Jeff

Herd Men are beasts and have the Beast Rune. They just look like men. But they are no more the Man Rune than stick insects are the Plant Rune.

I agree. Especially since the pseudo-Celtic or pseudo-Viking stuff doesn't look at all how those people represented their gods.

I've gotta say, I'm not a fan of either piece and wouldn't use either as reference pieces for other artists. Here's my go to reference piece for Orlanth:

Any discussion of Gloranthan warfare should start with pages 13-15 of the Guide to Glorantha. In a nutshell, here's the key section: Gloranthan Warfare Gloranthan warfare is superficially similar to that of our world. Formations of foot or horse fight under the leadership of a king, general, priest, magician, or warlord against their enemies. Ambushes, skirmishes, field battles, and sieges are used to break an enemy’s will to resist, just as in the wars of our own world. Unlike our own Earth, in Glorantha magic plays a decisive, often even primary, role in warfare. Priests cast bolts of lightning or call down flames from the heavens; shamans can unleash spirits like the all-consuming Oakfed; devotees of war or storm gods can shatter regiments; and the Lunar Empire has units like the Field School of Magic, the Crater Makers, or the awesome Crimson Bat that can decimate entire armies. In Glorantha, victory is often not on the side with the biggest battalions, but the side with the mightiest gods and spirits! This can have surprising results; for example, a Paleolithic band of hunter-gatherers, backed up by powerful shamans, can overwhelm a superior civilized phalanx lacking magical support. The few armies that are both magically powerful and organizationally sophisticated (in particular, the Lunar Army) are terrifying indeed. The magical elements of Gloranthan warfare can dominate a battle in many ways; for example: · Orlanthi storm worshipers can fly through the air wielding lightning and thunder. · Lunar magicians can call down meteors from the Red Moon to annihilate entire regiments. · Wizards can cast spells that manipulate natural laws, such as making bronze harder than iron, or causing fire to erupt from the air. · Priests, shamans, or wizards can summon elemental events, such as flood, storm, earthquake, volcano, or even a wall of fire. 
 As a result, Gloranthan armies often use tactics or strategies that would make no sense in our world but may be fundamental to using their army’s magic to its best effect. Armies are often assembled according to sacred formulae and combatants are often chosen to best match ancient myths. Certain individuals or units may lack any direct military value, but must be present for other regiments to use their own best magic. --------- Martin Helsdon has put together an excellent resource booklet on the subject, that I personally use as my go-to reference book.

The GSB is how RQG will look (since I did the art for both).

And who is to say that what you think of as "Pelorian" isn't derived from Esrolia artisans in the Second or even late First Age? It is worth keeping in mind that Nochet is the city of sculpture going back to the Silver Age (during the time of Panaxles the Architect and Seserto the Artist).

Orlanth is blue because he is the Air God. Umath, Vadrus, Orlanth, Kolat, etc. all are depicted as blue. Storm Bull has blue (but he's reddish from the Copper Sands) and even Humakt is blue-black. Wind Lords brew woad to make themselves more like Orlanth. Orlanth has many arms to visually represent the breadth of his power. He is Adventurous, he is Thunderous (four arms). He has taken weapons from all the other elements (four arms). He is Adventurous, Thunderous, and Rex (five or six arms). He is Movement and Change and can add arms when needed.

Bronze mined directly from the bones of Air gods is RARE. Most Gloranthan bronze is a mixture of copper (Earth) and tin (Sky).

In RQG, chainmail is not in the core rules - which is my way of saying that humans in the greater Dragon Pass region (including the Lunar Empire and the Holy Country) don't make it. BUT when you get the Bestiary, you will see that the iron dwarf example is armoured with iron chain mail. And man it is good armor.

The problem with doing that is that is not what the spell description is written for. For example, Bless Crops adds +20% to your Harvest roll to determine how well your farm did. However, the Harvest roll is not intended to be a perfectly average simulation of how well farming works across Glorantha - it is a mechanic that lets the GM figure out how well player character (or player character associated) farms and herds do in a given year and give them some reason to care about fields and livestock (since their income may depend upon it). The mechanic is weighed towards having interesting things happen (same thing with the Family Background generation - that is weighed heavily towards having the ancestors of player characters have a connection with the events leading up to now). In short, RPG game mechanics, even in a game like RuneQuest or Call of Cthulhu (or even WBRM), are usually primarily intended to be used by GMs and players in adjudicating stuff that happens in a tabletop RPG game in a fun and interesting manner, and not as the basis for SimSetting (tm).

I'd be very reluctant to extrapolate mass society effects from the description of a Rune spell. These descriptions are intended to given a game effect for player characters. The existence of the Bless Crops spell allows player characters and their communities to survive things like the Great Winter, wars, magical phenomena, angry spirits, ill combinations of planets and stars, etc. When I've run community games with harvest rolls, everyone runs to the Earth priestesses to hedge their bets. With Bless Crops you've got a chance. Without it, you tend to be screwed.

As Mob has already said, we'll have the clean character sheet as well. It seems with some commentators, the mere existence of an artsy character sheet that they don't need to use is too much.

Yes, there will be a fillable PDF.

I've found that newer and more casual players tend to really like the arty character sheets. Old grognards tend to like clear and plain character sheets. So we have both. But I suspect despite the comments here, the arty character sheet will get downloaded far more often than the clear sheet.

Assuming you are in Australia, do check out our shipping rates in Australia - we do stock a fair amount of stuff locally in order to keep the freight costs down.

Even though his title is Ram and Warrior, I would be surprised if he has any specifically ram magic. If I recall that is a reference to his martial ardour (rams being seen throughout Peloria as war-loving). That being said, he may have had an awesome horned helmet.

Reduced to bare essentials, Yanafal Tarnils was a Humakt cultist prior to birthing the Red Goddess. Essentially, he provides a subset of Humakt's magic to the Lunar Empire.

Who knows. The main currency in Fonrit may be pegged to a standardised cost for an agricultural or household slave. But I'm not going to work that out at this point.

Fonritian coins are not called dirhams or deniers, which have their root in drachma and denarius respectively and seem quite inappropriate for me. Fonritian coins, like Sesnegi imperials and the various Safelstran ducats (which just means "coins of the Duke"), likely have their origins in the "imperials" of the Middle Sea Empire. I strongly doubt they use Wheels, which I suspect is more of a Second Council thing.

It shouldn't. I'd suggest reading the section Making Gods very carefully.

The remaining Elmali likely reject the Vision of the Many Suns, but they are few indeed. I suspect Elmal is seen by most outsiders (including most Orlanth cultists) as the weird Yelmalio subcult (and not vice versa).

Actually I doubt Yelmalions would say Elmal is a different god from Yelmalio. Elmal was revealed by Monrogh to be Yelmalio. They aren't different gods, just a more profound understanding of the same god.

The one advantage Elmal has over Yelmalio is he gets Shield from Orlanth. But Yelmalio gets Catseye, Command Hawk, gifts and his ranking priests get Sun Spear from Yelm. I consider that to be considerably better magic than just Catseye and Sunbright. Heck, the gifts alone are worth the switch (raise Spear or Bow to 90%? Talk to your horse? Speak languages? Supersize or supersmart me? Heck yeah!).

There's never been a published RQ writeup for Elmal. I'm looking at what will be published and yes, Yelmalio has better magic.

In part, that's the mythology of Yelmalio - his stories don't kick into action until AFTER Yelm is killed. It is also historical - the Yelmalio cult didn't develop as part of the Dara Happen empire. As a result, there is neither a magical or a political basis for the cult to take a subservient position. The gods are associated - Yelm is an associated cult with Yelmalio and gives the high priests (both Rune Priests and Rune Lords) access to Sun Spear. But the cults are separate and removed. And Yelmalio does give better magic than Elmal. His gifts are nothing to sneeze at, and having the ranking priests have access to Sun Spear is a big deal. The Elmal cult has neither.