Joerg

Dernu and Gernu appeared in the Sartar Rising campaign. Their heroband is described in Orlanth is Dead, and in the third volume an attempt was made to show how it transformed into the Eaglebrown Warlocks - at least that latter attempt is not canonical any more, but I see no reason why the characters themselves should have become ungloranthan.

That fox episode was in KoDP from the beginning, and gave you the choice between hard times for growth or for magic.

The elurae fox women are classed with the beast folk - part human, part beast - but have a different, eastern origin.

The percentage of intelligent beasts ("less than one in a thousand") was in the Zola Fel cult write-up since Cults of Prax. Another stab at animal sentience was made in the sperm whale text which mentioned the occasional sentient giant squid as their opposition.

The Goldeneye horses of the Grazers probably are sentient in their own right.

The Praxian ritual to reverse the covenant in order to make herd beasts sentient might be regarded as unnatural magic if you see Waha's Covenant as defining what is natural, or might be regarded as undoing a huge magical change to return the beasts to their original, Golden Age state that Waha's Covenant upset (in order to let them survive at all).

There appear to be Hsunchen/Fiwan beasts that only rarely take human shape. The Tanuku milk antelope of Pamaltela is grouped with the Fiwan, their human shaped counterparts were first mentioned in the Guide, earlier on the only info we had on them (in the unfinished work Missing Lands) was that they served as domestic beasts of the Doraddi. The eastern Golden Eagle participates in the Korgatsu rites (as per Anaxial's Roster).

Regardless whether an animal is sentient or not, hunter cults treat it as a person.

9 hours ago, M Helsdon said:

As noted by others, Stormbringer, Call of Cthulhu and Ringworld are all missing. Pendragon should be included because it included published RQ concepts (Personality Factors etc.) and unpublished RQ concepts.

Also add Chaosium's ElfQuest, the swedish Drakar och Demoner, FGU's Other Suns. Is Superworld part of this list already?

Plenty of sentient animals in full animal shape around - lots of sentient fish in the Zola Fel cult, sentient foxes in the King of Dragon Pass computer/phone game speaking for the Wild, sentient deer in the Purendi myth (in Anaxial's Roster), and in Hsunchen lands the high probability that e.g. a deer is actually a shape-changed human (or, in their view, a human in his true animal shape). There is the famous Alynx rebel Dernu (with his mute human sidekick Gernu).

Ducks and other keets actually disqualify from your list because of their anthropomorphic bodies.

If you include demonic beings, how about the Crimson Bat or Ethilrist's Hound and horse demons?

55 minutes ago, Jon Hunter said:

im not sure why but safelster has always carrie din my head this image of being a little 'generic fantsay', unsure why, maybe completely unjustified. 

No idea why - independent city states at odds with one another, with gradual differences in their deity etc. fits the bill for the Bronze Age cities on the eastern Mediterranean or in Mesopotamia. The tradition of hiring Greek mercenaries may date back into the Bronze Age, too - Lyon Sprague de Camp wrote a nice story about a veteran from the siege of Troy (don't recall which one right now) taking service in Egypt - so the omnipresence of mercenary companies in Safelster appears to fit, too. Let's add the fleets on the lake, which may be a bit too advanced for Bronze Age, but emphasizing extremely sleek rowed vessels for war on that hardly roughened body of water.

The Arkat mysteries deserve some more exposition - I know that there is some material which hasn't seen publication yet, except maybe a few public readings.

The "Rise of Ralios" freeforms did some exploration of that area, so did Ingo's "King's Funeral". The Orlanthi both of Vesmonstran and of East Ralios were the subject of campaigns, e.g. David Dunham and Jonas Schiött in East Ralios or Nikk Effingham in Otkorion. Reports on these can be found in the Glorantha Digest archives. I myself took part in a play-by-email game by Jose Ramos set in Kustria which had us heroquesting using RuneQuest 3 rules - ask me or Paolo about details if you're interested. All of these had a distinct Gloranthan look and feel.

11 hours ago, smiorgan said:

Pavis/ Prax is also an isolated backwater and sandbox in a way, but is already a much bigger world with connected but very distinct sub-settings with no obvious order of play.

For many years the Pavis/Big Rubble setting was the best entry point for a Sartar campaign, having the best information on how Sartar (and especially a Sartarite city) worked.

I guess what really made feel Pavis so alive were the Griselda stories as samples of (solo) play.

I was pointing towards Ignorance since that is where a lot of Kralori bad deities are projected.

You are of course right that more often than not a parent-child relation between deities means that the child is an aspect of the parent. Like Orlanth in the shape of the Thunder Brothers.

But how does this manifest in Yara Aranis? She can be approached as the daughter of the Pentan (enemy) demon, or as granddaughter of the Red Moon. We know her as the guardian of the Glowline, the magical border that projects the surface of the moon magical reality onto the Lunar Empire, Tatius exploited that role for his New Lunar Temple (and it backfired, probably not quite related to Yara).

24 minutes ago, Ali the Helering said:

Quoting the Redline History "The Red Emperor used the secret fear of the barbarians to summon their Goddess of Tormented Death... The child of this union was named Yara Aranis". 

This seems to me to indicate that Yara Aranis is the Lunarised form of a Pentan demon.

To me this sounds like Yara is the daughter of the emperor and a Pentan demon (who shares lots of traits with Gorgorma, and possibly with one of the deities of the Kingdom of Ignorance). Sheng is the mystical shadow of the Red Emperor, and vice versa, much like Arkat and Nysalor. Note that the empire after Phargentes JarEelsson was slain was the Shadow Moon Empire.

If you look at the Battle of Gardint, it has all the elements of a nomad horde invading a land that was (once) protected by the Reaching Moon (i.e. Yara), so calling her up in defense is why I don't wonder whether it is legit. I wonder whether Argrath's temples of the Reaching Storm actually usurped Yara Aranis' magic and her being, making her available for the defense of Saird (KoS p.129).

43 minutes ago, mdomino said:

Thanks all. Would the RQ3 beastiary be useful for a River of Cradles campaign? I have these so far:

RQII kickstarter

The main Praxian use of the RQ3 Gloranthan Bestiary is to get stats for the Praxian steeds - these are already in RQ2. Not sure about the newtlings (but those would be in Borderlands). Little of the other content of the Bestiary is applicable there.

I thought that the creating the stats for all kinds of beasts and monsters could be done in RQ3 after you had a look at the beasties in the rules book and the Gloranthan Bestiary booklet - the hit points per location followed a simple math (a fraction of the general HP), and there were a lot of different hit location anatomies spread over the rules, the bestiary and the Book of Uz (providing insect data).

Anaxial's Roster provides the biggest collection of creatures inhabiting Glorantha, and even that is only a list of examples. It is valuable for RQ games too, giving tactics and standard behavior for the creatures.

A few notable beasties like e.g. the Lopers are missing from any of these sources, too.

I think the most extensive collection of Gloranthan creatures at the moment is the RQ6 collection by Hannu Kokko at his Notes from Pavis blog.

37 minutes ago, M Helsdon said:

Additional: I find it intriguing that in King of Sartar, Yara Aranis appears to jump pantheons to join or at least fight on Argrath's side in the Battle of Gardint. The Guide further supports this. Perhaps her allegiance was always to Saird, and the Lunars failed to appreciate this...

I don't find that so surprising. Yara Aranis was strongly defined by her hatred of Pentan invaders, and Sheng in specific. Given the chance to wrestle with her arch-enemy, of course she would heed the suggestion of Argrath's Lunar followers.

It might be a good idea to commission (or start) a couple of RQ scenarios when the re-design of the rules comes into the tuning phase, so that ideally there could be a custom-built scenario or two available when the system hits the market, and a few more for initial support. Maybe through magazines or similar outlets.

If you want to limit crystal accumulation, give them a maintenance requirement - you need to re-attune them regularly, possibly more so if they are less compatible with your own runes. That way, a character might own 200 points worth of crystal power, but could access only a fraction thereof (and less if he also chooses to use crystals with active, focussed effects).

11 hours ago, M Helsdon said:

The boundaries between neighboring groups are always fuzzy, but the further away from the borderlands you get, the wider the distinctions become and when you start approaching other cultural borders it starts to be difficult to define what, exactly, are the core attributes of identity.

We are dealing with clans here rather than with smaller units like steads or family groups, though. These clans usually have a clear idea who they don't belong to - unfortunately this includes many of their culturally related neighbors, but foreigners who talk funny definitely aren't part of the "us" (unless they make an effort to join us).

The Middle Ages and early modern era saw a lot of colonisation not unlike the American West in middle and eastern Europe. Settlers from an agriculturally more advanced or at least equal origin would come out of their own accord or attracted by local overlords in order to cultivate previously unused or only extensively used area. This is somewhat different from the Greek and Phoenician (or Irish VIking) placement of colonies as trading posts, or from the Germanic immigration into the decaying western Roman Empire (not all of which happened in the shape of invasions). The Lunars appear to have such a program, as the Redlands, the Risklands or the Grantlands show. The spread of the Esvulari along the Choralinthor Bay may be such a case where their knowledge as builders (and possibly seafront dam builders) made them welcome strangers in coastal Heortland and Esrolia.

11 hours ago, M Helsdon said:

At its widest (and perhaps most accurate) meaning Orlanthi means a people who venerate an entity that might be identified as Orlanth, or an important member of his pantheon. As some of the deities in the pantheon weren't members until the Lightbringers' Quest, the identity becomes even more nebulous?

Chronology of myths is always prone to be contradictory. The Sword Story for instance is an extreme shorthand for the entirety of the Gods War, glossing over things like the Lightbringers' Quest or the destruction of the world by Chaos as mere asides.

Orlanth first met Lhankor Mhy, Issaries and Chalana Arroy on the Lightbringers Quest. Eurmal made earlier contact in the Sword Story. Flesh Man was an Orlanthi tribesman of unknown allegiation (an everyman's grandson from any tribe).

Lhankor Mhy was the scribe of the Nochet compact, I think before Argan Argar bound Vestkarthan (and Kodig's presence may have been "the early incarnation of bad man Kodig" as far as the Esrolian Grandmothers are concerned). Chalana and Issaries were active among the Vingkotlings and Durevings, too, at least in form of some of the subcults. The Making of the Storm Tribe includes the Lightbringer deities, but those presences might be later additions proven true through repetitive performance/questing.

(In fact I wonder whether some of the Vingkotling tribal founders could have been cognates of the Lightbringers, with Goralf Brown a candidate for Issaries.)

There are some skills that should go up without experience checks, too - if you're spending a season or two with Praxian nomads, you should get an automatic chance to increase Praxian language, customs, and survival. The real question will be how many and what kind of skills will be used to handle such specialized knowledge/experience. The more different skills you introduce, the less able will a character be.

Academic as well as physical skills have the possibility of learning the wrong thing which sort of works (and often can be acquired quickly), but only to a limited level of proficiency, which then has to be unlearned (painfully, with a decrease in performance) in order to rise to higher levels. I have encountered this with as different fields as languages, physics, archery or musical instruments.

There used to be a discussion whether the Cheruskans spoke a Germanic or a Celtic language, so Germania may very well have been part of the Celtic world before the migrations began. The Suebes that Caesar encountered in Gallia and in his expedition east of the Rhine were recent immigrants from the Baltic (and possibly part of the decision of the Helvetii to start their migration).

The Belgae of Britain were fairly recent arrivals - a couple of generations prior to Caesar's arrival. As the name says, they may have arrived from the contact zone with the Germanic tribes (Belgia), which had been in a state of migration since a lot earlier - the Cimbri and Teutones arrived in Roman territory around the same time the Belgae established themselves in Britain.

I think it might be more productive to look at the Germans prior to the 19th century to get an idea what "Orlanthi" do have in common and what they don't. The unified German language started with the Luther bible (but retained the high German/low German split until the 19th century), the German national identity was mainly found when there was a huge outside threat (Napoleon really made it stick after over a decade of occupation) although the general idea was around already when Otto the Saxon established the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation, religious unity was created with Christianisation since the 8th century, lost with the Reformation in the 16th century and not regained, territorial identity was extremely difficult, and the presence of minorities (or in the baltic settlement area, majorities of other comparatively recent immigrants) made the definition of the German nation difficult.

RQ2 had the stackable common rune spell Divine Intervention which could be sacrificed for. Each point gave you a cumulative 10 % chance that the god would grant you a miracle to get out of a fix. If the god didn't grant you her favor, you would keep the points for a later try (assuming that you survived the situation which made you attempt the intervention).

17 minutes ago, Ainda said:

I suppose I should have said they're the only culture that, where they're focused on (Dragon Pass,) it's not popular and is even disdained. This, one, doesn't make sense to me, and two, frames the Lunar v. Orlanthi question in a frankly boring way.

There you see the influence of the Larnsti of the Hendriki who were leaders of the early period of Orlanthland in Dragon Pass, Kethaela and Saird. They worshipped the Spirit of Freedom (depicted in the Prince of Sartar comic chained to Belintar) and proselytized their rejection of individual slavery. (They didn't mind putting entire clans and tribes under severe tribute, unless it was themselves, though - see the Foreigner Laws of Aventus in History of the Heortling Peoples.)

Among the Heortlings, it is part of a decision the clan made in the Storm Age when they were asked to accept one of the minority peoples in the Vingkotling area into their tribe - as (near-) equals or as thralls. When a new clan forms, these decisions are sort of fought out between the ancestors the folk of the new clan bring along (actually by their descendants).

The Sambarri show that you can be anti-Lunar and slaveholder. The Colymar used to be anti-slavery, but when Blackmor accepted the Lunar Way they had to accept the slave plantation in their midst, too.

Pure ancestor worshipping Orlanthi:

Heort himself was a shaman and mainly a spirit user. The Theyalan missionaries included Heortlings and Esrolians, and members of other peoples on the Unity Council, although they would leave the approach of a new group still stuck in the Greater Darkness aftermath with their most suitable party members (meaning that they'd leave their uz guides and their elf companions behind). More often than not these missionaries married into the group.

On the occasion of finding an intact group of ancestor worshippers they would gladly have lent assistance to these practices, IMO. And if those ancestors had worshipped or at least propitiated gods, they would have taught such a group how to do so, too.

If you check the Dawn Sites in the Guide (p.710), the Deleskarings of Berthestead could be said to worship their founder and ancestor Deleskar over any Orlanthi gods. The Balurgans might qualify, too. If you leave the area covered by these descriptions further west, you can have all kinds of weird groups that were discovered later on. There is also room for groups hiding amid these survival sites for some time before being discovered by the dark trolls acting as the main scouts, though they would have had to hide extremely well to avoid detection (and inclusion in places like Urar Bar).

13 minutes ago, Ainda said:

After doing some thinking, I'm wondering how everyone feels about making slavery a larger part of Orlanthi society? They're basically the only non-nomadic culture that doesn't practice it, and too often it frames the Lunar v. Orlanthi question as one of Slavery v. Freedom, when it could be (and is, sometimes,) a much more nuanced thing.

Already several of the Sartarite tribes and clans keep thralls - the Sambarri are (in)famous for trading humans. The Hendriki as a rule don't, but there may be other clans in Heortland descended from immigrants from e.g. Esrolia.

Esrolian houses often keep slaves, and at a guess so do the Solanthi and Ditali (in their case captives from Kethaela or neighboring clans/tribes kept as thralls if not ransomed).

Tarshites quite likely keep slaves, both those of Wintertop and those who accepted the Lunar Way. At a guess, several Far Point tribes keep slaves, too.

Not sure about the Sairdites and Talastari - some of the Lunarized ones probably do.

Safelstrans keep slaves, and the hill tribes of Ralios will likely do so, too.

Jonating Orlanthi are kept in a state of thraldom, not sure that they would have tiers of this. We have no data on Oranor.

Umathela probably has adopted some forms of slavery, living next to Fonrit. I don't see why the clans ruled by the Woodland Council wouldn't.

We have a couple of labels for the Orlanthi culture - Theyalan, Barbarian Belt, Orlanthi, Hill Barbarians. I like @M Helsdon's comparison to the label Celts/Keltic. I remember a discussion I had with Jeff Richard where I posited that the (Kethaelan and Kerofinelan) Orlanthi material culture was very similar to that of the (Danubian) Celts. Jeff disagreed strongly, and instead pointed me to the Hallstatt and preceding Urnfield peoples. The very ones I was talking about, but Jeff assumed I was talking about the Irish.

The term Orlanthi has a double meaning, too - in the narrower sense it is a worshipper of Orlanth, in the wider sense a member of the culture that worships Orlanth and Ernalda (in various guises).

The Theyalan mode of theist worship originated with the Heortlings of Kerofinela and Kethaela (including the Esrolians here). They spread this to the rest of the Barbarian Belt during the First Age all the way to the places where Westerners and their opponents had their own, distinct Gray Age experience and memories. Other than the Pendali, Enjoreli and the Dangkae, most of the clans in between didn't have distinct Gray Age memories but only vague ideas about surviving the Greater Darkness. The lowland city peoples had memories of the horse warlords instead (all the way to Oronin Valley), and a repository of writings and other pieces of art to remember their earlier culture.

Many of the Hill Barbarians had at best distinct memories of their founders and their arrival in their settlement area, then bad attrition during the Greater Darkness. Those further west also may have had memories of contact with the Kachasti of Danmalastan who had come from the west and established a presence between their lands, and an exchange of ideas until their destruction. This Kachasti exchange will have influenced their material culture, their language and probably quite a bit of their magic, too.

When I speak of the hill barbarian founders, I also mean their beast totems. The Vingkotlings didn't see many of the hill barbarians of Ralios, Tanisor and Fronela as Orlanthi but as beast folk, if I interpret the Plundering of Aron correctly - this describes a conflict between Ralian beast folk and Vingkotlings. Those Ralians became (or already were) the Enerali. I wonder what the Ralian version of the Plundering of Aron looks like. The Fronelan version might be hidden in the myth in Anaxial's Roster where the Orlanthi gods are hiding in beast shape from the sorcerers coming out of the west (leaving it unclear whether this means the Kachasti, the Vadeli who usurped them, both, or neither).

When I include the Pendali in the definition of Orlanthi, I do so because of their eastward migration after their defeats against the Serpent Kings - some of their descendants ended up in Basim, others in the Solanthi valley. Greymane clearly is the epitome of a Solanthi Orlanthi. He also is a heir to the Pendali lion magics. Note that a lot of the Pendali descendants ended up becoming Seshnegi Malkioni after the monotheistic reform that followed the Serpent King dynasty.

I include the Enjoreli (also known as Tawari bull people - a similar case to the Pendali Basmoli and Eneraii Galanini, linking a pastoral or even agricultural and early urban culture to a hsunchen folk) in my observations on hill barbarians even though most of these ended up to become upright Loskalmi westerners.

This is supported in the Guide:

Quote

Oranor: This powerful tribal confederation was freed from the Ban in 1612. Its kings claim an unbroken heritage dating back to the late First Age. They worship an Orlanthi pantheon centered on Orlanth, the thunderbolt-wielding, bullriding chief  of  the gods; Eurmal, the friend of  man; Bakan the Boar God, a masculine fertility god; Ladaral the Fire God; and Oran, the first king, and his wife Frona, the land goddess. They have friendly relations with the elves of  the Erontree.

The bull-riding clearly is a nod to the Tawari/Enjoreli, and probably continues at least as a ritual duty of the kings (much like the bull-drawn wagon that had to be operated by the Merowing kings according to Einhard's Vita of Carolus Magnus). (English translation of Vita Karoli Magni) (Einhard writes about oxen, but he is quite partial about the uselessness of the Merowings, and never witnessed the rite himself.)

The Hykimi alliance shown in the same map, between the Enjoreli and the Talsardian Kingdom, mentions cattle-herding pastoralists. That means Tawari, and a continuum of Tawari bull people from the Esus river to the Neliomi Sea.

When I see a mention of KefTavar in the Bisos cycle in Entekosiad, I see a hill barbarian origin that uses the same ancestor as the Enjoreli, which makes me assume that these folk had kin further east (beyond the bear lands, in Charg and Vanstal). The Talsardian kingdom probably built on the Bisos mythology. KefTavar descends from the sky when he mates with Esus - indicating a star presence (not unusual for Orlanthi deities) and a possible foreign origin of the god (foreign to Arir, that is).

@Ali the Helering They live where Genert's Garden used to be, We know that there are lots of things that have been forgotten about that place. These guys (or their parents) could for instance have sculpted the statues of the Plateau of Statues (I don't think they did), or have maintained Yamsur's light or Genert's Palace before the Chaos invasion. The people who would have known have mostly perished, or fled in a state of terror that made them forget their own identity, let alone that of a bunch of magicians at Orathorn.

They could have hidden behind a Thorn Rose-like fence that only Sheng (or some of his Zolathi) could penetrate, to explain their inactivity throughout much of history. Or they are mystics themselves, and failed to avoid entanglement when facing HonEel and the Lunars, releasing a huge load of power that they accumulated on their unknown path to Liberation. Or the Night of Horrors _was_ one of their trials on that path, and the Lunars and Pentans simply were sucked into that horrific experience without proper preparation.

The point is that they could be immensely capable magicians without having meddled with the world for all of history. The only magical entities that ever grew up in their neighborhood were the EWF (they sit right on one of the dragon wings for the dragon creation project), Sheng's empire, and then encroachment by the Lunar expansion. We have no tales whether they hid from the EWF or whether they joined (or otherwise participated in the weird mystical things that happened in the EWF). Their participation in the Night of Horrors may have been the tribute they had to pay to Sheng for their ongoing existence, never mind that Sheng was gone - an obligation that needed to be delivered to remain on the path of Liberation.

Actually, any surfeit of magic can cause a collapse of reality, whether chaotic or non-chaotic in nature. Both the Lunars and the Pentan hirelings fielded magic of near compromise-breaking dimensions, and when the two magics clashed, a rift in reality opened. Even illuminates could get lost in such an intrusion of the Void.

You seem to have missed the Prince of Sartar comic, which has seen rather few armored Orlanthi.

The average carl family head probably has some armor, although hardly anything like the kind of armor a weaponthane would field. Other members of carl families probably make do with hard hats and some quilted cloth under leather, relying on their shields for armor (if any). A good alternative is woad, if the character is somewhat strong in magic.

Spears are the typical weapon - affordable, and useful in other situations. Same goes for axes. Swords as we understand them are probably the province of nobles and weaponthanes, shorter blades like the seax or the Crocodile Dundee-style bowie knife would be more common (again serving for more purposes than just warfare).

Weirdos might specialize on bows rather than slings. Slings are popular since they can convey Thunderstones and are cheap missile weapons to keep medium-sized predators away from the herds.

1 hour ago, Runeblogger said:

So what's next now? 

Sandy Petersen's Gods War boardgame, I think. The Kickstarter ought to start in very few months.

10 hours ago, soltakss said:

If you have unlimited experience then that can happen. However, I have restricted experience for a long while now and that allows PCs to specialise.

 

My campaigns rather had the problem that there wasn't enough advancement into the levels of competence I feel most comfortable when running a game.

Specialisation wasn't a problem, either. The previous experience system even of RQ3 (modified by Vikings) allowed for professions that the people were identifying themselves by, like boat builder or carpenter (all of these with a mandatory background in farming, too). There is a limit how much a rather new Viking colony on Celtic shores can support single purpose characters, so having a somewhat broadened background seemed the right thing to do.