Joerg

No, it is 19, 20, 21 aka 1W, etc. There is no benefit between an ability of 19 or 20 on an unmodified roll, however, once you augment or suffer from flaws, the difference will be there.

Very good questions. Technically, all the plunder from an adventure belongs to the sponsor of the adventure (typically the temple or the clan chief or someone like Duke Raus) who will then generously allow the party to keep most of it. He has no obligation to do so, but will be hard put to find parties risking their necks for him if he is too stingy. Living with your clan, there are rather few things you can really claim as your own. Plunder rewarded by the chieftain does count as personal or at least family property. Having this decision taken out of player hands probably doesn't go down well with people used to D&D (-inspired computer games) and its modern day views on property, which is why these aspects of Bronze Age society are carefully left untouched in most campaigns I have been told of or have been in. If your income has gone to the clan, then the clan also has the obligation to pay the tithe. Do you really own the item in the sense that you can pack it up, go to Nochet, sell it and have a season of debauchery? Or do you carry it on behalf of your chieftain, and are expected to return it to serve the clan?

Apart from the Block and the Paps, all oases/altars in the original Nomad Gods are named after people who you find in the credits of early Chaosium publications. Corflu, Pavis, Sun Dome Temple and Barbarian Town aren't oases, neither are the ruins. Dog Latin in Glorantha comes close to pun level at times, too, as do certain persistent mis-spellings. I have no idea whether Sherman Kahn's name was responsible for the occasional alternate spelling of khan. Miss-spellings of Latin names like Malia and Sagittus with double consonants in or absent from sense-altering or nonsensical places abound. To me, Mallia is the apple goddess. One humorous take on typos that was popularized on the Digest was Monalli, the Mistress of Clams, which is of course a play on Molanni, the Mistress of Calm. And I remember being ridiculed in a friendly way when a text of mine featuring "trade goods" being exchanged was disfigured by an accidental omission of one of the "o"s in goods. "Have an Argan Argar for your Issaries." Then there are the intentional puns like Uz. (Meaning "the people".)

IIRC, Irrippi was an early companion of Yanafal, a Carmanian, i.e. someone whose culture was founded from first hand contact with the God Learners, and plenty of local interaction with hill barbarians of Brolia and Charg. Yelmic administration was a thing in Carmania even in the Spolite Empire, and all the preceding ones, too. That means Buseri scribes should be found in all urban places in Carmania. Most of them not very academic but very bureaucratic. Irrippi obviously was much less of a bureaucrat and very much a scholar gone wild. As to the role distribution, I would place Teelo in the Flesh Man role, and have Yanafal in the Orlanth role. Danfive makes a good Trickster, bonded in chains. That leaves the Issaries role of the navigator and negotiator in the Underworld to Jakaleel, as Deezola standing in for Chalana and Irrippi for Lhankor Mhy are pretty much the only position there is little debate about. But that's assuming that the LBQ the Carmanians learned about was that closely modeled on Harmast's two (quite varied) experiences. While this is purely personal speculation, I tend to think that the Lightbringers' Quest known in Dragon Pass mostly is based on Harmast's first experience, which yielded Arkat, while in Fronela and probably all the way to Brolia the LBQ is based on his second journey that brought back Talor. If (personal speculation again) Harmast had to take a role different from Orlanth's in his second quest since you can make your own imprint on such a path only once, he would have had to lead the quest from the Flesh Man role, and someone else would have had to undergo the tests like the Flames of Ehilm. All of that may have led to a different way that LBQs are performed among the western Orlanthi. If (still speculation) the knowledge about the LBQ came from Carmania, it would have drawn on those western experiences and role models, and possibly activities of the questers.

I thought you were going to suggest something analogous to the Olympic games there for a second. I was referring to the Three and One Contests between Orlanth and Yelm. Umathelan nobles engaging in such contests would tread the mythic path of Orlanth vs. Yelm, which is fine for a Malkioni community living in the land named after the Primal Storm. As long as nobody gets killed in those contests, they can keep it at Golden Age interaction. There are downsides to this. The Challenger doesn't get to pick the judges.´Success for the challenger is to lure some followers of the challenged who unfairly gets decreed victor into his own camp. How that could translate into actual politics is a lot harder to imagine than Lunar Dart Competitions where you have bunches of Rune Levels going head to head in clandestine warfare. But then, the Umathelans have something like that, too - hiring non-Sedalpists to do their dirty work.

This is the comment cited in the post I cited and which I took exception to. Problematic. Not bollocks. The problem lies in the original Thanatar write-up, which suggests a pyramid hierarchy of cult ranks, and the presence of these underlings for high ranking cultusts to draw upon. In Than Ulbar, the cult may have absolute control, but it lacks the victims all those intermediate ranks would need for their lesser heads. In the Lunar Empire, the victim situation might be better, although Pelorian lowlanders are notably low on personal rune magic, so the only sensible targets would be the cult leaders, a much smaller and much harder target. Theyalan countries where you have initiation rates of better than two out of three provided the best hunting grounds, where even the head a random person would provide a divine spell or two. Now, let's look at Carmania, and the neighboring clans of Brolia. Lunar institutions are known for overcoming disgust and looking the other way when Chaos works in their favor. Sponsoring a cult regularly taking Brolian heads and select political enemies in a region where the cult of the Seven Mothers or Hwarin Dalthippa are of minor influence as rather individual Mothers would be worshipped sounds feasible. Thanatari do make good Dart Warriors, and in that function they have access to good prey, if harder to overcome (the opposition's Dart Warriors), but then you don't have to send out Thanatari-only squads. Teamed up with ogres and some other magicians they could strike effective terror attacks against rivals. Thus the existence of such a place might be possible.

Huh? The glow of any real world material at a given temperature has the same color. The difference between iron and bronze is that iron remains solid at much higher temperatures, hence iron implements can glow at much whiter colors than the dull orange you get from molten bronze. Pottery is no different from iron in this color play, so if you fire up a pottery kiln and want to see if you have reached the right temperature, you judge it by the color. For fine temperature measurements, you add salt mixes in cones, whose melting will show you that your glazing is going to be molten now. Glass blowers usually have a very good tan when working with high melting point material because of the almost solar glare of the material before their faces. Pottery and metal-smelting are thought to be connected technologies - the first accidental metal smelting in the chalcolithic era is likely to have occurred in a kiln rather than a campfire, as you need those higher temperature exposure. Coming up with a postulate how iron has a wider chromatic range without accounting for the same chromatic range in pottery is a bit weird. (But then, Phlogiston...) I do wonder whether synchronizing magic could make Gloranthan military units a lot more mobile than their ancient world parallels, even beyond the degree of Roman legions or Swiss phalanxes. After all, Polaris is master of the dance, and turning on the spot is his special move. The magical about-turn of a formation might even be an exhilarating experience with centripetal force like many folk dances where some of the dancers (usually the girls) get lifted off the ground by the circular motion of others.

If Peter feels singled out by my criticism of him questioning canonicity, it is because comments like the one I reacted to are rarely posted by anyone else but perhaps myself, with the difference that I use phrasing like "may not be canonical any more." The sweeping statement that the entire publication isn't canon any more wasn't helpful, hence the baby and bathwater quip. It's not that I disagree with the statement that the Carmanian mother complex sounds more like a propaganda film to lure new underlings into the cult than anything real, but given that Thanatar isn't the sanest of all cults and has magic to tamper with memories, this may be a case of believing in one's own propaganda over facts. Facts provided as information for scenarios written by freelance authors may slip in unchecked facts, especially as the format makes complete fact checking way too time consuming and work-intensive to be economically viable. But back to polemical detail: Thanatari walking around in the open with gibbering heads on their belts is an indication that they rule over the place. Thanatar is a cult that works from hiding and ambush, hence its weapon of choice, the tarnished silver garotte (possibly one of the least useful melee weapons ever). A Thanatari who wants to bring his heads to a place that has third party observers usually would use a cloak to hide the heads, and possibly something to muffle the heads so that their gibbering doesn't spoil any ambush. The entire original presentation of the Thanatar cult comes across as an organisation with huge manpower. If Carmania was to be home to a complex approaching the anomaly of Than Ulbar in the Wastes, it would have to have corrupted a couple thousand civilians into cowed silence, even if the majority of the cultists aren't humans or ogres. If your underlings are badly deformed chaotics too repugnant for cults like Thed or Vivamort, they aren't creatures you could hide in a crowd. Ecologically, preying on lowland Pelorians for rune-magic holding heads sounds like a losing proposition anyway, as the ration of rune-magic knowing initiates in the population makes the region a target-poor environment. Not even the Lunar cultists bring the victim potential anywhere near the target density you get in Orlanthi-settled areas. You'd have to prey on your potential allies for mere subsistence, and the only way to conceal that is before the background of an even greater Chaos mess. Trailing the Crimson Bat and scavenging on its larder might be less risky and a lot more rewarding. But then, decoy underground complexes with well planned ambush sites sound like an ideal hunting ground for the more devious of the cultists while pitiful half-wit chaotic wretches with useful chaotic features like regeneration or thick hide may be ruthlessly exploited as disposable decoys. Such considerations allow the question how common ugly chaos nests are inside the fringes of the Empire. It would take one or two of these to "outshine" regular Thanatar activity. When and where the cult breaks from hiding it must be certain to have either control over the entire society, or ready to move on anyway and cull some of the worst disappointments among the underlings.

Interesting statement in the face of too brittle iron with too high carbon content. Paracelsus' famous quote that the poison is made up by the (proportional) amount of a substance applies to metallurgy as well. Chemical comparison to slags containing the oxidized crust of such pieces can do similar wonders as isotopic analysis of teeth. You're obviously not thinking like a chemist, or an archaeologist using chemical fingerprints to correlate worked pieces of metal with workplaces. But I will admit that there have been no complete surveys of the catalogued finds by this criteria, as lab cost for such procedures easily break the budgets of most archaeological institutes. Etruscan steel appears to have been of fairly constant quality, too, judging from the relative uniformity of the slag in several meters thick deposits. I'll admit almost complete ignorance about Greek ironworking and its correlation to geography and geology, however. Sure, combining rods of iron with known (experienced) differences in qualities like ductility and hardness (which correlates to carbon content) is a pretty good method to guarantee an overall quality, unless the only ore you have happens to be bog iron. Better than no iron at all, but probably some of the worst basic material for making steel. When I first encountered them in my initial research of Glorantha (as a people in Genertela Book, not as the individual Piku Dostupiku at Gringlestead), the secret of making rather than just working iron was their selling point. There is no indication that Piku ever produced iron from non-metallic sources, but he is a single fully trained metallurgist in the diaspora. If Blacksmithing is so extremely rare, all blacksmiths must be in the employ of cults, given the relative ease with which cults can provide iron implements for damaging people and monsters.

Class mobility is (sadly) almost unknown outside of the Loskalmi sphere of influence. The original concept of the men-of-all was the only way to change your caste from whichever you were before taking the exams and the new job. They cannot be either Rokari or Loskalmi style Hrestoli because either of these movements started well after the Closing. The Sedalpists build on the same "Old Malkioni Church" (post-canonical term used in Revealed Mythologies for the mainstream, old-Hrestoli Malkionism during the Middle Sea Empire period) as do Rokarism or Hrestolism, but without the consequences of Halwal interfering with the state-supported Malkionism of Yomili, and instead with their very own and weird interaction with the Cult of Silence, and the exposure to Woodland Judgements following the systematic persecution of proven or suspected Malkioneranist heroquesters starting even before the Machine Wars. Nonviolent conflict resolution through contests, now where have we seen this before? A contest of dancing, a contest of magic, a contest of music, a contest of martial arts, the latter plunging the universe into a long-delayed and overdue night interrupted by something a lot worse that the hitherto suppressed dark.

Reread the Wayland saga on iron age metal processing, through symbolism. The impurities you are talking about aren't carbon, but phosphorous or sulphur that contribute negatively to both ductility and hardness. The chemistry doesn't change whether you know content ratios or not, but the distinction between iron blades and steel blades is simply nonsensical. If it is forged, it has become steel. The ironsmiths of the Noricum produced reliable quality in mass production, providing a steady stream of nearly normed forged steel blades to the Roman legions. There is a significant portion of recycled iron from former items that got damaged or just repurposed while their owners perished. Is the Third Eye Blue possession of the iron secret post-canonical now? Interesting. But still the question - how did they get from all the possibilities the Nidan dwarves to forge the blades for them, the most xenophobic lot of dwarves west of the Wastes? If they ended up in Carmania, they must have been part of Syrantir's 10,000 (or however many fighters may have followed them), which means they couldn't have used God Learner secrets to force the Nidan decamony to do their bidding.

There are overseas ship travel times in the Guide, per season, which could be calculated into knots or etmals. Presumably for a moderately fast trading vessel rather than a sleek warship full of tireless rowers independent of food. Other than that, the HQ1 era publication Men of the Seas offers the best estimates for Gloranthan maritime travel I know about. River travel would be different, and I don't recall to have seen many robust data points in the publications I have read.

@metcalph has very strict definitions, reducing canonicity to the publications since the Guide, making some allowance for canonicity of Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes, Sartar Companion and Pavis: Gateway to Adventure. Tossing out the child with the bath water, as far as I am concerned. But I agree that RQ3 era publications may have to be taken with moderate amounts of grains of salt, as do Hero Wars era publications. No comparison to the buckets full of salt that are needed to accompany the MRQ releases or early nineties fan releases, or pun-riddled Freeforms (fun and influential on Fanon as they were). The current Chaosium catalogue, according to the strictest of definitions only the actively supported rpg lines. That means even the paperback edition of King of Sartar is non-canonical when it contains different text from the hardcover edition. When I administrated the Buserian Glorantha index, I was maintaining something like a gliding scale of canonicity on information depending on the sources. That didn't keep me from including as many of those sources as my time allowed, but there was a rule for authors which sources to trust less than others. Blatantly contradicting previously published material without better cause than "I feel like this is cooler" was bad style then and did plague a few of the Hero Wars era products (and I am not talking about Greg Stafford admitting that he misunderstood aspects of Glorantha in his revelations about the setting, but other authors producing material for the official line. Sure. Most of the stuff is shock full of great and cool ideas, even when they clash with strict canon. Having huge membership parasitic cults like Thanatar in limited regions like Carmania may stretch credibility, but then "Carmania" is not restricted to the West Reaches of the Lunar Empire with its four satrapies, but extended into adjacent regions, especially Oronin and Doblian satrapies, but also west of the current border, and north of the Poralistor. Adding in those populations, something the suggested size might become marginally feasible, at least with government involvement on some level.

I am fairly certain that Argrath was enlightened, but I cannot say whether by Arkati or EWF means, or a conglomerate of these and Nysalorean ones. No idea how enlightened the Durulz are, but Argrath wasn't one of them. Their keet cousins in the east are providing several among the more prestigious mystic masters of the Gods War. Or did you mean [chicken]?

Not an archaeologist either, but a big fan of the Hallstatt Late Bronze Age Early Iron Age period that followed the Urnfield culture covering much of the upper Danubian watershed and reaching into the Rhine watershed, too. In the Carpathian basin there is the hardly known (and not that easily googled if you don't know the names) but very productive in archaeological finds of metal Noua Culture that presumably provided metal for the Nordic Bronze Age (that continued almost up to the Roman Iron Age) even after the Mediterranean/Fertile Crescent Bronze Age Collapse. Not being a literate society helped dampen the impact of the Bronze Age collapse with its loss of literacy. Having chalcolithic technology and experience to fall back to in the times of the worst shortages probably was extremely helpful. Doing well without having to put effort into irrigation prevented a negative impact of the loss of irrigation technology and know-how lost along with literacy. The down side is that we get at best exonyms from literate texts in neigboring regions, and at worst we have to make do with archaeological material culture names that don't necessary correspond well to the actual areas sharing ethnicity. We don't have names for the factions meeting at the Tollense Crossing, but we know that the presumed attackers were from basically all over the later Hallstatt area and some parts further north, and the defenders had more or less lived in the region - according to the isotopic composition of their teeth which does little miracles in placing dead bodies in a geological and thereby geographic context. According to the Nordic Bronze Age video that I posted in this thread, Central Europe lagged at most two or three centuries behind Greece or the Levante with the introduction of bronze smelting, and copper-working was known well earlier as proved by the Ötztal ice mummy with his copper implements. The question is how long it took them to promote the cult of the divine individual that permeates the divine rulers of the Mesopotamian, Nile and Mediterranean cultures, and which reappeared at the height of the Hallstatt culture e.g. with the Glauberg burial after the intermittent collapse of trade with the Mediterranean. How the collapse of Mediterranean trade affects a civilized central European empire is nicely shown by the late Merowingian era of the Frankish kingdom that succeeded the West Roman empire, and which at first was more or less a continuation of the Empire with just a new layer of government/military caste added. What soured this state of being was the loss of all the southern Mediterranean territories and trade to the expanding caliphate(s). It didn't really matter much to the everyday life in the Frankish kingdom whether the Ostrogoths or Byzantium held Italy, as long as the established trade routes continued to operate normally, but the paradigm shift to the Caliphates created the collapse of late Roman culture in Romanized western and central Europe. The high Bronze Age trade network was on par with that of the Roman Empire, though the means and volumes of transportation may have differed somewhat. Not that much, judging from the shipwrecks known to archaeology. But the Roman Empire trade network did extend into the Germanic Barbaricum and Scandinavia, and so did apparently the High Bronze Age network into the lands that produced Amber, Jet, Saponite and other such mineral curiosities deemed precious by the core Bronze Age cultures of the Crescent. The Tin sources mostly lay in the Bronze Age barbaricum, too, like Cornwall, Ireland, Carpathia, or Afghanistan. Climate was different from today - the Sahara being significantly greener caused significant changes to updraft patterns dominating today's climate (or that of 500 years ago when anthropogenic climate gas emission was hardly measurable in ice core bubbles). Central Europe was a lot closer to Mediterranean conditions despite the frontier of permafrost soil still receding in parts of Scandinavia nowadays completely free of permafrost, and the North Sea only slowly approaching the modern day coast lines from the basin devastated by the late mesolithic great Tsunami that drowned Doggerland and much of the British peninsula and the Danish coast on the Oslofjord although those regions were rising up by themselves rather than drowning, due to having been freed of 3 km of glacier. Unless I am misremembering my research of the recent weeks, there seems to be a shift from some material cultures identified by archaeologists around the same time the Linear A culture in the Aegean area disappeared and was replaced by the Linear B culture of the Myceneans, three to four centuries before the Bronze Age Collapse. This is at least true for the Carpathian basin and the adjacent Danubian area. The Urnfield culture started to take off roughly around the same period, too. Avoiding much of that intermediary decline, the Nordic Bronze Age was able to catch up further on the Fertile Crescent cultures in many aspects, but not in literacy. But then, the La Tene culture produced the Druid caste which consciously forwent literacy in their lore-keeping, and they were the heirs of the Hallstatt and thus indirectly the Urnfield culture. The shift from Urnfield to Hallstatt appears to have been gradual, without much signs of decline for the Urnfield culture. The shift from Hallstatt to La Tene on the other hand appears to have followed a century or a little more of cultural hiatus or decline, at least measured in the bigger population centres. La Tene oppida were built using Greek city planning, like Manching or Kelheim. Despite being an illiterate society (or if they were literate, they must have used extremely perishable writing material, similar to the misapplied use of papyrus in the wet parts of the Frankish kingdoms where vellum was the much more stable form of writing material), they were well aware about things that created a polis. I see little reason why Hallstatt shouldn't have had similar trade contacts, although the Greek and Phoenician colonies south of their lands were a lot smaller, and trade volume necessarily too.

This would be a case of kinstrife, and depending on the permanence of Kangharl's damage, may cause severe magical problems for the entire clan, and political consequences for her birth clan, too. First of all, a rush of jealousy is not very Ernaldan - this kind of behavior is expected from Storm Rune people, not Earth Rune people. It would be very much out of character. Being caught in adultery would be serious, but could be avoided in making it a magical ritual where both take the roles of deities. It would be a lot less personal that way, though. I am not sure how divorcing her current husband could be managed without her giving up priestesshood and clan membership, even if she immediately re-marries Kangharl. Technically, she would be the newest member of the women's circle. Becoming his widow (or pro-forma widow during an exile of his) would allow her to remain in her childrens' clan and maintain her position. An exile of her husband would even lower the adultery threshold - after all Ernalda had other husbands during Orlanth's exile. If any Heortling wife married into a clan murdered her husband, this would be a severe case of kinstrife, probably attracting dire chaos. A Heortling wife lethally fending off the unwanted advances of a male clan member other than her husband would be justified self-defence against someone who has committed kin-strife, but that doesn't change anything about Chaos being attracted to this magical weakness of the clan. A Heortling wife consummating an affair with another male from the clan she married into does weaken the clan's magic considerably. If the chief priestess does this outside of some magical/mythical precedence, the consequences would be twice as dire. Again, there is the exception "the magic made me do it" that e.g, Yinkini, Eurmali and to some extent Orlanth Niskis worshippers can (and will) field in such cases. The Earth Queen as a mythical being cannot really be accused of infidelity as she is the wife or at least bride to all. As long as there is the magical/mythical precedent and justification, the priestess is not the same person during those moments of magical re-enactment that she is in her married life, but an embodiment of the Goddess. There is the problem of providing such justification when the motives are more personal than ritual, though, and the accusation of hypocrisy is as damning to a head priestess as infidelity is to a normal housewife. Both will anger the deities and the ancestors, with repercussions to both the perpretators and their community (in this case, or more often their communities). As tp the personal consequences, the harder the clan as a whole is hit by the magical, political and resulting economical backlash, the harder it hits back at the individual. Divorce basically means exclusion from the clan she used to lead, bad relationship with her birth clan which must take responsibility for her in terms of weregeld (though probably covered by the amount of wealth she brought into the clan, although normally an equal amount would be married back to the other clan directly or through a chain ring of such weddings between the various inter-related clans of the tribe (given Darna's dislike for the Culbrea and Maboder marriages, there is a high likelihood that more than one Cinsina clan excepting the Dolutha might get involved in an ugly aftermath). If there is an eruption of evil magical energy brewing as the consequences of a foul deed, the normal reaction of the clan is to make the culprit the recipient of the worst of this impact. In mild cases, this leads to an involuntary initiation to Eurmal as the Scapegoat. In harsh cases, the individual becomes the focus of what the Orlanthi perceive as Chaos, and the object of a Chaos hunt by the local inter-clan Storm Bull community. In really bad cases, the individual turns into a named Chaos horror that is going to plague the clan for generations to come, though perhaps not quite on the level of King Brangbane. Maybe not. In such cases, the transformed individual is likely to suffer a series of bad ends and involuntary returns in ever worse shape and appearance, reinforced by curses that get added to the annual clan rites. There is a chance that in a corner of the consciousness of the transformed entity, remnants of the former person get to experience and watch the downward spiral in never quite numbing horror, with just enough sanity left to be drowned in self-loathing. Not that the individuals who have the bad luck to fall to such dark passions have an idea what they are facing at the time of the deed.

You know, I was arguing from an atomistic approach. Runic inheritance. LaMarckian rules. The tribal elemental magic works on such inheritance lines, but at times it appears as if a new Elemental Ruler overwrites the previous atom. Orlanth's maternal lineage plays a major role in his relationship to his half-siblings by his mother - Inora, Quivin, Tara/Velhara, and of course Yinkin. I guess you inadvertently activated the Strikethrough format offered in the online editor, either through a key combination or a key misinterpreted as some form of tag. Possible workaround if the formatting cannot be undone via the edit window: copy the entire text, paste it into an external editor as unformatted text, then paste it into the forum editor.

This depends strongly on how you define Illumination. The Fortunate Succession is full of illuminates rising up for their official recognition, and illuminate thought spread to Spol, Carmania and remained simmering in Dara Happa under various guises before the Red Goddess bundled it all up. The Lives of Sedenya has a list of her previous incarnations that was discussed here. And that's just Nysaloran school illumination, without looking into the Arkati twist of that, and the inheritance that the Malkioneranists took from the Arkati with that weird book that served as their entry path into the Theist world of myths which might have been Arkati, Nysalorean, or straight Gbaji. Then there are other paths to Enligthenment, like the various draconic approaches (Godunya's, Obduran's (which is also Ingolf's), Immanent Mastery) and the non-draconic eastern ones such as various Kralori sages preceding Daruda, the Teshnann Chal, the Vormaini inheritance of Imperial Vithela and the East Isles Venfornic, Perfect Stillness as an outgrowth of Nenduren's Stillness, and Mashunasan's Void. And Larn Hasamador? Oh, Nothing. There appears to be a Blue Moon path to mysticism, too, if you look at the Master of Tides in Maslo, some Melibian stuff, the Ingareens in light of Belintar's dismemberment, and the weird accord between Blue Moon assassins and the Mass Utuma that ended the EWF in 1042. And if you think that the Agimori escaped such nonsense, they were part of the Blue Moon Empire, and Garangordos' system is probably as tied to mysticism as Sheng Seleris's empire. True. Enlightenment blocks tribalism or general altruism, or at least delays it to be executed deliberately rather than instinctively (or as a result of social priming). That makes for bad commando units that basically are an artificial entanglement of the individual's existence with that of his squad members. On the other hand, it makes for excellent snipers or tunnel fighters. I do wonder whether an Illuminate can use passions (like the Storm Bull Rage) as easily as non-illuminates can. From Oddi's exchange with Paulis, he appears unable to tap into that rage any more. Whether that affects his ability to go berserk via divine magic is yet another question (and I'd think that it doesn't). On the other hand, Argrath on his path to deeper insights appears to be able to harness passions beyond the normal human measure - perhaps as a consequence of draconic insights. And whatever Sheng and his disciples did appears to thrive on passions, too. Arkat being a zealot in whichever new cult he joined may be tied to passions, too.

Voriof is as much or as little an earth god as are Varnaval, the Praxian Founders or Waha. (And look where the Good Shepherd is listed in Nomad Gods... good or goof job making your point, Joerg.) Barntar has mostly earth related feats, except for his dragon fighting inheritance of the Aroka myth. Voriof has herd related feats, which is Earth at least once removed. By ancestry, Orlanth is mostly an earth god, too. He has but one grandmother (Gata) and two grandfathers (Larnste and Aether, who himself is a child of Earth). That's five eighths Earth. Any children of his from Ernalda are going to be even more earth tribe, and bastards of his like Vinkgot are still around 50% Earth by ancestry.

No, that's the other Kilimanjaro. Seriously, we have two Devils in the monomyth - Kajabor and Wakboth. One is the embodiment of entropy, the other one adds moral evil out of its parents' spite. And the implosion of the Spike that released Kajabor occurred after the assault of Wakboth, which makes it very clear who left the lid open (AND "forgot" to flush). While nobody can tell for certain, I think that the morally evil one was able to one-up the merely entropic one in their direct confrontation (mapped in Uz Lore, both editions of Troll Pak) and ended up being available for the Block to crush it while the entropically but not morally evil one ended up in Hell acting as his own sperm in fathering Time in perfectly normal arachnoid manner, just like Arachne Solara is volunteering herself to be consumed by her child. Certain Tarantula mothers never get to see their near adult spawn. This of course opens debates among Gloranthan metaphysicists speculating about whether there is something new ripening while Glorantha goes down the entropy spiral, and speculating what that might be.

While I do admire the art of the complete books, when it comes to reference, I do prefer a more modular approach, too, with images and maps as additional info to the text or infographic. Your approach telling us we are welcome to create such personal copies - potentially "cut out" ones for re-ordering along our preferences - is quite generous in the current copyright rent collecting era. It only has the downside of being unable to share the work done in a legal way.

Basically any piece of iron that has undergone smithing or milling can be considered steel. Even a piece of de-carbonized iron gets re-carbonized when smithed in a charcoal or coke fire. Warning: three paragraphs of real world chemistry following. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> There is (quite hard to refine with pre-industrial methods) pure and soft iron, and then there is carbon steel, containing a certain amount of Cementite (Fe3C) crystallites, a metallic carbide significantly increasing hardness, which is the normal product of smelting iron with coal. As long as a piece of iron contains a small portion of carbon and has undergone a smithing (or milling) process, it is considered steel, an alloy. Carbon steel has up to 2.1 % carbon, which means up to 30% cementite crystallites. What may be confusing here is that the carbon doesn't come as an elemental form in the steel, but as an iron compound. Carbides come in three forms - covalently bound (e.g. silicon carbide, a popular abrasive for its hardness), metallic (as with iron and similar transition metals) and ionic (forming acetylene upon contact with water, like sodium carbide). Metallic carbides act like elemental metals or metal-metal compounds like e.g. the two phases of real world brass which have different Zn/Cu ratios. <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< Ok, science is over. I have no idea whether any of this has any meaningful application in Glorantha. We only know iron as ingots (a trade good, usually from Belskos in Seshnela) or as finished pieces produced by iron dwarves or Third Eye Blue smiths. The means of extracting iron from whichever mother stone (aka ore) is used may involve heat and coal, but not necessarily. It is at least as likely that the Mostali use magical energies in a process similar to electrolysis, separating out anything which is not Separation. We know from the Capstan illustration that they employ energy leads overseen by silver mostali to power magical processes, and there is a high likelihood that making iron is one of those processes. Third Eye Blue smiths might use a similar magic, possibly a variation of Tapping out the impurities. The smithing will usually still require coal for heating - whether charcoal or coke refined from rock coal (see the Caladra and Aurelion cult for data on rock coal). Heated pitch or tar might serve as a fuel with sufficient aeration, too, and let's not totally exclude using hot magma pools for heat quenching of smithed items. I don't expect there to be great amounts of iron dwarf skeletons available for smithing, unless the mostali breed a lot of them in excess and dismember them in rigorous elimination training. There is something scary about facing an army of magical smiths who wear the processed body parts of siblings they killed in training. If there are Mostali enclaves using this Growth method to access their iron, they will have highly damascened smithed bones to work with. But I seriously doubt that this method was employed in Belskan in Seshnela, or the God Learners would never have managed to conquer the place. Also, I don''t see Mostali trading away their highest quality goods. Occasionally lending them out, like Isidilian does, if they are very Openhandist. I do wonder what was the price of the swords, or when the Empire acquired them. Geography suggests they got there pre-Syndics Ban, post Bindle Wars, when Charg still was a known hazard barbarian-infested place like Brolia. Bbut that would mean that they either never saw action against Sheng in those disastrous battles kiling Takenegi (but then why are they a bodyguard unit), or that the legion had about Roman legion strength to begin with. Even if there was recruitment of sufficiently heroic warriors who went and returned a weapon conquered by one of Sheng's Lieutenants or otherwise favored recipient of this kind of plunder. Of course, Sheng lost in the end, and so a certain amount of lost swords might have been reclaimed early in the Fifth Wane, but then came the Night of Horrors, which left a battlefield one cannot plunder. That battle didn't feature the then current mask of the Emperor, though, so the legion may have been legitimately absent from that disaster. It might be possible to list the Lunar units in a table with battles and campaigns and the outcomes for the units, but that would probably be a project half the size of Martin's book. The price for the steel swords would probably have been several times their weight in moon rock, as I see little else the Empire could produce that the Nidan anti-Openhandists would value enough to part with that much iron, and hardly any way even the Crimson Bat could have created enough of a threat to force them to comply.

The use of "Iron Sword 17^2" did mean something completely different in Hero Wars, the first incarnation of Heroquest, however - a weird simulationist concept using "edges" in conflicts that had "action point transfer". Some of the older farts in the community will be prone to interprete this wrongly. Using the modulo/20 notation (adding 20 for each mastery) probably works well enough with people who can add and substract without using their toes, but in real life that ability is not the criterion for pulling a gaming group together.

That approach has the downside that there are no three-ring folders outside of the USA (and possibly Canada). Additional holes would have to be punched for European customers. WIth rather lengthy Mythos and History sections, an electronic "full version" of available cults and cult special spells would be easier to produce and to distribute. Signed pdfs would open up the content for newly purchased content (through updates rather than collecting from the pdfs, I assume).

The Devil did, which is why Magasta's Pool is uncovered. Last thing I heard about him was being crushed by the Block.