Joerg

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.

Sober rock has grottos that smugglers might have to share with plesiosaurs, but that might be used as an extra protection if they are crafty and bring some bait to access their hideout.

This triplet of dragonewt runes symbolizes a node in the dragonewt road network where travelers can branch off to a different leg of the huge dragonewt rune-shaped network covering the Dragon Pass region. The southeastern branch should lead to the High Wyrm settlement near Boldhome, and might have a frogolith (dragonewt stela) on the Bar island or thereabouts.

Thanatar has not received its regularly published RQG treatment yet, otherwise it is very hard not to love the Munchkin aspects of this cult with regard to access to rune magic. The Cult of the Bloody Tusk on the side, with a similar limit-breaking spirit zoo mechanic, a full shaman, and maybe something like Arkat's career in cults he joined, the troll part made easier by joining the Nightcult and undergoing the Kyger Litor adoption in troll shape. INT 15 sort of limits usability as a sorcerer, even with enhance INT shenanigans and divine gifts mentioned above. Getting to choose a chaos feature is not a thing, but you could "funnel" characters through repeated applications of Chaos Gift until one or two end up as sorcerer material. Any munchkin worth their loaded dice would create an ogre character rather than this above average human. Inside this challenge, possibly a subpar ogre character with all stats at 15 for the better species max.

The equivalent of a 21 years-old, as for some immortals (like Brithini) that is more like early childhood. Game balance (a noble goal rarely implemented in RQG) can be achieved by these characters excelling in a few areas extremely unlikely to be of any practical use in the game. Customs and lore irrelevant outside of their native culture, skills determining their social status inside that culture.

We can assume that God Forgot has a small collection of centuries-old sorcerers like Carvak Zirian. Most will be enmeshed in ongoing research or practical project of theirs, or paying off their sponsors with some trivial magics that keep interfering with their projects.

See Bolthor Hairybreeks who was an initiate of half a dozen or more cults, and moaning about the tithing. Being a king is good - you become high priest of the kingdom, and your temple pays your standard of living, but you are supposed to tithe your pocket money among the remaining cults. Storm Bull berserks acquiring a chaos feature is a job risk. Illumination only comes into play if said berserk wants to delay retirement indefinitely.

Possibly. But sometimes a migraine is just a migraine. When (almost) all bullies in a band detect Chaos, they are going to try and track down the culprit. Still the (cursed) Telmori and the Bullies used to be able to enter Boldhome at the same time without bloodshed in the streets.

Often said village (or nomadic clan) will be where they were supported. Chaos slaying doesn't really pay well, unless you create communities who become indebted to you. Killing these at the slightest suspicion soon leaves you starving and out of resources.