RCQ Question

[Spence]

So I have been reading the forum threads on and off and have a could questions about it that I either haven’t found specifically answered or if they were my forum’fu has failed me.

As I understand it the new RQG is reaching back to the old game before AH.   The game where magic was mostly Rune Magic.  For my group, we pretty much envisioned the old classical world when we played RQ.  Hoplites, galleys, bronze weapons, the Gods were accessible and instead of the mobile artillery team wizards of other games, magic was inscribed on the item or onto the PC themselves via runes.  Taking inspiration from the old movies.  It has been way too many years for me to remember exactly. 

I also liked the vagueness of the world and history since that allowed the GM maximum freedom.  Our last vestiges of interest died with the concrete straitjacket of the later years “histories” and “events”.  Great for the authors personal campaign, but death on everyone else.  

 

So a couple questions:

Is magic going to return the old concepts of Rune Magic?

Will the “known history” throttle back to be less stifling and specific.  Far vaguer to allow for the players to actually explore the great unknown and the GM to actually be creative?

[hkokko]

24 minutes ago, Spence said:

 

Will the “known history” throttle back to be less stifling and specific.  Far vaguer to allow for the players to actually explore the great unknown and the GM to actually be creative?

 

heh - probably not. Too much detailed stuff now available - too many grognards to argue about it :-)  What you can do is what I mostly do - ignore it in the my campaign's and players context :-) YGWV. I read it, am influenced by it but do not feel strait jacketed by it (I may be in strait jacket for other things) - I read (some of /most of ) it for inspiration and collect it for fun. Glorantha is a world - these histories are like others - they are viewpoints and many times written for specific readers by the victors and the writer's cannot be omniscient - they have been usually been paid by somebody (the victor's field marshal) and are working in tight deadline with limited and unreliable sources. 

[Spence]

7 minutes ago, hkokko said:

heh - probably not. Too much detailed stuff now available - too many grognards to argue about it :-)  What you can do is what I mostly do - ignore it in the my campaign's and players context :-) YGWV. I read it, am influenced by it but do not feel strait jacketed by it (I may be in strait jacket for other things) - I read (some of /most of ) it for inspiration and collect it for fun. Glorantha is a world - these histories are like others - they are viewpoints and many times written for specific readers by the victors and the writer's cannot be omniscient - they have been usually been paid by somebody (the victor's field marshal) and are working in tight deadline with limited and unreliable sources. 

Oh, I understand it is an extensive world.  But there are old worlds written with the idea that there are people that want to be able to retool to their own world and there are games that go out of their way to throw up road blocks. "What? Giggle-man is mentioned 2947 times?  Gah."   I seem to remember (though I may be wrong, it has been a long time) that even the included gods were close enough to myth to be easily compared.  It made it easy to bring in new players and have a sense of what was happening. 

 

 

[David Scott]

21 hours ago, Spence said:

Is magic going to return the old concepts of Rune Magic?

I'm unsure what you mean by this. RQ2 & 3 had rune magic. RQG has rune magic just as they did, with better flexibility (playability). It also has spirit magic (was battle magic) with revised rules for better playability. It will also have sorcery.

The known history is now very well established, published and discussed (up to 1625ish). There's even a Guide covering it. However the new setting date is advanced to 1627, well beyond all the established stuff. There's loose info about what's going to happen (King of Sartar and the cryptic Hero Wars section of the guide). So it's a new start against a set starting background. So the history is not yet established. We know broad strokes, not the details. So basically it's a fresh reboot. If you want to know more, then see if you can get a copy of the board game Dragon Pass. There you can play out the future if you want.

To me this is very reminiscent of what classic Traveller did. They set you off at a known date at the start of a huge war. If you bought the 5th Frontier War board game, you could play out your games against the backdrop of what you played. The outcome of the war wasn't set at the time (later publications jumped forward and described the canon outcome). Other games like Exalted (2) did exactly the same. This is a well established idea, so you don't need to know anything to start playing.

Edited April 30, 2017 by David Scott
corrected the date to 1627

[Joerg]

 

1 hour ago, Spence said:

As I understand it the new RQG is reaching back to the old game before AH.   The game where magic was mostly Rune Magic. 

Still is, if you stay out of the lands of the wizards. (Which were mentioned already in Cults of Prax and Cults of Terror, the two books where you learned about the gods.)

1 hour ago, Spence said:

For my group, we pretty much envisioned the old classical world when we played RQ.  Hoplites, galleys, bronze weapons, the Gods were accessible and instead of the mobile artillery team wizards of other games, magic was inscribed on the item or onto the PC themselves via runes.  Taking inspiration from the old movies.  It has been way too many years for me to remember exactly. 

Little of that has changed. You can have all of this, although not all of this at once - galleys and hoplites (at least formations of hoplites) don't meet in Glorantha, or only for a single event in the recent past. Which you can happily ignore, and make it happen if you feel it improves your game.

1 hour ago, Spence said:

I also liked the vagueness of the world and history since that allowed the GM maximum freedom. 

I started to be interested in Glorantha when I got my hands on Pavis (with its history bits), Troll Pak (with its world history from the perspective of the darkmen) and Genertela Box (which detailed part of the world).

I came from a world which I had designed myself, taking inspiration from (or, in other words, stealing from) Glorantha and a couple of other settings (Middle Earth, Midkemia, and most prominently the Viking myths and history). I had that maximum freedom, in the isolation of my gaming group - even though some of my players took the world for games of their own, I never found it easy to share my ideas about this world with others.

Glorantha had a dedicated community of fans, at that time recently pulled together by mailing lists on the internet just when it became a public place rather than a specialists' playground. One could discuss ideas and impressions, just like we still do here. One could participate in the creation of the world. You still can. It takes some determination, but you still will be able to submit scenarios with some setting information, and have a chance for publication. It might take a few years - Ian Cooper's Red Cow clan saga was around for how many years? 12? before it saw publication as "The Coming Storm", and soon "The Eleven Lights".

1 hour ago, Spence said:

Our last vestiges of interest died with the concrete straitjacket of the later years “histories” and “events”.  Great for the authors personal campaign, but death on everyone else.  

If you don't want to use these, don't. IMO you miss out, big time.

1 hour ago, Spence said:

So a couple questions:

Is magic going to return the old concepts of Rune Magic?

Rune Magic never has gone. It still is the main form of magic for characters from the core area of the publications - Dragon Pass.

In Prax, Rune Magic is available, but the native beast riders are at least as adept dealing with lesser spirits in other ways, and through their shamans (which have been present since the first days of RuneQuest).

Alchemy (in RQ2 the skill to make all kinds of potion) has been discovered to be a form of sorcery, the magic of the wizards mentioned for the far-away west, with increasing presence (once again) in this region.

1 hour ago, Spence said:

Will the “known history” throttle back to be less stifling and specific.  Far vaguer to allow for the players to actually explore the great unknown and the GM to actually be creative?

No throttling back. The history is there. It is what led to the current situation.

1 hour ago, Spence said:

 

3 minutes ago, Spence said:

Oh, I understand it is an extensive world.  But there are old worlds written with the idea that there are people that want to be able to retool to their own world and there are games that go out of their way to throw up road blocks. "What? Giggle-man is mentioned 2947 times?  Gah."   I seem to remember (though I may be wrong, it has been a long time) that even the included gods were close enough to myth to be easily compared.  It made it easy to bring in new players and have a sense of what was happening.

If you make the jump forward to 1627, the future events have as little detail as the events beyond 1617 had in RQ2. There is a quarter page timeline with more or less definite future events, and numerous prophecies of the Hero Wars spread over the Guide to Glorantha, plus an appendix with in-world-stories from possible outcomes. Feel free to use these or ignore these. The slate is about as clean forward as it was when RQ2 was published. And the world as it was before has been changed a lot by recent events.

Magic has become open for new ways, while the old ways have been revived, too. There will be scenarios where the old ways and the new ways come at odds with one another. And you will be able to decide which of the ways to prefer. Individually, and as a group. And the decision will change your Glorantha.

 

Looking backwards, there is a whole lot of information available now that explains how the status quo was arrived, and what the status quo is. Use this, if you want to. If you cannot be bothered, use the maps, as much info as you can digest, and start playing. Just don't complain if your world-changing events don't find enthusiastic support for inclusion into canon if you share them here, or if you want to submit them to a magazine that is somewhat interested in furthering canonical Glorantha. (The only one seeing print at the moment is Wyrm's Footnotes, with a publication period of indeterminate length.)

Your Glorantha Will Vary.

This may cause problems if a future product contradicts the outcomes of your campaign. Tough luck, that's one product which won't be playable as is.

During the last 25 years that I have studied Glorantha in depth, there have been several conceptional changes to Glorantha coming and going. The Yelmalio Schism, and One True Worldism. Sorcery variants for RQ. The Clan Only game. Three completely separate otherworlds triplicating all kinds of creatures to adhere to that canon. Subcults of subcults. Puma people (don't ask). Physically manifested runes (don't ask about this, either).
The region I chose to make my own about 24 years ago has been changed during that time, due to more and more information "discovered" or delivered after I started playing and designing there, and to find official truths about that region to disappear from canon that were the basis for some of my designing (e.g. Hendriki calling their warriors "knights", as per RuneQuest Companion from 1983 - basically because knights, even those earliest specimen of the Sarmatian and Frankish lancer variety during the dying West Roman Empire that I had advocated, have left Glorantha altogether, now being Men-of-all, which ironically don't exist among the aberrant Malkioni sect inhabiting Heortland which might have inspired the Hendriki to call their weaponthanes such). Having been a fairly loud voice and exchanging ideas with many other people, I think I managed to slip in a couple of my ideas into canon, by convincing other authors. And I had to learn to live with ideas of mine being rejected, or being transformed into something quite different from what I thought they would be.

 

If you have a concrete concept what kind of game you want to play, people around here will be happy to advise you where and how to do so in Glorantha.

You can ignore those opinions. If your city of London lies at the mouth of a fjord with 4000 foot high mountains to either side, so be it. If your Manhattan is the pastoralist colony of Dutchmen in the middle of the Atlantic, play with it. Don't expect to be able to use much of the background material that will be provided for this region of the world, though.

[hkokko]

2 hours ago, Spence said:

Oh, I understand it is an extensive world.  But there are old worlds written with the idea that there are people that want to be able to retool to their own world and there are games that go out of their way to throw up road blocks. "What? Giggle-man is mentioned 2947 times?  Gah."   I seem to remember (though I may be wrong, it has been a long time) that even the included gods were close enough to myth to be easily compared.  It made it easy to bring in new players and have a sense of what was happening. 

 

 

You can restart with something from here https://notesfrompavis.wordpress.com/2014/04/10/starting-a-glorantha-rq6-campaign-before-adventures-in-glorantha/ there are several guest posts by newer and older players(hi  @Joerg)  about how to start. They might be useful even with a restart. 

It is quite easy to fit in... The richness of current material is fabulous at many levels. You do not have to sweat it though - this is a game, not a university exam in comparative religion,history and xenology :-) Having in an earlier post said that one can "ignore" background material. Well - spent one weekend in studying everything possible written of Fonrit for creating background material for new player joining the campaign and for once and all creating the background creation set so the next one will be easier.

In the midst having most enjoyable romp on a wizard tower with very little direct tie-in to Glorantha background and history but having new player enjoyable settled in with nice background.   Then spending this weekend countless hours on an obscure non-canon Fonritan healer cult so it fits well with the rest of the campaign.

At the same time tuning my rune magic house variant on top of limited run RQ version (no it's not available) - this required walking thru quite a bit of spells, cults and magic system growth and interactions. This required looking at multiple versions of RQ rules and books. Could have done it without the research but just wanted to...

When we started - it was just Apple Lane and RQ2. Later on Pavis was the one that blew our minds.

There still remains after 36 years in Glorantha lots of books on Glorantha I have not completely (or even at all) read thru. They (I think I have most of them)  look at me with accusing eyes from the shelf nearby and I hear scffling pages plotting something. A day will come when I need the info and even the unread book will be opened. 

Even with this wealth of material I have not sweated it. Sometimes I read something (sometimes a lot) to research for a game session, tool or background, sometimes I just invent - surprisingly lot of activity can be surprisingly little prepared and still be enjoyable. Sometimes there is a whole Greenland worth of preparing and just a tiny bit of that is visible in a session. There are whole disciplines of thought that I just skip. The world is great, material is great and getting better all the time but the game goes on and most of the memorable moments are there because of the game we play not the material I read or don't read. 

Our game seems to be traveling farther from the well walked paths of Prax, Pavis, Balazar and Dragon Pass. Fonrit is where we currently are, we may return to more established areas or not...

Glorantha is lovely, YGWV.... 

[tedopon]

I just use whatever I want from the whole history of Glorantha that I like, stuff I make up and stuff I steal from elsewhere and I don't pay any attention to timelines/canon/etc. 

I hope that the new iteration of RQ stresses the YGWV ethos. A couple of the major DnD settings and some other well known IPs have annoyed me as gaming settings over the years because people were so concerned with canon consistency. 

While I understand from a publisher's perspective it is in your best interests to have an organized 'current' setting I'd hope for at least a couple throwaway lines encouraging people to do what they want.

Either way, I'm excited that this potentially could be a high point for Runequest/Glorantha. Yay.

[styopa]

It's all a matter of how hard you want to squint.

Squint really hard, and all you see is the rough outlines: the general map, broad sweeps of historic events and eras, masses of population; this leaves maximum flexibility for you to adopt the world as yours.  Likely expansions and supplements will require a comparable squint - leaving out great swathes of the (almost certainly extensive) expository stuff but still mostly being useful as 'situations' with monsters/npcs in different contexts that your PCs will be involved with.  After all, Rabbit Hat Farm or Dyksund Caverns could be *anywhere* from the Zola Fel region to the coast of Medieval France.

As has been said many times, Your Glorantha Will Vary.  More than that, I sincerely doubt ANYONE uses everything canon in their games.  Anyone.*

*well, aside from the Chaosium guys, whose games tautologically define canon.  But I bet not even all of them.

Don't be even slightly intimidated by people who react explicitly or implicitly negatively to your ideas.  Share them all you like.  Whether I or anyone uses them or not is up to us.  Personally I can almost always find something to steal no matter what the peculiarities of someone else's setting are...

I would say that we're necessarily going through a little current of One True Worldism right now (commercially necessary because I think one of the fair slaps at Glorantha has been the lack of an empirical true narrative over 30+ years of canonical wandering), it's not that big a deal.

[styopa]

16 hours ago, Joerg said:

Still is, if you stay out of the lands of the wizards. (Which were mentioned already in Cults of Prax and Cults of Terror, the two books where you learned about the gods.)

OK now I'm going to have to go dig through CoT CoP to see where they mentioned Western Wizards.

[Joerg]

@styopa It really was there in Cults of Prax (references to the Malkioni) and Cults of Terror (explicitely mentioning the wizards).

Malkioni wizards are mentioned in Cults of Terror under the Materialist entry, and where Time is discussed. Froalar and his daughter Fenela are mentioned in the Issaries cult. The land of Seshneg is mentioned in the Daka Fal cult.

Present in the background since RQ2...

[styopa]

3 hours ago, Joerg said:

@styopa It really was there in Cults of Prax (references to the Malkioni) and Cults of Terror (explicitely mentioning the wizards).

Malkioni wizards are mentioned in Cults of Terror under the Materialist entry, and where Time is discussed. Froalar and his daughter Fenela are mentioned in the Issaries cult. The land of Seshneg is mentioned in the Daka Fal cult.

Present in the background since RQ2...

Oh I don't disbelieve you at all, just didn't remember it.

[Spence]

 

I will be getting a rulebook regardless of whether I decide to play/run the game.  I am a RPG'aholic and just have to buy the new shiny RPG's

Thanks for all the inputs everyone, it has given me a lot to think on.

 

[g33k]

On 4/29/2017 at 0:18 PM, Spence said:

As I understand it the new RQG ... we played RQ....  It has been way too many years for me to remember exactly. 

 

12 hours ago, Spence said:

I will be getting a rulebook regardless ...

Welcome back!

 

On 4/29/2017 at 0:18 PM, Spence said:

I also liked the vagueness of the world and history since that allowed the GM maximum freedom.  Our last vestiges of interest died with the concrete straitjacket of the later years “histories” and “events”.  Great for the authors personal campaign, but death on everyone else.  

Will the “known history” throttle back to be less stifling and specific.  Far vaguer to allow for the players to actually explore the great unknown and the GM to actually be creative?

Overall, there is only more history/culture/detail than there was "back in the day."  The grognards have not been idle!

That said, "YGWV" = "Your Glorantha Will Vary" has always been Rule One of the setting; use as much or as little of the "official" world as you care to use, change what you want to change, etc etc etc.  "Rule zero" would be "if your group is having fun, you are Officially Doing It Right (no matter your adherence to canon)."

You will need to be able to set aside whatever bits of the setting don't suit you; can you do that these days better than you could back then when you felt straitjacketed & suffered campaign death?

 

On 4/29/2017 at 0:18 PM, Spence said:

The game where magic was mostly Rune Magic.  For my group, we pretty much envisioned the old classical world when we played RQ.  Hoplites, galleys, bronze weapons, the Gods were accessible and instead of the mobile artillery team wizards of other games, magic was inscribed on the item or onto the PC themselves via runes.  Taking inspiration from the old movies.  It has been way too many years for me to remember exactly. 

Is magic going to return the old concepts of Rune Magic?

Cues from the "Classical World" are, broadly-speaking, very apt indeed!  The gods are very active and accessible, although (due to the Great Compromise) they don't come into the world personally (but the PCs can still meet them via HeroQuests).  The PC's "cult" affiliation(s) -- or lack thereof -- are among their most-defining traits.

Note that Glorantha is extremely varied... some parts of it are actually stone-age cultures, such as much of the Wilds of Balazar (seen in the much-beloved "Griffin Mountain" sandbox-y setting), while more-advanced elements also exist elsewhere (the dwarves have mechanisms, guns, etc; some sorcerers are magical-scientist types building a magitech culture; etc) .

In most or the old-school RQ settings (Dragon Pass, Prax, Sartar) the players would probably have had more "Battle Magic" (aka "Spirit Magic" etc) than Rune Magic:  spells like Bladesharp, Befuddle, Glue, Speedart, Disruption, etc...  Rune Magic was something achieved only by more-advanced characters.  The new "RQG" edition moves away from that old-school "zero to hero" trope, however, with PC's starting play at/near "master" level in their core competence, and Rune Status not too far away.

The "Runes" are often worn, tattoo'ed, scribed onto weapons/items, yes... but in Glorantha they are much more metaphysical than that, and the outward signs are at least as much a reminder to the user or the maker of the item, and/or a display to others of the affiliation of the wielder.

 

[Spence]

On 5/2/2017 at 8:26 AM, g33k said:

In most or the old-school RQ settings (Dragon Pass, Prax, Sartar) the players would probably have had more "Battle Magic" (aka "Spirit Magic" etc) than Rune Magic:  spells like Bladesharp, Befuddle, Glue, Speedart, Disruption, etc...  Rune Magic was something achieved only by more-advanced characters.  The new "RQG" edition moves away from that old-school "zero to hero" trope, however, with PC's starting play at/near "master" level in their core competence, and Rune Status not too far away.

The "Runes" are often worn, tattoo'ed, scribed onto weapons/items, yes... but in Glorantha they are much more metaphysical than that, and the outward signs are at least as much a reminder to the user or the maker of the item, and/or a display to others of the affiliation of the wielder.

 

OK.  I can see my old noggin has forgotten much detail.   It must have been Battle Magic I was thinking of. We liked the idea of the requirement to affix the "Rune" to the device (sword, armor, what have you) and then invest personal power to be able to invoke the effect.  Yes the sword was now "magic", but only for that PC unless/until they also knew the "spell" and invested the needed power.  And if you lost you sword you had to go through everything to invest/create another. 

 

I really do not remember the details of how any of it actually was done rules-wise.  Just that it wasn't an easy process and the players in my group expended more effort to recover a lost/stolen object rather than create new ones.

 

Even after 30+ years I can remember how much fun we had.  Just can;t remember the nuts and bolts of the system.

[g33k]

4 hours ago, Spence said:

It must have been Battle Magic I was thinking of. We liked the idea of the requirement to affix the "Rune" to the device (sword, armor, what have you) and then invest personal power to be able to invoke the effect.  Yes the sword was now "magic", but only for that PC unless/until they also knew the "spell" and invested the needed power.  And if you lost you sword you had to go through everything to invest/create another. 

I really do not remember the details of how any of it actually was done rules-wise.  Just that it wasn't an easy process and the players in my group expended more effort to recover a lost/stolen object rather than create new ones.

Sounds like a "spell matrix" with a spell embedded into an item, needing "attunement" (via POW roll) by the user.