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Ride Like The Wind
- Complacent Gaming Syndrome: There's a plethora of gods your clan can worship, with various useful blessings. But in practice, the food gods are invariably the most important, and they only get more so as the game progresses. The manual openly tells you that without Busenari/Inilla/Uryarda/etc shrines your clan will be unable to support itself. Since shrines are limited by the amount of population you have, any successful player's strategy will go like this: food gods, then war gods, then the shrine to Hyalor that's plot-mandated if your clan supports Cenala, then maybe, if your population is doing really well, one or two gods related to whatever it is the player actually wants to do. Any other playstyle will end the game in short order.
- Game-Breaker:
- Trading food. As long as you keep all the food-related blessings active and allocate a little magic during Sacred Time each year, you can expect your food stockpile to never completely deplete, allowing you to trade food in exchange for cows and goods. For less than a season's worth of food (which was going to spoil anyway), you can get anywhere from 80 to 120 cows/goods per turn, soon making you obscenely wealthy without the risks involved in raiding.
- The Solar Mask of Yelm allows you to regain magic expended after a successful Ritual. This is an extremely powerful ability, as it allows you to perform ritual after ritual and, as long as you successfully complete them, amass treasures, wealth and various bonuses and boost the skills of your nobles to heroic levels.
- Genius Bonus: There are a lot of obscure Glorantha references in the game. For example, Nyalda wears the "Ernalda the Mother" rune on her chest (another hint that they're one and the same) and her belt is made of repeated Protection runes.
- Sequel Difficulty Drop:
- Even if a heroquest fails, the quester is much less likely to die than failed questers were in King of Dragon Pass. The latter often turned players away from a game mechanic that was vital to being successful, and a big part of the source material's setting.
- If the dower you offer for the endgame marriage is too small, you will be warned and given an opportunity to up it. Negotiations with the Feathered Horse Queen were much less forgiving.
- It is much harder to get a "clan destruction" event (instant game loss) than in King of Dragon Pass.
- Sequel Difficulty Spike:
- Roving bands of healers come around a lot less often than they did in King of Dragon Pass.
- The endgame is entirely dependent on keeping one particular tribesman alive. If he dies? Say goodbye to that playthrough note . You must also succeed several negotiation checks — fail one of them and you're locked out of the good ending.
- In general, the game's events pull far fewer punches. In King of Dragon Pass, nothing really cataclysmic would happen unless you antagonized one of the major factions too much. In Ride Like The Wind, having to choose between collaborating with The Empire or being wiped out by them and dead gods falling out of the sky and devastating your clan are par for the course.
Lights Going Out
- Sequel Difficulty Drop:
- All blessings, myths, and shrine types are unlocked from the start of the game. Previously you had to sacrifice goods to learn a blessing (a sacrifice which had a chance of failing), on top of the payment that actually put it into effect.
- Ventures can be performed from the start of the game; previously, you had to complete the expensive "build clan hall" task, which took at least three years and 50+ goods, to do so.
- The clan has many defensive structures already in place, whereas their predecessors had to build them from scratch.
- Unexpected Character:
- The prologue ends with narration by Arachne Solara, who won't appear in history for decades at least.
- The Weeders are somehow surviving the Great Darkness, which surprises people even in-universe. So are the Ergeshites.
