Our Guest
We welcome once again Austin Conrad to the show!
- His website is Akhelas
- Get Treasures of Glorantha: Volume 2, one of the finest books on the Jonstown Compendium! (which we talked about in episode 31)
- Austin hopes to be “done soon” with his upcoming “Wolves of the Wild Hunt” book… that was a couple months ago and it’s not done yet 😅 The book will include slightly remastered previous materials such as The Quacken, and The Queen’s Star, plus new stuff about Gagarthi monsters!
Show Notes
Things that happened in this episode:
- Joerg reminds us what the Reminiscences of Paulis Longvale are… Listen to episode 34 if you haven’t already!
- Cults of Terror is “the gamemaster’s best friend”
- Also listen to episode 35 with Simon Phipp, specialist of Dorastor!
- Yes, YOU too can play a Thanatar cultist!
- Ludo summarizes the previous episode’s story
- Austin mentions the old Dorastor book, plus gives another shout out to Simon Phipp’s books
- Ludo goes on a short tangent about the name “Bilini”
- Austin lays down another argument about the Orlanthi really being Vikings
- We discuss the various motivations of the characters regarding Chaos, Dorastor, and the Lunar Empire
- Ludo has made a spreadsheet! He tries to figure out what are the chances of the Bilini king’s army against Razalkark’s army
- How cute are baby broos? Or baby Scorpion Men? Apparently Diana Probst has one of those in Stone and Bone, go check it out!
- We talk about battle tactics and “broo walls”
- How the hell do you recreate this story using RQ rules? Should we play using HeroQuest/QuestWorlds? (again)
- The phalanx rules suck?
- Is dual wielding better than using a shield? (We fumble around the convoluted RQG dual wielding rules)
- Rules terms inside the narrative text… what to make of it?
- Would you abstract the things we see in this story to “just a few rolls” in RuneQuest?
- Austin is being an asshole (his words! not mine!)
- How much plunder do you get from Chaos creatures?
- Giving a “personal touch” to plunder and gifts… or just add some jewels!
- Reselling gifts to buy actually useful stuff, like skills and spells!
- “WHERE IS MY MONEY?” and other things players say
- Ancient cultures versus transactional cultures
- Ea-Nasir name drop!
- Storm Bull cultists as a biker gang
- Austin mentions “A Short Detour” and the way we tried writing Chaos cultists as nuanced people
- Are Illuminates crazy assholes? Or are they people with feelings?
- Uleria is more powerful and bad-ass than we give her credit for
- Body horror with Uleria! Play Limbo!
- Austin has more conspiracy theories about the Celestial Court on his website!
- Vampires in Dorastor… do they have enough to eat?
- World of Darkness vampires vs Dresden Files vampires (also, Ludo mixes up Dresden Files and Laundry Files)
- Austin’s Harrek campaign, and the shenanigans the PCs are up to
- Give player characters cool or embarrassing epithets!
- The interesting framing of a Chaos-based narrative with a Lunar perspective
- Telmori vampires! Or vampires feeding on Telmori! Maybe both!
- The lost power of RQ2 vampires that can steal Rune magic when feeding off someone
- Rituals to get your magic items to trust you
- Fear mechanics in RuneQuest?
- There’s a difference between improvising and off-the-rails-improvising!
- RQ2 silver magic collars… they’re in every RQ2 story
- How do you keep prisoners?
- Suspicious tricksters! (aren’t they always?)
- Joerg tells us about Jojo The Bobo. Also, Bugs Bunny and the Puppeteer Troupe
- “We’re in Dorastor, but we’re getting…. human drama???!”
Credits
The intro music is “The Warbird” by Try-Tachion. Other music includes “Cinder and Smoke” and “Skyspeak“, along with audio from the FreeSound library.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (44.7MB)
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS | More
Hi,
I’m really liking the podcast. You’ve got a lot of interesting takes on things. And Cults of Terror is definitely one of the great RPG supplements.
Regarding prisoners and magic, I think there’s a few things to bear in mind.
Very often a prisoner will have depleted all their Rune Points. If they’re denied the chance to worship, they can’t get any back. Even if they have some left, there aren’t many that will help someone who has their hands bound or wrists chained to escape. Aggressive spells like Sever Spirit or Madness will potentially kill a guard. But then you’re still bound. If your hands are free because you’ve been put to work, it’s likely there will be several guards, and more within call. You could, say, cast Fly or Summon Elemental (air especially) to aid a getaway. But presumably then the consequence is that other prisoners who you’ve had to leave behind will be punished or killed. While in some situations good use of Rune Magic might help, the consequences of failure will probably be severe. However a spell like Lie could be very helpful, and that’s a good reason to have a Trickster around I suppose.
Spirit Magic is more accessible. But how much of it will be actually useful. Ironhand would be one if you fancy your chances unarmed against multiple guards. Mobility would help you run. But you’ve got to cast these and a reasonably alert guard may well see something’s up. In the longer term, focuses can be removed (confiscated or inked over if they’re tattoos) to make the use of Spirit Magic harder.
So personally I don’t think a substitute for slave collars is really needed unless your players are content to take big risks and/or abandon fellow prisoners(very possibly kinsfolk or allies) to retribution.
Thanks David! I mostly agree with your points on Rune Magic, but not so much on Spirit Magic. Taking out the foci doesn’t do much per RAW, it just adds a round to casting. So any prisoner with Befuddle, Ignite, Dispel Magic, Silence, and so on has tools to help escape. And sure it’s still risky and still worth some good fun session of play, but it makes keeping prisoners a much more complicated and expensive endeavour compared to Earth. In fact, I would argue it discourages players from taking prisoners, and encourages them to be murder hobos. YMMV of course!
The incentive for taking prisoners is the often considerable ransom, surely. And in a setting where prisoner-taking is likely (say an Orlanthi cattle raid or feud), cultural codes and honour would mitigate escape attempts. After all, if you surrender, promise ransom and then try to escape (as opposed to being rescued, which might well be fair enough), then who’s going to trust your clan again? I’d presume the ransom system in that instance has grown up because of a desire amongst Orlanthi to avoid tit for tat killings and extended feuds becoming increasing murderous.
It’s harder with prisoners of war because there will often be far less incentive to play fair once captured. Being sold as a slave or Bat food is far less attractive then being ransomed! But if you’ve been defeated in a battle, presumably a fair number of prisoners may have been taken. So let’s say you separate them by clan. Then a simple, but nasty, way of enforcing obedience would be mass punishment for escape attempts. If anyone attempts – or manages – an escape, an arbitrary number of prisoners get mutilated (many slaves won’t require tongues or noses, some may not need ears. A few may not need toes or feet). Do you want to leave your kin to that fate?
As for just killing enemies who attempt surrender, I think Honour will largely get in the way of that. Of course if a party has nobody with any Honour then they can slit throats merrily.
Equally, if you’ve surrendered then Honour may well prevent you from attempting escape. It’s different if you were, say, captured while incapacitated, but if you willingly surrendered then would escape be honourable?
Interestingly, a couple of party members in my Six Seasons campaign have just been captured in the final battle. So it’ll be interesting to see if the guy with Dark Walk (and enough Rune Points left for an hour’s Extension) uses it to abscond and leave his clan-mates in the lurch…).
Thanks for responding, and it is an interesting question. I do agree with you that it makes keeping long-term prisoners and slaves harder in some instances, but not insurmountable. As you say, YGWV.
Hope you’ll manage another podcast soon.
All the best
Dave
Oh yes I know all of those arguments already. And many players go by these tropes… at least until they are captured, in which case I’ve seen things derailed by crazy attempts at escape facilitated by magic spells. I’m sure if I played NPCs the same way it would wreck havoc to most prisoner-taking endeavours 🙂
Anyway yes we have a couple of recorded episodes that I’ve been too busy/lazy to edit, but I really need to get on it! Thanks for listening and posting!