From: Eric Hansen (ehansen@adan.kingston.net)
Date: Wed 12 Aug 1998 - 10:33:08 EEST
Alex asks for clarification about HW mastery runes
> when you say starting characters don't have a level of mastery, do you mean
> "except for the idiotic 'free' level of mastery they get by virtue
> of being PCs (sic), of course, which goes without saying", or do you
> mean "No, they don't, none at all, none whatsoever"?
1) No character starts with any ability/skill/trait/passion/whatever better than 6/14 in
HW. No mastery runes can be gained until an ability of 2/18 is improved using Plot
Points. Instead of getting a 1/19, the character gets a 19W(this means mastery rune)21.
It should take some time for characters to acquire mastery runes, and even when they do,
abilities get better at more or less even increments. Gaining a mastery rune doesn't give
you a sudden and illogical leap in that ability. Sure, you have a mastery rune, which
bumps you up against poor slobs without them, but your roll before bumpup is almost
always a failure. Only characters who have been played a lot will have mastery runes in
abilities with low target numbers.
2) Player characters DO get a bumpup (as if they had a mastery rune) against what I
refer to as unnamed characters. If the character is so insignificant that you can't even
be bothered to give it a name, PCs get a bumpup against it. The rules do not explicitly
define ordinary people as unnamed (this is my own interpretation of _ordinary_). I think
the spirit of the rule is that PCs don't get the bumpup against any important GMCs.
Important, in this case, refers to the GMs dramatic purposes. Since HW models adventure
fiction/action movies, this convention makes sense. There are even a few rpgs (Torg,
AD&D and Feng Shui, frex) that use the idea of important vs. ordinary characters. Not
that this matters. If your Glorantha isn't going to be like adventure fiction/action
movies, chuck the rule out.
It is this _Ord_ rule that gave me, personally, the most trouble, at first. PCs in
I'll admit that once, when a PC fought his way out of a lunar fortified camp, he managed
This action in the lunar fortified camp of Totorum : ) also happened before the rule that
In summary:
Glorantha a cut above? Huh? But after playing the game for a while without using the ord
rule, and then playing with the ord rule, I became a convert. It lets the PCs deal with
minor obstacles more easily, letting game time focus on major obstacles, without
requiring PC abilities to grow to ultra-high levels (relatively speaking).
to accumulate in excess of 1400 SPs as a result of his bumpup, and an amazing run of luck
to counter huge negative modifiers for being heavily outnumbered. The odds said that he
should have gone down bleeding and squealing. The lunars poured more and more soldiers
into that confused meatgrinder of a melee, until they got an idea of what was happening.
When they disengaged and regrouped, those accumulated SPs became irrelevant, because the
break reset everyone's (the survivors, anyway) SP values to their normal levels (SPs
represent a character's situation relative to the others he's fighting). After that,
only spending Plot Points let Our Hero live to fight another day. I initially found the
sheer number of SPs accumulated appalling, but there are solid rules that allow you to
control the flow of action, and thus SPs can be periodically reset. Despite my
misgivings, though, this action was a lot of FUN.
allows a defender to reduce the SP bid of its attacker in exchange for a die roll
penalty. Once Bollix' (yes, that's really the character's name) SPs started climbing,
his player's bids did too, and things just spiralled out of control. If the same fight
had happened with the Defender Response to SP bids rule in effect, the total would never
have gotten so high.
- -PCs don't start with mastery runes, but do get bump ups against ords.
- -The rightness or wrongness of this is left to the discretion of the individual
gloranthaphile.
- -Never let Bollix out of the village alone after dark.
- -On second thought, who's going to stop him?
- -These lunars are crazy
Eric
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