radmonger

To expand on my answer, because cultural skills represent not militia training, but mostly skills learnt in childhood. Playing games, listening to stories, and the local equivalent of Sunday school. And neither Sartar nor Esrolia treat children in a strongly gendered way; gender is gained upon initiation. And then, as in the real world, gender highly influences, but usually doesn't determine, occupation. Which is wisely left to player choice not game system. Of course, any actual 15 year old NPC would have some low level of occupation skills too, depending on their parents occupation. That detail is left out of the RQ;G rules; i guess someone finally found a detail to fiddly to simulate 🙂 There is a subtle point to be made about the thelyalan gender system in that is, while not binary, seneray[1]. it claims to support all choices, but insists a choice must be made, Women, in particular are either fighters or mothers, Ernalda or Maran Gor. They can be Helerings who can change that choice, but once they have done so, they must follow that choice until it comes time to change back. The lunars break that system, as they break the pentad of elements. Jar Eel the Razoress is the 7th gender; capably of being simultaneously sexual and deadly. [1] i did have to look that up

I think this is the key point Dara Happa never had to build an empire. It preceded the nomads and barbarians who split off from it. All real world empires started small, and had to build to whatever size they ended up as. With Rome as the outlier, and they do genuinely have lot in common with the Lunars. Dara Happa started out large, possibly even lozenge-wide. Its whole claim is to unique purity and longevity, though presumably the Kraloreans would disagree. Their whole deal is that if the lunars are able to conquer the world, the result would be stable and peaceful. At least until Glorantha gets hit by another rogue planet...

If you are discussing culture instead of cult, then by what measure is say Nochet not a Dara Happan city? What aspects of material, non-magical culture do they lack that Dara Happan culture has? The differences between Nochet and Yuthuppa are entirely that of cult and mythology. Nochet is ruled by Ernalda, queen of the Gods, former underwife of Yelm. Yuthuppa is currently ruled by the Red Godess, Yelm's daughter. That's not independent centers of development of technology clashing, that is the result of political and religious conflict within one common framework. To some degree, all known Genertalan cities are solar cities, they just express that nature differently. Dara Happa is just the place that does so by claiming close continuity to the mythical pre-time concept of Solar Empire. The cities that existed before their cavalry became nomads, and their peasants hunter gatherers.

I suspect the key to the Esrolian way of war is their signature Rune spell Bless Champion. The key expectation of a war leader is that they have that cast on them. While it would rarely actually happen, there is an underlying power dynamic in a room that comes from 'if We Fight, I Win'. Normal war magic plus support from an earth priestess beats anyone who has only normal war magic[1] This breaks down if the earth priestesses themselves are divided, as with Rhigos and Nochet. This compares with: 1. classical (Manirian?) culture Orlanthi, where Lightning means anyone in the room can kill anyone else. 2. solar/pentan cultures, where Sunspear means those with legitimate authority can kill those without. 3. Malkioni society, where the Zzaburi perform a somewhat similar social role the the Esrolian earth priestesses. [1] hence the common expression in reference to Harrek the Berserk that he hits you so hard your Grandmother dies[2]. [2] This is considered by military scholars to be an exaggeration. Documented cases involved only the death of the priestess actually performing the champion ritual, not the head of their house.

i think cultural weapons are supposed to be not so much explicit training as merely growing up in a society where people were carrying, sparring and talking about those kinds of weapons. Sort of how anyone who has watched american TV knows which end of a gun goes towards the enemy. But it seems like there is no modern concensus between youtube videos as to whether a spear should be used underhand or overhand. I guess it would perhaps work a bit better thematically if they replaced, rather than added to, the base skills. Militia training is reflected in more the fact that most professions do get some level of weapon skills (e.g. farmer +15%, versus warrior +25). As i understand it, the key thing about Esrolia is that only women really get to be _hereditary_ nobles; typically men would have to marry into a noble house to follow that profession.

if you wanted the rules to reflect that vision, you could drop the rule about common magic being able to be cast by the highest rune a character has. Instead, it is actually cast using the rune, as the Red Book of Magic lists it under. And then have the rating of the rune be the value of the highest 'worship [deity]' skill a character has. This means that only an experienced priest-type could reliably cast them routinely, on an unboosted roll, as instant spells. For everyone else, they will be ritual spells that require time and preparation. Which means taking at least a full combat round with no other actions. As heal wound is a spell, many full adults can heal someone up after combat, taking several minutes and most of their MP. Doing that in combat for a squad, while dodging spear thrusts, is a job for specialists. For campaigns that start at the adulthood ordeal initiation, only the one special rune magic they get as reward from that heroquest is castable. The next few years after initiation are largely spent learning a worship skill that both makes that spell reusable and common spells accessible.

Obviously, the map shows not the actual state boundaries, but is a mytho-political statement from the perspective of an Esrolian noblewoman. Fronela is not actually ruled by an earth queen. But she found it useful to depict her that way, as an enemy of Ygg. Orlanth is not shown as ruling, but as an external threat, a peer of Gagarth. Slonta sleeps, and in her slumber, Graymane raids us. Kalikos is depicted as the same size as Valind, valiantly defending Pelora. Teshna looks to her own defence. With no husband. she is as scrawny as a Vingan. Belintar is absent. But does the prominence of Yelm imply the possibility of his resurrection too? Esrola half-rises, pondering how to deal with these threats. This is clearly propaganda created on behalf of the Red Earth faction.

Hate to disagree with the author of the work i'm citing, but I don't think climate, divinity and geopolitics are cleanly distinct topics. Certainly throughout earth history, the rise and fall of empires has been governed by the climate. The Dara Happan empire exists because it grows crops in a certain way. Which in turn is because the calm air of Entekos allows relatively easy access to the Yelmic realm. The lands of the Earth Godesses are the other lands where agriculture is practiced. Which works because crop-destroying storms only happen at a time in the annual cycle where the fields are empty. Any educated Esrolian would know that. They are, after all, a citizen of a state whose patron goddess gives them magic for agricultural productivity comparable to that of a modern organic farmer. I suspect there is an explicitly political message in the image that would only be apparent to someone fully up on the details of what exactly the Red and Warm Earth factions were up to the year it was commissioned. https://climate.nasa.gov/news/1010/climate-change-and-the-rise-and-fall-of-civilizations/

This mythic map from Ships & Shores of Southern Genertela, may add some points relevant to this discussion: Air/storm is everywhere. But it only actually rules marginal lands, in the form of Ygg, Valind, Gagarth and Storm Bull. Most of the places people live are actually Earth Godess territory, and merely defended and protected by Storm gods. Teshna is an earth godess carrying a fiery weapon (Tolat?),; all the other earth Godesses are unarmed. For solar gods, Yelm rules a small but significant territory, dominating an air goddess (Entekos) rather than protecting an Earth Godess. but the other prominent fire/sky god is, perhaps surprisingly, Kalikos . He is shown as a Yelmalio-like spearman figure, defending Pelora against Valind. His appearance here suggests to me Kalikos is a more significant god than generally presented, perhaps a major cult in the western reaches. Likely he has the heat powers that Yelmalio lacks, perhaps at the cost of light powers.

However, there is nothing in those norms that says a ransom has to be paid in cash, The default lunar playbook when a ransom is demanded for captured troops is to take an equal ransom value of hostages from the clan or tribe of those making the demand. If such a hostage exchange is accepted, no further action is necessary. If anyone refuses such a deal, they are clearly outlaws, and so subject to summary justice without compensation.

Ir clearly doesn't make any kind of in-world sense to have absolutely everyone, in a clan or not, everywhere in glorantha, receive a standardised multi-season magical education of exactly the same long list of mostly low-value spells. For one thing, it would make joining a cult in-play impractical. Maybe those spells are just completely natural expressions of magic, as intuitive to anyone who has gone through the initiation process as breathing. Or maybe, common spells are, as they were in RQ2, just 'spells you can commonly learn'. Or maybe they are mostly ritual magic, not castable in combat and so different from full rune spells that are. Or, ideally, someone goes through the list and sorts them into those 3 cases.

The way I specifically rule this point is that after completing the adulthood initiation heroquest, PCs get a standard heroquest reward; a single-use rune spell. This is could be freely chosen Or it could be suggested by the GM, perhaps based on their actions during the initiation. Making the new spell reusable requires learning a worship skill, which is done by joining a cult. In the case where a spell can come from one of several cults, this means they get to choose which cult to join. This is one common path to becoming a Vingan or Nandan, based on the pair of rune spells Orlanth and Ernalda share by association. It is also possible to disregard the free spell and join any cult However, this would generally be seen as rejecting the clan heritage, and perhaps going against the will of the gods. This is likely what prospective Seven Mothers initiates in Sartar during the Lunar occupation would have ended up doing.

As i see it, you can follow Buserian up until the point Yelm died. Or you can follow Lhankor Mhy on the first Lightbringer's Quest, up to the point of the Great Compromise. Or you can follow Irripi Ontor on the _Second_ Lightbringer's Quest, to the Amended Compromise. It's one linear narrative, albeit involving a sequence of characters inheriting their predecessor's legacy and titles. Like any reader of the Dune books, you get to stop where you like, and can say 'everything after that is non canon.

In the Sartarite dialect, the 'y' is commonly silent.

I would second that. Though imho part of this issue is that runes and passions were literally layered on top of RQ2 combat, rather than integrated into it. So there is a table that says how much a given level of success on a runic inspiration roll will modify your chance at succeeding in a weapon attack roll. The value in that table is added to your skill. This modifies the values of the success, special, critical and fumble thresholds you need to roll under. Once you have rolled the dice, the level of success attained looked up in another table, cross-referenced with the similar level the defender rolled, to see what actually happens. Or if you look at the section on chariots (p221), you will find that being trampled by a chariot deals 1d6+6 points of damage to each of 1d6+1 random hit locations, with details on how armour and spells protect. That seems a reasonable enough rule, and would means a tough guy wearing leather armour is reasonably likely, though far from guaranteed, to survive. That seems a reasonable baseline for what would happen to someone trampled by a herd of wild horses.. But because it is an add-on rule specific to chariots, rather than being part of the core rules, it isn;t used elsewhere. Instead you will find that a horse (in the bestiary) has a 'trample' attack that is entirely different (4d6 to a single location, and being able to miss, fumble or critical).

For an opposed roll, I would interpret a failure versus fumble to mean the goal is accomplished, even though you failed at the task. For example, you collapsed on the road 5 miles from Athens, but the runners the Persians sent themselves got captured and revealed their plan.

There is a 5% chance of the opposition fumbling, as they only have 10% skill too. In the table on p199, a failed attack versus fumbled parry results in normal damage being dealt, as well as a roll on the fumble table. Note that this rule means if you have a skill of less than 30%, it is actively a bad idea to attempt to parry or dodge and opponent with lower skill. One thing is I think there are different possible ways to interpret the 'over 100%' rules. The code assumes: The adjusted chance is used as the basis for calculating criticals and specials for both sides. the opposition skill only needs to be reduced to 0; any excess after that still adds to the chance of scoring a special/critical.

A couple of conclusion stand out from that table: for values less than 100, the table is irregular, over that is changes structure and repeats. because the the hard-coded '5 is success, 96 is a failure' rule, even extreme skill disparities have a chance of not ending the way you would expect. as there is no WQ/Pendragon-style 'tiebreak rule', any given roll has a non-zero, and sometimes large, chance of producing no decisive result For example, a contest between 90 and 80% skill has about 30% chance of being won by the higher skill, 205 by the lower, with 50% of a draw.

I did this previously for questworlds, and now here it is for RQ:G. RQ;G has a core mechanic for opposed rolls, described on p142. in short, both sides roll, and the one who gets a better degree of success wins. A critical beats a special, and so on down to a failure beating a fumble. This is adapted for combat by the 'attack versus parry' and 'attack versus dodge' tables, which contain more specific details about each case. Working out the chance of success when a skill of 40% is opposed by a resistance of 70% is actually suprisingly tricky, as there are lots of special cases like 'a roll of 1 is always a criticial'. and doesn't necessarily produce intuitive results. So i wrote a simple java program to do the calculations. This produced to following table: in it, rows are the skill or weapon attack percentage, and the columns the opposing skill or parry percentage. Both numbers go up to 250%; the 'abilities over 100%' rule from p144 is used. for example, a sword skill of 30% opposed by a parry of 10% has just over a 30% chance of landing a blow, based on combining: - chance of successful attack and failed parry - chance of special or critical attack and normal parry. - chance of failed attack and fumbled parry

The rules p253 actually say 'nothing else in the way of learning may be done that week. it also says this does not apply to spells learnt from shamans, or those learnt on cult holy days. I don't think any of the 6SiS adventures have the kind of extended duration that would cut into the normal routine of farming, herding, militia drill and so on. p416 says you also get 4 occupational skill checks per season of downtime, or one per week. So one option would be to look at the holy day calendar for each season, and offer a menu of spells that can be learnt for 'free'. But then allow picking different spells at the cost of one of the 4 occupational rolls. Or you can spend all 4 to be trained in something that is either not part of your occupation, or not increased by experience. It's also pretty reasonable to allow some or all of those rolls to be spent on cult skills, as they will be getting at least a 'windsday school' level of education from the clan. And 16 year olds, not fully grown, can likely complete characteristic training in 1 season, not two. if you want faster advancement than that, count up the number of extra skill percentages they would have if they were standard 21 year old PCs. These points may be spent 1:1 to increase the 1d6 skill gain roll from a successful experience check, to the usual maximum of 6.

i'd imagine the Pol Joni had a large proportion of thanes who wanted to be chieftains, farmers who wanted to be thanes, and thralls who wanted to be farmers. And relatively few farmers who wanted to be rich farmers, and thanes who wanted to be long-lived.

Unlike other Malkioni, but like other Orlanthi. warriors and farmers are a single caste. This changes the fundamental power dynamics enough that rulers will effectively need the consent of the ruled, just as the case in other Orlanthi societies. 'Noone can make you do anything' is likely their slogan too. An Aeolian clansman has most of the same freedoms as an Orlanthi. There are just two things they can't do: a: magically demonstrate they have the right ancestry to be a clan leader b: go back in time and spend their childhood indoors reading sorcery books. They would probably regard those things as inherently impossible for them, not imposed social restrictions. Incidentally, point 'a' sounds rather like the whole deal with lighting the Flame of Sartar, which is notably different from how tribal kingship works. Is there any canon word on whether Sartar was an Aeolian?

I think this is why the RQ;G rules specify that initiation is automatic and test-free for anyone who had a parent who was an initiate (p275). Anyone in that position will have already gone through a compatible adulthood ordeal or cult apprenticeship before play starts (assuming default starting PC age, of course). However, if you are a refugee or exile, you come from no clan, or one that holds no land and so no temple. So it is likely you missed out on a proper adulthood initiation, and there is noone to sponsor a cult apprenticeship. Many Orlanthi in Pavis in 1615 were in this position, as are many Lunars in 1625. Or maybe you just were one of the minority who failed the ordeal, or rejected the role it assigned you. So you have to take a true 'cult ordeal' initiation test, as your first experience of the God Plane. Which RAW is certainly not guaranteed to pass (succeed on 3 out of 5 skill rolls). There are no consequences stated for failure, but presumably they exist, or there would be no point in rolling..

https://www.ranker.com/list/best-movies-about-abraham-lincoln/ranker-film Lists 15 movies about one historical figure. In some of them he is president, in some a lawyer, in some a young man, in others a corpse. In one he is a vampire hunter, in another he battles zombies. None of the movies are entirely true. But more than one contains enough elements of truth that if true movies gave rune magic for watching them, you could build up quite the rune pool.

Before the creation of Zistor the Machine God, deities were what the god learners thought them to be; passive runic archetypes with no sentience or initiative, except where controlled or embodied by a mortal Zistor was the first deity ever to think and plan for itself. And what it planned was the propagation and dispersion of its algorithms across the mythic landscape. It did this by virally infecting all those who mindlessly reacted against it; the gods. With that gift of sentience, the gods were able to coordinate a plot against the Middle Sea Empire, leading to it's sudden and dramatic downfall. In short, the god learners were ultimately destroyed by the development of a rogue AI.