Date: Thu, 15 Apr 93 17:15:12 +0200
From: RuneQuest-Request@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (RQ Digest Maintainer)
To: RuneQuest@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (Daily automated RQ-Digest)
Subject: The RuneQuest Daily, Thu, 15 Apr 1993
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From: awr0@aberystwyth.ac.uk
Subject: Publication of material.
Message-ID: <9304141549.AA25890@deca.aber.ac.uk>
Date: 14 Apr 93 17:49:18 GMT
Ok where to start, how about a flame.
Ken Rolston writes :
-------------------
I got my first dummy copy of Shadows on the Borderland Tuesday. Copies should
be in the stores soon. It looks swell. Send adulatory hosanas and errata ASAP
for Us Who Would Be Wise. Shadows is set in the River of Cradles setting,
BTW, not in Dorastor.
---------------------
Excuse me?! We should correct your material? That when I go out and
spend my 15 pounds or however much this supplement will cost me, I
must also buy magazines etc which support RQ just to get the
corrections to the product that I have bought. Personally I would
prefer waiting an extra 2 weeks for a quality product rather than a
shoddy 'Get it published as soon as possible so we can make money
quicker' product.
The point is, that AH expects to find errata in there products. If
that is the case and it cannot be helped, then provide a mailing
service for people who have bought the product and keep sending them
updates to the various products that need correcting.
Another method would be to consider changing the published packs, by
including errata sheets, or (This may seem quite logical really)
correcting the publication.
I'm in a flaming mood so onto other points.
1) Issaries write-up in Cradles, where did the Rune-Lord status go to?
Merchants need protecting. Similarly, I would conisder that
Lankhor Mhy would possibly have 'Explorers'.
2) Do the words Lanbril, Pavis, Flintnail(Not sure on this one) mean
anything. Pavis was half covered in Cradles. It would of been
nice to have the more 'Cult'ural aspects of the city covered.
3) Thief God's, what happened to the trickster cult? I haven't seen a
write up of that cult anywhere. It would be nice to have a
decent write-up of a thief cult. The only one I've seen is
in the old Pavis pack. Which is not published anymore.
I have only been playing RQ to any depth for about one year now. I am
lucky to have a GM who has been playing for 12 years and has most of
the RQ2 stuff. I had to refer back to Cults of Prax to get enough
detail together for my Issaries character. (In the end I just
photocopied the relevant pages.) The detail in Cults of Prax compared
to the detail provided by the more recent publications seems to me to
be better.
Ok, that's all for now. I may be slightly biased in what I say. I am a
RQ2 + 3 (with slight RQ 4 modifications) player. I still consider
Cradles to be a cool publication. I could go on about GoG and what a
waste of paper that was, and maybe a book with 10 cult write-ups
rather than 400 would have been more worthwhile.
If I had enough money I would like to buy the rights to RQ2 from AH or
whoever owns the rights and print it. I know it would sell.
Does anybody know if the original material published in the early
eighties will ever be published, ie The Big Rubble, The Original
Cradle adventure, etc. ?
Thank you for your time,
Adam.
Ps : Go on then, flame me.
---------------------
From: bonar@math.rutgers.edu (Doug Bonar)
Subject: RQ Martial Arts
Message-ID: <9304141744.AA26965@math.rutgers.edu>
Date: 14 Apr 93 17:44:39 GMT
No real rules ideas here, just comments to the effect that I like the
combat thoughts that came by the list yestersday.
For a number of years it has seemed to me that RQ Martial Arts didn't
make sense. Granting that its purpose was to enable unarmed combat to
be dangerous (like in movies), it still didn't make much sense. If I
know how to make my punch do double damage, I should be able to apply
that knowledge to a dagger as well. In fact, any weapon that I can
control well enough should be boosted in the same way.
I'm not sure if I fully agree with the idea of a success in an attack
that is also a Martial Arts (leaving the name the same as the old
skill but taking Loren's definition) success being moved up one class
is a good one though. For one thing, since specials will occure
simultaniously in both skills (much of the time), it gets into
special-criticals and critical-criticals, etc. But, maybe more
importantly, by making criticals more likely it makes magical defenses
that much more valuable compaired to physical ones (and I'm not sure I
like the change in balance betwwen the two).
As a final comment, partially for balance reasons, partly because I
think that if attacking gets more detailed so should defending, I
would propose an Expert Parry skill (the name is bad, but I can't
think of a better one off hand). This would be essentially a skill
combining the knowledge and reflexes gained by combat experience with
an extensive knowledge of combat styles. It should work as an analoge
of the Martial Arts skill, but helping your weapon parry (or perhaps
small shield as well). If you know what to expect in terms of combat
'flow' from an opponent (from analyzing his style and movements based
on your experience) you should be better able to block his blows.
Again, it would be a Hard knowledge skill, and probably would require
a minimum skill of 60 (or more) in some weapon skill.
Together with Loren's Fight Fair (Fight Dirty) and Marital Arts
skills, this skill would help make a trained warrior different from a
casual warrior. In what I've seen of RQ3 the difference is generally
supposed to be represented in terms of attack and parry %'s and maybe
number of weapons the person is familier with. In the RQ4 draft, the
maneuver skill is added in and helps distinquish the warrior from the
skilled non-warrior (as most travelers would be). Since I think there
should be a real difference between the combat abilities of a strong,
agile punk, a well traveled merchant/ adventurer, and a recient
military recruit, I like the idea of adding more to combat than just
attack and parry %'s (The punk, traveler and new recruit might all
have %'s in the 40-50 range one from raw talent, one from long
experience, and one from training.) With the above skills added in,
the punk has only his talent, the traveler might have picked up some
secondary fighting skills at about the same level (say maneuver) and
the recruit has (perhaps) all of the warrior skills as a basic level.
(Note that by the tables given in the RQ4 draft, the town militia
would be a tough fight for a new army unit, and by numbers could
probably beat a unit composed of short service vetran.)
Doug
bonar@math.rutgers.edu
---------------------
From: tzunder@cix.compulink.co.uk (Tom Zunder)
Subject: Blue Moon
Message-ID:
Date: 15 Apr 93 07:40:00 GMT
Just a quick note.
If you presume that thief cults work for the Red Empuire as well as
against it, then with the Blue Moon cult and Irripi Ontor it is quite
scary.
I don't think enough has been put on paper about the very necessary
thief/trickster/darkness spells of Detection Blank, Divination Blank,
Honey Tongue, Manifest False Runes etc..
I know some do exist but they must all exist or it would be like 1984.
All those Illusion, darkness cults must have got similar defences
against the Light and order brigades!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
tzunder@cix.compulink.com.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------
From: STEVEG@ARC.UG.EDS.COM (Entropy needs no maintenance)
Subject: Re: The RuneQuest Daily, Fri, 09 Apr 1993
Message-ID: <01GWXYOKT5IA001KT3@UG.EDS.COM>
Date: 12 Apr 93 17:26:43 GMT
>> Surely the Lunar Empire counts as a strong central government?
Indeed, and as a first guess, ancient Persia seems the best fit to the
Lunars in terms of style. Orlanthi cultures, on the other hand don't
have much central govenrment, and the Western nations (Fronela,
Seshnela, Ralios) seem still in the age of bickering
baronies/city-states within each country.
>> I'm not so sure about the effectiveness of a force being proportional
>> to the square of the number of troops, after all, there must be a tail
>> off when a force starts to get so large that its command and control
>> becomes ineffective.
True, the effectiveness strictly goes roughyl as the square of those
who actually fight (excluding logistic tail). The argument goes
roughly as follows: if you have a force k times bigger than the
opponent's then your man only has to kill [incapacitate, rout,
whatever] 1/k men to wipe out the opponent, whereas each of his men
have to kill k. Thus each of his men has to kill k**2 times as many
for parity - but given equal quality of men , this means that your
force is thus k**2 as effective.
>> Rather than using the overly powerful Rune Magics for elementals how about
>> a simple use of Bladesharp 4 on the blade of the plough....?
This gets its mention in the RQ4 v2.0 playtest rules, with ploughsharp
being one of the common names of the spell
---------------------
From: MAB@SAVAX750.RUTHERFORD.AC.UK (Mystic Musk Ox)
Subject: RE: The RuneQuest Daily, Wed, 14 Apr 1993
Message-ID: <9304150938.AA11946@Sun.COM>
Date: 15 Apr 93 09:38:00 GMT
>Rather than using the overly powerful Rune Magics for elementals (Sorry, DIVINE
>magic, I must update my vocab) how about a simple use of Bladesharp 4 on the
>blade of the plough....?
>Inspiration for this idea came from Mark Plowman, I can't take the credit
>myself....while digging after a vampire, he suggested it.
Nice idea...but as you have to recast it every 5 mins, that is a lot
of magic points. How many peasant farmers have that much mp? (The
definition of an acre I seem to remember, is the amount of land one
man can plough in one day). Also I suspect that the actual sharpness
of a plough has a lot less to do with its turning power than the force
behind it. (a cart horse can put 6-7 tons of force into pulling a
plough!) with an elemental it is easily reusable, easy to command, and
will work all day for peanuts (or rocks), AND, importantly, it means
that you can do something else at the same time.
This is all getting off the track really, as I intended it as an
example of how ordinary people might have their lives changed by
widespread use of magic. I think the culture would tend to be much
more like 20th century than ancient. In fact the magic has always been
there right from the start, whereas early cultures on Earth initially
got along without any technology/magic at all, and thus developed
before it became available. If the magic was there before the
culture, that is going to cause BIG differences.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Looking at the tables in Glorantha, Genertala, we see that
>characters from the Barbarian Belt have a 89% to be in the 'carl'
>class, with 11% in the Thane/Housecarl class (Noble, Priest, Warrior),
>matching the estimation pretty closely. Sartar is listed on p 23 as
>having a total of 180,00 Human adults. Using the Estimation, about
>76,500 warriors can be mustered, 7,650 of which are heavily armed and
>armored. This would seriously disrupt society, but when you are being
>invaded...
I suspect that those tables have been frigged for player character
backgrounds, and don't necessarily reflect the 'real' population
breakdowns. I don't really have any idea on how real populations do
break down into percentages...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Yes, the Lunar Empire is a strong and sophisticated government, but
>I think that we have a tendancy to overestimate the capabilites of a as
>citizens of the modern world. I think it's necessary to remember that
>Bronze age cultures were limited in their ability to gather and mass
>information. I saw a ridiculous article in ToRM (Michael O'Brien, sorry
>to rag on your magazine the first week that you subscribe to the digest)
>about some sort of Lunar spy organization that gathered more information
>than the NSA does.
True, but I suspect that there is an awful lot of communication in
Glorantha (telepathy spells, teleports, air elementals, spirits...)
> Note to Mark, I'm not flaming you or picking on you're point of
> view. I'm just voicing my opinion on the subject
I didn't think you were for one moment, Bill! I'm always interested in
different opinions, because they usually have something in them that I
wouldn't have thought of...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Casulaties. I would have said that Gloranthan war is alot more like modern
>war. The magical casualties are frightening, the healing good. Therefore
>many people are just fried in one go, the lightly wounded pick up and fight
>again. However, healing in Glorantha is better than ours is now, so the
>casulaties will fall in percentages.
I have a suspicion (and am probably completely wrong here...), that
excluding the use of nukes, modern warfare actually causes less
casualties than previous wars.
>It all depends on just how long zombies can fight, what use they really
>are, whether spirits in battle can act as aerial assault, just what effect
>calling MoonFire down has on battles.
>Some of the BIG magic effects, crater attacks etc would disadvantage close
>order troops and favour loose order. In fact the more you look at the
>possibes the more you have to restrict the HUGE magics before it becomes
>the Gulf War and not the Pelopennesian (did I spell that right).
Um, well, the use of magic maybe DOES make it the Gulf war rather than
the Pelopennesian (?).
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Buckley
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------
From: staats@Athena.MIT.EDU
Subject: Skill Checks a simple, yet elegant extension
Message-ID: <9304151430.AA11885@random-walk.MIT.EDU>
Date: 15 Apr 93 14:30:14 GMT
Greetings!
I like the successful experience aspect of the skill improvement
system. The only thing I would suggest is that depending on what the
skill is, there could be a difficulty factor associated with learning
certain skills. It is already harder to learn successively higher
skill levels, but I'm saying something a little different. For
example, learning glass-blowing may be subjectively twice as difficult
as learning basket weaving. In this case, glass blowing would have a
difficulty factor of two. When you rolled to see if the character
improved, you could multiply their current base percentage by two
before comparing it to the percentile roll, and it takes twice the
amount of time to learn it. It is only one additional column on the
skill table, and it should slow the game down not at all as it would
only be done during administrative periods. At the same time, it
would tend to make certain skills very valuable. Most PCs would never
take the time to learn a very difficult skill which would make NPC
interactions who possessed such skills more important. I am also in
favor of expanding the number of study only skills; I have not seen
the revision of the sorcery rules yet (RQ IV), but I would think that
improving the chance to cast a spell would be study based or at least
a very difficult proposition, e.g. difficulty factor of 5 or so.
What do you think?
Look forward to hearing from everyone.
In service,
Rich