Brian Duguid

To ask the question another way: what is the Gloranthan mechanism by which ancestral sin is transmissible, yea - even unto them beyond the third and fourth generations? The Trollkin Curse was sent against the trolls by Gbaji, but it was its harm to Kyger Litor that affected their fertility, just as it was defeat by Yelm that had earlier affects Korasting, the mother of many. Trolls inherit the curse because it is a harm to the essence of what makes them who they are, personified as their goddess. I think perhaps Nysalor's blessing on the wolf-folk was similar; it was on the Telmori as a tribe, and so it changed Telmor himself in some way. The Cursed Ones inherit their magic from that part of Telmor which was polluted with Chaos (and then cursed by Talor). The Pure Ones inherit their magic from that part of Telmor that was not. These "parts" of Telmor could be different bloodlines (and hence the issue of ancestral sin); but if they are different faces of the corrupted or uncorrupted Telmor, then that holds out an easier prospect of change. A Cursed One could heroquest to become a Pure One by discovering a pathway to the uncorrupted Telmor; rather than having to "heal" the whole tribe by somehow cleansing Telmor of Nysalor's blessing entirely. That all feels like fertile ground for YGMV, to me. It doesn't resolve the question of whether the children of Cursed Telmori are chaos-afflicted, but it allows a different answer to the question at the top of the thread: Nysalor's blessing was offered to all the children of Telmor. It manifests itself as an alteration to Telmor himself and so is inherited by Telmori initiates. However, as with the case of Elmal and Yelmalio, we know worshippers can have different experiences and understandings of the same god, both of which are valid in terms of their effect within the mundane world. Perhaps Telmor is like that.

There are Pure Ones outside Ralios, but not many. It's not impossible that you could find one in Dragon Pass. Do Cursed Telmori children transform every Wildday? Even the babies?

Twenty pages in the RQG core rulebook is hardly "completely forgotten". But in any event, Chaosium are working on an Invisible God book which will presumably tell us more on the sorcerous culture of the west, or maybe even expand the sorcery system. The details haven't been shared yet, but Andrew Logan Montgomery on Facebook has told us he is working on it with Jeff.

The scenario A Short Detour by @Lordabdul on the Jonstown Compendium has a 7-page appendix giving rules and ideas for what happens when an adventurer acquires a Chaos taint i.e. Chaos Rune affinity. It covers Chaotic Passions that can then arise; corruption of other Runes; how this manifests through changes in the character's behaviour; and rules for resisting / reducing the affinity over time. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/385037/A-Short-Detour?affiliate_id=1107865

I have included a couple of ways, magical and physical, for the voralans to control insects in the book. One face of Gorakiki (the termite mother) is a particularly close ally to the voralans.

Just waiting on the last batch of art, then some final changes to the layout, and final proofreading. I'd expect it will be out before the end of this month.

Out now! https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/439149/The-Voralans-RuneQuest?affiliate_id=1107865 Coming soon to the Jonstown Compendium, this is an in-depth (I suspect many will say too in-depth) survey of the voralans a.k.a. the black elves, the fungus humanoids of Glorantha. It will be around 80 pages examining the black elves, their peculiar culture and society, myth, magic, creatures, fungal diseases, fungi and fungal products. It includes a re-imagining of the Mee Vorala cult, previously only published (in much shorter form) 35 years ago in Troll Gods. This image shows a black elf shaman, one of several great illustrations by @Leeoconnor.

Sorry for reviving this very old thread, but ... Chaosium have now made the RQG core book Boldhome map available as part of the digital version. And it looks really, really nice in giant JPEG form (21MB). The Dragon Pass map has also been added, for anyone who doesn't have that as part of the GM Screen Pack. Here is what was stated on Discord:

Jeff said last year: Other things he has posted more recently (numbers of members of specific cults) seem to line up with that.

Getting increasingly off-topic, but there are many hells (uz believe in at least seven), and the big shiny sod may not have ruined them all. Its Gregginess is unclear (it was stated to be "by or based on material by Greg Stafford"), but there was a piece in Drastic/Darkness which explicitly split out the Hell ruined by Yelm from the Hell where Kyger Litor now resides (yes, no longer Wonderhome, but still the troll afterlife). All seven Hells known to the trolls are described there. There was an indication in a previous thread on this forum (by whoever was working on the new troll pack) that even these are just a small number of many more Underworld Hells. Regardless of its Gregginess, that's broadly my working model. Of course, there is an easier way into the Underworld than by heroquesting, but that may not provide access to the more obscure parts of the Underworld.

Unless, of course you enter it on a troll or black elf heroquest, in which case it is a deep, dark, beautiful paradise which fills you with a sense of happiness and security?

I'm all for skydiving brians, sounds great!

Am I the only one who is very slightly dreading the publication of Heroquest rules? Fingers crossed that they don't give the impression that Heroquests must be run in only a certain way: that you can only interact with the Hero Plane (etc) using particular attributes; that success and failure are only measured in a certain manner; that there is a preferred "exemplar" of what a quest is for, how it progresses, etc. I'm looking at running a this-world Heroquest in an upcoming session (won't say more in case players are reading) and what I want with that is flexibility to do it however I want: whatever suits the characters, their stories, and the background material that will inform it. What I really don't want is a set of rules that reduce that flexibility.

Just dropping in to say that this is one of the absolute best products now available for the Jonstown Compendium (and there is obviously some stiff competition). The production quality and use of art set a new bar for community content, and there is just loads of gameable material in here. I've only had a quick skim through but I think much of the content will be adaptable for other purposes as well. Top notch.

No doubt people will whine and quibble, but yes, we are clearly having a Gloranthan Renaissance. Since the end of 2021 we've seen published (in no particular order and apologies for omissions): The Seven-Tailed Wolf New Pavis: City on the Edge of Forever Old Pavis: The City That Time Forgot Pirates of the East Isles Duckpac: 3 volumes The Lifethief Temple of Twins To Hunt a God Crimson King Hero Wars in the East Isles: 2 volumes Holiday Dorastor: 3 volumes The Six Paths The Children of Hykim Edge of Empire Adventurers from the Lunar Provinces and bucketloads more great RQ/Glorantha material. "But I'm talking about Chaosium". "But that's non-canonical". "But I need my cults (even though I'm a grognard with them in umpteen formats already)". The world has shifted. We are not constrained by the bottleneck of just one author, or one graphic design team, or whatever. Our Gloranthas are Varying more rapidly than ever. I'm as keen to see the new Chaosium output as anyone. And I think a coherent and active product line is vital to attract new players. But as someone familiar with the existing product line plus quite a bit of the JC material, I'm really not finding that I'm short of things to do in my actual RuneQuest game, or that I'm waiting for any Chaosium book to do what I want to do.

You're remembering they are all off at a convention right now, yes? 🙂 I don't see what you're looking for. We often see "Community Content" like Jonstown Compendium or Miskatonic Repository as if it is some kind of shop window that helps us easily find the content we want. But it's first and foremost an IP licensing scheme. JC and MR creators pay Chaosium a royalty on all our products to use their IP, within the broad set of guidelines issued for the specific CC programme. That's on top of a royalty we pay to DriveThruRPG to act as the actual shop window. Added together, it is a 50% cut of all sales. Chaosium police (with a pretty light touch) how the content is used so that JC creators don't duplicate what is in the copyright products, or detract from it, but complement it in a way that hopefully drives sales for the entire product line. Importantly, Chaosium are the publisher of this Community Content. It carries their branding and they will undoubtedly take something down that they feel is detrimental to their image. With BRP UGE, there is nothing to license and no royalties to pay, unless you wanted to try and cross-license some other Chaosium IP as well, and then they'll ultimately treat you exactly the same as any other licensee, like the French publisher of RQG. They'll be very selective, as this is more closely related to their valuable core IP and the associated branding. Sure, there are advantages to the support with publishing that the CC programs provide, and the shop window aspect, but with the ORC licensed systems you're out of the playground and into the wilderness. You don't need to ask, you just create, and sell. Plenty of people already do this on DTRPG, ORC just lets them adapt an existing rules system if they prefer to do so, or to sell add-ons to it. Maybe you could articulate more clearly exactly what you'd want from a BRP CC program that would justify the loss of freedom that BRP UGE under ORC has already provided?

I have some sympathy on this point. I think the marketing people will tell us that a release has more impact if all the publicity coordinates to a single milestone. Sharing the same publicity twice probably has lower impact the second time around. I suspect the Cults strategy is better than the RoL or BRP strategies. I expect the BRP one was largely about being the first ORC-licensed product on the market. That was probably worth more in terms of potential attention than waiting months for the print version and watching several others scoop first-mover advantage. It's in a different marketing game, where first move was probably seen as more important than anything else. RQG is not in that game. I'm only guessing, but I imagine that Rivers of London was put out in PDF so they could hit the big London convention, Dragonmeet, in early December last year: that's where I saw it and heard all about it, and the UK market may be seen as more important given the nature of the product. Just guessing, to be honest.

Do RuneQuest people live in complete isolation from the rest of the world? I'm with @g33k here. Seriously? I've just watched a trailer for a film I won't be able to watch until seven months time. I've been watching one of the Jonstown Compendium authors sharing preview text and art for his next book for what feels like 12 months ahead of its release (and I saw a physical preview copy of that five months ago - wait, am I an influencer now?) It's called "hype". It's about raising anticipation, about getting people excited, in the hope that excitement will prove infectious. And marketing the Cults books to the non-core audience is not about selling the Cults books to them, at least, that's surely not the sole point: it's about building brand awareness, about getting people aware that there's something exciting going on over here. That takes time. Yes, they may buy the Starter Set first. But it may be the marketing of the Cults books, with all their amazing art and content, that makes people aware this is a product line which is alive and kicking and filled with cool things. You build to a big bang and you make as much of it as you can. You want actual physical books that people can open and hold in their hands and tell their friends how impressed they were. You don't dribble out a few PDFs for the people who will buy it anyway, whenever it lands, only to have that wider audience tell you at Gencon "what's the fuss? You were selling this as PDF four months ago - it's old news".

The announcement here said they were coming (later in 2022, but never mind) for the Starter Set; and all the human pre-gens for the Starter Set can be freely downloaded. I'm adding 1+1 to make 2, but Your Arithmetic May Vary. :-).

Looks carefully at necklace pendant. Wait ... is that a Lunar trollkin? Do those rose-tinted glasses mean that they like to see the whole world as if they were within the Glowline?!

I'm going from https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/home/gloranthan-documents/prosopaedia/deities/k/kajabor/, and will be interested to see if the Prosopaedia matches what is shown there.

Yes, I've read that book (Entangled Life), and will happily second the review's recommendation. I think we're in the fairly standard place here of trying to define the soft edge between: things in real life that are transferable to Glorantha, most of which we know is observed to work in the same way as real life (humans eat food, they derive nourishment from it, they excrete), but where the cause and the explanation are not precisely the same i.e. the need to eat may have a mythic rather than evolutionary origin, and there are probably no gut bacteria or flora; those things in Glorantha which work differently because the mythic logic leeds to a different form of action (diseases result from exposure to a spirit, not to harmful bacteria - because spirits exist and bacteria do not); the observed outcome may differ, and Gloranthan disease can do things that real-world disease cannot. Regarding decay, I think we observe the same phenomenon in Glorantha as in our world: dead things disintegrate, and they probably provide nourishment for new living things (plants). Metal also rusts, and rocks eventually crumble. I do wonder about the source of soil in Glorantha if Orlanth, Aldrya, Mee Vorala and others did not in some myth or other act upon the surface of Gata to create it. Organic decay, rust, and disintegration are different processes in the real world. Must they have different mythic causes in Glorantha? Does rust in Glorantha require the presence of water and oxygen? Is it simply an inevitability of Time (ageing, as David mentions for organic bodies)? I think it's an open question, and we have some degree of choice here, because it matters very little other than to those of us writing mythology for Mee Vorala for fun in the background. We are certainly not bound to proceed from how things work in the real world. In the real world, much or perhaps most organic matter can decay quite happily without the presence of fungi. Fungi are especially good at degrading cellulose, which suggests to me something about the relationship between Aldrya and Mee Vorala. In my headcanon, things that are too small to see in Glorantha i.e. are invisible, are spirits, which are likewise unseen. Decay can therefore perhaps be caused by visible fungi, invisible fungal spirits, and by other invisible spirits (acting as bacteria do). None of this implies that Mee Vorala requires someone to chew her food, or that she can't dine also upon the living. But it suggests to me that her children are at the very least not the only agents of decay in Glorantha, that there are other forces which may work to rust metal, disintegrate mountains, and digest dead organic matter. And I do wonder about the role of Entropy within Time - we know that Time was quite literally made from what remained of the dead god of Entropy.

Ooooh. Where on facebook? Nice to see the different colours for the leatherettes, but hopefully they will have the cover art internally, unlike previous ones. I'm not optimistic on that front, though.

As already noted in this thread, there are other causes for disease in Glorantha. From the current RQ rulebook: The main diseases listed in the rulebook have something in common: they are entities that consume parts of the living, specifically, characteristic points. None of these entities consume dead matter, so far as we know. That feels like a useful distinction to me. We know that Mallia was originally a spirit of healing and fertility, born in the Darkness, who was later corrupted. Mee Vorala, whose fungi feed on dead matter (mostly?), is also an entity of the Darkness. What about "decay"? As David points out, fungi feed upon decaying matter but may not be the source of decay. It's worth noting that Time has its origin in the the devouring of the Chaos god of entropy, Kajabor, by Arachne Solara. Entropy - the tendency towards annihilation is built into Time, but is constantly counteracted by the cycle of life, the birth and rebirth of souls, and the growth of new living matter. Mallia is an agent of Chaos and works to accelerate the annihilation of life. Mee Vorala is an agent of life (she has the Fertility rune, according to the online prosopaedia). She is also an agent of Darkness, and there does seem to be an underlying pattern of consumption, eating, and therefore hunger, amongst the Darkness tribe. I think she is the goddess of consuming dead matter in order to nourish new life. But as one of the trio of Darkness "form" deities (with Sokazub and Kyger Litor), she predates death; so perhaps this is a role that she acquired, or a potential that she always held. There will be more on this in a forthcoming book about the voralans on the Jonstown Compendium, so I'll watch this thread with interest.

Lots of food for thought in this thread ...