Joerg

7 hours ago, davecake said:

I definitely don’t share this feeling. We’ve known the Praxians, a very anti-Chaos culture, will use broo as mercenaries. A temporary alliance with Chaotic beings for pragmatic reasons does not seem to make you Chaotic. I think Chaotic taint is a personal thing from personal acts. 

At least in the updated French edition of Nomad Gods (Les Dieux Nomades, using the Charette rules rather than Greg's original, often fiddled with result tables) suggested that the player allying Chaos would suffer a -1 on all die rolls from the moment of alliance onward, which is a major hindrance under those rules, halving the maximum possible damage.

3 hours ago, soltakss said:

Don't forget that the excellent Nomad Gods has many of the Deities of Prax present and incarnated on the gameboard. The Hero Wars allows such things.

The tribal deities (or spirits) seem to have been available already prior to the Hero Wars. Nomad Gods is about the Jaldon games, communal training exercises/holy ritualized warfare between the tribes.

No idea whether bringing along the tribal deities would work outside of Sacred Prax and/or the Wastes. The oasis spirits are localized entities which may be unavailable outside of the Praxian theater.

This might compare to the combo of Rathor and Harrek, with the difference that Harrek's taxidermy stunt changed who is in the driver's seat.

2 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

I know some people in Florida with orange skin but where in Glorantha? Does orange skin signify or register as chaotic?

Orange skin is a possibility for Orlanthi - there was a Pol Joni hero of Humakt with orange skin mentioned in the Cults of Prax write-up.

12 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

Cut open an alligator or a shark, and you may find recognizable chunks of their most recent meal, who they attempt to swallow whole if they can, or in big pieces because they bite but  don't chew..  But ogres, being basically people, chew.  The ogre might call your bluff because he knows he chews.

Use the Trickster spell Vomit on the guest, then Heal Body. The Gloranthan version of rescuing Red Riding Hood, if coupled with a Resurrection.

Overall I am reminded of a certain Babylon 5 episode

16 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Could be, or it is another attempt to render motion blur in static form: Fate is the Truth as it rolls over us leaving only bonemeal and meat paste — Rota Fortunae — because Fate and Luck are the same. Fate is capricious. Truth is arbitrary. What is is accidental.

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The understanding of Luck probably depends on your linguistic background.

In German language, Luck ("Glück") is always fortunate. "Bad Luck" is not a term in German, the phrase would be similar to "dry water". There is "Unglück", which doesn't mean "Bad Luck" but rather catastrophe or bad accident - the German word for that is "Pech" - a word that also means pitch, possibly associated with not-luck in the meaning of the bad stuff that the devils shovel with their forks in Hell sticking to someone. (Ok, there is "unglücklich" in the meaning of "unlucky", but that English language term in itself implies that luck is something positive.)

In French, Luck translates as "chance", a term that is neutral in itself, requiring a "bonne chance" as a blessing rather than the "lots of luck" German term "Viel Glück" which does not mean we wish each other a very randomized day.

English, inheriting from both these languages, sits somewhere in between.

French "chance" implies randomness, but there is a Gloranthan rune for that already: Disorder.

Fate on the other hand is a pre-determined outcome. In Greek myth, none of the deities can change a fate once it is assigned. Some mortal heroes (like the demigod Achilles) get to choose their fate, gods never do.

This does sound a lot like the Cosmic Compromise that bars the deities from exerting Free Will upon the World of Time or the Godtime following the Greater Darkness. Sending city-uprooting divine boars like Gouger in retribution is within the response patterns to mortal worship and willful negligence thereof.

leo.org offers a lot of alternate terms for the German translation of Fate (Schicksal), including fortune, lot, luck, destiny, doom.

Fate is tied to the concept of Free Will, something that moral philosophers (and jurisdiction) rave about and modern physicists like Sabine Hossenfelder cannot accommodate in their deterministic world view. But hey, we aren't discussing the real world here, but our fairy playground Glorantha, and in at least one important approach by Greg on the topic of heroquesting involves the abilities of mortal heroes to spend a currency called Free Will on imprinting themselves or their feats onto Godtime and the Hero Planes. Exchanging it for Fate, I suppose?

People can bind themselves to Fate - like Argrath swearing upon the "Styx" to tear down that Red Moon (or perish trying). (In RuneQuest terms, he acquires a surefire passion, possibly somewhat re-usable in heroquesting ventures, and possibly a slot or three of imprinting his Other Side actions onto Godtime.) Other people are born into a fate, like Jar-eel (who still has to work on achieving it).

Fate might be related to Truth and geases. A geas taken is a Fate to fulfill, an obligation waiting to be broken. While unbroken, Truth stands upright, when broken, it is overlayed by its mirror image (on a horizontal line through the junction), resulting in the Fate Rune.

Luck is a portion of Fate. As far as I am concerned, one resulting in good outcomes rather than doom. Not only did the people hiding beneath the city gate of Runegate escape being devoured by the Bat, they also seem to have escaped madness despite witnessing that horror.

Earth is the source of Food, of Life Energy. The Seas have always eaten away at Earth, even when it still was in its watery womb, and deposited depleted stuff (chalk) on its surface. There is no way that the waters hate Earth or regard it as dead.

Heler yearns for Earth, his waters are starved for its minerals, but as soon as they touch upon it, he loses them. Only within the rivers the waters of Heler can partake of the energies of Earth. But Storm keeps ripping Heler out of these shelters, calling it dragonslaying.

I believe that Heler was banished into the Lower Skies even before Umath was born. The Keet migration myth has a Sea deity separated from its home, and a terrible revenge by that sea deity's kin against the lands of Vithela.

6 hours ago, radmonger said:

That's a consequence of saying Elmal is a subcult of Yelmalio, when it would be just as metaphysically valid to say Yelmalio is a subcult of Elmal.

Which face of a deity is treated as the subcult and which face is treated as the main cult is a decision made by the cult, and doesn't really make a statement about the deity, only about how the worshippers and more importantly the cult leaders relate to the deity. So yes, equally valid from a God Learner perspective, without taking note of secondary characteristics like "Is Lightfore a child of Dendara?"
There are also different ways to pronounce the name of a deity. When English-speaking people mention "zooss" I need to do a mental translation into "tsoys" to understand Zeus and think of Dyaus Pater (Jupiter, or Jove, and no idea how the Romans came up with this declination).

And which deity owns the myth about tearing a dragon apart after capturing its breath in a bag of winds previously emptied onto the hapless critter? Is it Vadrus, Orlanth, or Barntar? Is Barntar just a face of Orlanth? And if so, is Orlanth being the father of Barntar meaningful in any way? Is Orlanth just an echo of Vadrus? Are there other dragonkillers using this (or a very similar) method to deal with the serpent, or with a river, or with a sea current? Is the Orlanth vs. Aroka myth about taming a wild river for irrigation to weather a drought, or is it just a rain-making myth?

6 hours ago, radmonger said:

Kind of like saying America to mean the USA, so America is one of the countries in America.

Pars pro toto, a common slightly poetic use of kennings in many languages.

Or a bad case of cultural appropriation of a term coined for the coastline of Brasil and Argentina by a German map-maker. No idea whether there are indigenous myths naming the continent in a consistent way. Few ancient cultures were familiar with the notion of a continent.

6 hours ago, radmonger said:

the Monrogh Doctrine. Establishing the principle that all those different temples, even the ones we don't politically control, should share a name. And therefor are all rightly considered independent from the old Yelmic Imperial cult.

"We never were part of the Evil Emperor, but we acknowledge the Life-Giving Sun."

Part of the Monrogh deal was to accept magic from the old Yelmic Imperial cult without subscribing to the Empire. Especially the Sunspear, a solar magic that was not available to the Dawn Age horse warlord emperors contemporary with Avivath (who possessed it).

There are different cults of the cold sun. The Golden Spearman is different from the Sunhorse Rider (Kargzant) or the Sunhorse itself (e.g. Galanin). There should be a Lightfore figure or two outside of Genertela. Is Vangono a Lightfore?

The business with the Sun Dome remains somewhat iffy, too. Elmal never stood for something like that, and neither Reladivus Kargzant. Antirius (the portion of Yelm rather than his offspring through sexual procreation) might have.

We have tales about Lightfore, the favourite of Dayzatar, fighting in the Gods War, even getting lost and getting rescued by Dayzatar.

Deities merge at times - when it comes to sun deities, we have two cases where two different deities merged into one, along with their celestial bodies.

The first such case is documented in the Copper Plates of Yuthuppa - when Umath disrupts the Perfect Sky, the northeastern Planetary Son of Yelm rushes towards his progenitor and gets subsumed in it.

The second such case was the Bridling of Kargzant, a celestial event which resulted in Reladivus Kargzant and Antirius Lightfore being merged into a single object in the Night Sky. Prior to this, the Fragment of Yelm and the Rider/Horsefriend Wanderer had distinct and separate myths. Afterwards, Elmal and Yelmalio shared the wandering celestial body of Reladivus and no longer had any meaningful connection to the (no longer) Golden daytime Sky Dome, aka the Sun Dome.

3 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

Who uses dino labor besides Dragonewts? Dwarves maybe?

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).

2 hours ago, Jeff said:

9 hours ago, Diadochoi said:

• Nochet (hidden Ogre)

 

No idea of the reference?

At a guess The Smell of A Rat, a Gloranthan story by Alan LaVergne in RQ2 RuneQuest Companion.

10 hours ago, ajs said:

As a follow up what happens(ed) at the trade site in the Quivin Mountains?

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.

4 hours ago, g33k said:

Either way, the question remains -- who is this deity?  (now with your additional query "and from which Pantheon?")

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?

4 hours ago, g33k said:

You are suggesting another pantheon's Battle/War god?  Hmm.  I think it could make a certain degree of sense & symmetry with Battle/Strength/Storm:  if TWO of them are from different pantheons, perhaps all three of them are.
 

I was rather looking at the Celestial Court as the single über-pantheon providing these protagonists. Tolat is an incarnation/devolution of the Twins.

4 hours ago, g33k said:

(as a separate query:  do we have any other insight or input from other pantheons/mythologies (or just lore, anywhere in the corpus) as to the identity of (other masks of) "God-forgets"?  Did he go the way of Splendid Yamsur?)
 

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.

11 hours ago, Geoff R Evil said:

Agree, he is indeed a nephew. However the Lightbringers book states “Although his father and brothers were tamed or destroyed in the Gods War, Ygg was never conquered. ” and as he has the death rune it makes me wonder if he defeated Humakt at some point, either that or Orlanth loaned him death.

Death or copies thereof were freely distributed by Eurmal after Dwarf reworked it and made the first copies.

11 hours ago, Geoff R Evil said:

It’s a powerful statement, never conquered. Yet I cannot find anything that indicates he was. So while he supported Orlanth generally either he was not at Stormfall, or escaped without being beaten….which is possible.

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.

8 hours ago, Geoff R Evil said:

Slight correction I think, Ygg was never defeated, which is ineresting as he also holds the Death rune...its an anomoli that a game I am in seeks to understand in a future HQ

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.

3 hours ago, soltakss said:

In our campaign, an Adventurer lost their Fetch as it was eaten on a HeroQuest. They were not happy about it and had to HeroQuest to get it back again. Obviously, that isn't canonical though.

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

4 hours ago, AndreJarosch said:

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.

2 hours ago, Orlanthatemyhamster said:

Even the purest of Malioni believe in Gods, they just think they are jumped up spirits and we shouldn't be boosting their egos.

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.

6 hours ago, jajagappa said:

Fun times getting that across the seas.

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

4 minutes ago, Erol of Backford said:

Wyrm's Footnotes 15 p.03 - Where did Count Felagga’s Mystic Menagerie get Ambelodon – (shovel-tusked mastodon) quite tame. “Ride the ambelodon! Five Pieces of Eight.” The ambelodon stands on an island surrounded by a moat. It can wade the moat easily, but putting it on the island allows for crowd control and the collecting of tickets... Teshnos?

Weird pachyderms - think Fonrit.

5 hours ago, soltakss said:

You can just use Gorakiki spells as the Transforms, they work in the same was as Hsunchen magic. I don't see any reason why some troll clans couldn't be the equivalent of insect Hsunchen.

 

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.