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Good gracious, @Joerg, did you have all that already written up, or have you been tracking (and side tracking) this reply to my humble question this whole evening? 😀 It will take a couple of evenings to try to palate that and find out ways how it could be brought into play. It's definitely high holy day stuff, or heroquest stuff. A Lankor Mhy answer to an initiate question. Thank you!

Some people might be imagining something like this: Great God Major God Bog-standard God Minor God Great Spirit Demigod Superhero Hero Schmuck Top Trumps! Some might respond by quibbling about the categories and the orderings — the stamp collectors and train spotters — but not question the idea that the “right” set of categories (to be determined) would occur in an ideal “physics” of Glorantha. In their ontology, these are natural kinds … if you like. But that is what I am skeptical about, although it is all but irresistible when the game has special rules for everything: the game “engine” becomes the physics of the world — “if you sacrifice x points (Joules) of POW (energy) to god y, then …” kind of thing. Gods aren’t like gold, or water, or even stoats or gravity. In the grand account of how the world works, gods don’t show up at all. Something, nothing, anything could be mentioned as a god in a myth or religious rite. That is not to say there are no gods, but maybe they don’t have enough in common for there to be natural laws about how mortals interact with them. Of course, there might be a myth about the gods arguing about who is objectively top god, who is a real god, who is a demigod, and who is just regular Jo Schmuck. Gods and mortals might even go to war over it — oh, wait … — but that doesn’t mean the whole thing isn’t misconceived.

No idea, although I thought people might enjoy the video. Friendface said "Those attending ChaosiumCon next week will be among the first in the world to be able to purchase Cults of RuneQuest: The Lunar Way, and the Pendragon: Core Rulebook! Both titles will be available in limited quantities!" and "Unfortunately there have been massive and unavoidable shipping delays. Not too much longer now, though" There's always plenty of other things to do while waiting for new product. There's new stuff coming out of the JC almost every hour (it seems like it anyway). Or you could familiarise yourself with the Pendragon starter set and hit the ground running when the new rules appear, or just wait here and ask every so often where's the new stuff, gently weeping.

Not sure how it would reflect in myth but one positive point of floods for Esrolia is dumping fertile silt on the fields - sure they've enough water but any extra bit of fertility comes in handy. Possibly an extra step in a 'revive the rivers' rites where the freed river brings along the fertile earth that got diverted/stolent/hoarded by whoever kept them prisonner. Possibly an impromptu mariage between Water and Earth prisonners and their offspring Silt coming back to grandmama to fertlize her fields. Which would tie in neatly with the esrolian GrandMothers.

Has this project been killed off? Would love to know as we've been waiting for more than 2 years now.

Yes, thank you, but... when? (for the rest of us, that is... I think C.Con has a few copies available, in a limited-release?)

"Release before chaosium con" T-T can't wait for the book haha and a great interview! I really like hearing all of Jeff's thoughts and insight

When it comes to rites of riverine survival through the Great Drought of the Late Storm age and the revival after the Breaking of the World as a side effect of Magasta's great feat, Sky River Titan's self-sacrifice, and the "reversal of the river flows" (which only affected those rivers still connected to the Heart of the Seas and not really the hibernating ones of Kethaela) might be subject of less well-known river rites. Or if known, hidden in river marriage rites, like the Sun Domer one which in all likelihood was learned or taken over from the Zola Fel River Folk, possibly as propitiatory exchange for their irrigation practices which seem to have inherited Pelorian weeder heritage (the Lodrili Ten Sons and Servants, and the Foreman, son of Lodril and the river). (Little surprise there, as the Second Age Sun Dome Templar cult emerged from the Black Eel Weeder territory.) Outside of this Sun Domer heritage, in the Heortling-descended portions of Saird and further south, there might have been human river folk ancestors of the Durulz, or at least precursors to Durulz rites reflecting earlier rites remembering and re-affirming riverine survival throught the Great Drought and into the bleak PTSD period of the Greater Darkness. The Durulz, and the Newtlings, and possibly some dragonewt or aldryami efforts, and probably some Styx Grotto rites of the Shadow Plateau. Questing along such riverine survival/revival rites might pick up the fun weird underground bits of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, with plenty Hollywood adaptations (and different approaches to reviving the archaic monsters of the deep) to loan from. Variations of this might almost write themselves, but maybe something along this line might be food for the Jonstown Compendium. (Given my lack of Jonstown Compendium publications so far, I would need to team up with people to actually produce anything. Contact me if interested, or steal the idea as is.)

River deities tend to be associates of the surrounding land deities and agricultural deities, with fishing and wetland harvesting the fourth of the Provider cults (farmer, herder, hunter, fisher). River management and designating flooding areas (ideally overworked fallows benefitting from fresh silt carried in) will always be done in conjunction with the river priesthood, who will also exact propitiatory sacrifices of energy (the riverine tribute to uphold Magasta's Whirlpool, keeping the Chaos Rift in the center of the world contained). Rivers rarely form borders between different (minor) land goddesses. The main exception to this are the peninsulas between deep river estuaries, but the further inland you come the more the borders will shift away from (changeable) river courses and towards watersheds dividing the river basins. Sooner or later, a (minor) land goddess will claim both shores of "her" river(s) and the surrounding foothills rather than regard the river as the shared border with her sister on the other side. The coastal division of the lesser land goddesses in Ships and Shores makes sense, but further inland the regional land goddesses will claim the entirety of the river basins. (Which is beyond the scope of that book, but a mythical map of inland Heortland may have the goddesses in quite different distributions than viewed from the coastline.) The major published agricultural river rite we have is the River Marriage of the Zola Fel Sun Domers between the naiad demigoddess Kinope and the Count of Sun County, described in MOB's RQ3 Renaissance masterpiece Sun County and picked up in his Sun County post-Cradle narrative on the Well of Daliath. I would speculate that Kinope was the guardian of something like a river refuge cenote during the dry parts of the Late Storm Age, nursing a minor remnant current of Zola Fel through that period into the return of the Seas following the Breaking of the World. Similar rites may have been part of the Esrolian and Heortling heritage in the Silver Age, with the rivers restored (although into a much lesser state of reversed current) and re-awakened. The rain rites would be shared by the river folk traditions, after all the example set by Engizi made the re-awakened rivers dependent on rainfall run-off, underground water transport (whether as actual underground rivulets in chasms in the limestone karst beneath the loess or filtering through layers of glacial clay, marl, and sands) and mountaintop melt-off from perennial mountaintop glaciation in Inora's realm. The dragon fought by Barntar no longer represents the primal river Sshorg/Nestentos nor the invading sea Aroka, but rather the prevention of feeding the new type of river prototyped by Engizi/Lorion. It might no longer be blue itself, although it still captures the waters of Heler (including those stolen by Valind). As a result, the Barntar variant of the Aroka myth might be set in a much bleaker post-Breaking of the World Late Vingkotling Age, with a much diminished homestead Barntar starts from and some more Greater Darkness opposition on his way to the dragon. The actual nature of the dragon might be less predictable than Aroka, although the Bag of Winds trick should still apply - somewhat. Barntar questers might be forced to be a lot more inventive than Orlanth cultists on the Aroka quest, possibly bringing agricultural and stead management technology into a more desperate struggle. There is a good chance that the dragon might have ice powers, the drought being caused by the refusal to release the water from the snows during the shortened agricultural season of the Late Vingkotling Age. Reawakening the rivers through the Barntar dragonslaying quest might also result in replenishing the soil in a flooding as the result of that quest.

When it comes to interaction of rivers with agriculture, monomythically this begins with Sshorg(a) climbing onto land after the Birth of Umath. (Local myths may have had rivers crawling inland a lot earlier, and there may have been severed sea tendrils trapped inside the top surface of the Earth Cube as it pushed through the sea surface and up the Spike in the Green Age providing the source of some very early (Green Age) instances of rivers.) The main agricultural deities of the "Orlanthi" (or rather Ernaldans) are Barntar and the Grain Goddesses. The Orlanthi are one of the few high cultures of Glorantha who don't cultivate some form of rice in the river marshes, but there are River Folk on almost all Genertelan rivers, with the Nogatendings fo the Black Eel the closest major group in Orlanthi lands. Such wet crop farmers may have been subsumed by the Vingkotling tribes - imagine a few of the obscure names that cropped up in the HQ clan generator questions as weeders adopted into riverine Vingkotling (later Heortling) tribes, with wet crop traditions retained in ancestral memory and probably recovered at some point after the Greater Darkness (quite likely already in the Grey Age/Silver Age as a slight advantage in the survival struggle). The main Barntar myth against droughts is a pastiche of the Aroka / Nestentos dragonslaying to free the captured rains, not exactly an irrigation feat. Still, the Orlanthi and especially the Esrolians are dam builders - Vogarth the Strong Man for instance built a dam to isolate Koravaka (the great Necropolis in central Esrolia) in an artificial lake. The riverine lowlands of Esrolia are densely settled, to an extent the World Building rules of RQ3 (and possibly some instance of Basic Roleplaying) compared to the Nile Delta, with no notable woodland commons between settlements (although allowing for wetland commons, probably with black alder or similar water-loving trees to provide at least some minimal source of fuel). I suppose a lot of the lowland fields are protected by low dams, which might be gradually sacrificed to floodings while keeping some of the harvest alive in dry basins. Overseeing which such lowland fields are to be flooded in emergencies, and compensated for the harvest losses by the Asrelian granaries, may be one origin of the authority of the Enfranchised Houses. Other than the strong matriarchal nature of the Houses, the non-centralistic organisation into small clans with distributed responsibility for enclosing land to keep it from being flooded and reclaiming catastrophically flooded areas bears great similarity to the Frisian design of their lowland coasts against the threat of their sinking land (as a late result from the disappearance of the glaciers), also with (in their case patriarchal) clans taking the leadership in such common projects. All of this is assuming the Mesopotamian model of irrigation for wheat antecessors during the worst of Fire Season (Summer) rather than the Egyptian model of letting open land be flooded by the annual Nile floods, bringing in lots of new fertile mud and arranging the sowing and harvesting cycles according to the floods. I don't see any evidence for such annual gift of fertile soil by the rivers of Kethaela and Kerofinela, although there might be a myth of leaving such behind as an apology after some extreme thaws. As far as I am concerned, the majority of the (somewhat mundane) fertility of central Genertela comes from the Loess, the gift of loose soil stolen by Orlanth from the abrasions of Valind's glacier and given to his wife and her daughters, captured in the rich grasses of their bodies. (Maybe the art direction for land goddesses should give them unshaven (or rather richly overgrown meadow) legs to account for this?) Unlike in the isolation of the Zola Fel or among the extensive bogs of the Pelorian bowl, the weeder folk of the southern rivers seem to have merged with the Dureving-(and quite likely also Helering-) descended fisherfolk following Pelaskos and Poverri, absorbed in agricultural clans (like e.g. the river worshipping bloodline(s) in the Red Cow clan) or grouped with the fisherfolk who gain the majority of their sustenance out of the water, the wetlands and the intertidal of the Choralinthor Bay. They may have quite a few of "wet crops" that aren't quite cultivated but readily harvested wild plants, like "sea asparagus" in the salt flats of the Choralinthor, water cress, reed rhizomes or kelp - resources also managed and maintained by the newtlings of the region, in addition to "crawfish" crawlies that may end up in the soup. (Given the information that the durulz may be one of the prerequisite re-engineered races of the EWF to achieve their Proximate Holy Realm effect for their core lands, I suspect that a population of Kerofinelan river folk provided the experimental stock for the Remakers to create the durulz imitation of keets, borrowing their dietary myths for the identity of their new species.)

I recall reading somewhere (it may have been one of Jeff's posts) that when the God King redirected the Engizi via the New River he 'married' Esrola as the local Land Goddess to Engizi. I can't recall the source.

Cue weird Olm-like blind albino cave-ludoch. Ludoch who have had a proportion of their Water rune replaced with Darkness.

You should get @jajagappa's input on Nochet waterways - Harald used to have his HeroQuest Glorantha Nochet campaign on RPGGeek, but it seems it disappeared since. The Lyksos has been joined with the Engizi river by Belintar, and nowadays I expect the Engizi cult to be the main river cult even though it is the Lyksos bed the conjoined rivers share. Thanks to the Skyfall and several marshes, the Engizi river may have the most steady basic flow of all rivers in Genertela, but seasonal runoff from the south-eastern half of Dragon Pass will boost this current a lot in Sea Season. Rainfall on the edge of Shadow Plateau might be quite reliable even in normally dry Fire Season, with evaporation from Choralinthor Bay blocked by the Plateau and likely to run off its cliffs. I don't expect much in the way of tidal interference with the Lyksos bed, although the highest tides might be noticable upriver from Nochet (if only by the current having to push against the rising Choralinthor Bay). Esrolian water management might be mainly concerned with draining the fields, although I guess there will be reservoirs in the Mesopotamia upriver(s) from Rhigos to make up for unusual dry spells. Providing waterways to transport the harvest to the rivers and into Nochet on barges will be an important side benefit of this drainage system. On the mythological side, the most famous marriage between Earth and Water would be that of Faralinthor and Esrola, overseen by Jolly Fat Man on the cover of the Prosopaedia (around 10 o'clock). Faralinthor was the surrogate parent of the rivers of Kethaela and Kerofinela after the Flooding of Ernaldela had receded in the Gods War, until he was dried out by a jealous (or just avaricious) Storm God. Godtime rivers ran from the Heart of the Sea (beneath the then still intact) Earth Cube through the surface seas (mainly Togaro and his child Sshorg) into the lands surrounding the Spike, with the northwestern (Hudaran) seas initially stopped by Zzabur, rediriecting their energies to fight Ladaral the Fire Mountain, with the Tanier River possibly being fed via the Neliomi, but anything east of that by descendants of Togaro. The river heads would slowly creep inland, scooping up matter and energies, sedimenting digested stuff while sending the energies and nutrients into the seas, which replenished their currents. The height of the Flood brought huge "rivers" - tendrils of sea creatingvast bulges even across all but the highest peaks of the Rockwood Mountains into Peloria, encircling Vingkots kingdom with two immense standing waves, huge walls of water encroaching on the lands defended by the Storm Brothers. This big flood was forced to retreat, until only Faralinthor's basin remained a sea between Jrustela and the Vithelan waters. Cut off from the Heart of the Seas, the rivers relied on Faralinthor to replenish their currents. The biggest river, Sshorg(a)/Oslir(a) had its back broken by the remains of Sh'harkarzeel, with the Marzeel River occupying its remaining river bed, and the cut-off northern portion of the river changing its direction, reconnecting to the Heart of the Seas via the White Sea. (The Seolinthur River and its tributary Zola Fel might have retained their connection to the Sshorg River and the Heart of the Seas east of the eastern shores of Faralinthor.) As the seas conquered during the flood fell dry, Faralinthor himself was cut off from the Heart of the Seas. As the Gods War proceeded, Faralinthor lost territory after territory, until finally only a mostly dried up salt lake remained, and possibly a few deep caverns or cenotes in higher regions beyond that salt flat. As a result, the rivers of Kethaela and Kerofinela dried up, retaining some hidden underground existence for much of the Late Storm Age. There should be a couple of myths about rivers hiding in the bosom of the land, and possibly water-filled deep caves which might be pilgrimage sites for magically enhanced river folk (or the intelligent fish worshippers of the rivers). Choralinthor Bay, the funnel through which the rivers took their currents from Faralinthor, had become a few miserable puddles and some mud, inhabited by the followers of Amphobos (or Amphibos) worshipping Flesiska, and some allied humans (the later fisherfolk of western and southern Kethaela). One such cenote might have been at the Caves of Diendimos, nowadays a holy place of Air Beneath Water near Deeper, but during the Lesser Darkness a hideout of the seas against the ravages of less friendly storms. I cannot say whether some Ludoch held out there in extreme confinement, or whether there were heroic ancestors of one of the two Pelaskite tribes lending them aid. The Breaking of the World, with the Implosion of the Spike, at the onset of the Greater Darkness actually brought a respite for the rivers, even though Engizi's example (the Skyfall myth) reversed their courses and took most of their vibrant energy away to contain the Chaos Rift where the Spike had been, creating Magasta's Whirlpool and the Homeward Ocean. Even though the rivers now collected what little water the rainfalls (or the meltoff of the Great Glacier) brought to them, they were re-connected to the Heart of the Seas, although only past the Chaos Rift encapsulated by the Doom Currents and their lesser helpers. While the southern shore of Faralinthor's basin had perished along with the foothills of the Spike, much of its bottom survived the Breaking of the World and was taken over by the Rozgali and Solkathi currents which re-emerged from their underground hiding places as the Homeward Ocean reached them. The ancient river currents retook their courses there.

If you are coming to UKGE I should have all of those there.

I've seen that UK restocks are coming sometime for Arkham, but I've also been wanting to buy fresh copies of the Starter Set and Core Rules slipcase set (since both of mine are out of date now, and I hate having errata sheets kicking around), but the latter two haven't been available in the UK for what seems like ages. Is there a restock coming for those items as well? Do we have a rough timeline on any of these items coming back to the Chaosium store? Edit: I'm only allowed one post per day apparently (!?), so in response to the below, I can't travel to UKGE due to mobility issues, so I can only order online.

So my new (male) character has farmer background but is interested in the river god. The location is right next to the river Lyksos, near Nochet. I think the river swells a lot during/after Sea Season, so its waters will rise on to the fields. Which is both a good and a bad thing. Perhaps mostly a bad thing, since Esrolia typically receives enough rain for cultivation. In practical terms, I think my character has been somehow responsible for irrigation and drainage of the fields. Since Nochet has those aqueducts, he might have been active also there, getting parts of the river to nourish the people. So my character is not a fisherman or a boater, yet still has a meaningful and practical job connected to the river. This got me thinking about the mythical and magical connections between rivers, rain and the earth. It seems that rain (Heler) is in the realm of the Storm Gods, rivers are usually allied to the Sea Gods, and earth & agriculture are the realm of the Earth Goddesses. However, making the fields fertile is paramount to all civilized people and requires coordination, and all these cults are necessary in cultivation, in one way or another. Question: is the coordination mainly social, among humans/mortals (husband and wife, village, priests of different gods)? Or are there examples of locally allied rain/water/earth cults that bring something extra to this marriage/technology of rain, water and growth?

Other that a creature should have at least a chance at lifting itself, you can assign much higher values independent of size. The typical giant ant retains not quite the proportional lifting capacity of an ordinary sized one, but will still lift itself and quite a load not because of physics but because of our expectations when encountering such a beast, despite the fact that its biology would not allow such a creature in current Earth's atmosphere at all. It takes only four of Terry Pratchett's Mac Nac Feegles to lift a cow (each one at one hoof) and carry it away. Four ordinary humans would have a hard time even with a rather small modern cow. That would give these SIZ1 creatures a strength of around 2D6+6 or better.

Got it, so, my main question is if I wanted to start building from the ground up is that a way to do it for 'realistic' stats and then change it from there if these creatures don't conform to normal laws? i.e. if I make a SIZ 4 creature, they'd have something like STR 8 as an average?

Hi Dangermouse, greatly appreciated! One last request - would it be possible to also add 'Allegiance' (p211) to the Roadmap? I think that would pretty much cover everything!

In this context, let me quickly plug my notes on Sedenya as “Mistress of the Three Worlds” (mundane, divine and mystical), on page 89 of my free Manifesto. They set down some consequences of ideas Greg was playing with when he conceptualised the Lunar Way: part of the uniqueness of the Red Goddess is that she combines and understands all three: she is simultaneously a goddess, and mortal, and a mystic.

I would go in a different direction. A buddha is not automatically a god (neither a deva or an asura) and is most likely to be a human, but within Buddhism, the knowledge of the Shakyamuni Buddha transcends that of Brahma the ruler of the devas. The applicability to Sedenya and Nysalor seems fairly relevant. Of course, some gods are also buddhas, and some buddhas wear the masks of gods in order to spread the dharma more expeditiously. The categories are not a pyramid, nor a ziggurat.

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And the Lunars would have you believe these are the same things... I'm not necessarily saying they are or aren't of course, I'm just positing the idea that there could be shades of godhood between 'heroes' like Harrek and Jar-Eel and 'True Gods' like Orlanth and Shargash. Perhaps, with her refusal to truly depart from the world of Time into the mythic, Sedenya is one of these shades. A shade like Nysalor, perhaps. Slightly different upper-tier steps on the path to enlightenment, that look indistinguishable to us puny mortals grubbing about on the ground. Alternatively, they're all one and the same thing (just in and outside of time), and all of this 'different steps' pigeonholing is nought but propaganda. Any sufficiently advance mortal is indistinguishable from a god (so perhaps all our gods are sufficiently advanced mortals).

Well, many gods also have physical presences in the world, being present in the water of a river or the stone of a mountain or in every lamb frolicking in a field.