Joerg

And all of that preceding the Sunstop Empire of Brighteye. Quite likely a time when the Sunpath or something like it was used by the White Goddess, possibly going through a dark phase when passing through the Underworld. Oria is an aspect of Ernalda, and probably was a concubine like many other goddesses that showed up in the marriage contest. Genertela Box had this intriguing passage mentioning the three orbs glowing above the metropolises of Dara Happa. This is an arrangement similar to how the eight planets are depicted on the Copper Tablets (which show an interestingly winding Oslir managing to place Nivorah northeast of Alkoth), and probably what the Red King was about, too.

Why would he inflict wide-spread long-term torture that would create anti-Shengs sooner or later? Sheng chooses an elite of volunteers and possibly a few highly suitable conscripts to educate. The Char-un follow such a belief anyway - not so much slavery, but they make a cult of hardship bordering on suffering to define their manliness, and have no regard for sedentary folk unless they are able to win over them. And then at best grudgingly, and constantly testing their boundaries. Another Garangordos? Oh please. Abject serfdom, yes, much worse than the Vendref before the FHQ, or the Ergeshi in Sun Dome County. Sheng treats the sedentary folk much like the Alkothi treat the Darjiinians. He does exchange bureaucrats and magicians between the big former empires, and establishes a brutal but efficient order. SS or Red Army occupied recently conquered lands. Genocidal? Certainly. But so were others before him. Palangio did the same to Orlanthland - he initiated a decades long drought (according to Ten Women Well Loved), and Lokamayadon prevented access to Orlanth. The Bright Empire didn't shy away from all manners of chaotic behavior. Not that the curses summoned by Arkat and Talor were any more wholesome. Before the FHQ rose to power, the vendref experiences just that - a life worse than the Oasis Folk. The Fifth, maybe. The Sixth are the garbage dump and miserable swamp folk. The swamp folk would normally live on tubers and whatever crawls and swims between them, much like the durulz. The Frog-eaters of the Bodensee pole houses paid for that diet by contracting bad parasites which would eat them up from the interior. At the best, the weeders may have access to wild rice. Rice paddies probably were left untouched by Sheng, after all you cannot turn them into useful pasture. The Dry Farmers on the other hand had to plant grain only to have it grazed off by the horses. The reaction to Endarkus Bull-slayer's revolt was on a similar level to the massacre of Gio, and won't have been the only such retaliatory strike. The oh so civilized rulers of the three empires conquered by Sheng were as brutal in establishing order. As a conqueror, Sheng had more opportunities to do so. Tolat may be a god of matrimonial fertility, but Shargash is not a god of love. Shargash is Zorak Zoran in the sky. His berserks quite likely partake of corpses before their raids and smear themselves with ashes and corpse wax, emulating the Shadzorings of old. They are civilized, which makes them more terrible than the Storm Bulls. I don't see much of a qualitative difference between Nontraya and the god of the Shadzorings, other than "but he is our monster" (which he often enough wasn't). Only because he wouldn't be distracted from his temple project. Earlier actions like the Dundealos incident show that Tatius enjoyed exactly this kind of cruelty. It is a Dara Happan cultural trait to exact the worst punishment on the unworthy (Gerra) and rebels. Probably the Thirty Years War in the Germanies, or the fifty years longer conflict in the Netherlands? A few Magdeburgs, a lot of Marode regiments, plundering, raping, force-recruiting... It was the True Golden Horde inflicted on Peloria? Sheng had as much use for the dry farmers as the US settlers had for the Cherokee, or Atatürk for the Armenians, or Charlemagne for the Saxons, so he acted accordingly. He may have done the wheat equvialent to the bison massacre which destroyed Plain Indian culture, or the Tasmanian conquest. He may even have rounded up unnecessary dry farmers for target practice, or have had his quite erudite Kralori and Pelorian bureaucracy arrange mass migrations into destruction. His main force - the horse nomads - had quite a few grudges to get even for, Golden Horde style. From history, you could name Attila, Timur Leng, Vlad Dracul and any number of European culture governments in the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century for cruelty. Sheng did build up an empire, and made maximum use of the civilized assets that didn't inconvenience his horse riders, like the Kralori fleet he sent to Vormain. His empire was well ruled, supporting a huge army. The peasantry was struggling to feed the army and themselves, but they managed, just like the Oasis Folk in Prax do. Re-dedicating wheat fields for pasture is no bigger a deal than declaring vast tracts of England as forests (hunting preserves), evicting or hamstringing the resident population. Don't get me wrong - Sheng was a power-hungry, cruel, mad demigod. But like Avanapdur, his empire worked for quite a while when Lunar Chaos was fought off as much as Kralori dragons. His opponents in the Lunar Empire were as ruthless as Sheng.

Still is if you have the Char-un or similar horse riders as occupation forces. The Grazers might have shed a bit of that after accepting the reign of the Feathered Horse Queens, and Joraz Kyrem probably made is followers obey more civilized rules, too, but the rest of the horse nomads have never been known as tender overlords. Tatius' Windstop was worse on the natives, and Tatius enjoyed that greatly. Those demons could just as well have been Alkothi, and that kind of diet probably wasn't too uncommon among the Sixths of Dara Happa without Teelo Norri alms. For lack of fire probably not prepared as a gumbo... So did he compare favorably or unfavorably to the Bull Shah episode of the Empire? Did he unleash the Bat on the population (from controlling it)? Yelm worshippers are a callous lot, and so are horse nomads. Combining these traits makes for charming folk. (Not that violent Storm Pentans or Praxians on steroids are any better...) I don't recall any repeat of Dagguneri ("Eats Women") for Sheng's reign.

Probably born on the Other Side, and possibly his father was a Kitori and Zorak Zorani who could take on Dehori shape, and/or got himself possessed by a suitable spirit. Vamargic quite likely was born when the EWF still bled off weird draconic magics, but possibly only after the fall of the Clanking City.

Indeed. I am willing to allow two or four inches of aura/breath to expand the notion of self that affects clothing, weapons etc. within that aura. Anything protruding from that (cloaks, long weapons, backpacks) is not. I am not quite convinced that CM can be cast on objects. If it can, you could cast it on a (rolled up) tent cloth, and then unroll it to have a CM screen covering several people, possibly even with narrow slits to fire arrows through. (Protection offers the same possibilities, in addition to making your parries more efficient if cast on a weapon.)

I don't recall seeing that in the discussion, yet, so no. Neither. Now that you ask, not really: I would have gone for no reduction in magic point cost, but David Scott argued for a free boost of the spell by the amount of POW invested. That didn't address the occasion where the spell would be cast at the amount of POW it was inscribed with, though. One might argue that a spell inscription worth 4 POW would be able to release the spell without using any MP, but a 1 MP activation cost sounds like the minimum I would ask for. It is like an enchantment, even somewhat lower in return as it isn't transferable at all. Enchantments can be expanded after the initial investment. Is it that much like an enchantment? To me this seems like it is a personal achievement, similar to acquiring rune points. So once you inscribed a spell with duration 2, it will always have to be cast with duration 2? That would be a matrix enchantment rather than an inscription. That's a bit like manufacturing the sorcerous equivalent of Truestone. It creates an INT extension that can be used in addition to Enhance INT. A middle way would be to have each point of Intensity provided by the inscription cost one MP regardless whether the technique or the runes are known or implied.

The twin eggs are for the mayonnaise...

There was a major defeat for Argrath's forces combined with a temporary occupation of Sartar in the meantime.

I wonder how they manage the distribution of this somewhat stale, superannuated grain - even if they get the vermin and mold situation under control by Asrelia magic, the quality of the grain goes down as it ages. Who is going to receive this second-rate grain when fresher harvests are brought in? Who oversees this process? How long can they store a grain harvest? How good will these seeds grow up after a catastrophic harvest failure like 1622? By multi-years, I suppose you mean several times the annual consumption of grain in Nochet rather than several times the annual grain production around Nochet. Few if any Sartarite clans would have been able to afford that luxury under Lunar occupation. I know that the German federal food reserve regularly sells off canned food approaching its expiration date when it is impractical to donate it directly, presumably to make place for fresh reserves. And the Crop Trust with its vault on Svalbard tries something similar with seed grain (possibly defying Monsanto with its activities). Even if Nochet had the grain to feed its population of say 120,000 for say four years, that will take care of only 240,000 extra humans after substracting the seed grain for the 1623 harvest for those people (calculating a generous harvest to seed ratio of 4:1). While that would be enough to feed the population of Dragon Pass outside the Glowline, I doubt that any amounts even approaching this could make their way there. The Sartarites would be lucky to receive enough seed grain for 1623. Farmers in more recently conquered Heortland might have had slightly better reserves, but few non-urban communities really plan for sieges etc., and anything on the order of magnitude of the Nochet grain reserve would be extraordinary. Tossing chests full of gold into this situation would enable those people closest to the trolls to buy emergency food and seed at only moderately inflated prices without ruining themselves. Dosakayo would be flooded with gold, buying rice from all over the east while depleting their own reserves. The initial wave of spending would reduce the consequences of the Fimbulwinter to the wealth of the people in Dragon Pass greatly as non-gold wealth migrates in the opposite direction. Even while creating an unprecedented inflation, this gift of gold would pretty much act like a Marshall Plan to counteract the Fimbulwinter. Orlanthi society is not sufficiently layered to make graft and kleptocracy major factors. Samastina's coup would have targeted not just the Red Earth, but would also have involved some Awakener questing, right?

A couple of years ago Fabian Küchler (chief organizer of the Tentacles conventions and now the Kraken, and editor of many a fund raiser) came up with what was essentially a Patreon to get Greg Stafford back on his keyboard to write a Gloranthan novel. The result was (at least) the first part of "Ten Women Well Loved", telling the adventures of Harmast Barefoot from his adoption to the Hendriki tribe until his misadventures in Nochet when the Grandmothers recognized his slightly modified Berennethtelli tattoos as Kodigvari. This was significantly after Morden Defends the Camp. From what I have seen of other such material, these starts are quite frequent in Greg's unpublished opus, and some of these have since been presented as mood pieces, like e.g. "Aftal the Waertagi" in Missing Lands. I would appreciate seeing a collection of these unfinished texts in print. Speaking for myself, I found that writing a short mood piece in prose often gives me a better idea of a character, group or setting than giving a gazetteer-like sandbox, for less effort. Most we know about Talastar comes from Paulis Longvale's travelogue, and without Biturian Varosh we would know a lot less about Prax and Praxians.

Access to rune magic from spirit cults or cults with shamanic associations, while keeping the different pantheons apart. Oakfed magic: yes, available to shamans. Grazer shamans may have selective magic from Yelm Kargzant. A shaman officiating for Daka Fal will get access to the Ancestor Worship rune magic. Cults without shaman positions shouldn't be very accepting of shamans. I wouldn't give a Daka Fal shaman associated to Yinkin access to any but the one associate spell, because of the conflict with the other children of Fralar. Odayla might grant quite a few more if the shaman is primarily working inside that cult.

There are two main (pony-sized) horse types around, galana hill ponies and sered horses. It isn't exactly clear whether the galana are united in a single origin or whether they are something similar to the Wareran shape of Genertelan humans, dominant wherever there were hill barbarians (including the lowland Enerali). The sered horse isn't much taller than the galana, and seems to hail from the eastern Pelorian grasslands. If the "racial type by region of birth" scheme is applicable, the Gamara horses may have been ancestors to both galana and sered breeds. The Hyal breed probably was lost whenever horses either were used to draw chariots or where people started to farm. The Hyal sun horses are descended from Hippogriff, and were the inheritance of the Pure Horse folk, only available through Feathered Queen magic. The centaurs are in all likelihood of Pure Horse Folk human and herd stock, and not so different from the Grazer ponies. Perhaps a little bigger, closer in size to a war zebra. I wonder whether Pegasi are only one stage of the degeneration of hippogriff or a separate species, and whether they may have left a different magical lineage in the horses.

I think that the Mansa-Musa-hajj effect would be much greater in the cities of Sartar, disrupting all trade there. The self-sufficient clans would still be hit by the inflation when trading for stuff they cannot produce themselves, but since they will be selling produce or beasts, they will only suffer from inflation over rather short terms. I wonder how long it would take to de-couple the gold-silver exchange rate. Sure, the trolls would have captured silver, too, but that has some practical use, too (wounding hostile spirits or werewolves) and might have been traded for lead earlier on.

While I have never played RQ2, that game had Defense which substracted from the opponent's attack roll, reducing the problem of such skills somewhat.

1440 is the year Yanasdros died and Orios took the crown for eight years. We don't hear anything about Yarandros' death, but after 45 years of rule (even after his father retired early) he must have been about 70 years when he died. Still the timing and the cause of his death in relation to the Colymar/Praxian raid would be interesting. Intagarn became king in 1440, so gaining the throne probably was his crown test.

The old Murphy's Rules effect was not addressed by the departure from the calculated location hit points, only the stats for giants were. How being able to take more damage on a limb makes a character more fragile is a bit of a non-sequitur. Do you mean survivability when hit by Bigclub's club? Your 9 HP character receives additional damage from being knocked back anyway. One hit, you live with a mangled appendage. Second hit, you're out.

You'll discover the disadvantages of playing a centaur as soon as you have any inside scenes in your adventure. Your centaur player better had a sidekick for such situations.

If you look at the Copper Tablets, there is of course one storm god cast down into the Underworld when Verithurusa entered, too - Umath.

Given the old formula that these hit locations (head, chest, abdomen) had 0.33 or 0.4 times the general hit points, this looks like an academic problem to me - if you have received 3 times the damage that location can sustain, you are out of hit points.

Personally I think that simply having an inflation of basic resistance is sloppy and lazy on the part of the narrator. While there should be opponents that become harder to overcome in combat, there is no reason that every combat resistance has to rise. If ability advancement barely keeps up with inflation, your characters will be come less proficient as the game proceeds. Not the desired outcome, is it? It is fairly easy to make life harder for experts by putting their normal skills at a disadvantage by making them less relevant to the task, or even making them a stretch in a test to overcome a specific hurdle. Just like TV shows allow their protagonist to mature somewhat and to acquire new facets, player heroes should have the same opportunity. I originally switched to RQ to escape the concept of experience points. If you have both XP and Hero points, you start exactly the kind of book-keeping that distracts me from narrating a story. I can live with a single currency, although I find the use of it already a bit troublesome. Easier than the meta-gaming "call a disadvantage for a benefit" in FATE, but almost as clunky. If your main opponent progresses just exactly like you do, why progress at all? All the effort you put into developing your hero is about as fruitful as all the effort Indiana Jones spent in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Lazy and sloppy narrating...

It's a port over from Pendragon. There is helps to give a epic feel to the game, since players will notice time passing and see their characters age-something rather rare in most other RPGs. I assume that the designers wanted to give RQG that effect. It also reflects that your heroes are grounded by/bound to everyday pursuits like keeping the roof from leaking, getting the harvest in etc. - the non-murder-hobo way of roleplaying integrated into a society. If you take an entire season or more off going on a campaign or a very long sea journey, you had better give your community something of equal value to replace your lack of work - thralls, a couple of oxen or cows, goods, a wagon-load of grain... if you're a god-talker, loan of a spell matrix worth a few rune points... The alternative is indistinguishable from lesser exile, which is fine if you stay away an entire year or two relying on a leader you follow to replace the security of your clan. You better bring gifts or at least experience and connections back when you come home. You can play a campaign where you are hanging by your nails most of the time, and resolve a few experience checks in the few downtimes you manage, but you won't be able to put in training or research in such a campaign. On the whole, you'll probably end up with more than half your skills checked and non-checkable skills withering along when your campaign reaches a season finale without too many cliffhangers. At least that's my experience with RQ3. The RQG approach gives you the chance to improve skills like lores on a similar rate as checkable skills. Not really required for broo-bashing and treasure-hunting, unless the map you get is in a language you cannot make sense of (and then over-paying an NPC LM sage for the service, and the privilege to encounter a rival party with all bits of the map translated). You shouldn't have to switch to Pulp Cthulhu to play investigative action scenarios in Glorantha with some reasonable advancement for scholars and the like.

Mashunasan is not the only eastern mystic, and he is just one of at least four known disciples of Oorduren. Venfornic mysticism is completely different and appears to be at the root of numerous martial arts practices as well as for tantric practices. As far as failed mystics go, Sheng's reign is pretty low-key malign. He inserts himself in the Emperor slot of society, pushing out the previous holders of that slot (Godunya, Takenegi, whoever reigned over Teshnos) or that of the chief/khan.

IIRC Harmast Barefoot farmed cabbages when he was a cottar among the Hendriki. He worshipped Niskis (for the rain and obvious other side benefits, as can be implied from the title of the still unpublished novel "Ten Women Well Loved" which was written under a precursor of Patreon. The partner in his rites was supposed to be the local land goddess. (And a nubile woman...)

Right now, we have two discussions of human racial types, the discussion of the "Malkioni hobbits" and over on the RQ forum the one about the Doraddi, from which this quote comes: The Doraddi actually are descendants of the original Agimori, and the people of Banamba and the black portion of the rest of Fonrit apparently are, too. Likely including the Exigers and other somewhat strange mixed cultures between Fonrit and Jolar/Tarien. Their creation story is that of the Men-and-a-Half, with the first drinkers and the first lineage plants, but somehow some of them managed to retain more of the Agitorani inheritance by rejecting the element of Water and clinging to the Fire rune. It probably takes some kind of spiritual purity in addition to a flawless descent to retain the extra abilities, but a watered-down residue might be there. That potential small advantage in the Fire rune may very well be part of their cultural package rather than the racial one, which probably still needs to be written. The other dark-skinned folk of Pamaltela look similar to the Agimori - the Hsunchen because they adopt the dominant body type of the regional humans, and the Thinobutans possibly because their creator used the same method, although he used four different shades of clay in making the first eight ancestors, who then proceded to procreate happily with all available colors of the other gender, creating the range of skin tones available to the surviving Thinubutan-descended folk of Maslo, Kimos, Thinokos (in Fonrit) and Kumanku. (The related population of Loral disappeared during the Closing, similar to Brithos. The population of Teleos may be of Thinobutan or Doraddi origin - you certainly cannot tell by their skin color, but apparently facial features and hair features point to some Pamaltelan origin.) In western Genertela, only the direct descendants of Malkion really are Warerans in the narrow sense of the word, and that includes the direct descendants of Waertag and (at least according to the Zzabur history of Danmalastan) the Vadeli. (They have an alternate origin myth in the Brithos history of the Malkioni which has them as descendants of a goddess of the land, possibly a daughter of Britha, and some unmentioned heroic ancestor. All the other "Wareran" racial types share the same general facial features, but Wareran race doesn't say much about skin color - everything from very pale to rich dark brown with an almost full assortment of the rainbow is known. Helerings are blue-skinned, Brithini and Vadeli come in color-coded castes, and elemental origin appears to influence hair- and skin-coloration in the theist lands. Godtime doesn't work that way, but it looks like there was one original population of humans in each of the three corners of the world which was re-created by subsequent creators or even demigod descent. Beast ancestry appears to be more a factor in size than in skin- or hair-color, at least for the Hsunchen. (The various Pelorian beast-descendants from deities like Durbaddath the Lion, Kenstrata the Fox, Arakang the Bear or Sakkar the Sabretooth may have some other characteristics, and the Beast Rider influence on the Praxians are fairly drastic, too, as variations to body size and coloration go.) There appears to be a flavor to the man rune which is tied to their area of origin - the one adopted by the Hsunchen/Fiwan/Hykimi which imprints on (almost) all the mortals in the region. (The pygmies appear to have some weird variant of that, whether among the Beast Riders - both Storm Bull descended (impalas) and adopted by Eiritha (bolo lizards, ostrich riders) - or among the Hsunchen.) It isn't clear whether it applies to pygmy populations - all of those which have mentioned appearance talk about dark skin, except for the Pamaltelan albino mole people.

The Gazzam of Murharzarm's Dara Happa are sitting right on this divide. IMO the feathered variant is appropriate to DH. It is a question of runic association - lizards are of earth, feathered beings are of the sky.