Category: Tools

Monster Island Weapons

Monster Island is one of the coolest supplements for Runequest currently. All the enemies (and the occasional friend) can be generated from RQ6 Encounter Generator – search with Monster Island tag.  Sometimes you might wonder what do the weapons the natives are using look like. I gathered here a small board showing an example of all the weapons listed in Monster Island supplement I could find.

So you want to generate RQ Encounters for RQ6 but do not want them to be in Glorantha

There are people who want to play in different worlds than in Glorantha but still want to use Runequest 6 and make it easy to create the encounters. That is very straightforward. There is an article on searching but below are few extra tips.

Use the filters

Select either “Fantasy”, “RQ6”, “Sea”. “Plant”, “Jungle”, “Monster Island”, “Chaos” as your filters in enemies or parties page. Most of the results will be non Gloranthan
There is a tag “Rq6” that shows you only the monsters defined in RQ6 rule book. There are a few missing (humans, elves, dwarves but they are described with their Gloranthan counterparts). I added the tag to most my creations but there are some in RQ6 book that I have not created the template but somebody else has.  There is also a tag “Monster Island” which shows all the entries from Monster Island.

Use the home page

Type -Glorantha on the home page and you will get only non Gloranthan results. Currently the minus only works in the home page. for example try typing into the home page (not enemies page, not parties page) Fantasy -Glorantha -Sea and you will see the list which has tags “Fantasy” but not Glorantha and not Sea.

Search with monster names

Search “Giant”, “Zombie”, “Skeleton”, “Lion”, “Tiger”, “Sorcerer”, “Primitive” etc and you will find quite a few entries.

About the tags. 

Tags are personal – so each creator of the encounter can only tag his own entries. There might therefore be differences in how people have tagged their creations over time.

Very short introduction how to map (Gloranthan) RQ Encounters to your generic fantasy world.

Many encounters in RQ Encounter tool are made for Glorantha but you can use all or most of them easily on any world with just a few tips.
 I am really direct and brief here – so forgive me – oh grognards of Glorantha for inaccuracies.
Forget about the names of the gods – think of the aspect below.
If you do not like to use the magic provided – discard it.
If you do not want to think of gods at all – drop them – just use the spells.

Mapping list

  • Orlanth  = Storm god, god of warriors. Worshippers of Orlanth can be used  as your standard barbarians
  • Umathela, Sartar = your standard barbarian areas
  • Afadjann, Fonrit,Kareeshtu = Think of thousand and one nights tales inhabitants
  • Agimori – Very tall dark people
  • Agartha, Akakor, Zerzura = Serpent people tribes from Monster Island
  • Anguri, Gabari, Gamari,Ghidori, Kamacuri, Kangi,Kumongi, Oodaki, Primitive tribesmen from jungle from Monster Island
  • Aranea = Spider god
  • Argan Argar = Troll trader god
  • Pavis = big frontier city
  • Balazaring = primitive hunter gatherers
  • Basmoli = Lion god
  • Broo = Chaos Hybrids with usually goat’s heads
  • Chaos = that unruly evil thing that you must oppose
  • Undead = those that live but do not
  • Doraddi = another tall, dark people tribe
  • Lodril = Volcano god
  • Exiger = excellent fighters
  • Etyries, Issaries = trader gods
  • Humakt = death god for warriors
  • Wachaza = Sea warrior death god
  • Ludoch, Malasp = mermen
  • Lunar = civilized warriors – think Roman, Persian
  • Lankhor Mhy = knowledge god
  • Odayla = hunter god
  • Waha = nomad chieftain god
  • Mallia = Causer of Disease God
  • Chalana Arroy = Healer god
  • Thed, Ragnaglar = Chaos Gods
  • Thanatari = Chaos knowledge god – headhunters
  • Yelmalio = Solar warrior god
  • Yelm = Solar ruler god.

This tackles most common ones in the RQ Encounter parties list.

Putting on my Protection from Flames spell with maximum intensity…

Creating your own encounters

If you do not find the right kind of encounters it is easy to create your own. Use a good tagging strategy when you do – see how others have tagged theirs.

Game Night supported by Mythras Encounter tool

RQ Encounter Generator provides you a way to very quickly generate evenings worth of encounters for your RQ6 game session. There are more than 1900 distinct encounter templates for enemies and hundreds of different ready made party encounters.  There are multiple ways of using the floor for preparing.

A. Using it on the fly

You need to have internet connection and preferably a printer available.

Find an enemy or party using the search tools

1. filter by category

2. search with any word and/or opponent skill level

3. browse or press “Do you feel lucky”

4. Generate

5. Save to a location of your choice or just print or use the pdf.

This might cause a disruption in the flow of your session so what I do usually is as follows.

B. Preparing for the session before hand

Sometimes you are preparing for a session well before the players come in. Sometimes it is half an hour or even less. The following approach is fit for both but of course you will have more time to think about the results of your preparation if you do it for example in the previous night.

I usually use loopy planning defined by Johnn Four which I have had very good experience so far.

Step 1 – the search 

What I have usually done – for an evenings’ game I create pdf’s out of the usual suspects of the area I am playing in – using the filtering and searching. I take care to look at the hanging threads and the plans of the enemies (loopy planning) when I am searching for encounters.

I might mark a few search results as favorites.  I might filter with a keyword and press “Do you feel lucky” a few times and create pdf’s out of those.

For example if I would need different kind of plants I would print out the “Not really a rose garden” – same for dinosaurs.

For a city I print out a bar and a market plus some random law enforcement and villains and/or gangs, a temple or two.

Usually it is enough to generate 2 or 3 encounters worth of enemies per terrain type or hanging thread. If the encounters are not rabble or underlings it might be hard to go thru more than a few robust melees or adverse encounters in an evening.

Step 2 – keeping the results

Usually I print the generated enemies out as I probably need to mark hit points down while fight goes on.

I keep a list of recurring enemies (the ones they did not manage to kill the first time round or that have hanging threads from previous session etc) in Evernote or Dropbox or printed out on a folder.

It is quite rare that I cannot live with these printouts as it is difficult during an evening session to go thru more than a few melees

Step 3 – adhoc

Sometimes during a game I need certain kind of enemy that I did not prepare for – I search for it and print it out from my iPad to a local printer.

RQ Encounter Generator reaches 1900: RQ6 Monsters all covered, Pamaltela and City Gangs

RQ Encounter Generator passed the 1900 templates mark this weekend. This also marks the point of having all encounters from RQ6 rules book covered.
Rq6 book encounters added
Pamaltela carnivore encounters added
City encounters added
Added also feature list for Pavis Street Gang names, Bakru Curses and Curse Durations.
Here is another undead – this time a Ghoul (Dark Troll)
Finally a possible campaign stopper – this time in Dragon Pass

Umathela – Orlanthi, Sedalpists, Vadeli in the Southern Continent of Pamaltela

RQ Encounter turns to South. Lord of the Storm is strong in the coast of Pamaltela (Fonrit, Fonrit update, Vadeli) even before the arrival of Harrek. The problems with Lunar seem remote when the real problems are forest elves, Afadjanni surges and Vadeli treachery and there is even talk of  new power of Kresh in the south. Sorcery is strong in this land. Thanks for Simon Bray for the very useful background discussions that will hopefully generate even more of Umathelan and Fonritan material in the future. Here are few encounters for Umathela in RQ Encounter Generator format.

Horses are rare in Pamaltela so Horse mounted mercenaries belong to wealthy employers or elite troops.  Some remote tribes have tamed large flightless birds (known as horse claws) as mounts.

Sedalpist Sorcery Order with Apprentice, Adept, Mage and Archmage has been created.

One of the cities has its own marine corps and it has been detailed here

Various inhabitants of Umathela have been created here.

The merchant caravan and Umathelan market has Common and Rare trade goods in Umathela according to the guide. Rare is rare if it is coming relatively far or is otherwise very precious…
Vadeli magic has been updated. A new sorcery order: Vadeli Sorcery order has been created.
Many of the encounters possible in Fonrit are also likely in Umathela even though they might be more hostile situations – so the relevant encounters have been updated with the tag “Umathela”
All of the sorcerers have been updated with Special Magic Component to Shape and Unknown Magic Component. The convention is that all the sorcery orders usually teach the default Magic Components by which sorcerers can shape their spells (Combine, Duration, Magnitude, Targets, Range). The order might sometimes not teach one of the default components (or might teach it only to higher ranks of sorcerers) and might teach one of the special magic components (Ablation, Focus, Fortune, Precision, Swiftness).
When creating a sorcerer you can choose one or more of these as a random feature or as non random feature. This will give even more variety to sorcerers. All of the sorcerers I have created have now this possibility of one of the default magic components missing and one special one added.

RQ Encounter Tool 101 Part 2 – Creating NPC’s and Parties

Here is a visual guide how to create NPC’s with RQ Encounter Tool.

This second guide concentrates on how to create NPC’s and parties. It gives a stepwise example of creating both basic and stronger NPC’s for a barbarian campaign. The example is for Sartar and Orlanthi but would be widely applicable to most campaigns.

The user guide for finding and generating NPC’s PDF  is here

The feature recap is here. 

What does the NPC look like?

There have been cases where the enemies have looked like stereotypic characters from a hack thriller – menacing, dark hair or bald, with a shade of beard, muscular. RQ Encounter tool has now new features you can add to bring a bit of variety to the looks of your shopkeepers, bosses and barkeeps.

There are now the following features that you can add:

  • Appearance (Arms, Back, Beard, Cheeks,Chest, Chin, Ears, Fingernails, Hair Color, Hair Condition, Hair Style – Men, Hair Style – Women, Hands, Legs, Lips, Mouth, Neck, Nose, Physique, Shoulders, Skin, Skin Texture, Stomach, Teeth)
  • Physical Expressions (Visual, Voice)
  • Motivation, Malformity, Personal Secret, Compulsion, Character Oddity, Character Looks, Character Complication, Character, Attitude, Social
  • Greetings
  • Fonritan Appearance
  • Fonritan hair color
  • Lunar appearance – skin, eyes, hair
If you like to rapidly create just the looks – take a look at this and generate the looks and discard the rest of the stats
Here is a test character that has almost all of the above features
These feature tables work best if you pick for example hair color and maybe one or two other attributes as 100% random feature and pick a few/all of the rest with a very small percentage thereby creating short descriptions that can vary quite a lot.
Here is a general barkeep following that guidance.
If you want to have features for Fonritan – use Fonritan hair color but not the general one.
 Sources
  • Appearance and Physical Expressions tables based on work developed by Darren Andrews. Used with permission.
  • Character, character complication, character looks, character oddity, motivation and social feature tables were started from The Covetous Poet’s Adventure Creator and Solo GM Guidebook and are used with permission of Frank Lee

tool

Gloranthan Cult One-Pagers get PDF of all cults

PDF file of all cult files is now available by popular request. It has bookmarks to individual cults. Thanks for Barry Baker for the first round of this – now will be provided every time cults change.

Gloranthan Cult One pagers have one page reference for RQ6 for most popular Gloranthan cults – more than 130 of them.

More info on the one pagers here

Updated cults main page exists here ! Updated cult descriptions, more cults. 

Rq6 Offensive and Defensive Special Effect Charts updated

Reformatted the offensive and defensive special effect charts for better glancability. All the related special effects should now be in the same groups (Defensive – move, Defensive – criticals, Defensive – fumbles, Defensive – does not need special conditions, Defensive – needs special conditions)

Similar grouping done also for Offensive (Does not need special conditions, move, needs special condition (for example certain kind of weapon), attacker critical, defender fumble etc)

The charts can be found here:

Offensive Special Effects

Defensive Special Effects

Rest of the charts