Book of Quests for RQ6

I recently picked up Book of Quests, a set of adventures published by The Design Mechanism, for RuneQuest 6. The book is softcover, 224 pgs. in length. It contains seven scenarios, including the introductory adventure, "The Caravan" which is available for free download from their website. Although designed for use with the RQ6 ruleset, Book of Quests is not set in Glorantha (although no doubt, it could be with minor adjustments). The genre is strongly sword-and-sorcery, which is also a clear departure from the Gloranthan norm. Magic is rare and sorcery, in particular, is almost unheard of by most people and greatly feared by those who do know of it. Hence, the common thread in the seven scenarios involves the rise of an evil sorcerer named Jedakiah. Acting behind the scenes, the sorcererous villain directs his barbarian allies to cause considerable problems for a civilized land known simply as The Realm. Throughout the series, the PCs slowly learn of Jedakiah's schemes and of dark secrets long forgotten.

In the end, of course, only they can thwart his evil machinations. The book seems to be well-written, with an excellent index (unusual for a book of adventures) and a decent amount of cultural background info, such that the setting can be fleshed out for further use. Of course, the final word can only be written through gameplay.

-Rognar-

Runelords update

Rise of the Runelords is coming to a close. We finished off Book 5, gained 2 levels and jumped to near the ending of Book 6. Most of the session consisted of 2 fights. The first against 2 golems and the next was against a bunch of super storm giants and a high level fighter. Both were very tough.

As a party we tend to approach combat the same way just about every time. Unleash massive amounts of damage and kill them before they kill us. There isn't usually much battlefield control. When facing opponents that out gun you, there are going to be problems. And we had a lot.

Our biggest problem with the first battle is that we were largely unbuffed to start. There was lots of scurrying around trying to get the basic buffs to start. Things were further complicated by one of the golems grappling a party member. The other one pretty much would always auto-hit and inflict 50+ damage so no one really wanted to stand near it. It was a mad, chaotic fight but we managed to win with no casualties although the cleric had some work to do at the end of the fight.

The second fight was much harder. We quickly discovered that the squishier party members would probably die if they got hit with a full round attack so this battle was largely about positioning. The wizard flew around dodging statues being throw at him by a giant before getting grappled in mid-air by the fighter. The archer ran around trying to snipe the giants and not get killed. The palabard was running around invisible trying to kill the giants and not get smooshed. The rogue got caught in a bad spot and got pounded by 2 giants. He died not once but three times as the cleric kept using reach spells to heal him and bring him back. The last hit pushed the rogue so far into the negative that he was beyond clerical healing. The archer was also caught by one of the giants and did not survive the battle. If this is a sign of things to come, I think we are in trouble.

Snap Shot

I was looking at feats last night and I took a closer look at this one. Snap Shot basically allows an archer to make attacks of opportunity with a bow. That sounds pretty good until you look at the the Improved Snap Shot feat. This adds 10' onto the 5' that you threaten with Snap Shot giving you a total threat range of 15'. That's huge!  One more feat line that makes archers very, very scary.