Joerg

It was a very recent idea for me, too. But we only have the reports of the descendants of the non-draconic survivors of the EWF, and only those who did not get caught up in the genocide of the True Golden Horde. Was there a betrayal by the dragonewts? Or rather a rush to fulfill their promise before the next cataclysm? The end of human use of draconic magic in the EWF happened just a few years before the arrival of the Luatha in Seshnela. Carrying over an unfulfilled promise would have damaged the spiritual progression of more dragonewts than perished at the hands of the Golden Horde. The non-draconic thinkers wouldn't understand what went on, and that's how we got the history.

Yes, dragonewts (not dragons) and blue moon trolls are rumored to be instrumental in those deaths. But was it simple assassination, or was it a coordinated mass utuma (self-sacrifice to reach enlightenment) on those who stood a chance to join into the Great Dragon at this time? As those leaders passed on, so did the draconic energies that had altered the central lands of the EWF. From one day to another, things that required those draconic emanations stopped working as they used to. Architecture bereft of this magical support collapsed. Animal husbandry that had taken on too much draconic identity ailed, then died off. The wonder grains of the draconic dream withered and rotted away. Did all that energy just dissipate, or was it collected in a mass transformative act?

We're playing quite different styles of games, then. Ok, if a horde of orcs has ambushed my party, it is kill or be taken out, possibly immediately killed, possibly taken away for torture or slavery, or possibly taken for ransom. But more often than not, it will be my party ambushing the orcs in their home territory and environment, or chancing on a patrol or group of non-alerted orcs, making us the aggressors, and also the ones to decide on our objectives. Killing them first and then have the necromancer or medium interrogate them might work out in murder hobo settings. I have had games where the party volunteered to aid a triibe of orcs against nasty mounted elf invaders following a twisted cult, so I definitely disagree with your 1 in 10000 encounters statistic. They never became friends of those orcs, but they parted in mutual respect and distrust, and with a pointer to the lair of an ancient archmage of dubious allegiances. Not even Tolkien presented all orcs as impersonal victims, some of the more memorable characters in the Lord of the Rings include Ugluk and Grishnakh, the captors of Merry and Pippin, as well as a number of named adversaries of the dwarves in The Hobbit. If I want opponents that can be mowed down without thought of regret or quarter, I use automatons (like golems or skeletons) or zombies. Only if you frame the scenario and setting that way. There are ways to mislead a patrol rather than to slaughter it. There are ways to recruit the minions of the bosses. While it may be necessary to kill or otherwise incapacitate the current leader of such a group, by reading the social dynamics there is a good chance to bribe or coerce the surviving lieutenant into changing sides. Look at the second biggest employer of orcs in the Lord of the Rings: Saruman.

The Yelmalians of Zola Fel valley had a good reason to fear dragons - they got consumed by dragonfire rather than by the True Golden Horde. The Heortlings from the south went there for a lost hope rearguard to buy their non-combatants time, not really expecting to return. What the dragons did saved the refugees who had made it south of the Crossline before the advancing horde. Their main complaint might have been "why this late, and not 20 years ago in Saird, so we could have kept our homes?" It isn't entirely clear what and who killed the draconic leadership of the EWF overnight in 1042, 58 years before the horde began its systematic advance on the pass. Certainly no dragons, unless this was a collective utuma advancing all of the draconic minds to the next level of existence all at once. Maybe the Great Dragon project did succeed.

In that case, if one of the opponents didn't care for survival, the difficulty for the other one who has "kill the other guy and survive" has got to be higher. Do you? If my characters encounter an orc, they will want to - avoid being killed - avoid letting the orc alarm the rest of the dungeon - get a chance to get at the orc's knowledge about the dungeon - possibly hire the orc away from his dark overlord, like promising him lordship over the dungeon once they have cleared it of the overlord and the items they desire. Weapons and/or magi will be argumentation aids for the orc to take his opposition seriously, but other than that, everything is open. Killing that orc is only an objective when the reason for the visit is revenge or extermination.

First came the Dragonkill; later, the Dragonrise. I expect there was some element of "srsly? dudes, wtf? r u RLLY gonna PO dragonkind AGAIN? k, whatevs... we r DONE w this shit. FIAT FORMIDO. I'm out. Thanks for the snack, btw..." YGMV, but IMG the Brown Dragon has made it part of the universe that Fear of Dragons is just a common piece of human nature near DP & Tarsh. IMO it didn't take the Dragonrise to keep fear of dragons alive. The arrival of the Green Dragon north of Arrowmound was a momentous reminder, too, just after humans had begun re-settling Dragon Pass (and it may have stopped further immigration from neighboring regions). The Red and Black Dragons were known for their presence anyway. And in a purely rational way, awakening the brown dragon before the temple started to bore into its magic might have avoided a much worse eruption of draconic activity. Imagine a glowline powered by draconic energies... the universe might have folded. There are a couple of such events. The Flood/Deluge may not have been a single event, but the massive loss of formerly ideal living space to rising sea levels has left traumatic memories all over the world, whether it refers to the tsunami of Doggerland, the flooding of the Black Sea Basin or the estuary of Mesopotamia, or the Thera eruption in the Aegaean. Fallout years or even decades after huge volcanic eruptions with the subsequent mini-ice ages or the black death are other such deeply ingrained scenarios of cataclysms.

Dragon Pass is the Bikini Atoll of draconic power discharge... the crosses just marked the extent of it for centuries. That dragon skull across the pass road at the foot of Kerofin Mountain is a good reason for caravans to choose Orstan's pass or the Falling Ruins pass instead, or the wider gap at Too Far. The Heortlings of the Kingdom of Night got the message of the Inhuman King that no humans would be tolerated via the Kitori (whose not quite human nature meant they were still tolerated across the line), although I guess the Kitori made a point of crossing the line only in troll shape in order not to trigger the curse. As for the life expectance of trauma: when did the phrase "save us from the furor of the northmen" fall out of use in medieval England, and did Bonnie Prince Charlie's invasion trigger it again? Revanchism doesn't count generations, either. I wonder how the sentiment of Irish Americans is towards the potato famine and the loss of their land of green. Or the relationship of confederate America to the civil war that is now more than 150 years ago? Ressentiments based on the battle of Amselfeld/Kosovo field a couple of centuries ago led to war and genocide less than 25 years ago. Fear Dragons was part of the Heortlling psyche already before the Dragonrise, e.g. in The Coming Storm and Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes.

Being born into a family with a refugee background and with one grandfather left missing in the aftermath of the war, I can relate to both these forms of trauma and hardship that result. The force that destroyed the homeland objectively was the True Golden Horde, and it had done so for about 20 years. The Orlanthi of southern Saird (aka northern Orlanthland/EWF) experienced years of more vicious occupation than the Lunar occupation of Sartar at the hands of the Pelorian invaders. Even though they were able to reclaim their territory north of the Death Line after the Dragonkill, what they reclaimed was devastated for a generation or two. The fact that they were able to reclaim their territory was thanks to the destruction of the True Golden Horde by the dragons. The 20th century parallel would be the fear of atomic cataclysm, something my generation managed to unlearn slowly, only to have it return in the last year thanks to a certain election. But still, even though the southern neighbors disappeared and the land was declared a fall-out area, the southern Pelorian Orlanthi know about their neighbors' fate under the invading True Golden Horde, and not a few would see the fiery end of those scourge of the hill folk as divine justice. They would still fear the might of the dragons, but with an element of admiration, too. The refugees to Kethaela who had managed to stay ahead of the avenging horde and who may have sent a good portion of those 40k participants as a rearguard to allow the escape of non-combatant refugees would suffer more mixed feelings. They wouldn't know to what causes their rearguard defenders have fallen, but there would be a sense that they had heroically bought time for the non-combatants to reach the lands south of the Crossline, even if they perished in the dragonfire devastation that they assumed hit the entirety of the Pass. (The systematic burn of parts that lie in modern Tarsh would have been visible from Kethaela, though hard to localize.) Maybe the best example of inherited trauma of the invaders was in the description of Balazar history for the Yelmalian citadel dwellers who had lost the entire generation of fathers and uncles to the Dragonkill in Griffin Mountain. The Praxians have a different situation, surviving in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where Chaos still lurks. Confrontation with annihilation is their daily experience, and dragons are a lot more distant than Chaos, which means that their slot for existential horror is held by the Devil. Still, the scale of loss they suffered in the Dragonkill was unparalleled in their history. IMO it took Jaldon's great raid in the time of the Twin Dynasty of Tarsh to overcome the notion that Dragon Pass was more deadly than the Devil's Marsh, the Krjalki Bog, or the Tunneled Hills, and more lucrative to boot. Hadn't Dragon Pass eaten up the remnants of the Pure Horse Folk, never to be seen again after Alavan Argay? The Dragonkill raid will have destroyed entire clans of the Beast Riders, those who had committed more wholly to the raid. Without enough warriors to protect the herds, the surviving females would have little means to protect their herds, losing significantly more than half their herds to those clans who still had more raiders. Without the ability to dominate an oasis, a significant portion of their annual food balance was lost, too, and clans returning from more distant wanderings in the Wastes found easy prey and unoccupied oases. BTW, I think that the Pure Horse Folk were part of that raid into the Dragonkill, possibly even leading the venture.

I would have thought it was the other way around - for the Dragonkill War some 40,000 Orlanthi came from the south, with the sources unclear whether to plunder or to fight the True Golden Horde which consisted of northern Orlanthi, Dara Happans and Carmanians, and another 40,000 strong force consisting of Praxians with maybe 10% Sun Domers came from the East. The relative loss of life to the home population was unproportionally higher to the Praxians than to the southern Orlanthi. The vast majority of Orlanthi of Dragon Pass were not killed by the dragons -- many had fled to the south when the True Golden Horde came to their doorsteps, many of the rest had been killed by the True Golden Horde, or by those Praxians. When the dragons arrived at Dragon Pass, the True Golden Horde had come as far as Vanntar. I would be very astonished if by that time more than 10% of the original population of Dragon Pass Orlanthi were still alive in the region, and those still alive were most likely enslaved. 40,000 Praxian warriors killed basically cut down the Praxian population by a quarter or so. Most Orlanthi whose descendants can remember were happy not to have been there.

I am curious about your use of "Viking" for Hrothmir, the Horned Hero. Is this for avoiding that norse-like pronunciation?

The feel of Hrestol's Saga doesn't really give any pointers to a real world culture. There is this caste-structured society with hereditary rulers following something like primogeniture (rather than elected rulers from eligible candidates within the caste). But then, the entire concept of people inheriting positions of power is relatively new in Frowal at the Dawn. Froalar is the son of Talar of Brithos, and together with his twin Hoalar presumably the first-born. Other Talar caste folk are addressed as cousins, but so are a few wizards, and, on the visit to Brithos, "Duke" Horal. All of the titles are standard modern English terms for nobility, as is the honorific "Sir" for knights. But this doesn't point to any specific point in European or non-European history, and could be applied to e.g. a pseudo-Japanese setting without all the few Japanese terms we have become familiar with through various media. So yes, knights hold vigils. Much like Samurai meditate, and initiands undergo other such preparations when abduction isn't part of the initiation rite (as per Orlanth's Uncles). There isn't anything there that cries high medieval culture. That's what led me already more than 20 years ago to suggest heavy cavalry parallels for knights that are found in the time of the late (West) Roman Empire, in the migration era, with examples from the Fertile Crescent as well. Armor like depicted on the Bayeux tapestry would have been the absolute high end of armoring technology, and Renaissance era armor like shown for the Loskalmi knight in Genertela Box... bad art direction and too low art budget, really. In a way it is a pity that Games Workshop never did any editions of the Gloranthan RQ3 material. It would have been interesting to see what kind of art they would have applied to these chapters. But outside of the Rokari influence, the knight is a magical warrior with basic education as a noble, too, which makes even a knight born to another caste (like Sir Faraalz, Hrestol's Horali-born sidekick) eligible as low level ruling Talar of a settlement in Froalar's/Ylream's expanding kingdom. Much of the Gregging is in the skewed reception of the data rather than in the data itself. I learned that if I say “Celtic” this is interpreted as “Irish”, not even Welsh, let alone Hallstatt or Heuneburg. When people see a longhouse, they instantly assume Viking, even though houses in that style had been in use for three millennia when the first Viking raids reached Northumbria (where people had just the same style of housing…).People lived in longhouses before they had copper for tools. let alone bronze or iron. Greek or even Minoan or Mycenean style equipment for Orlanthi is as unfortunate as Viking or Saxon, or Phoenician. A naval culture without ships is just a silly parallel for foothill dwellers. You could as well take a nomad culture like the Huns or the Mongols without mounts or wandering herds, made sedentary – see how useless this gets? Nick Brooke nailed it: “Parallels aren’t.” In this Malkioni case, cookie-cutter medieval culture won’t get you to any meaningful conclusion. And even then, what is medieval culture? Childerich’s Franks, or the Visigoth kingdoms? Charlemagne’s companions? Muslim Spain? Otto the Great’s heavy lancers overcoming the Magyars at Lechfeld? The Bayeux Tapestry? Provencal chivalry with its troubadours? Richard Lionheart? Edward I? Henry V? Henry VIII? The defense of Vienna against the Turks? Or fantasy stuff, like Mallory’s Morte D’Arthur, T.H. White’s Once and Future King? The Nibelung Song? Blackadder?

They store about a day's worth of unused mana. As long as the magician does the re-filling all himself, this is a limited advantage in a fast pace scenario. RQ3 did however provide POW spirits which would refuel such crystals, and that was something like a game-changer. But then a shaman with a 20 POW fetch regenerates MP at immense speed, too, so there are other over-the-top ways available as well. As far as I remember the RQ3 rules (Elder Secrets), only live crystals need attuning. Dead crystals (i.e. MP vessels) are usable without attuning. Besides, the RQ3 rules had a MP matrix enchantment which allowed you to spend some POW to create a "dead crystal"-like item without access to any blood of the gods. This enchantment or surplus dead crystals would be used in enchanted items like e.g. spell matrices. Your average professional spellcaster will have about 15 MP at any time, and probably a somewhat higher MP maximum. (Human species maximum was 21, leaving some room for successful POW gain rolls even at POW 18, and RQ2 increased that POW maximum by a few points for Rune Levels.) With some slight house-ruling of the previous experience rules, we managed to get one adept sorcerer in my non-Gloranthan RQ game. He had a rather weak familiar and no enchantments to speak of after half a year of regular gaming.

I interprete this as a return of the Gray Age. Like I said, the covenant remains in place, so it isn't the new start at the start of the (Praxian) Gray Age. It is about finding survivable grazing grounds (though not the original ones) or alternative sources of fodder and food (with fodder probably the priority). Did anyone release Oakfed? What can be made of the White Lady's blessing? The beast rider clans outside of Prax don't suffer a bit from the Windstop unless they bet their herds' provision by entering grazings covered by it from the east or the north. I wonder whether clans inside the windstop all gravitate towards the Paps, or whether they go to the Hidden Greens instead.

Shouldn't that be 1621, the Fall of Whitewall? Your date makes it look like there is an entire year between the Fall of Whitewall and the onset of the WIndstop. And the Windstop should be weakened by the New Breathers from the Battle of the Aurochs Hills. IMO it doesn't. The Covenant still is in place, only the growth seasons are out of order. The world doesn't dissolve, with gaps appearing between shards of reality. What we get instead is the last stage of the Lesser Darkness. The winds have departed into the Underworld. So has Ernalda's fertility. Valind, though broken by Chaos, rules. The dissolution of reality which really defined the Great Darkness, and which was turned among others by the I Fought We Won event, has no part in the Windstop. Neither has the Ritual of the Net, or the use of the fertility of Prax to imprison the Devil. All of the main events of the Great Darkness are skipped. Instead, we jump straight into the Gray Age. All of this still IMO. The sun is not in the Underworld. It's presence doesn't alter anything in the affected area, however, only the light affects the region under the spell, not the heat. Apart from their loss of Ernaldan fertility, the Sun Domers have all the light they ever had. Given the start of the Windstop in late 1621, shouldn't this event be in 1622?

I think people would be surprised how short that list is when you apply it to Greg himself contradicting officially published Glorantha. Fairly often the reason for Greg giving a different idea for some place in Glorantha may have been because he had not really studied that source where some other author slipped an assumption or three into published works. Quite a lot of perceived Gregging is Greg or someone near to Greg stating "no, your idea doesn't mesh with Greg's idea of Glorantha", like e.g. Soviet Lunars, Egyptian Esrolians or any other 1:1 parallel assumptions. @David ScottThe map of the Empire in White Bear and Red Moon isn't a retcon. It simply has a gliding scale and isn't true in the presentation of angles. Most of the topology is accurate. A few of these flaws are evident even by comparing that map to the map represented by the game board. Confusing the EWF with the (kingless) kingdom of Orlanthland or even the Unity Council in the history section of the game might be seen as a better example of this, or alternatively be read as some in-world text with a less than accurate knowledge of history older than the Hero Wars. Elmal and Yelmalio... I don't recall any statement that the deities in Cults of Prax, or those mentioned in the Wyrm's Footnotes series Gods and Goddesses of Glorantha, were the complete set, even for a single culture. There is no Esrola in either of these sources either - she appears first in the Holy Country article in Chaosium's RuneQuest Companion. Some of the minor changes were e.g. from mis-spellings (pharoah, saggitus) to better spellings (and pharaoh being dropped when it turned out that it didn't have the meaning it was supposed to have). The concept of knights has been returned to the original concept in Hrestol's Saga (which tells us about the creation of this not-quite caste). This has reduced the medieval concepts that were suggested for Rokari Seshnela in Genertela Book, and has led to the Gregging of Jamie "Ttrotsky" Revell's work on the western culture. I think this is the heaviest case of all. But then my early work on Heortland leaned heavily on the throwaway mention of knights in the RQ Companion piece, too, so this may be personal bias. My ideas weren't Gregged, however - they simply started in a number of irrelevant directions. The introduction of Elmal made defining the history of Yelmalio interesting, but not impossible. Its timing was unfortunate. It shattered the illusion of many a player that there was One True World where each Gloranthan deity was the same wherever it was encountered, but that was something never explicitely stated anywhere, more an assumption from people whose other source for deities in rpgs was AD&D's Deities and Demigods. Lax control over the Hero Wars/Heroquest 1st ed publications during Greg's Mexican exile led to apparent "canonisation" of a number of assumptions, sometimes by single authors, sometimes by group collaborations. Greg's agonizing about how to bring the cool story concept of heroquesting into gameable rules is a long process of attempting to combine all the various aspects he saw in this. I have yet to see a game mechanic that captures all of the prerequisites that are supposed to go into this activity (but then I haven't studied either 13G nor RQG in that respect, yet). I doubt that the "resource allocation game" like groups giving specific support (that Greg at one time felt would be best solved as a boardgame) is properly included. But that isn't really contradicting an earlier statement, but rather pointing out where certain rules constructs don't quite conform with the concept. Much china ware has been broken over the "Vingans are transgender people with predominantlly male sexuality" upset, possibly a few years before the non-standard gender/sexuality abbreviation had more than three letters. A number of perceived Greggings which alienated former active contributors didn't originate with Greg.

If they don't want to enter famine and desperation, have them make the detour through Balazar and Gonn Orta's Pass, that may allow you to arrive in the Zola Fel valley after the battle of the Aurochs Hills. Post-Windstop Sun County has two factions, with the draconic one under Belvani apparently without as much support as Vega's traditionalist one. @MOB has reported snippets of this several times, try googling for Belvani or Vega Goldbreath to find these. The few survivors from the grantlands might be found in Sun County, Pavis, or Corflu, with a small chance that Raus Fort might have held out by paying tribute to some nomad faction. Others may still survive as slaves of Praxian clans or joining oasis folk e.g. at Horngate. With the severe conditions of the Fimbulwinter, I think that most of them will make a new start under the protection of the Sun Domers rather than going back to contested and unprotected grants. When Argrath takes over in New Pavis, he might accept some of them in depopulated Pavis County, too. I would expect the displaced Lunars to group around Annstad of Dunstop, the leading Lunar follower of Argrath, rather than repair connections to the Heartlands. The River Folk never went away, IMO, and living off the river would be harder but far from impossible - after all, Zola Fel never stopped flowing in the Greater Darkness. Argrath returns only in 1624, after the Battle of Pennel Ford. I have no idea what happens in Prax in the two years in between, other than the ongoing efforts to build the Lunar Temple on its western border. The native Pavisites have gone through the troll occupation with about as bad provision, so I expect them to have good survival policies which they might have shared with the Sartarite and other immigrants to Pavis. Still, a depopulation of 40% seems likely, with a greater proportion of elders and children affected, and possibly worse outside of the city than inside, where the Lunar occupation forces still receive some food support, and possibly some food to share for missionary purposes. Once Argrath installs the White Bull empire, I guess he organizes a regular support with herd beasts. I expect the Pavis Temple and the mayor and magistrates to act as governors for Argrath. Once the White Bull is entrenched in Pavis, it only becomes a center of his activities and rallying point after his epic loss against the Empire (at Yoran, more than 12 years in the future).

No, it is from the Hero Wars rules book, p.240.

I guess we need to wait for reports from Eternal Convention, where this information is undoubtedly disseminated today and/or tomorrow.

IIRC some time in the eighties Moorcock also released an essay or even a book about writing fantasy, IIRC, so I think that Moorcock had read at least the Lord of the Ring including the appendices quite closely. If you replace "fascist" by "feudalist", there is nothing crypto about the position of Tolkien with regard to his romantically idealized past. Tolkien's world is anti-industrialist (think of his treatment of the war factories of Isengard) and about a layered society, with Sam Gamgee personifying the loyal common soldier/servant to the nobility officer. Like most fantasy, the focus is on a lost past rather than looking forward. Aragorn's kingship has long been destined. I guess that comes from his story-teller focus on SF. One can clearly say that Clarke created the concept of satellite communication and laid the groundwork for one of the pillars of the modern communication network. Moorcock's generally dystopian settings do have rather backward-oriented mindset, too - decadent Melnibone, then the end of that universe, although there was also the heroic story of carving out the hinterland of the southern continent from unshaped Chaos by Aubec of Malador, and the necessity to end the world of Melnibone and the young kingdoms to make way for a world of Balance. (Which doesn't really make sense in a multiverse...) Moorcock's one-dimensional axis of Law vs. Chaos probably is too much of a simplification, much like "left" vs. "right" in the political debate. From a story-teller point of view, a flawless utopia has no potential. A struggling utopia beset by interior destabilization and exterior threats is probably the best view of a world we can get, or alternatively a struggle between several not quite mutually compatible utopias. Otherwise a selective utopia for a few chosen few means a dystopia for most others.

Were you thinking of this article by Ron Edwards? http://adept-press.com/ideas-and-discourse/other-essays/goddess-of-rape/

Bitten ankles can easily trip an adult, and then several small dogs have no problems attacking simultaneously. If the victim manages not to panic and to grab the dogs and smash them against trees or one another, the outcome may be more expected, but shock from being bitten and blind panic can override such a combat. I have recently seen what wounds a single afraid Jack Russel terrier caused...

Where did I bash elf dwarf orc games? When a setting does provide an intrinsic evil, for this setting the morals provide exoneration performing evil on that evil. But that never was the point of Stormbringer. The Eternal Champions settings aren't a conflict between good and evil, they are between sometimes personalized, sometimes impersonal principles of order and chaos, and of the niche of human existence in between. Plenty of elf-like critters, but hardly any dwarves or orcs. I was referring to placing the default cultures of a setting as abusive and dehumanizing to anyone outside of their immediate tribe, and then offering the thrill of wet-dream powers based on that behavior, and only then providing realizations what exactly that would mean in another context. Power fantasies based on actions and conditions that the personal ethics of the players hopefully recognize as detestable. I have enjoyed many a level of Nethack, tinning all those orcs etc. to prevent them from spoiling, while feeding on the rest of the fresh corpses directly. Polymorphing all those @ and K corpse tins into other forms of % to avoid being accused of cannibalism. You don't get much more murder hobo than that.

We will have to wait how much importance those subcults will have under the new RQG rules. The RQ3 rules gave Humakt a thorough treatment with Tales of the Reaching Moon #5, which might be slightly more available because it saw a reprint early in the nineties. Then there is the Hero Wars treatment that was published in Storm Tribe (a title available as pdf in the Vault section of no longer fully canonical Gloranthan publications), in the context of the vast number of subcults and how every character defined himself first by the subcult, then by the cult under the Hero Wars rules. The myths and feats of those subcult heroes or aspects of the deity are there. Their translation into the coming rule-set is yet unknown.

Yes, we do like playing the exceptionalist masters, the destiny-born fantasy heroes or the caped crusaders of the superhero genre. We like to think that our destiny matters more than the life of those hard-working factory orcs providing the Dark Lord with manpower, arms and ammo. We are happy to demonize the opposition when slaughtering them for our perceived greater good (which usually only is good for our own - possibly extended - tribe). We like to claim the underdog role even when dominating the opposition in all but numbers, and we like to enforce our own faction's ethics on all others. We want that teenage wet dream. All I suggest is to do this consequently, granting the wet dream, and then realize how little different this is from the Confederate slave holder mindset, from the ethnocidal politics of Charlemagne (in whose name a renowned peace award is given out), or from the imperialist mentality even to other (as racist) imperialists, like the invention of concentration camps and their application to the Boers. Wet dream power fantasies sell. Exposing the inherent corruption might be less of a selling point, but should be addressed when published by people upholding a decent morality in real life. (Which might explain why plenty of Hollywood productions have failed to do so in the wake of the #metoo exposure.) At least that's the standard I would like to hold myself up against when contemplating designing such settings. YMMV.

It is called HeroQuest. You get sample spells/charms/whatever but can do whatever you want. You don't get game mechanic exploitation for lack of those game mechanics, however. (Though you do get punished for aiming for renaissance man characters in a setting where such characters were regularly found...) RQ is a gritty and deadly game system. That's because of a great chance of failure or at least lack of instantly gratifying success, and rarely any mechanic for failing forward in its RQ2 and RQ3 rules. (I do expect RQG to have at least some guidelines for this kind of outcomes, possibly only in the game-masters book.) It also has rules which can be exploited by rules-altering magic, which happens when people mix role-playing with playing the rules in a semi--competitive mode between players and GMs. Neither RQ nor BRP are particularly balanced games, but with the absence of even more unbalanced area-effect spells (need I mention fireballs?) and the availability of some magic for all characters problems that arose with Old School rules taken to extreme levels are a lot less than compared with AD&D 1st edition (the contemporary of RQ2 and 3). The problems that RQ3 sorcery brought are the same that you get when you twist Battle Magic making various rules-bending approaches universally or even just limited available. I think a lot of the problems RQ2 players had with sorcery was that it felt like devaluing their lovingly built overpowered rune masters or nearly rune masters under the old rules. But then I suppose they never tried to play an apprentice sorcerer or fresh adept under that system and experience the limitations, but they saw the vastly unbalanced examples like Griffin Island's Halcyon var Enkorth.