Joerg

butt...

Not mentioned in the session as far as I remember, but my bet would be trolls. There doesn't seem to be a campaign book for beast riders anywhere near completion, otherwise they would be a good guess. There was a rumour about a Grazelands setting, but the revised troll material has been toted for a few years now. There was an attempt to make Harrek's Circumnavigation into a campaign you could participate in, but unfortunately @Loz seems to have dropped it after RQG parted ways from The Design Mechanism. What I have played (one scenario) and heard about playtesting sounded like a fun romp. The Guide mentions the travels of Gebel, the blue Teshnan searching for the Sword of Tolat. He ends up enmeshed in Fonrit, but I can't tell whether he actually recovered the sword, or whether he may move onward. There is a good possibility for Kethaelan characters to accompany Gebel, given their presence in Dosakayo on Melib, just outside of mainland Teshnos. We are going to see at least a bit of that in the intermediate future. Likewise Harrek is going to return to Laskal, and people may accompany him. The naval campaigns between the Waertagi and the Dormalites (spearheaded by the Wolf Pirates) are fairly continent-jumping, too, and can be written in such a way. The Borg Waertagi chasing a single ship or a small flotilla separated from the rest by a GM fiat event... sounds vaguely familiar.

Not all forces of darkness were necessary fielding trolls. Personally, I don't think any but individual hero trolls ever visited the sky realms. They already call the Surface World "Hurtplace" because of its over-abundance of light. Xentha and Argan Argar have power over Shadows, entities of Darkness able to block intense light, providing shelter for darkness entities beneath. That is an awesome power - taking on the brunt of the enemy - but they seem not to possess any of the other Darkness-associated powers (Cold, Fear) other than formlessness. There is one Kalikos myth which has Himile and his frost demons invade the Sky Dome, weighing it down, until Kalikos frees it (causing or re-affirming the tilt of the Sky Dome). Again, these are incomplete darkness creatures, able to stand the brightness (reflecting it) but negating the heat. I don't think I have seen Dehori anywhere near the Sky. Not yet, at least.

Wyrm's Footprints #3 p.19 gives six "design notes" for power runes: none for Disorder (a broken circle, a twisted knot) or Illusion (everywhere where Truth doesn''t cover) Beast and Dragonewt are said to mirror a dragon's scale. Mastery is a sylized crown.

As long as the goblins have webbed feet and bills...

Unless the Aeolians use western script for their sorcery (while speaking a Theyalan language), they will be using Theyalan script, and knowlede of that is intrinsically tied to Lhankor Mhy. Mind you, lay worshiper status is sufficient to acquire literacy. If you want to assign cults to the castes, I would place Orlanth with the farmer caste (or Barntar), Lhankor Mhy with the wizard caste (those who don't actually become wizards are still likely to become scribes, alchemists or similar knowledge-based trades), and Issaries with the lord caste as the Talar caste has all this organisation and trading and diplomacy in their hands. Are the zzabur-caste worship leaders necessarily wizards, or can they be priests or god-talkers? Does a worship-leader act as the priest of the congregation's wyter? Do the wizards gain any magic points for use in sorcery from holding worship rites?

Elder Secrets tells me otherwise (Elder Races Book p.6): The Spike has been named the linchpin of the World Machine earlier. I suppose "central shaft" is yet another term describing the Cosmic Mountain. To me, this reads as a single event. The Spike is shattered at its base, Stone dies. Zzabur sends the Great Blast, the Spike shatters. Chaos invades the Cosmic Mountain, which implodes, and most of it gets swallowed by the Void. At the very least a congruence of events. Mostal himself is broken earlier, at the birth of Umath. Stone, the Spike, Toolmaker and the Mostali persist, until the Spike implodes and takes the other ones with it. What happens when a dead deity gets mostly annihilated by Chaos? It becomes unavailable for worship or anything like it. For every sleeping goddess of the land or the earth that got re-awakened, another may have been annihilated in that dormant or dead state. What happens if the Net slips in the Ritual of the Net? The attending deities get annihilated. Which are? What myths about the creation of the Earth Cube did I miss? What is Earth mythology about the birth of Earth? What is Earth mythology for the fact that rock is not fertile? Why is it that Earth elementals can only pass through soil,, or only manifest inside soil, but noth through/in rock? Do you have any myth that explains why rock does not give the bounty of Earth? What myths have been overridden? Please point me to any myths that you think I ignored or violated. Myths are made to explain the status quo of the world. That includes its petrology and palaeontology (of the kind mentioned in Snake Pipe Hollow). Viewed by someone with basic understanding in geology, The cliffs surrounding Snake Pipe Hollow shows a horizontal stratigraphy of various band of limestone, exhibiting different colors, with chalky exoskeletons of archaic sea life embedded in the sediment layers. The Rockwoods themselves have not received any such description, but we know their orogeny from the myth about the birth of Kero Fin. These mountains rose from the dry land as Larnste sowed them - if you wish, as Larnste impregnated the fertile earth, if you wish, as he planted the mountain tree nuts. He inserted Change into the land, and the mountains rose, pushing aside or up the soil and bedrock that had covered that land before. The orogeny of Blackorm Mountain nearby may be diffeent - it is known by various names, and each name has a myth to it. Thunder Rebels ties Blackorm Mountain to Orlanth's victory over Dargabon, the Storm Dragon. It is possible that the peaks at Cliffhome are the corpse of that dragon. The same dragon that Cragspider rescued from the Underworld and made her servant, the Black Dragon of Dragon Pass. If so, that orogeny does not disturb the limestone layers at Ginijji. Neither is there any evidence that they may have been caused by that dragonslaying. The depression of the Hollow may be the consequence of the Maggot excavating there, and Sky River Titan jumping down here, possibly caving in that part. But to its side, the stratigraphy remains undisturbed, althouh tunneled. The sediment is the result of a sequence or cycles of events, with different amounts of water salinity involved, or some other, possibly more oranic method of sedimenting this rock. There are no such events anywhere near this since the Land rose above the Sea. That makes the era of the Blue Age when Earth formed inside the Sea the best candidate for this arrangement for the surface structure. The Sea myth about Bab, the Food Goddess, fits this story, if you compare the limestone layers to the lime (chalk) layers of a pearl, or of the Mother of Pearl material sedimented similarly. This isn't just cumbled rock, this is sand and similar ground particles cemented together with chalk And with other stuff added to the layers, like ochre (for the bright bands of color). The facts are documented. There is a myth that helps explain the facts. What is the problem? And more to the point, what alternatives can you offer?

If you want alliteration, how about the cane calamiteuse?

They still accuse High King Elf of putting the axe to the base of the Spike. But yes, they may accuse Grower of feeding on Stone. This reminds me of the spirit entities Sandy Petersen's Pamaltela campaign encountered, beings consisting only of magic points. Perhaps Stone was of a similar nature, brimming with (stored) magic, but unable to regenerate it. The RQG rules for Truestone seem to imply a relationship like this between Truestone and magic. The Spike is well-known to have been made of (True) Stone. What else do we know to have been made of that material? Most of the Spike disappeared in that implosion, that had various culprits, including High King Elf, Zzabur, and of course the Chaos horde, and that left behind a gaping void of Chaos. The Spike disappeared into Chaos, that's nothing I made up. I do fess up on identifying Stone with the Spike - do you know another location where there was forest directly on Stone? The Cosmic Mountain is present in all the four elements (and after the birth of Umath, all five), and a substance apart. A meagre fraction of what was once there. Including the Block, maybe the equivalent to a pinky bone of its former body - enough to provide the DNA to identify the entity, but not enough to reconstruct it. (Wait, that was one of the first Denisovans discovered...) The sea deities are the only accessible ones that have witnessed the birth of Earth. Name another source I should look up, then. All Earth myths that I know start with Earth being a dry realm. (Not a perfect absence of water, but not flooded.) For the huge layers of sedimentary rock that covers most of dry Glorantha, you can either have a long history of mountains pushing up and then being eroded (and the war between Dragons and Elder Giants may provide a myth for that), or you can have sedimentation while submerged. (For limestone, the sedimentation has to happen when submerged...) There is the problem with the God Learner maps showing the flat surface of the earth with the first mountains. These appear in the Golden Age, shortly before the first river(s) invade the dry lands. I think it would be bad style to postulate mountains before the first mountains, but you may of course have the fallen bodies of dragons and giants, ground to dust, from these early conflicts, and their blood acting as the liquid medium they sedimented in. But where do the sea creatures come from? Parasites living inside both dragons and giants? Add Earth Shakers as another possible source of mineral material after their death/dismemberment. There is only one quite late period of flooding, followed by a single glaciation. Not much to derive geology from. Even worse, Snake Pipe Hollow (which has hundreds of meters of lime stone sediments) was not affected by the Aroka Sea flood, or at best peripherically. The Condor Crags appear to have remained dry in the Flood, too - another limestone formation. The "mother of pearl" hypothesis does give ample opportunity for such a crust to have formed. Do you have a better proposal for when all those marine sediments formed on the surface of Kerofinela? Ernalda's realm appears to be Earth, not rock. Earth elementals can operate in soil, will probably be able to deal with pebbles and larger pieces of rock in the soil, but are unable to operate in bedrock. Does this sound like bedrock is the domain of the fertile Earth? At a guess, a cave sacred to Ernalda will have a layer of clay or similar as its bottom. Clay appears to be the unmodified state of the Earth element. I'd expect to find that at the core of the Earth realm. Most rock will be regarded as lifeless - no longer liquefied by Lodril's heat (or that of his lesser or local expressions), not

I would rather suspect that they use the tactic of gulping down lots of water, washing in their smaller prey. For larger prey, their dentition resembles that of Polar Bears, except for the stone-crushing molars. Yes, go with a bear of similar size. Note that trollkin (who regularly chew rock) should have quite the nasty bite. Especially those trained to tunnel. Swarming trollkin may attack to grapple, then to bite. And I would give them a STR bonus for calculating bite damage.

It is reasonable to equate the Lunar side with Nysalor. All sides involved in this piece perceive the others either as an aspect of themselves, or as Gbaji. (Where the two options aren't mutually exclusive.)

Are those two approaches really that different from one another? Caste is a concept that allows different cultures to coexist under a shared umbrella culture. The coexistence of Malkioni(zed) overlords and Orlanthi peasants is a fairly common occurrance in Glorantha, only absent where troll or Dara Happan/Lunar influence is greater. The princes are a privileged caste, possibly subdivided, possibly unified (see below), having a quite different culture from the rest of the population that makes up the majority. This culture will be shared by their immediate servants or agents, at least to a degree, and some will be imitated by the "peasant" Orlanthi nobility. The Issaries cult has had ties to the Talars of the Malkioni already in Cults of Prax, where it is mentioned that Garzeen wooed Fenela, daughter of Talar Froalar and sister to Prince Hrestol. The tasks of a Talar besides exercising the command are administration and trade, both covered by the Issaries cult. Two Lightbringer cults were particularly valued by the God Learners: Lhankor Mhy and Issaries. Both deities, for all their confessed Celestial Court ancestry, may have come to Orlanth from the West. As may Eurmal. If you are a newcomer to Glorantha and read the Lightbringer's Journey, it will tell you how Orlanth is starting out from his tribe, at first with barbarian companions like his charioteer, but later more or less on foot, meeting foreigners who become his companions on his quest to bring back his wife. Oh, and the sun god, if that was required to get back his wife. I remember that I was surprised to read all those myths that have the Lightbringers (other than Flesh Man and Ginna Jar) happily share the Storm Village with Orlanth and Ernalda. That was not how I had learned about the other Lightbringer deities. That's not how they were presented in Cults of Prax (which I got after RQ3 Gods of Glorantha and RQ3 Genertela: Crucible of the Hero Wars, and RQ3 Troll Pak) or Cults of Terror. Then came King of Dragon Pass. We learned about quite a few more myths about the Orlanthi, expanding on what had been hinted at in King of Sartar. All of a sudden, the Lightbringers had been companions of Orlanth long before Ernalda was "not dead, but sleeping". Only we met Lhankor Knowing, or Harst Spare Grain. Thunder Rebels and Storm Tribe then flooded us with names of these deities - every feat of a deity suddenly received a named subcult. Which was confusing, over the top, and was discontinued already in Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes. Now it has been stated (e.g. in Arcane Lore, which is currently at discount) that deities have multiple presence - even still living heroes who receive worship do. This makes it possible for Orlanth to have know Issaries and the other Lightbringers for the entirety of his kingship and still meet the Lightbringers Issaries and Lhankor Mhy for the first time. Or you could try and understand the Cults of Prax article on Time in Glorantha, especially God Time. That one isn't easy, but whatever you take on from reading it will be enough to run a Gloranthan game. It may take repeated study of it to start creating Gloranthan myths that last outside of your own gaming table. TLDR: There is no problem claiming that Issaries and Lhankor Mhy are already somewhat Malkioni in origin. That would a) be very un-Malkioni and b) them giving up to be of the Talar caste. Talars are the administrators, including (at least foreign) trade. That's the Issaries role (next to the ruler role), and I don't think that the Trader Princes take much if any hand in actually ruling the surrounding tribes. The relationship might compare to the authority the Only Old One used to have over the Kingdom of Night. It would be a different thing to say "most Trader Princes are men-of-all". They might have cheapened that term all the way to it being of little distinction, but being of all castes has about the same effect as having no castes. This variant of Hrestol's revelation would be highly heretical to the Rokari Watchers, of course, but then the same would apply to the abandonment of castes. Likewise any dabbling with the local deities. Good thing that the Watchers are far away, and that there are bloodthirsty barbarians surrounding your fortresses (to avoid the mediaevally associated term castle).

Not as parts of the schedule, at least. The location is even closer to the neighbors than Castle Stahleck, but it has a nice old chapel which might contain the worst of the audible impact. The crowd is somewhat different, too, although there is a certain overlap. Both conventions are hubs and centers of the international Glorantha community in Germany (it helps that both Jeff and Jason are residing over here). The early days when the German RuneQuest and Glorantha community met in isolation ended in 1995 with the convention near Berlin - possibly also the last one (for a while) which did not have a Singalong. You were there... Having two such conventions is both a luxury and a strain on free time, effort and in the end money - a convention weekend costs me about as much as a short week of discounted holidays on the Mediterranean. (Not that I have been on the Mediterranean nearly as often as on one or both of these conventions.) They do promote the concept of the Glorantha tribe in a very personal way, though, and feel a lot different than a corner of RQ or Glorantha games on a larger convention. The UK has Continuum to provide a similar platform biennially, France used to have Chimeriades, and I think the Kalikos society of Finland has some sort of invitation conventions alongside their activites on Ropecon. Down Under has a similar convention. There was a short hype in North American RuneQuest conventions in the middle and late nineties, but that petered out rather quickly and has not been revived yet, unlike the Australian one. Kraken has changed a little from the original concept, I think. As a three-day event, it has a rather tight schedule again. Capped at 120 participants or so (I think about 80 resident on site, the rest nearby) it is a little smaller than Eternal Con at Stahleck. Accommodation on site is a bit nicer than the youth hostel vibe at Stahleck, and it has all-inclusive catering. Both events have become generation-spanning. Filk-wise, one experiment I would like to do one of these days would be to have an actual choir with separate voicings (if I remember what I learned about that in high school, or from band experience), possibly aided by some instruments, to study and perform Gloranthan-themed filk, or possibly even original music and lyrics. You know, like, in-tune, in rhythm, that is as fun to listen to as it is to participate in. (Our delivery of the Rhapsody intro may have been amongst the better-sounding ones, as the key factor in the Sing-alongs is enthusiasm.)

Last weekend would have seen the 25th annual convention there, if not for COVID 19, although management changed when Fabian ended the Tentacles conventions and Eternal Convention took over. Looks like Jeff was there anyway - has anybody seen the Twitch Q&A? These last years, there have been two annual Gloranthaphile conventions in Germany, Eternal Convention at Whitsun weekend, and Fabian's successor convention Kraken usually a week before Spiel, Essen in a palais in the middle of nowhere in Brandenburg. Both are quite international. Two good reasons for timing it thus - they are hard on the ears and voices, and unvoluntary audience has summoned the Police on occasion to quiet this down. Also, Daniel F can be found there dispensing suspicious drinks.

I think that the Trader Princes mightt be a harbor for less orthodox zzaburi. The Wenelian wilds are a good place to escape the attention from Segurane or other centers of doctrine.

The Spike was the main body of Stone, and that imploded and left behind the Void in the center of the world. That's a Chaos death, similar to those of Yamsur, Seolinthur, or Hard Earth (in the Skyfall myth). None of these deities are worshiped. The other dead gods you mentioned all have an Underworld presence. One might argue that Stone had that, by its very nature, but look at my thoughts on Gloranthan geology and mining. The majority of the body of Earth may be living soil, with rock only being the died-off scar tissue from exposure to other (hostile or at least overly demanding) elements, or the result of Lodril's offspring cooling down (also leaving rather dead material behind). Mountains and their rocks can be the bodies of mountain gods, elder giants or true dragons, or can be integrated into those when those entities deign to animate them (again). This seems to be a matter of these entities extending their selves, forming their bodies. Gonn Orta is still a long way from getting there. Thog's arm, torn off by the magic of the Arrowsmith zebra folk, reverted to a geographical feature upon losing connection to the giant. A similar thing happened to the Lead Hills after Belintar had slain the monster. (Note that Belintar did not damage the Obsidian Palace himself, it was the death throeos of the sepent that crushed that edifice.) The Mostali magics of endowing matter with magical power appear to be a similar concept. If you look a the "Larnste sows the Rockwood moountains" myth, there may be lesser instances of Stone in those other mountains, which would explain the Mostali custom of seeking out mountains for their colonies. Perhaps the "squirming thing" that Lodril wrestled was Stone? That merging would remove the original deity from easy worship access, too. Martaler in Gemborg may be on that.

As North Pent is pretty cold, a northern outlet may be dysfunctional most of the time. On the whole, North Pent strikes me as rather dry, with tpp little snowfall to form a glacier, and cut off from the main glacier by the aftereffects of the corridor the invading Chaos Horde left behind, cutting off any input from the main body of the Glacier. That may return gradually, but possibly only glacially slow. This doesn't stop the annual invasion or awakening of Hollri demons. They might be limited in size without decent snow cover or glaciation, or they might be able to draw upon the frozen undersoil of the permafrost. I live in a landscape where morraines are the only vertical feature. The morraines forming the Cimbrian peninsula are well weathered, though. A fresher landscape of morraines is full of bodies of open water - the marl that is created when the glacier scrapes up bedrock tends to be fairly impenetrable to water, allowing any melt-off to linger until the winds have taken up all the humidity. Those lakes and puddles don't last long, and become bogs rather quickly, unless they were formed from huge chunks of glacier cut off from the main body, leaving very deep depressions that take millennia to fill up. What you are describing there is the kind of landscape the Ahrensburg reindeer hunter cultures encountered.

hhile it is true that luxury goods from the Lunar Empire may reach Kralorela via the Red-haired Etyries caravans, Karse has been a Lunar port city for the last six years, which allowed cutting out the middlemen handling transport into Lunar-controlled area. Less so after the Battle of Pennel Ford,, true. But then, the Windstop of early 1622 must have hit the Gloranthan naval trade worse than the current Corona pandemic, as all the trade winds were dysfunctional. Deplite the bad conditions, the waters of and around the Mirrorsea Bay may have filled up with ships that had no way of returning to wherever they came from against the winds.

Depending on where they resettled that Kralori town, in Seshnela (rather westerly, not too close to the Tanier River, though). Or it was drowned with the rest of God Learner Seshnela. There are bound to be a few dojos in the former EWF region which may have Kralori-tainted bloodlines. Kralori naval merchants have contacted Teshnos and Melib, the East Isles, possibly including the Hinter Isles of Vormain, Teleos, and sporadically further ports like Westel in Maslo. The Lunar Empire had a considerable number of Kralori bureaucrats imported under Sheng Seleris, presumably with some family. A few of these may have survived the Seleric purges, and may be found in Dara Happa, Doblian and Oronin. Not in the Lunar holdouts from that period, though. I don't think there are many in the Holy Country outside of cosmopolitan Nochet and maybe Karse. The Pelaskites won't have forgiven the loss of dozens of ships when Belintar's expeditionary fleet to Kralorela was annihilated in the Suam Chow after leaving Lur Nop. Unless some were taken as slaves in retaliation, but in that case I wouldn't talk about "exile community".

That animated series, "Serengeti mustn't die" and a toy inspired 11 year old me to write a book on a discolored elephant leading an exodus of beasts with/for my little sister. Refugee heroes, a staple of all manner of myths and literature. Without any plane shifts, such stories are good Godtime templates. To make them a heroquest is to add a player character-inhabited "here and now" interacting with those patterns. Add some artifacts, story snippets, and how to activate the artifacts, and you have your big magic.

That's the myth for the deposits of metal in the soil and rock. There is a number of dead mountain entities whose bones are available for the miners. The bones are bound to be shattered and crumbled if their deaths were violent. And there was plenty violence in the Gods War. Many a river broken, many a volcano exploding, many an entity falling from the sky, at times fatally, many a dark thing welling up from below only to be burnt or hacked apart, and many a storm entity losing an arm or a leg in one of those activities. (Any metals left unaccounted for?) The most common mountain god is an aspect or son of Lodril, by whichever name he is known. But that same deity also is one of the prime suspect for mining activities, and for shaping rock and metal. One does wonder whether or how the Golden Age knew any metal, though. There is not supposed to be any strife that far back in mythic times according to a simple reading of the Monomyth. Fortunately, even the God Learner concoction presented in RQ3 Gods of Glorantha has previous conflict, like the tectonic battles between dragonkind and giantkind. There are the frequent pointers at the fact that the Solar Emperor rose to his position through strife and struggle. Entekosiad introduces Vogmaradan. The myth of Idovanus and Ganesatarus in Fortunate Succession also implies struggle from the outset. Lodril's descent into the earth is both an act of love-making (Lodril being the hot sperm impregnating the fertile Earth with Storm) and a conflict, with Lodril wrestling "a squirming thing", leaving both of them in tatters and on the brink of destruction when what remained of either merged. So, brass and tin (from Lodril), copper and/or lead (from the thing below that Lodril wrestled) or even Predark (with earlier victims attached?). The Green and Golden Age were an age of creation, and by extension also of regeneration. There may have been generous deities who maimed themselves temporarily to bring forth metal for themselves or their associates to work with. A temporary discomfort. The other subject for mining is of course how the stuff ended up underground with the need to be dug up. At times even tunneling into mountainsides or deep down, although I suppose that natural crevices or pit mines will be the typical approach to mining - not just for metals, also for stones that can be knapped, or be used as jewelry, or as pigments. Plus there is the need for salt, and there may be places producing rock salt rather than re-crystallized brine. The miner needs to know about how the crust of the Earth Cube came into being, in order to know where to dig, or he needs an entity who knows and can be asked for a Divination. Deposits imply underground movement, and forces at odds with one another. Real world geology is full of interaction with what can be identified as Gloranthan elements. Metamorphic rocks, igneous rocks, hydrothermal deposition, basal rocks, eruptive material... Heat, pressure, shock all play a role in this. And there are known forces in Glorantha that do such things, and there can be entities deducted in the interior of the Earth Cube that contribute to outcomes that reflect real world geology and geochemistry without having to learn about the real world geochemistry if the myths are somehow relatable. One of the biggest "problems" with Gloranthan geology is pretty much the same that the natural philosophers brought up in the knowledge that the univers is a bit over 6000 years old. We have hundreds of meters worth of sedimentary rock in many places, and it is layered, as the underground exploration at Snake Pipe Hollow clearly states. And that takes many many cycles of erosion and sedimentation, of areas covered by sea. Fortunately, there is a simple myth in the merman cosmology (currently out of print, in Missing Lands) which mentions that the Earth Cube was the first food, born within the vertical current of the Axis Mundi. The sea entities call the Earth Cube "Bab", the food deity, which makes it clear that for the entire duration of it being submerged (and continuing for the five sides which still are submerged), they have been feeding on it, and also left their imprint on it. The primal sea is a mollusk inside a shell of Darkness, and now a pearl grew within. As that pearl irritated the mollusk, it secreted layer upon layer of chalky matter on it. When the Earth Cube was submerged in the seas, all manner of Varchulanga's deep sea monsters welled out of the dark underbelly of the seas, the domain of Drospoly. These also include the watery children of Sokazub, the darkness animals of the seas. All manner of worms (armored ones leaving behind their carapaces), minuscule plankton with various kinds of shells like opal (a geologist term for thin sheets of silica that may sink down to form layers, in some cases the semi-precious stone mined like in Coober Pedy, in more cases aggregating into glass-like stuff under pressure that is known as flint), all manner of chalky exosceletons of things in the seas, taking their energy if not yet from a fiery sky then from the glow of the event horizon of the Chaosium where unlimited potential became - and still becomes - the stuff of Creation, and the Ultimate source of Energies at the top of the vertical vortex that would become the Cosmic Mountain after Earth had surfaced and then Sky was formed to diffuse those energies, making them bearable for the weaker entities populating the world. By the time the Earth Cube had risen out of the water, its surfaces had been bored into and secreted on many times over, leaving layers of ground material embedded in the chalky deposits, with bodies of water and darkness having intruded deeply into it, and still worming their ways into it. And Earth responded, with chthonic entities that may resemble serpents or reptiles, struggling with these intruders. The Behemoth (used as the mortal hero of the Earth Faction in Sandy's Gods War) is just one of many such antibodies in the employ of Earth to keep intruders at bay. Their movement made the interior of the earth tremble as the hardly plyable matter was condensed and shifted around. Earth Shakers, or perhaps Earth Stirrers, fully submerged. And these struggles will have seen their victims, with pieces torn off, entire sections of dead stuff left behind, including bones. Then the surface of the top side of the cube fell mostly dry, and sky inserted itself, then moved to impregnate the Earth, as the Cosmic Mountain solidified into Stone (Latsom?), the entity and substance cherished and mourned by the Mostali. Hot celestial semen pressed into cavities from previous invasions, sending pockets of water steaming into surrounding material, creating outgrowths on all surfaces of the Earth Cube. Surfaces covered by forests of coral where any light was to be had, and by protective shells of tentacled feeders creating even worse, bizarre forests growing out of the vertical walls, or down from its lower surface, into the deep undersea of Drospoly where Darkness may have solid enough pillars connecting the cube with the deeper Below that one could travel there dry. So, there is a crust of the earth, and beneath that crust there are crevices and caverns filled with all elements (possibly excepting Moon apart from places where the fallout from the inevitable crashes of each Lunar body may have seeped deeper into the body of Earth). The Earth Cube is not completely inert, and certainly was not when the outside invaded. The squirming thing that wrestled with Veskarthan, and things like it wrestling with bodies of Sea intruding as well as with the beings from the Underdark Sea worming their way into it born from Varchulanga. The Stone of the Cosmic Mountain was alive, and the lesser mountains were seeded in a similar manner - Rock was made from Earth as a kind of scab to protect the softer parts below, and a lot of the Earth Cube hardened in that process, at least around the crust where the fighting happened and things died, and also around the wounds that it received later as a result of the Breaking of the Earth and the Implosion of the Cosmic Mountain. There are still many places in the inside of the Earth which are vibrantly alive, ginormous Earth elementals, or soil full of life crawling, squirming, etc. Then a wave of entities populated the Underworld as Umath crashed into the Earth in the north. Rushing right through it to the deep Underworld of Darkness, with pieces and fragments shed on the way down, following some of the Planets that had gone before, and followed by the southern planetary son of Strength, Green Alkor, who was shredded in the same way as his victim, and became red Shargash in the process starting with him blocking the advance of the Intruder in the sky. In other myths, the birth of Storm was a hard and violent labour. Umath emerged first, pushing up his father Aether, to be followed by his sister (some say daughter) Serenha, and leaving behind an unborn third sibling, of indeterminate gender, refusing to leave the downbelow inside the womb of earth, the spirit of Deep Air, intruding into the empty womb where Aether had formed, witnessed by the Three Curious Spirits in the sidebar story in Uz Lore. There may be other wombs, some occupied by still-born or yet unborn entities, trapped there by the Compromise. WIth trapped seas sloshing around, at times squeezed lifeless, with magma sloshing around, at times cooling off, at times squeezed out to emerge on Earth's surface like a pimple pressed out (or as a phallic protrusion, and possibly both in one), all manner of metamorphosis is going on in the outer layer of earth, among the deadened scab that is rock. Dead bodies get ground up, bones shattering and cracking up, or deforming. The hot bones of the sons of Lodril may even melt, leaving an unlayered molded metal then ground up into nuggets of brass. As these fragmented pieces of godsbone are subjected to grinding, that same grinding also transports off the crushed bits, and waters permeating the crushed parts will carry them into crevices or caverns where they may drop their burden. Rock comes in various heaviness, and some of it may be as heavy as the metallic expressions of the elements, creating placer deposits - some on or near the surface, others deeper below. Placer deposits usually are covered only lightly, and can be accessed by shoveling away the "inert" (not metal-bearing) cover, or by slushing it away using the current of re-directed water. (Think Herakles and the Stables of Augias for a similar instance of clearing away the unwanted stuff.) It helps that all surface waters are kin to the rivers that hungrily reclaimed the top surface of the Earth Cube, and will pick up whatever they can before sorting it through and then discarding it in less animate passages. So, whatever you know about gold-digging as in panning and sluicing over vleeces is applicable to all Gloranthan metals except for solid Sea Metal, which floats and requires a skimming technique. There can still be soil deposits of sea metal, often side by side with amber, ambergris (which in Glorantha may come from more species than just sperm whales) and similar light minerals washed into lagoons near sea shores and trapped there over time. All solid metals will be found as nuggets or flakes, intermixed with sands rich in heavy minerals (like magnetite), in the real world used for metal smelting, or as pigments or the basis for pigments. The powers of Darkness include corrosion, and the metal may be covered in patina, or may be reduced to inclusions in almost completely corroded ores. Oxide or carbonate copper ores like Malachite may include flitters of natural copper metal even in the real world, and native copper forms when sulphide copper ores comes into contact with oxygenated water before oxidation contines further into these oxidic ores which provide mineral pigment, also sought by miners. Given the abundance of native metal in the Gloranthan crust, smelting of ores is rarely practiced in Glorantha. While the pyrotechnology for it exists - there are kilns for pottery, and there are glassmakers ovens, and there are people who cast bronze and tin alloys - the special tricks to smelt an ore using just the right amounts of charcoal and air from bellows or wind holes would be fairly accidental. It is possible that melting out native copper or native bronze from the corroded ore around it may produce some additional metal from inadvertant smelting as the conditions are bound to become somewhat right. Extraction of metals by amalgamation with liquid Sea Metal and then separation through evaporation or distillation will be known to Gloranthan metallurgists, too. The only metal that fails to alloy with Sea Metal (or any other known metal) is iron, the Death Metal with the power of separation - just like in real world chemistry. Things that can be mined: Treacle (no, seriously), Tar, Amber, Ambergris and other such resinous plant or beast-made matter. Graphite, Coal, Lignite, Peat Metals Flint, Jade, Obsidian other material suitable for knapping Soapstone, Jet, Galena and other minerals that can be carved using flint tools Sulphur Salt, Soda, Salpeter, Gypsum, Alabaster, Alaun, other mordant minerals Kaolin, Clay Chalk, Lime Gems (precious and semi-precious stones alongside with crystallized Gods' Blood), Crystals, Pigments Truestone, Adamant Where and how do people mine? Underground and tunnel mining typically starts with layers or clefts filled with the desired stuff sticking out from somewhat vertical cliff faces, or possibly inside natual caves or in rock perforated by digging creatures (including krarshtkids and trollkin or special rock-eating maggots bred by the Gorakiki cult). People start harvesting it from surface-accessible material, then follow the layers underground, and underground mining has been invented. Strip mining is a fancy word for digging aside layers of sediment that cover up what you want to get at. As large scale soil movements are possible using earth elementals, don't discount the possibility of strip mining at once. Pit mining is done into sediments (like the infamous diamond or coltan mines in Kongo) or into sedimental rock close to the surface. Flint mining in rather soft chalk on Bornholm shows that even Mesolithic and Neolithic people did so to get at their valuable tools. Quarrying is a form of mining, too. So is digging up clay for pottery, and cutting peat or grass sods as building material. Evaporating brine to get at the salt is a mining technique, too, as would be creating such a brine through input of liquids (water, acids).

TEB smiths equipped Daxdarius. The Nidan Mostali may have retaliated and genocided those. (Or some other Greater Darkness disaster wiped them out in Pelanda.) Syranthir brings TEB to Peloria. These guys may have a score to even out, and they enslave the dwarves of the Brass Mountains with the aid of the Fronelans.

The duck pogrome probably started with a Yelmie from Rinliddi taking offense, and Fazzur thinking "yes, that way our need for Karse is even greater. And I know I can take Karse! Unlike that bumbling idiot Euglyptus' bid for Nochet. Thankfully just had the decency to swallow eel."

That setting is about 40 years old, without me having done much in these past 40 years about it, but your questions got me thinking .of this setting that was not written with any rpg magic system in mind. The writing and some of the concepts are accordingly quite juvenile... but that might be refreshing to revisit. If I had time to finish a couple of Glorantha projects first.

Rather high, I guess. One of my earliest world-building project long before I encountered codified role-playing was about humanoids without any humans involved, with pecari-like steeds, and a different feel for physics as the humanoids were significantly smaller than humans. Applying the square/cube law does change "minor" things like carrying capacity. No spell magic - all magic comes from items. Creating these requires special substances. Rather pedestrian Iron Age or late Western Roman, with magic stepping up some of the technologies. Metal may be inferior to knapped jade-like crystals that can be endowed with special effects, so technologies may retain skill sets you don't expect in Dark Age or Medieval fantasy. The setting has gates to other places and realms under different skies, connecting to a crystal world. This does effect travel and trade. Yes. Given my topologically linked system of (presumably) planets, expansion into the wild away from the gates is a big disadvantage. Depending on how far the gates are spaced apart, the wild may be less interesting. Dark Ages feudalism is fine. High medieval feudalism has been done to boring death. All of that in their places, modified by the topological network and unexpected interactions. Warfare across the gates isn't really an option, unless you manage to create a bridgehead strong enough and sufficiently supplied to ward off the previously unchallenged power in place. There are realms which have deities or demon-like beings that would be as active as Icelandic folk lore has the elves and trolls to be. There are invasive supernatural powers. Shades of grey is what you'll find. I like my low stakes tying in to higher stakes. Yes. I have at least one realm in an asteroid belt with breathable atmosphere, for instance. And realms with "bad atmosphere" requiring breathing aids or filters or isolation. These may still be interesting because they may provide short cuts between gate routes. I admire the concept of the Ports of Call in Men of the Seas, and that concept is applicable to space ports or gate-connected places just as well. I guess in QW terms, you could assign certain difficulties based on the nature of the current realm. With my quite fragmented setting, you would learn about the world as you explore it, be it into the wilds, or be it into the network of gates. Discovering gates in the wilds is a major theme, I suppose. Having a non-secret gate will make the place somewhat less wild, or at least very well protected. I am a world builder at heart, and my setting allows lots of world building. I like living worlds, and accumulation of lore. This setting of mine does have some major struggle, but it is protagonist and antagonist driven. And every now and then you will encounter a new antagonist with a new scheme that may have been in operation for very long.