Joerg

Pavis and Flintnail appear to be on the sorcerous side of normal cults, and it isn't quite clear whether both are just different expressions of a common cult worshiping more than one entity. is a Ginkizzie also is the offspring of Flintnail and an actual daughter of Pavis. Sometimes who you are trumps hierarchy. The Pavis priesthood also combines a political office with spiritual/magical obligations, not unlike the Orlanth Rex cult. Oddi the Keen is a Storm Khan as well as the high priest of Orlanth Rex, and Illumination has nothing to do with that.

Well, these significant grandparents and parents often end up being late.

The closest thing I have seen to this effect is the character of Londra of Londros, a Sword of Humakt and associate priest of Orlanth currently residing at Old Wind Temple. These two roles take up 99% of her time and activities - luckily for her both those roles allow some adventuring on behalf of her congregations. She has practically no personal income, but expects to be well supplied by her cults. Unless a player runs the local cult as the chief priest and has a say in the "for the cult" activities, such dual priesthood is a good way to mostly retire a player character, pulling the character back into active duty only occasionally while building up another, less "married" character for some old school adventuring.

Ok, disclaimer time - I never played MoO, and have only a very shallow idea about the main cultures/species involved in the setting. I have however wasted enough months of my life on games with similar tech trees etc. Yes, although I am arguing about your specializations. In that case, how does the skill (or the tech level) in the specialisation affect the target number for whichever task is attempted? Is Tech Level part of the specialisation? I suppose that MoO models an imperial tech tree rather than the actual engineer's specialisation. I can see that there are engineering challenges in force field manipulation which go beyond what you can do with standard physics, and having a force field technician or a force field architect/designer might be a thing. I doubt that many player characters will be involved in ivory tower or top secret government research. They may be involved with reverse engineering captured or found or bought alien technology, though, but (at least in my roleplaying experience) extracting a blueprint from machinery will be much rarer than trying to get alien technology to run and to integrate with whatever technology your players have at hand. Does this mean the white-collar architect creating a blue-print and sending work crews to the various tasks, or does this mean hands-on tackling of specific tasks? I can see why the demands different research for space vessel chassis and space station backbones, but in the end a bulkhead will be a bulkhead, and working on hull material will require the same technology for space installations or for space vessels, even where space stations can use way more mass and volume compared to ships that need to fit into drive fields. Extra-Vehicular Activity, which means working in space wearing more or less armored space suits, hauling heavy equipment in zero gravity or on the edges of artificial gravity. (If there are discreet force fields, there will be artificial gravity, inertial dampers and other such clarketech). I can see the point when it comes to channeling energies from outside of this universe or out of the quantum vacuum, but when it comes to applying something resembling science rather than mystical knowledge, I posit that cross-segment understanding of technology will create a basic chance significantly different from 00%. If you look at our technology, some proficiency with systems running on unix/android/IOS or more hardware-adjacent operating systems will enable a food processing engineer to manage a sewer system or flight control with only a penalty and not complete ignorance. Specifics like legal and safety obligations specific to a task are usually taught to engineers and practitioners from adjacent fields in a matter of weeks rather than months or years. That will start out as rather narrow book learning, but will soon enough widen out (or otherwise result in a dead end career path). If you have a tested blueprint or have practice in putting blue prints into material reality, you don't really need to be a creative designer. While this is not my own professional specialisation, a friend of mine is an engineer coordinating (seagoing) ship construction distributed among shipyards in different parts of the world, managing the design and construction process as much as the material construction. It is a vastly distributed team effort which takes specialities far outside of the actual design branch - stuff like process modeling which really is the same basic international standards e.g. referenced in quality management and process management. Whether design or production, there are standardized work-flows which get at best augmented by specialisations. Of course that doesn't mean that your average baker who is a genius at designing wedding cakes will be able to cross over into designing space stations or vehicles. But if your players include anybody involved in current business practice, they might wonder where all that cross platform uniformity has gone. Building is a different skill than maintaining/repairing one, as building them requires production gear the engineer running the device (whether automated factory or energy plant with specialized output) won't have. A sufficiently large space vehicle or something like a planetary mobile extraction and basic refining vehicle will have automated factories or prototype constructors (3D-printers if not replicators) as well as energy generators or internal energy distribution systems if working on energy beamed or piped in. Specialised knowledge will be valuable in troubleshooting or modding, but ordinary operation will usually be done by conscripted men and petty officers from technical branches (or their civilian equivalent). Truck drivers will be able to exchange tyres and maybe apply duct tape to a leaking coolant pipe, but won't usually be able to work on valves inside the motor block. That's when you call in the towing service and subject the vehicle and the defective parts to specialized tools. Your vehicular engineers are supposed to keep the systems running in normal conditions, to manage limited red-lining in situations of stress, to contain damage from operation mishaps as much as from enemy fire, and to bring redundant systems into play as long as such are still available. On space stations and space vehicles, all crew would be drilled in emergency measures and damage control. Same for many civilian inhabitants in places inside hostile environments (like vacuum, toxic atmospheres, radiation hazards, etc). Build one? Only if you have a prototype printer/replicator for hull parts as well as micro-circuits on board, or if you have access to an industrial complex churning out these, and an assembly platform and scaffold to hold up the hull structure. Structural stress on bearing elements is the same for space stations or space vessels, and to some extent to planetary construction as well (tectonic stress, wind stress, vibration from traffic or processing inside). Climate or at least heat control will be a specialization you need in all of these, as a sub-topic of plumbing and wiring. And while you will need a coordinator to get all these specialist tasks pulled together into a project, these specialists will use the same knowledge whether they apply it to a crew shuttle, a space station habitat or a planetary arcology. Why is that a design goal? I think that approach of broad basic skills and narrower specialisation break-outs (QuestWorlds lives off these) works better than arbitrary mandatory specialisations which are way too narrow in some respects and way too broad in others. A car mechanic in a repair shop would usually know zilch about programming and maintaining an automatted welding robot in a car production line. The ability to service those is derived from a general maintenance skill and some specific instruction where what parts sit and how to service those. (That knowledge might be treated similar to a spell scroll in game mechanics, but if you can service a crane and know how to weld, you would have quite a bit of starting knowledge that you might be able to service a jammed robot arm in such a welding bot.) Quite different skills, really. Assembling prefab parts in a production line doesn't need specialisation, all it requires is some basic skill in metalworking, cell phone operation to select the operation mode, and a rather short instruction how to do your specific job. Assembling your Ford Mustang yourself in a garage from prefab may be closer to the skill set for modding a car. But then, what is going to stop a space ship modder from re-building his space station with the same set of skills, and vice versa? Yes. Getting something programmed may be a process similar to getting a modified wrap at Subway talking to Siri, your friendly automatted custom service platform. Getting e.g. image recognition processes automatted still takes some specialized skill, but once the heuristics have a sufficiently big backlog of data and decision trees, 2020ies "AI" will then iteratively modify decision trees and distil criteria the human specialist would never think of. While I can see that these dependencies may be hard-wired into the MoO tech tree in the computer game, what I am seeing here is that you need a sufficiently fast and powerful calculator and (more importantly) some weird unobtainium force field technology violating thermodynamics to get that built. (Thermodynamics and soft SF aren't friends. If Picard would place a glass in the replicator when ordering his Earl Grey at convenient temperature, the Enterprise could probably cross the distance between Earth and Moon in a matter of minutes on how much that saves on the energy budget, accelerating from and decelerating to stable orbit.) At the very least, I would think that you need fabbers, material, and specialized tools to do so. And if it is standard hardware, Alexa probably has a blueprint she can send over to the fabber. The real hardware challenge would be the projectors creating the holographic experience, not the calculator running the simulation. I posit that creating a new story takes about as much technical knowledge as creating a new quest in a game like MoO or say one of the X3 games. With future technology assisting systems, it will be like preparing a scenario on a VTT, using prefab modules or possibly tweaking a new one. Not exactly trivial, but neither something you need to spend two years at the naval academy for. Basically, this is an empire's decision on how much it invests into this form of morale boosting. Serving some rum did that job on 18th century British navy ships... Virtual reality gigs would do the same, really, if tactile and kinetic simulation is somewhat advanced. (With artificial gravity, any kind of acceleration can be simulated on the player's body without the body ever leaving its flotation tank, I suppose. No need for laser-tag environments created by unobtainium force fields doing stuff like that face to face.) Are you talking medical or recreational drugs, here? For recreational purposes, I would design nanobots with docking molecules for neurons, possibly with a swarm intelligence that can communicate with an interior or exterior programming interface. You don't even need the substances if you can alter the electrochemical potential in the neurons directly by pumping in the desired electrolytes creating that signal potential, bypassing or enhancing neural pathways without tapping into the physiology much. One could design mitochondria-analogues that would harvest radiation and turn that into ATP molecules, making food and oxygen intake optional for at least a while keeping the cells operational. I would demand there to be a fabber - a machine synthesizing molecules. The wannabe drug lord could take an existing biochemical molecule known to have one of the desired effects, do a 3D-analysis of that molecule and then get a 3D construction set to create molecules with a similar sensor geometry with the dipol moments in the right locations, maybe tweak them a bit by changing some functional group. Run a heuristic for long enough, and you can have your new upper-fixer if you know your target's biochemistry to enough detail. Or you could simply stimulate neurons in the pleasure center directly by altering the sodium and potassium levels in the neurons, or by inserting an electrode adding an electrical potential to the electrochemical one (used by the wireheads in David Niven's Ringworld universe). Do you have a task format for doing original research, then? One that is fun to play with the entire party, or one that is easily handled in between adventuring sessions? Yes. My question to you is: Does it enhance player fun by demanding a specialisation that needs abstract effort and takes away other character development opportunities? The Tech Level 2020 Terra plus 3 (which probably maps to well developed sublight space travel and maybe an experimental FTL drive) would have such a lab inside a box maybe the size of a gallon, with an interface either to neural coupling, or parsing spoken commands perfectly. It is a magical or technological item you own, possibly one you needed to jailbreak to neutralize government- or insurance-mandated limiters on what you can produce. And there would be the future equivalent of youtube videos to show you how to jailbreak such a device. Without a lab, it is just chemistry. It becomes biochemistry when you apply CRISPR or some advanced form of that on yeast or e coli processing some mix of nutrients. Cooking Meth isn't done (exclusively) by chemistry majors. Many cooks are their own best customers and have deteriorated their rationality significantly. We have shopping applications pretending to be human in our present time. Using the same kind of teleoperated interface for a door or letting Alexa open the doors for you when you are drunk as a skunk and your vocal commands are slurred like hell isn't the technology of next decade, it is possible right now. Still in the prototype phase, nowhere near mass production, but technology like that doesn't take much genius. Securing the technology against external tampering may mean that you run a lesser heuristic on site while doing some of the heavier calculations on dedicated servers, et voilà, a door or a car ignition you can talk to and argue with. IMO the main problem is to prevent the door from logging the opening event, or to prevent its sensors from registering that it opened. The old tricks like the security cam loop... Watch the Clooney Oceans 11 series for how Hollywood thinks it might be done (and avoid Swordfish). Heck, find a service streaming the old Max Headroom TV series for inspiration. If you want to turn a video game where you send fleets of battleships into space combat into a role playing game, you need to think about what aspects of shipboard life you want your players to experience. Are they part of the military, or hired by the military, or taken captive by the military? Check some Expanse, read some Honor Harrington, re-run Starship Troopers and read the Dorsay! novels for inspiration how the military experience on space ships might feel. Then create character designs based on what the protagonists or antagonists in those series go through for the various forms of miltiary spacers. You can still decide whether you want your player characters in active duty or after leaving the service (Traveller-style). Apart from its yesterday technology tree, Traveller does a good job modeling former military going on adventure in a feudal society. Add the spaceship technology from MoO, and think about what the non-military backgrounds for the various cultures would be, or whether they even have non-military individuals - I imagine that every Bulrathi has to undergo some mandatory defense service, even if they have a civilian occupation. If not the Bulrathi, than one or two other cultures in the setting. And the Terrans may be thoroughly militarized in response, too. But will they have a military caste, or will they have mandatory draft (no bone spurs nonsense, but possibly flashy and useless officers patents to be bought)? In that case, every player character will have undergone at least basic military training, and have basic combat skills. Design your amount of utopia and dystopia for the various cultures, and assign cultural skills accordingly. Take a look at how RQG does it, then twist it to MoO after you have decided on typical characters for each culture. I probably wouldn't bother designing more than two or three archetypical careers for each species, and then sit down with the player wanting to deviate from that to cobble together something that both you and the player think might work. How even will the distribution of technology be? Looking at our planet, mobile phones can be found in the hands of probably 80% of the world population by now, with maybe 10 years difference when it comes to how current the OS on the device will be. When it comes to cars with combustion energies, those are found pretty much everywhere, with less automation and more DIY potential in some areas and over-engineering and throw-away black box components in the decadent consumer population of the Western World. Now extrapolate to star empires with colonies on the fringes with different locally available manufacturing technology. How many countries in the world actually produce solar cells, microchips, or pure silicon? How many countries can build up such an infrastructure inside a decade, if supply is cut off for some (probably political) reason (excepting cataclysms)? Take Norway - one of the richest countries in the world, about 5 million inhabitants, provider of plenty highly sought after raw materials or at best pre-processed materials, rich in energy, customer for all manner of finished technology, exporter of fish and importer of other foods. There probably is no facility for building their own TV sets, and hardly any local textile mass production other than craft and quite specialized export products. Getting a local gunsmithing industry going might take a few months, getting a local solar cell industry running without just buying the plants would require decades of building up industry to build the tools to build the tools. The knowledge is available, the industry isn't. Now imagine you are stranding Norway on a distant planet, with maybe a few visits of interstellar haulers bringing in stuff, and carrying off stuff. Interrupt a few of those haulers by interstellar war. How will that affect local tech level? And to bring this back to the topic of skills: how will having received a character's previous experience in this environment affect the skill set? The result could be a mix and match of tech levels and practical experiences, and possibly stints of service or contract work on other worlds. Much like the steam-powered robots in Stainless Steel Rat, or the mismatched frontier technology in Firefly.

I would call some of these "research fields" rather than "sciences". Especially Force Fields - how are those different from physics? Sounds mostly like applied science, and might deserve experience checks. From my professional experience as a chemist, different tech levels make skills hard to transfer. While I was taught methods that Justus von Liebig used in his lab, working entirely with what was available in his lab would seriously hamper my abilities. Modern applications are designed to be very easy to operate and only moderately hard to troubleshoot, but almost impossible to repair. Reading raw output of spectra or chomatograms may be about as applicable to current edge lab work as calligraphy is to desktop publishing. And who would you rather trust with a public defibrillator - a top notch 19th century surgeon or a tech literate average person from the early 21st century? Anything like this may have broad and focussed abilities. Traveller has a few rules about tech levels which apply to the performance of technology, but your training with such technology may be important, too. Characters would usually acquire abilities inside a branch of a technology tree at a range of tech levels - if they are lucky, at the top range of the native level, often a few steps down the level with varying knowledge of lower level technology - especially when they have smart instruments at their beckon. When applying a skill to a comparable process from a different tech branch - say one culture/species uses orcanic, grown structural elements while another uses prefabs for construction - there will be a strong disconnect for the practitioner. Does this include zero g maneuvering and EVA ability? I don't think that space vehicles and space stations require different skill sets. You might be better of separating into statics/structural analytics for frames and bulkheads of any kind, plumbing and wiring (including management and re-direction of flows, locks, safeties, filters), and finally energy transformation (reactors, drives, radiators). The rest is architecture, usually not something you do on the fly. Do these abilities include jury-rigging such devices? Also: is maintenance not rather a ritual skill than something done in the adventure? How much programming would be done by people at higher tech levels? How much of it will remain people-readable? Macroscopic repair like sharp or blunt trauma with bandages, splints, and sutures, available at all tech levels and pretty much across species differences? Cellular attrition like burns, radiation, or organ failure, and symptomatic cures using metabolically active drugs helping or hindering natural regeneration? Just pouring in omnipotent stem cells, possibly blank ones copying the genetic codes from adjacent cells? Psionic or sympathetic redirection of (vitalist) energy flows? Nutrition, respirational demands and knowledge about irritants would have to be learned on the patient. Any sufficiently advanced implant technology won't require specialists to install (beyond injecting or fumigating the recipient with the starter mechanisms). There may be low tech-level prototyping skills doing this, but that's almost more of an art form than practical in the presence of more advanced technology. Depending on how much your setting leans into vitalism or mysticism, avoiding the "Cold Iron" effect on your magic generating abilities... It's a kind of magic. Seriously... On the one hand, you have ages old empirical or sympathetic methods based on observation bias and a more or less limited array of materials to use, on the other hand you have understanding of cellular membranes and entry channels and delivery mechanisms that you might print or gengineer, or nanorobots (perhaps drones operated by an outside operator or autmated navigation, perhaps a distributed intelligence riding on those apparatuses). And that's presuming that your organisms use osmosis as their (inefficient) means of generating potentials across phospholipid membranes. The one advantage our biochemistry has is that it could evolve from biofilms which may be the result of random chemistry. Or you go down the Roddenberry vitalism or chi mysticism and assume that life creates something like an energy signature or a "quantum field" (into which psionics might tie) and start violating thermodynamics inside spacetime. Thus you might extract or instill properties like youth or life. wiring, plumbing, neurosurgery... unless you want to make this an archaic skill set, I would subsume it in other maintenance skills (including medicine). Totally depends on the door you're facing. An emoting door with a pseudo-personality like on Zaphod Beeblebrox's stolen ship might be fast-talked or threatened, a lock integrated with dozens of sensors would have to be separated from the supervising system without triggering alarm, and hooked up on an isolated system or independent subsystem controlled by the hacker. If it reacts to proof of identity, that needs to be subverted. "Mr. K'Zorn, your body mass has changed a lot since your last visit. Please allow a biopsy for further identification!"

I wonder whether the Redwood of Dagori Inkarth has a chance at at least temporarily reclaiming lost territory in its environs. We know that the border region unclaimed by either beastmen or Grazelanders will be targeted as the site of a new grove, but that appears to be a more natural process than the overnight trees that are in storage for Peloria and the lands south and/or west of that. Vast fire magics are known to both Pentans (Erigia) and Lunars (Rist), and might be repeated. The (unabridged) Abiding Book also contains magical knowledge able to reduce a major elf forest to a sorry remnant, as was shown by Jrusteli in Vralos even before the Battle of Tanian's Victory.

Elf forest isn't exactly welcoming for Hykimi, although there are precedents for some Hykimi to welcome Aldryami, especially in Rathorela. Then there are some Hsunchen whose totem beasts aren't compatible with forest in general, like the Uncoling reindeer. (For those familiar with arctic "forest" inhabited by reindeer, note that Winterwood isn't anything like that, but instead like the endless spruce forest of southwestern Canada.) The reforestation effort appears to cover more terrain than the Great Western Forest of the Golden Age. Peloria has seen an elf reforestation effort in the Second Age according to the Fortunate Succession, in the reign of Fenaldevu (614-621), the aldryami complaining about a breach of ancient pacts. That's within living memory of dryads (although most Pelorian ones would have been burned in Erigia and Rist). Regardless whether there are moon elves in the moon forests or not, the Pelorian aldryami can be assumed to be quite hostile to the Lunar Dara Happan Empire. It doesn't look like the Kingdom of War has much of an interior, although the siege of the Riverjoin territories seems to imply that the KoW is able to maintain a frontline separated from the exterior expansion. But then, the Janube river might remain somewhat open for water transport even if the aldryami take over all the terrain denuded of humanity. With the powers of Maran Gor directed to forest growth rather than crops, the Loskalmi might be in for a surprise should they manage to annihilate a front segment of the Kingdom and then face an elf forest. But then, I would be surprised if there weren't any aldryami units fighting for Lord Death on a Horse. Another possibility might be a heroquest redirect where any heroquest battle encounter anywhere on Glorantha would be attracted to a military obstacle of the Kingdom of War for the time of its existence.

On the other hand, Bronze and Iron Age cultural changes other than migrations tend to be slow, at least in the archaeological record. That's part of the charm of playing in the distant past, you get rather stable social structures to fall back to. And - at least when talking about the Colymar - the Mennonites and Amish people come to mind. "We left because Belintar brought innovations, and we won't tolerate any following us here among us." It's centuries old traditional law applied today. Germanic farmers' republics persisted until the high middle ages, as in the Battle of Hemmingstedt. That mindset survives even today (I have customers in the region). The same has to be said about housing. It is pretty hard to tell the difference between a reconstructed neolithic farmhouse and a reconstructed farmhouse erected by colonists (in marginal lands owned by the Danish kings) in the 18th century. Vikings and Anglo-Saxons didn't change much, there - adding wooden horse-heads to the gables of their roofs may be the most significant change, and something occasionally still found in early 20th century rural architecture. But yes, the Dragon Pass resettlers did cut their ties to a millennium-old tradition of living around cities of their own making. The "What my Father Told Me" from the Varmandi POV is (at least in my eyes) the equivalent of a Mennonite farmer explaining modern US-American culture, applicable to only the most redneck Sartarites.

The biggest wild equine alive on our planet happens to be a zebra. Unfortunately, the Praxian wild zebras are described as rather small, and their goldeneye ancestors now inherited by the Grazers aren't that big either. But then, why shouldn't a man-and-a-half out of legend ride a zebra-and-a-half out of legend? Godunya managed to create an elephant-sized horse for Kui Hui, so any major demigod might be able to source horses of unusual size. Mules might be bred from Western large horses and extra large donkey stallions (like the Poitou breed) which would fit your man-and-a-half. The old pamphlet on horses (which made it into Anaxial's Roster with only minor alterations and some additions) makes it sound like the hyal and the original sered breeds aren't among the bigger horses of Glorantha, and only the Galana ponies are even smaller. At Feroda, the PHP were in contact with Jrusteli, and might have acquired some of the big-boned western warhorse stock to breed into their herds, but that would dilute the lineage of Goldeneyes rather than further them. On the other hand, the PHP may have been Sered horse folk (called Gamatae by some scholars) from Andarkon who only adopted the Hyaloring pure horse creed after Argentium Thri'ile. This still is in the Fronela description in the Guide, and the Carmanian Charger is derived from that breed, too, last I checked. Yes, provided you remove the Carmanian riding it from the saddle and from breathing. If you want to raid for horses, better don't bring any Praxians other than Pol Joni or Zebra riders. Most other Praxians would opt for good horses as in "the only good horse is a dead horse". The Pol Joni are known to reform outcasts from other tribes, so they might be the go-to people in Prax to get friendlier to horses, and possibly to take on riding. While Jillaro (Old Jillaro) is where I would start to dig for artifacts from Anaxalian era Nivorah artifacts, the Jillaro horse striked me more as a racer than as one of those big Daron-related big horses. In Prax, where would you get the myths for that? But then, the "Zebra-and-a-half" would be such a beast. The Agimori of Pithdaros or Fonrit have left that taboo behind, I think.

The Sambari tribe immigrated to the Quivin Mountains from Heortland, and they are known for having a hand in the slave trade. This implies that there are non-Hendriki clans and tribes in Heortland that practice slavery. This isn't really surprising. In the fifth century, the Hendriki king Aventus recognized various non-Hendriki "foreigners" living in Heortland, making the ruling Hendriki at best the dominating minority. And then the Hendriki got a taste for overlordship in the Adjustment Wars in Esrolia, and enough were expelled and returned to Heortland when the Grandmothers struck back.

The amount of upper body nudity suggests differently... The sacrifice scene with a pig about to be slaughtered was met by some people with criticism (equally distributed between depiction of partial nudity and depiction of animal sacrifice), and from a business POV it doesn't help being branded "the RPG with cruelty to animals". Orlanthi clan society is at large in Sun Dome County, and I wonder how you explain the name "Slavewall" for the easternmost of the Tarshite cities. The Hendriki concept of abhorring any form of slavery is rather exceptional. And the proportion of Hendriki-descended clans in Sartar may be greater than in Heortland. The unfree in Sartarite clans usually are integrated into the clan, and their offspring will be normal clan members (presumably bound to become tenant farmers aka cottars, or stickpickers without any assigned land). Prisoners of war will usually be ransomed back, as receiving the wergeld usually is more lucrative than selling the prisoners. If they are from neighboring clans, the risk of them running away or being freed in clandestine raiding is fairly high. People who married into the clan they were taken captive from have a second chance at being ransomed if the clan they married into defaults on them, or if the feud is so bitter that no ransoms are accepted. Long range raids between clans are rather rare. What happens if mercenaries fight elsewhere and take captives, though? Imagine Sambari mercenaries in the service of the Alda-chur confederation taking captives from the Alone tribes in 1610. Direct neighbors are a problem. Raiding Vendref or Far Pointers or Tarshites adds so much distance that fleeing becomes quite hazardous. Farming is a high-prestige activity, and while a rich farmer may employ field hands from resident cottars rather than have tenant farmers, most of the Heortlings apparently use tenant farmers rather than manage slave-operated farms. The Lunar manors in Colymar lands may have served as an object lesson at least to some of their neighbors, though, even if they were abandoned after the Dragonrise. Road work has some specialist jobs and a lot of digging and carrying, and those are jobs just as easily done by slaves as by paupers. Plus you have foremen on site anyway. Similar considerations apply to mines, quarries, and logging, maintenance of water works, etc. You don't need a big ruling class for a good part of the population working mainly to serve their desires. The Orlanthi have a greater per-capita standing military than the Esrolians, and those warriors need to be supported by tenant farmers or farm hands working under supervision. The Sun Domers are an extreme, but so are any places producing cash crops rather than sustenance. Not noticeably for the three "normal" confederation cities. Boldhome is weird for not having confederate tribes to feed it, but redirecting the fertility of Killard Vale to feed the capital may be one reason why Swenstown is lagging behind the other two cities. Stickpickers might make great foremen for slaves. Their sudden importance and rank may help making both them and their charges more productive. It's a tactic that was used widely in the confederate states, or by company muscle in the industrial north.

At worst, slaves cannot worship as initiates, although any act of rebellion (including sneaking away to a hill-top to worship) would change that magical state to "rebel", which is one of the ground states of Orlanth worship.

While it hasn't been spelled out, the underbelly of nastiness hasn't gone away. Just look at Biturian, who wasn't just doing in Prax as the Praxians do when he bought Norayeep and (grudgingly) Morak. It has always been easy to make a million if you inherited two... In Glorantha, you are where you are because of your ancestors' actions. And in fantasy in general, the pig herder who becomes king does so because he is the carrier of the divine grace of his divine and/or royal ancestors. Like Harmast Barefoot, like Argrath. The fairy tales are about the princesses, and the 0.1 % perpetuate that mind-set. With fatalism and some fervor, if you look at history and pre-history. They take pride in the ostentatious wealth their priests display. It is similar to people from the slums buying fan articles of soccer stars. People settling the flanks of an active volcano or a place called Shaking Valley are doing so with open eyes. They accept that they intrude into an area of divine wrath, and then undertake rites to avert that wrath.

For the ghost to initiate spirit combat, it has to cast (or otherwise acquire) Visibility (which really is about claiming space in the Surface World as self).

The smoke collecting in the rafters above the hearthfire serves to conserve ham, skins, etc. You don't need a chimney for a Mahome fire. On the other hand, you cannot have a Gustbran fire inside without a chimney (or without summoning Oakfed). A thane's house would have a bonfire (Gustbran) for central heating and lighting, as a statement of luxury, and thus it needs a chimney. Chimneys are an old Orlanthi technology commonly found in ruins from the Dawn and Second Age, and only the most backward hicks (like those of the Varmandi who never served as mercenaries) would even consider seeing one worth the mention. Every baking house has a chimney, every professional kiln has one (there may be pit kilns for low quality pottery, but on the whole Ernaldan pottery is quite sophisticated). The Sartarite masons use mortar, which means burning chalk - another Gustbran technology. Fires inside are dangerous, as they may emit the occasional flake of glowing fuel rising into the rafters. Rather than external chimneys, hearth fires might be fitted with chimney-like covers made from clay-covered wicker, sparing the need for one person to remain awake at night for hearthfire watch.

The Sourcebook takes a look at the elemental pantheons and has as its core portion the who-is-who of Gloranthan deities. In addition, it has histories of the important Dragon Pass factions and the History of the Lunar Empire, a good introduction into the recent history of the setting (and a much easier read than the distributed regional histories in the Guide). Until the two volume Gods Book shows up, this is the best currently published entry into the religious lore of Glorantha, and afterwards it still offers an introductory reference a bit more detailed than the Prosopaedia (a name list of gods with very short descriptions) and the long cult formats of the Gods books. The Guide gives you the major cultures of Glorantha and a geographic overview of the entire surface world, down to settlements of 1000 or more inhabitants. Lots of room in between to use material like the Adventure Book in the GM screen package.

Mythically, she might wish to seek a Kitori lover. The Norinel story has Kimantor wearing his lead mask any time except in darkness, when her other senses told her that what she held in her arms was pleasing. So a suitor of unsure gestalt, a leader of trolls and possibly of Darkness shape-shifting other lesser copies of the Only Old One might be enough for Samastina's needs. Problem is that a male's offspring doesn't mean that much in uz society, even less than in Esrolian society. Sure, Gash and Gore did found tribes in Dagori Inkarth, and are venerated as ancestors, but in the end, it was their spouses who perpetuated themselves in those tribes. The uz solution to the Curse of Kin appears to be to abandon the entire Uzko continuation of their lineages and to start with new lineages of a less defective lesser offspring. The Uzko would be allowed to peter out in Enloism and then become unviable, but the remaining Mistress Race ancestresses of those will still have been strengthened, and the new type will be able to make up for the worshipers lost to the Curse of Kin over time. In the mean time, the dark trolls have become almost as expendable as the Enlo or the Cave Trolls.

I talked to Greg about that when the Kitori reveals came out. At that time, the answer was that Kitori-born children wouldn't be Uz, but that something else, even if their natural form was that of trolls. Possibly more useful to have as offspring for an uz matriarch than a great troll or (KL forbid) enlo, but not a lineage that would perpetuate her uz-ness. But then, a Kitori born troll might be able to undergo the ritual of adoption with a lot less pain and risk of becoming a special type of troll pickle when undergoing it from troll shape. Question is whether that individual would be a valid descendant of the uz mother adopting the individual, or the start of a new, unrelated lineage pulled directly from the Hell Mother. If a superior trollkin undergoing that ritual remains a child of the mother that birthed the individual, then a Kitori child might, too. On the other hand, the enlo (whether superior or not) always has been a descendant of both the mother and the Hell Mother. I wouldn't really start looking at human descendants from Kitori individuals. Look at the Torkani for instance - even those adhering to Argan Argar don't usually acquire the Kitori powers. Pulling in the Ergeshi population of Sun Dome County might provide willing test subjects. How strong is that curse that keeps them from attempting to follow their ancestral magic?

In a Sartarite cities, all building plots belong to one of the stakeholders in the city - the confederated tribes, the major temples, the guilds, the Prince, and possibly a few at the discretion of the City Rex other than his own domicile. The Lunars used to demand the royal land and probably would have demanded land and houses from each of the stakeholders, too. With them gone, previous ownership would have reverted. The owners of the plots and the buildings on them will rent them out to households. I am not entirely clear who gains ownership of a building erected or modified on land belonging to one of the stakeholders. Someone who erects a building or outbuildings for a workshop will expect a) long tenure and b) possibly some recognition for the value added. But then, it may not be an individual but a guild that takes the rent of another stakeholder's plot. In Orlanthi law, individual possession of anything is pretty much an afterthought. Bloodlines might have it easier to manifest a claim, but the usual legal entity is the clan, guild, temple, or some superstructure like the tribe, the city, or the Prince (aka the Orlanth Rex Sartar temple). Depending on how soon after the Dragonrise your party is looking for a place, there may be places just vacated by Lunars available for rent.

Ascension involves a physical change of the individual. What you describe is the core of the humanist (humano-centric) world view of the Malkioni, the culture of the West. There are representatives of that culture in the Dragon Pass area, and there may be Orlanthi willing to adopt such a point of view, but the natives of Dragon Pass are usually not socialized as such, or even exposed to such ideas. Humans becoming gods is also the mainstay for the Lunar religion, with the Seven Mothers the main example. Disbelieving claims of divinity would be rare, a rejection of observable facts - something that happens in our world, so why not in Glorantha. Disbelieving the righteousness of deities is common - there are plenty enemy deities, or deities that require propitiation rather than initiation. The Orlanthi myths describe the slaying of Yelm as a regrettable necessity with major repair efforts to follow, the Imperial myths describe it as an act of destructive rebellion that required atonement.

I thought that scenario used the Styx Grotto and landed the punters in the Backwind Marsh?

http://i.imgur.com/GBxqls0.jpg

Don't confuse "worships" with "is initiated to". The Orlanthi are avid lay worshipers of their pantheon, and avid propitiators of their enemy gods that they need to overcome in their rites again and again in order to have the magic their deities embodied in those acts. It is hard to be a fierce chaos-killer when there is no Chaos around, so Orlanthi worship makes sure that there is some Chaos to be slain. If a Lunar or a Malkioni points that out, that may cause an unthinking outrage for challenging the cultural identity. Your average Orlanthi farmer may initiate to Orlanth, Ernalda, Barntar, Eiritha/Uralda, the Grain Goddess, or even Maran Gor, and still worship the other gods in that list, plus Daka Fal, Elmal, Heler, Asrelia, Waha etc. While Gloranthan theist initiation is a limited form of monotheism (except for multiple initiations), participation in the worship of other deities as a lay member is pretty mandatory if you want to be a member of the community. Providing prayer muscle is as much a duty as providing militia muscle. This even goes for the Malkioni worship of the Invisible God. There are plenty theists who are not initiated to any of the deities they worship or sacrifice to. Mass worship and sacrifice will endow magical leaders with the ability to grant magical blessings or curses. The Wyter mechanics in RQG are one such way that allows non-initiates to get access to such magics. Or the annual Sacred TIme activities. Or being dragged into someone else's heroics in a supporting or opposing role. Biturian Varosh participated in two separate Yelmalio heroquests during his time near the Zola Fel River, and narrowly avoided a Desert Tracker's quest and a Lightbringers' Summons. His role in the Paps rites went beyond mere lay/associate worship, too. A Daka Fal shaman may send an ancestor spirit to a non-initiate. Happened to Biturian, too, although those circumstances appear to have been rather unusual.

I would be interested in seeing this explored in a separate thread... whether Ringworld Map Glorantha, or Roundworld Glorantha, or even just space habitat Glorantha using Clarketech.

Mine, too, unless this is about uplifted species. There are way too many vertebrate aliens in science fiction, one thing that Lovecraft and BEM pulp SF got fairly right. Even with panspermia, the chance survival of the Cambrian explosion then mass extinction by those headless chordata proto-fish won't necessarily have repeated on other planets. Other Suns is a solid SF rpg if you replace the aliens with something more sensible, or otherwise if you give them a Dr Moreau backstory. Its tech level is much closer to what you see in other SF than anything provided in Traveller (which is basically Cold War military veterans with their weapons tech and education in aristocratic space).