Joerg

Speedart - yes, no problem (although adding the physical damage might reduce the splatter effect of the dung, possibly canceling the to hit bonus). Multimissile - only the original "missile" is real and can leave behind the after-effects, all other missiles do the impact (i.e. no physical damage) and then disappear without a trace. The psychological effect may be worth such a maneuver, anyway. Firearrow would work too, but cancels out all the special effects.

9th century Umathela saw the God Learner experiment of introducing the cult of Jogrampur, an entirely made-up deity. After a few decades of worship, the overseeing university experienced a bad shock when the rebelling worshipers of Jogrampur wielded very real magic against their experimentators. It isn't clear whether the cult still exists and whether it still provides magic. Another such case in the past was Avanapdur, Lord of Nightmares and leader of the Antigods during the Greater Darkness, a temporary reality boosted by lots of worship in the East Isles, which never returned from a challenge put to it by Mashunasan.

I've stated mine, we differ, and that's nothing new. The cult of Lhankor Mhy does teach sorcerous spell craft, but that isn't the only form of knowledge based magic coming from this cult, and absence of it won't make a Lhankoring worthless. While the cult values intelligence as a measure of memory, there is no entry requirement to have an INT of 13, and hard-working scribes or archivars without the mental flexibility to learn sorcery are still valid Lhankorings if they use mnenonic tricks rather than native characteristics to provide their Persecuted Lhankoring sorcerers in a hostile environment would be persecuted for God Learnerism or Arkatism (regardless of their real ambitions), not for being Lhankorings. Whether that persecution would involve more than being shunned, unfunded and their advice remaining unheeded for that taint or whether it means expulsion from the community is another question. The Elmali who left for Sun Dome County were "persecuted" for similar values of persecution. Yes, it would take a Lhankoring mastering useful sorcery (like significant combat boosts for one's rivals) to get accused of those "evil" -isms. Please don't mis-quote me. I doubted the ability to cast sorcerous as a requirement, not as an availability. I would need some convincing by exlicit and impeccably official sources to make the Derensev Library a center of sorcerous teachings that makes sorcerous spell casting mandatory for its Rune Ranks and forces it on its initiates. Sorcerous spell craft is an option for Lhankorings, not their definition. Mechanics or potion-making Alchemy are options, too. Creative Heroquesting to change the myths is an option. EWF lore is an option. The study of Illumination and its techniques is an option. All of these latter three deal with concepts that will elicit hostile reactions from stodgy Orlanthi, and even Lhankorings who will make documents like this unavailable for distribution. putting them into the repositories for "toxic" or forbidden knowledge.

Finally no longer in the Geas thread... Lhankor Mhy is the god of all knowledge, which makes all sorcery (regardless whether Lhankoring, Malkioni, Vadeli or Mostali) and all literature, all tradition and all jurisdiction based on laws and precedents his province. The ideal Lhankoring is a polymath and expert in all of these. And probably a cult hero one step short of apotheosis. (Belintar may have almost fit that bill, but doesn't seem to have limited himself to being a Sage or even an initiate of LM...) Yes, there is a strong portion of Lhankor Mhy tied to sorcery, but his main rune is Truth (as the current owner, or in the phrasing of this document linked from glorantha.com, its manifestation). Hence, any character in the pursuit of knowledge/Truth is a valid Lhankoring, whether he knows sorcery or not. The manifestation of sorcery would be Malkion (or Zzabur, or Mostal, or all of them). I disagree. It is an ideal expected in societies tolerant towards sorcerers, but not expected in "every" local Lhankoring in societies where sorcerers are suspect. Given the prevalence of Lhankor Mhy in Theyalan areas, at most half of them live in societies tolerant towards sorcerers, so the cult's expectations would be different. Whether this is regrettable or even laudable may depend on the local library/temple. If we extend the definition of Lhankor Mhy to cults like that of the "sacrificer of cattle", Buserian, or his Lunar offshoot Irrippi Ontor, we get to explore even more varied Truths about the deity. IMO (and all of this is, as of now, a difference of opinions), demonstrating some faculty in sorcery would be a similar demand as demonstrating some faculty in producing potions (as per the alchemy skill in RQG), and might actually be interchangeable in Gloranthan terms. Hence, even if potion-manufacture might be one of several alchemical disciplines which might satisfy the Law Rune demonstration in HQG, it wouldn't constitute sorcerous spell-craft in RQG. Another such skill set might be a manufacturer of mechanical instruments using gears or other such translation elements, again a manifestation of Gloranthan sorcery that is different from spell-craft. I doubt that more than a minority of Holy Country libraries have the requirement for Lhankor Mhy rune masters to be able to cast sorcery - Heortling Mythology certainly doesn't seem to suggest this. Safelster probably is a different proposition. But yes, Rune Masters of the Bearded One are more than likely to call one another "buffoon" or other unpleasant names or adjectives, as do their emulators on the various lists...

Oh, we are a crotchety group of critics, but in the end, this kind of critique means that the artist got so much right. And many of us will be happy to give similar nitpicks on early drafts...

That won't keep cursed Telmori to turn into the slavering hybrid beast-man thing on Wilddays. And being Hsunchen doesn't mean to turn into a beast and stay in that shape, it means being able to take either shape. 300,000 Uncolings in Tastolar (Fronela) on an area of roughly 1000-1500 hexes means 300 (down to 200) of them on each hex. Compare that to 130k Balazarings (Votanki and citadel dwellers) on an area about the same size, with much more clement climate than tundra. IMO the Uncolings can only manage this population density by turning into their totem beasts for much of the time. For comparison, agricultural Sartar has 500 inhabitants per hex on average.

That still leaves the problem of returning to the human shape from the locked beast shape.

This discussion about sorcery in the cult of Lhankor Mhy might be better placed in a separate thread (and yes, I am aware that I provoked the discussion in the first place). So a RQ2 Rune Lord of Lhankor Mhy (a cult position that in all likelihood doesn't exist in RQG) becomes a source of sorcery in RQG? Looks like a flawed argument. Discredit him as a source of sorcery, or at least combat-oriented sorcery. Especially since we don't quite know whether "retired sword sage" is meant to say "retired rune lordor even just a sub-section of the rune lords of the cult that existed only under RQ2 rules" or "retired member of a subcult of Lhankor Mhy". The other mention of a Sword Sage in Pavis is in Oliver Dickinson's Great Cart Caper. Nice to toss into a debate, but that definition of sorcery and the one in RQG don't go well together. In that case, the Alchemy skill and all of its products are sorcery.

There is a fair amount of cut and paste going on in the new books, or rather a moderate editing approach to older text that is reworked for putting things long out of print, so there is a certain possibility that older formulations that pointed us in the direction of our discussion in 1998 are re-surfacing without the insights of the Kitori statements in the wake of the Esrolia - Land of 10k Goddesses relevations having been revoked. At least that's where my stance is coming from. WF15 p.37 seems to support that stance. There are two things I'd like to keep apart - the Kitori race, which is a magical race of shapechangers, but one that has to be awakened through the special rites taught to Varzor Kitor, and the Kitori tribe, which contains all of their offspring that may not have undergone these (probably challenging) rites. And yes, there may be different groups within the tribe originating from the troll side and originating from the human side, which might result in Kitori troll clans and Kitori human clans in a joint tribe, with a requirement for tribal leaders to have undergone the full Kitori initiation. I would put it this way: Kitori religious practice is a subset of the Argan Argar cult, but there are plenty expressions of the Argan Argar cult that aren't Kitori - most prominently in Ralios, where we have Arkati troll sorcerers without any human shape-shifting in Guhan, and a strong Argan Argar cult in the troll lands of Halikiv and between those lands. So yes, we have the Nightcult as a special form of Argan Argar worship, and all "full Kitori" worship this, and probably all Kitori tribe members have it as their default tribal cult, too. I think that this sub-cult is probably as important outside of the Nightcult (i.e. in Halikiv and Guhan) as it is in the Kingdom of Night. That the Torkani are direct descendants of the Kitori follows only by inference from the statement that the Dark Orlanthi are descended from the Kitori, and then the Torkani being the one clear example of Dark Orlanthi clans, even forming their own tribe. Colymar's Black Spear clan left in 1315 while the Creekstream River still flowed unhindered on the east of the Shadow Plateau. The displacement of the Torkani might have been caused by the summoning of the Lead Serpent (whose giant body had to form somewhere, bad luck to you if that somewhere happened to be your pasture or fields) or by the aftermath of its destruction forming the Lead Hills. I would put their entry date into Dragon Pass in 1318, either way, with the Balmyr on their heels. They were in place for the Dundealos immigration, and left their first settlement area empty for the second wave tribe of the Sambari to take over and name the pass. Their loss against the Dundealos might have resulted in the complete loss of their Nightcult initiates and priests (more so if that worship was primarily propitiatory), cutting off their ability to access the full Kitori experience. Unlike the wretched suppression of the Ergeshi, they still were able to worship Argan Argar in the same way the humans of Ralios did. Then why didn't they try to contact their kin to regain knowledge about the Kitori initiation? Survival, further conflict, then displacement by the Telmori. The possibility that their Nightcult worship was without the full benefit of Kitori initiation. It was quite irksome to have this quite influential force left vaguer than the dragonewts while they have the potential to make great player characters. Human-shaped Kitori forcibly kept from initiation that might awaken their shape-shifting powers. I have already declared my dissatisfaction with the rune magic approach for Hsunchen and other part-time humans above - these folk ought to be able to toggle the change between their various shapes rather than just create a temporal (and fixed time) change.

In the Kitori thread, I voiced my disagreement about how the Hsunchen magic is treated in RQG, but I think this warrants a thread of its own rather than cluttering the Kitori discussion. According to the Bestiary, a complete wolf run (outside of the mandatory, chaotic change on Wildday) for exactly one hour consumes eight rune points. Even if all of these can be regained each Wildday, that is an awful lot of Telmori (or Rathori, Damali etc.) completely unable to take their animal shape at all.The partial transformation rule makes sense for the Basmoli, since they worship a dead god (spirit) and have a harder time to be like their ancestor. There are Hsunchen who probably don't make much use of the full transition, like the stag-riding Pralori. I would expect quite a lot of the smaller beast-totem Hsunchen like the Damali or the porcupine ones to rely on their beast shape as a way to escape dangerous situations. Doing so with a partial change might apply in some cases, but doesn‘t really capture their two-shaped nature. How could this be done differently, and preferably without breaking the rules in the Bestiary? One way might be an additional animist method – an allied (ancestral) spirit or a charm able to provide the toggling effect. Possibly limited to a magically attuned environment? The average Pujaleg visiting a Fonritian city shouldn’t be able to take off as a bat on a moment’s whim at low cost, unless it is one of the cities under their control in Laskal. I would like to see other suggestions or work-arounds.

From my perspective, the easiest way for a Lightbringer cultist character - or. to stick with the topic of this thread, a Yelmalian or a Humakti - to get sorcerous buffs is to have a support sorcerer companion who doesn't have to be a Lightbringer cultist at all. There are numerous sources for these: a former Ralian or Seshnegi mercenary who got left behind or stranded by his company, or left for other reasons a sorcerer of the Black Arkat cult from Arkat's Hold, possibly as the sidekick/support character of a Black Arkat warrior character an Esvulari zzaburi who somehow got entangled with the party a God Forgot apprentice sticking with the party (working off a gambling debt?) a ship's sorcerer from elsewhere whose ship was taken or destroyed by Wolf Pirates who has taken a retainer with one of the characters Gringle had a Third Eye Blue smith as a retainer. (What became of Piku and his family after Gringle's disappearance?) Such outlandish companions of powerful leaders/magicians aren't unknown in Sartar, and even less so in the Lunar Provinces. A Sword Sage could have a Lhankor Mhy sorcerer as his companion, but so can just about any other Lightbringer cultist. Now LM sorcery is not the most combat oriented, but as notorious hamsters of knowledge they will have tomes with combat-oriented sorcery in their possession. Some possibly including magics from Ethilrist - Muse Roost was plundered a few times, and some of the plunder will have gotten into the copying halls of the libraries after being used as payment for R&R.

I thought about the feat of "Little Borther" (or Barntar) facing bull(y) brother with nothing but a stick and a lariat when I saw this, but the outcome is different as it results in a tamed bull - not the case here.

Taking names and numbers is within the province of Issaries' Tradetalk, too, and LM does teach this much already to lay members.

I wonder whether I should report this for harrassment... 🙄😛 And, since you invoked the forbidden name... and the World Machine dislocated. Umath later was dismembered when he went to confront the court of Yelm, being thrown into the north pillar caused the Sky Dome to begin its rocking movement that creates the seasons. Most gods have alternative names. Mention that fact rather than give out even more things to remember. There were quite a few invasions of the sky - first the seas turning the day-sky blue, then Night turning it dark. Sky River Titan is fairly important and is instrumental in the "Rivers reverse their course" story. The Lightbringers' Quest and how it came about is essential for understanding Glorantha, as is the (short version) of the birth of the Devil. The text from Cults of Terror reprinted in the Guide is about the most condensed version of that and should be labeled "required reading" at least for the GM. Both Orlanthi and Yelmies agree that Orlanth slew the Emperor, they differ in who that emperor was. Orlanthi say it was Yelm, Yelmies say it was Yelm's son (Murharzarm, but don't mention the name at this stage) who took the blade, and that Yelm disintegrated out of grief. I am not sure that it matters much - the rebel Orlanth drew the sword against the Emperor, and Yelm ended up in Hell. Yelm summoning the rebels to Hell and demanding the destruction of the world for it to be born again is the Dara Happan version of the events, and plays down the survival myths of the Greater Darkness that both the Orlanthi and the Horse Nomads share. What this lacks is the dread of the Greater Darkness, and to be honest, I am not quite sure how to present that. Chaos horde let loose and destroying gods and inhabitants from existence (and from ever having existed) is bad enough, but should one tell stories where entire countries were sucked into Nothingness, and how the Web of Arachne Solara pulled surviving shards of reality back together with the net she had spun out of the food given to her as Kajabor? All of this affects even Godtime, retroactively. There used to be more to Godtime, and there are rough edges in Godtime where this re-editing is incomplete, where heroquesting can call forth unexpected fragments of things forgotten. But this is probably as remote from a short "this is how the world works" as you can get, and possibly deterring initial efforts to GM. So: Yes, ignore stuff that has disappeared, but reserve the right to make stuff reappear as and how you think you want to re-invent the world in a huge magical undertaking of your player heroes in some aspect of Glorantha. When the moon falls down, the Crater will be affected too, you can expect fissures in the earth, and stuff may disappear or re-appear. All of that is still a generation in the future, but if your characters get children now, they will be at the age of your characters now when that stuff happens.

Orlanth's ring only seems to spiral - effectively it moves up straight from Stormgate to Pole Star, but the stars in the background perform seven full rotations during that rise, which gives a spiral pattern on that background if you map out that journey, and mythic encounters that can be drawn from the approximation of the ring and other constellations. The magic used by the dancers of the Dragonrise (provided by the Dara Happan star magic used or abused in that rite) was extraordinary in pulling Orlanth's ring into a real spiral on the sky, rising halfway along Umath's path in a single night. In other words, there is no chance for Orlanth's ring encountering the Red Moon under normal circumstances, and Minaryth planned out the Dragonrise intrusion avoiding the Red Moon. They didn't have to make the full seven spirals, either, ascending only to the Dragon constellation in the River.

That's the rule for research. If you do training (paying for supervision), you don't roll whether you increase, only how much (which may still be zero). RQG p.418. And since the additional 5% apply to a wide range of skills you roll checks for, it should be cost-effective.

K-strategy vs. r-strategy? Small creatures tend to have high reproductive rates and great losses to predators, which makes death a different proposal compared to a species that has a two year pregnancy followed by a two year period of lactation before the next fertile period (as elephants or mammoths have). One unparried crit and they are decapacitated. Death requires mangling the prone body for quite a bit. Parry armor still applies. The worst fight between large animals that I have seen (in a documentation) was a polar bear massacring a whale (IIRC a beluga) in the last remaining breathing hole, wherein the polar bear failed to land a crit and kept shredding away its victim's blubber to exhaustion. Polar bears and orcas are the only remaining large carnivorous beasts attacking huge prey bigger than a hippo. Pleistocene beasts like the short-faced bear are more likely to have been powerful scavengers than killers. Carnivores (behavioral, not the mammal clade) fighting carnivores is rare - there is one viral video showing an inconclusive three-way fight between a cape buffalo, a small pride of lions, and a huge crocodile, but that's about all the material I can think of besides mating or territorial fights between bears. But then, tieing hit points directly to life energy is a rules mechanism that needn't be optimal. Before I started playing RQ, I used to play a similar skill-based, damage-reducing armor system that had two kinds of hit points - life points that were lost only on un-defended hits (or falls, or...) and endurance points which were lost on successful defenses (and which doubled as magic points). A system like that makes the fight and retreat scenario more likely. In the end, there are other places in the rules that may create a better simulation, and RQ and related systems don't cover all those options.

Jeff has stated explicitely that the handedness of the spiral has no sinister or clockwise meaning when used as tattoo or other ornamentation. IMO going inward is facing your inner wind, or the No Wind, or it is ascending the Holy Mountain. Going outward is to bring the force of Storm into the world. Both are meaningful.

Basically there comes the point when training your relevant raisable characteristics to the thresholds gives quicker results than training the skills directly. But then, unless he has fallen victim to the Shakes, a Rune Lord with 90% weapon skill is quite unlikely to have reached that with an abysmal DEX - at some point, skill training becomes undistinguishable from characteristic training.

Then why were you making that silly face? And while the feather may be sharper than the sword at times, most death drakes prefer to wield blades rather than their integumen. I have yet to see a barbarian succumb to points of grammar or expression, but many a barbarian succumbed to spear, arrow or horn points. That said, bad Bill. Pot, kettle, dark coloration...

For some reason, two kaiju fighting mano-a-mano has lots of knockbacks but hardly any hit location damage. Maybe a tentacle or two flying off, but never a limb when the total quantity is six or less. Probably lots of parries. While that shouldn't really be the case - there may be situations where a heroquester may take on a virtual stature on par with that of the Black Eater - I am not quite sure what you are suggesting. Are you proposing to use HQG for such conflicts inside a RQG game (let's say you found another Faceless Statue and direct it against the Watchdog of Corflu), or are you proposing that RQG heroquesting rules should provide a solution for such out of context altercations? Yes, the HeroQuest 2 or HQG rules allow to have an opposed roll to decide the outcome of that battle. RQG has the Battle skill, too, and maybe that is good enough for a spectator battle between two kaiju-sized opponents. Not sure about that. If you quest say along the path of Orlanth vs. Sh'harkar'zeel (add consonants or apostrophs to improve canonical spelling as required), either you remain Orlanth in the conflict and keep the dragon in the Mover of Heavens role, and behead the dragon, or you don't and may have to use the Enkoshons/Aroka method to deal with the dragon, or some other trick the enemies of the EWF figured out. Or you get eaten or grilled. At one (I think still Hero Wars) games at Tentacles convention run by Greg, our party quested the Plundering of Aron quest, and when it came to the Sivin contest, I announced that my Helamakt warrior would perform the Sivin feat. Rather than rolling any dice, Greg said "that's what Helamakt does", described the outcome briefly, and we went on to the next stage.

The number of successful checks is directly correlated to the number of attempts. Yes, your roll for increasing the skill gets worse as you advance, but with four rolls per season your character will still advance four times as fast at that level as a character with only one roll per season at that level.To put it into math, at 70% unmodified skill and +10% skill category bonus you have a 60% chance to miss a single roll, but only about a 13% chance to miss four of them. At 90% unmodified skill you have an 80% chance to miss a single roll, but a less than 40% chance to miss four.

Yes, why not, if the difference in bulk etc. is compensated with armor points - most wounds will be just a scratch, even if they draw some dermal blood. Hit points don't measure vitality in kg, but in proportional destruction of semi-vital to vital functions. A critical hit should have the chance to take out a hit location, though not necessarily to destroy it. Yes, a tree trunk will provide some terrible damage, but it has a limit before it breaks on a successful attack (never mind parries) delivering significantly more damage than its hit points, especially if the force is lateral to the stem. While Truesword and Bladesharp emphasize the cutting/piercing effect of a weapon and bludgeon possibly the hardness of the impact at the impact point, vastly increased strength when wielding a human-sized weapon designed for use by a human would in all likelihood break the weapon. I'd hesitate to apply this to critical damage and am unsure about special damage. Elephant bulls (and bulls of any other species) don't usually fight to kill their opponent, but to subdue him. That's why they attack the best armored portion of the opponent (his tusks, antlers, horns, blubber... you name it). Nobody has ever witnessed a fight between a sperm whale and a giant squid, and indeed one sperm whale was found that had missed its lower jaw for a long time but that had a belly full of squid remains. Apparently the hunting method consists of diving down, yawning widely while luminescent bacteria will clean their mouths of their last meal, with the squits swimming in seeking a cave to shelter in. I guess the Sperm Whale's swallow is matched vs. the strength of the squid's tentacles, which would account for the scars on their flanks. Many a lethal large beast combat (like male lion vs. hippo, or lion vs. cape buffalo with lion winning) will continue because the opponent is in berserk mode and will not fail the CON rolls that easily.

Nope, that's well-maintained bronze, just like her axe or the duck's sword. The cuirass appears to be hard leather or cuirboulli. As to the load the spear carries - helmet and pot about 2 kg each, bed roll another 1 kg, water gourds between 0.5 and 6 kg depending on how much she already used. The pot might be so big in order to cook broth to be carried in the large gourd, as a liquid meal.

Many natural attacks don't get the full damage bonus, and then there is natural armor. Still, the duel between King Kong and the dinosaur might be over faster than in the movies.