Joerg

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.

We are still trying to find out about the nature of space, and concepts like Dark Matter and Dark Energy may provide inights and even future technologies that find ways to work around the limitations of Einsteinian space-time. Right now, they are reminiscent of the Ether postulated to carry radio waves. Like the concept of the Phlogiston theory, which got the order of magnitude of the mass of chemical energy wrong, but ultimately was vindicated with E=mC² or m=E/C², the properties of the yet unobserved space may provide a medium in space that a future drive might interact with. The alternative is a space-warping technology. Whether it takes something like the Alcubierre math using exotic matter with negative energy or something slightly less extreme like a circular near-singularity by slowing C (not in vacuum, but in the medium used) to walking speed and moving the medium at that speed while pumping it full of light, weird effects may be possible. We haven't gotten much closer to understanding gravity and whether there is a quantum "particle" describing the exchange. Also, there have been assumptions about physical limitations that have been overcome by engineering, like e.g. optical microscopes with resolutions better than the raw application of the Heisenberg relation suggested, by not directly looking. Within memory of our culture, which is at most 12,000 of our planet's rotations around the sun. And the planet might be a protected biodiversity habitat, or rather might have been one prior to our efforts during the last few centuries. When the park rangers return, they might be angry about the squatters. Assuming that it takes sublight speeds to travel from star to star, would you send such an expedition lasting centuries to watch primates fling their feces at one another?

They'd surely leave a memento for the Lunar army to find. It doesn't matter whether you notify the kin or the chosen leaders of a slain enemy. There is no known case of Sartarite rebels annihilating a Lunar army unit without leaving any trace of them to be found. And the army would have gone after an AWOL unit, if nothing else then for disciplinary reasons. It is arguable whether the deed was a breach of hospitality. Feeding someone in your own house implies some acceptance of hospitality duties. Any breach of hospitality is a major anathema unto the High Gods of Glorantha. On the other hand, quite likely no oaths of hospitality were exchanged. The vengeful ghost doesn't require any guilt of the perps. Making it a single entity is a weird design choice, and even weirder is the hit location table of the resulting antagonist. Not unprecedented (Cwim had a similarly useless hit location table in Elder Secrets), but counter-intuitive, especially when there are chariot rules in the rules. I ran the scenario and found it to provoke a situation with high TPK probability, which is a different issue. As written, it is afternoon when the party arrives, and as soon as it gets dark, the antagonist will come again. The player characters are as uninformed about the threat as the third victim, and are as likely to end up in the third victim's condition. Other than the three previous victims were badly mangled, the player characters have not a single clue about the nature of the attacker. That's fine for the horror genre, especially if you have no great attachment to the protagonists yet, and letting a few of them die just sets the atmosphere for the rest of the bunch. Doing this to Glorantha characters may be consequent, but a bit unusual - people entering Snake Pipe Hollow have a rough idea where they are going. An Antorling hamlet doesn't call deathtrap. Sneaky is one thing. Going against hospitality - even forcibly acquired hospitality - is going against the inner workings of Orlanthi society the same way as kinslaying. Hospitality laws are one of the universal constants of Glorantha. Once you feed a foreigner in your house (or even your enclosed area), you have accepted the role of the host. Sure, the "guest" had obeyed the laws of hospitality mostly in the breach, too, but that is not an excuse - compare the story of Arangorf's visit at Orlanth's stead (in King of Sartar) for how a host properly deals with a guest overreaching their welcome. Did the villagers have an urgent need to kill the rune lord while he was a guest, however un-welcome?

Was the killing declared to the kin of the slain? If not, it is secret murder. The charioteer and rider belonging to the Seven Mothers suggests that they were Provincials, too - in other words, Orlanthi. As long as you declare the slaying to the cult or kin of the deceased, it is honorable. Failing to do so is the Ipharan way, and stay away from those daughters of Vadrus. Whether poisoning two men and then pommeling them to death is something to be proud of (for anybody but a Trickster) is a different question, one I would answer in the negative. A lot, as far as my part time Orlanthi Lawspeaking experience tells me. You kill someone, you declare your deed, and rush off into exile or become a rebel bandit - fine. HIding the evidence (including the bodies, except for the plunder) and the deed is not honorable. Unlike the stain on the honor of the perps. Giving the bodies a non-burial more or less was a surefire way to awaken a vengeful ghost.

True, the Lunar College of Magic has experts from all paths of magic (except draconic). This was a battle against the Pentans, well known for their shamans and solar magic, which means that their own solar magicians and shamans would have been active neutralizing the Pentan magic. The Pentans know this, and brought the Orathorn sorcerers as their nasty surprise. The Lunar response would have been what?

I get the impression that the author got that mixed up, regarding the black as the most magical time. Also the phrase "a full black moon rising" raised the suspicion that the author is new to Glorantha. It might be excused that this is when a full week's worth of moonglow has been stored by the Rattling Wind. For the final publication, this should be amended. It was secret murder. In Orlanthi culture there is nothing wrong with a manslaughter if you own up to your deed, but secret murder is a different issue. Yes, even if the three perpretators had gone into voluntary exile, the people inhabiting hamlet would have been slain or enslaved, and the rest of the clan would have suffered badly, too, but that doesn't change the fact that the trio acted dishonorably. For a modern parallel, it is like a hit and run after causing a lethal traffic accident.

There are some things about the visibility and ritual of sorcery that I might have liked to expand upon. Perhaps visuals like glowing letters in the medium inscripted by the sorcerer, like those long shutter time photographs, allowing the opposing sorcerer B to start an inscription (and incantation) to counter whatever sorcerer A is brewing up. There are at least two cases of sorcerous duels resulting in world-rending side effects - the duel of Yomili and Halwal at the Red Ruins in Tanisor, and the Night of Horrors which squared off Lunar regimental sorcery against Orathorn regimental sorcery. This is about huge spells interrupted or turned away into twisted magical energies, completely going out of control. The sorcery system I would like to see should have something like this. But then, there is a lot work to be done on Malkionism from the writings in Revealed Mythologies and Middle Sea Empire that require considerable re-interpretation and re-phrasing (at the very least) while at the same time keeping that history of Glorantha intact (after all, that is what the situation in the Guide grew from).