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Amidst the Cthulhu and Rifts stuff, I'll be the first (yet surely not the last) to tell you that it's awesome to see Glorantha and HeroQuest here; they are in need of more love, please go on.
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Feb 20, 2018 14:45
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Oh, Bronze Age. Now I’m even more interested.
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Feb 20, 2018 16:19
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I am fascinated with Glorantha, and Tekumel, and pretty much any fantasy franchise that is outside the box. But even the Glorantha writeups ITT leave me baffled.
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Feb 20, 2018 16:38
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Halloween Jack posted:I am fascinated with Glorantha, and Tekumel, and pretty much any fantasy franchise that is outside the box. But even the Glorantha writeups ITT leave me baffled. Well Heroquest is the single easiest one to get into, in terms of mechanics it is astonishingly simple to use. But what is it that leaves you baffled? BTW I am saying this as someone who played a bit of King of Dragon Pass because of this forum and I have been slowly grabbing as much Glorantha based stuff ever since.
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Feb 20, 2018 16:42
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 The World of Glorantha quote:Glorantha is not a planet, as is ours, but instead is a slightly bulging, squarish lozenge, like the Earth Rune’s shape. Glorantha floats upon Sramak’s River, the Primal Ocean that encircles the world. The Sky overhead is an off center bowl rotating about the Pole Star which marks the center of the Sky, and is the only stable point in the celestial dome. Between the Earth and Sky is the turbulent realm of the Air gods. Underneath both Earth and Water is the dark, silent Underworld.  The cosmology of Glorantha is based on mostly mythological concepts instead of scientific ones. Physically from the perspective of the real-world the physical makeup of Glorantha is completely insane, but fits well within Mythological traditions of things like World Trees, Giant Planet Turtles, and Islands in an Infinite Sea. Above is a representation of the Gloranthan “Globe” though obviously this statement is quite incorrect, but is a useful simplification. To begin, I will simply go through this “globe” giving a brief overview of the things within it. Consider this a “teaser”, a bundle of interesting information presented with minimal context.  Above the Sky Dome, in the realm of the Sky is Dayzatar, God of the Sky, Purity, and Morality.  Below Dayzatar is Pole Star. This star marks the center of the sky dome, about which the rest of the heavens rotate. It is associated with several Gods, most commonly Polaris the leader of the armies of the Sky.  Moving down further we reach The Sun. While there are many solar deities, the Sun itself is commonly held to be the god Yelm, who makes a continuous circuit moving from East to West. The line on either side represents the Sunpath he follows. Yelm spends half his time in the Sky, the other half in the Underworld, which is why there is Day and Night.   Breaking out pattern, we follow the Sunpath to see the Gates of Dawn and the Gates of Dusk. These serve as the easiest and best known ways to enter and exit the Underworld while still living. The Gates of Dawn to the east open only to allow exit from the Underworld for Yelm’s flaming chariot. They are guarded by a race of golden skinned immortals with voices of pure song. Little is known of it. The Gates of Dusk are to the extreme West and are better known. They are protected by the Goddess of Dusk Rausa and a race of purple skinned immortals known as the Luatha who destroy all trespassers.  At the opposite end of the Sunpath we find a representation of Yelm as a corpse. Yelm was slain in the Gods War by Death and resurrected, which is why he must spend half the time within the Underworld.  Now we return to the heavens, to reach the Air Realm. Here is Orlanth’s Ring, a strange constellation that sits not in the Sky Dome but in the Middle Air between Earth and Sky. One star, the Dragon’s Head is green while the rest are orange and form a spiral shape. This constellation is the celestial home of Orlanth the God of Air and Storm.  Sharing the Middle Air is the infamous Red Moon. The Red Moon hangs motionless in the Middle Air, rotating about its axis. One half is Red, the other Black. The Red Moon is the Goddess Sedenya, also called Shepelkirt, and rose into the sky of Glorantha only a few centuries ago.     These four figures arrayed about the edge of the world are the Four Directions, who support the Sky Dome and rule the edges of reality. Now we shall move from the edges inward: The furthest North is covered by Valind’s Glacier, an endless expanse of ice and home of the Gods of Winter and spirits of Cold. The extreme South is the Sea of Fire, where even water burns and the air is poison. The West lies Luathela and East Vithela, explained above in with the Gates of Dawn and Dusk. The Northern continent of Glorantha is Genertela, and the southern Pamaltela. Between them lies the Eastern Isles, Vormain, Jrustela, and many other islands. At the center of the Middle World is Magasta’s Pool. This is a titanic whirlpool that draws in all the waters of the world, and empties out into the Underworld. While once can reach the Underworld through the Pool, it is unlikely you would survive.     Finally we reach the Underworld. Here are represented several key beings and Gods of this realm. The first figure is Annara Gor or Ty Kora Tek, the Goddess of the Dead. Her priests guard graveyards and prepare corpses. Beside her is Deshlotralas a guardian of the Underworld who wields the Bone of Power. Next is a representation of Kyger Litor, the Mother of Trolls who were first born in the Underworld which they called Wonderhome. The Black and Red figure is Natha, a Lunar Goddess of Balance and Vengeance. The final figure is Deshkorgos the Monster Man, who is guard and warden of the Underworld, responsible for ensuring the creatures of that dark place do not escape. History Glorantha was crafted by the gods from the Primal Void of Chaos. At first there was no history, for it was the God Time. This is era of myth and legend where the world was created and shaped, and the gods were born and died and did their mighty deeds. The God Time was ended when the Gods War broke out, a struggle between the gods so extreme that it broke the world and let Chaos in. Choas nearly destroyed the world, but the Seven Lightbringers undid the damage and returned the Sun God to the sky, banishing the dark and healing the world. To ensure such a thing would never happen again all the gods swore great oaths and compacts to form the Great Compromise which is also called Time. This changed the world and began history. After Time began was called the Dawn Age, a period of rebuilding as the mortal races repaired the damaged world and filled it with life. This is the era when the Elder Races were strongest and humans were merely one people among many. This world was led by the First Council, made up of humans, non-humans, spirits and gods. This time of peace did not last, as ancient grudges renewed themselves. The First Council fell to be replaced by the Second Council, a martial empire that grew in arrogance and sought to bring back the God Time. To accomplish this end they birthed Gbaji the Chaos God, who began a 75 year long war which permanently reduced the non-human races and any hope of universal peace. This ended the Dawn Age. quote:Gbaji and Arkat New Empires and polities rose out of the end of the Dawn Age. Most important and powerful in Genertela and the Dragon Pass region was the EWF or Empire of Wyrms Friends. This empire lasted for 500 years, famed for its close alliance with the dragons and dragon-kin of the pass. The empire eventually fell due to the decadence of their rulers engendering rebellion. The Invincible Golden Horde descended on Dragon Pass seeking to destroy the EWF. At the same instant the Dragonewts turned against their human allies and the two forces annihilated the EWF. The Invincible Golden Horde was not satisfied though, and continued to attack the Dragonewts, looting their cities and smashing their eggs. This raised the ire of the Dragons, who descended on Dragon Pass from across Space and Time. The Dragonkill War got its name from what the dragons did, not what they suffered. Ever since humans have feared dragons. In 1220 the Red Moon raised into the sky, a newborn Goddess of duality and balance. From her was born the ever-reincarnating Red Emperor who founded the mighty Lunar Empire that spread to conquer every land it could reach. When the empire reached Dragon Pass it found the land resettled by the Kingdom of Sartar. A bitter war was fought, but the nation was eventually conquered in 1602 and integrated into the Empire. Unlike the other Lunar conquests though, Sartarites did not surrender, and a bitter rebellion was sparked and fought for years against the Lunar occupation. The Hero Wars Eventually tiring of the Satarite rebellions the Lunar College of Magic began to construct a Temple of the Reaching Moon in Sartar. This would extend the mystical Glowline, putting the entire Kingdom under Lunar magical dominion and ending any hope of successful rebellion. In 1625 Sartarite rebels perform a great magic act and awaken a dormant True Dragon that was slumbering under the temple foundations during the temple’s dedication ceremony. This event, called the Dragonrise, led to the temples utter destruction and the death of every priest and priestess and half of the armies there. At the same time, the Lunar city of Pavis will be conqured by barbarian warlord who will lead his army to Dragon Pass. This warlord is Argrath Dragontooth, a distant kin of the Sartar royal household and refugee from the Lunars. With an army of powerful heroes and magicians behind him he seeks to free Sartar from Lunar control and claim the throne. This begins the Hero Wars, a long prophesied time of war and strife where the greatest assembly of heroes and demigods in history will descend upon Dragon Pass and change the world forever.  quote:Genertela is the northern continent of Glorantha. It is largely temperate in climate; its winds generally blow west to east, and ofen from the north during Dark Season. The continent is 3,125 miles long and 1,100 miles wide. Wapole Languray fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Feb 20, 2018 |
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Feb 20, 2018 16:50
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Josef bugman posted:Well Heroquest is the single easiest one to get into, in terms of mechanics it is astonishingly simple to use. But what is it that leaves you baffled? BTW I am saying this as someone who played a bit of King of Dragon Pass because of this forum and I have been slowly grabbing as much Glorantha based stuff ever since.
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Feb 20, 2018 16:56
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I find it easiest to stick to learning how one culture at a time sees the world, then start worrying about the interactions between the many probably-possibly-sort-of-mutually-exclusive-but-not interpretations of events, cosmology, and how the world works later.
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Feb 20, 2018 17:06
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Halloween Jack posted:For starters, literally everything concerning how some stuff happened before the concept of Time existed and other stuff didn't. Ah, that stuff. I believe it's based on the concept of Dream Time, from indigenous Australian myth. Yeah, that took me a long time to get used to. Basically, anything that the gods did happened during non-linear time, which is how mutually exclusive things happened simultaneously. Stuff that happened involving only people probably happened during linear time.
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Feb 20, 2018 17:36
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Oh, I understand the concept, but reading it reminds me of when I reviewed Immortal: it's like trying to explain the logic of schizophrenia in rational ways to rational people.
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Feb 20, 2018 17:37
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Halloween Jack posted:For starters, literally everything concerning how some stuff happened before the concept of Time existed and other stuff didn't. Before the Dawn was the GodTime. Stuff happened during the GodTime, but it wasn't constrained by boring old rules about cause and effect or consistency. You can have a story where Yelm killed Orlanth, and another story where Orlanth killed Yelm, and they'd both be equally true (along with a later story about how Yelm and Orlanth then teamed up to fight a third foe). Every culture and every religion has their own story to tell (usually where they are at the center of it) and they're all equally true. When Chaos nearly destroyed the world and the surviving gods had to come together to forge the Great Compromise and bring about the Dawn, one of the limitations of the newly reconstructed universe was that Time didn't work like that any more - everyone was now stuck in boring ol' linear time with it's dumb rules about causes having precede effects and the like. Also, the idea that events in GodTime had a definite structure (with multiple distinct Ages and key events that everyone more or less agreed happened in a certain order) is almost certainly a construct of the God Learners, a sect of rationalist magicians who were so pissed off by how untidy and irrational and contradictory all the stories and myths they encountered were that they worked to systematically transform the myths of the God Plane (through Heroquesting) into something more coherent and sensible (the backlash of which nearly broke the world - again - and definitely destroyed the God Learners). Still, a lot of what cultures believe about their own myths and gods and religions in modern Glorantha is widely suspected to be that way because of the GLs, and have only a tangential relationship (if that) to the original ur-myths.
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Feb 20, 2018 17:50
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Does a story become godtime true when someone starts believing it, or rather it immediately turns out that the story was already true?
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Feb 20, 2018 18:00
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DalaranJ posted:Does a story become godtime true when someone starts believing it, or rather it immediately turns out that the story was already true? Heroquesting is awesome.
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Feb 20, 2018 18:09
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Don't worry about how Godtime stuff works. In universe if you actually can comprehend how The Godtime works you're either an illuminated master, a Dragon, or a God yourself. It's the sort of thing mortal minds aren't built to really comprehend. I'll go into detail when we get to the Heroquesting section but that'll be a while.
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Feb 20, 2018 18:37
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 By Matthew Gwinn TV Deals, Ratings, Finances, Venues, and Crowd Heat, or, The Thrilling Climax! It’s the home stretch, folks! Once a promotion’s Heat is 20 or more, they may be eligible for a TV deal- this is at the Booker’s discretion, though, and the contract will have to be negotiated as part of the Booking Committee. There are two big perks to a TV Deal- Exposure, which leads to Heat, and a benefit to your Resources. Every segment of a televised show a wrestler is in, they gain an extra point of Heat on top of what they normally gain or lose, with a maximum determined by the station’s exposure- a Public Access Station only lets you gain 1 Heat this way, Local Cable (note that I’m still not sure what this is) caps out at 2, National Cable’s max is 4, and a Major Network gives you up to 8. (Though if a single wrestler is in that many segments there’s something wrong with your booking.) The drawback, however, is that Heat losses on TV are doubled. When it comes to actually working out the details of a contract the mechanical details are sadly a little vague. A small promotion may have a contract that only lasts a single Series, networks might have different restrictions as to content, etc. (The game includes a potential network restriction being “No homosexual content”, but sadly that’s not too inaccurate at least for the time.) Basically the Booker has to decide a lot of specifics. The few mechanical bits involve how much of a Resources benefit a TV deal can give you, depending on the size of it: Public Access can give up to +2, Local Cable +4, National Cable +8, and being on a major network can land you as much as +16. The game also suggests that a TV deal will have a Ratings Requirement, usually equal to the Resources benefit you’re getting. Not meeting that requirement doesn’t instantly end the deal, but failing to do so four shows in a row can get you cancelled.  What’s that? Ratings? The game doesn’t give an objective scale, which is just as well given how much TV ratings numbers have fluctuated over the years. The way it works is this: you have a dice pool, called the Ratings pool, which starts at a number equal to your Production + 1/10 of your Promotion’s Heat (not sure if rounding up or down.) This is then modified by a number of factors. Holidays usually take away dice (people aren’t watching TV), pre-emption takes away one, a time slot can range from a -2 to +2 modifier, and broadcast range adds 1 die for Public Access, 2 for Local Cable, 4 for National Cable, and 8 for a Major Network. Any time a Match, Promo, or Skit gives someone Heat, you add a Ratings die- any time anyone loses Heat that way, you take one away. At the end of the show the dice are rolled, and each 6 means a point of Ratings. If you roll no 6s you effectively have a 0 Rating- almost nobody watched your show. Now this has been the core dice mechanic for the game, so now at the end I finally looked up some probabilities. Your probability of rolling at least one 6 on one die is 16.667… %, about 30.56% on two, 42.13…% on 3, and is just a little over half with 4 dice. Assuming an average starting promotion has 4 Production dice, plus maybe one or two from Promotion Heat, and the game says most promotion’s first TV deal gives them a bad time slot worth -2, and maybe that gets cancelled out by a 1 or 2 Broadcast Range bonus- well, that would still put us at about a Ratings Pool of 4 or 5. This would mean you’d most likely be getting a 1 Rating, which might not even meet the requirements of a Public Access station. But then we have to look at how often Heat is gained or lost on a show- and now I have to look up the probabilities of rolling two sixes or three, etc. So it may be potentially difficult to keep a TV deal in these circumstances, but the Resources bonus is optional and if we’re being authentic here, what gave wrestling such purchase on TV was the fact that promoters actually sold their shows for cheap, at-cost or even less, because the real money was made at the gates, and later on PPV. (The WWE does make a solid profit from its current deal with NBC/Universal, but that’s the advantage of a near monopoly.) I guess what I’m saying is these mechanics are okay. However there’s one major lacking thing here- it feels that there really should be a separate mechanic to determine the buy rate of a PPV. PPV success tends to depend both on how well the promotion is doing in general, and in specific how much they’ve “built” to the event in question- have they put together a card that people want to see, have they generated suspense over who will win, etc. I suppose you could figure Ratings for them like a normal show but I don’t think that is quite the same. WCW were going gangbusters in 1997, but January’s Souled Out show- a PPV that was in-story “run” by the evil heel faction the nWo- was a genuine flop because they made it clear that the non-nWo wrestlers had no chance and would generally be buried. The next section deals with Payroll, and while I mentioned before the players don’t have a lot of reason to keep track of the money their wrestlers earn, the Booker sure as Hell does. A company’s Payroll is expressed in terms of real US Dollars (though I suppose they could be Canadian or even pounds or yen or whatever.) It starts the game at 0, but after each show you multiply the Promotion’s Resources trait by $500 and add that to its Payroll. This is then used to pay everyone off. For the sake of efficiency the Booker only has to apply this to the player characters, and by default only wrestlers who appear on a show get paid. Most of the time these people are paid after the show, after Payroll has been increased. Payment can be worked out ahead of time via a Contract, but if not, there’s a table provided- Wrestlers usually get their Heat at the the start of the show x $5, Managers and Valets get their Heat at start x $3, Ring Announcers, Commentators, and such are paid based on their Mic Skills, and Referees based on their Work Rate. (Ring Announcers get Mic Skills x $50 so presumably Michael Buffer had a Mic Skills rating of 2,000. Entirely possible.) If a promotion doesn’t have enough money to make Payroll, they can simply not pay people and risk getting marked with the Bad Credit flaw, they can cut the roster, or they can negotiate with wrestlers to get them to take less- for every $100 a character defers, they get a bonus die on their next Clout roll, and for every $100 they waive altogether they get too. Wrestlers who aren’t getting paid and don’t have an agreement don’t have to roll Clout to refuse to work. A company can also take out a loan, gaining Resources up to its current Heat, and they repay that loan simply by reducing their Resources by the same amount- but, at the end of the series, interest takes it toll by reducing your Resources by 1 for every 10 you owe. If you go to 0 or negative Resources, well, you’re in default and theoretically that could be the end, but TNA still exists so who knows anymore. This section concludes with a reminder that other expenses don’t need to be tracked, and can be understood based on the rise and fall of the Resources trait. Which is fair enough. Venues are selected at the start of a Series, and are categorized by crowd capacity and the Heat a promotion should have if they want to fill the room. (Empty seats are bad not just for the usual “no money” reason, but also because a smaller crowd is less noisy and responsive and because it looks and sounds bad on TV.) At Heat 1-5 you’re “booking” backyards and parking lots with a capacity of about 50, and you go from there to banquet halls, school gyms, arenas and finally at 100+ Heat you can book domes or outdoor stadiums. The Booker should actually specify what these are, come up with names and locations etc. Basically before each show, you roll a number of dice equal to 1/10 your promotion’s Heat (rounding up), plus one die for AP spent on advertising. This is the Capacity roll. If the Capacity roll generates one 6, you sold enough tickets to break even. More than one 6 and you make a profit, increasing Resources by 1 for every 6 rolled. If the roll fails, the company loses 1 Resources for every 1 rolled. If a promotion deliberately books a smaller venue than what their Heat allows, they get an additional Capacity die for each step down the list, but don’t gain any profit from a successful roll. On the other hand, if they want to take a risk, they can book a venue one level higher than what they normally have, roll one die less for Capacity and double the amount gained or lost from the roll. So going back to probabilities. Starting promotions- and I’m assuming a starting Heat of 10-20 here- will want to be cautious, maybe deliberately booking smaller venues until they either A) have enough Heat to be rolling at least 4 dice, or B) have AP to spend on advertising. Again I wish there was a modifier for PPVs, which usually book bigger venues than the regular shows. Maybe have everything step up a size category? I dunno. There’s also a bit here about saving money on venues by cutting costs, paying less attention to things like “sprinkler systems”, “emergency exits”, or “non-exposed wiring”. For each additional die you get to the Capacity roll in this way, there is a cumulative chance of disaster striking- you roll a d6 and if the number is equal to or less than the number of dice gained, something bad happens. Also, for every additional die you gain you reduce the Crowd Heat by 1 because seriously this place is a shithole. The final mechanical section is about Crowd Heat. Way back in “The Show”, we were told that Crowd Heat is a number ranging from -10 to +10, determined by the Booker, and it gets applied to Match Heat. This section lists various factors that can determine Crowd Heat, in addition to those that have come up elsewhere in the rules (this really should have been compiled somewhere.) Every AP the company spends on Advertising increases Crowd Heat by 1 (so yeah Advertising pays off twice), and Crowd Heat is also modified by the Capacity roll- if it succeeds it goes up by 1 for every 6, if it fails it goes down for every 1. Papering- giving away free tickets to fill up seats- increases Crowd Heat by 1 but takes away 1 die from your next Capacity roll. Canned Heat is pumping in chants and cheers over the speakers, and depending on a Production roll can increase or decrease Crowd Heat. Creative lighting/seating (another Production roll) can help negate the effects of a failed Capacity roll - if you ever go to a TV taping of a wrestling show, you’ll notice the audience getting clustered opposite the hard camera and near to where the camera’s likely to be during a match. (If things get really desperate the company can just build the stage farther out and use the set to block out empty seats behind them.) Where you’re running a show can also affect Crowd Heat but this is up to the Booker, but a wrestler performing in their home town adds 2 to Crowd Heat whenever they’re out there, and a promotion performing in its home town gets an additional +2 Crowd Heat to live scenes. On the downsides, airing more than 10 minutes of prerecorded material in a two hour show reduces Crowd Heat by 1 for every minute you go over. (Obviously the WWE frequently tempts fate on this.) Finally, inclement weather can reduce Crowd Heat up to 5 points. And at last, there is an Appendix, listing off various popular match stipulations, from basics like Tag Team matches and No DQs to Flaming Matches (the goal is to light your opponent on fire), 3 Tiered Cage Matches (a bizarre specialty of WCW) and ___ on a Pole matches (a specialty of Vince Russo.) TNA was just getting started when this book was written so sadly there’s nothing on Lockbox Challenges, King of the Mountain matches, or Reverse Battle Royals. And that’s it! Aftermath: Talking Kayfabe  What I get from this game is that it could be fun but also would be very involved to play. There are just a lot of things to brainstorm- so much happens on one single wrestling show, which is one reason the individual stories have to be so simple. To play this game everyone needs to make a bunch of characters, make some decisions about what kind of wrestling company they wanna be involved in, there are a few tricky calculations (averaging everyone’s Heat to get the promotion Heat seems like it’d be best done on a spreadsheet), but if you can find a group of wrestling fans who really want to go that extra mile, there’s a lot of potential here. The basic system is solid, and that it leaves a lot up to GM Fiat isn’t a dealbreaker considering how much of a narrative game this is. The chief pitfalls of the game are some shaky organization and, as I’ve said before at least twice, not enough mechanical incentive for the characters to do the stupid things people in wrestling companies do all the goddamn time. I would love a second pass at this material, refining a lot of its ideas and incorporating the many techniques of storygaming that have been developed in the 15 years since this was released. The dirty real business of wrestling can be, in its way, as entertaining as the battles on screen, and I’m glad there’s at least one game out there that lets you get involved with it. So, give this game a look if wrestling is your thing, and as always, remember: 
Maxwell Lord fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Feb 20, 2018 |
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Feb 20, 2018 19:07
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For Glorantha Lovers/Interested, don't forget Prince of Sartar. http://www.princeofsartar.com/comic/introduction-chapter-1/ It's probably never going to be finished but what's there is really good.
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Feb 20, 2018 20:15
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Of note, the Lunars have a lot of illuminates and they love going into the hero plane to change things around. For example, they'll add the Red Goddess into a myth as a friendly foreigner who helped one of the local gods to make a new people react to them better, and be easier to absorb into the empire. That, or they'll decide to make it so the Red Goddess was really who this story was about all along, retroactively.
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Feb 20, 2018 20:37
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Quote is not edit
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Feb 20, 2018 20:38
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Deptfordx posted:For Glorantha Lovers/Interested, don't forget Prince of Sartar. The current arc in Prince of Sartar is, for the record, one of the original 'big' Glorantha adventures published for Runequest. Try to ID the PC group!
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Feb 20, 2018 21:16
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FMguru posted:It becomes godtime true when you actually travel into the godtime and change the myths. This is how we wind up back in the argument about whether Glorantha takes cultures' myths about themselves too much at face value. Also, I'm very disappointed in all the Arkat apologism in this text. Every educated person knows that Arkat was the real Gbaji.
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Feb 20, 2018 21:18
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Wapole Languray posted:The cosmology of Glorantha is simple to learn but difficult to comprehend. So used are we to thinking in the ways of science, of rules, of logic that Glorantha seems nonsensical. Instead think not in our modern ways of empirical fact but in ancient modes of myth and story and you will see the beauty of it.  
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Feb 20, 2018 21:30
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Rand Brittain posted:This is how we wind up back in the argument about whether Glorantha takes cultures' myths about themselves too much at face value. But aren't we all Gbaji?
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Feb 20, 2018 21:38
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Lol I'm not *smites a chaos born beastman*
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Feb 20, 2018 21:41
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Lunars teach us all about the evils of centrism. "That Broo may be an unspeakable horror that's a crime against reality but I'll die for his right to exist. Our emperor is also not totally an abomination that hides behind a veil of benevolence until the final battle when he shows his true, reality melting abhorrent visage."
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Feb 20, 2018 21:46
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The only thing that can ease my psychological need to hegemonize a fictional setting into my own view of Ascension is DUCKS. When do you get to the DUCKS.
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Feb 20, 2018 21:50
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Lunars teach us all about the evils of centrism. "That Broo may be an unspeakable horror that's a crime against reality but I'll die for his right to exist. Our emperor is also not totally an abomination that hides behind a veil of benevolence until the final battle when he shows his true, reality melting abhorrent visage." Of course not! He's actually a series of Pelorian noblemen who all just pretend to be the original Moonson to maintain the polite fiction he actually did keep reincarnating after that whole Sheng Seleris incident.
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Feb 20, 2018 21:50
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If all the changing and developing myths in Glorantha, accessible through the Godtime, are true... surely either the setting has no core 'reality' as we would describe it and different cultures experience different worlds, or else there's some universally accurate if highly symbolic account of the universe. It seems to me as though the first version of things is basically the out of character image of the world, and the second version is the specific cultural understanding of the world by the God Learner culture, who wanted things to work out. Their methods did work extremely well, as far as I can tell, until they blew themselves up. Could one compare this to a phenomenological account of anthropology, where all cultural accounts are taken on their own terms, but the Enlightenment worldview is clearly instrumentally powerful and capable of subjugating other accounts?
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Feb 20, 2018 22:15
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Define extremely well, because they blew themselves up in that they pissed off literally everyone else and got powerfully turbomurdered.
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Feb 20, 2018 22:21
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It strikes me that having a demigod as the leader of your empire is a terrible idea, since it means anyone else could heroquest up The Story of How The Red Goddess Made Her Child As A Punishment or other equally nasty crap.
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Feb 20, 2018 22:51
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Halloween Jack posted:I am fascinated with Glorantha, and Tekumel, and pretty much any fantasy franchise that is outside the box. But even the Glorantha writeups ITT leave me baffled. To be fair, I think the whole post and conversation here is a pretty good microcosm as to why. Too many Glorantha descriptions start with discussion of the metaphysics, deep history, and mythmaking instead of "Hey, what's this world like from the view of a human?" While the design of the whole "many myths are right" angle is cool, and heroquesting is cool, and Godtime is cool, it feels like the wrong way to jump in. But it feels like most Glorantha explanations start with the things you just... don't have to care about initially when playing the game or experiencing the world. They're clever and important elements, but they're not actually hooks.
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Feb 20, 2018 22:56
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Sorry, I guess I started out the F&F wrong. The book starts with a broad overview of the geography as well, and I thought doing the maps would be a cool way to catch interest, and tried for like, and enthusiastic voice, but the reaction was bad.
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Feb 20, 2018 23:03
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Alien Rope Burn posted:To be fair, I think the whole post and conversation here is a pretty good microcosm as to why. Too many Glorantha descriptions start with discussion of the metaphysics, deep history, and mythmaking instead of "Hey, what's this world like from the view of a human?" While the design of the whole "many myths are right" angle is cool, and heroquesting is cool, and Godtime is cool, it feels like the wrong way to jump in. But it feels like most Glorantha explanations start with the things you just... don't have to care about initially when playing the game or experiencing the world. They're clever and important elements, but they're not actually hooks. http://www.glorantha.com/docs/heroquest-voices/
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Feb 20, 2018 23:07
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Wapole Languray posted:Sorry, I guess I started out the F&F wrong. The book starts with a broad overview of the geography as well, and I thought doing the maps would be a cool way to catch interest, and tried for like, and enthusiastic voice, but the reaction was bad.
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Feb 20, 2018 23:09
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I'm not familiar with how the book does it, mind, I have the Guide to Glorantha and though it's an amazing book set, it also just starts by just dropping a massive wall of metaphysics and high-level worldbuilding on your head. Which is necessary, but as an introduction it's definitely a horse pill to swallow.
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Feb 20, 2018 23:09
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GtG is a lot of things, but it's not really an introduction. It's an 800 page battleship of a product that's meant to be the definitive a-to-z, soup-to-nuts, argan-argar-to-zzabur reference work on the setting. The Glorantha Sourcebook (just released in PDF! actual printing coming soon!) is supposed to be the cut-down, player-facing 226 page introduction to the setting.
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Feb 20, 2018 23:25
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Wapole Languray posted:Sorry, I guess I started out the F&F wrong. The book starts with a broad overview of the geography as well, and I thought doing the maps would be a cool way to catch interest, and tried for like, and enthusiastic voice, but the reaction was bad. Nessus posted:I don't know, you got people postin'. (I need to get back on the regular posting train myself.) People complaining about the book and its stuff isn't a flaw in your review. also finish oubliette you binch
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Feb 20, 2018 23:26
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Breachworld Part 6 Hey, how about I quickly close out an RPG I had one more update to finish just over three years ago and inexplicably failed to complete? That 'abandoned' note in the inklesspen archive is haunting me. Back to Breachworld! In the intervening three years, quite a bit has happened that feels relevant to this review. If you don’t remember, Breachworld was an RPG that basically acted as a knockoff Rifts using a much more coherent, rules-medium system called Mini Six. At the time it had a very useful niche to fill since so many people have a fondness for Rifts that absolutely does not extend to the Palladium rules system. Since my last update Savage Rifts was announced, successfully Kickstarted, and successfully delivered to backers. It uses the Savage World system and is comparable to Mini Six in rules complexity. I would never have guessed that Siembieda would ever allow this in early 2015, but here we are. It makes for an interesting comparison to this project. Additionally, Jason Richards, the author of Breachworld, has successfully kickstarted a run of miniatures for this RPG. I thought it was strange since I don’t imagine there is a great need for miniatures for a small press RPG, but they look good in concept at least. It’s not really relevant to the review but I hope this at least means he is continuing to find success. I will have more comment on it in the afterword, but for now I should mention that I have gotten to play another game using the D6 rules a couple of years ago (Star Wars) and a single session of a Savage Worlds spy game. I generally think the Mini Six system is a better choice for supporting the playstyle of Rifts than Savage Worlds normally manages, but I also think that Savage Rifts was a well enough designed product to alleviate this disadvantage. Breach Creatures There is only one main section left to the book and it’s the obligatory bestiary. The section is called Breach Creatures because it doesn’t include any human or humanoid opponents. That’s a pet peeve of mine – I tend to use more human enemies than huge monsters simply because having people around allows for a lot more complex motivations. Not a big deal, though, since it tells you what it is right up front. First we get some classic dinosaurs and are given stats for an Allosaurus and Tyrannosaurus. No complaints. Everyone knows that dinosaurs are a solid Rifts enemy.  Next we have the Creep, which is a larger-than-dog-sized bug that acts as a sloth-like ambush predator. No, I don’t mean sloths are ambush predators, but that the Creeps are described as moving so slow that they aren’t detected by normal vision and give electronic surveillance a run for its money. They look pretty scary, but I am imagining a sloth trying to adorably reach down and slooooowly snare a person and it’s hilarious. A standard griffin is included, which seems like a good choice for utility but not all that interesting. More interesting is the Hardhat, which is just a new name for some variety of extinct rhinoceros with a truncated horn. It’s just a big, smashy changing monster with nothing else to do.  Hoodlums are a sci-fi stand in for a gorilla, but are larger than any earth gorilla. Weirdly the entry goes into how they sense vibrations to signal amorous intent, and how they bang on steel objects so that their intent can be heard miles away. It’s certainly an interesting tidbit. Other than that it might as well be a gorilla or Neanderthal or any other humanoid bruiser that’s just below the ability to communicate. Imps are small demons that once again seem a lot like what you might expect. They’re roughly a foot tall and mess around with people’s lives through sabotage and trickery. I’m never sure how I would use something like this in a game (for another example, see mujina in L5R) but these kinds of enemies do show up a lot.  Leechers are an innovative enemy: flying squirrels with a huge mouth full of sharp teeth to tear their prey open, and then suck blood from the wound using a second mouth located on their stomach. I dunno where that came from.  The mauler is another big, mostly humanoid bruiser, but much larger and more dangerous than the Hoodlum. It has four arms – two huge arms for smashing things and two smaller arms for fine manipulation. I could see a fair amount of use for it as a set piece enemy.  Speaking of set piece enemies, we finally get to the Plasma Wyrm, otherwise known as the creature on the cover. Boy, it's a big, weird looking dingus. It’s an endboss type enemy with 6D scale, very high stats, and a base plasma attack of 9D. It will vaporize most encounters like a dragon-thing should. Luckily they are as rare as can be and only a handful are known. They tend to stay in their own territory and the best bet is to avoid them unless you go in with a good plan and a lot of firepower. A poison bat is an oversized version of a standard vampire bat than is also poisonous. It’s got a wingspan of 10 feet and injects poison through a long, proboscis-like tongue.  This smug looking motherfucker is a prowler beast. A prowler beast reminds me of an upscaled displacer beast. It’s based on a large cat but is actually larger than a lion. It exudes a dark mist that cloaks itself and gives it enhanced ability to sneak at night. If you manage to kill and skin one, the clothes you make from its hide give the wearer a bonus to stealth rolls. Trapcats are another large feline enemy but their claim to fame is that they are used as mounts by Reptilian Raiders. It looks very much like something out of He-Man. They’re natural hunters and move very quickly. There’s isn’t much else to recommend them. That’s it. It’s a strange smattering of creatures from the broadly useful (dinorsaurs, big bruisers) to the somewhat specific (vampire bats and ambush cats) to the loving weird (those squirrels). I’d say it needed to be fleshed out with more standard fantasy or scifi enemies to be truly useful. It suspect the intent was to utilize Mini Six bestiaries completed elsewhere, though. The last part of the book includes useful game aids such as character sheets and all of the tables that might be useful in a GM screen. I’d like to note that the author has continued to put out new races as mini-expansions on DriveThruRPG and has done more to support this game that I would have guessed when it was on kickstarter. Other than that we’re now done with the book. Afterword Back to thoughts on Savage Worlds and the comparison to this game. I mentioned that I felt Mini Six is an overall better fit for Rifts style play than Savage Worlds. Let me expand on that. I admittedly have fairly limited experience with Savage Worlds as a ruleset, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. I generally feel that Savage Worlds characters generally do a better job of being wide than deep. The base rules seem to lean toward characters that are fairly competent in a lot of ways and not necessarily extremely powerful in specific ways. A character with d10 or d12 in a combat skill is going to be very competent compared to someone with a d4 or d6 combat skill, but thanks to the wild die things could easily swing away from the better combatant. Additionally, Savage Worlds characters tend to be more fragile and a lucky shot could still end this fight early. Now my blind spot is that I really haven’t used the super hero rules which likely address this weakness and leave everything I’m saying in the dust. Mini Six and D6 games in general seem to have a slightly larger spread of power built into the system itself. A character with a 6d Might is going to be so much better in melee combat than someone with 2d that we’re not operating on the same level. A hand to hand fight would be a one sided affair to the point that I’d barely consider it worth running through without a large disadvantage placed on the 6d character. It might not seem like a positive thing in most games but it certainly fits the Rifts source material better. I also think the scale system for adding dice to a creature or vehicle is a pretty quick and handy way to adjust the scale of combat on the fly without having to re-stat things. I haven’t seen something similar in Savage Worlds, but that could be my inexperience talking. For better or for worse, Rifts is a game that tends to have very distinct power levels between different characters. Going back to the original Palladium system, one player could make a Vagabond and another an optimized demigod that can cast any magic, has ludicrous combat capability, and a minimum of hundreds of MDC. The only disadvantage is that the demigod would take maybe twice the experience to level than the vagabond, and that’s not much of a problem since a 15th level vagabond will still be orders of magnitude less powerful than a first level demigod. I don’t think anyone is looking to reproduce discrepancies of this magnitude. To get the ‘feel’ of Rifts, though, some level is probably necessary. Back to Savage Rifts. They actually do manage to reconfigure Savage Worlds to emulate Rifts fairly well, and they do it by making the classless Savage Worlds system into something roughly class based. It appears to work very well. A young dragon or a full conversion cyborg will have access to more raw power right off the bat than a MARS character, but they MARS character will have access to a better spread of skills and equipment. It just seems to work more slickly than Palladium ever did. It’s the fulfilled promise of the idea that the original Palladium system intended – different characters will be able to fill different roles and different power levels will actually be able to contribute more or less equally. I haven’t played it, though, so I could be way off base. I would have liked to see what might have been done with a similarly well thought out revision of the D6 system. I have been following the progress of Mythic D6 through rpg.net threads and it looks very promising as a super powered take on the classic D6 system. I’d guess that less tinkering would be necessary to make D6 into something that hits the right notes for Rifts than was needed for Savage Worlds. That said, I do think that Breachworld is now a product without a market. I will always contend that the selling point was a version of Rifts that isn’t tied to the abominable Palladium system. That’s what I backed it for. Unfortunately for Breachworld, there is now an official product filling this same role. I don’t feel that my own preference for Mini Six would be enough to spend the time porting over everything I needed when Savage Rifts has already done the work for me. And we’re done.
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Feb 20, 2018 23:43
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All this Glorantha talk is tempting me to write up a F&F of 13th Age Glorantha. It’s pretty interesting, especially since it has a tight focus on Dragon Pass in the earliest days of the Hero Wars, with a splash of extra Chaos for flavor. I don’t know enough about 13th Age core, though, and I’ve never done a review on here before.
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Feb 20, 2018 23:49
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Meinberg posted:All this Glorantha talk is tempting me to write up a F&F of 13th Age Glorantha. It’s pretty interesting, especially since it has a tight focus on Dragon Pass in the earliest days of the Hero Wars, with a splash of extra Chaos for flavor. I don’t know enough about 13th Age core, though, and I’ve never done a review on here before. Ooh. I was very interested in that, in fact I had a question. I don't know much about 13th age. It's based on 4th edition Dnd correct? At least as a starting point design wise. So is it designed with the assumption that you play with a battlemap and figures/tokens like 4th edition does*? I ask because we have a weird setup where 3 of us are in the room, and 2 of our group who moved away just Skype in. It works suprisingly smoothly (once we got a decent microphone and camera and our host upgraded his internet) but it does make any system that requires use of maps and figures a non-starter. * Yeah I know you could just play it theatre of the mind style with some goodwill and glossing over detail, but ruleswise it's clearly not meant to be played that way.
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Feb 21, 2018 00:06
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13A isn't really intended to need a map, it does a lot of the abstraction it does specifically to avoid requiring one.
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Feb 21, 2018 00:09
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The ultimate truth of Glorantha is that if you can kill everyone who disagrees, all your myths will be 100% true. Like, those God Learners people mentioned are basically Cultural Appropriation: the Empire. They loved wandering about, deciding that two goddesses were essentially interchangeable, and swapping them, just because they could.
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Feb 21, 2018 00:11
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