From: Graeme A Lindsell (graeme.lindsell@anu.edu.au)
Date: Sun 07 Nov 1993 - 20:33:13 EET
Ken Rolston writes:
>The boxed RQ3 edition is being replaced by a paperback with the same
>contents, but cheaper, so you won't be able to get the old boxed edition. I
And the questions rain down on Ken:
This sounds like a good move, since the price of the boxed set must have hurt sales. Is this product plus a RQ3 Rules Companion intended to replace the RQ4 project?
Does it include the material in the Glorantha Book in the Deluxe Set? I have the GDW hardbound set, which doesn't include that section.
Are there any plans to replace the other RQ3 products with a paperback version: I would buy the Gods of Glorantha and Glorantha: Genertela books immediately if they were re-issued in a somewhat more durable form.
johnjmedway writes:
>Why are we still wishing for this?
>1. Stafford doesn't seem interested in Chaosium doing it again.
>2. Avalon Hill and Ken have been doing very well, lately, if a bit slow.
I can have few complaints about Ken's work, but I can't believe Chaosium would show less interest in Runequest than Avalon Hill has. To me the basic difference is this: Chaosium produces successful role-playing games; Avalon Hill doesn't.
Geoff Gunner writes:
>And if your Uroxi
>is up agains enemies who *repeatedly* D.I. away from trouble then he/she's up
>against some _MEAN_ enemies ! I mean, are they all Rune Lords or what ?
He's only managed to trample 3 enemies so far: we're rarely fighting mounted. One of those cases was an initiate who DI'd, the others were shamans (all broos). My GM allows a simple DI in this case:
"[Insert Deity of Your Choice] Save Me!"
And he has an unusual amount of luck in rolling for it to work. Quite a lot of our enemies DI away, basically because he allows them to DI after they've been hit/killed.
Nick Brooke writes re the Pharoah:
>The Heortlanders call him. King of Kings? God-King? Who knows?
While Joerg suggests
>Pendragon, Ard Ri, Bretwalda, High King, Holy King, or local
>adaptions. The Shadow Plateau trolls might call him the Only New One.
Given his self-resurrecting habits, and continuing the Arthurian theme, how about the Once and Future King?
Joerg re Tradetalk:
>I've wrestled with Nick about the uses of Trade Talk in Aeolian
>society, and we came to peace with something along this lines: If we
>allow an earth parallel, it would be basest vulgar latin, maybe one
>would be speaking in the trucations mediaeval monks used to make in
>their copies. The real written form would be old Seshnegi, parallel to
>high latin, which would be understood partly by someone able to read
>Seshnegi script.
Well since the West has a single standardised script (again, compared with Latin) that means any literate person from the West should be able to get by in written tradetalk.
Make me wonder: could the written form of tradetalk in central Genertelan culture be older than we think? I'd guess that Arkat would have chosen to spread his own written language over the lands he conquered. The God Learners would then have spread it further. I'd guess that Western script would be one of the scripts that a Lhankhor Mhy would be expected to learn to be considered educated, along with New Pelorian and whatever local script they use.
David Dunham writes:
>Here's an unrelated question: magical tattoos. If you tattoo a matrix in
>your skin, is it usable by anyone else? I gave a bad guy a matrix, and my
>players wanted to skin him once they'd defeated him. I decided that it
>probably wouldn't work, but the RQ4 answer was that it would
There are arguments for both views:
Yes: If the caster didn't put a limiting enchantment on the skin tatoos, then yes they could be used.
No: when you destroy/break the item the enchantment is on, the enchantment fails. You could rule that skinning is destruction
When we played SotBL one of the broos had skin tatoos (MP storage) on his chest, and when he died our party Yelmalio decided to get them. Problem was, he had no butchery or skinning skill, so he had to dismember the broo and carry it's chest around with him, avoiding our Storm Bull initiate since it was still chaotic. Eventually, (after skinning) he gave it to Penliss as a gift.
Beware! Spoilers for Shadows on the Borderland below:
Sandy Petersen writes:
>I do think that doing Bad Things (rape, murder, torture) disrupts the
>world's order, and makes it easier for Chaos to break in. Let's not
Absolutely. Gaumata's vision is an example of a mundane evil deed allowing chaos into the world. IMO show how weak the fabric of Gloranthan reality is, that such an act can wreak such havoc.
Total Speculation Below:
I suspect that the fragile nature of Gloranthan reality is the reason the power of Gloranthan magic is slowly disappearing over time. On each of the Days the Magic Changed, we are told that the power of magic has dropped, from the Great Compromise onwards. I think that Glorantha/ Arachnae Solara/The Invisible God/Time/[Insert omnipotent deity of choice] must either reduce magic or be destroyed.
When you look at what heroquesting and the gods have done you can see that most "good" heroquests like Arkat, the LBQ, Dormal have been done to try and fix the damage done by "bad" heroquests - Gbaji, The God Learners, the Unholy Trio summoning Chaos, the Closing - and have never really fixed the original problem. In the long term powerful magic will destroy reality, as nearly happened with Chaos.
A test of this theory would be to find out what kind of mgic is available to the Harshax-era peoples of the Fourth Age. Can they still Heroquest, in the sense of enetering the Hero Plane, or are they limited to the more mundane ones like the Short LBQ detailed in KoS?
An observation on King of Sartar: one thing I find depressing about Gregs fourth age stuff is that it makes clear that nothing a third age PC does will amount to much: not because we're told that Argrath did everything (that could be false) but because it's obvious that Third Age civilization in central Genertela is going to be destroyed, and that little remains. Everything the players create will be undone.
Sandy again:
>The only advantage slavery
>offers in agriculture is that you can pay your workers very little.
>But you can do that anyway if you have serfs
I generally think of serfdom as slavery, though I know there are a few differences.
>Kralorela
>might not have many slaves, but I'm sure there are a few, and I bet
>the culture's not opposed to it.
I agree there is no real opposition, but most cultures that have lots of slaves practice agricultural slavery, since in premodern cultures this is what occupies most of the workers. China was notable for giving its peasants a fairly high social status, as compared with Europe through most of it's history. If Kralorela is the same then it is practically a free society, though not for the same reasons. (I know, this kinda destroys my previous argument about slavery in Genertela. Oh well)
There is of course the question of the status of women: one [anthropological] book I read about China details a small town just before WW2. The only slaves were female concubines, and there were very few. Do you know how women are treated in Kralorela?
Comparing with Genertela: it's noticable that agricultural slavery isn't mentioned much in the Glorantha Book, except of course for serfs in the West. I think it must be fairly widespread in the Lunar Empire: look at how many slaves the Polas have.
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