Joerg

I think you are reading this "Yes, but" in a purely negative way. From a narrator's perspective, this is a "Yes, you succeed, and I gain a plot hook from this." From the players' perspective, it is a victory with the knowledge that the villain still has an ace down his sleeve, or a replacement villain ready to plague them again in the future (think Boba Fett's identical progenitor, for instance, or - from the Wooden Sword chronicles - the Zorak Zoran rune lord killed by Urrrgh the Ugly's warhorse, and then again as a zombie).

"Elder Race" is a misnomer for "not-human sapient species", with a humanoid body plan an optional condition. Their lack of persecution by dragons after the Dragonkill War has led to the assumption that the (remaining) Aramites aren't human any more. We don't know whether there were Aramite humans remaining up to the Dragonkill War. Varankol the Mangler was the Great Living Hero of the Aramites, and in all likelihood the prototype tusked Tusk Rider. Whether uz or dehori parenthood or adoption played any role in this is unclear. Fact is that the Aramites at the Dawn were human in shape and biology, although already riding tusker boars and worshiping the Cult of the Bloody Tusk with the Darkness demon Aram had used to slay Gouger. Killing the God Beast Gouger did nothing to alienate Aram from Kero Fin (or the avatar of hers, Sorana Tor) at the Dawn, and Aram was considered civilized and peaceful enough to represent the humans on the Unity Council. The Aramite humans entered the Second Age without any recent population reversals. It is unclear whether they participated in the Battle of Night and Day and what their relationship to the Bright Empire may have been. Cross-breeding efforts are known from the magical society that enabled the birth of Pavis from an aldryami mother (it doesn't say anywhere which type of aldryami). Pavis was born around 800 ST. A dryad offering sexual service in Karse is documented for about 780 ST. Dragon Pass was rife with transformative magics - turning both crops and herds into draconic creatures. Some of these energies leaked into the Stitched Zoo project which re-created the Beastfolk from humans and other creatures. I think there is a significant likelihood that Varankol and his followers had the assistance of the Remakers of Remakerela in adopting their porcine appearance - a magical implantation of tusker boar tusks and a special blessing of the bound Darkness demon are a possible route from human tusker boar riders to tusked Tusk Riders without any Kyger Litor ancestry (unless the Darkness demon bound by Aram was an emanation of the Hellmother, which would raise other questions). That half-troll thingy... this comes from the God Learner systematic presentation of troll skulls in Troll Pak, and quite likely is a theory that originated in Lylket in the Second Age. It was repeated in the Borderlands encounter page without that in-world document context, though. The Tusk Riders are definitely not listed as a product of an attempt to undo the Curse of Kin, and that's the only agenda uz heroquesters have had since the Curse struck when it comes to transformative procreation. That leaves a rather short time window for troll ancestry to enter the Aramite population between the Dawn and the Battle of Night and Day. (Not by way of Aram, though - he would have brought in the divine ancestry provided by Kero Fin/Sorana Tor, as wearer of Kero Fin's Necklace.) We know that the Second Council did tamper with breeding projects, although we know few details. Seri-phy-Ranor is a Pavis-like mixed breed from the Second Council era, and the leg-less wyrms are blamed on (failed) Second Council attempts to open paths to dragonhood. After Argentium Thri'ile, the need for an alternative cavalry for the wars in Peloria had lessened significantly, and so would have troll willingness to contribute to a perversion like the making of Tusk Riders. This doesn't necessarily extend to cave trolls, but in that case, I would expect some residual Chaos taint in their descendants. (Come to think of this, Vamargic Eye-Necklace quite likely had such a chaotic taint, given his parentage, even if his birth as Great Troll may have canceled the regeneration ability. But that's a Second Age experiment, again, and in Kitori-controlled forests outside of the EWF.)

IMO the trick to acquire a new form rune in RQG is to become that new form. Welcome to the unexplored world of transformative heroquesting and/or mystical journeys beyond the limits of humanity. Gaining the Spirit Rune doesn't seem to be part of the agenda of the RQG Apprentice Shaman or even the Shaman who has awakened his Fetch. Becoming a ghost is likely to bestow the Spirit Rune, but quite likely at the cost of (use of) the Man Rune. A full Kitori in shadow form might possibly have a claim to the Spirit Rune, but that form still implies a physical presence in the mundane world, only a lot less tangible than troll or human shape. Becoming a plant (other than losing most of one's INT to e.g. Brain Fever) is probably impossible without a rebirth/reincarnation. Becoming a dragon requires a lengthy mystic journey and/or some mystical surgery. Ask Orlaront for an apprenticeship... Taking on the shape of a dragonewt via Immanent Mastery is easier, but does it really bestow the dragonewt rune? I doubt it. Chaos is not a form rune, but getting it is depressingly easy. Gaining Undeath takes only some assistance by magic, but again that is likely to suspend use of other form runes.

Lodril / Turos and his sons and daughters are the workers and crafters throughout Peloria. I am less certain about Veskarthen, although he did create the Obsidian Palace when chained by Argan Argar. In Pamaltela, Balumbasta appears to occupy a crafter role, too, although there may have been more when the Doraddi still had their urban culture at Tishamto. But then, there is a good chance for these specialist crafters to have been demigods. Perhaps even Agitorani. Orlanth the Everyman has his crafter aspects/sons/subcults/heroes/whatever. Orstan the Carpenter is the Dureving master craftsman, and continues to be attributed into Vingkotling times. Mostal may receive some worship or reveration by humans, even outside of Slon. E.g. among the masons of Sartar. (There is Flintnail of Pavis, of course.) Drona(r) and his offspring likely provide a similar role in Malkioni lore as founders of the jobs, along with Kadenit the Builder and Tadenit the Scribe for the white-collar crafts. Kralorela has the sons of Aptanace the Sage as occupational patron deities, and probably two or three independently emerged sets of occupation patrons from other regions than Hanjan and Wanzow, too. Minor occupational deities should be just the thing the people of Maslo might worship, as they shun worship of the greater entities. The mysterious craftsman and the incredible artificer are two mythical memes that find their expression in many a myth, sometimes combined in a single person (e.g. Wayland), sometimes kept apart. The Volcano god as smith or just maker of stone blades is fairly widespread in myths, too. Smelting metal from non-metallic ores is a mysterious process beyond the baking of clay in already elaborate kilns.

Yes, that is clear, and it is the only sensible course of action as a business. Otherwise you might end up on the other side of the muddle with copyright on Cthulhu mythos lore where quite a bit has originated from Chaosium sources and other companies might just take a licences to avoid problems, and nobody wants such a muddle for Glorantha. You didn't address my main concern: Will Chaosium produce a detailed description of Karse and/or Refuge in the foreseeable future? Or is it possible to leave any future product vague enough so that features of the City of Carse supplement don't contradict the new setting? Sure. I don't expect that a reprint of City of Carse with a Glorantha conversion guide licensed by MoonDesign is feasible, either, even if one had the license from Midkema Press. Those system-agnostic and setting-light products from the eighties were highly acclaimed at the time, and I still rate them very high in my personal list of best rpg supplements ever, and while there has been an OSR hype (that may have influenced maybe 10-15% of the customers in the hobby) What is the official stance on the description of Karse in Men of the Sea? On closer scrutiny, there are some references to establishments of City of Carse, mainly NPC names, that need to be done over. Using the layout of Caernarfon is not protected by any copyright laws - e.g. the Palladium Book of Weapons and Castles has Caernarfon city and castle with a street map almost identical to City of Carse. Because that's the documented extent of the city in the 1500s... (when that copperplate engraving of the city that Feist based his work on was produced). On a related subject, what's the deal with the Issaries priest Goldgotti from Nochet, scion of one of the Manirian Merchant Princes (as per Sourcebook p.44, and also Sartar Kingdom of Heroes p.159) and Gold Gotti the Wolf Pirate who participated in the Battle of Pennel Ford?

Yes, that has this information, IIRC. By making a map square 4 college block squares and alternating the pairing in every second column, you get the equivalent of a hex map. 1 1 X X 1 1 X X 1 1 2 2 1 1 2 2 3 3 2 2 3 3 2 2 3 3 4 4 3 3 4 4 (etc.) Anyway, a 25 km square will accommodate up to 25 agricultural settlements (of 50 adults) in square packaging, and almost 40 in trigonal packaging.

There are a couple of ways for demons to pay back their mortal supporters for sacrifice and worship. The demon familiar enters a form of contractual servitude. It uses its innate (magical) abilities to reward its "master"'s gifts. There is usually a reward clause for the demon in the contract, things like the soul of the contractor, or a firstborn child, or similar. The genie offers a limited form of rewards to its summoner. In the original story, for a major favor done. The demon cult works exactly like a spirit cult, only without shamans. Demonic deities are deities and may work through cults, or through propitiative sacrifice. Being deities doesn't necessarily protect them from coercion by powerful summoners.

After mentioning the RQ3 Gamemasters' Book, I guess it is best to point you there. The rules for densest human settlement, with only extra fertile regions like the Nile delta with its two harvests in a year as an example of denser settlement, can be applied. A 25 km hex field - 25 km to the side, or to the hex diagonal? Under optimal conditions, you can have a village practicing agriculture or horticulture with some animal husbandry on the side every five kilometers, and a trigonal pattern is the densest possible pattern you can get. This includes quite a bit of less cultivated land in between used as pasture, source for building wood and fuel. As soon as you add less productive conditions or a strong vertical component, forget about that trigonal pattern. Instead, you will get a pattern of such settlements stringed along traffic routes. For a barbarian culture as per RQ3/BGB, I would assume half the optimal density population of settlements. These can be concentrated in towns or even fortress cities if an easy mode of traffic (usually by water) is present. Primitive sedentary fisherfolk (like the Kjøkkenmøddinger of the Baltic Sea) may practice something quite similar to transhumance, with temporary settlements at the fish migration sites. I would reduce population density for such a culture to a third or less of optimal agricultural density, and of course limit it to rivers, lakes, wetlands with reliable stretches of open water, and sea shores. Purely hunter-gatherers are tricky to determine. Some follow the herd migrations, like the Ahrensburg reindeer hunter cultures (both the atlatl-user culture and its successor 2 millennia later using bows). They are on the brink of switching to a nomadic lifestyle, although the normal step towards nomadic cultures comes from agricultural cultures. As a rule, the population density of hunter-gatheres (and fisherfolk) is determined by the regenerative ability of their prey. Usually, prey and predators fall into mutual cycles of growth and reduction, but additional stress on the prey may lead to extinction first of the prey, then of the predators. New predators for isolated prey populations often lead to extinction of that prey within few generations, but so does loss of habitat.

In RQ and BRP terminology, neither "primitive" nor "barbarian" are meant as degrading usage. Sure, the terms aren't politically correct. But they describe an attitude to agriculture, technology, and political organisation that was laid out in the RuneQuest 3rd edition rules, and adopted widely. Primitive, Nomad, Barbarian and Civilized (where the latter is a bit of a condemnation - although Jennell Jacquay's old Central Casting supplements for creating more interesting characters added a fifth, even more condemning state, Decadent). The Guide has tried to keep those categories while desperately trying (and failing, IMO) to give better names. The definitions are in the Big Golden Book of BRP, inherited from RQ3, and they are quite clear, and, as mentioned, well established. Placing the question in this forum brings up that context. Your terms are about as undefined and useless - Jane Goodall's chimps are hunter-gatherers. What is a bronze-age settlement? There are regions of the world which never had a Bronze Age, but had urban iron age civilizations. What does "paleolithic" mean in Saskatchewan or Patagonia? Yes, European language carries an ugly colonial inheritance. Yes, descendants of these (and basically any) colonial overlords do deserve being reminded of what brought them into their comfortable existence, and own up their ancestral sins. And no, the cultural achievement of living languages should not be skewered by agendas. Censure is oppression. Jericho probably started out as Barbarian, as that is the cultural level for grain cultivation. The city is small enough to be a clan center in its origin, much like ancient Rome. And the Natufian culture is as much the odd man out as is the sedentary "nomad" culture of the Botai horse tamers in what became modern Kasachstan, relying heavily on the quite unique conditions provided in the Fertile Crescent initially.

That would make the exile mainly their fault, as opposed to swept along by a political development. The next such convenient event is the Firebull uprising among the Sambari and the dissolution of the Dundealos around 1618. Going into exile is a major cutting of ties, even if it is understood as "for the time the Lunars are here" - as far as people know, that could be a couple of generations.

Exiles because of their participation in the Starbrow Rebellion, or due to subsequent anti-Lunar activities? The Starbrow aftermath requires two years of narrative bridging. If your characters are Colymar, 1615 is a good year to go into exile in the wake of Blackmoor replacin Leika Ballista.

The death of our star and the merger with Andromeda might come roughly at the same time, and it is extremely unlikely that there will be creatures resembling us witnessing either event. The gradual increase of heat output of our primary is orders of magnitude slower than the runaway greenhouse effect that we appear willing to provoke. We are at the (apparently quite rare) cusp of spreading into our solar system and establish a presence away from our home planet. This appears to be one of the big filters that create the Fermi Paradox.

Thanks, Martin. That looks like it is verbatim from Cults of Terror, much like I expected.

Counting on the (five) fingers actually supports a base 12 counting system. Dozens, a gros... and weird intermediaries between base 10 and base 12, like the "large hundred" of 120.

Being able to create a state where the rules of physics are re-written might enable us to do some things we deem impossible right now. My hard-to-obtainium exotic matter for my warp drives is a tunnel of such near-singularities in ring-shape Bose Einstein condensates (Rb in carbon nanotubes) around a vessel with a certain velocity to separate the vessel from lateral space, creating a warp tunnel. This probably doesn't work in theoretical physics, and the physics I learned as a chemist don't even begin to enable me to do calculations on this idea. But they don't allow me to refute the possibility, either. And no, slowing the speed of light doesn't take the hard limit up. It only allows relativistic effects at much lower energies. Might slow down shipboard time, for instance.

Rockets fail because we cannot afford to upset our atmosphere any more than we already have. Without a fuel-saving method, we're grounded. Atmospheric friction will do quite a good job reducing a falling skyhook to atmospheric pollution. The rest falling into the water will of course create a bigger splash than anybody could like, but over a quite long period of time. But things that go wrong don't necessarily mean that the skyhook comes down. And "too complicated" was what everybody said about booster rockets making a vertical landing after having done their job. Too complicated is just an engineering challenge, not impossible. Your proposal for relying solely on chemical rockets for a space setting reminds me strongly of Frank Miller taking the PDP 10 as the pinnacle of computer miniaturisation for his Traveller technology. A Raspberry PI has almost the same calculation power, and speed. Space 1999 is hilarious to watch nowadays... Present day technology for nuclear power plants are steam turbines and dumping heat into nearby bodies of water. Deuterium fusion produces high temperatures first and foremost, which means more steam and more heat, but no direct conversion of radiation into electricity. I haven't seen any plans for a tokamak involving photo-voltaics. (But then, keeping the prototypes running for long enough to break even in terms of energy expended to start it up is the current goal of the technology.) Yes. Possibly enough mass to create a 50km asteroid if all of that would be collected in the Earth Moon L5. Optimistically, you could maybe create a hundred collector areas the diameter of earth with that - practically nothing. The Belt and the Jovian Trojans have many times that mass, and they have the volatiles required to create habitats. (Although water should be the smallest problem... in The Expanse, the rise of the sea levels could have been ferried over to Mars, solving two problems in one go. The salt could have been separated out and deposited on the moon or elsewhere.) They need to use that thrust to gather more gas to poop out than the thrust cost them. After all, they probably have the imperative to procreate. Solar sails and bioelectrics are probably easier on their mass. They might also be useful for harvesting the matter portion of the solar wind.

If you can provide a medium which has a signficantly lower value for C, relativistic speeds might be achievable. Chains of Bose Einstein condensates apparently have already succeeded to slow down light by several magnitudes. This trickery might enable you to produce a singularity - a volume where normal physics don't apply.

Eventually. In the mean time (and much sooner), it will get hotter and hotter. Then, it will expand into a Red Giant, which will probably extend outward to our current orbit, before collapsing into a White Dwarf (not the magazine...). Our TV has gone to the stars for some decades (before we started digital encoding), and might be reconstructed. For documentation of our culture to persist, all we need are time capsules. With written instructions about our DNA etc., a curious squid or snail alien might even be able to re-create the monsters which produced this amusing antiques.

Actually, that's Midkemia Press' IP, maintained by Steven Abrams. I contacted him a decade or two ago about use of that IP. While Raymond Feist is the author of City of Carse, there appears to have been a swap of IP allowing Feist to use Midkemia for his novels in exchange for Midkemia Press keeping the revenues on the Carse license (e.g. from the German translation/adaptation by VF&SF, who kept it in print through at least two editions, under the name of Corrinis). Are you going to publish any material on Karse on a city-map or even house-to-house level? With Nochet and possibly Seapolis, you have two bigger fish to fry and in the queue. I am not the only one with some extensive notes on Karse. Martin Hawley used Karse as the anchor point for his (unpublished) naval campaign for HeroQuest 1 (a hint of which is in Men of the Sea). The basic concept of a citadel with an adjunct walled city is basically a slightly larger version of the new (RQG) Clearwine- (Which is a very different town of the same name compared to that in the HeroQuest material. And the cities of Sartar are likely to undergo a similar upgrade, only Pavis is likely to remain unchanged except by warfare.) The main difference to Clearwine is that Karse is a seaport on the river estuary, and that it is the second city by that name, after the original citadel city slightly further upriver on the opposite bank had lost access for sea-going ships. (It isn't clear when exactly, and whether the Closing or the redirection of the Creek-Stream-River were instrumental in this relocation.) There is a difference, though - no King's Landing map has ever played a role as inspiration for the Glorantha campaigns, and I doubt that there is a map even approaching the Nochet map in the level of detail.

Nontraya is the usual suspect, or some of his horde. The anatomy demons of Kimantor's story are probably a lot more allegoric than literally expressions of humanoid/devilish anatomy (the only known instances of these are the gloves hands in the Devil's Marsh in Prax and Snake Pipe Hollow).

Actually, Raymond Feist is only a co-creator of Midkemia, but when he parted ways with Midkemia Press as his Magician novel became a trilogy with follow-ups, he received the rights to the literary use (and subsequently computer rpg use, although I claim ignorance of those licensing deals, which may have been a joint venture) while Steven Abrams and his company kept the rights to the rpg use. Midkemia is very much a role-playing world with the typical late 70ies/early 80ies tropes done right. It was one of several sources of inspiration for my first (initially Viking-themed) RQ3 fantasy setting which had a few hundred pages of world background and maps, alongside Glorantha. I don't see much of a problem with the street layout or most of the NPC outlines, but I think I would twist the architecture, too. If Pavis remains canonical, the layout of Carse is possible, and only the individual houses (which don't have any descriptions of the interior except for a few text passages) need some attention. So IMO the aerial view map of the supplement as published by Chaosium in the eighties isn't usable as is. The Menai Strait at Caernarfon does resemble a river estuary if you don't look past Bangor. Other local details vary greatly from Caernarfon. From the handling in roleplaying sessions, the City of Carse supplement is way over-defined for running a scenario or two, and the paper format isn't that helpful, but for creating integrated characters and plot hooks it is a treasure-trove. Much of the data is nice-to-have rather than essential, but the same goes for parts of Pavis as well. I made first contact with this supplement in its German adaptation to the setting of the Midgard rpg, the first game for which I developed a campaign setting/game world (using shards of the official setting to integrate the official scenarios I started with), and that may have made me more aware of the possibilities and occasionally necessities for adaptation.

The first thing I notice about Oran is not the similarity to "Orlanth" (drop l and th), but the similarity to Orani, a demigod son of the Storm Bull whose mistake names a place in Prax. My theory would be that Oran is a son of the Bull, from the general migration that deposited the ancestors of the Hill Barbarians in the Barbarian Belt, and from a culture of bull herders (and possibly riders, too). Whether that makes him distinct from the Enjoreli and/or Tawari is another can of worms. The Dawn Age founder of this kingdom (tribal confederation) may have invoked the Godtime ancestor/predecessor as the protector of his kingdom rather than apotheosizing as such himself (in the way Sartar did). IMO that's less likely than the parallel to the Praxian Orani. Drona appears to be an Earth King, and he is an interesting anti-parallel to Aram ya Udram. I see a good probability for a Drona, son of Malkion and Kala (a land/mountain goddess of Brithos), to have entered Fronela and to have established a theist kingdom alongside his divine companions. An unsubstantiated theory of mine is that there were twins, Drona(r) and Dromal, one of which became the caste leader of the dark-skinned native Earth folk of Brithos while the other led those who rejected the teachings of Malkion into an exodus. Adjusting this with the Kachasti/Kachisti Speaking Tour/colonisation of Gennerela may take some work, or possibly some source revelation, but the Drona exodus probably would have preceded the Kachasti acquisition. Bakan the Boar appears to be tied to all cultures practicing agriculture in Fronela. In a bull-obsessed environment it is almost weird to have the boar as the main phallic deity. An arrival prior to the Bull/Hill Barbarians and subsequent assimilation would be an explanation. The Guide claims only that the dynasty has unbroken heritage since the late First Age. That's a fairly big claim in a place that has certainly been subject to the Arimadalla dynasty. The best explanation might be that their kingdom shrunk down to an inconsequential local power during that time but became a leader under the Ban as their history and the extent of the Ban fragment coincided. (Which may have been a consequence of one of their numbers having joined Snodal as one of the Syndics.) The exact role of the bull Orlanthi of Fronela in the struggle between Talor and Varganthar and Arinsor is obscure, as is the exact nature of the Tarjinian Bull - a monster to the Hill Barbarians, or a deity in chains? In 450 Harmast returned with Talor at Hrelar Amali, and the two of them (plus unnamed companions) went across High Llama Pass to Oranor, where Harmast convinced the local Orlanthi to follow Talor's lead against Gbaji, convinced by the success of the Battle of the Giants at Ulros (which, while taking place in the Nidan Mountains, is a different event from Gonn Orta's attack on Nida in Dara Happan Emperor Sothenik's reign, a bit more than a century later. We don't have any indication why the battle at Ulros was called Battle of the Giants, and if actual giants were involved, on whose side they fought, and in which capacity. A participation of giant Jolanti seems likely. Or there being both a Dawn (or Gray) Age demigod by that name, and a Godtime precursor.

Uhrwerk is still in business, working through its insolvency by continuing projects in advanced stage of production (though with a lot less ambitious print runs to minimize risk). Unfortunately, RQG isn't one of those. But hopefully, Uhrwerk can shake off the shackles of insolvency administration in the near future, and possibly find ways to shoulder more ambitious projects again. Still, there is little hope for a German edition of RQG concurrent (or only delayed by a dozen months or so) with the Chaosium edition. On the other hand, with the not so fast rhythm of Chaosium publications of RQG, catching up at a future time might be possible - the French edition of RQ3 under Oriflam managed that admirably. WIth the RQG Quickstart available in German and the Jonstown Compendium project going ahead, it might be possible to support a German language RQG well before its actual publication.

It is something that the Butcher and the Hunter share (there are various hunting techniques that deliver the prey alive, though not necessarily unhurt). The God Learner explanation probably makes Waha an avatar of the primal butcher, taking the original practice on himself. Not dissimilar from Orlanth taking over most of Umath's domain. (Further discussion of this probably belongs into the Glorantha part of the forum...)

That's similar to switching from 1H-Axe to 1H-Hammer. A problem of inflexible application of the rules. Although an Ikadz cultist with Craft(Butcher) 100% probably should restart from zero...