Joerg

In the Mostali cameo in Elder Secrets, there is a Tin Dwarf who can control a dinosaur. Judging from the WBRM / Dragon Pass board game, controlling dinosaurs is an open secret in Dragon Pass. The dinosaur units can be allied just by moving into their location.

There is also the thorny bit about obligations as a host when the person suspected is there under oaths of hospitality. There is no exception to hospitality even for chaotic entities. In fact, reneging on hospitality may be a chaotic act, depending on the culture.

The question is how much the Waertagi would be interested in a dryland city next to their drydock. The drydock apparently stems from the Flood Period, when Prax still was a fertile savannah with cities and holy places galore, and the animal nomads just migratory guests to the Tada-Shi. These ancestors of the Oasis Folk would be the likely citizens of the dryland port, possibly with some Brithini transported there for sorcerous support (possibly ancestors of (some of) the God Forgotten).

No idea of the reference? At a guess The Smell of A Rat, a Gloranthan story by Alan LaVergne in RQ2 RuneQuest Companion.

At a guess, non-hostile contact with High Wyrm, the resident nest-city. The 'newts have needs which they may even out with granting passage or leaving grazing herds alone.

Strength can have other avatars - Earth Kings (including Lodril), the Seas (the God Forgot people were survivors of the Flood, and their lands witnessed Worcha's rage first hand), some of the Storms (both Vadrus and Storm Bull are associated with strength). I am wondering at the concept of Battle (as in contest between two teams of roughly equally powered contestants), as this form of conflict distributed over two groups of adversaries doesn't seem to be in keeping with how the Golden Age worked. Well into the Gods War, we have conflicts decided between individuals or at least champions rather than the big melee. Did Kargan Tor host mainly duels, or did he also preside over team events? I was rather looking at the Celestial Court as the single über-pantheon providing these protagonists. Tolat is an incarnation/devolution of the Twins. There is still a chance that the forgotten (or forgetting) deity was Malkion the Sacrifice, the founding ancestor going AWOL. Who may have been the one who gave his golden son the task of ruling or overseeing his realm.

Death or copies thereof were freely distributed by Eurmal after Dwarf reworked it and made the first copies. Given his situation growing up with some the worst bullies as father and siblings, either Ygg was extremely powerful or shrewd in avoiding conflict with his immediate kin.

Ygg usually is a nephew of Humakt rather than a brother, the same generation as Barntar or Voriof. If Ygg was never defeated, he seems to have been absent from the Battle of Stormfall on his brother's (or father's) Glacier.

Getting eaten is not necessarily the same as being destroyed, which makes a Red Riding Hood heroquest to retrieve it sort of feasible.

This superimposition shows the fallacy of such comparisons with projected maps away from the Equator. Placed that far north, Genertela is a lot smaller than placed further south (e.g. across Mexico) with the map of the USA remaining the same, due to the shortening of the latitudinal circles. On the other hand, this used to create a lot of wiggle room. Less now with the maps for the Argan Argar Atlas, where a hex is five miles long. (The large diagonal, the side, or the distance between parallel sides of the hex, though?) But even though surface Glorantha is supposed to be a continuous and mostly flat surface (the height of Top of the World or Kero Fin is just a fraction of a percent of the distance across Genertela), this doesn't necessarily mean that there is the same amount of surface land between pairs of two points a fixed distance apart. The mythical make-up of a place may fold some space in the webbing of Arachne Solara's patchwork world. Major events can fold in or out bits of reality, like most recently between the start and the end of the Syndics' Ban in Fronela where ruins of cities on the Janube appeared or disappeared.

Much like the first commandment delivered by Moses clearly acknowledges the existence other gods than JHV. The chosen people just aren't supposed to worship them side by side with JHV. Whether they may be worshipped as subservient to JHV is not explicitely stated - that there was a female goddess also receiving worship in Salomo's Temple (and other temples) until the reign of Hosiah, if I remember the Kings correctly. The difference to Malkioni is that there were animal sacrifices in Salomo's temple and the Second Temple. The Invisible God stands outside of the hierarchy of the Gloranthan deities, whether original runic entities or their heirs after the Compromise, or the High Gods of the Celestial (or Gloranthan) Court before them. There are a few Malkioni-exclusive entities that are part of the hierarchy - Malkion the Founder as a Burta descendant of Storm and Sea Srvuali (or as the original owner of the Man Rune?), or his grandson Yingar the Messenger, both also ascended entities, and Zzabur, whose writings claim him to be one of the Maseren (original rune owners), too.

This overlay of Greg's maps re-discovered a few years ago may be the most detailed treatment of the region we are going to get (although prettier when regional supplements come). There used to be other images of these maps online, but a quick search of the Well did not turn up results within two minutes.

The Doraddi cult of Pamalt (a bit more than Tada in Genertela) and the Aldryami are at odds. The Male Earth of Pamaltela and the forests are close allies. Different aspects of the same deity, I guess.

Maybe ask the Mostali - they shipped dinos from Slon to Jrustela. Shoveltuskers are small compared to that. Or the Vadeli.

Weird pachyderms - think Fonrit.

Gorakiki Trolls don't usually claim insect ancestry, unlike Hsunchen (and Orlanthi) who claim descent from totemic beasts. Other than Cragspider (and possibly troll victims of Bagog), I am not aware of any troll-arthropod hybrids.

Varmandi are in a state of feud with the Orlevings who control the valley Greenstone occupies, which makes pilgrimages or passage quite problematic unless they follow a non-feuding leader as sworn followers (if only for the trip). You don't usually grant hospitality to feuding foes, except when they come under emissary signs.

European serfdom, for a start, and similar practices in East Asia. You'll receive this week's Delecti Award for thread necromancy. 😄

High level politics are likely to be part of the underwater portion of the icebergs that are the initial encounters and antagonists faced by the player characters. Whether you have an investigative game or your players act as troubleshooters for hire, as you play a campaign you will learn about the people backing or controling your antagonists or possibly your patrons or your community. Sometimes your economical struggle is the result of House rivalries above your own community, and those House rivalries in turn may be influenced by the greater politics. Sometimes your players might work toward resolving a conflict by negotiation and compromise, at other times they might be involved in the decisive victory of one of the parties (and it may well be possible that they work for the losing side in that outcome, possibly losing a patron, possibly being introduced to some other deeper scheme). Other than houses (or clans or tribes) there will be guilds (similar, but not identical), temples (and temple factions), secret societies and civic associations, and factions and organisations operating outside of the law (smugglers, thieves, ransom hunters, spies, unlicensed slavers and slave-catchers), foreigners or outside the species (troll connections, dwarf contacts, elf agents, ducks, beastfolk, merfolk, newtlings, magisaurs, dragonewts).

I wonder whether that comes from the Al-Hazara caravanserai in the City of Carse which had images of camels being loaded. The other source for the existence of camels in Glorantha is the Trickster story about Mother Mammal being surprised so badly that the child became the camel. I wonder whether the (originally northern Keshian) Al-Hazaras became Kitori in the Chaosium House Campaign adaptation of Carse - in my adaptation I made them Etyries-worshipping Sable Riders from Kostaddi, and unless a City of Karse supplement by Chaosium is going to provide similar detail, a lot of the Midkemia Press NPCs I involved in my adaptation are going to transmigrate to the new city layout without too much change.

Much like with Glorantha as a setting, running an urban game in a fantasy setting (like Glorantha) should start small and expand from there. It takes some buy-in from the players, and having a stock of NPCs, ideally with some sort of portrait, and an idea how to run them helps a lot. Encounters (single or multiple NPCs) or neighborhoods with more color help, too. In modern era games, urban scenarios are way easier to run as the players will know most of the context. World of Darkness, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, Dresden Files, Rivers of London and of course Call of Cthulhu are full of urban scenarios and encounters, and having played some of these will help when facing the added complication of running a completely fictional setting where a lot more has to be explained the further the setting is away from lived-in experience or familiarity from movies or TV-series. You can learn and loan a lot from the Gloranthan freeforms when it comes to characterization of NPCs or contacts. (Freeforms tend to have few GM-played characters by design, but the GM can use the freeform PCs as NPCs with little extra work if any.) Unfortunately, there is currently only one of these in print, the Life of Moonson (unless you count Sartar High Council in Wyrm's Footnotes - 7 or 8, IIRC). Also, many of the freeforms concentrate on the who-is-who in the Gloranthan publications, aiming at a power level that is far from the grass-roots. In my experience, it helps when the player characters and a bunch of NPCs have a common history in the city. Depending on player buy-in and tools offered to the players, you might start out with a bunch of friends, rivals, patrons, friendly resources, reserved or even hostile resources created by the player group. Harald Smith's "Nochet - Queen of Cities" offers some mechanics towards this turnout. There are a couple of Gloranthan and non-Gloranthan iconic urban settings with different approaches. I had good experiences as a player and GM in the German translation (and world adaptation) of City of Carse by Midkemia Press, which offers a very useful shorthand to describe its plethora of NPCs. The amount of names and detail is overkill, but still handy to have. Tulan of the Isles and Jonril also use the outcome from the Cities Book which was also published as RuneQuest Cities by Avalon Hill, and scans of the early 1980ies publications are available at around five quid, and well worth it. If you want to test whether that format does anything for you, check Towns of the Outlands which is available as a free download. Another, sadly out-of-print city detailed using the Cities Book was Sanctuary (or Refuge?) in Chaosium's Thieves World box. Two AD&D city descriptions managed to impress me (and my GMing) back in the days - City of Lankhmar, and Irilian (from Best of White Dwarf vol. III). Lankhmar came with a "make it up as you go" approach which is good advice if you can pull stuff out of your head at a moment's notice, and if you have a framework of factions or associations you can integrate your new areas and encounters in, just like Rubble Runners does. Official Glorantha has the city of (New) Pavis with a cast of NPCs and a few scenarios and encounters. To a lesser extent, Jonstown has received a short treatment in the Starter Box. Harald Smith's Nochet - Queen of Cities and its companion offer a start in a metropolis, and it comes with guidelines and mechanics for integrating characters grown out of Harald's experience running games there. Nochet is huge, and while there are about 1000 buildings that gain a description, those are only a few places sticking out of the multitude. Simon Bray's Furthest - Crown Jewel of Lunar Tarsh presents a near-metropolis on a level a little more remote than Pavis, but with a few examples to be used for a neighborhood. Chris Gidlow's Citizens of the Lunar Empire shows how a living place can hold all manner of minor and greater mysteries, and provides a whole lot of memorable characters whose real world not-quite-parallels by Victor Hugo help memorize them. The Rough Guide to Glamour can provide some of the greater overview over the Lunar capital, and the freeform characters in Life of Moonson offer a lot of ideas for metaplot if you want to play there at a more grass-roots level. Citizens of the Lunar Empire can be transplanted to Furthest if you prefer your Lunar madness a little less overpowering. The upcoming Home of the Bold freeform will likely see a new edition of the Rough Guide to Boldhome, hopefully including a bit of the Who is Who from the character cast in this year's upcoming run at Chaosium Con. Beer With Teeths Dregs and Cups of Clearwine introduce two small neighborhoods in the very small tribal city of Clearwine with their own dynamics, leaving the greater "urban" who-is-who to the Colymar Adventure Book in the GM Screen package. Urban adventures differ in a number of ways from the expedition type scenarios where player characters come well prepared for havoc and crisis. That's one of the points where you need player buy-in - nobody appears fully armed and armored in the typical everyday situations that make up a lot of the urban gaming. You come across information or threats while performing every-day activities, like shopping in the market or hanging out for a drink or a meal. That may mean that your characters are vulnerable when a crisis comes. When investigating a criminal gang in a bath-house, I had a character of mine voluntarily spend half the adventure session in the nude (pretending not to have resisted their sleep drug) without any equipment (even the essential towel was taken), hostage situation and all that resulting... City encounters with more than three player characters involved from the start are possibly the exception, most of the time you are lucky when there is more than one person involved in such interactions. This can be handled in a play-by-post or play-by-mail environment more easily than in face-to-face games with a single GM, as the GM can give their full attention to every such expedition or encounter. In a face-to-face game, a small GM team could handle these separated parties (or indeed separate parties encountering one another) with some preparation, but to pull that off for more than a one-off event might be impossible. (Early on in my GMing days I created a semi-ruined city for several parties, each with their own GM, and a GM table with locations and encounters to take away, and leave their name when another GM's party approaches the same item. We somehow pulled that off as a tournament game for a convention I organized.) Having more than one GM also helps giving the NPCs more depth - you can have them in different voices. If your players are up to that, you could give encounter NPCs to players whose characters are not involved in that encounter with a short "how to play this NPC in this encounter" sheet. Rubble Runners is almost there with its NPC descriptions.

While I know that there are heroquesting ways to bond with a sky bull, "free roaming titanotheres" makes me wonder whether there are clans who have semi-domesticated these meat mountains?

Care to share some links or examples? We can only benefit from more sources.

What could the son of Zzabur and chief sorcerer of Brithos (after the retirement of his father) be rebelling against? The Engrions?

In the pre-Christian understanding of the world, if you perform the rites and sacrifices properly, the deity is bound by its nature to comply. If results fail to appear, another deity must have interfered, and the deity won't receive sacrifices for this task any more as it has become too weak. Nature phenomena are powerful, but they don't tend to have much in the way of personality or cunning. The many stories of out-tricking the devil harken back to the pre-Christian magical practices, and show a powerful but still limited entity that humans interact with.