Joerg

Not sure whether this is munchkinnery, but rather than getting weird geasa for extraordinary skills, I would prefer my "impossible" stat raises through heroquesting without such strings attached. Sure, you will gain some new enmity from someone supposed to be recurring, but that means more heroquesting opportunities.

There is Ernalda's participation in the Lightbringer's Quest, too. Her going to sleep (or deepest meditation) and emanating Ginna Jar to join the questers may have been a transformation beyond just taking on the role of the owner of the Earth Rune.

Claiming responsibility for everything that went wrong in the Second Age is a Eurmali scam. Obviously?

The point in laying eggs is that queens can produce a great number of offspring. Live births are limited to her body size minus vital organs and weaponry. I see scorpion men as usin r-strategy for procreation - lots of minions, as many quality offspring as possible.

Asrelia and her sister were maidens once, too, and would have been mothers when Ernalda, Maran and Esrola were born to Asrelia. TKT's underworld spawn might stem from the same Age. In the Underworld, some other forms of procreation are possible, too - creatures have been spawned when two parent entities rent one another (partially) to pieces. As for the father, I wonder whether this might have been Vivamort/Nontraya before his deal with the Devil.

Hmm. Verithurusa is supposed to be the descending red moon, the phase between the innocent white and the returned from the dead Lesilla. That's different from the innocent white one before. Jernedeus remains the overseer of Mernita after the Flood, with Lesilla as its nurturer. While it isn't unknown for a deity to participate in certain events in several incarnations, this is the first time that I see a suggestion that the two incarnations got into wedlock. IMO a likelier scenario is that she followed Yelm into the Underworld after the rebellion was successful, and became (or was reborn) blue in that process. In Prince of Sartar, she is shown as red-skinned rebel alongside Tolat (aka Shargash with the Red Sword), Artia (or whatever the Rinliddi death goddess was called) and blue-skinned Orlanth. To me this indicates that Verithurusa became Red upon contact (possibly repeated contact) with Umath, both in the Sky and shortly in the Underworld. For her to participate in the Rebellion that ended the Golden Age, she must have returned from the Underworld after her Umath encounter.

If Shield is that essential for your enjoyment of the character, join a second cult just for that spell. It has the nice side effect that your rune point pool for shield is independent from the rest of your rune points, so you can have a Shield up to your CHA.

Riddlers have misleadingly been labeled as Tricksters, too. Many mystical practices may appear as nonsensical as the drunk antics of your village drunkard trickster.

In that case, a sorcerer (or other character) who regular gets targeted by Disrupts or spirits doesn't really need any offensive magic... And to address the "less than 95% chance" - that applies to Spirit Block in Spirit Combat and similar protective measures.

But why not use these social traits of housecats and place them with an eight-legged, four-eyed species (may very well still be furry and have an endoskeleton)?

Part of the pro-blame is that plenty of the Glorantha threads where geekery is allowed have migrated over to the RuneQuest part of the forum. You don't always recognize whether you are in a full frontal geekery department or in a newby question. (And if somebody asks for a scholarly entry, I think a scholarly answer with the tldr on top is in order.)

That Berserker should have a high POW to resist its companions' attempts to cast Enhance INT on it, then...

The tactic was to use MP from storage while the opposition would spend personal ones - preferrably protected by Countermagic or similar. But my question is: does successfully resisting an enemy's attempt to cast a Befuddle, Disrupt or Sever Spirit earn you a POW check, or does only the active spell caster get a check in case of success?

"Receiving POW" sounds to me like RQ2 speech for "receiving renewable Magic Points in a chain of veneration" which is what happens to hero cults and spirit cults. Whether there is an absolute need for sacrificing a permanent point of POW to establish a link to the cult is another question. If you want to access the heroic feat or rune spell, probably yes, as an initial ante, but otherwise a support group of lay members appears to be sufficient to give the hero or spirit enough to work special stuff with.

A market is often found at a high holy day festival ground, see Biturian's visit to the Paps. There will be a shrine to Issaries, too, so these cost have already been taken care of by the cult or clan conducting the festival. The actual trading needs to be paid, yes. More likely because the GM tends to think "if they still have rune points after the adventure, I was way too soft!" If rune points are renewed seasonally, then there is a greater likelihood that everybody who has any spends a good deal of them under the season. True - I said so myself when I made the argument for making those rune points non-regenerable. The recipient of the spell may choose to cast one of his own spells instead. I still think that blocking those rune points is fair - the deity did not grant Path Watch to that Zorak Zorani, after all. While I wouldn't block the person who provided the spell to use some of their other rune points for the same spell, since in earlier incarnations of RQ you could sacrifice for multiple uses of that spell and Spell Trading only gave away one of those uses, I'd still maintain that the non-reusable nature of the spell for some other cultist will affect the donor.

I actually prefer the Anglo-Saxonism/Icelandic form godi to acolyte. Easier to spell and to pronounce, too. You can min-max and ruleplay to get through this, but with me as a GM, there would be an object lesson lurking somewhere. If all of them are drained of both MP (given to the rites) and rune points, a target-rich environment with moderate difficulty,

Or for a more light-hearted take on what personhood means if you are a genetically engineered wolf, read the Freefall webcomic.

Yes, it is quite possible that receiving worship develops your "spiritual organ" into creating that second manifestation that the minor gods and worshiped heroes have, according to Arcane Lore. The divine portion of your self (in case of theist heroes).

No more obscure (to its contemporaries) than pre-Garangordite Thinokos or Maslo, and much less obscure than Kimos. It is true that we have a lot less information on the Thinobutan culture of Loral. No known ruins or major cities in the Second Age. In other words: no chance to contradict any canon.

Double post. So, in order not to waste the opportunity: Why should a clan want their former kin to fail? Will it be complete bloodlines that leave, or will there be a mix of bloodlines going away ("younger sons" syndrome)? Many of the leavers will still have siblings in the clan they left. Now it is true that you cannot choose your family, and joining the leavers might be a less drastic way to leave your immediate family than joining Humakt or Eurmal. But it is normal to have sisters in other clans, and occasionally brothers, too, when a marriage goes uxorilocal. The result of a clan split just adds a new, momentarily migratory clan to this.

Sorry, but I don't subscribe to this reading of the Spell Trading results. To me, it sounds like you remove a number of your rune points from your pool of flexible rune points until your trading partner cast that spell he traded for with you. Likewise for your trading partner. Trading for a common spell makes only sense for members of spirit cults who don't get these. And yes, Spell Trading is a potentially very long commitment, especially with the rune point pool runes that allow the person who traded for the magic to do something else. I suppose the rune points traded away do return when the trading partner dies, even if the magic remains unused, but the mechanism you propose let's you load up with the equivalent of divine scrolls for just the cost of the Spell Trading spell. On another tangent, blowing off all of your rune points before a holy day is an invitation for outside interference with those rites, as e.g. in the Paps episode of Biturian's travels.

There is definitely a way for people to get worshipped. Hofstaring Treeleaper was a worshiped hero while he was alive, granting his worshipers a share in his signature feat. The exact mechanism of this haven't been detailed in a RuneQuest context yet. Arcane Lore shows at least some of the ideas that Greg considered to define such dependences. History of the Heortling Peoples hints at how this may have been institutionalized in Orlanthland early in the Second Age, with Hardros Hardslaughter receiving the status of Great Living Hero rather than king. By the time of the Machine Wars, we have several such worshiped heroes, most prominently Renvald Meldekbane (among the traditionalist Orlanthi of the Kingdom of Night) and Varankol the Mangler, the first of the Tusk Riders, for the EWF. EWF individuals like Isgangdrang and Lorenkargatan and possibly even Ingolf profited from such worship. This probably is an expression of Greg's wargamer side that occasionally shines through in the Glorantha material. The population numbers on his maps that made it into his world descriptions and finally the Guide are another expression of this. For all his mastery of narrative gaming, Greg liked his simulations.

I guess the starting year depends a bit on how many sessions per year you are planning. Have you decided on a culture and a setting? You could start a bit earlier than the Mongoose timeline. Ralios just before the fall of the Autarchy could be interesting, You might even play as the heroic Loper People army that could not prevent the fall of Paslac's last bastion and which is now fighting its way to the south. In southern Heortland, the arrival of the Zistorites at Kostern Island even before the city is started might be interesting. On the other hand, you could plunge right into the Machine Wars and play in that ten year campaign. Heortling History provides almost as many new Unity leaders as the Sartar Rising campaign provided warbands in league with Kallyr. I would avoid the skeletal creatures described in Mongoose's Clanking City book, though, and go for four meter high smaller versions of Zistor as combat vehicles.

Lismelder's split from her father and her brother most likely split the royal clan, too, and I would expect that you can map quite a few of the Lismelder clans to original clans of the Malani. The Colymar Book speaks more of fusions of destroyed clans with volunteers from the five original clans of the Colymar, like e.g, the Karandoli after their first destruction (when they suddenly have leaders with direct descent from the first five clans, especially Ortossi, King when Sartar made his offer). Both triaties that got absorbed by the Colymar did so after losing a clan which then was re-formed with folk from the original five clans volunteering. I don't think there is any further need for a mythic precedence for a splinter group to march away than the initial stage of the Downland Migration. So let's talk about the magic. A wyter of a divided people will be a weak wyter. Let's talk about what to allow the leavers (Clanxiteers?) to take along, and whether they get a deal or just break off, and who gets to go. The new group will carry some of the regalia of the old clan, in King of Dragon Pass terms a few of the treasures. A couple of the former prominent leaders in the clan will be gone. Where can they go? Post-Windstop Sartar will have some vacancies, as there will be communities that did not make it through that cataclysm (or whose magical escape was so complete that they haven't returned yet). The conditions for a new start aren't bad inside of Sartar. Setting up in a rather recently abandoned agricultural region may meet some protests of neighboring clans - fallow fields usually make rich pastures. It will be rather unlikely for those clans to have expanded their agriculture there, however, unless they themselves were close to a split. In older times, a three-way split would have created a triaty. While it is somewhat weird for former cousins to be promoted to your mandatory marriage pool, such a solution would simply promote the old clan wyter to that of the triaty. Initial small clan size is mitigated by having the rest of your former clan nearby. There is a good chance that the former clan seat becomes a partially shared main village for the triaty. (This is a quandary for pioneer clans, like Colymar's original group, or the Renekoti of Riskland - if yours is the only (Heortling) clan to have entered the new place, you have an acute lack of marriage partners. It helped that Colymar collected his new clan from both Hendriki and Esrolian groups, allowing for a measure of intra-clan cohabitation in the initial years, but that split into several clans must have been more or less pre-programmed.) With the exodus/extermination of the Lunar presence in Pavis, there is empty space there, too, and land to be reclaimed from Lunar confiscation. The leavers could move into a city. First choice might be their own city confederation. An urban clan or guild can be considerably smaller than a rural clan that has to be both a military force and a productive primary producer. The 25k Sartarites in Nochet are likely to be the result of such clan splits. A newly urban clan had better have a plan and some specialization to survive in that new environment. Some business or service they are uniquely or at least highly qualified to provide. They'll need a sponsor inside the city to set them up with premises - if they left on friendly terms, that could well be their former clan or tribe. If they move into a more distant urban area, they can be trading agents for their former clan or tribe.

The westernmost of the Arcos horse lords I know about are Hestus and Hurfor, in eastern Pelanda. They don't appear to have penetrated into the bull belt between Loskalm and the Esel River valley south of lake Oronin (Bisosae), and I have no idea which name their sun horse would have had. To my knowlede the Char-un in Erigia are the farthest west any Arcos-dwelling horse folk ever came, apart from the Grazer leaper king who reached Mount Nida and similar heroic undertakings.