Date: Mon, 15 Mar 93 18:46:43 +0100
From: RuneQuest-Request@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (Digest Subscriptions)
To: RuneQuest@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (Daily automated RQ-Digest)
Subject: The RuneQuest Daily, Mon, 15 Mar 1993, part 1 of 2
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---------------------
From: mace@lum.asd.sgi.com (Rob Mace)
Subject: Re: Lunars
Message-ID: <9303140053.AA02646@lum.asd.sgi.com>
Date: 13 Mar 93 08:53:59 GMT
>>> Seven Mothers is in many ways a cop-out, they are too easily the
>>> Lightbringers in reverse.
STEVEG@ARC.UG.EDS.COM writes:
>Interesting insight; and one that could be made more of, to give the cults(s)
>some distinctive character. Too often they turn out as badge-engineered
>versions of the originals.
I believe this was the idea. The Seven Mothers were meant to appeal
to worshippers of the gods that they are copied from. In our campaign
they are all healed versions of the originals.
Yanafal Tarnils is Humakt healed of his acceptance of self death.
The Lunar knowledge god(Can't remember the name) is Lankor Mhy healed
of the need to horde knowledge.
Telio Nori is Chalana Arroy healed of her need to heal everyone.
etc.
So my understanding is that this is the way it is meant to be and is a
Lunar recruitment ploy.
Rob Mace
---------------------
From: mace@lum.asd.sgi.com (Rob Mace)
Subject: Chaos characters
Message-ID: <9303140105.AA02664@lum.asd.sgi.com>
Date: 13 Mar 93 09:05:12 GMT
Roger Nolan writes:
> Anyone out there played Broos? Ogres? Walktapi!?
Yes. We decided to play a chaos party once. It consisted of a Broo,
a couple of Ogres, a chaotic Centaur, some I don't remember, and
Nasious Gorp Foot, a Scorpion Cave Troll.
Nasious was a really dumb cave troll who got his foot eaten off by a
Gorp. He had traveled around for a while asking everyone he found to
help him get his foot back. He eventually came across some Scorpion
Men. They were more then happy to help.
The party did not last too long. Being chaos beings we were not very
prone to organization, and the group broke up over some disputes.
Rob Mace
---------------------
From: mace@lum.asd.sgi.com (Rob Mace)
Subject: Dart Wars
Message-ID: <9303140141.AA02829@lum.asd.sgi.com>
Date: 13 Mar 93 09:41:45 GMT
Tom Zunder writes:
> Okay what are dart wars, I don't recognise them at all.
I know that one of the Tales of the Raeching Moon had a short artical
by Greg on Dart Wars. They are sort of a Lunar way of doing politics.
It is bassically a war of assassinations between Lunar
Factions/Houses. When the current local ruling Lunar faction becomes
weak, the rest of the factions start jockying for position to be the
next ruling faction. The common way they do this is by assassination.
Sometimes things get out of hand and open hostilities break out. At
this point the central Lunar goverment will usually send in troops to
sort things out.
In the campaign(Steve Maurer's) in which I play the characters were
hired to stop a Dart War in Bicky. We were not too successful and
eventually open hostilities broke out. I believe that some of the
others on this list were involved in a campaign that was also in Bicky
at the time and the events from the two sort of cross fertalized with
out the knowledge of the players at the time.
Rob Mace
---------------------
From: jacobus@sonata.cc.purdue.edu (Bryan J. Maloney)
Subject: RQIV
Message-ID: <9303140315.AA18778@sonata.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: 13 Mar 93 17:15:27 GMT
Why I want RQIV is this:
There are parts of RQIII that do not work or work VERY badly. I
CANNOT get my hands on RQII!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Remember, folks, not EVERYBODY ON THE WHOLE STINKING PLANET HAS BEEN PLAYING
RUNEQUEST SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME!
(End of gratuitous capitalizations and exclamation points--loud and
rude, but the point has to be made OVER and OVER and OVER AGAIN to
some people.)
Other reasons:
I hear that RQIV is going to be a "great-big-o" book, like Ars Magica
third edition--why? NOT for more rules, but to load as much of
Glorantha into a "basic" set as possible.
I LIKE this idea. It is one of the things that got Ars Magica sales
to pick back up. People got sick of having to buy oodles of
supplements just to get a campaign off the ground!
I am sick of having to buy oodles of supplements just to get a
campaign off the ground!
Finally: RuneQuestIV is actually being playtested out-of-house (by me,
I hope and pray, as soon as the RuneCzar finishes looking at the
latest version. Oliver, you have my name--PLEEEEEEEEEEZ, can I, huh?
PLEEEEZ? I've already given you bunches of comments 'n stuff--oh,
PLEEEEEZ? I've got players all ready and willing--there's the pair
who want to play an Uzko and his Enlo "hunting dog", my fiancee wants
to play a Chalana Arroy Duck, and more).
Anyway, this is why I think RQIV sounds like a good idea.
---------------------
From: carlf@Panix.Com (Carl Fink)
Subject: The Seven Mothers
Message-ID: <199303140423.AA29808@sun.Panix.Com>
Date: 13 Mar 93 18:23:27 GMT
mace@lum.asd.sgi.com (Rob Mace) writes:
[deleted]
>I believe this was the idea. The Seven Mothers were meant to appeal to
>worshippers of the gods that they are copied from. In our campaign they
>are all healed versions of the originals.
>
>Yanafal Tarnils is Humakt healed of his acceptance of self death.
>
>The Lunar knowledge god(Can't remember the name) is Lankor Mhy healed of
>the need to horde knowledge.
>
>Telio Nori is Chalana Arroy healed of her need to heal everyone.
>
Close, but Teelo Norri is the equivalent of Flesh Man. Deezola is the
"healed" Chalana Arroy (the idea of healing the Healer is
problematic).
Carl
---------------------
From: MILLERL@WILMA.WHARTON.UPENN.EDU (Loren J. Miller)
Subject: why RQ4?
Message-ID: <9303140617.AA22095@noc2.dccs.upenn.edu>
Date: 14 Mar 93 05:15:00 GMT
Remember that one of the reasons for RQ4 is to get shelf space back.
If you go into a game store nowadays and ask for the RQ stuff they are
likely to tell you that "that game is dead" or "nobody plays that game
any more." If they keep RQ stuff at all it will be in a small bit of
shelf space next to the other Avalon Hill games. When a new edition of
RQ comes out they will put it in the front of the store and make sure
they reorder copies when they sell out. Then new supplements will be
pushed more than they are now. Even though Avalon Hill keeps the RQ3
products in production, so you don't really run out of them as you did
with RQ2 stuff, the game stores don't sell very many of them and so
they don't reorder them or devote good shelf space to them.
IMO, the reason to do RQ4 is not to sell it to players, it is to
convince the game store managers that AH is serious about supporting
it.
-- Loren
---------------------
From: MILLERL@WILMA.WHARTON.UPENN.EDU (Loren J. Miller)
Subject: simplified monster descriptions
Message-ID: <9303142025.AA05539@noc2.dccs.upenn.edu>
Date: 14 Mar 93 19:22:00 GMT
One night back in college while I was running a RQ game an onlooker,
who had played RQ in high school back around Berkeley, commented that
he was surprised that anybody had enough time to run RQ games. I was
surprised at the comment, but he was pretty much on target. One of
RQ's bugs/features has always the amount of time it took to generate
NPCs for the game, and that generic opponents such as monsters, broos,
and city guards take as much time to generate as NPCs with
personality.
E.G. Roll the dice for all seven stats. Compute SRs and Damage
Bonuses. Compute HP by location. Determine spells and skills.
RQ monsters and generic opponents are defined as PCs rather than as GM
Characters. They are defined in the kind of detail that a player would
want to know. The problem with this is that the GM often doesn't need
this level of detail for a monster that the PCs have decided to
attack, yet it is impossible to generate the necessary combat and
magic abilities without going through all the other work.
I'd like to contrast RQ, for a moment, with Chivalry and Sorcery,
which came out about the same time as RQ. Even though I thought C&S
was too complex to run for long they did do one thing extraordinarily
well. The C&S monster descriptions included several full sets of stats
for monsters of different levels of ability, but each set of stats was
immediately usable in the game. All computations were already
performed. The C&S GM could simply copy down the relevant stats from
the book and run an encounter on the fly.
This is not possible with RQ, unless you resort to using the Average
numbers that are already computed. And with some creatures, especially
those with a huge range of values (giants, gargoyles, dragons, even
horses) the averages are given as ranges and aren't helpful. While I
can accept that giants and dragons should be crafted individually, I
don't buy that for gargoyles or horses.
I'd like to find a method to describe monsters that AH can use in the
RQ4 bestiaries that is more GM friendly than the PC-style descriptions
that we have instead. I'd like something that is closer to what C&S
did twelve years ago. Has anybody else written such a system? If you
don't think this is a problem how do you get around it?
whoah,
+++++++++++++++++++++++23
Loren Miller internet: MILLERL@wharton.upenn.edu
S sign lists littles what wetland received in phire bonuse --1M Monkeys
---------------------
From: tsl@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Tim Leask)
Subject: Re: Can a dagger kill
Message-ID: <9303150021.24573@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU>
Date: 15 Mar 93 15:21:45 GMT
> An interesting problem came up in a discussion here a couple of days ago.
> Can you kill someone with a dagger in RQ? We all agreed, if he is wearing
> any substantial armour, the answer is no, but the problem arises in close
> in combat where your opponent is unarmoured, and possibly unarmed. (Eg. a
> bar fight, a knife in the back.) It should be possible to kill the person
> with one dagger thrust to the gut. (And if you twist around a bit, you have
> a near certain kill.) So, should we have a 'assasination rule' to cover this
> situation?
I remember this problem being discussed in an old volume of the RQ
digest. The suggestion there, which IMHO was a good one, was that in
assasination type attacks, you increase the level of success of the
attack by one level. i.e. attacking a helpless or unsuspecting
opponent or attacking from point blank range a miss becomes a normal
hit, a normal hit becomes a special, a special becomes a critical, a
critical does double max damage ignoring armour.
Thus to cut the throat of the unsuspecting guard, Lefty has to make
his move silently roll to sneak up from behind. He halves his dagger
attack of 75% to do an aimed blow at the head (chance in 38%) he casts
bladesharp 2 just to be sure. So on a roll of 48 or less Lefty has
impaled the poor guard in the throat.
Care must be taken by the GM in applying this rule. The idea of lefty
sneaking up on the Guard while wielding his trusty halberd ("just to
make sure") should greatly increase the chance of detection.
What do others think ?
Tim Leask
---------------------
From: tsl@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Tim Leask)
Subject: Re: POW limits
Message-ID: <9303150124.26759@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU>
Date: 15 Mar 93 16:24:45 GMT
I have being thinking about the whole question of POW. One thing you
could do to redress the situation is allow a Priest or sorceror to
donate POW to there ally or familiar. Though not the quite the same
the precedent of POW donation already exists. Daka Fal have a ritual
for it why not create a new ritual along similar lines but make it
common.
Another idea I've being thinking about is giving priests an increased
species maximum. Every High-Holy day the officiating priest adds one
to his species maximum POW. This means priests of long standing would
be very tough indeed. The increase in POW comes from their prolonged
communion with their god which leads to an increased tie with the
infinity Rune. Heroquesting or sorcerous ritual could similarly
increase the tie with the infinity Rune.
On another point why does your POW stop increasing once you reach
species max ? Disembodied spirits don't stop increasing they just go
on forever but there increase chance is very low (5%), why not let POW
keep increasing after reaching species max just keep the chance at 5%.
I certainly don't think this would be too unbalancing and could lead
to greater uncertainty in encounters. "Gee that old geezer must be a
shaman none of my spells seem to affect him!" If nothing else it may
bring back respect for ones elders :-)
Am I walking along the path to munchkin land ? Views suggestions
rebuttals ?
Regarding RQ4 sorcery - I'd like to see some form of Rune based system
along the lines described recently or as described by Steve Maurer in
the old RQ digest. I'd prefer that the old RQ3 system be scrapped or
be restricted to Non-Gloranthan settings. IMHO it just don't fit in a
Glorathan context.
Just my $0.02
Tim Leask
===============================================================================
Department of Computer Science /*\__/\ "Money is something you have in
University of Melbourne < \ case you don't die tomorrow."
Parkville, Vic., 3052, AUSTRALIA \ _ _/ Gordon Gecko.
Phone: +61 3 282 2439 \| --
e-mail: tsl@cs.mu.oz.au
===============================================================================
---------------------
From: LINGST10%OUACCVMB.BITNET@OHSTVMA.ACS.OHIO-STATE.EDU (Patrick Flanigan)
Subject: RQ IV
Message-ID: <9303150614.AA08614@Sun.COM>
Date: 15 Mar 93 05:57:43 GMT
From the sound of things just about everybody has a copy of the draft
rules but me. Could somebody send me a copy of thing, just for my own
perusal? I'm not actually involved in a Runequest game at the moment,
so I can't playtest it but I'd be happy to send back comments and
suggestions.
I have mixed feelings about the publication of a whole new edition of
rules, but I'm glad that some of the problems in RQ 3 are being
addressed. The shamanism system was one of my own pet peeves about
that edition. I've never found shaman to be an insoluble game balance
problem, but they are, well, colorless. I get the impression that
someone decided most of the traditional shamanic ceremonies
(travelling to the land of the dead, visiting the gods, and so forth)
were "HeroQuest" abilities and therefor not to be touched. Instead we
were left with Gloranthan shamans visiting a blank and featureless
spirit world to control spirits that were little more than resevoirs
of game-abilities. Hopefully the new rules will change this -- they
certainly should.
---------------------
From: STEVEG@ARC.UG.EDS.COM (Steve Gilham | GDS Solutions)
Subject: Various threads from 12-14th March
Message-ID: <01GVTO32F7VM001BNV@UG.EDS.COM>
Date: 14 Mar 93 21:11:42 GMT
2 > 3??
=====
>> I converted to RQ III, but I did it selectively...
>> How many other folks did the same types of things in their own campaigns?
From the sound of things most people had favourite bits of RQ2 that
weren't in RQ3. The only slight problem is that these don't always
overlap. I preferred the old simple encumbrance system (the RQ3 one
gave silly results when we tried it). I didn't like the cheapening of
100%+ skills, either
>> I didn't like having to roll POW X 5 to cast a spell, too prejudiced
>> against lo POW characters.
Another of my dislikes, too, despite it seeming logical that the
spritually endowed are better at magic.
>> Actually, a lot of people (including yours truly) think that what nearly
>> killed RQ was lack of support.
A policy of providing a new offering in the impulse-purchase price
range every month will keep the punters flocking. While Shadowrun
must have struck an unexpected vein of support, the two glossy things
a month business plan certainly didn't hurt the success of what in the
first edition is a fairly poorly play-tested set of rules (rather like
RQ3).
However, the first thing to kill RQ stone dead in the UK was the
five-fold increase in price from the L7-99 Games Orkshop printing (the
one with the god-awful cover) of RQ2 to the L38-95 of the RQ3 deluxe.
(It wasn't helped with the UK distributors wanting get fat on the
profits by keeping the price static as the pound went from ~$1 to
~1-70). That things went quiet after that seemed to suggest that the
game hadn't taken off enough for it to be considered by the new
management to be worth supporting.
>> I would rather have Dorastor, Prax Pack, Chaos Gods of Glorantha, Pamalt
>> Pack, Maps of Glorantha or whatever vapourware is 'nearly' finished than a
>> new set of rules which I'll only change anyway.
Hear, hear! Given the prices people were willing to pay for Greg's
uncollected laser-printer output at Convulsion, I think that
publishing the unpolished stuff would still be a success amongst the
hard core.
How necessary IS support anyway?
If the rules are "OK", then people can use them, and purists who
always design their own settings & stories would say that's all the
publisher ever need/should produce; and at that point the only support
required is to keep the game in print. From a commercial point of
view, the purpose of support is purely to keep the revenue flowing in;
which means producing the not-strictly-necessary supplements -
settings, scenarios and such.
RQ's survival in the face of apathy
from the publisher suggests that support in the form of glossy
adventures isn't that important for something that has a dedicated
core of following. In fact, it's the new "secrets of Glorantha" type
of supplement that's been most earnestly missed, as most RQ-enthusiast
are actually Glorantha-enthusiasts who feed off another writer's
campaign world, and can't just look things up in a library or make it
up out of whole cloth and still be "official" : the sort of thing that
would be pitied if it were seen in e.g. DragonLance fans. As it is,
if a Gloranthan "Trivial Pursuit" set were published, we most of us
would have bought it, and memorized it (if we found anything we hadn't
already memorized, that is).
*** Some things I've not seen raised in the discussion so far
RQ3 also contains some bugs in the experience system that weren't
there in the previous version (consider the progress of a character
with a substantial category modifier like +30% - easily achieved by
Aldryami and Uz with fair-to-good stats - contrasted with that of a
human at say 5%).
Having developed a character with high dodge and moderate armour, the dodge
skill even with RQ3-ENC value subtracted from the raw skill%, seems to be
highly cost-effective compared with shield parry because:-
You can't drop it
It doesn't weigh anything
It doesn't occupy that other hand
You don't take *any* damage when you succeed
You don't take *any* knockback either
Having 60%+ in poleaxe and effective-dodge is an ungodly combination
(read, I was asked politely to refrain). By way of contrast Great
Parry spell only gives you the fourth of these five benefits, and that
for the outlay of 3 points of POW.
Rules chatter
=============
>> I can't find the cost of characteristic training... My GM has ruled that
>> the cost per week is equal to that of a skill 5 x the value of the
>> characteristic,
Sounds the most reasonable extrapolation of the underlying rules
philosophy - one of the good things about RQ, now somewhat buried, is
the fact that you can usually deduce what is missing rule ought to
have been, though alas not whether it is balanced.
>> Regarding spell spirits: I preferred the RQ II system with variable
>> spells bought in single steps, which gave a quadratic rather than linear
>> cost function.
We thought so to, so deliberately interpreted the rules as requiring a
spell to be bought in one-point increments. Not that this was always
a barrier in RQ2 - I recall some fan discussion about the likely
availability of Countermagic 18 under RQ2 rules...
>> If we want to keep spell spirits, then I might recommend the system we used
>> in our campaigns: the power of the spirit for an N point spell is the sum
>> of the first N numbers
This sounds rather like the best of both worlds, providing a soft
rather than a hard limit on maximum spell sizes at about 4.
>> RQ: All or nothing Healing
Sounds like a reasonable suggestions (but I can hear all those other
players howling out there)
>> Most of this [shamanic rules] applies only in the land of gross characters
>> no one will ever play.
We should be so lucky!
>> The most important point is shamen get gross fast, are gross by nature
>> and get worse.
Fortunately, it's easier to get a competent sorcerer as from the
character generation system than a shaman (w/o obviously grossing out
on previous experience). Both are far easier than a priest, though...
* * * *
jjm@zycor.lgc.com (johnjmedway) writes about managing to kill Argrath
& other oddities. Reminds me of a campaign that ended up with a Two Feathered
Rivals cult (and you don't want to know any more than that)
* * * *
Oh look - Glorantha
===================
>> Dunno about Vinga, but Yinkin is an associated cult....it does seem the
>> some notionally independant cults are almost sub-cults anyways,
Vinga aka Orlanth AdventurESS, a Sartarite warrior-woman cult.
Presumably a fairly vanilla, but women-only, version of Orlanth
AdventurOUS; except that henna (for the hair) seems to replace woad
(for the skin). I'd guess most likely to be found as a shrine (i.e.
sub-cult) in most places of Orlanth worship, and only rarely as a
fully separate place of worship; and then perhaps primarily as a
women's temple (and even there, probably ending up as an Ernalda
sub-cult along with the other woman-warrior cult ["Earth war-goddess"
-- Snakepipe Hollow], Babeester Gor).
I think that inevitable most cults would tend to be found as sub-cults
only in the Orlanthi society as outlined in KoS; where the specialist
cults are viewed as *strange* (as opposed to the
quasi-character-classes of many games ("I think I'll take a warrior
with spear - that means I must be a Yelmalio")).
>> Yanafal Tarnils is Humakt healed of his acceptance of self death.
Unfortunately for the otherwise interesting Seven LightMothers model,
Humakt wasn't a Lightbringer (maybe one reason why I didn't think of
the analogy myself) - he's one of those strange and *really exotic*
cults; and to further break the symmetry, neither is Etyries one of
the Seven Mothers.
>> Third Eye Blue is associated with the Runes of Fire, Life and Infinity.
Funny that, I posed exactly the same set for a Phoenix cult (yeah,
Marvel comics) a loooong while ago. That infinity rune doesn't get
taken down from the shelf very often...
>> The Redsmith (or "Thran'Tir") // Most common amongst the Third Eye
>> diaspora this aspect deals with the working of bronze...
The primary reputation (i.e. the context in which the few mentions
have been made of them) of Third Eye Blue is as Blacksmiths, the
workers of Iron. I would suggest that the Redsmith path would be but
a preparation for the True Work, which would carry much the same
benefits, but for Iron that the redsmith preparation provided for
Bronze. Achieving this status should not be quite as exacting as
Gardener status for Aldrya, but should be similar in nature.