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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Joerg Baumgartner" data-source="post: 7759560" data-attributes="member: 6893976">I switched to RuneQuest when AD&D 1st ed still was alive and kicking, because the rules were so much less complicated. And there are no levels, no character classes, with the cults offering magic and a few specialist skills much like prestige classes used to do in those handbooks for fighters, clerics etc.A successful parry works similar to armor class, but absorbs damage - possibly to the amount of armor worn on the hit location affected, in which case nothing gets through. Other than shields, parrying weapons get damaged when parrying too much damage.Hit points remain the same.In a way, your armor class (the parry roll) rises with experience, while your hit points remain static. Armor and magic can absorb more damage, which is vital because your ability to parry additional attacks is at -20% for each subsequent attack. As long as they can penetrate the armor, crowds of weak attackers getting to attack in the same melee round will wear any RuneQuest fighter down. And that's before special or critical successes which increase the damage and (with criticals) ignore armor.And that's just the mechanical side.The world of Glorantha may appear daunting, and it may require your players to shift their mindset. You wouldn't play a Dothraki horse warrior or an Unsullied slave soldier like a modern member of western civilization. When playing a Gloranthan, your character's society and cult will have virtues that your real life may see as vices or socially unacceptable. But then, how many revenge-killings have your characters in other systems performed, and how many have you in your real life? (The latter, hopefully none...)Your Gloranthan characters will tie in with their society. The cults are a great source of magic and support, but they require adherence to their (and their deities') rules. There will be times when both cult and society may be far away, but the gods aren't as long as you characters don't mess up. (Actually, when the characters mess up with the tenets of their faith, the gods and their spirits of retribution may be all too present...)There is other magic, too. Spirit magic comes from interaction with the spirit world, and shamans can provide your characters with more magic without joining a cult, although they, too, may have cults.And then there are sorcerers. Most of them are tied to cults or schools that perform a similar resource, but their magic comes from themselves and their mastery over the world. Sorcery spells take some time to cast and may be expensive in the amount of magic points required, but they can be manipulated in various ways, including duration which may result in long lasting low-level blessings available to the sorcerers and their friends, or in big-effect magics.Spells are defined by runes and techniques, which the sorcerer must have mastered (directly or indirectly), and each spell has its own skill which must be improved separately (through experience in application). And they need to be fueled, which will require some help from enchantments, bound spirits and artifacts for big effects.Now about the setting. The world almost perished in the Gods War, and was rebuilt from the fragments of myth and mundane reality that survived annihilation. The normal world of Glorantha is what other systems may have as otherworlds they visit in planar travel - a flat, cracked cube of earth floating in the center of an endless ocean with only the top side breaking out of the water, under a sky dome under which the sun travels on the day, only to disappear into the bowl of the underworld during night to reappear in the morning.Survival of the universe depends on your culture supporting the myths of survival and existence in the two weeks of Sacred Time, as does survival of your community in the magics and rituals they perform over the year, securing harvests, keeping foes at bay etc. - and between all of those activities that happen mostly in the backstory, adventure or special challenges await your characters.These challenges may take your characters into familiar roleplaying environments like wilderness, caves, ancient tombs or ruins, or they may take you into even more magical otherworlds, to walk the paths of gods to learn their feats or to prevent bad things in the real world to come to fruition.The gods are divided in different pantheons, with at times diametrically different goals, but they (almost) all united in compromise to keep Chaos at bay. Some Chaos entities became part of that compromise, and some compromise it.The RQG rules push you into the conflict between the storm- and earth-worshipping hill barbarians and the too civilized Lunar Empire which is a contradiction between a radically liberating religion of mystics in an ancient and rigid patriarchalic empire of sun worshippers ruling over an earthy peasantry. Both sides have used great magics in the past, the Lunars to conquer the barbarians, then the barbarians to throw off the Lunar oppression of their gods. The Lunar side habitually uses Chaos, the Orlanthi side has awakened a several miles long dragon that had better been left to slumber.Many of the denizens of Glorantha are humans, but there are elder races and minor species, too. Some of them are - somewhat misleadingly - named elves, dwarves, trolls, or goblins, but they bear at best superficial similarity with the standard ones you will be used to. Elves, or aldryami, are walking humanoid plants, more ent-like than resembling the likes of Galadriel or Drizzt, and goblins aka slorifings are a fern-like variety of that who live in hot swamps. Dwarves, or clay mostali, are humanoid tools of the World Machine, endlessly trying to repair the Gods War damage done to the great mechanism as which they see the world, and trolls aka uz are humanoid beings of Darkness who had to flee their lightless Underworld paradise when the dead sun was imprisoned there and burnt everything.Besides these Elder Races, there are numerous forms of merfolk, beastfolk from known ones like centaurs, satyrs and minotaurs via fox-women, swan-maidens to anthropomorphic water fowl, and then there are the draconic beings.True Dragons can be many miles long and may resemble a hill range while they are sleeping/meditating. While doing so, they can manifest aspects of themselves as so-called Dream Dragons, which have the dimensions you would usually expect to encounter in dragons. There are lesser dragonkind, like the winged but otherwise limbless wyrm, the bipedal wyverns, and then there are the dragonewts - immortal or rather reincarnating neotenic dragons which come in various stages of development and which strive for full dragonhood, possibly several deaths and rebirths in the future. Or not, if they fail in their development and grow into grotesque caricatures of dragonhood - dinosaurs.Engaging with this world may let you encounter lethal danger, weird mysticism, walk and experience the myths from the perspective of your gods or ancestors, and just maybe save the world or at least the little bit of it where your community lives. Centuries-old plots are coming to their conclusions while unexpected as well as prophecied actors bring in their own schemes, and errors from the past that had been thought securely buried may be exposed again. But then, your ancestors had to deal with that, too, and more than once, so maybe you just do everything in your power to keep things as they were.</blockquote>

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