Glorantha Second Age

[Y Mab Darogan]

So honest and brutal opinion is this product line any good? I went on a spending spree when the MRQ stuff first came out and they got sent straight to the dark corner of my hard drive unread 

Now I'm looking to get a Mythras game going I've been delving into the various MRQ books for material but with RQG coming soon(ish) was wondering if I'd get any mileage out of the Glorantha specific books?

Honest opinions?

[Jeff]

Greg and I both consider the Mongoose period to be the lowest point for the RuneQuest brand. Mongoose's absurd deadlines for their writers (many of whom are excellent writers) meant that there was rarely time for research, refinement, or thinking things through. Greg wrote History of the Heortling Peoples and Middle Sea Empire as a resource for Robin - which he barely got a chance to use because his deadline to produce the book was too absurdly short. Few of the books are even remotely canonical beyond the most basic of details. This was made worse by their lack of editing, poor art, and awesome production quality. 

And that's the nice version.

[David Scott]

Only Dara Happa Stirs stands out as anything worthwhile.

[hkokko]

You are much better off using any of the stuff from chaosium and avalon hill (except for eldarad) than any of the second age glorantha materials: You do not need to wait - you can start with the available chaosium and ah stuff - even though it is old. 

[deleriad]

11 minutes ago, HorusArisen said:

So honest and brutal opinion is this product line any good?

Honest opinions?

Two things to bear in mind. One is that they are all set in the second age and that Glorantha was essentially reset at the end of the second age so there is little, that can simply be plugged and played into the third age. To an extent, just how canonical they are is largely irrelevant.

The second is that because of Mongoose's well-documented lack of anything approaching quality control you are at the mercy of random circumstance for any individual book. At their worst they are as bad as the Daughters of Darkness but in my opinion there are some real pearls in the mud. 

Robin Laws' Glorantha second age is in my opinion the best written Gloranthan overview published but is not much use for the third age. I suspect that the Glorantha source book for 13th Age will be more directly useful. 

The three Gloranthan campaigns - Blood of Orlanth, Pavis Rises, and Dara Happa Stirs - have hundreds of hours of rich, fun and playable material. The second two in particular have plenty of 'historical' information that could be useful and were written by Loz who knows Glorantha pretty well. When I ran Pavis Rises I had my PCs time-travel to the third age and doing the reverse could be a lot of fun. 

Of the Races books, Aldryami and Mostali are potentially useful. The Mostali book is *very* funny in places, taking Greg's off-hand article about why he hates dwarves and running with it. Both books have plenty of ideas you can mine.

The region books aren't a lot of direct use. I happened to really love the Jrustela book; it was the first time the God Learners felt properly fleshed out to me. The HeroQuesting info has long since been superceded but the society and sense of doom is wonderful. Fronela is also full of great gaming seeds. 

With the exception of Pavis Rises, these are all for the first edition of Mongoose RQ so the rules stuff is, politely, garbage. 

[Martin]

43 minutes ago, Jeff said:

Greg and I both consider the Mongoose period to be the lowest point for the RuneQuest brand. Mongoose's absurd deadlines for their writers (many of whom are excellent writers) meant that there was rarely time for research, refinement, or thinking things through. Greg wrote History of the Heortling Peoples and Middle Sea Empire as a resource for Robin - which he barely got a chance to use because his deadline to produce the book was too absurdly short. Few of the books are even remotely canonical beyond the most basic of details. This was made worse by their lack of editing, poor art, and awesome production quality. 

And that's the nice version.

I for one am reassured by these comments....I vividly recall at the time being VERY unsure (thats the polite version) of what Mongoose would produce and mentioning this to several folk and what they did produce confirmed my perspective.

[Jeff]

As far as I am concerned (and I am pretty sure Greg would agree 110%), the Mongoose license was the biggest mistake in the history of the RuneQuest line. A terrible error that nearly killed off RuneQuest. There's many reasons why I am absolutely unwilling to think of MRQ as "RQ5" - the shoddy quality of those books is only one. 

[Y Mab Darogan]

lol that was blunt, brutal and too the point.

Thanks everyone I'll relegate them back to the vault where they can languish 

[Mankcam]

In my opinion the MRQ line had some great stuff mixed in with some bad.

The first edition era was particularly bad, I felt that it presented a very cheesy version of Glorantha. The MRQ2 era was much better, but still failed to capture the Glorantha of RQ2 days. However the authors did work hard to recover the losses from the previous edition.

The RQ6/ Mythras rules are quite good, although combat does flow somewhat differently with all the combat manuver options. 

If you have Mythras then I would suggest using it for the Mythic Earth settings. MRQ2 Vikings is quite good, and now Mythras has Mythic Rome and Mythic Britain. Lots of flavour in all these books!

However as far as Glorantha goes, I would be inclined to wait until RQG is published , and use the new supplements as well as the RQ2 reprints. If you are really eager then you could try RQ2 now, and update once RQG is released.

So back to the vault with most of the MRQ Glorantha releases, but still useful to pillage here and there, nothing is ever a complete waste.

Edited April 11, 2017 by Mankcam

[Darius West]

On 4/11/2017 at 6:05 PM, HorusArisen said:

So honest and brutal opinion is this product line any good? I went on a spending spree when the MRQ stuff first came out and they got sent straight to the dark corner of my hard drive unread 

Now I'm looking to get a Mythras game going I've been delving into the various MRQ books for material but with RQG coming soon(ish) was wondering if I'd get any mileage out of the Glorantha specific books?

Honest opinions?

There are definitely some awful products produced in this period.

At the time I had some money to splash around, and the Second Age had always appealed to me as a potential setting for a campaign.  I figured that the products would form a system foundation that I could adapt.  It was in fact a load of fun to have veteran Rune Questers playing in the Second Age, as it is one of the few times in Gloranthan history when international sea travel is reasonably common and you can go places.  It was of course tongue-in-cheek-ily immensely politically incorrect and pro Imperialist because everyone wanted to be a Jrusteli. One of my friends who was doing her PhD in Anthropology remarked that it was cathartic to throw cultural sensitivity to the wind and just slaughter the savages.  Given the stresses of a PhD, who can blame her?

A notable example is "Heroes of Legend" which adds a large number of stupid rune powers, a dumb take on the fantasy genre not in keeping with RQ's low fantasy settings, pathetic monsters.  On the other hand it does add a massed battle system, which is something that RQ badly needs now and then.  Of course I am sure it can be done better.   It also adds information about how to run powerful character but it doesn't really mesh with its other product "RQ Empires". 3/10

RQ Empires is a very different animal.  It is an attempt to systematize and international political system.  It is quite a reasonable product in many ways, and could feasibly be used to create histories for RQ settings, or keep track of Imperial powers in the Second Age (but not well).  Of course it suffers from some problems, such as a faction system that has no interlocature with the overall national system, so you wind up with factions that are an irrelevant addendum rather than the policy engine of the empires.  I like it because it is system and table heavy and "I love me a rules-grounded narrative", others will likely hate it for the same reason.  6/10

The Second Age Core Rulebook aren't terrible.  I bought this product primarily to see how the Draconic Mysticism section works.  It is in keeping with previously released RQ3 documents about Dragonewts, and I didn't hate it.  As an introduction to Glorantha it is pretty reasonable for a new player.  If there are lore inaccuracies they are relatively few, and have generally been drawn from Gloranthan source documents pretty faithfully.    6/10

Glorantha The Second Age was given to me as a gift by a friend who wanted to play it.  Essentially it is a glossy version of the Second Age Core Rulebook with some bad illustrations and about half the information.  Not worth it. 2/10

Pavis Rises is a scenario book that deals with Pavis when it is a working city.  While it isn't utterly faithful to the lore, it does make an effort.  It is primarily devoted to the factional infighting within the city and details various cultural cantons within the city prior to its fall.  What it fails to do, for my money, is express to me why I would want to pick up my belongings and move there.  I always got the impression that Pavis of old was a place with a pretty extrodinary load out of magical conveniences that made life easier and the Rubble worth looting.  That isn't adequately conveyed.  It includes a scenario when a Giant comes down from the Rockwoods and booms at the city, and another sceanrio where Dragon Mystics hide a Cradle in the Puzzle Canal.  6/10

Second Age Jrustela is worth purchasing for the multiple page article on God Learning 101 alone.  This essay is faithful to lore and quite amusing and insightful.  It is a more-or-less flavorless treatment of Jrustela otherwise which fleshes out settlements and history of the area in the Second Age.  System poor.  5/10

(except for the article in question which is worth a mark or two on its own.)

Gods of Glorantha isn't particularly canon friendly, but given what HQ gets up to, it sort of doesn't have to be... By which I mean that clause in HQ where it says that players are encouraged to make up legends about how their deity solved a certain problem so they can then apply their cult skill in the same way (Always hated that one, but hey, apparently players are encouraged to "rape the canon" in-game to get a better skill check and nobody thinks the worse of it, but heaven forfend you publish a product that bends the lore a little).  So, given that little license to riot, what does Gods of Glorantha give you?  Quite a decent treatment of Jrusteli sorcery in keeping with RQ3, and Draconized Gloranthan Cults that transpose divine magic for vaguely similar draconic magic.  It nicely provides a few background myths with each cult write-up for you to abuse with God Learning, and a pact system which I didn't use but don't necessarily hate.  Any decent Glorantha GM could have produced this book, but hey, you didn't and Mongoose did. If you like RQ2 and RQ3 there are things in this document you will enjoy, even if it is now "canon" to hate it.  So given that I like it, why the low mark?  Editor fail. Typos galore.  The Lhankor Mhy write-up forgot to include cult spells.  Sloppy.  5/10

Blood of Orlanth.  This is an ambitious little scenario that is sufficiently good that my crew and I have actually played it verbatim from the book as a mini-tournament.  It is written around a myth where Orlanth fights a dragon and is mortally wounded, as understood by a Heortling clan that has fallen on hard times.  Players factionalize with either the EWF, the Traditionalist Orlanthi  or the God Learners, all of whom have a "dog in the fight" about this local regional mystery cult and its implications.  When we played the scenario it was with 3 teams of 3 players, basically acting simultaneously.  It ended with a traditionalist victory, but only by a very narrow margin.  This is a pacy adventure, easy for GMs to develop further if they wish, and was a blast to play.  8/10

I think that by comparison Mythras materials look to be of higher quality, and I was definitely impressed by the quality of the rule book.  On the other hand I haven't had the opportunity to use those rules yet, but they look better thought out than what has gone before, and have obviously developed as a result of a lot of playtesting.

Edited April 14, 2017 by Darius West

[Ian Cooper]

48 minutes ago, Darius West said:

 but given what HQ gets up to, it sort of doesn't have to be... By which I mean that clause in HQ where it says that players are encouraged to make up legends about how their deity solved a certain problem so they can then apply their cult skill in the same way (Always hated that one, but hey, apparently players are encouraged to "rape the canon" in-game to get a better skill check and nobody thinks the worse of it, but heaven forfend you publish a product that bends the lore a little).  So, given that little license to riot, what does Gods of Glorantha give you? 

Wow, this is the most ridiculous statement I have heard on these boards for a long time. No one is encouraged to 'rape the canon'.

HQG draws from the same well-spring as Greg Stafford does, our imagination. In Greg's stories, such as Morden Defends the Camp, included with Hero Wars, magical feats are clearly the hero emulating the god (heroforming in HQG terms) and are based on the god's action in myth. We don't have all of the myths for all of our gods, so instead of limiting players we encourage both them and GMs to make up myths for feats that heroes or their god performed. Of course there has to be agreement at the table that the feel of that myth is in keeping with the established story of the gods. But all Glorantha's Will Vary.

For many it is far move evocative of Greg's writing to say I am performing the feat of Vingkot Holds the Lin,when his shield could not be broken than saying I cast Shield 4.

YMMV.

 

[Ian Cooper]

I'd recommend Dara Happa Stirs though, I think it is an excellent piece of work.

[Y Mab Darogan]

20 minutes ago, Ian Cooper said:

I'd recommend Dara Happa Stirs though, I think it is an excellent piece of work.

Ironically I don't think I have that one lol

[Joerg]

I am a rather obsessive completist collector of Gloranthan texts who has spent serious money for e.g. freeform game sets that were auctioned off at conventions, and I don't have a complete set of the Mongoose era pdfs with Gloranthan theme - only those I could acquire as cheap bundles.

Sometimes it hurts to see how excellent ideas, concepts or good workmanship is mixed with research blunders or irrelevant tangents getting promoted to a supplement's spotlight. There might be some personal disappointment, too, because I had managed to get my Glorantha index as a research tool running on the glorantha.com site at the time, which means that often enough the information was less than two or three clicks away from anyone who cared to look it up. I confess that I did not update the beast to keep up with the internal canon started by Glorantha the Second Age. While the God Learner stuff had profited from rather recent Unfinished Works, much of the pre-existing EWF canon was still spread across many sources - the page citations of  which were available as hyperlinks on the EWF pages of that collection.

 

My overall judgement - if you want to play a game with gloranthan concepts without caring to go too deep into background details, the Mongoose products can serve you well. They provide an alternate Glorantha. If you want to mess with your players' grasp on reality, you could stage some of the scenarios in a nightmare world of Glorantha. Revealed Mythologies gives a very rough idea about the Avanapdur wars, and how the Easterners overcame that overlap of non-permanent dream reality with their own.

If you want to steal Gloranthan ideas and concepts for another setting, the Mongoose books on the various races might be a good resource. Their veracity for canonical Glorantha is about on the same level as speculations on the various incarnations of the digest - some ideas are spot on, some are tangential spin-offs suddenly presented as core components. They do provide quite colorful and different monsters or NPCs for just about any other setting where you might want to introduce them.

I liked the concept of active Timinit participation in the Jrusteli development of Malkionism in the Jrustela Book. No idea how the humanists would have reacted to this, or Brithini expatriats arriving in Jrustela, but I can imagine that there would have been parts of Jrustela that had active Timinit participation in the religious life of the Jrusteli humans. The Abiding Book was well represented, probably because significant parts were reproduced from Greg's documents.

I felt let down with the Clanking City supplement. Who presents sceletal automatons when the city is ruled by the Flesh Machine? There were very nice clockwork punk ideas in the book, and some information taken over from Greg's briefings, but taking the Flesh of the monsters of the Flesh Machine was really really really counter-intuitive, rune-engraved and metal coated skeleton parts nonwithstanding.

Dara Happa Stirs was great. The heroquesty bits were a bit too vague, but probably the best available mechanics with that edition of RQ.

 

So: Second Age Glorantha by Mongoose does make decent to excellent modules for BRP-based fantasy games that you want to give a Gloranthan touch without going full monte. That's absolutely fine for a first approach to the setting and the rules, I did pretty much the same on my (RQ3 era) approach to Glorantha.

It doesn't set you up in the Glorantha carried by the other publications available for the setting, though, and you will have to unlearn details or accept that your Glorantha varies significantly.

[Y Mab Darogan]

I'll probably try to mine it for any Mythras games I run, alongside Elric and the MRQ supplements but leave Glorantha to RQG (RQ2)

[Darius West]

36 minutes ago, Ian Cooper said:

Wow, this is the most ridiculous statement I have heard on these boards for a long time. No one is encouraged to 'rape the canon'.

HQG draws from the same well-spring as Greg Stafford does, our imagination. In Greg's stories, such as Morden Defends the Camp, included with Hero Wars, magical feats are clearly the hero emulating the god (heroforming in HQG terms) and are based on the god's action in myth. We don't have all of the myths for all of our gods, so instead of limiting players we encourage both them and GMs to make up myths for feats that heroes or their god performed. Of course there has to be agreement at the table that the feel of that myth is in keeping with the established story of the gods. But all Glorantha's Will Vary.

For many it is far move evocative of Greg's writing to say I am performing the feat of Vingkot Holds the Lin,when his shield could not be broken than saying I cast Shield 4.

YMMV.

The HQ rules when dealing with cult specialty skills say that players are encouraged to think up myths that allow them to apply their skills to a given situation.  It doesn't say "there is already a body of myths, refer to them please".  Consequently you can invent a myth like "Humakt is forced to do Barntar's Chores: a Weaponthane versus Cottars myth", wherein Humakt uses his death powers to raise a barn by slaying all the nails and boards with mighty blows in just the right way, and constructing a tomb for the slain harvest, so Horvark Deathbrow can add his Death 2W18 affinity to his miserable 5 in carpentry.  HQ is a crappy, sloppy system, and I won't use it.  On the other hand don't tell me that the rule in question isn't there... it is, and it is carte blance to rape the canon.  No apology, no retraction.

[Ian Cooper]

Let's just leave it there. I sense no point in trying to persuade you against your alternative facts

[Darius West]

17 minutes ago, Ian Cooper said:

Let's just leave it there. I sense no point in trying to persuade you against your alternative facts

Alternative interpretation of the facts perhaps?  The rule is real.

[pachristian]

I quite liked Mongoose RQ2, and Nash & Whittaker have continued to improve their work. And I like combat maneuvers. More effort is required on the part of player, but the maneuvers give a much more satisfying combat scene. But this is not about the game system.

A friend of mine ran a (sadly short lived) second age game. He liked the setting, as did we. Because of the size of empires in the second age, it was easy to set a game entirely within one empire, and then ignore mass politics. In a Classic RQ game (in the classic setting) your game pretty much has to be pro-Empire or anti-Empire: Dragon pass is the setting for the hero wars, and everybody ends up on one side or the other. Playing in the second age was a way to avoid a game where you had to choose a side. We were adventurers in the wild parts of civilization; but we weren't being drawn into a war.

The Cults book is close enough to the classic material that you could plug things in pretty well. I liked the blend of spirit magic/divine magic that characterized the Praxian cults. If you use MRQ2, Legend, RQ6, or Mythras, these write-ups will give you a solid basis for adapting Glorantha to your game. They have flaws, but they work. A(nother) friend of mine particularly liked the variant abilities of the trickster, and made good use of it in a campaign (set in the 3rd age, but using MRQ2). I played a shaman of Kolat, and it was fun to have an Orlanthi shaman in party (shamans in the Nash-Whitaker RQ line can be very different from shamans in classic RQ).

The Abiding Book gave us something completely new. The book showed how financial organizations could be set up as "cults". Your character gets a dividend in money, instead of spells or mystic powers. I thought the discussion of the logic and philosophy of the Jrustali was very well written, and using the understanding of the culture's paradigm made it easy to adapt it to ruins, lost manuscripts, and other treasures of the lost age.

The Empires book is worth getting if you need to model any sort of political storyline. It allows you to play whole kingdoms as characters. Use it for a backdrop. I've used it to simulate the Safelstern city-states.

The Arms and Equipment book had some truly silly equipment, but it gave some very good rules for Enchanting, and for power crystals - something that was lacking in the earlier MRQ books. Divine casters "Enchant" by going on a hero quest, and bringing back a divinely inspired item. The rules worked, and made the items special, without being overwhelming. One thing they did not allow you to do was create volumes of permanent magic items. 

[pachristian]

As you're getting a Mythras game going, here's some tips from our experiences:

1) The MRQ2 stuff will plug in directly. There's a few skill name changes but that's about it. The biggest flaw in the cults book is that the relevant magic skills (Folk Magic, Exhort, Devotion, Invoke, and Shaping) are not listed as cult skills. You'll want to rewrite this, otherwise your players need two extra cult skills for every level of advancement.

2) My friend, who ran the MRQ2 campaign, characterized the system as "it moves you to the sweet spot (skills of 70% - 90%) as fast as possible and then keeps you there". He was correct. As you are using a points improvement system, instead of check marks, remember that players will have to pick and choose their skills very carefully. As he likes a "characters steadily advance" game, 7 IP per session, but gave very little training time. (it averaged out to about 1 week per game session) That will not work with rules as written in Mythras; If doing it again we'd give out ~5 IP per session and enough training to average out to about 3 weeks training time per session. 

4) Nash & Whittaker's work is written from a pulp point of view; magic is scarce in their default setting. In classic RQ, magic advances in a parallel path to the rest of the character development: Your POW goes up, and you can buy spells or bind spirits in addition to all of your other training. Mythras, as in MRQ2, magic and training are an either-or proposition: The time and IP you spend on magic is instead of other skills or attributes. Just be aware of that key difference when adapting classic RQ material, or managing player expectations. Magic will be less common than in classic RQ.

5) To adapt Mythras to Glorantha, I use the "Common Folk Magic" rule. I also allow a character to take the magic skills appropriate to their culture as additional professional skills in the Career phase of character development. So if you choose "Soldier" as a career, you can choose a war god, such as Humakt, and take Devotion (Humakt) and Exhort as professional skills in addition to your standard 3 professional skills. You get these magic skills at base, and can raise them like any other skills.

Edited April 11, 2017 by pachristian

[Steve]

2 hours ago, Darius West said:

The HQ rules when dealing with cult specialty skills say that players are encouraged to think up myths that allow them to apply their skills to a given situation.  It doesn't say "there is already a body of myths, refer to them please".  

The rules also don't say "there is already a body of acceptable weaponry, refer to it please", so does that mean the HQG rules are encouraging people to run around with lasers and rocket launchers?

[JonL]

4 hours ago, Darius West said:

The HQ rules when dealing with cult specialty skills say that players are encouraged to think up myths that allow them to apply their skills to a given situation.  It doesn't say "there is already a body of myths, refer to them please".  Consequently you can invent a myth like "Humakt is forced to do Barntar's Chores: a Weaponthane versus Cottars myth", wherein Humakt uses his death powers to raise a barn by slaying all the nails and boards with mighty blows in just the right way, and constructing a tomb for the slain harvest, so Horvark Deathbrow can add his Death 2W18 affinity to his miserable 5 in carpentry.

You know, if someone at my table tells that story - and it's GOOD - reflecting on Seperating trees into planks and comparing it to Utuma moving the tree to it's next stage of existence , and incorporating a lesson of some sort for how good Humakti should handle the difficulties inherent in being both part of the community and yet apart from it, and the folks at the around the table are caught up and entertained by it - I'll give that player the augment!

If it's bullshit he's getting a Stretch at best and more likely just told "No" with an admonishment about not abusing the rules.

 

4 hours ago, Darius West said:

HQ is a crappy, sloppy system, and I won't use it.

"Not to your taste." and "Crappy" are not the same thing. 

At any rate, I've looked through a couple of the MRQ books. I find the physical rune tokens to be a huge conceptual misstep. OTOH, I really enjoyed reading the in-character parts of The Clanking City.

[Joerg]

I am a rather obsessive completist collector of Gloranthan texts who has spent serious money for e.g. freeform game sets that were auctioned off at conventions, and I don't have a complete set of the Mongoose era pdfs with Gloranthan theme - only those I could acquire as cheap bundles.

Sometimes it hurts to see how excellent ideas, concepts or good workmanship is mixed with research blunders or irrelevant tangents getting promoted to a supplement's spotlight. There might be some personal disappointment, too, because I had managed to get my Glorantha index as a research tool running on the glorantha.com site at the time, which means that often enough the information was less than two or three clicks away from anyone who cared to look it up. I confess that I did not update the beast to keep up with the internal canon started by Glorantha the Second Age. While the God Learner stuff had profited from rather recent Unfinished Works, much of the EWF canon was still spread across many sources.

 

My overall judgement - if you want to play a game with gloranthan concepts without caring to go too deep into background details, the Mongoose products can serve you well. They provide an alternate Glorantha. If you want to mess with your players' grasp on reali

If you want to steal Gloranthan ideas and concepts for another setting, the Mongoose books on the various races might be a good resource. Their veracity for canonical Glorantha is about on the same level as speculations on the various incarnations of the digest - some ideas are spot on, some are tangential spin-offs suddenly presented as core components.

I liked the concept of active Timinit participation in the Jrusteli development of Malkionism in the Jrustela Book. No idea how the humanists would have reacted to this, or Brithini expatriats arriving in Jrustela, but I can imagine that there would have been parts of Jrustela that had active Timinit participation in the religious life of the Jrusteli humans.

[Runeblogger]

A friend of mine ran a RQ3 campaign in the Second Age with only zistorite PCs. And he didn't even know about the books by Mongoose. But the campaign was epic. So I guess if you wanted to run a campaign in the Second Age, you could mine these books for ideas. I might use the Clanking City book someday to get some ideas for zistorite ruins in the Third Age. And the same with the other books.

[Darius West]

21 hours ago, JonL said:

You know, if someone at my table tells that story - and it's GOOD - reflecting on Seperating trees into planks and comparing it to Utuma moving the tree to it's next stage of existence , and incorporating a lesson of some sort for how good Humakti should handle the difficulties inherent in being both part of the community and yet apart from it, and the folks at the around the table are caught up and entertained by it - I'll give that player the augment!

So... if the player rapes the canon in a fashion that pleases you, you give them the augment?  Hmm.  

21 hours ago, JonL said:

If it's bullshit he's getting a Stretch at best and more likely just told "No" with an admonishment about not abusing the rules.

 Abusing the rules?  Hang on, the poor player is simply doing exactly what the rules say they should do.  Really, they have simply failed their fast-talk-the-GM skill IRL.  How can you abuse the rules when the rule in question IS the abuse?  It is a terrible rule.  The rule says augment the character's skill if the player can come up with a myth about their deity that relates the augment to the situation i.e. invent a myth on the spot for extra points.  Obviously you have to reference the existing mythology, but the players are being told to invent myths, not just extrapolate on existing ones they are aware of.  So... it isn't raping the canon if the GM consents?  I don't think that is how it works

21 hours ago, JonL said:

"Not to your taste." and "Crappy" are not the same thing. 

Pretty much everyone I knew who loved RQ and Glorantha were immensely excited at the prospect of HQ when it was first aired, and we waited patiently for it to come out, put in our advance orders, and went to the shops to get our copies on the day of release.  We all read the rules and basically test bedded a series of situations using the rules on the following weekend.  We were all well aware that HQ was going to be a lot like Pendragon.  We were fine with that because Pendragon was a masterpiece.  Instead what we got was a game that was in all ways inferior to PenDragon Pass as featured in ToTRM.  Gone were all of the intelligent gritty rules that made RQ such fun, and in their place a rubbery "narrative" skill descriptors and "magical" augments, which meant that if your skill descriptor was sufficiently vague or inclusive it applied to everything.  Posessions, even magical items, just became more colourless augments.  Don't get me started on the misslie combat system's defects.  RQ had always been great because it encouraged players to diversify their skills, but HQ encouraged intense specialization, compounded by the experience system.  Pretty much every RQ GM I knew was going to convert their game over to HQ, and had simply assumed everything would be backwards compatible and easily convertible.  Nope, not so.  HQ was an immense downgrade, and was grossly inferior to PenDragon Pass, which was sketched out over about 6 pages instead of hundreds and cost about $15 instead of $80.  I know people who dropped out of RPGs altogether because of HQ because they were so disillusioned by it.  Now Mythbusters conclusively proved you CAN polish a turd, and I am not going to say that I hate all the source material and scenarios that have come out under the HQ label, most are good and can be retconned into RQ and are good, but the core rules themselves have rendered this modern incarnation of Glorantha an invertebrate, and the opinion is far from mine alone.

Edited April 12, 2017 by Darius West