Jeff

I love the pieces, but I am on record being a fan of Joann's art (and of Joann, who is an awesome guy).

Cults of Prax/Cults of Terror.

Lemme see, we could also look at the Shakya Republic, or any of the oligarchic republics in 6th BCE India, or we could look at any number of SE European states (to the extent we know much about their institutions). There are a lot of models for all of this - and the nice thing about them is they don't immediate scream "Viking".

It is the cults book.

Chief is used in a LOT of cultures. King is also used as a translation for an awful lot of cultural titles. And clan is also used with groups like the Iroquois and Choctaw. So I am perfectly fine with them. The usual translation for anax is "king". Same thing for "Lugal". Same thing with "raja". I got no problem using "king".

Generally the cult wants you to have performed some useful deed for the temple before it teaches you a new spell. Or donate 5 cows (100L).

Greg and I both agreed that the monomyth is correct in basic structure, but it is often off in terms of details, and has plenty of local contradictions. It might interest you to know that GRoY and the Entekosiad were first written using the names from the monomyth. Then Greg would tweak it and localise it, and add new details. But you can always see the monomyth in the background if you know where to look.

Very soon.

Sorcery in RQG has only one actual skill per spell - your skill at casting that given spell. Runes and Techniques are not skills - they are things you either understand or do not.

Stat it up and put it in the Jonstown Compendium when that goes on line!

A few responses here: 1. The Jonstown library has approximately 10,000 scrolls. Assume 250 scrolls per meter of shelving (8 "shelves" high), that's 40 meters of shelving. Maybe more. At Jonstown it probably goes 12 shelves high or higher to get all the scrolls into the Central Library. Each scroll is placed in a "box" with a bunch of other scrolls, that are related by subject matter. Each box and each scroll is tagged. Now comes the tough part. A scroll itself consists of numerous sheets of parchment sewed together - this can be very long (a Torah scroll can be 40-75 meters long when full unrolled - that gets you the Pentateuch in one scroll). An individual scroll may consist of many unrelated chapters sewed together. So a scholar needs to know the contents of a scroll to know that the scroll "List of Animal Gods" (named after the title of the first chapter also includes several chapters on the history of the Shadowlands) and that collection of recipes from Nochet. That's why at the Jonstown Library there is the great Catalog Wheel of Eonistaran - a wooden device like a broad water wheel. Each of the Wheel’s seven boards holds multiple scrolls containing a partial listing of the scrolls and codices within the Library’s collection. At least five different organizational systems coexist within these great scrolls; some are numbered, some are based on the first line, another based on a cryptic code, and so on. If a scholar cannot find what he is looking for in one scroll, he simply turns the wheel and looks in another scroll. Most scholars agree that the 120 volumes comprising Garangian Bronze-Gut’s Compendium of Persons Eminent in Every Branch of Learning with a List of their Writingsis more comprehensive (but far less practical) than Desosinderus the Librarian’s more concise Scheme of the Great Bookshelves. 2. Parchment comes from sheep. There are lots of sheep in Sartar. In Jonstown, the South Market is also called the Book Market, where scrolls and scraps of knowledge are exchanged with the scribes of the Jonstown Library. Here also sheep skins are bought and sold for parchment, ingredients for ink, and other tools used by scribes and sages. 3. No. Writing is an act of worship. 4. Lhankor Mhy libraries have a High Priest who is also the Chief Librarian. When a vacancy in the position of Chief Librarian occurs, the sages gather and choose a new Chief Librarian. The Chief Librarian has three subordinates that assist in running the library - the Chief Loremaster, the Provost of Apprentices, and the Chief Priest. 5. Chief Librarians are known to remove specific scrolls to be placed in Restricted Areas, where permission from the Chief Loremaster or the Chief Priest is necessary. Such actions are often vigorously protested by the other Sages, unless done secretively. There is rarely a place in the Library called the Restricted Area - this is more ad hoc. The scroll might simply be unlabelled and placed in an unrelated box, to the scroll is placed in a locked container with magical seals and wardings on it. In the Nochet Library (with more than 100,000 scrolls) the very knowledge of some Restricted Areas have been lost due to war, death, etc. 6. Nope.

I'd suggest the opposite - just use the monomyth as presented in RQG and the Sourcebook. Consider that the basic LM working understanding of how mythology works. Ignore GRoY (most Dara Happens do) and ignore Entekosiad (virtually everyone does). They are historical curiosities - like Herodotus trying to make sense of the Enûma Eliš. It is interesting deep-background, but not necessary - even misleading. In our games, LM gets dragged along all sorts of Orlanthi hero quests because he is so damn good at Knowing Things. The player doesn't need to know what the LM character knows - even the GM doesn't need to know it! That's what Skill roles and spell outcomes are for. In our game, the player with the least knowledge of Glorantha plays the LM sage and she's great.

As an aside, you'd be surprised how popular Lhankor Mhy is. I've seen far more LM characters over the years than Humakt or Storm Bull.

Sorcery is a major pillar of magic. Geez, look at the things you can do with sorcery - you can effectively reproduce the effects of all but the mightiest Rune spells WITHOUT a cult. WITHOUT cult restrictions. WITHOUT even needing the Runes. Heck, you can obviously create balls of fire or whatever else you want. But you do this through meticulous and lengthy study. Learn your INT worth of Runes and Techniques and you have a lot of potential combinations. An 18 INT sorcery has 7 Runes and Techniques they can learn. So pick Fire, Earth, Movement, Fertility, Combine, Summon, and Command. That gets you Death, Stasis, Separate, Dispel, and Tap (albeit at double cost). So almost any spell dealing with Fire and Earth could be learned. Learn a bunch of them at 3% plus your Magic bonus of +5% or 8%. OK casting is going to require a few tricks - use the right Day modifier (+10%), get a Minor Rune association for the location (+10%), and carry around a mundane object for each spell (10%). That gives you 38% in each spell. Meditate for 10 minutes before casting the spell - that gets you up to 63% which is pretty decent actually. Now you might have a dozen or spells that cover a wide range of possibilities. Now you need to cast them before you need them but that's ok. If you want to be able to cast a spell in combat, pick your "combat spell" and train it. And unlike Rune Points, you can keep doing this as long as you have magic points, which recover far faster. Magic points you say? Yeah, that's your actual Achilles Heel. Best solution - have a community that you can flock to your magical circle and get them to offer magic points to the Invisible God, and take a percentage of them for your purpose. Got a village of 150 adults? Awesome! What a magical pool for you to work with! Of course it is hard to take all those Dronars out on adventures, but you have more important stuff to be doing anyways - then again, that group of barbarian adventurers say they know where there is a treasure trove of lost Jrusteli knowledge. Imagine what you could do with that - what lost spells you might be able to learn! And what if you could reclaim some of the lost tricks of the God Learners that let them cast their spells directly on the gods! Worth the risk. Especially if the barbarians do most of the work.

We have a finished manuscript. But we need to get the next round of RQG books out before we can try to polish up the first book of a new line. I think you all should be able appreciate that.

So far it doesn't. It won't make individual sorcerers play on par with Rune Lords or Rune Priests - if you want to dazzle folk with your amazing in combat displays of magic, join a cult. If you want to research spells that you cast as parts of long and convoluted rituals on specific days, send terrible curses upon your neighbours, or weave sorcery around your chosen champion, then sorcery may be for you.

It is needed for Lhankor Mhy - who Greg and I concluded makes much more sense using using sorcery, than using a handful of spirit magic spells. It also is useful for when things expand a little further a field to the Holy Country and to the Lunar Empire. There are cults there that we can easily pick up and use the existing sorcery rules with. More is needed for the main Malkioni sects - to begin with, there is needed a decent treatment of the Invisible God, far more spells, far more cultural context, etc. You actually *could* do it with what is provided in RQG - except that there is no good description of the Invisible God, and the treatments of the Rokari and Hrestoli for RQ3 would be very misleading.

Lodril's Sons, Pavis, Mostal, - plenty of gods with Stasis. But since the very incarnation of the Stasis Rune was the Spike - destroyed by Chaos in the event that destroyed the world, its ability to directly impose itself on the world is quite limited.

Let's use Adventurous and not the names of sub-cults that haven't appeared in print in the better part of a decade (and are unlikely to ever appear again). Orlanth causes change and movement, he is a restless god that regularly upsets the status quo - even his own status quo; Lhankor Mhy seeks preservation and stability, he is often claimed to be a son of Acos or even Mostal. That tension between Movement and Stability is continually present.

You can't be the Perfect Orlanthi and Perfect Lhankor Mhy - but then again the god of Scribes isn't going to be the same as the god of Storm, Kings, and Warriors.

That's not exactly a major retcon - if it even is.. At the time I was writing the Guide the rules system I was working with was HQ, so the Guide runes matched HQ. Now we are using RQ, so some of the runes can align a little different.

It will definitely be available at Spiel. We should have an announcement of the Berlin Launch Party in Berlin coming soon.

I'm afraid that it is the reverse. LM had Law in HQ because we pulled sorcery off the Law Rune under the HQ rules. Since we don't do that in RQG, LM can return to being Truth and Stasis.

Comparing a sorcerer's repertoire to that of a Wind Lord is apples and oranges. Of course a Wind Lord will do Orlanth stuff better than any sorcerer - he is Orlanth after all. But only a sorcerer is going to come up with a spell that combines Fire and Water or otherwise forces the elements to do something they didn't do in the God Time. *Individual* sorcerers might not be able to easily match *individual* Rune masters, but sorcery is largely found in civilised lands where sorcerers are able to teach one another, train, have resources allocated to them, etc. We should all be fortunate that the Malkioni have rejected their God Learner ways, and have retreated back to less dangerous Rokarism and New Hrestolism.

Sure he does. Yelm, Ernalda, Aldrya, Hyalor, Vrimak, Yelorna - and the descendants of those he protected in the Great Darkness.