Joerg

I said this before, but it bears repeating: IMO Godsbone brass or bronze is a natural laminate, with growth rings creating a layered effect that is impossible to achieve with just melting copper and tin. Godsbone needs to be hammered to retain those properties and cannot simply be cast into whichever shape you think is convenient to achieve. The mostali might actually have a process of damascening brass to a similar effect. They refer to the metal by the name derived from the volcano/mountain deities exclusively, regarding the birth of Umath as the disastrous destruction of their world machine, and while they are happy to work storm-originated godsbone, they won't refer to it as such. Chainmail requires access to rather thick wire of the metal in question. Now producing wire isn't foreign to Gloranthan metal artisans - gold, pewter, and probably copper and bronze as well are shaped into wires before leaving e.g. pearl-like ornaments melted onto a bigger piece of ornamental metal, like e.g. a cloak clasp or a belt buckle. Producing this wire is a time-intensive task, however, and requires at least a journeyman's skill. Producing enough thick wire for even a small piece of mail armor (maybe little more than a curtain to attach to a helmet to protect the neck) will take up quite a lot of reliable wire. But then there is another question when it comes to Gloranthan armor: does anyone but the iron mostali walk around in an impervious shell of metal, or is armor more a statement of protection, expanded by sympathetic magic to cover slightly more than it actually does? Does armor "magically" attract weapon hits? If so, plate greaves and what we would name "ceremonial" bits of metal plate worn on chest or abdomen would be a lot more effective than SCA experience would suggest.

I wonder how much Eiritha's hagiography will have that pregnant human female and how much she will have cow's attributes, like an always-full udder. The Paps is where her sweet milk is given to her people. If anatomically correct (memories from watching the James Herriot veterinary stories...), her birthing orifice would be somewhat to the north and east. but IIRC Waha was born at the Paps and not back there.

Right now I get something like the message "female mystery is behind everything" which sort of devalues said female mysteries. In themselves they aren't stupid, but they start chains of barely rational decisions which definitely are. Both testosterone and menses-affected unreasonability bring back pubertarian decision-making to nominally adult persons, and giving in to such impulses can be stupid. There are other paths to mysticism. Yelmi/Dayzataran flame/fuel dualism. Reaching through Arachne Solara. Dragons. Vithelan ways. All unite polar opposites, and the gender vector is only one of many available.

Yeah, anything could be born. But I found it already quite an effort to suggest pregnant or breast-feeding heroines for a pilgrimage scenario. The descending pyramid in Spol has this, explicitely borrowed from meso-American nobility sacrifices (discussion with Greg at some Tentacles). Gifts and sacrifices - so a magician would transform parts of his body _permanently_ into magical powers. WIth no guarantee that the trade actually works every time. This does make for interesting magicians, and like I said, Spol might be a place practicing something like this. Kralori austerities might cost a limb or other portions of health, too. That, giving up an eye, a finger, half a foot, ears, teeth, fleshy parts of the nose, and all manner of piercings and scarifications. Could also be a weird and (but for a few hidden grimoires) forgotten Rubble survivor group (except that, in the long run, it didn't survive). Probably not something a gaming company would publish to the mass market, though.

Tough questions, ranging from the high-valuting all the way to "give me something to roll!" then. Ok, let's assume we are taking the way spirit combat works in Dragon Pass (under the Corbett rules). The attacking spirits need to overcome the Magic Factor of the defending units, in stacked order. There are two types of defenders - those who can only resist by being too big to be eaten, with no Range Factor, and those with a Range Factor of zero or greater (and no spirit away on detached duty) that can bite back against the attacking spirits. Again, there is pretty much the choice between "too big to be eaten" or "yum". Having a Range Factor even of zero is rather exceptional, so your average tight formation unit is trying to be too big to be eaten. (For some weird reason, I get pictures of allosauri trying to hunt a diplocodus herd. Maybe not the worst visualization for this kind of combat. Wolves and bison work, too.) That's sort of the crux with these attacks - they ignore you as individual (in a bad way - if you encounter this spirit as an individual, you're toast) and only can be countered by keeping together. Imagine the unit holding fast, except for a bunch of new arrivals in the last rank who break away, and perish gruesomely to whatever visual effect the attacking spirit offers. To the unit as a whole, such peripheral loss is hardly noticeable. To the player character holding fast watching what failure to do so means it is a different story. I am trying to provide my inner visuals when writing about this. I have read a couple of fantasy books or series which deal with threats like this, classics like The Black Company which has individual demigod-like sorcerers rather than groups of magicians, but similar battlefield effects, the Thraxas series, or the big siege epics like Gemmel's Legend. Nick Brooke's rewrite of "And the Band Played Waltzing Mathilda", "And the Band Played March of the Goddess", helps to bring the Gallipoli horror to a magical assault, too. Basically, you have to be able to describe what is going on in this magical part of the battle. That's the nasty thing about magical strikes, artillery or air strikes on formations: very little. "Shields up" against a hail of arrows or slingstones makes sense. "Strengthen the Standard/the regimental god/wyter" is the weak magical analogy which I tried to simulate with that coordinated MP donation. That's the crux of it - your battle resolution system that allows to deal with units while keeping some personal experience for the character included in some formation or other. It won't do to handle a battle in combat rounds, unless you are doing the heroic stuff like champions' battle. As your character doesn't get the choice to go where you want him to go but where his unit goes, the entire battle experience is more a collection of impressions and occasional saving throws to allocate or reduce adverse effects. And I have yet to see a rpg that makes this a core activity of its combat mechanism and a gripping and interesting one too. You can provide some between action low level heroics by pulling back wounded comrades from the front line, or stepping up for some, but that gets rather long in the tooth pretty soon, too. If you want roleplaying fun, avoid set battles, or use them only as the backdrop for the activity between battles. Battles are the grandfathers of railroading and dicing orgies. So, each unit has a regimental deity. Preferably a fearsome fighting thing that stands up to face the attacking spirit. The joint action is to manifest it to intercept the spirit attack, and hope that the manifestation will survive the onslaught of the spirit. To give the players some agency, let them roll for this manifestation. All of them look through the eyes of their deity, all feel its extremities and (if present) weapons and armor. So what happens if it fails to deflect that onslaught? Total party kill should not be the result. A unit becomes a casualty when suffering deaths, injuries and defections, and the individuals in that unit each will face consequences like being stunned out of consciousness, suffering a debilitating wound, possibly dying if not rescued by comrades. The horrible, shell-shocked aftermath. Which just might be fun to play, every now and then. The results of fear- or madness-based magic on individual combats is pretty well documented. The sheer reality of a battle situation might be enough to have each character in a unit (and his neighboring comrades) roll against such effects as the battle looms. A certain percentage of lost hearts won't break the unit, too much of it and it will disperse. Dragon Pass is especially cruel when it comes to emissary duty to Delecti, the Hydra, or the Ivory Plinth. Losing an emissary unit on a failed alliance attempt feels somewhat unfair but not evil. Losing it on a success however... Wyrm's Footnotes told that story. For the spirit attack, I suggest a "champion's battle" between the unit deity representation and the attacking spirit. The spirit attack doesn't take all day, the sent spirits have a few rounds during which they either overwhelm the defenders, or if not, they must retreat. If they feel they, as individuals, can do better than their regimental deity buffed up with hundreds of magic points to ward off a spirit even bigger than that, it's their funeral. If they really can do it, what are they doing in a mundane formation? Maybe that's their designated role in the battle, to come to the forth when the spirits get rolling. That's the other problem there is with roleplaying magics - they tend to be short term use under duress effects, and ignore the long lasting, long to prepare and (let's face it) not very exciting crafting of spells. Stuff done in the "catch-up" time between heart-throbbing action. There are players who do enjoy this kind of "build and expand" for their characters, and the rules should cater to them. Give us "ritual spells" which explain why these easily thought of bypasses don't usually work. I'm not the designer, not even a designer. But this is a gaming itch that my rpg characters rarely if ever managed to scratch. Also because it causes work for the DM, hampers his narrative opportunities later on, and easily unleashes potentially overpowered stuff into a campaing, breaking the rules reality in an arms race to still be able to hurt the characters (whose players have a vested interest in making that impossible).

There aren't that many attendants at the Dorkath rites (the only occasion that many commoner women might approach Takenegi). Illumination is notorious for being a contagious meme, via riddles, so anything suggesting direct descent from the Emperor sounds really false. The Pelorian clan names are derived from the name of the founding hero(ine), sometimes a bit obscurely so. King of Sartar gives Kana-Telsor's parent as Valar-Telsor. I don't quite see how Valare Addi contributed to that clan-name, if she did at all, since Valar- is the personal bit of that name, and Telsor would be the first component of the clan designation.

For a close order infantry group, I would look for the skill used to keep formation. It could be a commander's skill, which means passive for the individual members of the file. The mantra is "hold the line", so anything that keeps the character and his neighbors in the line and lets them refrain from breaking formation is what supports the magic. So, let's say you feel like the superior soldier, but the guy to your left is the unfortunate combination of a bully and a coward, and the guy to your right suffers from PTSD. What do you do to keep not only your own position but also those two guys in position? That's your contribution to the magic. In a huge group dance, the individuals' dance skills would make up the rolls. Some sub-par performance might be adjusted for by superior success by others, retaining the overall impression of harmony. In RQ it is easy to force imperfections: just ask for a series of rolls. (not done in HQ...) Imagine a rite that demands that the 100 attendants all light a cigarette at the same time. Simple statistics will cause quite a few failures to light. The unlikely case of a perfect unison lighting of all 100 cigarettes probably gets a ritual bonus, but a certain number of failures is expected, and calculated for. If you want to have a simple mechanistic way, have them sacrifice a MP to the unit standard in unison, with a 95% chance of success (same as rune magic).

Harmony is the peace-making rune, but the status of peace is equated with fertility, if you look at Orlanthi war and peace clans. Which is pretty much the point I wanted to make. If our church had allowed officiating women, none of those items would have ended up on the list of suspicious items. There is, but the same goes for all kind of phallic matters and magic. Every kind of hormone-induced stupidity is magical and/or holy in Glorantha. Possibly as unwelcome on a personal level, but integral part of the magic of life. Pregnancy and birth are the only secrets exclusive to females. and you need a bunch of immortal males to outlaw that and still survive. If you mean "let's trigger the war menses", let's not go there. We are hoping to expand our female player numbers, and that's how not to do it. Imagine a game that mandates "sure you can play a magician. When was your mage's castration, shortly after birth, or after his voice broke?"

There is the irony that the cockaignian nature of Golden Age makes all these pastimes rather meaningless. The food is there regardless. Only when things start to break down, these activities become mandatory, and some of this breakdown is tied to the gradual arrival of Storm Age troubles. I still think that the wyter approach, the manifestation of community unity as a spirit (or deity), describes this phenomenon better. But then that's a theory I have been suggesting for nearly 35 years now. You have never seen a Maori Haka, have you? A beautiful dance, and not at all peaceful. Anything can be demonized as a maleficium. The medieval church went for those things where its male and recently celibate priests had no foothold.

These formations are a magic unto themselves, and require extraordinary heroism to overcome. The scene where Arjunas's son fails to perform his father's formation breaking feat is probably the scene of the Vedas that comes to my mind first. I remember seeing a wonderfully choreographed movie sequence of the shields (never see the warriors behind them) closing in on the hapless would-be hero, ringing him in. A scene right from the most personal nightmare sequences. Basically, the formation of a "we" beyond many "I"s makes a huge difference also magically. Skirmisher units are usually magical lightweights because they lack such cohesion. Area effect mass destruction is the powerful exception in the Dragon Pass magical arsenal, and even there superheroes and dragons offer protection. These effects feed on those mass tactics and counter them. Other than such out of context scale magics, the formations form good defense or at least passive resistance.

They all are one. The bringer of illumination - whether Rashoran(a) or Jernotia/us or Metsyla - was androgyn, fluent, in-between, undefined or answering both definitions. And the deepest root of magic, Change, is presented as a male principle, and as father of Kero Fin. I got the impression that the usual Female Earth concept is "find a (better) champion to bleed for you" and receive that blood gratefully in sacrifice. And if displeased, send a huge monster (pig) and however gruesome, make its destroyer your new champion after having made your displeasure known. On the other hand, both Umath and Orlanth present the concept of the sanctity of their camp, the defense-worthiness, is named as their first "adult" deed. It doesn't go as far as to define defensive magic, though. The entire concept of conflict and war only gradually develops through various "end of Green Age" experiences, and generally involves men/male deities. Obviously present in the formation of the Golden Age, it fails to be traumatic back then. Things happen, but they fail to mar the participants, even if the losers disappear or find their roles turned over to the Underworld. In this sense, there is the paradox of using a Green Age style unity to form an otherworldly agent of destruction to release upon a battlefield on mostly defenseless troops. It does require some form of enlightenment to combine both innocent unity and aggressive intent.

While non-Gloranthan, I feel that the magic in David Gemmel's universe featuring novels like Legend is one of the few instances where literature has something coming close to the magic of the Dragon Pass magicians. Gemmel specifically has his warrior priests discorporate, then join up into an entity which exceeds the sums of the individuals. Their opponents are cruel horse warlords aided and at times controlled by ancient shaman mystics who forced the otherwise ultra-pacifist mystics into forming one such militant order, so there is quite a bit to loan for Sheng's guys there. The Dead of Dunharrow are a different phenomenon, otherworld entities without a controlling agency (the magician unit), and comparable to the Ancestors of the major tribes in Prax. Dead heroes that return to the aid of the living from whatever special Other SIde arrangement they have are a different proposal. Glorantha's capital H Hero status immortalizes a person's feats and to some extent the person even if the hero never made it to apotheosis and actual god(ling) status. If the Earth Twins of the Old Tarsh faction are indeed Arim's children, there is another case of such return, however they get divorced from their Earth Shakers magic, which rests with the priesthood unit of the same name. The proficiency of the Tarsh Exiles magicians is at least as high as that of the Sartarites, and the question is who taught them? Argrath gets the honor (or blame) for the Sartar Magical Union, and the Imperial College of Magic precedes that by centuries, being more or less uncountered except for the struggles with Sheng and his hordes. So, how much of those regimental-sized spirits is common in Kralorela? Do they have exarch units which act like the magicians in the SMU?

To my knowledge, that wing has not been built yet (and it is somewhat in doubt whether it ever will). For comparison: for hundreds of years, the building crane atop the unfinished towers of the Kölner Dom (the Cologne minster) was the trademark sight for that city. (I could name other, more recent ambitious building projects in Germany, but one of those - the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie - has recently and against expectations been finished and continues to please. Less such luck with big traffic infrastructure projects...) To show how badass he is? Seriously: the door of his home faces away from Suntown, which is how he and the Yelmalians like it. I guess that harkens back to better times when Humakti mostly were not-quite-dead-yet and contagious only when making contact with their blades or spells.

Not quite correct. Hero status is cheap, and can probably be reached in few years of intense torture and meditation, otherwise the numbers of his followers would have been limited to the few he was incarcerated with. It took Sheng 100 years to be offered complete liberation, at which time he chose the world instead, much like the antigods.. That's possibly a lesser form. Sheng would have tens of thousands adherents practicing this. Fewer rewards, but nifty shrug off enemy magic effects. IIRC the remaining disciples of Sheng were systematically hunted down and removed from the Surface World. NB: I don't think that the Lunar Prison Hell was anything the Kralori could have prepared him for, and unlike in his meditations, he pobably was pushed in along with his body, so that he had no anchor to return to. I guess that's what it takes to imprison a major mystic. Sheng was extremely gifted, so he may have proceded faster than others, but as said above, I think that Sheng had a sizeable army of Jolaty some 30 years after returning from his prison camp. He did install a regimen of overseen austerities, though, and without that oversight, a normal Pentan may very well have been slowed down to much less progress.

p.314 has a non-eel Pelorian noble with Ochlo-molari. While all the four official examples of the -eel family (Hon, Jar, Sor, Bor) have three letter personal designators, that's evidently not a necessity.

I think you will have to do separate lists for the different Pelorian populations. Non-Dara Happan Lodrili nobility (i.e. upstart Lunars) have the first part of the clan-name as a hyphenated suffix - Sor-eel. Both Dara Happan and Carmanian high nobility go by their given name, a title, and an epithet. You are supposed to know which noble family they belong to. (Aronius Jaranthir suggests that Jaranthir is an eponym, too, only one without translation provided.) Dara Happan naming conventions were discussed in a Lunar novel Greg read ages ago at a Convulsion I attended (94 or 98). A calling name, status (as a cardinal number), and IIRC another numeral. (The character in the novel was a female weeder, the lowest level of free Dara Happan nationality. IIRC a sixth.) Darjiinians just have a given name, no clan epithet, if the few examples I can correctly identify show the greater picture. Pelandans appear to make do with a single name, followed by their city (or the nearest city, which will probably add a (different?) suffix or prefix to the city name. Medium level Dara Happans also identify by their city. The rest will be nicknames like Caesar (baldhead), Cicero (chick-pea) or Flaccus (lop-ear), Blaatand (Bluetooth), or sometimes "the elder" (Cato), "the smaller/bigger" (Ajax in the Ilias). Or possibly awful puns sold as clever kennings. Individuals will amass such nicknames or war-names. Sometimes the descriptor will be clear text, sometimes it will be faux Pelorian (Jaranthir). Complications as with the Nac Mac Feegle of Diskworld shouldn't arise unless some namers get obnoxious ("Wee-but-not-as-wee-as-wee-wee-Donal-Donal"). Sometimes giving everybody the same name is a matter of family tradition ("Hermann Reuss", IIRC), which is as unhelpful to those around them. Even then, qualifiers like "the Sackville-Bagginses" may work around the issue. It may be a mark of distinction if a third person reference without too much context can be made with just one name element. I guess every Tatius in the Empire will hasten to add an epithet.

Farnwith failed in the First Age, and probably was destroyed by Ytarian aldryami rather than Gargulians. Nice try for naming them, though. Retreating onto their ships into safe harbors away from the jungle does fit their pattern, though. And when the yellow elf jungles suffered from the extinction of their House Errinoru leaders and accompanying diseases, they probably returned triumphantly and struck directly at the denuded trees of the Gargulian dryads. For some reason, Jhostrobbios/Dinal appears to have bypassed both the rise of the Errinoru dynasty and its fall, if its inhabitants (including centuries-old dryads) truly can say that they register no change since the Golden Age.

Are they still in contact with any Sendereven other than the spirits of the helmsman and his wife? I doubt it. Maintaining a fleet is a measure of wealth, especially in warm waters where the boring mussel requires a re-planking every few years, or, in the case of dugouts, the exchange of a hull or two, or the maintenance of spells to prevent that. The original Sendereven vessels are dugouts, though from rock. To maintain a modicum of those magics, the Maslo ships probably are dugouts, too. With the support of the Novarooplia aldryami, getting trees for that might be less expensive than otherwise. They control the seaward trade of the Arliss river traders, which might include silk available from jungle trolls. I wonder what textile fibre they are producing. Sisal? Hemp? Cotton? Not that Agimori facial features are that uniform - the Pithdaran sorcerer in the Seshnela chapter tableau as quite the sharp nose. Their variation of skin coloration is corroborated in the Fonrit chapter, where the Thinokans are nicknamed the "light blues". No idea what that does for their social status. I'd put them in not quite as many smaller fortified towns - and by fortified I mean various lines of defense against the jungle. Possibly concentric rings of salt or brine ditches, too. Not really. Overseas transport of choice wood has a long history, ancient Egypt was a major importer. I wouldn't underestimate the influence of the Blue Moon. While it might be limited to a small mystical order, the Master of the Tides must have a few disciples in waiting, unless he is a solitary immortal sage. The Thinokan creator Soli had the sun and earth spirits as helpers, so it might be Fire and Water for men and Earth and Water for women. But then, there are lots of clans with strongly different traditions, so probably elemental associations vary as widely.

I guess I would go for Dayak clothing as a baseline, and the general neighborhood of the Malay archipelago for tidbits of cultural detail. I am far from sure what kind of facial features to expect among the Thinobutu-related "Agimori" of northern Pamaltela (surviving in Kumanku, Thinokos, Kimos and Maslo, and disappeared in Loral). The Outrigger people have a varied stock they bred from. Calling them Agimori has always stuck me as sort of dogmatic, but then the dark skinned pygmy impala riders probably are going by Wareran as well, so there is a wide range of features united in each of the four categories. As former slaves of among others the Artmali, there is the possibility of some Veldang admixture, though significantly less than in the Torabs. Mythically, some East Islander ancestry might be present as well. One statement about Flanch population still makes me wonder - the huge number of rural Flanchites. I would have thought that the majority of Flanchites would live in cities with special anti-elf defenses and communally maintained girdles of death, with only very little and very precious safe agricultural land, and a diet predominantly based on the offerings of the Maslo Sea, both in meat and plant. If you were living next to homicidal ecoterrorist maniacs, would you trust any manioc harvested from soil they might have interacted with? Even if you follow the procedures to wash out the poison, you can never be sure that that will be enough. That's why I have significant conceptual problems with a distributed rural population in Flanch. Think Wildlings and White Walkers north of the Wall, you can have either one group or the other. It is also close to a miracle that the Flanchite culture of fighting the jungle survived Errinoru's Empire. Over on Elamle, you could probably use the manioc without detoxing it first, thanks to the centuries of cooperation between aldryami and humans. The Elamlites might spend just as much time "weeding" as their Flanchite brethren, but doing so to maintain the forest harmony rather than for protection of their crops. Maslo doesn't seem to have great wealth in metals, but has access to fine lumber - at least over in Elamle. While the Flanchites cut down lots of trees and shrubs and vines, the Garbulian elves would shrewdly keep access to lumber useful for ship-building very limited, possibly only as bait for deadly traps. BTW, I noticed an discrepancy in the Guide p.602: The original text in Missing Lands (and IIRC in Elder Secrets) had Gargulia or Gargualia for the embyli tribe of Flanch prior to the devastation following the collapse of the Errinoru growth. Was this a redactional decision to avoid the confusion that was obviously in Missing Lands?

While most of my experience is with field archery (round targets and animal shape targets), I wonder about these additional strike ranks for long range fire. If you are firing a military strength bow (or longbow) of better than 70 lbs draw weight, there is no f***ing way that you draw the arrow to the fullest and then fine-tune target acquisition for several seconds. No problem with a compound bow, but no such luck with any recurve or long bow in that draw weight class. That's why I used a nice 40 lbs recurve barebow (stringwalking) for competitions. It is also a myth that you can purposefully hit a man-sized target at extreme range. I liked clout archery at roughly 150 metres, where the "target" were concentric circles on the ground, with a flagpost in the center. Yes, I did ruin one arrow by hitting that flagpole, but I wouldn't say that was intentional. Firing at a target uniformly moving is only slightly harder than firing at a still target. If the target is more or less randomly zig-zagging, there is no point in trying an aimed hit, unless you can make out a pattern in those motions. Instead, you send three arrows in that direction, hoping that one of them will intersect with one of the course changes. Firing into a melee is similar, only this time you have a plus-minus target. Sniping is pretty much impossible at more than short range with a missile as slow as an arrow. Let me guess - you archery exerience comes from shooting a compound bow. Possibly with targetting aids like a scope. Or you are translating experience with gun shooting. It is interesting to see lighting as your skill modifiers, but not wind. And you don't mention the nature of intermediary terrain - do you see all the ground between you and the target, or are there ridges obscuring the terrain behind them, or open areas of water? Either make judging the distance quite hard. Most misses are vertical in nature, from misjudging the distance. Misjudging the distance by five meters will make half a meter difference on the target. Admittedly, firing at an upright human-shaped target still makes that a just so hit. In preparing field archery tournaments, the people setting up the course will seek out all the chances for shots with adverse conditions, like shooting across a well-lit and probably well ventilated clearing into a dark trail. It is pretty much impossible to bring all of this into rpg rules for archery.

Arkat was a heroquester first, and a sorcerer/normal magician a mere third (warrior way outweighed his use of sorcery, or other specialist magic). Creating spells from studying doesn't sound up to his alley, but putting things together by traveling to the hero plane and gathering leads there sounds like right up his alley. So, what he gave to the trolls was sharing heroquest rewards rather than researching spells in a musty laboratory, IMO.

Super-race of men: Erasanchula (according to Zzabur, who happens to be one). Super-race of bison: Mother Mammal, or Eiritha's Daughter(s). Super-race of merfolk: the Niiad Triolini, themselves descended from and lesser versions of Mirintha and Phargon. The rules of our science often fail to apply in Glorantha. Forget subatomic particles, but keep the wave/particle stuff for (to our physics) gross mis-applications. Things like parallax work fine - in the Middle World, but not for objects outside of it observed from the Middle Earth. Distances change when you approach the Outer World. Darkness is tangible, not the mere absence of Light. (The Lunar glow might be an absence of an absence of Light, though.) How things work can be figured out from observations through alchemy or sorcery. Deductive reason is a form of sorcery, and knowledge thus worked up has magical applications. Asking a god of knowledge is another way, but while the deity might be partial to that knowledge, it is in no way guranteed that the answer will be understood. Meditating on things may provide insights. As might communicating with an object's anima.

I found this article on Iron Age urbanism in my research collection provided by Academia (a network of sharing scientific articles free of charge), and I think it describes Orlanthi cities quite well. Even if you aren't into reading up on European archaeology north of the Alps, there are a few images from reconstructions in here which may prove valuable, and a few maps showing settlement patterns at well-known oppida and Fuerstensitze.

I guess this is a RuneQuest problem (and appropriately in this place rather than the Glorantha section). Where in HeroQuest you don't have to think about statting the people of a certain group of Praxians, giving them a number of default "properties" as their cultural keyword, in RQ you have to tailor the minutia in stats. Clearly a normal spectrum of human stats would result in a huge number of unsurvivable individuals for many if not all of the Praxians. However, we have been told from the very beginning that there are quite a lot of varieties in body types among the Praxians. Llama riders tend to be taller, bison and rhino riders to be stockier and stronger, and impala riders need to be small in order not to do a Vogon number on their mounts. Nobody has a problem declaring Impala and Bolo Lizard riders pygmies, since that choice leads to a special set of stats worse than the average human at least in size, but also in strength. But there has been quite a bit of criticism for making the Agimori Men-and-a-Half not only larger than life, but "superhuman" in the terms of RQ stats. Still, one obvious way to make sure that mainly viable lion berserk hunters result in Basmoli breeding would be to adjust the stat range for Basmoli characters. Which then would make them a favorite background choice for minimaxers. While these sound like arguments from 25 years ago on rec.games.rpg, I guess a certain part of the target audience for a system like RQ feels right at home there. With the runes combined with the cultic background providing some stat mods in character creation, tackling the Basmoli this way might be an alternative. Their culture rune is obviously Beast, as is true for all Hsunchen. That comes as a paired rune, however, limiting their character development unlike those characters who take an element for their culture rune no big problem having 100+% in air if playing an Orlanthi with all the trappings is what you want, but create a Basmoli with beast in that range and you basically get a lion in the wrong body, with the magic to change that for a short term way too costly. Basmoli are Hsunchen, and it is appropriate for Hsunchen to lapse in their humanity ever now and then. Calling the Basmoli warband the berserks suggests that the Basmoli are prone to this a little more than say Damali would isn't a big problem, either. That's where the not quite core runes from HQ1 would come in handily. There are two hunter runes, one for Yinkin (a cat's paw) and one for Odayla (a bear's paw), either of which might apply to the Basmoli and the essence of both their magic and their lifestyle. After all, they are predator Hsunchen, like the only other Hsunchen in the region, the Telmori. Giving them a non-paired rune to develop would be the "fair" method, rules-wise. There might be an animist loophole via voluntary possession of a lion ancestral spirit, but that (like the Men-and-a-Half Fire stuff too) feels a bit like a built-in rune lord feature. The elemental affinity approach works fine for Orlanthi, Praxian Beast Riders, and to some extent also for the Pelorians. It sort of breaks when there are no clear elemental preferences in a culture, which makes me sort of anxious about developing Malkioni or Kralori RQ characters.

The Red Moon doesn't have any influence on the seas (and how should it, sitting still in the sky?). The Moonbroth cycle has always been a mystery to me, but Glorantha averages two tides a week. The 7 day week cycle of the Theyalans is based on the 7 days of visibility of Orlanth's Ring and then 7 days of doing stuff outside of the star dome. Nothing Lunar about that. The Lunar energies are at an almost zero in the dark and dying phases, but the visibilty is pretty much there. Full moon gives everything a reddish tint in the nights, while less than half moon barely offers much to see by, but looking directly into the glow will clearly make the glowing parts of the moon visible.