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okay let's face it
rifts rune weapons are pretty bland compared to PF rune weapons
especially when Bill Coffin was around eg Libary Of Blethard
this dosen't mean they don't have personalitys like the PF ones
its just they just don't get fleshed out

so you are the new owner/owned of a rune weapon that has been around for thosands of years

so you are a 20 year old level 0-1 vagabond and the rune weapon wants to build you up

can it teach you skills, spells etc through that connection?

No. Rune Weapons are not teachers. Nor are rune weapons capable of teaching certain skills.

On a lighter note:

Rune Weapons do not wear pants.

Rune Weapons do not eat quiche.

Rune Weapons do not drink cappucino in italian restaurants with oriental women.

Rune Weapons do not drive German sports cars.

Rune Weapons do not invent eating utensils.

And so on...

let's take a simple skill lanuage

everyday the dwarf axe says

hello in dwarf is kapla

eventually you are going to know it

it is spekaing into your head

also when you are in combat

and the ten thsand year old axe sees a attack coming it can say parry block side step etc

I can see a rune weapon being able to teach its user things, but I know of no rule conserning this ability.

Rogue_Scientist wrote:

Shadow Wyrm wrote:I can see a rune weapon being able to teach its user things, but I know of no rule concerning this ability.

Ditto. I wouldn't allow it to become a serious issue in the game, but I can see a player picking up a skill or two over the course of the game.

Alternately, the GM could house-rule a few skills the personality within the sword maintains, that the user may (or may not) be able to access while in contact with the weapon. A great example of this kind of "different skills/memory in my head" thing is Robert Jordan's main character in the Wheel of Time series. Guy's got an insane dead man in his head. Every once in awhile, he's got something useful to say or knows how to help do something. But only if he a) is sane atm, and b) feels like it.

The best way I've seen Rune Weapons run in-game was by a GM who used slips of paper to communicate these kinds of interactions between players and certain NPCs. The group also used them for Telepathy, empathy, etc.

Over the course of a lifetime I would say that a rune weapon could be a mentor to it' owner,pushing him in a drection that is suitible to the weapons outlook.

"Lemme tell you how to deal with Splugorth, like I did back in the day...Wait! Crud! The Splugorth got me IN this sorry rune weapon mess, right!...Okay, forget what I just told you; we're going at this some other way..."

taalismn wrote:"Lemme tell you how to deal with Splugorth, like I did back in the day...Wait! Crud! The Splugorth got me IN this sorry rune weapon mess, right!...Okay, forget what I just told you; we're going at this some other way..."

I was thining old school dwarven warrior gets put in polearm at end of war
gets fouind by a sorry excuse for an American teen
polearm is having the kid work out train etc

I could see some basics, like language possibly, maybe literacy skills, but not much more beyond that. A rune weapon can't show you how to hold itself, or parry an attack, etc. So any physical skills would be a no-no on training. You can try to train yourself, but a disembodied voice isn't really going to help in training.

science and math skills, maybe, but those would be awfully hard to train and learn.

Last I checked a rune weapon can't see a thing unless it is a rune statue. Telepathy/empathy from the rune weapon doesn't mean it can see what you see, only that it knows your thoughts/feelings, so learning say math or literacy from it is going to be pretty painful way to go about it. Anything you could teach by simply 'talking it over' I would think wouldn't be to hard provided the rune weapon was willing to teach it.

So languages, history and lores probably wouldn't be to hard to pickup. Of course that doesn't make it easy to learn, just not as hard as other skills might be. I'd simply use it as a plot line for how a character say could learn ancient dwarven with no teacher or training materials to teach themselves.

When I GM I damn well don't let my characters just pickup whatever skills they want, there better be a logical explination for how they learn something as their character levels up.
-Matt