> To be honest, while Storm Tribe and Thunder Rebels are wonderful,
> they are dense and very, very hard going - even for the experienced > Gloranthii.
I'm sort of in two minds about this : reader mind & GM mind.
Mind n� 2 agrees with you !!
Nick :
> But that's OK by us -- we don't have to read them, game using them, > or indeed agree that they're wonderful.
I personally love those parts of TR + ST that are immediately useful and/or reminiscent of CoP.
I enjoy *reading* the other bits, but that's a different story. The thought of putting all of that detail into a game, well ... yikes !!
> In this light, I see the RQification of HW via HQ as a step in the > right direction... not in a "simulationist" but in a "fun-enabling" > way.
I completely agree with this.
Oliver :
> I have to agree with Jeff. Clear rules and scenario packs where
> you can drop characters in and play right away without having to
> have a degree in Glorantha
Actually, the fact that this old argument is cropping up again is probably a sign that Issaries did something right ...
If we're talking about the game in the same way that we used to talk about RQ2, it has to be a good thing !!
I do find HW/HQ far easier to use than RQ ever was !
Sure, Issaries is still striving for the right balance both in the rules and in the background info, and has from what I've seen perhaps overcompensated slightly away from the too much detail end of the stick with ILH-1.
Maybe one solution would be (if there were the money for it, which I doubt) to publish a kind of Gloranthan Reader's line of necessarily more expensive & more cheaply produced TPBs for a collectors and Gloranthan doctoral college market ??
I agree that the HQ line should shift emphasis away from hard-core-fan-financed survival towards fun-to-play stuff.
I definitely agree that the focus should be more on the Hero Wars (AKA scenarios !!) than on the background (although I have to point out that there was a definite and strong need for background more than scenarios among the hard-core fans who spent all of those Dobyski-illustrated years basically starved of it) (IMO).
Lack of info about the coming Hero Wars, AKA lack of scenarios, is why it's taken me the 2 1/2 years since HW was published before even contemplating starting a game, and even now, that's only because I took that time to help publish usable material in our own fan publication !!!
> OR necessarily wanting to play
> InitiationQuest- fun for some, too much for others,
I've only really played it once : NEVER AGAIN !!!
InitiationQuests are one or five steps too far away from playing a game, and fiddling about in player psyches for comfort.
> You don't want to scare off newbies or repel dull old
> simulationalists like me with too much detail. At least have a
> simple, basic level for the world where you can stop and play if
> you're not interested in totally immersing yourself in a world.
Well, I personally believe that any Gloranthan publication worth it's salt simply must provide too much detail : but I agree that the trees shouldn't be so presented that they hide the forest.
It's a shame that in TR the important useful stuff is sandwiched between a collection of sometimes pretty difficult essays and cultural analyses and two cult write-ups that should have been in a larger version of ST.
Everyone I know, including many newbies, who has taken the time and effort to read TR has really loved it : I think it's the format and the order of the presentation that is off-putting more than the actual content. But, some criticism of the book :
Keywords should have been chapter 1, plus HQ is likely to make them more irrelevant than not, AFAIK. Storm Realm info should have been in a volume of SR. DP weather and clouds should have been an Appendix. The calendar ditto, and it should have been one article, not two !! The often confusing and overly complex magic rules should have been saved up and done properly in HQ. As for pages 10-56, well all I can say is that it's a shame that there was such a huge gap between the publication dates of KoS and TR.
It's a pity that TR & ST weren't done as a single, currently standard format book, basically detailing the cults of Sartar, and with a few appendices to complement KoS if necessary.
But OTOH, I really do enjoy reading TR ...
Martin :
> as for scenarios, that can be a trickier proposition.
Martin, I think that what a lot of us old hands *really* want is to find out what the Hero Wars are going to be about, and have scenarios detailing this, scenarios like The Cradle and the ones in OiD.
Sure, we needed the Sartar info first, and we need the Lunar stuff next, but the reason we want this is so we can play out the Hero Wars.
Sure, we can come up with our own unofficial versions of the HW, and of course a lot of us have done exactly that. I think we'd all like the official HW to be published though !
I'd personally really like to see far more scenarios of the caliber of the OiD and that showed the future history of Glorantha in juicy, playable detail.
> > Give me a superficial description over an in depth one any day.
> > It's a better start.
> I have to disagree here.
Me too, although it's vital that opening chapters of books be easily comprehensible, immediately useful, and clear..
Julian Lord
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