boztakang

+1000 I've been playing the hell out of TW:Warhammer2, and thinking you could ALMOST do a decent glorantha version via mod. On the other hand, the warhammer property is only currently planned through tw:wh3, so there could be a window to a make a Glorantha version happen. I think it might be a bit of a hard sell, given the relative "niche-ness" of glorantha and the expense of that kind of AAA title, but one can dream 🙂

I don't think it's really what you are looking for, but this is the Dehori description from the upcoming trollpack "types of Uz" section The Glorantha Bestiary has stats as well as an example "unique" Dehori. Mythically, when Subere hid from Light becoming the dark beyond dark, Dehore broke into countless pieces - all the various Dehori. There are certainly wayyy more than 22 of them in total, but there could easily be a tradition of 22 "special" ancient and huge ones. Personally, any limitation to the quantity of dehori seems contrary to their mythology, but darkness probably the best place of all for YGMV, as even the most knowledgeable of gloranthans will be either ignorant or deliberately misleading about such details if pressed. A few possible "known" Dehori might include Hellroar (ZZs spirit of retribution) Cragspider (according to some interpretations of some early stories) maybe Basko, the black Sun. The vast majority, however will be nameless or forgotten. In general, Uz divide darkness spirits into two main categories: Ancestors, who at some point had an Uz body, and Dehori, or all the other assorted spirits of darkness.

The works of Edward Lear appear in lots of place names and some of the odder inhabitants of Koromandol. And have a very distinctive visual style. http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/ll/ybb.html http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13650/13650-h/13650-h.htm#songs For Bliss in Ignorance, films like "blood feast" and "2000 maniacs" were apparently inspirational in parts https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056875/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_33

I like the idea - this sort of HQ stretch seems full of delightfully unintended consequences. A partial failure might just put the chief to sleep for a few seasons/years (removing him as a crutch for your players) A badly botched quest could drag the party into a poorly prepared Lightbringer's Quest, where they unintentionally resurrect some old enemy of theirs. If successful, the resurrectee will likely have to become an Odaylan himself. He will be hairier and grumpier than before, and likely wander off into the woods on his own and have little time for all that annoying chiefly claptrap he was into before. (again getting him conveniently out of the way) As an alternative to giving birth, the quest might require your Odaylan and the chief to "swap souls" giving the PC a distinctly "Orlanth Rex" outlook in addition to the above change in the chief. (assuming, of course, the player is amenable) Lots of possibilities - full of MGF.

Much like the aldryami, female Uz in particular have a very wide range of physical appearance, or would if they didn't shun light so strongly and Blind or Extinguish or otherwise interfere with anyone trying to get a "good look" at them. Trying to nail down exactly what someone with a much higher Darkness than Man rune "looks like" is tricky at best. In general, I think that more magically powerful Uz tend towards extra mammalia. It is unclear weather magical prowess allows them to form themselves to be more "uzuz-like" or if the physical characteristics naturally correspond to increased magical potential.

Well, they still can't Defend if they wish to move this melee round, rather than the next one - which is a significant disadvantage. Which then brings up the question: If you attempt to Retreat in the scenario above, does the broo's attack next melee round count as "re-engaging" since he can attack before you can move? I would personally rule NO, so long as you continued to only defend, and you could then move on your normal move SR without penalty. But I don't know that the rules have anything specific to say about that case. (again, probably ok given how unlikely it is)

The appendix is included with the Errata manuscript.

It gets easier with practice. As long as you are focussed on ensuring that the players are engaged, you should be on the right path.

I would suggest the Birth of the Devil as an excellent heroquest. Something goes badly enough that the PCs need a powerful ally. So they make one. Only it is more terrible and powerful than they could have ever imagined. You've already got the Corrupt Healer (Mallia), the Abused and Wronged (Thed) and Violent Madman (Ragnaglar). All that remains is to put them on the path to summoning/creating an ally to wreak vengeance upon their enemies. Then its just up to you to help them "invent some entirely new ritual" to accomplish it. For best effect, the true nature of the quest should obviously not be apparent except in retrospect. Like, once their planned revenge is complete, they realize that they have no idea how to stop their "child" and that it's ever-increasing destructive power shows no sign of slowing or becoming less destructive.

I also think it would work, but there are a number of factors that I think would make it uncommon... 1. It's a shameful waste of food. Sure, any zombie could be viewed in that light, but elves are especially delicious. For the same reason, I suspect Dwarf ZZ zombies would be nearly unheard of. 2. The elfin frame is slender and agile - pretty much exactly the opposite of what makes a good zombie. 3. I suspect that an elf Zombie would dry out an get brittle relatively quickly. On the other hand, thinking about #3, they might well be delightfully flammable. A bonus that could be very attractive to any particularly pyromaniaically-inclined Death Lord.

I would think that any Hero-forming could be considered a temporary form of this. It's just the duration of "possession" that varies. At which point, the question becomes "What is special about Belintar and Moonson that allows them to remain incarnated for so long?"

I would argue that the "Bindings" for such long-term elemental spells would almost certainly look (to the un-initiated) an awful lot like a water screw or pump. Yes, the Reason they work in glorantha is myth and magic, rather than physics, but the end result will be remarkably similar to our own ancient world. IMG.

Use Case 1: Characters have a power, but the power is dangerous to use or of limited use. This is easily handled by your description of failure, or by an additional contest if they try to over-use the power. Ex1: "you feel the Rage building within you, how do you constrain it?" Ex2: Returning to your body is a contest where the difficulty ramps with time spent in the otherworld. Ex3: JonL's suggestion above seems good - Marginal success could include some self-damage, or you could again add a contest to resist the self-damage regardless of the success or failure of the actual mind-control (assuming the ability use warrants two contests worth of narrative attention) or you could rule that Mind Control always works, but that "failures" are just "costly success" - leading to the self-harm.Use Case 2: Characters have a 'stat' that impacts their behavior / abilities based on their action. I see two good ways to handle this, as lingering penalties, or Flaws. Just apply Lingering Penalties liberally, and make them harder to remove than normally suggested. -or- Particularly bad defeats might give a Vampire char "Flaw: Tenuous grip on humanity" or an Investigator "Flaw: Paralyzing spear of spiders (or fish-men, or...)" or similar. You can, of course, mix and match to taste. As a house-rules Idea, you could make these Flaws work more like a normal skill, and increase it's rating as desired, rather than tying it to other skill ratings like you normally would for a Flaw. As a rule of thumb I would suggest that if the downside should be temporary, use Lingering Penalty. If "permanent" use a Flaw.

That is certainly my take on it - A Thousand Hells With the universe turned on its head, and the natural order inverted, it was inevitable that the cracks beneath Arrquong’s well would widen, and leak horrors into the broken world. Bad Man, Weak Woman, and Traitor Spirit performed unspeakable acts, and together vomited forth the Devil. The Devil performed many terrible and unforgivable deeds, but by far the most foul was the destruction of the Great Queendom and the Spike at the center of the world. The destruction of the Center breaks the underworld into Ten Thousand Hells. Each one an isolated fragment of what was there before. Most of them are consumed by chaos and vanish as if they had never existed, Half of those that remain are corrupted so badly that no one can visit. Half of the ones that can be visited have been lost, and no one knows how to reach them. As a result, only one piece in ten of the original underworld remained to be bound by the great web, and can be reached by mortals within the bounds of time, and each of those has been damaged or corrupted to some degree. Humans claim to know of as many as nine distinct hells, but Uz can reach many many more than that. Most are terrible, broken places that offer little more than novel ways to suffer and die. Others provide subtle variations on the common themes of better known fragments of the underworld. Each major pantheon has at least one fragment of their own, where their devout dead go to await rebirth, and where their gods of darkness and death hold court. Important and well-known myths can overlap many such fragments, providing some modicum of stability to scenes shared by many gods and peoples. But nothing in the underworld is ever entirely certain. Connections between the thousand hells are irrational and ever-changing. It is common to shift unexpectedly from one reality to another in regions where the underworlds diverge or combine, and there is no map that can accurately predict where or when such events might occur. Even established and well-rehearsed myths might change drastically from one telling to another. Each of the underworld scenes described above have multiple reflections in the Thousand Hells, along with innumerable other locations, events, and happenings. (apologies for the off-topic trollpack teaser)

p10 top of 2nd column - "Dragonewts rose and crushed the heart of the once-might civilization" should be mighty also p10 col2 = "2. Aldryami, most in the Stinking Forest" should be mostly p13 - "ingratiating them into his realm" should probably be "integrating" p13 col2 - italics continues after the pure horse poem, into sections that it shouldn't p14 - "although a few are known to have not only survived but strengthened by their participation." should read "but been strengthened" p14 - "longabandoned" should be two words (or hyphenated?) p27 - image is of starbrow's rebellion, not grizzly peak.

The Zorak Zoran cult has its own spirit tradition based around enslaving or bullying spirits to do what you want. In general, ZZi have access to lots of smallish spirits to do things they find useful (fear, disruption, bludgeon, protection, etc - ie:"battle magic") but generally will have difficulty dominating larger "unit-chit" sized spirits, and when they do, are more prone to such spirits going rogue and turning on their summoners, given the least opportunity. Reliable control of really big spirits will def be more of a Kyger Litor thing, though even then, powerful underworld demons are never going to be terribly docile or predictable. After all, even the most friendly and well-meaning ancestors from the god time may not properly realize that YOU are mortal, and that killing and eating you is not just harmless fun anymore, like it would have been in wonderhome.

I'm not even certain that a human MUST have an elemental rune. I'd be just fine with a player taking for example Truth/Life/Change as their runes if they wanted to, and had a good justification. After all, everyone "has" ALL the runes really. The ones recorded on their char sheet are just those that are sufficiently strong to produce magical effects. Not having a strong elemental affinity is weird, but certainly not impossible in my glorantha.

also, if when the waters recede, you could park it just-so here on Blackorm Mountain, right next to Cliffhome, that would be very lovely, thank you! :urp!:

Shortly after discovery, the corpse of our poor Teelo Norri victim goes missing. After all, any newly hatched nest needs a queen... This way, she doesn't even have to have turned to chaos before she was murdered, and might even have been murdered for some unrelated reason, or even accidentally killed by an otherwise upstanding person, who has attempted to hide their role in the killing out of personal shame and embarrassment (completely unaware of the scorpion nest complications). Illumination comes with her resurrection, and she now seeks revenge for her own murder, and protection for her chaotic sibling/minions. Now you have a "mundane" murder mystery, where just as the PCs are about to bring the secret killer to justice, they suddenly have to face the wrath of the "victim" all amped up on chaotic scorpion awesomeness.

It could be worth noting that ultimately, Orlanth "defeated" chaos by running away from it and asking for help ;-)

Chaos itself is inherently Nihilistic - it is, after all anti-being. People (of Gods), however, are drawn to it for many different reasons. I think the Unholy Trio represent the three most common of those reasons - Survival, Revenge, and Madness. Primal Chaos, on the other hand, is nothing and wants nothing - it is just pure power that can be tapped by anyone desperate, angry, or insane enough to make use of it. So for the purposes of your scenario, what did the villain want badly enough to resort to chaos? and what is the horrible twist that chaos introduced to their plan to turn it all wrong and evil? You could have a village of ducks that hid themselves from lunar bounty hunters by summoning monsters, that now infect the ducks' eggs to reproduce themselves. You could have a Lunar Tax Collector who made themselves visible only by moonlight to escape rebels, but is now so horrible to look at they cannot bear to be seen at all. Or a bereaved mother who secretly "resurrected" her stillborn child (as an ogre, ghoul or vampire) with obvious downsides as the child matures. and so on...

On a macro level, I tend to believe that Magic is a wash. For every Repair spell there is a renegade Gremlin running around breaking things. For every Plowsharp, there is a stubborn Stone Spirit refusing to be budged. The simple existence of Heal2 means that people are far more likely to resort to swordplay over minor disputes then they would be in our world. The main "economic" difference I've seen mentioned is the big reduction in child mortality. A much greater percentage of Gloranthan births result in adults than was the case in the RW until very very recently. This extra population is, of course, then "spent" on battle fields and in various natural and magical disasters.

except Hunger is typically a Darkness thing... though I quite like the association of salt with satiation, which explains why we so often have trolls monopolizing or associated with salt gathering. I suppose there is no particular problem with elements sharing certain traits, like Darkness and Air share Sound.

@David Scott In my HQ formulation, trolls have three runes - Darkness, "Ancestor", and "Temperment" Storm is one of the Temperment runes. (So, in general the "third rune" as you surmised) Normal Uz are not at all likely to become Wind Lords. However, 13G chars are quite explicitly not normal folk. I can certainly see a "Windy" male troll managing to alienate his Mother/Wife and getting basically outlawed from troll society. In that case, he could easily seek refuge with the orlanthi, and prove himself useful enough to eventually rise to Wind Lord status. Any more traditional trolls in the party will make fun of him a lot, however.

I don't think many people would be able to find the errors at all without the errors thread to guide them. On top of which, HQ is an immensely forgiving rule set - it's nearly impossible to get "wrong" once you understand the core concepts - which are dead simple, but different enough from "traditional" RPG play that it can be a bit tricky to really "get" at first. Many of the best HQ games I've run involved little more than a few simple contests strung together by mostly player-generated narrative. If you focus on telling an interesting story, and just throw in a contest whenever it's not obvious how things will turn out, you should be just fine. IMO, the hardest part of running HQ is actually accepting how utterly simple running HQ can be. I know I went through a fair period of "nah, it can't be THAT easy..." and trying to over-complicate things before letting go and letting the system really shine in its simplicity. In HQ the rules are really just there to add a bit of surprise and tension to your collaborative storytelling. RQ on the other hand, is a far more traditional RPG experience in that it sets up a framework or rules and expects the players to work through them. The rules matter, and tell you more or less exactly what happens, based on how you tried to go about doing whatever it is you are trying to accomplish. The two games are very different in approach, but both work extremely well at highlighting different aspects of Glorantha.