Joerg

Whut? RQ3 bestiary (book 4 in the DeLuxe box, IIRC) had the calculations which was all that I needed, and hit point allocation tables for a number of body shapes. Most vital/protected body part aka chest 2/5 total HP, head, other body parts like abdomen and major limbs 1/3 total HP, secondary limbs like human arms or quadruped legs 1/4 total HP, lesser limbs (e.g. chitinous ones whose loss wouldn't incapacitate) 1/6 total HP. If any sample characters deviated from this, I never noticed, because I have never bothered to look up any numbers, but always calculate on the spot unless I am using a handout (which is rarely the case). Plus there is always a chance that neither player characters nor opposition are at full HP, giving just enough wiggle room to avoid total fails. (I did translate this part of the rules to German for private use, but didn't notice any discrepancies with the table. But then possibly I just calculated the values rather than transcribing the table entries without checking the text portion or the numerical tables verbatim, rounding mathematically correct.) RQ3 offered enchantments which would be available to major adversaries, pumping up location HP or AP - offering some wiggle room to avoid total pushovers, too. Then there was Enhance CON, which would create a few temporary total HP that could raise location HP by one or two for the duration of the spell with reasonably restrained sorcerers.

Let's be honest: how long have you played a character with characteristics like that in an ongoing campaign? A character with average stats throughout has plenty of disadvantages, like being unable to cause damage to an opponent in leather armor even for unparried hits quite often. Without the damage bonus, playing any kind of fighter is an exercise in "pling", as the range of weapons you are limited to doesn't really offer a fixed number added to the die roll. "Roll stat times 5" is a penalty game, too. Even more so when it comes to "stat times 3". To make a character at least somewhat above average, you have to choose dump stats (note the plural). If you are fine with playing the charming damsel in distress in your party of adventurers, no big deal. If the dumb hitter is your forte, bad luck - 8 is the minimum score for INT. RQ3 allowed to play the ugly brute (APP 5 or less) who still could inspire and use spirit spells, but RQG returns with CHA, combining leadership and spirit mastery with appearance. One in four characters will have one stat or more above 16 without any modifications. Every second player will have at least one stat at 16 using unmodified dice. True, you can buy down SIZ and INT to 10 to get these 6 points to raise a stat to 16 or more, and a second stat at 14 or so. Enough to give you a damage bonus and a slightly better strike rank, and to be able to wield a heavy hitter weapon. Or you can opt for the nerd wizard with pitiful STR and CON - the very D&D stereotype that RQ made obsolete. You can plan on lowering trainable stats at the start of your career, opting to spend valuable time and effort to get them to somewhat effective levels without capping your personal maximum attainable value well under species maximum (as per RQ3). Playing an imperfect character can be challenging and fun. Playing an ineffective character can be jarring, leading to a much higher death rate of such characters even beyond their greater vulnerability.

To me the text you quoted is clear. If both STR and DEX are below the requirements, all attacks and parries with the weapon are performed at half skill. A character with DEX 11 and STR 11 will be able to wield a Rapier at normal skill, although his style will be markedly variant from the normal style. It isn't clear whether excess DEX can make up for lack in STR. Given the availability of spirit magic spells that cause temporary increases in either of these stats, it makes sense to train a weapon even if it cannot be used without a penalty without that boost. I do wonder whether having too low stats lets you roll your skill increase ticks against full or against half skill, though. Can training under adverse conditions make improvement easier?

Naimless is a member of the Temple of the Wooden Sword at this time, located in Sartar, which makes her enough of a Sartarite in my book. Only 55 miles inside the Wastes is far enough to avoid contact with vengeful feuding clansfolk from back in Sartar, which might mean a semi-permanent population of Sartarites here, and possibly at other oases, possibly providing some "civilized" craft as a service. And I doubt that all members of Alain's expedition would have been Humakti - the surviving Arroyan shows that other experts would be likely, as do the adventures of the Temple of the Wooden Sword. If the goal of RQG is to pick up where RQ2 petered out, there should be numerous such bands of exile hobos eking out a meager life in Prax. Yes, there are Orlanthi settlers and refugees who have settled down to an ordinary Orlanthi life in Pavis County. We have the numbers. And technically, the folks who join resident clans aren't Sartarites any more, but a new type of uppity Oasis Folk in the river valley. Much like the Indagos. There are probably as many (combined) city dwellers without clan membership in Pavis County and itinerant exiles, quite a few of them registered as adventurers under who knows what false identities, or just re-equipping/re-sacrificing in New Pavis or Badside, operating from Adari or Barbarian Town or even Corflu, working as caravan guards when refraining from banditry. Others may live as guests of the Pol Joni, much like Olgkarth and his band of Pavis Survivors did when Dorasar contacted him. All the oases have shrines that may be of interest to Sartarite exiles hiding out in Prax, e.g. Adari or Barbarian Town, for the purpose of spell recovery or spirit magic acquisition. It is not like there are Theyalan missionaries inciting the Oasis Folk to step up and defend themselves against those Praxian take-overs, although the "Seven Samurai/Glorious Seven" trope could be played at any of the Praxian oases against some particularly awful occupation (e.g. by Lunar Sable phratries tolerating Chaos allies like Imperial ogres). But the very existence of a farmer-warrior who works his own little plot in an oasis but who is ready to defend his harvest might be a bad example that might re-awaken Tada-shi pride. Likewise nosy Lhankor Mhy folk researching how they can use ancient Praxian magic to bargain their way back into their Sartarite clans. Even more so if this happens during the Windstop. But, come to think of this, rose-tinted glass wearing Seven Mother missionaries are as likely to bring this to pass, and create a problem with uppity oasis folk for innocent Praxian clans taking over an oasis. There is too little in print about interactions with Praxian clans and Oasis Folk at an occupied oasis. Pilgrims from other clans or tribes do have a legitimate cause to access the oasis shrine, but will have to negotiate or even bully their way through the current lords of the oasis. Oasis folk will have holy folk and possibly a few slightly trickster-like wretches taking stuff from pilgrims or even occupators. They might also have some hidden avengers among their numbers, striking unexpectedly and anonymously at the worst perpretators with copper axes.

Greg used to run Hero Wars games where every player represented a community, in turn represented by a very limited number of abilities and a single score for each subunit of the community. There was some resource management involved, too. I played a game at some incarnation of Tentacles where each played controlled one uz faction of the Blue Moon Plateau, with the overall challenge to provide the optimum food to the oldest Mistress Mother to give birth to the new form of Surface World uz, untainted by the Curse of Kin. In our game, we managed to locate the cap of one of the eight planetary sons of Yelm - actually the top tier of his ziggurat - and attempted to transport it to Blue Moon Plateau. We didn't consider that this Son of Yelm also was an incarnation of Sedenya, and were intercepted by forces of the Empire. The game ended there and then, but as a narrator I would have allowed a second game where an underworld ambush to retrieve that thing from Lunar safeguarding could have been staged. I don't think there is anything like this published as an rpg. The concept is provably playable, although creating this as a genre pack might be kind of hard.

If you think of Cohen the Barbarian from Diskworld, he was able to use his full ability range, but on occasion he would have to roll against some ailment in order to be able to continue. No reason to treat ancient heroic Gloranthan humans who failed to achieve the avoidance of aging through heroquesting any differently. Accomplished heroquesters usually avoid aging and have a backdoor from the Court of the Dead (or some other stage down there in Hell) - Hofstaring definitely had both, and I suspect so does Gringle, though possibly at more advanced phsysical age. Hofstarings problem was that he had been sent to a different Hell in his body, a Lunar hell which was neither available for Chalana Arroy Resurrection paths even if there had been enough of him left for a Heal Body/Regenerate combo to provide something his soul could have been returned to.

RQ3 offered a ridiculously low number of characteristic points (IIRC 80) to distribute among the stats, obeying species maximum restrictions. The combined method aimed at 93 points (IIRC) as the cap sum to which rolled stats could be raised with up to ten characteristic points allocated by player choice, obeying species maximum restrictions. Characters having higher stats aren't really game breakers - it is legitimate (though exceedingly rare) to roll up a character with maxed values in all stats. One of the few cases where the old joke that the character's only weakness is his humility might be true. Having maxed out stats all over doesn't make a RQ character a Mary Sue. The skills play too much of a role, and maximal hit points are nice to have, but will result in maybe 2 or 3 more location hit points than your average human - nothing an overhead troll maul or a trollkin spear impale/critical in the abdomen, chest or head couldn't cure.

The enlightened have as many souls as do ordinary folk, or more. The Orlanthi recognize five elemental souls, the Dara Happans a sixpartite soul, and Lunar illuminates call themselves "sevened", indicating a seventh soul. Upon death, each of these souls will return to the appropriate origin, waiting to be returned to the cycle. The most dominant of these souls will probably carry much of the identity of the former living being. Mystics who approach the Ultimate by shedding their ties to the world (as e.g. the draconic school that Obduran and Ingolf belonged to) overcome their elemental ties to the world in the first few stages of gradual enlightenment, without necessarily casting them off. Obduran demonstrated that you could be a fully awakened draconic worshiper and still an active worshiper of Orlanth, and Ingolf did the same (but failed to advance as far as Obduran). Not sure about worthies like Lorenkargatan or Isgangdrang, and pretty sure that the EWF Sun Dragon that became Emperor was a solar worshiper rather than a worshiper of Orlanth. Ingolf's afterlife was chosen after he had squandered all of his draconic advances to Entanglement, and after he had started his mystical exploration a second time. When the Black Dragon came to fetch him, he was still sent to the most advanced state of being/unbeing that he had attained in his first enlightenment. It is unknown whether his second approach had brought him that far, or whether he had been successful to attain any stage of enlightenment at all. There is no mention of his other souls, even though he is a canonical hero of Orlanth who can be reached through worship, so apparently his Storm Soul made its way to Orlanth despite his draconic identity having been carried off to Kapertine.

The sequence of the seasons doesn't correspond to any of these systems, either... Sea - Fire - Earth - Dark - Storm - (Sacred) Zzabur's sigil has the elemental superiority sequence: Darkness eats Earth nags Storm churns Water quenches Fire burns Darkness The sequence of elemental ages is yet different (with Darkness appearing twice, before the Seas, and after Storm). Dark -> Sea -> Earth -> Fire -> Storm -> Dark -> Chaos (If you eliminate the second Dark, you get the sequence of the Theyalan week days: Freeze (Dark), Water, Clay, Fire, Winds, Wild, Gods Unless you count the Flood as the age of the Seas, which gives you Earth -> Fire -> Storm (can possibly be skipped) -> Sea -> Storm (again) -> Dark -> Chaos The character sheet sequence of the pentagram is yet another. Air trumps Fire? Then why was Umath/Umatum dismembered by Jagrekriand/Shargash? (And when did we first learn about this?) Edit: Missing the obvious here: the RQG arrangement is the vertical arrangement of the elements in the cosmos.

Biturian's travelogue - the Humakti duel at Tourney altar and Pairing Stone have Sartarite encounters, and with a quite high likelihood the Chalana Arroyan who had accompanied Alain's party was from Sartar, too. Moonbroth had few if any free Orlanthi other than Biturian, and Day's Rest had storm bull worshipers who may or may not have included Sartarites (as the RQG sample characters show, you cannot tell from their steeds whether they are Praxian or Sartarite). The Paps and Sun County had none. We don't have any encounters for Cam's Well or other oases with Oasis Folk population.

How distant are the Tarshite royal house and the Errio-unit of Sylila? Philigos' sons' followers (and Fazzur's family) spent their exile during Palashee's reign on Sylilan holdings. And how much influence to the Eel-Ariash have on the Tarsh court? Reuniting their Hon-eel bloodline with their more recent results (Jar-eel) needn't mean that Phargentes (son of Philigos) was their agent.

Perhaps it is seen as a disease rather than a consequence of aging. Old people are revered for their wisdom. But then, certain forms of madness are regarded as sacred, too.

It taps the life/breath-giving magic out of the air. If you tap the magic (the hardness?) out of a rock, the rock will crumble to dust, but tapping usually only removes a quality out of something. When the quality is the size (as with those blue-clad diminutive folk of Halkamelem near Sogolotha Mambrolal, Guide p.212), you might argue that a quantity is stolen. Let's play around with this. If you tap a house, will it be more prone to collapsing, will you create a hole in the wall, or will it shrink? If you want a hole in the ground, can you just tap it? When you tap a flame, can you still burn the fuel? Will the heat of the flame disappear, or its light? Tapping converts an intrinsic quality into one-use magic points. The effect of long-term tapping is described in the Guide in the description of Arolanit (p.414);

That's Pavis County, a cause lost since when the Praxians gambled away their participation in Dorasar's city. And anyway, protected or not, they will have to provide passage and support to Praxian clans passing through, like good Oasis Folk should. But there were Sartarites in many of the Oases as well, teaching the Oasis slave population weird stuff about liberty and equal rights. It is better that they have left from there. Yes. But they may count as an annoyance, too, and as one that has gone largely away. And Jaldon is the Paps Khan. Much reason for annoyance among the priestesses of Eiritha.

The second awakeners come out of hibernation when Rathor the White Bear God still is alive and well. I do wonder what happened to their White Bear cultist guardians of their hibernation. Did they experience normal time during the Ban? If so, did they manage to form some sort of survival cult to provide generations of guardians? And what about other Hsunchen sharing the Rathori territory? Does the Rathori hibernation pull the entire sections of Rathorela into the timeless slumber of the Underworld? What about the Green Elves? These questions aren't answered by the Guide, which means you'll have to decide for your campaign.

Both names describe the same place. Exile Stead refers to the Berennethtelli survivors of the conflict with Lokamayadon that led to the immolation of Brolarulf the Poet, who fled to the outskirts of Prax to avoid further damage from this feud. This is where Harmast Barefoot grew up and managed to get initiated despite Lokamayadon having usurped the initiation myth, leading an entire generation of Heortling initiands to their deaths or at least spiritual damage and unable to reach Orlanth. Here's a thread discussing this: Dundealos tribal lands used to end a good way north of this, but when the tribe was dismantled by the Lunars who constructed the New Temple on their lands, significant portions of that tribe fled south and re-populated the hard to secure farmland (but ok grazing) around this place. You might say this was the traditional "oasis" for the Pol Joni, but saying it was their center would ignore their dominance in the higher quality grazing grounds between Adari and Swenstown.

Depends entirely on how often you slay it, so it has to reform in its cave on the moon. Overall quite low, I would say.

On the matter of fluid physics: there remains stale air, so you don't create a vacuum. It just becomes unbreathable (like multiple times exhaled), and I guess not exchanged while under the influence of the spell. That's if you remove all the air, but as I read the magic, it removes the breathable quality of the air, not the substance itself. This spell doesn't create voids - you would need some Chaos component for that. So basically, think of this like the Gloranthan version of nitrogen and carbon dioxide. (Note that real world oxygen levels of above 20% are useless for breathing when the carbon dioxide content of the air reaches 5% - the problem is that you cannot exhale carbon dioxide any more, so that the carbon dioxide bound to your hemoglobine doesn't make place for oxygen. Breathing through water or alkaline solutions may mitigate that problem slightly, and absorbers with calcinated caustic chalk will give you several minutes of CO2 removal. Similar problems occur when you use a snorkel with a volume greater than your normal lung capacity - if you are unable to expel the exhaled air, you'll suffocate. But a candle flame might still burn on.) Does the spell description state whether this will extinguish flames? The quality of air required by flame doesn't necessarily have to be the same as the quality required for breath, despite our chemistry telling us they both require oxygen and exhaust carbon dioxide, but the Orlanthi concept of Breath also includes moving air. Still/stale air may still support a flame while making breathing organism's suffocate. How does this spell interact with air/storm elementals, and how does it work in a storm/strong breeze?

Yes and no. The revelation of Illumination is the realization of or confrontation with the Ultimate, the source of all energies coursing through Glorantha, and the Void (which is where all the energies go). The Void is the vast realm of raw potential unbound by rules or shape. Outside of the universe that is Glorantha, this is as it should be, and calling it "chaotic" or random is correct in the sense of modern physics. Another word for Glorantha is Creation, and this refers to the origin of the universe. The raw potential of the Void got structured, was given rules and shape, tentatively at first with Darkness, and ever more strict afterwards. All this Creation was only possible by drawing upon the potential of the Void, through Creation. At some point, the potential of the universe to accomodate more Creation was satiated. Depending on who you ask, further Creation then broke the world, whether you blame the Birth of Umath or ultimately the birth of Wakboth. The seams of the world were weakened, and the void's raw potential for both Creation and Destruction crept into the world. Unchecked by rules, it became the source of unchecked mutation and of annihilation, and was called Predark or Chaos. The experience of Illumination usually comes at you unprepared, even if you have been meditating on this for ages. Nysalorean illumination comes as a shock, but it is possible to prepare yourself for that. One result of illumination - whether Nysalorean or draconic - is the realization that Chaos is an expression of the Void just as much as Creation is an expression of the Void. Another result is the insight that even divine or runic energy is handed down from the Ultimate, and that divine retribution is just one such flow of energies, as much as rune magic cast by an initiate is. That realization is what provides the immunity to spirits of reprisal. Unrealizaiton and refutation of the material world is at the heart of both draconic and Vithelan forms of mysticism. Practitioners usually approach this very slowly, through numerous steps of insights, until they achieve the confrontation with the Ultimate prepared, and finally they pass through the Ultimate. Practitioners who have confronted the Ultimate may confront others with its presence. This is called the Liberation Bolt, and has an effect not dissimilar from Illumination. (Reading Heortling Mythology, there appear to be Element Rune variations of this - Orlanth's Liberating bolt Stormspear on p.92 appears to work just the same.) The most detailed description of draconic enlightenment at least as per EWF is distributed over Heortling Mythology (p.137-139), History of the Heortling Peoples (48-49, 51-52) and Revealed Mythologies (p.106f) out of the Stafford Library. Ingolf's path to enlightenment (and loss of that through entanglement with the mundane world) names a number of draconic realities beyond mortal ken, alternatively described as draconic hells or as stages of purification on the way to Liberation. The known 7 stages aren't all of this way, and probably only one of many paths to draconic enlightenment, but absent other such sources the one we have to work with.

Quite a lot of them, yeah. Exile is over now that the Lunars don't penalize their clans for worshiping the storm any more. And many of those White Bull fanatics have left, too. On the other hand, now they have Jaldon.

This is what we had to work with before "History of the Heortling Peoples", and you could have produced a post like this just quoting me from old digests. But those old digests would also find my somewhat disparaging "Subcult of Orlanth Regulus" "correction" to this. We found the Rex cult applied to the tribal kings of Sartar. That definition of "king" always reminded me of the "duodec princes" of the Holy Roman Empire prior to 1815, named that way because they would have about 12 subjects, or of the Norwegian/Viking ship kings whose kingdom was their ship and crew and whatever place they might claim for themselves by conquest. This may actually be unfair, since the Kingdom of Talastar appears to work under this kind of kingship. (The kingdom of Aggar exists under this kind of kingship, but I wouldn't exactly say that it works as a stable tribal confederation.) Arim's dynasty may have been a variant of this, but I don't see any "command priests" working on their Sorana Tors, or the subsequent Illaro dynasty. Neither for the Colymar kings and their Orane priestesses. In order to make this policy work, Alakoring needed tribal structures in the Orlanthi communities he converted. I am not sure whether the draconized Orlanthi of Kerofinela had such structures while their own leaders were part of the dragon dream. I don't think that clans were disbanded, but tribes probably became meaningless inside the deepest parts of the dream. Hendriki kingship had gone through all these Orlanthland changes rather unchanged, which is sort of ironic if you recall that many of these kings were elected from among the Larnsti, Masters of Change. I cannot quite tell how this affected tribal kingship in Heortland, and I am hesitant to extrapolate from Quivini tribal kingship. The only Heortland-elected migration king I can name is Mad-Blood Malan, who may or may not have been a Rex king. When Yanasdros of Tarsh took on Vingkotling kingship and spread his influence all the way to the Praxian border, the northern Alakoringite concept of tribal Rex kingship may have inflitrated the Quivini tribes, and possibly spread south afterwards. The "reign of priests" starts with the Taxslaughter, when Hardros Hardslaughter was named a Great Living Hero (receiving cross-tribal worship) rather than the successor of his fallen king. The Kingdom of Orlanthland continued without anybody taking the position of the King of Orlanthland. This concept of a ring of equals rather than a single person ruling the land didn't change any king rites, it just continued without any king rites. And still this was a period of great prosperity and growth, enough so that Domanand (Mirin's Cross) was established to stem Orlanthi expansion. The Draconic emancipation and then take-over was spear-headed by Obduran. His proof of non-exclusivity of draconic thought and traditional Orlanth worship took the main complaint of the Old Day Traditionalist away and turned the majority of the people of Orlanthland into Complacentines (as per Heortling Mythology p.138), willing worshippers of the draconic leaders who weren't that different from the Great Living Heroes like Hardros (or later Renvald). The Orlanth Rex cult description in Heortling Mythology sort of claims that with Rex magics, Obduran wouldn't have been able to seduce the Orlanthi into worshipping dragons. Apart from the fact that this text was written by frothing fanatics, I doubt that having the Rex cult (on a tribal level) in Orlanthland would have affected anything that happened on the supra-tribal level of the council of Orlanthland. I don't see the problem in any weakness of Orlanthi kingship cults, but in the absence of practicing these on the Orlanthland level. Hence I see little evidence that this magic would have been effective on the members of the Third Council.

Kralorela should have a whole set independently from Dragon Pass. Maybe not all the elements, but a full set of important concepts. The future Great Flood is another case where the event doesn't quite resemble the Godtime event with its standing waves. It will be the first time since Earth rose up from the bottom of the universe that parts of Kerofinela will be covered by the sea. While I don't doubt that there will be "tidal waves" running in on the land, they are no comparison to the mountains of water that covered the Rockwoods east and west of the Pass valley.

If you look at the Biturian tale in Cults of Prax (part of the Cults Compendium available as pdf from the Chaosium webshop), a lot of his wares are revealed only when a certain station requires mentioning them. I don't know how you have equipped your trader character - does she have a few mules with more or less unspecified trade goods? If yes, have her player describe how she presents her wares. Bring up prospective customers pointing out an item the player may or may not have described, "yes, that bluish glazed pottery there", and come up with a story of origin and function. Even if this turns out as no deal for this customer, it might spur some other possible lead to trade away. Biturian has gambled on a number of goods, and he sells a few with temporarily high profit (for Truestone, no less), only to yield up much in the Chalana Arroy, Yelmalio and Zorak Zoran encounters. Without the bison tribe wedding gifts to Norayeep, his journey would have been a disaster. With them, he was a made man. Your trader probably will have gambled on a few leading items, too, and may carry a mish-mash of odds from previous "better than a loss" bargains. What does the player of your trader really want from this trading? Detailed exchange of wares or coins? "A few of your previous oasis trades turn out to be quite the sellers, but the cloth that you thought would be sought after by the Yelmalians has a wrong shade of color, and turns out to be taboo"-style description of the trade outcome? Have the trader check some offers of other traders, there might be a hidden gem among their wares that her appraisal could discern. Or it might be a fake pretending to be such a hidden gem. Either way, a minor story hook results. One of those other traders might have already gone through one of these variants with your trader, and now he feels wronged by having been taken advantage of, or he may be accused of not having traded in good practice. Again, potential for conflict and or further stories. A rival trader is looking for a specific item, your trader learns about this, and might manage to buy it before the rival can, making a nice profit as intermediate, or even finding the customer of that rival and take him out of that trade.

Has it? Godtime cycles of consumption would have been a lot less stringent than the strict demands of Time. Going to the long sleep would have been easier. The Great Darkness wasn't that cold any more - Cold had lost against Chaos, much like all other powers. And the survivors of the Great Darkness numbered at best four digit numbers. This time you have five or six digit numbers of people to feed. Zola Fel will be able to feed the river folk even when there is no regular flow any more. There will be a few pools or vortices remaining liquid. If you really stop the rivers, then cracks from the Void in the center of the world will move up the dead strands of the rivers that reach into Magasta's Pool. No, it is a four Season period of less Fertility than Hell. And it has a border, which will be crossed by everyone mobile enough - the majority of the Beast Riders. They can leave, and will do so. The protectresses need to be freed to help - intense and time pressure scenario stuff. By definition, in this kind of Great Winter they are unavailable. The Founders may slay enemies and offer their carcasses, but that doesn't help the herds. Waha stepped up after the Spider's Net had been cast over the shards of the world, and he did what the Founders had been unable to do - he liberated the Protectresses, led them to water, then to the badly diminished remnants of their tribes. Waha is Gray Age, not Great Winter. His myths are irrelevant to return the grazings to activity. The ancestral grazings may be sacred, but they are dead, too. They cannot support even the herds of the small ritual rearguard, unless the beasts can live of dead vegetation, but only Impala and Sables can. The Protectresses are powerless before Ernalda stirs in her sleep (Ritual of the Net). The good thing about the Greater Darkness is its timeless nature, and even the Gray Age profited from that. No such luck in the Fimbulwinter. Nothing grows. That which has grown before is available for eating and grazing, but once it is used up, it is used up. You can dig up the roots - that will keep the herds alive, but ruin the grazing for years to come. Still, it will be done, but Prax will come out of this able to sustain maybe a fraction of the population of what it could before. The beasts of prey are starving, too, and their dead can be collected without any skill. They won't spoil in the cold, but they are hardly worth the effort of gathering up, unless your soup turns bones and hides into food. Ah, the Other Side cheat, evading Time. And you pay for this by way worse chaos foes. Nothing grows. Nothing at all. On the whole, 80% survivors means that there is no Fimbulwinter in all of its consequences, or that there is mass emigration. To be honest, the description of the Windstop is full of plot holes, way more than mythology can sustain before it collapses, making entire regions disappear like in the Greater Darkness. There are no myths of the deeds of the Founders or the martyrium of the Protectresses in the Greater Darkness - there is a blank, a memory block. Not even the spirits have any memories of this. We have Storm Bull calling the Block, then a blackout. Then Waha is born after the Spider has cast her net. There are no myths of survival when the world was broken, because everyone was effectively taking a time-out from being alive. The survival myths define the Gray Age. All of them. All the Greater Darkness has in myths are the last desperate and often futile acts of resistance against final obliteration. Calling in Oakfed? Late Lesser Darkness. Waha? Gray Age. Founders? out of the picture until the Covenant. At the Windstop, Time goes on, and can't be cheated. It can be evaded by linking to the Underworld or the Other Side, but both these options call up threats on a terror scale similar to the Dragonrise viewed from afar. The Gray Age myths have a remedy for that kind of trauma, though, but administering that takes time, and will start only after the Windstop ends. Orlanth and Ernalda are still in Hell, but the world stirs again. All the rest is extremely sloppy. And yes, myths tend to be, so Cain can go somewhere else and find a wife not born of Adam and Eve. Nothing grows, but harvests are brought in. There is no night, but days pass in Godtime, as do seasons. All fine for Godtime. And all unsuitable under the reign of Arachne Solara's and Kajabor's love-child, Time. That's my problem. I would be fine if it had been stated that the area of effect of the Windstop pulls the region out of Time - but it doesn't. Survival means cheating Time. Survival means this is the beginning of the Gray Age, and not the Greater Darkness. The Greater Darkness is only about Destruction and Annihilation, unless you are involved in he I Fought We Won event, or avoiding the entire Age (which the majority of the survivors had done). That's my mythic understanding of the Greater Darkness - Arachne Solara casts out the net from which she had devoured the Devil.. The heirs of the Unity Battle all are the last man/whatever standing in the face of Annihilation, and then recognize their one-ness with others whose existence wasn't even known to them. Only the simultaneous action of the last spark of Life and the result of the joint action of the Dead Gods keeps the Dream of Glorantha from disappearing. The Windstop has nothing of this. Either it reflects Orlanth passing the Gates of Dusk and Storm Bull calling down the fragment of the Spike, or it reflects the return from I Fought We Won and the start of the Survival myths. Conflating these is misapplied. Or we could shut up about this Greater Darkness nonsense, like we ought to shut up about other parallels that aren't, like Bronze Age. It is just bad story-telling. In that case, the Windstop is a magical calamity with a number of parameters that bear some similarity to the conditions of the Gray Age and some to the late Lesser Darkness, without any evidence for hope. Something grows. Something provides. Not true for the Greater Darkness. If true for the Windstop, then these are secret sparks of a better reality that defy that imposed reality, sparks that need to be nurtured. That would be a story worth telling. But it is the story of the Gray Age. The Story of the Deeds of Waha, of Heort and Ivarne, of the Kitori. The end of the calamity will trigger the next calamities? No problem with that. The Rivers freeze down to the bottom? No, not all of it, and a few precious strands keep flowing down keeping up the pact with Magasta, even if the vast bulk is hindered. All fodder has stopped growing, but this one weed will remain growing if you sing the right songs, in your ancestral grazings. Not dead yet, but sleeping. Yes, I feels strongly about this, and I have a problem about your way of presenting the problem. I don't have any problem with the way you provide solutions to the Gray Age problem, and I agree that there are excellent ways to make the Gray Age events meaningful for the survival of the people, and to make the Darkness misdeeds like the release of Oakfed necessary bridging events that make the situation even worse while those Gray Age quests are under way, creating the additional permanent losses to the Fertility of Prax that are the price for this desperate survival. Those stories are worth experiencing. But the presentation of the premise sucks.

Not at all. But then they aren't involved in ongoing Creation, other than their dreams and their procreation, either. Their dreams create temporary reality, and their bodies warp reality. The dragonewts did participate in the Surface World side of ending the Greater Darkness, like the Unity Battle and I Fought We Won, but there don't appear to be any dragons involved in the Ritual of the Net, hence no reason to acknowledge the Compromise. Individual dragons have powers that are associated with core runes, e.g. elements. Krisa Yar, the Red Dragon of Dragon Pass, is associated with Fire, the Green Dragon with Earth, the Black Dragon with Darkness, and the Brown Dragon with Storm. The Water part may have died with Aroka, or have been inherited by the Inhuman King if you need five elements tied to the dragons. Moon -> Chaos -> the Hydra. The sages of Lhankor Mhy mainly collect documents. Interpreting these enters the realm of speculation rather than knowledge. EWF era sages were frustrated by the effects of the draconic dream. Statements of utter clarity inside the dream became meaningless sophisms or riddles when re-visited outside of the draconic influence. The draconic mystics didn't leave much in the way of philosophical documents. Draconic advancement came through expieriences, not through learning. Zzabur claims credit (and necessity) for many of the reality-breaking disasters both before and after Time, and blames a few that befell his Godtime allies on entities like Walindum or the Vadeli. All that anthropomorphizing of runic powers is a mistake in his book, the effect of which coincides with the Compromise promise that the gods would refrain from meddling with the Inner World without intercession through the cults. Which God Learners do you refer to, anyway? The fanatic Malkioni monotheists who re-defined their philosophy and cleansed it from uncomfortable influences, or the manipulators of non-Malkioni magic and cults with sorcery and heroquesting? I suppose the latter, but those guys became targets of the Malkioni orthodoxy later in the game as much as of all the non-Malkioni they had manipulated and exploited.