From: kenrolston@aol.com
Date: Thu 14 Oct 1993 - 17:55:45 EET
Graeme:
Re: Gross Encounters and Mild Campaign in Dorastor
Read the statements of intent prefacing the book and the individual Encounter and Risklands sections.
The Encounters are a design-it-yourself gross campaign -- for mega PCs and experienced GMs who can rarely use scripted scenarios as written. The stats are labor-saving and useful as examples and benchmarks of heart-of-Dorastor denizens.
The Riskland campaign, on the other hand, is explicitly for beginning and mid-level characters. It may be too tough for sensible, roleplaying, non-heroic PCs (my home playtest campaign packed up and left after the spiders appeared), but it is as close as I could come to an adaptable range for beginning or moderately experienced PCs. There is no intent that the Encounters could be used with the campaign; in fact, note that there is no Riskland entry on the encounter tables, and that the campaign explicitly states that there haven't been any significant chaos encounters during the two or three years of the new colony.
Dorastor deliberately contains GM development and campaign material for all levels of play. I was originally excited by the Lunar caravan structure, too; in fact, that's what hooked me on Sandy's original design. But it turned out to be a greased rail, guided tour adventure structure -- hardly a suitable structure for experienced PCs and GMs. You can only tolerate such linear structures for experienced characters when there is a big mythic payoff -- like in the Cradle scenario. I wanted a campaign setting book -- not a scenario -- and I feel that Dorastor has a clever compromise structure that serves both low-level and high-level Gloranthan fans and RQ gamers. Like all compromises, it can't fully satisfy the exclusive, narrow appetite. Only the test of time -- whether folks attempt to set campaigns in the setting -- will prove whether Dorastor's compromises were productive ones.
> My question for Ken: the drawing of "Arkat the Destroyer" on P11 (I
>think): are the swords flanking the scene meant to be the Unbreakable
>Sword? Why is Arkat human? Did the artist get inside info or is the
>picture, as one of my correspondents suggests, just bad fantasy art?
Grr. John Snyder is a hard-core RQ fan, and not a bad fantasy artist. The illustration was designed as religious art for an Orlanthi temple like the one in Oxhead. The facial features are hideous to suggest troll-like disfiguration, but the representation is basically human in line with the Orlanthi graphic tradition of representation of Arkat, emphasizing his humanity over his assumption of uz culture. The swords could well be intended by the Orlanthi religious artist to represent the Unbreakable Sword, but, as usual, the contemporary artist had no idea what the real sword looked like, and perhaps only a vague notion of what any real sword looked like. The interesting details of the goat-like fallen creature to the left, the relatively benign and helpless appearance of Nysalor at Arkat's feet, and the representation of the throne of Nysalor are all worthy of disputatious squabbling among Lunar art historians.
Ken
From: RuneQuest-Request@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (RQ Digest Maintainer)
To: RuneQuest@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (Daily automated RQ-Digest)
Subject: RuneQuest Daily, Fri, 15 Oct 1993, part 2
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