Brian Duguid

I'm not sure that you can. Which is a good thing - these intriguingly titled but under-specified zones are full of opportunity!

I think there'd be far more mileage in reviving the idea of a Best of Tales than there is in trying to digitally reprint the originals, which I think is impossible as the owners of too much content can't be traced / are no longer with us / etc. Even that would (in my view) need the blessing of the main publisher/editor, and be a huge pile of work.

Actual photo of the New Crystal City, taken a few minutes ago.

There are also several for the elves, dryads, pixies and voralans of Dorastor in Holiday Dorastor: Woods of Terror.

There's one for the Hsunchen in The Children of Hykim. Private message me on here if you don't have it and want to take a look.

This is just a quick update for all you sensible people who don't frequent Facebook. This image is work in progress, courtesy of artist Kristi Jones. This is just a small part of the new wraparound cover for the forthcoming extended edition of The Children of Hykim, your one-stop shop for everything to do with Glorantha's shape-changing Hsunchen people. Here you can see shamans from eight Hsunchen totem animal tribes (feel free to guess which ones, noting that if you own the existing book it may be surprisingly easy!), and some of their companions. They are gathered as part of a joint effort to revive the Serpent Beast Master secrets and prepare for the forthcoming conflicts at the end of the Third Age. The colour version is in progress and looks fantastic. All being well, the updated version will be available to new and existing purchasers before Christmas; once new and refreshed art is complete, the main delay after that will be the Print on Demand checking process because, yes, this will be available Print on Demand! PS: As always, star ratings and reviews from existing readers are very welcome over on the DTRPG site ... http://tiny.cc/TCoH.

Related idea to some of the above. The Heroquester can draw power from the Earth to burn any undead who are in contact with it. It only works while on dry land. Given the nature of the Marsh, this may largely be of use to someone who can use an Earth Elemental to raise dry land around themselves, or under the feet of an undead foe.

In case anyone else has the same issue (Starter Set download via Bits and Mortar is missing the map pack), I got this resolved by contacting Chaosium customer services who arranged for B&M to push the additional file to me. It still doesn't appear in my B&M file library, though.

PS: for writing a scenario for the Jonstown Compendium, the Storytelling Collective recently ran a "how-to-write-a-scenario-for-publication" course which was very good and had a load of specific writing-for-RuneQuest content from the estimable Nick Brooke. Here's a link to what they did in July 2022*: https://www.storytellingcollective.com/courses/write-your-first-adventure-s2022 I believe they'll run it again at some point near the end of this year. Well worth considering as an entry point for anyone who is nervous about their own abilities. *Note that despite their attempts to be incredibly inclusive they called that July course their "summer" course. Yeah, screw you, southern hemisphere!

"There is nothing new under the sun" - the Bright and Illustrious Emperor Khordavu, the Glory of Dara Happa. Those high-falutin' Solar guys never thought to look in the Darkness. There's plenty that's waiting to be discovered 😉

Weirdly enough I was also wondering whether there would be Voralan equivalents to dryads the other day. So far, I think not.

You have the option of joining the Jonstown Compendium Creators Circle (on Facebook), if not already there, and putting your ideas out to check if anyone else is working on the same thing, and either wants to team up or at least avoid treading on each others' toes. Plus I think it would not be a bad thing to have different takes on the same topic, to be honest. There's scope for very different conceptions of Glorantha to find a home there.

This is true more broadly beyond Aldrya as the plant goddess, and of all those who domesticate plant life. I'm hopeful that the forthcoming Elfpack can shed some light on the relationship between the Aldryami and the Grain Goddesses, for example.

Oh yes, it's definitely a thing, it's just these were some of the only occasions where it was so clearly expressed. Other nomadic tribes in Glorantha (e.g. the Praxians) appear to take paternity more seriously.

I guess Greg was very into the "uncle" thing when he wrote that (and the associated "What my Uncle told me" for the Rathori as the Hsunchen exemplar). I think it's a useful text in pushing back against the whole idea that there's any neat phylogenetic tree for the Gloranthan beasts, like the ones that will presumably be in the Prosopaedia. No, just because the only cats shown under Fralar are Basmol and Yinkin doesn't mean that all other Gloranthan cats are descended from lions and alynxes! 🙂 I wonder who the "Sungchi" might be, listed as one of the First Folk in that myth. If it wasn't for their Uncle Tana/Tara being the "Noon World" I'd have guessed the Owls. There is also the "*" first people, whose Uncle is Inikos of Below, who I take to be the Bats. The mention of Sakkar is interesting: all the other peoples mentioned had Hsunchen descendants, except for Coyote (Trickster?) and Puma (let's not get into that one). Sakkar sabretooth Hsunchen would be extremely cool. I did briefly consider mentioning them in The Children of Hykim but thought better of it. I like the links to the land goddesses in that myth as well.

Paging @Scotty and apologies if you're the wrong person to page - could somebody please have a look at making the Bits and Mortar download for the Starter Set match the Chaosium.com version i.e. add the Map Pack file(s)? Thank you!

This is what is in the Bits and Mortar download. No sign of any "Map Pack".

Sorry to bump this thread, but same question. I've just re-downloaded the Starter Set files from Bits and Mortars today, and the PDFs have individual file dates of 16th November 2021. It would be good to have updated versions. Also: in the physical box set, the maps come at big size and excellent resolution. In the Book 2 PDF, the Northern Sartar and Jonstown area maps are split across two pages, which is less good for showing to players online. It's also much lower resolution than the full-size print versions. Would it be possible to have these maps added as separate single-page PDFs (at higher resolution) into the file set? To be honest, I can merge the pages myself in a PDF editor, but the resolution really isn't very good. Sorry if that's been asked before!

I'm happy to provide assistance with that via PM although @Nick Brooke is the more obvious point of contact if you want a quick review of the PDF and which buttons to press on the JC system.

I think it's a mistake to think that the diagram showing the mythic beast relationships works in any way like a phylogenetic diagram or a family tree. It's just one story about the entities depicted: the lion god and the alynx god both descend from an entity Fralar, father of carnivores. This is a God Learner story, and only as true as any other God Learner story. There are other stories we have not yet heard: in one of them, the lion and the alynx may descend from an ur-cat deity, who may be a face of Fralar or descended from Fralar, or both. Many things will be true. The story in Heortling Mythology about Yinkin's origin is just one story; I think the bobcat people, the Rinkoni (note the similarity of their names) would tell a very different story, in which Yinkin's relationship to Rinkona is described, not his relationship to Fralar and Kero Fin. There's a Fralar in Heortling Mythology who eats one of the six Sheep of Luck. I don't read that as referring to Fralar as an individual entity. I read it as indiating that a mythical sheep fell victim to a mythical carnivore (other sheep falling victim to Mallia i.e. any form of disease, and to Urox i.e. to kinstrife). The relationship of Yinkin and Basmol to Fralar echoes the relationship of felis lynx and panthera leo to carnivora. I don't think it tells us whether or not they are related to each other as cats. The diagram only tells a small part of the many stories that might exist here.

There are plenty of cat species in Glorantha beyond alynxes, lions, tigers, and sabretooths. We also know of cougars/puma, bobcats, jaguars, jungle cats, leopards, snow leopards, and I'm sure there are plenty more. If somebody zoomed in on the Fralar family tree, I expect the God Learners would have included more detail - I don't think anyone should see the small snapshot published as evidence the lions and alynx are not in some way both cats. Equally, if somebody talked to the locals in any area where these cats are common, they'd probably tell you stories indicating they are not related at all.

Type it all up, add the right credits, boom, publish on the Jonstown Compendium. I've done the cover.

Well, the elephant Hsunchen (the Kivitti) are long-extinct, following the Nysalor/Gbaji war. Noting that one of the other extinct Hsunchen tribes, the Tawari, had their bull deities captured from them and bound into the Bull Gate in Valsburg (in Fronela) (as per Guide to Glorantha page 211), it's easy to imagine that the Kivitti elephant god was likewise captured and bound when that tribe was destroyed. Runes would be Beast and perhaps Fertility or Earth. Could it be resurrected? Well, a campaign outline including a plot to free and bring back the bull god Tawar features in the excellent Jonstown Compendium book The Children of Hykim (page 123), so this would not be an entirely novel idea.

It's perhaps only peripherally relevant but another "form" or cousin of Hippoi is Galana, the female sun horse deity considered by the Galanini people in Ralios to be their ancestral goddess (as per Guide to Glorantha pages 382 and 384). The Galanini "cult" only appears in the obviously non-canonical The Children of Hykim, which has the Rune spells of Speak with Horse and Command Horse, similar to what David indicates above for Hippoi / Redaylda. The Galanini also have Transform Self (Galanini), but no other Hippoi-related cult would have that. Most of the Galanini are Sun-worshippers, following Ehilm, a version of Yelm, as their primary deity (it's all non-canonical, but this is as close to the Guide to Glorantha as I could reasonably make it). In that write-up, Galana is analogous to the "broken" Hippoi, the remnants of Hippogriff (this myth is in Wyrms Footnotes #11), but a version that became an ancestor and was not "domesticated". This is unlike Redaylda who is what Horse became after domestication by Hyalor (or, as WF#11 puts it, "slavery").