Survey what do you most want for RQG?

[Joerg]

I am most interested in sandbox material to run the scenarios that grow off the hooks in the character backgrounds and activities. No problem if these include a full scenario or three and some half-baked ones, and neither a problem when they describe local magics or peculiar entities, like e.g. swan maidens (important for the Hiording clan history).

 

1 minute ago, Videopete said:

While I picked the rules supplements like the GMs book and Socrery supliment, cultural books and campaign settings would be very helpful, especially since I own 3 of the Gloranthan Classics Beyond Borderlands, Griffin Mountain, and Pavis and Big Rubble, I feel Dragon Pass the Core setting is hilariously underdeveloped for the average player, mean while Prax  feels like the true default setting.

True. Before King of Sartar, the best (professionally) published information about Sartar was in the Pavis Box. In RuneQuest terms, the GM screen package has more than doubled the page count of RQ description of Sartar. There were three official RQ scenarios set in Sartar - Apple Lane, Snake Pipe Hollow, and Haunted Ruins. Plus two German language RQ3 scenario books produced by Deutsche RuneQuest Gesellschaft e.V. (better known as Chaos Society) and a few fanzine scenarios.

Like Jeff said in the video, the coverage of the region in the RQ3 material was that thin in terms of page count, and that's with all the encounter stats in the scenarios. RQ2 had even less. I don't even remember seeing a gazetteer listing the stockades on the Dragon Pass board, or their tribal (let alone clan) affiliations. The Composite History of Dragon Pass and the Colymar Book in King of Sartar offered a look at the history outside of the Military history in Different Worlds 28, a quite valuable table at the time which gave an impression on how violent the setting was in the years between the conquest of Sartar and the siege of Whitewall, for each sub-region. One of the most valuable feature of that table was the information about what went on in quiet years that didn't make the big headlines. And ten years later we finally got some Sartar material for Hero Wars and then HeroQuest. The full overview only came with Sartar - Kingdom of Heroes and the Sartar Companion for HQ2, and I suspect that that publication will keep that role for a while, with the new products looking deeper at certain places.

Has anybody compared the tribal census numbers of 1621 and 1625, and how badly the tribes fared?

[DerKrieger]

Quote

 

What I would love to see more than anything else is a visual culture guidebook almost in the style of Osprey's historical reference books. Show me what Sartarite Orlanthi look like, let me see their homes and their festivals. What makes a Tarshite so much more different and what weird foods do they enjoy that an Esrolian would be baffled/enthralled by?

I can point at an Elf or a Dwarf and everyone can picture it in their heads. If I mention French (or not-French) soldiers everybody has an easy reference point. Glorantha requires me to mesh some things together to explain but even then it can also give kind of the wrong idea. Orlanthi aren't Greeks but they also aren't vikings, but they kind of are? Each culture is its own unique thing and having a visual and low level reference would make a world of difference in introducing players. Reading Prince of Sartar recently has greatly influenced how I see and portray the world, I want more of that but focused on just the cultures themselves! I feel like King of Dragon Pass has taught me more about the Orlanthi than the corebooks but even then I have to remember that is several hundred years prior so things change.

 

I posted this in another thread but its very fitting here. I chose racial/cultural supplements and while I would love some that focus on additional mechanics I just really want great references that I can show players to help them understand what makes each culture unique, what to expect from each. I can point to different cultures/nations/kingdoms/clans in almost every other RPG we play even in settings I have made up and can easily explain the differences between groups. While I try in RuneQuest (and semi-succeed) I still run into instances where my players ask me about whether or not something would makes sense for their clan or if thats a common mindset for their people. This isn't to stop them from playing how they want but they like to know where the standard is when they deviate and I would love that as well.

Also I'm just a sucker for more Bronze Age cultural art, bury me in it!

[hkokko]

Campaigns, scenarios. For the game to really grow we need couple of really good sandboxes that are not rewrites of old ones. Then a steady stream of scenarios for the newcomers and even old hands.

 

Cults...

 

 

[Bohemond]

I would really like to see a book of questable myths. Maybe a collection of Lightbringers Myths with a quest or two for each deity. The same for the Earth tribe. The same for the rest of the Storm tribe. Questing looms so large in what Glorantha is about that we need to have a good range of them. 

But I'd also love a campaign book ala Coming Storm/11 Eleven Lights. Maybe something set near Alda Chur or a campaign about the Dundealos Revolt (although it's gonna be a downer...)

[jeffjerwin]

A Lunar (rules and magic) sourcebook.

Edited April 11, 2019 by jeffjerwin

[PhilHibbs]

3 hours ago, Bohemond said:

I would really like to see a book of questable myths. Maybe a collection of Lightbringers Myths with a quest or two for each deity. The same for the Earth tribe. The same for the rest of the Storm tribe. Questing looms so large in what Glorantha is about that we need to have a good range of them. 

The HeroQuesting rules will be built around the players and GM not needing to know the myths. Some examples would be good though, to give the group an idea of the sort of thing to aim for.

[jps]

I voted for scenarios because it's very important for GMs but, thinking about it, campaign and cultural contents are great too. I don't care much about non gloranthan content. At the end of the day, I'm thrilled with how Chaosium is dealing with RuneQuest.

[Steve3742]

1. Gloranthan rules supplements e.g. GMs book, sorcery rules expansion - we need the GM book. We also need some Heroquesting Rules - we've been waiting thirty years (Yes, I know they were sort of done in HQ, but something for RQG)
2. Gloranthan campaign/area sourcebooks e.g. Barbarian Town, Upland Marsh - as someone noted, if we look only at RQ, the default campaign setting seems to be Pavis. That campaign ends in 1621 with the players saving the cradle and having to leave Prax, with a suggestion made that they should go to Kethaela. The next campaign (in HQ) was actually set in Sartar a few years later and led up to the restoration of the Boat Planet after the Windstop. Now, we seem to have skipped another two years and are starting just after the Dragonrise. Is there any chance we could have a campaign or two set in the missing years? Particularly the Holy Country - refugees from the Cradle should turn up there just in time for the civil war to start. (Of course, this could lead to a mega-campaign, starting in Pavis, running through the civil war in the Holy Country then moving to Sartar for the Windstop and Boat Planet and then culminating in the Dragonrise.)
3. Racial/cultural supplements e.g. Gods & Goddesses, Trollpak - these kind of have to tie in with 2, otherwise nobody's going to use them. There's a wealth of material in the West concerning Fronela in particular that looks interesting - the Kingdom of War and its war with Loskalm, the Kingdom of the Jonatings and their involvement, the end of the Sydics ban and how this affects things, what, exactly, ends up on the Lunar western border when the Syndics ban ends, how the elf reforestation will link into all of this, etc. But if you're going to produce a culture pack for Fronela, you'd need to throw a campaign there as well, at least to start things off, something along the lines of Borderlands or even Pavis. And if it were successful , you'd have to keep producing stuff for it - alongside the Dragon Pass stuff. Can you do all this? Or would the development of Fronela come at the expense of Dragon Pass?
4. Gloranthan scenario books e.g. easy-to-use scenarios that can be dropped into any campaign - Yes. It's useful to have fillers, where you can forget about the Grand Campaign for a while and just go off on an adventure now and then.
5. Non-Gloranthan material e.g. Fantasy Earth - I have misgivings about this. Mythras seem to be doing a bang-up job of producing Mythic Earth, what with Mythic Britain, Mythic Rome, Mythic Constantinople, etc. Is there a lot of point in Chaosium producing a Mythic Rome or Mythic Britain? People who want to play there can buy the Mythras supplements and use RuneQuest 6 Mythras. If they really want to use RQG, it's not that hard to convert. I'm aware Chaosium produced Mythic Iceland and have heard it was quite good. I also know you've been promising a second edition with RQG rules for over a year. Maybe do that and see how it goes down. Perhaps you can do Northern Europe and Mythras can do the Mediterranean. 
6. Game aids e.g. spell cards, miniatures, adventurers journal - useful enough and I might buy them, but not a priority.

[Joerg]

51 minutes ago, Steve3742 said:

Gloranthan campaign/area sourcebooks e.g. Barbarian Town, Upland Marsh - as someone noted, if we look only at RQ, the default campaign setting seems to be Pavis. That campaign ends in 1621 with the players saving the cradle and having to leave Prax, with a suggestion made that they should go to Kethaela. The next campaign (in HQ) was actually set in Sartar a few years later and led up to the restoration of the Boat Planet after the Windstop. Now, we seem to have skipped another two years and are starting just after the Dragonrise. Is there any chance we could have a campaign or two set in the missing years? Particularly the Holy Country - refugees from the Cradle should turn up there just in time for the civil war to start. (Of course, this could lead to a mega-campaign, starting in Pavis, running through the civil war in the Holy Country then moving to Sartar for the Windstop and Boat Planet and then culminating in the Dragonrise.) 

You do know about The Eleven Lights and its time frame, do you? While it doesn't cover the Dragonrise itself, it does lead up to shortly before that.

What we don't have is the campaign of Broyan's last years other than as Vasana's back story, or Argrath's journey that led him to be ready to step in at Storm Hill to deal with the Phargantite army from Tarsh, tying in with the Eleven Lights as one of his two magical units

1 hour ago, Steve3742 said:

Non-Gloranthan material e.g. Fantasy Earth - I have misgivings about this. Mythras seem to be doing a bang-up job of producing Mythic Earth,

As I just wrote yesterday on rpg.net, the Mythic Iceland project by Pedro Ziviani should be progressing, and should be awesome. The campaign arc appears to touch all major hotspots of Viking activity. In my experience RuneQuest is a well-suited vehicle for fantastic Viking adventures, and I'd like to see one in print again.

[Sumath]

4 hours ago, Steve3742 said:

But if you're going to produce a culture pack for Fronela, you'd need to throw a campaign there as well, at least to start things off, something along the lines of Borderlands or even Pavis. And if it were successful , you'd have to keep producing stuff for it - alongside the Dragon Pass stuff. Can you do all this? Or would the development of Fronela come at the expense of Dragon Pass?

I don't think it's possible for Chaosium to do all this, which is why Jeff said in the Heinz Con video that they were deliberately focussing on Dragon Pass first before expanding to Kralorela etc. Creatively and commercially I think this is the right thing to do - as well as old-hands, they're bringing in a lot of new artists and content creators some of whom have never worked on Gloranthan material before, so getting them to work on a well-known area for which there are previous releases to refer to, makes things easier. But they are producing original content (Smoking Ruins, Pegasus Plateau) as well as revising old material like Pavis and Big Rubble, so this should appeal to veterans and newbies alike.

The sourcebooks outside of Dragon Pass will come later, and personally I'd rather wait for an excellent product than have Chaosium over-extend themselves on too many projects, or release something that later needs revision because of the way things panned out on other projects.

4 hours ago, Steve3742 said:

Game aids e.g. spell cards, miniatures, adventurers journal - useful enough and I might buy them, but not a priority.

I agree, I'd buy these but they're not a priority.

Having said that, one thing that would be really useful is a range of paper/cardstock miniatures for Gloranthan adventurers and monsters. Paper miniatures are colourful, cheap, portable and potentially easy to replace. But it's very difficult to find commercial quality paper miniatures that fit with a fantasy bronze age setting, and Gloranthan monster types are even harder to find. This is the sort of thing that Chaosium could licence out to a third party, like they have with their other miniatures.

[Jeff]

7 hours ago, Steve3742 said:

1. Non-Gloranthan material e.g. Fantasy Earth - I have misgivings about this. Mythras seem to be doing a bang-up job of producing Mythic Earth, what with Mythic Britain, Mythic Rome, Mythic Constantinople, etc. Is there a lot of point in Chaosium producing a Mythic Rome or Mythic Britain? People who want to play there can buy the Mythras supplements and use RuneQuest 6 Mythras. If they really want to use RQG, it's not that hard to convert. I'm aware Chaosium produced Mythic Iceland and have heard it was quite good. I also know you've been promising a second edition with RQG rules for over a year. Maybe do that and see how it goes down. Perhaps you can do Northern Europe and Mythras can do the Mediterranean. 

We will be coming out with our Fantasy Earth line. Jason and I have been speccing out the books, and already have three (actually four) in progress. But one thing at a time - first we make sure that RQG is self-propelled!

[Joerg]

6 hours ago, Steve3742 said:

But if you're going to produce a culture pack for Fronela, you'd need to throw a campaign there as well, at least to start things off, something along the lines of Borderlands or even Pavis. And if it were successful , you'd have to keep producing stuff for it - alongside the Dragon Pass stuff. Can you do all this? Or would the development of Fronela come at the expense of Dragon Pass?

2 hours ago, Sumath said:

I don't think it's possible for Chaosium to do all this, which is why Jeff said in the Heinz Con video that they were deliberately focussing on Dragon Pass first before expanding to Kralorela etc.

The bottle-neck in terms of production schedule seems to be art commission (but you'd need extra editors and layout folk, too). While Chaosium has succeeded to assemble a staff of talented artists for their Dragon Pass line. If another setting makes a splash, you'd need to assemble an additional team of artists and train them to produce the style of illustrations you want. Not necessarily an identical style, though, although it should be somewhat compatible with the styles used in the rules.
The other problem is whether such additional teams would be economically viable. It looks like Chaosium has fairly broad shoulders as they have just taken back the Pendragon line and taken over the Seven Seas line and kickstarter fulfilment. But is the customer base broad enough that two different supplementt lines will sell? Judging by the need to reprint the rulebooks, it looks like there is quite some potential for customers, although scenarios etc. always sell a lot less than essential rules.

2 hours ago, Sumath said:

The sourcebooks outside of Dragon Pass will come later, and personally I'd rather wait for an excellent product than have Chaosium over-extend themselves on too many projects, or release something that later needs revision because of the way things panned out on other projects.

Ensuring quality writing and editing shouldn't be that much of a bottle-neck if you look at the array of big names Jeff has mentioned. Chaosium does accept that putting out a publication that is up to their standard takes time, but that goes for each of these products, and in different steps. We might need a few clones of Jason, though.

 

In terms of paper miniatures or miniatures, I think the way Petersen Games has gone to use their line of board game pieces as role-playing aids is the way to go. If we have such character cards, they should come with a board or card game you can play outside of the RPG.

[Bill the barbarian]

9 hours ago, Sumath said:

Having said that, one thing that would be really useful is a range of paper/cardstock miniatures for Gloranthan adventurers and monsters. Paper miniatures are colourful, cheap, portable and potentially easy to replace. But it's very difficult to find commercial quality paper miniatures that fit with a fantasy bronze age setting, and Gloranthan monster types are even harder to find. This is the sort of thing that Chaosium could licence out to a third party, like they have with their other miniatures.

Interesting thought. Miniatures have advantages but cost of trying for a usable set has always had me using dry erase markers to locate positions on a battle map.

[Steve3742]

17 hours ago, Sumath said:

one thing that would be really useful is a range of paper/cardstock miniatures for Gloranthan adventurers and monsters. Paper miniatures are colourful, cheap, portable and potentially easy to replace. But it's very difficult to find commercial quality paper miniatures that fit with a fantasy bronze age setting, and Gloranthan monster types are even harder to find. This is the sort of thing that Chaosium could licence out to a third party, like they have with their other miniatures.

Well, apparently the Unspoken Word produced some paper miniatures in 2003. They were on a CD (which shows how long ago it was) and you had to print the tiff files out yourself. I suspect it's long out of print, but the files might be knocking around on the Internet somewhere.

[Steve3742]

And more research leads to a BRP forum on this very subject (Paper Gloranthan Miniatures). Complete with some suggestions as to how to maybe get hold of the files

[Prinz Slasar]

What do I most want for RQG?

-  a "Sartar Book", in which all informations of Sartarite culture, customs, laws, habits, society etc., are collected, updated to 1625 and RQG and official.

As a GM who wants to play a campaign in the Colymar/Sartar lands it's a bit tough to portrait the unique Sartar setting at the table and to avoid the "barbaric culture cliché". But to do it I have to know how they function.

The RQG Core Rules are a good teaser and the Adventure Book goes into more detail, but can't answer every question which will arise from the playoutcome.
So we as Glorantha newbies have to do research: many books, many opinions, we read in the HeroWars material, in the KingdomOfHeroes/SartarCompanion, even in King of Sartar and so on. But the informations are scattered, contradicting, suspected of being outdated/non-canonical.
So we ask the wise Tribe (aka Forum or Social Media) and asking questions about law&order, funerals etc. Even more information, and because the answers are so great, we have to dive deep in the forum and collect pieces of information from the many threads and topics to make a picture of Sartarite Culture.

So why not collect all written material from the now canonical books and texts (I guess S:KoH + Sartar Companion) minus informations, which are already in the RQG books.  Even the artwork in these books is IMHO good and has flavour.

I prefer the simple, straightforward approach of RQG, therefore I'll happy with only a summarized description of culture and customs.

In sum: If Sartar is the default campaign setting for RQG I need a condense, summarized description of Sartarite culture with its uniqueness and wonders. As an aid to portrait them at the table to my players.
The informations are buried and scattered, it's time to bring them together for RQG and its GMs.

[DreadDomain]

On 4/12/2019 at 9:12 PM, Jeff said:

We will be coming out with our Fantasy Earth line. Jason and I have been speccing out the books, and already have three (actually four) in progress. But one thing at a time - first we make sure that RQG is self-propelled!

I agree the focus should be Glorantha. Fantasy Earth is all good but others have that well in hand and trying to compete on that front (Fantasy Earth) while you have a unique topic (Glorantha) to cover seems counter productive (unless of course FE does not somehow draw resources away from Glorantha).

Also, one of the best element of RQG is how the Runes are baked in the setting and character creation. That would obviously play a different role (if at all) in a FE line.

[Shiningbrow]

The choice for my vote ....?

I forgot 😛

I was umming and ahing over Gods/Races and GM/Sorcery... chose one, then started reading... and forgot which one I finally decided on.

Cults are hugely important in Glorantha, and having a full ruleset to go with that is also vitally important. Also, I suspect a number of players will want a sorcerer around to play, and will want the full rules for that (what's in the RQG book just whets the appetite... it needs more!)

OTOH, I'd like to see a regular magazine come out again, but with a lot of fan-made material (particularly the scenarios people were requesting). I understand that the people at Chaosium will be snowed under, and having people write up their own scenarios may help in getting stuff out to the gaming community (as requested above), with minimal effort from the publishers (especially with the abundance of software available to the public... formatting becomes somewhat closer to a breeze than 30 years ago).

My vote, however. was qualified by reading that a) GOG will be coming out in the not massively distant future, and b) that it will contain HQ rules...

I'm interested in RQG - and that Glorantha is really important (where else  do you find Humakti Sword Ducks???)

Not high on my list (but above the Non-G settings) would be minis.... even though my current circumstances suck (I'm currently in China, and would really love to return to Melbourne, Ozlandia), some of those unique minis are just nice and so I might actually buy!

 

Ooops - looks like my 2 bolgs is running out now, I better sign off!

[Lordabdul]

I voted campaigns and scenarios, definitely. Glorantha is an impressively deeply detailed world, so it's often intimidating to figure out where to start as a GM. It's often said, for example, that one of the main themes of Glorantha is the relationship between humans and gods, but how does that actually translate into an adventure? It definitely shows in the world books, but I'm not just reading a history book to my players, I'm making them play something, and it needs to "feel" Gloranthan somehow -- I'm just not always sure how to do that.

I can come up with dungeon crawling scenarios around Dragon Pass, and hey I can even come up with some more inspired and complicated plots involving politics and religions and whatever, but I have no idea if this, say, adventure about trade routes being disrupted by an expanding clan is going to really feel like Glorantha, or if, regardless of its flaws and merits, it's a generic fantasy plot that could just as well happen in any other random fantasy world. So that's why I'd love to see more examples of adventures, and then I can branch out on my own from there.

Edited April 21, 2019 by lordabdul