Joerg

The mainland and the nearest islands were part of the endless spruce forest that is Winterwood. While the aldryami evidently tolerate or even encourage Yggite lumber-cutting on those fringes, I am less certain that they would have encouraged permanent human settlements there, even if their main primary production was turned towards the seas. Winterwood is nothing like say the Gudbrandsdal forest. It is spruce forest, dense, dark, and a huge monoculture with little in the way of undergrowth or clearings. The Norwegian concept of "Forest" is closer to "open low tree savannah" than anything that has to do with Aldryami. The closest European equivalent might be Schwarzwald, but for the epic size. This kind of forest is quite hostile to any type of hoofed ungulates, and definitely not a habitat of reindeer. The storm-plagued rocky archipelago offshore might be a lot closer to the Vesteralen in landscape, but probably (once) with patches of denser forest, too. (Possibly no longer since the Ban fell. Yggite material culture is likely to rely on wood for most production, and with access to the mainland cut off by the Ban, they would have ravaged their own tree stands beyond recognition.) Goats are in the canon - woolly ones, at that, though producing a coarse wool. This is part of their Vadrudi heritage. But there may be semi-domesticated reindeer as secondary herds. If so, then introduced from the mainland around Winterwood, possibly in times when northern Loskalm was anything but solidly Malkioni. Yggites riding reindeer comes dangerously close to Hitchhiker's Guide Vogons riding their own quadrupeds... Diet-wise, the Inuit or Siberian coastal arctic people might be the much better influence, but with Winterwood unnaturally persisting right below the Glacier, theirs is (or used to be) a culture with access to lots of wood useful for all manner of daily life applications, unlike the wood-starved material culture of the Inuit. Bone-derived, really - the material is quite distinct from deer antlers, e.g. useful for harpoons (which deer antlers definitely aren't). But then, whalebone (or other smaller leviathans of the Neliomi and Hudaro) may offer similar qualities. Neolithic probably fits the Yggite native culture. I don't think that they have much of a native smithing culture, being rather dependant on trade for metal items, but may be quite familiar with non-metal material to substitute that. The remains of the battle at Tollense Crossing have a mix of metal and stone spear- and arrow-tips. On the matter of wood scarcity (in pre-red coat Scotland, too) our ideas differ completely. I tried to argue that with Jeff, repeatedly, but Greg's source and vision for Winterwood basically is the great, endless expanse of spruce forest between the bison plains and Alaska - the territory the Alaska Highway construction workers had to battle during WW2. Old World concepts of vegetation often don't quite apply to Glorantha, even though its agriculture is thoroughly Old World.

A fairly mixed bunch of Fronelan warriors is likely to have helped Harrek plunder Sog City and may have accompanied him to the archipelago and then further south, accounting for a lot of variety for ships under his direct command (rather than Yggites following along). That wool would have to be goat wool, and unlikely to be of Angora quality. I wouldn't emphasize the use of semi-domestic reindeer - the coastal Finns (Sami) were boat people rather than nomads. They had reindeer traps to capture herds on their annual wanderings to the coasts, but didn't follow the beasts into the highlands. If these Sami came by without too much reliance on reindeer (which were found only on the largest of the Lofoten and Vesteralen islands), the Yggites who don't have any magical connections to these beasts probably can make do largely without them. Especially after a crisis that made them eat children, I don't expect herds of reindeer to have survived the isolation, although Loskalmi settlers might have re-established some. Seals on the other hand are sort of maternal kin to the Yggites, which wouldn't keep them from hunting and slaughtering them and wearing their furs.

Or ransomed them back to their families where the families were affluent enough to do so. This continues to be a real world industry in connection to piracy. The Hjortspring boat doesn't use dowels to keep the planks together, but has them sewn together (with bast, another tree product often overlooked even though good bast has the same material properties as nylon). Ships built using this technology appear to have taken the rough sea more smoothly than the nailed variety, at least if King Sverre's laudatio for the sewn ships he received from the coastal "Finns" (Sami) was anything to go by. But then, he and his men may just have been happy to leave the long night of the northern Norwegian coast, even if the official line was something like "god var det i gammen" - we had a fine time in the earth hut. Considering the alternative - homeless in the Norwegian winter - that's basically believable. Not exactly. RQ3 still operated on a coin economy, distantly inheriting from Pavis, and more from Roman Empire (or West Rome successor state) sources. The confrontation between Vasana and the Wolf Pirates shows similar dress. Personally, I think this is taking the mediterranean Bronze Age theme way over the top. The feathered caps are nothing that a culture that experiences wet snow on a regular basis would consider wearing. The horned wicker helmets in the image below are cute, but service all the wrong Viking tropes. Partial and even complete nudity apparently was totally acceptable in Viking society when the summer caused temperatures otherwise only known from the sauna. If the Yggites share the Orlanthi immunity to wind chill, the amount of fur and clothing worn by them may be significantly closer to (uncanonical) Conanesque barbarian dress, too. I wonder if these feathered caps were inherited from the Vadeli who hired Yggite marines in droves, and probably equipped them, too. If the Wolf Pirate fleet depicted in Prince of Sartar has a tradition of Vadeli ships for mercenaries, I can make my peace with that. Or Alatan ship-building (the Three Step Isles don't have much of a ship-building tradition, but Alatan does).

Not lost, but hard to access and I can't be bothered to fix it at the time. Exactly. A treasure trove for this kind of conditions, really, even though it is Karolingian (or, in the region visited, very late Roman Iron Age). They also appear to be somewhat functional in parting the waves in a video I have seen. The replica I watched being built about 12 years ago gave the impression that those beams would take some impact way better than the sides, so they might be useful in ramming, too. Viking longships had limited ramming capability, too, but you had to be careful to target only very weak targets. IMO it is one of the last examples of the Atlantic wooden boats that prevailed throughout their Bronze Age and into the Roman Iron Age.

Already Umath laid the sources for a honorable barbarian society, with rules for hospitality (greeting Veskarthan as a stranger rather than as the half-brother the God Learner identifications would make him) etc. Vadrus was very much Umath's heir in this regard, the warrior king ruling through strength and intimidation. The Vadrudi raids were not exclusively for the fun of it, although that (possibly in a Kargan Tor measuring of strength style, as in Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros) may have been an important part for the participants. Getting lays as a reward through this means was nothing wrong to this bunch, which may somehow "explain" how their role in becoming the paternal ancestors of the merfolk tribes was not chaotic where Ragnaglar's rape of Thed was. There's always the culture of feasting, boasting, etc. All storm deities (with the exception of Humakt, at least after his role in wielding Death) started out as pastoralists. While there are a few carnivores associated with Storm gods (bears, alynxes, wolves), almost all kinds of herd mammals have some storm connection. (Possibly even some horses.) Hunting and fishing come with this, too. There will have been sisters (if not wives of equal standing) overseeing the food side of the equation, and possibly overseeing the booty wives and their work. Orlanth's sisters are mentioned for his Downland Migration from Dini, although they soon get overshadowed by the powerful wives picked up on the way (e.g. Orane, and finally Ernalda). Vadrus's sons may already have been softened by their mothers' influence. Other than Valind, none of them gets a recurring role in the Gods War soap opera, and (at least according to Orlanthi myth) Valind rose to prevalence among his brothers by showing his soft side to Orlanth at an opportune moment. Anaxial's Roster. Vadrus was the war leader of the Storm Tribe, and before Orlanth (and Ernalda) established kingship, the War Leader was the top guy. Some of that mentality will have survived in any Vadrudi-derived culture. Describing the Jonatings as similar to the Vadrudi strikes me as quite accurate.

Since the metals can be found as metals, a good portion of metal mining may be by washing river sand deposits downward of Godtime battles where shattered bones may have left nuggets. Seametal nuggets would be found analogous to amber - in coastal sand deposits. If you are going for the motherlodes inside the rocky remains of deities (some of them possibly alive), you could do worse than hire batches of trollkin for the initial access tunnels. Depending on the type of rock, certain tunneling maggot breeds might be applicable, too (my Blue Moon winged troll tribe in the game improvised by Greg used such for tunneling), worming their way in. Ores and pigments (often the same thing, really) might be associated with other body structures than bones. A mining survey of the Thogsarm Hills could be interesting.

I wonder how many of those references might be to the Grey Giants, a species of giants described briefly in the RQ3 Gloranthan Bestiary (possibly the most useful and inspiring Glorantha publication next to parts of the Genertela Box and Gods of Glorantha of the pre-renaissance RQ3 era).

The links I had in the past to my otherwise unlinked Glorantha articles on my domain sartar.de might still work, but I have trouble accessing it in a writing mode since malware contained in the content management system my provider had me download from them inserted a spam link list word press fake page into my drupal page, and then my provider blocked my domains glorantha.de (which ran that drupal system) and sartar.de (which had old, manually created HTML3 and 4 pages). I still haven't found the drive to restore that (and all the estimated 80 print pages worth of Glorantha introductory material in German language that I failed to back up). The most relevant pieces of old were printed in Tradetalk. In the more recent time, my productive comments on how I imagine the Yggites have been drowned out by my raging and ranting against the use of "Bronze Age" as Mediterranean and Fertile Crescent Bronze Age only (as that appears to be the only Bronze Age the Anglophone world is aware of). As much as I share the fascination with the Sea People who appeared at the onset of the Bronze Age Dark Ages, they and their ship types feel absolutely out of place in my perception of Glorantha. If I were to tackle an Yggite campaign now, I would start re-reading Ottar's report of his journey around the North Cape. Ottar would be re-cast as a third generation Loskalmi overlord on one of the southern Yggite islands, with a native mother and grandmother (thinking of the Arab presence on the East African coast) with very little of Loskalmi sophistication remaining in his domain, and all the weird encounters that he related to King Alfred would be material for the various Yggite clans and possibly "tribes" (not that they remain stable in any way) further up the Winterwood coast. The Hjortspring boat would be the model for most non-Wolf Pirate Yggite vessels, a genuine Bronze Age or possibly even Neolithic ship design if we can trust Scandinavian stone inscriptions, usable for whaling, seal hunting and warfare. I wouldn't use any Inuit influences at all. They too seem wrong to my impression of the Yggites. Their interactions with European and American whalers are quite different from what I think the Yggites would have offered, both before and after the Closing (and the added problem of the Ban). I briefly mentioned the Maori before as a possible second culture that has parallels with the Yggites. I am thinking of the period just after the Moas had gone extinct and the population explosion they had enabled was left with way too few resources, so the Maori had to take on some drastic changes to their previous life in plenty. This is possibly the best parallel other than the failed Viking colony in Greenland to what happened to the Yggites when the Closing fell on them, and then the Ban reduced their fishing and hunting grounds off the Winterwood proper, too.

All of my following answers are in my personal opinion, grown from the disclaimer in the previous post. The population numbers in the Guide show the 1621 numbers, as far as I am informed. The Wolf Pirates have three major colonies - off the Seshnelan coast, in the north of the Jrustelan archipelago, and on Three Step Islands. Given their coastal raiding, I have assumed that a good portion of those colony populations are coastal folk carried off to serve as their underlings, with the original Yggites making up between 30% and 70% of those colonies. "Half the people" may be a figure of speech, or apply to certain regions only. Harrek's migration away from the islands was only the third major wave, and reinforced the previous settlements on Three Step, Ginorth and possibly also Gothalos. Harrek built a new fleet after his sack of Sog City, with his flag ship sharing certain traits of Olav Tryggvason's Ormen Lange (that was lost in epic combat along with the king). He would have arrived from Sog with a motley fleet of captured vessels which would have been available to any somewhat less warlike Yggites willing to relocate along with the Wolf Pirate crews. The circumnavigation fleet would have had all of Harrek's new warships, built without much if any at all metal, and all of the warships that the previous captains of the Wolf Pirate fleet at Three Step had taken from Rightarm Islanders, Slontan fisherfolk, Handran merchants or freebooters, Quinpolic merchants or freebooters, elements from Alatan (Malta jumbled up?) and converts from vessels of more distant origin like Fonrit, Maslo or beyond Teshnos. I gave my range of estimates for the general population above. In the ranks of the Wolf Pirates, I would expect the number of converts to be somewhat higher, as it is "convert or die" when your ship is taken by wolf pirates (unless it happens at night while beached, which gives a small chance to flee to an interesting survival quest on the coastal lands). It strongly varies from ship to ship - there are freebooters who joined the Wolf Pirates with their entire crews. While a certain number of shipmates will have met the dark underseas in the meantime and have been replaced by the toughest survivors of the captured vessels, these ships may have quite a different architecture and structure than your mainstream wolf pirate vessel. Another major influence on my thoughts on the Three Step population is Hugh Cook's "The Warlord and the War Wolf", a tale about a very dishonorable group of survivors from their pirate culture, and a fun read. One of my favorite fantasy pirate novels, really. (A recent addition to that list is Joe Abercrombie's Half a King young adult trilogy which manages to keep some of the grim outlook of his The Blade Itself series. Some of Steven Erikson's Malazan novels give nice variations on fantasy pirates, too.) I think that Henry Morgan's pirate constitution inherited a lot from the Likendeeler of Baltic Sea and later North Sea notoriety, who in turn inherited Viking traditions that were continued by the Balts after the Viking Christianization and central kingdoms put an end to that source of piracy. On Three Step, I think that the Yggites take a similar approach to primary production (farming/gardening/herding/fishing) as the Elmali converts in Sun Dome County with their enslaved Kitori "Ergeshi" population. A lot of their work force will be Rightarm Islanders and Wenelian fisherfolk or coastal farming populations abducted from their homelands and not ransomed back. Like with the fighting arm of the Wolf Pirate "culture", I imagine that quite a few enslaved folk who had not had much better standing in their previous lives have taken the meritocratic oppression of the Yggites for themselves and begin to rise as far as non-fighters can in this society. Unlike Oasis folk, the Yggite farmers who don't sail on wolf pirate raids full time or who had to retire due to injuries dictate the methods, with few southern Genertelan influences taking hold among the Yggites. When they do, then possibly through the captive wives of retired or semi-active wolf pirates taken from the mainland or its archipelagos. Unlike the colonies where the former clans have lost most of their meanings, the people remaining on their native islands retain their old clan structures, IMO. Clans tend to be smaller than Heortling clans (again IMO), due to the harsher ways of living. (Again, I used my info on coastal Sami and Halogalander settlement sizes and structures to arrive at this idea. Another useful influence would be the Maori, I guess.) Possibly least classical Yggite on Three Step, with more remaining tradition on Ginorth and Gothalos. For Three Step, see above, and take a loan from Abercrombie's Named Men northmen society. Whichever work, plus their ancestral ones that keep defining who they are. Their Niiad ancestress - a cousin of Warera - probably gives them a range of coastal sea deities and spirits useful on any Genertelan coast, although not tha useful in dealing with the Kethaelan and Manirian Ludoch. The merfolk back at home (and on the shores of Brithos) are the Ouori, who have quite different temperaments. (The absence of Ludoch and prevalence of Ouori on Malkioni coasts makes me regard the mention of Warera and Waertag's wife as "Ludoch" mermaids as one of the potential blunders in the Guide.) Men of the Sea had the most official material touching the Wolf Pirates, very lightly. I think I asked Greg that, too. No, the Ygg Seastorm folk apparently had been part of his unwritten Argrath Saga before the publication of the RQ Vikings Box, but that (excellent) RQ3 supplement, the Land of Ninja box, their licensed reprint of Carse and the Sanctuary box have all been playtested or at least played in the Chaosium Glorantha campaigns. Given my Coastal Sami bias, I like to think that the Yggite sea vessels are sown, a technique well documented for the Hjortspring war canoe as well as for the vessels Norwegian Kong Sverre (of Birkebeiner fame) received from coastal Sami during the winters of his involuntary exile. According to "Bireme and Galley", my go-to source for ancient naval wargaming by FGU, ramming attacks into the hull from the side were a risky endeavor for the ramming ship, too, and most ramming tactics would be aimed at the rowers, or aim to entangle the rammed ship in a manner similar to the Roman Punic War invention of the Corvus. The Hjortspring boat extensions have been discussed as some sort of ram - no idea what the final conclusions were (if there are any). The Yggites are the only (surviving) humans who have traditional logging rights on the Winterwood fringes - possibly because they remain on their rocky islands off the coast which are unsuited for the type of spruce forest the Winterwood consists of. The WInterwood spruce forest right below the Glacier remains a pet peeve of mine, as I have spent quite a bit of time on the arctic tree line. It is a testament to the strength of Aldrya's magics that the forest there doesn't look like in Halogaland. Possibly similarly harsh stuff like the WIldlings in Game of Thrones or the Hendriki in the Double Tribute to the Kitori.

I have a history of making assumptions about the Yggites, some of which led to weird sidetracks like the great moose debate when I assumed that the Pralori elk (that was mentioned for the Winterwood fringes) was alces alces, the European elk, and not the wapiti. I was researching Ottar at the time, the Tromsø merchant who visited King Alfred the Great in time for his travelogue around the North Cape (and that of another trader named Wulfstan in the Baltic Sea) to be included in the Anglo-Saxon translation of the Orosius text, a Latin geography from 4th or 5th century Iberia which named numerous peoples far beyond the known people in the empire. Ottar described his home in the text and mentioned the semi-domesticated reindeer herds his agriculture relied upon. My own experience from living in Northern Norway was very fresh (I even returned there briefly in the middle of the debate), and I had researched a bit on the coastal Sami who had interacted with the Halogalanders like Ottar or the island/peninsula kings of Steigen and Skrova (off the Lofoten) closer to where I lived (in a village originally founded by coastal Sami, who had been forced to abandon their native ways and become good Christian Norsemen, only to be re-populated by Lule-Sami forced to a more sedentary way of life a few centuries later). These coastal Sami and their relationship with the Halogalander Viking overlords influenced my impression of the Ygglings (as I prefer to call them in my writings, enjoying the similarity to the Ynglings of Snorre Sturlason's Ynglingatal in the first portion of the Heimskringla). I had the chance to talk to Greg about this, and while my original assumptions went in a couple of different directions than his ideas, I think some of my first-hand experiences in the region did leave a slight impression on his views, too. I have since learned of Sandy Petersen's Yggite campaign through various posts of Guy Hoyle who related the fortunes and misfortunes of the party including his awakened Praxian herdman adoptee Fido Two Big Clubs to the island that had been decimated badly between the effects of the Ban on top of the Closing and then the conflict with the Loskalmi. Those notes are fine for amusement value, too - search the temppeli archives of the digests. Using the (extinct) coastal Sami culture as a guide to their material culture was mitigating the "Vadrudi" bullyboy approach a lot, at least for me. Enough of that remained, of course, for them to crew the wolf pirate fleet in droves, but then the Norse sagas are full of Finn crewmates with weird and often magical abilities. The description of the Yggites and Wolf Pirates in the Introduction to Glorantha book for Hero Wars is a good starting point.

That's just one of the many very real-world-like and for an entry-level researcher frustrating case of giving various different names to the same group of people - some based on ancestry, some on their place of living, some on their totemic enblems, some on historical events like their leader at first contact, or how their neighbors made fun of them. Orlmarth - Woodpeckers - Starfires, for instance, and that doesn't include any derogatives from the western side of the ridges.

It's a chaotic void in there, with gorp as digestive fluid. Little can go wrong - while the heads are serpentine, they limit the size of the bites a hydra can take, so I doubt that either monster was swallowed whole. They may very well be outside of its prey scheme, and might require pre-digestion by regurgitated gorp stuff.

I think of the human appearance of the Alkothi as a body modification...

Doesn't the Hydra roll for its appetite every time it is feeding? Randomness being indicative of its chaotic nature, yadda yadda... (Also, allying with Chaos would give you a minus 1 on all other rolls in the Corbett-rules-adapted Nomad Gods, and only Lunars can use chaos with impunity there.)

While this data might mean something to people used to imperial measurements, people who are used to SI units might find the translation into millimetres precipitation more useful: Furthest 870 Mirin‘s Cross 717 Alkoth 614 Glamour 410 Raibanth 358 Yuthuppa 461 Elz Ast 563 Hazard Fort 1024 Arcos Valley min 410 Arcos Valley max 512 Pentan Grasslands min 307 Pentan Grasslands max 358 That's a lot more humid than I had expected, really. Furthest is a bit wetter than the German coastal region, and Hazard Fort approaches rain coast conditions. With most of the precipitation seasonal (Storm Season providing the big monsoon), it does make dry farming of hillsides rather more of a challenge than it did say in North Africa.

One of the God Learner Secrets (capital S) was that they knew how to change myths. Not a secret from the public, really, but the know how was a secret that required you to join them. (No idea how they dealt with dissidents who left them - the most famous dissident, Halwal, used God Learner methods (but it isn't sure which brand) to support rebellions against the establishment of the Empire, leading to the liberation of Akem and Ralios from the God Learner state. A lot of access to the myths that once were there has been lost. The myths might still be there, and might be responsible for strange and largely unaccountable encounters in the hero plane that have been re-interpreted with actors from other myths or other cycles. As far as I understand Godtime, the same events happened again and again, or simultaneously in different places/contexts, leaving a lot of individual actors filling the same roles as others. The sun is no exception. The more universal a deity is becoming (or is regarded as such), the more strange other stuff may accumulate in its name. The Dragon Sun may be one such thing.

"Has alwas been" is a somewhat relative truth as people have the ability to enter the myths and re-interprete and in extreme cases even change them. Human understanding of a deity is bound to be limited, in Glorantha as much as in the real world. When we debate how things were in the Gods Age, we pretend we're able to undo the damage that has been done to the world (and its body of myth) by the Greater Darkness (if we accept the Gods War as the necessary feature of the direction the myths went, otherwise the damage the Gods War did to the Golden Age comes into this, too). There have always been individuals who took a step back and looked at greater connections beyond "I know what god you are talking about, we have this story" or an ad-hoc adoption of a neighbor's story with their own tools of description. Taking this step backwards and distancing oneself from the absolute trust in one's own network of truths may be necessary at times, but takes away the innocent complete trust, and starts the path to enlightenment. It is a form of a Green Age moment, really, a fundamental experience that cannot be undone. As much as any discussion here.

RuneQuest being RuneQuest, a set of bumbling incompetent spear-kin can get lucky and bypass the 150% parry of Rurik. People mentioned the "wall of whirling blade" defense like the eights of the axe, and what happens if the weapon makes a significant contact - breaking that wall of whirling blade for long enough to make parrying the next incoming attack a challenge, to say the least. Several bumbling incompetents in the 30% range should be a severe challenge to a mere 80% attacker/parryer in my book. The same character doubling his sword skill through magic (and that's a cap I would suggest for any single magical enhancement) would be slightly inconvenienced, little more, even if his third parry has a 20% chance of missing. I usually err on the side of opponents being intelligent and somewhat competent. Bumbling morons or demoralized food trollkin are a different issue, and one that I wouldn't really take to the attack/parry dice. Not even in simulationist mode in RuneQuest. Maybe it's because I have never shied away from on the fly calculations, but in RQ3 I knew the fractions of general hit points for a hit location, not the actual value until I needed it. RQG has taken that nice math from me, but if in the heat of action and away from my sources, I probably still will wing it using the RQ3 method and nobody the wiser. Opponents may have bruises and lesser injuries, too. If a character makes Swordplay the focus of his character, I think that giving him challenges to the Swordplay like dealing with coordinated attacks and using some maneuvering to avoid such disadvantages is more productive than letting him yawn through any kind of opposition in sword trance. But that's me. Your GMing style will be different.

Weird. At first sight I interpreted that figure as a horse woman and not as a dragon, but you're right, the nose and beak are more draconic than equine. OTOH the horse as celestial being did have these features.

It is a rather low quality paper promo edition that saw the light at Essen Spiel (or Kraken just before it) 2015 or 2016. While its low print run might make it a collector's item, a glossy edition is (or at least was) planned (when the webcomic still was alive - wait: it's not dead, it's sleeping).

It's still somewhat pertinent to this thread in showing that whatever we find out for Sun Dome Templars may not necessarily apply to Stonewall phalangists. This forum has a usable search function, too. But I agree a separate thread with the Lodril/Veskarthan discussion quoted might be a good idea.

Stupid comparison really. If you make a coordinated weapon-swinging drill, have some boken-swinging guys bellow their attacks. If course not. I see a staccato of attacks going down more or less at the same time. If a kendoka is facing a men, do and kote attack from three coordinated attackers, how many is he going to parry, and how? I am not talking about the well-orchestrated katas where two attackers come in in time for the primary participant to parry, but the other, nasty stuff. But yes, if I have a shield wall with disciplined hoplites, not even necessarily of uniform size and dexterity, I do expect the first few attacks to come out almost in unison, with the combatants in the line entranced by their marching drums and orders, all to avoid thinking about what crazy situation for life and limb they have entered. That's called drill, and such precision is what makes a professional hoplite unit cohesive. The short sword guys they are facing are likely to be ready to parry more or less in unison, too, though with a mixture of shield and sword action, then to riposte in a staccato met by the hoplites' shields. Both these rows are shoulder to shoulder, unable to dodge and damned to parry or rely on whatever meagre armor they are wearing where the opponent is hitting them. With overlapping shields, all the shield parry can do is move up or down a bit to counter one incoming strike - if two strikes are coming in on the same combatant, one high one low, one of them is going to hurt badly. In the rough and tumble of a melee, I usually have small clusters of combatants. When these are between fighters trained to coordinate with one another (e.g. an experienced adventuring party), such simultaneous attacks from different directions and targeting different locations (with all the stupid randomization of RQ on well-above-average to hit results), I will apply such penalties. In a way too realistic simulation, people would waste parries on feints, leaving openings for others. Coordinated strikes against overpowered combat monsters should be a staple of RuneQuest tactics. As per rules, a character engaged in combat can move a fraction of their movement allowance while fighting. That's the only option the crowded swordman has to dis-coordinate his attackers. While not disengaging, he can force an opponent or two to spend extra time on closing up again. One problem I see with using Sword Trance is that now you have a hammer all solutions will be hitting on nails or rocks, with no other combat option even being considered. The trance guy won't sidestep or close up much as long as he has something to hit with his sword. He would be limited to sword parries even if he had a shield to go with a one-handed sword. Berserk or even Fanaticism will cancel out much of the effect, not to the usual amount of guaranteed hits... As to how to overcome such an opponent - Demoralize or Befuddle for spirit magic solutions if you don't like Dispel, and if you are dealing with Shielded trance fighters, backed up by a handful of MP. Once a Humakti gets renowned for his nigh impenetrable sword-weaving while under the influence, duelists or other such glory seekers will seek to join the opposition to get a go at this character. Phil, you are giving a good impression of how the MPs present their Brexit positions in parliament right now - ludicrous binary choices between straw men alternatives. I find it about as helpful. I do think that coordinated simultaneous attacks are a valid tactic against parry monsters, and I do think that it has a place in small group melees. And in mythic fantasy, surely? It would have to be a divine/heroquested feat to do so - possibly in the repertoire of Tolat, the other Sword God that killed the Emperor. "Sticky blade" or something, or a variant of "Attract Missiles" applied to melee strikes. Surely not your run-of-the-mill magic, and not really something Humakt would do IMO/IMG. Other than with that hefty dose of visible magic, it would seriously damage my immersion and fun playing out that combat.

The Ten Sons and Workers (including at least two daughters) are primarily a riverine Dara Happan bunch of subcults, dedicated to various jobs in irrigation and river taming. I doubt that they are mentioned at all in Veskarthan's worship in Caladraland, and if they are known in riverine Esrolia and Porthomeka, their numbers and attributes will be as different as their names. As subcults one might initiate to, only the Veskarthan worshippers in Kethaela are interesting - the Pelorians (both dry farmers and irrigation farmers) don't usually initiate to any specific cults, although they do turn up as worshippers and offer sacrifices so that the few dedicated priests of these deities may bring the deity's magic to the worshippers.

While that is true, actions on the same strike rank are supposed to occur more or less simultaneously. Especially when wielding a two-handed sword, parrying two opponents at once with a single blade is something that works only in cheesy Hollywood flicks.

The spell is very powerful, but casting it in combat means you are prone for one or even two melee rounds, depending on the amount of MP you are going to invest. With enslaved spirits (or followers) refilling the MP matrices, the Humakti may be able to go to high levels of this spell even after casting some other MP-requiring magic (or keeping his personal MP up for purposes of spirit combat). While I asked the question in this context, I would apply it to other situations where multiple opponents attack simultaneously. Under RQ3, the swordsman would parry one attack while dodging the other, but that option seems to be off the table in RQG.