Joerg

IMG, not evn Mostal the Maker could change adamant once it was given a form. Mastal and his children can form/set Truestone (or originally Stone) into Adamantine items. The Spike itself is True Stone, not adamant - otherwise the Block wouldn't have much of an effect on the Devil.

Oases in Kothar, as in places where sedentary folk practice horticulture on places protected by special local spirits. Possibly fewer of these, but Kothar approaches the Nargan Desert, too, with a decrease in fertility. The Kresh interact with a majority of non-wagon folks, whether sedentary (oases) or nomadic hunting/"transhumant gardening".

This brings to me the imagery of munchkin vampire candidates laid in state as "the Complete Adventurer":

Use of dragon magic under the right circumstances furthers draconic development - it helps the dragonhood candidate (whether EWF mystic or dragonewt) to encompass being a dragon by taking on more and more draconid traits. Looking at Ingolf Dragonfriend's development, the wings aren't just a means of flying but also an adaptation to some of the Draconic Otherworlds (msleadingly named Draconic Hells) on the mystical path towards achieving unity with the Source. IMG, dragonewts don't hatch from their eggs. They emanate, much like Dream Dragons, as the egg extrapoilates the dragonhood characteristics that its immature parent could not contribute to its racial memory. It is said that the dragonewts in Dragon Pass survived in weakness, whereas the dragonewts in Kralorela survived in strength. To me, one expression of this weakness are the dinosaurs, physical beings hatching from mis-developed dragon eggs destroying the egg in the process (unlike the emanation of another body for the dragonewt ego to inhabit). The (arche-) typical dragonewt egg seems to have been hatched in Godtime, making all time travel theories moot. The question is how did the number of dragonewts multiply from the roughly 5000 at Dragon's Eye at the Dawn to the tens of thousands in Genertela west of the Shan Shan if no new eggs were added? Or was there such a huge number of dormant eggs (without any current body for their egos) that dragonewt activity managed to activate more? In late 2nd Age Peloria, thousands of dragonewt eggs were destroyed: ending those potential dragons, or possibly sending them off into a Dragonewts Dream that manifested in Glorantha about 90 years before the date of the setting? IMO that's one of the fates of the barbarian dragonewts - when they die, their eggs fall dormant for quite a while before a new body for the ego is manifested. A dormant egg might even give up much of the substance it loaned from its environment, retreating into a much smaller physical reality leaving behind a small feature of geology or similar. To come back to dragon magic, the "adult" stage of it is to integrate the material world around a True Dragon into its self, assimilating surrounding hills etc. into its ego.

The date of that map is 1586, hardly part of the Theyalan expansion in the Dawn Age but part of spreading the Opening to the East.

There is also Ormsfang as one of the Greatway Mountains.

Finally finding the time to give this a read-through. Is there a place for reporting typos or formatting problems? I found a few lines to be missing from the Delargaraeo entry in the list of Enfranchised Houses, truncated after "Opposed the voyage of Dormal; was present at the return of Dormal and". In the line above, another interesting find: Ancestress of the Desdelaeo is Desdel, the twin brother of Delargara, children of Kimantor and Norinel. Given the continued existence of House Norinel, we can assume that Norinel had other daughters before accepting Kimantor, too.

I got inspired to a new weird expansion of my "Mostal is a von Neumann-probe" theory by a question about Sedenya on the Chaosium Discord: https://discord.com/channels/311619921639505922/311638496412565505/1137668946544308234 Basically, the Pseudocosmic Egg is a hatchling universe, one to be spawned into the Void outside of Glorantha. During the Sunstop it released not just Osentalka the Perfect God (a re-incarnation of Rashoran) but also the Young Elementals. In episode 24 of the God Learners podcast I speculated about there having been eight of these eggs, as eight is a significant number in the Mostali cosmogeny. And coincidentally there were eight planetary sons of Yelm, one of them being Verithurus(a), nowadays identified as a emanation or incarnation of Sedenya. What struck me now is the question whether Sedenya may be the (yet unborn) soul of the daughter universe of Glorantha still trapped inside the Pseudocosmic Egg, creating emanations of herself to act in the universe of her mother much like the immature dragon egg of a dragonewt does. What if all the planetary sons of Yelm are emanations of the future universes, learning from the current emperor of the world? What if Rashoran was an attempt by the Sedenya egg (which later birthed Osentalka) to lessen the impact of the Gods War? The transitory nature of Lunar Glamour would be explainable through this, and the Red Goddess's (and Nysalor's) establishing an alternate reality inside Glorantha. A similar potential, though other emanations, would have to be applied to Shargash, and possibly to the other (lost?) planetary sons (due to Umath's invasion of the Sky World).

Given the mythical reality of Glorantha, there is a good chance that Earthblood has somewhat different properties than crude oil. Not that crude oil has anything like a consistent composition, there is a reason why different "btands" of crude are traded, like e.g. North Sea "Brent". So, much like Diskworld, I am all for Treacle Mines from fossile sugarcane forests and fat shafts from the killing of Maran's beasts, much like Diskworld's Fifth Elephant.

Not necessarily. Not every climate is suitable for salt gardening, and not every coast will have sufficient salinity. If you add a coastal industry requiring salt, you will have salt transport to the coasts, or across the seas from coasts with more accessible salt. Not relevant for Glorantha, though. When discussing the international trade going through Sartar and Dragon Pass, Jeff dismissed salt as a regionally traded good without any long-distance relevance (at least in Dragon Pass). This is why that may be reasonable: Central Genertela has access to salt deposits from the Storm Age flood in the places surrounding the lands of Kethaela, Kerofinela and Saird that were defended by the Storm Gods. Quite a bit of that lies in Prax, Dagori Inkarth and Balazar where the Aroka Sea separated the Storm Lands from Genert's Garden, with enterprising traders able to dig for profits if they include the local natives.

Veskarthan/Lodril does a side business in poison, too - the shore south of the Vent is named after this.

I expect Sandy's campaign to be the only source for the Exigers and other such places, with the information in the Guide extracted from that.

They have explored their own bias bubble to the fullest, and the God Learners did a certain amount of transfer from other perspectives, but it is obvious that they missed a lot by missing out on the cultural context. And cultural context has been lost - both in the Gods War and since the Dawn.

Thanks. but that's not what I meant. Even the best researched cult may not cover the full real-in-Godtime entity.

Revealed Mythologies has quite a bit on Pamaltela in history and myth. Doraddi-related Agimori (and their Garangordite offshoot), Thinobutan "agimori race" peoples, and Armali. The Guide skipped this older history intentionally.

Which explains why RQ canon gets so condensed. I do wonder whether synthesis of cult entities needs to boil down to one synthesized deity, or whether one cult can synthesize two distinct deities as a single entity. An entity who can be equally well identified say as Orlanth and as Zorak Zoran. Ot as Humakt as well as Tolat. This happened in the past, resulting in the many Lightfores. Do the RuneQuest cults describe the entirety of the deities that are real parts of the cosmos? I doubt that is possible.

Mainly hero cults of Gygax, Arneson, Stafford and Perrin.

I have to contradict that statement: From the Dawn Age up to the Machine Wars the Aramite riders of the Tusker Boars were humans. There were bloody rituals in the name of the Darkness Demon tamed by Aram. They served as an elite military force, and may have cohabitated with other Orlanthi in the cities of Orlanthland and the EWF. At the time of the Dragonkill there were Tusk Riders of the modern "half-troll" type. It is possible that there were other Aramite riders of Tusker Boars who got evicted from Dragon Pass or who fell to the genocide first by the True Golden Horde and then the dragons. The first prominent Aramite to gain tusks for himself might have been Varankol the Mangler, a Living Hero of the EWF who was not (primarily) a draconic mystic. There is one notable half-troll during the Inhuman Occupation, but no data about his parentage. Typically, the Remakers are blamed for the new appearance. More theories are discussed in the God Learner podcast episode.

Yelm cultists love the idea of Illumination - little wonder here.

They are great users of geothermal energy, but think that volcanic eruptions are good for the environment. A mixed bunch... Coal may actually be used for making their slash-and-burn fields more fertile, turning it into Terra Preta, rather than just serving as fuel for the casting of bronze objects, and (tentatively) smelting Storm- or Sea-degraded metal ores (oxidic/carbonate/sulphate ores, as opposed to Darkness-degraded sulphidic ores) if there is any smelting done by humans under the surveillance of Gemborg. At the scale of Gloranthan metallurgy, use of fossile coal is environmentally preferable to the massive use of charcoal, even with some deforestation going on for securing those coal mines. Same with the petroleum they produce - this replaces massive whaling (or slaying of other marine beings, like e.g. manatees and dugongs, for their blubber) and serves as a replacement of plant oils as fuel, allowing these to be used as food instead. Even without polymer chemistry or synthetic alchemy requiring some dino-juice, there are plenty of alchemy-adjacent uses for oils and paraffine outside of lanterns and candles - de-fatting skins and furs, polishing and preserving metal items, waterproofing textiles, or as a neutral solvent for perfume extraction from basic ingredients.

You need to give some additional reference to the age of the celebrity in question, and in case of (good) actors the roles they were impersonating. A younger Sean Connery as in Time Bandits could be a good candidate for Argrath, but not when he played King Arthur alongside Richard Gere's Lancelot.

Humakt teamed up with Eurmal. In what way could teaming up with a follower of Lanbril be worse than that? From the Lanbril side, being friends with a death-wielder and truth-sayer may be stifling and irritating. Still, the friendship asked about is between people, possibly kinfolk, and not between cult representatives in their official function.

Spirit possession might be a way, depending on how you play with that. Including possession by a friendly discorporate warlock.

A lone hunter could still have an allied spirit adept at tracking by various means. Otherwise, a Ranger and Tonto combo might be possible, with a sidekick gifted in tracking and in making weird trouble. Not that having a Eurmali sidekick is mandatory for an initiate of Babeester, but would it be unusual?

Paulis was trained as an Irrippi Ontor scribe, tasked with observing the barbarians he visited. There is a good chance that he used quantized jargon from the Imperial College of Magic to document what he witnessed. In other words, a nerd.