short, Greg was pretty exasperated at the deal, and the current Chaosium crew as well.

Some products contained bits of material provided by Greg, like the Jrustela book(s) or the Clanking City, but the only product that had any interaction with Greg was Dara Happa Stirs, probably the best of the whole endeavor.

 

3 hours ago, svensson said:

As far a Pavis being a 'ghetto'

I was talking about the fact that almost all the published gameable material for RQ concentraded on the Zola Fel Valley, with only Griffin Mountain, Troll Pak and Dorastor and the two early scenarios Apple Lane and Snake Pipe Hollow offering something outside of that region.

I like the city of Pavis and the Big Rubble, but since my first experience of gaming in Glorantha was the Dragon Pass boardgame, I wanted to play in urban Sartar or the Lunar Empire. RQ3 Gods of Glorantha and the RQ3 Genertela Box (and the RQ3 Bestiary) offered some background information beyond that, as had the Holy Country article in RQ2 Companion, but no campaign material followed. (I did end up playing my first Glorantha campaign in the Holy Country.)

[Mugen]

On 11/19/2023 at 5:29 PM, Joerg said:

The Mongoose era was built on an interesting idea but created in undue haste and as a result near complete absence of quality control and not enough research of the available sources. Since the license fees were late and/or short, Greg was pretty exasperated at the deal, and the current Chaosium crew as well.

The "playtest" was a mess, and the first draft of the rules was a (bad) joke, with a d100 roll over system for combat, and a classic roll under system outside.

The last playtest document had been reworked by Kenneth Hyte, and was insteresting. But the Mongoose team modified it before publication, and they destroyed it...

They even included a Magic system that Steve Perrin had submitted to them as a draft, but was never edited.

On 11/19/2023 at 5:29 PM, Joerg said:

I was talking about the fact that almost all the published gameable material for RQ concentraded on the Zola Fel Valley, with only Griffin Mountain, Troll Pak and Dorastor and the two early scenarios Apple Lane and Snake Pipe Hollow offering something outside of that region.

I like the city of Pavis and the Big Rubble, but since my first experience of gaming in Glorantha was the Dragon Pass boardgame, I wanted to play in urban Sartar or the Lunar Empire. RQ3 Gods of Glorantha and the RQ3 Genertela Box (and the RQ3 Bestiary) offered some background information beyond that, as had the Holy Country article in RQ2 Companion, but no campaign material followed. (I did end up playing my first Glorantha campaign in the Holy Country.)

One of my problems with RQ3 when I was introduced to it was the lack of truly "gameable" products.

All that was available to me was the french translation of the early RQ3 line, which included Gods of Glorantha, Genertela, Elder Secrets, and a few scenarios. Those were truly awesome, but it was very difficult to get into Glorantha through them. As a result, I never played in Glorantha.