Which cult(s) for a city thief?

[Manu]

Orlanth could be a possibility, but any other? Lanbril has no Rune Magic (Therefore less fun for the player). Eurmal is too much 'disorder'.

The player want just to play a 'street rat' : sneaking, stealing, getting info and selling them to the right person, ...

[Jeff]

Lanbril has Rune Magic. He has Divination Block (known by all temples), and Dismiss Small and Medium Elementals (known by the largest temples). 

 

[Manu]

10 minutes ago, Jeff said:

Lanbril has Rune Magic. He has Divination Block (known by all temples), and Dismiss Small and Medium Elementals (known by the largest temples). 

 

As he has the Rune of Illusion, why hasn't he the illusion spells?

[Jeff]

11 minutes ago, Manu said:

As he has the Rune of Illusion, why hasn't he the illusion spells?

Divination Block is his use of the Illusion rune. Lanbril is a far less cosmically significant god than Eurmal.

[womble]

Does he get many (any) of the Common spells?

If Orlanth is an appropriate Cult for the character concept, (eventually) being an Initiate of both Lanbril and Orlanth might be an option, for more, erm, options.

[Manu]

41 minutes ago, womble said:

Does he get many (any) of the Common spells?

If Orlanth is an appropriate Cult for the character concept, (eventually) being an Initiate of both Lanbril and Orlanth might be an option, for more, erm, options.

It is what I will propose to my player. Initiated to Orlanth Adventurous for the 'normal days', and Lanbril for the 'normal nights'

[soltakss]

Lanbril used to get a Spirit Magic spell "Face of Lanbril", which allows the user to not stand out, to seem quite ordinary and forgettable. It also used to teach how to make various alchemical powders and potions that are very useful for thieves. Lanbril cultists rely on their skills and wits rather than on powerful magic.

If Lanbril isn't your thing, then Orlanth Adventurous might do, or a subcult of Orlanth the Thief.

Black Fang is more assassin-based, but I reckon has some organised crime.

Krarsht is also a thief-type cult, but might have some problems as a PC cult.

Alternatively, you could go into the Rubble and find a shrine to a long-lost thief Hero and start their worship, which might allow you to develop new spells for the cult.

 

[Manu]

I have the cult description of Lanbril. I like the idea of less Rune magic for more skills. But FastTalk is now a standard skill. And I'm afraid of having at the end a lot of very specific skill. I'm more in favour of more generic ones. Shadowing for me is like Hide. Otherwise, it means that noone except Lanbril thieves can follow someone in the city...

Same for Foil restaints. It can be Sleight

But for the time beeing, it will do the trick.

[jajagappa]

52 minutes ago, Manu said:

But FastTalk is now a standard skill. And I'm afraid of having at the end a lot of very specific skill. I'm more in favour of more generic ones. Shadowing for me is like Hide. Otherwise, it means that noone except Lanbril thieves can follow someone in the city...

Same for Foil restaints. It can be Sleight

But for the time beeing, it will do the trick.

Instead of going down the path of very specific skills as was done in the original Lanbril writeup, draw on some of the newer RQG skills.  While Fast Talk will still be important (even if a "standard" skill, it is not common among Rune cults), you can add in both Intimidate and Charm.  Use Insight(Human) [=old Streetwise] to help your character work their way through the city and find good marks, and successful use of that will tell you whether to Charm your mark, Fast Talk her, Intimidate him, or maybe just Bargain.  Use Act [includes Feign Death] to portray yourself as something else; use Disguise to hide yourself in cover.  The ability to augment with other skills covers many specific skills too:  Disguise augmenting Hide to "shadow" the mark.  Maybe Act augmenting one of the other perception skills for "voice mimicry".  

[Manu]

9 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

Instead of going down the path of very specific skills as was done in the original Lanbril writeup, draw on some of the newer RQG skills.  While Fast Talk will still be important (even if a "standard" skill, it is not common among Rune cults), you can add in both Intimidate and Charm.  Use Insight(Human) [=old Streetwise] to help your character work their way through the city and find good marks, and successful use of that will tell you whether to Charm your mark, Fast Talk her, Intimidate him, or maybe just Bargain.  Use Act [includes Feign Death] to portray yourself as something else; use Disguise to hide yourself in cover.  The ability to augment with other skills covers many specific skills too:  Disguise augmenting Hide to "shadow" the mark.  Maybe Act augmenting one of the other perception skills for "voice mimicry".  

It means that the cult itself doesn't give much to their followers (from a player point of view... Few rune magic,...  and players likes to have a little something special for being in a cult)

[soltakss]

This is why I like the way that Revolution D100 does skills. You have a kill of Perform and then Traits of Act, Feign Death or Voice Mimicry, Stealth could have Traits of Shadowing, Hide in Plain Sight, Move in Cover and so on. It saves having a really long skills list on a character sheet as well.

[jajagappa]

1 minute ago, Manu said:

It means that the cult itself doesn't give much to their followers (from a player point of view... Few rune magic,...  and players likes to have a little something special for being in a cult)

But rune magic draws attention, and there's lots you can do with well-used skills, passions, tools, and spirit magic.  And what they do have, i.e. Divination Block, has a lot of value to keep things hidden.

[PhilHibbs]

2 hours ago, Manu said:

I have the cult description of Lanbril. I like the idea of less Rune magic for more skills. But FastTalk is now a standard skill. And I'm afraid of having at the end a lot of very specific skill. I'm more in favour of more generic ones. Shadowing for me is like Hide. Otherwise, it means that noone except Lanbril thieves can follow someone in the city...

Yes, I don't like specialist skills for that reason, people will just use a more generic skill for the same thing and then the specialist is at a disadvantage in their specialty. It's the same with defaulting to stat rolls where there isn't a skill, and then finding that the skill does exist as a cult specialty.

Some Mostali get specialty skills like "Metal Lore". Who would disallow Mineral Lore to be used for metals?

[GianniVacca]

2 hours ago, soltakss said:

This is why I like the way that Revolution D100 does skills. You have a kill of Perform and then Traits of Act, Feign Death or Voice Mimicry, Stealth could have Traits of Shadowing, Hide in Plain Sight, Move in Cover and so on. It saves having a really long skills list on a character sheet as well.

We could walk the Revolution D100 path and have Foil, Shadowing, etc. be +30% bonuses to the relevant RQ:G skills when they are used in this particular way.

[davecake]

Lanbril gets a little rune magic, but a lot of unusual skills and some minor magic. They not only teach alchemy (which is unusual), they have different specialties from other cults (especially poison, but also smoke bombs, etc). They also know how to create unusual devices. They may be able to teach some unusual, not widely available spirit magic. And they should definitely be able to use their Illusion and Disorder runes to augment their thiefy skills. They are not as cosmically significant as Eurmal, but they instead have a wide range of subtler and directly useful powers, and are far more able to conceal their nature than Eurmal (who usually ends up outcast or bonded quickly). It is really less about getting good magic, and more about being part of a useful secret fraternity, 

And then, there is a possible connection between Lanbril and Eurmal, which for solo thieves might be more than they care to admit. I wouldn't be surprised if a few Lanbril thieves have picked up the Lie spell from Eurmal. 

[Roko Joko]

22 hours ago, GianniVacca said:

We could walk the Revolution D100 path and have Foil, Shadowing, etc. be +30% bonuses to the relevant RQ:G skills when they are used in this particular way.

Yeah, in a Glorantha context it would be interesting to have Traits be a special thing you can learn from certain cults.  The rules already provide other ways to get buffs - rune augments, heroquest rewards, and spirit and rune spells - but if you want even more chrome that's a way to get it.  Or if you just wanted to hack RQG to make it more like Rd100, with a smaller skill list.

Edited December 31, 2018 by Roko Joko

[Pentallion]

On 12/30/2018 at 6:01 AM, Jeff said:

Lanbril is a far less cosmically significant god than Eurmal.

At least, that's what Lanbril wants you to believe....

[RosenMcStern]

On 12/31/2018 at 7:43 PM, Roko Joko said:

Yeah, in a Glorantha context it would be interesting to have Traits be a special thing you can learn from certain cults.  The rules already provide other ways to get buffs - rune augments, heroquest rewards, and spirit and rune spells - but if you want even more chrome that's a way to get it.  Or if you just wanted to hack RQG to make it more like Rd100, with a smaller skill list.

Be careful about how you implement this. Either you follow the "hack" suggestion which Roko Joko provides here and trim down the entire skill list (doable, and there are options in Rd100 for using the good ol' experience check method instead of improvement points/rolls), or you should be rather careful with 30% bonuses. Traits as bonuses are designed to work with base skills in the 20% - 30% range, not the possibly very high base skills that you can achieve while making characters for RQ(G). I suggest you rule that the general skill suffers a -30% to the roll if used in a special way, but this penalty is avoided if you have the Trait. For instance, you can have Shadowing default at Sneak -30% or Hide -30% if you lack the Trait, or at the highest of the two if you have it. Handling skills such as Sense Assassin or Sense Chaos as a +30% to an existing skill could be... a little bit overpowered.

[GianniVacca]

Yes... Even better, have a Lanbril rune and get the bonus whenever you roll under the rune per the RAW.

[Jeff]

8 minutes ago, GianniVacca said:

Yes... Even better, have a Lanbril rune and get the bonus whenever you roll under the rune per the RAW.

For RQ purposes I would be VERY reluctant to mechanise the personal runes of deities. Better to just use the Disorder Rune when you try to do selfish things contrary to the harmony of a well-run community. Which is pretty much everything Lanbril does.

[womble]

29 minutes ago, Jeff said:

For RQ purposes I would be VERY reluctant to mechanise the personal runes of deities. Better to just use the Disorder Rune when you try to do selfish things contrary to the harmony of a well-run community. Which is pretty much everything Lanbril does.

I'm curious as to why the reluctance. It could be a bit like a Form/Power Rune, covering the 'type of action the God would have purview over'. Given the prohibition on 'stacking' Inspirations, that doesn't seem 'too much'.

[PhilHibbs]

1 minute ago, womble said:

I'm curious as to why the reluctance.

For a start, if Lanbril is allowed as a standalone rune with a different rating to Disorder, then you could have both Harmony and Lanbril at 80%, and have powerful magic that uses each. This would be unusual.

[Jeff]

4 minutes ago, womble said:

I'm curious as to why the reluctance. It could be a bit like a Form/Power Rune, covering the 'type of action the God would have purview over'. Given the prohibition on 'stacking' Inspirations, that doesn't seem 'too much'.

For the simple reason that creating a multiplicity of personal runes creates a massive barrier to accessibility. In addition, I view them as mechanically unnecessary. Lanbril's powers are entirely within the ambit of Disorder and Illusion. No need to add an additional rune (or 50+ personal runes) to that mix.

[Joerg]

My impression from the Pavis: Welcome to the City was that a huge number of those petty crime perps are pre-initiation youths or younger, which makes a thief gang relying on magic power rather divided in those who can (whether legally or not) and those who can't, with those who can't pretty much outnumbering the real cultists.

It does make sense for such a gang to have something like a wyter or lair cobold spirit.

If the thieves are organized like an outlaw clan, whatever they do isn't any more selfish than what the Varmandi do. They use their rather disruptive skills to raid "them" and to feed "us". Even with Krarsht in disguise as the entity behind the wyter, this is a fairly normal Orlanthi behavior. A raiding clan will seek shelter in the tribe mostly consisting of harmonious clans, and likewise a thief gang seeks shelter in the city.

In this respect, Orlanth is the perfect deity for such a group, once they find a way to lower their entry age into their full member magic (mainly a wyter function, I suppose).

 

I wonder what happens to a clan that contacted a rather troublesome trickster spirit for its wyter without realizing. Are they stuck with a wyter that keeps disrupting their more harmonious efforts?

A similar case could be made for a clan plagued with a huge number of "those" ancestors regularly interfering with their clan business. Cato the Elder was a plague during his lifetime, but Cato the Elder as a dominantly acting ancestor keeps for centuries.

[davecake]

10 hours ago, Joerg said:

My impression from the Pavis: Welcome to the City was that a huge number of those petty crime perps are pre-initiation youths or younger, which makes a thief gang relying on magic power rather divided in those who can (whether legally or not) and those who can't, with those who can't pretty much outnumbering the real cultists.

There are three Lanbril gangs in Pavis - the two largest (the Hole Lords and Harli's men) seem to be made up of adult gang members (only the third largest, Knobbys Nippers, seem to be youths. The street gangs are different, but more bored youths not yet established in their own lives with a strong sense of territorialism, rather than career criminals. 

 

10 hours ago, Joerg said:

It does make sense for such a gang to have something like a wyter or lair cobold spirit.

Most gangs are too small. They are organisations, not communities. To the extent that they do, this is more like a spirit cult than a wyter (and, of course, this is exactly what Black Fang is). 

11 hours ago, Joerg said:

In this respect, Orlanth is the perfect deity for such a group, once they find a way to lower their entry age into their full member magic

Orlanth the Thief is a pretty well established tradition. Works for both small groups of Orlanthi exiled from their clan lands for some reason, and individuals. Dark Walk is of course a fantastic spell for a thief, but they also have plenty of spells that will help them get into places they shouldn't, and make getaways when necessary. 

11 hours ago, Joerg said:

A similar case could be made for a clan plagued with a huge number of "those" ancestors regularly interfering with their clan business.

An ancestor worship clan makes a pretty good magic for a criminal gang related by blood. Discorporation is quite handy for casing a target, and ancestors can have a lot of knowledge of thief skills and special spells to pass on, and there is a strong sense of loyalty. Shamans can add a range of spirit cults for other magical purposes.