Joerg

It isn't that hard to get people to use up all their stored magic much faster than they and an entire zoo of bound spirits can regenerate them. Occasional sprays of acid or poison will cause quite a lot of Healing activity... There are no rules for attuning Dead Crystals in any incarnation of RQ that I know of. And there has never been any rule that you had to attune an enchantment. Does it need fixing? Keep in mind that when you demand attunement, you won't be able to use any MP you commanded a bound spirit to pour into a (separate) magical item or enchantment of yours. Having had a look at Biturian's Travels recently, it looks like "setting" a truestone just means pouring your rune points (and attached spell knowledge) into it. Once that has been done, the Truestone's rune points (once they have been used up) and those of the donator can be regained in worship rites. The set (and loaded) truestone can be used by whoever holds it. Why should a dead piece of crystallized divine blood be harder to use or transfer? Urvantan has no problems with accepting stored MP from PC-owned items in The Smoking Ruins. Have a few spirit bindings and order the bound spirits to fill up a magic point storage (or three) continually as soon as they reach full MP. Think of a full hybrid car using a diesel-generator to power the electric motor and having a battery or condensator to start the motor with, or to provide extra peak power. The same applies to magic storages. There's also an upper limit to how many spirits you can keep in RQG. There is no limit to how many storages you can use.

Where do you think I pulled these notes from, then? Let's look at Steal Breath, p.400 in the rules. This could be clearer, I agree. 2 MP allow the sorcerer to degrade 3 cubic meters of air per round (I suppose melee round, five rounds to a minute, 25 to a Full Turn). Each 2 MP added to strength will convert again that volume, adding another dice rolled. The volume seems to disappear, creating a flow of air replacing the tapped breath. Even if you infer both the rune and the technique, after three rounds of concentration the sorcerer should be in the plus. The asphyxiation effect isn't pertinent to what happens to the MP. The duration expires - that implies that the sorcerer doesn't need to keep the spell active to retain any excess MP, he only needs to add enough Duration to keep this extra buffer on his person. While carrying these extra MP around, the sorcerer doesn't regenerate any MP as his batteries are filled beyond their brim. All MPs tapped inside his POW become hist personal MP and remain regardless of the duration of the spell. (Under RQ3 rules, a sorcerer tapped way beyond his POW was pretty much immune to incoming spells, and would have had a lot of fun with Castback as in RQ3 the target's MPs would have to be overcome. RQG appears to use his permanent POW instead, unless this is a case of sloppy editing from RQ2 using "temporary POW" rather than MP.) P..396 tells us about the speed with which these tapped MP can be stored (under Magic Point Enchantment): I suppose Dead Crystals count as enchanted items, too. That means that a sorcerer who has tapped lots of MP wants to have invested in some duration to not squander any MP. This is the munchkin thread, so I won't start yammering about "if he wants to cast a spell with those excess MP. Hence my assumption "Active when raking in MP, passive when just holding on". I would allow the actual tapping only to come in one un-interrupted go. Once the sorcerer stops converting air into MP,, he cannot restart with the same spell. The MP still hang on until the spell expires. The sorcerer can cast another Steal Breath (or some other Tap spell) within the duration of the first one, and add another bunch of excess MP with a different duration timer start. I would allow him to use up the MP with the shortest remaining duration first, but your mileage as GM may vary. Either way, this creates quite a bit of book-keeping. Tap spells are destructive, they diminish Creation. Thanks to the emanation of the Chaosium, a certain amount of Creation regenerates at any given time, although the Chaosium is located in an Outer World that is pretty much outside of normal Time. In places where Reality consists mainly of spider silk with little else, Tapping may open micro-rifts, allowing Chaos to seep into the world. But that's the only connection between Tapping and Chaos that I can point to, unless you use the Boristi spell that taps the Chaos rune of chaotic creatures. I disagree about the thematic fit. It takes a spot with only a thin veneer of reality to actually let Chaos in. As for the mechanic fit - neither Vadeli nor Brithini have ever reported to have spouted tentacles. Tapping doesn't render a sorcerer chaotic. YGWV, yadda yadda. But there is no evidence that ties Chaos features (detrimental or otherwise) with the practice of Tapping. And that's your idea of "balanced"? The only sorcerers who are rumored to have to deal with random Chaos monsters are the Boristi, and nothing but rumors and vile propaganda against them has been printed. The Boristi themselves can be portrayed as a group of sorcerers who believe that they reduce the Chaos in the world by turning it from destruction into clean magical energy.

Tapping is indeed a spell that keeps giving and giving - until you take a step back and take a look at how you have changed the world around you. In the Gods War, the Brithini tapped the world around them until the mighty, land-invading "current" Neliom became a powerless and listless stretch of water, long before all the energies of the seas were called into containing the Chaos Void that had replaced the root of the Cosmic Mountain in the center of the world. Arolanit and parts of Fornoar still are regularly subject to Tapping, and the effects are tangible. The cycles of Time - the seasons and years, and the Sacred Time renewal - somehow counteract the overall effect of Tapping. The Neliomi Sea somehow recovered from being tapped out completely, possibly through the mutual annihilation of much of the Brithini and Vadeli populations. Tapping the cycles of Time in Arolanit may be a deliberate decision on part of the Brithini there who are still struggling with the concept of entropic Time, although they do seem attuned to a cycle of seeding and harvest anyway. No idea whether their concept of meeting cosmic entropy with selfish entropy helps them maintain their existence and culture. The two "Tap" spells in RQG are just examples. There are bound to be Tap spells for all runes. They all can be assumed to be active in terms of the transformation of some aspect of the world into magical power, and passive temporal for keeping all that excess of magical energy bound to the aura of the tapping sorcerer. By the time the spell's duration has petered out, the sorcerer is expected to have spent the magic, whether in spells or putting it into storage. Tapping is pretty much the diametrically opposite magic of Mostali bestowal sorcery. The Brithini and Vadeli have low regard for the material world and seek to liberate all the energy contained therein to serve their needs and whims. The Mostali value matter above energies, and their goal is a world machine of vibrant matter, ,mostly self-sufficient and very much in control of whatever new stuff leaks into it. All that Growth should be consumed, but all that consuming of the trolls needs to be contained, too. Your ultimate sorcerer has minions to keep the material world in check for him, an unlimited supply of magic points, and magical rituals to ward off the detrimental influence of Time. He has inscribed his spells with bits of his essence ad absurdum, has invested other parts of his soul and great chunks of the voluntarily offered souls of his minions into enchantments, and keeps re-growing what once was his soul but which now has become only his uplink into the magical energies of the world. His identity has moved away from this energy conduit and rests solely in his intellect. His spells surround him, termporary magical entities akin to spirits, but created by Man's will and knowledge. All of this is of temporary nature, and much of the time that the sorcerer has bought for himself needs to be spent for maintaining that status quo, but with every new point of POW put into inscriptions, the duration of those entities gets doubled again. It still remains a Red Queen''s Race, you have to run faster and faster just to maintain your positon. You start by exploiting lowly spirits. You move on to genii loci, and you may end up treating huge magical entities as your servants. There are always bigger fish.

From the moment they identified as Enerali rather than Galanini, I think that is necessarily true. The case of the Pendali is similar, IMO. Those who take their magical strength out of the descent from the Land Goddess are different from those who take their power from the Serpent Brotherhood of shamans. In case of the Enjoreli and the Enerali, I see a strong indication that they switched from a hunter-gatherer culture to pastoralism and (plow-less) agriculture or horticulture. The urban portion of the Pendali would be a similar case. I tried to find out more about the Botai culture as a possible real-world parallel either for the Hyaloring Pure Horse folk or the Galanini.

Given the number of excellent questions asked here that invite others to react to them, it might be useful to spin them (and their answers) off in separate threads. Possibly with the help of moderator powers to move messages?

Did I hear my name abused? Before doing a head-dive into the Entekosiad, I would suggest to take a dip into the much more accessible Fortunate Succession, especially the Carmanian mythology there. It gives you a frame of reference that may become familiar once you have blazed a trail through numerous Green Age names of goddesses which I found hopeless to even memorize on the first readthrough of Entekosiad. If you want to do cross-references between all those names, you might start with the index, creating entries out of each of those terms there, and then just interlinking those entries and noting your understanding of these entities, possibly mixing quotes with your own words, may help you organize the text. Just reading the stories from paper doesn't quite do them justice. I witnessed a number of readings by Greg which gave these texts a different quality. Perhaps read some of this into a recording device, and then listen to your own reading may alter your reception of these stories. There is quite a bit of cosmogony and theogony in the early bits of the core Entekosiad, with names that leave even a certified Gloranthaphile go "huh?" and scratching their beards (natural or artificial). The extra bits are a lot easier. Getting a sense of continuity or something resembling a timeline (or the monomyth laid out in the God Learner Maps in the Guide) is extremely hard. There are stories that feel like a dystopian Green Age...

When creating my HQ Glorantha character that earned me playtesting credits for HQG, I mainly put points into my runes (which double as magic abilities) and then broke out some useful everyday abilities out of these runes. This gave me a bunch of abilities not usually associated with the magical identification, at an ability score well above the beginning scores you get for a new ability. And then, these would be raised whenever I would raise one of my rune abilities. But then I went for an animist Orlanthi rather than your typical initiate. My main memorable feature was a spirit owl that would be visible to everybody.

In that case, was each of the Hsunchen ancestral deities created by Earthmaker as a finished beast, or do we get ancestral common type entities like Fralar or Mother Mammal, or even Hykim and Mikyh, somewhere? Not necessarily in the case of Galanin, but e.g. in the case of the entirely hypothetical Bemur the Bull?

But it looks like one that Zzabur would sign off, too. Both the Enjoreli and the Enerali do trace their ancestry back to a beast deity (Tawar and Galanin, respectively), and so do quite a few Storm worshipers (e.g. the Praxians). Not to mention the Hsunchen origin of a large part of the Kralori population. Third Age Seshnela really is Tanisor, a western Ralian kingdom that has usurped the Seshnegi regalia and titles. There may be some Brithini ancestry in a number of noble houses as lesser sons (from Seshnela and Jrustela) would have pursued their luck in the conquered lands of the Autarchy, and there might have been a few of the Seshnegi followers of Arkat who had gone native at the time the Autarchy was founded. The Malkioni racism or supremacism is at times not that very pronounced. The integration of the Pithdarans into their empire took less than two generations. According to Middle Sea Empire, the conflict with the Autarchy stems from a Trump-ish offense that Nralar the Old took when an Autarch of Ralios failed to send some unprecedented tribute to the rather insignificant king of the peninsula (MSE p.10f), and from some problems with troll raids from Guhan. Whether Arkat still was the Autarch at the time of Nralar's ascension is another question - his apotheosis should have taken place around 500. If he still was around, those ambassadors must have been sent out immediately after Nralar inherited his father's kingdom without any other qualification than birth. Tanisor was not yet a part of the Kingdom of Seshnela at the time of the reign of King Bretnos, a brother of his predecessor Nepur whose offspring was skipped much like Nepur's older brothers had been. Unlike their uncles, these sons did not have the grace to leave the kingdom but had their uncle assassinated on occasion of opening the Fourth Ecclesiastical Council of Malkionism. I wonder whether Thyerm was a sacred king of Hrelar Amali, or of the Basmoli lineage. In Seshnegi annals, no thought is given to that, though.

An allied spirit of Chalana Arroy might be able to leave the host in order to act as a Healing Spirit, leaving its Rune level healer between allies until re-summoned and re-bound. It might leave behind a butterfly tattoo on the individual healed that way, as the final transformation of that host. What exactly is the relationship between Chalana Arroy and Gorakiki? Does she have an allied rune spell that allows an Arroyan to awaken a pupa when a new host for the allied spirit is required?

Trolls have a society built on intimidation. Fear is a manifestation of the Darkness rune, much like Madness is one of the Moon rune and overbearing arrogance of the Fire rune. All trolls fear and worship the Hell Mother and her greater spawn. That fear may be part of the worship they offer, and it may be a familiar fear, even a protective one - a form of cultural Stockholm syndrome. Maybe the hunger inside a troll isn't that dominant while surrounded by the hungry Darkness, either. In troll society, Great Trolls usually aren't intimidating on their own. They make their presence intimidating on orders from above, which could be a troll matriarch or a Zorak Zoran Death Lord or his deputy. (Karrg's Sons are only the voice-pieces of the troll matriarchs behind them.) Much of the time, their intimidate will be augmented by Loyalty (Matriarch) or Fear (Matriarch). Using their Darkness rune for augmenting Intimidate should work, too. A few exceptional Great Trolls are known, most notorious among these Vamargic Eye-Necklace, a most charming fellow that I had the opportunity to incarnate for the freeform "Between the Dragon and the Deep Blue Sea". A similar breed though highly autonomous is another mixed breed male from a Dehori father and a dark troll heroquester mother, Pikat Yaraboom, Bina Bang's son from Lord Lurker in the Shadow, and coincidentally another Freeform character of mine, from the "White Bear and Red Moon" freeform. These guys are scary because they can choose whom (or whether) to follow. Most Great Trolls are quite docile in the presence of even Dark trolls, and may be ranked equally with superior/value trollkin and well-trained cave trolls. If coming from a prestigious matriarch, such individuals (including values and cave trolls) may outrank low status dark trolls.

The dragonewts sort of defined the region with the Crossline to the south and the Deathline to the north, leaving the eastern border undefined. So yes, the Stinking Forest and the Valley of Flowers may be treated as the westernmost extent of Dagori Inkarth just as much as they are part of Dragon Pass. Offering a number of entry-points avoids railroading the new GM into playing a style of scenarios that she may not be that familiar or comfortable with. Playing the underdogs can lead to light-hearted games while skirting on rather deep and deeply emotional subjects. The D&D-inspired web-comic "Goblins" is a good example of that. Ducks, trollkin and baboons all fill that role admirably. That said, I have avoided monkeying around so far, and the one durulz that I had in my Gloranthan games was squashed by a certain ghostly chariot in a one-hit kill. I'll edit the post above down and add it. You are right - City of Carse is available from Midkemia Press as pdf, so it would be eligible. (So are the cities of Jonril and Tulan of the Isles, the book that was published by Avalon Hill as RQ3 Cities, and another supplement "The Sunken Lands", for a mere 27$ total for their entire product range). Just like Griffin Mountain offered a place that wasn't over-defined in the RQ2 era, Blood Over Gold offers material outside of the narrow scope of the Sartar vs. Lunar Empire narrative while being close enough to be able to interact with some of that. While it was written for HeroQuest 1st edition, applying it to HeroQuest Glorantha rules shouldn't be a major problem. Its deviation from canon is not that crushing, really. The cuneiform correspondences of an Assyrian merchant family operating in Anatolia presented by the British Museum isn't that different from the setting in Blood over Gold, really. You can of course put canon a lot further out of the window and use Ttrotsky's Kingdom of the Flamesword version of a feudalistic Kingdom of Seshnela that can be found in the internet archives, or use D101's Book of Joy that covers Loskalm from the same basic assumptions that were all over the place in 1st edition HeroQuest. Depending on your language skills, you might be able to make use of the Swedish Fronela campaign or the French Dundealos campaign for their respective translations when they get available. I'll surely try to get hold of these. Other foreign language versions may come up with their own localized campaigns, too.

The Countermagic effect of spells like Shield, Countermagic, Shield stacked with Countermagic, or Neutralize Spirit Magic. That's numerically wrong in any reading of the rules. A Bladesharp 1 boosted by adding 3 MP would count as a 4 MP spell for overcoming e.g. a Countermagic 2, a Warding 3 or a target under the influence of Berserk. In most interpretations of the rules, the additional MP don't linger long enough to have to be overcome by spells like Neutralize Magic, Dispell or Dismiss Magic.

Your "Dragon Pass" outline leaves out most of Tarsh and the Stinking Forest. The scenarios in "The Smoking Ruins" can be fairly lethal, but the same goes for some of the encounters in the GM screen package, and my experience with The Rattling Wind is that any combat approach is a recipe for a total party kill. The Hidden Valley offers enough of a sandbox to start a campaign with locals. When I started playing in Glorantha, I took another place adjacent to the well-developed area of Glorantha and ran a campaign in Heortland. Nowadays, there are a number of promising series in the Jonstown Compendium community program that lend themselves for good starts. The White Ruin as part one of the Namoldin campaign gives you a start in the conflicted area between the Colymar and the Malani tribes. The Sandheart Militia saga is into its second installment, and builds on MOB's RQ3 supplement Sun County (which is sadly still out of print, as are the other RQ3 Renaissance products). For a ducker take at Glorantha, Yozarian's Bandits offer a good one-off or possibly a jump-off to a dungeons and drakes campaign, with The Quacking Dead offering some supplemental horror. The announced Six Seasons in Sartar and the Dundealos project of the Jaldonkiller Saga (both briefly covered in the current episode of Wind Words) have a similar scope. For a jump into a deeper, a lot more eldritch version of Glorantha, you could do worse than looking at the Rough Guide to Glamour as your setting material. You should have the Redline History of the Lunar Empire, and the boxed sections on the satraps of the Empire in the Guide to Glorantha can offer you additional material unless you want to go with the freeform characters of The Life of Moonson as your main NPCs. (The Namoldin campaign shows some shared DNA with the Home of the Bold and Heroes of Wisdom freeform background booklets and the after-game narratives, too.) Some of the Madness in Champions of the Reaching Moon (in the Hero Quest/ Glorantha vault at Chaosium.com) may come in handy, too. And the RQ3 Monster Colliseum (a much reviled supplement) will come in quite handy for gladiatorial themes in Glamour (or elsewhere in the Empire), too. Urban adventures can be quite Gloranthan, too. If you don't mind canon too much and are lucky enough to have access to the Thieves World box or the Midkemia Press City of Carse book, you can play these in Glorantha. The Chaosium house campaign did so. You can tie a naval campaign to that, too - Men of the Sea offers the concept of Ports of Call. Blood over Gold isn't quite canonical any more, either, but remains a solid campaign with strong Gloranthan vibe. Also in the Vault. If you don't mind doing a little more work producing your major harbor, Dosakayo on Melib is a great place which may inherit from Lhankmar or Sindbad's Zanzibar, and the Maslo port of Westel gives you a similar fairly blank land that you can fill with details. Having a (pdf) copy of the Guide to Glorantha is probably required for this, but you don't have to read that from front to back. If you can wait a bit longer, Nochet is going to be another extremely multicultural setting.

One of the most puzzling or telling points about the sun gods is the fact that the Lightbringers' Quest doesn't necessarily name the Evil Emperor by name in the original versions, but has an independent test of Orlanth's virtue through the Flames of Ehilm. (Not Elmal, though...) And in Wyrm's Footnotes #10 p.22f Lightfore used to have his (or her) own set of myths as the son of Pole Star and definitely separate from Yelmalio (whether the elf-friend, the horse-friend, the dragon-friend or the Vrok lord) - long before we ever learned about Antirius or Kargzant and when Jagrekriand was an unknown foe of Orlanth, Tolat the Red Planet and twin brother of Annilla, Alkor the guardian of Alkoth and Shargash unheard of. Galanin is the son of Ehilm to the Enerali. It isn't clear whether horses do have a Hsunchen descent - are they descendants of Mother Mammal, or are they descendants of King Griffon (another sun god rarely acknowledged by humans) or even Vrimak? Elven Yelmalio may be the Fire Dryad/Great Tree on top of the Cosmic Mountain rather than a wanderer. Shannon Appelcline talks about the White Elves as Halamdryami, IIRC.

Xentha or Netta appears in the Sky early in the Golden Age, according to the ReAscent of Yelm. Whether that is the Upper Sky or the Underworld Sky is another question. According to the Copper Tablets the stars first appear as a consequence of Umath invading the sky - one might say that Umath is the father or the midwife of the stars. Darksense cannot interact with the stars of the Upper Sky - they are voids in the main sense of the denizens of the Underworld, unless they get illuminated. It may sense the tattered cloak of Night, though. The stars of the Hell Sky may be hardly visible to optical sense, but may be emanating Darksense - not as echo, but as independent source. (Which leads to the question whether troll darksense can use some other troll's Darksense emissions for their own perception.) The planets are solid bodies, and tangible (if far away) to Darksense. The Red Moon's Shadow is tangible to Darksense, too. Its absence creates a highly disorienting void. The Orlanthi (Vingkotling) myths of the Star Captains tell about Orlanth's invasion of the skies, of his victory over the Sky Terror, and of some of his followers dropping back to the Vingkotlings bereft of Vingkot's lineage leaders. Dara Happan Star Captains are children of Pole Star or Lux/Arraz/Shanasse. There may be female or otherwise gendered ones in either myths that we still can learn about. The Pamaltelan Sky Witches are planets or moons (or both), and rather clearly tied to the Night.

Exposure to Gorp "acid" sounds more entropic than treatment with pratzim. The Flames of Ehilm or the Baths of Nelat may purify the bearer of the tattoo too. As might a Tap spell targeting the passion to the clan, or the elemental rune (storm or earth) identified with the Heortling gender role model.. There may be side effects.

The Dark Troll race has no healed future. A new race, born to mistress race questers, may be able to escape the Curse of Kin and mitigate the burning of the Womb caused by the Evil Emperor. Intervening with Gbaji a the Battle of Night and Day is defeatist, uzko questing. Maybe the answer lies in the uz side of the prequel to Orlanth's fight with Aroka?

I would expect you to be hardened by exposure to me.

There have to be three of you to do so. Father, mother and midwife...

Dorastor north of the mountains (Skalsland, Benksland etc.) may be infested with Chaos and somewhat mutable, but the real Chaos infestation is in the unmapped valley between Arkat's Last Tower and Kartolin Castle. We don't know many Feldichi ruins - it is possible that their Shangri-La was in the lost valley that isn't shown in any of the official maps. (And I am convinced that the distance measurements for the mapped part of Dorastor are entirely correct - the lost valley is a place where the seams of the patchwork of Arachne Solara's web fold away from the Surface World. A Hidden Castle/Hidden Greens situation. In older terms, maybe a Short World. IMG there are similar folded spaces, e.g. around dragonewt cities like High Wyrm, or the Karandoli valley between the peaks of the Brambleberry Hills or possibly the high peaks of Kordros Mountain and Hareva Peak. And then there is the inside of the Crater, which is the visible surface of the Red Moon. The Crown Mountains limiting the visible part of the Red Moon are the far side of the Crater peaks IMG. That way I never run out of parts of Glorantha that remain unexplored. The trick is to find the entrance and the entrance conditions to these places. (Or in case of inner Dorastor, how to avoid the place.) Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood gives a good parallel how some of these places work, a topology connected by a rather narrow ring with a near infinite interior. Much like my concept of the Red Moon being part of the SIlver Shadow, and vice versa. A way to rid Dorastor of most of its Chaos would be to separate Inner Dorastor from the Surface World. Or to resurrect the Feldichi Shangri-La. Maybe as a new mppn.

I am firmly convinced that the Cruel God that Antirius was fighting at the Hill of Gold was Shadzor or possibly Deshkorgos, the lord of the fourth Underworld, or Shargash proper. That makes Zolan Zubar a valid candidate for a Red Planet deity, possibly separate from Jagrekriand in Orlanthi myth.

The Wind Words podcast at https://windwords.fm .

Soaring on the Wings of Imagination, our intrepid explorers swoop down following the trail of one of the iconic explorers of Glorantha, an Issaries merchant from Dragon Pass or Kethaela braving the chaparral which is home to the Beast Riders of Waha's Covenant. Looking at some of the details of Hender's Ruins, the Block, and Day's Rest, our exploration meanders off to all manner of side issues, monkeying around, getting sweet, or discovering traces of Lewis and Clarke in Glorantha. Before you get into this action, you will have to shove through the packed masses beneath the Herald's podium in blatant disregard to the social distancing rules and you might be led astray by rumours. Enter at your own peril!

While there is no list, all the major Gloranthan languages should be mentioned in the Guide. Degrees of relation may be unknown - especially for the multitude of Hsunchen languages which appear to be species-specific, although the three different types of Rathori bear people probably speak related dialects. Different subspecies of bats as Pujaleg totems probably have somewhat related but different dialects, too. Many other hsunchen appear to have rather monolithic languages, and Sofali from Teshnos or Maslo should have little difficulty understanding each other even though their material cultures vary a lot. The ancestry of a language is a lot harder to determine than biological descent as mutual influences will have mutated the civilized (rather than racial memory-based) languages and molded them into one another. (Although bacteria and viduses are known to exchange sóme genetic material across species borders without sharing any ancestry - that would be similar to the effect of loaned words or even loaned grammar.) Elemental languages as strong ancestry of human (and a few non-human) languages may make a very limited common ground even between say a Doraddi and a Dara Happan possible.