What will Shamans be like in the new RQ?

[pachristian]

Shamans in classic RQ - in my own not very humble opinion - were rather lame. In RQ3, with a better line-up of spirits and some more options, they were somewhat better.

I really like the Nash-Whittaker Runequest Shamans - very evocative of Voudoun Magic, and quite unique. I started building a warrior-shaman in the last RQ game I was in. 

So what are we going to get for the new RQ?

[Runeblogger]

In my Gloranthan campaign with RQ3, the player with the agimori shaman was striving to recover his lost POW after creating his fetch during character creation. So he had around 10 POW and his fetch 7 or 8. After every adventure doing his shamanic things, he only had his POW check and a couple more skill checks. So while his friends happily rolled their 7-9 skill increase rolls, he was praying for success in his vital POW check, on which so much depended. But he had such bad luck, that at least once I let him gain +1 POW just like that. One day he started whacking his enemies heads with a mace he found in the Rubble, and he had fun doing that partly because after the adventure he would then have some more skills to increase. I started disliking the rules for shamans in RQ3 because of that. And we were using Sandy Petersen's rules for shamanism which were far better than the original ones. So I'm really hoping shamans are very different in RQ Glorantha.

I also hope shamanic cults are improved, because in RQ3 they were just like runic cults.

[MJ Sadique]

Sandy Petersen's rules for shamanism ... don't remember of these, won't you mind explaining ?

As for RQ3, Shaman rules to create a fetch is like a being a full pledge sorcerer, something done after a lot years or XP. Starting characters wasn't good for these, except if you do a 50 years shaman (15y + assistant for 15y and the full shaman for 25y = base pow + 5 + 25 = 3D6 +30). POW economy wasn't well use because there are a lot of littles rules, like the spirit of POW only usefull to give you massive amount of MP.

As for the fetch, I never understand the concept of separating your own soul in two. I just use a "familiar" as interior spirit and consider the shaman to fully awaken and being able to use his full POW and INT in the spirit plane.

But I agree with a lot of people, shaman lacks lot of things and they NEED a skill apart from the usual ceremony / ench. / invoc. So I made one to help shaman learning things and create a feeling of improving in the spirit way apart from collecting spirits.

Edited September 10, 2016 by MJ Sadique
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[davecake]

I very much hope the Kolat write up for HQG gives us some ideas for what me might get - shamans with a very wide range of possible magic depending on what spirits they are able to access, which is all tied in to a complex web of spirit relationships. One of the things that RQ6 absolutely got right was focussing the shaman/animism rules on a really interesting menagerie of spirits. 

But it's true that mechanically it would be great to vary shamans own abilities a little as well, make spirit combat or spirit plane exploration a bit more mechanically interesting, and give the shamans fetch a few more abilities. 

[Darius West]

Shamans in RQ have historically been a bit like playing a Netrunner in Cyberpunk, i.e. they are generally stuck playing a mini-game outside the main action.  I actually quite liked the RQ3 variant of Shamans, as with the power of a spirit cult behind them, plus a fetch, and a coterie of other spirits the shaman brought a lot to the table.  It was notable that a Shaman in the right spirit cult could have an allied spirit AND a fetch.  I had fun GMing a trickster shaman whose fetch and allied spirit didn't get along and used to prank him for taking sides, as well as the rest of the party if they got involved.  Having a Shaman in the party can be a lot of work for the GM, as every new spirit in the mix is another personality to keep track of.  It is potentially rewarding however.  I used to simulate the spirits by passing notes from the spirits that a shaman needs to respond to with their voice.  These odd outbursts can be quite interesting.

I totally agree with davecake that anything that can be used to make spirit travel more interesting (and more structured) would be good.  I tried to do this by suggesting that certain spirits were more common in some areas than others.  In retrospect it did become a bit like playing a lethal game of (dare I say it) pokemon go.

One thing that annoyed me however was the somewhat arbitrary Dex limits on skills.  Yeah, I know it existed to stop powerful magical characters also becoming combat wombats, but it is hard enough for characters to get decent skills regardless.  If you think about it, that arbitrary Dex rule should apply to many more characters than just Shamans and Priests, for example, all knowledge deity initiates, healers, alchemists, slaves, bureaucrats, etc.

I found RQ3 style shamans to be really quite powerful, often being more versatile and dangerous than even sorcerers.  IMO shamans either die stupidly or wind up as tin pot demigods. As Runeblogger says, much depends on your POW up, but if you have an allied spirit AND a fetch, that is 3 bites of that cherry.  Shamans generally wound up trading spell spirits to people and getting pretty rich to boot, even after looking after their tribe and cult.

Edited September 13, 2016 by Darius West

[styopa]

Well, Sheng Seleris was a shaman, so we know they can be hella powerful.  I quite liked Sandy's Shaman rules, so I hope they're very much a model for how RQ4 went forward.

In my campaign, more than any other tradition, their utility had a great deal to do with how immanent spirits are generally.  If they're common, the shaman could quickly grow quite powerful, and their abilities had a substantial impact on the party's play.  (Their absence is in my view the toughest part of porting over non-RQ adventures into RQ terms, because in Glorantha I believe they *should* be relatively commonly encountered.  IMO it's harder to balance their impact on play as their impact-curve is pretty steep: an unprepared party will get chewed up, but even one person having a couple-point spirit shield quickly trivializes all but the most powerful spirit attackers.)

I'm particularly interested in seeing what the mechanics are for the interfaces between the magic traditions: when can (or can't) a shaman use sorcery, for example?  We know now that LM's use sorcery, so what are the boundaries (cultural, meta-magical, mechanical rules-wise) between the various traditions and where are the overlaps.  Many cults have shamans as integral (Kyger Litor, Waha, etc) but 

Likewise, how the RQ4 rules approach spirit combat will of course impact much about how powerful/useful/necessary a shaman is to a party.

[soltakss]

On 9/13/2016 at 5:31 PM, styopa said:

Well, Sheng Seleris was a shaman, so we know they can be hella powerful.

So was Jalakeel the Witch and the Earth Witch. Shamans can be very powerful and it would be good to see the new rules reflect that.

[styopa]

5 hours ago, soltakss said:

So was Jalakeel the Witch and the Earth Witch. Shamans can be very powerful and it would be good to see the new rules reflect that.

I rather expect they will, given IIRC Jeff's offhand comments at some point that he really felt Shamans needed more fleshing-out than RQ2 had.

In any case, I'm rather interested to see it.

Edited September 26, 2016 by styopa

[davecake]

I don't think the problem with shamans is, or has ever been, power really. 

In RQ2 Shamans were masters of using normal battle magic, with the fetch really boosting their effectiveness, and a few spirits were really helpful as well. But spirits were not well defined in the rules, and being really good at battle magic might have been effective but just did not seem as interesting as Rune Magic. 

In RQ3 shamans could easily become virtually immune to magic cast by others, as they added their fetches POW to their own defensively, and spirits were defined well enough that there were a few interesting options. But in RQ3 spirit cults were usually defined by the rune magic they granted access too, so shamans often ended up more like a variant priest in play. 
Both the HeroQuest Kolat writeup and the RQ6 approach seemed to have a fun workable approach that makes animism seem both interesting to play and distinct from other forms of magic - concentrate on defining a collection of interesting spirits, and what you can do with them, rather than just making shamanism a variant approach to getting the same magic as others do. 

[davecake]

FWIW, I think that there are a lot of magicians in Glorantha who in some ways integrate or straddle animist and theist form of magic. We know of a few examples - Storm Bull/Urox does so very effectively, probably Kygor Litor does as well, Waha less effectively, Odayla a little bit, elves do, etc. Magic that integrates or straddles sorcery and shamanism is much less common, but I think this is, to some extent, because it is more common in areas we don't know much about - and the dominant sorcery traditions, that is to say Malkionism, generally rejects animism strongly. Actually I think Malkionist sorcery generally has a quite good theoretical understanding of how to integrate sorcery and animist approaches  to magic - but they call it demonology, and teach that only bad people like God Learners, Arkati, and Vadeli do it. Meanwhile, they somehow all keep their demonology books in their library, just in case it should become useful.... 

And likewise, many shamanic traditions think sorcery is forbidden magic, the practice of which is damaging to the soul and incompatible with being a shaman. Illumination may be necessary to combine sorcery and shamanism in most shamanic traditions  - its notable that one of the things the Nysalor cult did in the First Age was teach shamans to use sorcery. 

But I think traditions that integrate or straddle sorcery and animism are more common other parts of the world that we don't have a detailed understanding of. Integrating ancestor worship and dealing with local spirits might quite happily coexist with sorcerous magic in Kralorela (and summoning your ancestors is particularly effective and helpful if your ancestors happen to be learned sorcerers). 

And in Fonrit, the ruling Garangordos tradition can be seen as an attempt to reinvent a lot of the traditions of Pamaltelan shamanism as civilised, often sorcerous, magic. I think there are a few traditions in Fonrit that clearly straddle animist and sorcerous tradition (including one extremely nasty variant of ancestor worship, involving giving your ancestors new bodies by buying slaves and Tapping their POW so your ancestors can possess the bodies without resistance).