Brian Duguid

We know there are crafts with very specific magical secrets associated with them. Heat Metal is an example, a spirit magic spell that I assume is secret to Gustbran and related cults. Gustbran also provides Furnace Fire, and makes various Enchant (Metal) magics available to Initiates, that are normally only available to Rune levels in other cults.

There are skills which have a clearly stated ritual aspect and may be reserved to particular cults. Peaceful Cut is the one that jumps to mind, it is essentially Craft (Butchery) by another name. Perhaps it involves the expenditure of fractions of magic points to placate the spirit of the butchered animal.

My thought is that many if not all crafts do involve "magic", the knowledge of ritual secrets and the invocation of magical power. They are not inherently simply tasks that anyone can do; but for game purposes the magical knowledge involved is simply subsumed under the skill rating itself. Craft (brewing) is not just "making and flavouring beers", but includes the minor magics involved in that process (invoking the sprit of fermentation, or whatever). Craft (masonry) incorporates sorcerous secrets stolen or learned from the dwarves. These are guild secrets, and perhaps the carpenters guild in Jonstown does invoke Orstan the Carpenter in their rites, freemasonry style.

But that doesn't necessitate a cult of Orstan, let alone a sub-cult of Orlanth the Woodworker.

I found this one pretty despicable to be honest: did they genuinely think it was okay to print and resell to others copies of something they had bought a copy of only for themself? Apparently, they did.

@Lordabdul - regarding the diagram of the Gloranthan cosmos, the original version is here, drawn by Mike Dawson from an original by Greg Stafford:

The layout and text is almost identical to the original, although more gods and underworld demons have been added.

13 hours ago, soltakss said:

13 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Does it make any real sense to talk about base with Roman numerals? (I am just asking: it is clear fives and tens are important, but …)

Not really, and it is a nightmare to do arithmetic using them.

Presumably much easier using a Roman abacus, though i.e. a tool adapted specifically to that task.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_abacus

I was just reading Temples and Towers (and you have a new review added, @M Helsdon, because it's really good and astonishing value for money). Any chance of making some of the images and floorplans from that available as JC-permitted art as well?

2 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

Black Elf “adoption ritual” inspiration?

 

That one is already in hand, although nothing the discomfort this discussion has caused, I'm looking at describing two alternative outsider initiation rites for my planned black elf book. 😉. 

Fairly minor, but another fanzine:

Imazine #17, 1987.

RuneQuest hardback, pg 17, review of the GW RQ3 hardback.

46 minutes ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

I see the cruelty of the Lyger Litor initiation as something that goes with the cruelty aspect of the Darkness rune.  So I don't feel that it must be present in the Aldryami initiation.

This is certainly one point of difference. I didn't see it as cruel, any more than I see real-world ritual (and non-ritual) activities that involve piercing, scarification, tattooing and the prolonged endurance of pain as inherently cruel. As Effy asks, it's reasonable to query whether human initiation to Aldrya must only involved transformation, or whether a membership / allegiance option is possible. I don't have any issue with both options being possible. But if it's about transformation, we shouldn't shy away from the rites being genuinely transformative.

On 12/28/2022 at 11:04 AM, mfbrandi said:

Is this really a controversial take?

Controversial, no. But the real world comparison only assists to a point. It tells us that a process such as that described for elf transformation is credible in as much as it reflects experiences we have often seen described in the real world: it's not out-and-out bizarre. That is, it's consistent with a magical description of our own reality, although not with a scientific description. 

But Glorantha is entirely a magical reality. The real-world comparison helps in establishing credibility, but tells us nothing about whether the elf initiation rite is appropriate in Glorantha's own terms. I'm happy that it definitely is, and that it would be a duller world otherwise. If an elf wandered into this initiation rite and the candidate was not being properly disembowelled, they'd know both that cheating was taking place, and also that it simply could not work. 

I'm not trying to convince you of my perspective, and IRL I hold no religious or spiritual faith at all. I'm very happy that people come at this in different ways. But I wanted to acknowledge that some reaction (it's surgery, mutilation etc, and therefore not somehow appropriate) suggest an unsympathetic approach to equivalent beliefs in our own world (it's not mutilation, it's rebirth). 

4 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Clearly, if the Unmatjera shamans really did this, their own people would have them incarcerated as dangerous lunatics. When Glorantha takes something which IRL is hallucinated/metaphorical/symbolic/whatever and literalizes it, it can seem to me a bit … broken. It takes the magic out of the world in the guise of putting it back in.

As already noted, there are plenty of accounts like this one. I imagine that "their own people" believed that this is exactly what was done, and that they considered it to be magical, not lunatic.

I sympathise with the point about transference of how rituals are conceived and perceived between IRL and Glorantha being sometimes problematic. But I find it odd that we consider it unremarkable in Glorantha that limbs can be regrown, people resurrected, wounds instantaneously closed, etc, but that other magical transformations of the body are somehow suspect. For me, that's a very real-world modern mindset, and I find that approach to Glorantha odd in itself.

Each to our own!

Your Marsupials May Vary, of course.

For anyone following QW here and not elsewhere, @Ian Cooper has been posting a couple of updates over on Mastodon.

19th Dec:

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Final art direction out for #QuestWorlds Core Rules and a new version of the cheat sheet done.

Now on to review the development editor's last pass.

 

20th Dec:

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Current plan is a genre pack to support running #questworlds games in Glorantha and using #runequest materials when doing that. It’s unlikely we will have a “line” beyond that outside of Jonstown Compendium. I have some playtest materials that I have been using for that genre pack

In other QW news, Shawn Carpenter (of the withdrawn QW product on Jonstown Compendium, Valley of Plenty) is playtesting a superhero version of QW, and recently shared this news, along with some art:

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Work is proceeding apace on the Valley of Plenty 2e, a beginner's Glorantha campaign setting for use with Chaosium's soon-to-be released QuestWorlds rules. The new book will be larger than the first (which was a respectable size) and will contain more adventures, story-seeds, and activities in addition to expanded setting information so you can linger over the Wildlings childhood if you wish. 

The 2nd book of the Jaldonkiller Saga will be released concurrently with Valley of Plenty.

 

It might have been easier to simply name them something else if it wasn't the intention to evoke the significant features of the real-world analogue 😄.

IMG, they are very definitely a pouched marsupial, the last (known) survivor of the Pouched Beasts, and the only one who successfully journeyed north from Pamaltela into Genertela.

The Oppossum Hsunchen are included in The Children of Hykim, for what that's worth, with a background myth, pouch-related magic, and much more.

13 hours ago, Jeff said:

Pretty sure none in the West either.

In the Guide (page 19), the Pralori are said to hunt opossums. I'm personally happy that they are the marsupial exception to the broader rule.

8 minutes ago, kalidor said:

Wow, thanks for this. This explains a lot! No more human players in Aldrya's cult. I suspect that if you are human and love the woods/wild your only way is Ernalda.

I do hope you mean human adventurers. Otherwise there's some weird stuff going on round your table 😲.

But if it's causing anyone a problem, there's absolutely no need to change their existing game. Just rule it as YGWV.

Quick question / suggestion: could a human initiate to Flamal in a manner that doesn't require the Aldryami transformation, and become an elf-friend that way?

Love it! Half-way between Swamp Thing (in its gruesome horror period) and one of the shamanic initiation rites described in Eliade.

Version 1.2 of The Children of Hykim is now available on DriveThruRPG.

The revised version includes one more tribe (the Gord-un gopher people), a new story, two art pieces increased to double-page spreads, and corrections and amendments to various sections. It also has an absolutely wonderful new cover by Kristi Jones.

Existing customers will find the new version in their DTRPG library immediately.

The book is also now available Print-on-Demand, in both Premium and Standard colour hardcover editions!

If you like the book, please, please, please do leave a star rating and if possible a review!

I think the cults are compatible, for the reason given: Uleria was the mother of Shanassee, and is referred to in at least one place as the Grower.

But I think she will be "seen" very differently by the Aldryami than by humans.

There is very brief speculation about the various lost marsupial tribes in the write-up for the Opossum Hsunchen in The Children of Hykim.

In addition to the Yak, Tiger and Deer people, Hsunchen of the East also features the Bat Folk (Pujaleg), they were added in an update. There's more eastern Hsunchen information in The Teshnos Companion, but I've not read that yet so I'm not sure what exactly, and it looks like it's only 5 pages out of 80+.

I'd like to do further volumes of my own book but two books covering very similar material for Kralorela / Teshnos in different ways don't seem to be worthwhile especially given the small audience for topics away from the middle of Genertela anyway. Much the same would be true for Pamaltela, although it does have some fascinating Hsunchen tribes!

Hopefully this is nearly there. While waiting, here's how two copies of the POD look on a shelf.

#WhichWayWillYouShelveIt?

That's my favourite quote with respect to Glorantha, to be honest.

If it's not contradicting itself, it's not the Glorantha that got me interested in the first place.

2 hours ago, JRE said:

I would expect that many Hsunchen societies (unfortunately I have not yet got Brian's excellent looking supplement on Hsunchen) have people who trascend the limitations of transform spells through heroquests to adopt their "other shape", whether a weretiger or a tigerwere, functionally at will.

There is at least one such person depicted on the cover of the hopefully-imminent Print-on-Demand version, possibly more. And this desire to reintegrate their Beast / "Man" aspects is also discussed in that book, in the section on Hsunchen Heroquests on pages 124-126 (in the current edition - it will be on pages 132-135 for anyone reading this after the revised edition comes out).

2 hours ago, Agentorange said:

They are all male aren't they ? I never really thought about that before. I wonder why. Are only males affected. Or do the females live back at the den/set/whatever !

I kind-of assume it was because ... 1970s.

14 hours ago, Agentorange said:

Now we have the hsunchen model and only the Telmori seem to be cursed. Unless the others do exist as rare splinter tribes. maybe Brian Duguids book will tell us more.

It does not, sorry :-). The Children of Hykim ignores the RQ2 material and describes only the Telmori as having a cursed sub-set. I definitely wouldn't rule out others, I just had no particular reason to add them back in.

The big question for me is: if there are other cursed lycanthropes, how were they cursed, by who, when, and why? The Nysalor / Talor story is huge. What's the equivalent for the Tusk Brothers, Tiger Sons etc? (And why are they all male?)

14 hours ago, jajagappa said:

If they do exist, they might be cursed outcasts from Rathorela, or have developed within the Kingdom of War, or perhaps are an isolated Rathori clan who fell to Chaos during the Syndics Ban.

These seem like strong possibilities, especially the Kingdom of War.

13 hours ago, scott-martin said:

IMG multiple nations across history have been afflicted with RQ2-style lycanthropy, with the wolf empire only being the best known and most "successful" in the sense that all but isolated "normal" clans in Dorastor have now died out.

Canonically, there's still a large group of Telmori "pure ones", who were never blessed by Nysalor, in Telmoria, Ralios.

13 hours ago, svensson said:

So, in our discussion of Hunter cult spells, we also talked about the various Hunter cult 'animal shape' spells of attack form, protection form, and the collective spell of Transform. To an outside observer, it's very, VERY easy to confuse a Rune spell use with a Telmori transformation. This leads to a whole bunch of misunderstanding and prejudice. A Sartarite seeing a Pralori transform into an elk might legitimately think "WTF?! WERE-DEER???"

Transformation is not common in Hunter cults, in my view, it's specific to the likes of the Odaylans, who are a barely-disguised atavistic revival or survival of an original Rathori heritage. Their friendly relationship to the Storm tribe has left a non-animist distortion of their ancestral inheritance.

Odayla gets Transform Self from the Lady of the Wild, who exemplifies this distortion by "othering" nature as "wilderness" rather than as home. Hsunchen cults get the spell from Mother Mammal or similar, an acceptance that they are still beasts, part of nature rather than apart from nature.

I personally doubt that Sartarites would see Hsunchen transformations as automatically alarming. There is an existing clan (in Elkenvale) who consider themselves to be direct kin to the elk. And most well-educated Sartarites will be aware that Heort himself was one of the Deer Folk, descended from Doe Woman and others who could take deer form. Some will also have met or been told about Basmoli mercenaries.

13 hours ago, svensson said:

Now, something that needs to be said here is that @Scotty specifically stated in the Hunter cult spells discussion that the various Hsunchen or Hunter cult Transform spells are NOT 'lycanthropy', the recipients of those spells do NOT have protection from normal weaponry or susceptibility to Rune metals, and that they retain their human intelligence [including the ability to cast spells].

Well, the only example we know still exist in the RQ:G version of Glorantha are the Telmori werewolves. They have invulnerability to normal weaponry because that was the blessing specifically granted by Nysalor. It was never inherent to their ability to transform, which we can safely assume was just like that of other Hsunchen, and which will survive amongst the Pure Ones, who have no mythic / historical reason to have that invulnerability.

13 hours ago, svensson said:

- Uncontrolled shape changing

- Immunity /resistance to 'normal' weaponry

- Inordinate vulnerability to certain Rune metals.

- And the loss of Human intelligence and memory for the duration of the transformation.

In the case of the Telmori, all of these can be specifically traced to Nysalor's blessing / chaotic gift (the second point), or to Talor's curse (the first and last, and plausibly the third). There was therefore clearly a point in time when the Telmori had only some of these features, not the whole set.

That raises interesting possibilities if the blessing / curse happened separately to boar-folk, bear-folk, tiger-folk or any others, or if it were to happen again.