Hellhound Havoc

Sounds like a fun premise to a campaign: our wives and husbands left us, our kids are all grown up, so it's just us, booze, and the road to Pavis now! But seriously, amazing answer. I reached some similar conclusions in my response just 5 minutes ago but not to this degree of detail. I'd also forgotten about the city confederation thing, and yeah, historically speaking cities were population sinks needing constant migration from the rural areas - exactly these sons and daughters who didn't have anything to look for in the future.

True, but it takes pretty much just one Chalana Arroy and Asrelia or even Ernalda cultists to bless the birth, then the children, then hunt the disease spirits, and done, the bloodline is safe. That said, that myth really is quite applicable because I think that's basically it: if you're raised as a warrior and there's not enough land or cattle for you at home, either you very quickly steal some from the neighbouring clan (and since cattle raids are established as a regular summer thing, that's the most likely to me), or you go off on your own to make something for yourself with the blessings of your kin. The Orlanthi have a past of adventuring, after all, and that was a thing in viking society, which the Orlanthi borrowed quite a bit. So if your dad says "sorry bud, you're the 4th son and there's just not enough stuff here for you", I think it's reasonable to assume that the son will keep his chin up and go wander.

Sorry, could you expand a bit on what's up with the subcults? I know a bit about past history, but "current" events in Glorantha elude me a bit, and I got curious

Oh I wouldn't count on that if I were you! 😛

Wouldn't this make a Carl lineage into a Cottar lineage in like 3 generations? Say I'm a Carl, I hold 2 hides of land, I have 3 beautiful sons. I distribute these 2 between the oldest ones, and the third one works on one of his brothers farms. All of the three have kids, no one distinguishes themselves enough to have more land assigned to them, and maybe one of them finds success by going to the neighbouring clan or tribe and finding a woman of status willing to marry them, but if the sons of the third son don't do that, then they're basically out of the lineage, aren't they? And if they reach the majority while their father is still alive - hell, if I'M still alive - then where do they work? There's just not enough land or cattle to require all those hands. I can see, however, if my neighbour has a couple hides and doesn't have enough sons and needs someone to work that land because... well, someone's gotta plow. And that might be a mechanism of all the same families holding power, as you mentioned, but on a smaller scale, inside the clan.

I totally forgot about this, but it's absolutely true. The Orlanthi say it was Heort, and maybe it was, but the trolls in particular were also out there fighting. For all we know, the last hero was an uz, or a lone aldryami in the woods, or even a pack of plucky adventurers pulled together by the circumstance. Could have been a golden wheel dancer lol that would make everyone mad. This is a nice way to look at it. The Uz started being born in litters with the enlo, after all, and the existence of "Superior Trollkin" proves that, with enough time and effort, the curse doesn't have to be a curse forever. You could say it's just a phase of their species' story that has changed. We really are all uz. I wonder how that interacts with the I Fought We Won anti-chaos ideology, because the trollkin are essentially a product of chaos, so the hardliners anti-chaos wouldn't be able to reconcile it. At the same time, those who embrace the Lunar Way can do so either because they think the goddess can be regenerated like Sedenya and the curse can be averted, or because they think this is no curse at all and illumination is the only way to escape from the anti-chaos autogenocidal trap. To one side, the Uz live in a disciplined, cogent, top-down society. To the other majority side, the Uz live in a tyrannical, Spartan society on its way to oblivion because the Uzuz won't all live forever - not even the Only Old One could survive, after all.

I've been thinking about ideology in Glorantha. I don't mean our ideology, from our world, of course, but rather what sorts of ideologies might exist in a world such as this, and what would be the main factions, as well as what positions one might hold as important. We get clues from this every now and then, but I can't remember them all. So it goes something like this: Dwarfs - Probably the most straightforward. The Mostali are either Orthodox or Heretics, with Heretics being against the status quo either in a radically individualistic or open bent (Individualism and Openhandism) or in an extreme reactionary bent (Octamonism). Thus the main issues relating to a Mostali are: do you support the status quo? What should be our relationship to the outside world? Do you have a stance on the Iron dwarfs? In terms of goals, however, they all have the same one: restore the Machine God. That is in itself an ideology, though, because every one of these heresies are just different ways of restoring the Machine God. Elfs - I honestly don't know a lot about the Aldryami, but I'd imagine that their major split would probably be on the grounds of Reforestation, what that entails, and to what degree that should go, with extreme reforestators saying the Aldryami should cover the entire world in trees, while more moderate types would be ok with just islands of forest in other biomes, like Prax. Plus the question of old grudges and whether they should let go or keep it up. Trolls - The Uz seem to have the most cogent, almost disciplined and direct ideology of anyone, because they're basically fine with very little. As a species, they have basically one issue: their fertility goddess Korasting is dead and the children are being born weird now. Their stance on Chaos naturally stems from this, since it was Gbaji who did it. There's not a lot to divide the trolls; "should they contact this tribe or not" is an entirely practical matter, and there's just not enough people in your average troll clan to provide dissent, especially if there's an Uzuz nearby. I can see a faction forming, however, of Lunar-sided Trolls, who learned about how another deity, Sedenya, was brought back by ritual, so maybe they're investigating the matter and perhaps even reaching Illumination and letting go of past grudges? Lunar Empire - The main matter in Lunar lands is probably one of chaos. Aside from the "are you loyal or not" question, I imagine there are also pretenders or people who believe the Empire has gone too far away from their Carmanian origins and want to go back to that "golden age", when the women and barbarians knew their place. On the opposite end you have the White Moonies, who believe the Empire was never meant to have been created and the Empire must fizzle out. Orlanthi - The main matter with the Orlanthi is the Lunar Empire, but there's a bit more nuance there, because there are factions whose actions may look identical, but their motivations may be different. For instance, the Rebels aren't really unified, their single goal is to remove Lunar occupation, but I imagine there are those who fight to restore the Prince of Sartar exactly as it was before and keep the Orlanthi conservative, but there must also be those who reject Lunar occupation but think Orlanthi society needs to embody the spirit of Movement from Orlanth and be shaken up, perhaps to learn something from the Lunars. From those who support the Lunar Empire, and therefore reject the anti-Chaos Orlanthi ideology, there must also be White Moonies between them. And there's the Fazzurites and Phargenteites, which to me indicate different degrees of pro-Lunar fervour. Fazzur, for everything he's done, did save the citizens of Boldhome, and always gave me the vibe of "goddamn you rebels keep forcing my hand, I like this just as much as you do!", while Phargentes always struck me more as a power hungry guy with the spears to back it up. I don't know enough about Prax, Pavis, and the Holy Country to talk about them tbh, but what do you think? Are there or should there be some other factions? What else would someone in Glorantha believe is an important issue that should be addressed?

@svensson I understand the mechanics of Anglo-Saxon and Gael governance relatively well tbh, I just didn't think they'd play too much because those are very distinctly not Bronze Age peoples. We know so very little of the Germanic Bronze Age, all we can do is extrapolate from Roman Sources and from Late Antiquity / Early Medieval Christian monk sources. I thought Sartar was closer to Greece? And I'm not familiar with that to be sure, but now that I think of it, I'd expect to see more city-states, or the Mycenaean "quarters" or whatever was the name of the thing.

This makes sense to me, that trolls go by smell and that they would find different aromas more pleasant than others. That said, pages 13 and 14 of the Trollpak are an experiment to try and find troll food preferences, and the very first things are forms of leather, fruits, vegetables, and liquids. This isn't that different from human stuff, but I do understand that the combination prizes smells and what might appear to be "dirty" is actually carefully composed to smell nice. That said, those same pages of the Trollpak mentions that the dark troll never ate his own feces, nor the trollkin's, and that the trollkin only ate the dark troll poop but never his own - and it died of hunger. The Dark Troll preferred to ritually devour the trollkin and subsequently die of hunger rather than eat his poop, so that indicates to me that they do have some concept of what is dirty and what isn't; and surely it's inconvenient to have sticky stuff like wine all over the ground. And again, they herd beetles and trollkin. I understand that the preferred living of a rich troll would be to have a lot of food and other consumables laying around so he can eat whenever he gets peckish, but your average dark troll isn't that rich, and those beetles and trollkin gotta eat something, and I don't really see a dark troll wasting perfectly fine food on a trollkin or a beetle when they can very make do with least desirable food. That's exactly how humans have fed pigs for millennia. I have seen this claim numerous times, but only in these forums. I'd like to know where it originates from and if it's still canon. The Trollpak doesn't say anything about the trolls being constantly hungry, neither does HeroQuest 2e or even the Guide to Glorantha, despite repeat mentions that they can eat anything, they can extract food from anything. And there's the excerpt I put in my main post, which very clearly states "a sated troll", which seems to contradict the idea that the Uz are constantly hungry. It is implied that eating is very important to them, and that they eat whenever they get the chance, but to me that seems more along the lines of them being gourmands and deriving much pleasure from eating (which is explicitely said in the Trollpak) rather than hunger. The only place I've seen mention them being always hungry was in the Glorantha Bestiary, but the tone of the entry is very poetic rather than descriptive, and the more scientifically oriented Trollpak dissecates the Uz's entire digestive system but doesn't say anything of that sort. And it even emphasizes sometimes that certain trolls are hungry or go hungry, with mentions to sated trolls, which surely would make no sense if they were always hungry. If the definition of a troll is a Hungry Hungry Hippo, saying "hungry troll" makes no sense - starving troll would make more sense, yet it's almost impossible for a troll to starve in the wild.

Cave trolls and trollkin won't, I get that, but don't the dark trolls own the trollkin and the beetles like cattle? Wouldn't it make sense for them to feed them the refuse, leftovers, and dirt instead of actual food, since the trollkin can live off of Dark Troll refuse and litter? So wouldn't it make sense for, say, Dagori Inkarth to be tidy because all the dirt is the trollkins' food?

I've been reading Trollpak and understanding a lot more about the trolls, and how they seem to be these weird brutish creatures but there's a lot of sense in how they act and think. Well, as much as can be in a race of weird shadow hippo demons that escaped from Not!Hell and were cursed. But later on, describing their living quarters, they're described as slovenly, and this keeps coming up. How their hovels are ramshackle, how they keep refuse to the side apparently unbothered, etc. But I don't get why though. Also they can be poisoned, so surely they're also prone to illness, and living in abject squalor can't be healthy. Even the recent Glorantha Bestiary says: If anything, you'd think that the trolls would actually be quite tidy, because they have two equivalents of pigs to eat their refuse and even their dirt and poop (trollkin and beetles, which are notorious FOR being decomposers in nature). I understand being disorganized or even having different habits of cleanliness but squalor? Plus, page 30 has this little box: Which implies both that trolls can get their bellies full and think about things other than eating and mating (or else they'd just be wild animals, like the cave trolls or the broo), and also that they can care about comfort. So why are they always referred to as dirty, slovenly, living in filth and squalor, etc?

I DMed Six Seasons in Sartar a while back and one of the players decided to be a young noblewoman. However, the more we thought about it, the more it seemed like the "noble" is just a Warrior with more cash. To my understanding, the Sartarite organisation is: Kingdom of Sartar, composed of many tribes, which are composed of many clans. On the most local level, the basic unit - the "village" - is the Clan, right? Like the Red Cow clan, which is part of the Colymar tribe, which is part of Sartar. So the tribal king of Colymar has his loyal retainers, the thanes, and these men are considered nobles. But each of the clan leaders also has a retinue, and they're also thanes, and they also count as nobles, but all of this seems to be hand picked guardsmen. That is, nobles just seem like knights, or the Anglo-Saxon thane itself - but that is a social class, their occupation would have been "warrior" because the main job of the knight and the Anglo-Saxon thane is to protect their land and their suzerain's lands. Yet in RQ it is mentioned that the thane "coordinate and speak for their people". So how far down does this goes? Let me give a practical example. King Sartar gave King Colymar X amount of lands. King Colymar gave the clan Haraborn Y amount of lands. Out of this, a quarter belongs to the chief personally and a quarter to the temple. So the chief distributes his hides, let's say these are 80 hides from a 200 hide clan. The chief can't till all of that alone, and he has 3 sons, so he distributes 40 hides among them (20 for the firstborn, 10 for each brother) so they're not destitute in the event of his death. But these sons can't till that alone either, so they dole them out to other men and so on and so forth. At one point, someone down the line is going to live as a cottar or a free man. My point here is that these thanes aren't "speaking for their people", they're just protect the land alloted to them, so their occupation is that of Warrior, and their social class is that of Noble. The only true Nobles, it seems to me, are the clan leadership, which can be hereditary so these are people who actually grow apart from other freemen and are groomed to rule. King Colymar's son and Clan Chief Haraborn's son have both more in common with one another than with their free neighbours' sons. So what am I missing here? Why is Noble a distinct occupation with their own skills?

Great questions, you see: the Morocanth would love to lounge around in the fresh water and humidity of the rainforest - they don't need it but hey, who doesn't love a great soaking? However, it's tougher to herd their precious herdmen through the dense jungle. Also, the Sartarites and other tribes harass them too much for it to be worth their while, so instead their migrations take them to the River of Cradles during flood season so the herdmen can tamp on the soft earth and eat those delicious riverine plants they love so much. These grow not due to Genert's influence or lack thereof, but rather because of the god of the river and his magnificent bounty. There are, of course, Morocanth who do periodic pilgrimages back to Dragon Pass as a way o homage their freshwater ancestors and sink a bit on the rivers, but they've grown hard and distant and most of them can't swim, so they're a bit afraid of the water. Also I've literally just found out that tapirs also inhabit dryland forests, and there is mention of chaparral and shrubland in Prax, so it isn't a leap to say that their ancestral home as tapirs actually is the Wastes and that they never had a proper freshwater thingie. How did they arrive there if that area wasn't dry in the Godtime before Genert's death? That's a question that puzzles the Morokanth loremasters for centuries now, but their memory from before the Covenant is tricky. Some Morocanth are actually in the process of finding a HeroQuest that would remind them of their origins. Some say they should let sleeping tapirs lie, though. Who knows what one may find in such a distant past. What kind of sin was committed by or to them to confine them to such place? In my opinion, there is no sin at all. Prax is hard but life grows everywhere, and they're children of the Wastes through and through. They should, instead, invest in creating mud pits like the Sudd in Sudan so they and their herds can take mud baths and soak in the cool sucking mud. And of course the Incafied Lunars wouldn't march under such a silly banner, this is borderline disrespectful to them and to this whole concept. Such a suggestion... ...They would, of course, say it in Quechua instead! 😛

Very true, it's just that the Grazelanders are so horse centric that it's hard to fit them in a South American flavour. I think only the Mapuche, maybe?

the lostest tribe of Prax. they got so lost that they left Prax lol

Yes, though personally I was thinking more of the Tupi rather than the peoples of the Amazon, and the Tupi did live in some very hilly areas throughout their history. Besides, I think it can be a melting pot of inspirations, just like the Lunars can either be Persian or Roman or something else entirely depending on how you interpret them. Oh for sure, but it's one of those things that can easily be handwaved I think. In th context of broader RPGs and why they don't use those cultures, I understand the cultural differences are quite big, and some folks are also scared of "doing it wrong" like they are with Jewish-inspired religions and cultures. But in the case of Glorantha, I would personally just say "they're like the Inka but, like, if the Inka had horses and planted rice you feel me". Honestly, instead of moving it to Pamaltela, I would probably just make Dragon Pass denser jungle and move the settlements a bit closer to the river and put even BIGGER giant turtles there!!! Maybe add some turtle themes to the Orlanthi too, I wouldn't even make them Hsunchen; have some funny Ducks paddling around in canoes with bows to hunt turtles, put some quero-queros in Prax, make the trolls hairier to look like the Mapinguari hahahahaha just fully go wild No but seriously, this reminded me of reading an AskHistorians answer or something like that about Francisco de Orellana travelling down the river, meeting some indigenous peoples around the area you mentioned, and it was something about him being impressed with how many people there were there - I think the text mentioned something around 40 to 60 thousand people? - and these people themselves saying something about some queen up north being even grander and more powerful. I can totally imagine Orellana being some sort of early Lunar emissary going down river like "Jeez these people mean business, the empire won't be happy to hear it". One could possibly even turn the Dragon Pass map into a river based pointcrawl, where the main means of locomotion are riverboats and canoes, so you and your buddies paddle around all day meeting people, watching dinos lapping water from the sides, trying not to get lost in the Upland Marsh, etc. Maybe extend the Stream through the mountains to Boldhome too to connect everything.

So I don't have a RQ game to prepare, but this has been in my head for a while and I need to write it down somewhere. Basically, the more I think about it, the more the idea of a Dragon Pass with South American aesthetics sound possible. I'll go by topics. Yelm and Pelorians - These can be interpreted as similar to Tawatinsuyu, the Inca Empire. The Sapa Inca was seen as a god on earth, according to some traditions, and the Incas were the superpower in the region for the longest time. Plus they had a really robust administration with stuff "written" through quipu, and Cusco was no Glamour but it was still a pretty big city. Also their main deity (to put it simply, because Inca religion was really complex, see also the huacas) was Inti, a sun deity, just like Yelm before the moon goddess. Sartar and the Orlanthi - The many peoples of the Amazon (mainly the Carib and the Tupi, but also the Yanomami) seem very close to the Orlanthi for me. One of the main deities of one of the people there, the Tupi, is Tupã, who is either the god of thunder or the god of the sky whose voice can be heard through thunder (or was it thunder the voice of the great creator and Tupã just a description of that phenomenom? I'm no godlearner!). Like the Sartarite, they are also a fierce people who live in longhouses (except Tupi houses aren't usually made out of wood but rather wooden structures covered in a kind of grass) with a custom of periodical raiding and a whole honor system based around ransoming peoples. The peoples of the Amazon and of what is today southern Brasil are known to have raided and fought with the Inca and one another very much. The first European to have come into contact with the Inca, as a matter of fact, was a Portuguese coloniser called Aleixo Garcia who found himself in a raiding expedition with a Guaraní army (who assembled in Paraguay), and the walked all the way up to Bolivia to be defeated by the Inca. Anyway, many of these peoples also practice ceremonial tattooing, and they also had cities. The city of Kuhikugu, for instance, thought to have been populated by the Carib-speaking Kuikuro, may have had a population of upwards to 50 thousand people before the devastation of colonisation! That's twice the urban population of Sartar given in the Guide to Glorantha, but no one really talks about Kuhikugu because everyone thinks the indigenous peoples of the Amazon didn't have cities at all. Which isn't just untrue, it's also a dangerous idea that paints them as "backwards" and unrefined. Plus, there's little about their cities because they were all devastated by disease long before the Europeans got to them, unlike the Inca and the Aztecs, which were conquered faster. Thematically, the great sun-aligned empire fighting the thunder-worshipping "barbarian" underdogs just feels so Gloranthan. And besides, a lot of these Amazonian peoples have some sort of spiritual practice that closely resembles Greg's interests of shamanism, trances (a lot of it involving substances like sniffing tobacco or ayahuasca), and cool mysticism with out of the way aesthetics. Climate - Little fun fact: the soil of the Amazon rainforest is kinda poor in phosphorus, but it gets it through dust blown from the desert of the Sahara. Tons and tons of dust are blown over the ocean every year to keep the soil on the other side of the Atlantic healthy. In Glorantha, every year the Storm Bull blows the desert winds of Prax - which can be a sandy waste depending on your interpretation, but it can have dust without it- west to Dragon Pass. One can easily say that Glorantha's map is actually tilted on its side: in actuality, Genertela isn't on north with Valind, but rather on the west, and Dragon Pass is on the middle distance between Valind and the big fire south of Pamaltela, creating a sort of mild Equator filled with rainforests - much like South America east of the Andes! What I like more about this idea, though, is the thematic notion that the death of Genert hasn't ruined Prax forever. The Wastes seem hostile for life, yes, but life always finds a way, and even the dry hot lands have an important part in the ecosystem. It fortifies the Storm Bull's place as the "evil on our side" y'know? He is good but he isn't nice. He fights the Devil, yes, but he may also get you in the crossfire; he kicks up dust storms and they blow west and that's important for the florest, but don't get caught in one of them! In real life, these desert and dry ecosystems are some of the least preserved out there, because people just see a big heap of shrub and arid death, but they don't see the rich bird life or tenacious plant and burrowing life just underneath the surface. I feel like I had more to say but I can't remember anything right now, I just think that we don't really get stuff inspired by proper South American civilisations, especially non-Inca ones, and especially stuff that isn't tragic. They have a lot more to offer than the Great Dying. I also have some other thoughts kicking around like the Grazelanders resembling the Charrua in my mind and things like that, but nothing too solid to write about. What do y'all think?

That's a pretty elegant solution tbh, and it makes sense because it's not an either / or situation.

That does sound like an issue, but the game moves so fast and the characters are so competent from the get-go that, to me, it doesn't feel like "no reward" because you're kinda choosing your reward. Like, the purpose of having bigger skills is to win more checks, so if you spend the point to win the check you've just abridged your character development temporarily. That does sound interesting, but it's not in the new QuestWorlds is it? I've never read HQ 1e though, maybe it's from there. I understand that tension and your point, but to me the QuestWorlds approach just outsources the blame to the GM, because instead of "gosh darn I spent too many points being the cool guy back there and now my guy has stagnated" it becomes "damn it dude you didn't put enough checks for me to fail in this session!" I wouldn't go so far as to kill a character without explicit consent from the player though, and besides, the issue here is that your tailoring of the character gets limited. However, with Hero Points as in HQ:G, you could get a new skill on 13 basically every session. With QuestWorlds, it's very much possible that you take 2 or even 3 sessions to get an advancement, and then you'd have to use that to get one new skill at 10. In my HQ:G game what happened was that the players spent a lot of Hero Points very early on to flesh out their characters, and then when they hit around 5 or 6 abilities it slowed down dramatically, with them focusing on either getting better or passing rolls. I'll admit that I probably should have given them more Hero Points and even some free abilities, like you said, for effectively roleplaying new stuff and things like that. The main thing to me, though, is the magic system. I very much prefer the magic in HQ:G, especially Sorcery, because it feels different. It really does feel like you're hacking reality, and you spend Hero Points to add new spells because they're new abilities. Without that, you either have a very broad keyword to use, or you get like 2 new spells total due to how advancement works, neither of which is too satisfying to me tbh

I'm preparing for a QuestWorlds game. Really like this system, but I keep coming back for HeroQuest 2e in a lot of things. The first is magic, I just really like how magic is structured in HeroQuest and I always adapt it to my other games. But the other one is Hero Points as XP. Just the idea that the player can control his character advancement, and can use these points to create new abilities and signal to the GM "here, this is what I'm interested in, these are the things I want to be core to my character" is just really much cooler for me than the PbtA inspired advancements list. Anyone got some insight on why this was removed?

Yeah, I personally don't feel too compelled about the whole "this is sorta kinda like our world, but in the very distant past" that Conan and others like to have. I appreciate that Glorantha is its own thing - that's what I like about it, it's not our world because in our world we can't change stuff by taking enough drugs to take down a small horse and vanishing for a few weeks.

I can't remember where I've read it, but I remember reading something about this being related to succession. Suppose you have a chief with 3 sons, and he owns personally 10 hides of land. He himself can only work 1 hide, so he keeps 5 to himself, distributes 3 to his sucessor (as in, the one who will inherit his property, not necessarily the next chief) and 1 for each of his other sons. Suppose his son with just 1 hide of land has 3 sons, though. What will happen to them? They'll become tenants. Maybe they'll become tenants for their grandfather, working his land and eventually proving themselves to the next chieftain (which may or may not be one of his uncles) so they receive a bit of it. So you can see that, while yes, the tenants are of lower status, they can still be proud and have something to prove. It's not entirely hereditary, but that's just my understanding of it of course. As to the logistics of longhouses: how many people live in each stead? and what does that mean for number of steads in a typical clan? This is pretty broad. Sartar - Kingdom of Heroes says that it can be anywhere from 6 to 40. In Six Seasons in Sartar there are 12 for a very small clan. how many people does a typical longhouse in Sartar hold? I don't think there's a satisfying answer for this one. It's like asking "how many people can an apartment hold" - I imagine there will be different sizes of longhouses for different sized families, but I wouldn't doubt the 6-to-40 figure might still hold true. Maybe 3-to-20. can there be more than one longhouse in a stead? Yes, it says so in Sartar - Kingdom of Heroes. are there residences in a stead separate to the longhouse(s)? There can be. Tenants may live in cottages out in the field, but I don't think freemen would, since they typically own their own longhouse. if people live outside the longhouse, are they part of the stead or separate to it? Part of the stead. The stead is more of a social distinction. Like, even if you work on the fields herding sheep for half the year, living on a cottage, and only coming to the longhouse during winter, those sheep still belong to the owner of the stead. if the social ranks of "owns a plow" and "doesn't own a plow" still hold, how is membership of those ranks determined? Is it hereditary, merit-based or something else? See above, I imagine it's partly hereditary in the sense that people in power will prioritise their family when gift-giving. Is it only the "owns a plow" families who live in the stead/longhouse and the others live in cottages? (I know that's not either or, and could be a mix, but see the question about whether these extra residences are part of a stead or separate from it) Not necessarily. The distinction here is more "who has their own room in the longhouse and who sleeps in the main hall" rather than "who lives and doesn't inide the longhouse." The son of a freeman who doesn't own land yet is a tenant, but he'd still probably have his own room. if the "doesn't own a plow" rank is hereditary and those families don't live in the stead, does this mean we have a perpetual underclass in Orlanthi society? No, because they aren't necessarily undesirable for marriage. I think the confusion here stems from seeing these classes as castes, when I personally believe they should be more descriptive. "Carl" describes the person who owns a hide of land, and this person is generally richer, therefore they'll be treated differently, but it's not really a station of society because that would mean the society is feudal (that is, if the son of the owner of land is treated differently than the son of the tenant, yet none of them own land, then you have gentry). Meanwhile, with the Orlanthi, I personally imagine that if you have the eldest son of a freeman, and he doesn't own land (his father only has 1 hide of land), that means he'll be a tenant. But he's not undesirable for marriage because of his father's position, so folks from other clans would still be interested in keeping his bloodline close. And suppose he turns out to be a strong man with a promising future who might distinguish himself during a raid and come to own cattle? A woman from a neighboring clan would be interested in marrying him maybe even more than a cattle-owning carl who's weak in body and magic and might have his cattle stolen or scammed from him.

There's definitely mechanical precedent for that, but I'm afraid that would change warfare quite a bit. Or maybe not! I'm really not a military history guy so I have no idea how close warfare in the 1500's was to warfare in the 1200's / 1300's lol That said I did have in mind that instead of new tech being, like, plate armour, it would be something more like "by the way Arthur was patron of this guy and he just invented the printing press real quick."

Follow-up that I somehow forgot to mention: I was reading this AskHistorians thread right before writing all of this, arguing for the continuity of power between the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans. I'm not sure about the connection, perhaps something to do with Uther? Arthur's father doesn't really need to be called Uther, him being called, idk, "Henry" doesn't change things that much. Not to me, at least. Another thing: noble houses. I'd love to put in a bit more on bloodlines and houses instead of disparate clans like the De Ganis, De Gales, and the Orkneys. I don't think that would need to be systemised at all, it just comes down to narrative focus.

So I've been thinking a bit about this recently and I'd like to know if you fellas have suggestions, but mostly I think better by writing stuff down and bouncing it from others. Firstly, I'm really not a big fan of how the Saxons are basically low-tech vikings and the whole vibe of fending off these foreign invaders. I've GMed a couple of campaigns to different groups of players and in all of them, battle against the Saxon Invader was always the weakest theme and the one everyone was the least interested in. As it happens, I've been reading T.H. White's The Once and Future King, and that one takes place in the 13th century. T.H. White says that Uther lived around 200 years and that the other monarchs from the period were mythical - which also sounds like something Terry Pratchett would have said, "the chroniclers made up a line of kings because they were embarrassed that they wouldn't be taken seriously because the king just didn't die." T.H. White emphasizes the "racial" (in his words) conflict between the native Saxons and Gaels against the Anglo-Norman nobility, which isn't something I'd particularly love to emphasize, but this idea that Arthur has a vision of a better tomorrow and his existential threats are mainly angry barons and people that refuse to change is quite appealing to me, so I'd like to focus on that. So, thinking in terms of the GPC, some of the biggest events that would probably need to change or remain, at first glance: Badon and that whole business - Not a huge fan of Colgrin and the other saxons that show up a couple years before Badon. I would probably switch this for the business with Accolon and Morgaine, perhaps give the players a golden chance of not separating Arthur from his scabbard and really mess up the timeline. Maybe drag some of the events from the Conquest to happen earlier and age Arthur up a bit to 18 or 21. Anglia Uprising and the invasion of the Irish and Picts - This can easily be swapped by these barons revolting, respectively. Would be even better if it's put a bit earlier because it can be part of the turmoil of Lot's coalition of disgruntled vassals. The suppression of the Irish in this period can be a bit of... poor taste, so to speak, and I wouldn't want for a parallel to be drawn between Arthur and Cromwell, so maybe forget a bit about that. Galeholt / Galehaut - I don't like Mallory's treatment of Galehaut, I'll just say this. But what would he be king of? I think the Chivalricness of it all should be embraced and just say that there's a bunch of islands somewhere around Britain, and that's where he hails from. Or perhaps he's not from an island at all and rather he's Scandinavian, hence the "half giant" thing. Arthur conquers the French, the Romans, and becomes king of the world and president of the USA - I do like the globetrotting you get to do during this part of the campaign, and there were quite a few spats between France and the then-Angevin Empire if we're going with 13th century, but I suppose it's probably easier to switch this for a Crusade like Paladin does. Maybe the Albigensian Crusade? There are Historians who believe the whole thing was a sham and a power grab, so Arthur speaking up for freedom of religion - or at least against potential genocide - seems fitting for the current characterisation. Or perhaps diplomatic missions as Arthur tries to make friends around the world. That's closer to Charlemagne but whatever lol my players don't much care for old Charlie Afterwards - After the Conquest Period the game returns to Britain and there isn't much that needs to change there. What's up with Lancelot being king of France, though? I'm not sure I can solve that one. Perhaps he's actually a duke instead? Gotta think more on that. Evolution of equipment - It' pretty cool that you start the campaign and better and better equipment presents itself slowly, but idk, I wouldn't really mind staying roughly on the same anachronistic tech for the duration of the thing. I'd probably make it real anachronistic, like Dolmenwood, and put in pocket watches, maybe even coats and stuff like that. I worry about the tik tik boom of these later periods though, every long fight I've had where the guys keep hitting one another, landing, but not doing actual damage have been frustrating. Maybe incorporate Paladin's weapon / armour degradation? Or something like Worlds Without Number's Shock, where every hit does a little bit of damage even if the armour protects you? Gotta think more on that. That's about what I have for now. Anything else I should consider, some thoughts?