Joerg

To me, it is more like Mythras Traveller or Space Opera, with a more naval than airborn feel to it. But yes, it is an FTL setting, or at least provides all the tools for one. There is of course a generic SF guide involved, but ship design will always follow the assumptions of the tech tree - I know I have to adjust the system for the tech tree of the setting I am building. Sure. Once you have decided to use humans like ablative armor, there is nothing to stop you from crewing expandable missiles with them. Why? A micrometeorite creates a puncture and might require you to repair a number of vital systems or shut off certain systems (and activate the redundancy plans). Rather reaching a stable parking or docking orbit. So basically, you FTLed to your planetary destination and then used maneuver jets for the final docking or landing? If this is a genetic advantage, then you will witness the birth of a hereditary class of oligarchs. Since you are declaring these characters so, what is to stop you from declaring each and any of them to be a member of one of the spacefaring castes? "Exotic" reaction mass like metal ions evaporated from an anode, as I regularly do in my AAS lamps in the lab. I can name a couple of ion sources used in mass spectroscopy, where the ion source and subsequent accelerator is essentially an ion drive(r). The technology of the ion source is about as "complicated" as a vacuum tube TV screen. It offers you a heat sink, raw material, reaction mass, microgravity, shielding... everything you need for heavy industry. Doing a number of gravitational assist maneuvers, yes. It is almost like traveling on a raft in a current, yes. No false drama here. Travel is boring. ("Are we there yet?") Hence the show runners write "encounters" such as micrometeorite strikes (requiring frantic repair activity), solar flares (basically a "take cover" exercise, with some ominous rolling for system failures resulting in more repair activity), resource shortages (due to contamination or some other made-up reason), etc. If you have NPCs, you can let one of them go haywire. (It works... I cannot count how many times I have seen those scenes. Which, on second thought, means that you probably shouldn't use this scenario unless you manage to subvert it somehow.) "All stations - prepare for emergency thrust!" - another "take cover" excercise, plus not having secured your stuff creates a complication. In The Expanse, Amos had such a scene in Season 2 (IIRC). A table-top rpg cannot realistically simulate all the things that need to be considered for any futuristic or even contemporary activity without handwaving. NPCs usually remain quite one- or two-dimensional. Getting every aspect of technology right is impossible.

Other than being tumbled thoroughly by Veskarthan's fury in 1050, you're probably right. A ten foot wave going through the land may have left ripples which matter a lot at sea or river-bed level but may be invisible on the vertical scale of a map like that. The coastal flats in all likelihood aren't. I am pretty convinced that Kostern Island has a cliff of an average of four to five meters rising up above a beach line that may be just a few meters wide at highest tide and maybe thrice as much at lowest tide, similar to where the flint mines on Bornholm were found. At or near the tidal flats, a meter elevation means half a world of difference. Just above the flood line, willow, birch, black alder, blackberry vines, hawthorn, dwarf pine, gorse (the prickly kind), and out of the wind bushes like fuchsia or rhododendron would cover land not cleared for pasture and material to secure shore lines in the process of being washed away. Southern Genertela is probably not suited for mangroves, and extensive reed areas will probably be found only where the tidal outflow is compensated by river water. On top of the plateau, almost everything used to be forested - in my opinion a fairly open forest of predominantly deciduous hardwood trees in flat (but elevated) areas out of the wind. IMO soil coverage on the plateau is nothing to scoff at, and due to the massive Ice Age Glorantha has undergone, quite a lot of the top soil may be loess (fertile ground earth carried away from the glacier front and deposited here by Storm). Like Orlanth carried Ernalda out of the Evil Emperor's lands to the north... so let's assume a loose sediment layer of several meters above the limestone and karst bedrock in most places, with clays and possibly podsol from pre-Ice Age forestation providing water-retention layers making the plateau well provided with surface ground water. Where I live, we have some picturesque (but at best 15 meters high) cliffs of glacial marl clay topped by a beech-dominated deciduous forest slowly gnawed away by storm floods, with parts of that cliff and the trees above falling down every few winters. The cliffs of Dover have similar degredation (but no forest on top), the cliffs of Rügen have such forest on top of chalk cliffs. For the Heortland plateau near the cliffs, the vegetation of the Channel Isles like Jersey might be a good guideline (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jersey): For the southern part of the plateau (Esvular) closer to the Storm Hill foothills, the rising landscape might get closer to Istria, with occasional karst coming to the surface: The edges of the Footprint might look similar, too, although covered in forest. Possibly with quite a bit of cedar and spruce. But the Heortland foothills south of the Print also feature quite lush and well watered valleys: (I chose Istria for comparison as it used to be the forest region providing the timber for the Venetian fleet, now somewhat denuded.) Higher up in the Storm Mountains, the western Pyrenees or the mountainous regions of Greece, coastal southern Anatolia, or Cyprus might be a good guidance. The rather extreme vertical upfolding of the northern cyprus range (just south of Kyrenia) might actually be a good geological parallel for the upfolding caused by Larnste stamping down into the footprint, pushing up the general ridge of the Storm Hills through which Veskarthan's sons then rose to form the higher peaks, their trapped earth-fire finding a way up between the cracks left by that mighty stomp.

The highlands of Heortland? Do you mean the tree-line of the Storm Mountains, or the foothills north and south of the Footprint? Cypress is definitely a candidate (Redwood is a close relative), but so is pine. Overall, I might be willing to go for a vegetation beween Danube Valley in Bavaria and Austria on the cold extreme and Cyprus on the warm extreme. Probably only winter hard trees in most places, so no olives or oranges - at least not after the lack of summer 1622. Spruce is a candidate for Dekko Crevice and the Troll Woods.

Fair enough. But then it can be argued that Thed's broos were not Chaotic before she gave birth to the Devil, and the Wild Healer of the Rockwoods and the rumored warm valley beyond the Glacier nonwithstanding, all known broos are chaotic now. On the other hand, the encounter with Pocharngo mutated only a portion of the overall troll population into cave (and sea) trolls bearing the chaotic taint (and a quite benevolent one, too). There are a couple of associates of the Chaos deities which aren't chaotic of themselves. Most Lunar deities, to start with.

Those incredibly sophisticated magnetic field shapes sound like a handful of unobtainium with discrete field borders, or some almost fractal array of magnetic coils around the hull. Neither will be feasible without an unobtainium internal energy source, or alternatively an externally induced magnetic reaction to electromagnetic radiation. Yes, but a setting like that is not anywhere close to the setting outlined by M-Space. That is an FTL setting with workable, highly efficient fusion reactors (or a similar kind of unobtainium internal reactor), consuming rather negligible amounts of fusion fuel probably doubling as highly energetic reaction mass after fusion. Dark Matter is postulated to permeate the space almost everywhere baryonic matter (stuff like we know it) is found (I recently read about two satellite dwarf galaxies which may not have the uniform rotation of other galaxies like ours). If there is something influencing the inertia of the stars so that they don't drift individually, that something is available to be targeted by inertia-affecting hypothetical gravitics. I called that stuff "ether" because it provides an unseen medium between the stars which is a current hard science postulate. True. But M-Space provides the tools for an FTL setting similar to those of e.g. Classic Traveller. Applying it to the rocket age is similar to using Mythic Britain for a Clan of the Cave Bear setting as far as technology is involved. Only you wouldn't want to sit inside those vessels if you can remote-control them at much higher G-forces than you yourself could withstand. Something like the drone ship-to-ship combat of Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy. No, it transforms waste heat into infared laser exhaust generating thrust (in case of doubt by superheating hydrogen plasma to push the ship away reflected by low temperature plasma shields). Liquid H2? You don't want to expose that to micro-meteorites providing outlets for lateral thrust... H2O has sufficient density to filter out some cosmic radiation if you give it a 10m radius or so, and you might use the inner part for growing food (algae, animal plankton, fish) and supporting your life support. Anyway, using your fuel for shielding means that you are left without shielding for the last leg of your journey (if you plan for emergency fuel, plan on continuing the mission after having expended this emergency fuel). This is a bit hard on the crew and other sensitive payload, don't you think? Until we get a sky hook and a railgun into a useful orbit. There are quite advanced passive take-off systems for atmospheric lift-off, with transfer of external energy to accelerate reaction mass, or even to generate thrust by reflection of what the craft's target is shot with. Getting a rocket assembly into an orbit where most of the heavy lifting out of our gravity well has already been paid appears to be the basic requirement for a crewed Mars mission to me, regardless whether that is in Earth orbit or on the Moon. Apart from the protomolecule stuff, the main cases of unobtainium in the first two seasons/volumes of The Expanse are controlled fusion and the efficiency of the Epstein drive. (And the weird idea that an ice harvester ship would make the trip back to the customer when a railgun could send re-packaged ice cubes there in a constant stream of missiles). The amount of energy (and fuel) to lift an intact, fueled Saturn V rocket equivalent into a near earth orbit to start a Mars voyage is as unsettling. Chemical rockets allow a journey to the moon inside of 3 days. A trip to Mars at ideal constellation is in the order of 400 days, and in less than ideal constellations several times that. Unless you enjoy roleplaying camp fever, not much in the way of roleplaying opportunities for such a voyage. You can of course gloss over it, let the protagonists make a number of skill improvement and body deterioration rolls and say "two years have passed, and you have reached Mars orbit." Rather you claim that other active shipboard drives are softer SF. I still disagree - the main advantage of rocket drives is that they can be tested outside a vacuum. Or you skip the requirement for high delta V, and use external power for much of your acceleration. Chemical drives are fine if you want to have a game in Earth orbit, and/or possible Earth/Moon L4 and L5 NEO capture sites. That's not quite a space opera setting, though. For interstellar drone missions, the light sail approach riding laser beams is a real alternative. It takes quite a bit of initial expenditure for the infrastructure, but the free electricity generated by that infrastructure might be enough to pay for that expenditure. And you said you didn't want to limit space travel to a privileged few? Yes, no computer is ever going to need more than 640 KByte RAM. When it comes to pushing Near Earth Objects with usable material into convenient collection sites like Earth orbit or Earth-Moon L4 and L5 points, an ion drive making use of a fraction of the payload and solar panels is vastly more efficient than sending chemical rockets and the fuel to do the job. But that's just big money you're glossing over. This vessel is of course sitting somewhere where it doesn't have to care about escape velocity any more. A 9:1 fuel to payload ratio sounds extremely optimistic to me, anyway. Rather than a battleship, let's discuss something like a small O'Neill cylinder (or just a pressurized donut that diameter) being pushed to say Ceres to establish a human colony on (or rather inside) that planetoid (probably in a sub-surface O'Neill cylinder, or attaching your travel cylinder to a pole of Ceres). You'll probably want to send two such vessels at the same time. With a target like that, you need to provide enough fuel to brake at the target, then stabilize your rendezvous orbit for years. You don't even have to carry the fuel for the return trip - such reaction mass would be harvested from Ceres. Assuming similar mass and getting the initial acceleration from Earth completely by booster modules (some of which you might harvest a few years after your arrival for return missions to Earth), you can slow down from 10km/s. The shortest possible distance between Earth and Ceres is 250 million kilometers, resulting in a journey of a bit less than 3000 days or a little under 8 years. In practical reality, your path would probably be at least twice as long. Still, 15 years of interplanetary journey sound remotely possible with chemical rockets, and with mostly female passengers and frozen embryos (again mostly female, and some frozen sperm) you might be able to establish a viable second or third generation population of colonists with enough bio-diversity. So - an interplanetary journey of 8 to 15 years, and your entire fuel available for braking for less than an hour at full thrust. What's your hurry with acceleration and deceleration?

I was talking about the Malia cult and its runes - provided this was already part of that older manuscript, I would be interested whether there are significant changes to the runes of Malia.

I like how your second image shows coastal flats, a cliff, a plateau, and a mountain range in the background, althouh this needs to be scaled up a lot to become a view to the south-east from the edge of Shadow Plateau. The vegetation should be a lot lusher, though - at least to the level of the British Channel coast.

Could someone check the GaGoG manuscript whether that statement has been altered significantly, please?

Completely different from my expectation, to be honest. There is no plateau above the cliff, instead what we have here are coastal ridges. And too few coastal flats. At least the rock type is somewhat correct - sedimentary chalk and limestone. The only cliffside I have visited that comes close to the relief of Heortland is the cliffs of Mohare, although the elevation is too low and the rock type is wrong. The cliffs of Arkona (Rügen) or Bornholm might be a small scale version of what I expect from Heortland - a 1000 ' near vertical rise, with occasional overhangs. Below that, rubble foothills, tapering off to coastal marsh and pasture. This is how the edge of the Mirrorsea could look like (if you add some impressive cliffs where the distant clouds are): (Tümlauer Bucht, Eiderstedt, Germany) (North coast of Cyprus, near Kyrenia) (also northwestern Cyprus, a rather broad coastal flatland with only occasional rock outcrops below a plateau) (possibly some of the Leftarm Isles, where the plateau portions are significantly lower than at Vizel)

I think that even Rune Lord 1D10 DI has limits in its applications, otherwise your friendly neighborhood munchkin will roll up a Wind Lord or Sword of Humakt follower doing nothing but upping all the Munchkin's character's characteristics to 21 over the course of a few years. Biturian apparently never considered praying for DI to push his allied spirit back into effective POW values.

M-Space doesn't spend much text on technologies from the real world. Digital computing doesn't receive much attention, neither do combustion engines. I agree with an earlier comment by you that fuel consumption for FTL is arbitrary. Same for energy consumption of such technology. While there is no hard physical barrier preventing technology that produces magnetic shields able to ward off cosmic radiation, there is a problem with the energy consumption for such a device. No argument here. So why your fascination with chemical rockets? 😋 But then, we aren't talking about slow motion, only slow deceleration. Anything able to create artificial space curvature and localized gravity wells inside a vessel should be able to do so outside of the vessel, too. If you assume an "ether" of Dark Matter pervading the galaxy, that source of gravity offers a reactio to your artificial gravity actio. But I agree with your disagreement on reactionless action. Yet, conservation of momentum poses a problem with all FTL travel. Provided you procure that energy on board of your vessel. Mass-energy transformation has some potential (aka anti-matter), but handling that stuff even after wasting huge amounts of solar energy creating it in the first place remains problematic. No jet fighter dog fights this way, no. Imperfect - yes. But building a carnot engine to use stored potential energy to move distributed heat to concentrated heat is easy. Getting the source of stored potential energy for that is hard. You need supraconducting magnet coils to avoid frying yourself warding off cosmic radiation (or counteracting the Jovian asteroid belt) if you plan to survive your space trip. You mean ballistic objects after assisted acceleration (true, using chemical rockets) with minimal thrust for course correction? This is mostly faulted to our starting point at the bottom of the gravity well, and the enormous surplus energy expended to overcome that. Most of the kinetic energy of our deep system probes comes from swing-by acceleration leeching kinetic energy from the planets. You can build up velocity using gravitic assist of planets and planetoids, regardless whether you start your shot with a chemical rocket or a fusion rocket. An umpowered impactor is hard to detect until it is way too late to avoid it. Power generation aboard a space ship... ok, that's an issue when you are far from the Goldilocks zone. As long as you are within collector range of a primary, you can collect sun light, and by skewing your collector sail you can use that collection for a bit of additional thrust. Photovoltaic collectors will generate electric energy, most likely to be stored chemically or in sufficiently dimensioned condensators. Rotational energy in gyros would be possible, too, but a bit self-defeating when what you want to use the energy for is to accelerate or decelerate mass. Using the external fusion reactor as light source for your PV panels - if need be via an array of collector sails spread around the ship, possibly separate from the ship - sounds like the sensible way for power generation. Really? Getting the fuel flow right is a bitch - that's why Korolev's umpteen drive moon rocket didn't take off. The few big rocket exhausts of the Saturn were anything but blue collar friendly, either. Eventually, you will have radiated off every Joule above cosmic background radiation, too... Process heat put to a controlled use isn't waste heat. The problem with anything but chemically stored energy available for electrochemical processes is the release of heat over time, and in correlation to the work done. Heat pumps transfer heat where you can handle it, and concentrate it - by adding more heat from the work you put in, reducing your on-board energy storage, but when that heat concentration translates into propulsion, this is energy put out of your engine. Carnot engines don't work in Vacuum unless you can dump your coolant as reaction mass. That's the problem with nuclear reactors on board of space vessels - the slow plutonium pile powering thermocouples for those interstellar missions doesn't give you any gigawatts, either. Gigawatts in terms of chemical energy translate as megatons of fuel, so there is no way you'll be happy with your chemical thrusters, either. On-board power generation is prohibitive. Photovoltaics with beamed light is a different proposal than your rooftop panel relying on daylight. Put a collector array in orbit not too far from the sun, and provide a coherent beam of just the perfect wave length for your PV target, and your wattage won't suck. Maybe a maser for energy transmission might be more useful? Building a stable frame (the hulls can be attached to) with sufficiently low mass, putting on a massive shield in flight direction to minimize collisions caused by your own vector, ... you'll need hectares of rocket engines to push this. That kind of gravity isn't habitable - tidal nausea will incapacitate your crew, rather than prevent bone degradation and fluid build-up. What do you call "impressive" in terms of space drives? Your chemical rocket only leaves you coasting after a short boost, the ion drive doesn't offer short boosts but has a greater output during the journey. Light is cheap when you haven't reached Kardashev 2 yet. Combining sail pushback with PV energy generation will beat even fusion power plant efficiency if you have no heat dump to cool down your steam turbine. GURPS apparently has. Covering highly asymmetric tech levels without huge doses of handwavium if you don't want to use the standard unobtainium is always a big demand for a slim SF rules set. Just out of interest, if you want a gigawatt of propulsive force generation, how many Saturn rockets do you need to lash together, and how long can they maintain this output?

I did say "outside the worship by broos", didn't I? To repeat: Cult Compendium p.255: This goddess has an existence untainted by the broos, too. Worship of Malia was instrumental for the survival through the Greater Darkness for many a group. And even Orlanth has a not so secret association with the Mistress of Disease - his Impests are an affliction very hard to discern from one caused by Disease spirits. That's the broo cult, which is chaotic and uses the Chaos rune. There is more to Mal(l)ia than broo worship. Chaos can insert itself and its rune into the roles of other runes. Outside of broo worship, these spells are using Death or Darkness. I'll give you chaotic taint if the spell was cast by a broo using the Chaos rune. But: Carry Disease uses Death or Chaos. Cause Disease uses Darkness or Chaos. Only one rune is used to invoke a rune spell, spells with more than one rune show that different cults use different runes to cast this spell. That's why Orlanth's version of the Charisma spell uses the Illusion rune (the spell being a tribute by his bonded Trickster Eurmal). The anti-Vaxxer stance is a form of Malia worship in the real world - these people encourage personal immunity from e.g. the Measles by infection, undermining herd immunity protecting those who will take severe (often lethal) damage from the disease.

Mal(l)ia's runes (outside of worship by broos) are Death and Darkness. Cult Compendium p.255. Her role in the world may be destructive, but is a necessary part of the cycle, and titles like "Janitor of the Gods" show a role in the greater picture of things that is lacking for most Chaos deities. A disease does not imbue or carry a chaos taint detectable by Storm Bull's Sense Chaos.

I draw my flatbow (at my draw length about 75 lbs) in a somewhat hunched posture, too. Shooting a longbow is supposed to be one fluid motion. In sports archery you are prohibited from pulling in from above for security reasons (a premature release might send the arrow way beyond the target - not a concern when you are shooting near your extreme range in a clout tournament, but very much a problem in at best mediocre application of ballistic net in field archery). Unlike the archer in the video, releasing a battle load of two dozen arrows over a short time with that bow would wear me out in terms of shoulder tension (the main source of force) even in times when I was competition shape, but that doesn't affect swinging a sharp object against foes as badly as it interferes with further shots with the bow, as those swings activate quite different muscles.5 (My recurve bows using aluminium carbon arrows have draw weights of about 40 lbs at 31.5'' draw length, and are usually shot with a straight back, although I twist the entire upper torso shooting uphill or downhill at more extreme angles to keep shoulder tension constant. In field archery, I am occasionally forced to shoot from a kneeling position as free headspace often isn't calculated for a 2m archer with a 72'' bow, and neither are the throw arcs.) I haven't heard about any archer ripping his face off (although bearded ones may have epilated themselves painfully on occasion), and there have been all kinds of horror stories about archery injuries when I was still active. Eye punctures by the nocks of arrows in the target range quite high in the ranking of serious archery damage. Splintered arrows in your bow arm are another nightmare story (aggravated with splintered carbon shafts which are pretty much invisible in X-Ray and require ultra-sound and deft pincer-work to be removed completely from muscle tissue, or you will sooner or later have to remove that tissue if you missed any splinters).

Mal(l)ia's diseases aren't chaotic. They are Darkness. The horrible kind. Apart from Cure Chaos Wound, is there a cure other than to cut out that larva before it destroys the host, followed by a Heal Body? Sever Spirit might work if the larva can be targeted using Second Sight, but then the "infected" matter still has to be removed. Are there any "phages" against broo larvae? Gorakiki Ichneumon Wasp might have the spell for you... but probably needs some command spell to minimize damage to the host of the broo larva both when infecting the broo larva and when hatching from the remains of the larva inside the larva's host. An injection of Gorp, again with a long term command spell, and subsequent draining of the gorp might be the least invasive technique to remove a broo larva. Diseases received from a Chaotic creature - does this include infected equipment picked up by looters, or is this restricted to infections transferred via natural weapons (teeth, horns, claws) of the disease carrier? Removes the consequences of broo infection - as in Heal Body following "destroy and dissolve the larva, and any poison that it may have left in the host"? (And removing the chaos taint from the broo infection, too, though none of any other source.) But this makes me think of a weird character concept - a Storm Bull healer. The spell needs to be stacked with a healing spell. As such, it probably can only cure diseases contracted through open wounds - normal infection doesn't need normal healing magic. IMO it should be one spell per infected wound, and non-wound infections are unavailable for treatment by this spell. That's what "Cure All Disease" is for. If a broo headbutt manages to transfer several diseases with one contact, all of them are the same wound. One fundamental statement about Glorantha is that it has no STDs. Hence, injection of a broo larva shouldn't also transfer a disease. The previous grapple attack is a different matter, though.

This spirit is the object of a spirit cult, a completely different relationship than an allied spirit sent by a deity or a lesser spirit captured or bargained into a binding (enchantment or crystal). Yes, you can sacrifice POW to the object of a cult, whether deity or spirit. RQG has a rule for wyter spirits (only) that allows 1:1 conversion of sacrificed POW into wyter POW (which then can be used to cast rune magic). An initiatory relationship is required (or established) for the transfer. An ancestor worshiper worships the ancestors he or she can target with "Gift POW". To me, this indicates that the POW transfer works upwards, towards entities receiving worship, but not horizontally or even downstairs. Biturian Varosh's travelogue was written for RQ2, but RQ attempts to be quite true to those rules (at times too much, IMO). In the Sun Dome episode, Biturian's allied spirit achieves a successful Divine Intervention for its master, leaving it with three measly POW points, which the author bitterly complains about. If it could have been fixed with a few POW transfers, Biturian wouldn't have complained as much.

Any Orlanthi clansperson imagines one afterlife in the Storm Village of God World, as a follower of the appropriate deities. In this case Voria and Voriof. An Orlanthi mother expects to share her afterlife with her offspring, even if that offspring is distributed over several clans in real life (whether through marrying away or through temporary marriages of the mother). Thus, it feels right to have an expectation of some form of permanence of deceased children in the Storm Village.

I think that Counterstroke is the Battle of Heroes - it has Harrek and Jar-eel on their first direct encounter. But then, all subsequent scenarios have both these superheroes, too, whereas the next few major battles lack at least Harrek, until the LBQ when Harrek apparently returns from Laskal once more. Argrath's Return should be the battle of Storm Hill, but the scenario doesn't have any magical units other than the Dragontooth Warriors.

Gwandor Saga is ignorant of Samastina and a number of companions of Argrath, and has lots of player character Argraths. That's an interesting campaign concept, but not for everybody, and canonical sources published since suggest that the number of Argraths in Gwandor Saga is a bit too high. The campaign log remains a good read and inspiration, but it clearly varies from what is forming as the Great Argrath Campaign. Esrolian units (except for the professionals) tend to be somewhat less effective than those from more martial places like Sartar. In old Dragon Pass terms, 2-2-3 or even 2-1-3 would be adequate for hastily recruited local militia. Possibly some 1*-1-3 skirmishers, too. (Dragon Pass stats read <combat> (asterisk indicates pre-battle skirmish ability) - <magic (resistance, also overall cohesiveness as a unit)> - <hex per day movement rate> - optionally <range of magical attack in hexes> with any value (even zero) indicating the ability to fight back at spirits rather than just being selected as casualty)

Yes, and confirmed by Jeff, too. Give or take 10 or even 20% of child mortality, but a significant number of children perishes before initiation, so this is a regular concern for all Theyalans. (The looser initiation customs of Peloria are another can of worms - here such intercessors are likely to act for adults without specific cultic initiation, too.) One reason I asked is because there is a strong incentive in the afterlife to spend it with (an idealized verson of) your kin, although that basically can be reduced to a sense of home in timelessness. (Cabell had Jürgen meet his grandmother in her afterlife doting on a younger version of himself, introducing another level of relativism into this afterlife experience.) Retention of individuality in your afterlife is another debatable boon or curse. As a rule, people receiving a punshment can expect to retain a lot of their individuality that is slowly tortured away, while people's souls entering the afterlife of their deity are fairly non-individual. (A similar effect used to be ascribed to the theist version of ancestor interaction, based on King of Dragon Pass, with "the ancestors" being a collective entity rather than select individuals.) Voria and Voriof (quite likely even the Pelaskites keep sheep) as intercessors for the children make sense, but giving them a separate Godworld afterlife doesn't seem quite right, except for those Jürgen moments.

You somehow doubted the ability of the M-Space system to cater to chemical rockets, whereas I wanted to point out that the ship design is based on the tech tree M-Space inherited from Traveller, with weird spots of softness in the SF behind it. Shielding the payload (whether the on-board AI / heuristic or organisms, or just organic or highly organized matter) from the hostile environment is quite essential. Even maintaining digital data integrity is a challenge under exposure to cosmic radiation. And structural components don't get better with such exposure either. So what is the hurry to change course and velocity? It is not like anybody will be surprised that the target object comes into range. Reactionless thrusters are impossible with current ability to manipulate gravity or spacetime. Photon drives - especially infrared - are a possibility. Not for high thrust, but everything counts in large amounts. Another possibility is to send a lighter (easier to brake) module ahead to install a mirror array on the target, and then use light beams to brake multiple times as the beam is reflected between the vessel (or its parabolic light sail) and the target. The main problem is to have an energy source that doesn't produce vast amounts of waste heat (i.e. wasted energy). Although adding some more energy, a medium and a mirror array allows to send defined IR laser beams as photon drive. I've seen calculations presented by David Brin which make a Sundiver possible - a combination of cooling and force generation. Hence my cry for assisted acceleration. Including light sail technologies (which also can serve as energy generators using photovoltaics). I am a chemist, and that makes me doubt chemical energy as a viable long range solution. Booster rockets to overcome the worst of the gravity well or to get on an initial vector are feasible, but remotely transfered push and illumination sounds like a way more feasible option. Not delta V, just V. Releasing a payload on a swing-by course and (in case of atmospheric entry a heat shield) will produce enough terminal V to be very destructive and extremely hard to fend off, especially if the last swing comes from the direction of the sun. Magnetic coils and electrodes aren't exactly rocket science. Chemical rockets are... by definition. Personally, I think that a plasma technician is just a glorified electrician. I am a chemist, but I am deeply respectful of explosives (and rocket fuel is by definition a bomb waiting to happen). (And I have worked with plasma in the lab, and with high temperature lasers. Getting silicates to melt or at least sinter within non-geological time frames without evaporating the stove can be frustrating.) Do you really think that uneducated blue-collar work will be able to maintain high-tech beyond their home culture? That's like putting wipers with oily rags in charge of a fusion reactor. Yes, that's the question. The energy source with the least waste heat would be the hydrogen oxygen fuel cell, leaving the waste product as reaction mass. I still advocate external energy, photovoltaic cells, most likely focussed by a solar sail also providing thrust while braking towards the light source or accelerating away from it. I don't see fusion reactors with a manageable waste heat solution on spaceships in our near future. Fission reactors are nothing but steam cookers, and you need to get rid of the heat. (Same problem with fusion reactors, too - although those temperatures at least allow a secondary energy collection with photovoltaics.) Anti-matter and mass-energy conversion probably can reach the highest energy densities, but releasing that mass into energy results in hard radiation and heat. Storing the stuff requires quite creative or energy-intensive and not very stable solutions - ion traps near zero Kelvin, or possibly some 3D-printed clathrate crystals with strong enough electrostatic towards the cavities to immobilize anti-protons (or ideally anti-atom cores). I don't think that such a technology is much further away than a continuous artificial fusion process. The vast amounts of energy to produce the stuff is available as soon as we get mass-produced photo-voltaic collectors in near-Earth orbits around our primary. That's the general problem with weapons powerful enough to bridge those distances and remain effective. Self-destructing missiles reduce the Kessler syndrome, or at least make it more manageable. Misses with a rail gun remain in instable orbits for generations - imagine entering a hardly explored solar system and to be hit by a salvo of high velocity slugs from a space battle millennia in the past. Ship size is extremely limited if you want chemical propulsion for its sublight drive. Any rotating body is a gyro, and quite hard to convince to change direction. A space installation producing a palpable centrifugal force without nauseating anybody exposed to it is extremely likely to have a significant amount of angular momentum that needs to be overcome for altering the orientation of the rotational axis. (Not to mention that changes of that orientation will cause weird and disturbing effects on any organism subject to these changes (including plants grown to provide life support assistance). Are ion drives that complicated? Ion beams in mass spectrometers are produced by various means from quite diverse sources, and once you have freed an ion, accelerating and directing it is fairly straightforward. Electrostatic solutions require less energy than magnetic ones. Yes, nobody in their right mind would use irradiated steam (or other such exhaust) within the atmosphere, and getting out of the gravity well is the main problem we are facing at them moment. That's why each entry to space (other than reaching the 100km mark) requires travelers and payload to latch themselves to an undetonated fuel bomb guaranteed to rip you apart when fuel flow goes fatally wrong. However, once you are out of the well, the fission rocket becomes quite attractive, as you can convert the superheated steam directly into propulsion without needing to run a heat-force engine. Other forms of assisted take-off and landing are under consideration. I see the Skyhook concept as the most likely assist system for atmospheric entry and take-off, although other concepts (like active suspension railgun ramps as presented by Isaac Arthur) are feasible, too. I disagree. Light sails in combination with solar powered lasers (or mirrored beams) can provide constant thrust in periods you would otherwise coast, and reduce a lot of fuel requirements. Sure, you want redundance, the ability to bridge fatal defects in your collectors, with on-board means, but that redundance is costly in terms of payload, and may be under-powered. (Compare the number of lifeboat-seats on the Titanic.) I can see some attraction in making the planetary young adult novels of Heinlein featuring reusable chemical rockets the background for a space game. The technology modeled in M-Space is far beyond that level, though. Yes, it is possible to design lower tech-level vessels with the M-Space rules, or to alter the technology tree, but that requires alterations to the ship design rules.

Just one question: what did the trolls use for a ball in the Vingkotling Age? There weren't any trollkin available back then.

With 50% of the population dying before their 15th birthday (i.e. quite likely uninitiated), what is the thought of the cultures in and around Dragon Pass about their afterlife? Do they go directly into the rebirth queue at Ty Kora Tek, or do they enter the realm of deities which blessed them at or after birth?

You'll end up with vastly different ship designs when you don't allow for artificial gravity. I think that acceleration assist is a standard service in developed systems, whether it is a railgun service to get ships at initial vees, lightsails and lasers, or pellets of fuel shot into a capture mechanism (by railgun) using the slowing of the pellet as additional delta v. If it uses containers, you might even shoot them back (by railgun) as reaction mass. (And yes, that makes for quite busy space lanes.) Military vessels might wish to operate without these considerations, and exploration of new systems doesn't offer any such comforts (leaving this as a priority job to install some assist systems). But then, entering a vessel that is getting shot at might be something one leaves for AIs which have backups if sentient. The ship design is tailored to the tech tree assumption, and to the top end of the tech tree assumption, as such technology tends to be distributed to less advanced places of origin by trade and/or theft. Fuel is just one aspect that may get glossed over. Heat management, armor (or shielding) against micrometeorites and cosmic radiation are another aspect usually neglected (especially the fact that any armor that is capable of stopping a micrometeorite will create significant amounts of hard braking radiation). Force fields are known to science, but they have infinited range (if at extremely low intensity) and no discrete edges. If you want something like fields that extend only so far, you need a medium, e.g. a plasma (which could produce an electric flow around the vessel which might be sufficient to dampen the amount of cosmic radiation hitting the vessel somewhat, and will interact very briefly with incoming material objects, too. Like I said, hydrogen plasma exhaust gets better exhaust velocities, and exhaust velocity is where the rocket equation gets power from. That changes when your ammunition gets "intelligent". The difference between the long range battleship combat of WW1 and WW2 and the Falkland conflict rocket attacks. The tethered countermass rotation is the only viable options for vehicles you can push to more than walking speed with chemical rockets, causing significant fuel expenditure to build up/slow down the rotation. You don't want centrifugal acceleration with nauseous speed differentials just for lifting your head. Rotational velocities for O'Neill cylinders are expected to be tolerable in this respect (according to Isaac Arthur's excellent videos). If you are in for long coasting, I maintain that Ion drives and assisted initial velocity is way more likely. Booster rockets are a form of assisted initial velocity source, btw. So are "ballistic" fuel tanks that go active for rendezvous with your craft, or use shorter range matter "beams" to transfer the payload. I think that the fission-reactor powered atomic rocket will be built for interplanetary travel until ship-sized internal fusion reactors become available. And yes, these do use up reaction mass. Otherwise, passive drives (light sails) are going to play a role.

The Glorantha Sourcebook mentions the battle for some of Argrath's companions (Mularik, Narib - p44) and has a pictorial representation (p38). The only hint for a date that I could find lies in the description of the appearance of Orlanth's Ring, moving up one third of the distance to Pole Star (after having been suppressed earlier since the Fall of Whitewall). We do know that the cloud cover was 50% or less during the battle (when the big Sunspear struck Harrek). Unfortunately, we only know of the Dragonrise that Orlanth's Ring had no business appearing in the sky on the date of the temple dedication, so it is hard to calculate the possible dates for the battle from that little bit of sky lore. Yelmic priests of the Lunar College, troops from the Siege of Nochet, the Grazeland Army under the FHQ in the service of the Lunars, the Solanthi (starting on Broyan's side, dying as turncoats after Harrek had cleared out the Yelmic priests). Broyan and his followers were there, probably including Kallyr and other Sartarite rebels. Argrath somehow ended up Caladrian spearmen, Harrek had his wolf pirates, Sir Narib most likely supported Nochet. And sundry Esrolians (likely on both sides). The Sourcebook makes vague sounds about the Sartar Magical Union making its first appearance there, which I would take to mean the Eaglebrowns (the former heroband of Dernu and Gernu, possibly in the middle of its transition into a band of warlocks). And Sir Narib is confirmed. Hendira probably was excused on grounds of having left the world of the living, as this is the closure to the Siege of Nochet that kept the Lunars out - something which wouldn't have happened under Hendira's leadership. Gunda and Mularik are confirmed (Gunda in the ransom bit of Vasana's Saga, Mularik in the Sourcebook). Participation of several Sartar rebel bands is possible, but unlikely all of those described in the Sartar Rising campaign. Kallyr and Leika are likely to have fought in Broyan's personal band. Second tier folk like Vasana are somewhere in the mix, too.