I've noticed quite a few posters mentioning RuneQuest 6 recently, and I thought it would be nice to dedicate a thread to it. It's been out a couple of years now, and I think it's slowly winning hearts and minds ... If you're into Glorantha, there's the excitement of the new Guide to Glorantha, and the prospect of the upcoming Adventures in Glorantha from the Design Mechanism, but I'm not a Glorantha person myself; the buy-in seems too huge. I'm more interested in what people have been doing with their RuneQuest 6 games up to now.

I've been playing a great campaign using the Monster Island supplement, a gang of pirates stranded in Port Grimsand, and exploring the ruins in search of a get-rich-quick scheme to buy back their ship that their drunken captain lost at cards. We don't get to game very often, but when we do it's been absolutely awesome. One of the really rich things about it, I've found, is that characters who use different magic systems, from different cultures, have a whole cosmology built in, and the confrontations between different belief systems have become, in some ways, a theme of the campaign. We've had some great moments as the voodoo shaman pirate quartermaster and the Islander acolyte of Ravenashoor the Shark God have vied for influence over the young impressionable cabin boy - he's been brought on a vision quest with the shaman, with the tribal animists of Gamari village, and, after losing a hand in a fight with an allosaur, convinced by the Shark God acolyte to perform a ceremony in which he cooks and eats his own hand as a sacrifice to the god, to return the strength of the limb to himself. All of this really came from the characters' deep backgrounds and magic systems.

I've also found combat to be an absolute blast. That battle with the allosaur was truly epic, and there was also a deadly and dynamic show down with some cultists of Zululuun the Unforgetting in the settlement.

But a hell of a lot of the fun has also come from using the wide range of skills available to the characters, and particularly the hilarity that has ensued from characters rolling criticals in ridiculously non life-or-death situations: a critical Deceit roll in convincing some sailors that a character was an acolyte of their god, critical Dance roll to impress the villagers in a tribal ceremony, critical Craft (Carpentry) roll to fashion a crutch and spears from the shafts of an Ivory Impaler, critical Lore (Herbalism) roll to perfectly harvest and preserve the pollen of a Black Lotus the characters came across on the jungle path ... The skill system seems to provide tons of fun just in these unforeseen and ridiculous successes ... and there have been a couple of fumbles too, more crits and fumbles than I at all expected; we've also been enjoying the Passion rules, with Loyalty (Captain), Adherence (Pirate Code), Rivalry (Other PC) coming into play ...

I could go on at length, and perhaps later in the thread I'll chime in with my plans for a new campaign, but for the moment I'm interested in how people who are using RQ6 have been getting on with the rule-set. How have you set the dials for magic use? Which magic systems are you using?

What settings are you playing in? Published products, or homebrew?

How are you finding the rules make themselves felt in play? What are your thoughts on the Combat Special Effects?

Tell us about your campaigns! I'm convinced that this version of what was already one of my favourite games is one of the best systems out there for emulating swords and sorcery, gritty, bloody, culturally rich fantasy ....
Have you been using it for anything else fun?

Have at it!

I just discovered RQ6 a couple weeks ago and don't currently have anyone to play it with, but I've made a couple characters and played out a couple solo battles, which I've really enjoyed.  The available set of combat actions and the special effects system are both really well done.  I'm still a bit concerned about how much combat comes down to sheer numbers (specifically, how many total action points each side has), but, then, spending an AP to counter a missed attack is optional, plus there's Outmaneuver, so simply having more AP on your side isn't necessarily decisive.

I don't have any history with BRP in general or Glorantha in particular, so no real interest in that setting.  Instead, I've been revisiting the Hyperborean setting from Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea with an eye towards converting that to RQ6.  Haven't gotten far with it, though, given that I have no "We're playing in X weeks!" deadline to push me.

As for magic systems, I'm thinking I'll definitely be using animism (Kelt druids, Kimmerian shamans, etc.), mysticism (quasi-oriental monks), and sorcery (Ixian necromancers calling on Dark Powers), although I hear that Magic World has an Elric-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off magic system which might work better than sorcery for demon pacts and the like.  I might also find use for theism, but haven't decided yet whether it would just be unnecessary kitchen-sink bloat or not.  (Maybe use it for Esquimaux shamans, given that the Esquimeaux are a bunch of Kthulhu cultists...)

Yeah, I think it would work really well with the setting from AS&SH. As for demon summoning, I could see two ways of going with it from the RQ rules as they are. You could play it as Animism, reskinned to be all about dealing with demons. It works really well I think, and could replicate those Elric "demon weapon" and "demon armour" type things with binding the demons into those objects as fetishes, and then having them manifest to work their powers; the other option is to use the Sorcery spells, Evoke, Dominate (Demon), and perhaps Protective Ward for the magic circle or pentacle or what have you, and Imprison to hold the summoned creature within its boundaries chalked on the floor in mystic glyphs, surrounded by candles and so on ....

The "Animist" Demon Summoner (it's suggested in the rulebook actually) would really be all about using demonic powers to Augment or Manifest creatures he's summoned, or to do deals with demons, perhaps for parts of his soul! (sacrificing Magic Points to them, and other, squickier things), whereas the Sorcerer could do some Demonology as a side-line, and be a more general spellcaster otherwise ...

I ran a lovely kitchen sink, dystopian S&S game with it and had a blast.
Combat is just great fun.
I will return in a year or so but limit the choices more and just use Theism and Sorcery, with Folk Magic.
It may even be Glorantha which I have not run for years.

I got RQ6 when it first came out and to my mind, it's ramped up the complexity beyond where I can be bothered trying to remember all the rules.

So I like it in theory.
It looks quite nice, but in practice, I just can't be bothered to run it or try to remember all the rules.
Also I don;t particularly like Glorantha. It feels very unapproachable and I feel like I have to read lots of books and lore to get an idea how to run it.

It sort of feels like Rolemaster in that way. which I also like the rules set sort of, but I just can't be arsed with it in practice.

Quote from: danskmacabre;824968Also I don;t particularly like Glorantha. It feels very unapproachable and I feel like I have to read lots of books and lore to get an idea how to run it.

But RQ6 isn't tied to Glorantha... so why is that an issue?

Quote from: Simlasa;824970But RQ6 isn't tied to Glorantha... so why is that an issue?

It isn't tied to it directly no and the Glorantha comment was more of a side comment, which I feel is valid, given Glorantha was mentioned in the original post alongside RQ6.

I'll put it this way. Both Glorantha and RQ6 feel like too much like work and less like fun.

Early on it also struck me as a bit more complex/detailed than I needed but I keep dipping into it for bits to borrow... first the stuff for building cults and then the magic systems and now I'm coveting its combat maneuvers.
We're still playing Magic World but it's slowly creeping closer to RQ6.

My background with RQ in general goes back to 1st Edition Stormbringer
Then followed through with pretty much every iteration of Stormbringer/Elric over the years.

I had played various versions of RQ over the years.

I really liked RQ2/Legend, which I ran a lot of for some years.
Then RQ 6 came along and it felt to me it just upped the complexity beyond where I could be bothered to keep up.
On the face of it, RQ6 and Legend are very similar, but there's elements of RQ6 I just found too fiddly.
I ran a few sessions of RQ6 and found I was flipping all over the book in a sort of disorganised way for character gen and just generally running the game.

Nothing, sadly...

Now, when they release a full on Meeros setting book...

Speaking of Magic world though.  As a big fan of the Elric/Stormbringer RPGs, I've been tempted to get Magic World.
But there's so many good RPGs out there I want to run and play, I dunno if I'd get a chance to run or be able to find players for Magic World.

Still I might just buy the PDF one day on an impulse buy , just to read it.
Especially if it ends up on a Humble bundle or something like that.

Quote from: danskmacabre;824993Speaking of Magic world though.  As a big fan of the Elric/Stormbringer RPGs, I've been tempted to get Magic World.

It's nice having most all the bits derived from Stormbringer in one place. The Advanced Sorcery book is a pretty great addition as well.
Still... there's just something about the writing in RQ6 that keeps pulling at me like some honey-tongued purveyor of exotic treats. Every time I dip into it my imagination fires up with the possibilities.
I'm thinking when our little group gets back from Spring Break hiatus and finishes up it's current doings I might push for a short stint of pure RQ6 in the same setting but farther out in the boonies where things are a bit less civilized.

You know, it just doesn't seem that complex to me, though even some of my players seem to think it is .... The d100 roll under mechanic itself, once you get your head around it, is really simple, and all the rest is just trimmings. I will admit though, when you add in the magic systems ... I still find Animism a bit of a head full to run without checking bits of it from time to time. And the combat manoeuvres are relatively complex ... Okay, I get your point!

Quote from: YourSwordisMine;824990Nothing, sadly...

Now, when they release a full on Meeros setting book...

Shores of Korantia and The Taskan Empire are both out now from TDM, that's near enough of a Meeros setting as you're likely to get. SoK is essentially a bronze age Greek city state fantasy analogue...

On the subject of RQ6's apparent complexity, it really isn't, it's detailed which doesn't have to mean complex. It's not detailed in a Rolemastery way it's detailed in the sense of - here's five different magic systems, five of which are optional. When I've looked at Pathfinder rules or any of the d&d editions from the last 20 years I'm amazed at the detailed set of special rules written for each character class (!)...yikes, but that's the most popular rpg, so from that point of view players love complexity as long as it's about levels, powers, druid spell lists, but if it's about parrying? Woah, are you crazy? That's waaay too involved.

Quote from: danskmacabre;824984Then RQ 6 came along and it felt to me it just upped the complexity beyond where I could be bothered to keep up.
On the face of it, RQ6 and Legend are very similar, but there's elements of RQ6 I just found too fiddly.
I ran a few sessions of RQ6 and found I was flipping all over the book in a sort of disorganised way for character gen and just generally running the game.

What are the things in particular that you find too fiddly? I for one couldn't be bothered with the optional rules for more complex movement in combat. Maybe because I don't use miniatures. Otherwise I find that Combat Manoeuvres, for example, are really worth getting your head around and play much more simply than they read. They give you real pulse-pounding knock-down drag-out fights ... But also sometimes fights that are over very quickly due to one side being incapacitated. It's far from slugging through hit point attrition ...