Re: Designing & Rescuing Magic Systems

From: Tim Westlake (stormbull@cix.compulink.co.uk)
Date: Mon 10 Jan 1994 - 13:13:00 EET


In-Reply-To: <499A0182140@marketing.wharton.upenn.edu>
Paul Reilly writes

> I _liked_ the idea that Glorantha had deep underlying laws, some of
> which had been discovered by the inhabitants.

Absolutely, I couldnt agree more. The strongest part of Runequest for me
has allways been the environment of Glorantha and the way that the game
system complimented the world.

> There is now too much of "Glorantha is just like Earth, but with
> magic."

Yep! Glorantha exists because of its mythic creation. It is not Earth,
it is nothing like Earth and Earth concepts should not be applied to it.
There is no way that we can extrapolate the effects of magic on
societies, not when they have had over a thousand of years to work on it

and a natural understanding of its mechanics and limitations. Glorantha
is a fantasy environment and should be viewed as such.

As a side issue

The other night I sat down and read the RQ2 rule book. All of the rules
took me about 2 hours. This was a great strength to the game and led to

its popularity amongst new gamers in the early eighties. You could buy
all of the game mechanics in one book and they were easy to understand.
RQ3 altered this and understanding the game became a lot more of a
serious exercise, so much so that with the group that I play in we
actually run RQ2 with a couple of minor modifications.

TTFN

Tim


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