Re: Mastery runes in HW

From: Eric Hansen <ehansen_at_adan.kingston.net>
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 03:33:08 -0400

Alex asks for clarification about HW mastery runes

> when you say starting characters don't have a level of mastery, do you mean
> "except for the idiotic 'free' level of mastery they get by virtue
> of being PCs (sic), of course, which goes without saying", or do you
> mean "No, they don't, none at all, none whatsoever"?

1. No character starts with any ability/skill/trait/passion/whatever better than 6/14 in HW. No mastery runes can be gained until an ability of 2/18 is improved using Plot Points. Instead of getting a 1/19, the character gets a 19W(this means mastery rune)21. It should take some time for characters to acquire mastery runes, and even when they do, abilities get better at more or less even increments. Gaining a mastery rune doesn't give you a sudden and illogical leap in that ability. Sure, you have a mastery rune, which bumps you up against poor slobs without them, but your roll before bumpup is almost always a failure. Only characters who have been played a lot will have mastery runes in abilities with low target numbers.
2. Player characters DO get a bumpup (as if they had a mastery rune) against what I refer to as unnamed characters. If the character is so insignificant that you can't even be bothered to give it a name, PCs get a bumpup against it. The rules do not explicitly define ordinary people as unnamed (this is my own interpretation of _ordinary_). I think the spirit of the rule is that PCs don't get the bumpup against any important GMCs. Important, in this case, refers to the GMs dramatic purposes. Since HW models adventure fiction/action movies, this convention makes sense. There are even a few rpgs (Torg, AD&D and Feng Shui, frex) that use the idea of important vs. ordinary characters. Not that this matters. If your Glorantha isn't going to be like adventure fiction/action movies, chuck the rule out.

It is this _Ord_ rule that gave me, personally, the most trouble, at first. PCs in Glorantha a cut above? Huh? But after playing the game for a while without using the ord rule, and then playing with the ord rule, I became a convert. It lets the PCs deal with minor obstacles more easily, letting game time focus on major obstacles, without requiring PC abilities to grow to ultra-high levels (relatively speaking).

I'll admit that once, when a PC fought his way out of a lunar fortified camp, he managed to accumulate in excess of 1400 SPs as a result of his bumpup, and an amazing run of luck to counter huge negative modifiers for being heavily outnumbered. The odds said that he should have gone down bleeding and squealing. The lunars poured more and more soldiers into that confused meatgrinder of a melee, until they got an idea of what was happening. When they disengaged and regrouped, those accumulated SPs became irrelevant, because the break reset everyone's (the survivors, anyway) SP values to their normal levels (SPs represent a character's situation relative to the others he's fighting). After that, only spending Plot Points let Our Hero live to fight another day. I initially found the sheer number of SPs accumulated appalling, but there are solid rules that allow you to control the flow of action, and thus SPs can be periodically reset. Despite my misgivings, though, this action was a lot of FUN.

This action in the lunar fortified camp of Totorum : ) also happened before the rule that allows a defender to reduce the SP bid of its attacker in exchange for a die roll penalty. Once Bollix' (yes, that's really the character's name) SPs started climbing, his player's bids did too, and things just spiralled out of control. If the same fight had happened with the Defender Response to SP bids rule in effect, the total would never have gotten so high.

In summary:
- -PCs don't start with mastery runes, but do get bump ups against ords. - -The rightness or wrongness of this is left to the discretion of the individual gloranthaphile.

- -Never let Bollix out of the village alone after dark.
- -On second thought, who's going to stop him?
- -These lunars are crazy

Eric

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