Joerg

It would be remiss not to mention the result of the 1613 duck pogrome, the enchanted duck bill worn as a necklace, granting the wearer a rudimentary swimming ability, increased agility, and the immediate hatred of any durulz they encounter. (I wonder whether rostrectomy with surviving subjects wearing prosthetic bills afterwards was practiced anywhere.)

I would play it that Second Sight gives you the senses to perceive covert possession, but that the ability to recognize it may require training, or Insight (human), etc.

Amusingly, the Rokari of Tanisor used to be portrayed as licentious in their sexual relationships with marriages primarily establishing an inheritage for any resulting children, but all this license remaining within the caste. This may have been inherited from the linealist Hrestoli of Seshnela, some of whom survived in the lower Tanier Valley after the breaking of Old Seshnela. (Which means that the Castle Coast will have the same level of licentiousness, and its men-of-all and women-of-all allowed to mingle freely with all the castes. Essentially a ping-back to Malkion's favorite wife, Tilnta the Goddess of Love, who mothered a number of male/female pairs of twins that went on founding talar caste lineages in Brithela.) As far as I can make sense of it, the Seshnegi linealist Malkionism caste system did not (ever) allow a change of the birth caste. It did allow advancement to the status of a (wo)man-of-all-castes. The Rokari system of adopting suitable boys from all castes seems to be a short-cut of this superior qualification, and gives their monastic sorcery a quasi-monopoly except for "acceptable ancestral powers". The breaching of this monopoly might be a major theme in Rokari higher society of all three castes that you can be born into.

The Invisible God of the Abiding Book, which they called (or understood as) Makan the Creator, or if they were heterodox heroquesting manipulators, Malkioneran. The Zzabur mythology in Revealed Mythologies has a Devolution of the One Mind/Prime Mover through various stages of realisation as the One World (result of the Second Action, the stage for the Third Action) devolved into Danmalastan, which then collided with (integrated with) the Surface World of Creation that shares the Monomyth. Ancestral Malkion - the child of Aerlit and Warera Triolina - is an emanation of this deity in its Devolution, reborn in a demigod body which inherited from the body's parents (local storm god, water demigoddess), too when he sired (and/or created) the people of Brithela with a bunch of Goddesses and/or the migrating Logic Tribe that descended from the Spike. All of these ancestries are true, instantiation of the pluripresence of the Prophet who is an emanation and part of the Prime Mover/One Mind. This ancestral link to Makan changes the perspective of the descendants of Malkion, making them descendants of the Creator.

Niebie's prophets spreading a disease only they could cure by enlightening the victims may be seen as a form of austerities meant to lead to illumination. The perpretators may not even have perceived this method as evil but as benevolent, to spread a spark of illumination to as many recipients as possible. The Niebie disease may have been a Riddle. To start with, these allies of Nysalor got access to raw Creation for their powers - the godly beast of the Telmori, and a chance at immortality for the Tanisoran kings in an initially not too malevolent pyramid scheme. It pretty much says so. Use of raw Creation gets out of control. The users of these powers get to choose helpful features, or learn to refute detrimental ones by controlling that Creation to some human-possible extent. A logical choice then would have been Storm Bull rather than Humakt, except that the foe at the time may still have been the Vampire Kings, and Arkat still learning about the nature of his adversary. His path into Darkness would have been pre-ordained when he faced his Darkness Self, contracting the Unhealable Wound from Zorak Zoran's powers - again an austerity leading to another stage of Enlightenment. (I'll idly wonder how Gloranthan history had turned out if he had received a draconic injury instead.) He does not betray them - Arkat's Command grants the trolls of Dagori Inkarth a share in the rich Dara Happan plunder his Heortling allies collected while the trolls fought and bled against Dorastor (to be collected by the Kitori Shadowlords already upholding the Only Old One's cohesion through the older Shadow Tribute/mutual aid program), and he establishes the new colony of Guhan near his seat of retirement, possibly visiting them regularly, possibly in Troll shape. In post-Gbaji Wars Kerofinela, the Kitori Shadowlords were named Arkati (or Arkatings) and vice versa (as per History of the Heortling Peoples), and the shape-shifting power seems to have been available to the more dedicated followers of Arkat. If his followers knew the secrets of the Nightcult, there is a good possibility that Arkat and his companions themselves possessed this secret as well, making all of his human appearance after the battle a rather trivial thing. He did so already from the outset. And my personal ("dumbest") theory still is that Gbaji was indeed the layer of Deception that separated Nysalor from Arkat and Arkat from Nysalor, the perceptive filter that made either perceive the Other as a vile abomination rather than the mystical shadow, reunion with whom was a necessary prerequisite for further ascension. I think that to Arkat, deception is Gbaji's original sin. While it may be Chaos or at least Wakboth's brand of Moral Evil, I regard Gbaji as the evil entanglement keeping Nysalor and his Shawo Self apart. After having overcome that barrier, Arkat spent much of his remaining time among the mortals in contemplation to finally find union with his Other, and then to ascend, leaving behind a bodhisatva-like presence for his disciples which is what the God Learners sealed away or shattered. The fivefold Arkat separation is the result of this, with the thing separating the five probably needing to be overcome in brutal conflict, too. A purging of self, not unlike the draconic path taken by Ingolf.

And of course virtue of birth brings the innate ability to do your caste's work, and nothing else. Unless you get chosen as a zzaburi candidate, when virtue of birth is ignored. It's all logical, trust the watchers.

You just declared the trolls of Glorantha as a chaotic species. (However, most uz would balk at letting Fire mess with their food if they can have it without, except perhaps as a transgressive "spice".) You can argue that butchering sentients for eating is a transgressive behavior that may lead to Chaos when taken out of other mythical context. Funerary cannibalism already is something else again, whether done to kin, foes, or as a ritual to guide the dead on their way. Survival cannibalism in extremis is yet another situation, where "in extremis" may be the mythical framing for reliving the Greater Darkness.

Boldhome doesn't exactly have a city confederation of neighboring tribes, its immediate neighbors are part of the Swenstown tribal confederation. The city will have a chief magistrate and leader of the militia fielded by the urban residents, whose number equals one of the larger tribes or two of the more average ones. Also, the Prince will have an appointed deputy to keep the day-to-day business running with the princely seal (or whatever item of authority is required). If Leika was appointed something like city rex or royal deputy of Boldhome while remaining Colymar king, would that bring the Colymar together with the Boldhome citizenry as another tribal confederation, or would that just give Leika two hats under which she can raise militia?

I posted this on Facebook, but I find this forum more suited to my kind of discussion: Rivers in Glorantha have a headwater - the furthest place from their to which their inland crawl proceeded in Godtime - and a "source" beyond their estuaries, their connection to the Heart of the Seas. Rivers and sea currents are similar in nature, but sea currents never leave their element, whereas rivers ultimately do so, invading a territory that is alien and all too often hostile. Sshorg was the First River, a tendril exploring the land after the Togaro Sea had risen above ancient Keetela in the southeasternmost corner of the Lozenge. People called her a serpent or called him a dragon as it made its way past the Spike and north towards Dragon Pass, and then beyond. The tendril arched high above the land surrounding the initially shallow bed carved by this entity. With its head it would savor the riches of Earth and Soil there for the taking, sending down the delicious stuff back to its source through its interior, dropping out detritus when the good stuff between it had been digested and enriched. Sshorg spawned many children, including mighty Seolinthur, the river that entered Genert's Garden, and spawned children of its own, of whom Zola Fel is the greatest, but also the Teshno River entering that land, and branches further northeast. On its approach to Kero Fin, a bunch of other rivers had parted their currents from the parent current, tendrils of their own semi-merged with the parent tendril. These were the greater and lesser rivers of Kethaela, remaining behind when Sshorg had overcome the upland that would form the watershed between Kethaela and Peloria. Sshorg's head had proceeded all the way to the northern edge of Peloria when its back was broken across that watershed. Essentially, it had become beheaded, a truncated tendril no longer exploring inland, although its spawn still did, to the south of Kero Fin. North of Kero Fin, what remained was a head and neck just within reach of another lead to the Heart of the Seas from which its parent Togaro had risen, although this one led through the Hudaron waters and its child Arcos. The re-connected Sshorg turned inward to itself, its head climbing back the way it had descended. The children of the rivers were tendrils of their own, interwoven with the parent river and sea currents where the parent current separates from the currents of the seas when reaching back to the Heart of the Oceans, but separating more and more until finding a bed of their own. Sky River Titan's battle leading to the Skyfall, and then Magasta's call to all currents (including the rivers) to lend him their strength to contain the Chaos Rift in the center of Glorantha caused the rivers to change their nature. Rather than bulging high out of their beds, they now have mainly flat surfaces and stay rather deeply inside their beds, and normally only the seaward current that used to be their inside remains somewhat strong. These currents still retain some sense of identity when tributaries join greater rivers, and then seas, all the way to the Heart of the Seas where Magasta draws on their strength to keep the rift contained. When crossing coastal flats, these currents may disperse into rather flat bands, or possibly even split up for a while before reuniting on their way to Magasta's Pool and beyond.

The common hope about Glorantha is that it was Kajabor (the misplaced unlimited potential) who was consumed with all orifices to give birth to Time rather than Wakboth (who is both moral evil and annihilation, but born of and into the cosmos of Glorantha). This would mean that the entropy inherent in Arachne Solara's Web is not evil, but that a suppressed evil still is trapped in the world.

The Sky Dome rotates around the Pole Star, which (in first approximation) stands direcly above Magasta's Pool. A rotation of the Sky Dome (at least the constellation visible on the sky dome) takes roughly as much as a full day, but there is a daily overshoot or undershoot (no idea which) which causes a precession, so that the constellation of Lorion is visible above the Gates of Dawn at sunrise at the spring equinox (Day 1 of Sea Season) and above the Gates of Dusk at sunrise at the autumn equinox. According to the Copper Tablets (in the Guide) there were no stars or constellations before Umath invaded, but this rotation of the sky dome seems to have been active even before, defining the "days" of the Golden Age and later when the sun(s) stood motionless in the sky above holy mountains or ziggurats. Planetary motion to Hell and back seems to have started irregularly upon the sky invasion by Umath, and regularly after the disintegrated Yelm marked the path and Dark Dendara completed the circle, as did her child Lokarnos. (Veldara went a different way, following Lorion). The Sky Invasion of Umath caused the northward tilt of the Sky Dome, when Shargash/Jagrekriand crashed the Storm King into the North Pillar. That tilt was countered by Kalikos at a later point of Godtime, and reversed southward, until the Sky Spill burnt away the Nargan Sea, and the lightened Sky Dome tilted back upwards. After the Dawn, this tilt had become an annual cycle. The Sunpath from the Gates of Dawn to the Gates of Dusk past Pole Star is now shared by several celestial bodies that move along it with different speeds. Mastakos/Uleria is the fastest, needs 8 hours to run across the Sunpath, then reappears immediately at the Gates of Dusk. Yelm takes the entire day to traverse the Sunpath above (and the night to traverse it below), and Lightfore takes the entire night to reproduce Yelm's path from half a year ago against the Nightsky. The Sunpath is also traveled by Dendara/Moskalf and Lokarnos. There is another planetary path, the Southpath, which is shared by three bodies - Shargash/Tolat, Artia the Bat, and the Twinstars (a double body). It starts slightly north of the Gates of Dawn and ends at a range of positions in the southwest. There is the Red Moon, immovable above the Crater, usually in the northwestern sky unless you are too close to the Crater or too far northwest in Glorantha. There are thee jumper stars visible in the night sky, Rausa the Dusk jumper around sunset in the west, Kalikos the northern jumper around midnight in the north, and Theya the Dawn jumper around dawn in the east. There is Orlanth's Ring, rising from Stormgate (a fixed spot in the western sky) up to Pole Star, over the course of a week, then disappearing beyond the Sky. There are a few other irregular celestial objects, like Zenith (stationary), the Juggernaut (completely irregular), Stormgate (mentioned above) and a few rarely occurring effects, and there is a panoply of fix stars on the sky dome, with Pole Star in the center of the sky dome. The stars occupy four major regions of the sky, the Sky River dividing the lower sky in a half and then going around the celestial city in the center of the sky dome (as the second of the regions), the forest and the desert. Only the stars that occupy the lowest part of the sky dome get to rise and set across the horizon when the tilt is strong enough. Mainly in the north around Midwinter, but possibly in the south around Midsummer too. No following the sun (or rather Lightfore), but rotation instead.

Unless you bring in terrain and other such limiting factors. The Munchrooms from Trollpak are a classic example of such a case.

Proper Cthulhu style would be to have the armor fade away as the wearer takes on the features of the slain foe, including its memories. Armor protection remains the same, but now provided by the wearer's body rather than the accoutrement. At some point, the dragon will awake into the nightmare of being restricted to a mostly human body.

Funnily this is exactly why I feel a lot more comfortable creating a RuneQuest opponent on the fly than creating a HeroQuest or Questlines opponent on the fly. With RuneQuest I have a good sense of the probabilities which allow the player characters to hit or be hit, and how much damage to expect, and whether or not to be able to deal with the consequences, by having these steps in segments. With the opposed rolls of the narrative system, I have much less an idea how often the opposition will wipe the floor with the player characters (or rather force me to deal with die results that derail the story, rather than player decisions). The most deadly encounter of my career GMing RuneQuest in scenarios of my own was two people trying to hunt a small herd of bisons from the front. One dead, one successful DI costing all but 2 POW, outside of the prepared scope of the scenario. The most deadly scene I had when running a scenario as written was with RQG, applying night visibilty and slippery ground penalties in a hamlet plagued by a weird monster leaving crushed bodies behind, including a third of the party, caught by a whip (a weapon that only became available to players with the W&E Guide). I knew that monster was TPK bad news and inexperienced monster design when I saw its stats, but running a scenario from the text was a test.

While you are waiting, take a look at Nick Brooke's suggestion: A sundial would show how many more or less hours a day has on our planet. In Glorantha, you can match the movement of Lightfore (the opposite of Yelm's path) against the revolutions of Mastakos/Uleria to know about night length, and hence about day length. Zzabur has (or at least had until the Dawn) the Red Sands of Time. Mostal is a clockwork deity... who needs Galileo? Remembering the illustration of the Starseers in the Guide, I think a water clock would look exactly right in that kind of environment. Triremes are Iron Age. Silver and gold coins are Iron Age. Stone bridges crossing rivers are Iron Age. All of these exist in canonical Glorantha. There is even at least one Aeolipile like the one built by Heron of Alexandria. While I would have been happier with "Leonardo the Scientist" having used the name "Archimedes", the trope is the same. Stuff invented and built by Archimedes is well within the capability of artificers in Gloranthan history or present.

Agreed. North and South on a planet or moon are defined by its rotation, even if it is tidally locked to a bigger body like our moon is to our planet. A flat world with an overarching sun path might require different directions, like Pratchett's Diskworld rotating on the backs of four giant elephants which has Hubwards, Rimwards, Clockwise and Widdershins. Things get strange when you should tell which direction to look for the sun at noon. Except for our antipodean friends, most of the Glorantha fans are used to find the sun in the south at noon, but in Glorantha it actually stays mainly above, like it does in our equatorial regions (which somehow have fewer Glorantha fans). Having lived north of the Arctic, that summer had 12 very long hours by that definition... You need to qualify that statement to "at the Equinoxes", especially if you have variations in day length like you have at rather high latitudes, or like you have in Glorantha where Midsummer has a 16 hour day and an 8 hour night. Yes, counting Cesium atom vibrations is tedious, and you quickly run out of number words and symbols. And you must remain within certain speed limits. Finding and isolating them requires some work, too - as does constructing them out of Element and Power runes. More importantly, even though this is an integer operation, effectively you are limited to very few significant numbers when measuring things. Heartbeats or breaths are a common measure, but will vary depending on agitation and exertion. Hourglasses are known to the Brithini, demonstrating that physical experiments work in Glorantha, runic or atomic. Water clocks (or other liquids) are feasible for measuring time. Pendulums are. A rotating device letting out steam when placed above a fire can be used to measure or record Mostali work cycles. RuneQuest spirit spell duration might be a tempting gamist's measure... A Light spell will give you exactly two minutes of light, unless activation time (the strike ranks needed to finish the spell) is deducted. Except that the world doesn't know the game, and things like this might be (and should be) fuzzy. And your RQ3 Light spell will last five minutes.

That is a Binding Enchantment using an animal to house the spirit. (Still something that can be given to a starting character "as a heirloom", btw.) Naturally you don't inscribe a spirit-housing matrix that can be re-used for other spirits of that type for an animal companion spirit. That kind of Binding will fade away with the death of the Binder. Something like that could become a nasty plot element if the creator of your animal companion given at character creation dies - a possible but not really player-friendly way to introduce a plot, killing off a familiar sidekick without much a player can do about it. An NPC follower that will have become a fixture also in the other players' experience of the game. Just by GM fiat.

How would such "support" have to look to satisfy your demand for guidance? An actual play of such a complex battle? (Note that there is a sample of guidance in the third scenario of The Smoking Ruins, for the antagonists of the first year.) In the past, GMs have improvised and winged this, e.g. in the Haunted Ruins module that got played by the Temple of the Wooden Sword cast of characters. The scenario is in RQ2 Troll Pak, an action report (though rather un-detailed) is in the Stafford Campaign notes. Both are available from Chaosium. Especially these troll tactics have been explored in some detail, both in Troll Pak and in the Big Rubble. How such situations play out depends on the GM and the players about as much as on the context given by the scenario material. I made my first steps in such a direction with the RQ3 Vikings box, which had a very useful booklet with pre-rolled adversary or allied vikings for the GM to pick individuals from and to send into the breach. RQG has something similar in the Starter Set - generalized stat blocks for normal residents of Jonstown and some more experienced upgrades thereof. It also has the sample characters. The rest is a learning experience, taking into account the possible consequences of e.g. Divine Intervention or of coordinated NPC tactics, or of less well known rune spells suddenly landing in the situation.

The general agreement seems to be that a Gloranthan year is the equivalent of a terrestrial year for biological purposes. Day length, while measured in 24 hours by some, doesnt have to be the same as the terrestrial day, although it might. (It does work as a standard circadian cycle.) YGWV - play with whatever concept gives you a narrative kick, or ignore such minor discrepancies if they don't make a fun story to explore for you and your (current) group.

You might remember the warrior dragonewt by the name of Inoi Sessele in Griffin Mountain Dream Dragons don't exactly re-incarnate after having undergone utuma, although they might well be a recurring dream of their "ancestor", and at the very least they will be something like a piece of memory for the dreaming dragon. Now, if somebody successfully bonded with an armor made from that dragon's skin (or possibly a whole set of matching armors, possibly for the whole party, considering the size of such a dream dragon), that piece of dream and/or memory may be (temporarily) lost to the dreaming dragon, but keep drawing magic from it. Sooner or later, the Inoi Sessele story might have to be acted out by that dreaming dragon, or at least by some dream dragon emanated in stead of the slain one. Do true dragons shed skin and/or scales? If they do, do they routinely devour what they shed to avoid being targeted via sympathetic magic? Can they overlook small pieces (much like Siegfried did not notice the linden leaf on his shoulder)? There is a remote chance that dream dragon material that is destined to disappear after some time (often only after years) might be stabilized by bits and pieces of the dreaming True Dragon. And given that dragons can pull their environment in to form a gigantic body, there may be ambient former material of the dragon in the region, possibly as soil or rock. If that dreamer was the Brown Dragon, residual draconic matter will be at the site of the New Lunar Temple, with some ruins possibly still accessible after the eating. And possibly there will have been people visiting that site and taking souvenirs, such s dust or temple pieces or... TLDR: there is some creative potential here that might be fun to explore.

Such "dark alchemists" could be good associated members and customers of the alchemists' guild and the knowledge temple, with something like a "registered small business" e.g. in antidotes (which require the same ingredients as venoms). In the Rubble, the Black Fang poisoners may run material collection quests for the guild. The Knowledge Temples are massive money sinks, and while royal stipends are nice, personal luxuries and rare book demands may exceed those stipends, which explains their astronomical research fees. The associated guilds like alchemists, perfumers, parchment/paper makers etc. serve as money-makers and don't ask too many questions about their customers.

There is slightly more text in the now semi-canonical and out-of-print HeroQuest publication "Dragon Pass: Land of Doom - A Gazetteer of Kerofinela". And there was some online discussion about that, possibly already somewhere in the mailing list archives at http://glorantha.steff.in , or possibly in the Google+ archives that ended up on Tapatalk IIRC.

RuneQuest monsters or beasts are rather easy to design. The Third Edition had a range of tables for hit locations which calculated hit points by simple fractions, but the current edition has switched back to less mathematically elegant lookup tables that scale better at extreme values of SIZ and/or CON. If you can find it second hand, the Games Workshop hardcover of the generic RQ3 bestiary is a good set of examples to modify for other creatures of a less Gloranthan spin, and the Alternate Earth RQ3 boxes for Vikings and Land of Ninja have adaptations to those myths and ecologies. What really makes RuneQuest monsters apart is their role in myth and ecology, and the resulting typical behaviors upon contacting them. Those take some work if you create your own or if you want to flesh out why this species from game X (say Talislanta) appears in your game setting, if your game and your players need any such justifications. Human opponents are a lot more typical in RuneQuest than in other rpgs. With significantly different background cultures., and cults, this human variability replaces a lot of the humanoid monsters say from the goblin range. Glorantha outside of Dragon Pass has plenty monsters which aren't that hard to put into stats. Some have been statted out in RQ2 or RQ3, or have just received descriptions like e.g. the Pamaltelan Hoolars. There are various antigod races with a generally humanoid body (although parts may be grotesquely enlarged), like the huan-to of the Shan Shan mountains separating Kralorela from Pent and Genert's Wastes, or the gorgers of Kimos. We have other names, with other grotesque details hinted, that can easily be extrapolated from that, or from troll stats (just another race of underworld humanoids, after all). Do you want the Starspawn of Cthulhu as RuneQuest monsters? We have hit locations for Walktapi and for winged dragonewts pr Wind Children to adapt. Balrogs? Use Cacodemon, or in case of doubt dragonewt ruler hit locations.

Aggar has a few possible EWF remnants. The City of Ten Thousand Magicians had been ravaged by its former uz student from Yolp, but somehow survived. Possibly the anti-dragon alliance considered that troll raid sufficient to cleanse the draconic taint (and more importantly, grab all the valuable plunder). The city might have had a short troll occupation - not really comparable to Old Pavis, but possibly some similarities. Plus there is that prophecy... Ormsgone Valley is the logical place for any mystics attempting to harmonize with the Red Dragon and its dream. Karse may be an outpost and possibly a recruitment center. The school might actually be inside the dragon's dream. The Green Dragon is too recent to have any EWF attachment, and even more so for the Brown Dragon Lair beneath the devoured New Lunar Temple. Ormsfang in the Rockwoods might have something. If the Black Dragon of Cliffhome has anything, Cragspider will have acquired that.

One of the functions of a self-assembling von Neumann drone is self replication after having completed its cycle of self-assembly. This would have begun after completing the elemental balance, a process that got disrupted by the Birth of Umath rather than the manufacturer of the Moon engines which were to be the child drones. One surviving early prototype was found in the Feldichi ruins of Dorastor, the Pseudocosmic Egg which was used to breed Osentalka, the Perfect God. The limitation of the Young Elementals to Darkness, Water, Earth and Fire either suggests that this was the entire list of pre-designed elements (the absence of a Bronze caste of Mostali, with a Brass caste as one of the three derivations of the Tin caste instead, seems to support this) or that this was one of possibly several items under construction. The moons of the Storm Age may have been other such mechanisms prematurely released by the birth of Umath, with the one resulting in Nysalor and Arkat possibly being rather far from completion.