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Clan Military Logistics - Wyter Magic


HreshtIronBorne

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I apologize for starting off any sort of argument. 

13 minutes ago, Jeff said:

So you have a maximum POW wyter for your example, rather than the normal 27 POW, CHA 14. This is obviously SUPER-clan, whose wyter is some god.

Does this mean that the wyter cannot be raised to maximum possible power through sacrifice at every ceremony? Do you roll dice and that is the CAP for that stat for that wyter until the community gets older or bigger? 

Edited by HreshtIronBorne
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35 minutes ago, Pentallion said:

If it shouldn't happen in Glorantha, it shouldn't be in a rulebook for a simulationist rpg.  RQG either simulates Glorantha or it doesn't.  One of the things I always loved about RQ3 was how well it simulated Glorantha.  It had flaws too, but I can't honestly say RQG has addressed those flaws, it seems I'm always finding new flaws.  Like, yes, the rules allow it, but we should ignore those rules because...Glorantha.

No, we ignore exploits because otherwise the rules would get bogged down. Kind of like saying that an RPG to simulate the real world needs quantum mechanics and relativity. No, it just needs to be fun and playable, and approached with a mindset that works for the group (and if OTT silly stuff is your thing, then go for it with the halberd-pixies).

All rules are hierarchical special cases to Crowley's Law of Thelema, at some point you have to stop descending into more and more niche special cases. Where that descent stops, exploits begin.

4 minutes ago, HreshtIronBorne said:

I apologize for starting off any sort of argument. 

Not at all, I think this is all entirely legitimate exploration of "What is RuneQuest", "What is Glorantha", and "What is intended/exploit".

Edited by PhilHibbs
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14 minutes ago, Jeff said:

Your wyter has 42 points of POW. In theory, it could blow 41 points of POW to cast Rune spells, but that is stupid unless this is a murder-hobo wyter. That wyter's POW has all sorts of other functions, like being the spiritual force of the community, keeping hostile spirits out of the clan sacred lands, etc. Reducing the POW of the community spirit weakens your community - this should go without saying (and not something that should need clockwork mechanical things). Why are the other clan members going to give up their POW - their SOUL - just so that our rules-lawyer chieftain can feel super-swell?

Heck, reduce your wyter to POW 1, and maybe just it gets captured by a hostile shaman. Maybe some weak hate ghost with POW 15 decides to take its vengeance. Maybe a ritual enemy that normally is obeisance now can manifest. 

 

3 minutes ago, Jeff said:

Knock 40 POW off that wyter and that wyter is going to be terribly magically powerful until some big ceremony could be held to replenish its POW. If I was the GM, I'd probably say that needs to happen during Sacred Time or the high holy day of the wyter. This isn't the sort of event that should be done casually. 

In the meantime, that wyter is spiritually weak. Who cares if you have 40 nigh-invulnerable warriors for a year, if your wyter is gone. The cosmos tends to react strongly against rules-lawyers who abuse the spirit of the rules.

If the spells are being cast during worship ceremonies would the wyter be able to regain lost POW relatively quickly? 

 

If we step back from the Power Gamey and talk reasonable Gloraanthan expectation, would maintaining an Earth Shield on the Chief's Bodyguards all year, maybe a total of 10 or 12 POW in a single ceremony, be a reasonable idea?

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2 minutes ago, Jeff said:

Knock 40 POW off that wyter and that wyter is going to be terribly magically powerful until some big ceremony could be held to replenish its POW. If I was the GM, I'd probably say that needs to happen during Sacred Time or the high holy day of the wyter. This isn't the sort of event that should be done casually. 

In the meantime, that wyter is spiritually weak. Who cares if you have 40 nigh-invulnerable warriors for a year, if your wyter is gone. The cosmos tends to react strongly against rules-lawyers who abuse the spirit of the rules.

The idea behind this abusiveness is that it would be done during the holy days as part of the ceremony.  For that precise reason.

I didn't write the rules.  So how am I supposed to intuit the "spirit" of them?  For all I know, you want uber powerful characters and the adventures that come out will have wyter buffed NPCs.  How am I supposed to infer anything but what is written down and figure that playtesting would have exposed this as a flaw.  I have to go by the assumption that it's a game design decision.  But now that I understand what the "spirit of the rules" are, because that wasn't really spelled out in the actual rules, I know to simply disallow the wyter to gain power from worshippers sacrificing to it.  Then the game will simulate Glorantha more faithfully.

Thank you.

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The Ernaldori Clan Wyter

The wyter of the Ernaldori clan is bound to a corn snake, held sacred by members of the clan. It has POW 32 and CHA 17. The wyter resides in the Clearwine Earth temple and communicates with the High Priestess (who serves as the wyter’s priest). Each season, prior to Ernalda’s seasonal holy day, the wyter is worshiped by the members of the Ernaldoring clan, who offer it magic points and sometimes even points of characteristic POW (which could bring its POW up to a maximum of 42). 

The Above is quoted from the Grey text box at the top of Page 287 Core Rulebook RQ:G.

This leads me to believe that all wyters in the same category of size and age would be able to achieve the same level of POW with Community Sacrifice. I would also assume it would be rather foolish to leave a clan's wyter at anything less than maximum potential. Most communities would "top it off" on the holy days and use whatever they needed for events/emergencies throughout the next season, yes?

Wyter Size Community Members POW CHA

Shrine, Large Family, or Vexilla 50–100 4D6+6 3D6

Shrine, Village, or Company 101–250 5D6+6 3D6

Minor Temple, Clan, or Regiment 251–1,000 6D6+6 4D6

Major Temple, Small Tribe, Large Town 1,001–3,000 7D6+6 3D6+6

Major Temple, Large Tribe, City 3,001–7,000 8D6+6 5D6

Great Temple or Large City 7,000+ 9D6+6 4D6+6

Great Temple or Metropolis 15,000+ 10D6+6 6D6
 

Edited by HreshtIronBorne
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17 minutes ago, HreshtIronBorne said:

The Ernaldori Clan Wyter

...

This leads me to believe that all wyters in the same category of size and age would be able to achieve the same level of POW with Community Sacrifice. I would also assume it would be rather foolish to leave a clan's wyter at anything less than maximum potential. Most communities would "top it off" on the holy days and use whatever they needed for events/emergencies throughout the next season, yes?

I would say it's an over-simplification to say that all clan wyters have a max POW of 42. Just as it has levels for "small tribe", "large tribe", etc., I'd say there's some unspecified granularity in clan wyter size. Also not all clans have a good grasp of RuneQuest game mechanics and "maximum POW", so they can't always hit that sweet spot where further sacrifice is wasted.

Having said that, it does seem odd that not all wyters have maximum POW, seeing how that would be fairly easy.

Edited by PhilHibbs
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23 minutes ago, HreshtIronBorne said:

I apologize for starting off any sort of argument. 

Does this mean that the wyter cannot be raised to macimum possible power through sacrifice at every ceremony? Do you roll dice and that is the CAP for that stat for that wyter until the community gets older or bigger? 

I included enough on wyters so people could include them in their games. Here's the Notes on Wyters section in the RQ Campaign book:

NOTES ON WYTERS

Wyters are intended to be a potential resource for player characters and their community. The description of wyters in RuneQuest Glorantha (pages 286-287) provide a useful overview of wyters. A wyter is the spirit of a given community. Weakening the wyter weakens the community. When a wyter weakens itself through expenditure of points of POW to cast Rune spells, it weakens the spiritual health of the community. If the wyter reduces its POW by half, the community may begin to collapse. Additionally, the wyter must be persuaded that using the magic is appropriate for itself. No wyter will endanger its community simply to function as a rechargeable POW battery for its priest!

The wyter is responsible for the spiritual well-being of the community, and among its important roles are protecting the community from hostile spirits, vengeful ghosts, enemy gods, and more. Although such things trouble even those communities with a powerful wyter, this happens far more frequently when the wyter is weakened. Pity the doomed community whose wyter becomes weak enough to be defeated by an ordinary spirit or enemy shaman!

Although members of the community may sacrifice points of characteristic POW to the wyter, this is in practice more complicated than the RQG rules might suggest. Normally such sacrifices only occur on the high holy day of the wyter, although a kindly gamemaster might allow an adventurer to sacrifice a point of personal POW to prevent the wyter from being extinguished. It is perfectly reasonable for the gamemaster to only allow adventurers to make such sacrifices – perhaps that the wyter’s characteristics assume that other community members are already making whatever the sacrifices that community can be expected to make. Alternatively, the gamemaster may decide that any community that has been significantly weakened by the wyter’s loss of POW is too spiritually weak to sacrifice POW for the wyter unless that sacrifice comes from the player characters.  

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Quote

NOTES ON WYTERS

Although members of the community may sacrifice points of characteristic POW to the wyter, this is in practice more complicated than the RQG rules might suggest. Normally such sacrifices only occur on the high holy day of the wyter, although a kindly gamemaster might allow an adventurer to sacrifice a point of personal POW to prevent the wyter from being extinguished.

So this probably explains it - they might "all" have 42 POW on the high holy day, or the clan's foundation celebration day, or Sacred Time (if everything goes well - I'm looking at you, Kallyr), but throughout the year this will get used up leaving them with 6D6+6 at any random moment.

Edited by PhilHibbs
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Just now, PhilHibbs said:

 

So this probably explains it - they might all have 42 POW on the high holy day, or the clan's foundation celebration day, but throughout the year this will get used up leaving them with 6D6+6 at any random moment.

Or whatever the gamemaster decides is the appropriate limit for that particular wyter. The Ernaldori are a very powerful clan that has been around for three centuries. They are the royal clan of the oldest and most powerful Orlanth tribe in Dragon Pass. Normally its POW is 32, but if player characters want to sacrifice up to 10 points of their personal POW, they can increase it up to 42. But that is their call. As the GM, I'm not going to let NPCs do that for them.

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3 minutes ago, Pentallion said:

thank you.  I hope I didn't come across as being argumentative.  I just wanted clarification of what was intended from a game power level perspective.  That clarifies things greatly.

Often it is preferable just to get a concept out there, with the assumption that enough information is there that people can start including them in their games. And then we can wait a bit for a later opportunity to handle some of the deeper nuances. For 95% of the games, what is in the core rules about wyters is likely enough. The RQ Campaign Book gives an opportunity for a little GM facing nuance.

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3 minutes ago, Jeff said:

Or whatever the gamemaster decides is the appropriate limit for that particular wyter. The Ernaldori are a very powerful clan that has been around for three centuries. They are the royal clan of the oldest and most powerful Orlanth tribe in Dragon Pass. Normally its POW is 32, but if player characters want to sacrifice up to 10 points of their personal POW, they can increase it up to 42. But that is their call. As the GM, I'm not going to let NPCs do that for them.

As an aside, that is a key bit of my own design philosophy. The rules are designed for modelling the player interaction with the setting - it is intended for running RPG games. They are not intended to be a clockwork machine running in the background, determining how NPCs interact with NPCs. Or as I have said on more than one occasion to my line editors - "The GM should not be rolling dice against themself!"

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We have been wanting to mess around with Wyters and regimental magic like the 11 Lights and stuff. Having this community to bounce things off of has been invaluable in getting Maximum Fun out of RQ:g. 

I, for one, absolutely love the experiences I have been having with RQ:G. I deeply appreciate the work of everyone at Chaosium!

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31 minutes ago, Jeff said:

I included enough on wyters so people could include them in their games. Here's the Notes on Wyters section in the RQ Campaign book:

NOTES ON WYTERS

Wyters are intended to be a potential resource for player characters and their community. The description of wyters in RuneQuest Glorantha (pages 286-287) provide a useful overview of wyters. A wyter is the spirit of a given community. Weakening the wyter weakens the community. When a wyter weakens itself through expenditure of points of POW to cast Rune spells, it weakens the spiritual health of the community. If the wyter reduces its POW by half, the community may begin to collapse. Additionally, the wyter must be persuaded that using the magic is appropriate for itself. No wyter will endanger its community simply to function as a rechargeable POW battery for its priest!

The wyter is responsible for the spiritual well-being of the community, and among its important roles are protecting the community from hostile spirits, vengeful ghosts, enemy gods, and more. Although such things trouble even those communities with a powerful wyter, this happens far more frequently when the wyter is weakened. Pity the doomed community whose wyter becomes weak enough to be defeated by an ordinary spirit or enemy shaman!

Although members of the community may sacrifice points of characteristic POW to the wyter, this is in practice more complicated than the RQG rules might suggest. Normally such sacrifices only occur on the high holy day of the wyter, although a kindly gamemaster might allow an adventurer to sacrifice a point of personal POW to prevent the wyter from being extinguished. It is perfectly reasonable for the gamemaster to only allow adventurers to make such sacrifices – perhaps that the wyter’s characteristics assume that other community members are already making whatever the sacrifices that community can be expected to make. Alternatively, the gamemaster may decide that any community that has been significantly weakened by the wyter’s loss of POW is too spiritually weak to sacrifice POW for the wyter unless that sacrifice comes from the player characters.  

 

18 minutes ago, Jeff said:

As an aside, that is a key bit of my own design philosophy. The rules are designed for modelling the player interaction with the setting - it is intended for running RPG games. They are not intended to be a clockwork machine running in the background, determining how NPCs interact with NPCs. Or as I have said on more than one occasion to my line editors - "The GM should not be rolling dice against themself!"

That is a perfectly reasonable approach. Based on that, I would suggest that you make the bolded sentence in your text more definitive. When I first read it I felt the end of the paragraph was wishy-washy and my reaction was "wait, I do not want the game to tell me perhaps how a wyter work. This is a critical aspect of how a wyter is modeled by the rule and I'd prefer the designers to tell me how they intend it to work".

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5 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

We know that the God Learners could mass-produce magic items on the cheap, but I don't think they used a wyter-hack. I think that was from zerging Heroquests.

The Zistorites (not the God Learners in general) were mass-producing magical swords that worked just fine in Zistorela on Kostern Island (in God Forgot) but which became basically mundane weapons (of inferior quality to Heortling ones) when removed from that place far enough. The crystals powering that magic clearly drew on some magic source inherent to that place, or inherent to the God Machine running below the Clanking City.

Another way to create a magical artifact is to take an ordinary item to a heroquest, identify it with a mythical item, and return holding that artifact. This method is commonly used by all heroquesters, and the number of such items depends on the number of your heroquesters and heroquests. In this, the God Learners certainly had an advantage over most other cultures, although the Holy Country proved to be a hotspot of heroquesting, and its daughter culture in Sartar as well.

The HeroQuest 1 material had the Chain of Veneration for the Malkioni, a method to channel and redistribute the magical advantage accumulated by their Worship Invisible God rites somewhat more directly to their zzaburi, possibly side-stepping the formation of a wyter, but then the history of Hrestol does suggest that he was more than aware of wyter magics. His quest to slay Ifttala, daughter of Seshna Likita and ancestress of the Pendali, was basically the quest to slay the wyter of the Pendali peoples. Snodal's quest to slay the God of the Silver Feet is similar. It is worth mentioning that these God-Slaying quests have very negative consequences for the questers.

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Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

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7 hours ago, Pentallion said:

I didn't write the rules.  So how am I supposed to intuit the "spirit" of them?  For all I know, you want uber powerful characters and the adventures that come out will have wyter buffed NPCs.  How am I supposed to infer anything but what is written down and figure that playtesting would have exposed this as a flaw.  I have to go by the assumption that it's a game design decision.

I'm with you and @HreshtIronBorne on this one, @Pentallion. You're exploring the rules given to you by the designers. If the rules about wyters had been playtested more rigorously, we might have seen some limits published in the RAW. I think you found a very interesting set of ideas and rules around wyters and clan war. Some reasonable limits have been proposed to tone down the pure power-plays, leaving some powerful new options for RQG play. I've taken some notes for use in my own game. ;)

I find this thread interesting for addressing the stunt monsters in the Bestiary like the Crimson Bat or Cwim. I understand that they're designed using a "LOL, this is funny" principle and I couldn't see a way for RQG characters to ever challenge them (using the rules we currently have). But now we've got this "burn down your wyter" idea to think about. Can it be theorycrafted? Maybe. I'm probably not the one to try. But it expands the horizons of what's possible. And before the grognards start declaiming about AD&D/Deities and Demigods/"If it has stats, we can kill it," I know. I know. I've been around a long time. I read about it in the letters section of Dragon. ;)

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4 hours ago, EpicureanDM said:

You're exploring the rules given to you by the designers...
I find this thread interesting for addressing the stunt monsters in the Bestiary like the Crimson Bat or Cwim...

I agree that it's sometimes hard to distinguish between "Here's something gloriously over the top that is obviously intended" (Terrors section of Bestiary), and "Here's something over the top that you could do within the rules... is that intended?" (Wyters with Mass Extension).

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Firstly, Wyters of a military regiment should be casting those spells! And, I'd probably have it as part of the High Holy Day ceremony, in which the Wyter casts the spells and then, during the same ceremony, the initiates etc refill the Wyter's POWer.

Secondly, it makes absolutely no sense to me for a Wyter to not be able to cast Extension - just because it's OTT/OP. If there's an incredibly awesome reason (or mechanic) that makes sense, I'd be all for it. But, the above 'arguments' don't provide that. We have Crimson Bats, and Harreks, and Jar-Eel, and Argrath... and the Lunar Colleges of Magic, and Argrath's Sartar Magical Unions... using the Wyters in the way described above seems perfectly in line with what's happening in Glorantha these days.

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1 hour ago, Shiningbrow said:

Secondly, it makes absolutely no sense to me for a Wyter to not be able to cast Extension - just because it's OTT/OP.

It makes sense to me, since we know that Extension requires a Rune Point pool dedicated to maintaining it. Without the RP backing up the spell, which are moderated by a CHA stat, which maintains a connection between the middle world and the god world, it drops.

On the other hand it may be a legitimate move for a community that is facing annihilation to use up their Wyter in a last desperate move. Harrek's killing and binding of his god is a little like this. He might have sacrificed his community's wyter as part of achieving that. It's clearly an unusual move, though, and not something that normal, healthy communities do regularly.

Edited by PhilHibbs
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17 hours ago, EpicureanDM said:

I find this thread interesting for addressing the stunt monsters in the Bestiary like the Crimson Bat or Cwim. I understand that they're designed using a "LOL, this is funny" principle and I couldn't see a way for RQG characters to ever challenge them (using the rules we currently have). But now we've got this "burn down your wyter" idea to think about. Can it be theorycrafted? Maybe. I'm probably not the one to try. But it expands the horizons of what's possible. And before the grognards start declaiming about AD&D/Deities and Demigods/"If it has stats, we can kill it," I know. I know. I've been around a long time. I read about it in the letters section of Dragon. ;)

This is exactly the idea I hit on with my GM the other night. Broyan took a bunch of dudes up to the bat and had them all expertly bring it down. I can see how with the right spells, proper preparation, and enough community support could allow Broyan to lead an attack on the bat and wound/kill it. There are HQ abilities and all sorts of other stuff he could be using but, there is no way right now other than handwaving mythical powers into existence for PCs to get stuff like that.

 

I can see most groups of adventurers that get to a high enough level forming or acquiring access to a wyter through at least one party member. A High Priest of Any Temple is connected to a wyter, the Clan leader is connected to a wyter, tribal leaders are connected to wyters, regiments can have wyters, hero bands are a different thing, or not, I dunno?

 

Even at the bare minimum a wyter acts as a highly reliable alternative/replacement for a Divine Intervention. An Orlanthi-connected wyter can Teleport whole parties away (Thanks Mastakos), Heal Bodies (Thanks Ernalda), and Darkwalk parties into and out of danger. All of that is still incredibly efficient, even if you can only fill its POW once per year, AND all the PCs have to pay for it. 

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12 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

Firstly, Wyters of a military regiment should be casting those spells! And, I'd probably have it as part of the High Holy Day ceremony, in which the Wyter casts the spells and then, during the same ceremony, the initiates etc refill the Wyter's POWer.

Secondly, it makes absolutely no sense to me for a Wyter to not be able to cast Extension - just because it's OTT/OP. If there's an incredibly awesome reason (or mechanic) that makes sense, I'd be all for it. But, the above 'arguments' don't provide that. We have Crimson Bats, and Harreks, and Jar-Eel, and Argrath... and the Lunar Colleges of Magic, and Argrath's Sartar Magical Unions... using the Wyters in the way described above seems perfectly in line with what's happening in Glorantha these days.

I would tend to agree with you @Shiningbrow. 

Our campaign is currently reaching the end of the Eleven Lights HQ campaign that our GM has been converting to RQ:G. In the process of the campaign we have become the Eleven Lights, a Sartar Magical Union Unit. We have been playing it as a regiment bound by a wyter. The Eleven Lights can do a whole special ritual Argrath taught as our way of hand-waving the SMU special magical abilities, 11L basically nukes stuff a couple hexes away, like the other SMU units from the boardgame. It takes an hour and the core wizards are highly vulnerable. Otherwise we are bound to a unit wyter and are trying to figure out how to use it in play as a group of adventurers.

We can't treat the 525 members as POW batteries but, what is a reasonable level of contribution? Do you just roll the 6d6+6 and that is the "homeostatic" POW value for the Wyter during average times? Anything above is given by PCs as they are doing active and interesting stuff? Anything spent the PCs pay for? 

I can start a new thread for this semi-tangent if people want me to, or discuss here.

Edited by HreshtIronBorne
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3 hours ago, HreshtIronBorne said:

We can't treat the 525 members as POW batteries but, what is a reasonable level of contribution? Do you just roll the 6d6+6 and that is the "homeostatic" POW value for the Wyter during average times? Anything above is given by PCs as they are doing active and interesting stuff? Anything spent the PCs pay for? 

 

Unless you wish to micromanage the wyter doing its day to day duty and spending points that it would have to expend if it was not a slave to a band of murder hobos instead of being a spirit guide and support to a  larger community as well, that pretty much sounds like the rules as intended and as written.

Cheers

Edited by Bill the barbarian
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