radmonger

i I'm have doubts of the accuracy and scope of any sentence that starts with 'the malkioni', let alone continues with 'worship'... The Aeolians are the world experts on the storm deity links of Malkion the Prophet, so any details on that known to scribes in Nochet likely reflect their perspective. As i understand it, the Aeolians have a tri-caste society, with: - Zzaburi performing sorcery, and also acting as rune priests of lightbringer deities - a combined farmer/warrior caste who are mostly initiates of lightbringer deities. - a noble caste who are Rune Lord/shamans with ancestry tracing to Malkion and Aerlit. Significantly, they hold this system to be the way things should be, not a pragmatic compromise due to the lack of available lifespan to fully train proper wizards. They regard both other Lightbringers, and also other Malkioni as each having lost one half of the picture

IMG being an initiate requires two things; a magical connection to a deity, and a magical education. There are two common systems by which this happens, corresponding to the two possible orders you can do this. The adulthood initiation ordeal system forms the connection first. it dumps you on the god plane, where you meet and form a connection to a particular deity. Then you come back to the mundane world, a bunch of experts peer over the details of what you saw, and so assign you to a cult to be educated, under the sponsorship of your clan. Some people essentially fail this step, and so end up with no magic, which limits their prospects. This is mitigated by an increasingly wide selection of low-status fallback cults, including Foundchild, Eurmal and Gagarth, for those whose experiences don't fit the conventional definition of success. And then if none of those options apply, then perhaps you have been chosen by chaos, and need leave town right now. A cult apprenticeship system does the education first. if you take to the education, you get to the point where forming the connection is natural and untraumatic. You just need to convince the examiners that that is so. This does tend to leave society with a rather larger number of people with no useful magic, but fewer ones with unwanted, harmful or inherently dangerous magic. In Sartar, the former is the traditional default, but apprenticeships were gradually increasing in popularity in urban areas under the lunar occupation. Among the Pavis exiles, the clan system had almost entirely broken down, with cult apprenticeship being the main way of learning magic. When Argrath took over, he reconstituted adulthood ordeals, but as effectively a state, not clan function, separating young men from their families for long periods in camps outside the city. This is the source of many of his most loyal followers

Relatedly, p77 also says 'often worshipped as a subcult of Orlanth Thunderous and/or as a subcult of Ernalda. Presumably that should either be 'associate of Ernalda', or 'worshipped using either the Worship (Orlanth) or Worship (Ernalda) skills.'

In Sartarite tribal society, it would be quite normal for a warrior-noble to semi-retire and become a lawspeaker of Lhankhor Mhy, handing out free advice to the current rulers as to how things used to be done. if the PC is of this type, a Lhankhor Mhy temple would likely just need proof of either clan support, or notable individual talent. Or perhaps the PC is more of a warrior, serving in an organised regiment like the sun dome mercenaries? Then every such group needs clerks, and training such clerks is more or less Lhankor Mhy's job[1]. Not, perhaps, one they are particularly enthusiastic about. But something has to bring in the wheels to pay for repairs to the library roof. A demonstrated willingness and ability to pay the full going price for such cult skills will go a long way to speeding such an application. i suspect it probably is a good idea to have the temple in question not be one that has much capability to train sorcery. Just because mechanically the process of learning sorcery from scratch as an adult is probably going to be a waste of time and effort for everyone involved. Both in and out of world. but if the player understand the consequences, i don;t think there would be any actual rule forbidding such teaching. [1] At least now the Irripi Ontor temple got burnt down.

The predictable result of such a change is that there would only be say 25,000 tons of the pre-maize grain grown, when previously there were 250,000. This literally and physically reduces that grain godess to a tenth of her size. The effect, if you get it to stick, is the same as diverting the water source of a river. A gloranthan river will generally resist such a thing, and my do something resembling active planning to stop it. you can certainly expect floods at at inconvenient times. on the other side of the same coin, a cult politically objecting to it's planned obsolescence will be minded to run the 'lets have a flood now' heroquest. In Sartar, the cult of Orlanth certainly vigorously opposed plans to tame the region's storms. Only the Red Earth faction of Ernaldan's was persuaded by the argument of how that would improve crop yields. If it were not for the threat of the lunar potato doing the same to their power base, perhaps that faction would have been larger...

The characters in 6SiS are being actively supported and educated by their clan[1], so this should be an ideal case for using the training rules (RQ:G p416). Six seasons of training would give 6d6-6 points, or 0-30. Which seems a bit light, but is easily tweaked. For example, 5% gain for a skill 0-25, 3% for 26-50. the current rule about taking 2% stays for skill higher than that, with skills over 75 still being untrainable. Another option is to record the number of points of cult and occupation skills they would normally get. So long as that pool isn't empty, they may use up to 5 points from it instead of rolling for training or experience. [1] note that the rules say 'cult', but for rules purposes, a clan is a type of cult. For the Haraborn, characters slightly older than the PCs who seem destined to become scribes or other specialists would commonly be sponsored for training at a temple in Clearwine, Boldhome, or elsewhere. This would normally come with an expectation of coming back to the clan afterwards, although alternative arrangements are possible.

I hadn't really considered that, but it does make sense that Nochet was, in the pre-time Golden Age, something very like another Dara Happan city, centralized around one male ruler. Everyone did their allocated tasks, and everyone got their just rewards. As the world was perfect, the books would naturally balance in a way that made things so. In the storm age, the world broke, and so one year was not like the next. In a good year,the farmers might need to labor twice as long as normal to produce enough food to store for next year, where there might be none. One year the priests would be required to perform great feats of magic they would need long preparation for. One year the soldiers might be off to war. Noone knew what the extent of their necessary work was, and there was grumbling. Buserian became obsessed with trying to understand the pattern of changes, with only some success. But the disruption was only really mitigated when Lokarnos invented the wheel. This could be used to track when a group did more than their allocated task, and so bring their diligence to Yelm's attention. The magically enchanted gold wheels were like the dots on a motion capture suit; always visible to Yelm's sight, no matter how cloudy the skies got. Hence why even to this day, a solar divination about the location and quantity of wheels will always receive a precise numeric answer, and not the usual metaphor, cryptic clue or vagueness. And so why they are the preferred store of value and medium of exchange at the guild or city level. Excluded from this system was Ernalda, the weaving woman. She worked exceptionally hard and well, but it was other woman of Yelm's household, led by Dendara, who got the credit. Orlanth did see what she was doing. So when he overthrew Yelm, he recognized her as the Earth Queen she had been in past ages. And, following the advice of his boon companion and steward Issaries, he introduced non-magical coinage, the first guilder, or 'gilder', made of unenchanted gold. This smaller denomination could be used to track individual, not just group, contributions and entitlement. The Lunars, in recapitulating the lightbringer's quest, later brought this innovation to Dara Happa itself, in the form of the silver lunar coin. The use of silver for guilders is now widespread in Sartar and Esrolia too.

Many centralised hydraulic empires did. Not so many loose tribal confederations. Coinage, and the Issaries cult in general, is not doubt an anachronistic god-learnerism. But it clearly does exist, and i very much doubt Sartar would be a place of large cities and rich trade without it. It is structural, not just a decorative flourish. That very much suggests things work by the kind of hybrid system where coinage is a symbolic representation of your rational entitlement at a household level. Just as gold wheels are at a higher level of community. Something like the Rex hands out the silver ration. Household heads have discretion to spend that on grain delivery for home baking, or hot pre-cooked food. Part of being relatively wealthy is having the skills and infrastructure to live well on the ration.

i would tweak things so that it is symmetrical to pcs/npcs, but only applies to people who had an 'adventure' that season. Which might be rare for pure farmers, but would probably pretty common for thanes and nobles, if a cattle raid counts. If a PC really proposed staying at home and doing nothing for 5 years until they got their pow up to species max, then that rule would apply to them to.

It seems pretty self-evident to me that potatoes are not the staple food of any mainstream Gloranthan culture, and so don't have the kind of deep mythic roots that grain goddesses do. This leaves them open to be a Lunar innovation, transplanted or resurrected from some obscure or distant location and promoted by the imperial bureaucracy for mytho-strategic reasons. if you take the contrary position, you might as well say there is no reliable canonical record of a species of 400m wingspan bat being native to Peloria.

i think the right way to approach this is similar to the discussion in the taxation thread. In game, what you actually owe the obligation to is a clan, tribe, nation, land, warband, ships's crew, regiment, secret society, gang, guild or hero. A 'cult' is just a generic rules term that means 'any of the above'. Think of how 'weapon' means any of sword or bow or spear, not a distinct thing that you can learn how to wield. If, at rune level, you are not dealing with, or indeed running, one of the above things, then perhaps the game is being run contrary to the intended design. Or perhaps the character is being played as falling short of the normal moral expectation of the position they hold. The latter is a perfectly valid story hook, which might lead to them being challenged for that position by someone who promises to do better. But the former is usually a mistake, one which can come from projecting modern ideas of monotheism and separation of church and state onto Glorantha. Adventures at this level are about politics, war, myth, glory and/or economics. All of which are inherently 'cult' business, for there is no other type of business for them to be.

Religious tithing/taxation long precedes mass literacy, and may precede coinage. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/history-taxation-ancient-egypt-digital-tax-technologies/ Though, as Jeff points out, Sartar does actually have both coinage and a large class of professional scribes. Though IMG that kind of formal, ledger-driven taxation is solely a things for clans, tribes, cities and guilds. For individuals, it's more commonly a matter of community obligation, organised via temples and enforced by peer pressure, sometimes magic (i.e. spirits of retribution), and ultimately the threat of exile. What you might find is a particularly rich trader deciding to declare their immediate family as a clan for tax purposes. This cuts off their obligations to all their poorer relatives, making the official levy a lot easier to bear.

i doubt the lunars as such would waste good bat-food. All gladiators, including those participating in the hon-eel rites, are volunteers. Professional gladiators generally try to avoid the Hon-Eel rites, in which the loser dies and is not resurrected. But that is an honorable and respected death, if you live long enough to start to get slow. Note that as i understand it, the city of Alkoth, run by the cult of shargash, is legally part of the underworld. if so, it may not be technically part of the lunar empire. Which in any case is not going to unwisely interfere in what it's denizens get up to.

I agree in reality the surplus goes to the clan. It's slightly open-ended, and likely varies between clans, whether that is explicitly routed through the chief, or the chief just shows up and says 'you know, Hedkor's stead got hit pretty hard by that last raid. Do you think you do me a favor and help them out until we raid them back?' [1] The earth temple owns the land, not the herds or tools. The way that comes into it is the temple will, in a well-run clan, grant that land to the people who will agree to such requests for aid[2]. And as the situation we are likely talking about is not a Barntar-led clan, that means the donation is not made to a 'cult of Barntar' that exists as a discrete thing taking 50% of the earth's bounty and spending it on massive elaborate ivory plinths[3]. A God Talker spends 10% of their time maintaining the shrine or site, and the rest farming, or training farmers. Which is why they have occupation farmer and not priest, and don't quite qualify for noble status. [1] Meanwhile, the chief is going to a full Orlanth Thunderous stead and saying 'next windsday is the raid to get those bastards for what they did to Hedkor. You in?' [2] I suspect a Lodrili farmer would be more 'i have done my assigned tasks, so i am taking the rest of the day off. Please move away, you are blocking my sunlight'. [3] they won't make that mistake again.

The Barntar writeup does explicitly say that they are not financially supported by the cult. They do provide 'room and board', but that is surely of very limited use to to a farmer, who has to live where their herds and fields are, not where the temple is. I assume it applies only when they go visit the city, to save the cost of an inn. Otherwise you get the very strange picture of junior farmers running their own steads. But once they get good enough they move into shared cult accomodation. Which, in the absence of any higher authority in the cult, they pay for out of their own pocket, and run themselves. Where do their wives and children live? It makes far more sense to say that the 50% obligation is something than can only be taken on by a rich farmer with several hundred L of nominal income, and a ~60L 'free' SoL. Though this is somewhat of a chicken and egg situation; in a well-run clan, the good farmers will be the ones who are allocated the five hides. They will use it to grow more food than their household can eat, and pass it along to their neighbors. Each year they will breed more cattle than are eaten or die. And so they gift each new couple getting married with a wedding gift of a starter herd. They will cough up when their idiot nephew needs ransoming, and also when the tribe needs to keep its military in the field for another few weeks. They will answer the questions other farmers have, and sometimes go out to their fields and show them how to do things better. in a badly run clan, the good land is given to the idiot nephew. They can use it to support themselves at the 200L 'noble' level, but they contribute nothing to the clan but a bad example. Barntar is the good son, not the idiot nephew. So those who follow him aspire to being the former, and not the latter. They will suffer the disdain of their peers if they do not live up to that.

Someone over on rpgnet did a 'let's read' of the lightbringers book, and they pointed out that a GodTalker of Barntar is paying 50% of their income as cult tithes. But they are the highest authority in the cult; there are no true rune levels, and few elaborate temples. So who are they paying that tithe _to_? Part of the answer is that presumably the 'cult' of Barntar in Sartar is largely a lie told to the Lunars. Whatever the religious status of Barntar as distinct form Orlatnh, organisationally is was an integrated part of the clan and tribe system. During the occupation those resources actually went, via that system, to supporting the deer folk rebels. Right now it is mostly going to the Free Sartar Army that is supposed to stop them coming back. As it is an army that is capable of fighting them on equal terms, presumably this involves more or less the same amount as taxation as the Lunars themselves levied. But the other half is that clans are a family, and you don't pay tax on non-cash transactions within a family. Some people, including the prosperous farmers represented by Barntar GodTalkers are expected to contribute more, but all full adults are expected to contribute something. The net result is that there should be sufficient surplus to pay for the the clan nobles, and also any formal taxes levied by empires, tribes or nations. So if you give you chieftan a magical sword you found. He awards you 10 cows, and has a word with one of the thanes and the clan shaman to give you private lessons. No tax applies because everything stays within the clan. If you took that sword and sold it to a lunar, then it certainly would.

And the name of that competitor was Orlanth...

One way to run things that is both reasonably gameable and makes sense in-world is that 'spending' money on training and spells is just a simplified mechanical representation of what actually happens. Which is that you gift treasure to someone significant, and they are impressed and bump you up the priority list for being taught the good stuff. And as you never really owned anything, there is no tax to pay. Actually paying 10% taxes on received (or gifted) treasure is a implicit claim that you are worthy enough to keep it yourself. Which means you would need to already have 10% of the value of that treasure available to pay. Using a treasure to pay for itself would be seen as fundamentally illegitimate, the kind of thing a Eurmali would be laughed at for trying to get away with. This makes professional income important as it is the only reasonable way of gaining the starting capital you need to make more.

The context might be a bit confusing; i was talking about my proposal, which is criticals (or critical specials, to be unambiguous) on x1 and regular specials on x5. So of successes, 10% are criticals, 10% are specials and 80% are regular hits. With a skill below 100, choosing to halve your skill to make that be 20/20/60 is a strictly bad idea. But with a skill of say 150%, you now get; - 25% chance of failure - 45% chance of regular success (.75 x .60) - 15% chance of special (.75 x .20) - 15% chance of critical (same math) This seems playable, and avoid the '95% chance of nothing happening' stalemate that can affect a pair of heavily-armored opponents with 100%-plus skills. Of course, the other, and perhaps cleaner, way to do it is just roll another d20, alongside the hit location dice. 1 = critical, 2-4 = special.

I've always assumed that a critical was inherently a special, not that you apply both sets of rules independently due to the way the numbers work. But even if not so, if you are changing the rules, there is no reason not to change that too. One option is to replace the combat maneuver rules, which generally involve halving your skill to get some special effect. Instead, you can choose to half your skill to get a double chance of criticals and specials. So criticals on x1 or x2, specials on x5 or x6. Having a skill over 100% just makes that more practical.

The Humakti definition of 'undead' is perhaps better translated as 'not dead'. Everyone is supposed to die; those who defy death must be dealt with. Skeletons and zombies are actually dead, so they in theory don't count. However, the vast majority of such in the Dragon Pass area are raised by Delecti the necromancer or one of his minions. As he was around in the second age, he presumably is using some form of sorcerous immortality adjacent to vampirism. So they do detect as undead because it is his magic that power them. Corpses animated by other means (by trolls, or perhaps Esrolians) do not detect as undead because they are expressing the death rune normally. However, such practices are one minor heroquest, or sorcerous innovation, away from summoning and binding a dead soul back. So Humakti are always suspicious of them. As they are of Chalana Arroy healers, who have the other half of the magic required to do that, as was shown when Queen Deezola participated in the rebirth of the Red Goddess. Perhaps the seven day limit on resurrection is more of a pragmatic compromise between the two cults than an unbreakable cosmic rule.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thieves'_World is a very RQ and somewhat Gloranthan fantasy anthology. Chaosium published a boxed set describing the novels setting, the city of Sancturay. As I understand it, the Esrolian city of Refuge was, once upon a time, a stand-in for Sanctuary. However, that this is not currently true, presumably for the obvious reason that Chaosium do not want any part of official canon Glorantha to be based on a way out of print box set based on someone else's IP.

The red book of magic has _detect undead_ as a spirit magic spell. So presumably whether something is undead or not is an answerable question. This is in contrast to chaos, where there, by current canon, no reliable objective procedure to determine whether something is chaotic or not.

I use: x1 on a success is a critical. x5 on a success is a special x0 on a failure is a fumble This is simple, but does double the odds of a critical. I use it with other tweaks to the per-location 'instagib' rules that make a critical a fight-ending event, not necessarily a life-ending one. i need to check out the math for adding an extra rule: x2 under (skill - 100) is a critical x6 under (skill - 100) is a special and so on.

Humakt is neutral to chaos because, having severed all relations his kin, he can't feel anything but indifference towards his nephew Wakboth. Doesn't mean he won't kill him in a fair fight. or if he's getting paid. But there is no hatred there.