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Joerg

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Everything posted by Joerg

  1. I would rather stress that there is a difference between the cult as an expression of all the worshipers of a deity and the local cult community (with a wyter and all) which may be quite different, and which may harbor friendship or hostility for other things than just your primary cult. IMO Stormbull is pretty much a hostile force as a principle, with a series of exceptions. This might be a general trait for Disorder deities. Good at fighting Chaos and other bad things, often unconventionally, but really bad at fitting into society.
  2. A real hero has several beards he or she can switch at need...
  3. The ability to parry or shield from missiles is a definitive advantage of the shield parry. The dual wield approach requires at least as much training for the off-hand, but it has the advantage of leaving the main hand weapon attack at full skill rather than halving an attack above 100%. The down side of this method is that you need to cast your sword-enhancing magic on each blade separately, or go for Multispell. Parrying a massive blow with your attack weapon may take out your attacking arm and not just the weapon, leaving you unable to continue the combat in the next melee round. For my personal taste, RQ has too many skills. The more skills a system provides, the less proficient will the characters be. Each additional skill is another thing you cannot do -- sometimes not at all, sometimes not decently. That said, mastery may come only with specialisation. From a realism point of view, there are some weapon skills where attacking and parrying are more or less the same, and there are other weapons which work fine in the offensive but which are lousy for parrying, like head-heavy weapons such as flails, hammers, heavy axes or mattocks.
  4. The first culture to make a defining technology of where to carry their swords on the hips appear to have been the La Tene culture warriors, whose sword-belts show a constant development and improvement throughout the La Tene period, ending up being at least as heavy as the swords they supported, but optimized not to get the blade entangled in the legs even during rigorous movement. Swords hung not from the belt but from the neck and possibly a shoulder could be worn much higher than swords on a belt, which helps keep them out of your legs, too. With the scabbard hanging loosely, it should be possible to upend it enough singlehanded while grabbing the hilt, and in case of doubt use the space between the left upper arm and the chest to keep it in place while removing the blade. Massively and irregularly shaped blades like the kopis wielded by the noble on p.68 of RQG or the storm scimitar shown on p.133 would require a different kind of sheath than the rather straight or regularly curved blades we are used from other settings. I guess that quite wide, almost shield-like scabbards of wood or leather are possible for such blades, but there might be other solutions to prevent the blades from accidentally cutting stuff (including the bearer), such as wrap-around sheaths for parts or the whole of the blade. Possibly even something like reed mats. A kopis miht have a semi-open sheath for the sraight part of the blade and a sickle-shaped regular one fitting the curve of the blade, allowing for a resonably quick draw of that blade by twisting the sheath away following the curved bit. I wonder whether there are sheaths that double as defensive armament or as quivers for small missiles.
  5. Joerg

    Lascerdans

    I haven't seen any. The description in the Umathea chapters of Missing Lands has them as quadrupeds and weird heads (horned, alligator-like snouts), otherwise possibly similar to Permian synapsid herbivores, like the Moschops. The Guide talks about lascerdan slash-and-burn methods, but those don't necessarily mean farming for plants. Fire-farming is an ancient method used by hunter-gatherers to clear undergrowth and attract fresh growth of plants, whether for hunting or for grazing. But we learn from this that the lascerdans had mastery over fire, and apparently also dam building.
  6. Getting the Black Eater to waste the crunchier bits of a snack could be a harder heroquest than to counteract D'Wargon the Womb Biter... The difference between a superior or value trollkin and a food trollkin is uppity. Such blessed births might result in the likes of Neep or the Neepspawn, who definitely don't fit in as values in troll society.
  7. This may sound like a stupid question, but I got caught co-GMing RQG at a con a few days ago armed with the Quickstart, and needed to rule the attack strike rank of the elementals available to the sample characters, and drew a blank. Which is why I sat down today to do my homework on elementals in the RQG rules or the bestiary. To my dismay, I still drew a blank. So I checked the Classic RQ rules book, to find basically the same text blocks as in the RQG descriptions, and again no strike ranks for their attacks. I notice that two other creatures use "engulf" as an attack form, Brollachans and Gorp. Brollachans do so on SR9, Gorp on SR1. Not really helpful. So, in my desperation, I turned to the Biturian Varosh narrative of the duel between Alain and Naimless at Tourney Altar, which has a fire elemental attack in the third melee round (though, as part of the narrative, no strike ranks given). Still, Naimless's fire elemental attacks before Alain can strike his third strike against Naimless. This seems to indicate a rather low Strike Rank for the elemental. So, when exactly does the Elemental attack take place in the melee round in RQG?
  8. Joerg

    Lunars

    My approach to canon varies with my prospensity to play a long campaign in the setting. The longer the campaign, the more will deviations from canon make your life difficult if you rely on future publications. For the Lunar Empire, there is too little backward canon available. The association in Champions of the Red Moon didn't quite work for me as a whole, although I will surely continue to draw inspiration from various sections inside. What I would want to play in the Lunar Empire: - descriptions of the normal people, their religious practices (including those where they are led by ambitious nobles to provide magical support for some great project or dart competition scheme) for a number of typical subcultures. (Not necessarily all at once... I'll deal with Orlanthi variant cultures on a case by case basis, too.) - two rivaling houses embroiled in a Dart Competition, with their networks each, rather than just one, possibly more - the Game of Thrones audience managed to track five contenders for the Iron Throne. I guess it is fine to start with a mediocre house that may rise to a major supporter on satrapial dart competitions, and possibly receive recognition over the dead bodies of some other houses. That could include a superior house each, also at odds with one another, at least on some significant topic that involves the player houses. Since Dart Competitions are civilized guerilla warfare, they may aim at basic or specific production or transport of food, trade goods, and military/magical/special supplies. Some sort of basic economy game might be useful to model such warfare. At the same time, Dart Competitions may dig deeply into the mythic realms and target core myths of the Lunar Way or at least the ancestral myths defining those houses. Finally, there could be a Silver Shadow campaign full of Lunar mystical weirdness and intrigue, continuing on the Red Moon (while it is still available as a stage).
  9. I was of course overstating my point. If you want a tour-de-force through the Iliad, you could do worse than Lindybeige's video on it, but Lloyd actually makes part of my point about 8 minutes into the video when he singles out one of the names entering to die. (Although that specific individual apparently lost the Darwin lottery because he had not even consumed the marriage he had paid for so dearly.) The Iliad has been viewed through many a lense, e.g. through the importance of honor for the protagonists, as in this lecture which compares the heroes' motivations with those of gang members and PTSD. But the importance of genealogy as an element of personal honor is something our egalitarian values play down as irrelevant. What do I care that your ancestors were better rapists and murderers than mine? Apart from our genes, we also inherit our sense of self from our ancestors. Our cultural programming is built on what our ancestors did, on all the laudable stuff, and as much on all the despicable stuff they did or at least acquiesced to. Genocide, rape, plunder, theft, exploitation...All of that ended up in our material cultures. Our education and our absorption of entertainment is based on that, and while we like to think of these as individual achievements, objectively they aren't more than half that, probably a lot less. All the rest is (unfairly) inherited. Gains, but ancestral losses, too. I hope that this search result will yield the same result for you as for me - a discussion of the scene between Glaucos and Diomedes and the impact of Glaucos reciting his lineage. Scrolling back a page, the point of these protagonists leaving descendants is prominently made. A bit later this source has a statement by Hektor that "fame is a common property that a hero shares with his family". This makes all the "son of the son of a hero" introductions useful as to make these red-shirt appearances significant opponents to the hero slaying them, but it also works towards the audience of the Iliad to share this ancestral fame as their personal honor. Providing almost a who is who of the legendary age is a fairly unique property of the Ilias. The lists of Helen's suitors or the crew of the Argo fall short by hundreds of names. But then, more than three degrees of separation are almost impossible in the Greek myths.
  10. Joerg

    Pronunciation

    Sartariten is how I form the plural, as one parallel to Isrealites ("sraeliten" in German referring to the ancient people, not usually to the modern state inhabitants, who usually are "Israelis" - at least that's my language feeling) or also Semites, Hamites, Iaphetites. The -ite ending feels a bit like it sneaked into English from Latin, and German has lots of such Latinisms, too. No idea why the Hittites get the "Hethiter" form - possibly because the "-it" is not from Latin. There is one other such ending, the German form of Samaritian is "Samariter". Possibly the -i is part of the word stem, which is not the case for the other examples. But there are other forms I have seen, like "Sartarier" or "Sartarer". And then there is the language, which in German would be "Sartaritisch" or "Sartarisch". There is a certain phonetic similarity between Sartar and Sparta if you drop the "-it" component, which is one reason why I insist keeping it. On the whole, this declination and conjugation business probably is quite alien and remote for English-speakers.
  11. Ah, sorry. Joerg at work again. 🙄 Consider that this happened in the Golden Age. The rebel gods still were scum hiding out in the shadows and away from the courts. Umath had a camp while Yelm had a palace atop a city. Giving fire to humanity was a breach of the natural order - if you aren't a Fire Tribe entity, you have no business wielding fire, do you? Without this prospensity to accept runic powers alien to their nature, humans (represented by Grandfather Mortal) wouldn't have succumbed to this borderline Chaotic expression of the Separation/Conflict rune. Monkey See, Monkey Do. And without Grandfather Mortal setting the pattern and blazing the trail into the Underworld, the slain Emperor wouldn't have been bound to that course. Releasing Death onto the world brought a change - in some philosophies a necessary change, but overall a deeply regrettable change the majority of the establishment would have preferred to avoid - most of all the Emperor who had imposed his reign of stagnation onto the world. And Death didn't stop at the mortals. Orlanth demonstrated it on the Emperor/Rebellus Terminus demonstrated it on Murharzarm, and even the divine were irrevocably affected. As it turned out, there were things worse than Death hiding outside of the Cosmos, and those probably were able to enter only because Death had been removed from the border. The myths around Death are difficult, too. All too many myths make it hard to decide whether they are dealing with Humakt or Nontraya. Which of them was the invader Tada hid Eiritha from? Yes, this is blaming the victim. A lot like e.g. the fallout victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki carrying the shame for their condition. It is a mind-set that (real world) westerners don't usually apply inside their own social group, although they are more than ready to assign inferiority and "they deserve it" to other, in their eyes benighted, cultures.
  12. Yes, but that was the purpose of the Iliad - to cram as many names and characters into one poem as possible to cover everybody's important ancestors, unmistakeably (just consider the two Aiases, and plenty other barely distinguishable names if you don't give the lineage etc.). The Iliad is a catalogue of the respected ancestries for important people, the proof of divine blood enabling a lineage to rule. That's how you get dynasties calling themselves the Heraklids or even the Tantalids (despite the evil in that lineage). But the Iliad wasn't first and foremost a piece of entertainment - it was a re-affirmation of status for the hoi oligoi. It is a collection of celebrity selfies or 4 o'clock tweets. In the Iliad, the main plot is the window-dressing.
  13. He has been humiliated by others often enough to build up a lot of grudges. But I think this is actually a case of siding with the mortals, and being condemned by almost every deity for this. I guess it is mutual. Grandfather Mortal is blamed for being the first person to accept Death. Compare the Brithini reaction to the Expulsion Walk and sacrifice of Malkion. Actually, you managed to pick out a conflict that hasn't been that prominent in Gloranthan myths - that of humans (and their rare allies) raging against the gods, acquiring their powers for themselves and their own ends. Stealing fire from the sun or from the gods as a collective. Elevating the hoi polloi to manipulate the exclusive domain of the great ones.
  14. Consider sport fans who boast of the achievements of the professional players in the team rather than of their own. What's the difference? In RuneQuest terms the warrior reciting his lineage etc. probably is just firing up his Loyalty (Family/Clan) bonus for the upcoming fight. And one typical theme in the ancient myths is the inheritance of family traits, so even if it was your Great-Grandfather who did something great, you are expected to carry the potential to do likewise. Or, in case of the Tantalids (e.g. Agamemnon), the prospensity to cause great harm. Of course we aren't the target audience for this, but we all enjoy a piece of expository flashback scenes inserted when a character presents himself in movies, don't we? (Like Eddard keeping re-appearing in Game of Thrones.)
  15. Because everybody has beaten him, kicked him, punished him... Also look at Fronela, where Eurmal is known as Firebringer and "Friend of Men" - basically the Prometheus figure. Probably received a similar treatment by a majority of the other gods, too.
  16. But this is exactly how Orlanthi boasting prior to the duel works. Without all that grandstanding about the deeds of their great-grandfathers, a duel wouldn't last more than a few strikes with a blade. First off, there is a likelihood that this guy managed to leave some descendants before getting killed, so this could be an instance of genealogical pride. A bit like "In the Gbaji Wars, my ancestor fought Arkat, and parried once before getting slashed into halves." Second, it establishes the credence for this opponent - it is a bit like the introductions the challengers in boxing are presented. After all, even if the champion wins, he had better not win against some rabbit, but a real challenger. Otherwise, you get a duel like Basko vs. Yelm (where Yelm didn't even notice his cousin). Nobody wants to listen to a story about Rurik Runespear slaying a trollkin (although the reverse story never gets old).
  17. How is that different from Game of Thrones where the first season is the build-up for Eddard Stark to be beheaded?
  18. The guide will have been required to pass the barrier between the mythical place and the everyday world. Compare the quests during the hunt for the grail. Not really. Destiny will make sure that he will arrive at his target sooner or later, unless he fails one or several of the tests/barriers on the way and gets lost. Sure that this is ancient Greek myth, or is this cheesy Hollywood railroading? Take Theseus and the Minotaur - it builds on the story that led to Daidalos' imprisonment and his son's flight too close to the sun. Then there is Ariadne dumped on Naxos... lots of branching or just namedropping inclusion of another mythic cycle, like all those poetic classicisct references in English poetry that require Bullfinch or a full classical education to have a slight idea what the poet is referring to. But then, nowadays there are people who can recite the Gloranthan pantheons, the full catalog of Marvel or DC characters and their abilities, or name every Pokemon. Geekery remains, only the focus has shifted.
  19. We're lucky that orange is a valid skin color for Storm worshipers.
  20. You could try and create a bypass of the joint Creek and River around the Marsh, and then roll it up from the southeast - but that means defending the canal against the Daughters of Darkness. Canals like this are just within the abilities of demigods or irrigation cultures, look e.g. at Belintar's New River. This depends on how much support you get from the river cults, I suppose. About half the durulz are river cultists or depend on the river trade for their luxuries and livelihood. Their hold on the river trade to Nochet relies on their free passage through Beast Valley way more than their relationship to Delecti, and I like to think that a good portion of them still prefers the post-1613 diaspora to their symbiosis with Delecti.
  21. Inasfar as material Greek Bronze Age culture is concerned, yes, and for the same reason the Vikings' Age is inappropriate - no ships. Removing the sea from the events makes all Greek parallels pretty worthless, and that goes for the stories around the Iliad, too. (The Iliad itself alternates between the battlefield and the camps, and doesn't mention the ships much) Metal availability actually surpasses most of earth's historical ages. Yes, some Gloranthan bronze smithed from gods bones has superior abilities, but cast Gloranthan "brass" (the copper-tin-alloy) should have pretty much the same properties as terrestrial bronze. Not quite. Bronze is not magnetic, for starters. It probably doesn't spark as much as iron does with flint, which would make pyrite crystals the replacement in "flint and steel" igniters. And that is what Jeff is trying to say when he invokes Bronze Age. What he really means is stories and heroic interactions like told for 1200 BC give or take 2000 years. Note: not necessarily told in 1200 BC, like the Aeneid, Dido in Carthage, or the Iliad were re-told by much later authors, or like the Mabinogion was told at Welsh courts (possibly including the court of Artorius of Britain as in the lovely little in-setting anthology "The High Kings" by Joy Chant). All of the Greek heroic age as summed up by Homer and his epigones happens in at most four generations, with a few local outliers (like that snake-limbed king of Athens). All of that stuff is going on pretty much at the same time, one hero's mythic interactions are the backdrop for another's, and the heroes crossing paths only at a limited number of cross-overs. For all its cheesecake anachronisms and blatant mistakes and mis-interpretations, the Hercules TV series featuring Kevin Sorbo (and Xena) aren't the worst pop culture phenomena that transport a bit of the Gloranthan Bronze Age vibe. Glorantha is a world of demigods, superheroes, but also mortal heroes almost on par with these, and plenty less sinificant actors as normal people. You don't go directly against the gods of the enemy (unless you move into the hero plane), but you go against their temporary avatars when those cults send their rune levels against you. Or you compete with other worshipers of your own deity for the favor of that deity (a situation pretty similar to that of the Iliad). This actually is a pretty good summary for the Nordic Bronze Age following the Bronze Age collapse in the Mediterranean and further south and east. Although I take exception at "no crafting technoloy at all", as even our paleolithic ancestors were highly proficient flint knappers and woodworkers, bone and ivory carvers, and even sophisticated alchemists who would produce a birch pitch which was the universal glue of its age and could still be a iable product nowadays. There's also the post-apocalyptic aspect that is missing from most of our history. The Bronze Age collapse was pretty bad, but only on par with the Closing, and no comparison to the Gods War. Late Vingkotling Age survival myths are in the range of the apocalypse or Ragnarök. In part, the magic wielded by the Gloranthans of the Hero Wars are the result of those myths, and the rest is of earlier ones. The Toba catastrophe is too far back in our pre-history to have affected our stories this way, and the other major volcanic incidents or the meteor strike at the end of the Weichselian Glaciation that brought back rather extreme conditions after the ice had been on the retreat for a millennium or two are much weaker than the Greater Darkness. There are the Flood Myths connected to the end of the Ice Age, but again these compare rather to the sinkings of Jrustela, Seshnela, Maniria and Kralorela at the end of the God Learner period, or the greater floods of the Gods War. (The upcoming Great Flood could be another such event.) There is many an Atlantis in Glorantha. The Brithini pre-history has it. Ernaldela has it. The implosion of the Spike is one. And Nochet is about to become one, I suppose.
  22. Pretty much what I thought, too. All those visible objects must have received some focus to appear that enlarged against the background. About the visibility of Kero Fin, I don't think that is much of stretch. What we see in the picture is probably just the upper half. This is similar to seeing the Alps from Munich, which have only 2.5 km height advantage at most, whereas Kero Fin has a 29 km height advantage to this perspective (we can barely see the top of the Shadow Plateau, which is about 1km above sea level).
  23. First off, it is a ritual spell, meaning it isn't just one melee round of ticking of three rune points. "This spell summons the deceased spirit to approach its former body." There are two ways such a summoning can be played out. One is that you draw a summoning circle or similar magical focus, then recite the name and deeds of the resurrectee and pour magical energies into the corpse and the circle in order to call up the spirit. Mechanistic, boring... possibly how the Zzaburi sorcerers of Brithos and colonies handle a resurrection. The other way is more shamanic in nature - the summoner descends to Hell, singles out the resurrectee and leads her back to her healed body. The bout of spirit combat would be dealing with the spirit's inertia, keeping it from turning back on the way up, etc etc. The ritual will have the questing priestess encounter numerous mask-bearers offering support or hindrance, involving a number of volunteers to take part in this rite. Basically, this is a chance for your players to get involved in the rite, possibly create some minor bonus or malus due to their performance as one of the deities the priestess confronts in the role of Chalana Arroy. And playing the part of the deity may offer the participants insights in their cult lore, and possibly help them regain a rune point if they perform well. No, the rules as written don't offer this as the default option. If they did for every such spell, the rules would be the size of the Guide. But putting in this narrative, demanding a few die rolls and confronting the players with the myths of their culture might be worth regarding this ritual as a This World heroquest. I have seen this done, and creating a strong experience for the involved players, within the matter of a few minutes. This is building on the strengths of Glorantha. Don't let a dry rules mechanics text get in the way.
  24. To make matters worse, there is a rather fluent border between worship, casting rune magic, and heroquesting. Activities that demand expenditure of rune power, and activities that demand expenditure of magic points from a great number of initiates and lay members, and taking on the mask and mantle of the deity in the face of the deity's Godtime tasks, feats and opponents. Possibly in ways that the Godtime events didn't quite seem to have covered, until you did. Some ritual spells like e.g. Chalana Arroy's Resurrection are a This World heroquest, although that ritual has an Underworld component, too, and is a very short version of the Lightbringer's Quest from CA's perspective. They still take 3 rune points to perform. Outside of the normal lay member interaction with the deity, but not necessarily outside of the normal initiate relationship with the deity. Yes, this is where things get fuzzier than you like. I've GMed This World heroquests as pilgrimages with rune point expenditure, or if very codified, just as rune spell ritual. I have sent characters on the Other Side or at least into the border regions, and have allowed them to attune to the flow of runic power rather than invoke sacrificed POW, basing this on the experiences I made playing HeroQuest in varying incarnations, including games with Greg and Jeff. There is no window dressing. Your mechanistic description has significant gaps. If ruleplaying is your road to enjoyment, yes. And it is not like I haven't been down that road once, either. But a quarter of a century later, I find myself a whole lot deeper into Glorantha and a whole lot less deep into the RuneQuest rules than back then. YRQGDV: house rule, ok. RQG amendment: over the dead bodies of at least 99% of all Humakti and Yelmalian player characters ever played. (And I never played any, and GMed very few...)
  25. I attempted to state the Gloranthan side of things, and I mentioned stuff that your model did not cover. In the end, I mean to point out that the map is not the land, and the algorithm is not the process. Not really. To access a god's power, an individual might as well travel to the other side, confront the deity and make some other deal, or even a conquest. Do you think that Harrek sacrificed personal POW when he bound the White Bear God? If so, how much? That's where I disagree. That's where passions come into play, for instance. No. "This is Glorantha!" The magical energy could be treated very mechanistically to be used up in the renewal of the world at Sacred Time, and a lack thereof might well result in stretches of reality fading away, becoming accessible only at special times, or worse establishing barriers of mist like those of the Ban which mask nothing but Raw Void, or at worst creating actual chasms of void in the middle of everywhere. Reality is a construct that needs to be upheld. (Or, if you are a Mostali, frozen in Stasis.) Gloranthan history tells us differently. And even when suspected (aka "found out"), the obscured truth was not easily accessible, and some may not have become accessible again. Yeah, that's the crux of the matter. That is why you want to change the rules to fit them to your understanding, and as long as you do so as your house rules, you're more than welcome. Your economy might be easily countered with a variation of those Mastercard advertisments: "Initiation: 1 POW Resurrection: 3 POW Gifts and Geasa: priceless"
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