Nick Brooke

2 hours ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

why / how is there a lunar magic ?

Because the Red Goddess has mastered strange powers - a weird combination of mysticism, sorcery and spirit magic - and can teach them to her inner circle. Nobody else on Glorantha can do this. The Lunar Way has brought many new things into being.

See the article Mistress of the Three Worlds in my free Manifesto to understand the uniqueness of the Red Goddess. We aren't making this up, she really is special and different. And the unique and powerful magic available only through her cult reflects this.

There’s a half-page of information about the Vantaros tribe in the Sartar Book preview section of A Rough Guide to Boldhome.

Updated again:

• Holiday Dorastor: Bugswarm Swamp, by Simon Phipp & Leon Kirshtein. This unexpected Holiday Dorastor release details the horrible insect-infested swamp of the Foulvale, not far enough upriver from Densdam and the Risklands settlements. The swamp’s inhabitants include Voralan black elves, insectile Broo, the Bugland Clan of trolls and innumerable insects, some of them intelligent. After the usual bestiary, short-form cults and plunder entries, six short scenarios give adventurers a range of bad reasons to venture into one of the worst places in Dorastor: The Last Meal, Bug Hunt, Caravan Stop, A Swarm of Flies, What Lays Below and Bug Wars. (64 pages for $8.00)

10 hours ago, John Biles said:

Citizens of the Lunar Empire [title corrected] is an incredible book if you can get your PCs to actually stay still in one place.

It's a great source for understanding how Imperial cities function, too.  It is set in Glamour, but almost all the social/economic stuff applies to any city.

We specifically called this out in a one-page advertorial in Furthest: Crown Jewel of Lunar Tarsh, and it's mentioned in the introduction to Citizens as well. The Insula (the setting for Citizens) was designed to be the "home base" for a party of adventurers who need a place to live in any Lunar city. It works like any clan village, presenting a microcosm of the larger society through named, characterful NPCs, and showing how everything works: education, clothing and supplies, food and drink, entertainment, retirement, religion: it's all covered in Citizens.

While we’re talking about female armies armed with hat pins…

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/hatpin-peril-terrorized-men-who-couldnt-handle-20th-century-woman-180951219/

6 hours ago, Eff said:

I am starting to convert notes and memories and cogitation into something that might be useful for other people to pick up for play…

Consider me suitably aroused.

6 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

Typical insula shrine .... so in Nick's Glorantha she IS worshipped!

Lots of room for development here.

Have I ever suggested that my Glorantha doesn’t vary? That would be ridiculous!

(Also, the book is by my friend Chris. I think it’s one of the best-written supplements RuneQuest has ever had, but, you know, that’s just, like, my opinion, man. Link.)

In my demonology-inspired model, God Learners learned summoning circles, secret names and words of power that could compel pagan gods to work for them (e.g. by providing Rune spells), however unwillingly.

"If I do X, I can make this demon do Y."

4 hours ago, Tatterdemalion Fox said:

A lot of my perspective on Deneskerva comes from her portrayal in Life of Moonson and Crimson King...

I had a third paragraph in mind, then I had to walk away, and now I have lost it. Mm. Hopefully it comes back sooner rather than later.

Jolly good! Her character sheet in Life of Moonson was written by Chris Gidlow, then adapted by me for Crimson King to add blatant BeeGees and foreshadowing.

That lost third paragraph might have mentioned that one of her worshippers (a mashup of Cosette from Les Miserables & Miss Sarah Brown from Guys & Dolls) and a typical insula shrine to Great Sister feature in Citizens of the Lunar Empire by Chris Gidlow.

As Harald said, pretty much any human warrior from Sartar or Dragon Pass (other than the Grazelands, duh!) and every warrior from the Sable Tribe of Prax and the Hungry Plateau, could ride a Sable Antelope, it just so happens that the specific picture you were asking about depicts a Culbrea Headhunter. I doubt there’s much that’s unique about their mounts or gear: the severed heads they like to carry around are the only “uniform” feature, the rest is whatever they could buy, loot or otherwise acquire. Not all Headhunters ride Sables; not all Sable riders are Headhunters. HTH.

5 hours ago, EricW said:

Maybe the problem is having a chaos feature makes you less durable.

No, it makes you potentially unreliable in the eyes of the Powers That Be. Remember, the Lunar Way in no way condones the worship of Chaos entities that follow the way of Gbaji and fall into moral depravity. Losing control of the Crimson Bat to a morally-reprehensible Chaos cultist is unthinkable, like putting Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper in command, or handing nuclear codes to a depraved populist with substance-abuse issues and an authority fetish. The system ought to prevent it.

Let’s quote something I wrote that made it into Cults of Glorantha: The Lunar Way.

“Some cultists compare the Red Goddess to Arachne Solara, who she met during her godquest. The Red Goddess is like a spider on the Cosmic Net, scuttling across a web of myths that binds everyone else, picking and choosing how and where and when she inserts herself into the existing matrices of stories…”

(p.120)

You can’t encounter the Red Goddess on Godtime heroquests: you can only meet her shards, masks, fragments and precursors. And of course the Red Moon itself does not exist in Godtime: it’s far too important to let itself be constrained like that. It works within the mundane Middle World, transforming and regulating, gradually expanding its magic to cover all Glorantha, and it does it wondrously well.

12 minutes ago, soltakss said:

It really is a shame.

But, I am pleased to see that both sets of Dorastor maps are Copper Sellers.

Obviously lots of people want to go to Dorastor...

Check its Runes, Simon. I know you're from Dorastor, but even so...

Crimson Bat worshippers are Chaos cultists, good citizens don't emulate them. They're all kinds of f**ked up.

Maps have always sold badly. The best-sellers are regional maps for published campaigns:

• Anders Tönnberg's Balazar Maps are a Silver best-seller (101-150 sales), and his Elder Wilds, Dorastor and South Pelorian maps are all Copper (51-100).
• Dario Corallo's gorgeous Big Rubble and Dorastor Maps are Copper, and his Pamaltela Map is within 10 sales of Copper.
• Mikael Mansen's map of Dragon Pass is Copper, his Jonstown Area map is almost Copper, and none of his other maps has sold more than 35 copies (the ones that sell best are of published campaign settings: Elf Sea, Eastern Rockwoods and Upland Marsh).
• The hex map of the River of Cradles just made Copper.
• The dirt-cheap Rainbow Caves map is five from Copper.

Setting those 14 aside, the other 82 maps on the Jonstown Compendium have sold an average of 10 copies each.

In my Glorantha (and Your Glorantha Will Vary), the Seven Mothers can sometimes be associated with transitions between phase-states, rather than the phases themselves. Teelo Norri is Full => Full Half (Verithurusa), Jakaleel is Full Half => Crescent Going (Lesilla), Deezola is Crescent Going => Dying (Gerra), and so on and so forth. But YGWV.

I think this change (and it was a conscious change, before the typo-theorists start up) was motivated by (a) the desire to have Queen Deezola more strongly associated with Gerra, the ancient Black Moon goddess of suffering, (b) the obvious associations between Jakaleel the Witch, the troll-haunted Blue Moon Plateau, the lost city of Mernita, and therefore Lesilla/Cerullia, the ancient Blue Moon Goddess who is linked to the Crescent-Going phase of the moon, and (c) the common-sense association between Jakaleeli Witches, the horns of the crescent moon, and sickles used to slice bits off naughty children who ask irritating questions.

@MOB is the best person to respond.

Another book you might want to check out is Pavis County & Beyond: Secrets of the Borderlands by @Ian A. Thomson and friends, which includes notes on running a hybrid Borderlands/Pavis campaign.

The Sandheart scenarios that won't work well IMO are Tradition (Book 3) and Mad Prax: Beyond Sun Dome (half of Book 4), as they assume a Yelmalian party carrying out cult duties for the Sun Dome Temple. I think the rest could work just fine: you'll need to tweak temple archives in The Corn Dolls, as there won't be any ancient tablets recording harvests in the brand-new Weis Domain, but maybe Duke Raus is building neighbourly relations by lending his troubleshooters to the Guardian of Sun County, as she doesn't trust her local militia to deal with a sensitive situation...

10 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

I’ll crunch some numbers for you tomorrow, if I can find the time. For QuestWorlds-only titles, it’s easy: there are 5 releases for that system — one Electrum, three Silver, one Copper.

Here you go: best-seller medals in each product category (as per my Catalogue), using current data. The two bumper-size December Monsters of the Month are counted as RuneQuest Scenarios. The chart on p.199 of the 2023 Catalogue has a more sophisticated presentation, but I'm not planning to update that for a while yet.

4 hours ago, g33k said:

I'd love to ask the question in relative terms:  what percent of all RQ titles on the JC go to Electrum or better?  And what percent of QW titles do so?

I’ll crunch some numbers for you tomorrow, if I can find the time. For QuestWorlds-only titles, it’s easy: there are 5 releases for that system — one Electrum, three Silver, one Copper.

4 hours ago, g33k said:

Does that also apply to a QW clean-sheet genre-pack for Glorantha?

I would not expect one of those any time soon.

35 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

I did have the opportunity to play in this, and had a fantastic time! I'm sure the folks down at the bar were wondering what we were singing though!

From memory: The Red Vexillum, Indissoluble Union, Men of Furthest and Hon-eel’s Song (“Ever Lunar”), but not (alas!) Marching Through Sartar.