This is cool. I loved that series. I won't likely play the system, but I look forward to plundering it for ideas.

As someone who hasn't read Vance and has never heard of Lyonesse, can someone briefly encapsulate the awesome of this?

Quote from: RunningLaser;1035696As someone who hasn't read Vance and has never heard of Lyonesse, can someone briefly encapsulate the awesome of this?

I'm fairly certain you are going to get some difference in the answers, because Lyonesse is an odd-duck written by a person with a distinctive style--who tempered the style writing that work.  That said, here is why I enjoy it so much:

1. If Dying Earth (and the various sequels) was Vance and his love for language and word play turned up to 11, then Lyonesse is the same thing with the volume turned down just enough to avoid distortion and feedback.  Those familiar with him will see outbursts where he goes full out, but it is much more artfully crafted into the whole story, instead of a thing in its own right.  It also makes the characters more distinctive, in that Vance has altered the voice by character.  

2. It is a slow developing story at first, but the pace is fast at the end, and the entire arc is a masterpiece of pacing.  Ideally, you'll read the first book in snippets, slow--and the last book you won't put down for the last 100 pages.    This can be deeply satisfying to read if you go in with those expectations, and plan accordingly.  It is not, for example, a story to read on a train while commuting to work.    Contra to what we so often see out of current fantasy, it is well-plotted.  So all of those slow developing scenes early matter at the end.  You can have such a satisfying and rollicking ending with multiple meanings because of what has been so carefully developed up until that point.

3. A lot of people say they like a mix of mythic, fairy tales, and more cynical/worldly fantasy.  More than a few authors (and gamers) try it.  Vance is one of the few people I know that has made a world and a story that does it with so few false steps.  (This is the big thing in the translation into a game that I'll be watching.  If you can't translate this, it isn't Lyonesse, but only a game set in the world of Lyonesse.)

4. The humor is in the characters and their natural reactions to at times wildly fantastical events.  As opposed to, say, other works that I won't name that get that exactly opposite, to so little effect, humorous or otherwise.  The exceptions (the wildly fantastical characters in Lyonesse) stand out for being the exceptions.

5. Vance isn't afraid to let his heroes be heroes and his villains be villains.  He can make a flawed hero still heroic and an understandable villains still dastardly even as you empathize a little with how he got there.  

6. For fans of Vance, it is a culmination.  So much of his material was written as short stories or serialized originally, or when he was still thinking in those episodic terms to secure a paycheck.  Here, we get to see a full work using all the craft developed in those shorter works.  There are slow places, but almost no "filler".  For so few fantasy novels can you say that--or even in literature as a whole.

Quote from: Mike the Mage;1035656Is it worth buying Mythras if I have RQ6 or is there an errata? Much appreciate any answer.

From a basic rules point of view, no, but Mythras has a lot of extra stuff that you will like if you liked RQ6.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1035704Ideally, you'll read the first book in snippets, slow--and the last book you won't put down for the last 100 pages.  

Funny - that is actually how I read it!