Jeff

2 hours ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

 I agree that Glorantha is more interesting without "evil" Lunars.  I know that was Greg's take.  Keep up the good fight!  Our RQ group played Lunars for ~20 years and loved them.

However, the newer RQG material definitely takes the Lightbringers perspective and emphasizes the horrors of the Bat, Chaos (see recent FB post by Jeff), the Red Goddess, and the Great Winter.

My PC, Thane of Apple Lane, gets a lot of cross looks from the other PCs for even allowing Lunars to live there.  I think it's proper roleplaying by all.  And been funny a few times 

The newer RQG material is set in Dragon Pass, so of course it has a Lightbringer perspective. Chaos needs to emphasised that it is a real thing in the setting - and although it is not necessarily evil, it certainly includes the worst of moral evils.

The Lunar Empire is expansionist, imperialist, and often hubristic. That does not make it "evil" any more than any other empire in human existence.

4 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

30 some years ago, when we still chatted on Glorantha newsgroups, I pointed out what seemed obvious to me: chaos is just as "natural" as air and death.  That created a real s**t storm of heated and angry responses (and, in truth, by me too).  The calmer, rational responses likened chaos to Original Sin.  In effect Sin / Chaos isn't "natural", it came into the world through bad, unnatural acts.  I may not agree 100%, but I can understand that take.  

I believe that shortly thereafter canon added this officially to the Great Compromise, where the victorious Gods declared that Chaos is unnatural and, effectively, "evil".  If one accepts that, then Chaos has an innate moral valence.  (As I understand that term which I just googled)

Chaos, as Greg used the term, is not "natural". It entered the cosmos through the cracks in the universe caused by the Gods War. Chaos does not recognise or acknowledge the limits of the natural and moral universe. As one put it, Chaos wants to be in the world, but not of it.

This understandably terrifies the beings that uphold the natural and moral universe. 

2 hours ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

My argument is that everybody except Nick considers The Bat a chaotic abomination, and it's a primary reason to oppose the Red Goddess.  Even Humakt and Chakana Arroy, two of the most neutral and forgiving gods, hate the Red Goddess.

If Praxians (and your PCs) sink to the same moral level as the Bat, that's a fine campaign, I might enjoy it, but its more Joe Abercrombie than Glorantha.

Just to complicate things, Chalana Arroy is hostile towards the Red Goddess and Humakt is an enemy. But both are only Neutral towards the Crimson Bat. And so both cults consider the Red Goddess a more malevolent entity than the Crimson Bat.

Chew on that for a while.

The Praxians are known to make use of broo mercenaries. Most recently the nomad host that met the Lunars near the Moonbroth Oasis in 1610 included a contingent of Broos, alongside Bison Riders, Impala Riders, Rhino Riders, Pavis Survivors, Agimori, Newtlings, Basmoli Berserkers, Bolo Lizards, some medicine bundles and even a shaman-controlled Oakfed.

Broos are enemies, but the Praxians are - like most humans - capable of working with enemies against other enemies. This has happened again and again in Gloranthan history and our own.

28 minutes ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

I found another fairly big difference between the new Grazeland material and old.  It is the Golden Bow:

RQiG page 308 in the Yelm section;  Note that Yelm in this book is a lot more Grazeland than Dara Happan- anyway, it presents Golden Bow as shamans only:  "Golden Bow {Shaman): . Requirements: any Yelm initiate who becomes a shaman qualifies for this status."  To summarize it, it gives Golden Bow members special Grazer oriented shamanic taboos (presumably instead of the standard taboos), and also gives access to one Rune spell (dismiss fire elemental).

 

Contrast this with Golden Bow in older material:

Heroquest Voices  / What the War chief told me; A good bow shooter is told someday he may qualify for the Brotherhood of the Golden Bow.  This sounds like a shooting club to me, not shamans.  Clearly there is a difference!  And in the second 'voice',  "What the Grazer Shaman Says", the Jardan the Warrior subcult  says "Jardan is also the patron of the Golden Bow society..." with no reference to shamanic business.

And  David Dunham's material on shamans does not have Golden Bow in it.  But his The Yu-kargazent pantheon entry for Jarden the warrior does refer to Golden bow: "The Brotherhood of the Golden Bow is an elite group of wariors.  among its twquiremtns are 90% with Bow and Ride Horse.

This seems to me to be a strong indication that David Dunham's material and Heroquest Voices material on the Grazers  is not going to be official / canon, and canon is going in a different direction.

:

It is not. And I played in David's game - but that is not the approach Greg and I took in RQG.  

6 minutes ago, Jeff said:

All Telmori become wolves on Wild day. That is their Chaos taint.

But this being Glorantha, there is an exception. Ostling Four-Wolf only became a wolf when he chose to. His son with Onelisin the Cat Witch, Kostajor Wolf Champion, also only became a wolf when he chose to. Both were kings of the Telmori, incredibly-long lived, and ruled the tribe from 1480 to 1620. Neither belonged to any clan of the Telmori (under Telmori customs, Kostajor belonged to the clan of Sartar) and yet both were undeniably Telmori and chiefs.

And to give you all another secret - one of Kostajor's daughters later became the love-wife of Prince Salinarg, and was mother to Harsaltar, Enothea, and Benera - the children leaders of the Household of Death.

All Telmori become wolves on Wild day. That is their Chaos taint.

But this being Glorantha, there is an exception. Ostling Four-Wolf only became a wolf when he chose to. His son with Onelisin the Cat Witch, Kostajor Wolf Champion, also only became a wolf when he chose to. Both were kings of the Telmori, incredibly-long lived, and ruled the tribe from 1480 to 1620. Neither belonged to any clan of the Telmori (under Telmori customs, Kostajor belonged to the clan of Sartar) and yet both were undeniably Telmori and chiefs.

33 minutes ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

 

Thanks! That's  consistent with the more recent stuff printed by Chaosium in Smoking Ruins. Grazer clans moving around, perhaps seasonally, covering half the north-south length of the Grazelands in a year.

Which leads to the question of Vendref clans and croplands, which by their nature won't move around.  It appears that in the 1990s everyone focused on the Grazers and not on the Vendref.

What we need - or at least what I'd like to use -   is a comprehensive resource that defines canon for the Grazelands.  I am writing to the appropriate person here...

But for Friday I'm going to put together what seems cool and exotic to Sartarites,  AND is consistent with that canon as I perceive it hazily and in the distance.

 

 

The "vendref" number about 20-22,000 people (depends on what you want to call the townspeople). They are farmers who worship Ernalda, Orlanth Thunderous-Barntar, Maran Gor, Humakt, and the Seven Mothers. They provide fodder and food for the Pure Horse People, make craft goods, and handle trade with outsiders, in exchange for protection, magical blessings, and trade goods from other lands.

I don't believe the Pure Horse People have such defined geographical boundaries. I am pretty sure the herds move around from year to year based on local conditions. The tribal king, aided by the Yelm Elders, allocate grazing lands to the various clans or bands, based on status, prestige, numbers, magical contests, dance competitions, whatever.

5 hours ago, SDLeary said:

 

And yet, mRQ and mRQ2 IS part of Runequest history, as much as many would like to excise it. mRQ rules were atrocious, but seriously cleaned up by Loz and Pete for mRQ2 into something playable. Even though I didn't agree with all the rules systems, the further refined RQ6 would have been a fine engine to game on in Glorantha. And I'm sorry that The Change™ occurred before they could get out AiG, so that we could see their take more fully.

Mongoose's treatment of the Second Age may not have been what Gloranthan purists wanted, but Third Age was off limits, and Greg said they could use Second Age. Now, Mongoose's treatment is much more along the lines of Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance in tone, but oddly enough this was able to draw players of those other properties into Glorantha for the first time.

As far as art is concerned It wasn't all that bad for games of that day. Certainly not up to Chaosium's currently high standards, but certainly much higher than the low point (*cough* AH before the First Renaissance *cough*).

SDLeary

Not as far as Greg was concerned, and not as far as I am concerned. The whole Mongoose episode was a disaster. 

8 hours ago, Chaot said:

Heard of this? Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno created these cards to help in the creative process whenever you come across a problem that confounds you. They're meditational. Schmidt originally called the cards, The Thoughts Behind The Thoughts. Sometimes I'll draw one as use it as a mantra for today. For example, my day today is 'What Else Is This Like?'. So, today I'm focused on making connections between two seemingly unrelated things.

Which, in part, is why I'm posting here. It occurs to me that Oblique Strategies might be useful in running a game as a meta structure for the GM. Draw a card two hours before a session and internalize the phrase. Whenever there is an in game decision to make, reflect on the oblique strategy and let it influence your choice.

These sorts of meta structures are fun to use. It reminds me of an old post I read on some board about a person's Buffy game. The took an album that they liked and decided that the game would have as many sessions as there were tracks on the album. Each session's theme would coincide with the album track name. It seemed like a really cool way to organize a campaign. I'm thinking of The Wall right now. That would be 26 sessions. I can just imagine how the session would play out for Run Like Hell, followed up by Waiting For The Worms.

Like many things these days, Oblique Strategies has been digitized and can be found here.

https://www.oblique-strategies.com

If you are interested and more tactile you can also buy the cards at Eno's shop, but they are pricy.

https://www.enoshop.co.uk/product/oblique-strategies.html

I use them all the time.

36 minutes ago, Shiningbrow said:

 

Oh, you're also so right in that I completely forgot to look at Mongoose RQ!!! Just quickly checking a couple of books, and it doesn't help us a lot, as they basically mirror all previous versions. No hints at all that the majority of adults are initiates (but, as I said, it was a quick look!)

Given that neither Greg nor I had anything to do with the Mongoose material - when we finally saw it, we were both shocked and horrified at how bad the art was in MRQ2 - I wouldn't consider the Mongoose material as indicative of anything about how we view Glorantha.

36 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

The Prosopaedia notes that in DP, she is identified with Ernalda, while in Peloria with Dendara. She is the mistress of ceremonies and source of wealth and blessings. And she is sometimes depicted with the head of a horse (but is not noted as the Horse Goddess).

The Prosopaedia is damn handy!

18 hours ago, AlexS said:

Great.

Your question really got me thinking about the issue with having the Grazers as a single tribe, even though it make sense in terms of the lore (and appears to be current canon): there are just too many of them.

Jeff says that out of the 40k inhabitants of the Grazelands "Roughly 18,000 are Pure Horse People". That is 4-5 times as many people as an average Sartarite tribe, but we're talking about semi-nomadic pastoralists, which is not the kind of society that in the RW tends to support big tribal structures.

Dividing the 18k Grazers into 40 clans in line with David Dunham's work gives us 450 people per clan, which is smaller than the average Sartarite clan but not by much - and anyway as I said these are pastoralists not farmers so smaller clan sizes do make sense.

And I do think that all 40 (or 41 - he mentions an extra one presumably as a placeholder for HeroQuest-style 'make up the background for your adventurers' own clan' development) are actually Pure Horse clans, not vendref. The names he gives them ('Burning Hoofprint', 'Proud Colt', 'Sky Leap', 'Yellow Orb', etc.) are just too horsey and/or Sun & Sky related to be Tarshite or Esrolian (i.e. Earth-worshipping) vendref clan names.

However, 40 clans is a lot to keep track of if you're the kind of GM who likes to prep about about who is feuding with whom, who backed the Lunar-loving FHQ and who backed the Lunar-hating one, etc. David Dunham is the Uber-expert on that kind of clan-based gameplay (see KODP, Six Ages, etc.) and in his Grazelands material he only bothers to give four of the clans an actual named chief and to mention that three of them breed slightly different kinds of horses. Plus, if you're narrating journeys for an adventuring party, breaking the Grazelands into 40 different territories makes it just too bitty.

So, I reckon that there must be some kind of intermediate clan-like structure that sits between the 41 clans and the one tribe. This is how we explain the reference in the RQG rulebook to there being 'a dozen clans' of Pure Horse people (which I guess means that the reference to there being six clans in the Guide or wherever has been superseded).

I very much agree. That's why I concluded that IMG the Pure Horse Tribe is divided into a dozen smaller groups (let's call them 'over-clans' for now), each of which is composed of between three and six 'mini-clans' who historically came together to agree on how best to share a large area (like one of the main valleys).

The 'mini-clans' that make up each 'over-clan' intermarry, do big religious ceremonies together and generally don't raid each other. They may have a Big Chief and a Big Priestess for the 'over-clan', but each 'mini-clan' has its own chief and priestess, and its warriors can go raiding in the next valley over without asking permission from the 'over-clan' chief, because for most purposes (managing the herd, organising raids, initiating the young people, etc.) they are a clan in their own right. It's just that when it comes to the really big stuff (mustering for war, dealing with a vendref rebellion or dinosaur incursion that affects the whole valley, running a major Sacred Time Heroquest, etc.) they all come together under the Big Chief and the Big Priestess of the 'over-clan'.

TLDR: the Pure Horse Tribe consists of a dozen big clans that are made up of smaller kinship-based groups, and for ease of reference we can call these smaller groups 'clans' and use some of the cool names (and cool locations on the map) that David Dunham made up for them two decades or more ago.

I did go full-on map-nerd and sketch out the likely territories of these 'over-clans', as well as assigning them to triaties (like the Runegate Hyaloring clans) so that the intermarrying would work, but this post is already too long and I have a feeling that it should have been in the 'Glorantha' forum not the RQ one anyway, so I'll take that stuff over there...

Enjoy your adventures in the Grazelands – and please keep us updated here with how the game goes!

I posted some thoughts on PHP clans in the Glorantha forum. That seems more appropriate for this discussion than the RuneQuest forum (which is more about specifically RQ rules and mechanics).

To start with, the Pure Horse People are not Orlanthi clans. Every Pure Horse person in Dragon Pass claims descent from the survivors of the Battle of Alavan Argay, and as Pure Horse People, they claim distant descent from Yelm. 

As we know there are about 18,000 Pure Horse People in Dragon Pass. They all belong to one tribal group - with Yelm Sun Lords as the tribal leaders, aided by Yelm Elders and Golden Bow shamans. The total number of these Yelm Rune Masters is probably somewhere around 100 - for convenience, let's say 60 Sun Lords, 25 Elders, and 15 shamans. The tribal king is the leader of the tribal Yelm cult.

We've got a whole bunch of extended kinship groups here, led by Elders. All of the Pure Horse people consider themselves noble, but there are of course kinship groups that are more or less powerful than the others. I suspect we have a number of traditional bands or clans, most of which date back to their acceptance by Ironhoof (so say around 1250). So let's say there are 9 clans, each with two elders, and then 7 tribal elders that serve the tribal king. That gets us to 25 Elders. Some clans have more Sun Lords than others, and we have the Golden Bow as a cross-kin or tribal magical society.

Now the women worship Ernalda and Hippoi and care for the horse herds. They marry into the patrilineal and patrilocal clans, perhaps bringing horses as a dowry. They raise children, care for the horses, prepare food, manage the households, etc. But as Ernalda cultists, the women also have the ear of the great Feathered Horse Queen, before who even the Elders must prostrate themselves. The Feathered Horse Queen is the indisputable ruler of the Grazelands. She is backed by the Humakt cult, the Lightbringer cults, her sisters at the Shakers Temple, and by the gods and spirits of Dragon Pass. 

So our clans might have around 2000 people on average, with some having more, and some having fewer. However these clans - or divisions (which is probably a better word) - are stable and Yelmic, with much greater stability than Orlanthi clans (but also far more ceremonial and far less dynamic). 

Now among the vendref farmer communities we have some 14-20 clans and village chieftains, and these follow the Orlanthi norms. They also accept the Feathered Horse Queen as their ruler, but are not part of the Pure Horse People tribe.

19 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

I guess it depends what proportion of the population is children — assuming they are included in the 170,000. If a big chunk is the kids, then the % of adults who are initiates shoots right up: half the population is initiated adults, not half the adults are initiates, right?

(As always, I may be completely wrong.)

———————————
EDIT:

As a general rule about 66% of any listed Gloranthan population are adults and about 33% are children. Compare that to the modern US where only about 18% are under 15. I am really not interested in going more granular than that. — WoD

I used to assume as a short-hand that half the population of any given human Gloranthan community were adults, the other half uninitiated children. I've refined that somewhat, and now assume that about 60-66% of any given human Gloranthan community are adults, the rest uninitiated children. 

Now the reason for that comes down to lower children mortality, longer lifespan, and also that in most Gloranthan communities adulthood initiation takes place at around 14-17 years old. This ends up with the adult being initiated into a RuneQuest, although the full process might take several years.

28 minutes ago, Shiningbrow said:

No! If you'd read past the emoji, you would have noticed that...

I was complaining that you'd changed the approximately 20% initiation rates (except in Sartar) to now at about 65% (across the whole lozenge), and that now "Most to all adults are initiates of a cult, regardless of culture,... Just about every Gloranthan culture defines adulthood as initiation into a cult... This is true for just about every human culture – Orlanthi, Pelorian, Lunar, Malkioni, Praxian, etc."

Perhaps you should read what you linked to? Let me quote it again:

"There are about 170k people in Sartar (including the Far Point but not the Pol-Joni). 

Let’s assume a little over half are initiated adults. That gets us 90k cultists."

Now my updated figures have the number of initiated adults in Sartar at 115k, which is a little higher, but not much of a change.

I have no idea where you are getting you 20% initiation rates from. What RuneQuest publication are you referring to? I am pretty sure the Guide and the Sourcebook are completely silent on such matters.

4 minutes ago, Shiningbrow said:

Ah, I hadn't seen that (until tonight). But that's not surprising, given your link is only a couple of days old.

Another retconn... awesome 🙄

I think most of us on here remember when it quite loudly and proudly proclaimed (not all that long ago) that only about 20% of an adult population were cult Initiates, and the rest Lay Members... (except in Sartar  https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/cult-membership-in-sartar/).

 

Either way, it doesn't answer the question. Does your idea of religious practice in Glorantha also apply to Lay Members?

 

So you are complaining that I have further refined my notes from "about half" to about 60-66% is another retcon? Now in published materials I have deliberately kept that question open as long as possible so we could really look carefully at it, but now how dare I change my working assumptions to any extent? Or maybe the answer is I should not share any of my working materials (especially here)?

9 minutes ago, Eff said:

https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/a-few-rules-of-thumb/

So within the current incarnation of official Glorantha, the overwhelming majority of people are initiates to a single cult. That is how religion is intended to work in the setting now. That is what I am talking about.

Rather than look at this in the abstract, I recommend just taking a few examples to see how this works in practice. Take our average peasant in Darjiin. He's an initiate of Lodril (which has Oria, Oslira, Yelm, etc. as associated cults). He is a lay member of the Red Emperor, and likely the Seven Mothers as well. Maybe he is a lay member of SurEnslib as well (keep on the good side of those Bird Women!).

Or let's go to Esrolia, where our character is an initiate of Ernalda (which has a whole host of cults as associates). She's also a lay member of Dormal and Issaries (she sailed between Nochet and Handra Liv on several occasions).  

2 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

Those who want to settle scores remember past events in which they believe the candidate did not display Justice, Honor, or Generosity.  If there are a majority of such people that casts doubt on the candidate's Wisdom in running for clan chief.

So it is all relevant.

Bias?  Yes there is bias on politics.  As soon as you grant that this is not just going to be a comparison of stats on character sheets, you should recognize that it's politics.  That is why I mentioned the question of who judges whatever the chief contest may be.

A clan is an extended kinship group, not a political district. So imagine the average clan in Sartar with about 600 adults. About 40 adults belong to the clan aristocracy of priests and thanes (and their immediate family), about 400 are full free members of the clan, about 100 are semi-free tenants and other adult dependents, and about 60 are unfree.

The chief is almost always going to come out of that group of 40, and most likely there are no more five or six potential candidates. Everyone in the clan likely knows who the potential candidates are. If there is more than one actual candidate, the 400 full free members decide who that is. But usually this is just decided by acclamation - everyone knew that Baranthos was going to become chief after his uncle died - his immediate family (who had led the tribe for nearly two decades) agreed that he was the family leader, the Clearwine Earth temple (led by members of his immediate family) supported him, and he even had ties to the Sartar Dynasty. There really was no other real candidate. 

Now among the Varmandi a few years back the choice was less clear-cut. After so much suffering from war and rebellion, the clan assembly was dominated by the women of the Ernalda cult and a wealthy (and peaceful) farmer was chosen instead of a Wind Lord (who had the backing of the Orlanth cult leaders). That happens, but it is relatively uncommon.  

So the most powerful "organised military" as of 1625 is the Lunar Empire - there's no question that this is the most powerful organised military in Glorantha.

After that it is the militaries of the various large states: Seshnela, Loskalm, Kralorelan Empire, the Vormaino Empire, Golden Kareeshtu, and Afadjann, plus the powerful nomad confederation of Voor-ash (the Voor-ash might actually be the most powerful military of that group). Argrath's alliance of Sartarites, Wolf Pirates, and Praxian nomads is going to rapidly climb the charts to where it can go toe to toe with the Lunar Empire for over two decades, but that is still a few years off.

The Elder Races are not "organised militaries" in that sense, but I'd certainly not want to see them on the march if I were a human ruler (unless they were allied with me). 

OK, if this is going to become a discussion about the Andins of the East Islands, pleaser make that a different thread or I need to lock this down.

4 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Nothing to do with embarrassment or taboo concerning what actually pulls a thunder god’s chariot? Unclean! Unclean!

I'm more a fan of Zeus, Taranis, Perkunos, Hadad, etc. But that's just me. 

5 minutes ago, Darius West said:

That is for gladiatorial combat a la ancient Roman sporting use of chariots, not bronze age military chariot deployment.  I can't think of a single RQ scenario which featured a chariot or chariot warfare; not even as a novelty.

Given that prior to RQG there were only two RQ books set in Dragon Pass (Snakepipe Hollow and Apple Lane), I can certainly understand why neither featured chariots, since both involve combat in enclosed or underground locations.

But RQG is explicit - chariots are commonly used for mobile platforms for spell-casting and missile attacks. Just check out pages 220-222. That's an official Chaosium publication, not some comment on some digest from the 1990s.

You are of course welcome to have your Glorantha be whatever you want it to be, but if your Glorantha refuses to incorporate anything from the last decade, you should probably state that.

1 hour ago, soltakss said:

For me, broadly the same rites are used to become Clan Chieftain as Tribal King.

Each tribe or clan would have its own version of the crown test, in my opinion.

Remember the sorry tale of the contender for Clan Chieftain who had to swim across a river, climb to a cave, wrestle the bear within, climb down and make love to the previous clan chieftain's daughter, after swimming the river and climbing to the cave, he went in and all everyone heard was snarling, growling and the sounds of a great struggle, then he emerged from the cave, climbed down and asked "So where is this woman I need to wrestle?"

They are not broadly the same rites - a chief is not a mini-king and the Chief Tests are not the Crown Test. 

So the "Chief Test" are basically proof that the candidate meets the requirements of being a candidate - remember that the assembled members of the community ultimately choose who among the candidate will lead them.

The "Crown Test" is a ritual duel, display of magic, or feat of adventure (like a raid or quest). The more impressive the Crown Test is, the more obvious it is that the gods support that person to be tribal leader.