Joerg

Shield of Justice, IIRC.

My reasoning for that mainly is if this is a magical people with something approaching immortality, if only by their castle being close to the Gods World, then how often would they change queens?

The system puts a cap on the growth rate of characters, with rather insignificant amounts of growth (as opposed to the somewhat more energetic bumps from spells or augments). I've experienced sessions of roleplaying with hardly any die rolls made, with soft skills applied. Egregious check grabbing is a bit of the bad side of the absence of experience points. The limitation of opportunities to increase proficiency in the downtime can be a problem when GM and players want to leave the "powerless newbie" stage somewhat organically, rather than going the old Chaosium house campaign way of starting at rune levels. This sort of feels like declaring a campaign at higher levels as "badwrong fun" if the players have not undergone the grinding experience of 60 sessions per character to reach rune level. One of the important rules of RuneQuest in its current incarnation is Maximum Game Fun. Some players and GMs derive that from the Zero to Zero Point Zero Zero One, others prefer a career from veteran to hero. Zero to Hero the hard way may be the traditional way of OSR RuneQuest RAW. But then, however much magic the characters bring into a game, the GM can wring them dry if he wants to before entering the main story, or he may put the characters to tests outside of the checkable skills.

The name appears only in the King of Sartar version of the Battle of Castle Blue (p.82 hardcover/pdf), reprinted verbatim in Book of Heortling Mythology (p141). The description of the battle mentions which is a clear allusion to the forces of the Sea Tribe. That source also uses the name Elmal for the forces of Light on the other flank, which helps placing this document in pre-Monrogh Kethaela or southern Kerofinela, as use of that name would be anachronistic anywhere else. The Sourcebook refers to this conflict (on p.143) The version in the Redline History of the Lunar Empire, Zero Wane, (Sourcebook p.158f) has seen a considerable update compared to the early version in Wyrm's Footnotes 8 (p.15f), and mentions names introduced only in The Fortunate Succession and Entekosiad. Fortunate Succession p43 introduces the name for that race of magical beings, the Veth Ethdisi. TFS p.89 tells about Carmanos, who was born to Charmain (rather than Carman) and who retired to Castle Blue as an immortal. The Entekosiad offers the story of the origin of Lake Oronin, the site of Castle Blue, but doesn't seem to mention the Veth Ethdisi, or any queen of Castle Blue, or the castle itself. I don't think that the name Vyran is that authoritative. The same sources say "Jagrekriand" instead of Shargash or Tolat, and other such local names. Charmain (the name re-used in the Guide, rather than Carman) would be the queen and ancestress of the Castle people, who would be kin to the riverine Waertagi who created the Poralistor and Oronin rivers, and who imploded Mount Turos creating Lake Oronin. The Veth Ethsidi are the inhabitants of the fading land that is Castle Blue and its suburbs of dome-shaped houses. A bit like a Brithos en miniature... Unlike Old Brithos, which sent away all those of its citizens not conforming to the Taliban-in-Chief Zzabur, the Veth Ethsidi offered asylum to their mortal offspring in Carmania before abandoning the world (in a similar way as the City of Wonders has disappeared after the 1624 plundering by Harrek).

I would expect to find the Shaker's Temple in the Vingkotling Age, possibly already ancient then. There is one event that happened around here that pretty certainly shook both the earth and the heavens - the slaying of Sh'harkar'zeel (place those glottal stops wherever you think they fit). The formation of the Dragonspine Ridge, or perhaps making that the permanent location of that spine, would be a moment to attract the goddess of the Earth Shakers. The brood of the dragons is nearby, and even accepted the temple into their magical road network. Then there is the view that Ernalda kept all the positive goddesses near Ezel, and put the more problematic ones a good distance away. The dark sister Maran settled down at quite a distance. So, if I had to name a builder, I might settle on Tada. We know that he allowed Vingkot to marry his twin daughters. Twins have a bit of a history here.

Other than Gimpy's and Urrgh the Ugly (the Colymar version of Forrest Gump), there aren't that many prominent disabled or disadvantaged characters in canon. Less prominent ones include the mentally challenged girl of Apple Lane, and the Dregs of Clearwine. (And then there are durulz and trollkin.) If you take a look at the population figures, with up to 50% children, there is a lot of mortality when people enter into adulthood, or shortly after. Initiation rites aren't necessarily a cakewalk. Candidates may not make it through the ordeals. Or through the subsequent young adulthood tests of life. Herding may be a less lethal occupation than fishing, but out alone with your herd in the high pastures where sabretooth cats or Telmori prowl, tusk riders seek sacrifices for their demon, and mischievous spirits of nature may seduce and entrap the unwary and less witty, there will be some attrition. Orlanthi cattle raiding is a milder form of the Koryos practices, those only apply to the actual rites of male adulthood initiation, and a good part of that is directed to the Other Side. But then, some might decide or be pushed into not attending male adulthood initiation, undergoing an ersatz Ernaldan adulthood initiation instead. Taken out of the normal marriage pool, even if they make it into a long adulthood life, they won't have many if any children. Then there are those who never become a functional adult. These may be picked up by Eurmali, or the Seven Mothers' Teelo Norri charities - Teelo Norri is the receptable for such individuals in Lunarized lands, or might live with the temple orphans. But then yes, there are many low status occupations that may be an outlet for the clumsy, unhealthy dimwits. Collecting forage beyond hay (e.g. green branches), pulling weeds, herding swine (which is really reporting their position and preventing them from entering the fields), gathering rocks from the fields, collecting chalk for the kilns to produce plaster or fertilizer, collecting fuel for household fires (stick-picking), cutting willows and similar branches for fabrication of baskets, brooms, wicker for wattle and daub walls, collecting manure for tanning or dyeing agents, carrying gravel to fill potholes in somewhat maintained secondary roads, show up for rites to fill the ranks of worshipers and get some of that sacrificial meat and other food, collect edible herbs, wild vegetables and fruit, and easily hunted, slightly icky small animals (frogs, slugs, snails, maggots, earthworms).

Babeester getting pregnant without having had sex, or in case of Eurmal, fathering a child without having any of the fun, opens up a different can of worms. Immaculate conception and Eurmal in the same sentence? That must be a joke. Hence possible.

Warhammer FRP used the flipped d100 success roll to determine the hit location (to be looked up on a table). You might be able to find other different outcomes for a success in non-combat rolls.

No witch burning competitions, please!

Hon-eel proved her Ernalda-ness at Heruvernalda. And that's after her introduction of maize.

The Trickster persuading the stoic and honorable warrior - what methods would Eurmal apply to make Humakt commit to a stupid venture? He must have dangled something before the Storm god to get him on some instinctual level.

Thank you, Steve Perrin, for the game that has dominated so much of my gaming life. Fare well, and heartfelt condolences to your kin. On rpg.net I came across the thread "when were you last excited about an RPG system?" l wasn't quite sure what to answer, but it was easy to answer when was I most excited about an RPG system: when I discovered the RuneQuest game system first hand (in the guise of Games Workshop's RQ3). When I learned about RuneQuest (in the same book that taught me about multi-player roleplaying games, after I had discovered the solo adventuring books from the UK), what drew me to it and actually made me sit down to translate the game as soon as it finally became available to me were the elegant rules that did away with such unnecessary ballast as classes or levels. and with very few algorithms that allowed me to improvise a very gritty system without having to consult the rules book very much. I learned to associate Steve's name with that rules system when I bought the Swedish adaptation Drakar och Demoner, which credited Steve Perrin as the only non-Swedish contributor. All of that happened pretty much in local isolation, as there were no early adopters of RuneQuest left in my home town, and the nearest big convention was dominated by AD&D and Das Schwarze Auge, with hardly any other system in evidence (not even Basic D&D, which was considered inferior by the AD&D crowd). Unlike many other people from the Chaosium family, Steve never made it to any of the conventions I managed to attend, so regrettably I never met him in person. But then, the design spoke (and continues to speak) for itself.

Where did we get that myth, BTW? While Blood Beer features in "Heortling Mythology" (twice, with AFAICS identical wording), it doesn't say anything about the Valley of Healers. That location is from the Lead Cross quest, of the Humakt cult. Now Eurmal apparently did manage to seduce Humakt once, which led to Humakt severing his ties with his kin. No idea (and really no interest) how sexual that seduction would have been.

In case of Belintar, that was only a theory about Esrolia, but we have the sacrificial kings of the Illaro dynasty with their seven years terms of office, and apparently Unstey of Wintertop follows this model, too. But then, it is Sorana Tor who acts as the intermediate between the king and Ernalda, so "technically" Ernalda doesn't accept human sacrifice, but Sorana Tor does. As goddess of the Greater Earth, IMO Ernalda receives the human sacrifice both from the sacred kings and from the maize rites.

A rare achievement

While there is more to the Bronze Age than ancient Greece, for a demigod's last rest and fortress this might be a good fit. I wonder how much of it was found intact when the Locaem tribe moved in and started to push out previously arrived Balmyr farmers in those lands. Quite a few places are. Second Age Dragon Pass was very urbanized, even before the Dragonspeakers came to power and were able to provide the magically supported special grains etc. that made even the God Learner visitors blink in wonder. I am less convinced that the Orgovaltes tribe of the Vingkotlings would have built that many Cyclopean hillforts - we know about Clearwine as a summer residence, and of Ulaninfort as the strongly fortified survival site in the Greater Darkness, when all the lesser sites had been abandoned, starved, or overrun. But then, Great Bearded Bran (the Vingkotling demigod hero buried here, according to the crowd-sourced Dragon Pass - Land of Thunder: A Gazetteer to Kerofinela for HeroQuest 1st edition, was a foe of horsemen and charioteers. A slightly weird guardian for people associated with sun and horse worshippers by the authors of that gazetteer entry. The circular shaft grave in Mycenae certainly would make sense for a hero of that stature. Speculations on God Time population numbers may be in the realm of speculating the number of angels able to dance on a sewing needle's tip. (The answer to the latter is of course 42.) Which ones exactly? Elkoi is Tyrins. I thought that Dykene would match up with Mycenae, but there are significant differences.

Interesting question: how integrated is a wyter into the binding/operating object? What feedback will it receive, will getting kicked just muck up its coordination and control, or will it actually cause some visceral form of being unwell for the entity? If appearing as/in a living being, I suppose it will receive all manner of physical feedback, including vertigo, nausea, and pain.

Off-and-on as in "Remove Body Part"?

So, how exactly was Jarosar murdered? Jarolar fell in battle, and so did Tarkalor after the establishment of the Sun Dome Temple. Or was it Saronil who was targeted by the Elmali?

I take that as "the cult has the special status where someone with the general qualification of a priest gets employed by the cult as a God-talker." Every cult will have initiates taking care of shrines or sites where a priest is rarely seen. Such people will be God-Talkers by their job description, but not according to the rules. The main difference seems to be that only the official God-Talkers get priestly Divine Intervention - they get to add their unused rune points to their POW when doing the percentile roll, and use up unspent rune points before they touch characteristic POW. A successful DI still is very likely to cause a break in the ability to work as a priest, as the POW is going to take a hit at least half of the time (assuming a priest with POW 18 CHA 18 and 18 unspent rune points to get that 50% chance of not losing any POW). Thus, asking for Divine Intervention as a priest can be a career-breaking move. I wonder whether that is intentional? Old RQ2 had priestly DI as a Runepower 1 spell, which makes phrases like "stack this spell with a DI" a lot more harmless.

There is a "no magic" rule that is meant to be enforced by giant referees kicking the violators, which I think means yes, a physical body is required.

If it has a physical body, why not? If that body is small, possibly as the ball.

That concept of subcults has been taken back a couple of notches. Ulanin still works as a hero cult of Orlanth, as much as he did for Elmal back in the days. (If his rider god wasn't Yamsur instead.) There is also the possibility to approach him via ancestor worship. Quite a lot of the Orlanthi in Heortland have Orgovaltes roots, as far as I can tell. Possibly as many as have Hendriki roots, or after centuries where inter-marriage could have happened, both.

For Umathela, Arkati societies won't work. But then, resistance against the Cult of Silence may explain that secrecy. Naval supremacy would be a rather recent phenomenon - up to the Battle of Oenriko Rocks, the Vadeli who had Opened the seas were very much in control of all naval activities, and many cities still have a Vadeli quarter where their former overlords remain plotting. But then, your city may have been overlooked by the Vadeli, and may have come out ahead of the Oenriko Rocks destruction of the Vadeli and allied fleet. Most seaports would have been founded in the Second Age, before the Closing struck. Not all cities would have been centers of God Learner heroquesting - those that were got hit hard by the retaliations, the main university cities left in ruins. If you want to have a dark secret, it probably would be some remnant of God Learner activity. Not really - it is a gang of assassins, poisoners, and occasional robbers, survivors in the Big Rubble through the Troll Occupation with their abilities. More like a warband around a spirit cult. Maybe with a hint of Glen Cook's Black Company,

It is as possible that learning a spell at a shrine still requires the presence of a priest from a nearby temple. The Godtalker's responsibility is to maintain the shrine as a holy place through a string of (weekly?) sacrifices and (low-key) worship rites. Somehow, the priest needs to spend 90% of his time at cult business. Touring shrines around his temple might be one way.