Joerg

That's not a deviation from their plan to put out scenarios early and frequently. I wouldn't be astonished if they manage to insert another scenario book or two between campaign guide and GaGoG. A cause for rejoicing rather than sadface, really. Those remain in print (or available as pdf), and are pretty unavoidable if you want to do more than follow existing campaigns (including the ones for HeroQuest which are sort of stat-less cameos in terms of RuneQuest usability). For Orlanthi heroquesting, The Book of Heortling Mythology offers a lot more myths you could follow, and it gives you a feel for the kind of myths you could invent for those deities.

There is barding in Glorantha. The Seshnegi use it (there is an color plate in the Guide which shows a heavily scale-armored warrior sitting on a rather small scale-armored horse), and possibly give their horses long lasting strength spells to be able to carry such load. Lighter types of barding are shown on various of Martin Helsdon's sketches in the Swords of Central Genertela thread over in the Glorantha forum. Solar cultures like to use wing motives to re-affirm the horses' celestial origin. A piece of High Llama barding is shown on the Praxian color plate in the Guide.

I can understand that point of view if you came from RQ2 Battle Magic which didn't suggest there were spirits involved, except when you went to a shaman to learn one. Coming from RQ3, I imagine that you wrestle with a spirit for the entirety of its spirit (or battle magic) spell knowledge. If the spirit is a Bladesharp 4 spirit, you can learn Bladesharp 4 from it. If you only have three points of spell capacity left, you immediately forget one of those points, but you still learnt 4 points, and that's what you will be charged for. What I am not clear about is whether a used spell spirit is released back into the spirit world where it can somehow recover its spell knowledge, or whether it resides covertly within the spell caster who learned the magic. In one case, if you have its name, you can sic it on applicant after applicant, allowing for some regeneration in between. In the other case you will have to provide a different spell spirit every time you provide someone with that knowledge. The HQ1 model appears to imply that the spirit stays with the owner of the charm. Spirit magic is something you have.

He might attempt cloud wear: https://grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-738-dont-ask-where-cloud-9-is/

Not swallowing Nysalor goes against everything that the Black Eater stands for, and the only way to achieve that would be not to invoke the Black Eater. Very risky, because a great number of ancestors of the modern trolls were assembled in the path of the deity, and as a collective entity they survived (though they were cursed). Perhaps a strong drill to chew their food real well might get those claw stuck in the teeth rather than get into the bowels and eventually womb of the Black Eater? Questing to this historical event probably is difficult, too. You are supposed to quest as the Black Eater, and there are no other troll entities present. There is no "Arming of" event. Cragspider found one way to insert an Arming, but her quest only resulted in male and mostly infertile Great Troll hybrids. At least this was a guaranteed way to avoid birthing a trollkin litter. Regarding the huge numbers of trollkin - these cannot come from dark troll mothers, there must be significant numbers of breeding trollkin females to outnumber the dark troll births by a factor of at least 40 - even if you include cave troll-birthed trollkin. Trollkin are heavily predated on by their larger kin. The problem of a stable population or perhaps even over-population of Ignorance without any resident large troll types is another such indication.

There is a strong likelihood that they were initiates or ifbefore they passed on and were summoned. Yes. A Rune Lord's DI wouldn't be that disastrous.

Delecti lacking vampire traits: Taking a beast shape is not a core vampire power, IMO, and Delecti having a Malkioni background might be unwilling to debase himself in that direction. Delecti clearly was not a dragon mystic, as he seems to have remained in Dragon Pass after the 1042 utuma. If he already was undead at that time, why did he start creating and expanding the Upland Marsh in the Dragonkill? And, given the huge amount of freshly slain corpses available in the dragonkill war, who did he send those against? Wyrm's Footnotes 15, sidebar p.27 is quite explicit about that. The authors use the term "lich" for undead that retain their personality when transitioning. Ghouls have the distinctive feature of obligate necrophagy, and as far as I know, zombie flesh counts as dead and will sustain them as well as inanimate dead. I did consider a Delecti-like mass necromancy using something similar to ghoul spirits for a non-Gloranthan settin, though. What would that be? From what I have seen about the EWF, Delecti might have taught them how to set up the chain of veneration that let their Third Council leaders manifest Great Dragon bodies. God Learner as in Abiding Book? Most likely. God Learner as in Malkionieranist? I think he left the Empire too early to have been fully caught up in their myth-breaking. He would know RuneQuest Sight, but that ability has become useless as the after the disappearance of Jrustela. They appear created to me, rather than conceived through the normal Vivamort rune lord ways. They might be a weird cross between sorcerous apprentices and RQ3 sorcerous familiars. Perhaps undead made from succubi. A sorcerer of his stature might have a special "shatter swords" spell, possibly with an area effect. Unless it is Mostali (the Iron Energy Prison) or Zzaburi. Zzabur was (or is) as wicked as the Vadeli with his sorcery - look what he did to Solkathi or the Vadeli magicians. His one or two redeeming traits are that he took the Brithini as his servants and did actually protect them somewhat, and that he (apparently) had a role to play in the I Fought We Won myth. (Personally, I would find it a lot more logical if the "Zzabur" who participated in IFWW was a God Forgot zzaburi sorcerer, as IFWW is the identifying Theyalan myth, and his folk on Brithos are anything but Theyalan.) Death is a borderline chaotic power. This is the first time I see someone suggesting ravens as having a vampire connection. As diurn birds, the Vampire would be in a significant disadvantage in that shape.

You aren't telling the original variant, after the durulz were cursed by Yelm to lose their sky attributes this was a revenge game played with eggs. Some hard boiled, some raw...

That's for Vivamorti who have human (or other mortal, sentient) cultists (that also fuel the worship MP to make rune points regainable). How do Delecti's Dancers in Darkness do it?

Ninja'ed by Harald, so editing duplicate replies. Sort of. You'd be taught Heal 3 rather than "one additional point of Heal". Accumulating a range of useful and powerful spirit spells for yourself and your spirit companion is indeed one of the ways to "level up" your character, besides skill increase and (rarer, more time-consuming) characteristic increase. Learning spirit magic takes comparatively little time. While there is a handful of rune spells common to most cults, the selection of rune spells you can learn is limited by your cult's (or cults') catalogue. Spirit magic on the other hand is an open catalogue. The cults may have limited spell teaching resources, but they will make them available to lay members in good standing, too. (Bring a large enough gift and be from a neutral or better cult, and you'll be in good standing unless you or your ethnicity have some negative history with the temple.) Even less limited is the array of spells that a shaman can teach, but then the shaman can only teach you spells for which he knows the spirits. An experienced shaman may have access to a great range of spells. It might happen that he only has a "Heal 5" spell spirit and no "Heal 4" spirit at his beck and call (or he may be lying about that), so you might be forced to learn the higher version to be able to cast the lesser effect. Small temples might have a similar problem. True. "We hold these truths to be self-evident", you might say, meaning we might fail to point it out to a new player. Keep asking.

When it comes to fighting women, agreed. A woman strong in the fertility rune will probably be better at wetnursing than a female dedicated to death. But I also mentioned adventuring fertility priestesses - admittedly not likely to be of vingan gender - who are a lot more likely to take their infants along on a journey. If a warrior woman has a battle-born child, someone has to do the nursing, and that someone needs to have given birth recently. Not the most likely find while away on adventuring, so even a vingan gender mother might find herself in the situation to tag a nursing infant along.

Yes. Although without a vampire body, he lacks most of the regular vampire traits. He doesn't seem to have any need to drain blood (or souls) for his magics. He does require recently slain corpses to raise his undead armies, and that process appears to draw on the life force they lost in dying, or perhaps on the onset of decay in their corpses. It is a power stolen from Zorak Zoran and amplified to crazy dimensions. When he receives sacrifices to join his service as new undead, His ability to jump corpses means that he doesn't need to take many precautions to save his body as long as suitable dead bodies are available to jump into. He might run an ice house for maintaining especially promising bodies, and at worst a herd of donors to be killed whenever he desires a new physical shell. Ideally by Steal Breath or a similar Tap spell that doesn't alter anything about the future corpse that matters to Delecti. Besides that, he does appear to use sorcerous techniques to create special undead. His run-of-the mill zombies are the ZZ variety of identity-less shamblers that have at best herd-man awareness to follow orders (and whose orders to follow). I wonder whether they are Vivamorti. They do have the bite attack and the blood drain to increase their hit points, but they don't appear to have any Vivamorti lore, and they don't appear to have the ability to reproduce by converting victims into one of their kind. They seem to rely on Delecti to replenish and expand their numbers, and they worship him as an incarnation of Nontraya the Taker and Waster. Unlike their masters, the Dancers don't appear to suffer from decay, or if they do, they don't turn up as dancers any more. The Dancers don't appear to retain any personal runes from a potential previous human existence. All of them are of a beautiful appearance (at least to human observers, human traits of beauty may be lost on newtlings, ducks, tusk riders or minotaurs). There are a few subtle differences between Dancers and Vivamorti. The Dancers react already to the presentation of a Death Rune with a damage equivalent to Disruption, and that is damage which they cannot regenerate (in smoke form, I suppose - drinking blood should remove that damage, otherwise your average Dancer would be minus a few hit points in 1D6 hit locations). Vivamorti vampires must be touched by the rune to take that kind of damage, but forcefully displaing the rune to them will make them want to shy away. Dancers lack the beast forms of Vivamorti - no bat or wolf shape. And likely no jewelry in that style, either... The Enthrall ability appears to be the same for Dancers and Vivamorti, although the details for it are only found in the Vivamorti entry. Dancers lack the Darkness rune. (Is that why they are called Dancers in Darkness rather than Dancers of Darkness? Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes calls them Dancers of Darkness) Delecti's means of recruiting or creating the Dancers remain unknown - for all we know, he might father them onto his captured nymph. But then: If Delecti recruits future Dancers through seduction, he might have to maintain a small harem of apprentice dancers before he could transform them. The Vivamorti certainly maintain a cult (or maybe herd) of living lay members and initiates who donate magic points and blood on a regular basis to their cult masters. The initiates probably get their personal runes changed into the cult runes upon initiation? Sartarite women aren't usually pale skinned. (Slanders about their beauty are a different topic...) They also appear to wear highly visible tattoos in their faces, something none of the Dancer pictures (WF15, Bestiary, S:KoH p.234) shows (the upper right one wears a band on her left arm that might be a tattoo, but the lower right one wears a band of some material there, so I assume the other is wearing an item of clothing or jewelry there, too). They are undead, however. In S:KoH they communicate in Auld Wyrmish, suggesting great age or intense training by Delecti. I don't recall any notice to that regard. Nobody is nagging, but it would be nice to have. IMO yes. Or at least different from the minion cult as presented in Cults of Terror. To me, the question is whether Nontraya is dominantly a vampire tradition, or is his cult a general form of identity-keeping greater undead and their minions which may include vampiric entities like the Dancers in Darkness. I still don't see Delecti as a vampire, given his corpse-jumping existence. It is unclear whether original lieutenants of Nontraya are regarded as vampires or whether as vampiric underworld demons. They probably had Vadeli magics in addition to the vampire powers they gained from the dark border of Illumination. (The Rokari might have this Vadeli portion of their heritage, too.) Both wolf and bat are associated with Death - Telmor ate the sun, the Bat helped slay the Emperor, and vampire bats are a clear manifestation of vampirism. Both are (now) associated with Chaos - not necessarily, but at least tainted, and in the extremes (Crimson Bat, Chaos Wolf). Let me ask a bit heretically how the wyter - an entity unable to regenerate Magic Points, whose (in the end drained) POW only marks the upper limit of their MP reservoir, and which relies on a select group of supporters - might be seen as a vampiric entity.

Any adventuring female with children would usually leave them with the other women of her (or rather her child's) household, even fertility priestesses. While nursing, she might carry them along on journeys that aren't clearly adventure expeditions, e.g. when visiting the off-household side of the family (could be her own childhood clan or the in-laws if the partner moved into her clan). While there are households that resemble a modern core family, most Orlanthi households will be multi-generational, and often several couples (siblins, first cousins) sharing a hearth. Childcare of weaned children up to the middle primary school age is the task of the hearth, not the individual mother. In fact, quiite often it will be the task of a grandmother or grandaunt who may call in the assitance of other women busy around the hearth, or one of the mothers doing the day care for the lot of the stead. Even the sleeping arrangements may put all the children of this age group together onto one big wide piece of bedding. As the children graduate to pre-apprenticehood - accompanying the various workers on and off the stead to assimilate the skills needed for those duty - the mothers may become even less involved in raising the children, and the males take a greater share in tutoring the stead's next generation. In an urban environment with smaller family units, a female servant of the household may step in if no blood kin is available. Long established families will have a sufficient range of kinswomen to provide at least a kinswoman in an overseer position. Many young vingan-gendered women (women choosing some typically male life-style which will lead them mostly off-hearth, like warrior, hunter) are fairly likely to remain unwed. Without a husband's or wife's stead to choose, their children will be raised by the women of her birth stead. In case of a married Vingan having given birth to a child, her marriage stead's females are likely to look after the child.

True. Quite a few of us who are complaining about how Mongoose presented the world they had licensed like to think of ourselves not just as fans of Greg Stafford but as friends of Greg, and that makes the disregard displayed in the production something personal. The Glorantha Tribe is a network of people who have met on many an occasion, often in Leicester or at Castle Stahleck on the Rhine, at Chateau de Buoux and in recent years also at Schloss Neuhausen, and at the game fairs/general conventions like Gencon or Essen Spiel. And numerous other places which I haven't had the chance to visit. Sure. But you don't start preaching in Latin in a Southern Baptist church, do you? We have a forum for the Mongoose incarnations of RQ, and apparently that's the place to discuss the merits of that system even when comparing it to RQG, or discussing Glorantha in that context. If some people prefer not to step into such discussions, fine. "I've seen this in MRQ products, and I think it might work in RQG" is actually a good way of probing the waters. Jeff seems to prefer this forum to deal with the current editions of RQ (G and classic), so I guess we can use the Legend forum (which doesn't see that much activity) to discuss such things, and everybody will be happy. If you think a rule or method would work with RQG there is no problem presenting this as house rule presentation or as a home-made cult adaptation for RQG. People are trying...

I prefer Glorantha over Gloranthish every day. I've had my own wild deviations, which, while interesting to pursue at the time, in the end were based on misleads rather than leads. I really don't see value in taking a rich, interrelated setting, then sever all these interlinks for the ease of telling a story that doesn't quite fit the setting. Why start with the real setting in the first place, and not use some pastiche that has all the elements but none of the depth? Some settings have premises that contradict their promise to me. The Second Age book was one such setting. If I want some unrelated setting using Gloranthan names, I can watch Star Trek. To be fair, the book was written true to the sum of published Glorantha knowledge from about 17 years prior to its publication date, sprinkled with a selection of names dropped from a fact sheet given to the publishers. Now I happen to enjoy a lot of the stuff that had been developed in the intervening 17 years, and I don't want to miss that. The EWF is a phenomenon that got my curiosity since I first saw its mention in Dragon Pass. Seeing its treatment built on misleading details that weren't that well formulated all that time ago is fairly damaging to suspension of disbelief, and thereby enjoyment. To say it with Gary Oldman's character in the Fifth Element, I was disappointed. Still am. So: I really don't see value in bowdlerizing Glorantha's publishing history. Different focus, different values.

Did they even have any formal structure back then? Their common experience was "I Fought, We Won", discovering the sum of something greater than themselves on their own and alone (and greater than their people's previous success over Wakboth's invasion that had failed to open the Dara Happan dome roof before meeting their joint forces, and which let itself be deflected eastward, to face Genert and his host). After I Fought We Won, there were other, important things to be done, like unfreezing his (future) wife, separating the dead from the living, and sending them to their rest (or at least sufficiently strong holding pens). Neither the Only Old One nor Heort himself were given as council delegates.

You mean other than the Wildcards anthologies by George R.R. Martin and his Superworld gaming group? The webcomic GRRL Power has a number of fairly fragile characters, especially in their intelligence branch. Lethality mainly on the side of the villains, so far, though. While more of a steampunky Mad Scientist setting, the web comic Girl Genius is quite generous with lethality. There are other webcomics in the Supers genre, at many power levels. Supers are not quite my genre, and quite a few are behind a paywall, but there should be some rich choice out there.

I wrote that before actually looking at the MRQ1 pdf bundle. The flaws in the rules execution would have been tolerable for an original setting dedicated to these conditions for magic. Yes, it used the Gloranthan runes... so did I for my Viking-inspired RQ3 fantasy setting (basically, the runes were present as constellations, with Storm a bunch of stars falling around a nearby massive black Hole, and Chaos a dwarf planet-sized comet on a highly ecliptic orbit). I noticed the marked increase in canonicity in those products, but how did you deal with the basically flawed premise on the EWF that you were dealt by the 2nd Age book? By the time of Dara Happa Stirs for MRQ2, we get the Third Council with IsgangDrang and the other known Dragonfriends of the era, and of course the history of Obduran demonstrating the compatibility of Orlanth worship and draconic mysticism (at least at that time), and if there still was a senile Vistikos overseeing the Great Dragon experiment, that wasn't all-important any more. The second edition of the Glorantha Book did get a good update that agreed with Greg's material (now published in History of the Heortling Peoples) at least in the history section. I guess we have to thank you for that re-write? How much time (and space) were you allotted for that? The Vistikos stuff did remain in, but with the correct rulers named in the history section, at least you could produce the subsequent works like Dara Happa Stirs. I missed most of your efforts at the time. There was a Second Age Glorantha community, but it had few links to the HeroQuest-dominated Third Age community. (And I would probably have come across as a troll. Not the uz kind.) Still, there remained quite a bit of material based on flawed assumptions, and the dates in History of the Heortling Peoples required quite pointed attention to detail to get e.g. the role of Tharkantus right, or the non-EWF Orlanthland leadership. Your fix worked to jumpstart the chosen period of play into the right directions, but it left the history and the bitterness in the rise of the dragonfriends against the traditionalists in the dark. Of at best secondary importance for the game line, so commercially of no interest at all to Mongoose. The more or less non-treatment of Greg's suggestions at drama and action for the Clanking City remains a shame. The plunder of Lylket could have made a great uz scenario, and a side quest. Preliminary warfare ravaging southern Heortland could have made a great community survival game. There were a number of other interesting hotspots which would have deserved attention. The collapse of the Umathelan university cities due to Closing and riots. Godunya's story. The naval campaigns in the east. Melib and Teshnos, and the Red Sword Saga. Valkaro. And a pity that the Six-legged adventure had already faltered by the chosen setting date, Ivy Kang's war could have been another great campaign.

I don't think that Theyalan gender considerations are anywhere except within their own marriage range. Cross-species marriages do occur for ritual reasons, and in exceptional cases may have offspring, but that more or less requires these separate species to participate in the same system of social reference. There are rather few "pick from all species" rings or organisations (read: few if any Fellowships of the Ring). The Unity Council was the great exception. (It just dawned on me what great influence the Heortlings had on the Theyalans despite not being represented on that ring: the Unity Council is an Orlanthi ring, and while it may have given itself a different internal structure (like not having a chieftain but seven co-equal ring members, except in matters of certain expertise, like war) than the usual Orlanthi ring, it seems to adhered to its rites. The kingless ruling ring of Orlanthland appears to have used the same structure.) There are a few Heortling rings that may have the occasional or permanent non-human on them - the priesthood of Pavis has the (half-)dwarf Ginkizzie, Sartar High Council of 1613 had the durulz Jonathan Greenbeak. The Daughters of Pavis are (or have become) completely ungendered, with the (finally complete again) 1613-1621 complement having a single female among them (plus whatever Ginkizzie is). There aren't that many places where different species co-exist. Some of the Holy Country ports have a more or less permanent Ludoch presence (Seapolis, Nochet, City of Wonders), a small number of cities has full troll communities (Nochet, Boldhome, greater Pavis, possibly some more Esrolian cities) rather than a few individual resident traders/resident mercenary agents/bodyguards/transient mercenaries, and a few cities have more than a handful of duck families or individuals alongside humans. The continued duck presence in Apple Lane is quite exceptional for a place of that size. (They might have a "monkeys on Gibraltar" problem there...) Newtlings don't really share many communities with humans, other than river or sea cults like Zola Fel or Choralinthor, or possibly human (Pelaskite) worshipers of Amphibos the Wanderer. Other than the Unity Council and the Kralori empire, I have no example for an organisation where the dragonewts are part of a community with other (non-draconic) species. Even in the EWF they appear to have remained mostly apart from the human antics. Dragonewt sex may be quite different from the binary (ok, four stages, yes or no for both male and female in all combinations) choices for humans, but then the contribution of the various stages may be spiritual rather than bodily to engender the new clutch of eggs. Propagation among neuters, except for the dragon-form participant laying the eggs. There's even the possibility that the eggs of all the unfinished newts are used up in the process to create a (much higher) number of new eggs.

But then Jar-eel will probably have gifts that raised those maxima, too, or give her an effective multiplier to some of those characteristics.

The reason to go to Dorastor after the liberation might be to notify your kinsfolk there of the possibilty to return, only to find them honor-bound to solve the problems of the Riskland campaign, and yourself embroiled in this. (Provided you have no duties in a certain hamlet to fulfill...) What exactly is the time-stamp of the Paulis Longvale stories (in Cults of Terror)? The Guide says it starts in 1623 (p.344), but how long does this campaign stretch? You might be able to stretch them out long enough to ride on some of those events.

Not necessarily. An alternative would be that the wyter object is destroyed, and that survivors who failed to participate in the mission can re-summon it and build up the regiment again. The Lunar "vexillum" alternative wyters offer another solution to this. Yes. But then, just because the wyter is destroyed doesn't mean that the pre-existing entity who took on the duty of the wyter is destroyed in the afterlife. Still, my proposal of destroying the wyter object to allow a recovery of the wyter by absent friends sounds like a reasonable way to deal with this. BTW, this is not my idea, it is the concept behind David Gemmell's Order of the Thirty in the Drenai series, a group of suicidal warrior mystics quite similar to a magical regiment of the Sartar Magical Union or the Imperial College of Magic.

I'll stick to my initial judgement, I think. Full of ideas, no fact-checking for consistency with canon, sloppy editing. Illustrations on a semi-professional level, with occasional abysmal aberrations like e.g. the small image of "Lodril" in 16th century garb holding one spear in one hand and two in the other, in the cults book. And not actually cheaper than RQG so far, despite considerable differences in production quality. A decent variation of the generic RuneQuest rules with a cute but non-Gloranthan idea how to bring runes into magic. A weird "memorized divine magic lowers your effective POW!" rule that goes against any previous forms of how RQ handled that. Sorcery without obligatory familiars (as expression of the sorcerous "spiritual organ". A system to raid the hero planes that may be related to insider heroquesting by usurping the same jump-off sites (though obviously at less fortunate times, or the home religion would be there holding a rite - I wonder how the authors could miss that error in their correspondence magic) and abusing the myths normally maintained there. That's because "there is a product with RQ on it that says X, therefore X must be true in RQG, too". I am content to show the flaws around those statements, to acknowledge the more creative deviations, and to point out that it is a good try at an alternate Glorantha, but not a serious try to write for a Glorantha consistent with the presentation it has accumulated. The Second Age Book is probably largely consistent with published Glorantha information up to Elder Secrets of Glorantha and a few of Greg's preparatory notes given to Mongoose. The misplaced locations are ones not shown correctly on any map. If that is your jump-off point for your involvement of Glorantha and you don't care much about more recent additions or clarifications, then you will have none of my "this is sooo wrong" reactions. It's like Bobby Ewing remains dead and gone in Dallas (or for a more recent popular phenomenon, the Blood Wedding never happened in Game of Thrones). You'll have to accept that new publications will follow a different continuity, and in case of the presentation of the Malkioni (and more recently the Morokanth), you will have to live with a continuity break that may be much weaker than the different conclusions you drew on the earlier presentations. I just stumbled over a few of my digest posts from 1994, about initiation, Iron Age Glorantha, Malkionism, Elmal... stuff that was debated here on the forum in the last few weeks or months. The stuff where I was wrong (given today's knowledge) usually was based on reasonable but false assumptions. Some of that different knowledge may have come into existence by refuting those ideas. Currently I don't have them. They simplify some things and make other things more complicated. To me, the character sheet of RQG has way too many "you can't do this/you don't have any reasonable chance in hell to do this" entries in the skills and weapon list. I would be a lot happier to see broader skills, from which you can take narrower specialisations, and possibly narrower specific ineptitudes, too. I am actively unhappy with the "opposed powers add up to 100%" rule, and at the very least I am inclined to add a rule that Illumination allows you an overlap of those abilities that totals up to no more than your illumination/enlightenment/whatever score, so that an illuminated rune lord of Yelm could have both Life and Death above 50%. Or a divine gift that you can use your cult's power rune at 20% above your personality score - another way to de-degrade those power rune-based cults.

That's why I put it in front, yes. First impressions are important. Mine were from playing the Dragon Pass boardgame, and playing a whacky scenario which put us in a fight against ducks on a boathouse (pretty much like the one in the Leatherstocking TV production about the abducted girls) where they had all the terrain advantage. Pretty exasperating... So I got drawn in by the big magical battles, rebels vs empire. Not quite. I had the chance to play one of several Wolf Pirates with Loz as GM using MRQ2, and it was a fun experience, with the rules alterations vs. RQ3 not that big a deal and the new combat options fairly nice. I have its successor RQ6 (which became Mythras) in both English and German. I genuinely enjoyed reading my way through Dara Happa Stirs. The Mongoose stamp doesn't have to mean that the content is off-course. Oh, I am perfectly fine if there are whacky versions of Glorantha which has Elmer Fudd as Gringle. The problem I have is when a setting like that is marketed as "This is Glorantha" rather than "This is our idea of Glorantha". There have been other attempts at describing official Glorantha that I have been thoroughly unhappy with, and others that managed to irk me enough to keep grumbling about them. What I don't quite understand about 2nd Age is how following the God learner timeline for Jrustela and the God Learner phenomenon as a whole could accept the starting date for the movement in the middle of the 7th century and the rise of heroquesting in the middle of the eighth, but still insist that it was from God Learner activity that draconic speech emanated from Esrolia into Dragon Pass. The God Learners needed Arkat's secrets to discover the Other Side of non-Malkioni, so how would they have been able to influence events 170 years before the fall of the Autarchy with such heroquesting and knowlede theft? More important would be the enhanced pieces of armor. The rules are unclear, however. If an enhancement requires step 3 in quality improvement, does this allow another step 2 improvement and a step one improvement on the side, or does it block all three slots? Perhaps that's the one point where a clear canonical statement about the mass produced bladesharp 1 swords of the Machine City should preclude your run-of-the-mill Gloranthan enchanter from producing this. The source is a caption for a rather mediocre illustration - from memory either in the RQ3 Genertela Box Glorantha Book in the Second Age history or RQ3 Elder Secrets Secret Lands section near the Clanking Ruins entry. Nothing wrong with the generic MRQ1 rules offering such enchantments as an option for other settings, mind you, but just because something is in the generic rules doesn't mean that it has to apply to each and every setting where these rules get to be used. There is no setting reason for making this a case of individual rolls, although I notice that David Scott used a very similar take on Discorporation of assistant shamans in his narrative how a shaman might learn a new shamanic ability. Personally, with the rules offering of MRQ1 I would use a reverse team roll mechanism for the heroquesting party if they have formed the equivalent of a hero band, i.e. created (and initiated or at least significantly sacrificed to) a hero band wyter, or a loaned wyter received through an "Arming of <Protagonist>" preliminary rite. Cult lore or perhaps specific myth instruction lore can be upped a lot by sticking to a narrowly defined role in the "Arming of" rite. The lead quester(s) receive all manner of ritual items, and each item may be represented by an individual or even a group of suitably uniform assistant questers, and their performance in this also gives them an edge for interactions on the heroquest involving this activity. Thus, when Orlanth receives his sword Deathbringer, that's how to include Humakti or Telmori bodyguards into the ablative meat team of questers. From what I read elsewhere (possibly in MRQ products) on Jrusteli heroquesting, ablative meat heroquesting was part of the God Learner method of exploitative heroquesting. That would explain the insane numbers of heroquesters produced by the universities of Umathela in the mere 150 years before riots destroyed them - after the Closing, but long before the destructions of Old Seshnela, Old Maniria and Jrustela. Runes and Battle Magic haven't been linked in RQG. Given the terminology in RQ2, I find it surprising that the commonly available Battle Magic of the previously available magic systems ended up being the one tied to the runes. On the whole, the rules for the Blood of the Gods in the shape of magical crystals has been established at least since the Bertalor article in Elder Secrets, although the live and dead crystals of the Gods had been quite ubiquitious in RQ2 NPC and plunder descriptions. RQ3 re-introduced them rather late, and they didn't catch on much in the RQ Renaissance NPC and plunder descriptions, IIRC. So integration of physical runes as per MRQ1 would be attuning live Crystals of the Gods when it comes to physical objects. For the other side of a person somehow aquiring a rune there is RQG's use of the runes as personality traits or as sorcerously mastered knowledge. Either could be a form of heroquest award. Especially the element runes of powerful heroes could have impressive percentiles, beyond 100. Such values might be necessary to offset hostile environments. There used to be mention of a technique in Hero Wars and possibly HeroQuest 1 about integration of spirits to acquire those abilities - IIRC related to Kralorela (possibly eastern Hsunchen) or Sheng Seleris. Now, with elementals we have one type of runic spirit entities, and healing spirits might be considered Harmony spirits. To recap: the generic parts of the MRQ rules covering "the world" issues aren't terrible at all. Whether and how much you want to simulate this is part of personal and party preferences - there are players who thrive on empire-building in their rpgs, and the MRQ rules offer many a tool (and indeed splat book) to play that. RQ3 tried that with the Monster Coliseum, and didn't succeed so well. The addition of 50 pages of a gladiator-themed game in a Lunar place - why not Furthest or Mirins Cross so you can use Orlanthi and Seven Mothers - would have made all that generic bling into useful background for Glorantha, while still offering enough gaming for people playing elsewhere, and a Dart Competition campaign could have been built off that. (Yeah, AH era RQ3 had its less useful bits, too. The AH reprint of Midkemia Press "Cities" on the other hand was just the preservation of timeless roleplaying gold.) The Ship rules are a continuation of the RQ3 sailing and vessel rules. I haven't gone into detail, but the RQ3 rules (which I did use in earnest, given my Viking themed backstory) work sufficiently well, so I don't expect the MRQ rules to do a significantly worse job. No points for innovation there, though. The rules for invasive heroquesting using enemy sites look fair, but they disregard the community effect that regular Gloranthan heroquesting is about. Not even Jar-eel inserting herself into the Holy Country magic or Hon-eel entering the Tarshite Earth rites use such methods. Acceptable for God Learner brute force methods, but that's it. Looking at the MRQ product line which showed some serious lack in that department already just skimming through the basic rules book, I wonder how much Jason Durall is bogged down with rulesy consistency checking, and whether he has volunteer or professional aides. Gloranthan fact checking is another criterion, and the one where the MRQ line made the IMO bad decision to keep creating Gloranthish rather than Gloranthan products for sake of their rapid-fire publication strategy. Parts of the Glorantha audience can be extremely nit-picky. (Look who's talking...) Allowing the authors to follow their fancies did result in a number of unusual-awesome concepts that would be totally fine in stand-alone products or less developed settings. I still wonder how animated metal plated skeletons become living machines. The Clanking City book used the material offered by Greg in History of the Heortling Peoples. With the chief Zistorite described as "to a great part a machine", why aren't the living lesser instances of Zistor cyborgs? The Machine Wars could have been flying magicians vs. Battletech. Avatar was published only in 2009, so dragon riders vs. robots would have been fresh and original at the time of publication. And Mongoose could have continued with Machine War episode books sufficiently similar to Avatar to appeal to that fandom without having to pay much if any additional royalties, having clear evidence for prior publication.

I wonder whether there is either some suppressed magic for Alkothi to turn into Shadzoring Hell denizens or otherwise some ritual marking to transform them symbolically into these Zorani entities. Unlike mainstream Zorak Zoran, it is possible that their body modification to a normal Darkness Man Rune entity wasn't burning but flaying, similar to the Bat that at least according to one story used to be of a slightly darker (and bluer) color before Arkat overcame and flayed it during the Gbaji Wars. No idea whether it would have been nearly as chaotic and glowing as it is today, and whether its hunger was as chaotic as it is now. There are other such Zorani entities. Lodril as Monster Man, Deshkorgos, shares many such attributes. And maybe that's the explanation why the Pamaltelan cognate of Lodril is associated to the Red Planet. But the very least modification I expect from Shargashi is some form of Third Eye and a few lines indicating a skull face, a hell denizen face, or both. Scarification ritually exaggerated by cremation ashes would work for me. Possibly scarification through selective flensing. An accident with a concrete surface left an almost Harry Potter-like area of discolored (unpigmented, often sun-burned) skin on my brow. Shargashi might do this ritually - at first displaying the raw, bleeding wound (which does give a really gruesome appearance), then leaving these indelible lines of reduced pigmentation.