Joerg

But this would make the quester the new leader of the community that is shaped by this quest. Basically the questers provide the new leadership of the new community, and become part of it. I don't think this was the intention of the original post - that was to get a stable partner clan, rather than to take over management of the neighboring clan. The Making of the Storm Tribe is a quest for leadership that unites separate communities into a new entity. As alternative benefits, its re-enactment provides proof of leadership ability, or it provides proof of the benefit of cooperation of the separate groups of one's community - under the leadership of the quester. A tribe is something fundamentally different from a clan. A clan is a kinship group that shares your daily life, and your possessions. A tribe does provide much less of kinship, it is about cooperation between disparate groups, with separate possession and identities. It is an in-law relationship, often going hand in hand with marriage relations, .The making of a new clan is a rare event, unless it is the result of a clan split. Old Man Colymar apparently merged together various groups of emigrants into a new clan before braving the Kitori Wilds and the forbidden lands beyond. I think that is basically a creation of family ties, of common ancestry. No idea whether it can be used to re-cement intra-clan relationsships.

I am not sure that this quest can achieve something from without the clan. If peace inside the clan is the desired result, then at least one quester should be a member of that clan. The support group and indeed the heroquesting support may very well come from outside of the clan, but with the clan wyter as beneficiary, starting the quest within the target clan or at least with a would-be leader with ties to the wyter appears to be a necessity to me. However, this criterion might be winged if the questers include wives born in the target clan. Ideally from different factions of that clan. How many quarreling factions are there? If there are basically two camps and one underpowered third party of conciliators, the Issaries quest might be more appropriate, targeting just the two camps, and doesn't need to be within the clan. Chalana Heals the Scars is another candidate that could be done from the outside.

It is a piece of Truestone. Embodied Stasis. Where is Zzabur - the Sorcerer who wields Law - active against Chaos? He is fighting the Vadeli for different reasons, and instrumental in destroying the Spike, thereby enabling the Void to enter. It is not Law vs. Chaos. It is Creation vs. annihilation. Fighting chaos on a steed better had that steed bereft of its own will, or under the influence of the Storm Bull (as awakened steeds of Storm Bull berserks can be). Oh, out-munchkining Chaos creatures. Well, put the berserk on the bison or rhino, and make that lance attack before you heft your axe. I usually avoid this as a general rule. My old Heortland game had widely different Lunar occupation officers, noble and terrorist rebels or rebel symps. Nobody was evil or good because of political, cultic or ethnic affiliation (except perhaps for the Dara Happan Solars, who didn't really offer any Orlanthi-compatible noble opposition, but mostly vicious revanchism), and before the Lunars a similar array of Rokari affiliates. Here's my take on stereotypical cultists: http://www,sartar,de/glorantha/oldsite/npc-hrut.html Practically all of my organsations have their dogmatic pains in the posterior and other members with their unexpected quirks which may make them loveable or execrable.

The City Harmony spell was powerless to keep Praxians from wreaking havoc inside Old Pavis during the time of the Seventeen Foes of Waha. Why should it prevent a later generation of Praxians from doing whatever they meant to do to the Lunar forces inside the city?

I think you are getting this wrong. Most of the rabid anti-Chaos gods are anything but deities of Law, and in several cases have as little regard for Law as they have for Chaos. Gloranthan "Law" is tied to logic, as per the Malkioni definition. The Cosmic Compromise is not an alliance against Chaos, it is a mutual agreement to avoid cataclysmic conflicts on a world that is held together by thin strands of spider silk and good will. Yes, the cults have rules and demand certain behavior. This goes for the cults of Chaos, too, and for those of disorder as well. As such, your "Law vs. Chaos" view that dominates the Moorcock multiverse doesn't fit the relationship in Glorantha.

I would assume that the high gate towers are 30 meters high in order to provide a view of the top of the Rubble walls, which are at 25 meters. The lower towers just need to stand out above the new wall. I agree that all depictions show a different height ratio between the gate towers, and I'd go with the visuals while leaving the high towers and those tower.like structures on the Rubble wall at a height.

This is at best a zero sum endeavor for the priest providing the Sanctitiy spell (I suspect that some Extension might be asked for...) You would need at least 3 compatible priests to get to a positive sum for all priests (and other beneficiaries). No, you need a naturally holy place, or a somewhat compatible shrine, in order to contact your deity without paying an initial cost. Or a portable shrine/temple. A scheme with Guided Teleports might be less costly.

This sounds like a new kind of event for conventions like the Kraken - "Can you out-munchkin Sandy Petersen?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_railway_history offers dates and routes for railway lines. Road travel will have been sketchy - the Panamericana was started only in the 1950ies in South America. Road networks would be mostly on national levels, and connecting the hinterland to the ports on the sea coasts or major rivers. Ship travel was well established. The huge Dornier sea planes that connected Europe to South America took up their service only in the 1930ies. There will have been land based air traffic before that, but I have no information on that. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Los_Angeles_(ZR-3) did service Panama in 1929.

Didn't I say so? The ritual practices being renewing the paint in a rite, whether it is optically necessary or not. The Rule of Cool also says that no protective measure is without weaknesses. If the seas batter a ship thus protected, life on board gets complicated, and you get story potential. In Star Trek terms, you cannot beam because of Macguffins like ion storms, mineral deposits or whatnot.

Week 6, the Cosmology inherited from Cults of Terror, and hardly any mention of the Green Age in the correct context. The text Charles is referring to is not in the Guide.

Actually, you can. All it takes is an artifact like a Bag of Winds, or sorcery. It wouldn't be Orlanth in all his splendor, but a weaker kin. People flying around on sylphs aren't this controversial. I wonder why? When I hear "quern", I think of a neolithic saddle quern where the top stone was moved back and forth in the canal. I've seen such querns in operation at archaeological museums in Denmark. There is only one animal well suited to operate such a quern - a herdman (of either sex and almost any age). I found out since that kitchen sized rotational mills go by this name, too. Attaching these to a donkey might be feasible. Cultures other than the Orlanthi might employ goats for this purpose. Among the Praxian herd beasts, again only the herd man appears suitable for this kind of activity - impalas don't do well at exerting constant draft, and anything else is too big and/or too unwieldy.

Harrek Art I have been part of a few discussions about Harrek's appearance in the last two years. One was about the depiction of Harrek in Prince of Sartar, and how difficult it is to put the lower jaw there in a position that doesn't make the bear look slack-jawed. Eric Vanel (the artist behind some of the more artistic maps in the Guide) has been working on Glorantha-themed scupltures, and his current project is a 3D-version of the fight between Harrek and Jar-eel. Eric has chosen to go all polar bear on Harrek's head, with interesting effects where the bear body gives way to the bear fur worn like a cloak by the human. If you take a look at a polar bear's skull, you will notice that it is comparatively flat, and that the upper jaw with the skull might be made into a headgear resembling a baseball cap-shaped helmet. For all the impressive angle a bear can open its jaws, in order to fit a human face in between the lower jaw would have to be dislocated, and it would look like a cross between white sideburns and the ribbons fastening a bonnet. It looks a lot less threatening than it sounds. I guess what Harrek's opponents really see is a superimposition of his moustached snarling face and the snarling head of the White Bear God. It might be possible to use transparence or animation to achieve this, but for stills, the version without the lower jaw and the human face is one way to do it, and another is to go full bear.

Sure. Still, there is Gimpy's, with its three amputated proprietors. Often enough the available healing magic is a lot less than the demand for it. This is especially made clear for the availability of resurrections whenever that possibility is mentioned. You're probably good when your side is the one taking the battlefield. Having near instant healing available for the first moderately serious wounds means that your party will push on, collecting the next such set, and so on, until the high-powered healing options are used up, the lesser options stitch up the absolute minimum required to continue, and yet another encounter inflicts new wounds. In other words, the normal course of an adventure. Chalana Arroy's son and subcult Arroin is the patron of normal healing.

I see a person from the White Camp. Gods' Wall Asharthcha, the White Guardian. Kalikos (as per Copper Ledgers) is a sky god who stepped in when the Sky Dome torn loose after Shargash smashed Umatum against it broke the White Pillar, and pushed the Sky Dome back south - so much that later on its heat would flow out on the rebound. (There is another manifestation of Kalikos mentioned in the Guide. Both are true - practically all deities have at least two manifestations, the more powerful they get, the more manifestations and avatars they can support.) My point is that there is no northern, white pillar any more. Shargash and Umath destroyed it. The God Learner mythic maps tell about the four families of the Mountain (Spike) People populating the camps. I can buy that the Altinae are descendants of the White Camp folk - refugees after Umath and Shargash destroyed their original home in their struggle which saw Umath dismembered. We'll discuss this several times some time next year, I reckon.

Coin weights - Troy oz or imperial ounces, all the same to me - good for comparing weights, but not very useful for absolute values. Unless they vary strongly in their thickness, wheels are about the same size as lunars or guilders, where I had the impression that the wheel would be somewhat bigger than the lunar. The much smaller weight of the Sentanos ducats indicates roughly 2 Euro coin size for the silver penny. Coins are of course an anachronism in a Bronze Age setting... A long standing tradition of Gloranthan documents. This is even stranger since the pure Man Rune (which I assume stands for humans) would logically have preceded all other applications of the Man Rune, such as Men of Stone, of Plants, of Darkness, of the (deep) seas. Sometimes it seems that birdlike folk were almost everywhere on Glorantha before there were any humans. The old RQ3 classification had the label "Barbarian Culture" for chiefdoms, but Jeff didn't like the savage connotations of that term. In the old scheme, the mystics would just retreat to meditate and accumulate experience in a single ability: Refute. A mystic would have been able to refute e.g. gravity, magic, or ultimately the perceivable cosmos, reaching directly into the Ultimate, the source of all. Mystic disciples using martial arts or other techniques for meditation would be able to use these meditative techniques for cool Wuxia in Robin Laws' original vision, but Greg Stafford later clarified that martial arts would use a variant of sorcery (something you know) rather than pure mysticism (refute). Little is known about the mystic's journey of refutation, but it appears that experience of the (other) three Otherworlds and transcending these is one of the earlier steps. Greg Stafford had this concept of the four magical Otherworlds having been separate and pure at their inception, along with their populations, and that these worlds collided to form the known world of Glorantha, which is something of everything. The original concept of the strict apartness of the four Otherworlds has been softened up since Moon Design took over. Yes to all. Size is somewhat irrelevant. Parts of Dragon Pass are named for places inside Orlanth's and Ernalda's cottage, e.g. the kitchen. In one story, the lead character heroforms, and in the eyes of the observers grows to divine scale matching his opponent. In his own eyes, the opponent gets reduced to eye level. There is a mountain range north of Dorastor, separating that land from the rest of Peloria. These Tobros Mountains are the sleeping body of a son or grandson of the primal Storm God. When Umath crashed into the White Camp of the North, he left a deep crater there that forms the White Sea. Yep, it comes out of the sea... The association of the solid form of this metal with Lodril has been puzzling the Gloranthan metallurgist community since we started discussing Bertalor's essay (then in Elder Secrets of Glorantha) on the digest, in the nineties. Personally, I think that Lodril's metal should be brass, a weird mixture of an impure sky metal with the earth metal, as Lodril becomes the deep heat of the earth. Brass is the metal of the Mostali alloyists, never bronze. It may very well predate bronze by an Age. This makes many finds of god bones of brass rather than bronze possible. Brass being the bones of vanquished volcano deities, quite a number of which are mentioned in various myths. Unless you are an unmarried and childless Orlanthi approaching your midlife crisis. In that case you become a Wanderlore pilgrim, seeking adventurous encounters on your spiritual journey approaching elderdom (in absence of having raised kids, which is a different kind of transformative adventure). This refers among others to the Vormain enslavement of the Quombs, strange creatures of one of their islands that work tirelessly and without food on their own island without adverse effects, but which wither away when taken elsewhere to provide their work there. They still are taken from their home island. The Waertagi used Deri slaves for long range communication between their city ships. Andins routinely take human and keet slaves from surrounding East Isles. The Dwarf of Dwarf Mine has enslaved a tribe of humans as servants of his Cannon Cult in exchange for their survival during the Inhuman Occupation. Lunar sculptors are said to do atrocious sculpting on living gargoyles. Ethilrist's demon horses keep their riders as near will-deprived pets and servants. Morokanth are notorious slavers, and they are known to eat their herd men in their ancestral rites. Then there is Fonrit with its Vadeli inheritance.

I have no problem with bleached wood and tar eyes on them. I can live with carved figureheads with brightly stained wood as in the Pacific Coast totem poles that withstand weather conditions almost as bad as constant wave action. But I don't buy that perfect varnish on the female figurehead on your lower picture. Linseed oil won't be that good, even though it makes decent kitchen floors. This is technology of the Renaissance, and possibly the Late Roman Empire. Minoan ships are depicted as colorful in the frescoes, but those are showing ritual cruises rather than everyday contact with the hostile seas. I have no problem using colorful chalks or wax crayons to provide temporary splendor for such processions - in fact, this splendor being temporary contributes to its holiness. It is supposed to fade away, similar to the CMB star singers' blessings common in Catholic Germany. The temporary nature of the blessing and its expression is a feature. But a trading ship coming in after struggling with hostile seas will look battered and bleached, just like its crew, and will require painstaking (and loving) recreation of such splendor if that is part of the magic that keeps the ship afloat. The egyptian grave gifts are so well preserved because they had no exposure to humidity and temperature changes, or to waves battering against the lumber, possibly carrying fine sand swept up from the shallows, sandpapering the hull. Which probably makes describing my next harbor scene even more colorful, with a ship crew busy re-decorating their ship's rather worn ornaments in order for the next leg of their journey. At least for me, this is a new discovery I can use to bring a port scene alive. Mission accomplished.

The four Guardians with their Four Camps in the cardinal directions are a feature of the Perfect Realm of Yelm, and show up in numerous mythical maps or on the Gods Wall. The destruction of the White Camp is described among others in the Copper Ledgers, which we will encounter in a few weeks, but also in some of the oldest texts about the Storm Pantheon from ages ago. These guys are located way beyond Sramak's River. The Altinae live on the edge of the Lozenge, or only slightly beyond, just like the Luatha, and presumably the Vithelans and the fire folk of the South. Depicting them this far outside, and separate from the jumpers (Theya and Rausa in this map, and Kalikos we encountered on the inner cover) that appear to rise and fall inside of Sramak's River, where the (vertical) Gates of Dusk and Dawn are situated. They don't appear to be the four magical master deities for sorcery (Malkion or Zzabur), Theism (Yelm), Mysticism (Vith) or Animism (Pamalt), either. That's why I identify them with the four guardians, who do have a business being that far outside of the Inner World, even if their cams are supposed to be on the edge of the Lozenge. I did not recognize the northern and southern figures from the Outer World map here. I see a Red Guardian of the South and a Yellow Guardian of the East, a resonably dark Guardian of the West and a White Guardian of the North. Never mind apparent gender.

Looking at the strictures @David Scott has put onto this thread, here's my personal main impression on the World Structure of Glorantha One of the most jarring differences between the Lozenge and our world for me is the equatorial course of the sun. I haven’t ever seen the sun at an angle higher than 45° above the horizon, on the other hand I spent over a year north of the Arctic Circle, where I experienced both no sun at all and months of the sun permanently, but low, in the sky. In Glorantha, even deepest winter will see the noontime sun at an elevation of more than 70° in the southern sky, due to the tilt of the Sky Dome. Day length Dows vary (a lot), but every noon you will cast almost no shadow. More troubling to me than the unsure nature of the horizon (which is lost in haze sooner or later anyway). Nitpicks True to my notoriety, I have niggles and nits to pick. The remark that humans are one of the younger races goes a bit against my grain when at the same time the merfolk are presented as Elder Race. All of the Triolini races (gnydron, ysabbau, malasp, ouori, ludoch) were born from the Vadrudi "wife raid" (to avoid the word rape, which would be chaotic in Glorantha) in the Storm Age, significantly later than the first individual memories of humans in the Golden Age. Clay Mostali aren't any older than that, and trollkind devolved from the Mistress race only at the start of the Lesser Darkness. The origin of Brown Elves is very much a mystery to me, although I will acknowledge the seniority of Green and Yellow elves. In other terms, the ancestral merfolk that were around were as divine as Zzabur or Vith’s sorcerer, priest and shaman sons. Sure, most of these earliest humans were closer to demigods than to mortals, but while they figure in the End of Green Age tales of e.g. the log carriers of Wendaria, these guys aren’t worshiped or provide original magic (they imitate their – divine, and worshiped - father’s paintings sung to life, an ancient art that may be lost to the world since the conditions allowing these songs to work may have changed irrecoverably. So, why are humans (or keets) regarded as significantly younger than the merfolk? On steeds near the Wastes: Horses less common than Praxian herd beasts in Sartar, presumably Tarsh, Heortland, and even Esrolia? Surely not the Grazelands. Then why even bother writing about riding horses in or near Pavis County? Apart from the Zebra Tribe and the Pol Joni (accounting for probably 50,000 horses), nobody needs horses there – Issaries can import its mules from wherever they keep the donkeys to breed them. If mules are the most common pack animals, there must be about as many horses as there are mules, and a significant breeding population of donkeys, too. We can safely assume that those horses and donkeys will serve as steeds and beasts of burden, too. With probably half the mares used to breed hybrids (cavalry zebras and mules), we can assume that there is a very strong selectional pressure to improve the horse breeds (at least towards the purpose of breeding brood mares for zebra and donkey stallions). Given the Pure Horse origin of the zebra riders, they might want to aim for a near-hyal breed in their brood mares. This probably is provided by dissident Grazer clans turned Pol Joni, and explains Olgkarth’s presence among the Pol Joni when contacted by Dorasar. Economically, keeping a herd of bison as mounts looks to be more efficient than keeping horses – you get more meat, milk from worse grazings, and even wool. You’ll need extra guards against bison braves and other Praxian raiders, though, or you need to retreat into the Heortling hinterlands where such raiders have a hard time slipping in and out unnoticed. This effect and the presence of the Pol Joni might lead to a greater proportion of horses used directly on the Praxian Border than in the hinterland, and possibly a greater reliance on Praxian type beasts near the Grazelands. Keeping your steeds high quality but unattractive to neighboring raiders seems to be logical to me. Would Vendref be tolerated riding or owning donkeys, mules, or Praxian herd beasts? Encountering bands riding mixed herd beasts generally means trouble. They are either members of one of the warrior societies, Uroxi, Gagarthi, or adventurers or mercenaries from Heortling lands. Economy: “the vessels themselves works of art painted with mythological or quotidian scenes.” Painted sea-going vessels? I have serious doubts about that. It is one thing to paint frescoes by admixing pigment to the plaster. Creating a weather-proof paint is a different proposition. Linseed oil does provide a natural polymer that could stabilize pigments applied to the wooden surface, but that would be rather brittle. It is possible to stain wood in a way that it might keep its color when regularly exposed to the ever- hungry waters of the sea and the jealous rays of the sun after richly applied oil or honey tar for varnish, but paint (if available at all) or lacquer (a possible trading good from trolls or elves) is a luxury good, and would probably be reserved to figureheads and cult items (like a Dormal statue). I would expect stained carved relief rather than paint. A sail’s canvas might see embroidery, and possibly might have seen dyes, but again, the seas are ever-hungry, and so is the gaze of the sun. (I could have argued about salt and ultraviolet light damaging the paint, but the concept of hungry seas licking at the vessel and solar stares bleaching paint with its fiery rays is nicely mythical and still gets the job done.) The Cosmology Map on Page 10: Taking a look at the surface map, this combination of forests and coast lines appears to describe the situation in the Dawn Age, with Jrustela intact and Kylerela floating southeast of Teshnos, or Churanpur still shown. Apart from the active flames in the south and the forest bordering on the flames area, the surface map is that of the God Learners Grey Age map. That Grey Age map (p.697) doesn’t show the Greenwood of Jolar, which disappeared only after the Dawn. There are four guardians on the cardinals, where there should be only three – the northern guardian joins Umath in the pre-Death absences of deities. The smaller sun symbol in Bijiif’s Hell might be a duplicate depiction of Yelm, or it might be a wrong rune representing Lightfore. None of the other Sunpath objects (Dendara/Moskalf, Wagon/Lokarnos, Uleria/Mastakos) is shown. The jumpers are shown on the Sunpath, though – I wonder whether this cis-Sramak’s River position applies for Kalikos and the noontime Jumper in the south, too. This also raises the same question for the Eastern Mouth and the Dodging Gate. The Earth Cube is incorrectly shown as intact (and not quite as cubic as it should be – I’ll take that as artistic license to fit as much detail of the surface map into this cosmological map). The merfolk don’t share much about the depths, but they do share the information that the doom currents are bottomless oceans, just like Magasta’s Pool and the waters of Sramak’s River. I wonder whether the underwater structures of the five major places outward of the shattered cube are correctly represented. I like to imagine that Luathela, Vithalash and possibly Memb and Forng sit atop columns like coral branches reaching out from the earth cube, and that Last Stop Isle and the Iron City in the middle of Magasta’s Pool do so, too. Maps are almost always the carriers of a narrative rather than an objective representation of topography and associated themes. Features may be omitted or misplaced for representative purposes – this is called generalization when omitting detail from large scale (i.e. detail maps) to small scale (world maps). Labels will jump willy nilly as they find space in the neighborhood of the feature they describe, and in most maps the anchor for that feature isn’t displayed, leading to sometimes gross misinterpretations of maps. (A classic example was the Sartar Tribal Map in Barbarian Adventures.) The guide has two types of maps – the topographically accurate hex grid map by Colin Driver (based on Greg’s transparent paper master map) and the reasonable derivations from this map showing certain themes (like political entities with borders, areas of influence, or the extent of the windstop), and artistic representations of maps. This cosmology and the God Learner maps I compared the surface structure to are of this second type, as are the Copper Ledgers (some of which have significant amounts of surface map info, indicating that they are a view from above.) There are a few objective errors in a few of the map, like the duplicate Stravulstead in the Dawn Site maps in the region of Aggar. There may be mis-spellings in a few of the map labels. There can be unlucky representations in the maps. These may lead to annoying or sometimes significantly misleading differences of interpretation, especially when using the map in context with other information.

The old Paracelsus quote - the dose makes the poison. Many poisons can serve as antidotes or medicine in the correct doses. I tried to look this up. The only thing remotely resembling such a thing was the notion that a spirit of health defeated by a spirit of disease loses its healing powers for good. Given that the spirit of a victim of a disease may be turned into a spirit of disease, there must be a way to purge such a spirit from that state, so I guess the reverse is true as well. I doubt that the victorious infectee will have this effect on the spirit - it will retreat from the physical plane, but will be available to the disease master after regenerating its MP. CA is an opponent of Death, too. So in your opinion a CA healer cannot amputate an irrecoverable limb, allowing the rot to kill the patient? Have you looked at the requirements for "Regrow Limb"? The mangled partial remains of a limb would be in the way for the regrowth. Undead only have unlife choices, and sexuality usually doesn't come into it. Undead are immune to sleep or poison. I suppose that Arroyans get to perform a shamanic "dividing the living and the dead", just like King Heort did in the Silver Age. They surely won't hinder any Humakti frothing against undead. According to Shadows on the Borderlands, rape may result in ogre children. As a Sartarite or Praxian, you need illumination or an extreme conviction to overcome your cultural bias. An Arroyan from a Lunarized background might see this differently, but even Lunar society feels immense unease when faced with blatant chaos, such as untamed broo. Chaos is a wound in Creation, and needs healing. Chaos creatures usually are a symptom. Cleansing them usually involves fire or similar destructive measures. The normal Arroyan response to confrontation with chaotics begins with "Chaos stalks my world"...

In a supers setting, your characters probably need abiliities like "roll with the blow" instead of parry - taking most of the impact as knockback damage rather than wounds. You'd probably need to introduce something like stun damage as default when applied to supers. In case of The Hulk vs. Loki in Iron Man's apartment, you might need rules for characters as weapons against inanimate objects like the floor. This problem isn't limited to supers. Take your classical werewolf impervious to any weapon not of silver (or magic). How exactly does this play out? But I agree, the most difficult position to adapt a rules system to a setting is the magic/supernatural component. The POW economy of RQ hasn't really worked in my games - lots of opportunities to lose POW, hardly any to get it. The magic point as currency isn't really fine-grained enough if you want to play a magic wielder without oodles of external MP sources, or a massive use of the Tap spell rules to be applied on components like mineral crystals, meditative scrolls, ley lines, or the like. Conan or his entire world may have a magic of refutation (or a Cold Iron effect). It is his raw will or stubbornness against whichever sorcery he struggles against, or as per Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Grey Mouser the Laugh which weakens even whatever the gods may sling at these heroes. The Laugh might be a use of passion. In order to run a game with Conan- or Mouser-like characters, you might have to give them effective 100+ skills for their major abilities in systems like RQ3 or RQG (the latter possibly through use of passions).

Humakti initiates casting sever spirit may turn out to be one-use initiates once the opposition catches up on them. Humakti are the Gloranthan equivalent to Paladins - useless in ambush, useful as one-use rear-guard or Leroy Jenkins. Mechanically, does the spirit spell require a material focus like the charms in HQ, or can it be imprinted in a character's spiritual organ (integration)? Or does this vary from source to source? The short mnenonic for the three standard magic systems goes "Animism is something you have, sorcery is something you know, theism is something you are." At least in HQ. In RQ3 there usually was a material component to sorcery, too (even if memorized rather than stored in a matrix), like pointing with a staff or wand. Still, the knowledge determined your success chance, absence of the focus reduced it.

I have remained silent so far, simply enjoying the fact that my house rule has mostly been made official. I used to be a little bit stingier on common divine spells, but I am fine with this. My main reason for demanding specific sacrifices to add a spell to the rune pool is that each directed "sacrifice" of permanent POW rather is a transfer to that spiritual organ Greg keeps telling us about, that part of the soul already anchored in the divine realm. Tying this to a defined "practice heroquest" feels right to me. When I look at the associate cult passages in RQ3, there are numerous instances of associate cults granting some common divine spell to the worshipper. Will this be re-defined, or will these be opportunities for a character to regain rune points through worship as associate initiiate in that other cult's rites?

What makes you think that the authority of the Queen-Priestess of Ezel is limited to Esrolia? At Ezel there has to reside a queen-priestess of Kethaa, subservient to that of Ernalda-of-Ezel, whose cult embodies the whole of Kethaela, whether within the borders of the Holy Country or currently outside (e.g. the Ditali lands). As of 1621-1624, there are four earth factions whose leaders have claims on the title. Hendira of the Red Earth faction maintains the title as Queen of Nochet and former hexarch of Belintar, but her authority is eroded away by the other three factions. Traditionally the Queen of Nochet - the survival site for the majority of the Esrolians into the Grey/Silver Age, at least after their return from the Obsidian Palace - is also Queen of Esrolia, Ezkankekko Kimantor was the guarantor for this in male circles, until Belintar challenged that and overthrew the Only Old One (toppling the Obsidian Palace in the conflict). Whichever queen of Nochet was there in 1318 or so accepted Belintar taking over as guarantor (possibly having ousted a previous queen relying on Kimantor), and mind your own business, thank you. We know that Belintar visited Ezel, but his miracle there remained minor. I agree - the other four (including Hendira) aren't appointed by Belintar, but confirmed after being nominated by their respective Sixths. They might be better described as plenipotentiary representatives of their Sixths. IIRC there were significantly more than six dukes responsible for the musters of the Holy Country. In case of Heortland with its recalcitrant elements, the positions of duke and governor may have been held in personal union much of the time. Tatius occupies a similar dual position as governor general and Dean of the Field School after axing Fazzur (admittedly in a different hierarchy). The first governor ("Zombie King" Andrin) demanded his position as king back from the rebels. I would guess that it was predominantly non-Heortlings who relied on the title of governor rather than on that of King/Queen. I would guess that the Vinavale would give greater honor to the governor title while the High Temple has protocols/rites which fit the king (formerly "president") of Calardaland. No political leader can control the High Temple, but the Low Temple might be made to listen.

Venus too sounds like a project where I would start with a mirror or filter array in the L1 position, or with floating bubble colonies (or possibly a Bespin cloud city-like approach) in the high altitudes that have tolerable temperatures. Giving Venus an earth-like atmosphere and hydrosphere sounds like a much longer prospect project, although harvesting sulfur for synthesizing SF6 greenhouse gases for Mars might be an option. The question really is whether a future society would want to brave life on the surface in constant exposure to volcanic activity, even if Venus could be made an ocean world, or whether they would prefer floating teflon-coated habitats with interior biospheres. Colonizing the moon in closed habitats with vertical gardens might be a major project, too. Our satellite might very well become a self-sufficient multi-domed megacity once enough carbon and water have been imported from Jupiter and/or beyond.