Nick Brooke

There may be a hint about this in that footnote about imperial plurals I inserted in the back of the Guide. Previous Masks of Moonson had employed the "imperial plural" form (e.g. the famous Moonbroth Plinth inscription: "Our name is Moonson Argenteus, Khan of Khans: look on our works, ye humble, and aspire!"); on the later Takenegi Stele, however, Phargentes the Younger does not. This may tell us something about his fundamental nature: it is often suspected that the previous Masks were gestalt composite entities with a weirdly multiple sense of self (after all, the plural of "Ego" is "Egi")... but what is he?* * (Möller, taking after Graves, suggested "a populist grammatical pedant," but his footling arguments can be trivially dismissed)

Yes indeed! For much more speculation about what happens in an interregnum, see my second Gloranthan Manifesto, available in this group.

Fanatics gonna rant, I suppose. Good luck persuading anybody sane.

Here is Mooncat again in a tiny detail from Katrin's astonishing panorama of Nochet City, which Martin Helsdon shared with the RuneQuest group on Facebook last March. The full piece will be included in his next book, Ships & Shores (of Southern Genertela).

Katrin Dirim writes:

Digital versions are available direct from Golden Goblin: https://www.goldengoblinpress.com/store/#!/Cthulhu-Invictus-RPG-Resources/c/57082001

That’s no lady, that’s Prince Argrath, wearing one of the Red Goddess’s outfits. Don’t ask him why, unless you can handle the truth.

Quoting Sun County Backgrounds, one of the three (“four, sir!”) types of Sun County Noblility is “COPPER — nobles with perhaps remote Praxian ancestry, who left their nomadic tribes to settle among and lord it over the common folk of Sun County. Over time, parts of Sun County have been ruled by Praxians from almost every tribe, who subsequently intermarried: consequently there are now a medley of tall, short, hairy and bald nobles. That’s genetics for you!” (The others are Gold, Bronze, and now Silver. There’s a box nearby on the slurs they direct at each other. It’s all fun stuff!)

We have seen elements of the leadership of the Sun Dome Temple in Prax, in the RuneQuest Classic period, displaying misogyny and xenophobia. I wouldn’t generalise from that to say that all Sun Domers, everywhere and always, are misogynistic xenophobes, and I’m not sure where you pulled the racism from. But YGWV, of course. The Sun Dome Temple has a strong meritocratic bias, so that sort of silliness is probably confined to the oldest “noble” lineages (and there are new, competing lineages who despise them for it - in my account, the “Bronze Lords” who arrived in Monrogh’s time would be as heterogenous in background as everyone else in Dragon Pass). In my own writings, I’ve tried to make it clear that Count Solanthos’ regime could be in many ways an historical aberration, while Countess Vega’s Sun County in Black Spear has a very different feel. The implicit “Cavaliers vs. Roundheads” framing of Varthanis II vs. Solanthos’ factions in my Sun County Backgrounds article is there for a reason: if you visited England under the Commonwealth, you’d have a strong impression of how society worked (“Christmas is cancelled, smiling is illegal, and sex hasn’t been invented yet”) which wouldn’t have been true a decade earlier or later. Some racist Sun Domer nobles (who'd surely say that they were of “Golden” descent, tracing their ancestry in a straight line from Arinsor) might look askance at an Agimori (“a touch of the skull-bush”; “mere Copper, not Gold”), but they are what we refer to as “assholes.” They are only in the game so you can stick a pike up them, whether metaphorically or literally. And a whole bunch of other Sun Domers would find their obsessive genealogical concerns hilarious, absurd and irrelevant. Hang out with those guys, they’re more fun to be with: that’s my advice.

Chaosium would like to do it (at least for the non-reprint stuff): it's just a question of priorities. (There are no rights issues, or anything nasty like that)

And there are 7e conversion notes for Invictus and other settings in Cthulhu Through the Ages.

Argrath and the White Bull. Just saying.

My own take on the White Bull cult is more or less set out in Act 7 of Black Spear: it's an apocalyptic movement, led by an obscure spiritual entity that is definitely related to Storm Bull (somehow), whose Illuminated leader takes his fanatical horde of followers away from their traditional role defending Prax against Chaos to throw them into the meat-grinder of his senseless war against the Lunar Empire. Which eventually culminates, as we all know, with him betraying all the gods of Glorantha (the Storm Bull very much included) to Wakboth the Devil. But I'm sure everything is completely above-board and ticketty-boo, and there's absolutely no reason to question anybody's motives or doubt that this is an entirely good thing. (Nods, vigorously). Hail Harshax!

Argrath's life inc. more White Bull details: https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/a-short-summary-of-argraths-life-to-1627/ Argrath in Pavis: https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/pavis-and-prax-circa-1625-1626/ Argrath's Army (Facebook only): https://www.facebook.com/groups/RuneQuest/permalink/1772622146247110/ Excellent discussion thread here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/RuneQuest/permalink/2159076850934969/ Cheers, Nick

Notes on the White Bull that Jeff Richard posted to Facebook: https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/white-bull-notes/ Somewhat related notes on Argrath's New Pavis: https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/argraths-new-pavis/ Lots of these people have White Bull connections: Impala Tribe leaders: https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/notable-people-of-the-impala-tribe/ High Llama Tribe leaders: https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/notable-people-of-the-high-llama-tribe/ Sable Tribe leaders: https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/notable-people-of-the-high-llama-tribe/ Bison Tribe leaders: https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/notable-people-of-the-bison-tribe/ Morokanth Tribe leaders: https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/notable-people-of-the-morokanth/ Cheers, Nick

To be clear: your scenario (or whatever) has to use 7th edition rules, but it can take inspiration from anything in the Cthulhu Invictus books published by Golden Goblin Press. (But if any of those books say they used something “with permission from” an author or their estate, you can’t use those bits, as this stuff can’t be delegated)

Yes, that’s exactly what it means. Golden Goblin Press has kindly agreed that Chaosium community content authors can use their Cthulhu Invictus background, characters, monsters, etc. in Miskatonic Repository scenarios. You can’t simply cut’n’paste chunks of text from their books (other than monster statblocks, as ever), but they are happy for you to play around with their setting, come up with your own original/derivative material, and sell it on DriveThruRPG. There are several Cthulhu Invictus scenarios already up there: “A Balance of Blood,” “Ravishing Beauty,” “The Assignment,” “Return to Teutoberg Forest” and “Akhenaten Unveiled.” (That last one shows how you can use Invictus as a generic ancients RPG ruleset: it’s not just for Romans)

No: see RQG p.144. You can only attempt an augment once with any ability (Skill, Passion or Rune) in any session. If you try and fail, you can't use that ability for another augmentation attempt in that session. You already blew it. And if your gamemaster thinks it's not clearly relevant and appropriate, you can't even make the attempt.

(a white steed, certainly)

Credit where due: the "depictions" are Katrin Dirim's, and those "pagan excesses" and "dungeon complexes" are mostly confined to the bonus content, for sanity's sake. (If you bought A History of Malkionism and haven't yet downloaded the 40 pages of bonus content, you're really missing out! If you got it in print format only, just forward your DriveThru receipt to me (address below) and I'll email you the files you're missing. Same holds true for any of my Jonstown Compendium books, in case you were wondering)

Here's the main page for A Thousand Thousand Islands. It's a series of rules-free art zines by Zedeck Siew (text) and Mun Kao (art), packed with imagery and almost poetic idea seeds for South-East Asian inspired fantasy roleplaying, and if you're playing in the East Isles you'd be crazy not to look at them for inspiration. I'm a massive fan.

"King when you're winning: You're only King when you're winning!" - a popular Sartarite war-chant

I agree with Darius: this “Invisible Orlanth Cult” is something new. It may have roots - what doesn’t? - but even so it’s a strange and unpredictable bloom. “There’s always something new coming out of Peloria,” as the God Learners might have said.

Yeah, that’s how I wrote them. Structurally, I used Persian chrome for Carmanians because it gave us: 1) a very different feel for a monotheistic(ish) chivalrous(ish) society than we saw in the “modern” mediæval Malkioni West (Jeff’s bathwater incident was still decades in the future when I wrote this stuff): I was exploring how far pre-GL Malkionism could deviate from the modern mainstream, playing with Manichaeans and dualism, etc.. 2) an initially ancient-world model (“Persians”) that could interact with “Greeks,” “Romans,” “Babylonians,” “Byzantines,” “Ottomans” etc. (that is, the then-common analogies for various Pelorian cultures) in ways that make sense and have some historical and literary depth; again, this is before the Glorious ReAscent inspired the faux-archaic “Babylonian Lunar” mistake that blighted the Hero Wars / HeroQuest era. 3) a neat twist on the Arkat vs. Nysalor, truth in Darkness vs. deceiving Light angle to the Gbaji Wars, which preyed on loose words used by Greg in the Zero Wane History (you’ll find them on a re-read: look for Truth, Light and Darkness, then make them core) to give them more depth and significance. My scrappy old notes from the Before the Moon era are here; the stuff in ILH-1 and the Guide was derived from them by Greg Stafford and others.