Joerg

Yes. Depending on the story, he wrestles Krarsht, or Monster Man (Deshlotralas - his own Underworld aspect), or something else. Where he touches down is Fire Mountain, or the Lava fields. In Fronela, that's Ladaral's Mountain, later imploded by Waertagi magic and now the Brass Citadel of Sog City. In Carmania, it was Mount Turos, imploded by Oronin's Waertagi water magic, and now Lake Oronin, with Castle Blue somehow connected to that. In his descent, Lodril kept Heat but sort of lost Light. Still has the fire, and red glow lava illumination. In the Holy Country, various places are possible. The Obsidian Palace (now shattered aboveground) under the Shadow Plateau, the Vent, possibly the abyss in the Footprint... IMO Lodril didn't so much crash but dive in headlong, injecting (as) Aether's fiery sperm into Gata's loins, which led to the birth of Umath. According to Dara Happan myth, Lodril overcame Monster Man and returned to the surface world where he oversaw the peasants of the Dara Happan Empire, siring the Ten Sons and Servants on Oria and Mohenjar the Overseer on Oslira. Kethaelan myth has him as mate of Asrelia, fathering Ernalda according to Jeff's latest genealogy preview. Lodril is the father of mountains, poking his head out in many places, like Quivin, Stormwalk, ...

The villagers donning the sacred masks of the Evil Uncles may be all benevolent and wishing to cater to the strengths of their iinitiands, but there is always a chance that a deity takes over the mask and delegates the wearer to an observer role...

Jaldon's early history is framed in a bit of weirdness. Pavis GTA (quoting the RQ2 Pavis material) says The tribes roaming the Wastes rather than ancestral Prax was of course a consequence of the return of the Pure Horse Folk after Joraz Kyrem retook the city of Pavis from Thog the giant and his troll and jolanti allies. (The jolanti may have been those liberated by Gonn Orta in Nida around 562.) "in a bison tent" doesn't necessarily mean "as a bison rider". His mother may have been a slave taken from the refugees from Pavis, possibly a zebra or Pure Horse woman, or possibly a pregnant visitor at the Bison Rider camp, possibly from the Paps (a priestess, or a woman of her entourage). His father could have been a Waha khan, given his acceptance as khan later on, but again need not have been a bison khan. Maybe even the Paps khan before having to leave sacred Prax. Jaldon's (almost? completely?) skeletal steed "Home" doesn't resemble any extant beast of Eiritha. The image on his Dragon Pass boardgame counter resembles a ram's skull. While unknown as a Praxian beast, there were sheep-descended draconic beasts in Dragon Pss which miay have grown to this extraordinary size

The Two-Legged Alliance is mentioned in HQ2's Pavis: Gateway to Adventure. The Ostrich clan was absent from the original Nomad Gods Independents, but appears in Borderlands (or at least in Borderlands and Beyond). There was a one page article on the Ostrich riders by Mike Dawson in Avalon Hill's Heroes Magazine

That in itself makes you "lose" your indentity challenge, turning you into "Eurmal pretending to be Babs". Which may be fine for a situation but requires a re-identification as Babs for whenever you want to access one of her feats, becoming her. Taking ordinary questing and making it extra-hard experimental questing just to stay on track. Little different from brute-forcing a myth in the God Learner way, with losses of questers left and right. Eurmal is rarely far from Babeester. It is almost as if he was fascinated by her not getting the joke.

Why should the sex pit be a place different from the prison of the strangers in the Orlanth experience? All the candidates are there.

Would a cult run by women, a significant minority women traumatized by misdeeds of men, accept a man joining their cause as one of them while remaining a man? Even a man whose Otherworld experiences earned him direct approval of the deity? This is quite similar to an ogre openly identifying as such or a cursed Telmori, in either case having earned the marks of a Humakti, asking to join the Malani temple of Humakt, or the Humakti bodyguard in Boldhome. Would a functional male be able to become the goddess for purposes of casting her rune magic or being her in a heroquest? How would this person be able to pass an identity challenge?

I am currently trying to formulate my view of deities as Venn diagrams of myths and runes, groupings of mythical figures/feats/events. That's where the shared subcults from the Hero Wars/HeroQuest1 approach come into play. If the new deity visits the same mythic event in the same role, then the rune point for that spell is transferable. Happens more easily in a parent-descendant relationship between deities, might work with siblings. (Genealogies of deities may have more than one true relationship between two entities, Odayla for instance can be the son or the brother of Orlanth.) The one rune point pool per spell doesn't work out for two- or three-point spells under RQG rules, but this was how my more restrictive rune power model for RQ3 worked.

I don't quite see why rune point pools should be transferable. It is not like you can yank your soul investment away from the greater soul of Orlanth and shove it over to Lhankor Mhy. And why should you? Tithing, time commitment... sure. But if you can afford to learn to read this late in your life, you have already lived with that extra time and financial commitment for quite a while. Just go on doing that. Maybe lapse a little in your Orlanth duties? That temple gets an additional scribe. Do you want to learn sorcery? Ok, in that case it is good bye to your commitment to Orlanth. But seriously, starting a seven year commitment for sorcery this late in life? And your trainer in sorcery is likely to tell you that letting go of that theist commitment will help your resolve and advancement. One thing I liked about the Hero Wars/HeroQuest1 subcultitis was that you could anchor your magic on a subcult shared by deities of your pantheon. RQG has reduced that to the one change that is best documented, from Orlanth to Barntar (or vice versa). Few other such subcults with an existece other than a Godtime feat reflected in a runepower (aka rune spell) exist. How many lapsing initiates are there in Glorantha? Initiates failing to provide the necessary time or material commitment to their cult, foregoing the opportunity to regain their runepower should they succeed in casting those spells after failing to identify with their deity that much?

Fetch!

Bean there, done that. Counting beans won't get us much further here. Are there any vomiting-inducing beans in Glorantha? After all, it takes a whole lot of hyenas to vomit those pieces of Genert into a mold to return the body of the Earth God, and then some other high-powered earth miracle to return the Earth King to life - possibly requiring Tada to bring back the fertility of the Garden wherever that resurrection is to take place, only to be consumed in a similar manner as Eiritha's in the Dead Place. Just maybe that energy could be collected from up above? In that case a giant beanstalk might be helpful. But how does one get the hyenas upstairs?

IMO not. A holy place will often be a natural feature, in this case the caldera left where the spear of Lodril pierced the squirming thing and where the Syphon descends upon its remnants on its way to the Underworld. There was no occasion when the ichor of Larnste's wound did not fester since that spear struck, hence no oopportunity to build a place of worship. Without an active volcano in place (let me remind you of the Syphon washing down there again), there is no way a construction similar to the Obsidian Castle could have been wrought there, either. Except maybe a temple in the Fish Road zone of the Syphon, which could be reached from the Backford terminus or the Grand Exchange below Loon Island. Belintar could theoretically have had such a construction erected there. But a river-bottom Lodril temple? Doesn't sound likely. The logical assumption is that the spear that pierced the creature that had been stomped underground created the opening through which the Syphon enters the Underworld. Given the acidic properties of Krarsht, I wouldn't look for any remnants of the spear in that wound. There might be some thermal reaction where the brine of the Syphon hits the acid of Krarsht or the festering ichor from Larnste's wound. Not enough for lava, though. The main seismic event I have always associated with the Footprint was the Stormwalk range folding up. Yes, sone brothers of Quivin rose up amidst that folding line, with a slight potential for one or two fiery peaks, but most mountains never were volcanoes.

Actually he did not. He outlined how Right Action in normal situations would maintain the current status of Rightness, nd how maintaining Right Action in the face of adversity was a chance (or the method) to increase Rightness. Having a Rightness score of 1 or greater allows a Malkioni to use Caste Magic. (But I have not seen an example of what Caste Magic would be for any of the castes, or how it would be cast, or whether the Rightness score serves as a kind of rune power for caste magic.) While we have some ideas about wrong caste behavior (which varies between the different Malkioni schools), is Right Action simply the avoidanc of transgressions against prohibited activity? A zzaburi sorcerer is not to haggle or judge, not to wield a weapon in combat, hunting or training, not to till the fields or perform menial task, but there are "crafts" which fall into the zzabburi spectrum - flensing human skin alive for writing material, alchemy, operation of measuring devices, writing. And then we have the training for Man-of-All status, where the prospective man-of-all aquires the Man-of-All-appropriate skills from the other castes, which is Right Action under Hrestoli initiation. But if it takes initiation to become a man-of-all, is that lofty state the equivalent of being a god-talker? The rules posted by Jeff answer some questions and put up more, and questions I won't expect exhaustive answers for before Jeff's most urgent projects have passed into "mechanical" post-processing like layout or proof-reading. Right now he is clearly engaged in art direction for the Prosopedia, and I can only admire Katrin Dirim for the speed with which she puts out illustrations in that new style discovered for that book. There is also projecting for the great campaign arc going on (I hope that some of the scenario writing will be distributed).

This makes me wonder how Rokarism has managed to stamp out Hrestolism in the lands under their boots. Or have they? There are Hrestolist sympathies among the Pithdarans, and all those southern Tanisoran families who submitted to Guilmarn but managed to hold on to their ancestral holdings, if somewhat reduced in extent. Most dialects of Arkatism are founded on Hrestolism, too. As far as I can tell, the orthodox Second Age Hrestolism/Makanism as adopted by the (IMO generally pious) Pithdarans, and as defended by the great sorcerer Yomili towards the end of the Seshnegi empire, embraced piety and a righteous attitude rather than blatant meddling with pagan entities like various Malkioneranist schools did. Pilif the Magus's Order of the New Order was reprimanded after the attempted coup, and while it had come from enthusiastic discoveries in the Abiding Book, they might have undercut Rightness. I wonder how exactly caste magic manifests, and whether the Rightness score acts like some sort of rune point reservoir. For the zzaburi caste, an expansion of their limitations in mastering runes and techniques and an expansion of their Free INT seems desirable, allowing the sorcery in the core rules to be applied to Malkioni without much problem. It would be interesting to see TSR's Urvantan and his Arkati counterpart updated to include a Rightness score.

It might look like the incubator that Pwyll used to raise Pryderi after making his sister Rhiannon give birth both to Pryderi and an older brother from an earlier fling with a sea god after disproving Rhiannon's virginity, in the Mabinogion. (In other words, there is an ancient Celtic description of a technological device...) The strct dress code among scientists in the laboratory nowadays is something of a myth. Other than in laboratories where stuff may contaminate or mildly aggravate the researchers, lab coats are rarely worn. This mythical world of science with people in lab coats with reverence for the great ones... maybe something like that existed in the 1960ies, but even then the way to make your name in science was to disprove a theory of one of the well-known names in schience. This funny dress code? Other than many people immersed in science having no time or interest for a fashion sense, I haven't been able to confirm that. Lab coasts outside of chemical labs are rare, and mainly only traditional wet chemistry labs, and not modern apparative chemistry. They offer a short-term protection from spilled aggressive liquids, a bit like ablative armor that you can take off easily. Protective gear comes in different forms. People working in a steel mill wear stranger suits and have stranger behavior. In the end, you make a point describing something that doesn't really happen except in Hollywood as the perception of something people not involved don't understand. A judgement on a caricatue of reality.

We know very little about Malkioni temples, other than that they can be monumental buildings ("cathedral of Mardron"), a focal part of the Malkioni special architecture and city planning designed to enable community support for the wizards' magic. The major Kadeniti contribution to the magic of Brithos. In addition to communal places of veneration, there are monastic complexes of sorcerer monks in Seshnela and Jonatela, and probably elsewhere, too. It would be weird if the community would not manifest in some collective entity. Whether that entity follows all the rules for a wyter in RQG is another question. There is a good chance that the entity might be manifest in the architecture of the holy place, possibly as an inscribed or sculpted piece of scripture (doubling as the spell formula to summon the entity into the Surface World?).

More than one convention, all the way throughout the "Three Different Worlds" dogma, and in various written comments, too. There is a post from 1995 where a passage from Sandy's shaman rules talks about the fetch as a special organ already: http://glorantha.steff.in/digests/GloranthaDigest/vol02/1680.html (Quoted by Phil in 1999, according to another hit in the archive search.) There is no such mention from the "vast" amount of writing we have from the RQ2 era, which would make it "recent" for fans from way back before.. apparently a non-negligible population among the fans and customers. I haven't seen any official position that there is not a specific spiritual organ that a character interfaces with their chosen form of specialized magic with. In cases like Waha which combine theism and shamans, the organ serves as interface fitting the approaches used by the Cult of Waha.

Jose's approach to look at a definition of piety makes sense, especially if you are not a native speaker and your mother language and/or religious background may have a different outlook. The Oxford Dictionary equates piety as a state of either showing or having respect for something or somebody. Animism says that everything has a spirit, and that that spirit deserves respect. Ok, piety is required here. Theism says that there are divine entities worthy of worship, and when performing that worship or when emulating their feats you usually show respect. But then, respect of a deity is sort of the basic definition of piety, so little wonder here, either. But then there is materialism, which comes in a number of flavors. The Mostali approach is rather similar to animism, only it isn't that much a spiritual quality that receives respect but the material presence is worthy of respect and support. The Logicians are materialists as well as humanists. They assign worthiness to the world only to the extent that it supports human existence. Brithini and Vadeli sorcerers tap the world around them rather freely, imposing their wills on the matter and energies that surround them. They may consider entities more powerful than themselves as worthy of wariness, but that's hardly respect when they look for ways to impose their wills on these, anyway, if not through brute magical force addressing their weaknesses then through bargains, addressing the entities' desires. Malkionism is a weird form of veneration of ancestors, of whatever is left of these in an Otherworld. This applied already to pre-Hrestol Brithini, both on Zzabur's island and in the colonies. Zzabur's Revelation of Now was tempered with the concept of Solace, and that of a higher entity, the Invisible God, from which Logic emanated, which found embodiment in various instances of "Malkion of the Nth Action", with N ranging from 1 to 5 (some say from 0 to 5). Somewhere around the Third Action, that Malkion started to be human in perceived shape and appearance, but there is an Invisible God somewhere at or before the First Action. Some schools say that the act of Creation by the demiurge already was human in nature, thus prone for errors, and that the Invisible God is an entity beyond that, others hold the Creator as that Invisible God. Either way, this entity is worthy of being shown respect in the rites led by the sorcerers, rites from which the sorcerers draw magical power or empowerment. Worship or veneration is an act of piety, or at least a show of piety, whether honest or just a social and/or magical obligation. For some reason, the Malkioni deem it erroneous to send that veneration directly to a sorcerer, declaring sorcerers who demand such worship as False Gods. On the other hand, it seems to be acceptable to direct worship at that ineffable Invisible God, First Mover or even entity beyond that, with the people's sorcerers partaking of the energies sent in that worship to the benefit of the community supporting the sorcerers. (After all, Malkioni society is supposed to be a society optimized to enable powerful sorcery to serve the will of the humans.) Malkioni piety might be limited to public acts of piety. Acts of piety are rewarded - by recognition of your peers and possibly inferiors and superiors in society, and by availing society to magics powered by donations of the many without having to Tap them or reality. The pursuit of henosis with the One Mind (another term for the Invisible God, or the Creator/Prime Mover) is another form of piety. Prior to Hrestol, this seems to have been the province of the Zzabur caste alone, a practice that enables the sorcerer to manipulate the energies of the world, starting with those of their own selves, but Hrestol took that a step further and experienced Joy, an intellectual state of utter clarity beyond the mere ability to recognize and rearrange the magical energies (but including that, too). Within the tenets of Malkionism, demonstratively following caste strictures and striving for excellence within your caste strictures would be a display of piety, e.g. obeying a dress code or mastering a craft, a weapon, a language, or a spell. The rewards may be granted by society, or they may take the form of a blessing by the One Mind or Creation. These rewards may very well be demonstrable, and the kind of currency that Rokari piety is paid back in. Some may be social, affirming your position in society (which means never to take it, or the rights accompanying it, as granted). Seer Theoblanc claims that his pursuits and successes are rewarded with longevity, for instance - proof of the rightness of his pursuits by the same measure that Brithini rightness is rewarded (with an unaging existence). Great caste-appropriate ostentation can be a display of piety. Writing this, I notice that this concept of piety fits quite well to the displays of televangelist piety (mirroring Pharisean rather than Christian values), and going against the grain of what the German term for piety means for someone with Lutheran roots...

This came up in a discussion about sorcerers in RuneQuest, but thread drift took this out of the RQ context and maybe somewhat out of the Malkioni context too, but I plan to retun this there. Here's a short summary of what went before.

But is the pursuit of say the scientific method or the platonic ideals an activity that involves piety, whether outward or personal? Does mysticism (on the other end of the spectrum) involve piety?

Katrin's most recent image of Humakt shows a slashing blade with blunted point.

Saronil was raised at Shaker Temple, which is where he may have befriended Palashee, and which may be where he found both his wives. Sartar went forth to fight for the Exiles at Grizzly Peak, too. Whence that hostility?

So, temples to Orjethulut and Hanjethulut (corresponding to Humakt and ZZ, although I forget which is which) would do nothing to Humakti, Yanafali or ZZorani visiting Fonrit in your Glorantha?

In my opinion and actual experience of passions, those swings may be too minor, or too limited. A passion tends to be goal-oriented rather than method-oriented, which means having to choose which weapon skill it applies to feels a bit iffy. Everything else is maybe "an interest" rather than a passion.

Rather than switching, is it possible to dual cult Yanafal and Humakt? Asking for a munchkin friend...