Joerg

Or rather that Greg was rather dogmatic about at the time, saying that softening the edges was reserved for the activities of the Hero Wars. Basically, the source of Rune Magic matters more to e.g. Pelorians or Orlanthi than the magic system it derives from. Dragon magic is as terrible as Chaos, possibly more so to the descendants of the True Golden Horde warriors than to the descendants of Orlanthi refugees who avoided the Dragonkill, and not terrible at all to devout Kralori. Jagrekriand's (Tolat's, Shargash's) hell magic is way worse than Deloradella's (Kyger Litor's) hell magic.

The more important distinction of looking at the world is through the lense of your culture. As an Orlanthi, this magic includes both spirit magic and divine magic, and a smattering of sorcery for the learned occupations (mainly through Lhankhor Mhy's alchemy). As a Praxian Beast Rider, your deities are the giants and the ancestral deities, and you perceive the world through the lense of the Covenant. As a Kralori, you have the choice between state-supported acceptable magics, traditional hedge magics from your "officially this never happened" hsunchen or Beast Rider ancestry, or antigod magics, with no distinction along any God Learner categories applying. As a Pelorian, you may continue one of your or more of your ancestors' traditions (which include Western sorcery for Pelanda even before the arrival of Syranthir's refugees from God Learner Fronela) or join the Lunar Way. Only specialists in one type of magic should have real restrictions - no Shaman should be allowed to use sorcerous manipulation skills (Lunar ones are acceptable), and no adept sorcerer should be allowed to develop a fetch or become a rune lord (by any other means than discovering and wielding Balastor's Axe, an admittedly way too low entry criterion).

Elves _are_ gardeners, and know the benefits of pruning. Possibly even extending to their own bodies. So yes, elves have axes, and while it is easier for them to grow the wood into the desired shape than to carve it, they will have tools for cutting wood and even cutting down trees that harm the harmony of their forests (e.g. by lowering the ground water levels to the detriment of the rest of the forest, or creating a fire hazard where none would be tolerated - yes, thinking of eucalyptus here, which may have its own place in forests, but maybe shouldn't be allowed to take over other parts). Elf Babeester will have a different focus, and I am not quite sure whether it will be regular aldryami or rootless ones remaining behind to serve their sundered kin to take these roles. Babs and Yelmalio are often named as the most popular cults outside of ancestral Aldrya.

While Sandy is to blame for the details of troll and elf biology in Troll Pak, the deep mythology of the trolls predates his involvement - the cult of Kyger Litor has the tragical troll history already in RQ2 (not yet in RQ1, though), and quite likely before as part of Arkat's Saga. Xem the Troll featured in Jonat's saga. Troll Pak is also the first publication to give a fairly complete (if troll centered) history and pre-history of the world. With RQ2 publications being mythical artefacts where and when I started playing RQ, it was Troll Pak which made me understand how Griffin Island was ripped out of Glorantha. Speaking of Griffin Mountain, that publication's coverage of mostali and aldryami is very much generic, fitting generic pastiches like Shannara (which has, to my memory, pointy-eared elves). But in all fairness, that was before DW 24, and the Greatway dwarves are renowned to be the least orthodox mostali in Glorantha. They did receive overseers from Nida to keep them in line, but enough dwarves are alive to remember the good work shifts of the Unity Council and the not so good work shifts when the EWF corrupted itself. At least that's the first publication of that aspect of Greg's Glorantha. It may have been implicit earlier on. The`Dwarf of Dwarf Run was published with WBRM, and his gifts were quite unlike anything done by other famous dwarves from mythology. Tolkien's writings had one similar case of magical technology, coming from the pits of Angband at the Fall of Gondolin. I prefer the Book of Lost Tales version over the heavily redacted Silmarillion version, it has dragon war-machines with orc marines spilling out of the big scaled mechanized creatures - a vision as weird and wonderful as the Waertagi dragonships or the Dwarf of Dwarf Run. (It is one of three epic fantasy siege descriptions which end in the fall of the fortress (unlike the siege of Minas Tirith which doesn't succeed), along with Gemmel's Legend and Feist's fall of Armengar in A Darkness at Sethanon which create my gold standard for such epics.) The EWF is mentioned in the Sartarite backstory in White Bear and Red Moon, and the dragonewt weirdness of re-hatching from the same egg over and over again stems from that game, too. While I am confident that Greg's original notes did not have these details, it isn't quite clear whether the stories he had not published or finished did allude to such alienness. Glorantha began with a lot of syncreticism long before role-playing games and their clichéed fantasy races came to the fore, but by the time of Troll Pak I feel that it had left its Arthurian and likewise roots far behind. Not so sure about the time of publication of WBRM, but that definitely predates the effect roleplaying games had on our perception of standard fantasy. None of my games ever featured aldryami, although I had isolated dryads. But then that was for geographical reasons mainly - eastern Kethaela and southern Sartar don't have them. My Balmyr game had dragonewts, and my Heortland campaign originating southwest of Jansholm had indirect contact with uz. One of my fanzine-published scenarios set in the neighborhood of the German RQ3 Glorantha scenarios in Malani lands has Dinacoli possessed by vengeful dragonewt dreams north of the Creek as opponents. (That one was requested as "do a scenario about dragonewt weirdness to be used with our recent publications," which I sort of delivered while keeping the game from confronting the dragonewts directly.) I wonder a bit if the concept of elves and trolls started out a bit like the various fey folk in E.R. Eddison's "The Worm Ouroboros", where all the various fantasy-creature named fey apparently are simply somewhat alien but non-twisted variations of the human building plan (all within Star Trek rubber forehead variations). Eddison doesn't go deeply into physical differences between his folk, either, bbut clearly has psychological variations between them. And Tolkien called his Noldor elves "gnomes" or deep ones (apparently independently from what we associate with Innsmouth) - tune into the spin-off of our "they don't exist in my Glorantha" thread over on rpg net to read on the popular appeal of gnomes. Biological otherness other than unlimited longevity and a special bond to their forest possibly wasn't much on the table. We have learned about greater mutability of troll types since, too, after the (great) illustrations of rather uniform, long snouted humans in Troll Pak led us to assume some uniformity. I came into Glorantha only after the vegetable nature of the elves had been set in wood and meat by Troll Pak, and I never was comfortable naming them elves. My own RQ3-Viking based setting had a variety of elves and trolls based on RQ but thoroughly different from Glorantha, with their vulnerabiity to iron thoroughly grounded in their original nature as spirit-realm creatures manifesting a body in the physical world. My world's spectrum of elves ran from only semi-manifest elemental creatures of starlight, twilight or moonlight towards mound-dwelling sidhe and Midkemia-like forest dweller elves. None of these were humanoid plants, aka mini-ents. I had a place for those creatures, too, in woodlands inheriting from slavic mythology, but not as one of the great civilizations. Coming from the generic rules of RQ3, which had yet a different description of elves as non-plant humanoids with pupil-less eyes and also stats for orcs as a twisted variation of elves in the original Tolkien sense (the probably best adaptation of Tolkien's orc origin myth in any rpg, quite ironically given the lack of use they saw), didn't help me to come to peace with the term "elves" for these plant-man bowslingers. Reading WARP's Elfquest at the time didn't help much, either. All of this means I was pretty much from the beginning in the man-sized ent camp of man-rune aldryami in my vision of Glorantha, embracing their difference from the elves that populated my world. While their bodies were separate plants, their self was more like a hive-entity of their aspect of forest. (That's why I don't gain much from the Id Ego Superego triad that was forwarded to explain the Elder Races.) I still mean to ask Sandy whether the muscle cells of aldryami are supposed to have a separating layer of cellulose outside of their phospholipid membranes... not that I am in any way sure that any living body in Glorantha has cells. Galen's balance of the humors might be more correct, with each humor addressing an elemental quality.

I think that Troll Pak and the Different Worlds issue about the Mostali were groundbreaking in defining the otherness of the Elder Races, but the "kin of trees" concept may have been a lot older. Leaves for hair and wood for bone are from Troll Pak, but the presentation in RQ1 makes it clear that they are just one aspect of the aldryami, and offers dryads, runners and small stuff alongside. A careful rereading of Cults of Prax still enables Tolkienesque or Andersonesque elves, having any kind of nymph for a parent doesn't make you an elemental of that nymph's domain. (Achilles for instance had no notable water powers.) Trolls in the woods is not a problem when trolls feed on rock or humans, but eschew feeding on trees. However, the uz like their salad with crunchy bits. The Stinking Forest received its name because of the mess of pigs inhabiting it, even before their riders took on physical characteristics of the pigs they rode. We used to think that it was called the Tallseed before, but now the Tallseed forest marks the northernmost end of Genert's former garden before it botches its re-awakening. (My theory for that northern forest still is that they were a brown elf forest awakening in the decidedly wrong climate.) Not quite Tolkienesque. It is a common misconception that Tolkien's elves had pointed ears, but there is not a single mention of this in the books anywhere. (Nor for the halflings, for that matter. The Khazad might have them as well, from what we see in Tolkien's books.) When did Santa's elves get invented, and did they have those pixie ears from the beginning? Tolkien's elves are revealed in the Silmarillion (1977) to be something much closer to the Brithini than the Aldryami. If anything, that pixie-eared archer in the branches resembles the fairy folk in Poul Anderson's Broken Sword, the other great book on elves published in 1954. I wonder which mythology RQ3 Vikings inherited the hollow-backed wood wife aldryami from - might be related to the leshyi. The Vikings box alfar are something quite different from the aldryami, and rarely take physical form in the middle world. Tolkien once described his relevation of the ents stemming from a thorough disappointment at the fulfilment of the prophecy in Macbeth, and the scene in the aftermath of Helm's Deep was his way of showing up the playwright how such a thing is done properly.

Features like the Ducks, Tusk Riders, the Dwarf etc. were present in White Bear and Red Moon, published in 1975, and developed and playtested earlier. I doubt very much that there were many roleplaying campaigns in place then, a year after the first D&D was published. WBRM had the most whimsical unit names ever. The middle of the duck triplets "Ducks, and" probably stands the test of time. There certainly was a bleed-over in the roleplaying material since. Chaosium playtested its products in their house campaign, which was set on Glorantha. Karse and Refuge definitely were playtest sites. Glorantha canon does include non-Gloranthan stuff, like Redbird, the character who led the party producing Prince Temertain in 1613. Quite a bit of the campaign reports don't sound that terribly "canonical" but made it into canon somehow. The twisted Teleri elf origin of Tolkien's orcs and goblins was unpublished before 1977 (The Silmarillion), so the remark about "basically orcs" is fair enough. Before Trollpak, there wasn't that much definition to the Gloranthan darkmen, either, though enough to populate the Pavis Rubble.

Troll presence here is rather limited - mainly the bee tribe bee herders, nowadays trollkin, although that role must have been filled by Gorakiki-worshipping uzko before the Curse of Kin. There is a lot we don't know about the Vale of Flowers - are the flowers perennial, or do they shoot up like crazy each spring with the thaw of the snow? And this is giant land rather than troll or aldryami land.

I think that Varzor was distant kin to Aram ya Udram, another prominent non-Heortling human of the region and era. Dark Earth Orlanthi (or Dark Earth Theyalans), not Heortlings, and no Vingkotling relation either. Whether there is a link to Harand Boardick or Drolgalar Orlanthsson is speculation, but how many different humans with dark connections do we expect? But back to the topic of uz and forests, apart from the jungle trolls who live in an environment that regrows almost as fast as it can be eaten and the Kitori woods, there are no known places where trolls and forests coexist for a long time. Xemstown in Fronela will be interesting when the Ban lifts. The uz concept of sustainability pertains to darkness, not to plant growth, They will rely on fungal growth, which might even possess autotrophy (Growth) in Darkness (stygosynthesis or umbrasynthesis?) - we are talking about Glorantha here. Fungus might get predatory only when the darkness is impure.

The deeper secret here is that the Kitori aren't really Kyger Litor trolls (although they certainly can take their shape, and more often than not do) and aren't subject to the Curse of Kin. They actually can and do have human agriculture and farming, if in a very primitive and darkness-centered way, as it is only one of several of their mainstays. Collecting tribute was of course their main source of income and to some extend also food, in exchange for messenger and peacekeeper duties.

Did it? I don't see sod-wall longhouses anywhere in that game, nor are the horses period-appropriate pony-sized. Early 80s art uses Republican Greek Hoplite style. That's a millennium removed from their bronze Age, which coincidentally is about the same temporal distance between early Viking Age and the start of the Roman Iron Age which follows their own Bronze Age. And neither attire nor housing style changed much from the Roman Iron Age to Viking Age. If you believe Snorri Sturlason's Heimskringla, the Aesir-worshipping Ynglings (ancestors of the Norwegin kings) followed the route of the Corded Ware culture (which I still remember as "Battle Axe" culture) from Anatolia through the general neighborhood of Thrace (aka lower Danubian plains) into Scandinavia. Snorri didn't know about the Corded Ware culture, but there must have been some tribal memory of having hailed from far away. Those linguists' hobby horses aren't worth much. Asia Minor would be spot on for Snorri's story, but Thor is spelled and pronounced "Tor" in Anglian place names dedicated to the thunderer, without any "th" (while other local sites like thing-places clearly have the "th" spelling).

Speaking from a Praxian beast rider perspective, if you are approaching any type of herd, it is going to be owned by you. Prior ownership claims might be an obstacle, little more.

Pentan-bred cattle will and does thrive on the plains. Derek Pol Joni made a point of stealing a Pentan bull frpm the Opili nation, affiliates of Sheng who ruled over parts of Saird and the Arcos Valley at the time, to start his nomadic herds. Goats prosper about anywhere. They might even succeed in southern Pamaltela. Goats, sheep and pigs are not really suited for mounted herders, though, getting where your mounts don't. They are slow, but so are herdmen, so they may very well last a while as snacks on legs. Ragtag raided herds are rarely bred by their beast rider owners - it would take ownership of slaves from appropriate tribes (or foreigners) to provide the fertility magic for them to breed under Eiritha's domain (there are hints towards this in Biturian's story). It would take a very odd raider to manage this, some sort of Beast Rider equivalent to Gringle. Horses are a cultural problem more than a cult problem. As non-ruminants, they are at a disadvantage, but so are herdmen. I wonder whether donkeys would be a problem. Mules aren't (but they don't breed, reducing the impact). Tusker boars are another type of foreign mount which might be abducted into Prax. These mean-spirited beasts probably are just food on legs, nobody would want them to thrive. Troll insect herds should be able to support invading darkmen, and could be raided. Morokanth might be able to stick with them, mixing them into their herdman herds. Then there are dinosaurs. The Dragon Pass/Nomad Gods rules state quite clearly that Brontosaurs are capable of supporting a huge army in the chaparral. The other types of dinos might require support, but then Bolo Lizards don't.

Do you know that the second person from the left may be pretty much how Viking girls (!) dressed in summer? There is a very nice "skirt" which consists of lots of tassles which used to be on display at Hedeby museum (their undergoing a rebuild right now). Tunics are documented as summer wear for these folk, too - they wouldn't add a cloak the way the person on the right does, though. The dresses are dresses, when all is said and done, and wouldn't be out of place anywhere. Orlanthi male summer dress may be unsuitable for publications... holy men with special relationship to the air around them can afford to go sky-clad year round without letting the cold attack them, but non-magical individuals may fall back to that option in Fire Season as an acceptable way to leave the house. A hat to ward off the glare of the sun still is much appreciated, like the guy in second position sports. There is ample evidence of historical Europeans dropping textiles, whether Greek gymnasts or Celtic warriors. Anglo-Saxons and Vikings weren't different. While we have few contemporary accounts, it took extra effort of the church to impose our "modern" prudish insistence on covering the body throughout Europe, whether applied to topless Venetian belles at the beach in the 16th century, common nudity in bath houses all over Europe, or shared steam baths further up north. I take that to be one style of Orlanthi housing, probably tied to the Axe Orlanthi, and not exactly optimized for colder climate. If anything, that style screams "Roman villa at the Limes" to me. Earth culture predates Storm culture. Esrolia Land of 10k Goddesses has stories about submission to Harono the local sun god which was ended (or replaced, if you ask the grandmothers) by the arrival of storm, and it asserts that their culture was still older than the sun god taking charge. This gives us all manner of traditions that may be inherited. Elmali might have favored round houses with the hearth in the center, and it might be the preferred style of Mahome in her role as hearth fire. Attire and housing are always adapted to function and the environment at the time a style develops. Since we are talking about Glorantha, runic shape matters, and has practical consequences, but building material and the conditions a bilding has to withstand matter a lot, too. Earth temples like to dig in deeply into the soil, but this is highly impractical if not impossible if you are living on a fluvial lowland with high ground water levels, like e.g. the Rhine or Nile deltas or the Bengal estuaries. If you want such an underground edifice there, you will first have to raise the mound you want to build it on (or raise the mound around your building, although that would be cheating - part of the point of such a temple is to dig into the earth). Orlanthi seating arrangements indicating status are incitive to have a single, long table, or a U-shaped arrangement of tables on occasions like weddings, which favor a long drinking hall. (The architectural challenges to build a square hall at such dimensions are considerable, too, whereas the A-frame with or without supporting walls has been in use since the Neolithicum - also among the farmer/hunters in the New World.)

@David Scott I guess you weren't aware that my old database was collaborative in design - all you had to do was to register as a user, and you could start participating, pending on moderation, or the admin could give you direct publication rights. Web forms to edit the database aren't much different from the web form I am using right now to communicate this. You seem to have missed the point of alphabetical lists as a quick lookup tool, too. A web interface would only ask for the parameters of the SQL search, and not ask for the fully articulated SQL statement. (I got that feature on request, though...) All the features that were discussed are already present in Charles' design, except for the additional tag for language and the generation of alphabetical look-up lists.

Let's just accept that Anglo-Saxons had not a very distinct look. Their dress and equipment would have been right at home with the contemporary slavs and other agricultural folk north of the Alps and along the Danube valley. Neither Anglo-Saxons nor (hornless) Vikings look very special, they are quite interchangeable with any warrior-farmer culture of that climate up to the steppes around the Ural. Their shield form is the most telling, give them a rectangular shield and an occasional Etruscan style helmet, and you get continental Celts from the Danube region, at least in winter.

Wikia won't give you a list, but you can create a re-direct for e.g. German translations to the English language article, and if Peter doesn't want foreign language on the main articles, there are the discussion pages for the entries which can have all the other stuff. For a simple list, something like a Google Docs spreadsheet would be the easiest way to collaborate. Just make it either a thread, or ask nicely for a translation-related subforum here. I seem to recall there already was one German language translation thread here, either in HQ or Glorantha, or otherwise in the old forums of glorantha.com . As to synonyms - those exist for the English terms as well. Wikia handles this via re-directs. My old database basically had an open--ended number of descriptors for the page they pointed to. Charles Corrigan did that old database structure. Now that my domain is able to run a MySQL database, I might just ask Charles to put the structure and whichever incarnation of the old database in chaosium.com survived up at my glorantha.de domain and use that for this purpose. The "name tag" could get a linked list with languages that use it. Once you are operating a database, alphabetic lists in whichever direction are easy to generate, and creating a form for that might even be within my own meagre SQL-fu. I would have to invest in few SSL certificates, though.

More to the point: an Eiritha priestess from the Oasis population or the sedentary Paps population. With the post of Most Reverend Mother held by a Sable queen (IIRC) and the Paps far away, he could have snuck across the Storm Mountains and have wooed an oasis priestess. Possibly Cam's Well or Pimper's Block. But the world of Vingkot is broken inside Time. There is no way a Vingkot king can do exactly like Vingkot, unless he manages to retrieve Tada. Basically, I read this as a wonderful character concept for a sage follower of Broyan (or later on Argrath, or any other hopeful founder of a Vingkotling dynasty) - research all those forgotten myths and suggest weird magical alliances. So basically, you have Broyan starting out as _a_ king of the Volsaxi before 1613, and becoming _the_ King of the Volsaxi sometime after Kallyr's revolt? The liberation of the Spirit of Freedom from Belintar was what allowed Broyan to revive the Hendriking kingship in more but in title. That's a different claim to overkingship than the Vingkot myths, the historical influence of the Larnsti instituting (mythical) change in Time rather than retreading Godtime myths. If you look at the heirs of the Larnsti kings of the Hendriki, they managed to avoid conquest by either Slontan God Learners or the EWF, although their area of influence dwindled significantly during the heyday of those empires. They remained a traditionalist spark that never was attempted to extinguish, unlike those southern Pelorians who were draconically subdued by (Isgang)Drang. This is blamed on the effects of Broyan acceding to the Sword and Helm (and the Kodigvari tattoo). I am not certain what exactly Orngerin attempted. He is a much under-characterized player, and while the timeframe when he would have been met by player characters has been put ten years into the past of the current products' "now", I would like to revisit the theme of my Heortland campaign which was set in the last years of the last governor king of Heortland. Cutting a lot of drama of 1619 short, with Broyan choosing to defend Whitewall rather than to disperse into the woods like the Hendriki of old did. The Windstop was created over Broyan's not quite dead yet body. The defense of Whitewall would have taxed his ability to create huge magical effects for the rest of that year. Several weeks after the Fall of Whitewall. However he and his companions managed the defense of Whitewall, they would not have come out of that struggle without a scratch. This is all the Hendriki "survival in obscure places" theme. What would be a major weakness to any other claimant to Vingkotling kingship - the lack of a seat of power to rule from, like e.g. Sartar's Boldhome - works in Broyan's favor as he re-lives the Hendriki origin. That's something that only the sage companion character I talked about earlier would have on his agenda while the king was moving from hideout to hideout. I am strongly reminded of a novel about King Sverre of Norway (one of the earliest Norwegian kings after those covered in Snorre's Heimskringla) which had him running around, creating the famous Birkebeiner event that still is remembered as a long range skiing competition. Which is very much to the point, given the conditions created by the Windfall. Wikipedia on King Sverre This is quite a good source of inspiration for a king having to face what Broyan did. Hmm. Grasping at mythical straws here? Roitina's dance relies on the presence of the gods and goddesses, after all what the Durevings suffer from is their displeasure, not their absence. The Arrowmound myth is pretty non-localized in ie in relation to the Vingkotling rulers. Jarani is a grandson or great-grandson of Jorganos, but his adventures may have taken place while Kodig was king, or after the demise of Rastagar - we simply don't know. So you want to make it personal, caused by the King, rather than an ironic back-lash from taking on an office with old debts nobody told him about, or debts that he thought he was above and beyond? Apart from the bogus date based on KoS, "Broyan's Hall" might be an Other Side hide-out, similar to e.g. the Karandoli hidden valley hinted at in Jalk's Book. That's a very Vingkot moment - Vingkot received his mortal wound in a battle long after his death/ascension.

Which sort of makes me wonder how much Chaosium or Steve Perrin are cut in to the Wildcards novels. Probably not, since concepts aren't copyrightable.

Having just read a treatise about recycling of textiles in my "research" feed from academia.edu, I wonder which groups in which cultures of Glorantha use patchwork textiles or furs for their clothes, and how much of it may have a ritual component - I can easily see Fronelan Hsunchen shamans to wear such patchwork pelts. Here's the link to the quite long academic treatise (hope it works without subscribing to their newsletter): Recycling of Textiles in Historic Contexts in Europe. Case Studies from 1500 BC till 1500 AD.

I would have interpreted "Stormwalk" as the poetic name for the spiraling ridge leading up to the flattened peak, resembling the ritual spiral walkways leading up the sacred hilltops used by the Orlanthi for their rites. You have one of those on Orlanth Hill in Nochet. While I started my interaction with RuneQuest translating the rules to German (before I knew there would be an official translation), I never felt comfortable translating place names or personal names. These translations can often change the voice in which a story is conveyed, the subtle double-entendres or additional associations I may have with the term in the original language. I did have my run-in with mis-translations during my term as the editor for the German RQ-fanzine Free INT, which was the club magazine of the Deutsche RuneQuest-Gesellschaft e.V. better known as Chaos Society (and for publishing Tradetalk, which started as the English language "best of" feature for Free INT). I do most of my Glorantha thinking in English. When I encounter translated versions, I judge them not so much for literal accuracy, but for capturing the spirit of the original version. And, if possible, its original verse scheme. "Broobasher" is a short, three syllable nomicker. To "bash" translates as "(er)schlagen, zerschmettern" (literally to beat/slay or to shatter) and results in a polysyllabic monstrosity in German that no silent menace-type of a bully would bother to wield. I have seen and admired the full translation the French have done to the Glorantha material. It creates its own kind of mood, which is appropriate to the setting, but it sounds completely different. (German translation efforts have remained sadly rudimentary. Most of the German deep fans use English, and English language terms when playing in German language - which might be at fault for not shearing off a better proportion from all those "The Dark Eye" players running around in our country.)

Uz may be masters of the dark, but elves are owning their environment. Intruding into an elf forest is the equivalent of raiding a high security installation where every item may start hostilities or at least provide the defenders with intelligence about the intruders. Encased in lead or chitin, the shock troups of the uz might be able to avoid most the poisonous thorns whipping at them without any humanoid aldryami in darksense sight, but actively entangling vines or roots are a different proposition. Especially when in the field of fire for their ridiculously effective elf bows. This effectively strips the uz off their trollkin support, maybe leaving them with a bunch of redshirt cave trolls that manage to regenerate as fast as those attacks sap their bodies. (Possibly literally, as their skins may sprout quick-growing plant life feeding on their bodies.) Humanoid aldryami as melee opponents are to normal elves as a fully magicked up Brithini Horali is to a normal Malkioni farmer - tanks with incredible support (including snipers out of the range of any troll magic). Such High King Elf combatants can go root to toe with ZZ berserks or Karrg's Sons, and shamanically they ought to be evenly matched most of the time, too. Uz can whittle down the fringes of elf forests by denuding them with hosts of trollkin and cave trolls, but the aldryami have and will use quick growth magics to counter such endeavors.

I still think that it is way better than lugging around a Heal 6 spirit spell which is pretty much impossible to obtain if you use the spirit summoning and spirit combat rules of RQ3. Unlimited (or limited only by the wound) conversion of magic points into hit points. I would allow the spell to stop dying at 1 strike rank, but the healing to take effect at however many magic points poured into the spell afterwards. But then my RQ3 campaign game had a lousy POW gain history. That didn't detract from our gaming experience, though, it just made for a gritty game despite the presence of magic. A game of exploration rather than high magics. If you come from a 1 point Divine Intervention spell as RQ2 had for priests, it sucks. But I never had those in my RQ experience, which is based on RQ3 and a playtest campaign in the 1990ies Adventures in Glorantha, and apart from Heal Body this was the best healing available on the market with spirit and divine magic. Sorcerous healing (didn't have that in my long running RQ3 campaign game, which was based on/started off the RQ3 Viking box and played out in its own setting, which had about as much setting notes than boxed AH Glorantha had) or Dragonewt Pre-Healing (didn't have that, either) may change that. I was the default GM in my two great campaign settings (one for a German game called Midgard, expanding snippets of their game world to a huge setting inheriting from various sources, and the other one RQ3 Vikings creating a world of its own, that time with "digital maps" created on an Atari ST) before I started playing on Glorantha in the mid-nineties. Both these settings allowed me to play as a player in spinoff-campaigns GMed by some of my players using that background. Most of my gaming experience as a player came from the "lets try this system for a short campaign" games in our regular rounds, or from convention gaming. At times I'm being a difficult player in those games, too, so it isn't just a "creator of the setting" effect.

As a rule, the Storm Age (starting Late Golden Age) human races are descendants of the gods rather than made races (think Praxians, Orlanthi, Veldang). Durev (who was carved out of wood by his father, Orstan the Elder, a native of Dini) is an exception to this rule. His wife Orane is presumably an entity similar to Sorana Tor. The Malkioni are born to the Erasanchula and their goddess mates, too. Maybe the gods were lesser in that era, maybe the new humans were rather demigods - while mortal, they still were quite powerful. I am not quite sure whether Arroin (who doesn't grant any magics) is a demigod receiving worship as a subcult, or whether he is just a godling. And what really is the difference? (There is of course Arroin's identification with Eron, the Aldryami spirit of the Good Waters, and ancestor of the Murthoi with Murthdrya, much like Halamalao is the ancestor of the Fire Elves/White Elves on top of the Spike. If Shannon Applecline's writings to that effect have drawn upon canonical unpublished info, or are considered canonized...)

Malia (the goddess of bad things, not the goddess of apples, to those of you with a minimal smattering of Latin - think "Saggitus" vs. "Sagittus") provides individual immunity, but no herd immunity. The individual becomes a carrier instead, and only a herd of carriers is safe on their own. Woe to anyone getting into contact with that herd, though. It is true, Malia is not a chaotic being in herself. She is a being of darkness, similar to Mee Vorala in a couple of aspects, but she, too, is responsible for combining moral evil with Chaos, creating the Devil - the worse of the pair of Great Deities of Chaos. Kajabor corrupted through his nature, but Wakboth corrupted for the sake of causing damage to whichever not-yet corrupted parts of the world there were. (That's why I am pretty certain that it was Kajabor who was corrupted into being the seed of Time rather than Wakboth - that entity lies being smashed and seared under the Block, with the waters of Sounders River bleaching away on its edges. It would be interesting to calculate the catchment area of rainwater going down the Good Canal to keep the cancerous growth of the Devil in check. But that''s a side issue.) Personally, I think that Chalana Arroy came from the Celestial Palace on top of the Spike, but she left early on in the Golden Age, spreading her Healing to those suffering from their Green Age moments. The Celestial Palace is associated with white, purifying flame, and bringing that into the suffering world is the role of Chalana. She may have visited and taught the White Camp first, though.

Chiming in as another archer, I want an option to lay covering fire with a bow - shoot fairly rapid fire. Carrying around a bundle of arrows is noisome if you are moving through difficult terrain. I never owned 48 arrows fit to any of my bows at any a single time. This full military load-out is three to four times the amount of ammo I carry into a field archery tournament of 30 targets, which may be 90 shots if it is round target archery, and anywhere between 30 and 90 shots if it is animal silhouettes or 3D targets. Creeping around potentially slippery territory, facing drops that will destroy your equipment even if you yourself come out of it fairly unscathed, maneuvering between low-hanging branches - those are things where carrying around a six foot longbow is a big inconvenience, and having to drag along 35 inch arrow containers (my draw length is at about 33 inch) anywhere on your body in addition to that bloody unwieldy and surprisingly fragile bow while struggling to keep your balance and not to get entangled anywhere are aspects of doing archery in such an environment which don't usually carry over into rpgs. I also had to take shots kneeling down to avoid entangling either my upper bow or my arrow flight path in low-hanging branches. I had one shot make contact about half-way to the target, sort of entangling a flexible branch, and heading off almost vertically into the terrain. For all I know, the arrow still is rotting somewhere out there. These things, and the difficulties of aiming at vertically removed targets (asymmetric ballistic curves) aside, for someone who knows his life expectation hangs on his proficiency with that bow, these matters are solveable. I have taken shots at trick targets moving roughly towards me, or running more or less orthogonally to my fire arc. Objects with constant or predictable speed and acceleration can be hit. Someone sprinting at you from 50 meters will face at least two somewhat aimed shots (and time to switch to a melee weapon), and unless he is very confident in his armor or shield might have some reservations at doing so.b' One fun shooting we did on our archery club range was one person shooting an apple on an arrow tip in a low speed arc and the other people trying to shoot that apple in flight. For a bunch of bloody amateurs, the results were fairly satisfactory. That's not something you do with your tournament quality arrows, though, and using air-braking fletching is advisable. 12 shots in a minute are quite manageable, with considerable aiming possibilities. You would want to do that behind a ditch and sharp stakes. Shooting into a melee isn't something I have done (obviously), but I have shot numerous "plus-minus" targets where hitting the "hostage target" meant a serious setback to your score. Aiming with bow and arrow is about as exact as aiming a rifle without having a rest for it. That kind of archery goes against instinctive archery, though, which is what you want to use when firing at someone or something coming at you at speed. Why would anybody shoot weak bows? It's a matter of physique. In many cultures, archery is regarded as a somewhat elegant social activity, and is performed by people who wouldn't go to battle with a bow. (They might go hunting from howdahs or ambush.) Even a weak ranged weapon is a lot better than having none at all, and if proficiency with it advances both social standing and survival chance, it is a good weapon for a non-fighter. Why would any fighter shoot a weak bow in a combat situation? I use a pretty weak bow (about 40lbs at full draught) for target archery. It performs well at the ranges that are offered in target archery, with the right set of light but durable arrows. To get to about the same range with wooden arrows and a longbow, I draw a bit over 70lbs, and lose out on precision, though not at all on impact. Archery pretty much has two very different forms of aiming. Horizontal aiming is a matter of the correct technique releasing the arrow, choosing the correct arrow strength for that draw length and power of the bow. Getting this right can be trained to quite some efficiency. That's before calculating in the effects of wind, though, especially if the wind conditions change on the flight path e.g. shooting across a ravine. Vertical aiming requires lots of experience, whether you do it instinctively or by calculation. Any vertical difference between you and your target will turn a symmetric ballistic curve into something quite different. Not knowing or misjudging the distance due to optical tricks like broken ground, open bodies of water, or massively different lighting of different parts of the flight path is a major factor. Fortunately, all of that matters a lot less if a six foot humanoid is running towards you, that gives you 4 foot of error margin on target - way more than an archery target allows you. The much higher ballistic curve of an arrow makes those mistakes a lot graver than for a high-speed missile with rather flat trajectory. I cannot really speak out of experience how mutilating arrow wounds are. Hunters will know about this, and adjust their arrow tips accordingly. Realistically, if an arrow lands a meaningful hit, it impales. How deeply is another question, but if it doesn't get stopped by armor or slowed by textiles, it will create a puncture wound, with the arrow tip stuck in the wound. (The shaft may be designed to break off a few inches behind the tip - IIRC they found this technology even with mesolithic arrows or javelins.) Everybody has had thorns penetrating obnoxiously into their flesh, making every use of the surrounding musculature painful and causing more damage (or undoing any clotting effect that the body may have exerted to the wound). While the object stays in, it slows blood loss unless it is yanked about. Adrenaline can be a game changer towards wounds. I have been on adrenaline highs a number of times which allowed me to ignore serious damage, whether strong compression of bones after an impact (I could see the ripples on the outer bones on the X-rays, even though nothing was broken, and I have since returned to my full size) or pain from bleeding wounds where significant (to me, at least) amounts of skin and other tissue were lost. It should be evidently possible to be doomed to die and yet fight on for quite a bit, so peppering that berserk running at you with a couple of arrows better had cause some functional damage. Him bleeding to death won't give you much satisfaction once he has dismembered you. So, what do I want arrows to be capable of? Taking out an opponent not in any form of berserk mode. While professional fighters probably have a higher proportion of people able to take damage, a majority of people hit by a missile will prefer to be out of combat if they have a choice. This goes for faceless minions as well as for non-combatant specialists picking a lock or removing some other obstacle for the muscle. In heroic mass combat, archers like Paris take considerable risk by entering the combat in rather poor armor, trading for mobility instead, but they also deal quite a lot of critical wounds from effectively point blank range before sauntering out of the way of friends of the target. Much like Marvel's Archer does, too - some of those maneuvers could come directly from the Iliad. In a way, bow and arrow behave pretty much like a 17th century rapier, with slightly longer reach. Anything Zorro inflicts on the Spanish troopers with his pig-sticker should be manageable for a nimble-footed archer dodging just out of range of their melee weapons. So, depending on the amount of swashbuckling your game allows, this type of archers should be put on an even footing. Archers as snipers are a different type of adventurer hero. Their impact on a melee should be just the same as for a modern sniper, just at a much lower distance. My favourite historical fictional character here is Einar Tambarskjelve, a companion of Olav Tryggvason on his last journey. Snorri Sturluson describes one of the most fascinating and epic archery duels in that chapter of his Heimskringla. In a narrative framing, this is the kind of spotlight a dedicated archer character wants. In a more gritty simulationist game, the effects of archery should allow this for combatants in high skill levels. For Einar or Paris to work in a D100 game, they would need an effective archery skill of roundabout 300% to achieve the number of impales that the stories credit them with. That means they need some way of "berserking" to get into this archery "zone", at will. Maybe this is a general issue with these games - they don't allow highly proficient characters to enter the "zone". Land of Ninja's Ki skills reflected this a bit, but the mechanic of applying this only to 100%+ skills was broken, IMO.