Immortal characters

The fear of mortals ganging up to kill them is the reason why the Witches of the _Bewitched_ series kept their existence secret. The Highlanders also keep their existence a secret from most mortals, so that mortals don't gang up on them and wipe them out.

Although I don't know what happens if a mortal cuts off the head of an immortal. I'm under the impression that only a Highlander can kill another Highlander, and that if a mortal did it, the Highlander would eventually recover.

(Still, it might be hard to do anything if you're buried seven feet under the earth. But I suppose an immortal could eventually dig his way to freedom.)

If the mortals don't know there are those among them with superhuman powers, they aren't going to do anything about it.
 
Utgardloki said:
The fear of mortals ganging up to kill them is the reason why the Witches of the _Bewitched_ series kept their existence secret. The Highlanders also keep their existence a secret from most mortals, so that mortals don't gang up on them and wipe them out.

Although I don't know what happens if a mortal cuts off the head of an immortal. I'm under the impression that only a Highlander can kill another Highlander, and that if a mortal did it, the Highlander would eventually recover.

(Still, it might be hard to do anything if you're buried seven feet under the earth. But I suppose an immortal could eventually dig his way to freedom.)

If the mortals don't know there are those among them with superhuman powers, they aren't going to do anything about it.

There is NOTHING that says that anywhere in Highlander, just that if your head is seperated from your body its all over (nothing about it having to be an Immortal or not) in fact there are instances where an Immortal has 'lost his head' not from a direct blow from another Immortal, and the Quickening has 'leapt' into the nearest Immortal.


"I'm talking about a chance of living forever. To live free." "What, without a head?" -- Richie and MacLeod
 
So if a mortal does behead a highlander immortal, that just helps bring about the day when there is only one highlander left?

So maybe beheading immortals is not such a good idea...
 
Utgardloki said:
So maybe beheading immortals is not such a good idea...

I guess it depends on the individual immortal. Some are just asking for it. :)

I reckon an explosion would do the job just fine, just so long as it was powerful enough to seperate the head from the torso. Of course, if you just obliterate the torso that solves everything I would guess :D
 
The rules simply and clearly state, if your head is seperated from your body.

So - Decapitation, Road Accidents, Industrial Accidents, Explosions, it all counts Lol!
 
BTW, I know the people in the UK know this, but I've run into some of my own countrymen who don't so..

Highlander is a term that applies to people from the Highlands of Scotland. It was orginally used to refer to Connor MacCleod. That is why there are lines like "Ther Highlander, bring him to me!" in the orignal film.

The term was used in the series mostly because the producers tried to capture as much of the COnnor concept that they could, making Ducan another Scotsman from the same clan and who carried a Katana.

None of the other immortals in the films or show are ever reffered to as "Highlanders".

Sorry, but I actually witnessed someone at work once wanting to call security on a man because he claimed to be a "Highlander". She thought he was insane. He thought she was being rude. I almost didn't stop laughing in time to pip up and stop one potentially great lawsuit.
 
S'ok.

I have Scottish relatives on my Mothers side of the family Lol!

TBH - Highlander is a bit of fun (I am also a fan of Gregory Widens other creation "The Prophecy") it bugs me when people take it all that seriousley.

Its not like its real (unlike Glorantha ;))!
 
I also noticed that nobody called anybody a "highlander" in the "Highlanders" episodes I watched, except perhaps as a reference to the Scottish characters.

It's kind of unfortunate in my setting though, because the "highlanders" are not the only immortals running around. There are also vampires and amazons and angels and who knows what else.

That could cause a problem with people trying to take off Wonder Woman's head because they think they'll get some quickening out of it.
 
Lieutenant Rasczak said:
S'ok.

I have Scottish relatives on my Mothers side of the family Lol!

TBH - Highlander is a bit of fun (I am also a fan of Gregory Widens other creation "The Prophecy") it bugs me when people take it all that seriousley.


It's just incredibly funny as most Americans are not that familar with the term. If they had used a character from any other part of the Earth it probably would have caught on in the same way. Connor MacCelod, the East-Ender? Heck they could have called him the New Yorker and half the country wouldn't get it.





Lieutenant Rasczak said:
Its not like its real (unlike Glorantha ;))!

Eeek. Say it isn't so. Glorantha is real media? Why? What was wrong with mp3 or AAC or AC3 or FLAC or DIVX or XVID? Why real?

And remember...no one has know we were among you...

..until season two of the series when alll those freakin' watcher showed up.

You'd think that in six thousand years of recorded human history an immortal or two would have looked around and noticed they were being tailed. What with people out to decapitate them an all. Sheesh.
 
Utgardloki said:
I also noticed that nobody called anybody a "highlander" in the "Highlanders" episodes I watched, except perhaps as a reference to the Scottish characters.

It's kind of unfortunate in my setting though, because the "highlanders" are not the only immortals running around. There are also vampires and amazons and angels and who knows what else.

That could cause a problem with people trying to take off Wonder Woman's head because they think they'll get some quickening out of it.


Well, thereis an unoffcial set of Highlander rules (several) for White Wolf, where they have "playmates".

Actually if a GM is careful and prepares things, you can fit an immortant into a reguar campaign. You just gotta give them some major drawback to balance them out. Something like sword wielding lunatics who want to chop their head off. Plus once their secret is known, they start to run into more people doing precise strikes to the head.

They key is to start them off like a normal character. Keep them from dying (give no explaination) and then let their powers mature at around the same time that the other PCs are getting thier powerful abilties. After a point, they sort of look underpowered.
 
Managing immortal (or at least very long lived) characters isn't too bad in RQ. There's a few methods to handle super-high skills that we've run into.

First a bit of backround. The campaign I play in has been running continously since 1981 (actually a bit earlier, but it was technically moved to a new "world" at that time). As of this moment, we've had 116 years pass in game time. Most characters have lived, adventured, and died, with multiple generations passing over that time. To give you an example, in the senario I'm running right now, there's a character that is the great great grandson of one of the first characters ever played in the campaign. During this time, there have been a few who've achieved some level of extended life (heroquesting type stuff) and are therefore exceptionally old (most in the 100-120 year range just due to time that's passed though, so nothing like the 400-5000 year span you'd see for highlander style immortals for instance).


The first thing I can tell you is that combat skills will advance continually. I personally have a character that's about 110, and has a 380something skill with his primary weapon. He's a bit of a special case, since he's a RuneLord of Humakt and so has focused on mastering his sword skill to the exclusion of most other things (As a side note, due to his religion, he had to take some pretty hefty geases in order to allow him that long of a life, Humakt tending to want his people to die and come join his army in the afterworld...). The point I'm getting at is that I think most people are grossly understimating the rate of skill advancement that can and will occur if you actually played characters out for 400 years (for example). You will run into problems if you actually plan to have NPCs or even PCs with very long lives. You'll need to come up with some rules to explain why they don't all have skills in the 1000%+ range.

How we manage this is that we apply "soft caps" to skills. First off, for non-weapon skills, it's generally not a big deal. With the straight MRQ halving rule, it might be, but we've always used the "subtract your roll from your skill" method, which somewhat automatically places diminishing returns on super high skill. By 150%ish, you're high enough on a non-opposed skill roll to overcome most negatives that GM might apply because of environment. By 200%ish, you're going to be able to defeat most opposing skills you'll run into 100% of the time (ok, 95% of the time). Past that, additional points only allow you to overcome higher opposing skills, which presumably you'll run into only a small percentage of the time. In 25 years of playing, we've never had a problem with super high non-combat skills. They're somewhat self correcting (and the GM still gets to decide what exactly a success means, so they don't overpower anything really).

It's the combat skills that can become a problem. We came up with a somewhat logical scale to handle it. The assumption we started with was that the first 100% represents your ability to master the "basics" of a weapon. You're learning standard attacks/parries/etc. Nothing special. Just learning to execute the standard moves consistently. The second 100% (101-200), you're learning the standard counters to the standard moves. We use a "optionally subtract skill over 100% from the opponents opposing combat skill" method, so this makes a whole lot of sense. You're literally countering his skill level with your own. And since he's still learning the "standard" moves (assuming he's under 100%), the 101-200% range is also relatively "standard" as well.

Past 200%, the assumption is that you're now learning custom moves. You're creating your own unique style of fighting. You've mastered the standard moves, and the standard methods to counter those standard moves, and are now coming up with your own "tricks" to allow you to overcome even higher skill levels. At this point, you can only gain skill increases from an opponent that is within 100% of your own (you can't learn anything from the "standard" moves anymore, because you've already mastered that stuff). This puts a gradual break on the rate of advancement past 200%, simply because the number of "normal" people that have skill significantly enough above 100% for you to get a skill increase will decrease sharply as you increase in your own skill. We do allow characters to still train their skills, but they must have someone to train with that meets the requirements (be within 100% of their skill).

Past 300%, we apply the final and largest break. At that point, you've created your own unique style of fighting, so you're basically learning to deal with other people's unique styles and counter them (you're only learning from opponents in the 201-300 range, right?). As such, you'll only learn a small amount from each different style you face. We abstract that by saying that you can gain no more then 5% from any one style. Training effectively stops at this point, because two high skilled people can't go past 305% just training together. Additionally, the assumption is that schools of fighting that actively train people past 200% will typically be teaching the same style, so you can't just have a group of NPCs sitting around fighting eachother and gain infinite skill. You actually have to travel around the world and face opponents of very high skill to continue progressing past this point.

We've found that this works very well. Not that we have that many characters in that range (I think we have only ever had maybe 3 characters exceed 300% with a weapon skill), but it's somewhat important to create a reason why a very long lived NPC doesn't have weapon skills that are incredibly high. So that super old vampire likely wont have skills much higher then the mid 250% range. Not because he's not old enough to have gotten higher, but simply because he's not necessarily seeking out highly skilled opponents (why on earth would a vampire do that!?). Same deal with that thousand year old necromancer. He'll be nasty powerful with his spells, but his combat skills should not be too much higher then some characters can obtain in a single lifespan.

Of course, orders of powerful immortal knights (like the Malkioni) can obtain very high levels of skill. But that's going to be the exception, not the rule. And even they will tend to peter out in the 400% range just due to a lack of opponents they could face with the same degree of skill that isn't someone they face all the time (their own people). As a general rule, we tend to make 400% the "semi-hard cap" for high level immortal warrior types, given the assumption of an incredibly small number of people in the 300%+ range which would be required for advancement past that point.

Highlander style immortals would actually be an exception in this case. Since they presumably *do* seek out other immortals and fight them, they'd have much greater potential for exceptionally high weapons skills then other immortal types. A campaign that included them would need to account for that. It's kind of hard to justify *any* real caps on their potential skill levels. But that's kinda in keeping with the series and films. They were pretty much represented as being just plain better at hand to hand combat then any mortal they ever encountered. However, that certainly does not make them immune to simple ranged attacks like bows and guns. As was mentioned several times in the series, mortals who knew about immortals could quite readily track them down and kill them. Because motals were not bound by the rules, and could kill them with guns and on holy ground.

The final (and perhaps most important bit) is that as a GM you control the NPCs. The best aspect of the Highlander series wasn't the swordfighting (although that was cool of course!), but the interaction of the characters. Every older immortal that a young PC immortal encounters does not have to be hell-bent on taking the younglings head. You can certainly roleplay out many encounters with older immortals as the GM, always giving the player(s) the perception that they could be wacked by this guy easily if he wished it, but perhaps he's more interested in something else instead (much more fun that way). Additionally, assuming you've got a mixed campaign, the NPC immortal may not want to deal with the PC immortal's friends, giving him a good reason not to attack (at least in a way that they'd know who did it).

Also, the skills sytem I just outlined allows for someone to be mentored to a pretty high skill pretty rapidly (rapidly is relative of course). With a semi-hard cap of 400%, and the potential for someone to train up to 300% (with a willing super-high skill mentor, perhaps someone like Ramirez?), it's quite possible to "prepare" a young immortal in a relatively short time to have a chance against a much older one. He may not be able to take on someone like the Kurgan first time out, but he'll be able to hold his own against the "average" immortal who might come after his head.

Dunno. That's just a system we use for our high skills. It's not like we have tons of PCs running around with skills in that range, but it's useful to have at least thought it out. If for no other reason to explain why some of the immortal NPCs running around *aren't* sitting in the 1000% range...
 
I like how you've thought things through, Gnarsh, and I'll have to use some of your ideas to interpret the 100%, 200%, and 300% levels.

I think my square root rule puts on a soft cap, because in order to find an NPC with 1000% sword ability (why would you want to?), you'd have to find a very ancient one.

And perhaps I'm being a bit too generous with how much improvement a typical highlander gets from killing his fellows.

The literature I've read indicates that immortals tend to take long vacations, which slows down their advancement. Also, the fact that it is harder to find opponents who can really challenge you means that it is harder to pick up new techniques.

I do have a problem, however, with what to do if I ever do create an NPC with 1000% skill. :shock:
 
Utgardloki said:
And perhaps I'm being a bit too generous with how much improvement a typical highlander gets from killing his fellows.

The literature I've read indicates that immortals tend to take long vacations, which slows down their advancement. Also, the fact that it is harder to find opponents who can really challenge you means that it is harder to pick up new techniques.

I've never played in a Highlander style game, but I've always had a few ideas about how I would run one if I did.

First off, you've got to remember that the series and films were always somewhat deliberately vague about exactly what "knowledge and power" was gained when an immortal took another immortal's head. A decent starting point would be to look at some of the writeups for RQ cults like Thanatar (Atyar really) and Bagog. Both have rituals that allow them to consume other sentient beings and take their knowledge. Typically, it's relatively small though. Like a skill increase roll in any skill you're not already better then them at, and nothing if you already have the skill in question at a higher ability. I think you'll find that adding skills together would introduce waaay too steep of a power increase.

In more general terms, I've always thought of the Highlander concept as having three aspects to "power":

1) Amount of "quickening energy". This is basically the magical energy that infuses an immortal and grants him his special abilities. All immortals have enough energy to do things like heal from damage and death, but presumably taking heads adds to this power. This can be thought of as a pool of energy that can be drawn upon. If you recall the first film, Ramirez describes it as the ability to feel the energy of things around you and become them. He demonstrates this by having Conor sense the beating of a stags heart, let the power flow into him, and run like the wind as a result. In theory, if you were to make a game, you might create "quickening powers" which would allow immortals to increase their physical/mental stats and abilities by expending points out of their pool. The more heads you've taken, the larger the pool.

2) Age and "quickening skill". Pretty simple. If you paid attention during the series, you'd note that older immortals tended to develop "special" abilities beyond the normal ones. One could plant suggestions into the minds of others. One could project nightmares. I always suspected that Methos developed the ability to mask his power level, since on several occasions they mentioned that immortals could sense the age/power of other immortals (the sound effect they used), and when Methos revealed himself to Duncan the first time they used this really strong low sound to represent the sensing, yet magically he appeared the same as any other immortal to everyone else (in fact pretending to be someone else to draw out another immortal in one eposide). In any case, the assumption here is that as an immortal gets older, he becomes better at using the power of the quickening and can use it (with a *lot* of research/training) to do nifty things beyond just swing a sword around and recover from injury really fast. This could be abstracted by some sort of research only skillset designed to take a long long long time to master (most immortals with special abilities were in the 3k+ range in the series).

3) Fighting ability. In the series and films (ok, excepting the last film, and which was the one part that made that film silly), your age and power seemed to have almost *no* impact on your survivability against another immortal (barring some special ability that might give you an edge). Methos was 5,000 years old, and the oldest immortal, yet due to being out of practice, he was no match for many other, much younger immortals. Also, clearly age and power alone wasn't the only determinant, or such relatively young immortals as Conor and Duncan should never have been as successful as they were. Clearly, while the other two aspects give immortals advantages in some areas, at the end of the day, it's the skill with a sword that's going to determine who wins in a straight fight.


I think the key to implementing Highlander style immortals into any game will be figuring out a good way to balance those three so that all have an impact on the total "power" of an immortal, but no one overpowering. They also serve to provide an interesting process of advancement for a PC immortal, since he'd likely not be able to develop any of the special abilities for a long time, but could certainly gain in general power over time, potentially increasing his "magic" abilities in other areas. Again, I'm assuming you're thinking of a mixed campaign where not all characters will be immortals, so having other special abilities might be useful (cause not every adventure is going to be about fighting another immortal).

Dunno. Just some thoughts I've had on the subject.
 
Utgardloki said:
There can only be one.

I was watching Highlander today, and thinking, "How would I implement one of those "highlander" immortals in Runequest?

The big problem is figuring out how high an immortal character could improve his skill level. The "highlanders" are even worse, since when one of them kills another, he gains all of his foe's experience.

I did some calculations, and concluded that a 400 year old "highlander" could very easily have a Sword ability at 720% or even higher, much much higher. With a 72% chance of getting a critical hit, I ought to make up rules for Ultra-Criticals.

Well, the first things is to work out what is different about certain character types and then work out how that affects them in a RQ environment.

With the Immortals from the Highlander films/series, they have certain abilities:
1. They are immortal and do not age after they have initially been killed
2. They have to be dealt a fatal blow in order to become immortal
3. They can sense other Immortals
4. They can only be killed by being beheaded
5. If an Immortal beheads another Immortal then he gains their powers, memories and some of their skills

Other people might think of other abilities, of course.

How to handle these in RQ?

1. Immortals do not naturally die, are immune to disease and poison and do not age.
2. An immortal who is dealt a fatal blow doesn't die and realises he is different.
3. They get a Sense Immortal skill that allows them to sense if another Immortal is nearby. It will only work with similar Immortals, so wouldn't trigger if a vampire came acalling.
4. Non-beheading blows are not fatal. Other locations hit regenerate at a rate depending on how powerful the immortal is.
5. Beheading another Immortal allows them to take some of the POW, memories and abilities of the killed immortal. Perhaps they get 1/10th POW and weapon skills.

Utgardloki said:
Fortunately for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Vampires are a lot easier to handle with my theories, since they don't acquire the experience of their defeated foes, and they spend so much time whining that they don't raise their skills as rapidly in any event. A 400 year old vampire would be more likely to have a combat ability at around 120%.

Vampires are tricky as RQ/Gloranthan vampires are not the same as vampires in Buffy or The Vampire Chronicles.

Generally, non-Gloranthan Vampires have some of the special abilities:
1. They are undead and are immortal
2. They are super-strong, super-fast and super-hard-to-kill (cut head off, stake through the heart, burn to death)
3. They do not have reflections or shadows
4. They can turn into bats or wolves
5. They must drink blood to survive
6. They cannot enter a building without having previously been invited in
7. Sunlight burns them
8. They don't like the Crucifix
9. They get more powerful as they get older.

So, in RQ terms:
1. They do not age and are immune to diseases and poisons
2. STRx2, CONx2, Vampiric Hit Locations (doubled HPs in each location), turn to smoke if smashed in a non-vital (head/chest), take double damage from fire/can't regenerate from fire, they regenerate damage doen to them at 1 point per round/minute/hour/whatever etc
3. Cosmetic effects
4. Shapechanging ability
5. As RQ3 (must drink HPs, gives them Fatugue Points - HPs in RQM - but lose 1D6 MPs and their MPs in fatigue points - HPs in RQM - each day.
6. Cosmetic effect
7. They take 1D6 non-regenerable damage per round of exposure to any hit location exposed to sunlight, armour does not protect
8. Crucifixes cause them to shy away and damages them on contact - they take 1D6 damage if hit by a crucifix
9. Some vampire types need a measure of how powerful they are as Vampires, some abilities become more powerul as they become more powerful. Perhaps a VAM characteristic that can be increased, skills limited to VAMx5%, regenerates VAM/10 HPs per round and so on.

Utgardloki said:
My theory is that a character's experience increases by the square root of his age, so if character A is four times as old as character B, she has twice as much experience. For a human-level intellect, advancement slows down to 1/3 after reaching 100% skill level, and I am judging that a motivated human can reach approximately 100% skill level over a 50 year career. (Most don't, but I can assume that vampires and highlanders are motivated.)

It shouldn't necessarily depend on age. It might depend on power/innate ability.

For instance, Lestat, in the Vampire Chronicles, is a very powerful vampire not because he is very old but because he drank the blood of an incredibly ancient vampire. The ancient vampires are skilled in some respects but are not super-skilled. They do have very strong vampiric powers, though. So, Vampires should top out at a certain point, but that point should increase with age/power.

There was a TV series called Werewolf back in the eighties that had a character who was a tramp and an old werewolf (he lived in America "before the Ice went") he was a powerful werewolf but didn;t have any other skills.

Utgardloki said:
Vampires are only active for half the day, and spend a lot of time whining, so they only advance 1/3 as rapidly as a "normal" immortal. A 400 year old vampire has lived for 8 times as long as the benchmark 50 year career, so he's gained 2.828 times the experience. Subtracting 1 and then multiplying by 100 to represent the first "time" was used to gain 100%, he's got 182.8 more "points" which are divided by 3 because he's advancing only 1/3 as rapidly after reaching 100. That's about 60.9, but I divide by 3 again because vampires advance 1/3 as rapidly as other immortals, so he has 20 points over 100 or about 120%.

An individual may vary considerably from the average, of course.

I've got my own views on how vampires work, but generally not all vampires are interested in building up skills. Many vampires don't have the time or motivation for training/experience, they are just trying to survive. The ones that do are interested in building up useful skills, so they will be linguists, musicians, artists and diplomats rather than soldiers. After all, you don't get to be 400 years old by continually fighting. So, vampires will have a lot of non-combat skills. They might also have good magical skills, if they are magicians.

Utgardloki said:
A 400 year old highlander will, on the average, work his skill up to 160% by his own experience. But a highlander can also gain the experience of his defeated enemies. I assume that if a highlander defeats a more skilled highlander (which is probably not likely), he gains the higher skill, plus the benefit of where he's learned things his foe has not. If he defeats a less skilled highlander (which happens more often), he's already learned most of what his opponent learned, but there may be a few tricks and techniques that are new to him. So I'll assume a highlander will be able to add 1/5 the lower score to the higher score, and that will be his new skill level. Thus if a highlander with 160% defeats another highlander with 160%, he will gain 32 points, and be at 192% after the battle.

I just guessed that the average highlander will have to defeat 2d6-2 highlanders every 100 years, or an average of 5. Good highlanders probably don't get into as many fights, so maybe they average 1d6-1 victories, while evil highlanders average 3d6-3. Just arbitrarily, I assume the average highlander gains 20 points after a battle. So a 400 year old evil highlander will have defeated 28 enemies and gained 20 points from each, for a total of 560 points, plus the 160 points he earned from his own experience. His total sword ability is something like 720%.

Well, if you like combat-skilled characters then yes, those figures are OK. I would give each character a limit to their skills that meant that skills over that limit were hard to increase. Most of their training time is spent maintaining their current skill, for instance.

Utgardloki said:
Has anybody else considered how to determine the abilities of ancient characters? Do my numbers seem reasonable or way off base? I'm open to any feedback or considerations.

As to other immortals, it depends on the game setting and powers of those immortals. Generally, though, I would put a limit on how high their skills can go and increase that limit by age. So, older immortals would be more skillful, but this is because they are more experienced immortals.

Hope that helps.
 
Ok, I can't resist this.

In one of my RQ3/Elric games I had a duck NPC show up once called The Ducklander. He'd been semi-posessed by a Spirit of Healing that instantly regenerated damage for him and made him almost impossible to kill. He was being hunted down by his enemies - if anyone did manage to kill him (decapitation in one hit would do it) they would be possessed by the spirit, in a process known as The Quackening.

What can I say? Highlander 3 had just come out, and I was weak.


Simon Hibbs
 
simonh said:
In one of my RQ3/Elric games I had a duck NPC show up once called The Ducklander. He'd been semi-posessed by a Spirit of Healing that instantly regenerated damage for him and made him almost impossible to kill. He was being hunted down by his enemies - if anyone did manage to kill him (decapitation in one hit would do it) they would be possessed by the spirit, in a process known as The Quackening.

Lol! The Quackening. Classic... :)
 
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