Joerg

A line of sight teleport. Guided teleport brings you to an Orlanth temple where you sacrificed, which I doubt you will find on the back of the Bat.

Taking the deal, but need some time before I can read and review. Which goes for many other works that I bought, too.

What I dislike about RQ3 spirit combat is that it is slogging the Resistance Table rolls until one combatant is 10+ points below the other, or down to zero. That simply isn't fun to roll or to narrate, and you end up with a useless comatose shell of a spirit.

Antirius moved laterally only twice (as per GRoY, both times to the Hill of Gold), otherwise he lowered his height through the Gods War until extinguished. According to Plentonius, he followed the Sunpath after the Dawn. He merged with Kargzant/Lightfore only in 109 ST, the Bridling of Kargzant.

The upper echelon of the solar cults in Dara Happa are actually bird-like folk in disguise. They hate the durulz for the temerity to go unmasked.

Looks like you have what you need to go off adventuring in fantasy. My edition of Drakar och Demoner had one kind of magician with what I would call somewhat overpowered Battle Magic, quite appropriate for a setting where fewer characters know magic. For a game of RQ3 Vikings I would stick with the RQ2 arsenal of magic styles, with wizards left to the opposition, or as the weird hired guy. Hit locations are sort of fun, and not that much additional overhead once you get used to them. If I were to create a D100 game these days, I would probably use broad skills (maybe break up the RQ skill categories once or twice) and allow those to be trained to 75%, and specializations thereof to be broken out of that (rising when the broad skill rises) and gaining their own skill checks (against broad skill plus specialization). Learning speed depends on what you are happy with. Too high skills need rules for skills above 100%, which usually skews the game badly, like e.g. RQG. Sketchy tavern - how did your adventurers get past the door man? "We don't serve that kind..."

It is a bit difficult to discern what comes across as a UK idiom if that's where the author comes from... and speaking as a non-native speaker of English, the same applies for US idioms and US police procedural terms, and I haven't come across any of those in my reading so far either.

I am fairly certain that there are clans with non-continuous settlement (plus claimed wilderness) areas, if only by loss of a former settlement or area to a rivaling neighbor. That said, the central town with outlying farms or hamlets seems to be pretty standard, with a town shared at least in part with a neighboring clan or a non-aligned temple being possible but rather odd. Having clan kin in the confederate city or in Boldhome should have become the rule for all but the most backward clans or tribes (cough Varmandi cough). Jeff's presentation of the Culbrea included several severely undersized clans that would be hard put to combine into much more than a hamlet. All of these have their own clan temple(s) to their main deities - usually Orlanth, Ernalda and possibly a third one. Some clans may be hosts to an independent temple, like Uleria's at Apple Lane. A "symbiotic clan" sharing several villages with people from other clans but no main village of their own probably is something closer to a cult (Geo's) or a (possibly non-urban) guild. A market town is a place where people from further than the immediate 5 mile hex meet on market days to exchange goods and possibly services. It usually should have something like a caravanserai, or at least comparable services. Naturally grown cities usually originate as royal seats and/or major temples with followers from other clans taking residence with the king's clan and/or the temple population. There aren't really any such cities in Dragon Pass, as the pre-Sartar cities usually occupy urban ruins from before the Dragonkill which occupy the best defensible places near trade routes and water resources, adopting those ancient structures even if little more than the foundations are left of the place. Old Wind might qualify as such. The trade posts in the Grazelands might, too, with the Issaries market the temple attracting people from surrounding communities. Clustering homesteads are limited in size by the time it takes for the resident farmers to go to their fields and back, possibly carting home the harvest. Communities with a strong fisherman population are a natural exception as fanning out by boat widens the radius significantly, even without high sea fishing with absences similar to trappers going into further wilderness. After a clan disintegrates, there will be bloodlines and isolated individuals left without a clan. If there are cities within reach, such bloodlines often relocate there, with some founding guilds or integrating into existing ones and others starting some form of underworld organisation. Otherwise, there are a few Orlanthi terms for unaffiliated people. One is outlaw or bandit, a different one is a Wanderlore pilgrim (the term which described Sartar the hero at the time of his arrival in the Quivini region). Usually, these severed cultists are followers of some local grandee, affiliates of independent temples or sacred bands, or members of mercenary bands. People who are outlawed just far enough away from the point of outlawry may enter service with a local bigwig, too, or join a temple band or mercenary group, or they can form their own gang operating as part-time mercenaries, part-time bandits. (Foraging mercenaries are hard to tell apart from bandits, anyway.) Alebard and the people at his tower appear to be clan-less, or possibly a group of people from various clans away from their kin. The tower might be regarded as an independent temple under Colymar aegis. Oddly enough, that kind of "kinship"/professional group is called something else in Esrolia: Land of 10k Goddesses, the Hall. Orlanthi society has been class-based since the first tenants (e.g. from failed tribes, like the Nalda Bin) or captives of war worked on land of the demigod nobility in the Storm Age. With the Sword and Helm Saga the pan-tribal royalty was no more, but tribal royalty remained tied to bloodlines, as the direct lineage from Korol to Heort documents. In a way, King Heort became high king also because he fulfilled the criteria of primogeniture. Sure, he had carried I Fought We Won, but with that pedigree, how could he have failed? I wonder whether that was so hard, as other than the Esrolians, almost all Orlanthi south of the Crossline had ancestors from north of the Crossline. If you look at the Dawn survival sites, the only Dawn Heortlings south of that line are the Garanvuli, one of the first Dawn survivor tribes to fail within History. The Hendriki formed out of some of their remnants, but they grew through external marriages, and then Lokamayadon's reign pushed quite a few individuals, households and even clans southward, leading to the Hendriki king Aventus who created the Foreigner Laws for all those immigrants to Heortland. Oddly enough, among those groups who fled Belintar's take-over seems to have been a higher proportion of Hendriki-descended or at least Hendriki-tradition clans than the general make-up of pre-Belintar Heortland had. Groups like the Varmandi (who seem to have been drawn to the Greenstone Temple as soon as they crossed the Crossline) or the Red Cow (with their Ulanin heritage) would have had their immediate link to the Earth, much like the Clearwine temple called to Hareva.

With all the gods dead in the Fourth Age, Humakt will be dead, too, and there is no more active persecution of the Walking Dead. Accordingly, your monster empire can enslave its dead, much like the Kralori navy already does before the Hero Wars. The Black Sun looks likely to embrace that approach and to spread it westward.

Waha, the bearer of Death, teaches Peaceful Cut, not Eiritha, the bearer of Life. Could be a similar constellation for the plant rune.

For a water-based solution, a hero might redirect a branch of the Styx through the Upland Marsh. Take Styx Water, Delecti! (But Delecti is not your ordinary Vivamort rune lord. His body-migrating self probably can withstand limited contact with he Styx, although his Dancers might succumb to that Darkness. Still, he is probably the most stylish undead, with his harem of beautiful monsters.)

There are the cosy and safe basements of the Castle(s) of Lead (built only after the exodus from Wonderhome) that survived even the implosion of the Spike.

That's the RQ3 interpretation. RQG beasts don't have a Fixed INT stat, but certainly have instincts. Without the need to build up the animal Fixed INT to useful levels for sorcerous familiars and no longer using INT as the measure for how many spirit spells you can have, the incentive to have that stat as a rules item has gone. Personally, I don't see how "smarts" are the measure for instinct. Yes, neural networks might be involved, but quite a lot of instinct comes from the neural networks in your intestines, aka gut feeling. Which is admittedly something only Darkness elementals embody, whereas fire elementals are expressions of intellect without having an INT stat.

Do tell? Is it printed anywhere? Sober Isle or Sober Island is depicted as a single island at the scale of the AAA or the Holy Country map in the RuneQuest Companion (where it also gets its name). It is the first island you see after leaving the port of Karse, and possibly the first you see sobering up after having been pressed into a crew. When Jeff re-discovered the more detailed maps of Dragon Pass, Prax, Dagori Inkarth and Kethaela, it turned out that there is a channel between two islands in that location that may have been too unimportant to show up on the larger scale. Since I am doing some development for those islands, I had to come up with a name and reason for those names, so I decided to make the smaller of the islands into Sober Rock, a seabird colony without any good beaches other than the tidal flats around it, and the larger one still named Sober Island the home for two hamlets of fisherfolk and shepherds whose flocks graze the tidal flats that span from this island all the way to the mainland south of the Syphon River according to Jeff's map of tidal zones on Facebook. The coastal villages and hamlets below the cliffs have a similar economic model, with maybe some gardening but no significant grain agriculture. You can find it on my "3D"-treatment work in progress that I posted here. In the nineties I wrote a silly little scenario for the German RQ zine Free INT (#5) about a dormant volcano inhabited mainly by seabirds before the Heortland coast, never giving its exact location, with some grottos including a special one at the summit, inspired by the Crystals of the Gods essay. Sober rock is a good candidate for this location, as long it retains some deeper channels that remain connected to the sea, in order to allow some larger marine animals to use the grottos as their retreat, so hey presto. The main difference to the wet part of the Rainbow Mounds is the absence of embodied sentients or resident Chaos. Sea caves may occur anywhere along the coast where you define a lesser cliff peeking out of the surrounding tidal flats, with a tidal channel gnawing away at it. Ideally in river estuaries where the river flow will maintain water even at lower tides. Some of these rock faces may only become visible at low tides. Others may be inside larger lumps of cliff material fallen down into the marshy flats, possibly sunk down a bit. Again, you want a segment of the coast with an abrasive current to prevent the cliff face from sanding up.

IMG some do. Others are just a portion of the elemental body of the parent deity with its instincts.

Not a metallurgist but a general chemist. Real World "fire hardening" of steel really is upping the carbon content from reaction with hot carbon monoxide, changing the microcrystalline balance towards greater Cementite (Fe3C) content which makes it hard and brittle. If you use heat without that carbon monoxide, steel tends to get softer, too, as the faulty inter-crystalline bonds that determine the macroscopic properties of that lump of fused micro-crystals softens up, and you might even get larger mono-crystals which weakens the macroscopic properties. Real world bronzes don't take up carbon that way, but the re-crystallization of the stuff between the microcrystals happens, too. Copper based bronzes are basically metallic copper with admixtures that change the properties. Some admixtures are detrimental, like phosphorous (like it is for iron), resulting in really brittle material, while other real world elements like arsenic, antimon, tin and lead or even silver may distort the copper lattice and the amorphous inter-crystalline bonds in more beneficial ways. Real world brass is rather different from real world bronzes. It is really an alloy of two distinct stochiometric copper-zinc components, not a modified copper lattice. Gloranthan steel has never heard about carbon uptake. But Death having been retrieved from the Underworld, where Fire (Yelm) entered as Death, may make fire treatment of the elemental metal of death more deadly.

The Humakti might be able to claim that the death sentence turned the executionee into a walking dead which needs putting to rest.

If they come from a deity, they are cult spirits with that deity's agenda, which is why someone like Yanioth can get her gnome to cooperate with a simple 3 point Summon without having to pay 2 points for Command as well much of the time. Why would that deity's agenda not include some measure of self-preservation?

You'll have to ask @kalidor who suggested a Tanian heroquest when a limited-size Moonburn would be a lot safer to control. That might still release Oakfed, but in a damp swamp Oakfed's options are limited, especially if your opposition controls the water levels.

Glorantha is a Bronze Age world that has metal coinage. Which clearly shows that our world's Bronze Age doesn't apply 1:1 to Glorantha, with the first metal coinage we know about the cast and possibly marked lumps of electrum (a 1:1 gold/silver alloy) introduced in Iron Age Phrygia to pay the mercenaries (who had been paid in naturals before). Mesopotamia had baked clay exchange tokens like the ones you advertise above before the Bronze Age collapse, no idea how early that came up. Other prestigious luxury items like gemstones may have served as portable and exchangeable wealth before, after all diplomacy always involved an exchange of gifts. For the urban food distribution I suggested a model where the bureaucracy would be served without a paper trail by using containers assigned to each recipient. (Which is a principle still used for waste removal in modern European society, btw...) Details. You could deliver grain to the baker or the miller, who would retain a certain portion of the grain as payment for the service, and deliver a product equivalent to the reduced amount of grain to the carrier. Of course, you can only trust a guild baker to demand and return the appropriate amount. Baking requires an oven, which used to be an edifice on its own made of as little flammable material as you can get away with. Rich households may have their own on-site production facilities. In Rome, street vendors selling pastries paid resident bakers for using the bakers' ovens in preparation of their food. Yeah, obviously you don't wait around for the next batch to be finished unless you can spend the waiting time drinking the previous batch. Which you as customer probably wouldn't mind doing. So why not exchange the grain intended for future beer for already finished stuff? The container is the guild "flatrate" token for a measured amount of reward. Much like your public transport ticket for the month or the year that you present when entering the subway. So yes, maybe the measured amount can be split into a general grain allotment or a specific bread or beer allotment. We are talking basics here, not social gatherings with luxuries or excess amounts (those you have to give coinage for, or run a tab), and possibly with seasonal adjustments as new harvests come in or the winter slaughter provides a temporary surplus of meat. Clacks appear to be the oldest form of coinage, created by the Mostali, possibly for when they had to part with some of what they think of as rightfully theirs. Wheels may have started as valuable votive offerings before becoming a means of wealth transfer. Silver pennies followed and became the cognitive base unit of currency. Bolgs are tricky. All of that had long been in practice when Sartar arrived among the Quivini tribes. That leaves imposing a metal currency on daily transactions, rather than running tabs (leaving the accounting to the vendor) or exchanging favors. I don't remember which financial historian/theorist suggested that the introduction of obligatory coinage use in transactions took the control of wealth away from the communities running tabs and favors on one another, putting that into the hands of the ruling classes. I read that a few years ago, as part of criticism against corporate control over resources. Basically, you turn a society based in mutualism into one ruled by sovereign decree. Something like this has been happening to Orlanthi society, usually to be reset in a great upheaval. Both the priestly elites of the Second Council and the Kingdom of Orlanthland did something like that, and received backlash. Part of the backlash against the excesses that resulted in the Third Council was the introduction of the Orlanth Rex model which now put the power into the hands of the king rather than the priests. In the Sartarite model, the Rex is in control over the foreign trade volume, not so much limiting the clans and tribes but still cutting them out of the new business model. So yes, some sort of loss in mutualism may have been involved in the establishment of the Sartarite city confederations (based on the model of the city administrations the settlers of Dragon Pass left behind in Belintar-occupied Hendrikiland six generations earlier). Perhaps more decisive may be the different size of the economical unit in a city, compared to the rural clans. While RQG lets the player characters roll for the economic success of the household, which (at least for the semi-free or cottar class) is responsible to provide the rent in the shape of a certain amount of the harvest, the overall economical unit is the clan whose earth temple administrates the agricultural and pastoral yield and keeps an eye on the other two primary professions (hunters and fishers) for food distribution. Individual hides may suffer from local calamities like flooding or fires when neighboring hides escape that, but usually an entire stead/hamlet or town will share the effects of rain and sunshine on the harvest. It is a situation similar to comparing individual martial efforts with the outcome of a battle. In the cities, the economic unit appears to shrink to the individual and their dependents, until they join a guild, which then replaces the function of the clan. As you and @scott-martin correctly point out, the individual urbanite (household) becomes the steadholder or even clan chief of their economic unit in interaction with other urbanites, but other than the wealthiest "nobles", few urbanites have the means to create hoards of resources on their plots. Space inside a city is valuable, a scarce commodity "ownership" of which gives you political agency (citizenship). The exact terms of "ownership" between the major earth temple (say Clearwine or Greenstone) via the Rex, the guilds or tribes, and finally the urban household may be multi-layered and opaque. So yes, as a visitor or resident of a city without having a citizen cover for your stay (like a guild-master you're apprenticed to, a temple where you are staff or member in good standing, or the tribal king extending a certain or even unlimited period of hospitality to a tribesperson), you are firmly in a cash society, and none of this idea about dividend applies. You may take temporary jobs or short-term service to be given a share of the city food dividend rather than cash, or you can beg for charity or dumped leftovers, or steal. Note that there are minimalistic forms of Orlanthi hospitality that offer you little more than access to the water from the well and a place to spread your blanket on that may apply in non-urban places you visit, too. Entering a city more or less means accepting this limited hospitality of the (yet anonymous) city rex. You may play on your Cult of Geo membership, but while that is a convenient form to give drifters some immediate access to the base necessities to survive, it is another mutualist agreement. You are welcome to take a meal or two without providing more than some goodwill work, but normally and in the longer term you are expected to bring something to the pot luck, or donate cash to the food funds. We have some ideas about the urban system in Esrolia, we know that Kethaela has residual Malkioni influences from the Slontan domination re-awakened by Belintar. Pinging @jajagappa for the role of the earth temple granaries in Nochet and other cities...

Just like Takenegi...

Really? Each household has their own container for their ration that gets filled by the keepers of the granary. Bureaucracy achieved. The container is delivered by the evening, and gets filled alongside all the others. Other than in Pavis (which has less grain than most cities), meat is a special boon distributed widely only on special days, if at all other than as the communal feasts after sacrifices. All non-sacrificial butchery will be done at the meat market, except for further processing which may go to the workshops away from the butchering site. Such as clay vessels with the household's sigil/symbol, to be filled again and again. Why exchange tokens when you can run a tab? Other than Boldhome, a Sartarite city has less inhabitants than an average tribe has members. If you have been a resident for some time, anybody unknown to you will be a transient or a brand-new immigrant, and you will recognize quite a lot of the transients too if they are regular visitors. You might not know their names. Thrift with grain might allow the household to brew its own beer, provided they find a place where they can securely cook the mash, and possibly sell/barter that for other amenities. In the end, a salary of consumables is a good idea. (The term "salary" is the salt ration given to soldiers or other followers for their service, to be exchanged for other necessities, or to be used as ingredient.) Coinage exists, and will be used for special transactions, like e.g. ransom, individual training, the purchase of weapons, armor, or the ingredients for a private feast. Or for your personal sins and foibles, like drink beyond your allocated nourishing beer.

Hardly for free - at the very least, you have to listen to the sermon while the soup is dished out. And you are really really really expected to clear the table, wash your bowl etc. afterwards.

So a communal worship rite doesn't count as a spell? A propitiatory sacrifice, possibly by the weird person in the clan, is unimportant? Do you mean as your character experiences in games run by others, or as how you run a game for other players? True for a significant portion of the citizens, less significant for all the residents. Orlanthi farmers or guildpeople aren't professional fighters. Most are trained militiamen, though, and many are active members of warbands, on a time allotment similar to temple service (or included in that allotment). Guilds and temples have an obligation to participate in defense and in policing, which they may do by including professional fighters in their ranks, or as hirees, or by providing sufficient manpower from among the guild members. Much like the rural Orlanthi do, too? And there will be ritual in the daily tasks, like sharing a meal (breaking the bread etc.), with blessings pronounced. Possibly reinforced by a MP or two by whoever leads "the congregation" in this. When running a game, I aim to include such everyday interactions with the magic of the setting until they are established, then to zoom out without any further need to establish how much smaller the hobbits are than the rest of the Fellowship. Same with automatic chores like taking care of military equipment, tuning string instruments, keeping a bow string at the right tension, etc., stuff the characters will do as ingrained behavior. That's where our Gloranthas differ. See There is the Questworlds treatment of the setting (formerly HeroQuest Glorantha) which doesn't make any such distinction. There is as little reason to abandon that system as there is to abandon RQ Classic if that is how your game has played out so far. There is a school of GMing that says that skill checks are for stressful situations or to determine attrition, but not for ordinary performance. (Otherwise we'd have to roll for "Walk" whenever moving from A to B...) Applied to production, this kind of roll might determine the overall use and waste of ingredients and the quality of the product. As per the RQG rules you roll once in Sacred Season to determine your player character's household's economic success. Micromanagement doesn't enter this.