Joerg

We know of a community of six (the Lightbringers) to manifest a wyter (Ginna Jar). Granted, they may have been slightly more magically powerful than humans, but the lower limit should be in this magnitude. I don't think that a marriage between two individuals suffices to create a wyter, but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise if there is a good explanation. (A harem? sure.)

I assumed that the Black Bear subspecies from North America was meant rather Tibetan brown bear species.

Yes, the spirit magic spell isn't suited to be used on embodied (unbound) creatures. It would be different if that creature has a previous condition so that it acts like a spirit in a Binding. Still not usable on an enemy horse, but possibly useful on an animal companion of yours. The RAW don't have such preparations, though.

There is also the priest's productivity to the temple to be taken into account. The temple has economic needs as well in order to be able to serve the community, and spell teaching provides some of the necessary wealth to perform the right rituals. Plenty of the sacrifices don't just demand a bullock, but specify the color of the sacrificial animals. That's some extra effort the breeders have to put in, increasing the economic value of these sacrificial beasts to match their increased magical value.

I wonder what is it with this "effectively nude but for greaves" look? Compare Vasana in RQG p.373. Same design of greaves, btw. The sandals as accoutrement have a myth to them. Do these greaves have one?

Sure, Lorion climbed into the Sky, from the lower edge (branching off Sramak's River), accompanied by the Blue Moon and aided by Heler, moving towards the Celestial Dragon which had already been bound in place if I recall the star lore correctly.

The Indo-Europeans share a lot with the Yelmic culture of Glorantha, with less patriarchal and less solar expressions notable exceptions. Some weak memory migration history corresponding to archaeological finds of the banded ceramics (formerly battle ax) material culture is narrated in Snorri's Heimskringla, and tells of the encounter of the migrating patriarchal folk (the Aesir) with an indigenous and apparently much less patriarchal group (the Vanir). They exchange hostages/cultural influences, then migrate onward. Some of the names used by Snorri are similar to those of antique travelogues into the barbarian lands (like Nerthus for the Kimbrian peninsula, resonating with Njörd). Whatever traditions were available to him must have reached at least a millennium back, possibly three. (Nobody complains about the Kalevala being collected at least a millennium after the earliest events in that mythic cycle, so what is the problem with Snorri?) It screams archaism and Anglo-Saxon to me. Starting with the spelling. It doesn't help that German has "Heim und Herd" (home and hearth), one of the many Germanic phrases poisoned by NS propaganda. (Also, there is the misogynistic "Heimchen am Herd", the homely and subservient wife at the cooking fire.) That would make the Orlanthi a Solar culture, really. The IE chief god tends to be celestial, and sun/sky worship is pretty much synonymous with Bronze Age culture pretty much everywhere. The Germanic/Norse pantheon is somewhat weird in having the Yogi/mystic as the chief deity and a great fondness for the Storm god. Dyaus-Pitar is Yelm in his various appearances. Ancient European chief gods include Zeus Pater, Dispater, Jupiter. Norse Tyr was the much reduced form of this sky deity. The Fertile Crescent had Bel/Baal (which somehow turns up in the Celtic pantheon, too), and the Iranians and Vedic Indians have precedence of the sky and light god, too. All early Bronze Age symbolism has the sun dominant. Acceptance of Storm as the most important of the gods is rather rare. Some storm accoutrements are really sky accoutrements, like lightning. No difference between Earth and Glorantha there. Rebellion against the giant precursor generation of the gods is a common theme in European myths, whether the titans or the original giant. The war against the giants as an ongoing or defining feat of the gods is another typical myth, whether in Ragnarök or in the Mahabarata. Mesopotamia has God-kings, or divine descended kings. If we want to look outside of the IE culture, the Canaanite hill folk which emerged after the Egyptian empire retreated to its core lands led by their biblical judges (including Samson) might be the best guess at the Orlanthi I can find. Almost all of the other cultures required proto-urban cooperation and administration to maintain their agriculture, like irrigation or other such communal water works. Where such massive communal works wasn't reqired beyond some shared holy places (henges and similar), a way more individualistic and small-unit organized culture dominated. Not even to the level of the ship-kings/city tyrants of the Iliad. Occasional leaders - possibly only exceptional ones - could muster warriors and weapon bearers in the hundreds. We have one evidence for such a battle, the Tollense crossing, with a southern army taken from all around southern Germany attacking native defenders (at least that's the story told by the chemistry of their teeth). Both sides were equipped with similar amounts of bronze and non-bronze (stone) weaponry. The attackers appear to have included mounted horsemen. If the defenders had horses, none appear to have perished in the battle. The casualties from this battle suggest a social structure rather similar to that of the Orlanthi, with free carls as part-time warriors, and a noble and specialist core of mounted warriors with superior equipment. Similar horsemanship in the Fertile crescent appears to have cropped up with the Iron Age, with chariots dominating earlier conflicts (contemporary to the battle of Tollense crossing, like Megiddo or Khadesh, and the invasion of the Sea Peoples). The only place where we can ascertain such cultures is north and west of the Fertile Crescent and the Aegaean. The protagonists of the Iliad are more similar to the sonse and sons-in-law of Vingkot, with divine birthright determining the right to kingship. With the Heortlings, traces of this divine birth-right are still there in potentia, but it doesn't play much of a role since the destruction of the Kodigvari by their own spouses. The Heortlings are a post-cataclysmic culture. The horse-nomads are, too, but they adopt the pre-cataclysmic greatness of their subjects, and become vulnerable through that as they simultaneously attempt to maintain their superior purity. The outcome of Argentium Thri'ile may not have been inevitable, but a horse warlord victory wouldn't have ended that war. Musing more about the Orlanthi, I have some difficulties identifying the emergence of the clan as the recognized unit of population. All the survival places in the Guide are tribal, not clan-based. There is little evidence of the clan as political unit in the conflicts between Rastalulf of the Berennethtelli and Lokamayadon. While Haradangian is presented as a chieftain, he is chieftain of the Berennethtelli. Rastalulf is at first a mere stead-master, after his service with the King of the Heortlings he is a chieftain. (Still no clans mentioned, though, only individual leaders and kin, and carl followers.) Population density appears to have been a lot lower than in modern Glorantha. Given the very small starting populations, not that surprising, really. By Harmast's time, population appears to have doubled or so compared to Rastalulf's time, despite Lokamayadon's iron grip on initiation and the connected losses. I still don't recall references to clans by other terms than their chiefs, though, but I may be overlooking them. By the time Orlanthland is founded, the clan may have taken on an identity beyond that of the immediate chieftain. Kinship rules no longer apply to the tribes, but to smaller subdivisions of the tribes. Marriage relationships get likewise downgraded. Taking wives from within one's own tribe becomes normal. Cities pop into existence, outside of Esrolia. Kings die without successors, and instead a hierarchy of priests fills all the council seats of the Heortlings (though apparently not with the non-Heortlings of Saird and further west). Only with the spread of the Alakoring Rex cult do we get Orlanthi business as usual.

You're right, in the Runnel River section that usually gets omitted in the text description (and obviously my memory). Enjossi's clan pretty much occupies the niche of the bear, and Salmon knows this, and still follows Enjossi. The Upland Marsh section of that quest should take place in the Underworld. Salmon enters a region of Death, and while he may un-die at the end of that passage, this part of the quest should be hellish, or Greater Darkness-evoking. I am still uneasy about the sky leap for the salmon, based on Enjossi's feat. Perhaps there was an EWF variant of the salmon with draconic traits that could attempt such a feat? Researching the local magic of Seapolis and the Grand Sea Exchange below the City of Wonders might be another way to enable Salmon to swim up the Skyfall. At the most extreme, one might try and extend the Fish Road from Nochet all the way to Skyfall Lake. (This would also create a nifty side-effect to deal with the upcoming ice-blocked flooding of the lowlands.) A similar fish road approach could be tried up the Marzeel and through Styx Grotto, creating the first of possibly three Underworld/Greater Darkness sections (the third being Snake Pipe Hollow).

Grain farming in the Eurasian Steppe? Pastoralism, no doubt. But grain farming away from the riverine urban-dominated areas? Something left to the equivalent of a Vendref population, AFAIK. (This would have been the case for the cossacks under Elisabeth the Great. Later on, farmers would join cossack uprisings, and possibly be acculturated.) Yes, there seems to have been a group of Yamnaya-related folk that made it pretty far east, the Tocharians. They inhabited oasis-cities, in all likelihood with some celestially descended overlord like most of the Yamnayan European Bronze Age descendants. The terms I really would like to see replaced most are Chief, (tribal) King and Clan. Chief is the least toxic of these, as it conjures images of Tecumseh or Sitting Bull. Or Winnetou. King gives me everything from Hamlet's dad and uncle to Louis XIV, and while I can live with Helsingborg, I can't with the Versailles images. (Kinglet gives me the Viking sea kings, but we mustn't think Viking, we mustn't...) And "clan" is something I used to associate with plaid kilts, at least until recent forms of criminal structures in Germany. At a stretch, the KKK comes into play, too. The German term "Sippe" has completely different connotations in my mindscape, and describes what Coming Storm calls a Bloodline. I could live with "hundred" for a clan, as in one hundred man-days behind the plow to feed the community, and also the average size of the warband owed to tribe or (federation) king. Tribe takes my mindscape to colonial confrontations of the 19th century, but that's ok. Spear-wielding Zulus threatening to overrun red-coated invaders are fine as my mental imagery for the Orlanthi goes. So do tribal names like Sioux or Apache (learned from Karl May). Nothing wrong with that (weirdly lensed) imagery, either. Hearth is another term that cries out "Anglo-Saxon" to me. Modern English has "fire-place". But then, I don't mind 4th and 5th century Anglo-Saxon, except for the boats.

The identity of Ralzakark is shrouded in mystery. I find it quite likely that he is in some respect an aspect of Ragnaglar. The illuminated one... And who knows in which role Ralzie quested when he confronted Seseine? The only accessible Vadruding would have been Ragnaglar.

Yelorna has been tied to horse-riding women before, like the Galaninae queens of Safelster (who may have aided the Second Council against the Horse Warlords). (I wonder what role the Berennethtelli and Orgorvaltes played in those conflicts. Not horsemen enough? Or just too few horsemen?) But if Elmal is Yelmalio, then why not have Redalda as Yelorna? There is little in Yelorna's mythos and history that is specific to unicorns.

Effeminated? In case of Ralzie, oh yes... and in the four-letter-word sense, too. I point you to the story of Janelosp, the niiad ancestress of the Gnydron who sex-changed her would-be rapist (and herself) and fathered the only water-breathing race of the mortal Triolini upon that Vadrudi. We haven't heard of her (the Vadrudi) since. (And I don't think that Brastalos is the answer.) Seseine has water connections, after all. So yes, Ralzakark possibly mothered Send Valu.

Good call? But my Schwyzerdütsch is at best passive only, despite my Alpine surname, and the Swiss undertitle their own German with high German on TV, so we'll need a pronunciation guide. I'll ask Philipp Glass at Tentacles for a list of Schwyzerdütsch terms for Thane, Carl, Cottar and Thrall, and whatever other "norman" terms people can think of that need de-anglisation.. 😋

That's why I inserted the "male" statement. An article on broo biology was among the first Gloranthan articles I handled as editor of the German Free INT fanzine in 1992. It talked about the injection of a broo larva rather than insemination. A different reading would be that Thed is a goddess of fertility, and that the non-fertile broos just don't fit her requirement. Broos without the ovipositor just cannot reproduce in the active way that she wrestled from her rape experience. Thed isn't the goddess of victims. There is no evidence of female broos displaying any udders. There is one (awful) illustration of a female with horns (and high heels) in the Games Workshop edition of RQ3, a homage to GW's very own Chaos settings which received a D100-game named Warhammer Fantasy a short while later (around the time they stopped licensing RQ3). Anyway, a SF version of broos able to impregnate hosts of any kind would have to use this kind of biology rather than normal sexual propagation. I don't quite recall how the Magog of Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda discriminated for hosts for their children, but it is well known that the writers for Gene Roddenberry include some quite knowledgeable Glorantha fans, so I am fairly certain that this concept was more than just inspired by the broos of Glorantha. Female broos would still exhibit broo features. Not necessarily all of them, but there are so many - goat legs and hooves, fur, goat heads, horns... There have been broos with a great deal of human features mixed into this. Could there be isolated cases that might have passed as humans? Possibly. As voluptuous females, though? Thus I brought up the idea of Ragnaglar Ralzie serving as the mother of Send Valu rather than the impregnator of Seseine.

No, since Harrek bound the White Bear spirit into his fur, the Rathori can no longer appeal to their common ancestor to grant them activity in hibernation time. While Harrek and the Bear share their presence, the White Bear Empire of Fronela cannot see a revival.

The RQ2 rules were among the last RQ2 sources I managed to get my hands on. If you started with RQ3 in a non-English-speaking country, getting RQ2 material was quite the quest. Off my head, the one tin plunder item I can recall was a compass. It pointing towards (or away from) Magasta's Pool made it a useful tool for navigation, as you could get a true east-west bearing from the Sunpath, and knowing the direction of the Pool gave you a radiant from the Pool. Not quite all you need for triangulation, but quite good when you had one of those extraordinary mountains, or objects like the Skyfall, to get a bearing of (unless that object happened to be on the same radiant you were).

But then, according to Casanunda, the art lies in the chase...

Codices make bad use of valuable parchment - they use perfectly good writing surface to sew or even glue pages together! One version of codex I have seen recently was more of a box with parchment in a more or less uniform, box fitting size, a numbered loose pages collection. (I think the Wulfila bible - the silver letters on purple parchment - was collected like this.) Third century AD? Don't discount the use of clay tablets. While the Dara Happan skript isn't that well suited for cuneiform, using clay as a writing material should be possible. Orlanth is a wood-carver (among plenty other quite practical crafts), and may have learned a bit from his knowing companion. Never underestimate those barbarians! Rulers often require writing on official buildings - whether carved into rock or wood, or painted as fresco into the plaster, or laid as mosaic, or glazed into representative pottery. Or stamped on coins.

Kin are those who will stand up for you before the law, and who will take you in in times of need. This stranger who happens to share your father's blood will do neither for you. Is he kin? The case gets hairier when a sibling is married off to a different clan. While marriage moves the sibling from the birth clan to the marriage partner's affiliation, in case of a divorce that individual will revert back to the birth clan. But still, while the sibling is part of the other clan, and if your clan and that clan go heads to heads in a feud, slaying your sibling won't be kin-slaying. Phil Hibbs's Trickster character had the Orlanth initiate as his sidekick. While this feels slightly munckinny to me, it would be an option. Only Orlanth cultists have the mythical precedent to bond a trickster. Any other Orlanthi cult probably would be betrayed in no time short. Possible solution: dual initiation of one of the other characters to Orlanth. If Londra of Londros (a Sword of Humakt, and associate priestess of Orlanth) can do it, why not a character in your group? Enjossi leaping the Skyfall? That's quite a big bid for a mortal hero whose leaping feats were up the Stream river. The Creekstream River has no known cataracts between Duck Point and Nochet.

A library like that probably has lectoria where scrolls are taken to be read, or scriptoria where the reader first creates a copy of the passage he intends to use, returns the original, and then may use his copy for repeated reading and cross-referencing. Such excerpt copies with source citations may be added to the collection as well, and create a certain amount of redundance. Quite a few works by ancient authors are only known through such partial citations of their works by later authors. Library Use might be a social skill rather than a knowledge skill...

If you take Jeff's example, your character would have to learn seven skills (runes, techniques) and then to acquire a number of spells without any future skills. Any spell would use at least two such skills. Do Sorcerous Runes and Techniques in your proposal get experience checkboxes? If yes, which of the two or more skills you use for a spell will receive the check? And how do you plan to tell sorcerous rune mastery apart from your score in the runes? This bunch of question illustrates why the course taken by RQG has less design problems. RQG as is has one skill per spell. Even if you double the current number of sorcery spells through developments of your own, the number of spells a sorcerer will have memorized will be low, the number he has learned (and probably inscribed) will not be that much higher. A sorcerer with eight or nine spells will have to learn one or two skills more than the sample sorcerer from earlier. All of this said, I do think that grimoires should be a thing in RQG western sorcery. I don't quite know how, yet - possibly give a greater starting ability for spells from that grimoire. Possibly reducing one doubling penalty for an inferred technique or rune. Possibly allowing to infer an extra rune (from a short list of runes connected to the grimoire) if the character doesn't have that rune (yet).

Other than saving on the required magic points (and hence casting time) that come from the doublings, there is hardly any benefit from knowing more techniques than Command. As a sorcerer, you have the choice to be either fast and focussed or flexible and slow and MP-hungry. It also gets you Water and Darkness (at double cost, each), leaving out only Air and Moon. Personally, I would have left out at least one of those techniques, and taken a form rune instead (e.g. Man, Beast or Spirit), as Command alone already gives you all the other techniques at double cost. Switching the role of runes/techniques as binary flags and spells at skills to the inverse situation: Does this system still allow using inferred runes (i.e. neighboring elements, opposed powers) or techniques? If not, a sorcerer like this would quickly become a one trick pony. If it does, is the full skill applied to inferred runes/techniques, or is the skill halved for that? (MP still doubled?)

Just to hew into the same gap that Jeff already has chipped into this armor, the monomyth is the easy, GM- and player-friendly version of the Gloranthan myths. Saying "God A is God B" is always fraught with dangers if you expect it to apply to each and every aspect or expected reaction. Even variations in local worship of the same deity can cause different outcomes. When you change names and cultural context, the differences may grow. Neither really are good food for newbies, not even on the scholarly level. If you are willing to go the scholarly way, King of Sartar is the most rounded and finished of these works, is pertinent to the area of Dragon Pass, and will subversively introduce a distrust in the documentation of the world in the reader. There is some stuff in there that is only distracting from the use with roleplaying games, like all that Fourth Age speculation, but the rest is the material a Lhankor Mhy sage would encounter in his research, and hope to make some sense of. That's my main approach to the cult of LM, too. Sorcery is an option, not a necessity, unless you go as far as saying that all knowledge is sorcerous (which is pretty meaningless). "Experimental" heroquesting is in no way scientific. There is no way to make a heroquesting experience repeatable. There is a way to make different choices at certain expected stages of a quest. There may be unexpected victories in places where you aren't supposed to experience them, throwing your assumed knowledge of this mythical path off-balance, and possibly removing you, your quest, and your supporters' outcomes from the expected result. The classical example is the Yelmalian who managed to hold on to his fire powers and possibly his armor on the Hill of Gold quest, emerging as something different than the Yelmalio of Time. Illumination is sometimes presented as removing the quester from the emotional experience and his or her previously learned certainty and conviction. Not always, though (and that insight comes from the story of Valare Addi, which does make up a small portion of Entekosiad), as a new insight or conviction may only be as incomplete in understanding as previous information. (On the other hand, had Valare been a much more powerful heroquester, her conviction might have changed the Red Goddess into something a lot closer to Dendara, the Virtuous Wife. Genertela might have looked drastically different as a result.) The cults of Lhankor Mhy and Buserian aren't directly concerned with Illumination. They observe the history of Illumination mostly from the outside. There were sages that were illuminated, draconically enlightened, and possibly (in Buserian) also umbarically endarkened under Spolite influences, but none of that really affected the core deities or the cults as wholes. Almost as likely the hoarder, judge and rival might be sitting right in your own temple.

Did they have a broo in the party? The (rumored?) allosaur broo must have had an enterprising parent...