Jeff

Delecti is the paramount leader of the Vivamort cult in Dragon Pass and he began as a Vivamortist.

Given that we have Mongoose's RQ sales figures (as part of the royalty statements), I think it can be safe to say the most important lesson is Don't Do What Mongoose Did.

There are many additional reasons why MRQ is ignored on this forum, especially by anyone associated with Chaosium. The polite way to put it is that Mongoose was not one of our better licensees.

I sure as heck would have Rune magic and spirit magic in an intro game.

As an aside, that is a key bit of my own design philosophy. The rules are designed for modelling the player interaction with the setting - it is intended for running RPG games. They are not intended to be a clockwork machine running in the background, determining how NPCs interact with NPCs. Or as I have said on more than one occasion to my line editors - "The GM should not be rolling dice against themself!"

Often it is preferable just to get a concept out there, with the assumption that enough information is there that people can start including them in their games. And then we can wait a bit for a later opportunity to handle some of the deeper nuances. For 95% of the games, what is in the core rules about wyters is likely enough. The RQ Campaign Book gives an opportunity for a little GM facing nuance.

Or whatever the gamemaster decides is the appropriate limit for that particular wyter. The Ernaldori are a very powerful clan that has been around for three centuries. They are the royal clan of the oldest and most powerful Orlanth tribe in Dragon Pass. Normally its POW is 32, but if player characters want to sacrifice up to 10 points of their personal POW, they can increase it up to 42. But that is their call. As the GM, I'm not going to let NPCs do that for them.

I for one would be very reluctant to let the wyter spend more than 10-15% of its POW without an existential threat to the community.

I included enough on wyters so people could include them in their games. Here's the Notes on Wyters section in the RQ Campaign book: NOTES ON WYTERS Wyters are intended to be a potential resource for player characters and their community. The description of wyters in RuneQuest Glorantha (pages 286-287) provide a useful overview of wyters. A wyter is the spirit of a given community. Weakening the wyter weakens the community. When a wyter weakens itself through expenditure of points of POW to cast Rune spells, it weakens the spiritual health of the community. If the wyter reduces its POW by half, the community may begin to collapse. Additionally, the wyter must be persuaded that using the magic is appropriate for itself. No wyter will endanger its community simply to function as a rechargeable POW battery for its priest! The wyter is responsible for the spiritual well-being of the community, and among its important roles are protecting the community from hostile spirits, vengeful ghosts, enemy gods, and more. Although such things trouble even those communities with a powerful wyter, this happens far more frequently when the wyter is weakened. Pity the doomed community whose wyter becomes weak enough to be defeated by an ordinary spirit or enemy shaman! Although members of the community may sacrifice points of characteristic POW to the wyter, this is in practice more complicated than the RQG rules might suggest. Normally such sacrifices only occur on the high holy day of the wyter, although a kindly gamemaster might allow an adventurer to sacrifice a point of personal POW to prevent the wyter from being extinguished. It is perfectly reasonable for the gamemaster to only allow adventurers to make such sacrifices – perhaps that the wyter’s characteristics assume that other community members are already making whatever the sacrifices that community can be expected to make. Alternatively, the gamemaster may decide that any community that has been significantly weakened by the wyter’s loss of POW is too spiritually weak to sacrifice POW for the wyter unless that sacrifice comes from the player characters.

Man, I loved the Tomoe Gozen series. I'd also add Delany's Tales of Neveryon.

Knock 40 POW off that wyter and that wyter is going to be terribly magically powerful until some big ceremony could be held to replenish its POW. If I was the GM, I'd probably say that needs to happen during Sacred Time or the high holy day of the wyter. This isn't the sort of event that should be done casually. In the meantime, that wyter is spiritually weak. Who cares if you have 40 nigh-invulnerable warriors for a year, if your wyter is gone. The cosmos tends to react strongly against rules-lawyers who abuse the spirit of the rules.

I mean the more I think about this, the more I would absolutely ruin a chief or high priest who tried to do this. "You broke our ancestral god - OUR ANCESTRAL GOD! - to do what? Our clan is dying, we have kin slaughter and more than half the community left to form a new clan, so that you be invulnerable? We have summoned the assembly and have decided to strip you from that office so that we might survive."

So you have a maximum POW wyter for your example, rather than the normal 27 POW, CHA 14. This is obviously SUPER-clan, whose wyter is some god. Your wyter has 42 points of POW. In theory, it could blow 41 points of POW to cast Rune spells, but that is stupid unless this is a murder-hobo wyter. That wyter's POW has all sorts of other functions, like being the spiritual force of the community, keeping hostile spirits out of the clan sacred lands, etc. Reducing the POW of the community spirit weakens your community - this should go without saying (and not something that should need clockwork mechanical things). Why are the other clan members going to give up their POW - their SOUL - just so that our rules-lawyer chieftain can feel super-swell? Heck, reduce your wyter to POW 1, and maybe just it gets captured by a hostile shaman. Maybe some weak hate ghost with POW 15 decides to take its vengeance. Maybe a ritual enemy that normally is obeisance now can manifest.

Please stop with the "well, this is also Iron Age too" nonsense. As lordabdul said, "Bronze Age" has connotations and associations that lets Glorantha strongly contrast itself with other fantasy settings. In a popular culture where medieval-Viking-pseudoIrish-Scottish-Roman Empire settings are a dime a dozen (GoT, Skyrim. every fantasy series on Sky/Netflix/Amazon/etc), the more "Bronze Age" Mycenae/Hittite/Urnfield/Danubian/Sea People/Villenovan/Gilgamesh stuff all stands out as distinctive and different. Which is a good thing. Are we using "Bronze Age" like careful archaeologists would? Of course not - this is a fantasy setting. But Bronze Age gives us a good and handy aesthetic tool for describing the setting.

That is how I see Knowledge Temples as well. Most of their texts are records - contracts, property lists, construction drafts, recorded judgements, foreign correspondences and engagements, aristocratic declarations, and financial matters - but they also include literary compositions as divination, religious, omens, incantations and hymns to various gods, lexical, medical, mathematical and historical texts as well as epics and myths. Not to mention plenty of wisdom texts, used to train people to scribe.

Not surprisingly, I agree.

Please move this thread to Mythras.

Especially since Hwarin Dalthippa is not one of the Seven Mothers. Her runes are Movement, Moon, and Light btw. In Jillaro she is often associated with Harmony as well.

And this is why descriptions of the visual and audible aspects of the spells are NOT given except in rare cases.

Maybe so in your Glorantha, and that's fine. But in mine (and Greg's), this stuff happens all the time. Earth Priestesses cast Charisma and make sure that they can get the upper hand against warlords, Wind Lords, and the like. In our Glorantha, they do that in council meetings when it matters. Heck, they might be prudent to save those Rune points for the assembly meetings....

Happens all the time. Its "acceptability" depends on what god gets brought in and how powerful they are. Your community of Neolithic farmers gets visited by a tattooed stranger who wants you to help him fight against the lowlanders. Your spirits and elders, led by your Light Priest, say no, but the stranger says his god is mightier than yours. He challenges your Light Priest to the Contest of Manifestations. The Light Priest agrees and summons forth a a light as bright as the sun. "I am the light of the Sky," he says. The stranger laughs and a dark storm gathers in the sky, blotting out the sun and the blue sky. A terrible explosion is heard, as a thunderbolt crashes down upon the Light Priest, slaying him. "I am the King of Storms," he says. The shaman says that the Storm King is a dangerous and deadly god, and that god is more powerful than the light of the Sky Dome. Your village agrees to let any adult who chooses to follow the Storm King into war. The stranger offers gifts and plunder, and many agree to follow him.

Again, this happens in many Gloranthan stories. Gods show up, and people either acquiesce, summon their own gods, or run away. Sometimes the "gods" have a contest and people carefully watch who wins.

Look to Korean shamanism for some ideas. Everything has spirits. Your assistant shaman is more strongly connected to ancestors, the spirits of human communities, the spirits that watch over tribe and community, etc., while the spirits of the "wild" are more hostile.

This stuff is all over Gloranthan literature. Many people fear that the entire God Learners project was actually a series of Trickster Lies. Same thing with Nysalor/Gbaji - the whole matter of Illumination is just a Trickster Lie. As for Charisma making it easier to persuade others, yep that is exactly what it does. You might hate Yanioth, but damn when she puts on her goddess aspect, she is so damn impressive that it is really hard to not follow her. She's not cheating, any more than Baranthos is cheating when he uses that 100% Orate skill of his. You know Baranthos is about to make one of his barnraising speeches the moment you hear that hackneyed opening, "Seven summers past, the wild queen, Cleopatra, dreaming her dreams of ruin on your lovely Empire, sailed her hopes into the harbour of Actium...." But despite knowing his oratorical techniques, even you find it a persuasive speech.

Yes it does. Everyone comes to RQG with a different purpose. There are many diverse styles of play and there are countless mechanical situations that need to be resolved in a manner appropriate for your game. Not my game - your game.