Joerg

In case of draconic illumination overcoming the human rune is the point of the exercise. Lunar/Nysalorean illumination doesn't seem to have a goal like that, I agree, although I doubt that Jar-eel is ruled by her Man Rune any more.

Hyalor is the Horsebreaker, taking that from him is similar to Yelmalio overcoming Zorak Zoran at the Hill of Gold. Same with Hippoi, really - he might end up with an injured hippogriff instead. Deviations from the normal myth have consequences when taking them to this extent. YGWV, and it might unravel other cults and cultures if this propagates.

There is no indication that Boshbisil uses cooking utensils or skills for the mountain of meat traded with the Praxian beast riders east of the Pass.

Highest level Dart Competition teams will employ chaotics, whether by species, by cult, or otherwise gifted. However, often enough competitors will be required to blend in with the target family's subjects, which makes easily detectable Chaos more of a hindrance. But then, the marvels of civilization include sewers as alternative routes without much need to blend in.

Not quite, IMO - you are overlooking the Heracles element. A son of Orlanth and a mortal woman from ab iobscure northern tribe, rather than of Ernalda. Unlike the Durevings, the Vingkotling lineage is less favored by the wife of Orlanth, despite Vingkot's wives (daughters of Tada). Vingkot had to face off Odayla (or his demigod hero) at Grizly Peak, establishing southern domination over the northern Orlanthi. He seems to be localized around Kero Fin.

Gbaji, the Deceiver. It's rather in your face (although the deity may be hiding behind other masks, like Nysalor or Arkat).

Yelmalio is a Golden Age warriors' cult, stranded in the Gods War and History.

That's where those cescent or 8-shaped shields come in handy.

What is the procedure to receive associate magic by visiting a temple or shrine to that associate deity? Or would that open a separate initiation and rune point account?

In that case, why make the bow about Humakt, and not about the Star Captain founder?

While there is no reason for a Humakti not to be proficient with a bow, there is no reason for the Sword God to provide special magic for that weapon. Yelmalio offers archery gifts, though not weapon specific. Special damage after penetrating armor would need to be on the arrows, and taking a gift on an ephemeral item like that seems to be weird, even if it is that one special arrow.

Funny there are no half-halflings in Bree, or are there?

The Founders are the forefathers of both the two-legs and the four-legs. Why should they sit atop a mount while embodying part of the mount? As far as I am concerned, the illustrations in Nomad Gods are accurate, especially that battle image showing the two Founders.

The Spike or at least some high valleys on its flank was the ancient homeland of the people of Orlanth. The Downland Migration created their sedentary pastoralist culture. ("It wasn't all bad, but we left.")

One note on giant-sized string, reed or brass instruments: Those would work in infra-sound, creating earth-quake like frequencies, rather than audible music. Edit: That said, if you can live with the panicky exposure to infrasound, the range of upper harmonies such instruments may generate might be astonishing.

Look up "Spirit Cults".

The "Bronze Age Collapse" was a phenomenon limited to the Fertile Crescent and adjacent territories. The Carpathian and non-Mediterranean European Bronze Age continued with hardly a hitch for a few centuries more, with the Urnfield culture being a good analogon for Orlanthi culture. They simply lost a market and source for luxuries. Iron was developed on Cyprus, the copper island, when feasible oxidic copper ore deposits ran empty, well before the Bronze Age collapse. As a replacement material, it started out inferior, requiring a lot more work for the same amount of workable metal, new methods of smithing, and initally no significant if any bonus in terms of hardness or durability. The German forests had their share of bog iron, but the Germanic tribes of the Roman era still were starved in metals, and imported most of their iron from the Empire. "Any old barbarian" does not cut it.

River of Cradles needs only the River Voices campaign to be lifted out of the rest, which is reprints of parts of the Pavis Box and Cults of Prax adapted to RQ3 rules. The River Voices campaign character stats might need adaptation to either RQG or RQ Classic. The smaller folios are basically reprints of Troll Pak or standalone RQ2 scenarios, with the RQ3 Gloranthan bestiary containing a few creatures that might need rescuing. Minaryth Purple's yellow page treatise on the trolls from Troll Gods, the Mostali plot outline in Elder Secrets and maybe a little more of the dragonewt caravan than just the description of the illustraiton in the Guide might also deserve rescuing from the Chaosium-authored RQ3 line. And a Gloranthan adaptation of the campaign used in both RQ3 Vikings and Land of Ninja.

The French complete set translations of RQ3 were a luxury shared only by the Finnish and maybe the Japanese (at least for the Avalon Hill range created by Chaosium). RQ2 has not been published translated into any language other than British English. The Glorantha Classics series by Moondesign made the Chaosium boxed sets for Glorantha (other than Troll Pak) available, rather shortly after the end of the RQ3 Renaissance, filling that limbo alongside the fanzine, mailing list and convention scene. Pavis and Big Rubble in 1999, admittedly limited to 1000 printed copies and no pdf release on the horizon, but available by mail order, and at several of the themed conventions e.g. in Leicester and Castle Stahleck, and I would guess at Chimeriades, too. By the time those copies had sold out the pdf option was on the horizon. Foreign language players unwilling to face the difficulty of reading in English are bitten anyway unless your language licensee throws more resources at RQ than Chaosium does. When the language community comes up with good and playable content of their own, that will usually be contradicted by some English language information published later than the non-English material, and if produced by the official licensee, will leave that licensee in a quandary whether to translate that newer English language material. More often, such material will be published as community content, once upon a time in fanzines or convention booklets.

Color me slightly confused as well, and away from my rules, so disregard if I type nonsense. Rune level DI requires at least one unused rune point, with the DI cost paid in rune points as far as available and with POW points for exceeding demand. Initiate DI does not work on rune points but on the initiate's POW instead, with the rune points not added to the success chance or substracted from the cost. Rune points are a measure of divine favor earned by sacrifice, given for the specific purpose to re-enact a feat of the deity (or one of its allies). When a character is promoted to rune level, the favor may be used to call for intervention, too. Cost of and probability for DI varies greatly, and is one of the few items in RQ2 which were not inherited by RQG, working with a modification of RQ3 instead by bringing the rune points into play. This is a big divergence from RQ2. (Again, I am away from my books/pdfs:) RQ2 had a one point rune spell for Divine Intervention for priests. I don't recall whether that was a one use spell (would make sense with the RQG design), but AFAIR a priest's DI was a lot cheaper and more reliable than any (!) rune lord's DI that cost POW directly. With the RQ2 option of becoming a rune lord/priest, a rune level could graduate to use either method. RQ3 got rid of both the POW 18 requirement for priests and Acolytes (RQ3 God-Talkers, at least for a selection of cults) and the 1 point divine spell and gave priests only the same chance and cost to DI as initiates would have. RQ3 also got rid of most rune lord ranks in the cults. (And RQ3 was my entry to GMing mainly non-Gloranthan RQ.) Having flipped through "Rune Masters" (one of my latest RQ2 purchases, and to me perhaps the funniest with its mechanistic elaboration of the RQ2 appendix character generation and all the cults in Cults of Prax), I can see the point for reducing the rune levels for most cults except for the few society-bearing ones (Orlanth, Yelm, Aldrya, Kyger Litor, Seven Mothers in lieu of Red Goddess, and weirdly also the fringe deity Yelmalio) with some weird omissions like Lodril and Ernalda. Yelm, Aldrya and Kyger Litor also get shamans... I wonder whether shoe-horning all cults into these two-and-a-half forms of rune masters is such a good idea nowadays, having experiences other game systems. Gloranthan gaming has a different definition of "game balance" than D20 gaming and especially old school GMing offers (and that includes RQ2-isms coming from contemporary gaming conceptions despite having taken a quite different course). There is the soft restriction on GMing DI as having to be within the deity's domain except for a few traditionally included effects like the teleport to safety, anyway. Using DI to undo gaming system restrictions e.g. on raising stats in RQ is one of these extremely old school relics in the discussion. Why should a deity care? On mechanical considerations, why should the success chance be so different for the various types of rune master? And why the backflip for priestly DI from RQ2 via RQ3 to RQG? The entire mechanic is sort of contrived. Having a one percent chance to expire/ascend as the result of a DI (as an initiate) by expending all your POW is somewhat cool, but the effects of expending all your POW but 1, 2 or 3 give a totally uncool result. I have played a character with a starting POW of 5, and while that sucked for a while, he got over it inside a few adventures and a Sacred Time freefer. The mechanic is as contrived as is the hero point currency in HeroQuestWorlds. The rather low chance to succeed for any but a few select cults' rune lords just to break a game mechanic (like "unraisable stats" or "stat ceiling") feels extremely old school, and might be hard to explain to people joining after the height of the Grognardian Age. What's the mythical reason for the success chance be so different for the various types of rune master? There seems to be an agreement that a rune master (or even a mere initiate) achieving a successful Divine Intervention request doesn't break the Compromise or the magical stability of the world (much). DI as a low to reasonable chance to Get Out of Fix is a useful counterbalance for bad dice luck in RuneQuest combat (or too good dice luck for the opposition). To have something like that is a good countermeasure for that design choice, but why shoe-horn breaking the game system in non-critical situations onto this not overly exciting mechanic? Disclaimer: I had most of my experiences roleplaying in Glorantha in Hero Wars/HeroQuest (while my GMing in Glorantha was mostly using RuneQuest, most recently RQG but mostly older editions or playtest variants) or possibly even in multi-player freeforms, which makes me think of RuneQuest as just one system to play in Glorantha, and not necessarily the last word in doctrine. I have also GMed RuneQuest more in my own setting or occasionally in one of RQ3's "Fantasy Earth" settings than in Glorantha, with rules aspects of my own setting lending heavily from rules published for RQ3's treatment of Glorantha and other BRP incarnations. I am still trying to use as few house rules as possible, trying to evangelize the (German translation of) RQG when GMing and playtesting scenario elements for possible publication on JTC. Should I manage to return to a regular face-to-face GMing of Glorantha, I will probably fall back to heavy house-ruling in order to let my players develop their character stories against my attempts to throw plot at them alongside allowing them to tangle with situative hooks that may further my plot or just a totally new direction, or use QuestWorlds once it comes in a user-friendly presentation for both me as narrator and the players.

The Well of Daliath has a few introductory pages, but those aren't exactly elevator pitches. A couple of years ago I had a German language website attempting something like that, but what works in an interactive document (offering links and hovertexts) distributed over a number of pages doesn't work that well in print or as a static document. I definitely also over-ran the "only a few pages" worth of printed text, too, and I lost most of my work to hostile insertion of spam. It is also a case of "know your audience" or their expectations for a fantasy setting. Comparisons with real world history or other fantasy settings matter only if the thing the setting is compared to matters to the audience. And, since you are writing this in the RuneQuest forum, do you need this applied to the RuneQuest rpg compared to other rpgs? But maybe a "pay what you want for a charity" product might be feasible for the Jonstown Compendium?

Some fewer to gas for the gardener of the Labyrinth, then...

Eurmal killed off much of Argan Argar's role when he made Kimantor Nightson the Only Old One on the betrayal of the Lightbringers' Quest in the Obsidian Palace souterrain by killing his son. The race of the Kitori shadowlords was ended before it could spread out, and the ruler aspect became obscure, and the Nightcult became an adoptive race for the shadowlords (not shadowpriests) mastering all its mysteries, making them shapechangers on par with Vivamort's (likewise adoptive) spawn. In Nochet, Argan Argar is a husband-protector and a war god. Good enough for the Kimantorings (the only part of the Nochet militia to operate away from Esrolia) to give Fazzur Wideread a measure of grief in his (very successful) conquest of northern Heortland (except for Whitewall) in 1619, easily outdoing Euglyptus's failure (although in all fairness he did not face a living Belintar). (This really makes me wonder why the Empire had not tried marrying the Godking into the Lunar pantheon like they did with Pavis. Possibly the idea was nixed by the Assiday?) Heler is another deity that lost much of its warrior aspect when his pirate culture was absorbed by the Vingkotlings. A similar argument for at least local occurrances of Rune Lords could be made for Lodril, who is a major soldier deity. Pamaltelan Vangono is pretty much the warrior aspect of Balumbasta/Lodril separated out as an individual cult, without any of the Lightfore baggage of Hastatus Yelmalio that I have seen published so far. Teshnan Calyz is more of an everyman and crafter(famer deity, bits of Gustbran and Barntar tossed together, and possibly Mahome as well. Turos is Lodril as a lord without eeed for an emperor (and actually toppled by the second Pelandan emperor, Daxdarius who followed Gartemirus). Goddess cults with rune ladies are few and far between. The Red Goddess, Kyger Litor, Aldrya (all of these predominantly male lords), Babeester Gor, VInga and Yelorna are the ones I can name without further research, but there aren't that many warrioress goddesses in Gloranthan myth anyway. Something like Artemis is subsumed by the Red Goddess, something like Athena or Morrigan is mostly absent.Kali as martial goddess might be found in Gorgorma.

Not a chance against Gorp. You'd need a special additional enchantment to withstand Chaos. Non-chaotic acid from beasts will be unable to damage waxed, laquered or gilded armor, though, and moderately realistically it takes more than a few scratches in the wax to change that for only moderately reactive metals. YAcidMV. Against Gorp acid, such a layer should give one additional hit point.

The ancient Chinese actually used such a method, but their technology was kind of unique until the industrial age. Iron producers elsewhere in the Old World smelted iron without melting it, then wringing the impure iron at temperatures which allowed some increased ductility, exposing it to further atmospheric contact drawing the excess carbon out. Much of the r-carbonization is caused by exposure to carbon monoxide, which is then dissociated into carbon dioxide and carbon bound to iron (cementite, Fe3C), or "dissolved" in the iron lattice for lower grades of carbon admixture. I fear you may be expecting too much from a low chromium admixture. While probably slightly less prone to corrode, these materials do take on corrosion. Especially when exposed to sweat or human tissue.