Joerg

If it was ever mentioned outside of MOB's Wyrm's Hold scenario, I missed the reference. The word sounds trollish to me. I am seeing Old Pavis during the Arrowsmith Dynasty here.

King of Sartar (pdf/hardcover edition) p.32 and p.114 explicitly mentions a Kethaelan play about Sarotar and Arkillia. @jajagappa's map of Nochet has a theatre as the Donandar temple (or vice versa) in Nochet, between Kena Hill and the necropolis. We don't know whether the plays resemble Greek drama or comedy, or whether the use of Illusion magic might give Gloranthans the equivalent of cinematic experiences when watching Donandar actors presenting a play. At the very least, something like Gandalf's fireworks dragon at Bilbo's birthday party should be available on stage.

Weirdly enough, in RQG in a three on one situation one can parry all three attacks on the same strike rank with the same weapon, once at full skill, once at -20% and once at 40%.

Try doing that crouching in four foot high tunnels... short spears, knives and gladii were what the parties I GMed were using. The Greatsword might be good for parries, but as a thrusting weapon its damage is greatly reduced. Human-sized tunnels where mine-ponies or mules could be used are easier to fight in, but I agree about high-swinging attacks. Unfortunately, my (very limited) kendo training would leave me with only one applicable technique. Escrima (raw beginner, too) with scramasax-length blades on the other hand has almost its full potential. But then, I bring 6'7 in shoes into the tunnel. Those fire extinguishers in ferryboats are life-threatening... and it is easy to convey that feeling to my fellow gamers who don't get to experience that in daily life. My players get forewarned, and usually have a shorter side-arm.

An easy cure against people only using long, two-handed weapons is to put them into narrow spaces, or to inflict low-hanging branches or ceilings on them.

We know about salt gardens in the Backford area, which means that there is some taming of the (very much active) Syphon river going on here. Elsewhere, there might be water mills, there are bridges, and there may be protective edifices for river port sites.

My understanding is that Talor's curse affected the gift of invulnerability in changed form given by Nysalor. Those Telmori who never accepted that gift escaped his curse. While impervious to normal weapon damage, the gifted Telmori still were taking casualties from magic and rune metals, and they were fighting at the forefront of the war. The Pure Ones would have fled.

The rivers of the Pelorian basin pretty much have been tamed by the humans living on them, diverted into reservoirs and irrigation canals, dammed embankments, and possibly even groynes to regulate the main channel of a river and keep it navigable during periods of extreme water levels and to direct some of the flow into reservoirs or paddies. But then, the Oslir is a mile wide in places.

The pre-chaotic (and presumably pre-parasitic) Broo may have been quite similar to the Minotaurs, another hominoid herd beast creature of unusual fertility, only based on bovines rather than caprines. Depending on which sources you read, minotaurs may have fertile minotaur offspring from cattle and human (-shaped) females (including nymphs), or among their own species if they find a female specimen. There are a couple of exclusively or at least predominantly male species in the canon. Unicorns are an all-male species, and so are yellow elves. Broos are predominantly male, and so are satyrs and minotaurs, and probably Brown Elves. The ancient Logicians of the West were predominantly male, too, but after two or three generations of breeding with local (lesser) goddesses there was a roughly equal number of male and female births. (But then, quite a few of the Brithini may be third generation, and if a new generation of Brithini is bred in Arolanit, chances are that they still are a mid range single digit generation since the Founders. Hrestol was third generation through his paternal lineage, a great-grandson of Malkion Engr Aerlitsson.) Then there are exclusively or predominantly female species, like nymphs, Elura fox-women, swan-maidens. And at least one such humn culture, the Marazi amazons of Trowjang. The daughters of Moonson might be a similar bunch, although they marry outward, converting the nobility of the Pelorian elite into great-grandchildren of the Red Moon. But then, these all-female species may be capable of pathenogenesis to breed true, and able to breed fertile offspring with whichever male partner they accept. Last not least there may be sexually ambiguous species, like the Niiads, the demigod ancestors of the modern Triolini.

Lead white was also used in cosmetics. In cosmetics, it caused long term poisoning, also in pigments. The Renaissance painter Caravaggio got lead poisoning from his pigments (possibly had the habit to clean his brush between his lips), which caused dementia and phobias (the latter visible in his later work, the former in his criminal record). The lead deposited in his bones was used to identify his mortal remains inside a mass grave (I suppose using one of those nifty portably X-ray resonance spectrometers). In Glorantha, we know that white face-paint may be used in Esrolia and in Earth temples - there is a picture of Yanioth with white make-up in the rules book. There are other sources for white pigment, including finely ground egg or clam shells, but lead white simply works better to cover any color below. In the real world, finely ground minerals will also cause problems when the dust settles in the lungs. Miners' notorious bad health stems in part from this. But, given the thread we are in, the uz have the perfect solution for this - send in food trollkin or giant insect larvae capable of boring into sedimentary rock. Any exposure to stuff unhealthy for humans will serve as seasoning, similar to grazing herd beasts on aromatic herbs before the slaughter.

To be honest, I wonder about that decision. The Syphon is a river well known for flowing uphill from the Choralinthor Bay, which means it doesn't have to cut a deep gorge into the Plateau when it could just have ignored hydrostatic considerations. I choose to read that map as the Syphon rising up to almost 290 or so meters above sea level, with the plateau to the south giving a rather gentle rise towards the higher lands along the coastal cliffs and the foothills (where we get higher isohypses). The Footprint is about as high above Sea Level, and further inside close to the descent into the Underworld it may actually flow downhill, but always headed towards Chaos - just like Lorion/Engizi called all rivers to do.

Different material, unless you mean use as crayon (the German word for crayon is "lead pencil"). Lead II sulfate is not a metal, but a mineral you can precipitate from more soluble lead salts and sulfate salts. Lead sulfate was used e.g. by Rembrandt in his so-called "Night Watch" painting, where the lead ions exchanged the Sulfate for Sulfide ions from the egg white used to apply the pigment, making a brightly lit daytime portrait of a militia into a looming night scene. But all of that is real world chemistry, and does not have that close ties to the Darkness Rune. (Except that sulfide ores are the result of anaerobic = Darkness corrosion, whereas oxidic acid ores are the result of Sea and Storm corrosion. At least in my Glorantha. But the ions that reacted with either of these are not yet metallic.)

Except for Ironhoof, I suppose. Plus there are quite a few descended from Malkion and his various wives in Old Seshnela, transformed by Luathan magic.

Actually, you could use a GIS and randomized events to model this, yes. Also, do your travelers get notification of these difficulties before they encounter them, or are those difficulties baseless rumors spread to lure your travelers away into some alternative route (if only to enrich trading there)? You could work out a couple of encounters, like the ones in Borderlands or Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes, and slowly add names and characters to those as you go. You could determine a pattern between ship convoys reaching the Holy Country from all over the world, cargo availability, merchants specializing in certain types of goods, etc. one piece at a time, slowly adding to your back-log of pre-made encounters (and substracting from the random or "create a new specific one" probabilities). Road segments come with their own difficulties - rock slides, mud slides, avalanches, snow drifts, road works in progress, military passing through, big caravans passing through, heavy loads transported, robber activity, raider activity. Robbers and raiders may have patterns, and local clans and tribes have patrol responsibilities and response times and capacities. Robbers and raiders also come in different patterns, and different attack modes. Trolls operate by night, which may mean they attack caravans at rest. Ambushes or brazen demands for protection money for a stretch of road where a certain band of robbers are said to be active are another way, with the protectors possibly in league with the robbers causing enough trouble (but little enough actual damage) to make this a legitimate, tax paying business. But then, such extra protection can turn out to be the insiders of a hustle. Possibly even an elaborate one, exchanging e.g. a bag of silk cloth for a very similar bag of raw wool. A Thane of Apple Lane for instance would have all manner of such tasks put before him because of Byrne's Squeeze. He might have to offer guided crossings of that road, for a small toll, taking only full responsibility for traders using this service, but then having to take the responsibility if robbers do turn up and get away with loot or causing injury.

I wonder whether the caravanserais in Sartar offer a service to exchange riding beasts or pack beasts. Most seem to be run by the Issaries Cult or close associates (like Geo). Most appear to have a Horsemaster's Guild stable attached, even in hamlets like Apple Lane or Farfield (from "The Rattling Wind"). The Weapons and Equipment Guide doesn't seem to give load capacities for carts or wagons - a weird omission. Ox carts were used extensively for bulky cargo (not quite bulk cargo) between connected harbors (e.g. Hedeby and later Schleswg and the river port of Hollingstedt, a distance of a bit over 11 miles (18.6km). That's a one day trip for a mule train, according to Jeff's table. How long does it take two people to load or unload a pack mule? Wagons and 4-wheeled carts have the advantage that you don't have to unload them overnight, which may make up for their somewhat slower progress.

I blame the absence of a Google Maps equivalent for Glorantha. But then, if you google named Martian features like Pavonis Mons or Valles Marineris, the maps search points you to North America and India, respectively. Maybe the maps of the other planets are only available in Google Earth.

Not quite, due to the particular orogeny of the Rockwoods compared to Alpine upfoldings (a term which covers the Rockies and the Himalaya as well). The Rockwoods were planted as a fence to separate two populations who were in conflict with one another. For some reason, the Soul Arranger decided to plant the fence so that both populations were cut in half, creating four populations which each had to deal with one of the other populations but lost contact with the other half of their own. Propagating change through the stasis of mountains,I suppose. The result would be deep rock pushing up through the sediment rock left when all the Earth was still covered by the Sea, The Nidan orogeny appears to be similar, if coming from a different seeding mechanism - I think of them as a number of Jolanti downbelow created for the only purpose of standing up and cutting apart the Kachasti realm into a northern (Fronelan) and a southern (Ralian) portion, using a pre-existing range of soft hills for deiineation. Presumably the watershed between Frona and Ralia, even though that meant the direction the water crept inland from rather than the direction it drained. An Alpine upfolding happens when two tectonic plates collide. While there is usually some subduction involved (ongoing earthquakes, possibly some vulcanism, at least on the subducted side), the typical feature of an Alpine orogeny is three chains of mountains - two (usually chalky) ranges where sedimentary rock is lifted up, leaving the sedimentary layers (chalk, limestone) at an almost vertical orientation, inducive for sierras, and a central massif of rock from deeper layers pushed up in between. Those highest mountains of that range usually occur in that central range. Between these ranges, you find a collection of upland valleys like in the Andes. A mountain range which seems to have these high valleys, or at least a single range of those, are the Shan Shan mountains, which were raised by Tada from the west and by some Kralori dragon emperor from the east, creating two ridge lines. The orogeny of the other mountains varies. Yolp and the Brass Mountains are of Lodrilic origin, and Gerendetho's mountain (nowadays the stump of the Hungry Plateau and the debris of the Jord Mountains) probably is, too. I have no information on Imther, but volcanic origin combined with a general upward push is likely, too. The Jernotian range has Turos involved. Tobros is a giant lying there, asleep. The Eastern Rockwoods have sleeping giants, too, whereas we know the hills south of Aggar to be of Draconic influences. (There is a lesser race of giants, there, too, Boshbisil's kin and ancestors.) I don't know enough about the origin of the Autumn Mountains, or any other mountain or hill ranges I might have missed.

They'd rely on Imperial Age maps, acquired from the Malkioni - probably in the 1615 plundering of Sog City, then expanded with knowledge stolen in the City of Wonders 1616. I wouldn't expect Harrek to be literate in a great variety of languages, which means that he must have some literate followers on his ship. He might have basic literacy in New Pelorian as part of his Dart Competitor training, but that won't buy him any knowledge about the Seas from plundered or copied writings in the places he visited. How did the Westerners do it? I think they must have some sorcery which will make a current give off a glow to the caster, and possibly help identify the sea entity one wants to communicate with (using another spell, I suppose). Waves and water currents are (parts of) manifest deities in the surface world, Sorcerers should be able to summon (an avatar of) the entity and have a conversation or negotiation with it - the sea sorcery developed by and inherited from the Waertagi is one of the better known sorcerous schools. The current will have sensory input from the length of its existance - in case of normal rivers from their source in the Deep Downbelow (through all their parent currents) all the way to their headwaters. And they'd know about land (aka Food) on their way, and of sea bottoms that form obstacles, feeding places, and dumping (sedimentaiton) areas. There are orphaned, dammed, tamed or redirected rivers, and probably sea currents, too. Major cataclysms, Lodrilic activity underwater or even piercing the water surface, stronger currents dumping stuff... new sinkholes from Maranic tectonics, or underworld cavities pushing upwards... Waters are fluid, and will adapt. Lots of tradition, visible mountains, sacrifices dedicated to a named current or a named island deity... Reading the waves might be part of it, but then there are regions like Dang Leng Dang where all conventional wisdom fails. The Maslo people and their brethren Thinobutan outrigger folk have inherited Sendereven methods of navigation, and might have an advantage over the common East Isles sailors. IMG there will be use of conch shell trumpeting to communicate with the waves and currents for Masloi and East Islanders. Possibly conch shells mounted on paddles, possibly receiving modulations of the sound from the current or wave they are interacting with, changing the tone or the tune of the melody in harmony with the player. Possibly more so in a desert of shifting dunes than on the seas. The Zola Fel is mighty enough to be noticeable quite a way out in the Rozgali (and probably silty enough, too). The Condor Crags are quite a landmark, towering as far above the sea cliffs of Prax and the Wastes as those are towering about the marshy beaches below them. The outline of those cliffs will be readable to experienced navigators, too. Mirrorsea navigation will include reading the sea bottom using the lead, not just for fathoming but to get a read of the sediment or sedentary benthic growth. Whenever I think of the Gloranthan sky - whether day or night - it strikes me how different it is from what we can experience on this planet. The stars rotate as if you were observing them from a really high latitude, places most people never visit. At the same time, the sun and the planets move across the sky like in an equatorial place. And the Red Moon, Zenith and Stormgate are fixtures above, unmoving Then there are the irregular wanderers, Orlanth's Ring, the Blue Streak, and the Juggernaut, or the three visible Jumpers. Stars don't rise or set - the ones near the horizon may dip below the surface, or come up above it, near the Winter solstice, which offers a 16 hour night to admire them, making all of them visible unless you are in a valley or have other such obstacles obscuring the horizon. Planets do rise, from two locations in the East, and they set in two rather separated locations (or areas, in case of the Southpath) in the West. There are at least two planet-rises and settings visible each night, more often three when the night is long enough for Mastakos/Uleria giving a repeat performance. Most other planets use the entrances and exits more sparingly. Lightfore marks the start and the end of the night. On equinox nights, it rises in the same constellation that it sets in. In summer, it sets ahead of the rising constellation, in winter it lags behind. The heavens provide a precision clock, with Mastakos/Uleria offering an easy tool to keep track of the hours - just divide the arc of the sunpath in eighths, i.e. quarter the distance between the horizon and Pole Star, and you have the full hour positions. The tilt of the Sky Dome and the Sun Path doesn't affect that measurement, as it hinges on the two gates of the Sunpath. (It does affect the Southpath, in addition to other weird mechanics that I have been told could be calculated.) But then, longitude is not a problem on Glorantha - the world has a single time zone all across the Surface World. At least, not a problem connected to time, finding out how far east or west your position is remains a navigational challenge. There appear to be magical devices that point towards the temple they were made in/for, which should allow triangulation if you have a set of three or more such pointers, sufficiently separated on a base line. We are dealing with the geometry of a mainly flat surface. Take a map of the surface of Glorantha, and put strong pins into the positions of the three temples. Have two contraptions that allow you to put their two arms at the exact angle between a pair of pointers. Take two measurements and glide those contraptions so that they touch both pins, and find the one position that allows you to have both connecting points on the same spot - that's your position on the map. If you don't have such devices, you may try and use the position of the Crater as one such landmark. It is easy to find, right below the Red Moon. Find a second land mark, put one of the contraptions described above into use, and you will get a circle on the map which will go through your position. Additional data like the fathoms, the material on the sea bottom (if within reach of your lead) will help you determine the position on this circle. These methods require a two-dimensional map of the world. Such a bird's eye view of the world doesn't come naturally to a sailor, though. The natural experience of a journey is that of a thread, with observations around you. Old road maps are like this, or the experience of your navigation device in your car. There are old pilgrims' road maps that combine several such threads to a topological map that bears little similarity to a topographical map, resembling a subway-plan. The experienced navigator knows how to follow a thread, how far he can deviate from it and still come back to the originally planned course, and where and when to expect other routes connecting to this one. An experienced navigator should also know how to find a course after a storm has driven his vessel away from course, with wave action and cloud cover preventing any accurate observation of how the course changed. But while such conditions last, any navigational device but magical pointers and the lead will be useless.

Probably eaten away by the massive gorp attack later on. If that's still in the later stage siege calendar. As for Bat excretion, that way lies madness... possibly the crimson glow is what the Bat excretes. Aerosols, aerosouls, who knows?

There is another, bigger, more diabolic hand out there in Prax, the one part of the Devil that is easily recognizable as such. It usually hangs out in the Devil's Marsh, ready to ambush prospective Waha Khans or Storm Bull trainees. Or entire regiments thereof. The mapped portion of Dorastor is mostly only somewhat chaotic, unless you wander into the giang Dokat gorp or find yourself hunted by hungry creatures. SPH on the surface may look deceptively normal, until Chaos creatures jump you, or pass on by oblivious of your presence. The nasty gradient goes up as explorers go down. Barleyhead knows why. Unmapped Dorastor is at least half again as big as mapped Dorastor, according to Sandy Petersen's seminar at Kraken convention (2017, IIRC). There is a huge valley between Karolin Castle on one side of the Rockwoods and the Last Tower on the other side, and that place is ever-shifting and unpredictable. Travelers have encountered an ocean there, a ruined cityscape with chaos horrors ambushing them, a savannah of chaotic plants and beasts and other creatures, an idyllic but utterly wrong agriculturual land, and more. Or they may have just used the pass road shown on the maps. The return journey may be the same, or completely different. Does it get more chaotic than that in Glorantha's Surface World? The lower part of Snake Pipe Hollow might not qualify as Surface World, but may be more corrupting than unmapped Dorastor. Foulblood Forest or the deep seepage under the Block, or the opposition in the Eternal Battle, or the battle grounds of the Nights of Horror. The inside of the Crater may be such a place, except that it is a non-place. The Chaos Spot where the Crimson Bat died in 1602 is a lot smaller, and probably more concentrated in Chaos, but there is a lot more Chaos loose in the depression. There is enough Chaos to be mobilized in the Hollow that the Lunars can create/provoke an outbreak comparable to that of the Queendom of Jab.

Why Kallyr? If you are going on a heroquest anyway, why not try for Tarkalor or Sarotar? In Prince of Sartar, the Argan Argar character Lionfish diagnosed Argrath as early as in 1621, on the eve of his adventure on the Cradle. http://www.princeofsartar.com/comic/71-the-master-of-this-house/ http://www.princeofsartar.com/comic/72-both/

Unless there is a major assault going on, the Lunar siege of Whitewall is a small city on the route which relies on traders and supply trains arriving, from both directions. Traders passing through will not be that strange. Also because marine travel is hampered because of the inward-blowing winds outside of the Windstop. Sailing to Kethaela has rear winds until the horizon, after that all vessels need to be rowed or towed. Lunar transportation efforts directed towards the New Temple building site. Wolf Pirates are mostly absent from Southern Genertelan seas. Locals will step in. With the wind patterns restored, traders get to deliver those wares that may have been built up en route. There may be a post-Brexit-like scarcity of transportation. The Karse route will be busy with Lunar supplies to the siege of Nochet, as wlll be the Grazelands route.

Argrath has already died at least one time without that stopping him, in his meet-cute with Harrek. Whoever is behind him won't let him off his oath that easily.

And it gives the battalia. The tribal Heortlings fighting for the High Council of the Lands of Genertela would have been those 200 Sairdites in the Storm Army on the left wing. Three tribes sending a "full" complement of their warriors, 3 tribes sending warbands, and a motley collection of other volunteers. Let's assume three tribes together provide 150 warriors, 50 per tribe. Let each tribe have say 2000 adults. That's 2.5% of the adult population. Sounds fair.

For starters, I wouldn't use STR or DEXx5 for such tests. Characteristic x3 often is more than generous, especially if it is a favored characteristic. The BRP approach is to have skills to roll on for specific tasks. A GM can go all simulationist and demand that only the exact skill named by the scenario or the GM can be used. But in that case, if you have a large set of skills with low default values, the character sheet basically tells you what your character can't do. The "crude skill" approach might be a work-around, but on the other hand, it makes use of rare skills obsolete, and thereby it makes those skills obsolete, at least for your game. The RQG concept of augmenting the chance of success with a suitably related ability that your character actually has a decent chance at succeeding in does a fair job catchung up there, and feels truer to the underlying resolution system. Depending on the amount of grit you like in your game (which should be there at some level if you consider a D100 system) you can improve some chances. A cook who does his own maintenance on household appliances should be able to do a routine car repair with suitable tools, a suitable replacement part and a good set of instructions. The same character probably should not be able to re-attach a severed arm doing micro-surgery using wikipedia. BRP allows you to harvest some bonuses on die rolls. You can play on that, have other characters contribute to a task. As a GM, you should consider the tasks you put into the way of the player characters in a narrative context, too. Can the adventure be continued in a satisfactory way if the player characters fail at the task? If no, then the players will sooner or later succeed at the task, but at accumulating cost. There is the concept of failing forward. The cost may be attrition on character health, character equipment, or it may be attrition on possible rewards, aka secondary mission objectives.