Joerg

Dust seems to be something like nano-technology, non-rogue replicators waiting to do their creators' bidding and slightly amenable to commands of others. In RQ terms, Dust could be an ingredient of enchantments, possibly replacing the POW sacrifice.

Every night, the Gloranthans can observe the adventures of Lightfore as she rises up into the sky all the way to the Pole Star, and then descending again to a place within a sixth of the circumference of the sky dome from her starting position (on the equinoxes setting in the same constellation as she rose from). The path forms a loop in the sky resembling the HIV symbol. Plentonius attributes these paths to the actions of the Young God (GRoY p.69) and identifies the Young God with Yelm. But the Copper Tablets tell us a very different story: they show Yelm (and initially his two brothers) as that stationary object in the center of the sky. We only have one myth about the sun rising in the east, and that is from the Dawn, the last day when all the Gods walked the world. There is no Godtime precedent for the sun emerging from the Gates of Dawn in the Monomyth. We do get one wandering sun in the Copper Tablets, though - Reladivus Lightfore, as a consequence of Umath ascending into the sky, known as Kargzant to the horse nomads of Pent. If you choose to believe the mythical contradictions of the Entekosiad over the artificial corset of the Monomyth presented in Mythology (a work that explicitely warns against mistaking such a "map" for the territory), there was a Golden Age before Yelm Brightface replaced the White Empress Goddess (possibly with the rotating searchlight) as the Emperor. We do get one short piece of Yelm prior to becoming Emperor of the World in the Prosopaedia (originally in the Jonstown Compendium) - his three challenges by Basko (the Black Sun), Molandro the Earth Walker, and finally Jokbazi the Predark Chaos. All of this is very different from the story of the Young God. It does work perfectly fine with the Brightface usurpation of the reign of the White Empresses, though. The Golden Age immobilizes Jokbazi, taking it out of the perception of Yelm. A feat very similar to what Magasta does. Yelm the Youth basically becomes Yelmalio inside the Yelm cult. Nothing that Antrius does (other than accompanying questers to the Hill of Gold) is anything like what Lightfore does. The Bridling of Kargzant, aka the Anarchy Year, is what gives us a Lightfore sharing in all the non-Yelm elements of the little suns that never entered Hell but confronted it whenever it surfaced. Youth is about opposition, about failure to obey. Yelm is not at all about this. In the Entekosiad his ascension is about betrayal of trust (of the White Empress) and of abuse of jurisdiction. In the Prosopaedia, it is about destroying the previous order by painting it as monstrous and then demanding collective followership to deal with the problem the absence of previous power has created. Experience of the world is something Yelm cannot undergo, except in proxy. Reladivus (the son corrupted by Umath) gives him such proxy. (So do Verithurus(a) and Shargash, and the four who perished. The one who re-absorbed may have been the necessary link to the others.)

Zeus may not have changed his name, but his appearance for many of his extramarital affairs. Odin walked the world using an alias, and many other rulers are attributed the same way. I think that there are plenty examples of deities interacting with the world in a diminished form of exposure. And those are many of the names of the gods.

David Castle is doing a read-through of the guide on his Glorantha Discord server, and as of last week David entered Volume 2 of the Guide, which was not covered in this series. I wonder whether there might be an interest to accompany the Discord discussions here?

The old fart brigade may have had these myths, or may have created their own spin-off version of the Monomyth to play with. (And that spin-off thing is fine for a game table, as long as nobody claims that their version is what canon has to be.) RQG is aiming to become a self-contained description of Glorantha (including a few rules-free collections of world descriptions like the Guide and the Sourcebook). As such, it has to deliver its own presentation of the Monomyth. More than rules you need GMing tips and tricks to navigate myth, and for that an understanding what myth means is a prerequisite. And here the Mythology book delivers at the start. So yes, we need a book on heroquesting, and how to use both the Monomyth and the specific cult write-ups to create regular heroquests following a passion play approach, or the deeper godtime dive of the similarly scripted quests, before we can ponder ways to veer off from such entry myths into other paths or into unknown territory without falling out of myth back into some (usually dismal) surface world or hell experience. I sincerely hope that there won't be more than a handful of rulesy pages in such a product.

The rules are pretty worthless without a framework of myths to quest in. The Monomyth is supposed to provide the scaffolding of Godtime, to branch off from. It resulted from Arkat#s cross-referencing his heroquesting experiences in multiple cults. The only rulesy bits for heroquesting would be what portion of the standard array of RuneQuest abilities ports into heroquesting, and how to adjust and create heroquesting rewards and penalties. The rest is how to turn bits of the mythic landscape (or hypersurface) of Glorantha into adventures, and that requires some basic familiarty with archetypical myths and possibly variations thereof (like slaying a blue dragon to release a mask of Heler).

Leika would have been aware of Kallyr's quest, and would know that a portion of it was to be enacted in Antorling lands. Kallyr is calling up an immense amount of magic, and people alongside the ritual would be able to join into that magic, both to support the main thing and to syphon off some of the magic for their very own goals. The usual clan level questing during Sacred Time is a passion play of the Lightbringers' Quest, with the questers separated from the rest of the community, who then act as the heroquest encounters wearing the masks of the encounters. Some of these re-enactments routinely run out of the limited scope of the passion play and may take the questers deep into Godtime, or may replace mask-bearing clanfolk by actual enemies (which is when the ritual guardians come into play). Kallyr's quest is such a passion play writ extra large, and then with some whammy. Delegated mask bearers might have to quest against other obstacles to get to their stations to receive their ritual defeat against Kallyr's band of questers, or may be admixed to the actual threats, and then to have to decide how to proceed while keeping in the myth without defeating Kallyr outside of the script. Few other Lightbringer cult activities would be available for the LBQ passion play portion of Sacred Time. There is of course I Fought We Won as a (very dangerous) alternative rite to perform during Sacred Time, betting a lot of one's own communities on the outcome of very few solitary questers. This is an Orlanth cult quest that doesn't involve Orlanth. There might be others. One quest I haven't seen played out or written up yet would be Orlanth's conquest of the sky world, and his successful defence against the Chaos invasion of the sky. At a guess, something like that may have earned Kallyr her starbrow, but no details are in publication. (The Well of Daliath might have hints, not sure I have read them all.) Brave questers might opt for an "as above, so below" approach to use their Sacred Time magic, but that might result in a much weakened magic for Ernalda.

The Monomyth is close enough to Arkat's understanding of the hero plane. Fairly basic knowledge you should have for running a heroquest before considering possible mechanics for heroquests, IMO, but then I am a Glorantha scholar first, and only then a GM and scenario writer.

I had the impression that the Chaosium was named that already when it became the base of the Spike. Primal Plasma being polluted: surely not the entirety of it, but probably the portion of it carried into Glorantha by Wakboth and minions.

I wonder in which age communication between different entities became a problem requiring magic. As a rule, the further we go back to Creation, the fewer problems would be involved - the Green Age did not even require fire, the Golden Age did not require much in harvest magic, Storm Age required magic to supplement the missing sun, etc.

Players who want temporarily or spatially limited characters would be well advised to roll up a secondary stand-in character to play when the focus one is absent. Brown elves would be absent only in Dark and Storm Seasons, Sacred Time consists of their Awakening quests. Rathori characters need to hibernate roughly the same part of the year. Hollri would have pretty much the reverse activity phases, at least away from their glacier(s). You wouldn't normally bring a centaur to a cave crawl, or a ludoch merfolk onto dry land. Playing a baboon, gorilla or minotaur might limit your enjoyment of adventures of urban intrigue.

Taking a look, like the classic style. p.9 "rolling lower natural 20" - to be honest, I have no idea how a natural 20 could be rolling lower than the opposite roll. Does this mean rolling nat 20 ad having fewer successes than the opposition? Or should these be "higher natural d20"?

Winter aconite pixies would be used to frolicking in the snow...

Runic inspiration is fine, but fairly risky to use - one fumble in a rune that your character needs to activate their rune magic, and all that magic becomes inaccessible until the character gets across their disorientation. Other runes may still be disconcerting if you fumble, but leave your magic intact. Use of augments will help you earn experience checks. In case of augmenting a skill with another you might get an extra check on the augmenting skill if the GM judges this as a crucial use.

So the real reason the Lunars invaded Sartar was that gold rush in the wake of Monrogh's conversion of the Locaem Elmali? 😉

Vinga as a goddess doesn't have much beyond being the female who is Orlanth (or his daughter among the Storm Brothers). As a Storm Brother, she is one of the many, blending in despite being somewhat different, "one of the boys". Vinga as society's model for a particular non-binary gender expression is a bit different. In Thunder Rebels, the ideals of (oart of) Heortling society defined divine roles (Allfather, Allmother), taking away a certain amount of divine nature and replacing it with human values. Sanctifying society into cult objects. Among others, this resulted in a cult of Ernalda that may have been differently magically powerful but dreadfully limited in female mystery cult aspects, or, as Claudia Loroff put it, sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll. The Goodwife, and her Faithful Husband. Juno, with a less flamboyant husband. The Storm Tribe treatment of Vinga was a symptom of this combined with subcultitis. Now I will admit that adding one of the Thunder Brother identities to your standard Orlanth initiation offered a fair bit of variety interpreting the "yeah, another Orlanth worshiper" yawn. But the cult, the connection to the divine, doesn't have to match a person's occupation 100%. Having access to magic useful in such pursuits may well be an advantage, but you won't have this magic up all the time. In the end, it is not your personal on the job magic but your community's communal magic and blessings that provide for the community. Your redsmith's Heat Metal won't influence your yearly income roll.

You make this sound as if worship of a type of elemental deity will - over time . generate the metal deposits associated with that type of deity? This seems to go against Bertalor's logic that the metals you find are those of the victims of such battles. (Victors rarely leave their corpses lying around). Or are you talking about extracting the metals, crystals etc. out of the living body of the deity, say mining for copper in the Eiritha Hills?

A port/harbour with a syntax?

Learned Graeco-Roman authors made little distinction. Hard to tell since all sources about Wotan/Woden were burnt under Louis the Pious, undoing a generation of scholarly work on the myths of the Saxons and pre-Christian Franks after slaying their carriers of tradition, too. Graeco-Roman visitors assured us that they worshiped Mercury/Hermes. Fairly different. While Norse Mercury had rulership aspects in addition to his mediatorship to the underworld (hanging himself from the world tree), the Sky Father (Dyaus Pitar) arrived in Norse myth as Tyr (Tiu/Tiwaz), god of the oath and the sword, while lightning and thunder would be the realm of Donar/Thor. The pagan visitors would not have identified the one-eyed king of Asgard with their Olympian king. Whenever you reduce a deity to a name, you are applying a mask or a very specific PoV onto the elephant whole of the deity, and if you are lucky, that mask/perspective offers trunk, tusk and ears in one go. We have texts talking about the 49 names of Orlanth (in Heortling culture), and there are doubtless others in other places, recognizing different places of birth, possibly different mothers. That list will change from place to place, too. Lodril has a bunch of names when associated with certain fire mountains - Ladaral/Laddy, Lodik, Turos (ViTuros, KetTuros...), ViSaruDaran, Veskarthan, Solf, Balumbasta, Baba Ulodra... The identification game gets interesting when you exploit the clear parallels of clearly distinct entities to either flip between their roles in myth, or replacing one with the other. Like making Tolat the sword bearer who stabbed and dismembered Yelm, and then went to Hell for the reunion with all the others he sent down there to attend the Ritual of the Net.

Tolat is loosely associated with rice agriculture on Melib, too - his sister Annilla is more so. Orlanthi have stayed away from rice - rice-growing cultures have some psychological problem with the mytholog and ideology of Orlanthi free farmers. (Weirdly enough the libertarian Frisian farmers were famous for their cooperation in reclaiming land without any higher authority but the divine above them.) If you want to approach the god of the Red Planet shamanistically, by all means do so via a spirit cult. There is such a son of Lodril/Veskarthan who does the burning: Oakfed. The myth of the three lowfires has it that Oakfed can be contained in Mahome, perhaps indicating a careful burning of a perimeter before setting off the wildfire.

There are a number of cults with Enchant Gold (Yelm, Yelmalio?) and Enchant Tin (Shargash/Tolat, others), but that doesn't necessarily mean they have magic for metalworkers. Lodril (or Turos) is the god of craftsmen as well as workers in general, and his lowfire son Gustbran might be available through his cult.

First off, "dungeon master" is a phrasing we aren't used to for GM (or game master) here. At least the older of us think of AD&D when they read Dungeon's Master Guide. A GM guide book has been in the plans since the publication of the quickstart, but hasn't seen publication yet as the Cults project has greater importance and impact for RuneQuest, the cults being a stand-in for what the D20 games think of as character classes or prestige classes. There is an alternative, faster method for creating characters in the RuneQuest wiki: https://rqwiki.chaosium.com/adventurers/

By extension, this tells us about a certain amount of identity between Dendara and Orenoar, and Acos and Yelm? The latter two certainly share the unchanging overarching dome aspect, tho former the female purity in the sky. A deity being born several times in mythic cycles would be nothing surprising to the recipient of the vedas, with the five brothers themselves being such incarnations.

Just takes a head...

The future battles of the Hero Wars are outlined in the old board game White Bear and Red Moon (later re-published as Dragon Pass with different rules, one edition by Chaosium, one by Avalon Hill). The outlined battles in King of Sartar's Argrath Saga section are also in the Guide to Glorantha appendices version of the saga, alongside other prophecies - especially the Takenegi one is of interest.