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Which to get


1970

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I'm thinking about to getting a setting supplement for Classic RQ and am soliciting opinions for which of the new books to get, either Griffin Mountain or Borderlands & Beyond.  I have no experience with the system, so I'd like to get something that's player/game master newbie friendly.

 

Thanks for your help.

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Personally I'd say GM. It's all I had as a teenager and provided years of gaming. Self contained, lots of little adventure hooks as well. You could start off as neolithic hunters, locals from one of the three citadels, Lunars trying to control a boarder town or what my players did - play orlanthi refugees from Sartar. It was easy to progress from there to Borderlands as there is a link between the two. We did GM, Borderlands, then Pavis & Big Rubble.

My players were actually on the run after an incident in a small village in Sartar. They'd been asked to guard a shop, but it mysteriously burnt down, they lost all the important magic stuff, but caught some unrelated bandits. Weirdly the bandits had none of the stolen goods on them. Rather than face the music, they ran...

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Borderlands and Beyond is probably easier to run as it has a series of interconnected adventures.

Griffin Mountain is an excellent sandbox but might be a bit harder to run.

If you got Pavis & Big Rubble as well, you could do Borderlands, then do the Cradle, then go to Griffin Mountain through Gonn Orta's Pass, then return to Prax when things had quietened down a bit and finish with the Rubble Scenarios.

 

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Thanks to all.

I'm still not sure which one I want, but knowing more about what each is about really helps me out.

14 hours ago, soltakss said:

If you got Pavis & Big Rubble as well, you could do Borderlands, then do the Cradle, then go to Griffin Mountain through Gonn Orta's Pass, then return to Prax when things had quietened down a bit and finish with the Rubble Scenarios.

I don't have Pavis & Big Rubble.  Hopefully Chaosium will re-release it sometime in the future, as I doubt I'd have the resources to get it from eBay or other sites.

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1 hour ago, 1970 said:

I'm still not sure which one I want, but knowing more about what each is about really helps me out.

The biggest question I think is whether you want to design your own scenarios or take advantage of existing ones.  If the latter (which is more newbie GM friendly), then go with Borderlands (either could be used with the former).

 

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I like published scenarios, but always end up wanting to make my own, even if I'm not very good at it.  I don't have a group at the moment, so if I ran the game I'd have to run a solo campaign, so maybe a setting is better than a campaign.  Honestly, coming into this I was favoring Griffin Mountain, but I really didn't know much about either.  Now, like jajagappa and others have said, I need to decide what it is I want out of a supplement.  I'm just not quite certain what that is just yet.

Sorry for being a bit wishy-washy about it.

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I ran Borderlands as a solo campaign in the early days before I had a gaming group available.  I had both GM and Borderlands at that time, and Borderlands was definitely easier to work with from that standpoint.

Btw, since you note not having a group at the moment, have you considered running a play-by-forum campaign?  It's a different style than face-to-face, but I've found it very enjoyable to run.  RPGGeek is one option for a place where you could run such, and you could look for potential players there or on the Glorantha G+ forum.

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I'm another who votes for Borderlands. IMO it's one of the best campaign startups ever written. It gives some nice descriptions and introductions of the various cultures that the PCs have to intereact with in the game, plus a book of pregenerated NPC and creatures stats that saves the GM a lot of set up work. Griffin Mountain?island is a nice expansion to an existing campaign, but doesn't really help the GM introduce the PCs to the setting the way Borderlands does. Plus Borderlands has a 7 adventure year long campaign that the GM can fall back on while he works up his own adventures, with help from all the story hooks that comes with Borderlands. 

Chaos stalks my world, but she's a big girl and can take of herself.

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I was looking over the description of Griffin Mountain and it says that there's a Running a Gloranthan Campaign treatise in it, which sounds exactly like what I want.  Does anyone know what that's about?

17 hours ago, jajagappa said:

Btw, since you note not having a group at the moment, have you considered running a play-by-forum campaign?  It's a different style than face-to-face, but I've found it very enjoyable to run.  RPGGeek is one option for a place where you could run such, and you could look for potential players there or on the Glorantha G+ forum.

I've run PBP games before, back in the day.  I didn't have to look for a place, as the website I used had a private server and I knew the owner personally and had one of the administrators playing in my face to face group.  Unfortunately, it's long gone by now.  I wouldn't be against it, but would have to look around before making that sort of decision.

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7 minutes ago, 1970 said:

I was looking over the description of Griffin Mountain and it says that there's a Running a Gloranthan Campaign treatise in it, which sounds exactly like what I want.  Does anyone know what that's about?

In my Moon Design version of Griffin Mountain this is six pages of advise by Greg Stafford, mostly covering the idea behind Griffin Mountain and the preparation and running of a Griffin Mountain campaign.

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I've added the Table of contents for both products over at Glorantha.com, it may help you decide:

 

Borderlands & Beyond also contains Plunder & Rune Masters.http://www.glorantha.com/docs/18517-2/

 

Griffin Mountain http://www.glorantha.com/docs/griffin-mountain-table-of-contents/

 

Both PDFs are $20, personally that's a good investment as there's hundreds of hours of gaming there.

 

 

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Thanks, rust.  I was hoping it would be more encompassing, but oh well.

David Scott, that was a huge help.  I think I've definitely decided to get Borderlands & Beyond at this point.

Thank you to everyone for helping me out!

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'Parvis & Big Rubble' makes a good companion volume to 'Borderlands & Beyond', given that they share the setting of Prax. The 'Borderlands & Beyond' book also includes the Plunder section which lists many unique Gloranthan items to give a good flavour to the setting.

'Griffin Mountain' is a much more self contained region further north in the lands of Balazar & The Elder Wilds. However it is really one of the best sandbox settings you'll find.

 You really can't go wrong with any of the Gloranthan Classics  series, they have all stood the test of time.

Enjoy!

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" Sure it's fun, but it is also well known that a D20 roll and an AC is no match against a hefty swing of a D100% and a D20 Hit Location Table!"

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For Griffin Mountain, classic version integrates what was added in (otherwise far less complete) Griffin Island box (mainly better PNJ descriptions, new ones, better citadel descriptions and additional plans), except Soldier Port (which has been moved to Teleos, see Guide p 576).

And for Borderlands & Beyond, background info from Nomad Gods wargame has been integrated.

 

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I'd get Pavis & Big Rubble, but PDFs put me to sleep.  I'll wait until there's a physical copy, should there ever be one.

On 8/28/2016 at 10:47 AM, jajagappa said:

I ran Borderlands as a solo campaign in the early days before I had a gaming group available.  I had both GM and Borderlands at that time, and Borderlands was definitely easier to work with from that standpoint.

How did that work out?  I was going to use the Mythic GM Emulator to help me out, but I can use any advice I can get.  Apologies for being off-topic here.

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5 hours ago, 1970 said:

How did that work out?

IIRC (and it was some 30 years ago), it was at least an opportunity to play some of the RQ material I'd been buying, but I really didn't have any tools/emulators available at the time to help provide more randomness or add the unexpected things that players bring.  So interesting, but certainly not as enjoyable as a good gaming group.

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9 hours ago, 1970 said:

I'd get Pavis & Big Rubble, but PDFs put me to sleep.  I'll wait until there's a physical copy, should there ever be one.

How did that work out?  I was going to use the Mythic GM Emulator to help me out, but I can use any advice I can get.  Apologies for being off-topic here.

For products that are long out of print, it's possible to take a PDF and create a private project with a print-on-demand service (like lulu.com) I did that with Pavis & Big Rubble because all of the aftermarket copies I've seen were north of $200 U.S.

That said, if Chaosium ever decides to release another physical copy of Pavis & Big Rubble I'd gladly buy a copy; the POD version is OK, but the quality is nowhere as nice as my retail Borderlands and Griffin Mountain books.

For the record I don't condone making copies of books that are still available from the publisher and you should not try to sell these for profit.

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15 minutes ago, Nick J. said:

For products that are long out of print, it's possible to take a PDF and create a private project with a print-on-demand service (like lulu.com) I did that with Pavis & Big Rubble because all of the aftermarket copies I've seen were north of $200 U.S.

That said, if Chaosium ever decides to release another physical copy of Pavis & Big Rubble I'd gladly buy a copy; the POD version is OK, but the quality is nowhere as nice as my retail Borderlands and Griffin Mountain books.

For the record I don't condone making copies of books that are still available from the publisher and you should not try to sell these for profit.

Isn't Chaosium going to reprint Pavis in book form, and same too for the Big Rubble? They should complete the PDFs this year, and then hopefully soon after put back in to print - hopefully ready for the new RQ.

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Just now, jongjom said:

Isn't Chaosium going to reprint Pavis in book form, and same too for the Big Rubble? They should complete the PDFs this year, and then hopefully soon after put back in to print - hopefully ready for the new RQ.

I honestly have no idea. I'm a fairly recent arrival to the world of Glorantha. I just know that you can get all of the Gloranthan Classics title except P&BR in print form on Chaosium's webstore. Nobleknight is out of stock, Ebay sellers charge an arm-and-a-leg and I couldn't find a copy for what I consider a reasonable price. So I broke down and did some PDF-fu and made my own.

If/when it comes available through Chaosium I'll buy it in a heartbeat.

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