I see...ok. Jokes on me. Good enough. But I definately found that site very useful. If you read enough of it, there is actually quite a bit of nice material in there. Material that matters in the current setting, seeing how the backward time spin was either:
A: A great selling point for powergamers.
B: No clue what to do after the 3rd age...4 comes after 3 in my world. But that would require some new and ingenious thought procedures, and time.
C: Re-boil that pot of tea...the water is still in there...
So we have a rule set that:
1. Does not have a concensus of how to run combat.
2. Armor give you two penalties for wearing it.
3. Charts, examples and tables that don't work.
4. A magic system where playing anything other than a charcter than learns sorcery is a waste of time. (Still cant find anything that sais that Godlearner spells are written in Greek. ANY sorcerer ought to be able to understand or synthisise their spells.)
5. Need more bleeding gods to get more runes, since the Godlearners have a Seek Runestone Spell of sorts.
6. Starting Character generation that (I think) represents the common mill of the people, at age 15-30, that, previous to their Adventuring days, were domestic cattle, and can't feel their way out of a box: but damn do they know how to Ride, since Ride does have 2 stats it starts with, whereas many other skills that ought to be more used by normal people, have only one stat bonus. Nevermind the imbalance of character starting percent. Adding some of them up just leaves me wondering why I'd whant to play any but the ones that either get one or two of the actual useful adanced skills, or the ones that have the most percentages for starting skills. Why play a character profession that starts with 15% bonus total in the skills, when another may have 25% or higher? Some effort should have been made to balance these percentages a bit more.
7. Athletics: OMG. I can Swim, Run, Sprint, Jump, Climb, Leap, Vault, Saumersault (oops, thats Acrobatics) break chains and ropes, lift heavy objects, resist somone holding me, break out of a spiders net, hold my breath (or is that resilience?)...I love that skill. So do my players. Every improvement goes straight into that skill. And why not...? Any adventurer knows he has to do all those things eventually....right?
8. Reduce damage bonus, since it upsets the game balance, and then reduce armor to compensate (...) and then, lets make sure they cant wear too much (may save their lives) and reduce all combat skills by all that weight, where they cant dodge or parry anymore, or hit anything. And then, we make cool neat weapons that do tons of damage! give them special abilities! Change the Basic Weapons in the book to compensate, so that they dont look silly next to the new ones we make! Ohh, and BONE armor. (OK, I did see the dude with the bone jaw in that latest movie from Mell, but comon...).
9. I can go and fight a god as a beginning character...why? "So that every level of character can go fight gods, and it wont be boring for us"...ok.
I love the Runequest system. There are some broken items and rules, but I can live with those. What I find frustrating in the extreme, is this whole "they must be powerfull, because they were, and thats how it is" attitude I get from you people about the Glorantha setting. its called RUNEQUEST, not bloody HEROQUEST. I can play heroquest any day, I have the game. Making up a whole bunch of rules and empires for meeting, recreating and playing gods is just a bit of a powertrip. So instead of beeing called "The game where you can play a Duck", its now called a game "Where you can play a god"....comon. Serious. Kiddy gamers like that kinda stuff. Religious fanatics maybee like that kinda stuff also. Or people that have some personality power mongering issues.
Yes. I really dont mind flaming this system at all anymore. Its beyond gaming statistics, classes, powertrips of game-designers - its about selling stuff. Who cares what we ask for, or need. Lets sell neat God Stuff, instead of fleshing out the core rules...thank god you made this system an open license game. Perhaps others will create something more usefull than your latest book...up until then, I loved the game - even with its quirks - the books were nicely laid out, well thought through, but this Magic of LGorantha book should not habve been published at this time. Too many loose ends...or starts.
Q...