Ian Absentia

In Skyrim, there's a trapdoor at the edge of a fireplace in Fort Dunstad with no key and no room beneath it. I'm just saying, these things happen. Treasure the mystery. !i!

Well, it's about time (and hopefully they'll handle it a lot better than Netflix and Hulu have handled the AD&D episode of Community). Maybe they'll finally catch up to where we were in 1980 when our adventuring party found a baby orc and we fell to arguing over whether or not a band of murder-hobos could raise it to be of a Good alignment. I'd be interested in reading the article you mention, particularly with an eye toward how it would dovetail with what emerged in 13th Age, which was strongly influenced by RuneQuest. !i!

Hrmm...any chance this was a 13th Age: Glorantha essay, and not a RQG article as such? The notion of running a D&D setting with a Glorantha-intersecting rules set, and punting the Enneagrammatic alignment system for cults sounds right up 13G's alley. !i!

There's always another sunrise, yeah? Unless Orlanth comes along and dicks it all up. !i!

Too true. White Dwarf had a much more vigorous crossover curatorship of both AD&D and RQ, particularly when Games Workshop was the UK publisher for Chaosium games and prior to diving deep into Warhammer and 40K. However, as Chaot pointed out, neither magazine was the source of the article in question. !i!

I'm getting a strong whiff of White Dwarf magazine circa the late '80s. My existing collection is pretty sparse, though. Anyone with a searchable PDF collection? !i!

I've noted hint of this heresy further up-thread. That way lies Aldyra. Next thing you know you lot will be offering up sacrifice in a wicker-man. !i!

And to produce the Kwisatz Haderach! !i!

Nice! Speaking of just-regular-folk, has there been any substantive discussion of who does the tattoos in Orlanthi society? And for whom? Kalf here is a stickpicker, but how does his ink stack up against others in Clearwine? I know plenty of people of very little means who still manage to sport some impressive body art. And, er, vice versa. I see Kalf's Air rune took a nick. Is he going to have that touched up, or does he spin a story about taking a scar in battle? !i!

Skitterbuggers. Almost a throw-away article in The Dragon magazine from the early '80s. How do I even remember it? Because James Halloway did the art for it. And it's clear as day in my mind. His art was a touchstone for a lot of great games in the early years of RPGs, and beyond. !i!

By God, man, run with it! !i!

Okay, this idea doesn't really help toward the goal of building a stead as a "women's adventure," but walk with me for a moment. Sen/Chihiro of Spirited Away naively falls into her role of mediator to a dysfunctional household of spirits, but her role as an outsider is vital to the mission's success. Meanwhile, Raus is hiring swordslingers in the typical fashion of old-styled Western movies. And elsewhere in Glorantha, we hear the lament of "What is my shaman character supposed to do?" Far-flung communities throughout Dragon Pass and Prax are reeling in the wake and turmoil of the Dragonrise and the Windstop. Things are just beginning to get back to "normal," but the spirit world is in disarray. What if your character band was a group of spiritual troubleshooters? Healers and ghost-talkers who get recruited to travel from stead to stead, re-negotiating pacts with the local land spirits, bringing home the spirits of the dead lost in battles leagues away, re-teaching the old ways and forging new traditions among broken communities. The adventures would feature challenge, mystery, danger, but not necessarily violent hostility. Sort of a middle ground between This Woman's Work and The Magnificent Seven, like Ghost Whisperer meets Ghostbusters, or even Call of Cthulhu with a gentle smile. Okay, that last one is a weird image. But where are these adventures? !i!

Even at face value, who better to play the Canon Police than the Mostali? All hail the Canon Cult of Dwarf Run. !i!

My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away leap to my mind -- stories about "fixing the house," though in distinctly different ways. Totoro is straight-up home repair and establishing a relationship with the resident spirit population. Spirited Away is repairing the social structure of the spirit population of an established stead. I'm also thinking of the old RQ2 classic, Borderlands. Duke Raus is trying to build a homestead in the Zola Fel grantlands, so he hires a group of mercenary troubleshooters. The scenarios are typical external threats. But what if the action were turned inward, as you say, and the adventure involved incorporating the indigenous superstructure and environment instead of expelling it? Thinking out loud more than spitballing solutions. !i!

Blasphemy. It wouldn't have been mentioned in the canon without clear intent of a deeper meaning. You relativists sicken me. !i!

From geological perspective, this the one I was going to point to. Though, as you mention, names like "greenstone" are awfully colloquial and can vary depending on what side of the ridge you live on. "Soapstone" was word that leapt to mind when I first read the thread title. Of course, Glorantha differing from Earth as it does, who knows if "greenstone" means the same thing in both places? (c.f., runic metals) !i!

My first RQ character was a centaur, yeah, and coming from AD&D it took a while to grok the nature of cults in play. My second character, c.1981, was an interesting take on one of those "atheistic" western sorcerers mentioned in Wyrm's Footnotes, so I still wasn't grokking cults, though our GM was a big fan of Orlanth Adventurous. By the time we headed up into Balazar in 1982, I finally got it, but it was all about Brother Dog and Yelmalio. After that, it was life in the Roman-occupied Levant...er, on the Zola Fel. Not to descend too deeply into My First Character, I suspect that our collected anecdotal accounts would generally converge on the trend that one's formative years have an enduring influence on our perceptions of Glorantha and its gods, evident in the cognitive divide seen in early editions. !i!

I reckon this statement gets to the heart of the matter -- players will play what you present them. Virtually all of my games -- as player or GM -- have taken place beyond the periphery of Sartar, so the presence of Orlanth has been...peripheral. Focusing the current iteration of Gloranthan gaming on Sartar places clear emphasis on Orlanth and Ernalda, to little surprise. And, of course, all evidence provided to date has been anecdotal. !i!

I dunno, man. I have a remarkably unpleasant story about a showdown with a rooster that didn't go down as planned. Brittle bones, maybe, but muscles and tendons as tough and flexible as all get out. Not a flying bird, but I'll give chickens high marks for resiliency. "Hit Points" cover a wide swathe of territory between life and death. !i!

Shucks, maybe I need to get out more. !i!

In my experience over several decades in various incarnations of Glorantha, Orlanth, despite his prominence, has almost never been a player character choice. While GMs may have been more enthusiastic about the cult, Orlanth is generally seen as a ruling class option for homebodies, and players have invariably leaned into more adventurous cults -- in older editions, typically Storm Bull, Yelmalio, the Seven Mothers, and even Issaries. Third Ed. Gods of Glorantha and Hero Wars / HeroQuest opened up even wilder options for player character cults, and still no takers for Orlanth. My experience with RQG is more limited, and its evident that the emphasis on Sartar is pushing Orlanth and Ernalda as pre-eminent cults, but even then I've seen players shy away from Orlanth. I played a character who was an up-and-coming thane, so he got saddled with the Big-O out of necessity, and I still played up a spiritual conflict with Yelm, making his Fire rune equally as powerful as his Air rune. !i!

So what's the elevation at base? !i!

[Oops. Mis-read another post. Move along.]

Clearly not one of the lines attributed to Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon. !i!