Joerg

I would think that it works on anyone in Prax or Genert's Wastes, or wherever else Praxians and their herd beasts continue Waha's Covenant. No idea about the Hungry Plateau Sable riders. The Bison folk of Kostaddi, Sylila and other places in Peloria clearly have abandoned the Covenant and don't have herd beasts they can awaken any more. As a consequence, they shouldn't be able to do the reverse magic either. The Pol Joni do follow Waha's covenant, but I have no idea whether they can awaken their cattle. As they don't ride their cattle, there is a lot less of a point doing so than for the Beast Riders. They should be unable to awaken their horses, just like the Grazers or the Pentans. That doesn't preclude them from having allied spirits in their mounts, though (but then that's an option for Praxian Beast Riders, too, although probably only for renegade ones as the herd mothers might object to destroying the personhood of that beast).

Both Behemoth and Kraken are there as the heroes of their pantheon - demigod beings, like the Emperor of the Solar faction, Cragspider (an anachronism, or a post-factum heroquest insert/replacement?), or the Storm Champion. The Kraken appears in the 1616 naval battle between Harrek's Wolf Pirates and Belintar's navy, at least in the Prince of Sartar version, responding to a priestly summons. (It can also be summoned from the moat of a hunting palais in Brandenburg in the Prignitz region...) The Malkioni control elementals of all the other elements, without any of the special flavors of those elements. I haven't seen them described as Spectres, yet, but then my shipment hasn't even been avised yet.

I look towards eastern Central Genertela, too. Possibly some of the Praxians or the Votanki, or sedentary folk in the Arcos basin. Maslo is Polynesian or Austronesian phenotype where it isn't one of the African ones. Laskal is strictly Agimori, almost no Veldang admixture, hardly different from Jolar or the mountains in between. Stepped pyramids might be the most basic monumental building style. You start with a temple on a terrace, then there are two terraces, then there is a stack of terraces. "Wareran" includes a veritable rainbow of color schemes, plus any imaginable shade of brown. A Brithini Dronar may be as dark as a Pithdaran Agimori, but facial features would still favor narrower noses, and probably longer ones, too. I wonder about the noses and ears of the Brithini. In normal terrestrial humans, these continue growing throughout their lifetime. Ancient Brithini might live a slower life, but extreme ear and nose lengths might be typical for the ancient ones. Zzabur himself might have to use straws for drinking... The humans of Slon - both dino Hsunchen and dwarf slaves - are of unknown racial type. The Mostali slave population might have been inherited from the Vadeli slaver empire, and be a melange of Artmali, Agimori and Warerans with some Thinobutans tossed in. It isn't known whether or how much the Mostali intervene in the breeding of their humans. Their handlers probably include both Gold and Tin dwarves. Maybe Quicksilver too, if unrepairable ones, excess growth or casualties are recycled for food.

Sure, all-encompassing. And that's where I think that we part company, as Lunar magic as understood through the introduction of the concept of glamours etc. is an imitation of normal (Gloranthan) reality magic tied to the reality of the Red Moon, which is different, and which is either emanating from the body in the sky or an extension of its presence around the Crater through the highly disruptive magic that creates the Glowline. The "spirit magic" enhanced by the RQ3 Lunar magic techniques is probably best understood as Lunar spirits manipulated with Lunar energies. But then, manipulating magic from an alternate reality appears to be what mysticism offers to both orthodox and "failed" practitioners, and which applies to Darudism as well. Each of the past Three Ages had such alternate realities - the Glowline, the Dragon Dream (with a less fixed boundary), and Gbaji between the perceptions of Arkat and Nysalor. The EWF had a huge amount of stray magic from the "chain of reveration" method (taken from Malkioni sorcery?) that powered the accelerated ("failed") mystic development of leaders like Isgangdrang, Lord Burin and probably Lorenkargartan. The Dara Happan Dragon Emperor may have been a more Darudic example, and Ingolf was one of the more powerful students of the unchanged branch of draconism that produced Obduran (the only worshipper of Orlanth who became a full dragon, but quite likely not the only student of his school of draconism who reached a draconic existence before the 1042 utuma). Oh, Immanent Mastery is false or failed Mysticism, and whatever the non-Ingolf draconic leaders of the Third Council did, was Mysticism straying from the path to the Ultimate, too. Much like Sheng. Darudism appears to be the draconic understanding of the Sun Emperor, including the necessity of cycles that Yelm Murharzarm was blind to. The Kabalt practice uses austerities and is a Mashunasic, non-Venfornic practice which branches off from the pure refutation meditations of their master. Nenduren's Stillness and derived schools practiced a form of refutation, too. And Larn Hasamador, oh, nothing. I think that access to the Liberating Bolt requires a minimal "grade" in refutation, and that that goes for a great number of the other martial artists involved in the Demigod Cycle. True. Still, the disciples of the Bolt carry their insight won through refutation and push it onto those who seek to disturb the world into complete distraction. Venfornication might be the most fun way for mysticism, but Venforn and even Sivoli and Kamboli are part of the Gods Cycle, not the Demigods Cycle. Vith and Venforn are the two successful students of Oorduren. Mashunasan still isn't there yet, and might never be. Nenduren's guidance failed when the Face of Atrilith was twisted into the mask of Chaos, although there is a possibility that Nenduren found a way into an emergency ascendance in that process. Annihiliation under your own power in face of great mishap still is a mystic victory. I don't think that these realities are transient - their intersection with the reality of Time might be, though.

Gyffur made his debut in the Hero Wars product line, starting with an illustration with a paragraph of description below on p.133 of Thunder Rebels, and an A4 page dropping a few names for the Hidden Gale band and its structure on p.38 of Sartar Rising vol.2: Orlanth is Dead, repeating the text from Thunder Rebels. Picking up those Sartar Rising pdfs from Chaosium's Vault for less than 5$ is definitely worth the money: https://www.chaosium.com/heroquest-and-glorantha-vault/

Dave, I think you are short-selling Venfornic techniques if you limit them to martial arts. I think that Venfornic practices are ones of integration of e.g. spirits into one's self. So no, it isn't about having the Ironhand spell, it is about gaining the Ironhand ability, and exploring that through meditative techniques like shattering boulders or mountains. And the same for other such abilities. As far as I have understood this, the goal of Venfornic mysticism is integration of the All and thereby reaching the Ultimate. Sivolic and Kambolic practices appear to be a rather thinned down version of that. It is possible that this path was only possible "early on" in Creation, and that the sheer amount of Creation since has made achieving the end of it nigh impossible. Or that the destruction of the world in the Gods War has made finishing this path impossible. The early approach outlined for the Hero Wars narrative basically suggested a two-pronged approach using a pair of characters. One has a meditating hermit learning to refute basically everything, including any kind of magic in the employ of mortals, spirits, gods and essences, over a long time. The other was your cool sfx martial artist using a piece of equipment at hand (say a meat cleaver and a beaten pot) and making an elaborate combat skill out of that by cementing individual feats with it. Fairly easily done with HQ rules of any generation, but probably subject to a Ki skill like mechanism under RQ, preferably with a lower entry enty skill than 95% (although RQG has made that within range of a starting character). To be fair, this would result in unmodified success chances for such effects similar to those of non-core sorcery spells under RQ3. Feat effects ought to be cheesy, but needn't be that big. For Big Cheesy, I still demand a number of people pooling their power through a leader in a kind of mindlink. Gemmel's Drenai novels feature the Temple of the Thirty, a mystical order that felt quite Gloranthan in their constituting a wyter from melding their discorporate selves into an entity called Temple. Theirs being a suicide pact with one "defector" seeding the next temple isn't quite in keeping with how I see the Sartar Magical Union or the Lunar College of Magic, but otherwise it fits. And it might fit for an Eastern or draconic model of mysticism where oblivion is a welcome goal, possibly called ascendance. On an individual level, something in between rune points and the RQ6 model of transforming magic points into something like rune points, though through meditation rather than worship, might feel right. The original concept had some concept like "strike" and "counter" for the magical martial arts. Possibly powered by "will" or "intent". "Illumination" or enlightenment appears like something that can be seeded or awakened, but needn't be a permanent magical benefit until re-affirmed by some ritual repetition, be it of self-mutilation (starting with meditation under a waterfall, aka ice bucket challenge) in order to collect power, perfecting a related or unrelated skill (the Land of Ninja Ki rules) such as a kata or calligraphy as a focal skill, or similar. The Refutation of the meditating hermit was to be constantly tested by temptations. The weird and not quite useful rules on occlusion in one of the Lunar HQ1 books appear to have been a not so well communicated attempt at that. The RQ3 "Lunar Magic" with its linear expansion of spirit magic was neither big nor cheesy, compared to the similar logarithmic expansion of basic sorcery. It was better than normal spirit magic mostly for its systematic variability, but no more so than a shaman with a fetch and some crystals/matrices full of spirits to do his bidding. I ported this system to my non-Gloranthan RQ3 setting, tying it to a twilight-worshipping druidic caste, and found it a lot less over the edge than a full fledged adept's sorcery. In case of Darja Danad, it appears to be a cult which may teach a special strike skill that has no significant difference from a normal attack unless you a) achieve enlightenment and b) become able to share it with your opponent. And with the small but significant risk that your flash-enlightened opponent does "get it" and use it upon you, as happened to Nenduren with his final pupil. I don't see the martial artists of the demigod cycle as weaponless masters. Rather the opposite - martial arts should include the use of implements other than your bare hands. Even forms like Aikido have spear elements. Kicking, grappling and boxing are nice, and might offer you some technical armor when parrying, but that's just kicking, grappling and boxing when the day ends. Weapon feats or non-permanent "gifts" as the result of martial arts paired with some magical effect seem to be in order. Possibly up to the "distance strike" melee feat known from wuxia or manga. I do miss the draconic branch of mysticism in this discussion. Granted, the EWF required the Dragon Dream, which may or may not have been tied to the Grand Dragon project, and definitely was tied to the pyramid scheme of the Third Council leaders allowing them to achieve dragon shape and more. I wonder why nobody talks about the Immanent Mastery method of providing Hsunchen- and dragonewt-like effects for the disciples of this short-cut mystical nostrum, or the full draconic magic available to the disciples of Godunya (aka exarchs). The main power gained from austerities is the power of refutation, at least under the original model presented by Greg for Hero Wars (without any concrete rules attached). The path of Ingolf appears to be an accumulation of gifts (in his case draconic transformations), and the austerity lay in abstaining from using these gifts in an entangling way. Refutation basically comes across as treating the permanent mundane reality as transient reality. I don't think that either the Glowline or the Bright Empire's area of effect or the draconic dream are exactly a transient reality. They are an alternate reality that the enlightened user may draw upon for their gifts or magic. Some of that may be linked to facing entropic situations, whether as purification or as trial of fortitude which might be understood as austerities, and undergoing more mundane austerities might be some schools' approach to these later, meaningful (i.e. rewarded) tests. Enlightenment should be the switch to turn access to these powers on. And that switch needn't be permanently on once you have experienced your first glimpse of enlightenment. There is some potential to treat enlightened activity like "getting into the zone", a state of experience beyond the normal limitations of body and will. Possibly like the RQ3 knowledge skill "Martial Arts" that was queried together with the weaponless combat skill roll (typically significantly lower, not providing experience ticks).

I thought I'd mainly use existing stuff and keep it in the background except when I feel there is a call to bring it on. Let me put it this way: You are having a clan festival, and there are in-laws and other folk present and participating. Don't you think that clan members' donations of MP or whichever equivalent a MP-less system assumes are way easier to process than those of foreigners without that special bond to the wyter? Sure. Tampering with Theyalan theism only comes to the front when you are dealing with people who are not initiated to at least one cult, as the assumption used to be that those people are rare one in seven cases, and "all men initiate to Orlanth, all women initiate to Ernalda" for an Orlanthi All. The Lunar provincial Seven Mothers cult appears to be made to fit into Theyalan theism, too. And we know that it is rather rare in the Heartlands. I am not quite certain what magic the Grey Age people who would join the Unity Council had. Heort himself was a shaman, not a theist, but he managed to die before the Dawn facing Orlanth's Liberating Bolt, which does seem to indicate that despite not yet having returned from the Underworld, the gods' magic was already seeping back into the Surface World (created within Arachne Solara's web). The deities holding those strands and having agreed to the Compromise seems to have started the potential for Theyalan theism as discovered by Hantrafal (and quite likely others, too). The energy flows of the Gloranthan universe appears to be a bit complicated. There is the Ultimate, source of all energies, which express themselves through the runes and the deities embodying them, to create and animate the Cosmos of Time. There is the Middle World, inhabited by mortals who create such energies within themselves, unbound by those runes and rules, and they donate it to the deities or runes, in order to manifest that rune in a way outside of what went on before, and that's magic. Spent energy goes down into the Underworld, to be absorbed by the Void, empowering the Chaosium to lay on new Creation. It used to be different, with the deities and runes direct sources of Creation, with less rules applying, but that was the cause of the Gods War, and that culling and then defense against oblivion was what led to Time and gods and other primal forces unable to manifest on their own. I just wonder about the implications when divine magic isn't something I am, but something we are.

I am a bit astonished to read that Belintar paid for the repair/expansion of the Whitewall fortifications (done by Sartarite masons). Was this something of a peace offering to the Volsaxi? Or did he feel the need to balance the influence of High King Tarkalor? And I really really really hate the "cursed river" drivel about the Syphon, the first of the Chaos-fighting rivers which never ever turned away from his duty - not during the Flood Age, not in the subsequent dry period, not when the Spike imploded. People fighting the Chaos from the Foulblood Forest ought to fortify themselves with its waters.

Another type of ancestors. The early Seshnegi kings included a lot of conquered Pendali into their kingdom, and later on conquered Enerali joined the party. Probably some Serpent Beast Society groups, too. Not all ancestors need you to be their direct descendant, after all.

Apparently even the non-henotheist Rokari follow this model now. They possibly can do so claiming descent from a number of local deities, masking it as ancestor worship. What the peasant population of Loskalm does when they are not studying to become Men of All I don't know. Siglat made war on a number of non-Malkioni ethnicities trapped inside his bit of Fronela, like the musk-ox folk in the north, and Orlanthi near Oranor. It isn't clear how prevalent Irensavalism is among peasants and outside of Loskalm. Jonatela apparently reserves Malkioni practices to the non-peasants. It has monastic wizards of a Makanist tradition, extracted from Seshnela by Jonat Big Bear. Bear Orlanthi practices go hand in hand with that. The Carmanians have always had sorcerers and priests. From the looks of it, even Syranthir Forefront's 10,000 fleeing from the Arimadalla conquest may have included warrior societies paying homage e.g. to the bull god. Likewise, the Stygians in Ralios (and, once upon a time, in Tanisor) had a continuum of mixes almost from orthodox Malkionism and all the way to almost purely theist ways. The situation in Umathela is a bit unclear - there appear to be orthodox forms of Malkionism and purely theist backwoods tribes, but there may be remnants of mixes of these, possibly in the form of sorcerer-led theist cults originating from one of the universities there. In Fonrit, all bets are off.

Pantheon initiation In RQ3 Gods of Glorantha we had two such examples - Yelm the Youth and Aldrya Children of the Forest (the cult joined by Morak in Biturian's travelogue). Both Yelm and Aldrya stand for the head of the respective pantheon, and joining this cult gave you an afterlife ticket to the respective realm, and little more - possibly a POW check for participating in high holy day rites. It would make you an associate initiate for any number of cults within that pantheon, a lay member whose magic contribution was a tad above the general layfolk digestibility in terms of initiate count and magic channeled by the officiating priest. The Orlanthi parallel is the adulthood initiation creating the link to your clan wyter, IMO. Yes to both. "I give you POW you give me magic" doesn't have to mean "I give you spell knowledge or rune points to cast that magic yourself". It can just as well mean "we all blow a couple of MP and our crop will be blessed", or similar effects. King of Dragon Pass had sacrifices prior to combat, for instance. There is this Pelorian model where people go sacrificing to (or otherwise worshipping) a different god if the one they used to sacrifice to didn't deliver which is quite impossible with the Theyalan approach.

He didn't, because when he asked for Sheng, the assembled deities in Ashlieges's court couldn't provide him. Argrath then took his questers on a yet deeper quest, using up most of them to find the Lunar Hell Sheng was lingering in. When encountering Sheng there, there was no need to go through all that Solar appeasement routine any more. You might say that Argrath went on a Lightbringers' Quest, and knowingly botched it.

The modern form of Orlanthi theism with sacrifice was not what e.g. the Vingkotlings did to contact their deities. According to Heortling Mythology, it was Hantrafal who created the method that became the dominant one wherever the Lightbringer missionaries went after the Dawn. It isn't quite clear whether the Dara Happans and their associated Pelorian cultures who used Yelmic administration (and probably ministration) adopted this, too, though. In the west, there were a few cultures that practiced some form of theism already before the arrival of the Lightbringers, like the Enerali with their holy city of Hrelar Amali, or the Seshna temple in Old Seshnela. The Enjoreli bull people of what is now Loskalm had a similar level of sophistication, and the Serpent Brotherhood of Hykimi nations appears to have been some adjunct to the old serpent earth cults of the land goddesses, too, with temple cities (Göbekli Tepe style?) in remote areas. Genert's Wastes were an impenetrable obstacle even for the beast riders following Waha's covenant, and their explorations opened this avenue only in the early Second Age. Further north, it doesn't look like there was a significant number of horse nomads in the Pentan grasslands when most of the wheels and riders had taken vast areas with agricultural people as their underlings. The Praxians learned about Theyalan theism long before the later Theyalan hill folk further west learned about it, and some of that may have merged with their ancient rites at the Paps. The Pentans would have learned from the Yelmic ministers. Beyond the Wastes, the Teshnans are mainly a theist society (and indeed a theocracy more than anything else), but that's the current state after about two centuries of being the God Learner Duchy of Eest. That may have brought Theyalan notions and methods to them, although their older fire cultic practices and monastic traditions appear to have prevailed. Theism also appears to be the dominant substrata of Kralori dragon mysticism, with residual hsunchen animism and Seleric imports of Pelorian, Pentan and Praxian methods actively discouraged by the bureaucracy (though persisting nevertheless). Outside of Genertela, we have Umathela as Theyalan style theism (reinforced by God Learner experiments), Fonrit as a hodgepodge of stuff, again with potential God Learner interference, weak otherworld interaction in Maslo, weird Parondpara island deities dominating the East Isles, and Imperial Vormain as the successor of Abzered. The Sheradpara story about the three sons (sorcerer, priest, shaman) scheming against Vith suggests that they brought methods from Meksornmali outside of Abzered to challenge their father, but whatever theism they may have found in pre-Greater Darkness Genertela would have been different from modern practices. Probably similar to Teshnos if those ways preceded both the Zaranistangi and the God Learners. Apart from Vormain and Maslo, the God Learners may have imposed some Theyalan methods on the cults they met, if only to give them a standardized entryway into the cult secrets. We are still left with vast areas with less personal (less animist) interaction with the deities than the Theyalan model, more on a vague general initiation and development of that soul organ that allows the flow of magic from the worshippers to the deity without devoting to one or two in specific unless you are a holy person. And possibly with rites that involve multiple active participants under the ritual leadership of a head priest, performing divine magic like e.g. the river priests did when the Cradle arrived north of Pavis in the Prince of Sartar webcomic (or the Pelaskite ship priests calling up the Kraken against Harrek in 1616). I have yet to see something like this tackled in any Gloranthan rpg rules. (At a stretch a HeroQuest group contest might be used for something like this.)

Never hesitate to develop existing places. The city maps in Sartar-Kingdom of Heroes and the Sartar Companion are more in the nature of guidelines than well-defined terrain. I'll take the view of the Swenstown eastern gate from the street scene on p.162 of the rules over anything I could construct from the aerial view in those older publications. It is pretty normal to supersede an existing description of a person or place with some creation of your own if that ties in your characters better, and on that level of magnification canon is a very thin substance. A while back when the new Clearwine was revealed there was a discussion of having villages with folk from more than one clan permanently inhabiting them. That's a concept we had seen only for cities so far, and absent from existing description. I wonder whether some stray Lunar survivors/deserters might form, join or take over outlaw bands in the outback. This would be an interesting encounter...

This was an extension to Greg's idea of colliding, separate worlds deeply back in the Creation Age, where an essence world in the west collided into the already joined divine and spirit world, and somehow the mystic east joined in as well. There were areas and states of pure essence, pure divine expression, pure spirit world. The mystic east has no such pure form but the approach to the Ultimate beyond the base world of everything. The strict reading of this doctrine that most of the otherworld is separated up in that way, too, has been abandoned, but the underlying explanation of how the different magical approaches make up Glorantha is cool enough to separate the baby from the bathwater IMO. So while there were such realms of pure expression of materialist energies, divine emanation or pure spirit, these aren't that pure any more, and everything in the middle world has essence, spirit, and soul (the divine part), as well as the potential to transcend all of this. The world as Gloranthans experience it is made of all these magical components, including the Gloranthans themselves. According to this doctrine, a person will develop a "magical organ" to interact with the type of magic he or she is exposed to. For an animist, this ultimately becomes a shaman's fetch, for a theist it becomes his link to the deity and ultimately being the deity, for a sorcerer it is the intellect organizing the energies and essences of the world. It is all the same organ, but developed in a certain way. If you accept that the mead and whatever furniture you are resting your spiritual butt on may be meaningful archetypes in some way, too, or just stuff filled in by your feeble mortal mind to avoid being completely overwhelmed by the experience, or both, then yes. "Storm rune, owner of..." doesn't do much to explain Orlanth's relationship with Ernalda, aka "Earth rune, owner of...", and limits the insight that a sorcerer can take from this way of looking at these great deities. Perceiving the banquet as a longhouse with wooden benches, drinking horns, sheepwool rugs, and buxom maidservants hauling the ale probably carries a lot of cultural baggage, and the person next to you might as well perceive you lying on a recliner quaffing wine from a shallow saucer, with marble floors and other signs of sophistication, which of course would be his cultural baggage. If you are awakened to higher truths (some path toward enlightenment), you might be able to perceive some deeper truths about this. You pay for this with a loss of immersion and simple faith. At some point, "being the deity" is more like mummery than a fulfilling experience in itself, but that's the price of striving for things mortals weren't made for or born to know. (You might feel like a father or uncle accompanying an underage girl to a concert of her favorite boy group from some casting show... or like a significant non-gamer other accompanying a gamer to a gaming convention.) But this detachment from the experience that a storm soul undergoes in Orlanth's Hall is a far cry from the non-participation sorcerous perception and (to a much lesser degree) a pure animist's experience upon visiting this "place" coming in some other way.

Bush children in the Dragon Pass boardgame are originally Old Tarshite missile troops from east of the Dragonspine as part of the Sartar Free Army. If memory serves me well, among the fastest of the mounted forces in the Free Army, with low melee or magic combat factors, but great skirmishers to frustrate advancing forces to very slow advances unless they brought as fast troops to avoid parthian shot retreats again and again.

Depends strongly on whether you quest on the normal hero plane or within the spirit realm, and if on the normal hero plane how you got there. There is the description of Orlanthi worshippers on a seasonal holy day taking flight to the next Great Mountain, then up into the Middle Air and into the God Realm into Karulinoran, Orlanth's eternal banquet, and after some (timeless) imbibing and eating of the god's fare, the opportunity to leave the banquet hall (TR spoke of a long house, some of Jeff's more recent presentations make it closer to a row of recliners where you sip watered-down wine from saucer-like vessels filled from a cauldron-like crater) through one of several exits landing you in one of the mythic cycles such as Late Golden Age, early Storm Age, Middle Storm Age, Vingkotling Age, Late Vingkotling Age, Greater Darkness or Grey Age, or into Orlanth's place in the Sky World (where he had his one significant victory over a chaos incursion), so you could experience one of his feats and emerge with the corresponding rune magic. Or to deviate from those paths and explore those eras differently. That's not how e.g. the Red Cow quest starts, which has elements of a This World quest with overland travel to the site of Ulaninstead and back towards Red Cow Fort before you land in a Gods War situation where the village is a stead of giants instead. As far as I can make out, most planned heroquest experiences start out with a community having a ritual for the quester(s) to send them into Godtime, without the detour to their deity's innermost realm. These rites may be sacrifices for theist quests, they may be ecstatic communion with guiding spirits for animists, and they may be weird encounters with otherworldly guides and guardians for Malkioni questers. Spirit quests within Time consist just of crossing the veil, usually through discorporation. (Which isn't very different from an outsider's view of an Orlanthi Holy Day rite in which the storm souls fly away and the participants' bodies are left behind.) Shamans should be able to cross over from Time to Godtime on such a quest, and from the Godtime spirit plane into the hero plane (through Visibility or a stronger parallel thereof giving them a body to move in the Middle World portion of that quest), and they ought to be able to guide other discorporate people along. Following a guide through a portion of the spirit world may well be one of those fairy realm excursions during which you are prohibited from certain actions. (E.g. don't look back while singing your wife out of Hades, don't eat any food offered to you, ...) But then, similar temporary taboos may well apply to any other type of quest, too. Special effects for entering the spirit world apply - groovy colors, overlapping entities... Entering the hero plane will be quite a psychedelic experience, too, as the magic will be stronger or harsher than your existence in Time, but unlike walking the spirit world, the reality of the hero plane Made of Everything will be solid, possibly more so than the mortal world.

Though not your own, as a parry fumble only allows the opponents to get a hit.

Interesting question. This has never come up in play yet (for magic point matrix enchantments in my RQ3 games, which work just the same). Another question would be if two people touching the same crystal could load it or draw on it simultaneously. I don't think that a charge transfer from one such object to another is possible, though. MP need to be used fueling some magic. I'd also be hesitant to allow stored MP to be the only MP sacrifice on holy days. I'm fine with such a source being used for additional MP sent to the deity, though (as someone with very low POW in desperate need of a success in Worship (deity) might want to do). (Which brings me to another weird dilemma - can a person whose POW was reduced to 1 participate in a worship ceremony? Will their blacking out for the day be acceptable to the deity?) I would say yes, too - after all, that's what happens if a bound spirit is tasked to refill it for a character's use.

Both places have entries in Dragon Pass - Land of Thunder in the category Resettlement Sagas, naming the founders or co-founders of these settlements and their memorable activities.

I've seen that claim all over, but then where are the wizards unable to wield a sword? Gandalf is a master of his sword. The cleric of the anonymous deity owes a lot to Bishop Odo of the Bayeux tapestry fame. D&D is a mash-up of numerous tropes. The entire thief guild trope has been lifted from Lhankmar, where it was introduced as a paradoxical institution. The main Middle Earth contribution to D&D are the halflings, dwarves and the seed for various goblin types, including the orc and the half-orc. The elves crept in via Middle Earth pastiches rather than directly, and inherit from other sources like Poul Anderson's Sword and the Stone, too. I usually argue that the Brithini are a rather good parallel for Tolkien's high elves, in a process of parallel evolution - immortal island in the west, and all that stuff. Which leaves the aldryami as a diminutive version of ents. Tunnels and Trolls uses the same races as the Fellowship of the Ring, too. Were halflings a playable race in OD&D, or did T&T start the halfling madness? IMO the most playable dwarves and elves are the ones from Midkemia, another early rpg setting which became influential through Raymond Feist's novels starting with Magician. It notably made do without orcs and hobbits. The Warhammer skirmish rules with their takes on the Tolkien monsters probably were as influential. The later whimsical Europe WHFRP setting took that lead minis inspired setting to a new direction. When it comes to modern influences, I guess Warcraft is at least as great a carrier of memes as is D&D, and to me it looks more like it inherited from fantasy skirmish games like Warhammer than straight from the D&D memes. The player base of such computer games is easily as big as that of D&D. Baldur's Gate has of course infected the computer "role playing" game world with D&Disms. Elder Scrolls with its shared RQ design DNA might be a better base to jump off than D&D.

About time. I hope that the lost article about the shrewbush, their main food plant, will be found as well.

Kolat has rather weak ties to the Gods World, other than to Umath himself. Oakfed on the other hand is one of the lowfires who exist in both the spirit world and the gods world equally. The Great Spirit Oakfed that is worshipped in Prax is different from the untamed divine brother of Gustbra in the details, but the entity behind those variations of that power is one and the same.

Jeff has thankfully provided a definition of the various Other Side realms: The image is in the Guide, and was provided by Charles Corrigan. I still think that the "Otherworld" viewable from all three perspectives is the "Middle World" portion of the Hero Planes, the part "Made of Everything". There will be places where a certain influence is significantly stronger or significantly weaker than the others, and there will be Otherworlds exclusive to one of the modes. These places are outside of any notion of Time or at least temporal change, they are simply eternal. Your view on them might be colored by a perception of Godtime cycles, though, like the visits to the Storm Village that can be experienced in the course of the flight to the next Great Mountain in Orlanthi worship rites when leaving the banquet to relive a major feat of the deity. There is no place for a divine view of the spell "space" of the sorcerers. Simply "being" in that space doesn't convey any insight on the magic of those spells, you have to know them, it is a place of the mind. Likewise I expect the presence of the Great Spirit, both before and as a consequence of his dismemberment and transformation, to be something that is quite unavailable for perception from the other perspectives. The orthodox mystic paths on the other hand will confront the mystic with all of these unique existences, and more, as an opportunity to either externalize or encompass them in their alienness. Visiting them is an advanced variation of the initial forms of austerity in meditation. So yes, everything you see in the God Learner maps of the Godtime (aka the heroplanes in the sense of "The World is Made of Everything") can be perceived meaningfully through all three methods/modes, but trying to make sense of the Storm Village beyond time through runic energy bands alone will fail you, as will observation of Creator/Earthmaker through the same application of runes. The overpowering presence of Storm and Spirit respectively will blind the alien practitioner from what is going on, and his mundane senses will be led astray by mortal preconceptions. Observing either the Great Spirit or Orlanth in the Godtime will be possible as runic interactions or movement of spirits, but his home turf will be intransparent to someone limited to an alien perception. The mystic doesn't require perception for his confrontation with these realities beyond normal realities. He will meditate through them, either absorbing them into his greater self (Venfornic mysticism), or purifying his greater self of the shackles to these realities (orthodox Mashunasan mysticism and related practices). Either way is a valid path to the Absolute and hard to discern at the end of the path.

Looking at the Afidisa story, a limited recurrance of innocence is possible, up to reviving the ruined Camp of Innocence on the shores of the Sea of Blue Flame (Revealed Mythologies p.47f). The story (told from a Doraddi perspective) claims that the Artmali of that period were not awake, like themselves were. This does indicate that a mental regression of a portion of the populace might be able to impose a state of innocence that might even be reflected by a land susceptible to this. Even ravaged Genert's Garden, all of whose surviving inhabitants have a deep yearning to the better times they had deemed lost forever. Even if that means a reversal of the effects of Waha's covenant. I am less inclined to believe that anything like this might work for the Orlanthi, but I am willing to be convinced otherwise.