Joerg

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.

My feeling is that few of the magic crystals will be as transparent as the gem-stones we are used to e.g. from the Habsburg crown or the English crown. The Habsburg crown is rather low in faceted gems, IIRC, and has round polished sapphire and ruby if I am not failing my mineralogy completely. Opaque magic crystals are quite likely. These still can be polished to a shine, and there are other opaque minerals that are highly valued, like e.g. lapislazuli. Others like pyrite were recognized for their bling but mainly used to strike fires. Just because something is a scarce resource doesn't automatically create a high demand, true. I'd rather blame the rigors of survival. Gem-cutting is not an activity that puts food into your belly during nomad or troll occupation. As soon as the walls broke, this craft was doomed among the Pavisite humans. The Flintnail dwarves presumably are some variation on rock mostali. What caste was Angarko from Bluesmoke? I seem to recall that they were visually different from the Greatway and Nidan dwarf stereotypes encountered aboveground - swarthier, smaller, more crumpled faces. Still, dwarves don't have to be Openhandist to trade with non-dwarves for stuff they lack or desire. And what were their northern cousins like before an army of dragons destroyed their tunnel city? Shadows of Erebor in easternmost Pent?

I was only commenting on air temperature, not on precipitation. Cloud formation from sea fog is probably observable in Glorantha, and there might be a myth about that, but there are other sources of atmospheric water. The Skyfall probably loses a lot of the Lorian waters branched off to fall down (although the celestial river continues, apparently undisturbed by the wound, which isn't allocated to the starry sky anyway). Stream and Creek are said to be fed the same way as the River in myth, with a lot less obvious rainfall at their headwaters on the mundane surface world. Still, I would rather compare the Mirrorsea Bay to the Baltic in terms of freshwater/salt water exchange, or possibly the Black Sea. It combines two major and productive catchment area aestuaries in a rather small area, almost like the lagoon of Venice. The Choralinthor water should be borderline potable. There might be other elements from 20000 years of Cromagnon adaptation and selection analogous to the selection that created the Neandertal race from the common African ancestor. I read the 40% claim for the first time. I haven't seen any data on other chalcolithic DNA in comparison to our Neandertal cousins, either. The ice mummy offered near perfect preservation and none of the metabolizing and chemical degradation all the older stuff discovered through the Pääbo method suffered from.

RQ6/Mythras inherits from MRQ and Robin Laws-inspired martial arts and cool dragon-bone singing for EWF "mystics", which in turn inherit from Hero Wars and HQ1 concepts (also by Robin). If you manage to put aside some of the major flaws in the original MRQ presentation of the EWF, some of the game mechanics there might be interesting for your game. On the whole, most of the martial arts stuff is actually some other source of Three Worlds magic approached on an indirect, slightly mystical path, but the dragonbone-singing comes across as an imitation of what dragonewts would do to arrive at their material culture. Not sure the dragonewts would bother starting with a material piece of dragonbone, though - they might as likely begin with a bony protrusion on their hide and meditate on that in a cocoon, and emerge with the weapon and minus a bony knob on their skin (for all future re-incarnations). If you can access the MRQ stuff for little money (like back in the time the 20$ bundle sale), it is definitely worth the money for access to ideas that may be used in your game. If I understood Jeff correctly, there aren't going to be RQG rules mechanics for mysticism as a magic system alongside spirit magic, divine rune magic and sorcerous rune magic spells.

That would imply that illuminates could worm their way out of tithing - something Bolthor Hairybreeks appears to have been unable to do, despite massive exposure to Nysalorean riddles from his treaty wife.

Think of invoking a rune or a passion as similar to a low level rune point pool that requires some cool-down for regeneration. Perhaps allow a second invocation at a massive disadvantage (e.g. 40 percentiles lower), which might give all but the most one-dimensional zealots a pause to consider the effects of a failed invocation. (True to my maxim to prefer "yes, but" over "impossible".)

With uncut diamonds hardly diverging from D8 shapes (octahedra, for the geometrically literate), I suppose that every diamond used in jewelry will have undergone some smoothing of surfaces and addition of facets. At the very least uneven splits resulting in a flat surface on the truncated pyramid above the untruncated one, offering a 9-faceted stone with some interesting internal reflections available already. Gem carving and gem cutting probably is as old as is chalcolithic metalworking, though the tougher (nowadays most precious) stones may have been left out for long. Some of the neolithic base material like jade was first used for everyday tools and then refined into more and more artistic and precious-stone-like pieces of work. It isn't clear whether the hardness of gems was prized as much as the optical effects the gem would create, which places tiger eye, mother-of-pearl, pearls and amber in the same category as emerald or sapphire although the latter corund crystals are among the hardest (and hence most difficult to work) materials out there. Scarcity and distant sources of the basic material contribute to the value assigned to a piece of jewelry as much as scarcity of workmanship sufficient to pull off a special effect giving it the special sparcle. Dwarf-produced gems from Caladraland would set both the trend and the price, and while human workmanship will struggle to achieve results even approaching a dwarf-cut gem's play with light, it will be done, and probably less on specimen of optically active minerals and a lot more on dead gods' blood fragments. Putting magical crystals into shape without reducing their magical potential will be a very specialized trade, and probably also one the dwarves will excel at, but nobody in their right mind would entrust a magical crystal to a dwarf artisan in his own underground city from which it might never re-emerge (not after the Clanking City episode...). Apostate dwarf gemcutters might enjoy an almost orthodox life style in the service of affluent masters, with specialty tinned food and similar "luxuries" offering them as close to a "natural" habitat as possible while also serving to their individual ideosyncrasies. Dwarf- or Lhankor Mhy-trained human gem-cutters are likely to be found near affluent rulers or temples. There probably is a dwarven equivalent to Svarovsky, producing a lot of sparkle out of rather low value ingredients. High lead content clear glass might be equally highly valued, but even mostly opaque glass with unusual pigmentation patterns is bound to end up in high end jewelry.

The Feathered Horse Queen is considered to be the avatar of Kero Fin. Lacking a formal cult hierarchy in most places, this would put her on top of most local hierarchies, although the Shaker's Temple might disagree at times, providing a stronger non-Grazer incarnation of Sorana Tor (an aspect of Kero Fin known to have had priestess avatars). The Dragon Pass boardgame definitely has both avatars on the board for the same battles.

Does anybody know more about the recipe/preparation method for the ancient Persian holy drink of soma? Short research points to it being plant sap harvested from ephedra or sarcostemma, and potentially non-alcoholic yet inebriating.

So the Ur-Argrath Saga wasn't the most bull? But seriously, urox is to me a transcription of an ancient Theyalan expression into an ancient (proto-) English expression and shouldn't be used as source material for Theyalan. Uralda, on the other hand... is an unholy mix of the two. Given the vast scope for language admixing in the history of the Vingkotlings and the previous earth goddess cultures, Theyalan probably has as many roots as does English, even when those roots branched off from the same original runic languages. There are several potential incursions for Fire-Rune based languages into the Theyalan language family, as the lowfire husbands and of course Mahome herself - possibly a Veskarthic influence rather than a Dara Happan - and the Harono domination in Esrolia lifted by Orlanth/Kodig, and then the rider influences through the followers of Beren and Ulanin. We lack information about the wives of Korol and Jorganos (and the widow of Lastralgor) and what possible cultural and linguistic inheritences they may have brought with them.

There is also the problem that melanin levels (a measurable quantity) expressed by individuals are hard to correlate to traceable genetic and selection criteria. I have no idea whether the dark skin of e.g. Bantu and Khoisan populations are regulated by the same genes, and whether that of Tebu and Tuareg groups is related. The utterly outdated and un-scientific concept of race that still dominates US politics and bureaucracy is as much an anachronism as is Sharia law or similar fundamentalist and literalist community rules (often accompanied by adjectives like "orthodox") although it is at most a century older than the USA themselves, and to a significant extent carried by more recent immigrant groups who brought their own pocket orthodox religious rules having been purged (aka ethnocidally displaced) from Europe. Compared to that, the Islamic treatment of skin coloration or similar phenotype differences is outright liberal and something the Western world should have adopted long ago. I wonder how much Gloranthan tan changes with varying exposure to the sun due to annual cycles, with day length variations world-wide on par with those of Copenhagen or Anchorage. How pale (Inara-like) do Heortlings become in winter? Are only certain pigments affected? Could there be others (e.g. orange ones) with a contrary cycle (suppressed by exposure to sun-light)? The numerous skin colorations found in Glorantha suggest that pigmentation has more than one major component (unlike melantonin and its slight variation in red-haired folk in the real world). Runes alone don't explain e.g. both blue and orange skin pigmentation in people strong in Storm ancestry. It almost makes me wonder why there are no recorded human palominos on Glorantha.

This depends on the relative strengths of the Neliomi vs the Solkathi influence. The original Solkathi invasion was an offshoot of the hot river Sshorg(a) (which then became Aroka/Oslir(a)). Subsequent defeats and the four seas sacrifice to create the Raging Sea that was broken by Orlanth weakened those original currents. Nowadays, we have a Solkathi current which is a child (i.e. fed by) the northern of the two eastern-originating doom currents running into Magasta's Pool, carrying water which already has shared some heat with the East Isles currents coming down from Kahar's Sea and further east counter-currents to Sramak's River, offering only moderate warming effects. The cooling effect of Neliomi carrying off some cold from the Glacier is probably significant enough to be carried overland along with the ocean and glacier winds, pushing warmer and gentler winds eastward to Kethaela. The Tanier river valley might benefit from some "Valind's winds were stopped up here" mythical effect that replaces a rather common disproportional warming of winds sinking down beyond the Nidan mountains. The original cities under Neliomi influence likely were somewhat less pleasant. With the Mislari offering a second such barrier, the further east you go in Maniria the more pleasant temperatures will become. Coastal Esrolia only happens on the Choralinthor Bay, with the chain of Veskarthan's children actually shielding off Solkathi influences.Tidal influx into the Choralinthor would carry some Rozgali water (i.e. at least gulf stream warm water, which doesn't say that much in winter Biscaya terms) into the bay, but the incoming tides are really slow, and the Esrolian rivers combined with the Sartarite ones since Belintar re-directed the River into the Lyk(s)os bring probably as much continental water as the returning tide carries Rozgali water. That said, Neolithic and Bronze Age Central Europe in all likelihood had temperatures well above what it has experienced in all but the most recent recorded history. Even Imperial Roman age glaciation of the Alps in certain places was down to levels similar as we have reached in recent years, as some finds of mining sites in high glacier valleys have shown where 50 years ago there had only been ice. Which he derived from their runic ancestry rather than from rather recent anthropology (more recent than Greg's first public statements on the fact, which made some waves on the Glorantha Yahoogroup at the time), with a number of (Real World) unavailable tones of skin tossed in especially on the western and sea-related ancestry. Solar guys with golden hair (not quite the white blond of archetypical Scandinavians or hydrogen peroxide) and well-tanned skin even as their winter default (unlike most Europeans prior to wide-spread availability of cheap tourist flights and solarium tan). Probably immune to sun-burn, too, unless transgressing somehow. Storm people with orange skin tones (not entirely unheard of in the real world, unfortunately) or dusty brown skin tones, like soil or dust blown into the air. Pretty much like typical Pashtun skin coloration on the swarthier end. Earth folk with even darker brown skin, possibly lightened to more gray by a green input from divine ancestry, are more than half of the Theyalan ancestry. Blue skin tones may come both from Sea Rune influnces (Helerites, Waertagi bastards among Pelaskites) and from divine Storm (where blue can be an alternative for orange, however opposed these two colors are on our real world color scheme) and Sky Ancestry. While the blue color of the sky is commonly associated with Lorian, given the bluish white color of Ze-Metal (tin) it merely may have undone the unnatural gold of the Sun Dome obscuring the hotter plasma of the sky from which Storm descended. Another factor might be ancestry through Kero Fin to Larnste (often depicted in celestial light blue) and Gata (deep brown when not bright green). I am not really convinced. While the Ötztal ice mummy has few if any genetic descendants in modern European populations, there hasn't been any indication that he was particularly dark-skinned in any of the reports or reconstructions I have seen, and while ice mummification might alter skin appearance as much as other known methods, I would expect that specimen to be available for measurements of melantonin or melantonin-metabolites as those measurements can be done spectroscopically without destroying anything. The Neanderthal admixture most likely occurred on the fringes of Neanderthal expansion into the Middle East (ironically giving at least some truth to some of the "proto-Aryan" hypotheses fielded by numerous local identity-pride movements, although certainly not the one they were looking for). Last thing I heard was that the blue-eyed mutation quite likely was a single point event that then spread - in somewhat recessive inheritance - through a wider population. If the Neanderthals did have it, they might have injected it into a portion of the modern human genome... Another interesting factoid to throw into this: the red-haired phenotype was also typical for both the Phoenicians (who might have had Sea People admixture) and King David (i.e. even pre-Philistine settlement Hebrews if there is substance to the sons of Jacob claims of descendance for the House of David) long before the Celtic (La Tene-era) migrations, i.e. common around the Mediterranean before the Migration era admixture of central and northern European (Germanic and Celtic) genome. Most of the Mediterranean spoke Semitic languages to begin with, with Maltese being one of the few survivors and Hellenic later superimposed on many of these. The Etruscans and their kin on Lemnos (and presumably Asia Minor) didn't speak an Indo-European language, either: Haplogroup mapping has become a trend only in the last few years, and connecting that to ancient DNA has been available for only a little longer. The currently commercially available ancestry kits look at very select groups of markers, and their statistic weight analysis of these is at times rather pseudo-scientific. Y-chromosome admixture and subsequent propagation doesn't necessarily have to reflect permanent settlement - the same result can result from regular raids with limited capacity to carry off slave women. There is a village in France where the genome of the local population shows direct consequences of the draw at the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields, with significant Hunnish admixture to the local genome, in all likelihood to there having been something like a field hospital and regeneration camp of Huns after the battle (never mind that the Huns only were a minority of their own troops fielded at that battle, with goths probably outnumbering them on their own side, not even counting the opposite side). Male explorers going somewhere new and taking a local wife has always been a normal occurrance, maybe not as well-romanticized as in the ancestry of the population of Pitcairn, but e.g. trappers in North America going native and in the longer run contributing their genome to the Native American communities was rather common. A good portion of the Cherokee nation ethnocidally displaced in the 19th century probably had claim to European ancestors, and some African ones, too - indentured immigrants set free after they had served their term, seeking their luck further west than the crown-controlled lands. Being able to obtain European goods without much suspicion, they would have been rather wealthy in that respect in their adoptive communities, and hence have had a greater chance to propagate their ancestry. In Glorantha, this is epitomized among others in the Downland Migration which resulted in the Dureving tribes. While there is some initial talk about the sisters of Orlanth at Dini, a lot of wife-collecting appears to have occurred after taking in Orane (and presumably lots of in-laws). What started out as a Burtae community at the foot of the Celestial Palace where all the mixed offspring of the Powers and some of the Elements (mainly Storm and Sky) went wedded itself to the Earth-dominated (but variously admixed) local population of Ernaldela. The Dureving migration is a parallel to the distribution of the (no longer used in current archaeology) Battle Axe culture (nowadays named Corded Ware culture after the ceramics they left behind). While associated with cattle breeding and possibly oxen-drawn carts, it wasn't a horse breeders' migration, however. Chariots appear to be present already before the Vingkotling era, which added rider culture elements among at least some of the Vingkotling groups, including the dominant one in eastern Dragon Pass and northern Heortland (Ulanin). The Vingkotling Age is the last major age of assimilating other cultures by including them in the tribes. Later cross-cultural demigod ruler marriages didn't manage to integrate those other cultures as well into the nation (as shown e.g. by the difficulties with the Telmori and Grazers in Sartarite and Tarshite history). The Second Council magical interbreeding mostly affected the lost civilization of Theyalan Dorastor, and hardly the Heortling and other Orlanthi tribes in Council lands. I blame the limited range of the undisturbed Pseudocosmic Egg for enabling that prior to the God Project. In a similar way, the species of the Wyrms may have sprung from this egg, too. Most recently, Lunar admixture may have brought a new wave of interbreeding to the Pelorian Orlanthi (including some formerly Heortling populations), with the Lunars themselves being a wild mix of Pelorian natives married to the demigod lineage descended from Teelo Estara.