Joerg

I have had a few discussions since I last edited those old notes on my website. I have come to regard the Syphon as an active water, behaving a bit like a jellyfish tentacle on dry ground when it comes to its shape and how it interacts with the river bank. A very flat such tentacle. Calling the Syphon a chaotic river is correct only if you think about what lies at its headwaters. By the same reasoning, the Sounders River on the other side of the Storm Mountains which feeds the Devil's Marsh is chaotic, too. Yes, y drawing water from the Mirrorsea Bay makes the Syphon brackish. More so than before 1318 when Belintar slew the Darkness monster whose remains (the Lead Hills) blocked off the Creekstream River, redirecting most of its water into the Lyksos river. I don't think there is much boat traffic up the Syphon. It often behaves like a whitewater even on rather flat ground, and this gets worse when it ascends small slopes in rapids. From the name "Backford" I deducted that there is no bridge across the Syphon, but that the road traffic manages to wade through an especially flat stretch of the river here. The river ground will be covered in shingle, so that there is little to no risk that cart wheels get stuck. Most of the ford is going to be less than knee deep, except a few deeper portions which may shift over time. The information about Belintar's Fish Road in the Syphon is rather new, and didn't weigh into my old descriptions. Obviously there has to be a sufficiently deep portion of the river up to the temple (area) which offers the entrance to its underwater portion, so it ought to be downriver of the ford. Since I think that one can ride the fish road on a horse (or even high llama), this could mean that the Syphon has to be navigable up to Backford even in seagoing vessels. However, the Syphon is an active water, so much of this depth may come in the shape of a bulge on the water, and keeping a boat or ship riding this standing wave will take extraordinary navigation. A similar challenge is found e.g. when crossing or riding one of the doom currents out in the Homeward Sea. I also doubt that users of the fish road (including Choralinthor Bay Ludoch) would react favorable towards ship keels threatening to collide with their heads.

Ok. First of all, I feel with you about your personal situation. I agree - fan policies that strangle fan creativity suck. So does the rest of the people on this forum, including those who make a living out of our hobby. "Fans" suing original creators suck big time, so a modicum of protection from a repeat of the Darkover desaster is the best way to ensure that there is a steady stream of more original material. Some protection of intellectual property might be necessary, too, to avoid IP trolls trying to disown you. That's where you hit sensibilities - not just Rick's, but mine as well. You're referring to rumors, thereby spreading them. Doing so in a thread on Glorantha makes every reader assume that you have a specific problem with this having happened in Glorantha. I was cooperating with the Lokarnos initiative at the time of the Fan Policy - a platform for links to Glorantha content and related stuff, so I had a fairly good overview over the websites at the time. I don't remember "a lot of fan-made material" ordered removed from the net. I do remember some very few people throwing a fit and retreating from the forums when they suffered a "my vision is incompatible to official decrees" downer. Those web presences rarely disappeared at once, but usually they fell into a torpor. Perhaps the greatest loss in fan creativity on the net was when Geocities closed shop, and all those pages hosted there disappeared into the limbo. I had a wiki project of mine disappear when the wiki provider folded. Some great projects have disappeared - Oliver Bernuetz's Mything Links, the (slash.dot-based) Lokarnos.com, and numerous private web presences. Some fan stuff on the official Glorantha pages got lost when switching to a technology that is closer to state of the art web presences. (I lost about 20k pages...) In all of this, "cease and desist" did not play a significant role in the Glorantha community. Other publishers (especially those bought up by business outside of the hobby) did tear down well-established fan presence. Some still do it (Star Wars expanded universe started with the roleplaying material, then added a body of novels, and now much of that body of information is largely ignored by the authors of the latest movie - and they had no excuse about inaccessibility of that material, there is the thoroughly researched wookiepedia). Breaks in the continuity of a setting (e.g. Elmal) are rarely greeted with enthusiasm by long time fans. They are supposed to sacrifice their investment of years of their time and creativity for a new direction that doesn't necessarily improve the setting. (My personal negative highlight for this was the Traveler New Era setting, but I didn't react too well to the changes made to Mage the Ascension either.) In these cases, I don't recall much of enforced retirement of fan-created content, though. I can empathize with authors cutting short their research when faced with looming deadlines, but I don't really enjoy the outcome of this approach. (That's why Mongoose's Glorantha - The Second Age didn't work for me, there were a few fundamental flaws that multiplied into lots of highly irrelevant or plainly wrong details. There were quite a lot of brilliant ideas in those books, but due to those flaws few products conformed with the Gloranthan lore. The ones that did, like Dara Happa Rising, were real gems.)

@Baron - are you new to the Gloranthan web presences? The etyries.com page is at least 10 years old. A lot of fan pages were taken down because keeping them up and alive was work or cost money, and interests may drift. Especially if the official line just made a turn that runs against what you thought was the one and only truth - and you will be hard put to find any Glorantha fan not qualifying for at least one or the other of the other 9 points in Nick's list. I know that my own involvement varied over the years with a) how well integrated my vision was in the official view and b.) how much I was involved in doing creative stuff or actual gaming. The Glorantha Tribe is a community of real people, with personal likes and averstions, and wildly differing preferences. There have been a number of changes to my impression of Glorantha, some of which I accepted, some of which I hated, and of the latter, some of which I came to live with, some of which I fought, and of those latter some of which got better (from my point of view), and a few fights which I lost or gave up, and a couple of ongoing ones. I have learned to be mostly civil about these issues. The Fan Policy wasn't one of these. I had one project which made strong use of copyrighted material - so I gave it to Issaries Inc. for publication on their website. All I did to my own website was to add the legalese paragraph, register with Issaries, and then I continued to do what I had always done. It would be nice to have an official website to host fan-augmented copyrighted material. That involves quite a bit of work, work to be done by volunteers with both the time, the know-how, and the perseverance. Especially perseverance in times when your hobby horse is grazing outside of canon. Right now in the wake of the RQ2 reprint hype the RQ2 grognards have a heyday. "We were right all along!" Sure. Just not entirely canonical. At the same time, there is the destillation of 30 years pf development since the RQ3 switch that are presented alongside those sentimental reprints, and the commitment of Moondesign cum Chaosium to carry on on this body of work. We finally have a publisher who puts out quality material in predictable word count to time frame ratios, and a good such ratio, too, even not counting the reprints - making all of that out of print material available again, and keeping the decanonized Issaries stuff available as pdfs, too, is an excellent move. A bit of a shame about that Mongoose material - a lot of which was playable, but also had some significant flaws from the beginning WRT canon. We have third party publishers of quality Glorantha material, too, which doesn't produce canonical but highly useful and not counter-canon material. We also have a lively base of fans who maintain their personal contacts even if their fanaticism has cooled down quite a bit. The European conventions with a strong Glorantha component are as much of a family meeting these days as they are gaming conventions. It is nice to see some of that return to the USA.

Or one of the non-riding Independents - a solitary Basmoli, a wandering Agimori, a follower of the Cannibal Cult, or a Baboon preparing for her Shaman quest. If you are staying reasonably close to the river, an adventurous Zola Fel worshipper might be a good addition as a native guide, too. (An intelligent fish woud be rather limited in adventuring options, though - the other eligible species wouldn't pose much of a challenge.)

Arkat learned how he could take on a different mythical role while on the Hero Plane (without falling out of it). Likewise the God Learners. You don't have to belong to a cult to attempt a heroquest. The God Learners made do with fragments of stolen knowledge, and the Lhankor Mhytes are experts in putting together little shards of myths into a comprehensive and explorable path on the Hero Planes (which is what the God Learners liked about them). This is a memory I cherish from running the original Rise of Ralios freeform - the stalwart band of Orlanthi questers was down in Yelm's Court of Ashes for the second time in the game (having found Arkat the Liberator on the first run, and ending up feeling underwhelmed/betrayed), so they went back for some deity of light to counter the Darkness of the Arkats. I made encouraging noises about the fact that there used to be a deity of light balancing Arkat, and that the Pelorians knew of a quest how to find this entity. So off they went from the ritual of the web, turning even deeper following the vague information they had on the Red Goddess Quest, and emerged from the Underworld riding the Star Bear carrying Nysalor. (It did help a lot that Nick Brooke acted as the leader of the questers on this run...) The Plundering of Aron was the raid to get back all the herds stolen by the Enchanter of Aron. While I am certain that there are myths about Orlanth raiding another tribe's herds, price bulls or horses, this one isn't. Like I said above - the herds in question in the Plundering of Aron were magically stolen from the Vingkotlings, from under the protection of their wyters, and would make little to no trouble when led back.

With Persian, I assume you mean the era of Cyrus and Dareios, I don't see much that is hellenic in Dara Happa proper - the Phalanx influences are from Peloria, which has more of a Hellenic influence. Personally, I try to look for the Indus culture of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa for influences. Replace elephants with gazzam, and off you go. Those extremely broad brush strokes tend to tickle all the wrong associations. Getting specific doesn't help much, though, if the recipient simply files them under his preconceptions rather than taking a look at the suggested specifics. Given my own ethnic background which covers most of central Europe from the Baltic Sea to the Alps, from the Hugenot lands in France to East Prussia and Hungary, I feel kinship to most of the European groups discussed here. Less to the Thracians and Dacians, I have to admit. I have done so for my worlds whenever I could. There are practical considerations to this, too. If you want your "barbarians" to use ox-drawn plows and yet have a decentralized society, to find a suitable real world parallel you have little choice but to look towards temperate climate Europe or possibly parts of ancient India where you have reliable rains and no need for irrigation or flood protection. I have made a point of taking a look at what I could find about pre-contact North American farmers and housing, too. A perhaps underused good inspiration for the Orlanthi of the high regions are the cloud people of the Andes, just north of the Inca empire. Don't forget the earthen ramparts. There are a number of rectangular earthworks in the Danubian valley known locally as "Keltenschanzen" (Celtic earthworks). Whether these were actual steads or rather enclosed holy places remains open to debate, but the later oppida used Celtic Walls (as described by G. Julius Caesar in De Bello Gallico) upon such earthworks. Both Kelheim and Manching had these. (Those are the ones I visited in person.) Both were coopted by the Roman Empire when they changed the status of Noricum from associated kingdom to province. This is how I view an isolated stead - square enclosure, main house probably somewhat larger, one or two of these houses as separate homes for the cottars sharing the stead, the round house as workshop, the elevated granary, and gardening, a pottery kiln etc. in between. Maybe not a palisade but a larger version of the pig pen enclosure in the previous image. This is an aerial view of the map of the citadel of Elkoi. The architectural style is Cyclopean as in giant-built. Similar walls are found in Old Karse and parts of Nochet. These giants showed significantly more sophistication than Paragua and his friends at Robcradle, although all he did was to erect some field defence with stone slabs taken along from further north. That's simple - place the cursor where you want the new quote and quote the article you want to include, deleting all you don't want to repeat, or if it is all in a single post, create an empty line, then press return twice, to break the quote into multiple parts. (If you do it only once, you'll write from right to left...)

I guess this is mainly due to them being framed in a combat/ambush situation. Especially the Viking culture is often reduced to the dragonship pirates and ignoring elaborate Thing rules, shrewd overseas or long range river trading, or seamless integration into the elite mercenary force of the Great Empire at Constantinople/Miklagard, alongside christian knights from e.g. Britain. How exactly would you describe Anglo-Saxon influences? Are you talking about Nydam-boat riding invaders on the shores of Roman Britannia, or do you envision Northumbrians fending off invading Scoti from Ulster, Wessex guerillas stopping the expansion of the Danelaw in the bogs, or King Alfred's scholars translating classical knowledge into colloquial Anglo-Saxon, or the grand fusion of Anglo-Saxon and Danish culture under C(a)nute the Great? LIkewise, how do you define Thraco-Dacian-Mycenaean elements? The Mycenaeans were gone for 15 centuries when the Dacians experienced a short spotlight in the reign of Trajan. The Thracians in the time of Belisarius were cataphract heavy cavalry, the epitome of knighthood in the late ancient world. In the time of Spartacus they appear to have been farmer-warriors like the Orlanthi. If you are looking for an urban culture away from the Mediterranean, the oppida of the late Hallstatt and the La Tene period are the best place in Europe to look. The point about Orlanthi culture is that their farming is not relying on massive group efforts (like irrigation, land reclamation from wetlands) but that it works fine with small communities on comparatively friendly soil, furthering individualism rather than subordination to organizers.

I am a bit divided between using mythic parallels for mundane purposes as a quest, or as supporting scenic frame building for a known magical feat. Just like the timing (auspicious dates as per season, week and day runes), identification of the opposition with appropriate mythical foes aids the magic of such feats. Still, all of this is happening in the mundane world, not on the hero planes. A heroquest on the hero plane will drag aspects of the outcome of that quest into the mundane world - framing for the magic on a large scale. I wonder if an Orlanth-worshipping Praxian could use the Plundering of Aron instead the Waha quest to regain stolen herd beasts, and whether he would have to have done the quest beforehand in order to get the appropriate magic for his This World task, or whether quest and task are one and the same.

This is very (Anglo-) Saxon, with a Beowulf-like mead hall as main building on the steads. Including the horse heads. On one hand, these are very nice visuals of the type of housing I was advocating early in this thread, and the Rohan version is perhaps the most picturesque variant of that. On the other hand, the Rohan culture is a culture of Vikings on horseback, and these are the "Norse" influences lamented by quite a few of the posters in this thread.

Nope. That's the diamond quasi-caste of the Decamony. Gold is a regular caste that dwarfs are created for/born in., and present also among Octamonists.

I don't think that Belintar was able to choose the day of the battle that freely, after all the Lunar army was pushing towards Esrolia, and placing the wall to make it a useful barrier against the Lunar advance (not easily evaded) means that he had to choose the location rather than the time of the battle. Belintar may have had the seeds of the wall prepared beforehand, and his deployment of troops will probably have made less tactical sense initially. If this was a heroquest, it wasn't one well known beforehand. As I said in an earlier thread, the Mostali are likely to use wall raising in battles, and they used such magic to raise the eastern wall of Boldhome, sealing in the cul-de-sac valley. Not in the middle of a battle, though. I still think that Belintar inherited that magic for his battle.

Usually gold or iron dwarfs/mostali. Gold are overseers and planners, iron are designed for interacting with potentially dangerous outsiders. Iron dwarfs are known to act on their own, while gold dwarfs are supposed to be attended by other castes in order to function, so gold is the more fun way to do this. In Heroquest, you could have one central character with some of the skills, and then distribute other skills among his dwarf retainers. Doesn't work that well for RQ, though.

@David Scott - for all practical measures, it doesn't matter if your opponents are strongly temporary different or genuine mythical entities. This makes me wonder, though, whether you are going to (en)counter God Learner intrusions even when questing starting from the Third Age. If the answer is yes, we are going to need some mechanical write-up for God Learner encounters in the hero planes. Encountering Arkati probably is a standard element of otherworldly endeavors. Mostly you wouldn't realize that they were there for a purpose other than scenic extras. However, if you are going to warp the myths in a bad way, beware of those guys. (Which makes me wonder - would those Arkati be in any way similar to the Kitori tax takers when provoked?)

For a grimmer variant, you could make the dwarfs like H.G.Wells' morlocks from Time Machine (take those of the most recent Hollywood incarnation), or the uruks of Isengard in The Two Towers (the Jackson flick).

Ginkizzie and his compatriots are Openhandist and Individualist, like their True Mostali founder, aka Isidilian, the Quicksilver Mostali of Dwarf Mine. Apart from these two heresies (each of which works separate from the other just as well as in combination), there is Octamonism (denial of Iron and other modern ideas, interestingly including Clay Mostali while being practiced mainly by Clay Mostali), some Pamaltelan ones practice Vegetarianism (use of self-Grown stuff). (Note that it was Openhandist Isidilian who had the entire plnder of Machine City placed under a huge army of dwarfs.)

@Baron: The difficult thing to do with orthodox Mostali is to give them meaningful motivations that makes playing an ace-of-a-single-trade worth the while. Playing a broken dwarf doesn't require any background info at all, except for "the only thing you used to be good for and good at was X, but now you were forced to leave your people you are free to do whatever you want, and frankly, that scares you - what do you want?" Add a few cool gadgets (like a limestone grinder for de-flavoring grown food - think parmesan grinders) and lots of nonsensical ones that were necessary for the job you no longer do. Maybe an animated stone pet for company. From here on, we get into slapstick territory. Like, if there's a Yelmalian in gilt plate armor, report to him for your work shifts, and also report off shift. Best during the night when that character tries to sleep, or report off-shift in the middle of some action. Be over helpful, maybe like one of the minions. React in inappropriate ways to threats, demands, or friendly overtures, ideally by ignoring the interaction or pointing people to your foreman (the character displaying the most gold/gilt). Complain about the stringent taste of even the blandest food, but then eat a bowl of salt with a withered sprig of parsley for decoration, and go into lengthy poetic descriptions about the subtle notes caused by the mineral impurities. In short, be a useless comic relief sidekick except when your speciality comes up.

Mostali as player characters are difficult to cater for if you want to play them as in-culture, functional parts of the world machine. Playing them in Paranoia-style one-off games is possible, and fun, and you could do an anthology of such scenarios, but then you could do slapstick stuff for any other Gloranthan culture, too. I can see some scope for a different style of game where the players control entire enclaves or factions of Mostali decisionmakers and advance the Plan they have for the repair of the World Machine. Such a game might make a good strategical game, say a board game or a computer game. It may still retain elements of role-playing if the engine allows that. But playing an individual worker drone that is not in any way deviating from orthodoxy doesn't feel like fun. Playing a faction attempting to define the Plan of the Orthodoxy in the face of developments in the world changing some of the frame the plan was supposed to work in could be rewarding.

If it is strength training, aren't you supposed to carry them up? One at a time, for starters...

For a D100 lite, why not use the core rules of Pendragon? Sure, it switches to a D20, but that's not much of an issue.

Oh, I don't mind neighborly raids, whether for cattle, slaves, or other portable valuables. I address the cattle as exchange medium economy that prevails where coinage is rarely seen. That has an Irish feeling to me - the exchange medium for wergeld etc. was (imported, whether by trade or raids) silver that was valued by weight. For lesser exchanges there were other natural units of exchange, like e.g. eggs or fowl. The concept of personal property and exchange of values between steads or individuals on the steads is quite hard to grasp for us who grew up in the materialist/capitalist environment (that produced roleplaying as a pastime). That is also a learning step that the majority of the players don't want to take, I dare say. We have the strange (and anachronistic - for a Bronze Age environment) situation of having a coin-based economy in cities like Pavis or Boldhome, also applied to gamist concepts like paying the trainers in classic RQ, and the attempt to depict a non-monetary economy that still has some appeal to players who like to measure their wealth, whether in coins or in other measures of exchange.

In RQ3 there was the strange effect that you did not gain any "common" rune spells at shrines, only at temples. For a spell really to be readily available, it has to be available at shrines, otherwise you won't find a Heal Wound anywhere in the Elder Wilds except for Yelmalians, in one citadel.

Glorantha always had an Iron Age flavor. Metallurgy got stuck on bronze, but made up for that by making bronze as widely available as bog iron is in our own history. We have a world of coins, actually paved roads, permanent bridges - all inventions of the Iron Age. Literacy, fortified cities, metal armor all were developments of the closing Bronze Age. Those "Norse" influences actually were Anglo-Saxon ones. There is a cultural continuity in Europe away from the Mediterranean since the introduction of domestic cattle (at least in material culture) from the Neolithic to the Viking Age, broken only by Romanisation and later Christianisation. We have few enough written sources on the life of the "barbarians", so we toss together what the Greek historians, Tacitus, Bede, Alfred of Wessex and the Viking/imperial Saxon chroniclers (including two islamic travel logs) offer in terms of written reports. As to the use of "Celts" - in the early 1990s I argued to make the Orlanthi like the Danubian Celts, namely those of the Hallstatt culture. I had no idea then that a majority of the English roleplayers would misread "Celts" for "Old Irish". Two facets of the Irish heroic age have made it into the Orlanthi canon. Cattle as currency (not mentioned in any sources on continental practices - the iceland saga instances of wergeld which we assume to have carried over from the continental Norse use bags of silver measured by weight instead) and the wergeld catalogue (which basically adds a price tag to Old Testament's "an eye for an eye"). I am willing to allow for less uniformity across the various populations of Orlanthi in the region. The History of the Heortling Peoples distinguishes between six Orlanthi population groups in Heortland - Esvulari, Pelaskites, Esrolians, Highlanders, refugees from Dragon Pass, and Hendriki as the ruling group. These groups are named in the early Second Age context of Aventus giving the foreigner laws, but again distinguished in the travelogue of the post-Machine War God Learner sorcerers, four centuries later. I don't see why another four centuries (until the Resettlement of Dragon Pass) would have eradicated these differences, or why the clans of Sartar should be uniform in their practices. House raising is men's business, so the cross-marriages of the wives doesn't influence what form the family hearth gets, especially since usually the new wife is marrying into the extended family of the husband and doesn't become steadmistress simultaneously with the marriage. It might be my national stereotyping, but when I think about raiders from forested river valleys, I think of the slavs south of the Baltic. However, Greymane and his kin have some Pendali heritage, so we need to add in some exiled former city lord lion-brother element that is somehow hard to find in Real World history. While lions were common enough in Bronze Age Greece that Herakles is known as a lion-slayer, I know of no warriors of that region (or the Balkans) who had lion-themed totems or similar. Naming Alexander the Great the Lion of Macedon doesn't really count, and I have no idea whether this was just modern fiction about Alexander or whether it was an ancient epithet. The Pendali-ruled -ket cities of Old Seshnela apparently had masonry, but that may have been the work of their demi-siblings, the Likiti, who took them on as lords when the Darkness came. (Basically, all cities ending on -ket in Old Seshnela suggest a pagan founder, while those ending on -wal suggest a Malkioni founder.) I don't want to suggest that Greymane has a hall of masonry. Some dry-stone wall construction might be in order, though - but that could be done for any other Orlanthi group with ties to a predecessor group of earth worshippers (and which Orlanthi group does not?) just as well. I am curious about your Norse elements. Could you elaborate them a bit? Despite being rather cramped geographically, there is ample wiggle room, and a multitude of eligible influences. IMO there is a Kitori/Ezkankekko style of architecture that has been imitated by the Esrolians of Nochet after Kimantor built them their cyclopean wall and infrastructure, and which appears to have been used for the original site of the Pelaskite city of Karse, too. I would be surprised if one of the foreigner laws groups of Heortland had not used that style for their housing. I don't think the Pelaskites themselves would qualify, though - I see them as mainly shore-dwellers, probably on low terps, with some artificial coast like on these pictures of the Holm in Schleswig. Their houses are most likely wooden - after all they are expert boat builders, so some solid carpentry should be within their abilities. (I picture Seapolis as a variant of the Rorbu fishing huts of the Lofoten. Other coastal settlements on the estuaries might resemble the Bodensee stilthouses. That rorbu picture might actually show the expanding port side of Karse in the decade after the Opening, after some adaptations to the previous image from the Pfahlbaumuseum at Bodensee.)

Both Cave and Sea Trolls bear the Chaos taint, but both are somewhat integrated into uz society/hierarchy (though rather lowly, about on par with the enlo). If you don't have much information beyond the creature catalogue in RQ2, I can see how that impression is formed.

The problem with dwarf masonry is that they hardly ever build aboveground buildings - there is the Petra-like entrance to Dwarf Mine, and there are probably a few portals to Greatway. I can imagine stone dams to capture mountain creeks for water power, but that's about what I expect in above-ground building activities. Fortification walls are known and used, and raising them overnight (like the wall dividing the Boldhome valley from Killard Vale) might be a standard dwarf tactic for the rare instance of them fighting field battles. Dwarves use quarried blocks of rock, but they also carve entire structures out of standing rock (like the Pockets in Boldhome), or they pour concrete. They even know to fuse rock from various sources into a monolithic structure like the Rubble Wall (containing the big slabs brought Paragua and friends, and much of the body of the Faceless Statue, one of the largest Jolanti ever).

For winters when it gets significantly lower than freezing, and to avoid exposure to predators. Also, they double as breathing generators of warmth.