Joerg

Yes. There are a couple of conventions set by the design of RQG combat that I would have preferred in a different way. Introducing house rules may change the game in unexpected ways. One thing I experienced in mock combat was a non-physical pushback of an opponent (in a rubber sword duel) just by intimidation. (It may have helped that there is a lot of me, vertically.) Imagine a battle situation with your Humakti on point and all attackers going for the flanks rather than the point man, leaving the Humakti without an immediate opponent. Not a fix, more of a want - something to enable a modicum of movement inside the Strike Ranks in a melee situation. Admittedly more based on armchair research and limited rubber sword experiences than actual martial arts training or real life combat situations.

We seem to be mainly in agreement. I was thinking about a submission to the Miscatonic Repository with lifepath events that create both some skill boosts and a list of hooks directly for the GM to lean into, but that has to be for Seventh Edition, which I neither know nor own. (Which can of course be remedied with a little money and some time.) When every outing results in the face-off with horror from beyond the world and from beyond reason, even with Sanity attrition it becomes the usual fare. When you offer other problems which might be as existential for the characters (as e.g. the Police catching up with the drastic solutions you used to prevent the apocalypse one or two adventures ago), the next Mythos encounter may be a surprise again. One of the most fascinating Mythos-adjacent offerings of the last few years, Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country, manages to make the Lovecraftian bits of horror pale towards the description of everyday horror for people on the receiving end of Jim Crow laws. True. The setting research for CoC usually is quite well done and can serve for normal Film Noir or investigation games. When I started my personal dive into fantasy literature in the early eighties, possibly half of the books on the market were Arthurian or pastiches thereof, with the popularity of "The Mists of Avalon" pulling in lame imitations. Mainly because I should focus on getting anywhere with those Glorantha projects that have plenty stuff written or outlined already. That's not at all what I meant with "troupe play". I encountered the concept first in Ars Magica, where every player was encouraged to create both a Magician character and a companion character (with skills to deal with the mundane world), and for each adventure the player would choose which of the characters they would play. The other characters would continue their usual activities at or around the home base off-screen. Character attrition in an action scene won't be replaced immediately - this is not Paranoia where the replacement clone gets shuttled to the smoking boots of the predecessor within minutes. Introducing a replacement character either means there is someone on standby to slip into this role (say someone sitting in the escape vehicle waiting for the party to flee from their current location), or you need a lull away from action to regroup and introduce the replacement from the pool. The idea was to let the player characters have shared a number of their lifepath experiences with some of the replacement characters. Surviving in a collapsed bunker in the trench wars in northern France, escaping a shipwreck, finishing a period of education together, being subject to a razzia in a speakeasy (to choose some 1920ies background opportunities) - stuff like that. Ideally also shared with some of the other players' characters so that there already is some common ground between the characters when they enter the scenario. Realistically, writing something for the Miscatonic Repository probably will find the bigger audience than a generic self-published BRP ORC license offering, if only through the cross-promotion on Drivethru. RQG uses the same concept (in the core rules - the Starter Set has no character creation at all, except for a quick and dirty character tool on the RQ Wiki). I have seen people bring in replacement grandparents or parents when the first candidates meet an exceedingly early and possibly meaningless demise. The Char-gen I am envisioning will also protocol these background events as plot hooks for the GM, ideally nicely lined up so that the GM can create NPCs or complications that echo such past experience. Old grudges, possibly a vendetta, unpaid debts (financial or moral)... or thwarted or faile relationships returning as an option. Not all previous investigators need to go completely gaga when they get retired, especially when there is an option to carry over some of the accumulated experience to the replacement character as they use the retiring character's exploits as their most recent background results. Putting this into a form that is flexible and makes use of a campaign log or similar will be a bit of a design challenge. Something like that, too. If a young researcher perishes in a scenario, the academic mentor could also be the replacement character, or possibly a retired military instructor. Sandy Petersen keeps raving about using ghost stories etc. as Call of Cthulhu scenarios. And you can incur sanity loss from non-Mythos traumatic experiences - surviving the trench wars of WW1 caused plenty PTSD (or shell-shock, as it was called back then), and prohibition era gang wars could be very nasty, too. Ideally one would provide a lifepath engine that can be completed with events or tropes native to the setting. One thing that doesn't change much between settings is the development of humans - encountering temporary significant others, gaining or refusing academic or work or criminal experience, serving in the war(s) or similar events (subsequent occupation, colonial endeavors...). Earlier in the thread I mentioned Jennell Jacquays' Central Casting books as one such product. These lack the "parental" approach of RQG or KAP, and the group dynamic-building introduction of shared experiences in the backstories of characters (both one's own character pool and other players' characters). I'll have to play around with these ideas a bit.

The Avalon Hill deal was made before there was a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (all there was at the time was the skirmish game Warhammer Fantasy Battle). The GW RQ3 license may have overlapped with WH FRP. The case made it into Wikipedia. This was before the Mongoose license. Eldarad wasn't bad and had a few useful ideas, but people already had a RQ city next to a ruin field that was very much alive. Daughters of Darkness was neither original nor very useful, except in its inflammatory service as centerpiece of community building at conventions. The Mongoose era was built on an interesting idea but created in undue haste and as a result near complete absence of quality control and not enough research of the available sources. Since the license fees were late and/or short, Greg was pretty exasperated at the deal, and the current Chaosium crew as well. Some products contained bits of material provided by Greg, like the Jrustela book(s) or the Clanking City, but the only product that had any interaction with Greg was Dara Happa Stirs, probably the best of the whole endeavor. I was talking about the fact that almost all the published gameable material for RQ concentraded on the Zola Fel Valley, with only Griffin Mountain, Troll Pak and Dorastor and the two early scenarios Apple Lane and Snake Pipe Hollow offering something outside of that region. I like the city of Pavis and the Big Rubble, but since my first experience of gaming in Glorantha was the Dragon Pass boardgame, I wanted to play in urban Sartar or the Lunar Empire. RQ3 Gods of Glorantha and the RQ3 Genertela Box (and the RQ3 Bestiary) offered some background information beyond that, as had the Holy Country article in RQ2 Companion, but no campaign material followed. (I did end up playing my first Glorantha campaign in the Holy Country.)

Thanks to @David Scott for pointing to the official guidelines. TLDR: I am blathering about how we players and GMs may relate to the difference the Bronze Age-ish setting works, and how to make these activities relate to our real world experience. In my Glorantha, the clan (and its earth and storm cult, and above it the tribe and the city confederation) have a direct involvement in the agricultural primary production (grain, cash crops like linen or apples, dairy, meat), and the harvest is a collective effort under the auspices of the local temples and officials. Apportioning the hides and recognizing the surplus beyond returning the seed stock (which will have come from the clan granary) as "individual" hide manager effort is the tricky bit to decide what is household income. What is a household in Sartar? RQG makes it look like the adventurer's activities decide over the financial fate of the extended family they belong to in the name of player agency. Sure, the player gets to make the end-of-year rolls depending on the player character skills, the rules offer a result for annual income and the consequences of not having met the requirements. Wealth generated from non-adventuring activities seems to be seen as contraproductive to game enjoyment. In actual play, material adventure rewards can (and occasionally do) outdo annual income rewards by a magnitude or two. At the same time, annual household income from a single hide is in no way sufficient to afford a season of training or a new point of spirit magic once every two years for a single character, and there may be more than one player character to a single household. The designers seem to believe in an austere scarcity regime when it comes to means available to develop a character by anything other than adventure rewards. The question then is how to tax adventure rewards. And that is where playing in a Bronze Age-ish setting hits us with a series of hammers. If you play a "culturally correct" game, the designated leader during an adventure gets to decide the distribution of all rewards accumulated in the course of the adventure. Regardless who overcame that foe or who might want to claim dibs on a find, Bronze Age culture puts all the rewards in the hands of the designated leader, who in turn is obliged to bring all of this before the quest giver. Typically, the quest giver is an official of one of these tax-taking institutions - in the GM Screen adventure book, the quest giver is ultimately Queen Kallyr or one of her officials, in the Starter Set, the adventurers are brought before the City Rex or his officials and get their quest from them. In theory, one of the adventurers becomes the quest leader responsible to present all the spoils of the endeavor (minus consumables used up in the fulfilment of the quest) to the quest giver, who takes it and then doles out rewards to the party leader and possibly individuals with special achievement. The party leader distributes the rewards to the party according to rules of leadership similar to the shares distributed by a pirate crew, typically receiving a double individual share and a bad time reserve share he (or a temple) keeps for maintenance or weregeld payments, and the other party members receive their share. If this process means that the party has given the entire amount of the loot to the quest giver, then the amount the quest giver returns to the party leader and possibly individual party members would be "taxes paid" but not individual cult tithes paid. But then, equipment upgrades aren't exactly taxable, while ostentation upgrades (i.e. material wealth that can be traded or just presented to underline one's status) might be. A player adventurer receiving something as reward from their own cult would not be tithed for that boon. Receiving a reward from a different cult or a different leader might make the leaders in their cult or clan listen up for their organisation's share in that, and at least build up an expectation to receive something which may affect their generosity when dealing out stuff from their coffers in the annual distribution of economic assets. That's because "property" is mainly owned by the institutions, not individuals. The household is such an institution, with property assigned to it by the clan and/or temples, which in turn may have been assigned property by superior temples or by the tribe, or the city confederation, or the confederation, in all cases through the leaders of those institutions or officials acting in their name. I guess hardly any game follows this culturally correct procedure. Practically all us players and GMs are part of a capitalist society that recognizes individual property and institutional property in the capitalist sense, and few of us will have any practical experience with taking adventure missions (although some of us may have experienced taking on military missions or development or investigative contracts). Few of us will be familiar with collectively owned assets or collective income outside of the tax revenue of (usually emotionally distant) institutions. Perhaps the closest to the adventuring activity of our player characters is service in volunteer militias (like e.g. volunteer fire brigades in rural areas, or technical aid services in disaster relief like provided by the German THW or some cases of National Guard mobilisations), or reservists recalled to active miltary duty. Or maybe volunteer participation in archaeologocial digs. When framed in such terms, the quests aren't expected to finance our lives. We might get a tax-deductible or in rare occasion a tax-exemted material reward for our participation. We might get an advanced rank in such volunteer organisations or in our professional careers from such activities, but we might also see our professional careers falter or be damaged by such extracurricular activity. Our expectation of spoils of adventures has been built by fiction or more approachable historical approaches to looting, like e.g. Henry Morgan's codex for his pirates (which may have been a fiction in his time, too) applied to our real life understanding of modern personal property. We might live in a system that demands property tax from us - more often indirectly unless we are registered as land owners or drive a car, or run a business which has such taxable property. We are used to income tax and social security payments, and taxes on windfalls like inheritance or significant gambling or lottery wins (when run by registered organizers who need to deduct taxes). Tithing a religious organisation may be familiar to a subset of us, but usually on a much lesser scale, and voluntarily or (over here in Germany) as a small percentage on top of our regular tax payments forwarded to our state-registered creed that has delegated tithe collection to the state. We don't expect to tithe our new car or our new house, or the new roof to our house, to the church. We are rather used to claiming tax deductions from our usual drain of income when doing such investments. Few players would understand their property as that of their household, possibly on loan from their local or national government. "Mine" is what we are used to thinking, rarely "ours", with the "us" rather narrowly defined and rarely extending to non-core family communities. Sure, our local church or club may own a property, which we as members have a certain feeling of "ownership", but that is different from the ownership e.g. for the clothes we wear, unless it is a uniform or security gear provided by our employer required for our work for that employer. We may be used to regard military (or otherwise security) service weapons as property of the employer, but we may also own our personal weapons (for hunting or sports). Few of us are working in primary production any more (farming, herding, fishing, professional hunting, subsistence farming or gathering)., but many may have a garden on the side or collect mushrooms or berries in the commons during the right seasons, or fish or hunt not just for trophies but for the frying pan on the side. We don't expect to pay taxes for these non-commercial activities even if they may relieve our budgets somewhat, and neither will Gloranthan societies (other than sharing your spoils of such activities with your households when you are in the situation to bring them home). Note that the Gloranthan conception of household usually extends way beyond the notion of flatmate or core family. Perhaps the face-to-face gaming session, maybe with a collective barbecue and the pooling of game snacks and drinks, is the best real life approximation for in-game economy.

A bit like RQ3's fatigue rules, yes, rules that offer an option but nobody really loves. A subset of rules that is there but doesn't quite find application.

At the time AH produced the box, its price range felt like that 200$ hammer (it was well above 50$ at the time, IIRC, with a production valley that was adequate for complex board games but even at the time it appeared subpar to rpg material. The production value of RQ2 Troll Pak far exceeds what Avalon Hill put into the DeLuxe box. My own first contact with the game was the more affordable Games Workshop licensed books, with all its Citadel miniatures high-gloss weirdness. Nice if not extremely durable hardcovers. IIRC their version of the Bestiary included the pregens from Monster Coliseum, making it the go-to resource for monster data. In hindsight, if Chaosium had struck a deal with Games Workshop rather than Avalon Hill, the history of RuneQuest could have been very different. I guess that never was an option, as Avalon Hill probably was in a different financial weight class, and no such offer was made. The Renaissance sure re-awakened RuneQuest for a while. The new Glorantha source material (booklet 5 in the De Luxe box, Gods of Glorantha, Genertela box, Gloranthan Bestiary, Elder Secrets) and the slight expansion of troll lore in Troll Gods was nothing to be scoffed at, as opposed to straight or at best slightly reworked reprints (like the stripped RQ 3 Trollpak with its cults, Into the Troll Realms and Haunted Ruins separated out, Apple Lane, Snake Pipe Hollow) or the de-Gloranthized Griffin Island. Sure, getting the troll lore back into print was a good move, but did nothing to expand the Glorantha explored by RQ2. The Renaissance material had some of this reprinting going on, too. Sun County reprinted selected portions of the Pavis box in the just right amount to provide context for those who had missed the Chaosium offerings. River of Cradles was a bit heavier on the reprinting with its presentation of much of the New Pavis GM book, but had an original campaign and the long absent long cult formats for four of the Lightbringers and Zola Fel - themselves "reprints" from Cults of Prax or the Pavis Box, but significantly expanded and updated or redacted (loss of superfluous rune levels for Chalana, Issaries and LM). Shadows on the Borderlands supported these two books with two epic scenarios and useful background on the Chaos cults in separate booklets (a bit pre-empting Lords of Terror). Dorastor: Land of Doom broke out of the Zola Fel valley and revisited the backdrop for the Paulis Longvale story in Cults of Terror with a somewhat incongruent mix of historical background, Kaiju monsters of Dorastor and Risklands, a gritty farming campaign on the edge of apocalypse. Cults of Terror almost slipped back to what had been done with Troll Pak. Getting the RQ3 treatment for most of the Chaos cults was nice, expanding this by the antithesis of RQ2 Rune Masters for Chaos baddies in RQ3 format was a bit of original material (not quite on par with all the new cult material in Troll Gods). Strangers in Prax returned to the Zola Fel Valley ghetto, with brand new RQ3 material, new story material. Great stuff, although overshadowed by the attempt to progress to a new edition of RQ - this time without Chaosium as writers. We would have been happy to see more material of this kind, but the attempt at updating the game system ten years after the last revision made the already reluctant publisher more reluctant to continue this line. Early on in this period, we also got a (state of the art) softcover edition of the first four books of the DeLuxe rules, too, a long overdue offering. With Ken Rolston moving on and his successor a lot less involved in the tribe (which by then had formed up through the conventions in Leicester, the US, Down Under, and Germany, as well as through the daily exchanges on the mailing lists), we got listless contract fulfillment from Chaosium (Daughters of Darkness, Eldarad). RQ4 AiG failed to get approved by Chaosium, and then the project leader became a victim of defamation. But then we also got Greg's deep Glorantha background writings - King of Sartar, Glorious ReAscent of Yelm, The Fortunate Succession, the Entekosiad, and The tribe and the conventions continued, fanzine activity bloomed. Fan publications included glossy Reaching Moon Megacorp products (sorely missing reprints like Wyrm's Footprints and Collected Griselda, and the non-RQ Tarsh War) and foreign language edition supplements (like German Schatten in den Hügeln and Ort ohne Wiederkehr - the only new game material set in Sartar throughout the RQ3 period).

Why? Cannot a Celestial Court deity succumb to existential angst now its former power of Separation has been superseded, and fallen into the hands of a trickster and a Storm-born upstart? Kargan Tor as a god of athletic contests clearly was a rune with unfulfilled potential up to the release of Death. We have stories about some of the Power deities - most strikingly the interplay between Uleria, Ratslaff (or rather his Boggles) and Tylenea, and the ventures of Larnste that lead to the Rockwood Mountains and Kero FIn. Orenoar is reflected in Lhankor Mhy's lost love (or it might be an oedipal relationship, possibly up to and including killing Acos? Or at least aiding and abetting it through the sin of Ignorance - for the Knowing God). Another interpretation that that "always something fundamentally wrong with the universe" might have been that it is a compassionate universe, a universe that has been forgiving to a fault, until that fault threatened to overwhelm it, and forced it to transform into the devouring Sun Spider, integrating oblivion in as compassionate way as possible. (And then Sedenya overtook that with her reassembly/rebirth).

I think that lane could be productive. I have been playing a couple of Sandy Petersen's space game prototypes at Kraken convention - Hyperspace is probably the closest to fulfillment after Corona disrupted his production schedule and model, and there is another game where you captain an individual vessel or a at best a small flotilla rather than playing the strategic game using the same background. Now Sandy has consistently been using some of the Mythos species as player options in his SF without making them seem out of place. Alien life forms warping our concept of science are a rather generic trope in SF. Take for instance The Expanse, which has crystalline rather than tentacly alien things, making great use of that. The problem with introducing such opposition is that it changes or at least challenges the fundamentals of your setting and your technologies. You may have to provide a bunch of solutions for the interaction of this alien stuff with your existing technologies, and maybe allow or guide player-driven experimentation in this direction. Maybe not quite up to the madness of Girl Genius mad science, but into that direction. There may be tentacle horror in established settings. Niven uses psi for his hyperspace navigation, and I seem to recall a statement that avoiding matter may be more a way of avoiding such tentacly encounters than something like avoiding impact. Straczinsky's use of the Shadows and their minions in Babylon 5 is tentacle horror, too. (I just happened to take a peek into the episode which sends Babylon 4 back in time, where Sheridan interacts with a guardian-infested Londo in a cut-out future scene.) You might have to lay out a couple of meta-rules for introducing these things into your space opera - whether you define "realms" of different laws, and how these create overlapping zones where the laws mix with ours, and possibly how to preserve our laws in the face of such reality warping. But then, any introduction of Faster Than Light technology in medium-hard SF introduces such alterations of our reality.

Or at least, no such thing has been published as a Call of Cthulhu game. Too bad I am ignorant of the current edition of CoC, otherwise I could create something like that. Sure. Your standard CoC game using published scenarios with plenty Mythos encounters won't have long-lasting characters, and may make using something like Heinrich's Guide overkill. While I cannot speak for my fellow players and keepers, my own games usually don't use published scenarios. (Unless you count the Mythos CCG as a GM's quick draw toolkit.) Occasionally, we chase cases that smell of Mythos involvement but that turn out to be something else - more in the style of the Hound of Baskerville or other such local superstitions. CoC lends itself to such scenarios, too. Yes. You may be right about that (unless there is a yet deadlier use of BRP rules). I was merely pointing out what kind of Coc games could and should benefit from such a supplement. (Like I said, I have zero experience with 7th edition - my group played various German translations of earlier editions). And now you are telling me there is no such publication? Weird. I'lll refrain from further comments on KAP, as my exposure there has been lower than for CoC, mainly because my idea of Arthurian Britain was shaped by Rosemary Sutcliffe rather than Sir Tomas Malory. Sounds like I should investigate how to create something like that. If that is the case, we are looking at a supplement opportunity here, aren't we? And not necessarily limited to CoC. I am not at all informed what kind of scenarios and campaigns exist for CoC 7th edition. There is a whole lot of material out there for Keepers to pick up, both in the shape of scenarios and in the shape of other tools, and I have read just very few of those, mainly from the German language publication history. Sure. I don't know that product. I was talking about making such a lifepath product applicable in a game with high player character attrition (whether through actual death or retirement in a ward). (Having retired previous characters in a ward might be a fun way to inherit information, too - is there any supplement dealing with that?) Well, thank you for explaining how my outsider approach to using CoC which probably would make use of such a guide by providing not just character bonuses but also a sheet of GM hooks for such a character. If Heinrich's doesn't have this, we have another supplement opportunity here. I am coming from the perspective of an occasional player of CoC, rarely using pre-written scenarios (but reading those e.g. when I edited them for a fanzine or did some slight typo- and plot hole hunt). I bring my expectations from other mystery games and how things can and should be handled from among that infinite number of things, and I was thinking about what kind of keeper would find such a guide useful. Anyway, we are here in the generic BRP forum, where other settings might be served with life-path options (which is why discussing KAP and its use of inheritance was sort-of on topic, too). BRP has rather fragile player characters by default, which makes such a precaution a sensible thing to have. Taking a look at how authors of novels manage such a change of focus characters and translating this into rpg mechanics is what this forum can do well.

IMG zombies don't ping anybody's Sense Chaos, regardless of their origin. RQG Bestiary has revenants, skeletons and zombies under monsters, not under Chaos Creatures. Stprm Bullies probably are fine with ZZ zombies if they serve as sword fodder against Chaos foes. It isn't clear whether they would mind being turned into a zombie or skeleton if that allowed them to take down more Chaos posthummously. Neither do we know how they will react to cave trolls among the ZZ goons. Interestingly ghouls are under Chaos Creatures, despite having no rating in Chaos and neither a chance at receiving a chaos feature short of a gift of Thed spell. I think that grouping Gark with the Chaos gods is similar to grouping Malia there. Gark might have chaotic worshipers or sponsors, but there may very well be non-chaotic ways of joining Gark and continuing an active physical existence beyond the last breath. Gark zombies presumably retain something of the spirit of the previous owner of the body, but that doesn't give them POW. But then ghoul spirits possessing a dead body lack a POW stat, too, while they have POW before possessing a corpse.

But who says that a game like CoC cannot obey the "chain of unfortunate family members/friends" we get in Lovecraftian stories? How often has the letter of a missing uncle sent the nephew and his comrades into doom or at least close to it? This would be something like troupe-style character creation, only with the serial attrition of one after another. Who expects their Cthulhu characters to last for more than the better part of a campaign-structured adventure? Giving each player a small selection of inter-related characters, with one main character per game session but possibly one or two more on story standby, would deal with a higher attrition. Uther doesn't get much attention unless you play a Pendragon prequel sequence, possibly even starting with Ambrosius or Maxen Whledig and Vortigern. Once you leave the corset of Le Morte D'Artur and appropriate some additional Artus elements (like establishing a short-lived empire on the continent, a shadow of Magnus Maximus or possibly the Duke of Aremorica) and some other Late Roman events romanticized as Arthurian-style knighthood (e.g. the Merowing knights serving the late Roman empire, at first pagan knights, then Christian), you get other opportunities. Otherwise, Uther is just that useless king who never appointed or sired a heir, letting the realm fall apart. Some bloke involved with Merlin (who makes pretty much a non-appearance with Malory). Depending on the premise of the campaign. Dead Pendragon knights usually have younger brothers or offspring, or possibly in-laws or squires. Pendragon is designed for a multi-generational campaign with player character turnover, not necessarily generational if the dice are unlucky. And if you use extended families, the player kin muster can be pretty big. The Hero Wars are such a setting, with the end of the world as we know it having started even before the Dragonrise. CoC could be played as a generational game, too - with family traits, heirlooms and curses inherited by a later period character, and through the use of contemporary kin groups or fated company (e.g. fellow students in a fraternity, people who survived the Somme together, you name it) can provide such lateral replacement, inheriting backstory for a period. I wasn't talking about people in active service (that would be closer to a game of Achtung Cthulhu), but veterans who shared the horrors of a trench and the backstory skills involved in that. Comrades who have saved each others backs and who are willing to investigate the cause of the disappearance of such a comrade. One could play a game of Cthulhu with a bunch of minions, but that is getting more into the territory of Sandy Petersen's boardgame Planet Apocalypse.

Once you leave the valley and spread out into the Delta, many other factors are missing. One thing Esrolia and the Nile Delta have in common is the insane population density, with practically none of the common "wilds" left in between the settlements (and those left mostly being wetland used by fisherfolk). Already RQ3 World Book pointed out that extremely fertile places like the Nile Delta would go without those three quarters of less cultivated land between the villages, and that reasoning is applicable to Esrolia. Esrolia benefits greatly from the woodlands south and north of it (Caladraland and outside of Arstola proper), making up for the severe lack of forestation in its mesopotamia and surrounding soft hills. There is no mention of annual (or even twice annual) floodings bringing fertile river sediment to the fields at all - Esrolian soil is blessed differently, possibly the equivalent of Ukrainian black soil (loess, although that would imply a debt of gratitude to Storm suppressed by the Grandmothers, although implicit in the Wooing of Orlanth and Ernalda).

The Imperial Regalia are those of the Ten Tests of the Dara Happan emperors. None of those were in any way reborn.

Prompted by @Crel's musings at his blog I got into argumenting over at the Glorantha discord, where we were musing about the nature of Kargan Tor. I blurted out about Eurmal, Humakt and "not-yet-Vivamort" (Nontraya?) being involved in releasing capital D Death into the world. Not-yet-Vivamort's role in this was dereliction of his guard post at (the bottom of) the Spike. This is the very fault blamed at Kargan Tor when he failed to guard the Spike against the advancing Chaos horde led by Wakboth and his parents. So, in addition to Uleria and Changed Larnste, we may have identified a third of the eight power deities remaining in the world: Kargan Tor might be Nontraya might be Vivamort. The Death that came to Prax, tricked by Tada when he buried his wife/beast queen Eiritha. Portions of Kargan Tor persist elsewhere in Glorantha, too. Karrg is the martial son of Kyger Litor, (K)Argan Argar is the spear-wielding Darkness counterpart of Lightfore ("Darkfore"), and we find "Tor" in the avatar of Kero Fin, Sorana Tor, the demi-land-goddess overseeing the human sacrifice to the Earth.

George R.R. Martin's drastic cropping of well-established characters in the Game of Thrones series gives a certain method to that madness. Although killed early on in the series, the characterisation of Eddard Stark resonates through the rest of the series in a way that a less defined dead king doesn't. (In Glorantha, for instance, the death of Belintar or his governor king in Heortland have left much less of an impact on the players without some prior investment to make them feel the loss.) A mere mechanical advantage probably doesn't do much. But e.g. having not just the Browning heavy machine gun skill but also the squad that used to operate this thing under fire in the backstory might suggest a replacement character stepping in once the gun has been futilely emptied into a Mythos baddie in the shape of a squad mate or similar. A specific skill may imply other (minor, but possibly useful) abilities tied to that thing. Taking apart and re-assembling that MG may result in some basic skill with other mechanisms or contraptions. Etc.

In my games, you can parry or dodge lying down, at a disadvantage. If you choose to use defensive actions, standing up will be delayed. Close to my ruling. My problem with RQG combat is the static nature of it. A combatant knocked down onto the ground will rarely remain in the original position. It would seem reasonable to regard a character suffering a knockback of more than a meter to start the next melee round as disengaged from the cause of the knockback unless said cause explicitely maintains contact. In a perfect world, there would be a combat maneuver producing an intentional knockback of an opponent to disengage. RQG simplifies this disregarding the finicky bits about the knockback and just going through the procedures of disengaging, but from a player perspective, doing so by shoving the opponent back is narratively more satisfying. Dodging and evading on the ground, rolling with the blows and kicks is a trope of cinematic combat and operatic martial arts. Part of the job of a GM is to frame a combat in such terms without re-inventing the rules, but possibly tweaking them for a better shared experience of the combat.

All magic ultimately comes from the Source, the interface to the Ultimate at the high energy end of the Gloranthan cosmos, beyond Dayzatar's realm or the upper outer draconic realms, beyond Atrilith of Vithelan mysticism. Filtered and/or flavored by the Runes, these energies resonate in the living beings of the Middle World who then can share them with the entities of the concurrent spirit world (who partake in that mechanic, too), share them with the deities bound by the Compromise, or with resident deities and wyters, or they can shape them into magic of their own - usually through spirit magic or added to rune magic, or to construct and cast sorcerous spell weavings. Sorcery spells are different from Spirit Magic - they act as entities of their own, constructed and controlled by the trained minds of the sorcerer(s). One symptom of this is how meeting the innate mana resistence of unwilling targets is handled - with Spirit Magic and Rune Magic, the caster's POW has to overcome the resisting POW. With a sorcery spell, the magic points in the construct dedicated to its magnitude are the force overcoming the resisting POW. The sorcerer dedicates a portion of their (his or her) intellect to run the algorithms of the spell. The sorcerer may employ the aid of inscribed POW to extend the mind-space for this specific type of spell. Spells that aren't active can be left alone, following their last set of instructions, or just their nature. (For instance, Tapping is active while drawing magic points out of whichever target the spell has storing the magic points in the spell structure, but the spell structure sticks around while the duration lasts and there are magic points stored in the structure once the sorcerer stops holding it active. Activating the spell again is commonly regarded as unfeasible, but advanced sorcerous spell construction might be able to overcome that problem.

Delecti uses Vivamort, about as much as he uses the zombie generation power of Zorak Zoran. Hero level, definitely. Follower? Maybe once upon a time, although his method of continued existence in Undeath is rather distinct from the Vivamort pyramid scheme presented in RQ2 Cults of Terror. For comparison: Sartar was a hero of or for Issaries, although his magics seem to have stemmed from Larnste and/or Orlanth Adventurous and Rex. I think Delecti is a similar case with his association with the Vivamort cult. The typical weaknesses thwarting Vivamort - direct sunlight, holy symbols of Death and Separation, flowing water - all don't seem to apply to Delecti, or are at least very much diminished in their effects. His possession of dead bodies reminds more of ghoul spirits than of vampires (who value preservation of their original bodies above preservation of their souls), but again without the ghoul weakness of having to consume dead bodies (and apparently also without the advantage of the ghoul howl). Delecti was a master shaper of flesh during his (long) lifetime in the EWF. He seems to have been one of the lead developers in the project that populated the EWF with token creatures of long-extinct mythical creatures in Remakerela as part of the scheme to provide a Proximate Holy Realm to the center of the EWF power. This ability to shape or mold flesh seems to extend to the dead bodies he occupies, as he is able to give them a different appearance while he wears them. This is somewhat different from Belintar whose God Self is recognizable regardless which winner of a Tournament of the Masters of Luck and Death he wears, but still has the theme of the body swap once a body wears itself out.

Climate-wise, the Po valley might be a better approximation, although it only has a single river. Maybe the Danube delta region, although that lacks the mountains. For a non-European parallel, maybe the Mekong? Too much rice, not enough wheat, though. Maybe the hinterland of the Chesapeake bay or Sacramento Valley?

Jolanti are not quite animated statues - they are re-enlivened stone in runic shape, little different from animated clay (like the first Dara Happan humans, or the Agitorani). Bundalini and his dancing skeletons somehow escape the ire of the Humakti. Are skeletons a blasphemy against buried (or sky-exposed) remains of humans, or are they merely bone golems? Skeletons may be different from Zombies, as Zombies retain a lot more of the physicality of the former living human. Fresh zombies are hard to tell apart from slightly damaged living humans. Sure, zombies usually have a creator - e.g. a Zorak Zorani death lord offering a deceased cult member's body its post-life service to the cult. Or Delecti's stolen mass zombification of recently deceased from a Zorak Zorani heroquesting feat. Vampires, revenants, mummies - the so-called "higher undead" retaining some measure of the previous personality, though not "the soul". Somewhere between zombies and vampires we find ghouls. Some are fairly mindless ravenous undead, others like King Brangbane retain their identity.

Do Jolanti have a soul (other than those in Aggar liberated from Nida by Gonn Orta who were gifted by the Aldryami)?

I misplaced the y - it is Gabaryanga. Personalities of Fonrit, Guide p. 553, and Guide, Fonrit chapter prophecies/future events p.562.

Undead as physical creatures lacking POW is a RuneQuest definition more than a Gloranthan definition. In RQ terms, it is very clear and concise. The Walking Dead aren't necessarily undead - CoRQ Mythology has introduced to us the City of Departure, which seems to have seen a steady stream of passengers to the Underworld. An absence of POW doesn't indicate wrongness. Sandy's Pamaltela campaign encountered spirits who consisted of Magic Points only, that had existed in that shape since Creation. When captured and used to power spells, they ceased to exist. Rather than pass on a work obligation to the next generation, a follower of Gark gets to fulfill their work quota, serving their community and easing the lives of their loved ones. Or, in Fonrit, make sure that the owner gets the amount of work owed for the acquisition of that slave. Existence as a zombie is finite, but allows the deceased to leave free of debts or obligations when the zombified body finally breaks down. That is liberating. A soul thus purified of obligations brings better karma. Zorak Zorani agree. There is nothing wrong about the Void where it belongs (which is nowhere inside the cosmos). Both the Source and the Void are acknowledge as extracosmic components interacting with the cosmos. What broke Glorantha was not Chaos, it was an over-abundance of Creation bursting the seams of a too limiting design under a regime unwilling to adapt.

Indeed. E.g. Prosopaedia p.42 or CoRQ Lightbringers p.90: Collectively called the Wild Hunt (CoRQ Lightbringers p.94). In fact, the Wild Hunt and Nontrayas hordes of the dead don't sound so different. There are also the undead Vadeli created by Vadel's encounter with the shaman in Pamaltela.

What about Gabarangya, Gebel's Artmali companion in Fonrit?