Tag Archives: OQ2

A non-depressing gaming situation

Happy forest

A while back I wrote about my depressing situation in trying to get the gang together for gaming.

Now, after some yapping on my part, we’re ready to go next sunday. Not all of the gang, but we’ll be 4 people and that’s good enough!

This month will have been 2 sessions of Swords & Wizardry and 1 session of OpenQuest/Ravenloft.

Cool.

OpenQuest awesomeness!

Hoplites…

 

Finally, OpenQuest delivers the stuff that Chaosium’s old RuneQuest 2 started out long ago.

First out, the OpenQuest 2 rules set is awesome, and has just about the right amount of rules crunch for me these days. And now there’s even a free basic version.

Second, the supplements for the game are seriously cool:

  • Crucible Of Dragons – Ancient Greek style Hoplites against Dragonmen on a weird isolated island.
  • Savage North – Barbarian Swords & Sorcery galore.
  • Life & Death – Death in the ancient post-apocalyptic desert sands.

This game and the supplements feels like the natural successor to RQ2. Simple and cool, yet intricate enough for intrigue and investigative games.

This is what I wanted and hoped that RQ and Glorantha would become – adventure and action in a well designed setting. They are also a great GM tool to help design your own, less “serious and mature” and more adventurous – well, adventures. I also think that OpenQuest has the right amount of crunch for a beginning d100 GM.

What happened in real life was that during the lean years in the 90’s, Glorantha became a scholar’s world, with layer upon layer of esoteric knowledge added and the focus shifted from cool place to adventure to some mythic quasi ethnologic intellectual training ground for self proclaimed Gloranthan Scholars. Shifting the system from RuneQuest to the more free-form storytelling HeroQuest, did not help the situation either. (There’s a more in-depth post on that here).

The result of this, plus the Mongoose thing kinda burned me out on Glorantha. Thus, I’ve decided to draw up my own World for running OpenQuest and RuneQuest 6 adventures, and I will cram in all these cool mini-settings plus the new non-Gloranthan ones for RQ6. And yeah, I will throw in the old, but modded Gloranthan stuff also!

Started on the World Map today! Freedom!

References:

d101 Games (OpenQuest)

The Design Mechanism (RQ6)

Moon Design Publications (Glorantha)

OpenQuest 2: On regaining Divine Magic

Temple detail

In some ways Divine Magic is the most powerful magic in OpenQuest. However, the biggest limitation is how you get your spells back once they’ve been cast.

The rules suggest 3 ways (p 148 OQ2 Core book):

  • Visit a temple and pray or perform in ceremonies on cult holy days – regain all spells (default method)
  • Meditate/Rest/Commune with deity – regain 1 point of divine magic/hour spent in meditation (optional method)
  • Perform a Deed in your Deity’s creed (optional method)

I’ve decided to allow all the methods, since we play in Ravenloft, which originally is a D&D setting (albeit lower in magic than most D&D settings). The meditate method is the most controversial, and I think the rules as written are too beneficial for players, so I added a chance of failure. New rules below. I will also add them to the Codex Divina and upload a new version when I get the time.

Regaining Divine Magic

There are 3 ways to regain Divine magic:

  • Visit a Temple of the deity and pray or participate in ceremonies (as in book)
  • Meditate/Rest/Commune with deity (1 point of divine magic/hour in meditation – see below)
  • Perform a Deed in your Deity’s creed (as in book)

Meditation new rules: After meditation time, roll Lore (Religion) with a +5% bonus to the skill per hour spent meditating. If failed, you can try next day. If fumble roll 1d4 for when new try is allowed: 1=1d6 days; 3=1d6 weeks; 4=1d6 months.

This only applies to the meditation variant though. The Visit a temple and Peform a Deed still works as usual.

(More info: p.148, OQ2)

OpenQuest 2 Dark Fantasy character concepts

Some more goodies for my OpenQuest Ravenloft game. Here’s a bunch of Dark Fantasy Character Concepts.

OpenQuest 2 Dark Fantasy Character Concepts

Dark Fantasy Character Concepts

Link to PDF

I had a great deal of inspiration from both the Domains of Dread and the Gothic Character Archetypes in Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque II.

Have fun with it! And of course, you can find them in the Alexandrian Library too.