Joerg

Pretty much everybody's character doesn't, because "if it isn't on the character sheet, it doesn't exist in the game!" (anonymous GM) Which is weird because RQG has a mechanic for granting augments, at least using runes, passions, or skills. Why not items, or items as focus for passions, skills, etc (increasing the chance to succeed in augmenting the skill actually used)? The other thing any anonymous GM would ask is "how much silver does your character spend on this?" Sounds like a JTC product waiting to be written (and lavishly illustrated).

Isn't that the equivalent to "I wish I had not entered the assassin character class at adulthood, I should never have become anything but a necromancer?" RQG doesn't really let you have interesting character backgrounds like that unless the GM cooperates with the player. "I trained as a scribe in the Lhankor Mhy temple until age 20, but then left and joined Storm Bull" might be possible to some extent, but what skill set would you give a character like that? Scribe, and the cult minimum for Storm Bull? A number of Sartarites will be stranded after the Dragonrise with rune points from the Seven Mothers. Some may have another cult they may have initiated to before following the Lunar conversion, and some may have been dual initiates to that other cult and the 7Moms. The philosophy of RQG appears to be to play rather youthful yet somewhat accomplished player characters, and to provide only a rather streamlined possible personal backstory, and to make all the big decisions other than the choice of cult and (possibly) occupation in game. Character creation in RQG is already a rather lengthy game. Story-wise, I think it might be more fun to start a post 1625 game with a character who was exiled in 1613 or even earlier, or who removed themselves from most of the regional action. A lot like the returning daughter of Dronlan, the Thane of Apple Lane who died at the hands of some of the worst Lunar oppressors. Or like a certain youth from the Orlmarth who ended up as a slave in Genert's Wastes.

Are we talking about high resolution prints (like the ones you sold at Castle Stahleck) or originals?

A find like that would be from a sea port or major trading hub where charms from far away would be available. For Nochet I see troll scarabs, Islander sea-shells, Caladraland amethyst, Earth-cult copper, jade and terracotta, Storm and Lunar silver and bronze, solar gold.

Mostly correct, there are properties of the material world that derive from the magic associated with the myths. Quite often, a rule is derived from "this first happened in the Green Age". (Although, in another sense, anything happening the first time is a Green Age transition from undefined to defined. Thus the first application of Death on Grandfather Mortal was a Green Age transition, inscribing itself undeletably onto the cosmic laws.) There still is a set of observable rules that form Gloranthan physics. And there are strong differences between Glorantha and the normal world we know. The changes in day length between summer and winter correspond to moderate latitudes, while the experience of the sun path is closer to the latitude of the tropic of cancer or slightly further south towards the equator. That's true for all of Glorantha, and for nowhere on Earth. As a result, nobody in Glorantha would associate the cardinal direction of south with the sun. If you want the sun to shine into your house entrance, you either greet it (facing east) or say farewell (facing west). Or you have a vertical light shaft, an interior court. The logical direction for the long stairway up a solar ziggurat built within Time would be oriented to the east, so that the priesthood mimics Yelm's re-ascent into the sky. For Godtime, there is no preferred direction of ascension based on solar movement, as all the movement Yelm did prior to his run to the Gates of Dusk was purely vertical - first descending out of Aether, then slightly rising to avoid the first arrival of the Oslir. (And afterwards downwards in steps for the cold sun disk of Antirius until it fit under Manarlarvus's dome.) The Footstool in Raibanth implies that the god rested his feet sitting on his throne in the city of Yuthubars above, usually shown in a northwestern direction from the Footstool (towards the Crater, really). That makes a southeasterly approach along the stair up to the temple atop the Footstool somewhat likely, as a supplicant would approach the god from the front (as shown on the Gods Wall). A southern approach would mean that Yelm sat on his throne facing the Celestial Court on the Spike at all times, looking up to the Glorantay. There are hardly any pieces of iron in the archaeological record that don't contain some carbon. While it is possible to de-carbonize and thereby soften wrought iron through prolonged exposure to heat in an area with little carbon monoxide and some excess oxygene, this takes quite a bit of time, fuel and hammering. Even then, you are likely to arrive at some carbon still alloyed to the iron phase. In other words, practically every bit of iron you have ever encountered is a steel. The "enchanted" steel would be hardened steel, a wrought piece of ordinary steel hardened in the carbon monoxide part of the flame to form more cementite, a hard and well-defined compound containing three atoms of iron for each atom of carbon. "Cast iron" contains quite high amounts of cementite, and is known for being brittle and not ductile enough for smithing. The only ancient culture that produced pig iron was china, where the cast pig or iron was exposed to air to lower the carbon content in order to arrive at steel for smithing. Alternatively you might be thinking of crucible steel, discovered in India and traded over long distances almost like bronze two millennia earlier, with customers like Ulfberht, the famous Frankish sword smithy of the Viking Age. Carbon content in that is high, but it is a different form of carbon than in either austenite or cementite, giving that material enough ductility to be wrought by smithing while retaining superior hardness without getting brittle. Meteoric iron usually is an iron-nickel alloy, a material that could not be reproduced prior to the industrial age, from when we also get various types of steel alloys featuring other metals, leading to plenty new properties (like stainless steel). Steel is as much a word for iron alloys as bronze is a word for copper alloys (including stuff like arsenic copper). In Gloranthan context, "steel" and "iron" are interchangeable. Same for "brass" and (cast) "bronze".

I checked, and ... not really. Best fit I got was "minutes" (twice) and "diminution".

Basically, he was one of ten warriors facing Korang the Slayer, led by Engizi (Lorion/Lorian), the Sky River Titan. Korang had an iron spear that would slay everthing, so Hard Earth sacrificed himself and trapped the spear in his body. RIP. Source: King of Sartar.

Or worse, the descendants of beasts and animated dirt.

That's what a game in Fronela is likely to look like, and possibly the Aamor story-line in Fornoar (just northwest of Rindland), too. Safelster is already a different beast with its rivaling city states and the Arkat theme. "Knights" in "Seshnela" are talar caste warriors. When "errant" that means they aren't the designated heirs of the holdings that support the cataphract equipment and stable of horses a full cataphract talar-warrior requires. Let's assume that younger (or otherwise non-heir) sons who don't want to serve under a brother and playground rival will seek distinction and rewards away from the family holdings, hoping to impress a patron - ideally the king or the High Watcher - to appoint them to some newly vacated holding. Given Guilmarn's track record to unite all the provincial ruling holdings to his person, the remaining talars are reduced to rural holdings, or secondary cities at best. While they are valued as providers of regiments to ride in the king's numerous campaigns, maintaining such regiments will stress the output of thier holdings To me (and presumably to the Rokari Watchers), men-of-all-errant sound like the worst of the Hrestoli aberrations, and need to be censured, except where they might be exploited for deeper plots of the High Watcher and his cabal. Unless they form up or join a mercenary company in the Safelstran playground. Once upon a time Greg also toted a chivalric "Army of Tomorrow", an order with 10 chapters, one of these active in Kethaela. I cannot tell whether or not these are identical with Sir Narib's Company. There is enough overlap. There is no problem taking the concept of Lunar Dart Competitions and adapting it to high ranking Tanisoran struggle for power and influence at Guilmarn's court, with the leading families represented by wives and concubines of the king and military field leaders, possibly mercantile or administrative officials in his name, too. The most influential houses in (modern) Seshnela are the Rindland families who supported Bailifes in his conquests of all of Tanisor and much of Safelster. Older ruling families lost their main titles, and probably the main lines of those houses, but many lesser lines of the same Old Seshnelan descent (as opposed to strongly Enerali descent like the Rindland nobility) and practically all of the Pithdaran familiies remained as lesser talar houses, waiting to come to some office above local level. I am very curious what happened to the Zzaburi lineages that must have existed at some previous time. The Zzabur caste started out as one of several hereditary castes. While we know about monastic sorcerers in Imperial Seshnela (like the fanatics transplanted by Jonat into his homeland), it doesn't appear like these orders could be joined by anyone of the talar, horal or dronar caste, or by men-of-all of non-zzaburi birth (if at all). The entire concept of the Man-of-All is antithetical to the Rokari sense of order. Going errant on a quest of self-insight is not at all what the Watchers encourage - they claim the sole authority for magial insight for themselves. But then, I have a slight conceptual problem with the talar caste of Seshnela practicing ancestor worship and the Rokari doctrine of complete dissolution in the state of Solace. Manifesting dead ancestors shoudl be impossible under that doctrine, shouldn't it? The Hrestoli sects apparently are fine with the concept of re-incarnation (mentioned for the Galvosti sect in the Guide).

That material was from my 1994 website. I had been exploring a possible RQ3 version of the Aeolian Church and Heortland 1616 was where and when I set my first Glorantha game. Nick Brooke and his work on How The West Was One had been an influence on that even before that game was first played, from private discussions. The ideas for using Chaosium's Thieves World boxed set for Refuge from the French magazine Tatou were part of my overall picture of Heortland, too. WHat I had to work with (phrased in accordance with how the Guide and the History of the Heortling Peoples phrase things): Belintar disappears in 1616. The king of Heortland dies in 1617 without a successor. How The West Was One had a number of characters with a back-story in Heortland. That game had been played by the who-is-who in Glorantha fandom and remained the defining work on Malkionism at least until Greg published Revealed Mythologies. Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe and Frank Stenton's Anglo-Saxon England were hugely influential on my background desgin, too. Another strong influence was Poul Anderson's "King of Ys" tetralogy in a fictional late-/post-Roman Aremorica. My own take on Malkioni chivalry was a lot less medieval than the illustrations in Genertela Book and the "What My Father Told Me" for Seshnela suggested. For all the weaknesses the 2004 King Arthur movie starring Clive Owen and Keira Knightley had, one thing I enjoyed very much was their presentation of knighthood. away from mddle to late medieval chivalry. 10 years earlier I would probably have used stills from that flick to illustrate some of the NPCs in my game. I way overshot how the Aeolians would change Heortland. In my defense, there were a number of red herrings in the two (rather short) descriptions of that place available to me, RQ2 Companion and the RQ3 Genertela Box. For my game, I wanted urban Orlanthi very unlike the Varmandi described in the Orlanthi "What My Father Told Me" (originally published in Genertela Box, also part of HQ Voices). So, however much I am tickled by seeing those ideas still in use when we have the Guide and other material to draw on, I have stopped trying to re-align all of that with current canon. Not really. You have listed all the sources I had when cooking up that soap opera for my idea of an Aeolian Heortland. Marc Galeotti and the Unspoken Word crew came up with a different take on the Aeolians, adapted to the Hero Wars/HQ1 product line and the additional revelations therein. The Esvulari homeland in HeroQuest Voices is pretty much a distillation of those ideas. Knight Fort was an addition to the Nomad Gods boardgame for the French edition (Les Dieux Nomads). There is little more recent information. The Bandori tribe and the Marcher Barons have been discussed since. My idea of using a Krak des Chevaliers lookalike as a leftover from the God Learner presence in southern Kethaela was a mix of availability of sources, superficial similarities (a fortress in a desert just outside of the Holy Country, with mainly mounted natives as opposition) and my own attempt to use soap opera interconnections between the major NPCs. One set of questions I had was What did Broyan do between 1613 and 1617? How were Kallyr, Leika and other prominent Sartarite exiles uninvolved in Sartar during that time, and out of range for Lunar assassins? I used to take that river course and the black dot on the RQ2 Companion map as my guidelines to place the fort, so your conclusons are the same as mine. That was one of my ideas, too. My own fascination for Prax has always been quite limited, but many of my contacts were very invested in Prax, and I thought that this would give them an entryway into my weave of story hooks. I had them as horse riders, without any consideration for Praxian sensibilities. If the Pure Horse Folk could survive in Prax for 600 years, and the Pol Joni for 200, then why would Malkionized Orlanthi opt to ride Eiritha's beasts? The point of the fort was to stage a reaction force to whichever Praxian raiders might try their hands at entering the Marcher Baron territory or Heortland beyond. Short of building a limes or Hadrian's Wall, that's the best any non-Praxian could achieve on the edge of the chaparral. That hatred of horses actually works in favor of the purpose of stopping Praxian raids. Every hot-head that decides to go lance to lance against these fairly heavily armored riders is one less sneaking past the fort and raiding the farmers beyond. For the warriors stationed here, it was a post where they could distinguish themselves. My old ideas were identifying the Aeolians with the Hendriki, based on the text in Genertela Book p.49. That text has since been retracted, but to illustrate how and why I came up with those ideas, here's what I worked from: Little of this has survived with the material produced on the Hendriki tribe in "History of the Heortling Peoples". Instead, the Hendriki have become the Braveheart tribe, or rather have remained true to their roots during the Gbaji Wars throughout 12 centuries of subsequent history. The text might be salvaged somewhat if one replaces "Hendriki tribe" with "Hendriki kingdom". The Hendriki mentioned in Pegasus Plateau are basically Volsaxi, the tribesmen who formed King Broyan's core supporters, and completely unlike the decription I quoted from the Genertela Box. But then, the Volsaxi tribe emerging from the Kitori wars was heavily influenced by the House of Sartar and the changes it had brought, too. I am not quite clear how good the relationship between Belintar and Tarkalor was - at least in my reading of that period in history, Tarkalor was one of the driving forces behind the assassinations of the leaders of House Norinel and its allies, in revenge for the killing of Sarotar. Belintar may have disapproved, or he may have turned a blind eye as the influence of queens, then Reverend Grandmothers Bruvala and Brengala may have gone against his own plans, and as he was allied with a rival Enfranchised House for his Dormal project. If Broyan was mainly a local leader of the tribal confederation of the Volsaxi, his exposure to Aeolians would have been limited to a few crafter families in Smithstone, a minority population in Jansholm, and possibly the ruling family in Karse and their dependents. None of those rural Aeolians of Jaransbyrig (a market town on the plateau between the Solthi and Syphon estuaries) with their mixed population that were the center of my RQ campaign in the region, except for a hefty dose of YGMV. (A community like that could exist in Bandori lands, though.) Other than the last governor-king of Heortland, Orngerin, who appears to have been a very decent Orlanthi overlord, too many of the previous governor kings of Heortland had been from Esrolia or of Esvulari stock, and a lot less patient with "Orlanthi nonsense". "Having holdings" sounds something like the Hendriki kings from the time of the Adjustment Wars might have had. For the picture of Broyan as painted post HQ1 (where he was an avatar of Vingkotling kingship more than anything else) as the City Rex of Whitewall or Prince of the Hendriki, that doesn't sound quite in character, unless it is supposed to mean that his office had a lot of tenants financing him in the region. The area between Backford and the Footprint was one of three permanent borders of Heortland where standing forces were required. The Praxian marches were another one, and so was a naval response team for the coast. My old campaign background had a Warden of the Footprint Marches and a Warden of the Isles, and whoever led the response force in Knight Fort. In the light of Backford being the religious (though not administrative) center of the worship of Belintar in Heortland, I would place a certain amount of Aeolians there in 1616. What happens after Belintar's disappearance is up to your campaign's recent history. A conquest by scorpionfolk pretty much ends all human occupation of the city, but it is unclear how many people may have made it out of the city before it fell. Any who were caught alive would have ended up as food for Gagix Twobarb, to be re-spawned as the next generation of her superior offspring. It isn't clear whether Broyan was anywhere near Backford when Gagix's forces stormed the city, or whether he or one of his lieutenants did anything to end that sorry chapter in the history of the city. Basically, that's another thing left up to you to develop for your game. It doesn't look like the Lunar Provincial governor Tatius cared about that place at all. For all we know, he may have instructed the local Lunar occupation forces to open the gates for "these allies of the Empire" (consigning the recipients of that order as well as the messengers to share the fate of the citizens). Gwydion of Sklar was one of the characters in How The West Was One, written by David Hall IIRC, part of a very nice family drama spanning several factions in that game. I really hope that @Nick Brooke and his co-authors will follow up the Life of Moonson freeform material with their How The West Was One material. I managed to get the set of characters and the referee instructions in an auction at a convention, and it has a similar web of inter-connected backstories of the characters as the Life of Moonson material. Campaign hooks galore. The text from Genertela Book p.49 that I quoted above explains why people wringing the source material available in 1994 would have Aeolians all over Heortland, rather than limited to the south and some cities. The massive rewrites for the initial Hero Wars material were tte first publication of the term "Esvulari", and subsequent exploration of the notion of the Aeolians being mainly a southern Heortland and urban phenomenon were slowly oscillating towards the information we have now. I stopped pursuing my previously published theories when I was nominated as the go-to person for information on the Holy Country during the initial phase of the release of Hero Wars. "Bishop" is one of the terms from Dark Ages Christianity that has been retired with the shift to terms like "Men-of-All" instead of "knights". But then, "Watcher" sounds quite similar to a literal translation of "episcopos"... With the caveat that I probably wouldn't use this character any more when I run a game in the region, at the time I was integrating him into my Gwydion was in position to see Belintar disappear, so he would have taken the lead of the Heortland Aeolians some time before 1615. Sklar would be the place of his birth, but certainly not where he would have received his sorcerous education or his priestly consecrations. I would picture him as one very bright youth placed with the high functionaries of the Aeolian creed, probably in Mt. Passant. If you want to use Jeff's previews of how the Esvulari are going to be presented in future supplements, he would have to be a scion of a zzaburi family of the Esvulari, a strictly endogamous caste. His parents would have been posted to a backwater, possibly as the result of an intrigue, or as the result of a patron dying and that patron's supporters being removed from the center of power in a "promotion". Gwydion would have been fostered on some bigwig with influence, and then may have been placed as a local highest authority ("bishop") in some other place with high Aeolian population. The Aeolians do recognize merit, which may have earned him the top dog position in Heortland. All of that during the reign of Orngerin the Sophisticate. Gwydion probably would have been a staunch supporter of Belintar's regime. The Aeolians in general were benefiting from the changes Belintar had wrought in Heortland, and there is little if any reason to have their religious leadership in opposition to the Godking. (Unless you find a plot element in your campaign where elements in the Aeolian community had something else going on.) I would suggest you drop any mention of Owain for Orngerin - see https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/carvak-zirian/ http://www.princeofsartar.com/comic/29-the-city-of-wonders/ https://glorantha.fandom.com/wiki/Orngerin_the_Sophisticate I don't know who came up with the name "Owain" any more - may have been David Hall, may have been myself given the Welsh origin of the name. Orngerin is probably the Orlanthi name that sounds the closest to Owain. At the very least, that gives you a nice character sketch for this NPC. Your game is starting significantly earlier than mine did - I picked 1615 to introduce the last year of an intact Holy Country. Good old Guisido de Capratis, Pasos bishop of the ancient Seshnegi Sea of Neleoswal, of the Rokari sect, was my rival in the first run of How The West Was One, played by Alex Ferguson, one of several people I had been debating on the RQ Daily. My own character was the Castle Coast bishop of the ancient Seshnegi See of Neleoswal, of the Linealist Hrestoli sect of Seshnela. Don Capratis in Nochet was introduced by MOB, also based on the work done for How The West Was One. The Capratis of Pasos and the Du Tumerines of Nolos were the leading mercantile families below the houses of Mulliam and Porfain, and their rivalry was on par with that of the Montagues and the Capulets. In my game, the mercenaries of Rikard were accompanied by a du Tumerine Rokari bishop who was very hot about establishing the See of New Malkonwal under his direction, overriding whichever local organisation the Aeolians might have had, and while Rikard himself was not a religious fanatic or an iconoclast, I wrote a number of Rokari-leaning followers of his into the setting who would confiscate Orlanthii-themed votive imagery in the Aeolian temples, preferredly those made from precious material. The Capratis family would have been quite ready to support anybody working against any DuTumerine ambition, so yes, in my game Don Capratis would be a logiical contact. How The West Was One did not have a Navigationalist sect of the Quinpolic League. That was first described in Glorantha - An Introduction to the Hero Wars, and picked up in HeroQuest (1st edition) and Men of the Sea, and finally in the Guide. Any mercantile house of Nolos or Pasos is more likely to be navigationalists than orthodox Rokari, but that wouldn't stop them from getting some minor kin supplied as wizards for the Rokari College. A good mercantile empire will have family in many a faction. Vancelain is another character from How the West Was One, IIRC. The Guide presages a Seventh Ecclesiastical Council for 1625, but unlike the Reaching Moon Megacorp version it won't be hosted on neutral ground in Sog City, Fronela, but in the bastion of Rokarism, Leplain in Tanisor, and the atmosphere there will be quite different from the experience of the Freeform. None whatsoever, other than my campaign notes influenced by HTWW1 and exchanges on and off the RQ Daily around 1994, and whoever thought those notes to provide a playable background for the region. They would need Belintar firmly in possession of Heortland and Esrolia. King Andrin of Heortland was slain in 1317 (or early 1318) and returned from the dead a year later, starting shenanigans in Heortland that would lead to the exodus of Colymar from the upper Solthi area - not that far from Backford. The Fish Roads requires a temple in Nochet as its terminus, and while the entire city area of Seapolis in the Righarm Isle acts as the terminus (or at least as the dry part of the Fish Road), I tend to think that at Backford it would have to be a temple directly on the river, and I don't think that such a temple would have existed earlier. Normally I would say that such a temple doesn't get built overnight, but Belintar has a track record for raising sacred buildings by magic while his woshipers watch. Still, 1318 was an extremely busy year for the Godking, starting with him digging the New River to re-connect the Creek-Stream River with the Sea after blocking it with the remains of the Lead Serpent summoned by the Nightdragon Society in defense of the Only Old One. Establishing the Fish Road may have been an atonement for blocking the mythically most important river from supplying Magasta's Pool, as the road towards Deeper and beyond into Magasta's Pool offers another carrier for energies maintaining the seal on Jotimam. The Syphon branch may have been an afterthought to that. The Fish Road between Loon Island (upon which lay the City of Wonders) and Seapolis may actually have pre-existed Belintar's victory over the Only Old One. In that case, the Nochet branch and the Deeper branch may have been additions after the fall of the Obsidian Palace. The Syphon branch would certainly have been established within Belintar's first incarnation. I would estimate that it was operational by 1620 at latest, and 1617 at earliest. The Aeolian temple in Nochet lies outside of the city, but right in the middle of Meldektown, the Aeolian/Malkioni quarter of the city. On the other hand, my versions of both Karse and Jansholm have their main temples inside the walled parts of the city. For Backford, it depends how well entrenched an Esvulari presence would have been prior to Belintar's ascension and his appointments of Esvulari as overseers over the unruly Storm Sixth. While the Durengard Scrolls in History of the Heortling Peoples attest an Aeolian population in Leskos, the travelogue remains silent about Aeolians in Backford, while mentioning the salt gardens established there by the Hendriking kings. (p.63) To me, this sounds like the Esvulari presence takes a significant upturn with Belintar establishing his temple here, and that makes a proximity of the Aeolian quarter and their temple likely. I wouldn't expect a shared temple, though - at least not if there are enough Aeolians here to warrant a bishop important enough to succeed as the leader of the sect. There is one other potential posting for an Aeolian bishop to succeed as the leader of the sect - the City of Wonders. I haven't seen any population numbers for the place, but I think it would have been a metropolis, at least before the 1616 plundering. As such, it may have housed an Aeolian community in the thousands, possibly stronger than the Nochet presence.

It makes me think of Waha the Butcher or Foundchild, and what happens to the spirit of the butchered beast after receiving the Peaceful Cut. The proximity of a Thanatar shrine nearby is a marked contrast or contradiction of this principle.

Assuming that you deposit your ransom in actual cows, as per the backstory for the "Cattle Raid" scenario in the Colymar Adventures Book in the GM Screen package you may end up herding those cattle for the temple, still harvesting their milk, and even some of their offspring. But then, what happens when (not if) disaster strikes your local temple? Your pre-paid ransom may be gone. You might have to wait for your temple to regain the wealth (putting you to work to make that happen), or you might have to accept spells or training you did not mean to acquire in the first place just so that you don't make a total loss. Your status in the clan (or rather your household's status in the clan) depends on whether or not the clan chief, advised by his clan ring, will renew your current holdings to your group in the Sacred Time Remaking of the World. They will probably let one case of needing to pay ransom for you slip without taking a look at your status. Maybe more than once if those times you need ransom happen on clan business. (There is no qualitative difference between having to pay your ransom to get you back out of involuntary guesting with others or having to pay for wounds or deaths you caused. Both will cut into the clan's resources if you don't have your own contribution to offer.) If such occasions pile up, your standard of living may drop from free to semi-free. That might mean you still keep that freeman's holding, but your household's taxation to the clan temple goes up so much that your discretionary spending is gone. (Much like having activated a private health insurance...) Your household will usually involve your immediate family (or in-laws, other than your children, if your character is the one who married into the household). So, whatever you do, always think of the children. Delivering a ransom to another party may be an activity fraught with danger. Even if the recipient of your ransom is less likely to just take the wealth without acknowledging your payment, other parties who may be potentially unfriendly to your party or their cause don't have much reason not to claim the wealth for their own if you deliver the wealth yourself. It pays to pay the premium for an independent, well-connected middleman to deliver the wealth to the intended recipients. Your party or clan may still provide some of the security to make sure the wealth arrives where it should (that helps keeping the middleman honest, too). One way I have tried to acquaint players unfamiliar with the concept of ransom is to have them involved in delivering a ransom. Possibly in gathering enough wealth in the short term to get the problem out of the world as soon as possible. It is also a good way to confront them with a (hopefully recurring) villain or at least strong rival in a stressful but peaceful situation. If it is about bringing a hostage back home, make that your uncle, cousin, older brother, or your rival inside your community. Neener niner, and all that... Imagine you are playing an Ernaldori party from Clearwine constantly in the shadow of the exploits of Vasana, Harmast and Yanioth, and rather than going to Argrath they had to turn towards Clearwine to get out of that pickle with Gunda the Guilty.

Maybe this is a bit of a quandary - Seshnela could easily be pimped up to cater to teenage boys' wet dreams, sold in a special brown paperback envelope because of the scandalously low necklines around the navel. All together entirely economically viable, if you look at the sales of the HBO Game of Thrones, or how well the Spartacus series sold. The Rokari way as something to die for to that clientele might be a hard sell, though. "What do you mean - the talars get to cosy up to lots of topless chicks, and the sorcerers may look but never touch?" The Western novels by Greg are as focused on the men-of-all as is the Pendragon roleplaying game. Peasants remain something like non-entities - there might be a few roles for worker caste individuals from urban backgrounds, where the fourth caste can aspire to some wealth and influence. Playing a game of beast-totem infantry samurai serving with the heavy cavalry of the nobles might be problematic, too. But a Horali may end up with more personal magic than a Talar. How to sell this kind of setting to the non-adolescent-male clientele, though? How would a RuneQuest game centered on Seshnegi females look? Female horali bodyguards are available in Martin Helsdon's description, so a martial angle would be covered. Worker caste dress-makers, cooks or perfumers, possibly with criminal connections, might be a go, too. Sorcerous enchantresses can only do their thing in secret, a bit like in Mage, or one would have to play a woman making it into the Rokari orders hiding her sex. This leaves the noble ladies, who don't get to ride around in cataphract armor but do get to look decorative. On the other hand, they may get talar suitors doing their bidding.

And their rebel opposition, the Comm-Issaries?

It was Naimless who released the fire elemental.

There is a difference in that many of the errata have been worked into the translation.

Happens all the time in the real world... That way, the player character future parents can also go shopping for the maximum affordable blessing for their kid.

There is an entire main road with blocks around it hidden behind Issaries Hill. Getting something akin to Streetview inside Jonstown would be awesome, and I wish I had time to start modelling this (or Boldhome) in Sketchup to get at least the outlines of houses as a basis for sketches of such views. But then, that's way beyond the scope of a short presentation of a tribal federation city. I wonder whether there is some info on where my Torkani rural clansfolk characters would have to go to find their resident tribal representatives to help them with whichever legal or administrative problem they want to solve.

Even though Gloranthan history has been only about 1625 years, its prehistory is worth millennia of cultures - even the Vingkotling era of middle Storm Age started about the amount of 5000 years ago. That means that grain cultivation (if not as a human achievement, then as gifts from specific goddesses) may well be more ancient in Glorantha than it is on our planet. On the other hand, having a goddess as the guardian and guarantor of a seed and its growth patterns will lead to a lot more static breeds, and less ongoing cultivation, except for new hero(ine)s and goddesses introducing new types of grain. Winter, on the other hand, appears to be a comparably recent phenomenon (or maybe just a comparatively recently returned phenomenon). First came the Flood(s), then the Glacier expanded in a major way, forcing the concept of winter onto the world - especially Brithos, Fronela and Peloria. There doesn't appear to have been winter (or other such turn of seasons) during Yelm's stagnant reign, but then we know that the Yelmic Sunstop in the Golden Age was the result of him usurping power from previous, apparently phasing White Goddesses who were all about cycles. While Valind is a fairly young god (third generation Storm), Himile, the god of cold, is one of the oldest deities outside of the Celestial Court. The entire concept of the turn of seasons is sort of anathema to the static reign of Yelm. Murharzarm's reign at least could have had a cycle of floodings based on the tides of the tamed Oslir River. When the Neolithic farmers migrated from Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent into the lower Danubian lands, the climate was warmer than it is today. Somewhere just east of the Pannonian basin, the expansion of these farmers stopped for a few centuries as the farmers had to come to grips with the stronger shift of seasons in the less warm lands beyond. Overcoming this obstacle was a major achievement, almost a second neolithic revolution, as it allowed the farmers to occupy previously unsuitable climate zones, and it also allowed them to stay in that region when the climate grew colder and real seasons started to haunt the farmers all the way to the edge of the Fertile Crescent. The Brithini, the later Anaxial emperors of Dara Happa, and the Hill Barbarians all were confronted with the expansion of Valind's Glacier and the turn towards a colder climate. The lands closer to the Glacier would have had to cultivate either faster growing summer cereals (like barley), or they would have had to switch to autumn sowing to give the plants some late year growth and a head start towards ripening in the following seasonal cycle. But then, such cycles could have been around before the Yelmic Sunstop.

If the refugees wish to sail into the neighborhood of Waertagi again, and not into the east, where the East Isles, Maslo and Lur Nop for Kralorela are within reach. Originally,I thought escaping to the west would be it, but then I looked at how fragmented Seshnela had become, and I noticed that the Pasos islands might have an escape route directly north. A largely unknown and untested route, but that goes for their pursuers as well.

Metal is the Made form of the elements. It should be a form rune, alongside Beast and Plant. HeroQuest 1 called it "Mineral" and extended the concept to crystals and any non-living, somewhat solid or at least manually tangible stuff (with one metal and possibly a few "minerals" being liquid, and possibly some vapors or smokes or other such aerosols eligible as having a mineral nature, too). While we can show the elements in a plane, I think that forms like plant, beast, spirit, or mineral would be properties orthogonal to that plane, and maybe not diametrically opposed, but at least opposed to one another. An alchemical system might still project such a duality or ternality onto the same plane as the elements.

Thanks for remaining with me, David. You make it sound like there are no runes in the spirit world. Why? The Spirit Rune possibly describes the entirety of the spirit world, but at the very least, form runes are used to differentiate between groups of spirits. Elements and elementals may be only spirit-adjacent, sharing some traits (which sort of curves back to whether bound elementals offer the same benefits as bound spirits in the discussion we started from). Runes (or at least what they stand for) are present and foundational in the theist world. And they are certainly part of the sorcerous/philosophical/humanist approach of understanding Glorantha. Many gods are nearly indistinguishable from Great Spirits, and vice versa. Then there is rune magic that comes through certain spirit cults. Is such magic a spirit thing? Is it from outside of the spirit world? From talking about such things with Greg (admittedly when he proselytized the "Three Separate Worlds" dogma), the spirit world is directly tied to and descending from the Ultimate, which makes it Real and relevant, even if it may be changeable or even capricious. In shamanism this is a dual effect. First the event causes Soul Loss, part of your spirit/soul leaves with the trauma. Would that part of the spirit/soul still be a thing that might be recovered, captured, possibly united with something else? Is spirit integration necessarily a voluntary process? Voluntary by both parties? Looking at e.g. RQ3 ghouls, this doesn't seem to be the case. While the ghoul spirit certainly is eager to merge with the corpse, the thingness of the corpse is at best indifferent to the concept of becoming a ghoul, but in all likelihood opposed to that. I think that a chaos taint would be very much something with a representation in the spirit world. A chaotic feature even more so. Either becomes grafted on the recipient (spirit), becomes a feature of its identity. Both these examples are from the extreme end of possibilities. Are there things in the Spirit World that cannot be bargained with? The Bad Man?

Machine intelligence will be born with extelligence, something humanity only acquired gradually (whether as oral tradition, writing, or modern multimedial record-keeping). It might already be possible to create machines with enough of a heuristic set of decision-making that could create copies of itself, at least if fed with sufficient amounts of basic resources, and to modify these copies, comparing performances and possibly elevating a variation as a new standard. If such an entity was given the power of resource extraction, one would have designed a von Neumann-probe. Trying to deactivate that might trigger improvements that prevent deactivation. Such an entity would only be partially material, and might well hide away virtual versions of it as backup against such interference. So yes, let's try designing something like that. What could go wrong? Rights are something we assign to entities which get assigned something like dignity. (Unfortunately, we include corporations in such entities... also states, religious organizations, political organizations.) The case of corporations shows that we are already beyond reserving rights for actual living beings. Corporations are (not yet?) identified with material objects, only associated with such. We allow them to hold and control resources, ideas, cultural content, and we allow their assigned attorneys and directors to influence the lives of humans. UAVs are the present, already. Decisions are made by heuristics. Self-driving cars, or machine-optimized trains... Such systems don't have anything like a consciousness, yet. Drones aren't part of the controlling heuristic's identity, if that heuristic got copied onto that drone. "Experiences" (i.e. weighted decision trees created while in operation or at least training that served to optimize performance) might still be reproducable. They might still be something similar to our limbs, or the limbs of an octopus, if sufficient amounts of telemetry are fed back to an external system of much greater capacity controlling such units. Such a system will have (programmed) values - biases what outcomes are to be achieved, what outcomes are to be avoided. And overrides to avoid situations where the system running public transport decides that all timetable problems go away if it doesn't let passengers enter or leave any more. (Similar decisions have already been made by humans running trams...) Without a sense of identity and conciousness (if only at animal level), I find it hard to consider rights of an artificial item. Our definition of consciousness is linked to body experiences, a sense of "this is me" and "this is not me any more". (Admittedly, prosthetics, like e.g. automobiles, can become an extension of self. But then we are talking the rights of the organism extending into such a device rather than rights of the device itself.) If we ever get to create virtual realities where isolated systems run a portion of the simulation, those isolated systems might have the chance to develop a sense of self, and possibly something resembling consciousness. Lifting such a system into operating machines interacting with the real world might pose a situation where machine rights may become a thing, alongside animal rights or ecosystem rights. Once we get around assigning such entities a dignity, we start talking about individual rights. Not there yet... "Intelligence" is a hard to grasp term. And it may be independent of "consciousness". We are a tool-using culture, and we are constantly improving our tools. Letting a tractor with sufficient amounts of sensors and a good programmable heuristic tend a field with "smart agriculture" still is a tool.

Looking at the very nice Jonstown map previews, I was surprised at the mesa-like structures of the Jonstown hills - those slope symbols used by Greg in his original map can be interpreted as something else than vertical inclines. For comparison, look at the original map of White Bear and Red Moon, which has just slopes outlining the hill territory of upland Sartar, and compare the William Church map in RQ2 or the more detailed version of it on the Dragon Pass game board which resolves those hills into lots of slopes of varying inclinations. We know about some mesas in the region - Pegasus Plateau and Larnste's Table being the most prominent. Whenever I see a relief - whether in person, or on a map - I wonder what forces would have created this landscape. (Blame my early school experiences for a fascination with glaciers, maps, and how one leads into the other.) Relief is created by the forces of orogeny - forces which push up or deposite elevations - and forces of erosion, and occasionally major cave-ins (or dragons taking to the wings, or giants rising up) leaving depressions. The primal force of orogeny in the region was Larnste, the Soul Arranger. He had been given the job to erect a mountain range to deal with the conflict of two peoples - some sources talk about strife between Aldryami and Mostali, but it might as well have been giants and dragons. The way Larnste sowed the Rockwood Mountains was not how the forces of stasis would have imagined that, though - rather than isolating the two populations from one another, he split each of the communities with the mountain ranges, allowing them to develop on their own, furthering change. Later on, the gap he left (known as the greater region of Dragon Pass) became a center of traffic, another expression of the Movement/Change rune. Larnste fathered Kero Fin by pushing her mountain seed especially deep into the earth. From these extra deep roots rose the highest peak of all of the Rockwood Mountains, isolated because Larnste became fascinated with the Dragons and Dragonewts. He might have helped provide the immature dragons a way to become True Dragons despite their neotenic birth, introducing them to gradual change rather than the normal draconic way of emerging with the full birthright of a dragon. Kero Fin started out as a solitary peak, but she was successfully courted by Veskarthan (Lodril) multiple times, and their children pushed up out of the earth around the Mother of Mountains. Their mightiest son towards Prax was Quivin, who grouped a number of siblings, offspring or other followers around him, forming the Quivin peaks. Quite a lot of lesser peaks arose around Quivin. Some were visitors who remained, like Thorgeir's Cow. Others may have been less successful siblings or offspring, pushing up but never quite breaking through, or pushing up and then facing unfriendly neighbors. And a few may have taken the ancestral inheritance from Larnste to heart and roamed the area as giants or their livestock, or they left the region. Similarly, newly hatched dragons - the foremost of the dragonewts who had hastened through their developmental cycles - would lay down between such peaks, meditate for a few centuries or millennia (as far as that makes sense for the cyclical experience of Godtime), and then gathered the lands around them to take to wings in a much grander stature than they started with. Some would settle down again, and enter another period of meditation, often confused with sleep or even death by the lesser beings crawling across them. But most draconic ranges would have awakened during the EWF, when draconic energies converged on this region, and humans actively sought to awaken these entities or to become one with them. Some few humans succeeded as individuals, others as collectives. One of the later feats of orogeny was initiated by Larnste again - when he stamped the squirming PreDark monster Krarsht, the shock did not only leave his footprint in the geography of Heortland, it also pushed up a range of mountains between Quivin and his brother whose original name we do not know, but whose corpse we know as Stormwalk. That range became the accepted border between Tada's kingdom and the lands of the husbands of the Earth Queens in and around Ezel, and both sides built these up higher - by magic, or - for a bit of the Sambari Pass - even by stacking slabs of rock into a wall. (This may have been in connection to Orlanth commisioning Aedin's Wall around his Storm Village in the Storm Realm.) All that point force lifting up the crust of the Earth Cube did raise quite a bit of that away from the deeper layers, and may have left behind hollows. Fossil evidence e.g. from the descent into Snake Pipe Hollow proves that all the upper bedrock away from the volcanic or otherways basaltic peaks pushing up transformed deep material once had been underwater. However, even during the highest extent during the Flood Age, the Storm Gods had kept this area free from sea coverage, which means that those fossils must be way older, from before any myths of gods, giants or dragons of the land. The merfolk tell legends of how Bab, the cube of food and nourishment, formed and then rose inside the primal waters. Even as the Earth grew, taking in raw Creation from the Chaosium, the Seas and its earliest beings partook of it, wore off the living matter and then excreted the stuff they would take little or no nourishment from, forming the layers of limestone, possibly depending on cycles of marine life development, sometimes depositing reddish stuff rich in ochre, at other times leaving white or gray stuff behind dominated by chalk. And these layers would sometimes have been deposited on the backs of tendrils of water boring deeper into the rich nutrients generously provided by the Earth. And so, tunnels filled with water may have been present inside that surface material even long before the cube broke free of the upper end of the Sea, starting the Green Age. That way, we don't even have to wait for rainfall and resulting leeching of that toprock for cavities to have formed in that material. Come the Earth Shakers, huge hulking beasts stomping down on these surfaces, causing many a cave-in while leaving other such elevations intact. Such massive cave-ins following now collapsed tunnels are the best justification for limestone mesas like those shown for Jonstown that I can come up with. Water erosion doesn't quite cut it this way, and glacial erosion doesn't usually leave mesas. These mesas being pushed up later doesn't look right, either - however rounded, new mountains rise up as phalluses, not flat top-heads. The access tunnel to the old hill-fort is nifty. I would guess that Sartar had it built. I do wonder why the city expansion did not make use of that nice upper mesa. Is that some sort of sacred pasture? In any case, it looks like a patch of very secure pasture - no way to raid any cattle grazing here. Where does Jonstown get its water supply from? The upper mesa might serve as a catchment area for cisterns under the hill fort, and the lower city might have wells. The Issaries Hill houses would need a cistern, too. Most houses seem to have sensible slanted roofs to push any rainfall to the sides of the houses. The bottom floor masonry, upper stories timber and filled frames (possibly bricks, possibly masonry, possibly wattle and daub) does look faintly like the oldest still standing parts in ancient European cities, but function does define form and material. The southern wall is in a state of bad disrepair, and so does an area inside the walls south of the main city gate and north of those gaps - possibly the consequences of a fire, or siege engines/magics. Any post-Dragonrise uprising would probably have been staged from the inside of the city. I don't see any events like Flashman in Kabul with a strongly reduced remaining garrison that was spared duty at the New Temple dedication (at the time probably left here as punishment for bad behavior or at the very least for slacking, missing out on the sacrificial feasts), which makes me wonder what force would have attacked the walls of the lower city from the south. I hope we will get a map for the part of the city north of Issaries Hill - it is all hidden in the isometric view.

I am trying to figure out Glorantha, though, where Illusion is temporary reality with as much thingness as permanent reality while the temporary thing exists. Stuff that fades into and out of Time. A ray of light, a cloud of shadow, a clap of thunder, a push of force? In Glorantha, I would think these have thingness. A route regularly traveled - whether the Sunpath, a road, a herd's trail, Waha's Trails into Genert's Wastes, the trench left by the Block in the Devil's Marsh, or Ronance's ley lines between Oases. But then, there appears to be a practice of integrating spiritual things (or actual spirits) into one's self. Aren't passions something like this, at least potentially? Terrible events bring a long "pools of" awe, terror etc, and some of that latches on to at least some of the witnesses.