Joerg

Apart from their Mycenean equipment, my first impression was dark-skinned Polynesians or Indians. The guy in the back on the left has almost Mongolian features. Their skin color is similar to that of Beat Pot or his allies in Prince of Sartar, or the Dara Happan generals visited by Jar-eel. I agree about paler skinned Pelorians, but from the hair style etc. in Prince of Sartar, those appear to stem from western Peloria rather than Dara Happa - the region which is home to the Eel-Ariash.

We might reasonably say that Lhankor Mhy is more Aristotle than Plato or similar. But jumping from that to 'so, it's irrational' is wildly anachronistic. And, FWIW, I don't think it is very representative of LM either, as LM obviously is interested in sorcery, alchemy, and investigation of the true nature of things. I think LM knows both, to the extent that Heortling law works that way. But if we had to choose between the two, that LM lawspeakers literally recite the exact terms of the law before each moot would tend to indicate that they know them. After half a week of absence, I find the thread on RQ sorcery closed before I had the chance to reply to David Cake's well-written reply to my rather flippant claims on Lhankor Mhy learning vs. Malkioni reasoning. Note that the bearded guy is among my favorite cults as a player, offering plenty of attitude and some snobbery. Not so much in the role of a lawspeaker but in the role of the cartographer (rather than pathfinder) of the Otherworlds. His temple-libraries are magpies' hoards of snippets of knowledge. Possibly comparable to the 19th century antiquity/colonial exotica collections (real and imitation) of the well-to-do white men, and what their catalogers could make of them. We do know about some of the specialties of the Great Libraries - including one priding itself on its oral tradition "collection". You are not distinguishing between command and control, maybe? Esrolia and Dara Happa have centralised command, but they exercise command over a broad collection of independent authorities, who have their own privileges usually enabling them to control their own internal organisation. They can't, for example, demand the Granite Phalanx retrain as peltasts. I specifically think the Talars can order the zzaburi to help them defend against a threat, or even join them in a way, but I don't think the Talars can, for example, demand all the Debaldan school switch to learning Furlandan magic, no matter how terrifically handy it would be. If that is what you understand by control, then no, no historical realm prior to the spread of "socialist" autocracies had this power. There is no 100% successful conversion of a population to a different cult or sect. Rokarism and New Idealist Hrestolism may come close, but there are strong old-Hrestoli sentiments in Seshnela, and weird non-conformist traditions in Loskalm. A wise ruler will only issue irrational commands in order to exact punishment upon non-fulfillment of said command, like in the case of the Shadowlord Krengen Bik did (HotHP p.72). Any bureaucracy comes with a huge dose of "Yes, Minister". Military logistics always calculates some "living off the land" into their calculations. As long as the units don't start slaughtering their mounts or fellow soldiers for food, everything is within parameters. Of course there is rather little the Talars can do to influence the curriculum of a sorcerous order, except sponsoring a new one with a curriculum after their wishes or needs. Outside of Loskalm, they have no real understanding of what is going on in sorcerers' education. Inside Loskalm, they will tend to be too tied up in their own upbringing to envision much of a new way (and the same goes for leading sorcerers in the schools anywhere). The God Learners had not one dubious, in hind sight heretical or unwise, idea, but multiple. Calling down Tanian's Fire was of course tampering with powers beyond their control and resulted in the Firebergs as fallout, but the destruction of the Vralos forest pretty much was within the expected parameters. Zzabur's great magics had greater adversary side effects and yet are claimed as necessities, so we may be over-critical when looking at the Jrusteli schools. As a rule, any big enough magic performed in Glorantha will create an adversary effect that will haunt the originators (or their descendants). Tampering with the structures and protagonists of the myths defining their world was clearly the Malkioneranist branch of God-Learnerism. The Makanist Hrestoli still suffered from Adventurism, but lacked the places to expand into after their Six-Legged Empire had failed and the seas closed. Dealing with pagan deities from an equal or even superior position is what sorcerers do. It works excellently as long as the enemy doesn't do anything unexpected. Which they will be trying very hard to do. Specific Runic Protection is particularly fragile - it relies strongly on having a very good idea of your enemies magical resources, so one bunch of unexpected allies can be devastating. While that is true, it goes in the other direction as well. There are ancient enemies of the Orlanthi which made their deity look bad, or at least required him to take a great detour. Summoning Daga in the middle of a battle should stifle much of the Orlanthi magics, manifesting Tarumath would be devastating. The magic of standards and their totems is well known to the armies of Seshnela and possibly also Loskalm. The resistance of the units to the wyter-spirits in Dragon Pass may derive from the regimental cohesion magic in these standards in non-Orlanthi (non-wytered) units. The Dara Happan priests were close enough for Harrek to wade right through them at Pennel Ford, which might limit the "long range" aspect of wyter warfare a bit. Part of buffing the troops is buffing magical defences, so these sorcerers may not be quite that "useless". And they may serve by lending power to the spells of their better adapted colleagues. Yes, and it all depends. The sorcerers are likely to have defences up against spirits and deities attacking them - that's expected behaviour of the enemy, and as standard procedure as providing a wooden palisade for a post-Marian Roman field camp. Sure. It still beats the Leroy Jenkins attitude you can expect from an Orlanthi army.

The Flood saw much of Aldrya's Forest drowned, and it took intervention by Orlanth to return those lands to the forest. That's what they were harvesting the material for, I suppose. All of them, to both. These are myths, and as such may be interpreted in many a way, sometimes with identifications that make little or no sense to our pre-conceptions. From the context, these are "lost in the Gods War" episodes, and nice ones, too. Third Eye Blue: I like the influence of the Mycenean style heavy bronze plate armor in this picture. Dark skin, I agree. African features I fail to see. The rather straight hair style for instance is found everywhere but in Africa. Their skin tone is that of the original Dromali of the West, the workers and makers. They do appear to be quite tall for westerners, though (through a trick of perspective). Vadeli are known to have overthrown the Kachisti when the Nidan Mountains "erupted" (in collusion with the dwarves there, not as in volcanic eruption, but more like quickly shooting up through great tremors, cutting the Kachistil lands in two). Kadeniti were the architects and makers among the ancient tribes of Danmalastan, who weren't known for any migrations than fleeing the expanding Vadeli empire of Endernef (or succumbing to it). Yet their skill sets spread to all the Malkioni peoples, and may have resulted in these self-proclaimed part time sorcerer crafters. (Them being warriors too is of course another aberration to the Malkioni ways, that profession was held by the red-skinned Horali.) Dara Happans and Theyalans are what US "racial" norms would call "brown skinned" or "olive skinned" by a majority. There are pale groups among them, but those would be remarkable for their tone of skin. I would place these majority central Genertelans on the darker end of the Eurasian spectrum. Definitely no southerners. I think that a Kachisti origin is quite likely. If some Kachisti group managed to evade enslavement by the Vadeli uprising, they would have inherited an enmity to the dwarves who facilitated that uprising by destroying their empire, and would seek to get back at those interfering short nuisances where it hurts them most - in their magical secrets.

I don't recall seeing this anywhere in a Chaosium/Issaries Inc. source, or any printed fan material. That said, when Vadel approached the Mostali of Magnetic Mountain for assistance in dealing with the spirits of the south, they had the Iron Energy Prison ready for him to use (or possibly field-test). There may have been shackles to apply to a fallen dragon, too. Dragons in the west are at times underwhelming, like the "ease" with which Waertag and his descendants make use of Sea Dragons for their naval equipment. There is a possibility that there was some trade between Waertagi dragonmasters and Mostali, so I think that there is a fair chance for something like this. I am less sure about Mostal still having agency when this may have occurred - Mostal was crippled when Umath ripped the sky dome off its rest on the Spike. A cabal of ancient Mostali - sure.

Lhankor Mhy is rote learning - like knowing all the dates of history, but having no idea how those events are linked, being able to name every single bone in a human body but having no idea about how they interact in force distribution, etc. Knowing all the precendences in a legal conflict, as opposed to knowing the exact terms of a law regulating such exchanges. I had the impression that centralized control is the defining feature of the Bronze Age high culture, like e.g. the lords of Glauberg or Heuneburg, the (Alpine-born) master of Stonehenge and similar. Pretty much everything Dara Happa stands for, and also the Grandmothers of Esrolia. First and foremost they learned about the Invisible God, and most of the God Learner era Malkioni stuck to those principles, with only a variant minority doing the (in hindsight blasphemous) subversion of deities. The fires that destroyed most of the Vralos forest have nothing to do with Malkioneranism but all with driving sorcery to new perfections shown by the Abiding Book. Burning two points of rune magic (Extension, Bless Champion) for each spell meant to last him through the battle? The theist gets the option to switch briefly to spell casting in the middle of battle, but only with personal magic. The sorcerous soldier goes into the battle with specific runic protection to avoid that kind of harm.

No, I think that there is a difference between All-Knowing Lhankor Mhy and All-Deducting Zzabur. Lhankor Mhy keeps collecting even meaningless trivia, whereas Zzabur regards everything and everyone as instances of parent phenomena and doesn't care much about individual differences. Does the Kaelith (i.e. hero with backdoor from Hell or major resurrectee) necessitate discorporation? And even when discorporating by means of spells, this doesn't convey the shamanic dual presence which is IMO the crucial element in being able to capture spirits in the Fetch, and other such abilities. Basically, it looks like they are using sorcery or shamanism when they really work in the Lunar Glamour, a state of superimposed Lunar reality on the Surface World reality. This Madness is reacting to stimuli and experiences unavailable to other people (as I recently had the difficult opportunity to find out in the real world with a tenant). When the observable facts and the personal experience differ and personal experiences override facts, you find yourself in a denial of reality. I am not even sure that each warlock needs to know such a combination. Each might provide their trick pony to the group awareness (the wyter), and have the group awareness act through the individual. A different sort of madness, maybe, and definitely a different form of enlightenment.

It specifies the effect beyond this rather general combination of tech(s) and rune(s). Depends pretty much on how you calculate potency. Some strength 1 spells are pretty good deals, and they last significantly longer than spirit spells. A strength 1 Neutralize Magic will protect you against half the disrupts thrown at you, and won't dissipate when overcome. A strength 1 Neutralize Rune will give you an additional saving throw against that rune's magic - still a 25% chance of success vs. a Thunderbolt or a Sunspear, or a Sever Spirit, which is a lot better than getting none. Finger of Fire is a remote melee attack quite similar to Firearrow, and lasts for up to five minutes (25 melee rounds). Boon of Kargan Tor offers 1D3 magical damage bonus for the strength 1 spell, for five minutes- not too shabby, really. Against leather armor, a strength 1 Neutralize Armor has a very good chance to bypass that armor, corresponding to another +2 damage. Conflagration as the sorcerous Ignite may be slower, but can be maintained for a while, can cause 1D3 damage a round to a person until that person moves away from the point where the fire has been called (which can be quite a while... I wonder whether a Conflagration cast on a saddle will remain stationary or move with that saddle, but either way it will create a hot seat that may persuade a rider to dismount and a steed to buckle. Create <sensation>, the sorcerous illusion spells, duplicate rune magic effects at low cost, and are the envy of every Eurmali even at strength 1. Cast Disappear on your spirit bound into a small beast (e.g. a Vrok Hawk you cannot ride) and you can do all kinds of sneaky stuff. Attract Magic is quite potent at strength 1. Attract missiles at strength 1 requires a veritable hail of missiles to be effective, but set up several such alternate targets and any missile gets to roll lots of dice to check for deviations. Since you can apparently choose unarmored locations, this may be nastier than expected. Attract Spirits at strength 1 is likewise a lottery strategy, but can be quite decisive in the later stages of a spirit combat. Other spells at strength 1 require some situational prerequisites to be interesting. Animate Dead can turn a normal person moving a head into an apparent Thanatari, can cause trophies on the wall or on the belt to move and possibly attack folk, etc. - quite the thing to distract a terrifying Death Lord hung with trophy skulls or similar. Carapace armor might be undone, etc. Preserve Item at strength 1 is a wonderful spell to make fragile or water-susceptible items survive such ordeals. Many a scroll has been saved that way. And many a prank has created non-writing pens or stain-proofed parchments in the scriptoria. In all fairness, you have to compare strength 1 sorcery spells with the 1 point battle magic spells in case of variable spells. Spirit magic is more quickly released than a sorcery spell, but lasts less than half as long (10 melee rounds rather than 25). The MP cost is generally higher. The weirdest thing about sorcery is that the spells act as magical entities which interact with their environments - often it is no longer the sorcerer himself but instead the spell strength which contests with whatever it comes in contact with. The Resistance Table is almost overused when having sorcery confront other magic. In this, they are quite similar to cults. Except for a few everyman cults, most cults are quite limited in the magics they offer, too. They still need to have mastered the runes, or at least implied runes, and techniques (less of a problem for most sorcerers). Lhankor Mhy libraries - at least the restricted access sections - have a good chance to provide such sources. To me the absence of grimoires is the most jarring difference, but then the Torvald Scrolls are the only grimoire really covered by the RQG rules so far. HQGs equivalent of Inscription might be the breakout abilities from the grimoire. HQG stretches would be the equivalent of improvising a spell using rune and tech mastery in RQG, which is verboten. Agreed. In HQ1, you had to be a devotee to use a magical ability as an active ability (i.e. casting a spell) rather than just augment some other ability (like Sword Combat through Bladesharp).

There might be a few Uzuz demigoddesses who could approach something like this, but that's about it. Lunar magicians may have glamours similar to that, but such combinations would be rare (and madness-inducing), too. Basically you need a split personality, one with the magical organ developed in the shamanic ways and the other in the sorcerous rigors. Try getting three scholars to agree on a single topic, you will end up with four or more opinions. Rational thought isn't really what Lhankor Mhy is about. This is the deity who hogs all knowledge, of whichever kind, for whichever purpose. If it can be known, the deity knows it. However, spirit magic isn't something you know, but something you have, much like other magical tools. It is quite ironic that the sorcerer inscribing magic to items is reducing his own speciality to this "something you have" level. Even though this is only usable by himself, the sorcerer objectifies and materializes the brilliant realm of pure thought into something almost profanely material. Do they? It looks a bit like Western magic aids pursuits reminiscent of Japanese calligraphy or other such ritualized formerly mundane activities, a lot of preparation, a very short release of activity at a maximum of concentration and involvement, and a masterful work is delivered. Apart from the magical healing (and the slightly flawed repair spell), the effects of spirit magic are fleeting, gone faster than you can hold your breath. A western sorcerer will have a retinue of assistants doing menial tasks for him, with some student-level assistants doing menial sorcery for them. One-trick-pony magical assistants may be called in for preparations. Having your mnenonic enhancer (a subservient sorcerer specialized on providing you with Enhance INT) probably is a mark of status. When attempting to dominate an entity, you have your students cast Drain Soul on the subject, giving them the opportunity to flex their magical muscle and saving you quite a lot of spell intensity to succeed. It may be a one man show, but that one man will have a whole staff of folk paving the way. Having some exotic or barbarian magician at your beck is part of this style. Perhaps the combination of spirit magic and sorcery can be compared to the skills of a gunslinger (fast draw and shot from the hip) vs those of a sniper (able to eliminate the influences of wind etc. to make well prepared shots at near impossible ranges). While the skill sets aren't mutually exclusive, training the one muscle memory will distract from the other.

Give it a few points of POW for inscription, and the Free INT limit becomes a nuisance rather than a hindrance. You will have to cast the spell with a base intensity of nine (for the 2W6) or something like that, but then you can decide on how long you want it to last even with an INT 15 sorcerer. It doesn't have to be that high strength if you add a Neutralize Armor spell of similar strength to the same weapon. Having sorcerers on your side can make The Arming of Orlanth (or some other deity of choice) turn out quite overpowering. In the military, you would expect a squad to pool up magic points for a week or so, with one member getting such a spell per day. All it takes for something like that are two good or three average dead crystals and a sorcerer willing to spend an hour a day on this, possibly syphoning off a few surplus MP from those crystals of his for other purposes. Likewise, magicians bodyguards will most likely contribute a few magic points a day as per contract, receiving magical protection on their job in exchange for that. It doesn't have to be blood magic (as in Trudy Cavanaugh's trilogy) if volunteers can fill a medium to pass on to the magician, although some blood letting might heighten the input of the volunteers.

That's quite a high tower rather than a howda, and even with those chains to the throat and under the tail I don't think that it will be very stable. More a mobile siege tower than an armored skirmisher platform, with the Thunderbeast serving as the ram against non-stone fortifications. I think that the ancient Dara Happan version (possibly on a different type of saurian, e.g. Stegosaurus?) had a lower outer gallery for archers and a high central podium for the sun priests, a mobile ziggurat.

Larnstings are mystics (though not conventional Nysalorean illuminates) and/or heroquesters, and these change feats are a consequence of their weird mystical/hero-power. They appear and disappear in history, apparently appear through inspiration, and disappear when no longer needed. (The powers appear and disappear, not necessarily the wielders of these powers, who live out their lives to whichever end they reach.) They appear to have a mobility requirement, being physically unable to remain in one place for long (I wonder what weird Mostali tricks Sartar had included in the Royal Palace so that he could spend time in there on the move without leaving Boldhome). Hendrik of the former Garanvuli appears to have been the first person inspired in the Larnsting ways, and he uses that to spread liberty to his folk hiding in the forests of eastern Kethaela, never being conquered by the Bright Empire. His tribe, the Hendriki, start out as at best semi-sedentary farmers moving from plot to plot, probably part of his magic to keep them hidden. Hendrik's successors moderate the consequences of the Gbaji Wars for about a century, then the Larnsting powers disappear. Aventus for instance creates the foreigner laws which define the royal tribute in addition to the shadow tribute that goes to the Kingdom of Night. There appears to be some conflict between the heirs of Arkat's powers and the Larnstings, but the brunt of that conflict is with the Kerofinelan tribes. By the time of the Tax Slaughter the Larnstings have disappeared, and they don't have much of a hand in the shaping of Orlanthland and later the EWF. The spirit of liberty that makes Kethaelan Heortland such an indomitable and often unruly place is finally chained by Belintar, but that appears to release the Larnsting powers anew. It is possible that Belintar did this knowingly, and that his altered Andrin (and his successors) may have had some access to the Larnsting ways, but at the same time some old style Larnstings appeared (possibly from the ranks of Belintar's or his governors' henchmen), and among these Sartar, the only known Larnsting to have been able to leave Hendrikiland. Sartar has at least two powerful transmutations among his feats - assassins to termites (which then get eaten by woodpeckers), and a powerful curse into a calm breeze carrying a sweet song. Making his presumably Jajalaring associate Ostling into a four-wolf Telmori chief is another such feat, but this was a lot less public magic. None of Sartar's heirs inherited this Larnsting magic until the Dragonrise. It is unclear whether Kallyr or Argrath have some minor access to this.

If you approach heroquesting rewards from what we know of high level heroquesters, there are a few known ones: - avoiding aging - backdoor from the Court of the Dead (aka self-resurrection) - individual feats like Hofstaring's Tree-Leaping, Delecti's mass zombiefication, Cragspider's Pillar of Fire, Belintar's Land Raising, Sartar's Change of Nature That might speed up skill learning quite a bit. Personally, I wouldn't let situational modifiers like fighting downwards influence the ease of experience rolls, whether as a flat deduction (or bonus) or whether as a fraction (or low multiple) of the skill.

Yes, but for no good reason. It is a rule for the sake of having rules. Not quite. The old doctrine of HQ1 advocated a strict separation between the sorcery world and the spirit world. There, the old concept of "this world magic" existed, though only in the shape of augments, not feats, i.e. not as an active ability. In other words, "this world magic" is reflected by using your runes or your passions to hype you up and gain a bonus to your activities. @Darius West - your RQG will obviously vary. If you want Shaman-Sorcerers, go ahead, and why not give them RuneQuest Sight, too. In D&D terms, you want to have MUs with Cleric magic. RQG does allow the mixing of magics, but at a penalty, as per RAW. It is your game, so feel free to ignore those penalties. It is also your Glorantha to play with, which again gives you all the freedom to play as you want, and do with the background whatever you want. In the Glorantha I know, there is a proven way for sorcerers to get spirit magic done - they dominate a conquered spirit (or deity) knowing the spell to cast that spell, then put it back into its temporary domicil. Ruleswise, I wonder whether a dominated spirit with the job "hang around me until I tell you to get active, then hang around again" would count against the CHA limit of spirits under the character's control.

Those were sent by your rival priest to pester your underling.

Only as long as the bound spirit was a spirit associated with your cult. Which has really odd side effects if a player character collects agents of reprisal as magic point batteries... which is bound to happen somewhere. (Mind you, they could have been targeting a no-good initiate comrade of his, while he himself remains rather virtuous.)

If I was concerned more about cramming in more runes than about saving MP, I would go for Command or Tap as my main technique, which implies every other technique there is. Which keeps bringing me back to the issue of ecologically viable Tap spells, as far as the sorcerer and his culture are concerned. If Tapping some ubiquitious elemental source is acceptable or even desirable, you would want to make Tap your go-to technique for cheap access to MP, and then use those MP to overpay all your other spells. And in turn, if you come from a culture opposing this targeting (like being Orlanthi next to the Galvosti), the image of the evil sorcerer is easily spread.

The old POW gain trap that never worked even moderately well in my old RQ3 game. I do wonder whether sorcerers should have a way to manipulate their spells so that overcoming a target's POW is made easier. In the past, having tapped a nice pool of extra Magic Points was a surefire way to crush target resistance. Drain Soul looks like the ideal preparatory spell for a follow-up with Dominate spells and looks to be a spell offering a POW vs. POW contest. I would expect spells like Tap Body also to require a victory in the POW vs. POW roll.

As soon as the duration ends, the extra rune/technique will still reduce the amount of Free INT available. The RQG rules allow 9 points of manipulation once you have learned your INT limit (INT above 9). If you overextend yourself using Enhance INT, that drops to 8 or less, before you deduct Free INT for known (and memorized) spells. Basically, this is a way for a sorcerer to cripple his manipulation limit for good, so why forbid it? The sorcerer can still use inscribed magic to have some manipulation available. Welcome to the POW dump.

Depends on how you define Malkioni orthodoxy. Pacts with spirits are pretty much the norm for Rokari Horali. The ancient Malkioni made pacts with spirits and goddesses, too, e.g. married them to sire the various tribes. At the Dawn, the Brithini were willing to make deals with the land goddesses of both Brithos and Seshnela. Approaching spirits and other supernaturals as anything but superior entities probably is in keeping with sorcerous traditions. I found that there are various approaches for optimizing a sorcerer. You can create a few tricks monster spending the minimum amount of MP by having the exactly right runes for their spells. You can try and create a sorcerer who can learn almost any spell he wants with just one technique (Command or Tap), two elements. up to four powers and just enough forms to be able to target whatever he expects to encounter, but paying multiples of the spell cost. Such a sorcerer could create all manner of phantoms, for instance. If your sorcerer comes from a school that allows some limited form of Tapping, magic points are not much of a problem - you tap them, and then you use them up before they dissipate. There is no upper limit other than the time limit to how many MP you can have from Tapping, and you needn't bother with binding spirits. You can store the tapped MP in crystals or enchantments if you don't have any immediate use for them. (In Wheel of Time terms this sort of Tapping was called "grasping the Source".) The verdict still is open whether tapping huge localities or elements like the storm or a river does permanent damage to that entity or whether the amounts lost there are re-created in a sustainable way. The sorcerers of the brass citadel in Sog City tap the hell out of the volcano god they are plugging with their settlement, and no significant loss in heat intensity has been observed in their lifetimes. What can a sorcerer do with ley lines? Can sorcerers tap the Dragonewt roads? The description of people drawing magic from them does suggest such a mechanism, maybe even without any Tap spell.

I second the problem that sorcery is fire-dependent in its stats. You would want Fire as your highest rune to get those extra two points of manipulation (or, with mediocre stats, just enough to be able to be taught any sorcery). Enhance INT basically is a spell to get a few extra points of manipulation into the spell you are preparing. The obvious solution for a Lhankor Mhy sorcerer is to have a fire-sorcerer spouse to cast Enhance INT on them - mythically appropriate, isn't it? Sorcerers work best in that kind of support structure. A student trained to do so might be another way to outsource this preparatory activity. That''s not that much of a problem, except for the casting cost, if you have Fire as an implied rune (Water or Earth). Fortunately the MP-doubling dpesn't require any Free INT-doubling. Debaldans and Waertagi at least are covered. Those irrational storm magicians aren't that close to the Brithini anyway. They had the Battle of Tanian's Vicory, then magic to explore Umaliath, the Slontans had those fire-spewing turtle ships... Their God-Learning probably went after deities that were victorious in their feats, leading to less mythic exploration of the sky deities and a stronger focus on Sea and Storm.

Tatius was a good ritual and research magician, well steeped in Imperial Lunar intrigue, so chaotic that he almost made his own glowspoit, and a lousy general whose only virtue was to maximize casualties of his own troops. For ritual purposes, mind you, but that's his track record. If you were a soldier, you preferred to march for Fazzur, who conserved his troop strength for the next phase of his campaign, rather than for Tatius who might decide at any time that you and your unit would make the next ritual suicide attack.

Probably unrelated to Cwim, but the Zistorites at Locsil included Triumvirate, a merging of three powerful sorcerers into one person. Room for speculation...

You're also bound to lose a lot more of them, whereas it is harder to fail to find a javelin after use (in hunting). For the supposed weapon of the light rune, arrows have an unholy affinity with soil and vegetation when fired at short or medium range, and arrows that missed are quite likely to go AWOL for good. Spears are unlikely to penetrate completely, and hence are more likely to stick out. Any archer who wants to return with as many of his arrows as possible best had a "detect substance" spell and use that highly specific substance somewhere in the making of his arrows. Possibly a sliver of silver, with the detect magic doubling as a "find coins" spell that also works as an indirect "detect civilized rich people".

Bab is the food goddess. Of course the seas love their food, and they never quite forgave the earth to keep one of its six sides from their access. Enabled by Umath pushing the earth cube back down so that the seas could reach and occasionally overcome the edges, according to some depictions of the original world design of Mostal which had the cube half submerged, half elevated. None of that was at the agency of the sea gods. It was a combination of Zzabur's Great Blast and the implosion of the Spike which shattered the earth that surrounded the Spike. Sure, the seas were all too happy to have these new surfaces to take nourishment from, which is why they are adamantly against the Mostali Somelz restoration project which is going to close the rift that separates the Slon shard from the Pamaltelan fragment. Unusually, that rift is not vertical in nature but teeters off to the side of the cube, making Slon the least massive of all the surviving fragments of the cube. That lack of marine snow and even residual light makes that rift a lot less hospitable than the other, vertical reefs, but the denizens of the Sea of Worms would appear to have adapted to those conditions, and now are about to die out. Unwanted kinship with Vadrus is at the source of the modern Triolini merfolk. While there are merfolk that may deserve the appellation of Elder Races, most of the ones encountered at the surface are younger than most of mankind, a product of the later Golden Age when the seas first re-conquered parts of the upper cube side. Valind added more insult by trapping lots of the northern waters in his glacier, denying the seas their energy. I wonder whether the formation of the glacier was tied to Heler losing his ability to return to the seas.

The Icelandic pony is the sole survivor of the old European horse breeds after a highly fatal plague swept through Europe in the Middle Ages, eliminating the previous breeds left behind by Huns, Romans, Avars and Germanic folk, probably replacing them with Spanish and Turkish breeds. Prior to that plague, it was simply the horse... Thus a breed well known (at least by reputation) by the Greeks who created this mosaic, that apparently got other details right like the rails of the chariot - a vehicle that was only used in races by the Greeks by the time the mosaic was made. Unfortunately most of the horse detail on Alexander did not survive, but otherwise that mosaic is pretty much setting the tone for all subsequent battle depictions. I'm even less of an artist, which makes my drawings of humans at best resembling those on the Bayeux tapestry. Occasionally I dabble in drawings of architecture, landscapes or in maps, and may do that again once I get myself a WYSIWYG graphic tablet. (My most recent "oeuvre" was a set of drawings of helmeted and round-eyed legionella bacteria for an aborted infotainment webpage.) Let me put it that way - your drawings have the quality that this one threw me off for not quite being up to the high standard you put forth. Some of those lists may have fallen into the post-canonical category, and never appeared in official print. Mind you, I was advocating combined arms regiments for Carmanian cavalry when I first addressed the issue of knights in Glorantha two dozen years ago. I regard the Dragon Pass regiments as one of the untouchable basic foundations of Glorantha, possibly subject to some re-interpretation. Even when it makes the Sartarite hillman militia better cavalry than their lowland Native Furthest corps counterparts.