Joerg

I don't remember exactly how Greg put it, but he differentiated between that that can be known rationally and logically, which was the province of the mind, and that which cannot, which was part of the mystic "experience". I agree that the term "experience" for the mystic whatever is not completely correct as per the dictionary definition, but I don't know the jargon used by mystics to (fail to) communicate their mystical moments or journeys. Let me put it this way: the Kingdom of Logic and its inhabitants were unable to cope with the concept of the mystic east, and they had mastery over the Mind.

Doesn't that sort of apply to any victims of a Create Head spell?

Some info on the Kitori lead masks, spears and cloaks comes from History of the Heortling Peoples and Esrolia - Land of Ten Thousand Goddesses, with the additional term "Kimantoring" for the Nochet city militia available for missions away from the city that uses such gear, too. Wearing the lead mask and the cloak while wielding the spear is a low level of Only Old One heroforming, and might be interesting for that Argan Argar brother. The Shadow Tribute was an Equal Exchange that included martial service as well as emergency feeding, and the Kitori Shadowlords who collected the tribute and who provided martial protection in cases of trouble were always wearing these masks and cloaks, which obscured their current shape (human, troll, dehori). Carrying such a lead mask into Sun Dome County will create quite a bit of reaction among the Ergeshi slaves, and therefore also from the Yelmalian slave-owner overlords. Emissaries from Nochet can do little better to insult the count but bringing a bodyguard of a few Kimantorings in full regalia. There are no such spells in RQG (yet), but there might be some magics affecting all the fighters in a unit wearing these items. Possibly some Black Arkati sorcery makes use of this to identify the recipients of certain spells.

Provided that the mind is the seat of that mystical experience, which may not be the case.

This post deals with Alternative Truths rather than with Darius' varying own Glorantha (where all his points may be factual). That is a patently false claim. The truth is different: While the Closing lasts, no ship can make it past the horizon without being claimed by the Closing in some way, or escaping it heroically or through some neat magical trick like the Opening ceremony. The initial force of the Closing may have been more intense, but in the centuries since, there have been no invisible walls pushing ships ashore. If (and its a rather big if) the Waertagi made it in time to destroy Jrustela (and escape into Hell again, or perish with the Jrusteli?), then already a century after the Closing some suicidal sailing was possible again. Not true, never been stated anywhere in published material, contradicted fairly often in published material - e.g. Dormal's Third Journey in Men of the Seas, the journey of the Last Ship to Seshnela mentioned in Middle Sea Empire, and there are a number of other, unpublished stories from Greg during the Closing including Jonat's weird sea travel around 1040, and the potential involvement of a Waertagi fleet in the sinking of Jrustela. What gave you this strange idea of ships going under like lead zeppelins? All the rest of your observations on the Cradle are based on these two wrong assumptions (wrong anywhere outside of your and possibly other peoples' private Glorantha , that is), and might be worth some "what if" discussion, but I won't participate in that.

So you would be ok with an "Illusory Passage" spell? What I envision wouldn't exactly be the type of illusion usually employed by the Puppeteers or Eurmali. Instead it would apply to a weakened reality at the seams of the world, and would be pretty much powerless in pristine surviving spots from the Godtime. (In other words, the GM would have the "Ion Storm" or "Magnetic Deposits" defense against the Transporter Room.) Do it too often or too big in the same spot, and cracks in reality may become permanent.

Think of negative or overwhelming emotions you can get rid of for good.

Mainly the lack of a familiar and much of the ballast that went with that (having to go through a zoo of Otherworld beasties for becoming an adept, sacrificing permanent stats to it, yadda yadda). Gods without Godar was a small boxed text section about contacting the deity directly rather than through a cult. Basically a form of heroforming. IIRC they were from the RQ3 Glorantha Bestiary (the green booklet with the Morokanth metalworker on the cover). Jelmre can crystallize intense emotions, but lose the ability to have these emotions afterwards. The crystals in turn can activate such emotions, IIRC as one use items. In other words: weirdness galore.

The RQ3 Land of Ninja ki skill system, its mandala variant of RQ3 sorcery, and the RQ3 Vikings box Gods without Godar might be worth mentioning, too, as well as Jelmre crystals and similar exotic stuff.

Carried over from the Core Rules thread: Illusion can alter reality - create a wall where there was air. Can it create air where there was a wall? Can it push the previous reality aside for the temporary one (and let the non-temporary one snap back afterwards? Powerful dreams can mess up topology. An illusion might find a piece of border not occupied by that wall that wasn't there before, and won't be there afterwards. Given the nature of Glorantha as a patchwork reality, this latter maneuver might be quite valid. Reality isn't necessarily as continuous as mortals perceive it.

Does an Ignite spell (without suitable fuel) suffice? Would a multi-spelled barrage of Ignites suffice?

Will you still use the Upland Marsh setting for the next episode, or are you going to translate that to the Footprint? Replacing King Blackmor with a local leader won't be easy, either. Getting into the Woodpecker campaign might be easiest by marrying off a sister or two of the characters into the Orlmarth clan, and have the Feast occur when they are guesting with the in-laws, whether on occasion of the wedding, or on occasion of becoming uncles, or because one of the husbands has been selected to woo Ernalsulva, and your clan is rightfully concerned about the validity of the previous marriage. One or two replacement or additional characters could be Orlmarth, then. They might have to spend a temporary exile as weaponthanes of the Orlmarth. Given the previous experience of your characters, they'll be more likely to come as muscle rather than as diplomats. But maybe one of them has just become head of his family and has to learn to deal with stuff like that.

Whatever it is, for this specific subject line, necroing a thread feels strangely appropriate.

I would allow the fire elemental to engulf the weapon as soon as it impales. That would cause hit location damage to the impaled location and to the weapon hand(s) of the wielder, plus any hands that would grab the spear to pull it out. Limiting the engulfed area to the spear head would only do location damage, but wouldn't prevent the impaled person to pull it out. Basically, this seems to be an awful lot of POW down the drain for a bypass of "Fireblade doesn't impale" to "acts like a Fireblade on impales only," especially when normal hits don't have any bonus from the weapon. As far as I can observe, fire in Glorantha needs contact to two kinds of fuel - something combustible, and some form of air. The impaled bit lacks access to air (unless the lungs are impaled - in that case that person would breathe fire, if only briefly). "Inject fiery semen" might be an adequate (but probably un-publishable) Lodril spell, without any elementals involved. But then, a harmless spell name like "Cauterize Wound" might do the trick. No bleeding damage after removing the weapon after an impale, but heat damage while it is inside.

Speaking as a chemist with lab experience, "too hot to hold" means "I will rather take 2 points of heat damage to the hand than 2D6 acid damage from dropping this hot vessel.." There are also tricks around handling too hot items. Robert Bunsen famously held blobs of liquid lead in his hand by letting them move around, not staying long enough in one place to do any damage. You don't have to be Man-and-a-Half to be able to handle something too hot to handle. (And in case any of you who met me in real life might accuse me of sharing some of that ability due to my size, I am way too pale to fit into that niche, and I drink way too much tea to qualify.) All it takes to keep it from lighting everything is a clay jar that easily fits around the weapon. If this is limited to a single, signature party item, why not allow it. The Temple of the Wooden Sword set an example how heroic parties ignore limiting rules.

Another example of Glorantha not really being a Bronze Age world in the way that we understand it in the real world. Glorantha has paper, parchment, papyrus, clay tablets and so on. Far more than existed in the RW Bronze Age. That depends strongly on which kind of Bronze Age we are talking about. The Cuneiform belt with its Linear B outlier certainly was quite familiar with the written word, whereas e.g. the Golden Hat and Nebra Disk culture of Middle Europe used no written language but possibly some astronomical code. (Kalin decorated Dayzatar with such a golden hat in the Sourcebook, p.95, if you don't want to browse for museum web pages.) Literacy is fairly high in Orlanthi society, certainly better than in Karolingian, though maybe not quite as high as in high Merovinigian. The papyrus used by the Merovingian administration did not survive the climate, though, and Karolingian era parchment was way better preserved. Don't underestimate wood carving. We have quite a bit of apprentice level writings from Bergen carved into beech staves (indeed the German word for letter is "Buchstabe", derived from beech stave). Orlanthi wood carving is well established - their first leader Durev was carved from wood. (That makes all the Orlanthi the equivalent of Pinocchio's children and grandchildren. Maybe something the ducks could allude to when your party insults them mercilessly.) Depending on the importance and holyness, other material might be used, too, like sheet metal. "Don't decay" is an illusion, however. Maintaining a library is a constant battle against mold, vermin, and other forms of rot. Copying tattered volumes to keep the knowledge accessible probably is 80% of a Great Library's activity.

Atarks (a male version of Rashorana that got castrated by KaCharal, a Maker/Earthwalker father of Turos. I.e. another form of Gbaji.

Orlanth has a bunch of mythical excuses to use spears. Thunder, lightning, stuff wrestled from the Solars, even tridents. Getting mythical excuses for swords in pre-Carmanian Peloria is a lot harder, though. Sickles less so (there's a myth about that). Even the God of the Red Sword (Tolat, mainly known as Shargash, Shadzor or Jagrekriand in Peloria) wields a club, or a club and a spear in Pelorian depictions. Daxdarian traditions might have brought a stabbing sword along with the hoplite concept.Other than that and curved cavalry swords or sword sickles, the myths don't favor the sword.

Speaking as someone whose campaign was set just west of Backford, in Heortland you are left on your own. There is hardly any fan material to use, and even less official material beyond what you find in the Guide. I haven't seen any info on Volsaxi clans, a few mentions of Curtali, Bacofi and Sylangi clans in fan material, and nothing south of the Solthi River. My own invention, the Jaranings of the peninsula between the Solthi and Syphon estuaries, are highly uncanonical in detail, due to the age of that material. Out of Volsaxar, you will have first to decide whether your clan has a Hendriki tradition or whether it stems from one of the clans that used to be subject to the Foreigner Laws of early Second Age King Aventus, mentioned in History of the Heortling Peoples - which is a necessary resource to scrape together at least a little detail for your clan history. The verdict is still open whether clan and tribal size in Kethaelan Heortland is as small as it is in Sartar, or whether somewhat larger organisational units dominate the game. The four (over-) tribes of Heortland - Volsaxar, Jondalar, Gardufar and Esvular - would be called kingdoms in their own right in most other Orlanthi regions. Ancestor influence means that clans will maintain traditions from before the EWF, which may set them apart from the Hendriki (whose traditions dominate the clans and tribes of Sartar). If you have coastal clans, the tribe may actually be a mix of agricultural Orlanthi and quite Orlanthized Pelaskite clans with little dry land activities. Other than the descendants of the Hendriki, the clans of Heortland are quite used to paying tribute to rather distant kings and godkings, from the Kitori "equal exchange" which later became confused with Arkat's Command to the taxes collected by Belintar's governors, Rikard's nobles, or Fazzur's Tarshite administrators, and probably some tithing to the Ludoch of the Mirrorsea as well. Quite a bit of the Eleven Lights and the Colymar campaign is difficult to rip out of Sartar. On the plus side, you get to deal with Wolf Pirates, Scorpionfolk and other Chaos from the Footprint, and with funky leftovers from Belintar's three centuries of reign.

Basically, you give up one melee round for always acting first, and with an aimed blow, as that is what going last in the previous melee round means. Little different from spending the first melee round getting ready and magicked up, really. There is the issue with having to deal with all manner of attacks before that action, but that would be the same if you placed that action as the very first action of the next melee round. It really is a question of perception.

The Veldara cycle doesn't need any other moon color than blue to go through all those stages (except crone, she or her planetary body was killed/destroyed before it came to that). The different fathers do play a role in their inherited (and occasionally quite different) powers. The affinity to the waters is something that the Pelorian blue moon never quite mentions or achieves, but it is a core identity of Annilla (of troll and elder giant myths, and as known in the west) and Veldara (the Artmali are among the most successful sailor cultures in Glorantha). According to the sourcebook, Tolat doesn't share that heritage - son of the sun god and the goddess of night, conceived in the Underworld, while Annilla is the daughter of a sea god and a darkness goddess. The various moon myths defy the God Learner cycles of the world through the cycles of their own, which do intersect. Annilla as per Troll Gods is one of the main actresses in the war of dragon and giants, so deep in the mythic past that there are no elemental myths to match them. After her husband died/was maimed beyond recognition, she begat a dead child and took over its body, rising into the sky. That's where her myths fall into the Blue Moon pattern. Trying to match the earlier Annilla to any of the Pelorian pre-blue moon goddesses becomes very much a stretch. Verithurusa the Red Moon wanderer did mate with a huge male freshly arrived in the Underworld (as per Lives of Sedenya) as the arrival of Umath restarts the cyclical pattern of the heavens for a short time, until the Bad Emperor summons forth Shargash to stop Umath (Sourcebook). The Veldara Cycle is firmly placed in the Storm Age, but it has the entire cycle again, from Afidisa's innocence (very similar to what is hinted but never detailed about Verithurusa's wanderings) over Artmal's first empire with the demigod entombing himself for apotheosis (Sourcebook) or getting imprisoned by Storm opponents and Trickster, over Artmal's heirs who fit the Storm Age and Greater Darkness patterns while both their ancestor and ancestral goddess are dismembered by enemies, and a desperate and in the end ruinous alliance with Chaos.

I would say the Devil obviously wasn't Zistor, since Zistor was beaten 133 years before the end of the Age. For comparison, the Bright Empire lasted only 75 years. And Zistor wasn't exactly born. It was revealed. It wasn't the birth of Nysalor that produced the break of the Compromise, but Palangio manifesting Daysenerus in the Battle of Night and Day. The uz manifesting the Black Eater in response were as Compromise breaking, but hey, can it be broken twice in a single battle? The same reasoning applies to Renvald manifesting Orlanth in reaction to the revelation of Zistor. No, Nysalor was a perfectly valid demigod birth/rebirth, all within the rules of the Compromise, as if orchestrated by a lawyer. The Devil moment of the Gbaji Wars probably was Arkat and Nysalor manifesting their Chaos Monster aspects at the final battle, something enabled by Harmast's Lightbringer's Quest. Their battle must have been an re-enactment of the big slug-out Kajabor had with Wakboth, which left Wakboth remaining in Prax to be hit by the Block and Kajabor roaming Hell to be caught in Arachne Solara's Web. The survivor at the Battle of the City of Miracles somehow managed to transfer all the Chaos into the curse laid on the land of Dorastor and return mostly un-bedeviled to Ralios. We have no idea what exactly went on on Jrustela, other than that there was some naval or maritime assault or action ("damn the torpedoes", although reading up on the origin of that phrase attributed to Admiral Farragut at the Battle of Mobile Bay, it may have quite a different meaning than I originally assumed, referring to naval mines in the way the ships would be taking, and not incoming ammunition). It is more than possible that a conflict similar to that between Halwal and Yomili caused another magical implosion. Jrustela isn't glowing in the night (any more), but if that conflict was naval, some place under the water might. The Luatha faced only token resistance in Seshnela, but they may have faced much worse out at their island, with their rite in Seshnela a desperate magic to support their real fight. I would still like to blame an Orlanthi alive in the late phase of the Second Age, but all draconic leaders had undergone utuma in 1042, and while a Hendriki king died heroically failing to defend against the allied Carmanian - Dara Happan - (Dog) Sairdite raiders, I see little potential there for a devil release. Post-Halwal Ralios doesn't offer that good a cataclysmic battle or struggle, either, and same for Fronela (unless Jonat did something a lot bigger than I know of). That leaves Umathela or Slontos. But then, maybe this lack of such an Orlanthi made that devil comeback mostly a non-event.

On a tangent - could said Thanatari steal dragon magic earned as a reward for a bachelorhood of faithful service to a newtling?

Nick Brooke's Game Report of his run of Gaumata's Vision also had YOY at some stage...

Unit traditions and such may outlast short religious fads decided by wizards. Being close to Ralios (especially Holut with its Galvosti variation on Hrestolism) and Fornoar offers areas of retreat, being close to Kustria offers wizard-disapproved outlets for Adventurism. Having left in time to escape official wizard scrutiny probably helps, too. If you want to have sorcerer knights, any form of Hrestolism will be preferable to Rokarism. In Mularik's case, I would make a case for closet Galvosti Hrestolism for his men if they are from Rindland. If Mularik assembled his unit after he had to leave home, all options are available, including inheriting a sizeable contingent of Sir Narib's Pithdarans.