Joerg

Outright starvation ought to be extremely rare, as trolls can even eat air. Severe malnutrition and getting more and more ravenous on a diet of just dirt and rocks is well known on the other side, at least for trollkin hordes. IMO they are brutalized, as a species /The term for dark trolls means "Hurt Trolls", and lesser species are degenerates thereof), not so much because of Chaos but because of Fire and Light. Trollkind was born on the front against Chaos, deep down in Wonderhome. Down there, it was more of a nuisance than an existential threat, and in the surface world their anti-Chaos attitude still is a lot less rabid than that of the Orlanthi or Praxians. Didn't. An uncomfortable and hurtful world full of remaining light and fire greeted them, like Lodril and Yelmalio. Encountering elfs and dwarfs was just a continuation of earlier encounters and raids. Chaos destroyed their main queendom on the eastern slopes of the Spike, but even that might be blamed on High King Elf slaying the Spike as much as on Chaos invading it. But this happened long after the Dark Tribe had established itself in the Surface World. Where? Chaos has infested their kind, whether Pocharngo having turned uzuz or uzko into Cave Trolls, or Gbaji causing the Curse of Kin, but I am not aware of any chaotic plot to invade the troll stronglands in the forseeable future. The Curse of Kin is in the process of driving the race of Dark Trolls into extinction, and the new prototype troll about to be born in the Dagori Inkarth Castle of Lead is going to make the Dark Trolls and their Curse of Kin irrelevant. The new species will be superior, mostly untainted by Yelm's burns and presmably free from the Curse of Kin. Humanity has a grace period until the mid 1639ies until the first of these new model trolls become old enough to interact with them. The remaining Dark Trolls will grow up like "superior trollkin" twin births have been neglected before. Trill mothers giving birth to inferior kindred are likely to pass these on to mothers among that inferior kindred, damning that offspring to even less care than they would have experienced normally. Such mothers will likely serve as wetnurses for their peers with healthy offspring, while those with healthy offspring might serve as wetnurses of the offspring of (lesser) descendants of hiigher class mothers. ZZ is furious whether he faces Chaos or not. ZZ is the archetype of the Dark Troll, and thus he might be diminished in impotance, too. Any pregnant uz is a ravenous creature, eating not just for herself but also for the lspawn growing inside her. And defecating for two, too. Her males and sisters have the responsibility to keep her hunger in check. As soon as an uz enters pregnancy, I suppose her offspring is taken away from her, possibly to aother wetnurse, otherwise weaned. Mothers from lesser kindred will have to wean their offspirng earlier to act as such wetnurses, and may be prohibited from contact with adult males. All the way down to the most miserable trollkin young not receiving much in breast feeding at all. Female offspring will remain at the breast for longerthan male offspring. Do the children receive love other than the sharing of food and the warding off light and fire? There is a reason why 3th Age Glorantha has a character class called "Hellmother". While the breast-feeding mother will nurture her offspring, I don't see much gentleness here. Tough love, dragon mothers. Helicopter parents - yes, definitely. Most uz will have been full adults for a while before leaving the rough embrace and demands of their mother. Take all bad mother-in-law stereotypes, and turn them up to eleven. That's how I see troll mothers. Troll fathers and uncles may be a lot more gentle and caring in their treatment of the young, at least up to a certain stage of development. Sooner or later they will turn into the initiatory uncles, challenging the next generation with limited harmful tasks. Those who break may find their way to Zorak Zoran, or may fail to initiate. Possibly acting as lowly foremen for trollkin rather than directly ending up as food. Yes. I expect that there are early dark troll great-grandmothers who founded strong lineages that were able to use cunning and experience to compete with lineages more recently born to an uzuz mother. Uzuz: most of them yes. Ancestral trolls will most likely have died, leaving the lineage to descendants. And I doubt that either Jarkanita AB (IIRC, the individual whose questing against the Curse of Kin resulted in multiple births) nor Garazaf Hyloring (who gave birth to Arkat Kingtroll and his companions) are still alive and well. Both will have lived to see the fruit of their labors, but any such heroic deed will remove the individual from the world of the living sooner or later. Cragspider is a notable exception to this Even humans know heroquesting paths to stop aging, but the example of Belintar shows the toll on a mortal body At the very least, I would demand that she touches it throughout her pregnancy, starting with attempts for conception. Loss of contact might cause deterioration of the spawn, resulting in a single weak uzko. And use of the item might cause a small deterioration of her stats, transferring those to her child. I did adopt the uz species to a non-Gloranthan RQ3 setting, with a somewhat different evolution of Trollmother, no Chaos conflict in their origin story (instead hiding from a race of titans). I had probably about as much mythos and history on them as one of the shorter Cults of Kyger Litor full write-ups plus the Bestiary non-rulesy bits. My trolls were kin to and herded insectivores rather than giant insects. (My world had those giant insectoids, too, but in a different corner of the world, and with non-Darkness origins.) I haven't had any trolls played by players in any of my games yet - I usually start from rather closer-knit communities with only replacement characters bringing in more exotic backgrounds unless the community had a good reason to have such. My Sartar doesn't have moe than one or two permanent troll or trollkin residents in cities other than Boldhome, except possibly heded by Torkani or Kitori tribesmen.

When I discussed a possible Fazzur counter in the Dragon Pass boardgame, Greg told me that he definitely wasn't a (4!) 10 _6_ style hero, and neither was Kallyr, but he conceded that his leadership was enough to give him stats similar to a Praxian Khan, something along the line (1!) 4 _6_ . Fazzur had command authority over the Lunar army and the Imperial College. We don't have a Tatius counter, either (because of the Dragonrise), unless you think that the Magical Leader counter type as in one of the Footprints would apply to him.

Nochet is known to have had literate theft for centuries, and since the library never completely closed down, all kinds of knowledge thieves - including sorcerers of God Learner and other orientation and origin - will have been task forces to acquire sorrcerous knowledge from the Temple and their rivals. It would be criminal neglect for any school of sorcery not to employ sufficiently literate and trained thieves to strike at protected vaults of knowledge, neutralizing defensive magics on the way. So, from me a hearty yay for sorcerous crime gangs. And yes, they would employ mercenaries from other magic systems, too - I suppose a shaman will be invaluable for scouting out a rival vault, or for overcoming certain anti-sorcery wards with spirits. Shadowrun Nochet... Edit: and writing that, Sandals of Darkness jump at me, whether involving Argan Argar or Orlanth.

If the OOO was just a troll, you'd be right, but he is the only one of an ancient race that can take on the shapes of troll, human, or dehori. Kitori masters of the Night Cult would attain these racial abilities (regardless of which species they started from) and become the New Ones of that race, but because Eurmal killed his son during that Underworld banquet in the Obsidian Palace, there is only one Old specimen of that race. (Perhaps species rather than race, but being able to breed with any of the shapes he was able to attain begetting fertile offspring may make the old biological meaning of race a better fit than species.)

Backford is a roadside terminus of a Fish Road, allowing travellers to come fully submerged from below the Mirrosea Bay all the way to the ford, and beyond to the Footprint. That does imply sufficiently deep water for riverine boats, although you would have to manage the whitewater-equivalent of a body of water bulging up from the ground, with internal currents and inversions. Heroic boating skills might provide these, and Waertagi ancestral magics ought to work, too. Nogatending or similar weeder magics might work, too, as they do for the Durulz riding up the whitewaters of the re-directed Creekstream River in similar reed crafts. Backford controls the only good crossing(s) of the Syphon River, making it of great strategic importance for the overland traffic into Malkonwal. However, Malkonwal was yielded to Fazzur after his victory over Rikard in the field, including its cities. That includes rather durable fortified cities like Durengard or Mt Passant.

Once you are a hero, you can have pluripresence similar to the shaman's double presence in the mundane and the spirit world. WIth one of your selves on the spirit plane, the difference to having a fetch wouldn't be that big, except that you can leave the spirit plane if you wish.

Greg once talked about the spiritual organ that a practitioner would develop. A shaman would grow it into the fetch that creates their permanent presence on the Spirit Plane, a theist would develop it to manifest (part of) their soul in the Gods World managing the energies passed on by the deity from the source through their runes, and a sorcerer would attune their organ (no idea how it was called at the time) to manage the flow of energies themselves to impose their will on the world using the knowledge of magical procedures aka spells. (Or alchemy, or mechanics, or architecture...) A theist allied spirit is an entity merging with the spiritual organ connecting to the Gods World, manifesting it in the world.

Here are a few points about my personal experiences with coastal fishing, and research into the methods of our forefathers. Net fishing: My father used to lay out eel traps made from net and wooden (or plastic) rings. A trap is basically two or three "baskets" made of net with a funnel bottom, allowing the fish to find its way in but not out again. The last funnel was knotted shut. Two such baskets would be lying on either end of a central vertical net, held down by a weighted line and held up with swimmers (made from cork or foamy plastics, but in the past glass bottles or hollow glass bulbs would be used, with pottery another alternative). Several of these arrangements would be layed out between two buoys held down by a significant weight, both to indicate position and to lay out your "claim". The netting was fine enough not to let eel of sufficient feeding size through. Other than eel, we also caught local cod, crabs, and a couple of other coastal fish, depending on where we would lay these nets. We worked in the shallows, between 1 m and 5 m depth. Knitting such nets is a craft similar to weaving or macramee, but my father bought ready-made netting before sewing it into the funnels for the baskets. He knew enough about net knitting to repair tears or cuts. When I was available, I would do the hauling in and out of the boat while my father navigated with the motor, or absent a motor I would do the rowing (skulling), but the work can be done by a single person in a boat. Our hunting grounds were on a bay on the Baltic Sea. Another net my father used to employ while it still was legal for others than full-time fishermen was a standing net held upright similarly to the one described above, consisting of a loose inner net (of considerably larger mesh) and two somewhat tighter outer nets of rather huge meshing. The function was to have a migrating fish push the middle net into one of the meshes of the outer net forming a bag, from which it wouldn't escape. Typical desired catches included flounders and cod. Another method to get at flounders or cod was to lay ground lines with worms as bait. While quite a bit of the bait was eaten away by crabs, flounders or cod would bite, and even the occasional eel, and other, less well known fish of the region. For herring and cod (and occasionally mackerel or other predatory fish following the herring swarms), fishing with a rod or a hand line can be quite productive if you know where and when to fish. Before overfishing, a four hour trip for a single person using a rod could easily provide 10 or more kg of herring, biting on glossy hooks moved up and down rhythmically. Predatory fish would bite on the same, or on the silvery weight at the end of the line, if you used greater hooks, whether with a rod or (IMO more satisfyingly) with a hand line. I was on a few expeditions inland of the Lofoten or on a side fjord, where (depending on the position) we would catch quite a lot of haddock and some cod. One four hour trip on the west fjord with hand lines yielded about fifteen sizable (4kg+) cods or haddocks per participant - we could have continued longer, but that was about what we were able to consume, so we broke off. The herring migrations to their spawning grounds have been met by fishermen from considerable distance for millennia, and salted herring was a main export for the Hanseatic League. Herrings could be caught with nets, or with wooden fish traps (basically palisades in a waterway) creating a series of funnels that you could close off with netting or baskets at the end. Surrounding a school of fish with a hanging net and pulling that together is another tactic used from boats. A variant of that is used in bays where walkers (and occasionally swimmers) will close off part of the bay and then pull the net towards the shore. The same method is used to "empty" fish breeding ponds in autumn that would have been seeded with youngling fish (or fish eggs) earlier. I don't have any personal experience with spear fishing, harpooning, or bow-fishing. Tridents or comb-like spear points can be used while wading through water suspected to house fish like e.g. eel. Spear fishing or harpooning requires rather clear water, or you have to catch fish leaping up obstacles. If you do this during a migration, rather simple catching methods will feed you through a winter. Ask any bear near a salmon river... Finally, there is the gathering of seafood, like clams, mussles, normal-sized crabs (in tidal pools or in basket traps using the funnels described at the top of this post). How to model this in RuneQuest? You need local lore or animal lore to find the best fishing grounds and times. "Documents" or sage advice will increase your chance of success by 50 or more percentiles. For the equipment, I would ask for "Craft: Fishery" rather than Devise. Your fisher will need to know knots, possibly net knitting, crafting fishing spears and javelins/harpoons, repairing boats (whether coracles, dugouts, or planked boats), possibly basket weaving. A fishing javelin won't be the equivalent of a bronze-tipped war javelin, but 1D8 will still be a good estimate for a stone- or bone-tipped throwing stick created from coppiced wood, some rope or sinew, and some material for the tip. The weight of the shaft is enough to let even a pointy stick pierce fur, blubber or animal skin, but points and barbs will make it a lot more useful for piercing and hauling out the catch. Boating or Swimming are optional skills, depending on how and where you go fishing. Stationary fish traps in tidal waters don't really require either, and neither in not too deep rivers. Making functional baskets, wicker fences, or palisades doesn't require much in the way of a craft skill. Higher skill will produce prettier or sturdier specimen, but won't affect function that much. Local Lore will include knowledge about currents, about steep underwater edges where fish schools would collect with the right (wind-induced) local current. Collecting and preparing bait is a fairly trivial though possibly time-consuming pastime.

There were many Brithos-born Malkioni and mixed offspring in Malkioni lands. Arkat as a demigod born inside Time was part of a somewhat smaller group. There have been a few cases where Brithini offspring interfered with Seshnegi dynastic politics. One of the Emperors of Land and Sea married a Brithini woman, whose lineage was present in the subsequent emperors who had to deal with the Closing and other cataclysms.. Other than unusal age experienced in a stasis environment and extensive job specialisation, I don't think that Brithini are "superior" to other Malkioni. Neither do I see how Malkioni are superior to Hykimi-descended humans, many of whom mingled with the descendants of Brithos/Danmalastan. the followers of Froalar thought nothing bad about taking Pendali wives. The war between them and the neighboring Pendali resulted from a fatal contest for a Pendali woman, without any notion of bestiality.

The original cloud of ash, brimstone etc. blown here by a Storm God to keep the oozng Chaos in check. A pyroclastic cloud, by another name, with slightly different outcome. Only if you happen to stumble into the Godtime event or an echo thereof. You could engineer such a thing. Or your player characters might. Some Lodril magic might help.

Troll cuisine in Nochet: Trollkin probably are only ritual food or a food reserve in a city that has thousands of humans and pigs roaming the streets. Renting them out for a steady stream of foodstuff, without having to feed them/keeping them from feeding on oour possessions is another bonus. Keeping giant arthropods in the city might be troublesome. Neighbors may react hysterically when these escape to feed on stuff in the neighborhood, like pets or little children. Trolls will delight in providing clandestine funerary services, for instance. Including double proof where the victim is eaten by trollkin who then are eaten by hteir owners. The pigs in Nochet may provide the same kind of service, but those aren't as good at dealing with the bones. Trollkin may be hired for latrine duty. The stupid humans feed the trollkin and pay for the privilege... Demolition work may be another culinary business for the dark people. Few crocodiles will survive long inside the sewers...

Argan Argar has "Summon Shade", which means that "shady dealings" doesn't have any negative connotations among AA merchants. There is of course the Bolg exchange rate currency hustle...

The games of the houses was what I wanted to forward for criminal activity, too. Ernalda is a part-time underworld goddess, after all... The Sarli district has a huge complement of Sartarite families in exile, probably scheming and plotting on the same level as local grandmothers or guilds. There is also a troll warren in town, with at the very least shady dealings. I wonder how safe Nochet is. How many corpses are brought into the mortuary by the patrols on a daily basis, or fished out of the sewers or the harbor? How many people go missing (in another way than waking up aboard a ship Opened to a rather distant port)?

That conspiracy was an outgrowth of the Theyalan idea rather than a God Learner movement, taking advantage of the ambient magical energies that followed the draconification of Dragon Pass. A similar project was rampant under the Second Council (and probably continued under the Bright Empire) in the Dawn Age. The absence of such a project in the Third Age is rather noteworthy, unless you count the Tusk Riders as a Third Age development.

Are you volunteering?

This is possibly the fiirst time I see this discussion applied to roleplaying games (it is a quite common complaint with boardgames that come with modula expansions). However, this isn't the first time RuneQuest has been running into that problem. When the 3rd edition was sold to Avalon Hill, a decision was made to divide the rules into a standard edition and a GM box as well as a "DeLuxe" edition that had all the content from those boxes. The subsequent scenario releases then included sections which explained spells and possibly other elements that weren't covered by the standard rules box. In a way, RQG might be seen as in a similar situation now, with the Starter Set rules providng only a selection of the full rules, but I doubt that we are going to see extra pages of rules explanations to users of the Starter Set in future releases. I won't exclude the possibility of add-on pdfs with such info if there is a significant target audience with the Starter Set only, but who would produces those? And, in a way there already is a budget version of the Cults Book with the Red Book of Magic.offering all the rulesy bits.

What matters of the heart? We were talking about marriages, and ending them.

Elder Secrets, not Elder Sign, but what you describe is the common experience of people who started with RQ3. Troll Pak was sort of the only glimpse into the RQ2 era that a player of RQ3 could acquire via a FLGS.

I would think that they would leave the stuff to compost for a while. They prefer the poop from earthworms.

A head on a lance is mostly free from Thanatari suspicions... Unless there are "basket lances" which have a holding area for a garrotted head looking like it was pierced.

Spawned from reading up on yesterday's discussions on the Chaosium discord: "Eurmal" is the disgusted exclamation by his mother on Kylerela, muffled after two syllables. What she meant to say before gagging was: "You're Malkion!" Proof: Orlanth, LM, Issaries, CA and Flesh Man chance upon the Fifth Action where Malkion is about to apotheosize. The five interfere, however, and thus the wretch is carried onward into Hell. Various attempts to sabotage the quest fail.

I've been to many conventions with Rick, and I may have driven him (and a couple more people) up or down the way to/from Castle Stahleck. At the very least, I spent many a Pentecost Monday noon between packed bags on the courtyard, saying farewell to people. I don't remember any big pieces of luggage. (Unlike e.g. my last visit to the Kraken where I had an oversized bag to carry the bare necessities for 5+ players Gods War...) The epithet was given in an online community - https://glorantha.steff.in/digests/GloranthaDigest/vol05/4568.html

Some things become impossible when the overlap with Godtime goes away. Thinking of it becomes hard as the magical vocabulary you had all of a sudden is just a piece ot technobabble without any relation to the reality you are in. It is a bit like one of those grand, world-changing ideas you have when sufficiently inebtriated or awakening from a dream that fall apart when you are faced with a harsher reality that nixes some of the basic assumptions for your wonderful experience. Written records will have lost the context necessary to make sense of them. What used to be a concise treatise now reads like Joyce's Ulysses, or maybe just a bunch of onomatopoeia. "Calibrate the plasma flow!" "activate the flux compensator!" "Trickle-down economy"

All we have is examples. I mean, the term has been brought to awareness only recently in one of Jeff's Facebook posts, and a few follow-ups. For the Dragon Pass regions, the PHR has been achieved twice - first by the pyramid scheme magic drain of the EWF Third Council, and second (more sustainably) by Belintar through his Masters of Luck And Death quests that kept adding to the holiness and helped maintain that nexus to the God World that made the City of Wonders so outstanding. It is possible that the presence of the Pseudocosmic Egg in Dorastor created that kind of effect, too. One result of the PHR being activated might be new or hybrid species. We have the Wyrms that apparently were a creation of the Second Council, the mixed ancestry of Gwalynkus the Good and his even more magical offspring by the Gold Wheel Dancer for Dorastor, and the EWF brought us the Stitched Zoo, the Tusk Riders (who may or may not be the result of the Remakers and their magic), we have Pavis and Ginkizzie as the results of cross-breeding, we have that couple that had the aging contest, etc. Belintar's magic brought us magical places and artifacts, like the Fish Road with its termini, the rainbow bridges, or the Building Wall. And possibly the Sartar Magical Union.

Neither Lodril nor Dayzatar were prominent in the Dragon Pass, but at least Lodril is found in Caladraland, a volcanic chain south of Esrolia, forming a barrier to the Solkathi Sea (part of the inner ocean of Glorantha). There are some sky temples in Esrolia, ziggurats similar to those described by @Nick Brooke above. Think Ishtar Gate for Dara Happa, with fired and glazed bricks at least for the surface of the walls. Dayzatar is associated with the Star Seers of Yuthuppa (in Dara Happa, now in the Lunar Empire), who seem to have round, hollow towers with an internal frame structure similar to a yurt, used for observations of the rotating firmament. If you are going for a Lodril holy place, underground complexes near lava flows are an option - cue Indiana Jones imagery, however unscientific that may be. Or Journey to the Center of the World. Caladraland has volcano temples, one on top of the Vent, near the caldera, another one in Vinavale, a lowland with geothermal as well as tectonic activity. But the cult is present in parts of Esrolia as well, possibly using their Golden Age earth temple style, like this illustration of the Paps (in Prax, but similar in style). The best source for the cult write-up for Lodril right now would be the Cult Compendium in the Gloranthan Classics series. RuneQuest information for Dayzatar is currently out of print, although his spells are part of the Red Book of Magic. I'm away from my sources, so I cannot look those in their RQ3 incarnation up now. The Sourcebook gives a good general description of both deities, but no RuneQuest data. That's close to my impression, too. My current "projection" of Godtime is a layer of cycles around a central axis (resembling the Spike of Godtime) where any Godtime myth is a linear path through these layers, intersecting or interacting with certain major myths that are present or reflected in multiple layers or cycles. These paths may go down into earlier interactions or up into later ones, where they may meet and interact with other paths, at certain vertical myths/locations. Think of some deed a deity performed in Godtime, and other deities involved, whether as allies and supporters, or as opponents. As the quest is supposed to be lost, assign fragments of (one version of) what you think happened to the lore of some of those deities, so that your questers can prepare mythical fragments that may or may not lead to this event. Making up those bits is a bit work, but then you can lean back and have the players reconstruct a story out of these snippets, possibly including red herrings. After they have written your scenario for you, you are asked again to judge whether their approach will yield a useful effect or not, although that can take in how the dice roll... I agree that you need an idea how player characters can start off on a heroquest. You could do worse than leech off ideas from Jeff Richard's GMing in his White Bull campaign, on youtube. Nick's Jonstown Compendium oeuvre "The Black Spear" sends the players off on a heroquest, too, and also offers a number of ways to use RQG rules to decide stations of a HeroQuest. You could borrow Simon Phipp's concepts for heroquesting, also on Jonstown Compendium, or look at the suggestions in "Six Seasons in Sartar", the best-selling product on Jonstown Compendium, with lots of other useful GMing advice.