davecake

You mean... civil war? I mean drastically lowering its POWer is a short cut to losing a civil war. Or creating one. If you drastically weaken the wyter of a community, that is a good way to create a civil war. It is also a good way to weaken the unity of your community to the point you are guaranteed to lose. Eg - you use 80% of your wyters POW to strengthen your warriors and win a strategic battle. And most of the commoners decide that the price of war is not worth it, flee the clan as refugees, your council turns against you and will no longer support your leadership, and your warriors morale is low and many of them no longer wish to fight for the clan and begin looking around for mercenary gigs. Have you won? Is it worth it? Within a few weeks, your clan is smaller, without resources - and then your enemies attack with their powerful magic, and your wyter is too weak to defend you. Not saying it doesn't happen, just that it will generally be understood as the mad hubris of leaders who want to win at all costs, rather than the wise tactics of a war leader. But leaders destroying their communities in order to win IS a core part of any civil war story. So yes, the tactics you describe will get used in civil wars - because civil war stories are about hubris, foolishness, and the destruction of communities by people who should know better. Even then, they are the tactics that get used by the losers of civil wars. The people who win them are the ones who keep their communities together and strong.

Yes. Its POW and CHA should generally just come from that Size chart for the community, that bit is easy. But the nature and origin will make a lot of difference to how it manifests and interacts. For an Orlanthi clan, it might be an ancient ancestor, or a spirit of the place where the clan settled in, or a heroic clan founder. For a temple it is usually a minor godling (and its lineage will matter) , but could also be a ghost of a founder. Etc. The special abilities of the wyter are the ones you probably know the best, because they are the ones that are either used regularly and/or in well know myths. A wyter has its own runic associations, they make a big difference to its powers (and literally could be anything that a humans could be at least), and they make a real difference. The example of Many-Breath from The Coming Storm is a good one. An ancient chieftain, when the clan re-entered Dragon Pass and settled they found his old Barrow Mound and convinced him to protect the clan. He was an Orlanthi Chief and has Air and Movement and abilities related to rain and has the abilities • Cause Rainstorm • Drown Ogre • Find A Way Out • Get Help From The Stars • Open Asrelia’s Larder • Rain that Burns Chaos The Wyter of the Cinsina tribe, Blue Ghost, is an ancient Vingkotling warrior. The wyter of the Dolutha is too, with Air and Death runes - but his clan has turned away from Orlanth, so he is weak, and the clan lacks unity. The wyter of the Two-Pine Clan, Greatblade, has the Death and Mastery runes, and was a Humakti, so the clan always has good war magic, but limited fertility. Some of those abilities can be translated easily to Rune spells in RQG, some not so easily. There are also city wyters, these are known for most of the Sartarite cities - eg Hauberk Jon, the first mayor, for Jonstown. And there are smaller wyters, usually not much more powerful than an allied spirit at least at first, but possibly becoming a potent force, for warbands and bands of magicians - and this might be the sort of wyter that your players might command directly, having founded some sort of group through heroic action. There is an example of PCs creating on in the Coming Storm. In this case, you would want to have a very clear idea of its powers, perhaps have powers gradually added through heroquest etc.

No, wyters have plenty of other useful properties, as I tried to make very clear earlier in the thread. Especially when you look at specific wyters, that usually have unique useful abilities. First, looking at that Size chart you are so fond of, even the qyter of a Metropolis usually only has a POW around 40. And that is reducing it to less than that of a shrine or small village. A lot of magicians could pretty easily destroy such a spirit (causing the whole city to basically collapse, its citizens fleeing, its government dissolving) or capturing and magically enslaving the city. Second, its going to weaken that community drastically in the mean time. People begin ignoring the leaders, unity disappears, social institutions fail. Reducing the wyter that drastically has a massive cost, its not just POW. Doing so for short term advantage is criminally irresponsible. You would do so only when the entire city is threatened. So no, I think it is wildly unacceptable for a leader to do that in almost any circumstances.

Just the fact that there is more than one per clan shows that it isn't a wyter. Most of the things you are talking about are clan treasures usually have nothing to do with wyters. But yes, wyters help in multiple ways. Usually an individual wyter has a bunch of special abilities, that may manifest as wyter magic (such as being able to cast particular spells with magic points, or an innate ability, etc), spells it may teach as a sub-cult (like the snake guardian does), or even secret heroquest paths it knows or similar. Most of them do not involve the wyters POW sacrifice.

Sure, but that implies to me it is as much a religious schism destroying the Ernalda cult rather than a civil war over leadership. That may totally be what you want. And there certainly is that element - though it isn't clear to me which sub-cults are on which side. Sure, the question is how? My point is that IF you think the wyter is being used in such a way as to greatly reduce its POW for magical attacks etc, then the corollary is that the related communities are falling apart and maybe being destroyed in the process. Using a wyter as a magical weapon in a way that risks its existence or reduces its POW hugely is to risk the communities existence - quite consciously understood I would think. If you think the Esrolian civil war gets to that level, that eg Queens are willing to risk the destruction of their clan, on a gambit - then that is your story. I'm just arguing against the idea that using a wyters POW, especially on a big scale, using a significant %age of it, is a routine tactical strategy. It is always damaging and costly, and usually reserved for fairly dire straits by most rulers. Other ways of using a wyter (using it to scout, protect from spirit attacks, whatever native abilities it may have, its rune points, etc) are much more routine.

The RQG Gods of Glorantha will be full of glorious depth on these and many many other cults. The project just seems to have rather gotten out of hand. But when it arrives, it will be pretty great.

So does anyone have the stats for Fazzur, or any of the other stats from WF that weren’t reprinted? I found the reprinted ones surprisingly inspirational for fleshing out these major NPCs in play, even if actually fighting them is usually pretty foolish.

The Seven Mothers cult is what you really need, and other Lunar cults can more or less be extrapolated from there if all you need is Lunars as antagonists. There are two versions, the one in HeroQuest Glorantha and the one in the HQ Pavis book, Pavis:GtA, which I heartily recommend to anyone running a HeroQuest game anyway (after S:KoH and the Sartar Companion for a Sartar based game). The big differences in game are that Lunars do not normally get Feats, but are sometimes able to use their Lunar ability for a range of other abilities - magic normally associated with other Runes, or even different forms of magic (eg an Irripi Ontor might be able to use their Moon Rune for Truth or Illusion magic, and might have both sorcery and divine abilities). Much more detail in the 7M writeup.

I actually have real hope that a lot of these questions will be more clearly answered in books in actual production now. It does. Questions like exactly how wyters work in magical warfare are things most games won't need much. We've already got a LOT more detail than we ever had. We are in the very early stage of RQGs production cycle, there are much more important things (like those juicy full length Cults books, and some heroquesting rules), in a couple of years we will probably have a lovely rich collection of resources that answer a lot of these questions. We just aren't there yet.

I'm not sure that there are usually sub-cult wyters - I think most sub-cults are somewhat dispersed through the cult and don't form a specific community - sub-cult heroes or minor deities etc might certainly exist, just may not be wyters. And even if one did, would face the problem of the sub-cult being dispersed between factions. And we don't generally see sub-cults with individual Passions. Clan and family wyters are much more a classic wyter situation. And, yes, something that is really bad form can still happen. Leaders damaging their own clan by over committing to defeat of a rival, through ego or vengeance etc, is a classic literary trope. Leaders doing foolish things for bad reasons drives story. But even then, significantly weakening your wyter for temporary political advantage seems like such obvious poor judgement as to likely lead to the downfall of the leader in question. You would only reduce a wyter to a tiny faction of its previous power if you were saving the clan from literal destruction.

Please quote... RQG pg 286 when it lists the types of spirit that may be wyters "The origins of an individual wyter varies, and wyters include the spirits of dead heroes, genius loci, children of gods, artificial psychic constructs, souls of extinct spirits, intelligent elementals, and many other possibilities." - why would it say that, if not because unintelligent elementals would be inappropriate as wyters? I guess, but that doesn't mean it is one .No, still just isn't. Do not use a thing clearly labelled as something else and then expect it implications to make sense. I think the implication of the lack of a stat block is that there is no such thing as a 'generic' wyter - they can be from many many different origins, and have many different properties as a result. A wyter is not a species, it is an entity transformed through a magical relationship to a community (much like, eg, a rune lord isn't a species, but a mortal transformed by a magical relationship to a deity). We can certainly agree that this section is badly edited, and confusing - my question and the answer from Jason clearly indicated that, and I think clearly also showed that the implications from the examples may make more sense than the text. Sure we can continue to have a few difficult questions until these things get properly clarified, probably in a future book.

Actually, while this absolutely happens, I think it is done through the Ty Kora Tek cult, not Ancestor Worship. They give advice (as well as compkain etc), and more, but I don't think they do the same range of things that Ancestor Worship provides, I don't think they have access to Spirit Guardian or similar.

There is no generic stat block in either. In both cases, there is a clearly labelled Size chart. You are confusing a Size chart with a Stat block. The absence of INT doesn't mean they have no INT, it just means it doesn't vary with community Size. Or there is no stat block, and you've confused yourself. If you read the text, it is implied that even types of being that normally lack INT, such as elementals, generally have iNT as a wyter. It is certainly true that wyters vary widely, and an 'artificial psychic construct' is likely to have a very different kind of mind, but sapience certainly seems the standard, both from the description and the examples. What wyters are they? Esrolian Houses are going to have wyters relative to the size of their houses, and queens of their houses are going to be able to command their wyters, and it is part of magical contests between houses - totally fine. Being able to command the backing of the wyter of your house is one of the privileges of being the leader of your house - and while using a lot of POW of your wyter in such a contest is probably a bad idea (reducing the integrity of your community in pursuit of a short term goal doesn't sound very sensible), the authority to make risky, possibly bad, decisions probably comes with being Queen (at least, until the Grandmothers decide to remove you). They probably don't fight each other violently (they are Ernaldans of course) but they have plenty of other options for magical contest. If either one is trying to use a bigger wyter (such as the wyter of Nochet itself) against the other, then you have to consider by what authority they are able to command it, and what consequences there are for potential misuse of that authority.

It varies. Some killed in wars or riots. Some died in huge disasters like the destruction of Slontos. Some killed magically, by terrible monsters or mysterious blights. Some killed by magical assassins. Some hid, and may or may not have survived, but do not appear to have passed on their beliefs. Some key God Learner magic stopped working, so their descendants no longer practiced magic that didn't seem useful any more. Some of their knowledge and magic is preserved and known, if awkwardly not much discussed. Some was expunged from the world by magical assassins who killed everyone who knew it. Most of the normal people, the commoners etc, either died in disasters or lived on under changed leadership. There were a few survivors. Some hid, and some may be hiding still. Some denied their previous path and may have survived, or were protected by powerful entities. But mostly, the more powerful and knowledgable about God Learner magics you were, the more likely you were destroyed by some terrible doom. And if you were a powerful God Learner and survived, someone would probably want to destroy you just on principle. A lot of people still remember why they destroyed the God Learners, and would be keen to finish the job, including a lot of Mostali and Aldryami. And Orlanthi. And Loskalmi. And and and... Of course, the ones captured by Ralzakark probably just wish they were dead.

Start by regularly worshipping there, using Sanctify or as a Spirit Cult. Ideally it is a site with some known link to the deity, or the appropriate buildings or other permanent elements are constructed. The difference between a Site and Shrine is really having a large enough congregation regularly worshipping, and being actively maintained. Once you have a congregation and the site is maintained, it should function as a Shrine and allows replenishing rune points and POW gain rolls etc. I don't think every Shrine has a wyter, some are part of other communities rather than separate communities themselves etc. But if you need to, once the congregation is large enough, perform a ceremony that creates (or attracts, or installs, or affirms) a new wyter, and you have a relatively permanent shrine, that is likely to survive losing a maintaining God-Talker.

I don't know where you go that at all - all three example wyters in the bestiary have an INT stat. And I think many provide moral or tactical guidance as part of their role. The phrasing used in the RQ Bestiary is 'direct', not command. They can tell the wyter what they would like it to do, but I don't think the wyter is compelled to do it. I don't think the priest could command the wyter to act against its own cult, for example.

Thank you to Phil for digging up the clarification from Jason. This wyter POW vs RP thing bothered me so I asked Jason for clarification a while ago. Still a bit confused - sometimes a wyter spends POW, some times RP, sometimes a mere magic point, to cast a Rune Spell. and we haven’t even got onto sorcery! My suspicion is the wyters of largely sorcerous magical units like the Free Philosophers and Sir Naribs Company substitute for the old Multispell manipulation, allowing an extra target per magic point or so, but that’s still very speculative.

In the general spirit of trying to interpret a lot of info from the dense but lacking in detail info in the Bestiary, I want to look at the example wyters in the Bestiary. i don’t think the mechanic of ‘spending POW to get big magic’ is the mechanic you be looking at to work out how wyters normally work in warfare, or anything but extremis. The wyter is deeply weakened, and that weakens the community, and it is hard to recover and seldom timely. It is the equivalent of eg permanent reduction in clan Magic rating in Hero Quest, or at least significant temporary. You try to avoid it, and when it happens it’s better than having the clan killed etc but it’s still a heavy price to pay. You do it only to prevent worse things. You don’t do it as part of your normal strategy, you do it when your normal strategy has gone wrong. DI even less. DI risks the destruction of the wyter, which is in effect the destruction of the clan as an entity, every time (if it’s initiate DI). You do it only when the destruction of the community is already a possibility. But various other things to note. 1) wyters can engage in spirit combat etc, and this helps protect against, among other things, attacking wyters. Consider it part of your units MgF in Dragon Pass - even if it makes no difference offensively, still useful. They can also be used to provide magical attacks on enemy leaders - the priest can cast his spells using the wyters POW. And many case manifest physically in an imposing manner. All very useful as clan defences or on a HeroQuest. 2) wyters can have their own Rune Points - and generally will have a fair few points, and thus is able to cast them with a large POW, and this is effectively at least adding an extra Rune level to the community, potentially much more. 2) wyters can provide the whole clan with some special magic (as Snake Daughters provide Creative Fissure). Usually a single spell, but it can be pretty nice. (Note that a powerful Create Fissure is very effective battlefield magic!) Regimental wyters often have spells such as Morale, which is very effective. Even if wyters do nothing directly, they can make a big difference. 4) I think dedicated ‘offensive’ wyters linked to a magical unit generally alsohave a special power that is offensive but does not cost POW, similar to the way She That Strikes From Afar can mass cast Madness for magic points. Probably the wyter of the Eaglebrown warlocks might similarly cast Lightning or Thunderbolt. STSFA can act as a Large Lune as well, and so on. 5). The wyters that appear as Dragon Pass unit spirits are more than just wyters, and involve the mysterious techniques of many Illuminated magicians working together. Such wyters will have multiple powerful magicians (and whatever spirits they may be able to supply) defending it, and feeding it magic points. In such a circumstance, the power of the wyter are very extensively leveraged. When a Minor Class unit magically attacks using her as their wyter, She That Strikes From Afar will be powerfully defended against magic attack, and able to cast, over the duration of an attack, Madness on literally hundreds of people - while multiple other spirits and magicians, follow through to cause huge damage to the unit while mos5 are incapacitated by Madness. And what’s more, they can do so without expending POW, only Rune Points and magic points, which means they can probably do it multiple times a season without weakening STSFA.

I don’t really like the idea of anyone being commanded to DI on command. Opens a big can of worms. And wyters already have big, much more well defined, list of powers.

For RQG, presumably in Jeff’s GoG preview and we’ll see it when it’s ready. For RQ 1/2, in the Cults of Terror Vivamort writeup. It makes being fed on by a Vampire immensely pleasurable for both, and is overwhelming and addictive.

Some Wyters have Rune Points, which function normally, which suggests they are at least initiates. But a wyter using DI sounds like one of those 'the DM rolling dice against themselves' situations where you'd be better off improvising using known story ideas, like known Wyter abilities.

As Jeff says, yes, by ritual means, effectively gathering the POW from victims. Vampires most certainly can improve their skills at sorcery, and so become phenomenally powerful if they live long enough. I think virtually all vampires are obsessed with living long enough. Wherever some cool sorcery effect requires POW, I assume vampires do so by draining POW from victims, generally somewhat willingly given via Ecstatic Communion. Not sure he does lack the vampire traits. I think he has plenty of other sources of magic points besides draining humans, as you'd expect from a well resources archmagus, but maybe he doesn't care about blood because when he runs out he just switches bodies - draining blood isn't a requirement of continued existence the way it is for others. But I wouldn't be surprised if he shapechanges, etc. He certainly requires bodies. not sure if it is stolen from ZZ or not. Many of those walking corpses might even be considered ghouls these days? We do know that Delecti definitely uses some magic learnt from the EWF, maybe some God Learner techniques as well. That might somehow explain where the Dancers some from, and how they differ from the Vivamort standard. Does Delecti use other standard Vivamort tricks, like sword breakers, basilisks, Vampire Kings of Tanisor: Practically all wicked sorcery not explicitly Lunar or Eastern is allegedly Vadeli somehow, so yes, but whether this is in more than a sort of obvious way is a good question. The Vadeli includes lot of quite specific things that seem a good fit though, so definitely - Viymorn first visited the land of the dead and returned, the Vadeli specialised in magic that separated Matter and Energy, which sounds a lot like vampiric zombie creation, and so on. Then there is the Telendarian School of magic that ultimately descends from the Viymorni, and is a foundation Vadeli sorcery - and its list of known spells does sound a bit suspiciously vampire/Vivmortish - including Tap Spirit, Travel Quickly, Evade Pursuit, Disguise Form, and Travel over water. They all sound a lot like known vampire abilities, or things that would be incredibly useful to vampires (who otherwise find water a barrier). Telendarian school is definitely associated with Chaos in the Gbaji wars era (which is why Talor banned it). Yeah, sort of, but it is a pretty weak link. Both are associated with Humakt, too, but also lots of other things besides. I'd like to see something more specific than just 'Death', such as either a myth of Vivamort, or somehow the Vampire Kings having stolen the power to change shape from The Telmori and some unknown Raven associated group, or it being specifically power stolen from Humakt.

And that is clearly a text box, not a monograph, designed to tick a box not actually deliver what was promised in the Guide kickstarter. Its not the only example. Without rancor or wanting to cause trouble, I'd still like to see something more in the spirit of what was intended eventually turn up - even if no longer by Mr Rein*Hagen.

You can roleplay practically anything. And in Glorantha the concept of Evil, with a big E, isn't that useful a one in general (and is culturally subjective, just as it is in our world) - even though Wakboth is literally moral evil incarnate, there are still a few who Gloranthans who reject the concept (eg the Vadeli, I expect). But cruel, tyrannical, sociopathic, brutal, disgusting, destructive, nihilist, abusive, morally corrupt, etc are all relevant terms that modern players might use to describe various Gloranthan beings, and you might rightly find them not fun to play. FWIW, I do think most Chaotic beings have parts of them that are intrinsically awful and destructive, but just being awful doesn't preclude playability. The World of Darkness games, for example, variously required playing characters like pure nihilist destructive Spectres, necessarily predatory vampire, beings who might easily slaughter every human near them in Rage or Frenzy, beings in revel in serious body-horror territory. Some players enjoyed that. Some players found it not to their taste as all. But you could certainly run a game that got into that sort of territory in Glorantha if you wanted. Though RQ rules might not be your ideal rules set. And trolls are the obvious sort of go to example here. They eat trollkin, who are sentient, and their own relatives. They deal with beings that look pretty much like scary demons all the time. Zorak Zoran worshippers in particular are horrifically violent and ruthless. They are also fun to play, and have their own moral code that makes lots of sense. Sociological storytelling gets at something else, though. I don't think it is to do with Actor vs Director stance that much either. I think it is more about having social institutions, which inevitably centre around cultural factors, driving your narrative, rather than conflicts between individuals. FWIW, I think a large amount of sociological storytelling is more or less the Gloranthan default. Take the way Sartar: KoH starts with your clan creation, and Eleven Lights plot is driven by the clan and tribal politics. A good way of telling whether something is using sociological storytelling vs a more traditional personality based narrative is whether you could take individual characters out and retain most of the narrative, vs stories that you can radically change the setting of and mostly retain. You can do either in Glorantha, but we tend much more towards sociological stories than most other RPGs do - even when games have a lot of interpersonal conflict, it is often driven by social institutions (eg cults). I've had the idea of a Black Company mercenary warband inspired game for years, though I always wanted to put it in the Seshnela/Ralios area, and make much of the action about first the Seshnelan invasion, then the various Arkats. But if you wanted to stick closer to the plot of the early Black Company books then making them part of the KoW would work.

Yes. Jar-Eel wasn’t a superhero at birth, just boosted far enough along the path that she was a minor hero before she was a teenager. My point is more that sometimes, things that look like muchkinnery are things that real Gloranthan might actually do - because sometimes real Gloranthans are obsessed with exploiting magic for power too.