Joerg

There are the commonly traveled parts of the Underworld, the trail blazed by Grandfather Mortal and traveled regularly by Yelm, which are fairly well explored, and there are deeper places, less stable rather shapeless and shifting, a trait of Darkness as well as of Chaos. These are not places that human souls are normally exposed to - even some of the more punishing hells like say the fourth Dara Happan underworld (The Glorious ReAscent of Yelm is another good source on the underworlds) are comparatively cosy compared to these soul-shredding environments. The Underworld may be the birthplace of Time, but Time isn't entirely in control of these places. It is unimaginably huge. Surface World Glorantha is covered by seas for more than 60%. The underworld comes first as the cube of Earth which is barely peeking out of the vast realm of water surrounding it on all other sides. Even if you slice it in neat 15km layers (which is way beyond the surface world atmosphere), you can fit 400 such layers into a cube of 6000 km to a side. Arne Sacknussem wouldn't run out of places to explore if he had a Brithini or Vadeli life-span, and neither would any Lidenbrock on his trail. And that's still way above the basements of the Spike, which may have survived the implosion of it to a certain degree. The Spike was shaped like a cone, only one eighth of its volume formed the visible mountain. That's a lot of invisible Spike beneath, probably Mostali-inhabited space, too. Or the remaining parts of the Castle of Lead which pokes out in a couple of places in the Surface World (Dagori Inkarth, Halikiv, others?). The Obsidian Palace is known to have a basement level with a banquet hall at the same level as the Court of Silence and Wonderhome/the halls of Maggotliege Yelm Bijiif. There are many places in the Underworld which are places of bliss or at least solace and nurturing, at least to those at home in these places. Outsiders infringing on these places may experience them as dangerous, terrorizing and deadly. (A bit like the experience of visiting Glamour, another such Hell. Alkoth probably as well.) Places like Wonderhome before Yelm re-decorated it.

How do you treat households that contain multiple player characters? (Such as married couples?) Take for instance a couple with different social status according to occupation, one free, one semi-free (to use Blandistani terminology). Both are from the same household, both contribute to the household's situation through their toils throughout the year, both are given assets in character generation which should pay for a household's social upkeep (as food and housing aren't anything the clan charges for or not covered by 15 lunars per annum, that leaves clothing, make-up, perfumes, personal weaponry and similar fripperies).

beware the sheep riders!

That opens the interesting question how the people of Danmalastan were created. Was that a process similar to the intellectual conception of Dayzatar, Arraz/Yelm and Lodril? Were there fertility goddesses of land, sea, or pure fertility involved? Were the initial Maseren budded off the Paseren?

If Praxians think that laying eggs is freakish, why do they tolerate Ostrich riders and Bolo riders? (lizards, not tanks) Does painting stripes on your horse to make it pass as a zebra actually make it into an infertile cavalry zebra?

The one lunar constant in Glorantha seem to be the tides, but that isn't really meaningful to the Sartarite highlanders. Annilla's myths make her the spouse of Lorion (and thereby Sky River Titan/Engizi), which might give the river worshipers a tentative link to a lunar goddess. The Blue Moon suffered from many attackers, and its surface world empire had an unfortunate lack of distance from chaos in the later phase of the Gods War, too. She also is a guardian of secrets, which might open a connection via the knowledge cult. Orlanth conquered the heavens in the Gods War, and even led a successful defence of the heavens against Tyram and his Chaos invaders - his one major win in a direct confrontation with Chaos. That activity may have brought the Blue Streak under his reign.

The RW3 way to use a summoned elemental is to order it into a binding with the struggle to overcome its POW, and then call it forth using Command (or Control, or Dominate) without any chance at resisting while offering a sufficient volume of the element, and add a "and return to the binding when your time is up or when I tell you to do so". An elemental cult spirit will act in the interest of the cult deity. That may include to listen to orders given by the summoning cultist, but is that reliable?

The seas encompass all of the Three Worlds, and Lorion as a third generation sea entity is close enough to the original cast of sea powers that he and his brothers could each take one of those worlds for their own. The three children of Zaramaka had at least three possible pairings to sire and give birth to the next generations, and while we think of Heler, Triolina and Nelat as deities, not all of their offspring necessarily belong to the Gods World. Lorion appears to be a sibling or descendant of the Manthi. It may have been his conquest of the Sky World and bringing down those waters which made him so thoroughly tied into the Gods World as the Sky World is usually regarded as part of that even under the HW/HQ1 doctrine.

One sorcery that the lack of blue Vadeli might prevent is the Tapping of Land and Sea like both the Vadeli and the Brithini did in the Storm Age and Darkness. There is a notable absence of anything like that in the Vadeli Isles, Jrustela and northern Pamaltela. Maybe their continued identification as one of the original tribes is what allows them to use more ancestral magic than the Brithini? or command an enslaved practitioner of pagan magic to cast it for them? If they managed to place themselves as owners in Fonritian society, they have access to huge masses of worshipers of pagan deities. Or they just act as merchants of destruction, like they did with the Seshnegi kings who destroyed (most of) Hrelar Amali in the First Age. I had the impression that the job as a Vadeli judge / overseer was a result of Zzabur's victory with the Breaking of the World, a kind of Corflu job for talars in bad graces. Hrestol volunteering to do it might have been seen as a deserved penance by the Brithini? I don't think that they are discriminating against mortals - they are just as happy to exploit orthodox Brithini, and if they think they can get away with it, Luatha or Mostali (and alliances be damned).

And that is a mirror image of the first one, getting the quiver on the left rather than the right as in the first image.

Nice picture. Are both draconically enlightened, or do we see a mirror image?

Old Pavisite names may resemble Grazer names when the ancestors were part of the Zebra Tribe, formerly Pure Horse Folk.

That's pretty much how it felt. I had to walk backwards in order to be able to breathe in that air current (of slightly over 120 km/h / 75 mph), and I think the Bernoulli effect was to blame in part. In the Middle Air, there would be no turning away, your breath (soul) needs to be the strength or attunement to work in that environment. Sufficiently strong souls may allow you to direct where you are carried away by the wind.

As you enter Orlanth's realm, your breathing needs to be more and more heroic. Last time I was out in an actual hurricane (Cyril, by now 8 years ago or so), I found myself breathless facing the storm (which had just toppled the one tree next to the place I was working at, requiring a quiick check whether anybody was hit by it). I suppose that entering Orlanth's realm has a similar effect. I have no idea which exact physical phenomenon caused that experience, but then fluid dynamics are a lot less inside my field than are thermodynamics.

Sorry about that, then. I was replying from work and memory. Not my personal theory, anyway - in that case, I would have known the source.,Stuff shared with me when inquiring about the Holy Country in the last decade of the previous millennium.

I really dislike this phrase. What happened according to Uz Lore was that Belintar slew the lead-boned serpent which had wound itself around the highest pillar of the Obsidian Palace, and it was the beast's death throes which shattered part of that pillar, leading to its collapse. The lead bones also blocked the course of the Creek Stream River, leading to another ordeal Belintar had to overcome by digging the New River to drain the Dammed Marsh. If anyone was to blame for this, it would be the Night Dragon Society that summoned this beast to overcome Belintar.

I wonder whether the Moonson Imperator cult which should be present in every Lunar administrative franchise would qualify as the cult of Yelm. If so, Provincial Tarsh would have quite a few places of worship, whereas any such places in Old Sartar would have been purged. Alda-chur on the other hand is bound to have Yelm in both as his associate to Yelmalio and in his Imperial aspect. There is no easy way for an Orlanthi to join the cult of Yelm, even if he happens to be the byblow of a son of Moonson that will need some proof by heroquesting and (probably harder) getting acknowledgement from the Imperial bureaucracy, and finally it will require a temple of Yelm to confirm these through initiation. There appear to be a few odd Grazers living among the Orlanthi, like the stable-keeper in post-Windstop Apple Lane. Taking a "resident Grazer" background opens that avenue somewhat.

When I created my RQ3-Vikings themed fantasy world, I had limited geographic spread of most of these non-humans. Elves of various stages between physical beings and starlight spirits, or a dryad-like species not called elves but using the Gloranthan definition of aldryami, were limited to two northerly regions. Hobbits and ducks were absent. Chaos-warped iron-using elves aka orcs were the horse-riding warlords of a piece of vast steppe around a chaos impact. RQ ogres (looking human, but slightly larger and stronger, evil sorcerers requiring a diet of sapient species) were limited to an archipelago near one of the elf populations (ancient foes), giants in the distant north, serpent-folk in one of the jungles semi-mortal descendants of various jinn-like entities in a southeastern desert (effectively non-European elves with totally different magical background than the others, no biological relation either), insect-like people on a metal-poor peninsula in the far southwest, dragonewts with allied/subject humans in two places in the farther west, RQ trolls in a few middling mountain ranges, dwarves in others, with contested points of contact. The nonhumans and the humanoids (dwarves, ogres, giants all different races of homo, elves explicitely not) and the humans all had migration histories from the cataclysmic war 10k years back and other major events just 5k, 2k and 1k years back, like a major glaciation happening after the first great war and then slowly going away. Smaller populations of beast walkers, chaos mutations limited to a few impact sites of the 5ky cycle, etc. Chaos as a cancerous mutagen rather than annihilation, unnatural and unpleasant anyway. I did loan from the general layout of Viking Europe and the Mediterranean, but then flipped east and west, divided the continent by a high mountain range running from (slightly northerly) east to (slightly southerly) west, two interior seas in the center separated only by that range and connected by magically powered canals through higher mountain valleys, and then I stole from a small number of non-Viking inspirations. Including Glorantha, and Jules Vernes' Journey to the Center of Earth, with the trolls one native species that made it to the surface. A lot less thought on underwater populations, much more on shadow realms connecting to certain places, all on a planet. A few hundred pages of notes, maps, and how to break earth analogues and other loans, enough info for one of my players to use the setting for his own games as GM, but nowhere near non-fan publication.

When Gonn Orta passed through Dara Happa on his way to Nida, he apparently picked up the Dara Happan Emperor Sothenik as a travel companion. Sothenik did not return to Dara Happa. Whether the term Hecolanti applies to Gonn Orta as well or only to his giant companions isn't quite clear. The most ancient myths of Annilla (so far published only in RQ3 Troll Gods, although I expect that to change by the end of this year) connect the Elder Giants of the Rockwoods to the Blue Moon goddess. Still, at least the Lunar Empire managed to aggravate the Pass Giant when they tried to capture and plunder his daughter in 1621, which explains nicely why he is going to muster against the Empire. Greg's early writings had a range of elemental entities with distinctive names. The term Promalti appears to be tied to Aether Primolt, the Likiti are the earth entities of ancient Seshnela, and so on. The earliest mention of darkness beings bear more resemblance to the Dehori (or the Dehori shape of Kitori) than they do to the Uz, although by the time of RQ1, the curse of kin clearly has been established. The first published trolls are of course the units of Cragspider in White Bear and Red Moon.

I plead Chekhov's Gun on the City of Wonders... You don't dangle a thing like this before the GMs and don't use it. But then, the City of Wonders would have its connections to the Other Side of the Holy Country, the place where the Tournaments of the Masters of Luck and Death used to take place. IMG it is a Hidden Castle, similar to Castle Blue. If not even identical (but that's material for a different thread, you know which one). IMG I know where to look for incredibly life-like murals of the place and secret passages leading under the water level of the Mirrorsea Bay.

The world was formed out of the Void, which is all potential - including destructive. Chaos is an incursion of the Void into Creation, losing most of its potential but retaining the mutation and annihilation aspects. This apparently happened as side effects of the Creation process, leading to what the Orlanthi call Predark, and which describes early Chaos opponents as far back as the early Golden Age. Dragons appear to regard all of Creation as temporary in nature. It isn't quite clear whether their utuma returns them to the Void, to Void-adjacent realms, or whether it takes them to and through the source. Weirdly, the only dragons known to have committed unaided utuma are Ouroboros and Obduran the Flyer. Other dragons like Aroka or Sh'harkarzeel did accept Orlanth's assistance in undergoing utuma. Waertag and his heirs appear to have assisted quite a bit, too, although it isn't clear whether leaving a city ship behind hampers ascension. This has become so since the conception of Time. Whether it is still Chaos when the world has disappeared is another question. It might just implode. I wouldn't phrase it that way. The Chaosium funnels creative potential into the world, separating it from its antithesis which is left outside of the cosmos. The Pseudocosmic Egg event with its creation of the Young Elementals may have been something else. Possibly an undeveloped twin of Time? Primal Chaos is the cosmic Gorp - pure and irreversible dissolution into the blob. For a while, it may be used to creatively destroy only things that "don't look like the elephant". But when the elephant has emerged from the block of stone, the blob still needs feeding, and if only the elephant remains, then that was it for the elephant.

Chaos is a wrongness inside the cosmos, destroying what it consumes. Outside of the cosmos and in the process of creation, this dissolution is balanced with creation or overwhelmed by it. Inside the cosmos, unaccompanied by creation, Chaos carries a wrongness, a lack of purpose (other than annihilation) or future, of being. Carrying the mark of chaos will draw the carrier towards annihilation or some other form of corruption. The Telmori experience a total loss of control over their morals or their ability to discern between friend or foe during their involuntary transformations on Wilddays. This goes beyond their ancestral ties to Death, and it is something of a wonder that they don't mutilate their wolf companions when in that state. That curse started out as a gift - immunity to normal weapons when in that man-wolf state, and the ability to slip into and out of that. They received that gift for being the spearhead of the Bright Empire's forces in the west, and receiving that gift made them even more so. When Nysalor granted that gift, the Telmori were safe in his glow of enlightenment which mitigated the instinctive and visceral fear of Chaos or of unsupervised Creation. Talor the Laughing Warrior had been on the losing side facing the Bright Empire and its Telmori forces, and he had experienced the horrors beyond the Gates of Banir and the Underworld. After Nysalor had been slain in the City of Miracles, Talor and Arkat both cast - or possibly transferred - great curses of Chaos towards the core lands of the Bright Empire, Dorastor, and towards its most stalwart warriors, the Telmori. It isn't quite clear where these two heroes got that power from. Maybe what they did was demonizing their foes, a magical technique that may go back to Zzabur's wars against the Vadeli, maybe what they did was to separate themselves of a chaos curse they attracted in their career of fighting the Bright Empire and maintaining their existence in Hell, transferring that to their foes in an act of self-mutilation as much as of achieving a partial transcendence. Talor's curse turned the Telmori gift into a bad thing, both for the Telmori themselves and for their allies and neighbors. They lost control over their shapechanging, and while involuntarily changing on Wilddays, they also lost any reason or restraint in that shape. The Telmori had been Hsunchen, but Hsunchen on the cusp of some greater sophistication, similar to the Pendali Basmoli at the Dawn, with a temple city of their own. Like the Pendali cities, this city probably had been built by a subject culture, but Hsunchen empires lording over neolithic or even bronze-using farmers is nothing new in Glorantha, and wasn't at the Dawn either. The curse uttered by Talor destroyed any hopes of maintaining that kind of empire if the subjects were exposed to the savagery of the beast stage without any restraint. These subjects were the first to feel the consequences of the curse, and as a result the Telmori lost their secure base of power and income that had allowed them to serve as the shock troops of Nysalor's empire. Foes of the Telmori see the chaos manifest as their inability to hurt Telmori in their savage man-beast stage with normal weapons. The Telmori themselves experience the chaos in their inability to maintain a domination over a subject population, usually pitting them into an involuntary permanent state of warfare or enforced isolation. Talor's curse has robbed them off that perspective and tradition.

I think it is a bit hard to be the embodiment of a tree and not claiming that ancestral tie to the mother of tree plant life. Maybe a sorcerous dryad? But that would be about as rare as a dwarf shaman or a triolini fire priest.

Good old Paracelsus's "the amount makes the poison". Oxygen poisoning is one of my favorites, right next to carbon dioxide. Then there is the case of self-administered intoxicants, often for magical or ritual purposes. Would Detect Poison react to venoms that are mainly digestive fluids? Would it react to acids? Would it react to malicious application of ultimately harmless substances? Bad cooking? Raw green beans? There are a couple of detection targets which aren't substances. Life, Detection, Magic.

Aerial, naval, underwater, yes. Things like ramming, vertical element, bombing (missile combat from above). Stuff for a GM book, or possibly to be included in a scenario with a heavy element of one of these environments to be lifted into a scenario-less GM resource later. RQ still is this crunchy system, and while much of this is just adapting or re-confirming existing rules, new GMs may not have those resources.