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New RuneQuest and gods' Runes.


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12 hours ago, Oracle said:

Even more so as Glorantha is a world based on living myths, which may even contradict each other and still will be true. This is (one of) the core idea(s) of Glorantha, and any game system based on this setting may try to set up definitions, which are consistent in the context of this game, but will never be able to define a single true and only, always applicable set of definitions for this world.

So regarding everything related to the God Time (runes, myths, gods) the Guide to Glorantha may provide the most consistent view of 'pre-history', but surely not the only one possible. (And even that may be true only from a Godlearner's point of view.) That's at least my understanding.

Nicely put.

Again, I'd say that while this makes for a fascinating Campbellian exploration of the variability of the monomyth, and an insightful setting for the poly-cultural heroes journey...

...it's going to be confusing as hell to anyone who isn't already invested in exploring it.  Frankly, while some people may find such metaphysics exhilarating and challenging, others find it exhausting, pointlessly complicated, and irrelevant.

Some people just want a fresh setting where they can play an RPG with their friends.

I'm not saying Chaosium should water down Glorantha to make it some insipid flavorless Greyhawk clone, but I do feel that for commercial viability there has to be some place for a newbie to find a conceptual footing amongst the quicksand.  

I feel a little bit like some (not implying you) prefer a Byzantine-flavored Glorantha, where every grubby fishmonger has a violently defended opinion on the triune nature of God.

Will there be a shallow end to the Gloranthan pool where new explorers can splash about and simply have fun without worrying about drowning?  

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11 hours ago, SDLeary said:

For example, how would a character explore Yelm's mastery aspect, rather than life or death, in the game. Would this simply be a matter of staying within the culture and rising through various social barriers? And how might this effect new magic spells?

I ask, because exploring these "other aspects" might be fodder for various quests that must be accomplished by a PC.

This is the realm of heroquest, story and adventures. Yelm's mastery rune isn't in RQG, if you want to include it you can go ahead and do so. You will have to wait for the rules to see how the cults and magic works with the runes. Currently there is no Mastery based Rune Magic, but that's not to say some won't be published or you can make up your own, using the Devising your own Rune Spells (like the old Runepower guidelines.)

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39 minutes ago, styopa said:

Nicely put.

Again, I'd say that while this makes for a fascinating Campbellian exploration of the variability of the monomyth, and an insightful setting for the poly-cultural heroes journey...

...it's going to be confusing as hell to anyone who isn't already invested in exploring it.  Frankly, while some people may find such metaphysics exhilarating and challenging, others find it exhausting, pointlessly complicated, and irrelevant.

Some people just want a fresh setting where they can play an RPG with their friends.

I'm not saying Chaosium should water down Glorantha to make it some insipid flavorless Greyhawk clone, but I do feel that for commercial viability there has to be some place for a newbie to find a conceptual footing amongst the quicksand.  

...

I do understand the need for this kind of clarification absolutely. In fact I guess most of the players in my group are not interested in the metaphysics of Glorantha nearly as much as I am. Therefore my current hope is that the announced cult books will bring clarification at least on a regional level - as already mentioned in a previous post I don't think this is possible on a universal level. So introducing the required kind of information on a regional level may be the best compromise between holding up the complexity of this game world and making it accessible for players preferring a less confusing and more playable approach.

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Not to worry. Disney will buy out Glorantha. A new set of canon material will be defined, everything else will be moved to "legend" status, and JJ will direct a movie based on the result.

It's ironic to see the direction that two universes that started with the influence of Joseph Campbell took.

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Glorantha is great and I love it, and I praise the job made by Chaosium's team, but it is in my opinion sometime going too far in obscure metaphysical concepts, which at the end can be seen as trying to cope with inconsistencies in the setting. Sorry, but we don't need quantum mechanics for Glorantha to enjoy it. It is up to the players to make it vary, but the publisher shall provide solid references. Game designers shall first design...a game, and not get lost in intellectual masturbation, as the French say.

Qui bene amat bene castigat, I still love playing in Glorantha.

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44 minutes ago, Zit said:

Glorantha is great and I love it, and I praise the job made by Chaosium's team, but it is in my opinion sometime going too far in obscure metaphysical concepts, which at the end can be seen as trying to cope with inconsistencies in the setting. Sorry, but we don't need quantum mechanics for Glorantha to enjoy it. It is up to the players to make it vary, but the publisher shall provide solid references.

Sure - the games set in Glorantha should provide entry level information for innocent fun with a single absolute truth. Chaos is a necessary part of the world and a safe source of magic, Orlanth's rebellion has brought everything bad to the world. Praise Yelm and the Red Goddess. (Probably not the single and absolute truth you were thinking of, but valid.)

That innocent fun shouldn't bar these same games from allowing deeper explorations for a different kind of fun. If it isn't your kind of fun, don't go there.

There are no inconsistencies. There are different cults for a similar or the same divine entity. Compare real world's Islam and Santeria, for instance. Do you have any problems with Orlanth Adenturous vs. Orlanth Thunderous, or are you so used to this that it hasn't struck you as some of the same phenomenon?

 

44 minutes ago, Zit said:

Game designers shall first design...a game, and not get lost in intellectual masturbation, as the French say.

Greg may have had a commercial career as a game designer, but he has been a world and myth designer for much longer. Glorantha as a game setting is pretty old, but that's not what it originally was made for.

King of Sartar is a great piece of fiction, not a game supplement. It is one of the best Gloranthan publications for me.

BTW, if you do it to others, it isn't called masturbation, but foreplay, leading to greater enjoyment of playing. I have yet to meet a Glorantha geek who wasn't a gamer, too, and who hasn't produced gameable stuff or provided a platform for gaming in the world.

 

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Glorantha is at the same time a great strength of RuneQuest and also its greatest weakness.

It is a fantastic, rich setting that is refreshingly fundamentally different from the typical D&D style Middle Earth inspired settings.

However this can come at a cost.  As this thread demonstrates it can be very confusing and convoluted and appears to be frequently subject to change.  For someone to feel comfortable enough with it that they are confident to contribute to a discussion would take a lot of time and research. This may not be noticeable to many people here because their understanding has grown and evolved over (literally) decades.

Responding that this will all be clarified in one of an endless series of supplement may seem attractive but is itself risky.  An opinion of "It is a great game once you have spent $500 on source books" is not really a good  one to have. RQ is not Warhammer 40K (with the common joke that the 40K stands for the disposable income you need to have to play the game).

My prediction is that if this new version gets too tied into the very nitty gritty of Glorantha and mired down as a pseudo socio-mythic experimentation tool then it will fail.  Then we will have a group of people standing around wondering what went wrong. They have a fantastic system and a great world.  What could have possibly gone wrong?

Even the hope that copies will be bought by people who are attracted to the system and hope to use for their own settings (a great strength of the D&D community) may be dashed based on the disparaging remarks of some posters, which seems to be of the attitude that RQ=Glorantha and that if you don't want to play in Glorantha then don't play RQ.  

 

Ultimately this version should not be about creating a game that perfectly matches our understanding of Glorantha's most intricate details.  It must be about attracting new players to both the game and to Glorantha.  Getting the balance right between making it accessible and understandable to new people and also satisfying the old guard is a very tough challenge.

 

 

 

 

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1 hour ago, Mechashef said:

Ultimately this version should not be about creating a game that perfectly matches our understanding of Glorantha's most intricate details.  It must be about attracting new players to both the game and to Glorantha.  Getting the balance right between making it accessible and understandable to new people and also satisfying the old guard is a very tough challenge.

And from the design notes, that is what I believe is the intent and what I've seen come across in the RQG QuickStart.

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11 hours ago, David Scott said:

This is the realm of heroquest, story and adventures. Yelm's mastery rune isn't in RQG, if you want to include it you can go ahead and do so. You will have to wait for the rules to see how the cults and magic works with the runes. Currently there is no Mastery based Rune Magic, but that's not to say some won't be published or you can make up your own, using the Devising your own Rune Spells (like the old Runepower guidelines.)

OK, lets go with this "explanation" for now. 

So, this being the case and from here on out, I am assuming that Chaosium will make clear in any Gloranthan publication or supplement which runes/aspects belong in which game. This is especially important in supplements that are systemless or those that cover multiple systems (future printings/revisions of The Guide for example). I see a lot more sidebars and callouts in Chaosium's future. 

I'd also like to point out that many who have already invested in the Guide might be put off by this situation, as it makes it a bit less useful in playing RQG, or possibly 13th Age, if the same internal inconsistencies persist. 

SDLeary

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5 hours ago, SDLeary said:

I'd also like to point out that many who have already invested in the Guide might be put off by this situation, as it makes it a bit less useful in playing RQG, or possibly 13th Age, if the same internal inconsistencies persist. 

The guide never was intended to provide an introduction to the magic of individual gods.

Take for instance the cult of Eurmal, Friend of Men in Fronela. I am fairly convinced that this is quite different from the Dragon Pass treatment of Eurmal with aspects like Killboy or the various dismember, swallow and fart magics, instead I expect a Firebringer aspect, and probably stealing other essential civilisatory stuff from jealous gods or sorcerers. His feats had better involve heavy use of illusion in order to justify his ownership of that rune.

A system-less gods book that presents mythos and history and key feats of the deities in connection to local forms of worship is a huge order. There is an updated Prosopaedia easily the size of the RQ3 cults book covering a huge number of deities waiting for its companion volume providing mythos, history and cultural variations.

The pantheons provided in the Guide are a very superficial listing. Deities shared between these pantheons will be approached differently. Some places externalize certain feats or magics into a subcult or hero cult, others merge cults that are separate elsewhere into a single cult. Sometimes a cult will just use strange names and  pictorial representations of a deity familiar from elsewhere, sometimes two rather similar deities will turn out quite different in their role in society. Compare Alkoth and Trowjang, for instance, or check the deities worshiped in Fonrit for similarities with Dara Happan or Theyalan gods and for big discrepancies.

Such different perspectives aren't limited to Glorantha as a setting. For an OSR setting that has grown through literature, take a look at Midkemia. With just about a dozen of major deities, there are strong differences e.g. in the worship of Guis-Wa as hunter and rulership god in Kesh whereas in the Kingdom of the Isles the cult is a reviled one of assassins and little else.

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1 hour ago, Joerg said:

A system-less gods book that presents mythos and history and key feats of the deities in connection to local forms of worship is a huge order. There is an updated Prosopaedia easily the size of the RQ3 cults book covering a huge number of deities waiting for its companion volume providing mythos, history and cultural variations.

As an aside, I actually think a GoG reboot like this would be a great idea. Heavy on lore, and high on production standards. A beautiful double-tome, coffee-table conversation piece to compliment the G2G. Then Chaosium could roll out different pdf or PoD versions of stat-splat pantheon or cult books for RQG, HQG, and 13AG. Something like that would be cool.

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8 hours ago, SDLeary said:

I'd also like to point out that many who have already invested in the Guide might be put off by this situation, as it makes it a bit less useful in playing RQG, or possibly 13th Age, if the same internal inconsistencies persist.

Putting this into perspective. The Gods' rune variations only affect 4 pages of the guide (Major Pantheons pages 150-153) and within that only the Praxian Storm and Solar Pantheons and within each of those only a few lines. The guide doesn't even cover the sub-phases of the Moon rune in the Lunar Pantheon. It says as well that 

Quote

The Runes associated with each god by the God Learners and other scholars are also listed.

Which makes it an in-world document not a gaming document.

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1 hour ago, Joerg said:

The guide never was intended to provide an introduction to the magic of individual gods.

 

But still to be the canon.

12 hours ago, Joerg said:

Sure - the games set in Glorantha should provide entry level information for innocent fun with a single absolute truth. Chaos is a necessary part of the world and a safe source of magic, Orlanth's rebellion has brought everything bad to the world. Praise Yelm and the Red Goddess. (Probably not the single and absolute truth you were thinking of, but valid.)

That innocent fun shouldn't bar these same games from allowing deeper explorations for a different kind of fun. If it isn't your kind of fun, don't go there.

There are no inconsistencies. There are different cults for a similar or the same divine entity. Compare real world's Islam and Santeria, for instance. Do you have any problems with Orlanth Adenturous vs. Orlanth Thunderous, or are you so used to this that it hasn't struck you as some of the same phenomenon?

 

Greg may have had a commercial career as a game designer, but he has been a world and myth designer for much longer. Glorantha as a game setting is pretty old, but that's not what it originally was made for.

King of Sartar is a great piece of fiction, not a game supplement. It is one of the best Gloranthan publications for me.

BTW, if you do it to others, it isn't called masturbation, but foreplay, leading to greater enjoyment of playing. I have yet to meet a Glorantha geek who wasn't a gamer, too, and who hasn't produced gameable stuff or provided a platform for gaming in the world.

 

We are speaking about two different things:

-          Glorantha as a work if literature. It is great and plays with complex intellectual concepts, discussed in the Glorantha subforum.

-          Glorantha as a game setting. This what it is about here, since we are in the Runequest subforum.

I’m not found of simplistic settings, otherwise I wouldn’t be posting in these forums, and as I already said somewhere else, I like Glorantha for its complexity. Saying that it may go too far in complexity AS A GAME does not mean that one prefer simplistic settings: pretending this is an excessive reaction. All is not black or white (very gloranthian, isn’t it ? ;)). It's also not despising Greg's work. We could of course argue about where to put the limit of complexity for the game.

It is here a question of playability. In my opinion, as a general thought, in a game setting, you shall at some point stop exploring and start providing answers. And players are free to change them if they don't agree. It is just like writing a historical game (since you are mentioning RW religions): in RW, myths and beliefs don’t have influence on the world mechanics, but they will in the game, so you have at some time to stop scholarly discussions and provide a playable solution "a minima". In RuneQuest for instance, magic exists through the runes, and there are rule mechanics for it.

Of course, we could decide that RuneQuest is a game of exploration of intellectual concepts through role playing. But I would keep this as an option only. It may also be that variable runes are very playable, but it should be clearly stated, explained and somehow come with at least guidelines and consequences (game wise), since in a gloranthan based game, it is not just a detail.

The Guide to Glorantha has been presented several times as the canon, so hearing two years later that it is only a relative point of view is kind of weird, but ok, we'll go ahead with it. But when players get confused, it shows that something is wrong either in the concept or simply in the way it has been introduced or explained.

 

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3 minutes ago, Zit said:

But still to be the canon..

I used to be tasked with tracking canon before Moon Design took over Glorantha, working on my index (now lost, at least all the additions since putting it online) , so be assured that I care about canon.

The pantheons as presented don't reflect any single practise anywhere in Glorantha. They are outsiders' observations and conjecture, as @David Scott pointed out.

And the guide doesn't give us much about the Otherworld reality of Glorantha. There always was meant to be a companion volume to cover that, which Jeff has put tremendous work into already, like in expanding the Prosopedia from measly 16 pages in Gods of Glorantha to a booklet of its own while still being a work in process.

 

3 minutes ago, Zit said:

We are speaking about two different things:

-          Glorantha as a work if literature. It is great and plays with complex intellectual concepts, discussed in the Glorantha subforum.

-          Glorantha as a game setting. This what it is about here, since we are in the Runequest subforum.

So, we are talking about yet unpublished supplements for a yet unpublished game, RQG. I expect those supplements to state that whichever way the cults and deities are presented, these will be either specific instances of a cult in a place and time, or otherwise they will be generalisations with plenty ways of local variation, and hopefully some examples thereof. If a cult accompanies a scenario setting book, I would expect it to offer a fairly accurate representation of the local form of the cult. If it is a general overview for the magic supplement of the game, there are likely to be generalisations.

Cults with different runes are a thing. These are called aspects or subcults when you insist on having a greater, overarching structure in an organized religion, such as the Earth Cults of Esrolia. Don't expect such a thing for the storm cults of Orlanth, though.

I have called the Orlanthi praxis of specific initiation as pantheistic monotheism before - all the other gods are accepted and worshiped, propitiated or counteracted, but the initiate and devotee will reserve their otherworldly identity for that single cult. Pelorians don't form these exclusive bonds to a single deity. I expect all the various game systems, whether HeroQuest, RuneQuest Glorantha or 13th Age Glorantha, to offer workable player magic for such characters when the publishers get around to cover that region. This may prove something of a rules challenge in both HQG and RQG.

 

3 minutes ago, Zit said:

We could of course argue about where to put the limit of complexity for the game.

And there is a solution to that - limited truth through whichever general perspective the game offers.

Your game doesn't have to challenge that truth, or to match it with other limited truths. If you do, you are in the deep morass that you allow the literary expression of Glorantha to be.

3 minutes ago, Zit said:

It is here a question of playability. In my opinion, as a general thought, in a game setting, you shall at some point stop exploring and start providing answers.

For a computer game with very limited narrator's response, I'd grant you that.

Having been trained as a scientist, I have found that the reward for a solution of a question are further questions. There rarely is the solution for a question. If there is, you start asking why.

Let's assume that the Argrath Saga as published in the Guide was used for a campaign. You could stop that campaign at every break, starting with a new part, and have a closure for that game. You cannot avoid hooks for other explorations presented with such a solution, though.

Part 7 (p.742) may very well build on the events in the wake of Gebel, the Teshnan hero, searching for the Red Sword and awakening the Veldang of Fonrit, who then revive ancient alliances with Chaos.

 

3 minutes ago, Zit said:

And players are free to change them if they don't agree. It is just like writing a historical game (since you are mentioning RW religions): in RW, myths and beliefs don’t have influence on the world mechanics, but they will in the game, so you have at some time to stop scholarly discussions and provide a playable solution "a minima". In RuneQuest for instance, magic exists through the runes, and there are rule mechanics for it.

The runepower spells of the deities in RuneQuest are tied to their feats (or those of their avatars/heroes) and nature in their myths. Less common feats have been described unclearly as heroquest powers rather than spells, but with the improved accessibility of heroquesting since the days of RQ2 I don't think that the new RuneQuest Glorantha will keep them this obscure.

The Runes model the nature of the gods. When the gods don't quite conform, there must be some other factors in play - such as different aspects/sons/heroes who bring their own, variant runes into the mix of a god's magic.

Basically, there may be runespells associated with a god that don't quite follow from the god's primary runes. Lightning, Sandals of Darkness, Shield of Arran.

All very playable rune spells for Orlanth cultists.

3 minutes ago, Zit said:

Of course, we could decide that RuneQuest is a game of exploration of intellectual concepts through role playing. But I would keep this as an option only. It may also be that variable runes are very playable, but it should be clearly stated, explained and somehow come with at least guidelines and consequences (game wise), since in a gloranthan based game, it is not just a detail.

Explaining Glorantha only through the runes would be a sorcerous game - something the coming edition of RQG supports only peripherally, due to its concentration on Dragon Pass as the setting. Like with the less personally entangled theism of the Pelorians, this sorcerous game is left for future supplements to explore.

3 minutes ago, Zit said:

The Guide to Glorantha has been presented several times as the canon, so hearing two years later that it is only a relative point of view is kind of weird, but ok, we'll go ahead with it. But when players get confused, it shows that something is wrong either in the concept or simply in the way it has been introduced or explained.

The guide contains numerous in-world documents. The existence of these in-world documents is canonical. The theses and theories in these documents are options, not necessarily canonical truths.

The runes assigned to names dropped in sloppily assembled pantheons aren't much of an issue to me. The mainly vegetarian Morokanth that were described in HQG are much more of a problem for me.

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6 hours ago, Joerg said:

Such different perspectives aren't limited to Glorantha as a setting. For an OSR setting that has grown through literature, take a look at Midkemia. With just about a dozen of major deities, there are strong differences e.g. in the worship of Guis-Wa as hunter and rulership god in Kesh whereas in the Kingdom of the Isles the cult is a reviled one of assassins and little else.

I'm not referencing differences in regional worship. In any event, that wasn't David's response to the issue. It was stated that the runes were different because its RQG, and not the Guide. 

YGWV... If I choose to change something in a game to make it fit my story better, fine. A company producing a world though should be somewhat internally consistent; simply changing the world (the Gods are part of the world) because of a particular game system only leads to confusion. 

SDLeary

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3 hours ago, Zit said:

It is here a question of playability. In my opinion, as a general thought, in a game setting, you shall at some point stop exploring and start providing answers. And players are free to change them if they don't agree. It is just like writing a historical game (since you are mentioning RW religions): in RW, myths and beliefs don’t have influence on the world mechanics, but they will in the game, so you have at some time to stop scholarly discussions and provide a playable solution "a minima". In RuneQuest for instance, magic exists through the runes, and there are rule mechanics for it.

This. Much better articulation than my own.

SDLeary

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3 hours ago, Zit said:

 

 

Of course, we could decide that RuneQuest is a game of exploration of intellectual concepts through role playing. But I would keep this as an option only. It may also be that variable runes are very playable, but it should be clearly stated, explained and somehow come with at least guidelines and consequences (game wise), since in a gloranthan based game, it is not just a detail.

The Guide to Glorantha has been presented several times as the canon, so hearing two years later that it is only a relative point of view is kind of weird, but ok, we'll go ahead with it. But when players get confused, it shows that something is wrong either in the concept or simply in the way it has been introduced or explained.  

 

The game of RuneQuest is a roleplaying game in a fantasy setting. It is absolutely unnecessary to delve into its cosmic secrets to enjoy it. For most players, the mere fact that the background is both deep and broad is sufficient - but also something that remains in the background. I expect concepts like Loyalty or Honor or Devotion or the importance of honoring the dead to be FAR more important to most players than esoteric questions such as how many Runes dance atop Yelm's head. 

The Guide is the foundational document for anyone who wants to write for Chaosium. That being said, it is not intended to be a religious document, parsed by Talmudic sages to be the one true answer to everything. Yelm in the Guide was given the Runes of Fire, Fire, Stasis, and Mastery. In RuneQuest, the Yelm of the Pure Horse People is given the Runes of Fire, Life, and Death. Both are correct. If that troubles you, welcome to the God Learners' burden.

Jeff

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1 hour ago, Jeff said:

In RuneQuest, the Yelm of the Pure Horse People is given the Runes of Fire, Life, and Death. Both are correct. If that troubles you, welcome to the God Learners' burden.

If this is the case, why not name the cult Yu-Kargzant rather than Yelm? I don't mean to be critical, but I'm curious to understand the reasoning behind it, as it seems that by similar logic we could say that the "Yelm" of the Orlanthi has the Runes of Fire and Truth.

 

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I debated this point but ultimately concluded to call him Yelm because he is known as Yelm to most people of Dragon Pass (early drafts even called the cult Yu-Kargzant(. The noble Yelm cult of Raibanth is a long way away (and many of its Life and Death functions have been usurped by the Red Goddess). But that's all for another book.

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19 hours ago, Mechashef said:

My prediction is that if this new version gets too tied into the very nitty gritty of Glorantha and mired down as a pseudo socio-mythic experimentation tool then it will fail.  Then we will have a group of people standing around wondering what went wrong. They have a fantastic system and a great world.  What could have possibly gone wrong?

The best RQ2 supplements, in my opinion, had a light touch on the deeper mysteries of Glorantha. Cults of Prax/Terror, Trollpak, Borderlands, Pavis/Big Rubble and Griffin Mountain all touched on the Muthos and the Monomyth, but kept the rules as rules without getting tied up in knots about how things worked. In RQ3 the same thing happened, Sun County, River of Cradles, Strangers an Prax, Shadows on the Borderlands, Dorastor and Lords of Terror described places, cults, people and scenarios, without getting very deep into the detail of how things worked.

In Hero Wars, we started getting too deep into the way that cults worked and the mechanics of worship. Some HeroQuest supplements got even more twisted up, Imperial Lunar Handbook 2 fo example. 

I would hope that the new RQ avoids this by saying in a very simple way "This is how divine cults work", "This is how Western cults work", "This is how Shamanic cults work" and "This is how Mysticism works", then describing cults in these ways. If a cult is more spohisticated and uses several of these ways, then this can be handled in the cult description, by saying "This cult works differently to the normal model and has ...", again in a simple and uncomplex way. 

 

19 hours ago, Mechashef said:

Even the hope that copies will be bought by people who are attracted to the system and hope to use for their own settings (a great strength of the D&D community) may be dashed based on the disparaging remarks of some posters, which seems to be of the attitude that RQ=Glorantha and that if you don't want to play in Glorantha then don't play RQ.  

Isn't that the official line, though?

RQ <=> Glorantha

I don't agree with that, as I love using RQ for non-Gloranthan settings, but for Chaosium, that's what they have BRP for.

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1 hour ago, kaydet said:

If this is the case, why not name the cult Yu-Kargzant rather than Yelm? I don't mean to be critical, but I'm curious to understand the reasoning behind it, as it seems that by similar logic we could say that the "Yelm" of the Orlanthi has the Runes of Fire and Truth.

 

Yelm the Rider is a different god to Yu-Kargzant.

They share some similarities, as they are Solar rulers worshipped by horsemen, but are different deities.

Now, the God Learners might have said "Shiny Suns worshipped by Horse People" and tried to conflate them, had they bothered, in which case we would have got some overlap between them. But each would have gained some of the properies of the other, rather than merging the two deities.

Simon Phipp - Caldmore Chameleon - Wallowing in my elitism since 1982. Many Systems, One Family. Just a fanboy. 

www.soltakss.com/index.html

Jonstown Compendium author. Find my contributions here

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23 hours ago, dragonewt said:

Not to worry. Disney will buy out Glorantha. A new set of canon material will be defined, everything else will be moved to "legend" status, and JJ will direct a movie based on the result.

Inora as Snow White!

Darth Delecti!

Mouse replacing Duck!

Done!

 

C'es ne pas un .sig

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7 hours ago, Joerg said:

The runepower spells of the deities in RuneQuest are tied to their feats (or those of their avatars/heroes) and nature in their myths. Less common feats have been described unclearly as heroquest powers rather than spells, but with the improved accessibility of heroquesting since the days of RQ2 I don't think that the new RuneQuest Glorantha will keep them this obscure.

If the Yelm cult in Dragon Pass has one set of runes, and the one in Dara Happa has all the same but one is different (because of theistic interpretive differences), what happens when a worshipper from the former tries to recover a spell that is tied to that missing rune at a temple of the latter?

Sounds like a Judean Peoples Front vs People's Front of Judea situation to me.  

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13 minutes ago, styopa said:

If the Yelm cult in Dragon Pass has one set of runes, and the one in Dara Happa has all the same but one is different (because of theistic interpretive differences), what happens when a worshipper from the former tries to recover a spell that is tied to that missing rune at a temple of the latter?

Sounds like a Judean Peoples Front vs People's Front of Judea situation to me.  

What happens if a worshipper of the Trickster god Hermes tries to recover a spell from his god further north in a temple of the Trickster god Loki?

(I confess, that this example is not truly matching, as Hermes and Loki differ in more than just one aspect, but anyway:)

I think this is something, which is up to the game master. In most role playing games this kind of scenario will never happen, because most role playing games provide simply just one single pantheon. This is quite different with RuneQuest, and obviously there is no easy way to solve that. In fact if RuneQuest would provide a general solution here, it would limit the creativity of the players, which is not desirable - at least not from my point of view.

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