From: owner-rq-rules-digest To: rq-rules-digest@hops.wharton.upenn.edu Subject: RQ Rules Digest: V2 #33 Reply-To: rq-rules Errors-To: owner-rq-rules-digest Precedence: bulk Content-Return: Prohibited Return-Path: owner-rq-rules-digest RQ Rules Digest: Thursday, 10 August 1995 Volume 02 : Number 033 TABLE OF CONTENTS Brian Tickler 200% skills... MSmylie@aol.com HQ/aspected POW, again. David Dunham heroes; Jonstown booklet pre-announcement D. Pearton HQ & the comunity RULES OF THE ROAD 1. Do not include large sections of a message in your reply. Especially not to add "Yeah, I agree" or "No, I disagree." Or be excoriated. If someone writes something good and you want to say "good show" please do. But don't include the whole message you praise. 2. Use an appropriate Subject line. 3. Learn the art of paraphrasing: Don't just quote and comment on a point-by-point basis. When paraphrasing you demonstrate exactly how well you understand the point someone was trying to make. 4. There is no number 4. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: tickler@netcom.com (Brian Tickler) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 1995 14:07:33 -0700 (PDT) Subject: 200% skills... Fred: I agree that you can't run an effective campaign if your PCs know you won't kill them. The 10% kill rate example just seemed excessive; it reminded me of the days of GMs who kept track of their kill percentage and took pleasure in how many characters they could kill (in fact, they kept "kill sheet" files containing dead characters' sheets with a big R.I.P. written across the front...), as if this was somehow hard for a GM to do. I would estimate my campaign's kill rate at about 1-2%, but the characters are still skulking around in fear of their lives even though these characters are almost all Rune-level. I have absolutely no problem keeping my players' "apprehension level" where it should be; after all, in Blind King's Castle, there are many worse things than mere death... :) - -- Brian T. Tickler E-Mail: tickler@netcom.com ------------------------------ From: MSmylie@aol.com Date: Thu, 10 Aug 1995 17:52:14 -0400 Subject: HQ/aspected POW, again. Hello, again. Neil Robinson, decloaking: >I'm of the opinion that most heroquests are to explain or keep things >going the way they should, from blessing the fields, to keeping the >river pure, to a rebirth of spring quest. It isn't what happens when >the person succeeds that matters, but what happens if they fail. While I somewhat agree, I think there is a distinction between ritual obligations and heroquests. In Glorantha, at least, there are plenty of moments during the year that an individual partakes in celebratory, ritual reenactments of Godtime (or other time) events with the express purpose of maintaining the status quo; virtually everything you do in the Sacred Time falls into this category. These are not, IMO, heroquests, though a heroquest may in fact duplicate some of these rituals. The Sun River Ritual in MOB's _Sun County_ comes to mind as a good example; if I remember correctly, those who performed the ritual successfully but were doing it out of obligation (i.e., the count or his official rep.) didn't benefit personally from the heroquest. They performed it strictly as a duty to their community, which benefited from their success (and suffered if they failed). _Independent_ heroquesters, however, would receive a boon or gift for successful completion of the ritual. For me, heroquests are undertaken with different motives than those behind obligatory rituals. Graydon: >I don't see what's wrong with making 'understanding', 'connection', >and 'permance' universals; those are the consequences of the >ennactment of myth pretty much anywhere. (the fourth one is >'change', but change is a function of personality.) Actually, I don't really see anything wrong with making them universals in the broadest sense; what worries me is building a heroquest/aspected POW system around them. The Condition Runes function in Glorantha as a set, IMO, making them ideal for distinguishing someone on the hero path from a regular adventurer, but in other worlds they may not be as distinct. I dunno, maybe I'm being overly cautious on this point. >What I *am* proposing is that if you want to oppose someone else's >HQ power, you have two options. One is to oppose it by your >connection to the same root - so two Humakti trying to kill each >other are competing to see who has the greater connection to >Death, say - and the other is to oppose it with something >else...[example excerpted]...To keep things from becoming >ridiculous, I'm arguing that you can use as much magnitude of >connection to other Runes/archtypes/Powers/etc. _outside_ their >own sphere as you've got magnitude of connection to the Mastery >Rune. (or generic 'understanding aspected POW'). Hm. Some clarification might be needed here. I'm sort of thinking that a Humakti with Death-aspected POW (to use your example) would still have to either a) know the Sever Spirit spell or b) have some ability gained on heroquest to use that POW to power a Sever Spirit spell; the spell itself would presumably function in the same way, with the Humakti trying to overcome the target's (spirit) POW with his own. If you're suggesting that his Death-aspected POW could in effect be added to his regular (spirit) POW in order to overcome, then I guess I may be in agreement (with the defender having to either add his own Death-aspected POW or some other POW -- either Mastery Rune POW, or other aspected POW with the Mastery or perhaps Magic Runes as a modifier or cap). If, on the other hand, you're suggesting that it's strictly a Death POW vs. Death POW kind of thing, I'm not sure I follow the reasoning. Personally, I wasn't thinking of aspected POW as operating in such a seperate fashion. >The (extremely straightforward) way to incorporate divine spells into >an aspected POW/magnitude of connection system is to hash out >a list of which aspects/runes the spells represent. If you know >three instances of Sever Spirit, you have 9 points worth of >connection to the Death Rune. If you know 2 instances of Oath, >you've got 8 points worth of connection (1 use spells count double) >to the Death-Truth pair. Agreed, although I think I would want to avoid the whole pairings and combinations thing as being a potential headache; frex, a heroquester belonging to a cult with three Runes would wind up with seven possible aspected connections (a, b, c, ab, ac, bc, abc), and that doesn't include the possibility of associated cults and independent sources of aspected POW. Much simpler, it seems, to just have associations with each individual Rune, though that would probably mean having to pidgeonhole some spells (the Oath spell, frex, strikes me as being a Truth Rune spell, but then again, it's backed by a Sever Spirit; what to do?). I have to admit I'm leaning more and more towards the idea that learning a divine spell and acquiring aspected POW are seperate; i.e., that the POW you would normally sacrifice to learn a divine spell is instead "transformed" into aspected POW, while you learn the spells to cast it in some other manner. So the Humakti above would have sacrificed 13 POW over the years, and have 9 points of Death-aspected POW that he could use to cast the Death-aspected spells he knows, and 4 points of Truth-aspected POW to fuel Truth-aspected spells. He would then try and learn new ways of using his aspected POW on heroquest. A departure, I know, but it's starting to make more sense to me. Later, Mark ------------------------------ From: dunham@hamachi.pensee.com (David Dunham) Date: Thu, 10 Aug 1995 18:50:00 -0700 Subject: Re: heroes; Jonstown booklet pre-announcement Mark Smylie wrote >Heroes, as >"modern-day" Gloranthans (or generics, whatever) understand them, did not >exist before the Compromise That would imply that Vingkot and Heort aren't heroes, and I think you'd get a lot of argument from the Barbarian Belt. After all, there are myths about each of them... I will be the North American distributor for the guidebook for the Jonstown LARP, which was held at the German RQ convention earlier this year. I haven't yet seen it, but I'm informed it's 40 pages, including local dignitaries, tribes, history, and essays on the Lhankor Mhy cult. The cost is $8, including shipping. You must send me a check (in $US, made out to me): David Dunham 532 N 71st St Seattle, WA 98103-5127 I will ship orders by the end of September. You must pre-order, since I don't expect to print more copies than orders. And while I'm advertising, I'll mention my Gloranthan Web site, . David Dunham Pensee Corporation dunham@nw.pensee.com Voice/Fax 206 783 7404 http://www.pensee.com/dunham/ "I say we should listen to the customers and give them what they want." "What they want is better products for free." --Scott Adams ------------------------------ From: "D. Pearton" Date: Thu, 10 Aug 1995 19:20:45 -0700 (PDT) Subject: HQ & the comunity Hi all, Well I've just spent a good deal of time wading through all the digests and I thought I'd add my thoughts. I don't have any contributions to the mechanistic debate as I'm not all that enamoured with mechanics myself. I do want to add my support to Neil and David (Cake and Dunham) who reiterated that heroquests are largely community affairs. Heros are those who go out and gain benifits for their tribe/clan/village. If the local fertility spirit is being beset by cold demons from valind's glacier then you go and fight it for the good of the tribe. There are heros whose primary objectives are personal power, we can mention a certain white bear..., but I think that the majority aren't. Most of the HQ's I've read about, Harmast, Arkat, Argrath, Jar-Eel, Sartar, Elame'-Ata(sp?) are HQing for the good of their community or the world. The personal power that they gain is a "side-effect" of that. I think that mechanistic rules tend to obscure this point and should at best be used as guidelines. I think that any heroquest rules must take into account the support of the comunity, cf the white feather that represented the support of the tribe in the LBQ. That's all for now folks, Yak - -- *********************************************************************** Dave Pearton * ....As I was saying before I Biochemistry Dept. * was so rudely interrupted University of Washington * by one of my multiple Seattle * personalities.... pearton@u.washington.edu * pearton@unpsun1.cc.unp.ac.za * Naked Lunch (W.S. Burroughs) ************************************************************************ ------------------------------ End of RQ Rules Digest: V2 #33 ****************************** This is the bottom of the RuneQuest Rules Digest. RuneQuest is a trademark of Avalon Hill, and Glorantha is a trademark of Chaosium. With the exception of previously copyrighted material, unless specified otherwise all text in this digest is copyright by the author or authors, with rights granted to copy for personal use, to excerpt in reviews and replies, and to archive unchanged for electronic retrieval. 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