Joerg

No, you did not, other than chaotically equating Chaos with the Void. Also consider that Disorder is the effort to create a straight vertical line from two thirds of a circle's sections. If you make the possible permutations of such combinations (disregarding sequence), you arrive at the required material for the Law rune again, too. Voi Law...

Actual testing (with @Dogboyvolunteering at Stahleck, years ago) showed that a human able to shed the limbs symbolically (using loosely tied or better velcroed textiles on the limbs, and wearing a hat) provides quite satisfactory games with experienced teams. The "ball" is still wearing down quickly. European style Australian troll ball is (supposed to be) played in slow motion for the trolls. Players taking advantage of the giant referees being distracted are supposedly using forbidden magic and may be rewarded by referee kicks. There have been occasions when the kick delivered a ball-bearing player directly in front of the opponents' goal, with a huge amount of food accidentally dumping into the referee's rest zone. Accusations of bribery fell flat and had to be scraped off the playing field after the accused giant put down his foot in the face of such accusations. Or was it in the face of accusers? Who cares.

Next you are going to suggest that the Invisible God/Prime Mover is a Chaos entity? Silence is a phenomenon tied to Storm, really. That what precedes the Thunderclap. The eye of the Storm. The Yelmic/Celestial folk might feel more at home in the Primal Plasma that is said to be the source for the Animists (and which sort of seems to be understood similarly by the Brithini devolution theorists). The Silence has to do with potential, too, as far as I (fail to) understand it - it is a pre-Creational state of unfulfilled potential. A bit like the Copenhagen interpretation. Darkness isn't optical, it is what blocks the seeing rays emitted by the observers' eyes to taste the impact of Light. It certainly is not unlimited potential, or annihilating you upon contact. It may well be the fear of such annihilation, though. As to black holes, these objects do retain momentum, both linear and angular, and there may be energy fluctuations in the event horizon (where all that light gets slowed down so much it cannot enter or leave the black hole). A realm where everything that ever happened to the object is present and preserved. Sounds somewhat familiar. Godtime?

Who caused it? A joint effort of thousands of Lunar mages, the lives of thousands of slaves, dozens of quests happening in parallel to the ceremony, and the trigger when the questers directed by Minaryth Purple machinate the return of Orlanth's Ring, and then allow the superposition of the Dragon's Head (the green star in Orlanth's Ring) with the constellation of the Dragon (in the Celestial River). The Lunar ritual preparations accumulated the magical power that awakened the dragon as the superposition of head and torso occurred. The Orlanthi dancers provided just one of the numerous stars of the constellation, the Lunar dancers provided all the rest, maintaining their positions in the circular progression that was the Lunar "dance". The encounter was about as inevitable as this movie collision:

The dreaded Storm Bull approach to philosophy... Weird that you pick the left-handed (draconic)/Eastern perspective as authoritative, when the Theist (and thus most relevant) approach has emergence from Silence, quite a different proposition. Yes, the interaction between the Void and Creation is Chaos, or vice versa Chaos is the destructive interaction between the Void and Creation, the un-doing of Creation. The Chaosium is the inverse process, limiting that unfettered potential into providing the necessary stuff for manifestation. While this process does not provide a complete conversion, causing (manageable) hostile Chaos to enter the world (mainly the Underworld where the Chaosium sits), it is the "natural" contact of the Cosmos with the Void. The Mystic way is confrontation of the Created with the Void, allowing a sufficiently "steeled" mystic (by identification with the Absolute) to make use of that unfettered potential subject to their will. Yes. The potential of the Void is like the radioactive fire of our sun - neutral or even beneficial as long as it doesn't directly interact with your reality, then catastrophically damaging. Yes - in a way, Kajabor was a victim in the Gods War, too, an entity drawn into a hurtful environment, slashing back at the most hurtful of that environment. Including Wakboth... Arachne Solara's re-shaping his substance and releasing him into the Void may have been an act of love, something that Teelo Estara felt an echo of when she herself gave her all to Blaskarth. I am highly dubious about that Chaos Tribe. If there really was a demonic host besieging the interface between the Cosmos and the Void, waiting for their saviour Wakboth to open first a way inside and then opening the rift for more to enter. Not just Kajabor, there is also the Void magic of Thed, and Black holes don't cause destruction of information... Mutation, yes. "Always existed" in a timeless cosmos might be a matter of definition, but existance and Darkness seem to result from the same event. Context is important. Exposing your fortified self to the Void can be liberating, allowing you to join the Ultimate. Exposing unfortified reality to the Void leads to annihilation thereof, and that is called Chaos when happening inside Creation (however wounded the barriers may have been at that period of the Gods War). Tapping into a limited amount (and limited exression) of this then no longer unfettered potential is what is behind effects like Cave Troll or Sea Troll regeneration (or Walktapus regeneration, which (the regenerating meat) can even be used for cooking and is nothing bad in itself except for the behavior of its platform) or the shapeshifting of were-tigers or Telmori. While it triggers the sense of wrongness in Storm Bull PTSD, this kind of "non-festering Chaos" (when not coupled with another curse, like that of Talor against the Telmori gift, or unnatural fecundity) isn't any more destructive than Storm (e.g. Storm Bull or the Wild Hunter) or Trickster. Nysalorean Illumination starts out as a different form of PTSD, possibly an apathy to triggers. It doesn't result from exposure to Chaos, but from Exposure to the Ultimate, which contains all the knowable and all the unknowable. Fortification from experiences of the Ultimate can negate the loss of self otherwise experienced upon contact with the Ultimate or its lesser gate-holders (like Atrilith in Eastern mysticism, the discipline mastered by Nenduren, the Master of Stillness, taught to Oorsu Sara who then inverted that. Orlanth is fairly fortified against the Void, having undergone self-fortification in the Baths of Nelat and the Flames of Ehilm and having had his Inner Dragon awakened. The Mass Utuma of 1042 removed all mortal Dragonspeakers, but Orlanth Dragonspeaker remains in Godtime, a lot easier to access than Arkat. Speak for yourself, knave of the Void. I prefer to be the result of the First Movement in the Silence of the Primal Plasma.

I know that your perception is trained on Dorastor, but Chaos is a part/not part of Creation, and in the origin of Glorantha Creation only became. Glorantha emerged from the Void, that seething nothing of unfettered potential, with a strong limitation of potential and therefore being. Then some of the unfettered potential of the Void seeped into the otherwise separated Creation, and that became Chaos. Calling Chaos the source of everything is a dangerous fallacy, spread (among others) by the Lunar Way. Really, re-read Cults of Terror, and the four explanations of "Before Creation". None of those names Chaos. All of those, and more. The Spike and the two hemispheres of the World Machine may have been another "from the Start". There is also all that Elder Gods thing, entities that received prayer from Orlanth when preparing for a Feat (the Godtime equivalent of a Quest, at least before the Greater Darkness diminished all that and more). Chaos corrupted the world, mostly destroying it, until the Lightbringers salvaged a few dead but otherwise unharmed bits, and supported Arachne Solara in devouring the shapeless Chaos and regurgitating some of it to create a patchwork of authentic surviving bits of the world, a lot of extrapolation and reconstruction in between, and (IMG) tucking aside some shards which would weaken the new web if inserted and made part of the Mundane World. Lots of convergent or parallel developments, with protagonists who may be avatars or reflections of some other, possibly more important deity (being closer to the Rune, if that is criterion for importance - having many surviving supporters is another criterion). The concept of the Collision of Worlds (that accompanied the now safely buried concept of Three Different Worlds) is one (possible) explanation for how all of these approaches are true. Basically yes, although the reverse can be true as well - a newly discovered repeatable act of magic will insert (or re-awaken, if you prefer) into Godtime. Once having been imprinted into Godtime, it will (sort of by definition) always have been there. It's not like the runes don't play a role in rune magic, the name sort of spoils the surprise... Sorcerous use of runes is different from regular use in rune magic. Theism and hence Rune Magic is the act of Being. Sorcery requires knowledge, but a sorcery spell as presented in RuneQuest Glorantha is an entity that while controlled by a sorcerer is detached from the sorcerer. This is reflected in the rules, a sorcerer doesn't overcome a target's POW with his own (there may be one or two exceptions to that rule), but instead the magical energy accumulated in the spell acts like a spirit, measuring its strength against any resistance of the target. Little different from a shaman sending a spirit entity with a similar offensive power against a target, only "Animism is something you have" while "Sorcery is something you know" and not relying on property (other than magical energy).

And here I thought Chimeriades was a convention in France and not a contest...

Speculation: rather than entire regiments, these may have been representative vexilla instead. Thus, many contact relic copies of regimental standards from all units in active service, and at the very least a decimation of the regiments as none of those 10k would return.

Elemental Air is more than just molecules (small aggregates of mostly air runes) in a gaseous phase undergoing Brownian motion. The Orlanthi would talk about Storm rather than Air, anyway, and they might be more correct about the Gloranthan element, with some stale low-level Fire presence already availlable before Umath's birth. The Lower Sky never left when Umath claimed it as Lower Air. The Devil's Marsh below the Block has Gas as one of the parts of the Devil. Darkness has some heaviness to it, too. Spherical gravity apparently is part of Glorantha in the Sky World, with the Red Moon the biggest apparent object exerting that force. If you stand at the Down pole of the Red Moon, the surface world is visible overhead, around that blind spot that is the Crater. There are significant differences. Like northern hemisphere sun orientation going southward and Pole Star orientation going northward, where in Glorantha both are more or less directly overhead.

There is that notion "You did not pray hard enough" (or for everyday engineer magic, "If something doesn't work, swear at it. In case of doubt, swear at it again. If it still doesn't work, you didn't swear hard enough."). Dealing with capricious deities without the desired results might mean that you should find a better way to make deals, or you should find a different deity to give your attention and sacrifice. And there may always be some other group who may have made a better offer for the attention of your deity. There is a certain similarity to trusting elected officials' pre-election promises...

Does freezing water turn it into Earth? How much is the solidity of ice a property of Earth, and how much is it a property of Stasis? Cold is a factor anyway. Steam is different - it is invisible while still gaseous, although you get to see the fog that results from steam cooling down into small droplets. On the other hand, the steam lodge is a common means in many cultures, with the evaporation of the water on the hot rocks as much part of the transformative experience as the droplets condensing on the bodies of the participants. Now, is steam just Water (or Sea) runes taking up Heat? Then what about the residual salts (if you use hard or brackish water)? Is that solid also an aspect of Water and Heat? The classical Greek elements are the four standard aggregate states of matter - solid, liquid, gas, plasma. Glorantha adds Darkness, for which we are offered "Space" as a real world physics parallel. (And let's not discuss Moon, which is a mystical thing and shouldn't have much of a parallel in conventional physics.) However, we do recognize Water also as a chemical compound (or really, as a solution of minerals and even gases in "Fresh" or Helerian Water, and we still recognize ice as a special form of Water despite having lost its fluidity. One way would be to regard ice and steam as sub-elements of water, but my theory of elemental Water is that it is roughly isotonic, sort of brackish but drinkable, and its two sub-varieties are the fresh waters of Heler and the brines of Nelat, both still liquids, rather than evaporated or frozen water. So how do steam or ice retain the "Water Rune"-ness despite having lost the defining quality of being liquid (and wet). (There are liquids which aren't wet to the touch, like oils. That is one way to tell such liquids apart from water.) Then what about other typical liquids, like blood or milk? How much are these Water runes, and how much are they Life (Fertility) and Form runes (Man, Beast, Dragonewt, even Plant for blood from elves, unless that is purely sap)? Or possibly even other runes, like the elemental runes for the class of animals they belong to? What kind of vapors (or aerosols) do we know in Glorantha? There is smoke, the product of Fire consuming fuels (weirdly enough entering Air when the flame has too little of "active air" or the fuel has too much of Water). There are fogs and mist, smallest droplets of water suspended in the air. There are clouds, and there is rainfall, but those don't really have the quality of Air any more. There are volcanic vapors, like those that give the Poison Shore south of the Vent its name. A different kind of smoke, with mineral admixture (in this world's chemistry, mainly sulfur components). There are alcoholic vapors that form when heating wine or beer (pr mead, kumiss or cider), or well fermented fruits. There is miasma rising up from carcasses or bogs where Dark fermentation releases these fumes. (Also happens in processes like making ripe cheese...) And then there is Stale Air, often the result of chaotic interaction or Tapping.

Spirit cult initiation can provide about as much rune magic as can regular cultic initiation, but the conditions for re-usability might be harder to meet as spirit cults tend to have fewer holy days etc. Worshippers of Lanbril and other thieve entities might be a spirit society rather than distinct spirit cults, which is better than collecting spirit cults on your personal own (unless you are a shaman yourself). You're still missing out on quite a number of functions that a regular rune cult offers, but a spirit society would be a fairly reliable source of personal magic if you are in good standing with its charismatic leader. In Old (and New) Pavis, this spirit society would also include the Black Fang. The cohesion would be a lot less than an Orlanthi urban guild, and the charismatic leadership might alternate between the patrons of theft-related activities listed in the Pavis books.

I wonder whether they did that in the style of the original Kitori concept, the leaden-masked collectors of the Shadow Tribute that enabled the Unity Council, or whether they were merely troll bandits and troll-friend bandits extorting the Volsaxi etc. natives without the "Equal Exchange" rationale? The Only Old One who had been behind that in the Silver Age had been offed by Belintar, but the Kitori magical subcult that allows the shapeshifting for masters of its secrets is anchored on Argan Argar rather than his demigod son. In those old times, anybody could join (the order of) the Kitori through that cult, and apparently many Orlanthi not sharing their immediate homes with trolls did. The Troll Woods would "always" have been part of the tribal Kitori range for sustenance and magical activity. Now it is a lot more crowded. Quite likely not sustainably so.

Immortality of gods: clearly not the case - plenty of gods perished upon contact with Greater Chaos during the Gods War. Plenty of Creation did, likewise. But it doesn't even need capital D death to take deities out of (expressed) Gloranthan reality. Umath was dismembered and so much diminished that only his fragments ("sons" and "daughters", like Kolat) and offspring (other sons and daughters with known co-parents, like Storm Bull of Mikyh or Orlanth of Kero Fin/whatever the Mountain goddess of Top of the World is called/...) remained active in the late Golden Age. Molandro and Jokbazi did not re-appear after Brightface vanquished them. Perhaps this is one valid criticism that Western philosophy has on the supreme Theist interpretation: the Gods are exchangeable and finite, the Runes remain infinite (albeit limited). Does current Glorantha know and experience all of the runes that existed prior to the Greater Darkness? Hard to say, really. The runes might still be around but currently not recognized as essential building blocks of Glorantha, but then the God Learner understanding of ecology and the minor role of lesser actors keeping the whole intact and running was provably flawed (thinking of raccoon guardians and the like), and it is their syncretic theory that is perpetuated by the Geeks of Lhankor Mhy (in all of her masks). Amount of divinity to "count" as a god: The ones to gauge deities on such scales would be sorcerers, who would have a fairly objective metric of required magical power to manifest that deity through a straight (no short cuts or auspicious circumstances used) summoning. (Not that any sorcerer ever would do such a thing, except as gedankenexperiment.) In praxis, they probably know how much to invest under more and less auspicious circumstances and will be able to calculate an estimate of an unaided summoning. And they used the method "it takes a god to summon a god greater than itself" to call down Tanian, and luckily for them their back of an envelope estimate rather than calculation was enough. Another metric might be "how hard is it for an orthodox mystic to refute a deity", but mysticism and metrics don't really get along. A deity is master over its domain, and its power might be measurable as the Energy from the mystical/magical source, aka the Ultimate through this domain. How much of that is required for a deity to provide rune magic? (And keep in mind that already living heroes and rather minor spirits may have a way to grant rune magic.) (In non-RuneQuest context, Rune Magic might be a Feat or a Subcult Secret if we look at HW/HQ1 mechanics, and there should be similar parallels for HQ2/HQG/QWG or 13G mechanics that could be identified with RQ Rune Magic. And toss RQ gifts and geases, taboos and shamanic abilities onto that pile of Rune Magic equivalents. This does run into a problem as the really cosmic dimension deities like Arachne Solara don't usually deign to grant any mortal use of rune magic. Some immortals or capital H Heroes do manage, though, like e.g. Cragspider. A different approach (also tested out by the God Learners) is the amount of community/cult magic sacrificed to the concept of the entity. The Jogrampur experiment succeeded beyond their wildest imagination. But they might have been warned if they had read the report of Eestern mythographers about that Avanapdur business... Both Jogrampur and Avanapdur (if indeed they were different entities) prove that a deity doesn't require permanence or object permanence, as long as enough power from the Source (refined by mortals) is channeled through that entity. What's a non-interventionist god? Having established the concept of a domain, there may be deities whose domains are rather real (and possibly required for persistence) but who don't appear to do anything (or at least, not anything other than resisting erosion/evaporation). Entities with or without permanence, but without agenda or agency beyond being. When a lightning or disease strikes, does it do so according to a plan or intention of the deity, or does this simply happen due to a random expression of the impersonal nature of the entity or their domain? Propitiatory worship deals with both these possibilities, appealing to the emotions of a deity not to grant a strike that another group may have requested, or appealing to its domain's existential proclivities erecting a screen against such expressions. The real world polytheist model of interaction with the divine is that sufficient appeal to an entity will result in its action or inaction. In Gloranthan terms, with the gods prevented from freely manifesting (what remains of) their powers of Creation applied to their domain or expanding on the extent of that domain, energies donated through worship, flavored by the content of the ritual (which usually will address certain Godtime feats of the entity, or in case of ascended mortals, hero plane achievements). Their domains may include quite mundane phenomena, which may be influenced by larger scale magical activity. One such pair of cumulative magical activities are the Cloud Call and Cloud Clear rune spells.

IMG that which separates Glorantha from the Void was made to contain a certain pressure, but the birth of Umath exceeded that pressure, and the container got torn in places, allowing the void to contaminate parts of Creation into Chaos in places other than the Chaosium, taking away from Creation rather than contributing to it. The Greater Darkness destroyed quite a lot of what had previously made up Glorantha, and only shards of that were recovered by Arachne Solara, extended on the fringes by memories of what was there before imprinted on the regurgitated stuff of Kajabor. Thus my Glorantha has the mythically solid places which are carry-overs from Godtime - e.g. the Paps, the Block, Tada's Tumulus, Stormwalk, Nochet... and there are rather non-descript places in between which may be overwritten by as little as a fertile imagination. And then there are parts of the Godtime which have not successfully been re-integrated into the Surface World reconstruction but which linger in loops of the web, much like non-expressed DNA e.g. for a fish tail lingers in the human building plan. Those may be pretty hard mythical places, too, but possibly having lost their mythical actors. When the Syndics' Ban fell on Fronela, that region flipped some places out of existence and provided others as "always having been there" but without any textual or living memory of their origins, especially in the Dona region of the Janube, but also the Black Forest. Check the section in the Guide and read it with this concept in mind... The Malkioni/Brithini West suggests Devolution, a way of expansion that makes everything new that comes into the world smaller than what was there before, thus expanding the holding capacity of this container by mucking up the dimensions. The mystic East challenges our concepts of reality instead.

Plus there is precedent, that Redbird priest who went to fetch Temertain... Maybe not from our world, but did not disintegrate (at least not before retrieving Temertain). The official stance seemed to be that anything like transmigration from outside of Glorantha is a bad idea. (That doesn't mean it doesn't happen... Dragons might have entered an existing cosmos through the Void, or possibly created it. Maybe a Copenhagen interpretation effect for them? While in the Void, if you take notice of something in that nowhere and nowhen, its potential will spring into existance, but rivalling potentials will wear it down. But that's going a bit too far afield...) Traversing the quantum plasma of the Void might taint you with residual potentiality, aka Chaos (once contaminated with the matter of Gloranthan Creation). Another way of entry might be through accidental interweavings of outer strands of the Web of Arachne Solara with strands from somewhere else, taking the "Hidden Castle"/"Hidden Green"/"unused folds in the web" - theory a little further. Your body might be similar to that of a dragonewt, in that case - a projection of the runic properties (as rather permanent meat and blood) rather than the original. Your accoutrements would transform somehow, too. A cell phone might become a charm with a messenger spirit. Or possibly your allied spirit, depending on your real world dependence. While we're in Star Trek mode, let's just say "holo-deck rules apply" and be done with that.

Sure you can. Bladder on a stick should be a classical (Eurmali) instrument. The magical version is the Sack of Winds (employed on the Aroka Quest). What you do is that you trap your breath in that balloon. The force it extends comes from the Air Rune as much as from the tightness of the bladder. For an experiment, if you cast Steal Breath on the content of that bladder, how much would it deflate, though? Yes. A gentle nudge to your breath and any intruding wind or other air/gas. Yes. Possibly spiralling up, though, with a chance to tie this to Orlanth retrieving Mastakos, possibly on his visit to the baths of Nelat and Daliath's Pool of Wisdom. Or possibly related to Brastalos? Twisters exist in Glorantha, too, including those pulling up water from lakes or the seas. People and beasts do pee in Glorantha. Piston-and-tube pumps or hydraulics might be known to the Mostali, but not necessarily. A similar technology is used by the Cannon Cult, though. And black powder weapons use that chemical pressure force, too. Fanning a fire would be a thing, but the mythology behind that might take some development. Fire going up when Air arrives: that's Umath's birth. The flames getting hotter? See above. Yes. A famous bubble effect is the gift of Diendimos to the Troll Strait Ludoch. Other than Mostali floating castles, no ships would have piston pumps. Advanced Kralori barges might have textile balls on a rope pulled through a tube-contraptions to deal with the bilge water. Waertagi dragon ships might have some form of kidney sewer system to get rid of the bilge and sewage. Rather than swarms of isolated air runes, I would advocate for small groupings of runes to make up the different qualities of air and breath. Thus there might be life-bearing runic agglomerates that further breathing, and death-bearing or at least life-depleted runic agglomerates that are exhaled. On the whole, a person's breath is a living thing, though, their personal wind surrounding them (permeating/permeated by other Air around them). Possibly including their olfactory aura, too. Too simplistic, takes all the fun out of different recipes for poisons, and gives access to universal antidotes without the ingredient hunts. It may have looked like an implosion, but I guess they joined the realm of their studies... Speaking as another chemist, my solution is to decouple quite a lot of properties from the matter and make it a power of ambient runes. Again, using the (weak) analogy of the Higgs Field for scientifically anchored folk and talking of auras and miasms for the crowd familiar with those medieval or esoteric concepts. Soot as dead earth? Mostly burnt plant, I suppose, possibly with burnt beast or burnt man mixed in. Just like air is mostly not made up by single atoms (less than 1% noble gases), I would advocate for runic complexes taking the role of molecules. Odors may take on some Man or Beast or Plant Form Rune, plus other elemental flavors as lesser addition. A single fire rune might influence a whole bunch of such air complexes (similar to the Higgs Boson) for the flavors. Aboveground, air is also permeated with Light, as the Lower Air is simultaneously the Lowest Sky. The day/night cycle is not noticeably accompanied by a massive exchange of air, but over night the air bleeds Heat and acquires Cold, a process which is reversed in the day. I suppose the Heat is devoured by Night, while the Cold is burnt up by the sun. It is somewhat weird that the sub-runes of Fire (Light, Heat) and Darkness (Cold, Shadow) are antagonists while the runes themselves are not. Rewriting physics to account for the opposing forces like Cold or Shadow shouldn't make that much of a difference. As far as you can imply a concept of linearity on Godtime, not true. Animals and People existed in the Green Age, as did Fire, but Umath definitely did not. According to the Dara Happans (well, Plentonius), Umatum was conceived in 10,000 YS and born in 40,000 YS, and dismembered in 70,000 YS, all in the Golden Age. But one aspect of the wonders of Godtime is the absence of worries, the stronger the farther you go back. Need a boat? Take a piece of bark and a large leaf, and you might be good, the symbol is what matters more than the material execution. Although that may break down somewhat in the presence of materialists like Mostali or Danmalastani. The HeroQuest challenge works on equipment, too - bring enough doubt and it may falter. The concept of drowning might have been born alongside Umath. IMG Umath did not just push the sky up, he also pushed the Earth Cube down, ramming it onto the Spike (creating the upper valleys from Earth that remained on the slope with no further to go down), while on the northwestern and southeastern edges the Seas found their way (back) to the top surface of the cube. On the other hand, breathing was pre-invented, as beasts and land-animals would already have had lungs and noses. Hunting by scent already works in the medium of Darkness, and may have worked in the medium of Aether (Lower Sky), too. There would have been no wind pollination without Umath, which means that flowering plants would have been older than grasses or pines. Pollination used to be the province of pixies alone, but insects and some smaller birds got in on that business.

Charmilla, a troll representative on the Unity Council, was said to be a descendant of XU. (If a mistress race troll, she might still be around.)

Sure. Eurmal has "Fart".

Or the divination might show that while the Lunar way is antithetical to the world-preserving magics of Orlanth, these specific Lunars are helpful in the greater picture. Which might be why Tom (whose consumption of Hazia etc. seems to indicate that he is looking out for otherworldly advice himself) does associate with these weirdos in the first place. How reliable can such a drug-induced vision be? Or how likely would millions follow a merchant writing down the words of god available only to him?

Orlanth is the god of trial and error, and his heroes are allowed failures, too. And in that sense the following quote remains wrong. Orlanth's first battle against the forces of Chaos is called Stormfall, and it was an unmitigated disaster, with Orlanth escaping in tatters and much of his household destroyed. Argrath's 1624 attempt to invade from Prax was such a disaster of almost Jon Snow (TV series version) dimensions. Heroically lost battles are par for the course, it seems. Winning some only gives you the resources to eff up royally, beyond any redemption (or recognition). Situation normal, really. Heroic failure is written into White Bear and Red Moon. Heroic escapes from disastrous battles. The denial of tragedy as an outcome is a very Hollywood problem, with happy endings stitched onto just about any story. The Orlanthi love success, true. But they know how to tolerate failure. You cannot win the Lightbringers' Quest (even the annual one) without massive failue on the way. If you do, your seemingly positive result may be a curse. Of course, interim failure doesn't protect from ultimate failure, either. A hero isn't necessarily someone you follow, and a good leader doesn't have to be heroic. (Compare the two Byzantine leaders against the Ostrogoths in Italy, Belisar as a heroic leader leading from the front, and Narsetes the eunuch bureaucrat who systematically drove them out.) Heroes aid leaders, and may lead limited action. A hero as a leader is a bad idea unless the followers are fanatics, really desperate, or heroic themselves. A leader with potential for heroism but not defined by that heroism is the better leader by far. You want wisdom, political and economic acumen (or at least good human resource management to get good followers in charge of those pursuits). Harmast is a Hero whose "successes" were two massive failures, for all the interim advantages they may have brought. He did end the Bright Empire by releasing Arkat and Talor on it, but at some cost. (And he was hit by the tragedy of the Harmastsons which led to the death of most if not even all of his male offspring.) More recently, Londra of Londros managed to miss all of her objectives in the Upland Marsh, leading to the dissolution of her Temple of the Wooden Sword heroband (which otherwise might have ended up as one of the canonical units in the Dragon Pass game, possibly after a name-shift).

Why do people have a problem with Argrath? IMO because he is the player identification character from a different game than a roleplaying game. He is like the role of Mark Hamill in Wing Commander, someone all players of that game have taken on as their role. And all of a sudden, there are roleplaying games where the players create heroic characters of their own, with ambitions as grand as that player identification character of the setting, who suddenly becomes the dread establishment. Weirdly, no players seem to complain that there is that Art(h)u<s/r> character in the Pendragon rpg and that they play lowly knights rather than becoming the Pendragon. But then the establishment of Camelot and the Round Table follows the Boy King developments which are no longer the subject of RQG. The usual protagonist in fairy tales and Sword and Sorcery does their heroic bit, ang receives (half) the kingdom and the hands and/or affections of princesses (or high priestesses). Mulairk is one such, receiving Furthest and the surrounding lands (and people). There is the typical problem that this reward is personalized, it goes to one distinct character rather than the usual gang of five (or however many protagonists your campaign has). From a world-building perspective, fantasy cultures ruled by councils of five or seven rather than an individual might be better for roleplaying game purposes. (Such as Orlanthi Glorantha in the First and Second Age, before Alakoring ruined it...) Gloranthan story-telling follows the "heroic )future) leader with heroic companions" trope, often minus the paternal overpowering wizard figure guiding the fledgeling hero as much as the newly raised king (or whatever title you want). In literature, that king often is the weakest link in the party, be it young Artus guided by Merlin surrounded by better knights, be it in Shannara or the Belgariad with the Gandalf/Merlin/Chiron/Aristotle figure. Instead, we have the main heroes as their own protagonists, still supported by an excellent team but at the very least princeps inter pares.

That's patently wrong, unless your only definition of "hero" is that of Hollywood. Heroes are the subject of tragedy, they will find a "bad end". It is part of the job description. There are few exceptions, like Beowulf who succeeded in death, or Odysseus whose ten years of shagging with occasional travel and monster enconters interspersed allowed him to reunite with a son he didn't know and a wife who had offered "hospitality" to dozens of suitors in a home drenched with blood. But then, the Odyssey is the comedy coda to the drama of the Ilias and related stories. Jarolar may not have been the most heroic of the sons of Saronil, but he did have two moments - when his ambush out of a forest destroyed the Lunar strength and the personal forces of Philigos, and when he chose to make a last stand wilh his household forces to cover the retreat of the Far Place tribes at Dwarf Ford. It was a last stand, something which is the mark of many a hero. Rolant for instance earned his eternal heroism in death at Roncesvaux Pass. The (often heroic) Ostrogoth kings following Theoderich share a lot with the fated end of the Sartar dynasty, minus the difficulties of a conquered empire. The Varus battle did not make Varus a hero (but then his suicide and loss of three legions was not an achievement), but he was more administrator than war-leader anyway. The victor Arminius was a hero, and accordingly found his gruesome demise. Argrath's feat at Sword Hill was similarly momentous as the Varus Battle - a "barbarian" foe meeting the empire on its own terms, overpowering them in a magical battle where that was what the Lunars usually did. And from horseback, too (at least the Eaglebrowns, and what goes for "horseback" near the Plaines of Prax). Sure, there was an ambush, but way too well organized and orchestrated.

RQ2 offered lords, priests and lord-priests for all cults (e.g. in Rune Masters). RQ3 took away half of those, with few exceptions (Orlanth, Yelmalio, Yelm, 7Mothers, Kyger Litor, Aldrrya) while introducing the Acolyte (God Talker) semi-priest. RQG has inherited the "incomplete" spread for most cults from RQ3. Thus you will find positions in the RQ2 cult descritptions which aren't in canonical RQG. YGWV. RQG has the general rules for all these ranks, RQ2 has details on some of these cults. Use what feels right for your game. Cults and cult ranks are made by the worshippers, although the magic comes from the deity, or some subservient entity (could be a child, an aspect, an immortalized hero, a community wyter). Local cults will have differet forms, imagery, etc..

Allready Halwal, the great God Learner dissident, set about to re-unite Arkat, but his best efforts only managed to coalesce the Arkati knowledge he could find into (what would become?) the followers of the three rivals Goraint, Valsatar and Mabodinarne. And that's not touching the troll version or the expected Chaos monster. The idea that the Tower of Xud fulfills a function similar to the (rumored) iron sword piercing the Only Old One in keeping Arkat from re-uniting is intriguing. But the decyphering of that children's book from the fall of the last Archon will have taken considerably longer than the first establishment of magical impediments of Arkat. The Seshnegi/Jrusteli conquest of Slontos seems to have followed the fall of the Autarchy, with the Loper People interfering rather badly. On the other hand, Slontos may have been the first Jrusteli conquest relying on invasions and alterations of native myth rather than overpowering sorcery and daring acts of chivalry (such as killing native demigods).