Brian Duguid

There have been a couple of more detailed reviews of this book recently, so if you are in two minds about whether it might be for you, feel free to take a look: http://rlyehreviews.blogspot.com/2023/03/jonstown-jottings-77-children-of-hykim.html https://akhelas.com/2023/03/10/review-children-of-hykim/ I'm not expecting to make any more updates to the book until the Cults of RuneQuest volume featuring the Hykimi cults is published, and that is likely to only be a short supplement highlighting and advising how to deal with any differences that arise.

If it's for print, also changing the colourspace and colour profile of the images to avoid weird shit happening in the print process. I'm sure Nick can advise on that if necessary!

Many thanks for everything you are doing with this tool, Phil, including your support for the community content creators! I will have a play with it and test out the COH elements when I get some time.

My intention was in addition. So "Insight (bear)" for a Rathori. Yes, "Insight (human)" at the standard starting level. I don't see Hsunchen or Akkari as a separate species, not for this skill. In the RQG core rulebook, "Customs (X)" is per social group, so I'd have "Customs (Akkari)" etc, similar to "Customs (Grazeland Pony Breeders)" as a Homeland cultural skill bonus in the core book. That seems reasonable.

I guess it's also worth noting that we can expect (source: Well of Daliath website) the official versions of the Rathori, Mraloti, Pralori, Basmoli and Telmori cults in one of the Cults of RuneQuest books some time in the next year or so. They will almost certainly not match mine precisely.

Who is the cover artist?

Yes. "For the cult of Rathor, use normal Hsunchen spells". The normal spells are on page 25-26 of the current version of TCoH, and include Transform Self. As per page 25 of the current edition, Extension is a standard spell for all Hsunchen tribes unless otherwise noted. The text for the Uncolings seems to imply they may not have it, but that's an error. It was one of the very first tribes I wrote up and I just never edited it to be more in line with the others. Oops!

Perhaps for the 6/7 days when they don't normally take wolf form, don't have an invulnerable hide, and may need other ways to deal with antagonists?

I've typed them in above in the forms used in the book: all the names above appear in the book except for the puma people (see below). Note that some of the deities / ancestors have dual names e.g. both Mralot and Mralota appear in different sources. I've used the ones above which are used in the book. In some cases they don't agree with other Gloranthan publications, sometimes deliberately. The table is missing the Gord-Un tribe (from v1.2 of the book), whose ancestor in the book is Grandfather Gopher or Grandmother Gopher (take your pick!) In the book, it has Most Ancient First Grandmother and Most Ancient First Grandfather as the ancestral entities for the puma people (SheHe was the "first" Puma, but is perhaps analogous to Mikyh/Hykim). But those are very long names, so I've suggested using "Puma tradition". And in fact you could use that as a cop-out throughout, with "Worship (Rathori tradition)", "Cult Lore (Damali tradition)", etc. That might be best.

Thanks, and also to @mfbrandi for the Anaxial's Roster reference. In my headcanon, Telmor's teeth have a passing relation to Orlanth's sword (Humakt) in their role in slaying the Sun, and so Humakti Telmori are just a bringing back together of two distantly related mythic traditions. Albeit probably not one that anyone acknowledges, just a bit of synchronicity.

I would have sworn blind that there is a myth somewhere about Telmor having eaten / slain the Sun somewhere, but having spent a bit of time trying to find it again, I've had no success.

An entirely fair concern. I have colleagues who are using AI in a professional capacity, and we are very careful about what we use as source data for the AI we develop ourselves (all sourced carefully with clear permission), and what use we can make (if any) of open-access chatbots like ChatGPT (with great care and only with information that is properly in the public domain). That latter bit gets very difficult when there's no transparency from the developers about their source data or how they process it. An absolute minefield.

Yes, much better to ask these sorts of questions of some of the community's well-known Gloranthan lorehounds, and get instead seven slightly different versions of what is actually true in Glorantha 🙂. The old ways are the best! I wonder whether the makers of Zistor attempted a sort of Turing Test for their creation's intelligence: we will know we have succeeded when it behaves like us, because we know that we are intelligent. One of the ways we know that ChatGPT lacks intelligence is because it generally shows different types of unintelligent behaviour to those that we display: it is often simply ignorant (as in these examples, where it has too little training data to work from), rather than showing internal bias (its bias is systemic). And where it is ignorant, it confabulates i.e. makes things up to fill in the gaps, partly because it's primarily a language model rather than a knowledge model. That fingerprint is all over these examples. A lack of adequate training data means that it fills in the gaps with garbage pieced together as best it can. It's job is to mimic language, not to be an expert. It would be more interesting if it was actually trained on several decades of Gloranthan publications*. Then we'd get to see where the real gaps in our knowledge are, and how a God Learner might go about filling them. *IP owners: don't worry, I'm not suggesting anyone actually does this, just saying it would hypothetically be interesting 🙂.

Not sure that I want to spin off a big discussion about AI - but one thing I find interesting about ChatGPT is that it seems to have been given that over-earnest writing style characteristic of high-school essay writers who are trying too hard to please the teacher.

Right now: #8 of all bestselling titles on DTRPG. And the #1 best-selling community content title:

Many thanks to everyone who has bought The Children of Hykim over the last nine months or so. It has now hit Electrum best-seller status, which is an unexpected delight! To celebrate, I've added two more pieces of bonus content. There's a short "words from the shaman" type thing, for the Lotari raccoon people, which was originally prepared for a player in my own game. There is also a full (lightly edited) transcript of the Hsunchen episode of the God Learners podcast, featuring myself, @Joerg and @Lordabdul, for anyone who prefers reading to listening. (For anyone who prefers listening to reading, or doesn't want to buy the book, the podcast is here). http://tiny.cc/TCoH

I've sent messages to both now.

There are a few good images of hairstyles on the Well of Daliath: https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/concept-sketches-of-hairstyles-for-aristocratic-esrolian-women/ https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/hair-and-beard-guide-reprise/ There are also quite a few useful images under this heading: https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/tag/art-direction/

Storm Tribe.

There are a Craig Pay, a Mitch Lockhart, and a James Holden on the RuneQuest Facebook group. I can send any of them a message if you like, but people don't always pick up messages on there from people they don't know.

Given that Jeff has said it will have 19 cults and there are 19 cults listed under Lightbringers here, you can probably be fairly confident what will be in that book :-). And likewise for the 16 cults in the Earth Goddesses book, and I imagine similarly beyond that ...

Absolutely. We're all successfully GMing games in RQ today without a GM's Guide. We have player characters who can play as members of up to 28 different cults (core book + bestiary) with sufficient rules and magic to be getting on with - and more if we use RQ Classic or other material. I'm in the "will probably buy everything" camp, and look forward to expanding our knowledge and opportunities. But each and every book in the Cults series will do that, we don't need them all to get value out of the first group to come out.

There are quite a few more in the Gateway Bestiary as well: https://www.chaosium.com/gateway-bestiary-pdf/, which are for RQ2 but easy enough to use with the latest edition. The RQ2 Trollpak also has a few that aren't in the current bestiary: https://www.chaosium.com/trollpak-pdf/. As noted already, there are many, many more spread across specific publications both official and on the Jonstown Compendium (e.g. check out Anaxial's Manifest: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/377924/Anaxials-Manifest?affiliate_id=1107865). If you want an overview, there's an index to published monsters from before the current edition in the Meints Index to Glorantha: https://www.chaosium.com/mig3-the-meints-index-to-glorantha-pdf/ Personally: I'm more than happy with what's currently available. Like most people's RQ games, I don't play it as a monster hunt. You can encounter trolls many times, and the experience may be different each time. And much of my game is about interaction between human tribes and cultures. But if you are after monsters, there are plenty more waiting for you in other existing publications.

These are legit, yes? For sale on eBay, in case you need tiny RQ spaceships in your life.

Page 76, regarding Koth, the son of Argan Argar who became the cult's spirit of reprisal: