Roko Joko

@OP numbering your list was not the clearest way to express yourself. %) The new one is RuneQuest. There's a blog post about that that I'm not going to search for. There are good RuneQuest history articles out there that I'm also not going to search for. This subject wouldn't make a bad sticky for this forum.

Mostly flatulence. It's good for leaving behind a signature after a raid and a few great heroes have harnessed it for flight.

I think if you heroquest to the underworld there will be a pull on you to be moribund and undead-like while you're down there and maybe if you come back too. There are probably also implications for how magic works with you and how your death mantle interacts with your other runes. For heroquesters it's a poetic distinction and YGWV as to what its effects are.

I'll take a round or two in the mud pit. "Among the dead" does not mean "dead". Being in a Place of Death does not mean you are dead, any more that visiting a cemetery means you are dead. "Mythology's language is metaphor. I don't mean simile - metaphor. God is my heart." - https://youtu.be/_hKrVRTOYpY?t=9m39s Death is and remains the point at which your body and your spirit are separated because one or the other has been severely damaged. Going to the underworld the way Grandfather Mortal did is the usual way to go there, but even if you descend the pool or something you're still doing what he did, and are still him. Baby Giants I say baby giants die when they go to the underworld, but so what? First of all, they're true giants. Second, they went down the right way for true giants, and they have their full body and cradle when they arrive. why would giants be upset if humans killed their babies and robbed their cradles if they were sending their babies to die in the underworld anyhow? Because then the baby would get there the wrong way, and without their full body, and without their cradle. internal contradiction of Humakti Hero Questers Humakt coming back from the underworld is morally and mechanically different from a resurrection spell. He descended for a purpose and knew what he was doing when he went there and when he returned. Maybe he paid a price. That's different from a mortal not honoring death when it comes for you. And I think resurrection spells specifically go get a spirit while it's on the path of the dead or waiting in the hall of the dead. That wouldn't work on a heroquester anyway. The thing that draws me back to Glorantha is the internal consistency of its myths There are contradictions there, though, especially about things like the mysteries of life and death. people being compulsorily dead It's compulsory for heroquesters in the sense that it's hard to get back. It's not compulsory in the sense of losing as much strength and agency as the involuntary dead lose. The involuntary dead aren't all the same anyway. Those with better funeral rites are stronger. game mechanics. There are different games set in Glorantha and they don't all say the same thing about the setting. plausible - believable - be consistent - suspension of disbelief Verisimilitude in fantasy settings is very subjective. consistentcy of context that any audience needs People are diverse. Not everyone is going to agree about stuff like whether such-and-such constitutes an extreme contradiction. The Lightbringers don't die in the underworld any more than a Baby Giant does They do have strength and agency down there, as do baby giants if they descend properly. there needs to be an unbroken link and association to the Living World The lightbringers had support from the living. Does Dayzatar who is so very pure look at a mortal hero from the middle realm and think of them as being "part of the sky", no, he thinks "I wonder who this mud footed interloper is. I hope someone else respects my purity enough to deal with this dirty Earthbound creature". He does both. The sky and the underworld are different anyway, though. The underworld is more of a mixture.

Yeah, clockwise. Like the sky dome and Orlanth storm.

Or a strange woman lying in a pond distributing them. It's hard for me not to imagine Storm Bull in flying cow form even though there was some art that showed him as a minotaur. I wonder if they sometimes imagine him as a flying llama. Or as a man... but with the head of a herd man.

"The clear separation of body and spirit/soul only happened as a result of the compromise." At least compared to the Great Darkness, which was like a zombie apocalypse among other things. "The realms of life and death could not be told apart and we find demons and the dead moving through the same realm as those who are struggling to stay alive. This means, by the way, that the dead were also struggling to stay dead and, in a perverse sort of compoeteness, the devourers were trying to be eaten, the conquerers were trying to defeat themselves, and the good were trying to be bad enough to survive." http://www.glorantha.com/docs/devil/

By Adventures in Glorantha, are you referring to the second of the two aborted products that were going to be named RuneQuest: Adventures in Glorantha?

So pumped for this. Outstanding way to lure people into becoming Glorantha nerds.

Personally - I'm not really motivated to hang out in Discord, but as it happens I do use IRC for other things, so if someone ran a Glorantha IRC channel I might hang out in that.

It's a live text and voice chat server, not a place where you post or look in. No, it probably won't catch on, but it doesn't overlap with anything that's already established.

Moon design has a precise definition of its canon, here: http://www.glorantha.com/docs/canon/ . YGWV.

make offerings and sing songs to Mr. Berry Bush and Old Man Acorn Grove sacrifice when needed to Sister Water, The Guy in the Pool wave their spell sticks over the butter pot to make that special cheese pay the gal with the Healing Charms to get rid of the flux eat the "color shrooms" when they need to find their cattle go without food and water for three days when they want to find the pigs lost in the woods chant over the birds found dead in the woods bake special bread and leave it out for the things that used to come out of the woods lay aside a portion of the ale for the ghosts of those who died near their creek toss salt over their shoulder for good luck cross their fingers and knock on wood offer their own blood when the baby is sick http://glorantha.temppeli.org/digest/heroquest-rules/2005.02/20736.html

There was an adventure game concept that got part way through licensing / pre-development 5 or 10 years ago. Not much was announced about it. Games are expensive. Shout out to Age of Glorantha http://aow2.heavengames.com/downloads/showfile.php?fileid=781 for wargaming in Dragon Pass.

Come to think of it there are only so many options if you like nice round numbers. 294 = 2*3*7*7, or 2*2*2*5*7 + 14 days sacred. But ^ and ^^^ yeah, Dara Happans and Theyalans count 4 and 5 elements and the same number of seasons, and Vithelans 6 from creation age myths, so once you divide the calendar into seasons, you can see how the size of each week can follow, without necessarily a lot of additional mythology. You could also note how the Theyalans revere 7 lightbringers. It doesn't fit in some ways, but I like it.

^ I didn't know that. The question is a little less interesting (BUT STILL FASCINATING) if it's not 7 days everywhere. So maybe Dara Happans have 10 hit locations.

Any thoughts on what could be the mythical origins of the 7-day week in Gloranthan calendars?

Evilroddy, I think very little has been written about this. I'm not sure, as I often am with questions like this, whether you want to know about canon texts, fan texts, extrapolations from them, or unpublished ideas. You've read the canon texts and I don't remember any articles except a few in the Pent blog A Land Fit For Heroes And Their Horses. I spent some time thinking about a campaign where the PCs are Red Hair tribe members. (The campaign premise is clan survival during the Hero Wars.) So here are some MGWV answers from that. 1. Caravans are run by Redhairs. The Molari-Sor tell the Redhairs what to ship, take profits, and audit the books, but they don't do operations management. 90% of caravan participants are Redhairs. Merchants and others can book an escorted passage for themselves and/or goods for a price. Etyries Redhairs manage the caravan logistics. The other important Redhair cults are Sun Horse, Moon Mare (I'm happy to use Sons of Kargzant as a starting point for those two), and YA. It feels more fun and wild to say that the terrain is too rough and unpredictable for wagons, so that the Lokarnos cult is not involved. 2. Caravan security is all Redhairs. A passenger could also book passage for their own guards if they wanted. 3. YA cultists are essential to caravan security. They're all devotees and are called horse eaters. They ride camels and wear a wooden shoulder harness called the effigy of the horse eater consisting of a headpiece and an extra pair of arms in a ritual pose. If there's trouble from Pentans they can dismount, heroform YA, and use running and other combat magic. They are something like 5% of the adult caravan population. I think they also have magic to improve Lunar magic outside the glowline, but I'd have to think harder about whether and why they do or don't perform that function in other Lunar frontier areas. 4. In my concept there are many smaller caravans rather than one huge one. 100-200 people each, maybe. (The numbers partly depend on whether the Redhairs ever raise their own children, which I'm not sure about - but if they do, the children travel with the caravan.) For one thing, small caravans set up the PCs in my campaign concept to have their own mobile clan. And I forget the details, but Pent is small enough that I think you can run many more than one caravan per year. Caravans mostly go to Ignorance rather than the Iron Forts because it's easier: there's better grazing along the way and they're better at fighting Pentans than Praxians and Hsunchen. The maps show a valley north of the Iron Forts and maybe they try to use it sometimes, but I think it has Hsunchen and other interesting hazards. I think maybe they use barges that they maintain on the Sirdaryo River. That would mean that in addition to clans that run caravans end-to-end, there are clans dedicated to carrying freight along each of the legs from Palbar to Sirdaryo, down the Sirdaryo, and from Hot Lake to Ignorance. The clans are more flexible than that implies, though. A clan can get reassigned to different roles, and individuals or families can get reassigned to different caravans, or ask to be. So the caravans are as much like businesses as clans. A couple spin-off adventure ideas based on trade routes are: * For some reason you need to route a trade route through Palbar Senbar. That's roughly the premise of the Frog God megadungeon Slumbering Tsar, so that module could be what Palbar Senbar is. * Your quest is to find a northern, naval trade route to Ignorance. Nobody knows what's up there or whether it's navigable. Previous expeditions have been blocked by [ice or other reason]. In Ignorance I think caravans mostly end at Jangi-Shar. A foreign merchant can apply to buy a permit to travel through Ignorance or a more expensive and restrictive one to continue into Kralorela. Redhairs might escort such a merchant for a price, but usually only through Ignorance. Jangi-Shar has a large foreign quarter and a Lunar embassy called the Moon Base which is also the Redhair compound, together with grazing lands outside of town. The Kralorelan embassy in Palbar is called the Dragon Tower (or something) and is separate from the western Redhair compound, which is called the Stables. 5. Your encounter ideas are as good as mine. I think there are also spirits, weather, and sometimes terrain changes that force trade paths to be rerouted. Pentans do attack caravans sometimes, but the Redhairs defend themselves from other Pentans through agreements, allies, trade, tribute, and the threat of their own defenses. The published texts also imply that the Pentans might have accepted some kind of treaty after the Nights of Horror, so there might be some kind of ritual bond in play as well. I think the way it works is that the Pentans are mostly organized into clear groups who control known territories, so it's not usually practical to raid a caravan without it turning into a declaration of war. At any given time the Redhair trade routes run through the territories of a certain number of Pentan tribes, and relations might be poor or hostile with one or more of them. That's one situation where caravans might add extra security, negotiating for it from allied tribes when traveling near hostile ones.

But you're saying that in all of your games the sorcerer finds a good reason to cast detect iron (or whatever), and also every other one of their spells, in every session? Really?

They did, http://www.chaosium.com/pavis-big-rubble-pdf/

If desired, yeah! And if more than one skill was involved, you could say the PC gets an experience check in the skill of their choice. Very similar to what Jeff described, but with slightly fewer skills (and fewer still if you omit technique skills) and the look-and-feel you describe.

"her spells are beyond mortal ken, and she does not respond to prayers and appeals." http://www.glorantha.com/docs/arachne-solara/. That's typical for great mystical entities.

The Gloranthan Cult One Pagers cite their sources. They only draw on a couple of HQ2 books and I think no HW/HQ1 ones, though.

HQG is pretty loose about how grimoires can be associated with runes, so it's not like it's a perfect match to these rules. For example the Debaldan Grimoire on HQG p. 174 is labeled with five different runes, which isn't very friendly for these rules. I bet there are ways to house rule HQG's particular notion of a grimoire, though. For example you could add a grimoire-specific type of technique, and say that every grimoire has a primary rune, and that if you master a grimoire and its primary rune, then that unlocks all the spells in it regardless of your other masteries.

The rules look cool. Is the tap technique in these rules meant to have the full barrel of moral implications that the word tapping has in this quotation: "Most sorcerers, except the Brithini, Vadeli, Waertagi, and Lunars consider Tapping to be immoral and evil" [GtG and HQG]? I have the impression that Kralorela and the East Isles have their own sorcery tradition that's independent of the western one, although it's never really been clear. Would these rules be OK to approximate that, or is that magic so different that it would call for very different rules? (I can imagine reskinning these rules by using a different set of techniques or runes, maybe that'd be enough.)