Yazurkial

Elves could be mad that the humans cut down their forest and plowed the land. If they are new players, it could be that it’s just a few elves plus some runners, without much support from the dryad. Or it could just be one ploy that the dryad will use over a decade and they are now in her bad books.

Ian, I understand and agree with what you wrote. But as a response, it makes me think I wasn't clear, and left a misimpression. My main point is that doing the job that Chaosium is doing successfully right now is impossible to do without making editorial decisions -- they literally must make them in order to produce a product. And they must make them in such volume that they will inevitably gore someone's ox. That's ... a tough job. But to your point, if my ox is sufficiently gored, my Glorantha can always vary.

Another alternative for people who want some potato story in their Glorantha: I take Genert's "Garden" to be somewhat literal. We know of no grain goddess of the Garden. We know rabbits and fruit cam readily to hand. Much of it was forested in recent maps, but earlier maps don't show that. So if you want potatoes to be possible but not currently known, they were in Genert's Garden. Maybe they were blasted out of existence. Maybe you can find them in one of the rare barely livable parts of the Wastes. Or maybe if you quest there, your HeroQuest reward comes with fries.

I've always thought it odd that Herotlings and Praxians use cremation for all of their male deaths. Cremation takes a lot of wood, which is pretty expensive in terms of work. Even worse for Praxians! So the Cremate Dead rune spell in RQG seems like a culturally important thing. I get how Waha would get that spell from Oakfed, because there's the Waha Tames Oakfed story. I'm not aware of an equivalent for Heortlings. Have I missed it? Or do they get it from someone else? It would make sense as some kind of sacred lowfire. Along those lines, I see a comment in 2016 from Jeorg: "According to Thunder Rebels, this practice is overseen by Torabran, a Lowfire husband of Keva, an Ernaldan handmaiden or the first person to be cremated (or both), indicating Fire Tribe origin for the practice, and possibly shared by some of the Solars." So perhaps he provides Cremate Dead to the Heortlings. Also, in terms of burial inside the temple the ashes of a dude are pretty small. The problem would be women. Perhaps, at least in Nochet, the family vaults are something like those found in New Orleans. In New Orleans, the vault is typically divided by a shelf. The body is left (usually in a coffin) on top of the shelf. The heat generated inside the vault helps the body break down over the course of a year. After a year and a day, relatives would open the vault and move the remains below the shelf, which is just open dirt -- and the remains of loads of other ancestors. In the case of a woman who wants to be buried permanently in an Esrolian temple, I'd expect that they would put the remains in a small urn and bury the in the temple. That would be much smaller than the urns used in rural urnfields, where the woman is buried bodily inside the urn.

I just wanted to add two things: First, throughout history, we see some levels of control maintained by having the heaviest element of your military most tied to you. For Romans, it was legions. For the Ptolemies, it was the "Macedonians" (who were not necessarily Macedonian). In medieval times, it was knights. And so on. In Esrolia, it strikes me that it would be the Axe Maidens. Second, and completely separately, we think a lot about battles being about clashing armies, but we have to also think about the clash of heroes that would typically precede a clash of armies. If you have an army on one side and Harrek with a regiment of caterers on the other, Harrek probably wins. If you have Harrek and Jar-eel on opposite sides, the superheroes are busy trying to eke out some small advantage against the other, and the battle can be decided by the armies. So the big buff given by Bless Champion and the like can completely decide the battle by tipping the clash of heroes decisively. Where the Esrolian Queen decides who the blessed champion is, none of the male militias will be able to dominate any of the others over time. That might not be entirely true where one potential champion is a hero in his own right, like Belintar. But it would not surprise me for Esrolian Queens to rotate the honor among the militias in order to maintain a greater balance of prestige between them than would appear to be true from the population percentages. Nor would it surprise me to find that Esrolian queens have a bunch of treasures that they "customarily" hand out preferentially to whoever has fewer dudes, to buff them a bit in prestige. I imagine that they have a lot of other ways of preventing dominance by any fo the male militias, and that these and the cultural aspects mutually reinforce each other.

There's definitely a scale between a full character sheet and Viking 45%. The very fine book, The Company of the Dragon, available on Drive Thru RPG (and no, I'm not the author), has a way of boiling a lot of numbers down into one statistic, which -- I think? -- has the interesting side effect of putting more emphasis on the narratively relevant parts of the description.

Huh. I had forgotten that page exists! And fair enough. I do appreciate Chaosium's focus on getting playable Glorantha stuff actually to market. This iteration of Chaosium has excelled at that. No one who has been playing in Glorantha for 40 years is going to agree with all the editorial decisions that have to be made. I recently wrote up a cult for a character that I'm playing. It's not a popular cult -- I've never heard of anyone else playing it. But there was some decent information on the web and in Greg's old works. And even with as little as that, it was unavoidable that I had to ignore some of it! So credit where it's due.

It kind of depends on what you consider canon. All of the Hero Wars line of books took the view that multiple worlds mashed together and are somewhat mixed and somewhat separate. That doesn't matter much at all for lower-level players. But if that's really how the universe is, then it will matter if you play a hero (or a superhero, or immortal, or transcendent master, or an aspirant to apotheosis, or maybe dragonnewt). To my mind, Arkat was a PC.

Ian: Are you trying to reimpose the three (and a half?) worlds view as well? It's not so relevant for beginning players, obviously. But the HQ mechanic lends itself to the higher-level-player complexity that Greg talked about in Arcane Lore. Even at low levels, the treatment of great spirits as gods in RQG rubs me wrong. But it works OK as a mechanic at low levels. I haven't tried it at high levels for an animist yet.

Yazurkial says, "Grain goddess? What are you talking about? The Greatlands have no grain goddess. We have Eiritha's blessing, the fine grasses that grow in our best grazing." Roneer says, "Back in the day before night and the night before days, before the weeping times, the Greatlands were the Greenlands. But the Greenlands were the Giant's own garden. None of his long-haired daughters settled there. This is why there was never grain in the Greatlands." Yazurkial says, "Roneer, you just made that up. Your face should be as red as your cousin." Roneer says, "Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on how you look at it. And you always look left. But these are Outlanders. <spits> They won't understand anyway." Yazurkial says, "True."

The entry in the Prosopaedia about Dendara mentions the "Eight Original Planets," of whom Shargash and Buserian still live. Who were the others? Is there a direct relationship to the ten cities of Dara Happa, other than the two central cities?

Perhaps this is linked to another question: Does anyone in Glorantha use a heavy plow, wheels out front, coulter to cut the ground, plowshare, and mouldboard? If not, then the little bit I was talking about would never be needed. The ard plow (aka the scratch plow) can be handled by a couple oxen, rather than an 8-ox team.

My title was a little misleading. When I was in undergrad (early 90's), we learned that the horse collar was a significant invention that allowed the use of horses for plowing. Horses are like 4 times better than oxen for plowing. So, where typical heavy plow (blade + plowshare) would require an 8-ox team, a 2-horse team would suffice ... and still be faster. But that was somewhat debunked since then. It isn't the horse collar itself that was the problem. Romans had horse collars, and used them for wagons and carts. The problem was that the attachment to the plow was much lower than the attachment to a wheeled cart. That was the little bit that needed to be invented. So that raises the general question: Are there horses pulling wagons in Glorantha? If so, where? Are there horses pulling plows in Glorantha? If so, where?

Yazurkial Blue Llama says: Our enemies are Chaos and Pentans <spit>. Scratch on bark how to kill them. Everyone else are just ground men. Scratch me where they are and how to raid them. That is all.

I'm not sure. My hero, Scrooge McDuck, used it for entire situations without having to figure out hard questions like that. (But I don't think there's anything defective in your description.) The current rule set actually represents the chrome better than prior versions of RuneQuest. Recall that in prior versions, a shaman would summon spirits to each you spells. The implication was that your own will powered these. Why only spirits could each you spells, instead of some old dude, was a mystery. If you have to defeat the spirit in spirit combat, surely you don't just get knowledge of the spirit -- you get the spirit itself! Anyway, it was ambiguous. The current version solves this nicely: "Spirit magic is the most basic and common magic found in Glorantha. It concerns communication with the spirits that reside in the natural energy currents of the world and is practiced in one form or another by nearly every Gloranthan culture and religion. ... To cast a spirit magic spell, the caster concentrates upon the spirits they have a focus with and temporarily alters the spiritual energy currents to create an effect." So a spirit magic spell is about communicating with embodied spirits in the natural world. Presumably then, you could have a spirit magic spell that allows flight. You'd be altering the flows of spiritual energy in the winds and birds and such. But, compared to an Orlanthi casting flight, it is going to be way less efficient. An Orlanthi is already attuned to being part of the wind wind. It might take like 1MP per point of SIZ. That would be consistent with the old RQ3 rules for sorcery, which required 1MP per point of SIZ. (Sandy's sorcery rules, which might have informed the current rules, said 1MP per 3 SIZ. That makes a closer 2x comparison to the current theistic flight spell, which covers 6 points of SIZ with 1 rune point.) It doesn't seem like there is anything about Glorantha saying that the list of spirit magic spells is fixed. The list represents those that someone has invented and passed on. There could be new ones. There could be ones that only some isolated population knows. And now I have to run a duck character whose mission in life is to find the spirit magic spell permitting him and his SIZ 6 buddies to fly for just 6MP. Yeah, you're right. That was a false trail. That's if you summon a pigeon spirit. (A big one, presumably.) If you are using the flying spirit embodied in the birds around you, you don't need to summon it and bargain with it.

Trust Simon to suggest something right and playable, too. (If you have not read his book on heroquesting, go get it from DriveThurRPG! Stop readng this. Go buy it now!) It kind of helps explain why the Praxians refer to Orlanth as both Rain Man and Little Brother: it's two different spirit cults, one for Orlanth Thunderous and one for Orlanth Adventurous. The key point to me isn't whether stuff is animist, theistic, or sorcerous, but whether the method of accessing power is. When we talk about an animist society, we know how they interact with power -- dancing, drumming, sweat lodges, summoning, medicine bundles, totems, possession, and so on. Theism has its tropes -- sacrifice, prayer, and so on. As does sorcery -- books, diagrams, incantations, material components, etc. We know of first age heroes whose heroic act was discovering how to worship. For example, Borabo nightmare was Waha's first shaman; he discovered how to contact the great spirits. I think Hantrafel, the first Orlanthi god-talker, was the one who discovered how to contact the Orlanthi gods. I dunno about sorcery; I guess it was Zzabur (for Birthini) or Hrestol (for pretty much the rest of the west). Perhaps mysticism's equivalent hasn't come along yet; or they immediately transcended and didn't pass it on. What I was looking for is the way for the game engine to match the Gloranthan chrome. I don't want the animist method to be systematically inferior to the theistic and sorcerous methods. A different path to roughly the same point is fine. This doesn't really work as strictly as you are saying it (though maybe that's just words). Orlanth is not the Thunderbolt he grants: lightning is a fire thing that he took from the fire tribe. It's not part of his nature. But I'd agree with something right next door to that. A worshiper can find a rune spell that corresponds to anything that the god did in god time. (Perhaps that's what you meant by "nature.") Humbug. You'd summon a flying spirit and have it carry you. Just like you have a sharp spirit inhabit the edge of your sword. But the best flying spirits are air spirits, which is why you see flying Kolatings. Bird spirits are a good second, but there aren't many bird cults (other than ones that don't fly, like Ostrich). I only see this as description, not explanation. It puts the rabbit in the hat. For example, you say Waha is a god. Why? I assume it's because the current RQ rules say so. But the Heroquest rules said otherwise. And that gets back to my original question. Maybe I'm misreading you there. This seems more meaningful. The implication to me is that the infinity rune is a form rune, not a condition rune; or that spirit is a condition rune, not a form rune. So the spirit rune means spirit, the infinity rune means god (huh, or superhero in White Bear Red Moon -- suggestive). Mastery rune is pretty much the hero rune. Law is pretty much the sorcerous rune, describing the magical essence of creation. Switching the spirit rune to be a condition rune probably be true in IMG, but I was hoping for something that conflicts less with the RuneQuest rule book. And I can't endorse spirits being a "mere" form while heroes, sorcerers, and gods get condition runes. Also, as an aside, there used to be a lot of speculation that, in the collision of the four worlds, the mystic world kinda lost (or transcended) and became the unexceptional stuff the material world. But as the text for the magic rune says, this rune is almost redundant in this magic-rich world. So ... maybe, whatever. Also, boo to demoting the luck and fate runes from the powers to conditions and the trade (Issaries) and theft runes from powers to nothing. My Glorantha varies! But I get why leaving them out of the powers makes for a better game product.

One of the interesting things in HeroQuest rules was its treatment of animism. It extended the concepts of worshiping spirits all the way up in power. So your magic from belonging to the cult of a great spirit was powered by spirits. And it was just as powerful as any other big deal out there. RQG goes back to the approach of old RuneQuest (with lots of great improvements), which I enjoy enormously. But. Your magic there is either spirit magic or rune magic. Perhaps the label of "spirit" magic doesn't matter. We could just call it battle magic or whatever. But you do learn spirit magic from spirits, and you learn rune magic from the gods. Huh. As a born-again animist, that kinda rubs me the wrong way. It means that gods are big and spirits are small. It kind of breaks the notion of the four worlds. Maybe one way to deal with it is to abstract a little. "Gods" like the Praxian ones aren't gods. They are great spirits. The difference between spirit magic and rune magic isn't spirits vs. gods -- its little vs. big. Great spirits grant rune magic, not because they are divine, but because that's the powerful stuff. We've got a game mechanism to describe powerful magic and weaker magic, but both work for divine stuff and spirit stuff. In game play, you just put the right chrome on the machine. But ... sorcery. It works a different way. And it runs all the way from little to big, depending on what you pump into it. That makes it all asymmetric. Perhaps that's not a flaw and it's just my OCD. But if you are worshiping a saint through sorcery, surely you ought to be worshiping a great spirit through an approach that works for spirits and not for gods. And we don't use sorcery generically across cultures. (Though now I want to play a native Praxian wizard, whatever that would be.) Perhaps mysticism isn't really a magic system, so we don't have to address it. But if it's a thing, then it would present the same issue as sorcery. Someone thought about this, at least a little, in putting RQG together. What were the thoughts then? What have others thought?