Joerg

File.

I agree about rats, but there might be giant roaches as livestock.

Neither are the Greek poleis or their triremes that dominate the naval warfare of the Mirrorsea Bay. Finding any genuine Bronze Age culture or technology in Glorantha will be about as hard as finding evidence for potatoes. We have quite good genetic and isotope evidence from the Lech Valley about the patrilocal local farming nobility and the impressive migrations of their wives. While that does not give us the leadership hierarchy in greater settlements, greater settlements emerged only rather late in this region, or the Carpathian basin. Quite an Orlanthi situation. The written sources deal with Germanic Iron Age, with possibly the most appropriate report the description of the Nerthus cult on the Cimbrian peninsula. Greece (and Ionian Anatolia) with its endless coast line and heavy naval element to their cities is about the worst model you can have for Sartar. This goes for the Mycenaean citadels, too. Greek parallels are about some of the advanced equipment, although that paralel is stronger for Pelanda (nowadays Carmania). The Silk Road settlements might be the best analogy for the Sartarite cities in terms of economy. While not at all Bronze Age, the mercantile cities of the Hanseatic League on the German rivers - many of these newly founded - have a similar economical raison d`être. They lack the City Rex office, though.

Rot is a form of living Darkness, which may be desirable to detect with Darksense (which is not sonar, but uses ambient Darkness to interact with its targets). Thus the visible squalor might be something like glitter to Darksense. Using trollkin to keep things clean can be difficult - training them to be picky eaters or chewers to eat only a specific component of the available food, which makes them very hard to train as a laundry service. Trollkin able to be this discerning and obedient are quite highly qualified specimen who could be used for other purposes. Food class trollkin can be used for waste removal, but that can be used to remove rubble from digging or similar (as long as you can get them potty-trained to defecate outside).

Would a pinned thread here serve?

Doesn't look quite genuine. Even though I never saw the original,

Lunar ties start when Hendira is left without the Godking after the 1616 disaster. Previously she had little inclination to seek Fazzur's favors.

Spicy delicious food. Spicy for mistress race trolls might be hard to adjust.

Red Cow village has one. Blue-skinned folk, fisherfolk,

This does of course stand their topographical correlation on the head, with the lowland empire paralleled by the high Andes range territory, and the hill barbarians placed in the riverine bowl. The (yet mostly unknown) Amazon basin agricultural culture(s) whose remains have been located using LIDAR fairly recently might be a parallel for a near future Glorantha where the Aldryami reforestation succeeded. The urban Moche culture was coastal rather than riverine, but their (non-square) mudbrick pyramids might reflect some aspects of Dara Happa quite well, too. The general problem with using New World high cultures (and their millennia of agricultural cultivation of food plants, a cultural achievement easily overlooked by archaeologists concentrating on physical artifacts) is the absence of animal muscle in their power generation. The use of oxen to pull heavy loads, mules and horses to carry stuff, or even just pastoralism to keep sources of protein from otherwise inedible plant growth around rather than relying on annual migration cycles does make a difference in infrastructure.

If you are a high quality enlo, you might succeed at undergoing the Ritual of Rebirth and become a fully acknowledged Dark Troll. There is a rumor that the ritual really just is a painful way to turn uppity hangers-on into well-marinated food.

There are bloodlines of Helering descent with a good number of Heler-initiated helering-gendered people. Weirdly enough, the Pelaskite fisherfolk around the Choralinthor Bay don't appear to have any dominant Helering descent.

IIRC there was a SF edition of Jennell Jacquays's Central Casting tables to spice up the past of the characters that might be mined for a RQG-like lifepath. You would of course have to include notable recent setting history into your paths to arrive at a similar level of setting immersion.

Deities may be incarnated in humans without too much of a breach of compromise. Such an incarnation will clearly be hero material, and may either apotheosize on their own, or reunite with the deity upon death.

Sorcery is extremely flexible as you can research any spell you want. The problem with sorcery is that you have to research every spell before getting sufficiently proficient in it to cast it - a process that may take decades. If you happen to be taught just such a spell, it might take a sorcerer only a few seasons to get a reasonable chance to cast the spell. So: Most flexible, yes. Flexible in a time frame useful for adventuring: usually not.

Basically, Tapping is application of irreversible deterioration for a temporary gain. Irreversible deterioration is very hard to discern from chaotic corruption.

I would expect rather 95% of all grimoires to have subtle errors. Known errors to those in the know, but making the spells useless or hideously overpriced if cast as written. (Which might be a good summary about the spells in the core rules...)

A 95% skill has the minimum 1% chance of a fumble at a roll (1)00. More crits are nice to have, but how does a crit in read/write manifest when inscribing a spell collection? And if you really need those crits, that's where Mental Acuity and other supporting magics may come in.

Beetle carapaces have been used by Kogag and (Varan)Orlanth.

100% - unless you want to chance mistakes. 95% is the best chance at success you are going to get regardless of your skill.

And new interior artwork if I understand the thread above correctly. Possibly with captions leading to new text. Whether you consider art as content is up to you, but given Chaosium's recent track record you probably should.

Actually no. Hundreds of lay worshipers of the Invisible God volunteering POW to one enchanter.

One possible reason why the dual purpose in-game-aid and XP may have been removed is that this rewards the players who spend less XP on the narrative rather than the ones who spend their XP on the narrative but then having no reward left.

Nysalor is rather clearly Rashoran reborn. Rashoran was killed by the Unholy Trio, but that doesn't prevent him from coming (or being brought) back as Gbaji. Yellmalio's encounter with Teller of Lies might have been with Rashoran or with Gbaji, or (as likely) with both. Unlike his procreator, Yelmalio is not known to have been illuminated. We don't know whether Gbaji had an in-world presence between the Dawn and the Sunstop. He might have experienced another rebirth. Or he might have led the Second Council to the Pseudocosmic Egg to facilitate his insertion between the new deity and its Shadow.

Many of these original inhabitants were deities, genii locorum, or their mortal offspring. Personally, I think that the claim that the dronar population of Brithela is descended from Malkion the way the three minority castes are is a bit weak. Revealed Mythologies p.25 has a summary of Greg's early world building for the Gloranthan west. It clearly marks the Vadeli (of the three colors brown, red and blue) as the indigenous humans of Brithela, and claims that the Malkioni are the result of Malkion (aka Engr) mating with a series of (local divinity) wives. I am spouting a lot of "In My Glorantha" nonsense below, which does make a certain sense to me. Read at your own risk. These people descended from Malkion would have become the Logicians, the people of the Kingdom of Logic.. IMO the majority of the indigenes of Brithela other than the Vadeli were the Dromali, dark-skinned children of Kala, given "Founders" by Malkion. They were the people of the soil, farmers, but also builders - a human culture of early agriculturalists and earth (ancestor) worshipers. King Drona, accompanied by Bakan the boar, and aided by Eurmal Friend of Men (and later Eurmal's son Yomat) left Brithela as the Logicians took the reign and spread his form of agriculture into the Hykimi lands of Fronela and Ralios (long before the Nidan range of mountains was raised). Drona may have been a son of Malkion and Kala, if not first-born then highest-born of the Dronari, and thus a king of the farmers when left alone by his half-brothers (Talar, Zzabur, Horal) born to Tilnta. The majority of the Logicians claim descent from Tilnta, the favored wife of Malkion who gave him many sets of male and female twin children, each pair becoming a married couple founding a dynasty. (This seems to be a typical start of a royal dynasty born of human and goddess - other such couples include Ylream and his sister Nebrola whose child became the second Serpent King of Fronela, or the twin children of Arim the Pauper and Sorana Tor founding the Twins dynasty of Tarsh. The founders of the Caladra&Aurelion cult used the same precedence.) They became the core of the Logician culture while being a small minority in terms of population compared to the vast majority of Dronar caste farmers and workers. The mothers of the six tribal founders of Danmalastan are left unclear, except in the case of Waertag, whose mother was a kinswoman of Warera, a Triolina tied to the Wartain tribe from which the Ludoch seem to have descended (even though nowadays the Neliomi waters don't have any Ludoch any more, but instead have a few types of Ouori). The story of Viymorn (who became the ancestor of the Vadeli royalty) is described separately from that of the other Founders, in the Stafford Library book Middle Sea Empire, also telling a history of Godtime Jrustela. In his case, we know that he founded three groups of descendants - demigod births (including Vadel) called The Seekers, Made Humans (the clay etc. method) to populate his lands, (all names not mentioned in any other text I have ever seen). and allegorical third set of cardinal directions (Middle Sea Empire p.6, which would make Vimorn himself South.) But TLDR: IMO there were a couple of chthonic peoples (claiming descent from local land goddesses like Vadela or Kala) in the West when the six tribes of nobility fathered by Malkion developed their philosophical/Logician specialities while upheld by the labor provided by the Chthonic class of Dronars, and apparently against the will of the children of Vadela except for Vimorn whose son Vadel became the founder of the Vadeli with his explpratory journeys outside of Danmalastan. Yes, but not necessarily in the same way as the Vadeli and Kachasti who happened to inhabit the inner border regions to the northern and southern triangles/continent. Basically, we have the northern expansion of the Kachasti that is known by the euphemism "Speaking Tour". They enter the same Hykimi lands previously colonized by King Frona, and might have gone there with the intention to make these escapees from the Logician oversight return to their fold. For a while, they succeeded, seeding the lands of Fronela, Ralios, and possibly Maniria with their Speakers among the Hykimi, and possibly bringing in Kadeniti city planners to provide the Hykimi with ancestral temple cities in the style of Göbekli Tepe. Their presence may have been similar to that of the Trader Princes in post-God Learner Maniria unt.il they got involved in the Vadeli War. The Kadeniti were the tribe of architects and civic engineers. They created the Perfect City, and then spread out to other Logician lands (and the Kachasti lands) to seed the perfect Logician cities enabling social order and maximized channeling of magical power to the sorcerers (or to the temples to the ancestral entities). So Kadeniti do expand, but only as enablers of the other tribes, not bringing their own domination but providing their infrastructure. And Tadeniti record-keeping pervades all the Logician activities, too, in a similar way. The Enrovalini - Zzabur's folk who own the island of Brithos - are the ones who don't do much of anything (but cogitating), which might be the most Logician activity, but also the least active behavior. Do they spread out? Well, there is Arolanit, the Rational land, and there is Sog City, both on the far side of the Neliomi Sea. Do they do anything there? Not really. Do they spread to God Forgot? No idea. IMO the technology was one of the causes of the differences between Vadel and Zzabur becoming a war. Zzabur does similar bad things to the couple Horal and Menena, but gets thwarted there. The emigration of King Drona may fall into this, too. The Vadeli were vilified and demonized by Zzabur (while providing him with his stationery of living hide), and at some point they embraced that identification, and embraced it for the power it gave them, a power that allowed them to overthrow the Logicians by subverting its virtues. I cannot say anything about the immortality of any Danmalastan natives other than the Enrovalini descendants on Brithos and their Tilnta-born nobility born outside of those tribes. The Brithini immortality derives to a large extent from expelling Malkion as he is on the brink of accepting Mortality in the Fifth Action. That Fifth Aciton might be a thing that might have gone painless and hopeful except that it was sabotaged, not just by Zzabur but possibly by the Vadeli and other forces as well, the latter potentially including the Westfaring Lightbringers. Demonizing and then sabotaging foes is a cheap trick played by Zzabur again and again. There are a few times when it misfires, but otherwise it has served him very well. Vadel was on to Zzabur's duplicity - he was an accomplice in tricking the Mostali out of the Energy Matrix artifact which the Logicians mass-produced in the lesser (bronze) edition from the original (iron) device. Expecting the same from Zzabur, Vadel offered the Mostali to catch Zzabur with his own tricks (while profiteering again), and the Mostali agreed to go after the bigger target, keeping Vadel and his folk as useful if unreliable accomplices. When Zzabur declared some of the actions of Vadel as anathema - including the expeditions to Bamatela which he himself had sponsored - and (as far as I understand the story) flensed Vadel and his brown and red co-noble of the Vadeli for his books, there was little to top the insult against the Vadeli. The Vadeli then went all out to prove the absurdity of Zzabur's interpretation of Malkion's rules by obeying them in the most contrary manner and still benefitting from the caste benefits. The Logicians were a bunch of supremacists. Possibly the worst kind, incorporating all the vile -isms and claiming something along the lines of manifest destination. The Malkioni mortals of the west are those who followed Malkion out of that supremacist trap into milder forms, dissidents against Zzabur, making his magic-gathering engine/society less effective, which led to the successive excision of all dissidents and polluted if doctrinally sound individuals (pushing the latter to Arolanit, it seems). Malkioni societies can be pretty awful towards non-Malkioni, and possibly worse to dissident Malkioni. There are three power groups inside the Malkioni who grab the power - the sorcerers following Zzabur's books of supremacy, the talars with their inherited ability to order the zzabur caste about despite being their servants, and the military with the men-of-all movement by Hrestol undoing all the great taming success the sorcerers had over the soldier caste, making them obedient followers of talars and zzaburi, only to be replaced by the super-caste of the men-of-all who inherited the military power and some sorcerous insight while recruiting a majority of the ruling talars to their way of doing things To some extent I agree with Rokar's criticism of the men-of-all involvement in the ruling of the realm, but the pyramid scheme putting the sorcerers back as the main recipients of society's benefits that is Rokarism strikes me as a pernicious fallacy repeating the God Learner mistakes rather than counteracting them as professed. Sorry about the rambling and referencing of (essentially) unpublished old Western material. This is what has shaped my impression and my deductions.