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Post by vladtolenkov on Jan 3, 2012 15:36:09 GMT -6
Okay, a few months ago I was pouring through the RQ 2nd edition rulebook, and I was trying to work out how setting up a RQ campaign differs from setting up a classic D&D campaign. There is some really good advice floating around about old school D&D sandbox style campaigns, but I wanted to work out what type of campaign the RQ rulebook seemed to suggest and what ways it differed from a sandbox D&D campaign. I started a thread on story games which you can find here: story-games.com/forums/discussion/15014/gm-stance-in-old-school-sim-games-aka-how-would-you-run-runequestI framed the discussion as being connected to the issue of GM stance/role which is something that has been an active topic over there in the last year or so. In that thread, one of the commenters, epweissengruber, had some really wonderful advice about setting up a RQ campaign which I'm going to quote from here: You don't have to know all of Stafford's fictional world to play the game. Look at the text: there are 2 cults and models and a description of 1 or 2 guilds. All you need is to do as Johnstone suggests: make a map with neat spots. Now come up with 2 positive cults, 2 weird cults, and 2 evil cults for your bad guys to worship. Make up details about initiation and Rune Lord/Priest status as needed for your characters. Put their temples on your map and bang! Your players can choose to react with those however they wish. Let them set goals in this fictional space. Do NOT have the temple of truth COMMAND them what to do. Religion and magic are ways to advance characters and have fun NOT for the GM to railroad.
"That fits with many of the other things included in the game--especially a cool two page map of the Kingdoms of Sartar and Prax which, although not on a hex grid, is exactly right for exploration style adventures. "
Exactly. This is all you need. Look at that 2 Page History of Glorantha! That is all you need to set up a little campaign space and make an adventure area as Johnstone suggests. Look at the runes. All you have to do is look at the rune as say "humh, what rune-related stuff is there?" or "what opposing rune would want to mess around there" or "what would this guy way over here find of interest in this opposing rune way over here?"
1. Look over the character sheets and make note of their skills.
- set challenges high to make advancement hard
- set challenges low to speed up skill advancement
- given them communities there to help them advance their favoured skills IF they do such and such or IF they will join up. But give choices.
2. Treasure. So maybe there's loot hoards in monster-infested dungeons, or maybe there's just financial rewards for being a judicial champion or recovering falcons.
- financial rewards are all you need for the game mechanics
- to reinforce the fiction have communities approach them for their good deeds OR have opposing communities take them to task
- at least have the characters see the responses to their actions -- you don't always have to present them with drama every time they take an action
3. "The chance to die," of course means danger.
- Or crippling! Beginning characters in Runequest are fragile. Limbs get chomped all of the time.
- That means that characters need help from communities/organizations/temples/guilds. You want healing spells, you have to make nice with the healer cults, and make big contributions if you want resurrections. You need to get relics that contain healing spells and into which you can devote your personal power. (The idea that you project your own personal drives into magical items is very close to the psycho-anthropology of magic).
- To have real heroes there has to be real danger. Keep death meaningful in Runequest.
4. This usually goes without saying, but I like that it's called out in the text. Put in fun stuff! Try to make exploring this map and pursuing treasures and other opportunities as fun and exciting as possible.
- And meaningful.
- And hooked to reward and advancement.
- Advancement: skill use possibilities, items of special interest to temples and guilds that could get you skills and spells, COIN
- Reward: seeing your character get to use specialized skills successfully, interacting with allied magical powers (followers of the god of principles that the character follows), interacting with enemy magical/mythical forces, and CHANGING Glorantha. That can include participating in initiation ceremonies, undertaking the great challenges that one must pass in order to rise to higher levels like devotee, Rune Lord, and Priest.
Do all of this on your own. Do NOT try to wade through Gloranthaphilia to get your answers. Make stuff that will engage players. And provide POSSIBLE routes of progress, not railroads.
Thoughts and expansions on this would be welcome. Edit: Updated the link above. |
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bert
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Post by bert on Jan 3, 2012 18:45:49 GMT -6
Doing a RQ sandbox should not be far different from a D&D sandbox. The key elements are the same; some towns (and some politics), a few big baddies, lots of little baddies on encounter tables and some well signposted easy scenarios to kick things off. The cult thing means you are going to have to be a bit more in depth than usual in developing your campaign religions, but that's about it.
Are you going to set it in Glorantha? If so have you looked at the Blank Lands? Another thing it might be worth reading is Greg Stafford essay on RQ Campaigns from the Moon Design Griffin Mountain reprint.
I am currently running a Griffin Mountain campaign over Google+, and GM is as good an example as any of how to do a sandbox for any game - the key is adventure hooks, adventure hooks and more adventure hooks. The nice thing about Glorantha (and Balazar) is that there is no shortage of inspiration for plots.
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Post by vladtolenkov on Jan 3, 2012 19:48:02 GMT -6
I've been wanting to get a copy of the moon design Griffin Mountain. I'll probably just have to settle for the PDF from RPGNow. . .
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Post by Falconer on Aug 17, 2012 7:53:39 GMT -6
FYI, hard copies of the Moon Design Griffin Mountain are available once again.
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Post by trebormills on Aug 17, 2012 21:17:20 GMT -6
dont forget the issaries stuff for heroquest/hero wars- yes its not strictly RQ anymore but it has some great stuff for the heortlings if your in dragon pass. not so good for prax. for hq/hw pdf's, books or website support is good- i also love the clan creator and dragon pass pc/ios game.
I like dragon pass with the lunar vs heortling tension but rq2 seemed much more focussed on prax
RQ IMO= ducks, lunars, heortlings, broo, walkapus, trolls/uz, elves/aldraymi, weird riders, humkat
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Post by Finarvyn on Aug 25, 2012 7:06:37 GMT -6
FYI, hard copies of the Moon Design Griffin Mountain are available once again. Really? Do you have a link for this? |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 25, 2012 7:15:30 GMT -6
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Post by Deleted on Aug 25, 2012 8:41:41 GMT -6
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Post by Deleted on Nov 22, 2012 12:05:57 GMT -6
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Post by kesher on Nov 22, 2012 17:29:01 GMT -6
Um, that was some of the best advice for setting up an RQ2 that I've seen. I'd add run with the HeroQuest idea of the characters forming their own hero band (or adventure band, using RQ2 terminology), and binding a spirit to the group.
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Baron
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Post by Baron on Nov 22, 2012 20:16:16 GMT -6
I like dragon pass with the lunar vs heortling tension but rq2 seemed much more focussed on prax RQ IMO= ducks, lunars, heortlings, broo, walkapus, trolls/uz, elves/aldraymi, weird riders, humkat Seconded! HW/HQ gaming turned into scenarios and campaigns that just didn't interest me. |
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Post by Vile Traveller on Nov 22, 2012 22:24:42 GMT -6
By the time I actually got my hands on some of the other RQ stuff my campaign world had already organically grown so detailed that I never really incorporated much of it. I still have a big desert called "the Haunted Lands" where everyone else has a "Shadow Plateau". There is a hell of a lot of stuff to base a sandbox off just in the RQ2 rulebook, even without Apple Lane/Rainbow Caves and Fangs. Also, remember you don't need to know much about cults unless your players join them - for NPCs you just need anything that materially affects the game (spells, gifts, geases, etc.).
Also check out the Gringle's Pawnshop forums for some old-school RQ talk.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 24, 2012 15:15:46 GMT -6
I’ve been asking a question similar to vladtolenkov: How much Glorantha do you need to set up a RuneQuest campaign? As a newbie to old-school RuneQuest and Glorantha, I’ve been struggling with it. I wish I had read this piece of advice sooner: You don't have to know all of Stafford's fictional world to play the game … Do NOT try to wade through Gloranthaphilia to get your answers. I did try to wade through all the Gloranthaphilia out there, and I was quickly overwhelmed by it. Then I realized that those old-school Runquest players didn’t have access to all that, since much of the current Gloranthaphilia hadn’t been published yet. So, how much Glorantha do you need to set up a RuneQuest campaign? Looking at what was available back then, I’ve come to a couple conclusions. First, I think I agree with with Baron and jamesm when they say: Just to drop my preferences into the mix, I'm a fan of Chaosium's RQ2 myself, in Prax, 3rd Age. I think, for gamers of a certain vintage, Third Age Prax is RQ. I know that's technically not true, even in the historical sense, as Chaosium produced material set in other places -- even other worlds -- for RQ2, but, for a lot of us, " RuneQuest" means RQ2, which also means Glorantha, which also means Prax. The reasons why this is the case are not immediately apparent: As jamesm mentions, Chaosium did produce material set in other places, and the rulebook itself talks about Dragon Pass and Sartar far more than Prax. So why Prax? I think the answer lies in the history of the game: Apparently, in the beginning there were two campaigns: Stafford’s Satar campaign and Perrin’s Prax campaign. For whatever reason, the Satar campaign never got published as a RuneQuest product outside of the rulebook, and two early scenarios: Apple Lane and Snake Pipe Hollow . This left the Prax campaign as the source of (perhaps) much of the supplementary material that actually did get published. But what about Griffin Mountain? It was actually published before any of the Pavis, Big Rubble, or Borderlands supplements, so why Prax instead of Balazar? The answer to this involves character progression. As ffilz writes: One other issue for Praxians in Balazar is getting temple training, which to me is an important part of the game. This factor weighs heavily to a Prax/Pavis based campaign as being one of the few places one would expect to be able to find temple training for every cult documented in Cults of Prax (and probably most of the cults from Cults of Terror). And this brings me to my second conclusion: in Glorantha, character engagement with society, especially guilds and cults, are a key component of the game. The gentleman the vladtolenkov quotes in the first post explains it like this: (original post here). In the end, I suspect epweissengruber is right: all you really need is the rulebook, and some imagination to design your own map, cults and guilds based on the models it provides. However, since I’m lazy, I’m interested in basing my campaign on published materials. Based on my conclusions that Prax is old-school Glorantha and the importance of cults, I will opine that Pavis, Big Rubble, and Cults of Prax are probably all I need to know about Glorantha to set up a RuneQuest campaign. The rest of it is nice to have, but not necessary. Your mileage may vary, of course… |
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Baron
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Post by Baron on Nov 24, 2012 15:41:54 GMT -6
I agree with your conclusions. I would point out that Griffin Mountain was a product written and submitted by Paul Jaquays, not one of the original campaigns, and added to Gloranthan canon based on its quality. (Which is considerable.) But it had a different feel, at least to me, and I wasn't at all interested in running a game there or playing in one.
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Post by Vile Traveller on Nov 24, 2012 18:58:50 GMT -6
Based on my conclusions that Prax is old-school Glorantha and the importance of cults, I will opine that Pavis, Big Rubble, and Cults of Prax are probably all I need to know about Glorantha to set up a RuneQuest campaign. I can go with that.  |
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Post by kpeterson on Jan 3, 2015 16:59:44 GMT -6
Apologies for necro-ing an old thread, but.. great thread. I remember reading that original thread on the StoryGames forum a few years back, and it really opened my eyes to the potential of running a personalized from of RQ2 Glorantha, without having to go to the extent of digesting the entirety of Gloranthan background.
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Post by havard on Jan 4, 2015 13:20:33 GMT -6
Cool thread. Although the initial post mentions skill use under advancement, I think that skills should be integral in setting up adventures. Since successfull skill use means a chance at advancement, there should be lots of situations where the PCs get to use all their different skills.
-Havard
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Post by chris107 on Feb 17, 2020 10:09:03 GMT -6
For a number of years now a couple of fellows from Dragonsfoot & I have been looking at starting a RQ2 campaign.
After much discussion we’ve hit on a format and are now two sessions in.
Rather than the traditional DM and players route we are treating it as a mutual exploration of a world we adore. With each taking up the writing gauntlet as fancy takes them.
I started the ball rolling in Adari with a brief adventure that allowed everyone to knock off the rust and get used to the mechanics again. I was not selfless in this as for decades I was unhappy that Biturian’s travels ended in Adari and I’ve expanded them right through to a possible hero quest at Sogs Ruins.
Others may choose to take us in different directions of travel along the way. More likely one or more characters will loose limbs and we’ll start again somewhere else.
For us there are benefits to this mutual writing exercise. Firstly we get to explore the bits of Glorantha that intrigue us as well as been introduced to areas we possibly wouldn’t have looked at. Secondly we get to enjoy several different styles of scenario, we each have a very different way of doing stuff but most importantly we get to have a laugh with our chums playing a game we love.
Next up the one of the characters is trying to join the Storm Bull cult as a lay member. Dream Questing will be involved.
We run it over on my Discord channel when ever folks are free. It can be added to at anytime the muse is upon us with a catch up game when it’s convenient.
If anyone would like to take a look or come join us sometime, leave a message and I’ll send an invitation.
Regards
Chris
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Post by thorswulf on Feb 25, 2020 22:00:37 GMT -6
WOW! Some great observations all around. I can really appreciate the whole problem of getting wrapped up in the Gloranthaphilia. It tends to just suck you in as it is so d**n interesting! Alas the sheer volume of it is truly overwhelming. I like RQ2, nay love it as a system. I think using the framework and winging the cults is a terrific idea. My suggestion is make the cult write ups about the REALLY important ones (good, weird, bad) and to a lesser extent simplify cults that deal with day to day things like farming, by having them be minor NPC type affairs. Sure you get a priest to bless your crops, but how important is that when you are trying to recover the Lost Eye of Haggoth (or whatever)? Not very. Only minimal write ups about what kind of sacrifices are needed and so forth if you wanted to.
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