Joerg

That's not the Glorantha I met. Everybody is initiated to some deity, usually Orlanth or Ernalda. But then, the big change is that - in RQ terms all of a sudden - both Orlanth and Ernalda have become bad-ass, rather than the agricultural providers of Cloud Call and Bless Crops. RQG sort of inverted the dilemma of the RQ3 "Shrines provide Cloud Call" doctrine. Also, the common rune magic spells have really become common, in that you don't have to travel to the next temple to renew them. Bless Crops has been the staple rune spell for farmers forever. And rune points invested in Bless Crops are bound up all summer long, which means they aren't available during Fire Season (campaign time). Nothing much has changed in that regard - you ritually cast that spell when you sow the grain (or whatever) on the freshly plowed field, and when you harvest, you can regain those rune points during the harvest festival. Herders have Bless Animals work similarly, but at a more opportune time - when the herds return from Summer pasture - and without duration. As a consequence, herders have more rune points available for combat, and they need them, too - because of cattle raids. But then, Barntar farmers are both plowmen and breeders of cattle, so they will have some personal magic left after the Bless Animal, and some reserve for Cloud Call. The Rune Power concept now allows those essential rune points to be used for warfare, too. Bars with brawls are a city (or at least market town) thing only. You don't clobber your own clan mates in your drinking hall for fear of invoking kinstrife, even if you would enjoy that so much. Fortunately, no such restrictions exist for in-laws, other than hospitality rites. For the other stuff, divinely sanctioned competitions and duels are the outlet. Arm-wrestling can be quite rowdy and mean. Bringing a gun or a lightning strike to a bar brawl is regarded as criminal intent anywhere anytime. I have been wondering how Pelorians (who rely on agricultural magics just as much as do Heortlings) get their ritual spells or their regimental combat magic cast, but the wyter rules provide something of a mechanism to enable that without them needing to initiate to a specific deity - just entrust the wyter (or whatever the Pelorians call that community deity icon) to the holy person of that deity, and support your wyter as you have always done.

The text about wyters in RQG gives a very high information for word count ratio. Possibly more than can be easily digested. Basically, wyters are the way to magically establish a community that has magical consequences. The wyter is the manifestation of the community, and the community reflects the state of the wyter. My original idea of a wyter was a collective spiritual entity that formed from the group's magical unity, without a the need for a pre-existing entity to take on that role. Sure, the Protectresses are manifestations of Eiritha, but they are the collective soul power of the entirety of the bison (or impala or herd man) population of the Wastes that can manifest when herds are in danger. But then, wyters have been given quite a bit of individuality, which makes them pleasantly different from the ancestral notions of conformity for continuity. City gods often are wyters, with the founding father acting as the wyter. This has an obvious conclusion - the wyter entity can migrate from the original spirit to the founding father when the founding father has left the world of the living. The wyterhood gets transferred, and the former spirit may become a helper spirit of the founder. Fairly obviously, the Jonstown tribal confederation created a wyter when the city confederation was formed. Quite likely Hauberk Jon quested for it himself, possibly analogous to the westfaring (which is where Ginna Jar manifested - nowadays I think that Ginna Jar was the roving, not-sleeping soul of Ernalda). I am not clear on how specific wyters are for Orlanthi culture, or whether the Dara Happan city gods are a kind of wyter, too. Dara Happan regimental gods and regimental regalia appear to be related, with the wyter being the standard or whatever. As you asked for the grognard experience, let’s have a look at the publication history. King of Sartar was the first publication to mention the wyter, clarifying that we knew about it in the shape of Ginna Jar already. KoS (hardcover) p.218 “Tribal Spirit A tribe always has a protective spiritual entity. It is a collective entity or group spirit of the type called wyter. The tribal wyter is analogous to the ancestral clan spirit. It is a literal esprit de corps. Like all spiritual entities, the health, magnificence, and power of the tribal spirit varies with the number of individuals devoted to it. A similar type of entity is named Ginna Jar in the Lightbringers’ Quest. This name is a term of unknown derivation and impossible translation, but is apparently the Lightbringer Wyter.” The book was published in the early 1990ies, at a time when there were no new rules products, so the concept never got interated into RQ3. In all fairness, the RQ4-AiG playtest draft did mention them as a special case of cult spirits. In the early days of the digests we quickly identified the spirits of the magician units and the protectresses in Nomad Gods as some manifestations of collective spirits. Thunder Rebels created the definitive write-up about wyters, although not for RuneQuest. As far as I know, everythingsaid about (Orlanthi) wyters there still applies (though the absolute values for wyter strength are no longer used in HQ2). Sartar-Kingdom of Heroes picks up much of that text, and specifically expands on how a wyter may be used on a heroquest. Perhaps because of this coverage, the wyter only gets mention on two pages in the HeroQuest Glorantha rules. (13th Age Glorantha doesn’t mention wyters.) Arcane Lore has a couple of texts dealing with the evolution of the wyter mechanisms. I’m pretty certain that some of that stuff was experimental only, but it is another source for how this came to be. The Glorantha Sourcebook focuses on the military use of wyters in the Sartar Magical Union. RQG picks up much of that. As I said, reading the text once won’t give you much insight.

Funny. I would expect dwarves to have body modifications as factory standard - mechanical or clockwork limbs, animated rock, etc. Mostali regard themselves as artificial beings, and becoming more machine-like would be becoming more like Mostal. Tattooing might be one of the more visible marks of individualism. Mostali come in a huge variety of body shapes, even within a single caste, so they are hardly uniform in appearance. Each dwarf becomes a purpose-built tool for the maintenance and repair of the world machine, whether in janitorial or in hard repair missions. Scars or brandings from exposure to broken machinery would be marks of either ineptitude or of honorable achievement. Nidan or Slon dwarves probably don't go for individualism, preferring conformity. Greatway dwarves celebrate individuality while conforming to their assigned tasks. Jrusteli dwarves trade for toucan feathers, indicating at least some sort of foppish individualism.

Given the utter lack of involvement of Greg in the writing of MRQ (except for Dara Happa Rising), I am dubious about most that was written about the EWF in the early MRQ publications, like Blood of Orlanth. The treatment of the EWF basically was what convinced me not to play MRQ. It was to what I had learned about Glorantha what the Flat Earth society is to our world. The EWF leaders of the Third Council were mostly "short cut" mystics following follies like the Path of Immanent Mastery or Isgangdrang's variation thereof. These did gift them with Great Dragon bodies, but they did not achieve the draconic consciousness necessary for ascension to full dragonhood - despite or possibly because they were directing energies of draconic worship to themselves from all over the Empire. That cult from Blood of Orlanth certainly is one of those paths doomed to fail. There are other, proven ways to turn a human into a beast - the Praxians have a rune spell for that.

Heler is gender-fluid and sex-fluid, but not necessarily hermaphroditic (as in both sexes at the same time). What non-humans would have been subject to Heort's Laws? We have no idea when the durulz adopted them. I doubt the Wind Children adopted them. The Kitori might, but I guess it is more correct to say that there were Heortlings who became Kitori (changed their species through Darkness adoption), and others who never were Heortlings. The Aramites were part of the First Council (indeed they provided the human speaker), but they were not Heortlings. The problem of a married person wanting to have sex with someone one is not married to can be solved easily - conduct a bed-marriage. It isn't quite clear how exclusive Heortling marriages are. There have been leaders with multiple wives, and there will have been priestesses with multiple husbands. In fact, the marriage of Orlanth and Ernalda appears to have worked under this premise, at least for Ernalda, but Orlanth siring Vingkot on Janerra Alone may have been sanctioned by an additional marriage, too. Androgeus is a case on herself, and he is not a Heortling, nor has she ever been. Yeah. Display signs of draconic powers, and you'll be killed the day you have been born, except for the EWF era and few exceptions (like Obduran before and Orlaront after the EWF).

That's an unfortunate misprint in the genealogy. Goram Whitefang was the husband of Tarkala, Terasarin's younger daughter (granddaughter of Tarkalor).

I do think that more than an Orlanthi All of the Sartarites are initiates - many of them to one or more of their wyters. My reasoning: if you go and gift your wyter with your POW, you might just as well initiate to it, and increase its rune spell pool when enough initiates are present. There should be no extra 10% tithe for gifting the wyter with your POW, and the rites to the Wyter are part of your annual ritual time allotment anyway. You will want a wyter with a high POW, because that's a wyter that can hold a lot of magic points, and provide spirit magic (like Heal 6 to re-attach a limb) more than a few times. Pretty handy for a warband.

There are plenty submerged remains of Godtime now visited (or shunned) by merfolk - possibly drowned forests with skeletal trees supporting reefs, certainly drowned temple cities of Ernaldela. A lot less where Worcha struck against the Trembling Shore. (Likewise, there should be places in the Rockwoods where mountain peaks are surrounded by small reefs and even sandy beaches (both of course fallen dry) where the peaks stuck out during the Flood.)

It should be possible to play a "Black Company" style game of a warband of sacred mercenaries hiring on with Lord Death on a Horse and remaining oath-bound honorable. It's not like the self-righteous Loskalmi don't make good villains. Ompalam priesthood: no worse than Yelmic priesthood, if you are of the Renewed ("tsanyano") faction rather than the brutal Oldster ("bolgaddi"). I am a bit puzzled why you place the Kralori exarchs here, and not for instance Rokari watchers, or Alkothi priests and rune lords. They are functionaries in a hierarchy, not ravening dragons demanding to be fed virgins or infants.

At least in the case of widows dyeing their hair red, I would think that they take on vingan behavior, but that is temporary. There are surely other cults that take in vingans, like e.g. Redaylda, Lhankor Mhy, Issaries. I wouldn't speculate on gender in Eurmali characters - there probably is a story how Eurmal got pregnant.

It's not like the Lunars hadn't encountered that high initiation rate earlier, when Hwarin Dalthippa suborned the Sylilan bear Orlanthi to establish Lunar rule over the Provinces. But then, those were fights between pro-Lunar and anti-Lunar Orlanthi, and the level of organisation of those Orlanthi wasn't anything to write home about if the Talastari are the measure of that. If you want something similar to the Roman distrust of the German cold and dark forests, the theme of the oppressive mountain peaks that obscures so much of their beloved sky and on occasion even the Moon, in combination with the absence of the Glowline, and the vast over-abundance of rain (compared to the Pelorian bowl, which gets most of its water from irrigation, even for "dry farming"). The community support bit will blow up in the Lunar faces when the Flame of Sartar is relit. With the kingdom's wyter fully functional again, the Sartarites might experience a cohesion tighter than the empire - at least while the Mask of the Emperor is ever more disfunctional.

Ancestor worship outside of Beast Rider culture only makes sense when it works without requiring a shaman. Duke Raus was an ancestor worshipper, and as head of the family also the chief priest of the ancestor cult. I don't recall seeing a shaman from his family in his entourage.

The Wyter is something like a sensation of common sense, and that may be expressed more strongly by somthing that is a huge magical beacon rather than a quite wilted plant. One might simulate that by capping the effective (resonating, not hate) passion rating to that community by the Wyter POWx5.

You should have said that earlier - at least I was arguing from "this doesn't fit Glorantha". Personally, I don't worry much about cultural appropriation. It's not like it doesn't happen in the other direction, too. Adapting RQ to other settings to make the magic fit is quite a different proposal than houserule one's Glorantha game. I am content with the knowledge that this was written by someone who was practicing those beliefs and who wouldn't treat them disrepectfully. With the current bunch of rules. The other end of the power scale (the black of the Moldvay D&D boxes) hasn't been published yet, probably not written yet either. If you mean clearly distinguishable and quantifiable deities, yes, that's a refusal. That is inherent in the mythology approach to the world building. It took me about four years of playing RuneQuest before I played in Glorantha, back in those days when the first German language RQ was published (too little way too late). I am still happy with my Viking Age themed fantasy setting I created for my game.

Isn't the point of many a heroquest to pull an enemy into a rather predictable set of options by assigning him a well-known (and disadvantageous to him) role? An out of mythical context situation is what happens if you lose your path while heroquesting. Biturian did not want to face Chaos that would kill an accomplished Sword of Humakt and keep his soul prisoner. That's different from "do not want to heroquest as the active quester." Being on the receiving end of other people's quests twice (Strikes of Anger in Sun County, the Zorak Zoran encounter) and wishing to remain a trader rather than a desert tracker in Corflu just means that these were not his causes. No, that's a Green Age event. More like "Orlanth and the Broom", or "How the dust mice became visible to men". 😉 That sounds a bit like what happened to Biturian on his ZZ encounter. Probably still "marked" as a stand-in for Orlanth, he may have been dragged into Rurik's partial (?) Hill of Gold quest (?) to pin down that ZZ death lord. Not just some places. The historical world of Glorantha is a mosaic of surviving shards from the God Time, with some spider glue in between, and those areas of spider glue are fairly common, and weaker in reality. That.

I wonder what makes you think that that lazy flapping with the wings is what keeps the Bat aloft? I would say that it uses levitation, and that the flapping only allows for locomotion while levitated.

I don't see it anywhere in the rules that a spirit or ghost has something that can be hit even with their Visibility on, and why should Truesword change that?. Spirits don't have a special vulnerability to iron, they just get slowed in their magic exchange when exposed to the unenchanted stuff. Not sure about Sever Spirit either. The spirit has no body to be severed from.

First of all, have a supporter multispell Dampen Damage. That should take normal damage down into the low twenties. Even that is more than you would want to parry with enchanted dwarven Iron Shields and dwarven Iron Plate (or chain) and five or six points of Shield, so dodge instead. Use Shimmer 12 or something like that. Neutralize Damage will give you at least a second chance to avoid damage, however low it may be. Don't let them close on you, have them deal with two or three whirlvishes, salamanders or similar each. Earth elementals from below, Steal Breath... Use illusions or phantoms of yourself synchronized to yourself - keep them intersecting with your body until you are real close, then separate. Heal the opposing Humakti. That is bound to break one of his geases. Get Draconic Prehealing. In short - take away their advantage by any means you can imagine, avoid being hit. Don't get into melees. Send in the trollkin (Battle of the Somme style). A fair fight in a Champion's Battle means that you have a 50% chance for your demise. A Gloranthan warrior would find these odds acceptable. Once the game gets to damages in the twenties I probably would add a rule that attacking weapons have a maximum damage they can deal without taking the excess damage themselves in addition to the target. True Weapon could increase that value by the maximally added damage. And these are bronze implements... Morden has been published: https://www.glorantha.com/docs/morden-defends-the-camp/ It is playing the champions battle between heroquesters, yes. Hrestol's Saga is a rather ancient unpublished story, and has the knights errant questing into increasingly more magical lands, interacting with guides and temptations, occasionally proving themselves in preliminary deeds.

Avoid or be amputated/killed. If you are a rune lord, use Divine Intervention. If you are a heroquester knowing the backdoor out of Hell ending up dead, return some time later, probably in a new body. Heroform before entering a fight at these stakes. If you are able to take on a stature equivalent of your opponent, you will be able to take such a hit while in that form. Unfortunately, the rules for such heroforming (along the lines of Greg's story "Morden Defends the Camp") have not been published yet for RQG. Already Hrestol's Saga talks about entering the divine realm and becoming like unto a deity.

Au contraire. For one extra POW (a total of 2), a 1 point spell gets to affect up to 6 people, another point of POW will up that to 11, etc. - a massive saving already. If we go back to talking 6 points of Shield, the question is whether you pay 8 or 18 points for 66 points of shield. 18 is a bargain, 8 is over the top. King of Dragon Pass had "sacrifices before battle" which sounds to me like a worship service to top off the wyter's MP, and possibly invoke a blessing, then redeem it. That's a whole lot of POW traded, and some extra time spent in worship. If you have enough wyters, that's still a heck of holy day worship services (aka POW gain rolls) even at once per year. POW that might be obligatory to gift to the wyter.

I wonder what the Wyter POW for Runepower economy is. Effectively, initiates of the Wyter sacrifice for a one-use spell that the wyter will cast on behalf of the community, with a vast multispell advantage by allowing five more people affected for a single point of POW (presumably per point of the rune spell, or this gets into extreme munchkin territory). How often will initiates (e.g. members of a regiment) be called to be drained for such a sacrifice? Is it a quid pro quo deal (with the multispell effect giving the wyter some way to build up reserves)? Are the initiation points to the wyter available as "rune power"? Given the usefulness of wyters, are there communities with layered wyters (for subgroups and overgroups)? Take your average Joe or Jane Orlanthi. He or she can be initiated to the clan wyter, the cult's temple wyter, the tribal wyter, the city confederation's wyter, possibly the warband's or hero band's wyters. Especially tribal wyters will gain huge amounts of initiation POW when a clan joins, or when a clan presents the new adults to the tribal wyter. What is the time commitment for a wyter worship service? Does a wyter have holy days? If so, how often?

Basically, this is a whole economy of adventurer activities waiting to be written. If you look at Biturian's Horngate episode in Cults of Prax, there are a number of healing plants mentioned, but the section also has a CA runespell Refine Medicine which works analogous to Heal Wound to instill POT into herbs, or to transform their field of operation (moving along the table provided under the cult skill Find Healing Plants which apparently both Biturian and Norayeep possess). Unfortunately for both Biturian and us, there is no sale, and neither any information on the amount of plants required for a healing attempt, and the amount that can be harvested. The table has a number of cute ideas. Upon a quick check, none of the plants mentioned in the Biturian narrative made it into the RQG Bestiary.

The alchemist will spend some significant effort on making this potion, providing himself (and his dependents) with food and housing, maintaining (and occasionally replacing) his lab equipment (I work in a lab in real life, which means I have a good idea what things cost when the break down, how long certain implements remain usable, etc.), and paying taxes. Oh, and maintaining and expanding your library of methods and recipes. IIRC RQ2 and RQG both have prices for magic cast by NPCs on your behalf. Those might be a good way to adjust the different price tables to one another. In a way, the RQ2 Healing Potion almost feels like a pre-cast Heal Wound rather than a Heal. The RQG potion works a lot more slowly - one hit point healed immediately, additional hit points coming back one per hour. Having pre-cast spells on you to release with just one action is a huge force multiplier, as it doesn't dig into your magic economy. If I were manager or co-manager of a hero band, I would consider to hire an alchemist on retainer if the band had been successful. Yes - the temples (of LM, CA and certain Lunar cults) sell potion kits for 50L per potential POT. That doesn't mean that there aren't other sources for the raw material. In fact, the temples buy these in bulk, or send out parties of cultists on missions to acquire them in the field - your party will probably be tasked with something like that, or at least with running escort while a herbalist does the gathering. What they sell is the Gloranthan equivalent of a baking mix that only needs milk added and some stirring, and then careful baking, or those "brew your own little casket of beer" gimmicks. These ingredient kits are obviously made by alchemists using the alchemy skill, too, and that means that a dedicated player or sidekick alchemist could put in that work, too. On the other hand, you buy a well tested and complete set of ingredients. As anybody who ever worked in preparative chemistry can attest, each preparatory step towards a finished product comes with some degree of loss. In RQ terms, each such step comes with a failure likelihood that may ruin your material. In the long run, your process will have an unavoidable inherent waste rate for each step (rarely mitigated by specials or crits) multiplied by your chance of success at performing this preparation step. And worse, ingredients - even inorganic salts - don't keep indeterminately, and may have to be purified before using them (another step of loss, or else a greater risk at failure). On the whole, purchasing the fresh mix from the temple might be cheaper than trying to produce it yourself. RQG doesn't mention ingredients or lab equipment cost. It only gets specific by mentioning that alchemy requires "specific raw materials" - so no info available here. RQG treats healing potions as possible heirlooms (Harmast has drawn the "13" heirloom in the lottery).

To me the only "Viking" thing about the Orlanthi was the community-based campaign published in RQ3 Vikings and RQ3 Land of Ninja, each with a slightly different flavor, which was applicable to a Sartar campaign, too. I went for pagan Anglo-Saxons (also pre-migration) where I didn't go for Hallstatt and La Tene people (Celts), never making an issue about skin coloration until that came up by a surprising Greg post. La Tene mainly for the oppida, as the Danubian and Rhone Valley cities bear climatic and geogaphical similarity to how Dragon Pass has been described, the agriculture fits almost exactly (more wheat variants than barley anywhere in the Old World), military (dis-)organisation and the religious practices appeared to be reasonably close, too. Climatically similar Native American cultures never had plows (at least not before accepting stray European settlers into their tribes), and the Fertile Crescent doesn't fit climatically. How do you think these wounds were acquired? If done right - which means you need a maintainer on retainer for all the technical issues (like updating the infra-structure every few months) and at least one editor to publish and on occasion write material (summarizing or expanding on published stuff). The old glorantha.com site was ably maintained by volunteers combining these abilities. That doesn't give you graphics, and given the state of partial or major undress quite a few of these images provide, you also need the legalese electronic equivalent of a brown bag. Not the first time I lost significant effort to technical problems. This was my apprentice fee for using a low cost hosting service to put up the website. It was their content management software that allowed the malware insertion, and they made it my fault... Right now, I am not sure whether I should just make sure the site is backed up, or whether I should step up my investment to an infrastructure that allows me to create a real information system. That would come with a steep learning and re-learning curve at a time when much of my time is eaten up by keeping a house intact. In that regard, hats off to Sverre (aka @Trifletraxor) for his job in keeping this site up and running.

Sure. To me, these images have been pluripresent in various posts. But then, the original question would have been repeated along the line "nice images, so I guess they are Celts/Phrygians/Successor State Hellenized Persians" or whatever someone might wish to recognize there. You have to realize that these are raw, unhealable wounds for some of us. Yes, it would be great to have a well organized official website giving official information and showing these copyrighted pictures. (I think linking to the artists' portfolio pages here is fair use, but displaying them on a website of my own would incur license payments.) Maintaining such a website can be a painful experience - my German language Glorantha site was hacked, the data lost. That's not what happened. Rather the reverse - my response was closer to "don't go haring off following real world stuff labeled Bronze Age which is at best tangentially relevant if you want to learn about these cultures." I am willing to give hints and explanations, and to expand at as much length as my time allows and the person asking is willing to tolerate. I've been called out to keep it short and not to frighten people away with information overload, so I give hints where to look at the IMO best sources.