Joerg

Not exactly the shape of a seax, but here is a dagger from the Baltic region dating around the time of the collapse of the Mediterranean Bronze Age cultures: The blade is thin at the bottom and considerably thicker at the back. The accompanying explanation in German translates roughly thus: "Towards the end of the Stone Age, at the onset of the Bronze Age, the silex knappers successfully managed to reciprocate bronze daggers with flint (due to lack of available bronze). The result were the so-called fishtail daggers, mostly produced in northern Europe. Blade and handle made from a single piece of silex. The picture shows one such dagger (owned by a private collector from Cuxhaven, Germany). Even the seam from casting the bronze blade has been reproduced in the stone material. The dagger dates roughly into the supposed era of the Trojan War." Here is a blade from Norway with a more rounded back: https://digitaltmuseum.no/021026856692/flintdolk

That depends whether you casting Shield on yourself counts as an incoming spell or not. If Countermagic affects spells cast by yourself as well, do this in this sequence and you stand there without any kind of magical protection because the shield is negated by Countermagic, but the Countermagic is eliminated as well. If you can cast spells on yourself beneath that Countermagic, you're fine. Otherwise, cast the shield first, then a 4-point Countermagic 2 (because the Shield's Countermagic effect doesn't get destroyed when overcome. The spell description doesn't make an explicit exception for spells cast by yourself, so this is open to interpretation. Countermagic stacked total is 4. Even a 3-point spell would knock this down, and thus your two extra points go poof, only the shield effect remains. No effect on you, the spell gets countered before it could target a specific spell on you. 1 point of Dismiss boosted by 3 MP does the trick, as opposed to a 2 point Dispel Magic boosted with 4 MP. Dismiss 2 boosted with 1 MP will dismiss both Shield and Countermagic. Shield 1 stacked with Countermagic 4 would require 3 points of Dismiss without any boost because Countermagic works only at half strength against the already doubled points of the rune spell, so six incoming points vs.effectively four points of defense. Correct? Yes. Same for Berserk. Counter magic being only at half efficiency against rune spells is what worries me.

You're not alone with that. The Elmal/Yelmalio issue has been problematic for a while, after all the cult was strong in two of the three human settings published for RQ2 (Pavis/Rubble, Griffin Mountain), and the example character from the rules belonged to this cult. All of that is true. The impact of that document (and the listing of Elmal in the gods of the Orlanthi) was exacerbated by the almost contemporary and highly accaimed release of Sun County for RQ3, which re-iterated all the Yelmalio history from the Pavis Box and expanded on it. Due to the lack of Sartar/Orlanthi scenarios and background description until Hero Wars and Thunder Rebels, there was little opportunity to publish anything about Elmal. I would have to check whether Elmal was mentioned in the Riskland background in Dorastor - Land of Doom (Vinga was, weirdly, the other major upsetting revelation in KoS). Yes. King of Sartar returned to the origin of Glorantha - storytelling and weird exploration of myth and history. following heroic protagonists. At that time, two families of game systems existed for Gloantha - the RQ roleplaying game and the boardgames WBRM/Dragon Pass and Nomad Gods. I think it would be fairer to say that the roleplayer readers of the book had to grapple with the game systems. Greg's own grappling with game systems for Glorantha had gone into quite a different direction at that time, struggling with a concept for heroquesting which used elements of resource administration a few notches above what he had done for the Pendragon campaign game, and probably still leaning on the concepts that never made it into the game Masters of Luck and Death. Arcane Lore shows snippets of that game development. So, if KoS has to grapple with any game system, it would be with the heroquesting role-playing boardgame computer game Greg was struggling with. (After Hero Wars had come out, I had the chance to play in a game with Greg where he used reduced Hero Wars rules to simulate this combination of storytelling, resource management and heroic questing to great effect.) My impression of this document is rather that Greg wrote it for himself, to answer why it had taken him so long to recognize the need for a positively associated sun god for the hill barbarians. And unlike the RuneQuest community, Greg had been using local names and aspects of sun and storm deities forever. Ralian/Seshnelan Ehilm had been present as the test of Ehilm's Flames in the Lightbringers' Quest for as long as we have had that information, but Gods of Glorantha's Prosopaedia confusingly presented Ehilm only as a False God of the Westerners. My own discovery of Glorantha fell into this period. I had been playing RuneQuest 3rd edition for a couple of years, using a fantasy setting of my own inspired by the RQ3 Vikings box. A world that had a heroic/magical history/prehistory of ten thousand years of human (or humanoid) agency in a struggle of demigod beings much older than that, designed to make best use of all the inspirational creatures and cults delivered with that game system without taking them over directly. This means my first approach to Glorantha was that of a scavenger, although I had enjoyed the full panoply of Gloranthan weirdness in the Dragon Pass boardgame. Possibly with an Arkati ethos of approaching this world of myths with respect while taking its inspiration with me. My first encounter with the Vrok-Hawk riders of the sun-worshipping citadel in Votanki lands was through Griffin Island, not Griffin Mountain. I researched its pedigree through Uz Lore (Genertela Box had weirdly declared all the weath of Griffin Mountain as a blank land...), so I began the next hemicycle of putting Glorantha into and out of that setting in my research. The Griffin Island cult of Hilme for that citadel became a "many suns" revelation of my own. That is pretty simple to answer. The RuneQuest material we had on Sartar was extremely fragmentary. Genertela box offered a few paragraphs on the Varmandi clan in the Genertela Players' Book Sartarite "What my Father told me" - not the most representative of all the clans in Sartar. Apple Lane was our next best (and most misleading) glimpse into rural Sartar, just like the New Pavis material was our best glimpse into urban Sartar. King of Sartar presented the Orlanthi clan, their rites and lesser deities. It is only the second view at a typical Heortling clan. How could we have encountered Elmal in Pavis County or Gringlestead, or in the raider clan of the Varmandi? To me, King of Sartar also established clan level worship of Yelmalio in the "Tarshite"-speaking tribes of northern Sartar, including the Dinacoli. Now that's the big question. Monrogh Lantern was already established as a Yelmalio cult hero in Cults of Prax. The history of Pavis and Sun County makes it clear that Dorasar was accompanied by Sun Dome Templars, not Elmali. This gives us a very narrow window for the Elmal to Yelmalio conversion in Old Sartar. Fully subsumed in the places anything on that detail level had been published for. And yes, the insertion wasn't exactly perfect. Neither were the dates given for these events consistent. Nothing as bad as the CHDP mentions of Moirades after 1610, but the dates for the reigns of Jarolar, Jarosar and Tarkalor are a bit of "pick and choose your favorite". So yes, people - especially long time players of Yelmalian characters - felt like being tossed out into cold water. Here was Sun County, faithfully transporting all the RQ2 Yelmalio lore from the RQ2 rules examples, Cults of Prax and the Pavis box into the RQ3 era, with glorious scenarios and great local detail, and there was this trip into deeper story-telling. Elmal, the fire-owning horse and sun god of the Heortlings, and the loyal thane who kept guarding the stead in Orlanth's absence, refused to fade away. We can blame the third officially published game system for Glorantha, the King of Dragon Pass computer game, which helped popularize Elmal as part of the Heortling normal range of deities. Then came Thunder Rebels and Storm Tribe, approaching clan-based Heortlings for Hero Wars, and providing the Elmal canon that now is mourned. As far as I am concerned, all this Yelmalio stuff applies mainly to Sartar and to a lesser degree greater Tarsh. Neither the Elmali in the outback of Heortland nor Esrolia would have followed Monrogh en masse. And Yelmalio among the Praxian Beast Riders requires quite a bit of explanation or adaptation, too.

The cult of Dark (or Rex) is pretty much a cult with one initiate/priest with a clan or tribe as lay members. Given the gender-divided nature of the cults of Orlanth and Ernalda and the known (though not that common) case of female chiefs and kings, there can be no "if you are chief you are the clan priest of Orlanth" effect. As a result, I see the expressed need for a chief priest (or god talker) to Orlanth and to Ernalda besides the chief. There will be rites that demand the chief leading the sacrifice, and there will be rites demanding that the rite is led by the specialist priest, and there will be rites where some other quester will lead.

When metal became widely available. The same shape of the blade was present worked in flint deep into the Bronze Age, metal being a rare commodity in the region. In all directions? That strongly depends on the point of impact. I have seen flint blades (spear and arrow tips) with nicks from impacts on hard targets like bone when just the thin blade struck. Yes, any kind of glass - whether obsidian, opal, flint, or jade - has a tendency to break conchoidally, lacking the splittable layers of a crystal structure. This still allows the shape of the blade to account for mechanical stress, reducing the chance for breaking. In addition to knapping, heat treatment of the raw piece of mineral glass may provide additional tensile strength which may survive subsequent knapping. Do you know those glass bottles which you could use to hammer a nail into a piece of wood, which then will fall apart into a thousand shards if such a nail is dropped inside the bottle? Never under-estimate glasses. I surely struggled with them during work for my diploma thesis on silicates. Glorantha might know cast obsidian, with some control over cooling speeds, too. Given the magical associations, I would suggest Obsidian for spear tips rather than sword or axe blades. Klanth blade inlays are fine, though. Stormglass from lightning strikes is magically pre-destined to make sword blades. Dragonfire might even have produced glass with bronze metal backs in the Dragonkill, not by design, but by accident. A skilled knapper might be able to create a special weapon from such composite material.

What I meant to say, yes. If "priest" includes "Wind Lord", then maybe, although I can see both Storm Voice chief priest and Wind Lord first warrior defer to mere initiate politician/negotiator/poet etc, who may be initiate of another deity in addition to Orlanth, like Vasana's cousin Harmast. I don't see Vasana on the track to chieftainship, but I can see Harmast returning from the side of Argrath at some point and unhurriedly politely being given chieftainship a few years in the future, with the then chief quietly stepping down. The Red Cow chief at the beginning of the campaign is neither. Sure, there is Lunar occupation and suppression of the Cult of Orlanth going on, but still this cannot be entirely blamed to the Lunars. Yes, a chieftain is a form of a priest. Just not necessarily to either Orlanth or Ernalda. He is the guardian of the clan wyter, able to communicate directly. Chief and wyter play an instrumental role in managing the clan's portion of the magic of the worship services at any holy day celebrated by the clan, regardless which specialist priests officiates the rites of the deity celebrated.

A cottar is free to pack up and go elsewhere, the main difference towards a carl is what he will be tolerated to take along of the stead's wealth. Tenants are bound economically, given favors like cattle loans by their "landlords" of thane or carl rank. If they leave the clan, their most immediate kin will have to take on outstanding favor debts. They would have to leave barefoot, like Harmast. Reducing chieftainhood to clan priesthood is doing the clan structure a bit of a disservice, IMO. Yes, the clan chief is the priest of and single contact to the clan wyter, but that doesn't make him or her the chief sacrificer of his/her cult. Temple leaders are semi-hereditary (given the highly unfair advantage the priests' children get in observing rituals etc.), if only through marriage with equally privileged households in other clans in case of "wives".

In central Europe, these Fürstensitz central authorities appear quite lately, even though there must have been social and magical elites like the maker of the Nebra Disk long before. Settlement spacing of cultures like Unetice or Urnfield is very much like the Roman Iron Age barbaricum. You mean in the parts of the Danelaw settled by Norwegian settlers? Yes. Not that Angles or Jutes had been significantly more gregarious before they left the Cimbric peninsula, unless threatened by constant conflict. Without external threat, the first and second century AD saw lots of isolated steads or small groups of steads in Anglia. In the third and fourth century, few isolated steads remained active (according to the use of burial sites) while bigger centers accumulated much of the population. Grave goods give evidence through the wear on the weapons. The settlement distribution of Norwegian steads has remained relatively constant, if you allow for significant parts of more marginal farmland abandoned when the climate deteriorated, and reclaimed when it got milder again - at least in the Vesteraalen, on which I have data until the 17th century. Viking Age Norway and earlier did have King's seats - lots of them, and small ones - as small as Skrova (inland of the Lofoten) or nearby Steigen. Given the much harsher climate, communities had to stay smaller just to be able to make enough hay to get the lifestock through winter. Only the fishing communities around Vestfjord could make do with somewhat less land, and live by trading dried cod with the south, and even there the Halogalander steads were quite isolated. The coastal sami fisherfolk appear to have stuck together a bit more, relying on fishing and seasonal reindeer herds captured in permanent traps. Ottar, the trader visiting Alfred the Great of Wessex, probably only lacked divine descent to call himself a king, or he had given up on that submitting to Harald Finehair. Finehair's institution of hundreds that had to provide a ship for the royal fleet cannot have come out of nowhere, there must have been some small clan-like local organisation before, likely for a local thing or so. Travel between steads on boats was easier than overland travel, weather conditions permitting. Norwegian/Icelandic style settlement patterns require an absence of big armies and some alarm against Viking raiders. A shipload of raiders would still outnumber any number of defenders of a stead, which made fortifying these steads a luxury only chieftains (ship owners) could afford and crew. Retreat and ambush were the best bet to avoid significant loss to the raiders. Sartarite settlement patterns (to get back on topic) suggest a prevalence of fortified central settlements for a clan, with between 30 and 85% of the population living there, and in cases of temple sites like Clearwine, contingents of neighboring clansfolk, too. Looking at the Red Cow, about half of the clan population appears to inhabit the former giant hillfort, the rest spread out in steads and hamlets.

"Green glass" is a good description for jade. The Skyriver Titan descends to Dragon Pass myth is one of the very few somewhat positive Greater Darkness myths we have. Stone, brother of Mostal, had already died/fallen comatose when the Spike collapsed/imploded. Lorion/Engizi jumping down is nice for slaying Korang, but the real story is about Engizi not seeking to heal the wound in the sky but instead rushing onward to join Magasta in the struggle to encapsule the void left after the invading Chaos horde and the Celestial Court annihilated one another. Some remaining Storm god must have done the same above, and Darkness must have contributed from below, too, but first and foremost it was the Churner and the aid by almost all of the waters of the world whose ongoing struggle prevents that rift to expand again. Elsewhere, the world still got shattered and dissolved at the edges of the shards remaining, but without that feat, all of the world would have been sucked out into the Void, and end of story. Orlanth did manage to defeat the Sky/Middle Air invasion of Sky Terror before he set off on the Lightbringer's Quest. Reading the story in King of Sartar carefully, Korang's spear wasn't iron, but sharper than iron, able to cut through an adamantium helmet. Material like a horn of the devil or similar. It also was poisonous.

Not quite - the Humakti hunt undead on a regular basis, and the winter giants are ancient foes of many clans in the region. Unfortunately neither would be specifically vulnerable to stuff made from rock (or architecture) melted in the Dragonkill.

Farming density in Heortling communities will rarely go to the limits of plowable land. There will often be patches of clearings which could be expanded with some work, or less-than-optimal-but-far-from-hopeless pieces of land that can be claimed for plowland. Pasture is a lot less critical and can be good only a few inches above the bedrock. But brush or woodland on terrritory claimed by the clan is not unused. There are berries and even branches that get gathered, healing herbs etc. which grow in such company and shading, pasture for poultry or pigs, bed stuffing, additional winter fodder, refuge for game that can be hunted or spirits to be placated, etc. Most folk with carl status couldn't support themselves any better than any cottar individual, they just happen to live in a carl household that tills land with a plow. Cottars (like e.g. young Harmast Barefoot in the Hendriki chapters of the Ten Women Well Loved draft) also grow vegetables and similar foodstuff in their garden plots. Thanks to Harmast's lovemaking rain magics, his cabbages were always well watered even though the land suffered a severe drought under Palangio's regime.

Obsidian or flint make astonishingly good short swords. The terms "Saxon" is derived from the stone-blade knife-sword that had been used in the region for millennia. Living in the original settlement region of the saxons, the flintstone we find here is from marine sediments of silica microalgae opal, fused into the glassy consistence of flint mainly under high pressure but not too high temperatures (given the surviving chalk structures e.g. of the belemnite cephalopods whose characteristic fossils are locally known as "Donnerkeil" (thunder wedge). The blade is obviously not made for parrying or clubbing, but for slashing and impaling. Other than obsidian or flint, the blade might also be made from lightning glass - fused and glassed silicate where a lightning struck. Such a blade would be highly appropriate to transmit magical damage in addition to stabbing and slashing. Using obsidian might be a carrier for fire or heat magics. Marine flintstone might be good against Chaos if it carries similar searing powers like the Sounders or Syphon rivers that sear and leech away at the Chaos at their destinations. Then there is dragonglass - also widely available in the Pass region. A blade like this would likely be a weapon dedicated to fight special foes.

If that is canonical I must have missed that - Mastakos/Uleria is the special planet that doesn't enter the Underworld, with a stable 8 hour cycle. If Lightfore does this, too, he becomes indistinguishable with the sun in the day, wth highly variant speed near the solstices and constant speed at the equinoxes. The Guide doesn't suggest this, but it would be an acceptable interpretation of observable facts for worshippers of a Lightfore deity.

Vanntar certainly was a holy spot for the little sun which would be why Palangio the Iron Vrok established his garrison temple to Daysenerus there in the Bright Empire. With that inheritance, I am fairly convinced that the Yelmalio Tharkantus sun domers of Domanand spread there in time for the Kotor conflicts of the EWF. Note that the success of the Tax Revolt hinged on the trolkin abandoning their post because of the White Healers brought there by the Yemalians, which means that whatever became out of the Daysenerus cult after Palangio's demise played a role in the rise of Orlanthland. The introduction of Elmal in King of Sartar created a thread on the RQ Daily and hot debates on conventions when King of Sartar came out shortly after Sun County, and did ceate a similar schism in the Glorantha tribe. That was a time when many a "RQ2-grognard" (aka people who loved the setting since at least the early eighties and had been playing their beoved RQ2 characters probably without a break since then, and never bothered to switch over to all of the new-fangled RQ3 stuff, or who had grudgingly adapted their old characters to the new system) who did like RQ3 Sun County felt backstabbed and went on for other pastures. IIRC it was Martin Crim who created a list of overdone topics on the Daily. The top three were the Elmal/Yelmalio debate then (when we knew next to nothing about Elmal), the "sobjectivity" debate (objective vs. subjective universe), and the great moose debate when Europeans outed themselves as reading "elk" as Alces alces rather than as wapiti red deer. The latter one led at least to amusing silliness. The other two were connected, and led to some bitterness. Probably since long before the discovery of Elmal... When we started to learn about Elmal, there certainly had not been a temple to a second little sun god in Boldhome. Greg's Many Suns revelation (which he gave one of the keynote short essays on in the Baltimore RQ-Con booklet) makes it look like this happened in play or when writing a Tarkalor narrative that never has been seen by the fans. Unlike Greg who had lots of variant pantheons and deities in his earlier writings about Glorantha, with many names for the sun, people who had been "brought up" with Wyrm's Footnotes "Gods and Goddesses of Glorantha" and Cults of Prax/Terror were used to the Jrusteli Monomyth as a single piece of monolithic truth, and probably never thought about e.g. the Teshnan solar pantheon as anything different from the unwieldy Cult of Yelm which described a religion practiced by neither Pentans nor Dara Happans as written. RQG successfully presents Yelm the Sunhorse for the Grazer pure horse folk, without attempting to model the Dara Happan society under the same heading. Perhaps even more so when you can associate faces of people you met at conventions with people departing from their former community over the little suns schism. It is quite a pity that the reworked King of Sartar did not expand this little germ by an account of Tarkalor's journey to Teshnos. That has been my impression since when I first encountered the sons and daughters of Vingkot. The only thing I am unclear about is how these folk became shadowcat people rather than dog people. There are a few significant differences. One is apparent size in the sky - our moon happens to appear to have the same diameter as the sun. I suppose that that is true for the Red Moon outside of the Glowline, too. Another is that our moon does share the day sky with the sun when it is at its darkest, all the way to eclipsing the sun. This gives a much livelier "moon chases sun" experience than the diametrical opposite of the sun and Lightfore. I wonder if there are heroquests or myths about Lightfore's journey across the Underworld sky. Or for any other periodical body that leaves the sky, like Orlanth's Ring between its exit from Pole Star's gate and its re-entry at Stormgate. Celestial bodies are associated with many deities, and deities may be associated with more than one celestial body or location, too. The travels of Lightfore paint the stories of Yelm the Youth onto the sky with its formations. Apart from the star seers of Yuthuppa, few people can perceive the stars in the sky when the sun is up, which makes me wonder about the Starspill in the Copper Tablets. Elmal's celestial presence is the sun that travels the Sunpath, but many of the Yelmalian rites are day rites, too, and look at the one sun for their magical support. Neither cult is impotent in the night (unlike Yelm), but I don't think that either cult cares much about whether light from Lightfore touches down or not. Day rites take in power from the sun, in night rites the cultist is the sun in the dark and radiates the light himself.

Darkness was the space that formed (and expanded) upon separation from the Void, and used to be everywhere before the other elements formed within. The fiery glowing sky dome may have been the afterglow of the conquest of whatever went there before. There may have been a period when there was only light where light was pointed or carried (by chariot, riding, ....). An earlier sun may have been rotating and directional, like the Red Moon (only white or golden). There is much that has been forgotten about Sedenya. Do you know where I could read this? This encounter is in a sidebar of the Uz Lore book of Troll Pak, both RQ2 and RQ3, ZZ gets badly burned and decides that this is a foe, AA gets close enough to learn the secret that allowed him to chain Veskarthan, and XU decides that this is "friendship from afar". The original list of the eastern emperors was one of many as interesting as cryptical few-liners from the Jonstown Compendium in RuneQuest Companion for RQ2. Names like TarnGatHa appeared only with Revealed Mythologies in the Hero Wars era, which is also the first time I have seen Vith without the land moniker Vithela. A certain sky connection makes all manner of sense for the place which has the Gates of Dawn. On the whole, the better eplanation would be that the God Learners tried to understand Vith as Aether, which got them no further than the westernmost East Isles.7 One thing that keeps baffling me is the untouchable continent of Vithalash, empty of humans, keets or antigod races. Seems like a waste to me. Greg's original Pamaltela was similar, the land beyond the elf forests populated by bomonoi rather than humans. Maybe Vithela just never experienced someone like Sandy who placed his campaign there? Vith is half bright half dark, much like the observable sky within time. So is Sedenya, the turning sun, the one who didn't claim to be the all-seeing eye, but only the turning eye in the sky that holds the balance. Not even much need for mysticism in this perception of the pre-Yelm sky, really. That is a delicious conspiracy, although it, together with the idea of a Aetheric "coup" does paint the Sky-rune beings in a very conceited and poor light (no pun intended). I'm wondering if there's something more complex to it. Yelm was a Lodril? In the sense of the ground-walking good-for-nothing fire deity/mage, yes. Fond of mountains, too, although not a maker of mountains from his inner heat. Ehilm, son of Lodik. The static Golden Age with its Sunstop state was just the new status quo that resulted from Brightface's putsch.

Saxon inheritance laws which designate a single heir to take over the entire farm isn't that different from this. The individual holds the farm for his bloodline.

They weren't enemies of Saronil and Jarosar but an underprivileged minority in Sartar which expressed their displeasure by denying a call to arms. That's not open rebellion, or treason. That's not how I read this at all. The guys who followed Monrogh had no strife with those who remained - doctrine varies somewhat from temple to temple. These warriors were treated as second class Orlanthi, and Monrogh gave them a chance to be lords in their own light. Tarkalor was the one who made the disgruntled Elmali listen to Monrogh in the first place. If he could put up with those ritual challenges, everyone else ought to have been able to, too. Purely based on what has been published before, I truly don't see how you can call this a retcon. Once more we are arguing about details which may make less sense when approached differently, like the 2003/2004 debate about the location of the Balmyr (after their "tribal center" Halfort was put right in the middle of the then victorious Locaem and Kultain tribes). Problematic details, not a retcon.

You could put this into a single table. I also note that your tables lack the "your ancestor died of other causes" option.

It was written for an audience of warriors. Poetic exaggeration was accepted in such poetry, like Beowulf's heroic swimming feat. If you want to capture the option of epic heroic combat at the upper range of the combat system, boosted by magic, this is what your system is supposed to support. You do want the gritty professional level on the other end. Rolled tatami maps? Maybe 20 strikes, and your energy spent for a few minutes as this would be a sprint effort and not sustainable aerobic activity. More than half as many arrows in rapid fire mode at point blank "you need to fumble to miss" range, if you have those arrows ready, Arrowmound fashion, and a lot less anaerobic metabolism. Ypu'll be able to hit about as many fencing contacts with your opponent's weapon, and much less exhaustion. A strike followed through is a different kind of effort than testing your opponent's weapon for a clear strike. How many pieces of wood can you cleave with an axe in a minute? There are weapons which deal a lot less force per strike but have a greater strike frequency, like daggers, and the RQ strike rank system sucks at simulating knife fights or fisticuffs with chain strikes, unless you treat the chain strike sequence as a single attack.

No, it does make quite a lot of sense that Tarkalor would have an embassy of Sun Dome County in his capital. They would be an addition to the already impressive array of loyal warriors of the Telmori and the Humakti who form the regular royal bodyguard. Like Nochet and Pavis, Boldhome is a melting pot of neighboring folk rather than a typical local city. It has a troll quarter, for crying out loud. It will have a Praxian market, and probably an Earth Shaker and a Beast Folk embassy as well, though not necessarily always occupied. The dwarf embassy was mentioned in the silver dancer scenario. Terasarin's ties to the Far Place when the Far Place Yelmalians gave asylum to dissidents from Vanntar may mean that that arrangement soured within a few years. We don't hear anything about templars standing guard for Temertain.

Day and night cycles shouldn't happen before the Dawn if you believe the commentary on the God Learner Maps in the Guide, but either a Sunstop or a permanent night with a moonlight equivalent orb somewhere high. On the other hand, some form of "day" cycle appears to have existed even in the Golden Age (cf the 294 servants of Yelm, one for each day of the Gloranthan year). And Argan Argar, the son of Night, led his portion of the Wonderhome trolls to the surface (Halikiv, Shadow Plateau) just after Yelm Bijiif had entered and burnt out Wonderhome, which implies a pre-existing concept of night, too, though not necessarily during the reign of Brightface.

Leaving realism aside, if you check the exploits of Paris as a heroic archer in the Iliad, he does a veritable Legolas in that Trojan assault. Distance would have been under 20 meters, but in a melee situation where he dodged between heavily armored melee fighters. At a similar distance, even relatively untrained me was able to fire six well-aimed shots at similar distance on torso-sized targets which showed only every five seconds or so for maybe three seconds in considerably less than a minute. That's one called hit onto a hit location per melee round. Sniping from a position away from melee. Depends on the size of the target, and whether it is moving about, and on arrow speed if it is moving about. Your average sports bow with ultra-light arrows will achieve similar flight times as a low military strength longbow with wooden arrows. At 80 meters, you can have a second arrow notched and ready when the first arrow strikes the target. With flight times like that, you need to guess at the movement of a moving target to land a hit. You can reliably hit a torso-sized area at that distance, but the target needs to cooperate and cross that area when the arrow arrives. The closer the target gets, the smaller the area you can reliably hit, and the greater the chance that the victim will be within that target area because time to move out of it also shortens. Again, at 20 meters you can snipe fairly well, but the target needs to cooperate through constant movement or failure to evade. If you are shooting at a densely packed mass of targets, effective range is about 150 meters. Hitting an individual target reliably at that distance is hard, but on good days even I managed to put most of my arrows within the second innermost ring at a clout tournament. Rapid fire archery at an approaching mass is a sound strategy if you don't have to worry about ammunition. Given the amount of material and labor that goes into a well-adapted arrow, not having to worry is likely a situation where your opponents arriving makes all conservation of ammo a moot decision.

Cult compatibility and Eurmal? Who are you going to trick? Seriously, apart from the Orlanth cult which may take responsibility for a bonded trickster, most other cults in Sartar are at best neutral to Eurmal. He is the most popular in parts of Loskalm and Ralios, where he is acknowledged as the Firebringer who sided with humans against selfish gods - not sure that that will make any of those gods more inclined to be friendly with that cult. Plenty a cult will have a myth of how Eurmal (or some other trickster) interacted with their deity, and if that myth has a moment of non-violence, a Eurmali might be able to invoke that for a period of non-aggression which will end when the trickster transgresses again. (I.e., give it a day or two, unless it is a very elaborate trick that takes longer to set up.) Outright enemies will be the kin of Eurmal's murder victims (of which there are plenty, too). Toleration with strong restriction is the absolute best a Eurmali can hope for unless he manages to trick himself temporarily into a better position (which he will trick himself out of soon again).

I think it is rather the contingent provided by Monrogh for the cousin of Tarkalor, some of whom remained in the new city at Pavis while the rest went to Mo Baustra/Sun County to end their Solitude of Testing for good.

There is Storm Tribe and Book of Heortling Mythology with a number of aspects and myths.