Glorantha - How was it back then and how is it now?

[Hugo Barbosa]

Sort of a long title, but here's the gist of it: I'm trying to wrap my head around Glorantha. I've backed the Runequest 2 kickstarter back in 2015 (?) and I really enjoy how slim and minimalist the rules are. I've always been a fan of the BRP, having played Call of Cthulhu back in the day (if you count the 1990s as "back in the day"). Since then, I always envisioned a campaign in Glorantha, but there is, I think, a content overload that goes back for 40 years now. Even consulting the Guides to Glorantha is a slog, with so much back and forth, and names that really don't mean anything, even if I want to focus on a specific area, say Dragon Pass. My question is for veterans and new GMs alike:

- How was your Glorantha back in 1980 when there was so little material to work with? Did you invent all your stuff? Was each Glorantha game unique?
- With no heroquesting rules, how did you manage that part of the game? Was it integral? Not so much?
- Anyone considered using Heroquests as an exploration of the myths of Glorantha and also as a world building component? You invent your own Glorantha myths that become fixed in your campaign but are different from every other campaign.

I'd like to get the ball rolling and perhaps come up with some more questions.

 

[ffilz]

Copying over my responses from TBP:

I started playing RQ in 1978 with little more than the RQ1 book, Apple Lane, Balastor's Baracks, and the White Bear & Red Moon board game. My early play was sort of jumbled, but then Snake Pipe Hollow and Cults of Prax came along, and with Cults of Prax and a few issues of Wyrm's Footnotes, things expanded. There were also Judges Guild modules and some adventures published in White Dwarf, some stuff in Different Worlds, and some stuff published in The Wild Hunt (including stuff from Steve Perrin, Greg Stafford, and Sandy Petersen). Later I got Troll Pack, Borderlands, and Cults of Terror. That expanded things (low on money when they came out, I missed Pavis and Big Rubble and the Solo Quests). Oh, and Griffon Mountain. I ran some various short campaigns, but they were enough to establish MY Glorantha.

In the 90s I started a decently long running campaign. I adapted some D&D modules and started picking up the RQ3 material which expanded my view of the setting somewhat, but it was still very much MY Glorantha. Near the end of this, I found Pavis used for a good price.

In 2005 I started a new campaign. By then I had picked up a bunch of the Hero Wars and Hero Quest stuff. I also FINALLY got a copy of RQ2 (I found an eBay lot with a $100 buy it now price for RQ2, Cults of Prax, Cults of Terror, Borderlands, Pavis, Big Rubble, RQ Companion (another thing I never got), Thieve's World (which I already owned but never used with RQ), and maybe a few other things). I also had a couple Gloranthaphile players. I hit information overload, and things that clashed with MY Glorantha. So when I got engaged and I had to make room for my fiance, I started selling off some of the HW/HQ stuff.

Over a year ago I started another campaign. Having cleared my mind of the HW/HQ stuff, I resolved to run MY Glorantha.

What did you pick up in the kickstarter? I went for the all digital having hard copy of almost all the material. I have suggested all you really need to run a good game is a copy of RQ (1 or 2, I prefer 1 with some bits taken from 2) and Cults of Prax. I think it's much more approachable than Tekumel since it doesn't imply a non-European culture or European idea of barbarian culture (ok, so the later material drifted the culture, but back in the RQ1/2 days, you could play it with culture you were familiar with). Use any adventures you have available, and feel free to port adventures from other games if that's your thing. The early RQ dungeons were stocked much like a D&D dungeon, though with a smaller set of monsters to draw from and a bit more attention to how things fit together. It's an easy model to follow.

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My suggestion would actually be to ignore the more recent material, especially The Glorantha Sourcebook. Stick with the Glorantha of the 80s and make it your own.

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Since there was almost nothing on the West (and nothing on the East) in the 80s, they have never been part of my play. Heck, there wasn't even that much on the Lunar empire. So my campaigns all occurred in Sartar and Prax with a bit of Elder Wilds thrown in.

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The Avalon Hill material that mirrors RQ2 stuff is probably relatively the same. The way cults are described has changed in a way that makes RQ3 cults not so useful along side RQ2 cults. The Avalon Hill material added some additional adventures in Prax, and a whole new area Dorastor. We tried a Dorastor campaign, but it didn't go down so well with my players. I keep the RQ3 material (and I do like the color map from RQ3 Trollpak) and will dip into it occasionally, especially for a bit of extra Prax information.

As to Hero Quests, all through college instead of saying that would happen when hell froze over, we would say that would happen when Hero Questing rules were published... I'm not sure Hero Quest the game really covers Hero Quests... There was some information on them published in The Wild Hunt and Steve Marsh (I'm pretty sure the same Steve Marsh who was involved with D&D) also did some work on Hero Quests.

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For some other material that could be plugged in with the 80s material:

Thieve's World (Sanctuary) was set in Glorantha as Refuge for playtesting.

Midkemia Press's Carse was set in Glorantha as Karse.

 

[Savage Schemer]

I didn't play Glorantha "back then" as I really only first discovered it a few years ago, starting with Heroquest: Glorantha. I have since picked up Runequest Classic (aka: RQ2) and the new Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha games.

When starting with the Heroquest stuff, I found the setting to be utterly unapproachable. I couldn't for the life of me make sense of it, no matter how hard I tried. Even accepting the idea to "start small" and just play in Dragon Pass, I always felt like I was just missing some core element.

Later, when I got my hands on Runequest Classic, I noticed how roughly sketched the setting was. Yes, if you read through the the creature sections and the appendices and the magic section, you got a fairly rich look at the setting. But it was far less verbose, and more akin to "worked examples", illustrating a way for you to go populate Glorantha with your own bits and bobs.

And for whatever reason, that made the setting approachable for the first time for me. I can get on board with high level things like, roughly bronze age technology level (check), elves in this setting have a form association to the plant rune (check) and so on.

In other words, in the time it was written it didn't yet have forty years of developed canon. And by not having so much material to draw on, you as the players were expected to go make shit up! I found it liberating. As a result I now totally ignore all the anthropological stuff and just play Glorantha as I and my players envision it. Your Glorantha Will Vary, after all.

 

[Hugo Barbosa]

In other words, in the time it was written it didn't yet have forty years of developed canon. And by not having so much material to draw on, you as the players were expected to go make shit up! I found it liberating. As a result I now totally ignore all the anthropological stuff and just play Glorantha as I and my players envision it. Your Glorantha Will Vary, after all.

That's my assessment, too. I own Runequest 2 Classic, and a few other PDF books from the early 80s (courtesy of the kickstarter) and I get the impression that each Glorantha was unique to each gaming group. And I agree, it can be much more liberating. You don't have 40 years of canon to fall back to.

 

[Atelerix]

RQ2 and the Cults Compendium is more than you need to keep you busy forever.

A lot of the RQ2 stuff (Borderlands, Big Rubble, Griffin Mountain) was pretty standard fantasy adventuring, just with a Glorantha twist, where even the "baddies" like Lunars and Trolls have living, breathing cultures and religions. And a dose of zaniness - careful with troll booze!

You can minimise that too, by making your campaign a Sartarite exile campaign set in Prax, the Wastelands and the Elder Wilds.

The Hero Wars metaplot, starting with King of Sartar, put me off the setting for a while. You don't need that to make it feel like Glorantha.

 

[Séadna]

My brief advice is to have a read of the Prince of Sartar comic:

Introduction – Chapter 1

Visit the post for more.

www.princeofsartar.com

And read the lore section of the new RQG.

They'll give you a good sense of the setting. A little reading (or even just a general feel) for Bronze age cults and how "primal" they were is also useful.

There's the Tarshites that have a nice contained set up. Basically one major settlement up a mountain, a few farming villages and allied with a cannibalistic earthquake cult.

 

[Nobby-W]

So I played quite a bit of RQ2 back in the late Jurassic. I've still got my RQ2 stuff.

Chaosium never published a comprehensive Glorantha guide for RQ2, although they did produce material like that later. The minimal starting point is really the rulebook and Cults of Prax. As cults sort of proxy for character classes in Runequest, Cults of Prax is very useful (more-or-less a must have), and has a fair bit of lore scattered throughout it.

Beyond that, there are electronic versions of the other RQ2 materials available, such as Snakepipe Hollow, Pavis, Cults of Terror, Trollpack and so on and so forth. These give you specific adventure modules that go into some of the regions in more detail. There is also a fair bit of material for RQ3 but it was written by different people and it's more sterile.

Runequest 2 has aged a lot better than most of its contemporaries and is still a good system even by today's standards. Although it's somewhat crunchy it's still very playable, and the RQ2 material gives a good sense of atmosphere. I haven't read any of the modern Glorantha stuff so I can't comment on it, but you could do a lot worse than getting the electronic RQ2 books (or hunting for paper copies on Ebay) and running with that.

 

[Luca]

You want the best introduction to Glorantha?
Go find a copy of the old Avalon Hill's RQ3 boxed set "Generthela: Crucible of the Hero Wars".

That boxed set is dripping with potential. You can see what the original idea was: a world on the brink of huge changes, but *those changes were unwritten and unknown and would more than likely be altered by the PC's actions*. Even just all the tidbits about the Hero Wars prophecies and how every single one of them could be interpreted a billion different ways... It was brilliant.
None of the modern shit about having a fixed metaplot all the way to over a hundred years in the future.

80's and early 90's Glorantha was by far the best Glorantha. I suggest you ignore most of the modern stuff, and just use it if and when needed to complement the old material. Reason is simple: the old stuff was designed as actual RPG supplements, not as academic studies on Greg Stafford's works.

 

[robertsconley]

Wyrms footnote are an interesting look at early days of Glorantha and Runequest.

RuneQuest RPG - RuneQuest Scenarios - RuneQuest Classic - Wyrms Footnotes - Chaosium Inc.

www.chaosium.com

What thing I noticed there was quite a bit going on with the two wargames.
White Bear and Red Moon
Nomad Gods

Runequest was not a thing until later issues.

 

[robertsconley]

Runequest 2 has aged a lot better than most of its contemporaries and is still a good system even by today's standards.

Although amputations happen quite a bit.

Runequest Nights and oh how the body parts flew.'

A quote from one of the players in the comments

It was one of the bloodest games I had been in. Out of the three goblins that came in the front door, one lost a leg, another lost an arm and one porr guy lost both arms. And one head was completely completely obiterated. I think there were two more arms in the back group. I lost my leg, but had a high enough healing to attach it. When I bought healing that high I never thought I would need it right away. It was like a Rob Zombie movie.

 

[Nobby-W]

Although amputations happen quite a bit.

Runequest Nights and oh how the body parts flew.'

A quote from one of the players in the comments

Until someone in the party got Heal 6, we tended to make a lot of trips back to the local Chalana Arroy temple.

I played a duck once, and I know someone who played a baboon and someone else who played a dragon newt. Somebody did a whole dragon newt cult for our 'zine based on his character. Once I played an Issaries goldentongue called Ham, who started a 'Distributed Inverted-Funnel Customer Need Fulfillment Programme'. Needless to say, this came to be known as 'Ham's Way.'
We had recently lost a friend to a multi-level marketing company.

Glorantha is not D&D by any stretch - there are a few other silly monsters like Jackobears. Trolls are very well done in Runequest.

 

[ffilz]

Although amputations happen quite a bit.

Runequest Nights and oh how the body parts flew.'

A quote from one of the players in the comments

Yes, limbs fly... And Healing 6 is critical. One rules oopsie... If you have a severed limb, you can't heal yourself as you are incapacitated.

We had a fun bit in my campaign. A PC got his arm obliterated with poison. Another PC had Heal 6, but I pointed out that the poison was still in the arm and Heal 6 wasn't going to do anything about that. They severed the limb, and then went on a quest back to town (several days away) to find a Rune Priest with the requisite rune magic healing (Heal Body or Regrow Limb, spells that need to be cast within 7 days - which meant the PC who was about to become a Rune Priest of Aldrya wasn't going to be able to save him, it takes 7 days of praying to learn a new rune spell).

As to changing the Baboons in Gringle's Pawnshop to Goblins, that works fine, though I'm perfectly fine with Baboons (and Ducks are my favorite).

I've only run Gringle's Pawnshop once, I don't find it as interesting as Rainbow Mounds, but it is a good intro scenario. Rainbow Mounds is a wonderful little dungeon scenario that also introduces several critical additional rules (I think at least some of those rules got included in RQ2). It also introduced another wacky RQism. Eurmal's Crumbs, shrooms that either harm you, do nothing, or boost your POW (did anyone point out this was a California game...).

On the other hand, some of the stuff from Different Worlds was just too much for me like the cult of Indlas Somer (more California madness). Somehow the wildness of the official stuff feels constrained and doesn't break the game for me, while a beach and surfing cult is just too much.

 

[Jerry]

Below is a link to RuneQuest and Glorantha history. RQ is the only game I currently know of with a concrete and codified history that unique and different at every table. It’s essentially a recipe book that doesn’t give measurements and tells you to “add to flavor” any ingredient you want in it,.

 

[Alai]

Although amputations happen quite a bit.

 

[Dammit Victor]

Critical failure rules in combat are utter nonsense and people who insist on them are objectively wrong.

Anyone who thinks the above makes a lick of sense needs to go lay down and stop bothering people about "realism".

 

[Mankcam]

My question is for veterans and new GMs alike:

- How was your Glorantha back in 1980 when there was so little material to work with? Did you invent all your stuff? Was each Glorantha game unique?

I was too young to be involved in involved in tabletop roleplaying in 1980, but I was playing RuneQuest by 1985/1986 using RQ2, then moved onto RQ3 by 1988. The answer is yep, I invented stuff, and I actually posted about this some time back, so I've linked it here: My initial RQ/ Glorantha homebrew
Turns out that alot of us did stuff like this, depending on what we were able to get our hands on

 

[Alai]

Anyone who thinks the above makes a lick of sense needs to go lay down and stop bothering people about "realism".

If you're referring to the 'toon I excepted there, I should have mentioned it's from Murphy's Rules, the old Space Gamer rules-mocking feature from SJG, rather than -- say -- some advert for the gritty realism of the game.

(It's also rather misleading, as if 6,000 armoured, experienced warriors with Great Axes, the battle couldn't possibly last for thirty minutes, at the sort of "five attacks per minute relentlessly the entire time" rate they're obviously assuming here. More like one minute. Unless they're playing "winner stays one" or "battle royale" rules until there's only one of them left. And even then, not.)

 

[Dammit Victor]

If you're referring to the 'toon I excepted there, I should have mentioned it's from Murphy's Rules, the old Space Gamer rules-mocking feature from SJG, rather than -- say -- some advert for the gritty realism of the game.

I had assumed something similar, but the premise of the cartoon still holds-- you can adjust the numbers downward, but if there's still any number of times you believe person severing their own head or limbs with a greataxe is reasonable, you need to go outside.

 

[Acmegamer]

It's clearly a joke and the game was never bad on the fumbles in my opinion or at least my memories of it playing it back in 78' to 83' in my friends game that he ran. I started running it in 81' set in Thieves World and in 83' swapped to running Thieves World in Palladium Fantasy Rpg (It was an easier sell to new players since it felt a bit like DnD with classes/levels but still had a parry/dodge/armor absorption system that I liked), which I ran until late 86' before swapping to using GURPS 1st/2nd edition as my mechanics system.

Remember the chance of a fumble was 5 percent on a d100. Here's the 2nd edition Fumble chart.


You've really got to be truly unlucky to end up doing that, sure it's possible but really unlikely.

Edit: We used to play Rolemaster off and on back in the 80's as well. If you truly want to discuss grim criticals and fumbles. lol

 

[Acmegamer]

Sort of a long title, but here's the gist of it: I'm trying to wrap my head around Glorantha. I've backed the Runequest 2 kickstarter back in 2015 (?) and I really enjoy how slim and minimalist the rules are. I've always been a fan of the BRP, having played Call of Cthulhu back in the day (if you count the 1990s as "back in the day"). Since then, I always envisioned a campaign in Glorantha, but there is, I think, a content overload that goes back for 40 years now. Even consulting the Guides to Glorantha is a slog, with so much back and forth, and names that really don't mean anything, even if I want to focus on a specific area, say Dragon Pass. My question is for veterans and new GMs alike:

- How was your Glorantha back in 1980 when there was so little material to work with? Did you invent all your stuff? Was each Glorantha game unique?
- With no heroquesting rules, how did you manage that part of the game? Was it integral? Not so much?
- Anyone considered using Heroquests as an exploration of the myths of Glorantha and also as a world building component? You invent your own Glorantha myths that become fixed in your campaign but are different from every other campaign.

I'd like to get the ball rolling and perhaps come up with some more questions.

My friend and I loved the mechanics system. The Bronze age setting while interesting to us wasn't a big draw. He started using the World of Greyhawk that he had been using as a base and then building/deviating from. As I said in my previous post I used Thieves World since I was a big fan of the book series and Chaosium had come out with the excellent box setting for it.

To be blunt there was "so little material to work with" for all gaming. The hobby was relatively new if you think about it and no internet etc. I spent a lot of time around 79'-81' drawing up huge poster sized color hex based maps of Hyboria myself for a 1st ed AD&D campaign that I never ran because the Thieves World box came out as I finished. lol. Most of us just built our own worlds, usually based on books we loved. I also was particularly fond of The Land for example and giants, bloodguard, urviles etc and used to incorporate some of that lore into games I ran off an on.

We pretty much played it like how we played DnD or Traveller or anything else that we played. We went on adventures. The gm would introduce bird crumb adventure ideas etc. Same as it ever was honestly. The biggest issue which apparently is still an issue today is the game world. It's fascinating but just not most people's cup of tea. They don't tend to want to play in the setting. The second issue is the game mechanics, many feel that if it doesn't have a class and level to it, it's wrong. Selling people on classless, leveless systems has been an uphill battle the whole time I've been playing rpgs.

 

[Vile Traveller]

We ran it by the RQ2 deluxe boxed set alone for a few years, then started incorporating bits from Griselda and the last 4 Wyrm's Footnotes. I used Cults of Terror quite a bit. We didn't even have Cults of Prax or the Companion.

 

[ffilz]

I have seen disastrous fumbles, but they are rare. In my current campaign, a roc fumbled and ripped it's wing off and crashed and burned. I think we've maybe had one or two other fumbles damage self or friend.

As to how I played in the early days with so little material, I never managed a very long campaign until the 1990s, but the early gaming was fueled by Judges Guild and White Dwarf scenarios so plenty of material for a campaign that would last at most a few sessions. In the 1990s campaign and all campaigns since, I have adapted D&D modules for additional scenarios and the most recent campaign they just finished exploring a second set of ruins in the Rubble using Dyson Logos maps and my own populating.

 

[SJB]

I started RQ in 1979. The joy of the game was that storytelling occurred procedurally by following the rules. There could only be a few encounters in a session and unexpected things were likely to happen, the aforesaid wounds and a search for healers, for instance. There were extensive rules for pre-and post-adventure play. One needed trainers, which meant settlements, NPCs and organisations. No-one was the least bit interested in Heroquests in 1980. I’ve posted this quotation from Trollpak written by Greg Stafford and Sandy Petersen (1982) previously: “Encourage players to retire established characters when they become Rune masters. After all, the name of the game is Runequest, and once having acquired that Rune, the character has won the game through mastery.”

 

[T. Foster]

I started playing RQ c. 1988 which was a weird time for the game. RQ2 was long out of print and the stuff for it was legendary and very hard to find. Avalon Hill had revised some of it for RQ3 (Apple Lane, Snakepipe Hollow, and Trollpak (which they managed to split into 4 separate products)) but without the other stuff - especially Cults of Prax - it was hard to make sense of. The Gods of Glorantha set converted the nuts and bolts of the CoP cults to RQ3 but left behind a ton of the flavor both of the cults themselves and especially the de facto guide to Prax in the form of the Biturian Varosh journal.

The product that really won me over was the Genertela, Crucible of the Hero Wars set, released in 1988, which was almost unbelievably rich and dense, moreso than any other rpg product I’d ever seen. Its scope was much broader than the RQ2 material and its treatment much more comprehensive. To me this is the greatest RQ/Glorantha product, the reason I fell so hard for the setting and became such a fan.

When I finally did acquire copies of the RQ2 material a few years later I could see why it was so highly regarded and how much easier it would have been to get into the game and setting if I’d had Cults of Prax, and how the adventure-centric approach of Griffin Mountain, Borderlands, Pavis, and Big Rubble was more immediately accessible than the Big Picture RQ3-era sets - Gods of Glorantha, Genertela, and Elder Secrets of Glorantha (released in 1989) - but because of those sets I knew too much to turn back the clock. The focus of RQ2 seemed too small and parochial in comparison.

Because of that the “RuneQuest Renaissance” books of the early 90s felt like a retreat and a step backwards to me, and Tales of the Reaching Moon fanzine felt the same way. They were trying to recapture the same spirit as RQ2 but not as well. And, of course, that was right around the time that Greg Stafford switched gears into non-game products and Glorantha fandom became all about anthropology and after a couple-three years I pretty much tuned it all out. By the time the Hero Wars game was released I was totally off the train, with one exception. The Missing Lands manuscript was the unfinished companion to the Genertela set that covered the other continents in the same style and level of detail and was just as good. It went onto my shelf alongside the 3 RQ3 boxed sets as my Glorantha Encyclopedia. With those for the big picture and the RQ2 stuff for a more focused starting point (and also the Dragon Pass board game and Wyrm’s Footprints), I really felt like I had everything I needed for Glorantha and nothing the anthropological-wankers did could take any of that away.

Since I fell out of Glorantha fandom around the turn of the century I haven’t seen much of what’s been released since then. I have taken a look at the Guide to Glorantha and it is very impressive, but I can’t help noticing that it’s built around the core of the old Genertela, Missing Lands, and Elder Secrets sets and I’m not sure everything else that was added on top of them was really necessary. Likewise I’ve briefly glanced at Chaosium’s new RQ and as far as I can tell it seems to combine the backwards-looking focus on RQ2 with new anthropo-wankery flavor, just like the TotRM stuff I eventually tired of in the mid-90s.

I’m glad that Glorantha is still being published and getting flashy high-budget new releases and that Greg Stafford got to see a lot of them before he died and felt that his legacy was in good hands, but it’s not really for me. If I were ever to play in Glorantha again I imagine I’d do it the same way I did in the late 80s and 90s - use those Encyclopedic RQ3 sets for the big picture and make up the local-level stuff on my own.

 

[David Johansen]

Critical failure rules in combat are utter nonsense and people who insist on them are objectively wrong.

Anyone who thinks the above makes a lick of sense needs to go lay down and stop bothering people about "realism".

"You accidentally drive the point of your lance into the ground and fly 30' taking a D Krush critical." You're clearly, objectively wrong, probably tripped over an imaginary, deceased turtle, and are very confused.

Though, GURPS is probably the most realistic critical hit and failure mechanic. Most of the results are pretty boring.

 

[Alai]

Likewise I’ve briefly glanced at Chaosium’s new RQ and ad far as I can tell it seems to combine the backwards-looking focus on RQ2 with new anthropo-wankery flavor, just like the TotRM stuff I eventually tired of in the mid-90s.

Well, that's surely in the spirit of "Karallan’s Plight" itself, is it not? Though rather than "Follow Chosen Leaders", the obvious compromise would be to split the difference in whatever combination works best for you. Don't like the FamHist, the Passions, and/or the Runes? Then ditch 'em, and you're pretty much back in a RQ-like space, or whatever point in between works best for you.

make up the local-level stuff on my own

Always a good plan, especially if it's done in a way that helps get player buy-in. I think the clangen thing was a great idea for that, though some people seem to really dislike it -- even some of the Chaosium-orbit peeps. 'Clans were fine for HeroQuest, but now we're way more heroic than that!'

Even if that's not your poison, info on even tribal level is fairly limited. There's lots out there, but it gets contradicted or declared "post-canonical" faster than new material is produced. So an essential step is to become confident in either creating your own such material, or at least being a decisive editor of the various available options.

 

[Alai]

I had assumed something similar, but the premise of the cartoon still holds-- you can adjust the numbers downward, but if there's still any number of times you believe person severing their own head or limbs with a greataxe is reasonable, you need to go outside.

Well again, I'm the person that posted the cartoon, so I'm not sure why you're explaining it back to me, or otherwise who you're looking to have a 'realism' argument with. But unless you think "hit self" results are inherently unreasonable (or focusing on the "severing" part, also something of a breezy paraphrase of the RQ2 rules), we're very much in that "now we're just haggling about the amount" territory. (Apparently neither a G. B . Shaw nor a Groucho Marx quote!)

Though, GURPS is probably the most realistic critical hit and failure mechanic. Most of the results are pretty boring.

Funnily enough, while RQ2(&G!)'s fumble table gives a 6% chance of a "hit self" result, that's a 7.4% chance in GURPS! Now admittedly, while RQ's start at "do normal damage" and gets worse from there, that's as bad as the GURPS ones ever get. (Hit self for half damage indeed seems pretty boring, given the armour-soakage rules of both.) So the game-mechanical basis for the hilarity here is the 1% (of the minimum 1% chance of fumbling in the first place) that's an endocritical. Combine that with the eye-watering damage from a Great Axe, the slightly odd way the "severed or irrevocably maimed" rule works, and there you have it. Spoiler alert, the very next sentence is how to "revoke" the irrevocably maiming -- least twisty plot plot-twist ever, you need some magical healing. For head and trunk, it doesn't saying anything at all about amputations -- the result is just "instantly dead".

Actually, Murphy's Rules effectively had two goes at the same rule!

That one they have changed in RQG, btw. Rather than the steps going 0HP, -HP, then -6, they're 0HP, -HP, and -2*HP. But still with the same 1 in 10,000 minimum chance of criting yourself.

 

[David Johansen]

In GURPS the chance of a critical failure is lower than 5% and the 9 - 12 critical hit result is just that the target can't defend.

Rolemaster has a specific fumble range by weapon. So you're much less likely to hurt yourself with a club or staff than a three headed flail which will probably get you at least once per combat.

I really like the 2d20 Mutant Chronicles stress rule where your fumble chance goes up as you get more stressed.

But back to Glorantha. The Runequest second edition rulebook mostly defined the setting with the rules. There was some material, a two page map and some description but it really didn't show the breadth and depth of the setting. I didn't buy the supplements but I did read my cousin's copy of Troll Pack. Between the Ducks and the menu it was hard to take the setting seriously. The Glorantha book in third edition did a better job of it.

 

[Alai]

In GURPS the chance of a critical failure is lower than 5% and the 9 - 12 critical hit result is just that the target can't defend.

As I understand it, flat 1.8% for most characters, but higher if your skill is terrible and you're troubling the 'miss by 10' rule. That could bump it up to 25.7%! In both RQ2 and RQG the range is from 5% to 1%, but starting RQ2 characters will be closer to the 5% end of that, and RQG ones closer to the 1% one... (There's a rule in character generation about not increasing a skill over 100%, which they end up repeating maybe half a dozen places. It's definitely needed: over at The Other Place poster doing a read-through with a worked example of chargen, and her Babs Gor cultist hit 100% Battleaxe (shock) skill with a section or two of advances still in hand...)

The Glorantha book in third edition did a better job of it.

And the Gods box, IMO. Both frustratingly vague and high-level for actually playing anywhere, but suddenly presenting a huge vista of possibilities...

 

[Alai]

I started RQ in 1979. The joy of the game was that storytelling occurred procedurally by following the rules. There could only be a few encounters in a session and unexpected things were likely to happen, the aforesaid wounds and a search for healers, for instance. There were extensive rules for pre-and post-adventure play. One needed trainers, which meant settlements, NPCs and organisations. No-one was the least bit interested in Heroquests in 1980. I’ve posted this quotation from Trollpak written by Greg Stafford and Sandy Petersen (1982) previously: “Encourage players to retire established characters when they become Rune masters. After all, the name of the game is Runequest, and once having acquired that Rune, the character has won the game through mastery.”

I wonder of things have actually changed all that much! We've had a few stabs at heroquesting rules, in general and case-by-case, but the focus these days is very much on "practice" HQs, rather than the "Hero Plane" kind per se. i.e. you're still having adventures in the mundane world, you've just put magical, mythic and ritual bookends on it.

And the game-scale is essentially the same, too. It's not like you're starting with 70-100%-skilled characters and getting them up to "super-Runequest" levels -- apparently Steve Maurer envisaged that to be Harrek or Jar-Eel when you grow up, you needed to have a skill of 2000%+ to get your first 1% chance of a "hit someone so hard their ancestors die" super-hypercrit, and so on.

So maybe it's more of a case that instead of starting at 25% skill level and slogging all the way to 90% to retire, as adolescents and college students able to manage four six-hour sessions per week with high reliability until they grind it out... we start with characters that are almost runelords already, and hope to stagger a few advances until we get to that point!

 

[Newt Newport]

- How was your Glorantha back in 1980 when there was so little material to work with? Did you invent all your stuff? Was each Glorantha game unique?

By the time I came across it in the late 80s as a player first, RQ2 and all its supplements was long gone here in the UK, so it was RQ3 in hardcover from Games Workshop. I ran generic fantasy, of a very dark type almost WHFP. I then spurlged on all the RQ 3 boxsets I could get my paws on in the early 90s, then Glorantha was suddenly a thing for me for the rest of the decade.

I deliberately ran my own Gloranthan setting, with my own cultural biases, well away from the established Dragon Pass setting, otherside of the Western Rockwood Mountains in Ralios.

Elaboration on the barebones of the info given in the box sets was the order of the day until I encountered Tales of the Reaching Moon fanzine in the mid-90s, and later on the online discussions via the Yahoo groups and various veterans of the earlier Gloranthan digests. I added information that was fun and useful and happily ignored the rest.

- With no heroquesting rules, how did you manage that part of the game? Was it integral? Not so much?

Heroquesting in my games evolved into this thing where I had two sets of GM's backgrounds. The normal FRP "what the situation is in the real world" and a mythic background that was hidden initially to the characters, which was guiding the actions of the npcs and was the hidden reason for everything that was going on.

- Anyone considered using Heroquests as an exploration of the myths of Glorantha and also as a world-building component? You invent your own Glorantha myths that become fixed in your campaign but are different from every other campaign.

Yes, and I did that with my own Gloranthan setting, which I built outside of Dragon Pass in the Eastern Wilds of Ralios - which is a fertile area for doing your own thing since detail is sparse but many of the Gloranthan Eldar Races and cultures are at work there. Oh and Arkat, many Arkats , vs. Gbaji. I have variant deities which have their own foundation myths. Partly because some of the cannon deities for that part of the world are vaguely defined and partly out of me striking out and creating my own variant bits that make sense. For example, I have a thieves god called Black Tarl, whose origin story is that he's Orlanth's shadow, which separates because the Big O is such an overbearing ass If I was a Godlearner I'd say it's a Troll take on Eurmal. If I was following cannon, I would have never have written it. It would either be a straightforward Eurmal or Argan Argar cult.

 

[AsenRG]

I just want to remind you* of the advice published in the very first RPG setting...
"Make your Tekumel your own".
In other words, your Glorantha may differ. In fact, it probably should...otherwise, what would be the point of playing in, say, @Seadna 's Glorantha/AsenRG 's Glorantha, if it's just a lesser, imperfect copy of Greg Stadfford's Glorantha?
Maybe I should start a new thread on that.


*I see most of you have been following it anyway, but it bears repeating.

 

[T. Foster]

Forgot to address heroquesting. In my 80s-90s games it was only a background feature of the setting, not something that showed up in play.

This was when heroquesting was generally thought of as “super-RQ” where your skills were divided by 10 (or more) so everything was extremely difficult and dangerous but succeeding in the quest generally have you some new special ability (depending on what quest you were performing and whether you followed the script or innovated Arkat-style), so it was understood as something that would only be attempted by very experienced characters, which we never made it to. Our longest campaign ran about 4 years and the PCs were only at the cusp of rune level at the end of that period.

It was sort of like building a castle and establishing a barony in D&D. Something that was present (or at least contemplated) in the rules and that we knew was part of the designers’ original campaigns and was the theoretical “endpoint” of the game, but we didn’t have much interest in it because were having enough fun without it that we never missed its absence.

 

[Alai]

This was when heroquesting was generally thought of as “super-RQ” where your skills were divided by 10 (or more)

I alluded to this sort of thing above; I believe it originated with Steve Maurer (or maybe earlier?), and you can find something on these lines online currently if you google "Nikk Effingham's RuneQuest House Rules" or such luck. (I won't link as it's not clear they're authorised copies, and because... well, don't, really. )

But the basic logic is...

• A special happens on 1/5th of your skill chance;
• A crit happens on 1/20th of your skill;
• ... therefore a roll under 1/100th of your skill should be a... supercrit?
• So obvs, under 1/400th is now a hypercrit!
• Super-hypercrits?
• Continue until wiser thoughts prevail!

 

[AsenRG]

I alluded to this sort of thing above; I believe it originated with Steve Maurer (or maybe earlier?), and you can find something on these lines online currently if you google "Nikk Effingham's RuneQuest House Rules" or such luck. (I won't link as it's not clear they're authorised copies, and because... well, don't, really. )

But the basic logic is...

• A special happens on 1/5th of your skill chance;
• A crit happens on 1/20th of your skill;
• ... therefore a roll under 1/100th of your skill should be a... supercrit?
• So obvs, under 1/400th is now a hypercrit!
• Super-hypercrits?
• Continue until wiser thoughts prevail!

Special crit and critsquare, please!


(Though if you can roll under 1/100 of your skill, rounding down, and have it being a success, I'm fully comfortable saying "you do with the opponent whatever you wish").

 

[Acmegamer]

Forgot to address heroquesting. In my 80s-90s games it was only a background feature of the setting, not something that showed up in play.

This was when heroquesting was generally thought of as “super-RQ” where your skills were divided by 10 (or more) so everything was extremely difficult and dangerous but succeeding in the quest generally have you some new special ability (depending on what quest you were performing and whether you followed the script or innovated Arkat-style), so it was understood as something that would only be attempted by very experienced characters, which we never made it to. Our longest campaign ran about 4 years and the PCs were only at the cusp of rune level at the end of that period.

It was sort of like building a castle and establishing a barony in D&D. Something that was present (or at least contemplated) in the rules and that we knew was part of the designers’ original campaigns and was the theoretical “endpoint” of the game, but we didn’t have much interest in it because were having enough fun without it that we never missed its absence.

Ditto, it was also more in the background for us well in the 78-82' time period. I just realized when I read your reply that I also didn't address it in my post above. It was something that we just didn't a lot of attention to. We more or less just ambled on in the general direction. lol

 

[Alai]

Special crit and critsquare, please!


(Though if you can roll under 1/100 of your skill, rounding down, and have it being a success, I'm fully comfortable saying "you do with the opponent whatever you wish").

Unless your opponent has rolled under 1/400th of theirs, in which case, flip that.

I dunno quite what the motivation was for the progression being quite that geometric. While it's true advancement doesn't get any slower past (say) 200% as compared to past 100%, it's not like it's any faster, either! While it avoids the "everything stops dead at 40" feature of Pendragon -- looking at you, Lancelot! -- the way HW/HQ/QW handles it seems cleaner and more logical. (i.e., goes up a step every multiple of 100%/20, not every power of 4 or 5.)

 

[Voros]

Well again, I'm the person that posted the cartoon, so I'm not sure why you're explaining it back to me, or otherwise who you're looking to have a 'realism' argument with. But unless you think "hit self" results are inherently unreasonable (or focusing on the "severing" part, also something of a breezy paraphrase of the RQ2 rules), we're very much in that "now we're just haggling about the amount" territory. (Apparently neither a G. B . Shaw nor a Groucho Marx quote!)


Funnily enough, while RQ2(&G!)'s fumble table gives a 6% chance of a "hit self" result, that's a 7.4% chance in GURPS! Now admittedly, while RQ's start at "do normal damage" and gets worse from there, that's as bad as the GURPS ones ever get. (Hit self for half damage indeed seems pretty boring, given the armour-soakage rules of both.) So the game-mechanical basis for the hilarity here is the 1% (of the minimum 1% chance of fumbling in the first place) that's an endocritical. Combine that with the eye-watering damage from a Great Axe, the slightly odd way the "severed or irrevocably maimed" rule works, and there you have it. Spoiler alert, the very next sentence is how to "revoke" the irrevocably maiming -- least twisty plot plot-twist ever, you need some magical healing. For head and trunk, it doesn't saying anything at all about amputations -- the result is just "instantly dead".

Actually, Murphy's Rules effectively had two goes at the same rule!
View attachment 36867
That one they have changed in RQG, btw. Rather than the steps going 0HP, -HP, then -6, they're 0HP, -HP, and -2*HP. But still with the same 1 in 10,000 minimum chance of criting yourself.

Yeah, while I'm a fan of magic failure results because it emphasizes the wildness, mystery and uncontrollable nature of magic, combat fumbles resulting in self-inflicted damage is just pretty dumb.

 

[CRKrueger]

View attachment 36837

This is really the issue with Critical Fumbles in general. If you logically follow the chances for them and extrapolate to the world at large, the entire setting becomes a farce. I'm willing to bet you could arm all of us with greataxes and have us go to town, and no one would cut their own head off. Leg injuries, sure, just like you get when people haven't been shown how to cut wood properly. Friendly fire injuries, sure, especially if we tried any formation. But cut off your own head...nope.

If you look at the Fumble ranges for Wizards and Priests in WFRP2 and Psykers in FFG40k, all of humanity would be consumed in days from the random warp rifts, possessions, blue bolts from angry deities, and greater daemons hearing the caster ringing the dinner bell. It's ludicrous.

There's nothing wrong in theory with Critical Hits and Fumbles, but it has to be a weighted roll, based on differences in skill. Bruce Lee in a one-on-one fight against an untrained nobody, there's practically no chance he'd lose. Get him in a bar with an unknown number of possible assailants, his chance of walking out goes down a lot.

The world has to be able to exist as if the NPCs running around who are doing things similar to the PCs are succeeding and failing according to their abilities just like the PCs.

Assuming of course that you want the world to be consistent and verisimilar. If your game runs on different logic, then obviously you're doing something different.

 

[CRKrueger]

SInce it's RQ, Glorantha and Heroquesting we're talking about, I have a few questions for the Glorantha GMs.

Do your Characters HeroQuest?
Do they use specific ones already known and detailed in different Chaosium or Stafford writings, or do you just freeball it based on what's going on and have someone go on something like the "Orlanth learns to love a clear sky." Heroquest?