Jeff

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.

The official line is that "pure" sorcerers aren't intended as adventurers in Dragon Pass or the Holy Country, let alone Prax. But nor are Ompalam cultists, Godunya cultists, Daruda cultists, or Garangordos cultists for that matter. You can include them in your game, but their magical ecology is going to be very different from those belonging to cults like Orlanth, Humakt, Seven Mothers, or Storm Bull. Or even Lhankor Mhy or Irrippi Ontor, both of who are tightly connected to more traditional "adventurer" cults. My personal thoughts about running sorcerers in the West is more along the lines of Ars Magica, which would close that circle as Jonathan holds that Ars Magica was supposed to be about doing RQ3 sorcery right in the first place.

Again, that all seems right for me. At least for any sorcerers likely to be made in Dragon Pass or the Holy Country. Which of course is the setting for RQG. At this point, we don't even have a proper write-up of the Invisible God (I have the contours of it, but a full write-up will await its own book). We don't have anything that details Western characters for RQG. Which means at this time playing a Western (aka a "pure sorcerer") is akin to playing a malfunctioning dwarf or a rootless elf - you certainly can, but you should be aware you are definitely playing a peripheral character and your work is going to be cut out for you.

So basically David's complaint is that Gloranthan sorcerers make lousy adventurers. I agree for the most part. LM sorcerers work (I've now seen enough in play) because they are using their sorcery to enhance their information gathering abilities. Same thing with Irrippi Ontor sorcerers - they are largely using it to enhance their core abilities (and that Discern Lightfore spell can be surprisingly useful). But these cults aren't pure sorcerers - they are just replacing their (rather lame) spirit magic with sorcery. Pure sorcerers - by that I assume you mean Rokari or Loskalmi wizard - aren't intended to be adventurers (especially given that the Invisible God is not even detailed at this point). Its RuneQuest, so yes, you can play them (just like you can play a malfunctioning dwarf or a rootless elf) but you are swimming upriver. That's not that the RQG sorcery rules are problematic, but that you seem to have a different view of what sorcerers are than the writers of the setting and the game.

Greg once told tell me that to keep the goddess Glorantha alive and eternally youthful, he needed to be an Arkati Trickster Shaman. Now that that duty has fallen to me, I've donned my coyote mask and taken on the role. It is fitting that I've decided to revisit Greg's heroquest to discover Elmal, only this time to reject that god in favour of restoring the god he had supplanted - Yelmalio. Elmal was discovered to answer an important question for Greg's Harmast novel, a book that he worked on fitfully from 1989 until 2009 or so. Harmast was set in the late First Age, some 400 years after the Dawn. Greg posed himself the question - who was the Orlanthi Sun God before the Orlanthi encountered the Yelm-worshipers of Peloria? In the early drafts of the novel, the answer to that question was Yelmalio. Yelmalio was the last light that survived the Darkness. He held out throughout the Greater Darkness, although he became weaker and weaker, after being robbed by Orlanth, Inora, and Zorak Zoran, and then savaged by Chaos. But he endured and was not extinguished and was there to greet the Dawn. But that's the Third Age myth - what was the story at the Dawn? Greg concluded that the Orlanthi recognised this god as Elmal, who loyally protected the people of Dragon Pass throughout the Greater Darkness. When Orlanth left on his Lightbringers Quest, Elmal remained behind, "the loyal thane". At the Dawn, Elmal took the Sun Disk and carried it through the sky as the Sun God. Presumably, he is also Lightfore, the "little sun" that appeared in the Grey Age and who rises when the Sun sets, and sets when the Sun rises. This might mean that Elmal never died - he is always in the Sky. When he sets in the West with the Sun Disk, he immediately rises as Lightfore in the East, and vice versa. Let's fast forward to the late Third Age. We know that there is Yelmalio all over the place. Sun Domes in Sartar, Prax, and all over Genertela. We know he is the main Fire/Sky god worshiped in Dragon Pass - heck, he is in White Bear Red Moon and his most famous initiate Is Rurik Runespear. So where did Yelmalio come from? Greg's answers were properly contradictory, as is the nature of such things. He came from the elves. He came from Monrogh's Vision of the Many Suns. He was revealed by Nysalor at the Battle of fNight and Day. All are correct, all are partially false. Or least not entirely true. But equally, all contain some truth. Then came the real tough question - what is the status of Elmal in the late Third Age? And by that I mean Hero Wars Sartar. Greg let others answer that question as his interest was in the First Age. He didn't know. David Dunham tried to answer it in his amazing computer game, King of Dragon Pass. Elmal is one off the main gods in that game, and Yelmalio is nowhere to be seen. But like a number of elements in that game, that never seemed right to me. And later Greg let me know that he agreed with my doubts. Note: that is not a dig at KoDP which I consider to be the best introduction to Glorantha ever made. But there are elements of the game that never set right with me. Elmal. Anglo-Saxon clothing and skin colour. Etc. These are tiny critiques of a master piece, and pertinent only in an essay like this. As I worked on the Guide to Glorantha with Greg back in 2012, Greg hinted that we should be reconsidering Elmal. Vinga had already been revealed to be the female incarnation of Orlanth, and not merely another Thunder Brother. Yelmalio, Greg suggested, was the main Sun God of the Third Age Orlanthi. And so Yelmalio got much more attention in the Guide to Glorantha than Elmal did. As I started putting together RuneQuest, Greg and I talked about the player character cults. "Gotta have Yelmalio," Greg said. "We've always had Yelmalio in RuneQuest." The elemental progression wheel and the conflict between Air and Fire are hard-wired into the rules. The Storm fights with the Sun. That's a driving theme in the setting and the game mechanics reflect that. But where does that put Elmal? We didn't even include poor Elmal in the book. In the Cults Book, the time to evade the question is over. This is a game book, not a speculative collection off essays. So here's the answer: Yelmalio is the Sun God of Dragon Pass and the Lunar Provinces. The Yelm cult among the Grazelander Pure Horse People is the exception that proves the rule. Since the 1550s or so, even most of the solar worshipers among the Sartarites have agreed that Yelmalio is the god of the Cold Sun. Elmal is still present - as a subcult of Yelmalio. If you want to have your Elmal cultist who is allied to Orlanth and the loyal defender of the Orlanthi clan, you can. He just has the ignominy of being treated as a member of a special Yelmalio subcult. And the even greater insult of being largely ignored by the Sartarite Orlanth cult. But Elmal can endure. And who knows, he might endure long enough for Arkat to need to betray his gods and become a passionate devotee of something old, something new. Who knows - I mean it has happened before!

Or they were a rejected name for the Esrolian Python. Which is more to the case.