Yes, and I believe that was a very good idea. The interesting thing is that the HQ magic as written for Glorantha is better for me for use in any fantasy world than any other magic system that I've seen, including ones written for those worlds. That is, I'd rather play with HQ in Greyhawk, than use D&D. What I'm saying is that HQ approaches magic in a way that's so cool that it makes every previous magic system obsolete, IMO.
When I can understand it, that is. :-)
>The magic system was written *for* Glorantha, so anything about "this is
>common", or "this is uncommon", or "You can't go from the God Plane to the
>Spirit Wold" is pretty Glorantha specific. Once you've thrown out the
>Gloranthan material, you are 'way off the beaten track!
Yes and no. That is, I agree with you that you can't use the system without adjustment in another setting. But, that said, you can use a lot of it as is, or with minor adjustment. In any case, the better I understand the intentions of the design, the better I can do in altering it, if/when I have to do so.
>When you ask about Self Rock you are asking a Glorantha specific question.
>We've tried to answer it for Glorantha. But is it the only way to
>concentrate common magic your universe? I can't answer that question! Only
>you can answer it, because you know what pertains to your game. And you are
>specifically empowered to "make it up".
Of course I am. But I bought the HQ book because of what's in it, not because of what's not in it. That is, if there's any wisdom to be gleaned from how Common Magic is handled in Glorantha, it might have a bearing on what I want to do.
>HeroQuest wasn't written to be a generic system (though it works fine for
>just about any sort of heroic adventure game), and the magic system is the
>biggest chunk of Gloranthan material in the book.
Again, amen for that. But, for those who haven't tried to use HQ in other ways, I can only recommend it.
In any case, this has strayed far to far into what my game is all about, which is a tad OT, no? The only question that I have left that I didn't see an answer for was whether or not Common Magic religions count against the starting character's limit of one Specilized Magic Keyword to start. To ask the underlying question, are common magic religion keywords of the same "weight" as other religion keywords, or are they "light" enough that they shouldn't count against chargen limits? Put yet another way, are the occupations and homelands "balanced" in terms of interest that allowing these keywords to be associated with the other religions for free balanced overall? Is that the idea?
The reason that I put "balance" in quotes, brieifly, is that I'm not concerned with power balance, but more with just making sure that the options are attractive to players enough that they might all be selected. That is, I worry that if you make certain homelands have lots of extra free keywords from common magic, that they'll be overly attractive to players.
Mike
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