Category: Runequest

Classic Fantasy Monsters for Mythras With Some Blood Tide Welling In

Classic Fantasy is a Mythras supplement for dungeoneering in the percentile world. Here are some of the monsters (some of them classics we grew to love in the early days of RPGs) in the Mythras Encounter Generator format.

There are also some encounters adapted from the evocative Blood Tide supplement for pirate campaigns.

For the fun of it here is an undead variety of the crocodile of the Pamaltelan continent.

You will likely find more useful encounters with the Encounter Generator. There are users guides to finding encounters and creating encounters and monsters

Down On Your Luck in Monster Island – Law, Order and Hapless Explorers

I have been working for awhile with some side projects related to my campaign in Monster Island. As a result of those I also created a few Encounters that might be useful in Monster Island or possibly even other places play.

Monster Island is a wonderful place for hex crawl type activities and this is what the party has been doing the last few sessions using several new things I have been working on. Extended conflicts have been used from M-Space and they are actually rather wonderful way of setting heists, chases etc up. More on that later. I have been using Johnn Fourr’s Campaign Logger to build up a personal private campaign log. It is truly good way of tracking your campaign with minimal effort and the latest addition of random generators that you can either keep private or use what they provide or contribute as open source have been extremely useful. More on that also later.

In my campaign Monster Island is of course an alternate form of Loral – perhaps a touch more accessible than in the official lore but still plenty tough and modified to fit my Fonrit.  Fonritans of course want to exploit the riches of the island. M’Simba M’Samba the Green Walker is around but not seen…   Some wish to see him, others definitely do not.  Beware what you wish for you might get it, and it might not be what you thought it was.

Governor’s Guard is a small of group of toughest mercenaries so far seen. White Death is a larger group of mercenaries brought in to keep law and order. Stingers is militia volunteers.

The following parties might be encountered

You will likely find more useful encounters with the Encounter Generator.

Who says Dorastor has all the fun – join the Cwim’ming party

Every Tom, Dick and Harry knows that you should avoid Teshnos and Wastelands close by  it on the Wilddays as Cwim is having his daily walks.

Created the old favorite

from the Gloranthan Secrets book. He joins the Encounter Generator’s chaotic party with his small friends

who are spitting image of himself. For convenience there is now

which contains the Cwim itself, gorps he throw and the spit monsters.

It would be good to know about his arriva a bit beforehand as the party might need some preparing. So I created random party table for Foreshadowing the Encounter. It can be attached to any party and it can provide some clues that an encounter might be occurring. Some examples would be

  • locals fleeing the encounter
  • carrion animals associated with encounter gathering
  • Spoor of the encounter found
  • Footprints made by the encounter
  • Wildlife alarmed by the closeness of the encounter
  • Favorite food animal of the encounter growing alarmed

and so on.This is attached now to Cwim’ming party but will in time be attached to other parties as well.

Here are few other Chaos encounters from earlier posts

 

 

Encounter Generator Returns to Anaxial’s Annex

After a brief break here are a few additions to Encounter Generator to help Mythras and RQ6 referees create new NPC’s and other encounters.

Pamaltelan continent

Seas

Elementals

Various

Monster Island

 

 

Sorcery Tool for Mythras (and friends) updated

Sorcery tool described here has been updated based on user feedback.

The new version of the tool (1.1) contains both the standard durations for spells and the optional long durations. You select as per your GM’s choice using the campaing duration rules field.

The unenchanted iron version is a house rule that is now explained.

The new version can be downloaded from the same location than before in Sorcery Tool for Mythras (and friends like RQ6).

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There are other charts available for RQ6 and Mythras here. RQ and Mythras Encounter generator is found here

Classic Fantasy -Old School Monsters

There seem to be lots of interest in old school recently. Classic Fantasy supplement by the Design Mechanism looks likely to fill the craving for old school for a long time to come. the list of monsters is like who is who in the memory lane of the early days of my gaming in late 1970’s. Spent a few moments in creating templates to generate some of the monsters from my very first games in 1976 or 77. Somebody beat me to the indomitable kobolds but here are a few

The first I remember throwing at my players in those school days was the carrion creeper or crawler.

The next that I vividly remember in cube form was

There were others in the early days as well like

..and when the players grew up in levels they found

The interest seems high as I have rarely seen so many contributed monster encounters in so little time in the RQ Encounter Generator. Please keep contributing and marking them with “Classic fantasy” tag. It would be good if you remember to add the “Abilities” to the monster when you create it – this will help gamemasters in not having to flip back into the pdf or book to check the ability.

There are already bugbears, kobolds, goblins, hobgoblins, gnolls, orcs, hill giants, killer mimics, skeletons, umber hulks…

 

To see the Monster Island and die – Monstropedia of Loral

 

Here are few new denizens of the beautiful island called Loral. It is populated by rare endangered pieces unified in their approach to life (hate the intruders). There is rather large treasure ship wrecked on the island and there used to be God Learners here long time ago so the historians are of course quite interested in the island. The below natural exhibits are imagined for RQ6 Encounter Generator. Among the less educated the island is called Monster Island.   The sources have been the Tradetalk #13, Guide to Glorantha and Men at Sea.

Some are really co-operative and are driven by the sense to please (their palates) and fulfill their heart’s desire (hate the intruders). Some of these are bad news indeed.

There are other pages on Monster Island

 

Close Combat Situational Modifiers For RQ6

In my quest towards perfect GM Screen for RQ6 I gathered all the close combat situational modifiers into one table. 

It now contains the usual ones (fighting in pitch black darkness, partial darkness, blinded, while prone and so on). In addition it has the shorter reach for those of you playing with Reach rules. I added also the fatigue effect on close combat skills and limitations brought by swimming, climbing or riding while fighting.  In case your players are doing a fighting retreat with the loot it contains the encumbrance modifiers as well. If for some reason the players (or even the NPC’s) need to grab a different, perhaps unfamiliar weapon to use – the table contains the modifier rules for those as well. 2016-01-31_22-21-03.png

I also updated the movement chart with colors – green for earthbound movement, blue for swimming.

The rest of the charts for RQ6 are here 

Movement Chart for RQ6

For the future chase sequences in my campaign decided to combine all the movement effects into tables that fit into a single page. I find it easier to look info from table instead of calculating it with the rules.

It contains now a table for movement rates between 1 and 14, effect of athletics on the speed when walking, running or sprinting. It also has a table for the common modifiers for movement like encumbrance, armor and fatigue.  It has also the effects on ranged combat.

Here are the tables as PDF.

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I also added similar tables for swimming.

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Other useful tables exist for Combat Special Effects, Healing and Wounds, Diminish spell effects, weapons and shields & Criticals and difficulty grade effects on rolls.

 

 

Spotlight Cards for RQ

Read an interesting article at Dread Unicorn site about spotlight cards and hipster PDA as a player reference for GM.  The idea is to help GM to remember to let each player shine at the spotlight in the game. This can be especially problematic with larger groups at play same time. The spotlight card method gathers rough information about each player and their aspirations to an index card and at the bottom  of the card ask the question: “has the player been in spotlight already”. At the start of the game session you pick a card and make sure that person gets her spotlight in some way. You may have prepared for this beforehand already. After the spotlight moment you move the players index card to the bottom of the stack and go for next player making sure that during the session everybody gets their chance. On that page there are spotlight cards for several game systems.

I thought this was an intriguing and try to combine it here with having some reference information about the player in one card which I have been thinking about how to do for some time. Here is an example (not of any of my gamers…)

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The card contains information that might be useful for GM overall.

The proficiency is marked as in Monster Island supplement – as a rough measure: Elite would mean between 71-90% and Cannonfodder 30 or below. Proficiency progresses downwards from Elite-Veteran-Seasoned-Green-Cannonfodder. The color coding helps to see at a glance the levels: blues are elites, green is seasoned, red color is cannonfodder or green proficiency. The colors give the GM a quick indication what should be the level of challenge to come up with and what might be the weak or strong areas.

All of the spotlight cards for my players sit in my Evernote with a combined card as a shortcut that has links to all of the individual cards. I might also print out these as index cards.

I will experiment with this for awhile and will return to the subject.