Joerg

You are of course right, Balance is one expression of the Lunar power. A giant hummingbird wouldn't necessarily be much longer than the Goddess herself, but it was visible from all over the battle field, so it should have had at least a certain size.

Fossilized water, aka salt, some of that toxic ash from Oakfed's wildfire that eradicated even the Redwoods of the original Praxian savannah, carried in by seasonal "serpents" and then evaporating. The place is not a salt plain like in Utah, but the soil is permeated with the potash and brine. And that happened after the Storm Bull received all of the life that had been in the soil before. IMG there is a small trade in salt from the Dead Place for embalming corpses - the lifeless soil will even stop Darkness from rotting corpses.

The Crimson Bat is the sorry remains of the Rinliddi Bat goddess (the death-bringer) which was flayed by Arkat during the last weeks of the siege of Dorastor or so, fielded by desperate defenders. Whether it has any follicles left or whether those are writhing tendrils or tentacles is up to your personal preferences in horror. Neither can we say what that membrane between these elongated finger bones are - in case of doubt, they might be solidified moonglow rather than skin. I am not informed where the Rindliddi Bat God encountered Chaos enough to make its maw an entryway into oblivion. It might have taken a load of surplus Chaos off Teelo Estara.

Why did you not use the mirror rune, ?

Luck clearly is the lower half of Fate.

At the First Battle of Chaos, the followers of Teelo Estara perceived their re-appearing goddess riding a giant hummingbird instead of the Crimson Bat. (A fact that makes me somehow puzzled about the bat imagery in their commemorative coins.) Given the Lunar association with insanity, many Lunars might think that sanity is overrated.

Which Dark are you talking about, Nick? The Monkey Kingdom was a Golden Age empire, when the monkeys told the newly introduced humans the mores of civilization and city-building. It all happened under the watchful gaze of Brighteye, not somewhere huddled in the long night.

Last Word of Jeff had the Aeolians practicing close endogamy in their three castes (talar, zzabur and commoner, with every caste taking up arms as required). While there may be the occasional Malkioni or Orlanthi convert joining one of their castes, there don't seem to be any efforts to attract new worshippers. Possibly owing to the fact that the local Orlanthi worship may act as additional lay worship to their temples? The Marcher Barons apparently uphold a tradition of heavy horse-mounted cavalry, possibly with Western style armor and tactics. Whether they (or at least their nobles) are Aeolian or traditional Orlanthi may differ from case to case, as with the Bandori tribe or the rest of Esvular. As a rule, it is a lot more likely for noble Aeolians to be able to own and maintain a cavalry-trained horse and the associated personal armor than for Aeolian commoners, and ditto for the local Orlanthi. Baboons can teach humans about reaching their human ancestors, which means that Nick has a point about being taught about religion. But unless there is a branch of storm baboons, that exposure doesn't quite explain how and why they turned to the Storm as amendment to their Zzaburi ways.

The ancient Dara Happans used a different Sky creature than horses to do their heavy pulling: Gazzam, aka Earth Shakers, IMG the fluffy downy kind. As far as I can recall we never discussed either harnesses or heavy gear operated with the help of those, although the Mostali turning the Capstone on Jrustela seem to have workable dinosaur harnesses.

While parentage of a deity may be mutable, there are a couple of different parentages for various expressions of Lhankor Mhy. The Theyalan version has LM as the son of Acos and Orenoar (the Power Rune deities of Stasis and Truth) or of Mostal and Orenoar (Mostal as the "son of Acos"). The Dara Happans have Buserian as a son of Yelm, though not necessarily a Planetary Son of Yelm, and thus a brother of Reladivus Kargzant (as the Planetary Son of Yelm for the Southeast). He is the city overseer of Senthoros, the near (or lower) Eastern City of Murharzarm's Decapolis, and thus associated with the Arcos Valley. There is a Malkioni version of Lhankor Mhy which is Tadenit, the Founder of the Tadeniti tribe of Danmalastan, the inventor(s) of writing. Tadenit is one of the six Founder sons of Malkion, by an unknown minor or local goddess of Danmalastan if his brother Waertag is a sensible template. There is at least one Eastern Parloth god of writing (possibly duplicated in Kralorela and Vormain as one of the local entities, or as heroic mortal sages on their path to ascension) though not (yet) explicitely for Teshnos or some of the greater East Isles civilizations except possibly as mortal sages who out-saged mortality. The Doraddi don't seem to be literate (any more - their Golden/Storm Age Tishamto civilization is bound to have had some form of literacy), but the Fonritians certainly are a literate culture. No idea about the Thinobutans - they are a bunch of refugee cultures. The Kimotans construct ginormous earth glyphs changing their mutable landscape, so maybe they are the heirs of advanced Thinobutan literacy. All of these are writers or Knowers, and as such aspects of Lhankor Mhy. One writer in particular is as much a good fit as a bad fit for Lhankor Mhy: Zzabur, the Sorcerer Supreme, master of (applied) Knowledge (aka Sorcery). Discuss!

Ward Against Weapons requires the intensity of the spell to overcome the incoming damage. In case of a critical, the incoming damage tends to be well into two digit territory, for which the typical Ward Against Weapons will have a bad chance to work.

None, really - it was human dragonfriends who did so, and less draconically aligned EWF citizens provided worship to empower the effects of the dragon dream aka Proximate Holy Realm. Dragonewt activity would re-inforce human dragon magic, and possibly vice versa. It isn't quite clear what the dragonewts got from the EWF, and what they may have wanted from it. For a while, the dragonewts thrived and possibly even multiplied, creating new nests throughout the EWF, including Ormsland in Ralios (even with an Inhuman King of its own, like Ryzel in Maniria, at least until Alakoring Dragonbreaker slew it permanently and apparently prevented any replacement from awakening) and Peloria/Dara Happa. Those northern nests were all destroyed when the Dara Happans threw off the reign of the Dragon Sun Emperor and allied with Carmanians and recently liberated Sairdites against the dragonfriends. The Dragonkill on the other hand may have been an accumulation of draconic energies beyond anything previously experienced. The presence of so many dragons may have had beneficial effects on the development of the surviving local dragonewts. As far as I can tell, no human scholarly records exist about the overall mystical advancement of the dragonewts in the region. Some weirdo tailed or winged priest might have an idea. Whether such an individual would communicate those ideas with non-dragonewts is yet another question.

Sheep. Maybe weird-looking, but sheep. Think of the water associatiion via Heler. And think of the non-food, non-wool, non-landscaping uses of sheep. Slightly more serious: Mastakos probably would use river horses.

These are two magical steeds owned by Mastakos, and may or may not be actual sky creature horses. Given the fact that already Harmast's kin has settled this location (as farmers), I think it a safe assumption for there to be an aquifer fed by the meltoff from the Storm Mountains reliably feeding local wells throughout most of the year. Barbarian Town is not an oasis as it is not part of the drylands but of the wetland eastern foothills of the mountains. There being reliable wells may explain its role as a trading town. The trasients would be the herder portion of the tribe. The cattle are standard Orlanthi cattle bred with a magical Pentan steppe bull Derik liberated from the Opili horse nomads some time after the Battle of Quintus Vale. These two statements are true, but IMG not causally connected. IMG Barbarian Town does have agriculture. For most of its recent incarnation, the Pol Joni have warded off other Praxian tribes from occupying the place, and the recent influx of Dundaelos refugees would have increased that agricultural portion of the population. Praxian herds entering here need a lot of guards to avoid being slaughtered or sold off. The only role Jaldon played in the establishment of the Pol Joni town was that his great raid had aggravated Derik Pol Joni enough that he quested mightily to put that ancient recurring hero to rest again. While the Pol Joni ride with Jaldon in the Barbarian Horde in the WBRM / Dragon Pass boardgame, that is a way more recent reincarnation/summoning of the hero, I don't think that Jaldon would be welcome in the town. The Pol Joni practice nomadic pastoralism and rarely bring their herds to town. They roam the Pol Joni March, comprised of the Good Place and the Better Place, the area where the seasonal streams die off in the dry season, with the cattle probably following the furthest extent of their water-bearing portions as that recedes. The pasture is year-round fertile (to Praxian standards). The people of Barbarian Town are in the same position as the Marcher Barons further south, east of the Bandori tribe. The Pol Joni tribe is a source of breeding mares (horses, not zebras) for the Zebra Riders to breed their infertile cross-breed cavalry zebras, and it is likely that they provide the same service to the Issaries mule breeders, who may have some donkey herds for fertilizing such breeding mares with mules. Dorasar found his zebra-rider ally Olgkarth among the Pol Joni when he collected allies for the construction of New Pavis. There might be some donkey breeders in Barbarian Town, and zebra riders bringing breeding war zebra stallions may be a common event, too.

Spacecraft freely entering planetary atmospheres is a standard trope in less hard SF. Escaping the rocket equation is theoretically possible by using external sources of energy to produce lift, e.g. focussed electromagnetic beams or fields creating a virtual space lift. Starting and landing beams collected in the equivalent of solar sails could allow vertical take off and landing. There are cheaper and more easily constructed alternatives to space lifts, like e.g. railgun sleds. Isaac Arthur has an episode where the sled's rails are upheld dynamically by a high-speed circular cable beneath these rails using the direction change at the end of the loop to produce enough force to counter the gravitational pull of the planet. Or space bolas, basically docking facilities slung down into the upper atmosphere at the rotaitonal speed of the planetary surface to enable aerial docking, then moving up with the rotational momentum, to leave the docking module when the vessel is at a convenient angle and start velocity. The losses in rotational energy would be re-filled either using rockets or beamed electromagnetic energy.

Maybe the ship's figurehead? At least that's what the wolf pirate ships are famous for.

Some of Isaac Arthur's concepts are for our technology level (but great commitment).

Check out some of Isaac Arthur's series on megastructures for more ideas:

Orthodox Mostali are encouraged, nay, required to develop a personal hobby project for part of their downtime. That extravaganza may define them as much as their job function. Not quite - you need the INT capacity to manage that much manipulation, or a lot of POW sunk into Engravings of that spell.

Cold-resistant tubers sound like something of great nutritional interest to the Gopher people of northern Pent.

To my knowledge, nothing heavier than a chariot is pulled by horses in Glorantha. The heavy work for wagons or plows is left to oxen or water buffalo while lighter work is given to donkies or mules. I remember seeing an interesting plow team (I think from Egypt) consisting of one donkey (working on the unplowed side of the furrow) and one camel (on the plowed side of the furrow), the donkey for maximum grip and the camel for minimum soil condensation, but I have no idea whether anything similar has ever been considered in Glorantha.

Rather than a grain goddess, I see Thed originally as one of the animal mothers like (the daughters of) Eiritha or Nevala (the sheep mother). Thed is obviously connected to goats, possibly originally with some of the Vadrudi tribes. Broo are the offspring of Ragnaglar and Thed when both of them were regular deities of their respective categories. Non-chaotic Broo early in the Storm Age were little different from Storm Bull's Minotaurs. That changed when Ragnaglar (already psydhically traumatized from his failure at initiation) and Thed (as a traumatized victim of his trauma-induced insanity) conspired with Mallia to incarnate the Devil in their collective child (Wakboth) after interpreting Rashoran's message in their revenge-ridden way. Much like with Vivamort, the question is whether such earlier not-yet-chaotic experiences of the deity can be contacted, or whether a turn to the Chaos pantheon overwrites all initiatory access to such a deity. In case of Mallia, there is a possibility of propitiative initiation bypassing the Chaos link, approaching her through her original element of Darkness. While Mallia doesn't provide herd immunity against that specific disease, she offers survival in infection, and with a herd immunity building up in naturally healing-overcome diseases or magically treated ones, being infectious at some point becomes a non-event if nobody attracts the disease any more. RQ diseases follow a simplistic scheme describing a general set of symptoms depending on the pathogenicity which comes in levels, rather than our world's mutating cell lines we have disease spirit lineages from propagation which may be less diverse and harder to ummunize against. But enough of the Mistress of Diseases and Midwife of Wakboth.

This goes for past historical records, too - i.e. don't trust any declaration that the God Learners went extinct, or what marvels there were to be had in Dorastor prior to Arkat cursing Dokat and other such Feldichi places. Possibly "again" after a prior curse (or genocide) leading to the extinction of the Feldichi (really?) was not enough. Switching into a near future in the early 1630ies: How did the Fazzurites excise Phargentes from the Sartarite records of the campaigns against Lunar Tarsh? Is this a literary (rather than physical, Mularik "helped" there) assassination of the very existence of that ingrate?

Black elves might have a love-hate relationship with these tubers - they love to infect them, and therefore hinder their regular harvest. What rivalry is there between Mee Vorala and Annilla? Possibly enough that she went on to salt-resistant rice on Melib, although there too might be a fungal disease called yellow rice mycotoxicoses.

Cuchullain had the conflicting geas never to refuse hospitality - this went far beyond social obligation, and was fate's way to announce that Cuchullain was fated to perish. A person without that geas never to refuse hospitality can do so, especially if declaring a conflicting geas (like "never eat bird on Firedays"). This does of course paint that geas as a target on the bearer, a weakness waiting to be exploited.