Joerg

I would be interested where the Praxian Basmoli would get lionskin for their loincloths from. Do they skin their dead?

I think the Artmali and other Blue Moon worshippers do profit from the Lunar energies in some way, but they don't have a place for that distant Red Moon in their stories. If they wanted a red moon, they could have taken Artia all along. (Artia was described as a moon in several ancient documents.) The Ytarians of Afadjann may have had a different relevation, but that's not really my home corner.

If you still remember the stuff from Borderlands, there was the RQ3 Renaissance era with a couple of good products: Sun County, Shadows on the Borderlands, Strangers in Prax and the campaign in River of Cradles. All of these are out of print, but if you happen to come across an affordable second hand copy, these have much playable material. River of Cradles duplicates some of the info from Borderlands and Pavis, but the campaign still is considered a classic. If you don't tangle with Sun Domers or Riverfolk and are looking for purely nomad adventures, the best info is part of the Guide of Glorantha. Nothing immediately playable, but lots of locales you never heard of before. Still, that's maybe too much of everything else than Prax for quite a few dollars. One of the nicest Glorantha products ever, though. The only published RQ scenarios that I can recall set in Beast Rider Prax are those in RuneQuest Adventures #3 (a fan publication distributed as stapled photocopied A4 booklets, in the 1990ies), The Block. It is remotely possible that there are a few copies mouldering in the Chaos Society stock in Germany, try and contact them at editor@tradetalk.de , or find someone willing to scan those pages for you. I cannot recall any scenarios from the Tales of the Reaching (another out-of-print fanzine from the 1990ies) special issues on Prax. Other than that, look at the Prax-themed threads on this forum, or ask directed questions.

Most of Pamaltela should see the Lunar phases on the same days like Dragon Pass does. The angular elevation of the Red Moon should be the same everywhere outside the Glowline. The usual assumptions for mountains hiding the moon should apply, too. Even the size should be the same. The reason for this pretty much seems to be that the Middle and Upper Sky have basically the same distance to any place in the Middle World, so neither parallax nor triangulation provide any meaningful measurements. When the way you look at the sky changes, you are approaching the Outer Worlds, whether on extreme mountaintops like Kerofin or Top of the World or approaching Sramak's River. There may be some extreme East Isles where you get to see the sun rise in the southeast or northeast. The moon being tied to the Crater may be the sole exception to this Middle Sky business, and while elevation and size probably aren't affected in any way, the equatorial Lunar poles (strange, but real concept) you are facing do change, and the angle on the map probably does change, too. As a navigation aid, this might work best in the northern Kahar Sea or in the Neliomi, but for most of the seas the changes in relation to the Sunpath termini won't be measurable to sufficient accuracy. Inside the Silver Shadow and its extension through the Glowline, perception of the moon is quite different, but that has little to no bearing for Pamaltela (yet - who knows whether or when Fonrit will get its own Glowline, and what color it will be).

I wonder whether Hannibal's Hispanic allies would be another good fit for Orlanthi (with the core of the Punic forces possibly another model for Arkat's army or the Carmanians)?

Been there, done that - "The Great Moose Debate" is one of the points in the list of Digest encounters that the world could have been spared. But it did clear up that the Pralori ride wapiti red deer, and not moose, and created the Alekki Hsunchen to boot.

So you are creating a North Fronelan mythical landscape with the Uncoling Shaman-Singer, the TEB smith and the Rathori headstrong warrior? I was seeing the TEB more in the role of Louhi than Ilmarinen - quite different from oneself, not quite local. Always presuming that there was a Hsunchen "us" when there wasn't a strong overdose of "them" (whether the Gbaji empire, the God Learners, post God-Learner Loskalm (so they claim) or the Kingdom of War). The Dawn Age Serpent Beast Brotherhood was such a animal-totem surpassing union of shaman-overchiefs, and they managed to gather six of the Eleven Beasts of that Dawn Age battle against the Gbaji allies (from Prax and converted locals). Which makes me note that earth worshipping "Beast Riders" were far from exclusive to Prax, the entire western forest of Genertela had them. Bulls, stags, zebras, elephants, llamas, musk oxen, mammoths, and horses. So, then who exactly are the TEB folk? Remnant Kachisti gone mainly native, but retaining a knack for sorcery that allowed them to either invent iron independently or to really steal it from the dwarves (who would claim that the secret was stolen regardless whether the TEB made the discovery themselves or not)? No. I distinctly remember Pralori Hsunchen outside of the direct neighborhood of Pralorela (i.e. ouside of southern Safelster, Tanisor and western Maniria). The fringes of the elf woods would be friendly territory to them, making Erontree much less of a barrier than for the Malkioni (who did have road rights for a single Alaskan Highway route). Pithdaros is within the ancient Pralori-led Serpent Beast Brotherhood of southwestern Genertela. (Elsewhere other Hsunchen took the lead, where they didn't get infected by culture like the Enerali, Enjoreli or Pendali.) That's sort of my conceptual problem. If the stag and stag spirit population (and population density) in Pralorela isn't much higher than in Rathorela, then why aren't there any two-legged stags in Rathorela? Less than elsewhere isn't much of a problem. We are talking migratory hunter-gatherer culture here, with 500 people already an above-minimum sustainable population. There doesn't appear to be any open hostility between aldryami and hsunchen, either. The aldryami reforestation project would benefit the hsunchen, and they in turn might help defend this new extended habitat against farmers eager to cut it back again.

Yeah, you would want to prepare a good way into your afterlife before you go in harm's way. But I repeat - you get a mostly rational approach to religion in the legions, some sort of afterlife insurance rather than getting pumped up to fanaticism. While you want a strong esprit de corps, you do not want individual braveries in a phalanx (which the Roman formation essentially still was), but stolid support for your neighbors. Basically, you get crazed Lunar fanatics next to dour Pelandan or Dara Happan phalangists in the Lunar army, but even the Roman auxilia was trained not to rush in out of fervor. While there would have been the usual demonizing pep-talk/hate-speech prior to the battle, there is no "blood for the gods/demons" element here. Again, you are describing the situation some 80 to 150 years into the occupation. Hadrian or later. Different emperors, different situation.

Yeah. That's middle Imperial Rome. Under the Julian emperors, there was an influx of eastern mystery cults like Isis, Ishtar, Mithras, and Christ, but mostly the state religion prevailed among the citizens. The conquered non-citizens... The Roman legions still were mainly Romans. There were no great expectations that the units did more than disciplinary sacrifice to the standard or the divine emperor. The degradation of the legions with the introduction of the Limitanei was still in the future. Most foreigners still served in the auxiliae. Now compare e.g. the Siege of Whitewall, where dozens of regiments did little else than participate in magical rituals, powering them by their prayer, and paying an immense soul-toll just for helping erect the magical ramps of the Seven of Vistur, dying in their hundreds, if not thousands. Where attacks were sent against the fortification just that enough of the Lunar soldiers died to serve some mystical magical purpose in creating some other (likely also futile) effect. The Romans were no strangers to such tactics - employed by their enemies. They had a proven method to deal with it - just doing their job cutting them down. They even managed to turn the barbarians into disciplined forces. But that, too, lay in the future when they conquered Britannia.

Another major difference is that the Lunars are as god-crazy as the Heortlings. The run-of-the-mill Pelorian may be a lot more relaxed in his cult activities, but the Lunar cultists are fairly excited about it. The Dara Happans are there for taking revenge and for the (return of the) plunder that they missed out when the Invincible Golden Horde failed to live up to its name (with "up to its name" being sort of redundant in that statement). What makes the Lunar Empire so interesting are the many often contradictory goals of its players. The Romans are way too monolithic at the time of the conquest of Britannia. That said, I look forward to getting the imagery.

Babeester Gor is widely known for arranging severed sexual appendages, and since that is what flowers are to a plant, I would say she fits the bill.

Basically there is one Kalevala character reflected in one Uncoling shaman in name and attribute. There are oodles of difference, though. Väinämöinen building his kantele out of a pike's jaw sounds right out of Varanorlanth's bag of tricks, and there are more such traits that make the wild Odin parallel of Orlanth a better match than a shaman. Kalevalan Väinämöinen probably is one of those super-magicians, not limited to a single area of expertise. And he is a swordsman as much as a magician, nicely depicted in Gallen-Kallela's confrontation with eagle-form Louhi. There is shape-changing in the Kalevala, mostly attributed to Louhi. I don't see an Ilmarinen/Daedalos/Wayland character among the Fronelan Hsunchen, though. The pair of Dronari near Sog City probably come the closest in all of Fronela if you avoid Nida. Kullervo on the other hand might be Harrek or Janan Vartool, or any other headstrong young warrior with too much prowess and too little shrewdness. The Kalevalan song of iron would qualify as Gloranthan sorcery, btw - it is what you know, not what you are or what you have. The consequences of the Ban for the wildlife of Fronela in addition to the human cultures of Fronela have been under-explored. Migratory species abound in Fronela. Reindeer, salmon, birds like the swallow (which feeds on Gorakiki's bounty, also known as Gorakiki's curse in the subarctic regions), and at a guess even butterflies in southern Loskalm. I seem to recall Pralori outside of Pralorela from the info in Genertela Box, also north of the Nidan mountains, but there aren't any in the Guide. There ought to be elk, and Vargantyr sports elk antlers rather than reindeer ones. Speaking of the Pralori and getting back to the subject line of this thread, they claim to be the only keepers of the Serpent Dances which made up the Dawn Age shamanic meta-tradition of the Great Western Forest. At a guess, this was accompanied by rather monotonous singsong and drumming, possibly done by the dancers, rather than by stringed melody instruments (like the kantele) or reeds/flutes. .There are things in the Guide that require looking more closely, especially with the map of the Thaw which cannot be right, but that will be better served in a separate topic.

An interesting interpretation of that rules construct. IMO the dichotomy between Man and Beast for humans could be as easily be replaced by Man and Spirit (another of those form runes), creating a different but as Gloranthan set of implications. Do the Uz have another Darkness rune down there? What do the Mostali get?

Väinamöinen is the sankari hero, the spell-singer. (It may be such me, but "sankari" and "singer" look a lot similar, despite the fact that Finnish is not an Indo-European language. But Finnish has been in contact with Indogermanic languages for quite a while, and is in fact a valuable repository for ancient, unchanged forms of Indogermanic when the two language groups went out of contact for a while, leaving the loan word as part of the language.) He is the Merlin/Chiron/Odin the grey wanderer, the Mary Sue magician-fighter that no RPG (not even RQ) has ever been able to replicate satisfactorily as a player character. You don't get my meaning: the post-Ban Uncolings have a human culture mainly when they meet at Porent. Those few weeks in the year they have more than a few man-shaped minders around their herds, much of the rest of their time they spend ruminating on lichen and similar meagre fare. Like I said, the Ban may have forced them to adopt that lifestyle, but they get to be human mainly for their festivals. I am far from convinced that "hunter" still is a major occupation among them. The time on the hoof may be some kind of meditative experience for the tribe, from which they only awake at the meetplaces. The Pralori of Fronela have way more in common with the Sami (or Nenets, or any other northern Asian reindeer hunter/herder culture) than the Uncolings. Although, to be fair to the Sami, the reindeer herders are simply the portion of the Sami which was the hardest to assimilate into Norse culture. The coastal, fisherman Sami/"Finns" of Halogaland (northern Norway) were already halfway assimilated into Viking society at the end of the Viking Age. Enforced Christianisation and a penalty on using their native language for naming and other purposes completed their ethnic cleansing. By the time the nomadic reindeer herders fell under the evils of Christianisation, their coastal cousins had become undistinguishable from their Norse neighbors. I would agree that the coastal Sami (possibly including those on the Bottnic Sea) could be identified with Louhi's folk in Kalevala. But they, like the Karelians and e.g. the Savolaiset, had almost nothing to do with reindeer. Having lived n Drag i Tysfjord in the Sameland area and digging into the region's local history may have left me with a widely different impression of Viking era Sami, where the coastal Sami had permanent reindeer traps (or funnels) for the seasonal herd migrations but subsided on fishery and local hunting and growing for the rest of the year. The nomads who followed the wild herds year round still spoke a closely related language and likely shared much of their religion and magical practices, but they were almost another culture. Compare Enerali and Galanini in Ralios, or Enjoreli and Hsunchen Tawari in Fronela. The Uncolings may be closest to the Tanuku Fiwan in lifestyle. Migrations and survival on the hoof, but turning into human shapes for magic. Huge human populations appearing and disappearing, with only a small percentage of guardians keeping human shape in the times between. Probably including most if not all of their shaman and shaman trainee population, so I will grant you that the Uncoling shamans might be living a life-style that resembles the nomadic Sami or their Siberian cognate cultures (many of them speaking language from the transuralic branch of the Fenno-Ugric languages). So, sorry if I have very defined ideas about Sami - I published a German language non-Gloranthan RQ scenario around this in Free INT #7 (the Vikings special) , making use of my previous research. Corraling up wild reindeer for sustainable herd culling was an activity shared by coastal Sami and Vikings - check the Ottar entry in Alfred of Wessex' Anglosaxon Orosius for a mention of his wealth in stags. As for the Uncolings, they might as well be charaterized as members of the Ahrensburg mesolithic culture, near the area where I grew up and still (or again) live. Yeah. Only that you are doing the Klatchian imitation of Djelibebian culture, which is the equivalent of this footnote in Pratchett's Pyramids (p.111 in my Corgi paperback edition): Basically, I have lived in the region, have researched the coastal "Finn" population rather intensely, have listened to stories about Halogaland Viking kings and their relationship to the coastal and inland Sami. After Norway, Finland is the land outside of Germany where I spent the second longest time, and I started to learn their language up to early immigrant proficiency while studying their history with application to my roleplaying activities in mind. While I own a Finnish language edition of Kalevala, my main exposure comes from a German language verse-form transcription which I read in its entirety, with the sing-song of the Finnish language in my mind. Fronelan Hsunchen or not-quite-any-more Hsunchen are great for using this, like Rathori or Winterwood Pralori, possibly also the Enjoreli/Tawari. Almost all, except for the Uncolings. Those only fit the cliches, similar to the Sauerkraut and Wurst-devouring Bierfest-celebrating "Germans" in Lederhosen or Dirndl. Or, to sum up the Down Under cliches as far as I was made aware of, no worries, mate, keep your corks on your broad-rimmed hat jingling while living on Vegemite and Fosters or XXXX while riding your roos herding your sheep, saving them from crocs. (Or whichever cheap blackface cultural atrocity you might impose on any culture...) It's not up to our standards. Hold your horses - "the only traditional reindeer herding shamanic tradition on earth"? Northern Siberia is full of semi-hunter semi-herder reindeer folk (or rather, if you meet one of the sparse natives there, he or she is likely from such a culture). The Nenets (aka Samoyeds) are much closer to the Uncoling circumstances of life than the Sami. And while the native Caribou hunters of Canada aren't herders, their lives would be fairly familiar to a member of the Ahrensburg mesolithic hunters. The TEB make for a good Louhi. That's my explanation, too. In the last few years? Checking the map on p.201 in the Guide, the Ban on Tastolar lifted as recently as 1620. (The Porent meeting of 1617 with 50,000 individuals hence must have happened before the Thaw reached Tastolar.) Even with the "now" of Glorantha moved from 1621 to 1627, the Uncolings have just re-emerged from the Ban, and feel the pressure of the Kingdom of War in the same way other buffer states of Loskalm do. If you make the Uncolings contemporary Sami all the way, with their colorful felt clothes and duodje and whatnot, then all my sensibilities are triggered. Tastolar is a subarctic open taiga, with the necessary tundra providing its slow-living but nourishing lichen only in a different portion of the Ban, leaving the migratory reindeer herds at a severe disadvantage through the Ban - their fattening summer feeding grounds have gone. The effect is worse than SIr Winston Churchill's straight lines delineating various Hashemite kingdoms without any concern for the bedouins who utilized the sparse grazing on either side of those arbitrary lines. Fronela is a lot more fertile than Sacred Prax or the Wastes, but the herds are adapted to migrating between different regions, and the Ban trapped them on either side, leaving them with at best half of the resources that their hard life in subarctic conditions demanded - it is not like the Valind storms were blocked by the Ban. And at the same time, the Ban ruined their fishing for good, preventing salmon or sea trout migration - which the Rathori survived only because of their magical hibernation, and the early awakeners of 1594 clearly suffered from lack of this resource, little wonder that they became as aggressive as under Black Hralf in half a heartbeat. For the Uncolings emerging in such strength, they must have done something unreported but along similar lines. Reindeer do the opposite of hibernation, they remain active through ice and snow, subsiding on what little they can ruminate on. Like I said earlier, the coast dwellers of Norway built reusable reindeer traps to corral the wild herds that would arrive seasonally, culled them to their benefit, then let them go again minus a few beasts for domestication and others for the food locker. Those reindeers that were kept back as domesticated beasts became the sorry specimen that are exhibited at the tourist trap duodje tents along the highways rather than the proud huge-antlered beasts that roam freely. I knew a salt lick on a fjord where such specimen could be observed with some regularity.

Herd or pack structure doesn't always translate into the human-shaped interactions of Hsunchen. Rathori are way more gregarious than their beast shape side. Telmori tribal packs are beyond anything wolves come up with outside of human-created confinement. Sofali culture is quite different from that of the sea turtles. The Pendali wars and probably Greymane's tribal peculiarity have Basmoli males as defenders of territory, with the females only joining in when it comes to defending the pride. Females are hunters, and often provide for their males who may be pre-occupied with other pursuits related to territory - the feared "basmoli berserk" units fielded in Praxian warfare. Few if any Basmoli beastmen still have beast brothers, but they still retain the ability to change (back) into their beast form.

So, which species (race is definitely the wrong term) have the man rune? Humans, the three major Elder Races, mermen, wind children, a majority of the beastmen, broo, scorpionmen, ogres. Dragonewts have their own stuff, newtlings are possibly a case in between (bachelors function as if they have it, adults don't necessarily, and the pollywogs don't). Likewise undefined are the timinits. Pamalt's earlier attempts at making people don't all have the man rune - the Hoolar doesn't, Jelmre and Pelmre (Slarges) are two more undefined cases.7 Losing the man rune is shown for e.g. midget slashers and herd men. Winning it for the Morokanth, whose bodyplan doesn't quite conform. The Mad Sultanate grey ones aren't quite man rune owners any more, either, and I make no promises for the adherents of the Kingdom of War by 1635 or so. Eligibility for Daka Fal membership is more a consequence of possessing the rune rather than another criterion. Neither for Hsunchen beasts or Praxian animals (limited to land-dwelling herbivores, though). Prior to the Covenant contest, both Beast Rider two-legs and Praxian four-legs sort of conformed with the Man Rune. I am sure the Malkioni are bound to object, after all they regard themselves as maternal kin to the mermen through Warera, the Triolini (niiad) mother of Malkion (in whichever of his appearances). And her son's appearance has stamped the term Wareran on roughly a third of all humans in the known world. But the baboons of Prax act like they have the man rune, and apart from the fact that they never take human form, they might be another Hsunchen type. I am not sure that the rootless elves have lost their affinity to the plant rune - what they lost is their connection to the superego of the forest. Apart from that, they still are plants, ingest leaves and compost. In a way, elf aldryami are trees grown to the pattern of the man rune, developing "meat" for muscles around their "skeleton" that is grown out of the nut that their mothers (whether female brown or green elves or dryads) give body birth to. I wonder whether their wooden bones are separated into individual pieces like the separate bones of our bodies, or whether they only have non-solid cellulose fibre rather than ligaments. The menu at the troll restaurant doesn't show any joints in their depiction of the elf torso, only "bone" branches clearly hacked through. Elf hands can be fairly similar to human hands, but their feet tend to be different. Like e.g. Stom Bull Berserks? I think that both the Praxians and the standard Hsunchen have a strong tie to their man rune.

The "biped" appears to be sort of optional if you think about centaurs and mermen who only have the upper body of our conscious biped. Ouori and male zabdamar take the "able to use tools with their hands" rather down, too, but still are accorded man rune status. Even Morokanth are better at manipulating tools. And herd men have the manipulating organs but lack the consciousness to do something with them.

The magic in the Kalevala is shamanic to some level, but it also has parts which aren't. The entire setting is about the Sampo, the equivalent of a Mostali Artefact gone astray. One reason I took objection is that I crushed the numbers, and the huge number of Uncolings would require either extremely numerous herds to sustain the humans, or that the humans spend much of their time on four hooves to survive - more so during the Ban when their migrations were curtailed. It is possible that the post-Ban Uncolings are significantly different from the pre-Ban ones, when they still may have roamed all the way from Winterwood to Eol. This special situation is in no way relevant to the stories in the Kalevala. As are parts of the Odin traditions (where they aren't yogic). Knowledge stored in vaguely alliterational verse isn't exclusive to the Finnish magic, the Merseburg spell formulas are one of the very few Germanic texts which escaped the book-burning of Charlemagne's son Ludwig the Pious (following up the killing of people with the knowledge under his father). I guess the Song of Iron is the best preserved tradition on both the killing with and the repairing of damage by the iron, though knowledge of the iron. It might apply directly to Glorantha and have a hand in its increased lethality against the Elder Races. Yes, the Rathori culture is borderline non-hsunchen with their semipermanent edifices, gardening etc., and the Jonatings south of the Dona may be an offshoot gone theist. Like I said above, the Uncoling census during the Ban doesn't leave enough grazing for the herds if a similar human-to-herd ratio is postulated like with the Pralori or the Praxians (Sables are about the same size, slightly heavier). This four-legged mostly lifestyle doesn't say zilch about their shamans, I agree, but it changes the people completely.

I wonder whether the mystic path allows a gap or an overlap of the opposed runes. Maybe you have to start your meditations developing a gap, then perfect balance, then an overlap (with the choice up to the enlightened person rather than the dice). After all, these runes are used to effect magic (not necessarily by the 'newts, but e.g. by Yelmites strong in both life and death).

That's a common misconception because the Norwegians used to call the Sami "Finns". The Kalevala is the Finnish, or more specifically the Karelian epos. That means it deals with a culture of farmers and forest hunters who rarely got to see a reindeer, but plenty of moose and squirrels. (The Finnish term for money, raha, is derived from the value of a (red) squirrel fur when dealing with Hanseatic merchants, it being some sort of smallest denomination.)

The thing with the spiritual organ attuned to a certain way of magic is part of the meta-rules of Gloranthan magic, like (usually) the energy for magic being created by the denizens of the Middle World, with denizens from the Outer World more or less Being their magic rather than producing it. Sure. But the God Learners were right to a certain degree. They went wrong when they adapted reality to their theories rather than the other way around. The trouble is that they were able to do so despite going wrong.

Most are, but I will have to wait for the museum to re-open again after re-organization to be able to tell what's on display now. (I work a few km from it...) Looking forward to seeing those. Great... that's the kind of continuity between Viking dress and elsewhere I was talking about. Dress, housing, tools - the main advancements were introduction of iron as the other available metal, and shipbuilding. And I am not exactly sure whether the jump from Hjortspring's carvel-built sewn canoe to clinker-built Nydam boat was a direct advancement from that shipbuilding tradition or a new player studying the models of others and applying his own technique to it. (That's how the first Hanseatic cogs were built, and with "upside down" clinker.) When I look at a contemporary statue like the "Thusnelda" (captive female barbarian), I wonder how much of that is depicting the strangers in Lederhosen and Dirndle when portraying Germany as a whole. Take one minor region's idiosyncrasies and project them on a great and mostly innocent population. It's a bit like seeing basically nude Impala riders and telling everybody that the entire Paps is a great nudists' paradise.

In RQ, spirits used the spell (or ability) "Visibility" in order to interact with beings on the physical plane. WIthout that ability or residence in a material object or host, no interaction was possible. A spirit with Visibility still was part of the spirit plane, but could reach through the veil. The range of interaction on the physical plane might be line of sight, but on the spirit plane there are different or no obstacles for line-of-sight. A spirit that can perceive the fetch on the spirit plane may be blocked sight (or other pertinent senses) to perceive the shaman on the mundane plane. A somewhat able shaman will of course use his fetch as a spirit radar while navigating the mundane world with his other senses.

The OP didn't talk about wandering monsters, but about the shaman straying into the mundane world territory of spirits potentially hostile. It is like passing through another clan's territory. A shaman within reach of his own tradition's territory will be aware of the neighborhood, and will have made arrangements for travel when crossing into known neighboring areas. A shaman straying far from his responsibilities may encounter foreign territories unprepared, and I would definitely allow encounters there. But then, even though there is a link between the mundane and the borderland spirit territory, there may be another adjacent spirit region which remains just outside of the boundaries of a dominant spirit linked to the land, some sort of anteroom plane. It may be quite narrow, though.

Dragon magic can be acquired (e.g. by newtling slaves) like RQ3 divine magic. Spend a core ressource (POW or hero point) for single use. Despite that formalism, it probably feeds upon the draconic reality around the caster, much like a sorcerous Tap.