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Gloranthan Cult One Pagers - Cult of Yara Aranis and Solar Update

Gloranthan Cult One pagers are an attempt to gather into a one (or two) pager format useful information about Gloranthan cults.

Here is another batch of one pagers from the net. Brown book of Zzabur, Nick Effingham's site and soltakks page have been the source with updates from other material.  I modified them a bit and here they are

• Yara Aranis - Eater of Horses, a Lunar soldier god
• Polaris - Solar God of the Generals, Pole Star
• Oslira - First Water, Goddess of the Great River
• Urvairinus - Solar Military God

Here is the link to all the one pagers

https://notesfrompavis.wordpress.com/2017/06/05/gloranthan-cult-one-pagers-cult-of-yara-aranis-and-solar-update/

Need to automate that. A bit later...

Gloranthan Cult One Pagers - New Cults

Gloranthan Cult One pagers are an attempt to gather into a one (or two) pager format useful information about Gloranthan cults. 

I got the permission from soltakks to add a few of his versions of Gloranthan cults into this format. I modified them a bit and here they are

• Elmal
• Buserian - Solar knowledge god
• Daka Fal - this comes from the Cults of Prax
• Barntar - Loyal Carl
• Tolat (Kab Tolat Self) - Teshnan War God
• Gorgorma of Two Mouths

https://notesfrompavis.wordpress.com/2017/06/04/gloranthan-cult-one-pagers-new-cults/

In my campaign - from sea near  shores of Prax  to loral took a long and devastating storm to eventually wreck the ship near the safe shores of Loral...

46 minutes ago, soltakss said:

I had a look and can't find any spreadsheets or HTML regarding this, so probably gave up. I have some conversions of ILH2 and CoG Cults which show what I think the Associate Cults are, if that helps. Also, some Associate Cults are at My converted Hero Wars cults but they might be hard to extract.

Let me know/PM me your email if you want the conversions.

PM sent

I certainly would not go for general hit points. Limbs, heads, tails - chop them off.. 

a version should be up in moments after google drive syncs (it is under Praxian)

you have a (sharp) point

First version is now at the one pagers page. I think some of the spells were a bit too combat oriented for the cult for example Bladesharp does not fit well for the cult - I replaced that with Spirit Shield. Added spells of Calm and Deflect as perhaps more appropriate. 

Match Made in Heaven - Who are your Friends or Enemies - Gloranthan One Pagers meet Compatibility Chart

Glorantha has rich and diverse tradition of cults with enmities forged in times beyond Gods War and friendships made in Time. It is good to know who your cult's traditional enemies are. If you do not follow the traditions of your cult's relationships it will be that much more difficult to get ahead in the cult, not impossible but more difficult. Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.

The information here can make for tense moments in your party and in society in general. If your Blackfang assassin has managed to stay in good standing with your Zorak Zoran and Pavis fellow members it still might not be wise to let them know about your tight connections with Krarsht.

Cult Compendium has a great compatibility chart for finding out who your cult's friends and enemies are. Currently it has 43 cults there.  I have now combined that information for those cults into easily digestible form into the Gloranthan One Pagers.

• Gloranthan Cult One pagers link contains all the one pagers

https://notesfrompavis.wordpress.com/2017/05/27/match-made-in-heaven-who-are-your-friends-or-enemies-gloranthan-one-pagers-meet-compatibility-chart/

Gloranthan Cult One pagers are an attempt to gather together in a single page (well sometimes two pages) format the main cult information. Your game system may vary (Runequest versions or even Heroquest) but you might still find something useful in here even if you are not using the exact same version of game system - this is material I have created for my campaign over the years.  It relies on multiple sources but might not be exactly canon even if I have tried to follow that as much as is useful for my campaign. 

Gloranthan Cult One pager contains the following parts (if I have been able to find out the information from a source or invented it in case of some)

Name and the main purpose of the cult

Runes

Requirements to Join initiate

Requirements to join - rune level

Cult skills

Folk magic for Initiates

Theist Miracles (Rune spells)

Pantheons the cult belongs to

Sources

Areas the cult (thru its Pantheon or otherwise) can be found

Personality traits that the runes of the cult expect members to personify

Opposite runes. 

Enemy, Hostile, Friendly and Associated cults

Holy Days and High Holy Days

Spirit Societies the cult belongs to or is associated with

Totem animals the cult's spells can command or speak to

https://notesfrompavis.wordpress.com/2017/05/27/gloranthan-cult-one-pagers-renewed-main-page/

2 hours ago, soltakss said:

I tried to do this, but there are so many RQ3 cults that it made it quite fiddly.

What I did was to put each cult into a pantheon and had default relationships between the pantheons, then I made adjustments for individual cults.

So, Eurmal is in the Storm pantheon, so would by default be Associated to Lightbringers, Friendly to other Storm Pantheon cults, Hostile to Solar and Darkness Cults and Enemy to Chaos, with other cults as Neutral, however I would then fiddle with certain cults, upping some and reducing others, so Eurmal is friendly to Thief cults, so Eurmal and Black fang would be Friendly, Krarsht would be Hostile not Enemy as Eurmal feels some affinity for Krarsht thievery.

Ernalda is in both Storm and Earth Pantheons, so would be Associate to many Earth cults, Friendly to all Lightbringers and Solar cults and Enemy to Darkness and Chaos. Orlanth becomes an Asociate cult, all the other Husband Protectors become Associate cults, any daughter of Ernalda becomes Associate, many Earth cults become Associate, the others become Friendly, Darkness cults are Enemy (Earth) and Hostile (Storm), so I would allocate these on a case by case basis.

The problem is, with a matrix of 100 cults you get a very complex set of relationships.

Do you have any vestiges of this work that you would like to share. Am embarking on a quest to do this and could use some help (=build on shoulders of a giant)

Looking for cult compatibilities information. Does the Cult compatibility chart at Cult Compendium contain all the information known (in that format) or is there additional cults in any other publications or net. Several cults are missing there for example Ernalda, Eurmal... that chart contains 43 cults and I am looking for many more. I can start to extrapolate from that information but would like to first consider all the available material.  I am looking for information in the form of "

Flintnail considers these as

Enemy Cults: Krarsht, Kyger Litor, Primal Chaos

Hostile Cults: Bagog, Cacodemon, Crimson Bat, Lanbril, Mallia, Storm Bull, Thanatar, Thed, Vivamort, Waha, Xiola Umbar, Zorak Zoran

Friendly Cults: Caladra & Aurelion, Chalana Arroy, Geo, Issaries, Lhankor Mhy, Zola Fel

Associated Cults: Pavis

Any thoughts what would be the holy and high holy days. Crawling the net I find place mentioning only Sacred Time rites. I think this is a bit broad for a relatively minor deity. Is there a specific day at Sacred time... Next version of one pagers will contain a first cut at one pager for Hearth Mother

I can create a one pager if somebody points me to the right source. Cannit recall if there ever was cult description for hearth mother

Hi

Burayha Xolani is Fonrit (it is from my campaign) 

Most of the rest you will find here... The source is many times Gods of Glorantha for the Pantheon locations.

https://notesfrompavis.wordpress.com/2015/09/27/adventures-in-glorantha-take-3-gloranthan-cult-onepagers-come-for-aig/

Updated most of the above (the ones I did not update where ones I need to think about how my software takes those specialties into account)...

There are several versions of Gloranthan Holy Day calendars floating around. Soltakks has a nice one on his site among lots of other useful stuff and there exists a beautiful Theyalan rune calendar made by Nel - another fellow Finn.

I wanted to have a complete calendar containing all the cults. It is A3 in size :-)

• Gloranthan Holy Days Calendar

This is a draft version with as many as I could find so far. There are a few cults that do not have holy days or have floating ones - those are not in here.

• Cults and their Holy Days

This list contains the cult by cult their holy and high holy days.

If you want to have the pantheon holy days in addition, please take a look at Nel's calendar.

I added also the Holy Days and High Holy Days into Gloranthan Cult One Pagers.

https://notesfrompavis.wordpress.com/2017/05/21/gloranthan-holy-days-calendar-and-cult-one-pagers/

Another Finn! Great. 

Lovely calendar - thanks. Mine is in a database - will be creating some tools for my campaign based on that. Some will be published.

How should I read your beautiful calendar.  For example Day 6 of Sea Season - Lanbril. That is a holy day I guess...

High holy days are in bold...

Missing the holy days and high holy days for the following. Would anybody know. Updating my one pagers - will publish the information there...

I took a look at Soltakks' excellent calendar and few other sources,  found many but not the below ones

Ana Gor

Annilla

Arkat

Basmol

Blackfang

Bolongo

Crimson Bat

Dark Eater

Devil's Hand

Dorasta

Eurmal

Evukindu

Fida'ls

Foundchild

Garangordos

Gark the Calm

Geo

Gerak Kag

Gloomshark

Heler

Henird

Hiia the Swordman

Hobimarong

Hungry Ghosts

Hykim & Mikyh

Krjalk

Lamsabi

Lanbril

Lemure

Lumavoxoran

Nyanka

Odayla

Ompalam

Pocharngo

Ragnaglar

Rasout

Sailigor

Serlarn

Seseine

Shargash

Sidana

Sun Dragon

Telmor

Vinga

Yinkin

Zong

How about Pavis Big Rubble map and new Pavis map. While I am asking how about the River of Cradles map from Borderlands...

Recognizing a rabbit hole.... There are multiple points of view and there is no right one - our Gloranthas will vary even with broadly similar rolesystems. Luckily it is still Glorantha   :-) 

2 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

I wouldn't agree. While the 40 session or so isn't too far from the mark-that depdns a bit on how lucky they are with improvement rolls and which previous experience rules were being used, if any. In our games most characters joined a cult or two prety early on and so were on thier path to rune level within the first month or so of gameplay.

 

The tricky bit was surviving those 40 game sessions. RQ combats were a lot more dangerous than comparable D&D fights, and in 40 game sessions a PC would probable wind up on the wrong end quite a few impales and several critical hits, and fumbles. The laws or probability aren't nice to PCs on the path to rune level. 

Well -the route to my point is that both maths and practical experience of our games saw that getting to 90%+ level is relatively straight forward and we saw many who evolved to 90%+ and even relatively many rune lords. Even rune lords occasionally died but DI helps you there.  We saw quite a few deaths but it is not nearly as difficult than it is thought to be. In practice if you have long running campaign (we had decades of real time with active play) - even in quite  early part of that campaign you are already evolved into clink and wait for the lucky shot. It even did not have to be rune lords. 

My wish is system needs to be something else than "clink"  once you are on the higher end of the percentages. Magic to me is not the only right answer - it may be for some - but combat needs to stay fun and fulfilling even at higher levels if that was what players have come to enjoy and be good at. 

2 hours ago, Roko Joko said:

The 13th Age book preview has sections that discuss what runes mean for PCs thematically and sometimes in terms of personality.  It looks like the same rune list as in HQG, but there's more and different text per rune.

For Light I think there's plenty of personality stuff in the Yelmalio cult and mythology.  (And I guess Elmal is also Light?)  If you want to do Light-but-not-Yelmalio I don't know.  The heat and light parts of the Fire rune don't seem to have an obvious distinction psychically.  Maybe Light is the Truth part of Fire and Heat is everything else.

One bit about Moon I liked was Thomas Iverson's first comment here: https://plus.google.com/+Iskallor/posts/FBiBN148qfH

Wonderful - thanks. How would you describe as single word adjective(s) the attributes that 13th Age book places on Man rune. At this late hour I do not find the right words....

4 hours ago, jajagappa said:

This may fall within the Mastery rune, which after all reflects Sovereignty (rulership) as well as personal mastery.

You might also consider some of the original comments in RQ2, e.g. "it may also signify the independence of a Hero or magician from cult ties" or "As master of men, it describes a Hero."  So you could end up with Mastery: Heroic, Independent, Authoritative, Just.

Could be, this is also a little bit Pandora's box of what to add and what to drop, how many, what kind of adjectives...

Looking at who else has Mastery: Ompalam, She Who Waits, Danfive Xaron, Xentha, Basmol, Vinga, Waha, Pamalt and Argan Argar.... 

49 minutes ago, Byll said:

So how does the Orlanthi up hold his 'Just' Trait when he is being 'Reckless' and 'Violent' ? I know there is an inherent tension in Orlanthi kingship acknowledging earlier imprudent action and trying to correct it, but there must be cases where you only have to epitomise a part of a god's characteristics.

One could consider that to be the differentiator between the Recklessness of Orlanth and Zorak Zoran or Yinkin. As a GM I might throw in situations where the Orlanthi needs to consider his recklessness and violence in the context of being just - in the context of Orlanthi culture - just. The Orlanthi would not always be just but that would always risk the displeasure of the god/cult and society He would be on the slippery slope of not being worthy Orlanti and that has consequences...