I'm horribly cheating:  This game died long ago due to players drifting. One is in Iraq, one was playing because of player A and one player was always something of a no-show.

However, as I'm still using this world, the game that just started will be using this thread for play-by-play.  The new group is younger on average and contains many new players who are not at all familiar with RPGs.

the New Group and the First Session:

To begin with I kept my convention of beginning in Renbluve, under the premise that all things come there eventually, leading to a very cosmopolitan locale, perfect for disparet groups.

The 'System' is, nominally, the Avalon Hill Runequest, though I am working on hybridizing it with Mongoose RuneQuest and 'other things'.  I also decided to pull a note from D&D with regard to races and gave everyone a +2 to an attribute based on their race.  In retrospect I should have attached a corresponding -2 to balance out. As a rule no race got a bonus/penalty to POW.  I like this better than the variable numbers of dice that I used in the MRQ game.  I will be doing the most work in the magic department.

The Players:

Kitara: An elf from a nomadic culture (the pepper Savannahs this time), and a warrior.  To accomodate the 'real age' issue dealing with Elves in this system I had everyone pick an equivilent age.  

Layiani: A non-RPGr who was playing a nomad elf (herder), obviously ALSO from the Pepper Savannahs.

Jason: Playing a Lizard Shaman, who utterly misunderstood the nature of spirit magic. I set him in the Amal tribes who had migrated to Avante, but are still Primatives.

Maria: An inexpirenced RPGr, playing a 'half elf' from the Melitior plains, a shepardess (barbarians in Avalon RQ)

Carlos: A human soldier, and the youngest character, and also the only one who didn't pick a ranged weapon to be skilled in.  Also: never even heard of RPGs before, outside of computer contexts.  Ideally, Carlos would have been perfect as a Kerkeshi 'mercenary' but I was suffering from buckshot exhaustion at that point so I just made him a recently mustered infantryman from Nornsa.

They met in a bar, recognizing eachother as fellow wastrels and outsiders who didn't know what to do next. I cheated, since no one was interested in playing their character particularly.  Kitara just wants quests to kill shit and Jason is a clown, everyone else was too new or quiet to push things along.

Enter 'Factor Jonas', spur of the moment addition to Renbluve's upper classes, a man who specializes in hiring dangerous people to do things for rich people who want to remain hidden.  The Factor has been trying, unsuccessfully to recruit 'adventurers' for a particularly rough job, enter the players.

The primary monentary system is 'silver pennies' in Runequest, so the offer of a 1000 gold for the success return of a 'family heirloom' from the ruins of Ysithideri is 'really good money', though the players are upset that they aren't getting anything in advance.

The heirloom? A circle, like a bracelet, of beaten copper, inscribed with some unknown alphabet that happens to be large enough to fit over a man's head. As a further detail, the 'bracelet' is banded about with a fine wire braid laced with tiny crystal beads.

The Players show zero interest in their mysterious employer, though I wonder how they will act when they are paid in 'gold' that is unusually hard and has the faintest traces of reddish tint?   The Heirloom is said to lie somewhere near the Warlord's Scepulture in the heart of the ruins.


The players realize only the nomads own horses or have reasonable ride skills, forgetting that this is RQ and everyone can ride to some level of ability.  They pool their wealth and buy a wagon and a month's worth of food and fodder and head south down the coastal road to avoid 'The Scar' in Kerkesh.

A week passes with nothing of note happening (I've taken to rolling a d6 for 'random encounters' per day for traveloge scenes like this...) before coming to a swampy marsh area, crossed by the old stone paved road, passing through the decaying city of Ys without pause or comment.

At 'dawn' the next day they are attacked by a Peripati, a giant earwig looking thing. They kill it with arrows (And the shaman learns that casting firearrow on a 'war boomerang' is not cost effective...) without getting hurt at all.  Oh well.

That evening, as they exit the swamp they are set upon by Demi-birds, which turn out to be much tougher and more dangerous. Despite having several rounds to shoot them down, all four birds make it to the fight and inflict some hurts. I use fumble rules, one Demibird kills another with a fumble, one player hits Carlos with an ax for  1 point of damage and Carlos proves murderous with his two handed sword, in addition to being semi-impervious.  Jason fumbles a first aid check and almost kills Layiani pulling a fumbled arrow out of her thigh, but makes up for it with healing magics, though she bitches mightily at him the rest of the night.

After another dull week they run into a patrol of Kerkesi who direct them to King Daved's city (which I forgot the name of, to my shame).  THey decide to take the side trip to restock a bit and look for 'side quests'... the WoW mindset rearing its ugly head.

So I give them something: Escort a diplomat across The Scar, a two day trip without rest or sleep, but decent pay.  An endurance challenge, should be fun, right?

Four hours in they get jumped by a 'scouting' party of giant ants, the prelude to a great 'chase' idea.  Only... Carlos can't hit anything,  legs get chopped off and the Ants start winning... then the players start Fumbling. Carlos chops Layiani's leg right off as they get down to the last couple ants!  

Crap.

I give Layiani's player a 'freebie', as this is the first session for her. She's down and out and needing massive amounts of healing and rest, the NPC realizes the players can't make the rest of the trip and scrubs the job, delaying a week and halving their pay for 'failure'.

We will see who returns next week.

Lessons: Have the proper character sheets printed a few days in advance. My printer ink ran out early in the job and, in my rush I used the wrong edition sheets.  Ugh.

Generous stat rolling is utterly out of place in RQ compared to D&D. Oops.  

I need a plan for when players roll for their experience. They rolled when they hit King Daved's city and again at the end of the night.  Not too OP when you start out, but it'll lead to absolute monsters if I keep it up too long.

I seriously need to work on getting the new players into character or I'll probably lose them.  Allowing Kit to dominate the play style (easy to do as she's loud and...um... motivated?) will probably send at least Carlos back to computer games, though Lay is essentially being arm twisted into playing with us for now.

I really need a more serious, sober minded older player to temper this group or I"LL go nuts.   Kit is happy running from fight to fight and collecting shinies, Jason just enjoys sticking his tongue out as a 'lizard'... and those are the experienced players... sigh.

Spike,
Sounds like this group is not going to do the work of being organized and on target.  Nor can you count on the older, sober player...
 I think that means you have to do it.  You need to have more ready and do less seat-of-your pants, or at least that is how it came across to me.  Getting them 'in character' might be easier if everything else is in place.
How much is 1000 gold in this setting?  What will it by in terms of armor or property?

Well, its a fair chunk of change, certainly.  Even divided five ways (potentially), that works out to the equivilent of either (um... can you tell I haven't bothered to read up on the exchange rate recently...) 2000 'silver pennies' or 20,000 silver pennies, more than enough to get some very good armor either way.

It doesn't go as far as you might imagine, however.  Off the top of my head a full set of chainmail runs 2.5k, and plate probably edges to the 10k.  Property wise it won't go far either unless they want to live in tents.  Too much money isn't really much of an issue in my games, particularly since there isn't a major 'magic market' for them to buy the 'good shit'.

Of course: The coins in question are not actually gold but a little known (or understood) metal that I've covered elsewhere and you have probably heard outsdie of gaming 'orichalcum'.  Aside from being actually more valuable... to the RIGHT buyer, its worthless to most merchants...  The hope is to spur them to investigate further.

But yeah: I don't mind being the older, sober player of a group, but as the GM its lonely...

Session Two:

Luck: I was able to pick up one of my old regulars at the last minute, as he'd dropped out of his existing sunday night game due to personal conflicts.  Double luck: he's a bit less aggressive/ADD and more into character for its own sake.  We now have two lizards in the party, though since he is from the distinctly different racial group from the Desert of Hesh (which I had honestly forgotten about last week...), he's not quite as primative as the other, and speaks a different language.  I integrated him smoothly by having him hired on as a mercenary by their employer to try a second attempt to cross 'The Scar'.

I decided not to repeat the encounter with the Giant Ants for multiple reasons, ending the concept of a 'running match' as they attempted to outpace the monsters.  Instead I tossed in two Giant Crabs with some 'Chaos Traits'...  I need to start using mini's soon, I think... if only to give people a general idea of where things are in relation, give the new guys a handle to grasp on what they can try... something.

Anyway: Lesson learned: Too many critter monsters have brutal amounts of armor and do massive damage to be 'fun' fights for the player at this stage of game play. Lesson Two: Use existing fumble tables. This party rolls like ASS and in some fights have been doing more damage to each other than they do to the critters. Not Fun after the second or third near death to friendly fire in the same fight!  Pushing Magic might help both issues a bit.

Anyway, after the crabs (including one lucky crit early with a flame arrow to the body that killed a crab outright (ignoring armor is very useful against giant crabs...), I tossed in an 'endurance fight' against a swarm of agressive 'ham beetles'... nuisance food animals driven aggressive by the divine magic of The Scar.  As the beetles were extremely unlikely to do more than one point of damage at a time (D4 minus a d8 damage, and a measly 20& hit chance) and could only survive a hit if you rolled minimal damage, this should have been easy.

Silly me: Shepardesses have NO armor at all, meaning every niggling 1 point hit was bad news. And guess who got hit the most? the Shepardess! AMAZING! I hate dice, it is official.  Up next: Amber!  

I used 'fatigue points' to cover the grueling treck and dice rolls to govern how many hours they covered between fights, giving them 'roughly' 48 hours to survive without rest times.  Given how stressed the party was by the two fights thus far I threw the Chon-Chons at them (two of them), knowing that the MRQ monster book (at least) gives them some actual 'loot' to make up for the fight in the form of 2d3 runes a peice!  There were some giant ticks somewhere in there, and due to the terrible rolls of Ribbit (the new player at the table) there was an extra chon-chon after, making the second half of the trip easier than the first by a long shot.

Lesson learned: current fights are boring, and hard to engage every player due to high swish factors and utter lack of tactical acumen on 'imaginary' fights. Use mini's and start tossing in details, offering fancy manuevers. Also: Next batch of fights will be against manlike foes, with weapons, armor and loots. Will be a much more interesting thing, playing to RQ and party strengths, I think.  Also: make time for more descriptives and more 'roleplay' to keep this from being 'fight, fight, rest' for the rest of the 'campaign'. Setting does nothing If I don't engage the players properly.

Players were paid and began resting in town to finish evening, making this an 'all fight' sort of night.

Things went less well than I had hoped this week.  I was really pushing the players to pick up on the magic business, as Runequest seems to me to be about more well rounded characters who have multiple options: The fighter has a spell or two he falls back on to boost himself, the mage can whack a motherfucker when he has too... that sort of thing.

And thanks to the Chon-Chons the players are rune heavy for only three/four game sessions, not to mention the fact that almost everyone started with at least a little magic.

But details!

Okay, so first of all they arrived in the new town, which thanks to a lack of researching my own notes I was forced to call Fiaora rather than whatever the fuck it was supposed to be called.  Fairly big city, though less militarized than the city they'd just left. I tried to put some effort into providing some color to draw their attention, to get them to DO stuff, rather than look for another 'quest'.

OF course, they are pretty hard up for money, so buying a few low level spells was about all they could afford to do.  No one bit at all on the Dragon Magic I introduced (having the books for it), and they all did some shopping and spent a week, allowing several of the players to get some weapon training.  The Lizard Shaman decided that he REALLY wanted to use a ball and chain as a weapon, for example.

As armor is a major issue for the party (three members are wearing none, though two of them have scales... and only one player is remotely 'heavily armored', and he's rather passive)... I introduced them to a dwarven smith who needed someone to retrieve his load of ingots that had been taken by goblins who had assaulted the caravan he'd been bringing them in on. I managed to introduce a few elements of dwarven culture in his commentary (needing to impress the womenfolk with his craft skills so as to earn a wife), and let the players know they'd be going up against a very large group, including at least one spell caster, but their payment would include some armor, not to mention the right to keep any salvage except for those ingots.

Once again, dice proved to be almost a bigger problem than anything else. Just as the numbers on the assault turned against the party (the goblins, being subterranian in nature hate being out in the daytime, so were sleeping in their 'hidden' camp), their dice failed utterly. One player kept missing by 3%... for five rounds.

Of course the one player who has 'dice issues'.. that is she never fails unless its time to gain XP... slaughtered every enemy (including the 'big boss') in one round... dealing out max damage almost every time. Sigh.  I don't mind fudging from time to time but its really obviously broken... though of course every time I actually check her dice have rolled really fucking well. Seriously, she should play the lotto.  

Anyway: the party gained a fine dwarven steel helmet (using MRQ's rules for steel: +2 AP, making one player's head virtually impenetrable), a bunch of crap salvage, random trade goods and the like, and some broken bits of chainmail the goblins were trying to 'resize'.. that their employer graciously turned into a whole set.

Total haul per player: 2000 silver, a full set of chainmail and a back and breast to go with the helmet (though just an ordinary one), and a ringmail hauberk that was taken from the big boss as well, after being throughly cleaned.

Issue: the big boss was underwhelming in the first place.  I mostly just adapted an existing monster statline, and he turned out less dangerous (but more armored) than the goblins he was leading.  His signature spell was useless because it would have crippled his own side, and the players split up the two runes necessary anyway, so they couldn't learn it (the earth rune, the one that provides bonus stats went to Miss Luck, who's attributes were just shy of being maxed out anyway.  BROKEN! I just want to shake my head at this...).

Still, I needed something other than random beasts to throw at the party, and the goblins, aside from their numbers, turned out just about right.  One player went down to a head wound (the unarmored archer/shepardess) and lived, another had to burn another fate point (hero point, from MRQ) to avoid losing his leg at a critical turning point in the fight.

But: The players who had been buying spells had actually recinded that purchase, so no spells were cast during the fight, and only a minimal amount of healing magic was done afterwards... (correction: The new player used a blur spell, vastly overcharged, on the shepardess, inadvertantly waking one of the sentries to start the fight. Sadly, despite a +25% dodge bonus, she failed her only dodge check and went down).  

I seriously need to break these people of D&D style class-ism and WoW style questing. They are boring me to tears with the whole 'lets look for shit to kill and people to pay us for the priviledge' playstyle.

Sounds like you are going to have to step in and

A) Give them a ton of shit going on in town, so that something OTHER than going out to kill stuff and loot is of interest.

B) Have some stuff happen TO them.  or AROUND them.  Or from their past.   Have a political agent start taking an interest, or a Smithing Guild (that actually paid the Goblins to raid the Dwarven Smith's Stuff in the first place) that has it in for the players.

Just some 'player-breaking' ideas.

I've actually got a minor bit planned, but I will give more thought to your ideas.

What I've had in mind before was an attempt to recruit one or more PC's into the local Dragon Cult, all innocently, and subsequently involving them in the religious 'war' going on in the backdrop.

Also: When they finally get close to the ruins of Ysithideri I was planning to place an orc village essentially in their path. While not liked in this region of Haven, neither are they savage brutes who attack first and eat you later.  Since none of the players speak any Orcish dialects, nor have much interaction with them historically, this gives them the need to actually work to get any value out of the Orcs, who would prove too numerous and dangerous to fight for the hell of it.

After a long hiatus due to other commitments I was able to run what may be the swan song session of the campaign.  We dropped two of the players, the brother-sister team of do nothings, for whatever reason.

One of my regular players is leaving town indefinitely so we got together for 'one last game', and the players pushed south to Ysithideri, the big goal of their quest to date.

Highlights: They saw the orc village and decided to go completely around it, avoiding any interaction with the 'locals'.

They also decided not to spend any time searching or scavenging in the ruins for valuables!!!!  Seriously: They wanted an item that was probably on a dragon's corpse so they headed straight to the heart of the city where most (but not all!) the dragon's died, and despite walking literally over the unlooted remains of an entire city, with many notes of glimmers of metals and stones among the bleached bones, the players were relentless about not stopping.  I 'seasoned' the evening (despite the fact that RQ can be lethal, the players all feel that a night without fighting is wasted...) with an encounter with some skeletons, with a surprise attack of zombies mid fight (a VERY interesting fight: Skeletons are durable enough to be challenging without having any 'powerful' damage dealing potential, making them less of a TPK risk. Zombies, apparently, are the opposite, much easier to 'kill' but hitting twice as hard... ironically the two missing players were also the most heavily armored... oh well), and followed up with a very powerful fire elemental... which failed to leave behind a runestone and very nearly torched half the party despite seeing the first real use of offensive magic in the game.  Irony: The spirit focused Shaman failed his only attempt at 'anti-spirit magic' in the campaign so far (spirit screen, which would have kept him from being crisped when the Salamander engulfed him... saved by burning all of his Magic Points on self healing as a 'reflex action'... I play very fast and loose with the rules... leaving him a single hit point after that...)

I mostly thing that my GMing, at least for this group is utterly gormless shit, but I do hold a couple of things went very well. The players did seem suitably creeped out by the 'set peice' of the utterly lifeless ruins, so my descriptives were spot on, Second: When faced with the charming and genteel God 'Death' they were suitably panicked and worried that they might offend him and be killed... so they don't appear to think I pull punches...  They wound up with the artifact (and on a miraculously timed '1%' roll they learned that it was an artifact from ancient Irem, despite having any real knowledge among them...)

After leaving the ruins (with a Death rune, a gift from Death himself to the one player that offered a gift to the God (now: is it a normal (lesser) rune of Death or the 'OMFGBBQ!!!' Greater Rune of Death? I haven't decided yet...), the Shaman decided to expirement with the Iremi artefact, permanently losing a Hit Point to corruption and summoning some Amorphia into the world... just enough to burn a small hole in the ground and conjure up a new species of bug.. nothing serious... he also got lucky on a 'chaos mutation' roll and wound up with tiger stripes.

Seeing the effect the Amorphia had, the Elf archer (Miss Luck previously) decided that such a potent device was best left in the care of Death, and tempted fate to go back into the ruins (despite realizing that to meet Death again would be rather... final), but decided not to try walking through the silent, ephemeral 'Blind Maidens of Death' who blocked her path.   I took a moment out ot point out that just about ANY powerful, ancient, magic was going to be equally nasty, and that this thing barely even registered on the 'world destroying scale'...


So, to sum up some other things that went down:

A chatty Death mentioned that if they passed through the Hydenimoi forest and spoke to the Siti elves there they should mention he was planning to drop by and collect on some old debts.

Dragon bones are somewhat metallic, and the players were more interested in looting THOSE than anything else in the city (ok... only one player... interestingly, also the one who expressed a real interest in serving Death... )

No: Death did not have anything resembling real stats at all. In fact, at one point he 'cleared a path' out of teh city for them by 'killing' everything down that route with the wave of a hand... including, incidentally, the two orcish sentries that were outside the walls. Oops.

So, while apparently I, the GM, find the campaign to be hollow and lifeless, consisting of occasional life or death battles of PC's vs random gribblies straight out of the book, the players seem to have real and vested interactions with the campaign world, to the point where they are willing to self sacrifice themselves to keep potentially world destroying artefacts out of the hands of unknown and possibly villanous badguys...  Maybe I see behind the curtain a little TOO well.

I think you've done a good job building the versimilitude, allowing the players to get into their roles.

I also think you have a talent for consistency in the 'unruled areas' of the game, making it seem like the unknowable is following a deep logic than they can understand.

And what will you possibly do next?

Believe or not I do have a sort of 'outline' for what is going on, presumbing they even remotely attempt to follow script.  They have a powerful Rune, a decent amount of wealth/armor... though lacking a strong, dedicated 'melee fighter'... and an artifact of significant power and the means to make some potent magical weapons or armor (the Dragonbones collected by the one player...).

This may seem like a good place to 'end' a campaign, but really it was supposed to move the game forward from 'ordinary joes doing dirty dangerous jobs' towards 'big damn heroes involved in the bigger picture of the world'.

Their unknown employer is a Dragon, their supposed payment of gold is not quite what it seems (Orichalcum coins, also from Irem... worthless as modern coinage, but not valuless at all...) and at least one character is slowly moving from 'ordinary dude' to 'agent of a greater power' while another is... between obscene skills and broken dice rolls... taking more of a roll as a powerful scion.

In other words, they are, more or less where I want them... they may not collect their coins (sounds like it...), but as long as they don't get TOO left feild with what they do next the game will continue apace... provided i can replace the player who is leaving (I DO have a chance to recruit one of the old, original players back into the game... excellent timing all around.)

Once More with Feeling: The all singing all dancing very special episode....

So, we lost half the group earlier due to life change issues, but its all good because one of my original Runequest players returned from his sojourn, and we picked up another 'new to gaming' player of uncertain reliability.

Our returning Characters are:

Kitara, the Savannah elf Archer with dice blessed by the Gods of fortune.
The Shadow: her companion, another Savannah Elf with nearly the opposite luck but some magic mojo.
Grok: Our hapless 'big hulking lizard' who happens to now be the personal emissary of Death, though he's a bit new to his role.

Our New Characters:
Sir Neebelbaum: Noble Explorer, a native Renbluvian Nornsas, a third son and quite the expert on Dealyryeth legends, if not exactly familiar at how to adventure without the assistance of Servants.
Misty: A runaway 'child' of the Siti tribe of Elves, a witch with some minor healing magics and the potential to learn to sway emotions (Moon rune, but no spells for it).

The trio of returning characters are awakened when their lizard shaman (the now departed player, not Grok...) manages to blow himself up quite spectacularly with the artifact they recovered from Ysithideri the previous game in a second experiment.   Grok, meanwhile, manages to figure out some of what his newfound 'Death' powers are: namely that the handmaidens of Death will reanimate nearby corpses to fight on his behalf (may be changed to simply manifesting to further remove 'undeath' elements), wether he wants them to or not. A death touch power and the ability to summong 'The Pale Horse', which I have decided is 'made' of powdered bone.  He blows all his MP summoning the Horse, and then the party sits around bullshitting as the new players wander by.

Sir Needelbaum (All names are changed, or not, completely at random by this writer...) is immedeatly facinated by the seven legged brassy beetle like critters still wandering around locally from last session's experiment, but also by the 'not-dirt' lining the larger crater created at the start of the session. He is assured by Grok that the new beetle things are quite tasty.  Lacking any real motive force the new characters sort of assume they will be welcome by the existing group and everyone makes fast friends.  Must be the PC glow.

After many hours of innuendo and chit chat they realize that an Orc hunter has approached their camp, complete with stone tipped spear and WAY more fetishes and voodoo charms than in really practical.  He also brings a bag full of severed heads of those orcs slain (accidentally) by Death the night before, and tells them in broken Nornsan that they have offended the spirits and are cursed and please get off the lawn (okay: he says 'our hunting grounds'... but get off my lawn is funnier).

This inspires the witch to start dancing to placate the spirits, which then prompts the orc to begin his own spirit dance, complete with barbaric yawps. Sir Needlebaum attempts and fails miserably to compete in the barbaric yawping while the party breaks camp.

Kitara, as nominal party leader, decides she is offended by the Orc's demands and decides to ride THROUGH the Orc village on their way out, the hunter taking off ahead of them to warn the tribe, thus the village is abandoned but for a bunch of 'anti-curse' spirit poles set up all over the place. Misty begins dancing with the various poles and kitara knocks a bunch down. The players don't know it but they've just picked up a mild curse from the tribe's ancestor spirits, whom they've offended.  

Given the late start to the character's day and their insistance on being jerks towads the local tribe, they are still in sight of the walls when they break camp for the night... just in time to see a flight of gargoyles rise up from the city and come for them! (I use 'random encounters' for travelling throught the wild and untamed parts of the world.)

With six points of armor the Gargoyles are virtually impervious to weaponry, so the experienced characters resort, with mixed results (at first) to offensive magic.  The dozen gargoyles break off into twos to attack the players with the balance attacking the pale horse.  Round one sees two of the characters fall flat on their ass (Grok is knocked off his horse and Sir Needelbaum fumbles with his spear thrust... note: neither new player had bothered to buy any equipment, which we ran with...) Given the size of the gargoyles and their reluctance to actually land this meant only one could reasonably attack each prone player.

The Witch, with a borrowed dagger does absolutely nothing for two rounds before wounds knock her out. Needelbaum manages to inflict a couple of minor wounds with his borrowed spear, despite spending a fate/legend point to avoid having his leg ripped off in the second round.  the Shadow pulls out the 'Big Guns' with 3d6 damage skybolts (that ignore armor) and, despite a few failures, manages to blow two apart completely and sheers off the left arm of one of the two flying off with the 'captured' witch.  Kitara uses the less spectacular 'Disrupt' spell to decent effect, but winds up using the artifact to kill the two on her to great personal cost (she turns one into an inert, and seriously obese, statue of a Gargoyle, the other she turns into a cloud of alien flies. She herself suffers 10 HP of damage, temporarily turning her teeth into fangs and having all colors leeched out of her (halving her hit points and the durability of her equipment. She'll heal, eventually.) as a result of misusing her Earth Rune to channel the chaos through the ring. Safer than what the lizard shaman was doing, but also completely wrong (runes being metaphysically the exact opposite of Chaos (even the Chaos rune, ironically...).

The Pale Horse proves to be a nasty combatant, if rather unmotivated. More armor and HP than the gargoyles, does more damage and never misses, though at the end a critical from a gargoyle rips its right foreleg completely off, and it begins leaking bone dust from the wound as it slowly dissolves.

As mobile statues (rather than stonelike critters) the Gargoyles, like the undead before them, are only mildly put out by the crippling of limbs, which only makes them nastier combatants.  The 'flying off with our unconcious comrade' was an improv moment on my part, one that should lead to deeper questions of WHY they were being attacked by the gargoyles in the first place.

The fight over:  Kitara is crippled by her own (mis)use of magic. Literally, unable to walk as one leg is at negative hit points from backlash. Magical fumbles abounded (Kitara blew her own pants off... random fumble table result (armor 'straps cut', random location) from a Disorder spell, the Shadow's fourth Skybolt landed at her own feet, sending her flying... in time to be knocked out by the next to last gargoyle, Sir Needlebaum was unconcious from having his arms mauled... only Grok was both concious and mobile, mostly out of sheer stubborn grit (and... ironically if it weren't for his own refusal to buy pants (leg armor of any sort) he'd almost be in good shape! )

Session ends with the players licking their wounds and muttering 'ow' alot.

Systemically:

In order to cut down on rule book use, particularly with such inexperienced players, and to streamline the game... and also to provide some wiggle room on those cases where a player suffers an 18 point hit to a leg or some such in the first round of a fight... I've kept things to an absolute minimum until everything is sorted. I plan on re-introducing more complex rules one at a time, or faster as my players demand more.

Essentially each player gets to attack once per round, via melee, range or magic. They may also defend themselves against each attack. Bad guys defend only in certain cases (undead or animate statues never, humaniods with shields usually), to keep the wiff factor to a minimum.

Magic is equally simple: If its a fight roll your runecasting skill, if you fail mark off a MP, if you suceed, mark of the MP's equal to the spell, do your damage. I am slowly working towards adding a 'resistance' check so people can 'mark up' the POW... to offset the spendy nature of that attribute.

We haven't been tracking total body HP so much, but strictly using hit location HPs.  At 0 or a neg HP in a location the player rolls (typical conx5) to stay concious and keep fighting, though at negative HP they limb is rendered useless. At neg HP (that is, if you have 5 Hp in a leg, at neg 5...) the limb is maimed or, if one shotted, severed completely. fate/legend/hero points can be spent to 'negate' a hit or to 'surivive' a blow... depending on the way the fight has been going.

XP falls into the 'if you got a successful skill check roll at the end of game', with a successful 'advance' providing a d6-1 skill points for that skill.

We haven't really gotten into anything fancy yet, though I suspect 'called shots' are high on the list.

You now know enough of the runequest rules to... more or less... run my table.

I should mention critical hits have started getting used, along with the fumbles: 1/10th of your skill is your 'crit chance' and the only purpose so far has been to ignore armor, though for lighter armored opponenets 'max damage' is probably more useful.

So, the brand new party Healer didn't show last night, leaving the party licking their wounds after the Gargoyle fight, though I did GM through her burning up her MP at least patching the worst of it.

I'd already rolled for the 'random' encounters on the way back to town, so despite their many wounds there was an encounter the very next day.  I decided to pick something relatively simple and straight forward... a Broo.

A single solitary broo, due to a dice failure (I rolled a d6 for number as I didn't want to overwhelm them). I decided a single broo, a perverted humanoid beastman 'native' to the Scar, would only attack the party if he had a trick up his sleeve: Magic.

They spotted him, so there wasn't any surprise, but they weren't expecting the Magnitude 2 Multimissile spell he used on his Javalins.

As I was bringing in additional combat rules as I moved everything closer to 'core MRQ', even Kit's fantastic dodging didn't keep her from being hurt, it just limited how badly as two of the javalins sliced through her thin leathers. Grok, the lizard warrior also got hit as he charged on his Pale Horse, ironically blocking everyone else's shots, but the fight was over quickly and without much damage done. Grok's hearty lizard constitution kept him from getting sick, and Kitara never noticed mechanically as the rest of the trip was largely uneventful.  

The Broo was animated by one of the Maidens of Death and silently accompanied the party, they made it dance.

A day outside of town, and almost completely recovered, teh party was attacked by a pair of Grampus (acid spewing giant scorpions). The Broo kept one busy, the acid spray proved a nasty shock, and the Pale horse critted and killed both Grampii (sp?), not that anyone minded, as they've been struggling to pierce armor regularly.

The nobleman discovered a heretofore unknown facility with skinning and tanning as he was able to cure the thick chitinous hides of the Grampii to take into town with him.

They spent five weeks in town, learning magics, unloading stuff, yadda yadda. The Lizard and nobleman turned in the grampus hide and dragon bones to the local Dwarf who agreed to pass them on to others to turn into weapons and armor: They got TOOK on the dragon bone (he took half as payment, turned half of what was left into a single spear head and some sheild fittings and gave them pennies for the rest... the noble got some lovely grampus hide armor and a custom made rapier for most of his wealth).

Kitara started studying Dragon Mysticism, mostly for the Blood Alchemy, allowing her to make some healing potions with her blood, and regrow severed limbs (again: Blood potions), which might allow the party to finally save up some Hero Points, she also found a spell for her Water Rune, turning into an Undine (Mag 6... pricy!), which took most of the time.  They spent themselves broke.

Mechanically: Dragon bone upped the raw damage of weapons (a dice type) and allows it to bypass up to 3 points of armor. I may add 'barbed' effects. As armor it has an AP 10, but as a shield fitting it merely increased the AP and HP of the sheild... usefull for those times the 'left arm' location is rolled btw.  I may covert that 'penetration' to somethign easier to track mechanically (bonus damage?). I used a standard MRQ ruleset for the Grampus hide, turning it into AP 3 armor.

Due to the dearth of healing magic the party did some research into possible locations of Fertility runes (Still STUCK on the rune as their primary source of healing....).  One is rumored to be fueling the giant ant hive in the Scar, one is said to be in the possession of a bandit queen sorceress in the Hygleac peninsula, a month's travel to the south, and the Hydenimoi forest, in theory, is fecund enough to provide numerous plant and fertility runes.  I believe they've settled on assaulting the giant ant hive.  They are uncertain as to what to do with the artifact they have retrieved, and they are desperate to get their hands on more dragonbone now... but Ysithideri is, essentially, off limits to them (no one meets Death twice and lives...)


Some notes: As the bearer of Death's signet ring Grok counts, essentially, as a Runelord, despite his lack of 'death cult' spells, and he can use the greater rune as a normal Death rune for runecasting.

The Ring: If they try to learn how to use it I will run them through a 'historical' god-realm type quest in Irem to learn the skill and get other rewards.  It can be used three way, all of them 'bad ass'.

1) channeling MP into it produces Amorphia, which they already know (but can't do safely). Amorphia counts as an acid, though instead of simply dissolving stuff it 'changes' it. every MP translates into 1d6 of acid. stored amorphia can be tapped as 'free standing MP', or in sufficent quantity used as POW to enchant items. (sufficient is currently undecided).

2) can be used in place of any rune for 'runecasting', spells cast via the ring use no MP, but critical failures result in backlash effects.  Loss of the ring means known spells can be cast through bonded runes as normal, however.

3) 'miracles': Mechanically: Any effect that can be accomplished by a spell (unknown or otherwise) or seems like it should be do-able can be willed into being via the ring. However: 'mere' successes result in unpredictable variations. Failure results in backlash and critical failures result in more lethal backlash.



On the upside: the players have been starting to look at Cults finally. Sir Needelbaum (my name for him..) is a member of the cult of knowledge (Adapted Langkhor Mhy) and Kitara apparently is charmed by the cult of Emerlda the Allmother, and no one seems interested in the Renbluvian Sun Cult (something about having to have your heart ripped out to advance within the cult....ah well...)  Kitara, as stated, is also starting down the path of Draconic Illumination, at least as adapted to Haven, time will tell if she sticks with it.

Plans for next session:  Dwarven caravan across the Scar (complete with oxen-turtles, warwagons with arbelests and so forth, and Deathcult Kerkeshi mercenaries (already canon), and the first use of a battlemap (hex motherfuckers!) for the Ant Assault.

Longer range plans:  Turn the ring over to their employer and discover they've been paid in Orichalcum instead of Gold? Keep the ring and find and angry Dragon coming by for a visit? Who can say... (and RQ dragons are most definitely party killers... still: a source of massive amounts of dragonbone and hide? Maybe....)

Also: Sir Needelbaum may be getting a minor buff in the skills department to bring him up to speed with the rest of the party.  Depends on what his player says (mos def a Roleplayer...)

Hey Spike, I just wanted to drop a note that I enjoy reading your game session synopses.  I love old school RQ, so it's nice to read about the ins-and-outs of actual play reports.