Joerg

I don't really see any indication for a Thinobutan ancestry in Caladraland (which would be the case if Vaybeti coincides with Kumanku). The human settlers in Jrustela had two language families - Olodo, from pre-Malkionized Slontos, and Seshnegi from Seshnela. Even with Telerio and Moray being Jrusteli in origin I don't see much of the western language creeping into the local language - possibly on par with Hanseatic German creeping into Finnish. If their priests had grimoires, those would have been written in Seshnegi. There doesn't seem to be evidence for earlier human habitation of Jrustela, except possibly as slaves of the Mostali. Those would have been Tadeniti, one of the six ancestral tribes of the Westerners (and possibly birthplace of Lhankor Mhy). Gives a whole new dimension to this "Son of Mostal" business. The other possible place of origin for the Vaybeti lands would be northern Slon. This is pre-Breaking of the World, so you have to imagine Slon still inhabiting the lands north of Umathela, as if the splinter that was cut off the world by the thwarted cut towards Magnetic Mountain was pulled back in place. The Elevens of Slon have similarly unclear ancestry - they might be a mixed slave population sold here by the Vadeli, or they may have been a genuinely native population of unknown ancestry. If anything of this points towards Caladraland, it would be quite a stretch, though. Who would have been the human worshipers of Aurelion? The shores around the Breakwater were among the first to be colonized by the Malkioni, without much contact with Olodo folk. Still, some Olodo, or more recent immigrants from (by then malkionized) Slontos may have brought some old Volcano worship with them. (Note the Slontos temple of halfway mentioned in the Cult of Caladra and Aurelion. Not mentioned anywhere in the Guide, though.)

About their phsyical culture and horticulture, looking a the master map of eastern Caladraland (mainly Esrolia and the Mirrorsea Bay) with the distinct absence of settlements which peppered e.g. Esrolia or Heortland) I wondered whether Papua new guinea with its millennia old horticulture and rather small clans or tribes even with distinct languages might be another model for the Caladralanders, united mainly by the Volcano priesthood. They haven't splintered into that many distinct languages and tribes as the Papuans as they had maybe 20 millennia to form their culture (if you count late Golden Age and Storm Age in millennia) whereas the settlement of New Guinea reaches back 50 millennia or more. Still, the forest horticulture and occasional harvest of a Sago palm tree might be an element in Caladrian everyday life. But then, the horticulture on the slopes of Mt Kilimanjaro might be another model for what goes on on the slopes of the Vent.

(I am posting this in Alastor's Skull Inn because it covers quite a few topics outside of my usual narrower focus on Glorantha and related stuff. Partly because I am unsure whether this would fit in its entirety into either the RQ, Glorantha or HQ forum.) Kraken Report 2019 Another Kraken has gone by, and another “What I did in my holidays” essay is in the making. I left work shortly after noon, slightly earlier than usual on a Friday and drove almost directly to the convention, arriving around 4 pm. I found out that my lodging was not on site but about 5 minutes driving from Schloss Neuhausen, so I set off to that place shortly after greeting a few people I had not seen for more than two years. The shortest route turned out to be a cobblestone track with a big bulge in the center of the road, big enough that I had a few hard bumps to the bottom of my car (thankfully without causing any leaks). On the return trip I tried the alternative route, only to be stopped at a fire brigade activity blocking the road to the Schloss, so back to the old-time road and creeping along to avoid too much movement in the suspension. (The weekend before I had been on a RuneQuest weekend in a guest house on a Rittergut halfway between Kiel and Lübeck, also with road blocks – there due to road works – making me travel even more disreputable roads, leaving my car looking like an offroader. Come to think of it, the last times I took the train to Essen Game Fair, both times Essen Central Station was blocked for traffic, and on the way to the last Eternal Con I visited I had to traverse North-Rhine Westfalia when there were 1300 km of traffic jams on the Autobahn there. That means whichever force tries to prevent me from going to a convention quickly left me off lightly this time.) Back at the convention I learned that there would be the beer tasting late that night. Yay, a beer tasting before I would have to drive back to my lodgings. The Schloss itself was heated quite strongly with the wood-burning stoves, luring people outside into the deceptively mild autumn air. While I didn’t manage to catch a fever this time like three years ago, I still caught a minor cold. Maybe some time I will learn how to dress for Kraken? On the plus side, the internet connection was almost too good for a convention, with hardly any delays putting up content here on BRP Central. One of the main attractions of visiting the Kraken is to talking with people you rarely meet in person, often over food in addition to drink, among them quite a few notables. This year had attendees from 19 countries, not all of which I was able to talk to or identify. Still, that’s about half the EU and a few adjacent and overseas territories (like Switzerland, Norway, the US and Iceland). I managed to talk to Robin Laws and Cat Tobin on Friday, had breakfast with Ken Rolston and Chris Lemens on Saturday discussing game ideas and local history, and found some time to chat with Sandy and Wendi Petersen between events. I also was selected as entertainer by Jeff’s and Claudia’s daughter Lara, failing to solve many a “math” problem (mostly ones that involved crossing the moat of the Schloss where it forms a creek, and occasionally getting up imaginary cliffs with the aid of two feeble sticks and “math”), and getting away with it by lifting her onto my shoulders. Another main attraction are the panels, even though you are able to witness these afterwards as Thoumy and Alienor once again recorded everything professionally. Being able to inject a question or two adds another level of immediacy. I’ll point out to the panels when they get online if nobody else happens to notice them. I did miss Ian’s Heroquest panel due to me getting lucky in the Horror Lottery (which dishes out seats in games with the guests of honor), and at least half of the Elmal vs. Yelmalio debate due to Lara occupying my time and shoulders, but with the assurance of being able to catch up on youtube that wasn’t that much of a sacrifice as it would have been otherwise. The Big Rubble panel with Jeff Richard and Robin Laws started the panels of the Kraken, and is already available on youtube. Watch that channel for further videos on the other panels, e.g. Jeff’s presentation of the (eight) master maps of core Glorantha, which will possibly come with split screen and stills of the maps added in post production. Core Glorantha grew by increments of A2 maps defining new territories, starting with Sartar and Tarsh, continued by Heortland and core Esrolia plus Mirrorsea Bay, and extended into the east as Prax and Dagori Inkarth. There are no master maps on this scale for Peloria (which would require dozens of such sheets), where just the eight sheets I mentioned above have about 1200 named locations with some population and even altitude data. Jeff described those lands as grasslands rather than densely populated agricultural land (making the claims made blaming Sheng’s minions for reducing Peloria to such a state a bit weird). But that’s for a different discussion, not for this convention report. I did manage to get a little gaming under my belt this year. As mentioned above, I got lucky in the Horror Lottery, and had a place in Ken Rolston’s Paranoia game, as assistant team leader of the only all-Infrared troubleshooter team in all of Alpha Complex, a team that had enjoyed an unprecedented 715 day-cycles of trouble-shooting without losing a single clone. After presenting my five things only I know about my character to Ken, I was told that I have way too many bad ideas (for him to exploit). But what’s so bad about being color-blind in Alpha Complex? Or being one of those emancipated AIs liberated by the AI Liberation Front that had itself incarnated as a citizen to further the goals of that secret society? Or already having been terminated once despite bearing the clone-number 1 (which turned out to be an extraordinary feat of foresight on my part)? We found out… Prominent points of the game were e.g. the statement that none of us had ever seen one of our team-mates psi ability (to block any photons) in action. (How could we have, as sight was shut down as no photons could move?) Or making Ken realize that the laser weapons (including that laser rifle with ultra-violet crystals that had somehow become our standard equipment on this mission holiday retreat) used photons, leading to an amusing case of sunburn and k.o. of said team-mate. Or flabberghasting the guards at the exit point to the “wilderness retreat” by confessing that our team had no team leader, only an assistant team leader, and that we weren’t on a mission. Good paranoid fun, interrupted by Ken’s recurring role as high priest of pancakes and judge in the re-run of the Pan Cake Cook-out between Risto and … (giving us a chance to catch some, too). I had a look at Sandy’s newest iteration of Orcs Must Die, combining toy soldiers and dinosaurs – every young geek’s wet dream. And that will allow Sandy to produce Dino miniatures. If he produces them to scale, they might even be useful for Glorantha gaming… I got to play with probably one of the last uses of Sandy’s prototype set of Hyperspace, as the delivery of the finished was delayed, under Sandy’s tutelage. A fun little game of space exploration and colonisation, somewhat asymmetric again but with a fairly sturdy general mechanism. My Mi-Go might have fared a little better hadn’t Sandy convinced me to end the game as he was to host another event. Playing those diverse species was fun, putting Hyperspace on my short “games to buy” list. As it turned out, there was no copy of Gods War at the convention except for the one that was still in my car from the previous weekend, so there was at least one game of Gods War – three people from France (including Gianni Vacca), two from Germany, with the Invisible God (Gianni) managing to overtake Chaos (me) by one point in the final reckoning, thanks to everybody ganging up on my Chaos nests in the last turn. I also managed to squeeze in a three-player game exploring the Restricted Library of Miscatonic University, which was quite fun with that number of players. Amid discussion of other forms of gaming (there are quite a few game designers and authors at the Kraken willing to talk shop not just with one another, but also with ambitious fans), I also had a short look (actually a rather badly shot video) at Gianni Vacca’s Hero Wars-themed boardgame “Last Faction Hero” which is played on a map based on a vertical cut through Glorantha from the gates of Dawn to Dusk, featuring the superheroes and some demigods of the Hero Wars as characters (Harrek, Jar-eel, Androgeus, Cragspider). Something I need to try out at one of the next conventions... I managed to witness the last stages of Ian Cooper’s Dragonrise scenario, of which I played an earlier version three years ago, and to sit in in an after-mission debrief discussing the problem of player-agency in a heavily scripted heroquest. Observing Ian’s dramatic presentation of the last stages of that event after a hard-won success by the players, I wonder whether I would be able to present the events half as well – certainly not speaking English. (Writing down stuff gives you a second chance for a first impression, performance simply doesn’t.) The successful outcome of the Dragonrise is pretty much the basis for the Glorantha presented in the current publications (for RQG and 13G, at least), which means that a failed quest would leave an ongoing HeroQuest campaign utterly stranded in a quite different Glorantha. If you want to play this quest with open-ended results, it would work best as the finale of a campaign. In case of failure, possibly with a coda not unlike Frodo’s return to the Shire. On the other hand, if you mean to play on after running this scenario and thus a success is more or less scripted, your agency would be similar to that of Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark (as pointed out by Amy in the Big Bang Theory). Food for thought, and possibly a thread or even panel of its own. I left the convention at 11 pm on Sunday, driving home. This time over quite wet roads, with another road block pushing me widely off course (with the aid of a navigation system). Still, I arrived at home in the middle of Monday night, managed to get up in time for work, and back home from work before sleeping like a log.

Simson is to me from a Bronze Age environment, and David's confrontation with Goliath is beginning multiplication of Iron similar to the Iliad. The kings of Israel inherited Philistine iron mass production. The transition phases don't necessarily mean an immediate change of cultural outlook. The end of the Bronze Age ending Darkness might as well be timed to the distribution of alphabetic script beyond the priestly caste. The earliest kings of Israel would have fallen into this transition period, and are sufficiently within the broader stroke Bronze Age that Glorantha invokes. There are always two stories if both parties have historians. Rastagar's wife is the perfect Villainous Queen to those Orlanthi holding their Vingkotling ancestry in esteem, and the perfect heroine for the Grandmothers. Ancient times have few women in a ruler's role, and the more successful of them were either re-defined as males (Hatshepsut) or vilified by later patriarchalist chroniclers (who were almost exclusively male).

Blindly drawing straws or differently colored balls is a well established ancient means of deciding on e.g. decimation or winning an office.

True. Many an original antagonist of a myth needed to be replaced with a somewhat acceptable stand-in. Modern Glorantha is a patchwork of fragments - some of significant size, some of generally continuous even if only half of what was there before, and some fairly isolated ones just salvaged at all, leading to isolated appearances like Firshala in the Elder Wilds. The God Learner maps of the Godtime are educated guesses based on the modern topography as encountered by the God Learners. They remind me a bit of the cartographer Mejers's attempt at re-construction of the pre-Mandrenke North Frisian coast showing all the known places that had perished not only in the recent second Mandrenke, but also the one that destroyed Rungholt and about half of the former lands in that region. Theism as practiced within Time appears to have been invented in the Late Storm Age or the Grey Age, with a few distant (remnants of) gods granting their intercession for sacrifice. People had gods before - often as not so distant rulers interceding in person with their innate powers rather than as grantors of magic. According to the Heortlings, it was Hantrafal who worked out how to worship and sacrifice in a way that allowed a worshiper to manifest an innate power of the deity as magic. Given the context in which this became necessary, the number of deities available to grant such magic would have been extremely small. Orlanth was on his Lightbringer's Quest, and only rather independent manifestations may have been available for a magical effect. Still, such manifestations may have received worship and sacrifice and shared it with the greater cult entity that we know in the Second and Third Age. At the Dawn, there may have been a lot more deities that subsequently became mopped up in the major cults, as obscure subcults. Theyalan syncretism, then God Learner simplifications (forcibly imposed on Godtime) and occasional destruction of old knowledge results in cults that may be significantly different from what they had been before. Sometimes new cults crop up, like Orlanth Rex around 900 ST, and they are generally some form of the deity that has been lingering somewhere. Sedenya follows three centuries later, from even greater obscurity. There are portions of Godtime which remain largely untapped by the Surface World because the mortals forgot how to interact with these, but on occasion they may be re-discovered. Baroshi is a prime case of such. These are only peripherally the same event really. Rising up against the Emperor is something else than Umath creating the Middle Air. Breaking his chains - if there were any such chains, they would have been parts of the World machine. But then, the Emperor Umath was straining against may well have been Mostal. The Stafford Library tome Middle Sea Empire tells us a very different story. Their "analysis" followed uncharted raids into local, then regional holy sites, into random myths that were observed, without any context. That assumes that they had the inside perspective of worshipers of those deities. The description in Middle Sea Empire doesn't make that that likely. Yes, though usually through the perception of the community that launched them into the myth. You need either another inside perspective or some abstraction (RuneQuest Sight) to get past that "skin" of the mythic nodes you are traveling along. Stripping a piece of literature (like e.g. a Shakespeare play) of all context or translating all that context into memes is very similar to what the God Learners did for their understanding of Godtime. This allowed them to recognize reuse of memetic combinations which gave them entry leverage and patchworking interfaces to create new paths, and occasionally new bridging territory, possibly brought in from an unrelated myth. In a way vaguely reminiscent of CRISPR working on DNA.

Durev is the pastoralist immigrant (from Dini Valley, high up on the flanks of the Spike, where Umath had his camp) and cultural founder of the earliest Storm Tribe humans, a role very similar to those of Vingkot and Heort. Durev was carved from wood, but received the divine breath. He is the breath inside the body, and inside culture, making it vibrant and alive. As storms go, that's quite subtle.

The marriage of Storm to Earth is an important myth which keeps happening again and again - Orlanth's wooing of Ernalda coincides with the contests with the Emperor, Durev marries Orane on the Downland Migration even before that event, and in the Storm Age there are plenty reprisals of that. There is a myth how Umath was destined for Asrelia but they were kept apart, too. All of these stories with their different protagonists touch the same archetypal event, spinning off slightly or strongly different versions of the same event. Eiritha marrying Storm Bull maps on Durev marrying Orane, and an Eirithan cultist may interfere on an Orlanthi re-enacting the Three Challenges in a quest.

Extending their tendrils in the dark to taste their environment sounds like perfectly aligned with what funghi will do in their natural habitats.

I wonder whether the myths of Nontraya describe Vivamort before his fateful encounter with Wakboth. There is no real evidence for vampiric activity in the Gods War, though there may be plenty in the Grey Age. Nontraya/still complete Vivamort is about the reign of the non-separated dead from the living. As Moon is accused of? And plenty other uncomfortable ones (e.g. Storm)? Unlife is an antithetical as much as synthetical rune to both Fertility/Life and Death/Separation. Is that really a sub-rune of Chaos? There are cases of runes within runes, like the dual runes in the ownership tables of older publications implying the Infinity Rune for this deity to be the closest to the pure runic expression of that kind of magic. There might be similar antithetical syntheses of the other three pairs of power. Dissonant harmony. Static change. Antifactual truth, or permanent impermanence. Good news for the Telmori, then. Trolls are so good at fighting Chaos because they are so similar to it. You can excuse lots of cave troll behavior which is as typical for Chaos as it is for Darkness as troll behavior, hence non-chaotic. Apart from Nysalor, most Chaos also thrives in Darkness and shuns the light. ZZ adds Disorder to Darkness, becoming even less discernible from other Underworld Chaos or near-Chaos like Nontraya or Shargash.

The powers/runes behind the gods already have temperaments since their conception, as far as I can discern. A great deal of contributing factors to the personalities that the cult entities we know as gods have are intrinsic to the runes (trying to avoid the term "powers" here as it has multiple meanings). The earliest deities aren't necessarily as abstract as the myths extracted by the God Learners make them appear. Each rune is a passion (or set of passions into which later generation expressions of those runes may specialize), not just as a rules mechanic in RQG. Perhaps this can be illustrated by the Sea Myths, which appear to be quite well expressed. So let's look at the Sourcebook and at the creation myths in Missing Lands for all manner of "unnecessary concepts and complications" which tend to be ignored by the God Learners and your almighty GM looking for singular truths, but which contributed to the downfall of the God Learners (the Malkioneranist bunch, the researchers of Theism rather than pure Malkioni truths). (Both God Learners and EWF suffer from unclear definition of those terms. Each have a nascent stage - the colony of Jrustela prior to the Abiding Book, and the kingless Kingdom of Orlanthland; an early stage that somehow continues through to the downfall - the Malkioni sorcerers doing great things inspired by the scripture of the Abiding Book, and the draconic mystics pursuing individual dragonhood through dragonewt-taught or -imitating methods; and a later deviant stage co-existing with the remnants of the middle stage - the Malkioneranist God Learner Collective and the Third Council with many of its short cut methods. With both these empires, the fall was affecting both the middle and the later stage adherents, with differing severity. The God Learners obsessed with Malkioni truths are a different bunch than the God Learners obsessed with Theist truths.) The deities underwent specification and multiplication, to the point when they created or gave birth to significantly less divine entities that would contribute to their power by other means than purely being the thing. The activities of the deities - their myths - become the masks through which the cult entities are identified. Just yesterday at the Kraken Jeff and Robin had their Elmal - Yelmalio debate about divine identity and different expression thereof. As all of the Kraken panels were professionally recorded by Thoumy, expect to see this come available online in the near future. (A good thing, as I missed some of those due to other activities.) Jeff argues the identity of the many Cold Suns - naming Elmal, Yelmalio, Kargzant and Antirius as different expressions of the deity that will be presented as Yelmalio in RQG Gods and Goddesses of Glorantha. Omitting the original name of the sun entity worshiped e.g. by the Impala Riders of Prax, the role of Yamsur - probably yet another entity in the mix, Halamalao (aldryami Yelmalio - the name is lifted from Shannon Appelcline's Aldryami book published by Mongoose for identification purposes) and possibly Ehilm, Ralian god of the sun and flames, and refusing to draw the Teshnan mess into this. (To clarify: Jeff is refusing. Wait for the panel video...) Vinga is an expression of a great many of the bundle of temperaments the entity we call Orlanth possesses and adds the expression of the female body with quite a lot of the baggage and a limited amount of the bounty. Possibly the female gender, more likely a male-like gender we call Vingan (one I would never apply to people with male not-female sex, but to any of the other three combinations of not-male, male, not-female, female). This could be anything - a sex-changed (but still bisexual) Orlanth, a daughter of Orlanth, an agglomeration of heroines striving to become like Orlanth, (a daughter/mainly female archetype of) Ernalda acting like Orlanth, or an entity out of a merger of parts of Orlanth and Ernalda resulting in this mix without any birthing or indeed sexual procreation involved but reknit from the threads that the two of them make. And none of these are really mutually exclusive, either. Add personality through the varying importance of certain myths of this entity (or a very similar entity maybe differing by only a few strands of identification) in the local cult to arrive at the deity. (That's another thing Jeff emphasized in the Elmal-Yelmalio panel - that there are basically three cults of Orlanth which all relate to Orlanth but which express the entity behind it quite differently, emphasizing a political relationship of the cult of Yelmalio with the cult of Orlanth Rex in Sartar, but leaving open all manner of different relationships with the cult of Elmal. Or, to paraphrase Jeff, learn about the hipster urban cosmopolitean cult of Yelmalio and the backward, extremely crusty cult of Elmal in and near Sartar. Not Prax, though. Again, look out for that video to come online.)

This depends on how much you follow the humanist way of anthropomorphizing the runes and deities, or the already implied personalities in the Elder Gods and Celestial Court runic powers and elements sophontomorphized in other (possibly lost) earlier ways, like the dragon/dragonewt way, or the Elder Giants (Man Rune?). Possibly a fire entity population like the bird (gryphon, centaur etc.) entities of the first half of Yelm's 100,000 year reign, before he deigned to make humans. We know that a lot was lost to the Chaos invasion, possibly entire runes from the original Glorantha (at least Form Runes, though maybe even some Element or pair of Powers). The Malkioni/Zzaburi claim quite a great amount of intellect for the Erasanchula, including those of the Srvuali and Powers. As for personality, that is evolving as the Celestials (including the Elder Gods) interact with one another, and as they create more precise offspring. The only truly impersonal forces are the greater chaos entities that entered through the rift - Kajabor, Krjalk, possibly others of the same ilk.

Graphene might be the ideal monomolecular foil, although for the desired reflectivity a single layer of the stuff might be insufficient. As a carrier material for a thin film of metal (e.g. Lithium or Beryllium) it might work, too. Manufacturing Graphene sheets of that size is an engineering unobtainium at the time being, on par with spacelift or sky hook technology. I am considering plasma shields on the same principle as a first line of defence against impacts and irradiation, but having to bring the energy is the limiting factor for this, and the field strength is a matter of distance squared between magnetic coils. Give me a flexible high temperature supra-conductor (like the stuff used by the Puppeteers in the Ringworld novels) and I might believe in something like that for a solar sail, but that just provides another unobtainium in addition to the flawless graphene manufacture at near-continental sizes. For the magnetic fields to be planar with a payable amount of energy, you'd need to have the magnets on a lightweight mesh of fabric (possibly monomolecular) or more rigid profiles of some light matter strong enough to keep those magnets apart. But then, the individual magnets might be maser-powered, from a light source similar to that of the wavelength chosen to propel the sail, external to the ship and powered by the system primary. Setting parameters would include how long distance sailing vessels interact with objects in defined orbits - do they adjust all of their payload to that orbital speed, or will there be some sort of lighter system or just cargo pods dropped in the keel"water" to be salvaged either by the sailing vessel or by the stationary object. I think there would be mirror farms and probably stellasers feeding distant relay lasers with solar energy. Keeping those mirrors in decent reflectivity is probably a major maintenance task. You wouldn't quite get a Kardashev 2 situation out of such a setting, but at least a step way beyond Kardashev 1 by dimming and concentrating the light emitted from the primaries of this civilization. Spectra of such stars might be a lot more metallic than expected due to interaction with the mirror material when viewed from a sufficient distance. Externally powered interstellar travel at sublight speeds might become possible, although the travelers would be dependent on long term stability of their propulsion beams in their system of origin.

Outside of player character involvement, plunder taken on a mission goes to the sponsor of the mission to decide. The "sponsor" of a clan patrol is the clan chief. Ransom gathered from a captive may traditionally be given to the captor(s), as will the duty to house and feed the captive, but a chief at odds with the members of the patrol might take that out of the captors' hands (including the housing and feeding) and deduct a generous amount from the ransom for this service - possibly enough to cut into any re-distribution of other plunder. There is no point in being that generous to people you want to get back at for causing trouble. If the plunder is taken not as a course of a mission (e.g. as an improvised reaction force to a raid or cattle raid), the party (and if it has one, the party leader) gets to decide on how to distribute the plunder. Some of that may need to be given to the clan or - in case of trouble with the chief - bypassing the chief and clan ring and going directly to the stead or bloodline, still to the benefit of the clan as a whole, but outside the direct grasp of the chief and ring. Selecting some trash as the chief's voluntary portion is another way to make a political statement if the players mean to escalate the disagreement. On the other hand, out-gifting the chief will make that statement, too, in a way less controversial to the ring members if those need to be won over. When a piece of plunder is handed over to the sponsor and given back, it might come back as personal property of the recipient, or the recipient might carry it in the name of the clan. The difference is that an item carried in the name of the clan (or left in the stead of the recipient) is expected to be given back to the clan, while personal property may be sold off or otherwise lost with nobody offended. Depending on the level of Gloranthan simulation in your game, you might wish to apply such distinctions for powerful items you wish to keep under GM control. For everyday items it is easier to just assume them as personal property, unless you need a plot hook sunk into the characters' property. Fun fact about people taken for ransom: These folk become guests of the captor's clan (and/or chief, and/or tribal king) with limited liberty to move around, but otherwise expecting a certain level of guest treatment, at least while negotiations are conducted in good faith. As such, the hostage will have access to the internal politics of the clan unless specifically excluded from places, is expected to worship at the clan shrine and/or the hearth of his host, and to assist the clan according to his guest status and equipment. (Hostages without their own weapons aren't expected to defend the clan, but hostages with some armament, possibly on loan by the hosting clan, are.) It might gall other clansfolk immensely to have a personal enemy of theirs being treated like a guest. Again, an opportunity where generosity towards the hostage may translate into political or diplomatic capital, and lack thereof as well (just with different folk).

The light reflected from the sail might be harvested by photovoltaic cells, or (parts of) the sails could be such. If the sail can be kept in a convex shape, concentrating a lot of diffuse sunlight reflected on the collectors makes this viable way farther out in a solar system even without active irradiation. Returning inward probably requires slingshot maneuvers around massive objects for change of direction and weaker lateral acceleration for additional tack. A developed system will have mirrors or sun-powered lasers to provide rivers of light that can be sailed inward. These mirrors might be rocket ships or railgun missiles which carry only an array of light sails into position. Actually, those are in all likelihood something like Stellasers - basically pairs of mirrors in moderately low solar orbit using the photosphere of the sun as laser medium. A third mirror directs the output passing through the center of one of those mirrors. Yes, these are weapon grade when held on a planetary target or similar.

If Undeath is a rune of its own (I think the rune you are referring to used to be called "Hunger" and has nothing to do with Zombies), that rune doesn't mean Chaos. Likewise, the Lunar rune doesn't automatically imply Chaos - there is e.g. Annilla who hasn't had a personal connection to Chaos (unlike her Artmali descendants). Trolls use Chaos regularly. ("Wait. What?") Trolls harbor (or heard) their chaotic cave troll cousins, who participate in their culture as Kyger Litor cultists (though rarely initiates). This includes the ZZ cult, too - it is anything but unheard of that ZZ assaults include cave trolls. A mummy guardian of a tomb is a form of necromancy which doesn't necessarily involve Chaos. And Skeletons may use parts of dead people (or beasts), but aren't reckoned as undead. The Orathorn sorcerer family is Pentan by location, not by culture.

Belatedly reporting from the RQG near future release panel, the next two releases still are Smoking Ruins and Pegasus Plateau, Jeff and Jason went into how art direction for Glorantha is a lot more time-craving than for e.g. Pendragon or Cthulhu and how bad that is for a project like GaGoG. The possibly most enlightening news (other than Jeff and Jason name-dropping various authors for the two scenario books) was that the upcoming RQ Starter Set will contain a write-up of Jonstown with detail on par to that on New Pavis. Robin's upcoming Pavis/Big Rubble project had its own panel which dealt with the way it is going to be a sandbox, what everybody believed the old Pavis and Big Rubble boxes contained and what people imagined it to contain. Overall, exciting perspectives - there will be a character generation system in the Pavis box that allows you to create characters who followed Argrath and Harrek on the Circumnavigation, with the option to have gained the attention of Harrek, losing an arm as he ripped it off, then having had it regrown or otherwise re-attached, resulting in a character having the potential to both gain the passions Loyalty: Harrek and Fear Harrek.

The woman formerly known as fastes woman alife?

You select three of your deity's special spells regardless of cost, and cast any of these. It just doesn't make sense to me to be able to learn a spell you don't have enough rune points for, but that's just me.

Only to a golden crisp, please... "The bandit ducks" sounds like a phrase from a single player adventure... but it would have my vote out of the three titles.

Putting yoursel into the future is a standard heroic feat, really - basically any legendary king worth his salt to be called upon in the future has such an abode. Arthur, Barbarossa, Jordan's heroes of the Horn... The problem is that this is a one way trip, and you miss much of the intervening activity while lingering or sleeping in your personal limbo. Aspects of the gods exist in Time. Sure, those aspects can be immense, and they might draw in the full attention of the entity when Compromise is broken. The agency of the gods outside of their assigned cyclical roles lies in their devotees taking on the existence of that deity when they perform one of the deity's feats.

Rather than this pulp Cthulhu scenario cited by MOB, here is some science about where the stuff came from: https://www.academia.edu/10126837/_On_the_Location_of_Irisagrig_en_S._Garfinkle_-_M._Molina_eds._The_Present_and_Future_of_Neo-Sumerian_Studies_From_the_21st_Century_BC_to_the_21st_Century_AD._Proceedings_of_the_International_Conference_on_Neo-Sumerian_Studies_Held_in_Madrid_July_22-24_2010_Winona_Lake_2013_pp._59-87

That's assuming Malthusian population growth, a theory that doesn't quite work for civilizations. I am a regular consumer of Isaac Arthur's SF channel on youtube, which means I am aware of those calculations. All of these come with the assumption that civilization doesn't change much. Here's a fun setting theory for you - Dark Matter is actually all those solar systems or local clusters that have retreated into pocket universes, linked by wormholes, with their residual gravity holding together all the remaining galaxy. We're actually inhabiting the wastelands and spaces left out by that wormhole network, all the undesirable places. (Or our system is too young to have been included in that massive exodus?) For a different explanation of the Fermi paradox, read the Schlock Mercenary webcomic. Great Filters and frantic exodus fleets away from the populated places in the galaxy to avoid that filter. True, both of these are rather fantastic explanations. But your assumptions run on "barbarians in space", something that might be untenable. Our definition of matter may be flawed. My point, really. Our window of observation is too short. While you're at it, take the matter from the suns as well, and increase Hawking radiation on the event horizons of black holes, evaporating them. Such a locust civilization would be leaving a void behind. (Or something like Dark Matter.) And I mentioned before that exploiting an aggregation disk around a newly forming star offers much easier access to all the raw material - collect the stuff before it clumps into planets or blows off all that valuable gas and dust. If you have the choice between exploiting a mother lode and exploiting the slag and waste of a previous extraction operation, you are likely to go for the mother lode, right? Stuff bound in planets are the waste heaps of the universe. I'm with Isaac Arthur on this - if you manage to colonize the outer system, there is nothing to stop you from continuing into the Oort Cloud, and the interstellar space beyond until you reach the next star system. You can do so at ppm of C. Because that would be stupid. If you want heavy elements, go to mercury, or collect asteroids and meteorites. Way more bang for the energy put in. We assume that Mercury originally came with a lithosphere. That isn't there any more. We have no idea whether all of that just evaporated or whether someone came and harvested. If you talk about strip-mining our system over the course of 5 billion years, a superior civilization could have visited about 5 billion years ago to harvest the aggregation disk, and leave the rest as a waste pile. Earth has nothing that you cannot get more easily elsewhere in our solar system, except for organisms which may hinder your extraction processes. Why bore deep wells and push the stuff up our considerable gravity well when you can just pump the liquid off Titan for a fraction of the effort? A visiting civilization would have come with space travel, and would have gone to Mercury for heavy metals, to various planetoids for regolith, to Jupiter or Saturn for water ice or methane, and to Titan for slightly more complex hydrocarbons. Take the oxygen from regolith (you'll want the metals the stuff was bound to, too) and react it with the methane, and even a first half 20th century chemist can produce all the basic organic chemicals you might ever wish to use from that (with a sprinkling of sulphur or nitrogen, e.g. taken from Venus atmosphere). Energy is there for the collecting - a fusion reaction just 8 light minutes from here. There is plenty of coal about 3 km below the Cimbric peninsula - as much as there used to be in the Ruhr territory, for the same area. You don't go extracting that because there are much easier alternatives elsewhere. (And because we have a slight over-supply in re-mobilized carbon from sequestration traps that we need to deal with more urgently...) On Titan, all you need is some tubes with liquid methane or ammonia to pump some heat into the sedimented hydrocarbons and a pump to load them on whichever method you want to use to lift the stuff off a sixth of the gravity well you have to overcome when you have an oil extraction running on our planet. For the heat, use some solar mirrors built from stuff from the rockier smaller moons nearby. Now, which spacefaring civilization in their right mind would go extracting minimal amounts of dino juice from our dirtball with that place as a ready alternative? For less complex hydrocarbons, drop a floating methane extraction rig into the atmosphere of any of our gas giants and fling the stuff out from there. Meanwhile, enjoy the songs of the giant insects at the sunsets every eight hours on a beach resort on Carboniferous Earth on your shifts off from lifting crust and core matter off Mercury, or go cloud-diving on a much cooler Venus, or skiing on a rather wet Mars. Our planet offers less of everything you find concentrated in these other places, and way harder to get at. It makes for a nice resort if you can avoid the native organisms, but so do the planets 2 and 4 during the Carboniferous, in all likelihood without those pests. My point is that if some galactic civilization came here for a mining operation in a distant past (when the sun was less glaring than today), hardly anything would have been extracted from Earth. Strip mining on Mercury may have happened without us ever knowing about it. Gas extraction in the outer planets, and hydrocarbon harvesting on Titan? We won't know about that until we start such operations ourselves. Traces of resorts on our dirtball? Lost in the background noise. The galactic civilization would know this as a former extraction area, and without much activity remaining, may have written the place off as too much trouble to extract more. Their remaining civilization (after sending out waves of colonists elsewhere) would have crumbled in the Ordovician gamma ray extinction event, possibly evacuating some survivors in their space habitats. The system could be registered in the data of that galactic commonwealth as mostly mined out, interrupted by a cataclysm, with possible survivors leaving for a different place. Maybe the system is regarded as haunted - who says that civilizations need to be all rational? While Germanicus went and cleared up the mass graves at Kalkriese, according to Tacitus, the Romans didn't return to settle Germania Magna after the Varus battle. Not worth the effort.

This is what people said about flying or sailing past the horizon, too... Why would there have to be an alien colony on our planet to prove past visits? Quantum gravity is not really resolved, is it? Yes, zipping around at near-lightspeed with something like a buzzard ramjet (something quite close to a second order perpetuum mobile) appears quite unrealistic. Moving through interstellar space is a boring case of millennia of "are we there yet" with the slight problem of remaining alive and goal-oriented during that journey. Why settle here? Just because we have adapted for this, our planet's circadian cycles and surface gravity might be deleterious to the visitors, our biosphere too aggressive, and our atmosphere toxic or at least noxious to the explorers taking a look at our rock with their interstellar probes. Sure. But why would such a civilization settle on planets? Look at the level of urbanisation humanity has accumulated in the last few centuries, and extrapolate from there. Constructing the perfect habitat is what we perceive as the hallmark of civilization. Why deal with all the drawbacks provided by planets? And then, a planet in a resource-depleted aggregation disk like ours when a freshly formed solar system has way more in terms of accessible resources? You are extremely focussed on planetary life as the only thinkable way of expansion. What are the advantages of having to reproduce aeons of adaptive evolution just to occupy another mudball if your technology allows you to survive travel across interstellar space? Look at the projections made by SF authors like Jules Vernes and his contemporaries. Those were made by extrapolating their cutting edge technology and society into the future. Our own projections are likewise limited, but of course we are at the pinnacle of insight and couldn't probably be surpassed, aren't we/could we? Plus, do we have clear evidence that the introduction of cyanobacteria to our biosphere was not an invasive species? There was a rather recent paper (a year or two ago) that tackled the problem that traces of a technological civilization prior to the Chixculub impact would be very hard. Even ceramics have a very hard time surviving such time-spans. With travel times in the range of our history as sapients in a slower than light setting, visits to outlying systems even by a swarm of drones don't have to occur that frequently. So what resources does our planet offer that you couldn't get out of the Jupiter or Saturn system or lift off Mercury with less interference and trouble? What exactly makes our dirtball prime estate for a space-faring civilization?

As predicted by the evangelist John, in Revelations. Or somewhat differing in details. Musing about the Fermi paradox can be fun, or it can be dull. Me, I want me a form of space opera setting that makes a couple of unobtainium assumptions in a sufficiently logical form, much like I accept similar assumptions for magic, deities, or even an improbable universe like Glorantha.