Jenx

Martin has hit the nail on the head above. There was not "time" before Time. There might have been cause and effect, but there might have not. The simple fact is - the only perspectives of the Eternal, of that which existed before Time was born is from beings and minds which were born during Time, and thus have an inherently flawed perception of those events. If you recall the section on Time in the Guide to Glorantha, it talks about three types of time: 1. Linear Time - the one that a lot of cultures in Glorantha subscribe to. A follows B, follows C and so on, in a line. 2. Cyclical Time - some other cultures (and some of the first ones) also notice that sometimes things repeat themselves. Patterns, events, whatever you want to call them, come and go in a circle - destruction and then peace. a new god is born, then ruined. and so on. 3. Illusionary Time - this is the time of the Gods World. It's what a mortal mind sees when it tries to filter in the Other Side. And, like it's name suggests - it's illusionary. It appears to have consequence, but it doesn't. It's an illusion. The only beings I can think of that could possibly have a good take on how things used to be, versus how things are, are individuals like the The Dwarf from Dwarf Mine, or Cragspider the Firewitch. Except a. I don't see either of them really bothering to talk about it and b. who knows if they even CAN remember how it used to be before Time? For all we know, they've lived in Time for as long as it has existed, so maybe their minds have also just gotten quite used to it.

To be fair, constructing a fictional place in the other world is just the kind of nonsense the God Learners were really into. It's those pointy hats they wore, I think. Made 'em all loony!

Well...nothing in the setting, nor the rules, actually say this can't happen, so I don't see what the problem is. I mean, even something as severe as Hero Forming can be resisted within the rules of HQ:G, so I don't see how the Runes and Gods having influence on your behaviour should contradict the character going against it. It's just that the system points out you can't do that without consequence, which I think is fine.

I can offer my own take on how and why runes affect a person's character and personality. I don't claim this is supported by the setting's fiction, but it's a good way of handling the situation, even if it delves a bit into metaphysics. Now, let's establish some things first, so I can explain what I'm talking about (hopefully) better after that. 1. The Gods are made up of Runes. Some of them are made up of various runes, some of them are just a single, primal rune. But they are runes. 2. The Gods made the mortal races, including humans. 3. Humans are also made of Runes, though usually a mixture of all of them, instead of the purer essences of the Runes that the gods are made of. A god is a concentrated powdered drink. A human is that same powder mixed in with water, wine, some soy sauce and who the hell knows what else. 4. The Gods are almost inconceivably larger in scope and existence. No mortal can ever fully, absolutely understand and comprehend a god in it's totality - they can only experience parts of it, sometimes even many parts at once, but the mortal soul is simply in an entirely different scale to perceive the true totality of the divine. Following these four points, let's examine how all of this relates to the actual gameplay mechanic of runes affecting your character's...well character. While in HQ:G each of the runes is given a broad and generalized behaviour and character, I think that's mostly done to simplify things, and instead just having a strong association with a rune doesn't actually affect you. To me the personality-affecting aspects of your Runes is closely tied to your character's magic. Magic, as both HQ:G and the Guide point out is, to grossly generalize, the interaction between the mortal and the divine. Between the temporal and linear (or cyclical) mind of a being existing within Time, and between the infinite Now and the eternal existence of something that exists in the God World. Your character performs magic by making a connection between her own temporal self and a god's infinite self. The resulting link is magic. The different cultures in Glorantha do this in wildly differing ways - through sacrifices of animals and items, through chanting, through fasting and physical exhaustion, through the taking of drugs and opiates, through the recitation of hellishly complex logistical formulae, through cutting scars in their skin, through creating sever changes in their environment as elaborate rituals, the list goes on. However the end result is, ultimately, the same - Something from the Infinite and something from the Finite bridge together. (This, by the way, is what Illuminates are capable of understanding, and it's what makes them so feared, hated and distrusted by everyone else. They just stop looking at existence from the point of view of everyone else.) However this connection does not just result in power, energy and fireballs being transferred from the divine into the mortal, but other things as well. Coincidence, Fate, whatever you want to call it. And personality. Where I'm going with all of this, is that the closer a mortal is to a god in Glorantha, the more that god's personality (or their perceived personality. It ultimately doesn't matter if they have one of their own, or if it's just one imposed by the mortal's cultural understanding of the world.) becomes imprinted into that mortal. Let's again use an example of an Orlanthi cultist. Once a male child in Sartar has passed his adult initiation, his soul is now open and awakened. During his initiation he has met with gods and heroes, and perhaps felt a connection, kinship or friendship with some of them. Or perhaps he didn't. Regardless, his soul (his Runes) are now awake. In game terms, this means your character can perform augmentations using his runes, but that's all. They don't have any link to the divine from which to draw actual magic, they just use their own will and soul to make themselves better. In our own world that might make them superhuman, in Glorantha (where everyone can do this) it's just..normal. So from my perspective, this young man is free to act how he likes. Let's say in game terms he has the runes of Air, Mastery and Movement. None of those really affect him in any meaningful way. He might be more aggressive and passionate than, say, a young boy born in Loskalm, but that could also just be the way the traditions of his culture and his environment have raised him. Several years later, once that boy has finally decided on which god he wants to follow, he decides to just join the broad cult of Orlanth, without really picking a sub-cult or a hero cult within that group. He goes through the rituals of initiation to be entered into the cult and he is, in some way, presented to the God. He meets with Orlanth and Orlanth acknowledges him as one of his own - a connection of formed between the mortal and the god. From here onwards this young man will be able to channel Orlanth's being to perform magic in the mortal world, through this connection. In HQ:G game terms you can now use your runes as a direct ability, producing over magical effects, not just vague augments. However the stronger this connection becomes (in game terms - the higher your ability rating in a specific Rune is) the more Orlanth's personality starts to impose itself onto the young man. Let's say his highest rated rune (and in fact, his highest rated ability) is his Movement rune. This doesn't mean that this young man is now mind-controlled by his god, but it does mean that he starts feeling urges pulling on the strings of his soul. He feels the need to wander, to explore, to travel. He becomes less satisfied with simply staying on his father's stead and tilling the fields. But that's all this is - an urge, a feel. If he resists it, it doesn't mean the connection with Orlanth is severed, but it might become weakened again, as the Mortal asserts itself over the Divine.So here is where you might have this conflict and struggle of character that you desire in a game - does your character simply give himself to God, or does he decide, for various reasons, that he wants to assert his own self, and not just follow the urges in his soul? Let's say he does decide to give in though. He is struck with wanderlust, he wants to travel and see the world. He meets a holy person who also follows this urge, and after being tested and initiated he is given secrets of a deeper aspect of God - that of Orlanth the Wanderer, the one called Larnsting. He is sworn into secrecy, like he was in his general initiation, to not reveal this knowledge and understanding to those who don't already posses it, or wish to join the cult. He is now a Devotee, in the terms of HQ:G. In the game you can now perform Feats - great acts of magic which don't just create a link from the Gods World into the Mortal World, they actually bring a piece of it into mortal reality. The most common side-effect of this is what's called Hero Forming - when the person performing the feat takes on what he perceives to be the physical look of his god. Once hero forming, a person's identity vanishes. They no longer have their own will and character, they are an incarnated fragment of God, existing for a brief moment in mortal reality. Devotees then feel a much, MUCH greater pull through this connection to their god, and therefore their own personalities start to become consumed by that of the divine. They don't usually mind, of course - if they did, they wouldn't have decided to devote themselves entirely to a single god (after all, that's why they are called Devotees). At this point, I think a story-line about a character battling with his god is probably pointless - if they've decided to go this far, they probably are willing to commit to it. You can't really force someone to become a Devotee, they must want it. Mind you, Devotees also delve into the much stickier philosophical subject of just how much, if any, Free Will exists in Glorantha, but that's a topic for an entirely different thread. I do hope this long and rambling post makes enough sense to help you understand why (at least from my take in Glorantha) the Runes affect a human's character and personality, and why I don't think it's such a problem. P.S.: Holy shit, look at the size of this post. I have become Joerg!

I think something that might be adding to the overall confusion is a simple assumption - the assumption that any single roleplaying or other gaming system so far has portrayed the setting of Glorantha in it's entirety. This is simply not true. White Bear, Red Moon, RuneQuest, HeroQuest and the upcoming 13th Age in Glorantha all show only some aspects of the setting - accentuating some, downplaying others. Stuff like having runes on your character sheet or "battle magic" or "affinities" or whatever - those are all game system artefacts, they are not the living reality of people who live in the setting. The Runes are universal and omnipresent. Every single human being is composed of every single rune, in some specific mixture. Some people have more Death in them, some more Life. Some have more Air and some have more Darkness and yet others seem to be almost entirely composed of Harmony. This is a fact of the setting. Now going from there, different systems decide to approach this fact in different ways - some simply ignore it, or downplay it, others (like HQ:G) make it central to your character generation process, asking you to highlight the three runic aspects of your character that define her the most. (This is also why the question that sometimes pops up of "Okay but why do we only have three runes? Can't we have four?" is kind of meaningless. Your character doesn't have three runes, she only has her three most prominent ones highlighted.) You can think of HQ:G's approach like this - forget Runes. Forget the symbols and the concepts of them and so on. Instead imagine that the games asks you "Please define the three most obvious aspects of your character's personality. What is he like?". Obviously nobody is only just impulsive or loves ice-cream, but at some point you need to just pick three, because...well there needs to be a cut off point in this for the sake of sanity. Now, if you don't want your players to have to deal with Runes and the aspects that they help define in a character, that's fine! Just start the game without any runes, and tell your players that their characters have all recently become adult members of their society (or hell, if you want take jajagappa's advice and even go further back and run the actual adult initiation as as a session), and that it is now time for them to pick a god they want to initiate to, picking the one that they want to be central in their life. In-setting at this point the new adult has had a couple of years to talk with priests, family members and all kinds of other wiser people, to try and figure out what direction he or she wants to take their life. Do this with your players - explain to them the gods and their paths in-character, though series of dialogues with their clan's priests and priestesses, their parents and grandparents, their siblings. Then ask them which one they want to chose, and then actually run the initiation rituals for the cult(s) they chose. At the end of this you then tell them to define their three most-central runes. While they might have awakened their basic power when they became adults, the cult is what gives that power direction and avenues to manipulate the world around you. And there you go - you just went through the same process you would go in RQ with people needing to join a cult. Now, on the topic of mundane vs magical - this is of course something you should run with, if you think it's an interesting thematic element in your games. So regardless of what anyone else say (including what I will right now), if you like it - run it. It's your game and it's your Glorantha! For me, there really is no divide between mundane and magical, at least not in the way that a 21st century person from europe or the united states understands those concepts. I would argue that by our standards there is no "mundane" a Gloranthan person's life, much in the same way there is nothing "mundane" in the life of a farmer or builder in ancient Egypt or Rome. Those people didn't just believe in magic and gods and charms and rituals and good luck trinkets. Those were so integral to the way they viewed the world around them that suggesting that any of that didn't work would be seen as an almost absurd proposition. In Egypt a farmer has a small charm of a farming deity that he offers a tiny bit of bread to every time he goes out to tend to his field. He doesn't just believe, he knows that doing that will make his work go easier and faster. That, after all, is why he does it. In Sartar a farmer has a small charm of Barntar that he offers a tiny bit of bread to every time he goes out to tend his field. He too doesn't just believe that this works, he knows that it will, which is why he does it. Is this mundane or is it magic? In our world you might say "this is just mundane, it's a psychological ritual to make the person convince themselves their work is going easier." In Glorantha it just sides with the person and says "of course it's magic. It works, doesn't it?"

From what I recall, he is described to have had green skin and flowers in/as his beard and hair, so he clearly had some notes of his plant ancestry.

Styopa - This is all perfectly fine. This is, after all, why Your Glorantha Will Vary. You just do and use whatever visual or stereotype or narrative device you want in your own games, as long as everyone is having fun! However my argument would be that a lot of people then seem to take their own version of Glorantha and expect other people, and especially official publications, to conform to it, getting disappointed when it inevitably doesn't. So my stance would be that a coherent cultural and visual depiction of a fantasy culture should be made and have it be there for people who care about it, and people who want to ignore it can do so freely without bothering. So no, Orlanthi are not Vikings or Mycenaean or Celts or anything like that, they are Orlanthi and I want to explore, visually, how these people look, dress and where do they live and what items they surround themselves with. You are then free to not care about any of this and just do whatever you want in your own game for your own fun.

Yeah, sorry, no idea where the link vanished there.

This would be a great place to link to this thing: It's a DeviantArt group I made to serve as a hub for any Gloranthan artwork on DA (be it stuff like mine, or Jan's or Jonny Hodgson's where it's official illustrations put up on the web, or just fanart and stuff from people's campaigns and such), and while lately I just keep forgetting to check DA that often ,it still has a decent catalog of artwork. Since the group is a free one, I can't organize the actual submissions into categories, but if you check the Favorites of the group, I've tried to arrange those in relevant cultural/geographical groupings. I hope this is useful for finding artwork...although I'm afraid I don't have a map of Sun County.

While they might look rather dodgy, we all know that the Orlanthi are very calm, rational and understanding people, so just because you're in an Orlanthi neighbourhood doesn't mean there's a high chance to get your face punched in or something! (That's just the kind of propaganda the Lunar occupation would like you to believe!)

Joerg, let me introduce you to the absolute brilliance that is Tibetan religious art: Also I have a sneaking suspicion there's a chance I end up having to draw that guy, so we'll how that will turn out!

Now, in general Orlanthi are very open and very into sex. That means sex with members of whatever gender or sexuality (of which there are, if I recall correctly, 4 and 7), as long as it doesn't break the few sexual taboos that they do have (no sex with animals, chaos, married people or non-adults). Beyond that, the Orlanthi are actually sexually active people. However, all of this can very easily be considered untrue, if you want it to be for your game, because there really isn't much of an "Orlanthi" culture. Most clans don't really care for some abstract, overreaching cultural heritage. Well they care for it a bit, but most of them are more concerned with following the traditions and customs of their own clan and it's ancestors. So, want a clan where men(or women) having sex with men(or women) and Helerings is frowned upon? Then yeah, such a clan could easily exist. You'd have to figure out a reason why they are like that, of course, but it's not really beyond the realm of possibility. A connection to Yelmalio, as Joerg suggests above, would be a good way to go. Hell, even being an Elmal-centered clan would be more than enough, as Solar cults and culture are generally a bit less into the hanky-panky as much as Storm and Earth are.

Well, you also remember that Prince of Sartar is basically one massive spoiler for the King of Sartar novel, right?

Well if nothing else there's this fellow from the comic:

I wonder where you got the idea that Vingans is "virginal" by the way. They're not. Like...at all. They are Orlanthi, and as such they hump like horny jackrabbits. Hell, Gorites are by no means "viriginal" either, although they are celibate. What they've been up to before joining the cult is irrelevant though. Also, if Maran Gor is not one of the most awesome gods in the setting, then I have no idea what measure of awesome you are using, but it's probably not correct.