Joerg

Storm gains symmetry through movement, absolute point symmetry over Time. The birth of Umath necessitated the birth of Time?

The confederation cities attracted refugees from the famine and saw some increase in resident numbers. The rural outback would have lost population.

The Pavis breeding essentially was the continuation of Second Council breeding program.

There are a few God Learner reports on the treasures taken at Robcradle (or Cradlesnatch Island). Do these report weird golden artifacts for every cradle?

The mating had at least one descendent, Seri-phy-Ranor, a member of the Dorastan Ring, or its secretary.

Praxian wild zebras are the size of the quagga. War Zebras are transformed Hyal horses, retaining the size of the Goldeneyes. Cavalry Zebras (infertile crossbreeds from breeding with Pol Joni-sourced mares, rather than cavalry-trained pure strain "War" Zebras) vary in size depending on the breed and size of the mares. These crossbreeds might be only partially striped, like the extinct South African quagga. There might be lesser fertile zebra crossbreeds from crossing Joraz Kyrem's original breed with wild Praxian zebras. If so, the nomadic Zebra tribe might be more likely to breed these, although they might also trade them with the urban

This might be spoiler-worthy:

The role of heralds may be fulfilled by Zebra Tribe em-issaries hired for the occasion. There is some saying about peace coming in black and white...

From our most recent episode my stance on Ralzakark in the fourth century: He was very much the very civilized unicorn-headed guy in the City of Miracles operating this ancient technology, a good conversationalist, possibly a good dancer.

Not quite fair. What triggered the Dragonkill was the threat to destroy all the dragonewt eggs in the Pass. A veritable genocide (on the resident Orlanthi as well).

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At that point in the game, there is a good chance that both Argrath's magicians and Ralzakark's magicians do so, too. The previous mainstay of Surface World uzdom, the Dark Trolls, are about to make their last grand stand before they all get obsolete. I don't know how much new troll births are regarded as a chance for re-incarnation of lost dead mistress or dark trolls, and whether and how trollkin figure in this set-up. With the multiple births of enlo, practically every ancestor runs the risk of being reborn as an enlo... The new type of troll recently brought into the world by the efforts of the swarm will take time to become important. If you look at the Gbaji Wars, the Curse of Kin struck in 378, but adoption of massed trollkin doesn't seem to happen before Arkat's duel with Nysalor. They are certainly the major part of troll military in the disaster against the Yelmalions at Mirin's Cross in the early 600s. Great Trolls entered the picture in the early 800s, and became a significant military asset by the time of the Machine Wars. The new superior type of surface trolls may be just about entering military age at this time, born from Mistress Race mothers breeding with the new magical method. There won't be many, yet.

Idle thought for the day: Will Accelerate Growth increase water consumption? How sustainable would that be in semi-arid or arid conditions?

It would have been Flamal who caused the cycles, but that was before the aldryami (trees) were forced to make such a decision whether to go to the long sleep or take sleep in the short cycles and stand guarrd through the long night. Flamal is so primal that it probably has features that could turn into either form and function. Eston is presumably the forest destroyed across High Wyrm Pass mentioned in the Guide p.191, sending the Elder Wilds aldryami into a diaspora. I doubt an unprotected Great Tree could have survived that ire.

repeated castings of Heal Body might even offer repeat experiences of that torture.

Yes, I failed to find it where I remembered RQ2 to have it. Cult structure or at least cult roles are generalized, earlier in the chapter. The cult comes rather late, after the rules for shamans, and my pdf is not searchable (yet). But I was speaking of the mythology of the Storm Bull, which is in quite glorious detail in the Nomad Gods rules, at least a year before RuneQuest was first published. Wyrm's Footnotes arrived at the Storm pantheon rather late with the Gods and Goddesses series (now reprinted in the Sourcebook). The name Orlanth fails to show up in the board games. While a deity may have little if any free will, they will have an agenda defined by their myths in Godtime, and a nature. Elemental deities have physical representations in the Middle World (or nearby, like the Sky World). The deity is as much a resource as they can be an obstacle. A certain personhood of deities seems to be acknowledged even by the Brithini philosophers, who talk about the False Gods (false or fallen Erasanchula, according to Zzabur's unpronounceable technical terms) as misguided powerful rune people. And yes, the application of the god's power is subject to the caster's will (and ability/affinity). Using runic identification as the trigger has lowered the casting chance for Rune Magic again (surefire in RQ2 IIRC, 95% success in RQ3, rune rating in RQG).

Not so much size but luminosity. Tolat/Shargash is bigger but less luminous. The star map in the Guide p.645 seems to have Orlanth's Ring following the rotation of the sky dome, but the text description seems to work like your steadily ascending western rise. (The ritual of the Dragonrise dance may have had the ring in different places, as the Orlanthi dancers did half a week's motion in a single night.)

I would have thought that sympathy is too weak to describe the identification/impersonation of the deity when casting rune magic or going through a conventional heroquest, whether the This Side passion play with mythical overlay or the complete cross-over into the Hero Plane (or the Outer Worlds). The initiate attaches a piece of their soul to their deity, allowing the deity to manifest in the initiate when casting the Rune Magic. At the very least, it is not "I cast Lightning" but "we cast Lightning", with the caster and Orlanth making up the we. The runic make-up of a person causes certain physique and behavior. That's little different from saying that in our world differences in brain chemistry and hormonal balance cause different moods or predilections, possibly all the way to gender identity. Careful with the terminology: you can worship any deity, regardless of how compatible your runic make-up is with theirs. This is about initiation, about creating the soul-link to that deity (and that deity's promise of afterlife, at least for this chunk of your composite soul) via the toolkit of the cult (rather than say direct mystical exposure to the deity, or direct exposure on heroquests). Here we are getting into game mechanics vs. in-world observations. The less compatible your runic make-up is with the deity whose magic you are invoking, the less likely the effect will take place. (Although this opens a different bag of worms for users of rune spells acquired through Issaries' Spell Trading. The rationale seems to be that it is the original caster who made the identification, putting the spell into some kind of delayed release state to be triggered by the recipient of the trade. In other words, a deity in a box, or out of 1a machine.) I understood Heroforming to have been supposed to be rune magic on steroids, pulling the hero plane onto the person heroforming, beyond the limited/well-defined effects of "conventional" rune magic. Except for those people who became the living avatars of their deities. We find this in contemporary religions, e.g in Shinto or in Hinduism, where individuals are possessing/possessed by divine traits, being the deities while also living a life as humans. Apparently a similar thought process was applied to say the twin girls serving Apis (whose stepfather absconded with the capital they had accumulated as retirement funds for when they reached maturity and the sacred bull they had accompanied their entire young life was sacrificed and mummified, to be followed by a new bull calf and its twin girl care-takers). I sort of agree. Julius Caesar could act as the Pontifex Maximus, correctly presiding over the rites, without any apparent attachment or sympathy to the deities he was supposed to connect with. Sincerity did not matter, keeping the form did. Pretty much how the Malkioni sorcerers approach deities, isn't it? That has been the status quo since RuneQuest first dealt with rune magic in Glorantha. Anything earlier put into rules was regimental scale magics as in White Bear and Red Moon, or interaction with spirits independent from the magicians, or the tribal shamans from Nomad Gods whose fetches were extensions of their spirits. (Orlanth is only mentioned once as "the Storm God" in the description of the Sartar Magical Union, claiming that the most powerful magicians in that organization "were relatives of the Storm God, who had headed the local pantheon since Sartar first came." In fact we learn about the Storm Bull in much more detail than Orlanth before the publication of RuneQuest second edition, which had the Cult of Orlanth as one of three sample cults, alongside Kyger Litor and Black Fang.) Of Greg's earlier Gloranthan heroes, it seems that Jonat Bigbear came the closest to the Theist mindset, with henotheist Serpent King Seshnela a runner-up. I haven't read Jonat's Saga. The Dawn century material on Seshnela has men-of-all encountering divine entities on their questing, priests contacting the deities to call up their essential magics (with Pendali demigod shamans or witches called sorcerers too, and not that clear a distinction between their bargains and the spell-carried ones of the sorcerers). There are priestesses of Seshna Likita who preside over unfathomable rites (and who mother the next serpent kings on their twin brothers). There are plenty demigods, including the two founders of the Serpent King lineages (Ylram and Sonmalos), Damol the great-grand-son of Froalar (himself a great-grandson of Aerlit and Warera through both his twin parents) via Fenela, and son of Aerlit, hence half-brother to Malkion even though he was a stout pagan, and the three Basmoli sorcerers opposing Ylream and his heirs, children of Basmol and a great-granddaughter of Pendal Basmolsson. What there is not (yet) is rune magic in the Theyalan style, the stuff of RuneQuest (since its first rather abstract incarnation in RuneQuest 1st edition as Rune Power 1, 2 and 3). We have learned rather recently about Greg's actual design demands for magic in RuneQuest in the Stafford House Campaign collection of old APAZine articles. The relevant passage is in the first of these, available as free preview from the pdf, go and read that. But that was still just how the magic is to come out in a roleplaying context, in a way different from Vancian spell-casting as realized by TSR, and not about how this magic affects religion. That came with Cults of Prax and the introduction of the Long Cult Write-up, one of the sacred grails of RuneQuest (about to hit us a hundred-fold with the cults books). Here we learn about the effects of cult membership on the afterlife of cultists. Prior to that, we knew about Ancestor Worship among the Praxians, with the Ancestors manifesting as a magical/divine unit to aid their descendants, as the only form of afterlife anybody had described. Yes, Etnilrist and his troop had been to Hell and Back, but they had mainly encountered demons, not dead people.

In Genert's Garden, both the human and the animal parts of the Beast Nomads were equally sentient. WIth Waha's Covenant, the eaters gained quite a bit cogition, and the eaten may have given up some. Restoring Genert might overturn that... To Genert, beasts and humans are quite likely equally valuable. The civilized folk were the Tada-shi, the people of Tada, Vingkot's in-laws. Nowadays they live in conditions only a little better than Greater Darkness squalor - they enjoy the fertility of the oases, but are exploited to the bone by the animal nomads.

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That spirit is called the White Bull, and was bound to/by Argrath, leading all the able-bodied young warriors astray into the western wetlands. Of course, a white heifer might counterbalance that.

I think it would take quite a high mystical insight to be able to fully master both shamanism and sorcery. At which point you would wonder why bother, and instead wield primal magic without the restrictions of either system at your well-meditated-upon will.

I am fairly convinced that there will be other people besides Argrath to achieve apotheosis. Things like that happen all the time (well, once or twice per century and a million people, to give an entirely arbitrary guesstimate, prove me wrong). With the Lunar Empire promoting a much higher rate of ascension to the Red Moon, whether that is going to prove to be a permanent apotheosis or just a Glamour. Reawakening deities like Baroshi, Tanian and whoever else may have made it back into the sky is a symptom of the Hero Wars, as are the five Arkats. None of these are (yet) big news like e.g. the Crimson Bat was when ridden home by Teelo Estara (who herself was even bigger news). Reassembling Genert and Tada are the big possibilities east of Sartar. Repairing Basmol directly clashes with attempts to reassemble Tada, as both claim the lion skin/loincloth. Getting back all those lost sons of Eiritha and the Storm Bull would be an extraordinary feat in the Wastes. Although, if accompanied by Genert, possibly another nail into the coffin of Waha's Covenant. Making Eiritha rise up from her hills to greet her returned father would be another strange change completely ruining Prax. The return of the Redwood Forest savannah would be little more than a footnote to that. Bringing back the rivers of the Wastes, or bringing in a replacement river for Seolinthur might be feasible, too. How such deep Sea lore would make its way into the dry parts, and called in by whom would be another weird matter, but the River of Cradles Troubled Waters heroquest might be a good start. (On a comparable scale to the major task as the difference between bringing back the Red Cows or bringing back the Aurochs from the giants' stead in the Cinsina campaign.) A Praxian happy end would see the Wastes restored to chaparral, with year-around fertile spots available and oases awakened. Such a state has never been before, however. It would take some heavy lifting in terms of heroquesting to imprint such a mythical non-past onto the remains of Genert's Garden (which was far lusher and had no need for the Covenant). But maybe the chaos-tainted dwarfs of the Tunneled Hills might be tricked into a travesty of the Somelz project achieving such an end?

Briefly, at least. Those big nasties need food.

Both bison and sables would roam the wild pastures of Sartar, except that a combination of hunting and transhumant herding makes the region less desirable for the herds. Small groups will get by just fine, but larger herds like in Prax are unlikely to form. (At least not until Argrath brings bison folk into Dinacoli lands.)