Jeff

The main island is about 50 miles long and 10 miles wide, so about 500 square miles. or comparable to Rhodes, Lesbos, or Oahu. They are about 300 miles off the coast of Maniria, or comparable to how far the Cape Verde islands are off the coast of Africa. Skullport is the Gloranthan Tortuga, rich and dangerous, filled with pirates. It takes two to four days to sail from Skullport to get to the Troll Straits. 

To be honest, by 1625 the Wolf Pirates are mostly NOT Yggites. The Wolf Pirates have Maybe only around third of the Wolf Pirates actually are Yggites. The Wolf Pirates have been voluntarily exiled from the Ygg Islands for over a generation and by now they are a polyglot crew, as soldiers, refugees, outlaws, and adventurers have joined Harrek's fleet. Yggs Islanders now form a relatively small minority of the Wolf Pirates. The lingua franca among the Wolf Pirates is a Theyalan creole made out of a simplified Ygg Islander with strong influences from Rathori and Jonating, Many Wolf Pirates also use Tradetalk. 

They've been based in the Three Step Islands, which are warm year-round. Most of the Wolf Pirates have been to Teshnos, Teleos, Fonrit, etc. and been influenced by those cultures. Probably a good fifth of the Wolf Pirates actually joined during the circumnavigation, so you'll see Maslans, Fonritians, Umathelans, Teshnites, alongside Sartarite adventurers, Nimistori, etc. 

2 hours ago, Dan Z said:

Those are great ideas!  I'll see what I can fit in by tomorrow.  I'm using the maps for tomorrow's session but even if I can't get any changes before then I'll update them after.

Here's the initial close up of Two Sisters also.

Lovely!

A few comments:

There is typically a thin riparian line of trees between the grasslands and the Upland Marsh. It may be only 10 to 50 meters wide. There is likely something similar along much of the creek. I doubt there is much woodland in the lowlands between Old Top and Two Sisters, although there certainly might woods on Stael's Ridge (think the Berkeley Hills in California). Old Top itself is probably bald.

1 hour ago, Dan Z said:

Thanks @Jeff.  I'm guessing the tiny community (~100 at most) is on both sides of the creek?  And if you don't mind my asking, how close is Old Top?  In any event I'll post my map(s) back here when completed in case anyone has a use for them.

Yep! It straddles the ford. Old Top is at most 4 km away.

6 minutes ago, Imryn said:

enchantments are rune magic spells, learnt and used in exactly the same way as common and special rune magic spells.

Regardless, this evidently wasn't one of the intended uses for Wyter's.

As I said, the rules were there to provide additional resources and ideas for gamemasters. If one of the player characters became the wyter-speaker (perhaps for a Heroquest), and in order to fulfill part of their quest they needed to create a few magical items with the wyter, I'd likely allow it. Because that is their function - they are a pool of POW and magic that might make all the difference in a dangerous quest, but at the risk of weakening the community's magic.

Their function is not mass produce magical items or any such thing, and I really didn't think I'd need even raise that point.

6 minutes ago, Imryn said:

Nope. RQG P287:

..A wyter may cast spirit magic or Rune spells on any member of its community when directed to by its priest. The wyter may even simultaneously cast the same spell on multiple members of the community by spending additional points of POW. Each point of POW spent lets the wyter cast the spell on an additional five members of the community.

The only additional cost is the 1 point of POW per 5 worshipers.

To make myself completely clear - the writers have explicitly created a way of generating POW out of thin air. They will probably change that at some point, but for the moment it is there.

The example of this is having the Wyter cast Shield 2 on 10 members of the community. That costs 4 points of POW and is the sort of thing that might be done as part of a heroquest or as the result of gaining community support.The wyter can only cast the spells it possesses - I don't believe many (any?) wyters can create enchantments as that isn't really their magic. Admittedly the short section on p 287 says "any spell the priest knows", and maybe I should have said "any common or special Rune spell the priest knows - excluding enchantments," but honestly, the wyter rules are there so that that the gamemaster can use them in their game as a special resource and not to play mental exercises with about how those rules could be theoretically minimaxed by NPCs.

I am not sure what the problem here is. 

1 minute ago, Jeff said:

Two Sisters is on solid ground maybe a kilometre from the Upland Marsh itself. It is located on ford across the Creek. It is about 6 to 8 kilometres to Runegate, and some 15 kilometres or so to Tink.

As an aside, Two Sisters is a small place - I imagine something like this:

Much smaller than Runegate, let alone Clearwine.

5 hours ago, Septimus Kendaro said:

So I’m drawing up a map covering a 10x10 km area around Two Sisters. Exactly how close to the Upland Marsh is Two Sisters?  Spitting distance?  Kind of swampy?  Or clearly outside of it?  Also looking for suggestions as to what else should be nearby.  How close is Old Top?

Thanks! 

Two Sisters is on solid ground maybe a kilometre from the Upland Marsh itself. It is located on ford across the Creek. It is about 6 to 8 kilometres to Runegate, and some 15 kilometres or so to Tink.

15 hours ago, RHW said:

According to older sources, Sartarites also raise pigs and geese. They'd have access to goose eggs (much bigger and gamier than hen's eggs). Pigs would provide salt pork and lard to flavor food. Salmon is available in season. I'd expect Sartarite children would fish, gather berries, catch crawfish, gather wild bird eggs, and kill and trap small game as part of their family responsibilities/play activities. I did the first three growing up in the 70s, my father did all five in the 40s. Wild and domestic honey would both be common.

Woodland tea would be a fairly common beverage (made from juniper, spruce, fir, etc.) 

And of course, there's haggis. THERE MUST BE HAGGIS!

Eels are probably a thing. Roasted and smoked.

Native nuts gathered in season would include chestnuts and walnuts. Acorns and pine nuts would both be eaten.

Food taboos in Sartar include (IMO) goats and snails. Depending on the tribe, nonsentient ducks might also be taboo out of respect for the Durulz. I doubt Sartarites eat horse or cats, but they happily kill and eat wild dogs when they find them (except Lismelder tribe).

Pretty much all spot on. Lots of pork, lots of cured meat. Lots of salmon. There's beefalo as well (most cattle have some bison in them) and Praxian animals (which of course can be found in Dragon Pass).

I suspect instead of haggis there is something equally controversial - Andouillette!

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andouillette.

Andouillette is also a great cultural divide between the north and the south of France - as Wikipedia correctly observes, "Although sometimes repellent to the uninitiated, this aspect of andouillette is prized by its devotees." (I am one of those devotees). If you want to preserve that divide, then Sartar eats andouilette, Esrolia does not.

KIT DE LA MENEUSE
One of the things I am so pleased with the new French edition of RuneQuest is the title of the Gamemaster Pack - "Kit de la Meneuse". In the English edition of the rules, we refer to the Gamemaster as "she" and the Players as "he". There's a couple of reasons we did that:
1. It is useful to have different pronouns for players and gamemasters - having both be "she" or "he" gets confusing quickly.
2. The decision to use one pronoun or another is totally arbitrary. So why not use both. About half the world are "she" and about half the world are "he" (which doesn't add up to 100% of course). Many gaming groups (including my own) has women and men - so why not use both? 

2 minutes ago, davecake said:

Yes, that is the basic tradeoff - but I think we very much differ on where the trade off points lie. You are talking about using 80% of a wyters power - at that level, I think you are essentially accepting that you have probably destroyed your community in its functional form, or at least medium term reduced it to that level, so you would never do it to 'win'. You do it to avoid annihilation when you have already lost. You might try to get together and re-POWer it - but you would be accepting that that outcome might likely never recur. 

Or the city is destroyed in its current form, and later survivors form a new social structure, with a new wyter, from the ruins, probably one that no longer has a Queen at all. If you reduce the wyter of a metropolis to one less powerful than an average ghost, you risk that alternative outcome. And those that the Queen depends on for power and support know that, and may judge her accordingly. 

Eg if you have reduced the wyter to one that weak, a wicked magician could easily destroy or capture it. A hostile foreign forced could take the city, and without the power of the wyter, the inhabitants might just let them. 

 

I doubt the either faction in the Nochet civil war drew down the Nochet city wyter at all until the siege of Nochet. And even then it was only to help repel a foreign military assault. And I suspect the city is now paying the price for that decision. Once you weaken a community's spirit it is awful hard to get the community back together to "re-POWer" it. One might even call that oxymoronic.

6 hours ago, lordabdul said:

Probably for historical/nostalgia/respect-for-the-original-material reasons. But yes, that's why many groups don't use the "roll the dice" rules for character creation, and instead use house rules -- because players know they want to make a warrior or a thief or a priest or whatever, and they don't want to leave it up to chance to have appropriate scores. That's why CoC has no less than 6 alternate character creation methods (see the Investigator Handbook), and why, most probably, the RQ Gamemaster Guide will have similar options (it's mentioned in RQG that it will have such options).

In a purely logical sense, there's not much difference between having different stat rolls for gender and having different stat rolls for species in a fantasy game. However, we don't exist in a pure logical plane of existence, and some things have context and history. There are a whole bunch of other incendiary topics that also fly above my head, so don't feel too bad about it as long as you do recognize that these issues exist (which you seem to). The goal of the GM is to make sure everybody at the table is comfortable and is having fun, after all.

That said, on a purely abstract game design level, making up a character takes several steps that have a specific order. This means that the order between choosing your sex and determining the stats is important. For example, there are some Rune Cults like Eiritha's or Ernalda's which require you to be of a specific gender, which then poses a problem:

• At a table where players have to roll dice for character creation (without any optional/house rule), you roll your stats, and then you know if your character will "look" like a warrior or a shaman or merchant. But if dice rolls are predicated on sex, by the time you know if your character might be a good Ernalda Rune Priestess or not, you already had to pick between male or female! This means that some options are effectively "closed" to the players, and players generally don't like that IME.
• At a table where players are using a house rule that lets them (re)distribute points between stats, or re-roll low dice, or whatever, the whole idea of having dice rolls that have any statistical relevance flies out of the window, so make sure to not mix the two.

Finally, as Jeff pointed out, we should recognize the fact that the point is not to make statistically accurate characters in the first place (we are supposed to play heroes after all!). And even assuming that's what players at your table really consider "fun", then it should start with the elephant in the room: you don't really choose how you're born, so if anything, that house rule should be preceded by a coin flip to determine your sex randomly (and that's already ignoring some "corner" cases of human biology... it should probably be a D100 on a table... also to be followed by another D100 roll on another table to determine your gender! Humans are complicated...).

So anyway, assuming you know for sure nobody at your table will be upset, I'd say you can run your game as you want, but, I think, for that house rule to make sense on a game design level, it would indeed need to be preceded by rolls to determine sex/gender. Have fun!

When I ask players to create characters, I let them pick whatever characteristics that matter to their character concept, and then they often roll dice for stats they don't particularly care about conceptually. 

10 minutes ago, lawrence.whitaker said:

Yep - I'm running my group through 'Horror on the Orient Express' right now, and exactly this group of skills, plus Spot Hidden, are the ones that are most useful. Languages too, especially if globetrotting.

Although I have to say, the one ranch hand cowboy in the group proved very useful. Not his Rifle or Pistol skills, but Ride, Track, and Survival!

9 minutes ago, lawrence.whitaker said:

Yep - I'm running my group through 'Horror on the Orient Express' right now, and exactly this group of skills, plus Spot Hidden, are the ones that are most useful. Languages too, especially if globetrotting.

Absolutely! 

As far as I am concerned, there is no reason to treat any human sex differently in terms of basic characteristics in the rules. 

In our last game - Credit Rating, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Occult, Library Use, and Law.

40 minutes ago, Martin said:

Nochet Cuisine

The type of fish and the numbers eaten by the residents is only surpassed by the ingenuity of locals when it comes to recipe variations. These culinary creations have more than doubled in recent times (since 1600) with the rise of the so-called Sesh-Tesh cookery, combing unusual ingredients from all along the coast of Genertela in mouth-watering and often spicy dishes.

 

Savory rice pudding is a popular breakfast dish with the cooking water—Congee—allowed to cool before drinking later in the day. Oat porridge is also eaten in vast quantities, sweetened with white clover honey traded from the Bee people of Esrolia.

 

“God-King’s Hair” is especially favored, eaten rolled up in oat pancakes and served with spicy Teshnan dips. Shellfish and meat broth have long been eaten as a main meal of the day, nowadays spiced up to produce a Gumbo. Residents eat lots of sea plants, with sea kale, kelp, and seaweed being regular side dishes, as is a salad of Mirrorweed shoots, which are also eaten boiled and dipped in skullbush oil. Among the more unusual dishes are: Sturgeon eggs on thin oat crackers, dishes of live sand eels, also eaten sugared, and plates of garishly colored, pickled sea cucumbers.

 

Kalomin tea is often drunk cold in the late afternoon, but the most popular beverages are Karkadai, made from the hibiscus plant, and the multitude of Esrolian white and red wines, and the ever popular, if murky, oat beer. On special occasions, the Esvulari families consume Tusoweo—a sea urchin spirit.

 

I love it!!! You only forgot the mud-bugs (aka crayfish)!

On 6/1/2019 at 3:34 PM, jajagappa said:

And a bit of my writeup on Foods of Nochet, greatest city in all Glorantha where, of course, you can find something from almost any culture (particularly if it's in a pie).

One day, when the daughters were out playing, Esrola got tired and lay down for a while. Kena [“headrest” or “pillow”] is the hill in Nochet where she laid her head. “Grainland” [Esrolia] is where she napped. When she woke she said, “I dreamed that this was the land of grains.” Where she had lain was ever blessed with an abundance of grain.

Agriculture is easy in the well-watered, fertile lands of Esrolia.  With the aid of the earth goddesses and their virile husbands, Esrolia produces vast quantities of grain: some used locally but much brought to the great cities for storage, tribute, and trade.  Esrola herself raised the fields of First Grasses.  Her daughter Esra is here with her sheaves of barley and her husbands: Porridge, Baker, and Minlister the Brewer.  So too is Usara with her oats, Fresala with the wheat, and Suchara who makes the rye.  Later, Esrola shed tears as the Darkness grew and these became the hard corn and blood millet which could grow even without the Sun and allowed many to survive the Long Night.

The God of Change setup the Great Wheel House near Nochet and showed everyone how to turn grain into flour.  Later Harst gathered the Spare Grain and taught everyone how to make the first exchanges.  Then Veskarthan carefully dried the grains with his breath and Asrelia sealed the grains in her jars.  When the Darkness was strong, the Queens taught all to bring the grains and jars to the cities and share the grain to survive.

"Porridge by morning, a pie for midday, bread and beer in the evening to wash all away” – so goes the common rhyme in Nochet that describes the daily food of the commoner. 

Yet Nochet is not just a city of grain.  For pie-mad Nochet that notion fails to reflect the variety of fish pies, shellfish pies, meat pies, fruited pies, and other varieties of and variations on pies that can be found.  Many pies now include an array of spices and herbs from afar ever since the Opening such as the Teshnos-inspired "hotpot" pie that reflects the blazing hot spices included that are all the rage among young noblemen.

Most houses have their courtyard or neighborhood gardens yielding fruit, vegetables, roots, and herbs that supplement their diet.   From orchard lands outside the city come cherries, guava, peaches, plums, currants, grapes, sea-grapes, and other fruits, as well as products from those such as various fruit wines.  Many houses raise small flocks of geese and ducks or a small herd of swine.  And from the great river and the bay come fish and shellfish which are variously eaten fresh or dried, pickled or in some cases pressed for oil.  House Loma is particularly (or infamously) known for their tangy fish oil sauce called lomalalan or more colloquially “Loma sweat.”

From the hilly lands come great flocks of sheep and herds of cattle, slaughtered, butchered, and sold or dried in the stockyards of Tendayvora.  From further afield and across the seas come all manner of luxury foods to grace the meals of the Enfranchised Houses and wealthy merchants.  And from the marshes south of the city and the Rightarm Islands comes the ever derided marsh cabbage, source of many negative slang expressions and said to be fit only for a Duck yet regularly found in everyone’s soups and stews in Seaseason. 

Remember the shrimp, crawfish, fish, spices, chilis, emmer grain (not barley), grapes (raisins), and the rest. Flat breads fried in lard, smoked lizard spiced hot enough to make you sweat and put on a stick, coucous made out of emmer grains, you name it. Nochet is the New Orleans of Glorantha. 

2 hours ago, 7Tigers said:

Well, for my side, about the rules, given than RQ6/Mythras has been available for a while, I can't see many reason to use MRQ I & II or refer to it.

About Glorantha content, I have no issue taking ideas in the best books, S&P issues or Living Glorantha scenarios, as I do with every other fan material.

By the way, about Living Glorantha scenarios, as they are still available via web.archive, I'm wondering if we are allowed to link to them, or if there is a licence / ownership issue?

I sure hope those scenarios are not available, as they are now copyright violations.

1 hour ago, Shiningbrow said:

Got it. Fine... so, which is the RQ 3 (Avalon Hill/Games Workshop) forum It obviously can't go.in the other RQ forum... Because it's as similar (and different) to the "classic and current" as MRQ is. 

Pendragon Pass is not Runequest - it's Glorantha. 

I'm not sure anyone anywhere anywhen has ever questioned why you should "rely" on MRQ. I certainly haven't. (In Logic, that's called a Red Herring - sending a discussion off down a different path than was initiated)

Look at the credits of RQ3 - it is "a Chaosium Game." More to the point, Chaosium owns RQ3.

This is a fine enough place to talk about the MRQ books, unless Loz wants it moved to Mythras. But point of principle - Mongoose was the worst licensee Greg ever had and treated both the line and Greg badly enough that I don't want discussion of it in the RuneQuest or Glorantha threads. Anyone we have to come to the edge of litigation in the federal courts - twice - just to get past  royalties paid isn't going to get a good hearing from me.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

On 4/30/2019 at 7:47 PM, Iskallor said:

Will Chaosium have a presence there this year?

Not this year, but eventually I'd love to come back.

On 5/21/2019 at 12:22 AM, Rojo said:

In the beginning, I visualized Vingans as men inside women jackets, but after I tried to learn more about them (damn my players) my vision is changing. At the moment, and knowing that Vingan is a gender, I´m having a few problems:

- I´m supposing that a Vingan can marry both men (Nandan or not) and women (Vingan too?) alike. Not having found anything canon about that (in my limited knowledge of the setting), I´m not totally sure.

Yes.

On 5/21/2019 at 12:22 AM, Rojo said:

- What kind of Ortlanthi marriage would they use? I don´t see Vingans subordinating themselves to men, for example. Any canon response about that?

Depends on the status of the spouse, just like with everyone else.

On 5/21/2019 at 12:22 AM, Rojo said:

- Are Vingans able to get pregnant? I´m inclined to think that they can, as they aren´t men but a different gender. Dedicating themselves to childcare is a different matter (that´s women or Nandan stuff).

Yes.

On 5/21/2019 at 12:22 AM, Rojo said:

- My final question: any idea if Vinga would be included in the new Gods of Glorantha, or Vingans in general in another book? It would be really useful to have a better (and canon) idea about them.

Vinga is included as a subcult of Orlanth. She's always worshiped as part of the Orlanth cult.

Just now, Joerg said:

That's for Vivamorti who have human (or other mortal, sentient) cultists (that also fuel the worship MP to make rune points regainable). How do Delecti's Dancers in Darkness do it?

They capture victims and perform the ritual. 

On 5/26/2019 at 2:36 PM, PhilHibbs said:

That's how human sorcerers do it, there could be other ways.

The POW is usually provided through the Ecstatic Communion ritual.

45 minutes ago, Shiningbrow said:

It amuses (annoys) me that MRQ is not seen as real RQ. 

I've seen Legend, and I've seen the similarities in the rule system.

 

Just.. This IS an RQ discussion. (And confirms my thoughts on on another thread). The Glorantha forum I would have at least understood... 

Anyway...

I believe this was moved here because the RuneQuest forum is the "RuneQuest forum for Chaosium's roleplaying game system, current and classic editions." Which does not include MRQ1/2 (or the draft "RQ4", Epic, or Pendragon Pass). Whereas the Legend forum is the Mongoose D100 discussion forum.

If you want to talk about the things you liked about MRQ1/2, why it is a shame I don't have any interest in relying on MRQ materials, or the like - this is the right place to be.