Jex

Hope I didn't come across as rudely shutting you down—it's not so much that I didn't want to continue the discussion; it's just that it seemed off topic for this thread and I was afraid we were annoying the other participants. If you want to continue the mathematical discussions, I'd be fine with doing so in the Alastor's Skull Inn forum, since that seems to be the more anything-goes, off-topic forum; I just was uncomfortable doing it here and derailing the thread. And speaking of not derailing the thread, I guess I should post something relevant here now, except that I'm still new enough to RuneQuest that I don't really know that I have any dumb theories interesting enough to be worth sharing yet, or rather that I probably do but I don't know enough to realize how dumb they are. But I'm almost done reading through the Guide to Glorantha, and I'm learning, and I'm sure soon I'll have no shortage of really stupid theories.

Apologies if I'm misunderstanding the question and this isn't helpful, but in case you weren't aware, the adventure "Defending Apple Lane" in the Adventure Book included with the RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack involves an attack by a band of Tusk Riders, and has full statistics for all eight Tusk Riders and their mounts. It's not a squad sheet, but if you just need some Tusk Rider stat blocks, you can yoink those for use in your own adventure. There's also some advice about the Tusk Riders' combat tactics, though those are tailored to the specific scenario and may not be as useful for you.

So, I'd originally posted about this in the Alastor's Inn forum, but as @g33k pointed out, I probably should have just made the post here. (I didn't do that initially because in some other forums necroing old posts/subfora is strongly discouraged, but apparently that's not the case here... sorry.) Anyway, I was wondering if there existed anywhere an archive of the information about the SharedWorld? Some of the information is available in this forum, but browsing the forum posts I get the impression that there's a lot of additional information that was only in a now-defunct wiki... and while the overall page on the SharedWorld setting is available on the Wayback Machine, it seems the subpages with further details are not. Did anyone keep an archive of the SharedWorld information, or know if there's another place it can be found? (@Trifletraxor, you seem to have been the main driver of the project, so I'm assuming you'd be the most likely to know about such a thing?) It seems like quite a bit of thought and work went into this, and it would be a pity if the whole thing was lost forever with the old wiki. [EDIT: Guess it might be a good idea to also ping @Atgxtg, since it looks like you were also involved with the SharedWorld project and you've been active on the forum more recently than Trifletraxor...]

Apologies; I didn't post there because there had been no posts there in over a decade, and in a lot of forums it's considered very bad etiquette (or even explicitly against forum rules) to resurrect old threads or subfora. It does seem, though, that that sort of thing isn't frowned upon here as it is elsewhere; had I realized that at the time, I agree that that would have been the better place for my post. Sorry about that.

@Scotty: Oh, I think I just ran across one more. Currently reading the section on Umathela, and there's a description of a port city called Gargulla, but I couldn't find any city by that name on the map, either in the Guide to Glorantha or in the Argan Argar Atlas. There's a city called Govgulla on the Jarasan Gulf, but that's a different city with its own separate description in the Guide. There's also a Garguna in Fonrit, but, again, that's a different city. I can't find any city on the map called Gargulla. Apparently I'm not the first person to notice its absence; a web search turned up a relevant post from a few years ago, but with no apparent followup or resolution. Seems like an interesting city, with its own Gnostic-flavored sect of Malkionism, and it would be nice to know where it is. (Also, FWIW, since the topic of this thread seems to have broadened, I changed the thread title; hope that's okay.)

Oh, wait, one more, though this one's maybe a bit more obscure. The entry for Hornilio says that the goblin Queendom is "a few hundred miles south along the coast from the Cliff of the Agankar Wind", but there's no other mention of the Cliff of the Agankar Wind and I couldn't find any indication of its location. (For that matter, a few hundred miles is a long way, and it would be nice to get a more specific location for the goblin Queendom—though of course that's not really important since it's not a place many PCs are ever likely to be going.)

Oh, wow, thanks! To be completely honest, I wasn't necessarily expecting to be told the exact location; I would have settled for getting confirmation that it wasn't there and that I hadn't just missed it. But of course actually finding out the location is much better! Oh, I did find more entries that were missing from the maps, but I didn't ask about those because I'd either found them in other sources or found a post by someone else asking about them that confirmed they weren't on the map. But if you want to know about them for the Q&A page, let me try to remember... As I said in a previous post, Manelarpanan in Kothar isn't labeled in the Guide, though it is labeled in the Argan Argar Atlas. The section on Fonrit describes Benestros, but it doesn't appear to be labeled on the map. (I found a forum post speculating that it was synonymous with or included within Gargosganda, which seems plausible but doesn't seem to be confirmed.) The cannibal island of Motumobabi in the East Isles does not appear to be labeled on the map. In the section of Maniria, Troll Mountain and the Haunted Fields are not labeled on the map. I did find an older source that showed they were next to Ice Peak, but this isn't clear just from the Guide. (Granted, the description of Ice Peak does mention "a nearby troll stronghold", and it's reasonable to guess that might refer to Troll Mountain, and certainly it makes sense for a troll hunting ground to be near the troll stronghold too, but the Guide doesn't explicitly say so. As a matter of fact, until I found the older source confirming their location, I'd guessed that Troll Mountain and Haunted Fields might have been in that area, but dismissed that idea because I thought it was unlikely that the Haunted Fields would be so near the Temple of Peace, but it turns out they were there after all.) Those are the ones I remember off the top of my head, but there might have been more. If I remember any others, I'll let you know.

How are you "cutting" the shape without removing points? If there's a discontinuity in the shape, which there must be if you can't pass from one side to the other without leaving it, then there are missing points. In everyday colloquial language, "infinitesimal" might be used to just mean very small, but in mathematics it has a more precise meaning. "Infinitesimal" literally means infinitely small. Sure, there's no problem with two different shapes having a boundary in common. Two shapes can share some of the same points. You can have two different shapes overlap each other as much as you want. But a shape can't meaningfully overlap itself—a shape can't share points with itself; a point is either in the shape or it's not. There's no meaningful sense in which a shape can share a boundary with itself and still include the boundary. You can't just draw a line through the middle of a shape and declare that it's included in the shape but also a boundary. That doesn't mean anything. Sure, you can just declare by fiat that the red circle can't pass through that line, but in that case you're not changing anything about the shape itself; you're just setting rules about what the red circle can do. Note that a shape doesn't have to include its boundary. A square that includes its boundary and a square that excludes its boundary are both validly defined shapes, but they're different shapes. (For that matter, there's no reason a shape can't include only part of its boundary, though that's not particularly relevant here.) So if you want that line partway through C to be a boundary, well, is it included in the shape or not? If not, then the points on that line are in A but not in C, and the two shapes don't have the same points. If it is, then shape C is continuous across it and there's nothing special about that line, so in what sense is it a boundary? Well, sure, if you just want to write a nonsensical argument between intoxicated gods, then mission accomplished, I guess. [EDITED TO ADD: Look, I seriously would rather not keep getting into mathematical discussions in this thread; I feel like we're really derailing the thread and probably annoying its other participants. (Yes, I know I could just not reply, but I keep feeling compelled to respond against my better judgment due to Somebody Is Wrong On The Internet syndrome.) Some of the points you bring up touch on some fairly deep mathematics, and I don't want to discourage your interest, but if you really want to discuss these things, might I suggest you take it to somewhere like math.stackexchange.com? That's a site all about discussing mathematical questions, and you may find people there who have a lot more experience explaining these things and may be able to give better explanations than I do.]

Oh, heck, we're back to math again. Are you trying to get a contradiction out of the idea that a plane figure is defined by the points it contains? Because it seems unlikely that you're going to successfully undermine the foundations of geometry. In this case, the problem with your argument is that A and C clearly do not contain exactly the same points. You've removed a line segment from the middle, so the points on that line segment are in A but not in C. Yes, the line segment is infinitely thin, and doesn't affect the area; A and C do have the same area. But they don't have all the same points, and so they aren't the same shape. It may seem counterintuitive that removing an infinitely thin line of points can make a meaningful difference, but it does. (Again, there's a lot in math that's counterintuitive.) Even removing a single point from a shape makes it a different shape. Again, it doesn't change the area, and it may not seem like a single infinitesimal point should make any difference, but a plane with a single point missing and a fully intact plane have some very different properties. (Among other things, one is an open set and one is a closed set. I'm not going to go into exactly what that means, but it's a mathematically significant distinction.) [EDIT: Oops, more accurately, one is an open set, and the other is both open and closed.]

Whoops, yes, you're right, of course; I meant Tarien, not Kothar. Got the sides of Pamaltela mixed up. Still, though, yeah, I couldn't find it on the map and couldn't find any information about it online so I was wondering if anyone knew where it was or if it hadn't been specified. (I think the reason I had Kothar on the mind was that there had been a different location in Kothar I couldn't find in the maps in the Guide to Glorantha: Manelarpanan. But in that case I checked the Argan Argar Atlas, and it turned out that while for some reason Manelarpanan wasn't labeled in the maps in the Guide, it was marked in the Atlas. But I checked the Argan Argar Atlas for Lath Eskan, and no luck.)

So, I'm in the process of reading through the Guide to Glorantha from cover to cover. It's been slow going, because as I read the entry for each site I've been trying to find it on the map, and that's not always easy particularly for the sections, like Fronela and Fonrit, that cover large areas split over multiple maps, and it sometimes takes time to find the location. A few times I was unable to find a site on a map, but in each case a web search turned up a post by someone else asking about the site in question, and it turned out that either (a) the location was specified in an older book, or (b) at least there was confirmation that its location wasn't specified on the map and I hadn't missed it. But now I just finished the section on Kothar, and there's a site that's got me stumped. I can't find Lath Eskan on the map, and this time a web search didn't help. All the Guide to Glorantha says about the site is "This oasis is where Pamalt broke the mask of Trickster and freed him from his own worst trick." So it's apparently somewhere in Kothar, but Kothar is a big place, and it doesn't seem to be on the map; I was wondering if anyone has any idea where it was (or, conversely, could set my mind at rest by confirming that its exact location hasn't been established). I suppose this isn't really particularly important, given that I don't anticipate running or writing an adventure set in Kothar any time soon, but I'm trying to learn as much as I can about Glorantha, and it bothers me a bit not to know where something is, though again it'd bother me considerably less to have confirmation and know for sure that its location isn't defined and that I haven't just missed it.

Originally I'd tacked this on to the end of my post about the ruins by the Stream, out of reluctance to start two separate threads so close together, but it was unrelated enough I figured I probably should make a separate thread for this question after all. Anyway, I know that in the events of the Lismelder campaign, the Lismelder King Thanos of Swordvale died in 1616, and was succeeded by the Poss chieftain Harvald the Hairy (who would later be devoured in the Dragonrise and succeeded by the Greydog Branduan Greatblade). However, I haven't found any information about how King Thanos died. Was that something that was established? It's not terribly important, but I'd like to mention his cause of death in the Lismelder King List in the Marshedge project I'm working on.

So, I'm still working on my Marshedge adventure and gazetteer, and I've started making maps of both the Lismelder territory and the Marshedge clan territory specifically. I want to include a brief description of each location on the maps, similar to the descriptions of the locations near Jonstown in the Starter Set. However, there are two ruins near the Lismelder lands that appear on several maps but that I can't find any descriptions of anywhere. I've circled them below on an excerpt from a map from the Starter Set: Does anyone know if there's any information anywhere about these two ruins? If not, of course, I have no problem with making something up myself, but I wanted to check first to see if there's already been something established about them that I shouldn't contradict.

Oh, I figured that, but I figured I may as well explain it anyway in case anyone was interested. No, while it's true that there is a radius that can be drawn through any point on the circle, that wasn't the main point; that was just a step in the proof. The point was that it can be proven that adding together the rotated lines gets you all the points in the filled circle. It's not something you have to "swallow"; it's something that's mathematically provably true even if it's counterintuitive. (There are a lot of things in math that are counterintuitive but true.) As for adding up all the points getting you the area... well, yes, if something includes all the points in a filled-in circle, then it includes that filled-in circle; a shape by definition is the sum of all the points in it. Every finite (or infinite!) shape is made up of infinitely many (dimensionless) points; it's routine in geometry to define a shape by specifying the points in it. For instance, a disk—a filled-in circle—can be defined by the formula x²+y²≤r². But what that formula is really defining directly is the points in the disk—it's saying that every point (x, y) that satisfies the inequality is included in the disk. That infinitely many zero-area points can make up a shape with finite (or infinite) area is kind of fundamental to geometry. But anyway, I feel like I've kind of been hijacking this thread to ramble about math; sorry. Unless there are any related questions anyone really wants to know the answer to, I'll shut up now and let people get back to dumb theories about Glorantha. [EDIT: Okay, I said I'd shut up, but I just thought of another explanation that may help... or may just make things worse; I don't know. Anyway, I think the crux of the issue here is that when we're asking what's the area of infinitely many dimensionless points, we're multiplying zero times infinity. Now, zero times any finite number is zero; infinity times any finite (nonzero) number is infinity. So what's zero times infinity? It's undefined. It doesn't have a unique value—at least without more context. Zero times infinity isn't necessarily zero, or infinity; depending on exactly how you get the zero and the infinity, it can be zero, or it can be infinity... or it can be one, or fifteen, or π. So how could you get a value for zero times infinity in a given situation? Well, one way is to use limits. You let one value get larger and larger, and one get smaller and smaller, in such a way that the bigger the one value gets, and the smaller the other value gets, their product gets closer and closer to a given value. And that's one way we can define area! We can approximate the area of an object by covering it in squares. For the purposes of this argument, let's take for granted that we know the area of a square of side length L is L². So okay, let's take a circle of radius 2, and we'll take a bunch of squares of side length 1 and use them to cover it. Each square has an area of 1, and it takes 16 squares to completely cover the circle. So the total area of the squares is 16 times 1, or just 16. But of course this overstates the area of the circle, because some of the squares extend beyond the edge. We can come closer using smaller squares. Let's use squares of side length 1/2, so the area of each square is 1/4. Now it takes 60 squares to cover the circle, so their total area is 60 times 1/4, or 15. Of course, there are still a few squares that extend beyond the edges, so this is still an overestimate. What if we make the squares even smaller? Let's use squares of side length 1/4, so the area of each square is 1/16. Hm, now it takes 224 squares, so the squares' total area is 224 * 1/16 = 14. But there are still some squares overlapping the edge. As we use smaller and smaller squares, the area of each square gets smaller and smaller—tending toward zero—but the number of squares we need gets larger and larger—tending toward infinity. But if we look at their total area, while it does decrease the more squares we use (because we're lowering the amount that extends outside the circle), it doesn't decrease at the same rate; the rate of decrease gets smaller and smaller, as the total area of the squares—the area of each square times the number of squares—approaches a particular value that it never drops below no matter how small the squares get. Specifically, in this case, it approaches 4π, or about 12.56637... We can take this to be the limit of the sequence as the area of each square approaches zero, and as the number of squares approaches infinity—and we can take this limit to be the area of the circle. (In fact, one very common way to find the area of a shape, integration in two dimensions, essentially is doing just this, finding the limit as the shape is divided into infinitely many infinitesimal bits.) Now, if at the limit the squares have zero width and zero area, what's the difference between a zero-area square and a point? We've effectively just divided the circle into infinitely many points, and in this case their total area—infinity times zero, the infinity of the number of points times the zero area of each point—came out to 4π. But of course while that value holds for that circle, if we used the same procedure for other shapes with different areas we'd get different limiting values. So, like I said, infinity times zero can be... pretty much anything. But, in particular, it certainly isn't necessarily zero. The TLDR takeaway here is just that infinity is really weird, and doesn't always behave how you'd expect, and infinity times zero is especially weird. And now I really will shut up unless there's some mathematical question someone really wants addressed.]

You can't put together finitely many zero-area line segments to get something with nonzero area, but you can do it with infinitely many zero-area line segments. Infinities are weird, and things can happen at infinity that are qualitatively different from what happens with any finite number, no matter how big. (Here's one way to think of this: So, we're looking at a disk of radius D/2, centered on point O. Pick any point P on that disk (besides the center). There is a line segment of length D/2 centered at point O that passes through that point. (How do we know this? Because two points determine a line, so we know there's a unique line passing through those points, and we can just chop out the length we need. That line segment is at some angle from the x axis, and it's not too hard to show that it's the only line segment (of length D/2 centered at point O) at that angle from the x axis. So as we rotate the line segment 360 degrees, it must pass through point P. Since point P was an arbitrary point on the disk, that means this is true of every point on the disk. (Well, we did specify that point P wasn't the center—that was to assure the uniqueness criterion—but of course all the line segments pass through the center.) So since the line segments pass through every point on the disk, if you put together all the rotated segments you do indeed get the full, filled-in disk. In fact, not only can you get a nonzero area from adding together infinitely many zero-area line segments, you can even get an infinite area. The entire plane can be composed from infinitely many lines.) That's not an "antifractal"; that's just a (kind of) regular fractal—in fact, that's one kind of fractal I had in mind. For some famous fractals that work this way, see Cantor dust or the Sierpiński gasket. (Those fractals of course don't meet the Kakeya/Besicovitch criteria, but they're examples of fractals that work subtractively.)

Yes, I think that's correct; it's the "centering" of the shapes that led to the overall shape of your overlaid rotated versions being squarish instead of circular. (This isn't something unique to Inkscape; I think Adobe Illustrator and most other graphics programs use similar methods of alignment.) That's an interesting conjecture, but as it turns out it is false. Let's take maybe the simplest noncircular shape possible: a straight line of length D. Superimpose its aligned rotations, and you get a circle with radius D/2. This is not, however, the smallest area that will contain this line in any rotation. The "concave triangle" shape below (technically called a deltoid) also works and has half the area of the circle: (In fact, for some time it was believed that this is the smallest such shape that fits these criteria... but it was later proven that not only is this not the shape with minimum area, but there is no shape with minimum area; assuming the line is infinitesimally thin, it's possible to get the area as small as you want with an appropriately designed shape (well, as small a positive area as you want; it can't actually get to zero). If this seems counterintuitive to you, yeah, it's counterintuitive to me too; math can be weird. I first read about this in the book The Unexpected Hanging and Other Mathematical Diversions, by Martin Gardner; you can read more about it on this Wikipedia page (which is where I got the image above), though it's kind of technical.) [EDIT: Okay, glancing over that Wikipedia page myself, I find that I was mistaken about one thing in the previous paragraph. The area can't actually get to zero only if you add the criterion that you must be able to continuously rotate the line segment within the shape. If you only care that the line segment fits within the shape at any angle and don't care that you can actually rotate it from one position to another without leaving the shape, then the area actually can get to zero! That... seems really counterintuitive to me, and I have a hard time seeing how that could work (some kind of fractal, maybe?), but apparently it's been proven. Like I said, math can be weird.]

If the question is whether, if you rotate the Air rune 360 degrees around a point, the shape made by collecting all the points it passes through during the rotation has full rotational symmetry (i.e. is circular), that's certainly true. It's not hard to prove, though I'm not sure how easy it is to phrase the proof in a way that makes sense to someone without much mathematical background. (I'll give it a try, though but I'll put it behind spoiler tags because it may get a bit long and it's not very interesting.) The problem here is, though, that that's not a property unique to the air rune. Note that nothing in the proof referred to anything specific to the air rune—this is true for any shape at all! Rotate any collection of points about a particular center of rotation, and the collection of all points they pass through is going to have circular symmetry. Nothing about the air rune is special in that regard. (Not all shapes, however, will of course give solid filled circles... rotate the illusion rune or the law rune about the center and you'll get a hollow circle, but it'll still have full rotational (and point) symmetry.) Ah, wait, no, hold on; there's more to it than that. @Joerg specifies that "over a set of full rotations the spiral will have touched everywhere on a radius from the eye with the same coverage if you accumulate the presence" (emphasis added). Okay, yes, that is something specific to the Air rune... there are other runes that aren't already circular but form a solid disk if you rotate them, but some points in the disk would be passed through during the rotation more times than others. (The Fate rune also has this property, but it's not a rune commonly associated with mortals. The Truth rune would have this property if it were drawn with all three legs of equal length, but as it's usually depicted I think one leg is slightly longer.) (Oh, one more: Like the Truth Rune, the Movement Rune would have this property if all three "arms" were identical... which at first I thought was the case, and I was going to take issue with the claim that it didn't have rotational symmetry. But on taking a closer look, I think I see what you mean; it would have rotational symmetry if it were a perfect triskelion, but as @scott-martin alludes to it isn't, quite; the bottom two arms join up directly and the top arm joins them at right angles. This not only destroys the rotational symmetry, but also prevents it from having the equal coverage property of the Air rune.)

Well, yes, as I said, the Shared World forum is how I found out about the Shared World in the first place. The thing is that it seems most of the details about the Shared World weren't actually posted in the forum—they were posted in the wiki, which no longer exists, and the relevant pages of which are unfortunately not archived on the Wayback Machine. Ah, I see the cause of the confusion—in my original post I referred to the "old Chaosium forum", while I meant the old Chaosium wiki. Whoops. Sorry about that. (I've edited my initial posted now to fix that error.) Yes, the Shared World forum is still around and readable, but the old Chaosium wiki, where most of the details about the Shared World were posted, is not. There's some information about the Shared World in the forum, but it seems that there was a lot more in the wiki, and that's what I'm wondering if anyone has archived, because if not it seems that most of the details about the Shared World are lost forever.

Yes, I was kind of thinking along those lines, but it's good to hear that someone else has similar reasoning. Thanks.

Okay, I'm probably getting a bit ahead of things since I haven't finished my Marshedge project yet (I'm working on it, I swear; I hope to have it done by the end of the month—at least the writing if not all the illustrations), but I've been mulling over some ideas for future projects, and I had a possible idea for one of them for which the matter in the topic of this title is relevant. Do Maidstone Archers have normal human lifespans, or do they live significantly longer than humans? Or is this something that hasn't been established in canon? (I kind of want to use a Maidstone Archer in my next RuneQuest project, but given the nature of that project it would only work if Maidstone Archers could live for at least a century and a half. If not, though, no big deal; the Maidstone Archer was just a fun detail I wanted to include, but it isn't essential to the concept, and the project can still work fine without it.) (Side question: In earlier editions Maidstone Archers were called "grotarons", but as far as I can tell this term has been dropped from the latest edition (maybe it's used somewhere, but not that I could find). Is "grotaron" an officially deprecated term, or is it still used in some contexts? Or is it, for instance, a rude nickname to which Maidstone Archers would take exception?)

Apologies if this isn't the right place for this post; I wasn't quite sure where to put it—while this question is about the Shared World forum, there hasn't been a post there since 2010, and it seemed to make more sense to post the question here than to try to resurrect a decade-dead forum. Anyway, I was recently poking around the Chaosium Forums and looked into the inactive forums just for the heck of it, and I found the Shared World forum, which struck me as an interesting project—a, well, shared world (or worlds?), possibly released under a Creative Commons license (at least, there was discussion about releasing it under a CC license; I'm not clear on whether that actually ended up happening). Unfortunately, I couldn't find any sign of where the information about the Shared World setting(s) actually ended up, if indeed it's still available anywhere. The old Chaosium wiki where it was originally posted is long gone, and while I found the settings page on the wiki in the Wayback Machine, the pages that actually bear information about the setting seem not to have been archived. I'm very curious to see what it might have entailed, and it seems like it would be a pity if the information about that shared world was lost for good. Does anyone know if it's still accessible anywhere, or did anyone perchance keep their own archive of it?

I was actually already planning on having a Duck among the pregens, since the Lismelder have such close ties to the Ducks, but the Duck was going to be a Lhankor Mhy initiate. (Hm... although now that I look again, the Glorantha Bestiary says "Ducks tend to join certain Air or Death Rune cults (such as Orlanth and Humakt) as other cults tend to treat them with distrust". But since the Durulz are more accepted among the Lismelder than among other Sartarite tribes, maybe there it wouldn't be as unusual for them to join other cults? Eh, I was also going to have a Humakti pregen; if a Duck initiate of Lhankor Mhy would be too improbable I can switch things around and make the Humakti a Duck instead, although the image of a Duck Lhankor Mhy initiate having a false beard hanging underneath their beak does appeal to me...) As for the shaman, I think I'm currently leaning toward @Nick Brooke's suggestion of making them an apprentice of Bofrost.

Oh, that is interesting. Hm... in light of the last paragraph of @scott-martin's post, I think I was leaning toward just having the pregen assistant shaman be apprenticed to the established shaman in Marshedge; it kind of helps tie them into the setting; I realized a way I could use it to foreshadow a future development I'm considering; and anyway according to the most recent maps the Hillhaven clan is kind of on the opposite side of the Lismelder territory from the Marshedge. On the other hand, a shaman of Umath could have some good potential, and after all even if the Hillhaven and Lismelder territories don't directly border each other they're not that far apart... and maybe having the PC not know the local shaman in Marshedge at the beginning leaves more room for discovery. (Not that the local shaman plays a major role in the adventure anyway, unless the PCs don't have a shaman and turn to him for help, but he may play a larger role in a sequel.) I'll have to mull this over. Thanks for the information.

So, months ago I made some posts here about an adventure I was writing for the Write Your First Adventure workshop, set in the town of Marshedge in the Lismelder Tribe territory. Well, I didn't finish by the workshop deadline (in large part because I got way too ambitious and went way over the suggested word count), and then with one thing and another I kind of... set it aside for a while. But I'm finally picking it back up again; even if I didn't finish it by the end of workshop I still want to get it finished and published, and I hope to have it done within the next month or so. Anyway, when I say I got way too ambitious, part of it is that I decided there was enough material that it would be better to split it into two products: the adventure itself, and a Marshedge gazetteer. (The adventure could be run without the gazetteer—there are a few characters fully statted in the gazetteer who appear in the adventure, but they play very minor roles in the adventure and their stats probably won't be needed.) The adventure itself is fully written (though it could do with some editing and revision, and it hasn't been illustrated or laid out yet), but the gazetteer I just finally got off my duff and seriously started writing yesterday. But then I decided I may as well add a (much shorter) third product: a set of pregenerated characters mostly from the Lismelder tribe, for use in the adventure. (This maybe I'll release for free, to possibly pique interest in the other products. But I digress.) So I've been planning out a set of pregen characters that (a) fits the area where the adventure is set, (b) isn't too similar to the pregens from the core book/starter set, and (c) covers all the bases players are likely to want covered. Now, to satisfy (c), I figured one of the pregens ought to be an assistant shaman. (The party doesn't actually need to include an assistant shaman to complete the adventure—although there are some parts of the adventure where it could be very useful to communicate with spirits, there are other ways to proceed, and anyway there's an NPC shaman whose aid they can enlist if they want to. Still, I figured I ought to have an assistant shaman character as an option.) And I've been having a bit of trouble coming up with a good concept for an assistant shaman character that fits criteria (a) and (b). I don't get the impression that shamans are that common in Sartar, so it would seem unlikely there are two shamans (well, one shaman and one assistant shaman) living in the Marshedge area. The core pregen assistant shaman is a Waha initiate from Prax, so I wanted to do something as different from that as possible. So I thought it might be interesting to have a Golden Bow shaman (well, assistant shaman) as one of the pregen characters. Sure, Marshedge is pretty far from the Grazelands, but the core pregens include some characters from outside Sartar as well (besides the aforementioned Praxian shaman, there's a Lunar Tarshite, an Old Tarshite, and an Esrolian), and all my other pregens are from the Lismelder area; having one foreign pregen didn't seem out of the question. The problem is, given the Pure Horse People's isolationist and xenophobic nature, I'm not sure what plausible reason a Golden Bow shaman would have for adventuring with the other PCs in Marshedge. I thought maybe one of the other PCs could previously have traveled to the Grazelands and helped him out somehow, and he's returning the favor, but that seems a little thin. And as I was typing this entry another solution occurred to me, one that in retrospect seems blatantly obvious and I feel stupid for not having thought of it before. I said it seemed unlikely there would be two shamans living in the Marshedge area—but that assumes they're there independently. What if the PC assistant shaman is apprenticed to the NPC shaman that I've already established lives in the area? The biggest problem I see with that is that, well, the NPC shaman only went through his own ordeal and became a full shaman a few years ago; he wouldn't be much older than the PC. Would it make sense for a relatively new shaman to take on an assistant only a few years younger than he is? Okay, I suppose now this post contains two sort of unrelated questions, but I guess they're related in that I'm exploring two alternate solutions to the same problem and trying to figure out which one is more workable...

But the Red Book of Magic says that special cult spirit magic spells like Preserve Herbs "are restricted to cult members" and "are not taught to non-initiates and are closely held secrets" (page 107). That sentence from RQG 288 doesn't seem to me to necessarily contradict that; sure, you can go to an associated cult to learn spirit magic spells, but that doesn't mean they'll teach you their cult's special spirit magic spells. Otherwise you'd have Chalana Arroy cultists teaching Orlanthi and Storm Bull cultists the Sleep spell, for instance, which doesn't seem like a thing they'd be likely to do...