Joerg

Pavis factional and family politics, and spill-over into adventuring or even mugging rubble explorers. I used the Wind Words episode "Scenes from a Market" scenario seeds as the starting point for my "reform the Pavis Royal Guard from Hargran the Dirty's thugs into the elite cavalry unit in the board game" starting point, but over-eager and way too straight-laced player characters soon pushed themselves into a greater mess when they sped up the burial of Hargran to within two hours after successfully ambushing him after merely two weeks serving at Zebra Fort. As a result, other than fending off some chaos snakes out of the Chaos Playground disturbing the excavations below Yelmalio Hlll I haven't had the chance to playtest my rough notes to turn these into RQG adventures yet.

I would expect the Lightfore super-cult for Hyalor Horsebreaker by whichever name it is called to be fairly common as a minor cult in the Storm Sixth, at least on par with Gustbran, and like that deity tied to a network of guilds. That doesn't necessarily reduce his importance for horse breeders and stable keepers in the trading network that extends at least to Karse, but probably all the way into the Heortland Plateau, following the Sartarite model of roadside "inns". The horsemasters' guild(s) along the Issaries network may have a big number of the Lightfore worshippers. The Issaries cult is involved in breeding equines, too, and will have both donkey and horse breeders among its cult members, or as associate worshippers. Not all horsemasters will be Lightfore worshippers, but where else do they draw the Horsebreaker secrets from? Yes. We know that the Hyaloring Triaty, the Dundealos and the Locaem brought heaps of Lightfore worshippers into the Quvini foothills. We know that Ulanin (another descendant or kinsman of Hyalor) is big among the Red Cow clan. But then, we also know that there is a selection bias when it comes to what folk left Heortland to brave the unknown or a little later the known new dangers in Dragon Pass over succumbing to Belintar. On the whole, one might think that any Lightfore cult would applaud Belintar ending the domination of the Only Old One's shadow over the Holy Country, yet we find three strongly Lightfore worshipping tribes (Runegate, Dundealos, Locaem) and several more clans among the first and second wave immigrants to Dragon Pass. Thus probably associated with horse-breeding and horse-training, essential for the mounted forces of both Heortland and Sartar warrior nobility. Hard to bridle, requiring to be broken into beng useful, just like the horses. I wonder whether there should be some Lightfore aspected subcult of Issaries or a guild controlled by the cult for the purpose of breeding mules as well as their two progenitor beasts. Then I look at Apple Lane and find the franchise of the (Jonstown?) Guild of Horsemasters still taking care of the stable there, although now with a Grazer worshipper of Hyalor and Lightfore. And Yelm. At the very least, all these horse breeding or breaking professionals should provide a stable pool of permanent lay worshippers at Lightfore shrines. More so than all the Waha worshipping butchers.

In my last session in my Pavis Royal Guard game, the characters received a VIP tour of some of the shrines in the outer comples of the Paps thanks to an expeirence entering the sleeping Eiritha Hillls on their way to one of the nomadic zebra clans, and the Impala rider Yelmalio worshipper was confronted with a depiction of his deity (clearly recognizable as such) as Sun Daughter (i.e. with enough accoutrements that were totally different from what he had seen a week or so earlier at (Vega's) Sun Dome temple on the Zola Fel. A fellow cultist from the same tribe (but not part of the party) suggested to refrain from asking questions (channeling Worf in the "Trials and Tribulations" episode of Deep Space Nine when Miles O'Brien asks him about the appearance of the Klingons in the original series).

Liquid honey, then. Why do you have all of the liquid at the bottom, rather than dripping down from the walls? And possibly with some sort of rotating or otherwise unstable definition of "down" indicating the collapse of normal reality?

I had the impression that the IFWW usually is part of the initiation, at least for Heortling males, which means it is the quest through which their runic stats and at least some of their passions are formed, rather than going into the quest. That said, I have suggested this quest as an extraordinary feat of desperation when facing unstoppable Chaos approaching, to be performed by extremely experienced heroquesters (Full Lighbringers Quest veterans on one occasion), but if I had to do this again I would take their experiences from such previous quests and challenge those as their personal tests. At least to my understanding, identification is a very big part of succeeding in stations of a heroquest. By proving your identity, the challenge becomes a narrative pass, even if it results in a major setback in the original narrative and forces the quester to suffer the consequenc of that setback.

Possibly when some heroquesting identity challenge imposes that identification on an opponent (or themselves). While I think that Arkat did embrace Chaos in his ultimate fight against Nysalor in the City of Miracles and had the Chaos credibility to curse the land, Talor only was tormented by Chaos in his sojourn to the Underworld through the Gate of Banir before his rescue by Harmast, but he still was able to impose the explicit chaos nature of the Telmori curse.

A good part of "vacating the city" may have been as prisoners of the Wolf Pirates, or as corpses due to the sacking of the city. The Gunda story in the Hero Wars box story collection suggests that mortals remained in the city for the next eight years, although cut off from the mortal world, and that the deterioration of the city in absence of Belintar had quite mundane side effects, too. At the time of publication, Greg seems to have been d'accord with that state of occupation in the City of Wonders, or at least part of it. Not necessarily a mundane part, though.

Per the board game, the dragonewts only enter in the Full Game where you start allocating diplomacy points to independent powers, and again in the thre-way game where the Exiles and other independents form the third party in the already complicated hero wars (while other independents like Ethilrist or Cragspider, or those allied individually like the True Dragons or the Spirit of Movement, stay out of that game).. Allying with one of the parties typically leads to the occupation or destruction of the nests in the territory of the party losing the alliance - something one might expect in the course of the Hero Wars, too. They do recognize the Lunar kings of Tarsh as a legitimate power in Dragon Pass, though, which may even extend to Emperor Phargentes II Takenegi during the occupation of Dragon Pass following Argrath's decisive defeat at Yoran. What I don't see at all is the Lunars reepeating the mistake of the Golden Horde to try and exterminate the dragonewts piecemeal in an unstoppable invasion. Godunya's utuma leaves the Kralori dragonewts without their Inhuman King equivalent, which might become a major issue in the upcoming events in Kralorela unrelated to Ignorance or the Antigods in general. Why bother when the humans are so excellent at hurting each other already? The dragonewts might use the Hero Wars to uplift the slacker dragonewts worth saving into dragonhood while all those excess energies abound, giving up on the rest, or giving those time to rebuild an upper echelon at their own Time-bound pace. I don't see any evidence of Argrath going full EWF - the Proximate Holy Realm he creates may resonate with draonic energies, but in the end he is building temples of the Reaching Storm rather than creating anything like the Dragons' Ring of the EWF. There is no indication of Argrath sponsoring or even tolerating a Grand Dragon scheme or other such ambitious fripperies outside of his Reaching Storm. Argrath might regard himself as the blade of the utuma rather than the recipient, or the dragonewts might regard him as such. If they do hitch a mass ride on that Lunar utuma, they may welcome his ambition and even support it to some degree that wouldn't threaten their flawless ascension. Inkarne might own her own dragon, though, neutralizing any such advantage held by Cragspider.

Naimless dueling Alain at Tourney Altar for the right to recruit fighters for their Sazdorf expedition in Biturian Varosh's travels in Cults of Prax is missing from your list. We have a date: Clayday / Stasis Week / Dark Season /1614

Ho hum. Mythically, Grandfather Mortal is the ancestor of all Man Rune creatures, including the Agimori, Thunobutan and Dara Happan oriiginal people made of clay by various coteries of deities. One thing being true doesn't necessarily prevent a seemingly incompatible version from being true as well. Or Pamalt and some of his Necklace buddies tried again after dropping the Hoolar, the Jelmre and Pelmre before arriving at the Agimori. A case could be made that the original "Man Rune" creatures were bird -shaped, like the Parrot People of Forng, the Keets and Durulz, or even the upright Griffins as the one on the Gods Wall. (Not Galgarenge, IIRC) Such creatures might be the inadvertent by-produts of way too much magic/Creation going on. LIke the Luathan transformation of Seshnela.

The EWF proved the draconic identities of many deities, including deities of Darkness. Much of that may be projection, but the runic template for Beast implies dragon and vertebrates except for the most form-fluid Elements.

Left Clavandal and Right Clavandal is an EWF classification of the cities and lands of Dragon Pass, for the Dragonspine Ridge as separator. Left being black and right being red might tell us a bit about the Hero Wars?

A "Sense Storm Bull" skill? So, does your Glorantha hire Storm Bull examiners to check all candidates for initiation for Chaos traits, or would your Gloranthans be (righteously or mischeviously) be outraged at the implied accusation of being chaos-harboring scum? If your answer is yes, then in your Glorantha McCarthy has a field day. A god's knowledge of things in the mortal world is limited to what happens in their domain. Sensing Chaos falls into the domain of the Bull, and no other gods. Can the cultists of a deity use their worship or other rites to update the deity on community gossip, and make that available as part of their divination? If so, does hearsay slip into divine pronouncements? Other than Storm Bull, I see few cults where an ogre would be revealed to the deity sooner or later. The mandatory vegetarian initiates of Chalana Arroy should be hard to infiltrate for ogres, even on a diet of aldryami. Orlanth has a certain stake in marital fidelity thanks to his marriage to Ernalda, but then there are aspects of Orlanth which require him to perform sexual activities outside of the bond of marriage, or that represent a younger, yet unwed deity that coexists with the married one. So how good will Orlanth be at detecting marital infidelity of one of his initiates? And who will send the impests on that perp, the deity, or the local cult? On what evidence? My question is: how does the deity learn about the candidate being chaotic? Imagine someone initiated to a deity not hostile to the new cult (and vice versa), would the divination of the new cult deity be able to provide any inside data from the other cult? And why would that be the case? The phrasing "Will X be ..." also assumes that the deity has knowledge of a future yet to be shaped by the multitude of entities exercising their free will, leading that concept ad absurdum. And yet a mortal's free will is what makes them different from a deity establlished on the Other Side.

With evil cults, I would allow the sacrifice of a sapient victim to make up for quite a number of worshippers to maintain a temple. In case of Ikadz, ongoing lethal torture.

Could this Dai-ichi have been some input by Tadashi Ehara?

Given that the three main elf species don't appear to be interfertile, interfertility with non-elf man rune individuals doesn't look that hopeful, other than for fertility spirits and nymphs (dryads), or semi-divine entities like the offspring of Damol and Serpent King Bertalor by their aldryami wives, two daughters of the neighboring forest king (i.e. a minor land god). But then, the closer you get to divinity, the less impact your species will have. There is powerful fertiity magic that enables interbreeding, with fringe groups conducting research starting during the Second Council, and picking up again during the EWF. They tend to use a "Proximate Holy Realm" effect where and when Godtime properties are allowed to enliven the mundane world. Otherwise, my idea about forest wives is that they are lesser goddesses taking the shape but not all of the biology of female aldryami (i.e. brown or green elf females, as there are no yellow elf females, they "only" have dryads to mate with). Weirdly enough, green elf males don't (usually) produce offspring with dryads. No idea whether that is biological, or whether this is a cultural taboo. But if evven their own forests' dryads are taboo, how would a fertile mating with humans happen? (Other than on the Other Side in Godtime?)

TL:DR - experiences with overland hikes with equipment, bad footing, bad lighting. During my solitary work stay in Northern Norway three decades ago, I used a sun-lit weekend night to experiment going on a camping trip in open terrain, packing all the useless stuff my characters carry around, including a heavier hatchet, a nylon tent, cooking gear, etc., and for maximum bulk and encumbrance my sports bow and a quiver of arrows, and set off without much other preparation. The terrain was fairly rough, with bedrock covered by about 5 to 10 inch of spongy vegetation and soil, and following a water course did not mean that I had a level path, at least if I stayed out of the water. Also, beware of areas with bedrock going deeper down and the spongy layer getting quite mighty... A modern trekking backpack and activated archery equipment don't go well together... Hiking with the bow at the ready also made the risk of damaging the gear when traversing slippery rock or other hindrances that can make you lose your balance more threatening economically. Checking aerial photographs of the region, I managed to walk about 6 km away from the road as the bird flies (almost over to the next fjord, except that the valley way running mostly parallel to it) and return to my car in a matter of 12 hours, some sleep in the tent and a field-cooked soup included. On the ground, I would say that each single trip felt like 10-15 km, not counting a few minor detours for interesting vistas. While the absolute height was less than 300 m, I had started from slightly above sea level and had to cross a few lesser ridges left at the bottom of the glacial carves, including two cases where I had to progress on all four, especially for the aforementioned vistas (without most of the baggage, but still bringing bow and arrows, and the hatchet, for the rpg experience). As soon as I sat down in the car, my entire body began to ache badly, and I barely made it the few km home. I have been doing hardly encumbered midsummer midnight dusk walks (which can still be fairly light here at 55° latitude) on farming ways and hiking treks to the next lake and back with 10-15 km and hardly any such consequences, both before and after that Norwegian experience. Without any artificial light, visibility was about the same as a full moon night over snow outside of tree cover, but under the much lusher tree cover (compared to the arctic savannah) it was already very hard to follow the narrow trample path alongside a waterway which I knew well from daytime walks. I would rule Yelmalio's Catseye to be of little use under those conditions. For comparison, night walks north of the arctic circle in the deep of winter were fairly easy on the eye when there was snow cover, even with only less than half a moon in the sky. Turns out our planet's rotational axis is more or less perpendicular to the plane formed by our moon's rotation around our common point of equilibrium, so that it appeared to rise and sink more or less the same amount regardles of the shenanigans of the sun. Walking to and from work in a rainy November was another of those total darkness experiences except for some widely spaced artifical lights after the sun failed to rise above the horizon - probably the darkest time of my life so far. Little of that applies to Glorantha, where the sun follows a tropical path more or less directly overhead, and never anywhere near the southern horizon. With Lightfore, there is a constant light source about a quarter of our full moon's output in the sky, which doesn't help a bit in seriously cloudy nights but is nice to have in clear nights. Dawn and Dusk are red glows caused by the jumpers, and there is the northern jumper Kalikos spreading some lesser cold light around midnight. Then there is the geostationary red orb which passes off a varying amount of glow, not really useful for visual perception. Experiencing stuff in the real world doesn't mean that it is applicable in this specific setting. Using a waxed garden torch to explore the underground ruins of a WW2 flak post (no longer extant) gave me another appreciation for how distracting a flickering source of light can be, especially if it remains at less than arms length from you while you try to keep your footing on rubble. Moving directly against a rising or setting sun is a joy I get to experience twice thanks to Daylight Saving Time, and that is another serious impairment to visual intake of information of your surroundings, but I find that closing my eyes most of the time while relying on the relative positions of songbirds allows me to stay on path pretty well for abot 20 meters until I reluctantly open an eye to scan for new obstacles. Away from the main traffic noise, it is possible to hear even an electric car coming and bypassing you. Talking about spelunking or dungeoneering - natural caves don't usually come with level grounds unless full of sediment. The caves I have vsited were inside chalky karst or gypsum keuper, and other than man-made enty tunnels into the keuper cave, The artificial caves with a flat bottom you could dance a waltz on exist only in low budget SF and fantasy TV shows like the original Star Trek, and remained in use in Next Generation. Probably mostly for the benefit of the film crew off-screen. Man-made tunnels tend to have smoother bottoms, at least if the rocks they were carved out allow such smoothing, or otherwise fine rubble makes up a bottom layer. Larger rubble makes progress about as unsteady and painful as across the see-weed overgrown big pebbles that make up half of the Baltic Sea and Förde coast, one of the joys of eroding glacial deposits with rounded stones between a quarter and twice the size of a human skull. Try moving quickly across that, or similar rubble remaining from a hang-slide leading up a cliff.

You're talking the Big Rubble, rather than New Pavis, here, otherwise I would have proposed to contact Matthew Cole for his 3D project "Vistas of New Pavis". I am not enough of an artist to produce other peoples' covers, but I probably would start with a 3D model of that street, and then deteriorate it (and the background) while commissioning different street activities. Possibly including a military parade, a religious procession, or just a market scene during the civilized times, down to urban combat scenes for the rubble period. This "Time Machine" vibe is great for historical epics.

The Assiday Heartland jerks had their grubby little paws extended at that prize in 1605 when they let him take care of the eastern flank, with way better results than the main army under the nincompoops. During the Siege of Whitewall Tatius worked very hard at beating the losses incurred by his cousin at the Building Wall, but his masterpiece was yet to come - the Dragonrise. Unfortunately, he did not survive long enough to see that. But then, securing Karse for himself gave Fazzur the main trade route on a silver platter. Whichever genius came up with the duck bill artefact idea in 1613 had ended any hope for successful use of the Creek-Stream - Lyksos river route anyway, so the overland route along the ancient river bed of both Creek-Stream and Sshorg was it. And the failed logistics during the biggest cataclysm within the last two wanes were only a pretext. IMO if there was one professional military man in the early phase of the Hero Wars, it was Fazzur.

Dwarfs have a solution for that kind of attrition: gobblers. Perhaps the one species that outcompetes trolls on the subject of voraciousness, these entities that bear some resemblance to Krarshtkids get sent out to devour and neutralize dwarf-created stuff that got away from their possession without any contractual compensation. (I suppose that a huge wave of gobblers was released after the fall of the Clanking City to neutralize all those loaned dwarf artifacts that the victors who were prevented from plundering the place took home instead - a concept dwarfs might have anticipated if they have personalized tools. The dark trolls of the Lesser and Greater Darkness probably were quite adept at removing the poisonous shells and inner framework from their slain adversaries for that special buzz they get from their stone gizzards. In my chemist's Glorantha, aerial corruption (and to some extant, watery corruption) will result in oxidic minerals, while Darkness (anaerobic) corruption results in sulfidic minerals. The two forms of mineral can be transformed from one form to the other by accomplished alchemists, but to extract the metal from either is outside of their expertise for Death metal. (I am still unconvinced that smelting is widespread in Glorantha when so much can be done by separating out dust and nuggets of natural metal and then melting them or just pounding them together.) Several metals are easy prey for the elements, but iron is fairly immune to Darkness corruption. Unlike the celestial metal (Ul-metal, silver) which is fairly immune to Storm and Sea but is easily overcome by Dark corruption. And then there is the uncorruptible gold, weak but persistent. Such a feat would be a restoration rather than a transmutation, a different magical concept as every sorcerer would be able to tell you, using the Dispel technique with the appropriate corroding elements rather than the Separate technique that is used to isolate the metal potential from a mineral. I like the idea that I ran across again today that the TEB may have been Kachasti who were enslaved in the Nidan uprising and given to the dwarfs, then escaped after observing the mostali metalworks operating bellows and similar at best semi-skilled tasks. Heat is used in the production of all metals. Fire is a purifying agent when its destructive potential is used in a very balanced way, which would be the secret of smelting. (And of roasting sulfidic aka Dark ores to create oxidic ones, releasing noxious fumes.) Weirdly enough that goes even for dark metal aka lead, at least if we assume a modicum of behavior like the real world analogs. If not, then the act of smelting would be something difficult to describe and to fulfill audience expectations.

Revealed Mythologies has about a quarter of a page about the Kadeniti, the Builders of the Six Tribes of Danmalastan who created manifest civilization by architecture as well as urban organization. As usual, these tribes would have had workers, warriors, administrators and sorcerers selected by caste. Apparently, these Logicians had a means to build a community magic in concrete matter, or possibly even in concrete (think the Pantheon in Rome made of "opus caementitcum" for the material I am talking about rather than modern Portland cement stuff). Anyway, there is a community magic inherent in Logician (and by extension Jrusteli) planned cities, with the walls being what held the place and its inhabitants together (prominently enough that the Brithini cities all ended on "-wal", although the term "-ket" appearing in both Seshnelan and Pelandan place or god names might have a Logician source in the Kachasti migration, too, possibly describing a defensive structure with inhabitants rather than a city built to support the Zzaburi). So, possibly the design of a planned city has a magic to create a community, which then acts as a conduit of communal magic to the sorcerers.

Most chiroptera adults sport ten limbs, with many others retaining vestigial versions of the wings. The common housefly does for the missing set of wings, too, while beetles have turned one pair into exterior armor plates. (And we know that the Creator loved beetles...) Multi-limbed organisms aren't necessarily chimeras, and the development of wings may use parts of limbs (birds, pterosaurs, bats) or use other appendices grown into wings or sails, like certain gliding lizards extending mobilized ribs, not that different from bone-fish fins. Most creatures we talk about here are chordates, with that weird building plan of interior bones extending from that long encased back brain we are so familiar with. Evolution tends to favor economical approaches to number of limbs and gets rid of superfluous ones, or turns them massively vestigial (like T.rex forearms or ape tails), but creation and hardly limited potential is not limited in the numbers of appendices to that basic structure. (Not that I would like to figure out the skeleton of a winged bull or the internal plumbing of a centaur in a hurry...) The dragonewt development suggests that functional wings can be grown from a neotenic form as an afterthought. This suggests that embryonic development of sky-related creatures may show wing development and subsequent resorption, much like the mermaid tail human embryos develop and ditch, except for a few unlucky specimen that kept them until becoming unviable, and ending up in formaline in medical collections. But then Godtime creation often follows one of two paths. The first path is directed birthing by mother goddesses, collectively called "daughters of Uleria" or Tilntae. Nymphs may choose the shape of their offspring, both when a father is involved and when not. The other path is to take some magically imbued clay and to start shaping that, drawing out limbs etc. as required, and possibly by that time drawing those out of already living flesh-and-bone, or at least living matter like the original Stone. According to the Monomyth, all beasts come from the twin dragons Hykim and Mikyh, and thus are manifestations of draconic devolution or development. Thus there will be draconic features in every beast that has bones, starting with fish, and only the creatures of Darkness without endoskeleton deviate from that.

One possibility: The Zebra Founder, of which Joraz is the avatar. David Scott went into a little bit of detail on this in episode 9 of the God Learners podcast. Another possibility is the oddity of the "Great Living Hero", a Second Age Orlanthi magic deifying a living and deserving hero, starting with Hardros Hardslaughter, the perpretator of the Tax Slaughter, a feat that would previously have won him high kingship, but the ruling priests of Orlanthland found this other way to reward him. (All of this happened around the same years that a few people studied dragonewt mysticism using Auld Wyrmish and weird mystical dancing in the wilderness, the Hunting and Waltzing bands. The EWF inherited this practice, but the Old Day Traditionalists and the Hendriki independents had it, too, and several such individuals from very different backgrounds participated side by side in the Machine Wars. Including Varankol the Mangler, the founder of the boar-tusked Tusk Riders, who represented the EWF.) Joraz may have been steeped in Issaries magics - possibly the God Learner version, as his Pure Horse People had been the protectors of Robcradle - but he was a Yelmic king of an Orlanthi city. Again, listen to David Scott's insights. https://godlearners.com/episode-9-nomad-gods-part-1/

Does Asrelia need a mate to produce a daughter?

With Scorpionfolk,census is always little more than a momentary glimpse. There is also the deterioration of scorpionfolk offspring in the absence of quality rebirth food which results in drones with little in the way of sapience or independence other than feeding urges, and an understandable hesitation by scorpionfolk queens to hatch their successors way too early. The population of krarshtkids and krarshtides (spirits) near the surface is another unknowable.