New to Runequest?

[StephenMcG]

Part of Runequest to me is the fact I have been playing and reading about it for almost 40 years. I forget that others might be coming to it for the very first time. I understand that Glorantha might be overwhelming to a newcomer, I forget that Runequest might be intimidating, there ARE a lot of moving parts.

If you are new to the system, what should you do?

My advice is start small on both Glorantha and the system. Grab Apple Lane. Build some characters (don't use the whole background thing, that can come later when you grok the core system and will speed up the delivery of playable characters).

Make everyone human, you can even make everyone worshippers of Orlanth, there is enough diversity at beginning level without having to import multiple cults and races.

Don't worry too much about runes and passions, tell the players you will be open to them making changes between sessions if their initial choices are not as optimal as they would like. They should not stress about spell choices but at least half of them should have decent healing magic (again be open to swapping magic between sessions, it is a great way for players to explore the system.

As GM you need to be a few pages ahead but you can paint the wider world and other cults as weird and obscure. You can mention all these things and the draw of alternatives to Orlanth will take your players away from this base.

It should only take a couple of sessions to play through but by this time you will all be content with the basics:

1) How to hit, parry and dodge

2) how to manage strike ranks

3) how important spirit magic is

4) how a cult provides a connection between the character and the world

5) How passions and runes extend the basic system.

You will also see how much time you have before any of the more complex stuff like skills over 100% and sorcery and shamanism will take to become relevant. Ignore that stuff in the book to begin with.

Your players will either be quite content in their Orlanthi bubble and keen to explore the world, or they will be bursting to try out other cults and magic.

You could then offer to run through the background stuff to fill in their character backgrounds and broaden their passions etc, this will begin to introduce them to Glorantha's deeper history or you could just run with what you have, letting players decide their relationship to stuff as you encounter them (which would be less coherent but quicker and less prone to folk worrying about making the 'wrong' choices).

The big rule of thumb I got from this community is do whatever provides the most fun to your players. Everything is disposable to that end.

If you veer wildly from canon, who cares. If you want a game more tied to the mainstream start another set of characters using all the bells and whistles once you and your players are comfortable with what matters.

There you go. The rules you have in your hand will provide you with more than enough information to do Apple Lane, when you have run that you will know enough to judge other stuff and how to use it in your Glorantha. That's my two cents as a grognard, enjoy the game youngling, it has been a pleasure of mine for nigh on four decades and it looks better than it did back in the day....

 

Stephen

Edited October 11, 2018 by StephenMcG
removing grognard terminology

[Mechashef]

Great advice.

However to make it even more useful for beginners I'd suggest changing your point 3 from "battle magic" to either "Spirit Magic" (if you are using the old RQ2 terminology) or something like "magic in combat" (if you mean the general use of magic during battles).

[StephenMcG]

good point, editing now...

haven't played the new rules, my current campaign uses a mix of RQ2 and Heroquest. I am guessing magic in battle is gonna be more accurate, Rune magic looks to come in much more quickly in RQ:G

Edited October 11, 2018 by StephenMcG

[Gryphaea]

To be honest the Quick Start is a pretty good, it works well as an introductory set of rules. New players can do a lot worse than starting with those then moving on the full rules if they like what they see in the Quickstart

Edited October 11, 2018 by Gryphaea

[creativehum]

5 hours ago, Gryphaea said:

To Be honest the Quick Start is a pretty good, it works well as an introductory set of rules. New players can do a lot worse than starting with those then moving on the full rules if they like what they see in the Quickstart

I, too, recommend the Quickstart. At least for the people I ran it for it (none of whom had every played RQ and only three out of five had encountered Glorantha in a short burst of playing HQ), it went great.

[jajagappa]

On ‎10‎/‎11‎/‎2018 at 4:32 AM, Gryphaea said:

To be honest the Quick Start is a pretty good, it works well as an introductory set of rules. New players can do a lot worse than starting with those then moving on the full rules if they like what they see in the Quickstart

I agree.  Although I ran RQ for 10 years, I had not done so for 20 years at the point where I picked up the RQG Quickstart.  It gets you into the basics:  use of skills, basic combat, use of augments/runes/passions, use of spirit magic, use of rune magic, how to heal damage,

 

and I extended slightly to get in some spirit combat.  Using pregens allows you to get to those aspects quickly and give you a reasonable balance of characters to start (though not sure why the pregens had such crappy Herd skills!).

With basics down, explore character creation.  Start with humans (or something very close like ducks).

On ‎10‎/‎11‎/‎2018 at 2:05 AM, StephenMcG said:

You will also see how much time you have before any of the more complex stuff like skills over 100%

Well, that didn't take long at all!  Harmast with a sword and inspired by his Hate(Greydog) went right over 100% during my Quickstart run.  But that was just one addition to figuring out the combat results.  

On ‎10‎/‎11‎/‎2018 at 2:05 AM, StephenMcG said:

The big rule of thumb I got from this community is do whatever provides the most fun to your players. Everything is disposable to that end.

Yes!