Coursing & Crawling - More Commentary On - Runequest Cities A Generic Role Playing Supplement

Now let's pick it up right back here on the blog with Runequest Cities.  But what makes Runequest Cities so damn useful for Sword & Sorcery OSR and BRP games?! When it comes to Stombringer Rpg cities, the Runequest fourth edition's Runequest Cities is an excellent resource and one that is especially useful when round out the Sword & Sorcery's Young Kingdom. Why?! Because between adventures there's a catch up system that allows Stormbringer & Elric adventurers to have events outside of the dungeon. Even in the description says so;" The Fourth Edition of the Cities supplement from Midkemia Press was brought into the Avalon Hill/Chaosium Runequest series as a generic sourcebook. This served as one of a number of AH Runequest supplements in their "Gateway" series, intended to broaden the RQ system beyond the Glorantha setting." 

"From the publisher:
RUNEQUEST CITIES: the natural arenas for fantasy roleplaying adventures, city events are the most interesting, city dungeons the deepest, city biways the darkest, city dangers the most invidious, city activities the most tempting, and city rewards the most fabulous.
A unique guide to urban possibility, RQ CITIES includes clear instructions, more than 60 tables, additional dozens of sub-tables, and many illustrations and silhouettes.

RUNEQUEST CITIES: Entertaining, systematic, indispensible.

• Challenging Encounters
• City Populating Procedures
• Character Catch-Up System" 

As I stated my own recent experience with Runequest Cities has been Adventurer, Conqueror, King rpg. Where the PC's are between adventures and need to have experiences on thier own terms many of which have gotten rewoven through back play and the like into the Borderlands campaign that we've been doing on and off for years now. The Borderlands is rich with several Bronze Age civilizations and societies. And because of the very nature of Runequest Cities we were able to bring to life many of the lesser areas around the Borderlands to life as minor cities and the like. 
And the same was true with the Young Kingdoms there were minor kingdoms and road  side towns that needed to be fleshed out. And Runequest Cities was a God sent of a product. Many of the plethora of random tables allowed us to flesh out Sword & Sorcery cities without the need for other 'official D20' style supplements. This went hand and glove with many of the ideals that echoed in the aftermath of the D20 implosion.  

Because of it's very nature Runequest Cities is perfect for the Young Kingdoms allowing minor areas of The Sea Kings of the Purple Towns  & Perils of the Young Kingdoms to be filled in with living and thriving areas of vice and trouble across the board. 

Commentary On Plane Hoping In The Stormbringer rpg - The Second Entropy Configuration, Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique, and The Pan Tangians

 Last night we our group got together for beers and to talk about Stormbringer and the Rogue Mistress campaign was brought up. And this also brought to the fore front Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique. The events here take place after our experiences at the Inne Between Worlds. 

We had already served aboard the Rogue Mistress by this time and our wizard patron wanted an Entropy congifuration. Why?! We weren't sure but the pay was good and so we were off. This takes place after my uncle's passing. We three DM 's were still working from his notes. 

Nineteen Ninety one saw our crew of retrobates back on Zothique as we faced off against a crew of Pan Tangians headed by a Chaos priest. There's a part of Zothique called the 'wastes of time' that my uncle made up and it's filled with the wreckage of scale ships. Why it was filled with this wreckage we never found out but we did find out it was a demon haunted place of horror. Skeletal crews still were at the helm of some of those ships. And the Pan Tangians were dressed in desert gear and light weight demon armor. We were after a brand new used entropy configuration for a scale ship we were working on. The entropy configuration powers a scale ship's drive systems. And why is it called a 'scale ship'? Well according  to the scale ship entry on Moorcock Multiverse Wiki; "Those who utilize Scale Ships are not reliant upon the Moonbeam Roads, and can travel anywhere in the Multiverse they are capable of navigating to. Scale ships utilize an IT (Intercontinua-Travelling) drive to manipulate mass. Folding/Contracting the ship's mass allows its passengers to "scale down", falling through the scales towards realities of ever higher density." "Unfolding/Dissipating the ship's mass allows it to scale up, rapidly ascending towards realities of ever lower density. Experienced pilots, such as The Rose Von Bek, can skim their ships across the billowing fractals of the Ether like a stone across water." DM Steve & DM Barry took over my uncle's game after this point and had his notes 

We made it into the wreckage of a scale ship & then found out the hardway that it was haunted by a small hoard of Chaos demons. And we also heard that the Pan Tangians had also found out the hard way as well. They lost one of thier number to said demons. The closer we got to one ship's wreckage the worse it got! We found a number of sun bleached corpses and these were actually the former crew of the scale ship that we were exploring. 
And when they animated not one of us was surprised. What were surprised about was that one or two of the skeleton warriors could hurl spells at our PC's!  What we were surprised about was the fact that these skeleton warriors also attacked the Pan Tangians as well! We were inbetween a hard place and Hell itself! 
Our party began to look around for some solution when we came across another scale ship. This scale ship had a huge number of glyphs of Law & we decided to go inside. Inside the interior was an unsusual set up almost entirely biological in nature. We went to remove the 'Entropy Configuration' and heard the following, "Oh if you do that you'll kill me! However you'll make a lovely meal" and that's when the phantoms came out! The guardians of Law or the ship's immune system were more then happy to feed on us. Needless to say that we were able grab the configuration and then leave quickly. The 'ship' lay dying but what it actually was was a minor noble lord of Law. Our theory is/was that the scale ships were part of some great battle at the 'end of time'. 

To this day we have no idea what happened to that group of Pan Tangian reveavers. Our wizard patron who sent us to Zothique wanted his entropy configuration. The 'wizard' wasn't actually a wizard but Balo the Jester of Chaos in disguise. What he actually got was the 'heart of a minor lord of Law'. This artifact would cause us no end of problems later on. And this is one of the reasons why we had to aquire our own scale ship coming up. 

One of the the things that set my uncle's Stormbringer rpg campaigns apart was his frequent use of the 'plane hopping' motif. And this was normal in his view because of the mythic & epic nature of the Stormbringer rpg line of products. We as a party couldn't go jaunting out into the planes per say unless it was through the use of some artifact or patron. So our games never got out of hand per say. Sure we journeyed across the planes but it was through artifacts and sorcery. Or through the machinations of some wizard or powerful patron. We're talking about using a combination of third edition Avalon Hill Rune Quest and Fifth edition Stormbringer rpg systems. Scheduling and timing is going to be the key to getting this off the ground. 

Exeperiences In The Care & Handling of A Stormbringer first edition Campaign

 One of the advantages that Rogue Mistress allows a DM to do is to take an 'across the board' approach to thier campaigns. Want to bring in a PC from Hawkmoon's world? No problem. Want a barbarian from the lands north of Elric's Kingdom? No problem at all. 

I've seen comments describing Rogue Mistress as 'rail roadie incarnate' and to a certain extent that's true. Chad Bowser on Rpg Geek from '09 described it as thus; "A genre and 'verse spanning campaign. If your players are into it, this can be a lot of fun. The group really has to be up for anything, though."
And this is absolutely true. Why?! Because Stormbringer is designed for epic and mythological play. And that's no lie. 
The fact is that we thought that the game was better without Elric & Moonglum there to muck things up for our PC's. 
My biggest complaint has been the fact that many Americans have lumped the rpg in with the  Santanic panic'. I've run across people & player who think that the various demons and creatures of the game are 'real'. And during our gaming I got into two very real and dragged out fight with religious players who swore the 'demons' of Runequest and Stormbringer are real. Needless to say that we quickly ejected these two morons out of our campaigns. 
So let's go back to the fact that if we interlock the Rogue Mistress into the events of  Perils of the Young Kingdom. Then we've got an epic cycle that can circle into Sea Kings of the Purple Towns. 

What we did was to take the Stormbringer Companion #1 and the  fact that the companion actually had the Melnibonéan slaver & war ships within. These ships are capable of making even the most hardened adventurer quake within thier boots. 
And that's no joke none of our PC's wanted to end up in a drugged stupor serving on the Dreaming Isle or worse shackled to the end of a Pan Tangian chain. 

When the events of Rogue Mistress come around we were penniless and jumped at the chance to gain entry onboard the Mistress. Much later on we gained our own scale ship the Entropy Climber. That was much later on. All of these events looped back around after all of our PC's had died multiple times within Roge Trader. We had a couple of barbarian tribes men from Glorantha and Avalon Hill's Runequest third edition among our party. 
This was after a lucky break after we had been captured by a the Melnibonéan slaver ship. Only a lucky storm allowed us to escape. We had added two new players which would have been right around '04 just before meeting my wife from the U.K.. 
At it's heart is the fact that Rogue Mistress takes place around to key events one is the fact that the PC's are placed in dire circumstances and must complete the events. We didn't do that but were instead picked up by the Rogue Mistress and had a debt to Captain Maria De Pistola. And the second is the fact that the Mistress is a part of the world ending plot that drives Rogue Mistress. We didn't see the need to derail this plot and we were the group up for anything. And this was one of the secrets I think to running a solid Stormbringer rpg campaign. 
And Rogue Mistress events opened up our party for journeying to Corum's five realms. 

OSR Commentary - Rune Quest Cities A Generic Role Playing Supplement

 Let's pick it up from the other day here on the blog.  And now I mentioned yesterday to one of my players how I was shaping a Stormbringer campaign and we started talking about the game. He mentioned having a collection of early Chaosium material and mentioned that there was a book that I was going to need from 3rd edition Runequest. That book is Runequest Cities from 1988 is one of the best generic universal urban supplements ever. 

Rune Quest Cities is a solid sixty six pages of urban encounters and random tables that isn't simply useful for Runequest but game after game of Sword & Sorcery as well as fantasy. 
And it's all keyed with dice matrixes across the board. Rune Quest Cities is even useful for Cepheus Engine or old school Traveller where you need primitive or other Bronze age world encounters. And so it's incredibly useful for a game of Stormbringer or even another OSR game. 

And my most recent use with  Rune Quest Cities has been with Adventurer, Conqeuror, King.  Yes that's right Rune Quest Cities works very well with a late Roman Empire Style campaign. 
And this was around the time when I had quit D&D completely for about two years. D20 had taken over the entire spectrum of the market. And older players wanted something or anything besides 3.5 or even 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Our Stormbringer campaign had seven or at one point as many as ten players who rotated in and out of the game. 

The Care & Handling of A Stormbringer first edition Campaign

 "A thousand years ago a great war between the Dharzi and Melnibone eliminated the ancient race of sorcerers from the Young Kingdoms, and established the Dragon lords as masters of the world. Far to the north of Melnibone, the family of a lesser lord took the caverns of a tall, black island as their home, transforming the former laboratory of a Dharzi sorcerer into a magnificent abode."

"Then, the Bright Empire began its inexorable decline, and the caverns were abandoned. Four hundred and fifty years have past, and something dark and vile now inhabits this isle, warping the natural order of living things and twisting their very beings into hideous monsters."

"Lord Straasha summons the adventurers to the coast of Tarkesh, bordering the frigid Pale Sea and the unholy domain of forbidden Pan Tang. Visions of bloody waves ceaselessly haunt their dreams, presaging a doom to come should the heroes fail to heed Straasha's urgent call."
One of my all time adventures that I love to use to introduce the Stormbringer PC's into the world of Michael Moorcock's Corum has been 'The Man Who Sold Gods' By Geoff Gallian. The adventure centers around a prince from the realm of Corum; "RORN FELDUN HARAI is a Prince of the Vadagh, a fugitive from the World of the Fifteen Planes. He has come to the Young Kingdoms seeking military aid for his people. Centuries ago they left their native plane in their Sky City. Now they are unable to return, and are besieged by the forces of Xiombarg, Queen of the Swords. Prince Rorn’s quest has been in vain. The Melniboneans declined to assist him in any way. Now he only wishes to return home, but cannot find a way to." 
Eventually the PC's have to summon the 'infinite cathedral' & here's where we recently changed the adventure. And this element was the planar engine  within the cathedral over into an Entropy Configuration ala the Rogue Mistress. 
We did this after a Facebook comment and then to keep internal consistancy with the Stormbringer Rogue Mistress &  Corum book. Our own party had to face the machinations of many Chaos packs and thier handlers.  And this all takes place right after or before the events depicted in Sea Kings of the Purple Town. 

Yes I took this photo from Wayne's Elric/Stormbringer entry here. 

And this allows the campaign to maintain internal consistency. And this is something that we're looking to do coming up with our Stormbringer rpg campaign. The Corum sourcebook has such good material that it can be back drafted into 'The Man Who Sold Gods'. And this allows the DM to pick & choose what adventure elements wants. 

This all feeds into the internal campaign aspect something highlighted within the Rogue Mistress campaign. 

But why?! Well get into that coming up!