Another glorious adventure

[james_davis_nicoll]

I am going to run an adventure from the 2022 Runequest Starter set. The current RuneQuest edition is a bit of a tome, but I am hoping the more streamlined version from the Starter set is within my ability to keep track of all the whirling gears.



As it happens, the adventure is a bit contingent on events from the official timeline, in which the Lunar Empire has suffered a setback and Sartar in general and campaign town of Jonstown in particular have been (at least for the moment) liberated from the Lunar yoke. This will be a bit of an adjustment, as I only ever played in Lunar-occupied New Pavis.

One issue I had was that while the Starter comes with lots of pregen characters, they're in a single huge pdf. There's no reason the players need to know each other's minutia, so now I know how to chop up pdfs into bit sized pieces.

Comments

[james_davis_nicoll]

I keep bouncing between "I can do this" and "Wow, that's a lot of game mechanics to keep track of."

[viktor_haag]

After playing RQ with my Friday group for several months, I can confirm that yes, it's a lot of game mechanics to keep track of. It helps if your group is a bit devoted to system mastery -- they should always be finding ways to improve their chances of success (ample mechanical opportunities for this exist, but knowing what they are either requires a GM who's willing to constantly suggest and translate, or for players to learn and remember what they are).

My take on RQ is for the casual player (ie "starter set one-shot"), the system isn't really designed or ready to hook you in. For the player that falls in love with the world and is lucky enough to be in a group that has also done that, and all are willing to own and learn the rules to explore all their nooks and crannies, it's a game built for long term support of play.

Player interaction with religion and magic is even more complex in this edition than in previous ones, as well.

I think I got to the point with the game where it became clear to me that RQ:G is the game that the Gloranthaphile grogs wanted and finally got. For newb players, it's a steep hill to climb and I'm not sure the starter adventures work all that well, frankly -- they're sort of "hello world" and they don't seem to me to have a good enough ramp into subsequent play.

For my part, I ignored the starter adventures, and Dragon Pass, and put the players right into Prax with a series of adventures that had simple set-ups and slowly introduced concepts to them over time and were designed to lead into a River of Cradles campaign. We had fun, but I'm not sure we'll ever return to that game.

[kgbooklog]

I discovered the "Print to PDF" trick of splitting files when I found out our accounting software can't handle documents over 30 pages.