Joerg

Giants are intrinsically unfriendly to any settlement near Robcradle. That Jolanti seems to be similar in size to the Stone Men guarding Dwarf Mine in Dragon Pass (and might be one of them). The Jolanti have rather un-dwarfish proportions, same as the Faceless Statue. How comes? Unless it is a Lhankor Mhy-worshipping daughter, this would be Pavis himself, his son, or a son-in-law. At a guess the other Stone Man from Dwarf Mine, on loan to Flintnail, or hired out by Isidilian. The other question is whether these are the big brontosaurs (why change the name for Glorantha?) or some smaller species, and whether they are controlled by tin dwarfs or dragonfriends. Alternatively these may be a first visit of some of the giant Jolanti called in to repair the damages of Thog's conquest (and then fused into the giant wall, creating the structure we know today). Speaking of which, the wall in the background might be too even for the original clearing of the statue.

The Dormal project took off from Nochet, backed by Belintar and House Delaineo. one of the major six Enfranchised Houses of Nochet. https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/home/catalogue/websites/old-glorantha-com-news/esrolian-queens-list/ The source "text" was a mosaic floor in a storage hall. It probably had rather detailed depictions of shipyard facilities, too. The boat builders would come from the Pelaskite tradition of Karse, hastily trained to fulfill Dormal's new requirements for Imperial Age ship types. It is unclear who would have overseen this project - quite possibly a kinsman of Jotisan of Karse as official for Belintar. The fleet building was instituted a lot quicker. The Alatan encounters saw fleets of 40 or more ships each, in all likelihood from all three major ship-building sites, and the 1587 eastern expedition had a high count of new vessels, too. 1588 might have seen the completion of the facilities in the lull after producing the eastern expedition fleet. Martin Helsdon has done some number crunching both in his Armies and Enemies of Dragon Pass and his forthcoming book on sailing along Southern Genertela. At its height, Belintar's fleet may have had 180 to 200 galleys (biremes and triremes), which means up to 36000 sailors. That's roughly the population of the Rightarm Isles, but rowers were recruited from all the human coastal areas of Choralinthor Bay, with probably equal amounts provided by Heortland and the Rightarm Isles and some larger number from coastal and riverine Esrolia. Sklar would have had between a quarter and a third of that naval strength nominally based here, but in reality there would be contingents and depots in Dosakayo and possibly Handra. 40 to 50 ship sheds sound realistic. Kethaelan merchantmen had a lot smaller crews, but probably half as many sailors, too. The fidshing fleets may have had a similar number of sailors, on smaller vessels. The crews would have included sailors from distant ports, hired as replacements or to bolster understrength crews. But then, Kethaelan sailors will have ended up sailing on foreign ships, too. These numbers suggest that every fourth coastal adult may have been servied on navy ot merchant ships at some point in their lives. The other major naval yards would have been Nochet and Seapolis. The City of Wonders would have had depots and ship sheds, too. Rhigos and Leskos would have provided for some local galleys. Timber transport to any of these yards would need to cross the Mirrorsea Bay, and rafting on a tidal basin doesn't sound that feasible, which means there would have been merchantman tubs carrying timber across the Bay to Sklar and Seapolis. IMG most naval lumber for Sklar would have been sourced at the upper Marzeel forests via Karse, and Seapolis would have sourced its timber from Caladraland or western Esrolia via Rhigos. Dormal's journey accounts for another few dozen ships that need replacement. I don't think that Kethaelan ships would have used the modular build of the Egyptian fleet that could be taken apart and transpoted overland from the Red Sea to the Nile Delta and on one Mitanni campaign from the Levanitne Mediterranean to the Euphrates. Such a modular approach might have made partial replacements of damaged sections of the hull possible, but without that, bore worms would keep a ship's life expectancy rather short. It is possible that certain sanctified elements of vessels that are beyond repair are moved to a new hull which then inherits the ship's cobold and the crew wyter. A quarter of the regular strength might be under construction at any time. The Solthi estuary may have seen the end point of timber rafts down the Solthi, possibly with processing into planks before transporting the lumber to the ship sheds overland. Otherwise I expect liumber to be loaded on merchantman tubs at Karse and sailed into the bay of Sklar. Artificial canals in the tidal zone will sand up in record time. Martin Helsdon assumes that the naval yard at SKlar will see seasonal activity only, probably doubling the population during those seasons. Sklar would have to cater for thousands much of the year, be it yard workers, navy rowers and marines, or visiting merchantman sailors. And of course for the resident service industry and fisherfolk. Prostitudes and entertainers (full time and part time), chandlers, granary personnel... How many guests can be served by an inn? If 40 is an average number, then you'd need a dozen or three dozen such establishment at times with high demand. At the time the naval facilites were constructed, the defense doctrine may have been that the Mirrorsea would never be lost, and the seaward defenses would be handled by the ships and crews in the harbor. The wolf pirate presence starts around 1605 and may have led to ome fortification efforts. The naval yards would occupy quite a bit of hinterland behjind the boar sheds, too. No idea whether some or a majority of the boat sheds would be subterranean like the Egyptian ones on the Red Sea, hewn into a coastal cliff of up to 40 meters. Signal fires on both capes of the bay might be possible, with another one on the cliffside, maybe 50 meters above the beaches of Sklar. Boat sheds wouldl have had their own lanterns. The edge of the main cliff may have signal fires to convey warnings along the bay, but not as regular navigational aids IMO.

These lakes are inside the Redwood Forest. I don't recall any of them being labeled on the Troll Pak maps of Dagori Inkarth (RQ2 or RQ3). Redwood is an elf forest, and while river cultists will be allowed to travel up the Zola Fel to the Leaping Place, few other outsiders will be welcome. It should be a rather safe bet that there are one or more sisters of Kinope for this stretch of the river, receiving some worship from the aldryami and other denizens of the forest.

Yes, but potatoes have been removed from the descriptions in the Guide. Your Glorantha may vary and have these spuds, but Greg pointed out that Genertela lacks the kind of highlands like the Andes from which potato farming conquered south and central America in pre-Columbian times. The cults are still canonical, but this little detail probably won't re-appear in the Gods Books. It will be a while before we find out, though, as neither the cults of Light and Fire nor the Lunar cults are among the first batch of the Cults books.

Different associates, different mutual relationships to other cults. Orlanth and Magasta aren't the best of friends, but Heler has ties to both. Not really, unless being in a cult allows you to ride along myths of associate cult deities. Tradition, people don't know better, hostility trumping utility - various possibilities. If you can have a cult that is associated with both all the rivers (and Magasta etc. at the end of them) and with Orlahth and his friends, you might have a better range of associated cults of myths. Or at least the cult leaders tell their followers that this is the case, with few of them being able to check whether this really is the case, the cult leaders included. Logically contradictory claims can be magically proven to be true at the same time by using slightly different names. Already the God Learners stumbled onto this when they did their replacement experiments.

I don't want to speculate on what exactly the prince did to sleeping beauty, but that trope is too hard to break IMO.

The full panoply of names and subcults was a barrier, yes. Providing some of these as additional options rather than as obligatory specialization would have tickled my preference for broader skills and less generally inept characters. But you could have three Orlanth-worshiping farmers from the same clan and possibly the same household with different magical special abilities without making them accomplished heroquesters in the backstory. My personal GM barrier was more in the rules with all those simulationist hold-overs lampooned in Nick's "Hero Wars Gaga" and a sudden lack of the ability to gauge the outcome of encounters compared to RQ. Yes, there were sub-cult affinities that were needlessly restricted, like e.g. Orlanthi flight or Lightning.

Or rather shorter: The English language plurals of cayman, shaman and human are caymans, shamans and humans, not caymen, shamen and humen. Basically any word where "man" couldn't be replaced by "woman".

A befuddled person should mistake the attempt to dispel the spell as an attack. Can you dispel a spell cast on a person not recognizing your spell as benevolent without overcoming that target's POW with your own? Can you dispel say Fanaticism or Ironhand without a POW vs. POW rol? You can't: https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/home/catalogue/publishers/chaosium/cha4034-the-red-book-of-magic/cha4032-the-red-book-of-magic-qa/cha4032-red-book-of-magic-chapter-03-spirit-magic-spells-qa/#Dispel-Magic If the befuddled target successfully resists the Dispel, it will recognize the source of that magic and their allies as hostile. Resisting the spell once is enough to make the befuddled person aware of the caster even if the caster hasn't been within the field of vision, and the befuddled victim may act while that caster prepares a second spell, possibly with enough time to strike a blow or throw a weapon before another attempt at overcoming the POW succeeds.

How so? A single soft kick, bite or tossed rock by an ally will awaken a victim of Sleep, and a passionate kiss should do the trick, too. Befuddled characters can be harder to return to functionality.

@hanszurcher That's supplements by Pelgrane and/or Chaosium. There is a huge fan-created project about the Arrolian territories of Fronela in the final stages of layout and editing, scheduled to be released as the next issue of the Escalation fanzine, for free. Evan Franke aka @eknarfer , the main designer on the project, has been releasing art previews on the RuneQuest facebook group and probably elsewhere too. Perhaps it's about time to share them here, too?

Glorantha was hanging out with the Elder Gods, including Grower and Maker, when she had herself organized into the spherical bulge in an endless plane shape adjacent to but separated from the formless Void feeding the Chaosium on the lower end and the Source of energies on the upper end. The lozengitudinal shape is just the limit for the Earth-based Gloranthan denizens, whether mortal or immortal, formed by Ga the primal Earth inside the seas of Zaramaka before climbing up on the (emergent? already present?) Spike. Upon breaking free of the surface seas, Aether, already formed in the darkness of Ga's womb, ascended above, giving substance taken from the Chaosium to the upper hemisphere extending way beyond the limits of the lozenge, above the plain of Sramak's River which formed a local eddy in that possibly infinite plane of storm-beaten water surface with hints of darkness below and fire (lightning?) above. That infinite plane may not have been part of the original Glorantha, but may have escaped upon the Birth of Umath, creating a pressure valve for extraneous Creation to disperse in the outer limits of that eddy. I would depict Glorantha roughly Saturn-shaped from the outside. The closer you come to the sky domes related to the Inner World, the more you get into weird "surface" realms on that structure, like the Draconic outer realms stacked towards the Source, and possibly other such mystical stepping realms towards the Ultimate, too. That outer plane may not be part of Godtime, either, although it would be part of Creation. Ragnaglar and his spouses were illuminated when the Storm Bull cast them out of the Godtime cosmos, which may have allowed them to cling to these outer mystical realms, which they descended or ascended to force their re-entry into Godtime from the north, where Shargash/Tolat had weakened the cosmos by crashing Umath into that pillar. They had to enter the Spike in order to reach past the Chaosium and bring in the Void, wounding Glorantha badly. The wounded cosmic goddess summoned her avatar, the Solar Spider, possibly from the kernel of togetherness that was Ginna Jar, and roped in all the remaining fragments of the Inner World's Godtime. Much had been lost to entropy, possibly shrinking a once vast Godtime world into the dimensions of the reclaimed world of the Gray Age and the Dawn. It is entirely possible that there are shards of Godtime that remained outside of the mundane Inner World after this reconstruction, and it is possible that the Thaw in Fronela or the ascendance of the Red Goddess brought back some of these, in case of Fronela and Brithos as a wedge-shaped insertion pushing the coastline about 30 degrees to the west. possibly re-instating some Vadeli lands, and in case of the Red Goddess providing portions of the Lunar surface. Other such shards may still be folded away from normal topography, some accessible through narrow overlapping boundaries. Inner Dorastor on the Rockwood Watershed connects to a vast range of chaos-infested intermediate realities connecting Kartolin Castle with Arkat's Last Tower across the pass road according to Sandy Petersen's Secrets of Glorantha.

Fake potato - formed from maize starch,, or some form of beet like rutabaga (an unwelcome memory for many WW2 survivors, much like dark bread in France). No potatoes in canonical Peloria...

To make my intentions clear: Nobody should have to memorize that entire list of Thunder Rebel "single rune spell" subcults in order to play an Orlanthi. Leave that to nerdy pub-quizzes. The various suggested subcults in HW did a lot to make playing a worshiper of Orlanth less run-of-the-mill compared to the previous RuneQuest incarnations, and brought to attention a lot of potential specializations, supporting these as possible previous experience options which would give the character a range of abilities commensurate with that specialization. Something that can be done in RQG without breaking the system or the (non-existent) game balance just as well in your game/Glorantha.

Doing so would have rescued up to three units in his stack and force him to make a heroic escape. In the board game, Ethilrist needs to move into a straight route of hexes pointing toward Harrek's stack. That will force him out of his fortification. If he decides to make use of terrain plus defensive doubling there, having the Hound's 10+2 quadrupled as the first defensive unit inside Muse Roost means that the attackers need a lucky roll to make it past this first defender. Sacrificing another unit on top of the hound makes that defense even stronger and gives a good chance to eliminate Harrek in regular defense only combat once or twice. I seem to recall an article assigning RQ stats to the cloak goblins, but there is nothing intrinsically wrong with using the RQ3 orc stats adapted for whichever version of RQ you are using. Just don't confuse using the stats with using all the other baggage and description that comes with orcs, whether the original Tolkien ones echoed in the RQ3 description, the D&D/Warhammer ones, or the pig-headed Manga/Anime ones.

Under the Corbett rules for Dragon Pass, the minimum combat strength to guarantee to splat the solitary Bat is 24 after suffering one loss from Chaotic Magic. Ethilrist on the Hound is only 16 (Ethilrist 4, Hound 10+2) which succeeds on a roll of 2 or better on a D6. If you use an Exotic power, the exotics happen before any Chaos magic. That includes the Assassins. The Bat doesn't get a heroic escape. All dragonfights eliminate the dragon from that game - the dragon fights, probably eats, goes back to sleep, and no wakey wakey thank you - once was enough.

The usual course for the Hound being released on a Doom Run is that it leaves the board before either Ethilrist or Keener Than can capture it. Ethilrist has a move of 7 without the Hound, Keener Than has a move of 10 like the Hound, but both need to respect Zones of Control which the released Hound ignores. Without a few lucky random changes of course over subsequent turns, there is no chance that Ethilrist can catch up with the Hound after releasing it on a Doom Run. There are no historical reports about Ethilrist releasing the Hound in battle. It is a pretty nuclear option without much of a chance to regain it easily (other than returning to the Hell where he found the Hound), so it may be safe to assume that he has not released the Hound with any witnesses to report such an event. (Or a release of the Cloak of Darkness.) In the Dragon Pass board game, Ethilrist riding the Hound creates a stack with a CF of 16 with room for two more full units to participate in battle and receive to CF each from Ethilrist's leadership, which adds up to 30 if he brings two black horse cavalry. That's pretty impressive. Argrath with his three melee bodyguard units at CF6 and two dragontooth warriors fields a CF of 33 for three full units plus three hero/individual units, which is pretty good. A superhero plus best friend plus three full units of CF 6 plus 3CF each from the combined leadership adds up to CF 51, and that's pretty much as good as it gets, usually. The Hound outside of a Doom Run is worth half an army. On a doom run, it leaves no survivors, until it returns to Hell.

Warhammer fantasy battle was a fairly good (though too deadly) skirmish game that you could use as backdrop or cutout for your fantasy campaign. It predated the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying game by at least a decade, IIRC. Whether it was about fantasy realism I won't say, but on the whole it provided a fun-enough-to-play game to decide struggles on warband level. Warhammer FRP provided a humorous grimdark setting loaning from medieval Germany, with a couple of excellent campaigns to it. Somewhat less simulationist than RQ3 but similar enough. The high fantasy punk crept in around this time, though, but it really manifested in the 40k setting, and my experience of the Moorcockian games by Chaosium wasn't too far away from WH FRP in game style.

The UK definitely lost a lot of FLGS dedicated to roleplaying in the turnover. In 1990, I found only a few GW stores worth visiting for roleplaying material other than WH.

Spirits teaching sleep will demand the Chalana Arroy code of conduct. Sure, a shaman could raw-force an Arroyan spell spirit, but that will keep him busy defending against all manner of avengers and questers. Sleep as a rune spell would be harder to dispel, faster to cast and last longer.

Did the statue remain completely undamaged in its wrestling match with Waha? There may be some chunks fallen off in that struggle, too, which might have ended up at North Quarry. Possibly with pieces of Waha mixed in.

For me with my quality of handwriting, that's rather legible.

True. Effectively going into the same direction as Thunder Rebels did for Hero Wars, which had a subcult or at least local invocation for each equivalent of a RQ rune spell. Harkening back to the Hero Wars/HeroQuest era, there is no reason why any one subcult should be limited to a single cult if there are mythical reasons to include the magic in the arsenal of another cult. Sometimes a spell comes from a subcult, at other times the same spell may come from an allied deity.

How does this matter if your goal is to learn another rune spell anyway? Or is the rune point part of a different rune point pool?

Aruzban Ironarm of Delela, Ralios, is known for using his iron bracers to burn captive trolls.