Joerg

The attack spells cast on it sort of duplicate (and then expand) the Disrupt function of Warding (the divine magic equivalent) or its Issaries derivate Market, so they don't surprise me much. At least they aren't backed by infinite MP (causing automatic damage) but by the MP spent to boost the circle. I see great potential for phantom spells placed on protective circles... you could replicate many a D&D favourite "rune" spell with those, or other not really protective spells. (Provided the phantoms do count as an attack of sorts...) Almost (?) enough to make a trickster study sorcery.

Only after a detour into the more fertile parts of Prax as allies of Orlanthland, then the EWF. In Prax, those who would follow Issaries got their horses striped and became kings of the city of Pavis. The remaining True Horse folk may have been less inclined to trading. It took the contest of Sartar (founder of the kingdom of the same name) with the emerging Feathered Horse Queen to set up the three trade posts in their territory. The Grazers had a terrible conflict between conservatives and progressives around that time, and Sartar and the FHQ helped the progressives to emerge victorious. Ironically, the traditionalists then join the newly founded Pol Joni tribe and return to Prax, but herding cattle. It makes them soft and almost sedentary, relying strongly on grain as horse fodder rather than pasture. They still delegate the actual trading to Vendref stewards.

Our main source for how Truestone works in relation to rune magic from a Gloranthan perspective still is the Biturian Varosh narrative, despite the ludicrous exchange rates given in the trades. Biturian offers a piece of Truestone with a good deal of his pathfinder magics to avoid a quest into broo-infested Sog's Ruins at Horngate. It isn't quite clear whether he was able to regain those spells at his next temple visit, but the story almost makes it sound that way. If Biturian was able to regain use of those spells without new permanent POW sacrifice that would suggest that he only placed rune point uses in the stone, rather than the entire spell knowledge. Basically, an empty spell trading (but then that may have been what he did, rather than place the spells directly in the stone?) without any return magic. @Sumath I guess to still enjoy those singles, being truly stoned might help. (And it makes me feel rather old having been in the age bracket to have listened to those ditties...)

Using dinos as beasts of burden or warbeasts was common in past ages. The domesticated beasts of the late EWF were only remotely bovine, and use of dinosaurs may have been as common. Golden Age Dara Happa used "gazzam" (earth shakers) as their main domesticated beasts before bulls and oxen got introduced. While the Gods Wall has various mammal deities on the second and third tier, these may not have been mainstream in Dara Happa proper. It remains unclear whether such use of dinosaur relied on capturing and taming young adult wild specimen or raising them from the egg (as the ones in King of Dragon Pass were). Given the anti-draconic iconoclasm that accompanied the fall of the EWF, there are hardly any older depictions of dragons left in central Genertela. We have no Third Age proof of pre-EWF use of dinosaurs as husbandry. Given the Second Council origin of the wyrms, I wouldn't be that astonished to find some dinosaur husbandry in the same era.

While his journey to the Threestep Isles certainly proved the concept of the Opening to Kethaela and Handra, it didn't start the Hero Wars any more than Sartar's founding of the kingdom bearing his name or the 1602 conquest of Boldhome. Tatius' escalation of the Siege of Whitewall resulting in the Windstop is fairly legitimate as starting date. There may be other events in other parts of the world roughly in the same period, but with less obvious ubiquitious effect. There have been others. Arkat apotheosized around 500. Pavis (Second Age) and Sartar (1520) are known examples preceding Dormal. And there is a whole bunch of Lunar mortals who became deities, like the Seven Mothers, Etyries and others less well known in Dragon Pass. Hon-eel is a borderline case. She does have a cult which provides divine magic, but her disappearance at the Battle of the Night of Horrors is similar to Alakoring being chained to Sheng's Hell. But then Dormal sailing across the borders of the Inner World is similar to that, too.

As a rules artefact, yes. As a combat situation - only if the intruder is part of a general rush and the defender concentrating on another incoming opponent. A bit like defensive play in handball, only with a lot less restrictive rules regarding how to deal with the opposition. Basically the defender who didn't get to hit the intruder when coming in gets to attack him from his rear as he engages someone else further back. Doing a penetration attack without trusty wingmen to cover one's rear is suicide in a combat system like any incarnation of RQ. But then, any combat situation where there is no fixed formation (such as a shield wall or a phalanx) will involve lots of footwork and in-combat movement. A single warrior holding a bridge won't remain in one spot all the time (making it harder to harpoon him from below).

The splitting of diamonds using a directed force along one of its crystal planes is essentially the application of a flint knapping technique to the diamond, and one that doesn't rely much on hardness but on natural surfaces that can be revealed. Rubbing diamond against diamond is the only known way to grind diamond (although nowadays the diamonds you grind with are minuscule ones strewn over (and slowly worked into) a rotating metal disk). By applying the grinding to the edges of the octahedron, you get the octagonal pyramid that forms the long end of a brilliant. By rounding off the square from the splitting and the edges around it, you slowly approach something like the brilliant shape with its internal reflections that create the gloss that is valued in clear diamonds. Gem carving appears to be quite ancient. The Griffin Warrior agate gem from Pylos has a level of detail that is hard to perceive with the unaided eye, and must have been even harder to produce. Agate is a fairly hard mineral sillica glass, similar to jade. My main exposure to it is as mortars and pistils or ball mills for grinding other minerals down.

Sounds sincerely wrong to me.

They must have been very obscure, then. I was tackling the problem that an attack of a defender that would go off at the earliest of say SR7 would give the person running in earlier a free pass past him despite having the weapon ready. Did you mean that a SR of 7 means you have to act out your stated action on 7 and not on a later SR? That your runner would arrive at SR 8 or 9 and the defender had his action not any longer? That's not the point of the SR. It gives the earliest moment you can strike in comparison to the opposition, not the exact or the latest moment the action can be performed. To repeat your complaint: What exactly is your problem? Do you have these guys lined up in a one person wide corridor? In that case, running past them will require a knockdown for every goon in the way. I assumed that the playing field is fairly open ground, with the goons irregularly placed on the field - some to the left, some to the right of the course of our runner towards his desired foe. The runner starts, and the defenders edge in on him. The reckless runner would still select a course that would keep him from direct contact with any of their starting positions, right? That can mean that he gave goon 1 a wide enough berth that goon 2 gets into striking range first. What is the problem with that?

Depends on their lateral displacement to the course of the intruder. If the defenders have a very open formation allowing movement between them without running directly into them, they will use the 1m per strike rank in combat movement to approach the intruder. I still say this is very much a strawman setup. And I also say don't mind strike ranks except for relative first strike option between opponents. The rules are fairly clear on this. You move into the envelope of the foremost defender and are engaged (unless the NPC is befuddled and doesn't make his rolls). If you still say you plow on, the defender gets an unparried attack if he has a weapon ready. If you decide to parry or dodge, you slow down to combat movement rates. And positions on the grid are what there is at the start of the melee round. Decreasing would make sense, so the attack can take place. Increasing means that the attack opportunity doesn't come up because every 12 seconds everything grinds to a stop, and then some characters will start moving. First rule of GMing: there is NPC info that PCs don't need to know and don't get to know. Just because something is written in the scenario notes doesn't mean it has to be played out exactly like that.

There is no weird turn by turn movement of people in Glorantha. If someone has their weapon ready, anybody running by will be a the sharp end of their weapon if they declare so, strike ranks be damned. The example makes it sound like there is a pause in battle every 12 seconds until the fastest people start acting. That's simply not the case. And yes, it can mean that the second NPC bypassed gets to strike before the first NPC bypassed gets to do so. So what - they will have moved slightly. It still results in two (or three) attacks rolled at the person trying to bypass them before arriving at the selected target. The question only arises if the NPCs bypassed don't have their weapons ready. In every other circumstance, common sense and a wise GM will roll the attacks. It's not like the players have a need to know the exact strike ranks of the opposition anyway.

On the topic of running past intermediate people with weapons ready I find the notion of exactly one mobile attacker and three intermediate, static defenders quite weird, too - only seen in soccer (both amateur and more so professional). From my experience of mock combat, a significant amount of footwork is involved. Playing with miniatures can easily get you into a chess mindset. Standing there with an implement designed to hit the opposition changes that perspective drastically.

Probably because the upper layer is actual facial fur of a bison? I do wonder about the bison horn part of the shields. Is actual bison horn involved? Is it purely ornamental, or does it function as something like a sword catcher or even piercing attack implement?

First impression: too many runes for a subcult. Subcults and lesser deities should be limited to two runes through which they are approached. Adding Storm to the two runes in Thunder Rebels doesn't help much. Movement is only cited for two feats, no affinities. I do admit that I have my problems with the illusion rune as the concept for the skald (and that applies to the Thunder Rebels subcult, too). His role is much deeper than cheap flimflam. Skalds as I understand them do sing praises, but usually do so citing facts. The real world sage Snorri Sturlason treated skalds' verses in direct quotation as some of his most trustworthy sources in assembling the Heimskringla (the Norwegian royal saga) some two centuries or more after the events.

It's in the Adventure Book of the Gamemaster Pack of the boxed set, page 123, under "Power enhancing". I would have expected that heading for the description I find under Spell Reinforcing. Crystals aren't enchantments but divine artifacts - there never were such enchantments in any incarnation of the rules I know about.

For all the phallic symbolism around his cult, Lodril really is a load of hot sperm shot into the body of Gata aiming to beget Umath, so I wonder whether the first syllable in the name should be "load". What to make of the rest, though? "Real" doesn't make much sense following "load", which probably leaves us with "drill" as in military exercise (rather than auger). "Aether had a full load drill." About his brothers: Apart from the town of Yelm somewhere in the western part of the US, the name sounds a bit like a "Yelp!" with the end swallowed up. (If you think that is unfair, Orlanth sounds a bit like a legitimate barfing sound.) And the other one appears somewhat dazéd, err (or if you feel inclined to speak like a pirate, "arr")? (Daystar doesn't make much sense for a god of light never seen in the sky.) Am I alone in feeling that "Aether" is among the most uninspired names in all of Glorantha? Even "Sovereign Sky" or "Prince Plasma" has slightly more appeal, to extend the series of hardly more inspired alliterative homonyms for the elemental rulers in the monomyth (Dame Darkness, Sir Sea, Empress Earth...). Calling the area of greater Teshnos Verenela (now depreciated) somehow made it an anagram of "venereal", which might have been somewhat on topic with the Solf cult except that Glorantha is free of this (other than the Impests, which aren't transferable through intercourse). It would be a logical extension of the continent of Genitalia, though. Wokistan (the province which is the center of Somash worship in Teshnos) sounds much like a liberal area accused of political correctness.

To my best knowledge, the name is pure onomapoesis, the "Wa Haaa" woop of the riders in the charge. However, while "Ta Daaa" has similar potential, it is derived from Tadashi Ehara, early Chaosium member (co-founder?). If there was a Wayne Hansen or similar in Greg's circles in those years, that might be another reading. Kralorela is riddled with the Mandarin or Han equivalent of dog Latin or (Pratchett style) Latatian. The Mountain Mountain Mountains do remind me of Pendle Hill (aka Hill Hill Hill), but at least the subdivisions have somewhat sensibly only a single Shan without any Mountains following. I wonder whether the Hsa tiger Hsunchen are somehow related to the second syllable in Shang-Hsa MHNBC, and if so, whether the other part can be read in any way similar to Naga as in Shogun Toranaga (as we all know what "Tiger Tiger Tiger" sounds like in Japanese). Even so, "Tiger and Dragon" sort of comes to mind. The discovery that the dragon emperor names that we got in the Jonstown Compendium might have been Theyalan transcriptions of imperial names came up on the Digest years ago, and was gratefully accepted by the community. (And due inclusion of the belt buckles sales man's slogan "That looks good on ya", which was Greg's means of getting rice onto the cooker when the first copy of D&D was sold indirectly to him. The full circle comes when reading up on the EWF in Revealed Mythologies, which may not have made it in all details into the Guide, and the nuclear testing ground of Lop Nur slightly re-arranged to arrive at the name for the metropolis on Fanzai where foreigners arriving by ship need to spend a year in quarantine to prove they can keep their manners.) Then there are of course mildly sinified (is that the proper parallel to anglicised?) names from coastal (at least) Lovecraft Country in certain coastal places of Kralorela. How many slash horror flick titles have been immortalized in Glorantha? Not quite my genre, so I know only about one for sure, but knowing Sandy and his choice of terrible movies from various cons, there could be way more.

Argrath certainly was exiled from the Orlmarth clan within weeks after his initiation at Age 14, presumably in the wake of the Starbrow Rebellion not that far away on Larnste's Table. His maternal lineage is not entirely improbable. Onelisin and her (known) daughters certainly got around, being Yinkini women. (Ironically, having to be around Ostling's wolf warriors may have been one motivation for Onelisin leaving Boldhome. But then, having had her way with too many of the visiting heads of tribes or cults may have placed parental "approval" for her decision to leave, too. Not being considered for succession after Sarotar's death certainly was another, major, component. IMO she left Boldhome shortly after Sarotar's death, although she still may have contributed to the assassination war with the Nochet families behind Sarotar's death. There is the possibility for a female to leave unacknowledged children in other clans after a year marriage (actually slightly more than a year unless already pregnant at the wedding). While it is somewhat unusual for Yinkini to go through all that legal hassle to get a lay, it isn't unheard of. The Year Marriage mother doesn't play any role in the upbringing of the child, and while she leaves her bloodline with the kid, there is little else in terms of legal kinship resulting from this descent. Old women have long memories on such matters, especially those in the Asrelia cult. A ninety year old crone in the Colymar tribe might have seen Onelisin and her daughters in person, apparently they lived somewhere isolated in the northern reaches of that tribe's lands. Annstad definitely is Fazzur's son and Onjur's brother. I am unsure about Fazzur's wife, and any maternal connections of either Onjur or Annstad. Leika's family connections are detailed in the Colymar booklet of the RQG GM package and give her (mostly severed) family relations to Londra of Londros, Naimless, and the (demised, Cradle-faring) Urrgh the Ugly, for a second-tier web of family links in Sartar. I don't quite recall which of the two female Humakti (or yet another one?) gave birth to the invisible child in the middle of battle... it doesn't appear in that family tree. We have an idea of family links among the descendants of Queen Bruvala of Nochet, although only Samastina remains to take an active first row role in the Hero Wars after Hendira's demise. Two generations earlier, we get Dormal and various other notables in Kethaela. But then (from talking to Kris Hohls, who played Samastina in Jeff's HQG game) there are plenty of children conceived from various worthies in recent Gloranthan history. Possibly even a child of Broyan, definitely one from Argrath down the line. Ernalsulva being the daughter of Entarios and Hofstaring is a major plot element in the Sartar book HQ campaign. (The Red Cow campaign on the other hand stays outside of this web of blood relationships, limiting the contacts to up high to companionhood.) I did play with maternal descent from House Norinel through a runaway renegade involved with Sarotar's daughter blamed for her running away, also emphasizing companions of the mighty over blood relations of them. Trying to write for a potentially all female party (or their hubbies) from across various tribes, there is always the possibility for some short term marriage or ritual fling with one of the male protagonists, of course, like e.g. either of Fazzur's sons. In the name of both diplomacy/religious call and desire... There is little information on the various offspring of the powerful earth priestesses like Entarios the Cow or Samastina.

That's a return to RQ3 Land of Ninja's Ki skills - basically, after having mastered a skill, you can develop the heightened, magical application of that skill from zero, with experience rolls of the basic skill applied to raise the ki skill. Not really a player friendly way to introduce magically boosted martial arts attacks, though. No idea how available Land of Ninja will be these days. Apart from the Avalon Hill box, there was also the Games Workshop hardcover, so there might be a sufficient remainder of second hand copies to keep the price acceptable. If you're just after the Ki skill rules, the purchase would probably be too expensive for at most two print pages on this, but the supplement was excellent (if officially non-Gloranthan, and only semi-seriously "integrated" to Vormain by a throwaway line in Elder Secrets). The campaign was almost identical to the one in the Vikings box, though, with only minor re-themes (haughty samurai rather than berserks, etc.) I never played Land of Ninja (having used the campaign from the Vikings box for my then alternate Earth/Glorantha setting in a world of my own), and my memory blurs it with FGU's Bushido (by the same main author) which I did play a few sessions of as a player.

Hmm. My throwaway comment was rather directed at the concept of taking the free disengagement after having downed your direct opponent(s) for a short role as non-combattant support or refreshing spirit magic before returning to the melee, and not as part of the tactical advice thread. For which I might have a one syllable, three letter advice: "Win!" 😜 (And more seriously, that thread lacks advice on how to proceed when losing a fight, taking a tactical defeat to salvage most of the party rather than suffering a TPK. Short of Rune Lord DI, that is.) I have no practical experience yet with applications of Extension and Multispell to stabilize spirit magic over significant portions of the scenario, though I have sufficient experience with mid-duration (RQ3) sorcery. Blowing say three rune points and a matrix/crystal worth of MP for such an effect rather than a day's worth of MP and ceremony for the sorcerous way might be more cost effective than the normal duration benefit from say three points of Shield for one, at most two, combat situations. Little difference when facing the final boss in the final showdown, but boss villains have the nasty habit of escaping from a showdown and reappearing at a later time, so how can you be (or make) sure that your showdown is the final one for this scenario? This is of course advice for the GM how to make a villain with mediocre stats but a good escape trick outlast the party's heavy magical augmentation and catching them just a little later with their magical pants down. Minus a few henchmen, with blood-stained rips in parts of his robe, but alive (even healthy) and kicking ass.

From Sylila/Kostaddi? While outside of the scope of your project, this makes me curious how the post-Sheng remnants of Praxian overlords of Hongguan in Boshan look in barely Kralorelized gear. I am fascinated by the shield, wondering how functional using the thick parts of actual bison skull would be for the top part of the shield, and how to provide adequate protection for the lower part where the shield obviously has flattened beyond the shape of a bison's skull - possibly cuir boulli attached.

The Kralori myth of Wild Man and Allgiver doesn't make his instinctive mating with whichever he met very much of a conscious act. It took his meeting with Allgiver and the more implicated mating rites to get her attention to awaken that ihnerent but undiscovered potential for consciousness. His first son with Allgiver, Aptanace the Sage, then was the prototype of the conscious and civiized person. Not the bromance of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, but The Beauty and The Beast with a hefty dose of hands on sex. Grandfather Mortal is fairly universal. Grandmother Mortal is not - more than half the Grandfather Mortal myths have him find goddesses, or even The Goddess, as his mate. His gift of future mortality to his children establishes paternity as mythical precedent, and opens the way to patriarchal society. In the West, his descendants even face the choice of the children of Luthien. Malkion of the West, reincarnating in ever more devolved states, like Malkion the Founder who gets born from two deities, Aerlit and Warera, and goes on to marry other goddesses to spawn the tribes and the archetypes of Brithini ancestry, is weirdly non-humanist in that way. Not quite the Prometheus creation of mankind (although Eurmal Friend of Men carries a lot of that Promethean story), but there is a story of defiance to the Gods even if those Gods are also said to be former kin of the Archetypes prior to their Devolution. Of the devolved Archetypes, only Zzabur makes it to the Dawn alive. There is Duke Horal, another son of Malkion the Founder who is not a Caste archetype but more a tribal leader with Talar rank, but that character doesn't appear to carry the burden of the Third Action prototype Other that plagues the physical Zzabur and explains his hybris. The arrival of Time may have separated the physical Zzabur from unity with his un-Devolved self, and may account for his all too human mistakes shortly after the Dawn, leading to his (apparently first) experience of regret of his divisive actions (all of this in the unpublished Hrestol's Saga, not much of a novel (or perhaps better: romance), but quite a load of myth when combined with the double set of origin myths in Revealed Mythology). (And rather than facing the Fifth Action of Malkion, both the Seshnegi and the Brithini lament the arrival of Gether, God of Death (of Old Age), rather than Humct Wielder of Death through hostile interaction. No idea how much Eurmal Friend of Men is involved in this.) Even stranger the Doraddi version, with Dorad the first of the drinkers to lay down his physical existence to provide the first medicine plants to his lineage. Mainstream Pamaltelan myth is brimming with Death from the start - Bolongo's assassination of Earthmaker, and Dorad's funeral. While there is a sword associated with Death (the Red Sword of Tolat), it isn't Death itself as it is for the Theists.

Except that there is one such notion, where the Daxdarius epic copies the hidden mythical reference to meeting the Wild Man in the Gilgamesh epic with befriending the hairy Wild Man. You might of couse say it is all Freudian or Jungian play with archetypes, but IMO myth isn't just play with archetypes, but quite often a factual memory of historical events, too. The different cousin married back into the tribe, and its children remaining a productive and procreating part of the tribe, is a powerful and empowering story. Gloranthan tribalism is both less exclusive of people because of different appearance and more exclusive because of "not one of us" even down at clan level where even some of the wives' birth clans can become hostile "not us". There's of course the possibility that the group that crossed the Sahara around 200 000 years before the Toba explosion and established itself in Europe left some folk behind in Africa. The Bantu tribes outside of west Africa have quite the migration history behind them, with the Zulu among those who migrated the farthest. I wonder what kind of myths that accumulated.

Only those we didn't mate with... There is a great likelihood that pockets of the remnants of the western Neandertal population might have encountered some CroMagnon types, but not enough to make a significant further contribution to their gene pool. A docu that I watched two or three months ago suggested that an explosive eruption of the bigger volcano next to the Vesuv some 45 k years ago might have smothered much of the European Neandertal population, reducing the already low genetic variety by culling most groups east of the Massif Central through sudden climate change and loss of their food sources. The remaining few thousand survivors west of that eruption suffered milder consequences, but might have fallen below sustainable genetic variety, and mostly too early for modern humans to step in and provide fresh genes for at least a hybrid population to survive. No evidence of such hybrids has been found this far west, only on the Balkans there has been DNA evidence for an individual with sapiens admixture a few generations back, IIRC. That, and ever more fluctuating climate making the habitat difficult for their dwindling hunt targets may have been the true cause for their disappearance, until the few coastal habitats failed due to inbreeding and malnutrition rather than acute starvation. Less developed antecessor humans is something missing in Glorantha. We rather see the opposite, more perfect specimen degenerating into the modern forms or (slowly, as many of these are effectively unaging) dying out from failure to breed true through the cataclysms that diminished their numbers. The only indication of such folk is found in Kralorela, where the Wild Man needs to be tamed by Allgiver to father the first civilized human, Aptanace. (Unless you count the Vadrudi horde... including Orlanth and Humakt in their early days.) We do get modern humans in Paleo-, Meso- and Neolithic cultures, but no populations of physically variant body types except for various pygmy populations. Gloranthan lesser giants are sometimes presented with features we'd expect in earlier hominids, but their magical nature and size takes them apart from humanity. That (and the admixture of Denisovan DNA to certain Pacific and Australian populations) I did know, but the statement that the Ötzi individual would have had that much Neandertal DNA was absolutely new to me. The number of just 15% of African natives being free of Neandertal DNA is suprisingly low - I hadn't expected Arab descendants to spread that widely into the population, across that many tribal borders. Semitic-based native languages are found all the way down to the Bantu-settled parts of Kenya and the populations speaking them might have been in genetic exchange with the Middle East along the Nile, but West African admixture probably was a lot more recent and less pervasive. Ok, sailors being sailors, there would have been some exchange, but rarely south of Mauretania prior to the Portuguese expeditions.

Amber should be a possibility all around drowned Ernaldela - Worcha's parents did cover and smother lots of forest, and bleeding trees might have left sap to transform. The non-time of Godtime may allow less aging just as much as it may allow accelerated aging compared to the generations of named ancestors and kings passing through.